by Nancy Calabrese | May 7, 2024 | Podcast
About Roy Osing: Roy Osing is a former president, CMO, and entrepreneur with over 40 years of successful and unmatched experience in executive leadership in every aspect of business. As President of a major data and internet company, his leadership and audacious ‘unheard-of ways’ took the company from its early stage to $1 Billion in annual sales. He is devoted to inspiring leaders, entrepreneurs, and organizations to stand apart from the average boring crowd and achieve their true potential. He is a resolute blogger, keen content marketer, dedicated teacher, and mentor to young professionals. As an accomplished business advisor, he is the author of the no-nonsense book series ‘BE DiFFERENT or be dead.’ Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Roy.
In this episode, Nancy and Roy discuss the following:
- Importance of differentiation in business
- Roy’s concept of the “only statement”
- Use of passionate language to capture attention
- Cultivating a client-centric culture
- An unconventional approach to recruitment: “Hiring for Goosebumps”
- Embracing audaciousness to stand out
Key Takeaways:
- Differentiation is the key issue facing businesses today. Without it, organizations eventually die.
- Step outside your comfort zone and do things differently.
- Treat discomfort as your strategic ally. Be audacious, be brave, and choose to be different every day.
- Stand out by doing things others aren’t doing.
“And so, I came up with this hiring for Goosebumps approach, which went as follows. First, I, as President of the company, was involved in panel interviews with most of the people we were hiring. And I did that for a specific reason. First, I wanted to show the people in my organization who sat around me what to do, and hopefully, hopefully, that they would copy what I did. Secondly, it shows the person applying for a job that they are important. So, I asked them two fundamental questions. I go, “Nancy, what I’d like to know is, do you love human beings?” Now, you would typically go, “Wow, okay, I’ve never had that question before. I think I know the right answer, but I have no idea where this dude is going with it.” And you would say, “Well, yes, I do, Roy. I love human beings.” I’d say, “Okay.” So, the second question would be, “Tell me a story. Tell me a story that proves to me that you love humans.” Now, this is the killer question, okay, because it separated the wheat from the chaff. The people that treated this as an academic exercise would give me a story that left me cold. Okay. There wasn’t any truth to it. It was all mumbo jumbo, superficial, narcissistic chatter from this individual, right? But the person that had the gene told me a story that was so rich and passionate in terms of how they related to people and their feelings for people. Guess what it did, Nancy. It left me with goosebumps, and I got him right now. I would hire that person and teach him the business. People thought I was crazy. To this day, I can have; a while ago, I had a podcast with a PhD in HR in New York, and I told her this story, and she just went apoplectic. In fact, we had to stop the interview. She couldn’t take it.” – ROY
“I want you to be different. I want you to go out, be brave, be audacious, and choose to be different today, right now, in the moment, in some small way. I want you to be uncomfortable. I want you to treat discomfort as your strategic ally. I want you to do it. And tomorrow, I want you to do two things and be different. And the next day, I want you to do three things. I want you to sort of get this persona strand going for you because we need you to be different. Okay, we don’t need you to conform. We don’t need you to comply with the rules. Now, I’m not talking about being illegal. I’m saying step out, be creative, be innovative, and do things other people aren’t doing. That’s the source of joy. That’s the source of economic opportunity. And we need you in business and organizations to be that way. And you salespeople, if you’re not the only one that does what you do, Why do you have a job?” – ROY
“Step outside of your comfort zone, but do things differently than everybody else does. Okay, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable and continue to do the same thing as everybody else. I want you to be uncomfortable because you’re doing things differently, right? In a way that people care about. And the only point I want to make here is that this is not about you doing things for yourself. This is about you doing things differently in a way other people care about. So, my whole “be different” philosophy, Nancy, is about serving others in a way that no one else does. And salespeople, I want you to do that. I want you to serve your clients like no one else does. And I don’t care about the textbook. Okay, the textbook got you this far. I want you to put it down. I want you to put the textbook down and do some practical human things that are different than everybody else, including the textbook, that light fires in your client’s eyes. And guess what it does to them? It wants them to buy from you because they believe in you, trust you, follow you, and be loyal to the company. Boom. And there goes the revenue lineup. And that’s what we want you to do.” – ROY
Connect with Roy Osing:
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today and it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Roy Osing, a guy who took a startup internet company to a billion in sales. He is the only author entrepreneur and executive leader who delivers practical and proven, audacious, unheard-of ways to produce high performing businesses and successful careers. He is a blogger, content marketer and mentor to young professionals. As an accomplished business advisor, Roy is the author of the no nonsense book series, Be Different or Be Dead. With the audacious unheard-of ways, I took a startup to a billion in sales as his seventh. Welcome to the show, Roy. This is going to be a lot of fun.
Roy Osing: Hey Nancy, thanks very much for having me. I’m honored, believe me. [1:20]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, listen, your words are really catchy and let’s just jump right into it. What was the idea behind Be Different or Be Dead? And how does that relate to sales?
Roy Osing: So my experience, and I’ve been at this for like 40 years, very early on was that organizations didn’t really do a very good job of differentiating themselves from one another. They couldn’t answer the question that a customer might ask, which is, why should I do business with you and not your competitor? [1:54]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. Right.
Roy Osing: And so, it led me down the path of saying that differentiation is, in my view, it was then, and it is now the key issue facing businesses. And the consequences, quite frankly, of not differentiating at all is that your organization eventually dies, quite frankly. And I know that sounds draconian, but it is. There’s too much claptrap what I call out there where people claim that they’re better, they’re best, they’re number one, they’re the market leader. And quite frankly, Nancy, it’s hogwash. They’re not. Okay. And so, I had to create my own process, which I call the only statement, which says we are the only ones who do what we do. And there’s a lot of detail behind that as my way of counteracting this clap trap. So, the be different or be dead thing simply says, if you’re not different in some meaningful way that people care about, eventually as an organization, you will die. [2:52]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, wow. Wow, so where do you come up with all these terms? Audacious, claptrap, catchy words.
Roy Osing: Well, you know, language is so important when you’re trying to get people’s attention. And I guess one of the failings that I’ve had is that I’ve been at this, I wrote my first book in 2009 and basically started formally this thing, although I’ve lived it my whole life. And it’s kind of like an admission of failure on my part to say, I don’t think we’ve really moved the yardsticks very far from claptrap into being the only ones who do what we do. And so my tactic is to try and use as passionate, emotional kinds of language as I can to kind of capture the imagination and interest in people to take a look at why should you be different? And so words like unheard of and astonishing and unmatchable and audacious, they’re intended specifically to say, oh, what’s that all about? And if I can get you in to listen, then I might be able to convert you. [3:59]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. So, what does it take to be an audacious salesperson or leader?
Roy Osing: Yeah, well, the first thing is I have to say that without the right context and culture, it’s basically impossible. And I thought a lot about your mission and your persona around personable strategies and human connection, of which I totally agree with. The problem is unless the sales organization has an environment within which the strategy is about building customer loyalty and the culture is about behaving in a way that people care about it’s really hard for sales to be audacious. Like I can give you a whole bunch of tactics, but quite frankly, sales will be an island onto themselves unless we have the right context built for them to succeed. And my observation is because for the most part, salespeople today tend to be product floggers and it’s not their fault. Okay. And so, I would say that leadership has a bigger role to play than trying to teach salespeople how to be tactically more efficient. I can do that, but the reality is in terms of their effectiveness without the right environment, they will fail. [5:21]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Yeah. So how do you build that culture of cultivating salespeople to be client -centric?
Roy Osing: First of all, it’s not about sales, it’s about the organization. And there are two things, because, you know, there are customer service and there’s all sorts of other functions in a business that need to have the same behavior. So, for me, there’s two pieces here. One is strategic context. Okay, leaders need to build a strategy that encourages building long -term customer loyalty in favor of short -term sales. Okay, I mean, if the quota in 12 months dominates, you’re never going to have a relationship building culture because people don’t build strong relationships in 12 months in some cases, right? So, the strategy needs to be around building your existing base and growing on the base of those existing customers. The second piece is all about behaviors and that’s the culture piece, right? That says, okay, we need to treat human beings as human beings. We need to love human beings. While people cannot be trained to love human beings, Nancy, you know that. You can train them to grin, and you can train them to have a smile in their voice, but you cannot train their DNA to have a fundamental desire to serve people. And so, there’s a huge recruitment piece in here that I had a whole bunch of fun in, in terms of hiring for Goosebumps that requires you to execute on before you can even go down the journey. And so I say to leaders, if you cannot create the environment, okay, within which you can expect certain sales behaviors, then those behaviors will not happen. It occurred to me 100 years ago that we don’t need sales. Okay, what we need are people that serve human beings, right? And I don’t care what you call them. If you can serve them, in a way that solves their problems in a unique way so that you’re the only ones that do what you do, they will automatically, they will buy from you as opposed to you flogging at them and you selling them. We don’t need people to sell. We need customers to buy, and they buy within an environment where you have certain behaviors that exhibit, they care for you. They, they treat you with dignity and respect. They follow up with you. They answer the phone call, or they answer the email immediately. In other words, they care about you. But if the comp plan doesn’t honor that, rather it honors how many products you’ve sold, you’ll never make the transition. It’ll never happen. [8:10]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Yeah. Well, so how does a guy take a startup to a billion in sales? How did you make it happen?
Roy Osing: Well, first of all, we had no idea that it was going to be that successful. And by the way, you can’t see this, but whenever I start talking about this, I get, I get goosebumps because it was such an amazing achievement by just a team of turned-on amazing people. So, what we knew was Nancy, that the opportunity, and this was in the early days of the internet, we knew that the opportunity was huge. Okay. We just didn’t know how huge it was, and we were sitting in a monopoly telephone company at the time. And so, we had to literally change the culture away from order taking and engineering to proactive selling, if you will, a relationship building, customer service and marketing. And so that was a huge undertaking in simply how to do that. And the way I chose to do it, was to basically discard tradition. I’m a disrupter. My basic nature, it always has been according to my mother, has always been to disrupt the status quo. And in this particular case, it was the only way to break away from that strong monopoly-based culture that really had the grips on the company for a long time. Right. And so, my choice was to basically do things differently. I chose to do things differently in terms of how we approached planning, how we approached operations, how we approached recruitment, how we approached customer service and sales. I basically took all those functions, turned them upside down and said, hey, what if we tried a different approach, okay, that captured the hearts and minds of people in the organization? Because really, it’s not about the efficacy or your plan anyways. If you can’t turn people on to execute and help you on the journey, then nothing happens. And so, my strategy, I kind of coined my leadership as leadership by serving around. And it was all about how can I help? How can I help you? Because if I could do that, and it wasn’t about the cool ideas, it was about top line performance. But if I could light your fire, then I would be willing to bet that our top line performance is going to go through the roof. And in fact, it did year over year. It just took off and people just joined the journey. I mean, we had an army of advocates, Nancy, and throwing away the traditional approach to doing things. We hired for goosebumps. We killed dumb rules. We cut the crap. You know, we had line of sight leadership to get rid of organizational dysfunction. So, you know, there’s a lot of small crazy things that you won’t find in any other book, but mine that actually worked, you know, based on practical approach to business, not based on, on textbook theory, which I have a difficult time with anyways, which probably wouldn’t surprise you. [11:15]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, listen, I love that you make it all about them, helping them, not worrying about yourself. I mean, I think that makes a whole lot of sense. Tell me something you know is true that a lot of people don’t agree with you on.
