On unique IPs and intent: One-call sales close expert Alex Schlinksy talks things that will get you noticed

On unique IPs and intent: One-call sales close expert Alex Schlinksy talks things that will get you noticed

By Jim James, Founder EASTWEST PR and Host of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. 

Alex Schlinksy has had open-heart surgery and he’s currently running a seven-figure Mastermind. He’s an expert at helping entrepreneurs to get noticed and he does it in an interesting and unique way. In the new episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, he joined me from Tampa Bay, Florida to discuss all these.

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How to be Unique

Because there’s a huge sea of entrepreneurs and marketers out there, you may feel like you’re being slammed over by everyone else and constantly getting lost. This prompts you to ask — how can you be more unique and original?

You can step into your own greatness by trying not to copy other people and by being unique. One of the things that Alex and his team do in their Prospecting on Demand Mastermind is to

come up with intellectual property (IP).

In his case, one of his IPs is the one-million-dollar, one-call close sales method. A lot of people know him because of this specific piece and it’s why he gets invited to come to other people’s Mastermind or events.

As another example, he cited that they have a client who works with medical spas and she helps them generate leads and prospects.

Generating leads and prospects is a promise that you’ve probably heard 10,000 times already — whether you’re a roofer, dentist, or chiropractor who wants to get more clients. To be unique, that client offers the so-called glow method. It’s a four-step process to getting 60 prepaid patients in 90 days. She does TikTok videos that are funny and unique, allowing her clients to stand out rather than be the Bunnell standard like everyone else.

For Alex, creating unique, interesting content and building out your own IP is how you can really separate yourself from other people.

Don’t Fear Competition

When you join Alex’s Mastermind, the first thing that he does is to avoid talking about market saturation.

The general understanding is that if you’re a marketing agency, you’re significantly outnumbered and that your competition is crushing you. However, the numbers are actually drastically in your favour.

For instance, you’re running a medical spa agency. In reality, most agencies cannot manage more than 50 clients. So if you multiply that number by the amount of med spas out there, you’ll realise that there’s really no competition. Hundreds of thousands of agencies can thrive because there are millions of med spas out there. This applies to other niches.

If you focus too much on the competition — you’re worried about how your competition is doing  — you could end up becoming exactly like them in every way and stay unoriginal.

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Apart from taking you out of that “I fear competition” mindset, their Mastermind will also help you develop your own IP through a seven-step process.

The Seven-Step Process Towards Having Your IP

In sales, when you overcomplicate things, the confused customer or client won’t buy. This is why Alex and his team simplify things through their process.

Through it, they help clients come up with a very specific promise based on what they can accomplish. A standard marketing agency will say that they offer leads. But their clients will say something more particular. For example, “We promise 20 guaranteed patients in 30 days or your money back.”

The specific framework they use revolves around an irresistible offer. It comprises seven steps to help you build an IP and stand out from the crowd. They also help you promote your IP, typically through an advertisement and by specifically stating how you’re different from everyone else.

The seven steps are:

1. Pain. What are the problems that your avatar is dealing with?

2. Solution or ascension promise. What is the offer that you are going to provide for that pain or problem? What is the outcome? Most agencies will go on saying, “We're going to do Facebook ads for you. We're going to do five posts a day.” They don't care about the mechanism. They just need to make sure that you understand what the result is. However, Alex emphasised that you need to focus on the solution.

3. Results, benefits, and features. Customers need to know what they’re going to see, both tangibly and intangibly. For instance, one value you can offer to your buyers is how your services can save them time. Today, a lot of offers in the marketing space are really focused on how to make more money — but what people also want is to have more time available to them.

4. Value and risk mitigation. What's your risk reversal? Do you have any guarantees? Do you have social proof? Do you have any buying strategies to make it easier for them to buy from you?

5. Positioning. How are you creating that like, know, and trust factor? How are you building authority and credibility? Again, this comes down to social proof and how your profiles are set up.

6. Sales strategy. How are you generating your leads and prospects? What about audience targeting and price anchoring? What if you have any urgency or scarcity? Can your prospects buy from you immediately or do you only work for a certain amount of people?

