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

Mike Deimler is one of the best client relationship developers on the planet. In this episode, Mo brings to light the three major lessons that Mike Deimler shared during his interview and how you can apply them directly to business development. Making progress every day is crucial. Mike went through an extremely traumatic event as a child where he lost his eye and a close relative gave him a key piece of advice that changed his life. Mike decided to focus on making progress instead of being stuck as a victim. As a partner at BCG for the past 30 years, Mike always tries to make progress in three important areas: with his clients, his leadership roles at the firm, and within his personal life. In business development it’s very easy to have setbacks, maybe more than any other area of life. When setbacks happen it becomes easy to switch your focus to delivery and forget about growth. Mike’s system for business development has been a powerful framework for getting results. Taking a strategic perspective and writing down the top priorities your client should be focusing on is a great way to get started. As great as your ideas for your client are, you need to think about how you can persuade them to move from their current position. Start off by asking questions so you can understand their world from their perspective. By doing things when clients aren’t ready to hire him, Mike has created some of the most beneficial and profitable client relationships for his business. Making strategic investments into a client with a give-to-get is a great way to start a relationship. Investing in a person before they can hire you is another way to create demand for your expertise. The biggest contracts that are ever sold, by and large, are the ones created before there is actually a commercial opportunity. Moving without the ball will help you with a huge number of future client opportunities. The power of a system, when it’s implemented, is that it creates incremental momentum that moves you progressively towards your goals each and every day. How are you staying focused on doing the work that’s important right now but also always investing in the future? Proactive investing and give-to-gets, when done correctly, hit all six dimensions of Robert Cialdini’s Persuasion framework. It establishes authority and creates a need for reciprocity. You may not get anything in return right away but you almost always get some value back eventually. Instead of just talking about what you can do, a give-to-get puts you into a position to actually do it. Your give-to-get should have a clear next step for the client. Don’t overwhelm them by offering a number of options, make it clear and easy to understand what the simple next step is because people want to continue going down the road they are already on. People tend to spend time and money with people that they like so your give-to-get should be enjoyable. Build in some time to bond with the person on a human level. Try to include any potential decision makers on the project as part of the give-to-get meeting. Any sizable work often requires a number of decision makers to say yes to it. People want more of what there’s less of. If you are genuinely busy, make it known how special it is that you are offering them a give-to-get. If you can create valuable and enjoyable give-to-get meetings where you are helping your clients and that naturally leads to a next step it will create demand for your expertise. Check out the mini courses down below to learn how to apply these business development ideas to your organization. The most inspiring thing about Mike is his consistent drive to continue moving forward in all areas of his life and focusing on improving his craft. If you can always have an open mind and always be striving to get better yourself, then you’re going to continue to have a bigger and bigger impact on the world.   Mentioned in this episode: bdhabits.com bdhabitsforteams.com winning-more.com

Mike Deimler shares three incredible business development lessons that he’s learned over the course of his 30-year career at one the most successful consultancies in the world. Learn the secret to creating powerful client relationships, why empathy is one of the most important skills you can cultivate, and how you can apply the same transformation that Michael Jordan underwent to become the greatest basketball player in the world to your own career. Mike Deimler is one of the best business development consultants among over 15,000 people that the Bunnell Idea Group has trained over the years. Business strategy has been Mike’s main focus for the past 30 years and he’s been working, thinking, or writing about business development for pretty much his entire career. Being good at relationship development and business development is a lot like being a good father, they are learned behaviours and anyone can become better at them. Mike tells the story of his near-death experience as a child and the lesson he learned when the surgeon told him that his eye couldn’t be saved. At the age of nine, Mike learned that he had a choice to make. He could be angry at what happened to him or he could make the most out of every single day of his life. Mike chose the latter and applies that lesson to all of the relationships in his life. If you’ve survived something difficult, you should look at it as a gift and make the conscious choice to value each day. You can pivot your strengths and learn new ways to thrive. Taking a strategic perspective comes