Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

Dealing with qualified prospects only is the best. Try to get rid of some people as early on in the process as you possibly can. If you found out that you invested some time with them and you later discover, okay, this person is no longer qualified. Cut the cord, move on.

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing Qualified Prospects Only. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Thank you, David. Wow, this is the dream, right? This is the dream. If you could spend all your time only dealing with people who want your services, need your services, and then, wow, that’s what we’re searching for every day.

David: That’s it, man. We are living the dream. And I think for a lot of people, the reason they don’t live the dream is because they don’t make it a priority. They don’t build it in to their processes. They don’t say to themselves, when I am in touch with a prospect today, this needs to be one of the very first things that I do.

Is to get them qualified in or out as quickly as possible so I can move forward and not waste another nanosecond of my life energy on an unqualified prospect.

It’s doable, if you prioritize it as one of the first things that you want to have happen in a conversation with any new prospect.

Jay: Yeah, and I do want to point out there’s qualifying your leads and making sure that new leads fit in, but then there’s what we’re talking about.

Okay, you’ve got somebody new, you’re talking to them. In that process, you don’t want to spend more time with them than you have to if they’re just not going to fit what you have to offer. Now, I can usually do this in about five minutes, with somebody on the phone, and it’s because I’ve learned what to ask.

So, normally I’m like, I really don’t think we’re going to be able to serve your needs. And then I get to move on to the next call. And I think you’re sending a message to them and they may circle back to you eventually, because you were upfront with them.

David: Yeah, and we want to be upfront with people about that. Because we don’t want to waste their time any more than we want to waste our own time. One of the things that I’ve said to people so many times in so many conversations is, “Look, I respect your time as I respect my own, which is to say a lot.”

And it is so true. And the older I get, the more true it becomes. Although it’s been true for decades now, right? I’ve always looked at it as, I think I heard this from Brian Tracy originally, in one of his recordings, he said if you run out of money, you can always make more, but if you run out of time, all the money in the world won’t help you.

And I thought that is brilliant, because it is so true. When we invest time with unqualified prospects, when we spend too much time chasing down people who don’t have the need, the desire, the money, the budget, the willingness to spend. It means we are not in front of people who have all of those things.

And I did learn this lesson fairly early in my business, but I didn’t immediately implement it. It took me probably another several years before I finally got all the processes and all the procedures in place to try to strain those out, before I ended up in conversations with them.

And so often in my conversations with our clients, I’ll be talking to them about their procedure for bringing new clients through the door, like clockwork, because in my mind, everybody has to have that.

If you don’t have a procedure, in your business, for bringing new customers in like clockwork, then you’re going to be struggling. You’re going to be missing out. And during some of those conversations, I’ve had people say, “well, yeah, I’ve been trying to get an appointment with this person for months.”

And sometimes I’ll say, well, does this person even deserve an appointment? Have you qualified them? Have you asked a couple of qualifying questions to find out if they have any of the things, the need, the desire, the money, the budget, etc.?

And in a lot of cases, the answer is, well, no, that’s why I was trying to get to an appointment. And my point there is, why on earth would you spend any time at all trying to get an appointment with someone if you don’t already know they’re qualified?

Particularly if we’re talking about an in person appointment, which is what’s happening in a lot of these cases.

From a 21st century standpoint, where you’re trying to generate leads online, for example, it really is a two step process because you’re going to want whatever advertising you’re doing online to sort of weed out the worst quality prospects.

So you’re not taking calls with people who aren’t qualified to begin with. But even then it’s a net, you’ve got to sift out that first layer. And then sometimes you’ll end up on the phone with somebody who is still not completely qualified. And you’ve got to have a series of questions in place, a lead qualification procedure that will allow you to find out as you do, Within the first few minutes, whether or not it’s a good fit.

And if you don’t have that in place, if you don’t have a lead qualification procedure, a series of questions you can ask, relatively quickly, get answers to, and make that determination fast, you are going to spend not hours, not days, not weeks, you are going to spend months and years of your life talking to people who have absolutely no ability to buy from you.

Jay: Yeah, but the problem is it’s so hard to think, Oh, I can sell to everybody or especially if you’re early on and you’re like, I can’t afford to filter these people out. Well, you can because you should be focusing on other methods.

It may be more valuable to be spending time reassessing your system than it is spending time on the phone with people who can’t use your system.

I mean, we have a system and we’ve talked about our system quite a bit, but at every step there is a qualification process, right? So our first qualification process is our insane focus on keywords. We’re doing it right now, again, we’ve just gone through a new list of keywords.

That’s the first thing. We only want people contacting us who meet those keywords. Then once they’ve set up a consultation right there in the form, where they fill out their consultation, we ask questions about what they’re looking for. Who are they? What they want.

If they don’t fit, then before I even get on the phone with them, they’re going to get an email from me saying, Hey, we’re probably not going to be able to answer this question for us. So that’s step two, right?

And then step three is actually in the conversation that I have with them. So by the time they get to me, I’m the third level of qualification, right? we’re just insane about this process.

David: Well, I would say you’re more structured than insane because what you described is beautiful.

When you talk about a three level process like that, that is specifically designed to reduce the amount of time that you spend with unqualified prospects, that is smart and beautiful.

And that’s what we encourage all of our clients to do. Not just take anyone who can fog a mirror, anyone with a pulse.

We’re not looking for that. We’re looking for the right people up front. Now, during a process like that, is it possible, or is it even likely that you’re going to disqualify somebody who could potentially buy from you?

And the answer is yes. We view that as a cost of doing business. Because for every one of those people that you miss out on selling, there are probably 9, 10, 50, or 100 that you will not waste your time on.

So from a simple math standpoint, from a simple, time investment standpoint, you’re going to be far better off doing exactly what you and I just described, than if you just talk to anybody who’s willing to have a conversation with you.

Jay: Yeah, so true. But we also have a sorting process, right?

Because there are other steps after that. I sort them into immediate, can I close them within the next seven days? Then I have another group of weeks, and then years, and then I have a long term drip, right? Depending on which way I sort them, there are other steps, right?

So I never look at somebody as gone. I’ve added them to my marketing list, right? And so they’re going to hear from me once a month. You’d be amazed. I get two or three calls a month from people who at the time I had sorted out of the system, but now they’re back and things have changed, right?

And I’ve been on their mind once a month. So the filter continues and you don’t have to feel like, oh, that was a waste. I don’t know that any contact is ever a waste if you can sort them and not spend time on them again. But your system allows you to keep in contact with them again.

David: Yes. And what you identified there lines up perfectly with exactly what we’re talking about.

Now, I believe that in the beginning, in those first few layers, especially that you described, that a goal there is to disqualify the unqualified as quickly as possible. Because you don’t want a lot of them in your followup procedure. Even if it’s a drip campaign, you don’t even want to be dripping to people who really have no ability to buy what you’re selling.

So I believe it starts with a disqualification procedure first, because in any situation, like what you described with the keywords, your keywords are going to eliminate probably 90 percent of the people who are ever even going to see your message. So that’s kind of unseen, but it’s absolutely happening.

For people who aren’t doing that type of thing, they’re going to have to have more conversations and they’re going to have to be more ruthless than you are when it comes to disqualifying people. Because they don’t have those automated levels happening first to make that happen for them.

But once you’ve done that, when you’ve been able to eliminate the 80 to 85 percent of people who are never going to buy from you, then everything you described as far as the nurture is concerned and determining are they going to buy now or they’re going to buy next week, next month, next year…

If they have the ability to buy from you, yes, we absolutely want to follow up. And of course, in our work with clients, we talk about the five levels of qualification.

Are they ready to buy now? Those are the ones we’re going to buy within the next week or so.

Do they have specific dates in mind when they want to buy? Well, I’m not ready to buy now, but first of the year, I’d like to do it, right? That’s the second group.

Third group are the ones who are generally receptive. They’re open to the idea. They have the money, the need, the desire, the money, the budget. They’re just not quite sure exactly when they want to do it. Definitely want to drip to those.

Then you have the disqualified that we talked about before. No need, no desire, no money, no budget, no willingness to spend, rude, obnoxious, belligerent. I want those people out. If they happen to make it through the first couple of nets, I want to make sure I nail them on the third.

And then there are the unresponsive, the people who just stop replying to you. And for those, you can either continue with your drip campaign, or you can say, you know what, that’s enough. No soup for you. No more soup for you. I’m done.

And when you recognize that there are only five levels of qualification, it tells you exactly how to follow up with each one.

It gives you a system you can follow, and it makes your life a whole lot better.

Jay: Yeah, and I want to point out to anybody who’s watching or listening, I’m in a very niche industry. I mean, as niche as you can get. That makes my keywords, that makes my steps very simple and then I can continue to fine tune that.

I don’t want to imply that everybody can just rush out and figure that out. It’s not the case, especially if you have a broad base. Customers that you’re looking for, right? I hate it when people are like, “just do what I do,” right? is, certainly not that simple.

David: But the message is exactly right. Because however you do it, whether it’s through the technology or whether it’s individually, whether it’s at a sales level, however it is it’s happening, an automated level, it doesn’t matter.

The point is the same. You still have to do this. It might take you longer. It might take you a different process. But that’s why, it’s not about one solution. It’s about identifying your specific situation, which is why we find it so important to have conversations with people ahead of time.

We don’t want to take on a client if we’re not absolutely convinced that we’re going to be able to help them. And so for us, that’s criteria number one.

And it really should be for everybody listening to this as well. If you don’t feel like you are the best solution to the person that you’re communicating with, you want to determine that upfront. You want to be the one to say no, right?

And some people, salespeople in particular, feel like, no, everybody is my prospect. I should be able to sell to everybody. And, I don’t know. Is it possible that’s true? It’s possible, I guess. I think it’s unlikely, but it is possible. But if you recognize that there are people who need what you sell right now, and you realize that you’re not in front of one, you want to be able to expedite the amount of time between now and the time you can make that happen.

Jay: Yeah. I’ll give you one last example of something we’ve learned over time. And that is when we first started out, I wanted to sell everybody. So I would offer discounts, right? I’d rather have the money than not. And we have realized, over time, in our industry, that people who want discounts are the most demanding people.

And guess what? We don’t offer any discounts, anymore. Not because we don’t want the money. We would love to have the money and provide the service. But we know we’re probably not going to be able to satisfy that person. And it’s going to be a lot more work for us. So when they ask for a discount, I’m even more firm.

You know what I mean? I’m like, we are the experts. We are going to save you money. We’re going to avoid any issues for you. So yeah, take it or leave it.

David: It’s a disqualifier for you. I mean, it goes exactly back to our primary topic here, which is that there are some people you want to try to get rid of them as early on in the process as you possibly can. If you found out that you invested some time with them and you later discover, okay, this person is no longer qualified. Cut the cord, move on.

Jay: Yeah, exactly.

David: Qualified prospects only!

Jay: There you go. All right, David, how do people find out more?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team. If you’d like to be able to interact with more and better quality prospects, we’d love to have a conversation with you.

We’ll start by looking at where you are now and where you need to be in terms of visibility, sales and profits. Visibility meaning, are you visible to the type of people who actually want your services and are ready to buy from you now?

Because if you’re not visible to them, they don’t know you’re alive. You can’t possibly sell to them. So let’s have a conversation.

TopSecrets.com/call. If you’re not interested in buying from us, we don’t care because that means you’re not qualified to buy, but you could still be qualified to learn something. And our determination on these calls is to say, “okay, even if you’re not qualified to buy from us, is there something we can help you with?”

Can we give you an idea that may help you to become qualified to buy from us? And we do a lot of that. And then we hear back from people later who said, “Hey, you know what? I implemented that one thing you suggested on our strategy session, and I was able to generate the revenue I need now. Yeah, I’d love to work with you.”

And we’d love to have them back. So TopSecrets.com/call. Let’s have some fun!

Jay: All right, David. Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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Each time we’re handling objections in sales, we should get better at it. Every sales call you have, every objection you ever receive, if you’re able to document the primary questions and objections and concerns that you get, and you can properly document your best responses to that — the ones that have gotten you the best results — now you build up an arsenal of material that allows you to stage those responses up front, make them part of the presentation, part of the reason to buy from you rather than your competitor.

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will discuss why salespeople struggle handling objections in sales. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, thank you, David. Another great discussion. I feel like we get into just kind of the same old responses, or we feel like at the first rejection, “Oh, that’s a no. So I move on to the next person.”

David: Yeah, I give up when in fact, most objections indicate interest. And sometimes salespeople forget this. A lot of them know it and they forget it, but some don’t even realize it.

They think, okay, if they object, they don’t like it. They don’t want it. They reject me. They hate me. All these types of things. Most of which are not true. And maybe none of them are true.

But when somebody objects or raises some sort of objection to what you say, it means, “okay, you have me interested enough to ask the question. Otherwise I would say, no, not interested at all. Thanks.”

So that’s one important aspect of it, is that if you struggle handling objections in sales, part of it might just be your mindset. If you believe that an objection means non-interest, then you kind of shoot yourself in the foot to start out with.

