How Danny Mullins’ Mother Got Him to Reconsider Joining the Royal Navy

At the end of an interview with a Maestro Hall of Fame inductee, we always like to ask if there’s anything we haven’t touched on that we should know. The point Danny Mullins decided to end on (though he acknowledged it wasn’t about sales) was this: “I have an amazing family that people should know.”

This rang true. Earlier in the interview, when I asked whether he’d experienced culture shock upon moving to the U.S., his mind had gone right to family, as well. “I’m a big family person. So, being away from my mother and dad and little brother at that point was a lot, and the only way of communicating was via email. It was when Skype was just starting to bubble up as an international way of communicating, and so I’d be emailing back and forth, and so that was a big change.”

Danny had moved from Northeast England in 2009 for college, which had been a kind of compromise. He’d started to train for entry into the Royal Navy. “My mother didn’t want me to go into the military, so she dangled the carrot of, ‘Hey, do you want to go to university, and possibly America?’” He very much did. “So I actually came here on a soccer scholarship [at Grand View University in Iowa] through an agency.

LET THE SALES BEGIN

Today, Danny is a sales executive for Goodshuffle Pro, an event and party rental software platform (and home to another Hall of Famer, Mallory Mullen). When I spoke to him, he had just gone to the firm’s D.C. headquarters to meet the team and was thrilled with what he saw. “Everyone is wonderful, and they’re a high-performing team. They really pride themselves on talent density and making sure that they have excellent people throughout the organization, and their product has rave reviews. It has a very distinct and obvious ICP [ideal customer profile], and it provides great value to them.”

After Danny graduated from university, he got a job as a loan originator for mortgage sales. “I remember the office. There were like three desks at either side of the room. The boss sat at the front and center, kind of like a movie almost. And then each morning, we would get 50 leads printed out, like 50 sheets of paper, and I would call them, and this was a manual call. I didn’t have a headset. It was a pick-up-the-phone-and-dial. And so we called for each one of them, left a voicemail for every single one of them. And then when you got to the end of the 50, you just flipped the sheets back over again and went through it all again.”

Danny thinks he probably made 200 calls a day. The fact that each of his phone calls was overheard by all of his colleagues—not to mention his boss—only amplified the pressure. Still, he assigns a lot of the credit for his sales capabilities to this job. “It was great. I mean, I developed grit for sure, and I developed a fast-twitch fiber that I could spring a response or a rebuttal pretty quickly.”

A TRANSFORMATION

Danny feels the sales world looks very different today than when he began. “Oh my word, so much has changed.” One difference that stands out to him is in the relationship between buyer and seller. “It’s not: you’re selling to them. It’s a cooperative environment now, where you’re kind of both thinking through the solution and coming to the right resolution. It feels very cooperative.”

Subscriptions, Danny believes, represent another disruptive factor. SaaS has taken the place of buying software outright to a large extent. A subscription, says Danny, “opens up the availability of technologies to a lot of companies. Cash flow is massive in business, and being able to have a subscription for a platform that can advance your business is incredible, rather than having to save up capital to do so.”

And that’s just for the buyers. On the other end of things, “in the sales process…it makes it a lot easier, not having to ask [for] that massive check, and it also builds security, because you’re essentially winning their business on a monthly basis, and I think there’s some level of trust placed in that, that we’re going to win your business.”

In Danny’s experience, the sales act has become more of a proactive undertaking than a reactive one, for sellers and buyers. It’s made sales projects more of a joint venture. And that is cause for celebration. “The dynamic,” Danny says, “is great right now for both sides.”

Danny has evolved in a way similar to how he sees the industry has evolved: toward cooperation. One of the Maestro teachings that was most impactful for him was how to conceptualize a deal. “My original philosophy in sales was the transfer of enthusiasm. I thought that if you were so excited and exuberant about your product, that you could—not convince, but persuade someone to kind of come to the same side of the table with you. They’re going to be as excited as you. But the Maestro principle is that you are two parties moving in parallel to the same goal, and that is cooperative, right? So that leads very well to how the industry thinks about sales, or the buyer wants to think about sales.” Danny is also a fan of Maestro’s emphasis on understanding a prospect’s objections rather than just rebutting them. It’s about gaining a mutual understanding and working together. It’s about cooperation.

You can learn more about Danny here. Be sure to congratulate him while you’re there!