10
the introvert’s edge in real life
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Despite my Irlen Syndrome, I’m proud to say that I’ve become an award-winning blogger. The time it takes me to write a great fifteen-hundred-word post, though, is huge as well as agonizing.
I knew that I wanted to share my sales system for introverts with a bigger audience. That meant writing a book. The thought, however, of writing tens of thousands of words, of going back and forth editing, and going through a manuscript time and time again plagued me for years.
That is, until the solution called me out of the blue.
I could share with you how that came to be, but honestly, since Derek’s already ghostwriting this, I think I’ll just let him tell it.
THE GHOST OF BUSINESS PAST
It’s weird to come out from behind the curtain.
Then again, it’d be weird to ghostwrite about myself from Matthew’s point of view.
Putting the stories of his other clients down on paper is easy because I don’t have an emotional connection to them. They’re just stories about people I’ve never met or met only in passing.
When it comes to my own story, though, it’s a battle to keep emotion at bay. Even as I put this story to paper, I have tears welling up, threatening to spill over.
Let me paint a picture for you of where I was the moment before I picked up the phone to call Matthew: depressed, scared, and at my wits’ end. I hadn’t landed a new ghostwriting client in over a year, and I’d already finished my other projects. What little money I had saved was rapidly dwindling, and there were no prospects on the horizon.
Things were bleak, to say the least.
For much of my married life, my wife had been the primary breadwinner while I went to grad school and then again after I quit my job (with her encouragement) to work for myself.
It took some time, but I found a measure of success. In fact, I’m proud to have been the sole income earner while she went to grad school herself, went through her clinical training, and then during her maternity leave with our second child. Thank God she went back to work when she did, though, because that’s just about when the bottom fell out of my business.
I went for over a year without landing a new client. Fortunately, one of my authors had opted to stretch her project out over a year, but after it concluded, I was staring at a shrinking bank account and growing credit card debt, with no prospects in the pipeline. That, plus tens of thousands of dollars in healthcare bills from my wife’s difficult pregnancy and child-birth (combined with crappy insurance through her grad school) made me one scared son of a gun.
I’d proved to myself that I could do it. I’d been the sole provider for our family for a year and a half. Why couldn’t I land any more clients? What was I doing wrong? Was this a sign from God? Had it been a run of good luck, but was it now time to return to the world of men and get a real job? Were my dreams crashing down around me?
During a monthly mastermind group that I hosted with a select group of other ghostwriters—when admittedly I felt like a fraud—my colleagues all offered ideas to help. One suggested I find a business coach and offer to trade services: ghostwriting for coaching. That very day, I happened to see a LinkedIn article that someone shared about niche marketing.
I thought, It doesn’t get much more niche than business ghostwriting, so I followed the link and read the article. It made intuitive sense to me; I thought the author was really on to something. I followed his bio and landed on a website that was little more than a “coming soon” page. I found the contact page and fired off an email, figuring that the guy would probably blow me off.
About twenty minutes later, the phone rang.
After a brief sketch of the problem, Matthew somehow magically pinpointed exactly where I was in my business, exactly what my problem was, and exactly what I’d been trying to do to fix it. In fact, his accuracy was a little unsettling.
From that, I knew this guy could help me. I also knew there was no way in hell I could afford him. I tentatively pitched him the idea of trading coaching for writing.
He laughed and said, “I was just getting ready to look for a writer to help with an ebook I’m doing with a colleague.” Though we were both a little wary (and each could tell that about the other), we agreed to work together on an ad hoc basis.
I’m not sure I ever told Matthew before writing this, but the only reason I agreed (even though I’d been the one to suggest it) was because I had nothing to lose and was grasping at straws. I didn’t like “sales and marketing guys” because I always found them full of themselves, all bluster and bullshit and little else. I also detested the fact that Matthew subscribed to neurolinguistic programming. I thought it was pseudoscience and, at its core, manipulative. Last but not least, I hated trading services. I’m a free-market capitalist: If you want to trade for services, go find a commune. Like my power company, I take only cash.
I put on my happy face and went into the kitchen to tell my wife about my new arrangement. Years later, she confessed that she, too, thought I was grasping at straws. But I’d literally tried everything else I could think of, from going back to copywriting to redesigning my website to even trying to find employment. Nothing had worked. We were at the point where, if something didn’t break, I’d have to swallow my pride and go beg my old boss for my job back.
Over the next couple of weeks, Matthew coached me while I worked on the ebook. My biggest revelation was that I didn’t do sales. I just didn’t. I liked marketing and, consequently, I was a decent marketer. Sales was a whole different story. I’m an introvert. (I mean, I’m a self-employed service professional who writes books all day and works with only a handful of people a year. I am the poster child for professional introverts.) My basic approach was to let my marketing do all the heavy lifting so that the sale would happen naturally.
