#MeetCoolPeople

I got an email from a client this week that freaked me out. Things weren't launching when they expected, and I was afraid I was doing a poor job. The truth was a little different. A ton of work was happening behind the scenes. I was just doing a poor job of communicating it.

This solo episode is on Yu, or "Courage", the last of the seven virtues from The Follow Up Code. I share what it took to own my mistake, get on the call, and say it plainly. I also talk about why the fear we build up beforehand is almost always worse than the thing we're afraid of.

Key Takeaways

• Why owning the mistake first puts the other person at ease
• What I lost sleep over, and how the call actually went
• Why we fear things that rarely happen
• A simple worst-case exercise to run before your next hard conversation
• Where courage shows up in your follow up, from the phone call to The Slacker Email

Listen If You...

• Have a client, coworker, or prospect conversation you've been putting off
• Know you should follow up with someone, and keep finding reasons to wait
• Draft the email, stare at it, and close the tab

Grab The Follow Up Code

Courage is one of the seven virtues in The Follow Up Code. If you want the full chapter (and the other six), grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/4c4exEM

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.

You open your AI tool, type "build me a CRM," and let it run. A few hours and a pile of credits later, you've got a lot of stuff nobody needed. Nowadays, everybody thinks they can just open up chat, say a few things, and it just builds the next amazing app. Alison Simmons says the mistake happened before you typed a word. Her advice is to not start with AI at all.

I got to sit down with Alison. We ran in the same circles for ages and never had a call until about a month ago. We hit it off, and we met in person a couple of weeks later. She's a former high school math teacher, a mom of 5, and a systems person through and through. After she maxed out her own business, she rebuilt it around AI. Now she teaches solopreneurs to run the backend of their business with it. Practical AI, not shiny objects.

Key Takeaways

• Where to begin before AI ever enters the picture. Alison explains what to build first, and why it saves you credits, time, and a few headaches.
• "If it's not documented, it does not count as a system." What that means for everything living in your head.
• Pick one tool and learn it inside and out before you go shopping for the next one. Her take on ChatGPT versus Claude: "Pick your poison and then drink it."
• Her Dora the Explorer trick for telling AI exactly what you want, plus the one thing to ask it to do before it builds anything.
• AI isn't coming for your job if you learn how to use it. And as Alison puts it, "AI doesn't make us lazy. It just points out who was lazy to begin with."

Listen If You...

• Keep burning through AI credits and still don't have anything that works
• Feel behind because a new AI tool drops every week
• Run a small business and want AI to handle the backend, not just write captions

Connect with Alison

The best way to find Alison is on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/alison-leigh-simmons.

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.

You know you need to prospect. It's on the list every morning. By 3:30 it's still sitting there, and now it feels twice as heavy. Sound familiar? David Riener has a simple fix. Eat the frog first.

I got to sit down with David Riener. We've got to know each other over several months, but had our first time to really sit down and chat at a happy hour that just happened to be at his house, and we hit it off right away. He's a U.S. Marine who has spent more than 30 years running or supporting sales teams. He came up in office technology sales at Xerox, back when that meant banging on doors and hitting the phones. Now he helps owner-led small businesses build sales that actually work. And he's done all of it as an introvert.

Key Takeaways

• You don't have to be an extrovert to win at sales. David has led sales teams for 30 years as an introvert, and his edge is knowing his numbers. For analytical types, that makes sales feel a lot less like a mystery.
• "Quantity has a quality all of its own." Quality still matters, but volume is what turns a bad day into just a bad day. David shares the two ratios he trains every rep on, and what they add up to.
• It's only cold outreach if you call it once. Every follow up after that gets warmer, and it shows people you believe in what you do.
• The hardest part of prospecting is starting. David compares it to a workout, and he explains why a prospecting buddy works just like a gym buddy.
• Eat the frog. Put prospecting first thing in the morning, then celebrate the top of the funnel wins almost as much as the closed deals.

Listen If You...

• Call yourself an introvert and figure sales just isn't for you
• Know you should prospect every day, but it keeps sliding to the afternoon (then not at all)
• Run a small business where the sales come in, but it's hit or miss

Connect with David

The easiest way to find David is on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/davidriener.

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.

Back when I was writing my own book, I bought someone else's. Right after I bought it, I started getting three emails a day from him. Every one pitched his next program, and it wasn't cheap. I hadn't even had a chance to read the book yet. I never did. He burnt the bridge too fast.

This solo episode comes straight out of The Follow Up Code. It's on Rei or "Respect", one of the seven virtues in the book and one of my own core values. When somebody gives you their email address, they're putting their trust in you. Respect is how you earn the right to be in their inbox before you ever ask for the sale.

Key Takeaways

• Why pitching before you've earned the right burns trust you don't get back
• How often to show up, and why most people aren't emailing enough
• What "consistently inconsistent" means and why it makes your emails feel human
• How to handle unsubscribes without taking it personal (and when you should)
• The 5 questions I run every email through before I hit send

Listen If You...

