Ryan Stewman, who is known as the Hardcore Closer, goes into not your typical sales tactics that you pull out of Selling for Dummies. This is a person that really shifts people’s mindsets when they go to sell and takes them from being just order takers to really making a difference in creating their value, selling to the right people.
He is the founder of Break Free Academy. And he is known for getting salespeople paid what they’re worth from the marketplace. And he does it in a way that is not shy, it not coy and he helps people push past that resistance of those people that fear sales.
But also there are a lot of people that could be making a lot more money. I’m talking about adding zeroes and commas to their pay if they just get out of that mindset of being order takers and start actually making sales.
How you doing, Ryan?
Ryan:I’m wonderful, man. I’m really excited to be on here. Thanks for having me.
Jack:Oh, yeah. Well, I’ll tell you, salespeople. That’s one of the biggest fears people have is sales. One, there’s a lot of people that fear “no.” No is one of the scariest answers that people get. It’s rejection. And I want to hear how you can work with people to get past the fear of rejection.
But one of the things I’ve also found with a lot of sales people is their fear of getting a yes. Because then they’ll have to fulfill what they just promised and sold. And I think one of the things that you do is help people to not just build their confidence to convince their prospects on selling.
But also to convince themselves that they are worth what it is that they are making. And getting paid for that, for being the best at what they do and the value that they provide.
So, let’s talk about that. I know that you started out in the mortgage and the real estate world, and now you’re working with a lot of sales folks from across the board. Entrepreneurs.
But from my experience with mortgage folks, there’s a lot of them that are order takers and don’t know how to push it. But there are a lot of them that are just making crazy amounts of money. And in very similar circumstances to people who are struggling.
What is the big difference that you see between those two?
Ryan:Well, first, I want to take a step back and answer the first thing that you had mentioned earlier about people being, this big fear of “no.” And I just read this morning, if I don’t get it out of the way, I’ll forget it, but I wanted to bring this to your audience here. Just this morning, my newsfeed on Facebook, I saw an article on one of the major publications, like Huffpost or something like that.
And it said doctors prove embarrassment is the strongest of all emotions.
Jack:Ahh.
Ryan:And so that’s why people, when they say no, you get that feeling of embarrassment, like I didn’t do my job. They didn’t see value in me. They didn’t see value in what I have. And it’s like this horrifying, apparently, according to this study I read, it’s like this horrifying experience for most people.
Now, a good salesperson doesn’t really experience embarrassment when it comes to no, but an average person that’s trying to sell, or a person that hasn’t just done this and built a routine and the mindset and stuff like that, it’s really hard for them to face.
And so a lot of people run from it.
Jack:Right. And “no’s” oftentimes doesn’t necessarily mean, it’s not a personal reflection on you. No sometimes means that they want to tell me more or maybe it’s not the right person for you. There are a lot of people that spend a lot of time on the wrong prospects when they’re doing selling.
And especially in the real estate world, not just on people that might be looking for a mortgage, but also on selling themselves to people that might be potential referrals.
I know mortgage folks work with real estate agents and there’s a lot of referral business that goes on. And you have to sell yourself. Not just to your prospects and your customers, but also to those people that have a good influence on people that could be your customers.
Let’s dive into that a little bit, on the two different mindsets that go with selling yourself to customers and also to those referral partners.
Ryan:Well, I always say, as a salesperson, you’ve got to have an angle. And so, so many people like, well, I’ll just go back to what I’ve been doing the last few years, working specifically with loan officers. You know, people, when we first started doing this, people chasing refinances, we started chasing real estate agents.
Because we knew that refinances would dry up, so we stayed one step ahead of the game. Right now, everybody else is doing, refinances are going on. We’re chasing real estate agents.
I’ve trained my loan officers to chase after divorce attorneys. Right? Because it turns out, in Collin County where I live, which has like three million people, there’s thirty-thousand people a month that get a divorce here. That’s two houses. Two buys and one sell. That’s three transactions for every one of those people. Well, we can just enter fifteen thousand transactions that are going down involving real estate, each and every single month, just in my county alone.
So that’s where the business is at, because real estate agents, they want to know where they can get sellers of properties. Loan officers want to know how they can get deals from real estate agents. So a good sales person sees an angle that they can go in and provide a solution of both of those problems. Problem solved. Everybody makes some money. Everybody’s happy.