When Matthew started talking about a sales script, I instinctively shied away. I didn’t want to sound like a robotic telemarketer following a rote script. But then again, my way hadn’t been working so well.
I soon had a sales call. I didn’t really feel confident about going through the process Matthew had helped me create (The Introvert’s Edge lite, you could call it), but I went through each step as I was supposed to. In thirty minutes, the client was ready to sign.
I hung up the phone and sat there, stunned. Did that just happen? Did I just land a book in thirty minutes? For real?
Over the next two-and-a-half weeks, I sold $80,000 worth of ghostwriting and editing work. By the end of six months, I’d sold more than I had in the previous three years combined.
I could take you through the following three years, but let me give you the CliffsNotes version:
We went from financially struggling to debt-free and financially affluent.
We moved from a (cute) little starter home in an older neighborhood with my office in the garage to a gorgeous home that we still have trouble believing is ours.
My children have trust funds for their education. Regardless of scholarships, awards, or anything, when they each turn eighteen, we’ll have enough to write a check for their bachelor’s degrees from nearly any public university.
I now have retirement investments, and we’ve set up another one for my wife aside from her employer’s plan. If we do nothing but continue to invest the quite manageable amount we’re contributing right now, we’ll not only retire as millionaires but be able to live comfortably on the interest and pass the principal on to our children and grandchildren.
I traveled to Zurich on business.
I took my wife to London and Paris.
As of the weekend before we submitted this book to the publisher, I closed a ghostwriting deal big enough that I don’t need another client for another year.
If you would have told me the moment before I took Matthew’s call that this would be my life in the next three years, I’d have asked you to share whatever you’d been smoking. It had to be some good stuff.
Honestly? It took me at least two years before I finally accepted that this was normal. I’d lived in fear for so long that I didn’t know any other way to feel. I kept waiting for someone to drive up to my house and say, “Derek, look, this has all been a social experiment. You enjoyed it, but the study’s over. Time to get back to reality. You’ve got twenty-four hours to move your stuff out.”
Hasn’t happened yet.
All this because Matthew showed me how to leverage my strengths as an introvert, to stop shying away from sales, and to put together a basic sales process that worked for me—something that fit the way I did business, not that forced me to go against my nature.
Today, I step outside and the sky looks different. The air smells different. I see my life and my world as having changed. But nothing around me has changed; I have.
WHAT I DID THEN
What did I actually do to sell $80,000 in under three weeks?
I’ve tried every kind of outbound marketing: cold-calling, cold email, direct mail, LinkedIn networking, in-person networking, etc., etc., etc. I’ve never been able to make it work for landing ghostwriting gigs. Every dollar I’ve ever made came from people finding me, primarily through finding my website.
Before Matthew’s coaching, when I got an email, I would have tried to do as much preselling in my response as possible. I’d send an email back chock-full of information with five or seven attachments of even more information. I wanted my potential authors to make up their mind by reading all of it and then simply pick up the phone once they’d made a decision. As Matthew pointed out, no one wants to entrust their book—perhaps the summary of their life’s work—to someone based on an email and some PDFs. I wrote those long emails because they’re what I wanted to send, not what potential authors wanted to see.
This time, I simply responded with a short, gracious note and a few suggested times for a phone call. We confirmed the times, and I did nothing else.
When we got on the phone, I walked through the main steps of my freshly minted sales process:
Rapport: I asked where the two would-be coauthors lived, and then we talked (which turned into joking) about our respective accents (Southern, British, and Australian).
Questions: I asked about the book they had in mind and asked a few clarifying questions to show that I understood what they wanted.
Stories: I told them two stories. The first was about three authors I’d worked with who needed help figuring out what they even wanted to write about and how the process of working with me resulted in a restructuring of their entire business process. The second story involved a French-German consultant whose husband, upon reading the ghostwritten manuscript, looked up from the couch and said, “Wow—this sounds just like you.”
That was it. Notice that I didn’t have an agenda, qualification process, or objection-handling cushions—there were plenty of things I had yet to embrace in Matthew’s approach. Yet even with those things missing, and just using this bare-bones process, I still nailed $80,000 in sales.
After a little more conversation, I didn’t even have to ask for the sale. They asked what my fee was. I told them. They thought it sounded good and asked me to send over the papers.
I went through the same process twice in the next week with another ghostwriting project and then a smaller editing project. Over three phone calls totaling about three hours, I’d changed the course of my life—personally and professionally.
