Why Your Sales Team Is Failing to Close Deals and How to Fix the Non Obvious Problems

Earnings Disclaimer: You have a .1% probability of hitting million-dollar months according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. As stated by law, we can not and do not make any guarantees about your own ability to get results or earn any money with our ideas, information, programs, or strategies. We don’t know you, and besides, your results in life are up to you. We’re here to help by giving you our greatest strategies to move you forward, faster. However, nothing on this page or any of our websites or emails is a promise or guarantee of future earnings. Any financial numbers referenced here, or on any of our sites or emails, are simply estimates or projections or past results, and should not be considered exact, actual, or as a promise of potential earnings – all numbers are illustrative only.

There are some very non-obvious reasons that your sales team is failing to close deals.

I’m going to tell all of them to you here today.

On your path to cracking million-dollar months or adding that next million dollars a month, sometimes the simplest little changes, and sometimes it’s something that’s very non-obvious that you otherwise wouldn’t see without help from people like myself putting you on game to exactly in this context what your sales team needs to do in order to close far more deals than they are right now.

I promise you this, these are all going to be worth it. Make sure that you’re very attentive and intentional during this specific set of lessons here today.

All we talk about around here is cracking million-dollar months. Whether it’s the first million month or the next million month, these are all just lessons from people who have been there, done that, that we’re handing down to you.

Of course, there’s not a single income claim that we can make around here because we have no idea who you are and whether you have any probability to turn money into more money.

There’s a 0.1% probability, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, that you’ll ever crack $10 million a year, let alone the even smaller probability than that that you would ever crack million-dollar months or the even smaller probability than that that you would ever do a couple million bucks a month.

So again, I’m not claiming you’re going to make any money from reading this. Again, I’m just handing down lessons from people that are absolutely crushing it in terms of revenue and telling you the things that they have going on that are working well for them.

If your business is already generating $100k+ per month, My Inner Circle is where you break through to the next level. Inside, I’ll help you identify and solve the bottlenecks holding you back so you can scale faster and with more clarity.

Why Your Sales Team Looks Terrible and How That Kills Your Authority and Close Rate

Here’s the first one. Your people have zero authority. Research shows that 61% of sales leaders rate “establishing credibility and trustworthiness” as the top skill needed to succeed in sales, making professional presentation absolutely critical.

When you look at your sales team, they look terrible. You probably hire a bunch of third world people. There are some guys that we work with that are always in the low couple hundred thousand a month range.

They’ll hire literal third worlders. They’ll hire VAs. They’ll hire anyone who just shoots them a DM on Instagram. They’ll hire the little broccoli boys with the crazy cuts.

Your people look terrible.

This is very important to understand. Authority transfers quite well. However, it does not transfer quite well into people that look terrible.

This is very important you understand this.

I’ll give you a great example of how this works. You sit here and you watch somebody like me. I’m a high authority individual. I talk with certainty. I put you on genuine game.

If this isn’t your first piece of content with me, or even if it is, I’m going to teach you stuff that you can go out there and apply into your business that will help get you some results. You’ll see momentum from it.

You’ll start thinking to yourself, “Dang, this Jeremy guy really knows what he’s talking about. Like, he’s good. I want to go buy from this guy.”

Then what you’ll do is you’ll go to one of my funnels where you’ll see me again. I’ll be in the VSL sales letters. I’ll be the guy that’s writing the copy on the pages. You’ll experience me in written form and in a different format on a sales page.

At that point, you’re then going to apply and you’re going to schedule a call with us. Then you get on the phone with somebody in my organization.

Now, there’s a very high probability that you’re going to talk to somebody named Leo. When you talk to my guy Leo, Leo is my head of sales. He talks to the richest amongst you. He talks to people that are most qualified amongst you. We have other sales guys that you may also talk to.

But here’s the best part. You will find that my people don’t look terrible.

You can go to my people’s Instagram. They look good. They represent the business well. My people on every single sales call they’ll ever be on, they’re wearing a little Megalodon Marketing polo shirt with our company logo here.

My people, like my guy Leo specifically, he makes as low as like 80K a month. The last like two months he made upwards of 133 grand a month. He’s got a lake house. That’s a second house for him.

Does your sales guy have a second house? Probably not.

