Cold Calling Isn’t Dead. You’re Just Doing It Wrong: We Have a Meeting
The Business Growth Secrets podcast with Adam Stott and We Have A Meeting.
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Cold calling isn’t dead – you’re just doing it wrong. Zac and Jack, founders of the sales agency We Have A Meeting, break down the exact process they use to turn a cold list into paying clients, why every business owner is secretly avoiding the one call that would fix their pipeline, and how to reactivate leads everyone else has given up on!
Zac and Jack are the co-founders of We Have A Meeting, a UK B2B sales agency and podcast that grew from a one-man hustle during the pandemic into a team of 20 generating thousands of leads a month for their clients.
They explain:
· Why “I don’t want to bug them” is the excuse that’s killing your pipeline
· The pattern interrupt opener that gets a cold prospect talking instead of hanging up
· The framework for uncovering a real problem before you ever try to close
Chapters
Chapters:
00:00:00 Intro
00:00:27 How Jack And Zac Started We Have A Meeting
00:02:04 Going Into Business With Your Best Friend
00:05:30 Why They Started The Podcast
00:07:15 The Early Days: Being The Hunter And The Delivery
00:09:04 Building A Team Of 20 (The No D***head Policy)
00:11:01 Why Business Owners Fear Selling
00:12:04 Making Peace With Rejection
00:13:06 Buy, Borrow Or Earn: Where To Find Leads
00:16:04 Strategy Vs Execution: Stop Hiding Behind Research
00:18:29 How To Work A List Of 50 Cold Prospects
00:19:47 The Pattern Interrupt Opener
00:22:01 Live Cold Call Role Play
00:23:57 Why Chasing The Sale Too Hard Backfires
00:25:20 The PMS Framework Explained
00:26:41 Uncovering Whether There’s A Real Problem
00:27:52 The Best Questions For Uncovering Problems
00:29:48 Why Getting Someone To Tell Their Story Matters
00:30:55 Uncovering The Real Cost (The Effect)
00:33:28 What To Do When You’re Scared To Follow Up
00:35:11 The “Close The File” Email
00:37:23 How To Structure A Simple Sales Pipeline
00:41:46 Reactivating Cold And Dead Leads
00:45:06 The Direct Mail Trick That Made £300k A Letter
00:46:03 Creative Reactivation Campaigns
00:48:04 It’s A Lead Maximisation Problem, Not A Marketing Problem
00:52:15 Three Tips To Sell More: Zac’s Turn
00:53:59 Three Tips To Sell More: Jack’s Turn
00:58:41 Where To Find We Have A Meeting
00:07:18 Pitching QVC And Selling Live On TV
00:11:05 The Buyer Who Doubted Her
00:13:04 Selling Out And Scaling Production
00:16:08 Learning To Sell In The Family Shop
00:17:22 The Body Language Rule That Changed Her Pitching
00:19:14 Why Setting The Tone Matters
00:22:04 Taking The Leap At 21
00:23:36 The Limits Of Hiring Friends And Family
00:24:56 The Hire That Changed Everything
00:28:47 Managing Ego As A Leader
00:30:11 Doubling Down On Your Strengths
00:31:23 The Website Lesson: Delegate, Don’t DIY
00:33:07 Cash Sales And Working Capital
00:34:16 How Maternity Leave Forced Her To Let Go
00:36:04 How Dragon’s Den Happened
00:39:06 Imposter Syndrome In The Den
00:47:06 Reframing Imposter Syndrome
00:50:04 Passion, Vision, Drive: What She Looks For
00:51:12 Why She Invests In People, Not Products
00:54:08 Her Favourite Investment Story
00:56:32 Mentoring Beyond The Cameras
00:59:22 Advice For Fearful First-Time Founders
01:01:36 Should You Quit Your Job To Start Up?
01:02:29 Surround Yourself With The Right People
01:04:22 Balancing Guilt, Family And Ambition
01:05:41 Her Husband’s Secret To Supporting Her Success
01:08:45 Advice For Scaling Past The Early Stage
01:10:27 Creating An Environment For Others To Succeed
01:11:51 Building A Business Around Values
01:12:54 The Danger Of Being The Only Energy Source
01:13:42 Ten Years Of Coaching
01:16:32 Why Consistency In Coaching Matters
01:17:58 Accountability And What Gets Measured Gets Done
01:26:17 Audience Q&A: Traits Of Extraordinary Leaders
We Have a Meeting:
Agency: https://bit.ly/4bBDh82
Podcast: https://bit.ly/3TMPl04
LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/3TOyMkk
Even More Value:
Download your FREE Start, Grow, Scale Roadmap in under 30 seconds: https://bit.ly/4prr8bL
Hear from Adam and some of the country’s biggest entrepreneurs on how to SCALE your Business past £1 Million: https://bit.ly/4wgG4M7
Learn how to build a 7 Figure SCALE plan that runs WITHOUT you: https://bit.ly/4fhx57G
Follow Adam Stott’s Socials:
LinkedIn | Instagram | YouTube | Coaching
The following is a verbatim copy of the podcast transcript and as such may contain some minor grammatical errors.
So welcome back everybody to Business Growth Secrets I’m very very excited today because I’ve got Jack and Zach from the we have a meeting podcast sales agency with me today.
They’re amazing guides that built an incredible business. They understand sales inside out. So I’m super excited to have a deep conversation with them all about sales.
And for everybody that’s listening today, you can really start to drive the sales in your own through what we’re going to talk about.
So welcome chaps. Thanks for having us. I’m super excited. So why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about we have a meeting. How did you get started? Tell us all about the podcast, the sales agency and what your journey has been like so far. Wow. Where to start? So the business is five years old next month.
So I started it just coming out of the pandemic. Had fourth child on the way for really? Yeah. Had about a month’s wage to make it work. And obviously, as I’m sure you’ve been told, you can’t start a business with no money. You need investment, all this sort of stuff. And I thought, no, there’s got to be a way to do it.
And at the time when I was at home working for a business, I was constantly being told, we need someone like you. We need someone who can kick the doors down. We need somebody who can get us in front of new clients. And I started asking people, if I could do that for you, would you pay me? Yeah.
The next person I spoke to if. Yeah, yeah, I’d pay you as well. Before, I had four people who were like, yeah, yeah. If you have, you said you would do that for us. We’d pay you tomorrow. So I left the business I was working in, and then before you knew it was fully at capacity. And when it hit that capacity point, Jack was also dealing with the with the woes of the pandemic.
And I’ll hunt you, actually, Jack. Thank you, sir. Thompson. And I just I’ve been working as a single on a cruise ship out of Miami, and obviously there are no need for cruise ship singers during a pandemic. Came back, got a little job. Well, and truly redundant. Singing in nursing homes. No thank you. So I got a little job in Amazon and I was like, oh, this is crap.
And then I was like, what do I know? Like, my first sales job was when I was 16. I was like, well, I’ll go back to selling insurance. I was doing that. I was dealing with micromanagement. I was like making a bit of money. But I was like, is this really like what life is approaching 30. Thinking like, oh, this is what I’ve signed up for.
That’s telling me about all the success and money that he’s making and how how much, how he’s got too much work. And I was like, there’s something there, but we could really, really ruin our friendship. I don’t want to do it. Maybe I’ll go and get an apprentice somewhere else. I’m thinking about you being friends. That’s interesting. We’ve been friends since we were about you.
