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

Mo asks Ron Tite: What’s your big idea on how the audience can grow their book of business, grow their career, and grow their relationships? The first thing is to stop gaming the system and stop looking for shortcuts to business development. You need two things: a consistent brand narrative to sell the things you have and to be entrepreneurial so you can create the resources that people need. Business development is bound by purpose, defined by actions, and adopted by other people by how you communicate it. Your purpose has to go beyond the thing that you sell that speaks to your brand belief. If you can’t articulate that, that’s where you need to start. You will be defined by the actions you take to fulfill and live up to your purpose, it’s not by the things you say. Those first two are not enough though. You can be living in your purpose authentically, but you still need other people to adopt your purpose as well if you want something to grow. Even in a retail setting, you can still act in an advisory or consultative role. REI is a good example of a company that embodies that principle as they have a purpose that is strategically aligned to where they make their money. They inspire, inform, and equip people with the proper tools to have a greater enjoyment of the outdoors. Your purpose should align with what you sell. REI also communicates its purpose in a way that conveys trust and authority, without sounding too corporate and separated from what the customers really care about. Your brand narrative flows consistently out of those three foundational ideas and is composed of these five things: What’s going on in the world through your lens? What problem does that create? What do you believe about that problem? How do you solve that problem? Why should someone believe you? This set of questions establishes your brand narrative and gets people’s heads nodding. It’s not about selling, it’s about framing the conversation around where you add the most value.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com rontite.com churchstate.com

Karim Nehdi shows you how to read your prospect’s mind so you can tailor your service offer to exactly what they want. Learn how the Herrmann Brain Dominance model works in business development and how you can use the concept to better understand how a prospect thinks, what they care about most in terms of communication, and how you can use that to close more deals.   Mo asks Karim Nehdi: What is your big idea on how people can grow their book of business, relationships, and career? Different people think differently, but most people don’t realize what that really means. The most effective leaders and business developers are able to harness the differences in thought and cognitive diversity for maximum effect. We all have neural pathways that shift over time. We innately default to seeking out people that think like us, but the best teams break out of that pattern and tap into the differences in the way that people think. Karim is the CEO of Herrmann International and has been working with Mo for a long time in many of the programs he’s developed. We are just scratching the potential of what the brain is capable of. We’ve learned over the past few decades that there are cognitive modes that dictate the way that we think, and the four different modes come together in different measures within each person. The first system is analytical thought. The second is structural thought. The third is relational thought. The fourth is experimental thought. We have all four pathways in our brains, but over time we come to default to one or two primarily, and that’s where the trouble comes in. People think they connect on preferences and areas they align. When you feel a match with someone the ideas tend to flow fairly easily, but when there’s a mismatch, the interaction can be awkward or difficult. A good example would be the IT team and the customer facing team. They both think in nearly opposite ways, and this can create tension in an organizational setting. In a business development context, understanding the differences can be very powerful. If you sense the prospect is risk averse, you should probably minimize the experimental and transformational elements of the pitch and focus on the process and how it all works. The most important component of good management, good leadership, and good stewardship is making sure that you have diversity of mind. Leaders that can bring a unique viewpoint and harness that within their organization can have a big impact. 3% of people are balanced across all four quadrants. Everyone can tap into the four different thinking systems. You just have to be willing to stretch and flex those cognitive muscles.   Mo asks Karim Nehdi: How can we use our cognitive diversity to create and close more deals? What if you could read the minds of your customers and predict their response in advance? That would be an incredibly powerful business development skill. The first step is understanding yourself and where your preferences lie. For Mo, he fell into the experimental/analytical spectrum and knowing that helped him understand what was really on his mind and how he approached life. Your unique thinking style comes with strengths but also potential blindspots. Your default thinking may be leading you in the wrong direction for a deal, and if you never look back or get into the habit of thinking about your thinking, you will keep making the same mistakes. Once you know what your thought process is like, you can use that as a model to consider how a prospect might be thinking. Think about one of your most important customers and take a guess about what they might be thinking about in terms of what you are offering. If they are a big picture experimental