MC25 – Connecting With Prospects – Using the Stories of Others to Sell
You’ve decided you can’t really sell yet because you don’t have a story. No dramatic turnaround, no before-and-after, nothing worth putting in front of a prospect. So you wait to earn one, and while you wait, you don’t sell, which guarantees the story never arrives. It’s a perfectly circular trap, and this session from the Classic Masters Course exists to break it from two directions at once.
Dave Wood’s first answer is simple: you do have a story, you’re just not using it. But it’s his second answer that opens the whole session up, because it removes your last excuse. Even if you’re absolutely convinced you have nothing to tell, you can use somebody else’s story. There is always someone sitting next to you, behind you, or somewhere in your company who has a great one, and borrowing it is not a workaround. It’s how the professionals actually operate.
Why does a small story out-sell a spectacular one?
Here’s the tangible example Dave gives. Empower Network deliberately put member stories on the front of the blog, and the ones they chose were not always from the top producers. A lot of times the more compelling story is the one that’s smaller and more relatable. He points to a video from Shalonda Gordon: a woman standing in front of her house in a completely regular neighborhood, who said she’d been struggling for a couple of years, telling the camera how excited she was to have hit a real milestone for her household. Dave’s verdict: that thing was compelling as hell. Not despite being modest. Because of it.
The mechanism is worth understanding, because it runs against instinct. Prospects don’t measure a story against a fantasy. They measure it against their own believability threshold, and a story that lands too far above that threshold just bounces off as irrelevant, or worse, as suspicious. The small story slips underneath and hits. That’s why the beginner’s story you’re embarrassed about is often more useful to your team than the biggest story in the company.
Dave also drops a warning about what happens after the sale, by way of a story he finds hilarious: a promotion where four thousand people bought a product and nobody downloaded it, because nobody mentioned it needed to be downloaded. Selling someone something and getting them to actually use it are two different jobs, and the second one is where stories do their heaviest lifting.
What are you actually selling, the offer or the belief?
Dave lays out the selling formula in one pass. The way you sell something is by talking about what people want, which is only a few things. You get them to believe it will work if they take action, decide, and buy right now. You prove it’s happened for you as the presenter and for a bunch of other people too. You appeal to their desires, give them a reason to act now, and then tell them to do it. A certain percentage of people will buy. That’s the front end.
But after people get in, they won’t do anything unless they believe it will work for them. That belief usually isn’t there yet, especially for someone new. And Dave’s proof of how belief gets manufactured is the Atlanta event. He asks the room: what did we actually teach there? The honest answer is nothing new. It was three days of stories, examples, and proof that the few simple things people had already been taught actually work. It works if you work it, that was the entire curriculum. And company growth doubled in the thirty days after it, because an army of people finally believed that if they did what they’d already been told to do, it would work, and because they believed it, they went and did it.
Sometimes we think we know what people want. And a lot of times I think that’s what a lot of the industry gets tripped up on, is that they think they know what people want, but really is all they want is they just want a little bit of belief.
That’s the whole thesis of the session in one sentence. The prospect calling a leader to ask, is this the real thing, isn’t requesting information. They’re standing at the edge, asking to be pushed over it. Proof and stories are the push.
How did Tracy Walker build a business on one borrowed spotlight?
Then the session hands the microphone to someone who lived this from the bottom. Tracy Walker got started online in 2008, coming out of real estate when the market turned, needing to build something else. The first person she found on the internet was a marketer named Dagan. She joined his system, started learning to generate her own leads, and tried to reach out to him, except he had no phone number anywhere. She hunted down a Gmail address. Nothing. So instead of waiting, she did the thing this whole course keeps repeating: she just went and did something, and created a result on her own.
Eventually she found his Skype ID, and when he answered, amazed anyone had found it at all, she shared what she’d been doing. He was impressed enough to interview her. That interview went out to his massive list, and to her list of maybe two hundred people, and everything took off from there. Here’s the part to study: the people who felt Dagan’s story was too big for their belief system started calling Tracy instead. I heard you on the audio. Is it true? Is it real? Her credibility rose, and it rose entirely on a story leveraged through somebody else’s network. She was the believable-sized story in someone else’s marketing, and it built her name from nothing.
