Master Deal Maker Secrets

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have.

On today's episode, we are talking about the Phoenix, because for me, the Phoenix is the perfect metaphor for business, you must be wondering, "why is the Phoenix the perfect metaphor for business?" Well, about seven years ago, I transitioned from being in a partnership with a business partner and I went out on my own.

I had a number of things going on at the time, my first wife had just passed away very suddenly and I had a three and a half-year-old son and a five-month-old son, it was a particularly challenging time. So I created a new brand and I came up using the likeness of a Phoenix. 

When I looked into it, I realized how much significance it had. I mean, it had some personal significance for me because I was literally having to relaunch my entire life, not just my entire business, but I had to relaunch myself personally, I had these two children under the age of four, one of which was basically a newborn.

The most popular myth of the Phoenix is Arabic and in Arabic, the Phoenix archetype was for a thousand years, then it dies and it is literally reborn through its own ashes. That had personal significance for me at the time because I literally had to relaunch my entire deal, including my business. 

That was why I adopted the Phoenix as my brand and have run with it ever since. But from a business perspective, and this is the main point that I wanted to get to here, is that when you're in business, you get to the end of the month and even if you've had a really good month, the next month doesn't care.

The Phoenix is such a perfect metaphor for sales because you know, it's not about what you did last month, what did you do for me lightly? And what are you doing now? When was the last time that you got in front of a potential client? How many conversations did you have last month that could have resulted in business taking place?

You know, so many businesses out there can get busy dealing with the clients that they've already got or looking and focusing in the minutia of running a business that they forget about what the actual lifeblood of a business is. And that is generating new business, coming up with new ways that you can help and service and delight your clients and give them a fantastic outcome. Often we get complacent and we sometimes forget to do the things that have made us successful.

It's a very easy thing to lose sight of, busy work can eclipse the things that deep down we know we should be doing. That's why I love the imagery and the branding around the Phoenix, because the Phoenix, every thousand years it dies and it has to be reborn through its own ashes.

I know this is a slightly unusual, subject, it's more of a metaphorical or a philosophical type subject for us to be talking about. But, I've had this brand for a while and I haven't really talked about it that much, but I recently had somebody asked me about it and I explained it to them, it turned out that they were quite fascinated.

To DOUBLE your lead-to-sale CONVERSION with the leads you already have, go to http://JohnBlakeAudio.com for his exclusive, free, no-fluff, audio training and companion PDF guide.

Inside you’ll get word-for-word email followup templates, phone scripts, and more that you can put to use today.

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have.

There are a number of serious problems associated with entrepreneurs and depression. This has become more and more prevalent in recent years. I've been looking and examining some of the dominoes that fall along that road: what is it that causes somebody to come into a place where they start to feel surrounded with very few choices.  

I think that it's worthwhile exploring that. When people want to begin a business, the first thing that they'll do is need some seed capital. But if you don't have enough money or you don't have a history of being able to borrow money and tie it back, then the banks aren't going to give you any money.  

What would you then do? You might go looking for investors. Investors can come in many forms, even in the form of mom and dad.  

Let's say you might've had one really successful business. And so, you go to start a second successful business. I expect the second business to be as successful as the first. Often, that's really not the case. 

That first success can be isolated. If you go into a different industry that you don't know much about or perhaps you haven't done as much due diligence and research and really set yourself up to take a goal straight off the bat, that second business might not go very well at all.  

I think it's the pressure of having to let the people down who are closest to you is what causes people to be depressed. And in extreme cases, and I'm starting to hear about this more and more: entrepreneurs are taking their own life. 

And why is that? Because there's science that they've borrowed money off people that had cited them, and they've got to go back to those people, cap in hand and say, “I lost your money. I haven't been able to do the things that I really wanted to do and I haven't been successful in this business.”  

Some people dread that conversation. Who wouldn't? I was thinking about what's the antidote to that. That is actually pretty simple and it's about bootstrapping; it's the philosophy that I have myself. 

It's the philosophy that I typically work with. I had clients that have come to me that have had an idea that they want us to launch, and they didn't have the first idea about how to do it.  

Probably the best example would be the PC client that I've worked with who is just going gray gaps while she's just creating some incredible wins all over the place. When we first started, she had a payday business.  

