How I got 3 Clients Referred to Me

Before publishing this I realized it had been written three months ago so I added in some parentheses showing what happened currently as well.

"So what's the product?" he asked. "Well..." I took a deep breath "We have just recently started this...but so far so good by using our marketing methods we can give you more business"..."What's the price?" he asked..."We need to discuss that when we meet"..."Ok, lets make a meeting time and we can talk about it next week".

Just like that I was in! I met this guy from a friend at a business event who was doubtful as a client, however here was the opportunity! As Gurbaksh Chahal says "risk is your best friend" so I took it. My co-founders were ecstatic that this could be our second client! (Our first ended up leaving us interestingly enough). That week during the meeting I was completely honest with him. I told him we're in the early stages of the company and don't even know if people want what we're offering; "Ok he replied lets see what you have and if I like it I'll refer more people". That same day we negotiated on the price and off we went! A few months later I asked him if he liked the service, new features, received feedback on the price, how to pitch people, what he sees as the ROI and what he thinks about where we're going. I was completely transparent putting myself on the line as a result so was he.

He referred 5 people! Yes I know I wrote 3 in the title because those were the ones who have converted so far aka paid us (now all 5 have paid), but two just got started on our trial. If I do well here (knock on wood) I can get more clients as referrals and I won't have to cold call anymore (now I learned cold calling is inevitable and actually like it). I'm a pessimistic person, so even if this business fails it's ok because I'm learning a lot and this is the first time I've been referred clients. (In retrospect I actually need to learn a lot more, it's amazing how much I don't know).

So how did I do it? How did I get clients referred? Well simple, it was being HONEST from the start and thereby easily building trust (If you're honest and really like your product selling to clients isn't hard at all). After a few months of business with this guy we are now on good terms (still on good terms). I'm ecstatic that my intuition about being honest and working hard has been proven correct! I can't disclose everything, yet and we're a baby company (still a baby company, looking to finally explode in the next few weeks), but I finally have a valid looking business model. Whenever I doubted something I told him, whenever I didn't know if we could deliver I told him and by doing that I am now in an amazing relationship with someone who truly likes our service.

I know it may sound too good to be true to you, but it took a lot of hard work and as I stated earlier about 4 months of business. In the end I have to say it's definitely worth it. From now on I will be completely honest with everyone on every cold call and am very happy to have things starting to look up. What's our conversion rate? Well 1/100, but that is real world numbers (still is). I think if you want to succeed that's the effort you gotta be willing to put in and slowly I'm learning how to work hard daily.

As always thanks for reading and feel free to ask me any questions.

How I got over my Cold Calling Fears

My hands used to shake, I used to sweat profusely when dealing with negative potential clients, I'd sit in front of the phone blankly staring at the wall thinking about the call...THAT DOESN'T HAPPEN ANYMORE! 

How did I get over my cold calling fears? Well in multiple ways...I had TONS of issues, but they all mainly dealt with the fear of rejection or the fear of failure once I really thought about them. After realizing what the fear was I figured out how to confront it, interesting how you need to mature your character to succeed in business, something I rarely hear people discuss. So how did I get rid of my fear of failure? Multiple ways.

1) Reduced the volume of cold calls I make.

I used to make 30+ cold calls a day. Cold calling takes energy no matter who you are and I've figured out its like a muscle you build so start low if you can. Perhaps do 1 cold call tomorrow, then 2 the next day and slowly increase as you get more comfortable. You'll find your fear of rejection slips away as you gain experience with your product, build up your sales skills and cold calling starts taking less energy; the cycle will only become more positive the more you do it. 

2) Create the fear of regret in your life.

This sounds bad, but if you fear losing out on something it'll prompt you to take action in your life, which will most likely lead to success. Whenever I want skip a day of calling I always think about how bad I'll regret it.  I think about how all my progress will go down the drain if I don't put in any effort today and that gets me enough energy for the first call (which is the hardest). As each day goes by and I spend more time on the phone I grow more and more comfortable and I have to use the fear of regret less. Warm up by calling current clients, that can help as well if you can't even make the first call.

3) I keep in contact with people who have turned me down or laugh past them.

Keeping in contact with PLEASURABLE people who have turned you down does a couple of things. A) It tells you its ok to be rejected and helps your mind find peace with that. B) It shows you that people who have rejected or will reject you aren't scary. C) It gets you valuable feedback that can lead to future business with that person.

