Inside BS Show

On this episode of the 60 Second Sales Show I share my September 11th story.  This was recorded on location, overlooking the 9/11 memorial, the day after the fifteenth anniversary of the attacks.

Here is a transcript of this show:

Welcome once again everyone to another edition of the Sixty Seconds Sales Show. I'm your host, Dave Lorenzo. Today's show is all about following up. Today's show is about your follow-up skills. It's about the most important thing, the absolutely most important thing in sales, in business and in life. Follow-up is critical to your success as an entrepreneur, as a business leader and as a sales professional. Before we get in a follow-up, I want to take a moment and recognize our fantastic producer, the lovely and talented Nancy Popp. Good morning Nancy. How are you today?

Hey David. I'm doing good. How about you?

I'm doing great. Nancy helps us with finding guests, she helps us with getting great questions every week and she helps us put the show together, so thank you Nancy for all that you do for us. We are today, talking about follow-up. Before we get into follow-up, I want to tell you about an unusual experience I had this week. We're recording this show today. We're recording it, it's just a couple of days after the 15th anniversary of September 11th, and this day in history, it's one of those days that for me that is surreal. Many of you who have followed me for awhile know that this day has some significance for me.

I worked in Manhattan on September 11th, 2001. I ran a corporate housing company and we had three hundred employees, but in particular we had thirty that worked in Manhattan cleaning apartments. We had eight hundred apartments in Manhattan, and this crew of thirty people would clean all of our apartments, some of them once a week, some of them twice a month. On September 11th, 2001 I was in my office, and I had held our cleaning crew back because we had an awards ceremony. We were giving out the awards for the folks who had, we'd had a contest over the summer and we were giving out awards for the winners of the contest, we'd had a breakfast.

Usually the housekeepers who worked with me in our offices at 518 5th Avenue, which is 5th Avenue and 43rd street, just two blocks from Grand Central Station, usually these fantastic men and women, the housekeepers that worked with us, would leave our office no later than 8am. Some days they would go to the Upper East Side, some days they would go to the Upper West Side, some days they would go downtown to work in the apartments that we managed. Well on September 11th, 2001, I held them back. They left our office at 8 o'clock, and a crew of twelve of them, it was ten housekeepers, a housekeeping trainee, and a housekeeping supervisor left our office at 8am.

Now that's ... The time they left our office is significant and you'll find out why in just a second. They left our office at 8am, they got on the subway to head downtown. They were going to clean apartments in a building on 17 John Street. 17 John Street just two blocks, two and a half blocks really from the World Trade Centers where the twin towers stood. They left our office at 8am and I went upstairs in the building to have a meeting with our staff of thirteen sales people and then my admin team, so I think there was seventeen of us. We had a stand-up meeting every morning, like a little huddle where we talked about what the priorities were for the day, so on and so forth.

September 11th, 2001 was a beautiful day, just as September 11th this year was, and I was doing the stand-up meeting our break room with our sales and admin team. Behind me was a television and the television was always on, and it was always tuned to a news channel. We had to be into the news because a lot of our clients were in the financial services industry, we needed to know what was going on on the markets.

In this episode, Dave talks about how to take your Frustrating Annoying Killing you Everyday sales process and transform it into a Fun Rewarding Easy and Engaging sales process.

Here is the transcript:

Hi there, everyone and welcome to another edition of this 60-second sales show. I am Dave Lorenzo, I'm your host and I'm the guy who helps you close more deals fast and helps you create lifelong relationships that not only add value to your clients, but also help you get home on time for dinner every single night.

Today, we are talking about how to transform your sales process from a fake sales process into a free sales process. That's right, we're going to take your sales process and transform it from being frustrating, annoying, and killing you each and every single day. That's fake into a free process. Something that's fun, rewarding, engaging, and educational. I'm Dave Lorenzo and this process was developed not only to help you, but I'm a convert of my own system. This process is something that developed out of necessity. This process is, there's 5 real key elements to this process and there are 5 deadly sins, 5 mistakes I was making, and that's why I develop this process to help myself.