Jack:So you said something that was really important. Because there’s a lot of people that think that, especially if they’re in a business where there’s a referral, that if you’re a mortgage person and there’s a real estate guy. He’s a player and doing just tons of business. And they won’t even approach him because they think, well, he’s bound to have somebody. He’s bound to be working with someone. He’ll never talk to me.
You know, think back to Wall Street when Bud got the Gordon Gekko. You know, bag the elephant. And you just mentioned something that you’re solving a problem. And most people go into that referral relationship with what can I get from them. But it sounds like you’re going into that relationship with here’s a solution that I can provide to you. Let’s do some business.
Ryan:Yeah. So let’s just talk about the movie, Wall Street. So many sales people are so sheepish and don’t even get what really went on in that whole scenario with Gordon Gekko and Bud Fox, right there. Since you brought that up, let’s just talk about that.
So many people say, Bud Fox got that deal because he was persistent, which is partially true. But Bud Fox really scored that deal because Gordon Gekko, every financial advisor in the city wanted. This is just like the top dude. This is like Fredrik Eklund, who I’ve worked with from Million Dollar Listing. He’s the top dude in New York City in real estate. I’ve personally worked with him.
It’s how you get to these people is you have an angle, like I was saying earlier.
What Bud Fox had was an inside stock tip that he was f***ing 100 % certain about and he knew for a fact that if he could get in front of that dude, he could change the game and change his life for the better because of this stock tip he had. And he stopped at nothing to get in there.
So it wasn’t that he was, he could have never called Gordon Gekko ever before. Not the, you know, hundreds of times that he had called on a daily basis, where Gordon knew his name, he could have avoided all of that.
It could have simply just cut straight to the chase and say, hey, I have this. This is the money that’s come from it and I’m a hundred percent confident this is going to happen. And he had that angle. The same outcome would have happened either way, wouldn’t you agree?
Jack:I, absolutely, I think you’re right. Most people do. I think that’s a lesson in persistence but it really is a lesson in what’s in it for me, and providing that.
Ryan:Yeah. Innovation.
Jack:That is. And so I know that you work with folks and you’ve gone, like I said, well beyond the real estate and mortgage now, to just about entrepreneurs and any type of area. And people that are, whether they’re coaches or consultants, selling big ticket items.
And I know the folks that you work with, one more sale, one more closing each month can mean a big difference in their revenue stream. Not just over the course of a year, but over a course of that month.
And it seems that you help folks go beyond the here’s how you get that prospect. That you say let’s go fish where the gettin’s good, as we say in Texas, by selling and developing these relationships with some of these other players that can introduce you to a pretty big haul.
Ryan:Yeah. So I’m a big believer in multiple streams of income, but that can all happen within your primary business. So say that you’re a CPA. Your average customer is going to give you, let’s say a thousand dollars a month or two thousand dollars a month, depending on whether you handle mid-sized businesses or whatever.
And you spend your time crunching numbers. You’re not really out there selling an awful lot. You’re kind of out of practice because you spend your time crunching numbers and everything. But you know you got to get out there in order to upgrade that standard of life.
You gotta get out there in order to do this stuff and be able to sell a little bit more. You know, someone like that, $2000 a month from one sale could, that’s another $24,000 a year. Ten, twelve more people like that a year, that’s another quarter million dollars that you can add to your income over the next ten years.
I mean, it’s like really simple math. If you’re in a big ticket business, like I’ve got a guy that’s, and funny thing is if you start thinking about things the right way, your little ticket business that you kind of have right now, can turn into a big ticket.
I’ve got a guy that was in the IT business that works with, he came through our Break Free Academy. He’s in the IT business and he was charging $15 an hour for IT services. And I showed him how to change his USP, his Unique Selling Proposition and change the way he marketed and packaged it up and made it to where it was a $1500 a month service to keep him on retainer. All, as much as you could ever possibly need him. He would even come to your house, if necessary.
And provide all this necessary technology and stuff like that that benefited the customer, but basically, it was the same thing that before they were billing them three or four hours a month and spending $45 with them. Now, all of a sudden, they’re spending $1500. He’s still only working those three hours, but they feel safe and secure.
In the meantime, he’s targeting millionaires, by the way. These are not like normal people that he’s just getting over on and changed it from $45 to $1500. These are people that just didn’t understand the value of what he was doing and he was undervalued as well.
