Working From Home: Episode 15 – Why selling is the ultimate superpower with David Angel
Nelson is joined by David Angel, the Sales Angel, to discuss how freelancers and business owners can take their businesses to the next level by honing their sales skills.
Topics Include:
– Sales as a skillset that anyone can learn
– Why you need to track your sales numbers
– Work life balance
– Setting clear expectations and boundaries
– David’s sales course
Resources Mentioned:
Timestamps
[02:34] – David shares his background, how he got started in sales, and why sales is a skillset that anyone can learn.
[13:48] – How freelancers can sharpen their sales skills, tame their inner critic, and land more clients.
[20:13] – Why you need to track your sales numbers, and how to use these numbers to build a system of accountability.
[23:30] – How to deal with the lack of barriers between work and personal life when working from home.
[30:58] – How to set and communicate clear boundaries with people in your life when working from home.
[39:54] – David discusses his online course that will teach you the sales skills you need to take your business to the next level.
[47:58] – Closing thoughts from Nelson and David.
Transcript
David Angel
David: [00:00:00] So me and a friend were talking the other day about this and we both used to do our commute, which took me about 45 minutes each day. Because of lockdown everyone’s working at home. We used to dream about having the ability to be a home. Not go out in the rain, nice to do this, nice to do that. Then suddenly we’ve got everything we’ve wanted and then were like ah I’ve missed doing that, I used to see my mate on the way. Whatever it might be.
Nelson: [00:00:37] Hello, and welcome to the working from home podcast with your host me Nelson Jordan. Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by David Angel who’s a sales coach, better known as the sales angel. David, thank you so much for joining us.
David: [00:00:50] Thank you very much for having me I’ve been looking forward to this.
Nelson: [00:00:53] Oh me too. Me too. I think one of the things that I’ve been looking forward to the most is as a freelancer I do the job that I do, which is conversion copywriting and digital marketing, because I’m very, very good at that role, the actual doing of the work. What I’m not so good at and what other people, kind of in my position as well, are not necessarily experts in is sales is bringing those clients on. They’re very, very good at performing the work and today why I’m so happy to get you on is to give people those tips and kind of strategies that they can employ to get better at sales.
David: [00:01:35] I’m glad I’m looking forward to it. I think it’s true. We were just talking offline about it a minute ago and I think it’s so accurate, that especially as a freelancer, if you’re doing stuff that you love but you’re never going to be an expert in everything out there and I think one of the big problems with people now doing coaching is a lot of coaches there are coaches for everything which amazes me, there are a sales coach, a hype coach, a this coach, that coach is a copywriter. You want to have an expert in your field, and this is why the podcast really is such a great feature, because if you are now sat listening to this, and you are at home and you sat at your desk looking at it, hopefully we can resonate a few things on that, it can help give a few pointers.
Nelson: [00:02:21] Perfect. Well, what I think the listeners would like to know is kind of what qualifies you to talk about this? Could you tell me kind of how you started in sales and your kind of start?
David: [00:02:33] Well, where to start? So, I think with lot of things with sales, I’m 40 now, and I’ve been doing sales for over 20 years now. I fell into sales and I wasn’t the best at sales. It was something which was learnt. And the reason I bring that up is if I can do sales and I can learn how to do sales after suffering, anxiety, depression, and all the other stuff, things that are limiting behaviors. Then anyone can do it. I mean, literally anyone, it is very much a practice, a learned skill.
If you want it to become a professional footballer. And your goal is to play at man city. I believe a certain amount of that is born genetics and still you need to be on the ball from a young age. I wasn’t the kid doing lemonade stands or any of that stuff.
So, I went through school. Wasn’t the best behaved. I wasn’t necessarily naughty. It was more the fact that I just didn’t have my attention at school. So coming out of school, that was 96 time, being a chef was cool. I’ve become a chef, got onto Master chef, done really well because it’s quite high standard, run my first restaurant at 18, but the problem with doing catering is you’re doing crazy hours, I mean a hundred hours a week, every week. Never getting Christmas off. You never have New Year when your friends are. So I got to the stage to suddenly I’m 20 years old, 22 years old. No real qualifications. Well, my experience with cooking food, but I don’t want to do that, I can run a restaurant, but don’t want to do that.
And someone said there, the famous line, you’ve got the gift of the gab, go into sales. The idea of sales just confused me. I didn’t even understand it. I genuinely didn’t get it. But I thought what am I going to do? If you’re presented with limited options, you go with an option. I was never somebody who wasn’t going to work.
One of my first jobs was, doing door to door sales, which if anyone’s ever done sales, going through it for a day is hard. I mean, baptism of fire is an understatement. I’ve been chased by German shepherds, chased by chavs. Been accused of being a Jehovah’s witness. There’s just crazy stuff that you get.
But it builds this resilience, which I think you’re talking about the home learning side, anyone in sales, we see the people that have that and if you don’t have it you look at it with envy, and if you do have it you just have it. It’s like pain. If you’ve got a high threshold of pain, you already know the pain threshold you’ve got, so you don’t really know if you’ve got high one.
