The Sales & Marketing Playbook

Very cool. So thank you again for joining me. I think this is going to be my last class with you this semester. This class today is going to be on sales and marketing. In our last class we spoke about finding the right product, and now it’s going to be selling that product and also marketing that product, and this is what I love talking about. By the way, you’re also going to get the slides. I’m going to show you a link at the very end, so feel free to take notes, but I will give you the slides. And stop me anytime. The more engaging and interactive it is, the better. For questions, you can raise your hand in the chat. Caitlyn, if you see anyone, please let me know. Or you can just put a question in the chat and I will definitely answer it. The more questions you ask during the presentation, the better it’ll be, the more interactive. So I’m going to skip all this, we already covered all this about me. So, getting into it. As a founder and CEO of your own company, you are the ones that need to be mastering sales and marketing.

You’re going to wear every hat, so to speak. The sales hat, the marketing hat, the customer service hat, the tech support hat, the billing hat. But sales and marketing is probably one of the most important ones. And if you don’t love it at all and you really hate sales and marketing, you should probably find another co-founder that enjoys it, that’s more extroverted, that loves speaking with people, because this is probably one of the most important skills when launching your business. You could have the best product or service or software in the world, but if no one knows about it and you can’t sell it and you can’t market it, then you’re a nobody. I do want to stress this point, because I’ve seen many, many great companies, especially software companies, that have come and gone. Their product is really good, but they just don’t know how to market it. They have a bad website, they don’t do any advertising, and they end up failing, and it’s sad. So the summary for today, what we’re going to cover, is organic versus paid marketing, meaning

free versus paid marketing. Some online marketing strategies. You might be asking yourself, if there’s so much to do, what do I do first? So I’ll get into that. I’ll talk about the typical sales process in a software business, SaaS software, and lastly, selling your own product or service. So as a founder and CEO, how do you master sales and marketing, especially if you have no experience? Number one, and I will always keep saying this, and it doesn’t necessarily mean read books, but digest content. For me it’s books. It could be audiobooks, it could be podcasts, it could be webinars, it could be YouTube, it could be TikTok, whatever it is. Just learn from the pros. There are so many experts out there teaching you everything. Just consume the information. Number two, watch videos, like I said, anywhere online. Number three is probably my favorite one, because real-world experience will trump anything that you read online or watch online, or any class you take, or even this class, or my presentation. Work for other companies. When you work

for other companies, as an intern, even if it’s free or paid, you will get real-world experience, which to me trumps everything else. And as you’re learning, apply what you learn. A lot of people will read books but then not apply it. So anytime you’re learning, try to apply it to something. OK, this is probably one of my favorite sales books ever, and it’s a pretty new book also. If I were you, I would stop right here, take a picture of this, screenshot it, write it down and buy this book. It is one of my favorite books ever on sales, and it will help you not only in selling your product or service, but also in getting a raise, getting a job, whatever it is. Anytime you need to sell or negotiate with anyone, this book will help you out. I love this book, it’s a great read. And there’s also this book. So that was my sales recommendation. This is probably my number one marketing recommendation. This book has 77 different ideas for you

to help with marketing and sales, and I got a ton of ideas for my own business. There are worksheets and to-do lists, it’s pretty cool. So, love this book. All right, moving on. This was probably my number one regret throughout college, and you could also apply it to high school as well. My one biggest regret is not starting my own business in college. I took a lot of classes, as I’m sure you are also. Business classes, entrepreneurship classes, marketing classes, sales classes. And the projects are like what you’re doing now. Build a business plan, start a business, launch a business, a fake business. But it doesn’t need to be a fake business. I wish I had taken those classes and homework assignments and projects and actually turned them into a real business. So you are very lucky that you’re at this age, going through this class right now, building your own projects, trying to start your own business. If there’s ever a time to do it and fail

early, it’s now. And a lot of times you can sell to other classmates, you can sell to anyone. So really, if there’s anything you take away from this, throughout the next four years of your life, try to start your own business now, while it’s cheap, it’s free, there’s no pressure, there’s no stress, there are no financial burdens. Because think about it, when you’re my age, 36 years old, and you have three kids and a family, it’s really hard to quit your day job and start your own business, because there’s a lot more risk. You need to support the family, take care of the children. You don’t have that risk at your age right now. You probably don’t have many bills right now. So now is the time to start, and even fail. That’s OK. OK, now we’re going to talk a bit about sales. I made up this quote, but it’s so true. I used to always say it to my salespeople. May the best salesperson win. And what that means is, especially when someone’s trying to buy your software online or any product online, think about how you normally look for software or a product online. You go

to Google, you type in what you’re looking for, you find five different websites, you start looking at all of them, signing up maybe for a free trial or a demo, whatever it is. And usually you might talk to two or three different salespeople. And really it comes down to who did you feel more comfortable with, who do you trust more, who did you like more, which product or software did you think would do a better job solving your problem. So to me, you might have the best product in the world, but if you have the worst salesperson in the world, you’re not going to win that business. So it’s really important that you’re really good in sales, or that you find someone, either a co-founder or someone you hire, that’s really good in sales also. OK, now generally, which company will win the sale? I’ll tell you, in our company, for example, we’re a property management software. People are signing up to our software all day long. 60 people a day are signing up to try our software, but those people are also signing up to try our competitors’ software. So how come we win a lot of the sales? A few reasons.

Number one, we call them right away, first. And there’s a stat on this, I forgot the exact number, but it’s like you will win the majority of the sales if you call within the first three minutes. You need to call within the first three minutes, because imagine they’re on my site right now. They submitted their contact form, maybe they’re still on my site, but after three minutes they bounce and they’re on a different site, on a competitor’s site. So if you call them first, you will win most of the business. And this is so true in any industry. It’s mind-blowing to me that in Miami this is mostly the case. I don’t know how it is in New York, but in Miami, if I’m trying to do anything, say I need a new roof on my house, it blows my mind how few people will even call you back and call you on time. But the ones that call right away normally get my business. They’re more communicative, more responsive, I trust them more. So call right away, right

away, ASAP. Number two, do you follow up and answer all their questions? This might seem simple to you, but a lot of companies don’t do this. So if a lead sends you an email with questions, are you following up and answering them right away? It seems like common sense to you right now, maybe, but as you get older you’re going to notice that a lot of companies don’t do these basic things, and they lose a lot of business because of it. Number three, are you answering the calls right away? If they’re calling your 800 number, whatever number, are you answering the call right away? And if you don’t, do you call them back right away? Very important. And lastly, who responds to emails the fastest? Also important. So this whole slide basically is, can you communicate well, and can you communicate fast? It’s all about speed in business. They love that. You can email from your phone any time of day now. OK, now here’s a little warning. It is very, very hard to learn and master sales yourself. I only learned at the first