down to taking another person’s perspective by listening and understanding where they are coming from. When working with CEOs, Mike always strives to understand what their view is and what their strategic agenda should be. When you take someone else’s perspective and internalize it, it forces you to think deeply about what they should be working on. For every client that Mike serves he writes down their strategic agenda on a single piece of paper. This requires him to be concise and sharp on the issues that matter most and helps establish a relative priority to the things that need work. To move someone to take action, you need to move them twice, both emotionally and intellectually. At the highest levels this takes persistence and the willingness to explore other possibilities, combined with the patience to see the process through. Some of the most important topics Mike has ever worked on took nearly two years for the change to really take place. If you’re pushing a product or service, you’re selling, and if you start with the client’s perspective in mind you are obligated to move them and encourage them to take action. When you start with the other, selling is the consequence of doing the right thing. If you’re ever uncertain in a meeting or a business development situation, just pause and listen to both the heart and the mind. You will rarely go wrong by taking a holistic approach to the other person’s perspective. If you can think of the opposing pairs of facts vs. feelings and big ideas vs. tactics, you’re going to make every meeting and comment better. More Judo, less Karate. Young partners often get anxious about business development and believe they need to push in order to sell. By coming at the meeting aggressively they end up defeating themselves. Sometimes the best thing to do in a meeting is to talk a lot less and listen a lot more. Talking is Karate, listening is Judo. When you’re listening more than speaking, the other person is coming to you and sharing what’s on their mind. Be comfortable with empty space in a conversation, not every second of the meeting needs a slide. There is always a balancing act between being proactive and waiting. Asking questions is important, but strategic perspective is about having a point of view. If you’re going to be a trusted advisor to anyone, you need to do the work to have a value-added perspective. The art of knowing when to pivot from asking questions to proposing solutions is an art. There will be times where you have to take a stance and press your point of view. Asking permission is one way of opening the door and changing the other person’s frame of mind. Don’t be afraid of disagreement. Starting off a meeting by asking questions first allows you to understand the other person’s position in their own words, which in turn allows you to propose a solution to their problem. Mike tells the story of attending the same high school as Michael Jordan and watching him develop as a basketball player, seeing what made him special first hand. During the course of Jordan’s career, it wasn’t until he transformed from the best offensive player in the world to the best complete basketball player in the world. He truly became the best when he learned to move without the ball. If you’re building a sustained relationship with anyone, the most important thing you can do is create opportunity for the client as well as your business. Putting your client in the right position so they can win is more important than scoring on your own. Like most behaviors, when you try something new, you have to try harder but as you move forward it becomes more intuitive. Nurturing relationships outside of the usual business transactions is something that nearly all successful business development professionals have a system for. If you’re just getting started learning these skills, it’s best to have a more disciplined approach. Mo shares a personal lesson he learned from his father that he applies to nearly every area of his life. The most common question Mike gets from young professionals is “How is it you’re so successful at building relationships with senior clients?” Think about your closest relationships and what you or the other person do to make them successful, chances are you’re going to think about empathy, honesty, compassion, and asking for feedback. Relationships require frequency, both parties need to put effort into communicating. The best relationships are fun as well, where spending time with the other person makes you feel good and you do the same for them. The best relationships in your life are the ones where you are both willing to be vulnerable. In business, when a client is willing to be vulnerable with you, you have truly become a trusted advisor. If you strive to make your business relationships as good as the best relationships in the rest of your life, the business will take care of itself.   Mentioned in this episode: bdhabits.com Blasting Through Plateaus - bunnellideagroup.com/blasting-through-plateaus/