Smiles because I was lying. So it was about four years. But friends, since we were 14. 15. Yeah. Lived together in London like we’ve we’ve we’ve been very close friends. Godfather to his kids. So it was a case like if I come in, it doesn’t work. Yeah. It’s difficult. Yeah. I’m taking money out of his kids mouths. Literally eating money they love.
So I don’t I didn’t want to fuck it up. And then I was a case of like, let’s have some hard chats. And then four months after he started the business, I was like, you know what? Let’s give it a year. Let’s try it. And I was all in. Yeah. When you had those hard chats, I think this would be quite interesting.
You know, primarily business owners that listen to this and there’s a lot of them that run through this and that I should I be doing business with a friend? Should I be bringing somebody in as a partner. And I have these kind of things happening, and I think it’s just important. It sounds like you did the right thing by having those hard chats, because it makes a big difference.
What did that look like? Tell me a bit like, what was that hard chat? Like, what were the things that you wanted to make sure? Well, I think it was it was probably from your sense, your side as well. Like a bit of a pre mortem. How are we going to deal with conflict. What are we going to do if we clash.
How do we resolve an argument. What happens if I want to do this. But you think we should do it in other way. So we’re having those like coming up with an action plan. If X happened we do. Why. So all of a sudden when we get to those points of I feel this and I feel this, well, we’ve already mapped out what, what the plan is going to be.
And like in, in true, in true sense of like how we sell, we’re never trying to convince somebody or push someone into it. It’s probably a job of like, I’ll get you to talk yourself into it. And that tried to talk me out of it and gave me all of the bad news. And like, you’re going to be working really, really hard, making loads of cold calls, getting rejected X, Y, and Z, and I’d come up with the solution.
So every objection he handed to me, I would solve it myself until there was only one path of fuck it, let’s do it. What did did you ever come back to that playbook of what you originally wrote out? Luckily, we’ve not really like. It was kind of green lights all the way through and like, and we’ve definitely had moments of clashing and disagreements and stuff like that.
But like, in terms of the relationship working together, there aren’t those big clash moments like it has been pretty smooth sailing, so luckily we’ve not been in a position. The first month the rules were Zach was like, you’re going to have to pay for yourself, which is whatever the minimum wage was. I was like, I’ll just take the basic two, three grand a month or whatever it was, and I was a couple of hundred pounds off from paying for myself.
The next month, landed a huge client, were in the green, and it was kind of green, like sailing down there. Yeah. Good. So so you go off, you start working together. You got the podcast, which has become really, really successful as well as the agency. When did you. How have you navigated those two things and how do they feed each other?
What’s it been like? Probably lots of people are listening that maybe they’re thought of. I like the fact that you’ve named your agency in your podcast the same thing. You’ve got the same ecosystem, and then you really put into us. I think that’s really cool. I think a lot of people could learn from that. And tell me about the process behind that.
I think that’d be interesting. The honest thought process was we didn’t have much money and and we were doing things. We were going to do things that we’ve never done before. Yeah. So managing people, recruiting people, scaling, growing all these things that like, we didn’t know how to do. So we started a podcast to bring people on who’d done it already.
I love that and then say, so you say you’re a recruitment expert and I don’t know how to do it. I’m going to sit down with you and ask you about recruitment for another. That’s so awesome. So we did that for probably the first maybe two years. It was like that. And then before you know it, you’ve got some next level, brilliant business person on who then opens the door to some.
And it’s been quite a natural thing of curiosity, like getting sit Down with you. We just had a podcast for you before. The questions we ask are all things that we actually are interested in learning about, and hopefully it feels that way when when we’re chatting to 100%. And I think that’s such an awesome strategy for people. It’s so overlooked.
It’s really cool. Your your business is we have a meeting. One of the easiest ways to have a meeting is a podcast. Tell you everything you know with no resistance. It’s happy days, isn’t it? Right. So so you start off the podcast, you go and bring these people on and you know you’re building the agency. So what’s that’s been like, what’s it been like getting the clients and building it up.
And you know, what have been some of the challenges you’ve experienced? Wow. Loads. There’s the initial this star, I’m the hunter and I’m also providing the service. Yeah. So I’ve got yeah. Go out and kick the doors down and say, do you want to come and work with me in that moment of like, well, yeah. What is the product?
Well, the product is also me. Yeah. So you’re getting almost like this freelancer. So you can imagine I’m in okay, top of funnel mode. But then the next day I’m doing outreach for you in your business. Then the next, I’m thinking, oh, I need to go back out and find some more clients now. So that was the initial bit.
And then you’re bringing in people that we’d not brought in before, and you’re thinking, how do I motivate them? So at the start, we had some really unusual strategies to motivate people that I thought might work. Amazingly, some of them did that we’ve kept and some of them didn’t, that we’ve thrown out, but like one was unlimited holiday, which we’ve kept like there’s no you could just take time off whenever you want if there’s enough notice.
I don’t care about 40 days a year. People usually take about the right amount, but it’s like, oh, right, great. So I can just yeah, no pressure. Like if you’ve got doctor’s appointment, you want to go on holiday. I’m not going to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to hold you run some with that. One of the ones that didn’t work early on with the first few hires.
We used to have a rule of two and go, so let’s say a client wanted one meeting. We’d say if you get two, you can go home. So great fun. That feels like it’s going to solve a problem. But what started happening was they were like just putting any old yeah, yeah. Any old. The quality went down from there.
So it’s all been like a learning curve completely. And I think like there’s no finished article to it either. There’s still stuff that we’re trying to learn and and get our head around, but it’s amazing how just optimizing for action and just like just try it, just do something. Just throw something out there. I’ve got this idea. Cool.
Let’s just run with it and see what happens and we’ll learn on the other side. I’d always implore people to just do that. If you’ve got an idea and you want to try it, just try it. What’s the worst that can happen? Yeah, having that ability to take the action is is undoubtedly super important. So as you’ve grown and you had that problem initially that you’ve talked about, you’re the hunter, but then you’ve also got to do the delivery as well.
How have you found building your teams? How have you found that evolving? What has that been like for you in, and how many people in the team now in the business? Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So we’ve got a team of 20. I think what I looked for in the early days compared to what I look for now, like I think one of my strengths, I can be a bit of a barrister when I’m doing an interview and I feel like if I can smell, smell something a bit dodgy.
And I think that salespeople, so many of them are full of dodge and like giving like a and I’m like, there’s something not right that can get in, get into the crux of it. I think the main, the main thing when when hiring good salespeople is like, we’ve spoken about this, but like, no
dickhead, there has to be like a no
dickhead policy because you’re coming in, you’re working with, like, you’re in this culture, and we’ve had it before where people will sit there and they’ll be like, this list doesn’t work.
Nobody wants to speak to me today. Nobody likes me. I’m not good at this. I hate myself, and that spreads like wildfire. So I think one of the things that we’ve been so protective of is that sales culture. Because if you’ve got a room of people that are performing great, you can keep adding in performers. If you’ve got a people, like even one person can really, really dampen that.
And I think like being a little bit stricter on the hiring process. Whereas in the early days I’d sit down with someone and go, you seem really sound like getting it. Yeah, yeah, you can cold, cold and then getting it on and hearing a big accent and thinking like, that’s not going to work. Yeah, I know, I totally, totally get that.
And you know, the reason I’m really pleased to have you on is this get deep into sales. Right? I think you’ve obviously scaled this agency, done really, really well and built a great, you know, brand around that as well. There’s a lot of people listening that are small business owners that are looking to build their businesses. Fundamentally, they have a fear of selling.