Jack:You know. And that’s a great example. Because one of the things that a lot of people think is to move into that kind of sales situation, to move into the mindset of going from a $15 an hour offer to a $1500 a month, that you got to have some kind of natural born sales in you.
And I see the results of some of your clients. And I see their results on Facebook. I see them talking about it. I’ve talked to some of your coaching students and clients, and seen some, not just incremental growth in their business, but exponential growth in their business, because of something that changed.
And I was really amazed to think that this person doesn’t come across to me as a natural born sales person. You know, they don’t come across as that hardcore closer.
Can you give some examples of folks that have gone from being kind of meek and that order taker to being that hardcore closer and what it, what is it? What is the switch? What is that thing that you find in their brain that transforms them like that?
Ryan:So I’ve recently nailed down exactly what that is, Jack. So I have, I’ll give you a couple of examples actually.
I had a gentleman that lives in small town, Alabama, a town of six hundred people. Was making about a half a million to a million dollars a month in loans. And his top producer had just left him. And it was really a big struggle for him. Came to me. I changed the way that his mind worked. And I changed, not so much of his message or his methods. I just changed the mentality that he had and showed him where he could increase certain things.
He went from literally doing half a million to a million dollars a month consistently, to the last three or four months, he’s done five or eight million dollars consistently those months.
I have a lady that’s in Glendale, Scottsdale, Arizona. I was just there last week with her. This is a person that when I first met her, she didn’t even want to pick up the phone with me. She sent me her credit card information through Facebook chat.
Didn’t even want to pick up the phone with me. Extremely shy. Then only six months later, she’s got her own radio show on the local radio waves there in Phoenix.
She just threw an event for three hundred and fifty people that co-starred Josh Altman in a venue that was like unbelievable and hosted the whole thing as if she was like Steve Aoki, the DJ. She had like this whole thing under control. Transformation.
And then, you know, we don’t talk numbers. And she tells me that she’s consistently closed four million a month for the last three months. This is somebody that basically started from scratch.
Then my, the last example that I can give you is I have people that come to me all the time that haven’t even used Facebook ever. Like they’ve, I’ve had a guy just a month or so ago, tell me, hey, when I started this things, I had 70 people on Facebook and I hadn’t posted on there in two years. And now I’ve been able to generate over a hundred thousand dollars in sales in the last 90 days just from using Facebook chat.
I have a gentleman that like, I posted yesterday, just four months ago borrowed money from a family member to be able to join my program and now he’s going to break six figures in commission just this month.
And so, these are people across different, from mortgages, in real estate to insurance and the whole common factor is just changing how they think. And then to get them thinking on the right page, like a hardcore closer, as we call it. Get them thinking on the right page. Then they can relay that message to the right person, cause they’ve identified what it is that they’re best at and who it is that’s best served by what it is that they’re best at.
Jack:Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that you brought up is a lot of people are chasing unicorns, I guess they call it. Is that they’re buying the next book, the next program that is teaching them tactical things. That they think, oh, if I just learn this one more tactic, this one more little ninja trick, that’s going to do it.
And I think that with the results that I’ve seen from your folks, it has little to do with tactics. And more to do with them getting their head straight around what it is that they offer. And understanding the value that they have and they could provide.
Do you think that’s a huge, huge discrepancy between the value of learning a new tactic versus the value of getting your head straight around what it is that you offer?
Ryan:Oh, yes, exactly. And it’s really not getting your head straight around what it is that you offer. It’s getting your head straight around what it is that the people you offer your stuff to want.
So for example, a real quick one would be nobody wants a mortgage, right? That’s thirty years of debt for most people. But what they want is a house. What they want is a way to save money on the mortgage that they have, so that they can pay their credit cards off and finally go on that vacation to Jamaica that they deserve after being on the Board of Directors for twenty years without a vacation, right?
Once you uncover that problem and you assure them that that’ll be okay, then, it’s no longer a concern about what the numbers are. It’s just the fact that, yes, get us to where we want to go, which is Jamaica.
Jack:I think that right there speaks to the first rule of marketing – give them what they want, not what you want them to want.
Ryan:Right.
Jack:And I think that’s something that you absolutely have made crystal clear for us today. And I know you make it crystal clear for the folks that work with you.
Now, as an influencer, and you’ve influenced dozens, hundreds of people that have changed their business and the way they sell things. I like to find out what is influencing the influencer. What is it that influences you most to not just build your business but also influences you in the way that you are helping others?
