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

Mo asks James Barclay: Tell me your personal definition of business development. Growth is all about your leading indicators. Your behaviors, values, and what you do every day are what will put you in a position to win. Focusing on the end of the pipeline will make you look desperate. With the right values and habits, you’ll come up with the right tactics for the people looking to buy from you. Helping is the key to growth. If every time someone reaches out you help them, at some point they will ask you what you do and be interested in what you sell, which is way more effective than reaching out to them to buy your stuff. When someone asks you what you do, turn it around and ask them about themselves and their challenges while looking for an area that you may be able to help them, either with advice or a connection. Curiosity is an emotion that humans love to experience. By getting the other person to ask what you do twice, it increases the curiosity element. Business development is about providing a solution when the other person needs it, and this takes patience and consistency is providing value. It can be even more powerful to be helpful when the other person is unable to buy your services. One of James’ key qualifiers when selling to someone is whether they like him and James likes them as well. It’s common for highly analytical people to talk about anything other than their content and expertise. If you find yourself uncomfortable in a sales environment, your clients probably feel the same. Finding the place that you're comfortable with could actually be the sweet spot between you and other analytical prospects. Reach out with useful content between billable projects. Sending an asset or an idea is an effective way to keep the conversation going.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com linkedin.com/in/jamesbarclay1 james@passle.net passle.net blog.passle.net

Mo asks James Barclay: When did you realize that business development was great? James' first job out of college was as a conference organizer and that’s where he learned the power of selling ideas. Selling conferences in the 1990s changed once the internet became more established and James began using websites to promote them, but they discovered that brochure websites weren’t very effective which led to creating content based websites instead. The skills that James and his business partners developed in creating those businesses were a natural fit for content online, but he realized that taking the expertise in his head and sharing it online was actually really difficult. That’s where the idea for Passle came from. Showcasing your expertise online as an expert is crucial, especially when people are still not visiting businesses physically as much. Do something rather than nothing, and realize that you won’t be great at it straight away. Run an audit of LinkedIn to see who you are connected to. Compare that list to a list of the people that give you money for what you do, and if you’re not connected with the people who give you money correct that. Write short, client focused and timely content at least once a month. Your content should be easy to consume and don’t outsource it. Someone shouldn’t be pretending to be you online. Taking content that is already published is a great place to start. Just add your own perspective or commentary to something that already exists. Picture one of your top ten to twenty clients and write something that you know will resonate with them then publish that on a public space like LinkedIn or your blog. Ask them directly what they would be interested in, and then write content around those answers. At the very least share your company’s content and provide some commentary on it. You need to be digitally active. People won’t be thinking of you if you’re not present in the public square that is social media. Write for one person instead of writing for everyone. Think of the people that pay you money for your expertise and then write content with one of those people in mind. They are the most likely to share your content and refer you to other people when they find it useful. That’s how you give your raving fans ammunition.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com linkedin.com/in/jamesbarclay1 james@passle.net passle.net

