Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

To convert more sales and turn leads into customers you need to be dealing with qualified prospects. If somebody is not responsive, you can decide, do I want to continue to pursue this person, or do I want to leave them to my competitors? Let my competitors chase that person. If they’re disqualified, you don’t have to spend time with them at all. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of converting more sales: turning leads into customers. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. Such a pleasure to be with you. This is kind of the secret sauce, right? I mean, if we could all increase our conversion rates and bring down our customer acquisition costs that’s where the rubber meets the road. David: Yeah, in a lot of cases it’s a really critical part of it, and I think some people make a mistake upfront when it comes to conversion, and that’s that they want to convert everyone. You know, they just meet somebody for the first time and they immediately go into sales mode. And I think that they can really save themselves and other people a lot of time and a lot of aggravation if they actually start where it really should begin with a little bit of qualification. Trying to find out if they have the need, the desire, the money, the budget, the willingness to spend, those kind of things. Because a lot of times there are salespeople who will spend weeks, months, years pursuing somebody, just to find out once they get an appointment with them that they weren’t qualified to buy to begin with. And you can eliminate that right up front. Save yourself a world of heartache. Jay: Yeah, I love this point, David. I can’t tell you I’ve had this happen, you know, I’m on the phone with somebody and talking about the product and things like that, and then after asking some questions, I realize this is not a good fit. I don’t have the services they’re looking for. And I could have saved us both a lot of time if I had done a little pre-qualification before we got started. David: Yeah. Or if that’s happening on the first call, then you’re pretty good at that point. But literally, I know there are people who have gone to networking functions for a long period of time, and they’re talking to people and trying to get them to agree to an appointment, and then they finally agree to the appointment, and then you get out there and you’re talking to them. I had this experience myself early in my career. I’ll never forget it. There was this guy and I thought he was going to be a great prospect, so I tried to get an appointment with him. He agreed to the appointment. I showed up at his place. His place was a dump and he didn’t show up for the appointment, and I was sitting there looking around and I was thinking, “okay, why am I here?” And so a little bit of diligence upfront and a little bit of qualifying goes a long way. Jay: Yeah, I agree. And I also think technology can do a lot of that pre-qualifying, right? We had the experience where our Google ad buy was not targeting the right people. And so I was getting all these calls and I’m like, “wow, look at these leads we’re getting.” And it turned out I was just wasting time. So I’m wasting money on the Google ad buy. And then I’m wasting money fielding all of these calls. That’s just, you’re spinning your wheels at that point. David: Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about it, pitching unqualified prospects is the single biggest time waster on the planet. So if we can avoid that, we’re going to be a lot better off. Jay: Yeah. I think there’s a tendency though to think, “oh, we can sell anybody.” Or I think the other side of that is if you’re not pre-qualifying, then you don’t have a really good idea of how effective you are as a salesperson, because you’re comparing it to every person you talked to. Like, I’ve talked to a hundred people, my close rate was 20%. Well, if 5% of those were never going to be a lead for you, or never going to be a customer, then you’re not really using accurate numbers. Right? David: Yeah, exactly. Everything’s skewed when you’re doing it that way. So, I mean, I believe qualification upfront is really important and systematic follow up is another thing. If you’re not following up systematically with people, which means that you are in touch with them at the times when you need to be in touch with them, then you’re also going to be at a big disadvantage. Jay: Yeah. and that’s really an area where I struggled a long time ago, and that is if I didn’t get them right away, then I’m going to move on to the next person. David: Mm-hmm. Jay: And like you said, it’s about relationships. And again, I love technology that can do a lot of

To fix your messaging and improve business communication with the TBDs, consider this… If nothing that you convey in your communication, instills any sort of belief in the other person as to why they should take the action that you’re requesting in the third step, then it’s not at all likely they’re going to take that action. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the TBDs. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, it’s such a pleasure to be here with you again, David. We’re talking about communication here and I’ll be honest, oftentimes we’ll discuss a podcast that we want to do, or you’ll send me the topics and I sit here and I think, you know, I’ve never once thought about this type of thing, how to improve communication. I just kind of fall in the trap. You know, I talk to people, I send them emails. I’m guessing that that’s good communication, but I’ve not really thought about it, David. David: Yeah. I sort of introduced this topic backwards, I guess, at the top of this podcast. When I say we’re going to be talking about the TBDs, what we’re really talking about is improving our communication with the TBDs. And for those of you who are saying, “what are they talking about?” Allow me to elaborate. A lot of times when I’m working with clients, one of the things that they’ll ask about is how to improve the results that they’re getting with the communications they’re having with prospects. That could be anything from the messages they’re leaving on people’s voicemails. It could be not getting responses to emails. It could be the things they’re posting on social media, any form of outbound communication, whether it’s one-to-one or one-to-many. What you say in those communications is going to determine what happens. We touched on this a little bit in the previous episode. But if you want to really think about what is going to likely get you the best results, what I ended up boiling it down to for myself and for my clients is what I refer to as the TBDs. Now, when people think of that abbreviation “to be determined,” that’s often what’s used there. That’s not what I’m thinking in terms of. When we’re looking to communicate with other people, particularly when we’re looking to get a result, we want to ask ourselves: “As a result of this communication, what do I want this person to think? What do I want them to believe, and what do I want them to do? Okay? And so if you structure your communication in a way where it addresses those three points, you’re going to be a lot more likely to get at least closer to the result that you’re looking for. If I’m sending somebody an email and there’s nothing in particular that I want them to think, believe or do, there is no reason for me to send that email. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: If I’m making a phone call, if I’m leaving a voicemail message, if I’m doing anything that is initiating contact with another human being, if there’s nothing in particular that I want for them to think, believe, or do, then there’s no point to having the conversation. Now, if you’re calling a loved one, Okay. You know? Jay: Yeah. David: You want them to know that you love them, you want to know that they love you, all that sort of thing. But, in business in particular, in our communications, if we don’t have a reasonably good idea of what we want the other person to think, believe, or do, then there’s not a whole lot of reason to communicate. Jay: Yeah. That’s so powerful because how often or is the temptation I’m calling a client? Hey, just checking in, seeing how you’re doing give me a call back. It’s like, that’s the trap. I think so many of us fall into. I’m not thinking at that moment, what I want them to be thinking is, please call me back because you need me. But I sound kind of desperate and not like there’s a priority. There’s no urgency, there’s nothing really being conveyed. Right? David: Yes. And when we’re doing follow-up calls, when we’re doing check-in calls, and just even using those words in a voicemail message. There’s nothing really compelling for them to respond to there. Is there? Jay: Mm-hmm. David: If you’re saying to somebody, “Hey, I’m just checking in,” it’s like, “okay, well they’re just checking in. I’ve got nothing for ’em at this point. I guess I don’t need to respond to that.” But when you leave a message like that, We have things we want them to think, believe, and do. We want them to think, oh, I’m going to get this message and I’m going to call this person back. We want them to believe that

A lot of people think the goal is to get likes and engagement, but when it comes to the best use of social media in business, conversations and conversions are the metrics that matter. That’s what results in sales. The rest are vanity metrics. Those who think it’s all about views and clicks might be missing the point. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the best use of social media in business. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you so much, David I feel like this is one of those areas where I don’t feel confident in myself, but I’m not in a position yet where I’m going to hire somebody to do it. And so, it’s hard to get motivated every day, because I know it’s an important part, especially in my business. Most of our leads come from the internet and social media, so it’s like I don’t know that this is something I should be handling myself. David: I think a lot of people feel that way, and for many of us, social media can be a huge distraction. And in some cases, like, well, the best use of social media is to keep it turned off if you have to actually get things done. But there are benefits to it when it’s used properly, and part of our Total Market Domination course involves working with our clients to help them through the best forms of first contact with a new prospect. And one of those methods is social media. I mean, you can be doing it via cold calls, you can be doing it via networking events, direct mail, lots of different ways to initiate first contact with a new prospect. But many people like the idea of using social media, particularly because it is a one-to-many method of reaching people. You can post something on social media one time, and hundreds of people could see it, or thousands of people could see it. And so it allows you a great deal of leverage much more than if you’re making one phone call at a time or meeting one person at a time. So there are definitely benefits to utilizing it. And of course, with the benefits come the flip side, the detriments that go along with it in some cases. And so one of the things that a lot of people seem to struggle with is that they go onto social media with one purpose and they end up doing 10 other things that they didn’t plan on doing when they got in there. And they don’t end up doing the thing that they actually wanted to do. And so a lot of it, I think, boils down to the fact that we’re not sure what to do. In a lot of cases. We’re not sure, well, what should I post? What should I say? What should it be designed to do? And there’s so much talk among so many people about creating content, and I’ve done classes on this. The fact that content is kind of a misunderstood word. If you think about what is content? Well, content is whatever’s in something, right? If you’ve got a bag, whatever’s in that bag is the content. Could be something good, could be something very bad, right? But whatever’s in the bag. So if you think of it like that and you say, okay, I have to create content. Well, yeah, but you need to do more than just content. You want to make sure that whatever it is that you’re dispersing to the masses has enough value for people that they say, wow, that was actually worthwhile. That was worth my time. So a lot of what we focus on in the communication aspects of what we do with our clients is related to how do we do that? How do we create value in our communications? And I know I’m sort of rattling off all kinds of different things that could be entirely different podcast subjects. But coming back to the idea of the best use of social media, if you think about what it is, I mean, I’ve got an idea of what I believe it is. Do you have any thoughts on that before I spill the beans on what I think here? Jay: Well, I think it’s going to be different for everybody and what type of clientele you have. I’m guessing a key part of this and we’ve spent a lot of money on my end doing this. Is identifying who our end user is, what, what type of client are we trying to attack? When we first started it, we were and I’ve told you this story before, we were attacking so many leads. It was blowing us out of the water. But the leads were not closing, and so we had to narrow that field, finally to a point where we could just get potential leads. In order to do that, we spent a lot of time around a table figuring out who that potential client is and what are the keywords that are going to be interesting to them? And when you talk about posting content, if you’re just shooting in the dark and you haven’t identified who your target is, then you’re going to spend a lot of time on social media spinning your wheels, and you may be chasing people away or just making them disinterested because you haven’t put

Are your priorities BS? Well, focusing on that area in particular, looking at what are the things in my life that really are important to me? What are the actions that I want to take and need to take that are important to me? Even if they’re not urgent, how can I get those things scheduled so that they have a better likelihood of getting done? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the topic Are Your Priorities BS? Welcome, Jay. Jay: Hey, David, as always, such a pleasure to be with you. And another great topic. I think that it’s so easy to just do the squirrel thing or the squeaky wheel gets the grease and we don’t really know what our priorities should be a lot of the time that’s half the battle I think. David: Yeah, I think that’s true. Knowing what our priorities are and recognizing that a lot of times they’re not really what we think they are. And most of the time when I talk about stuff on these podcasts, it’s not because I’m particularly smart, is because I feel like I’ve made every stupid mistake that anyone can make. And so if I can help our listeners and viewers to avoid doing some of those things, then that’s a pretty good service. And when I think about priorities and I reflect on the priorities that I’ve had over the years and over my life, I recognize that we have priorities that we really put out there. We say, okay, this is what’s important to me. What’s important to me is my family. What’s important to me are my friends. What’s important to me is, whatever, losing weight, like if we have goals, my my priority is to do this and to do that, and all these different things. And then when we look at our actions and we realize that our actions don’t really line up with what we say our priorities are, it raises the questions are our priorities BS? And I think in some cases, even when we don’t realize it, they might be. Jay: Yeah. First of all, I’d say there’s nothing wrong with learning in the school of hard knocks. I mean, sometimes those are the best lessons we can learn. But I also think it, we can spin our wheels a lot trying to reinvent the wheel, so learning from other people can help expedite that process. Right? Which is why I’m glad you’re so willing to share the trials that you’ve had. I think that that’s so critical. But I think you’re right. We’ve talked a lot in the past about self assessment. Can you really look at yourself and know what your weaknesses are and what your strengths are? And oftentimes, I think you’re right. We think something is a priority for us, but in the grand scheme of things, and according to our own actions, it’s really not. And we’re kind of fooling ourselves. David: Yeah, and the way that I’ve actually sort of worked through some of this is recognizing that there’s a really big difference between our stated priorities, the things that we say are priorities to us, and then our actual priorities, meaning the priorities we act on the things that we do, the actual steps that we take or don’t take. Because if our priority is to spend time with our family and our actions are that we’re working all the time and we’re not spending time with our family, then we have two different sets of priorities, our stated priorities that always sound good, and then our actual priorities, which is what we’re doing on a daily basis. Jay: Yeah, I see this all the time in like TV reality shows. I don’t know why this comes to mind, but you see people saying, my family is the most important thing to me, and they’re working 80 hours a week at their career, or their job. And I’m sitting there thinking, Hmm, no, I don’t think you really understand what your priorities really are. David: Yeah, and most people are sincere, I think, when they say those things. It’s just that in many cases, life interferes. And when we allow life to interfere, then it turns out that our actual priorities are different than the ones that we’re telling ourselves and telling other people. Jay: So how do we sift through that? How do we do that self assessment and really identify what our core priorities are, and maybe we need to identify them as BS and head in a different direction. David: Well, I put together a worksheet. You can download it here. It’s very simple. It’s basically got stated priorities on the left and actual priorities on the right, and what you do is you list down on the left hand side all the things that I tell other people and that I tell myself are my actual priorities. And then you just keep an eye on what you’re doing every day. Did I take action on my top priority on the left hand side of the page? And if I didn’t, what did I do instead? If my goal is to write a bo

So what is your first contact with a new prospect? Another good question to ask yourself is how does that first contact happen? And is it proactive on my part? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing your first contact with a new prospect. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, it’s good to be with you again. David. When you say first contact, I always think about Star Trek with their first contact with the aliens, and I feel like you’re kind of sitting there going, okay, are these going to be nice? Are they going to try and destroy the human race. You know, there’s a lot of trepidation with first contact and sometimes that first contact, how it goes, determines the whole rest of the relationship. David: That’s exactly where I stole the term from Jay. That is exactly where I stole the term from. And the way that came about is that I was talking to somebody about cold calling. This was years and years and years ago. Well, actually we were talking about prospecting and one of the things that this person mentioned to me was something related to cold calling. And I said, “okay, well, cold calling is one way that you can reach out to people.” I said, “think of it like it’s your first contact.” And literally it was because I had seen that movie about first contact and I thought it’s such a great concept. The idea of whatever, meeting an alien species for the first time is one thing. But for salespeople, you’re exactly right. It’s the same thing. We’re walking into an unknown situation. We have absolutely no idea how the person is going to react and that. Doesn’t matter whether it’s on the phone as a cold call, whether it’s meeting someone at a networking event, whether it’s through social media. We have no idea what’s on the other end until we engage. Therefore, the whole idea, the whole concept of first contact, I think is really highly appropriate. It is the very first contact that we have with a prospect. If you understand that conceptually, it can really sort of open up your mind to the possibilities and to the opportunities. Because there are a lot of people who view whatever it is they do as first contact, as first contact. What I mean is if all they’ve ever done is make cold calls, they view that as first contact. If all they ever have done to generate customers is through social media, that’s what they view as first contact. When you recognize, that’s just a method, that’s just one particular method of first contact, and you realize that there’s a whole other universe. To continue the space analogy here, there’s a whole other universe of options. It really allows you to test different things to figure out what’s going to work best for you. Jay: Yeah. And I love the idea that first contact, when I first thought of this, I was thinking that’s the first time that I meet them voice-to-voice or face-to-face. And in today’s world, that’s probably not going to be the first contact. In my business, the first contact is our website. That’s the first time that they’re going to see us. Now, in my business, I’m very fortunate that our three main competitors, their websites are awful, David, they are terrible. They are designed terribly. They’re hard to read. And all the time I get people saying, literally saying to me, “I chose you because I liked your website.” We’re somebody that offers this high level of expertise and you chose us just because we have a really good web designer. But that was the difference. Their first contact with us is positive, because we’ve spent the time to get that right. David: Yeah, it’s a lot more than the web designer too, because you could have a beautiful design, but if the words on that design are not resonating with them, it’s not going to work. Which goes back to what we talked about before, the MVPs of marketing. The message that’s on that website is definitely going to determine whether or not they’re going to be interested in what you say. Now, the way that is presented, which as you refer to the design, that’s all part of the messaging component. But if the words don’t resonate, if the imaging doesn’t resonate, they’re not going anywhere. But you’re right! So many times, people don’t recognize that first contact is happening all the time. Even with things that you’re not even aware of. You go onto social media and you post something, whether it’s a picture of your dinner or a comment about politics or something business related, that could very well be their first contact with you. And if they hate it, they’re not going to be revisiting. Jay: Yeah, exactly. And that’s why there are companies out there that are designed to h

The trouble with targeting in business is that a lot of people don’t do it well. It reminds me of that line from one of the Godfather movies where Michael Corleone says something along the lines of, “if history has taught us nothing else, it’s that you can get to anybody.” Right? And that is now true in terms of advertising. You can get to anybody, but what is the cost? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I discuss the trouble with targeting. Welcome back Jay. Jay: Hey, David, once again, I’m excited to be here and I’m really excited to get your feedback on this, because when you first said we’re going to talk about the trouble with targeting, I kind of thought in my head, well, isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing? Aren’t, aren’t I supposed to be targeting? David: Oh yeah. Yeah. We definitely have to target. We definitely need to target. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with targeting. The trouble with targeting that I was thinking about is that a lot of people don’t do it, and a lot of the people who do do it maybe don’t do it as well as it can be done, and as a result, they don’t get the results they’re looking for. Some people think they’re targeting and they may be doing that, but if you’re not targeting to the point where it’s resulting in better quality prospects, better quality clients, and conversations that lead to sales, then you might need to hone in a little bit better in terms of your targeting efforts and your targeting approach. Jay: Yeah, so as I think about targeting, there’s a lot of work to be done upfront, right? If you’re going to target somebody, you’ve got to know who the target is. And that can take a lot of research on your own part. A lot of experimentation, a lot of looking at past contacts, how those contacts came into your funnel, and understand those things before shooting arrow in different directions. The odds that you’re going to hit anything that looks like a target are pretty slim. David: Exactly. And I think a lot of the reason for that is, many people think of the term targeting in terms of what you said, targeting’s like aiming at something. But it’s not just aiming at something, it’s having an idea in advance of what it is that you want to hit. And if we think in terms of some of the more common ways of targeting. Some people don’t even get this specific about it. But if you look at the different ways to target, I mean some people target geographically, I’m going to target everybody within a certain geographic area. If I’m a realtor and I’m working in a particular neighborhood… Great example of geographic targeting. Some people target by industry. If I’m selling B2B, I might target a particular group of people in a particular industry. I might target companies that deal with technical kind of things, or I might target education, or I might target finance, right? So that’s a different way to target, by industry. I can target by need if I’m selling something like whatever, insurance, and I’m targeting people who need insurance. Okay. They could be wherever they are. Now, it’s harder to do that when you target by need because so many people might need it and you might have to pare things down a little bit to be able to get to the people that you want. In the promotional products industry, where I do a lot of work, people can sell by program specialty. In other words, people who are looking for a specific result. If you’re selling to people who are looking to increase safety in the workplace, then you could potentially be selling them a safety campaign, a safety program. There are some people who target by product specialty. There are different companies who might be looking for a specific kind of product. There is a company that’s been in the promotional products industry for ages. You’ve probably received pens from them in the mail, and they’ve been doing that for years. There’s a cover letter. Very often the pen will have your company name on it, and they’ll send that to you in advance. And then there was just a sheet of paper and a place where you could say, all right, if I want 200 of these, I send a check, I mail it in. And that was an example of targeting by product. So you can have a very successful business that does just that, right? Targeting by a particular product. And then some combination thereof. I could target a particular niche, a particular group of people. I could target financial institutions within a certain geographic area, or I could target a certain type of industry with a specific need. So, industrial companies that need safety programs. So lots of different ways to slice it, but if you don’t think through your options, then