7. Objection handling. What are the most common objections that you receive and how can you handle them before your prospects even bring them up? If you're capable of that, it increases your authority significantly — to the point that they’re already considering working with you because you already know everything that they’re going to ask.

Having a Sense of Purpose

The severe lack of intention is one of the problems that we face today. A lot of people run companies with the primary purpose of generating more revenue; their secondary purpose is delivering for their customers.

At Prospecting on Demand, the internal mantra within their Mastermind community is client success over client acquisition. So if a customer paid for your product or service, they wouldn’t say that you should find another customer immediately.

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However, the biggest mantra that Alex and his team follows when helping clients is to build a business that facilitates their life — not at the expense of it. This kind of transparency and intentional focus allows people to generate more growth and fulfilment.

In their company, he has his clients write a daily journal topic: What’s the one emotion that you felt today more than anything?

Many entrepreneurs are very fearful of this journal because what they’d commonly write there is anxiety, stress, or frustration. Nonetheless, the idea of entrepreneurship is all about choice. You have the choice to do what you want. And it's surprising that you would choose to feel frustrated, anxious, or upset about it.

This is why intention is very important. If you want to simply make more money, the reality of it is that you’ll feel like you’re running on a treadmill. You run a lot but you don't get anywhere. And this leads to burnout.

Embodying this and what they say about client success over client acquisition, Alex and his team chose to be a boutique company. They know that they can't just magically bring in 30 people a month and still deliver the same quality of service. They know that there will be diminishing returns.

When people ask him why he runs his company, Alex says it’s because he has the intention to get what he wants. And what he wants is to build a community and a culture of people that he loves and considers his family. He wants to help and have these personal relationships to make a huge impact on their lives — and on his life as well. But he acknowledges that he can’t do that with 100 or 150 people.

On His Pivotal Life Experiences

When Alex was 15 years old and a freshman in high school, his dad worked as a financial advisor. Prior to that, he was a funeral director. However, that work became very challenging for him because many people were passing away who shouldn't pass away yet. When he couldn't handle that anymore, he created a financial planning business. He did amazingly well for himself and their life had changed for the better.

Unfortunately, his dad had a massive stroke (he said that he’s alive and well today). After suffering from a stroke, he was out of work for about two years. What their family quickly realised was that his dad didn't have a business — he was a freelancer. As soon as he got sick and the fact that he was working with people's money, it was pretty evident that his dad’s clients had to find someone else.

Money got tied and things got stressful. His dad wanted to get back to work but he couldn't. It took Alex about eight years to get through the trauma of it and, also, to realise what his mission statement is as an entrepreneur. He must learn from his dad’s error, which is failing to build a system, a process, and a team around him.

Alex then had the opportunity to be featured in Entrepreneur magazine where he wrote about how his dad’s health crisis created clarity for him on how he can help people avoid what his dad experienced.

Over the years, he also ended up working with people who have their own children and there are much greater stakes if they do their business without realising that no one will run it if something happens to them. He witnessed how people didn’t want to talk about mortality or morbidity when it’s indeed relevant.

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Another story happened when Alex was 28 years old. He was told that he had to have open-heart surgery, which he was able to do when he was 29. He had to wait 10 months because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And for him, the waiting was the worst part.

But after the surgery, it did create such a strong purpose for him. He realised that, now, it’s his individual story that’s going to impact people. This is the same thing that his mom told him.

Because if you’re a younger person and a 60-year-old tells you to care more about your time and be more cognisant with your life, you might just shrug that advice off. But it’s more impactful if it’s a 30-year-old who has a five-month-old son who says to you, “I almost died when I shouldn't have and I almost lost everything. I worked very hard for 10 years and I would never have the fruits of my labour. Maybe you should focus a little bit more on fulfilment and enjoying it rather than the never-ending hustle culture and cycle of let's work harder.”

This is how he ended up creating a clearer mission statement for the people that he works with.  And it’s why one of the main elements that he tracks in their Mastermind community is the number of days off per month. They don’t just track profit or sales calls, they also track how many days did you take off to do the things that you’re fulfiled with — along with how many days did you write in your journal the word fulfiled, happy, or tranquil.