John Tigh shares the business development lessons he learned in the trenches working with top-10 pharmaceutical companies and digital transformation. Learn why business development is a heart-centered sport and why empathy is key to connecting with someone, how to look for disturbances in the force that indicate where you can contribute the most value to people, and get a crash course on the most important growth-focused conversation framework there is.   Mo asks John Tigh: Tell me of the moment that you realized growth is great. Eleven years ago, John was bit by a radioactive statement of work and has since gained the superpower of bringing in business. Being a consultant is all about having one foot in the work and the other in finding the next gig. John considers himself a relationship person rather than a salesperson. The better you can cultivate relationships, the more likely it is that you will have a chance to be of service to those people in the future. Business development is a heart and people centered sport. For John, if he can be of service to someone, that really energizes him. In the first meeting, John is looking for disturbances in the force. John is on the lookout for something that the other person hesitates about or expresses disappointment in a particular area. Those are places to dig deeper. Mission, Vision, and Values should apply at all levels of the organization. At the top of the enterprise, within the work group, and at the level of the individual. Where the gaps are is where John can help the most so that’s where he focuses his effort. John is looking for moments of clarity and polarization. Whether you’re selling ideas, products, or services, asking how you might be able to get it done together gets buy-in and accelerates momentum. John is a collector of interesting people. You can’t talk heart-centered without being empathetic, and you can’t get into someone else’s shoes without being curious about them. John believes in connecting others. By giving away information of value, he generates reciprocity in the future. John goes out of his way to connect awesome people with other awesome people because it makes everything about those relationships better. By connecting people, you can generate potentially dozens of interactions.   Mo asks John Tigh: What is your personal definition of business development? For John, business development begins and ends with acts of service. It’s all about following up and finding ways to help people. The fastest way to build a relationship is to deliver value and not necessarily in a commercial fashion. By being useful and helpful to other people, there are often second, third, and fourth order connections that come as a result of that. John aims to put a pause in people's fight or flight response when they hear the word sales, and just focuses instead on being human. By asking what makes someone special and giving them space to answer, John is trying to help them identify where their T-shape uniqueness is and how he can broaden the conversation from there. People always have areas of commonality. The more John knows about what makes people unique and special, the more opportunity he has to connect them with other people that need their products, services, or talent. Whenever John finds one person that they believe should know another person, he goes out of his way to find them interesting people to connect with. He sends an email that he refers to as a gusher about what makes those people awesome and why they would be even greater if they knew each other. If you think of business development as acts of service, it’s about learning what’s important to the other person and that creates a great buying process by showing you're trustworthy and you care. The habit that John tries to cultivate everyday is around being uncomfortable. The practice of discomfort and stretching his personal and professional boundaries is what put him on the growth path he is on today.   Mo asks John Tigh: What is your favorite science, step, or strategy from the GrowBIG Training or the Snowball System? John has been involved in the Snowball System for a long time and the Gravitas Model is a strategy that he uses every single day. It’s the perfect framework for taking any conversation where you want to go. It has an incredible level of flexibility and imparts a character to your conversation that people can’t help but enjoy. It also gives you the ability to keep the conversation going. When you ask great questions, you get a triple win. With the way the Gravitas Model is designed, they light up the pleasure center of the other person’s mind when they are sharing their personal perspective, you learn their priorities in their words, and the questions highly correlate to likability. The more they talk and the less you talk, the more the other person will like you. John’s perfect buyer is in the C-Suite or someone dealing with content creation. During a conversation with his perfect buyer, John would talk about what they have in common, the challenges they experienced in the past, and their current role and their current projects. Typically, the goal for each meeting is to secure the next meeting. By addressing the base level mechanical questions, John can take a conversation up to higher level vision-based goals. He often asks people how calm the seas are and what they think the future holds, with a hook at the end about any questions that John didn’t ask but should have. John is always looking for an opportunity to offer value in some way or to make a connection or introduction for the other person in an effort to secure the next meeting. The framework is simply built around looking for ways to make the other person look good. Once you get the Gravitas Model in your bones, it really does help every kind of conversation, whether that’s spoken or written.   Mo asks John Tigh: Tell me of a business development that you are particularly proud of. During John’s time working as a consultant while working for a top-10 pharmaceutical company. He had a chance to meet another top-10 pharmaceutical company and help them implement a new technology. John had a productive initial meeting but hadn’t really heard from them for two years. Eventually, John was contacted to pick up the project after another consulting company dropped the ball. Disaster struck and the leader that was meant to guide the project left the company. John put his hand up to help them move the project forward as long as they were willing to trust the team to get things done. Over time, the team grew and John ran that project from the outside for three years and grew the business to the tune of multiple millions of dollars. All of that came from one initial meeting and building trust by offering some expertise and help with no strings attached. He was the one who wrote the strategy that transformed the business as well as the leader and operations person who helped make that happen. John’s biggest achievement during that time was in overcoming his own inner critic. By learning about and practicing meditation each day, he learned how to get out of his own way. Having a moment at the start of each day to throw off the doubts and the worries and focus on doing what he can do has changed the rest of John’s life. One of the biggest blessings of a high performing team that has your back and believes in you is that they can help you manage your own inner critic.   Mo asks John Tigh: If you could record a video for your younger self around business development, what would it say? John would start things off by telling his younger self to be quiet since he wasn’t always the best listener. The other thing he would say is that everything is about growth. Everything is sales related, and it all has to be articulated to get any kind of traction. Listen first, and then find ways to be helpful. John looks for liminal spaces within conversations. He uses pauses to ask for invitations to speak because getting permission is a much more productive way to speak. There is an energy around change, so it’s usually best to try to slow things down and build in pauses to reduce the tension. Pauses and asking for permission can also increase curiosity. In dealing with externalities, reacting is not always the most effective way forward. Stopping and saying, “that’s interesting, tell me more” gives you space to respond instead. It’s okay to ask someone to restate the question. Being vulnerable shows that you actually care about what’s being said and what the other person is trying to communicate.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com john@clevercognitive.com linkedin.com/in/johntigh clevercognitive.com