Pursuing unqualified prospects is a waste of time. Lately, I’ve also been on a bit of a kick in terms of commitment versus interest. If you’re interested in the possibility of working with us, that’s very different than if you’re committed to getting the results you want in your business and working with us to do it. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the pursuit of unqualified prospects. Welcome, Jay! Jay: Hey, it’s so great to be here again, David, and I always love the topics that we get into. I think usually, or mostly, especially in my case, I’m in pursuit of just any prospect and I don’t give a lot of thought to are they qualified, are they not? It’s like, just send me all the leads and all sort through it, and I’m sure that I’m wasting a lot of time doing that. David: It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s like just looking for warm bodies. Anybody who can fog a mirror, right? And to some extent, that’s part of every process. Because we really don’t know who’s qualified and who’s not until and unless we have a qualification procedure in place to figure that out, or if we just sort of get good at it from having conversations and hearing what people say. So I think you’re right. I think no one really sets out to pursue unqualified prospects, and yet, to some extent, we all do it every day. Jay: Yeah, exactly. I will tell you that as a company, we’ve done some things. when we first started using Google ads, it was crazy. I mean, we were getting so many responses. And then after taking all of these leads and calls, we realized that 90% of them were not good. Because, our key words that we were using for Google were bringing us the wrong type of client that we couldn’t help and that we couldn’t close. So once we just did something as simple as figure out our keywords, wow, that saved us a lot of time and money. David: It really helps to dial it in, doesn’t it? When you’re more specific and it, you’re right. It could be the difference of one additional parameter, one additional thing that you’re saying in the messaging that you’re putting out there. Because all of that’s going to contribute to the type of people who respond to your ads when we’re talking about leading with advertising. Jay: Yeah, exactly. The other thing we found is a seasonality to it, and you and I have talked about seasonality a lot when it comes to sales. But we’ve found that the same keywords don’t work the same all year long, that there’s different motivations that things change. And so, we’re kind of starting to keep track of that now for the first time, and I’m excited. You know, we probably won’t reap the benefits of that until next year, but that’s how far ahead we have to be, to know when and how to start pivoting and adjusting. David: Yeah, I can see exactly how that could be the case. And it’s something that you discover through doing it, right? Through iterations. You try different things and you say, Hey, this isn’t working. This used to work. What’s the reason for that? So a lot of it too is sometimes talking to people. One of the things that we’ve done for a long time is when people make a decision not to work with us, or sometimes, if someone expresses interest in working with us, but then doesn’t follow through, we’ll reach out to those people and find out. “Hey, it looks like you were thinking about contacting us. Looks like you were maybe thinking about scheduling a strategy session with us. You didn’t do it. What was it that held you back? And the answers you get from that can be extremely helpful in terms of finding out what might also be holding other people back. Jay: Yeah. That is so powerful and I think sometimes people are afraid, because they’ve turned you down and they’re afraid that if you make another phone call you’re going to be bothersome to them. But if you do it in the right approach, or it can even be done in a form, a survey after the fact. You know, some way to kind of gather and harness that information. Something really obvious might rise to the top and you’re like going, “oh my goodness, why didn’t we think about that? It should have been so easy for us to see,” but we get that tunnel vision so often. David: Yeah, and everything’s obvious in hindsight, right? Once we figured it out, I was like, “oh, of course. How did I not know that?” You know, one of the things, too, that I think about unqualified prospects is that they’re everywhere. Right? They are everywhere. And I know one of the early mistakes that I made in my business was assuming that everybody was going to be qualified until they proved otherwise. And tha

When we think in terms of what makes us different from our competitors, a lot of it should be addressing who is our ideal target market? And it’s largely going to consist of people who want to do business the way that we do business, and then matching up our style of business with the way that they want to do it. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will ask the question, what makes you different? Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you for asking me to be with you again. David. I love this question because if we don’t know what makes us different, I think it becomes harder to sell or to present yourself or anything else, knowing your strengths and weaknesses, and playing to your strengths. Well, that’s obviously something that we should be doing, but I’ve met a lot of people that don’t have a self-awareness. They wouldn’t be able to answer this question, and so they don’t really know where to focus and they’re kind of haphazard. David: Yeah. In the promotional products industry in particular, people struggle with this because you have all these distributors who are essentially representing very similar lines of product or the same lines of product from the same manufacturers. So a lot of people look at that and they say, well, how can I be different if I’m selling exactly the same products as all the other people that I’m competing with? And if you ask that question in a rhetorical sense, well, how can I possibly do it? You’re doing it wrong. You need to actually ask yourself that question in a way where you demand results of yourself and sit down. Bullet point it out. What is it that makes me different? What could make me different? What can make me different? A lot of times when I ask the question in live seminars and I say, what is it that differentiates you from your competition? And sometimes people will shout things out and sometimes somebody will say service, right? And I’ll say, who here feels their service differentiates them and sets them apart, and 40% of the hands in the room go up? And I say, okay, keep ’em up and look around. You know, can you all be right? Can your service differentiate you from the other people who have their hands in the air? And it’s kind of a rhetorical question, but the answer kind of has to be yes. It has to be yes. I have to be able to differentiate myself in a way that justifies my existence in the market. And so I can be different. I can be different than you. We can both be great potentially in different areas. You know, if you think in terms of the Walmart approach, you know, their thing is cheapest price. Ideally, we don’t want to be that in our market, right? But there is probably something that we can do that will better serve the clients that we’re looking for than what other people in our market are doing. Jay: Yeah, it’s such an important question if we’re all selling the same product. Then what’s going to make somebody choose me over somebody else? And we talked about it in the last podcast. Relationships can be a, a certain part of that, but our systems are turnaround. You know, there’s so many things we can look at internally to say that we live up to that. I think the other hard part, and maybe it’s an important part, is to figure out how to assess what your competitors are doing. If you’re losing sales to your competitors, can you try and assess what they’re doing that is making them win and you not? David: Yeah, and for a lot of people, the difference between an online business and an offline. Is like night and day. Very often there are offline businesses that are trying to compete with online businesses, which have a completely different set of rules and a completely different set of benefits. So very often, rather than saying, how can I compete with this website or whatever, it’s often better to say, how can I be competitive among the people who aren’t really interested in buying from a website, the people who are actually interested in buying from a human? If I’m selling as a human, right? If I’m selling through a website, then I have to ask the opposite question. But there’s always something that we could and should be doing that will differentiate us from our competitors, and that’s what we need to find out. Dan Kennedy, the marketing legend, I remember he said in a seminar one time, the question that we really need to ask ourselves: Why should I do business with you versus any and every other option available to me, including doing nothing? And I was like, wow. Mind blown. Right? But I’ve considered that question so many times over the years. And the last part of it, “including doing nothing” is huge. Because the biggest thing that people tend to do when they’re not buying is they’re deferring. Th

Building and strengthening client relationships is critical. Some people feel like they can get more attention from a salesperson calling than they get at home because maybe they feel like this person’s listening, paying attention and then asking about it. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing strengthening client relationships. Welcome back. Jay: Hey, David, once again. It’s great to be here and I think that this is another really, really important topic. The key word for me is relationships. I think that oftentimes you see people with a business model who want to “turn ’em and burn ’em,” so to speak, and they don’t think about that word, relationships and how important it is. David: Yeah. And very often, even if they don’t intend to do it, the tendency among many salespeople is to get in there, make the sale, move on, get to the next one, get to the next one, get to the next one. And when it happens this way, it’s very difficult to really maximize the value of those relationships in terms of dollars, but also just in terms of the relationship itself. When you do that, when you just get in there, you sell something and then you move on to the next one, you’re not really building and nurturing a relationship, which is critical if you don’t want to have to constantly replace the clients that you’re losing because you’re not maintaining those relationships in the first place. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is that there is for most companies a customer acquisition cost. And so if you’ve already paid that cost to get that customer, well, that goes away if you can build a relationship and they continue to use you. That to me is just such an important approach. If you’re just doing it one at a time, you’re going to pay that cost every single time, and it’s going to lower your profit margins. David: I completely agree, and people talk about that sort of thing all the time. We all know that it costs a whole lot less to resell an existing customer than it does to find and sell a new customer. We all know it intellectually, but it is rarely practiced as well as it could be and should be within most businesses. You know, an analogy that helped me a lot was when I realized that when we’re building a client base, it’s a little like building a brick wall. You know, you get that first brick in place and then you get the next brick in place and the next brick in place, right? So your first year in business, you’ve got this sort of layer of bricks. These are each of the initial customers that you brought in. And then, your second year in business, if you’re able to maintain all the customers you brought in the first time, then you can add on, you can layer in another layer of bricks, another layer of customers, and then your third year you can build in a third level and you can continue to grow it like that. And eventually you’ve got this great monolith of exceptional clients who continue to pay you money on an ongoing basis. But the problem is that we are not able to retain those customers. You get a crack in that, one of the bricks disappears from the first level, then your second year in business, you’re starting out by plugging the holes. You have to replace those missing customers. And so everything takes a lot longer. You’re essentially reconstructing your customer base, and a lot of it is unnecessary if we would just focus on strengthening and maintaining those client relationships. Jay: Yeah, and there’s several ways to do that, right? Phone calls, emails, drip campaigns from your customer management system. There’s a lot of ways to do that. But I got to tell you, you know, as somebody who’s on the phone all day long doing sales, when I already know that person and they know me, it’s just easier all the way around. I mean, it just feels so good when I call ’em and they’re like, “Hey Jay, how’s it going?” Instead of, “what do you want?” You know, “I don’t have time for you.” It doesn’t just affect your sales, I think it affects your peace of mind, right? To work with customers who know you and like you, and know you provide a good service. That’s just a great feeling and it really helps motivate you, I think, to move forward. David: Yeah, and so much of it is a mentality issue. If we go into that call with the idea of “I want to sell this person something.” With every single call, then that’s not going to build and strengthen the relationship. Sometimes those calls are just designed to find out how they’re doing, what they need, what they’re struggling with, how the last thing that we sold them worked out for them, what’s working for them, what’s not work

To earn what you’re worth, you need to find and eliminate the bottlenecks. Consider this: When you’re outproducing what you are earning, that creates friction. It creates a bit of tension. And in most well-run organizations, the organization says, “this person needs to be compensated more.” And if that’s not happening in the organization you’re with, if you are outproducing what you’re earning, it means that there are plenty of opportunities for you somewhere else that will actually recognize and appreciate that value and reward you accordingly. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be asking the question, are you earning what you’re worth? Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David, it’s great to be with you again. And as I was thinking about this question, I realize I’m not sure I know what I’m worth. I know some people that say, you know, my time is worth this much money, and if I’m not making it, then I’ve got to change something or do something. I’m not there yet. I’m just not. David: Yeah. I think you’re not alone. I think there are a lot of people who struggle with this, and the real challenge comes in the last half of the question, you know what you’re worth because can’t answer the question until you determine that part of it. Are you earning it? Well, I don’t know. I have to know what I’m worth. Or I have to decide what I’m worth, choose what I’m worth. Choose what I think I’m worth. I think, and I’ve said this to a number of people over the years, the reason that I ended up getting into business myself is that I couldn’t find anybody else who would be willing to pay me what I thought I was worth. Right? , you work in different jobs and you say, okay, well I feel like I’m worth more than this. Well, when you start your own business, you’re earning what you’re worth because if you’re not producing anything, you’re not earning anything. And if you start earning stuff, then whatever you’re producing justifies it. And so essentially you’re earning what you’re worth. But still, even with all that, a lot of times, those of us in sales or those of us who own businesses, may feel like the work that we’re doing is costing us too much in terms of time and energy and effort and not producing what we’re looking for in terms of financial results, which is the reason I ask the question. Jay: Yeah. I think it is so important that there’s other ways to be paid for your worth. You know, if you’re in a place where you get job recognition, where they listen to your ideas, where you can climb up the ladder, for a lot of people that’s worth more than the bottom line paycheck. Now, if they’re not getting enough to pay their bills, then obviously cash is king. But all of the surveys I’ve seen say that people would really take less money if they felt like they could get rewarded in other ways. Now, when you’re working for yourself, that equation changes completely. David: Yeah. And I mean, a lot of times people start their own business. They do their own thing because they figure it’s going to give them all sorts of time freedom and things that they don’t have in a regular job. And very often they find out it’s exactly the opposite. I think it was Michael Gerber, the author of the EMyth who talked about the fact that there are a lot of people who work for other companies and they say to themselves, “okay, this guy’s a jerk. I’m going to start my own business.” And they stop working for a jerk and they start working for a maniac… themselves. And when I heard that line I’m like, “that is so true.” So often we will do things in our own businesses that we would probably never do for another employer in terms of the amount of hours that we’ll put in, the amount of thought that we put in, and all that sort of thing. Now, there are employees who do that. There are employees who are really focused on that and who really give their all to a job. But when you are an entrepreneur, particularly if you’re a solo entrepreneur, when you’re kind of doing your own thing, you’re the business. And so the things that you do have to count, they have to matter. And the actions we take have to generate. enough of a result that we’re able to get the kind of money that we need to make just to maintain the business, let alone earn a good living. Jay: Yeah. And don’t you think we kind of romanticize what it is to be an entrepreneur, to be a small business person? You know, we picture all the good. , you know, all the freedom that we’re going to have and everything else. And sometimes what we did is we gave ourself twice the work and half the pay. An

Very often, inferior competitors play the price card: Jay: I get that question. “Well, I talk to your competitor and they’re less expensive than you are.” Well, now I have to find a way to let them know, yeah, we are more expensive, but there’s a reason. And it’s because we’re very good at what we do and we have certain guarantees that they don’t, or whatever it is. David: Yeah. A pack of cigarettes is cheaper too, but that can also kill you. No, that would not be a good answer. But sometimes it’s what we feel like saying… David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host, Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of losing business to inferior competitors. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: It’s good to be here, David, and this is one of the most frustrating things for me when I know that I have a better product, I have better customer service. I know this because I’ve heard complaints about my competitor and all of these things, but you lose it to them for whatever reason. Well, that can really ruin your day , and it can also affect your business. David: It really can. And I think just this idea and even the word inferior competitors, probably anyone in business who has competitors that you’ve run into has had this experience. And you’re like, I can’t believe they went with that person instead of us. You know that what you have is so much better and offers so much more and is going to transform the person in positive ways so much more than they will if they go the other way. And yet they go in that direction. It can be extremely frustrating. So when we think about this idea of how to avoid this, how to avoid losing business to inferior competitors, there are a number of different things that we can do. But I think it starts with recognizing, first of all, that they’re out there. That there are a number of people out there who are not as good as we are. And then it’s about, okay, how am I going to be able to communicate that to my prospects in a way that doesn’t make me sound like I’m bitter, or make me sound like I’m frustrated? And that can be the challenge sometimes. Jay: Yeah, I agree. I have people regularly ask me, what’s the difference between you and your competitor? And I find that you have to be very careful with this question. And the tactic that I’ve chosen is to say, here’s the value that we can bring you. Here’s what I know we can do. And I try and s teer it back or say, you know, I haven’t worked with them directly, but let me tell you this is where we shine. And I know we’re going to bring you success in this way because it’s always been weird to me that somebody would believe what I say about my competitor. I’m the worst person to ask. It’s like in politics when somebody runs an attack ad, why would you believe the guy who’s, you know what I mean? It ‘s the worst person to ask, but we put so much faith and trust in it. David: Right. And I think, going exactly along that line, one of the things that we’ve tried to do when people come to us and they ask us about it, is we’ll basically say to them, well, listen, anything I say is obviously going to be biased. Why don’t I fill you in on some of what our customers have said about that topic? And then we’ve got videos and we’ve got audios, and we’ve got written testimonials of customers who have worked with us and we’ll point them to that. And allow them to hear what other people just like them are saying about the products and services we offer. Sometimes there are situations where a customer will talk about a bad experience they had with one of our competitors and the reason they came to us, and so sometimes we’ll share those stories as well. Say, well, listen, I can’t tell you this personally. I’ve never personally dealt with this other company. But you know, we’ve had a number of customers who were dealing with them in the past, and here are the reasons they gave for switching over to us. They said that they found that we do this better and this better and this better. I don’t know if you’ve ever had any experience with that company, but if you have, you might have noticed those things as well. But either way, I can tell you that these are the things where we’re going to be very likely to provide you with better service in those areas. Jay: Yeah, that’s great. And I don’t want to skip over what you said about having customer reviews and testimonials available. That’s got to be an important part of your sales process because, you know, I have people ask me all the time, well, can I talk to somebody who’s worked with you? And in my particular line of work, my customers don’t want to receive calls every day to give references to people. B

When we’re doing business-to-business or business-to-consumer outbound calls, those fears can be founded. Call reluctance can seem very real. They might very well say no. They might be rude, obnoxious, belligerent. They might say all kinds of things that you don’t want to hear. So that’s all true. That could happen. One of the things that helped me a lot though, is recognizing that we are not doing it for them. We are not doing this for the people who react like that. We are doing it for the people that we are ultimately going to help. And we can’t get to the people that we are going to ultimately help without having to go through some of these people sometimes in between. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the topic, Is Call Reluctance Real? Jay: Listen, it’s a pleasure to be here, David, and let me tell you, this is one of my biggest issues. I know it’s real because I have a job where I spend a lot of time on the phone and man, there are days where I just do not want to do it. And what’s funny is it’s actually something that I enjoy, but it requires a certain level of energy. It requires that you are prepared and there is the occasional call that turns in a direction that I don’t want to go. And so this is me to a T. I experience this on a regular weekly basis. David: Yeah, and the title is kind of provocative and I guess I sort of did that on purpose. Because anyone who has experienced this, that feeling of, “oh, I just don’t feel like picking up the phone,” is going to look at this and say, “well, yes, of course, it’s real.” And I think that when we just look at it as call reluctance, then it’s easy to say, yes, it’s real. What do we do about it? But the reason that I wanted to raise the topic is that I don’t believe that call reluctance is actually the issue. if you boil it down, what does it mean? And when I did this for myself and for other people who were struggling with it, it all really just boils down to fear, right? It’s some type of fear. It’s not that we’re really afraid of picking up the phone. That’s the easy part. It’s not that we’re afraid of dialing, that’s the easy part. It’s about what’s going to happen next. It’s about that unknown. And I think that’s what people struggle with, without even realizing that that’s what they’re struggling with. Jay: Yeah. So I mean, for me, fear of rejection, fear of the no, and I mentioned fear of the negative experience. You know, the guy who’s asking the questions that I can’t answer or wants to spend two hours on the phone and I only have 20 minutes for him or those kinds of things. You’re right, it’s all born out of fear. David: And what’s interesting, too, is that today, if you have to pick up the phone and call somebody and you don’t have an appointment with that person, the likelihood that they’re actually even going to answer, that you’re going to get to a live human being is probably what? 30%? 20%, right? 10%. I mean, most of them are going to go to voicemail. And so voicemails are kind of easy as long as you know what you’re going to say when you get a voicemail message. So a lot of it, I mean, at least 80% of it, it’s like, well, there shouldn’t be any fear here because they’re probably not going to answer. Right? But as you indicated, it’s the fear of rejection. In some cases, it’s the fear of success. And some people are like, “I’ve never had fear of success. I love success.” Well, we all love success, but sometimes getting to that success can be a little frightening. It can be a little bit of a struggle. And sometimes it’s just, hesitation is born out of fears that just haven’t even manifested yet. Jay: Yeah. They’re not real. And, for me, it’s asking the question, “what if?” And this is again, something that my parents taught me. I would tell them that I didn’t want to do something or I was afraid of doing something and they would say, “and then what?” Or “what if?” Right? Okay. Let’s say you do it and something happens, and then what? And they would play it out until the very end and eventually help me come to the conclusion that my fears are not rational and they are getting in my way. So I think recognizing, like you said, that it is a fear., and then having a way to process that fear in your mind can be so powerful. David: Right, and when we’re doing business calls, when you’re calling people who don’t know you’re going to be calling… if you’re doing a cold call, whether it’s B2B or B2C, it’s kind of the same because you’re reaching out to people who do

If you want to avoid feeling overwhelmed, it’s often just a good idea to take a moment and consider: What exactly is it that I’m struggling with at the moment? What are the specific things that make me feel overwhelmed? Then, what’s the one thing I really need to be doing right now and what’s the next step I can take toward making that happen? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be continuing our discussion on how to avoid feeling overwhelmed. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. It’s good to be back and I’m really glad we’re following up on this topic because after we recorded the last podcast, we kind of sat around and continued the discussion and thought, we need to share this with everybody as well. Before we were talking about self-awareness. But it really occurs to me that who you surround yourself with, especially on those days when you’re feeling overwhelmed, that’s going to be really important. David: Absolutely. And as you said, we started talking about it after the last podcast and the conversation got so good, I’m like, “we need to hit record and just keep going on this topic.” Because you raised a great point, particularly related to who we’re surrounding ourselves with. And very often when we are in that negative state that we had talked about in the previous episode, where we bring the wrong “us” to work, or the wrong us shows up to work, you know, the unmotivated, unfocused version of ourselves show up. When we do that, we limit the kind of people that we’re even going to be able to interact with. Because most other motivated, focused people don’t really want to be around that version of us. And so the more we bring that version of ourselves to work, the less likely we are going to be to get in front of other people who are going to help pull us out of whatever it is that we are stuck into. Jay: Yeah, and I think the exception to that, and I’ve experienced this, is if you have people who know you well enough and you’ve built trust with them and they are able to tell you and point out, you know, is everything okay? Because you kind of feel like you’re off your game a little bit today. You know, if you surround yourself with yes men, then you’re not going to get that. And if you surround yourself with people who are negative all the time, then they’re going to be bringing you down even on the good days. So being able to assess your team and hire appropriately is so critical, and I don’t think people really think about it in those terms. David: I agree completely. I also think that when people tend to give into those emotions, when they give into the overwhelm and they just basically withdraw and say, “no, I can’t do it, I’m out.” At that point, what are they leaving to themselves? I mean, they’re really leaving the opposite. And there are people who will unintentionally feed into that. If you say, ” I’m just overwhelmed. I don’t feel like doing this.” They’ll say, “well, that’s okay,” you know, “Hey, you don’t have to do it.” And maybe that’s true, and if it’s something that’s not good for you, you definitely shouldn’t do it. But if it’s something that you were committed to, that you really wanted to be able to accomplish, and you’re having an off day and you make a decision like that, in a lot of cases, there’s no going back on that. Jay: Yeah, you’re exactly right. And so in that point you need somebody to say, “look, this is really important. We plan this out. You got this.” You know, this is really important because if we can close this sale, then it’s going to propel us forward. If you can surround yourself, at least have one person on your team like that, what a game changer. But I think when we’re interviewing people, we’re thinking more about will they be able to accomplish a specific task, more than we’re saying, will they fit into our culture and will they be somebody who brings me down or brings me up and helps move the whole team forward? David: Yeah, and even in our personal lives, there are times and there are people in our personal lives where we may not be able to share exactly what we’re going through or what we’re dealing with. I mean, there are people who, if you tell them about something that’s bothering you , they’re either going to then tell you about 10 other things that they’re dealing with that are a lot worse, or they’re going to tell you that why what you’re dealing with isn’t that bad. Or they’re going to tell you that because of what you’re suffering with, now it’s going to make it worse for them because now they’re going

