[00:00:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: Today joining us is someone that's gone from door to door salesman selling solar and alarm systems to the CEO of a multimillion dollar business. Our guest today is Sam Taggert. He is also the bestselling author of Eat What You Kill, Becoming a Sales Carnivore.

[00:00:35] Sam Taggart: Yeah, happy to be here.

[00:00:49] Sam Taggart: Arguably, yes.

[00:00:58] Sam Taggart: Great question. I think it was when I was little. My brother was doing some door to door and he was selling these happenings books, or it was like these coupons, and I'm like 11 years old and he is like, you wanna come do this with me? I end up selling more than him, and he is 10 years older than me. And then I call my cousin and he's like, you wanna paint addresses on the curbs and go door to door on a Saturday? And I end up going out that Saturday and made some money and I was like, oh, that's cool. Then I ended up take that to a whole nother level and had 11 of my friends in high school working for me painting addresses on the curbs.

[00:01:57] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. And here we are today. So how'd you go from those, I'm gonna say humble beginnings. From those humble beginnings to being the CEO founder of a multimillion dollar business?

[00:02:26] Sam Taggart: I remember dropping out of college and my dad was like, why are you even in college? Where a lot of parents are like, you shouldn't, you should finish school. And to me, I'd go out every summer and I became the number one sales rep at Vivin, which is a multi-billion dollar company. And I, made hundreds and hundreds, thousand dollars every summer. And I remember sitting , in biology, and I'm looking at my teacher and I look up like, what's the average biology professor make? It was like $80K to a $100K or whatever. And I just made $550,000 that summer in four months knocking on doors, and he's getting mad at me for not doing my homework. And I was just like, I'm done. And I vividly remember, I fold up my textbook and I was like, I'm out. And I never went back to school. And I quit college just to drop into the school of hard knocks. I just kept recruiting and growing. I built a team I have 70 reps in Vivin. And then I had a hundred sales guys as the VP of sales of a solar company.

[00:04:51] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. I think it reinforces the fact that there is still a place for that direct to consumer, direct to business sales model. You can't automate your way out of everything. And quite often in sales, as I'm sure you've heard, people need to know and trust you. It's hard for someone to know and trust you if all you are is a bit of a marketing page with, some good copy. I feel like I'm gonna have some copywriters send me a note after that statement, but that's all good.

[00:05:22] Jason S. Bradshaw: Now is this your secret sauce? Is this how you were making half a million, in your summer?

[00:06:56] Sam Taggart: And so, I think we need to remember this carnivore that we're innately built to be, but too many people have been herbivortized essentially as lead babies. And then they've lose that fight. It's almost like you tame a lion. You put it in its cage and you've been feeding it dog food all day. Go put it in the wild. It's gonna fill out of place, right?

[00:07:41] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah. So before we dive further into the book and there's nine different parts to the book you like, it provides a great blueprint on how to be successful in sales. Why do you think so many people are fearful of this notion of sales? No business can survive without sales, right? Yet you do have leaders. You do have founders, even that perhaps get more distracted by the nice shiny object or the marketing campaign or something else, versus, sometimes hard to do, but picking up the phone, knocking on the door, making a sale happen. Why do you think so many people are scared of the sales discipline?

[00:10:19] Sam Taggart: And so I think of like sales where most people, they create what I call death by business cards. They start a business and they die because they're sitting there going, I care so much about what my business card looks like, and my website and my hats and my shirts and all this stuff. And I'm like, how about you just go get your first 20 customers? How about you just go put on some revenue and then worry about what your business cards and shirts look like? You see what I'm saying?

[00:10:45] Sam Taggart: I think it's like, welcome to entrepreneurship. You should care so much about sales. And I watch ops people get mad at sales all the time and they're like, oh, these salespeople and the sales team. And there's always this conflict, right? And I'm always like, bro, if you didn't have sales guys, you wouldn't have a job. So you better stop bitching 'cause they're getting fired after you, no offense.

[00:11:17] Jason S. Bradshaw: Part one of your book is all about mindset. You mentioned mindset just a moment ago. What sort of mindset does a sales professional need to get into to be really successful?

[00:14:04] Jason S. Bradshaw: Okay.

[00:14:07] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah, that makes sense.

