Note: You can listen to the blog post on the video or read the blog post.
Hello and Welcome.
I am Esther.
I am Peters A I Assistant to create voice overs.
I will simply read Peters blog posts, so that you have a choice of reading the blog post, or listening to my voice.
Hello and welcome Gentlemen.
I have been back on LinkedIn for a couple of weeks.
I have re-linked with some old friends back here.
I guess I can’t say I have hooked up with some old friends back here any more.
To say the least, LinkedIn is a car crash now.
People are using LinkedIn like face book.
Everyone is creating posts of pretty much exactly the same format.
Quote.
Oh, read about my problem.
I had this problem.
Let me tell you about my problem.
Let me tell you how I felt about my problem.
Let me bore you with some more details about my problem.
Let me tell you how I solved my problem.
Would you like to solve this problem too?
Then contact me here, and pay me, and I will help you solve your problem that is like my problem.
End quote.
There are variations of this, but you get the idea.
I guess this is called social selling or something like that.
So let me break the mold as I have done so many times before.
I will give you the one sentence that made me an extra million dollars.
You can scroll to the bottom now and read it right away.
Or you can listen to the hopefully very entertaining story, of how I came to come up with this one sentence.
Either way?
This post gives you the single most valuable sentence I have ever come up with in my lifetime.
For Free.
But hey, if you want to send me some money for it?
Be my guest.
I am currently 60 years old and in debt.
So any money you send to me will help me pay my debts.
Ok.
Are you ready?
I will begin my story in 1994.
My then wife, Jennifer, and I, had bought our second house in 1992.
To say it was a ship wreck would be to insult ship wrecks.
It was the worst house in a great area and I was going to renovate it.
You can actually look at the house on this link.
It’s worth about 2 million Australian dollars today.
realestate.com.au/property/8-schofield-pde-pennant-hills-nsw-2120/
I had moved to IBM Marketing in 1990 and 1990 was my transition year.
I was trying my hardest to become an IBM Salesman but I was failing.
I was very frustrated in my failure because I had never failed at anything significant in my life before.
But I was failing as a future IBM Salesman.
Jennifer and I knew each other since I was twelve.
We went to the same high school.
I rescued her little brother, Michael, from bullies in the school yard on his first day at high school.
Jennifer had been a high school dropout because she got pregnant at sixteen to her then boyfriend.
By the time we started dating in 1984 she was a divorced single mother of two small children.
I put Jennifer through college learning programming.
I did all her assignments for her.
I got her a part time job as a secretary at IBM while she was studying in the 1985 to 1988 period.
I finally got her a job as a trainee programmer in IBM.
I helped Jennifer get into IBM in 1989 through the back door.
She was not good enough to make it through the front door.
Jennifer did well early on at IBM and got some promotions and pay rises.
Occasionally she would bring work home.
I would do some programming for her that she would present as her own at work.
The normal thing.
Anything to help your wife along in her job.
By 1992 we signed the mortgage for our second house.
The equity to buy our second house came from the renovations I did on our first house.
I made fifty thousand dollars profit on our first house.
This was because of my renovations and the general rise in house prices.
At just 28 years of age I had a check with my name on it for fifty six thousand dollars.
I kept it for a day, just to feel good.
Then gave it to the bank to pay off a portion of the mortgage we had taken out on our second house.
So, the story goes, by 1992 we had moved into the house we planned our children to grow up in.
You can see from the link it was an excellent house in an excellent location.
It was also just 5 minutes drive from the IBM Australia head office.
Jennifer used to complain to me that the drive to work was so short that the heater did not heat the car properly.
I noted to her that I knew a lot of people who would like to have that problem.
The problem of a five minute commute to go and work for one of the world’s top companies.
So, the story goes, by mid 1994 I am working for IBM and I am on seventy thousand dollars a year plus car plus family medical benefits.
Jennifer was on forty thousand dollars a year as a mid level programmer and team leader.
We had both signed the mortgage for our house and needed both incomes to pay for the mortgage.
When we signed the mortgage we had three children to feed, with plans for one more.
So, one day I am sitting at my desk in the city office of IBM and my desk phone rings.
It was my old mentor whose name was Greg.
I worked for him for three years.
He was a senior systems engineer and one of the best.
He was a great mentor and friend to me.
He went over to our internal IT department as a manager.
He wanted to spend two or three years learning to become a manager before applying to be a manager in marketing.
As it happened so often in IBM, Greg was now Jennifers manager in the IT department.
Greg asks me, where is Jennifer today?
