Why Removing Deliverables Beats Lowering Your Price

Jordan Lally:0:00
Welcome back to the High Ticket AI Systems podcast. Everyone, please welcome Mr. Trent Daibol. Trent, welcome to the show, my friend. How are you doing today?

Trent Dyball:0:09
Good Jordan. Mate, I'm excited to be here today. It's been looking forward to this for a while, so excited to get into it.

Jordan Lally:0:15
Yes, sir, yes sir. And for everyone that cannot tell where you are from, please let the world know exactly where home base is for you.

Trent Dyball:0:23
Australia, if you can't tell by the accent. I've been told quite a few occasions that I've got a f pretty broad Aussie accent. And if you're gonna live in Australia, where else would you live but the Gold Coast? So, you know, beautiful one day, perfect the next year.

Jordan Lally:0:36
Yes, sir. I like that. At a very high level, what would you say the company does and who you guys serve best?

Trent Dyball:0:46
So the company, my company, Media Scrum, started about five years ago with a business partner of mine, which is a whole different story, but it's a good one. I said I'd never have a business partner after running a few businesses, but I've got an absolute winner of a business partner now. So loving it. So we identified this gap in the market. So I'm probably I'm confident it's like this the world over, but it's really hard to find true sales people.

Easy to find account service managers, easy to find people to look after clients once you've got client signed up. Bloody hard to get a real salesperson that can close a deal. So in Australia, we there's a lot of automotive events. Automotive, the automotive subculture is massive in Australia. So we've got some big events out here. And both of us had worked in that automotive industry, me and my partner for I don't know.

For like 35 plus years, my partner the same amount. And we're we keep getting approached by events, automotive events to sell their sponsorship and trade space. And yeah, it looked like a lucrative market. So our business fits in between the event and the sponsors. So we connect the sponsors with the events, we do all the concepts for the sponsors to get them into the event, and then as any true salesperson, we get paid. on pure commission. That's where the money is. If you get a good commission right, you can make a good living in sales if you're good at selling.

Jordan Lally:2:24
That's so funny because if you are a a salesperson and you're arguing arguing or trying to negotiate, one might say, with a company you're looking to to work for, and you want a base and you're arguing for a higher base and a lower commission, that to me as a business owner screams you're not good at sales. Like you don't you don't trust your sales ability. Because if you're good, you're like, Well, I don't want a base, remove the base, give me more commission. You know what I mean?

Trent Dyball:2:44
Hundred percent.

Trent Dyball:2:51
That's it, no base, uncapped commission. Then you gotta find the real salespeople.

Jordan Lally:2:56
Exactly, exactly. What were some lessons? I guess the different nuances between starting in the automotive industry 30, 35 years ago to selling and connecting the sponsors with the events. Because I imagine that the I could be wrong, but the the sponsorships that you guys are selling are a much higher ticket than where you first started in the automotive industry.

Trent Dyball:3:26
Yeah, so the sponsorships are generally like six-figure deals, so big deals. and the nuances are interesting. So prior to this I ran like a advertising agency when they'll call it advertising agencies, then it became a content agency. And the real difference is now we've got true two true clients. So we've got the event, which is like our client, because you know, we try and do exclusive deals with the event where we have the rights to sell.

Jordan Lally:3:32
Right.

Trent Dyball:3:57
the sponsorship into those events exclusively. And also then we've got the sponsors. So we need to match the events expectation when it comes to revenue and what they can deliver as part of a sponsorship package with the goals and challenges that their sponsors have. And I think that's where we that's where we've really hit the sweet spot. We really focus on solution based selling. So we don't go out and we don't have like a standard deck that we send to people when they inquire about it.

We have a meeting with a potential sponsor, find out what their marketing goals are for the next 12 months, if they've got any pain points, what their target market is, and then develop a bespoke sponsorship offer that matches their goals and also matches the revenue that we're required to get for the event and what the event can deliver. And it's in that part, you know, we've we've found that we've been up to push the events to deliver more to sponsors by identifying different items that they haven't put a value on in the past that we can commercialise.

Jordan Lally:4:59
When you say some of the goals for the sponsors, 'cause I I'm so green, I'm such a novice in this space. Can you describe or give us a few examples of like what a what a goal might be for a sponsor?

Trent Dyball:5:11
So one of their goals might be to grow, so in the automotive space, you have like your DIY consumer, so the guy that will go to a retail outlet, buy whatever he needs, and fix his car in the shed. And then you'll have also trade clients, so like mechanics. So a sponsor might want to grow their DIY market or grow their trade market. And then we put the programs in place to match their goals. So if their goal is to grow the DIY market, events are some events are really good. So you As you probably understand, most of events attract automotive enthusiasts. And a lot of those are DIY. But we've got a few events where 30% of the spectators that come to event actually work in the automotive trade as well. So when we find a sponsor that's looking to increase their revenue through their trade clients, we can just match them with those events that have the right spectator mix to match their target market.

