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

Josh Kaufman shares the fundamental frameworks that amplify business development success and breaks them down into actionable strategies that you can start implementing today. Learn how to speak the language of business so you can understand your clients on a deeper level, solve their problems more effectively, and determine which opportunities to pursue and which to pass over so you can make the most impact possible.   Mo asks Josh Kaufman: What big idea do you have to help business developers be more successful? Regardless of what industry or market you are in, understanding business at a fundamental level is a significant advantage. It will help you deliver more effectively as well as the business development. Having an accurate understanding of what businesses are and how they work will help you do your job better and serve your customers better as well. Organizations are good at teaching a deep understanding of a specific specialty, but they are not necessarily good at teaching the general business language and communicating that to a client. Most employees know their job very well, but they don’t know how they or their boss fits into the bigger picture of the organization. Having a comprehensive understanding of the entire business system is where you get to the strategic and practical insight that can really make a difference. The decision-maker in an organization has to think of all five parts of the business, the value creation side, the marketing, the sales, the delivery, and the financial side when deciding what actions to take. Expanding beyond a narrow view of the business helps you understand your client and sell your services, but it also helps operate within your own organization. Thinking into the future and anticipating issues before they arise will make you a better business person and make you more valuable to your organization. As we communicate with clients we should do so with their priorities in mind and in their words. All aspects of business development get meaningfully better if you can talk the language of business. Business development is about trust. Everything you can do to convey that you understand a client at a fundamental level, the more they are going to trust you, the more effectively you are going to be able to work with them, and the more effectively you will be able to close business.   Mo asks Josh Kaufman: How can the ideas of The Personal MBA help people manage their opportunities? Begin with a thought experiment. “What would it look like if…?” Counterfactual questions can be extremely useful for understanding what is true in the given moment, and what could be a way of making things better in the future. Business development is all about the future. Asking this sort of question takes you out of the present situation and gives you clarity on what’s possible. All of the most valuable questions in business start with that question. These questions allow you to supply your brain with a destination which is how you start formulating a plan to get there. This is a powerful tool to get unstuck and figure out what your next action should be regarding an opportunity. Most of the breakthroughs in Josh’s career have come from posing this thought experiment. As you are planning out the next quarter and figuring out how to reach your financial or personal goals, the way you get your brain in gear to solve the problem is by asking yourself a counterfactual question. Starting from the question allows you to avoid being mired in self-criticism and doubt. You will come up with ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise because you weren’t framing the problem in that particular way.   Mo asks Josh Kaufman: Great relationships are something we should invest in. How can someone be more effective at managing relationships? When you enter into any new relationship, trust is something that needs to be built over time. Trust is earned by showing up and demonstrating that you understand someone, and what’s important to them. Even before someone becomes a prospect, you can keep adding value to a relationship and building that trust. This is known as earned regard, and all business development activities will be more effective as the trust grows. You earn the trust and regard of your team in the same way that you earn the trust of a prospect or client. Keep showing up and providing value, and demonstrating your trustworthiness. There are three methods of building trust known as the Golden Trifecta: essentially, you treat people with appreciation, courtesy, and respect. The more you interact with people in those three ways the more likely you are to produce a positive result. In a business environment, you layer adding value on top of those three fundamental approaches to interacting with people. The effect of this accumulates, as well as behaving in the opposite. Respect compounds and leads to a trusted and valued relationship, constant disrespect or discourteousness destroys relationships over time. The combination of earned regard and the Golden Trifecta are very effective at deepening relationships in all areas of your life.   Mo asks Josh Kaufman: How can someone hack their own habits and accomplish more when it comes to business development? Most of us imagine a world in the undefined future where all our tasks are completed and there’s nothing left to do. Fortunately for us, that’s not the way the world works. We live in a finite world of tradeoffs with limited energy and attention. As a consequence of that, we have limited opportunities to get things done. We can make ourselves miserable by not realizing that we live in a world of tradeoffs. We must make choices between competing alternatives. You must be clear on your personal values and priorities to know what choices to pursue. They become the lens that helps you decide which opportunities will make the biggest difference in your life long term. You don’t want to spend all your time and energy climbing a ladder, to only discover at the top that it was leaning against the wrong wall. Being clear about what you want helps eliminate some of the existential pressure. You’re only responsible for figuring out what you should be doing to get to the end result you desire is instead of doing everything all at once. No is a complete sentence. It’s okay to pass on certain opportunities. There is a certain amount of status consciousness that doesn’t serve us when it comes to opportunity, but we have to keep our values in mind and use them to choose our direction. Most people try to avoid making a decision until absolutely forced to. When presented with multiple opportunities, most people will say they are all important. We don’t need to feel bad about the opportunities we are passing on, because that’s a necessary part of the process. It’s what allows us to enjoy the benefits of the things we value the most, and the more we can do that the more effective and happy we’ll be. We all have an unlimited opportunity, and we all have limited time, so creating a mechanism that allows you to embrace that is crucial. Business developers need to be proactive and make things happen, and that means making the right choices.   Mo shares his insights from the habits of Josh Kaufman. Speaking the language of business seems obvious, but most people don’t realize how important this is to business development. Specifically speaking with your prospects’ words and language and understanding them on a deep level. Get out of the mindset that you speak internally because that can come off as jargon. Talking with the language of a client is a differentiator that will set you apart from other competitors. Adding that to every aspect of the business development process is an incredible advantage. Counterfactual questions like “what would have to be true for X to happen?” are great for opening up your thought process to possibilities. It’s also a great tool that you can use with clients in their business. Asking the right question can open the door to making it a reality. Use those kinds of questions to start a conversation that can create incredible results. We have unlimited opportunities as humans, but we have limited time. We need a mechanism that catalogs the opportunities available to us and a system to triage the ones you are going to focus on. It’s okay to say no to some ideas so that you can say yes to the ideas that will make a major impact.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com JoshKaufman.net The Personal MBA How to Fight a Hydra

