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

Mo shares his insights from the habits of Josh Linkner. Don’t forget the dinner mint. Don’t forget to add an element of surprise and delight for each interaction you have with a prospect or client. That tiny amount of extra effort often has an outsized impact on the end result. There was a study that showed the effect of different ways of adding dinner mints to people’s meals and they found some pretty interesting results. Little good things have a big weight because they are unexpected. When you add up the little surprises and delights, they can outweigh the inevitable bad experiences. The most valuable things you can do are things that help your client succeed, both on a professional level and a personal level. These could be little ways to innovate the delivery or make the experience a little more unique. You could also improve the process or offer them additional information or connections. Tweaking the way you do things and measuring the results can lead to incredible breakthroughs. One example is the way that Mo offered webinars and follow up content. One simple tweak led to 10x times the result. Small, low risk experiments in each area of your business will yield some incredible results. Not everything will succeed, but that’s why they’re small. Fall in love with the problem, not the solution. What can you deliver that will be streamlined and effective, but also unique? A simple improvement would be to describe what you do in your client’s language instead of your own. A little extra effort in the delivery and presenting the solution in the client’s own language will make it feel completely unique to them and create a much more memorable experience with your business.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com biglittlebreakthroughs.com

Mo asks Josh Linkner: How can we hack our habits with Big Little Breakthroughs? The short-term tends to scream the loudest, to the detriment of the long-term. Over the next 12 months, if all you do is what you’ve done before, you're likely to fall about 30% short of the results you could have achieved. Too often we overestimate the risk of trying something new and underestimate the risk of standing still. Think of your effort, time, and energy in the same way that you do as your stock portfolio. You wouldn’t take all your money and invest it entirely in one stock. The same principle has to apply to your time. It’s important to carve out some of your schedule to be strategic and think about the future. Some day a company will come along and put you out of business, it might as well be you. A constant stream of reinvention allows you to control at least some of the inevitable disruption that will happen to your business. The first thing is to try a 5% adjustment. Carve out just two hours each week for the next four weeks where you’re not going to do anything tactical and only focus on heads-up strategic thinking. Josh has issued this challenge to thousands of people around the world and found they experienced a 0% decline in productivity but by the end of the 30 day period, most people report that those two hours are the most productive time they spend. Use your creativity to solve your short-term problem and it will, in turn, solve your long-term problem. The first thing you need to do is challenge the assumption that it’s impossible to be more efficient or to find space to commit to head-up thinking. Creatively rebalancing your calendar and creating an untouchable day or untouchable morning can make a huge difference. If we want certain desired outcomes, it’s the rituals and rewards that will support them. If you need help saying no, make a list of things you are going to stop doing. Having a simple framework (Think, Do, Feel) can help you benchmark things against so you will make better choices.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com biglittlebreakthroughs.com

Mo asks Josh Linkner: How do we use the Big Little Breakthrough concepts to deepen relationships? Creativity and innovation are tools that we use to focus on product development or marketing, but they also apply to relationships. In a relationship setting, think about the other person’s big problem and about how to solve their issue. The more you fall in love with your client’s problems, and the more they view you as someone who is aligned with them, the relationship becomes transformed. Mo had a similar experience with a lawyer friend he had where he had to have a difficult conversation with her but the end result was that it completely changed her career trajectory. Feedback is a gift. If you care about somebody you have to be willing to have hard conversations with them. If you do, you demonstrate that you care about them and that deepens the relationship. Failure is a part of life, in terms of relationships, those are opportunities to deepen relationships. Owning your mistakes and doing what it takes to make it right is how you show integrity in relationships. Doing a feedback session after a loss sets up the next win. Even when you win, there is an opportunity to ask for feedback on how to improve. This shows that you are always working on your game and are committed to over delivering. This takes your relationship from transactional to one of substance.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com biglittlebreakthroughs.com

