188: How Curiosity Can 10X Your Sales Game with Stela Roznovan – 7FL

What if the key to closing more sales isn’t being slick, but being curious?

Today’s guest, Stela Roznovan, breaks down why most people suck at sales and how to fix it through curiosity. Stela went from being an immigrant with zero English knowledge to leading a multi-million-dollar insurance agency in the U.S., and she did it by mastering the mindset most entrepreneurs ignore. A former concert pianist and Taekwondo black belt, she reveals how discipline, curiosity, and obsession with practice shaped her into a high-performing business leader.

We dig into the psychology of money, the immigrant hustle, why most sales conversations fall flat, and how sales isn’t about pitching, but about listening, storytelling, and crafting connection. Plus, Stela shares her 3-part framework for sales success and the exact mindset shift that helped her close deals with confidence.

If you’re tired of pushing harder and still not seeing results, this episode will show you what most are missing.

Tune in! 

P.S. Want to get access to Stela’s secret sales vault? Just DM her “BAM” on Instagram 👉 https://www.instagram.com/stelaroznovan/  

Inspiring Quotes

• “We tend to overthink things as we become older. But when you’re a kid, you just take it for face value.” – Stela Roznovan 
• “If you want to get good at anything—whether it’s sales or learning a new language—you have to become obsessed with your own curiosity about the process, not the outcome.” – Stela Roznovan
• “Don’t sell numbers. Sell stories.” – Stela Roznovan
• “The best thing you can do as a sales professional is to create a projection that the client can see themselves in.” – Stela Roznovan
• “The number one reason people fail in sales is because they can’t reset quickly after rejection.” – Stela Roznovan

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:00:55 Learning English in thirty days 
• 00:03:56 Learning as an adult
• 00:06:31 Scarcity mindset and financial behavior 
• 00:14:29 Parallels between being a pianist and being an entrepreneur 
• 00:22:08 The art of asking 
• 00:28:13 Dealing with the pressure of competition 
• 00:36:06 From piano to insurance sales 
• 00:44:54 Why insurance? 
• 00:49:00 The science of sales and building relationships 
• 00:59:30 The challenges of transitioning from sales to management
• 01:03:47 Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs 
• 01:05:46 Outro

Stela Roznovan 0:00
You were raised on $2 a day, $2 a day, even in Moldova and Eastern Europe, was very little. I was embarrassed to invite any friends over to our apartment. I’ll never forget my first night making calls. I was just sitting there for five hours straight, non stop dialing, dialing, dialing, and I had the most appointments out of everybody that was there for years. If you want to get good at anything, you have to get obsessed with your own curiosity about that process, more so than the outcome. The sale doesn’t happen at the end. It happens throughout the entire interaction. We have to understand that first sales is built on three principles, like any sales conversation, it’s authenticity. If you can have those three fundamentals, you can close the deal at the end,

Brad Weimert 0:42
Congrats on getting beyond a million. What got you here won’t always get you there. This is a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to reach beyond their seven figure business and scale to eight, nine and even 10 figures. I’m Brad Weimer, and as the founder of easy pay direct, I have had the privilege to work with more than 30,000 businesses, allowing me to see the data behind what some of the most successful companies on the planet are doing differently. Join me each week as I dig in with experts in sales, marketing, operations, technology and wealth building, and you’ll learn some of the specific tools, tactics and strategies that are working today in those multi million, eight, nine and 10 figure businesses, life can get exciting beyond a million. Stella rosneman, I am grateful that you took some time to hang out. Thanks for grabbing our time.

Stela Roznovan 1:28
Thanks for having me, Brad. I’m really excited to be on bam. I’ve listened to a few episodes, and I gotta say, it’s a value packed show. Thank you for what you

Brad Weimert 1:36
do. Love it. Thank you so you grew up and spent 17 years as a classically trained concert pianist. You were a black belt in Taekwondo. You moved to the States at 13, not knowing English, and since then, you have grown a multi million dollar insurance agency. I want to talk about a lot of business stuff, but you know, first and foremost, you moved from Eastern Europe when you were 13, not knowing English, and learned it, supposedly in 30 days. Tell me about sort of the mindset to doing that, and the practical steps you took that serve you still today.

Stela Roznovan 2:11
You know, I think that there’s so many lessons in being a 13 year old kid in an environment that you’re thrown into and you have to just kind of figure it out and not speaking the language. I can tell you exactly what I did to start to communicate, because obviously we don’t have any friends, and you can’t communicate, and you feel like an outcast doesn’t feel good. And so I definitely had this intention of being able to understand, you know, the people around me and the kids who were trying to ask me questions and engage with me, and it just literally, all I could say was, my name is Stella, and then I kept asking a question, like, what? Every time they’d say something, be like, what? I remember I would ask the question because I was trying to understand. So I just, I just kept saying what. So it became the What girl, you know, because I kept asking that what question. And there were a few things that I remember piecing together through pure observation. And I think there’s a huge lesson in that, because we tend to overthink things when we become older, when we get into like, adulthood, we’re just like, Well, why do you say it like this? And what’s the proper, you know, phrasing for saying that? But when you’re a kid, you just take it for face value. And I think that there’s a lot in that. Like, I remember somebody sneezed during, like, physical education class, and somebody else said, bless you. And I just, I had this moment was like, okay, when somebody sneezes, they say, bless you. Got it? Like, it just clicked. I didn’t ask why and how, and what’s the correct phrasing, and is that proper? Is there anything addition to bless you? No, it was just bless you. So the next time somebody sneezed, I just went, bless you, and they said, thank you. And I was like, yes, thank you. And I was like, yes, it worked. So there were moments where I just pieced things together, and I always lean back on that, because, you know, in my business now, I run a massive agency in sales, and obviously there’s a really, like, heavy Spanish speaking community that we service as well. So I actually taught myself insurance Spanish on the job using the same tools like I used to visit face to face. And there’s a lot of body language that you get to learn through, you know, when I would service my clients face to face, I would say certain things, and I would just watch what they were doing with their body and understand what they were saying. And so I speak enough Spanish to have a full on conversation and insurance, you know, because he’s the same practical tools of just watching the body language, observing, you know, what’s happening in the conversation, and piecing together what everything means, and that’s the best way to learn. You just immerse and you through pure observation, put together the pieces, and it comes together.

Brad Weimert 4:37
Yeah, I think that. I mean, there’s something you mentioned it, but there’s something about being 13 where I don’t know that you’re any less you might be a little bit more fearless when you’re 13, but you’re also more plastic, right? And you’re just learning in general as an adult, what would you do differently? Or what do you do differently when you well, you Spanish? What did you do? Differently when you went into the Spanish speaking side of things that’s practical for

Stela Roznovan 5:03
you today, I think there’s a certain level of confidence in your ability to figure it out, that we have to have confidence, in my opinion, has nothing to do with knowing something. It has everything to do with your desire to figure something out. And so if your number one outcome from the process is to just figure out, you know, the solution, then you go into something a lot more fearlessly in general. So I think if you want to get good at anything realistically, whether it’s learning a new language, or it’s sales or a different skill set, or, you know, you want to get good at piano or playing the violin, whatever it is, you have to get obsessed with your own curiosity about that process more so than the outcome. You just have to get really curious. And I think that most of us, through adulthood, we lose that sense of curiosity, because kids are naturally curious, right? Like, we want to know everything. We’re like, how far is the moon, and can we go there, you know? And why do the birds make that sound and like we’re just very curious about everything, and we ask a million questions a minute, and our parents are like, stop it, you know. And then when we become older, like, we get put through school, and it becomes less about being curious and more about competing for the outcome. Like, you get ranked and then you want to finish first. And like, it just becomes the sense of competition all the time. So we become more obsessed with the outcome than we are with the process. And I think part of it is the educational system. You know, it’s the fact that rather than taking a test with a group of 10 people to figure out the answer, we’re like, let me finish first, and you’re ranked on on, you know, your grades and your responses and stuff like that. So we do tend to lose that sense of curiosity. And when that happens, we get more frustrated when we don’t have the outcome fast enough, versus asking, Why is this not clicking yet? Or why is this not working yet? Or how can I spend this to understand the process better? And so that’s kind of a long winded answer to just say, think that fearlessness has to do with your ability to have confidence in figuring stuff out and leaning on your curiosity to get through the process and understand the process better, so you refine from it, versus just, you know, shoot for the outcome.

