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

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.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com convinceandconvert.com

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.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com talktriggers.com convinceandconvert.com

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.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com talktriggers.com convinceandconvert.com

Todd Henry shares why creativity is crucial to business development success and a new mindset for identifying client problems in a way that will make them think you’re reading their mind. Learn a practice that allows you to connect the dots and deliver brilliant insights when you need them most and a method for getting to the root of a client’s problem without being pushy or relying on a PowerPoint slide deck.   Mo asks Todd Henry: What is your big idea for folks to stand out, to be creative, do their best work, and get their prospects’ attention? A lot of people believe that they are not creative because they don’t make art, but creativity is problem solving. Any line of work that involves problem solving requires you to be creative on a daily basis. Most successful creative professionals have disciplines in their life that prepare them for moments where they have to be brilliant. They build study time into their schedule to fill their mind with valuable stimuli. If you want to be brilliant on a moment’s notice, you have to begin far upstream from the moment and that begins with building practices into life so you can deliver great results when you need to. One of the interesting challenges of working from home over the past year has been that meetings have become frictionless. That means that everyone needs to identify time on the calendar to commit to engaging in those disciplines. Block out time in your schedule to read, to think, and sit and think about your priorities. Get ready to feel unproductive for a couple of hours because creativity is not about efficiency; it’s about effectiveness. If something is important to you, you will find time for it. Those that are willing to take the uncomfortable step to carve out strategic time on the calendar are the ones that are going to see results on the other side. We have to manage our energy in the same way we manage our time. We need to think about our time in terms of investing, and when you invest, you are expecting long-term gains. Part of your time portfolio should be investment focused on efforts that may not pay off now but can lead to bigger results later on. Treat this time like a meeting with yourself. If someone calls you and requests that time, treat it like you were meeting with a client or important prospect. It’s also important to create feedback loops with your team so they can see the results of your efforts. We have to say no to things that aren’t using our time in the way that we want to use it in order to use our time effectively. One of the problems with meetings is that people will often set them for 60 minutes by default. One tactic you can use to restrict meetings to accomplish what they need to without wasting time is scheduling them at specific times (9:22) and a specific place (potted plant on the 2nd floor). You can also define how long you want to commit to when asking people to pick a time on your calendar.   Mo asks Todd Henry: What is your best advice on how people can create demand using creativity? If we want to be effective creative professionals, we need to become effective at defining problems. If you can define the problem your client is trying to solve better than they can, and also propose some solutions, they are much more likely to come to you for the work. The creative process begins by defining problems effectively. Those who ask the best questions win because they get closest to the middle. When the client feels like you are inside their head and you deeply understand the issues they are facing, you become the go-to expert. Every organization thinks they’re unique but they often can’t see the problem they are facing because they are too close to the work to have a proper perspective. You can bring an outside perspective and if you can identify the problem differently and give them the language that helps them simplify the problem, you’re halfway to closing the deal. Start with very broad questions and work your way down. Broad questions give you opportunities to ask more pointed questions that can guide you towards the deep problem the prospect is dealing with. The issue with experts is that we start to become comfortable with what we do and start to lead with solutions instead of questions. We have to be curious and want to understand what is going on before we start offering solutions. Your marketing materials are tools for the prospect to justify the purchase decision, not the reason to make the purchase decision. At the end of the day, they want to know if you can solve their problem. Many of us artificially escalate the perceived consequences of failure and this prevents us from taking enough action to really get results. We need to rely less on the PowerPoint slides and more on the personal relationship where you are invested in them and solving their problems.   Mo asks Todd Henry: What is your #1 tip to deepen relationships? If something is important to you, it becomes a priority. We need to start treating relationships as investments rather than obligations. As we become successful professionals, we start to see relationships as more transactional and we need to change that perception. We need people in our life to reveal patterns that we can’t see, to speak truth to us, to help us see life through new eyes, and to inspire us, and we need to be that person for other people as well. Do you have anyone in your life that you meet with routinely to help each other become better? Especially with leadership, you need meaningful relationships in your life where people are willing to speak truth to you and preferably before the other person needs something from you. Be intentional about your relationships. A head-to-head is a good tactic to deepen one relationship at a time. The next time you meet with the person, share one new thing you’ve learned since the last time you met and have the other person do the same. This simple practice expands your capacity to see the world and helps you both be better at what you do.   Mo asks Todd Henry: How do we hack our own habits to have the best chance at long term success? Professionals that succeed in the long term and continue to be prolific, brilliant, and healthy are the ones that have disciplines and practices in five key areas. The first is focus. Successful creative professionals solve problems; they don’t work on projects. Define the problem you are trying to solve and whittle it down to the most important aspects so you can allocate your finite resources effectively. The second is relationships. We need other people in our life to help us solve problems effectively. Creativity is a team sport. Teams that are good at connecting the collective dots are the most effective. The third is energy. We have to be good at managing our discretionary energy in ways that help us create more energy in the future. We have to be good at saying no and investing our energy in meaningful places. The fourth is stimuli. These are the dots you put into your head that you can connect later. You need a practice of inspiring yourself with stimulus that forces you to see things in new ways. The fifth area is hours. We often think of our time in terms of efficiency and not effectiveness. We need to invest our time in long-term future value.   Mo shares his insights from the habits of Todd Henry. Long scale creativity is a process, just like business development. The Snowball System and the Grow Big Training are a creative synthesis of the business development practices that have been shown to work across industries and time. Any kind of long-term sustainable work, whether that’s growing a business or learning a language, takes a long time to get there. As soon as you realize that, you can identify the process behind it. Anybody who is great at something has both learned it and earned it by developing a process around it. “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” -Jack London You should walk into your first meeting with someone with a hypothesis as to what’s going on, but lead with broad questions. Ask enough questions about the prospect’s situation until you can articulate back their problem to them better than they can describe it themselves. By asking questions first, you get a triple win. Good questions light up the pleasure center of the other person’s mind, you are going to learn their priorities in their words, and the more self-disclosing information they give you, the more they like you. You have a higher chance of getting the yes at the end by starting with great questions at the beginning. A simple tactic you can use to take your business development efforts to the next level is the head-to-head. Find someone who is moving in the same general direction you are and schedule a 30 minute meeting once a month to share what each of you has learned since your last meeting. Build in an element of accountability to stay committed and maintain momentum. As you share your three big things that you plan to accomplish, you will start to notice ways that you can be helpful to each other. Business development is a project that never ends. It's a process, like creativity, and if you want to grow your business, you need to focus on it and have a system to make it happen each week.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com toddhenry.com

