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

Mo asks Scott Winter: What is your personal definition of business development? The first component is being genuine. If you’re not, people will see right through what you’re doing. Scott has been fortunate to work with companies that he authentically believes in, and that confidence in the product makes being genuine possible. Drinking your own champagne helps. Scott is an avid consumer of the products he sells, and that makes the conversations easy and learning more about what the prospect needs simpler. Be genuine, love what you do, and treat it as a learning exercise. When you love what you do, it will come through in your enthusiasm for the client and the results you can get them. Think of it as a partnership where their victory is your victory and you will convey your pride and energy for what you do. Think with empathy, get excited about the future and help the prospect create that future. Business development has to be flexible because this is not a one-size-fits-all world. You have to be able to take your service offering or product, listen to what the other person’s needs are, and show them how it can help solve their problem.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com scott@index.io Scott Winter on LinkedIn

Mo asks Scott Winter: When was the moment that you realized that business development was great? Scott started his career off in sales with LexisNexis and that developed into a role in consulting. Eventually he made the switch to a product management position with Interaction where he focused on CRM and client relationships. Interaction is the world’s largest CRM system for law firms and by coming up in that environment, Scott learned a lot about the technical aspects of the software which helped him better serve his clients. Scott had the typical mindset about sales in college that most people have, but he reframed his perspective after getting some actual experience in sales positions. The one key moment when Scott realized that business development was a powerful tool for growth was after having a simple conversation with someone on a plan. Just listening carefully and remembering what he learned blew that person away when they met again many months later. Scott has a knack for having a conversation on any subject and being able to find a point of connection. He also tends to add notes in his phone of a particularly interesting detail (powerlifting, ironman training, etc.) and makes use of his CRM to keep track of everything. Remembering details about someone is an art and a science, but there are tools you can use to make it easier.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com scott@index.io Scott Winter on LinkedIn

