How I closed $9M+ in sales in under 4 years

I've sold $9M+ in sales in under 4 years. In this post I'm going to show you exactly how I did it. The process, the mental shift, and why 99% of salespeople get stuck being a glorified order taker.

If you're happy closing 20 to 30% of the people you talk to and think there's nothing else to learn, this isn't for you. This is for the closer who knows there's a way to close almost anybody and just hasn't found it yet.

The mental shift that changed everything

I got into sales a little over four years ago when Covid hit. I was in Kansas, just graduated college, working two waiting jobs to pay for school. I am deathly scared of being average. I never wanted to be the guy who died two miles from where he grew up. So I shipped off to Miami and jumped into sales.

After investing over $30,000 into mentors, I got consistent. Around 15 to 20K a month. Closing 20 to 30%, sometimes 40%. But I knew there was another level because I'd seen it in other people. The advice I kept getting was "just take more calls." The number one guy in my office was taking 16 calls a day, seven days a week. I wasn't willing to do that. I wanted a life outside of sales.

On top of that I had a legit medical problem. Bad neck issues from a motorcycle accident and old sports injuries. My vagus nerve was barely getting blood to my head. After an hour on calls I couldn't think straight. I had to lay down for 10 minutes between calls just to function. I put over $30,000 into fixing it, and insurance didn't cover most of it.

So I needed a different way. Not "take more calls." A way to close more while talking to fewer people.

I found someone who was closing over 90% of his sales as a high ticket closer, making over a million a year consistently, not some flash in the pan offer that disappears in a month. I got one on ones with him and dissected his brain. The biggest thing I learned from him wasn't a script. It was how to tap into people's identity.

"It's their identity. If their identity was aligned to the person who they needed to be, the actions, their beliefs, everything else would be aligned."

That's the whole shift. Nobody's actions are the real problem. Their identity is.

Why most closers are stuck as order takers

I think about every prospect as a lock. There's a combination that opens them. Most closers just don't have it. There are three levels.

Level one, you're a hammer. Fresh into sales, robotic, reading a script, falling into every prospect's frame. You close maybe 10 to 20%. Some fragile locks break anyway, but you're not skilled, you're lucky.

Level two, you're a key. This is the glorified order taker. You close 20 to 40%, maybe touch higher some months. You can pivot a little but you fall into type A frames, you can only connect with a certain type of prospect, you're either too passive or too aggressive in objections, and you work long hours just to hit quota.

Level three, you're a lockpick. Doesn't matter the lock, you have the tools. You follow a process but it adapts to the person in front of you. You read people, you have a real frame, you close 45 to 75%+ consistently, and you do it without being on 16 calls a day.

"Imperfect action beats perfect inaction."

You don't need word for word scripting to get to level three. You need to understand the process at a deep level so it sounds like a real conversation, not a pitch.

Opening the call without sounding like a salesperson

The second you sound like every other salesperson they've talked to, their brain puts you in a bucket and shuts the real conversation down. We run automated scripts in our minds constantly, it's how we function without overthinking everything. If you trigger the "salesperson" pattern, you're fighting an uphill battle from word one.

So skip the weather, skip "where are you calling from." Get straight into why they're actually there and why they booked the call. Then find out what they're looking for help with.

Here's where most closers get it wrong. They ask "what's the biggest challenge you're looking to get help with" and accept whatever surface level answer comes back.

"We can't accept bullshit. Anybody you're talking to is wearing a mask. You're not talking to the real person, you're talking to the representative."

Type A personalities especially will give you a polished non answer like "I'm just always looking to get better." If you accept that, the whole call stays surface level and they lie to you for the next 45 minutes. Push past it and get the real problem or the real goal.

Building the frame and digging into the problem

Once you have the real reason they're there, add a frame. Not an agenda. I rarely use agendas. An agenda is you telling them "I'm going to ask a few questions, at the end we'll see if it's a good fit." That just reminds them they're in a sales call and kills the conversational flow.

A frame is different. It's putting an identity on them. If you sell a bizop, maybe it's "I love working with people who are going from order taker to action taker, becoming a business owner." You're planting the identity you need them to adopt by the end of the call.

From there, dig into situation. What are they doing now to solve the problem, how long have they been doing it, and why. Ask "why" specifically because people usually don't have a good answer, and hearing themselves say "it's just how we've always done it" creates doubt on its own.

Then the problem. They need to admit they are the problem, not the market, not the economy, not their schedule. You can't change external stuff. If someone selling leads to real estate agents blames "the market," you can't fix the market, you can only fix their lead flow. Bring it back internal every time.

Once they own the problem, probe it and make it hurt.

"People change due to pain or the fear of future pain. If you truly believe in what you're selling, you have a moral obligation to make people feel the pain."

Widen the gap between where they think they are and where they actually are. That's what creates urgency and gets you objection free closes later.

Buying decisions, identity, and future pacing

This is where the real leverage lives. Two things matter here: eliminating limiting beliefs and tying everything to identity.

Find out why they haven't changed yet, even if they've wanted to for a while. Pull out the actual belief holding them back, whether it's "I don't have time," "I'm too comfortable," or shiny object syndrome. Then tie that belief to their current identity, the gap you built in the problem section, and contrast it hard against who they need to become.

"This has to hurt. For a lot of people, you need to make them cry. It needs to hurt because it needs to create that urgency inside of them."

One of my students, Emmanuel, dug into limiting beliefs this way and got 12K cash collected in a single day off two 6K deals.

After that, future pace it. Where are they going, why, what does hitting the goal actually do for them, tangibly and emotionally. Then take it one step further and get to a moment in time. Not the whole future, one specific moment.

My student Georgie made 32K in a month and bought a car. The happiest he'll ever be about that car isn't six months from now, it's the moment he drove it off the lot. I did the same thing with a Jaguar I bought myself. Get the prospect to see their specific moment, vivid, in their head. That becomes their North Star, and they'll do whatever it takes to get there.

Then hit consequence. Rip that image away and bring them back to reality. The contrast between the high and the drop creates the urgency to act now.

Handling concerns without logic trapping

If you've done the earlier steps right, most of your closes come in with little to no objection. But when concerns come up, don't go into logic mode.

"If somebody starts to push me, I don't care what DNA I've got, there's no way you're getting me across the line."

Logic trapping someone into a cancellation policy or a feature list only works on the 20 to 30% who are easy to push. Everyone else feels it and shuts down. When my client Jared got hit with a question about canceling, he didn't explain the refund policy. He addressed the real identity shift underneath it. Someone asking "can I cancel this" before they even start doesn't have the mentality to get results from any program. That's the real conversation to have.

The bottom line

Every prospect is a lock. Most closers only ever become a key, something that works on a few locks and fails on the rest. Becoming a lockpick means understanding identity deeply enough that you can adapt to whoever is in front of you.

You don't need a new script. You need to stop accepting surface level answers, build real frames, make the problem hurt, tie it to who they actually are, and paint a moment in time so clear they chase it themselves. That's the whole process. It's the same one that took me from 20K months in Miami to $9M+ in sales, and the same one I use to get my clients from 30% close rates to 70, 80, even 90%.