WHAT I DO NOW
I still don’t consider myself a great salesperson. Just decent.
But that’s all I’ve needed to gross a healthy six-figure income every year. My sales process has gotten a little more sophisticated, and my bank account reflects that. The better I get, the more I sell. Sometimes I think, Man, I’m getting pretty good at this sales stuff!
At one point, though, my confidence led to overconfidence. I started to see my sales slump. In fact, I was in a sales lull for about six months. Those awful feelings of desperation started seeping back into my bones. My fears I thought conquered came back to haunt me.
I reached back out to the man who’d saved me before.
Matthew’s first question: “Well, are you following your script?”
I said, “Well . . . it’s kind of grown organically . . .”
We went back over it and I saw where I’d let some things slip. Two weeks later, I closed a deal that took me to the Swiss Alps; a month after that, another one took me to London.
I went back to the basics and things picked right back up.
I’ll show you what I do now, but keep in mind that by the time this book goes to press, I will have tweaked something. In fact, working on this chapter with Matthew gave me a chance to get even more coaching on my sales script. I will incorporate those changes and do some modifications of my own. They might work, they might bomb, or they might be inconsequential, but I will experiment with something—the key being: one thing at a time.
My sales leads continue to come from online sources, primarily via either organic searches (just a straightforward Google search) or a keyword search that triggers a pay-per-click ad (PPC). Many of my marketing efforts focus on search engine optimization (SEO), but I’ve also published a book (The Business Book Bible), been a guest on a few podcasts, and done a smattering of other things to help people find me.
But—and let me make this clear so as to underscore the point of this book—I’m not trying to just get more traffic, or even just more quality traffic. I didn’t need a book or PPC to sell that ice-breaking $80,000. In fact, without a decent sales process, all those tools would have gotten me is more inquiries, not more sales. I didn’t do anything different but learn how to sell to people already in front of me.
I’m about to show you how 80 percent of my calls go.
Honestly? Seeing my sales script laid out in black and white for all the world (or at least the people who read this book) to see makes me uneasy. I worry that you’ll feel that I’m disingenuous by having such a routine down. But it’s worth it if it helps introverts like me find success pursuing their dreams, too.
I’ve found that in a phone call, being prepared and in control helps me be my authentic self; instead of having to mull over a question or comment, I can be in the moment. I can focus more on the client’s response instead of having to come up with my own. Before I had a sales process, I didn’t have any preparation for a phone call at all. I tried to do all my selling through email. The client would, by default, lead the conversation. The discussion on price would happen far too early, well before the author had a chance to appreciate what I brought to the table. I’d respond as best I could, but inevitably I’d get off the call feeling like I’d somehow failed. In times of self-denial, I’d blame the authors for why they wouldn’t choose me as their ghostwriter: They couldn’t afford me, they didn’t know what they wanted, they feared I didn’t have the requisite experience, or any of a dozen other reasons why my failure at sales was their fault.
None of the above were true. Once I had a basic sales process in place, all of a sudden money wasn’t an issue, they knew exactly what they wanted, and they were impressed with the level of experience I’d had with other authors just like them.
Knowing how the call is going to go takes the worry off what I should say and how I should respond. I already have the hard part out of the way. Instead of worrying about my performance, I can let that automatic stuff happen almost without conscious effort. That frees me up to be fully present: to concentrate on what they’re saying instead of stressing to figure out how I should respond when they finish speaking.
This is how upward of 80 percent of my sales calls go:
Step 1: Trust and agenda.
(Get on conference line.)
“Hi, this is Derek.”
(Wait for response.)
“[Name], it’s nice to meet you, thank you for reaching out. Now, where are you?”
(Wait for response, then short chat or benign joke about location.)
“Well, this is how I usually suggest these calls go. I’ll let you tell me about your professional background, from when you started your career to where that’s brought you to today. Then I’ll give you a quick snapshot of the kinds of authors I work with and the types of projects I collaborate on. Then, you’ll tell me about your idea for your book and where you are with it. Then I’ll quickly walk you through the five-step process I use for every project. Then we can talk about the different service packages I offer and my fee for each. Does that sound good?”
(Wait for response.)
“Great. Okay, I’ll give you the floor. Tell me about [full name].”
(Intently listen to their professional background. Laugh or comment appropriately.)
“Thanks for sharing all of that. It gives me a good idea of where you’re coming from. To give you a quick snapshot of myself, I work almost exclusively with business thought leaders like you. I’ve worked with authors on five continents, including a Turkish economist, a Texas oil tycoon, an IT start-up millionaire, a Brazilian federal judge, and a Cajun colonel.
