Episode 91: The Art and Science of Selling with Eric Lofholm – Transcript
Rennie Gabriel 00:09
Hi, folks, welcome to Episode 91 of the Wealth On Any Income Podcast. This is where we talk about money tips, techniques, attitudes, information, and provide inspiration around your business and money. I'm your host, Rennie Gabriel. In past episodes, we spoke about how to understand the numbers from your business, how to measure the level of pleasure based on where you spend your money, how to track your money in 5 - 10 seconds, what determines how close you are to Complete Financial Choice®, and how to run your business without being in your business. And last week, we had Dr. Saida Désilets, who built a business training women on how to become audacious, sexually sovereign individuals. Well, you may have wondered how that related to business, but she also told the story of how one person lost $10 million because of the lack of intimacy between he and his wife. Today, we have as our guest, Eric Lofholm. Eric has been helping more people make more sales for over 20 years. He's passionate about teaching the art and science of selling. Eric, welcome to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast.
Eric Lofholm 01:33
Rennie, I'm excited to be here today.
Rennie Gabriel 01:35
Terrific. Well, let's get right to it with some questions. Okay, so you teach people how to make more sales. Why?
Eric Lofholm 01:43
Well, my natural gifting is teaching. I love teaching people. And I was trained by one of the top sales trainers in the world, a gentleman named Dr. Donald Moine. And with his help, I went from a bottom producer to a top producer back in the early 1990s. And just for joy, I started teaching what he taught me to my fellow co-workers. And I started producing some pretty outstanding students, I wasn't charging them for it, I was just doing it for the love of teaching. I then had a three-year run with motivational superstar Tony Robbins. And in 1999, I started my own company. So for the last 20 plus years, I've been teaching people all over the world how to make more sales.
Rennie Gabriel 02:26
Fabulous. And it sounds like you're still having fun at it.
Eric Lofholm 02:31
I love it. I have no vision for, you know, sitting back and playing golf and retiring. I want to do this and until the end of my career, and I just love helping people make more sales and seeing the growth in my students.
Rennie Gabriel 02:45
Terrific. And it's interesting because you talked about no intention of retiring. And one of the people that I've been around has a wonderful - what I want to call - explanation behind the word retire. She used to work on a ranch and when the cows could no longer produce milk, they would put them out to pasture to die. And the term for that is retiring the cow. So when you're prepared to go out to pasture and die, you can retire.
Eric Lofholm 03:19
There you go.
Rennie Gabriel 03:20
Which is . . . Yeah. Which is why I created the term, Complete Financial Choice®, to replace anything that had to do with retirement. You know, you want to work, you want to... terrific. You want to travel - terrific. You want to do charitable work - terrific. You have the financial skills, choice, amounts of money to do with whatever you want to do. And I mentioned charity. Is there a particular charity that you support, and if so, what do they do?
Eric Lofholm 03:54
Yeah, so the charity that I consistently donate to is my church. And then outside of that, I'll pick individual things that really grab my attention, things that I want to support. A couple years ago, I got behind people that lost their homes in the Camp Fire, which burned down the town of Paradise and I dedicated an entire year of my life to support that effort. And we raised well over a million dollars for that particular project. And so I'll find passion projects, but the one that I regularly donate to is my church.
Rennie Gabriel 04:30
Oh, fabulous. Yeah. And I happen to also be in California. So I do remember the Paradise fire that literally wiped out an entire town that no longer existed after that fire went through and a major loss of life. Okay, so anyone could be selling. I mean, it could be life insurance, sales or solar panels. What's your target market?
Eric Lofholm 04:56
That is my target market. It's really anybody, and I teach a system, a way to approach selling that works in any industry. It works in group selling, Zoom selling, door knocking, face to face. It's a methodology that I developed with the help of my mentor, Dr. Moine. So I train anybody in any industry. And so I have clients, you know, in all different types of industries.
Rennie Gabriel 05:25
Got it. Okay. Well, that makes sense. What would you say, was your biggest failure, whether it was personal or business?
Eric Lofholm 05:34
Well, I had a situation back in the mid-1990s. And I started my first company. It was a telemarketing company. And I've never run a company before. So I was a "fish out of water". Didn't know about HR and training and all the things that go into running a business. So the company ended up failing, and I shut the company down. And when the company failed, I took on the identity, 'I am a failure'.