Mo shares his insights from the habits of Todd Henry. Long scale creativity is a process, just like business development. The Snowball System and the Grow Big Training are a creative synthesis of the business development practices that have been shown to work across industries and time. Any kind of long-term sustainable work, whether that’s growing a business or learning a language, takes a long time to get there. As soon as you realize that, you can identify the process behind it. Anybody who is great at something has both learned it and earned it by developing a process around it. “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” -Jack London You should walk into your first meeting with someone with a hypothesis as to what’s going on, but lead with broad questions. Ask enough questions about the prospect’s situation until you can articulate back their problem to them better than they can describe it themselves. By asking questions first, you get a triple win. Good questions light up the pleasure center of the other person’s mind, you are going to learn their priorities in their words, and the more self-disclosing information they give you, the more they like you. You have a higher chance of getting the yes at the end by starting with great questions at the beginning. A simple tactic you can use to take your business development efforts to the next level is the head-to-head. Find someone who is moving in the same general direction you are and schedule a 30 minute meeting once a month to share what each of you has learned since your last meeting. Build in an element of accountability to stay committed and maintain momentum. As you share your three big things that you plan to accomplish, you will start to notice ways that you can be helpful to each other. Business development is a project that never ends. It's a process, like creativity, and if you want to grow your business, you need to focus on it and have a system to make it happen each week.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com toddhenry.com