Jordan Lally:6:08
Okay, cool. Thanks for the context there. When you're trying to land spons sponsorships for the events, are you cold calling these prospects? Are you cold emailing them, LinkedIn, working your network? How exactly does all that work?

Trent Dyball:6:22
Whoa. So you know, you've got to we we realised early that if we go to a meeting and we have to educate a potential sponsor about an event, then the sales process is long. So what we try to do with a combination of LinkedIn, email, database, social is educate the potential sponsors about all the different events that we have in our schedule that we can sell. And then when we reach out to them, so we do a lot of cold calling, it'll be hey, we, you know, something like, you know, we've noticed that you've been doing this in the market. We think we've got a great fit here. We'd like to talk to you about it more. And we know that if they've seen our communications about the events and we walk in and they know a lot about the event, then the likelihood of getting them across the line is much greater. But if we're tasked With educating potential sponsors about the event, then working on pure commission, the numbers don't work out that well. So I don't know, my it was my business part. I've got to give him the credit for this one. He came up with this and it really rung true for me. He goes, Everybody's got something to sell. What we need is someone to sell it to. So we've invested heavily in building a database of about 5,000 potential sponsors in the automotive industry that we just Email updates to like once or twice a month, keep them in the loop, and then just go through and cherry pick which ones we think are suitable for which events and start the conversation there. So a lot of cold calling, but generally start with keeping start with educating them and then reach out to them with a personalized email or call to set up the meeting so we can do a discovery to set session to find out what their goals, challenges are, and then build out a sponsorship program around.

Jordan Lally:8:01
For sure.

Jordan Lally:8:18
Gotcha. Yeah, back in when I first got started in the industry, I did a lot of cold calling. And you have to have a completely different mindset to to work as a pure commission only cold caller, right? And I'm very grateful for that at that time in my life. part of me still misses it, I'm not gonna lie. Because you you like you pull money out of thin air. Like there's no better feeling than pulling money out of thin air, in my opinion. You know what I mean?

Trent Dyball:8:44
Might I before like we're going back before I had the agency, so thirty plus years ago, I was a door-to-door salesman and I liked it too. Selling you know, we're selling like video like video easy cards, so they're worth, I don't know, one cent because you're selling really selling a bit of cardboard for thirty-five bucks. And I love that challenge about pulling money out of thin air and then, you know, thirty years later I'm back to selling on commission only, and it's bloody great.

Jordan Lally:9:14
Absolutely. so you started off in frame the podcast with a very important topic. You can find great account managers, you can find great accountants, you can find great people to like help you with fulfillment, but damn it, is it hard to find true exceptional salespeople? Can you give us an overview of just from your experience what separates like I guess customer service reps versus true salespeople?

Trent Dyball:9:44
I mean there's one thing that identifies them straight away. Do they have the balls to ask for the money? So we've I I've seen it, I've seen what I think are fantastic salespeople and they'll get right to the point and they're too afraid to ask for the money. So that's when they're a client service person. They just need to be able to ask for the money and you know, not be offended when people say no. Because you get a lot of no's.

Jordan Lally:10:06
When okay, so give us an example of asking for the money. Is it is it directly I understand it's asking for the money in all industries, all service like providers, all that fun stuff. But how would one how would one ask for the money in your specific situation? Is it just simply state of the next steps?

Trent Dyball:10:27
So, yeah, would you say, so if you want to lock this away, we'll send you an invoice as soon as we walk out of this meeting. And I think my and I I've got to say, I thought I was a good salesperson. So back to my business partner. I met him about a decade ago because I was one of his biggest clients. He was running one of the larger, the largest like custom automotive magazine in Australia and my agency did a lot of automotive stuff. So for 10 years I was his client.

And then magazine industry is dying, obviously. So he took a redundancy package from the magazine. I thought 30 years in an agency is probably long enough. It'd be good to do something different. And we're in a quite early in the in our relationship at the start of the new business, we're in meeting with a client. And I thought I was a great salesman until this meeting. And then I realized that my business partner's a better salesman than me.

So we're in this meeting, we'd gone through all the deck and everyone was excited and everyone was on the same page. And then the client said, All right, now it's time to talk about the money. And I was sitting there, like I said, it was right at the start of when we set up the Media Scrum business. My business partner closed his laptop and started walking out the door. And I'm sitting there going, What's happened? Has he got a message or something? Is his wife sick? And then someone in the room goes, Where are you off to? My business partner's name, Matt. And he goes, Where are you off to, Matt? And he goes, I can sell this sponsorship at this price. So If we're talking about price, I'm out of here. Like, we're done. And they're like, come back, come back, come back, nail the thing. And I'm like, man, this guy is the because he's, I don't know, I think he's got a baby face. I call him the baby face assassin. He is absolutely brutal when it comes to negotiation. So I ask him, I go, dude, have you been have I been paying overs for the last 10 years? And he's like, maybe just a little.

Jordan Lally:12:14
That is so, so good. essentially, if I can articulate it back to you, is he was willing to walk away from the deal. He's not gonna negotiate price. He's like, this is the value, this is what you're getting, and I and I'm okay not selling it to you. And I think most people, of course, for me, right? I'm not I'm not the goat by any means, but because you want the deal, you're willing to negotiate. But if you just stick to your guns, it's almost as if they're trying to like.

