Life as an Apprentice ~ December 18th, 2017 ~ We are still going strong with calling, aiming for 12 hours a week of calling. I have no idea how people at call centers spend almost 40 hours a week calling people! The more you do it though, the more you will start to change how you say things. You'll start to realize that things don't work and you need to figure out the best way to say it.

Calls will become boring but keep the end in mind that these potential clients are worth actual money in your pocket. A lot of your call reaction will depend on the list you are calling, I'm calling Realtors, a lot of people hang up on me or don't let me explain anything and just say not interested. I use to be a Realtor and I can relate because once you become a Realtor it feels like everyone in the world will start calling you and trying to sell you something.

So with that in mind when you get to this point don't take anything to heart, because these people will not remember you an hour down the road.

November 8th, 2017 ~ This week we are going to start diving into the readings. Two books, The Art of Selling by Tom Hopkins and The Ultimate Sales Letter By Dan Kennedy I'm really excited to learn so much from both of these books. Hopefully what I'm writing here to you will also start to sound better!

Furthermore, with Vyral you are flexible to build your personal portfolio in your free time. So outside of my work schedule, my prior job referred me a client who was having an error with his email signature. He wants the same style email signature, but needed some additional fields added and the logos and head-shot cleared up.

These where all thing I had never attempted to do before, I have done some photo restoration in the past but this wasn't quite the same thing. However through this wonderful thing called google I was able to teach myself this new skill of creating an email signature.

It definitely wasn't the most simple of a process as possibly purchasing an email signature template, but it was pretty darn close to the original. And it allowed it to be exactly what he wanted which you would have a hard time finding with a purchased email template.

Then after being able to prove my skill set I was tasked with photo-shopping an image to remove the dead grass and some reflection. This took me back to my photo restoration days and I got to have some fun. To see that work check out my work samples page.

November 17th, 2017 ~ I finished up the Tom Hopkins book this week I learned so many different techniques for approaching a sale, I'll definitely have to refer back to it as we go along. Reading definitely took up a lot of my time the beginning of the week.

Though I also worked on my letter to my potential partners and helped out my fellow apprentices by reviewing their letters. As with anything, there are slow times and that's kind of how it will be until after Thanksgiving.

Outside of the Apprenticeship though I have been PROMOTED to full-time. I'm super excited that after only 6 weeks I was chosen to be Adela's assistant alongside Sandy and help out with any work that needs to be done. In just one day I have got to work with Sandy on how the Vyral Marketing Interviews get promoted after the webinar and I've got to see how Facebook ads are set up.

Seeing it done I have complete confidence that one day I will be able to do these things just as easily. It is exciting to start and see what the future holds!

November 22nd, 2017 ~ There is a lot of reading that we do with Vyral, you either enjoy it or you don't. I enjoy it and finished up another book this week, No B.S. Sales Success In The New Economy by Dan S. Kennedy.

Kennedy talks about the Power of Positivity a lot, and that is one of my favorite things. I am not naive and think everything in life is flowers and rainbows, I like to always see the good in things, which definitely is tough sometimes. I never officially thought about it the way he does, "Positive Power of Negative Preparation," think about that for a moment.

If you prepare for the negative outcome, you can remain positive because you are already prepared to handle it!

Beyond reading, we continue to edit our letters that we will be sending to potential partners. Next week we will start making phone calls to farms, so we watched Peter make calls this week, we realized a lot of people will not pick up.

This week I also got to do some writing for one of Adela's partners. It was the first write up I ever got paid to do, which was new and exciting. Other then some minor changes it was posted on her partner's website, in a way I guess it was like ghostwriting, which is interesting because you don't really get any credit for it.

It was a good experience because I learned that I can do this and it definitely confirmed that I could not just be an assistant to someone long term.

A core value that I have really tried to work on lately is being Proactive. A couple weeks ago we were writing letters and going over rough drafts and Frank tells us we should go over the 20 questions and do our best to answer all the questions for our potential partners and write our letters with that as a guide. I was so mad at myself because I had already known about the 20 questions, I literally had them printed out sitting on my desk as he was saying this, but I hadn't gone through them or even thought to use them in that way.

That day I realized that I needed to be proactive and not just wait to be told to do something. We are autonomous and have so much freedom to make the mistakes or succeed right now. But if we don't take the chance we are wasting that opportunity!