To avoid feeling overwhelmed, consider which version of you is showing up. Some days we start out and the you that shows up is the focused, motivated, energized, action-taking you. And some days the you that shows up is the unfocused, unmotivated, lethargic, non-action-taking you. And when we recognize this in advance, we can do a couple of things. One is to say, okay, I don’t really like the me that showed up today. You know, can I get myself in gear? Can I take some sort of action? Can I get myself motivated? Or will I at least take the next step? Will I take one small step in the direction of accomplishing what I’ve told myself and others that I intend to do? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the topic of how to avoid getting overwhelmed. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. It’s great to be here, and this is such an important topic, especially for the entrepreneur. There are so many different things going on, and you know, oftentimes you have to be the front office, the back office, you have to fulfill the orders. I mean, there are just so many things, and keeping track of it can be very difficult. David: It can. And before we even really dive in too much, I just want to point out, first of all, we are not experts in the mental health field at all, right? So if you’re struggling with actual mental health issues, this is not the podcast to listen to. But if you’re in sales or marketing or business ownership, or just dealing with the day-to-day and occasionally feeling overwhelmed, that’s what we’ll be talking about. If you’re feeling a little overwhelmed or stressed in business, that will be the discussion at hand today. And yeah, as you were saying, Jay, I mean, most of us have this situation at one point or another when you’re in business, particularly when you’re in sales, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed on some days. It’s like, oh, I don’t feel like making the calls, or I’m struggling with this, or I’m struggling with that. And just that thought alone can stop some people in their tracks and cause ’em to not move forward. Jay: Yeah. I think first of all, it’s important to tell people it’s okay to feel overwhelmed. I mean, that’s the reality for most people. But if that feeling becomes a stress paralysis, like I’ve experienced, like there are so many things going on. I don’t know which one I should be focusing on, so I end up doing less instead of more. That can really be damaging to your business. David: It absolutely is. And what I find is that in a lot of cases, the things that cause us to feel overwhelmed is when we focus on all the different things that we have to do or all the different things that have to be done. And the fact there are too many things coming at us at once. And it’s this habit of looking at everything as opposed to looking at the one thing or the next thing that I can do, which would actually allow us to move forward. And that I’m sure sounds very simplistic, and to some degree it is. But when we’re struggling with that, a lot of it really becomes about our focus. How tightly can we narrow our focus so that we can actually concentrate on doing just one thing? What’s the one, tiny, next thing I can do to move forward so I don’t just give up? Jay: Yeah, and a lot of people I think, sometimes want to give up. But I think it’s really important to do some work in advance here. If you don’t have a list or a plan that talks about all of those things that need to be done and maybe prioritize them. If you don’t have that done, then it’s going to be very hard, like you said, to say, what is the one thing I should be doing right now? Because you haven’t taken the time to plan ahead and even know, so, then it becomes “the squeaky wheel gets the grease,” right? And sometimes that squeaky wheel is just the last thing that you should be doing. David: Yeah, that is exactly true, and it happens to probably all of us at one point or another where there are a lot of things to do, and as you said, whatever’s making the most noise, whatever’s rattling our cage at the moment gets done when in actuality, that might be something that either shouldn’t be done at all, or it should be something that should be prioritized or deprioritized to move down farther on the list. I think it’s also important to understand that all of us have good days and bad days. And whenever we make life-altering decisions on bad days, it’s usually not a good outcome. So part of it also is just recognizing when we’re having the kind of days where we are feeling overwhelmed when we’re feeling like things are too much, and then maybe just sort of holding off on making big important decisions until we feel like we’r

When we think about how to handle indecisive prospects, we each have to recognize our own tolerance for pain. How long am I willing to chase? How long am I willing to wait? How much am I willing to sacrifice in terms of my own time and my own self-esteem? Right? And it’s different at different stages of life. I spent so much time in the past just trying to accommodate people who, ultimately, it wouldn’t have made sense to accommodate in the first place. And so for me, I’ve recognized that it’s not always a good idea to just do that. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing indecisive prospects. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. Thank you so much. This is the bane of the existence of so many salespeople because you think you have somebody, they see the benefits, but they just can’t seem to make up their mind and you know that you can help them. You know that if they would just do this, they would be on their way to a better place, but you just can’t get ’em over that finish line. It’s so frustrating. David: Yeah, Jay, you know, I was really struggling to decide if we should do a podcast on this topic. It was weighing on me and I’m thinking, should we do it? Should we not do it? And I went back and forth and I spent eight months, and then I decided, yeah, maybe we’ll do it. No. That approach it’s brutal and we’ve all dealt with it. The term wishy-washy comes to mind where they just can’t or won’t make a decision and it’s frustrating. But it’s also kind of unnecessary because when you’re dealing with someone who really is just not able to make a decision, it’s almost a disqualifier for me. And it very often becomes a disqualifier for me. Because if we’ve laid out our best-case scenario for why it makes sense to move forward with something we’re doing or not to move forward with something that we’re doing. If we’ve done that and they’re still sort of going back and forth and they don’t know why or they can’t put their finger on it, then they’re probably not a good prospect. Because the problem with indecisive prospects is they go on to become indecisive clients, which means every time you want to sell something to them, they’re going to have to think about it or go away and meditate on it or whatever it is they’re going to have to do. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for everybody. They’re not getting the result of whatever it is that they were thinking about buying from you. You’re spending a lot of time chasing them. They’re spending a lot of time either being chased or avoiding being chased or dodging you. So for me, it can become a disqualifier pretty quickly. Jay: Yeah, and I think you’ve actually kind of zeroed in on a larger recognition, and that is, are we thinking about what type of customer this is going to be while we’re talking about them initially? Because it may not just be that they’re indecisive. We may through the conversation find out this client is going to be very hard to work with because they have a bazillion questions, or they seem so demanding or whatever. I think that kind of pre-assessment in the process can be very important. I also think with indecisive people, you know, you have to have your steps. Have I gone through every step of the process? Have I tried every skillset that I have in the book, and they’re still waffling back and forth, then you’re exactly right. Is this somebody that I want to be working with on a daily basis? Is it worth my time? And I think the answer is probably no. David: Yeah. And when you listen to what people tell you, if you’re having some sort of interaction with someone who’s considering working with you and you’re actually paying attention to what they say, and their story changes dramatically from day to day. That to me is a huge red flag. I had a situation recently where someone was talking about how determined they were to grow their business. They wanted to get it to a certain point as quickly as possible, and the reasons that they were doing it were all very noble. They wanted to do it for their family and they wanted to reach this particular level of sales, and they wanted to do it sooner rather than later. And then two days later they decided they weren’t going to do it because they needed to do something with their house first. They needed to, you know, fix up their house before they could focus on this. And it’s like, okay, well that’s perfectly fine. Right? Everybody gets to choose their own priorities. And the person said, Hey, I’m not saying we’re not going to work together. I’m just saying that, you know, not right now. And my response was, well, you know, listen, as of the other day, your focus was on g

When prospects don’t respond, think in terms of what gets your attention, what gets you to respond? What makes you want to respond when someone else is reaching out to you? That can also be a great indicator of what you may want to be saying to the other person to try to get a response from them. Now, they might not respond to exactly the same things that you respond to. But it’s possible they will, and it’s not a bad place to start. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarlane and I will be discussing why people don’t respond. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you so much David. This is something that frustrates me in the process when I’ve made a good faith effort, I’m expecting a response and I get crickets and it, you know, it’s one of the hardest things to deal with in sales because you got to constantly be remotivation yourself and when you’re not getting a response back, it’s hard to stay motivated. David: It is. And it’s hard to not take it personally sometimes. Even though it’s very rarely personal. It’s hardly ever personal. It’s almost never personal, but it’s still hard to get past that when it’s happening. Jay: Yeah, I I totally agree with you. And again, I think you just kind of have to have that framework that you know it’s going to happen. It’s not personal and you just got to get through those. But I also think that you have to ask yourself some questions and reassess what is our communication system? I’ve found that there are people who will respond via text, but they’re never going to respond via email or they will pick up their phone or they’ll never pick up their phone. So you’re kind of learning, and I keep track of these notes as I’m trying to reach out to people. And if I can get somebody via text, that’s the way I’m going. I just will stop sending that person emails. So, I think learning along the way about each person and their preferred mode of contact is very important. David: Yeah, that is a huge one. such a great point. And I know we’ve talked about this in previous podcasts. We normally talk about it in terms of marketing and sales, but it applies just as much to telephone calls because they’re marketing, they’re sales as well. But we’ve talked in the past about the MVPs of Marketing. What is the marketing message we want to communicate? Which combination of marketing vehicles are we going to use to communicate the message? And who are the people or prospects that we need to reach? And when people are not responding? Well, the P part of it is covered. The people that we’re talking to, the person who’s not responding, that’s the person that we’re talking about. So if they’re not responding, it is either the person themselves, they’re just not going to do it. But if they are still potentially going to be engaged with us, then the reason they’re not responding is usually either the message or the vehicle, like you pointed out. They’re not going to respond to an email, but they very likely will respond to a text. Cool. That’s easy. Okay. Now we’ll communicate via text. They won’t pick up the phone, they won’t return voicemails, but they will respond to text. Great. Once you get something like that nailed down, you’re back in the saddle again. as the old song went. But a lot of times people don’t even think of that because your preferred method of communication might be different than mine. And if mine is to pick up the phone and call you again and again and again and again, which it is not. But if it were, and if your method of communication is text, then you’re not going to respond to me. You’re probably going to get annoyed at what I’m doing and I’m going to be annoyed at the fact that you’re not responding to me. And it’s a simple disconnect that can actually be addressed very quickly. But if somebody is not responding to any of the different methods of communication that you’ve tried, and today there are a lot. If they don’t respond to you on the phone, you can send them a text, you can send them an email, you can message them on social media. You can send them something in the mail. There are lots of different things that you can do. If they’re not responding to any of it, then it’s very likely either the message that you’re communicating to them where they just want to have nothing to do with you, they don’t want to communicate with you at all, or it’s the person themselves, they’re just not going to do it. And for me, it’s very helpful to try to break those things down and when people don’t respond, it’s very discourteous in my opinion. That’s a nice word that I’m using the

I’ve seen situations like that where people are making excuses instead of sales. Somebody had planned to sell something and was talking about it for a long time, and all the dominoes had to be lined up just right before they’d flick it, you know, flick one of them and get it going. And ultimately nothing happened. Sometimes we have a great idea, but then it’s like, “oh, it seems like too much work” or “I don’t want to do it,” or “I’m scared,” or whatever the deal is. And unfortunately, you’re building bridges to nowhere when you do that. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing making excuses instead of sales. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much, David. Such a pleasure to be here. And I’m excited about this topic. And I’m just going to be brutally honest upfront. I’m guilty of this very thing. As I’ve been involved in sales and sometimes numbers would drop, and the first thing I’m saying is, “well, it’s this,” or, “well, it’s that.” And the truth is it, might be. And so I think it’s important to always go back and reassess what you are doing and have you changed something or has something changed in your system? David: Yeah, it’s very easy to do. It’s an easy trap to fall into. Because whoever really wants to say ” it’s my fault?” And yet, our behavior is one of the only things that we really, truly have control over to the extent that we can get control over it, right? We can’t control a lot of outside factors, but we can largely control what we do and what we promise to do, and then try to connect the dots between those two things. Jay: Yeah. I remember I was in a training and they pointed out that so often when a mistake happens or say sales have a problem, we’re looking for the person to blame. And so often it’s not a person, it’s a system. It’s something that needs to be tweaked. But it’s so easy to just pick somebody and say, you know, “you’re the problem, you solve it.” Maybe you’re the frontline salesperson, and so you need to fix it or there are going to be consequences. And oftentimes I think that’s the wrong approach. David: Yeah, I agree. And I think the reason that this topic even came up is I had an experience, fairly recently, where I was just sort of blindsided by someone’s ability to blame every single outside factor rather than just the fact that they essentially weren’t selling. And this is common in a lot of different businesses. It’s common in a lot of different sales industries. A lot of times, “well, it’s the leads.” And if you ever saw Glengarry Glen Ross, “it’s the leads.” And I remember when I was first watching that movie, I was like, oh, that’s brutal. You know, it’s probably not the leads. And then you find out, in that particular movie, yeah, it was the leads, because they were giving them bad leads. That’s really the exception, rather than the rule though. It’s the leads, it’s the market, it’s the product, it’s the supply chain. There have been a lot of really, potentially very good excuses, a lot of different things that people can blame for their lack of producing, but none of that empowers the salesperson. None of it empowers the person who is making those excuses to actually address the issues that potentially need to be addressed. In other words, if there’s a problem with the leads, what can that person do to track down better leads? If it’s the market, are there other markets they can approach? Or are there segments of the market that they could and should be approaching? If it’s the product, are they representing the right product? Is there another product they should be selling? So for every excuse, there is normally something that the salesperson can do to address some aspect of the problem that they’re citing as being the real issue. Jay: Yeah, I think it’s so important what you’re talking about. Because I’ve been in a situation recently where we did a Google ad campaign and man, the leads were just coming in. But then we looked at our close rate, and it was just miserable. And so we had to assess, is this the type of lead we want? Because we’re spinning our wheels here. And so we had to change keywords and go through a lot of thought processes and reassess. Because in that case, it was the leads. But I also think it’s important, especially in sales, to constantly be reassessing your own performance and what you’re going through. because we fall into traps, right? And also it’s hard, the grind can be hard. And so things that you know you should be doing, you’re not this time because it’

To grow your client base proactively, you have to do more than just post stuff. It’s about initiating conversations. And if you think of your social media content as your first contact, and you recognize that the goal of the first contact is to initiate a second contact (which means to get a response,) then your likelihood of success is going to be greatly increased. David: . Hi, and welcome to the podcast. Today, co-host Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing the topic of growing your client base proactively. Welcome, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you for having me on. I’m super excited about today’s topic. David: Yeah, it’s great to have you here. Jay: Yeah, I, I know this is a big question for businesses. I’ve heard the phrase, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And so growth is a constant thing that you have to be thinking about. How do you do that proactively? David: It’s a great question because so often we get caught up in the day-to-day of what’s going on. Particularly in the early stages of a business, when you don’t have as much business as you need, it can be really scary. And what a lot of people tend to do is they just sort of default to whatever it is that they think is going to bring in business. And they lose sight of the fact that if they aren’t proactive about it, you can really fall into bad patterns that can create problems and perpetuate a cycle where you’re not generating the revenue that you need to grow and scale. Jay: Yeah. This is such important information because I think most people don’t start a business because they know how to grow a business. They start a business because I have a great recipe and I’m going to put it in a food truck. Or I’m an attorney even, and I’ve learned the law or a dentist or a doctor. Those people are not trained or taught how to grow their business. They’re taught how to do their craft. So this is outside of anything they’ve been taught. David: It’s really funny because there was an electrician here earlier today at our house and he was taking care of some things and we were having exactly this conversation because he used to work for another electrical firm. He decided to start his own business and we started talking about what they don’t teach you in electrical school, essentially, right? I know how to do electrical work, but do I know how to find customers? Do I know how to find the right customers? Do I know how to handle the billing and do collections and hire and fire, and do all the other things that become necessary when you have a business? It’s a whole different set of skills. But you’re right. And from the standpoint of our topic today, in terms of growing proactively, a lot of business owners really don’t know how to go about that. They don’t know how to do it, which is the reason we’re having this conversation today. Jay: Yeah. And it can be so daunting. So where, where do you start? I mean, you know so many ideas. You know, you got social media, you’ve got all of these different tools available to you. Where do you begin? . David: Well, I think for a lot of people, if you want to take a strategic approach, you want to think in terms of the types of clients you actually want to have, the types of customers that you enjoy interacting with. By and large, these are going to be people who are pleasant to deal with. They’re people who have money and aren’t afraid to spend it. They’re people who appreciate the value you bring to the table. And a lot of times we don’t even think of that. Particularly in the early stages, if somebody is willing to pay us for what we do, we’re like, “okay, great. I’ll take it.” I think that can really be a mistake, because it can lead us to establishing the type of client base that we might not actually want to interact with on an ongoing basis. So when I think in terms of building a client base proactively, to me that means deciding in advance what types of clients do I want, what types of clients do I not want, and then really going about putting together the processes and strategies that are necessary to attract exactly that type of customer. Jay: Yeah, I love that. So, defining who your customer is. And how do you do that? I’m guessing some brainstorming, taking a look at your current clientele, the customers that you really like working with compared to the ones that you really don’t like working with. Is that kind of the process? David: Yeah. When you’ve got the benefit of having a customer base and you know which customers you like and which ones you don’t, and which ones are great to deal with and which ones aren’t, then it does become a lot easier to do that. To say, okay, well I’ve found that if I’m selling business to business, for example, people in this particular i

If you think in terms of seasonality and counter-seasonal selling, does your business have a normal seasonality? Something that you know and can plan for? It’s important to look at that. Look at your history. See if there are peaks and cycles that you might not even be aware of. If it’s random, if it seems to go in peaks and cycles, try to figure out why that might be the case. If you look at certain types of clients that do business with you in certain times of year, that might be a good clue in terms of what kind of counter-seasonal business you might want to look at. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing counter-seasonal selling. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much, David. You can have those booming months and then all of a sudden the bottom drops out and are you ready for it? Do you have a plan? And can you even survive it? And I think this is where a lot of companies fall down. And they don’t survive it. Because they’re not ready for the ebb and flow that comes with most businesses. David: Yeah. And you just raised a great point, which is the fact that there are some businesses where you just don’t even know what that seasonality is likely to be. It just sort of comes and goes in waves, like nausea. You know, you’re just not quite sure if it’s going to be a good month, is it going to be a bad month? And there are a lot of businesses that are like that. Because if you are not structuring your business to be able to proactively attract the prospects and clients you need, it’s bound to be feast and famine. And it’s hard to even think in terms of counter-seasonal if you don’t even know what your seasonal business is, right? If it’s just sort of random and it’s up and down and all over the place and you don’t know what’s causing it? As crazy as it sounds, there are a lot of businesses that are in exactly that situation. They get people who come in in a particular week or a particular month, “wow, we had a great month,” and the next month they don’t. And if they’re not doing something proactive to ensure that that happens, that is very likely to continue to happen. Jay: Yeah, it’s exactly right. And it’s really hard, especially in your first couple of years, you know, some you can track. Like, I had a restaurant in a college town and we knew that, at the end of the college semester, we were going to be empty and we had to figure out how to survive that. But we could track that and we knew. But a lot of other companies, you may not know. It could be based on the stock market, it could be economically driven. There may not be any rhyme or reason for it. And so having plans and systems to watch for it, to pivot, we’ve talked a lot about pivoting in these podcasts. Having a pivot planned is so important. David: Yeah. It could be a pandemic, right? We’ve all gone through that. Like who saw that coming, right? And that did a lot of businesses in, some because they were literally shut. They were forced to close down. Some of them were able to make it through, or they were able to pivot and get things done, and others just went out of business. But in terms of this topic, I was originally thinking of it in terms of the situation you described where if you’ve got a seasonal restaurant and you know that the students aren’t going to be there, and as a result, you’re going to have some lean months over the summer, it’s easier to plan for that. I was also thinking of it in terms of how, in my promotional products business, we did a lot of work with public television stations and they would have pledge drives three times a year. They would have a pretty large one in January, they would have a really large one in March, and then they would have another one that wasn’t quite as big in August. So during those times of year, we knew that we were going to have a bunch of business coming in over a certain period of time. And we also knew that when that wasn’t going on, we were going to have to figure something out. We were going to have to supplement. And that was the first time that I really even thought in terms of counter-seasonal business. Because each business has its own seasons. It has its own cycles. And if you don’t take the time to consider that or think about it, you might not even realize it. It’s like, “oh wow, we’re just having some slow months.” But in terms of being able to make that happen, it reminds me of an old Zig Ziegler quote where he said, “don’t look for your ship to come in if you haven’t sent one out.” And I thought that is just brilliant. It’s a very old reference, it’s a dated reference, but wow, it’s still is every bit as relevant. If you’re not doing something to create demand