Laugh past cruel people. You can't get along with everyone, I'm sure you've had a bad day and said something you regret once in a while too so give them the benefit of the doubt. You should also know that cruel people are VERY RARE and make hilarious stories. Remember rejection gives you more power. There's really nothing a potential client can do to hurt you, worst case scenario they hang up and you move on.

*Bonus Tip

Take notes after every cold call good or bad and review them. Leave nothing to chance in business get the most juice out of each call. If you're not keeping notes on what you can do better next time then you won't know how much you're improving everyday.

One of the biggest secrets in business Cost and Profit

My belief is that profit is one of the largest secrets businesses keep from other businesses and society itself. If you start thinking about profit and cost you'll inevitably turn off your consumer trained brain something companies would hate to see. So what are the reasons companies keep profit a secret? Well here's a few: Competition and Sales.

1) Competition

If the competition knows your profit margin they can figure out how to compete or take over your market segment. If profit is very high then creating a cheap knockoff brand has a greater chance of occurring. There's always one competitor that knows your market, but now the field is open to anyone and everyone. Someone  is always willing to charge less and now you have to figure out how to take price out of the equation completely, which can be a very hard task.

2) Sales

Once you make a sale and the customer buys a product they will be much more likely to keep track of ROI (return on investment). If your product doesn't give the best  ROI they can then look at competitors and see how your products truly stack up. Are you holding back on a feature because its unnecessary? Or do you just want to make more money. Looking at the price and cost of the item will focus the sale in the wrong direction because as masterful salesmen know the majority of purchases aren't logical, but emotional.

As cold and calculating as this sounds, I like to look at a majority of my life in the terms of cost and profit. Perhaps it is the business person inside of me, but I always wanted to do a Cost Benefit analysis on my life and calculate the ROI of stretching in the morning. People know that watching tv is bad for them, but how much money are you losing when you watch an episode of Seinfeld? I am a fan of the NFL myself, how much of my life am I giving up to the 12 billion dollar juggernaut? What do you think?

The easiest way to win, Do More Than Expected

That's right I said it. The easiest way to win is to do more than expected and by more I mean MUCH more. I think my early mess ups in business were holding too many concessions. For example lets say I wanted to start a consulting business, which I have in the past. If I could go back I'd tell the other me to go build at MINIMUM 10 free websites/apps for people I ADMIRE and big players in the industry. This would get me the skills and connections I needed. Then I'd tell myself to start charging everyone else and ask for referrals. The best business relationships come from referrals. Of course back then I wouldn't be smart enough to listen to that advice anyways. :-)

I'd also tell myself to do social media for those websites/apps too so I could learn how to effectively synchronize them and further build my skills. I realize at this point the old me would politely say "ok" in an awkward tone and wonder when the hell I lost my mind in the future. When would I make money you ask? Wouldn't I be working myself to death? Well the answer is yes and no.

I would NATURALLY be making money with all the value I'd bring people. See I'm at a point right now where I'm starting to think about how to naturally make money. That sounds weird right? Naturally make money...but think about it like this.

You know a cool confident guy who is great at programming, an experienced salesman, with great connections in multiple business fields and is great at marketing...how much money do you think he's making? Lets say zero for example because he focused on getting the skills more than the cash and is just down on his luck.

Well I think it's a matter of time before people naturally start contacting him for more work right? Perhaps some want to start a startup with him, perhaps they have a client they'd like him to meet, perhaps he has an idea of his own in one of the fields he helped out for free. I know those like me, skeptical ask: "what if everything went wrong?" Lets say somehow he made the mistake of helping all these people he admires and they were stingy and didn't want to give back.

Well simple, with all of his skills he can now write 10 ideas down on a paper a day until he finds a great one. He can then spec that idea out and get a company started. He has 0 money in his bank right? Well with all his skills he can convince at minimum those 10 companies to give him $100 a month to upkeep the websites and social media for them to fund his own ideas. Lets say we are still skeptical (which is never really bad to be), well then he'll have to get a job. Guess what? Remember all that free work he put in? Well now he can put those skills he gained down on a resume.

Worst case scenario he gets a job/internship for minimum wage at a tech company, (I think he'll work at a startup), but now he can afford his own place somewhere (no matter where) and as long as he has a laptop he just needs to work. The more he works the more opportunities he'll get, I think people forget that skills are more important than cash.

