280: The Reverse Selling Method with Petar Lakovic

Kevin Bees (0:06)

Welcome to Leading To Profit. I'm your host, Kevin Bees, and I've dedicated my career to empowering business leaders like you with the leadership skills, performance psychology they need to build thriving businesses. Are you ready for immediately actionable strategies from world-class profit leaders? Let's dive in. This is Leading To Profit.

Welcome to episode number 280 of Leading To Profit. Today we have Petar Lackovic. Petar has over 30 years of experience and has run multiple seven and eight figure businesses. He is an investor and the founder of the Reverse Selling Method and the Sales Institute of Australia. His global award-winning sales coach program, CONVERT Club, is renowned for helping business owners and salespeople fall in love with selling and creating amazing cash flow and profits for their businesses. He has consorted over 10,000 business professionals all over the world and is now the co-founder of the Sales Institute International Award-winning private sales training program, CONVERT Club and the Reverse Selling Method. So, hey, welcome to the show today. Right.

Petar Lakovic (1:05)

Thanks for having me.

Kevin Bees (1:06)

Now, I've known about you for quite a long while. I was just saying to you before I was down in Canberra with a very good friend and entrepreneur, and he was singing the praises of the value that you've given him in terms of how to improve his sales conversion. And he said, hey, we'll have a chat with him. I'm like, yes, I'd love to. So here we are today and I'm so glad to be connected.

Petar Lakovic (1:24)

Beautiful. Great to be here and looking forward to diving deeper.

Kevin Bees (1:28)

Let's go straight to the heart of this. I know this podcast is called Leading To Profit, and I can't think of anything that's much more suitable to leading to profit. I guess when you're very effective at sales or very effective at conversion, you can definitely profit. But of course, sales is probably a leadership game, isn't it?

Petar Lakovic (1:44)

It's 100% a leadership game. The reverse selling method, when I first created that, it was almost going to be called leadership selling in the fact that people don't like to be sold to, but they love to buy. And they love to be led down a process which is really good for them to make an easy decision.

And our job as sales once upon a time used to be information. Like before internet and the worldwide web and social media came along, the salesperson had all the information about the product or the service. So the customer would lean on the sales professional for all the products and knowledge. Now the consumers often know or think they know more than you do about what you do. And they can research your competitors and know what's coming to the market in the future. And so they're a lot more educated. So the role of the salesperson has evolved right now. And we really, sales is definitely about leadership, leading people down a journey to help them get a great result for what they want to achieve. So yeah, it's definitely about leadership.

Kevin Bees (2:39)

And tell us about all the things that you could have done with your career. I know I read before about, you know, you grew up for your family businesses and you worked in chip shops and different retail outlets. And of course you've landed in this place where sales has become the core focus for you with all the different aspects or disciplines of business. Why sales?

Petar Lakovic (2:57)

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't think anyone grows up saying, I want to be a salesperson. There's a one percenter out. There's a couple of weirdos out there that would do that, but it's not really a profession. If you weren't in primary school and the teacher said, you know, children, what do you want to be when you grow up? You probably wouldn't get many people saying a salesperson. It's something normally you fall into. In fact, when I co-launched Australia's first National Sales Academy in the early 2000s, I did a whole research and I think it was like 34% of people in sales have done a bachelor's of education or bachelor's of some sort of formal education. So you're doing a degree for something you don't need a degree for. So you tend to just fall into sales. And for me, it pretty much found that way. I mean, you said it earlier, I grew up with the European family and mum and dad had the corner deli, typical one thing to do. And then one day dad came home and said, we bought the fish and ship shop next door. And that was almost like Christmas for us as kids. I remember I was nine, my brother was 10 and a half. I had a younger brother who was like five or something like that. And it was like McDonald's for today. It was a fish and ship shop back in the seventies. And mum would run the deli, dad would run the fish and ship shop. And me and my older brother would be there after school. And then dad, the fish and ship shop got really busy. So mum ran across next door to dad. So you had a nine year old and a ten and a half year old running the deli while the parents were running the fish and ship shop. And then they ran out of chips. And back in those days, you didn't buy frozen chips. You used potatoes. You'd have to wash them, peel them, put them on the blades, pull down the handle. And then the chips will fall out the bottom. So you had my brother laboring in the back doing the chips. I was sitting on two milk crates in front of a cash register doing the deli and serving there. Well, you couldn't get more European than that if you think about it.