Real Relationships Real Revenue - Audio Edition | Invest in Relationships to Build Your Business and Your Career

Mo shares his insights from the habits of Dorie Clark. Build time into your schedule specifically to interact with people that you find interesting. When Mo was originally designing the Grow Big principles and training he created the concept of narrowing your relationships to people that you can proactively commit to reaching out to once a month. One of the categories is interesting people because interesting people spend time with interesting people. Relationships with interesting people can lead to incredible places, even if there is absolutely no expectation of any commercial benefit to begin with. When someone asks you to do something that is not quite the best use of your time there are four simple steps to say no nicely. Dorie has another simple three step system of triage you can use to filter out the most egregious. First, ask for more info. Second, ask for more granular info. Third, suggest a different approach once you know what’s being asked of you. The power of pre-commitment to hack your habits is a great tool to ensure you do what you know you should do. Put those activities on your calendar and make them the default, instead of trying to fit them into the chaos of your day where they will be endless pushed off by the whirlwind.   Mentioned in this Episode: growbigplaybook.com

Mo asks Dorie Clark: How can we hold ourselves accountable, hack our own habits, and keep doing what we know we should be doing? The first chapter of the Long Game deals with the question of why we seem to be so busy in our modern lives. One of the most critical aspects of senior leaders is setting the strategy for their organization and yet when asked, 96% of senior leaders say they don’t have enough time for strategy. We need to be honest with ourselves and realize that many of the constraints of “busyness” are in many ways things that we put on ourselves. For many of us there is a culture of busyness and research has shown a link to busyness and self-worth. We can set up structures in our lives to create pre-commitment and push us towards better behavior. Accountability groups are great examples. Creating accountability structures for yourself enables you to make habits of good behavior instead of negative patterns. High achieving professionals generally hate breaking commitments. Having activities in your calendar that you know you should do will make it much more likely that you will actually follow through. If you do the hardest but most beneficial activities early in the day, the rest of your work will sort itself out into your schedule. This avoids the chaos of the day from pushing those activities off indefinitely.   Mentioned in this Episode: dorieclark.com/subscribe

Mo asks Dorie Clark: How can we use the concepts of The Long Game to establish and build the relationship advantage? Turning down offers and clearing your plate is how you free up your time and space to connect with the right people. The more successful we become as professionals the more in demand we are, and the people who want to spend time with us may not be the people that we should be spending time with. Being able to say no more often and being comfortable while doing it is the key to being able to dedicate your time to the right things. One of the easiest ways to deflect well meaning people that you don’t want to commit to is simply asking for more information. Just by making them jump through some simple hoops and provide some more info you can screen out the tire kickers. The next step is to ask for a certain level of granularity in the request. Asking for an agenda is advance can be very valuable so you can focus directly on the important topics and cut out the fluff. Ask if it’s possible to discuss things asynchronously where they send you their questions and you reply with a voicemail when you have time. It’s also an option to simply invite someone to something you are already doing, which makes creating these kinds of connections scalable.   Mentioned in this Episode: dorieclark.com/entrepreneur

Mo asks Dorie Clark: How can we use The Long Game to grow our book of business and create more opportunities? One of the things that frustrates a lot of people with big goals is that the goal seems so unattainable in the moment. 20% Time is a concept that a number of companies use to make it easier to achieve those larger, more long term goals. Business development professionals can use a similar concept within their own careers and pursue ideas that are interesting and have potential. You can accomplish almost anything, the key variable is the runway. Planning methodically to achieve your goal can make incredible things happen. You don’t have to make a leap of faith, if you have an audacious goal and give yourself enough runway while devoting small amounts of time to it consistently, there is very little risk involved. 20% Time is a way to achieve big goals in a way that derisks the proposition. Your 20% Time can take a number of forms from networking, to creating a podcast, to crafting a compelling keynote speech, and more. If you want to build a business development process that works it’s going to take time and you have to dedicate the time to make it happen.   Mentioned in this Episode: dorieclark.com/toolkit