When we talk about selling beyond features and benefits, we did sort of discuss the idea of trying to elicit some emotions from people. try to find out what they really want. Then we can start to focus more on emotions and experiences. What is the emotion you want to have them feel when they are taking advantage of this purchase? What is the experience you want them to have after they’ve purchased it? David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of selling beyond features and benefits. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much, David. This is an important topic for me because I feel like so often if we just convince them that the features are perfect for them or the benefits are perfect for them, then we’ll get the sale. When as so often, what we’ve talked about, it’s more about relationships than it is features and benefits. David: Yeah, and we did touch on this topic a couple of weeks ago in the podcast, and I thought it was worth it to sort of revisit it, expand it a little more, because it’s the type of thing that people sort of basically know, basically understand, but maybe haven’t really implemented. So I’m hoping we can flesh this out a little better for people. And if you’ve got questions about anything we talk about, that’s one of the reasons I love these discussions is you think of things that I would never have thought of and hopefully vice versa. And we’re able to come up with strategies that are going to be helpful to people. So in a previous podcast we had discussed when we’re looking to get beyond the idea of features and benefits, how so many salespeople have been trained on this over so many years or even so many decades. That’s kind of all they know. And if you recognize that there is a world, there is a life beyond features and benefits, it really opens things up for you. It opens up your mind. It opens up your conversations, your dialogue, your interactions with prospects and clients. It just gives you a lot more that you can work with that can actually help to elicit a response from them. Find out what they’re looking to do, get down to their actual core emotions in addition to just what’s coming off the top of their head. Jay: Yeah, I think I told you it’s probably been almost a year since we talked about it, but I went to a week-long sales training. These were like the premier sales trainers in the country. And they told us the whole week that we were selling light bulbs. And that was all we could sell. We could never rely on our knowledge of the real product that we sold. That way we would have to focus on the skillset behind selling and building relationships. And what was so funny is that people would start making up features and benefits of these imaginary light bulbs, because they had to have something like that. Because that’s all they knew was selling features and benefits. And the whole week they’re trying to teach you No, no, no. Build relationships. Like you said, there’s an emotional component here. There’s so much more than features and benefits. And I came away with an incredible understanding. I think some people came away just knowing how to sell light bulbs, to be honest with you. David: Right! Yeah. So then they all had to go into business selling light bulbs. It didn’t help me sell anything else, but help me sell light bulbs. It really is kind of funny, the way our minds work sometimes. Because if you’re in the product zone, if you’re just thinking in terms of the actual physical product that you’re selling, it’s one dimension. But it’s not always the most important dimension. Because there’s that old expression that people don’t want to buy a drill bit, right? You remember that one? They say nobody wants to buy a drill bit. What do they really want? Do they want a drill bit? No, they want a hole in the wall, right? So there’s a lot of talk about that. But even that is sort of features and benefits, right? The feature is, it’s sturdy and it won’t break when you use it. The benefit is you can put a hole in the wall. That’s presumably what they want is the hole in the wall. But a lot of times it stops there. And people forget that if you really take it a step further, people don’t want a hole in the wall. Right? Hey, look at that hole in my wall. There’s something they want to put up there. There’s something that they’re looking to do. It’s either part of a construction project that’s going to result in something better than just a hole in the wall. And so if you limit yourself to the immediate feature and the immediate benefit, you’re missing out on the ability to paint a picture of whatever the thing is that they’re buying is ultimately going to create for the pe

To maximize trade show revenue, switch the mindset from, “I’m here to meet people and give away stuff” to “I’m here to collect leads.” This changes the entire dynamic. When she did that, she came back from the trade show, we were having a conversation and she said, “I’ve never had a show like that. I got so many leads. I have all these people I’m going to be following up with. You know, we had great conversations.” And all it is, is a shift in the dynamic, a shift in the strategy and the overall approach. Going from “I’m here to be here and to see people and schmooze” to “I am here to collect leads, follow up on those leads and make sales.” If you do nothing other than that, you’re going to maximize your revenue from trade shows. David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to maximize trade show revenue. Welcome, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you for having me on, David. I hope everybody had a wonderful holiday and have big plans for the great new year, and I’m sure trade shows, for a lot of people that’s part of their plan, so they should go in with some goals and some ways to make sure that they can maximize those benefits. David: Absolutely. In last week’s podcast, we were talking about hitting the ground running in the new year. And today we will continue that trend with the idea of trade shows. In the promotional products industry, this is definitely trade show season, which is why I thought it would be a good idea to address this topic. This week, in fact, the PPAI Expo in Las Vegas is going on. From the standpoint of promotional product suppliers, this is a really big show because that’s when they get to meet all the distributors. From a distributor’s standpoint, they get to see all the new products that are coming out. They get to visit with the suppliers who decorate the products, and it’s a really big show. I sound like Ed Sullivan, “it’s a really big show!” Takes place in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, and that’s going on this week. And what we’re talking about today, because most of the people who take advantage of our materials are promotional product distributors. They’re walking the show this week. So what I’m talking about in terms of this topic though, is maximizing trade show revenue as an exhibitor. Because a lot of our clients who are walking the show this week as attendees, also will very often exhibit at other shows and try to sell their wares there. And so I wanted to touch on that topic a little bit this week. Jay: Yeah. And I’m really glad you are because I’ve been in both situations. I’ve walked a show trying to meet people, handing out cards. “Hey, this is what we do.” And I’ve also been an exhibitor. There’s nothing worse than being an exhibitor and watching people walk by your booth all day long. You know, you almost need to have the old carnival barker out front, trying to bring people in. And that can be frustrating, because you paid money and you’re hoping to generate revenue. David: Absolutely, and I’ve done the same thing, but on both sides of the equation. Walk shows, and also been an exhibitor at shows. And one of the first shows that we ever exhibited at, we had never done it before. So when you’re new at exhibiting at a trade show, you have no idea what you’re getting into. You’re going to have a booth. You’re going to have some sort of backdrop, or you’re just going to have nothing and a couple of people standing there. But I don’t really want to get into all of that too deeply. I mean, whatever you decide in terms of the environment that you want to create there, obviously you want to create an environment that looks inviting, looks welcoming. You probably don’t just want to have two metal chairs and stand there looking at people as they go by. They’re probably not going to want to approach. But, when you are not really familiar with what to do, you tend to just sort of go for cosmetics in some cases. Like maybe you’ll put up a nice booth and then you’ll stand there and wait for people to come by, that type of thing. But what I’ve noticed is that many people, if not most people who exhibit at trade shows, take a very reactive approach. They show up. They set up their booth. And then they try to make eye contact with people as they’re going by. And a lot of people, when they go to trade shows, they tend to do “the bounce.” They don’t want to stop at every single booth. So if they hit the booth next to yours, they’ll probably try to get by you to get to the next thing that they actually want to see. So there are a lot of things like that. But, If we recognize that the goal is not just to inhabit

To hit the ground running in 2023, we can start by taking responsibility. Whenever we blame outside factors for things that go wrong, we immediately forget that there are things we can evaluate in ourselves to say, okay, well even if this is the case, even if this was just a terrible prospect, are there things that I could have done better and differently in this circumstance to create a better outcome? And almost inevitably, the answer is going to be yes. But in order for that to happen, we have to consider it. And we have to think, is this actually what I want to do? And if you do that, you’re just going to feel better about yourself. You’re going to feel better about your situation. Because you’re allowing yourself some level of control in the situation rather than simply delegating the failure to outside factors and assume you’re a victim and there’s nothing you can do about it. David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to hit the ground running in the new year. Happy New Year, and welcome back Jay! Jay: Thank you, David. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I think everybody has a desire, you know, at the beginning of the year, to say this year’s going to be different, you know, we’re going to make all these changes. It’s going to be fantastic. But do they really have a way to translate that into action? I picture myself hitting the ground, you know, it’s like the cartoon when they start to run, you know, their feet are moving, but they’re not moving quite yet. I think a lot of us are in that place. How do we get from spinning to actually moving forward? David: Yeah, it’s a great question. I know in the promotional products industry, we have trade shows that start at the beginning of the new year, the ASI Show in Orlando, the PPAI Expo in Las Vegas. And, There’s one in Fort Worth as well, an ASI show in Fort Worth. I think it’s actually in January as well this year. So we got three trade shows in the industry that are really designed to help people get up and running and get started. But as we look at today, you know, this first week of the new year, even aside from that, whether or not you’re attending a trade show, chances are you’re probably pretty reasonably fired up. Okay, here we go. It’s another new year. What are we going to do? This is exciting. And if we think about the types of prospects that we want to interact with this year, the types of clients that we would like to attract, the types of customers that we might want to let go this year, and really focus on building our businesses as proactively as possible. Building our client lists as proactively as possible can really help to improve our quality of life in a dramatic way. Jay: Yeah. I love that. in the restaurant business, there’s something called a theoretical food cost and an actual food cost. Theoretical is, what would things be like if you ran perfectly? If there was no waste, nothing. Everything was perfect. And then actual is where you’re at. And the goal is to constantly be trying to close that gap. And so to me, I think about it in any business, what does your ideal look like? Your ideal client base, your ideal staff, your ideal sales? So if you can know what that is and then track a course to get to it, I think that’s a great way to feel progress. Because that’s what I tend to miss when I’m running a business is sometimes it’s just a daily grind. And I don’t feel like I made any progress today. And if you do that over and over again, it’s hard to continue to press forward. David: It really is. And I think a lot of that goes to the fact that very often we’re just tied up in the day. Whatever it is that’s going on in the day, we’re just facing whatever is happening to us moment by moment, day by day. And that can get very frustrating. I remember, I think it was Tony Robbins was talking in a seminar one time about the idea that in order to create our future, we need to envision it first. It’s like if you are going to build a house, you don’t just start nailing boards together, I think was the analogy he used. I thought it was a great one. You have to envision it first. You have to figure out, what do I want this thing to look like? Where is it going to be located? How many rooms are going to be in it? All that sort of thing. And at the beginning of a new year, it’s really nice to start thinking about what do I want my life to look like this year? Who do I want to be surrounded by? Who do I want to interact with? Who do I no longer want to interact with? What types of customers do I want to work with? What types of customers have I decided I’m no longer really interested in pursuing anymore? Simple decisions like that can have an amazing impact on your life and your career.

Today, we’ll discuss how to use the Big APE™ this week to plan the new year. Very often we say we’re going to prioritize time with our family and our loved ones. And we do this every year, January 1st, going to spend more time with the people we care about, the people we love. And then by March, it’s back to life as usual, right? So if we decide what we’re going to prioritize, who we’re going to prioritize, and again, the flip side, what am I going to deprioritize? Who am I no longer going to prioritize in terms of allocating time? Those things as well allow you to live a far more proactive life. And it allows you to really start living the kind of life that you want to engage in. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing using the Big APE this week to prepare for the new year. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Well, I’m so glad to be here. David. I have to tell you, after Christmas my number one tendency is just to kind of want to detox, you know, because of all the shopping and everything else. But I know it’s also, because there’s not a lot going on business wise. It’s probably a great time to kind of start thinking about the next year. David: Yeah, and I think detoxing is also a really good part of that. It’s nice to be able to use this time, it’s sort of the eye of the hurricane, a little break in the action before the new year starts and everything gets rolling again. It’s just a great time to be able to do that, to be able to take a breath. Take a moment. Sort of think through how things went, what we liked, and what we didn’t like about the past year and what we want to do better and differently in the coming year. And for me, I think it’s just a great time for planning, for making notes, and really considering the things that we’d like to accomplish. Because, there’s something magical about a new year where everybody wants to start fresh and turn the page. I mean, there’s no reason you couldn’t do that any day or every week. Reminds me of the expression, “today is the first day of the rest of your life.” People hear that and they go, “yeah, that’s right.” And then we never do anything about it. But boy, January 1st rolls around and everybody wants to do things. We’ve got different resolutions, and I’m going to do this better. I’m going to do that better. Lots of people join gyms and they go for two weeks. Then that’s the end of it, right? So there is this tendency to get really excited and really focused about a new year, and then perhaps let it fall away. So if we use this week to just really think through, okay, what do I really want? What am I trying to get out of my life, my business, you know, my relationships? What is it that I’m looking to accomplish? It’s just a nice sort of quiet time to consider those sort of things. Jay: Yeah, and I think, you gave the example of the gyms. My wife goes to the gym all the time and she can’t stand January and into February because she can’t find an open machine to use, because everybody has set this new goal and it’s going to last at most six weeks and then everybody returns. I think that that’s kind of a microcosm of our goal setting for the new year and for resolution. So it has to be important too, as you’re being mindful to be specific I think, but also to be reasonable with yourself, achievable, right? And trackable are all things that I think would probably be important in this process. David: Absolutely. There’s another thing that I tend to think of, just in terms of planning and thinking things through. I refer to it as The Big Ape, A.P.E., the Big Ape. And it stands for activities, priorities, and expectations. So what are the activities that I want to engage in in the new year? What are the activities I no longer want to engage in in the new year? Right? And that’s big. So much of growth in business and personal development comes not just from what we do, but from what we decide we’re no longer going to do. Changing those behaviors that have not created the results that we’ve been looking for in the past. So if you were to do nothing else this week but get out a pad of paper and then jot down, okay, what are the activities I really want to engage in in the new year? And what are the activities I want to either do less of or completely eliminate? Start with that. And that exercise alone just allows you to kind of feel good. Because it’s a glimpse into your potential future, right? You have to decide whether or not you’re going to engage in those activities, if you’re going to follow through and do it. But as you write that sort of thing down, you say, okay, this is what I would like to be doing on a daily basis, a weekly basis, a monthly basis. Wh

I think the best holiday gift is to make the most of ourselves, when it comes to personal development, whether that means sales and marketing training, whether it means personal training, whether it means meditation, whatever it is for you, prayer, whatever it is that allows you to get to a place where you can really focus, really be present, and be your best for yourself, and those around you, is really important. David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host, Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the best holiday gift you can give yourself and your family. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much, David, for the opportunity to be here. And I love this question. It’s a little off track from some of the things that we normally talk about. But I think as we talk about running your own business and the amount of time that it takes, taking a little bit of time out to think about your family and how you can make their holidays special, I think it’s a critical topic. David: Yeah. And of course, because of the nature of the things that we talk about, what I’m really thinking about when it comes to the best holiday gift you can give yourself and your family, I tend to look at it as “a better you,” right? If you can provide yourself and your family with a better you, a smarter you, a more motivated you, a more inspired you, that is going to really make a huge difference in your business life, in your personal life, and the life of the people that you care about. And of course, this time of year a lot of people are focused on actual gift giving, which of course is a traditional thing as well. But when we think about what really is going to help ourselves, our family, our loved ones most, it’s going to be, you know, a healthier, happier, safer, more productive you, generally. Jay: Yeah. I love this line of thinking because you could give them all the presents in the world, but if you’re stressed out all the time, if you’re angry, because of what’s going on at work and those types of things, you can’t buy their love or their gratitude with gifts. Maybe they’re a little bit happy in the morning, but by the end of the day they still remember what kind of circumstances you’ve left them in. David: Yeah, I remember when the kids were really young and we’d have gifts in the morning and by afternoon , it was like everybody was kind of cranky because you kind of get what you wanted out of the day and have too many sweets and all that sort of thing. But again, I think if we think really more in terms of what we’re going to be doing and how we’re going to be living and interacting with each other. A great example of this about a week or so ago on social media, Charity Gibson, who is involved in the promotional products industry in a lot of ways, and is just really inspiring for a lot of people. She posted something on Facebook about what happens when, at some point, you’re doing everything for everyone else and you’re not doing anything for yourself. You’re not taking care of yourself. And I think it’s such a great point, because a lot of times people can fall into this trap of thinking, well, I don’t want to be selfish. But there is a big difference between selfishness and what I refer to as rational self-interest. In other words, rational self-interest is what keeps us from stepping off the curb and into traffic, right? The desire to look both ways before we cross the street. That’s rational self-interest. Nobody would really look at that and say, oh, you’re being selfish. But I think a lot of times people tend to, for themselves mostly, think, well, I should be doing more. I could be doing more. They want to help everybody else. And if you don’t put gas in your own tank first, you’re not going to have any energy left for anyone else. Jay: Yeah, such a good point. In fact, I saw a study just yesterday and it was talking about the high levels of anxiety in our youth, but also in adulthood. And they said, you know, anxiety is something you don’t want to have to deal with, but it’s a warning sign. It’s your system telling you something. Something’s going on. And we tend to just want to medicate it instead of saying, you know, what’s going on in my life that’s causing that? And one of the things they identified is what you’re talking about. We’re not taking time for ourselves. We’re putting so much pressure on ourselves that we’re never taking a break. And our body is telling us, look, this is too much. You can’t handle it. And instead of listening, we’re going “just drug me up and I’ll figure it out.” David: Yeah. I think the whole idea of making the most of ourselves, when it comes to personal development, whether that means sales and marketing training, whether it means

When you think about the idea of quiet quitting, and sticking with it, that just seems to me to be a soul-sucking activity. If you keep going back to the same job that you can’t stand and you’re producing at low levels because you don’t like the way you’re compensated, do something better for yourself! David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing Quiet Quitting. (Whispers) Hi Jay. Welcome. Jay: Yeah. Hey, David. It’s great to talk to you. We live in a world where these new terms pop up and keeping up with the terms is so difficult. So I think, first of all, we should probably define it for people. If they haven’t heard the term quiet quitting, what is it referring to? David: Okay. Well, I looked this up before we got on here because I wanted to have a definition that isn’t just me talking off the top of my head. Basically what they said online, when you Google it, the first one that came up said, quiet quitting refers to a rising trend where employees are doing the bare minimum at work, a reversal of the tendency to go above and beyond in the workplace. So that’s kind of a long-winded definition. Another one that I saw said employees who put no more effort into their jobs than absolutely necessary. And I thought that existed for a long time, right? That’s not a new concept. I think the term is new and I hate the term. I really do. When I hear quiet quitting, it just makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’m very. uncomfortable with the term. I don’t know how you feel about it. Jay: Well, you know, it’s interesting. I put together a management course 20 years ago, and I had my own name for it. I called it minimum expectations mode. So not as fancy as quiet quitting. But I believe that as a result of poor management, poor training, those types of things, employees would slip into this minimum expectations mode where they’re going to show up to work, they’re going to do as little as possible, stay under the radar as much as they can, collect a paycheck and then go home. And do that as long as they, can until eventually, you know they’re going to get fired if the company is tracking any of that. David: Yeah. And I think that whole idea of people just sort of doing the minimum, that’s existed forever. I think it’s the title of this term that sort of bothers me. Because it implies that you’ve actually quit quietly and you’re really not doing what it is that you’re paid to do. And the thing that I find most frustrating about this, is not the impact that it’s going to have on the employer. It’s the impact that it’s going to have on the person who is engaging in this sort of behavior. Because if you think about it, if I go to work every day with the idea of doing the very bare minimum to do as little as possible, collect my check and go home. What does that do for me as a person? What does that do to my ability to grow and potentially thrive or whatever? Some people don’t care about that. Some people don’t want to grow or thrive. And if that’s the situation, and if they’re doing the bare minimum and if that’s acceptable to their employer, then they can probably keep doing that for a really long time. But I think for people who actually want to excel, want to be really good at what they do, then this should make them a little uncomfortable as well. Jay: Yeah, it’s such a good point. You’re maintaining self-esteem while working at a job where you know you could be doing more and you should be doing more. Because they’re paying you to do more and you are not. I think that wreaks havoc on the soul of most people. I think it’s important though to talk about how you end up in this place. When I was much younger, we had a manager who was never happy with anything. You knew that he was going to be critical of everything that you did. And the net result of that was we knew we could never win. In fact, we started saying that amongst ourselves. You can never win with him. And so when you can never win, you’re going to go into quiet quitting, or minimum expectations mode. Because why would you try harder? You know what’s the point of that? If I know that I’m going to get criticized no matter what, then why on earth would I go out of my way to do more? And the turnover rate in this company was just amazing, because everybody wanted to get out and they were a quiet quitter until they did get out. David: Yeah, and I think it’s sort of natural that when someone is not happy at their job, that’s going to happen. But if that starts happening, I think that anyone who has some integrity and some motivation should probably recognize that as a sign to be getting as many resumes out as possible, as quickly as possible. Right now, if people want t