Rennie Gabriel 06:02
Hmm.
Eric Lofholm 06:03
And the reality is, the company failed. That didn't change who I am. But I didn't know that at the time. And so my wife and I ended up separating. I became homeless. My car got repossessed. I ended up going through a personal bankruptcy. And my life just spiraled downward from that experience. And I became emotionally paralyzed, like, I could not get myself to take action. And I could have - looking back - very easily pivoted out of that situation and not had this giant downward spiral. But that's what ended up happening. And so that was the low point in my life.
Rennie Gabriel 06:42
And you and I, I would say, have similar paths, where, you know, I went broke. And by age 50, after a couple divorces, and a business failure, I had to start over from scratch. There are advantages. What was the insight that you created from that?
Eric Lofholm 07:01
Well, when I got on the other side of it, one of the peak experiences of my life, I got a job waiting tables at the coffee shop at the Harris Casino. And it was a graveyard shift - so it was just this crummy shift. And I wasn't making hardly any money, but I was making a little bit of money. And when they hired me, it was the first win that I had had in several months. And it energetically gave me this this peak experience because it was like, setback, setback, setback, just downward spiral. And then all of a sudden, I had a win. And what I learned out of that experience is that small wins create confidence. And so anytime that I'm going through any kind of adversity or struggle, I just immediately know, 'Okay, focus, Eric on getting a win', and it will end up changing how I'm feeling. And I got emotional muscle out of that experience, having gotten through it and getting on the other side, and then my life began to, you know, go back upward and into a more successful life. And I turned it all around. And so it just gave me a lot of confidence. As other adversities have come up, I'm like, That's no problem. I got this, I've been through something much more challenging and I learned how to not be paralyzed when adversity shows up. So it just gave me a much better understanding of just the life, there is duality in life. There's ups and downs, it's part of it. And so I'm grateful now for the experience, although it was very, very painful back then.
Rennie Gabriel 08:39
Oh, believe me, I understand that kind of pain. And the advantage is, you recognize that's not going to keep you down and you can rise from whatever shows up.
Eric Lofholm 08:50
Yeah, Les Brown, he says, you know, knock me down seven times get up eight.
Rennie Gabriel 08:55
Yes.
Eric Lofholm 08:56
And I love his resilient mindset. And I love that approach. And, you know, I've never been paralyzed like that ever since. And so, yeah.
Rennie Gabriel 09:08
Yeah, so it works. So what are the common mistakes that you see that your prospects make?
Eric Lofholm 09:14
Well, one of the biggest mistakes is the mindset to selling. So there's a stigma to sales in our culture. And a lot of entrepreneurs are not traditional salespeople. They're not selling real estate or insurance. They're a small business owner, and they might have resistance to selling. And so if you bring resistance to selling into a sales presentation, it's kind of like running a race with a weight vest. You know, if you and I were going to do 100-yard dash and we're the same speed, but now I got to put on this 50 pound weight vest, you're gonna win every time. And so the entrepreneur puts themselves at a disadvantage if they have a resistance to selling. So that's one common mistake. And then another one is not going into the presentation with a plan. Many people wing it because they don't want to come across salesy. So their solution to not being salesy is winging it. And I always say, when you wing it, you get wing it results. So I'm all about preparation. I'm all about teaching people how to embrace sales if they resist sales. And one other very common mistake that people make, is when they look in the mirror, they don't see the extraordinary human being that they are. And likely when they were a young child, parent, teacher, someone says something to them negative, and they've been operating in their life with a lesser view of themselves than who they are. I'm a former cook at McDonald's, college dropout, and now I'm an international sales trainer. So my results are very different than when I was younger. But part of that has to do with what I see when I look in the mirror. I'm able to see the extraordinary human being that I am. I'm not saying that from a cocky or arrogant . . .
Rennie Gabriel 09:18
No, no, I'm not hearing it that way, either.
Eric Lofholm 10:56
But seeing as who I am, and the value that I deliver, and as all of you're watching or listening to this right now, this podcast, that's you, too. But not everybody sees themselves in the extraordinary light that they are.
Rennie Gabriel 11:21
Yeah, and you know, and when you're talking about having the wrong mindset, or walking into a meeting, whether they're not prepared or lacking confidence, or having resistance, when you compared it to one person running a race, and another person running the same race with an extra 50 pounds on them, the interesting thing that I've noticed is the prospects that you might be speaking to see that weight that you don't think they see. They see the resistance that you don't think they can see. They sense that.