Mo asks Todd Henry: How do we hack our own habits to have the best chance at long term success? Professionals that succeed in the long term and continue to be prolific, brilliant, and healthy are the ones that have disciplines and practices in five key areas. The first is focus. Successful creative professionals solve problems; they don’t work on projects. Define the problem you are trying to solve and whittle it down to the most important aspects so you can allocate your finite resources effectively. The second is relationships. We need other people in our life to help us solve problems effectively. Creativity is a team sport. Teams that are good at connecting the collective dots are the most effective. The third is energy. We have to be good at managing our discretionary energy in ways that help us create more energy in the future. We have to be good at saying no and investing our energy in meaningful places. The fourth is stimuli. These are the dots you put into your head that you can connect later. You need a practice of inspiring yourself with stimulus that forces you to see things in new ways. The fifth area is hours. We often think of our time in terms of efficiency and not effectiveness. We need to invest our time in long-term future value.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com toddhenry.com

Mo asks Todd Henry: What is your #1 tip to deepen relationships? If something is important to you, it becomes a priority. We need to start treating relationships as investments rather than obligations. As we become successful professionals, we start to see relationships as more transactional and we need to change that perception. We need people in our life to reveal patterns that we can’t see, to speak truth to us, to help us see life through new eyes, and to inspire us, and we need to be that person for other people as well. Do you have anyone in your life that you meet with routinely to help each other become better? Especially with leadership, you need meaningful relationships in your life where people are willing to speak truth to you and preferably before the other person needs something from you. Be intentional about your relationships. A head-to-head is a good tactic to deepen one relationship at a time. The next time you meet with the person, share one new thing you’ve learned since the last time you met and have the other person do the same. This simple practice expands your capacity to see the world and helps you both be better at what you do.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com toddhenry.com

Mo asks Todd Henry: What is your best advice on how people can create demand using creativity? If we want to be effective creative professionals, we need to become effective at defining problems. If you can define the problem your client is trying to solve better than they can, and also propose some solutions, they are much more likely to come to you for the work. The creative process begins by defining problems effectively. Those who ask the best questions win because they get closest to the middle. When the client feels like you are inside their head and you deeply understand the issues they are facing, you become the go-to expert. Every organization thinks they’re unique but they often can’t see the problem they are facing because they are too close to the work to have a proper perspective. You can bring an outside perspective and if you can identify the problem differently and give them the language that helps them simplify the problem, you’re halfway to closing the deal. Start with very broad questions and work your way down. Broad questions give you opportunities to ask more pointed questions that can guide you towards the deep problem the prospect is dealing with. The issue with experts is that we start to become comfortable with what we do and start to lead with solutions instead of questions. We have to be curious and want to understand what is going on before we start offering solutions. Your marketing materials are tools for the prospect to justify the purchase decision, not the reason to make the purchase decision. At the end of the day, they want to know if you can solve their problem. Many of us artificially escalate the perceived consequences of failure and this prevents us from taking enough action to really get results. We need to rely less on the PowerPoint slides and more on the personal relationship where you are invested in them and solving their problems.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com toddhenry.com