startup company that I worked at after college. The CEO took me under his wing, in his office, every day. He made me call people, and he pretty much taught me everything I know today. So my number one tip for you is try to do sales or marketing for another company, ideally a company with a great sales training program. You could also invest in books, you could buy training courses online, there are a lot of free courses online also, and just follow all the sales experts. There are a lot of sales experts. Number one is Grant Cardone, number two is Gary Vee, Gary Vaynerchuk. There are so many out there that you can follow and just learn from the best. Now I’m going to give you another warning. Beware of cold calling. Just a show of hands, does everyone know what cold calling is? You’ve heard of it before? Yes? OK, awesome. If you don’t know, cold calling is basically just going online and finding a list of people that you can call that have no idea who you are. So in our case, we’re looking for real

estate investors, landlords, people that rent out their apartments. So we go to Zillow.com, where they’re listing all their apartments online with their phone numbers, “Call us to rent my apartment.” And we call them and say, “We don’t want to rent your apartment, but we think you could use our software to manage the rental and collect rent.” And what happens? 99% of phone calls hang up on you. “Why are you calling me? You’re spam. I’m going to sue you,” blah, blah, blah. It’s very, very painful. But 1% will say, “Yeah, I’m interested. I was actually looking for that. That’s perfect timing that you called.” 1%. So it’s a numbers game. One out of 100 will probably turn into a customer. Now, when I say beware, it’s because it might turn you off sales forever, because it’s very brutal. You have to accept there’s going to be a lot of rejection, and the only way to succeed is to push forward and be persistent. But my next slide is a tip, which is do cold calling, because it is the best

sales training you can ever go through, ever. My experience cold calling was so important to my future in sales, because right now I can call anyone. You tell me to call the President of the United States and sell him on this product, no problem, done. I pick up the phone. I have no fear anymore of calling anyone. So it will help you blow past that barrier and roadblock that you might have. It will also teach you to call anyone, perfect the first five seconds of the call, and really overcome your fear of rejection. It will get you really good at hearing no and getting hung up on, but it will also give you a lot of confidence to keep going and keep persisting. After you do cold calling, you can pretty much do anything. So there is a warning and there is a tip, and at the end of the day I still recommend at least trying it. By the way, any questions so far about sales or cold calling? Just let me know, put it in the chat. So I know that a lot of you

— and actually, one more thing on cold calling. You can do it today. If you have a business right now, there is nothing stopping you from just picking up your cell phone, finding some customers online and calling them today. You can already start practicing, and it costs nothing. And what’s the worst case that could happen? They could just hang up on you. That’s it, and you move on to someone else. Big deal. Now, if you don’t want to call from your actual phone number, here’s a little pro tip. There is a website called Google Voice, voice.google.com, and you can just sign up for a free phone number. Google gives you a free phone number with unlimited free calls to the US. So that’s an easy pro tip. Google Voice, free phone number, if you don’t want to call with your own phone number. All right, the software sales funnel. For most software companies, the sales process will look exactly like this. Your customer is going to — oh, what

happened to my screen here? It’s a little buggy, let me just restart that. Sorry. There we go. All right, your customer is going to sign up for your software for a free trial, or to schedule a demo, or they will submit a contact form to contact you. They are probably going to get a demonstration, a demo of your software, on Zoom, where you show them how it works. This is mostly for software companies. And then, assuming the demo goes well, at the end of the call you say, “Hey, so what do you think? Does it look good? Ready to get going?” Great, and they sign up. They pay you. It’s a really simple funnel. You want to get as many people as possible into the top of the funnel, to your website, to sign up for a trial or demo, and then convert them into paying customers. That’s pretty much it. It’s a very simple sales process. All right, now, on these demo calls and on sales calls

in general, I want you to put your answers in the chat. What is one of the top 10 most used words in the dictionary, in regards to sales, when you’re calling people? What’s the number one most used word? I’m sure some people are Googling it, which is fine. Don’t ask ChatGPT. Oh yeah, Charlie. All right, let’s wait for two or three more answers. Come on, there’s no right or wrong answer here, so don’t worry. “Interested.” Good, thank you, Isha. Thank you, Charlie. One or two more people, what else? Come on, don’t be shy, put it in the chat. What is one of the top 10 most used? “Free,” that’s probably one. Yeah, I think these are all actually legit answers. “What,” “where,” “how.” Yeah, these are probably all correct answers. The word I’m looking for in regards to sales, and Charlie, maybe you already saw this

presentation before, but good job, it is “I.” Yes, one of the most used words is “I.” And the idea behind this is that people love talking about themselves. Remember this. It’s not about you. It’s not even about your product or service. It’s about the customer, the lead who you’re talking to on the phone. So when we start off sales calls, and I’m going to show you some questions that we use, I don’t start off the call with, “Hi, my name is David Bitton, I’m the CEO and co-founder of DoorLoop, and I’m the best, and you should buy from me, and this is why our software’s so good.” No, no, no. It’s about you, the customer. “Hey, Caitlyn, are you there? How’s it going, Caitlyn? I see that you’re a landlord, right? And I see that you manage apartments on Zillow. I see that you have three, right? Caitlyn, let me ask you, how do you collect rent right now? Because our software can help you automate rent collection. Are you collecting it by check and cash right now? Doesn’t that take you so much time? Do you have to knock on doors? People don’t pay you on time, and it’s hard to collect late fees from

them.” And right now I’m hitting her with pain points, because I already know that Caitlyn has these pain points. So keep in mind, the whole first 30 seconds is all about Caitlyn. Not about me, not about my software. It’s about her, it’s about the customer, about her pain points. “Caitlyn, how do you currently collect rent today?” Caitlyn’s talking, talking. She loves talking about herself. Sorry, Caitlyn. Everyone loves talking about themselves and about their business. “Caitlyn, how many properties do you have? What kind of properties are they? Are you looking to grow? Tell me about your business. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about your customers.” So it’s all about open-ended questions to Caitlyn, to the customer. Let them talk. They will sell themselves. The less you talk, the better. There are a lot of sales tools out there now that will actually record your Zoom call and show you what percent of the time you talk versus what percent of the time they talk. And what they’ve found is the best salespeople talk the least. It’s not about what you say, it’s about

how you say it and what questions you ask. It’s all about getting them to talk. So keep that in mind, remember that. Now, the problem is, when you’re nervous, you’re going to talk, and talk really fast. So you need to slow down, breathe and let them talk. So here’s my next slide. Get them to talk and ask open-ended questions instead of yes-or-no ones. If I just called Caitlyn, “Hey Caitlyn, do you manage properties?” “Yes.” “Are they residential properties?” “Yes.” “Is it on this street?” “Yes.” It’s boring. She’s giving me one-word answers. “Caitlyn, tell me about your business. Tell me about your properties.” Open-ended questions instead of yes-or-no questions. Let them do most of the talking and they will sell themselves. And lastly, build rapport. You might not know what this means, but building rapport means becoming friends with them. It’s all about trust. So I might say, “Caitlyn, you’re not going to believe this, but I see