Just to see what you're gonna do. Like, can the price come down? It's not that they're even mad about the price, or it's not that it's not that they can't even afford the price. It's just that can it go down? Can I can I s can I negotiate this? You know what I mean? But

Trent Dyball:12:47
Yeah.

Trent Dyball:12:54
Okay.

I think and so the the other thing that we saw, so when I was in the agency, I saw a lot of sponsorship, like the clients that I was working with used to share a lot of sponsorship proposals with me and asked me if they were of value, if they thought the price was too much, if they thought the deliverables were, you know, match the price. And what I noticed was there was a lot of things in like items in sponsorship decks that you couldn't measure.

So I won one that I remember, which was from the it was from one of the biggest motor racing teams that we have in Australia. So if you think NASCAR in America, we've got VH supercars down here, and it was a deck from one of those guys looking for a potential sponsor from like why. One of the line items was access to our social media. And I've gone, hmm, I like the sound of this. Can you go back to them and say, does that mean you just give us a login and we can post whenever we want? What does access to their social media mean?

And you know, they went back and they go it's like one post and this and that. And I go, When we started this business, we said we're gonna have every line item's gonna have a number next to it. So cause everything in our sponsorship proposals has a value. If you want to negotiate on price, we start taking out deliverables.

Jordan Lally:14:10
Yes, absolutely. That is the only way to truly negotiate. I'm not just gonna lower the price for you. Like, no, like if you wanna lower the price, I'm gonna remove some value. I I I I learned you may you may know who Alec Thermozy is, but essentially like the you could only nail this if your tonality is on point. It's like if they start negotiating about prices like, well can you do it for cheaper? It's like I can do it for more. Like

Trent Dyball:14:21
Yeah.

Jordan Lally:14:40
You know what I mean? Like I can do it for more, you know, opposed to doing it for cheaper, you know, but I guess you could only say it if you have like dialed in tonality. But getting back to your point, we as as I mean, I like to say that I sell on value, right? So if we are gonna negotiate and take drop the price, the only way that it makes sense for me, and the only way I can sleep at night without like losing moral authority is if I take away value and take away deliverables because we're lowering the price. You know what I mean?

Trent Dyball:14:40
Yeah.

Trent Dyball:15:09
Yeah, that's it.

Jordan Lally:15:10
It and and if and if you don't do that, I also think that the client or the customer like loses a little respect for you in a way. You know, it's like like you just lowered the price. Go continue. Yeah, you got it, you got

Trent Dyball:15:19
How to Yeah, 100%. Like we we won't lower the price without taking out deliverables because everything in our proposals is valuable. So if you can't afford it, we can build you a proposal that you can afford. It'll just have less. We're just like not gonna knock off some of the price and leave all the deliverables in there for you. Let's it just like if you do that, you start to lose your credibility because then they go, well, my buying is the anything in there got any value if they can just knock some of the price out. And it's like, no, we don't do it.

Jordan Lally:15:40
Well

Jordan Lally:15:51
No, completely agree. absolutely. Talk to me about what is your rule for if they say no, how many no's do I get before I like shut the door or before I set a follow-up appointment or before I like let them off?

Trent Dyball:16:08
Well it it depends what the no looks like. So if we go back and it's and our recommendations with our proposals don't hit what they've briefed us on, which happens occasionally because sometimes you don't get the best briefs, then we'll go back and submit a different proposal, like get a get re briefed on it. But I tell you what, once we get a no, we can move on pretty quickly because like I said at the start, we've got people to sell it to.

Not just something to sell.

Jordan Lally:16:40
Gotcha. So y so if I'm hearing you correctly, even if you even if you hear no, it's like you're moving on. It's like, all right, whatever, I'm not gonna retry or like re engage. You you just move on. Do you go

Trent Dyball:16:51
We just yes, we basically move on and then obviously keep the relationship going because we have because we're independent, we have different opportunities come our way, you know, as we take on different events or so we always keep the relationship going. We just know that maybe at this point in time we've got nothing that suits a potential sponsor. But at a time in the future, we could have something, so we don't move it on. Like

Jordan Lally:16:57
Right.

Trent Dyball:17:19
Interestingly, when we started this business, we've had so many people want us like reach out to us to sell their sponsorship packages. We would say no to 80% of the inquiries we'll get on from the event side because they're either not organized enough, they think their events worth more than we can sell sponsorship packages for, or they won't be able to deliver on the ground. So yeah, we we try and keep those relationships tight, even if we can't get a sale from, you know. from them at this time because we know in the future we'll probably have something as their goals change and as our suite of events change that we'll match. So it you know, it's about the relationship. You don't have to get a yes every time.

Jordan Lally:17:59
That's very interesting. I have switched from very transactional selling between door-to-door, cold calling for solar, cold calling for insurance, where it's like one call closes, right? To relationship selling. And you sell six figure packages. I just sell five figure packages or yeah, five figure packages. So, you know, 10X different, right? nonetheless, my friend, relationship selling, in my opinion, has been so much better.

