Ep 543: How To Find Where Your Ideal Clients are Gathering | Michael Mogill Episode Recap

RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help Mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. Before you can sell to your clients, you have to find them
RV (01:01):
In this video, we’re gonna share with you the eight top ways to find where your perfect clients all hang out. Let’s dive in right away with number one. And the first one is, it should be where you hang out. It really should be, it should be all the places that you hang out. Why? One of our fundamental core beliefs at Brand Builders Group is that you are always most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. Which means that if you are building a personal brand, it should be built around people that you’re trying to help. The people that you are best suited to help and who you are most likely to make a lot of money from quickly are the people who are like you were a few years ago. That is who you’re most powerfully positioned to serve. It’s who you are most divinely equipped to help support, which means that those people should be you.
RV (02:00):
They should have been you maybe five or 10 years ago or something like that, right up front. If you’re having a hard time finding your ideal clients, then you might be serving the wrong avatar because that means you are trying to reach someone who you don’t fully understand. If you’ve done the rest of your personal brand strategy right, and you’ve had a good strategist from our team, or if you’re doing it yourself, you should be dialed in on these people because it should be you. So ask yourself that question. Where do you hang out? What are the, what are the magazines that you read? You know, what are the conferences that you go to? And, and you really should know those if you don’t. That brings us to number two, which is ask, ask your current clients where they hang out. Send them a survey, call them on the phone, shoot ’em a quick email, like when you see them at your, in your next encounter, just ask, Hey, what are the books that you read?
RV (02:59):
What are the magazines you subscribe to? What are the podcasts that you listen to? What are the conferences you go to? What associations are you involved with? Who do you follow? Like ask your current clients. Where are their favorite sources of media? And there’s lots of ways to ask. You could do that in person with a email, with a survey, et cetera, et cetera. But ask, it is one of the legitimate best ways to find new pockets where your clients might be hanging out that you’re just not aware of. So go ahead and ask. It’s super, super, super simple. Number three is follow other industry leaders. You should follow other industry leaders. One of the biggest mistakes that personal brands make is that they forget, in order to be a great teacher, you must first be a great student. So you should, again, you should be studying, you should be learning, you should be following other industry leaders or other leaders who are in your space, not ’cause you’re gonna copy them, not ’cause you’re gonna steal their stuff, because you’re gonna learn from them.
RV (04:02):
And because that’s gonna help shape you and, and, and help you understand your space. It’s gonna help you know what’s already been written. It’s gonna help you in order to forward the conversation, which is what a thought leader does. A thought leader forwards the conversation. You have to be in the conversation, right? You have to know what conversation is being had. So follow the other industry thought leaders, because they’re gonna point you to resources and talk about people and events and tools and media outlets and groups that you can be, you know, plugging into. And that’s gonna help, help you understand really quickly where those people are. Which brings us to number four, which is kind of related. It’s podcasts. You should be listening to the podcasts in your space, right? Like they’re going to interview and feature other guests who are world renowned leaders in, in your space.
RV (04:54):
Now, our goal here, right as we build your personal brand, is that one day we want you to be the guest, right? I mean, one day you’ll probably be the host first, and we want you to get interviews with those other people. And then one day we want you to become the guest where you are the expert thought leader. You are the most world renowned authority. You are, you know, the leading, recognized voice in your space, but you have to kind of know who those people are. And so listen to the podcast and this plugs into number five, which is search. Use the search, search for your topic, search for your space, search for your audience in each of the search functions, not just Google, but search in the YouTube search bar, search inside of Twitter, search inside of Facebook, search the terms on TikTok, search the actual terms, and that will introduce you to the leaders, the influencers, the movers and shakers.
RV (05:49):
And it’s gonna show you the groups, right? Search on LinkedIn and, and you search a topic like sales and all the top sales groups are gonna come up. They’re all right there, right? Someone has already gathered your audience. That’s the great thing is while you want, while you build an audience, you want to find existing audiences while you build your own audience, which is one of the things we’re super passionate about, is teaching you how to build your own audience while you’re building your own audience. You need to find existing audiences, and that’s what this whole video lesson is all about, right? So use the search feature. Relatedly is hashtags, which is number six. Hashtags are going to help you find your people. And, and if you’re following industry leaders pay attention when they use a hashtag, right? If you don’t know what a hashtag is, right, it’s just, it’s just the pound sign and then a word, right?
RV (06:42):
Like, you know, we sometimes use mis pound mission driven messengers. And so if you’re following brand builders group, that’s like one of the hashtags that our, our people youth, right? So you would, if you were following us, you would pay attention and go, oh, there’s other people who are following this, this type of a hashtag. You gotta know what are the top hashtags in your industry? Again, this tool that I’m gonna share with you at the end of this video is gonna do all of these for you. So make sure that you stick around. Number seven is Google Alerts. Google Alerts. Google Alerts is one of the oldest features of Google. A lot of people still don’t know about it, but it still works really, really well. You can actually take any term that you would ever type into a Google search bar, and you can set an alert for that term.
RV (07:29):
And what a Google Alert does is it automatically emails you anytime that term shows up in a new published article or in a new online mention somewhere. So Google is scraping the web and it’s, it’s basically like making Google an employee for you, like a virtual assistant or something that’s gonna go scour the internet every day for all the new articles and all the new websites and any new mention of the terms that matter most to you. By the way, you should at least have a Google alert for your name, because you definitely wanna know when people are talking about you and writing about you online. So make sure that you set up Google alerts. And then finally, number eight, the tool is called Spark Toro. This is my absolute favorite. This is a tool that we discovered maybe about a year ago, and it is incredibly powerful because it basically does all of these first seven things for you.
RV (08:25):
What Spark Toro allows you to do is basically type in a topic and then it will tell you all of the people who are sort of like the leading authorities on that topic, or basically it, it scrapes the web and says, people who follow this topic also follow all of these people. The other thing it will do is you can say, you can put in a person and say something like, you know, whoever Mel Robbins and you say, I wanna reach people like the people Mel Robbins reaches. And so you could say people you type in Mel Robbins and Spark Toro will tell you, here’s everybody who has followers that are similar to the people who follow Mel Robbins. It’s a tremendously powerful tool. It it’ll introduce you to you know, branded, like branded or themed accounts or company accounts or just like communities as well as other thought leaders who you’ll be like, I didn’t even, I’ve never even heard of that person, even though maybe you have been in the space for a long time.
RV (09:26):
So we’ll include an our affiliate link to Spark Toro, but it’s a free tool. You get so many free uses of it, or at, at least at the time of this video, it is a free tool and you can use a couple free searches a month, and then you pay some very nominal rate to have access to this. So check out spark Toro. You can click on our affiliate link or just check it out on your own. But there you have it. There you have it. Eight ways to find your ideal audience. You have to find your audience before you can sell to your audience. And remember, before you can be a great teacher, you must first be a great student. So make sure you’re plugged in to your area and to your space to that you are one of these people in and among the crowd, so that you can then rise and raise your personal brand to where you’ll become at the front of that crowd.
Ep 537: Why You Want Your Book to Hit a Bestseller List | Rory and AJ Vaden Episode Recap

AJV (00:02):
Why you want your book to hit the bestseller list. Now, I hear from a lot of people that hitting the bestseller list isn’t important to them because this is not a, a vanity project or, you know, they’ve already made it in their career. And this isn’t about popularity or they’re not trying to feed their ego. And I would say, yeah, it, it, hitting a bestseller list should not be about any of those things. And then I hear from another group of people, I wanna hit a bestseller list. And then remains the question about why, right? So this is a quick review of why every, everyone should want their book to hit a bestseller list. And it is not because it’s gonna make you feel good it’s not because you get some resume resume builder or some new notch on your belt, or it’s some pride thing that you get to brag about to your friends.
AJV (00:57):
Or it’s not an ego thing, or it, it, it shouldn’t be about feeding your self worth or making you feel like your content is worth something. I would say all of those are not the reasons.
AJV (01:56):
So I’m gonna talk about two in particular the USA Today National Bestseller list, the New York Times, but there’s others. Success Magazine is putting their own list out. There’s the indie list. There’s Publishers Weekly, there’s, there’s varying amounts there. Even an Amazon bestseller list if we wanna count that. But it matters because it acts as a filter. It helps people go through the process of helping define what’s a little bit more credible or not, right? Not saying that if you didn’t hit a bestseller list, it’s not a good book. I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that with so much noise, our human brains need a filter of going, where should I put my time, money, energy, and attention. And what it does is it says, this author has done the hard work of helping their book get to X amount of people. And if that amount of people bought the book, there must be a, a varying level, a varying degree, levels of credibility of quality
AJV (02:59):
That is in this book. And that is really helpful. And like I said, there’s Amazon bestseller list, there’s Publishers Weekly, there’s the indie list. Success now has a list. There’s the USA Today List, and then there’s the New York Times. And I think through these different varying levels, it really does create a more intense filter, the higher you go up, right? But these filters help our brains process. Well, if this, if this list has recognized this because this many units were sold or this editorial, that means this. Many people bought it, which means this. Many people heard about it, which means there must be something to it. It is a credibility booster for your book. It is a filter for the noise. And most importantly, it gives your book the extra recognition that it needs, that it requires to be seen by more people, that it can help.
AJV (03:55):
That is why this matters. It’s why it should matter to you. It should matter that you do the work to hit the list so that you can help it get in front of other people where it has the potential to help them. If you are writing a book and you say, I don’t care about a list, then why are you writing a book? ’cause You should be writing a book to get it into the hands of the people. It can help. That means you have to do the work to get it into the hands of people. It can help, which means you, the author has got to promote it, sell it, market it, talk it about it. You’ve got to do the things. And if you do those things, hitting a list helps you do more of those things. So why should you hit the bestseller list? Because you want your book to change people’s lives. That’s why. And the list will help your book be filtered through the noise and get additional recognition and credibility to reach more people. That is why all authors need to care about making sure their book is a bestselling book.
Ep 536: 5 Things you Need to Know to Write, Publish and Launch a Bestselling Book with Rory and AJ Vaden

AJV (00:00:02):
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here getting to interview my one and only the one, the only Rory Vaden. This is apparently our annual podcast together ’cause we did one last year and we are doing one this year. Y’all, I have asked Rory’s permission to interview him as my guest on this episode because we have found ourselves immersed in this unexpected world of publishing over the last, I mean, really, I guess 15 years now unexpected for me, maybe not for Rory. And as we have discovered some things that we find are really important to us as we’re writing our next book, and as we’ve been working with so many of our clients at Brand Builders Group trying to decipher the best way to publish their book and to write their book, it, it drew out some interest in us of going, maybe, maybe we’re not just authors in this space.
AJV (00:01:05):
Maybe we have a bigger role to play in this space. We’ve published traditionally before. We will not do that next time. I’ll reserve what we are doing as a part of the interview. But through this 15 year, you know, kind of adventure in the world of publishing, we’ve learned a lot. And we wanted to share some of that with you today. And that’s why I invited Roan to be my guest as to help reveal some very exciting things that we have going on in the world of publishing. But to also help everyone understand just the state of publishing. Like what does the industry look like today and what does it take to hit a bestseller list? And what is required of the author versus the publisher, and where are we at? And so that’s what we’re gonna cover today. So if you’re listening and you are thinking to yourself, I wanna write a book one day.
AJV (00:02:01):
This is for you. If you’re listening, going, I’m in the middle of writing a book. This is for you. If you’ve already written a book and you’re in the middle of launching your book, this is for you. So, in other words, anyone who has will or will ever write a book, this episode is curated very specifically for you. So Rory, thank you for setting aside some time to come and talk with me today. This is an added bonus. Get an extra hour of my day with you. Yeah, which is also great, but also I believe that I’m not, I’m not saying this biased because I’m your wife and your business partner, but I believe you have figured out something in the world of publishing that no one else has, has cared to or has done the, the work to. But what you have been able to curate, discover, uncover, and Systematize is nothing short of revolutionary due to a deep desire of knowing how to do this better for yourself and for others. And so that’s what I wanna talk about on the show today. So welcome to your show.
RV (00:03:07):
Thank you, babe. I’m so excited about this. I I’m spending an extra hour with you. Yes.
AJV (00:03:13):
So be super
RV (00:03:14):
Fun. As you know, I’m a nerd. I’m a nerd on this topic. So this was, so this will be so fun.
AJV (00:03:19):
Yeah. And so what I wanna do first really quickly is make sure everyone has like a, a solid background on our history in the publishing world as authors. And so very quickly because we don’t have a ton of time and we have a lot to cover, can you just walk everyone through your journey to becoming a published author? And not just that, but a New York Times bestselling author, and then a follow up with a national bestseller. Walk us through, how’d that come about?
RV (00:03:49):
Yeah, so really quick not talking about it, how it came about. Basically, the first product that I ever produced was like audio CDs. But then the second product was a self-published book. And it was, it was the very first skill that I did where I taught, I did Speaking for Money, was called how to Be Funny to Make More Money. That was the subtitle of the book. So the book was called No Laughs, NO toay it to No Laughs, KNOW, no Laughs to No Laughs, how to Be Funny to Make More Money. And I taught the Psychology of Laughter and what makes people funnier, which was something that I had to learn how to do. And so We Self-published that book in 2007. Then
AJV (00:04:37):
Is this book available for Purchase Anywhere?
RV (00:04:39):
No, we have buried it deep, deep into the archives. ’cause It was truly self-published, which means we controlled all the editorial, we controlled all the creative, we found our own printer, we did everything. We registered the I
AJV (00:04:55):
VM number’s, what it means. That’s what it meant to self-publish. Mm-Hmm
RV (00:05:01):
Yeah. And we, we had to select the type of paper that we used and all the, there’s a hundred million decisions you have to make when you self-publish a book that you don’t even realize you have to make to turn it into a physical book. So, so there was that book Then Take the Stairs. It was a traditionally published book. That was our first traditionally published book that came out from Penguin Random House. Long story that we don’t have time for here about how we got a literary agent, and then how we got a book deal. And then that process took about three years, and then it took about a year to write it, do the presales. We release, take the Stairs in 2012, we hit number one on the Wall Street Journal, best settles number two on the New York Times. Then fast forward to 2015, we also released a second book with Penguin Random House called Procrastinating on Purpose, five Permissions to Multiply Your Time.
RV (00:05:55):
That book was one that we fully expected to be a number one Wall Street Journal bestseller, and and a New York Times bestseller. And we missed both of those lists. And we could not figure out why, which is a part of what l led us to where we are today. But we did hit the, the, the Indie IndieBound National Bestseller List. So it was a national bestseller, even though we did not hit New York Times or USA Today or the Wall Street Journal, which are the big main ones. Then last year we soft released another self-published book, which is a children’s book called Be the Buffalo, which we haven’t even really launched. We just, it, it is available on Amazon, but we haven’t actually done the book launch for it. But we released it so that we could print it for our kids. We used Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, which is now, you know, the easiest way to self-publish today. And now we have our new book that will be coming out. We’re tentatively slating around July of 2025, which is the book you and I are writing together. And we have left traditional publishing and we are now hybrid publishing. And we can talk more about that, but that’s, hopefully that’s what you’re looking for. Yeah,
AJV (00:07:10):
And I think this is really important, and I think there’s a, a couple of things that just kind of wanna highlight in our journey of publishing is we have now published in all the formats,
AJV (00:08:02):
It’s not what other people said. This is our direct experience. And I think that’s a really important context for the, the rest of this interview today is we have gone through the, the trials tribulations of all different formats of publishing. And our biased opinion is not meant to influence yours, but it’s to give you facts, right? We have our own opinions. We’ll reserve those for private conversations. But we will keep this high level and factual of expectations. And that’s where we wanna start is, you know, today there is a very, very feasible way to get your book published in three very distinct formats. There is traditional publishing, right? Which means you are working with a, you know, a New York publishing house. There is hybrid publishing, which means you have some investment, the publisher has some investment, and then there is self-publishing. And there is no easier time in the history of our country.
AJV (00:09:06):
We live in the United States. So I’m talking specifically about the United States to get your book published than ever before. Right? There, there was a time not that long ago that if you wanted to publish your book, you had one option and they got to decide if your book was good enough to get out into the world. That’s not how it is to today. And that is good, right? That is, that is powerful. Now, it also comes with pros and cons at every diff at, at every different level. And that’s what we really wanna talk about. So here’s my, here’s my question for you, Rory. Can you just break it down and help explain what is self-publishing? What is hybrid publishing and what is traditional publishing in a way that someone who has never gone through this experience could understand at a high level?
RV (00:10:04):
Absolutely. so basically if you start with traditional publishing, there are, here’s the advantages. The advantages are they pay you to write the book. So they pay you in advance against future royalties. And you have to earn out that advance before you ever make more money. But you never have to pay back your advance if you don’t you know, out earn it. So they pay you in advance to write the book. Then they owned the, they own the book. They actually own the, the, the intellectual property of that, those words in that order, which means they have exclusive right of where to print it, how to print it. They get to have final sign off on the title of the book. They get to have final sign off on the editorial, meaning the words in the book and what gets included and what doesn’t get included.
RV (00:10:58):
They also have the final say on the creative editorial, which is like the book cover. The way that the diagrams inside the book are laid out, the, you know, how big the pages are, they control the creative, they control the editorial. They also distribute the book. So they have, there’s a whole network in traditional publishing, which is publishers make the books, and then they, they send those books to distributors. Those distributors send those books out to retailers, and then consumers go and buy those books. And traditional publishers have a sales team that also calls on retailers and set tries to convince retailers to stock their books on the shelves. You know, of what, what’s new and exciting coming out? And it’s like a, there’s a whole chain. Some of the other great things about traditional publishing are the quality of the books is really high.
RV (00:11:59):
It’s the, it’s the, some of the best editors in the world. The distribution is one of the top things, which is that your book becomes available in airports and brick and mortar bookstores and can be translated into other languages. And there’s foreign rights deals, and sometimes those become movies and things. So that’s the, the, the fundamentals of traditional publishing. Let’s talk about self-publishing next, because it’s basically the opposite of all of that. So in self-publishing, you don’t get paid in advance. You have to pay. And why do you have to pay? Because you have to pay to print the books. First of all, you have to pay to write the book, right? So either you’re gonna write it or you’re gonna hire a writer and you’re gonna pay that outta your pocket. Then you’re gonna hire an editor, you’re gonna pay that out of your pocket.
