How to Master Sales with Dipesh Virji | Daring to be Human

In our last podcast, Dipesh Virji – the brains behind the Mindful Creator podcast – shared some of the toughest lessons he learned in his first-ever sales job, and we gave you four powerful tips to help you smash through your deepest, darkest fears when it comes to sales.

Now let’s dig a bit deeper into Dipesh’s incredibly colourful and sometimes hilariously random career path to explore what the personal development space taught him about being human – in life and in business.

After school and college – and feeling the kind of pressure that often comes with the high parental expectations of an East African and Indian family – Dipesh found himself studying electrical engineering. He took a side job in a call centre raising money for charities. Neither were his thing, and he dropped out to work for RBS.

“She needed help, I knew how to sell”

Newly set on a career in finance, he eventually decided to go back to Uni at the ripe old age of 22. Juggling his RBS gig during the day with a degree in Accounting & Finance at night, he slogged it out for four years. Meanwhile, his Mum – an optometrist – had the chance to buy the opticians she was working at. It came at just the right time for Dipesh; burned out from his career and struggling to balance the two, he quickly joined his Mum’s business.

“She needed help with sales, I knew how to sell, it just worked,” says Dipesh. “But it was so much easier than anything I’d done before because I’d just gotten so used to people saying ‘no’ that when it came to selling eyewear – something people actually needed to see properly – it was easy.”

Or so he thought. Finding himself up against the big players like Specsavers, Boots and Vision Express who had a market monopoly, Dipesh realised they had far greater buying power – and therefore marketing power – than him. Driven by a desire to do things better, he developed an unorthodox approach. He scrapped pricing on frames and pushed the fashion element.

It was his way of removing the barrier from someone getting something. Dipesh knew that if people tried the glasses and liked them, money wouldn’t matter so much. “OK, money was an issue for some customers but they were like ‘I could actually forego the pub for the next six weeks to have a better pair of glasses’. Most people take pride in their appearance and wanna feel good about what they’re wearing – and that helped us drive revenue.”

Then he learned how to do Facebook ads to drive foot traffic, and from there they were flying. But once he’d built his Mum’s business to a point where the marketing model was sustainable – and having completed his degree in accounting – it was time to move onto the next challenge.

“Who the f**k is Tony Robins?!”

“So I’m with a couple of friends and they were like: ‘Do you know this guy called Tony Robbins?’”. I’ll be straight, I had no idea who Tony Robbins was. But there was this preview event to sell into his four-day UPW workshop, and we decided to go. When I realised it was a thousand pounds a ticket, I was like ‘who the hell would spend a grand to go and see someone speak?’ But then I started watching his videos, and he was amazing – so we ended up going.”

The event turned out to be a four-day bender without the booze, and it that was so intense that for a while it put Dipesh off the concept of personal development altogether. By then, though, he was on somewhat of a mental and spiritual journey to find his purpose, and personal development was a big part of it.

“I was totally lost at that point. I still felt this pressure to do something my parents would be proud of, but I knew by then that no one can tell you what direction to take your life in because they’re not living your life.” But something from that Tony Robbins experience stuck, and Dipesh found himself selling personal development courses.

“You’ve gotta believe in the product”

Cue another massive lesson. “It doesn’t matter what the product is, you’ve gotta believe in what you’re selling. But everything you learn from personal development is already available to you for free in a book or on YouTube. And the difference between the people that implement that information, and those who don’t, is the difference between people that see success from it.”

Dipesh realised that people were looking for a magic pill which didn’t exist. They thought throwing money at the problem would solve it. And he started wondering how many other people out there felt as lost as him. That’s when he started The Mindful Creator podcast.

Now, alongside that, he’s building a collective bank of personal development-style content that’s available to everyone for free. He meets awesome, inspiring people and shares their experiences to help others. He works with companies as a fractional sales director, helping them refine their sales process and implement teams. And as an unexpected result of his podcast, businesses are reaching out to him to help them create better content.

“So it’s becoming a podcasting agency that interviews business owners to create a human connection with their audience, that will ultimately translate into better sales conversions and therefore business growth.”

“Check out my mate Gary”

And that brings us to the biggest sales message in this masterclass. It doesn’t matter what your company does; that’s irrelevant. The key is that the founder, CEO or Managing Director, in some way or form, has to connect with their audience. They’re the bridge between a prospect and their product.

“Otherwise, how can you differentiate yourself from the 3 million other marketing agencies or whatever other businesses are out there? The people on my podcast; these are real people who have something about them. It’s bringing back humanisation to what appears to be a corporate brand.”

As a point of illustration, Dipesh highlights renowned creator and investor Gary Vaynerchuk. Head over to his profile and you’ll see that he’s got a humungous personal following. But the thing that makes him his money is VaynerMedia.

VaynerMedia has around 2.5% of the following that Gary’s personal page has, but it’s doing over 500 million a year in marketing fees. “They get clients because Gary is human. People can relate to him, they like him. Simple as that.”

Gary’s an interesting and somewhat divisive figure because he’s long encouraged his followers to create masses of content every day and build an omnipresence across multiple platforms. Some people have pushed back on that concept, having trialled his approach for a couple of days and not seen instant results. A great example of why content is a long game that eventually pays off is another podcaster, Alex Hormozi.

“It took Alex more than four years of doing a two-hour podcast every Friday for one episode to go viral. Look at his following now, it’s humungous because people connect to him. He’s human. And that’s what I’m trying to do, too. I don’t need 100,000 followers to do that – you can build a successful business of 10 very well-connected followers.”

So that brings us to our biggest lesson from today’s masterclass; it’s not about the number of followers you have, it’s about the quality of people in your database. It’s the same with your friends. There’s no point having a thousand people as ‘friends’ if you don’t even speak to them, but you can have just three friends and they’re the best friendships you’ve ever had.

Five more lessons that will pay off in the long-run

#1. Don’t fear making mistakes. We’ve all made mistakes in business. We’ve all done things we didn’t really wanna do or to appease someone else. But you have to go through these mistakes to identify what your path actually is. Otherwise, you’re always forever walking on someone else’s path.

#2. Watch The Last Samurai. Seriously. There are so many messages in there about coming to terms with who you are and what you’ve done in your past, and then ultimately doing the right thing. And if you have no interest in the self-development side of things, the swords are cool. And Billy Connolly’s in it. There you go.

#3. Make decisions quickly. Well, don’t rush them, obviously. But don’t take too long to make a decision because there’s no such thing as a right decision. The only decision that’s right is the one you make in that moment and a week, a month or a year later, you’ll know if it was right or wrong. And even then, it’s probably the right decision because it got you to the clarity you needed.

#4. Scrap the victim mindset. Dipesh learned this from two amazing twins he interviewed on his podcast who’d both been through hell. When bad things happened to them, rather than being in that victim mindset of ‘why did that happen to us’, they were like ‘we learned a lot from that and so we want other people to learn from our experience’.

#5. Don’t just learn it; implement it. In the personal development space, there are two types of people; the vulnerable ones seeking answers, and the ones that take that information and act on it. Those people know that even if it doesn’t solve their problem, it might give them a 10% gain or a clue about what the next thing is.

You’ll find Dipesh over on Instagram and LinkedIn or via his site. You can also check out the awesome Mindful Creator podcast on YouTube, Apple and Spotify to find tonnes of inspiration from other business owners to help you succeed.

Don’t miss the next episode of Stay Hungry – we’ll dive into straight-talking insights on business marketing, growth mindset, and the realities of running a business. And if you want to take the hassle out of your marketing, we’ve got you covered with our done-for-you service.

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