The Chad Salesman: Tech Sales Education

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Introduction

In January, @BowTiedDolphin very kindly gifted me a copy of The Chad Salesman Course by the esteemed @BowTiedSalesGuy (BTSG). As a condition of my receipt of the course in gratis, he requested me to write up an honest reflection of my thoughts on Day 90.

Before commencing, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to this cartoon dolphin on the Internet for selecting me as the worthy recipient of a BTSG education. BTSG's course & the knowledge he provides on his timeline (alongside the general wisdom BowTiedBull provides on his Substack, which I highly encourage you all to subscribe to), have helped take me from a financially strained nobody to someone who is comfortably on course to earn more money than I've ever seen in my life. In a matter of months.

I really credit BTSG's concept of 'frames' as the underlying magic to this turnaround, which we'll delve into in this review. The concept is simple, yet powerful, something I encourage you all to consider spending time & money on understanding.

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Summary

The Chad Salesman course is a 4 parter which runs participants across the following:

  1. Frames
  2. Leveraging Psychology
  3. Chad Salesmen
  4. Success in Sales

I had never taken a sales course before this, so admittedly I have little benchmark to compare it to other than courses I've taken online on Money Twitter. I found the course to be comprehensive in the material concerning softer aspects of sales (psychology) and hard aspects of what you'll really be doing in a sales role (emailing, calling). I encountered very little fluff & BTSG is to the point & direct.

This said, I do not know what I am missing out on. I believe BTSG provides a relevant sales education & I largely trust the scope of the material covered because it seems to have covered everything I do in my career & business & is making me better at both.

Hence as regards coverage, I rate BTSG's course well based on personal experience in the B2B market.

Duration

The course is not long. This may lead one to question a $500 price tag on something which can be completed in a brief duration.

Remember however that the key metric is quality not quantity.

On this, BTSG's course demands you to make use of far more hours than it seems on the tin, as you need to proactively read, reflect on & apply his teachings & techniques on people IRL, pause & rewatch videos & scribble a ton of notes on paper. All in all, I would at minimum 2x the amount of time you need to spend on the course from the baseline hours taken to watch the videos and add in a healthy dose of reading & absorbing BTSG's Twitter feed, which is an absolute must to gain holistic value out of the course.

Let me repeat this point. Please take this course & read & imbibe BTSG's feed simultaneously. They are complementary components – his feed will give you tips, wisdom & tricks which you can use to make your life better, but you need the underlying foundations of the course to weave clarifying threads through all of BTSG's content.

To hit the point yet again, you will not become a Chad Salesman by watching the course alone. You need to do the course, which requires spending time by yourself actioning everything.

If you are not ready to invest time & money in yourself, please close this review now & do not buy the course.

If you are, you will gain way, way more value from the course as compared with someone who won't spend extra time going through the material repeatedly.

I would also strongly advise taking the course over a period of 1-3 months to allow the knowledge to sink in & shape your behaviour. Cramming this is a failing strategy because it's deceptively long if you do it properly.

Regarding length, again I rate this highly with the caveat that in learning, repeated exposure to material is the only real way for your newly acquired knowledge to stick & slowly change your mental heuristics overtime. So be prepared to make an effort.

Audience

Practically speaking, this course is extremely useful for sales roles, especially since BTSG maps elements of the softer side of sales onto the harder, actual ground game of selling in the form of a sales role in Part 4. If you're in any of the following (not exclusive) this course is directly, 100% applicable to what you are doing every day & will not only make you better at your role, but spot precisely where your company is messing up on sales processes:

  • Sales Development Representative
  • Business Development Representative/Manager
  • Account Executive/Manager
  • Partnerships Manager
  • Sales Leadership

Additionally, if you're an entrepreneur doing anything requiring B2B sales (whether agency or VC funded startup) this course is 100% relevant, given selling to customers or raising funds is such an essential part of what you do.

Sales is not something everyone will work in, but if you're a regular follower of types like Naval or BowTiedBull on Twitter, you'll also know that persuasion is at the very least one of the key skills which the smart people online tell you that you need to know, period.