So I was all right. I was quite happy to run resilient, but I wasn’t great, and then I was looking at other people who are getting five deals when I was getting two. And I’m like, I’m working hard. I’m doing the hours. I’m knocking the doors. I’m happy, I’m enthusiastic. It made me realize that working hard wasn’t it – working hard helps and especially if you don’t have a network and stuff, then working hard helps. But if I was working as hard as everyone else and I was happy and I was smart and I was polite, clearly there was other things in that. I just grabbed the guys who were best, it was on a commission base so you I just needed to have the balls, and said I’m coming with you. But whether you want me there, I need to pick this person’s brain. I think the definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. If I know I’m hitting twos, someone else is getting fives in a week, he’s getting what I’m getting in a month. Pretty much it was worth taking a day.
To follow this guy. And I suddenly realized he was just talking, nothing crazy, no hypnotizing them with a little clock, so I talked to him about it after – So now you’re saying the same, he said, no, we’re doing the same action, but why I’m saying it’s different, the questions I asked, the way I’m talking to people, be interested in them.
So you suddenly realize, ah, and he was like, he took his glasses off and put them on my head. From that point on, I was a student, and a happy student because suddenly learning made more money. If you’re going to be in a sales job, but money doesn’t change the world, but a lack of it definitely doesn’t help. I progressed and I progressed and progressed and I went through, I’ve done business to business, to is this consumer outbound, inbound, and pretty much always progressing, but a good thing with sales is you can progress in a role without progressing in stat job. Okay. To become a manager to become better using open items, 30 grand a year to 50, just by moving industries and taking more what you do or selling in a different way or upselling.
So this progressed, progressed, progressed. I was reading a book, not every month, every couple of months I was doing the audiobooks. I’m doing a podcast. And I’m absorbing the sim phone. I used to have notebooks, the other day I was trying to find them, I used to have note books with what I’ve learnt. I had businesses, managed sales teams, learnt all those sides. So I ended up going from, I think my biggest month was sort of 50 grand in a month, which is incredible got the cars, got the watches, got the boat, got the big house – life was great. Then I had a complete breakdown over the space for a few years. Booze consumption, drug consumption, everything.
And at the time, if anyone’s listening to this will be able to relate to this who’s gone through something like this. You have complete blinkers on what you’re doing is normal. Especially if you’re in sales, one person, you are amazing at selling. You just sell, you justify it. So I deserve it. I’ve had a hard week. And I didn’t see the spiral was as bad as it was until it was too late.
By that point, business has all collapsed, I’m a drug addict. Wasn’t sleeping for three days, I lost everything. So to come from the extreme of having the big white Range Rover on the drive, the holidays, the big house, the boat, to literally sleeping in my car. It wasn’t even my car, it was a hire car. From there. You were grabbed. You’re not even at a ground level, you’ll be sub ground level. Stopped the drinking, shook out of it, but then you’re left with the carcass of the life. So you’ve got to come through, but if anyone’s ever lost anything in their life, it leaves a hole and mine was my own fault, but it still leaves a hole all the same.
The only thing I was a good at was sales and cooking. I didn’t want to go back to being a chef, so sales. Now, the one thing which we all know in sales, if you go into a sales meeting or a sales presentation, and you’re miserable as sin, it isn’t going to go that well. I’m not saying you should be all rah rah but you have to put on the persona, your armor, put on your skillset like you’re going into battle. You’ve got to prepare yourself. And I think a lot of people go into it, like we said earlier, easy to be overly friendly and not see it as the position of where we are. We think we’re being professional, but it’s not as professional as we could be.
We want to be the SAS of what we do. And I had it so ingrained from doing all the training, doing all the teaching. But when I went into that sales job, bang, you hit in the high numbers suddenly, then people are like, basically can you teach our guys to do this. So all the knowledge I had, you know, well, yeah, of course I can – so then I’m responsible for other people and then what ends up happening is you realize you’re depressed and miserable as sin you’re doing more for other people than you will for yourself, the ven, you know, we talked about the whole fake it till you make it stuff. I’m not a big believer of faking your life. Because if you’re miserable as hell and you act happy, itrubs off sometimes.
Like sometimes you can shake it. Sometimes you can just be depressed inside. But a lot of the time, if you’re having a bad day and you can shake it off a laugh enough times, the laughter is real. And that pulled me out a bit. and then zoom forward, years go by, and coaching and coaching and coaching, I just kept going. Seeing the highs, the lows, the in-betweens, the good, the bad, the celebrations were massive.
The lows were really low. And I think this is one of the things where a lot of people are chalk and cheese. People love the story in the story. And I’m cool if people don’t like the story, I get it. A lot of people get ahead around how you can do all of that and lose it all. Other people get it. I don’t think we need to talk to everyone in the world or get everyone in the world to like us.
