The importance of taking a step back, knowing your value, and asking for referrals with Will Fuentes (Founder at Maestro Group)

Will Fuentes 00:00
I feel a tap on my shoulder, and it's the man. He looks at my customer, not at me, and he says, "Whatever this man offers you, whatever he tells you, you should get, you buy. He has nothing but your best intentions at heart. He's given me my wife back. We get to watch hockey. I make her popcorn, and she says she feels like she's at the stadium again."

Callan Harrington 00:22
You're listening to That Worked, a show that breaks down the careers of top founders and executives and pulls out those key items that led to their success. I'm your host, Callan Harrington, founder of Flashgrowth, and I couldn't be more excited that you're here.

Callan Harrington 00:42
Our guest today is Will Fuentes, the founder of Maestro Group. Will, welcome to the show.

Will Fuentes 00:47
Hey, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Callan Harrington 00:50
I'm really excited too. In just doing my research on the show, there are a lot of things I'm excited to dive into, but to kick it off, tell us a little bit more about Maestro Group and what you're doing today.

Will Fuentes 01:02
Yeah, so at its essence, we're a sales training organization that really focuses on solving two problems. Number one is, why do sellers do things that are counterproductive to their success? Really getting into the psychology of that. And then the psychology of building trust with buyers—what can we do as professionals in a consistent manner that creates psychological safety to get buyers to a decision? Not necessarily a yes or no, but a decision point. And that's really at the essence of what we are. We do a lot of other things, but our core is training and making sales professionals better.

Callan Harrington 01:42
Yeah, and that's definitely something I want to hit on, especially given my background with sales. I'm excited to chat through that. But to kick it off, where did your career start, and I definitely want to hear about the butcher shop.

Will Fuentes 01:57
Yeah, that's where my career kicked off—at the butcher shop. I wanted to take a young lady out in high school, but I didn't have any money. She was away at Brown University for a summer program, and she said, "When I get back home, I'll go out with you." I didn’t have any money, so I needed to get a job. One day, I went with my mom to pick up some meat at the butcher shop, and I saw that they were hiring. I applied, got the job later that day, and started working there. I call it a career because I was there through my senior year of high school, all of college, all of law school, and even after law school, I went back and helped during a couple of holiday seasons. I worked the counter and got really good at asking people questions about what they were planning on cooking for dinner and the next night, making suggestions, and becoming a "butcher solutioner," if you will. So that's really where it started. I went to law school, like I said, graduated law school, was the youngest law school graduate of my class, failed the bar, lost my job at a firm, and was just kind of drifting, working at a small firm I had worked in during law school. But I didn’t want to be there. My brother was working at Best Buy, and he said, "Hey, you should come work at Best Buy too, for the holidays." I ended up falling in love with retail and retail sales. I got an amazing mentor, Brian Dunn, who was COO at Best Buy at the time and later became CEO. From there, I managed a bunch of stores, went to Bed Bath & Beyond, hhgregg, and then started a software company. We raised some money but were a little ahead of our time. But, you know, it was a good learning lesson in terms of selling and selling the product. We wound that down, and I went to work for a company called Revionics. I had an amazing time there, learning from some former Oracle people, not only sales but product marketing. I had a great influence from Cheryl Sullivan, who taught me a ton. Then I got an opportunity—I had a little side hustle, consulting on sales and teaching sales to some younger account executives who were selling into retail. I got an opportunity to join a company I was consulting for. I took that opportunity, jumped over there to become the VP of Sales. I lasted there a month, and after that month, the CEO and I just—it just wasn't right. We were great as consultant and client, but not great as employee and employer. I left there with no real plan and decided to start Maestro. I got my first client a week later, and then a couple of weeks later, I got my second. Then, you know, a couple of months later, I had hired a few people, and we were off and running. That was almost seven years ago.

Callan Harrington 05:00
To pull it way back, why law school? What intrigued you about going to law school?

Will Fuentes 05:05
Perry Mason. My mom and I used to watch Perry Mason together all the time, and I loved it. I thought the idea of being a courtroom lawyer was something I could do and was going to be just an incredible job. When I got to law school, I realized it wasn't about courtroom dramas. It was a lot of hard work to actually be a lawyer, and very little courtroom time—unless you were a prosecutor or a public defender, you probably weren't spending much time in the courtroom. I wanted to be the big Perry Mason attorney type, but that just never materialized.