Brad Weimert 7:12
Yeah, I love that. I think that today there’s a significant challenge with the advent of really AI in the traction of AI, where people go to AI for the purpose of the outcome, as opposed to the purpose of learning and progressing in their own journey of education to get better and enjoy the process. They’re just trying to get a shortcut to the outcome. And you look at the the initial data around this, and you can see already that it disengages people’s brain and learning if they use it that way. But that’s a choice, right? And you get to decide if you’re going to use it to learn or use it to try to just shortcut to the outcome. But I think that that’s a that’s a great takeaway. You have said that you were raised on $2 a day, which, obviously in Eastern Europe, is different than $2 a day here, but nonetheless, raised on $2 a day. There’s some scarcity mentality that’s embedded in a lot of people, specifically immigrants, but a lot of people that come from a lower cost of living. How has that impacted your journey today and your relationship with money?

Stela Roznovan 8:20
That’s such a great question, because one of my favorite books of all time is the psychology of money. Not sure if you’ve ever gotten a chance to read through it, I highly recommend Morgan Housel psychology of money. And it doesn’t just talk about finances and understanding money, but also it talks about the behaviors around money and where they stem from, and how we behave, and why we behave the way we do. So, I do think that there is a level of scarcity that you get to, you know, sense when you are brought up in an environment that has less than, you know, the average person and $2 a day, even in Moldova and Eastern Europe, was very little. I mean, to the degree that even in Moldova, which is still to this day, I believe, considered the poorest country in Europe, didn’t really recover from post you Soviet Union. You know, the echoes of the past are still there. And even with that, you know, I was embarrassed to invite any friends over to our apartment, because our wallpaper was torn up, and it was just like a janky old apartment, and it just wasn’t a good environment to grow in as a kid. But I always had love for my grandparents. You know, I grew up in a broken home with my father and like the alcohol and abuse all that stuff, but I still had a dichotomy to see, like the love for my grandparents and my mom, who really put in so much effort to show us that even though we didn’t have a lot of money, right? So the $2 a day aspect of things was definitely a factor in the way that I look at things today financially. But also I remember, like always, hearing the story of my grandpa, who was a winemaker, and he actually did really. Well for himself during, like, the Soviet Union times, and then when the Soviet Union fell apart, he lost all of his money that he had, like, saved, right? And so it was like a lingering story that we knew the banks crashed, and like any savings that he had gone overnight, right? And it kind of resonated with me, and it stuck with me for a long time, because I remember my my grandpa was very frugal, extremely frugal. So if my mom needed a new shirt to go to school, he wouldn’t buy her new shirt even, look he had the money to do it. He was very, very frugal with his money. And so it kind of created this sense of, you know, there’s the scarcity from a financial perspective, but then also there’s a storyline of somebody that’s close to me, my family, that had the means while he did and didn’t, you know, improve the quality of his family’s life. And so the mixture of the two, I think, led to me being a little bit more risky with how I spend when I started to make, you know, six figures. And I started to do really well in my early 20s, you know? And being in your early 20s and making good money and having that Outlook, you definitely become pretty risky with how you spend. So for me, I think I’ve had to pull back, in a sense, and almost say, You know what? I have to understand my own psychology behind money and like, what’s driving my behavior, you know what? What’s the root cause of my spending and how I choose to spend money, right? And there’s a great quote from the psychology of money. Every dollar you get to keep is a piece of your future that you own. And so I had to kind of shift my perspective around, okay, just because I make this much doesn’t mean I should spend this much, right? And reading books and being more accustomed with the psychology behind, you know, the behaviors that lead us to spend or to save or to invest or whatever it is that we do with money, all of that came together, you know, as a puzzle after reading books and after analyzing myself and my behavior and my upbringing, realizing, okay, realistically, Long term, having massive amounts of liquidity is an extremely freeing experience, because that means that if you have X amount in your account, you do whatever you want with your day and your life, and no one can take that away from you. And so it took me some time, you know, having made quite a bit, to realize just because I make that doesn’t mean I should buy things and like, spend it and like, you know, have all of these risky investments that I make all the time. Some of them are actually great, and some were reinvesting in my business in ways that didn’t really pay off. And I think some of us entrepreneurs do that, but everything would have a reason for why I would spend until I realized, you know what, I need to be a lot more proactive about keeping so that I can build a sense of liquidity that gives me that freedom long term and allows for me to be what I want with my life and my time and never have to, you know, do something because I need the cash flow.

Brad Weimert 12:53
Yeah, sure. Well, that’s the, you know, people’s relationship with money is fascinating to me because their upbringing plays into it. The narrative that their family or friends have play into it. Their mentors or business relationships play into it. And ultimately, it tends to change. At least it changes over time for people that are self aware and are moving and are doing things and there’s no right path, right there are highly successful entrepreneurs that leverage everything non stop, and then there are highly successful entrepreneurs that are really allergic to leverage and really hold on to this high liquidity position. There are people that dump everything into their company. There are people that put everything aside in another company. So it’s always interesting to listen to the journey as it unfolds with people specifically coming from that backdrop. And I didn’t, I didn’t know the, you know, wealthy uncle or wealthy grandpa part of that story, which is an interesting addition.

Stela Roznovan 13:52
Yeah, used to be right, and then he lost everything. But you’re totally right. I think you have to understand how you move and what will fulfill you long term. At the root of it, all right? Because leveraging is something that is very common in the US, but in the eastern side of things, like in Moldova, there’s not really a concept of leveraging debt, right? It’s not a thing like most times people buy an apartment with cash, like, it’s not, there’s not really a structure in place. And I think that people perceive money very different in places like that, versus, you know, in a place like the United States, where you can take on massive amounts of debt, and you think you own the house, but you really don’t, the bank does, right? And so I think there’s, there’s a lot to that, but for me, realistically, I realized that any time that I had, you know, X amount in my account, and I had that much liquidity, I’ve always felt better, just in general. And I think that there’s nothing that can replace like your your mental, you know, space and how you feel and how you move, just knowing where you stand financially and otherwise, so being able to control your time, being. Able to control your outcomes at all times. I think does come with having a certain level of liquidity personally, you know, just knowing that hell or high water, you’re good, you’re good. You know, you don’t have to do the thing so

Brad Weimert 15:11
well, that’s that’s a choice, right? And there are some entrepreneurs that are totally comfortable driving without that, yeah. And then there are some that that safety net is super important to allow them to feel like they can reach out and take a bigger swing, totally. So the other thing that I have to highlight because I think most people in the US don’t realize this. Our banking system is very unique to the rest of the world and our world. You know, we are I think most people in the US self identify as a consumeristic society, but they don’t realize that that all is really built on the back of our banking industry and most other parts of the world, you don’t get to get a 30 year mortgage or 15 year mortgage, and the bank doesn’t just lend to anybody, and you really need to be Buying things cash. And obviously there are exceptions to this rule, and every country is different, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah, but the US is unique in that. And so there’s a very interesting shift in mentality from one place to another as a result. So you grew up playing piano from the age of seven classically trained international concerts, is there a through line between what it takes to be a concert pianist and an entrepreneur?