Mo asks Todd Henry: What is your big idea for folks to stand out, to be creative, do their best work, and get their prospects’ attention? A lot of people believe that they are not creative because they don’t make art, but creativity is problem solving. Any line of work that involves problem solving requires you to be creative on a daily basis. Most successful creative professionals have disciplines in their life that prepare them for moments where they have to be brilliant. They build study time into their schedule to fill their mind with valuable stimuli. If you want to be brilliant on a moment’s notice, you have to begin far upstream from the moment and that begins with building practices into life so you can deliver great results when you need to. One of the interesting challenges of working from home over the past year has been that meetings have become frictionless. That means that everyone needs to identify time on the calendar to commit to engaging in those disciplines. Block out time in your schedule to read, to think, and sit and think about your priorities. Get ready to feel unproductive for a couple of hours because creativity is not about efficiency; it’s about effectiveness. If something is important to you, you will find time for it. Those that are willing to take the uncomfortable step to carve out strategic time on the calendar are the ones that are going to see results on the other side. We have to manage our energy in the same way we manage our time. We need to think about our time in terms of investing, and when you invest, you are expecting long-term gains. Part of your time portfolio should be investment focused on efforts that may not pay off now but can lead to bigger results later on. Treat this time like a meeting with yourself. If someone calls you and requests that time, treat it like you were meeting with a client or important prospect. It’s also important to create feedback loops with your team so they can see the results of your efforts. We have to say no to things that aren’t using our time in the way that we want to use it in order to use our time effectively. One of the problems with meetings is that people will often set them for 60 minutes by default. One tactic you can use to restrict meetings to accomplish what they need to without wasting time is scheduling them at specific times (9:22) and a specific place (potted plant on the 2nd floor). You can also define how long you want to commit to when asking people to pick a time on your calendar.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com toddhenry.com

