by Sabri Suby
a wildly successful business.
Because if your business is being flooded with profitable sales, there really is
no problem you can’t solve with the right amount of money. No one you
can’t hire. No system you can’t implement.
Selling is not an optional task for an entrepreneur – it’s essential. And if
selling is essential, then learning to sell (i.e., developing the knowledge and
skills needed to sell) is an obligation, not a choice.
In this Phase, I will show you how to become a master at selling. Don’t worry
if you don’t know anything about selling yet. Everything you’re about to
learn is easy to follow, and I’ll teach you the lessons I’ve learned from years
in the trenches.
But first…
Why Should You Listen To A Single
Word I Have To Say?
Great question.
Let me preface this by explaining that the following information hasn’t been
learned simply by sitting around philosophising on the subject of sales,
reading books, attending sales seminars, or watching YouTube videos.
No.
I’ve spent seventeen long years in the trenches, on the front lines ‘doing the
work’. Collecting battle scars to find out every secret sales technique in
existence.
If there was a rumour of a technique, even on the other side of the world, I
hunted it down. If there was some hot shot claiming to be a master salesman
in some god-forsaken corner of the earth, I found them.
If there was so much as a whisper of a selling secret ANYWHERE, I tested
it.
In my years as a sales professional, I’ve studied every book, course, method,
and video I could find.
But I was never satisfied with what I found because the truth is that...
99% of what you hear consists of outdated, pushy sales tactics that work only
on unsophisticated prospects – and definitely wouldn’t work in today’s fast-
changing digital economy.
These are hard-won lessons I’ve collected like battle scars from the trenches
and the front lines.
I am a master salesperson, and with my proven process, even the best
salespeople in the world find it hard to compete with me. Let me explain
where it all started…
Single Parent Mother Work Ethic
I grew up in a small regional beach town in northern New South Wales,
Australia, called Byron Bay. It has a population of 9,000.
My older sister and I were raised by a single mother. I watched my mother
hold down three jobs and work tirelessly to give us a great life.
She would wake up before the sun and go to work before we left for school,
and she would often get home after we did. She would then head straight to
the kitchen to cook us a healthy dinner. As exhausted as she was, she did all
this with a smile and the affection and warmth only a loving mother can
provide.
There were times that were rough, and we had no money. Yet she always
found a way to pull through.
When I was eight years old, I started waking up early so I could help her set
up the café where she worked before I went to school. I would sweep the
floor, take out the tables and chairs, and set them up. When I was finished,
she would give me a hot chocolate and some breakfast as my ‘reward’.
Afterwards, kissing me on the cheek, she’d tell me she loved me and send me
off to school.
Why am I telling you all this? Far out, isn’t this meant to be a book about
marketing?
Yes, but this is an important point.
Watching my mother work so hard to provide a great upbringing for my sister
and me taught me the most valuable lesson I’ve ever learned.
And that is this: Nothing in life comes without hard work. Nothing is given to
you. You don’t get what you ‘deserve’. You get what you push, shove,
scratch, and work your ass off for. My mother taught me firsthand that having
a strong work ethic is the number one determining factor for success.
After seeing this, I wanted to pull my own weight to help her. So, still only
eight years old, I got my first weekend job – making peanut butter at the local
health food store for $2.50 per hour. I would give all the money I made to
her.
However, I soon realised that even if I worked eight hours a day, I would
never be able to make a contribution that made my mother’s life easier.
So I got to thinking – how can I make more money to help out my mum? I
found an old harmonica and decided to busk at the Sunday markets. I had no
idea what I was doing or even how to play the harmonica, yet this didn’t stop
me.
I threw my baseball cap on the ground, pulled out my harmonica, and started
playing. I’ll never forget that first day I made $80 in five hours. It would have
taken me thirty-two hours making peanut butter at the health food store to
earn that much!
I ran home eagerly to show my mum, but when I tried to give it to her, she
insisted I keep it for myself. I refused and she burst into tears, gave me a big
hug, and squeezed me tight.
I knew from her tears this money would make an impact and actually help
her out. I didn’t mind whether it would go towards the electricity bill or the
weekly groceries, I just wanted to help. I worked every Sunday market from
that point on, switching up my busking acts from harmonica to juggling.
Little did I know at the time what a valuable lesson I was learning, and that
this single parent mother work ethic would serve me well the rest of my life.