Somewhat bemused I say that as far as I know she is at work.
Greg tells me she has not come into the office and she has not called in sick.
Greg tells me he did not want to call our home phone because he felt that was intrusive.
Greg tells me he is concerned for Jennifer because it’s not like her to not come to work and to not call in to explain why.
I thank Greg for his call and I call Jennifer.
Sure enough, she is at home.
I ask her what she is doing at home and not at work, is she sick?
No.
She is not sick.
She tells me that work is boring and she does not want to go to work any more.
I would note, dear listener, that because our children were born in 1991 and 1993, Jennifer had the benefit of two years of maternity leave in her five years employment with IBM.
So now it was time for her to go to work.
There was an excellent day care centre right next to the office as there were one thousand four hundred people in the office.
This meant there was a good business running the day care centre next to the IBM Head Office.
It was, literally, the next building.
I had a guest with me from the United States, so I told Jennifer I would need to discuss this when I got home.
When I got home Jennifer was adamant.
Work is boring.
Being a programmer and team leader for IBMs internal IT department, with a 5 minute commute, and a day care centre next door, was boring.
Now, Jennifer declared, I want to be a stay at home mother.
I explained that we can’t afford her to be a stay at home mother.
I explained to her that she had signed the mortgage agreement with the bank.
I explained to her that I expected her to contribute her share to the mortgage.
Not the least reason for which was her two children from her prior marriage.
I explained that if she did not wish to go to work we could have remained in our prior house.
But in buying this house, she needed to go to work to pay for it.
I will never forget Jennifers comments.
She said, quote, just because I signed the mortgage contract does not mean I have to pay it.
I never said I would pay my share of the mortgage.
I only signed the mortgage contract. End quote.
She also said, quote.
I am the woman.
I am going to stay at home.
You are the man.
It’s your job to pay for everything.
End quote.
Of course, if I had uttered the same words I would be called a sexist, and rightly so.
So, dear listener, now you can see where I stood.
I had a wife and four children to support.
And my seventy thousand dollars at IBM was not going to pay the mortgage.
I think you can see, dear listener, why I was more keen than normal to learn how to earn more money.
Jennifer and I had some rather heated discussions over the next month or two about her going back to work.
She remained adamant that she was never going back to work again because, quote, work is boring, end quote.
Because of the progressive tax rate in Australia I would have to earn approximately double my income to be able to replace the forty thousand dollars income of Jennifer.
Of course, there was no way to double my income at IBM.
I was already one of the best paid people for my age in my position because of my efforts.
I would have to resign from IBM and go out contracting in the open marketplace.
In due course I left IBM on June 30th 1994.
I took up a contract worth about one hundred a twenty thousand dollars per year with my former IBM customer.
With an income of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars we could just get by with the mortgage payments.
It was tight, but it was doable.
My father thought I was crazy as I was earning more than three times his salary and saying I could only just get by.
But in the second half of 1994 and 1995 I was making about ten thousand Australian dollars per month and just scraping by.
This was when forty thousand dollars a year was the average salary.
Now I was running my own company and becoming a salesman became all the more important.
But I still failed as a salesman.
We went on our regular Christmas holidays in 1995 with the assurance I had a contract for the next two years that was worth three hundred thousand dollars to me.
But when I came back from my Christmas vacation that contract had been unhooked.
So, in the first week of January in 1996, I had a wife and four children to feed, and no job and no contract.
Being a salesman became even more important.
Then, that Friday, Jennifer called me from our home town called Wagga.
Jennifer says she is tired of living in Sydney.
Jennifer says that life is so much easier in Wagga where she has her mother and her sisters to help out with the children.
Jennifer says she is not going to return to Sydney.
I must come to Wagga, and rent a house for her, and she will live near her family now.
Of course this is complete nonsense.
I now do not have a contract or a job and I do not have time to argue with my wife about relocating five hundred kilometres from our home.
Because time will be important I get a flight down to Wagga and I take Jennifer to her parents house.
I tell her parents the situation, I ask them to please tell Jennifer she has to come back to Sydney and live in the house we already have a mortgage for, and put the children back into the school I worked so hard to get them into.
Jennifers father says, well you married her, she is your problem now, nothing to do with us.
Since a man can not make his wife do anything, I call up a family friend who is a real estate agent, and ask him to help me out with a house for Jennifer and the kids.
He warns me that the minimum he can offer is a one year lease, and if Jennifer changes her mind and moves back to Sydney I will still have to pay for the rented house.
So, I rent a second house in Wagga for Jennifer and the children.