Jay: Yeah, such a great point. I think you have to convert your thinking a little bit and look at rejection or questions as an opportunity.

This is kind of side thing, but you know, in the restaurant business where I started out, people were always afraid of customer complaints. And I always felt like these are an opportunity. They create an opportunity to build loyalty because none of us expect anybody to be perfect. Well, some people do, and some people you can’t please, right?

But they do expect you to resolve it. And so, I always felt like if I can really resolve this situation well, I build loyalty. Because they know that if they come here, they will be treated well. And I think rejections are the same depending on how you handle them.

David: Yeah, no question. And what you talk about, rejections, especially if it’s after they’ve received the service, right? If you come to a restaurant and you had a bad experience, that’s an after the fact, then it’s remedial. You have to fix that.

In a sales situation, they haven’t tried the food yet, right? So this is up front, this would be like, well, why should I even come into your restaurant in the first place? And that’s where you’ve got to be able to have your messaging dialed in to the point where it makes such perfect sense for them to choose the right option, as far as you’re concerned. To come into the restaurant or to take advantage of whatever it is that you offer, that they will give you a shot.

So when people struggle handling objections in sales, in some cases, it’s that they haven’t documented the objections they’ve gotten in the past. And if you don’t come up with answers, to the things that come up again, and again, and again, that is really a bad sign.

I’ve seen this recently on TV. I try never to talk politics on this podcast, but sometimes people ask the same question over and over and they never come up with a good answer to it.

Jay: Yeah.

David: And that doesn’t make sense. What you need to be able to do when you sell yourself, when you sell your business, when you sell an idea, is you need to be able to identify what are the most common questions I get?

What are the most common complaints or objections that I get about the possibility of doing whatever it is that I would like to have you do as a result of what I sell?

And If you got that objection once and you didn’t have an answer, okay, it gives you sort of an excuse. But then if you don’t come up with an answer, and you don’t have the right answer for that the second time it’s asked, now it’s not a matter of not knowing. Now it’s a matter of negligence.

Jay: Yeah, I totally agree with you. You’ve got to keep track of those types of things and you’ve always got to adjust your pitch and your sales calls and those kind of things we talk about that a lot in this podcast, but David, I think that how you respond in those first seconds to the question or to the rejection is more important than your actual response.

I see this. I experience it. Before I finish expressing the concern, they jump in with a pre-packaged, “oh, you said A, so on my flow chart, that means go to C.”

And for me, that tells me instantly this person doesn’t care about me. They’re not interested in my concerns.

So to me, when you listen And respond to what is said is much more important than the follow up line, because that shows to them this person cares.

David: No question. And that’s sort of the other side of the equation, where you have some objections that come up and they indicate interest, and then there are other objections that come up that indicate I targeted the wrong person.

Some questions that come up are disqualifiers, because if they immediately go to antagonistic responses and negativity, and if it starts going down a spiral, that can, in many cases, tell you that you’re dealing with the wrong person. You’re dealing with someone who is unqualified to buy from you.

And ideally the way that you can handle those types of objections is make sure that you’ve qualified people correctly upfront so that the conversation you’re having is with rational people who are actually good prospects for the products and services you offer.

Jay: Yeah, I think that’s important. I’ll just give you an example.

I’m on the phone all the time. You know, this, I can’t tell you how many people who, I get, who have spoken to my competitors and after they speak with me, they use this phrase. They say, “thank you for listening.”

And that to me, is powerful because when you’re on a call with somebody and they don’t feel like they’re being listened to, it’s such a difference.

So that’s how I know I’ve built a relationship. I haven’t just finished a sales call.

David: Yeah. And there’s also the element of preempting this type of thing. Because if you’re able to address the most commonly asked objections, before they come up as a question, you’re far better off.

So each time we do this, we should get better at it. Every sales call you have, every objection you ever receive, if you’re able to document the primary questions and objections and concerns that you get, and you can,properly document your best responses to that, the ones that have gotten you the best results.

Now you’re building up an arsenal of material that’s going to allow you to stage that stuff up front, make that stuff part of the presentation, part of the reason to buy from you rather than your competitor.

And it doesn’t matter what the objection is. I mean, if it’s a pricing objection, if it’s a speed of service objection, or not even an objection, if it’s a question, they’re saying, “Hey, well, you seem to be more expensive. Why is that the case?”

You want to make sure that your answer to that question is the reason that they should choose you rather than not. You don’t want to be operating from a position of defending your position. “Well, yeah, we’re a little more expensive, but we’re really good. And we really try harder.”

I mean, I guess try harder worked well for the car company that used that as a mantra for a lot of years. But for the rest of us, that usually doesn’t work. You need to be able to say, well, “yes, we’re more expensive. And here’s why. It’s because we provide this and they don’t. it’s because we provide that and they don’t.”

And provide all the best reasons for why, even though, yeah, it’s a little more expensive, they will get so much more in value that it’s the reason they should buy from you rather than not buy from you, as opposed to saying, well, yeah, we are more expensive. I understand if you want to keep it cheap.

And that’s, a problem among salespeople is that if they’ve got their own mental ticks about what is acceptable in terms of price and what isn’t, then they can let some of that creep over into the conversation.

So make sure that you’re really all over your messaging on that is going to be huge.

Jay: Yeah. So powerful. I have to tell you, I do, eight to 10 consultations a day. Very rarely will you surprise me with a question that I haven’t heard. And so you’re exactly right. Over time, I have developed a way to deal with a lot of those questions up front. And what’s interesting is that tells people that I know them and I know the situation, right?

It immediately establishes me as the expert. And if they can see me as an expert, they’re like, “wow, this guy’s speaking to me.”

Well, no, actually, I know everybody, in your similar niche. I, have learned that this is what you need and what you’re looking for. So it really positions you well.

David: It does. And all the things that we talk about in these podcasts flow into exactly what you just said about positioning you as the expert.

Because if you identify the right methods of first contact that suit your personality, suit your approach, and suit the people that you contat… if you utilize those methods of first contact, or if you anticipate the objections that most often come up, turn them into reasons to buy instead of not to buy and build those into your presentation upfront, you can not only eliminate those objections before they come up, you can use them as a reason to get people enthused about buying from you.

So a lot of it is strategic, but it’s also day-to-day, task oriented, identify what are the things they say, and how can I build this into my process, build this into my standard operating procedure, so that this particular objection that I’ve gotten more than once is not likely to trip me up down the road.

Jay: Yeah, very good. And they also teach me what to ask. There are certain questions that I ask that tell them instantly that I know what I’m talking about, right?

So sometimes it’s not necessary to just dive in and spill all the information. I know now that if I ask them a certain question, they’re like, okay, if this guy asked me that, he really knows my industry.

Cause that’s a very unique question, right? So sometimes you don’t want to just spill it up front, but be strategic in what you ask.

David: Yeah, it’s an excellent point. We don’t always have to immediately answer the question because if somebody is asking us or fielding an objection, that seems like it’s about to derail the sale, we may need to find out how important that is to the person.

Because sometimes people ask us questions or they will initiate an objection and they don’t even really care about the answer. So sometimes if they ask a question like that, and it doesn’t seem relevant to what you’re talking about, you can say, well, how important is that to you? I know that I’ve had conversations with people where I’ve said that and they’re like, yeah, you know what? That’s really not all that important.

It’s like, okay, well then you don’t have to address it at all. Some people are hesitant to ask things like that, but when you’re engaged in conversation instead of monologue, it’s a lot easier to be able to ask those kinds of questions, have honest conversations that have integrity to them and then advance the sale and help the people that you’re there to help.

Jay: Yeah, I love that. If you can make it feel like a conversation, you’ve won.

David: If it’s good conversation, yeah. Not just feel like it, actual conversations, right?

Jay: That’s right. That’s right. David, how do people find out more?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call. Check out the video on that page. If it makes sense to have a conversation with myself or my team, we’d love to have that conversation. So many times we get stopped in our tracks by things that should not stop us in our tracks. When you have procedures and processes that allow you to blow through those bottlenecks, it has an incredible impact on your ability to serve more people, to sell to more people, and to provide your solutions to more of the people who need that solution right now.

Jay: Yeah, so true. David, as always, it’s a pleasure.

David: Thank you so much, Jay.

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If you’re in a situation where you know you need to get more leads — you need to generate more and better leads — there are very specific ways of doing it.

One of the things that we do with our clients is we focus on, what are the different methods of lead generation that they’re currently using? What are some of the methods they could be using, if they’re not already using those.

And then testing those out as quickly as possible to find out what actually works and what doesn’t. Some people spend months or years trying to perfect something that isn’t working. And simply by switching to another method, you can get incredibly better results in a much shorter period of time.

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to get more leads. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, it’s so good to be here, David. What an amazing topic. I mean, it’s got to be the question on everybody’s mind, how to get more leads.

David: Yeah. And I think a lot of people look at it and they think, well, they know leads are the lifeblood of our businesses.

Now, if we’re not constantly getting new leads in the door, then your pipeline dries up, everything gets bad. It’s not an ideal scenario. Obviously, it’s a very important consideration. There are lots of ways to get more leads and there’s no shortage online of people who will try to sell you different methods of doing that.

And, this is why I value your opinion on this as well, because I know that you do quite a bit of lead generation in your own business, and lots of people pushing lots of different things. I’d like to get a feel from you, if you don’t mind, to start out. sort of the types of things that people have told you are going to help get you leads and which ones seem to work better and which ones didn’t seem to work as well.

Jay: Yeah, you’re exactly right. This is something that we rely on heavily. Our entire business model is getting people to sign up for our free consultations. And so, how do you do that? How do you make sure that they’re the best leads? We started out relying heavily on Google Ads, pay per click.

But even that, can be so tricky. I don’t want to spend my time talking to a lot of people who really don’t need my services. So, not just leads, but qualifying leads. We’re going to talk about that in an upcoming podcast. But, I’ll tell you, David, we don’t want to pay for every lead.

So our question has been, how do we get leads that we don’t have to pay for, right? And then also, how do we make sure that we have the best close rate on leads? But, we get email marketing, we get people contacting us every day saying, we can do this for you and we can do that for you.

And you want to try some of those, but at the same time, I’m like, oh, we have a system that works. And so I have a hard time breaking away from that and spending a lot of time on those other things because you really don’t know what’s going to work until you try it.

David: Yeah. We’ve probably had a bit of this discussion in the past as well.

The idea that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So there are people who like generating leads on Instagram. And so they’ll put out information on here’s how to get leads on Instagram, or here’s how to get leads through Facebook groups, or here’s how to get leads on LinkedIn, or through LinkedIn direct messaging.

And so everybody’s got their own little tiny slice that they’re looking at to say, this is it. This is exactly the way to get leads. And in my experience, not only in our own businesses, but also working with other people’s businesses, what I found is that it’s very easy for people to get sold on the idea of like one particular, tiny niche solution that is going to be the solution to all of your lead problems.

And I mean, I spend a lot of money on my own training, my own education, exploring, what’s available, what works, what doesn’t work. And there’s a case to be made that a lot of these different things can and do work, under the right circumstances.

But do they work for everyone? And the answer to that is usually no, they don’t.

They might work for you and they might work for you if they’re done correctly. But the likelihood of just saying, okay, this is the solution and it’s going to work, is actually pretty low.

So I think when we look at this idea, if we want to focus on being able to get more leads, If you’re already generating decent quality leads in your business, or let’s even bump that up a notch, if you’re already generating high quality leads in your business, then it’s a lot easier because you can look at things and you can say, all right, where did my best quality leads come from? And then, where do I go to get more of those.

So if you are generating leads online, is it through Facebook? Is it through groups? Is it through Facebook ads? Is it through DMing people? Same thing with LinkedIn or any other online social media.

If you’re doing YouTube ads, any of that sort of thing, you can look at what has worked for me historically. Does it continue to work, and can I continue to improve it?

If you’ve been doing things that worked for a while and then stopped working, then it becomes tempting to jump to something else. Okay, this is no longer working. But that’s really usually a mistake, because the reason that it stopped working might not be the platform you’re using, it might not be the online source that you’re using if it is a social media platform.

It might be something related to the messaging that you’re putting out on there. Maybe that message has gotten stale with the people who have been seeing it, or maybe you’re no longer reaching the right people. This goes back to what we talk about all the time in these videos, which is the subject of the MVPs of marketing and sales.

If your message is off or if it’s getting in front of the wrong people, then the marketing vehicle doesn’t matter because it’s not going to work. So, when there is this much focus on a marketing vehicle, like Facebook or YouTube or whatever it is, I think people end up missing the point. And when they try to get more leads, it’s easier to be unsuccessful because they might be working on the wrong problem.

Jay: I think that’s such a valuable point. And you talked about social media. I think one of the problems with social media marketing is you’re reliant on somebody else’s algorithm, right? And so what is working today, suddenly tomorrow, it’s like, wait a minute, what happened to all our viewers? What happened to everything?

Well, they changed their algorithm and so you’re going to have to figure it out again, right? So I’m a big fan of diversification, and you kind of mentioned that just like you diversify your retirement portfolio or whatever else. But for us, the real secret is always assessing.

