#AskGaryVee Episode 168: Relocating, Closing a Sale, & Dealing with Loneliness

“I want to relocate: do
I just pick up and move, “throw caution to the
wind, or do I wait till “I line something up?” – Bernadette, I think, the truth is I need a little more context
to answer that question. Can I see her picture? Maybe that can give me a little context. Oh, nope, it’s some sort
of interesting icon. Bernadette, I think it comes
down to responsibilities, where you are in your life, age group. You know, I really do think
that if you’re under 30 everything should be in play. You should sleep in the
subways of Singapore, you should live on a rock,
you should not eat for a year but not die, you know, like everything should be in play under 30,
because there is no reason to disproportionately deploy
practicality under 30, because of how long people are gonna live, on how much that’s an
incredible time in your life, and I would, absolutely
if you’re under 30, just pick up and go, especially
if you’re not prima donna. See, one of the great advantages
of being an immigrant, as I think about the book
that I may want to write one day: I Wish Everybody
Was an Immigrant, one of the main chapters
is Lack of Entitlement or No Prima Donna Gear, right? Like, last night my mom and
dad went out to dinner with me we were at an event, and we walked through the rain with no umbrella, and we were just laughing, like we just looked at each
other as everybody else in this kind of New York
City gala was kind of like umbrellas and ubers and we just
kind of looked at each other and were like “Belarus,”
you know, it’s just there’s nothing that’s kind of sacred. Everything’s pretty ghetto, meaning that if you’re able to, Bernadette, sleep in a crappy hotel or at your friend’s couch,
or if you’re just not in need of cozy things,
then of course you should pick up and go, because you could work at MacDonalds and live in
a shit hole and be happy, if that’s what’s pulling at you. If you need certain things
to function as a human like a clean bathroom or coziness, then it becomes harder
for you to pull it off, so I think that the graph is really completely predecated on
what you need to function. For me, I need nothing
to function, literally. It’s so damn scary, and
so everything’s in play, when it comes to that kind of extreme, because I can go to zero. I know what it’s like to
live on a small budget. I don’t need fancy things. I can wear the same four pieces of clothes on rotation for three years, so I just think it comes down to you and your ability to
grind, and the truth is, and I’ve been speaking
to a lot of people over this last year, most people
like to say they can grind, but they don’t, so that’s on you. – [Voiceover] Louis
asks: “How do you handle “price objections when
attempting to close a sale?”

“price objections when
attempting to close a sale?” – I assume price objections
mean that you’re asking for too much money and they
don’t want to pay that? What’s your take on that, Danielle? It’s not an easy show, to
just come and get to read and check out. – Are you sure? – Yes, I’m very sure. – I guess I would say if you
give them a dollar value, kind of like we do here when we give statements of work to clients
where they approve it, they come back with requests to take down or gets higher. – Do they ever request
to charge them more? – Sometimes they ask for more things, and then you do change orders, and you do get more money that way. – Love it! Look, I think it’s moments in time. Early on, when I was
building Vayner and I needed a leverage of clients and
logos to tell people, yes, it’s not just I did it for
myself and my family business, but for, at the time,
Campbell’s, the NHL, Pepsi, that mattered, and so I
was willing to take less. We’ve talked about spec work ad nausea if you watch the show. The DRock story. So I think it’s a leverage game, right? Like who has the leverage, and so I think that every transaction
has its own cadence. There is no blanket statement here. You have to understand
what your product is worth, but you also have to
think, and this is where romance kills people. You say that you’re worth $150 an hour, and you don’t quantify that
you need this client right now because there isn’t good deal flow, or you want to buy a ring for your girl, or you need to do different things besides just shoot weddings
because you want to show a better portfolio to get other business. People are not using other
variables and they go well I’m worth $1.50! Fuck you! You’re worth $1.50 in your head, the market decides what you’re worth. You’re worth $1.50 if
people will pay you $1.50, consistently, always, always and forever. You’re not worth that, look,
there was two years ago where I prematurely tried to
raise my speaking fee higher, and the market was like that’s great Gary, and you’re the best speaker ever, and this and that, but that is just not where your price is at,
and so you’re not entitled to anything other than
what the people that are buying your stuff agree to. What you need to be smart
about is understanding when’s the right time to negotiate down because it’s in your best
interests, or when are you negotiating down for no reason at all and you’re declining your value. That’s on you. That’s
being a good salesperson. That’s being a good operator. So, I think that everybody
here needs to have a balance of both. You have to pull from opposite directions. When is it in your vested interests? And then you deploy humilty
Kool Aid at scale, right? The amount of times I will deploy humility in a world where my ego
is on fire is off the, you know what, Staphon, I want fire here. Ego fire. Give me ego fire. I’ve got nothing but ego and bravado, but there’s plenty of
times I deploy humility ’cause that’s what that
moment’s game needs to be successful, and so I would tell you to not deploy romance. This is this and that. Deploy practicality of the moment.