Now, the thing is, a lot of them want to actually admit that. A lot of them want to want to label themselves as having a fear of selling. But when they got to pick up the phone, when they got a guy and have that meeting, when they got to have that conversation and ask that question, they’re a bit like, you know, and you really feel that hesitation come out of that person.
How have you how would you advise? Because you’re doing this every day, right? Going out, prospecting, getting in front of decision makers, you know, building a great sales business and managing a team of 20 plus, like, what would you say is the first step that a business owner can use to kind of overcome that fear? How would you help that?
How what would you suggest that people do? I think making peace with the answers you’re probably looking for in your business tend to be in the work that you’re avoiding, right? So if you’re wanting new clients, I would imagine the work you’re avoiding is probably something on the new business side of things. If you’ve got a culture problem, it’s probably because you’re avoiding having tough conversations with people.
So on that new business front, what is it that you’re typically avoiding and how do you how do you get there? But I’d find that if you can build a habit like no one even that been doing it for years, we’re not like, buzzing to make cold calls. We did a show on LinkedIn where we were cold call in front of like 100 people showing like, look, you can do this.
You can just pick up the phone, but there’s something that you need to recognize in your own brain. You fundamentally as human being, fear rejection. If we’re rejected from the tribe, we die. Yeah. And I’m saying pick up this phone and get rejection. Have that feeling like you’re going to die when you pick up the phone, which is what you will what you will get.
But Jack’s got this great line. No one ever died from a cold call. Right? So once you recognize that feeling that you’ve got is fundamentally something human. But you can bypass it and be the person in charge and pick up the phone. And probably the answer on the their end is going to be something that not only you’re avoiding right now, but has a lot of the answers within it.
So I’d say like make peace with the psychology, learn out why you’re avoiding that, and then decide who’s boss or your bias is the boss. Or is the actor in the boss?
in terms of when we say cold calls because it’s funny isn’t it? It’s like everybody thinks is a million ways to market to to go and basically start having conversations. But really there isn’t, you know, balls down to just a few things which we’ve been talking about, which is really cool, that you’re either going to buy inquiries, you’re going to borrow them, you’re going to them, you know, you’re going to go outside of these conversations.
There’s got to be a piece of strategy before, because let’s say the business owner listens to this right now and they need to make money, right. And they’ve got to start making money for the business. What should they do in order to go from I’m stuck, I’m not making any money. I don’t know what to do to actually going out, making some calls, getting some sales and moving forward.
What would you suggest to them? So I’ll go. I’ll give you a little story as well that lives on on the South coast. And when I went down to visit him a few years ago, I was driving and I had a baby in the back. I was like, we better pull over and just feed him. And we pulled him, pulled over in one of those lay buys for the big heavy trucks.
And at the end, just as you’re about to to leave, it says, want to want a new HGV drop job? Call this number. I was like, oh, that’s amazing because that’s saying heavy drivers are going to pull over there because that’s what they’re designed for. And it’s saying, want a job? So so you’re advertising where your people are and you know this.
So one of the things you’ve got to think about is like, where are the people that are in the most pain that definitely need me? So so when we started, Zach said, I’ve got a project for you. You’re going to find everybody that’s going to that’s got to stand at an exhibition in Manchester, and you’re going to call those businesses because one, they’re going to an exhibition because they need more leads.
Two, they’ve got money because they’re willing to advertise, and three, I can find that information, I can call them. So making sure that your calling people, but you don’t just want to pick up the yellow pages back in the day and just go through it and say, like I’m thinking about like, right, who do I need to speak to?
Who’s probably going to have the problem that I solve and who’s more likely? And then once you’ve done that, there’s like, luckily there are so many data tools out there now where you don’t have to worry and you don’t even have to spend a fortune to say, I’ve now got a list of 100 managing directors, or 100 CEOs or business owners that have the problem and maybe shown some sign of intent, some signal that they’re either new to a job role or they’re hiring for salespeople or whatever it is.
The question you’ve got to ask yourself is, what problem do I solve for these people? If I’m a marketing solution, they’re hiring for marketing people. Do they have no marketing function? And then I’ve got to call them, and then I’ve got to start a conversation with them. And all I’ve got to find out is do they have that problem and are they motivated to solve that?
And if they are, then that is enough to sit down and take it to the next level. And that is then take the action. What’s the balance of their stalking? We’re talking now cold right? So we’re talking about outbound. I love this because I know that, you know, I’ve got one of business owners in our mastermind and in the earliest in the bigger stages.
This is why they got sales teams. They’ve built it. They’ve been through this. But the ones that are early, you know, them actually picking up the phone and and ringing someone is almost like a, you know, an archaic strategy for them. Like they wouldn’t do it. But it’s actually I’m a big endorser, which I’m really pleased to have you on about this and talk about it, because I believe some really need to do it right.
So give me the balance between, in your minds between strategy and execution, because what you just talked about is a bit of strategy. You know, the reviewing, the looking, the collating and then the execution. And how do you which is making that phone call, starting the process. And then and then on the execution. Is that what we’re going to do.
We do five. We’re going to do ten. We’re going to do 50. What. How would you how would you approach that. Like it’s like okay both. We love sales strategy as you’ll have seen can sometimes be disguised procrastination. Yeah of course. Right. And particularly if if the thing that you’re avoiding doing is picking up the phone, I’ll do strategy all week and we’ll sit down with people like I’m researching.
I’m looking for the perfect lead at the perfect time. And before you know it, you’ve not done anything. You’ve just been researching all week. So actually just taking all that away. And there’s a lot of tools and I like AI for all its flaws, will get you a data list. It will get you probably people who are somewhat statistically open to your offer in the market.
So it takes all the procrastination bit out, and all you’re left with is a list of people that you can pick up the phone and then have the human conversation. So I think optimize for action all the time. Like I was listening to the day about Elon Musk saying everything in his businesses and he just become the first trillionaire, isn’t it?
Everything in his businesses is like optimized for action. Anything that feels like bureaucracy or table just totally get rid of it, remove it, and it’s all about action. Even like when he made his first money, apparently just put it all in something else and he had to borrow money for rent. Just just to like, go again. I’m just putting myself in a position for action all the time.
So make sure you’re putting yourself in a position to have to do something and don’t hide behind strategy. Yeah. No. Awesome. So optimize. So. And now would you balance it. So would you say to that that fearful person let’s say I’ve got a list of they’ve managed to go and get a list of 50 people. They’ve gone on LinkedIn or end all or sales navigate or whatever.
I got 50 people. I’ve got to call those 50 people. Now, what would you what would you have them do in order to go and get. What would your if you had somebody sat in front of you? A business owner has got 50 people they need to call. What would you say to them to get them to come and get some conversions and make some money out of that list?
Good question. So there’s there’s a there’s a few a few steps. Right. One is like you need to like set the stall of like I’m going to do this. So if you’ve got 50, get a piece of paper, draw 50 circles and you’re going to go through it. And every time you speak to somebody you’re going to take it off okay.
So then you’re not worrying about like the feeling too much. I’d also give a little exercise of like drawing a circle. And within the circle put all the things you can control on the phone. So how how you sound, the questions you ask, but then all the things you can’t control. So people are rude to your people. Hang up.
Know that if you’re in sales people, people are going to reject you. So like once you sign, I’m a business owner, you are now going to get rejected. That is life. That is going to happen. You have to accept that. And then if we get into like the the nitty gritty of like how I’m going to think about like starting called the way that we the way that we’ve always done it is with a pattern interrupt to start.