But she had this idea and this vision of what she wanted to create. Now we've grown that business to a point where she's now doing four or five times as much. We bootstrapped that business; we've grown it and established a solid foundation at each level of growth.  

If you know somebody who is an entrepreneur or if you are thinking of starting up your own business, before you borrow a whole bunch of money and set up really flash offices and spend a truckload of money on marketing, think about how you can grow that business organically.  

Think about how you can get to that first level and build that solid level of growth at that first level. Do that by bootstrapping. And by bootstrapping, I mean, use that time to do your own lead generation.  

Look at building your own database. Get off your farm and go knock on doors. Contact some people. You can use your network for introductions and leverage without having to use your network for borrowing money.  

The other cool thing about bootstrapping is that you get to market test your idea so you can get feedback before you actually go on down and throw a whole bunch of money into it. Before you go on tip a whole bunch of extra resources in, in the form of money or time into it, you can actually market test your minimal viable product before you go and invest a whole truckload of money.  

I know that mental health is a massive thing. Hopefully, if there's somebody who sees this, it'll help them to sort of kick things off on the right foot.  

To DOUBLE your lead-to-sale CONVERSION with the leads you already have, go to http://JohnBlakeAudio.com for his exclusive, free, no-fluff, audio training and companion PDF guide.

Inside you’ll get word-for-word email followup templates, phone scripts, and more that you can put to use today.

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have.

There are a number of serious problems associated with entrepreneurs and depression. This has become more and more prevalent in recent years. I've been looking and examining some of the dominoes that fall along that road: what is it that causes somebody to come into a place where they start to feel surrounded with very few choices.  

I think that it's worthwhile exploring that. When people want to begin a business, the first thing that they'll do is need some seed capital. But if you don't have enough money or you don't have a history of being able to borrow money and tie it back, then the banks aren't going to give you any money.  

What would you then do? You might go looking for investors. Investors can come in many forms, even in the form of mom and dad.  

Let's say you might've had one really successful business. And so, you go to start a second successful business. I expect the second business to be as successful as the first. Often, that's really not the case. 

That first success can be isolated. If you go into a different industry that you don't know much about or perhaps you haven't done as much due diligence and research and really set yourself up to take a goal straight off the bat, that second business might not go very well at all.   I think it's the pressure of having to let the people down who are closest to you is what causes people to be depressed. And in extreme cases, and I'm starting to hear about this more and more: entrepreneurs are taking their own life. 

And why is that? Because there's science that they've borrowed money off people that had cited them, and they've got to go back to those people, cap in hand and say, “I lost your money. I haven't been able to do the things that I really wanted to do and I haven't been successful in this business.”  

Some people dread that conversation. Who wouldn't? I was thinking about what's the antidote to that. That is actually pretty simple and it's about bootstrapping; it's the philosophy that I have myself. 

It's the philosophy that I typically work with. I had clients that have come to me that have had an idea that they want us to launch, and they didn't have the first idea about how to do it.  

Probably the best example would be the PC client that I've worked with who is just going gray gaps while she's just creating some incredible wins all over the place. When we first started, she had a payday business.  

But she had this idea and this vision of what she wanted to create. Now we've grown that business to a point where she's now doing four or five times as much. We bootstrapped that business; we've grown it and established a solid foundation at each level of growth.  

If you know somebody who is an entrepreneur or if you are thinking of starting up your own business, before you borrow a whole bunch of money and set up really flash offices and spend a truckload of money on marketing, think about how you can grow that business organically.  

Think about how you can get to that first level and build that solid level of growth at that first level. Do that by bootstrapping. And by bootstrapping, I mean, use that time to do your own lead generation.  

Look at building your own database. Get off your farm and go knock on doors. Contact some people. You can use your network for introductions and leverage without having to use your network for borrowing money.  

The other cool thing about bootstrapping is that you get to market test your idea so you can get feedback before you actually go on down and throw a whole bunch of money into it. Before you go on tip a whole bunch of extra resources in, in the form of money or time into it, you can actually market test your minimal viable product before you go and invest a whole truckload of money.  

I know that mental health is a massive thing. Hopefully, if there's somebody who sees this, it'll help them to sort of kick things off on the right foot.  

To DOUBLE your lead-to-sale CONVERSION with the leads you already have, go to http://JohnBlakeAudio.com for his exclusive, free, no-fluff, audio training and companion PDF guide.

