David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will continue our discussion about the AI Approach to Multiply Your Sales. This is part four in our series, and today we’ll be talking about learning, segmenting, and the Three Ds. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, thank you so much, David.

I really, really enjoyed this. I know I’ve said that in previous podcasts, but it’s true. After each one, I’ve gone into my own business and I’m like, okay, I got to apply this and apply that because these conversations are of such value. So I appreciate your time. I love this. And hopefully it’s been helpful to everybody else.

David: I’m glad, I feel the same way, and I’m really looking at this almost like a mini-course. If people were to put together these four episodes and say, “How much of this stuff am I doing in my business?” You can probably implement some things very quickly that can probably help you get some great results.

Jay: 100%.

David: All right, so let’s do the quick review. And again, what we’re talking about here is we asked AI what will help you to multiply your business because that’s been a focus of our conversations recently. AI came back with some different responses, and then we’re talking about what AI says and how we’re able to help implement those things in business with our clients.

And so let’s just recap. Number one was refine your target audience. Number two, develop a compelling value proposition. Number three, optimize your marketing channels. That was our first episode on that topic.

In episode two, we covered points four, five, and six. Number four was enhance your customer experience. Number five, implement a referral program. And number six, leverage the power of content marketing.

In episode three of this series, we hit utilize upselling and cross selling strategies, which was number seven.

Analyze and optimize your sales funnel, which was number eight, and invest in customer relation management software, CRM, which was number nine.

Now we’re going to be doing 10, 11, and 12. Eleven and 12 are really bonus because originally I asked it for 10 and then I realized that doesn’t break out well if you’re doing three in a podcast.

So I went back to the AI and I said, give me two more. And it did. So we’ll be talking about numbers 11 and 12 in this podcast as well.

So number 10 in the list of things that AI says will help you to multiply your sales is:

10: Continuous learning and adaptation. Stay updated with industry trends, attend relevant workshops or conferences, and be open to adapting your sales strategies to meet changing market demands.

Well spoken AI! Continuous education. It’s a good call!

Jay: It is, and some professions actually require it. But again, that continuous education is often on a service or a specialty or things like that. It’s not really on customer service or the technology or things like that.

I feel like in that regard, so many of us are a hamster on a wheel. You know, we’re just trying to keep up with what today is giving us. We’re putting grease on the squeaky wheel and we don’t have time to really think about staying up on, you know, all the latest trends and those kind of things.

David: Yeah. And a lot of people just don’t like continuing education, because they feel like so much of it is platitudes. It’s like, I already know this stuff. I already know it, right? But knowing what to do is very different than knowing how to do it. And that’s really what I’ve been trying to differentiate in this series of podcasts is that, yes, these are great statements.

Continuous learning. That sounds great. But what are you learning? Are you learning things that you can implement immediately?

Are you putting in place processes that will allow you to start getting results right away so you can gauge those results and then adapt, change, or tweak the process as you go to make sure that it’s working for you?

So once again, we’re focusing on all the little details that make these general recommendations profitable.

Jay: You know, I don’t know where I get it. I think I get it from my dad, but I am on a never ending quest to make things more efficient. I am always looking for the next software, the next device, the next system.

I’ve done it since I was 15. My first job was in a burger barn at an amusement park. And I was watching how they put everything on the grill and what they would do is they’d cover the whole grill with burgers And then they would flip them all at the same time, and then they would pull them all off at the same time, and while they’re preparing them, the grill is sitting there empty.

And so the line would move, and then it would stop, and I’m like, this is crazy.

Put down two rows, wait a second, put down two, put down two, and at 15, I changed the whole thing. I’ve been doing that stuff my whole life, so I I love the tech. I love the next thing.

And I’ll spend weeks and months finding the right thing knowing that it’s going to improve my business for years to come.

David: Yeah, and that really goes to the point. The words that the AI used , it said continuous learning and adaptation.

Jay: Yes.

David: And what you’re talking about there is adaptation and implementation. Adapting the system to be able to get the result that you want

Jay: Yes.

David: So that everything gets better for everybody. Beautiful thing.

Jay: Yeah, KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, that’s kind of what we use nowadays. And we’ve talked about this in previous podcasts, understanding every aspect of your business and knowing how you can influence it and adapt it.

Because you can’t adapt, if you don’t know the reality of what’s going on. And I’ve worked for so many companies where management has no clue what’s happening on the front lines.

And so we’re asking them, we’re begging them to adapt. Or they have software built by engineers who aren’t on the front line and we’re pulling our hair out because it doesn’t answer any questions.

It makes life harder for us.

David: Right. And unfortunately, a lot of it boils down to not knowing what to do and not knowing how to do it. “Yes, this is a problem, but I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t have time to think about how to fix it. Therefore, soldier on, keep moving, keep working. Good luck with that.”

And so much of this, and even this point, continuous learning and adaptation is about identifying those small hinges that swing the big doors. And so much of what we do with our clients is about doing just that.

Finding what is a small and obvious fix to a problem that could have been plaguing a company for literally months or years. You fix it in 10 minutes with a one sheet piece of paper that says, “Do it this way,” and they implement it, and they immediately start to see better results.

So, I think in terms of, okay, this is what AI suggests, this is how we end up getting it done. So that’s number 10, continuous learning and adaptation.

11. Targeted Marketing Campaigns. Develop targeted marketing strategies tailored to specific customer segments. This approach ensures that your marketing efforts resonate deeply with your intended audience, leading to higher conversion rates.

Once again, a lot of buzzwords in that sentence. A lot of really good recommendations in that sentence, but a lot of confusion too.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Can I brag for a minute?

David: Please do.

Jay: I want to brag for a minute. So a lot of people know that I’ve just recently started an accounting firm that focuses on day traders and they’re taxes.

And we’ve spent over a year and a half with my current company and my last company working on keywords to make sure we get the right leads from Google advertising.

And David, in the last four months, I have not had one lead that is not right in the strike zone.

Now, think about that. Think, I mean, that is unbelievable to me. That, and they, you know, we’re in constant contact with the company that we use.

And every month they’re like, okay, how many leads were outside? What do we need to adjust? And I’m like, just keep pitching ’em, man, because they are right there.

And the beauty of that is, all we have to do is adjust the volume.

Right? Certain times of the year we crank that volume up, and certain times of the year we crank it down. And, wow! When we have the secret sauce, I mean, everything else is just gravy at that point.

David: Exactly. And what you’re talking about really ties back to point three, earlier in our conversation, which is about optimizing your marketing channels.

Jay: Right, right.

David: When you’re able to do that, and you combine that with what we’re talking about here in number 11, which is targeted marketing campaigns, it’s a double whammy. Because now you are getting to the right people through the stuff that you’re doing with your SEO. And your communication is better, which is something we also talked about in the first episode in this four part series.

And now, when you talk about targeted marketing campaigns, to me what that means is you’re taking the communications that we’ve perfected, creating value in the communications like we talked about in a previous episode, and now you’re sequencing that communication. That’s how we describe it to our clients inside our program.

You’re sequencing your communication. You’re putting together a series of messages that go out in a specific order, in a specific timeframe, so that you’re getting the information in front of them when they need it most.

To me, a targeted marketing campaign is about doing that. You’re getting the right message out to the right people at the right time. Using the right targeted marketing vehicle.

Jay: I love that. Sequencing the information. That makes a lot of sense to me. And I think understanding that in first contact, they might not understand your product or the need for it.

But we all know if they see you a couple times, you know, what is it? You used to hear they have to see you seven times, you know, a billboard, a TV ad, or whatever that is?

Meeting them where they’re at. Instead of trying to force them to be where you want them to be. It sounds to me like a great way to go.

David: Yeah, no question. I remember, I think it was in the Guerrilla Marketing book, he was talking about the fact that somebody had to be exposed to your message nine times before they’d be ready to buy.

And at that point, I extrapolated for myself. I said, well, what if they only see one out of every three messages I put out? To me, that means I need to do nine times three, 27.

I need to get out to them 27 times before they’re going to be ready to make a buying decision. And that’s really the essence of what sequencing communication is.

A lot of times we feel the need to try to tell everybody everything up front, before they even know who we are. And their eyes glaze over and like, Oh, this is too much. This person’s too full of hot air. I’m moving on.

And when you sequence your communication properly, you’re dripping it out a little bit at a time. You’re giving them a little bit this time and a little more the next time, a little more the following time.

And each part of it reveals a different aspect of your approach. A different aspect of the way that you do things, and the benefits that you bring to them.

And if number one didn’t completely resonate, maybe number two will, and maybe number four will, and maybe number seven will.

And the ones in between, if it’s good, useful information, and it’s creating value for them, they’ll still be happy to see it. They’ll be happy to look at it.

But then, when you get to the ones that really resonate with them, they’re going to respond.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And I love how you said they don’t know who we are, but I would also flip that. We don’t know who they are yet, right? And so, like you said, we’re kind of dividing their possible interest into this sequencing.

And hopefully, at some point, we’re going to land on who they are and what their needs are in that moment.

David: Exactly. And so much of it really becomes fun when you’re taking an approach like this. And I use the word fun a lot when I’m talking with my clients. Because I figure if what we’re doing is not actually fun, we’re not doing it right.

Because if it’s miserable, if it’s a big old slog and we can’t stand it, Let’s face it, they’re not going to do it. But when you’re able to make it fun by taking the appropriate action with the appropriate people at the appropriate time, everything gets a lot easier and a lot more fun.

Jay: Absolutely, absolutely.

David: All right, so number 12, this is the last one on our list. And this is:

12. Data Driven Decision Making. Leverage data analytics to understand customer behavior, preferences and buying patterns. Data driven insights empower you to make informed decisions, refine your strategies, and optimize sales processes.

Many words.

Jay: Yeah, and again, how do you extrapolate that out into your own business? I know this is something we work on constantly. I don’t think there’s ever going to be a point where you’re like, “okay, got that one done,” right? It’s got to be constant.

David: Yeah, and once again, going back to the idea of simplification, which is a really big part of what we do with people, boiling it down to its essentials.

Data driven decision making, to me, and this is what I refer to as the 3 D’s at the beginning of this podcast, data driven decisions, right? To me, that means that you are making your decisions based on the right information, the actual information, not what we think might be right, not what we feel, oh, I feel like I should do this.

What does the data say? What’s working well? What are the things that we’ve done in the past that have worked well? What are the things we’ve done in the past that have not worked as well? How can we continue to replicate the things that we did that did well? Do adaptations on those, to be able to continue to move that needle forward.

How can we avoid the mistakes that we made in the past based on what we’ve done and the responses that we’ve gotten? To me, that is the essence of data driven decision making.

And if you look again at the AI description, leverage data analytics to understand customer behavior. That just means looking at what are the customers doing based on what you’re sending out?

Leverage data analytics to understand customer behavior, preferences, and buying patterns. Okay, so that’s all the same. Data driven insights empower you to make informed decisions.

Right, your decisions are now informed. They’re not just decisions, right? And then it says, refine your strategies and optimize sales processes.

It allows you to do all of that. So, I would argue that this one, data driven decision making, is essentially a combination of all of the above.

Because when you’re implementing the things that we talked about over this series of podcasts, and you’re gauging the results, you’re tracking it down, you’ve got the tracking sheets or however it is that you’re keeping track of what’s going on, and you’re making the decisions based on, not what you think is going to work or what you think might work, but what actually is working, everything becomes a lot easier.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Can I give you a bad example of not using data?

David: Sure, I love bad examples!.

Jay: So, I worked for a national pizza chain. I’ll give you a hint, Pizza Pizza. Still family owned, even till today. And one day the daughter of the owner came up with this brilliant idea that people wanted bigger pizzas.

I don’t know if you remember this. It was called Bigger is Better. So they forced every franchisee to go out and retrofit all of their ovens. Buy new pans. The whole thing probably cost five grand per business to just do this. And they of course marketed behind it. Guess where all those pans are?

They’re sitting on top of the walk in refrigerators. Because there was no data, it was not driven by anything more than a feeling. And it was just the most ridiculous effort I’ve ever seen.

And that’s some of the problems you can get into with a family run business, because you are making gut feeling decisions instead of looking at the data.

David: Yeah, I’d love to say it’s just family run businesses, but wow, New Coke. Two words, right?

Jay: Yeah.

David: This kind of thing just happens everywhere. And some things just seem like a really good idea. Hey, wow. If they like this one, they’ll probably like that one when you say it out loud. Sure. It seems reasonable.

And if the marketing was right and if the people wanted it, then that would have worked, but we just don’t know. So data driven decision making is also a big one.

All right. So in terms of sort of wrapping this up, because we’ve been doing this now over a period of four podcasts over four weeks. I feel like we touched on a lot of really good topics. I feel like we were able to dive deep in terms of some of the how, of how to do these things.

And I’m hoping that the people who have actually paid attention through each of these episodes got some really solid ideas on specific things they can do to grow their sales and profits.

If that’s the case, and if you’d like to have a conversation about how we can help really just Implement this stuff inside your business, go to Topsecrets.com/call. Let’s have a conversation. See if we can help. If we can, we’ll let you know. If we can’t, we’ll let you know that too.

There is zero pressure on these calls. It’s about identifying the primary areas where you need help, providing recommendations on what you can do and how you can do it, and then saying, all right, if you want to do it by yourself, you can do that. If you want to do it with us, you can do that, but you have the option.

So hopefully that makes sense. And if you’d like to do it, TopSecrets.com/call.

Jay: Yeah, I love it. And I’ll just kind of add my feedback on this series of podcasts. I’ve learned a tremendous amount. I’ve applied a bunch.

But one of the things that stands out to me, is that you don’t have to do it alone. And I think sometimes we see it as weakness, right? I should be able to run this all. I should be able to do it all.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. But there are people who have gone before you. There are people who’ve spent, David, how many years have you spent doing this and refining this and, and talking to customers?

So, I mean, it’s just a great service. Again, just speaking out loud about it has made such a difference for me. So, I’m a huge fan of what you do and I hope people will recognize your sincerity, that it is just a call, and you do have a very strong desire to help. And you help a lot of people.

