All Selling Aside With Alex Mandossian

Have you been around since episode 1? If so, you probably remember my pigeon story. (And if not, I recommend you go back and listen to it now, then come back to this episode.) If you need a quick refresher, here are the basics. I had just lost quite a lot of money through my business, and got kicked out of my apartment, so I had to move back in with my mom. Naturally, I felt tremendous guilt and shame. I sat on a park bench to think about my life, and how to get out of the mess that I had gotten into. That was absolutely the rock bottom of my life. As I sat there, I watched an elderly woman feeding pigeons. She held seeds in the palm of her hand, and walked slowly toward the pigeons (who walked away). She then turned around and walked away from the pigeons, who started following her. They repeated this dance several times, with the distance between the woman and the pigeons getting closer and closer every time. The pigeons had started as blocks of ice. As they danced with the elderly woman, they got warmer a

I don’t usually give the answers right away, but today, the topic is so important that I’m going to go straight for those answers. You can create a new movement, and you do so through three important elements: creating (or learning) a new language building a new community developing new leadership Ready to learn more about what this means, and how to implement these steps? Let’s start with the story of William G. Wilson (or Bill W.). In 1935, he found himself standing in a hotel lobby craving alcohol during a business trip. He narrowed his options down to two: order a drink in the hotel bar, or ask another recovering alcoholic for help. Fortunately, Bill chose the latter. He ended up arranging a meeting with Dr. Bob, an alcoholic surgeon. Their meeting was supposed to last 15 minutes, but they ended up talking for hours. They forged a deep friendship, which also led to Dr. Bob’s sobriety and the launch of Alcoholics Anonymous. As you’ll learn in this episode, the organization meets those three elements I me

In December 2000, I was on a plane with my family about to fly from New York to San Francisco. I had a thriving business on the East Coast, but we had no family there, so we moved to the West Coast to live with my in-laws until we found our home. Of course, after leaving my business behind, I had to figure out something new. This is when I decided to do teleseminars, set up a system, and in fact became the “Larry King of teleseminars.” The tragic events of 9/11 ended up having a profound impact on my business, and I was able to put the platinum rule into place: “do unto others as they would want done to them.” The reason that the platinum rule works so well in sales is that not everyone is like you. Fostering curiosity, instead of the false certainty that everyone is like you, helps you speak to people in language that resonates with them. The platinum rule is at the center of today’s key insights into becoming a highly skilled ethical influencer: How the platinum rule differs from the golden rule, and why t

I want to share a story (that may or may not be true) about one of my favorite people in investing. Warren Buffett was playing golf with three other billionaires. Just before he struck the golf ball, the other billionaires wanted to make a bet that he wouldn’t hit a hole in one. Based on the odds, he would have won $40,000 if he hit that hole in one, and had to pay just $20 if he didn’t. Instead of accepting or declining, he thought through the odds and then offered to play for a larger bet: $4,000,000 if he won, and $20 if he lost. The other billionaires probably rolled their eyes over how little fun he was to make bets with. Buffett pointed out, though, that it wasn’t about his $20 risk; it’s that stupid in little things is stupid in big things. This ties into Buffett’s first rule of money: don’t lose it! His second rule is this: “Never forget rule #1.” Risk is inevitable, but loss is optional if you take a calculated risk by acting small and thinking big. Acting small means testing. You track the result, t

Once there was a pastor in the American South who delivered a great sermon. Afterward, his congregation congratulated him on how great it was. The next week, he delivered the exact same sermon again. He did the exact same thing the following few weeks. Finally, one of the trustees of the church pointed out to the pastor that he had given the same sermon over and over for several weeks. The pastor revealed that he had been giving the same sermon intentionally. A crowd gathered to listen to his explanation: “I’ll stop giving that sermon the moment that the people in our congregation start living it.” The most common question that I’ve been asked at any of the hundreds of live events or thousands of virtual events that I’ve spoken at is this: “What business should I start?” However, business ideas don’t make money. What does make money is having something that you’re committed to that you build and grow over time. This is why what business you should start isn’t the first question you should ask yourself. Instea