Stela Roznovan 16:27
Yeah, absolutely. Think anything you do in life refines you over time, you know, and as a concert pianist, I mean, there’s, there’s massive amounts of focus that you have to have, right? You have to sit at a piano for three to four hours a day and run scales. And, you know, really hyper focus on what you’re doing. And I think that that’s such an impactful task to have, especially nowadays. I wonder how the next generations are going to be able to really hyper focus on tasks like it’s less and less easy to do because of the age we live in, right? I mean, even myself, as a concert pianist, I grew up like, the first time I had a phone, I was like, 17 or 18, you know, and I feel like I’m constantly distracted. And, you know, there’s some level of ADD or ADHD, if you will. You know, not diagnosed for anything. I think we label too many things too fast, right? But I do think that there is right. But I do think that there is some level of focus that’s lacking, like on a massive scale, where, if you’re if you don’t have a hook in the first point 05 seconds, good luck with going viral, because, like, that’s all you got as far as attention. And, yeah, we’re overly stimulated as a society. So I think one of the biggest things, and one of the best things that happened for me was piano performance, because it really taught me to hyper focus. You can’t not focus, especially when you go on stage and you perform for an hour and a half, and you have to perform from memory, like everything is going off, between your muscle memory to your auditory memory to your visual memory, like looking at the chords and the scales, and you’re just in the zone, and you cannot be distracted like period, right? Otherwise you lose it. You might lose the scale. Might have a memory slip, and it’s, you know, kind of falls apart. So the best thing that happened to me was piano performance, because it trained me how to focus on something for extensive periods of time. I’ll never forget just getting into sales, you know, my first night making calls and booking appointments, like sales calls. I was just sitting there for five hours straight, nonstop dialing, dialing, dialing, and I had the most appointments out of everybody that was there for years. It was just my first night. So like, how are you knocking those out so fast? I’m just like, I don’t know. I’m just in the zone. And I’m just like, next, next, next. So I think that that skill set of just being able to hyper focus on a task is so so important. It’s so critical, especially in today’s day and age. And the other thing I would add to that is, I think when you are in a an environment, or if you have some sort of a craft that that coaches you for an extensive period of time before you get to really show off. That trains you mentally. So what I mean by that is, you know, anything that’s athletic or piano performance, anything that’s performative, you know, like ice skaters, for example, I mean for them to go on for 10 to 15 minutes and show off took years of practice. You know, I’ll never forget, there’s a suite that I performed by Stravinsky. It’s called the Firebird Suite, my favorite pieces of music of all time. And it’s three movements, and it took me a full year to perform that piece, which is like, 15 minutes long, you know, and you go on stage and you perform for 15 minutes, but it’s like, you know, hours in the practice room before you can go on stage and, like, get a standing ovation after hours of practice. And so I always say, you become a top performer in the practice room, not on stage. And understanding that teaches you patience, that delayed gratification, that you know, I know that this is going to be rewarding, and it may only be rewarding for 15 minutes, but hell, I’m going to work. Work hard to get to that 15 minute process where I get to feel the experience and that, you know, take that deep breath of I did this. I worked hard at this. And here’s the result.

Brad Weimert 20:11
There’s no question that when you’re performing, the practice room is where you get good. How do you engineer a practice room inside your calendar now that your instrument is the P and L,

Stela Roznovan 20:24
yeah. So I think that there are so many aspects to being a business owner that you get to learn on the job. I mean, if we just narrow it down to something as simple as sales, right? If we kind of make that parallel between sales and, say, piano performance in sales you become good, not in the sales conversation, but through the role plays that you do, through the scripts that you practice, through you know, the the exposure that you have to other top performers, through the books that you read, through all the listening that you do all the time, like I used to listen to sales coaches all the time, because they have to drive out to my clients and some of my area my areas were, like three and a half hours away. So just play podcasts about sales like, listen to sales calls, just constantly, just, you know, conditioning my mind to get good at that skill. Because I’d never done sales before. There’s a psychology to it. So anything you do, I mean, you can’t create like an incubator for yourself to get good in the practice room at what you do. And in fact, I listened to a recent episode where the guest that you had was talking about doing trial reels, you know, to see what catches on for virality. And I’d done a few trial reels, and that’s a perfect example of an incubator, right, of just like doing different hooks and doing different angles and things like that. So that’s the practice room, you know, like that. That’s where your curiosity takes over, and where you have to figure out what works. So that when you actually do the real thing, maybe when you post the real video, or like you want to really post it for your audience, is fully refined, like you’ve gone through the practice, you’ve done the work, you know. So I think everything in business, whether it’s, you know, building an audience with social media, or getting good at sales or getting good at communication or getting good at leadership, all of that happens in the practice room. It happens through the reading that you do, the practice runs that you do, the role plays, the content, you know, the questions you ask, by the way, which I think most people tend to not ask enough questions, not nearly enough questions, and their questions are not good enough. You know the quality of your results will be dependent on the quality of your questions. So oftentimes, you know if something isn’t clicking and your business isn’t working, maybe people are not resonating with your leadership, or you feel like you don’t have buy in, or you can’t really vision cast. Who are you asking, and what’s the quality of your questions, right? So all of those aspects are what gets somebody Great,

Brad Weimert 22:51
yeah. And I think what you’re accepting is the answer is the beginning of that path, right? So if you accept something as an answer and you don’t choose to question it further, you’re very, very often putting yourself at a significant

Stela Roznovan 23:04
disadvantage, absolutely. I mean, there’s a great story actually, you know the idea of just ask, and I want to talk about this briefly, because I think this is super important. I had a business coach. He actually recently passed, but he was a great, great entrepreneur. His name was Steve Sims, and he ran out. Yeah, I know Steve. Well, you know Steve Wonderful. Okay, so do you know the story that he talked about where he put together this four course dinner at,

Brad Weimert 23:29
oh yeah, okay, tell it, though. So Steve actually was, like, interview number four on beyond a million something like that. Like, I vividly remember I had Steve on in the first eight episodes that I recorded. I recorded in a hotel room in San Diego outside of Traffic and Conversion Summit. And I got Steve a bottle of Japanese whiskey because he was Yeah, and he didn’t fucking open it while we were recording. And I was so pissed, because they wanted to have have whiskey with him while we were recording. Yeah, but, uh, anyway, continue.