that you have a property in Port Washington, New York. That’s where I grew up. I grew up in Port Washington, New York. I actually played tennis at Port Washington Tennis Academy, PWTA. Have you heard of it? Wow, that’s so crazy. What a small world, I don’t believe it.” I’m building rapport. I’m building trust. I’m talking about things that have nothing to do with my software, my product or service. And I’ll tell you a funny story. There was a salesperson at my last company, his name was Eitan, real name, and he was the best salesperson out of the ten people we had. The funny thing was, when he first came into our company, he said, “I don’t know about sales, I don’t think I’m going to be good. I have ADD.” And he had three screens up. One watching golf, one watching the Apple announcement, and one doing the demo with a customer. It was so funny, because when he talked to the customer, he would only build rapport. He didn’t even talk about the software. The first 15 minutes were like, “Oh, no way, are

you on a Mac? Wow, did you see the new Mac announcement yesterday? Did you see the new MacBook Pro that came out? I don’t believe it. Did you see the new goggles? Wow, crazy.” For 15 minutes he would just talk about Macs, golf, whatever. He would find common ground with the customer, and the customers loved him. They became his best friends. I had never seen anything like it in my life, and that’s why he was number one. Because they liked him, they trusted him, and he was building rapport. So the first few minutes of every call is called discovery. You’re discovering things about the customer, you’re asking them open-ended questions, and you’re also building rapport. You’re getting them to like you, you’re befriending them, and you’re being honest and genuine. There’s an amazing classic book called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Write that down. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It’s an all-time classic book, and it’s all about befriending people and remembering certain things. So in that book,

he tells you a lot about names. People are really big on names. Just remembering someone’s name is a big, big deal. And also being genuine. Not just asking questions like, “Do you have a family? How’s your family?” just for the sake of it. Be genuine about it. So what I used to do is, in my CRM software, which stands for contact relationship software, it’s almost like an Excel sheet, with the name of the person, the phone number, email and notes. I would put notes. “I spoke to Caitlyn. She has three properties in New York, she actually lives in Port Washington, she’s married and has two kids, a three- and a five-year-old,” whatever. And the next time I talked to Caitlyn, “Hey Caitlyn, how are the boys doing? Last time you told me one of them got hurt. Is he OK? Is he feeling better?” Or, “Caitlyn, I see your birthday’s coming up. Happy birthday.” So it’s all about these small things that make a really big difference. How to Win Friends and Influence People, phenomenal book. All right, let’s move on. So like I said, if they like you and they trust you, then

they may buy from you. It’s still hard to make the sale, but they have to like you first and they have to trust you. And then they might buy from you. One of our top salespeople now does something completely opposite to what we train the others to do. What we train other people to do sometimes is urgency. “There’s a sale, it’s ending this week, and you must sign up.” Pressure, pressure. Urgency tactics, which work a lot. This person, who’s our number one salesperson at this company, does the opposite. “Listen, I know that we have a sale, it’s ending Friday, but I want you to know I’m not going to put any pressure tactics on you. I’m not going to try to sell you on this by Friday. I want to make sure it’s good for you before you do anything with us. I’m being open and transparent. Chances are we’ll probably have the same sale again three to four weeks from now, so don’t worry. I don’t want to put pressure on you.” Wow. As the customer, Caitlyn, sorry to keep using you as the example, Caitlyn’s probably saying, “Wow, look how honest

this salesperson is. He’s not pressuring me, he’s telling me the truth and giving me some insider information that the sale will probably happen again in three or four weeks. Wow, I love that. Thank you for being honest with me.” So try different things, but they have to trust you. All right, Jeffrey Gitomer wrote one of my favorite books ever on sales, another great book to write down. This one’s really simple and really short. It’s about a one-hour read, very, very easy to read. The Little Red Book of Selling. Great book. All right, so what monetary value is your product bringing them? Why should someone buy your product? Why? I think we covered this last time with unique value propositions. Why do you do what you do? Why do you want to start your own company? Why should someone buy your product? So this is where it gets into the benefits and pain points, like I said with Caitlyn before. “Don’t you have that issue collecting rent?” Pain point. “Isn’t it annoying to

follow up?” Pain point. “Isn’t it hard for you to find new customers and tenants?” Pain point. That’s one of the whys. So what I want you to do is write this down right now, because it’s going to be very important in your class project. Why? What are the pain points? I want you to write down the pain points that your customers have that your product or service or software is solving. Number one, pain points. What problems are they having? What are their pain points? Now, in the last class I told you it’s important to start a business in something you know very well, if you’re solving your own pain points, if you’re your own customer, because you know what the pain points are. You don’t need to talk to people, you already know what they are. And if you don’t know, then you talk to them. You ask the customers, “What pain points do you have?” Number two, why are they looking for your solution

right now? “Caitlyn, thanks for signing up to DoorLoop, thanks for contacting us. Let me ask you, why now? What happened? Why are you looking for software today?” “Oh, I have to evict a tenant. They didn’t pay rent, and if only I was more organized and had software, I wouldn’t have this problem.” Great. I’m looking for the motivation. So the next question you want to answer is, why today? Why are they looking for your product or service or software today? That’s the motivation. So when I call the lead back next week, or a month from now, to follow up, I’m not just saying, “Hey, just following up.” No. I’m saying, “Hey, on the last call you told me that you had to evict someone and you wanted software to prevent that from happening. How is that going? How is that eviction process going?” So I’m following up on that pain point. So, why today?

And the third is probably the most important. What monetary value is your product bringing them? I want you to write this down. Money, monetary value. How will your product, software or service make them more money? Write that down. How will it make them more money or save them money? “Caitlyn, did you know that using our software can make you more money?” “No. How?” “Because right now it’s really hard for you to collect rent. We will automate it for you, and 95% of people will now pay rent on time.” Wow, you’re going to make more money. Number two, “Our software will pay for itself just on collecting late fees. If someone pays you late, we will automatically collect late fees for you, and that will cover the cost of the software. There’s no risk. You’re going to make more money, and we’re going to cover the cost of our own software.” There’s no risk. Who wouldn’t buy?