Are you invisible to your target market? Do they even know you’re alive? This goes back to the idea of money versus time. Because one of the advantages of social media is that if you have more time than you have money, you can spend more time posting and contacting people directly on social media. If you have more money than you have time, then you can run ads and you can get your ads in front of people without having to sit in front of the computer all day. So there are definitely different ways to accomplish this. If you want to become visible though, you have to have one or the other. You have to have time or money. You can’t be out of both. Well, I have no money and I have no time to do this. Well, at that point, you’re out of business. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the topic of, Are You Invisible to Your Target Market? Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much, David. This one is tough for me because when you know you have a product that people want, you just know it. And you know if they could just learn about you, that you would be able to sell this product and you just know they don’t see you. It’s a frustration. It really is. David: Yeah, we’ve talked about this topic before. I’ve talked about this topic in live presentations and probably in previous podcasts, and one of the reasons that I keep coming back to it is that it really resonates with a lot of people in business, a lot of sales people, a lot of business owners, because it is so important. The idea of being visible or invisible to your target market is going to directly impact your ability to make things happen. And what I find kind of fun about this topic, to the extent that it can be fun, is that a lot of times in the movies or in television, invisibility is generally viewed as a big advantage. It’s an asset, you know, Ooh, wouldn’t it be cool if I’m Harry Potter and I’ve got my invisibility cloak, and I can do all sorts of things that are cool and fun. But in business invisibility is just deadly. Because, as you indicated, if the people who could benefit from what you’re offering don’t see you, don’t hear you, don’t know you’re there, don’t know you are alive, then you have absolutely zero possibility of selling to them. So in evaluating that question for yourself, are you invisible to your target market? It’s probably a good idea to really think it through, and don’t assume that you are more visible than you might actually be. Jay: Yeah, we know about assumptions, right? But I think this is also important because a lot of people will only focus on advertising that gets them leads or some type of returns. There’s a whole nother level of advertising where it’s just brand awareness. You’re probably not going to generate clicks, but if you can be one of the options in their mind, you know, if you’re a plumber and you’re not necessarily getting a lead every time you send out a postcard or something, but when that toilet finally goes down, if you’re one of the three that they think about, then you’re so much closer. And so that’s a part of advertising that I think a lot of people miss. David: Yeah, I completely agree. I think another problem that people run into sometimes with this is that they’re trying to be everywhere at all times with everyone. And unless you have an unlimited budget, that just doesn’t work. So you can get in front of a whole lot of people who have absolutely no capacity to buy from you. I’ve worked with businesses in the past that were running radio ads and they were business to business businesses. And they’re running on music stations, and I’m like, okay, well, it’s possible that there are some business owners or some people who could buy from you who are listening to that station, but the majority of people listening to that ad don’t own businesses. They can’t use what it is that you’re selling. So you’re paying 100% of the purchase price of an ad on that radio station, but maybe only one to 2% of that audience is someone who could benefit from what you’re doing. So in that case, they have the opposite problem. They’re visible to lots of people, very few of whom can actually purchase. So recognizing that we need to be visible primarily to the people who have the ability to spend money with us is going to be key. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And that takes research and time and tracking. But you work a lot with promotional products, and I used to think, what good is somebody giving out pens or mouse pads or things like that. This is one of those things, you’ve been holding that pen and using it for weeks and it’s got somebody’s name on it. I didn’t need ’em before, and now suddenly I d

To become a 100K a month producer without losing your marbles means building your business properly. The issue that I’ve seen with a you-centric business is it’s almost like you’re building a cocoon around yourself. You’re starting out with this business and you’re doing things, and the more things you do, the more you’re weaving this cocoon around yourself, and you sort of isolate yourself in the middle of everything. And then when it comes time to grow, you don’t really know how to do it because you’re stuck in the middle of this whole thing. And so for most people who want to grow beyond what they’re just capable of doing themselves or who want to create a business that could exist separately from them, where they could say, “I own that business, but I’m not operating in it every single day of the week.” That requires an entirely different mindset and entirely different approach. David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to become a 100K a month producer without losing your marbles. Hi Jay. Jay: Hey, David. It’s great to talk about this issue because I think, you know, people imagine I’m going to be an entrepreneur and they think about the money and the lifestyle and what they did is they actually created a job that they’re working, you know, 60 hours a week, 70 hours a week. They’re not making progress. And so they’ve created a job and they were actually trying to create a lifestyle. And so that can be very difficult. David: Yeah, it definitely can. And I think the whole idea of trying to do it all for many people is difficult. And different people have different tolerances for pain. So some people need to hire earlier. Some people can afford to wait. They have the bandwidth to be able to do that. I know personally for myself, I had to hire early because there were specific skills that I just wasn’t good at. And there are certain skills that you have to have in business, and if you’re not good at them, you’re going to have to hire for them. So for me, I ended up doing it sooner rather than later, and I did it wrong. In the early stages, I ended up hiring another salesperson just like me. So we had two people who were good at sales and nobody who was good at doing the numbers and things like that. So you learn from those mistakes. But, if you want to become a 100K a month producer without losing your marbles, you need to focus on what are the things that actually need to happen in this business, well and consistently, and then do what it takes to get all that in place. Jay: Do you think it’s possible for somebody to be a 100K producer on their own? I know you said it was difficult or you had to move sooner. I’m just curious. Do you think that somebody could say, no, I’m going to do it on my own? David: I know it’s possible because I have clients who have done it. And I marvel with them. When they tell me what they’re doing and they tell me how they’re doing it, I’m like, “I don’t know how you do that.” I mean, a longtime client of ours, I love her so much, her name was Barb Burcham. She passed away a few years ago. But Barb was great. She did over a million dollars a year in promotional product sales, essentially by herself. I think she might have had an assistant at one point. And she did it on small orders. She participated in one of our mastermind discussions and she was talking about how she just has all these clients and she’s taking a lot of small orders, but she was able to do it. And I asked her, well, what sort of CRM are you using? She was doing it in Outlook and I was like, “I don’t know how you do that. I have no idea how you do that.” There’s another great client of ours, a guy named John, who does over a million dollars a year, primarily by himself. He might also have a little bit of outside help, but he’s just able to do it. So I think a lot of it is deciding am I able to do it? I know for me, there are aspects of the job where, no, I’m just not going to do a good enough job at it where I would trust myself to handle those aspects of it. Sales and marketing, yeah, I’m good with that. But other aspects of it in terms of ongoing operations and in terms of handling the finance and all that kind of thing that’s where I definitely need help. So it really depends a lot on the individual. Jay: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the things that’s really hard. Some people can’t really self-assess very well. You ask them what are you good at? And they might tell you everything. And the reality is they’re not good at everything. And so it’s hard for them to know, well, I should be focusing on this area and then I could get somebody else, like you said, to focus on the other

When you think about what top performers do better and differently, consider this. It’s almost impossible to overfill your sales pipeline. So if you focus on making sure that you’ve got more there than you actually need, you’re going to be in much better shape. Just look at the numbers, if you’ve got a hundred people in your pipeline and 1% of them close today, you made a sale. If you’ve got ten people in your pipeline and 1% of them close today, you did not make a sale. So from that standpoint, just the basic numbers say you want to make sure that you’ve got enough qualified leads in your pipeline so that somebody can close today. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing what $100,000 per month producers do better and differently. Welcome, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you so much, David. I really can’t wait to talk about this, because it will allow people to look at what they’re doing and compare themselves. And sometimes when you don’t have that, it’s hard to know if you’re doing things right. And you’re kind of more shooting in the dark than actually being purposeful about your daily activities. David: Exactly. And I think a lot of people, if they just really enjoy what they do and they focus every day on meeting new people and interacting and trying to find solutions, that’s all great. But if you want to be able to start achieving some of the financial goals that you have for yourself, then it really makes a lot of sense to say, okay, what are the people who are doing this extremely successfully from a financial standpoint, doing better and differently, or at least differently than what I’m doing now. Jay: Yeah. I saw in your ebook that time is significant. Top producers leverage their time better than others. How do you go about leveraging your time better? David: You know, it seems so difficult, and yet when you really boil it down, it’s actually pretty simple. If you think about the idea of being in front of a prospect or a potential client, and if that person has the ability to spend a thousand dollars with you, that’s different if that person has the ability to spend $10,000 with you, or $50,000 with you, or a hundred thousand dollars with you over the course of the next year or the next couple of years, or their entire working lifetime. And so leveraging your time can start with things as simple as deciding in advance what types of prospects you want to be in front of. And ideally, they’re going to be the type of people who actually need what you have to offer, purchase it on a regular basis, have decent budgets, have the ability to spend, the willingness to spend and the money to pay the bills after they’ve ordered it. Jay: Yeah, so identifying that client, first of all. And then I think that there is a tendency, especially for the smaller business owner, to get caught up in things that they could be having other people do. And so figuring out where your time is best spent is going to be a key to being able to grow. David: Yeah, no question. And so if you think about leveraging your time, that does go directly to that point, which is to say, okay, which activities are not worth the amount of money that I’d like to be making on an hourly basis, daily basis, weekly basis. Because if you’re engaged in those activities, they will just never pay more than they’re worth. If you’re doing administrative tasks, that could be done by somebody else for 10 or $15 an hour. Then those tasks are not going to produce a hundred dollars or 200 or $500 an hour for you. They’re only ever going to be worth that amount of money. So by delegating those things to the extent that you can, that is another way that you can help to leverage yourself, leverage your time, and make sure that you’re spending or investing your time in the right ways to get the results you’re looking for. Jay: Right, and what’s really cool is in today’s world, you know, people are like, well, I can’t afford to hire an administrative assistant and have payroll and all of those things. There are so many great services out there now where there are freelancers standing by, ready to do piece work or whatever to take some of that burden off of you. I just love that part of how technology has made that easy. Your assistant could be in another part of the world doing things for you while you leverage your time better. David: Absolutely. And also I think there’s a chicken and egg scenario that people get into. I can’t afford to hire somebody else for whatever, $15 an hour. Well, if you can’t afford to hire somebody else for $15 an hour, it probably means that you are already engaged in activities that are only worth that much or less. Right? Because if you were engaged in activities that were worth. $50 an hour

In a special Saturday edition of the Top Secrets podcast, David Blaise explains to co-host Jay McFarland why 100K per month in promo sales is not just doable, it’s also a decent, worthy goal for promo distributors who aren’t there yet. Comment below and let us know if you agree or disagree. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the significance of each $100,000 in promotional product sales. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, it’s great to be back with you. David, and I really want to talk about this topic a little bit. I know you’ve put a lot of emphasis on that first hundred thousand dollars. What makes that so significant, so special? David: Well, that’s a great question. I mean, it’s the first hundred thousand dollars, it’s every a hundred thousand dollars thereafter. And there’s no real magic significance, I don’t think. But if you bring in a thousand dollars sale or a $2,000 sale or a $5,000 sale — and I’m talking in the promotional products industry primarily, because that’s who this material was put together for — it’s helpful. It’s good. It feels good to bring those sales in. But, ultimately that can be done in a day or a couple of days or a week. And I think sometimes it’s just good to have sort of benchmarks that are out there a little bit. So generating a hundred thousand dollars in sales of promotional products for most people is an accomplishment. Whether that happens in the course of six months, or three months, or a month, or a week, or a day. It doesn’t usually happen for most people in a day. The industry at large generally does about a quarter of a million dollars in annual sales. Most salespeople do roughly that on average in the industry. So each hundred thousand dollars is actually pretty significant. And I think that when you look at trying to make an impact and trying to generate the revenue that you need to be able to support the lifestyle that you’d like to become accustomed to, it’s good to sort of stretch yourself a bit and to ask yourself. Okay. What am I doing to get to my next Hundred K in revenue or my first, if you’re just getting started. Hitting that first hundred thousand is usually pretty significant for people. Jay: Yeah. I’m guessing most people remember that first hundred thousand. But I think you’re right. You know, were they looking at that moment as benchmark? Were they saying ” this is going to be significant and this is our plan on how we’re going to reach it.” Or was it kind of haphazard and what a great milestone, but what did they do ahead of time to get to that point? David: Yeah, and that’s the question that each person has to ask themselves. What did I do to get me to this point? How long did it take to get there as well? I mean, there are some people who spend, and whether they start out part-time or whatever it is they’re doing, some people spend six months or a year or a couple of years even before they hit six figures in gross sales. When you’re doing that, you’re not earning a lot of money. Some people start out and they’re doing it part-time. They’re doing it on the side. So if they generate a hundred grand in gross sales, it seems like a really significant accomplishment for them. But if you look at the amount of time that it took to get there, sometimes you have to say, okay, well could I have done that faster? And for people who really want to make their mark and want to be able to generate significant sales, I think that it’s just a decent sort of benchmark to look at, to say, “okay, how long is it going to take me to get to my next a hundred thousand in gross sales? Is it going to take me a year? Is it going to take me six months? It’s going to take me a quarter. Is it going to take me a month? How long will it take and how quickly could I do it again?” Because that will determine ultimately what your gross sales are going to be, which determines your gross profits, which then determines your personal income. Jay: Yeah, I’m just curious, as you’re thinking about this, you talk about maybe starting out part-time, how do you judge? How do you know how much time should it take to get to that first hundred k? I think initially it may be hard to figure out what those milestones are and how you’re going to achieve them. Once you’ve achieved them, I think you can understand better. Okay, let’s shorten that time and those kind of things. David: Yeah. Well, I do a lot of work with people in the industry, and some of them are just starting out. And many of them don’t even really have any good solid benchmarks in place. They’re not thinking, “okay, well I’m targeting X amount of revenue.” They think to themselves, “okay,

Hi, I’m David Blaise and over the past few days, I’ve been sharing some resources designed to help professionals in the promotional products industry to achieve some of the financial goals that are important to them, including your next 100K in promo sales. Last week, I released a free ebook entitled How to Make $100,000 Every Month in Promotional Product Sales. To some people, that sounds like a lot of money. To others, particularly those who’ve already achieved it, it might sound just like another day at the office. So on Monday of this week, I released a video entitled “Your Next $100,000 in Promotional Product Sales.” If you’re brand new to the industry, your next hundred thousand in promotional product sales might be your first hundred thousand. If that’s the case, then hopefully that topic might seem pretty exciting to you. If you’ve already done a hundred thousand dollars in promotional product sales, then your next 100K will get you to $200,000. That would be double. So hopefully the idea of doubling would be pretty exciting to you as well. Of course, If you’ve already done $200,000 in sales, an extra hundred thousand will get you to 300. That’s a 50% increase over where you were at 200. Hopefully, that’s still exciting. But even as you continue to grow, each additional hundred thousand dollars in sales — every Next 100K — will get you closer to your desired sales, profitability, and income goals. One of the first things I addressed in the $100K ebook is the huge difference between gross sales, gross profit, and personal income. When we talk about Your Next $100,000, we can refer to any or all of the above. If your goal is to grow your personal income an extra hundred thousand dollars, that’s quite a bit different than if you just want to grow your gross sales by that much. However, many of the things you have to do in order to make that happen, are the same. It will often start with top-line growth — bringing in the additional sales necessary to generate the profits you need to increase your personal income. That’s why in video 1, when we talked about Your Next $100K, we discussed the fact that every sale you make is going to come from one of two primary groups of people. If you’re just starting out, those sales will actually come from just one primary group of people. But as you take action, and bring new clients through the door, you will create another source of clients — another source of future business — that will often be worth far more to you than the new customers you’re creating when you’re just starting out. Also, today I’m releasing video 2 in this series along with a free copy of my $100K Cheat Sheet. The $100K Cheat Sheet is a single-page document, but it really could (and should) be worth an additional hundred thousand dollars to you in your business over the course of the next year, IF you download it, print it out, think through the answers and take action on the recommendations made in that one-page document. In order to make it even easier for you to accomplish this, in today’s video, I’ll walk you through exactly how to complete the cheat sheet in a way that doesn’t require a lot of time, doesn’t require a lot of thought, and will help you to generate a level of focus that you may not have had in your business for a very long time. One of the big advantages to the concept of Your Next $100K is that it will keep you FOCUSED instead of just thinking, “What do I need to do today?” Or “What should I be working on today?” Or “What fires do I have to put out today?” Instead, you can be focused on the specific people and actions required to help you generate Your Next $100,000 in Promotional Product Sales. As I mentioned in video 1, if you bring in an extra thousand dollars, or an extra $10,000, it’s a help. It’s an accomplishment. But when you bring in Your Next $100,000 in Promotional Product Sales, it’s far more than that. It’s proof of concept. It demonstrates that the concepts and specific actions that I recommend in the $100K ebook, the Next $100K video series, and the $100K Cheat Sheet and video actually work. So with the right focus and consistent actions, you can start to achieve your financial goals systematically, instead of just haphazardly or every now and then. After you go through the ebook, the next $100K video, the $100K Cheat Sheet and ask any questions you have, I’ll give you a sneak peek inside our Next $100K portal. This is where I personally work with my clients to help them reach and exceed their next $100K in promotional product sales. Then on Thursday of this week, I’ll be opening up the doors to a small group of industry professionals who would like to work with me personally to achieve these milestones in their businesses. But regardle

I think for people who are looking to compete with internet sellers, one of the things they can do is say, “Yeah, you know, now anybody can set up a website. Anybody can say anything they want. But what if something goes wrong? Who are you going to talk to? You know, if you and I are working together, if there’s a problem, I’m going to be the one to handle it. Do you know who’d be handling it on the other end?” David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to compete with internet sellers. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you, David. So glad to be here, and this is a big deal. I’ve found sometimes I don’t even know that there’s an internet seller that I’m competing with. In fact, the other day I was trying to send somebody to our website and we found out somebody had grabbed a domain very close to ours. They’re offering a close product of ours. And now, every time somebody mistypes in our domain, they’re going to go to one of our competitors. And I’m incredibly frustrated by it and dealing with that very situation right now. David: Yeah. Squatters, they call them. Domain squatters. Very frustrating. Jay: Yeah. David: Yeah. Well, I know a lot of people, particularly people who have brick-and-mortar businesses, for the most part — but they may have an online presence — often struggle with the fact that internet sellers can sometimes seem to create better deals. Because they have lower overhead or they have more connections, or they have different connections. Or because of the fact that the client themselves are doing more of the work. Because if somebody can go to a website, pick something out, order it and not involve a human being, they can certainly save money if they’ve got that technology set up. But there are limits, and depending on the industry you’re in, depending on what you’re selling, very often human beings can have a bigger advantage, and human beings can also justify higher prices because of the level of service they provide. And I think that’s something that people tend to forget about. They tend to think in terms of, “okay, I can’t compete with this. These online sellers are able to provide stuff faster and cheaper.” But faster and cheaper is not always everything that people are looking for. Jay: I would say most times faster and cheaper… David: yeah. Jay: is not. But I also think that we’ve kind of accepted faster and cheaper in a lot of ways. You know, it’s another one of those things that’s changed with the pandemic. I think one of the other problems is that you can put anything on a website. You can say anything. It’s not like when you walk in a store and you can see how clean the store is. You can see. You can feel the quality of the product. You have all of this tangible nature to it. That’s all gone and we’re ordering stuff that we just see pretty pictures of. That makes it very hard to compete on the internet. David: It can, but actually that knowledge and the ability to communicate that can also do something that’s very important for terrestrial sellers, shall we say. People who operate in non-internet businesses. And that’s that they can. Or so the seeds of doubt, they can basically say pretty much exactly what you said. Yeah. You know, there’s a big difference between seeing an image on your screen and then getting it, and having it arrive, and having it be different or look different, you just don’t know that. And that even goes back to printed catalogs. There are a lot of times you get a mail-order catalog, you look at something and go, Wow, that looks great. And then you order it and arrives and it seems nothing like what it is that you thought you ordered. So I think for people who are looking to compete with internet sellers, one of the things they can do is say, Yeah, you know, now anybody can set up a website. Anybody can say anything they want, which is pretty much what you were saying. But what if something goes wrong? Who are you going to talk to? You know, if you and I are working together, if there’s a problem, I’m going to be the one to handle it. Do you know who’d be handling it on the other end? Now, if you’re dealing with a company like Amazon that is very good at what they do in terms of getting stuff delivered consistently, that’s a challenge. Because people then know, yeah, if I order it, I’m probably going to get it in a couple of days. Now, today I finally had to request a refund for something that I bought because it got lost in the mail. It wasn’t the vendor’s fault, but it didn’t show up. So that type of thing can happen as well. And who’s responsible for chasing that out? I am, right? Because I bought it online. I own that problem. And so for