Mo Bunnell breaks down the interview with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, and talks about why goals are not enough to achieve extraordinary results. Learn why your systems are the best place to start, how your habits shape your identity and not the other way around, and the essential framework for creating an exceptional business development system to get the outcomes you desire. Mo goes over a quick recap of the three major lessons learned in the interview with James Clear and how they can be applied to business development. Your current systems are perfectly designed to give you the current outcomes that you’re getting. This can also be looked at as your past six months of systems are perfectly designed to deliver your current results We all have systems whether we realize it or not. What systems have you had around business development for the past six months? Those are the systems that are delivering the current outcomes you are getting right now. Use the Most Important Things (MITs) framework to build up your business development habits. Choose three things to focus on that have a big impact, are 100% in your control, and are growth oriented. It’s easy to fool yourself to believe that doing your job well is growth oriented, but one small change can be the difference between regular service and generating additional revenue for your business. There are systems at individual levels, but you should also have systems at the team level that facilitate the outcomes you want as a team. Set up systems for setting goals as a team, how you are going to interact with each other and with clients, and for celebrating success. What are the metrics you can control as a team that you can use in your systems to know if you’re on track for success? Identity and how we think about ourselves is potentially one of the most important things to bringing in business. You don’t have to be the best in the world at business development; you just have to be better than the competition. Most people think that their identity changes when they change the goal, but it’s more important to think about it from the habit perspective. Every time you execute on a habit that moves you closer to your goal, that’s a small piece of evidence that you are the kind of person capable of achieving that goal. As you build those systems, your beliefs about your own abilities will change. Set your goals and then build the systems in a way that you can measure that can get you there. You should also build out systems across your team. Data transparency across a team can have a major impact on the overall results and takes a load off the team leader as the coach. As the results increase across the team, the team’s identity changes as well. Use James’ 4 law framework to help develop your business development habits and start off by auditing your existing system. No matter your discipline, there is a highly repeatable process that can be fine tuned and improved upon. Think of business development as a process that can be refined. Engage your potential clients in the process of a proposal. If they haven’t engaged and helped you define how you’re going to work together, then they haven’t bought in. You can look at the entire business development process and measure the metrics in each of the steps in a way that allows you to create a system of improvement.   Mentioned in this episode: bdhabits.com bdhabitsforteams.com

James Clear, author of the best-selling book Atomic Habits, shares the importance of creating a system of habits that makes reaching your goals simple. Mo applies the principles of Atomic Habits directly to the world of business development and shows you how starting small can create huge results in your business. James Clear recounts the story of the high school baseball bat incident, how he realized that something had gone horribly wrong and how he found himself fighting for his life. People are building habits all the time, but when your life is completely changed by a traumatic injury, you have to start as small as possible in order to rebuild them. Scaling down to what James could manage was how he was able to regain a sense of control over the life that he’d lost. You don’t have control over the random events that come your way, but you do have control over how you respond to those things and that usually comes down to your habits. Most people start with one foot in expertise and become great at what they do but once they reach the next level of success, they find themselves in a completely different world. This can often lead to them feeling defeated since they aren’t as skilled in the new area. Goals are helpful for setting a direction or a filter but they come with a lot of drawbacks. Your goal is your desired outcome, but your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. If there is ever a gap between your system and your goal, your daily habits will always win. Whatever results you have right now are by definition the byproduct of the system you’ve been running. It’s common in business for people to focus on the position or outcome, like doubling revenue or leads, but it’s more important to look at the system that’s running and the trajectory that business systems are driving towards. We want our results to change, but it’s not the results that need to change, it’s the habits that precede the result that need to change. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. Goals are useful as check-ins, but more time should be invested into the system of habits that lead to the outcome you want. The Snowball system’s structure of lead and lag measures is very similar. Everybody is running systems whether they realize it or not. The questions you need to ask yourself are “How do I design a good system?” and “Which habits should I build?” This is where BIG goals come in to send you in the right direction. There are three main things that impact your outcomes in life. The first is luck, the second is your choices/strategy, and the third is your system of habits and behaviour. When you master the last two, you increase the surface area for good luck to come your way. People will often conflate the outcome they want to achieve with the person that they want to be. James believes you should shift the focus to the identity you desire instead of the goal because the real reason habits matter is that they can shape your sense of self. True behaviour change is really identity change. Another way of reshaping your identity is to reframe your goal into a question. Instead of trying to close more deals, ask yourself what a successful sales person would do and then use that to select the action that moves you in the right direction. Questions are superior to advice because advice is contextual and situations change. Life is dynamic and advice will not always fit the circumstances. Identity-based questions guide you based on the situation. There are four fundamental things that increase the odds of getting a habit to stick. The first is to make your good habits obvious and easy to see. The second is to make them attractive and appealing. The third is to make them easy and convenient. The fourth is to make your habits satisfying and associated with a positive emotion. If you want to break a bad habit, just invert those four. When it comes to business development, we should look for one-time actions we can take that will help the cause every day from that point on to help mitigate the roller coaster that businesses tend to ride most of the time. A lot of business development is done through a screen. Is there an app or a tool that you can use to make business development more obvious and prime yourself and your environment for that use? James talks about the idea of the Temptation Bundle, where you combine a task that you know you should do with a task that you want to do in order to encourage the more important action. Don’t let one piece of silence prevent you from following up. A failure should not be desired but it should be planned for. When following up, there will also be people who ignore your efforts, but by writing down your next follow-up in your calendar, you will be many times more likely to keep following up. Life has a series of seasons and your habits should be different depending on the season of life you’re in. The same idea can be applied to your career. When you reach a new level it will probably require new habits in order to succeed. As your career progresses, typically, your responsibility increases. When your responsibility increases your ability to say no to things and to prioritize also needs to increase. Saying no to something is only saying no to one thing, but saying yes to something means saying no to everything else. Everything comes with a trade-off. If you’re going through a change of season in your career or your life, it may be the perfect time to reread Atomic Habits. The process of building habits is essentially rebuilding and getting started over and over as your life changes. In business development, the goal is not to be the absolute best in the world, it’s just to be a little bit better than your competition. Business is mostly a winner-take-all proposition so put yourself in a position to make more shots and improve your craft, and each day you will be more likely to win. Start with doing something small every single day when you don’t know where to begin. Any goal you have can be broken down into a two-minute chunk that will help you master the art of showing up. A habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize and scale it up and expand it into something more. One of the most motivating feelings for the human mind is seeing progress. A simple strategy to improve your business development habits is to create a way to visualize your efforts even if you don’t get any direct feedback. A visual cue is a powerful way to see your progress and increase the odds of you keeping pushing forward.   Mentioned in this Episode: Bdhabits.com

Mo Bunnell breaks down the three most important lessons shared by Kelley O’Hara and applies them directly to growing your business and winning more engagements. Learn how to cultivate a growth mindset, create a powerful feedback system that steadily builds momentum, and why preparation is your ultimate confidence-building weapon. There are three major pieces of content that Kelley O’Hara talked about in her interview that apply directly to business development: having a growth mindset, focusing on what you can control, and preparing to make progress. A common mistake that business developers make is in preparing to win engagements instead of preparing to make progress towards the goal. It can’t be said enough, business development can be learned. It doesn’t matter where you start or where you are now, there is always another level to grow to. Business development is such a complex skill that no one is born with it. Any complex skill is the roll up of dozens and dozens of skills, and because of that, no one is born with all of those. Nobody is born with everything they need. Business development is so in depth and requires so many hard and soft skills that it’s impossible to be excellent in all of them and there is always more to learn. Self-reflection is crucial to a growth mindset. For Kelley, the off season is when she really hones her craft. For business developers that want to get better at a skill, build in some time each week to decode how you did because your off season is in between meetings. Use a journal to track your progress and see where you are improving. Build in feedback loops for anything you want to become more skilled at. Any time something important happens and other people are around, ask them two key questions. When you frame a feedback loop in that way you will get really good information and it will help you improve. The problem with vague feedback is you will usually get positive feedback without the area to improve upon. Remember, asking better questions will give you better answers. Business development has less feedback than many other aspects of life, which can make it very difficult to know what to improve. Aim to disconnect yourself from the outcome so that you can keep moving forward. Perception, action, will. Whenever you’re in a moment that doesn’t seem to be going well, pull back and get some perspective, do something about it, and then keep at it. People often quit sooner than they should, don’t get discouraged. Track what you can control and use it as your motivation. Decode what you need to focus on to get results and develop a system to track what you can control to reach the goal. Even subjective measures are better than not tracking anything. Another common mistake business developers make is either tracking way too much and getting overburdened and burning out, or not tracking things that can move the needle because they’re too subjective. Start with simple tracking measures and build it out from there. There is no way that someone else can do the tracking for you. When you document what you do and your business starts to take off, you can go back and see what you were doing prior to the growth to connect the dots. Build in some time on a quarterly basis to do some deeper reflection and figure out what you need to prioritize in the next time period. Focus on preparation instead of perfection. If your bar is perfection, you will end up disappointed and in a negative thought loop. If you feel prepared going in, you are far more likely to perform better. Alternatively, if you feel unprepared, you will spend a large amount of time and energy just being stressed instead of performing at a high level. Do everything you can to prepare and walk in confidently. Do you know what your set pieces are? Think of a meeting as a bunch of set pieces that are put together in a random order. Prepare for those scenarios and you will be ready no matter what happens. There are several things you can do to prepare for a meeting. Write down your goal for the meeting and how you can frame it for the other attendees. You are going to win meetings in the first five minutes, not in the last five minutes. Plan for dynamic changes in every meeting. Think of the things that you are most afraid of happening and prepare for them and you will feel much more confident going in. Think through the most interesting questions you want to ask the person on the other side of the table. Also think about some of the questions they might pose to you and how you can engage them in a compelling dialogue. Think about the aspects of relationship building and how you can show commonality. There is a lot of research that shows commonality correlates to likability and likability correlates to purchasing. Preparing for weeks is the most important thing to keep up your business development progress. The week interval is so ingrained in our minds that it’s the perfect cadence for planning. Consider what actions you're going to take in the next week to make progress towards your goals or move a client through your pipeline. Rainmakers are the people that plan their weeks out and do a little bit each day to grow their business. Plenty of business owners end up in a roller coaster effect where when they get busy, they stop pushing business development forward, everything dries up. A quick recap on three major things learned from Kelley O’Hara. Mo retells the story of a company his team worked with and how they attacked a particular problem. The team figured out the three most important metrics to track and how those metrics improved over time. Learn the concept of the Give To Get and how to create a 60- to 90-minute strategic investment in a relationship. Mo’s team picked a few Give To Gets to build on and included those in the metrics they tracked. In terms of business development hours spent each week, the organization saw a 710% increase in time spent in only a few short weeks. They also almost doubled the amount of meetings requested with a jump from 60% to 96% in acceptance rate. They also saw a decrease in the Give To Gets scheduled because they became so busy with work. Just by tracking a few key metrics can lead to some incredible, business transforming results. After getting through the first few months it can generate a huge amount of momentum.   Mentioned in this Episode: bdhabits.com The Snowball System Dr. Anders Erickson on Freakonomics Radio Peak by Dr. Anders Erickson The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday Measurement Case Study

In the opening episode of Real Relationships Real Revenue, Kelley O’Hara, one of the top athletes on the planet, reveals her secrets of focusing on what she can control to perform at a world-class level. Mo Bunnell applies Kelley’s principles to developing relationships and growing a book of business. Together they cover how to have a learning mindset, set up tracking systems, stay motivated through challenges and how to prepare for high-stakes events. Whether you perform on the field or in the boardroom, this episode will elevate your game. Mo shares a slightly embarrassing story of how he and Kelley met at Mo’s book launch party for The Snowball System. Kelley has had an incredible career culminating in winning multiple Olympic and World Cup gold medals, but it wasn’t always easy. Kelley had the defining moment of her career when she was at the World Cup but not getting onto the field. Just like in business development, she made a critical choice to focus on what she could do and what was in her control to get on the field instead of feeling like a failure and accepting the way things were. Kelley took stock of the situation and identified what actions were in her control to move forward. Taking action taught her a lot about being confident in herself and her skills, and her story as a world class athlete has direct parallels in the world of business development. Eventually Kelley got onto the field in game 5 of the World Cup when she was put in as a starter. They won that game and went onto the semi-finals against Germany, where Kelley scored her first goal on a national team and sealed the deal to get into the finals of the World Cup. Anything really complex is both learned and earned. There are plenty of people who are bigger, faster, and stronger than Kelley, but that didn’t stop her from honing her skills and becoming a world class footballer. Mo relates Kelley’s ideas to the way many professionals say others are “born with it” when it comes to business development, and how those who do are thinking about it all wrong. Just like the technical skills of a sport, business development can be learned. Kelley breaks down how she approaches learning the skill of football and the key mindset of top athletes that allows them to push through failure and stay motivated and how that applies to business meetings across the boardroom table. You’re never going to have a “perfect” game. Similarly in business, becoming better and honing your skills is a constant refinement towards perfection. Being conscious of all the various elements that contribute to your success is a key element to becoming an expert at anything. Every time you practice your skill, whether athletics or business related, get feedback that answers these two questions: What’s one thing to keep? What’s one thing you would change about what I did? Kelley talks about a business she’s involved with called Tame the Beast and how having a focus outside of soccer has actually made her a better player. Most business people think in terms of annual goals, but very rarely break those goals down into daily actions. Kelley’s approach to being a better athlete is very similar to Mo’s system for business development. Kelley talks about the key metrics and methods that athletes track to drive improvement. Weekly goals are the “how” of achieving your annual or ultimate goal. If you want to have an undefeated season you need to win every game, one game at a time and approach every single game like it’s all that matters. The same applies to business development. Take each meeting one at a time and focus on making each one a win. Tracking something important subjectively is better than tracking something unimportant accurately. Mo talks about the MIT (Most Important Things) process and how it can help you understand what to track over time. When you’re picking your three MIT’s make sure they’re BIG (Big impact, In your control, and Growth oriented). If you accomplish those things consistently over the course of a year, your life will completely change. It’s important for the person that is striving to get better to collect the data and review it themselves instead of giving it to another person to do. Data is the feedback you need to understand if you are where you need to be and what you need to get better at. Mo talks about his tracking system for his MIT’s and how he knows whether his week was a valuable week or not. They can include a number of different things from phone calls made to time spent in the gym. Food plays a crucial part in the life of an athlete. Kelley talks about her goal of writing a cookbook and her plan for taking it from a document on her computer and turning it into a real physical object. Her method for getting the writing done can be applied directly to any business or project. Preparing for high-stakes games is very similar to preparing for important business development meetings. Kelley’s coaches focused on practicing particular set pieces and scenarios to the point where the team could execute the plan without thinking about it. When you prepare for something to the point where you can do it in your sleep, you actually become even stronger in adapting to a new circumstance or variable. Preparation shows confidence, although many people believe it will make them robotic or disingenuous. When it comes to business development, being prepared shows that you put in the time and you actually care about building a relationship. Kelley reveals how she recovers from making mistakes and how she uses little wins to get herself back into the game when things aren’t going the way she hoped, a technique that can be applied to business development meetings when they start to go off the rails. Don’t let your expectations dissuade you, bring it back to the little things you can do right now to get back on track. Kelley tells the story of how habits have affected her life and how they can help you get through the valleys of your life. She also talks about how doing the mental work can help you be more effective with the physical work. Putting in the mental effort before a big meeting can drastically increase your odds of success.   Mentioned in this Episode: Bdhabits.com Kelley O’Hara on Instagram Kelley O'Hara's favorite BEAST® products