Zero Sales: Generating Services Revenue Without Selling

By David Nugent

I created the Zero Sales Theory to both demystify the complex nature of revenue generation and create an understandable process that has proven very successful for me, in the hope that it would empower others. I hope to also shine a light on a “business art” that is often looked down upon by those who still subscribe to the idea of old-school sales and cheesy salespeople. Generating revenue requires a certain kind of practical intelligence that includes a nuanced set of skills honed over time but never perfected. It is the foundation of all business and creates happiness and security for millions of people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Nov 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737970118

Book preview

Preface

There once was a salesman who lived and worked in New York City. He was young and relatively inexperienced, but well-liked by colleagues and co-workers. He did not enjoy the formality of his job— the suit and tie, the corporate culture—but he found excitement in the status, perks like tickets to sporting events, dinners at fancy restaurants, and, most of all, the pay. The job paid very well. Each morning he would get up in his apartment on the Upper East Side, layer on his suit and tie, and make the roughly ten-block walk to the subway to travel to the office. The young salesman reported directly to the two most successful sales executives in the company, and he’d spend each day supporting efforts with their clients as well as trying to develop clientele of his own.

There were meetings, lunches, calls, more meetings, more calls.

He worked hard and began to rise in the organization. He built his own clientele, and eventually landed his own deals. It was a slow process, but his sales manager explained that this was how things worked and the way his career was supposed to go. They told him to keep pushing and good things would happen.

And so it went.

On one particularly hot day in July, he found himself late for work. The walk from the young salesman’s apartment to the subway was brutally cold in the winter and unbearably hot in the summer. The heat was especially challenging on the subway platforms and inside the two overcrowded subway lines he needed to ride to get to his office in Soho. On this particular morning, the subway he was riding was so hot and crowded that, in a panicked moment of effusive sweating and claustrophobia, he stepped off the subway two stops early and decided to walk the rest of the way on the street. The hot walk was not much better, and he arrived at the office sweaty and frustrated. He walked to his cubicle to try and pull himself together. The office was already bustling with people laughing, talking on the phone, and scurrying this way and that. He needed coffee.

As he approached the coffee machine, he had absolutely no idea that his life was about to change.

1.

Introduction

Why Did I Write This?

There are thousands of books on making money in business, and the world certainly does not need another one, does it?

I’m not sure I can objectively answer that question, but I do believe that what you’ll find in this book provides some new context on an old topic. The business world has changed more in the twenty-five or so years since the Internet came to be than it did in the one hundred years that preceded it. I am old enough to have received my initial sales training and experience in a business ecosystem that did not include email, cell phones, or the Internet. I have helped launch and run four companies since then—all focused in some way on Internet- based technology. In this sense, I believe that some of what you’ll find here is different from what you’ve read elsewhere. I will sprinkle in anecdotes about my personal experiences throughout this book in an effort to illustrate why I think the way I do, and hopefully add a little humor.

What you are about to read is based on my thirty years’ experience working in, and managing, commercial organizations. I feel very fortunate to have found success in developing a productive set of beliefs and a theory on the topic of generating revenue and building services businesses. I decided to take a close look at the elements behind that success.

As a founder or co-founder, my role has always been in finding new accounts and generating revenue, and I sought to understand the dynamics that needed to exist in order for business growth to occur. What I discovered in developing the Zero Sales Theory is that much of what is commonly referred to as sales is, in fact, not sales at all. At least not in the way most people think of sales, or the way most businesses approach the sales process.

I believe that to create growth for your business you must demonstrate to a buyer that you understand what matters to them, that you can and will create a relationship with them that they will believe is valuable, and that you are well-intentioned. Most traditional sales training focuses on persuading a buyer to do something that is in your best interest (i.e., the close), but may or may not be in their best interest. Zero Sales focuses on value creation, ethics, and trust as a foundation for business relationships that generate revenue consistently over time.

The Zero Sales Theory is the accumulation of some of what I’ve learned over my career, which includes best practices on the topic of generating revenue that has been developed by some of the greatest business minds in the world. I’ve done my best to footnote direct references to the research and work of others, but some of these theories overlap with each other quite a bit, as there are thousands of books, seminars, and videos that address some of the same topics.

I believe that a Zero Sales Theory can be helpful for anybody who has a role where directly or indirectly generating revenue is an important part of their job. Most of my personal experience is in the world of technology services, but this theory also directly applies to agencies and other business to business (B2B) professional services firms who seek growth in industries like architecture, law, accounting, financial services, etc. The general concepts of validity, creating value, and being focused on solutions to problems should help in most commercial scenarios for direct to consumer (D2C) services businesses and product companies but, again, the theory that I promote here is focused on B2B professional services businesses.

In the first few chapters of this book, we’ll examine what Zero Sales means and how my personal experience influenced the Zero Sales approach. From there, we’ll explore the importance of your beliefs and ethics and how critical trust is in the revenue-generating process. The chapters that follow cover the Match Mentality, which is when we begin to review the theme of creating value. We’ll go into the importance of goals and time management, finding and qualifying opportunities, the importance of storytelling, and wrap up with turning opportunity into revenue. The cadence of this book’s content is designed to have you explore yourself, what you think and believe, while understanding that generating revenue is simply about creating value. The sequence of the content also mirrors the typical sequence of the buyer journey and the process of generating revenue.

I have personally used books like this as guideposts in my journey toward success. I believe that all learning adds a new tool to the toolkit of a business professional, and sometimes certain philosophies or storytelling techniques can feel perfect for an individual person at a specific moment in time. I sincerely hope that this serves that purpose for you.

In the next three chapters, I’ll provide some background information on my life experience and how it informed much of my perspective and the Zero Sales approach.

2.

Life as a Sales Guy

In the preface, I described the day that altered the track of my life forever. As frightening and stressful as the weeks that followed became, it was the best decision I ever made. I was six years into my sales career and making very good money for someone in their mid- twenties, but I found that every Sunday night I began to dread the week ahead. I felt trapped but had no idea what to do. Like many people, I think I believed that hating your job was an acceptable trade-off if the money was good enough.

As I approached the coffee machine on that hot July day, a couple of older sales guys (who were probably in their sixties) were huddled around telling bad jokes. I was still sweaty from a horrible trip to the office, and I looked at the two of them. I remember thinking that being right in that spot as a sixty-something-year-old was the path I was on. At that moment, something in me snapped, and the decision could not have been more obvious. I walked into my sales manager’s office and quit. At that moment, my journey into entrepreneurship began.

I’ve had some kind of a revenue-generating role for my entire professional career. My dad was a successful executive who worked in sales for over forty years. He worked in financial printing sales and would often describe his job as something he could teach our cat to do, so I assumed I could probably figure it out. Somewhat predictably, my first sales job was working for a large financial printing company, a competitor of my dad’s company. It was a suit-and-tie corporate environment where the clients were primarily large law firms and investment banking companies.

During college, it felt like a forgone conclusion that I’d wind up in a job like this. Growing up, we lived a