RV (00:12:51):
Then you’re gonna pay someone to lay out the words on a page that’s called type setting. You have to pay for that. Then you pay for the graphic design of putting in the charts and tables and pull quotes. Then you have to pay for the design of the cover. Then once you actually have the book made and you have to find suppliers for all of those pieces, then you have to pay to print the books, right? And, and the good news is that you get to control that. And so the price to print the books might be lower. It might be like, you know, say four to $5 per book if it’s a hardcover book. But if you print 10,000 units at $5 each, you’re, you come out $50,000 just to get 10,000 copies of your own book. So you have to pay all the money, is the downside.
RV (00:13:41):
The upside is you have full control. You get to say whatever you want. You get to have final authority on the cover. The other downside though is you don’t have distribution. Now with Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing, they have made it super easy to do a lot of that stuff. And so your book can be sold through Amazon, but it’s not gonna be in airports. It’s not gonna be in Barnes and Noble. It’s not gonna be in Books a million. It’s not gonna be at, you know, Parnassus independent bookstore in Nashville. Those places are not gonna have that book. And so you’re naturally gonna sell less of those books ’cause fewer people are gonna see them. The other downside of self-publishing is the time it takes to figure all that out and to control all of that. The other downside of self-publishing is your book is not gonna be New York Times bestseller eligible.
RV (00:14:28):
And there’s some reasons why, but predominantly it’s because you will never s have enough books in print available at all the necessary retail stores around the country of where that book needs to be placed so that people could buy it so that it could all report to count for the New York Times. We have, we have figured out, very few people have ever done this, but we have figured out how to help a few self-published authors hit the USA today bestseller list following our system that we teach. And by the way, we work with client. We have done all three, as AJ has mentioned, we also work with clients regularly who do all three. But the dream of being a real national bestseller is, is pretty difficult and it’s basically impossible. There might somehow be a one in a hundred million chance knowing all the things we know that we could pull it off.
RV (00:15:27):
But it’s, it’s, it’s pretty much, and the other thing is the New York Times bestseller list specifically is there’s not only a quantity factor, there’s not only a distribution factor, there is also an editorial factor. That list ultimately is not objective. The New York Times was sued many decades ago, and the way they won the lawsuit was that they publicly said, it’s not an empirical only list. It’s an editorial list. And so they have very high editorial standards and thresholds. And so self-published books don’t usually cross those thresholds, even if they did sell enough volume in the right places on the right times. So you kind of weigh bye-bye to the, the, the, the New York Times, you know, dream. Then there’s hybrid. But
AJV (00:16:10):
Before we move on to hybrid, okay, you wanna preface ’cause there are some self-publishing companies today that really do help orchestrate and organize all of the things that we just said. Totally. So it’s not really that you’re in it on your own anymore. In the self-publishing world, there are many self-publishing entities that have all have, have orchestrated and put that all together for you. I think one of the, the things I think is important to note about self-publishing is really what is the purpose of the book, right? And I think that’s the same question you have to ask as we go through all of these is what am I trying to achieve with this book? What, what’s the purpose, the intended purpose of the book? And that will help a lot of going, is this self-publishing? Is it traditional or is it this, this middle thing called hybrid, which we can talk about now?
RV (00:17:04):
Yeah, so that’s a great point. You know, when we, we self-published our first book, we had to control all of that. We had to make all those decisions. Amazon, Kindle, KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing came on the scene. They have a whole process that helps facilitate a lot of that if you print through Amazon, but then Amazon gets to control the prices and things, but it helps tremendously. But you still get to own your intellectual property. That’s the other big advantage of self-publishing. You own the intellectual property, so you can do whatever you want with that book. You can create derivative products of that book. You have full control. And then when we did our children’s book last year, we used, as AJ mentioned, a vendor who helped coordinate. We paid them to help us with coordinating the self-publishing aspects of it. She was phenomenal.
RV (00:17:52):
We’ve had her on the podcast and I think we’re probably gonna turn, we’re probably gonna create a whole children’s book division here in the future, working with her ’cause she’s so wonderful. So when you get to hybrid publishing, now hybrid publishing is a blend of self-publishing and traditional publishing. So self-published books often are paperback, not always, but often when you do hybrid, you have access. There’s a hybrid publishing company and a lot of hybrid publishing companies are made up of people who used to be in traditional publishing who left traditional publishing for whatever reason, to go work at a hybrid publisher. So they have a whole process to produce a book that looks like a traditionally published book reads like a traditionally published, published book. Feels like a traditionally published book. So if you have a good hybrid publisher, and there’s, you know, there’s a whole gradient range of hybrid publishers and as well as gradient price points that correspond with each of those.
RV (00:18:57):
They a hybrid publisher though, the good ones, you could have your book right next to a book from Jim Collins or John Maxwell or Brene Brown, and you really couldn’t tell much of a difference. Versus with a self-published book, you can almost spot it instantly. And so there’s a brand equity piece of that that ties into this, that hybrid publishers can help you really create. So the big difference between a hybrid and a traditional publisher is that when you hybrid publish, you also have to pay to produce the book. So you’re not getting paid in advance. You have to pay the cost of producing the book. But much like a traditional publisher, you have a highly skilled team that knows how to produce the book. They also typically include editorial. So you get a top notch editor that you don’t have to go source and find yourself.
RV (00:19:52):
They’re usually included in the price that you pay and they help you edit the book. It also typically includes some element of graphic design for typesetting the pages, designing the cover, and it’s kind of sold as a package. Also, things like registering the ISBN number, those are things that, like the hybrid publisher takes care of a lot of the like logistical technicality things that you never know you have to think of. Now, so the downside is you have to pay, but the upside is you own all of the intellectual property, more like self-publishing. So instead of signing away all of your rights, you get to own them, which means if you wanna change the title of your book, if you want to change the interior of the book, if you wanna change the color of the cover, you have full control to do all that in the way you would.
RV (00:20:47):
If you self-published and you own all of the intellectual property rights to create workbooks and quote books and day planners and daytimers and whatever, whatever thing you wanna do, you maintain control of the ip, you can turn that, you know, into any type of coaching program, mastermind consulting, curriculum, et cetera. You need no sign off from the traditional publisher. The other big advantage of hybrid publishing is the cost of the book itself. So when you self publish, you get the books cheaper because you get to choose where they’re printed. When you traditionally publish, you get in advance, but then you have to buy your own book from the publisher. And usually it’s at a discount of retail. It’s usually around 50% off of retail. But like with, even today with Take the Stairs, we have to buy our own books. Like if it’s a hardcover, take the Stairs book, it costs us like $12 to buy our own book.
RV (00:21:49):
When you hybrid publish, you get to buy the books at much closer to a cost, which means, and the reason why this matters is because if you sell the books, you know, there’s two ways to sell. There’s to sell through retail channels, like stores like Amazon, Barnes and Noble Books, Ilion, you know, airports, independent bookstores, that’s retail channels. But then there are direct sales channels which are like through your website or at the back of a room when you’re speaking or to your consulting clients where they buy directly from you and they pay you when you do self-publishing or hybrid publishing. You know, people say you can’t make money from books, and that’s actually not at all true when you self-publish or hybrid publish. In fact, one of my mentors, Zig Ziglar said, the way to know which type of publishing you should do is you should ask yourself, do you wanna get rich or do you wanna get famous?
RV (00:22:43):
If you wanna get famous, you should tra you should try to traditionally publish. If you wanna get rich, you should self-publish. But Zig told me that before the world of hybrid publishing emerged. And so what hybrid publishing allows you to do is to kind of get famous, but also get rich because the other advantage of hybrid publishing is so, so, so that’s normal hybrid publishing, okay? Is you pay for the book, but you own the ip, you get the books at discount, but they can be but they look like traditionally published books even though you still have full control. And then do you want to talk about why we went into hybrid publishing?
AJV (00:23:28):
Not yet. Okay. I think that, you know, as we’re kind of like going through this interview, there’s really five things that you need to know to write, publish, and launch a bestselling book, right? And that’s what this whole episode about. And the first thing that we’ve been talking about is publisher type. I mean, that’s the first thing that you really have to decide is like, what, what publisher type of, because that’s a really important factor of if you wanna have a bestselling book. And so back to purpose and intent, perhaps that’s not what you care about. I think there is a reason of why to have one that we can talk about. But that’s the first, the first thing. The second thing, these are in no particular order is the marketing of the book. The, the third is the selling of the book.
AJV (00:24:08):
The fourth is pub dates when you actually publish the book. And the fifth is actually making money with the book, which is ROI, which Roy just mentioned. And as we go through this interview, you’re gonna get all five of these things. But I think one thing that’s really helpful to, just to kind of sum up this first one, which is publisher type, is to think about it like this. My good friend Alison Trobridge, who has a hybrid publishing company and a self-publishing company, and also an app called Copper Books. I love how she phrases it. She goes, you have to think about self-publishing like a bootstrapped entrepreneur, right? You’re figuring it out as you fall off the cliff, right? You’re building it as you go and you’re self-funding the whole thing, right? It’s a bootstrapped entrepreneur. Skip to self-publishing. It’s like private equity, right? Or
RV (00:24:53):
Sorry, skip from self-publishing. To which one? To traditional traditional publishing.
AJV (00:24:57):
Traditional publishing. And it’s like private equity, right? It’s like you better come with a well-vetted plan of how you’re gonna market and sell the book, and they only wanna invest on a sure thing, right? They want proof. They wanna know how you’re gonna make money. This is a private equity, you make pennies on the dollar, but they make a lot, right? It’s private equity. Then you have hybrid publishing, which is like a business partnership, right? And there’s a time and a place for all of those. But I think that if you can just go, okay, bootstrapped entrepreneur, self-publishing business partnership, right? We both have skin in the game here, there, this is a true partnership that’s hybrid. And then private equity is like a traditional publisher. If you just wanna kind of categorically think about ’em that way, it will help you just kind of go like, where do I fit based on my audience size my investment abilities my, my writing abilities, my timelines, the purpose of the book all of those things really go into this really huge conversation of publisher type. Now as Rory mentioned we are in the middle of writing our next book and we, it will be a hybrid publisher published book. But there’s more to that story because we ourselves have gotten into the hybrid publishing space. So in January of 2024 we, this is a, a sister company, it’s an extension of Brand builders group. We launched our own hybrid publishing imprint called Mission Driven Press. Now Rory, why did we do that? Like why did we get into the hybrid publishing space?
RV (00:26:36):
Great question. And by the way, if you go to mission-driven press.com, there’s a great table that shows you the advantages and disadvantages of self-publishing, hybrid publishing, and traditional publishing all in one table that we put together. So it sort of summarizes what we’ve been talking about so far at mission-driven press.com. So why did we get into tradit or hybrid publishing? Why would we leave one of the biggest publishers in the world where we got, you know, we were earning over six figures in advances and we hit the New York Times bestseller list. Why would we leave that and go back to hybrid publishing? Well, there’s a few reasons why in general, hybrid publishing is a great avenue for people who are entrepreneurial minded, people who know how to run a business and know how to market, know how to sell, and know how to make money.
RV (00:27:29):
Hybrid is really good because you get the quality and the gravitas of a, of a really, you know, beautiful book that looks like a New York published book. But you get the profit and the, the return on investment the way you do with more of like a self-published book. It’s more of an investment. It’s you’re investing in and you’re getting a return. The reason why we didn’t hybrid publish sooner is because typically historically hybrid publishing books were not eligible for the New York Times bestseller list. And there’s kind of a couple reasons why I think that is. One was that they, they often didn’t meet the editorial standards of New York Times, which are extremely high, extremely high. You might think you’re a great writer, but like it’s a whole different level to, to get the New York Times to sign off on your book, editorially speaking. But the other reason is more practical, it’s more functional, which is in order to become a New York Times bestselling author, first of all, it takes a huge number of units sold in a week.
RV (00:28:44):
And this is something we’ve spent years figuring out and just trying to understand because it’s, it’s a, it’s, they don’t publish much information about how it works. And so, you know, we’ve put together a team that tries to understand what are the ethical rules that the New York Times wants people to play by, and how much does it really take to hit the New York Times? And I’ll share with you a key data point. This is a proprietary data point that’s been compiled by our data science team internally that in the year 2023, okay, if you look at the, a full calendar year of 2023 on average, the average book that hit the New York Times the first time it hit sold 18,401 units in a week on average. So just that alone says you have to move a lot of units, but you also have, those units have to be sold in a variety of different places.
RV (00:29:41):
This is a term known as distribution, meaning it can’t just be 18,000 units sold through Amazon. There’s gotta be the New York Times. Apparently nobody knows for sure. This is a little bit like the Google algorithm, like we don’t, nobody knows for sure, but we’re using the hints they give us along with experience to kind of create a validating set of triangulated hypotheses that then become proven over time. But they have to be sold in lots of places. And self-published books are not sold in lots of places. They’re usually sold on Amazon and through your own shopping cart and your own shopping cart. Sales don’t count for New York Times because the New York Times only recognizes certain reporting retailers. And the industry leans heavily on something called BookScan. And only certain retailers report to BookScan. So your direct sales are good while you make money on them.
RV (00:30:32):
They do not count for the major bestseller lists when you sell through your website. The only sales that count are the officially recognized sales that happen through retail reporting outlets, typically that report through book scan and or the New York Times. So you have to sell a huge number of units. And in order to sell a huge number of units, you have to have a huge number of units in print. Most self published books. And most hybrid publishers are never gonna print that level of inventory. ’cause It’s a huge risk, right? I mean, imagine if you were the publisher, if it was self-published to go, I’m gonna print 20,000 books at $5 each, that’s a hundred thousand dollars just to have enough inventory available to even have a chance. And it’d be super risky on the editorial side. And that’s, and most hybrid publishers also won’t make that investment.
RV (00:31:19):
So most self-publishing never has the distribution necessary to hit like the New York Times. And almost all hybrid publishers also do not have the distribution required to hit the New York Times. That is traditionally that the historically that has been a feature set that only belonged to traditional publishing, they had distribution. Remember they have that channel of, they sell to distributors who sell to retailers who te sell to consumers. Those sales report through BookScan, and they were, those retailers report to the New York Times. And that was a feature set only available to traditional publishing. About two years ago, our team started to notice something very unusual. We noticed a hybrid publishing company that hit the New York Times repeatedly. They hit with, and they were signing pretty big authors like Glen Beck John Maxwell, Joan London like Mike and Peggy Rowe. And these are major books that were, that were hybrid published that were hitting the New York Times.
RV (00:32:33):
So we established contact with them. We wanted to figure out what was going on here. How is this pulling, how are they pulling this off? You know, because previous to a couple years ago, we’d always been told it was impossible. And we had never seen evidence that it was possible. Well, as we built a relationship with this team, we came to found out, find out something incredibly powerful. This company was started by some very high powered tra, formerly traditional publishing executives. And they were able to structure an arrangement where they are a hybrid publisher, but their books are edited. They have the, the editorial level of like a, a a, a major five New York publisher. And they actually have distribution through Simon and Schuster. So it’s not like Simon and Schuster. It is Simon and Schuster. It is a hybrid published book that is printed on Simon and Schuster Printing presses.
RV (00:33:39):
It is shipped from the Simon and Schuster warehouse. The Simon and Schuster sales team calls on retailers the way they would for a normal Simon and Schuster book. And those, it, it has the same distribution chain, the supply chain, so to speak, as a, as an actual traditionally published Simon and Schuster book. And that is why they were hitting the New York Times. They figured out a way to where hybrid publishing could move one step closer to traditional publishing, but it stays just inside the line of traditional publishing in that you own your ip, you control the creative, the author gets to determine the title. But then here’s the other awesome thing that they do. The author doesn’t have to pay to print all the books the publisher pays to print to, to, they pay for the initial print run to satisfy the initial retail estimated sales.
RV (00:34:38):
That is another massive feature set that historically was only available through traditional publishing. So that is when the world changed, is we said, this version of hybrid publishing is as close to traditional publishing. It’s all the editorial, it’s the distribution, it’s the supply chain, it’s being bestseller list eligible. It’s producing a book that is world class, you know, with an an in. You cannot tell the difference between it and, and a normal major book. And yet you can own the IP control, the creative. Now you do still have to pay the cost. So that’s the one sort of, the one sort of downside is you still have to pay because you have to pay to produce the book. But there’s all these other things. And that was when AJ and I said we think with that week. So we started a partnership with them. We created our own imprint, which is called Mission-Driven Press. And so now we offer hybrid publishing through Mission-Driven Press, but that has distribution through Simon and Schuster and has all the editorial and all of these things. And so we said, we’ll go first as authors. We believe in this so much we’re going to abandon traditional publishing, which was something we spent years of our life. It was a desperate dream of mine to do. And we’re abandoning that for what we believe is more of the future, at least for our audience, which is hybrid publishing. And that’s why we started Mission-Driven Press,
AJV (00:36:13):
You know, and I think it’s really important ’cause I think the, the whole concept of being able to, you know, have a legitimate bestselling book that is truly bought by other humans, which is a really important part of the integrity of the process was a really validating moment of this is a space that we could really get into. The other really validating moment for us was, and I think that most really successful brands, no matter what they are they succeed because they really, they were really solving a problem for themselves. And they realized that if they had that problem, others did too. And I think one of the things that made me want to get into this is when we went through years and continue to go through years of trying to make editorial changes to Rory’s previous books, including titles and covers and being told, I know that it’s your book, but no, can’t change the title, can’t change the cover, can’t change the words in the book.
AJV (00:37:13):
No. And it’s like, but we have, we have all this proof of if we did these things that would, it would make, it would, it would have a big impact. It would make more sales. You would make more money. Publisher. The answer is no. And realizing that even though you wrote the book and it’s your ip, what what really happens in traditional publishing is you sell your ip, it’s no longer yours. And to have that realization before, during, and after, as, as anyone who’s a content creator, and I just wanna put it in a a personal context of, you know, those are your stories and you are giving them away in exchange for dollars and cents, right? They’re not yours anymore. The those frameworks, those points, the stories the content is no longer yours. And many times, not even the derivative rights to do more things with that, you have sold that for a payment.