Stela Roznovan 23:59
He loved his old fashioned Steve was amazing, amazing. And he one of the things he taught me in the very beginning, when I started working with him as a business coach, was asking questions. It’s asking, what do you actually need for your business right now? And I remember the first session we had, he was like, okay, so what do you need help with? And I had to sit there, like, really think about that, right? Because I think oftentimes we don’t actually take the time to analyze our businesses and to say, okay, these are the gaps, these are the problems. These are the blind spots. I need help here. And here are the questions. And the questions have to be good enough, right? But I do remember him, him telling me this story he used to put together, you know, really high end experiences for like, the the most elite individuals, right? And so one of the experiences that he managed to put together was basically shutting down the gallery in Florence and putting together a dinner at the foot of Michelangelo’s David. And he had Andrea Bocelli serenade these folks. And it was this incredible. Experience, and no one had ever done anything like it, because they shut down the whole gallery just for this dinner, right? And he was talking to one of the coordinators at the gallery, and he was just kind of fishing, you know. And he’s like, So has anybody done this before? And the guy’s like, no, no one’s ever done anything like this. He’s like, Okay, well, why do you think that is right? And he thought that the guy was gonna say something like, Wow, you’re amazing. You’re such a great entrepreneur. You know, he thought it was going to be this, this great response. The guy just goes, you know, no one’s ever asked No. And I remember him telling me this story, and I’m like, that’s such a valid point. Because I think oftentimes, yes, the quality of our questions are going to determine the quality of the results that we get, but ultimately, oftentimes, I think most people don’t even ask, you know, and I see this as somebody that’s coached hundreds, at this point, maybe 1000s, actually, of agents in sales. And I can tell you, there’s very few that actually proactively reach out to me and ask me for my time, and ask me to role play and ask me for specifics to help them refine their craft. It’s very rare that I get that, because I think oftentimes people just assume they’re going to do the thing, and they keep doing the thing blindly without wondering what their blind spots are and trying to get extra coaching. I think that’s the ultimate problem. Is most folks don’t ask. They don’t ask. What can I do? Yeah,

Brad Weimert 26:22
well, I want to get more into sales in a little bit here, but there’s definitely that’s a core element of sales. But I think that asking in general, in sales and outside, people think that their frame of the world is their prospects frame of the world. And it’s really, really critically important to understand that just because you have a belief doesn’t mean the other person does. And so very often, you can ask something, or you can, you know, call somebody in a moment when you think you’ve got this emotional veil up that makes you feel like you’re invading their time or space, right, or that you’re going to offend them, and that’s just your shit, and it has nothing to do with what their frame is currently, their background, their belief, et cetera. And so very often, you get to ask something, and it’s very well received when you thought it was going to be offensive or invasive or break frame entirely. And it’s a really good takeaway. And sometimes you do piss them off, but it serves you to ask anyway. Have you know,

Stela Roznovan 27:21
have you had those experiences yourself where you’re just like, surprised by the response

Brad Weimert 27:26
a million and I think, you know, one of the I spent a lot of time in real estate and investing in real estate, and one of the most common in real estate, is under bidding, right offering somebody some like, radically disproportionate value to what they’re want, what they want, right? But you never know. You don’t know why they price the property as they did. You don’t know what they actually need in their life. You don’t know the pressures in their life. You don’t know any of that. So, like, you know to offer something low, you know, there’s typical negotiating wisdom, which is, if somebody takes your first offer, you didn’t ask low enough in the first place, right? And so if somebody takes your first offer, you should beat yourself up internally and be like, Ah, shit, I should have gone lower. Yeah, right. That should be your response. But you have to be comfortable living in that space and being okay with somebody potentially being offended by it. But you also have to realize that very often they won’t be Yeah. And also, who cares? You know, a lot of things in business, in sales in particular. Like, one of the big lessons I learned in sales at 1819 was you work through almost everything in volume, right? It is a numbers game. And so the more data points you have, the more reps you have, the less one experience actually impacts you. You just need to do more.

Stela Roznovan 28:44
So true, and that completely shifts your perspective from moving out of scarcity and overthinking everything to moving out of abundance. What’s next? Right?

Brad Weimert 28:55
Well, before we get back into into sales and business, I want to close the loop on playing piano, because it sounds like you don’t anymore. When you when you did was the, was the performance anxiety leading up to an event, or the feelings you had leading up to an event more intense or less than pushing for, you know, a seven figure quarter

Stela Roznovan 29:20
way more intense, way more intense. And I still do play, I just don’t perform. You know, I have a grand piano upstairs. I have a tiny little one, but, yeah, I still absolutely play that one up there. I can’t play that to anyone, but the one upstairs is phenomenal. And I have a couple of dogs every time I start serenading, they’re just like smoothing around and listening. So I love it. It’s one of my hobbies. It’s one of the things I get to do to kind of, you know, get all the energy out from the day and have my own space. So I still play, I don’t perform. Obviously, I don’t go on stage anymore like I used to, but that anxiety and the feeling of you. Wanting to win the competition was definitely something that was stressful, especially as a kid. And I’ll tell you, the first time I won a competition, I was eight years old, and having been raised by a single mom on $2 a day, and like wanting to contribute to that, I mean, she sacrificed a lot for me to have these extra lessons all the time and performances and stuff like that, and so to have a monetary win at that young age, and to feel like I’m helping my mom financially with what I’m doing, was a huge perspective shift. So the first time I won, I was eight years old. It was a national competition Moldova, and it was a monthly stipend from the government for winning this contest. And so we were receiving every month, yeah. And then I won an international competition in Romania after that, and it was like, I think the winning from that was like 300 euros, which was insane. It was insane for us, you know. So it definitely felt like there’s quite a bit of pressure to win, you know. And my mom, she will deny it today whenever we talk about this, but back then, she was a tough mom, right? And if I didn’t have a good performance, she wouldn’t talk to me like she we would be walking home, and she would be like, 10 feet ahead of me. I could be lost behind her. I’m like, crying my eyes out. She wouldn’t even look at me, and she’d just, like, walk ahead. And I just feel like, I tell people this story, they’re like, Oh my God, that’s brutal, and it’s fine, right? I remember those moments, and I remember feeling like such a disappointment of a kid, you know, because it didn’t have a good performance. But it coached me. It coached me to be tougher, you know, coached me to feel like if I didn’t perform, there would be repercussions. And maybe, you know, my mom was tough for sure as a parent, and there could have been better ways to manage that, I’m sure. But I don’t, you know, look at it as a negative at all, because I do think that there’s some level of accountability that that taught me as a kid, you know. It taught me to do better. It taught me to perform at higher levels. And I think that that’s a skill set you take in life, you know, and it pushes you to to be better in everything that you do, and to feel like there are repercussions if you don’t do well, if you don’t perform like it is a big deal, you know what I mean. But the biggest thing I think I learned from those performances by far, is how to reset. That’s a really, really tough thing for a lot of people to do, and the number one reason people fail in sales and entrepreneurship and business, and mostly anything, is because they literally cannot shorten the space and the time that it takes for them to reset and bounce back from the negative, from the rejection, from the whatever. And you can’t not reset as a performer, you know, like, if you’re an ice skater and you fall on your ass in front of like, you know, 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of people. You have to just get up like nothing happened and just keep going. You know what? I mean, it’s the same thing in piano performance, like, if I had a memory slip or I didn’t have a good performance, either in the middle of me performing, I had to pretend like nothing happened and keep going, or like, if it just didn’t turn out to be a good performance, and I had another one a week from then, I had to pretend that it didn’t happen. So I go back on stage and I ace the next performance, versus, like, thinking about the the slip that I had the last time. And that is a very difficult skill to acquire. For a lot of people, like to let go of like, the negative and reset and reset and reset every single time, but to be able to do that as a kid, because, literally, the next competition depends on you being able to do it. That was a game changer for me in life, for

Brad Weimert 33:28
sure. Yeah, there. I think that any form of competition lends itself to that. If you get serious about the competition, there’s that this expression, one day we’ll laugh at this. And the many, many years ago, I had this realization that as I focused on getting better and better, I was shortening the gap between that incident and when I laughed. And it went from one day I’m gonna laugh at this to tomorrow, I’m gonna laugh at this to an hour from now, I’m gonna laugh at this to five minutes from now, I’m going to laugh at this. And the question is, how can you release it immediately when you do something stupid, when you fail, when you feel foolish, to just let it go and move on and realize that that is part of the human experience?

