Brian-Margolis

Episode 11 – Ariel – HR Outsourcing Sales

Simplify Your Strategy
Magnify Your Results Podcast

Transcript and Audio
Episode 11 – Ariel – HR Outsourcing Sales

Brian Margolis (00:00:00):

This is Brian Margolis and welcome to the simplify, your strategy magnifier results podcast, where on each episode I use the pillar system to help a sales pro entrepreneur or other results based professional, create a weekly strategy to run a simple, more lucrative business strategy. So simple. It can fit on an index card, but so powerful. It’s actually helped create multiple seven figure earners and is now licensed by some of the largest companies in the world to create strategies for their teams. If you’d like a free copy of my book on exactly how to do this, or want to be considered as a guest on a future episode, head on over to productivity, giant.com. Enjoy the episode. This is Brian Margolis, and welcome to the simplify, your strategy, magnify your results podcast, where on each episode I use the pillar system to help a sales pro entrepreneur or other results-based professional, create a weekly strategy to run a simple, more lucrative business strategy.

Brian Margolis (00:00:57):

So simple. It can fit on an index card, but so powerful. It’s actually helped create multiple seven figure earners and is now licensed by some of the largest companies in the world to create strategies for their teams. If you’d like a free copy of my book on exactly how to do this, or want to be considered as a guest on a future episode, head on over to productivity, giant.com, enjoy the episode, welcome Ariel. And we were just discussing. So give me the history of your knowledge or your use of, or your exposure to the pillar system. And then we can go, we can go from there.

Ariel (00:01:36):

Yeah. So I first found out about you. I want to say it was last may when you did the podcast with the salesmen podcast. So I follow him and then I really resonated because for me I’m all about less is more. And the role that I was in had a spread across lots of different channels. And I personally had always felt a little bit of dissonance with that. I knew that I could focus better when I was focusing on less. And then, so your whole thesis of simplicity, and rather than thinking about all these complicated strategies, focus on the key activities that you need to do every week, the ones that are going to compound and make most of your revenue that resonated with me and I have since moved into a different role. So would love to recalibrate with you and see what your thoughts are on my pillars now.

Brian Margolis (00:02:30):

Okay. So, so you’ve, you were exposed to the pillar through one of the podcasts I was interviewed on. And then did you, did you read the book or did you just kind of use the podcast to figure out, you know, kind of do the pillars on your own?

Ariel (00:02:45):

Yeah, so I’m not sure which what if it was an excerpt from your book or if it was your full book, but I think somewhere on your website, there was one or two chapters. It wasn’t long, but it was actually written material that I studied and used to make my pillars.

Brian Margolis (00:03:02):

Yes. I’m I’m I know, I know what you’re talking about. Okay, great. So let, let me get a little bit of background then. So what do you currently do? How long have you been doing it? And, you know, just talk to me about your cut, then talk to me about your customer, who you’re going after, and then we’ll get into the bottlenecks and stuff.

Ariel (00:03:24):

Sounds good. So I am an HRO outsourcing. We sell to small, to midsize level companies, which for us it’s employee count. So anywhere from 10 employees on the small end, which is not really where I spend most of my time, all the way to, I can sell up to 300. I can sell to a thousand, but I usually spend most of my time within the 50 to 150 employee range. And what we do is obviously outsourced HR. But what that means is when you have a small company, they don’t have as many resources and time and capital to dedicate to, you know, building their own HR team. So to be able to outsource it to us, we have a software, but we also have a service model. And that allows them to get access to our large resources and also our expertise. So we help out not only with the defensive type of HR, which is like compliance, making sure you’re protected by all the legal things, but we also help you strategize your human capital.

Brian Margolis (00:04:29):

Okay. So it’s a, it’s a B2B sales and you’re selling the service and, or the software to outsource HR and a lot of the things that go along with it, right. Pretty, pretty, pretty straightforward. Do you have a, like a geographic territory you visit clients, like when you call on prospective clients, are you going out and meeting them face to face? Is it mostly done? Virtually?

Ariel (00:04:59):

Great question. So I am an outside field rep that has taken a pause with COVID-19. So we’re doing everything virtually now, but prior to COBIT I do have a territory, couple of cities, and I usually drive around, do a lot of prospecting, knock on doors, drop in as well as have meetings in person. So I started back in April this year, this was a recent promotion. So I did start when shelter in place had already happened. So I’ve been here a couple months now doing everything virtually and we target, we typically target the C level still for a company of that size. C CEO is the best CFO can work as well. If we’re not able to go get access there, we will go down to HR and use them as mobilizers.

Brian Margolis (00:05:49):

Got it. Kind of, kind of try to turn them into advocates, cheerleaders, and work your way up. Totally. Okay. So, and you said you do have a geographic territory. Is that a, is that a state or is it a few big cities? Like what is the size, I mean, are these overnight trips, do you fly places when, when things are normal,

Ariel (00:06:09):

It’s actually zip codes within a city. So some cities are smaller than others. So it’s like one to two zip codes, very small. I have maybe three of those. It’s all driving.

Brian Margolis (00:06:21):

Got it. Okay. So it sounds like if your territory is that small, it sounds like there’s a lot of businesses that there’s no shortage of. I’ll call them leads for lack of a better word.

Ariel (00:06:33):

I, well, I haven’t worked at a different company than this, so I don’t know how it compares. I would say that it’s probably better than some rural areas out there. I am in the Bay area, but as far as leads go, we don’t get a lot of leads. It’s actually, for my role particular it’s hunting.

Brian Margolis (00:06:53):

Right. I mean, yeah, maybe that’s what I was saying. Leads for lack of a better word, maybe oppor opportunities, I guess, is there’s a lot of companies that could use your service in your, in those few zip codes.

Ariel (00:07:04):

I think it’s, it’s definitely in line with the quota. Is that okay?

Brian Margolis (00:07:09):

All right. That does help. Okay. So let me just ask a general question and then we’ll get really specific about your weekly strategy about your pillars. So if I said, what is the biggest bottleneck in your business, right? What is holding you back from hitting slash in my opinion, crushing your quota. Is it access? Is it, you know, conversion rates once you’re in there? Is it, you know, you’re losing people shortly after you’re signing them up. What is, what is the biggest one bottleneck in your business to going next level? It would be access. Okay. So access to, I’m guessing the decision maker,

Ariel (00:07:59):

I should clarify access as in gaining access, having more of those initial appointments, I would say is the biggest thing.

Brian Margolis (00:08:06):

Okay. So with a, with a qualified person, whether they’re the decision maker or they’re one, you know, one or two degrees away from that person.

Ariel (00:08:14):

Correct. So just the initial executive overview.

Brian Margolis (00:08:18):

Okay. And, and you’ve, but you feel like once you’re in the door, once the ears are open and you get to demonstrate your product give your pitch that kind of stuff. That, that part of it, although I’m sure it could, you know, like everything, it can always improve. You, you don’t feel like that’s the biggest obstacle it’s actually getting in the door.

Ariel (00:08:38):

You are correct. Once we get in the door, conversion is not a problem. Okay,

Brian Margolis (00:08:43):

Awesome. So that’s, that’s good. That’s good to know that your product is, you know, people like the message and, and, and the product works. People are happy. So let’s go down to the three pillar questions. Okay. Let’s go down to three pillar questions and see what we can work out here. So, and again, we’re going to talk right now about potential pillars. Don’t, don’t worry about actually turning these into pillars. Let’s just, let’s just get an idea of what’s going on. So if I was to ask you, you know, what is something that you already know how to do effectively, that if you just did more of a remorse, consistent with would have the biggest impact on your business, what would that be in English, in English, where we’re basically saying, you already know how to do this effectively. You just, you know, you need to be more consistent with it, or you just need to do more of it.

Ariel (00:09:42):

Yeah. So calling, making calls, prospecting, sending out emails,

Brian Margolis (00:09:51):

I’m just writing here, prospecting both phone and email. Correct. Do you find that one is more effective than the other, or do you do some kind of combination?

Ariel (00:10:06):

I do combination. It’s interesting. It, I did see more success of phones a couple of months ago, and I’ve always been a phone person. I actually hate writing emails. It’s boring for me personally, but phone was really good in the beginning of coven and my territory since switched at the beginning of our fiscal. So now I’m not seeing as much success in phone. So I think it does within the area I’m in, there are little pockets where, you know, certain types of tech companies, not as much foam access, so you want to do more emails. So I think it depends on a couple of different factors, especially also with the unprecedented times that we’re in. But I normally do a combination of both

Brian Margolis (00:10:46):

And are certain accounts, obviously 80, 20 rule are worth a lot more to you and your company than others. Right. A hundred percent. Do you, do you have any budget for any other kind of prospecting? Can you send them physical packages in the mail? Can you buy them things? Can you send, you know, send certain kinds of things, you know, you know, kind of like get in the door packages and things like that. Is, is there a budget for that?

Ariel (00:11:18):

Basically zero it’s, 25 bucks a month.

Brian Margolis (00:11:22):

Got it. Okay. So, so if you wanted to mail someone to someone we’re talking about, it’s gotta be 25 bucks. Okay. And then what about social media rules?

Ariel (00:11:38):

We typically use LinkedIn and that’s also a channel, but I don’t use it quite as voraciously as I do calls and emails.

Brian Margolis (00:11:50):

And is that your own kind of personal bias or is it the company is very careful about, they have too many strict rules on LinkedIn? No personal. Okay. What about research? Do you use LinkedIn and other ways to research your client?

Ariel (00:12:09):

I do, but I don’t personally have sales navigator, so I do preliminary research based on what I see on their profile. But sometimes the groups that we’re working with also may not have a big presence, especially when they’re more blue collar, they’re maybe 50 employees. So I use it for the initial pre call planning, but once we get further into the process, the actual meat on the bones is usually through the client’s own data and through our other resources that we have relating specifically to what we sell.

Brian Margolis (00:12:43):

Got it. Okay. The, okay, so, so you need to be more consistent with prospecting and call or prospecting, both calling an email. What else do you need to be more consistent with? Okay.

Ariel (00:12:59):

I will tell me if this counts. So there’s a lot of internal administration in between each step for, you know, our process. I’m not an admin type of person. I like being on the phone. And so I usually procrastinate those steps and leave them until the last minute, the night before. And that’s when I come back and see, there’s a lot of things I actually need to gather. I, it would have been nice if I had known this beforehand, cause now I have to go back to the prospect. So it does come up. It is, I would say it’s not quite as detrimental as just not prospecting, but it does tend to be a little bit of a bottleneck sometimes because now I have to drop what I’m doing because I haven’t done this sooner.

Brian Margolis (00:13:44):

So, so you don’t mean actually submit, you’re saying a lot of paperwork has to be submitted or it has to be entered into the system or some combination.

Ariel (00:13:53):

Yeah. We have to enter in data into the system that we have to go back and sometimes our underwriters will come back and they have certain requests or exceptions. And it’s usually a list of documents that we’ll need to get, but I’m so focused on crafting my sales message that I don’t look and look at that until I’m reminded to

Brian Margolis (00:14:13):

Got it. Okay. So, so, so here’s, here’s an interesting, here’s an interesting diversion, which is whenever you want to incorporate something into your business, when you’re, when you’re using the pillar system, there’s kind of three, when you want to incorporate something into your business, we kind of want to run a triage. Okay. And what we want to decide when we want to incorporate something new, is, is this thing a pillar, right? Do I have to actually add a pillar or adjust one of my pillars? Right? Or is it a task? Meaning, is it something I just need to do once now it could take you five weeks to do it, but when it’s done, it’s done. If that makes sense. Right. So is it a task is a pillar or the third option? Is it just a mindset? Meaning I have to change my mindset around something. I have to ask myself different questions, think about things a certain way, react a different way. And so I guess with this admin, one that you’re talking about, could this be as simple as a task instead of a pillar, meaning do you have some kind of checklist or could you make a checklist so that on every call that requires it, you have this checklist in front of you to make sure before you get off the phone, you’ve asked for, you know, this, this, this and this.

Ariel (00:15:37):

Yeah. I think the checklist makes sense. I, it’s probably a combination of both making sure I follow the checklist and also the mentality I have behind it. So I would agree with you there.

Brian Margolis (00:15:51):

So it’s not a pillar it’s in the other two categories. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cause, cause for me, I would be thinking about this as a, you know, as a checklist that when you get on the phone, there’s these, you know, you can have a stack of them or however you want to think about it or for some people they’d rather just open up a page on their computer, but you know, by the end of the call, these are the things you have to do. Right. as far as the mindset, those, I think maybe you need to change. This is something I always get into with, with clients and people in my program, usually on hitting your pillars, but sometimes just changing the words around something can change your mindset. So for example, instead of just saying, thinking of this as admin, all right, as a checklist or it’s admin or it’s stuff I don’t like to do, you can almost rename this as, this is my time-saver checklist, right? This is my make my business easier checklist. This is my more free time checklist. Does that make sense? In other words, thinking of this checklist as a positive thing, not a negative thing, because to me, look, you get more free time or again, depending on how your brain works more free time, or it makes your business easier by using this checklist. Right.

Ariel (00:17:18):

I like that. And I think you’re right. Cause I totally call it admin, even though it’s technically not really admin in the sense of like CRN type of admin, it’s still related to ideal, but I clump them in the same group just because that’s not the type of activity I like doing. And I color it some ugly color on my calendar. And so I totally agree with you. And I think I’ll start reframing it as a, this is going to make my deal eat smoother type of thing.

Brian Margolis (00:17:44):

Yeah. I mean, you know, it’ll make your life easier to allow you to get more deals. You know, you’ll come up with the words that fit for you, but sometimes just what we call something can change our visceral response to doing it because it sounds like this is having a checklist like this on a recall would actually be a positive, not a negative, right? Yeah. Okay. So we’ll put that one over there. Let’s come back to what you have to do more consistently. And by the way, there might be admin stuff that you don’t do consistently that you might have to we’ll see if it, it rises to the level of the pillar. So let’s, let’s keep going down this road, you know, and I’ll just start throwing some things out there to get your brain working. But you know, what about things inside the meeting that you have to do more consistently? Do you feel like you need to be asking for referrals more consistently? Are there clarifying questions or things you need to make sure you’re asking inside each meeting, right? Are you getting off the phone and feel like maybe you don’t have the clarity you need. So things like that, that you just, you might not even want to do them, but you just know if I do them more consistently, it will have a big impact

Ariel (00:18:54):

Referrals. Definitely out of that list. You just gave me as far as line of questioning. I, I can’t think of anything there that stands out.

Brian Margolis (00:19:08):

Okay. So we’re okay. So we’ve got referrals you want to do more consistently. We have prospecting. What about customer? Once you have a customer, you know, I’m just trying to get your brain going here, but what about once you have a customer? Are there, are there things that you need to do more consistently to keep the relationship going? Are there things you need to do? So you, in other words, are there other services you can sell them?

Ariel (00:19:39):

No, not, not for us. And we basically wash our hands once they’re through implementation. So it’s interesting because I’m thinking here and really the biggest thing I can think of is prospecting because I’m a Hunter. I just need to get my conversion is fine. It’s pretty good. Actually. I just need to get more deals in the pipe. And my problem there is because preparing for these, you know, each step of these meetings and we have maybe six meetings for one prospect takes so much time. Sometimes that falls to the wayside, especially when I do start getting into the back and forth with our underwriters. That takes up time because that’s time sensitive. So that’s why prospecting definitely stands out to me as something, if I did consistently would make a huge difference in my business. But I’m struggling to think of anything else here for you.

Brian Margolis (00:20:33):

What about, and I’m a big fan of combining your personal pillars with your professional ones, because it, honestly, it is the same mindset. You know, the longterm goal here is going to be to develop the habit of pillar execution, single habit, that every week you have this open loop that you need to close. And so to me, if you’re going to develop the habit, you know, I think of this as the business of Ariel, right. Ariel incorporated. And so is there any, before we move onto the next question, is, is there anything from a personal standpoint that you would like to do more consistent?

Ariel (00:21:09):

Yeah. And actually would be really interested to hear what your thoughts are with us. I’m working at home now and I will be for a long time. So I personally am passionate about self development and I have had this thought that if I were to dedicate more time out of my day out of just doing, getting more sales activity and to listen back to my calls or record them and play back, do more role plays that would also potentially have a huge impact in my business. But that’s something I have to proactively carve time out of my day to do so. I dunno if that could be a pillar,

Brian Margolis (00:21:49):

It, number one at 100% can be a pillar, right? That’s number one. Number two is get rid of the mentality, I guess, for this system about carving time out of your day and let’s talk in weeks. Okay. So we’re going to establish pillars as you know, based on what you have to get done each week, which allows for batching, right? It doesn’t mean every day, you have to be listening to your calls or anything like that. Now how you hit your pillars. If you decide you want to do a certain amount each day, that’s fine. That’s the next step of this thing, but let’s just think in terms of week. So are you basically saying you want to spend, you know, a certain amount of time each week listening to, when you say your calls, do you mean your prospecting calls? Okay.

Ariel (00:22:38):

That could work too. So I’ll list a couple of different things that I think would help in terms of self development, going through the objections I’ve received pausing to internalize what my, you know, responses have been or should be, and role playing with my manager, recording initial meetings with clients and listening back on them as well as I could even record myself on calls. Sometimes I’ve noticed when I do excelling press the button to replay the voicemail. I just left. You learn a lot of how you sound. So if I were to continue to do that, which I don’t typically do, you know, also partially it’s uncomfortable and awkward. I think that’s another thing, but also reading more news articles and materials. So that’s another thing I’ll share with you. We get sent a lot of material and resources and I also follow different people on LinkedIn. So I want to read that podcasts are big for me, but they end up in my to do folder because during selling hours I’m working on selling and that to do folder ends up going sky high and I never really get to it anyway. So reading resources like that and internalizing because I’m you, the collateral we have on our current product that I sell, that would be helpful as well. And also getting to know my own product and technology better.

Brian Margolis (00:23:59):

Okay. Learning. So it’s really learning your product better from both a product standpoint and a marketing standpoint using the materials that are provided. Yep. Okay. Listening. Alright. Anything else

Ariel (00:24:30):

You can add trainings into that? They do a lot of trainings for us internally, which sometimes I’ll miss because I have a meeting. So then that’s another hour to two hours. I need to listen to which I’m dating back to Nan. I haven’t done some of them.

Brian Margolis (00:24:44):

Well, let me ask you, do you, do you find, are they voluntary trainings?

Ariel (00:24:48):

They are voluntary, but they are highly recommended.

Brian Margolis (00:24:55):

Are they, are they effective? Do you feel like that’s the best use of an hour of your time or does it depend on the training?

Ariel (00:25:01):

It depends on the training. Some trainings are better than others, but for the most part, especially me being new, I do think they’re very effective.

Brian Margolis (00:25:10):

Okay. What about what about collaborating with your colleagues? Meaning do you do, when you do talk to your colleagues, do you learn a lot? Do you learn things that are working for them? Do you find those kinds of talks effective?

Ariel (00:25:35):

Yes, but in small bites. So a lot of my team is new, like me and we have maybe two senior members with, and it’s usually, it’s, it’s a conversation that ends up in my opinion, taking more time than if I were to go another route because it’s got the padding of the rapport. It’s got the padding of like other things. So to just get that straight material, I find it personally, not the most direct form of communication. Got it. Okay.

Brian Margolis (00:26:12):

All right. So then let’s move in and, Oh, last thing on the personal stuff. So I just wanna make sure that part’s all clear in terms of consistency. What about anything in terms of, again, when I say working out or,

Ariel (00:26:25):

You know, that was one thing I wanted to ask you about. So with shelter in place every month has brought different challenges, both on the market and the business world, but also, you know, internally or personally when you’re dealing with being cooped up. And one thing I realized that’s been key to keeping me afloat in this time. It’s to not so much worry about the metrics that they’re shoving down my throat again, that’s why I do like the pillars because it’s keeping things simple rather than all the different things they’re asked corporate is asking me to track, but also making sure that I’m in a good psychological place with shelter in place, part of that is working out and making sure that above all, I am regimented in my self time, in my routine, my working out. So I’m wondering if we, now that we do have to be cognizant of that. Like for me, that’s the biggest thing I need to watch, not my daily call number. I need to watch that I’m feeling good if working out should be a part of this pillar.

Brian Margolis (00:27:28):

Well, we’ll hear. Yeah, absolutely. Look, I don’t, again, this is just me personally. And, and one of the things, you know, in the program that we work with with the clients, but I, again, like I said earlier, I look at this as aerial inc. Right. And you know, to me in my personal life, and this is for a lot of people working out directly affects my business. You know, my, I call it, you know, I call it your, you know, changing your mood, your state as Tony Robbins, whatever you want to call it. But, you know, there are things physiologically that we do that affect our emotions. It’s not just mind over matter. It goes the other way. Right. And every year, you know what I’m talking about, you have experienced this, I’m trying to do one thing in a certain state versus doing it in another state. So if you think that working out and how you feel around working out is better for your business, then absolutely. I would have this in there. I consider working out for me is not something I do before work or after work. We’re working out for me as part of my business. I do it during working hours. Cause it’s part of my business. It’s critical.

Ariel (00:28:37):

I liked that. I liked the way you think about it. I, I didn’t go so far to think about it that way. I think that is powerful though. So I would add working out in there and then reading is huge for me reading and podcasts, just audio books, all that sort of things. I do actually make a lot of time to read. So I do a lot, a lot of time into that already, but I would always be greedy for more time, especially to read more sales books because

Brian Margolis (00:29:08):

Okay. Yeah. We’re going to get into the learning stuff here in a minute. So just hold that thought, but let’s talk about working out for a second. So working out three times a week, I mean, I dunno what you’re currently doing consistently, but you know, again, these are minimums when it comes to pillars, but what about working out three times a week?

Ariel (00:29:27):

I three times a week works. I think when I was at my peak in terms of balance and feeling good, it was actually every day. Okay.

Brian Margolis (00:29:37):

But think about your worst week. Not in other words, when it comes to pillars, let’s talk bigger picture. Right? First we’re going to figure out what your pillars are. And then the second part is, you know, how do you then turn the execution of your pillars into a habit? So you’re doing it consistently, right? That’s going to be this the second part. So we want to start off with a number, with a minimum that is realistic, more easily achievable. Okay. It’s not going to rely on being perfect at the beginning. Look, if over time, this thing, the upward spiral begins and all of a sudden you find yourself working out every day. That’s wonderful. Right. But I’m talking about that week in February where, you know, skies are gray. Oh man, it’s a tough week. I wrote a, could you still get in three workouts? Right. And so to me, I would start with a number like that. Cause I want you to hit your pillars consistently at the beginning and then we can always increase them later.

Ariel (00:30:45):

I like that. So I would say two workouts between Monday through Friday.

Brian Margolis (00:30:53):

Okay. We’ll just two workouts a week. So, so, so again, let me, let me give you another piece of the pillar stuff and I’ll make sure you have the entire book when this is over, because this is the backend of the book, but you had the front end with that report. I know what you’re talking about. The, in terms of the week of the pillar. Okay. I always recommend that your week start on Saturday, they end on Friday. Okay. In other words, you know, I talk about the Friday night feeling, you know what I’m talking about? You know, feeling good that on Friday night you did what you needed to do so that your business is moving in the right direction. The reason I like to start the week on the weekends. So Saturday through Friday for pillars is very simple. It’s because look, if you don’t want to work on the weekends, don’t work on the weekends.

Brian Margolis (00:31:42):

I have no issue with that at all. Okay. But what I don’t want people doing is not hitting your pillars during the week. And then feeling like I have to work on the weekends to hit them or catch up. Cause that always ends bad either. Now it’s a negative thing because I have to work on the weekend or a workout on the weekend or whatever it is or you honestly, you just don’t do them and say, I’m going to start over Monday. Whereas if you’re going to do anything on the weekend, like work out or work, I want it to be a bonus. Like you’re getting ahead for the week of that makes sense. So if you decide on Saturday and Sunday, you want to work out both days. Great. You just knocked out two workouts for the upcoming week. Okay. So having said that is, do you, do you want to do, try to do two workouts a week consistently? Is that the goal for the pillar? Okay. So two workouts. All right. So let’s go into the next question. Question number two.

Brian Margolis (00:32:43):

What is one skill that if I significantly improved in would have the biggest impact on my business, even if nothing else changed. All right. And what we’re looking for here, cause you talked a lot about personal development and getting better and reading and training and all these things. So I want to go to the next level with this. All right. Because I don’t want you to listen to trainings and read books and listen to podcasts. Just kind of, as you feel like it, when something comes across your desk and looks interesting, right? I want to make sure a big part of your training and getting better is, is very specific. It’s very intentional, right? So the way we do that is look, if you’re going to get better at something, I don’t care if it’s going from a one to a four or an eight to a 10, depending on where you’re at now, you’re going to spend the time to get better at something. What skill would give you the biggest return on investment? And I will tell you, based on what you said so far, then you can fill it in. It sounds like prospecting and things that relate to prospecting is the number one skill for you right now.

Speaker 3 (00:34:04):

So I’m thinking about this and the prospecting is, in my opinion, it’s very much an activity thing. You just need to go out there, make sure you do it. As far as the one skill that would help me in terms of actually like strategy or I dunno if I should strategy in this call, but like a skill set, as opposed to just like a mere activity, I’m actually leaning towards just being better at talking to people. And that might be super broad, but I’ll explain why I say that at the end of the day, sales is just talking to people, having conversations and being able to give them an emotional experience that will lead them towards the product. So for me, in this new role, I come from a role where we dealt with very small businesses. We went straight to the CEO office manager, get out of the way.

Speaker 3 (00:35:02):

I don’t want to talk to you, but now in this role, especially with Kogan, we are seeing more and more just like group. Think the CEO, even in normal times would make a decision on his own. It doesn’t want to disrupt the work on his HR person’s plate, which is totally fair. So for me, having to work with influencers and manage three different personalities, all in one room and have to have these one off conversations to almost sometimes run three separate process, three parallel because one person here is trying to control the process because she wants to appear a certain way. The other two are more engaged, but because person a wants to control the process, I’m not able to speak, to control the people two and three. So being able to manage everyone’s personalities has been very new for me, big learning.

Brian Margolis (00:35:58):

Okay. So I’m going to put that under you ready? I’m gonna put that under sales skills. Okay. And this is what I mean by sales skills, things like group dynamics, emotional intelligence, empathy, overcoming objections, right? The general people skills that you can improve in, in sales. Does that make sense? Yeah. And there’s no shortage of information out there on that. Does that when I say it that way, are we talking about the same thing?

Speaker 3 (00:36:36):

I almost feel like that’s a little broad. I agree. Let’s get specific then. Okay. For me, it’s talking on the phone and from, even from like cold calling, picking up the phone and speaking to somebody for the first time, that level of conversation skill so that I don’t sound like a robot with a pitch and being able to, within a split second, get them to start opening up and talking to me rather than I throw my pitch on them and hope they say yes. And that carries throughout the entire process with managing different people.

Brian Margolis (00:37:18):

Let me, let me, let me cut you off for the sake of brevity here. If, if I said communication skills, right. And I’m talking about under the, under the umbrella of sales, right? Sales communication, how do you ask certain questions? How do you, you know, how do you build rapport? How do you get people to put their defenses down and open up, right. Is that where you’re going with this? That, that,

Speaker 3 (00:37:47):

I’m almost, I’m almost going to ake you. I think as I think aloud because

Brian Margolis (00:37:52):

Emotional, you’re talking about emotional intelligence.

Speaker 3 (00:37:56):

Yes. Because let’s say there’s a ton of overlap in what we’re talking about. Totally. But let me just distinguish why, because I can, you know, have a perfectly sequenced sentence and communicate it well, but there’s that extra level of being able to understand what it means to that specific person that specific influencer that I think would have a huge impact beyond just being able to speak coherently. Does that make sense? Yep.

Brian Margolis (00:38:26):

Is the word I’m going to use then is effective messaging. The key word here is effective. Meaning and I was going talk about this in a little bit, but boom, I will go to it here. Now. Look, it’s not it’s it’s not just what you say and the words that’s one critical component, but it’s, when do you say it? Who do you say it to? What don’t you say to certain people? Right? It’s it’s effective messaging. It’s it’s I think we’re saying the same thing here over and over. Right? You want to be more effective during the conversation. You just don’t want to give information and assume that what you say is what they’re hearing. You know, that people have filters, biases, all these things. And so you want to effectively communicate with people and it’s okay if I’m way off.

Speaker 3 (00:39:21):

I agree. There’s a lot of overlap in everything where it’s like everything we’re talking about communication, for sure. But for me, my product is a very emotional side. Many are, but this one, especially. So because it just entrenches so many portions of the business. So I think a big thing that I’ve realized is it’s being able to get my prongs deep enough into how it impacts them emotionally, maybe even personally. And that’s a level of almost like empathy that I don’t have from my previous role.

Brian Margolis (00:39:56):

That’s okay. So, so we’re definitely saying the same thing. We’re, we’re, I’m using the word effective messaging, but when I say a F or a communication skills or whatever it is, but yeah. W what I’m saying is it’s not just information it’s. Yeah. W w we’re basically saying the same thing. I think we’re looking for a label here, right? We’re looking for a label. Give me an example of a book or something you’ve that you say would fall under this, that you’ve read, or that you know about

Speaker 3 (00:40:29):

The only book that I’m going to say, I haven’t read a book that,

Brian Margolis (00:40:36):

Or podcast or trainer or something topic. I don’t,

Speaker 3 (00:40:42):

Can I give you an example of what I, what I mean? So we had a deal that had signed and wanted to move forward, but then come implementation. There was a small clause that came up and the way it was worded was making the decision maker now wanna rescind everything. And it wasn’t enough to say that this is going to like everything we talked about. Let’s review every single meeting we’ve had. You’ve said that this is going to help. This is what it’s going to do. Imagine what’s going to do for your business. It wasn’t enough to say that it wasn’t enough to say this particular person cares about her employees, that this is going to be better for your employees. It wasn’t enough to say that either because we couldn’t get over the fact that she felt like she was selling her soul to the devil, a very emotional comment. So the way we had to go about it was to also come from a very emotional angle of colorful language and paint the picture of, imagine what happens when you take this away from your employees. And hopefully that doesn’t sound super sleazy saying this out loud, but

Brian Margolis (00:41:49):

We’re saying the same. This is effective messaging. This is effective. Messaging has to do with the words you choose empathy, what you say and what you don’t say, right. Letting people speak. Remember I said earlier about the visceral response, you have to the word admin, right? It’s we’re saying the same thing. And so for the sake of time, okay, we can call this whatever you want. It’s your, these are your pillars. As long as you would know it, when you see it. Right. In other words, to me, everything you’re saying, empathy, emotional intelligence, you know, using the right words, overcoming your, that ed.

Speaker 3 (00:42:37):

That’s an objection. You can say, it’s emotional. That’s an objection.

Brian Margolis (00:42:41):

These are humans, right. That was a silent, eventually not so silent. Objection. That she felt like she was selling out, so to speak. Right. all of that is what you’re talking about, right? Like more effective communication, more effective selling skills, empathy, you know, getting people to make the decision themselves feel like they came to that conclusion. Right?

Speaker 3 (00:43:09):

Yeah.

Brian Margolis (00:43:11):

I mean, I mean, I don’t have the right label that you’re going to agree with here, but I believe we’re both saying the same thing or, and it doesn’t even matter if we’re both saying the same thing. Do you know, do you know if I said to do that for an hour, a week, work on it, would you know what you were looking for?

Speaker 3 (00:43:27):

Yeah. Well, how to research and find resources on this? Well, I don’t know how I would find resources on it. But I would say we are talking about the same thing. I have the lens of it being a very emotional thing. So that’s what I would personally label it as emotional intelligence.

Brian Margolis (00:43:44):

Okay. So do you want to call it the emotional, emotional sales skills? For lack of, for just right now? I actually really like that the emotional sales skills, see, I guess I come from the lens of all selling is emotional.

Speaker 3 (00:44:02):

Yeah. My previous role was not, not this emotional. I’m not this emotional. I mean, for sure we had a level of, I definitely need to speak a certain way, but transactional. Yeah. Different level.

Brian Margolis (00:44:17):

And by the way, there’s a ton of resources out there on this stuff. There. Believe me, there is no, just Google it YouTube. It there’s every, you know, you can find it in chapters of almost every good sales book good sales, things like that. Okay. Let me go back to something you said about prospecting that you think prospecting is an activity, not a skill. And this I hope is the biggest game changer of this whole conversation because I work with a lot of salespeople and I’ve helped a lot of salespeople get in the doors and with some big accounts and things like that, prospecting is an absolute skill. And it’s similar to what we were talking about, which is look, I can, one of the things I teach to one of the the industries that I work with, I it’s called writing emails.

Brian Margolis (00:45:16):

You know, that people respond to it’s it’s direct response copywriting. It’s how do you write an email, a subject line in a single sentence that gets people to reply. All right. People who are into the world of direct response, copywriting, the good ones, the people who are great at it. People who can put words on to ads or words in onto websites or words and emails that get someone else to notice it and take action. They charge anywhere between 20 and 80 grand a day. Some of them even more, because it’s the most powerful skill in the world, especially in 2020, right. To be able to write an email or leave a voicemail that causes someone else to respond. Do you see where I’m going with this? Yeah. It sounds like I need that class. Oh my God. Yeah. Because see, there’s when you just make a lot of phone calls and send a lot of emails, like you think of it as an activity.

Brian Margolis (00:46:13):

What you’re doing is you’re multiplying by zero. All right. If you have not exactly zero, but if you have a very low percentage, which you always do in cold B2B, right. It’s always a low percentage game. But if you know how to write a subject line or leave a voicemail or word things in a way that gets a person on the other end to quickly understand what you’re talking about, your percentages go way up. So now if you have a 0.3% response rate and you move that to a 2% response rate, I mean, you’ve just like 10 times your response rate, right? There’s only two reasons Ariel that somebody won’t take your appointment. You’re ready. There’s only two reasons. The first reason is that you have nothing. They value. And by the way, that’s true. Sometimes not everyone wants what you’re offering. Not everyone needs it.

Brian Margolis (00:47:15):

Would you agree with that? Okay. The second reason, and this is probably more the cause is you do have something. Cause you even said, once you have conversations, your conversion rates high, which means that people do actually value what you have. Right? The second reason someone won’t let you in the door, first one is you have nothing. They value the second one, you can articulate it quickly and triple underline the word quickly. Okay? In a 10, second voicemail in the first two to three sentences that you speak when you’re live on a call before someone’s defense is instantly go up and they’re trying to figure out how to get you off the phone in the subject line and initial sentence of an email that they see in their preview pane. You have to be able to articulate that you have something of value that quickly.

Brian Margolis (00:48:12):

And that’s where most people why prospecting doesn’t work because they can’t do it makes sense. This is such a skill that I’ve written emails and added question marks where there wasn’t and we’ve tripled the response rate. I changed the word, simplify your business, magnify your results to simplify your strategy, magnify your results many years ago for my stuff. And it, it caused tons more response. Because what I, in hindsight, what I realized was I think when I said the word business, people like yourself, who don’t think of themselves as a business owner, per se, a traditional business owner, you saw simplify your business and you didn’t think it applied to you. Right? Whereas I realized when I used the word strategy, I started getting more response. That’s how fickle individual words are and the way you say things. Right? So, so to me, this is called direct response.

Brian Margolis (00:49:15):

Copywriting, not regular, not explaining something, but getting someone to respond and there’s techniques. Right. For example, when you write an email to someone, I, and again, I don’t know how you do it, but do you, do you ask them to select a time or pick between a few times? Yes. Okay. See, you instantly just decrease your response rate on email by doing that. Because, because when you, when you do that, they, we don’t read email. We go through email. Would you agree with that? Yes. Okay. So what you do there is now that person to respond to your email, they have to take an extra step. When all they’re trying to do is get their inbox down to zero. They now have to look at their calendar to be able to respond to you. Don’t they? So there’s an X. It doesn’t seem like much.

Brian Margolis (00:50:08):

You’re like, Hey, isn’t their calendar in with their email. It might be, but you and I are both human. Right? We take the path of least resistance. When you add any friction, when you add an extra step, it’s difficult. So what you’ll notice, and I’m not here to teach you a lesson on direct response copywriting. I can give you some resources off this call, but when you just ask, when you say the words is something like, would it be worth a short call, right? Or would it be worth a short meeting? They can simply reply. Yes. And move on to their next email. They can go. Sure. Sounds good. Let’s set it up. Can you send me some info? And then they can move on versus saying, saying, Oh, this is a calendar next. Right. It happens in milliseconds. So prospecting is absolutely a skill.

Brian Margolis (00:51:00):

You know, I work with a guy we’ve become very friendly. We help each other out with our businesses, a guy by the name of Stu Heinecke, who he wrote two books called how to get a meeting with anyone. Right. You know, Jeb blunt, who I was interviewed recently on his podcast, he wrote a book called fanatical prospecting. Right. There are prospecting, there are skills to getting in the door. Okay. So I’m looking at your thing and going, yes, you need to prospect consistently, but you also need to get better at prospecting. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3 (00:51:37):

I agree. And I am a big fan of jabs. I meant it more from the aspect of you see some salespeople who get analysis process because they’re doing all the sort of research a hundred percent, you know, and really strategizing every single word of their email, but the person who still goes out there and make sure they make the activity just like straight from fanatical prospecting at the end of the day, you still just got to go do it a hundred percent. That’s where I, that’s where I came from. But I totally agree that if we were pulling on two levers activity, but also skillset, if we can increase the skillset, then it will have a huge impact.

Brian Margolis (00:52:20):

[Inaudible] That’s it Ariel. The answer is both. Look, anything, any issue you’re having with your business. And I’ll be able to say this till the end of time, any issue you’re ever having with your business, it’s either something you’re not doing consistently or not, or something you’re not doing effectively or both. And that’s why the pillar questions are set up this way. So for you, we want you to have a prospecting pillar, but we also want you getting better at prospecting. So you sharpen the act. So your percentage goes up. Right. And did you understand that? And that when I said multiplying by zero, if it’s not a very effective email or phone call, of course, pure numbers, you’re going to get some hits, but if we get better, we’ll get, okay. So we’re on the same page with that. Yeah. Is there, is there anything else in terms of skill? So we talked about emotional sales skills, right. And you can get more specific as time goes on, but you know, you’ll, you’ll know it. We’re talking about prospecting skills, getting better at prospecting, whether that’s response, copywriting, whether you know, whatever that is. Is there anything else on the skill side of things that pops up as something that would have a huge return on investment for you?

Ariel (00:53:37):

No, just those two. Okay.

Brian Margolis (00:53:39):

So, so let me ask you one final question and then let’s mold these into your pillars. Okay. The final question is what is something, what is something that you could organize planner create prior to taking action that would make the action much more impactful? And what we’re looking for here? Is there something you can do each week or put together or research or whatever, so that something else you do like prospecting or, or having sales meetings or whatever is more effective. So, so I’ll give you some quick examples. So you understand what I mean, for some people they need to, they need a, a, a, a meeting prep pillar, right. But they need a meeting, meaning they go into meetings and they realize, because they didn’t do the legwork going in that meeting would have been more effective. Had they done a little homework, right. Or it could be, you know, before they just reach out to anyone, you know, they make sure they do a certain amount of research each week to identify better prospects so that when they do prospect, the kind of people that they land on are the right people. Does that make sense?

Brian Margolis (00:54:55):

Yes.

Ariel (00:54:59):

It was not very confident at all because of those two. I do do tons of prep, so I don’t think that applies to me. And

Brian Margolis (00:55:10):

That’s just the cat. That’s just examples of that category. I’m saying, is there anything that you feel like you should be doing each week to make something else more effective? That’s not being addressed right now.

Ariel (00:55:20):

I feel like that falls under the self improvement, because the more I pause to recalibrate my skillset and improve, it would make everything else next week work better. But any along the examples, the examples you gave, I’m thinking I do that as far as time organization, I already planned my calendar. I have checklists, like you had suggested I do actually have checklists. Just may not always follow them. So organization seems. Okay. Okay. So I’m thinking self development.

Brian Margolis (00:55:51):

Okay. Not, not, not a problem. Alright. So then, then here, here, here’s what, let’s start working on these pillars then. Okay. We, I think we both agree that you need to consistently prospect. I think we’re both on the same page there. Right? What does that look like to you? What’s the right number? Is it sending X amount of emails? Is it making X amount of phone calls? Is it some kind of hybrid where you like, for some of my clients, we put together a thing where they send an email and then they call the same day. And if they get a voicemail, which happens a lot, they actually refer back to the email. Right. They give the benefit on the phone and then they say, you know, I sent you an email about an hour ago. If you want to connect, let’s, you know, blah, blah, blah. Right. What do you think would work for you? What do you feel like you need to do each week to be consistently prospecting?

Speaker 3 (00:56:50):

I think it would be,

Brian Margolis (00:56:53):

What do you want to measure it in time? You can measure it in time.

Speaker 3 (00:56:56):

Yeah. So I actually do both right now. So I tend to, I like allotting two to three hours a day to dial because I gives me enough time to get through around $50, but also have that padding because it’s going to take me time to build momentum, you know, just roll out of bed. And so I think I like the time aspect that’s been really successful for me, but it does still boil down to if I get 50 touches out, whether they’re calls or emails, that’s, that’s a good number for success in my role.

Brian Margolis (00:57:30):

Okay. And you obviously have a bias, I’m guessing it sounds like a bias toward the phone, which is fine. But you, you, you trust yourself to pick the right thing at the right moment, right? Correct. Okay. So, so is it, when we say the word dial and emails, let’s come up with a word for both of them, right. Would, would reaches be a right word? Like you have to reach out to, or like what’s a word you would like to use to combine them? Or we can just say dials slash emails

Speaker 3 (00:58:02):

Touches. Okay.

Brian Margolis (00:58:06):

So, and you said the goal you, you like to do about 50 a day. Yep. Okay. So since we do pillars in weeks, how do you feel about the number 200?

Speaker 3 (00:58:20):

It actually sounds a little done. It sounds a lot. I mean, not as an undoable, but just, it’s not a bite sized piece.

Brian Margolis (00:58:28):

Okay. Well, again, how you hit your pillars and what your pillars are, are two different things. In other words, I have no problem with you waking up every day and saying, you know, my, you know, I’m gonna open up my day by doing, by reaching out to 50 people, right. Or 25, but we measure it weekly.

Speaker 3 (00:58:48):

How about we measure it in time, then if we’re doing it weekly for this one, we can go back to 2.5 hours a day.

Brian Margolis (00:58:59):

Okay. So 10 hours a week to, I’m saying 10 to I’m putting it on the lower end. You can always do more. Okay. Here’s all we need, Ariel. This is the whole key to pillars. Right. And I know you only read the first part of the book. And so maybe that’s why some of this isn’t, you know, make it as much sense as I think it will. I just want you to feel on Friday night, like, I want you to be able to say, look, I know, as long as I do a least 10 hours of prospecting every week, everything else takes care of itself in that world. Right? Like, that’s, that’s good. If weekend and week out, I’m doing 10 plus hours business is going to work. Right. That’s all.

Speaker 3 (00:59:41):

Yeah. I think tons of good number. Okay.

Brian Margolis (00:59:44):

And you can always change that down the road. Okay. So we have 10 hours of prospecting.

Speaker 3 (00:59:54):

Okay. Let’s talk about

Brian Margolis (00:59:55):

Asking for referrals. Do you have opportunities every week to ask for referrals?

Speaker 3 (01:00:01):

Actually, no. That’s kind of why I asked that question

Brian Margolis (01:00:06):

In a newer role. You’re not having as many, you know, you don’t have a lot of, you don’t have a lot of accounts. You’re working people who are really happy with you, all that stuff. Cause you’re just getting going.

Speaker 3 (01:00:16):

Right. Okay. So we can circle back on that.

Brian Margolis (01:00:23):

Yeah. A hundred percent. I don’t think it’s critical right now. Again, I just want to be clear just because something’s not a pillar. It doesn’t mean you don’t do it or can’t do it. It just means it’s not one of your pillars. It’s not one of your, you know, the key things that has to get done every week. Right. Okay. I have a lot of things that aren’t pillars, but I just put a monthly reminder in my calendar before my day starts in a red block. And it’s like any, you know, I would write myself a note like for the third, Wednesday of every month and something, and I would just have a thing in there that said referrals, question Mark. And it would just cause me to go back through my notes and see if there’s anyone I want to reach out to. Right.

Speaker 3 (01:01:04):

Makes sense. More of a task. Okay.

Brian Margolis (01:01:09):

Let’s, let’s talk about learning the product better and the company trainings. All right. So I’m kind of combining those in a way, or maybe I shouldn’t, I don’t know. Under company training company, collateral, do you want to separate those or do you want to combine them?

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):

Yeah, I think it’s fine. You can combine them.

Brian Margolis (01:01:33):

Okay. Which means, which means, you know, that you know that each week you’ll make the right decision, like you’ll know each week where to spend your time. Right?

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):

Correct. Okay.

Brian Margolis (01:01:50):

So what do you think is the right amount of time? What do you think is the minimum amount of time you’re going to need,

Speaker 3 (01:02:04):

Hold on my calculator. I’m not that good at math

Brian Margolis (01:02:10):

For a week, for a week. I’m saying, do you think if you do that for an hour, a week, that’ll be sufficient or

Speaker 3 (01:02:15):

I think I would need two and a half hours to make a difference just because there’s so much,

Brian Margolis (01:02:22):

Is that ongoing or just cause you have to catch up

Speaker 3 (01:02:27):

Because I’m new and I have a lot to catch up on. Okay. So if we want to make it easy for me to succeed, we could do one hour for now.

Brian Margolis (01:02:40):

Yeah. I think one hour is fine. Yeah. I think, I think one hour is good and you can, like I said, you can always do more. So w w what word do you like for that one hour of company product training? Or how are you going to define it?

Speaker 3 (01:02:56):

Probably call it learning.

Brian Margolis (01:02:59):

Well, let’s get a little more specific just because we’re gonna have some other learning pillars, company learning,

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):

Product learning. Okay.

Brian Margolis (01:03:12):

So one hour of product learning each week, right?

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):

Yep. Okay.

Brian Margolis (01:03:22):

The two workouts a week where we nailed that one, that was easy. Now let’s talk about the what did we finally call it? The emotional sales skills. All right. The emotional sales skills. What do you think you need for that each week? How much time should you be spending? And by the way, whether it’s reading, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos does not matter

Speaker 3 (01:04:02):

An hour a week. Yeah.

Brian Margolis (01:04:15):

And then the last thing let’s talk about prospecting skills. Now, when I said prospecting and I kind of went through that, that whole thing with you I don’t know if anything stuck out, like specifically, maybe you need to work on your messaging, whatever. Or do you just want to start with prospecting in general and see where it leads? You like to direct response copywriting, to voicemails, to words that were two, and by the way, there’s going to be overlap with the emotional sales thing you’re going to find.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):

Right. that’s why I almost feel like it would fit perfectly right in that existing pillar. Maybe we could just a lot more time with that.

Brian Margolis (01:05:02):

It would, but here’s, here’s what I want to avoid. And I have a lot of experience with this and working with people in the heat of the moment, if you just say, I’m going to spend, let’s call it two hours and emotional sales skills. What we tend to do is we’re going choose something that we like learning about that we want to learn about, or in the moment, all of a sudden, based on maybe even something that happened that day or yesterday, we feel we need to learn about, right. As opposed to putting criteria around the pillar to say, you know, I have to spend this much time on this specific skill. And by the way, there’s a couple of ways to do it. One way to do it would be to say something like one hour of one hour of the emotional sales skills and a separate pillar that says, you know, one hour learning prospecting, right? Or one hour prospecting. The other one you could say is two hours of emotional sales skills. But we would have a caveat in there that says, we’d call it two slash one, meaning two hours of emotional sales skills. But at least one of those two hours has to be dedicated to prospecting. It’s the same thing. It’s just how you operate. Like, like for me, I would keep them separate, but some people just want to combine them. It does. And it doesn’t matter. It’s easy, you know, let’s combine them. Okay.

Brian Margolis (01:06:31):

So you want to say two hours of emotional sales skills and at least one hour has to be prospecting. I’m feeling pushed back on the prospect and a half hours between the two one and a half hours between the two. Okay. So you want to say, you know, what do you think the minimum each week should be on prospecting? 30 minutes, 60 minutes. 30 minutes. Okay. So I’m going to, I’m going to call this skill 30, 90, then 30 slash 90 emotional sales skills. Right. And at least 30 of that has at least 30 of that has to be prospecting.

Brian Margolis (01:07:29):

Does that make sense, Eric? I think, and again, I’m not trying to push you in any direction, but it’s obvious and you recognize it, that access is the number one bottleneck in your business. Right. And I think you’re going to find out very quickly that yes, you need to consistently prospect, you’ve got to do the dials. You’ve got to send the emails, right? Me personally, these days, I think emails more effective, but if you’re comfortable doing dials, you’ll probably get better doing dials. That’ll probably be what you’ll do. And that’s fine. But I will tell you this, there’s a whole world of knowledge and skills on how to get someone to respond to a phone call and to an email. Okay. And I think by you being exposed to that and learning the different tips and tricks and ways in and things like that, I think that’s just going to open up your eyes to a whole new world, right?

Ariel (01:08:43):

Yeah. I’m definitely thinking of that right now. So I, part of the prospecting for me is going to be focused specifically on emails, writing, like you were talking about writing emails, that people will respond to leaving voice messages. So between those two activities in particular, that would be my prospecting block. But I feel like that would still make sense. I do that once weekly, you know, I go through and learn new things. A vast majority of it is still going to be those two and a half hours dedicated to just execute on what I just learned.

Brian Margolis (01:09:22):

No, no. Right. We’re both in agreement. You need both, we’re both in agreement that you need that you need both. And I just, th the reason I’m focused so heavy on this part is because I feel like you, you, you already accepted the grinding part, right. You know, you’ve got to put in the dial, send the emails, you’ve already accepted that part of it. I think sometimes for some people it’s hard to, because you don’t look, your paycheck doesn’t change on Friday, right. Whether you spend 30 minutes and there’s going to be some trial and error right there, there’s going to be some trial and error. And I love, look me personally, again, I’m biased too, because one of my favorite topics in the world is how to get in the door. Right? I’m even thinking about it in the group program, starting an additional call each week, you know, where that’s all we talk about is just marketing and whatever.

Brian Margolis (01:10:18):

I built my whole sales. And again, this is a bias, I get it. But when I decided to start consulting and coaching others, because instead of just being an entrepreneur for myself, I built my entire business on cold email. Right. And it was amazing as my emails improved. And once I cracked the code on how to get responses from people, everything else changed. It, wasn’t just this pure numbers game of, you know, blasting. And like I said, multiplying by zero, it’s so noisy out there right now, as you know, right. It’s so noisy that the, the most powerful skill you can learn is how to get people to look over for a second and be able to articulate your value quickly. Okay.

Ariel (01:11:04):

Yeah, I agree. And I, the reason I said that is also a question to you when I put 30 minutes out there. So you see this balance of like 30 minutes a week versus what did we say? 10 hours for prospecting, very high, like for small ratio, whatever way you want to look at it in my head that I put it that way, because I’ll learn something one or two things new each week, and then I’ll go do it. Would you suggest then that I need to increase that and have more of a, you know, increase the learning and then less on the prospecting

Brian Margolis (01:11:42):

If you worked for me. Okay. If I was your boss and I was allowed to tell you what to do, there’s no doubt in my mind, because here’s the bottom line. You, if you’re, if you are, if you can increase your, think about this, if you can concrete your response rate from 1%, like one out of every hundred people, you reach out to, to 2%, you double your response rate to do that with just pure numbers and dials ads in other two and a half days of dials or whatever the number comes out to. I don’t know the math here. So to me again, it’s about, you’re talking about how many a batch you get, and that’s great. But to me, the easiest way to get in the door is to get to actually get your batting percentage up, if that makes sense, right? Yeah. What’s that,

Ariel (01:12:40):

So my question is, if I were, let’s say to a lot more time to learning again, coming, you know, from like a very transactional, like, you just got to go out there and do it. You can see where in that world, people who sat there preparing, doing all those, they were looked down upon. Right. Cause they didn’t, then they had the paychecks to show it or not show it.

Brian Margolis (01:13:02):

Well, yeah. I just want, I just want to say this is not, I’m not talking about research and paralysis analysis and getting ready to get ready, basically avoiding the phone. Right. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about spending 90 minutes a week, that’s it? Just 90 minutes a week getting better meaning. So when you write those emails that are more effective, when you make those dials, they’re more effective, there’s a good chance. And I don’t know what your last role was, but there’s a good chance that the messaging was already pretty solid. And so it just became a numbers game, right? Like, would you, is that like, did they kind of have the formula crack then, then you knew if you just made enough dials, you would transactionally you’d bring in more business people who avoided the phones. Didn’t right.

Ariel (01:13:56):

Thanks. I agree with that. So then is what you’re talking about.

Brian Margolis (01:14:00):

You could be in a different environment right now.

Ariel (01:14:06):

So then if we were to lot to ours, and I’m asking these questions for you to expand, because I am really thinking about it. What does that look like? Is that listening to podcasts, reading things like taking notes on, like, tell me more about what that will look like for your own.

Brian Margolis (01:14:23):

So look, you, you would start, you would start down and, and, and you can reach out to me offline. After this, I know, I know you have a hard stop, so I want to be cognizant of that. But to me, if you, if you look at the part unreferenced documents, not in my online course, but in the book on reference documents, you would have a reference document dedicated to this pillar. And what would happen is as you start diving in, as you just Google, for example, as you Google, how to write more effective emails like B2B emails or something, right. You’re going to get a billion videos, a billion hits. You’re just kind of going through and seeing what’s out there as you come across certain authors and techniques, and maybe key words that you like, you put them on these reference documents.

Brian Margolis (01:15:17):

So that every week when you, when you go through when you go to do your hour or whatever it is, have that skill, you’re not just starting from scratch. It’s like, okay, these are the websites I want to look at. These are the, you know, these are the people I want to look at. These are the, or, sorry. Yeah. The authors, the gurus, the whatever. And it’s like, most things usually, eventually you kind of find the people you like, or the websites or the resource centers you like, does that make sense at the beginning? I’ll tell you at the beginning, it’s going to be a little bit of a scatter approach. It’s going to be kind of seeing what’s out there. And then what you’re going to realize is now that our, I do every week, I’m kind of going down the road with this person right now, or this book or this technique or this exercise. Right.

Ariel (01:16:07):

I really liked that.

Brian Margolis (01:16:09):

I mean, that’s, that’s what happened. That’s what I mean by reference documents. Well, when I, when I talk about it and that’s why I said, I want to get specific and not just say, spend a few hours on sales skills every week. Right. We got to make sure a certain amount of that is prospecting. So again, if I’m your boss, if I’m your boss at minimum, I’m saying 60 minutes of getting better at prospecting, 60 minutes is a long time when you set your clock and say, okay, for the next 60 minutes, I’m just gonna, you know, Google how to write more effective B2B emails, right? How to write subject lines, that work, how to leave voicemails that you’re gonna, you’re gonna go down the rabbit hole. You’re going to start getting exposed to things which are going to lead you to other things. You’re going to see a whole new world out there. Right?

Ariel (01:16:59):

Yeah. I’m pretty excited.

Brian Margolis (01:17:01):

There’s people that are experts on this. That, that’s the thing that a lot of people don’t understand in 2020 information is basically free. Okay. When join my program, they’re not necessarily paying for the information because a lot of the information is already in my book or in a lot of my materials. What they’re paying for is that I’m shortening the cycle and I’m kind of being the accountable. I keep redirecting them, right. The information itself is already out there for all this stuff. Right. And so what you’re doing is you’re almost becoming the curator of that information and you’re figuring out what’s out there. Look, there’s going to be one or two ideas that are going to change the course of your prospecting. You just don’t, you just don’t know where there are right now. So you’re gonna have to go through a lot of stuff.

Brian Margolis (01:17:50):

So, so yeah, you’re going to start off broad. You’re going to go narrow, I guess, is a great way to say it’s a shame. You guys don’t have a budget cause there’s a lot of really cool ways to get in the door by sending letters and packages and other things these days. So, all right. So let me for the sake of time, let me, so do you want to change it to an hour of each? So 60 of that and 60 prospecting. So here’s what I have. You ready? This, this is what you’re going to do each week for your pillars. 10 hours of prospecting, one hour of product learning, two workouts, one hour on emotional sales skills and one hour on prospecting. Those are learning pillars.

Brian Margolis (01:18:50):

And here’s the question. And here, when you’re thinking about these, when you’re reviewing these okay. What I want you to think about? All right. What I want you to think about is do I feel on Friday night when I’ve done this, that my business is moving in the right direction. It’s just a matter of time and pressure, right? If you don’t feel that way, we haven’t dialed them in yet. Okay. The other thing I want you to think about is, is there anything, these pillars aren’t addressing in your business, right? As you think about these, like is something not being addressed or does something need criteria to be more specific? Makes sense. Yeah. How are you feeling I’m scanning right now to see if there’s anything that might be missing? Well, you can always reach out to me to off the, yeah, I actually got, I know you have a hard stop. I know, I know we’re kind of up against it. We went on for a while and I’m going to send you some additional stuff. Some additional resources, things like that.

Speaker 3 (01:20:09):

I appreciate that. No, this is good. I like the, I like that. I’m going to be dedicating more time onto specifically copywriting and also voicemails. That’s something that I’ve thought about, but didn’t really know where to get into. Because when I, in the past, when I had done those broad Google searches that you now clarified, I just have to get through to get to the more specific before I find somebody. Like, they seem very, you know, again, fraud, I don’t know who I’m reading it from. I don’t know how good they are. It’s a simple Forbes article or some random blog posts. So I liked that. You explained that to me more so I’ll be dedicating more time. Cause I do agree. That’s going to have a big impact and then having a nice, solid, even number on my prospecting time does feel really good too. And then having specific times to allocate it, to learning and all the other things that have been in my head, but haven’t been quantified. I do like the easy numbers here.

Brian Margolis (01:21:11):

Very cool. So I will, I won’t do it today cause I have a pack day as well, but I will follow up with you. Well, it could be later today. And I’ll put together some resources for you and talk about next steps.

Speaker 3 (01:21:26):

Awesome. Well, I appreciate your time and your help and expertise. Thank you, Brian.

Brian Margolis (01:21:30):

Awesome. It was a pleasure to talk to you. I’ll talk to you real soon. Take care. Thanks for listening to another episode of simplify your strategy, magnifier results. If you know someone you think could benefit from this episode, be their hero and share it with them. If you’d like a free copy of my book or you want to be considered as a guest on a future episode, head on over to productivity, giant.com have a great day. And thanks again. Thanks for listening to another episode of simplified your strategy, magnifier results. If you know someone you think could benefit from this episode, be their hero and share it with them. If you’d like a free copy of my book or you want to be considered as a guest on a future episode, head on over to productivity, giant.com have a great day. And thanks again.

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