If you recognize that more is never the solution to too much, then you can really start to think about what actually has to be done? What could potentially be eliminated so that I can focus my time and attention on the most important things that are actually going to move the needle for myself and my business? David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the topic more is never the solution to too much. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much. I love the title of this podcast and I think it embodies something that we all do. Sometimes we think that because something’s not working, it means we’re not throwing enough at it. So let’s just throw more and throw more and throw more, and that will solve the problem. And perhaps we’re making it worse. Or at the very least, we’re wasting a lot of time and money that could be used more effectively in other places. David: Yeah, so often people talk about, and we’ve talked about in the past, time management. And time management is maybe not the best term to always think of. Because what it implies is that you have to do all these things and you have to manage it better, that maybe you’re messing things up there. But if you recognize that more is never the solution to too much, then you can really start to think about what actually has to be done? What could potentially be eliminated so that I can focus my time and attention on the most important things that are actually going to move the needle for myself and my business? And I think for a lot of us, with COVID and people working from home, it probably caused a lot of people to start thinking about what is the most important aspect of what I do? And how many things that I used to do before, really don’t have to be done anymore? And for anybody who’s watching this, if you haven’t gone through this exercise, I would really encourage you to consider this. Because it’s very likely there are things you’re doing that you’ve been doing for a long time, and it’s always the way we’ve done it. We think we have to keep doing it. But sometimes, that’s not the case. So if you find yourself trying to figure out how you’re going to get it all done, maybe it’s time to start thinking in terms of “what could I potentially eliminate or what could I delegate so that I could really focus on the things that are going to generate the best results for myself?” Jay: Yeah. You mentioned the pandemic and I know personally, it has changed my work style and time management so dramatically on both sides. On the one side, I don’t have the guy coming up to my cubicle every 10 minutes telling me the story about the movie he just watched, right? So I don’t have those interruptions anymore. But on the other side, I have to now be self-efficient, self-productive. Nobody’s looking over my shoulder. Sometimes I don’t speak to other employees for days or weeks, and so… David: mm-hmm. Jay: I have to totally manage that time. So, I think the pandemic has changed work forever. And we’re all having to learn how to, manage that. David: Yeah, it definitely changed things and that’s why I think this idea, this topic. Is so important. Because what I’ve found is that people are overwhelmed. A lot of people are overwhelmed. People are constantly busy, busy, busy. They’re doing different things all the time. Some people wear “busy” as a badge of honor. I don’t really see it that way anymore. And there was a long period of time where I did. It’s like, “Oh yeah, I’m really busy. I’m really busy.” And then I realized, wait a second, what does that mean anyway? Does busy mean productive? Because if busy means productive, then okay, it’s good to be busy. But if you’re busy just for the sake of busy, it’s not. So now I think of it in terms of, “is busy a badge of honor or is it actually an admission of failure?” And I think in a lot of cases, for a lot of people, it becomes an admission of failure even though they may not realize that that’s what’s happening. And I have heard that term from some very high level, very important, impressive people. And when I’ve heard it from them, I thought, “Hmm, I wonder if they’re doing things as well as they could be doing them.” Jay: Yeah. It’s a great question. And there’s a lot of videos on the internet about productivity, and a lot of them, they’re like, Elon Musk, you know, gets up at 3:00 am. He schedules every 30 minutes, whatever. And they compared that to another billionaire who spends a couple hours a day and seems to achieve a similar amount of work. I think we have this tendency to think that there’s only one way to be. That we should all be that way. An

I think just the idea of initiating first contact versus cold call is a lot more exciting. It’s a lot less intimidating in most cases. I started using that phrase after I saw an old Star Trek movie where they referred to first contact as being your first contact with an alien species. And I just thought, wow, that has a lot of correlations with sales. Where you’re approaching somebody and you really don’t know what you’re getting into. Strange new worlds and all that sort of thing…. David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of initiating first contact with a new prospect. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: I’m so glad to be here, David, and I’m excited to talk about this issue because to me, personally, this is one of the hardest things to do. I’m fine once that first contact has been made. I feel like I’m really good at building relationships and closing. David: Mm-hmm. Jay: But I’m terrified about making that first contact and I’m not really sure how to do it. So I find myself shooting in the dark all the time trying to figure it out. David: Yeah, well, you’re certainly not alone. I’ve certainly felt that way myself, and nearly everybody I’ve ever met in sales has had issues with it. And we talked about this in a previous podcast. We were talking about cold calling and the idea that cold calling is really just one form of first contact. And so the reason I thought it would be good to have a discussion on the topic of First Contact itself is to first of all, recognize that, yeah, it’s more than just cold calling. There are lots of different aspects to it. And if you realize that, then you also realize that you can get comfortable with first contact, generally by engaging in a first contact method that is more comfortable for you. So if cold calling is not your primary thing, you have other alternatives and that should maybe give you a little bit of hope. Jay: Yeah, that does give me hope and I think the key is to know what the possibilities are. Because like I said, sometimes I’m like, okay, my only option is to cold call, and that’s not working. So really understanding what are the other options available. And the other thing I found is, lately I’m better at cold calling because you force yourself to do it enough and you can build a skill and you can get over the hump at least I’m finding that. David: Yeah, absolutely. And when you are good at cold calling, and there are a lot of people who are very good at it, there are a lot of people who actually really like it. They don’t even struggle with the call reluctance and that sort of thing, but for those who do struggle with it, I think just discussing this idea of first contact is going to be helpful. And if we think about why first contact is really so important, in my mind at least, it’s because it really helps to set the stage for the entire relationship. Whatever it is that they’re going to learn about us or think about us down the road, it’s all going to come from what that first contact is. If it’s a great experience, they’re going to have good feelings about us. If it’s less than a great experience, then they’re not going to feel as great about it. Since it sets the tone, it’s really important that people become comfortable with it, or at least come up with a form of first contact that they can be reasonably comfortable with. Jay: Yeah. It’s such a great line of thinking. I hadn’t really thought about it that, that first moment, maybe the first five minutes, David: Right. Jay: That could determine the whole lifespan of the relationship. How they view you. How they respond to your sales pitch. Everything. It’s kind of like we do it in life. First impressions, we know, are everything. Right? David: Exactly. And now there are so many different forms of first contact. For somebody you’ve never met, their first contact with you could be something they saw that you posted on social media. They may be scrolling on Facebook and they come across something that you posted, and that’s their first contact with you. You may not even realize this stuff is happening. But when you recognize that it could be happening, and it very likely is happening, then you can start to really think through the communications that you’re engaged in, and how you want to utilize them so that you can create a good, solid first contact, even when you don’t even know for sure that that’s what you’re doing. Jay: Mm, it’s really great. I think that you can do this on social media now. I always thought of first contact as a phone call, but what if first contact is, they’re watching that video I posted on YouTube. Or they’re watching this podcast that we’re doing right now. They form

I would say the number one thing that helped me the most with overcoming call reluctance is when I realized the people who are likely to yell or scream or be angry or be obnoxious or belligerent, they’re not the people we’re doing it for. We are doing it for the needles in the haystack. We’re doing it to find that perfect-fit customer that needs what we have to offer, and who was waiting for someone like us to come along. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of overcoming call reluctance. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: So glad to be here, David. And I really want to hear your feedback on this topic, because this is something that I struggle with. I’ve been put in sales positions in the past. I have a list of leads. All I have to do is pick up the phone and dial those numbers, and I can’t bring myself to do it. Which is funny. I can do it, if it’s a qualified lead and they’re expecting my call, or if they’ve set an online appointment with me, all of that fear goes away. But if it’s a cold call, forget it. I can’t do it. I just can’t. David: Yeah, well call reluctance is a big topic for people who have to make cold calls, and that is one aspect of it. But you hit on a couple of other aspects of it. There are some people who still struggle with the idea of picking up the phone, even when somebody is looking to hear from you. So, we’ll touch on a little of all of that, but you went to the big thing first, which is the idea that there are a lot of people who struggle with call reluctance. They don’t want to pick up the phone, they don’t want to do it. And if we think about the reasons for that, a lot of it becomes kind of obvious. What would you say is your number one reason? Jay: I guess fear of rejection. It’s just hard for me to feel like I’m going to get them to want to hear me. David: Yeah, and one of the reasons that I struggle a bit with this topic is that I’m not a huge fan of cold calls. It’s not that we don’t do them , we do. It’s not that I haven’t done them, I have. But generally speaking, my approach is to try to lead with something of more value. So in those situations, if you follow up with a phone call, it’s a lot more welcome than if they’re not expecting your call. But yes, what I’ve found personally and also with a number of the people that I worked with is that a lot of people think, Well, it’s fear of failure. It’s fear of rejection. I’m afraid that this person is going to get mad or they’re going to get angry or they’re going to hang up on me, and all valid fears because those things happen when you’re making cold calls. And so part of it for me, because those of us who have been in positions where you had to make the calls, regardless of whether or not you felt like it, you have to come up with a way to get over that. And the things that helped me the most, I would say the number one thing that helped me the most, was when I realized the people who are likely to yell or scream or be angry or be obnoxious or belligerent, they’re not the people we’re doing it for. We are doing it for the needles in the haystack. We’re doing it to find that perfect fit customer that needs what we have to offer, that was waiting for someone like us to come along, you know, the knight in shining armor or whatever. Those are the people that we’re doing it for, and you can’t get to those people until, and unless you first get to the ones that might not be as receptive to your message, shall we say? Jay: Yeah, absolutely. My dad was a very successful salesman his whole life. And he always told me that every day he has a goal for how many no’s he’s going to get. He just knew if he’s going to have a successful day, he’s got to have a hundred no’s. And of those no’s, he’s going to pick up a certain percentage of yeses. And so that’s how he made it a game. He made it fun for himself. That tactic never worked for me, but I know it works for a lot of other people. Cause after 10 of those nos, I’m just worn out, you know? David: That is so true. And I’ve heard that and I know that that works for other people. And the fact that it does makes me say, Hey, listen, if that works for you, absolutely do it. For those of us who are like, eh, still not quite there for me, it’s like, okay, well we need another way of approaching it. We need another way to think about. Because really fear of success, fear of rejection, fear of failure, it doesn’t even matter. It all boils down to fear, right? And so if we recognize that it is really fear that’s at the core of this, or in some cases it’s a lack of confidence or a lack of certainty. I’m not sure what’s going

Uncovering customer needs is critical. Essentially, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs implies that when one need is satisfied, another one is likely to pop up. Once I’ve got this satisfied, then I’m going to be working on this, and then I’m going to be working on this. It’s human nature. So if you recognize the fact that the needs are constantly going to be changing and you adopt a policy of constant requalification with your people — staying in touch, building that relationship, and finding out what they need next — you’re going to be in much better shape. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of uncovering customer needs. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much, David. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I think that this is another great topic because a lot of times we just decide on our own what we think the customer needs, right? So we formulate that in our mind and we try and force that square into a round hole. You’re probably creating a lot more problems that you really don’t need to have. Uncovering customer needs in sales David: Exactly. When salespeople go in with the idea of “what I want to sell this person,” instead of “what does this person need,” they’re behind the eight ball right from the beginning. And I think there are some schools of thought in terms of sales, particularly if it’s a company that has one primary product that they’re looking to push, that, okay, you just have to go in and sell this. It reminds me of, you know, selling things door to door. If you’re a Fuller brush salesman and you’re looking to sell this one particular brush, well that’s my thing. That’s what I’ve got to sell. If you are sort of a one trick pony like that, if you’ve got one thing you want to sell, then this can still actually apply to you. Because when we think in terms of customer needs, I think a lot of people get stuck on the idea that uncovering customer needs means discovering which products they want to buy from us. And uncovering customer needs goes way beyond that. It’s more about what do they really need? Where are they struggling? What do they need help with? What are they trying to accomplish? Because even if you’re selling a Fuller brush, if you go in with the idea of “do you want to buy this brush,” the answer is no. But if you find out that what they’re struggling with is that they’re very busy and they don’t have enough time, and their life is chaotic. Then you may be able to let them know that this Fuller brush is going to allow them to clean things faster and be more economical in their time and accomplish some of the things that they’re telling you are actually important to them. So while that’s a rather extreme example, it really goes to the whole idea of what I believe uncovering customer needs is all about. Uncovering customer needs with questions Jay: Yeah. And I think there’s only one way to get to customer needs and that’s to ask questions, right? David: Right. Jay: If you start out with your sales pitch, you’re not going to know what their needs are. And I also like the idea of letting them talk and that helps you build the relationship and discover their needs. Is there another way besides asking question? David: I don’t think there really is. I mean, you’ve got to be able to get the answers from them. The only way that you can actually uncover a need is for them to vocalize it. I mean, unless it’s something that you’ve observed, Hey, it looks like you could really use this. Right? Or if somebody refers you to that person and says my friend could really use what you’re offering here. But even then, it’s somebody else’s opinion. So that’s just the beginning of a point of conversation. Hey, your friend suggested I give you a call. I understand that you’re looking to accomplish this and perhaps this item can help. Wanted to see what your thoughts are about that. And then yeah, as you indicated, let them talk. Jay: Yeah, and letting them talk, I think you kind of help them understand why they need your product. And like you said, it may not be something they’re thinking about. They may not know that they need your product. But like you said, maybe there’s something else in their life where they don’t have a lot of time. This product will save you time and so you can actually deal with other issues in your life better. So, figuring out how you can best serve them and then helping them come to that conclusion. I love to go down that path in the sales process. David: Yeah, I agree, and I think this really kind of ties to the idea of what a lot of people think of in terms of features and benefits. If I’ve got a phone what&#8217

To monetize your sales pipeline, you need to fill it, prioritize it and tackle it. This whole idea of knowing what to do and not doing it, is rampant. It seems ridiculous. It’s like, well, who would do that? And the answer is nearly everybody does it. And none of us do it on purpose, but we all, to some extent, end up doing it. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to monetize your sales pipeline. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you, David. It’s such a pleasure to be here, and I really can’t wait to talk a little bit more about this process. I see people who kind of think they have a pipeline, but they’re not sure exactly what to do with it. So a good, important topic today. David: Yeah. What to do with it or in a lot of cases, even what it is. I think even before we can talk about how to monetize it, you almost have to identify it. What is it? What is your sales pipeline? Who is it? Who are the people who are in it? Where is it located? Is it just inside your head? Because if it’s just inside your head, leaving enormous amounts of money on the table. Jay: Yeah, and we’ve talked in the past about key performance indicators, KPIs, and so first you have to know what that pipeline is. Then you have to know how to track it and where people are at in each stage so that things ideally trigger automatically. I think that’s the end goal, but getting there can be difficult. 3 Steps to Monetize Your Sales Pipeline David: Yeah, I mean I think of it in terms of filling it, prioritizing it and then tackling it. Because if you’re not sort of doing it in that order, I think it’s going to potentially be problematic for you. Jay: All right. Well then let’s start with filling it. Let’s get that going. David: Okay, Well, when we talk about filling our pipeline after we’ve identified , after we’ve identified what it is and where it is, filling it obviously is the biggest thing. And I think a lot of salespeople tend to think of this as being pretty important, getting new leads into their pipeline. And of course, it is very important. It’s the number one step because until you know who’s in there, you don’t really have anything that you can do. You’ve got to have the prospect first. So filling it starts with asking yourself, who goes in here? And what types of clients am I looking for? Are they in particular types of industries? Are they located in a particular geographic area? What are the different things that I’m looking for in terms of a good, solid prospect for my pipeline? So who goes in is very important. But who stays out is also extremely important. And we don’t think about this, but it is so critical. In my sales career over the years, particularly in the early stages, I just thought if someone was willing to talk to me then they were a good prospect. And I learned, not as quickly as I should have, that that’s just not the case. There are people out there who will be happy to talk to you again and again and never actually buy anything from you. So when you’re looking at who goes in and who stays out, you want to think in terms of exactly that. When you are talking to someone, if you’re not able to get them qualified in as quickly as you’d like, to make sure that they have the need, the desire, the money, the budget, the willingness to spend, then you don’t want to keep going back to that well and expecting to get water out if there’s no water to be found. Jay: You know, we had exactly this problem here recently with the company I’ve been doing consulting for. They wanted to start using Google ads and David: mm-hmm. Jay: So they just put out some general pay for click kind of stuff, and their phones and their online scheduling just lit up. I mean every single day, packed and full. But only about 3% of those calls were related to their actual focus and their product. So they ended up spending all this time. And then what they had to do was go through a process of, like you said, Okay. Identifying the core customer and refining your keywords down to a point where you’re not getting all of that other stuff. At first, they’re like, “look at all these calls. This is going to be great,” and it turned into a huge detractor very quickly. To Monetize Your Sales Pipeline, Don’t Overfill it David: Yeah. And so when we think in terms of filling our pipeline, and I led with that. I said, Okay, first we have to fill it, but we don’t want to overfill it. And we particularly don’t want to fill it with people who have no likelihood of becoming clients. So, a lot of times the thought process is, you know, where is the next lead going to come from? Whether it’s coming from online, whether you’re doing something with Google, whether you’re doing in perso

Money is always flowing in one direction or another. And in a business, it needs to flow in from the customers. It needs to flow through to the employees and to the suppliers and to everybody who is providing you with services. And there needs to be something left over at the end to take home. And when you’re able to make those things happen consistently, everybody’s just better off. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing sales, profit, and personal income. Welcome Jay. Jay: Yeah. Thank you, David. I’m so excited, as usual, to talk about these topics that we discuss every podcast. I think that people often get caught up, especially small business owners, in one of these aspects, instead of having balance between all of them. And I feel like the one that they think about the most is sales. We have to drive sales. And if you’re not focusing on profitability in that regard, you could be generating all kinds of sales, but you’re not controlling your costs. And so ultimately those sales aren’t helping you. David: Yeah. Been there, done that. I think anybody, if you’ve started your own business, you’ve probably found yourself in this situation and gross sales is usually a good place for people to start. They’re thinking in terms of top line. Okay. I need to bring in as much as possible, which is true. You got to be bringing it in. But if you’re not paying attention to the rest of it, as you indicated, you could be selling a lot of stuff and losing money every day. And unless you’re keeping track of that, you’re not going to know it. I remember in the early days of my promotional products business, I would get together with my accountant once every 90 days. At the end of every quarter, actually the beginning of the following quarter, we would review the numbers for the previous quarter. And at that point, it’s too late to do anything about it. You feel like things are going well because you know, you’re selling stuff, but then you look at the expenses, the cost of goods, the cost of people, all your internal costs, your overhead costs. And you find out that you’re not making money on it. And 90 days later is too late. So once we got that in focus and we started doing it every month, reviewing what happened last month, where are our expenses too high and where are our gross sales too low? And which customers take up too much time and don’t generate enough revenue? Once we’re able to focus on the things that actually allow you to operate a profitable business, things got a lot better, a lot more quickly. And when we think in terms of these three things, sales, profit, and personal income, it’s almost like you’re starting here with the sales and then that generates whatever profit you have. And then after you’ve spent money on overhead and things, then you have some money to pay yourself, get some personal income going. But different businesses operate different ways. There are some business owners who are so focused on what am I going to bring in for myself that they may cut costs. They may short change people in terms of what they’re delivering in terms of product. They may choose less quality products. And so depending on where people’s focus is, determines where they’re going to be successful among those three things. Jay: Yeah. And I think you need balance. I mean, they’re all important. And so as you talked about looking at things monthly, I think having systems to identify and track each of these areas and have proper goals and benchmarks and reporting systems so that you can catch issues quickly. And pivot quickly is the only way you’re going to find balance in the force with these three things. David: Yeah, I agree. And I’ve operated businesses that had overhead that was too high. And that’s really hard. Because you feel like you’re trying to do everything right. And you’re trying to take care of the business and you’re trying to take care of your employees and you’re trying to take care of your customers. And if you don’t have the metrics right, it’s going to be pretty darn close to impossible to do that. And so finding the balance between the quality of product, which has to be high, the customer service, which has to be great. And the quality of client you’re interacting with, which also has to be great. When you get those three things lined up, you’re more likely to be successful, but if you’re not quite connected with some of those things, it’s a really uphill slog. Jay: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve kind of mentioned this in some other podcasts, but I see businesses when they need to increase their profitability. Their default is we need to increase revenue. And I think that can be misguided. Because in

Brute force selling usually comes about when someone feels like they have to sell their product or service, regardless of the needs, wants, or desires of their prospect. The antidote comes from better understanding, relationship building, and effective qualification. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing the idea of brute force selling. Welcome, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you so much, David. I know we’ve talked about a lot of different issues, you know, generating leads and those types of things. I’m very anxious to talk about this brute force. When I hear it, as a customer, I’m like “brute for selling? What exactly do you mean here?” Because I might want to run away from it. The Case Against Brute Force Selling David: Yeah, well, I’m not really here today to advocate for brute force selling, okay? So, definitely not my first choice, but it seems to me like there are so many people, so many industries that tend to engage in it, that I thought we should probably have the discussion. Jay: Yeah. I mean, nothing could be worse than chasing potential clients away. I think there’s a fine line between brute force and still trying to help customers understand the importance of your products and using good sales techniques. It’s really a fine line. Isn’t it? David: It is. There’s definitely a balance. And I think there’s a big difference between persistence and brute force selling. But to get to the core of it. I think one of the biggest problems that a lot of small business owners and salespeople have today is that they think in terms of selling. I have to sell this product, or I have to sell this idea. I have to sell this concept. I have to sell this customer. “I have to sell,” being the main thing. When you’re approaching someone for the first time with the idea of, “I have to sell,” it’s easy to slip into the wrong gear about trying to push what you have onto them before you’ve even identified, whether they have a need desire, money, budget, willingness to spend, any of those things. When I think in terms of brute force selling, to me, it’s often about people who have gotten into sales. They’ve been given maybe a lead sheet or in the old days, it was a phone book by their manager who said, “Go make sales. Knock yourself out.” And when you don’t know how to do that well, then trying to sort of push or bully or cajole people into buying from you becomes the default. So when the focus is just on sales as the first, middle, and end of the process, it’s kind of a lose/lose for both the salesperson and the prospect. Also for the company. So it’s a lose all the way around. Effective Qualification is the Key If we can train salespeople on the idea of first determining need, identifying whether or not this person is a good candidate for what we’re selling. I mean, we’re really just talking about qualifying. And a lot of salespeople and even a lot of sales managers fail to make the distinction between qualification and selling. When we’re qualifying somebody, we’re not trying to convince or persuade them to buy our stuff. We’re trying to find out if our stuff even makes sense for them. And what I’ve seen over the years is that there are a lot of salespeople who waste enormous amounts of time pushing and trying to sell to people who have absolutely no capability even to buy what it is that they’re selling. Without taking that step back and saying, okay, let’s do a little qualification first. Let’s find out what this person is dealing with, and what sort of help they need. And if I can even help them, if you do that first, then you can find out pretty quickly if somebody is a good prospect for you or not. And if they’re not, then rather than trying to push them into buying something that they don’t want or can’t afford you can thank them for their time. And you can actually move on and get in front of somebody who has a much better likelihood of doing business with you. Jay: Yeah. So you’re not wasting your time. I love this idea. I also think that qualifying them in advance will help you with the sales process because you’re going to be able to identify pain points. You’re going to build a relationship with them while you’re trying to qualify them. And so that can help you potentially close the sale later on. If you just dive in and try and close instantly, you’re probably lessening the chances that you’re going to accomplish that goal. David: No question. And I think there’s also in a lot of businesses, the element of preparation. Laying the groundwork ahead of time. Marketing. Creating an environment in which the people you’re approaching may be aware of you even before you meet them. Righ