Stela Roznovan 34:12
Yeah, yeah. I mean, some people will literally coach themselves through this. You know, there’s a really great excerpt on impact theory with Hal Elrod. I’m not sure if you’ve seen it. He’s the author of The Miracle Morning. Hal is a very, very close friend of mine. Amazing. Okay, so you know his can’t change it rule, right? Oh, yeah. So

Brad Weimert 34:32
Hal, actually, I actually was in house house in Temecula, launching the miracle morning with him. Amazing, 1212, 12. And we launched a midnight PST, so yes, know him very well, but tell, tell the rule so that people know and how has also been on on the show a couple times.

Stela Roznovan 34:48
House, incredible. So, so the rule is, and he was in direct sales, you know, in his 20s. I want to say he was, like 20 years old when he was doing direct with me, with you. That’s how we met. Did. You have the same coach that taught you the same role,

Brad Weimert 35:02
okay? But I know, I know Jesse, well, also Jesse. Jesse is a ridiculous human in general. Jesse Levine, for those that feel like looking them up, but you’ll, you won’t really find them. Oh, gotcha anyway. Keep, keep going with the five, the five minute rule.

Stela Roznovan 35:17
Amazing. So, so you talked about, you know, sales in general is like a microcosm for life. You know, because you’re going to have a sales goal, you may not hit it. You may have the order cancel. You may have, you know, somebody no show you or slam the door in your face and like, that’s going to happen no matter what you do, no matter how good you are. And so when these things happen, you know, his coach taught him. House. Coach taught him this, the simple rule, the five minute rule. He said, you can set your timer for five minutes, and in that time you can, you know, bitch cry, moan, punch the wall, do whatever you got to do, slam a door. And then when that alarm goes off, the five minutes is up, you just say, can’t change it and move on. And that resets your entire perspective, reframes, you know, your focus and your energy. And so a lot of folks will do it, like, I actually teach my reps to do the same thing, you know, like, if you can’t naturally or through your prior experiences as an athlete, as a performer, if you can’t reset yourself, then, for fuck sake, put that hard on five minutes, do the thing. And it actually is a pattern interrupt for your mind to, like, force yourself to actually reset. You know, I think a lot of those tactics and practices are really tangible ways to get good at something that you don’t naturally already have.

Brad Weimert 36:28
Well, what Hal doesn’t tell about that story, and he does conveniently bring up in other areas where it serves him, is that he also got brain damage from getting hit head on by a drunk driver. So he forgets shit every five minutes. Anyway,

Stela Roznovan 36:40
I do remember the the story of the car accident, which is insane, yeah, and he had a full recovery, insane,

Brad Weimert 36:48
yeah. Hell’s got an amazing background, amazing stories, and is an amazing human and a great friend. So I’m allowed to talk so much as I love it. But for for anybody that wants to dig into Hell’s five minute rule certainly, pick up the Miracle Morning book and check out a couple of couple podcasts. We’ll put them in the show notes. Okay, this is the interruption where I’m supposed to take money and let somebody else advertise on the podcast, but I don’t really want to do that, so I’m going to remind you that I also own easy pay direct.com, and if you’re a business that’s accepting credit cards or needs to beyond the fact that we can do a rate review to save you money, beyond the fact that we give you dedicated account reps, world class customer service, world class technology, and can actually optimize the way you accept payments online. You should understand why we have 1000s of people a year come to us off of platforms like Stripe or PayPal, and why they prefer easy pay direct. You can check us [email protected] forward slash b, a, m, that’s epd.com forward slash bam. Let’s back out to business. You’ve got an insurance agency now that you’ve been growing. Why did you stop piano, and how did you get into business in the first place, and what brought you to insurance in particular. You

Stela Roznovan 38:04
know, when I totally switched gears, I think one of the biggest reasons I decided to let go of piano and just get into insurance was because I realized that just because I did something forever doesn’t mean I have to do it for forever. Let’s just put it that way. You know that that was the thought of just like, listen, I can pivot, right? Like, I learned English in 30 days. I moved to a foreign country and figured it out, like with with my mom, obviously, but it was, it was an experience. I think oftentimes life is way more colorful when you actually switch gears and put yourself in a position of not knowing something and get good at it. And that’s what makes things more viral, vibrant long term, right?

Brad Weimert 38:40
So uncomfortable for people, though they don’t like to do that, I

Stela Roznovan 38:43
know, but I don’t have experience. But what if it doesn’t work? But what if it does, right? So I moved to LA in the pursuit of going to USC for grad school to do film composition. As soon as I got my undergrad in classical piano performance, and I got in, but it was like 50 grand a year, you know. And I just remember thinking, like, do I want to put myself in that kind of debt? Because I walked away with a debt free, you know, undergraduate, you know, degree in classical piano performance. And so I interned with Hans Zimmer for three months before, you know, supposed to go to USC. And Hans Zimmer, for those who don’t know, he’s pretty much like the top film composer, I think of, I would say the 21st Century, at least. You know, there’s John Williams, but then there’s also Han Zimmer, who did, like Interstellar, which is one of my favorite film scores of all time, the Batman movies, Pirates of the Caribbean, like he’s scored some of the biggest movies out there, still does. And so I interned with him, and great dude, you know, but I remember watching him in his studio all day, every day, and it’s like dark, because you have to have, like the, you know, the huge screen in front of you, and you’re scoring like every track and all of that. And I just remember having the thought of, this is such a lonely craft, and piano performance is a very lonely craft, too. And I had done it for 17 years, and I’m. Too much of a communicator, like I’m too people oriented to see myself doing this for the rest of my life, you know. And it’s also very brutal industry, you know, the entertainment industry is really, really difficult. And, like in film composition, I mean, there’s so much competition. There are kids from Austria and from Germany in that same, you know, internship with me, like waiting for their shot, you know, like wanting to do it. It’s

Brad Weimert 40:25
pretty wise for a young age. Stella,

Stela Roznovan 40:30
yeah, I just remember seeing myself 10 years from then, 20 years from then, let’s just say a sacrifice all this year is like learning the craft and breaking through and like competing for, you know, the next ability to score the next five measures, you know, let’s just say I do this, and then what was kind of the question, you know, I don’t see myself being fulfilled doing this. Even though I love music. I didn’t love it enough. That’s really what it is. I didn’t love it enough to sacrifice who I am as a person, which is being way more of a communicator, more of a social being, just putting myself in this dungeon,

Brad Weimert 41:04
yeah, yeah. I think the really practical takeaway for everybody on that is the way that you framed it was you didn’t love the music enough to make the sacrifices. And the other big part of that that was screaming at me was it’s phenomenal how many people I talk to on this podcast, but in general, who, when you ask them what they do and why they do it, how they got there, that they fell into it, and they weren’t deliberate about their approach to getting there. And part of that is that they didn’t assess what the opportunity meant, what the lifestyle would be like, what their day to day would be like, what their future would be like. With this thing, they just fell into this thing, and it was about success or money or whatever. But I think taking the time to break apart what it actually means to be a part of something is one of the most valuable things you can do, and you know, you correcting course. There went from probably a more fulfilling, engaging, meaningful life, because you went down a different path, despite the fact that you were teed up to be very successful in what you were already very good at and trained