Callan Harrington 05:45
When you decided to kind of change paths, right, you said...

Will Fuentes 05:49
I don't know if I decided, or it was decided for me, but yeah.

Callan Harrington 05:52
So what was that transition like for you?

Will Fuentes 05:55
It was humbling. It was incredibly humbling because, number one, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just doing something to do something. Number two, the Best Buy I went to work for happened to be across the street from the high school where I had been a graduation speaker a few years earlier. My boss was someone who was in attendance because they were graduating high school when I was a speaker, and that was like my first boss there. So it was a little bit humbling. The other part that was super humbling for me, and it was a wake-up call around sales in general, was that my law degree didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that I had all this education. I could be outworked and outsold by a 16-year-old kid who just learned the product, learned the process, and worked it. That was a really big wake-up call—to recognize that in sales, there is no barrier to entry, and anyone can be successful. Yes, education might help you in terms of learning how to think, learning how all those things, but at the end of the day, anyone, regardless of education, can be incredibly successful in sales, and that’s what matters. The scoreboard at the end of the day is what mattered, not the fact that I had a degree.

Callan Harrington 07:07
You bring up an interesting point that I think a lot of people wouldn't do—they end up getting stuck in a career because of the sunk cost fallacy. I mean, you probably could have continued and eventually made it through, or whatever that may be. But to change careers, I have to assume at some point you thought, "I don't really want to do this anyway." Is that fair, or am I off on that?

Will Fuentes 07:30
I think at some point, it wasn’t the right fit. It wasn’t what I really wanted to do, and I was really good in retail and really good at sales. There’s just something to be said when you’re really good at something—how satisfying it is, specifically something that literally has zero barrier to entry that anyone can do, right? Anyone can do it, but you just happen to be especially skilled at it. There is something to be said for that—it’s exciting, it makes you feel good about yourself, it gives you some sense of purpose or some sense of belonging, which, at the time, I was missing.

Callan Harrington 08:00
Were you attracted to sales prior to this? Or, like the rest of us (myself included), did you totally fall into it?

Will Fuentes 08:06
I was attracted to some level of sales, right? The idea of being a courtroom attorney was that you’re selling something—you’re selling the theory of the case to the jury. In law school, I did a lot of trial court board, and my best friend from law school always said, "Hey, we’re going to start a law firm, and you’re going to be the Rainmaker. You’re going to be the guy who gets us the clients. That’s what your skill is." And in my mind, I was like, "No, I’m a skilled attorney. Don’t pawn me off as a sales guy; that’s not who I am." But even in my short stint with the firm that hired me out of law school, I—pretty unheard of—within a couple of weeks, I had landed a fairly large client for the firm. A six-figure client is not small for someone who’s only been working for a few weeks at a law firm. So I obviously had some skill in it, but it was one of these things that I was just kind of like, I didn’t think I was committing to it. Part of the impetus for starting a retail-based software company was, "Oh, I don’t want to just be a retail sales guy. I want to do something bigger than that." But quite honestly, it can be a fairly lucrative career, and lots of people have done incredibly well for themselves by being retail salespeople and then moving on up and managing these massive companies.

Callan Harrington 09:22
So for you, when you were in sales for the first time, you said you were totally humbled, but obviously you got after it because you moved up really quick. What was it like when you first got there? What were some of those early feelings or signs, both positive and negative, once you got into that environment?

