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Today’s show featured an interview with Jamie Shanks.
Find Jamie on LinkedIn.
JAMIE’S TIP: “You just have to be willing to hear no. A no is fine. A no is like a maybe later, but you can’t be afraid of it.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Jamie, it’s great to see you. Why don’t you give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself before we talk about your story?
Jamie Shanks: I am a serial entrepreneur. I’ve owned three digital agencies. The first, a lot of people would know me from I helped pioneer the sales methodology or training category called social selling. I built a company called Sales for Life that scaled to 600 global customers around the world. It was the predominant social selling training company to the global enterprise like Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Thomson Reuters.
Agency number two was called Pipeline Signals. What it did is it became a tech-enabled service off of that training program that tracked job change alerts and was able to track human capital migration of people being hired, being promoted, and leaving, and sent those reports into our customer’s CRM, into HubSpot, into Salesforce. The sales team had fresh leads as their past customers were moving into new businesses.
Then the agency today is called Get Levrg. We are a sales and marketing offshore agency that does every sales and marketing support task you could imagine. Our big tagline is, stop doing the $5 an hour tasks so that you can focus on $500 an hour value creation. Let us do all the revenue operations for you.
Fred Diamond: Congratulations for all your success and I’m excited to hear your sales story. Jamie Shanks, tell us a great sales story.
Jamie Shanks: I’m fresh off doing my MBA and I’m working in commercial real estate. In commercial real estate, it’s a hundred percent commissioned job. You eat what you kill. I’m about six months into the job and I’m $50,000 in debt. I’m beyond hungry. I’ve just moved to Toronto, Canada, I have no money and I need to pay off amount of loans, and my rent is very expensive. I’m calling into chief financial officers or the owner or president of companies talking from the sell side of real estate opportunities in Class A and class B buildings. Think of helping move companies from one office space to the next. I’m balancing between commercial buildings and industrial manufacturing and I win this opportunity.
I get a CEO on the phone talking about this opportunity and that CEO is very hungry to build an industrial plant closer towards the airport in Toronto. I’m excited, and this is such a big potential, what’s called a mandate or the right to work on the business, that the CEO of my firm wants to come to this meeting. In a series of sales calls, we end up winning this business. It is a mandate to build an industrial complex, 75,000 or 100,000 square feet, enough money that it was going to pay off my student loans and be a down payment for my first home. It was hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions. I was so excited.
We start working through the process of the deal, and now we’re culminating towards the site visits. We’re going to look at plots of land where we’re going to be building these buildings, and they scheduled it for an April on a Saturday. That was a little bit different. But that morning, I get up in the morning, I put my suit on, put on my tie. I am so excited that in a few months I’m going to have a check for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I’m going to pay off everything. I’m going to have a new home. I’m smitten.
I get to this patch of land at 8:00 in the morning, a cool April morning. I’m in the car with the CEO of my firm and his chief operating officer. Then I see another car pull up, a Mercedes AMG pull up, and it’s the landlord that owns the land and his crew. Then I see our customer in an Audi A8 L pull up, and it’s the CEO of our customer and people I don’t know, what turns out to be their investors.
As soon as the car doors open between the landlord’s Mercedes and our customer’s Audi, these two guys lock eyes with each other, clearly knew each other, and start running at each other. This is a dirt patch in the middle of an industrial park outside of an airport, and they start fist fighting in this dirt patch. I’m watching two 60-some-year-old men wrangle each other at 8:00 in the morning. The scuffle breaks up. I’m totally confused. I’m a 26, 27-year-old, totally lost as to what has happened.
After the dust settles, our customer and his investors ask me to come into their Audi A8 L and I shuffle into the backseat and it’s dead quiet. My CEO’s beside me, backseat of this beautiful car, nothing’s happening. I see the investor toggle the mirror so he can see me in the backseat, and with his best Donald Trump impression just says, “You’re fired.” That’s it. I got fired. I’m like, “What? What just happened? Why am I fired?” Doesn’t say anything. Just, “You’re fired.”
Door opens, I get out, I get in my car, and I drive home. Then on the drive home, I’m crying like hundreds of thousands of dollars of pretend money is gone, and I get back to my crummy little apartment. When I’m at the apartment, I’m still 26, 27 years old. I have roommates. My roommates are bums. We’re just fresh out of university or our master’s degree. These guys are hung over. One of my roommates comes walking into the living room, there’s probably a box of pizza on the floor. He grabs a slice of yesterday’s pizza, and he’s sitting there and he could see me dejected sitting on the couch crying.
He looks at me and he’s like, “What in the hell’s wrong with you?” I tell him the fast forward version of the story, and this is where great ideas can come from anywhere, and you’d be amazed how you’re inspired. He turns to me and he says, “Buck up. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to go to the liquor store, you’re going to buy the most expensive bottle of scotch you can afford. You’re going to drive to that investor, who’s clearly the boss. You’re going to drive to his house, you’re going to ring his doorbell, and you are going to beg for your opportunity back and he’s going to see the determination in your eyes.” I’m sitting there with my hands on my head thinking, “This is the worst idea,” and slowly it’s sinking in. I go, “This is the worst idea. Oh my God, this is the best idea you’ve ever had.”
