Why Trump Tariffs Are ACTUALLY a Good Thing (for salespeople)
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Unless you've been living under a rock for the past week, you've almost definitely heard about Trump's tariffs. Regardless whether you think they are good or bad, or whether you like him or you hate him, they might be the biggest sales opportunity for you this year.

Now, there are over 2,500 sellers and business owners in my training program right now. And turning the chaos of Trump's tariffs into opportunity is something that we're talking about every single session on our group coaching calls right now. So give me a couple of minutes to explain why they're just so important for salespeople. And I promise that you'll leave this video ready to put more meetings than ever before.

before. Okay, so Trump's tariffs are a worldwide trigger event that are going to affect almost every single business in some way. Both your businesses, your customers' businesses, and your customers' customers' businesses. And this is where all this gets interesting, right?

And they're going to affect all of these individual groups, markets, just the entire world, because whether it's directly that a business is importing things from China, from wherever into the US and they're being hit directly, or whether they're being hit indirectly because these tariffs are affecting that company's supply chain, whether it's affecting employees, the actual physical products, software developed, there's all kinds of stuff that these tariffs are, again, indirectly or directly hitting.

So with all that said, how do we take advantage of this? Well, what we need to do is leverage what's called a trigger event. Now, you've probably heard this term banded around. There's plenty of books written on this subject, but trigger events are massively underutilized for B2B sales. Most B2B salespeople do not take advantage of trigger events when they're just dropped into their lap like these Trump tariffs. Now, if you're unfamiliar, a trigger event is just something that changes a market, or in this instance,

the market, because this is so global. And they are probably the most important part of the third rule of sales, which states to get a meeting booked and a deal closed, you need to put the right message in front of the right person at the right time. Now, obviously we're in control of the person who we prospect, whether we're going to call them, send them an email, try and meet them at a conference, whatever it is. We're in control of who we choose to target as a prospect, who we think we can deliver value to.

We're also in control of the message that we send and even the medium that we send that message over. Again, whether it's an email, whether it's a carrier pigeon, whether... If your message is strong enough, you can write it on a brick and throw it through someone's window and they're going to respond to it. There's got to be a strong message to pull that one off, but it's absolutely possible.

But timing the third part of this process, the third part of the Venn diagram is a little bit more tricky because typically we're not in control of when the buyer has a problem and when they feel enough pain to take action upon the issue that they're

facing. And this timing is even more important for B2B salespeople over B2C salespeople, for example, because in B2B there's lots of complexity, there's lots of people involved, budgets are larger potentially, and there's lots more complexity across the entirety of the buyer's journey. That means that the buyer is very likely stuck, even if they're in some pain, they are stuck in the status quo. They just can't be bothered to change.

So your message, even though it's the right message to the right person, they're thinking, well, this is one of 25 priorities and this is more important or this is more important. And so they get stuck in the status quo, right?

timing allows us to build enough urgency to break through that and to actually get a deal done. That's why it's so important for B2B salespeople. And a trigger event like these Trump tariffs is timing. It is done. People, businesses are losing crap loads of money right now. There is stress, there is panic all over the place. So that leads us to the question then, how do we leverage this to actually book more meetings and close more deals?

Okay, so hopefully you sold on the idea that this is a major global trigger event and we should be leaning into it. But how do we practically use this to book more meetings and get more deals done? Well, the skill here is to communicate how your product or service can help your buyers mitigate the pain from Trump's tariffs

right now. And I don't care what you sell. This is so wide, broad reaching that almost no matter what you do, you're going to be able to benefit your buyers in some way. And again, the skill here is wrapping up your message in a way that it now directly correlates, directly ties to the issue that everyone, literally everyone's stressing about, all senior leadership are stressing about this. Doesn't matter about what the company is, what the industry is, we're just going to tie our message to that specific trigger event, which is the tariff.

So I'll give you a few examples of how to do this in a second. But when we've got such a strong trigger event to use in our messaging,

This is leverage. This is massive leverage that we don't get very often. And again, for context here, leverage is when we can put a little bit of effort into a system and we can get an outsized result. And that's what we're trying to achieve. Okay. So how do we do this practically? That's what you're here for. Well, here are a couple of example called outreach messages that we've helped students from insidesalesman.com academy work on and build this week.

So we've got this one, hi, the prospect's name. I took a quick look at, and then an industry report that's within this industry, because they're going to prospect lots of companies with this email, or they are prospecting a lot of companies with this email. They all have a report that they release around this time of year that's mentioning these tariffs.

I took a quick look at your, then the name of the report. It looks like your supply chain is heavily skewed towards Chinese manufacturers. I think I might have a way to mitigate a portion of this tariff risk. Would it make sense to jump on a quick call and I'll run through it with you. Thanks. And then you sign off.

That is pretty simple, right? And there's a few steps, there's a few subtle things we're doing in this email that I'm going to explain in a second that make it incredibly powerful. And it's going to book a ton of meetings for this individual, the student within sales.com academy. But let me give you another example before we start breaking this down. So hi, name, Trump's tariffs are affecting tech investments now too. I'm sure that you're probably sick of hearing about them. So we had a little bit of...

relieve some of the pressure that I had a little bit of humor. There is good news for startup founders though. Mind if I send over a quick one pager that shows how you can take advantage of this chaos? And then thanks, signing off again. So what are we doing here? What we are doing is we're leveraging what's called the curiosity loop. I'm not getting our studentsinsideservice.com academy. I'm not asking them to tell the prospect exactly how they can help.