thinker, maybe they are looking for something more innovative. If they are more relational thinkers, maybe they want to know they are going to be taken care of and are really concerned about what everyone else thinks. If they are structural thinkers, they are probably hyper-focused on the details and whether the offer will deliver exactly what they need. If they are analytical thinkers, they can be very price sensitive and looking for the greatest measurable ROI for them. Understanding the different types of buyers can allow you to position your product or service around what their needs might be. Don’t assume that people are on the same wavelength as you and ask the question about what they need. There are certain ways of thinking that tend to manifest more often in certain industries. Analytical thinkers like actuaries are probably all about the bottom line and being efficient in their communication. Structural thinkers are probably all about the details. Relational thinkers may ask you about your personal life and will probably engage with you beyond verbal communication. Experimental thinkers will ask a lot of questions to try to connect the dots, and you might see them work out their thought process in the conversation.   Mo asks Karim Nehdi: How do we use cognitive diversity and adapt to each of these four different ways of thinking? The baseline is to understand where you are likely to default and what your blindspots are going to be. Think about your pitch through the lens of what the stakeholder wants to hear and needs to understand in order to feel comfortable to move forward. This can mean adding in additional details for the structural buyer, including some ROI calculations for the analytic buyer, bringing in other clients to speak on your behalf for the relational buyer, or coming up with some novel ideas for the experimental buyer. Prepare your thinking in advance and try to start the conversation with where their preferences are instead of starting with where you are at. We often think about relationships on a one-on-one basis, but there are lots of people involved in the business development process. Business development is all about making your team work seamlessly with your customer’s team which is where cognitive diversity comes in. You need to make sure that the people on your team that think a certain way are being paired up with people that need to think that way. You need everybody to be on the same page and moving in the same direction to take advantage of an opportunity, and understanding how each person on the team thinks and facilitates that knowledge transfer. In just 10 minutes you can get a basic understanding of the mindsets on your team and identify some of the things you need to do to bridge the gap. Taking the time to think about your thinking has a massive ROI in business outcomes. Understanding the thought processes of the individuals at play builds trust and allows people to communicate and solve problems more effectively. Challenge everyone that is involved in the conversation to think about their thinking and how it’s going to play out in the success of the stakeholder.   Mo asks Karim Nehdi: How can we use cognitive diversity to hack our own habits and be more successful, even when we’re busy? Business development is a team sport. There is a role for the individual relationship, but there is also an important role for the team that supports that relationship. Research shows that cognitively diverse teams who know how to harness cognitive diversity are 60-70% more effective than teams that don’t. Cognitive diversity accounts for about 20% of the variance in overall team performance and up to 34% in specific activities like strategic thinking and problem solving. The first hack is around making sure your team is built in a diversity by design way. If you all share the biases and blindspots, they will be magnified in a deal context. On the other extreme, if you have too much cognitive diversity without the tools to manage it, it can create emergent conflict. When you’re building a team, an easy way to stay balanced is to ensure you have at least one person who can represent the mindset of someone from each quadrant. Have an experimental thinker that can connect the dots, a analytical thinker who is going to be ready with an ROI calculation when you need it, a relational thinker who is able to build the personal connection, and a structural thinker that is going to make sure the customer has everything they need to feel comfortable. The best teams have a steward for each way of thinking. The lone experimental thinker may be an outlier, but they are also probably the most necessary mindset. Karim tells a story of a CEO that he worked with that had a specific set of questions answered at every meeting. Why, What, Who, How? Coincidentally, those four questions map to the four quadrants of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument. One way to take notes in a meeting is to create the four quadrants and write down notes in the corresponding mindset/question. If you notice that an area is missing, you can bring the focus there before the meeting wraps up.   Mo shares his insights from the habits of Karim Nehdi. There are four major ways we think: analytically, structurally, relationally, and experimentally, and each way of thinking gives clues. With an analytical thinker, they are going to be quick and cut to the chase. They want to jump right into the meeting and get things done. With the structural thinker, they will want to know the details and what the process looks like. They want to know the steps to start something and how to keep it going. With a relational thinker, you will see clues that they care with more emotion in their voice. They probably think from the perspective of other people and ask more questions to dial up the engagement. With an experimental thinker, they may zig zag in the conversation and want to do things that haven’t been done before. Experimental thinkers want to connect the dots. Analytical thinkers want to dial in the ROI, structural thinkers desire safety, relational thinkers want more connection to you and your team, and experimental thinkers want a strategic fit with where they are heading. To adapt to a person’s thought style, make it easy to talk about what matters to them, whether that is money and ROI, that you’re a safe choice, that your team is ready to engage, or what you stand for and how it aligns with their goals. Big deals are sold by teams, to teams. You can really knock a deal out of the park by covering all four ways of thinking.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com thinkherrmann.com/mo