The father of modern networking grew up in Covina, California. Despite his ordinary beginnings, Ivan Misner is the founder of the world’s largest business networking organization, BNI. When Ivan started his consultancy business, he was looking for referrals not for himself, but for his colleagues. This was the seed for what would become BNI, which is now a global business network. In today’s episode, I’ll explain the importance of relationships and having a strong business network. But remember that these relationships don’t just spring up; their seeds must be nurtured and fed through mutual trust and shared benefits. As they grow, they evolve through the three phases of the VCP process: visibility, credibility, and profitability. You may have noticed the agricultural language surrounding this process. As Ivan points out, this is farming rather than hunting. If hunting is transactional, farming is relational! Furthermore, hunting is about survival, while farming is about thriving. Both work, but the VCP proce

Zig Ziglar used to tell a story about three men cutting stone a few hundred years ago. A passerby asked the first stonecutter, “What are you doing?” The first man responded, “I’m cutting stone.”   The passerby asked the second man the same question. This time, the response was, “I’m earning a living.” Finally, the passerby asked the third man what he was doing. And this time, the answer was completely different: “I’m building a cathedral.” Which of the three responses is a legacy response? I bet you already understand that it’s the third. You see, there are three types of purpose: a daily purpose, a life purpose, and a legacy purpose. The final type is the one that involves creating something that will live on for future generations. If you’re not sure what your legacy purpose is, you’re not alone. But you might be surprised by just how easy it is to figure out! My strategy for figuring out your legacy purpose involves what I call the “five why” deep dive. In today’s conversation, I’ll go into depth about how

Let me tell you a little story about helping, assisting, dependency, and interdependency. I had just completed a teleseminar in 2004, while my one-year-old daughter took a bath. This evening, it was my responsibility to dry her off and put her in bed. When she saw me coming in to get her, she reached up her arms as if asking me to help her out of the tub. I might have been overthinking things, but I decided that this was an opportunity to assist rather than help her. Instead of lifting her out, I offered her a hand to help her out of the bathtub. She banged her knee as she got out, then the heel of her other foot, and started wailing as if she was badly hurt. Two days later, we repeated the same process. She put up her arms, I offered one hand, and she got out without banging her knee. She did, however, slightly hit the heel of her other foot again as she stepped out. And again, she started wailing as if she was in agony. Two days after that, we tried again. And this time, she knew what was coming. She took m

Imagine you’re in Italy in the 18th century, in a small village with 200 winemakers. The mayor of the village has decided to plan a feast, and has invited all of the local vintners to bring their best wine to him. He would mix all the wines in a barrel, and the feast would feature the best wine ever made. One of the vintner’s had a wife who pointed out that no one would notice if they contributed a glass of water instead of wine. Her husband shrugged and went along with the idea. A week later, at the feast, the mayor dipped his glass into the barrel. Guess what he pulled out?Water. You see, everyone had come up with the same idea as that vintner and his wife. The moral of the story is that in any kind of joint venture, it’s all too easy to end up with very little support. This is where the four laws of karma come into play: The law of expansion. The law of likeness. The law of cause. The law of effect. Tune into this episode to learn more about all of these laws! You’ll also learn how to apply the laws with

Let’s talk about New York City. Even if you’ve never been there, you probably know that it’s home to the Empire State Building. Completed in 1931, this 102-story building stands a total height of 1,454 feet (or about 444 meters). Even now, decades later, the Empire State Building is one of the tallest skyscrapers in the United States. Enough about the building’s height, though; let’s talk about its foundation. The excavation for the foundation went down over 50 feet, and then had to be built back up to the street level. Without a foundation this deep and solid, the building would never be able to rise so tall. Is your business built on a deep foundation? What about your selling process? Or are they built on quicksand? The deeper the foundation, the taller the building—and it’s no different in business. In business, though, the foundation means the relationships. A foundation means asking for a commitment that advances your prospect for the next step, not just trying to quickly close the sale. Can you begin th