Brent Atkins, Senior Vice President Business Development at Progyny, shares the business development lessons he’s learned over the years that have defined his career. Learn about the one GrowBIG training that changed how Brent thought about how he communicates and builds relationships with clients, the skill that all serious business development professionals have to master to be effective, and why you can’t win at business by simply copying what works for other people.   Mo asks Brent Atkins: Tell me about the time  you realized that business development was awesome. Brent learned early on the need for business development because he has done sales throughout his career. The one thing he realized from all his different work experiences was that he loved interacting with people and connecting with them. He understood that there was far more depth to sales than just telling someone your story. He had a desire to learn more and be more successful in his relationships in business and very quickly realized that there is a huge difference between talking to someone and listening to someone. Through the course of interacting with one of Brent’s early bosses, he learned he needed to be prepared for the questions he was going to ask Brent, but also that he needed answers to the questions from their perspective in order to serve them better. He needed to have a dialogue with the customer because all his knowledge about what he was selling was only one small piece of the overall business development process. The transition from talking to listening is a key mindset shift that all business development professionals need to learn. Brent now leads a team of many younger salespeople and helps them better understand the business development process. The first step is to help them want to learn more about business development, because without that desire, nothing else sticks. When setting meetings, Brent teaches people to set an objective for the meeting that you want the prospect to take away. If you have a lot of slides in your initial presentation, you’re making a mistake. Brent likes to start with a very light slidedeck in the beginning because his goal is to understand the reason for the meeting in the first place as well as the roles of the people he’s talking to. Brent is a big proponent of the pregnant pause. When you get a response, follow it up with another thoughtful question. Follow ups are where you get traction in a relationship. When it comes to the fertility space, Brent starts out with curiosity. Asking them about their familiarity with the space and exploring their experience is the foundation for a more fruitful conversation and almost always leads to how his solution solves their issue. It sets the tone for the conversation and allows him and his team to come back with a robust solution for their problem.   Mo asks Brent Atkins: What is your personal definition of business development? When training his team, he tells them to “build your brand.” The way they go about building relationships and adding value will be different from Brent’s, and they need to lean into that. When Brent worked on the carrier side of the business, his first goal when developing new business relationships was becoming a trusted individual in that person’s network. Brent always strived to have the credibility to say when he wasn’t a good fit for someone, and by being willing to do that, when his solution was the right fit, he had that person’s attention and trust. Progyny has a great solution, but it’s not the right fit for every organization right away. When that is the case, Brent digs into other areas of the business they want to improve on and offers material on how they impact those areas to see if that makes sense. Once they do those steps, the prospect often comes back with Brent in the #1 position in their mind. We’ve all experienced a situation where we felt like we had a great connection but it resulted in silence. Brent tells the story of when that happened to him and how by letting them know that he didn’t have their attention right now, but he would like to reconnect in the future when they're ready, and how that got him an immediate response. To child trust, connect with the prospect at their level. Ask them questions and give them the space to answer. When you are dealing with someone on an individual basis, they might tell you something real about themselves, and if you can remember that it shows that you think they’re important and want to connect in a thoughtful way. The people that develop the deepest relationships are the ones that are interested in the other person. Finding things in common is one of the highest correlations to likeability.   Mo asks Brent Atkins: What is your favorite science, step, or story from the GrowBIG training or Snowball System? Brent’s first favorite teaching is the walk around the brain. The science of how different people think is unbelievably valuable and creating a presentation that touches on all four quadrants is very effective. For Progyny, that looks like recognizing that the appeal of their program changes from Red/Yellow to Green/Blue as they move up the continuum of decision makers has been game changing. The four quadrants being strategic, practical, analytical, and relational. For Progyny, Strategic looks like finding ways to improve an organization’s benefit spend that adds value and speaks to diversity and inclusion initiatives. It’s about listening to the organization's priorities and tailoring the offer to that. For Practical, Progyny has been in business for seven years now and has a retention of 99%, so they have been changing their story from the cutting edge solution to the safe choice for organizations. People don’t buy Progyny for the dollar benefits, although that is important. They buy for the experience of helping people create families. Progyny focuses on creating the story for an organization that gets them to mentally buy in before dealing with the analytical aspects. You do not have to be a commodity. So many professionals get into a race to the bottom about pricing because they don’t talk about it properly. Managing the metrics associated with the business development process is critically important to the success of the organization. You have to create the curiosity to create the need. Once you create the need you create the story. Once you create the story and ask for a couple pieces of information, you build your model. When you follow that process, you will have a much higher closing rate.   Mo asks Brent Atkins: Tell us a business development story that you are really proud of. Brent tells the story of his days before Progyny as a middle market sales person for a national carrier. He had a competitive product and was finding a lot of success at the time, but there was one broker relationship that he couldn’t crack. He had to change the paradigm of his relationship by turning down a request for proposal from them, and in the ensuing conversation, he found out why he wasn’t getting the traction from them before. After sitting down with the client for two and a half hours, he became one of Brent’s close friends, and Brent won three out of five of the next opportunities that he sent in. The approach of wanting to learn what was lacking in Brent's approach was the key to opening up the relationship. Asking for help or advice is one of the biggest bonding things you can do to create trust and build an authentic relationship. They spent roughly half that time talking about business and getting into the details, and the rest, connecting with him on a personal level. Winning the business is great, but Brent considers turning that person into a friend the biggest win of all. Being vulnerable was key in that interaction. Vulnerability is something that he teaches his team to embrace, and to be willing to learn why they didn’t win when it happens. It’s about using the loss to set up a future win. Brent hears the response “no for now” quite frequently. If that’s the case, he encourages his team to figure out what the hurdle was and develop a strategy to keep the relationship alive with adding value, Give to Gets, and providing intellectual capital that makes you the easy choice in the future.   Mo asks Brent Atkins: If you could record a video on business development and send it to your younger self, what would you say? In the early days of Brent’s business development career, he did things very differently. The first thing he would say is to listen. Brent hears more things now during the course of a conversation with active listening, which is the opposite from how his younger self operated. There is an impulse when you’re young and fresh to tell everyone what you know, but listening and asking questions are how you really learn how to sell. Every product or service has multiple ways you can position it to win. If you listen, you can be much more effective in that effort. Brent is a student of business development even now. The first 21 days of a relationship are extremely important to solidify a bond. Reaching out to continue the conversation and creating that bond allows you to come back months or years later and pick up that conversation in the same way you would with an old friend. The final tip would be to build your brand. People are taught sales skills and usually want to apply them the exact way they are taught. Take what you’re doing and make it yours. Whatever sales skills you are working on, you need to make them authentically yours for them to be effective. The great business development rainmakers never stop learning. Brent is always looking to improve and work on his skills, especially in leverage tools like MIT’s and the Protemoi list.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com brent.atkins@progyny.com Brent Atkins on LinkedIn

