Welcome back to another episode of the IRA Cafe podcast! Join host Jasmine Trocchia, head of marketing at American IRA, for an energizing conversation with Dr. Donna Smith Bellinger—a renowned sales expert, author, and consultant who has spent decades helping entrepreneurs, business owners, and professionals master “revenue-generating conversations.” 

In this episode, Jasmine and Dr. Donna delve into the true essence of sales, breaking down misconceptions and highlighting the foundational truth that sales is simply two parties coming to a mutually beneficial agreement. Dr. Donna shares her inspiring personal journey, from becoming a young mother facing adversity to out-earning her peers and forging a diverse, impactful career across corporate sales, tech, and business development. 

Listen as Dr. Donna uncovers practical strategies for increasing client acquisition, maximizing referrals, and crafting conversations that deliver real results—not just in business transactions but in building personal credibility and leadership. She discusses memorable client success stories, her approach to bridging communication gaps across gender, generation, and culture, and the concept of the “yes-timonial”—her unique formula for testimonials that showcase tangible outcomes and expertise. Whether you’re a business owner, investor, or a professional looking to up your leadership game, this episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiration to help move you from “pleased to meet you” to “thank you for your business.”

Key takeaways:

1. Sales as a Service—Not a Pitch: Dr. Donna reframes sales as simply helping two parties reach a mutually beneficial agreement, emphasizing that effective sales revolve around understanding client needs, communicating value, and focusing on service, not pressure.
2. The Power of Communication: Success in securing clients, referrals, and leadership roles often depends on the ability to tailor communication to different audiences—across gender, generation, geography, and even professional “languages” like sales and marketing.
3. Extracting Maximum Value: Many businesses leave significant revenue on the table by not fully understanding client needs or reaching all relevant stakeholders; Dr. Donna’s strategies help clients identify untapped opportunities and increase their bottom line.
4. Overcoming Limiting Beliefs: Personal success requires tuning out negativity and embracing self-confidence, especially for women and minorities—a lesson Dr. Donna learned firsthand and now imparts to clients through both mindset coaching and practical business strategies.
5. Crafting Effective Testimonials (“Yes-timonials”): Dr. Donna introduces the “yes-timonial”—a structured way of building testimonials that highlight starting challenges, discoveries and solutions, and concrete results, providing credibility and proof-of-concept to attract new business.

If you’re ready to rethink your sales approach and boost your business results, don’t miss this insightful discussion with Dr. Donna Smith Bellinger. Plus, don’t forget to check out American IRA’s latest blog on self-directed HSAs at americanira.com for more investment tips and resources!

Welcome back to another episode of the IRA Cafe podcast. My name is Jasmine and I'm the head of the marketing department at American Ira. And in today's episode I have a really special treat. And I know I say that about every guest, but I am super excited to talk to Dr. Donna and rather than me muddling through your introduction, could you tell our listeners who you are and what you do?

Thank you so much, Jasmine. So my name is Dr. Donna Smith Bellinger. Sales is my natural language. And I have spent many decades in helping business owners, entrepreneurs and also coaches, authors and speakers create conversations that result in revenue. This is not just a matter of teaching you how to speak or any of those things, but how to have revenue generating conversations. Because as I said, sales is my natural language. All sales is, is two entities coming to a mutually beneficial agreement.

That's all it is. One is you're providing the service, the other one is you're getting paid for it. And bingo. That's your sales, that's your transaction.

You make it sound so simple. I, I am sure that our listeners, yeah, I'm sure our listeners could really benefit from what you have to say because we're mostly business people, investors. They're making transactions, whether they're sales or investments, every single day. So what is it that you offer? Coaching services or do you have a class? Books? What, what do you do?

Primarily the people who hire me are people who need to get more clients, sell more to their existing clients and increase their flow of referrals. I work on a one to one basis and I also go into corporate offices to do more task specific training. For instance, if you need your team to focus on a particular aspect of your business, but they're not delivering the result that you want, it could be that they need assistance in avoiding refusals, they need to learn how to penetrate clients, they need to learn how to pre qualify clients or they just need to learn how to communicate the value of what they are offering. And those are among the topics that I cover.