Roy Osing: Well, I’ll tell you, my, my, the basic approach to, to recruiting people was something that I had to do to attract people that loved human beings. And basically, the theorists and the academics in the world, they don’t believe it because it doesn’t conform to standard HR theory. And let me just give you a thumbnail on it. Okay. My logic was that if I, if you want to dazzle people, if you want to build a relationship, people, they must trust you. And fundamentally that individual must love human beings. They must have; the employee needs to have the loving humans running through their veins. They need to be born with the innate desire to serve people. That was my reasoning. And I said, well, okay, you know, because if you don’t like humans, you’re not going to be good in sales. You’re not going to be good in customer service. You’re not going to be an internal audit. You’re not going to be an employee that helps you foster a culture of caring if I can call it that. [12:33]
Nancy Calabrese: Listen, if you don’t like humans, you’re not going to fit in anywhere.
Roy Osing: Yeah, and some people would say who needs them because we got chat bots and I say take that away. Anyways, we can do a whole show on that because I have such vehement feelings. Anyways, so here’s the deal. Okay, so how can I tell if a person loves homo sapiens? That was my question. And so, I came up with this hiring for Goosebumps approach, which went as follows. First, I, as president of the company, I was involved in panel interviews of most people who we were hiring. And I did that for a specific reason. First, to show the people in my organization who sat around me what to do and hopefully, hopefully that they would copy what I did. And secondly, to show the person applying for a job that they were important. So, I asked them two fundamental questions. I go, Nancy, what I’d like to know is, do you love human beings? Now what you would typically do is you go, wow, okay, I’ve never had that question before. I think I know what the right answer is, but I got no idea where this dude is going with it. And you would say, well, yes, I do, Roy. I love human beings. I’d say, okay. So, the second question would be, tell me a story. Tell me a story that proves to me that you love humans. Now this is the killer question, okay, because it clearly, it separated the wheat from the chaff. The people that treated this as an academic exercise would give me a story that left me cold. Okay. There wasn’t any truth to it. It was all mumbo jumbo, superficial, narcissistic kind of chatter from this individual, right? But the person that really had the gene told me a story that was so rich and passionate in terms of how they related people and their feelings for people. Guess what it did, Nancy. It left me with, and I got him right now, goosebumps. I would hire that person and teach him the business. People thought I was crazy. And to this day, I can have, in fact, a while ago, I had a podcast with a PhD in HR in New York, and I told her this story and she just went apoplectic. In fact, we had to stop the interview. She couldn’t take it. [14:53]
Nancy Calabrese: She did?
Roy Osing: Oh, I stopped it. I said, I said to her, let’s call her Joan. I said, Joan, you’re really having a hard time with this, aren’t you? She says, yeah, it’s not true. I said, yes, it is true. Do you know how I know that? And she says, how? And I said, I built a business to a billion. What proof do you have other than textbooks? And so, we went at this, and I finally said, peace. I got, I’m out of here. I don’t want to talk to somebody that is not willing to accept the practicality of something that works, that doesn’t necessarily coincide with academic principles. Hell, nothing I did, okay? Nothing I did at the practical level went that way. And yet for some amazing reason, it lit fires in people’s stomachs and hearts and got them to perform and we got a billion. Boom. [15:41]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow. All right, well, wait a minute. Give us an example of the perfect story.
Roy Osing: Well, I mean, it must be, yeah, okay. So, a personal story would sort of go like this. The individual probably at some point had a very, very difficult situation in their life with somebody who opposed them at every junction. And rather than taking that on in some sort of conflict way, what they did is they actually were quite empathetic for the behavior that they were facing, and they could actually remove themselves from that and look at it objectively and decide what the appropriate behavior was going to be. And the right behavior for that person was listening, responding in a feeling -caring way, trying to find out the source of the angst and the issue. And then leading into a solution that was acceptable by both as opposed to, you know, enforcing rules or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it’s more than the, it was more than the detail of the story. It was like how the individual talked about it. You know, the tone of voice, you can hear the feelings exude from the body of this individual. And so, you know, for me, you couldn’t capture that on a, on a questionnaire. For example, you had to hear it. You had to feel it. You had to touch the emotion and, and without that. And the interesting thing was, you know, my management team, after having, after going through this a while with me, they got it. They, they became pretty doggone good at it. And after a while it became, well, you know, who did you hire? Who gave you goosebumps today? Roy, everybody knew what that meant. I got him again. I can’t stand it. [17:43]
Nancy Calabrese: I love goosebumps. I think it’s great. I think it’s great. I can’t believe we’re almost up in time, Roy. I mean, we could go on and on. What is the one takeaway you want to leave the audience with?
Roy Osing: I want you to be different. I want you to go out, be brave, be audacious, and choose to be different today, right now, in the moment, in some small way. I want you to be uncomfortable. I want you to treat discomfort as your strategic ally. I want you to do it. And tomorrow, I want you to do two things, and the different. And the next day, I want you to do three things. I want you to sort of get this kind of like persona strand going for you because we need you to be different. Okay, we don’t need you to conform. We don’t need you to comply with the rules. Now I’m not talking about being illegal. I’m saying step out, be creative, be innovative, do things that other people aren’t doing. That’s the source of joy. That’s the source of economic opportunity. And we need you in business and organizations to be that way. And you salespeople, if you’re not the only one that does what you do, Why do you have a job? [19:01]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, wow. So step outside of your comfort zone is what you’re saying. Push yourself.
Roy Osing: Yeah, not just that. Step outside of your comfort zone but do things differently than what everybody else is doing. Okay, I don’t want you to be uncomfortable and continue to do the same thing as everybody else. I want you to be uncomfortable because you’re doing things differently, right, in a way that people care about. And the only point I want to make here too; this is not about you doing things for you. This is about you doing things differently in a way other people care about. So, the whole be different philosophy that I have, Nancy, is about serving others in a way that no one else does. And salespeople, I want you to do that. I want you to serve your clients in a way that no one else does. And I don’t care about the textbook. Okay, the textbook got you this far. I want you to put it down. I want you to put the textbook down and do some practical human things that are different than everybody else, including the textbook that light fires in the eyes of your client. And guess what it does to them? It wants them to buy from you because they believe in you, they trust you, they will follow you and they will be loyal to the company. Boom. And there goes the revenue line up. And that’s what we want you to do. [20:22]
Nancy Calabrese: Love it, love it. How can my people find you?
Roy Osing: While I’m on bedifferentorbedead .com, I’ve been blogging on this stuff for a long time since 2009, so check it out. There’s some information on my website about my books, you can do that. And I have an email, roi .osing .gmail .com. For heaven’s sakes, I’m happy to have a conversation with people about what’s going on with them and if there’s any way I can help them. So please take advantage of me. [20:52]
Nancy Calabrese: Hey, you know what? Besides being a wonderful expert in what you do, you have a great voice. Did anybody ever tell you that?
Roy Osing: I’d like to, yes, I’ve heard that before, but I try not to let it go to my head. Because I don’t know what the use is, yes. [21:11]
Nancy Calabrese: You mean it doesn’t. Does it give you goosebumps when you hear it? Oh.
Roy Osing: No, no, it does not. It’s loud though. And I, my wife is always giving me my heck for the fact that I’ve never needed a microphone, quite frankly, and all of the speeches and, and presentations and that, that I’ve given in large groups, conferences, I rarely need a microphone. And I guess that’s just because of what you just said. And, and I’m grateful for that gift. Yeah. And I, I hope that it never, it’s never let me down. So, thank you for mentioning. [21:46]
Nancy Calabrese: Oh, yeah. So, people, he’s the guy, Roy Osing. Reach out to him. And, you know, I think what you have to offer is amazing. And the key word is stand out and be different. So until we meet again, Roy, thanks so much for spending time with us today and make it an amazing sales day, everyone. We’ll see you next time. [22:16]
by Nancy Calabrese | May 3, 2024 | Podcast
About Jason Friedman: Jason Friedman is the Founder and CEO at CXFormula, LLC, helping small businesses and entrepreneurs grow and scale their businesses, increasing customer engagement, loyalty, retention, revenues, and profits while improving their customer experience and creating raving fans. Their approach is at the intersection of psychology, theatre, business, and marketing. With decades of theatre experience between them, they combine the art of storytelling with the science of human behavior to create reliable and consistent customer momentum, generate massive engagement, and achieve incredible business growth. Jason has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world, including Nike, Disney, Foot Locker, Bank of America, and Harvard, to name a few. He’s changing the way people look at the customer journey. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Jason.
In this episode, Nancy and Jason discuss the following:
- How his journey in theater inspired Jason to develop the Kinetic Customer Formula
- The importance of shifting perspectives to prioritize the customer experience
- Flipping the sales funnel to focus on customer success
- Adopting a strategic approach to over-delivery.
- The transformative effects of prioritizing customer success.
Key Takeaways:
- Onboarding is how we help people move from one type of relationship to the next, like every transition, and a relationship is an opportunity for onboarding.
- Overdelivery is going to kill your business.
- Focus on the experience you’re creating for your customers: take a look at it through their eyes.
“What we did in theater, it’s like: people come into a show, and all the problems in the world are going on for them. Suddenly, they disappear as the orchestra plays, the lights fade, and they become very present. As the story continues, they laugh at certain moments, shriek back at others, and clap. It’s all choreographed to the end, where they are on a journey, experiencing a transformation, moving to their feet with glorious applause and standing ovations. After like 20 years of doing this, I realized, you know what? Like, I know how to keep customers’ attention and bring them in, crafting the journey that customers go on with brands, companies, online businesses, offline businesses, products, services – you name it. We help businesses create deeper engagement, focusing on clients and building deeper relationships. It results in much bigger businesses, helping you scale your business. That’s what the Kinetic Customer Formula is: all those years of experience packed into one nice little package.” – JASON
“Because what ends up happening is the first light bulb that goes off is the realization that we as businesses make it hard for our customers to do business with us. […] And so, the first thing I do is have them learn how to shift their perspective and understand the business from the customer’s point of view. And when you do that, you realize: “Oh God, this is like, I wouldn’t want to be my customer in many ways.” And that first kind of light bulb that goes off is an emotional light bulb. Some people have, you know, felt bad because they have done everything they’ve done, and all they have decided to help the customers. [..] The second light bulb is where people start to understand: “Well, okay, I get it. We can remove the friction, but I still have all this competition, spending all this money on ads and all my clients. I’m still not getting as many people in. I’m still not optimized”. And the second light bulb is that we spend all our energy focusing on how to get strangers to come to our business and talk to us, and very little of our energy and money resources on helping the people who said yes to us get those results. Now, I will help them shift their focus to the other side of the funnel. So, we flip the funnel. Those are the first two big light bulbs that blow up for people. And then from there, we go we go further.” – JASON
“If you can understand your customers that deeply, you can start to provide the journey they need to go on and make them feel safe and comfortable going on because you understand them. And most businesses know such superficial information about our customers, but when we start to go into this kind of a way to look at it, we uncover so much more. And that’s where we start to realize: “Oh, you know what? I can look at the business through their lens. I get them now”. In fact, in most companies that we work with, Nancy says to me: “Jason, you’re great. I used to hate some of my customers. I have fallen in love with them. I understand them better, and they appreciate me more because they know they feel understood”. And that changes the entire dynamic.” – JASON
Connect with Jason Friedman:
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today and it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Jason Friedman, founder and CEO of CX Formula, working with fast growing entrepreneurial companies to help them grow and scale businesses that give them stability, purpose and energy to work smarter and live better using his proprietary kinetic customer formula. Over the past 25 years, Jason has sold over 200 million in products and services through their various companies. He’s consulted with hundreds of entrepreneurs helping them grow and scale their businesses. And in addition to all of this, Jason is also CEO of Spotlight Brand Services, a marketing and brand management agency helping e-commerce businesses crush it on Amazon and other online marketplaces. Wow, Jason, where should we start? Welcome to the show.