Wow, I’m making you more money. One more thing, I’m also saving you money, because background checks used to cost you $100 and now they’re going to cost you $50. So I’m also saving you money. I’m putting my benefits in terms of money. So I want you to write down, translate your benefits into monetary value. How much money will you make them or save them? Super important. If there’s nothing else you take away, it’s these three things. And lastly, does your product pay for itself? Like I said, it will pay for itself by doing X. If you can answer all of these questions, the sale is closed. Done, game over. There’s no reason someone shouldn’t buy from you. Awesome. So, some opening questions. We’re not going to go through all of them, but you’ll have the slide deck, so when you do your first calls or your cold

calls, you’ll have these questions ready to go. This is a very important slide, it’s slide number 23, if you’re going to do any calling. Number one, “Hey, tell me about yourself. Tell me about your business.” Open-ended question. “Why are you looking for this today? What’s the most important thing you’re looking for? What are the biggest problems you’re having?” And lastly, “What’s your timeline? When are you trying to start using our software? Right now, today, next week? Or are you just sort of browsing around, maybe for six months from now?” That’s very important, because if someone is only messing around, only looking at six months from now, and they’re not really serious, you want to de-prioritize them. You don’t want to follow up with them as much as with everyone else. You might not call them every week, you might call them every month or every two months. So these are very easy questions. All of you can ask these questions. And I urge you, if you’re going to be doing calls, have a script. This is the script. Very simple.

When you have a script, it removes all fear, because you’re just reading a script. The hard part is sounding natural. So if I were to call one of you, let’s say Sophia, because you’re on my screen, sorry for picking on you, I don’t go, “Hi Sophia, my name is David. Tell me about yourself and your business.” I sound like a robot. So you have to practice in front of a mirror to get good at this. “Hey Sophia! Yeah, it’s David from DoorLoop.” Pay attention to my tone of voice. Sophia thinks that I know her, because it’s like, “Hey Sophia!” She goes, “Oh, do I know you?” “Yeah, it’s Dave from DoorLoop.” “Oh, Dave from DoorLoop, who’s that again?” “Yeah, Sophia, look, you don’t know me, but I know you.” “Oh, I do? How?” “I found you on Zillow and I saw that you rent out apartments. Tell me about yourself and your business.” And I go into my script, but it sounds more natural, more friendly, more inviting, more

open. So it’s also about your tone of voice. I practiced this in front of a mirror constantly until I got good at it. You won’t be good in the beginning, and that’s totally fine, but it takes time to get used to it. So that’s sales. It’s not easy, but when you get good, it’s incredible. Salespeople are some of the most highly paid people in the world. A lot of salespeople make more than the founders and CEOs. They’re some of the most important people for any company. If you get good at this, you can make unlimited amounts of money, and I’m talking hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in the right company doing sales. And it’s not that hard. So, removing risk. We already spoke about this, but we’ll cover it again. How do you remove the risk for someone trying out your software or using your product or service? Number one, no contracts. Sign up, no contracts, you can cancel anytime.

That’s pretty nice. Number two, you can pay monthly. There’s no annual commitment. You can go month to month and cancel any time. By the way, you also get a 30-day money-back guarantee. Who wouldn’t try your software out with all of these things? You pay $30 a month, you can cancel anytime, you can get out anytime you want, and there’s a money-back guarantee, no questions asked. Send us an email, we’ll refund you on the spot. Wow. Who wouldn’t sign up, right? Very simple. So I urge you, if you have a software company and you’re building a website, add these three things to your website. No contracts, pay month to month and cancel anytime, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. You will remove all risk, and you will see a lot more people sign up when you add these things to your website and to all of your marketing materials. This is everywhere for us. Now, some important sales lessons.

When you’re on the phone with a person, you always want to schedule the next call, the next step. “It was great speaking to you. Let’s touch base again next Wednesday. I’m free next Wednesday,” because I’m pretending that I’m busy, “does that work for you? Great. What time? How’s 1 p.m. Eastern? Great, I’ll call you then.” I never leave it hanging. Always schedule the next step, and always end an email with an action item. Now, it’s really important. I want you to think of a phone call with a customer as if you’re at a car dealership. I don’t know how many of you have bought cars or leased cars before. Show of hands, how many of you have actually leased a car before? Not many, probably. Oh, hands being raised, that’s funny. When you do, what you’re going to realize when you go to the car dealership is they’re not going to let you go, because they know that once you are at

the dealership, they have you, and as soon as you leave, you’re gone. It’s the same thing with calling customers. You have the customer on the phone. Do not let them go until the sale is made, or until the next step is scheduled, or they are gone. That’s very important. Now, this is probably one that I recommend for your websites. Always create promotions. Let me get rid of the hand raise here. Where is it? Let me stop raising my hand. Lower hand. All right, sorry about that. It’s funny, if I raise my hand now it’s automatic in Zoom. So, we create a lot of promotions. Every Friday we have a sale. If you go to our website right now, there’s a sale. A summer sale, a July 4 sale, an Independence Day sale, a Memorial Day sale, a Labor Day sale, it doesn’t really matter. Every holiday is a sale. And the more sales you run, the more sales you will

have, because there’s urgency. 72 hours only. How many times have you guys bought something because of a 24-hour sale? I’m sure a lot of times, or at least you’ll notice it in the future. Sales work. So create sales, create urgency, create scarcity. You need to create some energy, some action. Why should they take action right now, today? Why shouldn’t they wait a month to buy your product or service? Because there’s a sale right now, so you should buy right now. So it’s very important to create sales on your website. And here’s an example of a sale. The first 50 people to share this photo on social media by 5 p.m. tomorrow get 50% off. So a good sale has to have a few things. Number one, urgency. By 5 p.m. tomorrow, 24 hours only, that’s urgency. Scarcity, only the first 50 people get the sale. And it has to be

an actually good promotion. 50% off, wow, that’s a really good promotion. It can’t just be 5% off. That’s boring, no one cares about that. So I want you to write down three things. Urgency, scarcity, and a good deal or a good promotion. Urgency, scarcity, a good deal. Those are the three key points of every good sale. All right, if there are any questions, stop me, because we’re going to get into sales objections now. Yes, question? Charlie, did you have a question? Yeah, go ahead. “Yeah, so if you cold call random people, not just people in your audience, how would you come off as friendly to people who don’t know anything about you?” Great question.