Oh wow. Interesting. So how did you get started doing this? Were you originally in sales? Do you have a business degree? What is your background?

Actually it started out many decades ago when I had a child right out of high school. And back in that day it was a real big deal. My family disowned me and they told me no good man would ever want you and you'll be working the streets in six months. However, within three years I was out earning my management father and that was because I did something that a friend of mine coined, taking the stupid pill. And the stupid pill is you're too stupid to know that you shouldn't be able to do it, so you do so without a degree. I became an assistant admissions director in vocational and educational training. Then I shifted over into corporate sales, and I was a sales trainer, a sales leader, primarily in the tech space. I've always been very, very involved in working in economic development.

So I worked with, I'm in Chicago, the mayor's office, on gang relations. I worked with minority business development groups, women's business development groups, a variety of the Alphabet soup that we all know is out. And eventually I co founded a tech firm that specialized in data security. However, when I got to be in what I call my middle earlies, you know, some of this stuff here, I decided that what I really wanted to do was work with business owners and others who were not able to shorten the learning curve between pleased to meet you and thank you for your business. And it's a very simple path, but because we listened to certain experts who make it more complicated than it has to be, we were not always able to translate that into revenue. I work with people who need to up their leadership. One of my favorite success stories is a woman who is in mechanical engineering in medical devices. And she felt that she was not being recognized for her skill set by her boss, by her teams.

And when she and I worked together, we discovered that she was not communicating her value into the listening of the people that she was addressing. That's a sales conversation. We shifted the way she communicated with the managers and the other decision makers within the company, and we shifted the way she communicated with her teams and her peers. So she went from being completely overlooked to raising her revenue by 30% in less than two years and working with small projects to working with global projects, including with the government. And that is just a testimony to how these sales conversations go beyond the transaction.

Oh, wow. That is super cool. Would you consider that one of your more memorable clients, or do you have somebody. Another case study that's even more memorable than that.

She's one of my favorite people because my clients eventually kind of become family for me. And I am very attached to teaching my people how to communicate across gender, generation, and geography. My family spans five generations. We're African American, Italian, Italian, Irish, Mexican, and lgbtq. So I have all of these diverse conversations on a very, very regular basis. I quickly. A firm that I worked with was doing an assessment for them, and this one was kind of a fun one for me. When I did the assessment, I said, tell me about Your most recent win, something you're really proud of.

And they described it to me, and I listened and I took my notes, and I said, okay, my gift to you. Would you like to know where you left $40,000 on the table? And of course, they said, yeah, we'd like to know that. And I told them. And what it amounted to was they did not completely penetrate that particular client. There were stakeholders they never touched. They were so glad to make the initial sale, they picked up their toys and ran out of the room without doing their due diligence to discover the other opportunities that laid there. And so that turned into an extended engagement with them. Wow.

$40,000. Like, here you go. That's. This is where you can find it.

This corporation had a lot of money, but they had one contact. And when they dealt with that one contact and got the yes, they were like, yay. And right out the door. No, it's. Who else is going to benefit from this? Who else do I need to talk to? Who are the other stakeholders? What do you have coming up in the next three months, six months, year? And we don't always take the time. And even if you're doing B2C, it's just saying, okay, who do you know who has a similar challenge without making it sound like they're working for you? Because none of us are looking for an additional job.

Right.

But what we do want to do is be of service to others. And if you don't ask, you don't get. You already don't have it. What have you got to lose?

Yeah, that's true. That's true. I think it's true in most things in life, right? You don't know what you have until you ask. So I'm going to ask you a couple questions I like to ask all of my podcast guests, and it's past, present, and future. So could you give us a piece of advice that you would give that young mother, your past self? What would you tell her now?