Mo asks Dorie Clark: What’s your big idea when it comes to business development? One of the key things that professional service providers need to grapple with are the long term and short term needs of business and life. Long term relationship building is what really drives results, but in the short term we still need to generate business. When it comes to networking and building your network of relationships, there are three ways to go about doing it and the first is the most commonly thought of and also the reason the majority of people dislike networking. Short term networking is all about making the sale and what you can immediately extract from someone. When you already have a relationship with someone you can be direct and ask for the sale, but it’s not conducive to creating a real relationship. With long term networking you’re not trying to immediately get something out of the other person, and in Infinite Horizon networking you cultivate relationships solely because they are interesting and you never know where people will end up over time. It’s about having an infinite perspective of what’s possible. It’s about being helpful and meeting interesting people. When we think about networking most people think of it as a chore, but reorienting it towards meeting new and interesting people can change how we feel about it. Just getting to know someone is more than enough to build a great relationship. We are all pressed for time but we can all find an hour in our week to make this kind of networking possible, it’s just a matter of prioritizing it. In the era of the pandemic it’s also possible to host virtual cocktail parties to get to know people. Optimize for interesting, instead of money. Follow your curiosity, meet with interesting people, and you will go in interesting directions.   Mentioned in this Episode: growbigplaybook.com dorieclark.com/join

Pat Quinn shares his incredible insight into how to explode your conversion rate and get more people to say yes to you with the Storybrand structure. Find out how to win more clients and business by telling authentic stories that make your offer so compelling the client will be thinking “I’d thought you’d never ask!” Structure matters. Pat’s goal when he’s working with a speaker is for the audience to engage with the speaker after they’re done which means you need to structure your presentation differently. Engagement can take the form of doing business with you, using your service, or subscribing to your newsletter. The Storybrand formula has four steps: Heart, Head, Hand, and Heart. The first part, Heart, is your opening story where the purpose is not to sell, but to connect. The second, Head, is when you teach and help the audience. The third part, Hand, is where you ask the audience to do something with your call to action. The last part, Heart, is to finish with something inspiring. When you put all these things together you will have a presentation that will make people want to engage with you. Mo used to skip too early to the teaching part of the training but after going through Pat’s training he discovered that the personal story at the beginning is the most important part of the presentation. Everyone wants to be a leader and teach the audience, but you can’t lead until you have paced with someone. Pacing is not teaching or leading or selling, it’s saying that you’ve been where the audience is and understanding how they feel. Every communication you do in your business should be in the four part story format. You have some goals with a presentation but the biggest one is to connect and the best way to accomplish this is through episodic storytelling. The three goals of your opening story are to be ordinary, be extraordinary, and to show your why. Ordinary means showing you’ve struggled with the audience’s problems as well. Extraordinary means that you’ve solved at least one of their problems. If you can show your why and your passion about what you do, you will connect in an emotional way that will make them want to engage with you. Episodic storytelling is telling a story from a first person point of view. The first sentence is incredibly important. The secret is to start in the middle of the action which is the same way that great movies begin. This is very attractive and pulls people into your story in a way that reading off your resume can’t compete with. When you start your presentation in a predictable way, your audience will tune out and stop listening. When you start with a compelling story, you will stand out and rise above the crowd. After your story you still have to help your audience. Give away your best information because if you don’t help them at this point, you don’t build credibility and trust, and there will be no reason for them to believe that you can help them in a longer engagement. Most people think that you have to teach everything you know about the subject but that’s not the case. The person who teaches the most does not win the sale, they just leave their audience scared and confused. The person who wins the sale is the one who helps the most in the time they have. When asked to speak, the very first question you should ask is how much time you have. So many presenters try to cram as much material as possible into a time slot but that’s probably the biggest mistake that presenters can make. It’s vital you know how much time you have to speak. Use less of your time to teach and spend more on connection time and next steps. People do more business with those they like, so spend more time fostering the relationship. Have one