Today's Reading
A year later, when my family moved to California, I became the new kid at a new high school. I figured I could make some new friends and scale my business at the same time. I convinced eleven other guys to sell curb numbers the same way I did, and gave them everything they needed, including supplies, a sales script, and a schedule of which streets to hit on which afternoons. In return, they agreed to pay me eight dollars for every twenty dollars they collected from a homeowner.
In other words, at age fourteen I wasn't just a salesman, I was a sales manager. I tried to make our operation professional, ordering T-shirts that read "The Gutterman." We even had a MySpace page, which was cutting-edge marketing at the time.
I had to get really organized, because we kept running out of paint, stencils, tape, and scrapers. Did you know that if a high school kid tries to buy enough spray paint to cover every wall in town, the store is supposed to call the cops? I had to ask my mom to go around to various stores to pick up our spray paint, like a bootlegger during Prohibition.
Not long ago my dad found my old computer files from that business, including my ledger of sales, the schedule of names and streets, and the script I wrote for my reps. It was a pretty good script for a kid with no sales training. It included stage directions like "Slow down here.... Pause after this line.... Now change your inflection to get excited." It all came from trial and error. If something worked for me, I added it to the script.
Right after my high school graduation, my brother hit me up because one of his friends owned an alarm systems company called Platinum Protection. I figured with all my experience in curb painting, I could rock a summer job doing grown-up door-to-door sales. So on a Friday in mid-June I shipped off to Dallas—my first extended time away from home. Didn't know a soul in town. The local manager, a guy named Luke, was supposed to pick me up at the airport, but he was four hours late because he was too busy closing sales.
Before I even went to drop my luggage at the apartment where I'd be staying, I shadowed Luke for the last couple of hours of his day, watching him close two sales. Then he dropped me off at my apartment, leaving me with a training packet, three blank contracts, a company shirt, and an assigned neighborhood for the next day. At this point I didn't even know how an alarm system worked, but the next morning I was going to be a professional D2D rep.
You'll find out what happened the next day later in the book, along with some other fun stories about my early years in D2D sales. For now, just to fast-forward, I can tell you I got better and better through a mix of coaching, self-education, and trial and error. Before long I was making enough money that it didn't seem worth it to go back to college at Utah Valley University. For nearly a decade (2008 to 2017), I was a top-rated sales rep and worked my way up to sales manager. Then I became a VP of sales in two industries, alarms and solar.
But by 2017, I felt a strong urge to do something bigger than just continuing to boost my sales income. I wanted to share my success as widely as possible, while also unifying, upleveling, and bringing more honor and integrity to the sales profession—especially the widely disrespected practice of D2D. So I quit my $600,000 a year job and started my own training, consulting, and events company, the D2D Experts. We hosted our first annual convention, D2DCon, in January 2018. Positive buzz about us spread, and we've been growing ever since.
These days I feel blessed to have an eight-figure, kick-ass company and a much wider audience, helping tens of thousands of salespeople achieve the success of their dreams. My team now draws more than four thousand attendees to each D2DCon and thousands more to about fifteen other events each year. We have about ten thousand active monthly users on our online platform for D2D professionals. More than forty thousand users have participated in our online video training courses.
Building the D2D Experts has been an incredible learning experience. I had to figure out how to sell conference tickets, elite mastermind groups, and six-figure consulting packages for businesses. We even started three successful software platforms for salespeople: Recruit-o-Matic, Vanilla Message, and Xpand. Our newest software project, Xpand, is a human development coaching platform that will help individuals and companies enjoy personal growth and better quality of life.
All these new products and services forced me to sharpen my B2B sales and sales management skills, in completely different directions than I had ever attempted before. Sometimes it feels like a very long way from golf balls and curb painting.
But in another sense, it isn't very different at all. Ultimately, sales is sales is sales. It's a set of skills, strategies, and mindsets that anyone can learn, practice, master, and adapt to new settings.
And now, with this book, I'm excited to share this essential knowledge even more widely. So let's get into it.
...