I would give her the quote that I love from Eleanor Roosevelt, which is, never allow anyone to tell you no. Who does not also have the authority and the power to tell you yes. Hmm. Far too often we take that no and we accept it without doing the necessary penetration and determining if this individual is truly the decision maker in this particular transaction.

Wow, that's pretty cool. How do you think. So this is probably something you might have even thought about. How do you think she would have taken that advice, your younger self? Do you think that you would have made some other decisions Differently, or do you think you just would have carried the advice along in your life?

I think I would have made some different decisions because there were too many times that I allowed the statements of other people to determine how I felt about my competency. And I can give you an example. There was one meeting that I was in with peers. I was high up in a particular position, and when I went into a quarterly meeting with my peers from other regions, one of the people looked at me and said, oh, you must be really good at what you do, because they did not hire you for your looks. Well, I kind of let that get in my head for the amount of time it took me to get back to my office. But once I got to my office, I was angry, and I said, you know what? You don't get to occupy real estate here. Yeah, I shared that comment with my team, and I had such a relationship with my team, and I had this face. But I was working in Wichita, Kansas, and my team was made up of cowboys and pickup trucks.

Oh, golly.

And they made it their business to beat that person's numbers every single month, regardless to the effort that it took.

Wow.

And that's when you know that you are leading and that you are supporting. It wasn't because I said, I need you to do this. It was because of the leadership I had demonstrated and the respect that they gave to me that they wanted to go ahead and to do that. So once I got out of my own head, yeah.

Yeah, that's. I'm sitting here going, yes, I. I do that. I ruminate. I am in my own thoughts and. And not in the moment. So that brings me to the present. Staying in the moment.

What. Where can people find you or interested listeners? Where can they find you? And how can they contact you today? And what are you currently doing? Do you have any books, new courses, new initiatives? What. What is in the present that's exciting for you?

There are a lot of things in the present that are exciting for me. And the reason that there are so many things going on is because, you know, sometimes we get bored. We get stagnant. And the two words that I use the most when I am speaking to my audiences and to my clients, my two favorite words are, what else? So when I ask, what is your goal? What is your big, audacious goal, where you want to be in three months, six months, whatever? And they tell me what it is, I go, okay, so bink. It's done. What else? And they tell me something else. I'm like, okay, that's done now, what else? And I ask myself the same things. So I recently launched a new book.

The book is based on one of my favorite workshops and it is called Sales is not about wait and see, do you want to get paid now or eventually? And that's a collection of some of my favorite tots. Another thing that I'm doing is I am expanding my speaking. So if you have need of a speaker who is not going to put your audience to sleep, I am definitely a girl for doing that type of a job.

Yeah.

And that could be on leadership, motivation or sales. And then of course I work with individuals.

Wonderful. Awesome. We got a shot of your website so interested parties can contact you there at your website. Do you have like a LinkedIn or other social media as well?

I am on LinkedIn and I'd love for you to reach me there. If you'd like to have a conversation, Simply go to www.askdsb.com askds ask dsb.

Awesome. Love it. Finally, in the last few minutes, what do you see in the future? Normally I have business people or investors as guests and I say what trends socially, politically do you see are coming down the pipe for your business? If you want to answer that or what are your plans for the future? That would be an alternative question. So let's talk a little bit about the future.

When I talk about the future, here's what I'm taking a look at. My mission statement for my business is that the work that I do must affect more than the bottom line because it's not the transaction, it's the testimony. I have a term that I have.

Trademarked called yes timonial and I think that's fantastic. What do you mean by that?

A yes timonial is a very specific way to create a recommendation or a testimonial. Fortunately, I have over 40 recommendations currently on my LinkedIn profile and the formula for that is very simple. It is. First of all, where were you at the time that you sought my expertise? What was the challenge? Secondly, what did you discover or implement while we were working together? Or what I also call the aha moment. And then thirdly, it's going to be what was the result? Now, like I said, I've got over 40 of these yes Timonials on my LinkedIn profile and when you read through them, and I hope you will, you're going to see specific results. You'll see things like retained a high net worth client, won an award as a result of working with Dr. Donna, increased my close rate when someone Reads these things. They're like, yeah, that's what my challenge is.

