Choose Yourself! (14 page)

My final takeaway: god bless her. She’s worth $1 billion.

BECOMING A MASTER SALESMAN

No amount of schooling will teach you how to choose yourself. I don’t want to do an anti-school rant here. I’ve done that before. Let’s focus on the things school doesn’t teach you, because these are the exact things you need to survive: how to come up with ideas (discussed in an earlier chapter), how to sell those ideas, and how to fail and bounce back. Then repeat.

Someone I don’t know at all just wrote me with the worst-selling technique of all time. He wrote, “I really need to talk to you. Can I have twenty to thirty minutes of your time?”

The answer is no. Not that I think I’m so great. Or that my time is so valuable. But his message sort of suggests that my time is worth zero. He is offering me nothing, even less than nothing since there’s opportunity cost to twenty to thirty minutes of time. I could be watching half an episode of
Mad Men
, for instance. Or researching how to code Wifi into protein (not giving up on that one yet).

There are some variants on this horrible technique. Like, “I have a great idea that I’ll give you equity in if you give me twenty to thirty minutes of your time.” I don’t know if his equity is worth anything yet, so it’s the same problem as above.

Another sign of a bad salesman is a good negotiator. This might not always be true, but it’s true for me. I am horrible at negotiation. If I say, “This car is for sale for $10,000” and they say, “Eight thousand,” I shrug my shoulders and say, “Okay.”

When you’re negotiating you have to say no a lot. When you are selling, you are always trying to find the “yes.”

Everyone has a “yes” buried inside of them. A good salesman knows how to find where that “yes” is buried and then how to tease it out. Great salesmen know it instinctively.

When you’re a negotiator you have to be willing to say no, regardless of what the other side says.

So although they aren’t total opposites, the goals are completely different.

NEGOTIATION IS WORTHLESS. SALES ARE EVERYTHING.

Why? Because when someone says “yes” to you, you are in the door. Eventually then, you’ll get the girl (or guy, whatever) in bed. If you negotiate right at the door, then you might have to walk away and try the next house. That takes time and energy, and still might not work out.

In fact, not only will “bad negotiation” often result in great sales (and frankly I’d rather be in the bed than walking door to door) but, if you are a master salesman, it will also lead to the best result.

Some examples of my “bad negotiation” style that have worked out for me:

A)
I sold my first business for less than other Internet businesses were going for at the same time. It was 1998, the Internet was about to go bust, but first all the stocks went up. Maybe I sold too early. It certainly seemed that way for a while. But better to sell early than go broke. Some people say, “why not go for the long run—build a business that lasts forever. Very few businesses last forever. There’s a reason it’s called “fifteen minutes of fame.” That doesn’t apply to just people. It applies to almost everything.

B)
I gave 50 percent of Stockpickr to thestreet.com for no money. Blogs were written about how bad my deal was. But when someone owns 50 percent of your business, they care about what happens. They had to buy my company four months later rather than risk someone else owning 50 percent of it. For companies they only owned 10 percent of, they gave up on them. I was able to sell about four months before the market peaked. After that, it never would’ve happened. My one employee quit on me because he was so disgusted with the deal I did. At the time it didn’t seem like it was the best negotiation. In fact, it seemed like I was a horrible negotiator. And I am. But more important is to build relationships than to kill everyone and take every last dime in a negotiation.

C)
I sold Claudia’s car for $1,000 less than she wanted to sell it for. But now the car is gone. We don’t have to worry about it. That was worth $1,000 to me. And we stopped paying $600 a month to park it in downtown New York City. That’s +$1,600 in my book.

D)
I got my old company to do websites for New Line Cinema for $1,000 a movie—which was one two-hundredth of what we got for doing
The Matrix
site—even though some of the sites were the same size as that site. Why did I do that? The best designers wanted us to hire them to work on those movies. Meanwhile, they stayed late on Saturday nights to work on Con Edison sites that paid a lot better. I didn’t negotiate at all.

E)
I’ve sold my books on Kindle for almost nothing. I’ve given away books for free to people who showed up at my talks or signed up for my newsletter. Does that sound stupid? Maybe. But it got my name out there. I’ve now given out more than one hundred thousand copies of my books, on top of the sales. This will have lifelong effects for me. I feel them every day.

F)
I get offers every day to advertise on my blog. I say no to every one of them. Monetizing my site? Not part of my big picture.

The key is, don’t be stupid. Only negotiate with people you really want to sell to. Otherwise it boils down to just money. Creating value goes right out the window. And only sell something you love to someone you love. Always think, “What is the bigger picture here?” In many cases, in the bigger picture, the negotiation is not as important as the “sale.” Who cares if you got yourself a great price on a product that no one’s heard of or cares about? Hence, the rise of models like “freemium.”

TEN KEYS TO SELLING:

1. What’s the lifetime value of the customer?
   When I give away a book for free, it gets my name out there. That has lifelong value for me that goes way beyond the few dollars I could maybe charge. When you add value to people’s lives (for instance, giving away quality content for free), the opportunities that come back to you cannot be quantified. I’ve had the strangest opportunities this past year because of the honesty I offer on my blog. Sometimes it’s almost seemed like magic. But that’s okay. I like being a magician.
   
2. What are the ancillary benefits of having this customer?
   When we did Miramax.com for $1,000, we became the GUYS THAT DID MIRAMAX.COM! That helped get twenty other customers that were worth a lot more. I would’ve paid Miramax money to do its site.
   
3. Learn the entire history of your client, your audience, your readership, and your platform.
   You need to love your client. Love all of their products. Infuse yourself with knowledge of their products.
   I wanted to work at HBO
   because I loved all of their shows, and I studied their history back to the ’70s before I applied for a job there in the ’90s.
   
4. Give extra features.
   Do the first project cheap. And whatever was in the spec, add at least two new cool features. This BLOWS AWAY the client. Don’t forget the client is a human, not a company. That human has a boss. And that person wants to look good in front of her boss. If you give her a way to get promoted, then she will love you and always hire you back. Don’t forget to always give extra. A simple effort will get you a customer for life.
   
5. Give away the kitchen sink.
   One of the biggest investors in my fund of hedge funds had just been ripped off in a Ponzi scheme. They almost went out of business. I introduced them to reporters at every newspaper to help them get the word out about the Ponzi scheme. They were infinitely grateful and even put more money in my fund. Whenever the main guy was depressed about what had happened, I would talk to him for an hour trying to cheer him up. I wasn’t just a fund he invested in but a PR person and therapist. Go the extra mile.
   
6. Recommend your competition.
   Think about it this way: what are two of the most popular sites on the Internet? Yahoo! and Google. What do they do? They just link to their competition, other websites. If you become a reliable source, then everyone comes back to you; if your knowledge has value, they can only get that by having access to you. They get access by buying your product or services.
   
7. Idea machine.
   There’s that phrase “always be closing.” The way that’s true is if you are always putting yourself in the shoes of your client and thinking of ways that can help them. When I sold Stockpickr.com to thestreet .com, the superficial reason was that they wanted the traffic, community, and ads my site generated. The real reason was that they needed help coming up with ideas for their company. I was always generating new ideas and talking to my contacts at thestreet.com about them. Often the real reason someone buys from you is not for your product, but for you.
   
8. Show up.
   When I wanted to manage some of Victor Niederhoffer’s money
   [
   2
   ], I read all his favorite books. I wrote articles for him. At the drop of a dime, I would show up for dinner wherever and whenever he asked me to. If he needed a study done that required some programming beyond what he or his staff was capable of doing, I would offer to do it and do it fast. Nobody was paying me, but ultimately he placed money with me (at ridiculously low fees, but I did not negotiate), which I was able to leverage into raising money from others. Plus, I really liked him. I thought he was an amazing person.
   
9. Knowledge.
   When I was building a trading business
   , I must’ve read more than two hundred books on trading and talked to another two hundred traders. No style of trading was off limits. This helped me not only build a trading business, but build a fund of hedge funds, and ultimately build stockpickr.com. I felt like I knew more about trading and the top investors out there than anyone else in the world. Creating value was almost an afterthought. When I was building websites, I knew everything about programming for the web. There was nothing I couldn’t do. And the competition, usually run by businessmen and not programmers, knew that about me. And they knew that I would always come in cheaper.
   
10. Love it.
    You can only make money doing what you love.
    If you work a 9 to 5 job that you hate
    , then you’re on a leash that gives you just enough lead to get by and stops just short of real freedom and happiness. And money. If you love something, you’ll get the knowledge, you’ll get the contacts, you’ll build the site with the features nobody else has, you’ll scare the competition, and you’ll wow the customers.
    

I didn’t enjoy writing finance articles. I’d write a finance article for some random finance site and then repost it on jamesaltucher.com. I had zero traffic. Then I decided to write articles I enjoyed. To get back to my true roots, where I loved writing and reading. I also wanted to really explore all of my failures, my miseries, and my pain. In public. I love being honest and intimate with people. I love building community. I love e-mailing with readers. It was about a little over a year ago that I decided to make the shift where I was just going to open the kimono at jamesaltucher.com and say everything I wanted to say, and at the same time indulge in my love of writing, art, creativity, and reading. More than 4 million “customers” later, I’m enjoying more than ever doing what I love.

[
2
] Victor Neiderhoffer is a famous hedge fund manager who used to work with George Soros. In his day, he was so good, Soros sent his son to work with Neiderhoffer to learn how to trade.

HOW TO BECOME AN IDEA MACHINE

The Mental Body is the third leg of the Daily Practice. It is no more or less important than the other three legs. But many people get stuck here. They sit down with a pad and wait for God to come down and give them ideas to put on that pad. Or they wait for inspiration. Inspiration doesn’t really exist.

Stephen King, in his book
On Writing
discusses an accident he once had that prevented him from writing for several weeks. When he started to write again he could feel the difference. He said how the words just weren’t connecting right. His writing muscle had atrophied. He needed to exercise it again in order to continue writing the nonstop, bestselling thrillers he’d been writing for thirty years.

STEPHEN KING!

All it took was a few weeks out of action to throw him completely off his game even though he’s one of the best in the world at what he does.

The idea muscle is no different than the writing muscle. It’s no different than your leg muscles, for that matter. If you don’t walk for two weeks, the muscles will atrophy. And you will need physical therapy in order to walk again.

The idea muscle must be exercised every day. Even if you’ve come up with ideas every day of your life, it will atrophy if you give it a two-week rest.

What are the benefits of having a functional idea muscle? You will become an idea machine. No matter what situation you are in, what problem you see in front of you, what problems your friends and colleagues have, you will have nonstop solutions for them. And when your idea muscle is at its peak performance, your ideas will actually be good, which again means you will be able to create the life you want to lead.

To become an idea machine takes about six to twelve months of daily practice with the idea muscle. Below I discuss how to develop that practice. And again, this goes side by side with the other three “bodies.” You can’t develop the idea muscle if you’re suffering through a bad relationship, or an illness, or you lose your sense of gratitude and wonder toward the world around you.

In the mid-’90s, I had an idea that lasted about the amount of time it takes to drink two beers. I say this because I had the idea at a bar and it was quickly squashed by the two friends I was with.

I wanted to create a reality cable channel. All reality TV all the time. Reality TV was just beginning. MTV’s
The Real World
and HBO’s
Taxicab Confessions
were the only two real successful examples at that point. The day before, I had gone to a seminar at the Museum of Television and Radio about
The Real World
. All of the houseguests from my favorite season (but not Puck, or Pedro, who was dead) were there answering questions. I felt reality TV was a cheap way to produce TV and that people would get obsessed by it, particularly if sex was involved.