I feel like because trust is there, the sales process is easier. You don't get as much like sales resistance because like we had a relationship. You're like, you be honest with me, I'll be honest with you. Like, there's no no hard feelings out of the way, right? but but getting back to like hearing no X number of times before I set a soft follow up, for me, because our our ticket size is a little less than yours, a lot of the times it's like either I want to speak to my partner. where like they're like casting responsibility onto somebody else. I want to think about it, which to me is just uncertainty. Like, will this work for me? I have no fucking idea. Or go for it.

Trent Dyball:19:10
I think when they say I wanna think about it, they just don't have the guts to say no to

Jordan Lally:19:17
That is very yes.

Jordan Lally:19:24
Yes, but I also think they're a little fearful of making a decision. Whether it is yes or no. So what I try to do is isolate it. So let's pretend it's free for a second. Like let's put money aside. Do you think step one, two, three, four is the exact thing you need to help you grow the company? Yes, yes, so you're bought in on the process. Okay, cool. So it has to be the money then, right? I mean, yeah, like I I guess I have the money, but I just I I just don't know if it's gonna work. Well, you just said you feel like it's gonna work.

You just said that you have you have the funds to do it and you told me earlier that now's the right time. Do you feel like it's just like a little bit of risk that you're taking on? Yeah, it's definitely the risk, man. It's definitely the risk. And then you can get a like go it's almost as if you have to like mentally fucking coach them how to make fucking business decisions. You know what I mean? But you're selling six figure packages, so like they know how to fucking say yes or fucking no. For like for my demographic, it's like not

Trent Dyball:20:15
Yeah.

Jordan Lally:20:20
For anyone listening out there, like, I love you, but like they just don't know how to make a decision. Like they're they're scared of making decisions. And I think that's just human behavior, human nature. You know what mean? Yeah. Yeah.

Trent Dyball:20:28
I think so too. So and funny, Jordan, we also so we do all the sponsorship packages, but we also do the trade sales. So if you're thinking like a trade booth at a trade exhibition, a lot of the events that we do have the spons the six bigger sponsorships, but you could also just go and buy like a three by three trade stand for like two and a half thousand dollars. We find that the two and a half thousand the two and a half thousand dollar ones take a lot more negotiation sometimes than the six bigger ones.

Jordan Lally:20:50
shit, okay.

Trent Dyball:20:56
And I think the difference is you're dealing with the owner of the business, not the marketing manager. And that the owner of the business, the money's coming out of their pocket, the marketing manager, it's coming out of their budget. There's a big difference in the sales tactics there.

Jordan Lally:21:09
my gosh. So yes, I I'm honestly like heart to heart with you, bro. I'm thinking about going up market for our services, like selling into enterprise companies. Yes, I understand that the fucking sales cycle is significantly longer, but then yes, is so much easier. Like opposed to me selling a 10K package, I will be selling a 10K per month package to to a person that immediately easily can afford the fucking fees, you know?

So I guess I'm kinda getting excited because

Trent Dyball:21:40
Dude, if we're gonna do it, we'd stop selling the trade. But they want us to sell the sponsorship and the trade. The trade's the trade's harder work because it's much more transactional, many more clients, and the clients are, you know, a lot of the time they're the business owners where they're and so they won't have a marketing plan, they work on gut feel a lot, and the money's coming out of their pocket. But if you're working with a enterprise-sized business that does like the six-figure sponsorship packages, they have a marketing plan, they know who their target market is.

Jordan Lally:21:45
Yeah.

Trent Dyball:22:10
And they have a budget, we just gotta make sure that our offer is better than all the other stuff that there's in front of them. So it's really different. That the transactional selling I think's harder. But in the sales cycle, like what you said, we've got sales cycles of like 18 months.

Jordan Lally:22:25
But is it worth it though?

Trent Dyball:22:27
Yeah.

Jordan Lally:22:28
Longer say exactly, you know what I mean? Getting back to that topic. fuck, I'm gonna butcher this fucking quote, dude, but I think you I think you might like it. He's like, if you want to get rich, sell something to rich people. That was one of that was one of the things. The second thing is, is there's literally no difference when it comes to asking for the sale on a 2.5k ticket size or a fucking 250k ticket size. There's literally no difference.

It's just, hey, do you wanna buy this? Whatever whatever whatever you say, you know what I mean?

Trent Dyball:22:58
That's it.

Trent Dyball:23:02
Yeah, we I've seen I've seen salespeople that are good at selling three thousand dollar, four thousand dollar stuff that when you walk in and you're asking for three hundred and fifty thousand, they get scared and I go, what's the difference? There's no difference. You just gotta ask them, right? They're not gonna say yes or no. The values the values we you know, we know the values in our proposal because the values are there. So just be confident and ask for.

