DeepSpecialization_Justin Michael_EP 72_Video_Edited_V2
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[00:00:00] The law of attraction plus sales has never really been done at scale. You've never had someone who's an expert in sales. There's a couple of decades of experience who is fusing this with metaphysical mindset and psychology. It's kind of the medicine. So in a way it's the most controversial book.
[00:00:16] Welcome to the deep specialization podcast, the show where we blend focus strategy and client intimacy in order to scale and simplify our businesses and our lives. I'm your host, Corey Quinn. Let's jump into the show. Today I'm joined by Justin Michael. He's an executive coach. He's also the best selling author of sales superpowers, and he's the co founder of hard skill exchange.
[00:00:40] Welcome Justin. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here and excited about your show and your book and your approach. So yeah, this will be great. Awesome. I'm super excited as well. This is actually our first time engaging. Um, on zoom and on, on a podcast, we've connected probably for the last couple of years over LinkedIn and a couple other platforms.
[00:01:01] So I'm excited to finally get an opportunity to interview you and, and learn a little bit more about your process, your, your perspectives, your mindsets on all things sales. So before we jump into that, can you just quickly introduce yourself to the audience, give people a little sense of what you are up to.
[00:01:19] Yeah, so I'm Justin Michael, and, uh, I've been nicknamed the sales Borg or a seller cyborg because I got into automation of the top of the sales funnel very early. That's because I came out of mobile technology. So I've been selling since 2001 and in the mid 2000s, got an assassin by the, uh, You're really like 2011.
[00:01:39] I went to Salesforce and in the mid around 2015, I worked for an agency where we sent 5 million emails for a hundred startups at once. It was autonomous sales development and it's nothing like chat GPT now. So there's a lot more levers and mechanical type functions, right? But we ran experiments on 5 million emails, the subject line, we AB tested the calls to action.
[00:02:01] We looked at the targeting and the personalization and factors. And from that, I built out a methodology. Around that, which is a series of pattern interrupts. I call it heuristics, which is a giant word. It just means shortcuts. And what I found kind of like Bob Ross and the happy little trees is that formulas and frameworks are far stronger than templates.
[00:02:20] And we have, you know, 400 million small businesses and most have the same way that they cold call and open the cold call and send an email. Hope you're doing well. Or the, the phone call is, did I catch you at a bad time? And so I started sending Venn diagrams and visuals and I started making my emails. I messed up the grammar and the spelling and made it look like a text message on the subject line, hat, tip, or in class.
[00:02:43] And so I built all these interesting hacks and I put them into a book called tech powered sales and became a bestseller. And I've got a new set of Justin Michael method books. That's a series. And I've worked with about 200 startups in the past four years and about a thousand people have been doing a lot of executive coaching and it's fantastic.
[00:02:59] Mindset, skillset and disruptive techniques for client acquisition. And so when you were there at that agency, you sent the 5 million emails, you mentioned that was sort of the genesis for starting, you know, building your own methodology. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah. I discovered some of the phone techniques myself because it was on a phone for like 20, 000 hours.
[00:03:18] People say, how is that even possible? But in the old era, right, you would sit in a cubicle and call 14 hours a day. There was no, yeah, back in the day, the grind, you just like Red Bull and you sit there and you'd call out of the yellow pages. I mean, it was very, uh, Crow Magnin, you know, but, uh, it gave you a certain work ethic and appreciation for talking to people and getting past the gatekeeper.
[00:03:38] And those skills are still powerful now because we're in an era where emails becoming more restricted, LinkedIn's restricted, the robo dialer, and it's good in a way, but it's very hard to break through. And I really focus on opening as the new closing, like what are these techniques and rigor we need here to predictably get customers, get the conversations, get to the first meeting.
[00:03:59] Yeah, so what are some of the core principles that that are that you are made up in the So I think the biggest thing is that if you do what everyone else is doing with cold outreach, the prospects fatigue, so, you know, the human mind is actually visual. So let's just think of a cold call. You call a stranger and immediately triggers the back brain, the amygdala, the croc brain, as Orrin Claff calls it.