Mo asks Josh Linkner: How can professionals use the concepts of Big Little Breakthroughs to close more business? In the research for the book, Josh uncovered eight core mindsets of everyday innovators. One mindset in particular is called “Don’t forget the dinner mint.” For a business development person, adding a little creative flourish to each interaction you have in the course of business. A small 5% increase in effort can generate disproportionate outcomes. If you’re pitching your services to a prospect, before you hit the send button, think about what extra you can add that is unexpected. It could be an extra feature or shorter delivery time. Every single touchpoint or interaction with a prospect is an opportunity to add a little extra. Every extra touch can drive a significant impact in terms of your overall results. It doesn’t always have to take the form of an extra service; it could also take the form of a unique experience. The dinner mint strategy can also help differentiate your business from other service providers. Another idea has to do with the notion of experimenting being very provocative. What if every week you ran five little experiments in your business processes? This is how you can find tiny innovations without risking too much, and if you land on a winner, you can expand it out once you have enough data to justify it. Instead of thinking you need to come up with one idea to transform your business, what if you came up with three smaller ideas each week? When you break them down into smaller bets, it’s much less risky and you increase the odds of winning over the long-term. Your creativity is more like your weight than your height. You can adjust your weight with your behavior and your creativity works the same way.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com biglittlebreakthroughs.com

Mo asks Josh Linkner: What is your big idea on how listeners can focus on business development, grow their book of business and relationships, and grow their careers? Josh’s big idea is actually a little idea. We don’t need to bet everything on a single idea because innovation isn’t restricted to billion dollar ideas that change the world. When we think of creativity as small little acts or micro innovations it becomes more accessible, less risky, and actually builds additional skills over time. Many professionals struggle with doing any business development at all. The work always seems to get in the way and breaking it down to little acts makes it much more likely you will get things done and see actual results. Little acts of innovation could be changing up the form of your prospecting email or experimenting with the way you run a sales meeting. It’s small adjustments or counter intuitive acts of creativity that unlocks big results. Josh tells the story of how his relatively small business landed a $30 million contract by a simple act of innovation and everyday kindness. Look for anything you can test within your business processes because business development isn’t a mysterious skill you need to learn; it’s just a series of small experiments. One of the techniques that Josh uses to initiate innovation is the Judo flip. Look at the prevailing approaches in your industry and think about what the polar opposite might be.     Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com biglittlebreakthroughs.com

Nathan Barry shares the secrets of the world’s most effective communicators and how you can leverage the power of automation to scale your business development efforts to the moon. Learn how business development professionals can use email and content to grow an audience that is hungry for their expertise, reach more people in a deeper way at scale instead of just 1-to-1, and how the compound gains of consistent action can lead to incredible results.   Mo asks Nathan Barry: What’s your big idea for growing a book of business, growing relationships, and growing a career? Nathan used to play video games and he likens having an audience and a newsletter to having the cheat codes for business. Having an engaged audience that you can push content to is incredibly powerful. Some platforms have followers, like social and blogging, and others allow you to push content in front of your audience. The push method puts you in control and makes those platforms much more valuable in achieving your business goals. Many professionals don’t think of an email list as a relevant tool for building a book of business, but if you have a list of the right people that want to hear from you it can definitely be a powerful asset. Even if you’re not selling something through your email list, you can still build the mind share and reputation with your audience that increases your value in their mind. Delivering value is key. When it comes to professional services, a cadence of once a month is more than sufficient and the important thing is quality over quantity when it comes to communication. The best approach is to augment your close relationships with the vital few and combine it with a larger audience where you are delivering content. Those people are your prospective clients and finding a communication method that has leverage is how you can scale relationships considerably. Content allows someone to get to know you on a deeper level, well before you ever talk to them in person or on a phone call.   Mo asks Nathan Barry: How can we get more of the meaningful work we want to do? When you think about all the service providers you could hire, you consider all sorts of things like price, location, rapport, but near the top is actual expertise. One of the most effective ways to signal your expertise is to teach what you know. Nathan originally started off designing apps for the iPhone for other people, and in the process of trying to land more freelancing gigs, he had the thought that if he had written the book on iPhone app design it would make landing clients much easier. This led him down the path to creating a newsletter and writing a book. It’s hard to remember where you are in every conversation with every prospect you are currently talking to. This is where automation comes in and one of the reasons why email can be such an effective communication tool. You could create an automated sequence that delivers your content and includes the appropriate calls to action at the right time. It’s also possible to leverage your content that you’re delivering over time and turn that into a book down the road. When you’re just getting started with a smaller list it can be discouraging. When you have 0-10 subscribers, the first thing you should do is ask them where they currently go to learn about your topic and what their biggest pain points and struggles are. This gives you very valuable information and lets you know where you can potentially add content and lets you know what your follow up content should be. Whatever the audience is struggling with is exactly what your content should help them with. As your list grows, it’s okay to start asking them to share your content with people they think would benefit from it. Once you approach the 100-1000 mark, you can start bundling your content into a free ebook or course or resource and use that to continue growing your audience.   Mo asks Nathan Barry: How do you deepen relationships with an email list? When you first meet someone, your relationship is initially pretty shallow. Nathan likes to take as much information about himself and include that into his email sequence because that allows people to get a glimpse of who he is. Being authentic, open, and direct is a way you can help people get to know you and instill that vital trust. Any stories that you can teach and share are going to help someone who is following along feel like they can trust you. It’s also important to take your prospect on a journey where they are learning about you consistently over time while you are delivering value to them. An email course is a great tool to accomplish this. As a blogger or content creator, you can turn your best content into email content and use it as the basis of your email course. You can make sure thatyour prospect gets to know you at a set cadence over time and has already consumed your best content. By automating this kind of a sequence, you get leverage and scale so the hours you put to create the client onboarding system payoff considerably in the future. The most common place people struggle when building an audience is in being too broad. People are usually trying to solve a specific problem, so the more you can create content around that specific problem the more effective the hook in bringing people into your audience. The sequence of content also trains people to open your emails. If your content is good, you drastically increase the odds of them opening your next email. Great content also shapes the person’s questions and mindset for what they should be thinking about once they do get on a call with you. The trouble with creating content is that it can be very time consuming, and this is why the automation is so important for leveraging and scaling the work you are putting in. A common concern is that if you give away too much for free that no one will hire you, but the opposite is actually true. The more they learn, the more likely to realize how complicated what you do can be and understand that they need to hire a professional. If you’ve already been serving clients, you’ve probably already been doing half the work to create these kinds of assets that can work for you in the long term.   Mo asks Nathan Barry: How do we hack our own habits to keep building their audience? The most important thing you can do is do it consistently. Anywhere you can find leverage and compound returns are crucial to your long term success. This is where habits come in. Creating content is a long term game and if you only do it for a few months you’re not going to see a lot of traction. Nathan uses an app called Streaks to track his habits and his chain of accomplished actions every week, including sending a newsletter every week, writing every day, exercising and practicing the piano every day. If there is something that you want to get compound gains from, do it every day, even if it’s only for 10 or 20 minutes. It’s consistent effort over a long period of time that is going to get you the results you want. If you break your streak, that’s okay. Just don’t miss twice.   Mo shares his insights from the habits of Nathan Barry. ConvertKit has grown from a startup to $25 million a year in revenue. His perspective on seeing how thousands of professionals use his platform gives him a lot of insight into what works and what doesn’t. Teach everything you know. Many professionals resist the idea for fear of giving away all their best stuff for free, but the opposite tends to be true. The more you give away, the more the prospect realizes that they need your expertise to help them in their specific situation. The right place to switch from teaching to pitching is at the point where you have adequately framed the problem and figured out how you could work together. Teaching naturally flows into the conversation around working together. Give with abundance and do it in a way that scales. If you’re going to spend nearly a hundred hours packaging your education, you should absolutely use a platform like ConvertKit to automate it and scale your efforts. Once you set up something that’s automated, it works for you forever. Share what you are working on and what you’re learning with the people in your audience. Automation allows you to develop a relationship with a prospect without actually having to be there and sharing your story is incredibly powerful in getting people to bond with. For Nathan, the two most important things in business that he’s looking for is leverage and compound returns. Automation fits that bill. Once you create a piece of content, think of ways that you can use to help more people at scale. Develop fewer things and leverage them more effectively. When you think of your time when it comes to business development, ask yourself what things you can do that will pay off and work for you forever. Build it once and do it right, and then put it out in a way that scales.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ConvertKit.com nathanbarry.com