Mo asks Brent Atkins: If you could record a video on business development and send it to your younger self, what would you say? In the early days of Brent’s business development career, he did things very differently. The first thing he would say is to listen. Brent hears more things now during the course of a conversation with active listening, which is the opposite from how his younger self operated. There is an impulse when you’re young and fresh to tell everyone what you know, but listening and asking questions are how you really learn how to sell. Every product or service has multiple ways you can position it to win. If you listen, you can be much more effective in that effort. Brent is a student of business development even now. The first 21 days of a relationship are extremely important to solidify a bond. Reaching out to continue the conversation and creating that bond allows you to come back months or years later and pick up that conversation in the same way you would with an old friend. The final tip would be to build your brand. People are taught sales skills and usually want to apply them the exact way they are taught. Take what you’re doing and make it yours. Whatever sales skills you are working on, you need to make them authentically yours for them to be effective. The great business development rainmakers never stop learning. Brent is always looking to improve and work on his skills, especially in leverage tools like MIT’s and the Protemoi list.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com brent.atkins@progyny.com Brent Atkins on LinkedIn

Mo asks Brent Atkins: Tell us a business development story that you are really proud of. Brent tells the story of his days before Progyny as a middle market sales person for a national carrier. He had a competitive product and was finding a lot of success at the time, but there was one broker relationship that he couldn’t crack. He had to change the paradigm of his relationship by turning down a request for proposal from them, and in the ensuing conversation, he found out why he wasn’t getting the traction from them before. After sitting down with the client for two and a half hours, he became one of Brent’s close friends, and Brent won three out of five of the next opportunities that he sent in. The approach of wanting to learn what was lacking in Brent's approach was the key to opening up the relationship. Asking for help or advice is one of the biggest bonding things you can do to create trust and build an authentic relationship. They spent roughly half that time talking about business and getting into the details, and the rest, connecting with him on a personal level. Winning the business is great, but Brent considers turning that person into a friend the biggest win of all. Being vulnerable was key in that interaction. Vulnerability is something that he teaches his team to embrace, and to be willing to learn why they didn’t win when it happens. It’s about using the loss to set up a future win. Brent hears the response “no for now” quite frequently. If that’s the case, he encourages his team to figure out what the hurdle was and develop a strategy to keep the relationship alive with adding value, Give to Gets, and providing intellectual capital that makes you the easy choice in the future.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com brent.atkins@progyny.com Brent Atkins on LinkedIn

Mo asks Brent Atkins: What is your favorite science, step, or story from the GrowBIG training or Snowball System? Brent’s first favorite teaching is the walk around the brain. The science of how different people think is unbelievably valuable and creating a presentation that touches on all four quadrants is very effective. For Progyny, that looks like recognizing that the appeal of their program changes from Red/Yellow to Green/Blue as they move up the continuum of decision makers has been game changing. The four quadrants being strategic, practical, analytical, and relational. For Progyny, Strategic looks like finding ways to improve an organization’s benefit spend that adds value and speaks to diversity and inclusion initiatives. It’s about listening to the organization's priorities and tailoring the offer to that. For Practical, Progyny has been in business for seven years now and has a retention of 99%, so they have been changing their story from the cutting edge solution to the safe choice for organizations. People don’t buy Progyny for the dollar benefits, although that is important. They buy for the experience of helping people create families. Progyny focuses on creating the story for an organization that gets them to mentally buy in before dealing with the analytical aspects. You do not have to be a commodity. So many professionals get into a race to the bottom about pricing because they don’t talk about it properly. Managing the metrics associated with the business development process is critically important to the success of the organization. You have to create the curiosity to create the need. Once you create the need you create the story. Once you create the story and ask for a couple pieces of information, you build your model. When you follow that process, you will have a much higher closing rate.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com brent.atkins@progyny.com Brent Atkins on LinkedIn