So first off, you’re not going to just call any random person that you find online. You’re going to call someone that you already know some information about. In our case, we’re looking for landlords and real estate investors. We know where to find them. They’re on Zillow, for example, listing their property for rent. You’re looking for an apartment to rent, they’re listing it. If I just call a random person, I have no idea if they’re going to be a customer. They’re so random that the chances are pretty much zero. You have to build a list of people that are your target audience, and you have to find them. So in our case, let’s say John is a property manager on Zillow.com renting out his apartment. I know a lot about him. I know that he’s on Zillow, I know what property he’s renting, I know how much he’s renting it for, I know where it’s located, I know that it’s in Port Washington, New York. So I can already start building a buyer persona profile around this customer. I can already start building

rapport based on a few things. “Wow, beautiful home, John. Three bedrooms, gorgeous. I would love to live in there. I see it’s in Port Washington, New York. That’s where I grew up.” Whatever it is. So you’re already going to have some common ground, hopefully, or some things that you can work in. “Wow, John, I see that the property’s in California. I can’t believe what’s happening with the protests there right now. Oh my gosh, it’s crazy.” Or, “I heard about the wildfires. Are you OK? Are you safe?” I’m just trying to find rapport any way I can, based on the limited information I have on that customer. Does that make sense? “Well, what if it’s a less specific product?” Give me an example. “So for us, my group is developing an app that helps people connect through fitness. People who have trauma or anxiety about going to the gym

for the first time, or alone. So for those people, would you still say not to call random people? Because it could be anyone.” Yeah, interesting. So what I would tell you, number one, is do everything you can, I mean everything, to try to find people online, in any way possible, that you can contact, regarding people that go to the gym. It can be people in Facebook groups that are part of gym workout groups, health groups, whatever it is. It might not be gym groups, but it could be a health group, people interested in their health. It could be on Facebook, it could be on LinkedIn, it could be anywhere else. Number two, go to Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn, anywhere on Google, and look for other groups and forums where people are talking about gyms and health, whatever it is. You could probably try to find their contact information, but if you can’t get their

phone number, you could usually DM them or message them on those platforms. Or you could also comment, “Oh, I saw that you guys go to the gym. If you have gym anxiety, I figured out how to avoid that,” blah, blah, blah, and you throw your pitch in there. So do everything in your power to try to contact the right people, the right target audience. And trust me, there are ways. I just gave you a few examples, but if you really put your mind to it, you can probably find good people and good lists to call. If you really can’t, it’s going to be a problem. It’s not going to be that easy to just call anyone random. Sure, you could say the whole world is your audience, anyone could go to the gym, but it’s really not going to be that targeted. And I would also caution you that if it’s that hard to find the people, you’re probably going to have a hard time advertising to them too. So you really want to try to narrow down your buyer persona, which we talked about in the last class, and your target audience. Who are they? What do they listen to? Where do

they hang out online? What’s their buyer persona? How can we reach them? How can we contact them? What websites do they visit? Where are they active online? You really need to try to find those people, because if it’s that hard, I would tell you to think twice before doing this, because it’s going to be hard finding these people. Just calling anyone random is going to be tough. You can, but it’s an uphill battle if you can’t find the right audience. “All right, thank you.” Yeah, no problem. And everyone else, please ask away, this is what we’re here for. So how are we on time? All right, 15 minutes, so I’m going to go a little bit faster here. Sales objections. By the way, Caitlyn, do you have a hard stop at 11? How much can I go over? “Like 10 to 15 minutes.” OK, awesome. All right. So, a sale is always made. Either they sold you on no, or you sold them on yes. This is a funny quote that I got from my book. When you’re calling someone,

they’re either selling you on why they shouldn’t use your product or service, or you’re selling them on why they should. So in this example, it’s Charlie. “Hey, do you have anxiety going to the gym?” “No, no, no, I don’t have any anxiety. Everything’s great. I love going to the gym.” They just sold Charlie on why they shouldn’t buy his product or service, whatever he’s selling. You don’t let them do that to you, because in their head they’re always putting up these things. “No, I don’t need your product. No, I don’t know.” They’re going to try to convince you why they don’t need to buy from you. You need to sell them on yes and prevent them from selling you on no. A sale is always made, so I love this quote. There are two things. One is called an objection and one is called a rejection. An objection is something that you can overcome, and a rejection is something you can’t. As examples, in Charlie’s example, “Do you go to the gym right now?” “No, not really.” “Why not?” “Because it’s a little

bit far from my house. I really can’t use your product or service.” That’s an objection. You can easily overcome that. You could easily figure out a way around it. It’s not a really good excuse. Another objection. “How much is it?” “$30 a month.” “No, it’s too expensive for me.” That’s an objection. You can overcome it. You can give them a sale, a promotion, a discount. A rejection is, “Hey, I’m looking for John, the landlord.” “Oh, I’m really sorry, John passed away.” OK, there’s nothing I can do there. It’s over, move on, I’ll talk to someone else, unfortunately. Another example. “Hey John, I see that you have a rental on Zillow. You could use our software.” “No, actually, I have to turn it down. I sold all my properties. I don’t own any more real estate.” I’m really sorry, there’s nothing I can do. What am I going to sell him on? He doesn’t own any properties. So, rejection versus objection. And you need to decide, when someone’s giving you that objection, is it an objection or a rejection? 95%

of the time, it’s an easy objection that you can overcome. 95% of the time. And the funny thing is, you should make a list of all the potential objections. So write this down. Make a list of all objections. It will also help you with your fear of cold calling or talking to someone. So this is an important one. Make a list of all objections, write that down. Price, it’s too expensive. All the reasons that you have in your head, all the fears that you have, all the things they could say, write them out. And then what I want you to do is write down all your rebuttals. If they say price, you give a discount. If they say this, you say that. So now, when you go into a call, you have your script, you know what to say, and you’re waiting for that objection. As soon as they say, “Oh, it’s too expensive,” perfect, let me go to my script. Too expensive. “Oh,

we have a promotion ending today at 5 p.m., 50% off. How does that work for you?” You already know what you’re going to say. That will completely remove all fear, because you’re ready to go, you’re prepared. And if someone gives you another objection that you’re not ready for, “That’s a good point, let me think about that and I’ll get back to you.” And you write it down, and now you have a new rebuttal for that. So, a few common objections. Too expensive. Doesn’t have what I’m looking for. Missing a feature. Not sure if I need it. I need to think about it. I’ll get back to you. I need to talk to my partner. There are so many different ones, but you’re going to be ready to go and prepared. This is huge for sales. This is huge. And obviously another great book, Objections by Jeb Blount, one of the best books on handling objections. It’ll give you a lot of ideas. All right, we’re going to get into the second half of the presentation now, which is on marketing.