Getting Noticed Through Speaking

Alex considers speaking on stage as the format that fulfils him the most. Though doing podcasts is fun, it’s a one-to-one format and you don’t know the audience that’s listening to you. It’s different when you’re there in person and you’re seeing somebody’s eyes light up or be attentive and focused on you.

Today, attention is the hardest thing to get because of so many stimuli available to people. We have a computer in our pocket at all times with literally an infinite amount of material that we can consume. The idea of capturing and keeping attention to be noticed — and be continually noticed — is very important.

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Alex works with different companies that help him get positioned on podcasts and stage speaking. He also advised that when there’s an opportunity, put yourself out there because an audience member might end up getting interested and invite you to be on a podcast or an event. In his case, many of his speaking engagements come from either initial outreach or from people who have previously seen or listened to him in other events or podcasts.

When you’re out there, you also have to avoid being afraid of what might happen. Even if you’d say something stupid or bad, it will just get lost in the ether. No one will remember because there's so much information out there. But if you can capture even just one person and give value to them, that one person might have a connection that could change your entire life.

On Talking About Different Topics

A lot of people try to pigeonhole themselves into the content that they provide. However, doing this will put you in a position where you're either a master of all, or a master of none and a jack of all trades. You have to find some balance.

For the majority of his entrepreneurship-related speaking engagements, Alex does his one-call close training, which is his sales positioning. But it doesn't mean that he can’t talk about other things. People might want to know that he works with the Miami Dolphins or that he was a UFC media member or that he ran an agency for four years or that he had open-heart surgery at 29.

People are intrigued by these stories because that's what the human condition is — wanting to listen to someone who inspires you to do the next thing that you want. And this is the reason that he’s always open and available to speak on any topic (except numbers and cryptocurrency because he’s not a numbers guy).

He loves talking in general and he values the idea of talking about different processes and different things to different people. Who knows who's going to be in the audience in his next talk? Who knows what the next speaking opportunity holds? When the opportunity comes knocking, you must bust down the door.

Unifying Themes

Intentionality and confidence are his unifying themes whenever he speaks — whether the topic is prospecting, sales, entrepreneurship, getting noticed, or his heart surgery.

Alex hugely believes in being really intentional with what you do in your life instead of just always making more money or getting to the next thing. After his surgery, he now appreciates serenity and tranquillity. Before that, he was a person of great anxiety and stress.

When you have anxiety, you could end up creating a weird sense of what life is. You could experience unfair feelings of I’m not good enough, I’m not capable of doing this, I should have done this, I should have been there, or I’m going to compete against someone else.

But life is precious. The time that you have is incredibly valuable and you need to consider what you really want from it. And the key is defining your win. It’s actions over outcomes.

Something to Enjoy and Set Their Company Apart

Like other entrepreneurs, Alex and his business partner Brian Downard also consider what they can do to make their business different in their space. They know that it’s a saturated market so there’s a need for them to stand out from the crowd.

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One time when they were drinking shots together, they wondered what would happen if they take shots on Facebook Live and try to book sales appointments for their clients.

In 2018, they did their first-ever “Cold Call Shotline.” They compiled leads from their clients, acted as appointment setters, and called leads on their clients’ behalf. If they could book a sales appointment, they wouldn't have to take a shot, and vice versa.

This type of content is unique and attention-grabbing because people tend to want to see others get drunk online. It highlights authenticity and being unafraid to show who you are. It also creates excitement because their clients are caught between wanting to book sales appointments and seeing Alex and Brian take the shot.

Fast forward to today, they now have three versions of that Facebook Live show. Apart from the “Cold Call Shotline,” they have “Hot Wing Hotline” where the consequence is eating the hottest hot wings available from Buffalo Wild Wings. The third one is “The Wheel of Misfortune” and the consequence is saying a silly word or speaking in a silly accent.

They both look forward to doing these shows because they’re not just enjoyable. They also showcase the coaching that they’re doing. And if you can find something like that for your business, it will help you stand out while ultimately enjoying it.

This article is based on a transcript from my podcast The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, you can listen here.

Cover image by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash