good morning to all our members and thank you for joining us again for another webinar in our accelerator 90 series which focuses on um sales development and sales skills but particularly in the virtual world that we find ourselves in and today our focus is on getting sales meetings and appointments in a virtual world and we're delighted to have H Robert mckern and Ireland's foremost sales uh trainer with us again and the previous sessions that Robert did have been off the scale in terms of high scores so we're looking forward uh to more great Rich insights from Robert today so all that's left for me to do is say h good morning Robert and over to you thanks Dave uh just going to check before we get kicked off folks you can see that screen okay um and Dave thanks for the introduction I always like your introductions it make me feel really really good I have to say h so folks we're going to make this a really interactive session here today um and hopefully get as much out of your accelerator serious H thanks to DAR who's producing in the background here and to Dave again is an interactive so we're going have a really interactive session there's eight polls uh you can really help me out by getting involved and I have a chat box open on my screen so if you want to ask any questions and if you want to push back in any of the material or anything I'm saying to you it makes my job much more interesting let me tell you so you've got a hands off and and go for it as well um couple of things as we go through the slides uh this is our agenda for today we're going to look at how we reactivate this sales engine and I'm going to share with you some data about lack of Engagement we're seeing right across sales teams not just in Ireland but right across the world uh how you manage those crappy emotions about having to sit down and make outbound engagements killer customers we got talk about a thing called Cad and selling today uh and I've got stuff team leaders um that you can take away and use with your sales teams in meetings tomorrow or this afternoon and then if you don't do any of the things I've suggested I've got a plan B for you to take away from recession today you'll notice on the bottom right hand side of this slide that you have a little symbol saying handouts and those handouts will be sent to you after the session so you'll get two uh PDFs sent out to you post the session so let's get kicked off and I suppose the best way to do that is get you guys involved in in the process and let's do our first poll so Dera is going to bring that in and pop it up on the screen and I like just try and get 80 90% of people involved here today uh feeding back into the poll so the poll is very simple how much time in 2019 from March to November did you spend as an individual reaching out to people just click on one of the numbers folks so I'm going to give you about 10 15 seconds left so der you might just close off that poll and share the results with us I can't see the polls you're going to have to read out the numbers so Robert uh up to 5% is 8% up to 10% is 15% up to 15% is 15% up to 25% is 133% and 25 plus is 50% so we got some real pros on the line and der how many people involved uh what percentage of the participants 80% voters great okay so folks that's our first poll let's just get get into our second poll looks like the same thing but it's what did you do this year for March to November in 2020 and again love to get you inut into this to see if there's been any Dynamic change in the numbers so again really do app appreciate your participation in this there's some really interesting polls today folks and of course we're to share all that data with you as we go through our session so I'm going to give you another 10 seconds and then we're going to close off the poll as you can see this is interactive today it's going to be moving we as sales people are not used to sitting down doing nothing so Dar I'm going to ask you to close off the poll in five four three two one and if you can share those data and results with the teams and you can shout out the numbers to me please okay so up to 5% is at 99% up to 10% is 14% up to 15% is 9% and up to 25% is 28% and 25% plus is at 40% wow so you guys are absolutely Ely going against the trend so what I like to do is share you some data so we've seen a big jump of 15% of people doing more outbound our engagement um and it's interesting to see when we go through our process today which I'm recommending you use in your own businesses what are the things that maybe you can take away from a session because this is all about giving you value for money here today so what's happening in the world uh and there's a shocking reality for some people out there and maybe some of those numbers I'd like to maybe challenge it back as well so what we've seen here is that call connect rates are down about 20% on last year so this is data that I've collected from a number of my client base which is quite extensive across lots of different industry sectors we found that the email level of engagement is down by 35% and we found that the total number of face-to-face meetings has dropped off a cliff down to about 90% so big numbers big changes and obviously from a sales perspective we're used to this whole thing of engaging through face to face and body and it's a big challenge for some people to flip into this virtual but what's really happening around is we're seeing this dramatic stop in engagement and my message to you here today is that no one has ever answered a phone that did not ring so this whole thing of not reaching out to customer customers it's kind of like a disease in some sales teams at the moment where ultimately at the end of the day if there's no outbound engagement there ain't going to be no business coming in and again we'll talk to you about a little bit detail around that and again if anybody's any questions in chat my chat box is open here please push back at any of the materials or anything you want to have a chat about couple things I'd also like to share with your with sales engagement Trends across the world is a lot of professionals who are still doing face-to-face meetings are seeing less impact in the value of that meeting so to 30% 38% of people are saying less impact in certain sectors like the It sector getting meetings is not as challenging the difficulty is the quality of the meeting so people are jumping in on the call uh disrupting the meeting and challenging the meeting which I covered off on our last session on running virtual meetings but I wanted do suggest is that you have a protocol around that meeting what's the agenda who's attending and why couple of other things uh onsite sales meetings the TR is obviously downward but inside and outside sales that activity is now merged and a lot of companies have struggled for many years around inside and outside sales and who looks after Pacific accounts that in some Accounts at the moment is a complete utter disaster uh because inside sales are nearly covering is much volume if not bigger deals than people who are outside because the outside sales people are struggling to this virtual environment buyers and sellers are adopting digital tools so sellers are adopting Tools around research where they're getting data across a whole range of areas in mind it's feeding into the salesperson to give them insights into potential customers simple things like who's visited your website what pages have they landed on all of that information has been fed into the really good salespeople operating in Ireland and then they're targeting their campaigns around that remote selling model the investment has increased dramatically H lots of sales managers looking at the numbers one client of mine has driven 1.2 million in absolutely overhead costs because they're not simply traveling anymore across the continent and ironically their business is held up sales motion is no longer this onetime Spike it's just an ongoing perpetual motion it's a continuous engagement in the virtual world with customers so it's not one big drive it's an ongoing and I'm going to talk about this thing called Cad and selling a little bit later on this morning and buyers don't care about your inside and outside Sal structures and never ever ever folks has it been more important for you to understand how your customers buy I'm doing a session on Friday morning mapping out the purchasing process of one particular client so we readapting how they sell based on how the customer buys and it's really important to reach out to customers and see what they're doing differently to engage your suppliers it's also become really really clear that inside salespeople are actually closing bigger deals and I'd like to share a couple of stories around what's happened again across my customer base I've w client who's in the food industry and they bought a packaging machine for €15,000 purely purchased it across by watching videos now in the past they would have made six or seven visits to the plant to look at everything else to check with customers and all of those things so it's really really interesting what's happening in the world of purchasing I have another customer who bought a building in Bulgaria for 650,000 without visiting the site obviously as an agent but that's a big purchase um I've worked with sap for over seven years where you virtual account teams doing million euro deals where the accounts have't met each other people on the account team and they hav met the customers face to face trade shows that lots of people in retail would have been visiting over the last couple of months are now being done by video and Lou Copeland one of our best retailers here in Ireland his sales team are actually doing virtual tours of their stores and the products using video uh