Mo asks John Tigh: If you could record a video for your younger self around business development, what would it say? John would start things off by telling his younger self to be quiet since he wasn’t always the best listener. The other thing he would say is that everything is about growth. Everything is sales related, and it all has to be articulated to get any kind of traction. Listen first, and then find ways to be helpful. John looks for liminal spaces within conversations. He uses pauses to ask for invitations to speak because getting permission is a much more productive way to speak. There is an energy around change, so it’s usually best to try to slow things down and build in pauses to reduce the tension. Pauses and asking for permission can also increase curiosity. In dealing with externalities, reacting is not always the most effective way forward. Stopping and saying, “that’s interesting, tell me more” gives you space to respond instead. It’s okay to ask someone to restate the question. Being vulnerable shows that you actually care about what’s being said and what the other person is trying to communicate.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com john@clevercognitive.com linkedin.com/in/johntigh clevercognitive.com

Mo asks John Tigh: Tell me of a business development that you are particularly proud of. During John’s time working as a consultant while working for a top-10 pharmaceutical company. He had a chance to meet another top-10 pharmaceutical company and help them implement a new technology. John had a productive initial meeting but hadn’t really heard from them for two years. Eventually, John was contacted to pick up the project after another consulting company dropped the ball. Disaster struck and the leader that was meant to guide the project left the company. John put his hand up to help them move the project forward as long as they were willing to trust the team to get things done. Over time, the team grew and John ran that project from the outside for three years and grew the business to the tune of multiple millions of dollars. All of that came from one initial meeting and building trust by offering some expertise and help with no strings attached. He was the one who wrote the strategy that transformed the business as well as the leader and operations person who helped make that happen. John’s biggest achievement during that time was in overcoming his own inner critic. By learning about and practicing meditation each day, he learned how to get out of his own way. Having a moment at the start of each day to throw off the doubts and the worries and focus on doing what he can do has changed the rest of John’s life. One of the biggest blessings of a high performing team that has your back and believes in you is that they can help you manage your own inner critic.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com john@clevercognitive.com linkedin.com/in/johntigh clevercognitive.com

Mo asks John Tigh: What is your favorite science, step, or strategy from the GrowBIG Training or the Snowball System? John has been involved in the Snowball System for a long time and the Gravitas Model is a strategy that he uses every single day. It’s the perfect framework for taking any conversation where you want to go. It has an incredible level of flexibility and imparts a character to your conversation that people can’t help but enjoy. It also gives you the ability to keep the conversation going. When you ask great questions, you get a triple win. With the way the Gravitas Model is designed, they light up the pleasure center of the other person’s mind when they are sharing their personal perspective, you learn their priorities in their words, and the questions highly correlate to likability. The more they talk and the less you talk, the more the other person will like you. John’s perfect buyer is in the C-Suite or someone dealing with content creation. During a conversation with his perfect buyer, John would talk about what they have in common, the challenges they experienced in the past, and their current role and their current projects. Typically, the goal for each meeting is to secure the next meeting. By addressing the base level mechanical questions, John can take a conversation up to higher level vision-based goals. He often asks people how calm the seas are and what they think the future holds, with a hook at the end about any questions that John didn’t ask but should have. John is always looking for an opportunity to offer value in some way or to make a connection or introduction for the other person in an effort to secure the next meeting. The framework is simply built around looking for ways to make the other person look good. Once you get the Gravitas Model in your bones, it really does help every kind of conversation, whether that’s spoken or written.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com john@clevercognitive.com linkedin.com/in/johntigh clevercognitive.com