Jason Friedman: Hey Nancy, thanks for having me. Super excited to be with you today. [1:29]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, this is going to be fun. So why don’t we jump right in and maybe you can share with us what the kinetic customer formula is about.
Jason Friedman: Yeah, so, you know, it’s a funny story. I started out, my whole journey started when I was a kid, and I was brought into the world of theater. And so, I was a behind the scenes guy, did wax and lighting and things like that. And it started at summer camp when I was very young, and each year kept kind of doing more and more of it. And I had this kind of Mr. Miyagi, wax on, wax off experience, where I learned how to engage an audience like kind of accidentally, right? And so, what we did in theater, it’s like people come into a show and all the problems in the world are going on for them. And all of a sudden, they kind of disappear as the orchestra starts to play and the lights start to fade, and they become very present. And as the story goes on, they laugh at certain moments, and they shriek back at certain moments, and they clap. And it’s all choreographed to the end where they are on a journey, and they have this transformation where they are moved by the end of it and they hope to their feet and their glorious applause and standing ovations. And it was like the same experience night after night. And so after like 20 years of doing this, I realized, you know what? Like, I actually know how to keep customers’ attention and to bring them in and to bring them on a journey with brands, with companies, with online businesses, offline businesses, with products, with services, with you name it and what we do is we help businesses today create deeper engagement and focus with their clients and build deeper relationships by helping them really craft the journey that customers go on with them. And it results in much bigger businesses. It helps you. It is a magical formula that helps you scale your business. And so that’s what the Kinetic Customer Formula really is. It’s all those years of experience kind of packed into one nice little package. [3:30]
Nancy Calabrese: So, when you begin working with a company, how long does it take for the light bulb to go off?
Jason Friedman: For their light bulb to go off or their customers light bulb to go off?
Nancy Calabrese: Well, we could do both, but I have a fair life both.
Jason Friedman: There’s a lot of light bulbs that go off, right? Because what ends up happening is the first light bulb that really goes off is the realization that we as businesses make it hard for our customers to do business with us. And when you start to understand what I mean by that and how despite our efforts to make it better for our customers, oftentimes we’ve created so many friction points, so many obstacles in their journey because we’re looking at it through our perspective as the business, right? And so, the first thing I do is have them really learn how to shift their perspective and understand the business from the customer’s point of view. And when you do that, you start to realize, oh God, this is like, I wouldn’t want to be my customer in a lot of ways. And so that first kind of light bulb that goes off and it’s an emotional light bulb, right? Some people have, you know, they feel bad because they done everything that they’ve done, all their decisions have been to help the customers. And yet in spite of that, they have some of these challenges, right? So that’s the first light bulb. The second light bulb is this light bulb where people start to understand, well, okay, I get it. Like we can take out the friction, but like I still have like all this competition and I’m spending all this money on ads and all my clients, I’m still not getting as many people in. I’m still not optimized. And the second light bulb is that we spend all our energy focusing on how to get strangers to come to our business and talk to us, and very little of our energy money resources on helping the people who said yes to us get those results. And so now I help them shift their focus to the other side of the funnel, if you will. So, we flip the funnel. And my whole premise is that when we really focus on creating success, creating results for our customers, regardless of what kind of business you have. When that becomes our focus and our energy flows there, every dollar that we spend on the front end of our funnel, every dollar that we spend bringing people in, result in an exponential return. So, it makes more sense to invest in the front end once you’ve solved this other piece. And most businesses kind of do it backwards, right? So yeah, like those are the first two big light bulbs that blow up for people. And then from there, we go we go further, right? And there’s lots of light bulbs along the journey, but once they kind of have those epiphanies and they kind of have faith that, whoa, yeah, this process is going to help me, it makes sense, then all sorts of things start to happen. We start to take massive action. [6:23]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow, huh. You know, I know that you’re all about obsessing over your customer’s success, and you do a lot of mixing with storytelling and the science of human behavior. Can you explain that in more detail?
Jason Friedman: Yeah, sure. I mean, so here’s the thing. Like, let’s take someone that has like an online business, for example, right? So, someone comes to your business and there, they watch your sales video or whatever your presentation is and they’re like, yeah, this sounds pretty good. I’m in, I’m going to do this, right? That in and of itself is not a commitment. It’s an intention, right? And we think, oh yeah, they said, yeah, they’re committed to it, but they’re not. They had an intention, and they took a step. And so, then what happens is the psychology comes in, right? There’s Byers Remorse. They’re like, huh, you know what? I probably, maybe, I don’t know, maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Or, you know, I’ve done this before, I’ve tried something in the past and it didn’t work. This is going to be the same again. And so all of these normal reptilian brain thoughts come into our heads and these cognitive biases stop us from making progress. And so like, when we start to look at what are the stories that we need to tell, how do we show people that this is going to be a different experience, right? How do we get them to forget about all that stuff, like when they come into the theater, and just be present and be part of that story, and go on the journey with us? How do they have faith and trust us? And so that begins by that very first moment, realizing we must get their commitment and we must earn their commitment, right? And so, the onboarding part, like most people think onboarding is one and done. And we believe that onboarding is this ongoing thing. We think, say to people, always be onboarding, right? And onboarding to me is how we help people move from one type of relationship to the next part of, like every transition and relationship is an opportunity for onboarding. And so, when they go from stranger to customer, there’s an onboarding moment when they go from like the beginning of their journey as a customer to maybe the next level where it’s like a whole different part of engagement, that’s an opportunity to onboard people. And so, it’s in those moments that we must gain that trust and that commitment. And we do it by setting and managing expectations by providing enough information in bite sized chunks that doesn’t overwhelm people. Right. [9:05]
Nancy Calabrese: Well.
Jason Friedman: What I see, I see so many business owners do, Nancy, is that they come in and they just say, oh, I want to give them all the stuff they need so that they have everything. And so, they give them this, like they purchase that online course and they get this email of death. And it’s like, oh my God, there’s four billion things I have to do. And that’s when you’re like, I don’t have time for this. I shouldn’t have bought this. Oh, what was I thinking? Right? [9:30]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. I totally agree with you. I totally. Too much information is a turn off.
Jason Friedman: Yeah, and we need to know them. So again, using our theater background, the next epiphany that we have people kind of go through is really to understand their quote avatar, their ideal customers or their personas, whatever word you use, how do we help them understand them on a deeper level? And so, we use it in a way that people do in theater, right? So, imagine that you’re Matthew McConaughey or Robert De Niro, and you’re playing this character in a film. How do you get into character? So that when you’re on stage, everything about your isms, your mannerisms, your breath, your vocal, your whole backstory is all so believable that when we’re watching the show, people are like, oh yeah, like he’s totally that guy. It’s not Matthew McCona anymore, he’s this guy. And so, if you can understand your customers that deeply, you can start to provide the journey that they need to go on and that they feel safe and comfortable going on, because you understand them. And most businesses, we know such superficial information about our customers, when we start to go into this kind of a way to look at it, we uncover so much more. And that’s where we start to realize, oh, you know what? I can look at the business through their lens. I get them now. In fact, most companies that we work with, Nancy, they say to me, Jason, you’re a great I used to hate some of my customers. I have fallen in love with them. I understand them better and they appreciate me more because they know they feel understood, right? And that changes the entire dynamic. Always been there. Yeah. [11:16]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Wow. I think that’s a great idea. Yeah. Oh my God. So, I mean, I don’t know if we’ve kind of covered it, but do you have a particular unique idea that is different and sets you apart?
Jason Friedman: I mean, I think many of our ideas set us apart. But again, this idea of, like, what is an ideal result for your customer? So, for example, like, if I’m a diet business, right? I’m teaching people about weight loss, for example, right? I might think, oh, like, the ideal result is that they lose 20 pounds, right? Well, that is not the ideal result. The ideal result is more around how that customer feels about their journey, right? So, if I, like 20 pounds is the way we get them the result, but the result is that they feel more confident in their skin, that they feel like instead of sitting on the TV watching Netflix alone on a Saturday night, they’re calling friends and going out. And like when they walk in their closet, they feel good about the clothes that they can put on. They feel confident. That’s the ideal result. And so, when we start to teach people about how to really think about the results, It’s the idea of, we call it the R4, right? We want, the result is that we want people to rave about the journey they just had with you. We want people to renew their memberships or their subscriptions with you because they would feel lost if they weren’t part of that community. We want them to return to buy more products, the next product, the next level of products from you because they feel so moved by what’s happened that they just can’t help but want more. And ideally, the last part is that they recruit others to come work in your business because they feel this compulsion that they want other people to come in. They want to help people get what they got from you because it was so outstanding. And so, when you really think about the result that way, you start to do what we call write an ideal customer script, right? I want you to script the perfect testimonial that your customer would say because most businesses think, yeah, I’ve got great testimonials. It’s like, oh, I lost 20 pounds, it was awesome. That’s not a great testimony. The testimonial I just shared about like my life; I love me again. I go in my closet, and I put on clothes, and I feel good. I go out instead of sitting at home alone. I have never felt so confident in my life. That’s a testimonial that’s going to get someone to go by from you. And when I had that experience, if I had that experience, I’m telling everybody I know, because it was transformational. And so, what I want people to do is to reverse engineer everything that happens so that people, like a conveyor belt, like an assembly line, they have that same experience. And in theater, like when I was, I toured on the road with big Broadway shows like Jesus Christ Superstar, Fiddler on the Roof, Man of La Mancha, guess what? Every single night with a completely different audience, they laughed at the exact same moment. Every single night with the completely different audience, every single different city doesn’t matter. They had the same applause. They did the same things at the same time because it was scripted. It was practiced. It was engineered to take them on that journey. And most of them leave that to chance in our businesses. So, when you go through our program, you learn a system. You build an operating system for your business that delivers delighted customers who bring other people to your business over and over again. You’ve created this recruiting system of like, this crazy like word of mouth and this energy from people that they have to tell other people about your business. So then when you start doing all the other sales functions, all the things that you were doing to bring people in, now you know that you’re gonna actually get big results and they’re gonna convert. And those dollars that you spend on marketing, the things that you start marketing, are the success stories of your other clients. And that’s how you win. And so, we scale businesses by helping them do this over and over again. And it’s one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done in my life. [15:31]
Nancy Calabrese: Do you have a… I could hear your passion about it. Do you target a certain industry? Are you industry agnostic?