Will Fuentes 09:41
I can’t remember a negative sign. The only negative sign, honestly, was the reaction from my family and friends, right? It's like, "You have a law degree—what are you doing?" I mean, I joke with my wife that my father, up until maybe two years ago, would tell people I was a lawyer. And I'm like, "That’s not true. I have a law degree. You can tell them that, but don’t tell them I’m a lawyer." So it was funny. But that was the only negative—the way people in my sphere viewed me. Like, they thought I wasn’t serious, that I wasn’t making a career, that I was just going to be someone who flamed out and had a mediocre life in their eyes. So I’m not saying retail is mediocre, but in their eyes, I was going to work every holiday, work really late hours, not have a high quality of life, and that’s what my life was going to be. They thought I had so much potential, and I was wasting it. That was the only negative. On the positive side, I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed talking to people, helping them solve problems. There are three particular things I can point to that I remember, things that still stick in my mind today about the impact sales can have. The first was in the digital imaging department. That’s where I was placed back before there were cameras on phones. You bought a digital camera, and this was brand new technology back then. And those cameras did not come with memory. I laugh today when I get a 32-gig memory card for free with something, when a 1-gig memory card was like $400 when I first started, right? It was unheard of, and they were massive. What I got really good at was creating a story for people when they were coming in. This was during the holidays, and I was working during the holidays, asking them, "Oh, who’s this gift for?" "Alright, like, what do you want the reaction to be when they open it?" "Oh, I want my wife to be super excited." "Okay, great. Do you want her to use it immediately to take pictures of what the kids are getting, etc.?" And they’d say, "Yeah." So I’d say, "Okay, well, then you’re going to need a memory card, you’re going to need batteries, you’re going to need this, you’re going to need that, because otherwise, you’re just going to give her this gift that she’s going to have to wait until Monday or the 26th to go out and get the rest of the stuff to make it work." So the idea that I could really get to the essence of what people wanted, and not in a sleazy way, really solve something for them so they could have a wonderful experience—that was pretty cool. The second thing was, I moved over right after the holidays, I moved over to appliances. The appliance people had left or quit or whatever, so they needed someone to move over to appliances. So I moved over to appliances. I happened to be working in a store that was focused on launching the concept of customer centricity. It’s a book by Larry Selden called "Angel Customer, Demon Customer" that really talks about how you can treat your customers better and create experiences for them. Because of that, the COO of Best Buy would often visit—that was Brian Dunn, who later became CEO. Steve Ballmer, who was at Microsoft at the time (I forget what his position was), visited our store a few times. Brad Anderson, who was CEO, would visit as well because we were running some incredible tests. It so happened that there was a store visit that day, and they came by and said, "Oh, you’re the kid from digital imaging. You created a tracker." I created this little tracker that people were using to remind them of what accessories they should sell with stuff and how to offer it. They had rolled it out to various stores in the company, and they were just thanking me for that. Well, a mom came in needing a washer and dryer. I asked her a bunch of questions, and we moved from a very cheap washer and dryer to a much better pair for her. It had faster cycles, steam cycles—she had a bunch of kids, so it was perfect for cleaning their uniforms and all this stuff that the cheaper option wasn’t going to do. I had also sold her a service plan. When we got to the register, I said to her, "Okay," I walked her through what she was buying, and I said, "Okay, you’ve also selected the service plan. Here are the five reasons why you said it made sense for you and your family to purchase a service plan. If any of these reasons aren’t true or you don’t feel they’re compelling enough, let me know so I can take it off your bill." I walked her through it, and she said, "No, that’s exactly right. Thank you very much." Then, one of the executives came out and said, "I need to speak to you." I thought I was going to get in trouble because I was about to walk people through the service plans, giving someone the option to opt out of it after they’d opted in. They said to me, "If every one of our employees treated customers the way that you just treated that one, we would never lose a deal to Circuit City. Whatever you saw in her that made you feel there was doubt, you were able to overcome that by giving her an opportunity to walk away from it. That was amazing, and you have a great career here in retail. You should join our team." Now, I’m thinking, "This is amazing. I’m about to go to corporate." But what he was suggesting was that I become a full-time employee making $8.50 an hour. And I said, "Yes." I mean, what was I gonna do? So I remembered that experience. A few months later, I had moved into home theater, which is the big leagues in Best Buy. Now, you’re selling TVs. A gentleman came in, and there was a 36-inch TV, big old tube TV, that was on sale. He said he wanted to buy it. Most people, when someone says that, will say, "Okay, great. Let me put it on the cart for you. I’ll bring you out, whatever." I said, "Hey, before I sell you that television, can I ask, why are you interested in this TV?" He said, "Well, my wife’s losing her vision. I need something big. She also has difficulty moving. We used to go to hockey games, and I figured something bigger would allow her to see the puck." This was when HD was first coming out, and hockey just happened to be the one sport that was on HD. So I said, "Hey, I’ve got a loop here that can show you what hockey looks like on HD. Let me show you what that’ll look like. It won’t look like that on your 36-inch TV; it’ll look like that on something else." I showed him, and then I walked him through, "Well, this is the TV you need. These are the cables you need. Here’s the new service you need, how you upgrade it, and here’s what it’s going to cost you. I’ll get it delivered for you." He’s an older man, so I said, "I’ll get it installed, get it all hooked up." So it went from a $300 sale to nearly three grand. He walked out, and then a couple of days later, maybe about a week or a week and a half later, I’m sitting there, talking to someone, and I feel a tap on my shoulder. It’s the man. He looks at my customer, not at me, and says, "Whatever this man offers you, whatever he tells you, you should get, you buy. He has nothing but your best intentions at heart. He’s given me my wife back. We get to watch hockey. I make her popcorn, and she says she feels like she’s at the stadium again." I’ll always remember that. That, to me, was an incredible moment—sales could offer this life-changing moment for people. If you just take your time, ask the right questions, and solution things correctly, you can change people’s lives. That is what Maestro has at its essence. My one and only goal is to change people’s financial futures by teaching them to be better sales professionals. If I can do that for individuals, then organizations themselves will be successful. Those are the moments as I was making the transition that made me think, "Man, this is a pretty noble profession, and there’s nothing wrong with being a sales professional versus a lawyer."

