PART ONE: How I Closed The Wolf of Wall Street on a $25K Training

(Note: This post is an extract of our Sales Masterclass – The Million Dollar Sales Pitch.)

This is Part 1 of a 3-part series on how to attract and engage high-profile clients:

• Part ONE – [You Are Here] – How I closed the Wolf of Wall Street…
• Part TWO – What if Jordan Belfort is Your Business Coach??
• Part THREE – How to Cold Close a $1000 Service Sale Over The Phone

This blog is about playing to win, not just playing to not lose.

See, this concept of “playing to win, and not just to not lose” is a concept I learned from one of my coaches, Jordan Belfort AKA the Wolf of Wall Street.

As some of you may know, I spent a lot of my twenties travelling around the south of Italy with a French circus while on break from my work in Cremona as a violin maker. This is me:

But how did I go from violin making circus runaway, to sales trainer and executive coach to the world’s leading brands? Well it all started when I closed The Wolf of Wall Street on giving me his $25k training package for free…

So I’d come home to Australia and I was broke. I mean really broke. As in 50k in the hole, no job, no prospects – broke. I was one-parent’s-couch-away from a park bench (ahh, the good life!). I eventually found a job in a call centre where my boss reminded me daily that I was worth less than dirt – but to be grateful that today wasn’t the day I was getting fired.

Have you ever found yourself barely staying afloat? Tough to hold on to friends, family, a relationship, hope… Life becomes exceedingly simple. You basically have two options: find a desire to keep swimming or just quit flapping your arms and accept the inevitable. And for a while, I chose to accept.

But let’s be honest – I was never much for quitting (especially when it looks like I’m gonna lose).

So I stopped feeling sorry for myself and went searching – for anything. I did an online course on options trading (somewhere between the share market and the casino), and when I went to open my first trading account to gamble the last few bucks on my last almost-maxed-out credit card…

The universe stepped in.

See it turned out that the infamous Wolf of Wall Street was speaking at a live event that night. As part of opening a trade account with this (randomly selected) company, I would get a free $1000 ticket to see the man himself – TONIGHT ONLY. Now I’d never actually heard of him OR his globally bestselling book at this point. But apparently he’d built the largest stock brokerage firm on Wall Street and made $25 million a year – all in his twenties – and I was getting this $1000 ticket for nothing (the universe stirs...)

(NOTE: Want to become a master at handling buyer resistance? Download our Ultimate Guide to Handling Objections and learn how to uncover the real reason they’re resisting so you can design your conversation to speak to their fears, desires and reasons to buy now. Download it here.)

You can see how I might have been captivated at this point. So I went.

I can’t tell you what got me the most. Was it the fact that he was such a charismatic speaker, while so self-effacing about his mistakes? Maybe it was that the average salary of the 600 people in the room with me was about $700k, and he had them all so enthralled? Was it the elegance and practicality of his Straight Line Sales System and how easily I could see myself assimilating it into my own sales training? I don’t know – but at the end of the presentation, I handed the people at the back of the room my maxed out credit card, knowing they wouldn’t charge it until the next day – and that gave me 24 hours to come up with a plan.

It’s amazing what happens when you need something.

I don’t mean want – I mean NEED. Like when you get stuck on the side of the road in the middle of the night with your car in a ditch. When your brain knows that it’s life or death, it’s as if there’s a special reserve of strength and focus. For me, it was life or death. At the time, scraping together $3500 may as well have been scraping together 3.5 gazillion dollars – like I said, things were tough. And not doing this course, not learning how to sell like the Wolf, in that moment in time was like me telling the universe that I was ready to quit. Because this was a one-time window.

Now at this point you might be saying, “Jordan Belfort? Isn’t he the guy who ripped of the American public for about $200 million? Didn’t he go to jail for it and need rehab for his out of control hedonism and drug addiction? Why would you want to learn anything from a guy like that?”

Well – you’d be right.

But what you may not know, is that Jordan is also one of the smartest business minds on the planet. I don’t care about defending that statement – you can do your own research. But the guy is smart – I mean really smart, particularly in business building. The second thing you might not know is that apart from a series of progressively STUPID decisions in his early career, more than 95% of the money that Jordan ever made was completely legitimate. Since his jail time, he’s now one of the world’s advocates for ethics in business. And the third thing you may not know, is that he’s one of the most giving and supportive mentors and friends that a young, lost and almost suicidal nobody (violin maker-come-call centre trainer) could have. In fact JB started a young entrepreneurs charity to help thousands in Africa who would otherwise have zero chance of surviving in the business world without his help.

So back to the story… The following day, I went through my phone book and wrote down the names of the top 10 people I knew in my life, that I hoped I hadn’t completely burnt in my 18 months of self loathing and destruction, who might be willing to loan me the money on a strict loan-plus-interest basis.

On the fourth call, someone said “yes”.

But this still doesn’t answer the question – “how the hell did you get in a conversation with the world’s most famous salesman himself and convince HIM to give you his mega course for free??!!”

In Part TWO of this blog series, I’ll share with you the exact email I sent that closed the wolf on giving me his $25k training package for free. I’ll send out a reminder email when it’s ready so keep an eye out for it – the subject is: “What if Jordan Belfort is your Business Coach??”

In the meantime, if you haven’t seen the video masterclass I shot for you – GO WATCH THEM NOW>>> Seriously, Do Not Engage With Another Prospect Until You Watch This Short Masterclass!!

This masterclass was shot for our Next Level members only and we’ll be pulling them down from everywhere else very soon so I suggest you go watch them 😉

To your success,

DC

P.S. Thanks for all of your comments and kind words about the course, I’m getting to every one (including the PMs). Go and check them out for yourself here and post something about your experience with the series so far. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Discover Coaching Coaching Programs are tailored to each individual and align tactical, strategic and visionary leadership styles to reach both Professional and Personal milestones. DC is fully certified for the use of both proprietary (Neuro Linguistic Programming, TimeLine Therapy ®, Straight Line System) and authored custom programs (How to Boil an Egg, Million Dollar Sales Pitch, Mass Persuasion – Complete Sales Mastery, Coaches Collection).

David Cervelli is a certified NLP Master Practitioner, Coach and Hypnotherapist with the ABNLP and ABH.

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