Inside you’ll get word-for-word email followup templates, phone scripts, and more that you can put to use today.

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have.

Welcome to Master Dealmaker’s Secrets. Today, we're going to be talking about one of the single most overlooked things in sales that cause a massive disconnect between the number of clients that are being converted and the ones that aren't. 

Let me give you a bit of background that one of the biggest requests that I get is people tell me that their guys aren't converting or not converting enough. The word closing has the connotation of something that happens at the end.  

Everyone's obsessed with what happens at the end of the actual sales conversation. What they are often not aware of is that the decision to actually work with you or to purchase from you actually happens a lot further upstream in the process than many people are aware of. 

It really does boil down to this: a purchase takes place first in the mind of your potential client only when the perceived cost of doing nothing becomes greater than the investment in your product or service. We can boil this down to as simple as an analogy as you sitting on the couch. 

Bear with me for a cigarette. You're sitting on the couch, watching television. I'm not talking about getting up off the couch; but my question to you is: at what point do you change positions on that couch?  

If you're comfortable on the couch, you are not going to change positions on that couch until one thing happens. As human beings, we won't move from where we are until we become uncomfortable enough to do so.  

This analogy can be extrapolated out into almost any area of life. It's most certainly applicable in a sales context.  

Let's say I'm talking to somebody and they tell me that they have got a 1% conversion rate and that's ridiculously low. You've got a 1% conversion rate and you have an average transaction size of $10,000. So for every 100 inquiries that you get, you're converting one of them $10,000.  

I would ask them how long has it been like that, and they might answer that it has been six months. I will ask again how much they are spending on advertising. And they might say, $10,000 a month.  

I might say that they’re spinning $10,000 a month, and for every 100 inquiries, they're making $10,000 in sales. Then I will ask them, how is that impacting things?  

It's like if you have a problem in your life, you think about it a lot and you focus on it, it gets bigger. In a sales conversation, the more that we create an environment where the person can examine the problem that they've got, the more that problem gets bigger.   

The bigger that problem gets, the smaller your investment in your product or service. So often we talk about what is the return on investment.  

But often we need to look at COI. What is the cost of inaction? Because in many cases. that is what is going to get people across the line. 

Something that you can measure is a quantitative measure. If you've got a percentage conversion rate that you're looking to improve or you're looking to get a better return on the amount that you're spending on advertising, that's pretty easy.  

But the other part of it is there can also be qualitative things - things that you can't measure, but they can be as if not more powerful.  

So a qualitative measure could be: I can't sleep at night. I'm stressed and I'm working 80 hours a week. I'm not spending any time with my kids.  

Those things can be absolute as if not more powerful than the actual monetary or measurable things. You need language to confirm somebody’s choice to go ahead at the end of a conversation. 

But I think people have fixated on it. I think that if you get this bit right: exploring and creating an environment where the person can uncover the cost of doing nothing, a much more powerful place to examine your sales process and to look at how you can increase the likelihood of somebody coming on board.   

I wish you all the best in implementing this. If you can get it right, I think it will make a massive difference. 

To DOUBLE your lead-to-sale CONVERSION with the leads you already have, go to http://JohnBlakeAudio.com for his exclusive, free, no-fluff, audio training and companion PDF guide.

Inside you’ll get word-for-word email followup templates, phone scripts, and more that you can put to use today.

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have.

Welcome to Master Dealmaker’s Secrets. Today, we're going to be talking about one of the single most overlooked things in sales that cause a massive disconnect between the number of clients that are being converted and the ones that aren't. 

Let me give you a bit of background that one of the biggest requests that I get is people tell me that their guys aren't converting or not converting enough. The word closing has the connotation of something that happens at the end.  

Everyone's obsessed with what happens at the end of the actual sales conversation. What they are often not aware of is that the decision to actually work with you or to purchase from you actually happens a lot further upstream in the process than many people are aware of. 

It really does boil down to this: a purchase takes place first in the mind of your potential client only when the perceived cost of doing nothing becomes greater than the investment in your product or service. We can boil this down to as simple as an analogy as you sitting on the couch. 

Bear with me for a cigarette. You're sitting on the couch, watching television. I'm not talking about getting up off the couch; but my question to you is: at what point do you change positions on that couch?  