My mission is to help transform your fake sales process just like my process was fake into a free sales process, 1 that you will embrace and enjoy every single day. Let me run down those 5 deadly sins that I was committing and hopefully help you transform your sales process from 1 that is frustrating, annoying, and killing you everyday into a 1 that is fun, rewarding, engaging, and educational. The first deadly sin that sales professionals make that entrepreneurs, that business leaders make, all the time is they give up control of the sales process, they give up control of the sales process, they're like a sailboat on the ocean just drifting at the mercy of the tide.

You have the ability to control how much you make and when you make it, and you have the ability to control what you do with your life. Being able to sell, being a fantastic sales professional, being an entrepreneur who can sell, being a business leader who can help people for compensation because that's what selling is it's helping people for compensation, being able to do that gives you control of your life. I'll tell you my story, I'll tell you why this was so important to me in the hopes that will resonate with you.

For my entire career, I did things the way you're doing them right now, I knocked on doors, I tried to help people. Most of them didn't want the help I could provide. They give me knocking on a hundred doors and getting 99 no's, but I lived for that 1 yes because I thought every time somebody rejects me I'm getting closer to a yes. My friends, that is a horrible way to go through life but that's what I did. I did it really, really well. The first business that I built from scratch, from zero was a hotel, it was a startup and that hotel did $5 million a year an annual revenue by the time I was finished and I recruited our corporate accounts myself.

I was the general manager, I was on the road recruiting those accounts. The second business I built was a corporate housing brand for a large hospitality company. You may have heard of the Marriott Organization, I worked for them and I built their execu-stay brand in New York City, I took that from nothing to $50 million a year in 3 years and I did it by knocking on doors and convincing people to come and work with us. Imagine, 100 opportunities 99 no's. I knocked down every door I could at a sales team of 12, they knocked down every door they could.

Then the third time I did this was a consulting company, the consulting company based in Manhattan did no business when I started, took them to over $200 million a year in annual revenue, knocked down doors the whole time and I'll tell you my friends that is a painful ...

Forget Cold Calls: Be Invited To Sell - Every Time

Welcome to another edition of the 60 second sales show. I am Dave Lorenzo, I'm the guy who helps you make a great living and live a great life. Today we are going to focus on the one thing that every sales professional, every entrepreneur, every business leader thinks they have to do but they absolutely hate to do. We're going to focus on it because I'm going to give you permission to just forget about it. I'm talking about cold calling. The dreaded cold calling.

Let me let me drop a number on you here. Let me give you a statistic. This statistic is according to salesforce.com and I think actually ... Leap job actually quoted it out most recently, only 2% of cold calls results in an appointment. Only 2%, so if you think about that for a minute you're a sales professional, you're at your desk, you're banging away on the phones, you make 100 phone calls, you get two appointments to get in front of someone who's a prospective client. If you're the best person on the planet at closing you're going to close half of those, so one out of every 100 cold calls you make where you connect with someone, only one of those results in a sale. Think about the time it takes for you to do the research to find out who good cold calling prospects are, think about the time it takes for you to sit down and bang away at the phones, all right. The time element of cold calling alone is daunting, even if you can set aside time element. Think about the frustration element of talking to 98 people who tell you, "No." Who tell you, "You suck." Who tell you to stop calling.

The frustration element and that confidence crushing that you have to endure when you're a cold call sales person is incredible. But even if you can get past that, even if you can get past that time investment of making 100 calls to get two people to agree to see you. If you can get past the confidence crushing that it takes every time you here, "No, go away, stop calling me." If you can get past all of that, think about the ineffectiveness of going to a meeting of completing an appointment. If you do a webinar if that's where your initial appointments take place. If you're doing an in-person meeting, if it's a telephone sales appointment. Think about the uphill battle you face if someone has set that appointment for you via a cold call you walk in there and this person has no idea who you are, and you're starting from a completely and totally cold start.

It's horrible. It's sucks, it's ineffective, and it's a huge waste of time. Yet just last week I went to see here in the in the Miami area, I live in Miami, here in the local area. I went to see someone who's known as a sales Guru. Someone who gets paid upwards of $10,000 for a speech on sales. Someone who's conducted live events where people paid $500 or more per person to go see her talk about how to sell, and had a close deals. I go to this event, I'm excited, I'm fired up, this is what I do. I love to engage people, I love to help people and stealing is helping, so I'm thinking, "I'm going to hear this Guru tell me something new. Something outstanding that I can use myself in my business to get in front of more people. To help more people."