We need to find the people that resonate with us and bring that positive impact to them. And then that’s really where it came in, what sort of continued from there. Find the people that resonate with who I am, that see that actually my downfalls and my blessings can really cut down their learning time. I can bolt on the skills I’ve gotten from my head to yours and go “go on tiger” and you go into battle with skillsets that you’ve got, and then that’s transformed into an online platform because I could only be in one place at a time. And that I’ve built a network where we have an interactive, formal one-on-one coaching. I give people what works. Like you said earlier, when you love what you do when you really enjoy it, it’s just amazing. And it’s been the savior for me and now best place I could ever be mentally wise, the best I’ve ever been – don’t drink don’t do any of that crazy stuff. Very quiet but very happy life. Most of my time on zoom calls, which is nice I like it, but I still think it’s mental how much we now do business over this, but it’s an amazing time.
Nelson: [00:13:03] Perfect. So you mentioned, you mentioned the course and the sort of sales techniques that you talk on and thank you for sharing your story. Obviously there’s a certain amount of vulnerability that you have to open, open yourself up to there so I do really appreciate it. In terms of some of the sales techniques that you, that you talk about on your kind of online course and your platform that’s some of the things that we’re going to talk about a little bit today. we mentioned obviously that freelances aren’t necessarily salespeople. Sometimes you get you know, good freelances who were very good at their jobs, poor sales or, or very, very good at sales and lots in between to between to be quite frank.
So today you very kindly said that you’re going to, to help us out and, as fellow freelancers, kind of improve our skills. So one of the things that I definitely feel, especially when I’m cold pitching, so writing cold emails to people, I genuinely get a little bit scared. I get a little bit worried and a bit anxious and think, Oh, what’s this person gonna think of me?
I know how I react when I get poorly written emails from somebody who doesn’t know the first thing about me or my business. And I don’t want to be in that position, especially as a copywriter. I don’t want to be in that position where somebody is like laughing at my email or like firing me a snarky email back, or even just not even reading it and deleting it.
How do we kind of cross or deal with that mental threshold or barrier we’ve got in place with regards to fear?
David: [00:14:51] I, as you say, you can tell from some of those, I just had a complete breakdown, anxiety has crippled my life. One of the big turning points for me is the perspective of the way I look at things. A really good book, which helped me is called The Four Agreements by Miguel Ruiz.
And you know when you hear something a lot of times, and just suddenly someone says it, it just resonates different. They say slightly different. Or you just more open to hearing it. And in this book, a lot of little things resonated with me more and a lot of the concerns – and you think that I’d get money off this book, because I’ve mention it all the time – my anxiety has dropped down by easily 90% because I’ve just learnt a different way of looking at things. Now if anyone out there suffers with an anxious or anxiety type feeling, I used to be crippled by that, one thing that’s changed for me is – I don’t know where this came from – but I now see my anxiety like a pet tiger (bear with me).
If you mentioned having a pet tiger, if that tiger is well behaved, you would feel like a King or queen having this pet tiger walking around. So I think that about my anxiety and if I’ve got that under control, my focus is better, it’s sharper, my belief, everything’s better. When that tiger turns, pointing that tiger is not going to help. It’s a tiger. So, what I had to do was learn how to, if a tiger is angry, if it’s stressed out what it was, how would I calm it down? CAn’t do it by shouting at it , can’t do it by beating itself up. And this is what we do of ourselves. We judge ourselves far too harshly. We worry far too much about stuff that doesn’t happen. I mean, if you’re getting phone calls every day saying mate you suck in your emails, but actually if you’re getting it every day, you might need work. But I don’t think that’s the case. A lot of the time, we’re more worried “What if” and with what we’re doing, I think with your audience especially, if you’re a freelancer, you’re doing this because you love it or you’re passionate about your thing. So being someone being critical about it, like it’s a personal attack. What we have to do is look at what can I, however good I am at anything I do ever, be liked by everyone. I don’t think there’s anyone. I mean, Day Shetty is probably the only person on the planet who no one dislikes. So we know straight away, there’s going to be some dislikes. There’s going to be things out there that people don’t agree with, and we have to learn to accept that that’s going to happen. Secondly, when you’re messaging people and cold calling, you need to do the numbers. There’s one thing a lot of people fall back on. You have to work backwards to say, I don’t know what product range people do, but say, you’re trying to earn 5,000 pound a month and you make a hundred pounds per deal. Now you’ve got an idea of how many deals you need to get to your target. Now you need to work out how many people do I have to have agree to a deal to complete – okay so now say I’ve got 50% conversion. Okay now I know how many deals. how many people I need to speak to fully to get to the stage of writing a deal now, and how many people to speak to, now, I need to work out how many days or how many calls, but when you’ve found that out at that point, okay, I need to do whatever it is – 50 emails, 50 calls, 20 events, whatever it is, per day. Then it doesn’t bother you because you going into the day with an expectation of, I need to do 20 of these, every XYZ to get my results.