My point is, Leo’s also got four kids. This guy’s got his stuff tight. He looks the part. He’s fit. He’s got propaganda all around him in his Zoom environment. He talks the part. He represents the business well.

You could ask him questions like what you would ask me and he’s actually competent enough to answer them. Yes, that’s specialized knowledge that takes a fair bit of time to actually acquire and be able to represent on behalf of the business to potential customers and clients like you on the phone.

But here’s my point. That transfers. That authority from me into my team transfers and you will care about that when you show up to the call.

Whether you want to judge it or not, it will make a difference.

How Your Sales Rep’s Name and Phone Number Can Kill Your Show Rate by Thirty Percent

Let me give you another example. The names make a big difference.

This is going to sound super intense, but it’s very true. There was a guy, he’s in the Inner Circle, his name’s Eric. Eric had two salespeople. One had a 70% show rate, one had a 40% show rate.

Very first question. What are the names of the two reps?

One of them was named David. The 40% show rate or the 70% show rate. Which show rate do you think was attributed to David? The 70% show rate.

The one that had a 40% show rate was like a 10 syllable name. It’s how it works.

Sometimes it’s as simple as the phone numbers. We’ve always talked about this on this channel for a long time where I’ve always said we like to use iPhones to send our text messages out.

All my salespeople, they have business lines. No, we don’t use all these blue text message companies. We just use actual iPhones.

All those blue text message companies have all kinds of software glitches. You got to rotate the number all the time. Yeah, they can integrate into a CRM so you can send some automated stuff. We don’t care about that.

We will use an actual iPhone in perpetuity until all those little software glitches that those companies have fix themselves.

But let me be clear, the phone number also matters a lot. It does because if you have somebody text, like if you’re selling to Americans and you text us on WhatsApp, you’re going to have a terrible time.

Your people are going to have a hard time closing because as Americans, we don’t use WhatsApp that frequently. There’s some of us that do when we have to talk to our international teams or people that are overseas or our international customers.

But listen, all you international people reading this, you probably think that’s crazy. You know it’s true. You guys all use WhatsApp because most of the other countries on Earth for an extremely long duration of time did not have the benefit of being able to buy iPhones and you all adapted to using WhatsApp instead.

So anyway, I digress. I’m not trying to sit here and roast you all. We have customers from literally 100 plus different countries.

Here’s my point. If you’re selling to other countries, use WhatsApp. If you’re selling to Americans, you need to use an iPhone and actually text with blue texting back and forth with the leads.

It needs to be a phone number that’s actually going to show up like a real person.

Here’s my point. When your people look terrible, that authority from you into them is going to fail to transfer. Research confirms that a sales professional’s personal appearance serves as an initial indicator of trustworthiness and competence, significantly influencing how they’re perceived by potential clients.

That’s going to inhibit deals getting closed.

When your clients and your customers go look up your sales rep and there’s nothing about them they can find on the internet, they’re going to also have an increased level of skepticism.

When you look up my people on the internet, my people have a presence. My people are aligned with our organization. My people’s social media channels, they’re aligned to our organization.

When you get on a call with my people, again, they look sharp. They’re wearing company polos. They look like they got their stuff together because they do have their stuff together.

My sales reps in almost all instances are in some cases richer than the people that we sell to, give or take who we’re selling to.

We have plenty of people specifically for our Inner Circle offers and our agency offers of course where my sales reps are nowhere near as rich as the client that they’re sitting there talking to.

But as an example for our Master Internet Marketing program, my sales reps probably sweep you in revenue. You’ll notice, you’ll see them talking to you from their lake house.

That’s kind of my point. My sales reps have the authority of me, my belief system from me, my company culture from me transferred into them and they represent it.

They have normal names that again represent us well because at the end of the day, again, as intense as it sounds, it’s very true, that can create upwards of a 30% difference in show rate just based on the name of the person that you have them getting on the phone with.

The phone number itself also makes a substantial difference. These are just little things that you have to consider.

How to Train Your Sales Team So They Can Answer Technical Questions Without You

Obviously from there, this is one that I already kind of talked about, but I want to be really clear and make it into a whole point. Specialized knowledge.

This is something that most of you guys absolutely lack. Some of you, this specific point keeps you on the phone forever.

Like you as the business owner or you as the partner of the business, whatever you want to call yourself, you think that you need to stay on the phone because you fail to transfer specialized knowledge into people.