When we talk about capturing leads online, we’re referring to lures and lead magazines. It could be a free report. It could be a cheat sheet. It could be some sort of checklist, something that they request, they download. It would be offered on your website. And ideally, you would have some sort of sequential autoresponder connected to the back end. So that the minute they enter their information, it’s processed by the system, and the thing they requested is sent out to the email address they provided. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing the idea of capturing leads online. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much, David. It’s great to be here. And I think this is such an important topic especially when people just have a website that just talks about what their services are, but it’s not designed to capture any information. And I think that’s a huge, missed opportunity. David: I think so, too. And there are so many businesses who know they need to have a website and they generally do have websites. Very often they’re brochure sites where it’ll just have some information about the company. In some cases, they’ll have catalog sites. If they have actual images of products that people can look at. Sometimes they’ll have a full e-commerce site where people can actually buy products online. So lots of those types of things are generally thought of as being what’s required in a website. But one of the things that seems to be missing from a lot of small business websites, is just some sort of engaging lead capture system. So that’s really what I thought would be worthwhile discussing today. Capturing Leads Online Starts with a Goal Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I think that each website should have a goal, at least if you’re selling online, and that is to get them through the funnel, into a purchase. Or to get them to sign up and give you their email. Because an email list today is one of the most powerful tools that you have to market your products. David: Yeah, it definitely is. And I think a lot of times, business people and salespeople can forget that in typical sales scenarios, you have to meet someone before you can sell to them. So the idea of having your website set up in a way where you can actually attract and get people to provide their information so that they will eventually interact with you is really key to that process. I think a lot of people still approach their website as something that when they’re talking to someone, they can say, “oh, visit my website.” Or they can put it at the bottom of their email signature and maybe people will go there. But the truth of the matter is that if a website is not set up properly, then people are going to bounce off it the way that a bug bounces off a windshield. You’ll never even know who was there. And that’s why I think this idea is so important. If you look at the fact that there are going to be people hitting your site. Now, that’s not always the case. Sometimes people have websites, and nobody knows about them. Nobody’s hitting the site. However, if you’ve been in business for any length of time, if you’ve been promoting your web address, then people are going to go there. And if they don’t have something to do that will allow themselves to be made known to you like to say, “I’m here. This is who I am,” then you’re just never going to know about that business. Jay: Yeah, exactly. and I think that how you harvest that email is also very important. I get frustrated sometimes with this process. Because somebody will say “get a free estimate, instant estimate” and I’ll go, “okay!” And I’ll enter some information and then they’re like, “give us your email and we’ll send you the estimate.” And I’m like, “I don’t want to sign up for your email list.” And so I know a lot of people that will use a separate email, you know, for those types of things. So they’re not spammed like crazy. I think there is a danger of upsetting your potential clients. If you do this wrong. There are Right and Wrong Ways of Capturing Leads Online David: I agree. And you don’t want it to come across as any sort of bait and switch. Because if you do that, yeah, your credibility is totally shot. I do think that the way that I’ve seen a lot of people approach this, in terms of “lead generation,” I’ll put that in air quotes. Is that what they’ll do is put some sort of contact form on their website and it’ll say, enter your first name, your last name, your email, address, your phone number. What is it you want to talk about? Your next of kin? Your social security number? I’m exaggerating, but they put a lot of information on there and s

Technology can either help customer service a whole lot, or it can harm it a whole lot, depending on how it’s used. It’s like a weapon. You can use a knife to cut a steak, or you can use a knife to hurt somebody. And I think the technology is being used the same ways, where they’re trying to save themselves time and energy and effort. And they’re forgetting the fact that there are other human beings on the other end of that technology. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of customer service. Is it well and truly dead? Welcome Jay. Jay: Well, I think it depends upon the industry, but I’m going to say it’s more dead than not as far as I can tell. David: Yeah, it’s sad. And I feel like in some businesses, in the best businesses, it’s not dead. And it creates a tremendous advantage for those who are still keeping it alive, whether on life support or just because it’s the way they do business. But wow. I have had so many experiences recently where it seems like not only is the customer service unresponsive, uncooperative, unpleasant… Jay: Mm-hmm David: And there’s just this level of apathy that seems to go with it, which when you combine those things, really does seem pretty deadly. Jay: Yeah. And I think there is a temptation — because there’s such great technology out there — there is a temptation to say, “look, we can cut our costs if we just implement this new technology that maybe answers questions online” or “press one for this or for that.” I can see the temptation, but I don’t know if they clearly understand the frustration. I’ll tell you one of my pet peeves right now are the chatbots. I’ll go online and they’ll say, “Hey, if you don’t want to sit on hold,” which is an admission already that you don’t have enough people, ” go ahead, just chat with us.” And I’m thinking I’m going to get a live person. And no, I get a chatbot and I type in my question and it sends me to a predefined link that doesn’t answer my question. And I’m like, “I’ve just wasted 15 minutes and I could have been on hold the whole time.” So, very cool tech, but on the customer end, I think it’s frustrating a lot of people. Does Technology Help or Hurt Customer Service? David: It really can, particularly because technology can either help customer service a whole lot, or it can harm it a whole lot, depending on how it’s used. It’s just like any other weapon, right? It’s like a weapon. You can use a knife to cut a steak, or you can use a knife to hurt somebody. And I think the technology is being used the same ways, where they’re trying to save themselves time and energy and effort. And they’re forgetting that there are other human beings on the other end of that technology. But even beyond that, tech aside, there are now situations where you leave a message for somebody, or you send them an email. I mean, that is obviously tech as well, but if the human being behind the email does not respond to the email or they don’t return the phone call or they don’t return the voicemail or they don’t return the text. Now it’s actually more human error than tech error. And that’s where I think customer service is really struggling right now. Because if you’ve got well-meaning well-intentioned people who are determined to use the technology to make customer service better, then those companies are not just going to survive, they’re going to thrive. But the problem is there are people in organizations who just don’t care enough about the customers to even do the basic minimum things like returning phone calls, returning voicemails, and that sort of thing. Jay: Yeah. And then there’s the question of, you know, how do you know if you’re a business? How do you know if those calls are being returned? How do you gauge your customer service? Do you have a system to follow up with customers to see what their experience was like? If you don’t have a system to gauge that, you may be in real trouble because of your customer service and not even know it. David: We were talking in a previous episode about the idea of when costs are increased and you have to look for places to cut back. When there are situations where a company is employing people who are not taking care of the customer, if you’ve got to cut back personnel, that’s the best place to start. If there are people who will not be educated, and who are unwilling to learn what it takes to continue conversations with clients, that is really problematic. And so for the people who are serious about growing and expanding their business, who are serious about maintaining the type of customers that make you w

Being profitable is important, even with higher costs. Generally small and medium-sized businesses want to hang onto their staff. We want to keep our people. We recognize that we’ve got responsibilities to people other than ourselves. What I’ve been seeing though in the news lately, is that a lot of larger companies see this stuff coming and they’re like, okay, we’re cutting costs. We’re laying off 10% of our workforce, that sort of thing. So it’s different, depending on the size of your business and depending on your mindset, what you are willing to do and how much pain you’re willing to take when it comes to absorbing some of these extra costs. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of being profitable even with higher costs. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much, David. What an important topic. So many businesses are experiencing this right now. Their costs have gone up. Inflation is affecting everybody right now. So I love that you’re taking some time to talk about this topic. David: Yeah. I saw an article recently where they were discussing the fact that in the promotional products industry, in particular, what a lot of businesses are noticing is that even when their sales are even or potentially higher than they were last year, they’re not as profitable because their costs have increased. So keeping at the same sales volume is not going to cut it anymore. Jay: Yeah. And, we all hope that this is a temporary problem, but in the meantime, people have got to learn how to pivot. And I think that is one of the hardest things for businesses to do, especially quickly. The quick pivot. Like, okay, what are we going to do in the short term while our costs have gone up? David: Yeah, and I think that word, “pivot,” has probably gotten more use in the past 18 months to two years than it probably got in all of human history before that. Because everybody realized we have to do things differently. And what are we going to do and how are we going to do it? And when it comes to increased costs, the options are relatively limited. I mean, basically, you either have to be able to increase your overall sales and make up for it with the profit that you’re already getting, or a reduced profit. Or you’ve got to be able to reduce your cost so that you can get that spread back. You’ve got a cost to do things. And you’ve got a cost associated with what you’re going to sell it for. And the gap is where all the money is made. Without the gap, we’re out of business. And so keeping your sales at a certain level is not going to do it if your costs are approaching that same level. So a lot of it is really about identifying the primary costs in my business. And unfortunately, it’s really a matter of also being rather relentless about the idea of cutting back on the things that are not currently working. And that can be really difficult because one of the biggest expenses in a business is very often personnel. And so what that means is looking at the people that you’re working with and saying, okay, who’s pulling their weight? Who is more than pulling their weight? And those who aren’t, what can we do to help them to pull their weight or more than pull their weight so that we can continue to grow to be able to simply offset the costs that have increased so much? Jay: Yeah. I think the knee-jerk response from most businesses is let’s find a way to increase sales. But you know, they have to understand that depending upon their profit margin, if you increase your sales by $10, that may be $1 to the bottom line. But if you save a dollar in costs, that’s a dollar to your bottom line. If you save $10 in cost, that’s $10 to your bottom line. And so increasing efficiency, like you said. Maybe help train or implement better systems. I think all of those things go a long way to saving. You know, a dollar saved is a dollar earned, right? David: Yeah, exactly. I think you’re right, particularly when it comes to small and medium-sized businesses. Generally small and medium-sized businesses, we want to hang onto our staff. We want to keep our people. We recognize that we’ve got responsibilities to people other than ourselves. What I’ve been seeing though in the news lately, is that a lot of larger companies see this stuff coming and they’re like, okay, we’re cutting costs. We’re laying off 10% of our workforce, that sort of thing. So it’s different, depending on the size of your business and depending on your mindset, what you are willing to do and how much pain you’re willing to take when it comes to absorbing some of these extra costs. Jay: Yeah, I’ve seen several industries that have decided, well, in the short term, like in the pandemic, we’re going to look at the services we offer and maybe we&#8217

If you don’t think increasing order size and frequency is important, consider the alternative. Small orders and one-time clients can kill a business. You can spend an enormous amount of time tracking down one small order. And if you do a lot of that with a lot of different people, you can be busy, busy, busy, all day long, but not generating the revenue you need to sustain, let alone grow your business. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing increasing the size and frequency of your client orders. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much. And I have to tell you, I really love this topic. Because I think people get in a rut where they think the only way to increase profit is to add more customers, instead of looking at your current client base and saying, well, how can we expand on what they’re doing and using them as a lead source? David: Right. Yeah. And there are lots of different ways that people can engage in this. And the reason that I raised the topic is that Chris Ruvo from ASI recently published an article about a survey they did at the ASI Show in Chicago recently. And they talked about the biggest concerns that promotional product distributors have. And the one that came up as number one in the options that they were given was increasing the size and the frequency of client orders. So I thought, okay, this is a really good topic to discuss. Because it has such a tremendous impact on people’s businesses and it’s hardly ever considered. Right? A lot of times, as salespeople, we go out there, we get an order and we bring it back and you know, it’s just like hunting. You go out. You hunt it down. You kill it. You drag it back. You cook it and eat it. A lot of people take the same sort of approach in sales. And we don’t recognize the fact that different clients are going to behave differently. Different orders are going to be different. When we combine small orders and one-time clients, that combination — small orders, and one-time clients — can really be a business killer. Because you can spend an enormous amount of time just tracking down that one order. It’s a small order and you spend a lot of time on it. And if you do a lot of that with a lot of different people, you can be busy, busy, busy, all day long, but not generating the revenue you need to sustain, let alone grow your business. Jay: Yeah, such a good point. And I think for a lot of companies, their biggest expense is that customer acquisition cost. Right? And if you can lower that or make it so once you’ve experienced that cost, you don’t have to experience it over and over again. Because you’re increasing sales with your clients and increasing their orders. That’s just a really smart way to go, I think. David: Yeah, exactly. And so when we have clients who are able to spend more, place larger orders and are willing to do so more frequently, then that’s a real winning situation. But for people who don’t have that, it becomes a real struggle. Because they say, “okay, well I’ve got all these different customers, and they buy from me once a year and they place small orders. Where do you go with that? And the reality of the situation is that if you don’t have clients like that and you want to create a better, more sustainable business, you’re going to have to actually go out and hunt them down. As you talked about, it’s better when we can do it with our own internal customer base. Unfortunately, that’s just not always possible. Jay: Yeah. Not always possible. But I’m sure there are some tricks to the trade. I’m wondering, do you do this by offering or adding different product lines so you can offer something new to these clients? What’s the smart way to go about this? David: Yeah, it’s a great question. And again, a lot of the work that we do is in the promotional products industry. So there’s no shortage of different ideas and different products. There are literally hundreds of thousands of products that can be represented by a promotional product distributor. So to some extent, that’s already baked into the equation. You can recommend different things, new ideas, all that sort of thing. But particularly when the economy is a little more challenging, I think ego advertising goes out the window. When the economy is good, if I’m feeling good about things, yeah, I might think nothing of slapping my company logo on some mugs, shirts or tote bags and just get it out there because I think it’s cool to have my name on a tote bag. But as things get tougher for people, as expenses go up and people are looking for ways to cut back, one of the first things that’s going to go is essentially ego advertising. To get people to place larger orders and order more frequently, tie the products to the results the

Why is it that some businesses take off like a rocket while others can languish for months or years without creating explosive growth? Why do some businesses plateau at a certain level and struggle to break through, while others are able to grow consistently? In my experience, it boils down to three things we’ll discuss in this episode. Recently, I was reminded of a story about how Chinese bamboo trees grow very slowly underground, for years, completely unseen. The people who plant these trees water and fertilize the soil every day, even though there are no signs of life. Sounds tedious, right? Watering the same patch of dirt for years? I mean, that HAS to feel pretty unfulfilling at times. But the amazing part of the story is that roughly five years after planting — when the bamboo finally breaks the surface of the ground — it can grow up to 90 feet tall in just five weeks. That is a great example of creating explosive growth! And while a typical bystander might see that and think, “wow, that grew really fast!” The people who actually do the work — those who plant, water, fertilize and cultivate these plants — know EXACTLY what it took to trigger that growth. I love this analogy because it tracks so closely to the work I’ve done with promotional product businesses over the past 20+ years. Some of the people I work with might start out feeling a bit like the bamboo gardener — tending, nurturing, and cultivating a business that seems like it might never break through the soil. In fact, some are stuck for more years than it takes for a bamboo tree to crack through the dirt and see the light of day. But the good news is that promo businesses AREN’T bamboo trees. They’re not subject to the same restrictive laws of nature. Instead, there are very specific steps we can take to prep the environment and TRIGGER explosive growth much faster. In fact, when I work with clients, we operate in two primary modes: First is Stealth Mode This is where we lay the groundwork that no one else sees. It’s what’s happening beneath the surface. In bamboo terms, it would be the equivalent of supercharging the seeds, soil, water, and fertilizer to create a better, stronger, faster-growing plant that is heartier and more resilient than the other plants. Second is Intimidation Mode I know that sounds obnoxious. But the simple fact is that when you initiate explosive growth in a business, people notice. Their prospects are excited to see something new and different. Their clients are excited to be associated with a winner, OUR clients are excited to have their businesses attracting the right people and growing the way they want… And their competitors? Well, they just get intimidated. It’s not the intention. But it’s often a side effect. So each month, we offer a small group of promotional product distributors the opportunity to work with us to plant the seeds. Our goal is to help you quickly: Lay the groundwork Plant the seeds and Trigger explosive growth And we do this using our proprietary, proven framework. It is NOT cheap, but it is EXTREMELY effective. So what does creating explosive growth actually look like in a promotional products business? Well, let’s start with what it doesn’t look like… It doesn’t look like 10 to 20% annual growth. I mean, think about it. If you start at $50,000 in sales your first year and settle for 10% annual growth, it would take you more than 32 years to hit $1,000,000 in sales. Even at 20% growth, it would take more than 17 years. So if you’re serious about growth — particularly in the early stages — 10% to 20% annual growth is not going to do it for you. Ask yourself this. Are your current year-over-year numbers getting you to where you want to be? And if so, are they getting you there fast enough? Usually, creating explosive growth requires at least doubling your revenue multiple times over. Growing from, say $50,000 to $100,000 to $250,000 to $500,000 to $1,000,000+. Of course, the larger you get, the harder it is to continue to double like that. But in that example, with year-over-year doubling, you can get from $50,000 to $1,000,000 in four years. If you can achieve those doubles in less time, you can get there even faster. Of course, not everyone in our industry is interested in achieving that sort of growth. And you don’t have to be. I know many people who are happy to generate whatever sales they can in the time they allocate to it. But that’s not who this particular message is for… Instead, this is for you if you WANT to achieve exceptional results but have been struggling to get there… It’s for you if you KNOW you are capable of reaching your goals, but you’ve been unable to blast through your current sales plateau… It’s for you if you have been in the industry for months or years, and you’re still not trigge

It’s not like, well, there’s just one method for ruling your territory. But the one thing that is critical to all of it, is identifying your area. Identifying your territory. Focusing in on it and making sure that you become a known commodity in that area. So that people have the opportunity to choose you. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast in today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing the idea of ruling your territory. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Yeah. Thank you, David. This is a really interesting topic. I’ve been excited to get to this topic, ruling your territory, being the master of your general… David: your domain Jay: …area. Yeah, of your domain. David: That was a Seinfeld episode, I think. Jay: Yeah, that’s right. However you want to say it. So many of the things that we talk about, I don’t know if they’re top of mind for business owners or for salespeople. They have so many other things going on. For them to be thinking about market share or things like that and how that can affect their business, especially over the long haul. David: Yeah. That’s why I think it’s great to discuss. Because when we are in the thick of it, we tend to forget about the fact that, whoever we are, if we’re a business owner or a salesperson, we are operating in a particular territory. And recognizing that we could be spread out, we could have a few customers. Let’s say we have two customers in one huge city, and we’ve got two customers in another huge city somewhere else. If we’re sort of spread out, but nobody else in either of those cities even know who we are, at that point we’re really not ruling our territory. And this idea sort of traces along with the idea of dominating your market, which is something that we talk about quite often. You know, what is your market? What is your territory? How do you define it? Is it defined primarily geographically that you sell primarily in your small geographic area? In your area of town? Your city? Your state? Is it nationwide? Is it with particular industries? How do you define it? Because that’s going to determine whether you are just inhabiting a territory or ruling it, dominating it. Jay: I like that question. Are you just inhabiting? Are you just there? Or are you ruling it? And I think one of the things that can be done, and I don’t see this in a lot of small businesses, is just making a list of all of your potential clients. And that should give you an idea of where you stand. And then if you know a list of who they’re using. And so, you know, your client and you know who your competitors are. I would think that that’s probably a good place to start. David: It’s a great place to start. And also thinking in terms of the other people who are like your clients who operate in a similar area, either in a similar geographic area or a similar demographic, however, you’re defining your territory. Also, when I use words like ruling and dominating, I don’t want them to sound as intimidating as some people interpret them to be. What I mean is that you’re essentially staking your claim. You’re saying, okay, look, this is an area where I want to do well. I want to excel. I want to be known. I want people to know me and I want to know other people in this particular market. They’re not all going to do business with me. I recognize that, but I want to make sure that all of the people who could potentially use my products and services at least know that I exist so that they could consider me if it makes sense for us to work together. Jay: Yeah. I think that’s really important. I think a lot of times people think about, well, I go in and I get the sale and if I don’t get the sale, well, then I’m done with that customer. But if you make it more of I’m going to go in and get a relationship, instead of a sale. If you get the sale, that’s great. But if you don’t, what happens when the customer they’re using falls down? David: Right. Jay: When the customer they’re using makes a mistake or goes out of business. If you already have that relationship, well now you are going to be the first call, right? So that relationship, I think, is so important. David: Yeah, I agree. And I think for most salespeople, the idea of relationship, it’s always a great talking point. Not always as well practiced as it should be. But it’s absolutely true. If we’re establishing relationships, that’s going to be great. And as many relationships as possible and as makes sense in a particular area. So let’s say somebody’s focused on selling to a niche industry, a niche industry, however you want to pronounce it. And you’re selling to the tech industry. You want to make sure that you’re interacting with as many tech people as possible within the market or t