Stela Roznovan 42:16
for. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. I think at the core we have to ask ourselves, is this something that I see myself sacrificing X amount of years and really getting good at, and am I going to be fulfilled at the end of this journey? You know, because realistically, and there’s a really great story I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard I think I it was Tony Robbins that I heard talk about this, but it was about the treasure hunter. Have you heard the story trying to remember his name? I think his name was Mel Fisher, or something like that. You know the name, but yeah, I think I do know. Yeah. If I’m wrong on the name, I apologize, but I think it was Mel Fisher was the actual name of the the treasure hunter, and he was looking for the satoka treasure for 40 years, and it was worth, I want to say, a half a billion dollars, like four $50 million and everybody knew that it was a shipwreck off the coast of Florida. And so many had tried to find this shipwreck of like, all these treasures, and all that the toca treasure is what it’s called, and this guy spends 40 years of his life looking for this, this treasure, and in the process, in that time, I mean, he had the goal of finding it, and everybody knew that it was there. And like a lot of people tried, but nobody ever found it. And in the process, he obviously the funding cuts off after, like, 10 years, a decade of searching, and he continues to do it. And then later on, he lost his son in one of those expeditions. He drowned, like on one of those, you know, searches. And after 40 years, he finally finds the total treasure worth four, $50 million he goes down in history, as you know, somebody that did this incredible thing is this treasure hunter that finally found that token treasure. And the moral of that story is, at the end of that journey, it was worth it for him. So like, we know that it will be difficult and brutal no matter what you do. Work is work, it’s just gonna be demanding. Like, it doesn’t matter if you love what you do or you don’t love what you do, it’s still going to require a lot out of you, because it’s the process of refinement. So if you’re working, you’re getting better, and if you’re getting better, you’re going to be uncomfortable, right? But the question you have to ask yourself is, at the end of this journey, or at least in the process, am I going to have some level of fulfillment in what it is that I’m doing? It’s like for this guy to have spent 40 years despite losing his son, despite losing his funding, despite people saying you’re nuts, like give it up, you know, and having zero people in his corner, he still kept doing it, because there was some level of fulfillment for him in the end, and in the process, he loved he loved doing it. It was his thing, you know. So at the end of the day, I think we have to ask ourselves, you. Whatever industry I’m in, whatever it is that I’m doing, is there some level of fulfillment that I can find in this, you know? And if the end goal is whatever 1,000,003 million in income, whatever your end goal is, whether it’s 100 million, it doesn’t matter if it’s monetary. Is that going to be worthy enough for you to pursue the thing long term, you know, but if it’s something else, like for me, I think that most fulfillment doesn’t come from monetary things. It really comes from like, the process of getting good at something, and the value that you get to give back like that, for me is the most fulfilling thing.

Brad Weimert 45:35
So, so to that end, why insurance? Insurance is boring as fuck.

Stela Roznovan 45:42
It’s funny you ask the question of why insurance, and that was prefaced with people fall into something I kind of did in some ways, like, I knew I wanted to, yeah, I knew I wanted to, to get into sales, and I knew that I wanted to work with people. But the vehicle of, like, Would it be real estate or insurance or, you know, like tech sales or whatever, that to me, wasn’t as relevant as long as, like, the model really fit my needs. And the reason I got into insurance was not necessarily, insurance is the company, like, it gave me a structure that I liked, and I felt that I could fit it fit into. And one of the biggest reasons for that was, like, the warm market of the client base that we get to work with, like, middle class, working class families is really our like, blue collar families are the ones that we really service the most. And that resonated with me. And like the client, the client base being provided, was a big factor for me as well. But insurance in general is a very profitable business to be in, because you don’t just get to make the front end six figures, millions and all of that. You also get to build a passive income in the back end from the residual income that you get to accrue. It’s like, every time you sell a policy, it gets to pay you month after month, as long as the policies on the books. So you get, like, dividends from that, you know, and you get to repay yourself for all the work that you put in. So,

Brad Weimert 46:54
yeah, and payments. So, you know, I’m talking shit, but from a from a very knowing place here. Yeah. And you know, ironically, what you just said is very much how I feel. So I built a list of criteria of what I wanted in the opportunity, and then I found payments which fit all the criteria. And it’s it wasn’t about payments being this thing that I was overly passionate about, and I’ve developed quite a bit of interest and passion over time, but it was about it fitting the structure of what I wanted and needed as a means to get to where I wanted to go

Stela Roznovan 47:27
totally. I mean, what I knew at the core is I love working with people. I’m a good communicator. I’m pretty confident, you know, I can get good at most things I put my mind to. So if I’m good at, you know, practicing for hours and then going on stage for an hour and a half and playing for memory, I could probably memorize a five page script, like, let’s be real. Like, you know, I can do that right? And understanding, like behavioral psychology and things like that, has always been my thing. My mom is a psychiatrist now, and I remember listening to her tapes, like her medical tapes when she was studying for her exams and stuff in the medical field. And I was just so consumed by that stuff. I just love understanding human behavior as much as I humanly can. I want to know why people move the way they move, and it’s fascinating to me, right? So I knew that I needed to do something that’s within the realm of working with people, communication, behavior, things like that. But around that, there are certain things that aligned with this opportunity. And so when we talk about insurance like, nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks I’m going to do morning and thinks I’m gonna do insurance sales, like, that’s not a career that most was pursue. But like you, there are certain, you know, check boxes that I was able to check off in this business, and one of them was a warm client base, which I really appreciated. I’m like, hey, if I get to work with people that have the need for it and have an interest in what it is that we do, and I don’t have to, like, go to my friends and family, like, No, thank you. I don’t want you. I don’t like doing that. I don’t want to do that. Like, this was more of my thing I wanted to get into is, like, having a market that I can tap into. The second thing is, the product doesn’t go out of style, right? Like, life and supplemental health insurance, if you’re alive, you probably need it, right? Like, most of us need the product. So it’s not a product that’s ever going to go out of fashion. Another thing that’s really kind of goofy, but it’s a real thing for me, is I like selling intangible things because I’m a hyper minimalist, you know, and I think that, like mass production and all of that, is such a massive problem in society that if I sell something, I would rather sell something that isn’t a vacuum cleaner. I’d rather sell something that’s an intangible product, a financial product. So it made sense to me, and it kind of fit that need for me. And then lastly, the the residual income, you know, the ability to build a back end, passive income, while also making a front end, like, you know, insane amount of money that you can make an insurance by the way, it’s, you know, I don’t know if people know this. I’m sure most people do, but insurance is crazy profitable.

Brad Weimert 49:42
It is so it is. There are a couple of things you said there that I think are interesting. Let’s talk about the intangible side of things, because from a sales perspective, I grew up in intense sales, and it was tangible sales, and when you’re selling tangible things, there’s a touch feel. Component to it, features and benefits are real. Intangible is conceptual sales. And so people that are good at tangible sales very often can’t just move over to intangible. They don’t have the capacity to do it. They need to relearn a new skill set, a new way to sell. And on some level, sales is sales, is sales. But if you want to find somebody that’s good at sales, you should find somebody that’s selling exactly what you want them to sell, or something that has the same bones. So when you’re selling insurance and intangible, what messaging, what hook, What angle do you use that takes somebody that’s hesitant to buy into? Where do I sign? What’s the unique messaging or structure that you use to sell intangible