Michael Port shares the power of speaking to transform an audience and get them to take action. Discover how to skillfully and authentically impress and inspire any audience with substance and style, the best way to sell your services during a speech without actually selling, and how to connect with your audience emotionally and intellectually at the same time.   Mo asks Michael Port: What’s your best advice for professional services experts to get great at growing their book of business, growing their relationships, and growing their career? Stop speaking, and start performing. Most people who are trying to share their ideas tend to only share information, which doesn’t generally change people’s behavior. First we have to change how people feel before we can change how they think, and then how they behave. If you are working on a pitch or sales conversation, you have to think about how you want your audience to feel moment to moment, how you want them to think, and then what you want them to do afterward. Trying to stuff four hours of information into a one hour conversation is not a good way to convince someone. There are five foundational elements that exist in any type of pitch or presentation. The first element is the big idea that acts as a through line for the rest of the presentation. A big idea doesn’t need to be different to make a difference, it just needs to be true, relevant, and important for the people you serve. The second is being able to articulate the way the world looks to the people in the room. Changing someone’s mind takes a lot of effort and if the other person believes that you don’t understand them, it gets easier for them to say no. The third element is to have a clear and definitive promise that is associated with that presentation. The fourth element is articulating the consequences of not adopting the big idea and achieving the promise. The last element is the emotional, physical, and even spiritual rewards of adopting the big idea. Most people rely on their expertise when going into a pitch or presentation. If you’re not using a process for the content work and rehearsal, you will fall back onto your preparation, which in this case is minimal. Presenting is like running a marathon; you’re not going to succeed without training and preparation. Communicating your own value is a vital skill to learn. Talent is overrated. The people you are seeing on the stage at the high end of your profession work on their craft. They may have some talent to start off with, but the time they spend rehearsing and practicing is the real source of their success. The ones who excel are the ones who put in the most work into the craft of speaking, not the most talented.   Mo asks Michael Port: How can the audience create and close more opportunities? All sales offers should be proportionate to the amount of trust we’ve earned. When Michael started as an entrepreneur who wasn’t very comfortable making big sales offers so he started thinking about what people responded well to. This led him to the idea of inviting people during a weekly teleconference call. He started speaking about ideas that would help people think bigger about who they were and help advance their professional goals. He found that after six months of doing those calls, they had brought in 85% of the clients he had at the time. The interesting part was that although he made no sales offers during the calls, people were raising their hands to discuss working with him as a natural extension of the process. Rather than trying to sell every time you meet somebody, think about what you can invite them to that would add value to their lives and that you can do on a regular basis. You will start to find that it will begin to create business development opportunities for you. Using speaking as a promotional tool is one of the most effective tools you can employ, because there are very few environments that immediately infer credibility. The mistake that most people make is believing that they should be selling during the presentation, so Michael focuses on helping people deliver transformational speeches. If the audience has a transformation in that period of time while you’re on stage, all they need to know is that they can work with you and they will ask to work with you. If you have a truly transformational product, you don’t need a lot of marketing or selling because the product will do it for you. When you are delivering a speech, you should be getting stage-side leads every single time and if you get those leads, you will get clients and referrals for additional speaking opportunities. You can mention your services but keep it a light touch. Deliver something that people want, and if they want more of it they will book you as a consultant. Speaking live allows you to affect the way the audience feels and that’s the most important aspect of connection.   Mo asks Michael Port: How can people use speaking to deepen relationships? It’s critically important to start by demonstrating that you understand how the world looks for the people in the room. Can you fill multiple pages with their thoughts and perspectives? There is a difference between having someone tell you “you’re right” versus “that’s right”. Too many speakers are driven toward getting the audience to admit that they are right, but the better approach is to share an idea and get the audience to say in their head “yes, that’s right!”. That’s how you create an intellectual and emotional connection. It helps to find an analogy that you can use to demonstrate an idea. People are much more likely to adopt a new idea if they can contextualize it and relate it to something that they already understand. In terms of importance to communication, the most memorable things are stories, with metaphors and analogies towards the top, then data and facts at the bottom. Generally, we want to ask questions of the audience so that they can come to the answer themselves rather than us telling them what the answer is. Questions like “how would you feel if…?”, or “Would it make a difference if you were able to do X?”. Avoid leading the audience with questions that always end up in the affirmative. Research shows that people will resist answering your big idea when they feel led, but if you frame the questions in the negative you will actually increase the odds of getting a yes on your big idea.   Mo asks Michael Port: How can we hack our habits to keep doing things in the long-term even when we’re really busy? Michael doesn’t see himself as particularly disciplined. He tends to choose really intense projects that require a high level of focus and then move on from them when he is One of the key habit changing strategies he’s implemented in his business is using OKRs. Objectives and Key Results changed the way Michael and his team worked. OKRs are all about setting objectives and key results for the future in relatively short chunks of time, which gives Michael the best of both worlds. One of the most important things that Michael has discovered is that sometimes enough is enough and more is not always better. Being process-obsessed is the thing that has driven the growth of Michael’s business the most. The only way to keep his service at the highest level possible is knowing how he does it every single time without variation, the same is true with employees burning out. Every single organization needs to create their own operating system. This codified system allows people to be creative artists who are focused on growth and development within the framework of the processes. The operating system needs to be designed with a growth destination in mind. Develop the system with help from the people you work with. Allow your team to create their own standard operating procedures so it feels more collaborative as a result. You also need a way of measuring key results. Michael uses OKRs and health metrics in his operating system. OKRs are the growth oriented goals and the health metrics are the bottom line numbers you need to see to ensure the business is always healthy.   Mo shares his insights from the habits of Michael Port. Mo strongly recommends that you consider using speaking to grow your business. Like any skill in life, if you have the right formula, get on the right stage, and deliver the right message you will see results. Put in some practice and you can become great at it. Like driving a car, it takes time to learn but when you put in the time it becomes so ingrained that you barely even think about it. Speaking reaps big rewards. Of all the ways you can generate leads, speaking is one of the most effective and has the highest leverage. Speaking allows you to bond and connect with potentially hundreds of people all with one action. Those same stage speaking skills can now be amplified on the internet as well via webinars and online conferences. Speaking also comes with a number of secondary benefits. By getting great at speaking, you grow your skills in a number of other communication areas. Speaking is a craft, treat it like one. You need to practice and if you want to get better fast, hire someone to help you. The major components of a speech that you need to work on are your opening story, the three pieces of content that you want to cover, and the ending. If you nail the opening and really connect with people at the beginning, they are going to stick with you. Try not to put too much content into your speech so you don’t overwhelm the audience. For the ending, leave them with a little inspiration. Mo is going to create a database of the three elements of his speeches so that he can easily mix and match the pieces. When you give a great talk, write down what you said so you have a blueprint for your next great speech to work from.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com heroicpublicspeaking.com