[00:04:21] Right. And you should calm them down, like walking up on a horse until their logical brain, the neocortex takes over. Right. But what did sellers do? They interrupt and then they start buffeting them with logic and all it causes is more fear and just a saber tooth tiger, like get out of here. Irritation. So like you have to do cold calling in a way that calms the person down with your tone.
[00:04:42] So the traditional way of being really loud and confident and standing up straight and power posing the whole Jordan Belfort, Grant Cardone thing, it's great. They're showmen. I admire them, but sometimes a neutral tone, a trusted advisor tone cuts through right. And getting them to talk first is powerful.
[00:04:59] Then on the email side, we send all these marching ants. We send all this little text and pictographs. But I send Venn diagrams because a visual, it processes 60, 000 times faster than words. So one visual in an email will be ingested more than 27 email touches. Now you can't send that the first try because of the spam folder.
[00:05:20] So there's a couple of things. The third huge revelation is that LinkedIn is a chat platform. It's a direct message or DM choreography. Everyone asks me for the last eight years. Hey, what's the first message on connect? How do you customize? I do blank connects. And then I make my profile, a conversion page from the headline about, and Corey, you have a fantastic brand.
[00:05:39] So you get this right? Like weaving it into your book cover and your value prop and everything is just seamless. And then I just try to have a human conversation. So I created this idea called the fourth frame and it's like a chat flow choreography. So my story of AB testing all that email, I went in, I had 30, 000 maxed out connections, 55, 000 followers, and I wasn't getting clients.
[00:05:59] I'm like, Is this thing on? So I started testing all this outreach and you can read it in my book on page 177, this thing, and, uh, it's very effective. It's just very different. I'd like to go back. I want to, I want to cover that LinkedIn. It's, it's very, very relevant for today, but before we do, I want to go back to this, this idea of, you know, calming the croc brain.
[00:06:20] I also am a fan of, of Orrin, Orrin Klaff's and, uh, his work. I'm not familiar with that term, but you're absolutely right. I think one of my, my experience is that agencies will come in, but do sort of more of a blanketed approach, but really trying to lean hard on the offer on the cell upfront. Right. Hey, let me get you this for that.
[00:06:39] And I think that. My experience can trigger that more, that defensive, like, Hey, I'm trying to be, I'm, I'm getting sold here when really people don't want to be sold. They want to be understood. And so, um, you use the term a trusted advisor. And so can you talk about ways that an agency can go from more of a transactional outreach to maybe more of a trusted advisor?
[00:07:00] Yeah. So nobody wants to hire an agency or a consultant or a coach. They want to solve a problem or realize an opportunity, right. Or they have something blocking them or something that's a burning pain or latent pain under the surface of the iceberg. So starting a conversation about, you know, what's Q2, how's Q2 versus Q1.
[00:07:18] You're using all this newfangled chat GPT, just starting a question laterally. Like if you bumped into them at Dreamforce or a conference is a lot more effective. Getting into a very human conversation. And, uh, really focusing on service and listening. And as Alan Weiss said in a million dollar consulting, amazing book, it's one of them, the more you front load the conversation and slow down and just be human, even take two or three discovery calls before you try to pitch.
[00:07:45] The bigger the deal will be. Because we're in an environment where everyone's trying to sell the offer. Like you said, within the first call, even upfront, Hey, Corey, can I get 30 seconds? I asked you for permission. I lowered my status. Then they say, Hey, I'm helping other agency owners, uh, with training, or I say, Hey, I've got this amazing marketing plan and it works for companies just like you, and they're being sold immediately and they recoil and they ask for information and they haggle on pricing.
[00:08:08] They don't trust you yet. They don't know you and they get 10 more phone calls just like it. So slow down, be human. Be like the little snail as a Rich Liffin calls it, right? Like a happy little garden snail. And that's the paradox. Like what is it? Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. It's fast. And it's also like to, to scale your agency, do the unscalable, slow down and build very strong human conversations.