In 2010, I was at a four-day event for the Guerrilla Business School. I had just finished my presentation, and there was a huge table rush to the back of the room. Afterward, T. Harv Eker and I were having dinner in the green room, and he presented me with an idea: “What if we could have a five-day event where people could start the event wit nothing , and at the end, make money online?” His idea was that by day 5, everyone would have created not only a website, sales copy, and a shopping cart, but they would actually be making money. “What do you think?” he asked. “That’s impossible,” I answered. “Do you want to do it with me?” “Yes!” Fast forward a couple months, and we’re together in Hawaii planning the curriculum for this event. As we gathered support for our project, we got “yes” after “yes” to our impossible idea. We faced all sorts of technological problems (remember, this was in 2010), and somehow got through all of them. We next went through the preparing phase, before the event began the following d

Have you heard Aesop’s fable about the ants and the grasshopper? In short, a family of ants was bustling about in late autumn drying the grain they had saved from summer. A grasshopper, with a fiddle tucked under his arm, came up and begged for a bite to eat. It turned out he hadn’t saved anything for the winter, because he had been so busy playing his music. The ants disgustedly told the grasshopper to go dance, turned their backs on him, and got back to work. The moral of this story is that there’s a time for work and a time for play. The most important aspect of a productive business isn’t what, how, or even whom—but when. Your time is the most precious asset that you will ever own, and it’s incredibly important not to underestimate its power. Think about when: when you’re going to work, and when you’re going to play. There are three ways you can spend your time: profiting time (or work time), planning time (or organizing time), and playing time (or free time). Two of the three deal with business, but all

In the beginning of your business, you do everything. But you don’t really have a business until other people are doing the things that you had to do in the beginning. This means you need to find the right people, and get them in the right “seats” on a figurative bus (or minivan). This idea was developed by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great. Instead of thinking about what you need to get done or the best strategy (which is often unpredictable), think about who you can get on your bus. This leads to surrounding yourself with a team that allows you to perform brilliantly and achieve financial freedom. Another key to this strategy involves getting the wrong people off the bus! The good to great leaders in Jim Collins’ book understood three simple, but incredibly important, truths: If you begin with who rather than what, you can more easily adapt to changing the world in your own terms. If you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away. If you have t

Over 100 years ago, a young boy grew up in western Maine. Orphaned at the age of 12, Leon L. Bean still managed to live what he described as an “uneventful” life until he was 40 years old. At that point, tired of his feet being cold and wet during deer-hunting season, he decided to create a solution. He invented a unique boot design that provided strength, warmth, and dryness all in one boot. Solving this single predicament led to a multi-million dollar payoff. But notice something else about the invention: it wasn’t designed to cater to everybody. People in cities didn’t need these boots at all. Instead, they were specifically designed for the hunter and outdoorsman (or woman), a relatively narrow niche. Gradually, he developed a wide range of outdoor products which he offered in the L.L. Bean Catalog. Leon’s business leaped ahead by adding new clothing and outdoors products each year, but it all started with that rubber-covered boot. Leon credited his success to the fact that he personally tried every prod

I’ll always remember the moment that my good friend T. Harv Eker approached me during a lunch break at the Guerrilla Business School in 2010. He had a new idea for internet marketing newbies, and asked me a question: is it possible to take people to making money online completely from scratch in a five-day bootcamp? I thought it was impossible. So he asked if I wanted to partner with him and do it. I said yes. After all, the difficult can be done immediately, but the impossible takes a little longer. And that’s how the Ultimate Internet Bootcamp was born! After making about $25 million, coaching a few thousand people at $500 a month, and doing over 25 events on six continents, we retired the program two years later. One thing I learned was that closing a sale starts with seeding, and I already knew that seeding through storytelling is selling. Closing doesn’t start 15 minutes before your presentation ends; it starts in the first 300 seconds through seeding and storytelling. Ready to learn how to do exactly th