At sixteen, I got my first full-time job in sales. I’ll never forget it. The job ad
in the local paper said, ‘Earn up to $1800 per week. No experience required’.
I was sold.
It was a group interview of 30, and I got the job along with two other
candidates. We joined a team of 13 others, all crammed into an office,
converted from an old shipping container. We were tasked with making 100
cold calls an hour – calling so fast we could hardly put the phone back on the
hook. Feverishly, we worked our way through call sheets of businesses. I still
remember the sound of production in that shipping container – it was
deafening.
We were calling businesses to buy back their empty ink cartridges and then
selling them back refilled. I was making 600 cold calls a day, being abused,
hung-up on, and yelled at. People were screaming at me, ‘Fuck off little kid’,
or ‘Go fucking die!’ It was a cold hard slap in the face. Here I was at the front
lines of capitalism, and I was getting bruised and bloody from the rejection.
Worst of all, I was failing miserably.
After two weeks, my production was well below the other rookies. It seemed
I was the runt of the litter. I had my review with the owner who liked me and
said even though I was performing terribly, he wanted to give me another
seven days to see if I could turn things around.
After I stepped out of that meeting and went home for the day, I thought long
and hard about what I was doing and why I wasn’t being successful. I said to
myself, ‘Fuck it’, and it was as if it flicked a switch inside of me. Whether it
; was the owner seeing some promise and taking a chance on me, or me being
backed into a corner knowing it was all on the line, I don’t know – maybe it
was a combination of both – but something fundamentally changed that day.
I started looking at sales as a game. I would run through walls to get to a
‘yes’ from a prospect. Objections would bounce off me like bullets to
Batman. Overnight I literally became the company’s top producer. I couldn’t
be stopped.
This success led me to seek out and study the greatest orators and
communicators of all time. I started to examine human psychology and the
art of persuasion. I applied what I was learning, refining my pitch, seeing
what worked and what didn’t. If I changed my tone and cadence here or
there, how would it affect my success rate?
I became unstoppable. I was 17 and making close to $2,000 per week. It was
this early success that got me thinking about travelling the world to seek
more opportunities than my small hometown could provide.
After high school, while most of my friends were moving to Sydney or
Melbourne for university, I decided it wasn’t for me. So I packed my bags
and moved to London to start my adventures.
I would continue to work in sales, selling everything you can imagine over
the phone, from telecommunications, satellite TV, mobile payment devices,
and even legal will writing.
I worked at companies with sales floors jam-packed with 2,000 people, and
other companies with smaller, more involved sales teams. From multi-billion-
dollar corporations to start-ups and everything in between.
I was the top salesperson at every company I ever worked at, for every month
that I worked there. A fresh-faced kid from Byron Bay, not only holding his
own in one of the world’s financial epicentres, but beating the pants off
everyone.
How?
Well, I would like to say I was born with it. Some innate and natural talent.
‘He’s a natural salesman’, people would say.
That isn’t the case.
The answer is an unrivalled work ethic and hunger to master my craft,
learned from watching my mum slave away, raise two children, and wear the
responsibilities of two parents, all with a smile on her face.
I coined this quality the ‘single parent mother work ethic’. My personal motto
was:
I don’t care how talented you are, how fortunate your upbringing was, or
even if you had a better education or opportunities than me. You simply can’t
outwork me. Ever.
And it’s this principle that continues to serve me. When I started King Kong
in 2014 from my bedroom – with no money, no venture capital, and no safety
net – I was entering a market with incredibly established players who had
deep pockets and a huge head start. But over the intervening years I’ve made
many of these competitors wave the white flag and surrender. I’ve sent a lot
of these companies either out of business or I’ve forced their hand to sell, as
they simply can’t keep up with the fire-breathing marketing machine that is
King Kong.
This principle still serves me today. I start my days at 4am, hungry for
success, always willing to put the work in to make my dreams a reality.
And it’s something I suggest you instil and forge in yourself. Because all the
strategies and tactics in this book, or anywhere else, won’t mean anything if
you don’t put in the work.
Your work ethic is the only thing you can control in life.
And if you strengthen it, stretch it to its limit, and forge an unrivalled work
ethic that burns inside of you, you will win.
Having a single parent mother work ethic means being relentless. It means
demanding more of yourself than anyone else could ever demand of you,
knowing that every time you get tired, you can still do more.