using all sorts of tools to engage your customers and then delivering the product out to the homes so things are changing out there but the key message here is that customers are more comfortable ordering bigger numbers off you as sales teams out in the marketplace that's something to take away from our session finally the old thing of flying driving training down to customers and walking The boardrooms Walking The Halls and meeting people and going for lunch and dinner that in the short term and foreseeable future is dead and gone so if you're still struggling with this virtual flip you you need to reach out and have a really robust plan in place for January 1st around how you're going to do that engagement and hopefully some of the slides you're going to see later on uh we'll give you some guidance on how to do that so let's kick into a poll here and again great to have 80 90% to people do you know exactly what your run rate is and if you have no idea what a run rate is just click I have no idea what it is if you have a yes or no cool so let's give you about 10 seconds to do that so do you know what you're run rate is going to give you another 10 seconds 9 8 7 6 five 4 3 2 one so just close off the pole der if you can please okay so yes have said 27% no is 22% and I have no idea is 51% and tell me how many people participated we had 80% again fantastic you know what I love about dealing with salesp people all over the world is the honesty and what I love about this team here today working with this session is if You' have no idea what it is just say I have no idea what it is H for those who are in the yes category uh they live and die by their run rate so let me show you what the Run rate is um so it's about the amount of engagements of emails out phone calls LinkedIn or in in the the previous life the number of face to-face calls it's a combination of all those things so if you're making 250 engag engagements out and you get x amount of appointments that leads to number of proposals and that leads to converted business so what it's saying if that converted business is generating €10,000 Euros for you and your target is 100,000 you need to multiply all those areas above by 10 if you're managing a team or self-managing yourself and you don't have visibility in your own rate then you're not going to be driven on and motivated to go and make that extra call to send that extra email H to make that level of Engagement it's a really important number so my run rate is 1098 so 10 appointments nine proposals and eight pieces of conversion so basically every 10 customers I get either between 80 and 90% of that business that has taken me 20 years training two and a half to 3,000 salespeople a year to get to those kind of numbers and I had a really interesting conversation with an IT company this week uh where they basically sell security for Banking and the CEO was saying he's having a great year they've had a 100 meetings but it's interesting I asked him what his conversion rate or what his run rate was and ultimately fell down to two customers have bought out of the 100 meetings if you a run rate like this to 50 uh write down into those numbers there 40 uh appointments uh five proposals and one converted business there's a lot of things that aren't working well in your business and there's a lot of things you need as a team to maybe look back and revert and review so the starting one is just get your R rate before you do anything and try and measure it okay and again folks today I'm going to be challenging you back with different thoughts and Concepts if you want to get on in chat and ask me questions please feel free to do it know don't forget you got 211 selling days here folks I'm taking 90 minutes of one of those selling days so you're absolutely entitled to ask questions here and push back so what are the actions you should be taking post this session and again this is going to be sent to you post the session so what are your actions out of what we've talked about here so this is about reactivating your sales engine okay know your run rate know the level of activity that you have to be involved in to drive your business decide on the time you're going to allocate for generating meetings give your team time to block book out time to engage with customers B your slots for the next two quarters the worst thing you can do with a sales team if you're managing a team is do it in a day that it doesn't happen the next week or the next week so put a plan in for the next two quarters Tuesdays and Thursdays are the best Reach Out times and all the research about outbound stuff like prospecting you lose about 15% of your customers every year so everyone sitting on this line here today they lose about 15% of their customers those customers need to be replaced so they die they move off they change role and they're into a different business and that relationship you had and that company is now gone okay so that number should be at the back of your head as we go through this session here today nobody ever answered a phone that did not ring so what is your plan yeah this thing about never do outbound calls is nonsense that's a mindset folks uh the best sales guys idea was they have a really strong pipeline going into 2021 and they are not afraid to get on the phone and finally you're heading for a massive sales slump if you're not doing outbound activity and I'm going to share person story from 2010 I was off with my family I was in Spain and two days before I quickly looked at my DIY and realized from the middle of August to the 31st of December in 2010 I had not a two days training booked in for clients uh so it's a shocker and we've all been there and really is interesting we know it's going to be a shocker we don't get out and make calls and engage and get meetings yet we still fall back into that habit so that sign is going to be sent on to you it can be a part of your action plan for 2021 so let's move on here folks and I just need to get a little bit of feedback if someone could just send me in chat H just a quick pace is okay Robert speed it up slow it down so just one or two comments back there so I'm kind of getting a handle that we're okay with the session so far so don't be afraid to to put a note in chat there if you can so let's keep moving on so we're going to call talk about good Pace thanks for that pace is perfect really appreciate the feedback folks thanks Killian thanks Adam and thanks Brian appreciate that sometimes it's funny uh facilitating like this because you can't see faces and things like that okay um we're going to talk about managing your crappy emotions and I suppose the best way to to to have a look at this is get you guys to do a poll so again if you absolutely love doing outbound stuff if you hate it if it's a needs must or You' rather take weed killer in my coffee or tea H let's hear your view of the world about outbound stuff so going to give you 15 seconds to fill this one in give another 5 Seconds 4 3 2 one okay let's have a look at the poll results okay Robert so 22% said I absolutely love it five ftic 5% said I hate it 72% said needs must um and 2% say rather than weed killer in my coffee and tea rather take weed killer on my coffee and tea okay hey it's nice to have a little bit of fun and um 90% vote at that time great yeah I think we all have strong opinions on us the B is are kind of a funny thing folks and I'm not a psychologist I don't feel like sometimes I am at this stage of my career um but what we got to understand with the mind is how does it work and how does that come across in a call on the phone or an engagement with customers and this is a really important thing to get your head around and and that obviously for your a team as well so what we're trying to do here folks is understand that there's a lot of emotions going on we know the customers buy would logic F sorry emotion first and then move to logic we know that and we know that from all the research that's out there but it's interesting if you were to put this up here in front of your sales team at a sales meeting uh you can just Google this you can download the slides what do they go through and it would be a really interesting interactive thing to do at a sales meeting so just something completely different it'll throw your team and get them to talk about those things that happen in the mind prior to an outbound uh engagement great to see we TR two 2% of people love it and that is a fantastic mindset to get and I'd love to see what's the correlation between the 22% and your results so when we talk about the mind and I'm not going to get a huge amount of detail in this because I have a recommendation around it we have this brain on the left here but in the middle of this brain is a little thing called the lyic and basically you've got Logic on the left and you got the lyic on the right this guy is five times more powerful than the logic in other words your IR rational thoughts um and all the things that goes on is five times more powerful than the logic and this is why people struggle with outbound calls their logic says I have to do it because if I don't get appointments I don't get meetings I don't get the business but this little guy in here is screaming things like rejection um you know why do you want to do that leave it next week you have lots of time you you balance and and he this little fell in the middle or this little girl in the middle depending if you're male or female they call it the little inner boy or the little inner girl this guy screaming you to basically not do because you get rejection those 22% of people who said I love it they're managing to manage this now you notice I don't use the word control so this little limit guy is all about managing him or her it's not about controlling it and what I recommend you do here is buy this book on the right hand side called your inner chimp H and it's about mind management and it's a really super cool book to talk about it and even buy one as a small Christmas present for yourself sales team I think they're about six or seven EUR on Amazon and by the way if you've got irrational people in your family it's a wonderful gift to take away and some really funny lines in it so what other actions post our second part of the session about managing your crappy emotions make a plan numbers dates where medium and measure it so break this down into small pieces right I used to have a fantastic sales director a guy called n kinsa and I worked with n for 10 years in Mars and when he would come to talk about our budget for 2021 in this case he break down into little 10 or 12 little things of things we going to do and at the end he say what's our growth Target and we always over hit what the number he was looking for so make a plan document it put it on a one pager if you get onto my website today you can download a onepage sales strategy document absolutely for free your entire sales strategy can fit in this one pager um don't try to beat your emotions manag them we've talked about that and when you read that book the chin paradox uh you read all about that don't assume interrupting somebody's bad thing you just don't know what your buyers are doing at the moment what challenges they are and what they might need your services for but if your mindset is I'm interrupting somebody you have to interrupt you have to disrupt the top 20 companies in the world about 90% of them weren't even here 20 years ago that's about interrupting it's about disruption and that's what we're doing outbound trying to get meetings with people more activity is more rejection so get over it folks people are going to say no to you my daughter just started a new sales role on Tuesday and up to that she started looking for a job in September and every day she got at least 12 to 13 rejection letters we used to have a little sort of scroll about how good things were bad things based on the rejection letters it is about tenacity it is about grit it is about keeping down but the more rejections you get eventually someone's going to say yes you lose 15% of your customers every year I've talked about this these guys need to be be replaced and if you're not doing the outbound stuff you're not going to get meetings and you won't be able to replace them it's never about what you've sold in the past it's about what you sold today what you sell tomorrow and next month you cannot live on that history uh that's gone H interesting one of my clients is in November 1st and they had a cracking year this year um and they until the first of November everything's gone they don't even talk about it last year they've just moved on iO calls lead to business and it's really how bad do you want it so how bad do you want to have a full pipeline for next year if you've done no outbound calls for the last three months and you start today depending your industry sector whether you're long cycle a short cycle it's going to take you two to three months to start getting that Pipeline and and business physically being build out with PE numbers and taking checks so every day you leave it you're moving that back out into the near possibly quarter two at this stage and finally when you get into this process and when it's time to go home just make one last call just keep at it keep at that tenacity level keep going yeah so that's our piece we've talked about activating your sales engine KN that run rate managing those emotions that little small piece and now I want to get onto an area which I just find completely fascinating which is focusing on killer customers okay so Pia do you have an ideal profile uh for your customer have you an ideal profile uh for your perfect customer so just give me yes and no have you gone in and looked at who's the sweet spot for us in our business who's the people if we get engaged with them there's a good chance we close that business so give me a yes or no have you got a perfect customer profile so let's give you another 10 seconds we close off the poll give you another five seconds great so you might just issue that hold overly if you can please H so 82% have said yes and 18% have said no fantastic so now I'm going to challenge everybody back of those 82% um I'm going to challenge it back so I reckon every year we as an industry raised literally hundreds of millions chasing the wrong customers um and in my own personal experience as a state director for 20 years but prior to that even with customers I I I run so really when we look at the perfect profile customer really what level are they the right person so we call this the ICP okay so my next question before we get into some material around this is have you a plan around engagement levels and account investment for these potential new customers in this perfect Sweet Spot have you a plan broken down into the different customer types how much time your sales team is going to spend with them or use an individual is going to spend with them and have you got a budget around this so let's get a yes and no answer out here folks give you another 10 seconds right do you want to issue that Poll for me yeah h two seconds there's just one or two more people so voting there we go so yes is 30% and no is 70% okay so great and thanks for the feedback on that folks I'm going to give you some suggestions and ideas to take away from today's session so those people in the previous poll who talked about uh yes I have the ideal customer profile uh a couple of things happen when I do some consultancy work with clients is one is yes we we put that together when did you put it together three years ago um it's something that you need to review on a quarterly basis with your sales team because if you get it right folks you're cutting down dramatically and you're driving that run rate up so I give you an example at one run rate we had a run rate of 7% with one client and we now have it up to 42% just think of the mats on that uh the less work the sales team is doing the more efficient they are so you're creating your your ideal customer profile the first step for you if you're not in this case or you want to review it if you currently have it what's the perfect company size you know what industry sector are they in what Revenue are they doing what key challenges are facing them in their industry that you can help them what technology are they using what kind of growth are they getting so what does that mean so an IT company I work for and anything where they have 2,000 employees above they don't engage because they can't add value so when a an R ofp comes in for that level of business they just don't reply to it they don't get involved okay I have another client who is focused on one sector so they were going for the big large companies so they got the top uh 300 uh companies and they printed them all out and they did diagrams of all the people involved did a fantastic piece of work but when we analyzed it 80% of the business was coming from the next tier down so step one for me is what's the perfect company size for you if you're a small indigenous arage business you know but you get into the likes of Google or whoever you want to get into it's a long cycle cycle selling is there people that you can get in quicker faster more efficient and and and and offer them a better service okay and the key thing for me there at the end is the growth what's the growth sectors so if you're in a sector you know God forbid anybody in the hotel business my heart goes out to them it is a difficult place to be is that where you want to put all your focus in so Step One is rank your targeted base around the following criteria so tier three accounts fit the basic characteristics of your ICP which is the ideal customer profile and about 70% of your current accounts and potential your account should fit under this grouping okay they get standard service standard messaging okay in my experience having worked with field teams every time I've looked at this here and the call frequency of the three- tier accounts I've made them about 28% more efficient i' one sales guy years ago had 158 accounts we closed 58 accounts sales guy went absolutely ballistic and then I said to him what percentage of your business goes through that 58 accounts it was less than 67% not even 1% and as business screw dramatically because he put more time into the bigger accounts okay so what's really really important is when we look at the accounts we're not just looking at their potential but we look at their p&l and I've yet to really come across a really really Top Class efficient sales process or sales companies maybe two three over the years with a full p&l properly allocated costs to their account if you did a really extensive p&l piece of work in your existing accounts you would be horrified some of them they're absolutely physically losing money tier two accounts um are all of those you know they get a little bit more priority they should be 25% of your accounts and they get specialized personal based messaging so some companies are putting tier three accounts onto customer service teams or they're just doing onto an online offering tier two accounts they're beginning to get a call whether it be quarterly uh potentially montable tier one accounts these are about 5% of your customers and this is where the big resources are going okay and it's interesting if you measure your sales team so if you're a sales director sitting on the call here today or even yourself it doesn't have to be a sales director what exactly amount of time are we spending with these accounts and if you were to analyze it the big trap here for salespeople and we all fall into it we have a customer who's a tier one customer but we've had a fight with them we've had a bad engagement with them they've left us feeling really raw and we avoid engaging with them and as a sales director I found over the years these are the guys I had to find in certain territories to get our sales teams to re-engage and there extraordinary many times people have just pulled away so that's your your tearing of your accounts H and again if you have any questions on this please feel free to push back on us or or ask any questions whatever you want there's no problem the next piece on this is the multi level multifunction relationship and this is a really important concept to get away and for those who are senior enough uh to obviously talk to your sales director if you're here or your CEO and this is basically the two both the supplier and the customer coming together and I find this completely fascinating so let's talk about the customer the CEO so there's a very large business in Ireland that currently purchases just below two billion euros of a product a year okay and I had the pleasure of meeting the buying director a number of years ago every Monday because I was putting a national account manager program together but I met him every Monday and one of the questions I asked him was how many of your customers would you considered top top customers he said we a top 30 tier but then we've really if you look at 90% of our business there 350 customers in and it's interesting in those 350 customers I asked him how many have reached out to you and talked to you he said less than 5% so you'll be amazed with your top customers how little interaction people have with the CEO why is that well it's quite simple if you go to the left hand side your CEO might necessarily want to meet him because wary does what to say to him what are they going to talk about H what are they going to bring to the party is this going going to ask me for trading terms is he going to ask me to do something that we can't afford to do and that policy is don't get involved you know just keep Qui keep under under the radar however I asked the CEO of this particular customer those who engage with him which is less than 5% how the business grow he says exponentially it grew through the roof and what we're finding here is CEOs who don't engage at this level with the counterart and your financial people and your head of marketing and your head of risk insecurity or whatever your business is the relationship is very weak and the last time one CEO wants to talk to the other CEO is when there's a problem so the multi-level multifunctional relationship is your CEO engaging now you might have sales people sitting on the line said I wouldn't send my CEO to a dog party let alone meet one of my customers the difficulty with that is if you need their support and help and they haven't met the customer then you're in trouble I want to share a quick little story before we move on with a guy I was working with in the UK building industry really really good guy an Irish guy and my first questions when I was doing some coaching with them is you're top 10 customers can you phone them today have you had a beer with them have you had a meal with them have you been engaged with them and all 10 customers said no now eight months later he' managed to meet all 10 of them and get them to matches and engage with them and without a shadow of a doubt he said it was the single most important thing from a career perspective he move from an operations role in the business into this CEO role and finally the last story in this was the master stroke of Master strokes and this was a guy who worked in the food industry that I touched off many many years ago and he was coming in as country manager into Ireland and we used to call these guys pigeons so they'd come in and they shittle over your business and they leave after two years but this pigeon was the smartest pigon I've ever come across because he did a piece of research around Aldi and little coming into the Irish Market at the time and what was really interesting he then phoned up the head of M Graves D's tesos and he said listen I'd like to come in and just give you this research it cost me 50 Grand to put it together and I'm going to give you to free but in his first week in the business he never came into the office he met his top six customers so if you have a piece of research conducted about Trends in your industry it's a great tool for your CEO to go in not to talk about your specific business but the strategy of the customer what's happening into the future anyway I could talk all day multi level multifunctional relationships I'm not going to do that I'm going to keep moving on so what's the actions for you as a team post that uh that that that part of our session so we're going to focus on killer customers create a profile and make sure your team are focused and understand that profile and get them involved in putting that profile together understand those customers how they buy what's critical to them at the moment where do they hang out who do they socialize what do they post on LinkedIn how do we communicate with them um you know you need to have a strategy that's concise and put together around that and find an investment plan for your Reach Out program so we're going to move resources from moving from smaller accounts into mider or large accounts what's that going to look like as the team goes into 2021 and also then what's the p&l on those customers you will be shocked with your largest customers uh when you actually do a proper p&l what comes out of the back of those results and I'm telling you guys you will drop of those accounts so moving on and we're going to get into this thing called Cadence selling and going to spend a little bit of time on this because it's really important we've talked all about what's happening in the market what's changed why we have to engage on our run rates we've talked about putting your IP down your perfect customer now we're going to get into the whole Binks of but how do we do all this Robert you know how do we how do we get these appointments how do we get this engagement because I'm pretty good once to get in front of somebody I tend to get the business but how do I get there so let's talk about this thing called Cadence sellings but let's do a little uh background check on this so we look at the traditional model of outbound engagement you had basically uh we got a data list database sometimes it was good sometimes it's not so good we started C calling we know ideal customer profiles we call the top 40 every day uh we no external insights of data feeding into us so there is software you can get which will data mine all the social media and start feeding your s Sal teams with information about what's happening in that sector we'd phone them every few days H we'd contact a customer an average of four times and the average email is about 362 characters and 30 seconds long was the message we left and then the rep believe they contacted the account about 15 times in sales meetings but when you actually looked at it an average 3.3 times and on the bottom right was the the Outreach tools that people used email phone or email and phone so I'm not sure if that sits with you and have you adap on from that and but I'd like to ask you a question do you know what Cadence selling is if you can just give me a yes or no so do you know what Cadence selling is for those cyclists on the uh session here today they'll know what Cadence is so what is Cadence selling folks so I'm going to give you 10 seconds so Dar we close off the poll number five 4 3 2 one so you want to share that data with us yeah so 177% said yes and 83% said no fantastic at least I know today I'm going to add value to 83% of our participants which is great news I love adding value okay so let's take you through what cadences and for those who have a Cadence program in place um you might say that's interesting I never thought of that hopefully you get something out we take you through some of the slides okay so H for those who cycle H Cadence is the amount of time your fee basically turn on a bike uh so it could be between 70 and 90 times per minute depending on speeds and all that I'm not a I'm a cyclist but I'm not a technical cyclist so what is Cad and selling so the first thing it is is you get your ideal buyer is identified or ICP ideal customer profile that's the first thing so if you're going to spend money engaging with customers H you'll often hear sales data back from the banks it takes us €350 to onboard a customer or it takes €450 to onboard customer anybody that like a mid-tier sales role a face-to-face meeting is costing you north of €900 Eur for that meeting folks yeah so if you're not going into the ideal customer if you say if I'm doing 200 meetings a day I'm not getting paid that money Robert but how you get that number is you divide the amount of sales calls by the running of the business so step one in Kaden selling is get that profile of the customer right uh get a range of immediate engagement tools employed so yes use email yes use voicemail but yes use video and there's a whole range of video tools out there that you can embed a video in an email you don't have to click download it just opens instantly or if you open the email the video just starts playing and it's a much more acceptable medium in today's world because we're all watching Tik Tok or we're watching YouTube or we're watching video clips on Facebook uh we're even watching video clips on LinkedIn so investigate that for your team please don't ask me to recommend anything because I'm not allowed to recommend a particular type um agree the number of contacts you know every time I do a seminar around or an engagement around many times you phone somebody most people put down between three to five times um and then they stop contacting so agree what those numbers of contacts are and agree the time Gap this is really important and then the durations of the Cadence so most companies look at this Cadence over a week or two weeks it's just not going to land the worst I've ever had was snap printing uh which was about 10 or 12 years ago and I'm I've made 38 phone calls to get in front of the GM and we talked about persistence with sales people who said well how do you measure that with an online tool us is simple but let me tell you that my engagement with you I've taken 38 calls to get this meeting H now I got a very nice piece of business of them but it was interesting his view was that I only made three calls so that Cadence level is really really important the content of each step is critical whether you get a script writer in to help you um you know how you put that together how that's delivered the wording is really really really important the next piece on the your Cadence piece is uh basically the content of each step and then the final piece then is test it and change it so this is something that's going to evolve over a period of time and if you think you're going to just put this together in an N you're absolutely live in Cuckoo Land This is about two and a half days work to get the right Cadence model in place folks okay and again if anybody wants to come on chat and say hey Robert it took us three or four days that's fine or we've got a great system it took a half a day equally fine love to hear you on chat if you have any sort of insights we can share with the team today so let's look at Cadence in a little bit more detail okay so step one of the Cadence is make sure you've got some process of research whether you Outsource this or something you give your team time to do so get a real understanding of where does your customer hang out is he a fanatic on Facebook is he a LinkedIn poster do you get on to LinkedIn and say hey that was a great post got a lot out of it is he on Instagram or she on Instagram what are they doing on Twitter and you'll very quickly start to see a pattern of what people are like and you might say Robert my customers never got into any of those mediums that's fine but they have a network of people in the industry that you're in they hang out with those people they play golf with those people they bounce off with those people and I remember years ago meeting a guy in Tesco arant and uh I had set up my own training company and I was meeting this uh uh this buyer in Tesco for consultancy pie for a piece of work I was doing and I met this guy in the reception area and it was really funny he had his color up like this I said you need to put your color down you got you get chewed in that meeting he gave me a a lead into his father's printing business where I ended up doing work for the print industry for about 10 years he then gave me a lead to a guy in the UK who was in the building industry which led on to lots of business there that one meeting folks yeah and all of his contacts he just kept recommending me has generated over € 380,000 in in in business over 10 year period so understand where your customers hang out get into that zone yeah reach out via LinkedIn so this is really important that you personalize your message my favorite story with this one was a fantastic company called storage systems they do racking and shelving and stuff like that and I mentioned to the sales guy uh I won't tell you what part of the country you better off doing something familiar that weekend he's reading an article uh from this guy who's expanded his business so he sent him an email through Linkedin he said great to see you're expanding your business you're taking on five new salese and customer service people and he had an expanded business he said you must need more shelving you got a phone call or text back saying yeah drop in to me Monday and it was a six and a half Grand order so make sure your message is personalized to that individual step three is repeat the step so Step One reach out reach out a second time don't listen people can just say yes or no to you step four is a short sweet email okay which takes the person 10 seconds to read don't be putting in stuff more than 10 seconds if your son or daughter who's eight years of age can read it Happy Days anything over that too much hit them with a follow-up email okay don't be afraid to reach out because you're beginning to kind of land it's at least nine points of contact before you start Landing the snap one I sh with you was an extreme one worth it in the end but it's about nine points of contact before people start to or you know make a warm call and and if you do got on leave a short message script it if you went to The Abbey Theater tonight and please God all of these theaters are open in the new year you don't see the guys stumbling the lines it always amazes me people getting on the phone calls and stumbling through stuff rehearse rehearse rehearse if you have a meeting before Christmas here with your sales teams why not put your Cadence together at the meeting H why not get the guys to to practice it uh and the lovely thing about phone calls now is you can actually get the technology can play back and listen to them there an article this is a great one so understanding where your customers coming from understanding their challenges and share some things you've seen from the market what's happening what's not happening send a video email so I'm I was amazed this week uh I was looking at um this uh lady from uh the retailer uh keny design and she came on and she was sitting in her armchair and she's quite a strong uh accent and I went back like that when I saw the video and then I said to myself actually fair play to her I said and I committed to myself that I'm going to get into one of her stores and buy something because she was clearly had done something that maybe is out of her comfort zone I don't know but she came across passionate and energetic so folks video is where this is going um if you've got a face like Dave Malone for for for free video that's great if you look like George Clooney like myself that's equally great if you're uncomfortable with those things and by the way the George Clooney is a joke um if you're un comtable video if you just practice it folks practice it get the right lighting I've got a light up here on the right if I turn it off you can see the room gets dark so get the lighting okay uh next bit up is nudge your prospect so again a little bit of contact but not too much leave another voicemail um and then basically here have your your your email ready to go and then follow up finally with one last call and that Cadence program folks is run over a period of 22 days you can extend it 30 days so does anybody want to ask a question in chat on this does anybody want to is it Robert this is too much for me this is too little I've got a cool idea can I add it into the group anybody want to ask anything here Robert just you know the questions are coming in through question field not the chat field okay so I'm just going to click on my question field you want to just shout out some of the questions because I'm struggling with this here you can see them there can you I can't actually because um whatever way it's scrolled up for me it's I can just see one line barely and I can't see see on the question field when you uh on the right hand side there's like a square with a little arrow ah yeah have it great okay cool have it here yeah okay so let me have a quick look at some of these questions um sorry there's a lot of questions here I've obviously missed all ground good pce that's okay and that's the top ones here okay so um so couple questions in here more of a statement I think it is thought the upbound sales communication may not have decreased the biggest challenge is invoking change from people who are working from home but reluctant to change really good point um and the reluctancy is potentially drive a lack of Team support so I get that um would be interesting to understood okay that's from Dave Fernie I'm not sure if I captured everything you want and now there's no other questions there guys I'm getting in anybody else Paces so far H okay good one here from Michelle K uh how much time should you between emails four and then the next email so that's your call but I would definitely leave a gap of four to five days okay so don't worry about reaching out folks um I've rarely had someone ever say to me just stop calling me uh I'm 30 odd years in this business um so what I would tend to do here is uh you'll get you'll get you'll get a system Michelle okay H when should you back off when you're told to back off and that should be your mindset Keith it's a great question and again as I said in my experience unless you're doing something really stupid this Cadence I put together here is is very soft touch stuff as opposed to hard cell um the worst I've seen years ago was a guy just arriving into an account with a skeleton and uh he rolled into the account with a skeleton he's sitting in the lobby so there was pandemonium in the account uh and eventually the buyer was told to get down by the MD to say go what's this guy up to and he flicks the the skeleton's mouth and the mouth opens and he takes the product out was a little small calculator he was trying to sell into this company um so that's the extreme uh he was told to get out but they give him a sympathy order here um after the first few contacts from Nikki H you should leave a bigger gap between contacts again Nikki this really depends on your confidence your industry sector but I wouldn't be leaving anything more than two to three days email maybe four days um you you you need to keep that intensity because the person you're dealing with could be getting 100 120 emails a day and the best way to think about it is what would get through to you Nikki what you know if someone's trying to sell you something what would land for you is the most important thing okay so have no more questions there I'm going to move on and I want to talk about something a little bit different here which is this whole thing of inbound Cadence over 21 days so the first Cadence was outbound however some of you guys have really slick websites and you've got people contact contacting you inbound and then you go to contact them and they don't come back to you okay so there's a couple of things going on here so the really good companies have what I call trap doors in their website so you click on I'm sure you've all done it I maybe have given you a name that didn't land for you before but trap doors when you say the top 10 tips for outbound calls the top 10 things from designing a kitchen or the top 10 things from picking a computer and you have to give your email address and they send you out this PDF with a file that's a trapdoor so inbound can be a contact like a phone call into the reception it can be an email directly in through some sort of uh tool on your website and then you reach out to the customer and there's no engagement so this is an outbound based on an inbound call and again I've laid it out around phone calls voicemail email and social media okay and breaking it up over 21 day process of what you're doing you see in day seven you have a combination of H phone call and email okay and day 21 at the end a couple of things in this Folks at the bottom 92% of sales people give it up after four NOS 80% of prospects say no four times before they say yes okay um the most important thing is if you're reaching out to customers they've contacted you if you get to day 21 and I got this email from Salesforce the other day can I have your permission to stop contacting you Robert I thought it was a really cool one I had a good laugh I've just curiously uh left and not responded because want to see what's going to happen next because I've been following that paper trail and it's interesting if you want to get a Cadence together uh just contact the it companies uh or IT solutions and you'll get Cadence coming out of your ears and maybe there's something you can learn from it uh and I don't want to waste it people sales time either um but a lot of this is automator and there is automation of this that you can get you can get involved in but before you automate your system you're better off having a robust system that you know that works it's interesting uh of clients I've had when I engag with them first had got an outsourced their sales engagement uh to Outsource companies and I said they can be very effective but you're asking them to design your outbound program the difficulty with that and even though they're hugely experienced and very professional people unless you've developed yourself you understand it and you know it it's not going to work is my experience with it and it's ironic where you go back to these companies and you put your Cadence program together and you know it works then they tend to deliver better for you so what are the actions post this part of our session here today folks you need to put about two and a half days aside to put the content in place to have a proper robust Cadence program that works you ain't going to do it any quicker than that folks unless you're one of the 20 OD per of people who have a Cadence program in place but really it's that amount of time you need to invest into it to get it right you need to manage tightly the respondents engagement okay in other words any data coming back in or any contact coming back in from the customer is absolutely critical that you respond back a ASAP like really really quickly um like you got to think about how you're measured you're not measured against your industry sector you're natur fact you're measured against people's other experience with customer service and dare I say Amazon I ordered a book two two weeks ago I got an email when I ordered it it arrived out here two laters and I have a screen just above this screen here which looks at my front door my daughter picked up the book and I got an email back to say your book has been delivered so think about your customer that piece of Engagement and responding okay change and adapt till you get it right it's not like the Ten Commandments it's not in stone folks this is a fluid thing it's going to change as you launch new products you go after different sectors you change your ideal customer profile it's going to change all of these things have to be adapted discuss sales resilience with your team and commitment to it so get that slide of the emotions and say guys I understand that your sales director your sales team leader that you're going to go through these emotions what are we doing as a team to overcome these because as it was pointed out in the question board there it is a challenge it is difficult here folks for people who to change behavior um it's really really really really really challenging so let's keep on going here um have par hours so I've heard some great stuff from companies over the years where basically what they're doing is they're uh just the whole company gets on a Cadence program the whole company spends a half a day from the managing director right down to people in dispatch it's really cool uh and there's great engagement it's fun and it's exciting um one MD he put 500 Euros in a kitty he says whoever gets the biggest order at the end of the the par R keeps the money and you had a bell every time got somebody got an order and the 500 EUR went for the next guy the next guy and it was just unbelievable and it reminds me of a drinks company a worker many many years ago when they launched this new beer we put them in a pit with a bell and we asked them to basically bring along their um list of customers and they found out they engaged with customer they ran fellas that hadn't talk to ever they sold pads of beer pads and pads of beer um and we had a 45 minute slot three hours later they still at it yeah we the targeted 2,000 cases to sell they sold 21 and a half thousand cases phenomenal so that part hour where everybody does the same thing it's great fun it's really engaging and then share pizzas with the team and if it's virtual you know get the pizzas to arrive up to your your sales team's doors and stuff like that it's really good fun and by the way fun sorry Robert alone here just before you move on you you you've caused some interaction there there's a number of questions about that little section I can either call them out here you can have a look whichever no I've uh I'm I'm going to get them here so bear with me folks here um so I've gone to Connor and your B2B slides and your contact is not the decision maker is still appropriate to reach out uh sorry if you're in B2B sales and your contact is not the decision maker is it still yeah absolutely Connor um you know when when we look at B2B sales decision makers uh we can break them down the different types of of decision makers there might be the person that's using what you're selling Conor that might be the person has the budget and it's not necessarily the fell that's using it h it might be the person who's responsible some other part of the business but will be affected by your solution so yeah you can reach out to anybody in a business with a Cadence program um and often you know you might have somebody stopping you in the team I call them the the toxic anti- salesperson you might need to move around them to get in to create some conversation hopefully Connor that answers your question I don't have anything else there Dave bar that question from Connor Trant well um so there's a couple of questions there about um how much time should you uh leave between email 4 and the next that already Dave okay and there's a follow up on that particular one as well um about backing off do you wa to be asked to back off or or when when is enough enough I think that's a judgment call Robert isn't it really yeah I think when the guy says please stop hassling me or annoying me you get an email like that fine but the thing about this is go folks in my experience with salespeople is that's always at the back of their head right and don't you physically told that back off I worked as I said for for Mars for 10 years and we had three Nos and on the third no then you backed off doesn't mean you didn't go back to the guy next month but you're backed off after three NOS you know now if you're in B2B you don't upset anybody you know some people are stressed for lots of different reasons at the moment so it's your call does no one can tell you what to do folks you're you're the account manager you run the account you manage the account so it's really your call but I just say to you about things like persistence and tenacity when I set up this training business in 2002 um I went to a black tie ball and there was 182 people at that black tie ball and I had a list of 70 guys combination of guys and girls I wanted to get into now I'm not joking here folks I had three kids to feed uh at bought a house in Malahide and a third of an acre I was out the doors with debt and I went into toilets right and I was standing before SI and urals now I'm not saying you do this folks uh but I put a card into a guy's pocket he said mccar I'm going to give you an order based on that I don't know what I'm going to buy off you but I'm going to give you money for some reason so they're extremes and when you're in a place where you're really hungry and this has just got to work you do things and