Mo shares his insights from the habits of Karim Nehdi. There are four major ways we think: analytically, structurally, relationally, and experimentally, and each way of thinking gives clues. With an analytical thinker, they are going to be quick and cut to the chase. They want to jump right into the meeting and get things done. With the structural thinker, they will want to know the details and what the process looks like. They want to know the steps to start something and how to keep it going. With a relational thinker, you will see clues that they care with more emotion in their voice. They probably think from the perspective of other people and ask more questions to dial up the engagement. With an experimental thinker, they may zig zag in the conversation and want to do things that haven’t been done before. Experimental thinkers want to connect the dots. Analytical thinkers want to dial in the ROI, structural thinkers desire safety, relational thinkers want more connection to you and your team, and experimental thinkers want a strategic fit with where they are heading. To adapt to a person’s thought style, make it easy to talk about what matters to them, whether that is money and ROI, that you’re a safe choice, that your team is ready to engage, or what you stand for and how it aligns with their goals. Big deals are sold by teams, to teams. You can really knock a deal out of the park by covering all four ways of thinking.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com thinkherrmann.com/mo

Mo asks Karim Nehdi: How can we use cognitive diversity to hack our own habits and be more successful, even when we’re busy? Business development is a team sport. There is a role for the individual relationship, but there is also an important role for the team that supports that relationship. Research shows that cognitively diverse teams who know how to harness cognitive diversity are 60-70% more effective than teams that don’t. Cognitive diversity accounts for about 20% of the variance in overall team performance and up to 34% in specific activities like strategic thinking and problem solving. The first hack is around making sure your team is built in a diversity by design way. If you all share the biases and blindspots, they will be magnified in a deal context. On the other extreme, if you have too much cognitive diversity without the tools to manage it, it can create emergent conflict. When you’re building a team, an easy way to stay balanced is to ensure you have at least one person who can represent the mindset of someone from each quadrant. Have an experimental thinker that can connect the dots, a analytical thinker who is going to be ready with an ROI calculation when you need it, a relational thinker who is able to build the personal connection, and a structural thinker that is going to make sure the customer has everything they need to feel comfortable. The best teams have a steward for each way of thinking. The lone experimental thinker may be an outlier, but they are also probably the most necessary mindset. Karim tells a story of a CEO that he worked with that had a specific set of questions answered at every meeting. Why, What, Who, How? Coincidentally, those four questions map to the four quadrants of the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument. One way to take notes in a meeting is to create the four quadrants and write down notes in the corresponding mindset/question. If you notice that an area is missing, you can bring the focus there before the meeting wraps up.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com thinkherrmann.com/mo

Mo asks Karim Nehdi: How do we use cognitive diversity and adapt to each of these four different ways of thinking? The baseline is to understand where you are likely to default and what your blindspots are going to be. Think about your pitch through the lens of what the stakeholder wants to hear and needs to understand in order to feel comfortable to move forward. This can mean adding in additional details for the structural buyer, including some ROI calculations for the analytic buyer, bringing in other clients to speak on your behalf for the relational buyer, or coming up with some novel ideas for the experimental buyer. Prepare your thinking in advance and try to start the conversation with where their preferences are instead of starting with where you are at. We often think about relationships on a one-on-one basis, but there are lots of people involved in the business development process. Business development is all about making your team work seamlessly with your customer’s team which is where cognitive diversity comes in. You need to make sure that the people on your team that think a certain way are being paired up with people that need to think that way. You need everybody to be on the same page and moving in the same direction to take advantage of an opportunity, and understanding how each person on the team thinks and facilitates that knowledge transfer. In just 10 minutes you can get a basic understanding of the mindsets on your team and identify some of the things you need to do to bridge the gap. Taking the time to think about your thinking has a massive ROI in business outcomes. Understanding the thought processes of the individuals at play builds trust and allows people to communicate and solve problems more effectively. Challenge everyone that is involved in the conversation to think about their thinking and how it’s going to play out in the success of the stakeholder.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com thinkherrmann.com/mo