 

I walk in the room, there's great music, there's fantastic energy, and the guru takes the stage and half of the 90-minute presentation was spent on cold calling techniques. Wow! I was crushed. I was so disappointed. The reason I was so disappointed my friends is because I could not believe that in this day and age, when there are so many ways to connect with people, and to show how your expertise can be valuable to people, this sales Guru, who by the way is probably ten years younger than me, should be hip to the way millennials do business. This sales guru is advocating getting on the phone, going through lists, dialing numbers over, and over, and over again.

How to Sell When You Need Money Quickly

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the 60 Second Sale Show. I'm Dave Lorenzo. Today's show is about the question that's on everybody's mind. That's right. I'm talking to you. Today's show is all about what to do when you need money quickly. At least, and this is absolutely no exaggeration, at least once a week, I get a phone call from someone who says, "I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm not sure how I'm going to make payroll. I need to get some money in the door. I need to get some revenue quickly." This happens in good times. It happens in bad times. It happens when the economy's booming. It happens when the economy's in the crapper. It happens in every industry. You can't imagine.

Think of the hottest industry in the world right now. Think of the hottest industry on the planet. There is somebody out there right now going, "I don't know what I'm going to do. How am I going to get some money in the door?" Today, we're going to talk about what you can do when you need money quickly. I don't care if you're a business owner and you're facing payroll pressure. Very common. If you're a sales professional and there's somebody breathing down your neck to meet quota, "Got to get some money in the door quickly," if you're an independent professional, you're a lawyer, you're a CPA, you're an architect, you're a real estate agent and you got a wife who says, "Hey. The kids are going back to school. We got a tuition bill. We got to pay it in the next 2 weeks. What are you going to do?" I've got the answer for you today. I want you to know that this situation is so common that ...

Let me give you, let me get into a story which really illustrates how bad something like this can be. Back in 2010, I got a phone call from an attorney in Upstate New York and the call went something like this. He said very calmly, "You know, Dave, I've been practicing for almost 30 years. My father practices with me. He's going to retire in 4 or 5 years, and for the last 30 plus years, we've had 1 big client and that big client is an automobile company and I'm a little concerned because I don't think we're going to get any work from that automobile company anymore." My first reaction is to obviously help the guy feel a little bit better.

I said, "Well, I'm sure that's not the case. I'm sure you're doing great work. Tell me a little bit about the situation and either we'll find a silver lining for you or we'll look at it from a different perspective and see how we can turn this relationship into something that will be productive for the long term." He said, "Well, that would be great, but I'm not really sure we can." He said, "My client is General Motors, and on June 1st of last year," that would be June 1st, 2009, "they filed for bankruptcy protection. My job was to help defend them in a series of lawsuits that were filed against them and I've been defending them in this particular type of lawsuit forever. My father was defending them in this particular type of lawsuit forever before that. There are some nuances to the suit that make us uniquely suited," no pun intended, "to be the attorneys that would handle this."

 

I'm being a little vague in this area because I don't want to betray a confidence from this gentleman. He said, "But those lawsuits are no longer relevant because with the filing of the bankruptcy protection, General Motors, they're not going to be on the hook for big settlements because they don't have any money to pay. So the suits that were brought, most of them have been dismissed. The ones that were not dismissed are going to be either settled or they're just going to go away on their own, so I don't really know what we're going to do." I took a moment and I said, "I understand." Keep in mind, folks, this is 2010. I said, "Let's think about this. You know, what other clients do you have? What other type of work do you do?

Increase sales with communication frequency.

You don't communicate with your clients often enough.  That's why you don't sell as much as you should.  This episode of The 60 Second Sales Show outlines a way you can boost sales, immediately, by increasing your frequency of communication.

Here is the transcript of this episode.

