The best sales advice I’ve ever read starts by telling you to stop thinking about the sale. It’s in Russell Brunson’s Expert Secrets, and it comes down to one question:
“The goal with this or any kind of business is not to lead with, ‘How can I sell my product?’ Instead, you want to ask, ‘How can I serve people?’”
Russell is another person I’ve been lucky to spend time with, and he’s had a massive influence on me and my career. He’s just a nice guy who wants to see people succeed. That comes through in his books. I’ve read Expert Secrets four times now, across two editions, which tells you something.
I met him at an event in London. At the time I had a website that wasn’t asking anyone to take a next step. Russell showed me what I was getting wrong. What I needed was a funnel. That’s a simple map of the route a customer takes to you, with the next useful thing to offer them at each point.
In 2018 I was part of the brand new ClickFunnels international speaker team. I got to speak on a stage I’d seen in so many of Russell’s videos. So when I say his books have shaped me, I mean it fairly literally.
Building a movement around what you believe
Expert Secrets is about how to build a movement around your beliefs. How to find other people who care about the same things you do, and how to drive that forward in a way where everybody wins.
Russell says a movement needs three things. A charismatic leader, a cause that points to a better future, and a new opportunity people can step into. He’s also big on what he calls the Attractive Character. People follow a person with a story, a few flaws and a point of view much more readily than they follow a polished brand.
And he shows you how to tell the story of how you came to believe what you believe. He calls that the Epiphany Bridge. If someone can live through the moment it clicked for you, it might click for them too.
The book is full of simple structures and frameworks like that. The one I use most is the Big Domino. Russell credits the lesson to Tim Ferriss. Instead of knocking down every objection someone has, you find the one belief that, once it falls, takes all the others down with it.
I liked it so much I borrowed it for my own book. In Done Beats Perfect I used the Big Domino for goals and getting things done. Find the ONE thing that, once you knock it over, makes a whole bunch of other tasks irrelevant.
Read it alongside DotCom Secrets. That’s where I first found the Dream 100, an idea Russell credits to Chet Holmes. The idea is simple. Make a list of the people who already have the attention of the customers you want. Then build a real relationship with each of them, one at a time. It’s slow, and it’s worth it. The two books are interwoven for me. One gives you the route, the other gives you the story to tell along the way.
Your story against their story
The biggest thing I took from it is this: the person who tells the best story wins. And the story you tell someone has to beat the story they’ve been telling themselves.
Everybody you talk to already has a story running. “I’ve tried that before.” “It won’t work for me.” “I’m not a numbers person.” Facts rarely shift those. A better story can, especially one told by somebody who’s been there.
That’s why the question about serving matters so much. When you lead with how can I sell, people can feel it. When you lead with how can I serve, they feel that too. And they tend to stick around.
If you want the rest of the shelf that sits beside this one, it’s all in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me.
Maybe it’s time you worked out the one belief your customers need, and told them the story of how you came to believe it yourself.