“My authors work with the International Monetary Fund, DaimlerChrysler, SAP, Disney, the Marine Corps, and even the Red Cross. After a few years of working with these types of authors, I got frustrated that there wasn’t a good resource I could turn to on how to write these types of books, so I actually wrote the book on how to write thought leadership books, The Business Book Bible, which came out a few years ago.
“My typical author has been in business for ten to twenty years and has run their own company for at least five to ten. Now, of course, everybody wants their book to be a bestseller; however, for my authors, commercial success is a secondary goal. They write their book primarily to be a platform book: something to help them market their expertise, help them secure speaking gigs, or promote their other products or services.
“So all of that is to say: You are exactly the kind of author I work with. If you had come to me saying, ‘Derek, I’d like to write a memoir or vampire erotica,’ I’d say, ‘Sorry—that’s not my bag.’ But business thought leadership? That’s what I do all day, every day.”
If they spoke only to their professional background earlier: “Now, tell me about your book.”
If they started talking about their background and then wandered into talking about their book idea, say, “So, we’ve already started talking about your book, but—” and move on to Step 2.
Step 2: Ask probing questions.
Ask selected questions, based on information and/or concerns raised in their spiel.
(Because of Matthew’s coaching in not only my sales but my marketing, my authors’ concerns are so similar that I indirectly address them throughout the sales call. I don’t have to ask too many probing questions because almost all of their pain points are identical.)
“Let me ask you this: Fast-forward to one year from now. We’ve already finished your manuscript, we’ve gone through what it takes to turn it into a real book, and you’re holding it in your hands. What do you do with your book?”
“How long have you been thinking about writing your book? A year? Two years? Ten?”
“Have you decided whether you want to go the traditional publishing route or the self-publishing route?”
Step 3: Qualification.
“Now, do you have a business partner or coauthor, or are you going to be writing this book by yourself?”
(If not sole author): “Okay, great. I’ve worked on plenty of multiauthor projects. It adds a layer of complexity but nothing to worry about. When should we set up a call with them to talk about their involvement with the book?”
(If sole author): “Okay, great. Now, what about approval? Do you have investors or others who’ll be involved in final approval of the book, or do we even need to worry about that?”
Step 4: Story-based selling.
“You know, I’ve never had an author who came to me who knew exactly what their book was about, exactly how they wanted it laid out, exactly what Chapter 1 was about, exactly what Chapter 2 was about—most of the time, they just know that they want to write a book. My authors don’t come to me because they need someone who knows how to put a sentence together; they come to me because they need someone who can help them get all of their years of ideas and experiences out of their head and onto paper in a way that people actually want to read. So, you’re in good company.”
(Wait for response.)
“Now, it took me a little while to figure that out. I’ve changed the way I work with my authors over the years to accommodate this stage of figuring out what the book’s about in the first place.
“Let me tell you about the five-step process I use to get it out of your head and into a manuscript. I’m going to quickly list them, and then go through each one.
“There’s discovery, blueprint, Frankendraft, edit, and polish.
“The discovery process starts off with me flying to your city for a three-day author retreat where we lock ourselves in a hotel suite or office and we do a brain purge. You’ll tell me everything you’ve done over the last ten or twenty years: your ideas, your experiences, your stories, your expertise—anything and everything you feel might be even remotely related to the book. I’ll record all of it and send it to my transcriptionist in Kansas. Then we schedule two weeks of follow-up calls to go over anything else you might have remembered. At the end of all of it, we’ll have this mountain of raw material to use as we move forward in figuring out what your book’s about.
“In step two, we create a blueprint. I sort and sift through these hours and hours of conversations to find the underlying themes in your book. We’ll work together to say, ‘This is the book’s One Reader, this is their problem, and this is how the book solves it. This is what goes in Chapter 1: content, stories, examples, quotes, and whatever else. This is what goes in Chapter 2, Chapter 3.’ So we have this working outline of what we’re doing with the book.
“In step three, I ghostwrite the first chapter, send it to you, you read it, we get on the phone, and you tell me what you like, what you don’t like, what sounds like you, what doesn’t, any new ideas you’ve had, and what we should do going forward. I take all of that information and ghostwrite the second chapter. I send it to you, you read it, and we go through the whole process again. Chapter by chapter, we’re gaining clarity on your vision for your book. We’re shaping it even as we’re creating it.
“At the end of that, we have our Frankendraft. I call it that because writing a book is less about painting the Mona Lisa and more about bringing life to a Frankenstein monster that’s pieced and stitched together from dozens of different parts. It’s not pretty—but it’s alive.