Hey they're workplace warriors. Welcome to another edition of the sixty second sales show. I am Dave Lorenzo and I'm your host. Today we're talking about the most important relationships in your life. That's right. We're talking about relationships you develop that can lead to long term business but our frame of reference for developing these relationships and the entire foundation that the sixty second sales process is built upon is a foundation of deep long lasting relationships that can be built through an external orientation. Through your focus on the person with whom you're doing business. I'd like you to picture for a moment the most important relationship in your life. Think of that significant other, that spouse, that partner, your life partner. The person that you count on the most, the person that you spend the most time with. I want you to think about that relationship and think about how frequently you communicate with that person and now think about whether your relationship would be better with more communication or worse with more frequent communication.

In the back of your mind and maybe you've heard me say this before. In the back of your mind you may be kind of chuckling and saying honestly maybe my relationship would be better if we didn't see each other, if we didn't speak that often and frankly if your relationship would be better off if you didn't speak that often or if you didn't communicate that frequently, I'll tell you then maybe you need deeper counseling that I'm going to be able to give you here on the sixty second sales show. Seriously frequency of communication is the cornerstone of building a foundation of trust and that's what relationship based sales is all about. When we talk about selling something to someone it starts with a relationship. It starts with them and you having some sort of rapport. It starts with you both acting from a position of mutual interest not just self-interest. The entire sixty second sales process is built around you and the person with whom you are working connecting in that first sixty seconds and realizing that there is a foundation of a relationship here.

Let me take you back to a time in my career when I first realized the power of relationship development through frequent communication. I was working almost exclusively with lawyers in 2010 and I had developed a database. I had developed a list of lawyers over the two years that I was really in this business actively, 2008, 2009. I had database of lawyers and they would receive an email from me on a regular basis. They were receiving an email from me each week. It was Wednesday at noon. I still deliver that email. I now deliver it to all sorts of business leaders not just lawyers but at the time it was called The Rainmaker Minute and that email was going out once a week. It was something that I started in February of 2009 and nine and I started it in response to the need for me to develop deeper relationships with people who had met me let's say at a speaking engagement or had kind of come to know me through reading an article that I had written or maybe just stumbled upon my website.

All these folks had interacted with me one time and they wanted additional information from me so I started sending out this weekly email newsletter and I would educate people on business strategy, practice management, productivity improvement. Everything that they didn't teach lawyers in Law School I was covering in this weekly email newsletter. Around thanksgiving time in 2010 I had been doing the newsletter for almost two years....

Pushy salespeople suck. In this episode of the 60 second sales show you hear how I discovered a better way.

Welcome everyone to another edition of The 60 Second Sale Show. This is Dave Lorenzo, and I’m the guy who helps you close more deals fast. Today, I’m going to start off with kind of a confession actually. It really is a confession. I've been thinking a lot about you and what you're facing from a sales perspective, and I wanted to share with you one of the stories that has really shaped my approach to sales over the years. The confession is that, when I first started using this approach, actually how I first started using this approach to sales, it came about really out of the intimidation I felt related to sales and selling. You heard that right. I was absolutely intimated to walk into the office of some senior level executive and offered to help him or his company build and grow their business.

It seems, I guess, a little, maybe a lot surprising to those of you who know me well, because I go in now and I'm like a steamroller, I'm happy to walk into any executive's office at any time and I just start having a conversation. I guess maybe I should preface it by saying I don't steamroll over people, I steamroll into the office, and then I use the approach we're going to discuss, but at the time when I first started developing this relationship based sales approach, I was a guy who thought that sales was, well, for lack of a better word, show up and throw up type opportunity.

Here's the story that really changed the way I think about things. I had developed a business for Marriott. I was probably, if I think back I can give you the exact math. It was probably 20, no 18 years, 18 years into my career, and I had developed a $50 million a year annual revenue business for Marriott. I did that by selling corporate housing. I was the GM, I was the executive VP of the brand, but I sold every day because that's who I am. I was selling corporate housing to large companies, to a lot of financial services companies: Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Bear Stearns, Cantor Fitzgerald, all of the large financial services companies who would place executives on a temporary basis, at least 30 days, but most the time I was for 3 to 6 months. I was doing this in New York City, which is a very fast-paced environment.