Stela Roznovan 50:41
Yeah, I think the biggest thing to understand when it comes to selling intangible products, and you’re totally spot on, by the way, you can’t feel it, you can’t touch it, you can’t smell it. You have to understand the concept behind it and what it does. So I always teach my agents don’t sell numbers, sell stories, right? So the best thing you can do as a sales professional, I think, in general, is just to create a projection that the client can see themselves in at the end of the day. Like that’s really what gets somebody to understand the need, right? So I think for for us, I mean, in the sales conversation, there’s a lot of conditioning that you do throughout the whole conversation, right? Like, the sale doesn’t happen at the end. It happens throughout the entire interaction. We have to understand that first. And I always say that sales is built on three principles, like any sales conversation, I teach my agents all the time, it’s authenticity, why they should buy from you, exclusivity, why they should buy this product right, and urgency, why they should buy today. If you can have those three fundamentals, you can close the deal at the end. And so if somebody doesn’t really want to talk to you, or they’re not giving you anything and like, you just feel like you’re talking to a wall, they probably don’t like you. You haven’t really connected with them. You don’t know who you’re talking to, right? So that’s the authenticity. They tell you something like, Oh, I’m shopping around. I want to compare and whatever. Then you haven’t really built in the exclusivity, because everybody wants to feel like they’re getting the best sum of the deal at the end of the human nature, right? And lastly, urgency. If they say, Let me think about this, let me sleep on it, whatever, then you haven’t really built on the urgency. And there’s a bunch of ways to build on urgency, especially in life insurance, if you don’t have the thing, then you need the thing. It’s like they say, life insurance is like a parachute. You may not need it right now, but when you do, you better have it, you know. So, so these three fundamentals are absolutely critical in order to have a transactional outcome at the end, right? And so when it comes to authenticity, this is a very, very important one. And I teach my agents all the time, at the end of your interaction with your client, how much can you tell somebody else about this person? Like, if you were to talk to a stranger, would you be able to tell the stranger who Bill is like? Who is he? What does he care about? What are his needs? Who are his family? Who does he care about? Right? Because if he can’t actually explain to somebody else who you just met with, then you talked at them, not with them, and that is the number one problem. In fact, I see this for all rookie sales people, they just go into a presentation instead of a conversation, and they’re just like, showing you a bunch of stuff on the screen, and you get this, and it’s this, and it’s that, and they’re not engaging with the client to the degree that they understand who the heck they’re even talking to and what that person cares about, because it’s not about you and your product, it’s about them, right? So the best way to build value and to create a projection and the storyline is to understand who you’re actually talking to and what their needs really are. And I know that may sound kind of cliche, but that’s really all it is in sales, you know. And on the reverse side, if all you’re doing is interrogating the whole time because you’re trying to get who they are what, then that’s not real connection either. Like they have to feel like they’re having a beer with a friend, and you’re giving them, you know, aspects of yourself that they can relate to as well. So it’s a dance, right? A sale is a dance. And when it comes to exclusivity and urgency, I mean, there’s a bunch of ways to phrase that and to build on the value and the need and the fact that this is a great program or product for different reasons. There’s like, price anchoring, which is a really, you know, great technique to use where you will say, you know, program like this or product like this generally isn’t within this ballpark, which is a higher price range, but because of your membership, or whatever, you get it at this you know, amount, which is a lower amount, and that allows for price anchoring. Like, if I went to a store and I wanted to buy a camera, and they’re like, this camera is $2,000 and I had no idea how much a camera like that usually costs, then I’d be like, Oh my God, right. But if I understood that cameras like that are usually like, four or five grand, and it’s discounted at two grand, then I feel like I’m getting a deal that’s called price increase. Like, if you can use techniques like that that are, like, subtle but intertwined in your ability to connect and communicate and project value and build that storyline, then you always win in the end,

Brad Weimert 54:42
yeah, the the idea that sales is a process and sales is the entire relationship and not a moment at the end, I think, is mission critical for people. And we we look at internally and easy, pay direct, we look at the client experience, and it’s. From the moment that you see content or you see an ad or you talk to somebody through to a year plus of working with us, right? But all of that is the sales process. All of that is the experience that you’re going to have with us. And sales is intertwined with support and with relationship and with execution. It is not a moment. It is not an isolated thing. It is part of the process. When I was 25 I had a friend who I was talking to, and I was like, I said something like, how do you know if a girl wants to kiss you at the end of the date and he goes, bro, if you don’t know by the end of the date, you fucked up a long time.

Unknown Speaker 55:39
He’s not wrong. No,

Brad Weimert 55:41
he’s not. And that was such a good moment to think the same thing, right? You’re, you’re, if you’re waiting till the end to ask for something, yeah, then you just missed the whole point. Yeah.

Stela Roznovan 55:53
100% Yeah. I mean, you know, from the beginning, like, if you’re a great sales professional and you’ve been in the business, there’s a level of pattern recognition that you get to develop. And you kind of know from the very beginning, yeah, this is going to be a great interaction. This is going to be a sale at the end. And again, you’re not going to close everybody. Of course, there’s going to be people that you just literally, no matter what you do, like they’re just going to sit there and stare at you like, you know that happens, you know that happens to all of us. But

Brad Weimert 56:19
sometimes that happens, and you still make the sale, and you still fucking ask, yes,

Stela Roznovan 56:23
so true 100% like, I’ll never forget when, when I was visiting with clients face to face, pre covid. Like, now we do everything virtually. Like we live in a virtual sales realm. But before, I used to visit with all of my clients, and I remember visiting this one union member, and like, we have this, like, blanket coverage that we provide for them per contract with their groups that we have. And so it’s literally a certificate of coverage that provides them with, like, an accidental policy. It’s at no cost, like, because remember, you sign off and you keep it right. And so this guy, you know, this certificate of coverage is his to keep, he just had to sign off as the insured at the bottom and keep it. So I’m like, you just have to sign here and keep this certificate of coverage is your policy, and you just wouldn’t sign it. And I’m like, I’m not gonna take this. Like, this isn’t going any to some dungeon. Like, this is your certificate of coverage. You get to keep it. It’s like, No, I’m not signing anything. Like, I’ve been scammed before, whatever. And I’m like, What are the odds that this guy’s gonna buy a policy for me, give me his bank account and social security number, all this like information for me to submit a policy for him? I’m like, whatever. So I just went through the motions like he wouldn’t sign it. I let it go. I went through the rest of the conversation with him, and then at the end, you know, I still showed him a couple of options. I didn’t just walk out. I was like, All right, like, I honestly thought he wasn’t gonna buy anything, because let’s be real. And he’s like, yeah, let me go with a higher option here. And I was like, Okay, I’m gonna need your bank account. And he’s like, okay, like, your social security number. He’s like, Okay. I was like, what? And it just taught me, you never know you’re totally right. To your point, sometimes you’re gonna have somebody that’s just like, not giving you anything and maybe giving you pushback or whatever, but there’s still a buyer, you know, you just have to get through that interaction and do your best to still connect with them and do the other things. But all of that to say that, you know, sales, I think, is a very simple process, and it’s really not difficult to get good at sales, as long as you understand the principles behind it, and you can build on those three components, like the authenticity of the exclusivity, the urgency, if you have those key phrases throughout your conversation, and you can build that relationship, then that’s the most important thing you do. But one of the biggest things that I add to all of my interactions with my clients is, I’ll say this, like, I come with the policy, you know, and that’s a big factor, and like that builds on the exclusivity, because oftentimes, like, you might get a policy somewhere else, you don’t know who to talk to, what to do. You got to file a claim. You have no clue what’s going on here. But I come with the policy. I’ve been doing this for a very long time, so anytime I have a policyholder that’s under my name, they get the privilege of working with me long term. And I mean that, and I’ve helped tons of clients file claims, and that part of the process is rewarding to me, you know? So I think being able to own that and having the confidence in your craft and who you are, what you bring to the table and what you offer is one of the most important things to get good and confident in sales,

Brad Weimert 59:07
in intangible sales, in particular, service based sales, yeah, and it’s just true of a lot. Some sales, it’s very relevant in that you’re selling yourself, yeah. And some it’s less relevant. But there’s no question that certainly an intangible certainly in service based sales, a huge part of it is and definitely in sort of commodity driven sales where there’s a lot of price competition, your service, who you are, is what sells. And even in cases when you don’t think it matters, people still buy. People. Yeah,

Stela Roznovan 59:35
totally 100% I think the best sales reps. And you know, if you, if you talk to we have this one really great, you know, agent that’s been with us for 20 years, like 20 plus years. His name is Max, and I mean, he sells the 85% 90% closing, you know. And if you ever try to talk to his clients, they will say, No, thank you, because their guys max. And if it’s not Max, I don’t want to talk to anybody else like you. And I think that that’s really powerful. When you’re that good at what you do and you’re that good at building the relationship that your clients literally will not talk to anybody else. They have that massive loyalty to you, it’s huge.