We’re never satisfied with our lead generation. We’re never satisfied with our keywords that we use. We’re never satisfied by saying, yeah, we’re filling up our schedule right now. We’re never satisfied with that. So we are constantly looking for other ways, other sources, and we’re constantly reassessing our own. Because, you know, in today’s world, marketing social media, it’s moving so fast.

And if you think, oh, it’s working right now, that’s going to keep working, I think that’s a mistake.

David: It definitely is. And so far, all we’ve really talked about is online lead generation. And for a lot of businesses, that’s what they’ve been focusing on, but there are still a lot of offline methods of lead generation that people use, whether it’s going to networking functions, whether it’s getting phone numbers and making cold calls.

There are lots of different ways that people are still getting leads outside of the online methods.

Some people exhibit at trade shows. So there are still lots of things that are happening that allow you to get in front of the type of people that you want to be able to get in front of, to get them qualified in or out as quickly as possible, to find out if they are good, valuable leads for you.

In our Total Market Domination work with our clients, one of the primary things that we focus on is exactly this. We refer to it as the methods of first contact.

How is it that you are reaching out to someone? And it can be any of these things that we’re talking about. It’s the marketing vehicle in the MVPs, but it’s just one part of the equation.

So for anyone who’s watching this, who’s thinking, okay, so let’s get to it. How do I get more leads? The first thing you want to consider is: look at where you’re getting your leads now and is it working for you or is it not working for you? So that would be the first thing.

And write them down. Just put together a list of, okay, this is where I’m currently getting my leads. This is where my best leads are coming from. This is where my worst leads are coming from. And this is where no leads are coming from. If there are places that no leads are being generated there, you want to ask yourself a question then, okay, is it this particular marketing vehicle?

Or is it the people that I’m reaching on this vehicle or is it what I’m saying to these people? Cause it is always going to be one of those three things.

Now that kind of takes you in a couple of different directions, which is not ideal. But if you really want to be able to generate more leads that are going to turn into customers, this exercise is practically essential.

You pretty much have to do it. Because if you don’t, you may be spending a tremendous amount of time trying to solve the wrong problem.

Jay: Yeah. Figuring out while you’re doing it, how are your leads, where are they coming from? What are the results from those leads? And I don’t think this is something you should be trying to do from your recollection, after the fact, right?

We’ve talked about using a good CRM system. When I do a consultation, I write down the state they’re from. I write down their economic background. I’ve got like 10 different things that I write down.

And I’ll give you an example. We’ve found, for example, that we close more customers from Florida.

Now, do I know why that happens? Honestly, David, I don’t. I don’t have any idea why we close more in Florida. But what that did for us is we said, we’re going to alter our budget and we’re going to spend more money on clients that come from Florida. And that has had some success. So we are that specific.

So you talk about using a hammer? No, no, no. We don’t use a hammer ever. But I would never have been able to recognize that if I wasn’t writing down where everybody comes from and demographics and all of those things.

David: Yeah, exactly. And so if you are looking to generate more leads in your business, you start with this, you look at where most of my good leads coming from, where else could I potentially go to find high quality leads?

What are some of my competitors doing in terms of generating leads? Where are they getting them from? Are they getting them from online, from offline, from trade shows? Where is it? And recognize that it’s very likely that you may be so focused on the things that you know how to do, and you may have been doing that for so long, that there may be entire segments of populations of people that you are not getting to because you’ve never just taken a step back, taken a breath and looked at, okay, where else could I potentially go to find the kind of people I’m looking for to be able to invest in the solution that I provide?

And. They’re out there. And this is something that people have been kind of driving me crazy with lately, where I hear from people that it’s like, “well, I just to wait until things settle down. I don’t think things are going particularly well, with the economy and my particular business and my particular niche.

And it’s like, “okay, but if you do that, if you step back while other people are stepping forward, you’re not going to be doing yourself any favors.”

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And I think also don’t wait until things start to slow down, right? Keep moving. And the other thing I would say is you don’t need to reinvent the wheel all of a sudden.

They have people like you, David, who are glad to help them kind of walk through this. How do they find out more?

David: You can go to TopSecrets. com. Check out the video on that page and see if it makes sense for us to have a conversation. If it does, we’d be happy to have it. If it doesn’t, that’s okay too, but at least you’ll have an idea of what we could potentially do to help get you from here to there.

If you’re in a situation where you know you need to generate more and better leads, there are very specific ways of doing it. One of the things, as I said, that we do with our clients is we focus on, what are the different methods of lead generation that they’re currently using? What are some of the methods they could be using, if they’re not already using those.

And then testing those out as quickly as possible to find out what actually works and what doesn’t. Some people spend months or years trying to perfect something that isn’t working. And simply by switching to another method, you can get incredibly better results in a much shorter period of time.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. David, as always, it’s a pleasure.

David: Thank you so much, Jay.

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When I say “get over being scared of selling,” that doesn’t mean that you have to engage in methods of contact that you’re really, truly uncomfortable with, right? That means finding a path, finding a path that works for you, finding a path that works for your people. Finding a path that works for your prospects and clients, right?

And there’s always a path. There is always a path to get there.

David: Hi and welcome back. Are you scared of selling? If so, get over it. Today, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing that very topic. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, it’s a great Halloween topic, right? Being scared. My kids are watching scary movies all of this month and I participate in a scary movie all day long when I have to pick up the phone and I have to talk to people who I don’t know and convince them why my services are what they need. Please write me a check.

That is a scary prospect when you think about it.

David: Yeah, entrepreneurs basically are facing Halloween every day. In a lot of cases, a lot of ways, whether it’s making phone calls or making payroll or making decisions, making rules, it’s always about making something.

And the whole idea of being scared of selling, I hear this from so many people that I thought we needed to address it. And when I say get over it, that sounds very insensitive, and perhaps it is, but it’s also very necessary.

Jay: Yeah, I mean, it’s the reality. If you’re in a business model where you have to sell, then you have to get over it. It’s just that simple, and if you don’t, then you’re going to constantly be struggling.

And it’s not something that you’re going to do from day one, but it is something that you have to be determined to do.

David: Yes. And when I say this, I don’t mean to put anybody down, right? There are a lot of really good people who have really good reasons for being scared of selling.

Certainly in their minds, they’ve got really good reasons for it. And I’m not taking any of that away. It’s a fact. The fact that there’s a term called “call reluctance” indicates that there is a level of fear based here to the point where they had to create a term for it.

So, what I find is helpful — particularly if I’m interacting with salespeople who are running into this situation — and a lot of times they won’t even say they’re scared of selling, but ultimately that’s what comes out. One of the things that we have to look at first is why are they scared?

Why are they scared of selling? Is it fear of success? Is it fear of failure? And a lot of times we hear blanket terms like that and they’re like, “Oh no, it’s not that.” But sometimes it is.

Sometimes it’s variations of that. I’m afraid that if I call and they say no, it’s going to hurt my self esteem. That’s fear of failure. I’m afraid if I do too well, people are going to resent me and think ill of me, right? Some people think that way. So any of those preconceived notions that we have about what our sales success will do to us, for good or for bad, are going to impact our actions.

And that’s why I say we need to get over those things, right? We have to get past those things and once again, deal with reality. I’ve been on a sort of truth quest lately in terms of let’s not look at what we think about. Let’s not look at what we fear. Let’s look at what’s true. Let’s look at what’s real in the market right now.

If there is somebody in the market right now who is afraid to interact with prospects or clients, it’s going to impact their performance because it’s going to impact what they actually do.

If you’re scared to pick up the phone, you won’t pick up the phone. If you’re scared to send an email, you won’t send the email. Or if you do, it’ll take a lot longer than it should.

And then that’s four other emails that you wouldn’t have sent in the meantime. So we have to get over it. And a lot of it starts with the why.

Jay: Yeah, the why is important. And I think it’s also to kind of look at what you’re doing. I fall into the trap of, you know, email works really good, so I’ll just email instead of picking up the phone.

So I’m slipping into those comfort zones, right? And making excuses that that’s just as good. So I’m taking the path of least resistance.

David: Right. And then blaming the prospect for not replying to the email, right? When email may not be their primary method of communication.

And there are a lot of people who do the opposite. There are people who have done phone all their lives. And the idea of having to deal with the indignity of having to send a text, right?

There are some people who are like that as well. And they may want to make a phone call, but if the person that you’re reaching out to doesn’t like taking phone calls, there are some people who see the phone ring and they’re like, “who on earth is trying to call me?” They get really mad about it.

Jay: That’s me. Yeah, that’s me. So this is my question and I’m glad we’re talking about this because I’m a salesperson and I have these hesitancies and these fears and we say get over it and I know you, you never mean just get over it, you mean there is a path forward to get over it, right?

And so, let’s talk about that. What are those steps? You’re talking to me and I have to make phone calls, and every day I get up in the morning and I dread it. David, what can I do to begin the process of overcoming those fears?

David: Well, one of the things that we do with all of our clients is we look at what are the actual fears? What are the things they hate doing? Right?

And if somebody comes to me and they say, I hate making cold calls. Then if I go back to them and I say, “well, our program requires you to make 72 cold calls a day,” that’s not going to work for them.

But the good news is that they don’t have to do that, right? A phone call is a marketing vehicle. We talk about the MVPs a lot. I’m not going to get into it in this podcast, but there are lots of different marketing vehicles. And when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If all I know how to do is cold calling, I’m going to want to do cold calling.

There are people online now who say, selling is all about Instagram, right? And that’s all they know so that’s all they talk about. The truth of the matter is there are lots of different ways to reach out to people. And there are lots of different people who like to be reached out to in different ways.

So we have to match up what we’re ready, willing, and able to do with the audience that also likes to do things that way, right?

So if I were to say to you, you have to take phone calls from now on and you don’t want to do that, then what I would do instead is I’d say, “okay, let’s look at all the other alternatives that could help get you in touch with as many or more people as you’re in touch with now without having to utilize a lot of the tools that you don’t like using.”

Now, will you have to use them occasionally? Probably. But if you can get things set up to the point where you’re utilizing the marketing vehicles that you’re most comfortable with, then your job will be to connect with other people who are on the same page as you.

Jay: Yeah, I think that’s really interesting, can you accomplish the goal focusing on your strengths instead of just trying to do it the way everybody does it? Cause that’s the way that, you know, sales has been done for the last 50 years or whatever else.

In my case, calling somebody cold is the most terrifying thing in the world. But once I’m on the phone with somebody, if that phone call was generated in a different way, I am comfortable, I am relaxed, I build rapport, people thank me for the information that I give them, so I really excel once I’ve overcome the initial cold call portion, right?

I know I’ve shared this with you and our listeners. I’ve set up that system where we convince people through online means to set up a free consultation with me. So now I’ve overcome the cold call part because they’re expecting the conversation.

Now I can shine, right? So we adjusted our business model. Now I have a business partner who would cold call anybody, for any thing. And so he takes on anything that deals with that aspect. So we’re lucky to be able to divide and conquer based upon our strengths.

David: Yeah. And all of these things are tools. A phone is a tool. Social media platforms are tools.

It’s all just various tools. And when people get too married to the idea of one particular form of contact, they set themselves up for failure because those types of things change. And if we’re not ready for the change, if we only have one particular way of doing things, and we now require another way of doing things, it’s going to take a lot longer to adapt.

Jay: Yeah. And I also think, as you’re trying different things, tracking those different things. And we’ve talked about this many times. We just did a webinar. We formed a partnership with a company and we did a webinar with all of their clients. And we thought this is going to be a great opportunity.

And yeah, we lined up the free consultations. But out of about a hundred of them, I’ve closed one. So it’s like, okay, I didn’t have to cold call. I didn’t have to do these things. I filled up my calendar. But in the end, was there any value to it?

Not yet. You know, maybe in the long term, but not yet. No.

David: Yeah. And the value is learning that this doesn’t work as well as other things I’m doing, right? So you’re testing and you’re looking at the results of the test and saying, okay, is this something that I want to do again? And how long will I cultivate them?

And then the other 99, you know, then the question becomes, all right, how can I disqualify the poor quality prospects as quickly as possible and musical chairs. Musical chairs it down to maybe 10 or 12 or 20 or whatever that number ends up being.

But I would focus hardest right now on getting rid of the ones that you know, are not a good fit, so that you can then focus your time and energy and effort on the few people that are actually going to move forward.

Jay: Yeah, and it’s not that we get rid of them, it’s that we reclassify them, like you said, or pre-qualify them.

So they’re still in our database. They’re still going to receive regular contact from us. It’s going to be automated contact, and we will generate business from them. There’s no doubt. But if I could take a hundred new calls that fill up a hundred spots on my calendar from that same group. I would never do that again.

Yes, I might do something with that same company, but it will not be designed to give free consultations. That will never happen again with that particular format.

So we learned a great deal. We needed to do it. We think it will still be an income stream, but we will not sell to them the way we did the first time.