Mo shares his insights from the habits of Josh Kaufman. Speaking the language of business seems obvious, but most people don’t realize how important this is to business development. Specifically speaking with your prospects’ words and language and understanding them on a deep level. Get out of the mindset that you speak internally because that can come off as jargon. Talking with the language of a client is a differentiator that will set you apart from other competitors. Adding that to every aspect of the business development process is an incredible advantage. Counterfactual questions like “what would have to be true for X to happen?” are great for opening up your thought process to possibilities. It’s also a great tool that you can use with clients in their business. Asking the right question can open the door to making it a reality. Use those kinds of questions to start a conversation that can create incredible results. We have unlimited opportunities as humans, but we have limited time. We need a mechanism that catalogs the opportunities available to us and a system to triage the ones you are going to focus on. It’s okay to say no to some ideas so that you can say yes to the ideas that will make a major impact.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com JoshKaufman.net

Mo asks Josh Kaufman: How can someone hack their own habits and accomplish more when it comes to business development? Most of us imagine a world in the undefined future where all our tasks are completed and there’s nothing left to do. Fortunately for us, that’s not the way the world works. We live in a finite world of tradeoffs with limited energy and attention. As a consequence of that, we have limited opportunities to get things done. We can make ourselves miserable by not realizing that we live in a world of tradeoffs. We must make choices between competing alternatives. You must be clear on your personal values and priorities to know what choices to pursue. They become the lens that helps you decide which opportunities will make the biggest difference in your life long term. You don’t want to spend all your time and energy climbing a ladder, to only discover at the top that it was leaning against the wrong wall. Being clear about what you want helps eliminate some of the existential pressure. You’re only responsible for figuring out what you should be doing to get to the end result you desire is instead of doing everything all at once. No is a complete sentence. It’s okay to pass on certain opportunities. There is a certain amount of status consciousness that doesn’t serve us when it comes to opportunity, but we have to keep our values in mind and use them to choose our direction. Most people try to avoid making a decision until absolutely forced to. When presented with multiple opportunities, most people will say they are all important. We don’t need to feel bad about the opportunities we are passing on, because that’s a necessary part of the process. It’s what allows us to enjoy the benefits of the things we value the most, and the more we can do that the more effective and happy we’ll be. We all have an unlimited opportunity, and we all have limited time, so creating a mechanism that allows you to embrace that is crucial. Business developers need to be proactive and make things happen, and that means making the right choices.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com JoshKaufman.net

Mo asks Josh Kaufman: Great relationships are something we should invest in. How can someone be more effective at managing relationships? When you enter into any new relationship, trust is something that needs to be built over time. Trust is earned by showing up and demonstrating that you understand someone, and what’s important to them. Even before someone becomes a prospect, you can keep adding value to a relationship and building that trust. This is known as earned regard, and all business development activities will be more effective as the trust grows. You earn the trust and regard of your team in the same way that you earn the trust of a prospect or client. Keep showing up and providing value, and demonstrating your trustworthiness. There are three methods of building trust known as the Golden Trifecta: essentially, you treat people with appreciation, courtesy, and respect. The more you interact with people in those three ways the more likely you are to produce a positive result. In a business environment, you layer adding value on top of those three fundamental approaches to interacting with people. The effect of this accumulates, as well as behaving in the opposite. Respect compounds and leads to a trusted and valued relationship, constant disrespect or discourteousness destroys relationships over time. The combination of earned regard and the Golden Trifecta are very effective at deepening relationships in all areas of your life.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com JoshKaufman.net