AJV (00:38:05):
It’s no longer yours. And I don’t know if people really understand that as they step into that. And that was a very eye-opening moment for us when we had all this statistical proof and data of how all of these other things that were happening with a different title change would move the needle. And, and we can’t, we couldn’t, we were told no, because at the end of the day, it’s not really ours anymore. And the thing that was again, something we’re like, man, this should never happen again, is believing that no editor has the right to tell you that this can’t be published when it’s yours. Sorry, this part of that story, I know it’s true, but it’s too much for here, right? These words, that name can’t use those. And that’s a, that’s a really sobering moment for the accuracy of your story and the heart of your content.
AJV (00:38:57):
And just realizing as a content creator that you are giving that up for a paycheck. And sometimes that’s okay and in others it’s not. And when it’s not having a good alternative, like a hybrid publisher really made a lot of sense. And so that, that’s another component of just realizing those mm-hmm,
AJV (00:39:46):
How do you actually do that? Right? And I don’t care if you’re self hybrid or traditional, how do you do that? Because that doesn’t matter. It’s the same amount of work, right? To make that hell happen. But I think one of the things that is really important to note is that there is a huge gap and this is across all three options, self, hybrid, and traditional. No one actually knows how to market and sell their book
AJV (00:40:49):
What’s the work involved, what’s the investment involved? What’s actually required to sell enough book books to take a run at a bestseller list? But then also I think it’s a equally as important thing to realize. The other big gap was just knowing when to do it right? Because so many things in life, it’s all about timing. Launching your book is no different. It’s about timing. And I think that as we stepped into this and that’s why this is really a sister company, a brand builders group, which is a personal brand strategy firm. This is the fulfillment side of book strategy, right? But you gotta have a good writing plan, a good writing strategy. You have to have a good publishing strategy that’s mission-driven press. But there also had to be a good sales and marketing strategy to go and execute. And what authors don’t realize is that authors are the salespeople, you know?
AJV (00:41:46):
And I think that is where we really said, Hey, we we’re gonna fill this gap that’s clearly missing. There is no mystery of what it takes to sell books. It’s just some people choose not to do it, whether they don’t know it or they choose not to do it, right? And that you can be in either category but there, there is not a secret. It takes work. And that work is very specific. So Roy, if we could just move in for the, the next 10 minutes to talk about the sales and marketing side of what it actually takes to have a bestselling book, that would be great. And if we could also incorporate the timing component, right? So when we think about marketing, selling and the timing of those things, the nuance of that what, what would you tell the audience is the most important thing to know about how to market your book, how to sell your book, and when to publish your book?
RV (00:42:37):
Mm-Hmm.
RV (00:43:47):
And we’ve seen this time and time again. So one of the things, if you really want your book to be a bestseller, first of all, I think high level, you gotta understand the big buckets of what’s going on here. And so we talk about, again, at mission driven press.com, we sort of lay this out. There’s four, like when people say I wanna write a book, there’s actually four major phases of that project. Phase one is writing the book. Historically, brand Builders group has always been able to assist people with writing the book. We help them find their uniqueness, we help them create their frameworks, we create the big idea. We can help them create an outline for it. We can introduce them to ghost writers if they need them. But you, it’s writing the book. That’s like stage one. Stage two is publishing the book, which is, you know, publishers don’t sell books.
RV (00:44:40):
Publishers make books. Publishers don’t know much about selling books. You a lot of authors think they would, but that’s not what publishing is. Publishing is about making books. It’s about the editorial, it’s about the distribution, it’s about the, the, all the million decisions about what makes a great book. But it’s not so much about selling it. And, and that’s a big mistake that people make. So inside of publishing the book, there are the three options we’ve talked about mostly on this podcast, right? That’s what we’ve been talking about. Stage three is selling the book. So you write the book, then you publish the book, but now you gotta sell the book. And this is where our deepest level of expertise is at Brand Builders Group is teaching people a replicable system, a duplicatable system, a proven system to get real humans to buy your book.
RV (00:45:34):
And when I say we have a system for this, as of last week, we help our 51st brand builders group client, who has followed our system and become a New York Times Wall Street Journal, or USA today national bestselling author. We’ve done that over 50 times in the last couple years. And what we don’t do is we don’t tell authors to buy their own books. If anyone ever says what you should do is buy your own books that you should run, right? Number one, it’s very risky to do that. And it’s number two, there’s some questionable ethics around buying your own books just to make them count for the bestseller list. But number three, it doesn’t accomplish the actual goal, which is changing lives, helping people, and also building your brand and your business. So what we do is we teach a system and there’s seven main mechanisms that we teach people for how to sell books, okay?
RV (00:46:33):
And we can, we’ll deep dive on those for a minute here. But then you have stage four, which is processing the books or reporting the books. So you write the book, writing the book, publishing the book, selling the book, and then reporting the sales. And when it comes to where the rubber meets the road of making sure your sales report you know, to become a bestseller list or become a bestselling author, you have to make sure that your sales, whatever sales you generate, whether that’s 50 books or 5,000 or 50,000 books happen in the appropriate way so that they get recognized by the reporting outlets. We’re not trying to game the system, we’re not trying to cheat, we’re not trying to lie. We’re not trying to make it look like you’re selling more books than you are. We’re just trying to make sure that every single hard earned sale that you created gets counted and that’s it, right?
RV (00:47:29):
So that’s what we’re trying to do. And, and so we actually provide that service for free for any of anyone who’s a brand builders group client, whether they publish with mission driven press or not. If we’re helping you write the book or we’re doing the sales strategy, we do that part because we want your hard earned work to be recognized. We’re not really in the just the business of doing that. We just do that as a service because there’s a lot of people who do it wrong, and there’s a lot of misconceptions and frankly, there’s a lot of shadiness around it and a lot of disorganization and a lot of people have lost a lot of money. And so we just said, we’re gonna just take care of this piece and we’re gonna provide it for free. And we don’t care if you sell 10,000 or a hundred thousand or 10 books.
RV (00:48:10):
I mean, we do, we wanna help you sell. I just mean it’s not like we will only provide that service to like the big famous authors we work with. We provide it for everybody because we were, we were aspiring authors at one point too. So that’s the four stages. Now, if we zi deep dive here, what AJ’s asking about is how do we sell books? That’s stage three. What are the mechanisms? Okay, so I already told you the biggest thing that does not sell a lot of books is PR and social media, which is ironic because that’s what everybody thinks will sell books. And, and I just wanna spend a minute on this. PR is very important. PR is huge for brand building. If you do PR right? It can be huge for list building, but pr in and of itself, going on Good Morning America and thinking that’s gonna sell all your books is not a very good strategy because it’s very, very difficult to get that slot.
RV (00:49:07):
And when you get, when you get that slot, if you get that slot, which is, you know, one in a one in a hundred thousand, you, you’ll be shocked at how little books it sells. And we have, we have clients every week who are on like every month for sure that are on Good Morning America, Fox News, today’s show, you know, various things with Oprah. And you know, several of the biggest podcasters in the world are clients of ours, right? Louis Howes and Amy Porterfield and Ed Millet. We know exactly how many books are sold from being on those shows, but a national TV hit usually sells somewhere between 800 to 1200 units. So it’s not nothing, right? But it’s a very far cry from 18,000 units. If you’re trying to make a run outta New York Times or, you know, tens of thousands of units, if you’re trying to change the world, it’s not gonna happen that way. So
AJV (00:49:56):
Now there are a couple of PR mediums that we have seen that are better to do such as podcasts,
RV (00:50:04):
Right? Yeah. Podcasts are a high return on the buck for how small the audience is. So like the biggest podcast in the world typically are not gonna move as much as a Good Morning America hit, but the audience they’re reaching is much smaller. So as a percentage, because you go, you know, let’s take our book about personal branding. If we’re on a podcast that only has a hundred thousand downloads, but all a hundred thousand people are entrepreneurs will sell way more books to a hundred thousand entrepreneurs who listen to us on a 30 minute podcast interview than we will being on Good Morning America reaching millions of people for a three minute segment of which only a small fraction of them are entrepreneurs. So podcasts actually are a great strategy because one of the things that we talk about is you have to think of your online audience as an offline room.
RV (00:50:57):
And sometimes authors go, oh, I don’t wanna be on that podcast. It’s a small podcast. It, it only gets, you know, a thousand downloads a month. But if you were standing on stage in front of a thousand people, you probably would take that opportunity. You probably would be excited about that. And that’s more of what podcasts are like. It’s a thousand people focused on you giving you their full attention for 20, 30, 40 minutes. So we’re big fans of podcasts. Now you have to have strategies for how to convert those. And this is what it comes down to. I know we’re running short on time. Here’s how you sell books incentives in one word. The secret is incentives. And what you do is you give people additional incentives to order the book. And I’ll just share with you a really quick tip here. Here’s how to sell 50,000 books.
RV (00:51:51):
I can teach you this in 60 seconds. What you do is you get 10,000 people to buy one copy. And so you give some people some extra incentives. If they buy one copy, then you get a thousand people. You try to find a thousand people who will buy 10 copies. And so you come up with a few more incentives that they get if they buy 10 copies, and then we wanna get a hundred people to each buy a hundred copies and they get a really big incentive, and that’s another 10,000 units. Then you wanna find 10 people who will each buy a thousand copies. That’s another 10,000 copies. A great incentive there would be to like give away a speech and say, Hey, if you buy a thousand copies of my book, I’ll come speak or I’ll make an appearance or something like that. And then if you can, you try to find one person who would buy 10,000 copies, you know, and that might be like $300,000. So you’d have to give them some really, really, really big incentives. But you
AJV (00:52:49):
Let us know when you find those people because we would like to meet them
RV (00:52:53):
And, and, and, and there are those people out there. There are those people indeed. So incentives and that’s part of what our team helps you do is help you think through those strategies, think through those incentives. We’ve got templates and scripts and examples. But the point is, get real people to buy your book. And yes, we’ll use incentives to help them, but people know they’re buying books, we’re talking about the book. They’re real humans with real transactions. And you’re doing the hard work it takes to create a movement and change lives. And if all goes well, our team will help make sure hopefully those sales get reported properly and hopefully those sales get counted. And you get listed as a bestselling author and we’ve got a great track record of doing it because we’re trying to do it the right way. We’re trying to do it. We openly, honestly, in transparency with retailers, with publishers and with authors, it’s not about trying to just buy your own books to game the system. It’s doing the work it takes to tell the world about your book and that your book deserves to have that work.
AJV (00:53:57):
Yeah, and I would say one of the things I think it’s really important to kind of sum a lot of that up is like, that is sales. Y’all
AJV (00:54:50):
But that is at the end of the day, what moves books. We do this all day, every day with new authors every single day, every week having launches. And I can tell you right now, the people who go, I will sell my book, those are the books that sell
RV (00:55:20):
Well, you know, on this point, Robert Kiyosaki had a, a great quote on this. He said, you have to remember, it’s not called New York Times Best Writing Author. It’s New York Times best Selling author. This is a sales game. And like anything, whoever is selling the most is, is, is getting the word out there. And by the way, we do this for new authors. We also do this for the biggest authors in the world, right? John Maxwell, ed Millet, Lewis Howes, Amy Porterfield. Like we have helped Eric Thomas et the hip hop preacher, we’ve helped some of the most reputable, credible personal brands in the world build their brand by helping them do this stuff. We’ve had three of our clients have followed our system and pre-sold a hundred thousand copies of their book, like Pre-sold during their launches. So this stuff works at the highest level and it works if you’re just starting out.
RV (00:56:15):
But you know, the reason you would wanna be a bestseller is statistically you make, you make a lot more money in advances, in speaking fees. You get better media opportunities. I mean, look, you know, just to use Lewis Howes as an example, ’cause he’s a client and a close friend. Everybody wants to be on Lewis Howes podcast, everybody, it’s one of the biggest podcasts in the world. And every week his team gets flooded with books that get mailed to them. And when they open those books, there’s two piles. There’s the no pile, and there’s the maybe pile. Being a New York Times bestselling author doesn’t automatically put you in a, some type of a yes pile, but it pretty much almost always puts you automatically in the maybe pile. So you’re gonna separate, you know, it’s the, the, the, what is it, the wheat from the shaft.
RV (00:57:03):
Like you get separated from the crowd, that you get a real, legitimate, honest look by literary agents, by public publicists, by speaking opportunities by ma you know, being invited to be in part of, you know, VIP groups and stuff like that. But I do wanna just leave everybody with this, aj. It’s really important to know that you should do this and we’re really good at it, and we teach you straightforward practices that are ethical. There’s no, there’s no manipulation, there’s no deception. It is just hard work. But we give you the templates, we give you the tools. That’s what our clients pay us for. And you should want to do this because you want to sell a lot of books, right? But you have to remember bestseller lists. Don’t change lives, but books do bestseller lists. They don’t really change lives. They might change your life.
RV (00:58:01):
If anything, they’ll change one person’s life. They’ll change the author’s life. But nobody on the world, nobody in the world cares. If you’re a bestselling author, they care about, can you help me? Can you, could you have advice, insights, inspiration that will help me in my life? But either way, to reach a lot of people, you need to do the work of getting the book out there. So bestseller lists are fun to go after. They are meaningful. They, they do, they do matter, but they’re not the thing. Nowhere near are they the ultimate goal here. You know, they’re a fun game as a checkpoint to kind of go after. But this is about changing lives. This is about helping people. This is about making a difference in the world, and it’s also about helping you build your brand and your business by getting your, your message out there. So we try to, you know, we wanna pursue bestseller lists. We think that we’re pretty good at it. We got a strong track record, but it’s not the end goal. It’s, it’s a side goal of going, let’s help you get your book into many people’s hands as possible so that your book can make the world a better place. That’s what this is about. That’s why you started bestseller lists. Don’t Change Lives, but Books do.
AJV (00:59:12):
Yeah, and I would just add, like, why would you wanna do all of this? It’s a calling, right? You can’t not, amen. It’s a calling. It’s something that’s been placed on your heart that you feel like you have something that has the power to help someone else. And having it in writing words on pages it matters because you know that if somebody else reads it, it can help them. It’s a calling. And it has to be that first because then all the work is worth it. And it doesn’t know, it doesn’t matter how many copies are sold, it’s worth it knowing that it could potentially change the trajectory of someone else’s life. It’s a calling. That’s why you do it. And so we’re so excited to be a part of Mission-Driven Press. We’re so excited to be able to more deeply serve our community.
AJV (01:00:01):
And if you are an aspiring author or you’re in the middle of writing that book or you’ve got your book done and you’re trying to launch it, I would encourage you guys go check out our website, mission driven press.com, fill out our author form and tell us about your book. So Mission-Driven Press. There is a form that says, tell us about your book. If it’s a future book. It’s a book in motion. It’s a book heading into launch at any stage. We wanna hear about it, see how we can come alongside you, see what we can do to help you get that book into the hands of people that it can help. So, mission-driven press.com. Fill out the form. And y’all, thank you so much for listening. Rory, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. Everyone else, we will see you next time on the influential personal brand.
Ep 533: The #1 Best Way to Get Referrals | Sara Hardwick Episode Recap

AJV (00:02):
I’m gonna make this sweet. I’m gonna make this short, and I’m gonna tell you the number one way to get referrals. This is very easy, very simple. Give them first, if you wanna become an expert at getting referrals, then become an expert at giving referrals. There is no better thing to do in the world in order for someone to give you a referral than for you to give them one first. This, it’s an act of generosity. It’s an active initiation, it’s an act of service. It’s an act of you showing them, but you believe in what they do. But there is also this overarching law of reciprocity that just exists in the universe. That, and it’s, this isn’t why you do it. You’re not giving to get, you’re giving to give, but as a result of giving value, of providing connection, of establishing an introduction of giving something of yourself, there is this natural inclination in humanity to want to do that in return.
AJV (01:10):
It is harder for you to ask someone of, to ask something of someone before you have given them something first. I think that’s where a lot of sales hesitation comes from. And in this case, I think it’s where a lot of referral hesitation comes from. You feel bad asking, you feel guilty asking, you feel salesy asking. And I think a lot of that stems from a lack of confidence in conviction of knowing that you have provided them value before you ask. And there’s a lot of different ways that you can provide value. I’m just using this. One example of what you can do is give an introduction, give a referral first. There is value in that connection. There is a value in that introduction. I’ll make sure it’s a good one, right? But it doesn’t even have to be a professional one. Like maybe it’s a referral to a vendor.
AJV (02:04):
Maybe it’s a referral personally, right? But as you’re thinking about your network, your sphere of influence, your clients, past clients, whatever, pay attention, right? That requires active listening skills. That requires being present, but pay attention to what people are talking about, what they’re asking for. Perhaps it’s just a, a, a book recommendation, right? It’s a, it’s a connection of going, Hey, I heard you talking about this thing on our last call. I’m gonna send you the link to this book and then actually do it, right? That is providing value. Perhaps you heard him talking about taxes. It’s like, Hey, I don’t know if you’re looking for a new CPA, but mine has been amazing. Let me connect you to him. Perhaps they were asking for business, right? It was an I be like, you know what? I’m gonna inquire a little bit about that. I’m gonna say, Hey, person tell me, tell me
AJV (02:59):
Who it is that you’re exactly, that you’re looking for. Like, who’s a great client for you? Like, I’m gonna be intentional of going, okay, I’m gonna genuinely think about that and I’m gonna refer you to someone. I’m going to connect you to someone. That doesn’t mean they’re gonna buy from you, but it does mean I am listening and providing value to you through connections and introductions. Perhaps it’s a, a podcast episode. It could be a book, it could be a vendor, it could be actual business connections. Maybe it’s a personal connection. Maybe you heard someone say, Hey, we’re struggling to find extra, extra childcare help in the summers. And it’s like, oh, man, I have a whole deck of amazing people home from college. Let me refer you to them. Y’all like, the list goes on and on. If we can just reshift how we think about connections, introductions, and the word referrals specifically, it will change your mindset on what it is.