David: Yeah, so it’s an excellent learning experience. And we have to do that. We have to constantly adapt. We have to look at different things, potential twists and turns in the road that are coming ahead and say, all right, what’s something that we can test out to see how it works? And it sounds like you’re doing that and you’re already learning a lot from this.

And who knows, like you said, a bunch of those people may end up converting.

Jay: Yeah, but I still, David, I still have a tendency to seek the path of least resistance, right? I know that I’m best one on one on the phone. And so that’s the hardest piece for me, still, even with everything that we’re doing.

And I’m getting better, you know, sometimes it’s just the more you do it, and you learn about yourself and I’m getting better every single day, but I would never get better if I didn’t put myself in an uncomfortable situation, right?

David: Yeah. And when I say get over being scared of selling, that doesn’t mean that you have to engage in methods of contact that you’re really, truly uncomfortable with, right?

You said it best earlier. It’s like, okay, well, when we talk about getting over it, that means finding a path, finding a path that works for you, finding a path that works for your people. Finding a path that works for your prospects and clients, right?

And there’s always a path. There is always a path to get there.

It may take a little longer. It may be a little more convoluted, maybe more twists and turns, but you can get there. So getting over it doesn’t mean you have to do a lot of things that you hate doing.

Now, if you’re a salesperson and you don’t want to do any of that, you don’t want to make phone calls and you don’t want to send texts and you don’t want to send emails, you don’t want to do any of that, then you’ve got a problem.

In our retail mail order catalog business, we hired someone one time to work in our call center. So her job was to answer the phone and take catalog orders over the phone. And so we hired her the first day and she came in and she’s answering the phone, and she was doing it. And at lunchtime, she came to my operations manager and said, “Yeah, I don’t think I’m really cut out for making these phone calls.”

And he said, “Oh, okay, well, that’s kind of the job that you were hired for, but it’s the holiday season. We have a lot of mail orders coming in as well. What we’ll do is we’ll take you off the phones and we’ll just have you process the mail orders and we’ll have everyone else pick up the slack on the phones.”

So she said, “okay, good.” So back from lunch, she’s working the afternoon, entering the mail orders. Comes to my operations manager at the end of the day and said, you know what, I don’t think I’m, you know, really big on entering these orders into the system. And he’s like, well, now we’re kind of out of options, right? And you applied for a job that you really don’t want to do any of the things that are necessary.

So when it comes to sales, you’re going to have to be able to communicate with people. You’re going to have to figure out a way that you’re comfortable doing that. But it doesn’t have to be just one thing. A lot of times there are sales managers who will say to their salespeople, “you have to do this,” right?

And if it’s something that they’re just not going to do, or do well, then they’re not going to last, or they’re not going to do well. And that’s not a dig on the salesperson, and it’s not a dig on the sales manager. Some are just programmed, look, this is what we do. This is how we do it in our organization.

And if that’s the only thing they know how to do, then yeah, they’re going to have to find people who are willing to do it. But when they’ve got different forms of first contact, and that is something we focus on a lot in our training with our clients.

First contact is huge. Because there are so many different ways of doing it, that you’re bound to find several that you’re comfortable with, so you can actually interact with the people that you need to interact with, without driving either you or your prospects crazy.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. So, if people want to tap into that experience, how do they find out more?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call. There’s a short video you can watch there. Take a look at that, see if it makes sense to have a conversation with myself or my team. You’ll know from that video, I mean, if it makes sense, if what we’re talking about there makes sense, you’ll say, okay, I’ll have a call.

Now, there is no obligation to buy anything on this call, right? We’ll have a conversation. We’ll look at where you are now versus where you need to be in terms of visibility, sales and profits.

We’ll ask you some questions about where you are now and where you need to be in that regard. And from there, if there is something to talk about, if it seems like it makes sense for us to work together, we’ll give you some options on that.

But absolutely no obligation in that regard. So schedule a call. We’d love to talk with you.

Jay: All right. Fantastic. David, it’s always a pleasure. Happy Halloween.

David: Thanks, Jay. You too.

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Change is coming… because change is always coming. And we need to try to stay ahead of it. And we’re not always going to be able to do that. But we do have the ability to anticipate things that could potentially happen in the not too distant future and say, okay, if this happens, then what am I going to do? How am I going to adapt to that?

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the topic, Change is Coming. Don’t Make it Harder. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: It’s good to be here, David. Change is hard. Change is not easy in life, in business. We like comfort zones. We like to get in a groove. And I am the first to admit it. If I could find a way to not have to change in business and just cruise, I’m not opposed to just cruising.

David: Yeah, well, status quo can certainly be comfortable until it’s not, right? It’s very comfortable until it’s not. And when I say change is coming, I mean, so much of what we’ve been hearing lately is about all the potential changes that could be coming. And regardless, and I’m not going to get into politics ever at all on this podcast, but regardless of the outcome, there is going to be change coming, because it always does.

It’s the nature of life. It’s the nature of business. Change is always coming. And so, When we try to fight it, when we try to avoid it, we make things harder on ourselves, right? The change is going to come. Now, we’re going to have to change our approach very likely.

We’re going to have to do things differently. We’re going to have to plan differently. There are all types of things that we are actually going to have to do. But if we focus on that, rather than the indignity of the fact that change is coming, we make it a lot easier on ourselves.

Jay: Yeah, you’re exactly right.

I think about a change that we all had to go through, and that’s the pandemic. And how that was all a change that we wondered if we were going to survive. It was going to destroy our businesses, our workplaces, our way of life, everything. You think about, we’re home office now. And we’re going to stay that way.

And if you had asked me before the pandemic, I would have said, no, that wouldn’t work. I look at my friends in the restaurant industry who pivoted to drive through only, and when the time came back to open up their dining rooms, they didn’t want to do it. They really liked the drive thru model or the delivery model so sometimes being forced to change and being ready to change.

You’re going to discover, things that you would have ruled out otherwise, and you’re going to be better for it, ideally.

David: No question. That exact example, there’s a restaurant that we go to in our area a lot, and when the pandemic came and you were no longer able to go into the restaurants, they started a pickup service.

And it had never occurred to us to pick up from that restaurant before. We always went in, sat down, enjoyed the meal, and that was it. But after a while, you’re like, well, I could really use some of that food. We don’t feel like cooking. Okay, I’m going to give it a try. I’ll go pick it up. And all of a sudden, that door was open for us as well.

And so after you were able to go back into the restaurant, there were still a lot of times, and there are times now where we’ll still pick things up and bring it home because now we know that it’s possible. So what it gave them is a new revenue stream, right? At the time they had a new revenue stream, but they didn’t have their primary revenue stream. So they were hurting.

But then after things opened up again, they got the regular business back and now they have this takeout service that people are using more and more, it actually allows things to grow. So it’s a perfect example why our topic is so appropriate.

Change is coming. Change is inevitable. It’s happening all the time. And the more we resist reality, the more problems we have.

Jay: Yeah, and I think we mentioned this in the last podcast that those who are prepared to pivot, those who are prepared to face the new challenge head on and say, what can I learn from this? How is this going to make us better? How do we survive it? Obviously, that’s the 1st thing.

Those are the businesses that will survive, hopefully. Sometimes, after all you can do, it’s all you can do, right? But, so often, it’s the ones who are agile. They’re the ones that improve and survive.

David: Yeah, and any business that is likely to be in business for the foreseeable future has to be able to do that.

They have to figure out how to do that because there is always change. There are always challenges. We can’t always see what they are. In fact, probably most of the time, we don’t know. Something comes up, we’ve never dealt with it before, and we have to figure it out. Life in business is a little like a game of whack a mole.

You know, there’s always something that pops up, and you have to try to smack that one down before the next one pops up. It’s such a great analogy. And once again, just going back to the primary idea that if we complain about the fact that there are always moles popping up on our whack a mole table, we’re losing sight of the fact that this is the game we’re playing.

This is the game we’ve chosen, this game of business, being in business for ourselves or operating in sales in a business, being an entrepreneur, all of these things, this is baked into the cake. So once again, the more we resist reality, the worse off we’re going to be.

Jay: Yeah, I like the idea that you’re calling it a game.

I mean, if you are excited about it, like, you know, it takes a visionary sometimes, not all business people are visionaries, but if you are a visionary and you are looking at market trends and you’re watching the news. You said you didn’t want to get into politics, but there are things in politics that may directly affect your business model.

They may affect the entire country’s business. So, local, national, being aware of it can be important and looking to seize the moment, right? Okay, I see this. I’m going to jump on this or I’m going to…

You know, our whole business that we set up right now is based upon something that we saw. And we’re like, nobody is providing that. Let’s jump on it. If we had jumped before we jumped, we would have not made it. If we had jumped later, we won’t be able to compete. So timing, luck, you know, all of those things are involved, but just having an awareness and having, I think, an attitude.

Right? Attitude is a lot of what we’re talking about.

David: Yeah. And the reason that I even mentioned politics at all in this podcast is that right now half the country feels that it’s going to be disastrous if something happens, and the other half of the country feels it’s going to be disastrous if something else happens. And everybody’s going to have to adapt to whatever happens.

That’s my point with all this.

Jay: Yes.

David: And you know, vote and pray, right? If you’re a praying person, pray. Definitely vote, right? Do those things. But as a business owner, you’ve got to focus on the reality of the situation, whatever that turns out to be, however unhappy any of us are with the result that happens, we still have to move forward, right?

We’ve got to live to see another day. And the only way that happens is if we remain focused enough on the reality of the situation and what we need to do personally, accepting personal responsibility, to determine what happens next for us.

Jay: Yeah, and I don’t think you can do that if you’re just using the squeaky wheel gets the grease management style, right?

If you’re just always putting out fires, how can you see what’s coming? How can you prepare for the future? And I think that that is the nature, especially for new businesses, but I think for small businesses in general, it’s tough because sometimes you may be a one person business, a three person business, you know, it can be difficult, but somehow you’ve got to get control on that.

That’s why I love these podcasts and what you do, you’re always providing people with ways that they can manage those types of things, so that you can look down the road a little bit. If you’re putting out fires all the time, you’re not looking down the road at all.

David: Right. And we need to try to stay ahead of it. And we’re not always going to be able to do that. But we do have the ability to anticipate things that could potentially happen in the not too distant future and say, okay, if this happens, then what am I going to do? How am I going to adapt to that?

How am I going to pivot? As you said, right? You don’t want to have to wait until it’s upon you and then you have to figure out what you’re doing. You need to plan in advance, think ahead. All right, what do I need to do now, today? What can I do now, today, to start to get ahead of those types of things.

Jay: Yeah, the last thing you can do, and this is my tendency, is to just put my head in the sand and say, “Oh, it will pass,” right? It’ll pass, I just have to hold on long enough. Sometimes that’s true, right? Sometimes that’s true. But a lot of times when you do that, your competitors are not going to be doing that and you’re gonna get passed, right?

While you’re hoping for it to pass. And so, that’s probably not the best approach.

David: Yeah. You have to live long enough, right, to see it pass. And most of the time, most of us do, but it depends. Some things take longer times than others to recover. And if you’re just waiting for it to pass and you’re not planning alternatives for what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it and who you’re going to approach and how you’re going to approach them and what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it…

if you’re not doing those things in the moment, then there is so much missed opportunity between here and there, not to mention the fact that others who aren’t doing that are going to be picking up that business, so when you’re ready to get started again, there’s not going to be a lot of business available.

Jay: Yeah, it’s, too late to act at that point. So, this is why I think it’s a great idea to have a partner in the process. That’s where you come in, David. How do people find out more?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call. Check out the video on that page. See if it makes sense to schedule a call with myself or my team.

The goal of these calls is to simply figure out where you are now versus where you need to be in terms of visibility, sales, and profits. We start out with that. We look at the markets that you’re approaching and look at various aspects of what you’re doing right now that could potentially be hurting your prospects.

So in that call, regardless of whether we ever work together or not, we’re going to go over some things that will be helpful to you. It’s just good to have the conversation. So go to TopSecrets.com/call and we’d love to have that conversation with you.

Jay: Absolutely, everybody should do that. Sometimes it’s just good to hear even yourself say things and then get some feedback.

David, it’s always a pleasure.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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When I say your competition isn’t that good, what I mean is that a lot of them are not taking the time to learn the things that will allow them to perform better.

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I say, your competition isn’t that good. Right, Jay?

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Do you even know who your competition is? Do you know what they offer? Do you know what people think of them compared to you? Maybe you don’t even know if your competition is that good.

David: Exactly. And I hear, so many times, when I’m talking to salespeople, the idea that, there’s a lot of competition. Competition is very difficult. There’s a lot of online competition. There’s a lot of local competition. There’s a lot of price-cutting competition. There are all these different variations on competition.

And that’s all true. But a lot of them really, honestly, just aren’t that good. And if you recognize right up front that most businesses are average, right? There’s an average in every business, in every industry, there’s an average. And some people are better than average. Some people are worse than average.

