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 Even the church you go to was sold to you. The religion you follow was sold to you.

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 You can't be in business and hate selling. Those two things are mutually exclusive.

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 Most of us, let's be honest comrades, our products are not that good.

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 Hey everybody, welcome to the VT channel. This is the year 2026 and I came to share with you this

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 year what I think is going to be the best sales strategy for your business for the year 2026.

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 A word of warning here, sales is a strategy and it's a tool but most importantly it's a skill

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 that you can learn. The work that we do with entrepreneurs, I often hear entrepreneurs talk

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 about how much they hate selling and I've got to tell you, you can't be in business and hate

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 selling. Those two things are mutually exclusive. Everything you bought somebody sold to you,

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 every ad campaign was an attempt by somebody to sell to you. Even the church you go to was sold

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 to you. The religion you follow was sold to you. They call it evangelizing but all of these are

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 methods and methodologies of selling stuff. What I want to do is I want to talk to you a little bit

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 about the different sales strategies that you can deploy this year and how each of these sales

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 strategies will help you depending on the business that you are in. Sales strategy number one,

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 evangelize. The word we use now is influence, right? That there are other people who have more

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 credibility than you who can reach your potential customers and can speak about what you do to those

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 potential customers and get them to act and get them to buy. We'll come back to how do you actually

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 execute a strategy based on evangelizing your product or service. The second way to sell,

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 knowledge. In this model of selling it's based on what you know to be so uniquely true that customers

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 believe you're the only person who can execute on that thing and can execute on that thing at

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 scale. Our school of scale business is based very much on this, right? Based on actual knowledge,

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 what do you know? There are many companies that deploy this. We'll talk about those companies that

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 deploy that in a moment. The third strategy for selling, community. This in my mind is going to

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 become increasingly important, especially in the day of artificial intelligence. Because

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 with artificial intelligence, you can generate as much content as you want. You can research as

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 much stuff as you want. You can launch as many apps as you want. It used to be the technical

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 ability and prowess was what won the business strategy game. Today, it's who do you know and

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 who can you reach? It's community. That's why you see even the biggest podcasts now suddenly have

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 telegram channels and WhatsApp channels. We're all building stuff on Mighty Networks or

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 school or any of those platforms trying to build a community. Why? Because we recognize that

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 community is a very strong sales strategy tactic. The fourth sales strategy tactic,

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 this is one of my favorite exclusivity, sell to people on the premise that they can't afford

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 to get in, that they don't qualify to get in. Because what happens when you drive exclusivity is

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 people's internal desire and need actually goes, "No, I do want to be a part of that." Do you ever

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 notice how if you ever find something that you heard that you are one of a few people that knows

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 about, there's something about it that feels cool, right? It feels like, "Oh, I actually want to be

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 a part of this." If you ever find a small little click, a small little community, a small little

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 spot, a small little thing that happens and nobody knows about it, you feel like you're just ahead

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 of people. Exclusivity is one of the most misunderstood sales strategies of the year and I'm going to

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 give you some tips at the moment about how do you sell leveraging exclusivity? And then the fifth

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 sales strategy, and it's typically the one where most people start is free. The word we use in tech

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 and when you sell tech products, we talk about freemium. How do you start by giving something for

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 free? And if you give it to people for free and then you get them entrapped in the use of that product

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 and that's the word that I actually like to use, right? It's the entrapped word and I'll explain

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 in a moment, let's go back. So if you're building a sales strategy based on evangelizing, what are

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 the things you need to be aware of first? Credibility. So if no consequence to try and get people to

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 evangelize your product and the test here is the product has to be good and the people have to be

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 credible. If your product is not good and the people are credible, they will lose their credibility.

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 If your product is good and you get people that aren't credible, no one's going to believe them

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 anyway. So for those of you building out your sales strategies, looking for a way to evangelize

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 your product, what you might want to ask yourself is how do I build credibility of both my product

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 as well as my evangelists? And there's several ways to do this, like literally the entire

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 universe of YouTube affiliate marketing is based on this. You've got a YouTube channel and you go

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 and sell somebody else's product who you've never met but the YouTube tells you the product is good

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 and because you've got a channel and a following, it uses evangelizing as a model to drive sales.