I guess I need to maybe call Donna and have a conversation. She can solve that.

Fancy.

These are the types of things that you want to have in your recommendations. And not that you were nice, you were knowledgeable, you were easy to talk to. You're supposed to be those three things. They're paying you, you know? But what they want is for you to be the expert and the solution provider. And sometimes we get so hung up in our head, we drink that Kool Aid. Another thing that I love, love, love doing is working with people who are leaving corporate or the government because there's a big exodus going on right now, and they don't know how to position their expertise into a different sector. And I help you to craft those types of discussions without dragging the baggage and the jargon from your previous life into the conversation with people who really don't care.

Okay.

They don't care what committees you served on. They don't care a whole lot about the college you went to or a lot of this other stuff where you drink the Kool Aid and you're kind of like Arendelle. Wonderful. What they want to know is, can you solve this problem? And if you can, what is proof of concept? What is your case study?

Wonderful. I love that. So solving a real need, not just this, has been fantastic. Yeah, I love that. That's amazing. So in the last few minutes, is there any parting wisdom? Let's pretend I'm a new business owner or a young lady, which I am, aspiring chief marketing officer one day. What sort of advice do you have? Someone like me.

Okay. If I was talking to a chief marketing officer, the first thing I would say is, you need to make friends with the sales department because you speak two different languages. Yes. You're speaking in algorithms, and they're speaking in solutions. And those two things need to come together. So the reason I picked on you a little bit with that is because, like I said, don't drink the Kool Aid. Don't think that your way is the only way. You must learn how to listen to and digest the challenge of the person you are addressing.

And then you must wrap your solution into their way of communicating. Are they someone who communicates in pictures? Then paint a picture for them. Are they someone who needs some humor? Interject humor into your solution. Are they all about the numbers? Then talk to them about ROI and the things that most matter to them. Because as I said before, this is all about having two entities come to a mutually beneficial agreement. You've got the solution and you've got the transaction and that's what sales is. Hmm. There you go.

Wow.

Well, thank you Dr. Donna. A lot to think about and I hope there was some advice for our business people and investors to help them make more money to be able to invest. And we really appreciate you being here. I would love to have you back again as a guest, maybe in a few months. But Please check out Dr. Donna and Dr. Donna on LinkedIn and Dr.

Donna's website for more information. Thanks so much for joining me. It's been really fun.

Thank you so much for having me.

Now it's time for the IRA Cafe Q and A section where we answer a question from a listener or a viewer of the podcast and today's question we get this a little bit not as frequently, but what is a self directed HSA and how does it work? Well, luckily there's a recent blog post@americanra.com if you go to the website. At the top is the Resources tab and you can see all of our recent blog articles. We post two to three blogs every single week. There's an answer to what is a self directed HSA and how does it work? HSA stands for a Health Savings Account. Did you know that you can self direct your contributions to your health savings account and make that money grow in those investments? There's a whole bunch of information here on the website recently on the blog all about a self directed HSA and what you can do with it. If you have more questions, please feel free to contact us@american ira.com or give us a call at 866-7500. IRA.

American IRA LLC, a North Carolina LLC acts as a third party administrator for New Vision Trust Company, a state chartered South Dakota trust company. As a neutral, self directed IRA administrator, American IRA does not recommend or endorse any investments, individuals or entities, including financial representatives, promoters or companies. American IRA and the IRA Cafe are not responsible for other statements, representations or agreements, nor do we evaluate the quality or profitability of any investment. American IRA does not endorse guests on the Iraq Cafe Podcast. Guest opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of American ira, its subsidiaries, associates or custodian. Participation in the podcast is voluntary and no compensation is provided. American IRA is not a fiduciary and cannot offer financial advice. Please consult your CPA or another professional before making financial decisions.