If you're comfortable on the couch, you are not going to change positions on that couch until one thing happens. As human beings, we won't move from where we are until we become uncomfortable enough to do so.  

This analogy can be extrapolated out into almost any area of life. It's most certainly applicable in a sales context.  

Let's say I'm talking to somebody and they tell me that they have got a 1% conversion rate and that's ridiculously low. You've got a 1% conversion rate and you have an average transaction size of $10,000. So for every 100 inquiries that you get, you're converting one of them $10,000.  

I would ask them how long has it been like that, and they might answer that it has been six months. I will ask again how much they are spending on advertising. And they might say, $10,000 a month.  

I might say that they’re spinning $10,000 a month, and for every 100 inquiries, they're making $10,000 in sales. Then I will ask them, how is that impacting things?  

It's like if you have a problem in your life, you think about it a lot and you focus on it, it gets bigger. In a sales conversation, the more that we create an environment where the person can examine the problem that they've got, the more that problem gets bigger.   

The bigger that problem gets, the smaller your investment in your product or service. So often we talk about what is the return on investment.  

But often we need to look at COI. What is the cost of inaction? Because in many cases. that is what is going to get people across the line. 

Something that you can measure is a quantitative measure. If you've got a percentage conversion rate that you're looking to improve or you're looking to get a better return on the amount that you're spending on advertising, that's pretty easy.  

But the other part of it is there can also be qualitative things - things that you can't measure, but they can be as if not more powerful.  

So a qualitative measure could be: I can't sleep at night. I'm stressed and I'm working 80 hours a week. I'm not spending any time with my kids.  

Those things can be absolute as if not more powerful than the actual monetary or measurable things. You need language to confirm somebody’s choice to go ahead at the end of a conversation. 

But I think people have fixated on it. I think that if you get this bit right: exploring and creating an environment where the person can uncover the cost of doing nothing, a much more powerful place to examine your sales process and to look at how you can increase the likelihood of somebody coming on board.   

I wish you all the best in implementing this. If you can get it right, I think it will make a massive difference. 

To DOUBLE your lead-to-sale CONVERSION with the leads you already have, go to http://JohnBlakeAudio.com for his exclusive, free, no-fluff, audio training and companion PDF guide.

Inside you’ll get word-for-word email followup templates, phone scripts, and more that you can put to use today.

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have.

I was first introduced to this idea through a book called Psycho-Cybernetics, written by a guy called Maxwell Malts. He is a plastic surgeon; and what he realized is that there was a disconnect between how people saw themselves even after he'd done plastic surgery for them. [Listen for the full episode]

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. I was first introduced to this idea through a book called Psycho-Cybernetics, written by a guy called Maxwell Malts. He is a plastic surgeon; and what he realized is that there was a disconnect between how people saw themselves even after he'd done plastic surgery for them.

He would change someone's appearance and they would look in a mirror after he'd done the surgery, saying that they didn't see any difference in how they looked.

One of the things that came out of this book was this process which I was able to adapt to some of the clients that I work with on a coaching basis. I'm going to give you the exact process to do this, but I'm going to do it in the body of a story.

I worked with a sunglass rep and he was working in Victoria, which is a pretty good territory in summer. But in winter, when it gets rainy and miserable over there, the sun doesn't shine a lot. So it's pretty difficult to sell sunglasses during winter.

I was sent down to Victoria to go on the road with this guy and he was having a shocker. They were about to finish this guy up as an agent because he just was not performing.

I decide that I'm going to use this particular process with him. You need to recall an example of a time in your life where you won something or you succeeded in something. The second part is you need to recall what you could see, what you could hear and what you could feel in that moment.

You literally have to go back and relive that moment and experience all of the things that you could see, all the things that you could hear and all the things that you could feel in that moment. And more specifically, in the moment that they announced your name as the winner or that time as if you are receiving an award.

The second step is to visualize yourself. You can do this in two ways. You can do it John Malkovich-style where you're looking through your own eyes, which is probably the best way of doing it. If anyone remembers the movie Being John Malkovich, it is where someone gets reincarnated into John Malkovich’s body and they're experiencing the world through his eyes.

You take yourself out of that triumphant victorious scene and you walk into the scene that you're just about to walk into. It would be a sales type setting. You're walking into someone's office and you pitch everything going really well: the meeting going well, the person being receptive to what you're talking about and everything going particularly well right down to them.