Mo asks Karim Nehdi: How can we use our cognitive diversity to create and close more deals? What if you could read the minds of your customers and predict their response in advance? That would be an incredibly powerful business development skill. The first step is understanding yourself and where your preferences lie. For Mo, he fell into the experimental/analytical spectrum and knowing that helped him understand what was really on his mind and how he approached life. Your unique thinking style comes with strengths but also potential blindspots. Your default thinking may be leading you in the wrong direction for a deal, and if you never look back or get into the habit of thinking about your thinking, you will keep making the same mistakes. Once you know what your thought process is like, you can use that as a model to consider how a prospect might be thinking. Think about one of your most important customers and take a guess about what they might be thinking about in terms of what you are offering. If they are a big picture experimental thinker, maybe they are looking for something more innovative. If they are more relational thinkers, maybe they want to know they are going to be taken care of and are really concerned about what everyone else thinks. If they are structural thinkers, they are probably hyper-focused on the details and whether the offer will deliver exactly what they need. If they are analytical thinkers, they can be very price sensitive and looking for the greatest measurable ROI for them. Understanding the different types of buyers can allow you to position your product or service around what their needs might be. Don’t assume that people are on the same wavelength as you and ask the question about what they need. There are certain ways of thinking that tend to manifest more often in certain industries. Analytical thinkers like actuaries are probably all about the bottom line and being efficient in their communication. Structural thinkers are probably all about the details. Relational thinkers may ask you about your personal life and will probably engage with you beyond verbal communication. Experimental thinkers will ask a lot of questions to try to connect the dots, and you might see them work out their thought process in the conversation.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com thinkherrmann.com/mo

Mo asks Karim Nehdi: What is your big idea on how people can grow their book of business, relationships, and career? Different people think differently, but most people don’t realize what that really means. The most effective leaders and business developers are able to harness the differences in thought and cognitive diversity for maximum effect. We all have neural pathways that shift over time. We innately default to seeking out people that think like us, but the best teams break out of that pattern and tap into the differences in the way that people think. Karim is the CEO of Herrmann International and has been working with Mo for a long time in many of the programs he’s developed. We are just scratching the potential of what the brain is capable of. We’ve learned over the past few decades that there are cognitive modes that dictate the way that we think, and the four different modes come together in different measures within each person. The first system is analytical thought. The second is structural thought. The third is relational thought. The fourth is experimental thought. We have all four pathways in our brains, but over time we come to default to one or two primarily, and that’s where the trouble comes in. People think they connect on preferences and areas they align. When you feel a match with someone the ideas tend to flow fairly easily, but when there’s a mismatch, the interaction can be awkward or difficult. A good example would be the IT team and the customer facing team. They both think in nearly opposite ways, and this can create tension in an organizational setting. In a business development context, understanding the differences can be very powerful. If you sense the prospect is risk averse, you should probably minimize the experimental and transformational elements of the pitch and focus on the process and how it all works. The most important component of good management, good leadership, and good stewardship is making sure that you have diversity of mind. Leaders that can bring a unique viewpoint and harness that within their organization can have a big impact. 3% of people are balanced across all four quadrants. Everyone can tap into the four different thinking systems. You just have to be willing to stretch and flex those cognitive muscles.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com thinkherrmann.com/mo