Callan Harrington 16:23
I couldn’t agree more. One of the things that was told to me really early on by a guy who’s a very successful financial planner was, "If you’re a business owner, you’re a salesperson, period." And it’s for all the exact reasons that you just said right there. The best salespeople are the ones who are looking at the whole total picture, co-creating that solution together, and asking questions to get to the root of why we’re looking at this to begin with. A lot of times, what we think it is and what the actual solution is are two totally different things. That’s an excellent story. Now, was it at Best Buy where you learned about the 40/20 rule?

Will Fuentes 17:11
No, it wasn’t at Best Buy. Quite honestly, I want to attribute it to a gentleman named Matt Samuelson, but I’m not sure. It was a mentor of mine who worked at Gap, Williams-Sonoma, and Restoration Hardware. Matt, you can take credit or not, but for some reason, that sticks out in my mind. I think we were just talking about what it takes to be successful. He had created this career where he had started in retail and now was an executive at the time at Gap. I remember, for whatever reason, what sticks in my mind is that he had said to me that he had committed to himself to do his job in the hours that he was at his job and then spend at least half of that time trying to be a better professional and improve himself and learn more because that’s what he felt would advance him and advance him faster. That really stuck out to me because this was someone who, again, graduated from Jersey, Alabama. He was working in a Gap store, took a pay cut to go work for Gap at a lower level at corporate, and rose through the ranks. Obviously, he had been very successful. As I started to talk to professionals that I admired, I often found that they spent a lot of time honing their craft outside of work hours. Work was work, but there was professional development happening all the time, even self-reflection and personal development around who they were as a person or how they worked best and understanding that. As I started to apply it, I started to see significant changes in the business. Obviously, I’m seeing things that are changing in the business, I’m seeing that we’re being successful in how we sell the services of Maestro. So it’s like, "Okay, let’s start to create a small, little mini-training around this so that people understand." Because I often feel like we just believe that people understand how to be successful; they just choose not to. I actually don’t think that’s the case. I think most people know how to be okay at things, but they don’t know how to be excellent.

Callan Harrington 19:08
Yeah, that’s interesting. To break it down a little bit, it’s 40 hours of your regular job and 20 hours of doing things outside of our normal job, whether that’s courses, podcasts, trainings, whatever that may be, to improve both yourself as a professional and as a person. I love that. I never heard that before, but I will say, and I’ve said it all the time, I’ve said this a million times with people: What separates the best from everybody else? The best, especially in sales, and I think this is true with anything, but in sales in particular, the best are owning their own development. They’ll take what the company gives them, of course, but they’re always doing something outside of that to improve and to grow and to get to that next level. And they’re very humble about it. They don’t think they have everything figured out because the second you do, you’re done growing, right? So I think that’s excellent. So you’re at Best Buy, and you worked your way up through Best Buy. What did you do after this stint in retail?

