Your Next Five Moves

Most people don’t think more than one or two moves ahead. Those people are amateurs and flame out quickly in business. Effective strategy is about making a move and being prepared to launch another series of moves based on how the market or your competition reacts. You must think beyond your first strike to execute an effective strategy. When you start to get really good, you anticipate how others will react and can deploy a series of moves that are nearly impossible to counteract.

People who don’t think more than one move ahead are driven by ego, emotion, and fear.

Even though I have no formal education, I have read more than 1,500 business-related books. I was, and remain, obsessed with learning. I’ve squeezed every bit of wisdom out of these readings and applied it to my business.

I believe that having questions is better than having answers because it leads to more learning. After all, isn’t the point of learning to help you get what you want? Don’t you have to start with what you want and figure out what you have to learn in order to get it? —Ray Dalio, author of Principles: Life and Work and investor, on 2012 Time list of world’s 100 most influential people

Whether it’s a high school student asking for direction or a CEO running a $500 million company, when someone asks me a question, I respond by saying, “It all depends on how honestly you can answer this question: Who do you want to be?”

Nothing matters unless you understand what makes you tick and who you want to be.

Who do you want to be?

Make Pain Your Fuel

The only thing separating us from greatness is a vision and a plan for achieving greatness.

The key is identifying your cause and knowing who you want to be.

At that point, my blood was boiling. I couldn’t believe a grown man could look me in the eye after going back on his word. I had been so focused on beating the goal that I hadn’t put any thought into what I would do if it didn’t work out.

Use Your Haters and Doubters to Drive You

As an investor in entrepreneurs, Corcoran actually looks for people who are fueled by pain. She sees growing up poor as an asset. She said, “A bad childhood? Yes! I love it like an insurance policy. An abusive father? Fabulous! Never had a father? Better! My most successful entrepreneurs didn’t all have miserable childhoods, but somebody said they couldn’t, and they are still pissed.”

Michal Jordan’s late father said, “If you want to get the best out of Michael Jordan, you tell him he can’t do something.”

A phrase I use all the time is future truth. It means to live in the present as if your future truth has already become a reality.

To take things to the next level and set the bar even higher, aspire to be heroic. Think about your heroes, and ask yourself how they would act in such situations.

Businesses need a unique selling proposition.

In Blue Ocean Strategy, the authors warned against trying to beat competitors at their strengths. They insist that it’s a losing position and offer a ton of evidence to support their claim. They believe instead in focusing on blue-ocean marketing, going into areas that are relatively fresh and open to superior growth.

When you compete against people whose knowledge and skills are inferior to yours, you’re likely to win. No business is risk free, but you can decrease the risk by choosing a game in which the odds are in your favor.

Master Knowing Yourself WHO DO YOU WANT TO BE? 1. Whether it’s solitude, talking to a mentor, or using the questions we discussed in chapter 1, set aside time to get clear on who you want to be. It will help if you tap into your pain. Create a visual that is in your face constantly to remind you of your future truth. STUDY THE MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT: YOU 2. Don’t wait for a crisis to look for clues about the most important person (you). Make the time now to inspect yourself. Become at ease with asking yourself tough questions and become clear about what drives you. The Personal Identity Audit is the perfect place to start. YOUR PATH TO CREATING WEALTH: INTRAPRENEUR OR ENTREPRENEUR?

3. Find the path that allows you to use your unique talents with the best odds for the highest possible return, and that also fires you up. Whether you want to be an entrepreneur or intrapreneur or hold some other position, be strategic about how you’re going to build your wealth. Identify the competitive edge that will differentiate you and allow you to find your blue ocean.

Every master, both in chess and in business, learns more from studying the moves that led to defeat than the ones that led to victory.

What I Can Control Plotting my next moves My daily effort My choice of attorney and other resources Keeping our sales force and our leaders focused on slaying the next dragon What I Can’t Control Why Aegon chose to sue me Whether the lawsuit would put us out of business Whether other insurance carriers would drop our contract

Playing offense involves looking for opportunities to make money or advance growth, expansion, marketing, and sales. Playing defense involves solving a problem, preventing the loss of money, or going backward.

No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team. —Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn

To take the next step from solopreneur or side hustler, you’d better have a good answer to this question:

Before your company gets big, you don’t recruit people to your company; you recruit them to you.

Ask yourself this question: If people get closer to you, will they win? Will they do better in life? Do you have a résumé—a list of success stories of people whose lives have been enriched from being around you? In other words, think about what benefits program you are offering prospective employees.