David: Well, thank you. And we never try to push anyone into our programs. All we’re looking to do is we’re looking for the right fit. If you are a smart, focused, motivated business owner, and you are determined to get from here to there, then we probably want to work together.

If you’re not good with making decisions, if you’re kind of iffy or wishy washy, then it’s probably not going to be a good fit.

And in many of the calls, we can get two thirds of the way through the call and recognize pretty early on it’s not a good fit. At which point we’ll say, yeah, I don’t think we can help you. You know, maybe you can try this resource or that resource.

So, it’s really not about us trying to sell you into anything. If we can work together, great. If we can’t, that’s perfectly fine too because we’ll know, right?

We’ll have the conversation, and we’ll both know! You’ll know, “oh, it’s not a good fit,” I’ll know, it’s not a good fit. And you get closure, which is beautiful. If you’ve been thinking about scheduling a call and just haven’t, there’s no closure, right?

Have the call. It’ll be a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Either way, it’s great. You’ll have a great experience. We’ll have a great conversation, and I hope you do it.

Jay: Yeah, and listen, there’s no reason to be a salesperson when your product is great, and yours is. So, David, I love our conversations, and thank you so much for your time today.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will continue our discussion about the AI Approach to Multiply Your Sales. This is episode three in our series, and it’s about upselling, sales funnels, and your CRM.

David: Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Thank you, David. This has been fascinating for me as I look at what AI recommends.

And even just apply some of those basics to my own business but also realizing that these are kind of general, and figuring out how to apply them to everybody’s individual circumstances is no easy feat.

David: Exactly. And one of the things that I’ve really liked about this series is having the opportunity to talk about the “how” of a lot of this stuff, because as business owners, as salespeople, we’ve heard these recommendations forever.

But the question is always, “well, how do you go about doing it?” And so what I’ve been trying to do in this series is to say, okay, here’s the general what you ought to do, but then there’s the, how do you go about doing it? And this is exactly what we help our clients with. So it’s been really fun for me to be able to go through these and say, okay, there are probably lots of ways to do these things, but this is how we do it.

Because our goal is to simplify it for our clients. So you don’t have to say, Oh, well, should I do this? Should I do that? Should I do this? It’s like, okay. Implement this, gauge the results, see how it goes, report back, if we need to tweak it, if we need to do something different, we can, but you have an instant starting point, and that allows you to get actions taken, get results back quickly, and then be able to adapt as you go.

Jay: Yeah, I love that, that you’re able to kind of cut through all of the noise out there because there’s so much noise, and help them identify for their individual situation what they need because they may have asked AI and we have some of those lists here and items from AI, but again, it’s just a starting point.

David: Exactly. So let’s take a look at the things that we already discussed in the previous episodes. And once again, what we’re doing here is we asked AI, what are the things that will allow us to multiply our sales? It came back with number one, define your target audience. Number two, develop a compelling value proposition.

Number three, optimize your marketing channels. We covered that in previous episodes. Number four was enhance your customer experience. Number five was implement a referral program. Number six was leverage and the power of content marketing.

So now in this episode, we’re going to tackle numbers seven, eight, and nine, which is upselling, sales funnels, and your CRM.

So let’s get to number seven.

7. Utilize upselling and cross selling strategies: Offer complementary products or services to increase the average transactional value and maximize customer value.

What do you think?

Jay: Yeah. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. I will tell you this was much easier to grasp in my mind when I was in the restaurant business, right? It’s like, you want fries with that? You know, let’s make it a value meal. Let’s make it a, you know, a combo, whatever.

I will tell you, we’ve spent a lot of time in my current business identifying what are the other things, other products that we can offer that our customers will want, not things that we can shove down their throat, but what other things can we add that they may be looking for because they came to us?

David: Yes, exactly. And I think people hear about upselling and cross selling and they’re like, Oh yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Most people are familiar with the restaurant, the McDonald’s example, “want fries with that.” So it makes sense, but it’s like, okay, how do I apply that to my business?

And one of the ways that we help our clients do that is to identify, okay, well, what does this mean? What is upselling versus cross selling and all that sort of thing? And in a nutshell, the way that I view it, upselling is when you’re selling them a better version of the thing that they’re considering buying or a more expensive version of the thing that they’re considering buying.

Cross selling is the idea of “want fries with that.” It’s okay. You’re already getting this. This goes with it. Would you like to do that as well? In the promotional products industry, where I do a lot of my work, cross selling is, “ah, you’re buying t shirts, want sweatshirts with that.” Or if you’re buying sweatshirts, want sweatpants with that, right?

Want caps with that. Shirts and caps go together, that type of thing. So, It’s pretty simple when we boil it down, and it’s even better and it’s even easier when we turn it into a process so that everybody knows the words you say when someone is ordering a particular type of product.

Jay: Yeah. So I think that there’s two steps, right?

Identifying what those things are based upon your industry. And I think the key to that, honestly, for me is just listening. Right? I’m on the phone with these people every single day and over time I’m starting to sense, wait a minute, there’s an opportunity here that we can fill. But then there is the implementation of that process, right?

If you don’t make it a process, if you don’t identify it, define it, implement it, and track it, then it’s probably not going to happen, or it’s not going to be as successful as you would hope.

David: Absolutely. I think that a lot of people know that they need to be doing these things, but once again, they’re not quite sure exactly how, they don’t get a system in place, and as a result, it doesn’t happen.

And that’s going to really apply to all the different points that we’re talking about here.

Jay: Yeah, I totally agree with you.

David: So the next one…

8. Analyze and Optimize Your Sales Funnel: Continuously monitor and analyze your sales funnel to identify areas for improvement and optimize the conversion rates at each stage.

That sounds a little complicated. I don’t know how you could possibly get more buzzwords into one sentence than that..

Jay: That’s what AI likes to do. They like to cram all these big words in there, and you kind of sit back and roll your eyes like, okay, how

David: You’re really smart. I don’t know what you just said, but you sound really, really smart.

Jay: Yeah, and how on earth am I going to do that?

I will tell you, we’ve spent almost a year on this, and I don’t think we’re even close, David. I don’t think we’re even scratching the surface on this.

David: Yeah, and I think you’re really not alone. Most people, when they think in terms of optimizing their sales funnel, they immediately think in terms of the tech.

Right? What does the tech need to do? What do I need to have the tech do? And, once again, we’re all about simplifying things. So when I’m doing work with clients, we first look at, okay, what needs to happen from a human standpoint? What words need to be said to which people at which times? At which intervals?

And once you’ve identified that and you get something in place, you can test it out and see how it works. It’s not like you put something in place and it’s immediately perfect. But I’ll go back to one of the mantras that I say over and over again to prospects and clients all the time. Done is better than perfect.

You are far better off getting something reasonably good in place today than something perfect six months from now. Because that’s six months worth of missed opportunities and so many people do that and don’t even realize they’re doing it.

Jay: Yeah, I love that. Done is better than perfect because there are perfectionists out there.

I also think that people need to recognize that, yeah, it may seem daunting, but if you get it done, and you get it at least defined to some degree, you’re gonna save time over the next months and years because it’s just gonna become automatic. And if you bring in new people, you’re like, this is our system.

And so, you know, a lot of that kind of haphazard nature will go away. And you’ll have more time, not less time.

David: Exactly. Another thing that we do in our approach, I look at a statement like that, analyze and optimize your sales funnel. And I just think of it in terms of the things that have to happen. If you send out a hundred emails, how many people reply?

And of the people who reply, how many of them are ready to buy now? How many have specific dates in mind? How many are generally receptive? How many are rude, obnoxious, belligerent, disqualified? And how many don’t reply at all?

Because then it becomes process of elimination.

If I send out a hundred emails and I hear back from seven people, that means that there’s a hundred minus seven people that so far have been unresponsive.

So the next message that I send to them can be designed to pull them in. It can reference the previous message and we can get more juice out of the fruit.

Jay: Yeah, I love that. More juice, but also, that seven that you’ve spoken to, maybe you made customers out of two. What about the other five? What is your continuing message to those people?

How do you stay in touch? You know, you’ve got to identify each group and how they’re going to be handled going forward. And once you’ve maximized that, I’ve found it really starts to feed itself. And then it’s kind of fun, right?

Because I’m dealing with the leads that I got this month, but all of a sudden I get people who call me up and they’re like, yeah, we talked three or four months ago, or yeah, we talked two weeks ago. I got your email, and you’re like, you know, I didn’t have to do anything, because I set up a system to handle that for me.

David: Yes, and we have tracking sheets that we use, that we give to our clients to use, so that they can say, alright, I sent out 100 emails, that goes in the one column, I got 7 responses of the 7, here’s how many are disqualified, here’s how many are ready to buy, here’s how many are generally receptive, here’s how many did not reply.

And then at the end of a period of time, whether it’s a week or whatever, you go down to the next line and you say, Okay, we’ve got 93 who didn’t respond. What are we going to do with this group? Right?

And then we put them through some sort of process and we track the results there. How many more were we able to knock off the fence, right? And it’s systematic. Nobody falls through the cracks when you have simple processes in place to be able to do that.

And that actually ties perfectly to number nine in AI’s list, which is:

9. Invest in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: Implement a CRM system to efficiently manage customer data, track interactions and nurture relationships for better sales opportunities.

When you’re doing this, when you’re keeping track of What did I send? When did I send it? Who responded? Who didn’t? And you’re keeping track of it all in one place so you don’t have scraps of paper lying around and you’re able to know where you left off in the last conversation with someone. You are light years ahead of those who just do typical follow up.

Hey, just calling to follow up. No, we’re never calling to follow up. We want to see what that last conversation is that we had with them. And we want to pick up that conversation exactly where the last one left off.

Jay: Yeah, and be able to look and see, okay, they’ve had three emails, they’ve had two text messages, what was my initial conversation with them?

And the good news for a lot of people is that there are CRMs, like HubSpot, that are free for small businesses. So when you say invest, I really think the investment part for a small business is the time to set it up right, right? Because otherwise it’s garbage in, garbage out.

David: Yes, that’s such a great point. Because a lot of times people think of invest meaning money. But wow, for small business owners, our time is always more valuable than money because if you run out of money, you can always make more.

If you run out of time, all the money in the world will not help you.

Jay: That’s right. That’s exactly right. All right. I love it. So CRM, how do people find out more?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call. Schedule a call with myself or my team. If what we’ve been saying in these podcasts resonates with you, if it makes sense to you, if you know that you need to do these things and you’re looking for the direct line approach, the shortest distance between two points is that straight line.

Schedule a call. TopSecrets.com/call. If we can help you, we’ll let you know how. If we can’t help you, we’ll let you know that too. But definitely worth having a conversation.

Jay: Well, I know you’re going to help because just that conversation can, just like when I talk to you every week, I always come away from this and I’m like, okay, I’m going to implement this. David had a great point about this. And so just the fact that you talk about it externally can be starting point that you need.

David: Yeah, and then when you back that up with the bullet points and the templates and the trackers, it just makes it a lot more simple and streamlined.

Jay: Absolutely, David. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

David: Thank you, Jay.

Ready to Multiply Your Sales?

If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
5. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be continuing our discussion on the AI approach to multiply your sales. This is part two in our series, and today we’ll be discussing service, referrals, and content marketing.

David: Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Thank you so much, David. I’m really enjoying this discussion about AI because I think we’ve already established there are some great tools and resources with AI, but it’s not exactly to the point where it needs to be.

But more specifically, can it really speak to your individual situation? How do you pick through that and know what’s right for you?

David: Exactly, and last week we were talking about the first three recommendations it made, which were define your target audience, develop a compelling value proposition, and optimize your marketing channels.

This week, we’re going to be talking about its next set of recommendations. And it starts with number four on its list is:

4. Enhance Your Customer Experience. Focus on delivering exceptional customer service and creating a positive experience at every touch point to build loyalty and encourage repeat business.

That sounds nice.

Jay: It sounds fantastic. Again, just do that. You know, but how do you do that? I think I mentioned in the last podcast that so often people go into business not because they’re great at customer service, but because they have a great recipe, or they have a great product. And they don’t really think about how to offer that in a great way.

I’m in the accounting field now, which kind of blows my mind and is a different conversation. But I find generally, David, that accountants don’t know how to give good customer service. And they kind of feel like they have a captured audience and so they don’t even try to give good customer service.

David: And a lot of accountants also really struggle with marketing because they feel like it’s

Jay: Yes, yes.

David: Kind of, if not beneath them, they feel uncomfortable with it. They don’t want to come across as a salesperson. They’re very good at what they do and they’re less good at finding the people they need to do that sort of thing.

And that’s why a lot of them, a lot of small business accountants struggle, because they’re great at accounting and not so great at the things that we’re talking about here that will actually allow them to service more customers.

Jay: Yeah, you’re exactly right. Where I’ve come from, the retail side, the customer service side, that’s been my whole background.

So, we’re kind of owning our little space in the marketplace, because we’re focusing on that up front, and people recognize a difference immediately.

David: Yeah, exactly. So, one of the things we talked about in the previous podcast related to AI telling us how to multiply sales is that some of these recommendations come across as rather general. Okay, so enhance your customer experience is not really the kind of thing you would think of as “okay, this will allow me to multiply sales.”

It’s a necessity. You have to have exceptional customer service in your business if you want to survive, let alone thrive, let alone multiply business. But it doesn’t seem to me to be a multiplier in and of itself.

However, when we think about this idea, what can we do to make the experience better, what can we do to expedite the experience, make these things happen better and more consistently, that will allow us to get the velocity we need, in my opinion, to be able to then Multiply your sales.

In other words, it’s not enough to just do a great job with customer service. We need to be able to do it with a cadence of accountability.

We need to be able to do it in a way where it’s happening consistently. People are able to move through our process, get what they need, feel like they’ve been extremely well taken care of, and then we can move on to the next person.

Jay: Yeah, when I hear enhance their customer experience, for some reason, I think of Disneyland, like better rides or better signage or, you know, things like that. It’s very ethereal, like, how do I apply that to my individual experience?