So an opener you need something to say. You want to repeatable process that you know that works and you’re going to tweak it. We go for pattern interrupts. So there’s a few different things we’ll do. But if you think about the person on the other end of the phone, it’s not usually the human part of the brain. It’s the chimp part of the brain.
It’s the chimp part that if you cut them off in traffic, then chase you down the M1 and stick their middle finger up, they’re angry. They’re not sure they’re trying to suss out what you’re trying to do, whether you’re going to bore them, sell them something they don’t need. So a pattern interrupt had a few different compartments. One is honesty.
So being upfront and honest one is humor. So you can be if nobody’s ever angry and laughing at the same time. Very true. If they are, they look like a fucking mad man. Yeah, yeah. And them. Yeah I’ll do that. And like The Shining and allowing the room to say no. Yeah. So if I was calling you, I would call you.
I’d say Adam, a bit of a weird one. We’ve never spoken before. Can I fly through in 30s while I’ve chosen to call you? If you don’t like what I’ve said, by the end, you can drop kick your phone out of the room. Is that fair? Yeah, I like that. And then you’re good to go. You know what?
I actually like that. I get called all the time, but I actually, I would probably, I mean, I’d probably still hang up. Right. But but that’s the nature of it. And you accept that, right? Because you’re making those calls. So, you know, out of those 50 people, some of them are just going to hang up. But to be fair, I would prefer that.
Then you ring me up and say, this is a cold call. I’ll be I’ll just hang up. Right? I would probably go, oh, it depends on my time in the day. I’ll go give this guy a chance. Shall I have a bit of fun with this? Or like it would depend on what I was doing at the time, but I actually like that.
I think that was a good line. Do you know what the like a woman said to me once, if you did that to me, what Jack’s just done? I was speaking at an event and she said, I’ll probably tell you
to
fuck off. Yeah. And I went, fair enough. And I said, you know what I’d do then? I’d ring you back the next day and I’d say, you told me to
fuck off yesterday, but I thought I’d try my luck again and said, oh, if you said that, I’d probably laugh and let you let you know.
That’s what’s interesting, because everybody has a different reaction, don’t they? And some people, I would quite like that. I actually think that was good. I’ll get that was well done. Yeah, yeah. No it’s good. I think that’s a good line that somebody could could use for sure. All right. So let’s say I’ll go right. We’ll play out. All right Cornyn, let’s have a go.
We’ve got 30s. What are we saying? Nice. So now I’m going to give you a story, and I’m not researching every single person on that list because that falls into the strategy. And we know that actually research is procrastination. It’s paralysis by analysis. So I’m going to have something that if I hand it to you, it’s going to feel like.
So I might say we’re typically sitting down with coaching businesses who are really successful and doing great, but if they’re honest, they might notice one of these three problems. And then I’m going to think about the three key problems that I know that I help solve the coaching problems and how it impacts them. So it might be that they can get people through the door to their webinars, but actually their conversion rate isn’t really strong, which means no one’s giving them money or they can’t get people through the doors, which means they’re turning up for the webinar, and they’re turning to their assistant and saying, where the
fuck
do we go wrong?
Or third, they want to start a webinar. They want to do something new and draw people in, but they just don’t know where to start. I have a feeling you’re going to tell me none of those problems exist. Every time you run a webinar, it’s packed and you’ve got 100% conversion rate. Okay. Like that as well. And then you’re going to go no or oh yeah.
And then and then then we’re into a conversation. We have a framework which we follow called PMS. And then it’s going to be like, can I ask you questions? Can I find out your problem? Are you motivated to solve it? If there’s enough in that, then we’ll sit down and we’ll have a conversation. Yeah, I like that. Okay.
It’s really good. So someone that that’s listening, that’s never done that I think that’s great opener. That’s a great way to approach the opening of the conversation. We’ve gone on that pattern now. We’ve opened it up and I’ll go, right fine. You got me. Oh, I do want to close more and more webinars. What are we going to do?
So what a lot of people do that we spot in sales. And I like, really want to make sure people maybe trying this don’t do this is they go get the fishing rod out and they go, have you got the problem on the end?
And they get a tiny little bite and they go, fucking, I’ll get in, get my diary as quick as you can. And the person who their end, there’s a little thing called reactants in the brain. When I feel like you’re forcing me to do something, I want to go the opposite way. Of course. So as soon as you do it, I go, nope, not interested anymore.
Send me an email or call me back. So what we advise people do is just keep going deeper, right? So I’ve got a problem. You go to me. Yeah. Fair enough. I am struggling with closing and I don’t jump in, I go, okay, that looks a bit different from when you can’t give me an example, could you? Yeah.
Great. And then you’ll start to tell me. Then you’ll start to say, well, yeah. Like we were struggling with this before and, and last week this happened. Okay. But it doesn’t have any, any major effect. Like what would you tell. No, no. Has a bit of an effect. Okay. And then we start to move into like more therapy questions.
Okay. Well, why would you want to do something that you don’t want to change what you’re doing there. No no no no we do we want to change a few things. What’s what’s driving you to do that? And we take them through this almost like a therapy session type call. Yeah. Where rather than me persuading you, you’re gradually persuading yourself.
Beautiful. And as you start to persuade yourself, we get to the end of the call. And I don’t need to hard close you. Then I just go, okay, so this is happening. It’s costing you this. You want to spend more time? Okay. What do you want to do next? And they’re not used to that people. They’re not used to getting the choice.
And they go well I don’t know. Do we sit down. Do you show me something? Do you try and help? I’ve got some time for your next Tuesday. You go. All right. Well, see you next Tuesday.
No. Beautiful. So it’s kind of like a push. Like a push pull one. You’re really in it slowly, which is beautiful. The framework you mentioned. Tell me about the framework. I think that’d be really cool. You mentioned you said it was PMIs PMIs teams. Yeah okay. So tell me about that. So P means is problem. Example effect motivation FX expectations emotion.
Summary. Wow. Amazing. Was that right. Really good stuff I can’t spell but I didn’t like that. And so first of all if there’s no problem then then there’s no conversation to have. Next up we’re looking for those realistic examples. Okay I think that’s even before we jump forward. That’s a really good for the person that’s listening to this.
That’s somewhat starting to look at their list. And maybe I could call these people. I think that what you just said is quite a nice thing for them to understand. If there’s no problem, there’s no solution. And I think if I get that, then that is fine, because on the list of 50, there’s 25 of them. They’ve got no problem.
Right? Yeah. So if we can uncover that first, that’s going to be a really simple thing to understand. 50% of people don’t need what you got. That’s right. Probably more than that, you know. And that’s pretty cool right. So I think getting that across, that’s really important. So what’s your so what’s your on that problem. You do the uncovering the problem so they haven’t got problem.
How do you treat it so they don’t have a problem. You need to ask yourself two questions. Is it that they don’t have a problem or are they are they lying or have I not uncovered a problem? What typically happens? I say, you’re going to tell me none of those problems exist and you’re saying no, which is very short, sharp, you’re a CEO.
Fine. And now I need to. Can I ask one last question? Can I uncover. Or you might say, well, I run a webinar last week. We had this, we had this, we had this, and you tell me a story, but I don’t know if there’s a problem. So like before you move on to any steps, you always I, I think about it metaphorically as like an anchor.
If you’re on PMS, the anchors dropped to the P and you’re not moving until you’ve got that problem. And that could be two, three questions like they might have given you breadcrumbs, they might have given you symptoms of the problem. But you’ve got to ask yourself the question, do I know what problem they have and what problem is that.