Jason Friedman: Sadly, most industries think, well, but it won’t work in my business, right? You’ve been down this road before, right? It doesn’t matter. If you have customers in your business, this will help you, right? It really doesn’t matter. And Nancy, the crazy thing about this, the strategic byproduct is, and well, it’s that your employees end up loving their job more. Your employees, your culture in your business transforms you start to attract more right fit employees because they want to be part of the movement you’ve created. And so, some people come to us just to do this exact same formula just for the inside of their business because it’s the same formula, we do it the same way. And so, it’s just a powerful, powerful tool that we’ve spent years just kind of making better and making better. And it just makes sense. Like if you have clients who love you, they’re going to tell other people and that’s what we all want. Like nobody, I’ve never spoken to a single person that said to me, I don’t care if my clients like my product or not, you know? And if they do, if they are those people, it’s like, look, I just want the $10, if I get some returns, I don’t care, that’s not my client. They’re never going to buy my product and I don’t want them to, right? I want their competition to beat them because they’re doing good things to help people. Right, and that’s what we want to do. [17:00]
Nancy Calabrese: Something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.
Jason Friedman: That’s a great question. So here’s the, well, I’m going to tell you something that nobody agrees with me on at first. Okay? And here’s what it is. Overdelivery is going to kill your business. And they’re like, wait, what? When you overdeliver all the time, under promise, overdeliver. When it’s like, I’m going to always overdeliver. Like I always overdeliver my clients. They love me. I promise you that it will kill your business. And here’s why. Because the world needs contrast. The only way we know if something is good is if we had something bad. We must have a comparison. And if everything you do is a 10, it’s just expected. It’s no longer over delivery. So, what you’ve created by always over delivering is you’ve created an expectation of over delivery. So, all you can do is fail when you can’t think of another idea to do or you don’t have any more money to keep spending, to keep up leveling. And so, what we teach people to do is what we call strategic over delivery. Pick key moments that you wanna go a little bit above that are most meaningful to those customers. And so, when you get into character and you know who those customers are, you’ll know what moments matter the most. And that’s where we get that reward of an over delivery. And so, what you do is you set and manage expectations. And when you do what you say, just do what you say, you’re better than most businesses out there today. And you’ve built trust. And then when you pick key moments to go a little bit above and beyond, and maybe you’re always at a five, you go to a seven. Sometimes you go to an eight. Maybe you do an occasional 10. They will appreciate it. They will see it as over delivery and they will thank you, but it won’t build this expectation that that’s what you have to do all the time, and they will still love you. They’ll actually love you more. So that’s the one that I fight with people on initially, and then they finally say, you know what? That’s actually pretty smart. [19:15]
Nancy Calabrese: I love it. Yeah. I love it. Hey, I can’t believe we’re up in time already. What is the one takeaway you want to leave the audience with?
Jason Friedman: Yeah, like the big the big aha, like if you take nothing else away, focus on the experience you’re creating for your customers. Take a look at it through their eyes. Shop your experience and stop making it hard for people to do business with you. [19:38]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. I love it. I know you have the gift for the audience, right?
Jason Friedman: Yeah, I do. I know we’re living on time, and so I’m not going to tell you what it is, but I’m gonna tell you this. I have a PDF that will take you less than 10 minutes to go through. It’s totally free, no obligations to do anything further beyond that, and you can’t get it if you just go to my main website at cxformula.com. The only way you can get it is if you go to gift, g-i-f-t dot cxformula.com slash conversational dash selling and I’m telling you less than 10 minutes. And it’s an idea, it’s a big idea, like I shared with over delivery. It’s a bigger idea than that, with some actionable ways you can start using it, that will literally change your business. You got nothing to lose. [20:23]
Nancy Calabrese: Love it. Oh my God. You’re fabulous. I really enjoyed our discussion and everyone out there, he knows what he’s doing. So, for all of us or all of you out there that have customers and could really benefit from getting involved with your customers to the degree that Jason can teach you, I urge that you call. How can they reach you, Jason? Is LinkedIn profile, phone number?
Jason Friedman: You can definitely hit me up on LinkedIn if you want. It’s linkedin.com slash in slash Jason D Friedman. You can hit us up at my website, cxformula.com. There’s a contact us information. It’s got our phone number, all that on there. So yeah, definitely reach out. Love to chat with anybody. [21:09]
Nancy Calabrese: Great. Listen, again, everyone out there, take advantage of Jason’s generous offer and make it an awesome sales day. See you next time. [21:22]
by Nancy Calabrese | Apr 30, 2024 | Podcast
About Jon Keel: Jon Keel is the Founder and CEO of Improved Together, LLC, which helps small business people increase revenue and gain the freedom they want by using proven automated systems. Jon is a results-oriented Business Advisor who has been helping businesses and their leaders stand out and thrive for nearly 25 years. Jon has developed a local, national, and international reputation as a performance-based online marketing expert, actively involved in this arena since January 1997. In addition to being CEO of Improved Results, which he founded in September 1997, he co-developed the Xavier University MBA E-Business program, where he taught online marketing and e-commerce for over three years. Since 2008, his business has focused primarily on expanding its online presence, reputation marketing, and conversion improvement for local and regional businesses. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Jon.
In this episode, Nancy and Jon discuss the following:
- The rapid growth of LinkedIn and its frequent updates
- Importance of staying informed about LinkedIn’s changes
- Need for a professional LinkedIn profile.
- Significance of staying current with LinkedIn’s features.
- Tips on how to grow your LinkedIn followers through engagement.
Key Takeaways:
- The limit on connections is 30,000, but there is no limit on your number of followers.
- LinkedIn will now show about 60 to 70 % of the posts of the people for whose bell you’ve clicked.
- It’s essential when you reach out to people and make connection requests that you include a personal message with the person.
- 99 % of LinkedIn users use it ineffectively and don’t know due to ignorance.
“You have to master five principles. I have given a talk on mastering these five principles to be successful on LinkedIn. And, you know, one of them is to have a killer profile. LinkedIn also says, in addition to 99% of folks not using it effectively, that 99% of profiles— and I don’t know any better way to say it— they suck. They’re terrible. And people need to have their profiles be professional. In other words, would you show up as an amateur or a professional? And it’s your choice. The second is to understand that it’s about relationships on LinkedIn. It’s not a quick sale. LinkedIn is not a transactional platform. It’s a relationship platform. So, develop that mentality in your writing and in the videos that you do. And the third is to expand and grow your network. You can never have a large enough network on LinkedIn. And there are ways to do that. The fourth, I’m trying to remember, I’m just having a brain cramp this morning, but the fifth is to stay current, which is what I offer all my members, the ability to stay current through twice-a-month master classes that I hold where I share with them all this current stuff that I’ve learned. And my objective, Nancy, my objective is not to be the smartest guy in the room. I just hang out with them.” – JON
“Well, the easiest way is to find people on LinkedIn that you want to follow, that you think, well, that person, I might, number one, have the opportunity to do business with them. Secondly, they might be a great referral source for me. So, it all starts first with following them. And I remember from the “Five Love Languages” book that came out many years ago, it’s hard to withdraw before you make deposits. So, you make a deposit by following them and commenting on their content. A certain number of them will follow you back and comment on your comments. That’s the way it starts. It’s a process.” – JON
“There’s no limit to the number of posts you can do. I personally recommend three a week. Some people post every day, and that’s fine. If you can do it, that’s great. I personally don’t have the time to do it every day, but certainly no more than once a day. When you post more than once a day, your overall post-exposure will increase, but subsequent posts are throttled, if you will, by posting more than one today.” – JON
Connect with Jon Keel:
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today and it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with John Keel, the founder and CEO of Improve Together, an exclusive community of like -minded professionals working together to develop their personal brand by making LinkedIn work for them. John works with LinkedIn users who are frustrated, confused, feel as if they’re missing out on the tremendous business growth opportunity LinkedIn offers and even overwhelmed by LinkedIn’s continuous updates. And in addition, he co -developed the Xavier University MBA e -business program, where he taught online marketing and e -commerce. As I said just a moment ago, John, it’s all about LinkedIn these days. Welcome to the show.
Jon Keel: Thanks so much, Nancy. I’m glad to have the opportunity to share with you and your audience today. [1:20]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, you know, I watched a short video that you created. The one thing that jumped out to me was there were 350 million members in LinkedIn, and they add three new members every second. And yet, 99 % of LinkedIn users use it ineffectively. Why is that?
Jon Keel: I think the main reason, what I discovered four or five years ago, Nancy, was that while LinkedIn is a great platform, a great B2B platform, a great business platform, and it actually crossed a billion users worldwide, the end of 2024, and it’s now adding four new users every second, LinkedIn continues to make upgrades to the system. Improvements, et cetera. Last year, for example, in 2023, LinkedIn, made 140 changes and modifications to the platform. Well, that’s great. That’s great, by the way. But at the same time, in my opinion, LinkedIn does an equally poor job at communicating those changes and upgrade to its members. So people, in a sense, I’ve said this on several recent calls, people are wallowing in ignorance. It’s not that they’re stupid, they just don’t know. [2:43]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, that’s weird. So why do they continually update it?
Jon Keel: Well, to make the platform better. I mean, they’ve just within the last two weeks have made some additional what I consider to be fairly significant changes, particularly around the profile. And I personally believe it’s just going to make the profile better for those people who choose to use LinkedIn as a sales medium, as a sales potential medium. [3:13]
Nancy Calabrese: Sure, what kind of changes did they make?
Jon Keel: Well, they eliminated what’s called creator mode, which came out about two years ago. And what will in effect happen is that the about section will move up back up to the top of the profile the way it was before LinkedIn incorporated creator mode several years ago. Featured section will move down. But more importantly, I think for me, from my perspective anyway, is they have broken out the providing services section into a separate section with the opportunity for people to add media, videos, et cetera, to that section. And I believe part of this is, and I don’t know this, but I believe it’s due to LinkedIn maybe modifying its practices, if you will, to allow those of us who sell to use it more effectively. I’m excited about the change. [4:14]
Nancy Calabrese: Yo, how did you get notified? Because I certainly was not aware of any of those changes.
Jon Keel: Well, when I first got serious about LinkedIn around five years ago, I started reaching out to people and I have what I call a posse, my posse of 10 people worldwide who are definitely LinkedIn insiders. I mean, these guys and gals know their stuff. More importantly, over a period of time, I’ve come to trust them implicitly so that if they say something, I know that it’s correct. There’s a lot of people out there, a lot of people out there on LinkedIn advising that say things that maybe not, aren’t necessarily true or not up to date. And I pay these, I pay these folks every month, uh, just in order to have the, the relationship with them. [5:06]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow, I think that’s awesome. So, can any person on LinkedIn be successful? I mean, what do you have to do to be successful?