There are a lot of average. So if you’re competing with the average or the less than average, then you should be able to do pretty well. If you’re a conscientious individual, if you’re reasonably good at what you do, if you study and practice your profession and you get reasonably good at it, you’ll be able to outperform a lot of them because to the extent that there are really exceptional competitors in your market, there are a lot less of those than there are the ones on the other side.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always believed this, you know, you can get caught up in the muck. When I was in radio, I worked for a radio station that had a built in listenership because it was so ingrained in the community. And what that did is it made it so they didn’t have to work hard to get sales or to get numbers.

Now you would think, oh man, that’s an amazing place to be. But what happened is, they started to get complacent, right? Everything was so easy, and then all of a sudden ratings started to shift and suddenly they realized, we don’t know how to sell. Because we’re so used to sitting at a desk and the phone is ringing. And we’re just taking orders.

So you’re not a salesperson, you’re taking orders, right? And their competitors started to eat them alive because their competitors had to sell all the time, and they were very good at it.

So sometimes you’re successful just in spite of yourself. And that may be what your competitors are in, what state they’re in.

David: It really could be as simple as that and as difficult as that, in either situation. But, you know, the idea that the competition is excellent, or the competition is terrible, or the competition is average. In a sense, none of it really matters.

Because this is life. This is the world that we’re in. These are the cards we’ve been dealt, right?

So our competition is there. We’re there. The question is, how are we going to make sure that we are outperforming our competition in all the key areas of customer contact? I mean, if you were to boil it down and say, okay, let’s say my competition is very good.

Let’s say you completely disagree with the premise of this podcast, that your competition isn’t that good, or that it’s average or whatever you say. “No, I’ve got a lot of competition.”

Okay, then that’s your question. How do you outperform your competition in all key areas of customer contact?

Some people may say, “well, I don’t know. What are the key areas of customer contact?” And if you’re asking yourself that kind of question, that indicates that there’s work to be done in your organization.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And do you even know how the competition functions to be able to compare yourself? I mean, that’s got to be at least half the battle, right?

David: Yeah, that’s part of the battle. Maybe it’s a third of the battle.

Jay: Okay.

David: I was gonna say a quarter, maybe it’s a quarter to a third of the battle.And the only reason I say that is I don’t think we should spend a ton of time overanalyzing our competitors.

I mean, if there’s a really, really good one, yeah, you can take a look at what they’re doing. But ultimately, sure, we all want to outperform our competitors. But what do we really want?

We want to get to the point where we’re so good at what we do that it’s no longer about outperforming our competitors.

Now it’s a matter of outperforming our past best, right? What’s the best we were able to do? When you’re leading in a market, when you really are the market leader, you’re doing things right, you’re doing things well and efficiently, you’re already better than a lot of your competitors, then the goal you want to reach for is how can I do what we do better in our own organization?

Right? How can we initiate contact better? How can we leave messages better? How can we send emails that are more compelling? What are the very specific things, all these points of customer contact that could potentially change for the better to get me better results?

Jay: Yeah, I love this idea that your true competition really is yourself, right?

It’s kind of like golf or, you know, another single person sport where you’re, really competing against yourself. And, if you can identify constantly ways to get better and you’re not falling into that complacency, then you’re probably going to do better than most of your competitors.

David: Yeah, exactly.

Something else that I read recently, was talking about the idea that a lot of us want to try to beat our best month ever, our best year ever. We’re always looking to top that top line, which makes a lot of sense.

But I read this in a book by Nic Peterson. He said that, ideally, our goal should be to beat our bottom.

In other words, sales are going to go up and down, right? That’s going to happen over a period of time. Sales are going to go up and down. We’re going to have peaks and valleys, and hopefully it works on an upward trajectory, and as you’re doing that, if you can make sure that the floor is constantly rising ,then eventually you get to the point where your floor is higher than other people’s ceiling.

And if you think about the idea of being better than your competitors, that’s really what you want. Cause if you have a great month this month, an exceptional month, then it’s like, okay, now the new month starts.

Now you’re at zero again. You got to start from scratch. Right? But if you know that your first goal for that month is to make sure that you’re above your previous floor. Then it seems a lot more doable. It’s like, okay, we might not have another peak month this month, but if we can stay above our floor, then we will continue to grow and grow.

Jay: Yeah, I really like that. I’m somebody who tends to look at records, right? Like we just finished a record month and I’m like on a high, right? Things are great, but you’re exactly right. I mean, next month beating that every single month, month after month. Is that realistic? I think you’re pointing out, no, it’s probably not, and it could be counterproductive.

David: Yeah, it’s probably not realistic that each month is going to be higher than the last, and there are not going to be any that are lower. But I think it’s also realistic to say, okay, can I beat our worst month? Or a recent worst month? It’s like if you look at a stock chart and you see how there are these different…

Jay: let’s call them peaks and valleys, ups and downs.

David: Yeah, peaks and valleys. So if it’s bottoming out at a certain point, you want to say, okay, I want to get in higher than that. It’s a terrible explanation, but you kind of get the drift.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And again, we kind of always fall back to this, is what systems do you have to track these types of things?

Do you understand the cause and effect? I mean, so often, yeah, you had a good sales month, or yeah, you increased the baseline, but do you know why you did that? Was it just the phone rang more? Or was it something tangible? Because if it’s not something tangible, how are you gonna repeat it?

Was it more calls? Was it more advertising dollars? What was it that got you there? If you don’t know, then the business is driving you. You’re not driving the business.

David: Exactly. And each of those things are some of these different areas of customer contact, right? Whether it’s the advertising, whether it’s the phone calls, whatever it is, when we’re looking at that, we’re saying, okay, where are these key points of contact and what can I do to make each of those better?

Can I make the messaging better? Can I tweak the messaging? Can I reach a different or better group of people? All these different things. Can I reach them using different marketing vehicles? Can I reach them online? Can I reach them offline? Can I reach them on the phone, via text, via email?

How can I reach them? And look at what you’re doing, look at what’s working well and what may be not working as well as it used to, and then say, okay, how could I tweak some of these things, the messaging, the combination of marketing vehicles we’re using, or the people we’re reaching, the MVPs, we’ve talked about that a lot in the past.

Which of these can I adapt, can I fine tune, like tuning in an old fashioned radio where they used to have dials on them, right? That type of thing. So you’re able to dial it in clearly and make sure that you’re getting the right people, saying the right things, using the right combination of marketing vehicles.

Jay: Yeah, we talked about this last time, avoiding assumptions, figuring out why you got that customer, right?

Cause you may be thinking, “oh, I had a new ad campaign or new marketing and this is why they came in.” And maybe it was a contact you had made with them a year ago. Maybe it was a bad experience with one of the competitors. Maybe it was something that changed in their business cycle. I think that type of communication as to why they’re there, why you were able to close them, you need to have systems to track this and, be open and honest with your customers to find out. What was it that motivated them to come to you?

David: Yeah, in our work with our clients, we talk a lot about intelligent repetition of contact, being in touch with people again and again and again, but without saying the same thing, without getting boring, without getting tedious, without driving them crazy, right?

If we can do that, that’s intelligent repetition of contact, and it makes it far more likely that you will be in front of someone when they’re ready to make that buying decision.

Jay: Yeah, I love that idea, but you’re still going to have competitors. So do you need to have some awareness of what they’re doing?

Or do you kind of say, I’m going to focus on me and I’m just going to be the best I can and compete against myself?

David: Well, I like that better. I like the idea of focusing on ourselves. What I’ve found though, is that in most markets, you don’t have to look too far to hear about what your competitors are doing.

Because if you’re reaching out to a new prospect and you hear about one particular competitor again and again and again, that tells you who is actually pretty good in the market. If you hear those names again and again and again, if you hear different people, each time you talk to someone, then it’s like, okay, well that’s sort of the average, that’s the industry.

But if you’re talking to a lot of people and they’re all saying the same thing and they’re all saying great things, that’s an indication that you have now found the leader in your market. So that’s what you need to target, then.

Then you may look at, okay, well, what are they doing? How are they doing it? How is it better than what we’re doing? Or is it? Is it not better than what we’re doing? But they don’t know what we do, so they can’t compare.

Jay: Yeah, and finding out, can I even compete with them in one particular area? Maybe that exposes a different lane for you where you can be competitive, right?

So it’s not like you have to play chicken with everybody. That may not be the best solution. We’re in a very unique industry because our products and services are so defined that I only have probably three competitors nationwide. And so when I talk to people, oftentimes, our competitors will come up and sometimes it’s in a good light.

Quite often, like you said, my competitors aren’t that good. It’s not hard at all for us to offer better customer service, better products, everything. I have found, that, a lot of people are like, oh, I hope they don’t go and research and talk to my competitors and get outbid.

I’m like, go and talk to them. Go and have that experience because I know you’ll be back and I’m in a better position when you come back. So that’s made us more confident than less confident.

David: Yeah. And when you have a small number like that, it is easier to know what each of them are doing. I remember in our promotional product business, back in the day, we had a situation where there was one competitor that wasn’t really known for answering their phones.

You try to reach them and you couldn’t get through to them. And so, if a sales person of ours, or if I was in a conversation with somebody and they say, “Oh yeah, we use this company,” sometimes I’d say something like, “Oh, are you able to get them to answer their phone?”

And very often they’d laugh. Because if you know this about a company, you can say something like that. Like, “Oh, well, they don’t usually answer, but I can usually get a call back.”

“Oh, okay. Well, if you ever get tired of that, or if you ever get voicemail and you’d like to talk to a human, here’s my card, right? That’s just a small example, but you basically look for the things that you know to be true about a competitor.

And I’m not saying you’re picking on them. I’m not saying you’re dissing them or anything, but you just point out a very obvious truth about them. And very often that will get their attention.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I love it. How do people find out more?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call and watch the video on that page. See if it makes sense to have a conversation with myself or my team.

When I say your competition isn’t that good, what I mean is that a lot of them are not taking the time to learn the things that will allow them to do things better. And if you’re in that camp, if you’d like to be able to do things better and differently than your competition, if you’d like to be seen as the leader in your market, then by all means, TopSecrets.com/call.

Jay: All right. Fantastic, David. Always a pleasure.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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

If you’re at a point right now where you know you need to be selling more, but for whatever reason you’re not — and you could feel like it’s the economy, you could feel like it’s the competition, it doesn’t really matter what it is — If it’s either of those things or if it’s something else, there are ways around it. There are specific things you can do that will help you to get through to the people that you need to reach, and drive them to either a yes or no, thumbs up or thumbs down decision. Sometimes the answer is going to be no. But sometimes it’s going to be yes. If you’re not even giving them the option to give you a thumbs up or thumbs down, there’s no way you win.

David: Hi, and welcome back. Today, Jay McFarland and I will be discussing Don’t Wait for the Economy to Improve. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, Dave. As always, it’s a real pleasure. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about the economy, and it’s really kind of unique because there are parts of this economy that are really struggling and there are parts that are really booming.

So depending upon where you’re at in that spectrum, you could be getting hit really hard or you could just be celebrating, right? In our case, we’re definitely feeling the effects of inflation. I can feel it in our client’s willingness to make purchases. Cause things are a little bit tighter than they normally are.

David: Yeah, it’s interesting. Like you said, some people are really struggling right now. Some people are having their best months ever. It really kind of depends. But when we talk about the idea of not waiting for the economy to improve, I think there are a lot of good reasons for that. The first reason I would say is that your smart competition will not, they’re not going to wait, they’re going to be out there, they’re going to be in front of people.

And if you’re not in front of people, then that just means you have absolutely no opportunity to get the business. So I’ve heard a number of people talking about the problems with the economy. And I’ve heard a number of people talking about the fact that they’re waiting for things to improve. And I saw that comment online the other day, and I thought, we need to talk about this because essentially we have to be selling all the time, right?

I mean, most businesses can’t afford to wait around until things get better. Reminds me of that old Zig Ziglar line where you don’t wait until all the lights turn green before you head into town, right? It just doesn’t work.

Jay: Right. Right, right. It’s a great point. And I also think that part of any of your business strategy, you have to be prepared for the ups and downs.

Good businesses know how to pivot, they know when to pivot. So if you’re a new business, this is going to be hard for you, but it’s one of the reasons why you want to always be tracking, right? Always be watching because there’s seasonality, there’s economies of the country, of your local economies, all kinds of things that can impact your business model.

David: Yeah. And the truth of the matter is that we only ever have right now. We can’t sell in the past. We might be able to sell in the future, right? Nobody knows their future. But yeah, we can plan to sell in the future, but we can’t sell in the future right now. All we can do is sell now. We can make plans, but sometimes they happen, sometimes they don’t.

Right now is the only thing we’ve got. So it’s always the best time to sell. Right now is always the very best time that we have to sell, because we really have no alternative in the moment. Well, I guess the alternative is wait. But when you’re waiting, you’re not selling, and other people are.

Jay: Yeah, and I’ll tell you, I’m not in a business model where I can just stop selling.

I mean, that’s not an option, right? So, we’re in the process of talking about our pricing structure, talking about the different products we offer. We are seeing that some products suddenly are of more interest to people. So it’s amazing how economies impact people’s overall perspective.