Then it becomes less about the rejection, less about the people who don’t respond because you’ve done the math and you’re expecting it, unfortunately we go through o a lot of products and a lot of services and a lot of sales things, and we hold onto it like, I love this I’m the best at it and I put all this work in and you should love it.
But that’s naive. We can’t do that. Look at a Lamborghini, that’s a beautiful mazing machine, not everyone likes them. We have to look at the fact and realize where’s our audience, how many people do need to find, and if we’re not finding those by doing consistent actions then something might need to change. But I think a lot of it is it’s overcoming fear and expecting it.
Expecting to not hear back from everyone is normal. If you send an email you might get a reply, but actually if you had an abundant pipeline out there, would you care if someone didn’t reply? What we need to do is have an abundant pipeline so that the one or two people, when they don’t like us, it doesn’t matter. If we are casting our net really shallow we are only going to have out to catch a very small fish which isn’t going to feed us. If we cast it too wide, we’re going to get it watered-down bursting with massive holes, so it won’t catch anything. It’s about knowing our niche, filling up the bucket, having the preparation behind it and making sure that we are following those steps on a daily basis. Like we said earlier when you’ve worked out that list, it is a lot easier to keep to on a day to day basis. Does that make sense?
Nelson: [00:20:13] Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So it’s essentially reverse engineering, you know what you want the outcome to be, and just working backwards
David: [00:20:25] It’s so easy to go into thinking you’re going to want the most money possible. But if you’re already in 5,000 pound a month out and you want to get to 10, you’ve got the stats.
You’ve even got to do different actions or generating different leads, outsourcing whatever it might be, or you need to just double everything you’re doing. But a lot of the time we do 30% more effort, which is tiring and draining and we’re like why am I not getting it. But actually look at the stats. We’re not doing a hundred percent so we can’t expect it and if we don’t have numbers in front of us, the numbers don’t lie, and we don’t blame ourselves, if you are accountable to the numbers, on the day-to-day especially, it’s amazing what a difference.
I didn’t have a social media so if I’m going to spend a bit of time interacting with people, as I said, I set timer on my phone, I’d be like, Hey Siri, I’ll just start it now – my phone’s just going off now – I set a timer for 30 minutes now, that’s not because I only want to talk for 30 minutes, but it’s because I’m organized on my day. I meant to also, because I believe in having productivity over just activity. We can run on the spot as much as we want, but that’s not going to get us to our destination. And we use a lot of energy on activities. And if we’re not gauging where we are. If I want to engage for half an hour and I carry on for an extra five minutes, don’t smack yourself on the legs, but it’s amazing how much more work you get done. So I’ll go on Instagram for half an hour, come in with some messages, will look for staff. And if in that time I stopped engaging and I watch a funny video about cats. Cool. But when that alarm goes off, I know wrap this up, get onto the next task, make a coffee, come back in, look at the notes. Now we need to start doing X and suddenly in a day you’ll get done what you would have gotten done in two days.
And also when you take, you know, about down time and you’re still at work. Whether you’re playing golf or you’re with your kids. And you’re still thinking of you checking your phone. This stops this, because then when you’re doing your downtime, this is my, if you want to take time off set a timer, and it sounds so daft, but we’ll reprogram ourselves and then you go off and you go, wait, it’s three, o’clock now five o’clock set an alarm for five.
Put my phone in a drawer, go for a walk, go to the gym, go for coffee, watch TV, whatever it is. But when you’re at work, be at work and when you’re home or when you’re at downtime cause obviously working at home, you always have that point.
Nelson: [00:22:56] This is,part of the issue. And I was, I was talking about it with a friend of mine, actually, Rob Jones, who was the very first guest on this podcast.
He found that when he started working from home, that one of the things that was toughest for him is he used to have this commute time, you know, this travel time at the beginning and end of his day that kind of book-ended when he was supposed to be working and when he wasn’t, when he was supposed to be at home with his family, not working. I think when you’re a freelancer and you, or you work from home, cause you own your business for example, that gets increasingly tougher. you don’t have these barriers, this getting in the car or getting on the bus or anything like that to signal. This is a change of environment, you need to be doing different things now.
Is there any kind of way that you’ve learned to learn to deal with that, especially during coronavirus?
David: [00:24:02] Yeah. So I’ve got two kids nine and six, boy and a girl. When I lost everything, I had to sit them down and tell them that your dad’s messed up. I have a very clear relationship with my kids.People think my relationship’s quite bizarre with them cause I talk to them like adults always have, but I’m a big believer I have expectations of my kids and I let them be kids but I also read a line to them. I sit him down. Didn’t tell him all the dark stuff, but I sat them down. Right? Listen, your dad’s made massive mistakes all the cool business, the office people, it’s all gone. This means there’s no holidays for the next two years. This means I need to sit down and work. So if you call me and I’m working from home and I don’t answer, you need to know, I still love you and I’ll call you back as soon as I can. Now that conversation had to happen three or four times, but they get it now, the kids are really well. Don’t give them enough credit on that. It’s easy to think, Oh, I can’t do this. So I had that conversation with them. Secondly, it’s a different day we have. So you have to break your day up. So my day most days four till five I go to the gym unless the kids are around, my kids are swimming pretty much half the time, but it’s alright in a funny way.