Mo asks Brent Atkins: What is your personal definition of business development? When training his team, he tells them to “build your brand.” The way they go about building relationships and adding value will be different from Brent’s, and they need to lean into that. When Brent worked on the carrier side of the business, his first goal when developing new business relationships was becoming a trusted individual in that person’s network. Brent always strived to have the credibility to say when he wasn’t a good fit for someone, and by being willing to do that, when his solution was the right fit, he had that person’s attention and trust. Progyny has a great solution, but it’s not the right fit for every organization right away. When that is the case, Brent digs into other areas of the business they want to improve on and offers material on how they impact those areas to see if that makes sense. Once they do those steps, the prospect often comes back with Brent in the #1 position in their mind. We’ve all experienced a situation where we felt like we had a great connection but it resulted in silence. Brent tells the story of when that happened to him and how by letting them know that he didn’t have their attention right now, but he would like to reconnect in the future when they're ready, and how that got him an immediate response. To child trust, connect with the prospect at their level. Ask them questions and give them the space to answer. When you are dealing with someone on an individual basis, they might tell you something real about themselves, and if you can remember that it shows that you think they’re important and want to connect in a thoughtful way. The people that develop the deepest relationships are the ones that are interested in the other person. Finding things in common is one of the highest correlations to likeability.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com brent.atkins@progyny.com Brent Atkins on LinkedIn

Mo asks Brent Atkins: Tell me about the time  you realized that business development was awesome. Brent learned early on the need for business development because he has done sales throughout his career. The one thing he realized from all his different work experiences was that he loved interacting with people and connecting with them. He understood that there was far more depth to sales than just telling someone your story. He had a desire to learn more and be more successful in his relationships in business and very quickly realized that there is a huge difference between talking to someone and listening to someone. Through the course of interacting with one of Brent’s early bosses, he learned he needed to be prepared for the questions he was going to ask Brent, but also that he needed answers to the questions from their perspective in order to serve them better. He needed to have a dialogue with the customer because all his knowledge about what he was selling was only one small piece of the overall business development process. The transition from talking to listening is a key mindset shift that all business development professionals need to learn. Brent now leads a team of many younger salespeople and helps them better understand the business development process. The first step is to help them want to learn more about business development, because without that desire, nothing else sticks. When setting meetings, Brent teaches people to set an objective for the meeting that you want the prospect to take away. If you have a lot of slides in your initial presentation, you’re making a mistake. Brent likes to start with a very light slidedeck in the beginning because his goal is to understand the reason for the meeting in the first place as well as the roles of the people he’s talking to. Brent is a big proponent of the pregnant pause. When you get a response, follow it up with another thoughtful question. Follow ups are where you get traction in a relationship. When it comes to the fertility space, Brent starts out with curiosity. Asking them about their familiarity with the space and exploring their experience is the foundation for a more fruitful conversation and almost always leads to how his solution solves their issue. It sets the tone for the conversation and allows him and his team to come back with a robust solution for their problem.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com brent.atkins@progyny.com Brent Atkins on LinkedIn

