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Legendary Items

Finding Your Why: How Pinpointing Your Motivations
Will Boost Your Business

“Finding the why” is a phrase that you hear fairly often in the world of
entrepreneurship, and that makes sense. It’s important to know why you’re doing what you’re doing, and how your product or service will help your clients to achieve their “why” too. Eric has taken that one step further.

A San Antonio-based entrepreneur, Eric was a recent guest on the Local Talent: The Entrepreneur’s Handbook podcast, where he told host Jason about his “why” philosophy and how it affects all areas of his life.

Getting to the Foundations to Close the Sale

When Eric’s on a sales call in his role as an Amazon consultant, he uses a simple technique to get his prospective client to open up: find their “why” factor. He likes to ask his clients about why exactly they sell products on Amazon, and he’s not put off if the answer is just “to make money.” He drills down to find out exactly what their financial goals are, because in his words, that’s “the keys to the kingdom.”

When he knows how much money the client wants to make from their business, he takes this information and works backwards from it, calculating how long it’ll take for the client to get there at their current rate, and how he could speed up that process.

This makes for an impressive sales pitch, and once he and the client are fully aligned on their objectives, the client is often ready to sign off on the deal and get started right away. So finding that “why” helps both Eric and the client to achieve their goals.

Coaching Sales Staff to Face Their Fears

One of the top things that Eric’s excited about at the moment is linking sales and mental health. He wants to create a platform where sales staff can improve their mental health and mindset first, and their sales figures second.

For Eric, the salesperson’s mindset around sales and success is crucial to get the client to a close. He provides a model to coach sales staff through calls, focusing on getting them to open up about the fears that may be holding them back. Once he knows why the salesperson has those fears, Eric’s in a much better position to help to tackle them.

These deeper relationships with sales staff can allow them to grow into their role and bag more deals, which Eric lists as one of the ways in which he’s going to change the world.

Defining Your Legacy

Eric’s newest business venture, Legendary Items, was born from his obsession with defining your legacy. He freely confesses that he spends a lot of time “immersed in death,” wondering what happens after we die and what we should leave behind us when we’re gone.

Legendary Items answers these deep questions by turning people’s ashes into diamonds that can be embedded into swords, shields, axes, shotguns, and more. Eric contracts the work out to an expert craftsman who brings the piece to life and he also captures the process on film for the deceased person’s loved ones to watch and keep.

He wants the item to become a beautiful family heirloom that gets passed on from generation to generation, which has more meaning than a simple urn and gives a new purpose to the ashes. There’s also the possibility to add more ash diamonds to the item as other family members pass away, collecting the entire family history into one truly legendary item.

Representing the People

One of Eric’s ambitions beyond his businesses is to become a State Senator, and he has his “why” all lined up for this goal too. He truly believes in representing the will of the people and would run as a candidate who listens to the citizens and transmits their views exactly.

In an ideal world, he would poll citizens about their beliefs and then take exactly those views to the Senate, regardless of whichever side of the political spectrum they belonged to. Eric sees this as the solution to the current political stalemate, where it’s more important that senators toe the party line rather than enact real and lasting change.

If you’d like to hear the full interview with Eric and Jason, head over to the Local Talent where you’ll also find podcast show notes and links to Eric’s business. Make sure to subscribe to Local Talent to hear more funny and interesting interviews on Texas entrepreneurship with Jason Setzer and his special guests.

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