I think a key here is that our attention span with TikTok and all of these things is so low. And so when somebody lands on your website or when they’ve picked up a phone to call you, if they’re not moving through that process fast enough, you’re going to lose them.

And that’s just the reality of the world that we live in.

David: Absolutely. And I think this general idea of enhancing your customer experience is good. And again, some of the words they use are delivering exceptional customer service and creating a positive experience at every touch point to build loyalty and encourage repeat business.

So those are all great recommendations. But again, the question is, how are we doing those things? And in our work with our clients, the way that we do those things is through procedures and processes.

Jay: Yes.

David: And the next time method of delegation is one of the things that we use inside our program to say, okay, how can we make sure that things are being done the way that we as a business owner want them done and that our people can feel good about because they know they’ve got a system or a process in place to be able to achieve the result that they’re looking for.

Jay: Yeah.

David: So I think that’s what’s missing there.

Jay: Yeah, this is so important. We’ve spent the last six months in our business just identifying this process. What happens when they land on the website? What happens with our CRM if they’ve scheduled a consultation? What happens once they’ve had a consultation?

What happens down to, it’s funny to me, down to the forms that we send them. If those forms don’t look professional, if they look haphazard, then people will be turned off by them. And that’s such a simple thing when you think about it.

Just get them done right so that every step of the way you look professional, that builds confidence in your product, and that’s the face of our business. That’s the storefront now. And, it has to be pristine, in my opinion.

David: No question. And I think, you know, the idea of customer service is something that we could dedicate multiple podcasts to, but that was recommendation number four from AI.

Recommendation number:

5. Implement a referral program. Encourage satisfied customers to refer your business to others by offering incentives or rewards for successful referrals.

What do you Think?

Jay: This one’s hard for me. I’m not very good at tooting my own horn. Some people really are and it’s always been hard for me to say, Hey, if you liked us refer us to other people.

I don’t know why that’s hard for me. And I know that when I have good customer service, I’m very quick to recommend other people.

So oftentimes it’s not even saying it, it’s just providing that extra level of customer service so that we naturally will do that. I think we want to do that.

David: We all do. And whenever I talk to business owners, everybody knows the importance of referrals. Most people that I talk to know they should be doing it more. They should be asking more often than they’re already asking.

And one of the primary reasons they don’t goes back to what we were just talking about. They don’t have a process for it. They don’t have a system or procedure for it.

Earlier today, I was talking with one of my consulting clients and he was working on reactivating some old clients and we put together a process for him, just a week ago, that he was able to get out in front of people and the response that he got was amazing.

There were eight people in particular that he had great relationships with previously that he hadn’t heard from in a while. He initiated contact using the procedure we outlined. All eight of them responded to him within the first week.

Jay: Wow.

David: He’s back in conversation with them. Doesn’t mean they’re all going to become customers again, but he’s got eight out of eight.

And that happens when you’ve got the processes and procedures in place that allow you to just deploy it. Right?

Too often, if we want to get referrals, we’re going to spend way too much time thinking about it, worrying about it, gnashing our teeth and saying, I really need to do this. Whereas, if you’ve got something that you could just send out via email this afternoon, You’ll know what results you’re starting to have by tomorrow.

So once again, the recommendations that we’re getting from AI are great. The devil is in the details. It’s about, okay, how are we going to do it?

And once again, one of the things that we do with our clients is we get the things in place, the sort of triggers, the switches that they can throw the switch, make this happen, report back on your results.

If it’s working great, awesome. If it’s not, we’ll tweak it and we’ll flip a different switch. And we’ll keep things moving forward.

Jay: Well, I love that you use the word switch, because in today’s world of technology, it can be as simple as flipping that switch. But are you sending out quality? Are you sending out things that we’ve already talked about?

Targeting your customers? Identifying their needs and their concerns? Because, you know, in my CRM system, I can set up a drip program, right away. But like you said, the devil’s in the details. Is it going to be something that is beneficial to me or am I just going through the motions because AI told me to do it?

David: Right. And a lot of that goes back to the idea of creating value in your communications, which we talked about. That was number two, essentially. In what AI came up with and what we expanded on it to mean, AI was talking about developing a compelling value proposition. I was broadening it to include communication.

How are we communicating with our clients? And in our world, that means creating value in each of our communications. When you’re able to do that, it allows you to have the conversations that you need in order to get the results that you want.

Jay: Absolutely. Absolutely.

David: All right, so let’s see, we are now on to number:

6. Leverage the power of content marketing.

Boy, that sounds like it’s simple.

Jay: Yeah, once again, I’m not sure exactly what that means. I can tell you that we’re spending a lot of time now on SEO, trying to get people to come to our website organically, as opposed to paying for every lead that comes to the website.

Is that what this is talking about?

David: It didn’t refer to SEO in this particular section. I think it referred to SEO under number three with optimizing your marketing channels. But basically, the description that the AI gave for this is:

Create valuable and informative content — that’s a good recommendation — such as blog posts, videos, or podcasts to establish yourself as an authority in your industry and attract potential customers.

So this really is about the content. In other words, number three. where they were talking about optimizing your marketing channels that included things like SEO and ads and all that sort of thing.

For this, they’re talking about the content itself. And so the idea of leveraging the power of your content is definitely a good one. One of the things that we do with our clients is encourage them to think in terms of “what do these people need?”

The people that I’m reaching out to, what is going to create value for them?

What can I do to create value in my communications so that everything I put out in front of them is going to get their attention, create value, meaning they listen to your message or they read your post and they say, “Oh, okay, that was actually helpful.”

It’s like what we’re doing here. The content that we’re putting out here is designed to be helpful to the people who watch the videos or listen to the podcast and take action on what we’re recommending.

So. Our approach is to say, okay, if you’re going to put something out, make sure that it creates value, and that it has a purpose.

A lot of the focus of what we do with our clients is helping them to identify the purpose of each communication. What do I want to have happen as a result of this post, this email, this voicemail message I’m leaving?

Talking about the idea of processes and procedures. You can do small tweaks to the messages you leave as voicemails for people, that can dramatically increase the number of callbacks you get.

I can’t tell you how many people who have said, “I leave messages for people and nobody calls back.” And one of the first things I ask them is, “what’d you say in the message?” “Uh…”

Okay, let’s have a conversation. Now, most people don’t think of that sort of thing as content, let alone content marketing, but boy, isn’t it though? That’s really what it is. If you’re making phone calls, that’s your content. So I think leveraging content is key in a lot of different areas.

Jay: Yeah, you know, I didn’t even think about voicemails as being content. You know, it’s just like this, this thing that we do, right?

David: It’s a throwaway, almost.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. So I love this content marketing makes a lot more sense to me now. How do people find out more?

David: You can go to TopSecrets.com/call to schedule a call with myself or my team. We love this stuff.

Obviously, Jay and I, when we’re talking about this stuff every week. It’s fun. We just love it. And it’s the same way with our clients.

So, imagine having conversations like this where you can say, “Alright, what do I do about this?” And we say, “Oh, okay, use this. Here’s a template. Here are some bullet points. Here’s a script.”

We’re not big on “script” scripts because we don’t want you reading and sounding like a robot. But when you’ve got bullet points that you can go to again and again and again, and know that you’re going to be able to hit the points you need, it just makes everything a lot easier.

So if you’d like to just have a conversation about seeing what it might be like to work with us, TopSecrets.com/call.

Jay: I love it, David. Thank you so much.

David: Thank you, Jay.

Ready to Multiply Your Sales?

If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
5. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the AI Approach to Multiply Your Sales. This is the first in a multiple part series, and we’ll start off with targeting, communication, and reach.

David: Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, David, it’s great to be with you.

I’m really excited about this series because I think a lot of people shy away from AI. Or they’re getting into it and they’re hearing a lot of the things that it can do, but they’re not sure how to approach it or even if it’s the right thing to do for their business.

David: Yes. Agreed. The way this actually came about is that we’ve been talking for a while over the course of the past several weeks in particular about multiplying your sales.

And some people really struggle with this concept. And I thought, well, what does AI have to say on the topic, and how does what AI says about it relate to what we do, and how we help our clients, and do these things line up? So I thought what I’d do is I’d take the answer to the question when we asked AI, “What are your best recommendations in terms of multiplying sales,” to see what AI says and then compare that with what we’re doing.

And so the first three recommendations that it had were based on targeting, communication, and reach. Those are my words, not AI words in particular. But that’s pretty much what it broke down to, so I figured that’s what we’d start with.

Jay: I love it. We’re going to do a podcast on AI, and we’ve asked AI what it thinks first, and now we’re going to psychoanalyze AI to see if it’s in line.

David: Well, to see how it lines up. Because one of the things that I found interesting was that when I asked it about multiplying sales, it was coming back with responses that talked about increasing sales.

And so I asked it specifically to come up with recommendations based on multiplying sales. And at first it seemed resistant to that.

So it talked about growing sales and multiplying sales. But this is where it landed. So I figured we’d start with this.

Now, I had asked it to prioritize these things. I’m not quite sure if it did. But this is what it came back with. So the very first recommendation that it had in terms of multiplying sales.

I’ll tell you specifically what it said first and then we can discuss it.

So the first thing that it recommended is it said:

1. Define Your Target Audience. Clearly identify your ideal customers and understand their needs, preferences, and pain points.

So, that’s how it started. What do you think of that take?

Jay: It sounds very, very traditional, very typical, common knowledge. The first thing that I learned in a sales class years ago, identifying your target audience.

But I feel like that’s so basic, and when you talk about multiplying sales, I tend to think that’s more about taking the existing clientele and getting them to spend more. That’s what I think about.

David: I tend to think that way as well, but I thought it’s a pretty good jumping off point because whether your target audience means your existing clients and the new clients that you want to go after, I think it makes a whole lot of sense to lead with, determining who it is that you’re going to be going after.

I relate a lot of this to what we do in our Total Market Domination course. One of the very first things we do in our course is we have a three level system of targeting.

So what AI is recommending here in sort of a general sense, in terms of defining your target market, is something that we really dive into pretty heavily with our clients.

Because without that targeting up front, if you don’t know exactly who it is that you’re going after, who your ideal client is, the likelihood of bringing an ideal client through the door is Is generally slim to none.

Jay: Yeah. And you know, we’ve talked a lot about this in the past that knowing who your target audience is, is so important because you may spend a lot of time spinning your wheels, going after a really large base of customers and getting leads for people who are not going to turn into customers.

So you’re going to save time and money and effort if you can really hone that in.

David: Yes, I completely agree. So I thought the first thing that it came back with is pretty good. A little general. It seemed to me to be the kind of thing that one might get at a Chamber of Commerce session on growing your sales, to find your target audience.

Yes. Makes perfect sense. For me, with a lot of these, the devil is in the details, right? It’s going to be, well, how do we do these things? This is essentially the what to do, but it’s really the how to do it where the money comes from.

So, the second thing that it recommended is to:

2. Develop a Compelling Value Proposition: Create a unique selling proposition that clearly communicates the value your products or services offer to customers.

So, that’s what it said. What’s your take?

Jay: Once again, I think that you need to understand your customer’s pain points, right? And what their needs are.

You need to understand why you are of value to them. It can’t be, I just have this shiny thing that you want. They need to understand how it’s going to make their life better. I’ve heard it described as You need to make them the hero, right, of the story.

David: That’s right. And you’re the guide, right?

Jay: That’s right.

David: You’re not Luke Skywalker, you are Yoda, ideally.

Jay: That’s right. That’s right.

David: So, when I hear this, “develop a compelling value proposition,” makes perfect sense. “Create a unique selling proposition that clearly communicates the value your products or services offer to customers.”

It’s, again, great advice, but I can’t tell you how many business owners that I’ve worked with that knew that they should create a unique selling proposition and they either never got around to doing it, or they didn’t have a process for doing it, and they never managed to get it together.

So once again, it seems to me like a rather boilerplate approach to this. Good stuff, necessary, but not always as easy to implement.

Once again, sort of the difference between the recommendation here and the way that we do it with our clients is that we focus on a couple of different things when it comes to communication.

And the first aspect of it is what they hear from you initially. Because the communication we have with clients is very different when you’re trying to introduce yourself to them than it is when you’ve known them for a long time and you’ve been working with them for a long time.

So I find that difference, the difference between early stage communication and then ongoing communication and late stage communication are different.

And without establishing what needs to happen in each of those areas, I think it becomes a little too generic.

Jay: Well, one of the things I love about what you do, David, is, I was having this conversation with my son the other day and I said, “you know, doctors, they learn how to heal people. They don’t learn how to run a medical practice. Attorneys learn how to deal with legal things.

They don’t learn how to bill and those kind of things. Or, you know, a chef, he has a great recipe. They don’t learn how to do all this marketing and targeting of audiences and those kind of things. And so, like you said, I don’t know that they ever get around to it at all.

David: Very true. And some of them don’t, and that can definitely be an issue.

So the third thing that it came up with is:

3. Optimize Your Marketing Channels: Utilize a mix of online and offline marketing channels that align with your target audience’s preferences, such as social media, email marketing, SEO, and targeted advertising.

So that’s, one sentence, Jay.

Jay: It makes it sound so easy. Just do that. Just do that thing. That’s all you have to do. It’s a miracle.

David: Right. What did you do today? Well, I optimized my marketing channel. Really? What did that consist of? Well, it consisted of utilizing a mix of online and offline marketing channels that align with my target audience’s preferences, such as social media, email marketing, SEO, and targeted advertising.

Jay: Done!

David: And then I took the rest of the afternoon off.

Jay: That’s right! Done!

David: Yeah. So what do you make of that?

Jay: Well, so simple. Oh my goodness. I mean, if we could all have the magic formula for that. In today’s business, that is the absolute key. How do you find balance in those things? How do you know which one’s going to be more effective?

I’ve told you in the current business that I’m in, we spent nine months just on Google AdWords to get it to a place where we thought it was effective.

And now we spend money every single month honing that and tweaking it and assessing if we’re getting the right kind of leads. And that’s, before SEO, that’s before any other type of marketing.

David: Yeah. I find that comments like this, an approach like this just totally overwhelms people.

Jay: Oh, I agree. Yeah.

David: And so then where do they go from here? They look at that and they’re like, “there’s no way I can do all that, let alone service customers, let alone do all the other things that I have to do in my business.”

And one of the ways that we simplify this for our clients is something that we’ve talked about in previous podcasts. We boil it down to what I refer to as the MVPs of Marketing and Sales.

What’s the marketing message you want to communicate? Which combination of marketing vehicles will you use to communicate the message?

And then who are the people and prospects that you’re reaching?

If you take an MVP approach to what they’re saying here, optimize your marketing channels. Right, and I’ll read it again. It said “utilize a mix of online and offline marketing channels that align with your target audience’s preferences, such as social media, email marketing, SEO, and targeted advertising.”

The way that we do this with our clients is we look at their strengths. What do you like to do? And what are you good at doing? What will you do on an ongoing basis?

Because if I hire you as a sales rep and you hate cold calling and I say your job is cold calling, that’s not going to work well.

So one of the things that we do with our clients is we identify what are their strengths when it comes to what I refer to as First Contact, their first contact with a prospect.

If they hate cold calling, I’m not going to recommend they do it, because they’re not going to do a great job of it.

So when we’re able to identify, Methods of first contact that resonate well with the person that I’m interacting with, the results are so much better.

Same thing goes for social media. Same thing goes for paid ads.

Now, you can’t hate everything and refuse to do everything, but as long as there are a few things that you’re willing to do, you can very likely have tremendous success initiating contact with new prospects, cultivating relationships, and making sales.

Jay: I absolutely love this approach, because people feel like there’s only one way to do all of these things, and if they’re not comfortable with them, if they’re not efficient at them, then they feel like, you know, what am I going to do?

But we each have our own set of skills, and we each love certain approaches more than others. So let’s find out what those are and let’s focus on those.

David: Exactly. And when we’re working with clients, that’s one of the first things that we do. Identify what they like, what they’re good at, and we also give them options for things that many of them have not thought of previously.

There are people who just hate the idea of social media, they don’t have a great presence online, and my view and my statement to them is, okay, if that’s not your thing, let’s find something that is your thing that will still allow you to attract the high-dollar, high-value clients you’re looking for and turn them into customers.

And we’ve not had a single situation, Jay, where we haven’t been able to do that, I mean, unless somebody said to us, no, I’m not willing to do anything. I just want to sit here. it doesn’t turn into a problem. And in fact, even the people who want customers to come to them, you know, we have lures and lead magnets and things like that, that we’re helping people with that allow the business to come to them.

They still have to do things. I’m not saying they don’t have to do things, but the things they have to do can be limited to the things, generally speaking, that they like and that they’re good at.

Jay: Yeah, so lesson learned AI. Great starting point. It’s not bad information, but how do you apply it to your situation? Find out more and talk to David, right? How do they find out more?

David: Yeah, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. Schedule a call with myself or my team. We have been having the best conversations recently, with industry professionals who are just serious about growing their sales and their profits.

And they’re very good at what they do. They’re very motivated, but they’re looking for the specifics. What are the shortcuts? What are the things we can do to be able to get the results that we want faster?

And it’s never. about generalities. It’s always about the specifics, boiling it down to its simplest components. One of the things that I’ve been doing for years inside this program is working to simplify it each time.

What can we either simplify or remove to be able to streamline things so that people can get in there, take action on what they need to do, and get the results they’re looking for.

So if that sounds good, TopSecrets.com/call. We would love to have a conversation with you.

Jay: And you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. That’s the important thing here. You guys will help them expedite this process. That’s what I love about it. David, as always, great pleasure talking to you.

David: Thank you so much, Jay.

Ready to Multiply Your Sales?

If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
5. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

If you want to multiply money in your business, it means you have to figure out the very specific steps that you need to take in order to make that happen.

David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the topic, Can You Multiply Money? Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey David, of course you can. I have a tree in my backyard. Money grows on it and I just have to water it every year. What else do I need?

David: Nice. No, that’s great. You got a money tree. You’re in great shape. When I think about the abilty to multiply money, I know that in the early stages of some of my businesses, and in the early stages of trying to figure out how to make them work, I was able to multiply money. But I was multiplying it by fractions, you know. So…

If you multiply money by 0. 5, you now have half the money you started out with. So I think we’re all able to multiply money. But, ideally, we want to multiply by whole numbers.

Jay: Yeah, I agree, but we also subtract money. I’m not sure what the terminology is. Bbut a lot of times in an attempt to multiply money, if you’re not careful, you’re actually losing money.

David: Yeah. And you will have to invest. You’ll have to make investments up front. I think a lot of times people go into business, particularly small business owners, will go in with the idea of, “well, I’ll just bootstrap it.”

And it’s certainly what I’ve done, I did that a number of times and when it works, it’s fantastic. And when it doesn’t, it’s disastrous.

So as long as you recognize that going in, it’s all okay. But having that focus, what will it take to get this going? How much will it cost? How long will I have to work for nothing, if I bootstrap entirely? A lot of those questions come into play.

Jay: Yeah, otherwise it’s kind of gambling. You know, starting a business is kind of a form of gambling, but the better the idea is, the more help you have along the way, the more financially stable you can be in the process, the more you increase the odds that your gamble will pay off.

David: Yeah, and it really is a gamble in the truest sense of the word. Because you don’t know if it’s going to work. It might work and it might not.

You may have a really good feel for it. You may have done it before and say, okay, I feel really good about this. I think this is really going to work, but it’s still a bet. You’re still guessing and betting that it’s going to work based on what you know. You think you can multiply money, but you can’t be sure until you try.

I’ve never really been a gambler in terms of casinos and things like that, but I guess people who do that well and know how to do it, they can go into a situation and say, “okay, I have a pretty good feel for the fact that I’m going to make back a multiple of what I lay down on the table.

And sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong. And it’s exactly the same in business.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Only in business, you may put a lot of things on the line, your family’s future. You may quit your job. You really put yourself out there in many ways.

I found success in making sure my family is supported with a day job and then I pursued other things on the side.

Meanwhile, I had other family members who have said, “no, I’m going all in” and they put everything at risk. And that didn’t turn out so well, but you know, it depends on the individual and the idea, I think.

David: Yeah, absolutely. And I know in the early stages I tried doing sort of a sideline thing for a while and I could never personally make that work.

Jay: Yeah, yeah.

David: Because it was hard for me when somebody else was paying me money to do a job, I didn’t feel like I could walk away to do my thing, so I was torn in that way.

When I was working on my side project, I felt like I should either be working on the work that was paying me or when I was at real work, I felt like I should be working on my business.

I remember quitting a job that I had because I knew I was going to start a business. And it was really like flying without a safety net. You know, the big trapeze with no safety net. Because I literally quit a job. It’s like, okay, I’m no longer going to get that money and hopefully it’ll work out.

Eventually it did, but it wasn’t fast and it wasn’t a straight line and it took some real time and some real effort and a lot of scares.

We talked about scares in our podcast at Halloween. It took a lot of that stuff in order to get to the point where eventually things started to work. And I don’t know many entrepreneurs who don’t go through some version of that.

Jay: Oh, I totally agree. It’s a hallmark of entrepreneurship. Can you take that step into the darkness, right?

Are you willing, and I think is a double edged sword. Yes, you gamble a lot, but also when you do take the complete step, when you separate from employment or whatever, You’ve given yourself a level of motivation that may not exist otherwise, right?

Because when you have to pay the bills, when you have to make the money, and you’re like, the clock goes off, the alarm goes off in the morning, and you’re like, “Oh, I don’t know if I want to do this today.” If you’ve got a bill coming up, you put your family on the line, sometimes that keeps you going, that in itself.

David: Yes, exactly. It’s a tremendous motivator.

I think a lot of people too who have never owned a business, never started a business of their own, they tend to look at business owners and say, “Oh, well, they’re rich and they have it made and they should do more. They should pay their people more or doing this or doing that.”

I learned that lesson a really long time ago from an employer that I had. When I was a kid, I used to work in radio. I was about 15 or 16 and I was doing on-air shifts on the weekend and doing commercials and things like that.

They were doing a remote broadcast, so I was going to to a remote location to broadcast live from that place. And they were going to pay me like, I think it was 350 bucks. This was back in the day.

And I heard from the sales rep who sold that job or that gig, that the radio station was being paid $3,500 to do that gig. And I’m like, “Hey, wait a second, I’m only getting $350!”

Basically, I said this to my boss, the guy who owned the station, and he was a pretty young guy as well. So he had to be up to his eyeballs in stuff that I had no idea about.

And whenever you’d say something about money, he’d always rub the back of his head and he’d say, “don’t count my money!” And as an employee, I thought he was saying, “don’t count my money cause it’s my money, and, don’t count my money.”

But then when I became an entrepreneur, one day I figured it out.

I’m like, what he was saying is “don’t count my money, ’cause you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. You have no idea what it costs to operate this place and to pay salespeople and to pay for overhead and a transmitter, you know, we’re broadcasting, our electric bill, all that kind of stuff. I had no idea.

So I think it’s a mistake as, if you’ve never been an employee, if you’ve only ever had a business for yourself, then you may be non-sympathetic to employees. But the flip side is also very true. If you’re an employee and you’ve never owned a business, it’s very easy to say, “Oh, well, this person is this, and this person is that.”

And very likely, if you’re saying those things, you probably don’t know what’s been going on behind the scenes.

Jay: Yeah, one of the things I used to do in the restaurant business, because, that’s one of the reasons employees will steal from you, because they think you’re making money hand over fist, and the world’s against them, is I would sit them down, and I would show them my P& L.

I was just very open with them, and say, “look, you saw all this money, here’s what we brought in, and guess what? You got paid this month, I didn’t.”

David: Yeah.

Jay: And they’re like, “what do you mean you didn’t?” I’m like, “I only get paid from the bottom line here. You get paid hourly, whether or not…” So who’s taking the risk? That’s what they don’t understand. And so sometimes communicating that can be very important.

David: Yeah. And I remember a lot of times in the early stages of some of my businesses where I was just not paying myself at all. Other people were getting paid. I didn’t tell them that at the time because I didn’t want them to be scared, you know, that the business wasn’t going to make it.

But I think most small business owners have gone through some version of that. And if you managed to avoid it, congratulations, well done. But most of us, it takes a lot. because you have to go through all these different iterations. You have to figure out a lot of what doesn’t work before you can get to what does work.

And if you want to start to multiply money, it’s going to require a bunch of experiments, some of which will fail.

Jay: Mm hmm. And I think, for entrepreneurs, if you really get to that point where you can multiply money, you can say, you know what, I spent, $8, but I made 10. So I made a 20 percent increase.

It becomes this passion. It’s like a farmer planting a seed and it grows into something. To me, there’s something very, I don’t know, fulfilling about that idea that you’ve made something and you’ve grown it out of the dirt and then you’ve turned it into profit.

That’s what entrepreneurship is, and people gain a real love for that.

Like, I look at somebody like Mark Cuban, he’s a billionaire, but he’s still investing. The guy spends all day long multiplying money, and I’m like, “you have billions of dollars in net worth. Why do you still do this?”

And it’s because I get the feeling for him. It was never about how many dollars you made. It was about this skillset and the, the feeling of purpose and an achievement that you get from turning one dollar into two, or things like that.

David: Yeah, and having that passion for it. When I think in terms of billionaires and things that billionaires say about money, I remember the Richard Branson quote, “if you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.”

That’s what he did. And so there again, you multiply money by fractions. You take a billion dollars and you turn it into millions of dollars because you’re multiplying by fractions.

And obviously that’s not what we’re looking to do, but if you want to multiply money, it means figuring out the very specific steps that you need to take in order to make that happen.

And in a lot of cases what it means is that lead generation has to produce more than it costs. Your employees have to generate more than they cost. Your overhead has to more than pay for itself.

Anything that is costing you more than it’s generating has to be scrutinized. You have to look at that. And so that’s why I think it’s so important for business owners to really train their employees on what needs to happen, and how it needs to happen. Especially when it comes to salespeople.

A lot of business owners, they’ll just hire a salesperson and turn them loose. I remember the joke in our organization was that some places would hire a salesperson and the sales training would consist of, “here’s the yellow pages, dial nine for an outside line.”

That was the extent of the sales training. And that’s not going to cut it. When you provide advice like that to a salesperson, and you turn them loose on unsuspecting customers, you are doing them a disservice, you’re doing the customer a disservice, and you are doing your business a big disservice.So it’s just so important to think things through, and recognize that unless you get the success systems in place, the likelihood that you can multiply money is pretty much slim to none.

Jay: Yeah, I love it. And again, this is kind of a reoccurring theme every time we talk. You can’t know what your multiple is unless you know what each of those costs are. And you should be able to do it per product.

How much of this sale, what slice of that sale is my overhead in? So, each sale, there’s a little portion of rent, there’s a little portion of electricity, there’s a commission possibly, there’s labor, possibly. You’ve got to put all of those in each product.

If you’re a restaurant, how much of that is in each plate of food? Whatever it is, if you don’t know those things, then I would suggest you really are not prepared or you don’t know how to multiply money quite yet.

David: Yeah, I think a good frame of reference is to tell yourself that every dollar you spend needs to bring back more than a dollar, right?

Now, that’s not always going to happen on every investment that you make. And there will be some investments that you make where you know you’re not going to get back that dollar right away. But over a period of time, you will, and if it’s worth the investment, then you’ll do it.

But if you spend money in your organization with the idea that every dollar needs to bring back more than what you’re putting out, you’ll be in a much better position to succeed with it.

It also reminds me of the Warren Buffett quote where he said, “Rule number one, never lose money. And rule number two, never forget rule number one.”

Jay: Yeah, you know, one of the things I used to do in restaurant consulting is I would ask people, ” what would you rather do, cut your expenses by a dollar or increase your sales by a dollar?

And you would be amazed at how many people would say “increase their sales.” And, wait a minute, if you increase your sales a dollar, but your profit margin is typically 20%, then you haven’t earned a dollar, you’ve earned 20 cents.

But if you save a dollar, you’ve earned a dollar, an entire whole dollar. And so oftentimes if you’re focus is always sales, sales, sales, you have to make maybe 10 times the amount in sales to make the same amount of money that you could make just by saying, “how am I controlling costs,” right?

So that’s part of the skill set to multiply money.

David: No question. Because when you are saving money that you’ve already brought in, it’s easier to multiply it.

Because just like you said, once that hits the bottom line, if you’re able to save those dollars that hit the bottom line, then It’s a lot better than having to bring in five to ten times the revenue in order to generate that same amount of money.

You know, another Warren Buffett quote that I think of a lot is when he said that “risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.”

And so many times, it’s not because people aren’t smart. It’s not because they’re not determined. But they just don’t know the specifics of what they have to do to generate the revenue that they want to generate.

So when you think in terms of not knowing what you’re doing, it’s like, “Oh, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

It’s not that. It’s that you might not even know what it is that you’re not sure of. You don’t even know what you don’t know that would make all the difference in the world.

And that’s why so much of it, particularly for small to medium sized businesses, has to be about identifying those very specific areas that are costing you money, that are causing your dollars to shrink instead of to grow.

And when you’re able to identify that, and that can be done really pretty quickly, you can identify those areas very quickly, with a quick conversation. You can pretty much identify where’s the problem, so that you can then focus the bulk of your time and attention and limited dollar resources on fixing that problem.

Jay: Yeah, and in that conversation, they can know what they don’t know, because other people know it! They’ve already figured it out. So how do people find out more, David, so they can know what they don’t know?

David: You can go to TopSecrets. com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team. Maybe we won’t be able to figure out exactly what’s wrong in your business in that period of time.

But, in every conversation we’ve had, I’ve not had a situation where we didn’t uncover something where someone said, “Oh, okay, that’s great. I can do something with that. I can take action on that.”

And even those little things can add up, and can help you to start to multiply money. So if you’re open to the idea of thinking, “Hmm, yeah, it’s worth having a conversation,” TopSecrets.com/call. We’d love to talk with you.

Jay: David, as always, it’s just a great discussion. Thank you.

David: Thank you, Jay.

Want to Multiply Money in Your Business?

If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
5. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

I got a lot of great feedback from last week’s episode on how to create explosive growth in your business. So today I’d like to expand on that topic a bit and start laying out the steps to make it happen.

If you’re serious about creating explosive growth in your business, let’s start by discussing where that sort of growth begins.

It’s not in your marketing, not yet. It’s not in your sales scripts. That comes later. And it’s definitely not in whatever new shiny object comes flying across your screen as you scroll on social media.

Instead, it starts between your ears.

Here’s what I mean. If you look at the most successful printers and promotional product distributors, and really the leaders in almost any industry, a big difference in what sets them apart from their competitors isn’t luck.

It’s their mindset, the way they think about their business, their clients, their messaging, and their results before they do anything to reach out to them. And while you probably already know that’s important, you also need to understand why having the right mindset doesn’t just make you feel better about your business.

It’s not really about your feelings, it’s about your vision. Having the right mindset allows you to see better. It allows you to notice the people, the approaches and the opportunities that you might otherwise overlook. It allows you to recognize the profitable activities and patterns that other people don’t see.

As a result, you stop looking at the typical average approaches that create average, mediocre results for everyone else, so you can trigger the explosive growth you’re looking for.

This means thinking like a market dominator, not just like a participant.

You already know that every business has a ceiling, but you might not know that most of these ceilings are self-imposed. They come from the beliefs and the actions of the participants.

I hear from business owners all the time who swear they want to grow, but then the very next thing they tell me is the reason they believe they can’t do it.

“I want to grow, but I don’t have enough time.”
“I really need your help, but I can’t afford it right now.”
“I’m serious about growing, but the people in my market are cheapskates.”

The problem with that thinking is that you’re making excuses instead of making plans.

Explosive growth requires you to blow through that ceiling by asking better questions. Like:

“What if I do have the time, but up until now, I just haven’t been using it the right way?”
“What if I stop wasting financial resources on things that don’t move the needle and start investing in the things that do?”
“What if I adjust my approach to ignore the cheap skates and start targeting clients with money?”

These are some of the simple mindset shifts that allow you to see how explosive growth is even possible. Of course, mindset alone won’t do it, but it does allow you to unlock the rest of the process of market domination.

One of the biggest differences between struggling business owners, average performers and those who dominate their markets is how they evaluate their resources.

Struggling owners think in terms of shortages:

“I don’t have enough…”
“I don’t have enough time, leads, ideas, help, resources…”

But top performers who create explosive growth in their businesses, focus instead on leveraging everything they have.

“How can I generate exceptional results from the time, leads, ideas, help, and whatever other resources I have?”

It’s a simple shift that provides alternatives instead of focusing on excuses for why I can’t get the things I want.

Everything we do with our Total Market Domination clients is built on leveraging their time and resources, so they can accomplish more in less time and multiply their results instead of settling for less.

So as others complain about not having enough clients, you’ll be confidently attracting more of the ideal clients they can’t get, by improving your messaging, focusing your targeting, and perfecting your contact processes behind the scenes, in what I call stealth mode.

It’s silent, but it’s deadly to your less informed competition. It’s also where all the foundations of explosive growth are built.

In our last episode, we talked a bit about stealth mode and how it’s like watering those bamboo trees while there are no visible signs of life. It seems futile, but only to those who have no idea of what’s going on beneath the surface.

Much of our industry is kind of primitive. Your competitors very likely engage in the same sort of dull marketing and outdated selling approaches that consistently create average or below average results for the majority of the industry.

Instead of following the leader, it becomes a game of follow the follower, at which point everyone ends up traveling in circles and getting nowhere.

But when you’re operating correctly, in stealth mode, your competitors don’t know what’s going on. They don’t realize you are adapting your messaging, refining your offers, improving your outreach, and perfecting the systems that will allow you to dramatically outperform them.

If you’re determined to dominate your market, you cannot operate like everyone else does because the majority are doing it wrong.

Here are a few things you can do right now to start differentiating yourself:

1. Detach Emotion from Evaluation. Many business owners get lost in minutiae and emotionally attached to every prospect and every proposal. Market dominators focus on getting in front of enough of the ideal prospects, that they don’t have to worry about the ones who don’t close. They can focus instead on what worked, what didn’t, what’s next, and then they can evaluate the results dispassionately.
2. Prioritize Process over Payoff. Explosive growth is not an event, it’s a chain reaction. When you focus on improving the process, the results multiply, and growth explodes.
3. Abandon the Victim Vocabulary. Leave phrases like, “I can’t,” “It’s too hard,” “Nobody’s buying right now,” or “My market is cheap,” to your unworthy competitors. Let them wallow in the kind of words that will seal their fate.

The victim vocabulary is a signal to your brain to stop trying. Instead, you want to ask questions like, “Who’s buying now?” “How do I find them?” “What do I need to say,” and “How can I reach more of them faster?”

If you want answers to these questions, join our Total Market Domination Program and we’ll help you with that. It will allow you to tackle opportunities instead of just obstacles.

And while your mindset may be the ignition switch, it’s not the engine. Once you get your thinking dialed in, it’s time to take action, starting with your targeting. Because even if you have the best attitude in the world, if you’re targeting the wrong prospects, you’re still going to get nowhere fast.

If you just like listening to this sort of thing, you can wait until next week for that episode. But if you’re a serious professional, interested in creating explosive growth in your business sooner rather than later, and you’re interested in outperforming your competitors now, rather than later, then go to TopSecrets.com/call.

Schedule a call with myself or my team, and we’ll explain how you can create explosive results in your business while your competitors are still trying to figure out what to do next. Schedule a call now at TopSecrets.com/call.

Are You Ready to Create Explosive Growth in Your Business?

If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
5. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

 

Want to create explosive growth in your business? If so, consider this: Why is it that some businesses take off like a rocket while others can languish for months or years without getting the traction they need to grow?

Why do some businesses plateau at a certain level and struggle to break through, while others are able to grow consistently?

In my experience, it boils down to three things we’ll discuss in this episode.

Recently, I was reminded of a story about how Chinese bamboo trees grow very slowly underground, for years, completely unseen.

The people who plant these trees water and fertilize the soil every day, even though there are no signs of life.

Sounds tedious, right?

Watering the same patch of dirt for years?

I mean, that HAS to feel pretty unfulfilling at times.

But the amazing part of the story is that roughly five years after planting — when the bamboo finally breaks the surface of the ground — it can grow up to 90 feet tall in just five weeks.

That’s an example of how to create explosive growth!

And while a typical bystander might see that and think, “wow, that grew really fast!”

The people who actually do the work — those who plant, water, fertilize and cultivate these plants — know EXACTLY what it took to trigger that growth.

I love this analogy because it tracks so closely to the work I’ve done with promotional product businesses over the past 20+ years.

Some of the people I work with might start out feeling a bit like the bamboo gardener — tending, nurturing, and cultivating a business that seems like it might never break through the soil.

In fact, some are stuck for more years than it takes for a bamboo tree to crack through the dirt and see the light of day.

But the good news is that promo businesses AREN’T bamboo trees.

They’re not subject to the same restrictive laws of nature.

Instead, there are very specific steps we can take to prep the environment and TRIGGER explosive growth much faster.

In fact, when I work with clients, we operate in two primary modes:

First is Stealth Mode

This is where we lay the groundwork that no one else sees. It’s what’s happening beneath the surface. In bamboo terms, it would be the equivalent of supercharging the seeds, soil, water, and fertilizer to create a better, stronger, faster-growing plant that is heartier and more resilient than the other plants.

Second is Intimidation Mode

I know that sounds obnoxious. But the simple fact is that when you initiate explosive growth in a business, people notice.

Their prospects are excited to see something new and different. Their clients are excited to be associated with a winner, OUR clients are excited to have their businesses attracting the right people and growing the way they want…

And their competitors? Well, they just get intimidated.

It’s not the intention. But it’s often a side effect.

So each month, we offer a small group of promotional product distributors the opportunity to work with us to plant the seeds.

Our goal is to help you quickly:

1. Lay the groundwork
2. Plant the seeds and
3. Trigger explosive growth

And we do this using our proprietary, proven framework.

It is NOT cheap, but it is EXTREMELY effective.

So what does creating explosive growth actually look like in a promotional products business?

Well, let’s start with what it doesn’t look like…

It doesn’t look like 10 to 20% annual growth.

I mean, think about it. If you start at $50,000 in sales your first year and settle for 10% annual growth, it would take you more than 32 years to hit $1,000,000 in sales.

Even at 20% growth, it would take more than 17 years.

So if you’re serious about growth — particularly in the early stages — 10% to 20% annual growth is not going to do it for you.

Ask yourself this. Are your current year-over-year numbers getting you to where you want to be?

And if so, are they getting you there fast enough?

Usually, creating explosive growth requires at least doubling your revenue multiple times over.

Growing from, say $50,000 to $100,000 to $250,000 to $500,000 to $1,000,000+.

Of course, the larger you get, the harder it is to continue to double like that.

But in that example, with year-over-year doubling, you can get from $50,000 to $1,000,000 in four years. If you can achieve those doubles in less time, you can get there even faster.

Of course, not everyone in our industry is interested in achieving that sort of growth. And you don’t have to be. I know many people who are happy to generate whatever sales they can in the time they allocate to it.

But that’s not who this particular message is for…

Instead, this is for you if you WANT to achieve exceptional results but have been struggling to get there… It’s for you if you KNOW you are capable of reaching your goals, but you’ve been unable to blast through your current sales plateau… It’s for you if you have been in the industry for months or years, and you’re still not triggering the growth you need to reach your desired levels of sales and profit.

If that’s happening to you, it indicates a problem that time is unlikely to fix. Because, as the old saying goes, if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.

So what does it take to trigger the kind of growth we’re talking about?

Three things.

1. Mindset

We’ll start with mindset.

Of course, you need the mindset. Because if you don’t believe you’re capable of achieving that sort of growth, then you’ll never even look for the specific actions it will take to make it happen.

For some people, mindset is a little too “woo-woo.”

And there’s a good reason for that. There have been a lot of books and videos and an entire subculture built around the law of attraction and the idea that if you can conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.

Now that is not a terrible message, but it is woefully incomplete. And there is a segment of the law of attraction crowd who try to make it sound like that’s all you need. Which is absolutely false, unless you just happen to get extremely lucky.

But most people can’t and shouldn’t rely only on mindset and luck.

So yes, in my experience, you will need to maintain a positive mindset long enough to determine the specific actions that need to be taken to achieve your goals.

That means having a plan.

2. A Plan

Having a plan starts with knowing what to do, and when to do it. Most people achieve this through trial and error, which can take an exceptionally long time.

Vernon Law once said, “Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.” And I completely agree.

In fact, the reason I have been able to help so many people in our industry to succeed is not that I’m particularly smart. It’s because I feel like I’ve made every stupid mistake you can possibly make. By keeping my clients from making those mistakes, they end up years ahead of the game.

So instead of implementing trial and error, they can implement a proven success plan.

But in addition to the mindset and the plan, you also need the persistence to take specific action.

3. Persistence

In our bamboo analogy, you have to maintain the vision and the motivation to keep watering and fertilizing that plant until it breaks through the soil and you get the results you want.

You have to persist through your doubts and disbelief.

When I went to college, my mom got me a plaque with a quote from Calvin Coolidge on it. I still have it here in my office on my bookshelf. It says,

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.”

So ultimately, it takes the Mindset, the plan, and the persistence to make it happen.

We don’t engage in positive thinking in place of action, we engage in positive thinking so we can identify the plan and take action on it. And we don’t take action just once, we exercise persistence to maintain our action, adjust our course when necessary, and continue until we achieve our goals.

If that sounds good to you… or better yet, if it actually sounds exciting and FUN to you, then we should definitely talk. Just go to topsecrets.com/call to schedule a time to talk with me or a member of my team about working with us.

The call will be totally confidential, so you can fly under the radar, in stealth mode as we talked about earlier. So go to topsecrets.com/call.

I would love to have the opportunity to work with you to take new actions, accelerate your results and get you to your goals. Talk soon.

Are You Ready to Create Explosive Growth in Your Business?

If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
5. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

To turn focus into profit, consider this. Your focus determines the level of profit that you generate. Because the people you meet, the conversations you have, all of that flows from your focus.

So when you focus on those activities, the likelihood of increasing your profit increases dramatically.

David: Hi and welcome back. In today’s episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss How to Turn Focus into Profit. Welcome back, Kevin.

Kevin: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me, David. Focus. Focus is something we could all use a little bit more of probably in our day-to-day lives, but is that a rare skill in business today? In the people that you work with?

David: That’s a great question. I think for some people it is problematic. I think that’s the nicest way to say it. If you lack that focus, then it’s going to be a lot more difficult to accomplish the things that you want.

So if it is something that you’re already good at, then the question becomes, how do I best harness that? Can I turn focus into profit?

And if it’s not something you’re good at, then the question becomes, how can I get at least good enough at it that I can function at the level at which I need to function?

Kevin: I feel like my focus has changed over the years, and part of it is definitely technology. Because I’ve got a phone sitting next to me that might beep. Might be personal, might be business, could be anything.

I could be working on a project and a client on Slack gets in touch with me. Then I get an email. And then there’s just so many channels of communication.

I mean, do you find that technology has made it more difficult in some ways for people to focus, and to turn focus into profit? As opposed to maybe 10, 20 years ago?

David: Yeah, and I mean, particularly when you look at things like social media, because social media is designed to disrupt your focus.

Kevin: Right.

David: Everything that comes in, whether it’s an email or a post on social media, it’s all designed to get your attention. So that’s why, particularly in the past 10 to 20 years, focus is so much more of an issue for people.

Because as you said, there are lots of different things to focus on. The algorithms are specifically programmed to make you focus on their priorities rather than your own. That makes it challenging to turn focus into profit.

So if you’re aware of that and if you recognize that you have to determine what your focus needs to be in order to accomplish your results, then it becomes more likely that you’ll take the necessary actions to do that.

Kevin: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I mean, we’ve all been in situations where you go on social media for a business purpose and all of a sudden you’re watching videos of some knuckleheads playing slip and slide softball, which are kickball, which I’ve gotten watching, are those silly videos. You’re just like, before you know it, you’re like, oh my God, it’s been a half an hour.

I just came on here to check out a client’s page real quick.

David: Yeah. And again, they designed the system to do that. They built it in. That’s not a mistake. That is the purpose of the design. So when we recognize that only we can determine whether or not we will remain focused, then we take the responsibility on ourselves.

We recognize Okay, it ‘s designed to do that. So if I recognize that and if I leave that open, and if I have notifications turned on to an app that is specifically designed to derail me from my focus, then yeah. I’m sort of getting what I’m putting out.

Kevin: You’re in trouble. You’re in trouble.

David: Yeah.

Kevin: Yeah. so the topic today is about how to turn focus into profit. How does a lack of focus directly translate into lost revenue?

David: Well, if you’re looking at what your highest value activities are and then you focus on those, you’re going to be a lot more likely to accomplish what you’re looking to accomplish than if you allow your focus to be distracted by other people’s priorities.

I’ve heard an email inbox referred to as a storage place for other people’s priorities, and I think that’s very true, and it doesn’t just extend to the inbox anymore.

It extends to pretty much everything. Other people’s priorities are going to be popping up and binging and making noises. It’s a lot like being in a casino environment where it’s not designed to allow you to really focus. Let alone turn focus into profit.

It’s designed to have you be distracted and get excited and get those dopamine hits that come from replying to somebody’s thumbs up or whatever it is that comes through on social media.

So I think if you look at identifying what your highest value priorities are and then focusing on those, it’s going to allow you to get more done.

It will allow you to eliminate unnecessary distractions, or at least be aware of them. Because if you’re aware of the fact that these things are happening on a day-to-day basis and you don’t take the necessary actions, whether it’s just adjusting your settings or whatever it is, then you’re always going to be at the mercy of other people’s ideas, other people’s priorities.

Kevin: Absolutely. People might think they’re working really hard. Like, oh man, I’m working really super hard, but they’re all over the place, right? They’re not necessarily getting a lot done. How can you go from that to working with focus, and then to turn focus into profit?

David: Well, identifying at the beginning of the day, what are the top 3, 4, 5 things that I really need to get done today? And then prioritizing them, starting with number one. And then ideally, moving on to number two, once you’ve completed number one, and then moving on to number three.

That’s the ideal scenario.

But also if you just do that and if you keep that list front and center, then when something happens, and I’m not saying if something happens, I’m saying when something happens that derails you from the most important priority you’ve identified. If you do have to address that immediately, you can then at least go back to where you wanted to be at the start of the day.

Because without that, without knowing, what do I need to have happen today in order, most important priority to least important priority, you’re always going to get distracted. You’re never going to get to do the things that you actually need to do to turn focus into profit.

Kevin: But I feel like that’s where I can get derailed the most is I might make that list. I might say, okay, I’m getting this done, this done, this done, and this done today. And all of a sudden I get an email of someone who needs something or I get distracted.

But just, even if it’s business related, it’s not stupid videos on Instagram or a friend texting me something funny about fantasy football. I mean, it, can be business related.

Do you find that a lot of people have a hard time refocusing even if they start the day really good and then all of a sudden a couple emails come in, they’re like, oh man, I got to address this. Is it hard to refocus?

David: I think it can be if you don’t have your priorities outlined up front. Because if you’re focusing on the thing that you decided is most important today, and then something new comes in. You have to say to yourself, is this more pressing than the thing that I’m working on now? And if the answer is no, you need to move that thing that came in down farther on the list.

If it is more important, then yeah, you’re going to prioritize it. You’re going to move it ahead of the thing you’re doing now, you’re going to get that knocked out, and then you’re going to move back to the thing that you decided was going to be a priority when you started your day.

So there’s a constant process of sort of re-juggling, reprioritizing the different things that come at you during the course of a day.

And if you want to be able to remain focused, and if you want to turn focus into profit, which is really the ultimate goal here, you have to be aware of where your focus is, who’s trying to take it, and who you’re going to allow to take it.

Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. Reprioritizing. That’s a good way to put it. I mean, you could get into danger though if you keep reprioritizing of, if there’s something that’s maybe a, lower dollar client or something that might not be as pressing, that it can just keep getting pushed back, pushed back, pushed back, and pretty soon you’ve completely either forgotten about it or disregarded it or whatever. Is that a danger as well?

David: It can be, but that’s where the whole word priority by itself. has to mean something to you. If it’s a low dollar client and they come in and they’re asking for something, you have to ask yourself, is this low dollar client more important than the thing I’m working on now?

And if the answer is no, then you’ve got to keep working on the thing that you’re working on now.

Maybe you can delegate what they sent you to somebody else to have them do it if you’ve got other people in your organization. So if that needs to get done, it can get done. But prioritization means making the call, deciding, making that decision. Is this more important than that? And if the answer is no, then you can’t distract yourself.

You can’t divert your focus to something that is less important if you want to accomplish your objectives.

Kevin: We were talking about social media, you made the comment that it’s designed to pull your focus away from what you were doing and lure you in. How can a business person, an entrepreneur, truly identify the distractions and do something about it if you want to turn focus into profit?

Because it’s, sometimes it’s hard to see from your own view, you know?

David: Yeah. Well first of all, you have to ask yourself, do I want social media to be available to me, accessible to me during business hours? And if so, what are those business hours? Am I going to check it between 11 and 12 o’clock, like right before lunch? And then check it, between four and five?

Because if you limit it to certain times, then it’s less likely to scream out at you and distract you from what it is that you’re doing during the times where you need to be the most productive.

If it’s whatever, eight to 11, and then one to four. In those hours, you’re doing the work and the priorities, the things that you’ve decided are most important to you.

If you focus on that and then you allow time for some other activities to pop in, other potential distractions, you’re making the call. Or you say, well, I’m just not going to access social media during these particular hours.

So if you’re able to do that, it’s all about self-discipline. It’s about do I have the ability to discipline myself to do the things that I know need to be done during the course of a business day?

Kevin: If a listener is feeling super scatterbrained, super scattered all over the place, you mentioned prioritizing starting your day by setting priorities. Are there other things they can do to try to refocus or at least just get some organization in their lives?

David: Well, I think prioritization is the biggest. I use a program called Kanban Flow. If you’re familiar with the idea of a Kanban, it’s like to do, doing, done. I have more things on it than that. But one of the advantages of the program itself is that you can move things up on top of each other.

If something becomes more important, you slide it up. It’s like, “now I’m working on that.”

Kevin: You drag and drop…

David: Yeah, if something new comes in, I can add it and then I can say, “where does this fall?” And I slide it up or down. It really goes back to what we’ve been talking about all along. But for me, that makes it more visual.

It makes it easier for me to do. Because if I lose sight of that, the likelihood that I move onto something that is not as helpful is very high.

Kevin: Right. yeah. Well these are great tips. How can someone learn more about how to turn focus into profit?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/shift. Pick up a copy of our free PDF report. It’ll help you to identify what are the things in your business that need to be done? What are your priorities? What are the things that you determine are most important for you to focus on in any given day?

Because your focus is going to determine the level of profit that you generate. The people that you’re able to meet, the conversations that you’re able to have, all of that flows from your focus.

So when you’re able to focus on those activities, the likelihood of increasing your profit increases dramatically.

Kevin: All right, David. Well, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate all the insight.

David: Okay. Thank you, Kevin.

Ready to Turn Focus into Profit?

If so, download this PDF. Then check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just starting out in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
5. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

The success of your business is always determined by the what, why, when & how. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? When are you doing it? And How? If you don’t have the desire to help your clients, if it’s all about you making money, or if it’s all about you accomplishing a personal result for yourself, and you don’t have enough care or consideration for the person you’re selling to, I think it’s going to be hard to be successful long term.

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the what, why, when, and how of your business. Welcome back, Kevin.

Kevin: Good to see you, David. How you doing?

David: Doing great, and you?

Kevin: Good. Good. All right — so, what, why, when, how. Let’s start with the first one. Why is it critical to define your what before anything else in business?

David: Well, the way I look at it is, if you don’t know what you’re doing, then why you’re doing it, when you’re doing it, and how you’re doing it are kind of irrelevant.

Kevin: Doesn’t really matter.

David: Right. You sort of—

Kevin: Yup.

David: Yeah, you kind of have to know what it is that you’re setting out to do. Whether you’re operating solo or with a team of people, identifying what you want to accomplish — in your business or in any specific area of your business — is always the first step.

So, if the what is “getting clients,” then the question becomes: What is my procedure? What is my process going to be for getting clients? That’s the what.

You identify that first. Once you’ve even thought about what you want to accomplish — or what you think you might want to accomplish, if you’re still in the ideation stage — the what is important.

But the reason I go to the why next is because if you don’t have a strong why, you might not be committed enough to what has to be done.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that people who have ideas but don’t have a really strong, compelling reason for doing them tend to struggle to get those things done.

Kevin: So it can become a motivation issue to some degree?

David: It certainly can, because if you’ve got strong reasons for wanting to do something — whether it’s to support your family, to create a growing enterprise, or to eventually sell the business and make a profit — that strong why will definitely impact your motivation.

So I think that’s a big component. Without it, why does anyone really do anything?

Kevin: I suppose you could technically start with the why, right? Because if you have a reason for doing something, you can then build the what around it. Or is that a bad way to go in your mind?

David: Well, if you’re thinking in terms of starting a business, that would actually be the what. But I guess it’s possible to start with the why. For example, if my why is “I want to support my family and I’m not happy with what I’m doing now,” then I might arrive at a what like, “I want to start my own business,” or “I want to do A, B, or C to make that happen.”

That hasn’t worked that way for me personally — but it could for someone else. If you’ve got a strong enough why, you can then start thinking about what needs to happen in order to achieve the things you have in mind.

Kevin: When it comes to the when, why is it so important to define a timeline?

David: Wow. Anyone who’s in sales probably has some strong thoughts about when. If you’ve ever spoken to a prospect who seems really excited and seems like a perfect fit for what you offer — and then they just keep dodging you or stop taking your calls — that’s a perfect example of someone who doesn’t have their when dialed in.

In any conversation — with prospects, clients, or coworkers — we need to identify the when so everyone’s on the same page about the importance of the action and the likelihood of it happening. Because without a when, things just don’t happen.

A lot of our work is with people in the promotional products and print industries. In those cases, people will call and ask for a price: “Can you give me a quote on 1,500 of this particular item, in this color,” and so on.

If you just answer that question without knowing when they need it, you may be shooting yourself in the foot. What if you provide a quote that’s valid today, and then they wait six months and come back expecting the same price?

It doesn’t make much sense to quote someone without knowing when they plan to move forward. That’s why I think the when aspect is so critical.

Kevin: Let’s move on to the how. Obviously, that can change over time — how you’re going to implement things. Businesses evolve. How detailed does the how really need to be before taking action?

David: It needs to be detailed enough that you know what your next action will be. We recently did an episode where we talked about the idea stage, the action stage, and the system stage. The how is really about the systems or processes you’re building.

It’s about the actions — the how is about what you’re doing and which of those actions you want to turn into a system.

The how becomes especially important when you’re doing something repeatedly. You want to build a process so you’re not reinventing the wheel every time.

Anytime a business wants to grow or scale, having procedures in place — your how — is vital.

If multiple people in your organization are doing the same thing in different ways, it makes sense to ask: Who’s most effective? How are they doing it? Are there elements of their approach that others could adopt to get similar results?

Kevin: Is this something you coach businesses to keep revisiting — their what, why, when, and how?

David: Absolutely. It becomes clear when it’s time to revisit them — usually when things stop working. You might have procedures that worked great and then suddenly don’t.

When that happens, you have to ask: Has our process changed? Has our market changed?

A good big-picture example is how sales communication has evolved. Ten or twenty years ago, most sales conversations happened over the phone. Now, they might take place over social media, in Messenger, via text, or elsewhere.

So we need to look at what’s effective now and adjust accordingly.

Kevin: I’ve always hated when people text me for business. I’m more of an email guy — but I suppose it depends on when you grew up or entered the business world. Some people still prefer phone calls, but younger generations often favor text.

David: Right.

Kevin: Yeah.

David: And it’s not always our call, right? The client gets to decide how they want to communicate. We can either adapt to them or hope they adapt to us — but realistically, they probably won’t. If they can work with someone who already communicates the way they prefer, that person is more likely to get the business.

Kevin: Absolutely. Are there any tools you recommend for keeping these four ideas front and center?

David: For most people, if you’ve got a CRM in place, that’s where a lot of it happens. You should know what your first step is, what the next step is, and what comes after that — so you don’t have to think about it each time.

If a client has an event coming up, make sure that’s scheduled so you can follow up at the right time. Things like that. That’s probably the most important tech for this.

Kevin: What about a business that’s been around for 20 years but never really thought about these things? Is it too late, or can they still come into it now?

David: It’s never too late. This can happen the moment you become aware of it. Everything you’ve done so far has involved a what, why, when, and how. You may not have been conscious of it, but once you are, you can fine-tune each one — and make it much easier to take the right actions at the right time.

Kevin: How can clarity on these four ultimately help a sales team perform better?

David: For a sales team, they need to identify the right prospects and clients. They need to communicate effectively, show how they can help, and understand their own motivations.

The why should be more than just “I want to make money.” It should include “I want to help my client achieve a specific result.”

If you don’t genuinely care about helping your clients — if it’s all about your commission — it’s going to be hard to succeed long-term.

When you combine a strong what and why with a clear when and how, things align. For instance, if a client needs to send you artwork by a specific date and you don’t make sure that happens, the order won’t go through.

These four elements play together. Everyone kind of knows them, but when you consciously identify and apply them, things become much clearer.

Some people listening might say, “I’m good with the what and why, but my how isn’t getting results.” That’s a sign to re-examine your implementation.

Kevin: You made a great point on the why too — if you’re only doing this for yourself and not because you genuinely want to help, that comes across eventually.

David: Exactly. And if you find yourself in that position — if you realize you don’t like your market, your clients, or your work — it might be time to consider a different profession.

Kevin: Yeah, maybe it’s time to get out. For sure. You mentioned that people often get tripped up on the how. Is that the biggest stumbling block?

David: Probably, yes. Because it can be intricate. The how determines whether the what gets done, whether the when happens, and how the why plays out. Because it requires detail and discipline, it can be the hardest of the four.

Kevin: Right. We’ve talked about what, why, when, and how. So how can people learn more about this approach?

David: Just go to TopSecrets.com/shift. Pick up a copy of our free PDF. If you’re struggling with any of these areas — the what, when, why, or how — download the report. If you’d like to have a conversation with us, you’re welcome to do that as well.

Kevin: When should they do it?

David: They should do it right now.

Kevin: I think we covered them all. All right — thank you, David. Great seeing you again. Appreciate all the insights.

David: All right. Thank you, Kevin.

Ready to Nail the Why, Why, When & How of Your Business?

If so, download this PDF. Then check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just starting out in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
5. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

It’s important, no matter who you’re partnering with, from a business standpoint, from an employee standpoint, from a VA standpoint. Whoever you choose as your business partners and colleagues have to have the skills that you lack, if you want to be able to accomplish the things that you need to get done.

David: Hi. Welcome back. In today’s episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the topic of choosing business partners wisely. Welcome back, Kevin.

Kevin: It’s good to be here. David. I’m excited to talk about this because this is always an interesting topic.

David: Yeah. When we think of business partners, we tend to think of people that we’re actually going into business with. But there’s really sort of a wider group of people that could potentially fit the bill here. So I think it’s important to cover that as well.

Kevin: The first one you spoke of, the actual business partner, business partner. I mean that can test a friendship. It can test a relationship, it tests all kinds of stuff. So in your experience, just from that side of things. What are the biggest mistakes that business people, entrepreneurs make when choosing a business partner?

David: Well, I’ve made them over the years. My very first business partner was a guy that I worked with in another business. We decided we were going to start our own things. And so we just started out renting the same office space and splitting the rent on that sort of thing.

Then we got involved in projects that required both of us working together. It didn’t work out well. I started from the standpoint of we got along well, we interacted well. But neither of us took the time to consider our strengths and what each of us would bring to the table.

A lot of times when people start working with friends or family, they think, “well, I know this person really well. I trust them.” That’s a good start.

But unless you have similar visions for what the business is going to be, how you’re going to get there, and who’s going to do what, you can really end up with a lot of problems if that part of it doesn’t work out.

Kevin: Yeah. it can go downhill fast. It can definitely go downhill fast. So, in any business partnership, you know, you talked about the fact that there’s varying types of them. What qualities do you feel matter most in a potential partner and which maybe are overrated?

David: Well, I would say, starting out, you need to look at: Are our core values basically aligned? Do we sort of view the world in a similar way? Are we viewing business in a similar way? Do we view the relationship with our potential customers and clients in a similar way? Because if there’s a disconnect there, then you’re going to have problems starting with the very first decision.

So I think that compatibility is very important. Making sure that everybody wants to go in the same direction, right? If you’re in a rowboat, you want to make sure everybody’s pulling in the same direction. That’s extremely important.

If you have complementary goals, essentially that’s going to be a very important aspect of it.

I think also, what is the expertise? What are you good at? What are they good at? If it’s exactly the same things, you need to make sure it covers everything that has to be covered in a business.

So, if I’m really good at generating ideas and you’re really good at implementing those ideas, then that’s going to work out well.

If we’re both great at generating ideas, but neither of us are great at implementation, we’re going to struggle with that. And so you want to look at complementary skills.

I think that is probably one of the most important aspects of it. You’ve got the same vision, but you have complementary skills. So that one or more of you are not doing things they hate, right?

If you have to engage in a skill that you don’t like, or if your business partner does, then it’s not a good recipe. But if one of you is really good at idea generation, another one’s good at implementation. Another one’s good at the financial aspect. Another one’s good at the marketing aspect. Somebody’s good at sales.

If you’ve got all those departments covered by people who are good at those things, and who like doing them, then you have a much better likelihood of success.

Kevin: Are there any qualities, do you think people put too much emphasis on that they don’t really need to? That might be overrated.

David: That’s a tough one. Like when I think of what they put emphasis on, I mean, it might just be the initial shared vision, the idea that they want to go into business together.

Kevin: Mm-hmm.

David: That’s kind of the easy part. You know, we talked about ideas in the last podcast, and I’ve said for a really long time now that million dollar ideas are a dime a dozen in effect.

Because unless you’re able to take the necessary actions and build the appropriate infrastructure, those ideas are never going to come into fruition.

So when you’re establishing business partnerships, and again, whether it’s having a business partner, whether it’s a joint venture kind of thing, whether you’re hiring somebody to be a virtual assistant, I mean that’s essentially a type of partnership.

You want to make sure that the person and the people that you’re interacting with have the necessary skills to be able to allow you to achieve the vision that you’ve set out, both for yourself and for them.

That everybody’s on board and everybody’s understanding it. So I think just the idea of getting into business or partnering up with someone without thinking through a lot of those things is probably the biggest mistake that people make up front.

Kevin: You think that sometimes too, that people might think they need a partner when really they just need to hire talent?

David: I think in a lot of cases that is very true. And sometimes that boils down to whether or not they have the capital to be able to do it. And if you don’t have the money to be able to hire someone, then proposing a partnership, it’s like, okay, we’re, in this together. We need to build it together. And sometimes that can work and sometimes it can’t.

You also have to determine if you have the personality for that sort of thing. Because after my first experience with a business partner, I swore I’m like, “never again. I’m never going to have a business partner again.”

But eventually I did, and I’m really glad I did because it worked out so much better.

Because when you have the right business partner, when you’ve got the right combination of human resource assets in your business, people really, I mean that sounds so technical and clinical.

When you’ve got the right people in your business, everything flows a lot more smoothly. So, if you’ve had a bad experience with a business partnership, don’t necessarily rule it out, because if you’re able to do it right, you can leverage yourself, you can leverage your business, and you can create results that you would never be able to create on your own.

Kevin: Are there red flags that you would recommend people consider that might, or that should I should say, tell them, “don’t partner with this person.”

David: I would say communication is number one, two, and three.

Kevin: Yeah. That’s nuts.

David: You’re…

Kevin: Drives me nuts. Yeah.

David: Yeah. The ability to communicate effectively and openly and answer direct questions and just be willing to have conversations.

Kevin: Yeah. Just to respond sometimes, right? Just being someone…

David: Exactly.

Kevin: That actually communicates, period.

David: Yeah. Right, because if someone is not willing to communicate with you, then it’s very difficult to make things work extremely well.

Depending on the nature of the business relationship, it’s just helpful when you’re involved with people who respect you enough to reply back and interact and answer questions or whatever.

And people get busy, you know? So I’m not saying, well, you know, everybody has to be responsive to you immediately. That’s not realistic. But as long as people are willing to remain in touch with you, they’re willing to remain open about any challenges they’re having with communication, that type of thing, that’s different.

But when people are unwilling to communicate on levels where it’s really important, that’s where it starts to become a little dicey.

Kevin: How important is alignment on things like money, work ethic, company vision, when considering a partner,

David: Well, yeah, money’s big, right? Because if one of the business partners is thinking Elon Musk and another one of them is thinking on a much lower plane, that’s going to be a pretty big disconnect.

As far as work ethic is concerned, that is another big one because if one person is really putting in a lot of effort and another one is not, that starts to feel a little frustrating after a while.

Kevin: That’s what happened to me.

David: But also… Yeah, it’s happened to a lot of people. I think the reason it tends to happen sometimes is that some of us are really just wired to do a lot more things and some are just wired to focus on the things that need to be done and get really good at doing those.

I think it’s important to understand that if someone is not doing everything that you are doing, it doesn’t mean that they’re wrong or that they’re not a good fit for you. If they’re getting the things done that need to get done, then that’s the most important thing.

In the early stages of my business, I mean, I just worked all the time. I would just get up early and I’d stay and I’d work late and I did all these things.

Part of that was just a reflection of my lack of structure, right? My inability to focus long enough during the day to get those things done. So, in the early stages of my business, I could look at something like that and say, well, I’m doing a whole lot more work, but am I? Or am I just burning a lot more hours?

So I think we also have to be honest with ourselves about our strengths and our weaknesses and what we’re actually doing versus what we might think we’re doing.

But yeah, I think work ethic is big in the sense that everybody has to be committed to doing the things that they’re responsible for doing.

And if they’re not, then conversations need to be had.

Kevin: Absolutely. And then of course David, some people are just lazy. I mean, come on, let’s be honest.

David: Yes.

Kevin: Some people are just lazy.

David: That’s true.

Kevin: You gotta avoid those.

David: Yeah. And if you identify that that is an ongoing issue, then obviously you have to make the necessary changes.

And again, when we’re talking about partnerships, it doesn’t necessarily mean a business partner. Because hopefully you don’t get into a business relationship where your business partner is just lazy and doesn’t want to do anything. Right?

But even if it’s a situation…

Kevin: Uh, well, it happens. Trust me.

David: It does happen. It does happen. But even with employees or with virtual assistants or whatever, that type of thing can happen. And when it does, you really need to be able to make sure that you’re going after it and addressing that before it becomes an ongoing pattern.

The other problem is that when you have people who are in your organization who are not doing a good job, it impacts the morale of others.

When we had our retail mail order catalog business, we would hire seasonally and we would bring in a lot of customer service reps over the holiday season.

And sometimes we would bring somebody in whose attitude was just poison. And we knew that we had to get that person out of there as soon as humanly possible, because if we didn’t, it was going to impact the rest of the team.

So you have to be really vigilant about that.

Kevin: Mm-hmm. you mentioned before about complimentary skills versus identical skills. Is that just a conversation? Like, how do you determine that in any business relationship, any partnership?

What is the best way to determine where your skillset is versus somebody else’s and how they can all work together?

David: I think sort of starting with the left brain, right brain kind of thing, more creative versus more structured. Those types of things are a good place to start. Because if you have two creatives and you don’t have anybody who’s structured, you’re going to have problems.

If you have people who are just really structured, but they don’t have as much of the creative ability, I think that’s potentially an issue.

The skill sets are important. If someone is willing and able to get on the phone and make phone calls, if that’s required of the business, you want to make sure that they’re able to do that.

One of the things in our Total Market Domination course, one of the things that we focus on in our work with clients is to say, if there are things that you absolutely hate doing, we want to make sure that those are not required of you as you’re doing this job.

So if there are people who don’t like making phone calls, then what are the other methods of contact we can use that they are more comfortable with, that they can then use to get the same job done?

So I don’t require that our clients love cold calling because not everybody does. And I certainly don’t.

Kevin: Do not.

David: But there are some people who are wired to be able to do it. And if they are, that’s great. But if they’re not, there need to be other methods of contact that are acceptable to them.

For some, it could be social media, it could be email, it could be direct mailings. There are lots of different ways to initiate contact with a prospect or clients.

Because then if you follow up with a phone call, it’s not the first thing.

If you send something in the mail to someone and then you call them a few days later and say, “Hey, did you get the thing I sent you?” That’s a totally different experience than calling and identifying yourself and telling them you’re there to sell them something, or whatever.

Totally different experience.

So I think it’s important, no matter who you’re partnering with, from a business standpoint, from an employee standpoint, from a VA standpoint, whoever you’re partnering with has to have the skills that you are lacking, if you want to be able to accomplish the things that you need to get done.