simple, clear, and obvious single next step when putting in a call to action. Offering a menu of options leads to confusion. Tell the audience the right next step and make them say yes or no to that. A great presentation is like a sidewalk, it leads the person in front of you down a path to a single point of decision. The fewer options you give, the more people you will get to say yes. Don’t leave the audience wondering what to do next. You’re the expert, tell them the next step and the price that works. The right number of topics is three for the teaching portion of a presentation. Get to the stuff that actually helps people and give them a mix of real solutions that are both simple and complicated, short-term and long-term solutions. Short-term solutions give you instant credibility and long-term solutions lead to lasting results. You should make whatever you are talking about both simple and complicated. Simple so that they believe they can do it. Complicated so that they never try to do it without you. Your offer should be weaved into your content. If you get to the offer and it’s the first time your audience is hearing about it, it’s already too late. Our brains physically change when we detect a sales conversation. There is a second dialogue going on in every room. If your presentation is well designed, organized, and simple the audience is listening with about 20% of their brain. The remaining 80% is made up of everything else going on in their life but a good presentation can steer the second dialogue toward your offer. If you don’t introduce your offer early enough, you’ll surprise people. When you get to the offer at the end of your presentation, the response that you want from the audience is “I thought you’d never ask.” All great presentations have visuals which can take a number of different forms. Concrete deliverables will increase your conversion rate. When you have a deliverable, don’t just touch it and show it, do an “Is, Does, Means”. Tell them what it is, tell them what it does, and then tell them what it means. The money is in the meaning. Introduce the next step early on in your story and presentation. Limit the choices to the option of working with you or not working with you. Avoid declaring that everything will change, instead tell them the things that won’t change. The status quo is the comforting blanket around your offer. Actors and actresses are on stage pretending to be something they’re not. Pat teaches people to be themselves and make themselves more attractive to the companies they want to work with. If you do this you’re not selling, you’re just telling them how to get something they already want. There is no one right way to present. You don’t have to be funny, or glib, or quick witted. You have to know your story, have content that actually helps people, have one thing for them to do next, and every time you speak you will get new clients, more business, and make more of an impact on this world. There are two types of decision makers in every audience, tactical decision makers and emotional decision makers. If you only talk to the tactics you’re only going to get yes half as often as you should. Tell the audience what the offer is and also how it will feel. Close with emotion. The Hand is the tactical close, and the final Heart is your emotional close. Research shows that the emotional close doesn’t last as long as a tactical close. The goal at the very end is to have both aspects of the mind hot and ready to go.   Mentioned in the Episode: advanceyourreach.com/growbig GrowBIGplaybook.com

Mo Bunnell reviews the most important and timely insights from season 1 and talks about how to set yourself up for success during this time of the pandemic. Get clarity on how to stay focused, make consistent progress, and motivate yourself and your team to achieve even greater results while everyone else is binge watching their favorite TV shows. The last episode covered the timeless truths that every business development professional can use at any time with fantastic insights into the four major components of successful business development habits. Not addressing the realities of Covid-19 leaves a huge opportunity on the table. The Covid Clarities still fit within the timeless truths discussed earlier, but will be focused on the practical things to keep in mind in the latter half of 2020 and early 2021. Lots of the changes that have happened in the last seven months are here to stay. Get your own copy of the worksheet and the CliffsNotes of the Timeless Truths and Covid Clarities by going to bdhabits.com. The four main themes of season 1 were mindset, vision, accountability, and habits, split between the two perspectives, internal and external. Being helpful and top of mind is what our clients need right now to navigate their change. The number one thing that Mo is focused on is helping others learn to be helpful in this new world we find ourselves living in. The thing you have to realize is that you are not being annoying by reaching out and following up. The only time you shouldn’t follow up is when you’re not adding value. It doesn’t always have to be a sales pitch or thought piece, it could just be showing that you care. Frequency is important for relationships to develop, so we’ve got to take it on ourselves to reach out and be helpful. Mo retells a story of a major realization that a client had regarding follow up. Your clients need you right now, they need you to check in, and they