Zero Sales

Generating Services Revenue Without Selling

David Nugent

• Publisher: PublishDrive
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781737970118
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

I created the Zero Sales Theory to both demystify the complex nature of revenue generation and create an understandable process that has proven very successful for me, in the hope that it would empower others. I hope to also shine a light on a "business art" that is often looked down upon by those who still subscribe to the idea of old-school sales and cheesy salespeople. Generating revenue requires a certain kind of practical intelligence that includes a nuanced set of skills honed over time but never perfected. It is the foundation of all business and creates happiness and security for millions of people.

1.

Introduction

Why Did I Write This?

There are thousands of books on making money in business, and the world certainly does not need another one, does it?

I’m not sure I can objectively answer that question, but I do believe that what you’ll find in this book provides some new context on an old topic. The business world has changed more in the twenty-five or so years since the Internet came to be than it did in the one hundred years that preceded it. I am old enough to have received my initial sales training and experience in a business ecosystem that did not include email, cell phones, or the Internet. I have helped launch and run four companies since then—all focused in some way on Internet- based technology. In this sense, I believe that some of what you’ll find here is different from what you’ve read elsewhere. I will sprinkle in anecdotes about my personal experiences throughout this book in an effort to illustrate why I think the way I do, and hopefully add a little humor.

What you are about to read is based on my thirty years’ experience working in, and managing, commercial organizations. I feel very fortunate to have found success in developing a productive set of beliefs and a theory on the topic of generating revenue and building services businesses. I decided to take a close look at the elements behind that success.

As a founder or co-founder, my role has always been in finding new accounts and generating revenue, and I sought to understand the dynamics that needed to exist in order for business growth to occur. What I discovered in developing the Zero Sales Theory is that much of what is commonly referred to as sales is, in fact, not sales at all. At least not in the way most people think of sales, or the way most businesses approach the sales process.

I believe that to create growth for your business you must demonstrate to a buyer that you understand what matters to them, that you can and will create a relationship with them that they will believe is valuable, and that you are well-intentioned. Most traditional sales training focuses on persuading a buyer to do something that is in your best interest (i.e., “the close”), but may or may not be in their best interest. Zero Sales focuses on value creation, ethics, and trust as a foundation for business relationships that generate revenue consistently over time.

The Zero Sales Theory is the accumulation of some of what I’ve learned over my career, which includes best practices on the topic of generating revenue that has been developed by some of the greatest business minds in the world. I’ve done my best to footnote direct references to the research and work of others, but some of these theories overlap with each other quite a bit, as there are thousands of books, seminars, and videos that address some of the same topics.

I believe that a Zero Sales Theory can be helpful for anybody who has a role where directly or indirectly generating revenue is an important part of their job. Most of my personal experience is in the world of technology services, but this theory also directly applies to agencies and other business to business (“B2B”) professional services firms who seek growth in industries like architecture, law, accounting, financial services, etc. The general concepts of validity, creating value, and being focused on solutions to problems should help in most commercial scenarios for direct to consumer (“D2C”) services businesses and product companies but, again, the theory that I promote here is focused on B2B professional services businesses.

In the first few chapters of this book, we’ll examine what Zero Sales means and how my personal experience influenced the Zero Sales approach. From there, we’ll explore the importance of your beliefs and ethics and how critical trust is in the revenue-generating process. The chapters that follow cover the “Match Mentality,” which is when we begin to review the theme of creating value. We’ll go into the importance of goals and time management, finding and qualifying opportunities, the importance of storytelling, and wrap up with turning opportunity into revenue. The cadence of this book’s content is designed to have you explore yourself, what you think and believe, while understanding that generating revenue is simply about creating value. The sequence of the content also mirrors the typical sequence of the buyer journey and the process of generating revenue.

I have personally used books like this as guideposts in my journey toward success. I believe that all learning adds a new tool to the toolkit of a business professional, and sometimes certain philosophies or storytelling techniques can feel perfect for an individual person at a specific moment in time. I sincerely hope that this serves that purpose for you.

In the next three chapters, I’ll provide some background information on my life experience and how it informed much of my perspective and the Zero Sales approach.

2.

Life as a Sales Guy

In the preface, I described the day that altered the track of my life forever. As frightening and stressful as the weeks that followed became, it was the best decision I ever made. I was six years into my sales career and making very good money for someone in their mid- twenties, but I found that every Sunday night I began to dread the week ahead. I felt trapped but had no idea what to do. Like many people, I think I believed that hating your job was an acceptable trade-off if the money was good enough.

As I approached the coffee machine on that hot July day, a couple of older sales guys (who were probably in their sixties) were huddled around telling bad jokes. I was still sweaty from a horrible trip to the office, and I looked at the two of them. I remember thinking that being right in that spot as a sixty-something-year-old was the path I was on. At that moment, something in me snapped, and the decision could not have been more obvious. I walked into my sales manager’s office and quit. At that moment, my journey into entrepreneurship began.

I’ve had some kind of a revenue-generating role for my entire professional career. My dad was a successful executive who worked in sales for over forty years. He worked in financial printing sales and would often describe his job as something he “could teach our cat to do,” so I assumed I could probably figure it out. Somewhat predictably, my first sales job was working for a large financial printing company, a competitor of my dad’s company. It was a suit-and-tie corporate environment where the clients were primarily large law firms and investment banking companies.

During college, it felt like a forgone conclusion that I’d wind up in a job like this. Growing up, we lived a comfortable upper-middle-class existence in the Long Island suburb of Port Washington, and my dad’s job had allowed us to build a nice life. The financial printing industry had existed for over two hundred years; in fact, my dad’s company was founded in 1776 and was one of the original companies on the American Stock Exchange.