AJV (03:51):
Because really a referral is just an introduction, right? It’s a, it’s a connection. And that could be to a, like I said, to a book, to a podcast, to a course, to a, a vendor, to a, a prospect, to a, the list goes on. But what I know is that often the, the sales hesitation, this sales reluctance comes from a deep seated issue of have I earned the right to ask for this? Like, have I provided enough value that would, that would give me the confidence in asking for something in return? I, I know that it comes from that deep down for most of us, maybe not all of us, but for a lot of us. And I also know that some of us just aren’t gonna have that natural hesitation to ask for something. And that includes help, right? Which is really what we’re doing here.
AJV (04:38):
We’re asking for help. And so the best thing that you can do is not ask for it, but just give it, just give it and give it so well and give it so freely that the person then says, that was so generous, that was so kind. What can I help you with? What do you need help with? And then you need to be prepared, right? And that’s when you need to know clearly what do you need help with? What, what, who do you need to be referred with? What vendors do you need to meet? Like, what clients are you trying to connect with? And that, that is a clarity conversation that you need to have with yourself about who do I wanna be referred to? What I, what am I looking for right now? What would be helpful? Because I know personally, I get asked for referrals and introductions all the time.
AJV (05:25):
And the, and the other party can’t clearly tell me why or who
AJV (05:57):
Anyone in that seat right now, but let me make a mental note of this so that I know for the future. And I think that’s the other part about asking for referrals and asking for introductions is it’s not a one time thing, right? It’s not, there’s not, there shouldn’t be this huge buildup to this. One thing I’m gonna ask for this one time, and I hope I get it. It’s like this is a continuous thing, which means you should be giving continuously. It’s like how can you con consistently and continually provide value to those around you? And that means you’ve gotta be in their life. You have to know what’s going on. Could be through social media, through texting, through networking meetings, through phone calls, but this is called relationship building. Yeah, it is. And that takes work and it takes time. And that means it needs to be a part of your business strategy.
AJV (06:43):
This, this is a business growth strategy. This is a life strategy. This is
Ep 532: Growing Revenue Through Referrals with Sara Hardwick

AJV (00:00):
Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is AJ Vaden here today, and this is a really special and unique episode because I’m getting to do this interview, this conversation with Sarah Hardwick, who is a, a new acquaintance of mine, but she is on this interview on behalf of Giftology which is not new to me or to Rory, or to Brain Builders Group. And Giftology was founded by a really good close per personal friend of ours, John Rulon, who over the summer we’re at, we’re recording this episode in September, 2024, and just a few weeks ago John unexpectedly passed away while on family vacation. And I think it’s a very unique thing to get to be a part of a person’s legacy that literally like outlives them in a way that is felt like viscerally.
AJV (01:08):
I’m gonna give you guys this quick story about John as we step into this interview with Sarah. But I think this is a very good moment for us all to go. Does what we really do matter after we’re gone. Like, does our legacy really have the potential to live on, live on when we’re no longer here? Or, you know, there’s a lot of really big personal brands out there like Dave Ramsey and Zig Ziglar, and it’s like, you kind of see the, the generational change and it, it starts to lose its impact a little bit, or it has the potential to, and and then you have these moments that I experienced after John passed away just a few weeks ago. And I think this is a great testament to Giftology. I think this is a great testament to John, but also a great testament to the power of the work that you do that goes beyond you.
AJV (02:07):
And so after John passed away, it was probably only two weeks, two after he passed away, and I was traveling, and I got this very weird email. And it was weird because it was this introduction email that somebody had filled out a form on my personal website, not brand builders group.com, but aj vaden.com. And they had filled it out and they had said, Hey I know this is gonna sound weird, but you were referred to me by John Rulon. And I was thinking to myself, that is weird. What do you mean when? And he said to be honest, I don’t even really know how to talk about this in this form. I just wanted you to know that he’s been talking about you to me for months. I did not reach out in time, and I want to honor his legacy and follow up with you after.
AJV (02:58):
And so he was like, if you’d be willing, here’s my phone number. Call me. And I didn’t call him because I was traveling, but I did text him and I said, hi, this is AJ Baden. And then I realized that wasn’t enough. And so I made him a voice message, which I’m pretty sure I cried the entire voicemail. I think I had to pause like five times to get through it,
AJV (04:10):
I just, I knew that I had to reach out. And I actually have my call with him today looking at my calendar after this interview, not probably coincidental but this was scheduled weeks ago, way before this episode was scheduled. And I have my call with him today. And we were both sharing like, wow, like the life you live matters beyond your death. Like what you believe for what you stand for, what you teach it, it has significance like a lot. And for this particular conversation around referrals and connections, I thought it was just like the greatest testament to someone’s life work to go. And you’re still doing it after death, right after death. You are still connecting people through referrals. And so I’m glad I made through that without crying. But for everyone here listening today,
AJV (05:13):
That you’re, you do have the potential to change lives that you will never, ever, ever know about. And also, like when you do what you’re meant to do, when you’re, when you do that thing that you were called to do way beyond what you even thought it, it outlives you, right? It outlives you. And, you know, John’s entire thing was connections and referrals through gifting and and really just loving on people, really. And so I wanted to have this episode because Giftology is launching a very awesome referral course. And Sarah is here today to talk about referrals and the uniqueness of that. I’m gonna formally introduce her in just a second. But here’s what I would say. It’s like, this isn’t just an episode about how important your work is, whatever your work may be, that there is, there is a, there’s a component of it that will outlive you if you live into its fullness, but also the power of connection even beyond death, right?
AJV (06:13):
Like the power of referrals and what that has to do to help you grow and build community and build your business. And that’s really the heart of this episode, is how can we help you do the thing that’s required to help you increase your impact, which is you actually have to reach more people. And you can do that, I believe, in the best way possible through referral. So this is an, this is an interview today about how do you grow your business through referrals. So, longest introduction ever. Now let me formally introduce you to Sarah Hardwick, who is the community relationship strategist at Giftology. She is spearheading the Rich Relationship Society, which is an exclusive membership. We’re gonna be talking about that today. I’m so excited about that. But I think some other things that are really amazing about just Giftology and this entire concept in general is how you can do it in a way that actually fosters connection, not just sales. And that, I think is what is so unique and powerful about this course, this membership, what you guys are doing, and the heart of Giftology. And so Sarah, so honored to have you on the show today. Welcome.
SH (07:26):
Oh my goodness, I am so honored to be here, aj, thank you for sharing that story and getting through it without tears is, is a skill. But John was the ultimate connector, the, the referral king. And, and for what you said about the fact that these connections are still living on now is just a testament to his legacy. And that legacy is something that we are so, so, so committed to continue because building relationships and taking care of those relationships is, is so, so important from a business point of view, referral, sales, all those things, but also just like the heart of who we are as, as humans. So thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited for, for
AJV (08:14):
Our conversation. It’s gonna be a great conversation. And I know it’s gonna be great because I know that our audience and, and specifically I’m, I’m, I’m gonna pick on the Brain Builders group community just for a second, and the most loving way possible,
SH (08:32):
Yeah.
AJV (08:33):
And I’m like, I’m gonna tell you the easiest, best, fastest, cheapest way to grow your business is through referral. But what people wanna hear is somehow, if I can just make that social media post, or if I can just, you know, optimize this funnel or before I can, and I’m like the listen, you can try to convert strangers on the internet, or you can ask friends and family and clients who know, like, and trust you.
SH (08:57):
Yep.
AJV (08:58):
But there is this reservation, this hesitation to doing that. And so that I, I would really love to talk about that. And I think some like basic terminology might be really helpful for everyone who is listening. And so I wanna start by asking you and your opinion, what is a referral? Like, how would you just simply define a referral? What is it?
SH (09:19):
Yeah, I feel like sometimes referral gets this like icky stigma. It’s like this icky word, like you said, people don’t wanna ask their family and friends for business for introductions. But I would truly say it is just an introduction when we are adding value to the relationships that in our network, like the law of reciprocity is real. People want to add value to us as well. And if we’re in business, most of the time, the way that people can add value is a referral, is an introduction. And that referral doesn’t have to be a referral that’s a client. It can also be an introduction that is somebody like, Hey I have a bunch of kids and I need a ba new babysitter. Can you introduce me to a babysitter? Right? You’re still adding value by introducing that contact. So I would take the, the ickiness the stigma away from it, and really just focus on like, how can I add value to somebody’s business through introducing them to someone I know, like, and trust as well.
AJV (10:23):
Hmm. That’s so good because I think what you just said, it’s like people, and I think in our personal life, like I don’t think I’ve, I’ve ever heard any woman or man for that matter, I know who needs childcare help to be reserved about asking for referrals,
SH (10:39):
Yes.
AJV (10:40):
But it’s because we don’t process it that way in our head. And so I think a little bit, this is like a, a psychological shift. It’s a mindset shift of going, referrals are just introduction, and I love that. And it’s anything that can add value to someone else’s life. It’s any introduction that could add value add, add value. Exactly. It’s really, really, really powerful. But I mean, like, how would you feel about even, because I think one of the things that I hear all the time is, well, how do you ask for a referral without asking for a referral? And I’m, what, what do you mean? And they’re like Don, I don’t want to say that word.
SH (11:18):
Yeah. How do you get referrals without asking, right? That’s like the million dollar question. I think, and what John’s strategy has always been is about adding value to people first. Whether that is the, you giving them a referral first, whether that’s you gifting them writing a handwritten note, caring about their family in some way, showing up in an uncommon way for them. I think if you add value to the relationship first, again, law of reciprocity. I’ll keep bringing it up, bringing it up. They will want to add value to you. And then being able to frame that value in a business setting of, look, hey, I’m looking to grow my business in 2024. Here’s what we’re looking to do. Explain referrals in a conversational way and get away from the icky ask. It doesn’t have to be an ask that you throw out on the transaction table, right? Or in a client meeting, it can really be about like adding value to each other’s businesses. If I’m at a networking event, like, let’s talk about how we can help each other, and if that works out to be referrals, awesome. And let’s let add value in that way, introduce people, let the referrals flow both ways.
AJV (12:32):
Hmm. I love that. I think that’s so, and if you guys are not writing this down and taking notes, pull over and write this down. How do you ask for referrals? You don’t. You simply give referrals first.
SH (12:42):
Love it.
AJV (12:43):
It’s like you provide value. And one way you can do that is you make a referral. Right? Exactly. It’s don’t want somebody else to do for you what you’re not willing to do for them first.
SH (12:55):
Yeah. And we have this we have this long list of 20 plus ways you can demonstrate value, those demonstrations of value. One of them is introducing a professional contact. One of them is introducing a non-professional contact, that babysitter example, right? But there’s loads of other ways that you can add value and kind of get that referral ball referral conversation going, handwritten notes, sending a voice memo, just following up with someone after you had a meeting and realize that their kids were homesick. And you can be like, Hey, is there anything I can do to support you in this, in this hard time? Right? So I think it’s, yes, that is absolutely the best way to get referrals, like give referrals out but also just give something, demonstrate some sort of value and that will come back and if you frame it right in the form of referrals.
AJV (13:46):
Yeah. I love that. And I think that’s so important because, you know, I was actually I’m in this mastermind and we had our, they call it a pod. We had our pod meeting yesterday, and this was like a really great example of that as we tried to do a best practice. We rotate, like somebody do like their like little 10 minute TED talk. And yesterday was on like social media growth and at the end, so she did her whole 10 minutes. She was like, I have a whole course on this. I’m gonna give you my top 10 minutes. Like, these are the things that I think would be applicable to all of you. And at the end of it, we were all like, so how do we buy your course
AJV (14:47):
You know? Yeah.
SH (14:48):
I I love that you just brought that example up because I think sometimes the gap is where we add all of this value and then we don’t know how to receive people’s gratitude or payment or whatever that looks like. So we need to be strategic about like, okay, we’re gonna add all this value to a relationship, but also be prepared for them to come back and be like, Hey, how can I help you? What can I do for you? And that’s when you need to have that referral communication ready of like, I’m doing this in 2024. This is what a good referral looks like for me. This is what a bad client looks like for me. Like, give people who want to help you a clear vision of how they can help you, especially in the referral world. And that’s where like the idea of having a referral conversation with someone, we call it a clarity conversation. Get clear on two people’s needs rather than having just like a quick referral ask. And you’re like in the parking lot, like, bye, okay, hope, hope you send me somebody. Right? that is where like the real difference comes in. I think a lot of business leaders have a gap there.
AJV (15:58):
That’s so, and you know, it’s so interesting. I’m so glad that you brought that up. ’cause One of the things I have on my little question chart for you too,
AJV (16:06):
When, when someone says, Hey, that was amazing. How can I help you? Like, Mm-Hmm,
SH (16:54):
That’s not helpful,
AJV (16:56):
I’m like, because it’s literally, it’s like, it’s like literally brain overload. I’m like, if it’s everyone that’s like, I genuinely need to think about it. And genuinely, I probably won’t make time to do that. You know, I’m just being honest. But it’s
SH (17:31):
Yes, I will, I will answer straight and simple three things that we teach everyone to have clear in their own mind, and then also be able to communicate clearly to someone who is asking you like, how can I help? What referrals can I give? The answer is never anybody, anyone, exactly what you said. Then you’re putting them into like this decision fatigue cycle where they have to think and they have to think about their whole network. And, and that’s not helpful. So the three really clear points that are key to this clarity conversation that we teach. Number one, what client do I serve best? And be able to paint a picture of that to somebody that can be like business size or personality, put in some psychographics. Like you really want to be able to paint a picture of if they’re walking down the street and they run into Joe who’s a financial advisor and X, y, Z deals with these types of clients and lives here, they’re like, oh my gosh, I have to introduce Joe to aj.
SH (18:31):
Right? So what client do you serve best? Paint that picture really well. What client do you serve worst? Like, make sure you communicate that because creating that dichotomy for them then allows them to, to not, you know, live in the world of their whole network of anybody they can like clearly sort and be like, not, not for aj, for aj, not for aj, for aj. And then the third piece, which so many of us I think just, just miss and this makes it hard for people to refer you, is how do you want to be referred? Hmm. Good. Be clear about that. I prefer a three-way text message. So everybody who may be providing me introductions, they understand that and they send a a three-way text message. Why do I like that? Because I like to send a video. And this was John’s specialty too. I learned it, learned it from him, and learned it from the best. But being able to clarify how you want to be referred three-way, text message, email, phone call, like give people those simple steps to refer you business and more referrals will, will flow through.
AJV (19:39):
That’s so good. You know, it’s interesting ’cause I’ve heard lots of people say before it’s like, hey, to be super clear on who you wanna be referred to. Yes. I have not heard anyone say like, also describe who you do not want to be referred to. And as I was going through this in my brain, ’cause you know, sometimes the perks of being a podcast coach or or a podcast coach is like free coaching. So this is like, so good. You know,
AJV (20:22):
We are not well positioned to serve someone who is in the position of I have to make money in the next 90 days, or I can’t pay my bills. And that’s different than somebody who’s just starting out who has a runway. Right? And that was, it’s a really, ’cause I think a lot of people referred us, people in the past are going, oh, they’re starting to build their personal brand. You need to talk to Brain Builders group. And it’s like, actually we’re, we are best and most well positioned to start to serve someone who is already probably a little bit more established, not the super beginner in terms of I have no runway has to work. What can you do for me? That’s not who we serve best. And just even being able to clarify that little thing in our referral ask will be a monumental difference for our ability to serve people the right way.
SH (21:10):
Love it. Yeah. That, that clarity is so, so important from a personal and your business perspective. And then also being able to communicate that. And what I’ll say to, to your point of people who have referred you business in the past, and maybe it isn’t that right fit, right? Mm-Hmm.
AJV (22:22):
And I think that’s really important. And if you’re, I’m being serious. Like if you are like listening to this while you’re driving or something, I hope that you go back and actually sit down and do some of these exercises. Mm. You’re not good at it and you, or you’re maybe you’re good at asking but not good at receiving them. Or maybe you’re not asking at all. Like this is legitimately, legitimately what you need to do to get better at it. It’s your job to be a good asker. It’s your job to be a good communicator. It’s your job to paint the picture. That’s your job. It’s not the other person’s job. ’cause I know I’ve heard of, I’m sure you have too, Sarah, of like, well, I ask all the time, but I never get ’em. I’m like, tell me how you ask
SH (23:03):
Exactly.
AJV (23:04):
Yeah. And I think that this is the fine tuning of that. And I love what you said too, is include how do you wanna be referred? What’s the best mode of communication here? Yes. and I think that too is significant, right? Of going, let’s do this in a way that we can be responsive and do all the things that we do and include, I love that. Including a video in the text message. I think those are things that are also super helpful. So this is kind of in the same lane as that, but I’m curious, well, knowing all of that, which I think is so great, when is the best time to ask then?
SH (23:39):
Yeah. I will tell you the absolutely worst time to ask to start. And that is like right after a transaction or right after you sign on a client or a lot of people, they sit down and have like a 30 day, 60 day annual review with a client. Like, that is not the time. We want to separate the time that you are working for your client or adding value to someone else from the time that they are going to add value to you. So I will answer that with absolutely don’t ask at the transaction points. And that’s always been our philosophy from a gifting lens too. Like, don’t gift on the day a deal closes or at the time of transaction, right? Like, we wanna show up for people in uncommon times, in uncommon ways. When is the best time to ask? That’s why we’ve created a system around this. So you can actually like start, go through your contacts, start building those relationships, start having the referral conversations that then get you to a point where you’re sitting down with a potential partner and having a clarity conversation. So there’s not like a set time that we’re like, you have to ask now. But you definitely should be building up the relationship in a meaningful way before you ask. And that’s why we kind of need a system in order to get there.
AJV (25:02):
That’s good. You know,
SH (25:19):
We are definitely different in that regard. And that’s what I mean, even from a, a gifting perspective, right? Like that’s what is so different about our philosophy. We do things very, very differently over here at Giftology because we really are strategic about you showing up for this person in a relational way, period.
AJV (25:38):
That’s the difference.
