Landon Porter How to Sell Without Being Salesy

Donnie B.: All right. So a lot of you guys have been asking for this one and I'm looking forward to bringing Landon on. This is going to be a fun time. You should see his eyeballs right now. I got them all wigged out. But this is going to be a fun time. I'm bringing on the Sales Gorilla himself, Mr. Landon Porter and I think we're just going to have a killer time. I’m going to make fun of him a lot because I dig his hairdo and everything. So I think we're just going to have a fun time with that.

I'm Donnie Boivin. This is Donnie’s Success Champions. Landon, welcome to the show, my brother. Tell us your story.
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Donnie B.: Hey, guys! Before we get rolling with Landon, I wanted to jump in here and say thank you to Point Blank Safety Services and Blue Family Fund. They've been with us for almost the entirety of 200 episodes on this show and they've just been amazing and their message and what they do in protection of our freeways, our buildings and I'm honored that a company that takes care of our police officers and their families has been such a gem in supporting our messages, this show and everything they do and what they're doing for police officers and their families is truly a beautiful thing.

I mean, we all know the stories that teachers, police officers, military, they're all underpaid for what they're sacrificing with their lives. And I love the fact that Stacey and Michael found a cool way to get them additional income so they could take care of their families. It's really a beautiful thing.

So if you’re looking for security services or you're looking for highway protection and patrol, those type of things, man, do me a favor and reach out to Point Blank Safety Services and you can find them at PointBlankSafetyServices.com and tell them Donnie sent you, you heard it on the Success Champions podcast. But man, what an amazing company, amazing people and guys, do me a favor, follow them on social, follow all their stuff because I couldn't do this show without them.

Here comes Landon.

Landon P.: Thanks for having me on, man. So back in late October of 1977, right? My story is not the typical sales guy or finally made it big in business story or whatever. I learned early on that I was really good at a couple of things but I didn't really like doing them for a paycheck and I ended up in sales in my early to mid-20s and really out of necessity and I figured out pretty quick that the way sales is done doesn't feel very good.

Is it possible? Sure. Is it easy to learn and if you put enough practice in, get good at it? Absolutely. But it didn't feel good. And even though I got really good at doing it the way that it doesn't feel good, I eventually figured out that I just don't like everybody and that eventually turned into, if I don't like everybody, there's something in there that causes some people to want to say yes to me more and other people to say no to me more.

And I went about figuring out what that was and it turned out that relationships, right? This thing that us salespeople have figured out how to engineer, this relationship thing, if you understand the parameters of how it works naturally for you and who you want to deal with and you just leverage that, it's so much easier and it makes so much more sense and I'll finish that all by saying this, that's from the stance of a sales guy who was tasked with bringing on new clients, but the money wasn't in bringing that client on. The money was in dealing with that client long-term because all the money was long tail.

So I had to bring on clients and then I had to deal with all their bullshit and like, I don't really want to do that. So long story short, after about 15 years in sales, I decided, “Okay, cool. I want to go do something else.”
My wife and I went into a parenting thing and in that process, I was asking some people about running ads and they were asking me about, “Okay, cool....