And we’re really trying to key in on that and decide, you know, are we meeting the needs of current day customers, or are we still trying to sell to yesterday’s customers?

David: Exactly. And I hear some people say, and not just now, I’ve heard this all the time, over many years, and lots of different ups and downs of the economy.

I’ve heard people say, “no one is buying right now.” Have you ever heard that one? No one’s buying right now. There’s always someone buying, okay? Don’t tell yourself there’s no one buying right now. Our job is to find them.

It’s like a game show. I remember I recorded a video about this years ago. I was talking about how life in sales is like a game show and your goal is to find the buyer. Right? That’s the goal.

And sometimes it does feel like needles in haystacks. Sometimes there are more needles. Sometimes there are fewer needles, but regardless, our job is always to find them. There are people, right now, who need the products and services we offer.

And if they don’t know that we’re available as a solution for them, then they can’t buy from us. They have absolutely no opportunity to do so. And one of the other things that I feel very strongly about is the fact that invisibility is only a good thing in the movies, right? Invisible Man? Well, it didn’t work out too well for him, as I recall.

Harry Potter and his invisibility cloak. That worked out okay for him sometimes, but not always. It’s not always great. And in sales, it’s just deadly. When we’re invisible to the people who could potentially buy from us, there’s nothing that can happen that’s good for our businesses.

Jay: Yeah, it’s absolutely deadly.

And I think the other thing that’s deadly is making assumptions that are not founded on any type of reality. We tend to assume that we know what our customers are going through. We’re like, “Oh, I know my customer base. I know exactly what they need. I know exactly what they’re going to respond to.”

If you’re in unique times, then you probably don’t. One of the things that we’re experiencing is I think our natural tendency would be, well, the economy is not doing well, so we need to lower our prices or we need to appeal to a lower end type customer. David, we’re actually doing exactly the opposite.

We’ve decided that the people who can buy and afford our services are the higher end customers. So we’re going back through our lead base. And we’re re-approaching people who are really probably less likely to be impacted by the economy in the short term, but they still need our products in the long term.

My initial assumption was maybe we need to just lower our prices and get people through the door.

David: Yeah, and for some businesses that might work, but the truth of the matter, and you really just nailed it, is the fact that the people who are impacted most, whenever there is a recession or recessionary trends or inflation.

A lot of the things that are happening right now, the people who are always impacted the worst are the people who have the least amount of money. It always works that way because people who have money will still have no trouble buying gas. They’ll have no trouble buying groceries or medicine or any of that kind of thing.

The people who are impacted worst by these policies are the kind of people who are not going to be able to spend money because they just don’t have access to it. So when we’re in sales and we talk to a lot of people who are saying, “I can’t afford it. I don’t have the money,” all that sort of thing. We have a couple of options.

One is if we have the option to be able to charge a little less and we want to be able to make that sale, it’s a free market system. You can choose to do that, right? But generally speaking, if we’re able to interact with more prospects and clients who actually have the ability to pay now. Then it’s really a matter of focus.

When we’re able to focus in on the people who can actually spend money with us now, then all that other stuff goes out the window. And so much of it is about recognizing that, which kind of goes back to the needles and haystacks, right? There will be fewer of those kind of needles. But when you find them, it makes everything a lot easier.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is you might’ve already found them, right? Cause we were talking, we often talked about having a good customer management system, a good CRM, a lead base, right? We’re in a situation, I know a lot of businesses are where they’re like, they can’t afford to market, right?

Marketing’s always the first thing that gets cut in a business. Which is just, I would recommend that that’s the last thing that you cut, right? But you could change your type of marketing, right? So we’re scaling back on Google Ads, for example, but we’ve really ramped up our emails to people that we’ve already talked to about different products.

We’re finding success with that. So that’s a short term pivot that we couldn’t do if we hadn’t spent the time to not just intake our leads, but also classify our leads so that we know the different types of products that we can send to different types of customers. Can you imagine doing that on a spreadsheet?

I mean, you can do it. And starting out, maybe that’s where you start, but that would have been madness and we’re finding success with that in harder times.

David: It makes a whole lot of sense. And another thing that I think people should be looking at right now is your messaging. It’s very likely that your messaging has to change.

And some people, the messaging could be about lower prices. Again, I’m not necessarily recommending that. It’s more likely that what could potentially be more effective is if you’re able to talk to them about why now is exactly the perfect time that they have to do this, right? And that may seem counterintuitive.

It may seem like, well, why are they going to want to do it now? But, if you’re selling advertising, like a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are in the print and promotional products industries, you said something a moment ago about how people want to cut advertising right at the time when they shouldn’t.

Jay: Yes.

David: It really should be the perfect time to advertise. And so, if your messaging is going to change at this point, the messaging should be about the fact that now is the perfect time to get in front of your ideal prospects and clients with a promotional item, for example, that’s going to stay in front of them.

You pay for it once, it stays in front of them for years, unlike a commercial, which disappears after a few minutes, goes off into the ether, things like that. So when you’re able to reframe things, like now is the perfect time to do this because… and just write down your becauses, figure out why would now be the perfect time to buy.

And if you just think about it at a glance, you might say, “it isn’t. It’s terrible. It’s not the right time.” Forget that. Just set that aside for a moment and write out, now is the perfect time to buy because… and just force yourself to write down 3, 5, 10, 50 reasons why now is the right time to buy. And if some of them don’t make perfect sense, that’s okay. Keep writing.

And if you write down 30 or 40 of them, you can probably come up with at least half a dozen that are actually worthwhile. And so when you’re talking to somebody and you run one of them by the person, they say, “well, that doesn’t really apply to this.” Oh, well, what about this? Or what about this? How about this reason? Right?

There are lots of reasons. And it’s all about results, ultimately. What is the result the person is looking to get? If their result is, we want to save money right now, Meaning we don’t want to spend. Okay. That’s one potential result. But as an alternate result, hey, what if you could bring in business that you wouldn’t normally be able to bring in, while other people aren’t advertising?

Would it make sense for us to do some sort of low cost promotion now that will allow you to get in front of people while others aren’t? You make the reason for not buying, the reason for buying.

Jay: Yeah, I love the practical exercises. One of the reasons I love what you do, David, because you give practical explanations, right?

Sometimes we talk about conceptual things. We go, no, get out a piece of paper and write down why is now a better time to buy? To me, that’s brilliant. And I think that if you do this exercise, you may discover some reasons why this is an even better time to buy than normal circumstances, right?

If you’re really good, this could be a time where you, shine, where you excel, right?

David: Absolutely. And the other thing that it does, is it really changes the paradigm. When you’re talking to somebody who’s feeling like, well, no, this isn’t a good time. And you say, oh, well, what about this? And what about this? What about this?

And you point out like all these different things. You’ve got a list of 30 of them. By the time you get to number six or seven, they’re going to go, “wow, you’re pretty optimistic.” I mean, I’ve had conversations like this with people, and they’ll say things like, you’re really quite the salesman.

It’s like, it’s not about being a salesman. It’s about does it make sense? Is it true? Is it true or not? Is it true that now is actually a pretty good time for you to be able to get in front of the people that you need to get in front of? And if the answer is yes, then we’ll put something together that makes sense.

And if the answer’s no, it’s still no, but it just allows them to see the other side of the coin. And very often people aren’t going to do that for themselves. They’re not going to come up with all the reasons that they should buy right now. They’re not going to do it. And if we as salespeople are not helping them to come to that conclusion, if not just doing it for them, then we’re not going to get the results.

Jay: Yeah, now you’ve become a cheerleader instead of a salesperson, and now they look at you totally differently. I mean, that could just be a game changer for years to come. Such a great conversation. David, how do people find out more?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call, check out the video on that page, see if it makes sense to have a call with myself or my team.

We’d love to have a conversation with you. If you’re at a point right now where you know you need to be selling more, but for whatever reason you’re not, and you could feel like it’s the economy, you could feel like it’s the competition. It doesn’t really matter what it is. If it’s either of those things or if it’s something else, there are ways around it.

There are things you can do, specific things that you can do that will help you to get through to the people that you need to reach, and drive them to either a yes or no thumbs up or thumbs down decision.

Sometimes the answer is going to be no. But sometimes it’s going to be yes. If you’re not even giving them the option to give you a thumbs up or thumbs down, there’s no way you win.

Jay: Yeah, such a great, great service, David. As always, it’s a pleasure. Thank you.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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

We get results from social media when we’re able to identify the result that we’re looking to get, and identify the messaging that we need to create to be able to get in front of these ideal prospects to have them raise their hands and express interest. When we do those things correctly, then you can get to the point where nearly everybody you talk to is actually qualified to do business with you.

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing getting results from social media. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, David. This is a big topic. Talk about opening a can of worms. It’s something everybody wants, and we talked, last podcast about learning online and what great resources there are.

This is a place where there may be such an overload of information and different ideas that I don’t know if you’re going to find the answer online. I really don’t.

David: You’ll find a lot of answers online. Yeah., Right? Whether or not it’s the answer you’re looking for, whether or not it’s the answer that solves your problem, that is the big question mark.

But I feel like this topic is so important because everyone’s on social media. Everyone’s trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. And the reason that I believe the word results is so important is that it narrows your focus. It forces you to think in terms of, okay, what is the result I even want to get here? What am I trying to do?

Because as we talked about in a previous podcast, you can go on social media and it’s nothing but distraction after distraction. And if you just turn it on and go in there without a really strong focus in terms of what you want to accomplish, what result you want to get, you’re not getting any sort of result, except you’re going to get pulled into other people’s experiences.

So from my standpoint, the first thing we need to do is to identify what is the result that I would like to get from social media? And then you can look at how much time that I spend on there is actually allocated to getting that result. That’ll tell you a lot right off the bat.

Jay: Yeah, and I think that there is a misguided focus that you need a large audience, right?

Like if I can get up to 10, 000 followers or whatever, that’s not true. it could be better to have a thousand dedicated followers who are potential clients than having a hundred thousand people who may just clog up your pipeline and who really never are going to be your clients.

David: Right. And if they’re not responding to what you do, if they’re not liking, if they’re not replying, then the algorithm says people aren’t interested in this. So you’re exactly right. If you just had the hundred people or so who are going to click today’s link on there. You’d be seeing everybody, everyone would be seeing your stuff. But of course it’s impossible to do that.

So you’re exactly right. It’s about saying, all right, well, how can I get to more of the right kind of people who resonate with the material that I’m putting out? And I am not speaking as an authority on social media. Okay. I want to be really clear about this. I’m not coming to you and saying, oh yes, I’m the guy for social media.

No, not saying that. However, what we have been able to do is to identify specific things that our clients have wanted to accomplish, and we’re very good at helping them accomplish it, once we decide exactly what those results are.

Jay: Yeah, I’ll tell you where we’re at right now in our company.

As you know, we offer Tax Services to a very specific group, so, I’ve told you in the past, we have spent two years identifying keywords for paid ads, and it’s been a constant process where we’re refining, I do the consultations, And so when I see that we’re getting consultations that are not in the strike zone, I go back to our keyword, you know, the person doing our Google ads, and we refine, and we refine, and refine.

And I’ve told you, We’re to a place now, it’s kind of like our secret recipe, where we don’t get a consultation that is not in the strike zone anymore. We’ve been that focused.

But it costs us a hundred dollars per consultation. That’s what we’re paying. And that’s a pretty steep fee. So obviously we’re like, okay, how do we get organic people to come to our website from social media, where they’ve seen something that we’re providing, and they’re clicking through and that doesn’t cost us anything, right?

So that’s the goal, that’s the dream. But now we’re in another problem. We could probably get tons of people coming to our site. But now I don’t want everybody clicking on the schedule a consultation.

Because I’d be back in that same problem. I’d be talking to a lot of people who I can’t help. So this is the dilemma. This is where we’re at in our company right now, moving to social media, but we have to be very strategic about how we do that.

David: Yes. But you’re very clear on the results you’re looking for. Yes. You’re looking for a very specific type of client.

You’re looking for a very specific criteria. And for you, you know that even though a hundred seems expensive, you know that it’s worth it because you know that each client is going to be worth quite a bit more than that. If the service that you were offering cost 50 dollars, you could not do what you’re doing.

And that’s something else that I think is important for people to understand. Not every product, not every service is going to work in terms of social media advertising, no matter how great you get at it, because there’s always going to be competition for various keywords.

There’s going to be a number of factors that go into it. So if you don’t have a product that justifies that kind of investment, if you’re selling a pack of gum at a time, right? When you go into a grocery store and you check out, there’s a pack of gum, they’re like, Oh, I’ll have a pack of gum. You take it as an impulse buy, right? That sort of thing. It’s very unlikely that you’re going to be able to run ads on social media and sell a pack of gum, right?

I mean, just the shipping costs on it, it’s not going to work. There’s some things that don’t work. When you understand that, then you can recognize that if you want to sell something that doesn’t sell particularly well on social media, you need to find other ways to do that. And of course, that’s the subject of a totally different podcast.

