7 Minutes to better Selling Podcast || Episode 24 || Michael Zhang

Welcome to the Seven Minutes to Better Selling Podcast. I'm your host, Colin Lake, president and founder of developing the next leaders

So Mike is a director at Salt Lending. He's also the head of capital formations at New Order

I have had a good deal of interaction with Mike over the last couple of years. And I think the world of him as a human being, obviously that's why he's on here

But his ability to connect with people as it relates to selling more effectively

So Mike, so happy to have you here. Mike, let me ask you this

So in relatively short fashion, you go from just entering the financial services space and the crypto space to really lofty positions with some really big firms and firms that are doing great things in the crypto space

How does that happen for you? Like, how do you get to where you were to where you are today and give some people some inspiration on how they could do it themselves

Yeah, of course. So maybe I can start with kind of like my initial journey

my journey into like my professional journey. I'm a graduate at UC Santa Barbara with a BA

in statistics. It's a very interesting degree to have. I originally started with, you know

a double degree in financial stats and economics. Quickly while I was at school, I decided the best course of action

was to actually just get a BA in statistics as I was recommended that it would

have a higher leverage to go into business school. Long story short, I did not end up going to business school route

I ended up just going to work directly. And right out of college, my first job was

or I think most people on this call may be familiar with Oracle

It's a very big tech company. And going to Oracle, I was able to learn a lot about sales

just from kind of like ground levels up as an SDO. are So as a junior level position salesperson you know you get to learn a lot very quickly about rejection blockers And the ability to have to make multiple calls per day

You know, when a lot of people talk about sales, it's always a numbers game. I learned that very quickly there, right

Point is your willingness to like step into something. And then once you step into it, like totally dive in

and be fully committed to learning everything about it and be really successful with it

I think that's what I was always so impressed with you, so impressed about with you

was your willingness to say, I don't want to know a little bit about the business

I want to know a lot about the business. I don't want to know a little bit about a client. I want to know a lot about a client

And it was always, always so impressed with that. And so that leads to the question

I said, I have a question here is we're in a world where people are really skeptical of

of crypto, right? That's one thing. People are really concerned about the economy, the global

economy, the U.S. economy. They're concerned about inflation and things getting more difficult

What would you say from an opportunistic perspective, do you think that salespeople could be

doing to best connect with their clients and prospects today? I think, you know, going out during

these times of instability, it really does become a lot harder to sell. But selling, especially

in the financial industry, is a big relationship type of game. So being able to go out and be a thought leader and be able to educate everyone on what's going on

especially what you're seeing in the market. As someone that works in the industry, you should have access to knowledge through maybe other partners you work with in different types of companies in the space

For example, like infrastructure payment platforms, not just lending traders or just particularly like DFI

protocols founders et cetera this kind of backs into the conferences That why I in NFT NYC today is to really just get a general vibe of the landscape right But when you go out to your clients you know the expectations is they going to lean on you for your like for subject matter expertise

So you have you having the ability to be able to go out and let them know what's going on in markets, you know, how they can best set themselves up for the future is very important

And let's say like you're having trouble getting in touch to the client or prospect, which I'm sure happens from time to time with you

How do you take that and put it into like take the education piece and put that into the communication piece

Yeah. So specifically crypto, which may be a little bit different compared to like trade five, traditional finance

And feel free to stop me if I'm using some terms that, you know, may not be as a commonplace or whatever

Rubey, I think I'm tracking with you. I think you're good. Yeah. So you got to figure out like the avenues, the best place to communicate

Crypto specifically, a lot of guys operate on Telegram, what's at Twitter, not so much LinkedIn

So I know I'm like the traditional financial space, you know, LinkedIn is a poor area to go out and prospect

Outside of that, once this is a little farther ahead depending on like the level you're at, at your job today

is that once you're connected with certain groups of people, maybe, you know

director level of people or above or a certain group of high networks

asking directly, going out to them and asking for intros directly is one of the best ways to do

But the big thing that I take from this thing is like when you're, if you're in something, dive in both feet, hands, head, and put everything in there and get

into it. Learn a lot. Know more than most and then share that information with the folks and then use those

connections to make further connections in the space which again I seen you do and I seen you do beautifully well So Mike maybe a wrap up thought And then again where can folks find you to connect with you about maybe Bastion or maybe or I should say salt lending first

And then also maybe see if you talk about the new formations or, yeah, I mean, sorry

new order and your role is, you know, how to capital formations. Yeah, of course. So one thing I do want to point out to everyone

was, you know, previously when I worked with Colin, I did go through developing the next

leader program, which helped me tremendously in my sales career. So I just want to help me out

there. If you guys ever get a chance to work with Colin, do, please do. I see Colin as a mentor

and I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for a lot of, you know, like the tactics, his

mentorship and everything I've learned along the way. Thank you, Michael. Yeah. Always happy, you know, to support anyone that

to really help me along the way, especially someone that has provides such value as yourself

Secondly, just, you know, quick background. Solves collateralized lending platform. I lead the fixed income arm

So basically earning yield against your crypto. Anyone ever interested, please reach out to me

I'll put my contact information here in a bit. Also on New Order

It's Incubation Dow where I heat up formations where I help projects with tokenomics

And then once they're ready to go out and raise, I work with tier 1 VCs like Clay, Shane

to go and help them find investors to bootstrap the initial capital for the raise

That's awesome. They can find you on LinkedIn too, right? And I know you're on there

Right. Yep. Okay. So there's a link. There's Michael's LinkedIn. So that's great on that front

And then, you know, people will reach out to me from time to time. They have our contact information

I'll reach out to Simon. Perfect. That was awesome. Good sell and everyone. Michael Zang, thank you very much