So what we have to do instead of doing our we leave the house at eight, we get back at quarter past five or whatever. You need to have your sections of your day. You need to break up your battle time. For me I get up now, because I don’t drink, I get up at half five. My morning routine – most people would freak out, but I like it – So my morning routine, I get up at half five I’ll be on my phone in bed, working, happy. Now, I’m happy and I’ll do that say even my kids are here till half seven. It gives me that time. Half seven kids are up so from half seven until 9 is me and them, phones away, nothing. And nine till 11, now if they’re here, they’re nine and six, they can play I’m not leaving them hanging off a cord or anything, but it’s about gaps so if they need me, then it’s there. Because this is half term. Normally I’m going to get them to school at that point. Well, actually, if we’ve got that point, work our day out, if we need to get up half an hour earlier so that we get a bit of quality time with the kids or whatever it might be. It’s worth that. Rather than it being you try to send email out, not being with the kids. And also if you’ve got kids, you feel bad about it, or your partner, if you’re being short with them and not giving them your full attention, and then you feel guilty about it, it’s worth sacrificing 30 minutes kip. And having so instead of doing eight till five time, so well mine’s is going to be a bit nuts so plan it seven to nine is full on graft.
And if you are home or your other half works at home, you have the same schedule. We take a break from nine to half nine to go to a coffee shop. So you go to a shop and get a coffee or whatever you would do. And then from half nine to half 11 we do this we take lunch and it’s having that structure. It’s naive of us to think that the bus controller or the train controller he didn’t, we just have to be accountable. And if we can we become so much more powerful because it becomes a lifestyle choice and you will be so much more passionate, like I don’t begrudge waking up at half five because I chose that time. I chose that’s when I get up. Now, if I get up at six, I’m not going to beat myself up, but I committed to that.
And we were saying earlier about self-belief and confidence. Sometimes other people knock our walls down. Sometimes we’ve knocked our own walls down. We let ourselves off too easy for too long. We say we’re going to do something and then we don’t. We say, we’re not going to be all the crisps in a packet, but we do, and we’re going to do some of these things, but if we get everything out there, then we have a low expectation of ourselves.
Then we get on a sales call and people mess us around. Why do they mess us around? Cause we always lie to ourselves. And if we always spend a lot of our time not sticking to what we say, for example if I say to the kids we’re going to go to the car today, and I don’t take them, if I do that every week, what are my kids going to be like after a year, they’ll doubt me. And it’s the same with our clients. It’s the same with business, the higher expectation we have of ourselves and accountability, the more we will take of other people.
It’s the get out clause thing we do. When someone says do you want to meet up and you’re yeah, yeah, yeah, but then you get off the phone knowing darn well you’re not going to go. And you have the best intention, I’ll call him back later but I wanted to say it because John’s a good guy, didn’t want to let him down. So we’ve got good reasons. If we had just said to him on that call, listen, I know you’ve got a lot going on let’s have a quick chat now. I don’t want to go tonight, but be honest, say I’m socialised out I don’t want to see anyone. Because what happens is when you’re on a phone call later on is someone says to you “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m definitely going to do that. That’s great.” We’re like okay, good. The very same thing we do. And then we’re like well why didn’t he do it? It’s the same as you did your job. If you’re impeccable with your word, you won’t have a problem saying to a person you’re talking to okay, great. And then asking you more questions. Okay, because that’s what your expectation is of you.
Nelson: [00:29:20] So the two things that kind of stuck out to me most of your answer, I suppose, are planning the schedule – so knowing what you’re going to do in certain blocks of time and trying hard to kind of stick to those, planning those out in advance, but then secondly, being realistic and being open with your communications and with what you expect of other people and what they should expect of you within certain times.