Jon Keel: Well, I think you have to master five principles. In fact, I have a whole talk I give on master these five principles to be successful on LinkedIn. And, you know, one of them is to have a killer profile. LinkedIn also says in addition to 99 % of folks not using it effectively, that 99 % of profiles, and I don’t know any better way to say it, they suck. They’re terrible. And people need to have their profiles be professional. In other words, would you show up as an amateur or a professional? And it’s your choice. The second is to understand that it’s about relationships on LinkedIn. It’s not the quick sale. LinkedIn is not a transactional platform. It’s a relationship platform. So, develop that mentality in your writing and in videos that you do. And the third is to expand and grow your network. You can never have a large enough network on LinkedIn. And there are ways to do that. The fourth, I’m trying to remember, I’m just having a brain cramp this morning, but the fifth is to stay current, which is what I offer all my members, the ability to stay current through twice a month master classes that I hold where I share them all this current stuff that I’ve learned. And my objective, Nancy, my objective is not to be the smartest guy in the room. I just hang out with him. [6:51]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that’s smart. You know, you mentioned about the connection. I mean, is there a limit to the number of connections a person can have?
Jon Keel: Yeah, the limit on connections is 30, 000. But there is no limit on the number of followers you can have. I have a number of friends who have well over 100 ,000 followers. And that’s important because followers, in addition to connections, see your content and see your comments on posts. And I’ll say so I continually, every day I have an exercise I go through every day. It takes me about 30 minutes where I’m continuing to grow my connections and followers. [7:42]
Nancy Calabrese: Okay. How do you grow your followers?
Jon Keel: Well, the easiest way is to find people on LinkedIn that you want to follow, that you think, well, that person, I might, number one, I might have the opportunity to do some business with them. Or secondly, they might be a great referral source for me. So, it all, it all starts first with following them. And I remember from the five love languages book came out many years ago, it’s hard to make withdrawals before you make deposits. So, you make a deposit by following them, commenting on their content. A certain number of them will follow you back and comment on your comments. That’s the way it starts. It’s a process. [8:33]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. You know, why is it that, you know, I see some of my connections, posts, and I don’t see others? How does LinkedIn determine what posts you see?
Jon Keel: Well, that’s all part of the, some of the work that LinkedIn has done over the years, but more particularly since last fall. Typically, it used to be that LinkedIn would show when you post a post, LinkedIn would show your post to 10 % of your connections. Well, that’s changed a little bit. They now show your post, your content to people with whom you’ve had an engagement, you know, and messaging back and forth within the last two or three weeks, people who have recently followed you, which again goes back to why it’s important to continually build the list of people who are following you. [9:27]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. That’s really interesting. You know, one of the things I learned, and I don’t know if this is a new feature, but apparently there’s a bell on profiles. I’m sure you’re aware of it. They were on some profiles and they’re not on others. Maybe you can describe what the bell is. Why doesn’t everyone have that?
Jon Keel: Well, the bell is located right underneath the banner graphic in the upper right. If you follow somebody, you will see their bell. So, if you go to somebody’s profile and you don’t see the bell, you just need to go down and click the follow button to follow them. The bell will automatically appear. And when you click the bell, LinkedIn will then show you, and this is again, a change from last fall. It used to be they said all their posts. LinkedIn will now show about 60 to 70 % of the posts of the people for whose bell you’ve clicked. [10:32]
Nancy Calabrese: Okay. Huh. And how many posts do you recommend? I mean, is there a limit to the number of posts? LinkedIn allows you to.
Jon Keel: There’s no limit to the number of posts you can do. I personally recommend three a week. Some people post every day and that’s fine. If you can do it, that’s great. I personally don’t have the time to do every day, but certainly no more than once a day. When you post more than once a day, your overall post exposure will increase, but subsequent posts are are throttled, if you will, by posting more than one today. [11:13]
Nancy Calabrese: I mean do they ever flag you if you post too much?
Jon Keel: I’ve not read that. I mean, there are things you can do to get flagged by LinkedIn and you definitely want to stay under LinkedIn’s radar.
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Well, how many connections can you, I guess, reach out to on a daily basis without getting flagged?
Jon Keel: Well, that’s another good question. If you have the free version of LinkedIn, you’re limited to 10 connection requests a week. Yeah. If you have premium or Navigator, I think the limit is 200 a week. To me, it’s worth the money. I wouldn’t use LinkedIn without having Navigator. [11:56]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, no, no, no, we have navigator. You know, I, I, somebody told me it was about 50 a day.
Jon Keel: Used to be the LinkedIn has recently throttled that back. And I don’t know if they just want more people to have premium, invest in premium or Navigator or what. And it’s important when you reach out to people and make connection requests that you include a personal message to the person. Where do you want to connect? Whenever I get a connection request from somebody and I probably get 10 to 15 a day, if they don’t have a personal message for them, I will just immediately disregard that connection request. [12:45]
Nancy Calabrese: So, what do you mean by personal message? What are some examples?
Jon Keel: Let’s say I wanted to reach out to you. We’re already connected, but I’d say, Nancy, and I would write something like, and by the way, I have all this templated. Nancy, I’ve been seeing some of your recent posts and really like what you write. It seems like we should be connected. Let’s connect. It’s something that’s something personal. It’s not high brow, but it’s just you’re talking like you talk to somebody in real life. [13:20]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. You said earlier that LinkedIn is about building relationships, not selling. And I had this, I guess, conversation with somebody else about it. To me, I see LinkedIn as a sales tool. Yes, you want to build a relationship, but the ultimate goal is to sell. Wouldn’t you agree?
Jon Keel: Oh, totally, totally. I don’t do LinkedIn for fun. I mean if you have the time to do it, and it’s a hobby, that’s okay. But I use it as a sales tool. And, and the way I do that, and then here’s where a lot of people make mistakes on LinkedIn, Nancy is that they will connect with somebody, and somebody will connect with them. And the first word out of their mouth is, and many times they will automate their responses. Oh, I do this, I sell this, I can do that for you. And many of those messages are automated. I disregard those immediately. First thing I want to do is, when I say build the relationship, is maybe engender some type of conversation. Maybe I’ll ask questions about them or about their business. And I typically will do that a couple of times, maybe over several weeks. And then at some point I’ll say, you know, it seems like it might be worthwhile for us to have a conversation. If you agree, let me know. I never include my call scheduling link unasked for, or basically unless somebody has said, yeah, I agree with that. One of the things I was going to say, one of the things that a friend of mine taught me recently is, Nancy, would it make sense to have a no sales zone intro call so we can get to know each other better? And I like to turn no sales zone to put people at ease. Most people think if you want to have a call, you want to sell me something. Well, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe not. You know, I’ve sold over the last 40 years, I’ve sold hundreds of millions of dollars of stuff in various careers. And I never did it by being over the top or in somebody’s face. [15:50]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. How did you know I’m just curious how did you make the transition to LinkedIn marketing.
Jon Keel: Well, this is my third career. My first career, 23 years, I had an engineering background and I knew that I wanted to do technical sales. So, I aligned with the company many years ago and over 23 years where we sold water treatment and wastewater treatment, plant equipment, capital process equipment. And that happened to be my educational background was environmental engineering. So, it fit. And in that timeframe, I sold a quarter billion dollars worth of stuff over 23 years. I ended up owning and running the business or it ran me. And for personal reasons, I needed to sell the business, which I did. Then in my interim period, because I didn’t have a job, I discovered the internet. And this was January of 97. And at that time, Nancy, there were 72 ,000 websites in the world. I saw this as a tool I thought that small businesses could use to increase their businesses, to increase their revenue. So, I went out and found some people that I trusted, paid them some pretty good money to teach me all about online marketing. And they did. And for the next 25 years, I worked with almost 1600 businesses around the world, helping them increase their revenue I never used the term online or internet marketing, but I spoke to what they were looking for, which was increased revenue. And that worked very well, building up to about a million dollars of revenue a year, ongoing, you know, continuity revenue. And March 1st, 2020, that shut down with the pandemic. And frustrating thing was what I’ve been doing for 25 years just wasn’t working anymore. So, through a serendipitous conversation I had with a friend of mine because I had ineffectively been using LinkedIn for several years. He connected me with some people who had developed a SaaS product that basically makes LinkedIn work better. And I became a white label partner for them. I’m one of five white label partners in the world. And I just, in fact, I was telling the story this morning on another call that what I observed was knowing what to do and knowing the soft skills that you need in LinkedIn and noticing that LinkedIn just didn’t update people. Again, 99 % of LinkedIn users use it ineffectively. And due to ignorance, they just don’t know. I love to teach, so I developed a whole series if you will of master classes where every other month, I teach all things LinkedIn all the things you need to do and need to know to be successful on LinkedIn and over the last four years I’ve had over 7 000 people register for and go through the training. [19:11]
Nancy Calabrese: it. I love it. Yeah, and you’re having one, right? Relatively soon, I think, in the next couple of weeks.
Jon Keel: Oh yeah, I have one coming up in third week of March.
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. Wow. Wow. John, I can’t believe we’re up in time. I could go on and on. Is there anything you want the audience or leave the audience with? Like, what is one takeaway you want the audience to have?
Jon Keel: Well, I think to understand from a principal or a fundamental standpoint, I give a talk, I have a 30 minute talk I give, that I recorded. And it’s called master these fundamentals, these five fundamentals to be successful on LinkedIn. Once you know the fundamentals and you master them, you just keep doing them over and over and over again. I mean, you know, I’d be glad to, you know, I can get you a copy of the link and people can reach out to you directly and, and, and watch the recording. I really don’t sell anymore. I just educate. [20:13]
Nancy Calabrese: I think that’s awesome, awesome. How can my people find you?
Jon Keel: Well, if they go to LinkedIn, my name is easy to easy to find as J O N K E L John Keel, like the bottom of the group. Reach out, follow me, reach out and reach out to me to connect because I will connect if you want to schedule a call. The way to do that, you can find that on my LinkedIn profile. I probably have 20 to 25 scheduled calls a week. Just talking with people, all kinds of people from all over the world. [20:48]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow, fascinating. Take advantage of John’s expertise. I totally am in your court that LinkedIn is an amazing tool to develop the relationships and ultimately sell. So, people reach out to John. John, you were a fabulous guest and I’ll see you tomorrow at our networking event. But I really appreciate you sharing all of the wisdom that you’ve collected over the years.
Jon Keel: Thanks so much, Nancy. It’s been great. It has passed fast, for sure.
Nancy Calabrese: I told you it would. So everyone make it an amazing sales day and LinkedIn day and I’ll see you next time. [21:31]
by Nancy Calabrese | Apr 29, 2024 | Podcast
About Eric Boggs: Eric Boggs is the Founder & CEO of RevBoss, an outbound agency on a mission to bring honesty and transparency to the B2B sales process. Using a mix of software automation, creative strategy and messaging, and top-notch client service, RevBoss powers full-service outbound campaigns for 100s of teams across a wide range of industries, including SaaS companies, marketing and creative agencies, video production services, and business services providers. Today, Eric leads the effort to bring happiness to 100s of clients and more than 50 RevBuds worldwide. Eric spent the last 20 years building companies and advising successful CEOs (Device Magic, Kevel, UserVoice, Ignite Social, and many more). He completed his undergraduate studies at UNC Chapel Hill and earned an MBA at UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, where he was a Dean’s Fellow. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Eric.