Mo asks Josh Kaufman: How can the ideas of The Personal MBA help people manage their opportunities? Begin with a thought experiment. “What would it look like if…?” Counterfactual questions can be extremely useful for understanding what is true in the given moment, and what could be a way of making things better in the future. Business development is all about the future. Asking this sort of question takes you out of the present situation and gives you clarity on what’s possible. All of the most valuable questions in business start with that question. These questions allow you to supply your brain with a destination which is how you start formulating a plan to get there. This is a powerful tool to get unstuck and figure out what your next action should be regarding an opportunity. Most of the breakthroughs in Josh’s career have come from posing this thought experiment. As you are planning out the next quarter and figuring out how to reach your financial or personal goals, the way you get your brain in gear to solve the problem is by asking yourself a counterfactual question. Starting from the question allows you to avoid being mired in self-criticism and doubt. You will come up with ideas that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise because you weren’t framing the problem in that particular way.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com JoshKaufman.net

Mo asks Josh Kaufman: What big idea do you have to help business developers be more successful? Regardless of what industry or market you are in, understanding business at a fundamental level is a significant advantage. It will help you deliver more effectively as well as the business development. Having an accurate understanding of what businesses are and how they work will help you do your job better and serve your customers better as well. Organizations are good at teaching a deep understanding of a specific specialty, but they are not necessarily good at teaching the general business language and communicating that to a client. Most employees know their job very well, but they don’t know how they or their boss fits into the bigger picture of the organization. Having a comprehensive understanding of the entire business system is where you get to the strategic and practical insight that can really make a difference. The decision-maker in an organization has to think of all five parts of the business, the value creation side, the marketing, the sales, the delivery, and the financial side when deciding what actions to take. Expanding beyond a narrow view of the business helps you understand your client and sell your services, but it also helps operate within your own organization. Thinking into the future and anticipating issues before they arise will make you a better business person and make you more valuable to your organization. As we communicate with clients we should do so with their priorities in mind and in their words. All aspects of business development get meaningfully better if you can talk the language of business. Business development is about trust. Everything you can do to convey that you understand a client at a fundamental level, the more they are going to trust you, the more effectively you are going to be able to work with them, and the more effectively you will be able to close business.   Mentioned in this Episode: GrowBIGPlaybook.com JoshKaufman.net

Dorie Clark shares the long term strategies that generate lasting business development success. Learn how to create relationships with interesting people and how that can lead to incredible outcomes, a simple system for saying no so you can say yes to the right things more often, and how pre-commitment can force you to create better business development habits, and more.   Mo asks Dorie: What’s your big idea when it comes to business development? One of the key things that professional service providers need to grapple with are the long term and short term needs of business and life. Long term relationship building is what really drives results, but in the short term we still need to generate business. When it comes to networking and building your network of relationships, there are three ways to go about doing it and the first is the most commonly thought of and also the reason the majority of people dislike networking. Short term networking is all about making the sale and what you can immediately extract from someone. When you already have a relationship with someone you can be direct and ask for the sale, but it’s not conducive to creating a real relationship. With long term networking you’re not trying to immediately get something out of the other person, and in Infinite Horizon networking you cultivate relationships solely because they are interesting and you never know where people will end up over time. It’s about having an infinite perspective of what’s possible. It’s about being helpful and meeting interesting people. When we think about networking most people think of it as a chore, but reorienting it towards meeting new and interesting people can change how we feel about it. Just getting to know someone is more than enough to build a great relationship. We are all pressed for time but we can all find an hour in our week to make this kind of networking possible, it’s just a matter of prioritizing it. In the era of the pandemic it’s also possible to host virtual cocktail parties to get to know people. Optimize for interesting, instead of money. Follow your curiosity, meet with interesting people, and you will go in interesting directions.   Mo asks Dorie: How can we use The Long Game to grow our book of business and create more opportunities? One of the things that frustrates a lot of people with big goals is that the goal seems so unattainable in the moment. 20% Time is a concept that a number of companies use to make it easier to achieve those larger, more long term goals. Business development professionals can use a similar concept within their own careers and pursue ideas that are interesting and have potential. You can accomplish almost anything, the key variable is the runway. Planning methodically to achieve your goal can make incredible things happen. You don’t have to make a leap of faith, if you have an audacious goal and give yourself enough runway while devoting small amounts of time to it consistently, there is very little risk involved. 20% Time is a way to achieve big goals in a way that derisks the proposition. Your 20% Time can take a number of forms from networking, to creating a podcast, to crafting a compelling keynote speech, and more. If you want to build a business development process that works it’s going to take time and you have to dedicate the time to make it happen.   Mo asks Dorie: How can we use the concepts of The Long Game to establish and build the relationship advantage? Turning down offers and clearing your plate is how you free up your time and space to connect with the right people. The more successful we become as professionals the more in demand we are, and the people who want to spend time with us may not be the people that we should be spending time with. Being able to say no more often and being comfortable while doing it is the key to being able to dedicate your time to the right things. One of the easiest ways to deflect well meaning people that you don’t want to commit to is simply asking for more information. Just by making them jump through some simple hoops and provide some more info you can screen out the tire kickers. The next step is to ask for a certain level of granularity in the request. Asking for an agenda is advance can be very valuable so you can focus directly on the important topics and cut out the fluff. Ask if it’s possible to discuss things asynchronously where they send you their questions and you reply with a voicemail when you have time. It’s also an option to simply invite someone to something you are already doing, which makes creating these kinds of connections scalable.   Mo asks Dorie: How can we hold ourselves accountable, hack our own habits, and keep doing what we know we should be doing? The first chapter of the Long Game deals with the question of why we seem to be so busy in our modern lives. One of the most critical aspects of senior leaders is setting the strategy for their organization and yet when asked, 96% of senior leaders say they don’t have enough time for strategy. We need to be honest with ourselves and realize that many of the constraints of “busyness” are in many ways things that we put on ourselves. For many of us there is a culture of busyness and research has shown a link to busyness and self-worth. We can set up structures in our lives to create pre-commitment and push us towards better behavior. Accountability groups are great examples. Creating accountability structures for yourself enables you to make habits of good behavior instead of negative patterns. High achieving professionals generally hate breaking commitments. Having activities in your calendar that you know you should do will make it much more likely that you will actually follow through. If you do the hardest but most beneficial activities early in the day, the rest of your work will sort itself out into your schedule. This avoids the chaos of the day from pushing those activities off indefinitely.   Mo shares his insights from Dorie's habits. Build time into your schedule specifically to interact with people that you find interesting. When Mo was originally designing the Grow Big principles and training he created the concept of narrowing your relationships to people that you can proactively commit to reaching out to once a month. One of the categories is interesting people because interesting people spend time with interesting people. Relationships with interesting people can lead to incredible places, even if there is absolutely no expectation of any commercial benefit to begin with. When someone asks you to do something that is not quite the best use of your time there are four simple steps to say no nicely. Dorie has another simple three step system of triage you can use to filter out the most egregious. First, ask for more info. Second, ask for more granular info. Third, suggest a different approach once you know what’s being asked of you. The power of pre-commitment to hack your habits is a great tool to ensure you do what you know you should do. Put those activities on your calendar and make them the default, instead of trying to fit them into the chaos of your day where they will be endless pushed off by the whirlwind.   Mentioned in this Episode: growbigplaybook.com dorieclark.com/join dorieclark.com/toolkit dorieclark.com/entrepreneur dorieclark.com/subscribe

Mo shares his insights from the habits of Dorie Clark. Build time into your schedule specifically to interact with people that you find interesting. When Mo was originally designing the Grow Big principles and training he created the concept of narrowing your relationships to people that you can proactively commit to reaching out to once a month. One of the categories is interesting people because interesting people spend time with interesting people. Relationships with interesting people can lead to incredible places, even if there is absolutely no expectation of any commercial benefit to begin with. When someone asks you to do something that is not quite the best use of your time there are four simple steps to say no nicely. Dorie has another simple three step system of triage you can use to filter out the most egregious. First, ask for more info. Second, ask for more granular info. Third, suggest a different approach once you know what’s being asked of you. The power of pre-commitment to hack your habits is a great tool to ensure you do what you know you should do. Put those activities on your calendar and make them the default, instead of trying to fit them into the chaos of your day where they will be endless pushed off by the whirlwind.   Mentioned in this Episode: growbigplaybook.com

Mo asks Dorie Clark: How can we hold ourselves accountable, hack our own habits, and keep doing what we know we should be doing? The first chapter of the Long Game deals with the question of why we seem to be so busy in our modern lives. One of the most critical aspects of senior leaders is setting the strategy for their organization and yet when asked, 96% of senior leaders say they don’t have enough time for strategy. We need to be honest with ourselves and realize that many of the constraints of “busyness” are in many ways things that we put on ourselves. For many of us there is a culture of busyness and research has shown a link to busyness and self-worth. We can set up structures in our lives to create pre-commitment and push us towards better behavior. Accountability groups are great examples. Creating accountability structures for yourself enables you to make habits of good behavior instead of negative patterns. High achieving professionals generally hate breaking commitments. Having activities in your calendar that you know you should do will make it much more likely that you will actually follow through. If you do the hardest but most beneficial activities early in the day, the rest of your work will sort itself out into your schedule. This avoids the chaos of the day from pushing those activities off indefinitely.   Mentioned in this Episode: dorieclark.com/subscribe