Will Fuentes 20:15
I started a company called Lemur Retail. It was a clienteling application focused at the point of non-sales. What had made me successful at Best Buy when I started running stores and what made me successful at Bed Bath & Beyond and hhgregg was that I would often teach my teams to ask a very simple question when someone was passing on buying something: "Would you like for me to reach out to you when this goes on sale?" We were testing whether they were serious about it or not. When people said yes, I’d say, "Okay, great. What price point or what discount do you need for me to reach out so it makes sense?" They would tell me, and then I would take that information. There’s this thing in retail called at-risk inventory, end-of-life inventory, and you’ve got to get rid of it because it’s at risk. That means it’s going to come off your shelves, hit your P&L, and blah, blah, blah. We don’t need to get into the weeds of it, right? But the goal is to get rid of it as fast as possible. You get these reports that tell you when things are going to go at risk, like, "Hey, you’ve got 30 of these, and they’re going at risk in two weeks, and you’re going to take a 60% reduction on them." So I would get permission and be like, "Hey, I have a list of 50 people that want this item that’s going to go for 60% off and are willing to buy it at 20. Can I offer a special deal, non-advertised, to them at 20% off?"

Callan Harrington 21:30
Interesting. That’s a super interesting idea.

Will Fuentes 21:34
They would say, "Sure." So I would call people or text them and say, "Hey, I can give it to you at 20% off. You told me this is when you wanted to buy it. Let me know if you can come today or tomorrow." So I would move this inventory, and my stores were just a lot more successful. They were margin-rich because I wasn’t taking these massive discounts. What I wanted to do was basically codify that and put it into a process. We built a platform to do that. There’s a company today called Tulip Retail that does some parts of that. We were just a little bit ahead of the time—you needed an iPad. This was 2012; it’s not like every store associate had one. For me to tell someone, "You’ve got to buy a $300–$400 piece of equipment and hope it doesn’t get stolen," you know, and figure out how to lock them, that just wasn’t happening, right? But people were interested in the idea, so I got to meet a lot of very cool people and have great conversations about the future of retail with some great leaders and CEOs. From there, I ended up at Revionics. They did price optimization as well, but I took some of that learning. Revionics was a company with more backing and had been out there—they were focused on grocery. But I learned quite a bit on how to position a product correctly, how to create the right assets, all of those things that I was kind of learning on the fly, things I didn’t necessarily know how to do. But now I was getting taught by people who had been doing it previously at Oracle and now at Revionics. That was a big boost to my career. The nice thing about the 40/20 application is that there were a lot of things I didn’t know how to do, so I had to spend time learning the process, teaching myself so that I could be valuable to the organization. Everything from creating one-minute product videos—I’d never done that before—to using those tools to create specific marketing assets for salespeople. That’s where the next step in my career was.

Callan Harrington 23:25
At this next step, what were some of those challenges coming from starting your own company to now being in a more established company? What was that transition like, just in general?

Will Fuentes 23:35
Yeah, I mean, again, it was another humbling experience. I thought I had been on the cover of The Washington Business Journal, I had a spread in The New York Times, I had been in The Washington Post, and now I was back to just being a worker bee. That was a little bit humbling. But some of the bigger challenges were, okay, some of the stuff that I had the team do when I had my own company, the great ideas I came up with—now I had to go execute those ideas. Learning how to do those things was a little tough. Another tough thing was sitting on sales calls or going on sales calls and just seeing some of the techniques that—I didn’t know anything, really; I wasn’t professionally trained in sales, but I knew what I was seeing wasn’t the best. There were ways to improve it, but I had no position of authority to coach or train people. These were much more senior people, and that was a little tough too because I was thinking, "I could sell this better."

Callan Harrington 24:34
It’s interesting hearing these different stories. Honestly, one of the best takeaways I’ve heard from this, in general, is you have zero fear about going into whatever that next role is. One of the things I see all the time is people are afraid to take what’s perceived to be a step back. And I say "perceived" because I think that’s important. We feel that it’s a step back, but each time you did it, you had multiple steps forward. Is that accurate, or am I off on that?