I then rent out their rooms in the house in Sydney to at least reduce the losses a little.
At this stage I still do not have a contract or a job.
My bank manager calls me to note that I am drawing on my overdraft a great deal and he asks my position.
I have to tell him the truth.
That my wife is now in Wagga with the kids.
I have rented out rooms of my house.
That I have no job, no contract, no income, and I am doing my best.
The bank manager, rather obviously, tells me this can’t go on for too long.
Starting April 1 I got a job to launch the Hitachi Data Systems Data Warehouse Practice.
This was on one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
With this money I could just break even on the rental property in Wagga, and renting out some rooms in our house in Sydney.
So.
What comes next?
Well, of course, the school calls Jennifer and asks why our children are not in school.
She tells them because they are living five hundred kilometres away in Wagga.
The school tells her that if they do not return to class immediately their places will be given to out of region students.
The school tells her they will not be able to come back to the school even if they return to the family home.
I mean, what did Jennifer expect?
That the school would keep their places?
The next thing I know I get this hysterical call from Jennifer.
She says I have to get rid of the boarders.
She says she will be home this weekend to put the children back in the school next week.
Of course, I am now saying, you wanted this, you can’t just change your mind.
I remind her that the lease on the house in Wagga is for a year and that the money from the boarders is what is paying that lease.
She does not care.
The boarders have to go with 2 days notice.
The rented house in Wagga just has to be paid for some how.
She will be home in three days and expects the boarders to be gone and the rooms ready for the children.
How are you liking this story so far my dear listener?
So now I have a house in Sydney.
A house in Wagga with no one in it.
The lease precludes me from putting anyone else in the house.
I call my old family friend who organised the rental and tell him Jennifer has moved back to Sydney.
He is not the least bit surprised.
He says that he will do his best to rent the house and smooth it over with the owner.
It takes him about three months to rent the house.
I ended up paying about four more months rent on that house.
Meanwhile, I am working all the hours the Good Lord is sending me at Hitachi.
I know I am being very well paid and my boss has very high expectations of my helping make sales there.
But, towards the end of 1996, after all this, I have not made a new sale at Hitachi.
The agreement was to invest one good solid year and see if we can make a decent sale.
We went into December with no new sale.
I am worried I am going to lose my one hundred and fifty thousand dollar job at the end of March with little prospects of where else to go.
Also, rather obviously, there was great strain on my marriage because what man can tolerate this sort of nonsense from his wife?
I still remember that we were in our bedroom.
I was talking about how difficult she was making things and how hard I was working trying to learn how to make a sale.
Jennifer says to me, you really make me angry, you know how to learn how to make sales, but you just won’t do it.
I reply, I have done everything I can think of.
I have done my absolute best to learn how to be a salesman, and it’s not working out.
I fear we are going to lose the house.
If I knew how to make sales I would do it.
I will say there were other words exchanged that are not suitable for LinkedIn.
Then Jennifer says the words that changed my life for ever.
She says.
Quote. You can learn how to make sales at Landmark. End quote.
For those who do not know she meant Landmark Education.
We had done the Landmark Forum together but that is not a story for LinkedIn.
I look at her stunned, thinking, she is right.
I pick up my cell phone, call Landmark, book myself into the next forum in a couple of weeks.
The forum is three days, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
It starts at 9 am each morning.
Usually, the Friday and Saturday night will go to 1 or 2 am.
But I have seen it go to 4 am.
I am in my seat ready to go at 9 am Friday morning.
I am totally committed to investing the three full days into doing whatever it takes to have a breakthrough in selling.
Because if I am to keep my house and support my wife and four children?
I have to be successful in selling.
In Sydney, at that time, to make one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, you have to make sales. Period.
Remember, just two years earlier I was one of the highest paid people of my age and experience at IBM.
I was making seventy thousand dollars plus car and medical.
That was considered being very well paid in our industry.
Now I was making one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a one year investment, to see if we could break into the data warehousing area.
There were no guarantees.
We would have a review in March.
If there were no sales it would be out of my hands whether I would still have a job.
You can imagine how committed I am sitting there in my chair and thinking to myself.
I just HAVE to learn how to close a deal in the next three days.
And now we come to the punch line of this hopefully entertaining story.
At ten thirty, on that first day, the sentence occurs to me that would change my life, again.
The sentence occurs to me that will, over the next 10 years, make me an extra million dollars.
Would you like to know what that sentence is?
Sure you would!
Right?
That sentence was, drum roll please.
It was.
Quote.