So I think the thing with freelancers, especially those that live with other people, with their partners, their kids, whatever that kind of dynamic looks like is that quite often when you’re a freelancer, your significant other is not, they will have a traditional kind of inverted comments, a traditional job and they’ll be very much used to getting up at eight working and getting home at six or something like that. So the kind of nine to five plus commute. That’s their norm, you know, they’ll do Monday to Friday and then their evenings and weekends and their holidays are their own. Now I’ve seen a ton of stuff on how freelancers can be living on a beach somewhere, you know, answering and running their business from the phone and barely working. I mean, some people get that if that’s their goal after many, many years of behind the scenes hard graft, but for 99.9% of us, it’s not going to happen and lots of us don’t want that to happen anyway, but your spouses don’t necessarily understand why you’re working six, seven days a week. What you’re trying to achieve, why you’re working in the evenings why . For me, a lot of my calls happened to be in the evenings because the majority of my client base is based in America, unfortunately I’m working at the moment with lots of Australians as well so my time zones are a little out of whack right now, but for them that’s not necessarily normal. You know, to go to work. I’m fortunate in a way that my wife has yeah. Primary school teacher so she’s used to unfortunately taking, marking, and planning and stuff home with her so she can be doing stuff while I’m doing stuff, but lots of people that’s not the case. So the expectations, I think that you set for yourself and you kind of communicate for other people, I think is really key. Do you have any kind of advice on like how to have those conversations
David: [00:32:02] It starts with them. I think when I see it with the kids, my conversation, I said, I’m single so don’t have the example with my partner, but with the kids, I sat them down and it started with, listen, I love you and what I’m about to say, doesn’t change any of that. What I want to do is let you know where we are now and where it’s going to be. And there’s a reason of why I’m about to tell you why that’s going to happen.
And I think a lot of the time if you’re a freelancer and you’re doing a lot, it’s very easy that you’re just like argh I’m trying to do everything and I’m doing everything right now. But actually if you’re working in the evenings or your partner gets home and sees your on calls six to eight then you get organized with your schedule and you go and do a breakfast date once a week, or you do this.
If you’re going to plan your schedule, now some people don’t want to. If you work a nine to five job your wife doesn’t turn up at the office and say let go for lunch it’s two o’clock.
So it’s the same, but different. It’s flipping it on its head. So me and a friend were talking the other day about this and we both used to do our commute, which took me about 45 minutes each day. Because of lockdown everyone’s working at home. We used to dream about having the ability to be a home. Not go out in the rain, nice to do this, nice to do that. Then suddenly we’ve got everything we’ve wanted and then were like ah I’ve missed doing that, I used to see my mate on the way. Whatever it might be.
And it’s very simple. We don’t live a normal life, because we’re not trying to live a normal life. If we have got a busy schedule and our schedule is opposite there’s time in there that you can do something. And it’s about putting the priority. If we’re going to set our calendar for work, we have to set the calendar for the family. I will do stuff with the kids now where I’m like okay on this date that afternoon is done, Sunday mornings my boy does rugby, this goes on here. So there’s always wonder if I book an out 50 appointments in a week and a podcast missed and all that good stuff, but in a scheduled, dedicated time for your partner’s vital, because if you don’t now it’s only going to cause you problems later and then you don’t have your full commitment.
You think about it, you know, when you get laser beam focus at work. It’s like, everything’s going with you like in the Matrix. Everything’s good. If you’ve got a good supportive partner, it’s easier to be in the Matrix. And when you’re in the Matrix, you’re going to be more effective. So it’s about you approaching the conversation. I want to find more time for us so here’s what I propose. It might mean I need to work more you’re getting a Thursday night. I want to find more dedicated time where it’s us no phone, no email me, you, bottle of wine candles, whatever they want. Or whatever it is, go watch a motorcycle race, whatever it is, that’s your time. And if you keep your word on stuff, they’re going to appreciate that. And we realize it. I think sometimes we expect because we’re doing opposite it’s very easy for us to be well I’m the freelancer this is what it’s like, yeah, it is. But it’s advantages to it as well. Massive advantages for it. We might kids like I get to pick them up from school and they used to have to be in clubs. I get to do your school run. Now, a lot of people when I go to school, kids can relate, most people are there in the winter in pajamas, really blows my mind. So they literally go up so late. If you can live that life good for you. It blows my mind. We’ve got up so late we couldn’t even put jeans on or a tracksuit, literally pajamas, slippers, hair all over. If anyone’s listening now, ladies you look wonderful. In fact where your head is in the morning, I’m up at half five in the morning. So then it’s time I take the kids to school prepped, ready to go. About half an hour, time it. 10 minutes drive or 25 minute walk. Their mum will always drive them cause it’s quicker. I leave my phone here or I’ll have it onside or whatever and we walk and we’ll do sums in the morning, I’ll ask questions r else we chat, we enjoy it, my kids vibe on that time, but we love the school run. By Sunday you’ll take a walk and we just have chats. Some people think, Oh, am I going to have to walk to school? We look at it as, wow we get to walk to school. And I think if you can find the, wow, we get to do that instead of, Oh, this is hard. It changes it.
Nelson: [00:36:50] And I, I love what you said about making the conversation more about them, but in an honest, in an honest way, not kind of trying to pull wall over anything.
David: [00:36:59] Yeah. I’ve got a really good plan for you.
Nelson: [00:37:04] Like you’re not doing your relationship with your partner any favors by only being half there with them. Sat on the sofa and checking your phone or, yeah, we’ve all had that, that kind of feeling like our partner’s not really listening to us cause that their phone or their eyes are glazed over. We hate it. Yeah.