So think of like accountability. Like with our sales team, if they got a box of meeting call, what problem did they have and what are your favorite questions to ask for uncovering problems? Do you have like a set list of questions that you have that you go to for that? How’s that affecting you? What’s that costing you this type of.
Yeah. Yes. So they’re there. How is that affecting you? Probably like a, like a, like an impact question, but like, I want to know, like what is the like. So what is the biggest challenge when it comes to new business? When you went to your team and ask them what their biggest challenges, what do they tell you? Maybe something situational, hypothetical.
What’s your favorite question? I mean, I like there’s something called labels. So if I ask you lots of what and how questions. After a while you start to think
this is like an interrogation. It’s like a bit of a beat down. But a label would say something to you like, okay, so it sounds like you’re in a really tough, tough spot then, you know?
Yeah, no, I am actually, I’m really or they might say, like we’re trying to grow the business, but I’m still quite hands on and I’m like, okay, it sounds like you’re quite conflicted then. Yeah. You know, I am I am really conflicting. There’s that like gradual bring down from there. But being able to say things back in someone else’s words, you never get it wrong.
Because if I get it right, you go, yeah, you’ve got it right. But if I get it wrong, then I go, it sounds like this. You’ll go, no, no, no, it’s not that. It’s this. You don’t just go, no, it’s not you correct me, I like that. Yeah. Being able to give them that identity and then to be able to repeat that.
And I think this is cool because anyone that’s sitting there listening is really good for them to understand that they can they can pick up the phone.
They can have these conversations. There is a process. There is a way of doing this right. The questions are actually quite simple, but a lot of salespeople like confuse them or like they complicate them. And like I said, people get a problem. They go call. It’s in the diary. What you’ll see is no shows, deals, stalling, nothing going through because you could have uncovered it on the call and maybe it wouldn’t go to appointment, which is great.
You’ve saved yourself time. That’s what you want, don’t you? You want somebody that actually you can help you don’t sit down with someone who. Yeah, maybe you can help you find out a root cause later on, for example. So the way the brain works, we’ve got all these, like, heuristics. So the more information I can think of it cements something as true.
So if I said to you, I say I’m, I’m rowing with my partner all the time at the moment. You say, okay, when was the last row you had? And I go, oh, let me think. It was actually February 2023. So you go, okay, so you’re not wrong with your partner all the time. Okay. That’s not true. Okay.
We’ve now found that if you said when when when did you last with your partner, say 15 minutes ago. Minutes before that. Yeah. Hours before that. And then I start telling you. So the example part is the story. So can you tell a story? Can you complain. Can you moan. Can you give it some real life. So some recency.
It’s like when was the last time or maybe like big picture. When was the worst time that’s happened to then the more I tell you I’m talking out loud, like we say, convincing myself I’ve got a problem, I’m now cementing it in my head that this is a real life problem, because I’ve got this evidence, I’ve got these heuristics to say this is true.
So all of a sudden, I’ve got a problem. I can give you a real life examples of it. Now we know that it is a true problem.
okay.
So what happens next.
Then we’re on we’re on the final part of the P, which is the effect which is basically impact. Okay. So you’ve got this problem. This is how it shows up. But what is the cost of that problem. And it typically falls into three brackets which is it’s costing me lots and lots of time. It’s costing me lots and lots of money.
Or there’s risk and the risk could be reputation brand, which also probably boils down to time or money. So simple question. If I’m trying to find out the effect, I’m not going to go in directly and say like what is the impact of that? Because impact can maybe sound like a bit of a if we’re in the pub.
You said around my partner all the time, I said, what’s the impact to
I might ask, like, how do you know that’s a problem? What’s the knock on effect? How does that actually show up? Then? What happens when that happened? These simple questions you’re going to go well this. And then like we spoke on our podcast we’re taking it to that level four level five depth like Russian dolls. Tell me a bit more.
And then what. Keep going. And before you know it you’ve uncovered they have a problem and a core impact of how that’s actually affecting them. Lovely. And how long. So this is this would be the interesting thing. I see it with my team. I’ve got a team that runs our bookings and telesales team. And you know, they’ll call someone that’s registered for saying it’s not completely cold, but that person wasn’t expecting a phone call.
And quite often my team might be on the phone some 20 minutes later. And it’s almost like they’ve built a relationship with this person on the phone. And they just, you know, how often do you see those calls going when you do, you have like, do you have an average call time that you aim for? Have you? How does that what does that look like?
It’s usually anywhere from 12 to 20 minutes. Yeah. That’s the sweet spot. Yeah. Anything short or it’s like, yeah I’ve got a problem. Just. Yeah, just let’s get some time in. Like, they probably not going to show up. But someone who’s like, I think being a CEO in some of these businesses is a really lonely spot. I can’t really talk to my partner about it because they might not get it anymore.
I don’t have a business partner to talk to like I don’t really. So being able to just like have a bit of a moment or someone on the phone for 20 minutes, it’s almost like a cathartic. Yeah, that’s that’s exercise. Yeah. But the, the ability to then go from like Jack’s only three steps into the process there. There’s, there’s other bits to go through.
But by the time we’ve done that full 20 minute process, by the end it’s very unlikely someone’s invested all that time and they’re not showing up to what the solution is. Yeah, you’re taking them on a journey basically, and you’re manufacturing that journey in a really clever way. And I think that’s really awesome. So hopefully the audience of people that are listening, the business owners can pick up a few things from that and maybe they don’t go cold, but maybe it is.
They’ve got to pick up the phone to somebody that’s expressed interest, one of their leads and and anyway, they’ve got that lead there, but they’re hesitating. For example, what would you say this is a common one. Right. So it’s someone says I don’t want to bug people. They made an inquiry. I called them and they said they were busy.
I don’t want to bug them again, but they weren’t really interested. But I don’t want to bug them because a lot of people say that, like, you know what I mean? Business owners are like, oh, I know. And they’re just hoping in their mind they’ve counted the money already. They’re like, yeah, no, they’re going to pay me ten grand in three months, but I don’t want to bug them.
I don’t want to call them. I don’t want to. What would you say to someone like that experience in that? There’s two trains of thought for me. One. I don’t want to bug them. There’s two questions for ourselves. Is that true? Are you bugging them? Like. Like like if I. If I got the other person, I’m in a room.
And I said, when Sally calls you, she thinks she’s bugging you. Go. No, no, no, I’m busy. I forget about it. It’s something I want to do. These reminders are great. Like like I had it the other day. I chased someone and I said, like, listen, I don’t want to make it awkward and stuff like that, but like what?
Where, where we’re up to on this. It was like, I’ve got an ADHD brain. Please bug me as much as possible. So we have to we have to ask if it’s true. And then secondly, is it useful? Like me telling myself that I’m bugging them? That doesn’t move. The needle doesn’t empower you. So and then the second train of thought is like, if that if that is the belief, then that’s okay.
Don’t bug them, but don’t move your business forward and be content with that. Okay? I accept that the business will probably stay stagnant because I’m not willing to put myself in uncomfortable conversations. But if you do the bit where you pick up the phone, two things will happen. You’ll ever get a yes, which is brilliant, and you’ll move the deal forward and you move it, or they’ll say, you are bugging me, I don’t want to work with you.