Jordan Lally:23:25
Let's talk about confidence. I was told from Grant Cardone when I was 18, who I learned sales from initially, you only need two things confidence and conviction. Like the product could be ass, like obviously we we prefer not to suck. But like in general, the product cannot be there. you could be in a freaking recession, a lot of bullshit could be going on. But as long as you have confidence and conviction, that's gonna speak through your tonality and like that, that's gonna earn trust and buy trust. Feedback on that? What do you think?

Trent Dyball:23:53
100%. So I find, I find that I'm a confident seller. So when I'm on a roll, I find the next sale easier to make. When I'm not on a roll, when things are hard, I'm still confident, but definitely. I think sales is a confidence game. When you got it, you just go, I'm dropping deals left, right, and center. I can do no wrong over here.

Jordan Lally:24:12
That's so fucking sick, man. That's badass. Do you have a a small team that's helping you with like emails and cold calls or just you and the in the business partner?

Trent Dyball:24:22
mainly just me in the business, but we use a lot of AOI.

Jordan Lally:24:27
In what in what way?

Trent Dyball:24:29
so we use we use a product called Surf that plugs into LinkedIn. So once you find someone that you want to contact, Surf goes and finds all their contact details and then automatically puts it into our CRM and we use PipeDrive of our CRM. And then to create the content, we use a lot of AI. So, you know, like we're sending out articles about new events or about a new sponsor that signed up to one of our events.

We use a lot of AI around that just to make the content fast. So it means just means we can push out a lot more content faster. So when I was in the agency, I did a lot of press release writing. And so when AI came, and I I do love writing press releases, I just don't like writing them all day, every day. When AI came, it just means we can push out that we can push out more content faster, which means we can educate those 5,000 potential sponsors faster, which just Makes our sales process more streamlined.

Jordan Lally:25:31
One hundred percent. And I was actually gonna talk to you about this earlier, but we're here now. With the five K leads in the database, let's just keep it simple and call it five K. Do you have enough intel and data on them to personalize the emails you send based on sponsorships that they're or events that they're potentially interested in?

Trent Dyball:25:53
Yeah, so we'll have we we'll we'll do like a like a fortnightly to monthly newsletter which just goes to the whole database. So we try to in the newsletter we try to educate, so share them a bit of information about the industry that most people in the industry will find interest interesting. Entertain, so an entertaining fact, and then Tell them a bit more about some of the events specifically that we're working on. So just say if we signed up a new sponsor to one event, we'll have an article about that. And then in one of there, it'll be a much more hard sales. And then what we do is we look at the open and click rates on those EDMs, and they've clicked on the hard sales stuff, then we know that they're a hot lead. So then we go to them with a personalized email after that. So that works quite well. And then the other side is we just keep an eye out on. who's doing what in the markets, especially with the big dollar value ones. So if we can see that they're, you know, shifted their television campaign or something to start targeting a different audience, then we'll just reach out to them. But in our f for the 5,000 people who've got in our database, we've got enough information on all of them to personalize their emails to them. Once we get to that

Jordan Lally:27:02
That's so s that's so amazing. I learned from this guy named Jeremy Haynes. he was articulating this this idea in one of his YouTube videos. But basically he said, if you ever shop at Louis Buton or Versace and you you spend enough money with them, you get the utmost personal care. Like you get a personal congierge, you can text him all hours of the day. You say, Hey, I'm gonna be there tomorrow at two o'clock, they'll fucking pull up to your house And like a nice ass vehicle, they'll take you to the fucking place. You're you're the only guy allowed in the store, it's just you, the congiers, the fucking bodyguard out front. Like they treat you and personalize the experience so well. Like they make you feel like a rock star. And I'm trying to do that, you know, in my own business, of course, because that message really just resonated with me. And especially if I'm going up market, I want I wanna, you know, make it personalized. You know, it can't be a fucking spray and pray spray and pray model, you know what I mean? So

Trent Dyball:27:55
Yeah.

Jordan Lally:27:59
Ha hats off to you there. Do you find that It's beneficial, like it helps, like personalizing it. Right, right, right.

Trent Dyball:28:08
Hundred percent. Because what they realize what they realise then is that they that you've taken the time to learn a bit about their business and that makes a big difference. Because then our first our first interaction, like the first time we go to talk to them, is a discovery section where we want to find out more. But if you've proven to a potential sponsor that you've taken the time to learn a bit about their business for that initial personalized outreach, then we know that. from experience, we're more likely to get the meeting, to get the brief and then to go and sign the sponsorship.

Jordan Lally:28:42
Absolutely. And I guess getting back to the story, like if somebody picked me up like a Rolls Royce as an example, and I was the only guy in this Versace store, like I feel like a king. I'm like, fuck yeah, I love Versace. I'm doing this again next month or whatever the case is, you know? And and that's the same thing for the type of sales that we do. Like if you take the time to write something that is applicable to me and only me, it's like, thank you, Trends. I respect you for doing the research. You earn my business type shit. You know what I mean?