Marketing, to me, means I put in time, and probably committed some money to it. It doesn’t have to be money, it could be free, but time or money, I’d better see results. Everything you do in marketing needs to bring in results. If you spend your time or money on something, it had better bring in results, and you had better be able to measure it. Everything needs to be tracked and measured. Everything. And if you don’t know your numbers, you cannot make smart business decisions. Here’s what I mean by that. If I spent $100 today on a Facebook ad, how do I know if it worked? I want to track how many people clicked on the ad, how many people came to my website, how many people signed up for a free trial, how many people booked a demo, how many people showed up to the demo, and how many people converted and became customers. I’m tracking every single step. Because if I spent $100 and I made $100 back, I broke even. That’s a home run for me, I’m happy. If I

spent $1 and made $1.01 back, I made money. Amazing. I spent $100 and made $105, I made money. That’s all you’re looking for. Break even, or make a little bit of money. That’s marketing, that’s paid marketing. But once again, you could have the best product in the world, but if no one knows you exist, you are dead. Your company will never succeed. So marketing is super important, and so is how you market your product. And like I said before, you cannot measure what you don’t track. You must track everything. So early on, and this is important, if you have a website, you want to install, write this down, Google Analytics. Most of you have probably heard about this already. Google Analytics is free. Install it on your website and it will show you all the metrics. How many people visited, where they came from, etc. And I want you to make decisions based on data, not on emotions, not on gut feeling and not on

assumptions. Be careful with assumptions. This is especially important if you have business partners, because Charlie might have partners right now in his group, and they might say, “Hey, I think we should do X.” “No, I think we should do Y.” Well, how do we decide? Usually it’s the one who’s more convincing, or who screams the loudest, or who has the fanciest title. “I’m the CEO, I make the decision.” No. “That’s a great question, let’s look at the data. Let’s see what the data says and make a decision based on data.” This is very important. I love this quote, you may have heard of it. “If you build it, they will come.” Just build your product, just launch it, and they will come. It’s not true anymore. There are so many products out there. So today, the new quote for me is, “If you market it, they will come.” The world is so saturated with products and competition, you need to stand out from the crowd, and you need to spend some time and energy on marketing. We’re going to get into organic versus

paid marketing now. Does anyone know what organic — well, I already explained it, so I’ll just tell you. Organic is free, grassroots. Blog posts, stuff like that. Things that you could do right now, today, for free. Word of mouth, referrals, calling people, calling friends, cold calling, email campaigns. That’s all free. Paid is Google Ads, Facebook Ads, anything paid, trade shows, any paid advertising. So, organic marketing. There are a lot of different sources. I’m just going to throw up some examples and we’ll blow past this. Referrals, word of mouth, networking events, social media, SEO. There are so many different ways. Now, you might want to write this down. Slide number 40 has a lot of slide notes for SEO. We don’t have time to cover SEO. SEO means search engine optimization, getting your website to rank in the top 10 of Google. How do you do that? It’s a long conversation, but in my

slide notes I have my guide and my checklist for SEO. Super helpful. So slide 40, look at the slide notes, there’s a lot of good information there on SEO. And content marketing, which we also won’t be able to cover, but 50% of all leads and all revenue we bring into our business today is from SEO and content marketing. Content marketing means blog posts. People are searching for something, finding our blog and coming to our website. So it’s really important, and it’s free. All you need to do is write blog posts. It’s free. I’m going to fly through this also. Organic marketing, there are a lot of networking events. Meetup.com is a great website. So Charlie, you’re looking for people in the health and fitness industry, whatever. Go to Meetup.com and search for people that work out, that exercise. Fitness groups, maybe morning runs, morning yoga, whatever it is. There are a million of these groups. BNI is another one. This is more of

a professional, older networking group, and you can also join them. And there are a ton of local industry events. In my industry, I’m in real estate, so I went to Google and searched local real estate events in Miami, Florida, local real estate investor and landlord events in Miami, Florida, and I found tons. We go to them at least once a month. This is all free, you can do this stuff today. Now, events are good not just for making sales, but also for finding your buyers and learning from them. So Charlie might go to these groups just to get information. “Hey, do you guys have anxiety about this? What do you do about it? What do you think about this? If I built this product, would you use it? How much would you pay for it?” You could use these events almost like your survey group, your focus group. Just go and learn. It’s free. Social media, I’m sure everyone uses social media here. You know how to use it. You can all post on your own accounts and engage with other accounts. So

this is easy, this is free, but I have a huge warning for you, a massive one. Do not waste time on social media without seeing results. I don’t know if you can see my screen here. Can you — let me see something. Oh, you can see my slide notes. Sorry, I didn’t realize you could see that the whole time. My bad, let me share it again without showing that. Sorry about that. There you go, now you can’t see it. All right. Do not waste time on social media without seeing results. So many friends make this mistake because it’s free, it’s easy, “I know how to do it.” But it’s not good if you don’t know the results. I have a friend, for example, who calls me. “Wow, look at the results, I have 3,000 followers on Instagram and Twitter,” TikTok, whatever. I was like, “I don’t care. How many leads did it bring you? How many customers did it bring you?”

“I don’t know, I think it’s working.” So how do you know? Why do you spend five hours a day on it if you have no idea? So if you’re going to do it, I’m not saying it doesn’t work. For my business it’s not good, but for yours it might be good. But you must track the results, and it’s easy today to track the results. There are trackable links you can use. One of them is called Linktree, you might want to write that down. Another one is Bitly. So if you’re going to do it, make sure you’re not wasting time on it and you can actually track the results. And I love this quote. Building your brand doesn’t pay your bills. Because you might say, “But I’m building my brand, look how many followers I have.” Is it paying your bills? Are you making money? No. So brand building means nothing until you’re way down the road with millions in revenue. Who cares about branding right now? All you should care about is getting customers and making money. That’s it. Like I said in the last class, I don’t want you trademarking or buying

swag or anything like that. All you should focus on is getting customers. That’s all that matters. So, some content marketing things you could do. Blog posts. You can comment on other blogs, you can answer questions online on Quora, you can engage and participate in forums and groups. This is easy, this is free, you could do this today. Now we’re going to switch to paid marketing. I know that this won’t apply to a lot of you, unless you raise money, or you invest your own money, or family or friends give you money. But these are some ways you can grow really quickly. You can do print ads, which are sort of dead today, dying, depending on your industry. You can go to trade shows and events. My favorite, and probably your favorite, will be online digital marketing, PPC, pay-per-click. That’s Google Ads, and I’m actually going to show you. So here are some print ads. Industry magazines, industry newspapers, billboards. You’re going to be very far away from these things. They’re expensive and they’re hard to track, so I don’t really like them. I prefer

paid online marketing, and we’ll get to that in a second. Now, a quick warning. Beware of paying for branding with no ROI. Once again, you’re going to call a magazine and they’re going to say, “Oh, I can get you in for $1,000 and 50,000 people are going to see your print ad.” Wow. What’s the ROI? How many will actually call me? How many will go to my website? Whatever you do has to be trackable, otherwise you’re just wasting your time and your money. This is a really famous quote, and it’s not my quote. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” This was a quote from 90 years ago. Today you should know which half is wasted. You should know everything, because you can track everything. There are a lot of great tools to track everything. Track everything. Never waste your time doing anything unless you can track the results. Now, if you don’t have complex systems, CRM software, analytics to track it, it’s very simple. Whenever you get a new customer, or