[00:08:34] Now, remember the reason I call it the fourth frame is. Traditionally, since the telephone was invented in 1876, the first person said, Oh, wow, I can call Corey at the dinner table and sell him a hairbrush. And then we moved to email in 1993. And then we go, Oh, I can spam everyone. And just to sell them off.
[00:08:50] And then we had, do not call this DNC and can spam and now GDPR in Europe. Right? So the other idea is this, if I have a hundred. Potential clients I'm calling from agency and 97 don't pick up. And I only talked to three. Where are the 97 go on to social, go on to Twitter X, go on to where they live and connect meaningfully.
[00:09:11] And that DM flow, that chat flow is like a cold call. Now it could be even more valuable. Yeah, yeah, the, the concept of sell by chat is, is definitely been talked about a lot recently. I certainly just think reflecting on my own experience on LinkedIn, I know that anytime that I'm, I have a cold LinkedIn connection request, I do kind of, I still get that, that resistance coming out because I like, okay, if I say yes, if I accept this, then the pitch is coming right after that type of thing.
[00:09:40] So how do you, how do you lower the, I guess, the friction that's inherent in that transaction? Yeah. Yeah. I'll spill the beans on that because you get like. Hey, Corey comma, and then, and then you feel the, the automator hit. And some of that software is cool and there's ways to semi automate that. But what I do is I really, I don't even say, Hey, first name.
[00:10:00] And I don't congratulate. So a lot of this is the principle of disinterest or non hunger. A lot of the ways people prospect for new business completely violate any dating scenario. Hey, I want to date you. Could I get 30 seconds to tell you why you should go out with me? Like this will not work, but that's what our pitches look like.
[00:10:16] Pitch slap or Right. There's no, it's the alpha. It's very, it's very much a beta approach that was, yeah, yeah. I think, uh, Eben Pagan taught me this idea of, you know, you're paying the wanting it tax in the dating scenario. It's the same thing in sales where it's like, if you want something so badly, you kind of, you have a, well, they say commission breath.
[00:10:36] You repel it. Right. So, but then there's this other school and I worked for LinkedIn, the empire state building where it's like, well, I'm going to go on Corey's page and I see that he likes, you know, he likes Tony Robbins and he likes to hike and, you know, wow. He was in, you know, Austin recently. And I'm just going to mention that.
[00:10:51] And then you're going like friend zone, like, are you wasting my time? Right. So I, there's two graphs, there's the economic, right. There's the economic graph of LinkedIn. And then there's the social Facebook, Instagram stuff. And people are busy and they have something, their objective. They don't work.
[00:11:05] They're not playing all day. They're working. They're away from their families. They don't need another friend. They don't need a steak dinner. So you need to find something on their profile that is work relevant, work specific, and that's where hyper personalization comes in. So I got it. Perfect. I want to get to Corey Quinn.
[00:11:18] He's got a ton of podcasts. Let me listen to a few and say, Hey, Corey, last Thursday at minute seven and 15 seconds, the comment you made about AI, that was genius. I put the quote in there. I'm like, we have a technology that can support what you're trying to do that. Can we get a meeting? And I have such a higher ability to do that because I had a friend who tried to make a tech to be able to parse podcasts through that, but right now the machines can't do it.
[00:11:38] So think in terms of synthesis and personalization stacking and finding things about people that a machine wouldn't and standing out in that way. It's just a slight level of effort. Hey, it's Corey. I hope you're enjoying this episode. And I want to let you know that I have a new best selling book that has just come out that gives you my proven system to escape founder led sales.
[00:12:00] It's called anyone, not everyone. And it's been endorsed by Aaron Ross. April Dunford, Dr. Benjamin Hardy, John Rulon, and many others. If you'd like to get the audiobook absolutely for free, there's a link below in the description, or you could simply go to anyonenoteveryone. com and start listening right now.