Mo asks John Tigh: What is your personal definition of business development? For John, business development begins and ends with acts of service. It’s all about following up and finding ways to help people. The fastest way to build a relationship is to deliver value and not necessarily in a commercial fashion. By being useful and helpful to other people, there are often second, third, and fourth order connections that come as a result of that. John aims to put a pause in people's fight or flight response when they hear the word sales, and just focuses instead on being human. By asking what makes someone special and giving them space to answer, John is trying to help them identify where their T-shape uniqueness is and how he can broaden the conversation from there. People always have areas of commonality. The more John knows about what makes people unique and special, the more opportunity he has to connect them with other people that need their products, services, or talent. Whenever John finds one person that they believe should know another person, he goes out of his way to find them interesting people to connect with. He sends an email that he refers to as a gusher about what makes those people awesome and why they would be even greater if they knew each other. If you think of business development as acts of service, it’s about learning what’s important to the other person and that creates a great buying process by showing you're trustworthy and you care. The habit that John tries to cultivate everyday is around being uncomfortable. The practice of discomfort and stretching his personal and professional boundaries is what put him on the growth path he is on today.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com john@clevercognitive.com linkedin.com/in/johntigh clevercognitive.com

Mo asks John Tigh: Tell me of the moment that you realized growth is great. Eleven years ago, John was bit by a radioactive statement of work and has since gained the superpower of bringing in business. Being a consultant is all about having one foot in the work and the other in finding the next gig. John considers himself a relationship person rather than a salesperson. The better you can cultivate relationships, the more likely it is that you will have a chance to be of service to those people in the future. Business development is a heart and people centered sport. For John, if he can be of service to someone, that really energizes him. In the first meeting, John is looking for disturbances in the force. John is on the lookout for something that the other person hesitates about or expresses disappointment in a particular area. Those are places to dig deeper. Mission, Vision, and Values should apply at all levels of the organization. At the top of the enterprise, within the work group, and at the level of the individual. Where the gaps are is where John can help the most so that’s where he focuses his effort. John is looking for moments of clarity and polarization. Whether you’re selling ideas, products, or services, asking how you might be able to get it done together gets buy-in and accelerates momentum. John is a collector of interesting people. You can’t talk heart-centered without being empathetic, and you can’t get into someone else’s shoes without being curious about them. John believes in connecting others. By giving away information of value, he generates reciprocity in the future. John goes out of his way to connect awesome people with other awesome people because it makes everything about those relationships better. By connecting people, you can generate potentially dozens of interactions.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com john@clevercognitive.com linkedin.com/in/johntigh clevercognitive.com

