If you want to turbo charge your sales growth using your own website and some very cool digital marketing applications, this month’s Magnify Sales Book is for you. Marketing supports sales. In fact, sales and marketing are merging so closely that a new term has been coined – ‘smarketing’ which refers to the alignment between your sales and marketing teams. Sales has gone beyond conversations at networking events and handing out business cards. What are you doing to improve your social selling? Check out this month’s book for some handy tips.
What’s special about this month’s book?
It’s not every day you read a book that comes with a warning on the back cover like this one –
Warning: This book will flood your business with a torrential downpour of buyers!
If you’re ready to saturate your business with sales, this book will show you some incredible strategies to get the rain started.
‘Sell Like Crazy’ spills the sales secrets Sabri Suby, founder of King Kong, uses in his own business and in his clients’ businesses, to help them sell like crazy. The book’s subtitle is ‘How to get as many clients, customers and sales as you can possibly handle’, and Sabri has carefully detailed his process for business builders to create this change in your own business.
Book details for ‘Sell Like Crazy’
Book Title – Sell Like Crazy
Author – Sabri Suby
Publication Date – 2019
Who is Sabri Suby?
A passionate salesman for his company ‘King Kong Marketing’ who has spent ‘seventeen long years in the trenches, on the front lines ‘doing the work’. Collecting battle scars to find out every secret sales technique in existence.’ (see page 33) You guessed it, Sabri is obsessed with doing an excellent job growing sales for his business, and for those of his clients.
Sabri Suby founded ‘King Kong’, a leading online marketing agency, from his bedroom in Melbourne using a computer his girlfriend had bought him. Over the five years since 2014, he has taken the company from $0 to $10 million turnover, growing his team from 2 to 50 staff.
With ‘Sell Like Crazy’, Sabri opens the curtain on many of his secret strategies that have grown amazing sales results for King Kong clients – truly sending the lift back down to the business builders he is so passionate about helping.
What is the book’s premise?
That from the $500,000 Sabri himself has invested in learning (seminars, books tests, etc – see page 51), Sabri has distilled a remarkably simple framework that business builders across all industries can apply to set up incredible digital marketing that drives huge sales growth results for your business.
Sabri warns readers to put the book down right now if you’re not prepared to work hard and commit yourself to the cause of selling like crazy in your business (see page 10).
So why would such a successful businessman reveal all these incredible inside sales secrets for the price of a paperback book? As Sabri says on page 11 ‘This is my way of giving back to a community that has made all my wildest dreams possible.’
Does the book deliver on its premise?
With an eight-phase framework to assess your ideal clients and then put in place a digital marketing process that delivers super-keen sales prospects, Sabri helps business builders cut through the overwhelm of digital marketing and create a focused online sales process that works for them.
Each chapter contains helpful tips and screenshots to help the reader understand the concepts and Sabri’s processes which deliver your ideal clients who are ready to talk and then commit to purchasing.
If you’re wondering how all this digital marketing fits together to support sales growth in your business, and interested to hear how someone wildly successful broke through multiple glass ceilings in his own business and for multiple others, Sabri details his framework that can be applied to businesses across all industries.
What is the author’s voice like?
‘Sell Like Crazy’ is very easy to read. Written in larger sized print, well-spaced and in simple language – this book will benefit those just starting out in business, and those already successful at digital marketing.
This book is funny as well as witty and insightful. If you like laughing while you’re learning, you’ll love ‘Sell Like Crazy’.
Sabri is very real – so real that he uses colourful language in several parts of the book. Behind the colourful language are some incredible tips detailing how you can tweak sales in your business so that it just works better.
Sabri’s story is hugely encouraging. He shares his journey, from humble beginnings as one of two children to a hard-working single mother, who held down ‘three jobs and worked tirelessly to give us a good life’ (see page 34) – to where he is today – the successful business owner of Australia’s fastest growing digital marketing agency (AFR Fast Starter’s List)
So why would Sabri share so much of his ‘secret-sauce’ with the world? Isn’t he worried about losing clients? Writing ‘Sell Like Crazy’ fits with Sabri’s vision to be the change that he’d like to see in the world.
Because if you’ve done well, it’s your obligation to spend a good portion of your time sending the elevator back down. And that’s exactly what I’m doing in this book.’ (see pages 52-53).
For the business owners reading this review, ‘Sell Like Crazy’ will support you whether you decide to do digital marketing for yourself, or just simply help you feel more empowered to make better decisions if you decide to contract the work out.
Any memorable quotes?
A key message that comes through from Sabri is to focus on your clients, and on building meaningful relationships, and your sales will naturally progress. Sabri doesn’t hold back when he describes the mistakes that many businesses are making with their digital marketing (see page 137):
This is where I see 99% of businesses getting it wrong. They approach their prospects like an army would attack a walled city – with a full frontal assault. They send traffic straight to a landing page, or even worse, their homepage, and attempt to go straight for the sale and pray they’ll make a profit.
They simply disregard all the necessary steps that take place to turn a stranger into a satisfied, paying client. They are far too eager to make a sales pitch. They make the wrong assumption and treat everybody in their market as if they’re already eager to buy.
No wining, no dining… nothing! They are doing the equivalent of walking into a bar and asking a stranger to marry them!
In Phase Five ‘Traffic’, Sabri leads a discussion on the three types of traffic that come through your website – helpful details to identify each type, what they’re looking for and how to engage with these potential clients.