Well, that sales approach was one where I would walk into an executive who handled relocation, usually it was a human resource executive, and I would do a presentation. I would spout off features and benefits, and the executive would either think they were valuable or he wouldn't. Most the time, because I was successful, he would think they were valuable. To be frank, I was selling a Marriott product which was a very high quality product and had a huge successful brand behind me. They would either agree to work with us or they wouldn't.

The sales process was very straightforward. Like I said, it was a show up and throw up sales process. When I ended up leaving that role when I was recruited to join the Gallup organization to start up their business in Manhattan, I had to change my approach. The reason I had to change my approach came from this specific incident. I worked with a partner when I first started at Gallup, and my partner was a phenomenal relationship oriented guy. His role, I guess, would be considered an inside sales role these days. He would call people on the phone and he would set appointments for me to go in and talk about our consulting services.

My approach when I first began was one where I figured I would just go in and say, "Hey, I'm Dave. I'm here from Gallup. Here is the latest thing we've come up with you need it in your company. What do you think?" Typical show up and throw up sales process. I would go in there, talk about features and benefits, and apply the features and benefits to the client's sales organization.

Five Habits That Increase Your Income

This is Dave Lorenzo and you're listening to the sixty second sales show and in today's episode we're going to talk about the five daily habits that make you more money. Five daily habits that make you more money. This episode actually comes about from an experience I had right when I first started out in sales and in selling. I was running a business for Maria and I needed to attract more people to come to stay in the hotel that I ran. This was something that was not native to me. It was not something that I was used to doing so I did what a lot of sales people do when they start out. I did probably what you did when you started out. I went out and I joined every group possible. I joined every chamber of commerce, I joined every networking group, I joined every organization I could and I was going to a breakfast, a luncheon, a dinner, it seemed like every day of the week.

I was meeting a lot of people and I didn't really know what to do after I had met them. I met an older gentleman at one of these Chamber of Commerce meetings and one of the first things he said to me was, when you meet somebody that you really like you should try to follow up with them in a way that's special and personal to them. My thought was okay how am I going to do that? I decided I was going to pick two or three people from every networking meeting that I went to. I was going to just follow up with a note. This is a handwritten note and the reason it was a handwritten note and not an email quite frankly is because this was in the time before everybody had email. People had it and maybe they checked it once a week or maybe they didn't have access to it all the time so if you were going to communicate with people send a note to them in the regular mail.

I went out to the local drugstore on the corner and I bought some white note cards that just said ... I think they said thanks on the front, the first batch that I got. I would go to these networking meetings and I would meet people and I would pick three people who were the most interesting to me who I thought I probably could do business with down the road and I would write them just a handwritten note and it was very simple. I would say something to the effect, "It was great meeting you, I really enjoyed the experience, I'd love to speak with you again soon, have a nice day." Something along those lines and I would throw my business card in the envelope and I would send it off. I did this every networking meeting I went to for the first couple of weeks and something amazing happened. I probably sent out fifteen of these in the first two weeks, twenty maybe in the first two weeks. I got four or five phone calls people calling me thanking me for the handwritten note that I sent them and asking if they could connect with me and have lunch and learn more about me and what I did and how they could possibly help me.

This was something that for me it was a breakthrough at the time because it was a way for me to schedule follow up meetings, potential sales meetings. These people could have been prospects. It was a way for me to schedule these without having to cold call. It was a way for me to schedule sales appointments without having a cold call. I thought to myself this could be the breakthrough that I've been looking for let me go through the paper and highlight some of the most influential and important people in our community and let me write them a handwritten note. I went to a printer and I got some stationery printed up with my name on it, very nice stationery with my return address printed on the envelope and I started to read the paper every day and pick three people out of the newspaper.

I would write them note cards that said congratulations on being featured in the paper. I saw the article in Tuesday's ... And I'd put the name of the paper there.

How To Close Deals Fast

Hey there Workplace Warriors. It's Dave Lorenzo and this is, The 60 Second Sale Show. I'm the guy who helps you close more deals, fast, and today I'm going to remind you that we're in the business of building relationships. When we build relationships we close deals, and we do it quickly. Now, being fast is often times more important than being best. I know that's shocking, so I'm going to say it again. Being fast is more important than being best. In fact, I've made a career, a great career, out of being faster than everybody else. Back in 1999, I was the Vice President and General Manager of ExecuStay, that was Marriott's corporate housing brand, and I worked in New York City. There is no faster place on earth than New York City. Corporate housing at that time, especially in New York City, was an extremely competitive business.