Financial printing companies were responsible for printing stock prospectuses, S1s (registration statements for initial public offerings), annual reports, and other financial documents. It is hard to imagine now, but before the Internet, all legal and financial documents needed to be printed and distributed for execution, filing, etc. Financial printers were also a neutral business environment where lawyers and investment bankers from both sides of deals would go to draft financial documentation that was to be filed with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). Again, this was all before electronic filing, so these paper documents needed to be printed for distribution to shareholders and filed with the SEC, and they represented hundreds of millions of dollars in deals every year. These deals had filing dates associated with them that were critical, so an important part of that world was that it operated day and night, seven days a week, and deals regularly were negotiated in all-night sessions. The intensity of the environment meant spending long days and nights with clients, which built camaraderie and relationships, and those relationships fueled the business.

Within two years of starting that first sales job, my company was bought by my dad’s company, and my dad and I wound up in the same office. There were over thirty salespeople in that New York office, and this was old-school business. Think Mad Men, but in the financial services industry in the 1980s. Smoking and drinking in the office, off color jokes, inappropriate behavior, three-martini lunches, the works. It was not really the place you’d want to work with your dad.

We had grown closer when I became an adult than when I was a kid, but working with him was weird and not where I saw myself long term. And so, on that hot July day, I decided it was time to move on.

During my six-year tenure in financial printing sales, I learned a lot about relationship building, the critical importance of loyalty in managing people, working hard, sales prospecting, and many other lessons in business. I also learned what I was willing to do (and not do) in order to be successful, and this helped me begin to form the beliefs that would wind up guiding my life.

3.

Life as an Entrepreneur

After leaving the world of financial printing, I began exploring a passion I had for illustration, specifically cartooning. I had always been an illustrator and had created a tremendous volume of work over the years, some of which I kept and some I gave away. In fact, I got real joy in creating a piece of work and giving it as a gift. Some were simple birthday cards, or fun pieces about an event. To this day, I have people send me smartphone photos of work I created and gave to them twenty or thirty years ago, most of which I did not remember creating. It’s an amazing feeling to have those things resurface many years later and to know that they thought enough of them to save them.

My dad was a formally trained fine artist. He attended the NY School of Visual Arts and worked on the creative team in his old company before following a more lucrative path to a sales role. Now, I was going the other way—from sales to commercial art.

While I had a passion for illustration, I had just quit a job and needed to begin bartending to pay the bills. After a couple of initial bartending gigs, I landed a job at a big Upper East Side bar. Mondays and Wednesdays were a little quiet, but Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights brought crowds from the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island; the bar was packed, and the money was great. I needed to work as much as possible, so I became known as the “utility infielder,” taking any shift that was free in addition to my Thursday, Friday, and Saturday shifts. Bartending not only provided financial stability, but a great place to continue to refine my ability to tell stories, manage conflict, and build a strong “services mentality.”

Back when I was selling financial printing, I got into the habit of creating cartoons about funny things that happened during the deals that I worked on. I would work on them during the all-nighters we were forced to work, and then I’d get glossy reproductions framed and would hand them out as mementos when the deal was done. Clients seemed to love them.

So, years later, on the days I wasn’t working as a bartender, I began to cultivate a new business as an illustrator/graphic designer, focusing first on my connections in financial services. I taught myself Photoshop, Illustrator, and CorelDraw and built a small cadre of clients.

Over time, I began to realize that my ability to make money as an artist was more evidence of my ability to generate revenue than my ability to create great “art.” I had good connections and what I was creating was cheap enough for them to agree to buy without too much resistance. This also meant I wasn’t making very much money doing it. Despite the fact that I enjoyed every moment of the creation of each piece, and still do to this day, there was no clear path between my illustrations and my desire to create personal wealth.

The year was 1995 and the excitement around the Internet and the “World Wide Web” was growing. Companies were already using email (with varying degrees of commitment), and they were now exploring “Web pages” as a path to promoting their businesses and distributing content. I began to think there may be a commercial path between my desire to create and a place in this new business ecosystem. My cousin Bob and I partnered first at an IT services business and then launched a web design company in 1997. My life in digital technology began.

We ran that digital business through the fall of 2003, riding through the maelstrom of the dot-com bubble bursting. We had a few investments pay off and a few others failed badly. The business survived, but it had lost quite a few clients and existed primarily as a technical support arm of our largest remaining client. It was clear that it was time for me to move on, but I needed my remaining clients to find a “safe landing” with a business that could service them. At the advice of a friend, I met with a guy who was willing to take on some of the smaller clients. That guy’s name was Igor Ulis.

We transitioned the client base over to Igor’s company as I launched my new venture, a sports marketing company focused on custom content and events.

In addition to building and managing the sports marketing business, I continued with technology consulting during this time and began to get access to some larger tech services opportunities. By 2008, it became clear that the technology consulting business was outpacing the sports marketing business.

Around this time, Igor called and said he wanted to start a new digital technology company and was interested in subletting some space from me. I put him and four others into one of my offices and the next journey began. What I didn’t know at the time was that the guys that I was about to spend the next thirteen years with saw the world in a very similar manner to the way I saw it and shared most of my core beliefs. These beliefs became critical to the culture we built and the success we had.

4.

The Importance of Beliefs

Core beliefs are our most deeply held assumptions about ourselves, other people, and the world around us. Our experiences shape and define our beliefs and the way we see the world. Because everyone’s life experience is unique, we can’t expect others to believe everything we believe. Core beliefs can be positive or negative. Positive core beliefs can allow us to recognize that the world is a complex and nuanced place and that the people around us are similarly complex and nuanced. All people do both good and bad things. Negative beliefs often see the world as good or evil and...