‘If your message is not speaking to the temperature of your audience, it’s never going to work …
Think of it this way: If you went to a restaurant and ordered a medium-rare steak only to be served a steak so well done it might as well be a hockey puck, let’s be real: you’d be sending that steak back.
On a steak, the temperature has to be right before serving. And the same thing is true for ads, offers, and landing pages. If you want to convert your visitors, you have to match the temperature of your audience. – see page 208
Once again, Sabri likens the buyer journey to building your significant life-time relationship:
‘Marketing is much like dating. There are a series of steps and events that must take place in order for a relationship to develop and get more serious.’ – see page 209.
What are some insights I can get from reading this book?
Every chapter of this book is spring-loaded with incredible gems that you can deploy in your business right now to get your sales moving.
Check out Phase Four: The Godfather Strategy – make your prospects an offer they can’t refuse. Sabri gives an excellent definition of what makes an ‘offer’ on page 152
‘An ‘offer’ consists of two things:
- What your prospects want when they respond to your marketing.
- What they have to do to get it
Sabri’s Godfather Offer (page 167) is comprised of seven major components:
- Rationale
- Build Value
- Pricing
- Payment Options
- Premiums
- Power Guarantee
- Scarcity
We could go on – but you’ll need to read the book to get all the details.
See also the excellent discussion on email in Phase Eight: Automate and Multiply. Sabri is right – building your business depending on someone else’s owned platform puts your business at the mercy of their whims. If Sabri was to be stranded on a desert island with just one marketing weapon of choice – he would choose email.
‘It turns out that having an email list has a forty-fold impact on your bottom line. Yes, you read that right … for every dollar you put into email marketing you get back forty dollars more than you would through … almost every marketing channel. Forty times more revenue!’ (see page 293)
As Sabri also says on page 293 ‘Email outperforms every other marketing channel. Period. And one of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make is not building an email list from day one.’
It’s enough to make you want to sign up for Mailchimp. Except that ActiveCampaign comes out on top when Sabri compares the deliverability of several email software programmes across a range of email platforms (see pages 300-301).
There’s also a good exploration of the ideal length of your email subject line (pages 318-319).
The details that Sabri outlines are just incredible. You could be forgiven for think he’s being picky. Actually – email is a powerful medium for communication with our customers. Little changes can have a big impact, and Sabri has dedicated significant time and effort into making sure that readers understand how to shape their emails so that they get the best ROI for their business.
It’s time to ‘Sell Like Crazy’!
Sabri is exuberant and colourful and brilliant at sales. He makes no apology for his aim to ‘bring some spice, entertainment, and excitement’ to his readers’ ‘vanilla existence’. Putting it even more bluntly, Sabri says ‘I don’t care if your market consists of lawyers, financial planners, neuroscientists, architects, or a member of the royal family … they will never be ‘bored into buying’.’ (see page 328).
There’s just one problem with taking these words completely at face value – What if you sell a highly professional/expensive/technical product or service? Is Sabri’s approach too much?
For some situations, I personally think that it could be. However, Sabri has come to this statement from his initial premise that marketing needs to be speaking to the temperature of each individual prospect. We need to be communicating in ways that resonate with our ideal target market, otherwise our message will be lost. We need to craft offers that speak to our ideal target market – to their needs, their fears, their desires, their interests. This is when we will truly be selling – when we are giving our prospects what they want when they want it.
If you remember to put your customer at the centre of all your marketing, this framework will help you create the kind of focused sales and marketing messages that your prospects are looking for. Is your ideal target market introverted and careful? Match their tone so that they identify with you, and feel understood by you. This will increase trust and build better client relationships. Sabri would add that we need to also be different enough to stand out and get noticed. As a business builder – you need to choose the right communication level for your ideal target market.
Did the book live up to expectations?
Yes. By deploying just a few of the tips contained in this book, you can make a significant change for the better with your sales and marketing.
This book does an excellent job of demonstrating how to take all the elements of digital marketing and put them together into a framework that works across multiple industries. Whatever your business stage or industry, there will be something useful for you to take away from ‘Sell Like Crazy’.
Who would you recommend this book to?
I’d recommend this book to business builders
- Who want to do digital marketing themselves
- Who want to learn more about digital marketing so they can
- understand what their agency is doing
- make the best decision when choosing their digital marketing agency
Who should buy this book?
- Business builders who are committed to building an incredible digital marketing framework that drives sales for their business
- Marketers who want some tips from a writer who’s personally tested all the strategies in this book to check their ROI
- All those in sales who want to create amazing emails and written collateral, plus get some tips on overcoming objections
Where can I buy this book?
Here’s the link on Amazon – the Paperback is available from $19.95
Recommended snacks to accompany reading this book?
This book is deliberately written to shock readers into taking serious action with your digital marketing.
If it all seems too much and you’d still prefer to sit on the couch and leave digital marketing to your competition – perhaps enjoy a dish of Sabri’s suggested vanilla ice-cream with a few strawberries.
If you’re ready to take serious sales action and unafraid of putting yourself out there – serve yourself a dish of coffee ice-cream, with a swirl of deep chocolate sauce and a generous serving of pistachio nuts. Best recommended drinks – a ginger and turmeric slushie or your favourite craft beer!
Head over the the Magnify Sales Book Club to enter this month’s Sales Book of the Month draw. ‘Like’ our Magnify Consulting facebook page for an extra entry.