need to know you care. If you’re adding value, you can’t follow up too often. How can you add the most value and stay top of mind with your most important clients? Certain aspects of our new virtual world are here to stay. If you treat the changes like they are permanent then you’re going to act rather than delay. Think of the difference between the first place you rented versus the first place you owned. If you’re waiting for the pandemic to end, or certain aspects of it to end, you’re renting your time. If you take the extreme position of assuming the changes are permanent and own your time, you will be way better off a year from now. Take advantage of the things that are easier now and do more of those, and you will have immense success. What do you need to learn to leapfrog the competition? Focus on that and keep improving. Avoid the mindset of “I can’t wait until this is over” and instead think about what skill you need to learn to be more efficient. Your most important clients are going through immense change and relationships are going to shift faster than ever before. You need to be in front of that trend by adding value and having a vision for their business. Help them navigate the change. A Value Group can be very valuable for both the people involved and for your business development efforts. Put together a value group of your most valuable clients and you will have success. What do you want your top clients to say about you a year from today? How do you want them to describe your relationship? Define that and start doing things that line up with that. Any time of immense change creates winners and losers. Learn fast and you’ll be a winner. Write down what you’re worried about regarding your own skills and use that as a starting point. Your identity changes by taking small considerate actions so create a purposeful plan that you can do every day. How can you leverage digital to accomplish more? Don’t judge yourself by pre-Covid measures, judge yourself by what makes sense now. What we were comfortable with is gone and you can no longer control those things. Reset your expectations on what is accomplishable now. If you don’t do that you can talk yourself into believing you’re a failure. What specific numerical outcomes should you choose that will let you know you're successful? Pick something realistic and don’t beat yourself up over things you can’t control. Keeping focus and accountability on a daily and weekly basis will create momentum. Create a visible process for invisible actions. Visible feedback gives you the motivation to achieve more. Focus on what you can control and you will make it through Covid. Figure out your MITs and other subjective actions you can control and start tracking them. What metrics can you track to keep you focused on daily and weekly sprints? Creating automation at scale is the key to getting more done, especially in a digital world. This can be tech solutions like a text expander, but the real power is in bespoke automation. If you’re ever asked something more than once, take the time to create a template for it and make it as valuable as you can. What templates or systems do you need to build where you can add 10x the value for the time spent? Having the right habits will determine your fate, especially in times of immense distraction. If your habits are moving you in the right direction, you will be much better off a year from now, but the same is true in reverse if your habits are moving you backwards. You need to focus on the right things so that you are in a better spot tomorrow. Assume this pandemic will never end, and keep focus on things you can do today. If you do that everyday, you will win. What are the most important rituals you need to have on a daily or weekly basis to stay focused?   Mentioned in the Episode: bdhabits.com Season 1 Summary Poster - sign up at for our free weekly newsletter at growbigplaybook.com and/or at bdhabits.com for our training course, and you will immediately receive this summary poster via email as an instant download

Mo Bunnell goes back through the incredible first season of Real Relationships Real Revenue. He pulls out the timeless truths and nuggets of lasting wisdom from each guest and applies them directly to business development. Listen and discover the transformative advice from the masters of mindset, vision, accountability, and habits. Interestingly enough, the recap episodes of season 1 of the podcast were more popular than the interviews themselves. During the interviews Mo tried to make them as timeless as possible so that the lessons learned will be as applicable in 2050 as they are right now. Mo went back and condensed all the nuggets of wisdom and lessons learned throughout the first season into a three page document which you can download at bdhabits.com. The timeless truths break down into four major themes spread out over two different perspectives. The themes being: mindset, vision, accountability, and habits. Servant sellers serve first and sell second. By serving first, you have the legitimacy to sell your solution and solve their problems. (Dan Pink episode 9) Of the 15,000 people that Mo has trained worldwide, Mike Deimler was the best business developer and trusted advisor that he could bring onto the show. According to Mike, if you start with the client’s perspective in mind, you are obligated to move them and encourage them to take action. When you start with the other, selling is a consequence of