So that became her system as a leader. She tells her team to stop treading water trying to be somebody else and just create a result, any result, a belief result. You went from not believing to believing. From not going to the event to going. From no sales to one sale. From not being all in to being all in. Your father joined. Your brother joined. One of her teammates made a video with his twin brother, who had never joined anything he was in before, and it drove sales purely because people thought, well, if his twin brother is finally joining, I should join. Her standing offer: get a result, and I will do everything in my power to promote it to my network. That’s the engine, results become stories, stories get leveraged upward, and the leverage creates more results.
How do you use a result to get the next result?
Dave closes the loop with his own version. Three months removed from living in a van, he forced himself into a spot where he was getting sales every day, no budget, just whatever it took all day to drive traffic to his offers and close people on calls. Then he wanted the attention of people with influence, and they wouldn’t answer him either. So he wrote an article about them. One of them looked him up, saw he was actually producing, and asked him to teach what he was doing on a webinar. He said yes, on the condition he could sell something. He’d built up six hundred leads from SEO by then. One result, packaged as a story, put in front of a bigger audience, becomes the next result. Credibility, Dave says, is the key that unlocks the business, and you create it however you can.
Two conditions sit underneath all of it. First, consistency: in the beginning you pick one thing, the way Tracy was the article-and-blogging person and others were known for one channel, and you don’t move off it until the results are big enough to become the story. Second, sequence: you can’t get into the bigger circles without a result, because nobody will listen. People pitched Dave five times a day, can you help me sell my course, it’s great but I can’t sell it. His answer never changed: go sell it first, then come back and show me the result, and we’ll get you in front of people.
This is one session out of the full Classic Masters Course, which goes on to cover duplication, team building, and the rest of the machinery behind these events. If you’re new to it, the entire Classic Masters Course, this lesson included, is available for $99 at the Classic Masters Course.
This week, find one story, your own at whatever size it truly is, or a relatable one borrowed from someone around you, and build one piece of content around it. Sell the belief. The offer comes along behind it.
Full lesson transcript
Lightly edited from the original recording — fillers removed, nothing added. Income disclaimer.
So one other thing that I want to point out is that if you notice something that we do, we also use other people's stories. Okay, so somebody's sitting there and what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to swim into your head right now. And you're saying, well, gosh, I'm at the very beginning and I just don't have a story. Well, here's the first thing. You do have a story.
You're just not using it. But one thing that I want to also remind you of is that you can use somebody else's story. So that's why in Empower, let me give you a tangible example of this. We put stories on the front of the blog of people who have paid their mortgage payment. And I put that on the front of the blog, right?
So what we do, and this is just us, we'll get into some of this tomorrow when we talk about, you know, duplication and cult building. I love that word, cult building. We're going to talk a little bit about. How you can do that as well once you build a team. But you can also use that when you're first getting started.
That's why we do it, right? So if you absolutely are just convinced, even though we're sitting here telling you that you do have a story, that you're just, you don't and you're not going to tell it, then don't be afraid to use somebody else's story. There's always somebody that's sitting next to you or sitting behind you or in your company or your deal or whatever that's got a great story. And it doesn't always have to particularly be the top earner. A lot of times the more compelling, the story is the one that's kind of smaller and more relatable.
Which is why a lot of times we use the smaller, you sent us one. That one of Shalonda Gordon, she paid her mortgage payment. I mean, that thing, you know, that thing was just compelling as hell. Because here you have somebody who's standing in front of her house, right? She's standing, it's just, you know, she lives in just a regular neighborhood.
She said she'd been struggling for a couple of years. And she shot a video that said, I'm just so excited, I just earned enough to pay my mortgage payment. It did, right? Or how about the one with Christina Munoz? Talk about, I mean.
Well, what happens, guys, and there's different phases of moving people along. We're talking about a lot of this tomorrow, right? Selling people something is one thing. And even getting them to go through a product, it's kind of in the same thing. You got to sell them and then actually get them to use it.
Yes. Mike Hobbs knows, right? I want to talk about that story a little bit later, too. That's hilarious. You know, they got 4,000 people in somebody and nobody downloaded the product.