[00:12:19] I had a great cold LinkedIn outreach yesterday. It was a guy who reached out and he messaged me on LinkedIn, and he had a small message and then a screenshot, and the screenshot was his five star review of my book. So, uh, That he has, it was a verified purchase and it's not that you understand the value of that.
[00:12:39] And so, yeah, I would have never met this person and he's like, Hey, just, you know, I wanted to help share that. I'd loved your book and you know, this is the thing that I help out with. And I'm like, okay, all right. I showed my wife, like this guy, he took two minutes or probably more to do that. Right.
[00:12:55] Hopefully more. And it was, it shows a lot of intention and definitely. Got so much of my caught my awareness in a way that was like, okay, this guy certainly is being Intentional about reaching out and trying to build a connection here. So that that stood out. Yeah, so I instruct my clients to send books So maybe send Cory's book but then what you do is take the book go to page 75 put a post it take a picture of Of the book and the post it, you know, send the book to the mail.
[00:13:22] It's like I had this client who was doing a wealth consulting for retirement. And he was sending somebody else's book and he got a meeting that way, but it's getting outside the box is really good too. I mean, I'm just a student of every possible way to get a meeting. So I like all that Stu Heineck and Dale Dupree stuff too, is really interesting to me.
[00:13:40] I've done a lot of stunts there. If you FedEx people, like you've got a client, you got to get in front of you. Paid 32 cent of FedEx. Like I was sitting in a board meeting with my CEO and in walks the FedEx person and she takes it, she opens it in the middle of the meeting. And I'm going like, this is gold.
[00:13:56] I can just get to the CEO's hand. Yes. I'm just basically, so I was working in this corporation. They gave me like 50 FedExes and then built this analytics report. The other really big thing is an agency. You're trying to get client acquisition is what can you give? Right. And Hormozy does talk about this.
[00:14:08] What's a give that they'd pay for? Is it like an ebook, a white paper guide, but not something that's generic and obvious, something that actually has tools that will help them, right? Is it a analysis, a scorecard? Is it a tool as an ROI calc as an assessment, an audit, something, and then you can give that to people.
[00:14:25] For me, I have all these codex guides, which sound like ancient religious text. It's a hilarious word. It stands out like everything, like this hat. Yeah. But it, people read them like, gosh, I would have paid for that. And that gets them, you know, into a conversation with me. I learned this from Katie Power and Associates, the crisp 1 bill and then the huge survey.
[00:14:43] And then you're like, I want to burn this bill, but I can't. My last company, my last in house company, Scorpion, which you know, we would, we would spend Half of our budget on gifts, that was a big part of our go to market sending out gifts to cold prospects to kind of do the pattern interrupt, but in a way that was genuine and that conveyed that we were trying to build a long term relationship versus try and trick them into getting on a sales call with us.
[00:15:08] It's a very, very familiar and fond of that approach as well. How does, when it comes to list building, how do you approach this building for, or how do you recommend your clients approach list building? Yeah. So I work with a very talented virtual assistant team, a gentleman by the name of Aditya Prakash, aditya at task minions.
[00:15:29] com. He has a good sense of humor about that name. He's based in India. I went through about 75, you know, Sales assets and resources when I was doing that agency, but he's got a team of 30 and he has access to various scrapers and data sources, and that's helpful, but basically like the whole Chet Holmes dream, 100 things really good, like pick your top hundred accounts, or if you have a massive territory, 5, 000 or 10, 000, use a proxy for profitability because a lot of times with privately held companies, you don't know who's profitable and sometimes cost prohibitive.
[00:15:59] If you can get a data source, like 6 cents or a zoom info intent, that's awesome. That'll give you. Some semblance of what people are downloading. But for me, there's three states of business. Like my mentor, Tony, who's taught me is there's growth, there's stasis and there's down and stasis and down at the same.