Trent Dyball:29:08
And that that that plays to what we do. So for the big dollar stuff, we take the time. And you know, like me and my business partner, Matt, we're lucky. We've worked in the automotive industry for 30 years. So we know we have a before we came together, we had a lot of contacts, but we know the landscape. And the landscape in Australia, unlike America, the landscape's small out here. So you've got a few big players that own a lot of brands, and a lot of people don't know that they own all these different brands that are out in the market. So The one of the things that we need to be really careful of when we're signing up sponsors, 'cause for the most part, sponsors get exclusivity at an event. So just say you get like a O'Reilly's part store, you know, that you guys will know that. Then you wouldn't be able to have Napa as a sponsor at the same event. So we gotta make sure that if we engage a sponsor, we're engaging their biggest brand with the biggest budget, so we don't take a smaller brand and then knock out a potential one of the bigger brands from the other one. So, you know, there's only like 30 million people in Australia, so we're tiny compared to the state. So it's a bit more incestuous when it comes to who owns all the different potential sponsor things, because there's a couple of big businesses that own a lot of them. So understanding that, and when you can prove to someone that you understand what they own. So so I don't know if you'd know. So Napa bought one of the big automotive aftermarket change in Australia. I think it's like 10 years ago.

So we went to those guys and we go, we know how Napa and then the business, whatever he was Repco and then these five other brands. We know how they all into integrate and we know what you want to do with each of them. Here's a sponsorship proposal that takes in all the brands that are under your umbrella, whether the public knows that you own them all or not. And they love that because then they like, these guys know the automotive market as well as we do. Being the expert. Being the expert's critical, man, when you're selling.

Jordan Lally:30:57
I feel like if you can s Just gonna say that. If you can speak their language and you know like the insider lingo, it's like I can trust this guy. Like he's not some novice, some some guy just fresh off the streets who's gonna try to sell me some shit, you know? But like if you could speak their language at the back of their hand, you know their problems, their solutions, if you can articulate yourself and their problems better than they can, the solution just makes sense. Doesn't matter what the solution is, you know? qu quit or go for it.

Trent Dyball:31:26
That's right.

Trent Dyball:31:30
There's one other thing I was gonna say and it's it's it's a bit unique, right? So I love cars and I've got a l a few project cars and a lot of the times I walk in and I go, I've probably use your product more than you have. And a lot of the marketing managers agree.

Jordan Lally:31:32
Yeah, yeah.

Jordan Lally:31:43
Yeah.

Jordan Lally:31:49
That's that's badass. I like that. Let's see. I imagine and maybe I'm wrong here, but you kinda have two ICPs or two people that you can essentially sell to. Let me ask this question: Are you actively trying to take on more events so you can sell to more sponsors, or are you pretty locked in with your current events and you're actively just trying to sell more sponsors?

Trent Dyball:32:13
We're pretty locked in with our current events and just trying to increase the revenue from the sponsors. So depending on where an event's happen, I think, you know, we're five years into this business. We've got the biggest automotive lifestyle event in Australia. It attracts a hundred thousand people, so it's a big event. and I can see that we're we're we're gonna get to a point where we've sold all of their sponsorship assets.

Jordan Lally:32:35
Yes, that's massive.

Trent Dyball:32:43
So unless they find more sponsorship assets to sell, and we're doing, you know, now we're doing two and three year deals so we don't have to resell to the same people every year. Because generally the sponsors for this event, it's a it's a fantastic event. They don't really go. Once you've got them, they tend to stay because the event's good, the event promoter's great on delivering on what we've promised in the deck. So they don't go. So there's two things we try and do. We either try and find more Deliverables that they can sell.

And then once we tap that out, and we're not we're not close to tapping it out, but we're getting close to the biggest event, then we'll have to look for some other events. But it's a bit of a balance between the two.

Jordan Lally:33:28
Gotcha. Yeah, I I would I don't know the correct words for that, but I imagine you wouldn't want to

Jordan Lally:33:40
compete with the event holder, if that makes sense. Like we have event A and event B, and you sell sponsorships for like both events. It's like, you know, you know what I mean? Kind of like not messed up, but like a little messed up.

Trent Dyball:33:53
And this is and we've we've run into that problem, no doubt. And this is how we this is how we and it goes back to that solution based selling, right? So if we've got two different events, even if like we've got one client that has five different events, and it even their five different events are a little bit different, attract a slightly different target market. So when you do solution based selling and we've got competing events, which we do do have as well, we just go, well, we're just gonna sell them the solution that best

Jordan Lally:33:56
Ha ha ha.

Trent Dyball:34:22
fits their problem. And if that's not your event, that's really not your problem, right? We've got client we've got potential sponsors that fit your event, but when we're doing solution based selling, it's the solution. So if your event's not the solution, it's not going to get pitched to it. And that's an easy way to sort of manage that.

Jordan Lally:34:37
For sure. No, absolutely. On on that topic of like the sales process, how much time, percentage-wise, would you say is devoted to discovery, learning about their needs, their desires, their fears, their challenges, whatever, versus presenting the actual solution?

Trent Dyball:34:59
eighty percent learning, twenty percent presenting.