SH (25:38):
That’s the difference. And of course, like there probably is studies, statistics, all those things that show that window of, of opportunity. If it feels right, go for it. But if you are looking to build a relational referral based business, we need to show up relationally for people before they do something for us, before they add value, before they send us a referral, right? So being able to systematize how you’re adding value, warm up that conversation and then ultimately make sure again, like it is a conversation where y’all are seeing how you can add value to each other. That clarity conversation, it’s not just about what you can do for me, how you can refer me if you’re a business leader. I wanna know the same thing about you if you’re a client of mine. Like what’s going on in your world that I need to know about that we’ve never talked about before in the, on the transaction table. Hmm. So I, I think that’s really important, the separation for us at least.
AJV (26:37):
You know what? I just had an aha moment in my brain for the first time ever of why I think so many people are actually reluctant to asking for referrals. Hmm. I actually think it’s because they correlate it to sales and they’re reluctant to selling. Right?
SH (26:52):
Absolutely.
AJV (26:53):
There is that transactional element of it’s so hard for so many people to ask for the business, right? And it’s that kind of like rejection moment, right? Yeah. And I think as you were talking of like, yeah, don’t ask at the point of of transaction, it just clicked in my brain. I’m like, oh no. Like people are actually seeing this as like a defined sales conversation. It’s a transaction. And if we can shift that mindset to be like, no, this is, this is a relational conversation, don’t ask then this is a a give to give. Not even a give to give. It’s a give to give. Yes. and give. So well give so much that people naturally go, wait, how can I help you? Right. That’s a completely exactly different mindset. And I just, I know I’ve been through, I have been the person who’s like, all right, just power through. I’m gonna ask every single time. This is when I do it. This is my process. And I think that’s fine for some people, but I don’t, I don’t believe that will get you probably the best and most quality. It may get you the quantity, but it may not get you the best and most quality. And at the end of the day, that’s what we’re after.
SH (27:57):
Yeah. The, the quality, the quality piece is huge. Like having that conversation with somebody to get clear on who your best worst clients are, right? Clear vision of your business, who you work with, that conversation allows for them to go out and really talk about you well, in a way that they can bring back pre-qualified pret, trusted referrals to you. And, and that’s, that’s the goal. Like if people are just out there, you ask them to refer you business and they’re out there like referring everybody and their mother to you, but, but they haven’t done the work for you, right. Of like, I am out there selling you on your behalf. So then all you have to do is take my introduction. They’ve already said Yes. I’m so excited to work with aj. Like that’s the type of referral partner we want. And and our belief is like, if you just get a core group of partners, that is so much better than just like asking every client that you have, like for, for a referral. We, we joke like our course, a lot of referral trainings and things like that, it talks about how to get the fish, how to catch the fish, how to get the referral. Ours is all about how do you collect a crew of fishermen that will go out and find the fish on your behalf? That’s good. Yeah. Like shifting the focus from, it’s not about the referral. Those will come, it’s about the referral partnership who can get you the referral. And I, and I think that that shift is, is what’s needed.
AJV (29:32):
That’s a good word. Because that’s a, that’s a mindset shift. It is. And I, and I love that. And I know that this is a part of, you know, this, this entire course that you guys are launching out into the world, which I’m so excited about. And you guys have this awesome acronym called Rich. Yes. Which is reciprocal, influential, connected, and humble. And I’d love to just talk about that for a second. ’cause This is, that’s very much what you just said. It’s like, Hey, don’t go out fishing. How do you, you know, recruit a crew, a fishermen Yeah. To do fishing on your behalf. And so I think, I think one of the things I lo and I love that where it’s like any good relationship is reciprocal. Like at some point, if it’s one sided going burn out, right? But also influential.
AJV (30:17):
So they have access to the people that you wanna be, you know, you know, have influence over the people they have access to, connected, have access to ’em. And humble is doing it in a way where no ego is involved, right? And I think that’s really important for everybody. But I, I, what I wanna, I love to talk about for just a second is how do you identify these humans, right? Yeah. It doesn’t matter. Like I know some people listening, maybe you have thousands of product purchasers, others have maybe dozens or hundreds of service clients. Maybe you’re in a very niche environment where you have maybe only dozens or hundreds of a a book of business. And I think this, this is universal. It doesn’t matter how many clients you have, it’s like, how do you find your crew, right? Who’s your, who’s your fisherman crew? That’s gonna be my new term. Who’s our fisherman crew. Yeah.
SH (31:02):
AJV (31:03):
So what, how do you do that? Like, what are, what are you looking for? How do you identify it? Like do they all need past clients, current clients? Like give us some high level what, what you guys think about this?
SH (31:15):
Yeah, that, that’s great. I think Adam Grant’s book Give and Take gives a really like high level picture of this. That there’s givers, matches and takers in the world. Most of the time we can’t really move people from one category of the other. So in what we’re describing, the reciprocal relationships, right? Like someone who’s gonna add value to your business, you’re gonna add to theirs. We want people who are in that giver category. Sure. You can maybe dabble in the matchers like you’re giving referrals one way and, and referrals are coming in the other way. But being able to identify and also realize like, look, there are gonna be people that I add so much value to and they’re just not going to give me anything in return. And that qualification process, that prioritization process of your network, of your clients, of like whoever’s at your networking group, right?
SH (32:12):
That is actually really important. I think a step that we don’t do all the time. We give, we give, we give. And ultimately what, what Adam Grant’s book says is, givers always win, but givers also always lose. So to be strategic about who we are giving to is important. So to kind of answer your question about how do you identify those people, I think it’s through a process of qualification. First we ask questions of like, about referrals and things like that, that before we rely on them as a referral partner, we’re adding value and seeing how they react to that value. And if they reciprocate before, we rely on them as a referral partner. So if you also like the relationships, they are a little bit of a gut game, right? Like, if you genuinely feel like you’re giving, giving, giving, and someone is not receiving that, well, someone is not adding value back to them or back to you, rather, then that’s okay. That doesn’t mean stop giving, stop, be generous. That just means they’re probably not gonna be a referral partner for you. That’s gonna change your business. And ultimately we need to prioritize a different relationship. So collect, organize, prioritize your relationships is really important. And then energize them to be really good referral partners. That’s our, our COPE system.
AJV (33:35):
Hmm. What okay, so I have a comment and a question. Yeah. What I just heard you say, Mm-Hmm. Tell me if I’m hallucinating and wrote this down wrong, but this is what I heard is really look for people who are natural promoters of what you do.
SH (33:50):
Yeah.
AJV (33:51):
Who are Yes. You know, ’cause I’m just thinking like through our own, we have roughly, I don’t know, 880 monthly members in our brand builders group community and another 200 annual clients. And I’m going, there are just some people who screamed from the rooftops will tell whoever will listen, you have to know about this. Right? And then there’s others that would, but we usually would need to ask. Right? I think the only difference is just, I don’t know, season of life enthusiasm projects, they’re working on natural personality tendencies could be a variety of things. And I think that’s one of the things that I just heard is like, who’s already in your ecosystem? Who is just a natural promoter of what you do and who you are?
SH (34:36):
A hundred percent. And what I’ll also add to that is sometimes the reason why people are not those natural promoters in our orbit is because they don’t know how to promote you. Hmm. So yes, absolutely. There’s gonna be people that are just going to like ultimately be your cheerleaders and those are gonna be the best referral partners for you. But there’s likely people in your network that maybe, maybe they’re, like, they refer other people’s businesses, right? They are a natural referer, but they don’t understand what you need, who you’re looking for, what you actually do, that they don’t feel comfortable or they don’t have the tools to go out and refer you business. So I would say it’s like an and or of, yes, there’s absolutely these cheerleaders, but also there’s probably those diamonds in the rough in your network that you just haven’t taken enough time to sit down with and explain how they can refer you. And, and so they just haven’t yet. So being able to, to run through a system, to go through your network and, and see who those, those star cheerleaders are is really helpful. And then you can add value to those relationships and, and keep the referrals flowing.
AJV (35:51):
That’s so good. It’s so simple, but so impactful of just taking the time to have a strategy around this. And that’s, this is a lead generation strategy, right? Exactly. If you’re gonna spend all this other stuff, why not also have a referral strategy, right? Yep.
SH (36:08):
Yep. I, I joke all the time. I’m like, we have literally systems and strategies for everything else. We hire people for everything else. We have a team, we have scheduled calls, we have all these other things, but when it comes to relationships and referrals, we’re like, oh, like when I think about them, like I’ll give them a call or like, we have something in our CRM that sends an automated birthday text, right? But those are not the things that are going to make people show up for you. And so we do have to build a system around it. We build a system for everything else, why wouldn’t we for referrals and, and relationships.
AJV (36:43):
I love that. That’s so good. All right. So that was my comment. So then here’s my question. Yes. Yeah. what is the best way to incentivize
SH (36:51):
Incentivize, Ooh, tricky word. Because I think a lot of times the objection coming from the gifting side of the business, right? Is like, I don’t wanna bribe people into, into giving me referrals. I don’t wanna incentivize people Mm-Hmm.
AJV (38:06):
That’s good. I love that. You know, it’s so interesting ’cause I think there’s such a, what what’s the word? An affiliate mindset.
SH (38:19):
Yeah. Which like everywhere
AJV (38:20):
Is everywhere you go right now. And that’s not a bad thing. No,
SH (38:24):
Absolutely.
AJV (38:25):
How can we add in to add in addition to that, and it’s, I guess I honestly believe ’cause we, we pay 10% lifetime referral fees on any of our customers. You have to be a customer. Yeah. But if you refer us business, we’ll pay you 10% lifetime referral fees. I think our decision around that is like, Hey, we’re whether gonna pay that and other advertising vehicles, or we’ll pay you, we’d rather pay you. So, you know, but I also know that deep down no one would ever put their name on the line for something they didn’t also believe in. Yeah. It’s like, at the end of the day, I’m not gonna refer you for a dollar because my reputation’s attached to it. So it’s like, even though we have that kind of rewards program it, it is also on the back of no one’s gonna do this just for a dollar to people they know now. Maybe they put a link out and somebody clicks on it that they’ve never met before. Yeah. Different story. And I think that’s really the difference between referrals and affiliates. Yeah. It’s like, are you referring people that you know, like, and trust, or are you recommending something to you an audience? Right. Not saying either is better or worse, but I do think there is a subtle difference there of that whole process.
SH (39:37):
Yeah. And, and all’s
AJV (39:38):
Take is just no. Provide value and however that value comes, figure out what the value is and then provide it.
SH (39:45):
Absolutely. And what you said, like there, there is room in the marketing mix for all of these things, for you to have affiliates for maybe you to pay out some referral partners. Right? But where we have not made room in the past is these systems for adding true value and caring about the relationship first. Like those are all things, some people are quote unquote incentivized by some sort of payment, and that’s great, but other people like maybe don’t care at all. And they would really rather just understand like, wow, I’m helping AJ so much, right? Like, I, I am helping by giving this client, or I’m helping Susie by, by introducing her to aj. Like that fills a lot of people’s cups. And I think we have to recognize that like, we’re not the only givers in the world. Like a lot of other people do want to help, do wanna refer you, do you wanna give, but you need to give them the tools to do that successfully.
AJV (40:48):
You know, it is so funny that you say that because there’s, I think there’s two things that’s like light bulb moments for me that might resonate with everyone who’s listening is what I want more than anything else when I give a referral, I don’t know, this maybe sounds selfish, but I want gratitude.
SH (41:07):
Yeah.
AJV (41:07):
I can’t tell you how many times that between Rory and us, we’ve referred people to speaking engagements or to different podcasts or connected them with like, you know, someone they wanted to meet. And we never even got a follow up. We never got a thank you. Mm-Hmm.
SH (42:16):
Yes. Yes. And we all do. That’s the thing. Like gratitude is so needed, wanted, desired. And to actually bring that into your strategy, into your follow-up strategy for referrals and make sure it happens, like exactly what you said. Sometimes you refer somebody and then it goes dark for a couple months, then all of a sudden you see them on stage. Right. The difference in making sure there’s a system of, oh my gosh, AJ referred me business, I’m going to send her a handwritten thank you note. Oh my gosh, we ended up landing so and so on this stage, I’m going to report positive progress back to aj. Like those steps, to your point, they need to happen for our referral partners to feel good about referring us. And the only way you are going to continue to refer to that person is if you feel like that follow up cycle is solid, is if you feel like you are appreciated. Like, why would we do all this stuff if it’s not appreciated? I don’t need to refer you business like I, you know, it, it takes a couple minutes outta my day. Whatever that looks like. But for people who are grateful and, and use gratitude in their follow up and in their strategy for operationalizing referrals, it’s a game changer.
AJV (43:36):
So good. You know, I’m just making a note to myself. It’s like you know, even for like the people who don’t, of like even me being willing to go like, hey I, I would love to refer you, but I would really like an update. Like, I would really like to know what happens with this a hundred percent if it go anywhere or not. Because if it doesn’t, I wanna know that too. Like right. It’s like yeah, referring people when it’s quick, it’s on the other side. But I think that’s just even me adding that in of going, Hey, I would happy to be connecting you to X, Y, and Z. Would you please let me know how it does?
SH (44:11):
Exactly. And here’s the thing, aj, that’s awesome that you say that, but you should not need to be the one that that says that. Right? You should,
SH (44:18):
You shouldn’t need to be the one that follows up in that way. Like the person that is receiving the referral needs to have this down, needs to have this communication down so that you feel good about who you sent. You feel good that like, okay, next time I send my friend to so and so, they are gonna take good care of them because they took care of the last person I sent and they told me about how they did it, right? So that, that communication cycle, like we as people who are receiving referrals, we need to run that system. We need to have that communication stack, not you, I love that you do that because most people don’t. But I think it’s the people receiving it, it’s on us, the people that are receiving referrals to exude that gratitude to follow up to report positive progress as we say, and make sure that they know that the person they referred has been taken care of in one way or another. Even if it doesn’t work out, that’s okay. Come back and let me know and let me know what I can do better next time to refer you a better fit. Right. That’s all.
AJV (45:24):
So good. So, so helpful. Okay. I’m watching the clock. I know we’re almost out of time here. So here is what I wanna talk about next is yes, there’s, so like what you said, there’s so much strategy that we all put in all these different other things. And I can even tell you, I don’t know if I would say we have a clean articulated strategy, even a brain builders group after this conversation, if you would’ve asked me before, I’m like, yeah, we do
AJV (46:20):
So this is the last question I have. And then actually before I do it, before I ask this last question, I wanna just like, before we get in and I forget, like I wanna tell everyone, y’all, this is a high level, amazing training of a full course that you need to go get
SH (47:00):
Yeah. Love that. Before I tell anyone where to go to learn, I always like to say like, step one is committing to building a relationship based business. Like make that commitment that you want referrals to be a strategy for you. You want more referrals, you want better referrals, right? Like, make that commitment to your business of this is going to be a way that I gather leads, I’m going to transfer some investment, some thought, some strategy from cold email and social media and all these things to my relationship. So step one, commitment, step two when, when this episode goes live, there will be a link I believe in, in the show notes where y’all can buy the referral partner transformation course. We are doing a grand reopening of, of our course as and it’s gonna come with a bunch of bonuses from John’s amazing friends and networks and colleagues and some live coaching sessions as well. So there’ll be a link for y’all to get connected. And then once you, once you guys are connected there you are always welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn. It’s Sarah Hardwick and you can, you can find us Giftology on, on all platforms and just plug in to really how you can better your relationships and make that a fruitful referral strategy for you.
AJV (48:23):
I love that. And I’ll put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes as well as the website for Giftology. But y’all, this referrals course is really what you’re looking for here. Yeah. And if you, if you got any value from this episode, and I’m telling you I know that you did, it’s impossible not to. I literally have a page of notes to take back to our team. And I’ve been doing this for 20 years, so I know that you did get value if you actually listened to this episode. So please go check out this referrals course. I will put it in the show notes. This is, this is kind of one of those things, if you’ve been asking yourself, how do I wanna grow my business? We’re telling you, yeah, get good at building relationships and getting referrals. That is the cheapest, fastest, easiest way to grow your business.
AJV (49:09):
It is. So get good at it. Make a commitment that this is worth investing into, and then go and do it. Now the last thing I wanna say I wanna ask you and then we’ll wrap up is one of the things that I struggle with is I actually really love introducing people. I I would consider myself a connector, however, I get really bogged down when I have to write all of the different intro emails or make all of the videos and say, I would say, is there a tip for everyone out there? So I’m not telling ’em, you can tell ’em what’s the easiest way that you can make it for someone else to introduce you on your behalf?
SH (49:44):
Yeah, I think those, those questions that we went over of the clarity conversation, giving them like where you want the introduction is maybe that first step. But to your point, sometimes the bogged down of like writing out what this person actually does, if you guys sit down, I, I wouldn’t recommend just like sending a PDF to someone and going, Hey, refer me. Right? but if you do all these relationship steps, these relational systems, you build a referral partnership with someone like you are describing and you guys are referring each other business, it doesn’t hurt to shoot an email or send a PDF or whatever that looks like to be like, Hey, you’re sending me so many amazing referrals. Like, just so you don’t get bogged down exactly what you just said, here’s a quick copy and paste that you can save, pin it to the top of your inbox, throw it in a folder, right?
SH (50:31):
And you can just copy and paste this into into our chat or whatever that looks like. I think also like the, my my favorite way of being referred, the video or the text message, like, just, just send a quick text. That’s all it is. Some people live in this space of email referrals. And I do think it is important to edify the person that you are referring, but that can be done over a different medium. Hey, I told so and so, so much about you, aj, they already know how much I love you. You guys should connect, like periods, send. That’s all. And trust that your referral partner did did the hard work for you by selling you already. So I would say that is definitely a problem for amazing connectors like you, aj. But we just need to equip our referral partners better.
AJV (51:19):
Yeah, I think that’s back too. It’s like having a crew versus asking everyone because that’s where it’s probably a little bit exhausting and it’s like, oh, now it’s this and that. So if you have your crew, then it’s like, this is, this is how you do this. ’cause They’ve already heard about you from them. And so it’s, hey, just what you just said, it would be so easy. It’s like, Hey, I’ve done the good work of doing what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s like they already know everything. Here’s the connection. Take it from here. Let me know what happens. Right, exactly.