But when we think about the results that we’re looking to get. There are a number of different ones, right? The first one is, in your case, it’s about getting someone to have a conversation with, who is qualified. Getting a qualified person to raise their hands and express interest. And you’re talking about your secret recipe.

And I’ve always maintained that any business that does not have some secret recipe in it, is not going to last very long. And I’ve had people argue with me about this a lot. It’s like what are you talking about? You know, we’ve got a commodity business, essentially, like if your business is a commodity, that’s going to be a reflection on your sales, right?

If it’s just a total commodity, it is going to reflect in your numbers. There’s got to be something special, something different that you bring to the table, either in terms of the product or service that you’re offering, or in terms of the way that you sell it, right?

Because if you’re selling a commodity, Then you need to be better at attracting the type of clients who want to buy that commodity.

We do a lot of work in the promotional products industry, in the print industry, and a lot of people view that as a commodity. I sell print services. I’m an offset printer. Everybody sells offset printing. It’s like, that is correct. But what are the types of clients that you really want to bring in, right?

Who are the kinds of clients who are going to spend the kind of money with you that you want to actually encourage, right?

You don’t just want to take anyone with a pulse, anyone who can fog a mirror. You don’t want to just take anyone who comes through the door. When you’re building a business proactively, you’re deciding who you want to work with and who you want to choose to leave to your competitors.

So again, I want to stay focused on our topic, which is social media. We need to recognize that there are specific results we want, and then once we’ve identified what those results are, we can start to figure out what the specific plan is for getting those things to happen.

Jay: Yeah, and I’ll tell you, I don’t say this very often, but I really think this is a situation where you may be better off not trying to learn it yourself.

You know, I’ve watched videos, I’ve taken online courses, and everybody’s like, even down to the thumbnail you put on your YouTube videos and the, you know, what do in the video where I’m pointing at the, you know, taking all these pictures, I’m, looking like surprise and look, this is amazing and the clickbaity titles and all of those things,

but that’s always changing. That target is always moving, right? I’ve used something as simple as Fiverr, right? Where somebody who charges me 50 bucks a week, but this is what they do. I’ve gotten more results from that than I have ever gotten from trying to follow somebody on YouTube, and so I’ve just decided I’m not going to learn it. I’m paying somebody else to do it because I want to focus my time on what’s most important.

And that’s what we’ve found. Again, I’m not saying everybody that’s the solution for you, but we have spent a lot of time in this arena, and that’s how we’ve gotten results.

David: It makes perfect sense. I think it was Dean Graziosi, who I originally heard this from, he was talking about the fact that when you have the money to solve a problem, you no longer really have that problem, unless you’re too cheap to spend the money, right?

And so if you can pay somebody 50 dollars and you can get ad results that allow you to multiply your ad investment, it’s silly not to do that.

That also goes to the topic of “who, not how.” Dan Sullivan wrote a book about that. If you’re looking to do everything, every aspect of your business, you shouldn’t, because there are going to be things that you’re not going to be naturally good at.

But I think the core of this particular topic, when we talk about getting results from social media, The biggest problem is not social media. The biggest problem is people don’t know exactly what result they want, right?

They may think, “Oh, I just want to get more sales.” Well, yes, you do want to get more sales, but there are steps to that. And the first step, particularly if you’re using social media is going to be figuring out a way to somehow identify who those people are, whether you’re doing it organically, whether you’re doing it with paid ads, there are specific things that you need to do.

If those things don’t happen, you’re not going to get more clients. And whether it’s you coming up with the how on how to do that, or whether you’re paying someone else to do it for you, you’ve got to be able to convey to them what you want, and that’s where a lot of people get stuck.

They’re just so unclear on exactly what they want to have happen that they can’t get it done because they can’t even convey it to someone who can help them do it.

Jay: Yeah, such an important point. I mean, I’m just sitting here thinking, if you imagined our business with a storefront, you would think I want to line out the door and down the block.

I don’t. Right? I want the door locked and I’m buzzing you in, once I’ve decided that you fit in a specific category. That seems to go against everything. that we’ve learned about business, but we know that because we’ve spent so much time defining exactly what you’re talking about.

And what I think is the core, if anybody takes away from this podcast, and that is, if you don’t know what you want, how are you going to craft social media or any type of marketing towards that specific thing? That’s got to be job one.

David: Yeah, and the truth of the matter is that that situation you described about buzzing people in versus having the line, anyone who has been even remotely successful at identifying their audience and identifying ways to attract the right people into their organization would much rather have the buzzer, right?

Because otherwise you’re having to swat people away, and that is time consuming and it’s difficult. So when we’re able to identify the result that we’re looking to get, identify the messaging that we need to create to be able to get in front of these ideal prospects to get them to raise their hands and express interest.

When we do those things correctly, then you can get to the point where you are, where nearly everybody you talk to or everybody you talk to is actually qualified to do business with you.

Jay: Yeah, I mean think about it. We’re literally saying how do we get fewer leads? You know what I mean? It just seems like it’s such a different approach.

And I want to add one more thing. We’re about out of time here. And I think we should talk about this in another podcast. People who do have successful social media programs, you don’t want to rely on social media. They change their algorithms all the time. And your goal should not be just to get a sale.

It should be to offload them onto one of your properties. Your mailing list, your website, something else. Because you could spend all this money and have a great system and then an algorithm changes and you’re sunk.

So I’d love to dive into that a little bit more in the future.

David: Yeah, that’s a good one. And also the fact that the people who do this extremely well are not just running one ad forever. It’s very unlikely that’s going to happen. There are constantly going to be changes that are necessary because either the market has seen it and it’s gotten stale or there are approaches that work better and differently, or as you indicated, the algorithm could change.

There are a lot of different factors that go into it. So if you think you’re going to come up with one magic thing that’s going to work forever, it’s very unlikely that’s going to happen. But when you’re aware of the factors that you need to be able to focus on, you’re going to be a lot more likely to get the results you want.

Jay: Yeah, eventually competitors are going to steal that secret recipe. And what are you going to do then, right? How do you define yourself? David, as always, it’s a pleasure. How do people find out more?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call. Check out the video. See if it makes sense to have a conversation with myself or our team.

We love having conversations with really sharp, motivated entrepreneurs, salespeople, those who are looking to grow their sales and profits in a way that is sustainable. You’re not looking for just the next new thing, the next whatever it is that somebody says is going to get you the business you’re looking for.

It’s unique to everyone, and we need to be able to recognize and utilize your unique strengths in your solution. Otherwise, if you say, well, the solution is Instagram, the solution is Facebook, the solution is this, it’s that. No, the solution is identifying what is going to work best for you, and that’s what we do with our clients.

So, TopSecrets.com/call.

Jay: Fantastic. David, as always, a pleasure. Thank you.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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

David: When we talk about learning from failure, it doesn’t just have to be our failures. We can learn from the failures of others.

Jay: Oh yeah.

David: We can learn from the failures of our friends, our family, our parents, our children. We can learn from any type of failure that we meet along the way. And when we do that, when we learn from other people’s failures, we are saving ourselves a lot more aggravation.

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing learning from failure. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey, David. Once again, it’s a pleasure to be here. This one, again, another important topic. I think we have a tendency, when we have failure, to not want to try that again, as opposed to saying I don’t know who said it, but fail forward. Right?

So like it or not, we’re a result of our failures, and we’re probably going to fail more than we win. So defining what we do in failure, I think, is very important.

David: Yeah, I think this particular topic for myself, I know, has been absolutely critical in every aspect of my development from the time I was a child.

When I was in grade school and I wasn’t always the most motivated student because I wasn’t interested in some of the topics, I would not do well in certain areas. And that wasn’t great. I mean, what I should have learned from that is do a better job of it, anyway,

I didn’t learn that at the time. And maybe that’s why I’m an entrepreneur today, because I think a lot of entrepreneurs start out the same way.

It’s like you’re on a path. There are specific things that just really interest you that you can focus on diligently. And there are other things that you can’t.

But also just an example, I know throughout my own life, you’re going to be able to learn something from everyone you meet, whether it’s positive or negative. So you might as well take advantage of that.

And if you recognize that you can pick up on these things fairly early on in most relationships and decide to learn from them, everything gets a whole lot easier.

Jay: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with you. Once again, I think all the podcasts we’ve been doing recently self awareness. So important. Personal inventories, so important.

Do you even recognize the failure? Are you deliberate about what your response is going to be? And if so, I think you can turn it around and make it a positive. If not, I think it’s just by nature going to become a negative.

David: Yeah, and whenever we’re going through something in business that we would categorize as a failure, and that varies widely in business, as you know, to a complete business failure, I mean, that’s something you’ll learn from for a really long time, when that happens.

It can be small things, it can be large things, but if we look at each of those things as an experience, there is very likely a lot that we can learn from that.

What was it that caused this problem to begin with? I know in business for myself, most likely cause of issues and ultimate failure has always been, In some way related to communication.

We weren’t communicating properly with the other people, or they weren’t communicating properly with us, or they weren’t communicating honestly with us, or however it worked out.

But a lot of it, for me, boils down to communication failures. And when you’re aware of the areas where these failures likely happen, you can then pay closer attention going forward so that you don’t repeat those types of things.

Jay: Yeah, I grew up kind of in the retail industry and, when a failure happens, you have managers who want to just find the closest person and, yell at them and blame them.

But then you have others and I’ve learned that usually it’s not like you said, a person problem. It’s a systems problem.

So is it your communication that’s bad? What is it? And if you can fix it, is it your training? You didn’t train, you know, whatever it is, and that goes for yourself as well.

Finding and identifying that you’re actually going to accomplish something, as opposed to just the visceral, you know, I got it off my chest, but now I’ve destroyed somebody.

David: Yeah. And when you’ve got the right processes in place in your business, it becomes a lot easier to determine was the problem with the process or was the problem with the employee not following the process.

Jay: Yes.

David: Right? Because if the problem was with the process, it gives you an opportunity to fix the process so that it doesn’t happen again.

If the problem is with the employee not following the process, then you can encourage the employee, and you can train the employee to follow the process more closely next time.

And if you have an employee who continues to not follow process after process, then you’ve got a hiring problem, most likely on your hands.

But it’s a whole lot easier to identify when you’ve got the systems in place and you’ve got the people in place following the systems or not following them to identify where things are going wrong.

Jay: Yeah, and the danger is if you do this wrong, and again, I think it happens in our internal persona and also with other employees, if you’re constantly blaming people and it’s really a system situation, what happens is you create a “why try” or “you can’t win” atmosphere, right?

So if employees are constantly being blamed, when they weren’t trained, when there wasn’t a good system, they’re going to start saying, well, why should I even try?

It’s something I call minimum expectations mode, right? I’m going to show up, I’m going to do as little as possible, stay under the radar, and collect a check. I think we do that personally as well.

If we keep hitting a wall and we’re not aware of it, we’re not trying to learn from it, we’re not deliberate about it, we adopt a “why try” attitude as well, right? Well, every time I try something, I just fail. So I’m not gonna pursue this anymore.

David: Yeah, I agree. I think if most people in an organization take personal responsibility for their actions, whether it’s the employer, whether it’s the employee, doesn’t matter.

If an employee has something go wrong and they take personal responsibility and say, “okay, what could I have done differently? What should I have done differently? Oh, I should have followed this procedure better,” or, “oh, I missed this,” or “I missed that.”

If they recognize that there’s something they could and should have done better, then they are learning from that failure.

Same thing if you’re the employer. If something goes wrong, you look at yourself, you take personal responsibility and you say, “what could or should I have done better? Should I have taken a longer amount of time to train this person? Should I have made the instructions more clear?”

Because if everybody is looking to themselves in terms of what they could do better, then you’re not doing the whole blame game thing. You’re literally taking responsibility for yourself. And when everybody takes responsibility for themselves, Everything’s better.

Jay: Yeah.

David: And when nobody takes responsibility for themselves and everybody’s finger pointing and I’m blaming you and you’re blaming me and we’re blaming other people, it just doesn’t accomplish the result.

So learning from failure is something I think that we all have to try to concentrate on? To say to ourselves, all right, if this didn’t work, what can I do better? What should I do better? Who else has helped me? Could I have asked for, should I have asked for? And you may go through something and say, you know what?

I really feel like I did everything I could possibly do in this situation. And sometimes you’ll do that and things will go wrong anyway, but at least you’ll know, and then you can get feedback. Well, listen, this is what I did. This is the process that I followed. What else could I have done? What else should I have done?

And if you can get positive input on that, then it’s helpful because it allows us to grow. And I think the whole idea of learning from failure is that it does allow us to grow. It allows us to advance, allows us to get better, and ideally it prevents us from failing again the next time.

Jay: Yeah, one thing I know for sure, failure is going to happen. It’s going to happen.

And so having a system, having a recognition, okay, failure just happened. If it’s in an organization, this is how we handle it. Let’s look at our systems, our training then our individuals, or if it happened internally, okay.

You know, you’ve talked about writing things down. What did I learn from this? What should I do next time? Because a lot of times like you said, you did everything you can. And so sometimes you don’t need to beat yourself up. You don’t need to make changes. It just, it’s going to happen. that’s the reality.