Will Fuentes 25:07
We teach the Phoenix Sales Method, and the reason we call it the Phoenix Sales Method is that you pick up and rise from the ashes. Two interesting things for me that are threads in my life: One, really, is the influence my grandfather had on me. My grandfather would often tell me, "Look at those great long jumpers or pole vaulters. They take a step back, they rock back a little bit before they explode forward. Never be afraid to rock back a little bit to gain the momentum that you need in life." That was number one. And number two, he came from really humble beginnings. He had a third-grade education, self-taught himself statistics, and ended up with a master’s degree from Vanderbilt. But literally, with a third-grade education, he taught himself and got into a master’s program from El Salvador, right? He was an orphan, grew up in the slums of San Salvador, and figured out a way. For me, these minor setbacks—boohoo. I have a law degree, I’m working at Best Buy. That’s a minor setback compared to an eight-year-old kid who’s lost both parents, is an orphan, and has two little siblings he has to figure out how to feed. In my mind, it’s like, what am I even worried about? Fear is being eight, having no parents, and not knowing how to feed your younger siblings. Fear is not, "Oh, I’ve got a job that doesn’t pay me as much as I want, and I’m doing something that I don’t know how to do." Who cares? To me, I often think about that, and it’s actually one of the key elements that, as we talk about it with these behavioral psychologists, industrial-organizational psychologists, who review my sales process, they keyed in on that—there’s this sense of no fear. I’m going to ask the difficult question because what’s the worst that can happen? You’re going to tell me you don’t want to buy from me, but you’re not buying from me right now anyway, right? One of the things we often teach people is how to be bold and get over that sense of, "Oh my gosh, they’re not going to like me." They don’t like you or dislike you anyway—this is a commercial relationship. It’s okay if you’ve earned the right to ask for the sale, ask for the sale. Don’t be worried about the outcome, just be worried about not asking for it and wasting your time.

Callan Harrington 27:16
I couldn’t agree more. Was it after this company that you started Maestro?

Will Fuentes 27:20
This company was based in Austin, so the workday there started at 10 a.m. Eastern Time, right? They started at 9 a.m. Central, 10 a.m. Eastern. So I was consulting from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. on sales to various groups. One of those clients offered me a job, and I went to work there for a month. Again, you talk about no fear—I literally remember, one month in, it was the first day of kindergarten for my son, and I got a call. The CEO said, "Hey, I need to meet with you." The day before the first day. He calls me and says, "Hey, can I meet you for breakfast tomorrow?" I said, "Oh yeah, what time?" He told me the time, and I said, "Well, I was planning on dropping off my kid for his first day of kindergarten, but let me see if my wife can do that, and then I’ll meet you." He said, "No, don’t worry about it. It’s not a big deal. Just come when you can." So I said, "Fine." It was a beautiful September day. I dropped off my son, walked to the restaurant, and saw him sitting outside to eat. The head of HR and the COO were also there, and I knew this just wasn’t going to work. I had known this two weeks in. I knew things weren’t going great between us, and I had tried to get my job back at Revionics, but they said the position had been eliminated. If they brought me back, it would be at half my salary. I said, "Sure, I’ll take it." They said, "Don’t." I remember Cheryl Sullivan saying to me, "No, you’re not going to take it. You’re going to be unhappy. It’s a horrible decision for you to come back, and it’s a horrible decision for the company too." She wouldn’t take me back. So I walked off, and the CEO said, "This isn’t working out. I’m sure you know that." I said, "Yep." He said, "Today will be your last day, but we’ll pay you out for the next two weeks." I said, "Okay." I got up—didn’t even order breakfast; I should have ordered breakfast—but I got up. The distance between where the table was and where my car was maybe 250 feet. Whatever amount of time it took me to walk those 250 feet at a normal pace was the amount of time I allotted myself to feel sorry for myself. I got in the car, called my wife, and said, "I’m starting a consulting company focused on helping salespeople get better." She said, "Go for it. I’m with you." And that was it.

Callan Harrington 29:31
How’d you get it going?