In this episode, Nancy and Eric discuss the following:
- The importance of human conversation in sales
- Eric Boggs’ mission with RevBoss: client and coworker happiness
- The role of AI in transforming sales and marketing processes
- Strategies for generating qualified appointments
- The effectiveness of personalized email subject lines
- Recommendations for optimizing email cadence and timing.
Key Takeaways:
- When you see really long emails, it’s just laziness because it takes a lot of work to be sharp and direct in your communication.
- My team has probably gotten tired of hearing me say cut it in half, but I think you can cut it in half and usually cut it in half again.
- Content quality and volume are moving targets, but they are also goals you never achieve.
- If it can always be shorter, it can always be better.
“AI will not replace human-to-human interaction. However, it is in the process of absolutely transforming the steps in the marketing and selling process that ultimately will lead to human interaction. And it’s doing that with content and decision-making and process enablement. And frankly, it’s going to make the process better in the long run, but it’s making it awful messy right now.” – ERIC
“At RevBoss, we do lead generation for hundreds of clients. Most are marketing agencies, PR firms, and business services-type companies. That’s probably 60% of our customers. 30% are SaaS technology companies, and 10% are other. Machine shops and commercial real estate are all kinds of odds and ends. And our strategy and mechanism are generally the same across the board. We’re email first and primarily email. But increasingly, we’re augmenting that with targeted display ads. And sometimes, we’ll layer on a LinkedIn program if it’s targeted and small and makes sense. We’ve never done phone. And I know that’s your expertise. No, it’s more of a personal preference and experience than anything else. We have plenty of clients that have had a lot of success cold calling internally or with partners. And we’ve worked, you know, we’ve told plenty of sales leads in the past, hey, yeah, we don’t do that. But I do think that phone will work for you. We’ve just focused on email because we’re good at it. We can automate it with a lot of technology and increasingly automate it with many AI integrations. And that’s just kind of how we’ve how we built the business.” – ERIC
“As a subject line, I’m rather ambivalent. If it works, it works; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. We’ve had clients where we’ve dropped emojis and manipulated text. One thing I know works at RevBoss is that subject lines should resemble those you’d send to a coworker. You’d never send an email with a subject line like “Increase your XYZ by some percent,” right? Good subject lines are casual, like “Hey, how’s it going?” or “I have a question about this thing.” You’ll get the desired result as long as you broadly fall into that category. Emojis and text manipulation are great ideas.” – ERIC
“Our general approach is three emails over a week, maybe 10 days. One of the emails is usually like a bump or an inline reply, maybe two; perhaps both are inline replies or forwards. Instead of doing five, eight, or 10 emails or touches over an extended period, we like to do short bursts in seven days. Let that prospect chill out for 60 days 90 days, and then do another short burst over a short period of time. We found that the prospects we retarget—say, I email you today, and then if you don’t reply after two or three emails, I email you again in 60 or 90 days—roughly convert at the same rate as net new prospects. So, a lot of the success we’re able to generate for our clients is based on repetition, process, and ensuring we’re landing in the inbox with enough frequency, the right target prospect, and a tight message to get lucky. And you know, we get lucky to the tune of hundreds of times a day for our clients.” – ERIC
Connect with Eric Boggs:
Try Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/
Connect with Nancy Calabrese:
Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today. And it always starts with the human conversation. Today, we’re speaking with Eric Boggs, the founder and CEO of RevBoss. Eric has spent the last 20 years of his career building and advising successful CEOs. Eric started RevBoss in 2014 with a mission to build a business that made clients and coworkers happy. Today, Eric leads RevBoss’s effort to bring happiness to hundreds of clients and 50 plus RevBuds around the world. You can read about the guiding principles he wrote for RevBoss in the Hat Culture Manifesto. Welcome to the show, or like I said earlier, we have a lot in common.
Eric Boggs: We do. It’s really nice to be here, Nancy. Thank you. [1:12]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, I’m really excited. So, what’s a RevBud? I’m going to go.
Eric Boggs: A RevBud is someone that works at RevBoss. Google has Googlers. Lots of companies brand their employees with a fun name, and we call ourselves RevBuds. I did not come up with it. I’m pretty sure Mason, our VP of People and Operations, coined that phrase. It stuck, and it’s really kind of goofy and fun. [1:43]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, I think it certainly caught my attention. So, you know, we again spoke earlier about, you know, the hot button in today’s conversation, which is AI on sales and marketing. What’s your take on it? And can AI replace human conversation?
Eric Boggs: I think my take on it would probably go a lot longer than the 18 minutes you had budgeted for this conversation, but I’ll offer some headlines. And take, certainly, opinion. I would say an informed opinion. I’m not an AI expert in terms of the technology itself but do understand deeply how it works and how it’s being applied in sales. To your question, no, not. AI will not replace human-to-human interaction. But it is in the process of absolutely transforming the steps in the marketing and selling process that ultimately will lead to a human interaction. And it’s doing that with content and decision making and process enablement. And frankly, it’s going to make the process better in the long run, but it’s making it awful messy right now. [3:02]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. You know, I read an article today about a gal who boasts that she can have AI do the cold calling and have them sound human. Have you heard of anything like that?
Eric Boggs: I’ve not explicitly heard of that, but I absolutely believe that it exists.
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. Kind of creepy, isn’t it?
Eric Boggs: It’s a little weird, yeah. And I don’t know that I believe that, believe that exists in a seamless and meaningful way at this moment, but I do believe that it will exist in a seamless and meaningful way in the next, I don’t know, two to three years. [3:55]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. So, there are many different or several options nowadays for marketing. Part of it is cold calling, social media, LinkedIn, et cetera. What tools do you use to generate the qualified appointments? What’s your cadence? Do you mix it up with cold calls, emails, and so on?
Eric Boggs: Yeah, so at RevBoss, we do lead generation for hundreds of clients. Most of them are marketing agency, PR firm, business services type companies. That’s probably 60% of our customers. 30% are SaaS technology companies and 10% are other. Machine shops and commercial real estate, all kinds of like odds and ends. And our strategy and mechanism are generally the same across the board. We’re email first and primarily email. But increasingly, we’re augmenting that with targeted display ads. And sometimes we’ll layer on a LinkedIn program if it’s targeted and small and kind of makes sense. We’ve actually never done phone. And I know that’s your expertise. No, no, it’s more like a preference and experience thing for me personally than anything else. We have plenty of clients that have a lot of success cold calling either internally or with partners. And we’ve worked, you know, we’ve told plenty of sales leads in the past, hey, yeah, we don’t do that. But I do think that phone will work for you. We’ve just focused on email because it’s, we’re good at it. We can automate it with a lot of technology and increasingly automate it with a lot of AI integrations. And that’s just kind of how we’ve how we built the business. [5:48]
Nancy Calabrese: Got it. OK. You say email first. Why is that?
Eric Boggs: Why email first? That’s an interesting question. Probably 90% of the leads that we generate for our clients are a direct response to an email or an automated meeting booking that started with an email. So that is our go-to strategy for every client. The other cross-channel things that we do, display ads, maybe 20 to 25% of our clients, although that’s increasing quickly. And LinkedIn, maybe like less than 10%. Just because LinkedIn is kind of unwieldy and awkward and we haven’t had as much success generating outcomes from LinkedIn, which is not to say that you can’t do it. I know lots and lots of people do it and lots of companies do it. It’s just never been something that we’ve been particularly good at. Whereas the email thing, we know it cold. [6:49]
Nancy Calabrese: What about texting? Do you believe in that?
Eric Boggs: We’ve never tried it. Yeah, we’ve never tried it. And it’s never really kind of come up as an idea. And I think that texting for me is a lot more personal. Like I get, you know, business emails and I’ve, and it gets mixed in with lead notifications and Salesforce updates and emails from my team and automated billing, whatever from our own systems. And so, a marketing email isn’t out of place. Text message lands in conversation with my wife and my parents and my 12-year-old son and things like that. And it just feels a lot more off-putting in. And yeah, so we’ve never really done it for those reasons. Again, not to say it doesn’t work well. I would imagine it’s a lot more effective once a prospect is in your funnel and moving forward. I have used text for those types of things a lot. [7:57]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, I’m in total agreement with you. I kind of feel like texting is personal. And when I do get some business texts, it’s kind of off putting. No, you don’t know me that well. You don’t know me at all. So why are you texting me? OK.
Eric Boggs: Yeah, I got one today from some guy I don’t know, and I’m not going to call him out or whatever, but it’s like, hey, you might know these people that live in Durham, I don’t know them. Have you got a couple minutes for an intro? He’s like a clothing stylist, which is hilarious because you can see I have on a cap and a Steely Dan T-shirt, and I wear blue jeans and a t-shirt to work literally every day of the week. And there’s nothing I care about less than like my fashion appearance. And so, this guy, you know, the text I got before him was my friend and the text I got after them was my wife and he’s already out of place and he’s trying to pique my interest with something that I have negative interest in. And so, it’s annoying. [9:04]
Nancy Calabrese: All right. Yeah, well, I guess, how did they get your text number? Yeah, I agree. I think it’s intrusive.
Eric Boggs: Oh, I don’t know. It’s probably easy to find my phone number. I’m sure I’m on some list.
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. Let’s go back to email. It’s interesting you bring that up this week. In one of the sales training classes that I participate in, the whole topic was about email and how to catch the attention of the prospect. And we talked a little bit about the subject line. And it was recommended that if you put an emoji in the subject line or if you bold the text, they tend to stand out and get more attention. Has that been your experience?
Eric Boggs: I am a subject line I would say I’m ambivalent with subject lines. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I’m sure that we have clients where we’ve dropped emojis in places and done things like manipulating the text. The one thing that I know works and that we kind of operate from at RevBoss is that the subject line should look like a subject line that you would send to a coworker. And you would never send an email to a coworker that says, increase your XYZ by some percent, right? You would send a subject line that said, hey, how’s it going? Or, hey, I have a question about this thing. Or then you need to ask, what do you think about this? Those are good subject lines. And I think as long as your kind of broadly fall in that category with what you’re doing, you’re going to get the result that you want. And things like emoji and text manipulation, certainly those are great ideas. [10:58]
Nancy Calabrese: Now, the other thing that really turns me off is when I get an email that is like a book, information dump. What are your thoughts on those types of emails?
Eric Boggs: Yeah, oh geez, I hear you on that. It’s like that Tom Petty saying about songwriting, like get to the chorus before you bore us. And we try to keep the content that we generate for our clients, one, we try to focus on story, a narrative, versus like a transaction or a feature or something like that. Two, we try to use connectors, and connectors are basically things that we know to be true about you, the prospect, that we can incorporate in our messaging. And that can be simple things like where you’re located, or the presence of a certain job title at your company, or the lack of a job title at your company, or some reference to some customers that you have. Something about me that relates to you maybe a shared customer or a shared experience or something to that effect, so that the message that you receive shows that I know you, and which is why I’m sending this to you, and I am also a person and not an AI drone. And then sort of the last piece of that is we try to keep it really short to your point. And when you can do those first two things, a story or a narrative, and surface connectors and keep it really, short, then you’ve got something. You know, when you see really, long emails, it’s just laziness, because it takes a lot of work to be sharp and direct in your communication. [12:49]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, that’s interesting. And so how do you know how much is a good amount of information?