Now, for those of you who don't know, corporate housing is really like an extended stay apartment, if you will. In fact, in New York, these were actual apartments that I would go out and sublease for Marriott from either condominium owners or from large developers, and then my team and I would furnish them, we would turn on all the utilities, the cable. At that time they had land line telephones. We'd set all that up, and then executives would move into them for 30 days or longer. Now, Marriott had just gotten into this business. In fact, I was the pioneer of this business for them in New York City and this period of time in New York real estate was crazy. Apartments were flying out of realtors' inventory, developers would finish putting up the walls in a building and while the paint was drying, they would sell out the entire building.

They'd rent the entire building full of apartments overnight. This made it really tough for my team and it made it really tough for me to close deals because we could never get enough inventory, we could never get enough apartments. We had nothing to sell. This was actually good news. We took those lemons and we made fantastic lemonade because it meant that my competitors couldn't get any inventory either. I realized that if I could solve this problem, solve the problem of demand in the market, I would have a huge competitive advantage. I used my sales skills to tackle this problem. There were a few publications that developers would use to announce projects they were developing. They would do this with the hope of attracting people to lease their new building quickly.

What I did was I hired a publicist and I instructed that publicist to go out and connect me with these developers. I wanted to know which buildings were being developed and which buildings would be ready quickly. At 2:30pm, one April afternoon, I remember it like it was yesterday, this is in 1999 now, I found out a developer was ready to lease up a building on the West Side of Manhattan. The building was due to open in July of that year. Once my publicist let me know that this developer was going to go out with a big campaign to announce this building, I went to his office that afternoon. I went with my check book and I wrote a hundred thousand dollar check as a deposit for the entire building. He cancelled the publication of the story, didn't have to do any marketing at all for his building. I was able to lease up the 80 apartments in that building and my sales team was outstanding.

We filled it before the ink was even dry on that lease. Now, I used this strategy several times over the next two years and I dominated the market. We were able to obtain a 70% market share, 70% market share of the corporate housing business in New York City, in 1999, 2000 and early 2001. We were able to do that because I was better than my competitors, well, maybe I was better than my competitors. Was I smarter than my competitors? Yeah, maybe I was a little smarter than my competitors, but was I faster than my competitors,

Discover how to effectively use the referral multiplier to grow your business.

This is the second episode of The 60 Second Sale Show. In case you missed episode one you can follow this link to listen: How To Build Valuable Relationships with Your Clients

Hey there work place warriors, it's Dave Lorenzo and this is the 60 Second Sale Show, and today's show is about the referral multiplier. Today, I'm going to share with you the secrets of the referral multiplier. If you want to grow your business quickly, it doesn't matter if you are an entrepreneur, or you are a sales professional, or if you run a super big company the best way to grow your company fast is through referral. Think about it this way, if you had 50 clients, just 50 clients and you were able to convince each of them to give you one new referral four times a year, and you only closed 50% of those people who would be able to more than double, in fact, you'd be able to triple the size of your company in just 6-1/2 months.

That's right, you'd be able to triple the size of your company by just having a closing ratio of about 50% of the people who are referred to you by the folks who know you, like you, and trust you the most your clients. Today, you are going to discover the secrets of the referral multiplier. This is one of the most powerful strategies you can implement. The referral multiplier was born out of necessity.

There's the old expression necessity of the mother of invention, and the referral multiplier came about when I was sitting across from one of my best clients. In fact, my first client who was in the legal profession, my first attorney client was sitting across from me, and we were resigning. She was signing up for a second year of work with me. I was thrilled because she was the very first lawyer I had ever worked with, and we were having a discussion, and she said to me, "Dave, I can't tell you how happy I am. In the first seven months that we've worked together my business has doubled, and I was absolutely thrilled with the way I did it. I didn't have to do it in a way that made me feel like I was out selling vacuums door-to-door. I am beside myself with joy that we were able to grow, and work together for a year, and I'm happy to sign up for a second year."