So this is all happening in visualization mode, like if you've got 10 or 15 minutes, or might be five minutes to do it, sitting in your car before you walk into an actual appointment.

The reason it works is that you will be vibrating on the same frequency and the same wavelength as what you were when you were winning, and when you were experiencing that triumphant moment. People pick up on this: if you walk in with that kind of energy to an appointment, you are so much more likely to create a positive result and it'll make you look, sound, and feel so much more confident.

I did it with the guy I mentioned earlier. Turns out this guy was a professional windsurfer so he had won some wind surfing competitions. So he gets out of the car and he walks in. I just sat in the car and waited. He comes out with this massive smile on his face like he is just beaming.

I said, “how many did you say that you're going to visualize?” He had written the exact order that he had visualized in his head. And this happened again at the second and third shop that we went and saw.

I would encourage you to try this. If you have situations, especially ones that where you feel you might be a little bit intimidated, I want you to try this out and see how it goes.

To DOUBLE your lead-to-sale CONVERSION with the leads you already have, go to http://JohnBlakeAudio.com for his exclusive, free, no-fluff, audio training and companion PDF guide.

Inside you’ll get word-for-word email followup templates, phone scripts, and more that you can put to use today.

 

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have.

I'm going to give you a simple process I found powerful and have used it with a number of clients. In the context of your business development and your revenue planning, this forms part of what I actually do with clients when we're tracking their growth.

This is an exercise that you can do on a quarterly or yearly basis.

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have.

I'm going to give you a simple process I found powerful and have used it with a number of clients. In the context of your business development and your revenue planning, this forms part of what I actually do with clients when we're tracking their growth.

This is an exercise that you can do on a quarterly or yearly basis. I learned it from the mentor that I've been working with and I think this is particularly powerful in terms of the steps that you go through to make it happen.

We’ll work on a 12-month scenario and then you can boil that down into quarterly and then monthly targets, as we move through.

The first question is if there was a number that you wanted to grow by in the next 12 months, what would that number be? Think about it above and beyond where you are right now, and write that percentage down.

Let's say that you are doing $100,000 in turnover. So what is the growth target that you want beyond a hundred grand?

Let's work on 30%. What does that percentage mean to you in dollar terms?

Write that number down.

In this situation, we want to divide 2,727 by 1,000, which gives us 2.7. That's the number of sales that you need.

What you need to do is you need to multiply that number by 10 and that will give you how many more sales conversations you need to get that growth.

That would assume a 10% conversion rate, or maybe do it by five. 2.7 multiplied by five gives you the number of sales conversations that you need to generate that number. It's 13.5.

In order to do 2.7 sales per month, you need to add a conversion rate of 20%. You need to speak to 13 and a half people per month to bridge the gap and give you that 30% growth.

You might need to generate 26 leads to turn them into 13.5 conversations. This is a super powerful exercise to do because it gives you the amount of activity that you need to generate to give you that result, and what you need to think about beyond that.

Yes, this can be a powerful tool to plan your activity. A lot of people plan their growth and they plan their numbers, but they don't plan their activity. So, let's just go on 13.5 conversations per month.

Divide 13.5 by five working days. And that's 2.7 – which you can call it three appointments. Three conversations per day that you're going to have to create that result.

This is useful to those who use it, given that we're getting to the end of the year and that you are probably looking to work out what you want to generate next year in terms of increased revenue.

I'm very confident that this is going to be a valuable exercise for you to do, for you to start to map that out, put that together. And then you can start to look at the activity, and the strategies that you need to deploy to support that activity to make sure that you're delivering those conversion rates and having those conversations.

To DOUBLE your lead-to-sale CONVERSION with the leads you already have, go to http://JohnBlakeAudio.com for his exclusive, free, no-fluff, audio training and companion PDF guide.

Inside you’ll get word-for-word email followup templates, phone scripts, and more that you can put to use today.

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have.

Education-based marketing is the most effective way to create separation between you and your competitors in a world where everybody is promising inverted commerce, good service, and a great product that becomes null and void.

I became aware of education-based marketing through the late Chet Holmes. He wrote the book, The Ultimate Sales Machine... [Listen to the podcast for mo