doing the right thing. (Mike Deimler episode 5) One of the most important things you can learn about business development is that if you start with the other and put your goals and objectives to the side, and instead focus on helping, you will do the right thing, which will always result in next steps, momentum, and trust. Business development is a learnable skill. If anyone tells you that you’re just born with it, they’re wrong. Any complex skill is both learned and earned, and that’s backed up by the science involved. Another way of reshaping your identity, is to reframe your goal into a question. Instead of assuming you’re not good at business development, ask yourself what a good business developer does and then use that to determine your next right action. Many people think an identity is born from a lofty goal, but it’s really made up by routinely doing things that make up that skill. As you do those things over time, your identity starts to transform. The external key is to be focused on the other person’s perspective and find ways to follow up with them. The internal key is to realize that anyone can learn the skills to be a world class business development expert. Business development is awesome. It is creating a different future for other people, and it is something to get better at, and if you do get better at it, it is generally the number one correlation to people having career success, having relationship success, and being able to control their life. You can move farther, faster, with a clear client vision. Don’t be afraid of disagreement. There will be times where you will have to ask permission to open the door to changing another person’s mind. Mike Deimler writes down the things that each of his clients should be thinking about to move their business forward. The act of writing those things down and seriously considering what those clients need compels him to share his vision for where they could be. It also forces him to be concise. Don’t let your expectations dissuade you. Bring it back to the little things you can do right now to get back on track. (Kelley O’Hara episode 1) Just keep doing the next right thing to help create the vision you want to help your client get to. Accept that you will have setbacks and just keep going. Your vision gives you the courage to say no to trivial distractions. One of Michael Hyatt’s big insights was that your quarterly goals inform your daily priorities, and that by writing down where you want to be in three years and then using that vision to determine the daily actions needed to get there is very powerful. Michael Hyatt’s framework of Drift, Driven, and Design is a useful way to understand how you are operating and where you are heading. Write down what you want to be known for in three years, how much business you want to bring in, what your daily habits look like, and what relationships you want to have. Those four things are enough to have a strong internal vision. You want to measure your outcomes and your results. The trick is not doing it too often. Goals are obviously powerful, but because there are often other external variables involved, it can actually be harmful to review your goals too often. Tracking something important subjectively is better than tracking something unimportant accurately. If you want to bring in more business, measuring how many Give-to-Gets you think that went well is a solid metric to track, even if it is subjective to your feelings. Having a mix of metrics between your full control and external variables is a good way to stay motivated and assess your effectiveness. Whatever results you have right now are by definition the byproduct of the system you’ve been running. (James Clear episode 3) You can’t hide from the results of your daily habits. If you love your results, that’s great, but there is always more to learn and improve on. If you don’t love your results, tweak your system. Measure the efforts you can 100% control often. Focus on the things you can control every single day and don’t outsource it to someone else because you will miss out on insights and immediate feedback that will keep you on track. Accountability happens by tracking the things you can control. If you lead a team, build out systems and start tracking the results for the whole team transparently. As results begin to change, the identity of the team will begin to change as well. The one universal thing to track are your Most Important Things (MIT) each week, determined by them being Big Impact, In Your Control, and Growth Oriented (BIG). Create systems that automate and scale. Automation extends beyond software. Keep templates of questions you get asked often and processes you use. 90% of the benefit of automation is in taking things that require human intervention and creating a process around them. Templates allow you to increase your productivity and get more done each week by adding hours of value in minutes of time. Write down what you do for business development and then think about which parts of that can be automated. If you view business development as a process, you can create templates that will pay immense dividends on your time. Create habits that celebrate consistent progress moving forward. There are three main things that impact your outcomes in life. The first is luck, the second is your choices and strategy, and the third is your systems and habits. If you master the last two, you increase the surface area for good luck to come your way. (James Clear episode 3) Dan Pink used to focus on the big hairy audacious goals, but he realized it always came back to habits. It’s about the small wins everyday. Do the things today that your year-from-now self will be happy you did today, and if you do that over and over again, it has a cumulative effect. (Dan Pink episode 9) Business development is the learnable skill and project that never ends. If you focus on the things you can control and keep making progress every day, you will find success.   Mentioned in the Episode: bdhabits.com bdhabitsforteams.com Season 1 Summary Poster - sign up at for our free weekly newsletter at growbigplaybook.com and/or at bdhabits.com for our training course, and you will immediately receive this summary poster via email as an instant download