Kevin: With a partnership agreement. It’s important. It’s something that people should do, not everybody does. But assuming people do it, are there certain protections that you feel every agreement needs to have in order to avoid any future conflict?

David: Yeah, I don’t want to get too much into the legal stuff. I would definitely prefer to leave that to the legal experts. But I think that just having the conversation with whoever you’re working with, having the discussion about what you’re trying to do together.

If there’s a lot of friction, even just agreeing on what’s going to be in the agreement, that could potentially be a red flag.

But asking those questions, having those conversations, and then getting legal help to put together what that’s going to look like.

I also learned, a long time ago, that if you’re going to do some sort of partnership arrangement, it’s probably better not to have a 50 50.

I mean, you can have a 51 49, so it’s very close, but somebody ultimately needs to be responsible for making the final decisions.

So I think that’s very helpful. And if there is a point where everybody differs on what needs to happen, you know who has the final say in it. So I think that’s probably pretty key regardless of the setup.

Kevin: That’s a really good point. Really good point that people probably don’t think about. All right, great episode. Thanks everybody for joining us. David, how can people find out more?

David: Just go to TopSecrets.com/shift. Pick up a copy of our free PDF report. We’ll help you to create a shift in your business that will allow you to go from where you are to where you’re looking to be.

So if you’re at the point where you’re looking to establish and create the relationships you need inside your business to be able to take it to the next level, request a copy of the free report, TopSecrets.com/shift.

Then if you’d like to have a conversation, you’re welcome to schedule one with us.

Kevin: Thanks David. Appreciate your time.

David: Okay. Thank you, Kevin.

Are You Ready to Move from Ideas to Actions to Systems?

If so, download this PDF. Then check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just starting out in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
5. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.

We’ll basically help you to look at where you are now and where you’re looking to be in terms of getting something from ideas to actions and systems. Because without those three levels and without prioritizing it correctly, you can spend a lot of time, invest a lot of effort, and not get to the results you’re looking for.

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and I discuss the topic of ideas, actions, and systems. Welcome back, Kevin.

Kevin: Good to see you, David. Let’s dig right in. Why do so many businesses get stuck at the idea stage and fail to even move into action?

David: It’s a great question. I think ideas in a lot of ways are kind of the easy part. We have a brainstorm, we’re like, this is brilliant, let’s do this. And then we have another one has this, brilliant, let’s do this. And here’s another one. This is brilliant. Let’s do this. And then the question becomes, okay, what are we actually going to do?

I know this has happened to me over the years in my own business. It’s happened with a number of people that I’ve worked with over the years. You have a lot of ideas. And then the question becomes, what are we going to take action on? And then, which of the things that we take action on, will we systemize? Get into place so that we can take those actions consistently?

So that’s really the purpose of our discussion today.

Kevin: Yeah. how do you personally decide, which ideas are worth pursuing and which to ignore? Because I can find myself to be an idea guy a lot of times too. I’m like this, I got this, I got this. But sometimes it’s hard to prioritize what is actually a good plan. Then put it into action versus maybe we just skip that one.

David: Yeah, it’s helpful if we start out with essentially a data dump of all the different things that we’re considering. Just write them all down. Then have internal conversations initially about which ones of these are going to be our priorities.

What are we definitely going to lock in? Which ones will we save until later? And which ones are just kind of out there? We don’t really have to look at those at the moment.

Kevin: It seemed like a good idea last night…

David: I find that by,

Kevin: before I was falling asleep. Not so good the next day. Yeah, .

David: That happens a lot, doesn’t it?

Kevin: Yep, it sure does.

David: I have a digital recorder. I take it with me wherever I go and keep it next to the bed. When I get one of those brilliant ideas at night, I record it on there. Then you listen to it the next day and you’re like, that was horrible, what was I thinking?

Kevin: What a terrible idea. I can’t even understand what I was saying.

David: Yeah, exactly. But, I think it starts with that. It’s about gathering all those ideas, because some of them are going to be great. Some of ’em are going to be brilliant, some of ’em are gonna be terrible, but we don’t know it.

Now, a lot of times, it’s a good idea to sort of evaluate them yourselves before you start sharing them with everyone else, so that you’re only talking to your people about the things that you’ve already kind of thought through and believe are the best ways to go, and ideally to prioritize those.

And then do another round with your people and go through it and ask for their opinion on which things should be prioritized and which things should be deprioritized as it were, so that you can sort of work your way through and have everybody be on the same page as far as what we should be working on sooner rather than later.

Kevin: I feel like a lot of times ideas can get just stuck in sort of a neutral. Do you have to put a sense of urgency into turning ideas into action?

David: Well, I think you definitely have to prioritize it. So to say that, we give it a sense of urgency, I would say yes for the things that are most important.

But again, there’s this discernment process that needs to happen on the ideas to determine do they need to be prioritized? Do they need to be implemented at all?

And then once you’ve done that, I think it really helps for everybody to be on the same page so everyone knows what we’re doing and which one we’re doing first, and which one we’re doing second, and which one we’re doing third and so on.

Kevin: How can a small business owner build systems to help their business without adding like an overwhelming complexity? I think that’s a hard balance, right?

David: Well, complexity in my experience, comes about as a result of not doing these things. When you actually think it through, when you start with an idea and you decide, okay, this idea is going to be something that we’re going to work on. And then you think through the idea and you say, where are we going with it next?

is this going to be something that we’re going to build in? Are we going to take action on this idea? And if the answer is yes, then you can sort of brainstorm a list of what are the actions we could potentially take here?

Y ou can come up with a lot of different things that you could take action on. But then you also have to further refine it and say, okay, which of these actions make the most sense for the immediate future and for down the line?

So, in my view, it’s a constant process of sort of refining these ideas, testing them, determining what the most sense right now, and what makes the most sense for the foreseeable future.

Once you’ve determined that, that’s the stuff that you attempt to systematize. And I think sometimes this gets out of whack, in the sense that people come up with an idea and start building processes into their business to get it implemented.

That’s putting the cart before the horse in a lot of cases.

Kevin: Yeah, that’s a good point. But it can be intimidating, right? To try to put new systems into place.

David: It can be, sure, if you are unclear on what those systems need to be.

But a lot of times, I think when you do sort of think things through and you start with the idea and then refine and refine and refine that to get it down to the actions that make the most sense.

Then once you’ve identified those actions, systemizing those actions can actually be relatively simple. Because there are only so many different ways to perform a particular action.

I mean, in sales, things like whatever, dialing the phone, right? There are only a couple ways to do that, and that’s a very primitive example. But even as far as targeting is concerned, if you have ideas about who you’d like to target, for example, and then you have actions in place in terms of how am I going to do that?

Exactly how am I going to identify the people that I want to go after? And then that becomes part of your action. And then you say, okay, now in order to create a system around that, I want to make sure that I’m selecting the right quality, the right caliber of prospect to begin with, so that each time I go back to do this a second time or a third time or a fourth time, I’ve got that system in place, so I don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.

Because a lot of people waste a lot of time by doing that. They get involved in taking action and each time they have to do something, they sort of forget that they had a process for it. And then they’re reinventing the wheel all the time.

Kevin: Yeah, they just keep trying to redo something that’s already kind of working or already there.

you share an example of a business that put a new system in place and thrived because of it?

David: I think a lot of what we do with our clients in our Total Market Domination system, it’s all about that. It’s about identifying these key points of influence where people are having trouble, where people are struggling, and then getting systems put in place to be able to do that.

So for example, as I said, starting with the targeting, who am I going to go after?

There are a lot of businesses who just wing it day to day and they bring in anybody who can fog a mirror, anyone with a pulse, and that sort of approach is not usually helpful long term.

Whereas if you have a procedure in place for your targeting and you say, I’m, going to identify this particular type of business in these particular markets of this particular size,

I’m going to start with that and then I’m going to hone it down from there and say, alright, since I can’t reach every business in this particular niche or in this particular market, then how can I narrow it down to get to a smaller group of manageable prospects?

We refer to it as our largest, manageable submarket. And then from there, down to the initial contacts that you want to test it out with and the ones that you want to reach out to.

And each of those steps requires different systems, but you have that in place and that gets it down to the people that you want to initiate contact with.

Then from there, it’s like, okay, what are we going to say to those people? And then that becomes about the messaging.

How do we create the messaging that we want to communicate to our prospects and clients about our business? Again, a lot of times people just sort of wing it, or they say basic stuff about what they do and how they’re able to help, as opposed to having a bullet pointed list of the things that they want to make sure are communicated to each new prospect, every step of the way.

And then another example going on from there would be, how are we initiating our initial contact with them? Is it a cold call? A meeting at a networking function? Is it a post on social media? Lots of different ways to initiate your first contact, and then what’s the follow up going to be?

And with each of those steps, there are responsibilities that come with it. The responsibility of doing this consistently.

Because if you’re doing different things with different prospects, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, you really don’t know what worked and what didn’t.

When you’ve got consistent systems in place that allow you to know what’s working each time, now you’ve got something you can build on.

And it also increases the value of the business at some point if you want to sell it in the future. Because when you’ve got these systems in place, your business is just worth more.

Kevin: Sure. Makes sense. think a lot of times too, people get ideas and then those lead to maybe one-off bursts of action instead of building those consistent systems. How can people avoid falling into that trap and going more for a real system rather than just like a, quick fix of action.

David: It’s a really great question because so many people do struggle with this. You get an idea and you just start taking action on it. I start doing this, I start doing this. I start doing that before I’ve even evaluated that action, as we talked about before. Then the next day, you’re like, why was I doing that?

It doesn’t even make sense. So sometimes it’s really just a matter of taking a breath when you have an idea and asking, is this the kind of thing that I really want to dedicate my resources to, that I’m going to be willing to commit my resources to my resources in terms of my own time, the time of my team, money as far as if it requires advertising and all that sort of thing.

You want to really think through that first before you just dive into the action taking stage. So once again, I think the question of prioritization becomes really important, making those decisions up front, because if you just dive in, you’re probably setting yourself up for a lot of extra work that’s not going to amount to much.

Kevin: Yeah. And again, you talked about prioritizing your ideas, making sure that you’re not overwhelming yourself. Do you find yourself doing that? Do you go through sort of your idea list, if you will, and go. This is great. This is a, maybe, this is terrible. What was I thinking?

Like, is that kind of how you do it?

David: Yeah, one of the things that I do is I list everything out and I try to understand what it was that I was talking about when I wrote it down, right? Because sometimes.

Kevin: Why were you thinking of this? Yeah. Mm-hmm.

David: Exactly, and then evaluating it and trying to get a feel. And particularly if you’re interacting with someone else, if you’re generating ideas and you’re bouncing it off someone else.

If someone raises a bunch of ideas with you, you have to make sure that you understand what it is that they’re proposing, so that you can repeat it back to them and say, okay, is this what we’re talking about? Is that what we’re talking about?

And then once you’re clear, with the other person that you’re working with on what it is that they have in mind, then you can discuss and how it makes sense to proceed with that.

How you take it from the ideation stage to the implementation stage, which is about deciding what those actions are going to be.

Kevin: there’s a lot of people who are idea people. I’ve known a lot of those people throughout my life, whether in business or just friends, always got big ideas. Never really do anything with them. Sometimes that can be a personality trait, but can it also just be that you have so many, you don’t even know what to do?

You haven’t prioritized,

David: yeah, there are people who are just great at generating ideas and they just come out fast and furious. There are also starters, and there are finishers in business, right?

There are people who come up with the ideas, but they’re not quite sure how to turn it into something real. And so if you’re struggling with any aspect of this, you need to ask yourself, okay, am I an idea creator? Am I an implementer or am I a systems or process builder, or am I all three of these things?

If you’re all three of these things, then obviously you need to prioritize ’em and try to do them in order. But if you’re an idea person and you’re looking to get things implemented, then you really need to make sure that you’re surrounding yourself with the people who can help you to see that vision through.

People who are not just starters in terms of being able to get a project underway, but to get that project completed, systematized, built into the day-to-day aspects of the business so that you don’t have to worry about things falling apart.

You want to make sure that the wheels don’t start falling off the wagon.

Kevin: How can you keep those people accountable to follow through on the actions and the systems if you’re an idea person?

David: I guess it really depends what your position is in the organization, right? because if you’re the head of the organization and you’re setting the pace, you’re saying, we’re going to be doing A, B, and C, then it really is a matter of identifying who’s going to be responsible for making that happen, and looking at what is the plan for making that happen.

Because as the idea person, you may not even know exactly what those steps are, but you need to be working with someone who can identify that, who can get that ball rolling and get those things built into systems so that the idea can be tested. A lot of times it’s not just a matter of coming up with an idea and then saying, okay, let’s go do this.

The first step has to be proof of concept. We need to test it out and see does this even work? Is this idea viable in the marketplace? Viable with my people? Is this something that I can do without breaking the bank?

So there are a lot of practical considerations that come into testing out the ideas that different people come up with, before you can really start taking action and then building it into a system.

Kevin: This is really fascinating stuff. Idea, action system. It makes so much sense. For anyone listening who needs to know more. Who wants to know more? Who wants to pursue this? How can they get some more information from you

David: Just go to TopSecrets.com/shift. Request a copy of our free report. We’ll basically help you to look at where you are now and where you’re looking to be in terms of that curve: Getting something from the idea stage to an action stage, and then into a process stage.

Because without those three levels and without prioritizing it correctly, you can spend a lot of time, invest a lot of effort, and not get to the results you’re looking for.

So I think just taking some time to look through that, break through that, and have a conversation is probably very helpful.

But if you start out at TopSecrets.com/shift. Take a look at the report and then if it makes sense for us to have a conversation, you’re welcome to schedule it there.

Kevin: Well, thanks so much, David. Good to see you.

David: You too. Thanks a lot, Kevin.

Are You Ready to Move from Ideas to Actions to Systems?

If so, download this PDF. Then check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow:

1. Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just starting out in promotional products sales, learn how we can help.
2. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here.
3. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry.
4. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
5. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.