All I'm getting them to do is, "Hey, we might be able to help with this specific problem that you have at this specific moment in time." Now, the prospect on the other end of these emails is undoubtedly going, "Crap, I don't

I don't want to speak to this person. I don't want to speak to that person, but I am stressed out my mind. I've got to get a resolution in place for these tariffs, whether it's increased in customer prices, which obviously never goes down well, whether it's improving supply chain or changing something internally, whatever it is. The person that we're emailing with these emails is panicking. And so we are going to essentially leverage that panic. We're going to put a little bit of energy into the system. We're going to get a lot of results out the other end. So we're using what's called the curiosity loop. The

The Courier-Stu-Luke basically states, we share the problem that the buyer has, we share that we can fix it, but they have to jump on a call with us to learn how. We're exchanging our knowledge, our insights, the how with or for the buyer's time. A little bit of their time, 10, 20 minutes, just to see if we're a good fit, to see if we can actually

And that's all you should be doing. That is how simple this is. When the trigger event is this strong, an email like that cuts through all of the noise. And the good news is probably very few of your competitors are going about this process right now.

So almost every salesperson is just so blinkered in, I want to set up a sales process. I just want to let it run. And I want to just sit my ass and make some money with as little effort as possible. So,

When you've got a system set up like that, which is great just day to day, you miss opportunities like what we have right now with this, again, worldwide global drug event. And it doesn't happen very often. The last one of these was probably Trump getting elected and a bit of chaos on the market there as to what's he going to do next. And that uncertainty is opportunity for salespeople on B2B platforms.

business owners as well for that matter. And then prior to that, it was probably COVID. So this opportunity only comes every two, three, four years. And so this is why I'm just banging on about it, right, in this video. This is why I tried to get this video out so quickly and promptly. The time is now to act upon opportunity.

And this opportunity isn't just there for brand new, net new business. There's also a massive opportunity here to reconnect with any potential buyer that maybe you started the sales process, maybe you jumped on a call with them, and then they've ghosted you for whatever reason in a window of perhaps the last 12, 18 months. Now, a buyer will ghost you because the promise of the value of your offer just isn't valuable enough to get them to take action. They're stuck in the status quo.

That is almost why you're ghosted. Unless you've done something really stupid or you're rude to them. That is almost certainly why you've been ghosted.

Right now though, these trigger events of these tariffs might have just knocked them out of the status quo that they were in because of the level of pain that they are now facing and so they must take some action. So I want you to think about it like this. You might have jumped on the call with the prospect, you might have booked a meeting with them and you explain the situation that they find themselves in and it might be more devastating than what they realised. So the pain shoots up.

And then it probably drops down after the call because, well, they've got other stuff on. There may be something happens internally and the pain shoots back up, but we're still beneath the threshold where they're going to take action. Well, even though this conversation was 12 months ago, you're still slightly kicking about in their brain. You still, if you've carried on with your follow up, if you're still sharing content with them, if you're still somewhat in touch.

Even if they've ghosted you and you're just sending emails and calls and messages and content into the black hole that is the ghosted prospect. Hopefully you're still just chipping away at them and you're there in their psyche somewhere. Well now,

If they are affected by these tariffs, they might find themselves over the threshold of pain where they will take action immediately. And so you've done all the hard work. Now it's time to capitalize on it. And you can do that by a quick email, something like, "Hi," the person's name, "We spoke last year about the pain that they're in. The market is going crazy right now because of these tariffs. I think we can help mitigate this risk for you. Would it make sense to call and I'll explain how it works."

Something like that is absolutely going to book a meeting and if they are above the pain threshold where they're going to take action, the deal could happen almost instantly.

Whereas if these tariffs didn't exist, they'd be below that pain threshold and they still would not take action no matter what you send them. So this is an amazing time to reconnect with essentially anyone, anyone in the entire marketplace that you've had pleasant conversations with previously, but you've just not managed to get that deal over the line or the deal just died a death or you were priority number seven when they were only working on priority number one, two, and three, that time.

week, month, quarter, year, or whatever it is. And again, note here that I'm being slightly ambiguous with all of these emails. I'm leveraging the curiosity loop very specifically with all of this, I guess, warm outreach in this case. And honestly, right, just being completely straight with you here, the main thing that I want you to take away from this video is that for

every bit of chaos, even a tiny bit of chaos that is in the market globally, your market, so the industry that you're involved in, or the macro market of the organization that you're trying to sell into is facing, whether that be issues at the executive level, or they've just had funding, whatever it is. Chaos can be positive or negative, right?

that every little bit of chaos, there is absolutely an equal amount of opportunity that is created. Let me give you a real example from salesman.com. When COVID hit and everyone had to work from home, I was basically the only sales training business out there, well, the only sales training business out there that actually had an audience, so decent-sized podcast, YouTube channel, LinkedIn, all that kind of stuff. We've obviously been

We've spent the past decade investing into content marketing so we could put a message out there very quickly with a warm audience that actually paid attention to what we do.

We were the only sales training company out there that were already 100% remote with our training. I don't do any, or maybe I'll do one or two in-person events a year. And I just put the price of those up so crazy that to put everyone off from hiring me, basically, that's the simple strategy with that one. If people want to hire me and it's going to cost six figures, then I'll do it. Obviously, I'm not a complete idiot. I like money. But the whole shtick of salesman.com, and everyone's copied this way now, the whole shtick was 100% remote training.

And so, because we were already there, I just fired out a few videos, a few messages. We absolutely cleaned up because of that chaos. Every other sales training company on the planet, they were all panicked. They didn't take action. And so I just wrapped up all that business and had the best year that we've ever had.

And that, it was just crazy, right? But that was because I'm willing, I was willing to embrace the chaos and take action rather than what most people do is they see chaos and they panic. They get stuck. They're in this fight, flight, or freeze response, and they're just frozen solid. So again, if you take anything away from this video, make sure it's that. When there is chaos, there is opportunity.

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