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 That literally is how the entire YouTube affiliate marketing model actually works. So for you,

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 how do you know if you want to be using evangelizing as a model to sell your business?

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 It's quite simple. It's if the product you sell is commoditized because if the product you sell

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 is commoditized, there is nothing you can say that's going to get the attention of an additional

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 consumer. Like water is water is water. Water is water. But vitamin water is by 50 cent. See what

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 just happened there? And so his following and his his credibility is now lent to the water brand. Right?

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 Running shoes are running shoes are running shoes. But you know, Usain Bolt ran the fastest

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 time in the world wearing pumas. Night pumas just leverage Usain Bolt's credibility to sell their

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 product. When your product is commoditized, in other words, there is very little differentiation

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 between yours and your competitors products. This is a great model to use. Second model to use,

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 knowledge. This is one of my favorite, but I have to tell you in the age of AI, it's going to get

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 even harder to actually do this. Right? The model for knowledge is based on this unique

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 you have to know something that nobody else knows. Otherwise you can't sell based on knowledge.

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 And so which are the companies that use knowledge as a model of selling? Think about firms like

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 McKinsey. Think about Bain. Think about accounting firms like EY, all three, by the way, are clients

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 of mine. They use unique insights. I've got a very large client in the world at the moment called

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 IFS. Go and check them out online. They're a leading company that does industrial automation

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 using artificial intelligence. I've been with them to Miami when I shared the stage with Tier

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 Claire Tumi and Michael Phelps. It was because I was working with the IFS guys. They had me out

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 in London and unbelievable conference I spoke at for them in London. And all they do is they use

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 the knowledge they have from which knowledge they generate unique insights about how do you take

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 artificial intelligence and use it in your actual factory to drive your business. Not AI to write

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 prompts about to improve my script. That's not what I'm talking about. Talking about you running a

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 mega factory that is 10 floors that is manufacturing highly sophisticated stuff and you want to input

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 an artificial intelligence that will make that factory run at a 10% better uptime and improve

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 your efficiencies by 13%. That's what they do. And so when they do it, what they do is they publish

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 these reports which give insights and unique knowledge and they send it to other people in

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 the marketplace who then know that they're uniquely positioned to do this. So they don't sell themselves

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 and by saying, well, we're an IT company come to us. That's not what they do. They take customer

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 use cases, actual test cases, they publish it and then they let customers buy. If you follow the

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 entire IT industry, you'll find it actually does this. That's why you have those Gallup reports.

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 That's why you have those Gotner reports. It's based on unique insights and knowledge.

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 Still getting value? Yeah. Let's talk about the third model of selling now. Community.

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 Community. The thing about community is you have to have a stickiness.

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 I run a community called Club 100. I think we're over 1,000 members now. And when we started,

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 we just wanted to get to 100. We're like over 1,000 now. Unbelievable community.

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 But what you do when you build a community is you build a group of like-minded people who believe

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 in what you believe, who follow what you believe and who are evangelizing the product set that you

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 sell. The great thing is if you build a community, you typically have enough equity that you can

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 sell anything into them. But building a community is very, very difficult to do. Everybody wants it.

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 Very few people can actually do it. And I can tell you now, lessons from the grant actually doing it,

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 that the easy thing to do is to attract people to your community. The hard thing to do is to

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 keep them there. And so what you're constantly trying to figure out when you're building a

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 community is what makes it sticky, what makes people stay, what makes people not leave, right?

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 Because if you can't figure that out, don't even try this as a community set. And for those of you

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 here who are watching this who run services, businesses, I had a young man, I was chatting to

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 the other day, who was showing me that he's got this community he calls it on WhatsApp. First of all,

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 WhatsApp can't be a community as followers, but it can't be a community, right? Just by definition.

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 And he was like, well, he's got this community of people who's with on his WhatsApp group,

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 and he's a personal trainer. And I said, so what do you do to keep people coming back? He's like,

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 well, I post workout tips and diet tips. No, that's not sticky. I can get that stuff on the internet.

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 That's not sufficiently sticky. You need to find something that makes what you do unique

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 and sufficiently sticky, that it keeps them coming back because they can't get it anywhere

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 else. And I said to him, unless you've until you figure that out, you don't have a community,

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 you've got a group of followers on your WhatsApp group. This is why everybody thinks this is easy.