Ryan:Well, you know, I like to belong to masterminds. Some people like to buy training courses and some people are seminar junkies and some people like to read books. And I personally like to belong to masterminds, because I feel when you belong to a group of people that are, you know, I like to belong to masterminds where I’m the poorest son of a gun in the whole operation, right? And the dumbest. Those are my favorite ones to belong to.
Because I can look around and see what the potential is for me as I go up through the ranks. And also, being in a mastermind, everybody’s paid their dues and they’re there to help each other. So it’s like instead of me having to read three hundred pages in a book or watch six hours-worth of infomercials to get to the point that I want, I can simply go into the mastermind and ask a question on Facebook.
Or I can go and reach out by phone call and get my thing, my questions answered within four or five minutes and I haven’t spent too much time learning stuff that I don’t need to do, which takes away from the time that I need to be implementing the things that are going to make me money. So I like masterminds.
Jack:Yeah, relationships probably have been the most profitable things that I find in successful people, are the relationships that they have through masterminds, more so than the training that they’ve gone through. Not that it’s not important, but I definitely see the masterminds and the relationships are far, far more profitable.
I tell you, Ryan, this has been fantastic and you’ve given some incredible nuggets of information that I think, if someone just kind of applies this mindset in the way that you change the way that you think about selling, that they can make a dramatic difference.
What can people do, where can they go to find out more about the Hardcore Closer Ryan Stewman’s principles and what it is that you do to transform folks?
Ryan:Well, my latest offer, and really the greatest digital training that I have ever created is this program called Show Up and Close. And I’ve created four or five digital products that have sold thousands of memberships to them and people always love when I create stuff. I’m good for about one or two a year. But I finally, this year broke down and actually put all my sales stuff into a 30-day video program.
Nobody has hours to learn sales stuff and go through, like I said, some six hour training course. What I did was I put thirty videos that are somewhere between two and seven minutes long, that way you can watch one video a day, get a quick fix and in thirty days have your mentality right, have all your word tracks right, have the ability to close anybody that’s ready to be closed and it’s the perfect customer marketing, the whole nine yards.
It’s called Show Up and Close. You can go over to www.showupandclose.com and you can just put your name and email in and there’s a video right there that explains a little bit. The bottom line it’s a squeeze page. Put your name and email in. On the next page, there’s a video there I call Selling With Six Cs. And I’m going to walk you through my six step process that I use to close people.
And it generally allows me, and some people say, oh, those are horrible numbers. I think they’re really good. I usually close two or three out of every five people that I end up having a sales conversation with. Because not everybody’s a fit for everything that I do and we try to weed out everybody that’s not up front, which I teach you all throughout the program.
But there’s literally no way that a person can’t go through the Show Up and Close program and spend thirty days learning and mastering the art and everything, the state of mind and everything that I share with you, and not just show up on the phone, show up through Facebook chat, show up through email and be able to close people from any set of media, any communication mechanism that their audience is on.
So many people, like for example, are always trying to make cold calls and things like that, yet 86% of all phone calls go unanswered. So you’re wasting so much time. You’re chasing 14% of people that don’t want to talk to you anyway, and you’ve got to weed out through the rest of them.
I teach you how to get around all the stuff and then how to close the important people, make the most of your time and all that.
Again, it’s www.ShowUpandClose.com.
Jack:All right. That definitely, I think that’s some of the most valuable stuff that people can do is skip the fluff, get directly to what matters. And I know that your stuff definitely does that.
Ryan, I want to thank you very much for coming on today and I think, I love having influencers like you, ones that I’ve seen the difference you make, the ones that I’ve talked to the people that have been affected. Their lives have been affected and their income has been affected by what you teach. So definitely, very valuable to have you on as a guest and I’m sure the listeners will find the same.
ShowUpandClose.com. Definitely check it out.
Ryan, thanks for being on today and if you have any last words, let us know.
Ryan:Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Jack, and for everybody listening, don’t be afraid. Go out there. Enter your credit card number into the Show Up and Close sales page and I promise you, you’ll be able to use that to make money over and over every day and with every sales call for the rest of your life. You can’t go wrong with it.
Jack:All right. Fantastic. Folks, go check it out. You see, Ryan, he walks the walk, talks the talk and is not afraid to close at all. So check it out and see what you can do to take this and not only let it affect your life and let it improve your life and your business, but take it as a seed for you to go out and be an influencer yourself.
We’ll see you next week. Talk to you later.