Which means they will probably never going to work with you anyway. Like because they’re ghosting you for a reason, but at least you’ve got some clarity. The worst thing a salesperson can have is this maybe syndrome, this pipeline full of hope. It’s their Kryptonite. So like, one of the things we do is if a deal stalls, we’ve got an email that will send called close the file so the subject line will be close the file or say, hi Adam, I’ve not spoke with you, so I’ve not heard from you.
So I imagine you’ve gone in a different direction or it’s not a fit anymore. I’m going to close. I think that’s a beautiful
I just wanted to actually point out that I think that’s a great strategy for our business owners to, to actually adopt to their business, because clarity is better than, you know, like not knowing is a lot worse not knowing in their head.
So it’s like, yeah. So we send it I don’t close the file. I’ve not heard back from you, so I’ll assume it’s not of interest anymore. You’ve gone in a different direction. I’ll close the file on this. Now, if anything changes in the future, please let me know.
I’ve done this in training sessions. People say I’ve got this deal. It’s stalled. I say send that email. Within three minutes. They get replied, no, no, no, we’re talking about it or yeah, you’re right, thank you so much. And you get that piece of mind and we talk about it like with the the magic of maths. I need to know how many deals I’ve got in my pipeline to close.
So if you close a load of pipeline off and you’re like, well, those five deals are dead, I now know that my strategy is I need to go and do loads more input, loads more work, otherwise we’re not going to get to our targets. And if those five all come back at the same time, it’s a happy accident.
So our pipeline, when we do our pipeline reviews, if there’s not an attached next step to it. So I say I’m chatting with Google and you go, okay, when are you chatting with them? I say, well, I’m not chatting with them at the moment. Like, yeah, I’ve had a conversation with him. I’m going to walk past the office.
I use Google every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah thing. But it’s a case of okay, when’s the next chat with them? Oh there isn’t one. So it’s out the pipeline. Oh. Oh no I’m chatting with them Tuesday at 7:00. Cool. See you next Tuesday. Hey, I got in twice. Right. So on this, on pipelines, this tool pipelines for a minute because I think, again, that’s something that business owners need to bring into their game.
How do you look at and manage a pipeline? What’s your your structure for managing pipelines? You’ve got sales teams. You’re you’re doing outbound. Lots of outbound lots of calls. You must have quite a good solid strategy for pipeline management. Yeah. We’ve got a we’ve got our own team that are cold for our business. So they don’t work on clients.
They just work for me and Jack. Yep. And they book meetings in for us. And then just just naturally as things have grown, LinkedIn brings probably 4 to 6 meetings each a week from that with people who, like, I’ve been following your content for a while. I’m actually in the market for this right now. I’ll jump in with you.
And then there’s YouTube podcast, all that other stuff that just naturally like a big net. That’s over time. It started off with cold calling. You’ve gradually added to the net. More people come into the net now and book in in terms of our strategy. When we’ve got someone on a call, it actually is quite heavy disqualify, because I think there’s more reasons for one not to work with you than there are two work with you and it’s better to get them on the table up front.
So for me and you were sitting down and you know, you’d made it through the process, it’s quite hard to make it through, make it hard for people to buy. Which might almost sound counter-intuitive, but when you get there, I’d say, Adam, before we jump in, I just want to make sure I’m managing your expectations. You mind if I just give you all the bad news up front?
I’ll just tell you all the reasons why people normally don’t work with us. And you’d say, yeah, of course. And then, rather than me handling all the objections, I give you all the objections. And I said, sometimes people don’t want to work with someone for six months. That’s our term. No, no, I’d be happy to have you for six months.
Okay. And and in terms of commercial, you’re going to be spending anywhere from 3000 to 10,000 pounds a month. That might be way out of budget. No, no, no, that’s actually in budget. Okay. And lastly, we’d have to work together quite close. I might have to coach you on closing the deals. You might not want to have that sort of relationship with me.
No, no, no, I’d be comfortable that as well. So we’ve moved. Yeah. Stealing all the objections up front. Beautiful. There’s no object. And then we get into. Takes a lot of confidence to do that. I mean, like your average person that’s not got much sales confidence. It’s probably going struggle. But I can move towards that in time. But for your for your listeners, your business owners who were trying this for the first time, getting on calls like that, they will have probably a list in their head of the reasons why people normally don’t work with them.
So my advice then would be just throw one in, just throw one in. Like sometimes people don’t work with us because they’ve got another business, another business partner, and they don’t like this sort of thing. No, no, no, I’ve already had that conversation. And you’ll realize that once you try it a few times, it starts to work really well.
No, I think I think that’s really cool and definitely will help a lot of people, even if they can bring one in, you know, would be really cool. I think the term one is a good idea. That’s very simple. And and actually the close relationship. I think there’s a couple of good tips there. Now when you look at if we look at really structurally from a framework perspective of you having a pipeline, this imagine a business owner doesn’t know what a pipeline is.
They come on their listening to the podcast that I they’ve never structured a pipeline. They don’t get it. They don’t understand it. How would you say that they should set up a professional sales pipeline. What would it look like? What would the stages be? Not the conversation, not the sales strategies, just the physical operation of a pipeline. How would you set that up?
We keep it fairly lean of like there’s a meeting okay. So there’s like discovery, let’s call it there’s something there. So like you’re not getting into the pipeline until you’ve set the discovery meeting or like you’ve got your new new meetings that are coming through. Have they sat. Yeah. They’re in the discovery stage. Great. And then they’re in decision stage.
So then they go through into decision stage. And then from there, like we said earlier, there is some time or date attached to that for a level of decision. We either get it on the first call sometimes because it’s B2B, there’s different stages. There’s like, I’ve got another call with this department and another call with this department, and then for us then it’s into contract invoice and it’s close one like we you could look at sales organizations and I think they can really really stretch out they pipeline.
Yeah. And I think maybe in like enterprise sales to a level I can understand. There’s probably some new ones to it. But like all you’re asking yourself a very, very simple questions. Have I met with them. Yeah. Is it is there a next step? Are we moving forward? It’s a first date. Do we like each other enough to say, yeah, let’s go to Pizza Hut next week or are we leaving it?
And that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for a yes or no place for us. Close now.
Yeah. You might have to to take home straight away. Can you get there? And it’s close. Okay, cool. Let’s talk reactivation then. Because I think it’s interesting that you close the file. I like that I think that’s a cool strategy for getting clarity and people coming back. But there are really good ways that you can reactivate prospects, bring them back to meetings.
Maybe you want to, maybe you you’re a bit barren and you want to bring back some people to some dates again, right? And you need to go and cast on that a little bit. How do you look at reactivation in a pipeline? Do you have any you have a very good strategy for closing closing off. Yeah. So reactivation going back in and saying to them, how am I going to get them back and to bring us back into the pipeline again?
There’s loads of different things that we do. One of the things actually you’d mentioned before when we were chatting to you was if I start to see something repeat, I make an offer around it. So one of the things that we found was sometimes smaller businesses. They’ve just got a bit of venture money. They might want something smaller commitment.
So we might do a limited run of pilot, two month pilot. We’ll do 16 days on the phone for you, and then we go around all the people that were lost. For that reason, you reactivate those back in. You might not want to do it. Long term. Language would you use for the reactivation? I’d say Adam, it’s a dreaded follow up call.
It’s from me. Ever meet and I’m guessing you want to throw your phone out the window and you go, Zach, how are you doing? And we got a small town. The reason I wanted to speak to you. I know the reason you didn’t want to work with us was for this. You. You wanted to see if you still got the same problem or if you’re all good.