Brad Weimert 1:00:11
So you grew up selling insurance and have moved into management and leading sales and management are two very different skill sets, and very often good sales people are terrible managers.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:28
What do you think?

Brad Weimert 1:00:33
Why do I think that is? Why do you think that is?

Stela Roznovan 1:00:35
I think that great sales people have two things. If they’re naturally good at what they do, it’s harder for them to transfer the skill, because they just get it. They just they’re good, they’re confident. They can connect with people easily. So it’s harder for them to teach because they never, you know path to experience not being good at it. So that can be one thing. Another thing is they don’t have the patience like they they work really hard, they get the outcomes that they want to get, and they just don’t have the patience folks that maybe don’t learn as fast or don’t get it as fast. So I think those two things are usually the problem. I

Brad Weimert 1:01:10
think that’s right. I think that selling somebody to take action is different than selling somebody to consistently take action, yes, right? Helping somebody reprogram, redesign and learn a skill is very different than just driving to one specific outcome in a moment, yeah, which is functionally what you know the sales process generally is, yeah, I agree. Once you sign, you’re there, even if there’s fulfillment on the back end. Okay? So, I mean, I could talk about sales forever. We actually opened this before we started. You were like, We could talk about sales for hours and hours and hours. And I was like, Yes, I can. Yeah, I like it. I mean, I think that the, you know, there are a million interesting things about that that tie into life in a practical way. And the entrepreneurs or humans that think that sales is dirty or that they don’t know how to do it or they shouldn’t do it, need to fucking get over it and realize that everything in life is persuasion and some to some extent, and you’re doing it already. So own it, learn about it, learn where you’re doing it, and practice on it, because it’s, it’s about you getting better as a person in general. But

Stela Roznovan 1:02:26
you know, that goes back to, and I think it ties into your question, like, how do you go from sales to leadership? It’s all curiosity driven 100% you know, like, if you’re curious about the process, about what makes people influenced what creates impacts, like, when you get really obsessed with that and the process of figuring it out, I think you’re less likely to get jaded because of the outcomes. You know, like realistically and and the folks are just like, sales is terrible and, you know, like sleazy or whatever, whatever. The you know, thought processes, most likely these folks failed in some way, you know, and so they have this perception, you know, of sales, maybe because they didn’t get good at it, or they tried it and they sucked at it, or whatever. And I think oftentimes it really has to do with your inability to get curious with the process. And instead, all you want is the outcome, and when you don’t get it, you get jaded, you get bitter, and that’s all you can think about, right? So for me, like, one of my big things this year is like, I want to get good at social media, right? I have whatever, 20,000 followers, but I want more engagement. I want real engagement, where I know that whatever I’m posting has impact, so that it has value, right? But it’s a different game, like I could run a meeting for my my team, or another team, and they’re just like, taking all these notes and applying all this stuff, and it’s great, and it feels like it’s impactful and resonating with folks. And I love that stuff, but for me to have the same impact in a 30 to 45 second video is so different, like it’s a totally different craft and skill set. And so I’m obsessed. So like this hook and that hook, and Can I try this and Can I try this font and whatever? And it’s time consuming, yes, but the fact that, like, a video won’t catch on, does it make me that upset? Of course, I’ll be like, damn, this sucks, you know? And like, like, what else can I do? But I don’t stop because I’m just curious about what’s not working. More so than the fact that it’s not working, that makes sense. Like I’m curious. Why not? The fact that it’s not working, right? So that, I think, is a massive skill in life to have.

Brad Weimert 1:04:29
Well, you might have just answered this, but what advice do you have for a 25 year old entrepreneur that’s trying to make it

Stela Roznovan 1:04:37
yeah, get curious. Totally. You know you’ve got to get curious with the process. And anytime that you find yourself saying, you know this isn’t working, or you know they’re not buying, or they’re not showing. Like, show ratio with sales appointments is such a big killer, you know, change that, reframe that, and ask yourself, why? Like, okay, why are they not showing? What would get some. To show what would get somebody to show if you reframe the statement to a question, then you can start problem solving, like for me, like with the hooks, for example, what would get somebody to want to stay right? One of the best things that I actually did in my experience, and getting good at sales, took me analyzing myself more than anything, and asking myself, okay, that person in a buy like, what would have gotten them to buy? What could I have changed? What could I have asked? What could I have done a little bit different? What angle, you know, things like that, and I put myself in the perspective of being a client so many times, where I’d have the conversation with myself like, Okay, what would get me to make a buying decision? What would get me to be impacted or to be influenced. You know, whether you are a public speaker and you’re trying to influence an audience, ask yourself, what would get me to feel like this talk is impactful, or to remember something from it, right? Or if you’re in sales, will get me to buy? Or what would get me to watch? And if you can start asking yourself those questions. I mean, 99% of the time we have the answers. We’re just not asking ourselves, like our best advisors are, like sitting on our shoulder and it’s us, and we just, you know, don’t really take the time to analyze the process enough and to ask enough questions. We just make way too many statements. This doesn’t work. That doesn’t work. This was, you know, bullshit. This is whatever. And then we get bitter. And the number one reason that folks get better is because they make because they make too many statements and don’t ask enough questions. That’s all it is.

Brad Weimert 1:06:28
Stella, I appreciate you carving out time. Where can people find out more

Stela Roznovan 1:06:32
about you? Yeah, social media. You can find me at Stella, rosneven, s, t, e, l, a, and if you just type in R, O, Z, I’ll pop right up. But Stella, with 1l is the key. And honestly, I wanted to share something here too. I have this vault that I give to my agency only to my team, where there’s like, a bunch of tips on how to increase your show ratio, how to increase your closing how to increase your sales appointments, and five steps to six figures in sales year one. There’s like, a quick video that explains that and breaks down the psychology. If you want to get access to that, I will give you access, even if you’re not on my team, just message me, bam, B, A, M, keyword on my social media. DM me, bam, and I’ll give you access.

Brad Weimert 1:07:12
Love that. Well, we’ll put that in the show notes. We keep all this stuff hosted on the beyond a million.com website, and I appreciate that. It’ll be good for lots of people that are trying to be better at life.

Stela Roznovan 1:07:23
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me, Brad. This was honestly a great conversation. I loved it absolutely.

Brad Weimert 1:07:29
All right, that’s a wrap for this episode. I’m supposed to tell you that you should subscribe to the show and you should leave a review. I really want you to leave a review, though, because it makes like a radical difference in the algorithm and getting other people to be able to see the show. So can you please go leave a review? It’ll take you like 30 seconds. Also, if you want more episodes that are amazing, you can check out the full length video versions at beyond a million.com, or youtube.com. Forward slash at beyond a million. You won’t regret it.