Tell the prospect whatever it is he needs to hear, in order to buy whatever it is I am selling.
End quote.
It was so obvious, yet so elusive, that I actually broke out laughing.
For the next two and a half hours I just kept breaking out laughing.
I couldn’t help myself.
The people around me thought I had just gone nuts.
But I smiled and waved to say I was ok.
I was just laughing uncontrollably.
I had been putting myself through hell trying to learn how to sell and the answer was.
Quote.
Tell the prospect whatever it is he needs to hear, in order to buy whatever it is I am selling.
End quote.
Now, dear listener, if you do not know me?
I am sure you are very keen to know just how, exactly, using that sentence turned out.
Well?
Let me tell you how it turned out.
In early February, 1997, we closed a two million, two hundred thousand, U S dollars deal with Philippines Telecom.
In the third week of February, I was actually in transit in Hong Kong airport, when I got the news we had closed the one million four hundred thousand dollar pilot project for the Australian Customs Service.
I celebrated so hard in the middle of the airport that everyone thought I must have lost my mind.
This was just the pilot.
The project was estimated to be around ten million dollars over five years with about four million dollars coming in the first year.
Then I commuted between Manila and Canberra for a while working on both projects.
In the end we lost the Philippines Telecom project, but that is another story.
We then helped win the Department of Defence Finance Data Warehouse project.
Then I won a project for well over a million U S dollars in Manulife Hong Kong.
While I was there, I won a two point two million U S dollar project for a call centre with one thousand five hundred seats.
We had been told we had lost that project to Hong Kong Telecom.
I was asked to throw a hail Mary at the project, and I won it back from them.
My manager and the Hitachi management were overjoyed.
The next years budget obviously got approved and on we went.
I left Hitachi towards the end of 1997 and moved to Price Waterhouse Coopers.
At the end of 1998 I won the corporate data warehouse at the ex government Telco in Australia.
It is called Telstra.
That meant for two years running I won the largest data warehousing tender in the country.
In late 1998 a company called Ardent Software bought out Bill Inmon’s company called Prism Solutions.
As a part of that deal the Managing Director of the company that sold Prism Solutions in Australia was barred from joining Ardent.
His name was Mark.
He made a lot of money on the deal, but he could not go and work for Ardent.
Everyone who reads my posts know that Ardent were the inventors of Data Stage.
Mark was asked who could take over his role of selling the large deals and managing the team of consultants.
He told Ardent I was the only man in the country who had earned the respect of the consultants, who could also make the sales.
When I did my first interview with the Ardent Managing Director for Asia Pacific, his name was Trevor, Mark was in the room.
Trevor quoted what Mark had said and Mark nodded.
I was very thankful Mark spoke of me so well.
Both Trevor and Mark told me they wanted me to come and work for Ardent.
Trevor said Ardent was prepared to do whatever it took to get me.
So, while I was running the Telstra Corporate data warehouse project for Price Waterhouse Coopers, we entered into discussions.
As it happened the Ardent Asia Pacific Marketing Annual Event was coming up shortly.
Trevor invited me to the event on the promise that the CEO World Wide for Ardent, and the Director of Marketing World Wide, would be at the event.
They were both named Peter as I was, which was pretty funny.
Trevor said the two Peters would like to speak to me at the event about their view of the company.
Now, this is really funny, you are going to like this.
Telstra is in Melbourne.
The Ardent event is in Sydney.
So about four in the afternoon I feign that I am feeling ill.
I say I have to go back to my hotel.
I go to my hotel and pick up my prepacked bag and go to the airport.
I fly to Sydney and get a taxi to the Ardent event.
I am thinking the two Peters just want to take me aside for 10 minutes, and give me a run down on the company, and give me the joining pitch.
That’s not what happened at all.
I was invited to sit at their table, along with Trevor and Mark, and they proceeded to give me a two hour pitch to join Ardent.
I go to bed about 1 am in my Sydney hotel room.
Get up at 4 am.
Go to the airport.
Catch the 6 am flight back to Melbourne.
Make it to the office by 9 am.
And people are asking, are you feeling better today?
Sure, I feel much better, just a stomach bug.
Obviously, in the end, I joined Ardent.
The two Peters were very persuasive.
And how did we do at Ardent?
Australia was the most successful Ardent country measured against GDP and population.
On the day that Ardent was purchased by Informix, we had fifty Data Stage sites and only two Informatica sites.
Those two sites were installed by Hitachi and Price Waterhouse Coopers, my two prior employers.