Our protagonist can blog about all of his failures, triumphs and even the people that screwed him.  He can try out all of his ideas and finally succeed one day (whatever your definition of success is). As long as he keeps doing more than expected he'll be great. The more he does the better. I think the reason I haven't been winning is because I haven't been doing what's expected let alone more than expected. Let me know where you have been putting extra effort in and what's been happening with that extra effort.

Yesterday, I met two men at a coffee shop who both had experience in startups and were programmers. Both men I met at separate times had their fair share of victories (the latter selling stock in the recently acquired Sun Microsystems). Both worked at a multitude of startups, some got sold others failed. The thing they had in common was that they both didn't go on to start their own  business (I couldn't help, but wonder why not). They both settled for regular jobs (not a bad thing), but I just couldn't help thinking of the potential they had. Then it hit me, they were doing it for the money and not the skills, they they both talked about how they always did what was expected of them and not more than that.

You could tell they caved on the business dreams they used to have and gave me excuses. "Of course at the end of the day: as one of them quoted "1 out of 1000 succeed you'll see". "I have kids and a wife" the other told me "I can't do the same things anymore". I did see...I saw that you definitely lose when you stop doing more than expected of you and settle. In my eyes they lost, not because they got jobs or built families, but because they stopped trying to go beyond that. "I still get ideas every once in a while" one of them told me. Hopefully he'll get up and follow them again eventually. We lose when we don't do more than the given expectations.

As always, thanks for the read. :-)

Find me on twitter: https://twitter.com/VladMkrtumyan
Find me on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/pub/vladimir-mkrtumyan/15/454/878/
Or just google my name.

How to get people to blog about you

Recently I asked Gary Vaynerchuk a question on twitter. I was one of 7 people he answered in writing and was pleasantly surprised to be featured  in his blog post. What he did made my day and now here I am to blog about this as a thank you. You can see my original question in the link I provided...however he also unknowingly answered another question by example. How to get people to blog about you. You see I'm blogging about Gary for a couple of specific reasons and this isn't the first time either. This is the second time! So lets dig into why I'm blogging about him and why I think others are as well.

1) Authenticity
Each time you see Gary on youtube, twitter or anywhere he is himself. This is one of the main reasons I think he draws people in so easily and led to me admiring his style of doing business. If you ever find Gary on a platform, you can see he doesn't sugar coat anything, I think a lot of people respect that. By being honest with his audience he makes a great connection with us, which makes it a lot more special when he does something for you.

2) Empathy
So you know he's being authentic, but what also helps is he's very empathetic. Even though I've never met Gary in real life and I feel like he remembers me because of his ability to be so understand people. This is why I really liked his answer to my question. Read a blog he wrote about here, someone was disappointed in the comments section so he made it up to them. Of course there will always be people that can never be happy, but Gary's empathy helps him connect with everyone so each interaction gets him a lot of appreciation.

3) Give back more value than expected
Gary gave me a paragraph of an answer to my 1 minute thought out question, now that's a great ROI! This was a great way to surprise and delight me, which is the last reason I'm blogging about him today. By constantly giving people back more than they expect it earns him major points. Gary even does live streams with his audience giving back massive value by helping their businesses and making them more money!

So lets review. Gary is authentic in his brand and all of his content, which helps people feel close with him and like him a lot easier. Whenever he interacts with people he is empathetic with them and they like him more because he understands them. Finally Gary surprises people by giving them more value then they expected, which sets him apart and makes his audience personal ambassadors.

All the Lies in Business

I was shocked with all the lies in my early years of conducting business. I had dealings with people promising to make me a millionaire in a two years; Clients telling me no one would ever agree to use my product when their neighbors did, people telling me the product was to costly when it wasn't, Startup friends bragging about how much business they were going to do when in fact I knew nothing was going on...Worse though...the worst of all those previous lies...were the people who lead me on.

"So what did you think about our product?" I'd say to a customer. "Sounds good he replied, let me talk to my accountant I can definitely see the value, I'll get back to you soon". A week later, after 6 attempts of contact he said on the phone: "Sorry I know this sounds like an excuse, but we're busy over here I'll call you back in a few days gotta go". Ok, you're busy I thought to myself no problem you'll get back to me or I'll get to you. About 15 attempts of getting in contact with him, passing notes, emails, voicemails, cellphone texts! I finally asked the secretary to talk to him for a response. "Sorry" she said: "your product is just too expensive"...Well there goes another opportunity down the drain I thought.