• Have a list you only email when you've got something to sell
• Feel a little sting every time someone unsubscribes
• Sell a relationship-based service and need people to trust you before they buy

Grab The Follow Up Code

Respect is one of the seven virtues in The Follow Up Code. If you want the full chapter (and the other six), grab your copy here: https://amzn.to/4c4exEM

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.

You close five deals in a row. Then the exact same pitch flops on the next three. Most people blame the market. Tim Mata says check your microscripts first.

Tim's been one of my closest friends in this networking world for a couple years now, the kind of friend where the after-event dinner matters more than the event itself. He spent over 25 years in sales leadership, including 11 years at Splunk while it went from an $18 million company to north of $2 billion. Now he runs Calvary Sales Partners as a fractional sales leader, using the SalesQB framework to help small and mid-sized tech companies get past the wall that stalls their growth.

Key Takeaways

• Founders build a great sales process. It just never leaves their head. Tim's real job is getting what a founder knows onto paper so a rep who isn't as good as the founder can still run 80% of it, and revenue still goes up.
• Microscripts are the small, reusable lines that make a customer lean in. Tim has founders go find the ones already working in their own calls, and just as important, find the ones quietly killing the deal.
• Record your sales calls and feed the transcripts to AI. Ask it to compare what happened on the calls you won against the ones you lost. The pattern shows up fast, and it is usually something you didn't know you were doing.
• Every sales methodology, Sandler, SPIN, Challenger, is really just a different way of working with the same thing: the primitive brain. Fear and the need for social proof haven't changed, no matter how modern the product is.
• Tim watched a company grow from $18 million to $2 billion in 11 years. The people who stuck around were the ones who stayed open when the old process stopped working for the next stage.

Listen If You...

• You're great at closing deals but can't fully explain why they close
• You're managing a sales team of two to six people and every deal still runs through you
• You want a plain, practical way to use AI on your sales calls instead of chasing another tool

Connect with Tim

Find Tim at cavalrysalespartners.com. He's also on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/timmata.

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Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.

You have been told to network more. Put yourself out there. Talk to strangers. Nobody ever hands you the actual steps. So you white-knuckle through the event, leave early, and tell yourself you are just not a people person. Bill Lennan builds the steps.

Bill and I got connected recently and clicked on the first call, the kind where you both go, okay, we need to talk more. He was raised on islands, and he has spent his career building products and teams across mobile, recruiting, e-commerce, and now education. These days he specializes in building high-functioning teams. He also used to have real social anxiety, so he built a system to get out of it, and he has taught it to more than a hundred people since.

Key Takeaways

• Social anxiety was the thing about to stall Bill's career the day he got his first team to run. He treated it like any other problem and built a fix. The doors that opened after were not small. Networking inside the company, public speaking, even dating all got easier.
• The 2 minute recipe: Bill's on-ramp for social anxiety is a short physical routine he runs before he walks into a room, built to drop your heart rate and make the first exchange easy. He walks through the exact steps on the show.
• Communication is a stack of skills, like math. You do not start at calculus. Start conversations a few thousand times until they come across as easy and natural instead of needy. Needy is hard to date with and hard to sell with.
• Lead with curiosity, not your pitch. Bill keeps a small set of reusable questions he uses on strangers, on his own team, and on executives alike. They are simple, and he lays them out in the episode. If you are patient, people tell you their problem.
• If you run a team, your job changed. Bill learned early that leading people is a different job than doing the work yourself, and that the real work is clearing what slows everyone else down. He tells the story of the day that clicked for him.

Listen If You...

• Keep getting told to network and have no idea what to actually say to a stranger
• Call yourself an introvert and use it as the reason you stay quiet at events
• Just moved from doing the work to leading the people who do it, and it is not clicking

Connect with Bill

Find Bill at 40pb.com. His book, Talking with Strangers, is on Amazon.

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.

You have heard the advice a hundred times. Take a breath. Pause before you react. Then a real moment hits, your chest tightens, and you are just standing there wondering what you are supposed to do with that pause. Hiba Tanvir builds the part everyone skips.

This week I got to sit down with my friend Hiba Tanvir. We met at Sheryl Powers' author symposium last October, I was emceeing, and we have been trading messages on LinkedIn ever since. She is an emotional intelligence speaker and an award-winning author, and she is the creator of the Play and Pause methodology and the Zest framework. She is also the one who walks into a room full of executives with a tub of Play-Doh and watches the whole mood shift.