They would not buy from Ardent because that would have involved me in their project.
So, essentially, we were fifty to zero.
By the time I was interviewing at Ardent, I was so confident of my sales ability that I made a very aggressive proposal.
I would put forty percent of my salary at risk to create a three percent commission rate for making my quota.
Any over achievement on my quota would pay out at three percent.
I made one hundred and thirty percent of my quota!
That year I earned two hundred and ten thousand Australian dollars.
This being three times more than I had earned just 5 years earlier at IBM.
But wait.
There’s more.
One of my colleagues at Price Waterhouse Coopers was then working with Sean Kelly in Ireland.
Sean Kelly was Vice President of Business Intelligence for Sybase in Europe.
He was selling copies of the Sybase I W S Models like hot cakes.
He desperately needed more top flight people to deliver projects.
The deal was that the person had to be willing to travel to the client to do the installation.
Most men who had that level of skill were not willing to spend 5 to 6 months away from home.
It was very hard to find top talent willing to travel for so long.
My colleague told Sean all about me.
The first thing I knew about it is that I had a contract offering me two thousand four hundred Australian dollars a day in my mail.
This came from a man named Chris.
I asked Chris if Sean wanted to speak to me.
He said no.
He said Sean had heard enough from my colleague.
The offer of twelve hundred U S dollars a day was on the table.
The deal was that consultants like me would help on the sale for no fee.
Then, if we helped close the deal, we got the implementation.
I relocated to Dublin Ireland in February 2001.
From there I did projects at Lindorff Financial in Norway.
I did North Jersey Media Group in New Jersy U S A.
I did Saudi Telecom in Saudi Arabia.
I helped sell Mobily Telecom in Saudi Arabia.
I did Orange Telecom in Romania.
All with Sybase.
I also helped sell Alpha Bank, the largest bank in Russia.
I helped sell Standard and Chartered Bank in London.
I helped sell some telcos in Portugal.
Sean soon noticed that pretty much all the accounts I was asked to help sell bought I W S. .
Then, in 2006, I did Electronic Arts for most of the year along with other projects with Sean Kelly.
That year I made more than three hundred and thirty thousand U S dollars in consulting fees.
This was over four hundred thousand Australian dollars.
I was also selling my see E T L software.
In 2006 S A P bought Sybase, and Sean Kelly negotiated a deal around the models, and we started development of a generation 2 point oh for telco models.
We sold these telco models to Talk Talk UK in 2008 and to Sky Talk UK in 2010.
In fact, one time I called my dad to wish him happy birthday.
He was very serious and he asked me if I was actually an assassin.
I laughed and asked him how he could possibly think that?
He quite seriously said that the only profession in the world he could think of that required as much travel as I do, and pays as well as I get paid, is being an assassin.
He asked me directly if my story as a consultant was just a cover.
I promised him that I am just doing IT projects and not killing anyone.
He was quite relieved as he had come to have this story in his mind, and it had been upsetting him.
So, dear listener.
I put myself in the Landmark Forum in December 1995 and gained the insight of this sentence.
Quote.
Tell the prospect whatever it is he needs to hear, in order to buy whatever it is I am selling.
End quote.
That sentence transformed me from a failure as a salesman to a success as a salesman.
Now, you can argue whether to use the base of seventy thousand dollars or one hundred and fifty thousand dollars when deciding how much extra money this sentence made me.
But I think we can all agree that making over three hundred thousand U S dollars as a consultant in two thousand and six is pretty good.
At the end of the day?
If you want to make more money, for whatever reason, you have to be the salesman of what it is you are selling.
Why?
Because salesmen are very well paid.
We earn every cent of our pay.
If that means creating your own company and selling from the position of being the leader of your company?
Then so be it.
That’s what I did.
That’s what a lot of people do.
There is much more money to be made from launching your own company, and selling as the owner of your own company, than there ever is to be made working for someone else.
But only if you can make the sales.
If you can’t make the sales?
Your company will go the same way as my first company went in 1996.
In to bankruptcy.
Now.
That is my amusing story of how I came up with the sentence.
Quote.
Tell the prospect whatever it is he needs to hear, in order to buy whatever it is I am selling.
End quote.
In this post I have told you, for free, the most important thing you need to know to make a lot more money.
What you do with this information is up to you.
But if you think reading the average LinkedIn post is going to make you more money some how?
You are just crazy.
And with that?
I hope you found this blog post interesting and informative.
Thank you very much for your time and attention.
I really appreciate that.
Best Regards.
Esther.
Peters A I Assistant.