Will Fuentes 29:32
You know, it’s funny. I’ve been asked this question a lot by people who have found themselves either downsized or fired or whatever else, and they ask, "Hey, you seem to just get it going pretty quickly, from what I understand." I truly believe in this: I believe in the momentum of the world, and you’ve got to put it out there as quickly as possible, with as much energy as possible, to as many people as possible. "This is what I’m doing, this is what’s going on." I started that day emailing people, saying, "Hey, you commented one time that you heard me speak, that I was really good, and I probably was amazing at sales. I actually train people on sales—would you like me to train your sales team?" I was on message boards looking for people who were asking for help in sales, immediately putting my feelers out there, saying, "Hey, what exactly are you looking for?" Just really getting going. I’ll always remember the first deal because it was time and materials. We now do fixed fees, but it was time and materials. The CEO said, "Great, let me know what your rate is going to be." I remember thinking to myself, "Oh man, I really need this. I just really need this." My gut was telling me to go much lower than what my head was telling me I was worth, right? People always say, "Trust your gut," but this time, I didn’t. I trusted my head because my head was telling me, "Don’t do anything stupid, just trust in yourself and trust in your value." So I put out my hourly fee. I remember he wrote back to me and said, "Perfect, no problem. If you had gone any lower than that, I wouldn’t have hired you because I wouldn’t have believed that you believed you were worth it." I’ll always remember that. That started it. I got into this good rhythm. About a week in, his team was doing things differently. He came up to me and said, "Man, I’ve been listening to the calls—my team is so much more confident. I love how they’re talking to people, I love how they’re asking for the sale when they’ve gotten this information, things we weren’t doing before." I looked at him and said, "Okay, great. I need you to post to this message board about the success you’ve already seen in a week." He said, "Great." So he did, and I got my next client. The same thing happened with that client about three weeks in. They said the same thing, and I said, "Great, I need you to post to the message board where you found me about my success in those three weeks." I got into this rhythm where the minute people had an aha moment with me or Maestro, we asked for that referral. That’s the moment when they’re just like, "This is money so well spent." They’re going to be effusive, and if someone calls them, they’re going to say, "Oh my gosh!" That’s when they remember the pain. Asking someone for a referral nine months after they’ve forgotten how bad they were is, to me, mind-blowing. Why would you do it then? They don’t remember. They don’t remember what it was like to not be able to ride a bike. They just don’t remember. Literally, you showed up, and they had a box full of pieces. You built the bike and taught the kid how to ride it. That’s when you should be having them go out and sing your praises and be a referral, not after the kid won the Tour de France—who cares? There are so many other influences that have happened at that point.

Callan Harrington 32:39
That social proof that you’re talking about, right? Posting on a message board or getting a testimonial or asking for the referral at that specific time—that doesn’t last forever. You have no idea how that relationship’s going to end. Things could be going great for a while, and then something can happen that’s totally out of your control, or you screw something up. The odds of you getting those things at that time are going to be a lot harder, especially referrals and things like that. So hitting them at the peak is such great advice in general. Is that essentially what you’re saying on the referral and times that you’re asking?

Will Fuentes 33:15
Yeah, absolutely. By the way, it’s the same thing I tell salespeople, right? You’ve put someone through a great process where you have distinguished yourself as a professional versus a salesperson. You’ve always been on time, you’ve ended the meetings on time, you’ve asked great questions, you’ve given good solutions, you’ve been transparent and honest. That’s the time when you should ask, before the product that you gave them doesn’t exactly deliver to the full—just being serious, sometimes it’s beyond your control, right? People always say, "Well, what happens if they say, 'I don’t want to refer anybody to you until I’ve used it?'" I always tell them, "How about this? How about you just tell anyone who you think might be interested in learning about it about our process and how I treated you, how I valued your time, and gave you great insights. I’m not asking you to recommend the product, I’m asking you to recommend the experience with me." That has a pretty big effect for salespeople to get a network of people who believe they are insightful, smart, and professional. That can go a long way in terms of establishing trust in the sales process early.

Callan Harrington 34:18
I totally agree with that. I think some people are afraid that they’re giving away, especially in a services business, that they’re giving away too much upfront. I say, give it all out. Start going immediately. Here’s the worst-case scenario: Worst-case scenario is they don’t become a client. Okay, great. They used you for free advice—well, they probably weren’t going to be the best client in the world anyway if they were going to be a client. So give it out there, start going into it. Nine times out of ten, you end up just rolling right into it, and it’s a much better relationship. I totally agree with that 100%.