Jay Baer shares insights into marketing that will transform the way you think about business development and will allow you to spend half the time creating content while generating 10x the results. Learn how to inspire your customers to market for you, why marketing your content is more important than your actual content, and a simple strategy for creating extraordinary and memorable client relationships.   Mo asks Jay Baer: How can people become great at business development? The challenge with business development is that technology has made it so easy to create contacts. It used to be that you could stand out just by having a better toolkit, but now the volume of business development messaging is out of control. Competency does not create conversation. The best way to grow any business is for your customers to grow it for you. There is a time and place for advertising, but in many cases the most successful brands advertise the least because their customers and clients spread the word for them. Even though word of mouth is the #1 way of generating business, fewer than 1% of companies have a word-of-mouth strategy. If you want your customers to be a proactive word of mouth engine, you have to give them a story to tell, which means you have to do something different in your organization. What if, instead of sending your proposal as a pdf attachment in an email, you send your proposal in a completely unique and unusual way. Doing the normal thing is often more risky than doing something that’s a little bit different. Just because you're in professional services doesn’t mean that you took a vow of boredom. Every single person and organization can have a talk trigger, but we’re are often afraid to stand out. Start with a pilot program and roll out your talk trigger to a certain subsection of your customer base and see how things go. Once you see the results, you can roll it out to the rest of the organization.   Mo asks Jay Baer: How do we create and close more opportunities? You have to focus on the problems you solve, not on the services you offer. People don’t want services, they want a fix to the problem they have. You also have to really understand who you are selling to. This can become more challenging as time goes on as the number of people you are selling to grows, but it’s vital to growth. Figure out a way to rank your potential clients against one another and create an asset around that and they will beat a path to your door. It’s important to provide value instead of selling to them. If you provide enough value, the client will sell themselves. Figure out the marketing plan for the asset before you build it. When you do that, you will build a better marketing asset. You have to atomize your content. The individual asset (report, whitepaper, survey, etc.) can be broken down into additional bite size chunks. Everyone is besieged with opportunities and information, so you have to give them a short, easy intro to lead them in. Increase your conversion rate by merchandising the findings of your report in smaller pieces of content. It’s the little things surrounding the asset that drive people to the landing page. Every single slide of your webinar is a potential social media graphic, blog post, video, or infographic.   Mo asks Jay Baer: What is your best advice on deepening relationships? The more transactional you think the relationship is, the more transactional it’s going to feel. If your motive is based on getting paid, you’re not going to develop deep and rich relationships. The best way to go about building relationships that matter is to build relationships that you want to have on their own. If you get paid, that’s great. If not, that’s okay, too. Be there before the sale. Build the right relationships now, even if you have nothing to sell or are not the right answer for them. Someday you might be. Most people suck at business development because they are not patient. Have conversations with people that are not about business and eventually they may lead to a commercial deal down the road. If you’re trying to figure out what relationships to build today, it should be the relationships that you might try to monetize in 2022. If you want to build deeper, more valuable relationships that will eventually yield victories, it is your responsibility to add all the value to the relationships. Business development is like practicing your serve, you should just keep sending value and adding to the relationship. Who you are is infinitely more interesting than what you do. You have to add your personality into your interactions with people if you want them to remember you. It’s okay to treat people like people. How can you add value to someone if you don’t know what that person cares about outside of business? Do the work to get to know the person. It’s very hard to tell if a professional is 20% smarter or better, but it’s really easy to tell if they genuinely care.   Mo asks Jay Baer: How can we hack our own habits and be working efficiently at business development even when we are yanked away by other demands? The first step is you have to enjoy the process at some level in order to put real time into it. If you hate social media, you will suck at social media. You have to find the relationship nurturing schema that you actually enjoy so that you can stick to it. If you don’t derive satisfaction or pleasure around it, you are going to invent a bunch of excuses for not doing it. You also have to batch your relationships. Write down and organize your relationships into tiers and figure out what your idealized communication cadence for each tier. You have to schedule relationship time, just like everything else that is important in your life. Once you’ve organized your relationships, add them to your calendar. If you wait until you have absolutely nothing else to do and nothing better to invest in your relationships, it’s never going to happen. Everybody has time, the question is “How are you prioritizing your time?” If you don’t spend time investing in your relationships each week, it probably goes back to either not liking the process or you don’t believe it’s worth it. The best way to stay top of mind is to add value. The best way is to study what they are doing and then comment, amplify, or add value to what they are doing. People tend to underestimate the value of amplification for other people. If you’re not sure what to say, share what your tier 1 relationship is saying and act as their cheerleader. Sometimes all you have to do is schedule time each day to tell other people how great they are.   