sometimes they work sometimes they don't folks um but don't have a mindset that people are going to get upset you know I'd often stand up the at the start of a sales presentation I'd say at some stage I'm going to ask you guys for an order and everyone just burst out laughing it's a great line folks um and if anybody hates me then don't do business I'm not right for you right and sometimes that's a car crash uh so do something that you feel comfortable don't try to be somebody else be yourself understand your personality understand your style but folks never give up because there's business out there and if you look at the numbers folks there's nine billion in cash sitting in accounts and people want to spend that money and if you don't tell them that you're there to take the money or help them spend us they ain't G to phone you right so get out there make the calls Dave hope that answer that question it does and the last one then is a followup from Nikki um and I think I know the answer but I'm going to ask you anyway H in your opinion is there a particular time of the day that's better to reach out from an electronic basis yeah that's a super question Nikki so for me uh Tuesdays and Thursdays just after 10:00 if you're going to do a Reach Out program um I would often phone customers of mine at half 7 in the morning H and prior to lockdown I'd meet them at a coffee bar in the morning on their way to work so I know where their office is and I pick a spot near where they live and another great time to meet guys is a Thursday evening or a Friday evening on their way home particularly Friday around half three so they can say they can leave the office early to get to that meeting okay but from an electronic point of view you can send it out whenever you want the best time is going of Tuesdays and Thursdays but just think about your own specific sector there's some people in the retail food service business on the calls you know calling anybody in retail on a Monday is just a car crash it's just not going to happen uh but those two times seem to be the good Landing times uh for people as well as well but that's a great tip to take away around Adia fan a coffee and such and such a a cafe or such and such a hotel knowing where the individual lives um it's a really really great way I always 80% of guys always say yeah no problem at all look forward to catching up and and they'll meet you there so those guys you're doing work with good time to get them before the office kicks off you know I'm okay to give you buzz at half seven in the morning wa into the office yeah no problem at all should they stuck in the M50 I see the M50 got stuck the other day um so hopefully that answers your question Nikki and by the way I'm going to give you all my contact details at the end of the session folks if you're sitting back and I've been speaking too quickly or going through trick just get on the phone and call me and we can we can get your started out couple of things to wrap up question sorry Dave was that a question I was going to say thank you Robert that's the question's done thank you great sure so let's move on guys just a couple of stuff for team leaders now if you're not a team leader and your ambition is to be a team leader keep the slides folks because I'm going to send them on to you and if you're not a team leader have a look at these slides these are the questions you should be asking yourself on a daily basis not the first slide they're a little bit busy guys but don't worry about it so if I'm a team leader I should be helping my team nothing better to motivate a sales guide and saying I've got a great lead for you matter of fact I'm going to go out I'm not going to get involved in the call but I'm going to help you get this one across the line so how do you help buyers evaluate their priorities against you know your competitors make it simple for people to make a decision so if you're sending in your Cadence program out I mean if I go back and look at I bought Apple stuff I haven't got it running yet I have to wait for my it guide to come out but it was very simple for me to choose the different Apple piece I wanted because it's just simple to understand okay so team leaders that's your priority how do you show customers qualified results so saying something we do X Y or Z unless there's a business case around it that's simple to understand disaster you as the team leader need to get out you need to get on to conferences you need to speak to people at events you need to put yourself out there because that's the thing that's absolutely dying in the industry those coffee mornings when you're meeting colleagues you're hearing about Snippets and and bits of businesses but you need to do that now virtually so one thing I've done over the last 10 weeks is I've reached out to people I haven't talked to it could be 5 years six years you would not believe the response folks you're getting back it's it's phenomenal and business I'm not reaching out for business reasons it's just to say I was thinking about you and I'm reaching out to you and even folks to your families and your friends this Christmas I've spent hours putting together 60 Christmas cards with a letter in each Christmas card just to send it out the response is phenomenal so reach out um how do you percent your company as a thought leader you know what are you putting on to LinkedIn to say hey this is this is stuff that you should think about this stuff that's happening in our industry and sharing that data yeah here I am taking 90 minutes out on my day to give you guys as much value as possible it always comes back in some way yeah and if you have industry experts or associations get them to speak in your behalf Zeo health is a fantastic client to do work with they're always running these expert associations there's no hard selling it folks getting to talk about their Solutions uh other Solutions but not specifically mentioning their name so really really powerful company to to work with for team leaders managing appointments these are really cool questions that you can ask yourself so I'm going to give you a qu to let you read them for about 40 seconds okay so again folks uh if I'm sitting with you you're team leader or you're an individual I'm going to send you these copies they in your handouts just print them off folks ask those questions every single day and you will not go wrong on your outbound and I promise you you're going to see a big fat juicy pipeline uh in your business uh they're great questions I asked these questions myself on a weekly basis um it's really really interesting it's a great Habit to get into uh a habit takes 252 times to change it has taken me years uh to get involved with these questions but to ask myself these questions and then this last question again I'm going to give you about 30 seconds of quite just to read through them these are for new business uh questions and again folks again it's a handout you're going to get so again a great one um I've got these in inside sales teams they have these things laminated and they're stuck up in the wall and if you're a team leader today this is the questions you're going to ask your colleagues and your sales team not in an aggressive way but in a supportive way how can I help you get there how can I help you it's all about how can I help you how can I help you and in relation to this if those questions are going to be asked every time if you're a team leader asking these questions you're a sales team both the previous questions and the previous ones of yourself folks as well you just see the answers already prepared yeah they know they're going to be asked the questions they have the answers there and guess what happens to your your sales meetings the timelines collapse the meetings get much more more proficient so what are your actions post this session on this part is take the actions outlined above use them um and use the question sheets in all your sales meetings folks so I want to finish off on one last uh session which is called Plan B okay and uh so if you don't do any of the things I've talked about it's always nice to have a plan B okay and I particularly like Plan B because it's how I get all of my business to be honest with you so for those who are G fans sitting on the session here today uh if you remember back when we all used to get onto the pitch of our particular team one they had plan a and plan B so plan a is when they want people not to invade the pitch but if it got too rowdy or too dangerous they put these signs up saying Plan B to everybody and invade the pitch so what's Plan B if you don't want to do any of the things I've talked about today um because it's just not right for you or you just don't want to do it what's Plan B so plan B is I find just fascinating with companies all around the world and individuals so plan B I'm going to ask you a question our second last poll is do you have a written sales referral plan buly budgeters yeah yeah fully budgeters okay so what and and you get at least 50% of your business through that plan so it's 50% of your business currently coming through referrals at least so let's see what comes back in the numbers so this is our last poll folks so do you have a written sales plan which is fully budgeted that currently generates at least 50% of your new business meetings and we might share that poll results in about 10 seconds so would you like to share that poll with us Dar please yes so 19 people have said yes and 81% said no so 19% sorry great this is the second time hopefully I'm G to add value to you today um so since 2004 folks I have not uh had to make a phone call for business it's all the business been referal and repeat business and I'm going to show you what I do which makes that happen so I have a pipeline that