“as an entrepreneur sometimes. “How do you cope with that feeling?” – You know, for me, I’m built for it. I wanna be lonely. I want to struggle and grind
and have all the pressure. I’m gonna take the last shot in the game always, every time. It makes me simpatico with Staphon’s idol Kobe, the black mamba who’s on this amazing, it was funny, I was
working out this morning and I had to do some cardio
stuff that was hard for me, so I’m like Mike, put on TV
so I can watch Sports Center and not think about what
we’re actually doing, and I caught the clip of
the way Kobe last night in Philadelphia, and I said to Mike, I said, you know what’s
so awesome about sports? It’s that if you time it
right, and you know it, you can have this kind of farewell tour, so I’ve been thinking about
my farewell entrepreneur tour. I don’t know how to do that. I’m gonna be like 89, 97, be like eeeh, but you know, I don’t even
remember the question. I just wanted to talk
about Kobe’s farewell tour. What was it again? Oh! Being lonely. Look, the reason I brought up Kobe is, Kobe wants to take the last shot. Winners wanna take the last shot. You want to take the high with the low. When you are truly an A, and
actual pure-bred entrepreneur, you don’t know anything else than getting the accolades or getting shit on when you don’t execute. Actually, from first, you
know, it’s really interesting. I had a 100th of a second,
because I’m concerned about macroeconomic climates, for a 100th of a second yesterday, which is unheard of for me, I was like woo, what if Vayner took a step back and I had to deal with
people being like, oh, you’re not running this business well, or what’s going on? It’s so funny. I thought of it for a 100th of a second, and then I got so happy. I got so happy because
I quickly thought about the second chess move, which
was, for whatever reason, couple of our clients,
as you know, are starting to become very big clients
and I don’t like them being too much a percentage of my business ’cause they can go away the next day. I don’t like that, so that maybe is why it popped up in my mind. Or, I also think we’re in
a bubbly kind of world. You’ve got terrorism activity,
you’ve got Wall Street being too bubbly for
a long period of time. Anything can happen. Things can happen, and
so it was funny for me when I thought about it,
because that’s my job. I’m lonely at the top. I have to worry about
everything and make sure I’m hedged and ready and mentally prepared for anything that could go wrong, and then I got excited
about the second chess move, which was the thing I live for, which is the I told you
so when the doubters came and said, oh, you misplayed it, you didn’t think, social
wasn’t as big as you thought, you didn’t see this coming, then being able to navigate
through those choppy waters. I often talk about
being a war-time general over a peace-time general. Anybody can look good. Anybody who’s watching
or listening to this show can be an entrepreneur
now, ’cause shit is good. When it gets tough, when there’s not people throwing around $25,000 investment, when you can’t put up
your idea on Kickstarter and everybody wants to give you $100, because the economy’s crap
and they need their $100, that’s when the cream rises, and so for me, the way I deal with it, I, the way I deal with it is: there is no dealing with it. It is my DNA. It is my only known gear. I don’t even understand
that damn question. Now, I recognize that, to take
myself out of the equation and try to answer for the whole, look, you’ve got to put things
in perspective, you know? If you want the accolades,
if you have the audacity to want to be somebody that is successful, let’s play the data. If you want the audacity
to be a millionaire, which is by percentage, almost impossible. There’s very few of them,
if you really break down. Let’s play some math here.
Let’s keep it unemotional. If you want the audacity to
be in the top 1% of Americans, which is a very rich company, company! Country. Probably company too. Country. Are people in the hundreds of
thousands of dollars a year in revenue, not millions. So, we’re talking about a
very small group of people that are able to get to this
extreme level of success in business, and we can have shows about, actually, you know what, I
was going to point at India. Danielle, tell India, we
need to do a show about life and not business stuff, but
in the context of business, life happines, and there’s a million ways, and we ranted on it the other day, but if you want the audacity
to be a millionaire, to be successful, to write books, if you want the audacity,
don’t you understand the crap that comes along with that? Like, I wanted the
audacity to be in shape. It’s come with a lot of crap. It’s been a lot of work. I’m 18 months in, and I
said this the other day, on my fitness video, I’m
not sure I would do this if I saw what I would
look like 18 months later, meaning I look a lot better, but damnit, I would have been like really? For every single day for 18 months? To wake up at four in the morning? Like, I’m going (mumbles skeptically). You deal with it because it’s
a very small price to pay for all the phenominal
stuff that you headline read and you aspire to and you dream for. The problem is, most of you don’t want to eat that shit to get there.

– [Voiceover] Austin asks: “Hey GaryVee, “I’m a sales consultant for
Best Buy selling computers. “What advice can you give me to be “a better salesman?” – Austin, I think you
need to reverse engineer who you’re selling to. So, if I were you, Austin, I would spend all of January taking people
out to lunch and dinner or a drink, or getting them on the phone, but literally spending the
entire month of January not selling to people, and
just listen to the people that you sell to to find out
what their pain points are. I would walk in and be like, hey DRock. You know I sell you computer stuff and things of that nature. What are your pain points? What’s your problem? What’s your struggles in your business? Like, let’s cut the crap. Yes, I want to sell to you,
but let’s take a step back. I want to sell to you by providing you some sort of value. Maybe I have a friend. Maybe I will recommend that
you watch the #AskGaryVee show to make your business better. Maybe I will do a lot of
things, but what I’m doing is I’m providing you
value, and our conversation and our relationship is not just predicated on me selling. You know, I was talking
to one of my friends, and he was like I want to
have better relationships with girls, I’m like cool, why don’t you make it about
something other than sex? Like if your whole relationship is I want to hang out with you
every time to just hook up, there’s probably a good chance that person doesn’t think that you’re
providing them much value outside of that execution,
which is a fine execution. Everybody needs it, I
get it, blah blah blah. Same way I think about sales. If you’re just selling every single time, that is what your foundational
relationship is based on, and you become spam
and sales all the time. Why don’t you spend all of
January not selling ever, once, and opening your ears and
listening, and trying to help, even outside of the context of you. Even out of the context of you, meaning, how can you help them
besides just their business? Maybe you’ll get to know
DRock and find out that his aunt is a huge Dallas Cowboys fan, and you just get a Dallas Cowboys hat. Say, hey, you go to eBay and buy a Tony Doresett opened starting line up for $0.49, $3 shipping,
but you send and say hey give this to your aunt. It’s not what you spent. It was the thought. That stuff matters. That’s it?