Now, this is almost 20 years ago. Back then there was this website called Canada 411, and you could put in anyone’s name and their home address would pop up. This is before cybersecurity. Everybody’s phone number was online, and their addresses were online, like the phone book. I put in phone number or I put in details of this person, sure enough, name and address pops up, and the address is in one of the fanciest neighborhoods in Toronto, in a gated community. I go to the liquor store, I still remember I bought a bottle of OBAN scotch, get in the car, drive to his house, even a mile of the house, it’s a full gated community. Can’t even go near it.
I drive down a side road, park the car, put the bottle of scotch in my pants, and I scale the wall over the backside, sneaking into the gated community, and start running down the road a mile. Run down the road, run down the road. I see his castle and this windy driveway, and I start walking up the driveway. The investor is sitting in a bathrobe on his stoop of his house smoking a cigar, watching me walk up the driveway, and he starts laughing. As soon as I get to the front, he shakes my hand and he says, “Let’s go open that bottle of scotch.”
We go to his backyard, open the bottle of scotch, and he teaches me a life lesson. That life lesson that he teaches me is, “You need to be prepared for even the smallest detail. You should have known with a simple Google search,” and this is early days of Google, “That I was in a lawsuit with that landlord, but you didn’t do your due diligence.” The little details win and lose. It was incredible. We kept talking and developed a relationship and I won the business back. No, there’s more learnings there, but it was a great appreciation for somebody who’s made it big, worth hundreds of millions, and it turns out he actually was a billionaire, and the little things make the difference between good to great.
Fred Diamond: Obviously, there’s a ton of things there. We need some clarifying questions before you give us some of your tips. You said that you won the business back. Did you bring this investor and the landlord together, or did you get a different location, or what did you do?
Jamie Shanks: In commercial real estate, you win what’s called a mandate. No different than if you were to sell your home. You give a listing agent the capability of working on your business. That’s all it is. It is a non-binding letter of intent, if you think of it. He granted us the ability to be the exclusive agent to working again. We worked again, tried to find some office space, other opportunities. It all fizzled out months, months later. I never did end up with the big honking check, but the moral of the story is I had the right to work back on it. Now, if this was back in the paid engagement world, yes, my deal was back on.
Fred Diamond: Are you still in touch with this guy? Has he been like a mentor or was it a one-off type of a lesson learned?
Jamie Shanks: It was a total one-off. He is actually a famous Canadian billionaire. No, never saw him ever again. This investor owns many, many companies, this was just one of his tentacles in his HoldCo. He was just making sure the CEO was being mindful with his dollars. But it was really the CEO’s deal to be done.
Fred Diamond: As you’re meeting with him with this bottle of scotch, you’re a pretty confident guy, you’ve created a couple successful companies, were you kind of just, “Hey, I got nothing to lose at this point.” Were you trembling when you had this meeting? What was your mindset?
Jamie Shanks: Here’s what I’ve learned about myself, and I’ll tell this story in 60 seconds. When I was in the university, I was failing out of business school, my undergrad. In the final semester of the final year, I didn’t go to class basically the whole semester, and I needed straight Bs in my five remaining classes to graduate. I concocted this harebrained scheme where I got a suit, I had business cards made from the Bank of Montreal where I was working. I was actually working and going to school. My roommates thought there was zero probability this would ever get done.
I booked a meeting with each professor and convinced them that I was an investment that they should make in, and that they should give me a B in this class, even though I never showed up, and I would graduate and I would make them proud. I convinced five professors, five different ones, to give me all Bs, and I graduated. My roommates tell this story to everyone. Like, “You cannot believe what this guy can sell.”
I’ve determined, and the big moral of the story is, it’s the Wayne Gretzky concept, you only score when you shoot on net, essentially, and you score 0% of the shots you don’t take. You just have to be willing to hear no. A no is fine. A no is like a maybe later, but you can’t be afraid of it.
Fred Diamond: We end the Sales Story and a Tip Podcast with a tip. Obviously, preparation is something we talk about all the time, but what’s your tip that you really took away from this particular story?
Jamie Shanks: The tip for me stems back to what I was just mentioning, that you cannot be afraid to take a chance, take a risk, do something bold. Because if I would have done nothing, I was in a guaranteed position to make zero money out of this, and forge zero relationships. It’s like in the movie Dumb and Dumber. It’s like, “You’re saying you have a chance.” That was it. I gave myself just even a little probability. But you will be amazed when you go out of your way to serve a customer or do something for a prospect. I can’t tell you, you’ll feel slightly nervous for the ask and you’ll feel out of place or uncomfortable, but it’s a way better outcome probable than the doing nothing. The doing nothing is guaranteed to get you nothing.
Fred Diamond: That is a great bit of advice. Preparation, and you got to do things, and of course, you got to do the right things. That’s a great story. Once again, I want to thank Jamie Shanks for being on today’s Sales Story and a Tip. My name is Fred Diamond.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo