Paul M. Caffrey (00:01)
I'm delighted to be joined by Sjoerd Bak the founder of Become a Millionaire Limited. A man who has 18 years experience in sales and I'm delighted to hear. How are you doing Sjoerd how are you?
Sjoerd Bak (00:11)
Thanks Paul, I'm excellent. Thank you for having me. This is my first podcast to be a guest on, so I'm excited.
Paul M. Caffrey (00:19)
Look, no better place to do it and we're going to get straight into it. So it's not going to be easy. What's your number one prospecting tips?
Sjoerd Bak (00:28)
one prospecting tip, I would say be consistent. It's the same with investing. It's like everything compounds. So you can't send one prospect email or do one prospect call. You have to show up every day and do the numbers. And that's when you become successful. you just do it every now and then, it's not going to work.
Paul M. Caffrey (00:50)
Yeah, absolutely. The top performers are doing that all the time. Consistency. It's very difficult and it's very boring, which is therein lies the real challenge. You've obviously had a great sales career. So this is not an easy question, but what's your number one sales tip?
Sjoerd Bak (00:54)
Absolutely.
There's so much, but I guess the biggest one is it's not about you. It's about the customer. What I always try to tell people is like, you need to find the pain and you need, it's like finding a wound and then jamming your finger into it to make sure that the customer understands how painful it is. Cause there's no driver for human behavior like pain. People want to get away from pain. So unless you find the pain.
that somebody high up in the organization cares about, you're not going to sell anything. And that's my biggest tip.
Paul M. Caffrey (01:43)
Yep. Absolutely agree with that. If they're not aware of it, it's not going to happen for sure. You had a long, career at Salesforce. You've been promoted many times. You've promoted many people. What's your number one tip for someone who was looking to get promoted?
Sjoerd Bak (01:59)
Yeah, it's a great question. I would say is treat your job as a college. And what I mean by that is that 90 % of people, especially these days, they show up and they do whatever comes on their plate. And they rely on a company like Salesforce or Oracle or Microsoft to supply them with the knowledge they need. But you need to take ownership of your own education, your own development. And if you do that,
You can do amazing things, but you need to treat your job like a college. Every single interaction, if you approach it with enough curiosity, will have you learn so much more than anything you learn in college. And that's why it's unbelievably good to be in sales.
Paul M. Caffrey (02:45)
Yeah, you certainly do need to be learning all the time. And that's for sure. And when you're saying treat it like a college, then we recommend people study existing roles, study for their next role, apply what we're learning.
Sjoerd Bak (02:57)
So
it's like use it as your personal MBA. So you need to be curious about your customers, about the people you're speaking to, about what drives them. There's so much opportunity to learn from every interaction you have. And if you do that and you go into every interaction with the right kind of preparation, you'll do better than 95 % of all other people. So if you're constantly in the top 5%, you always get promoted.
Paul M. Caffrey (03:24)
There you go. know, be a top performer. You've got to do the work to get there. Really like that. What's the best concert you've ever been to?
Sjoerd Bak (03:29)
Absolutely.
best concert. like there's two that come to mind. I am the biggest George Michael fan and I've seen him maybe four times. So I loved seeing George Michael but the most spectacular concert, the concert that I didn't want to end, was Kiss. It's not because I love Kiss music but the show was just spectacular and it was unbelievable unlike anything I've ever seen before.
Paul M. Caffrey (03:34)
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't think I know many people have seen Kiss. I can't think of Annie at all. Where did you see the show?
Sjoerd Bak (04:08)
that they were in the three arena in Dublin. So there was a couple of thousand people there. But yeah, it was unbelievable. So spectacular.
Paul M. Caffrey (04:18)
That completely passed me by, I did not know that was on. very nice. When it comes to sports, who's your favourite sports person?
Sjoerd Bak (04:22)
you
That's a one. Most Dutch people would say Max Verstappen, but I don't think I have one. I like playing sports, like I like going out mountain biking, I like surfing, but I'm not much into watching sports, so can't think of one.
Paul M. Caffrey (04:48)
You're doing this for
a spotter than viewing them.
Sjoerd Bak (04:52)
Yeah, absolutely.
Paul M. Caffrey (04:54)
Okay, that's pretty cool. we get back into the business mindset a little bit.
Look, you've read a lot of books. You've been around a block of new kinds. What books do you recommend people check out or read if they want to improve their sales game?
Sjoerd Bak (05:11)
So yeah, it's a good question. It comes back to treat your job as your college. So if you own your development, like reading books is such a massive part of that. One of them, like I can see you've got Alex Hormozi behind you. He's really good. But one that I like is Influence by Robert Cialdini or Speak Like Ted by Carmine Gallo. like if you can...
be better at influencing and communicating, you'll be so much better at sales. And I wish I understood that 12 years ago, but I understand it now. And this is the thing. There's so much out there, but most young people are starting a job and they're relying on their onboarding and then that's it. Then it's just making calls during the day, partying in the evening.
But if you read a book every now and then, you'll be better again than 90 of the people that are sitting beside you.
Paul M. Caffrey (06:15)
Yeah, I really like that. And that book, particularly the Carmel and Gallabook, that's probably 10 or 12 years old, that book in itself. You can still get great value from books which have aged. I think that that's quite neat.
Sjoerd Bak (06:26)
Yeah.
Now the other book that I would recommend to change my life is the Simple Path to Wealth by J.L. Collins, because it made me understand that money doesn't have to be difficult. It can be pretty easy. And that made a big impact on me. Not necessarily for sales, but the best salespeople are the ones that know why they do it. And if you know what you're earning all that money for, then it becomes easier to stick with the prospecting, for example.
Paul M. Caffrey (06:57)
Yeah, absolutely. To know what you're going to do with that big commission check when it comes your way and what that will be worth in years to come. And I'm looking forward to getting into that in our longer podcast, which we're going to jump onto in a moment. But before we do that, what does preparation look like? What's the work before the work in your world?
Sjoerd Bak (07:16)
Like I have many calls now with people, potential customers or potential speaking engagements. And I just make sure that I allocate time before and after to prepare and to wrap up. my main takeaway is you need to prepare for every single interaction. And if an interaction is not important enough for you to prepare for, then why do it at all? So it's a good way to look at your calendar.
and look at all the stuff that doesn't require preparation. If it doesn't require preparation, you probably shouldn't be doing it.
Paul M. Caffrey (07:54)
I like that very, very nice way to end. If people want to find out what you're up to or they want to reach out and find out how you can help them, what's the best way for them to do that Sjoerd?
Sjoerd Bak (08:05)
Easiest two ways are follow me on LinkedIn. So that's S J O E R D BAK B A K or Go to my new company website, which is the letters BA so B A millionaire .COM
Paul M. Caffrey (08:21)
I'll see what you did there. really liked that. Both those links will be in the show notes below. So connect on LinkedIn, check out the website and Sjoerd Thanks so much for coming on.
Sjoerd Bak (08:31)
Thank you very much, Paul.