Key Takeaways

• All emotions are welcome, but they are not equal. Hiba splits them into high-value emotions like compassion, joy, peace, and collaboration, and low-value ones like anger, shame, and frustration. The mix you live in is what she calls your net emotional worth. Aim for emotionally wealthy, not emotionally poor.
• A pause only helps if you know what goes inside it. Build two or three small moves you can run in 90 seconds or less, and practice them before the hard moment shows up. Nobody runs their first fire drill during an actual fire.
• Play changes a room faster than any icebreaker. Hand people something low threat, Play-Doh, a pen to doodle, a walk outside, and the nervous system settles, the jaw unclenches, and real conversation starts on its own.
• Play stops being play the second it has an audience. If you are doing it for a photo, for likes, or for a finished thing to show off, you have traded the benefit for the performance.
• You do not need a checklist or a blocked calendar to start. Doodle on the next call. Take the call as a walk. Pick the kind of play that is actually you, and let it happen without scheduling it.

Listen If You...

• Keep hearing "just pause" and have no idea what to do in the actual moment
• Run meetings or trainings and want the room engaged instead of glazed over
• Think showing emotion at work makes you look weak and want a better frame for it

Connect with Hiba

Find Hiba at htcompassion.com.

Her latest book, Future Ready Performance Playbook, is on Amazon. It is about staying unapologetically human in the AI era, and it goes deep on the Play and Pause methodology from this conversation.

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.

I once watched a speaker work a room of about 400 people. She was the best speaker I saw that whole year.

A month later, I caught them again, in a much smaller room. Before they went on stage, I walked up and told them how good she was. Their first words back: "So did you buy the program?" Not thank you. Not even a nod. Just a receipt check.

That one sentence cost her over 20% of the room.

And this is just one example of not stopping and being intentional with your words. 

I break down why that happens in this episode, and it comes down to three things: how you position yourself, the words you use, and the actions you actually take. Get any one of them wrong, and it doesn't matter how right you are.

Key Takeaways

• Why every single thing you say or do creates a feeling in the other person, whether you mean it to or not
• The line I use on myself before giving anyone hard feedback: "I get what you're going for, here's an idea that might help" instead of "that's stupid, do it this way"
• A former client that I couldn't back anymore, even though I agreed with everything they said
• Why chasing the algorithm with your words instead of the feeling behind them makes content fall flat
• The gap between what you claim about accountability and whether you actually follow through, and why that gap does more damage than staying quiet

Listen If You...

• Have ever said something true in a way that still hurt somebody
• Get views on your content but can feel it's not building real trust
• Talk a big game about your values and want a gut check on whether your actions back it up

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.

We are creatures of habit. Same drive, same desk, same routine, day after day. I noticed my own thinking had gone flat lately. The ideas were not showing up like they used to. That rut is comfortable, and that is the trap.

This episode came out of one small choice. I recently joined a group of people looking to just go do cool things together. Last Friday a few of us went to a comedy club downtown. Instead of driving, I took the train for the first time.

There were a couple of small annoyances. A nine minute walk in 102 degree heat, and watching the clock so I did not miss the last train home.

Those were nothing.

What the trip really did was remind me how much I need to try new things and get out of my comfort zone. That is what gets the creative brain moving again.

Key Takeaways

• Comfort dulls your creativity. A change of scenery gets your mind paying attention again.
• New experiences make your brain troubleshoot, ask questions, and figure things out in real time.
• An offsite day at a coffee shop every couple of weeks resets how you think and work.
• Small experiments lead to people you would never have met. One networking event I almost skipped gave me a close friend and a future podcast guest.
• Trying something new does not mean being reckless. It means stopping to ask if you are stuck in your ways.

Listen If You...

• You do the same thing the same way every day and your ideas feel stale.
• You work from the same spot behind a screen and rarely change your surroundings.
• You have been meaning to shake up a process or a routine and keep putting it off.

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.

Last Friday I was at ConnectFest, an amazing annual event put on by Sheryl Powers, when something happened that stopped me in my tracks. A gentleman (Jack Kearney) on the panel pulled out my own books in front of the whole room and told everyone, "If you want to learn this stuff, go read these." I had no idea he was going to do that. It hit me hard, and it got me thinking about how important moments like those are and how bad we are at acknowledging the impact we make on those around us.

In this solo episode, I'm talking about appreciation. Not just giving it, but knowing what to do when you receive it, because most of us let it slide right past us on the way to the next thing.

Key Takeaways

• Why calling someone out for helping you costs nothing and means everything
• The habit of screenshotting every testimonial and compliment, and why it matters more than you think
• How a folder of saved moments can carry you through the days you want to quit
• Why business owners downplay their own impact, and how to stop doing it
• What to actually do the next time someone tags you or thanks you online

Listen If You...

• Have ever brushed off a compliment instead of letting it land
• Are in the middle of a stretch where nothing feels like it's working
• Want a simple habit that costs nothing and pays off on your worst days

Tired of prospects ghosting you after your first conversation? Grab my FREE 5-day email course at https://thefollowupfix.net/ and learn the five relationship-killing mistakes that are costing you sales (and how to fix them without being pushy).

About the Show

#MeetCoolPeople is where founders, creators, and entrepreneurs share real stories about building businesses that matter. Hosted by Ely Delaney, each episode goes past surface-level advice to uncover the mindset shifts, failures, and frameworks that separate people who talk about success from people who actually build it.