Jane Allen shares how she built a brand new category of business by taking a chance on trying to solve a problem she saw lawyers facing every single day. Find out about how Jane grew her initial client base for Counsel on Call, how proactive problem solving can be developed into a growth system for business, and why the most important thing you can do in sales is take a chance and ask for what you want.   Mo asks Jane Allen: Tell me of the moment where you realized you wanted to focus on business development. Jane originally went to law school because she had read Death of a Salesman in college, and she didn’t want to end up like Willy Loman. It turned out that to be a successful lawyer, you had to be a really good Willy Loman. Jane loved working with clients to solve their problems, and when you do that, they want you to solve more problems. Her natural approach of getting to know her clients in order to solve their problems made her realize that she loves the relationship building aspect of the business. There are a lot of women leaving the profession of being a lawyer. Prior to launching Counsel on Call Jane started looking for women who were exiting the industry to help her solve client problems in a different way. The business became a hybrid solution for meeting a need in the marketplace as well as the lawyers that serviced clients. Jane had three children in three years while also working as a lawyer full time. She was never the person that went to networking events, but she did have the advantage of working with very well-respected partners. Jane started her business by dialing for dollars out of the Nashville Bar Association book. She committed to making ten phone calls each day, started tracking her metrics, and landing meetings. Many said no, but most people said yes and the momentum started to snowball. When it comes to extremely technical professions, many people struggle with asking for help. Jane’s approach was the reverse, and focused specifically on asking for help in creating a company that would change her prospect’s business for the better. As an entrepreneur trying to solve a problem, Jane needed the voices of people in the industry to understand that a problem really existed and what the possible solution would be. To start off, Jane began with one lawyer and one law firm, and after the first few years the company had three offices helping lawyers practice in a way they couldn’t before. By the time Jane sold the company, there were 1,200 lawyers on the team. Jane recalls the story of how she helped one lawyer in particular in a relatively minor way, and how her advice allowed his career to flourish, simply by being willing to help.   Mo asks Jane Allen: What is your personal definition of business development? Jane’s definition is simply proactive problem solving. If you are trying to sell something, it should be something they need and may not know they need it. It’s about showing them a problem they have as well as the solution. People don’t like to be sold to, but they do like to buy. If you’re struggling with being proactive, realize that it’s not the job of the prospect to call you or respond to your email. It’s your job to get the meeting. One of the best kinds of meetings is when someone says that they are not going to work with you, then at least you’re not going to waste your time. Don’t waste their time. Even if you think you have all the answers, you don’t. The goal of the first meeting is to ask thought provoking questions and to determine whether you have a solution to their problem. If you can’t resolve everything in one meeting, the goal is to secure the next. The prospect should understand the importance of the next meeting and you should give them enough of a cliffhanger that they anticipate it.   Mo asks Jane Allen: What is your favorite science, step, or story from the GrowBIG Training or Snowball System? The personality test was the most fascinating element of the GrowBIG Training that completely transformed the way Jane’s company thought about meetings and communicating with other people. Jane has a systems mindset that allows her to scale a business that served her very well in Counsel on Call. Efficiency is a major driver for Jane, and she is always looking for ways to grow that don’t lose the elements of a personal relationship. Jane set communication as a priority from the start and then developed systems around that central principle. Jane also spent a lot of time developing databases to track metrics like the number of Give-to-Gets completed, objections, and asking for the next steps. Practice and having fun were also built into the system. The business has to be bigger than the individual. You have to capture the data to help you learn and evolve and keep yourself and your team accountable. If you’re not meeting people who are decision makers or can’t help you get to that point, is it really a good use of your time? You have to get honest about how you spend your time and then get really deliberate about how you spend the time you have. Focus first on how you’re different, and then how you’re going to eliminate the prospect’s risk of change. Measuring the quantity and quality of your business development efforts is the key to seeing an increase in your results. Try to get one metric of each that matches your book of business and relationships you’re trying to build.   Mo asks Jane Allen: Tell us a business development story that you are really proud of. Jane tells the story from the early 2000’s during a time when the people they were serving in corporate America were being overwhelmed by the explosion of data. One fateful dinner and “what if” scenario later, Jane started collaborating with a firm to solve real world problems with a solution that was unheard of at the time. As an entrepreneur, Jane didn’t take time to reflect on the success since she was so focused on the execution. Looking back now, finding a partner that was willing to take a risk and then deliver something that enabled her clients to practice law in a completely different way is something she’s very proud of. In terms of her career, Jane is most proud of the incredible people she worked with and learned from, as well as being willing to take the chance on herself and her vision for her business. Reach for your goals and take the chance. Rejection is a part of life, but you will never achieve anything if you don’t try.   Mo asks Jane Allen: If you could record a message to your younger self around business development or growth skills, what would it say? Jane would tell herself to embrace it. Embrace your intrinsic drive to connect with people. Jane wouldn’t have referred to herself as an extrovert, but when it came to her work and her business, she committed herself to getting the job done and connecting with people. Jane likes to solve people’s problems and connect them with what they need. Creating systems in her life that drive those actions and allow her focus on that has been the key to her success. Before becoming a lawyer, Jane was a school teacher where she loved helping kids understand complex problems. That trait has been a common thread throughout her life. Jane now works with entrepreneurs and helps them find resources and mentors through the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ec.co jane.allen@ec.co

Mo asks Jane Allen: If you could record a message to your younger self around business development or growth skills, what would it say? Jane would tell herself to embrace it. Embrace your intrinsic drive to connect with people. Jane wouldn’t have referred to herself as an extrovert, but when it came to her work and her business, she committed herself to getting the job done and connecting with people. Jane likes to solve people’s problems and connect them with what they need. Creating systems in her life that drive those actions and allow her focus on that has been the key to her success. Before becoming a lawyer, Jane was a school teacher where she loved helping kids understand complex problems. That trait has been a common thread throughout her life. Jane now works with entrepreneurs and helps them find resources and mentors through the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ec.co jane.allen@ec.co