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Today’s show featured an interview with sales expert Jim Padilla.
Find Jim on LinkedIn.
JIM’S TIP: “Know your audience. That’s your responsibility all the time. It should never be a situation where the project failed because you launched it to the wrong person. It is your job to do your due diligence and make sure that the people you’re serving actually have the problem that you solve, and that they’re aware, and that they’re actually interested in solving it.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m excited. We got Jim Padilla here. Jim, give us a brief introduction into who you are.
Jim Padilla: My wife and I, Cyndi, we are partners in this company called Gain the Edge, which is an acceleration sales company. We focus on building systems and sales teams for companies that are ready for hockey-stick growth. If you’re looking for a million-dollar payday in a short period of time, those are the kind of things that we focus on.
Fred Diamond: Jim Padilla, tell us a great sales story.
Jim Padilla: Well, the first couple of years in this business model, that we’ve just wrapped our 10th year in, we started doing exclusively events and launches. We actually got started because a well-known expert was wanting to do his first million-dollar launch and asked if we could support him. I said yes, had no idea what a launch was, or any systems, strategies, and ways to do it. Wildly successful launch, $1.6 million, all of a sudden, a line was at the door. We started serving a lot of the who’s who in the expert and influencer space on their launches and live events.
As luck would have it, we came across the Ziglar Foundation and they were getting ready to do a launch. This is post-Zig, God rest his soul. We came on board with some other very huge players, people that were involved with Kevin Harrington, Mark Timm, and others, and we had this huge partner launch that was planned. It’s very conventional wisdom when you’re doing a product launch to bring in a lot of affiliate partners.
This was the affiliate of affiliates, partner launch people, if you can imagine, with the kind of names that we’re talking about, everybody that you can think of who’s a who’s who in the personal development expert space, they were all part of it. We were like, “Wow, we are going to have literally exposure to nearly five million people in our audience just from their lists.” We ranched down the numbers and we’re expecting 200,000 people to participate in the launch. We were expecting nearly 20,000 conversations and close to 5,000 sales. We had a sales team of 22 people. We were so planned and ramped up for this thing to go.
When this launch went live, we literally had 20,000 people participate, which by most people’s standards, that’s a quality launch. But when you were expecting 200,000, because of the list, what we started finding out was that all of these experts, they were all, number one, we learned, that just because they have a big name and they know what they’re doing and they’re well known in the industry, doesn’t mean that they know how to take care of their list. Just because I have 100,000 people on my list, it doesn’t mean I’m going to produce results. It means who are the people on the list and how well do they get served? What kind of relationship am I building with my list? How well am I segmenting them? How well do I know them? When I ask them to show up for something, do they and will they? If they show up, will they take action on something?
I was wild-eyed and excited and I just assumed that all of this was going to happen. This was a three-week launch period. Literally seven days into the launch, we’re down to seven people on the sales team, because we didn’t need 22 salespeople. Everything just started to fold and implode. It turned out to be a decent launch. We made no more than what we had made with people that you had never heard of before. But it was an incredible lesson, learning of value on many levels.
Number one, we learned that people are gracious. The most successful people we have worked with, they don’t come at you and go, “Hey, what happened? Why did this go wrong?” They go, “Hey, what can we do next time?” They’ve learned. We’ve learned to believe the best in other people and be transparent and wise with these folks to be able to say, “Hey, look, we don’t know what to do here. This is not what I was expecting. Here’s what I’m thinking about doing. What do you think?” Just because somebody hires you as an expert doesn’t mean that they expect you to make magic happen. They just expect you to do what you say you can do, and they still want to be part of the process. It’s up to you to be responsible as a sales solution expert of whatever kind that you are, that you know exactly where you begin and end, and you manage expectations continually. You’re the one responsible for creating the environment for the success in the wind that you are trying to create, because at the end of the day, you’re the one on the hook for it.
Fred Diamond: The average person will be thrilled to have 20,000 people in their pipeline. I think you hit on a good thing too, is that a lot of the people listening, they’re sales professionals. They have relationships, they want to build referrals. I’m not even talking about at the grandiose levels you were talking about. Even for a couple dozen deals, whatever it might be, you get the splash on the face where you realize that the other partner who you thought had all these great opportunities and access to audience, et cetera, it doesn’t quite come through for what you expected. Thanks for sharing that.
You gave us a couple of tips along the way, but what is a tip that you want to share with the audience that they should take away from this?
Jim Padilla: Know your audience. That’s your responsibility all the time. It should never be a situation where the project failed because you launched it to the wrong person. It is your job to do your due diligence and make sure that the people you’re serving actually have the problem that you solve, and that they’re aware, and that they’re actually interested in solving it.
Fred Diamond: Jim, what’s the best way for people to reach you?
Jim Padilla: You can go to my personal website, jimp360.com. Find me there, all my social medias, all our websites. Shoot me a text and tell me you heard me here on the Sales Story and a Tip Podcast.
Fred Diamond: Once again, I want to thank everybody for listening today. I want to thank Jim Padilla for sharing the story. My name is Fred Diamond and this is the Sales Story and a Tip Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo