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

Mo shares his insights from the habits of Dr. Ivan Misner. Ivan Misner is the Chief Visionary Officer of BNI, the world’s largest networking group. There is probably no one else on the planet who knows more about building a valuable network or relationships. We need to be very careful about who we allow into our inner circle. This can include strategic partners that we work with to grow our businesses, the clients we work with, to the people in our personal lives. Think about your current ecosystem and about who shares your core values and who you want to invest your time with. The people you allow into your metaphorical room you can’t kick out, so it’s important to be cautious on the front end. When you have negative experiences with people you don’t get that time back, and those experiences will influence your decisions for the rest of your life. Be very critical of the people you let into your life and be willing to let people go when you discover that they are not a fit. The core values of your organization have nothing to do with what’s on people’s resumes. Your core values should be concise and clear. When you start to get to know somebody the Gains exchange is a great way to build the foundation of the relationship. Enter into a dialogue about your goals, accomplishments, interests, networks, and skills to facilitate a great conversation. Model the response you are looking for by sharing your Gains with the other person and then ask them to reciprocate.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ivanmisner.com bni.com

Mo asks Dr. Ivan Misner: How do we hack our own habits to keep building our relationships? Instead of saying we’re busy, we should think about our life being full instead. The foundation of networking is the VCP process. First, you have to be visible, then you move to credibility where people know who you are and that you’re good at it. Only then can you move to profitability. Most people try to leapfrog the process and go from being completely invisible and straight to profitability. When networking, you need to be aware of where you are in that process with that person because that will dictate the way you communicate with them. You always have to work on all three aspects of the process to maintain your business development efforts. Consistency is key. The biggest mistake that businesses make is doing a thousand things six times instead of doing six things a thousand times. It’s about doing fewer things and doing them well and not stretching yourself too thin. Work in your flame instead of your wax. Hire people to do the things you don’t want to do so you can focus on the things you want to be doing to carry your business forward. Ivan color codes his calendar and is very strict about his timelines. That’s how he knows what kind of day he’s going to have and he can see if he’s working on what he should be working on over the course of the week. Business people are constantly chasing bright shiny objects. Stop chasing the bright shiny distractions and focus on just doing the same things effectively over and over again.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ivanmisner.com bni.com

Mo asks Dr. Ivan Misner: How do we develop more and deeper relationships? BNI now has over 276,000 members and over the course of 2020, those members generated over $16 billion in business. A one-to-one conversation with people periodically is the best way to develop a relationship with them. The Gains exchange is a great way to deepen a relationship with someone you know. Write down your goals, accomplishments, interests, networks, and skills, and find out what you have in common. Ivan tells the story of two BNI members that were initially skeptical of the Gains exchange and discovered something they had in common that became the basis for a great relationship. People are usually open to the Gains exchange. You don’t have to frame the one-to-one beforehand if you approach it the right way. The perfect way to ask the Gains questions is to model it. Start with your goals, accomplishments, interests, networks, and skills, and show them what you want to know about them. The modeling provides the example instead of a perfectly designed question. Near the end of the conversation reiterate what you learned about them and open the idea of having another conversation in the future to connect on things that are important to them. If the other person has a need that you can help with by sharing a resource, that becomes the perfect reason to follow up. Before you ask for something, you should invest in the relationship with them first.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ivanmisner.com bni.com

Mo asks Dr. Ivan Misner: How do we grow our book of business? There is a networking disconnect, where everybody goes to networking events wanting to sell but nobody is there to buy. Networking is all about relationships, it’s more like farming than hunting. Avoid selling the first time you meet someone. Plant the seed of the relationship first and then cultivate it over time. Ivan recommends the 24/7/30 follow-up system. Within 24 hours of meeting someone, send them a note and let them know that you enjoyed getting to know them. Within 7 days find them on social media and make a meaningful connection with them. Go where they are, not where you want to be. Within 30 days reach out to them and ask to have a conversation about what they do. The whole time you avoid selling to them and focus instead on just building the relationship. Start with the other person in mind and get to know them as a human being. It’s not what you know or who you know, it’s how well you know each other that counts. The important thing is not about who is in your database, it’s who is willing to help you if you asked. If you follow up in a meaningful way with the goal of building a real relationship, it’s not going to feel formulaic or contrived. Helping and authenticity are key. Infinite giving does not mean that you’re an infinite victim. Giving can take all kinds of forms and there are a number of ways your giving will come back to you.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ivanmisner.com bni.com

Mo asks Dr. Ivan Misner: What is your big idea on how business development experts can grow their book of business, their relationships, and their careers? The quality of the people you surround yourself with determines the quality of your life. Imagine that you live your life in one room with one door and it’s one-way entrance only. If that were true would you be more selective about the people that you let into your life? The room is a metaphor for your mind, and when you have a relationship with someone, business or personal, their fingerprints are all over your brain for the rest of your life. This is why it’s vital to be very selective on the front end. Your experiences with people, the good and the bad, will affect your decisions for the rest of your life. You have to ask yourself whether a client is going to be worth the money and the psychic energy you are going to invest in the relationship. The selectivity starts with understanding your personal values. If you don’t know what’s important in your life you will take anyone that comes to your door. Clients don’t have to have the exact same values as you, they just can’t be incongruent with the things you believe are the most important. You’re better off turning down a client or an employee if you believe they will take you in the opposite direction of your personal values. One of the most important values in Dr. Misner’s organization BNI is that giver’s gain. If you want to be able to get business from people you have to be willing to give them business. Networking is not a get-rich-quick scheme, it’s a way to build a solid foundation for a strong, successful business. It’s an attitude and not an expectation. Creating a great organizational culture changes that organization forever. Your business’s core values should be short and repeated constantly.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com ivanmisner.com bni.com

L. David Marquet shares his incredible insights into how the words we use shape the relationships between us and our team as well as our clients, and how we can stop using the industrial age mindset in the modern world. Learn how to create a resilient team that generates extraordinary results for your clients, how to stop obeying the clock, and why creating the right business development habits can determine the arc of your career.   Mo asks L. David Marquet: What big idea do you have around using the language of leadership to build client relationships? The language we use today has been passed down from our parents and grandparents, and is in essence an industrial age language. In the past, language has adapted and changed as the work and society have evolved but more recently, language has fallen behind. Work and society are changing more rapidly than our language and this leads to communication issues. The underlying theme of the industrial age in terms of human connections was conformity, where disrupting the hierarchy typically caused problems. We need to retrain ourselves to connect instead of conform and we do that through language. Connection language is about being vulnerable without sharing too much; incremental intimacy is the key. It’s about reinforcing the idea of improvement instead of knowing all the answers right away. Clients are shrewd and if you try to pretend that you know it all instead of being authentic and honest, the relationship will be damaged. Communication is not part of the training for most complex expertise. One activity that we can do is saying “I don’t know” to a question a few times a week and being observant about how you feel about it, even when you do know the answer. We teach leadership as if it’s history, but that’s not the right metaphor. Language is the perfect metaphor for leadership because it’s all about practice and the words that we use to communicate with other people.   Mo asks L. David Marquet: How can the language of leadership help us control the clock? Controlling the clock is the antithesis of obeying the clock. In the industrial age it made sense because that’s the way production was done, but it doesn’t serve us in the way human teams interact now. For creative work, controlling the clock is about acknowledging deadlines but controlling the rhythm between action and doing, and pausing and thinking. Doing is all about focus, whereas variability is an ally for thinking. Many organizations are biased towards doing and action, and leave very little time for thinking and reflecting which leads to less innovation over time. Another aspect of the industrial age is coercion. The very structure of most organizations is about controlling the actions of other people, and if that bleeds over into your client relationship, it’s not going to be very healthy. Work with a client to choose a time to pause and get feedback, and as you get closer to the goal you can deliver more each time. You want your decisions to have expiration dates. When you reach the expiration date, you revisit the activity and evaluate what’s working. The key is to commit until that date. When we work in teams, we want the commitment to be small, so that the team can buy in without having to change their thinking right away. Make it easy for them to commit in the beginning instead of requiring them to admit their prior thought process was incorrect.   Mo asks L. David Marquet: How can we use the language of leadership to deepen our relationships? There is a language difference between resilient and adaptive teams, and fragile teams. Adaptive teams are more open to dissenting opinions with people being willing to speak up. On fragile teams, only the loudest tend to get heard. One of the most common patterns is that word distribution matches the salary distribution of the people involved in the meeting. If you’re in a meeting, the point is not to get your point across, it’s to understand other people’s points and to structure the meeting so that the people that are underrepresented are invited to share. Vote first, and then discuss. If you sense there is a dissenting opinion you should shine a light on that. You need to celebrate a dissenting opinion because that’s where all innovation comes from. Avoid binary questions when you want to increase variability and increase innovation. Always go to the minority dissenting opinion first, you want to hear from the people that feel strongly one way or the other. You should focus your time and energy finding out what the group knows and maximizing learning in the limited time that you have, and you don’t do that by rehashing what the majority thinks.   Mo asks L. David Marquet: How do we get our team to focus on the right client development activities? We act our way to new thinking. When you want to change something, you need to act the way that those people would act and the thought process will follow. Our brains change as a result of our habits. In terms of language, simply switching out the term “they” for “we” can create a very unique team environment. Instead of looking for what you’re doing wrong, you need to look at the things that you’re doing right and celebrate those activities. Invite your team to tell their story. We tend to focus on the outcomes for the things we do. Habits don’t change from the desire for an outcome. You have to put yourself into an environment where it’s easy to have the habits that generate the results you want. Learn what it takes to change a small habit first, because if you haven’t gone through that process yet you have no right to ask other people, including your clients, to change their habits. Celebrate all the actions, yours and your team’s, before you start suggesting incremental improvements.   Mo shares his insights from the habits of L. David Marquet. We, as humans, are typically either thinking or we’re acting and we tend to bias toward action. For business development, this means it can be very easy to just do the next thing and do it right away. Sometimes that focus on action is not the right thing to do. Occasionally, we need to step back and think about the next right move, but that can also include our colleagues and even the client or prospect. Ask the client/prospect what kind of followup they want to see from you. Build default thinking time in with yourself, your team, and your clients, and then act. Put time in your calendar once a week for your thinking time and commit to it. It’s important to not think about completion as just being a deal getting closed. A complete phase in business development can be the Give To Get, then each next step after that. Each step is an opportunity to step back and meet with the team about what worked well and what should change. When you celebrate the small, incremental steps, you will do more of them. Business development is challenging. We all almost always default back to delivery so we need to create mechanisms to celebrate every completion we do. Business development is a journey. Ask open-ended questions and use each moment to learn and get better. If you put 100 hours into improving your technical skills, your clients probably won’t notice. If you put 100 hours into your business development skills, not only do you improve your book of business and networking ability, you also pull through your expertise. Make it a priority and all kinds of good things will happen along the way.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com Enroll in The Nudge at https://intentbasedleadership.com/enroll-for-the-nudge/  View David’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LeadershipNudges

Mo shares his insights from the habits of L. David Marquet. We, as humans, are typically either thinking or we’re acting and we tend to bias toward action. For business development, this means it can be very easy to just do the next thing and do it right away. Sometimes that focus on action is not the right thing to do. Occasionally, we need to step back and think about the next right move, but that can also include our colleagues and even the client or prospect. Ask the client/prospect what kind of followup they want to see from you. Build default thinking time in with yourself, your team, and your clients, and then act. Put time in your calendar once a week for your thinking time and commit to it. It’s important to not think about completion as just being a deal getting closed. A complete phase in business development can be the Give To Get, then each next step after that. Each step is an opportunity to step back and meet with the team about what worked well and what should change. When you celebrate the small, incremental steps, you will do more of them. Business development is challenging. We all almost always default back to delivery so we need to create mechanisms to celebrate every completion we do. Business development is a journey. Ask open-ended questions and use each moment to learn and get better. If you put 100 hours into improving your technical skills, your clients probably won’t notice. If you put 100 hours into your business development skills, not only do you improve your book of business and networking ability, you also pull through your expertise. Make it a priority and all kinds of good things will happen along the way.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com Enroll in The Nudge at https://intentbasedleadership.com/enroll-for-the-nudge/  View David’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LeadershipNudges

Mo asks L. David Marquet: How do we get our team to focus on the right client development activities? We act our way to new thinking. When you want to change something, you need to act the way that those people would act and the thought process will follow. Our brains change as a result of our habits. In terms of language, simply switching out the term “they” for “we” can create a very unique team environment. Instead of looking for what you’re doing wrong, you need to look at the things that you’re doing right and celebrate those activities. Invite your team to tell their story. We tend to focus on the outcomes for the things we do. Habits don’t change from the desire for an outcome. You have to put yourself into an environment where it’s easy to have the habits that generate the results you want. Learn what it takes to change a small habit first, because if you haven’t gone through that process yet you have no right to ask other people, including your clients, to change their habits. Celebrate all the actions, yours and your team’s, before you start suggesting incremental improvements.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com Enroll in The Nudge at https://intentbasedleadership.com/enroll-for-the-nudge/  View David’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LeadershipNudges

Mo asks L. David Marquet: How can we use the language of leadership to deepen our relationships? There is a language difference between resilient and adaptive teams, and fragile teams. Adaptive teams are more open to dissenting opinions with people being willing to speak up. On fragile teams, only the loudest tend to get heard. One of the most common patterns is that word distribution matches the salary distribution of the people involved in the meeting. If you’re in a meeting, the point is not to get your point across, it’s to understand other people’s points and to structure the meeting so that the people that are underrepresented are invited to share. Vote first, and then discuss. If you sense there is a dissenting opinion you should shine a light on that. You need to celebrate a dissenting opinion because that’s where all innovation comes from. Avoid binary questions when you want to increase variability and increase innovation. Always go to the minority dissenting opinion first, you want to hear from the people that feel strongly one way or the other. You should focus your time and energy finding out what the group knows and maximizing learning in the limited time that you have, and you don’t do that by rehashing what the majority thinks.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com Enroll in The Nudge at https://intentbasedleadership.com/enroll-for-the-nudge/  View David’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LeadershipNudges

Mo asks L. David Marquet: How can the language of leadership help us control the clock? Controlling the clock is the antithesis of obeying the clock. In the industrial age it made sense because that’s the way production was done, but it doesn’t serve us in the way human teams interact now. For creative work, controlling the clock is about acknowledging deadlines but controlling the rhythm between action and doing, and pausing and thinking. Doing is all about focus, whereas variability is an ally for thinking. Many organizations are biased towards doing and action, and leave very little time for thinking and reflecting which leads to less innovation over time. Another aspect of the industrial age is coercion. The very structure of most organizations is about controlling the actions of other people, and if that bleeds over into your client relationship, it’s not going to be very healthy. Work with a client to choose a time to pause and get feedback, and as you get closer to the goal you can deliver more each time. You want your decisions to have expiration dates. When you reach the expiration date, you revisit the activity and evaluate what’s working. The key is to commit until that date. When we work in teams, we want the commitment to be small, so that the team can buy in without having to change their thinking right away. Make it easy for them to commit in the beginning instead of requiring them to admit their prior thought process was incorrect.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com Enroll in The Nudge at https://intentbasedleadership.com/enroll-for-the-nudge/  View David’s YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/LeadershipNudges