When clients don't pick up the phone or answer emails, when people make excuses for meetings you figure it out fast. The bottom line is you're just not valuable enough for them, and for whatever reason they don't want you to know. I've come to the conclusion though that its imminent, I myself am guilty of it as well on a smaller scale.

I'd tell people I was older when I wasn't, I'd say that me and my co-founder weren't related when we are, I would say I'm a programmer when I only know html and a bit of Javascript. I would pretend my company was larger on craigslist for development work early on and then quote graphic designers a fraction of the prices they asked for knowing they'd take it. (There's a close line to shrewd negotiation and lying I still don't know, which one that constitutes).

On the brighter side, in the recent years I've been more and more honest with people. We all know the "I ran into traffic" line just means you didn't think the meeting was important enough to come early. I still use some of those lines, but am cutting down on them. I think people love you for honesty as long as you're confident in yourself and can provide value.

The more people lied to me and my co-founder during business the more we were able to see through it. I guess being inexperienced salesmen back then we were way too optimistic about everything. We now know that "email me about your product, I'll do research and get back to you when I can, thanks" most likely means means fuck off, but in a polite way. If you do a cold call and someone says: "sorry I'm busy" well they're lying because they wouldn't have answered the phone for a random stranger in the first place, they'd just let it go to voicemail.

The more lies I hear the better business instincts I get. I've come to a point where if a client is acting shady during a free trial I cut them off and tell them to get back to me. At the end of the day I'll keep trucking on, hearing the lies and getting better at recognizing them. Each lie is more experience for me to learn from and another step closer to financial success or at least I tell myself for now.

As always thanks for the read.

Connect with me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/VladMkrtumyan
Connect with me on Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/vladimir-mkrtumyan/15/454/878

Stuck in the movie Groundhog Day?

In one of my favorite movies Groundhog Day, our protagonist Bill Murray is stuck living out that same day for like a billion years. He never travels to the future past Groundhog Day until he becomes the nicest guy in town, learns how to play the piano, build a nuclear reactor (maybe not) etc. I've realized my life and society is sort of stuck doing the same things daily like that movie.

Watch the trailer for fun if you want:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSVeDx9fk60

As a whole people never change. If you take a look at our developmental accomplishments in life most of them happen from when we're born to around the end of college. After college everyone stops learning all of a sudden, we all watch football every weekend and drink beer with our friends (I still love the Seahawks). No need to study for finals so its back to the bar or time to watch another episode of Breaking Bad.

The financial road we're on is generally the same maxing at around the 60,000 income range. Starting tomorrow "I'll eat healthy!" or "exercise" or fill in the blank, we say to ourselves and tomorrow comes around today...again...

I told myself I'd blog everyday of my life starting..."tomorrow", but it didn't work out that way...I know I need to exercise daily, but I don't. Programming is an invaluable skill-set right? Well I've been saying that for the last 2 and a half years.

We all have the next step right in front of us, but don't take it for one reason or another, which are all lame excuses at the end of the day.

So with all my ranting and whining about the problem, what is my solution? Well the reason I'm able to publish this blog today, the reason I've been more active is simple. A start is better than nothing...

I got myself to commit a little bit of effort these last couple of weeks. I now do 10 push ups when I wake up every morning. Consistently doing 10 push ups daily, I was actually in the mood to exercise a couple of days later, which I now do regularly. I made myself outline blogs whenever a topic or idea hit me, which makes publishing these puppies a lot easier. The next habit I'll try to instill is programming. Tiny consistent commitments that got me started down the right path made a huge difference. Even though I'm not blogging daily, which is hard to do things are definitely improving fast and I feel like I'm on an upward spiral.

After this post I'll do 5 minutes of programming lessons, which may be nothing...but tomorrow I may do 30 minutes of programming lessons who knows. I know I'll also do 10 push ups in the morning and still outline a blog idea tomorrow, which will definitely help lead me down the right path. The point is to start very small and you'll be impressed by what'll happen if you keep it up.

"I don't have the time" or "I'm tired" aren't excuses if you break down a huge goal of exercising daily into doing 10 push ups each morning or even less.

As we take these small steps the next ones will illuminate and should help us escape the Groundhog Day we're all stuck in. My goal is to keep improving past my early 20s for the rest of my life and hopefully become a badass mofo with this method.

As always you can find me on twitter: https://twitter.com/VladMkrtumyan
Thanks for reading. :-)