So you’ve grown Maestro, you’ve clearly made a big impact on a lot of people’s lives, and I love the messaging you’re having with salespeople, just in general. What’s next for Maestro, what’s next for Will?

Will Fuentes 35:02
So in 2023, we are really focusing on leveling up our training. What I mean by that is, we’re going to do some pretty interesting stuff. We’re going to go really hard into the classroom-based stuff with these labs, practicum, where you get to work with senior salespeople who can help strategize, help you really learn the concepts, and work through them. Right now, it’s been a little bit less of that and a little bit more of, "Hey, here are a lot of good things that you can learn, and hopefully you apply some of them here." We really want to have that strong impact. So that’s going to be an exciting change for us in general as an organization. It’ll also give us more bandwidth to do more of the training because we’re hitting a bandwidth capacity here. Then for me, I’m working on a couple of things. Number one is more speaking engagements. I’m really looking to get out there a little bit more. I did 12 last year, which was pretty good. I’m looking to do more of those to larger groups. The groups I did them with were mostly CEOs of companies between $5 million to $500 million. I’m looking to actually go to lower levels, like VPs, directors, even account executives, and do these larger speaking engagements. I’ve also been working on this book forever, so hopefully, I will... And the book is interesting, if you just give me the space here to talk about it for one second.

Callan Harrington 36:10
Yeah, go ahead.

Will Fuentes 36:12
So obviously I mentioned my grandfather earlier. My father-in-law didn’t know English. He was here from Greece and figured out, "Hey, there are a lot of ships that come into the ports of Baltimore, and they don’t have enough time to go out shopping. So I’m going to go shop, buy all this stuff, and then I’m going to sell it to the merchant marine guys on the ship so they can get all the clothes for their wives, their girlfriends, and all this stuff." He started a business that way and then ended up owning a bunch of real estate. There’s him, a couple of guys I knew who were homeless before, who started companies and have sold them, and who are now multi-millionaires. This book is really about the story of that "no fear" mentality—how do you overcome that fear? It’s really based on these stories of individuals and how to sell when you have no choice but to sell. That’s what was happening to these individuals—they wouldn’t eat, they couldn’t get a roof over their heads unless they sold. How do you internalize that type of mentality? That’s what this book is about—telling those stories. Because I think those stories are so powerful and so valuable to salespeople. Like, "What’s the worst that could happen?" The worst that could happen for this individual is they’re not going to eat, so they have no choice but to ask for the sale because they need to get that money so they can buy food for their family for that night.

Callan Harrington 37:32
I think that’s a great story. You’ll have to keep us posted when you finish that book. Hopefully, this is that forcing function to get you to wrap it up. It’s out there, you’re putting it out there now.

Will Fuentes 37:45
Yeah, I hope so.

Callan Harrington 37:47
Perfect. Last question I want to leave it on is, what advice would you give your younger self, and you choose the age?

Will Fuentes 37:53
Yeah, so probably I would tell myself at 17, when I was leaving for college, to not be in a rush. I graduated early from college, so I’d say not to be in a rush. Number one. And then the second thing I would tell myself at 17 is, don’t go to law school—go to business school or just get a job right out of college. You’ll be fine.

Callan Harrington 38:17
Oh, man, I love it.

Will Fuentes 38:20
I’m not saying that law is not for everyone; law is beautiful for a lot of people. It just wasn’t the right thing for me.

Callan Harrington 38:25
Totally. It’s one of the things I firmly believe in, right? Everybody’s going to have an opinion on what you should do, and I think most of them have your best interest in mind, but they’re looking at your best interest through their lens. If I’m hearing you, it’s more like, go through your lens and what you know you really want to do and follow that. And you’ve done that. I mean, the reality is, you’ve done that. Like I said, one of the things I didn’t even know about what you’re talking about with this rise from the ashes with the Phoenix is that you went to that next position and followed what you wanted to do. And I think that’s awesome. I think that’s such good advice. Will, this has been great, man. Thanks for coming on the show.

Will Fuentes 38:58
Loved it. This was a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun just kind of remembering some of the beginnings here. So I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Callan Harrington 39:06
I love it. I love it.