Cannon Carr shares the insights he’s learned over the years about why he’s not a sales guy, but loves business development. Learn about the key mindset shift that unlocks the power of business development and makes it something fun, easy, and repeatable, and how to instill simple habits that deepen relationships by being proactively helpful every single week.   Mo asks Cannon Carr: When did you realize that business development was great? There was not one moment, but a story stands out in particular for Cannon. When his father was retiring from the firm he was working at, he told him that he was a great analyst but not a great salesperson, and if he wanted to succeed, he would need to figure that out. When a professional services firm reaches a certain revenue threshold, the same things that got them to that point won’t help grow past it. Simply hiring a rainmaker won’t necessarily solve the problem. You need a broader team working towards business development to tap a broader network to grow a firm. The real mindset shift that unlocks the power of business development is “Are you selling, or are you helping to solve problems?” Take the sales hat off and integrate yourself into your client’s lives. Understand what their problems are, and if you can be alongside them during the inevitable transitions in their life, you can deepen the relationship. It’s about relevancy and solving problems. The sales and referrals will come naturally out of that. Life has transitions that create challenges along the way. Cannon helps his clients with a wealth plan that keeps their legacy and lifestyle intact.   Mo asks Cannon Carr: What is your personal definition of business development? If you have a craft that you know and love and want to grow, you are naturally going to step into business development so you might as well do it right. For Cannon, business development is about connecting people and ideas. He thinks of it as purposeful engagement that connects those two things. Connecting people with ideas often becomes deeply personal. During the pandemic, Cannon noticed a number of clients struggling with aging parents so they put a lot of effort into coming up with and connecting clients with ideas to help manage the issue. Taxes and the rapidly changing legislative landscape has been another area where Cannon and his team have been working with clients to stay ahead of the curve. The foundation is always being helpful rather than looking directly for business. It’s not about the revenue, it’s about enriching lives. Sometimes the solution falls outside of the firm’s specialty and that’s okay as long as the end result is helping a person out. You have to think of your relationships as a portfolio with investements in people all the time. Being proactive and helpful will eventually pay off. Not everything will connect. You have to look for additional opportunities to be helpful and keep reaching out. Think about business development as solving problems through connecting people and ideas together. If you are doing a good job, you will naturally get your share of the business. Proactive engagement is vital for service businesses.   Mo asks Cannon Carr: What is your favorite science, step, or tool from the Snowball System or GrowBIG training? The most interesting science for Cannon is around habits and the metaphor of the rider and the elephant for the conscious and subconscious mind. The elephant is a lot more powerful, and if you can’t control it, you are not going to get where you want to go. This is where the habits and routines come in to provide alignment with your elephant. Our emotions and our habits determine most of what we do. With the right mindset around business development and our emotions and habits, we can be more successful. Cannon sees this play out in client’s lives when wealth transfers to another generation. His team spends a fair bit of time helping their clients manage their own emotions. You have patterns. They are either the right patterns or the wrong patterns. Putting in deliberate time and getting out of your comfort zone is how to take away the wrong ones and instill the right ones. The key is to simply start and commit to 15 minutes of planning time each week. Combine purpose with a better pattern, and let it grow over time. The Protemoi List is a great tool you can use to create the habit of investing into the relationships that matter the most to your business development efforts. Every Friday, Cannon looks at an Excel sheet that he uses to track his business development work and make sure he is doing something every week to make progress on his most important relationships.   Mo asks Cannon Carr: What is the business development story you are most proud of? Cannon’s business is about long-term relationships, sometimes multiple generations, so being able to separate out personal risk and business risk is very important. Cannon’s favorite business development story involves helping personal friends navigate their challenges. He and his team found ways and resources to help them in a time of need and often anonymously It’s amazing what you can get done when no one takes the credit. Cannon’s role was in uncovering the need. The client mentioned something that triggered Cannon to listen more closely and look for ways to help. He tapped into his team to go deeper and be even more helpful for this person. Listen, notice, act. Cannon picked up on some fatigue in the person’s voice and some comments that led him to believe there was something more going on. Some good follow up questions helped too. There is no stock follow up question that works every time, but there are common themes that everyone shares. The goal is to listen closely and the follow up question will reveal itself. You should be able to summarize what they are saying accurately and paraphrase it back.   Mo asks Cannon Carr: If you could record a video about business development and send it back to your younger self, what would it say? Cannon would record a few simple vignettes, mainly focused on the why of business development as well as the storytelling, patterns and habits involved. The first one would basically be a quote from Maya Angelou. “I learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Following videos would involve some inspiring Rocky music, Steve Jobs’ iPhone keynote speech, and an interview with Jimmy Fallon and a guest creating something fun together. So many people struggle with business development because they believe that they didn’t get into their profession to sell. Playful exploration and spontaneity can make things fun, but there has to be purpose involved. Sales have none of those elements. If you can build that kind of fun energy into what you do, you can deepen the relationship, provide value, and grow your business at the same time. Don’t be afraid to have fun and be vulnerable. Making your Most Important Things into a game can add another level of motivation and enjoyment to building business development habits that lead to growth. It’s about creating the right behaviors. You can’t control the outcome, only what you put into it. Cannon’s firm has an internal coach to help keep everyone on track and doing proactively helpful things for the marketplace, knowing that the revenue will follow.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ccarr@cornercap.com cornercap.com

Mo asks Cannon Carr: If you could record a video about business development and send it back to your younger self, what would it say? Cannon would record a few simple vignettes, mainly focused on the why of business development as well as the storytelling, patterns and habits involved. The first one would basically be a quote from Maya Angelou. “I learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Following videos would involve some inspiring Rocky music, Steve Jobs’ iPhone keynote speech, and an interview with Jimmy Fallon and a guest creating something fun together. So many people struggle with business development because they believe that they didn’t get into their profession to sell. Playful exploration and spontaneity can make things fun, but there has to be purpose involved. Sales have none of those elements. If you can build that kind of fun energy into what you do, you can deepen the relationship, provide value, and grow your business at the same time. Don’t be afraid to have fun and be vulnerable. Making your Most Important Things into a game can add another level of motivation and enjoyment to building business development habits that lead to growth. It’s about creating the right behaviors. You can’t control the outcome, only what you put into it. Cannon’s firm has an internal coach to help keep everyone on track and doing proactively helpful things for the marketplace, knowing that the revenue will follow.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ccarr@cornercap.com cornercap.com