No, no, I’ve still got the same problem. Call. Well, we’ve actually got this offer at the minute. I can probably only take 2 or 3 people on it, but I thought I’d give you first refusal. Is that something you want to have a conversation about, or should I go and bother someone else? And you’re probably going to say no.
Yeah. If I still got the problem, I’ll have that chat with you. And then we go back through the same process. And would you always do your meetings your so you reactivating. Would you do it on a zoom call. Do you do it. Is that kind of your preference. Zoom physical meeting in person a lot of times it’s yeah like an online meeting.
But sometimes people do have a like Jack’s in Manchester. If if there’s a business in Manchester, it’s not uncommon for them to say, I’ll pop by and meet you. Yeah. Less likely for me in Bournemouth, people might want to just come down to get pissed and lie on the beach. They might not want to associate me with that.
But yeah, but there’s loads of other ways. But I think like, people are often scared to maybe ask the questions. So let’s say mean you can’t work together and we decide we’re not going to work together. Me asking you what would be a good reason for me to get back in touch you in the future? You’ll say, well, if you can do this, this or this, or if this happens, cool.
I’ll just let’s just keep in touch. Let’s just monitor that or I’ll follow you on LinkedIn. And next time you’re hiring, if I’m a recruiter, I’ll just try and be the first person that speaks to you. Would that be all right? Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Yeah, I like the transparency. I think that’s I think that’s actually a really nice way of doing it.
And I actually like leading with the problem there by saying to them actually, you know, like, have you still got the problem you actually have I still need here and we’ve got this new offer. It just makes perfect sense. I think that’s great. I think that’s a great way to do it. And definitely for people that are listening, there’s probably people that they could go and follow up and implement that.
Now, one of the things that we used to do for reactivation is we used to send a lot of letters out to dead leads and just be like, we’ve got some really good news for you. We just do this in the car industry. Well, very well. We’d say we’ve got some really good news for you. Do you still have the car?
59 you know G y’see. Whatever. And if you do, then you know, we’ve got good news and we need to talk to you and love that. And, and the people just honestly, we were just every time we sent that letter, we’d probably do 300 grand in sales on every, every single letter. People would ring up and they’d go, all right, you’ve got me.
What’s the good enough, I hate it. Well, actually, the good news is we’ve got a buyer for your car right now. We can offer you more for it than we offered you previously. And we’ve got something that’s really, really interested. But we need to look at it, and we need to go over a few things. And then we’d have a conversation with moving to appointment.
Yeah. And now the sudden they’re driving obviously you know we did have a buyer right. But we’re moving them in. And that would be just a great way of reactivating. So I think there’s always clever ways that you can bring people back into your pipeline, back into appointments. Isn’t there to do these kind of kind of things I thought is, you know.
Did you have any as well like that, that you’ve got little, little nifty little strategies that you use. Is there any you want to share? We’ve we do a lot of direct mail campaigns as well. I think you do. Yeah. Yeah. Like I think LinkedIn and email are so saturated to direct mail campaigned a brilliant for for loss leads, for lapsed leads and for like new business as well.
Like we’ve had it where it’s a like a branded Trojan horse that you could send. We got 50 fake 50 pound note. So we’d put your face on it making money. I did a campaign recently and it’s all about like making it feel a bit theatrical, like green envelope. So it was like matching the old brand, and we’d put a fortune cookie in it.
And then within the fortune cookie, it would be like, this is your year to win loads of new business. And then a letter to go alongside it. Ransom notes, like album covers, like you can do loads. And I know people that have done like sent pairs of socks and say, I know that you got cold feet last time we worked together.
Like smart stuff like that. There’s one you have. Do you remember your nose? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You used to send them a knife and fork and say I’m still hungry for your business. Oh, yeah? Yeah, stuff like that. You said it was the one that would always win quite well. Yeah, yeah, but it’s. But it’s just like most businesses are, like when they come to us and they say we want to hunt, know.
And I go like, probably sell on a gold mine. Yeah. Cool. Zombie leads, laps, leads, people that have inquired and stuff like that. There are so many ways to do it. But I think the question is, are people thinking about it or do they just go? Me no. Not know how to get a customer. That’s the bit. Yeah, I think a lot of people think sometimes they’ve got a marketing problem, but actually they’ve got a problem with the leads that they’ve already got.
They’ve got they’ve got a maximization problem in terms of their lead flow. Yeah, definitely. I even look at my business we generate 10,000 leads a month. Right. And we’ve got masses and masses and masses of leads. You never really should have a sales problem because you’ve got so many leads. You’ve just got to do more with the leads that you’ve got.
Yeah, I think that’s the difference between marketing, isn’t it? And then and then sales. How would you look to optimize the leads if we look at that then. So we look at lead optimization. What do you do with when somebody does an answer when they know they’ve got a good lead there, they’ve got a good opportunity, they can’t get hold of them.
Well sure kind of mindset for for chasing these down and getting them to conversation point. Oh there’s loads I mean the a lot of what we see at the minute is you’re almost spoiled with the technology. Yeah of course. So I’ll ring you up. You don’t answer and I don’t bring you again. But in my when I first started in sales, you wouldn’t like to do that.
You had like ten numbers and you were like, just keep going until you get you get them in the diary. Apple’s now putting up a spam right isn’t it. Have you seen that? Yeah yeah yeah. So even getting through that way people just give up when they see that. But I could get through that. It could go, you know, like what’s your reason for the core and the little AI voice note thing.
And I could go transcription failed. And then they say transcription fail and they think I have to answer it. I don’t know who it is and they have to answer it. But if I can’t get hold of you but I can get your voicemail, I go, Adam was hoping you could help me with something. It says, Zach, here’s my number.
Bang! What a lot of people. It’s Zach from ABC company. We have award winning, amazing services in this. Like, get back to me like, I’m not I’m not getting getting all that same with like, I can’t get hold of you, but I can send you a LinkedIn message or an email. They sell everything. They give away all the secrets of why I’m trying to get all of you know, if I was email, I got I got a proposition for you.
That’s it. And then when you reply to me, your numbers in the email, and then I pick up the phone to you again, you know, there’s all these little things to do have. Just don’t just spill the beans up front and don’t just give up the first time. It’s probably going to take your 8 to 10 times to get older someone.
So just like get them, get them back in the list, try them on the next one. And multi tech now voice notes WhatsApp using voice notes as well.
All right, so in terms of in terms of generating more, I think it was interesting when we start when we spoke that you said that you went out. I’m going to pull it all the way back there for a minute.
You go out and you started asking people questions. Hey, you know, could I do some work for you? Could I, could I do this? And you and you went cold. Who were those leads that you started off in the beginning, that you went in and pitched? You had a massive client. One of my first clients was Panasonic.
Was it really? Yeah. So there was a girl I’d been trying to sell to for ages, and I’d kept kept on with him for ages. And then I just said to him, I’m thinking about setting up a business that solves this problem. I don’t know if it’s ever something that you’ve dealt with before. And he said to me, that’s more like it.
And then he said to me, but I’ve only got ten grand. And I thought
I was like, thinking, I’m going to pay my mortgage this month. Only got Tangram. So obviously trying not to bite his hand off. But there was a lot of like construction businesses, a few tech businesses. And really what I was looking for was anyone who had a problem that I knew.
If I rang their potential client about, they’d be quite invested in. So the stuff that didn’t work was like loans and printers, and I was just like, this is never I’m never going to get you emotional about a new printer or a loan or something like that. But if it’s like, oh, there’s this tech that saves you time or whatever.