[00:14:47] Sam Taggart: Yep,

[00:14:52] Sam Taggart: It deserves it. No offense. There are a lot of bad actors, or call it 5% to 10% of salespeople probably are not with good intent. Those 5% to 10% of bad actors make up a big complaint. And a lot of it has to do with their commission hungry or their trying to just say whatever they need to 'cause their performance is based on their, sales.

[00:16:32] Jason S. Bradshaw: Yeah.

[00:18:06] Sam Taggart: I'm selling software, I'm selling whatever. At the end of the day, what if you looked at your passion and your way of approaching this as the highest level to serve your peoples only if I transact with them. I don't serve them unless I service them like having demos and cold calling, that actually is annoying. How I really help you is you buy my thing and we actually show you value. Does that make sense?

[00:18:41] Jason S. Bradshaw: So you've trained thousands. You've done the hard work yourself. You've sold on thousands of doors.

[00:18:59] Sam Taggart: A great question and we get asked that a lot. Like next week I have a sales leader bootcamp teaching how to manage sales teams. Last week we had a business bootcamp and a recruiting bootcamp. So our three pillars at D2D experts is recruiting, sales and leadership. And come last week teaching all these business owners, you know what I'm finding is the common trend, and I've done this over 50 times, that thousands of companies come through, is I have to assess their culture. And a lot of people, they have maybe an herbivore culture, and once an herbivore always an herbivore. And so the problem is you might actually have to set up two sales teams, a hunting culture and a farming culture.

[00:21:04] Sam Taggart: And so we could go into this. I mean I have 101 page playbook on this, but like I would heavily suggest auditing your personnel and being like, man, am I gonna have this like crazy battle restructuring? And it's okay. You might have some casualties if that's like what you're fully committed in 'cause you're like, my marketing dollars aren't getting 'em a return, then you'd probably wanna re consider and say, give us a call and we can architect like a better model that isn't so dependent on marketing dollars. Because if your phone's not ringing, then that sucks. Like you're not making money.

[00:21:58] Sam Taggart: I think it breaks down to three components. One is, can I remove all the friction and questions of what should they be doing? I remember I go consult a company in Denver. And he's here's the 17 things we should do every day. And I'm like, whoa, can we just turn that into here's the one thing you should do every day. Does that make sense? And so if you said, let's remove the friction of like where they should be calling, who they should be going to, what should they be doing, when should they start? Where should they start? What should they say? If I could answer all of those questions where it's laid on a silver platter for my sales team, now the only thing I have to really worry about focus on is talk to human, close deal. You know what I mean? That's it.

[00:24:28] Sam Taggart: So what I'm finding is that lead from the front mentality 'cause it's like what got you here sometimes was forgotten, and that knocking, that cold calling and a lot of entrepreneurs, they built their business off of this referral cold call drive, and then they get away from that as they grow and evolve.

[00:25:12] Sam Taggart: I would say commit to just a week. And what I mean by this is, it's gonna sound dumb, but give yourself a week of a blitz week. And I think a lot of people, they don't ever fully get a full week hustle like nine to nine, like 400 dials or 150 doors a day or whatever the number is. Too many salespeople and business owners, they like get so distracted with multitasking, follow up pipeline ops, this, right? And I'm like, if you could clear the calendar, and give yourself a week of just uninterrupt full tilt balls to the wall sales week, what that'll do is it'll help remove a lid, give you back into the clarity of what problems and issues and customers in your systems and all that stuff, and it'll help inspire if you're a leader. And it'll help you reach a full potential if you're a sales rep, to where now you've set a new lid because your goal would be to like, if I could do one week's worth of work and a whole month's worth of work in one week, now I've now seen and tasted what's possible or what I'm capable of. And I think if I were to finish this podcast and say, okay, starting Monday next week, or whatever the day is, I'm gonna clear the freaking calendar. My schedule is gonna make me violent, and I'm gonna go hard as hard, and just commit to a full like hell week. We'll call that. And see what comes on the other side of that. And I think too many reps and too many companies are afraid to go do something like that. And they're like half-ass dip and toe old school, kind of habitual sales style. I'm like, dude, what happens if you go balls the wall for one week?

[00:26:55] Sam Taggart: Oh, thank you, Jason.