Jordan Lally:35:03
Where did you where did you if you had to stick to a framework? By the way, I love that. Because you don't really sell anybody, bro. Like they only sell themselves. And you really just kind of ask so you ask good enough questions to like get them to rethink their own problem out loud. It's like, I didn't even think about that until you ask me that question. Like that's when you know you got them. Anyways.

Trent Dyball:35:26
Mm. That's where you know you got yeah.

Jordan Lally:35:29
The the the the the framework that you follow, like if you had like think about mentors or like people that you look up to in the sales space, 'cause I'll let you know mine. Like it was Grant Cardone, and then I realized like I love that guy. He's a great marketer, maybe a decent salesperson at best, great marketer. I I like Cole Gordon, but he also learned from Jeremy Minor. And I think Jeremy Minor learned from somebody else. But I think the last two I mentioned, Cole Gordon, Jeremy Minor is like the the process that I like to stick to where the same thing as you said. Eighty percent learning, eighty percent question asking, and just like shutting up and listening and twenty percent solution, right? But you don't really know how to present the best solution if you don't have all the information that you need. You know what I mean?

Trent Dyball:36:15
That's right. That's why we don't have these standard decks because they don't really they don't they you know, if they're for everyone they're sort of for no one.

Jordan Lally:36:23
And that's a fucking marketing principle. Absolutely. If you help everyone or you if you think you can help everyone, you inherently are for no one. You know basically what you just said. You know what mean? Yeah. another

Trent Dyball:36:32
Hundred percent.

Trent Dyball:36:36
And that's that's funny. I mean I I did I did marketing at university a long, long time ago. So I can't I came from a marketing background and work out that I'm better in sales, but that marketing background and I think this is where me and my business partner have really got these complimentary skill sets. Like I said, I learned he's a much better salesperson than me, but what I'm really good at is taking a brief and then turning it into a presentation that answers what we've learned in the brief.

Jordan Lally:36:40
shit. Yeah yeah.

Trent Dyball:37:03
And then he just goes in and does his baby face to sash and stuff, walks out and they start talking about price and then we're just dropping deals.

Jordan Lally:37:10
That's amazing. I I want to ask if you are attempting to gather data, ask questions, and they're giving you pushback, they are just not being not forthcoming, but not being compliant, one might say. Do you have like a mindset shift? Do you like reframe the conversation to bring it back on point? Or I I guess what what is kind of your your your your flow, your system?

Did that question make sense at all? Okay.

Trent Dyball:37:41
Yeah, yeah. So we will reframe it. We generally find because we do a lot of listening at the start, like in that 80% area before we start selling to them, and we've got a lot of history in the automotive aftermarket, then we're we we sort of come in and we know that 90% of our presentations are on point. They might just need a little bit of a tweaking, like change the deliverable here, do this. we can't we don't have that asset, so let's drop that and add this in. But Generally, by the time we get to presenting it, we know that we're pretty close to having a solution that's right for those guys. Just it's and then it's just getting them to understand that it's right for them. But when they've briefed us and we come back with a solution, then they know it's right. So it's a pretty easy thing. And it'll just be something like, and we see this a bit because I'm not sure what the economic economics are like in the States at the moment, but the headwinds in Australia are hurting pretty hard at the moment. Like it's not that.

Australia's in a bit of pain economically. Like cost of living's crazy. So that means that people are spending less. and it all goes around. But what we're finding is we're not that the only thing it's doing for us is extending the sales process. We're not losing deals. It's just taking people more time to to sorry, my phone's ring. Just taking people more time to make the decision. They've got to do more due diligence in the bigger companies to get it.

Jordan Lally:38:43
Sure.

Trent Dyball:39:10
Mm-hmm.

Jordan Lally:39:13
W we are in a recession as well, to be to be fully transparent with you. What's up?

Trent Dyball:39:20
Sure, kill one's fine.

That's a client trying to, hopefully trying to buy something off me.

Jordan Lally:39:26
sh should we sh you gotta go? Are you are you okay okay cool. but yeah, no long story short.

Trent Dyball:39:32
No man. No it's fine. We know that we know that we know that scarcity makes them want it more.

Jordan Lally:39:39
Absolutely, absolutely. Great time to let's see. yeah, we are in a recession as well. buying cycles have definitely increased. And I imagine for you, like you said at the start, sometimes it's 18 months. I guess you just gotta know and like trust the process, you know. I feel like as a salesperson, when I was up and coming, I would get so attached to the outcome. But you can't control if they're gonna say yes or no. Like you can't. You can do your absolute fucking best and they can still say fucking no to your ass.

Trent Dyball:39:41
Ha.

Jordan Lally:40:09
So I had to fall in love in and like even today, like I I'm still in love with the process, in love with the inputs, and like completely detached from the outcome. And it's if I can maintain that state, the more fucking outcomes I produce, it's fucking crazy.

Trent Dyball:40:09
Yeah.

Trent Dyball:40:24
Yeah, I agree, man. Like we do, we're the same. We're less about the yes than the no. If we know what we've presented is gonna match, then more fool them for not taking it, right? And that may and then generally if they say no, it'll be a reason like they've had their budget cut or they've changed. Sorry.