Mo shares his insights from the habits of Nathan Barry. ConvertKit has grown from a startup to $25 million a year in revenue. His perspective on seeing how thousands of professionals use his platform gives him a lot of insight into what works and what doesn’t. Teach everything you know. Many professionals resist the idea for fear of giving away all their best stuff for free, but the opposite tends to be true. The more you give away, the more the prospect realizes that they need your expertise to help them in their specific situation. The right place to switch from teaching to pitching is at the point where you have adequately framed the problem and figured out how you could work together. Teaching naturally flows into the conversation around working together. Give with abundance and do it in a way that scales. If you’re going to spend nearly a hundred hours packaging your education, you should absolutely use a platform like ConvertKit to automate it and scale your efforts. Once you set up something that’s automated, it works for you forever. Share what you are working on and what you’re learning with the people in your audience. Automation allows you to develop a relationship with a prospect without actually having to be there and sharing your story is incredibly powerful in getting people to bond with. For Nathan, the two most important things in business that he’s looking for is leverage and compound returns. Automation fits that bill. Once you create a piece of content, think of ways that you can use to help more people at scale. Develop fewer things and leverage them more effectively. When you think of your time when it comes to business development, ask yourself what things you can do that will pay off and work for you forever. Build it once and do it right, and then put it out in a way that scales.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ConvertKit.com

Mo asks Nathan Barry: How do we hack our own habits to keep building their audience? The most important thing you can do is do it consistently. Anywhere you can find leverage and compound returns are crucial to your long term success. This is where habits come in. Creating content is a long term game and if you only do it for a few months you’re not going to see a lot of traction. Nathan uses an app called Streaks to track his habits and his chain of accomplished actions every week, including sending a newsletter every week, writing every day, exercising and practicing the piano every day. If there is something that you want to get compound gains from, do it every day, even if it’s only for 10 or 20 minutes. It’s consistent effort over a long period of time that is going to get you the results you want. If you break your streak, that’s okay. Just don’t miss twice.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ConvertKit.com

Mo asks Nathan Barry: How do you deepen relationships with an email list? When you first meet someone, your relationship is initially pretty shallow. Nathan likes to take as much information about himself and include that into his email sequence because that allows people to get a glimpse of who he is. Being authentic, open, and direct is a way you can help people get to know you and instill that vital trust. Any stories that you can teach and share are going to help someone who is following along feel like they can trust you. It’s also important to take your prospect on a journey where they are learning about you consistently over time while you are delivering value to them. An email course is a great tool to accomplish this. As a blogger or content creator, you can turn your best content into email content and use it as the basis of your email course. You can make sure thatyour prospect gets to know you at a set cadence over time and has already consumed your best content. By automating this kind of a sequence, you get leverage and scale so the hours you put to create the client onboarding system payoff considerably in the future. The most common place people struggle when building an audience is in being too broad. People are usually trying to solve a specific problem, so the more you can create content around that specific problem the more effective the hook in bringing people into your audience. The sequence of content also trains people to open your emails. If your content is good, you drastically increase the odds of them opening your next email. Great content also shapes the person’s questions and mindset for what they should be thinking about once they do get on a call with you. The trouble with creating content is that it can be very time consuming, and this is why the automation is so important for leveraging and scaling the work you are putting in. A common concern is that if you give away too much for free that no one will hire you, but the opposite is actually true. The more they learn, the more likely to realize how complicated what you do can be and understand that they need to hire a professional. If you’ve already been serving clients, you’ve probably already been doing half the work to create these kinds of assets that can work for you in the long term.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ConvertKit.com nathanbarry.com

Mo asks Nathan Barry: How can we get more of the meaningful work we want to do? When you think about all the service providers you could hire, you consider all sorts of things like price, location, rapport, but near the top is actual expertise. One of the most effective ways to signal your expertise is to teach what you know. Nathan originally started off designing apps for the iPhone for other people, and in the process of trying to land more freelancing gigs, he had the thought that if he had written the book on iPhone app design it would make landing clients much easier. This led him down the path to creating a newsletter and writing a book. It’s hard to remember where you are in every conversation with every prospect you are currently talking to. This is where automation comes in and one of the reasons why email can be such an effective communication tool. You could create an automated sequence that delivers your content and includes the appropriate calls to action at the right time. It’s also possible to leverage your content that you’re delivering over time and turn that into a book down the road. When you’re just getting started with a smaller list it can be discouraging. When you have 0-10 subscribers, the first thing you should do is ask them where they currently go to learn about your topic and what their biggest pain points and struggles are. This gives you very valuable information and lets you know where you can potentially add content and lets you know what your follow up content should be. Whatever the audience is struggling with is exactly what your content should help them with. As your list grows, it’s okay to start asking them to share your content with people they think would benefit from it. Once you approach the 100-1000 mark, you can start bundling your content into a free ebook or course or resource and use that to continue growing your audience.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ConvertKit.com