Because he didn't mention that it needed to be downloaded. So nobody downloaded it, you know what I mean? 4,000 people bought something just to get money selling it and didn't download it. You know, funniest thing ever, you know. But you sell something.
And the way you sell something is by talking about what people want, which is only a few things, right? And getting them to believe that it will work if they take action, decide, and buy right now. That's essentially how to sell stuff. Now, there's a lot more to it than that. There's ways you can do call to actions.
But essentially, the way that you get people to make a decision is you appeal to what they want, right? You prove to them that it's happened for you as the presenter of the video and a bunch of other people, too, right? And then you appeal to their desires and give them a reason to act right now. And then tell them to do it. And a certain percentage of people will buy, right?
Well, after you get people in and they've made a decision, you've got to get them to believe they can do it, too, which happens later, right? They're not always going to believe that it will work when they get in, especially if they're new. Now, if they've got a big old list like Tony, it doesn't matter what I get in. I'm going to sell it, right? I don't care what it is.
It doesn't matter if it's a box of old shoes. Now, I'd probably maybe have an ethical thing selling a business opportunity with a box of old shoes that, you know. Even with a really good comp plan. But I could sell it if I wanted to. It really doesn't matter what it is.
It's completely irrelevant, right? But then after they get in, people won't do it unless they believe it will work. They won't do it, right? We've told people. This is a great example of this.
I want all of you. Who here was in Atlanta, right? You guys were in Atlanta. Most of you, right? Here's what happened in Atlanta.
That event doubled our growth in 30 days, right? Now, I want you to think about something here real quick. What did we actually teach there? Nothing. I mean, it was like… How to cross the stage with big-ass checks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like… No, it was like three days. It was like three days of stories, wasn't it? Cool ones. They had good concepts.
You know, we had some things that were important to help people join. We had the team thing, you know, calling teams. But what did we actually do? Nothing, right? We talked for three days.
We told stories and we gave examples and we proved to people that what we already had taught them, which is like a few simple things, worked. That's basically it. We didn't really do anything other than that if you guys think about that event. And you try to think and you think, what did I learn from that event? I learned that if I get two people a day and follow the eight steps and get to the next event, that I could be rich on the internet.
And you know what else… I mean, you know what I learned? We say that all the time. It works if you work it. That's what I learned, that it works if you work it. And sometimes people need to see that.
Sometimes people just need that tangible kind of physical proof to see Chuck Marshall's house that it works if you work it. Right? So sometimes it's just the proof. It's the belief. Sometimes we think we know what people want.
And a lot of times I think that's what a lot of the industry gets tripped up on, is that they think they know what people want, but really is all they want is they just want a little bit of belief. What do people do when they call John Rose? Hey, John, you know, just was about to join, you know, and I was just wondering, you know, if this was the real thing. Mary, it's the real thing. Why don't we go ahead and get you started?
They're right there, and you just need to push them over the edge. And that's what a lot of this belief and proof stuff does. And just look at the result. You know, who in here had their incomes grow by 30% after that event? You know, who had teams, who went with teams?
Right? I mean, it was an unbelievable – I was watching the – you know, I look at the top incomes. Right? All the top incomes virtually have doubled since that event. And then last month, our top 100, all of the top 100 made over – it was like 20 – it was like 2,800.
All of – everybody in the top 100 people made that or more. Right? So it doubled in essentially 30 days. Why did it do that? It did that because we got an army of people to believe that if we – if they did what we already have told them to do, it will work.
That's it. And because they believed it will work, they went and they did it. But here's what we also did, and here's how we did that, is we took stories and we hammered them at people. Right? I mean, have you guys ever seen so many people create success stories?
Right? Well, when you take success, when Tracy Walker – here, Tracy, come up here real quick. Give her a hand real quick, everybody. Tracy's rocking. Now, here's the interesting thing.
Now, Tracy is one of the people at Empower Network who does the same thing over and over. You haven't really increased your personal sign-ups so much, a little bit maybe, but she does the same thing over and over and over and over and over. She doesn't work any harder, and her income – your income is growing by like 30%, 40% a month. Right. Every month.
