Get so good people have to pay you money

The skill you drill until you can kill at will.

People pay me to consult mostly about webinars. How to improve their conversion, how to better leverage it, that sort of thing.

Occasionally people pay me for more strategic stuff - such as how to launch a product or position an offer to have the maximum impact.

Rarely - too rarely - people pay me for straight sales consulting. Literally, they dish out $3500 for an hour and all we do is close. They give me an objection, I give a close. Repeat until time runs out.

The last consult I did before leaving for Bali was like that. A publisher who wrote a smoking hot webinar for a client first paid me for 2 hours to help them optimize that webinar.

Then he re-upped for another hour and we just hammered through objections.

No script. No prep. Give it to me as it comes and I give you the magic.

On the 15 hour plane ride to Manila I got to thinking… everyone should have ONE skill with such an intense level of mastery. Can you drill one skill to kill at will?

If you do, it’s amazing how valuable it will be to you.

But it’s a damn tough thing to do.

The value of THE SKILL THAT CAN KILL AT WILL

I was in Orlando speaking a few weeks back. My friend Brendon Boyd came through through from Miami just to see me. I first met him in LA where he had me on his podcast. Then, for a bit of webinar feedback, he booked me on a dozen podcasts and put me in touch with some really great people.

I never knew how Brendon came into my world. So while out at a vegan dinner I asked him. He told me saw me come in on a webinar and just do closes. He liked my style, reached out and it just so happened we both were in LA.

The webinar he saw me on was for a young man named Tez who I was mentoring. Tez had about 5000 people live on a webinar and I told him I’d hop on after he did all his closes and then I’d close some more. Just for fun.

I had no time to prep so I just showed up - with a skill that I had drilled so now I could kill at will.

Funny, as I write this I just realized Tez was the one who told the client I just did the recent consult with about me… and that client came up to me in Newport (for a mastermind at a $50MM home) and said in front of some very famous people “Jason, you’ve made me a lot of money”… and then that led to this paid consulting.

The world is small at the top. But to get to the top, you need to have a skillset that is hard to match.

Like I said, it’s hard to do. But it’s worth it.

How to get so good it’s obvious to everyone

Now hopefully you’re committed. So the first step is the hardest - you have to start so small that no one will even notice. I got good at the global stage of selling by first doing it in small rooms with practically no stake… because I wasn’t worth more than that.

I put the reps in. I wish you could shortcut it. But that’s like trying to get 9 women pregnant at once to have a baby in a month.

A quote often attributed to Napoleon says “Quantity can become its own quality”. And that’s how I look at it. You suck at something every day and then you wake up six months later and all the sudden you’re good - somewhere it seeped into you subconscious.

Most people die before they get to six months though. You have to be okay with the pain.

Try to put yourself in a place that you can earn while you learn. You won’t earn much, but enough to keep you going. My first close was on a Sunday morning on Easter to be hired for $35/hr as a marketing consult to a local flooring company in Iowa City, IA.

I started at $35/hr… and now I have two extra zeroes behind it… shows how far you can go if you’re willing to put in the reps for a decade.

I used to do webinars for 50-100 people and then as long as someone had a question I tried to close.

For hours.

My thinking is if I got one extra sale for an hour of grinding then the math mathed - it’d make me $100 for that hour. Then $200. Then more.

I used to use scripts and techniques I read in books. I drilled it until it became boring. Then the boredom spurred the creativity. That’s how all my greatest closes were invented.

Start small, then trade up.

I had no idea how valuable this one simple little skill would become - but that’s the beauty of mastery.

When you climb a mountain, you get a better view point. Learning to sell one to one allowed me with minimal effort to transfer it into coaching, consulting, webinars and whole marketing campaigns.

I’m not saying the skill you should master is selling - but pick one skill small enough that it’s easy for you to drill it over and over again - but valuable enough that it will scale practically forever.

Maybe it’s how you speak. Or how you manage your time. Or a specific way to create impact in someone else’s life. Try to find a skill that is valuable across all sorts of contexts. Every business needs sales. Every business needs to build value. Almost every company needs to hire people.

Find such a skill and then drill down to its simplest element.

For sales, the biggest problem is people don’t know how to ask for the order. So I started there - just figuring out the close portion.

I’d literally practice in front of the mirror phrases like:

• “If that sounds good to you here’s how we can start a client relationship”

• “Should we talk more are you ready to sign up?”

• “It seems you’re a good fit so let’s make it official…”

Etc. Etc.

Pretty simple. That’s the point. Drill it until you can do it without thinking. Like tying your shoes. Then add something to it. For me, the next step was adding trial closes - because they are sort of like closes but they can test the water before you ask for the order.

Examples:

• “Does everything align with your vision of what you’re looking for?”

• “If this was all it did, would it be enough or would you need more?”

• “If we stopped right here would you feel our time together was already incredibly valuable?”

Then I’d learn how to pick up the cue - if it looked solid I’d then go into a close. If not, I’d focus more on the value side… which was the next part of the skill I drilled.

Again, I repeat - this is hard.

That’s why the big boys and girls get paid so much… because…

hard isn’t enough to scare us away.

But it’s only hard for a while and then it becomes so easy people think you’re a natural.

And you can trade up. Once I nailed sales, I started working on offers. I messed around with it enough that I helped inspired the book that sold a million copies on the subject.

As part of sales I learned how to break belief patterns (limiting beliefs will stop sales that should occur) and that inspired a different author to write his book which also sold about million copies.

Not bad from a small town Iowa boy.

Now I’m on the the grind again. I commit to you an article a week. I write this one in Bali. I’m putting my reps in. 52 a year.

I’ll eke it out for the thousandish of you that read it now and sooner or later maybe it will get so big I’ll write a book that sells a million copies. (But right now I get super pumped when I get one or two subscribers a week. FREE LEADS!)

But I will tell you this - the writing is already paying off. It’s getting me clients… and more important… it’s shaping my thinking to a higher level.

The real value of the skill isn’t what it gets you at the end - it’s who you become in the process.