Eric Lofholm 11:55
Absolutely. It shows up in your language.
Rennie Gabriel 11:57
Yeah.
Eric Lofholm 11:57
It shows up in your voice inflection. I talked to a CEO the other day, this guy is a multimillionaire, he has 400 employees. And I said, I can uplift all 400 of your employees. Well, I have to have a certain confidence to say that. And if I don't have that confidence, that's not going to come out.
Rennie Gabriel 12:16
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And you know, your prospect can feel the confidence or the lack of it.
Rennie Gabriel 12:16
That's right.
Eric Lofholm 12:16
Like, my enthusiasm, right now. I'm getting excited just talking to you about it, right? It's like, if I'm not, if I don't, if I'm not able to express my true enthusiasm with the real value I can deliver, there's no way for him to then know what I can do for him. So he's going to make his decision based on a lower version of myself. And fortunately, I've learned how to accept my greatness and to be confident within myself. And so that's something that is an area of improvement for a lot of people. I was talking to a top producer yesterday and he was describing to me different challenges that he's having in his mindset. And he's a top producer. You'd never think that he would be struggling with it. But he has and many people do.
Eric Lofholm 13:06
That's right.
Rennie Gabriel 13:07
So well give me an example of a case study to illustrate, you know, how your sales training worked for someone?
Eric Lofholm 13:15
Well, one of my star clients, his name is Kevin Hudoba. And he is a real estate agent. And in the year before he worked with me, he had made $125,000. And his goal was to make 250. So he hit half of his goal and he thought, 'Well shoot, maybe I need some help because on my own, I didn't have the breakthrough I was looking for.' And so we started looking at all kinds of things, whether it was his listing presentation - he's a real estate agent. So how can we strengthen the listing presentation? How can we strengthen consistency of prospecting? How can we, in real estate, there's a lot of peaks and valleys, feast or famine, you know, whether it's the seasonal time, you know, the transactions are down, or the market or the deal falls out. So he's dealing with a lot of ups and downs in his emotions. And so we're working on how do you maintain consistency in your mindset, even when you lose a deal. So he went from 20 deals to 80 deals. He built a small team, and what his big dream always was, was to be a real estate investor. So he started investing in real estate. He's still an agent. That's his, like, cash flow, if you will.
Rennie Gabriel 14:30
Yeah.
Eric Lofholm 14:30
Last year, he did a deal, all cash from the money he had built up. I think it was like $150,000 deal - somewhere around there. And it was like - he's in his 30s by the way. Who in their 30s are doing all cash deals for 150 grand? He's a future multi, multi-millionaire. He's just great with money. And so he's somebody who I've come alongside, mentored him, believed in him, coached him, and and he's just, he's on the fast track to success now. So that's one example. One person that I helped.
Rennie Gabriel 15:01
Okay, it's the perfect case study. Now, for those who are listening, is there some valuable free resource that you can offer people that could support them if you know they're not working with you?
Eric Lofholm 15:15
Absolutely - dailymotivationalcall.com. I do a free 15 minute call every day - saleschampion.com. I give away my PDF of my best selling book, The System. And I believe in offering things for free to let people have an experience with me. So if anybody's listening and you want to get to know me without making a financial investment, I've got several ways that I can support you through free trainings, and then you can get a comfort level. And if you have a need for a coach at a future date, then we can have that conversation as well.
Rennie Gabriel 15:47
You said something that I'll need you to provide a link to me for the show notes, something to do with a free 15 minute - what was it?
Eric Lofholm 15:57
So the website is dailymotivationalcall.com. And on there every Monday through Friday at 7:45 Pacific time, I come on and do a 15 minute free motivational training. And so people from all over the world plug into this call, and all the information is up at that particular website.
Rennie Gabriel 16:20
Great. Okay, so I just added that to the show notes. Beautiful. So well, is there a question that I should have asked you, that would also give some great value to those who are listening?
Eric Lofholm 16:34
You know, when I prep for this, the question, I don't have it in front of me.
Rennie Gabriel 16:40
Okay. Well, I'll tell you what you answered.
Eric Lofholm 16:42
Okay. I need a little help here.
Rennie Gabriel 16:44
Because I prepared. Okay. The question you said you'd ask is, what advice would you give to your younger self?