AJV (51:47):
So good. So, so many like, so many golden nuggets. So much value in this episode. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on and also just being so generous with the content. These are very likely things that are in the course that we’re gonna have to pay for. And I know there’s so much more, but this has been such a generous episode of some really great strategic tactical things that people can go and do. Everyone who’s listening, again, please go to the show notes, check out this referrals course, the brand new relaunch of the this updated program helping you grow your business through the best way possible relationships. Check it out and then come back and tune in next time to the influential personal brand. We’ll see you next time.
SH (52:32):
Thank you, AJ
Ep 530: How to Monetize Live Events with Jennifer Kem

RV (00:02):
Well, every once in a while I will meet a client who is someone who has been a vendor to several of our clients. And anytime that happens, I pay attention because this is such a small world that we live in. And because all of our brand builders, right, all of you mission driven messengers, are always looking for good vendors and asking us, who can I trust? Who can I do stuff with? So I really, really pay attention? Well, one of those people is Jen Kem, who I’m gonna tell you about. And she became a client of ours after I had been hearing her name. And so here, let me tell you a little bit about Jen. Okay. So she works specifically with thought leaders and personal brands and she helps them to make more impact and make more money. She has been named by Forbes as a top brand strategist.
RV (00:49):
Her company, master Brand Media represents influencers, celebrities, CEOs, experts, authors and really helps them with brand collaborations, live events. Kind of monetizing specifically through live events is what we’re gonna talk about today. And she, some of our brand builders, group clients that she has worked with is Selena Sue, Chris Winfield, Jen Gottlieb, Nicole Walters, all really high level clients that I know personally. She’s also worked with people like Lisa Nichols on an event called Speak and Right to Make Millions. They, they did that event together years ago. And anyways, when Jen became a private client of, of mine for BBG, and she was telling me what she did, I was like, I want to have you on the podcast. I need to learn about all that you do. And I know there’s gonna be people in our community who are doing this. So we’re gonna talk about how to make millions of dollars through live events and through creating and curating event experiences. Now, she has a book coming out also soon, so later next year called Unicorn Team Build and Scale, an Unforgettable Brand from the Inside Out. So we’ll probably touch a little bit on that, but I really want to learn from her about how she does what she does. So, Jen, welcome to the show,
JK (02:07):
Rory. I’m so pumped to be here,
RV (02:09):
Buddy. I am too. So, so how did you get into producing these live events and like how did you get into this live event world and business?
JK (02:20):
Well, you know, it’s a long yarn, but bottom line is I came from corporate. I used to be the head of go to market launching of big products and services. And so when I jumped the pond, if you will, over into entrepreneurship and started my own consultancy and agency around helping companies, products and personal brands do the same, it literally was one of my first mentors who then became a client. I’m sure this happens to you too, Rory, as we’ve talked about. Now, you are my mentor on the book side. And, and, and I had a mentor, her name was Lisa Nichols. And I wanna give full credit to Lisa because I hired her to be a mentor, to just make sure that from a leadership perspective, from a, the way that I looked at the world perspective, that I had a very, a bigger awareness of what was possible for me.
JK (03:10):
And in that relationship, I can’t help but like share with her, gosh, you know, I see these amazing things that you’re doing and I’m curious if you thought about doing X, Y, and Z. And she was like, I’m always open. And I think when you work with mission driven messengers, like Lisa, yeah, they are open to hearing how can I expand my message to the world? And so, bottom line, we created this amazing relationship. And it was her who encouraged me and said, because I said to her, I think you should be doing, she was already doing amazing events. She’s a very highly requested and hired speaker, and she had already a New York Times bestselling book under her belt called No Matter What. And I said, I think that from a next level perspective where we need clarity for your audience is like, what are really your offers that you’re making? Because people loved her, they would show up anywhere she would go. So she had all the charisma and the the of a visionary. And from a high ticket perspective, people were used to purchasing from her books, smaller bundles, things like that. And she was only available for higher level mentorship in a one-on-one capacity, which she was my, she was one of my mentors that I was paying a high.
RV (04:23):
Oh, so you hired her to be your like one-on-one private coach.
JK (04:26):
Yeah. And then what she did was she, like, she changed my entire life and, and I always teased her, ruined it at the same time. Just kidding. Lisa
RV (05:08):
It’s always like strategy. It’s always like, how do we get the coffee and what’s the AV and like all this stuff, all that stuff. But like you, so you have a framework, it’s called Million Dollar Experiences, is that what it’s called? Yes.
JK (05:18):
It’s called the Million Dollar Experience Model. Yes.
RV (05:20):
Million Dollar Experience Model. And so this is all about basically how to create an awesome experience that also translate into more revenue at the event, right?
JK (05:29):
Yes. And, and, and post-event, because even the model itself accounts for, you know, what’s all the pre things you have to do, obviously what happens at the actual event to create the transformation that makes the people who come. And the key is that the people who come in that pre-work are people who are ready for a transformation that understand they want more after an event and are are already primed because we’ve done a good job before the event to invite the right people into the room so that the offer itself is a perfect fit for the problem that they wanna solve. And then the post event is cared for as well. Because a lot of times what happens is, and also with the events, people don’t wanna do them because it’s exhausting, right? Physically strenuous a lot of the things
RV (06:19):
Totally. It’s, it’s, oh my, it’s stressful. Anytime you have to print name tags, that’s what I tell people. Like, if it’s small enough that you don’t eat name tags, it’s all right. Once you get into name tags and taking lunch orders and like the, the gets crazy if you bingo, it’s
JK (06:33):
Crazy. Bingo. And so the thing is that I always tell people like, you’re always gonna have the fatigue because you’re showing up for big work. But it, the fatigue doesn’t have to be toxic or unnecessary. And I think that a lot of times, because I always, one of my ways that I live my life is, I call it I work on the right hard things. And so if one of the hard things, and Rory is correct, friends printing name tags and lunch orders, it’s like, what we shouldn’t focus on. But it takes up so much energy, you just don’t even understand it. And my philosophy is, you know, treat a live event or a live activation, by the way this works online or offline. ’cause When you mentioned Selena Sue, she’s made the most income and impact from actually us architecting the right experience for an online three day event. She did. And she did it three times and made millions of dollars from it. And it just shows that when you have the right model, and Rory and I can geek out about models all day. ’cause He has like the most amazing models around
RV (07:35):
Oh, frameworks. Like frameworks and Yeah.
JK (07:37):
Models and systems. And me too from a place of using a live event vehicle, if you will. It’s a vehicle really to then I think amplify really all of the things you got going on, whether it’s a book and then turning that book into a high ticket offer that then, you know, gives you nice cash injection and, and income, but also anything really. So it’s also back to that post-event caretaking that allows people to, if they don’t choose yes at that time, they are ready for the next or the next time. And, and, and hmm. You know, I know brand builders and Rory and AJ are very much about the relationship building. And that’s what I also love about live events. They’re the best way to get closer to people and create relationships and not just sell more, but frankly, partner collaborate, creation, ship opportunities. Mm-Hmm.
RV (08:36):
There’s just, and there, it, it takes so much energy to your point. It’s like, ’cause you’re giving so much energy and it’s like mm-Hmm,
JK (09:55):
Right,
RV (09:56):
Exactly. So walk us through the model. Walk us through the, okay, so, so, so walk us through like how, how does it work?
JK (10:01):
So there’s three parts of the model the million dollar experiences model. And from this point, you’ll probably hear me call it MDE. So just remember those words, m France, m, m, d, e, million dollar experiences. Okay? And the model is comprised of three stages. So the three stages are strategy, sales, and scale. Okay? And under the strategy, strategy track, if you will, are three important components. Experience, design, offer, clarity, and the campaign plan. And so experience,
RV (10:31):
Design, offer, clarity and campaign des
JK (10:36):
Design, campaign plan.
RV (10:37):
Campaign plan. Mm-Hmm.
JK (10:38):
RV (10:38):
Okay.
JK (10:39):
And so I’ll, I’ll go through the two, three tracks and then I’ll just give you a little tidy taste under each one. So the stage, the next stage is the sales strategy, right? So that includes your event marketing, your offer invitation, and the agenda and zones, which is the way that we architect the right way to create a room of transformation. Like
RV (11:02):
A physical, like the physical space.
JK (11:04):
Yeah. So it’s the physical space. So the agenda and the zones are critical components to making sure that the sales strategy works. Interesting. mm-Hmm.
RV (11:28):
Scale, yep.
JK (11:30):
And that is the seamless logistics, the unicorn team that you need to actually do the thing. Mm-Hmm. And then the money, math and metrics. So those are the, the nine, if you will core parts of the model that really make what you were mentioning earlier, Rory. It’s like, what’s so cool about this model and why I am kind of obsessed with it, and I’m proud that, you know, we’ve been able to create such phenomenal results is because it, it speaks to my soul around leverage. You know? Because it’s leverage for all the right reasons. There’s you know, you get to grow your personal brand because people who see people in the front of the room, you know, Rory as a speaker, it’s, and when you produce your own events, you create a lot of authority. And then you have the income piece, which again, this model is so great if you have a mid to high ticket offer.
JK (12:24):
And then the third piece of it is actually you compress the amount of time to make cash. Because within online funnel, which again, you need those systems. I have online funnels, I have all the things, but when you are committed to a live activation, you actually can make the same amount of money in three days that you can make in 365 days. That then gives you the capital you need to be better at marketing online in an ongoing way. So this is why I love this way of doing things. And I, I think that most people don’t look at live events with that mindset. They look at it as like, oh, I just have to do it because people seem to make pretty good money. Or, you know, again, Tony Robbins is doing it. Maybe I should be doing it. And I’m like, no, it’s not about it. Do it because you wanna create leverage, you wanna get your time back actually, and you wanna like have the biggest impact in the smallest amount of time. Mm-Hmm.
RV (13:17):
Let’s talk about the offer part. Okay. So when you say mid to high ticket offer Mm-Hmm.
JK (13:37):
So I think it’s based on also the stage of business that you’re in. So I will say that at the minimum, it’s, it’s, it’s more worth it to do an MDE type of activation. If you have at least a $5,000 offer. When I say that, please listen to me, like perhaps you’ve written a book, right? And say you have this storied career, but right now people are starting to know you for a thing you want them to know you for. That’s why you go work with brand builders, right? You, you, you’re building your personal brand, you’re writing a book and you want to take some of what you’ve learned, but you know that people don’t really know you fully for this offer yet. An MDE event is great at that stage because let’s say it’s a five to $10,000 offer and you can get 50 people in the room, right? So let’s do easy math. ’cause This, I don’t wanna mess this up since we’re live on a podcast, but basically, let’s say you get, imagine if you could 25 of the 50 people to buy a $10,000 offer, right? That’s 200,
RV (14:34):
That’s $50,000
JK (14:35):
Right? Now. That’s some nice money. And imagine that the cost of you bringing 50 people into a room with a $10,000 offer, right, is only 20 5K. So now we’re talking about not is that 20, that’s 10%, right? Which a lot of events only break even, or they cost more than they make because they’re not doing MDPE. So now your profit is 2 25. And for you, if you’re just, you’re, you’re just getting known, what a great way to go. Now if you’re already known, oh my gosh, the amount of money you can make, right? So a lot of times what we suggest to clients is do you have a 20 5K offer and a hundred k offer, basically, again, everyone’s gonna be different depending on a lot of factors inside of the model I just shared with you. But generally speaking, when you talked about Chris and Jen or Selena, those were the price points because they had already built, they had a platform, you know, they were good marketers that type of thing. And so then you can elevate to that. And I’m not saying at when you’re starting that you don’t have, you can’t have a hundred k offer. Absolutely. You can’t. It might make a lot of sense. And that’s why the offer clarity is so important of like, how does it fit in with the audience you’re inviting to the event? Yeah. Because it fits with the audience you’re inviting. They’re gonna say yes, they’ll figure out the money.
RV (15:59):
Well, and I just, I think it’s, there’s some, i I know there’s people listening right now that like, it’s challenging. They’re limiting beliefs to go, wait a minute, you can sell something that’s a hundred thousand dollars at the end of an event. Is it, is it, is it always two days or three days? Or does the agenda change?
JK (16:15):
Yeah. So the be so the best practice and what we’ve seen work the best for clients is a two and a half to three day event. Yeah. Generally speaking. And what I wanted to also mention is because
RV (16:24):
People aren’t spending a hundred grand after 20 minute webinar, that’s for sure. Correct. That’s, that’s not usually how
JK (16:28):
It’s going down. That’s, that’s for sure. If you have a sales call maybe, and you have a good sales team, or you’re good at sales, you might be able to do it right? But in a live event, if you want to get 30 to 50 to 70% of the people in the room to move towards a big offer, right? You have to you have, you need some time, you need some time to lay it out. You need some time to help them understand why it’s for them. So,
RV (16:53):
But you could, you think so, so, so first of all, how do you get 50 people in a room for 25,000? I mean, 50 people’s, not that many people. Mm-Hmm.
JK (17:05):
So here’s the mon, so this is when kind of, I’m gonna pop up to the third track that I mentioned, which is the scale scale part scale, okay? Which is the money, math and the metrics. Okay?
RV (17:15):
Money, math, and metrics.
JK (17:16):
So to get what we know is like if we know the offer is a hundred k, let’s say, right? We gotta go find people who could demonstrate that they could pay that, right? So we build our traffic and marketing strategy as part of MDE based on those people. And so let’s say you know, you already have a list, I’m gonna go, we have a segmented list for us and we tell our clients you should do that too. Or part of the process is we’re gonna have to segment them first. So to find out who are our bigger players, right? Who are the people who are doing, let’s say a million plus in their business or more they’ve been in business for five years or more for a hundred k offer, generally speaking, that’s who’s gonna pay, right? So if I know about how much I have a hundred k offer, I’m gonna be looking for those people.
JK (18:07):
And there are three types of traffic, right? There’s what I call OPP organic paid and partnership traffic. And so in the strategy of who to get inside of the room, we ask ourselves what are our lowest hanging fruit in that OPP traffic model? So for example, if it’s partnership, I might say to Rory, for example, Hey, I have people, I’m doing this MDE event about MDE, and I could say, Hey, r Rory, I know we seem like great collaborative partners on this. It could be a win-win for some of your people. And I don’t even need you to nail anybody. Do you know anybody, like three people that you feel like could work for this? And when you take that type of care for a hundred k offer to actually ask partners to do that, you’re gonna have better qualified people in the room, right?
JK (18:59):
I don’t run paid traffic generally to events where I know my offer’s gonna be a hundred KI will run paid traffic to an event where I think my offer will be between 10 and 20 5K though. Because what’s cool about the MDE model is that getting somebody to pay you 10 or 20 5K is actually, and I say this with respect and humility, it’s quite easy if you use this model a hundred k little bit different treatment. You gotta work on the, the marketing strategy upfront in that pre piece that we talked about earlier. But that’s why it’s so important to architect a unique pre-launch in the event and post-launch strategy for your specific brand and where it’s at, at this moment, right? So that’s why I said it’s about timing and moment for you versus how much the offer should be.
JK (19:47):
Mm-Hmm.
RV (20:52):
To get even. So even I hear you saying though that like a 10 to $20,000 offer is something that very legitimately could happen in like a, you know, a fairly mass market way in terms of running paid ads. If you, you, you’re following the system, hopefully you pushing ’em to a two to three, three day event, and then you’re, you’re, you’re making an offer, walk me through the event, like high level agenda. So you said experience design, but then you also had agenda and zones that was in Yes. Underneath the sales. Like, you know, there’s a lot of things you can do with two and a half days, right? It’s like we could sing songs, we could do exercise routines, we could bring in guest speakers, we could do, you know, small workshops, round table. Like there’s so many, there’s a lot of time to, you could use differently. And it, I mean, it makes sense to me. If someone’s coming in and then, you know, investing at a 10,000 or $20,000 level, you’re, that’s gotta be pretty intentional about how you’re using the time while they’re there.
JK (21:50):
Yes, exactly. And such a great question. So that’s why the experience design and the offer clarity that I mentioned earlier are the most important components to do first period. Okay? You don’t need to think about where you’re gonna have it. You don’t need to be thinking about even how many people you want there, okay? What you need to be thinking about is what’s your offer? And then you architect the experience around the offer. Okay? So that’s number one. Then the agenda’s job is to make sure that the offer is the star of the show, right? When you’re building your personal brand, I think of it like this, like Rory is the man, and Brad Builders is the company around personal brand development. This is what I call your monetization product strategy, right? So it’s like the product that’s associated with me, right? How do we make it the star, right?
JK (22:42):
And so the agenda is, and then make the messenger, the me driven messenger, which is the personal brand that’s delivering the show, is amplifying, look, you love, you want me, but what you really want is this process, this model, this thing that we have. And the agenda should reflect the model. So for example, here’s a little trick you start with, if you have a model, right, like I do, and Rory has a ton like MDE I’m gonna teach them MDE as the baseline of the agenda, period, nothing else comes into play. Then I ask myself, day one is always about challenging the limiting belief, working on the mindset, helping us all speak the same language while we’re here together for three days, right? So we work with our clients to be like on day one, when you open with your story and, and the model or the framework that you’re gonna be teaching over the next two to three days, what is gonna make them see themselves in the story and the, the framework, what is gonna do that?