Instead of being selfish and looking to see what I could take from other people, I learned to focus on what I could give them—and I improved my own worth in the process. That paradigm shift—that one decision—changed my life for the better. I stopped asking how other people could make my life better, and instead, I asked: How can I make everybody else’s life better just by the benefits that I offer them?

Think about these three questions: 1. What benefits are you currently offering to others? 2. In what way do people improve by associating with you? 3. How many lives have you changed positively in the past year?

Headhunters get paid handsomely to steal your best people; you can bet they’re coming after them, so you’d better make sure you know how to retain them. Depending on the size of the business, a headhunter earns between $30,000 and $60,000 to place a CFO. The fee to place a CEO starts at about $80,000 and may go as high as $500,000.

Questions That People Will Ask (and You Must Answer) When They Are Deciding to Work for You 1. What makes your company distinct from your competition? 2. What separates your leadership from that of others? 3. Do you have a code of honor? Do you embody it? 4. What benefits program will they get from being associated with you? 5. Do people constantly see you growing? Can they tell that you are evolving?

What You Must Recognize in Order to Retain Talent People want to be compensated properly for their efforts. Outstanding performers want to participate in the success of the company. People want to know that they’re part of an organization that’s making an impact. People want to be recognized in front of their peers for the work that they do. People want to know that there’s an opportunity for them to grow within the company. People want to be judged based on a clear set of expectations given to them without the goalposts constantly changing.

“Let’s make a list of values and principles that we want to live by. Let’s see how many we come up with.”

everyone who knows me will tell you, I’m obsessed with principles.

When we decided to have kids, my wife, Jennifer, and I took another piece of paper and did the same exercise. As a result, our family has a culture. We stand for something. We have principles along with clear values that we repeat over and over.

Why am I so relentless, in both my personal and business family, about repeating our principles? Because I believe in the power of reminding and re-reminding. I want these values and principles to be top of mind at all times for my team and family.

I’ve observed other entrepreneurs who have problems in their businesses: people surfing porn sites when they should be working, doing unethical things to get business, and working just hard enough to get by but not hard enough to excel. Some of them have failed to clarify what they value. And some may have been clear about their beliefs but haven’t repeated them enough—and demonstrated them enough—for them to sink in.

I asked her the same question I always ask parents who are older than I am: “What are three things you did as a parent that worked?”

Her first two answers were the common ones: love your children, and give them plenty of attention. The last one was about credibility. She said, “If you threaten to punish them or take something away from them, do it or else your word loses value.”

As I was growing up, I can’t tell you how many times my dad said, “Never be afraid of the truth.”

Six Strategies for Replacement and Skill Transfer 1. List your tasks and skills. Make a list of all your tasks and skills and determine which ones you are the best at and which ones you are not. Focus on your strengths, and replace yourself on all the other tasks. 2. Identify who’s seasonal and who’s not. You can’t assume that everybody is going to work for you forever. You need to identify who is there to fill a six-year role and who a six-month role. If you determine that now, you won’t be surprised when someone needs to be replaced. 3. Know the different languages spoken by your sales, support, technical, and executive teams. Sales leaders generate revenue and build a company through their efforts. Employees are hired to support those efforts. You need to know the difference between them. Executives require empowering language that makes them feel autonomous and respected. 4. Know who can maintain the company culture. It is very important that whoever replaces you will fit the culture you established so that the business can keep growing after you leave. 5. Know your company’s practices and procedures. You need to put pen to paper and write down each department’s practices and procedures. Replacements will then have a manual to follow, regardless of their level, making the transfer of specific skills quick and painless. 6. Develop leaders to help spread the right mindset. Have one-on-one conversations with your future leaders to inject the company’s mindset into them now, before they need to replace someone. Your having a mindset of leadership development will also increase the value of your company.

Divyank Turakhia, a thirty-eight-year-old with a net worth of $1.76 billion, once said, “Keep figuring out how to replace yourself because your time is most valuable in this process. Once you figure out what you’re passionate about and as long as you’re doing it, you’ll be successful in doing that one thing and you keep doubling down yourself learning more.”

This means going beyond surface knowledge: your employee Joe likes fishing; your customer Becky is obsessed with Game of Thrones. What you want to know is what makes them tick. I do everything I can to get to know my team members.

When you push people with questions, you may touch a raw nerve. That’s fine. This is how you get to know them. When they become emotional, they reveal the parts of themselves that they might be hiding.

I can’t lead people if I don’t know who they are. I need to know their upbringing and what influenced them as they were growing up. In the same way, my people need to know who I am. I want people to know the truth of my story,

that I’m a guy from Iran who went through hell, that my drive comes from all those F-you people who are still loud voices inside my head. It all boils down to the willingness to ask questions—not just the expected ones such as “How did you like your last job?” but ones that poke and probe and encourage people to reveal a deeper part of themselves. You’ve got to ask dig-deep questions that help you discover who a person really is. That knowledge is gold, because it will allow you to think several moves ahead in terms of how the person fits into your game plan. It’s what will help you form a productive, long-lasting relationship. In doing so, the trust you develop grows stronger, and speed follows.

Questions to Ask Yourself to Reach Each Individual 1. What makes this person tick? 2. How does this person want to be loved? 3. What makes this person feel appreciated? 4. What’s the most effective way to show that I care? 5. What action will best “land” on this person?

WE NEED YOU Giving people responsibility is one way to show them that you need them. There are people who need to feel needed.

There are also people who don’t care to be needed. The more they feel needed, the more they may abuse the relationship. They may say, “Oh, you need me. Without me you can’t do anything.”

If you look at companies that are stagnant, you’ll find that recognition is not part of their culture. It’s all about pressure, pressure, pressure.

Relying on cash bonuses to motivate people makes them feel as though they need to be bribed to do their work.

Giving a bonus is the opposite of getting specific about what makes a person tick.

Some people may say, “I don’t need any recognition.” The ones who say they don’t need it actually need double the recognition.

expect. I don’t care how confident a person may seem, everybody needs recognition.

3. PRAISE: THREE DIFFERENT TYPES There are three different ways to praise someone. Knowing which to choose has to do with

knowing that individual. I’ll keep reminding you that everyone has different hot buttons. 1. Private: The first type of praise is given privately. It could be over a meal or during a casual interaction. It can also be done using text, email, or Slack. It may look something like this: “Listen, I just want you to know that you’ve grown a lot, and I want to recognize you. I see the work you’re putting in and the way you’ve been improving. None of it goes unnoticed. Thank you.” 2. Public: The next is public. This plays on recognition and works best with people who like to be in the limelight. You want to call special attention to their contributions in meetings. 3. Behind their back: The last type of praise is given behind a person’s back. You recognize people behind their backs when you praise them to others when they’re not present. I talked about the power of back talk earlier. Again, know the individual to use this effectively.

An expression that you often hear in sports is that you cannot teach speed. You can teach how to exploit it, yes, but speed is something you either have or you don’t.

Master Building the Right Team THE MYTH OF THE SOLOPRENEUR: HOW TO BUILD YOUR TEAM 1. Identify the types of team members you want to attract. Create the right value proposition (benefits program) to attract and retain the right team members. Be even more selective about whom you allow into your inner circle. CREATE A PRINCIPLES-BASED CULTURE 2. Establish and communicate your values and principles—both for your business and as an individual. Don’t compromise your nonnegotiables, or else they will be only words on a piece of paper. TRUST = SPEED: THE POWER OF RELIABILITY 3. Inspect every skill needed in each department to make it transferable to any new hire in order to develop new

leaders. Inspect the language you use to communicate with your teammates and leaders. Is it one that creates trust or doubt? Ask questions to understand what people care about most, and speak the language that moves them. Make a list of your top five team members, and identify their key motivators.

I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion. —Alexander the Great

How is it even possible that that person works out so much but continues to look the same? It’s possible, all right. In fact, it’s normal. Whether in the gym or the office, most people show up and just go through the motions. They work in their business but not on their business.

Growth is important, but entrepreneurs often treat it as the only function, and that’s a mistake. Two types of business growth exist: linear and exponential. The former represents steady but not spectacular gains: you meet deadlines, sell and maintain customers, and expand your network of contacts. The latter represents quantum leaps. It’s what happens when entrepreneurs step out of the day-to-day running of the business to do something exceptional.

1. OPERATING SYSTEMS This is about tightening up your systems, technology, and processes, making them more efficient and effective.

2. BIZ DEV AND SALES Next are business development (biz dev) and sales. This has to do with creating relationships with new vendors and new partnerships and making your sales process better. It’s about networking and attending events from your industry. Relationship, relationship, relationship. Biz dev is linear. You have to close deals and continue to grow your accounts.