Eric Lofholm 16:53
Yeah.
Rennie Gabriel 16:54
And the answer you gave was that you would have learned the principle of investing at a younger age.
Eric Lofholm 17:02
Yeah, you know, Rennie. I love what you do, because the world needs you. And I needed you, I need you now. But I needed you even more when I was younger. And I was actually doing some investing when I was younger, but I didn't understand it. I bought my first property at 28. I had a 401K, I was building up a cash value life insurance policy. And the mistake I made, Rennie, is I got into into some challenges in my business and instead of sucking it up, and figuring out a way to find the money, I cashed out my investments. And I probably have left $2 million on the table from investments that I had made, that I just didn't understand that like, owning a property at 28, I was really set up - like I was on my way. That property is worth a half million dollars now. I paid $128,000 for it. I have nothing to show for it. So now in my 50s, I am investing now. I am starting to use, you know some of the things that are a part of how you look at life, and I am building up my net worth and I'm happy about that. But if I had known that when I was younger, it really would have made a huge difference because I was making plenty of money. But I was just spending it on things that were were not assets, things that weren't going to help me in the future. And I didn't understand when I cashed these assets out the consequences of what that meant. I didn't even understand the decision I was making.
Rennie Gabriel 18:38
Yeah, oh, believe me, I've been where you are. And I personally understand exactly what you're talking about. In the same way that you gave up that house that you purchased for 125, had you not sold it to get out of the little difficulty you had at the time, you would have hundreds of thousands of dollars more money now.
Eric Lofholm 19:02
That's right, and that property would probably be cash flowing 1500 a month. So I'd have equity $1,500 a month cash flow for life. And, you know, it is what it is, but the decision making was due to lack of education.
Rennie Gabriel 19:17
Yeah, yeah. Not knowing how this will impact your future. Exactly.
Eric Lofholm 19:22
I didn't understand compounding. Yes. So not understanding compounding and not understanding that, you know, real estate tends to go up with inflation. It just, that's what it does. And so, you know, there was one other property I had that I pulled the cash out of and sold it as well. And I thought, Well, what if the property goes down? It's like the property I sold for a little over 600,000 it's worth over a million now. And, of course the money's gone, spent the money I pulled out. So, I just didn't understand money and the importance of investing and having that as a part of my strategy. Now fortunately, I'm 51, so I'm on the right track now and I'm acquiring assets again. I own a home again. But that was the big lesson that I could wish I could tell my younger self.
Rennie Gabriel 19:22
Oh, yeah. Perfect. And to support you in what you're saying, I remember - this goes back to the 1980s, I think the late 80s - when an apartment building, I had a little four-plex, and the market value dropped by like 40%. Now, I could have sold it, and you know, said, 'Oh, you know, this is bad. I want to get out of this'. But instead, the rents still supported the property. So I kept it. And I ended up, you know, the value returned. I ended up doing a tax-deferred exchange when it went from, and I mean, it dropped to like, $600,000. When I sold it, I sold it for 1.4 million.
Eric Lofholm 20:53
Wow.
Rennie Gabriel 20:53
Well, it wasn't. So it was a trade. And I use that to buy an eight-unit from the four-unit.
Eric Lofholm 20:59
Okay.
Rennie Gabriel 21:00
Yeah. So you're right. I mean, you hold on to it, it does make a difference. Well, Eric, I want to thank you for being on the podcast.
Eric Lofholm 21:12
Rennie, I appreciate it. And thank you for all you're doing and for the financial education that you're creating for the world because the world needs you and the world needs your message.
Rennie Gabriel 21:22
Thank you, Eric. I appreciate that. Now, for those listening, next week, we're going to have Johnny Byrne, talking about how to use technology to create a powerful and memorable online presentation. The things he shared with me already are very simple, and they're great time savers. You can listen to the Wealth On Any Income Podcast on your favorite platform. And please rate, review, and subscribe. And if you'd like to know how books, movies and Society programs you to be poor, and what the cure is, then log on to wealthonanyincome.com/TEDx. You'll hear my TEDx talk and can request a free 27-page Roadmap to Complete Financial Choice®, and receive a weekly email with tips, techniques, or inspiration around your business or money. And if you'd like to see how you can increase your wealth, and donate to the causes that touch your heart, please check out our affordable program, Wealth with Purpose, on the wealthonanyincome.com website. Until next week, be prosperous