Mo shares his insights from the habits of Jay Baer. Market your marketing. Most experts put in the time to create some content, but they would be much better served by taking half that time, creating less content overall, and spending the other half marketing that content. Doing this allows you to spend half the time and generate 10x the results. There are three components to marketing your marketing: the plan, the lead up before the launch, and what you do after the launch. Whatever you are creating, you should spend quite a bit of time upfront developing the outline of the content, who the audience is, and think about the marketing of that content. Start with what your audience needs to know and how you can create something that they would die to have. Jay’s example of creating a report on the top 50 university’s websites is perfect. If you’re the person that has the data, information, or algorithm, it makes you more magnetic to your prospects. Narrow down your audience to specific people. That will help you tailor the content directly to what they care about. The goal of your pre-launch is to break down your big piece of content into smaller, bite-size pieces as you can. Get as many people as you can to help promote them and get the word out for the official launch. The post launch step is the most important. Your big piece of content is not the finishing line, it’s the start. Post launch you should organize an effort with your strategic partners to funnel people into a meeting with you on how the content impacts them. Seize the momentum of your launch to get the meetings where you can actually get hired. Most people only do one or two parts of the three steps of the marketing your marketing process. Put all three into practice and watch your results explode.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com talktriggers.com convinceandconvert.com jaybaer.com

Mo shares his insights from the habits of Jay Baer. Market your marketing. Most experts put in the time to create some content, but they would be much better served by taking half that time, creating less content overall, and spending the other half marketing that content. Doing this allows you to spend half the time and generate 10x the results. There are three components to marketing your marketing: the plan, the lead up before the launch, and what you do after the launch. Whatever you are creating, you should spend quite a bit of time upfront developing the outline of the content, who the audience is, and think about the marketing of that content. Start with what your audience needs to know and how you can create something that they would die to have. Jay’s example of creating a report on the top 50 university’s websites is perfect. If you’re the person that has the data, information, or algorithm, it makes you more magnetic to your prospects. Narrow down your audience to specific people. That will help you tailor the content directly to what they care about. The goal of your pre-launch is to break down your big piece of content into smaller, bite-size pieces as you can. Get as many people as you can to help promote them and get the word out for the official launch. The post launch step is the most important. Your big piece of content is not the finishing line, it’s the start. Post launch you should organize an effort with your strategic partners to funnel people into a meeting with you on how the content impacts them. Seize the momentum of your launch to get the meetings where you can actually get hired. Most people only do one or two parts of the three steps of the marketing your marketing process. Put all three into practice and watch your results explode.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com talktriggers.com convinceandconvert.com jaybaer.com

Mo asks Jay Baer: How can we hack our own habits and be working efficiently at business development even when we are yanked away by other demands? The first step is you have to enjoy the process at some level in order to put real time into it. If you hate social media, you will suck at social media. You have to find the relationship nurturing schema that you actually enjoy so that you can stick to it. If you don’t derive satisfaction or pleasure around it, you are going to invent a bunch of excuses for not doing it. You also have to batch your relationships. Write down and organize your relationships into tiers and figure out what your idealized communication cadence for each tier. You have to schedule relationship time, just like everything else that is important in your life. Once you’ve organized your relationships, add them to your calendar. If you wait until you have absolutely nothing else to do and nothing better to invest in your relationships, it’s never going to happen. Everybody has time, the question is “How are you prioritizing your time?” If you don’t spend time investing in your relationships each week, it probably goes back to either not liking the process or you don’t believe it’s worth it. The best way to stay top of mind is to add value. The best way is to study what they are doing and then comment, amplify, or add value to what they are doing. People tend to underestimate the value of amplification for other people. If you’re not sure what to say, share what your tier 1 relationship is saying and act as their cheerleader. Sometimes all you have to do is schedule time each day to tell other people how great they are.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com convinceandconvert.com jaybaer.com