3. THE NEXT INNOVATIVE CAMPAIGN As CEO, you may launch a program or promotion that is potentially game changing. Bally Total Fitness did this when it introduced zero-down-payment gym memberships at a time when its competitors all required a sizable down payment.

Making the right move can create a massive surge in your business. You have to synthesize everything you know about your customers’ wants and needs, your competition’s limitations, and your own strengths to create a campaign that will drive rapid revenue growth.

4. LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT Exponential growth depends on your ability to develop other people into effective leaders.

You need to look at the strategy quadrant and ask yourself where you are and are not doing a good job. Where do you need to pivot? Do you need to create an innovative campaign? Maybe you need to look at the next ninety days and prepare for your next innovative campaign.

How can you get your people to perform at peak capacity? How can you motivate them to make significant improvements year after year? These are tough questions for entrepreneurs.

The way I apply pressure is by asking questions—and waiting for the answers. I challenge my people the same way I’m challenging you. I ask them to become clear on who they want to be and describe their next moves in detail. Once they express what they want, I use their answers to keep them accountable. I don’t yell and scream. I don’t impose my own goals on them. What I do is repeat what they said they want to accomplish. If they are falling short of their goals, I ask why and shut up. I’ve found that getting them to self-reflect is much more powerful than telling them what to do.

Before I started my agency, I was a lion working for a big company. I was aggressive. I was brash.

The key to dealing with lions is challenging them.

If you want to be liked, if you find delight only in making people comfortable, you’re not cut out to deal with a lion, much less be a CEO. People may hate you in the moment, but the only way for them to thrive and your business to survive is to hold them accountable.

How can you reduce the time it takes to get things done?

1. Being too cheap or splurging unwisely 2. Letting the wrong people have influence over you 3. Having a “royalty” mentality 4. Refusing to adapt 5. Obsessively comparing yourself to others

You’ve got to spend money to make money. Fail to spend money to update your software or launch a necessary new product, and you’ll pay.

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. —Sherlock Holmes

In business you should be constantly asking yourself: What can I track?

But if you want to build something big and sustainable, you also have to rely on systems.

systems of procedures; systems of processes. Systems help you with follow-through and follow-up, and they also help create a culture in which nothing is ever unclear. When you’re trying to move to the next level of business growth and you’re not sure which option is best, data on different markets can help you make the right choice.

You simply cannot scale your business without creating the systems for it to operate without you. You have to make lists. You must create manuals (video libraries may be more effective than printed ones). You must codify your knowledge. If it exists only in your head, you have a job to do. If you want to have a sustainable business, codify what you know and make sure it gets transferred to everyone else in your organization.

I then took a page out of Ray Dalio’s book and created baseball cards with every agent’s statistics for the year. Because the agents were aware that the cards would be going to press on January 15—and their performance would be seen by everyone in the company—sales in December skyrocketed.

Most of your revenue producers have type A personalities. They’re aggressive, confident, decisive types, and these qualities are useful in various aspects of business. But type A’s are also good self-promoters, and as a CEO, you need to differentiate between self-promotion and achievement.

If You Don’t Have a System, You Have a Limited Chance for Exponential Growth

Five Reasons to Implement Systems 1. What is measured can be scaled and improved. 2. You will know where and to whom to direct your energy and expertise. 3. You can stop micromanaging and empower your employees.

4. Your employees, especially your top performers, won’t be able to deceive you with hype. 5. You will simultaneously become more effective and have more freedom.

You are your own worst enemy. You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present. Since nothing seems urgent to you, you’re only half involved in what you do…. Cut your ties to the past; enter unknown territory where you must depend on your wits and energy to see you through. Place yourself on “death ground,” where your back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell to get out alive.

Every general from Napoleon to Patton mastered this technique, and every business leader needs to do so as well. Why are your numbers always off in February? Why is there always a mad scramble as deadlines approach? Why do a lot of your meetings degenerate into yelling and scapegoating? Why have you lost three major customers in the last six months? These are the types of questions that ought to give you pause. Investigate the deepest cause. See if you can identify the problem that is hidden beneath the surface of things. When paranoia leads to curiosity, which leads to solutions, it is serving its function.

MAKE FRIENDS WITH MURPHY’S LAW Savvy entrepreneurs respect Murphy’s Law. Before you launch a new product, make an investment, pull the trigger on an acquisition, or make any type of major move, ask yourself this question: What are the very worst events that might happen as a result of my action? Then take steps to mitigate those potential worst events.