Put. In. The. Work. Every. Day. Do something you don’t want to do first
thing every morning. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable and push past
the mediocre, the laziness, and the fear. Forge your work ethic and exercise it
like a muscle. Strengthen it. Build it. Be relentless in your approach towards
success.
No marketing hack, sales funnel, or software can make you successful if
you’re not going to do the work. Don’t wait for someone to make it happen
for you. It’s on you. And that’s why I’m telling you all of this, not because I
want you to know how hard I work, but because I want you to know what
you have to do for yourself to be successful in whatever path you choose in
life.
I’m not here to sugarcoat life. I’m not here to coddle you or tell you what you
want to hear. Nor am I here to paint a picture of a lavish laptop lifestyle by
the beach, sipping piña coladas as you click ‘refresh’ on your internet
banking account. Is that attainable? Yes. Does it require a crap-load more
work than the Instagram famous would have you believe? Yes.
But most people don’t talk about it. They would rather show you their rented
Lamborghini on Instagram. Or how they did a million-dollar week, all
through affiliates and joint ventures, hiding all the painstaking work that goes
into something like that. Or living their life as a façade on social media,
trying to sell you their system on how you can ‘click a button to riches’, just
like the false reality they’re living.
Sorry, not me. Not in this book. I’m going to tell you what you need to hear.
I’m here to cut the bullshit and kick-start the life and business you were
meant to have so that you can reach your fullest potential as an entrepreneur
and ultimately fuel every other area of your life.
Discipline, structure, rules, rituals, planning. These are the frameworks for
success, yet these are not attractive things in today’s world of instant
gratification. The average person reaches for the latest hack or loophole to
attaining success with the least amount of work possible. However, that is a
fool’s errand and will leave you broke.
Wherever you are now, however hard you’re working, I want you to take it to
another level you didn’t even know was even possible. Get into that zone
where you can shut out all the noise, negativity, fear, distractions, and lies,
and achieve all that you want in whatever you do. I want you to light a fire
inside yourself so big and so ablaze that no one can deny you.
In business and in life, there are a multitude of factors outside of your
control: How well funded your competitors are, the size and experience of
their team, when they got started in business, their joint venture partners…
All of these things are outside of your control.
The thing that is within your control is how hard you work. In anything you
do, to work hard takes no special talent, luck, or exceptional resources. You
simply just have to be willing to put in the work and do it.
There are no excuses. It’s no one else’s fault. It’s all on you.
You must be completely focussed on taking full ownership and responsibility
for every bit of success and every bit of failure that comes your way. Decide
how to get the job done and t
hen do whatever is necessary to make it happen.
When you make a mistake, don’t look for excuses. Don’t blame other people.
Own it. 100%.
Kill The ‘Little Bitch’ Inside
Strong words, I know. But let me explain. Anytime you’ve had an internal
struggle over what you want to do, versus what you know you should do…
that’s the Little Bitch inside you’re wrestling with.
It may be when your alarm goes off and the voice inside your head says,
‘You’ve been working hard and had a late night – just hit snooze and take
another ten minutes. You need it. You deserve it. Close your eyes and just
rest’. That’s the Little Bitch whispering in your ear. If your Little Bitch is
strong, it probably gets you to hit that snooze button of death several times
before getting out of bed.
Or maybe your Little Bitch rears its ugly head and tries to convince you to
miss a workout, going on to justify and sell you on all the reasons why it’s ok
to skip a session: ‘You’re still sore from yesterday’s session, and you’ve been
consistent all week, just take a rest day today – it’s all good’. Again – that’s
the Little Bitch.
Or how about when you’re at the office taking care of business? It might be
when you’re calling potential candidates to join your team, replying to
emails, or writing sales copy for a new offer. Perhaps you’re making sales
calls and the Little Bitch comes out and whispers, ‘You’ve already had a
bunch of great calls today with a handful of hopefuls, so don’t worry about
following up and calling every last proposal you sent last week. You’re doing
great. And hey, if they’re really interested in buying, they’ll call you’. Little
Bitch again.
This duality of human nature exists in all of us. I call this character the Little
Bitch because it’s always pulling at your heels, putting weight and resistance
on you as you’re trying to make a better life for yourself. It’s looking out
only for its best interest!
We all have one, living inside, whether it’s incredibly vocal or dormant and
lingering, only rearing its head in testing times. It’s there. Living and
breathing. Testing you. Forging your will. Seeing how bad you want it.
You need willpower, which is the control exerted to either do something or
restrain impulses and the ability to control your own thoughts.