Beyond sales roles, the course is a general education in applied psychology. By this I don't mean the Freudian psychoanalysis which college undergrads waste hundreds of hours reading articles on until 2am, training themselves to become overthinkers & poor executors.

By this I mean you will learn how to shape other people's behaviour & control your own in a way that helps you achieve whichever goals you're looking to, whether hitting quota, getting a chick's underwear off or convincing a stubborn bureaucrat to break procedure. Not in a Machiavellian 48 Laws of Power way, which helps you read other people's behaviour & build complex strategies around them. This is a course which will help you sit across the room with someone & learn how to use applied psychology to disarm & persuade them, through simple principles.

Concluding this section, The Chad Salesman course is 100% relevant for anyone professionally in sales. For those outside the profession, it is still helpful. I'd commence with BTSG's feed & if you think you're gaining a lot of value, take the course insofar as it cements & will at minimum 2x the knowledge you get from BTSG's feed.

Utility

Your garbage company training or marketing department's precanned outreach techniques will actively harm your quota & make your life unnecessarily harder. You need techniques which bypass or overcome the crap they are making you output.

Your edge will be a superior knowledge of frame.

There's a scene from Harry Potter where Voldemort & Harry are casting beams of magic at one another, and the beams are pushing closer to hit one or the other person & only one can emerge victorious. Imagine some kind of ethereal force between you & the prospect & the one dominating the frame has the stronger force.

Harry Potter duelling scene

This is frame.

Frame represents a subtle psychological relationship between 2 parties in an interaction. You will be faced with the prospect's shitty or adversarial frame & your responsibility is to ensure yours is the one which holds fort:

Remember, the prospect:

  • Lacks a real understanding of their & your market
  • Has an infantile need for guidance through the uncertainties of business & life
  • Has an ego which prevents them from understanding the limitations of their understanding
  • Sincerely needs help as they are overwhelmed or not competent
  • Needs someone with a complementary set of skills to make up for their weaknesses
  • Etcetera

Your responsibility is to diagnose these like a doctor & provide the solution if you or your company can. This is where I believe grandmaster salesmen cite sales as requiring very little persuasion or learning a bank of objection handling techniques. Done properly, people persuade themselves & objections melt in the face of a superior frame.

After the BTSG course & listening to BowTiedBull, I am actually convinced marketing is more of a 'dark arts' profession than sales. People have a guard up against 'sales-y' people or techniques when they really should have their guard up against powerful marketers, or people exploiting their need for ego, money, or beauty with words & art.

I digress, BTSG tells us how superior knowledge of your product or service, combined with a healthy level of competence & confidence, supplemented with a general knowledge of applied human psychology will all help you capture the frame of a conversation & achieve your goals.

Your company won't teach you any of this.

Tangible Results

I completely credit BTSG's course with the following:

  • Closing X figures in revenue through understanding how to control the frame of a conversation & show prospects I know 100x more than them, without being an asshole. Couldn't do this before.
  • Create employment for people thanks to more revenue in side biz.
  • Helped me realise I'm working for the wrong company. Cannot use 75% of his more extreme tactics because they aren't in line with brand image, even though they are clearly working overwhelmingly well for me in my side biz.
  • Understanding how sales & email marketing are done badly & why & how to do them better (skyrocket response rates).

Concluding Remarks

I can highly recommend The Chad Salesman course to any salesperson, aspiring salesperson or anyone who is looking to up their persuasion game. Equipped with BTSG's wisdom, you'll change your approach to sales, romance & life more broadly as you begin to detect frame dynamics in all your social interactions.

I have little comparison to make since BTSG is the only sales 'guru' whose content I've studied in depth, however the added autism on his content helps make it clear & actionable rather than sales-y & conventional like other gurus I've read or heard.

As BTB repeatedly says, career options to pursue for long term wealth are M&A, Tech & Sales along with a business of your choosing. If you in any way are in the early stages of sales or planning to go into it (or doing a business which requires you to sell B2B) do yourself a favour, get this course & watch yourself outperform everyone else.

Once again, my thanks to BowTiedDolphin for providing me with this course. Thanks to BTSG for such a great learning experience. And to BowTiedBull for bringing all the pieces together.