David: [00:37:29] It’s better to be speaking with someone. They get home at six and you’re like quarter seven to half seven. That’s us. What do they want to do? Not, you get off and you put the TV on Saturday. Cause I’d appreciate it – unless that’s what they want, but find that time and you know, even a lot of relationships out there you forget to do the little things sometimes the dates, the dinners, the cooking breakfast. With a freelancing life is what’s in their mean you can do stuff like that.
You think now what you do now, and your partner is a primary school teacher. Half term you have a huge opportunity that if you worked nine to five you wouldn’t have, because you can do breakfast dates, you can do this. You can do lunches in the afternoon because when your schedule works it and when you talk to someone, you say you realise now we can do these things you want.
That couple of days we can actually go away for a couple of days there. I’ll work in the morning, we’ll go hiking in the afternoon, I’ll do an hour in the evening and then we’ll go out for dinner. Rather than being listen why don’t we go away but I’ll still be working – very different terminology and the results the difference. Then you’re in the moment and freelancing is great because we have it. Sometimes we carry the same ax we use to chop down the tree is a burden, because we’ve got to carry it, but it’s pretty hard to use if you haven’t got it.
Nelson: [00:39:02] Sure. So I mean, we’ve covered a lot of the big things I think for freelancers. So, kind of the mindset that you have to have when you’re pitching, you know, how can we improve ourselves as the sales person aspect? I think a lot of that is mindset, not necessarily know knowing, you know, cheats and hacks about specific sales techniques, I think it’s understanding what is required and putting together the same learning process that you use to get better at your job. which is largely research and understanding the principles behind effective sales, the same sort of research you’d carry out for clients, and then that kind of implementation and the planning and the accountability and the time management.
So tell me these days, what’s the, what’s kind of the online course looking like at the moment.
David: [00:39:59] So the platform, so it’s all been put onto an interactive platform. So it has been built up. So taking anything, imagine all the stuff you now about copywriting and we take it and initially press a button and it goes from where your head is now in separate videos on the platform. So anyone wants to copy, right? They log on and it’s all just laid out nicely and organized. Thats what’s happening with my brain. So there’s 390-400 videos that range from two minutes to 15 minutes long, all laid down into categories. So for people that are new go to the basics and customer service or mindset or phone sales or face-to-face sales or meetings, or objection handling questions, it’s all laid out. But then that means on your phone, which is come on the greatest tool in the world, wherever you are, whatever you’ve got if you are doing a commute to a face-to-face meeting, you can easily hit play and watch some informa. But I’m a big believer what we learned today, we’ll do today. You wake up in a bad mood some days it’s hard to think of repairing faults. If you learn something today, say if you’re going to be doing a load of cold calling and you go on there and you go through and watch a few videos, it’s like that rah rah meeting before you get to the football team go out. They know how to play football, but coaches are even better for football, he’s like, right, you’re doing this, you’re going to do that, because he’s fresh in the mind. The platform acts as a tool to be able to do that. Now, the clever thing is, as we all know, it’s very easy to be on a course and pay no attention.
What’s good with this is interactive. So a video will come, you can watch five videos and nothing will come up but then a question will come up about a video and if you don’t know an answer you can’t submit. So it makes you pay attention. Now this works great because if you know if you watch to 10-minute video and you get questions wrong, you have to watch it again, you’ll get annoyed with me 100%. But you know what happens next time you watch a video you pay more attention, which means you absorb it, which means you get the knowledge that you want.
this isn’t a course that people get made to do. It’s there to help people with skills they want. So that’s the main platforms just worked in that way. You’ve got everything that you need and especially with the coaching idea, like I said it before we jumped on, I do one-on-one coaching. But the great thing about this is it fits around your life. So for example, if you’ve got a plan where five to six, every day you’d have dinner with your kids, so someone else would call on from three to four, I do X, Y, Z. It wouldn’t always be convenient to be on a call or a zoom call with me or in a team. What this means you can fit it around your life. This is the interesting thing. What really messes people up with this is there’s no excuse. If you do 15 minutes a day, just 15 minutes of actual learning, you’re going to become more effective.
Imagine if you’ve learnt Chinese for 15 minutes a day and you did it properly every day for a year. You’d be pretty darn confident, confident about ordering food, doing the basics. But if you did it for another year, when you’re doing stuff, which makes you money, you only need to see it start working. And then you’re like I’d like some more time to learn.
Because the moment you see that reward you get that nice, warm feeling inside. If you’re struggling on phone sales, and you speak to loads of people and you get disheartened, I’ve just done a post today about this, about knowing how to break down what an objection is and how to move through it in a sensible way. If you were in the army and you buck through a minefield, there’s a method. You don’t just go follow the stone to see what blows up. I’ve just done it we’ll be fine. Like it doesn’t work as well. With sales is similar. So if you know the processes and you understand what’s going on behind it, we look at things from our own eyes.