I’d be like, cool. The Panasonic one was interesting because it was they’d come up with a thing that cleans the air, and it was about how to get people back in the office and remove the Covid risk. So that was like quite an easy proposition when I heard that that’s what you wanted help with. I was
like,
okay, now I’m going to be able to do that all day.
Yeah. So there was quite a variety, but that’s what I was looking for. What’s a problem that you’d really moan about? I think that’s interesting. And had you had we, I know that we had some you had some experience in sales prior. What was your experience in sales prior? I’d had ten years of being the farmer Hunter.
It was like, I’m going to hire Zak in to get me my dream client and demo to them and close them. So I was like full 360. I’d done ten years of like, pretty high ticket stuff from boardrooms in Bishopsgate to, you know, boots on the ground, like construction, selling and stuff, usually like places that other people didn’t really want to do.
Yeah. And probably when I set my own business, I was like, oh, I can see why. Because you kept the lion’s share of the money and paid me 3 to 7 happy days. Yeah. So so if we were to the reason I asked that is I wanted to give context to both. We’ve also got both got a big background in sales.
And by the way, I think some brilliant, brilliant nuggets here for the people that are listening and for everybody that’s listening, make sure you, you know, relisten because there might be a few things here that you might need to hear once or twice to be able to put an install in for sure. But what would you say if we were to start to talk to a business owner and say, you got three, three things that you need to change to be more successful at getting sales in your business.
You might might repeat what you said. Maybe that’s good. Sometimes repetition or maybe be different, but you were going to give three bits of advice to a business owner that needs to sell more. What would you say to them? Should we do one thing? We can whistle. You do three. Each of you on three each. Yeah, yeah. Spoiler.
I think it as much I give these people as much as we can. And I think this is your perspective versus yours. And it might be different, but obviously if he goes first don’t steal his. No. Okay. I wouldn’t steal his right I’m going to go. First one is first one is a margin. Everyone’s got a big sign around their neck that says make me feel interesting, okay?
Because we’re all a person. Favorite subject is themselves. If we can get people talking about themselves, they’re more likely to open up. They’re going to have a great conversation. Most salespeople go in there and talk about I, me. We make all of your sales questions about them. Let me really, really understand your world. And when I feel like I truly understand you, I’ll tell you what the solution is.
I’ve already built the trust because I’ve listened and I’ve asked genuinely good questions. The trust is there. That’s why I’d say, I think that’s really, really good advice for the first one, because the people listening should. I think that’s part of fear. I think the part of the fear is them actually going, am I going to be judged?
It’s nothing to do with you. And I think the people can see that. That’s really powerful. Yeah. So yeah, that’s one that one down. That’s one and two is I would say most people wait until they’re drowning to think about getting swimming lessons or buy number enough. I don’t think anyone’s thinking about swimming lessons in the ground, but plan in advance.
If you know that you are someone that is sensitive to rejection. When I do this, I get rejected. I feel like this. Okay, what are you going to do to get out of that spiral? So have something in the book. We call it the first aid kit plan for it. Is there something you can do in a minute, an hour a day?
Like what do you need to do to get back to your baseline? Is it a quote? Is it a song? Is it a conversation with a friend? Is it a podcast? There’s a video that I watch of zooming out of Earth. It takes about ten minutes and you start as like a little dot there, and then you go throughout Earth and the solar system in the universe, and you go, oh, me getting rejected by that CEO in the grand scheme of things doesn’t matter.
That’s number two. And then number three, I would say our time on this earth is very, very short. We get about 80 summers. One day we’ll all be dead. And like when you’re selling and you feel like you’re rejected or you’re burning out or whatever it is, know that in the grand scheme of things like if you take it back to that stoic mindset, one day you’ll be dead.
When you’re on your deathbed, you won’t be thinking about Billy that told you to piss off. After a cold call, you’ll be thinking about much bigger things. You’ll be thinking about your family and the time that you might have wasted not being with them. Like, don’t. Don’t sweat the small stuff too much. Like, yeah, it’s important. Grow a business, grow an asset and stuff like that.
But most people grow a business and they want to do big, wonderful things. But like, nobody’s crying because they didn’t get enough leads closed on their deathbed, so they would be my three. That kind of fall into a bit of like communication and mindset. Yeah, I love that. I think well done. Brilliant. Can he, can he beat it?
What do you think is going to be better. So he’s the articulate one I don’t know about that. It’s tough. That was pretty good to feel okay. Right. So someone’s really looking to get good at this. Drive their business forward. Pull up your diary. Look at the things you’ve got plotted out. How many of them drive a revenue outcome.
And the answer for most people is probably not a lot. Yeah. So like sitting down and looking at branding or we were talking about spreadsheets before like these things aren’t going to drive things forward. So if they don’t and you can either outsource them or get rid of them, do that. That would be my first thing and keep that.
It’s a really simple question like, okay, does what I do drive the visitors, it drive revenue forward? No. Doesn’t go in like quite a hard rule to have, but you’ll notice a difference quite quick in doing that. I didn’t think it was going to be good, but that was actually quite good. Really? Yeah. Thanks mate, about that. He’s trying to put you off.
Maybe you can tell us like obviously remember to review this podcast. Who was better right. The second one your your mind will do better with playing an outcome rather than the clock. So like when I started off our business, the outcome I thought would work was if I could get two meetings a day for myself, I would stop at that point because that’s 40 a month.
I can’t work with 40 people, even if I closed 10% of them, that’s for only four days in a week anyway. So it gave me like, your point, lots of choice. Yeah. So find out what that is for you and play that outcome. When I get to that point, I stop. And sometimes I’ve done it by 10 a.m., sometimes 11, so that might take it the whole day.
But that way I’m never playing this. Like looking at the clock game of like fucking. I’ll procrastinate a bit. We’ll stop you. It’ll get you out of that, that flow. And then the third thing I would give people is don’t be scared to play more of a disqualify game than a qualified game. We’re much more wired for disqualification than we are for qualification.
If I start to sell you at perfect, I can solve all your problems. It’ll be amazing. Alarm bells are going to go off with the person that you’re dealing with actually present them with. Why can’t you solve this yourself? Why now? Why wouldn’t it make things more catered around? No. And disqualification. And it will feel uncomfortable at first, but you’ll be surprised how much people buy quicker and how much they fall through and sign paperwork and move forward with things without any friction because they haven’t been forced into something.
Yeah. So as we move through, you beat me, didn’t there? No, I don’t know, I don’t know. I think they were both very, very good. So you know I think it’s been a fascinating conversation. I really think that’s been packed with value for our business owners that are listening. I think they can definitely use multiple things that you’ve both talked about.
So I really appreciate that. So thank you. First of all thank you. Secondly, obviously you’ve got the podcast that people should listen to and you’ve got the agency where you actually do sales for people. So if people want to get in touch with you about that. Where do they go and look you up? How do they contact you?
What’s the process for that? We have a meeting. Com best place for the agency. And then if you want to check us out, we’re on all platforms. But LinkedIn is probably like our main platform over there causing mischief at all times. Yeah. Brilliant stuff. Well, look, I’ve actually loved it. I think it’s been a brilliant sales conversation, you know, thanks for coming along.
And for everybody that’s been listening, make sure that you go and review this podcast. That is the way that it grows. So if you could just take ten, 15 seconds to go and give this a five star review and make a note of the thing that you’ve enjoyed most about today’s conversation that would help the podcast grow and find new business owners that can really start to improve their businesses.
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