[00:16:12] They're not going to have the extra money to hire your agency services, right? So find people that are hiring because headcount is the most expensive thing and they might be taking on funding, right? But that's an obvious trigger and that gets a little bit. You know, worn out if you're like, Hey, congrats on the funding.
[00:16:25] Like they get, somebody gets funding and they get bombarded, you know, but do an 80, 20 stack rank and try to find the most healthy, profitable process, just because they're going to have a budget for you. You have a discretionary budget to spend on your agency. And that's critical. And you're not pushing on a rope.
[00:16:40] I love that. So you are about to publish your third book in a series, I believe. Is that correct? That's correct. I just, I'm blooding for punishment. Yeah. So tell us about, tell us about what the, the inspiration behind when you're writing the book, you mentioned that you would, you've, you've recommended your clients in the mouth, but tell us about the book writing journey.
[00:17:02] Why not just one book? Why three? Like give us, give us some insight on that whole process. Yeah. So as the case study of a book called combo prospecting with Tony Hughes in 2017, and then through that relationship, it was my mentor. And, uh, we got a book deal for tech powered sales on Harbor Collins. And then I got a deal for a book called reinventing virtual events.
[00:17:22] And now I have a third publisher named Jeremy Jones. He's out of Arizona. He's had 200 bestsellers. He's been helping a lot with strategy marketing and concept. And so I decided to write my magnum opus, sort of the time capsule to the future. And I. Thought I'd call it Justin Michael method. It was called unlock limited pipeline.
[00:17:40] And then it became sales superpowers to sell books. Right. So it became Justin Michael method 1. 0, 2. 0 and 3. 0. We split up the books in three and they're each about 50, 000 words. So it's a fast read. It's like a Hollywood movie. Maybe it's like a three hour movie. I've read two of your books so far. Yeah. I have yours too.
[00:17:56] And I left a review. So the first one's really mindset and tactics for the top of funnel. The second is, okay, well, how do I do the top, the full cycle? And what's the seven figure mindset and how do I do negotiation, closing demos, presentations, some of the sales stunts that we just talked about. There's a whole bunch of thoughts.
[00:18:11] And that's sort of there. The third book is the law of attraction plus sales, which has never really been done at scale. You've never had someone who's an expert in sales. There's a couple of decades of experience who is fusing this with metaphysical mindset and psychology. And it's kind of the medicine.
[00:18:28] So in a way it's the most controversial book ever written in B2B, but every seller I talked to is like, Oh, I love thinking, grow rich. I love the secret. I'm super into Wayne Dyer. I've told like people are on board with this positive thinking and new thoughts of, because ultimately. You can learn the tactics all day and you can get your mind right.
[00:18:46] But who you are at your identity is critical, your self image and reprogramming it. So I'm talking about music and frequencies and, you know, visualization and, you know, affirmations and all that sort of woo woo stuff, but putting in the context of, okay, you're on the road carrying the bag. Slugging away a case yet back and rejected all day long.
[00:19:05] How do you really not just get your mind right, but get your identity that place where you're kind of unstoppable and you're coming from that six or seven figure mindset, which becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. You really have to work hard on yourself to become the type of rep. That can hit those targets, which took me 15 years to figure out.
[00:19:25] Short is your journey. And that's awesome. So any, are there any techniques you could share with us today here, as far as a quick thing that could, I could help someone down that road. So what I found was the impact of music. I first called this. So my first book was called TQ or technology quotient, which is, you know, the fusion of human and machine, like the Java, the Jarvis Ironman suit.
[00:19:46] The idea of music for station is music and manifestation. Well, what kind of music? Well, soul fed geo, which is a sacred set of tones that aligns to your chakras. You might've heard of five 28 Hertz or four 32 Hertz. It's like the miracle tone or the heart chakra. There's these tones that if you play them against water or sand, they make perfect geometries of shapes.
[00:20:04] So if you play them to your body, it can repair your DNA, it can calm you. Your brain is functioning in a caffeinated beta state. However, when you pull it down one level into alpha or theta, gammas up top, That's where you get into that Salvador Dali place between consciousness and unconsciousness. Even if you're like, relax.