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 Try it. Man, let me tell you, try it. Fourth, exclusivity, exclusivity. So how do you build

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 a sale strategy based on exclusivity? You make it hard to join. And you intentionally make it hard

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 to join. So while club 100 community, you pay, I think it's $30 a month now, and you join the

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 community. You want to join club 100 or you want to join school of scale? Yeah, that's a $5,000.

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 And it's intentionally hard because the businesses we have in school of scale do a minimum of like

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 $250,000 turnover. I don't want people who are still at idea stage joining a community with people

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 who are doing $250,000 turnover. They're different stages. They have different problems. So I make

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 it prohibitively hard to join because I want it to be an exclusive community. You know what we're

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 doing this year for 2026? We're doing these global exchanges, right? So in countries that I'm going

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 to be traveling to, I'm going to be taking some of my school of scale members with me. So they

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 traveling with me to Dubai. I know that we're looking at a trip to Saudi Arabia. We're looking

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 at a trip to the United States. And there was one other country the team was looking at. I want to

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 say Canada, right? But I'm taking like five to 10 of them who are going to travel with me. And in

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 those countries, I'm going to introduce them to other business people, introduce them to investors.

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 We're going to do a couple of chambers of commerce meetings. Now, some of you are watching this

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 going, I would love that opportunity. Yeah, but you can join because it's hard on purpose,

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 because it's exclusive on purpose. Does that make sense? So when you're trying to drive your

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 sales strategy, you need to have absolute awareness over what it is that you're trying to drive

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 and white matters. And then the last one. And here, I'm just going to sell you right now, caution.

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 Let me tell you what happened with free. All of us were told freemium by these people who

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 build technology companies that said, well, you know, if you offer something for free and people

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 have a trial period of seven days after seven days, you can build them. And then that's how

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 you convert them. And what we all very quickly learned was that people who buy free very seldom

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 want to pay afterwards, very seldom. So in our club 100 community, we led with this as a freemium

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 thing. And we had like a two and a half percent conversion rate. I don't wake up in the morning

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 for two and a half percent. I'm sorry. There are some people out there who do and good luck for you.

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 I just don't play that game. Somebody will watch this and go, yeah, but two and a half percent of

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 100 million people is, you know, two two two point five million people. Have you ever reached 100

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 million people, you yourself? So how do you expect that I'm going to reach 100 million people and

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 get two and a half million people to join my platform? It's just not going to happen. And so

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 for us, what we learned was that once we positioned the product is free, it was very difficult to

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 get people to part with their money, because the psychological anchor they had was that the product

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 is free. Now, there are some products for whom freemium works and accounting software, CRM,

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 an emailing service. And it might work for you to go try and get a trial version, just one dollar,

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 and then you try it on after seven days or 14 days, if you want it, it'll convert to a paying model.

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 That might very well work for SaaS businesses, but for other types of businesses, very difficult.

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 It'd be like running a bakery and saying to somebody, come to my bakery, have the first meal on me,

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 I have the first loaf on me. Afterwards, you can buy another loaf. No one's going to buy another

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 loaf after they had the first loaf, because that's not the way you build a bakery business.

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 And so what's really important when you're watching a lot of this online stuff and a lot of these

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 online gurus giving you advice is you've actually got to understand what business are you in. If I

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 was running a bakery business, which of these do you think I would be based on? It would be based on

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 community for sure. Why? There's a bakery that I go to in South Africa and Benoni called Jurrita

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 Bakery. It is a proper business that understands community. I've never seen an ad of Jurrita Bakery.

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 I don't even think they have a social media platform. And yet every single time I'm in country and I

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 take my kids during a Saturday, it's flooded with people. You can't walk in and out. Do you know why?

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 Because their bread is so good, so fresh and so unbelievable that all of us who've tasted it go

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 back to it because the product is that good. So they back themselves because they know that's how

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 good their product is. Most of us, let's be honest, comrades, our products are not that good.

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 Our marketing is, but our products are just like everybody else's. So I want you to hit me

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 up on the comments section and let me know for the year 2026, which sales strategy are you going to

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 deploy? And having understood which sales strategy you're going to deploy, tell me how it is that

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 you think you can beat your competitors using that sales strategy. All right, that's it. I'll

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 see you on the other end of this. Hit subscribe. Share. Cheers.