Every month. From the same amount of production. Exactly. Yeah, all the time. Less production, actually.
Less production. Well, not really less production, more systemizing of the production, so it's less of me being involved in it. Yeah, so her time is going down, and her income is growing by 30% a month. Right? Now, here's how she does this, and then we'll ask some questions too.
Here's how she does it. She repeats the same thing all the time. Right? And then her income goes up, and she talks about it. And then her team believes it will work, and then they do it.
And then it works for them, and then they talk about it, and she takes the video and blasts it out in front of everybody. Exactly. I was talking about this earlier. That strategy, I mean, for those of you guys that have heard my story, I got started online in 2008, and Dagan was the first person I ever found on the Internet. He was, for some of you, what may be David Wood or David Sharp.
And so I found Dagan, and I didn't know anything about anything. Coming from a real estate background, I needed to create some additional income because of the downturn in the market. And he had a system at that time. I joined that system, and I started learning how to generate my own leads. And I tried to reach out to him a couple times.
And in fact, Dagan, I don't think you had a phone number or anything. I hunted down, and I found a Gmail account, which he still has that Gmail account right now. Well, he's the king of never calling a single lead. Of course he didn't have a phone. I didn't believe it, though, at that point.
It's my first time. I'm like, no, surely he'll answer. And I hunted him down and nothing. So I said, well, I'll just go and do something, which is what we've been talking about this last segment, just go do something. So I don't remember exactly what the result was, but I did something.
And then I continued to reach out to him. I found his Skype ID. And he goes, he answered, and he said, how did you even find this Skype ID? He's like, but since you found me, then, you know, you went through all that trouble, then what do you need? What's up?
Right? I kind of shared with him. No, if you get him, he'll talk. It's hard to get him, though. So the point was I kind of started sharing with him some of the things that I was doing, and he was actually amazed at what I was doing.
And he said, well, I'm going to tell you what some of those results were. We did an interview. Now, I was, there was no name of Tracy Walker on the Internet, but he said, well, I'd love to interview you one day, and we can just shoot the breeze and talk about what you've been doing. I said, okay, great. We did this interview.
And that went out to his list, which was massive at that time, and it went out to my list of almost nobody, not a lot of people, maybe 200 or so. And everything took off from there. Yeah. And what happened was people that felt that Dagan's story may be a little bit too high for what their belief system would allow would then call me and say, I heard you on the video or the audio, because we didn't do videos back then. I heard you on the audio.
Is it true? Is it real? Can you tell me more about this product? Is it this? Is it that?
And then my credibility started to go up, and I could start commanding things to take place, but it was all because of the story that Dagan leveraged with his network. So I understood that from the very beginning. And so I've always encouraged my team to stop treading water with trying to be somebody else. Just go create a result, any result, a belief result. You went from not believing to believing.
You went from not going to the event to going to the event. You went from no sales to one sale. You went from not being all in to being all in. You got your first pass up. Your father joined.
Your this. Your brother joined. I got a teammate. His twin brother never joined anything he was ever in until Empowered. He did a video with him and his twin brother, and he got more sales because people were like, well, shoot, if his twin brother's finally joining, I should join.
So the point is I've just kind of encouraged people to just get a result. Get a result. If you get a result, I will do everything in my power to promote it to the network that I have. And if it sounds good, I'll send it to Dave and Dave. And if they like it, I can't promise they're going to put it on the front blog.
But, hey, it's a story that they now know about. Absolutely. And they can choose to do it. And so my hope is that, you know, my whole mantra is just create a result. And let me tell you.
That's awesome. Give her a hand. Give her a hand. Hey. Let me.
Okay. Right? Relax. It's funny. But the, you know, here's what I did.
All right? And you'll see this. Right? This is what I did. I got on.
I started. And I did exactly what we talked about all morning. Right? Which is I just forced myself. Into a spot where I was getting sales every day.
Right? I just. By. By just the, you know, the sweat of my forehead. And just, you know, grinded it out.
I wasn't prospecting. Right? I wasn't doing any of that. But I was. I mean, I had no money.
So I just had all day every day whatever I had to do to get traffic to my offers. And taking calls and closing people. Well, I used that to get my first result. Right? Which was making some sales.