has me absolutely lots of space at in more business but it's absolutely jamous for 2021 in the current environment okay and it's always been like that for many many years and it's a very simple process folks so the first thing is any customer says to me thanks Robert you did a great job really appreciate it I will always ask them for referral so if they say something to you like hey that was great really enjoy the session the feedback is fantastic I always say to the customer hey that's I really appreciate the feedback thank you very much and uh listen if there's anybody in your network you think could use um uh the services or could use something like this uh I really appreciate it referral so that's the first thing you do and it's not just you as the salesperson in the business you be doing that it should be your van driver your delivery people your customer service people it should be your board of directors anytime you get a compliment back you ask the referral question because what happens in the referral question is you're putting pressure back on for somebody who said you've done a great job well can you help me and it's really interesting people want to help you so when you get that referral couple of things happen next thing you do is if they give you one and it turns into business you send them a gift and this is this is why you need and no quival budget for your sales team okay so gifting is still alive and I know there people out here gdpr and gifting and we can't do this and whatever it could be a handwritten note to say thank you so much for that I very much appreciate it or you could do with the guy that I did last week he's getting a pair of Nike Runners size 12 uh and and the thing that got him apart from getting the free Nike Runners for a piece of business worth 20K passed on he said how did you get my sizes and how did you get how did you know that's the brand I really like so it's about giving something back to say and just acknowledging it most people are thank you I'm Amazed people who get referrals all the time they never acknowledge it my famous one is the guy I mentioned earlier on who gave me 350,000 jurs and I traced it all back and I met him in the Marian hotel when he lost his job about 10 years later and I met him in the Marian Hotel about I'd say about six years ago and we went down to Patrick e balls for lunch the lunch cost me €25 but he said to me Robert I really appreciate this lunch you're the only person that's reached out to me really and and and met me to see if I can help me or whatever uh you done it and I told him about the 365,000 the key thing in that situation folks is make sure you've signed for the bill before you tell them the number uh but it's a wonderful story and and and I had a lady in locks restaurant one night with her husband and she got 60 red roses when she left you might think excessive Robert but she gave me a refer that led up to 40 Grands just over 40 Grands with the business so I don't care if it's a small thing in the States this is huge folks so what they have is gifting company set up that links back into your Cadence programs so you send things out yeah snap printing where pass master bringing little small gifts out everything from Patagonia jackets right down depending it's your top three tier company so have a budget and a no squibble budget Mr sales director if you're on the phone give the sales guy the budget to do it however at this sales meeting every single month he is to say I've done the following for the following customers and this is the business I've got back make it a part of what you do ensure that everybody in the business is a part of this engagement has a budget gift okay um fergo Quinn got rest him was a great past Master with my mother he used to bring her to this so-called customer feedback session and get them a red rose that cost him coffee cakes and a red rose she must have spent three grand a year with the guy okay I'm not saying that he did it in a manipulative way he didn't because she used to love that experience okay a couple of things come up with referrals um to cover this off so people who refer you you have a much better chance of flipping that business and getting that business then coold going into an account okay and this is a real strategy for you and it's really drove into the team you're going to see you're going to see results much quicker matter of fact I have one sales company that pulled all their advertising pulled everything they've pulled LinkedIn they've pulled all the spans they're just going after referral and the sales team are going back in phoning customers saying how do we look after you in 2019 2020 fantastic is there anybody else you know in your circle of friends because everybody has a circle of friends fot everybody okay I one lady this year is going to refer me she's given me seven referrals at this stage of which five of converted into business all be small 1500 two grand here doesn't matter amazing so one thing that does happen is you get a referral from somebody and you contact an individual and they don't respond to you so a couple of thing goes on in the salesperson's head oh my God this is a pain in the ass they won't tell take my calls back and the big mistake that says people make is they go back to the person who's given them a referral you never ever do that the referral is your responsibility so my favorite line is if I phone someone three or four times like a very large advertising company I did work with years ago I reached out to the managing director and said dear and I won't mention the person's name and I've contacted you nine times H about referral from John you want us some work done and in the key line was would you like me to try and continue to contact you yes no anytime I've send that email over the years the response usually is really busy sincerely apologize can you phone me at half seven on Friday or 5 o'clock or they phone you back immediately no one has ever said to me stop contacting me so great takeaway from your referral business folks um and even this year who people who have referred you and you haven't gifted you can go back out H and had another guy that I had I shouldn't be really sharing this kind of stuff but I sent him a check for, the other day I have never never done that in my 18 years of business he's on a tough time he's had a really tough time uh this year and it's a small instead of giving my money I give to charity every year I've given it to this guy but I don't know what it is about life folks but that is going to come back uh to me I don't know how why but it always comes back and with that referral piece that you go out you're telling somebody that you think about them you care about them and you're acknowledging it so folks it wouldn't be remiss for me not on the referral business to ask you if you've enjoyed your session and people that you think could add value to it or sales meeting or sales conference be delighted with any referrals uh as as we've discussed here today so I want to finish up our session here today folks uh I obviously take questions there's my contact uh my mobile number my email address if you have any further questions and if you want to link in uh I have a load of stuff coming out in the new year that I can share with you all about the sales stats and all that kind of stuff H hope you enjoy the session and I just want to see if there's any questions you want to take folks so there's any questions here folks okay uh thanks canis for the feedback appreciate that um I'm going to pass back to Dave folks if uh there's nothing uh thanks Marg really appreciate the feedback folks thanks Greta and we're going to get those slides out to you folks today so that you can start working with them with your sales teams or yourself and please feel free to reach out to me seriously I'm not uh one of those guys doesn't return calls I'll get back to you as fast as I can okay and Dave I'm gonna pass back to you to wrap up the session if that's okay thank you very much Robert the feedback as per all the other sessions you did with this year is fantastic it's it's a the the typewriters and keyboards are are are scorching hot with the the good feedback and I'm delighted to say that Robert will also be with us next year so we look forward to that Robert thank you for all your this year and it's not too early to do so so happy Christmas to you and all the mckans thank you very much and goodbye guys thanks very much and and thank you very much for facilitating the session in the background uh D really very much appreciate it okay folks enjoy yourself and best of luck in the last quarter thanks a lot and and finally der we' have a few uh events coming up in the next couple of weeks um so get your new year uh off to a Kickstart with Jim steel who works in the the area of kicking off getting your head mentally right 19th of January also in the accelerator 90 series and building human relations online human connection still matters again it'll be social psychology and influence on the 11th with Walter Bradley and on 29th of April um Sean wefer H will be coming in to do stuff about uh how to deliver successful and winning presentations both on and offline and as I said to you Robert will be in after that um delighted to say we sent everybody out 2021 schedule yesterday on the homepage of the website uh you can you can have a look at it and download it with some really exciting speakers this year uh and we're pushing the boat out internationally with chairman of Ikea with Katie Piper um and uh We've five or six globally ranked business academics from around the world on the schedule so other than that thank you for joining us today uh we look forward to seeing you early in the new year and uh thank you for joining us today goodbye