Eric Boggs: Um, my team has probably gotten tired of hearing me say cut it in half, but I think you can cut it in half and usually cut it in half again. I had a poetry teacher in undergrad that more than once I would hand in, and I’m not a poet. It was a fun class, but I’m not a poet. More than once I would hand in an assignment and he would like, you know, 16 lines or whatever, and he would circle two lines and draw a big exit through everything else and say, these two lines were by far better than everything else, start over with these two lines as the starting point. And so, I think that, you know, quality and volume of content, it’s a moving target, but it’s also a goal that you never achieve. Like it can always be shorter, it can always be better. [13:55]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, interesting. Yeah, so how much time should you put into crafting, say, a researched email? What’s your recommendation?
Eric Boggs: Yeah, well that depends on the context too, right? If you are an important relationship for me to try to develop and you’re a well-qualified prospect or for whatever reason, you know, as long as it takes, as long as it kind of makes sense. Like I wouldn’t spend all day working on an email to a single person, but would I take 10 minutes, 20 minutes? Heck yeah, if it’s worth it. A lot of times it might be easier to find a shared connection. Like if you know Susie, instead of me emailing Susie, I might say, hey, Nancy, will you write an email to Susie and introduce me? Here’s some copy that you can use. That might be a quicker way to end around that process. If it is what we do at RevBoss in its more automated, higher volume outreach, where maybe you want to email 25 people a day or 50 people a day or 100 people a day, then your copy needs to be sharp and direct with the things that we talked about with connectors and narrative, but then you can start to bring in variables into the copy that will adjust the copy based on what we know about you. So, if you have a VP title, the call to action might be a little different than if you have a manager title, or if you have this type of keyword in your company, or that type of keyword in your company, the copy might change. Maybe we highlight a different customer success or a different reference story. And so, when it comes to one-to-one, you can be really deep. When it comes to one-to-many, you gotta be smart about using variables and automation to make the copy relevant. [15:47]
Nancy Calabrese: And what’s your recommended cadence to getting these emails out? How many in total? What’s the spacing in between?
Eric Boggs: So, we actually did a lot of research on this. I mean, it was a while back. It was more than two years ago, and frankly, we should probably revisit it. We found decreasing returns and increasing leave me the heck alone after the third email. And so, yeah, our general approach is three emails over a week, maybe 10 days. One of the emails is usually like a bump or an inline reply, maybe two, maybe both of them are inline replies and forwards. And instead of doing, you know, five or eight or 10 emails or touches over an extended period, we like to do short bursts in like a seven-day timeframe let that prospect chill out for 60 days, 90 days, and then do another short burst over a short period of time. And we found that the prospects that we retarget, say maybe I email you Nancy today and then you don’t reply after two or three emails and I email you again in 60 or 90 days, the prospects that you retarget roughly convert at the same rate as net new prospects. And so, a lot of the success that we’re able to generate for our clients is just based on repetition and process and making sure that we’re landing in the inbox with enough frequency and with the right target prospect and with a really tight message to just get lucky. And you know, we get lucky to the tune of hundreds of times a day for our clients. [17:46]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, but let me, you know, a lot of emails wind up in spam. How can you prevent that?
Eric Boggs: Yeah, that’s a tricky one. So there’s the technical aspect of deliverability And a lot of folks on the internet on LinkedIn Make it seem like that piece of it’s really hard like DKIM and DMARC and SPF and authentication and all that That’s that’s actually pretty easy if Once you learn it, it sounds scary, but it’s not there’s some other things that you can do to ensure deliverability with like custom URL redirects for your open pixel or your unsubscribe link and those kinds of things that are a little bit more complicated. But that stuff is kind of meat and potatoes and it’s like a well understood set of steps that you must take and so that’s easy. Where it gets a lot trickier is the content of the email. And when you like, you know, this guy that emailed me about, you know, my fashion needs, like clearly dude I don’t know you, the message was bad, and I’m not interested in that. And so that was a very off-putting message. It would have been a lot different if he had done the work to recognize that I was a better prospect or had reached out to me with something that’s more along the lines of what I need or what I care about. And it’s the same thing with higher volume email too. If the prospecting is on point and the messaging is on point, you’re not going to get a lot of spam complaints or unsubscribed. And those are generally the things that drive you out of the inbox and into the spam folder. [19:31]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, well, listen, I told you this was going to fly by. We’re out of time, Eric. We could go on and on. How can my people find you?
Eric Boggs: I told you Nancy, I could keep going. I’m a talker when it comes to email. RevBoss is at RevBoss.com, R-E-V-B-O-S-S.com. I’m on LinkedIn, Eric Boggs, B-O-G-G-S. And I’ve been, one of my sort of goals for the new year was to increase my content production on LinkedIn. And so, I’m sharing a lot of videos and posts about email and the things that I work on and also a lot of personal stories. And so, I’d love to connect there with anyone in your audience that finds this kind of stuff as interesting as I do. [20:21]
Nancy Calabrese: I love it. Yeah, you know, I just learned this today. I had no idea that if you go to, say, I go to your profile and I click on the bell, I’m going to see your post. Did you know that?
Eric Boggs: No. I’m a little bit of a Luddite when it comes to LinkedIn.
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, see what you learned? Go to people that you want to follow, click on the bell in the upper right corner, and then you’ll see their posts come through. Yeah, I’m going to do that. Eric, you were fantastic. Very easy to speak with, and I suggest everyone to really take advantage of Eric’s expertise especially as it relates to emails, because I’m guessing you’d rather be emailing than cold calling. So, thanks again, Eric, for being on the show and to everyone out there, make it an awesome sales day. [21:18]
by Nancy Calabrese | Apr 24, 2024 | Podcast
About Benjamin Brown: Benjamin Brown is the CEO of 360 Sales Consulting, a company specializing in helping businesses and entrepreneurs excel in sales and dramatically increase their bottom line. Their proprietary sales system has come to be recognized as a “game-changer” and is in demand by companies of all sizes throughout the United States. Ben’s sales career of more than twenty years began with selling health club memberships and quickly worked his way into sales manager and sales director positions. Having held both inside and outside sales positions, his diverse experience includes selling autos, computer products and services, voice recognition software, staffing, and transportation services. Ben is a former United States Marine with six years of service and a Veteran of the Gulf War. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Benjamin.
In this episode, Nancy and Benjamin discuss the following:
- The importance of confidence in sales
- The effectiveness of mentoring and coaching in learning sales
- A 10-step sales process based on Benjamin’s proven sales system
- Customizing sales processes based on specific products or services
- The impact of AI on sales and the enduring importance of human interaction
- Benjamin’s journey into sales and teaching
Key Takeaways:
- 80% of sales is confidence.
- Children are good salespeople because they close for no reason.
- Anytime you’re in a conversation about working with an individual, there’s always a sale.
- Sales is the essential part of a business that brings in the money.
- One of the things that I teach is that you have to like it, love it, or leave it.
“ The best way to learn sales that I found is making sure that you have a proper mentor to work with or coach, especially if you haven’t done it before or if you have done it not to the point where you’ve been satisfied. Sales is a skill, so it’s better done in an apprentice-type situation where somebody is grading your performance as you do it. Theory, reading a book, watching videos and doing it and performing it doesn’t work well because there’s no way for you to get the direct feedback that you need to adjust.” – BENJAMIN
“We live in a Western civilization where we’re trained that your worth and things you want must be earned through your work. You don’t negotiate. If you make enough money to negotiate in America, the only thing you know in life is a house and a car. But if you go overseas and go to third-world countries or other places less, their actual mentality or culture is that if you go to a market, an open market in a second or third-world country, there are no prices. Everything is a negotiation. Right? Everything’s in the good in some cultures. If you don’t negotiate, they will see it as negative. So, I love it when I go overseas, and I go to these places, and at the end of the tour, you’ll see the native, the local people selling their arts and crafts at the end, and they’re coming at you with the, you know, the pressure for you to buy. You can look and see the Americans because they start to cringe. They’re not used to that aggression. But this is how people get things done in their country. We live in an economy where we don’t have to deal with that. But we get more inundation through our phones and television, driving down the road. We get hit just like they do. It’s just not verbally in our face.” – BENJAMIN
“There’s no need to fear sales if you understand that sales is a language. It’s just like sign language or anything else, and if you can understand that, your life becomes a whole lot easier because you’ll know when people are selling you and when you need to buy. And that comes through your personal life as well as your business. By doing that, your confidence level will increase because you now will understand that you need to listen more in a conversation because good salespeople are great listeners. And it is key. So, there are three things I say you need to do when you’re a good salesperson: First, you need to know where you’re going, which means a good sales process. Number two is that you need to be confident. You have to be able to take rejection. Number three is that you must listen. And you must do all three of those at the same time. Hence the skill of sales. So, some people could do one or two, but you need to do all three. And if you could do all three very well, you could become a great salesperson.” – BENJAMIN
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Voiceover: You’re listening to The Conversational Selling Podcast with Nancy Calabrese.
Nancy Calabrese: Hi, it’s Nancy Calabrese, and it’s time again for Conversational selling – the podcast where sales leaders and business experts share what’s going on in sales and marketing today and it always starts with the human conversation. Today we’re speaking with Benjamin Brown, the owner of 360 Sales Consulting, a company that specializes in boosting sales for businesses of any size and industry. As a sales coach, author, and speaker, he has over 23 years of experience in selling anything from stocks to cars to medical devices. His 10 -step sales process, which he reveals in his book, Master the Art of Closing the Sale, is based on finding and solving the customer’s pain points, building rapport and trust, and asking for the sale with confidence. Benjamin’s mission is to help salespeople and business owners achieve financial freedom by closing more sales. Well, as you know, Benjamin, I’m all about sales, so welcome to the show. Let’s get going.
Benjamin Brown: Glad to do it. Glad to be here, Nancy. [1:26]
Nancy Calabrese: I’m excited. So, you know, especially when I speak with other people that are totally into sales, and yet many salespeople struggle with asking for the sale. Why is that?
Benjamin Brown: 80 % of sales Nancy is confidence. So, when I work with individuals, the first thing I have to do is rate their confidence level, find out why it’s not as high as it should be. And most of the time that would help me reprogram them in understanding what sales actually is and what it’s all about and how fun it can actually be if you understand what it’s all about and you have a good actual sales process that you’re comfortable with. So, most of the time that’s them being uncomfortable or not confident enough. [2:22]
Nancy Calabrese: Well, why don’t we start with the basic? What is a sale?
Benjamin Brown: A sale is, I ask this for many people and they kind of don’t understand it because I say sales is simple but it’s not easy. So, I simplified it by the purpose of a sale is to get someone to move. So, it doesn’t have to do with money. It doesn’t have to do with denominations and currency. When your child asks you to pick them up, that is a close. They know how to close. Children are good salespeople because they close for no reason. Right? So, if you understand the concept of a sale is to get somebody to move, which means that we happen all the time. Click on this, give me your email address. Let me ask you this question. The billboard, call this number, fill this out. These are all baby steps in sales processes. Even dating is sales. Can I take you out? Can I get your ID? Can I get your phone number? Can you give me your name? All of these are baby steps in a process in sales. So, sales, when I teach the concept, making people relative to life is everywhere in life that you see it. You just haven’t paid attention to it. [3:35]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, well why is learning sales so important?