Like you said earlier, you get a fear about what if they don’t like this? And I know I’ve had that happen to me. This takes away that and we go, okay actually, if someone says to you they’re not interested, what are they actually saying? Now if they’re not interested that’s because you didn’t pre-qualify them. You’re cold calling random people. If you know, for example, say, if you’ve been on, say, if you’re a lead that’s coming to me, you’ve clicked on an ad, you inquired about coaching and you said, I want to go from where I am and I want to double my turnover and I want to do this and I want to learn Now if you turn around to me at that point and say you’re not interested, there’s a couple of things. One you’re not interested in me because you want to learn or two, I haven’t given you enough value. You know what? It’s not that you’re not interested in coaching, but a lot of people see it as a personal attack. So then suddenly we’re all okay sorry and that’s because people aren’t ready.
So the preparation, which is one of the pillars, make such a big change. There’s so much you can do practical, learning stuff. And that’s really what a platform to do.
Nelson: [00:45:14] I mean, I think there’s, from what I’ve seen, not just kind of, in terms of sales courses, I’m talking kind of learning in general. There’s far more kind of recognition these days that most courses go uncompleted. Most courses, people start and they’re very like cheerful and engaged at the beginning, and then it quickly drops off and most people kind of drop out, unfortunately, and don’t take the learning. So I think this kind of bite sized, engagement focused approach should be really, really useful for people.
David: [00:45:49] I find it funny, really. I really do because I say to a lot of people work, what you want to work, but if I’ve got a guy the minute he’s saying I am only going to be 15 minutes, I’ll probably be twice a week. I’m like okay, but let’s work this out. You are going to do 15 minutes a day, two days a week for the next two months. So you’ll get two weeks’ worth of knowledge. It’s relative, so you can work it around your own life.
Nelson: So what’s your kind of vision for the sales platform and for yourself over the next couple of years?
David: The goal is to help a thousand people be more effective in the next year, which the target’s flying for at the moment. Now that’s on personal users. I also, because of the way it works, you can have individual users. So if you’ve got a company say a hundred people, each person can be set up as an individual, you can see who’s trained on what. But that’s not included in that side. So that’s the other side is to then start going through, on to using that side.
So help a thousand people be more effective. When the craziness finishes, I want to get into doing keynote speaking. Not because I think I’m all inspiring. I think there’s a lot of great people out there that I just think, that one I enjoy it, selfishly, and two I watch a lot of things online and go to events.
And sometimes it’s the small things I learned the most, but I find it a real – sounds soppy – but warming feeling is knowing you’re making that positive impact. So I’m very much at that stage now where my kids are getting older with staff. I like the idea, about leaving a legacy for what they see. All the stuff’s online, that’s always going to be there. And I think that type of imprint is a really nice thing to do. Yeah. The aim is 1000 for this year, keynotes for next year, and I’ll move up to 5,000, and you leave a bit impact.
Nelson: [00:48:01] Fantastic. And, well, thank you so much for joining us today, David.
I really, really appreciate it. I know, obviously you’re known as the sales angel, I’ve seen people can find you using kind of that handle on Instagram. Is there anywhere else people go to find out more or even sign up?
David: [00:48:19] Everyone you go on and it’s the pretty much set for sales angel on there.
Actually, if you go on, there’s a free book, there’s loads. I put content out daily on a carousel on some type of lesson or videos, so you actually can get quite a lot help without even paying for anything. I’ve set up a YouTube, but to be frank I put like five videos. Everything on Insta is everywhere else. So insta is just fine.
You can search for the sales network group I’ve just started on Facebook, if you just search David Angel and I’ve really embraced the sales angel, being the surname. So there’s a picture of me, the pair of angel wings behind it. So it’s pretty easy to find bright orange logo.
Nelson: So David, whenever you’re ready, if you could just give details and we’ll kind of splice that into the main footing.
David: So I’m going to put an offer out there for anyone who wants to learn, who is a little bit concerned about paying out for stuff they don’t know. So we’re going to have two eBooks, one on mindset and one on selling your way to success, which will be completely free, and also access to the platform on some of that content so you’ll get some bits and pieces from different sections from customer service, sales one on one, mindset, and value wise works out just over 900 pounds completely free. And literally we can put a link in there and basically you can just hit the link. Just get access. it’s that simple.
Nelson: [00:49:45] where can people find this?
David: [00:49:47] I can send you a link over, it’s on the sales angel page, or on my page on Instagram, on Facebook and it will be there as well.
Nelson: [00:50:02] Perfect. So for anybody listening, you can just check the show notes and all those links will be included. Thank you, and that’s it for today. You’ve been listening to the working from home podcast with me, Nelson Jordan. We’ve been talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly side of remote work. Thanks so much for listening and I really hope you’ve enjoyed the time you spent with us today. If you’d like to discuss the podcast, you want to make a new friend, or you’re interested in working with me on a copywriting or digital marketing project, then visit Nelson-jordan.com. That’s Nelson-jordan.com, where you can also sign up to my newsletter to hear about this podcast and other exciting projects. Until next week, goodbye.