What A Punk Rocker Learned from Shifting Online

James: What were some of the lessons you learned?

Danny: With respect to making this change in the online world? Well, a lot of it, I think, was, we kind of all had this limiting belief that people wouldn’t be willing to do it, or that we couldn’t provide a service that was at the same quality level. Everyone looked at it that way. Well, we can temporarily do lessons online as a stop gap, and then we’ll come back to in-person when it opens. Don’t worry if it’s not as good.

And we went the other direction which was, what do you do to make this actually better than what it was like in person? And I can confidently say to somebody on the phone right now, my guitar lesson right now online is better than anything happening in person before, you know? And that is one of my sales chops. It’s another area that I always felt like I had a connection with you when I listen to your show, is that you talk a lot about the ability to sell.

And recently, you had been talking about people needing to still be able to have that skill of selling over the phone. And I’m just such an advocate for it. My sales skills, you know, I had to adapt a little bit and change up the pitch and figure out, I was so good at selling our music school before, how do I sell it online? It took me a little while. Now, I got it. It’s so good.

James: It is a great skill. You know, as part of training with new salespeople, I used to make them argue for tails on a coin. I’d ask them to tell me why tails is better than heads. And then when they were done doing that, I’d flip it over. And I’d say right, now I want you to argue heads. Convince me why heads is better than tails. And what I was teaching them was the ability to have perspective.

And it’s the kind of exercise you’ve had to do, where you take the one thing that you made your strength, and you take it away. And now you have to argue that it’s better the other way. And I think we should always be looking at every possible viewpoint of our business. And that’s how we innovate. The only way we can innovate is by letting go of something that we’ve been relying upon.

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