Anybody who’s been in sales has probably been in a situation where you’ve been in a room with someone and you’re looking at them and you’re having a conversation with them. And they’re looking around the room. They’re looking at things. People are buzzing them on the phone. They’re like, “excuse me.” They’re taking the call and you’re sitting there thinking, “why am I here? Why am I doing this?” So other people maintaining focus (or not) will give you a really good idea of where you stand with them. David: Hello, and welcome to the podcast. We are back once again. Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing, maintaining focus in your day. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: It’s so good to be here, David. And I know that focus is something that everybody’s working on. One of the reasons I know this is all of the technology companies are building focus tools into their devices. We must be wanting this because I can now tell my phone, no I’m focused on this and it gives me different screens for that particular time so that I can be focused in on this. So we must all want to be able to focus better. And the question is, how do we achieve that? David: Yeah. Especially when there are other technology companies that are trying to get you to focus on them. Right? You gave a great example. I noticed that too, on my phone, there’s the new focus button. And I like that idea, but in the meantime, nearly every social media platform is designed to steal your focus, to derail you from what it is that you wanted to do today in favor of what they would like to have you do today, which is to scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, and then scroll some more. So we do have technology that is working for us, and we have technology that is working against us. But last time when we were talking about the idea of building proactively, I think these things tie together. As we’re building proactively, we recognize that it does require day-to-day focus. And so in order to do that, we have to say, okay, how are we going to make it happen? Particularly with all sorts of forces, potentially conspiring against us. Jay: Yeah. I love that point, that on the one hand tech is trying to help us focus, and then everything else in the world, I’m like, “squirrel!” You know, squirrel there’s something new and it’s not just social media who’s trying to distract you. It’s the employees who want your time, the customers who call up because they don’t know your schedule. They just know they have a question, right? So they’re calling you. So how do you go about building some semblance of focus throughout your day with all of these distractions that are coming in constantly? David: Well, from my standpoint, I think we need to decide at the beginning of the day, as early as possible, what really needs to happen today? Because that’ll help us to determine where our focus needs to be. What is it that actually has to get done? What has to happen? What do you have to do versus what do other people in your organization have to do? So if you own the organization, you’re going to have to determine what you’re doing and what they need to be focused on. And how are you going to avoid distraction? Lots of people have, or had, open door policies when people were working together. Do I have my door open? Do I have my door closed? I liked the idea of having an open-door policy. So for many years in my business, I did. But unfortunately, that sometimes programs people to think, okay, door’s open! I’m constantly available. So you really need to balance that and make determinations as far as how much of your time during a given day is going to be dedicated to focus time. The work that you have to get done in a specific timeframe, in a specific way, without distraction. And then adapt or create an environment that allows you to do that. Jay: Yeah. I have a funny story. I went to a company, it was a brand new company. They just built this beautiful building. And I went to the CEO and his desk was right out in the middle of everybody else’s. David: Wow. Jay: No cubicle walls, nothing. There’s the CEO’s desk, right? And about six months later, I went back. And instead of that desk, there was an office. And I’m like, what happened? And he is like, well, I just realized, as much as I wanted the open door feeling and that people could come to me. I just couldn’t do the things that I needed to do, because it was like a line, where people were wanting to talk to me every few minutes. David: Right. Yeah. And so everybody needs to determine how much they can take. How much they can actually get done, without completely distracting themselves. And you basically have to engineer your environment around that. But I think the idea of, professionals in particular, requiring the ability and

All of the things that we’re talking about, go to the idea of building your business proactively. From the standpoint of a business owner, how am I going to do this in a way that will actually work? From the standpoint of an employee, how can I get that stuff done? It requires coordination. But more than anything else, I think it requires this proactivity that we’re talking about. David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of building your business proactively. Jay, great to see you. Jay: Thank you so much. So glad to be here as always, David. And I love this word, proactive. I know a lot of small business owners and I wouldn’t say they’re proactive. I would use the word haphazard. David: Ooh. Jay: Things just kind of happen. They’re lucky because they get referrals or things like that. But there’s not really any structure or proactivity to how they grow their business. David: Yeah. And I would love to say, “well, I started out being proactive.” But I really didn’t. And that’s why I particularly enjoy this topic. So often when I’m doing presentations for live groups, this comes up. Because so many people feel like they’re constantly having to react and deal with the day-to-day, I’ve got clients calling. I’ve got employees knocking on my door. And when you are reacting all day, it really leaves you in a difficult situation when you are actually trying to build a business proactively. So that’s why I think it’s a great topic to discuss. Jay: Yeah, I totally agree with you. When you’re in your reactive mind you’re, just not in a good place. You’re going to be responding quickly, not giving time to actually think about what you’re doing. If you’re doing sales, it’s going to put your sales at risk. If you’re working with your coworkers, it might turn out to be something you’re apologizing for later. Reacting is just not the way to go. I’ve always been taught you can act or you can react. And you want to focus on acting, because that’s purposeful, and that’s more the person that you want to be. David: Yeah, I think it was Steven Covey in one of the Seven Habits materials that he put out where he was talking about the difference between responding and reacting. Subtle nuance there as well. But I think when we talk about proactive, it’s a completely different discussion. Jay: Yeah, I totally agree. So here I am. I’ve got this business, like you said, phone calls coming in. I got employees knocking on the door. I’m trying to have meetings. How do I go about this? What are some of the first steps to get to where I’m acting instead of reacting? David: Well, I think one of the first things is allocating time, creating time setting aside time. I’m not going to say finding time because no one ever finds time to do things. But creating the time, allocating the time to really think about what you want to have happen in your business. What type of clients you want to attract. What size customers you’re looking for. How many you’re looking for. What industries? All those types of things. Because, when we are being reactive, none of that comes into play. It’s basically whoever stumbles through the door, whoever can fog a mirror. And if you want to build a business like we’re describing, you can no longer just settle for that. Jay: Yeah. Are you a fan of time blocking? Like looking at your calendar the next day and blocking out like this hour is going to be for sales calls. This hour is going to be for training or whatever. David: I think it can be very helpful, but I wouldn’t say that it’s always completely effective. I think it’s a great idea when you can pull it off, recognizing that life interferes sometimes. And so, yeah, I think it’s good to have parameters in place to say, “this is the time I have allocated to this.” And of course, if something comes along to disrupt it you’ve got to have a backup. “Okay, what am I going to do in the event that happens?” But yeah, I think it’s great, particularly for the most important aspects of what we do. To allocate the time for that. So whether it’s just blocking out specific times a day or a couple days, a week. As long as you know that you’re going to get those big rocks as the old analogy goes, you know, putting the big rocks in first and then you put the smaller rocks and then you put the sand and then you put the water. If you’re filling it up, you can’t do it backwards or you won’t get everything in. So I think the idea of allocating time for those big rocks is really important. Jay: Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. I’m more like the squirrel. You know, I’ve got 10 screens going an

Particularly in the early stages, you can do more of what you’re doing to get past a sales plateau. But generally, at some point, we hit a plateau that is created by the fact that we can’t run any faster. We can’t do any more by ourselves. So we either need to implement new procedures and new processes, we need to get some help, or something needs to change fundamentally in the business, in order to get us to that next level. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing the idea of overcoming your sales plateau. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: It’s so good to be here again with you David, and as always, I’m very excited about this topic. I know businesses that hit these thresholds. It can be a monumental task to get to the next level and they’re not sure how to do it. Is it, is it marketing? Is it adding new products? I think that’s what a lot of them try to do. They’re like, well, let’s add 10 more products to the lineup and then we’ll do it. And oftentimes that can just make the situation worse and not better. David: Yeah, it’s true. Most businesses, I think it’s safe to say, at some point run into some sort of plateau. They hit a level of sales and they can’t get past it. I believe in small businesses this is particularly true, where you’re just working and pushing and you’re trying to get to that next benchmark. And you just can’t reach it. And there are thresholds, I believe in small business, getting to your first hundred thousand in gross sales and then your first 250, and then you hit 500 and then a million and then 2 million and going from there. And in the early stages, you can generally do pretty well, like to get from a hundred thousand to 250 is often easier than it is to get from a million to 2 million. But most of us, at some point, will encounter some sort of plateau. You get there, you see it, you’re targeting it, you’re working toward it and you just can’t seem to hit it. And so it’s really just a matter of getting stuck. It’s like, I feel like I’m stuck and I’m here and I need to be here and I’m not sure what to do next. Jay: Yeah. And I wonder how much of it is that they’re not really sure how they got to the first plateau. I mean, they may think that they know, David: That’s true. Jay: But it could be something completely different. And this could go back to something we talked about in a previous podcast: following up with your customers. Find out why they purchased, how they feel about their purchase. Are they returning customers? Are they not returning customers? So if you didn’t understand why they bought in the first place and how they felt about that purchase, it’s going to be hard to push through that next plateau. David: It is, absolutely. And the biggest hangup that I see for most people is not knowing, “what do I do next?” And as you indicated, people get to a certain point in some cases, they’re not sure how they did it. What’s that referred to as? Unconscious competence? Jay: Mm-hmm, David: Where I’m doing things and it’s working, but I’m not even sure of what I’ve done. So I haven’t gotten around to building a system around it to put that into place so I can replicate it. But there’s also the idea that what gets me to here will not necessarily get me to here. Right? So what gets me to level one won’t necessarily get me to level two. That’s not always the case, particularly in the early stages, you can do more of what you’re doing to get to a higher level. But generally, at some point, we hit a plateau that is created by the fact that we can’t run any faster. We can’t do any more by ourselves. So we either need to implement new procedures and new processes. Or we need to get some help. Or something needs to change fundamentally in the business, in order to get us to that next level. Jay: Yeah, something that can be very hard for people, delegation, right? Letting go of your baby, right? David: Yeah. Jay: That you worked so hard on. And now you’re going to trust some new employee with some new aspect. It’s not easy to hand those things over. But often, if you’re not willing to do it, you’re not going to grow. David: That’s true. And some people don’t want to. Some people are like, okay, look, I don’t want to have employees. I’m comfortable with the way things are. And if they are, then that’s fine. If they want to get to another level of sales though, then it’s really going to be a lot more about processes. If you’re determined not to get additional help, at least in terms of human resources, then you’re going to have to figure things out in terms of either technological resources or being able

Reactivating your client base is easier when you create a community. This is overlooked by a lot of business people. If you’re interested in keeping your clients engaged and interacting, then by creating a community where you can interact with them on an ongoing basis, and they can, in some cases, interact with each other, it creates more of a bond than they would likely have with somebody if they’re just doing more of a transactional type of thing. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing reactivating your client base. Welcome Jay. Jay: It’s good to be here. You know, it’s funny. I hear this everywhere I go now. If I watch Shark Tank or anything else, I hear this term CAC. You know, what is your CAC? And it’s your customer acquisition cost. And I have to believe that your CAC, for a customer you’ve already worked with, has got to be lower than trying to bring in a brand new customer. Am I right? David: Oh, absolutely. And I think instinctively as business people, we probably already know this. We’ve probably heard it a hundred times, but the purpose of this discussion is not to have you hear it again. The purpose of this discussion is to ask, “are you doing this?” And if so, how well are you doing this? How much better could you be doing this? Because as you pointed out, once you’ve invested that money to acquire a customer, now you want to be able to leverage that relationship as much as possible to provide them with additional help, additional solutions so that you can generate the revenue. They can get the results they’re looking for, and you’re not spending more money to attract people. You’re able to just expand the relationships that you have with the people who you’ve already acquired that first time. Jay: Yeah. And I think it’s disappointing if you spent that money for customer acquisition and then you don’t have a system to retain them or keep them online. And so now it’s almost like you’re spending the same money twice. If you’re trying to get them back again. David: Right. Yes. And so when we think about reactivation, there are a couple of aspects to it. One is just people who haven’t bought from you in a little while, to touch base with them again, to reengage those people and to see what they want, what they need. Essentially, requalifying them to find out where they are in that process. Are they ready to buy more things? Do they have a date in mind when they want to buy? Are they ready to go now? Or are they just not ready to do anything? Are they sort of disqualified for the moment? Are they unresponsive to you? Because they’ll generally fall into one of those five categories. They’re either ready to buy. They have dates in mind when they want to buy. They’re open to the idea, but not sure when. Or they’re disqualified, or they’re not responsive. When you are able to go back and sort of requalify your existing clients, you can reactivate the ones who are ready to go now. You can schedule the ones who know when they want to go next. And the ones who are generally receptive, you can just stay in touch. Jay: Yeah. Or what about the ones who were disappointed, but they didn’t take the time. Right? So many customers will never tell you that they had a bad experience. They just move on and… David: Yeah. Jay: you had no idea. So you’re not improving your customer service and your chance of reviving that customer is very low. David: Yeah. And that’s an excellent point, too. Because as you indicated, if you don’t know that, but you’re reaching out to them to see how you can help next, and you find out about that problem, then at least you have the possibility of restoring the relationship, if not doing anything about the previous order. Jay: Yeah. So what are we talking about here? Like good drip campaigns? Is that kind of where you would start? So you’re in constant contact? What do you think is the best way to go about this? David: Well, I do think it starts with engaging your people. And engaging your people can be done in a lot of different ways. It can be done via email with a drip campaign. It can be done on the phone. It can be done in person. There are lots of different ways that we can engage with people. But recognizing that there is a tendency, sometimes, after we’ve sold something, to immediately move on to the next thing. “Okay. That’s taken care of. That’s done. Now I’m onto the next thing.” And then we sort of forget about that person until we either hear back from them. Or until and unless we’ve got some sort of procedure in place, in our own businesses, to remind us to go back to those people and see where they are in the process. And see how we can help them again. So I would say it

Protecting yourself from recession isn’t always easy. You’ve probably been through a recession or two in your time. And so for people who haven’t done this, it’s not fun. It’s not an exciting time. But I think the first thing that leap to mind for me is not to panic because for a lot of people, that’s the go-to strategy, and not necessarily the best one. And you recognize that, okay, things might be different here. Just as they were during the pandemic. They’re different, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed, even while others are struggling. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. Today, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of protecting yourself from recession. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Yeah, thank you for letting me be here. This is a big word that I’m hearing a lot now. The potential for recession, you know, we have a lot of inflation. We’ve got supply chain issues. You’ve got real estate issues. And so it’s something I think every company should be saying, “okay, what are we going to do if things start to turn south?” Because we really have enjoyed a pretty aggressive economy even through the pandemic. David: Yes we did. I feel a little bad even really talking about this topic. Because I feel like, for some people, they are just getting past pandemic stuff and quarantine and all that kind of thing. Jay: Mm-hmm David: And things seem to be going reasonably well with a lot of businesses at the moment. Sales are up in a lot of businesses compared to last year. But everything we hear in the news is very concerning. And so I thought, okay, well we should at least discuss this. Not from the standpoint of how bad things are, but what can we do about it? Because that’s really the big thing. Jay: Yeah, you know, I work with a lot of restaurants and I watched them pivot during the recession. And a lot did very well, but they had to be very smart. Like let’s shut down our dining room. Let’s go delivery only. Let’s go drive-through only. David: Mm-hmm Jay: And it’s something they were kind of deciding on the fly. It made me realize that every company should have a plan, not just like “let’s hope this doesn’t happen. And if it does, we’ll figure it out when it does.” David: Yeah, it’s really amazing. Because some restaurants did really badly and others, who were able to make that switch, have now not only done well during a difficult time, but they’ve also created a secondary revenue stream for themselves. Whereas before they might not have done takeout, they might not have done a lot of that sort of thing. And those restaurants are doing great now because they still have all the people who are picking stuff up, but then they also have people coming in. But when we look at this, I think, you know, the idea of a recession and thinking in terms of, okay, well, what are some things we can do? And I’ve been through them before. You’ve probably been through a recession or two in your time. And so for people who haven’t done this, it’s not fun. It’s not an exciting time. But I think the first thing that leap to mind for me is not to panic because for a lot of people, that’s the go-to strategy, and not necessarily the best one. And you recognize that, okay, things might be different here. Just as they were during the pandemic. They’re different, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed, even while others are struggling. Jay: Yeah, and for me, it’s always an issue of, okay, we know we’re going to have to have cuts. We don’t have the revenue coming in. And so where do we start? And oftentimes I see the cuts in what I consider to be the wrong places. Like, okay, the first thing to go, it seems like always to me is marketing, right? David: Marketing, right. Jay: And that’s the number one off the top. And that’s the one that could potentially keep you alive. David: Yeah, it’s a great point because when you think about what people do during difficult times, whether it’s a recession or something else, you’re right. That’s a go-to thing. And that’s what really creates opportunity for the people who think it through and recognize that while everyone else is cutting back, now’s the time to be moving forward. So the fact that other people might be cutting back actually creates more opportunity for you if you’re not taking that similar action. Jay: I like that. So they’re kind of giving up market share to just, you know, preserve the bottom line. And that opens up a whole new world for you, of brand new customers to bring in the door during a difficult time. David: Yeah. I remember years ago hearing, I believe it was Earl Nightingale, talking back in the day about the idea of, if you look at what the majority of people are

If outperforming your competition is an issue for you, you want to look at who is the primary competition and what are their advantages? In what areas are they outperforming me? Are they outperforming me in terms of just price? If that’s what it is. And a lot of times that’s what people are up against in the online market. The online sellers are able to sell for less. And at that point you have to say, “okay, is that something I even want to try to compete with?” Or am I more interested in finding the types of clients who understand and appreciate the value that I bring to the table. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. Today, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing the importance of outperforming your competition. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: So good to be here again, David and this topic is very interesting to me. You know, I’ve been in small business. I know a lot of business owners and I got to tell you, oftentimes you’re so caught up in, just generating sales that what the competition is doing, how much they’re doing. Are you competing with the competition? A lot of times, those thoughts don’t come up because there’s just no time for that. And so I’m wondering what the consequences are if I’m not even thinking about my competition. David: Well, if you’re doing great and you’re making the money you need to make, maybe you don’t have to think about your competition at all. Maybe you’re the one that everybody is trying to come after. And when we think about that, it’s not just about the fact that, okay, well, maybe somebody else is outperforming me. But a lot of people, if they’ve been in a market for a particularly long time and they’ve been selling to people who have other options, they’ll find out who their competitors are. Because they’ll say, “oh, I’m already doing business with somebody.” And you ask who it is and they give you a name or they give you a company name. And you’re like, okay, I’ve heard that name once now. And then you talk to somebody else and now I’ve heard another name and now I’ve heard another name. So you have three different names. Then you go to somebody else. And now you hear two for this one. Then you hear three for this one. And then four for this one. You say, “okay, this person has a lot of traction in this market.” So you start to recognize them as competition. Also, as things have evolved online, there are now online competitors that compete with local businesses left and right. And so there are a lot of people who think in terms of the online competition. How can I compete with that? So, when we talk about the importance of outperforming your competition, it’s not because, “well, I’ve got to win at all costs,” and all that sort of thing. But if you are in business for yourself and you are counting on your sales and your salary to be able to put food on your table. And if your competition is sometimes interfering with that, then the necessity of outperforming your competition becomes very clear. You don’t want to run into a situation where somebody says, “yes, I’m already dealing with this person.” You want that person to go in there and they say, “no, I’m already dealing with you,” right? Jay: Mm-hmm David: You want to be the person who already has that sort of foothold, that sort of traction in a market. So outperforming the competition starts with saying, “okay, who’s doing a pretty good job in this market?” And is there somebody that I think is actually doing a better job in this market? Or is there somebody who is doing a job that the marketplace thinks is better? Right? Because you may know that you are already better than this competitor they mentioned. And nothing can be more frustrating sometimes for people, when you go into a situation, they say, “oh, I’m doing business with that person.” And you want to say, “oh, they’re awful. I can’t believe you’re doing that!” But of course you don’t say that. But when you recognize that you’re already better, but other people don’t have that same perception, you say, “okay, well, how am I going to fix that? How am I going to change that?” Because it’s not just about outperforming the competition, it’s about letting the market know and understand and talk about how you outperform the competition. Jay: Well, it’s interesting. So first I have to assess kind of where they’re at and where I compare to them and then create kind of a battle plan to be able to go up against them and demonstrate to my potential customers that when we talk about outperform, we’re talking about quality, we’re talking maybe about cost, customer service. I mean, there’s all kinds of different ways tha