“In step four, I go back to the beginning and rewrite the entire manuscript based on all your feedback, comments, clarity of vision, and any new ideas we’ve had. It’s almost like we have to write the book before we know what we’re writing about.
“Then, I hand that version to you. You share it with a couple of people who’ll give you honest feedback—your spouse and a business partner, for example—and then we’ll come back together. You’ll say, ‘Derek, here’s what we need to change.’ I’ll say, ‘[Name], after coming back to it with fresh eyes, here’s what I think we need to do.’
“I’ll go do another round of editing, not only addressing any changes but also making sure that each sentence and paragraph is smooth and tight. At the end of that, I pass it off to two proofreaders in succession, and then, my friend, you’ll have a manuscript.
“Now, I can help you weigh the pros and cons of pursuing a traditional publisher or self-publishing, but either way, you’ll have an industry-standard manuscript.
“Okay, so now that I’ve just stood you in front of a fire hydrant of information, let me stop and ask: Any questions on any of that, on my four-step process?”
(Wait for inevitable variation of, “No, that all makes sense.”)
“The beauty of this approach is that each step of the way allows you to gain further clarity on your vision for the book. The clearer you are about your vision, the more clearly you can communicate that to me, and the more clearly I can translate that into your book so that your book embodies your vision.
“I’ll tell you the highest compliment I ever received as a professional ghostwriter. I worked with a consultant who wouldn’t let her husband read any drafts of the manuscript—partly, I think, because she wanted to develop her ideas on her own and partly, I think, just to piss him off. When she finally let him read a nearly finished draft, she printed it out, and he went to read it on the couch. A couple of hours later, she had to walk through the living room on her way to the kitchen and her husband looked up from the manuscript and said, ‘Oh my god—this sounds just like you!’
“That is when I knew I’d done my job: when your own husband thinks that your book sounds just like you. That’s the highest compliment a professional ghostwriter could ever receive.”
(Wait for response.)
Steps 5 and 6: Trial close and Dealing with objections.
(For my sales process, I usually don’t uncover an objection—if any—until after presenting my prices and asking what their budget is.)
“Okay, so the big question, of course, is, ‘How much does it cost?’ Let me walk you through the different packages I offer, starting with the most inclusive and working our way down.”
(Describe three service levels—turnkey, core service, and coaching—and flat fee for each, beginning with the most expensive. Yes, Matthew helped me create those, too.)
“So, I realize, of course, that writing a thought leadership book is a marketing investment, and your investment has to justify its cost. What budget did you have in mind for your book?”
(Wait for response.)
(If I detect a hesitation on price): “Well, I completely understand needing to think about it. It’s a big investment of time and money, but let me leave you with one quick story as food for thought.
“I once had a financial adviser who came to me wanting to write a book that wasn’t just about how to manage your money but about how to leave a lasting financial legacy. The book itself was to be his legacy to his child.
“But, being a guy who spent his days managing other people’s investments, he just couldn’t justify the cost of his book in his mind.
“Two years later, he finally came back and said, ‘Derek, I just can’t get it out of my head. I’ve got to write this book.’ He wrote the check, we signed the papers, and we finally got started on a book that we’d have been finished with if he had started back when he knew he really needed to write it.”
(Otherwise): “I tell you what: Why don’t I draw up a draft of what our agreement would look like, send it over, and let you look through it. We can schedule a follow-up call for next week to talk about it. Does that sound good?
“Awesome. Well, look, [name], I’ve been doing this long enough to know to look for two main things in calls like these. The first is that I make the author laugh. The second is that the author makes me laugh. If two strangers can get on the phone and make each other laugh, that’s usually indicative of how the relationship is going to go. And the better we work together, the better the book will be.”
(Wait for response.)
“Alright. Well, it was great to meet you and I look forward to exploring this further with you.”
Seriously. That’s all I do. Six figures a year. Year after year.
WHY BOTHER?
Derek’s script may seem long. You may be thinking that it’s a lot of work to come up with this and memorize it. But the joke I used to tell my team at the Pollard Institute was that people memorize entire Shakespeare plays to make $20,000 a year. If they memorized my script, they could make $200,000 a year.
To this day, I still use a script. In fact, my script was put to the test after I spoke at the Electrolux VP Summit in Bangkok. The trip back home was thirty hours long, and I finally arrived home late Thursday night . . . with twelve sales calls booked for the next day. The opportunity to speak had been last-minute, but moving all of those calls would’ve been a nightmare. So, I sucked it up and went through all twelve calls, jet-lagged like crazy and struggling to focus. I just used my same script verbatim—maybe with a little (or a lot) less vibrancy—and closed just as many clients as I did on any other day.
Do the work. Make a script. Make a mint.