When in reality what you need to do is you need to get way better at training your people so that specialized knowledge can actually transfer into them.

It’s not tough. Yes, there’s going to be instances where a question can’t be answered. You know what you do in that example? You have a phone a friend.

We call it phone an expert where there’s somebody that’s available on staff who does actually have the specialized knowledge that can be tapped into the game, that can be tapped into that call in real time.

Well, if I’m not busy and one of my sales reps need me to jump on the call because something’s not being answered properly, they will be able to phone an expert, me or somebody else in my staff, and we will jump in and we will answer those questions.

We will get the technical things answered because that’s sometimes what’s required in order to get a deal closed.

Why You Need to Get in the Trenches and Train Your Sales Team Every Single Day

Competency. This is one of the most important things that you have to understand.

I’m not even going to make up a number, dude. It’s almost all of you at this point. It’s unbelievable. There is so little desire to actually go out there and just run a proper sales organization at this point.

It’s unbelievable to me how few people on earth that are business owners anymore have willingness and passion and desire for one of the number one skills that grows an organization to substantial revenue numbers.

You have to be willing to get into the trenches from a sales management perspective and actually help your people become competent. You have to be willing to train them day in and day out.

Here’s the craziest part. You got to be willing to in a sense short-term sacrifice a little bit of quality of life just to jump in and train your people far more often than you are now.

Everybody nowadays is using sales agencies and it causes a whole different whirlwind of problems because they deal with the exact same stuff here, but arguably way worse in almost all instances. There’s very, very, very few instances where that isn’t the case.

Here’s my point. In-house teams when properly managed by a business owner that genuinely cares and transfers beliefs and transfers culture and transfers competency and transfers specialized knowledge, jumps on calls themselves occasionally and accumulates more and more training, is just filming stuff and immersing their people in culture, doing team meetings consistently, just jumping in and just training the heck out of people.

That makes a huge difference. It transfers. This is very important you understand this and you actually step into this role and do this.

How to Stop Your Sales Team from Blaming Bad Leads When They Stop Closing Deals

This is another one that’s very important. It’s called narrative management.

Narrative management absolutely destroys businesses out of results all the time.

Narrative management is where your people start to develop some storyline that they participate in about how the leads are terrible, about how there’s no way that these people are going to close.

Then all it takes sometimes is your sales manager or one of the competent reps or you jumping in on those calls, closing some deals, looking your sales reps in the eyes and being like, “What are you guys talking about? Shut up and close these leads.”

Then magically the narrative breaks and they start closing a bunch of deals again.

You understand? The narrative has to be attacked aggressively. You cannot have a narrative just go on and on and on and run wild because as it spreads, it cements itself more and it’s harder to take out of the ground and it grows back.

You got to get rid of the people that cause the narrative that stay latched onto it. Not a lot of businesses have the willingness to fire reps, replace them because they know it’s a multi-week process and they know there’s potentially going to be a little bit of a revenue loss there.

But at the end of the day, most of the time when the narrative goes against you, it’s really easy to see when the tipping point starts and everything starts to shift in the closing team or the setter team or the entire sales organization for that matter.

Their perspective about why what’s going on is happening and what story they start to live within.

The narrative is really important. This is the story they live in. Research on self-fulfilling prophecies confirms that when people expect certain outcomes, they act in ways that make those expectations come true, creating cycles of thought and behavior that directly impact performance.

If the story they live in starts to go against what would benefit the business, you have to come in and stop it immediately. It will destroy you if you do not.

I can’t stress this enough. The narrative, actively being in your organization’s favor, actively having positive things to say about leads that are coming in, being in a position where deals are probable to close solely because of the frame of the salespeople.

We recently just had a client, listen to this. They have a $17,000 and a $26,000 offer and the sales team started to complain about the leads.

Well, they had an 18 question application, long as heck. It had a $700 cost per qualified call that would come out the other side of it, sometimes as much as $900.

We lowered the quantity of questions in the application and still managed to leave the ones that were important for the conditional logic in there. They got the cost per qualified booked call down to about $350 to $500 instead of $700 to 900.

That was really good.

Well, the sales team was so attached to the idea that the intent was going to fall dramatically because the application went down that like magic, all of a sudden they weren’t closing deals.