Right? Just on that. Right? Just sweating it out. Which is hard to do with low paying affiliate stuff.
Right? It's hard. Right? So then what I did was I was trying to get a hold of some people that had influence. Because I know you get around people who have larger influence than you.
And you just get yourself in front of them. All of a sudden everything becomes easier. You guys know that? Right? It's like a little easier when everybody's talking about you all the time.
We talk about Tracy all the time. A lot of people hear us talking about her all the time. People will just go search her out and buy stuff. You guys know that. Right?
Right? It's just the way that it is. It's just the way that it works. So I was having a hard time getting a hold of these guys, so I wrote an article about them. And then he looked me up and he's like, shit, this guy's making some sales.
Right? And then he was like, can you get on a webinar and teach everybody what you're doing? And I was like, yeah, if you let me sell something. I had gotten 600 leads just from SEO and stuff like that to sell everybody on the webinar. Right?
That was three months after I lived in a van. Right? That's how fast I was able to go through. And I was going through with, honestly, shit that was impossible to make money with. I mean, it was literally impossible.
Right? And it still worked. Right? So when you get in an environment where you can actually make commissions. Right?
You can do it much faster, as a lot of people in the room have proven. Nobody ever had stories like we have in this room in our environment. Right? So you use a result to get another result. And so then what did we do?
Well, what we did was, there's a big need in the marketplace, obviously, for people to be able to earn money quick. You know what I mean? Because it takes forever and everything. And it's like lots of pain for never... Making any money is essentially what people experience all the time.
So we had this idea to start this. We already had results when we started this. If I had tried to start this and it was like, you know, I was the van man who took my last, you know, 500 bucks and hired a programmer in the Philippines, you know, to make the Empower Network to save everyone. You know what I mean? Probably, I would have put some people on it.
But we wouldn't have put 40,000 people in 10 months or whatever it's been. You see what I'm saying? Credibility is the key that unlocks the business. And you create that in whatever way that you can. Does that make sense to everybody here?
But the key even behind that is that the consistency is really kind of where we started off. It's you create the result from the consistency. If you really listen to what Sophia talked about, even though they're more diversified now because they can, in the beginning, she was the Google pay-per-click diva. Lady, probably. Right?
And that's how I was with blogging. I know you were that way with article writing and blogging. For a period of time, you are on that one thing. You don't move. You don't breathe.
You don't do anything outside of that thing until you can create enough of the results to then create the story. The story will help you make more money. The more money will help you diversify. And then you can start tapping into other things. But you've got to stay focused.
You've got to tap dance on that nerve. You've got to do that for a real long time. Yeah. And you can't get into the bigger circles without getting results because nobody will listen to you. How many times a day do we have people pitch us on why we should sell their stuff that they can't sell?
Yeah. You know what I mean? Hey, Dave, can you help me sell my course? It's a really great course, but I can't sell it. You know what I mean?
It happens like five times a day. You know what I mean? It's like, no. Go sell it first. You know what I'm saying?
Go sell it. And then come back and show me the result, and we'll get you in front of people. Make sense? Give Jerry a hand, everybody. I'm pretty much good.
Yeah. I'm good. So let's talk about, real quick, tomorrow what we're going to go over. All right? Tomorrow, guys, what we're going to cover, we'll start, what, 10 o'clock, same time?
I think so. Same time. 10 o'clock tomorrow. Oh, 10? Tomorrow, we've got a lot of stuff to cover that's higher level stuff.
All right? We're going to cover everything from duplication and team building, which is something that not a lot of people understand, especially on the internet. And we have a lot of different success stories on that and how people are doing it. And we're going to cover cult building, right? And I'm going to explain a lot of the stuff on why things work the way that they do here at Empower Network and why we built them in a certain way.
All right? You guys can use what we just covered. All right? Yeah. Because it's not difficult.
Right? What's Tracy really doing? She's getting like two people a day and saying the same thing over and over again with new stories, and just plugging people into our system, and her income increases by 30% a month. Yeah. Yeah.
That's enough by itself to do it. Yeah. But so guys, it's not difficult. Does that make sense to everybody in here? All right.
Give yourselves a hand, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow.
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