Everyone in business has a Goliath, and it isn’t always the biggest company in your industry. Your Goliath could be a company that is taking up market share in a particular region, or it could be more localized, such as another salesperson in your own sales department who has more experience and bigger, more lucrative accounts.

Know your weaknesses. Knowing your strengths is easy, but knowing your weaknesses will enable you to be nimble and pivot when taking on your Goliath. 2. Know Goliath’s weaknesses. You cannot fight Goliath where it is strong. You must find its Achilles heel and exploit it. 3. Master three things you do better. You set the terms of your battle in the marketplace. Use your strengths to master three things Goliath can’t do and do them better than it can. 4. Don’t try to be Goliath. You can learn moves and information from Goliath, but if you model yourself after it, how are you going to beat it? You have to take advantage of your own strength, not someone else’s. 5. Focus on specializing. Goliaths tend to generalize in order to spread their influence and power. You must specialize to capture market share from them. 6. When you’re small, make yourself appear bigger. Walk tall, and don’t be intimidated by Goliath’s size and strength. Embody your future truth and compete as though you’re the one with the advantage. 7. Keep a low profile initially. You are going to need a lot of help, and you will need time to get better. Don’t waste your early years rubbing people the wrong way and making noise. Work on your business first before looking for a Goliath to fight. 8. Move quickly. Use your inherent advantages of strength and speed against Goliath. It can’t move as fast as you can. 9. Partner with competitors that share an enemy. Goliaths create a lot of enemies. Look for your synergies with those enemies, and build strategic alliances. 10. Study history. History can give you context and strategies that you never even thought of in your fight against Goliath. Knowledge is out there for you to harvest and can only help you. 11. Let other competitors wear your opponents down. Goliaths must fend off a lot of competitors, and you don’t always need to be on the front lines. Standing back and letting someone else take the spotlight can help you focus your resources better and give you an advantage over Goliaths. 12. Don’t disclose every aspect of your strategy. To a grand master, this should be self-explanatory. Controlling the Narrative

Social media is the great equalizer. When I started my agency, Goliath used every resource it had to bully me. My competitors said horrible things about me and made up nasty rumors that could easily have ruined my reputation. That was when I fully grasped the fact that using social media properly would allow me to control the narrative.

Goliath can spend millions of dollars on PR. Meanwhile, you can make a video with an iPhone and get more views—and make a bigger impact.

When you post, really share yourself. We’ve been brainwashed that professionalism means only putting our best foot forward. The problem is that people don’t connect with perfect robots. They connect with all of who you are.

Be Shameless About Self-Promotion The first rule of self-promotion is that you have to be shameless. What holds people back is the fear of being judged.

Phil Knight of Nike is shameless. Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys is shameless. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is shameless. Kevin Hart is shameless. Do you think Hart reached nearly 100 million Instagram followers by being timid? If you’re not shameless, no one is going to know who you are. What holds us back from being shameless is the fear of humiliation. So what if you’re humiliated? Do you know anyone who’s not been humiliated?

Another way to self-promote is by making predictions. Make some predictions based on your intuition and research. Why is that important? Because if even some of your predictions come true, you gain credibility and look like a sage.

never being wrong and no one knowing who you are.

I realize I’ve thrown a lot of examples at you. To summarize, the most important tenets of social media are: Have a personality. Be bold. Be brash (if that’s who you are). Be engaging. Trumpet yourself when you’re right. Poke fun at yourself when you’re wrong. Accept the loss when you’re wrong.

Promotion is something you must constantly be doing. Here’s another technique. Instead of name-dropping, book-drop. Let’s say you’re sitting in a meeting and in response to a comment, you say, “One of the books I read was such and such, and in this book it talks about this, and I feel like this is what’s going on here with the company. And I recommend that book to you.” If the other people in the meeting are ambitious, they’ll write down the name of the book. If you can give two or three book recommendations in a business conversation with somebody, in that person’s mind you’re a well-read autodidact. Whether you have a college degree or not is irrelevant.

