Alex Hormozi shares his framework for becoming a top 1% salesperson, arguing that conviction and trust are the two foundational pillars of selling, not scripts or techniques. He walks through his sales framework, how he builds elite sales teams, and why childlike curiosity is the key to handling objections without confrontation.
Speakers: Alex Hormozi (guest, entrepreneur/investor), Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Learning to Sell: Do First, Then Read [00:00:00]
Sam: If somebody wants to get good at selling, there’s the “go out there and try to sell a thousand times” approach — that’s one way to get better. But if you wanted to improve your rate of learning, what books, courses, YouTube videos — what really clicked for you and was kind of a game-changer for getting better at selling?
Alex: I have relatively strong beliefs about this topic. First off, a lot of people read books before they start selling, and I don’t think that’s the right path — because you don’t know what they’re talking about. You don’t really know what the concept of building rapport is until you’ve not had rapport and gone, “Oh, okay, now I understand how this works.” Until you confront the reality, you can’t bucket the knowledge into something actionable.
So I’m a proponent of: do first, realize the deficiencies, and then go find the information that matches the real-life scenarios you’ve already encountered.
The One Insight That Changed Everything [00:01:30]
Alex: The second part of the question — which books or things made it click — there’s one moment that made things click. I said this in the book, Sam: make people an offer so good they’d feel stupid saying no. That was the secret of selling. If you just make it so good that they won’t say no, it makes your job a hundred times easier. I did work really hard on that side just to make my job easier.
And just as a quick caveat to complete the loop from about 40 minutes ago — you asked what the book or training was. My belief is, if you look at Belfort, you look at Bradley, you look at Grant Cardone, some of the big sales trainers out there — almost all of them invariably have the same story: “I started selling and was the best guy on the team by a mile, and then I tried to figure out what I was doing.”
So I do think some people, based on their childhood, their upbringing, or whatever, just have a higher proclivity for selling.
Sam: Just a gift of gab and empathy.
Alex: Yeah. And I think that carries over into how you recruit for sales too. We’ve built a lot of sales teams, and I actually have a very short window for allowing people to fail at sales — probably much shorter than most people. It’s because I’ve never had a killer salesperson who didn’t do pretty well the first week. We turn through it quickly, and as a result the team is just killers, and they know that.
I love this quote from Grant Cardone: “My sales team’s a dangerous place to work.” I love that.
Conviction and Trust: The Two Pillars of Selling [00:03:30]
Alex: People are really freaked out about the idea of selling. So I think the first reframe is: you’re not selling, you’re helping someone make a decision that’s going to help themselves.
And the foundation of that is — I believe the number one predictor of good sales is conviction. Fundamentally, you have one person who believes in something, and another person who doesn’t believe it yet. Trust is the thing that transfers that conviction.
So the two things you need are trust and conviction. Most times, salespeople don’t have 100% conviction. And the idea of conviction as a binary is false — it’s not “I believe it or I don’t.” It’s: to what extent do I believe it?
That’s why, if I want to improve a sales team, I can do the drills — we do that, it’s blocking and tackling — but the thing that really juices the sales team is hearing testimonials from the people they sold last week: what those people are doing today, how their lives have changed.
I noticed this on my sales teams when we were in person. Whenever I did weigh-out day — when everyone finished their challenges, everybody was crying and so excited — I tried to stack as many sales appointments as I could during those days. And on those days we closed like 100%, because people were like, “Dude, how can you not think this works? It’s right there.”
So you can either trick yourself into having the right tone, or you can train yourself. I think it’s much easier to trick yourself into it by simply believing. Because if you truly believe in the product, you will talk about it differently.
The Sales Conversation Framework [00:06:00]
Alex: In terms of understanding selling: you need conviction, you need trust. Trust is going to come from expertise and some level of rapport.
To help someone sell, we have to ask the right questions to get them to come to the conclusion on their own. Most sales conversations follow more or less the same framework if you know what you’re doing — otherwise people are just chasing their tail, trying to chase a prospect to an outcome that the prospect doesn’t understand.
We’ve had this conversation a hundred times. They’ve only had it once. We should be the ones who know how this conversation is supposed to go. We come in with a massive advantage because we do it every day.
So the big front-end pieces are: why are they there, what’s the problem, what have they done so far, understanding where they’ve failed, seeing why our product is different from the things that failed them, asking for permission to explain the product, explaining the product — not based on features, but only based on the experiences they will have as a result of it — and using analogies to explain those experiences.
Then having a close at the end. There’s a TikTok that references what he calls a “no-based close,” and I think a lot of natural salespeople do this anyway. If I want something I might say, “Hey, would you mind?” And they say, “No, I don’t mind.” It’s natural communication dynamics. People who naturally know how to persuade just do that on their own. This is just retroactively looking at it and asking: what did they do differently?
Childlike Curiosity: Handling Objections Without Confrontation [00:08:30]
Alex: People are afraid of confrontation — that’s what they’re really afraid of. I believe you can sell without ever having confrontation. You do that with what I call childlike curiosity.
If someone says, “Well, my husband’s not going to approve that,” I say, “Why wouldn’t he? Huh — that’s so interesting, tell me more about that.” Rather than, “All right, your husband’s an idiot.” That’s not going to work. In arguments, no one wins.
So: why would he think that? Because I would think he wants what’s best for you. He wants what’s best for you. Does he know you’re struggling with this right now? Well, I mean, yeah, he knows I’m struggling. Okay. So he wants you to solve something you’re currently struggling with — why do you think he’d be opposed to that? Just so I understand. Would he be happier if you continued to struggle? Well, no. Great — then would you be opposed to moving forward today?
And if you go home to your husband and you make it a fun, light scenario, you close it right there.
So childlike curiosity is the mindset you have to train, because people get defensive.
It’s like fighters in the ring — in the beginning, you breathe too much. If you’ve been sparring, you know: you hyperventilate. The guys who’ve done it enough, they slow down their breathing, because when things get intense, they can slow it down.
Sales is the same way. Your adrenaline kicks in, you start breathing faster, it’s fight or flight. You have to be able to slow down and go, “Huh, that’s crazy — I wouldn’t have thought that. Tell me more about that.” Now you’re curious, they don’t feel like you’re combating them, they feel like you genuinely want to help them. Which is what you should be doing — because you should only be selling to them if it actually makes sense for them.