Trent Dyball:40:49
yeah, they we know that we've had that that they've either had their budget changed, a new marketing person's come in, they want to do something completely different. That happens all the time. People like to put their thumbprint on their new role. But yeah, we detach ourselves from the process and it's just about having enough working, especially when we're working on the sponsorship, which could have, you know, a sales cycle of 18 months, it's just having the pipeline fat enough that you don't need to drop every if you need to drop every deal, you're in problem. If you've got a contingency for every, you know, every if we've got a

Jordan Lally:41:14
Plaps.

Trent Dyball:41:18
sponsorship asset, like the naming rights of an event that's for sale, we'll have our primary target and at least three others that we've got sitting there ready to go. So it's just about keeping the pipeline fat.

Jordan Lally:41:28
My my dad's an insurance sales and he said the same thing. He's like, you need your pipeline busted from the front and from the back. You're gonna have a massive pipeline. And I was like, you got it, dad. You got it. Let's see. As we are wrapping up on time, thank you, thank you for come going over. two more questions. One, what is the biggest goal for the company you guys are hoping to achieve over the next 12 months?

Trent Dyball:41:38
Yeah, but

Trent Dyball:41:49
interestingly, we are also struggling to find salespeople, which is hard. So within the next month, we're launching a new business, which is a sponsor advocacy business. So we're putting the lessons that we've learned selling sponsorship. We're going to go out there and work with larger businesses that have multiple sponsorship deals, review their sponsorship budget and their sponsorship spend, and help them.

Increase their RRI or their sponsorship dollar. So we've yes, we've got this new business called Silent Tiger, sponsor Avocacy business. So that's probably the next spool up from the business that we've got now. So Media Scrum is going to continue to grow and prosper, but this Silent Tiger is going to get the people who have sponsorships in place. And we know a lot of people are paying too much for sponsorships and not getting enough out of them. So we can come in and work with them to make sure that. they're getting more RID of their sponsorship budget. So we're excited about that. And we can only do we can we can only do that because we've done so many sponsorship deals in this space that we're the experts now. You know what I mean? In that market. There's not many people that have sold that amount of sponsorship in the automotive aftermarket in Australia of like a dollar value than me, my business partner Matt. So that that's the obvious next step for us and we're excited about.

Jordan Lally:43:12
I actually that's a strong, strong I don't wanna call it pivot, but strong up market move in my fucking opinion. Hats off to you, my friend. Are y'all only gonna stick with in the in the Aussie market? Or are you guys thinking about pivoting kinda globally for that?

Trent Dyball:43:20
Mm.

Trent Dyball:43:28
There's definitely a potential global pivot for that. we do a lot of work with some with with some businesses in the states already. and I'm not talking about on the sponsorship side, I'm just talking businesses that are similar to us. So marketing businesses in the US. So there's definitely the potential to push into the US from here. We think it's a pretty similar-ish market that we've got a pretty good understanding of from here. So you definitely.

Global that one's got global potential. The sellings like selling would be harder on a global potential because it takes a long time to learn about the events. And you know, because me and my business partner are unfortunately bitten by the automotive modifying car bug, we've been going to the events that we're now selling since we're like 20, so for like 30 years. We've been going to the events longer than some of the event promoters have owned the events. So we know them inside out. So taking that and then

Jordan Lally:44:03
Yes.

Trent Dyball:44:24
Putting it into a new market where we don't know the events inly is more of a challenge. But the sponsorship advocacy, new business we've got, that's got a global potential for sure.

Jordan Lally:44:33
That's what I was really referring to because I imagine that is a very similar structure. Cause it's selling events. I don't think selling events changes. Doesn't matter what the fuck the event is. But learning about each event, sure there's some fucking nuances and shit, of course. But like learning about the event is way more of a challenge. And I dude, I would live in Australia right the fuck now if it wasn't for the time zone difference. my gosh, dude, trying to sell with the time zone difference, I'm gonna

Trent Dyball:44:48
Hmm.

Jordan Lally:45:02
Fucking kill myself. It's so fucking hard, dude. my heavens. Anyways, but anyways.

Trent Dyball:45:07
I mean I I'd I'd just like to do six months living in the States and six months living here, miss winter here, do summer in LA, it'd be perfect.

Jordan Lally:45:15
Absolutely. And then last question for you, my friend. Where can they find you if they wanted to shoot the shit in talk sales?

Trent Dyball:45:22
media scrum.com.au. Just jump on there, shoot us a message, look for Trent Dibel on LinkedIn or Media Scrum on LinkedIn. we're pretty good at responding, being the salespeople. So I'd and I'd love to hear from anyone who's watching this podcast. And Jordan, mate, I've enjoyed it. It's been fantastic. That this 45 minutes has flown by. When you said we've got to almost try to wrap it up, I'm like, surely not.

Jordan Lally:45:47
Yeah, it's been it's been really fun. Same same for here, Trent. Or same same on my end. thanks for joining us, audience. Talk to you soon.