[00:20:23] So Quentin Tarantino writes scripts floating in his pool. Salvador Dali used to lay on a metal plate with a key so he wouldn't fall asleep and look at his paintings. So he's gone deep in the subconscious, but if you can reprogram yourself. Because 95 percent of your experience in life is subconscious.
[00:20:40] So what I do is I put on this music that really calms your mind. And I even had a client had a head trauma. I was helping him focus and you can experiment with this on YouTube. And then you do visualizations and then you do affirmations and you stack these all together. And this is like the muse of a station exercise.
[00:20:57] And I did this when I got to the Bay area, I turned 31. I had no degree. I couldn't get a job. I was making 45 K. And about three months later, I got hired for 45 K. And my brother who's at Google's like, Hey man, you got no experience. Like just take it, work your way up. And I rejected that. I kept doing this process and worked first job.
[00:21:13] I got hired by Sean Parker, who was the Facebook billionaire. And I worked in this causes. com thing. And I immediately got a hundred K offer and I doubled my income like within 90 days. It was amazing. No, I mean, right. The, how was I had investors who were involved in SAS fundraising companies and I had the experience, but.
[00:21:32] You know, is it correlation or causation? I'd like to think all that positivity helped me get there. Yeah. What about the concept of visualization? You know, going, you know, heading into a sales meeting, visualize a, you know, a signed contract coming out. Is that, does that have any impact in this recipe?
[00:21:50] Definitely like just running through in your head, like athletes do what the process of it going well, and the people understanding and shaking their hand and getting the deal signed, right. And the outcomes you want to see. And the biggest thing people miss in the law of attraction is one, the word action is an attraction.
[00:22:08] So you have to execute, you got to do things. You can't just sit around dreaming of Ferraris. And, and the second one is it's giving service equals wealth. So you want to grow your agency, serve more, you want to sell more, serve more, just get obsessed with the impact your product or solution can provide.
[00:22:26] And then like, it's really the go giver mentality. Like all day long, I just meet people and say, how can I help you? And I get the attention off myself. You're a huge, you know, stand for that. You're really generous and open and really appreciate the energy you put out with your work. Thank you. Thank you, Jess.
[00:22:42] I was going to say the same about you. I've definitely been on the receiving end of your generosity. Speaking of which I want to thank you for coming on this show. We're running a little short on time. This is a topic that definitely is, I think, very timely and the book that you're, that you've just written and you're about to publish is, I think, Really, really powerful that there's more receptivity in the marketplace for a really smart way to blend not only the technique side of the equation, but also the mindset and everything else you're bringing forth.
[00:23:15] So I'm super excited for, for you. I'm a fan of yours. I'm a fan of your book already. I haven't read it yet, but I'm, I'm excited to see that grow. So thank you so much for coming on. Where can people find more, find out more about you, maybe more about your books and your, your programs. Thanks for all of that.
[00:23:31] If you just go to Amazon and type in Justin Michael, I think there's like a funny book under another Justin Michael, but you'll see my stuff on there. And you can find me on LinkedIn, just, just Justin Michael. If you just type in search, Justin Michael sales or Justin Michael coaching. And then I have just a little microsite for the books sales, superpowers.
[00:23:47] com where you can go. And I'd be honored if you reviewed if inspired. And I think some of these techniques will be a direct hit. For agency owners who are doing founder led sales, or if you have teams, just spread the word and, uh, certainly encourage you to read Corey's book and leave a review because that is, uh, you know, that's gold for authors.
[00:24:06] So we love that. That's currency. It is cool, Justin. Thanks so much for coming on. We'll talk soon. Thank you so much. That's it for today. I'm Corey Quinn, and I hope you join me again next time on the deep specialization podcast. If you received value from the show, please go to apple podcasts and leave us a review.
[00:24:23] Thanks. And we'll see you soon.