Did you know that the BandAid had its birth in the kitchen of a woman who was inexperienced at cooking and hurt herself frequently? Her husband, Earle Dickson, was an employee of Johnson and Johnson. He found himself getting plenty of experience bandaging his new wife’s hands as she was cooking, and realized that if he could prepare bandages in advance, she could apply them herself without making him interrupt his work. Earle began experimenting with ways that his wife could bandage herself. Tape existed, and gauze existed, so attaching the two was easy. The hard part was keeping the gauze sanitary and the tape from drying out. Luckily, Earle realized the importance of not giving up. Eventually, he discovered that crinoline fabric protected the bandage. It was a huge success not only with his wife, but also for Johnson and Johnson, the company he worked for. The Band-Aid marked the beginning of the company’s meteoric rise to success. In 1921, the invention received the name BandAid, which it still bears today

Back in 2012, I was one of the beta testers for Google Hangouts. Every week, I would use the platform to deliver a topic that I thought would be worthy of my students’ attention as a free public service. I did the same thing week after week, and we had a really good run for a few years. Then my confidence in the Google Hangouts platform began to fade, because I didn’t see the company scaling it to a higher level. So what did I do? Switch over to webinars! I decided to use WebinarJam, which was created by two friends of mine. After a while, I noticed that Mark Zuckerberg’s sister started to really get behind Facebook Live. Over the course of 2015 and 2016, I started to use Facebook Live because it had something that no other system had: the magic “Share” button. Getting people live is important, because it implies engagement. And I particularly love video! Not because of actually doing it (which means needing to shave and get more presentable), but because video contains audio. And if you do video right, the

In 2001, I set out to find a marketing niche that I could dominate. Many were already occupied by great marketers, so I wanted to find one of my own. That was when I came out with a course on marketing with postcards. The course was a three-ring binder and included a physical CD. It was expensive to produce, but I did very well on it, making five figures a month with under 30 visitors a day. Thanks to this success with so little traffic, I released a new course called Traffic Conversion Secrets. This was where I made my first million dollars. After that, I started to release more courses, including Teleseminar Secrets (which made me over $14 million). I released many other courses, which did very well financially, but there was a big problem. None of my courses was scalable. Do you see why that’s an issue? My income would be episodic, going up and down depending on when I had released a course. And I had to keep working and working, always creating new courses, because the business couldn’t survive without me

You’ve probably heard of Chicken Soup for the Soul, but do you know the famous story that didn’t make it into the books? The story of Kyle is about how compassion can not only save a life and create a best friend for life, but also keep customers for life. In case you haven’t heard it, this story (told by Kyle’s best friend) is about a teenage boy who was bullied in school. The narrator, seeing Kyle’s torment, invites Kyle to join him and his friends for a basketball game, and Kyle accepts. That was the right thing to do! Doing the opposite is the first big mistake when you sell; don’t say “no” when the offer is there! The more the narrator and his friends hung out with Kyle, the more they liked him. Over the next few years, the narrator and Kyle became the best of friends. Kyle was high school valedictorian, and by then, he had filled out, looked great, and had tons of dates! On the day of Kyle’s speech, the narrator was stunned to hear from the speech that Kyle had planned to kill himself on that day they

Imagine if you could reminisce about the future. You would probably become an inventor, creating replacements rather than improvements. That was exactly the case for Samuel Morse, a fearless visionary whose unique ability was being able to reminisce about the future. This entrepreneur, credited with inventing the telegraph, was neither a scientist nor an engineer. He succeeded at developing innovations where other failed not by any special talent or education, but by determination and by following his own ideas. On a ship voyage back from Europe in 1832, Morse met several scientists discussing the latest discoveries in electromagnetism. Morse asked a question: “What if intelligence could be instantaneously transmitted by electricity to any distance?” His solution, as you may have figured out by his name, was to create Morse code and to create a way to transmit it by wire. This method of communication consists of patterns of dots and dashes representing each letter. While it’s not as convenient or advanced as