JK (23:49):
And whatever that experience is, we create that as the first agenda item because now we’ve set the primer for all of the other things we’re gonna put on the agenda to support them in having that transformation. So that’s day one, generally speaking, day one is all about that. And whatever experiences you create, whether it’s breakouts, perhaps other speakers, which again, other speakers by the way, you gotta, they’re part of the primer. You pick speakers that not only help people come and elevate your brand, but also can buy into the framework. Because if it’s a separate conversation, they get confused, right? The audience goes, oh, I should go work with this person, or I should do this, or I should do that. And we wanna make sure that they’re laser focused. The reason that they’re here is to work with us. And when I say that, it’s because we done the work upfront to right. To invite the right people. You know, it’s, it. So, so we do that on day one. Day two is about one
RV (24:46):
Thing to just, just to double tap on one thing you said there. I I’m, whether it’s in an event model or for the purpose of making money or anything in general, I’m such a huge proponent of make the framework the hero, not the messenger, the hero. Yes. Like, you cannot scale a company when the messenger is the hero. It’s like, it has to be a framework, right? Like that, that’s such an important idea. And, and it’s also something that if you really care about impact, it’s one thing if you, it’s one of the best ways I think you’d tell about where someone stands in their ego. If if it’s really about ego, they’re gonna have a hard time making it about the framework because they want all the attention on them. If someone really cares about impact, they’re gonna work really hard. And that’s one of the things we do is help people create their frameworks in our captivating content. But it’s because you go, a framework can outlast you, A framework can be taught to other people, A framework can scale, a framework can be duplicated. Yes. So I really, really, I really, really love that. So, okay, so day two, so tell, tell me what happens day two.
JK (25:52):
Day two is, now obviously if you have a two and a half day to three day event, you have to be able to emphasize the most important parts of the framework that solve the problem that they came to solve. Right? So you have to do that by lunchtime on day two, because lunchtime at day two is the first time you’re gonna invite people into play bigger with you, right? Using the work. And so ev we call it like the hemispheres of the event, right? So think of the lunchtime on day two as like a tipping point moment. So everything before that is mindset and making sure that you’ve taken actually the best parts of your framework and taught it the best, not the weakest, not the least important. None of that give them the best, right? And, and the key is to show them that it’s better to do it with a trusted proven guide, a KAA group of people who understand the framework better than you do, which is usually your team, right?
JK (26:55):
Or your company. And so day two, morning is all about making sure you’re emphasizing and solving the problems. So they’re like, oh my gosh, I got so much value already, right? Then you’re making the invitation at lunchtime. Now after that moment, it’s all about emphasizing why it, the framework will solve all the problems that they came to solve. So all the content on the agenda after that is about choosing the top problems that they think that they have and using the framework to solve it in the agenda period. Okay? And, and you can do that in a very cool, interesting, fun way. There’s a lot of ways to do that. That’s where like, it’s, that’s fun for me to be your thought partner on like, here’s a way you could do it that doesn’t feel like academic or boring, but sometimes it, parts of it will have to be academic.
JK (27:46):
And, and it again depends on the offer and, and the type of crowd that, that you, you attract. So that’s what day two after lunch is about. And the reason we know so much data on the people who come is because in the pre-launch process, after they’ve chosen to come, we have this amazing sales tracker that is like magic, okay? Where we put all the attendees in and we sort them based on their problems. So we’re gathering all those data ’cause we ask them before they come and then we architect the agenda around solving the problem period, right? That’s where the magic happens. ’cause They’re like, oh my God, they’re reading my mind. Oh my God, this framework really like, does the job, you know, oh wow, I really trust her or him because the me, the mission-driven Messenger, our job is to tell stories and share other people’s wins to elevate how the framework has helped us become successful in whatever we’re teaching.
JK (28:50):
So that’s a key part is a lot of people do not look at the data, the people coming. They don’t ethically stalk their amazing people that are coming, that are getting in a plane, train or automobile to come to you and taking time away from their families, taking time away from their business to come. And so to me it is our responsibility and that’s why I love this framework to actually study them and go, what are they really meetings that we don’t waste their time? Because when you do that for people, they are like, I gotta have this thing. And it’s actually a good quality product and experience that they’re having in an ongoing way. And then now they’re telling everybody about you because they’re like, oh my God, that three days that I spent at Brand Builders or with Mass Brand Institute or you know, super connector media or impacting millions all these people, like, they’re gonna go, wow, I, I, I really got and I met some of my best friends and colleagues there because they’re like me. You know? And so that’s really what the other side of the invitation on day two is about, is amplifying those things. And then by the end of the day you know, you’re gonna look back and go, wow, I got a 50 or 70% conversion at least 30% and that was a lot more than I got from an online funnel and webinar. So mm-hmm,
RV (30:09):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, so you, you talked about like offer structures, like being the most important. What are the parts that you have to nail about that, right? Because like I feel like there’s a lot of, I mean, clarity to me feels like, I mean, you said that and that’s why I feel like most of the time it’s just not that clear what’s included and what’s the result or the, the benefit or the outcome of if someone takes it up. But like, what are some of the keys around the offer clarity piece that either you see people screw up or you’re like, you know, make sure it’s this and not that. ’cause It’s not just the price point, right? I mean, a price is just a number. It’s really gotta be engineered from something other than just grabbing an arbitrary number out of thin air,
JK (30:55):
Right? So the two, the two things that I think are missing the most, and we touched on one already, is framework, framework, framework. Selling the process, not the person. Okay? So important and actually training yourself as a visualizer, right? The person who’s the messenger to realize that the business you, not the brand you, but the business you needs the framework, right? Your, your team, your company, your ability to serve more people is a, is gotta be a business decision, not a brand decision. And, and the framework is almost like your little clone. It’s your cloning device, if you will, that allows you to you know, replicate like you said and scale. So number one, we’ve already touched on that. Number two is you gotta nail what I call your rich niche, okay? And how I define niche, the rich niche. The rich niche, right?
JK (31:52):
Nail the rich niche. Yes. So I define niche a lot differently than I think other people. And I call your, to me, a niche is not the demographic or the psychographic or the person, the niche is the actual problem that you’re solving. And once you know the actual problem, then you go find the watering holes where the people who have the demographics and psychographics hang out. And then you use that to like focus your marketing efforts around. And so part of why offers don’t sell is because they really don’t know the problem that they’re solving. They really don’t. They, they think they do because then if I give you x amount of calls and a community platform and access to all of our educational content, and we’re gonna also assign you an advisor or a coach, those I know people will be like, oh yeah, I know those are just features and benefits.
JK (32:53):
They are literally just features and benefits and maybe they don’t need a coach, but you think they do to buy a 20 5K offer offer to you. Maybe they don’t. Maybe what they need is we do a kickoff for two hours with you, build your entire custom strategy using this process. And if you want, you can get a coach later, but that they’re getting a, a real win that’s palpable. And I think a lot of times again, we bloat the offers, we add a ton of bonuses. And by the way, I love bonuses, I love extra things. But the truth is that we live in a world now. And, and the way that you market online and offline is actually quite different than five years ago. Like, so if you’ve learned something five years ago, it’s not gonna be as relevant right now because people are in a state of overwhelm and over consumption. And that’s why we gotta like that. Like we gotta cut through all that noise and go, Hey, I see your problem. You actually told me this is problem.
RV (33:52):
I love this. And that’s so true. Like people bloat their offers with bonuses and it’s like more is more is not better it, and it, it, it really isn’t. It’s mm-hmm,
JK (34:47):
I keep, I keep coming back to, so two things, two tools inside the Mte model, you’re asking such quick questions. So remember when I said like stalking people ahead of time? Yeah. So first is architecting the right intake form when they’re choosing to come to your event and asking the right questions that really extract and make the problem come to the surface. You know? So asking better questions like be a better coach in your intake forms, meaning like, ask better questions so that they, it it, it brings to the surface what their problem really is. ’cause Then you can study that and make that part of the agenda, as I said earlier, the
RV (35:23):
Second. That’s good.
JK (35:24):
Yeah. The second piece of it is you know, asking, oh is to create a diagnostic that supports your framework. So for example, and you use that as part of either the pre-launch of the event or during the event depending on the space you have. Okay? And what I mean by diagnostic is a simple way for them to score themselves at solving the problem on their own. Okay? You do that early and you use your framework as the scoring mechanism. So it’s like, look at me, I just shared MDE, which is a nine part system with the three tracks, right? So if I were teaching MDE and inviting people to an MD workshop, I would say, there are nine things you need to create a million dollar experience, right? Score yourself on these nine areas. And I guarantee you there’s gonna be two or more areas where they’re gonna have a gap, they’re gonna have an atrophy. And people don’t buy from what they have, they buy from the gap. So they
RV (36:28):
Know. It’s also about that too is like, if you told them this is what your problem is, they’d go, no, I don’t have that. I got that covered. But the moment you have ’em fill out assessment, they’re like, oh dang, like, I really suck at this. Yes. And it’s them, it’s the it it’s them making the realization on their own of their blind spot versus like a salesperson telling them. Exactly. It’s so good. Y’all, I hate to cut this off there, there are few podcast interviews where I’m like, I wish we had more time. I wish we had more time. I have to cut this off. I don’t mean for this to be a cliffhanger, but like we, Jen and I both have a hard stop, as you could tell. This is why I had, I was like, we gotta have her on the show.
RV (37:04):
Like she knows what she’s doing and here’s what I want you to do. Go to brand builders group.com/mde MDE for million dollar experience brand village group.com/mde. If you are someone who is putting on a live event, thinking about a live event, maybe one day I’ll have a live event. But like, if you’re going, I want to do in-person events, you know, and virtual too. But I think it’s like, especially if you’re like one of those people that’s like, ah, screw virtual, I hate Covid and Zoom. Let’s get people in the room. Like, if you’re doing that, like, and that is your model, you gotta go check Jen out and her team brand builders group.com four slash mde. I mean, she’s given you so much value just on this call alone. I mean, structuring the agenda, structuring the offer, structuring the pre-event questionnaire, the diagnostic making, the framework, the hero.
RV (37:56):
Like, if you can’t turn this one podcast, and by the way, go leave us a rating on iTunes about how awesome our podcast is. ’cause Like I really believe that this podcast episode alone could make you tens of thousands of dollars. Like, so I believe that this woman can help you make a lot more than that if, if you have more time. So, so check that out. And Jen, this is so cool. Like, I, I just, it’s such a, you’re such an example too, of someone with like, such a specific problem you solve is monetizing live events. I don’t know, but like, I can’t even give you, but like three people in the world who even claim to be able to do that, that it’s like, that’s the the thing. So this is so good and, and we’re so excited about your book coming out and I think we should probably have you back to actually talk about that. ’cause That’s like building out your team and we could probably tie it back into this. But anyways, friend, you, this is awesome. This is so powerful. This stuff is great.
JK (38:55):
Well, I’m so glad it was valuable and I can geek out all day long with you, Rory Vaden, and I appreciate how much you’re helping the world and helping me, not just with my book, but getting messages that of people who have this intellectual property and, and expertise and helping us all grow even bigger. So thank you. It’s been so much fun.
RV (39:16):
It’s my pleasure, buddy. We wish you, we wish you the best. We’ll, we’ll be following your journey very closely and we’ll have you back again sometime soon.
Ep 517: 6 Traits of a Great Salesperson | Dr. Cindy Episode Recap

AJV (00:02):
All right, we’re talking about sales today, and it’s not something that I talk about a ton. But today we’re gonna talk about it. And this is a little no saver. I love talking about sales. I love sales. I love learning about sales. I love doing sales. I love being a salesperson. I think this is just something that we should all embrace a little bit more in our daily lives in and outside of work. And so I just had Dr. Cindy, who’s a bestselling author and founder of Orange Leaf Consulting, and she was on the influential personal podcast. And I thought this would be a great opportunity to talk a little bit about some of the things that we had in that interview that I kind of just pulled out as some really important things that set apart this sales mindset from, from not.
AJV (00:53):
And I think one of the things that I would love for you guys to kind of pick up on is do you even consider yourself a salesperson? And I bet most people that I engage with say no. They say, I am, you know, insert any title. I’m an author, I’m a speaker, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a coach, I’m a consultant. I’m a dentist. I’m an attorney. I’m a CPA. But even when you’re in sales most people don’t go, Hey, I’m a salesperson. I think that’s, that’s very, very rare that we would do that. And so I wanna talk about some of the things that I think make a great salesperson, even if you don’t identify with being in sales, because the truth is, you, you are, you are in sales, surprise. You are a salesperson. And that’s in and outside of work.
AJV (01:43):
And as a parent all day long, I’m negotiating, right? It’s just, who’s the better salesperson today? Me or them in my marriage, right? I’m selling all the time. Why this place? Why that thing? You know, why this restaurant? Like, there, there’s a sale always taking place as someone who recruits interviews and hires for our company. Like the entire interview process is just them selling me and me selling them products and services, podcasts listening to content, right? I think one of the things you have to realize is like, in order to have really great content, you can be a really great salesperson. You gotta sell. Why, why this is important. What problem is this solving? Why should I keep your attention with the 99 other things going on at this exact second? Like, that’s a sale. These are all micro sales. We are salespeople by nature, innately, right?
AJV (02:33):
It’s like that, that happens from a very, very young age of learning how to ask for what you want, the persistence in doing it, not giving up. And at some point, but that deteriorates over time. But we were innately equipped with this concept of selling, right? Which is, how do you get the things that you want, right? And, and I believe a lot of that is in service of other people. But, and often, right? It’s like as, as kids, it’s, it’s in service of yourself, right? It’s like, I’m gonna ask for this toy that I saw at Target 100 times, right? There is an immense level of persistence and determination in a five-year-old that finds the ninja turtle that they must have. Where does that disappear? Along the lines, when we get into business and adulthood, right? Something happened along the lines where we no longer do those things that we used to do.
AJV (03:26):
We’ve been taught not to we’ve gotten rejected too often. We’ve lost the passion, lost the persistence. The list goes on. And this isn’t a, a psychological, a psychological video today. But I do think there’s a few things that I wanna highlight that innately, regardless of what level of sales, if you are truly a sales professional or you’re just involved in communication, IE sales that are really important for you to kind of grasp. So these are in no particular order, but just a few things. Six to be exact. Six characteristics, six traits of something that I wonder if you would identify with on this path to acknowledging that you are in sales and that you are a salesperson on a daily basis. Number one is we all have to be ready for the opportunity. I think any great sale happens at the intersection of someone who has a need and someone who can solve that need, right?
AJV (04:26):
It’s the person who has a, a need or a want and intersecting with the person who can actually give them that want or fulfill that need. So step one is we have to be ready for the opportunity. What does that mean? That means we have to be aware. That means we have to be listening, engaging, communicating, participating, right? It’s some of the best relationships that I have ever developed happened on. And these are business relationships on the bleachers of a softball field, listening to someone behind me talk about some of the struggles of their sales team. I happened to be reading a book. I turned around and just said, Hey, I, I didn’t mean to be eavesdropping, but I was reading this book. And just by being aware, he was like, oh, yeah, I’ve actually read that book. What do you think? Started a conversation.
AJV (05:20):
And I said, well, I’m actually a, a sales consultant. I heard you talking. And, and we just struck up a conversation that ended up being a multi six figure client of mine in former life, and a multi-year long contract. Not to mention just a really great friend. Some of the other best relationships I’ve developed happened at different cookouts or social events or, or sporting events or in some regards restaurants. Like literally just being aware and ready for the opportunity. That is first and foremost, which means you have to know what is the problem or the need that
AJV (05:57):
You solve, right? That that’s step one. And when you hear other people have it, it gives you the opportunity to engage. But you gotta be ready, right? You gotta be aware of the opportunity and you’ve gotta be ready to engage. Number two, we have got to have the courage to ask, right? So you’ve gotta be ready and you gotta have courage. You have to have the courage to engage. You have to have the courage to ask. And a part of that is not being afraid of being told. No, it’s not being afraid of rejection not taking it personally, but generally speaking, it’s just the courage to engage. There is so much of our business that happens behind a computer screen, like right now that when we actually have the opportunity to opportunity to engage, we don’t, ’cause we don’t know how.
AJV (06:42):
Right? And a part of it is just being like getting engaged. Dunno where it’s gonna go. But I heard something that we have in common, so I’m gonna have the courage to ask about it. Not necessarily even ask for the business, just ask about what it is. What do they do? Where are they from? Just like I did. Hey, I don’t mean to be eavesdropping, but I heard something and I’m reading this book. I’m just aware, I’m ready. And I have the courage to ask. I have the courage to be curious. I have the courage to engage at number three would be being okay with accepting a no. Right? And I think that has a lot to do with just confidence and self-esteem of going, like, they’re not saying no to me as a person. They might be saying no to the timing.
AJV (07:29):
They might be saying no to the product or service. They might be saying no to my company, but more often than not, they are not saying no to me as a a person. Why They don’t know me, right? They don’t know me as a mom, a wife AJ Vaden. They know me as the representative of, you know, brand builders group or this product or service as the salesperson, as the person on the other line. But it’s not personal. 99% of the time. 1% of the time. Maybe it is. But you gotta be okay with that. It’s 1% of the time. And you’ve gotta just be okay with accepting the no, but also using it as research. And I think that’s the real takeaway here is one of the things that makes nos more acceptable to me, that makes my ability to tolerate them better. ’cause I don’t like hearing no, just like anyone else in the world. But what makes it better for me is when I then have the ability to go, this is research, right? This is recon, right? If I got a no, I wanna understand why. And this a little bit comes back to the one before this, which is the courage to ask. So if someone’s going to say no, give you a no, then you have got to have enough resilience and enough courage to go, Hey, I understand. Can you please let me know why?
AJV (08:51):
And then pause, right? And if they go, yeah, you know, it just, it is just the wrong time. Be like, well, is it the wrong time for this particular product? Was it, is it the wrong time for this in your budget? Like, I’m not trying to sell you here. I’m just, I truly wanna understand so that I can better myself. And so often it’s amazing the gift that you’ll receive in that feedback, right? But it, it does take courage to ask for feedback. But what I know is that you’re gonna be way more equipped if you go that one step further when you get a no and considerate research to go totally understand. Thank you for giving me a clear answer. Would you please help me understand why? And then take it, receive it, and do something with it. Improve your self pre presentation and improve your questions, improve the timing.
AJV (09:46):
Whatever it is you can influence and control. But take it, receive it, and then do something with that awesome feedback. Also acknowledge when to move on. In the interview with Dr. Cindy, I talked about how early in my sales career I would, I loved hearing maybe, right? I was like, there’s hope. They might say yes. And I would fill my calendars with a whole bunch of maybes. And you know what it did? I would follow up with the same people over and over and over and over and over again and never find new ones. And I was limiting my potential. I was limiting my ability to work with other people, serve other people who really needed and wanted what I had because I felt more comfortable stalking the people that had already talked to. And you know what, most of those people never bought.