anytime you speak to someone on the phone who calls you or signs up, one question. “How did you hear about us? Where did you find us?” That’s it. Or when they’re signing up on your website, they put in their name, their phone, their email, and “Where did you hear about us?” They can just type in their answer, or you can give them a drop-down list. That’s it. So, so simple. If you don’t have complex systems, just ask. It’s all about having data and learning. So here’s some paid marketing. You can go to trade shows, conferences, seminars, events. This is an example of one of our trade shows. We started off with a booth like this, actually a smaller booth. Then this was our 20-by-10 booth, and then it ended up working, so we doubled down and spent more money on a booth. So trade shows can work. This is way more in the future for you guys, but they do still work today. You’ll grow, you’ll get there, don’t worry about this today. But right now you can go to trade shows for free. There might be trade shows in your local area

for free. “I want to go to a health and fitness trade show in New York. Where are they?” And as students, you can probably go for free. So that would be the next thing I would tell you. Just go to Google, search trade shows, conferences, events for fitness, for health, whatever your market is, and go to them. You’re going to learn a lot, you’re going to see who’s out there, it’s really fun, and you get some free swag. So it’s fun. So, my favorite and one of the most important slides. Paid marketing online. I love it because it’s trackable. Every click is trackable. They go to your website, Google Analytics can track it, so it’s really easy to see, “I spent $10, how much did I make?” So the first thing I would tell you to do is go to Google and look for directories. In my case, my keyword is property management software. When I go to Google, I find tons of directories. Capterra, Software Advice, GetApp, all these websites, and I can advertise there. So that’s number one. Number two, and most important by far, Google

Ads. If you’re going to spend any money online, remember this for the rest of your lives. If you’re going to spend any money online on advertising, start off with Google Ads and master it. Master it. It’s the number one paid channel worldwide, and it probably will be for a while. The problem is, people start off, they don’t get results, and they quit forever. No. It works for everyone. If your competitors are on Google Ads, it works for them, and it can work for you too. Master it. And there’s an amazing book, I don’t know if I have it here, but write this down. Ultimate Guide to Google Ads by Perry Marshall. Ultimate Guide to Google Ads by Perry Marshall will teach you everything. Google Ads, number one. Social media ads are sometimes not as good, because people are not really searching for your product. But you could try it. It’s cheaper, but usually not as beneficial as Google Ads.

Retargeting is just ads that follow people around online. We can ignore that for now. And there are banner ads and paid SEO, but these are more advanced. Honestly, I really only focus on Google Ads. Remember the 80/20 rule we talked about last week. 80% of your revenue will come from 20% of the things you do. Google Ads, that’s all I focus on. So if you ask me, “David, what do you focus on the most?” My 20% is blog posts and Google Ads. That’s it. Seriously, that’s it. Blog posts and Google Ads. Master those two things and you are a master marketer. End of story. Oh, here’s the book. Yep, here’s the book. Great book. All right, inbound versus outbound marketing. What does that mean? Inbound means they’re coming to my site, they’re coming to me. Outbound means I’m finding them, I’m cold calling. So inbound, I’m doing

blog posts, I’m doing Google Ads. People are searching for me, finding me, coming to my website, which means we call them a hot lead, a warm lead. It means that they want to buy. They’re looking for your software. It’s much easier to close an inbound lead. Outbound, they don’t know who you are. You’re cold calling them, and it’s much harder to close. So here’s an explanation, hot leads versus cold leads. Cold means they don’t know who you are, and it’s going to be much harder to close them. So in inbound marketing, you can do free social media. A raffle. Whoever signs up in the next 24 hours, or comments, or likes, or follows, gets my product or service for free. And inbound is Google Ads, for example. Outbound is cold calling, email campaigns, mailers in the mail, whatever it is. You’re going to them. I urge you to try to focus on inbound first. It’s much easier to get people

that way. It’s much easier to start with inbound than outbound. But you’ve got to do both eventually. All right, last part, a few slides left. What do you do first? What do you focus on first in marketing? Number one, if you have software, you need a website. If you’re selling something online, e-commerce, you need a website. And I would urge you to spend as much time, and even money, on building the best possible website ever, because that’s your brand, that’s your company, that’s everything. A good website will make the difference between a successful business and a failed one. The website is super important. Now, these are my tips for building a good website. Number one, I don’t even know if I have it here, let me see. I do. Let me go here first. You can build it on WordPress, Wix, Shopify, Webflow, Squarespace, a million different things. The first thing you want to look at is templates. So in Charlie’s case, he’s

looking for a health and fitness website. He would go to Google and type in fitness or gym WordPress website templates, fitness or gym Webflow templates. And there are templates that exist, one click. Sometimes they’re free, sometimes they’re $40, and they’re beautiful, they’re gorgeous. So I would start there. Just look for a website template. Easy. If you have some money, maybe you raised money and you want the best possible custom website ever, then you would go to 99designs and do a website contest or a logo contest, and designers will build you a nice website. Upwork is another website we spoke about, but I prefer 99designs. So that’s the website. Now, a warning. If you’re very serious about the business, in the beginning you could probably use a template, but if you’re making it into a real business, try your hardest not to design or build the website

yourself. Unless you’re a designer, you don’t know what a good website looks like. Try to outsource it. Spend $200 if you can and get it done correctly, the right way. It’s not that expensive. For $200 to $300 you can get a good website. Now, blog posts. Super important also. 50% of my leads come from blog posts. And once again, either you master it, or you hire someone who has mastered it to do it for you. We don’t have time to talk about blog posts forever, but on this slide, slide number 64, if you want to write it down, in my slide notes I have a training video that I made for my team, a YouTube video, and a Google Doc for my internal team on how we do it. So if you want to do it yourself, you’re going to get the instructions in the video on slide 64. Super important. Blog posts and Google

Ads. Blog posts and Google Ads, the two most important things. And there are some easy and free marketing tactics. Get reviews online, social media. Now, a question that usually comes up is, how do I get reviews? You try to get your first few people who are using your product or service to give you reviews. Or you could always ask friends and family, if you’re OK with that ethically and morally. I’m usually not, but it’s up to you. But there are many ways of getting reviews. And that’s it. Some final thoughts. Always be selling. As a founder, there is no nine to five. You’re always on, you’re always selling, you never shut off. You seize every opportunity. There have been so many times, I could tell you, I’m in an elevator, I’m on vacation, wherever I am. One time my friend sold something on a ski lift, just meeting someone on a ski lift. You’re always selling. Always. And there’s a funny story I have

about a man named Don Bailey. He sells carpets for a living. He’s retired, the business is still running, he doesn’t need to make any more money. He’s a multimillionaire, he doesn’t care anymore. But till the day this man passes, he’s always going to ask for referrals. No matter when I talk to him, and I think he’s about 90 right now, I talk to him once a year about something random, and he’ll say, “By the way, if you know anyone looking to buy carpet, don’t forget about us.” I’m like, wow, this guy is always selling, always asking for referrals. So be like Don and ask for referrals. Never stop, never give up, be persistent. I’m telling you, you can do this. It is easy. Follow these steps and you can easily master sales and marketing. Focus on the 20% that will bring in 80% of the results and you will be successful. All right, thank you again, I appreciate it. Thank you so much, everyone. Virtual round of applause.