David: It is. And when we talk about learning from failure, it doesn’t just have to be our failures. We can learn from the failures of others.

Jay: Oh yeah.

David: We can learn from the failures of our friends, our family, our parents, our children. We can learn from any type of failure that we meet along the way. And when we do that, when we learn from other people’s failures, we are saving ourselves a lot more aggravation.

I remember growing up as a child and noticing things in adults, where I would say, “I don’t want to do that. When I grew up, I never want to do that.” And you see things in other people where you go, “I want to do that. That looks good. I’d like to be more like this person or I’d like to be more like that person.

And if not doing that, if you’re only noticing, “Oh, I’d like to be like this. I’d like to be like this. I’d like to be like this,” and you’re missing out on the things that you don’t want to do. Those are the biggest traps, right?

Those are the things that are most likely to mess you up. So, when you’re able to recognize failure at a relatively early age, recognize that you don’t want to go there, and then determine the steps that you can avoid, to not fall into those traps, you’re going to be doing much better.

Jay: Yeah, I love this. I love this.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. In today’s world, I mean with resources like what you provide with YouTube, I mean, I see somebody in my house and they’re trying to fix something and they’re just trying to figure it out and I’m like, have you gone on YouTube yet?

Because there’s gonna be 50 videos on how to do this. I have a plasma television in my house. It’s gotta be 20 years old. The screen is still spectacular. I had two of them. They both died after I had them for three years. And I’m like, these are expensive. I don’t want to…

So I went on YouTube and I found out first you can solder new capacitors into the board. And I’m like, I’m not soldering anything. But then I found another website that said you can buy the PowerBoard for 50 bucks, and it just plugs in.

I did that to both TVs. They’ve gone on for another 15 years, each of them. And I’ve fixed a washer, I’ve fixed our fridge, I’ve replaced shocks, I’ve learned how to code.

I’ve learned how to do all of these things because people have put together these systems and you’ve put together resources where you should be able to fail less, or be more focused or more advanced before you get to those places.

David: Yeah, no question. And I’ve said this to so many audiences over the years when I’ve done presentations.

I would say the reason I’m standing up on this stage today is not because I’m particularly smart. It’s because I feel like I’ve made every single stupid mistake you can possibly make. And if I can keep you from making just one or two of those, you’re going to be light years ahead. And so, so much of what I teach to my clients, is based on the potholes that we want to steer around, the things that we want to avoid, because it can save you years.

It can save you decades of your time. And that’s what I find so rewarding in our work with clients is that when we’re able to identify specific things that they can avoid doing or specific things that they can do that will allow them to advance their goals and their outcomes and what they’d like to accomplish for themselves and their families, it’s incredibly rewarding.

Jay: So how do people find out more about how you can possibly help them out?

David: Go to TopSecrets.com/call. Check out the video on that page and see if it makes sense to schedule a call with us. If it does, great. You can schedule a call right on that page. If it doesn’t, at least you’ll have a good idea of what may be possible for you. Some things that you might not have considered in terms of the growth of your business.

There are things that you either don’t yet know or don’t know the intricacies of that could be slowing you down, right? Because it’s not always about, “well, I didn’t know that.” It’s about, “oh, I didn’t know exactly how to do that.”

Those minor details make a huge difference. Could be something like that. Or it could be that you know a lot of what you need to do, but you’re not doing it consistently.

Our work with our clients is designed to address both of those things. What to do and how to do it is one part of it, and then actually getting it done is the critical part. Because that determines what’s working for you and what’s not.

Jay: Such a great service that you provide, David. As always, it’s a pleasure.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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

Investing in yourself isn’t always easy. It is a matter of finding the time to make these investments in ourselves and to say, “okay, if I can’t go to a cabin for a week, what can I do? When can I do this?”

David: Hi, and welcome back. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarlane and I will be discussing investing in yourself. Welcome back, Jay.

Jay: Hey David. It’s so good to be here. I feel like lately we’ve been going after things that I really struggle with. We talked about controlling your internal monologue. Now we’re talking about investing in yourself.

It’s really easy for me to invest in other people. That is very easy. But taking time to invest in myself… when I need something, I will go and find it and I’ll learn how to do it. But being proactive about it. I’m reactive, just about in every way.

David: Interesting. So when you think in terms of investing in yourself, you mean investing what? Time, money?

Jay: All of it. you know, investing in myself when it comes to just taking time to learn new things, or I think investing in yourself can be just reading on a regular basis, or instead of watching social media, be listening to productive podcasts, or, taking a walk, those kind of things.

We talked in the last podcast, controlling your internal monologue. Those are all things that require proactivity and honestly, I don’t know if it’s pride or stubbornness or whatever else. I’m like, oh, I’m good. You know, I’m good.

David: That’s interesting because we are actually on completely opposite ends of the spectrum on this one normally we’re agreeing with each other not that we’re disagreeing here, but I am at totally the other end of the spectrum.

I’m constantly reading stuff. I’m constantly investing in programs and audios and videos and courses. I can’t tell you, and I’d be embarrassed if I could tell you, how much I spend on that type of thing. Just because, I don’t know if that is like a FOMO element of mine, where I’m afraid I’m going to miss something, but I’m conscious of it to the point where I recognize that you don’t want to invest in everything, right?

There’s looking at investments that are designed to help you with right where you are now. If you need help getting over a particular challenge, that’s where I find the investments most worthwhile.

And then there are investments that sort of just in case learning. I’m learning this skill just in case. I’m going to learn how to do whatever, something related to social media that may or may not help. Or that sounds like the catchy thing of the day.

Because when you’re online, you will hear all kinds of people talking about all kinds of different things that are the solution to your problem.

And one person is going to tell you that it’s Instagram. And another person is going to tell you that it’s Facebook ads. And somebody else is going to tell you that it’s organic. And somebody else is going to tell you that it’s something completely different than those things.

Everybody’s got a solution. And it reminds me of the old adage that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?

So depending on who you’re listening to, who you’re paying attention to, you may end up investing in things that are not actually designed to get you from where you are now to where you want to be.

Jay: Yeah. And I guess I have to clarify a little bit of what I’ve said. If it’s something I need or want, I’m a dog with a bone. For me it’s the difference of, do I learn how to do exactly what I want, or do I go to college and learn all of these broad subject matters, and then focus.

I think both are important, and I’m never the broad subject matter guy, right? I mean, Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve learned how to make video games and released over 100 apps. I got into talk radio. I started several businesses. I have training courses. So, I certainly invest in myself, but unlike you, you’re kind of like, this is the world that you live in.

I only do it on very specific things and I only do it when I feel like this is something that will help me or my business or my family immediately.

David: Yeah, well, I think that’s a great way to approach it, because otherwise you can go down a lot of different rabbit holes, and you can end up following other people’s priorities, as we talked about in a previous podcast.

So, when I think about the idea of investing, it’s What are we investing? Is it our time? And in a lot of cases, it’s definitely going to involve time. Is it money? And in some cases it can involve money and it can involve quite a bit of money depending on what you’re investing in.

I know I’ve done online courses that have cost a lot of money and some of them have been really worth it, and some of them have been kind of worth it, and some of them… they just weren’t worth it for me at all.

It doesn’t mean the product was bad It may just mean that it wasn’t suited to my personality or whatever.

But I think as business owners or as salespeople, we consistently have to take the time, take the energy, take the money in some cases and invest in ourselves to be able to say, if I’m at a particular point and I need to get to a different point, a higher point, a better point, I want to be able to provide more and better for my family, as you mentioned, then what’s it going to take to get there?

Because in a lot of cases, what we know now has gotten us to the point where we are. So if we want to get further, we can either just try to keep doing more of what we already know, pedal faster, essentially, pedal the bike faster to get farther, or we can say, “well, what can I do to shift gears?”

And a lot of times that involves looking at the things that we don’t know and correcting that and saying, “well, if I fix this one problem, then I’m going to be able to go a lot farther and a lot faster.”

Jay: Yeah, so often, when we do these podcasts, we end up with self awareness as being such an important element here, right?

If you are going to invest in yourself, well, are you aware enough internally to know what you need, right? Where you stand? And you kind of mentioned this, I think what happens is, every once in a while I’ll get on this thread of self improvement or things like that, and I want somebody else to tell me what I need.

And I want them to just give me the secret sauce, right? And so that’s what I’m looking for. It’s like a get rich program, but for self improvement or for task management or goal setting, right? I want the quick and easy. And I think so often investing in yourself is not quick, nor is it easy.

David: Right. Particularly if you end up investing in the wrong things. And I think, to some extent, It’s really important to identify the areas where we’re stuck. To say, “okay, this is the specific problem that I’m trying to overcome.”

So with our clients, we work with primarily business owners and sales people who are at a certain level of sales and profitability in their business, and they’re looking to get to another level.

And they recognize that there are things that they are not doing, and they’re not quite sure what those things are. And so when we have conversations with people like that, and we’re able to identify those areas and say, “okay, is that something we can help you with?”

And if it is, we’ll tell them that. And if it’s something we can’t help with, we’ll tell them that as well. When we do that, It’s better for everyone. Because at that point, they either have a solution or they have to keep searching for a different solution. And we’re totally fine with either of those things.

We’re not looking to try to be the end all solution to everything. But because there are so many options, it’s important to be able to have conversations to find out exactly where the people are stuck so that we can determine If or how we can help them.

And that goes for myself, that goes for anybody who is offering you any sort of investment in yourself. You want to make sure that it lines up, not with what they want you to do, but with what you want to do, with what your objectives are, what your outcomes are.

And a lot of times in the conversations that I’ve had with people, I’ll ] talk to people who will say, well, I don’t like doing cold calls. And there are some programs where it’s like, well, you have to do cold calls.

And it’s like, well, that’s not going to be helpful to me if I don’t like doing cold calls, right? Or social media. ” I hate doing social media.”

Well, if you hate doing social media, you definitely don’t want to sign up for a course that requires you to do social media. And so in our work with our clients, one of the things that we’ve looked at is to say, “okay, let’s look at what you actually enjoy doing, what you’re naturally great at doing.”

And can we create a curriculum for you that is based around your strengths and your areas of interest, so that you’ll be a lot more inclined to do it?

In an earlier conversation, I’m not sure if it was this podcast or I think it was the previous podcast, you were talking about sort of the difference between school learning and business learning, right?

And in school, we’re forced to take subjects that might not resonate with us. Whereas once we get out, and once we get to call our own shots, we can focus on the activities and the skills that we want to develop, to get us to our next desired benchmarks and our next goals.

Jay: Yeah, I think it’s so important what you talked about, and that is, if you are going to use somebody to help, If they don’t take the time to get to know you and where you’re at and your strengths and your weaknesses, then, I’m not saying it’s not going to be helpful because I think anything that causes you to reflect and look at your own systems and kind of do an inventory, I think there is value to those things.

But I think we also fall into the trap of looking at somebody who’s successful and assuming we can do exactly what they do the way that they do it.

Like, I looked at Elon Musk and Bill Gates, and I look at the schedule they run, and how Bill Gates, once a year, locks himself in his cabin away from his family, with just all of his books, and he just reads and reads and reads and reads, and I’m like, I need to tell my wife I’m going up in the mountains for a week, and I’m gonna do this thing, right?

They’ve found ways to make it work for them and to invest in themselves. if you’re living by comparison and not really finding out about yourself, that’s a difficult road.

David: It is absolutely difficult. Yeah. And not everybody’s going to be able to do that. Not everybody can afford to take a week or two weeks or a month by themselves or even have a cabin. Right?

So, there are all those elements. I know for myself, what I find helpful is I’m able to take in a lot of information while I’m on the treadmill in the morning. I’ve got a Sony speaker and I just crank it up so that I can hear it over the noise of the treadmill and so I can take in information while I’m exercising.

So that’s kind of a twofer. And I’ve got a little digital recorder so that when I hear something that I need to remember, I’ll record it.

So I’ve got endless recordings of myself panting and recording messages to myself about things that need to take place. But it is a matter of finding the time to make these investments in ourselves and to say, “okay, if I can’t go to a cabin for a week, what can I do? When can I do this??

For me, again, early morning is great because it’s a quiet time. I’m able to focus on it. And it also gets my brain in gear for the day.

I’m not thinking about other stuff. Like if I watch TV? I don’t. I haven’t done that in years. But if I were to watch TV at the beginning of the day, it doesn’t matter what it is. If it’s entertainment, then that’s in my brain. If it’s news, that’s the worst, right? Definitely never want to do that at the beginning of the day.

So I find that when I’m listening to something that’s helpful to the business, in the morning, it allows me to get myself into gear a lot more quickly.

Jay: Yeah, I love it. Great discussion, David. How do people find out more?

David: You can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team, or just check out the video on that page and see if what we’re talking about makes sense for you. If it does, schedule a call. We’d be happy to have the conversation. If not, that’s fine too. We have lots of resources available on our website. Feel free to have at it.

Jay: All right, David. Always a pleasure.

David: Thank you, Jay.

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