Mo Bunnell breaks down the incredible insights shared by Dan Pink and talks about how to be truly successful in business development. You’ll learn why big goals aren’t motivating and what you need to do instead, the mindset you must have to consistently build valuable relationships, and why most people have the ability to be good at sales, they just don’t realize it yet. B2B sales is essentially management consulting. Mo doesn’t distinguish between sales calls and calls where he is working directly with a client. Both involve servant selling and coming from a place of providing value first. There isn’t much of a difference because at all stages of a business relationship the focus is in figuring out their priorities, in their words, and how you can help. It’s all about understanding what the next step should be and advancing the relationship in a way that's a win for everyone involved. The servant selling mindset is one of the reasons Mo’s company has grown so much. When you take away the stress of being hired or not and just focus on being helpful using expertise, that’s how we can be successful. No matter your profession or position, if you can shed the idea of only selling or fulfilling and instead embrace being helpful, that’s when you will be your authentic self and will start advising people on what’s right for them. Be targeted on how you spend your time and who you spend it with, be proactive and intentional, and be bold enough to ask for the next step if it makes sense for the person on the other side, while staying in the perspective of the servant seller. Most people are not extreme introverts or extroverts and often the ones who have a little bit of both personality types find success at selling. This means that most people have the potential to be great at management consulting and it doesn’t require being a natural-born extrovert. Any complex skill is both learned and earned, and that includes business development. Anyone can learn the skill and there is always a new plateau to reach. Mo has had more advances in his business development expertise in the last few months of the Covid-19 pandemic than he’s had in the last several years because it has forced him out of his comfort zone and to try new ways of approaching business. Business development can be learned, we all have it in us to get better at it, and no matter where you think you are on the introversion/extroversion spectrum you can use that to your advantage. The majority of us have everything we need to succeed, we just need to keep getting a little bit better every day. Dan Pink used to be oriented around setting Big Hairy Audacious Goals but now he’s focused on small wins. The Progress Principle states that the people that are the most successful are the ones who focus on incremental progress. They also tend to be the happiest as well. Mo wasn’t always good at celebrating his progress until he put systems in his life that allowed him to go back and see how far he has come. Celebrating your small wins leads to improved efficiency and a higher level of general satisfaction. Business development has one of the least amounts of quick feedback in all the areas and fields that Mo has studied. Most disciplines give you immediate feedback on your performance which motivates you to do more of the right things. The more you disconnect the action from the consequence, the more likely you are to not do the action anymore. That’s why it’s so important to create your own business development reward system to get that feedback. If you keep being intentional, keep being proactive, keep being helpful, then you’ve got a chance to grow your relationships and book of business. If you delay taking the next step until you close the feedback loop you will get distracted and lose your focus. Be HIP! (Helpful, Intentional, and Proactive) No more than a week should go by before you go back and look back on your progress. If you keep doing the things in your control, you will be successful.   Mentioned in this Episode: bdhabits.com The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile

Dan Pink, a New York Times bestselling author known for his insightful works on motivation and persuasion, explores the untapped potential of sales. He emphasizes that nearly everyone can excel in selling, dispelling negative stereotypes. Pink discusses the importance of timing and advocates for the power of small, daily wins over occasional big successes. He also shares his struggles with self-doubt as an author, and the value of embracing resistance in both writing and sales. Ultimately, he redefines selling as a service-oriented activity in today's information-rich environment.