This is the link to download these slides and notes. The link for last class was davidmbitton.com/bronx1, this is davidmbitton.com/bronx2. I think there’s also davidmbitton.com/bronx3 that you might want to check out. I think that one is on how to sell your business. I don’t think I’m giving that class this semester, but if you’re curious about how to sell your business, or at least how to prepare to sell your business from day one, there are some things you should be doing today. I think that’s Bronx Three. OK, awesome. I think we have a few minutes for questions, so ask away. I’m also going to pull this up again in case you don’t have it. This is my contact information. I think someone emailed me last week, which was great. Feel free to email me, don’t be shy. It’s me@davidmbitton.com. All right, questions. Feel free to throw them in the chat. Any sales or marketing questions. How to get started, how to sell,

who you should be contacting, your target audience, anything like that. Feel free to ask questions about the project you’re working on right now. Yes, go ahead. “I have a question in regards to our business plan. What we’re doing is making a website platform to connect students with third-party organizations for jobs, volunteering and internships. Our customer base is any third party who wants to promote their jobs, because we’re selling promotion. And I just want to know how we can contact organizations, because they’re not individual customers.” So say that again, because I had some noise in the background and it was hard to hear you in the beginning. Tell me again about your product or service. What do you sell? “We sell promotions to

organizations to advertise their jobs, volunteering, etc.” So let’s say I’m a customer, and I’m looking to hire a salesperson. What would you do for me if I’m looking to hire someone? “We will promote the jobs at the top of the search results. So when you search for a job, it’s going to be at the top of the results.” Awesome. So first of all, brilliant idea. Second of all, every company could use your service. That’s awesome. I’m not sure if you know, but recruiters charge a fortune for what you’re doing. So you might even consider changing your business model to be more like a recruiter. Recruiters take 25% of the candidate’s first-year salary. If we hire a developer for, and this is a low number, $100,000 a year, and developers can make $200,000 or $250,000 a year, recruiters are charging 25%. They’re making $25,000 just like this. And I learned what they do. All they do is take

your job and promote it online. Literally, what you’re doing is what recruiters are doing, and they just bring in candidates. So I would even consider changing your business model to be percentage-based. “We only charge 10%.” Everyone will pay you. So how do you find companies? Easy, easy, easy answer. Number one, you look for companies that are already posting their jobs on LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Monster, all the job posting websites. You’re just looking for those companies, because if they’re already posting jobs, they’re actively looking to hire. And as a little tip, the higher up a company is on that job list, the more they’re paying. So I would just go to Indeed.com, for example, to their homepage search box, where you can search for any job. So you search for salesperson in New York, and you’re going to find hundreds of

companies looking for a salesperson in New York. And I would advise you to target the first 20 results, in order from top to bottom, because those are the ones that are paying to advertise there. But literally, there are millions of jobs on these search engines. So the next thing I would tell you, if you really want to scale this up, is you get a developer to automatically scrape these listings. Every single day it automatically checks Indeed.com for a hundred different jobs in a hundred different states, in a hundred different cities. Salesperson in New York, Miami, California, whatever. Every day it gets new listings, and anytime there’s a new one, it automatically emails that company. So you fully automate your outreach process. That’s what I would do. “But the thing is, we’re targeting middle and high school students, so it kind of limits our jobs, because our target users are mostly younger students. So how can you

do that? A lot of the jobs I see on Indeed and other websites are mostly for college students and above.” So who’s your customer? The customer is the company, like me, right? So is your idea trying to find companies like me that are hiring students your age? “Jobs that don’t require a lot of knowledge or experience.” Yeah. I guess my first question is, why are you limiting yourself to just that? It’s a niche market, but I feel like you can go broader, because what I’m hearing from you is, “My business plan is to promote jobs for companies that are hiring high school students.” Is that right? So I would question why not just any job that’s hiring anyone. But you don’t have to answer it, it’s just a question to think about. Number two, it’s all about filters. You can go to Indeed.com and look for a sales job in

New York, but with a filter. No college education needed, high school only. Great, there you go, there’s your filter. You’re just adding filters to the job role, basically. I don’t think you’re going to find many jobs specifically saying, “We are looking for high school students.” It might be hard to find them. But another filter, when you’re scraping the list, you can tell the scraper, the bot, “Find me all sales jobs in New York that have the words ‘high school’ in them,” and that’s it. Or an age, for example. And exclude all jobs that say “college degree” or “18 plus,” for example. You can just do all these Boolean filters. Great question. “OK, thank you so much.” Of course. All right, Alicia wrote a question in the chat earlier, when you were talking about building rapport. “Is there such a thing as building too much rapport, and how do you know when to stop?” Awesome. Well, I’m happy you took the

advice, thank you. So it’s more about emotional intelligence. It’s just like when you’re talking to someone new that you meet. Let’s say someone introduces you to someone, like in high school right now, you meet someone new, you’re talking, you’re building rapport. It’s a feeling of, “All right, I’ve taken this too far. That’s enough. I’ve built enough rapport, I’ve asked them enough questions about themselves,” whatever it is. So it’s more of a gut feeling than a direct answer. Some people, I can build rapport with for a full hour. With other people, after 30 seconds I can tell this person doesn’t want to talk to me. I’m building rapport and this person is annoyed, giving me one-word answers. “Oh, Jessica, I see you live in New York. That’s so crazy, I’m also from Port Washington.” And they reply back, “OK.” I’m like, all right, this person is not the kind of person that’s going to let me chit-chat with them. So you have to feel it out and understand if they’re willing to build rapport or not.

Are they talkative? Are they open to it or not? And it’s pretty easy. When you get on the phone with the wrong type of customer, who’s just giving you one-word answers, you’ll know it right away. Or they’ll cut you off. You’ll say, “Oh, how’s the weather in California?” and they’re like, “Look, I get what you’re trying to do, I’m in sales also, I just want to see your product.” No problem, sounds good, let’s get into it. They might also just cut you off and tell you. Great question. And by the way, everyone, Alicia was the only one that emailed me. Feel free to email and ask questions, don’t be shy. And yes, you can definitely email me again, as many times as you want. I love answering questions. Anything I can do to help. I’m a free resource for you guys, use me as much as you want. Any other questions? Last question, we’ll take one more. Anyone else? No? Awesome.

All right, thank you all. Caitlyn, thank you again, and sorry for using you as my test customer. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Bye, have a good day. Bye, everyone, take care.