So what did we do?

We caught it thankfully within about two weeks, which is still an audacious amount of time to just get destroyed on revenue that could have otherwise been coming in.

We told the sales manager around narrative management. We were like, “Look, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to lie to the sales team and we’re going to say that we changed it back to the long form application. We’re not going to do a dang thing different. We’re going to leave the shorter form application and we’re just going to lie to the salespeople and tell them that we changed it to the long form application. Go along with it, Mr. Sales Manager, and let’s see what happens.”

Guys, guess what happened?

Yeah. The sales team magically started closing a bunch of deals again because they all thought that it was the longer form application.

Then after about a week of consistent performance, we told the sales team, we said, “Hey, nothing changed. It was the short form application that entire time. You guys’ belief systems absolutely mattered. Shut up and close those deals now.”

Again, we’re getting half the cost per call that we were getting prior. This is good for everybody, not bad. Close some deals, please, for the love of God.

Narrative management matters a lot. It could be as simple as literally lying to your sales team so it breaks the narrative.

In other instances, somebody’s got to come in and just close a bunch of deals and that ends up solving the problem.

Why Your Sales Team Needs to Stop Blaming Marketing and Take Responsibility for Results

One last thing. I’ll close it out with this. This one’s also very important you understand this.

You have to know that when you think in the context of real reasons that your sales team isn’t closing, they’ll generally play the blame game and they’re going to blame marketing.

They’re always going to say, “Oh, it’s marketing’s fault.”

The best organizations that we’ve ever worked with that are some of the most consistent, that have the highest performance, that have the highest close rates, it’s a combination of accountability and responsibility.

There’s a great book by Jocko, Extreme Ownership. Extreme Ownership talks about this concept where when we assume responsibility over a situation and we assume accountability over the situation, we then have the ability to influence it. Research from the American Society of Training and Development found that people are 65% likely to meet a goal after committing to another person, jumping to 95% with an accountability partner.

As soon as somebody starts playing the blame game, it’s cooked. There is no accountability. There is no responsibility in the blame game. Pointing a finger at others.

We want to instead point the finger at ourselves and say, “This is our fault.”

As an example, if you guys go to my content here and you read a lot of the other things that can help your sales team improve their ability to close, things like my back-end selling systems, my content ad strategies, my content first ad strategies that I’ve conceptualized, all of these incredible things that we talk about that relate to marketing.

This specifically in this context, in this set of lessons, is all just salespeople things they could do.

Blaming themselves and saying this is my fault, that’s what unlocks all that ideation that you guys have seen me put on display from the marketing side.

When sales teams that we’ve worked with blame themselves instead of blaming the marketing team, they also unlock a bunch of new ideas and a bunch of creative solutions that we sit there in depth and talk about one by one by one by one for exactly what all these sales teams do inside of my paid programs that I would never share with you here for free.

I’ve already put you on a tremendous amount of game here today.

All this stuff, just this stuff alone, these basic things that I’ve talked to you about here will make such a huge difference. If you’re not unable to implement, you can go out there and use all of these and get some substantial results inside of your sales teams.

Here’s the thing. First of all, I guarantee a lot of your people look terrible. I guarantee that there’s very little authority transferring over to them. I guarantee you this, there’s a huge difference between the names of the right people and the wrong people.

I bet your phone numbers are absolutely messed up. I bet you fail to transfer genuinely specialized knowledge into your people. So there are certain questions that certain leads show up and ask that your people will never be able to answer because you don’t actually care to train them. You don’t have a phone an expert that they can tap into.

The narrative going on in your team is absolutely trash. You fail to step in and just rectify it by either lying to them to improve it or just stepping in and closing deals yourself.

You let everybody in your team point the finger at everybody else instead of pointing the finger at themselves so they can actually unlock some true performance improvement.

It’s a shame.

Of course, there’s a ton of other things that we could sit here and teach you, but we hold back 80 to 90% of what we actually know. We put you on enough game to go out there, get results, make some money with what we teach, and then get to the point where you can actually join into one of our paid offers.

Most business owners waste years figuring out what actually works. In my Master Internet Marketing program, I compress that learning curve into 7 weeks, covering copywriting, funnels, ads, and more. If you’re ready to invest $5k and get serious about your skills, apply here.

Go get richer.

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