November 28th ~ This week we started making calls, you will get that same feeling right before you give a speech when you first start. However, you'll soon realize that 75% or more of people won't even pick up the phone. However don't wait to make calls, just get on the phone and do it. I make my calls between 12 pm-3 pm Eastern time Monday I only had 3 people answer the phone, but today I had 8. Still, most people say No but with more people picking up you get to start adjusting your script because you are seeing what doesn't work.

Things that helped me adjust my script was considering what the other person was hearing when I spoke, and you realize that it isn't working and have to change something. I also had gone through 5 calls and everyone was just saying no, not interested, so I took a step back and looked to see how my fellow apprentices were doing. I then listened to the calls of the yeses that they had, to see what I could improve and then made some adjustments.

My next call after that was a yes! So it helped on that call.

Everyone is required to keep track of how many calls they are making, how many people connected, and how many said yes. I find it easiest to have a total goal for the day, then just keep track of the connected and yeses as I go along.

Don't take the call personally when they say no. Think about how many people you say no to that try and sell or offer you something. Also, you may think a call is worse then it really is, I had a call where afterward I swear she was so mad at me and said no, but when I listened to it a couple days later I realized I definitely over thought it and she just wasn't interested.

When you are making these calls don't think of them as rejection. Every call you make is of value currently I am making about 25 calls a day out of those 25 an average of 6 contacts and then roughly 2 subscribe. That is a potential of $2,000 each day so each call I make is worth potentially $80. I read about this concept in either the Hopkins or Kennedy books, and it is a great mindset to have when making these calls.

From now on I am going to keep things separate between what I am doing as an Apprentice and a Marketing Assistant, I realized there is a lot happening for both and they deserve there own space.

Working from home the first week with Vyral Marketing was great. Everyone makes you feel like family and since we are all in constant communication it doesn't feel like we are half a country apart.

Every morning we have a morning huddle with our mini team of 4. Peter is our marketing instructor it's crazy to think he only started 3 months before us. He has so much insight to share after only 3 months it is exciting to see knowing we will be learning just as much as we move forward in the apprenticeship.

Our focus this week was on personal development learning the core values of Vyral and the 6 perspectives by Gary Keller.

Then on Thursdays, we get in a big meeting with Frank the CEO and all the apprentices to go over what we learned and see what the previous apprentices are doing. Meeting so frequently really helps build the work culture and not feel so alone.

Because so much about Marketing is communication the first 6 months we will be making calls to help Vyral with their core business. So the second week we spent learning about Vyral's core business.

We started learning the FAQs that clients were asking, read the marketing plan, and listened to different calls that our clients would go through after talking to us. it really gives you a clear over view of what our clients should expect.

Though we will not be working directly with core clients long-term learning about there process and how Vyral does business will ultimately help us with our partners.

This would be a good time to explain what our long-term goal is. Think of Vyral as two business' the core business and the partner business. The core business are the clients that make two educational videos a month and follow the marketing plan, we are only in contact with these client during their on-boarding.

We will be making calls to them for the first 6 months to build our skills at communication. Almost every person has some fears or anxiety of making a phone call to a stranger, let alone asking them for money, and the chance of rejection. This is why the communication if necessary these first 6 months its's to teach us how to overcome these fears and learn skills to combat them moving forward.

Then our goal is to reach out to coaches and trainer and build partner relationships. With the Marketing skills, we will learn over the next year we will have to help our partner with their marketing needs. We will essentially become their part time marketer.

Watch this video to get a more clear explanation: Partner Program

This week we worked on two things, Hubspot and Partners.

With Hubspot, we learned the ways of inbound sales. Inbound sales really changes the way of selling from the traditional way we think it is. No longer are you out there shoving your product or service down the customer's throat, now you are letting the customer find your product or service and educating them and helping them find the best solution for them even if it may not be yours.

Also this week we got a list of potential partner and got to try our first bit of copywriting. We had to write a letter to a partner to try and build a relationship with them to one day want to work with us. All of our letters were basically terrible, and thank god our partners will never have to read them!

It is exciting though to get a list of potential partners, knowing that one day we might get to work with one of these top producers.

One month in and we are getting close to making calls, but we needed to finish building our lists of people to have the most accurate information. That what we spent most of this week on.

We also did Industry training on our farms, since I will be working mainly with Realtors I watched some office tours of top producing Realtors and listened to some podcasts. But a bit of slow week just doing some clerical work which will always happen from time to time.