Jumping The Next Level In Sales With Storytelling | Robert Smith

🎥 May 22, 2022 📺 Brandon Bornancin ⏱ 3m 👁 40 views

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About Robert Smith

Robert F. Smith, founder and CEO of Vista Equity Partners, has discussed the state of the technology industry and proposed a private-sector initiative to address structural racism. At the 2023 World Economic Forum, Smith said that tech companies are "ratcheting down" their expense bases after a period of unsustainable pandemic-era growth, and predicted a "new equilibrium" in the second or third quarter of 2023. He described enterprise software spending as having fluctuated in 2022, with a strong first quarter followed by declines in the second and third quarters and a rebound in the fourth quarter. Smith stated that productivity software would be a principal area of growth in 2023. In a 2020 interview with Forbes, Smith outlined a "2% solution" in which large corporations would allocate 2% of their annual net income over ten years to Community Development Financial Institutions and minority-owned banks. He argued that this would address what he called "structural racism" in corporate America, particularly in the deprivation of capital to African-American and Latinx communities. Smith said that activating the wealth and income of the African-American community to the average level of white Americans could increase U.S. GDP by $1.5 trillion per year. He also stated that default rates in underserved communities are lower than the FDIC average, calling investment in these markets "good business."

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Transcript (4 segments)

Interviewer0:00

And I'm thrilled, honored, and grateful to have with me Robert Smith, who's the best-selling author ranked in the top one percent on IMDb. He's ranked number one with Money, Accent, York Life, John Hancock, Bank Atlantic. He literally wrote 'Sales Genius Number One,' which is a new release on sales techniques, marketing, sales, business, you name it, call center management, you name it. And he leads Robert Smith Productions, which has its hands in anything and everything to blow it up. I'm thrilled to have you, Robert. Thank you so much for joining us today. What is your number one top sales secret, and then we'll get into why and how?

Robert Smith0:44

Yeah, I mean, hands down, it's one word: it's storytelling. If you can tell stories in your business and get your clients excited and fired up and ready to move, that's all it takes. Because features and benefits might have sold in the 50s and 60s, they don't sell anymore. People need to get excited, and you gotta have case studies, you gotta have stories. I did a financial conference back in 2015 out in Scottsdale, Arizona, spoke to hundreds of financial advisors. And it's funny, I was on the same ticket as Tucker Carlson, and I didn't see him speak because I was too busy doing my thing. But it was... I've been giving seminars and doing the same financial seminars everybody else has been doing for almost 30 years. And I got into this thing, and it was funny: I start my talk and I see people perk up and get excited, then all of a sudden everybody's whipping their phones out and they're texting, and I'm thinking, 'What the hell is going on?' And we were already at capacity when we started, and by the time we were done, people were lined up all the way down the sides, all the way down the back of the hotel meeting room, and then all the way outside. And they were like getting a hold of their friends saying, 'Hey, how's your meeting going?' Because they told me later, and they said, 'Yeah, it's lousy, this guy's no good. Come listen to this guy.' And I've never seen it anywhere, but we started with a few hundred and we ended up closer to a thousand by the time they were done. It was crazy, and just from all the storytelling.

Interviewer1:58

Yeah, yeah. And basically just showing people that, you know, for myself personally, the day I switched to storytelling, I started making every month what I used to make in a year. And that's the difference. I mean, do you have like an example of the before versus the after? You know, what would you do when you would make all that money in a year versus when you would make it in a month, like the way that you would pitch?

Robert Smith2:23

Yeah, I mean, I literally didn't know about storytelling, and I read it in a book somewhere, you know, because it's like every other salesman, you're reading everything you get your hands on, you're trying to get whatever edge you can find. And then I just opened up this financial storytelling and I started using it with my clients. So I'd have someone that, you know, they'd have a large pile of money and they said, 'You know, we're not ready for an estate plan, we're not ready to go.' And I'd say, 'Hey, it's now or never.' And they said, 'What do you mean?' So I'd go into a story. And I said, 'I got a buddy of mine, this is a true story, had a client won like 140 million dollars in the Pennsylvania lottery. My buddy did an estate plan for him, and he wanted to shop the insurance around rather than just take it and move on and get on with it. So while he was screwing around and procrastinating, he had a non-fatal heart attack, and he didn't die, but he was no longer insurable. So the fact that he couldn't come back and get the insurance, no matter how much he begged, it cost his family roughly 50 million dollars in estate taxes back then.' So I tell that story to my client, and my client literally says, 'Here's my check,' like, 'Let's sign right now.' And they don't want to screw around with it. And you just got to find a way to create urgency and move your people. And the best way, no matter what business your people are in, is they can use examples of other clients.