Benjamin Brown: Well, if you’re anytime you’re an entrepreneur, Mark Cuban says the first thing you need to know how to do is sell. I work with beginning entrepreneurs and the first thing they want to focus on is a website and a business card. Now understand you must sell the product first to make sure it’s relevant. Right. Also, anytime you’re in a conversation of working with an individual, there’s always a sale going on. So, if you don’t know sales, that means that you’re always buying. [4:12]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Wow. You know, I read somewhere that you state that many businesses don’t think sales training is important until it starts to affect their revenue. Why is that?
Benjamin Brown: They fail to invest in it because most or some companies are more geared towards marketing and don’t understand sales aspect of it. They don’t come from sales backgrounds. It’s just like hiring a coach and he comes from a decent defensive mindset, and you hire him as a head coach. He’s going to focus more on defense than he would on offense because that’s his mindset. So, business owners come from a more marketing mindset than the sales mindset. And so, some companies can run purely on sales without marketing. Hence, network marketing is not really about sales. It’s about referrals, right? Which is a sale, not really the marketing aspect of it. [5:12]
Nancy Calabrese: Huh, well even asking for a referral is a form of selling, don’t you think?
Benjamin Brown: Yes, it is, but they gear their sales process mainly on that and benefiting the people that get involved to sell the seller, like insurance companies, all about referrals. Some companies are, but as far as face -to -face, cold calling, that’s another type of form, or would you say cold calling on the phone or things of that nature is a contact sport. So, you have to have a game plan for what that’s going to look like because it has to be replicated over and over and over again until it’s defined. And then you give that to someone new as a guide. And most companies don’t have a guide. I said most salespeople are not successful in the company because the company didn’t provide them enough tools to work. [6:08]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, over and over again. Okay, so what kind of tool should a company make available to salespeople?
Benjamin Brown: A solid sales process. Solid. Something that’s been proven, something that they do, something that has worked. Most people will come in and that, you know, IBM had a good sound set. You know, insurance companies have a different way of the training, you know, two to six months, sometimes training just purely just to get them to understand how they do things here. So, when I work with business owners and I say, when you hire salespeople, you need to have an SOP when you bring in a salesperson and say, this is how we do things here. And that is the mark that you want everyone to make. And if they can’t make that, then that’s your standing ground. It’s not because you don’t think they have a good personality. It’s just they’re not following proper instructions. [7:00]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Yeah, huh. What is the best way to learn sales?
Benjamin Brown: The best way to learn sales that I found is making sure that you have a proper mentor to work with or coach, especially if you haven’t done it before or if you have done it not to the point where you’ve been satisfied. Sales is a skill, so it’s better done in an apprentice type situation where you have somebody grading your performance as you do it. Theory, reading a book, watching videos and actually doing it and performing it doesn’t work well because there’s no way for you to get the direct feedback that you need to adjust. [7:42]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think about, again, myself, I’m speaking personally that I love sales, but many people absolutely hate it. They hear the word sales and, you know, they get goosebumps. They want to run away. Why is that?
Benjamin Brown: I’m glad you asked that. We live in a Western civilization where we’re trained that your worth and things that you want must be earned through the work that you do. You don’t negotiate. The only thing you know in life that you in America if you make enough money to negotiate is a house and a car. But if you go overseas and you go to third world countries or other places less, their actual mentality or their culture is if you go to a market, an open market in a second or third world country, there’s no prices. Everything is negotiation. Right? Everything’s in the good in some cultures. If you don’t negotiate, they seem it as a negative. Right? So, I love when I go overseas and I go to these places and at the end of the tour, you’ll see the native, the local people selling their arts and crafts at the end and they’re coming at you with the, you know, the pressure for you to buy. You can look and see the Americans because they start to cringe. They’re not used to that aggression, right? But this is how people get things done in their country. We just live in an economy where we don’t have to deal with that. But we do get more inundation through our phone, our television, driving down the road. We get hit just like they do. It’s just not verbally in our face. [9:25]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, let’s talk about your book Master the Art of Closing the Sale. What motivated you to write it? Maybe you can share a little bit about your 10 -step sales process.
Benjamin Brown: Mm -hmm. Well, I can prize that over the years of working with various companies and various sales system to formulate a simple 10 step program that can be retaught and made simplified. Like I say, sales is simple, but it’s not easy. Each one of these steps could take, if you had to do a semester in high school, it could take an entire semester to break down each step to make sure people understand what it is. Right. But by using these steps is front based, where you’re not having to worry about anxiety of closing because a lot of the steps that essentially needs to be done in the sales is done upfront and it’s done for the purpose of making the sales process a little bit easier. Also, making it more enjoyable. Also, the key is to make sure that the result is that you get a testimonial referral. So, if your sales process is smooth and can be done in a easy way asking to sale is just an aphor thought. I would prefer to get a referral and a testimonial and that way you can continue in your sales of driving leads as you increase your sales performance. Does that make sense? [10:53]
Nancy Calabrese: Sure. It does. It does. Another question just popped into my head. Do you believe in scripting?
Benjamin Brown: Some people do, like I said, every sale has 10 steps in it from my book, but not every product needs all 10. For example, there’s 10 steps in every sales process. When I was in the gem business, there’s five steps, need, use, affordability, spouse, and guest pass. That is the sales process for the gem. But there’s 10 steps in there. So, what I do when I work with individuals, I customize based on the 10 steps, the specific ones on your product or service, that way you can build a customized sales process that’s replicated and can be retaught. [11:41]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah, wow. You know, I guess sales has changed like everything else over the years. How do you feel it’s changed?
Benjamin Brown: It hasn’t really changed in my opinion. It’s just the tools that we use are different. Back in the 50s, you had nothing but door -to -door salespeople doing anything from vacuums, just talking to housewives. Then at the advent of the radio came with the radio commercial, then the TV, and then the telephone. So as of the last 20 years, we have been inundated with other tools, fax machines. The huge one is the computer and now the cell phone. So, people get too caught up into the tools and not focus on the performance of sales. And that’s why the process slows down in most businesses because they’re worried about how many likes they got on Instagram rather than picking up the phone and dialing. [12:43]
Nancy Calabrese: Yeah. So, what do you think about sales and AI? How is AI going to impact sales?
Benjamin Brown: Well, there’s gonna be a, you know, it’s gonna be a wave that’s gonna come along, but I actually see down the line, because I’m a little bit older, the fight for people to start coming back to reality. I mean, it’s gonna have its time, but man versus machine, it’s kinda like now when you get a robo call, right? People thought that wasn’t gonna work. People nowadays will not even take a robo call. They won’t take anything until they know it’s a real person. So, we have a sense of AI and what that’s going to look like, but it’s going to replicate to a certain extent, but it won’t replace humans totally. [13:34]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. I agree. Nothing replaces the human conversation. Don’t you agree? I mean, there’s…
Benjamin Brown: And the human contact is what we crave for, especially after COVID, us being locked down, things of that nature. We can’t survive without each other. Depression sets in. And so being to be able to sell at a distance with all of these tools is great if you’re making money. But most of the consumers prefer to have somebody live. [14:03]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. Yeah, I totally agree. So why does every company need a sales process?
Benjamin Brown: Well, it’s essential that you ask the same company, keep it simple. Why do they need a marketing process? Why do they need an accounting process? Sales is a part of a business. It’s the essential part that brings in the money. Marketing brings exposure and brand, accounting, accounts for the money, accounts payable and the money that comes in. Every part has a function in the organization. Most people don’t put it on sales until those other ones, become so faulty that they must look back on sales. [14:44]
Nancy Calabrese: Yep. Yeah. Tell me something that’s true in sales that almost nobody agrees with you on.
Benjamin Brown: Haha, ooh, I get everybody to agree most of my stuff. One of the things that I teach is that you have to like it, love it, or leave it. That’s how law there I am. If you don’t like or love what you’re selling, leave it. It comes through in your performance, your passion, your voice, your tone, which all of these play a part in your performance as a salesperson when you’re presenting. And people will know if you don’t like or love the product, if you don’t, they’re going to be like, why would I? And why would I pay money for it? [15:30]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. So, what motivated you to get into this business? I mean, you have an interesting background. You were in the military and of course selling along the way, but what is it about sales that attracts you?
Benjamin Brown: Yeah. Um, I started it by being recruited. It’s just like the acting bug. Once you get into it, you start and in Florida, you know, you make more money because this is a right to work state. A lot of the people here, and we based it on tourism to make significant money. One of the ways to do that is through sales. There’s a lot of sales companies here for the last 30 years. And so, by getting into that, there was a lot more opportunity to broaden or make it, you know, a significant amount of money through that and then suddenly, once I was taught properly how to do it over a period of time, it became enjoyable with my personality and what I can actually do. And then years later, I jumped at chance and thought about, I wanted to teach something, because most of my family’s preachers are teachers. And I sat down for six months to figure out what I wanted to teach. And it was always right in front of my face, teach what you know. And so, I tested the theory for about a year on people and individuals and looking at the results that was driven from that, proven and took that and built the company around that premises and been doing well so far. [17:01]
Nancy Calabrese: Wow. You know, I can’t believe we’re almost up with time. What is the one takeaway you want to leave the audience with?
Benjamin Brown: There’s no need to fear sales if you understand Sales is a language. It’s just like sign language or anything else and if you can understand that your life becomes a whole lot more easier because you’ll be able to know when people are selling you and you’ll know when you need to buy and that comes through your personal life as well as your business and By doing that your confidence level will gain because you now will be able to understand that you need to listen more in a conversation because good salespeople are great listeners. And it is key. And so, the three things I say you need to do when you’re a good salesperson, you need to first know where you’re going, which means a good sales process. Number two is that you need to be confident. You have to be able to take rejection. And then number three is that you must listen. And you must do all three of those at the same time. Hence the skill of sales. So, some people could do one, some people could do two, but you need to do all three. And if you could do all three very well, you could become a great salesperson. [18:19]
Nancy Calabrese: Right. I love it. I love it. Benjamin, how can my people find you?
Benjamin Brown: Number one is they want to reach out on one of the personable ones. They can go to meetwithbenjamin .com and schedule a call to assess where they’re at in their mindset or sales to figure out, because I would do mindset training as well. 360salesconsulting .com is the website they can go to, but they can go meetwithbenjamin .com and schedule. And then my book is Master the Art of Closing the Sale by Benjamin Brown on Amazon and on my website. [18:51]
Nancy Calabrese: Okay. Love it. Love it, love it, love it. I told you this was gonna go by fast, didn’t I?
Benjamin Brown: When you enjoy it, it goes by quick.
Nancy Calabrese: It does. So, folks, take advantage of this gentleman’s expertise, you know, and I keep going back to what you said earlier, children are natural salespeople. It’s interesting how, you know, when you look at it, they get what they want, usually, right? And they ask for it with confidence. So maybe we should. Take the tips from young children and definitely Benjamin. Thanks so much for being on the show, Benjamin. You were great fun. And for everyone else out there, make it an awesome sales day. [19:40]
