I paid $10,000 to learn how to close deals. You get it free.

The best sales advice anyone ever gave me was simple: 

“Shut up and stop pitching.”

While it sounds flippant, this wasn’t advice in passing. It was thoughtful and from one of the best sales coaches in the country.

Oh, and it was crafted specifically for me.

Since that day, I have closed more investors and won more clients for my company. This experience even impacted how I think about personal relationships, too.

I paid $10,000 for a lesson that I’m going to hand over to you for free today. 

My sales pitch was an Avril Lavigne song—complicated

In 2019, GoWild participated in what many call the best business accelerator in the world for the sports industry, Stadia Ventures. Harvard has a higher acceptance rate than Stadia, and once you’re in, you’re in their network and it’s nuts. We met and now know folks from the St. Louis Cardinals, Topgolf, Fanatics, NASCAR, Polaris, Redbull, Anheuser Busch, the Dallas Cowboys, Mark Cuban Companies, and hundreds of other global companies. 

I even met Mr. Beast’s manager and pitched him on investing in GoWild, which my son still thinks is the coolest thing I’ve ever done.

One week the program took us to the training facility for the Dallas Cowboys, where I met the head of sales for the legendary football brand. In a mentor meeting, she told me “You need to hire the Tyson Group—they’re who we use, and half of the NFL is turning to them now.”

That caught my attention. 

GoWild team members Arica Johnson, left, Zack Grimes, Jacob Knight and Brad Luttrell, with Sheila in the middle. Circa 2019.

A few months later, we hired Jacob Knight as the Director of Business Development. Jacob and I were both going to be working on our sales relationships, but I felt we needed help. Selling premium digital advertising to an antiquated industry is hard as it is. Toss in we had hardly any meaningful case studies? It seemed complicated on its best days, and impossible on our worst.

My cofounders and I chatted, and after a few meetings with the Tyson Group, we decided to hire them. They would come in and coach me, Jacob and a few other team members. It was about $10,000, which I know sounds expensive if you’re a startup—it was worth every penny. They put in a ton of time, and if it yielded a single deal, it would have paid for itself. 

The onboarding to Tyson was intense—personality tests, multiple one on ones, questionnaires, etc. I assumed I was passing with flying colors and was about to be acknowledged as a great salesman. Probably best they’d seen. 

Instead, I took one on the chin and my ego was put in check.

“You talk way too much”

Sheila McVeigh was the Tyson Group coach for our team. She did the prep and flew in for a full day of training. After looking at my tests,  our 1:1 prep, and in-person role playing, she realized something about me.

"Brad, you're a natural at pitching, but you talk way too much. You need to stop pitching, and start listening."

Or in other words, "Shut up, stop pitching."

“OK,” I thought. “I get that. No big deal.”

We role played more.

"You are still pitching. You need to ask more questions—you don’t even know what the client needs yet, why are you offering solutions?" - Sheila, again

This was hard. 

Eventually, though, I got it through my thick skull. I trusted the expert. I realized she was right and it absolutely changed how we run our sales meetings. Three years later, Jacob is still walking brands through the process we learned from Tyson Group. 

While I learned dozens of things that I still use to this day, the biggest tool was simply this: I was coming to every meeting, and never asking anything about my potential client’s needs. I "sprayed and prayed" as Tyson Group founder, Lance Tyson, says in his book. We showed a deck that spouted how great we were, and just leaned back as the presumed sales were supposed to flow in. 

The challenge is sometimes the deals had landed. I landed big deals in the past with my style, whether for GoWild or in advertising agencies, but it didn’t mean my process was without flaws. Just because a blind pig finds an acorn doesn’t mean he isn’t still missing most of his shots. And wallowing in crap. 

Today, my process is totally different. We start all meetings off by asking a ton of questions. We listen, follow up by asking questions about what we heard, and we listen for symptoms for which we have a prescription. If we can’t help solve their primary pains, we walk away from the partnership. 

Consider the consult

Look, a lot of people need to read everything I just wrote. They’re still pitching themselves instead of asking how they can help. If you’re selling an enterprise or premium product, I can’t advocate enough the value of going through comprehensive sales training to help find YOUR weakness.

I am in no way getting kickbacks or paid for talking up the Tyson Group, and I’m sure you can find other great sales companies. If you’re selling, coaching helps significantly. This process made our company more successful, because they fixed problems that would have rippled out for years. Instead, we started building our sales process on a great foundation, and it’s had a lasting impact. Tyson Group works with Eli Lilly, the Cowboys, Topgolf and other monster companies, but they do scale down really well to small businesses. 

If you still aren’t sure on making that jump, you can at least take my tips below and execute on them today to make you better at selling. 

4 tips to help you close more deals

1) Stop pitching. Ask questions first.

Get to know your audience. Listen to what they tell you and repeat it back to them. Do not leave the first meeting without understanding who they are, why they do what they do, and what pain points are prohibiting them from doing that as well as they’d like. 

2) Ditch the deck

For sales it’s tough to engage an audience with slides. Stop leaning on Powerpoints & have meaningful conversations. Gong has data proving this works. Also keep in mind many people do better when they have both visuals & audio.

3) Make conversations. Not presentations.

Conversations are memorable. People remember 20% of what they hear, 10% of what they read, but 70% of what they recall/say back to you. Get them engaged and dialoguing with you. Say back what you heard to them to make sure you understand what they really need.

4) "People want a 1/4” hole, not a 1/4” bit" 

That’s a great quote from Lance’s book, “Selling is an Away Game.” If I sell digital ads, I should pitch conversions not impressions. If I am raising money for my nonprofit, I pitch the good we do, not a tax write off. This is something I learned in copywriting years ago—sell the benefit, not the feature. This is often the biggest difference between good founders and great founders—the storytelling of why a product really matters. 

If you are interested and would like an intro to Tyson, let me know. I share because I care, and having used this group, I am always happy to introduce them to friends because I believe everyone will win with that introduction. 

What I’m reading: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

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