As she was signing the paperwork, I said to her, "Anna, thank you so much. I can't tell you how much it fills my bucket to hear you say that. It makes me feel like I'm on top of the world. I have to ask you one question. Why is it that since you are so happy with me you've never sent me to someone else? Why is it that you've never introduced me to someone with whom I can do business? You've never given me one referral in the entire year we've worked together?"

At that point, she put the pen down, and she looked at me, tilted her head and said, "You know, I don't have a good answer to that question," and together we brainstormed, and what we came up with was the fact that number one, Anna didn't know that I wanted referrals. Sounds silly, right. She didn't know that I actually wanted her to introduce me to other people who were just like her good, high quality attorneys who are looking to grow their business.

The second thing was she didn't know who could she refer me to. She didn't know to whom I would like to be introduced. She didn't have an idea in her mind. She didn't have a mental picture of who the right person was to connect me with, and then the third thing she discovered was she didn't know how to introduce me. She didn't know that I wanted referrals. She didn't know who to introduce me to, and she didn't know how I wanted to be connected with these people.

That really got me thinking, and I developed a process that would help me attract more referrals from my best clients, and in turn, it will now help you attract more referrals from your best clients. Think about it this way.

How to Build Valuable Relationships With Your Clients

Welcome to the 60 Second Sales Show.

I am Dave Lorenzo, your host. I'm the guy who helps you make a great living and live a great life. Today we're here to help you create deep, lifelong relationships with your clients, in 60 seconds or less.

Increasing sales requires you to create a sense of urgency among your clients. Creating a sense of urgency is not something that comes naturally.

I want you, now, to picture a big fat guy sitting on a couch at home in the middle of a snowstorm. He's sitting there eating a bag of potato chips. He's got them and he's throwing them into his mouth, one after the other. Your job is to get that big fat guy off the couch, get him to run out the door into the snowstorm to buy the product that you're selling. We're going to show you how to do that right now, here, today, on the 60 Second Sales Show. The best way you can do that is to motivate the person to act in his or her own self-interests.

Way back when, about ten years ago, when I was a partner at The Gallup Organization, my boss came to me. The CEO of the company walks into my office and he sits down in the chair and he says, "Dave, listen. I have something I want you to do and it's something that's really personal to me". I sat up, I leaned forward, and I was listening intently as he described to me a situation in which his brother in law, his ex brother in law, the guy who had just divorced his sister, had stolen one of his most prized accounts. The account was Ann Taylor stores. It was a clothing retailer. He described to me the pain he felt when his brother in law not only humiliated his sister by divorcing her, but also stole his account. He said to me, "I need you to do me this favor. I need you to drop what you're doing and go after this account as hard as you possibly can. I want you to land this account and if you do it in the next 60 days, I'm going to give you a $50,000 bonus".

You know and I know that money is a huge motivator for successful sales people, so I sat up in my chair and I said, "Boss, you can count on me. I'm on the case".

Keep in mind that this is a business, this is an industry, big ticket consulting, business to business consulting, which normally requires an 18-month to 2-year sales cycle. The minimum size account we would even bother to look at as a consulting organization is $1,000,000 in revenue to us on an annual basis. I just promised my boss I was going to do this in 60 days.

I looked around the room, just me there, and I said to myself, "How am I going to make this happen?" I went into my contacts file and I looked for people who had been to my speaking engagements in the past. I noticed there was one person from this company, one person from Ann Taylor stores, who had been to a speaking engagement in the past. I picked up the phone and I reached out her and I said, "I noticed you had come to see me speak. I'm wondering what resonated with you from that presentation".

She gave me a clue, she gave me an insight, as to how I could potentially help her.

She said to me, "What really resonated with me is that you talked about how diversity in our management team could increase sales in our organization. This is something we desperately need".

I said to her, "Wow". Her name was Allison. I said, "Allison, what's preventing you from making this happen?" She said, "I can't make the case. I can't make the case internally to my boss. I can't make the case to the CEO. The case is just too difficult". I said, at that point, "Allison, would you like some help with that?" She paused and she said, "Of course. I would love some help with that. What could you do to help me?"

At that point, we were off to the races. I knew I had her. I knew I had created an opportunity, but I didn't know whether or not we had a sens...