The next way to self-promote is to have strong opinions about subjects within your field of expertise. For instance, you may say you don’t agree with where the marketplace is going or talk about one of the mistakes the industry is making. A great place to do this is on your blog, vlog, or podcast. When the topic comes up, you can say, “You know, I recently wrote a blog about this. It created a lot of controversy because my belief was such and such. I’ll send it to you so you can read it.”

wrote an article about why home ownership is not the American dream. It blew up. Fox contacted me. CNN contacted me. The Denver Post did a feature on it. It wrote about this entrepreneur who doesn’t believe in home ownership. That was my opinion. It created so much controversy just because I wrote one article saying what the real American dream is and that it’s not home ownership, it’s entrepreneurship. So share your thoughts and opinions, and then self-promote the articles you write.

My challenge to you is to self-promote. Put your fear of being judged aside, and put yourself out there. Say or do something bold. Let people know who you are and what you stand for.

Spend alone time getting clear on the vision. 2. Consult with our creative team to brainstorm new names for the channel. 3. Buy and study every book on marketing and media that exists. 4. Identify who we don’t want to be as much as who we want to be. 5. Make the channel about the mission rather than my personality. 6. Create a new logo, name, and website that embodies a leading educator. 7. Attend social media industry conferences to learn different strategies. 8. Start learning the language of media and what needs to be tracked. 9. Hire people in areas where we are weak. In the next ninety days, hire an expert in SEO (Search Engine Optimization). 10. Gradually increase the rate of posted content. 11. In the next thirty days, hire a full-time editor. 12. Map out a strategy for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube—and be prepared to act quickly if the next social media app overtakes the big four. 13. Present myself as an expert in the marketplace. Write an article as an expert and post it on multiple platforms. 14. Create clear criteria for which guests to invite on the show that match the brand of Valuetainment. 15. I’m keeping this one quiet for now. This next move will be revealed soon enough.

You also need to cut the fat out of your life.

Do a mental inventory and write down: 1. Your five most painful moments 2. Your five most successful moments 3. Five moments when you felt untouchable State the affirmations and include the validation: 1. Start with “I will be a great leader” or “I’m going to make the greatest comeback ever.” 2. Add the story, drawing on your pain and triumphs. Use the word “because” to provide the evidence: “Because I came through”; “Because I’ve been there before”; “Because I’ve overcome more.”

People ask me: What gave you confidence to be who you are today? Four things: 1. Fate: I believe I’m destined to do something big. 2. Faith: I believe that a higher power has my back. 3. I became clear about what I wanted. I cast my vision. I told the world who I wanted to be, and the right people showed up. 4. I believe I’m the luckiest man alive.

This is not deep psychology; it’s a commonsense power move. If you don’t think you are worthy, others won’t, either. If you don’t believe in your product (or yourself), no one else will, either. If you look like a slob, you’re going to act like a slob, and people will perceive you as a slob.

If you’re going to “speak your story into existence,” you’d better have the right story and the emotions to back it up. And if you’re going to broadcast it to the world, you’d better back up the talk by living it. That’s how you control your life’s narrative.

Stop comparing yourself to people and companies that seem light-years ahead of you. Instead, focus on regular, achievable improvement.

Mobsters are masters at recruiting because they know how to sell the dream of the benefits of joining their team.

Seven Essential Steps to Prepare for a Meeting 1. Consider the other party’s needs, desires, and frustrations. Remember that what motivates most people is fear, greed, and saving face. 2. Anticipate what the other party will say. 3. Develop a script/outline for what you want to say. 4. Role-play the meeting several times in order to be prepared for different reactions. 5. Ask trusted advisers to point out your blind spots. 6. Put yourself into the best possible frame of mind before the meeting. 7. Build a reputation for overdelivering on your product.

1. Consider the other party’s needs, desires, and frustrations. Remember that what motivates most people is fear, greed, and saving face.

Think about how a shrewd attorney crafts an argument: he first has to consider what the other party will say. The more you can anticipate what the other party will say and why, the better you can craft your story or request.

A simple rule of business is that in order to get, you have to give.

When you put yourself into the other party’s shoes and lead with how they will win and make money, it will be natural for them to give you what you want.

The key to my success? It was the work I had done before the sit-down began.

He hadn’t learned any fancy sales tricks or manipulative tactics. He had simply changed the way he felt.

Once he believed in the product enough to buy it himself, his slump was over.

“Have an absolute and total belief that what you’re selling is worth more than the price you ask for it. Your belief in your product should be so great that you ought to be using it.”

Since emotion and belief are what truly sell, I hire people who believe in both themselves and the company.

Rather than looking for salespeople, look for people who believe in your vision and want to build relationships.

want to show you that asking how you can help others before asking for something in return will shift every interaction you have.