AJV (10:32):
A few of them did likely to, you know, have me stop following up. The point being is that there is a, there is a blessing in the know that allows you the ability to learn, but also the freedom to move on to find the person who really does need what you have, who really does want to work with you. And if you follow up with the same set of people all the time, you’re, you’re missing out on an enormous part of the population that could bless you and vice versa. But then also have gratitude for the yes, right? Acknowledge the no, but be so grateful for the yes. Don’t take ’em for granted. People are not numbers, they’re not quotas, they’re not revenue, they’re not profit, they’re people. So be so utterly grateful for the people that give you the opportunity to allow them to work with you and vice versa.
AJV (11:19):
It’s like, be grateful for it. And then last but definitely not least is be diligent in follow up. Be diligent in follow up with the people who seriously said, let me think about it. Send me the thing. Sometimes that’s not real. Sometimes it is. So be discerning and diligent in the follow up. But also be diligent in the follow up with the people who who said, no, not right now. ’cause It was a bad time schedule it just because they said no today doesn’t mean they’re gonna say no in the future. Be diligent
AJV (11:52):
In the follow up of the, the very high likely potentials, diligent in the nos for the timing, not right now. And be diligent for the yeses. Be diligent in your follow up for the people who did give you the yes, because you need to build relationships with them. These are your clients. It is not. Hey, wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Got the sale. Moving on. Don’t be that person. Be the person who said, I’m so grateful that you have said yes. I’m so excited that you are joining our company, product, service, whatever. And be diligent and touching base with them, staying in touch with them, building those relationships. Because y’all, that’s how business is done today. Regardless of what you hear on the internet or in videos like this, it’s like, I still believe that the majority of business is still done by word of mouth and referrals. And where do those stem from relationships, how do you build ’em? You get to know people. You stay in touch with them. You engage in relation, you engage in community. So be diligent in the follow up with the yeses just as much as with your prospects. That is what it means to be great at sales. And that is within all of us in any role that we have. So embrace that inner salesperson love the sale because we’re all making ’em all day long.
Ep 516: Why Everyone Is In Sales with Dr. Cindy

AJV (00:01):
Hey everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here. And I’m so excited to introduce you guys to a, a newer friend of mine. We got connected through a mutual friend of ours, but I’m most excited to introduce you to our guest today because we share a similar passion of sales. And what we’re gonna talk about today and why you need to stick around is why you are in sales, even if you don’t know it, and why you need to also become passionate about sales. No matter what your role is, no matter what your job is, no matter if your customer facing or internal facing, you’re a solopreneur, entrepreneur, small business owner, executive, or anything in between that I didn’t mention, having sales skills is one of the most important skill that you can have in life. And so we’re gonna talk about why that is.
AJV (00:54):
How do you develop ’em? How do you use ’em, and why these are important to you. And if none of that sounded appealing enough for you to stick around to the very end, then how about this? Knowing how to be great at sales is what makes you a great entrepreneur. It’s also what makes you a great parent. It’s what makes you a great negotiator, which if you are a parent, you know, is a very important skill set to have. So, like I said, these are life skills. And so we’re gonna jump right in. I’m gonna formally introduce you to Dr. Cindy, who is a two times bestselling author. She’s got two books on sales and we’re gonna put all of these in the show notes for you. But her first book is, every Job is a Sales Job, how To Use The Art of Selling to Win At Work.
AJV (01:38):
Her second and most recent is Sell Yourself How to Create, live and Sell a powerful personal Brand, which is part of why I wanted to have her on the show here today. She is also the CEO of Orange Leaf Consulting. She also has her doctorate in organizational communication. So this, these are, these aren’t just thoughts and ideas, like this is backed by tons of research and time and experience and expertise. And I could probably go on and on but I wanna jump in and actually do this interview. So before I get carried away with talking about you, let’s talk to you. So, Dr. Cindy, welcome to the show.
Dr. C (02:17):
Thank you so much for having me, aj. It is a pleasure to be here.
AJV (02:21):
Yes. And one of the things that I wanna do that I think is just really helpful is to help our idio, our idiots, our audience, get to know you a little bit and why sales has become such a part of your life. So like, where did that come from? How did you get into this and how did, how did you get to where you are today?
Dr. C (02:42):
Dr. C (03:30):
I just didn’t call it sales. Hmm. And I literally struck me and I went, wait a second. I have a PhD in communication, and I was never taught this, and I went to good schools. And it was like, why wasn’t this part of the curricula? And so that took me on a totally different journey. Started my company, my first company, orange Leaf Consulting, started writing books. And so, I know you guys believe in this too, is like you deliver to the person that you were like, you’re literally solving the problem that you had. So now I write books for my 20-year-old self
AJV (04:05):
Love that. So tell me what, what happened? Like, what was that kind of like revelation moment when you realized, wait, I’ve been doing this my whole life, I just never knew it was sales. Like, what was that?
Dr. C (04:19):
So I remember I was actually having to go and do what they called the pitch right at the, at the day and time. And I’m like, Ooh, pitch. It just sounds awful. Like the word sounds bad. And what I was preparing, what I was realizing is all I was doing was listing all the problems that I had come up with in the conversations with a prospective client and how I could solve them. And I went, wait a second. All I’m doing is helping them with a need that they have. Why are we even calling this a pitch? I’m not pitching them anything. I’m inviting them to this list of solutions that are literally gonna make their life and their company better. Hold on. Like, hold the phone,
Dr. C (05:10):
I was calling it negotiation. I was calling it persuasion. I was calling it convincing, I was calling it inviting. And I went, okay, I have to change the script on this. So I believe that sales is a life skill, not a business skill. And I am on a mission to help people to embrace their inner 5-year-old. As I say, you know, we’re all, we were all five. You have got littles, so you understand they’re the best salespeople on the planet. So it’s really just getting back to those innate sales skills that you already have, and then knowing how to use them to get more of what you want and help more people.
AJV (05:44):
Ugh, I love that. And you know, not to go too sidetracked for a second, but you know, I’ve been in sales my whole life. I consider myself the number one job I still have today, E even as like CEO is to sell, right? That recruiting, selling, interview, selling, retaining, selling client acquisition, selling vendor negotiations, selling contract, negotiate. Like the list goes on and on. It’s like even as a CEO, I feel like still, like the number one thing that I’m trying to hone on a constant basis is this concept of sales IE communication. But where I find it’s the most valuable at this current stage of my life is in my parenting. Like legitimately
AJV (06:42):
Like, like their, their, their per, their persistence is, it’s impressive. It’s impressive. And I tease all the time, I’m like, how can I transfer this level of persistence to like our sales team, like to our, our business development team, this, this level of, there’s no shame in how many times you ask or how repeated the ask is. And I think I, I, I love what you said, it’s like, how do we get all back to that inner 5-year-old? And as I have a 5-year-old, it’s like he knows what he wants and he knows how long it’s gonna take before I crumble, right? And it’s about 45 minutes, and I’m like, fine, you can have it, whatever’s, whatever. But it’s like there something hap along happens along the way, clearly, where we don’t do that anymore. And probably for most of us, just like you had, and I’ve even had these feelings before of like, I don’t wanna be seen as a salesperson.
AJV (07:34):
There’s this negative connotation with the word sales, with the concept of selling. And I would love to just kind of unpack that for a second of where did that come from? Where does that happen? Because I feel like most people would all agree that you did not grow up saying one day I wanna be a salesperson
Dr. C (08:15):
So I always joke with people and I say, you know, nobody dresses like a salesperson for Halloween, right?
Dr. C (09:13):
And I would argue even those people don’t wanna be those people, right?
AJV (10:40):
Yeah. So let’s talk about that for a second. What are the sales that we’re all making every day that we don’t realize are sales?
Dr. C (10:48):
So first one is, if you’ve got kids
AJV (11:55):
Oh, I love, like, even even the non-verbal exchanges. And I love that concept too, is that sales is just an exchange of trust. Right? And I, I love that concept because it really does take away some of the ickiness that we feel. And, and I know, I bet most of you listening would agree with this. It’s like when you’ve had a great sales interchange, it’s like, I love it. I love when I’m like, man, that was a great sales presentation. ’cause I feel good about it, right? I feel good about the person. I’m entrusting. I feel good about the person I’m paying. I feel good about the product or service I’m receiving. The, the entire experience was positive. And part of it is like, when it’s really good, it’s like, yeah, I want my money to go to you. That was great. And I think sometimes when I’m annoyed, it’s like I’m almost more mad that I have to give the bad sales experience.
AJV (12:49):
I have to give that person my money, even though I need the thing. I’m like, I do not want you to get paid for this. ’cause That was so bad. Like, and regardless if that’s good or bad, like a lot of my mentality is around like, I do not want to pay you it, it’s a, it’s a you thing even when I need it. Because I’m like, that was so, so bad, so bad. Yeah. And the opposite happens too, where it’s like, man, that was amazing. ’cause You know what? It just felt, it felt natural. And that’s how it, it should, right? And we have those daily exchanges every day. It’s like you know, it doesn’t matter if you’re carrying boxes or a stroller or whatever, it’s, yeah. It’s like those nonverbal exchanges happen. Those are like micro sales throughout your day. And so this whole concept of, you know, we’re selling all day long without even knowing it. How do we come more aware of these things? ’cause I know like one of the things you talk about how like sales skills are life skills, right? So it’s like, I think a part of that is the awareness that, okay, guys, we’re already in sales and our marriages and our friendships and our parenting and our jobs and our, our social interactions, like there, there’s a sale always happening. So how do we kind of reframe how we see that, become aware of it and then ultimately embrace it?
Dr. C (14:13):
So I think it’s kind of like the blue car syndrome where, you know, once you buy a blue car, you start noticing blue cars everywhere,
Dr. C (15:00):
That was a sale. They sold you on coming back and they sold you on being an advocate for them because you left feeling so good. You wanna go tell other people. So when you start to think of sales as that, you start recognizing it differently. But I do believe that it’s good to have a plan. I’m a planner, I’m a hyper planner, I’m a to-do list gal. It’s just my jam. But I think when you have a plan for the things that you want to occur, you’re gonna seek the opportunity to sell, to get closer to it. Mm-Hmm. So for example, take a personal one. You’re looking for a new sitter, okay? You’re gonna be hyper aware when you hear other parents talking about their sitters and you’re gonna jump in and have a conversation. It’s just because you had that plan in place. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re looking for a website designer, you’re still seeking that. And then you’re gonna find an opportunity to have a sales exchange to somebody either send you a referral or you’re able to sell your way into getting that person to work with you. And by the way, even when you’re hiring a vendor, you’re selling them just as much as they’re selling you. And I think we forget that as well. So I think that once you know what you’re looking for and you have a goal and a plan in place, those sales moments start revealing themselves differently.
AJV (16:22):
So, and, and I love that. And it’s like, what would you say? Like, as I’m thinking of, you know, I’m just thinking of like the, the micro example of just the team that we have here at Brand Builders Group. We have client facing team members, we have non-client facing team members, we have a leadership team. We, we got all types, we got vendors, contractors, all the things, right? And so if I were to kind of pinpoint what are some of like the universal sales skills that every person, no matter what your role is, no matter what your job is, whatever your daily things are, like, what would you say that you’ve identified as some of like the universal sales skills that we as just humans need to develop to be better communicators?
Dr. C (17:04):
So the first one is, is your authenticity of who you are, your own personal brand, and who you are bringing yourself to the, to the world and what your superpowers are In that as well, you get to know people based on their own superpowers. You’re the person I’m gonna go to because I know you’re gonna get the job done fast. You’re the one I’m gonna go to because I know that you can take it and run with it and make it happen. You start to sell into that, right? So that’s the first one is knowing your own personal brand and being really authentic because that’s how you build trust with those around you. I, I say this all the time. Nobody does this life alone. Show me a person that did it by themselves. And I’m gonna show you 14 people that helped ’em along the way,
Dr. C (17:44):
And so it’s recognizing how you’re creating those exchanges of trust so that you can get closer to what you need in your role, whether it’s client facing or behind the scenes, whether you’re in a support position or you’re an independent contractor, it doesn’t matter. You’re selling those exchanges of trust so that you can get your project, your job done, get closer to your goals. That’s the first one. Second universal one is you have to ask
AJV (18:23):
So true.
Dr. C (18:24):
You have to know what you’re asking for and you have to be clear because if you’ve built that trust, people wanna help you. You wanna go back and reward that behavior. You want to support people, but they don’t know how to support you. So you have to invite them in
AJV (18:41):
I mean, just, I don’t wanna like derail your thought train here ’cause I wanna hear the rest, but it’s so interesting because we are in the process right now of, of building a new home and I’ve been interviewing lots of different things. And anyhow, I’ve been having this interchange back and forth via email, and I’m not exaggerating. Literally this morning I had to send an email. So like what’s the next step? Like how do
Dr. C (19:41):
Awful. And so, and so, actually, funny enough, that’s the third piece is you have to follow up. It’s on you to be the one to f So the fact that you had to follow up like that makes me so upset because it’s like you had that person right there ready and you didn’t ask and you didn’t follow up. And so the key to think about it is you as the person selling, are doing 90% of the lift. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (20:43):
Yeah. And I think that’s a, I mean, just telling people, right? It’s like asking and then telling people what to do. And that’s one of the things that I’ve always said, it’s like for most people, they just need to be told what to do, right? Click here, write this, say this. Right? It’s like, like even me sometimes I’m like, I don’t want to have to think in this process that that’s why you’re here. Right? Yeah. I don’t wanna have to go through all of that. I just want you to do it, which is why I’m gonna give you my money, right? And so if I’m often left to my own vices, I just, I I I’m gonna, I’m gonna forget, right? It’s not anything other than as soon as this interaction, this exchange is over, I’m off to my other set of 99 things that I’ve gotta do. And if I didn’t have clear instructions from you on what is the next step and when is the deadline and when I’m, you know, like all the things Mm-Hmm.
Dr. C (21:40):
Yeah.
AJV (21:41):
And so
Dr. C (21:41):
I think entrepreneurs, yeah. Oh, I’m sorry, say that again.
AJV (21:44):
I was like, just, just the whole idea of like, don’t forget to ask and then don’t forget to tell ’em what to do and then follow up. Yeah. I think that that’s,
Dr. C (21:53):
It’s so hard for entrepreneurs too, I think when they’re building their brand and when they’re getting themselves out there because they have this feeling that, but everybody knows what I do. Everybody knows that I wrote a book, everybody knows I wanna be a keynote speaker. Everybody knows these things. But did you make it easy for them to help, you know, if you’ve got a friend that’s, you know, part of an association and when you wanna go speak there, do they have your speaker bio? Do they know the topics? Can they literally deliver it to the education committee with an open line email that says, Hey, I’m so and so and I speak on engineering and here’s what it is. You know, make it super easy for those people around you to be able to sell for you as well. And that, that’s another piece too, where I think we have to recognize we’re not just selling ourselves, but others are selling for us and with us.
Dr. C (22:44):
And so they need to know your network needs to know what they’re supposed to be doing as well. And advocating and saying, you do a great job, or you give good service, is sort of like, yeah, you, you made it into the game,
AJV (23:20):
Yeah. And it’s, again, back to left to their own devices. It’s like, who knows what people say, right? Yeah. And it’s like, we’ve got to go, this is how you introduce me. This is, this is the story I want you to tell. And as you were talking, you got me thinking about this, this asking thing because I think as you were talking about, I had like said to you gotta ask like, you, you gotta do it. Why don’t people do that? Like what, what what have you found is the hesitation, the lack of awareness whether it be fear or just sometimes complete unawareness or lack of training. But there, there’s a huge amount of people who even self-identify a salespeople that their hardest thing is the ask.
Dr. C (24:07):
It’s so true. And I think it’s a couple of things. I think you mentioned a few of them, which is they don’t know that, you know, there’s this assumption that, but you know what I do? Of course, you know what I do. Like why wouldn’t you, you know, use my services or come to my restaurant? So that’s one. Second one is they don’t know how to ask. So that’s a lack of training. And the third one is, and we all know it, it’s the fear of no. And it’s that fear of, if you tell me no, my entire world is going to crumble aj, it’s gonna be awful and nothing’s ever gonna happen,
Dr. C (24:49):
You get to understand why it’s no. Was your pitch bad? Did you not do a good job of understanding their needs? Did you not do a good job of differentiating yourself? Were you unclear on what the path was going to be that was gonna make their life better after the sale? Were you unclear in your ask? You know, there’s a lot of things that go into that. But the key is, if you’re not focused as the salesperson on what’s on the other side of the sale, then the no feels like, oh, I’m gonna crumble. Hmm. You gotta be focused on what happens past that for them and for you. And if it’s a no, it’s a gift because you also get to decide whether you’re gonna keep chasing them or not. And I have this conversation literally at least once a week with anybody we’re coaching about stop falling in love with people’s potential
AJV (26:03):
Yeah. And so, yeah, so I wanna dive into that deeper too, because I totally agree with you. And, and as someone who has spent the last 20 years in sales in some capacity, like, one of the things that I definitely in the early days I, I loved hearing, let me think about it. Or maybe because I was like, there’s hope, there’s hope,
AJV (26:58):
I’m not exaggerating. And me and my three business partners, we divided ’em up and they gave me WX, y, and Z of the alphabet. I didn’t know any better. So we’ll just say that was a gift. The naivete was a gift of this horrible set of letters. And one of the things I just remember, it’s like about eight or nine months in, it was like, I, I’m an obsessive OCD user of color coding and outlook and purple meant follow up. And I would have all these like micro 15 minute segments of like, and I, and here’s what I started to realize. I was like, I have no time to do anything else. All I’m doing is following up. And then I would just move it three months ahead, move it three months ahead. And so finally I started realizing these maybes aren’t aren’t so good after all.
AJV (27:43):
And it was like probably like a year, year and a half into my sales career. And I was like, no, actually no really is a gift. No is a gift that allows me the permission to move on and not get caught up in this emotional thing of, man, I have been following up with you with dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And it’s like, no, I don’t have to do that anymore. I just need to go find someone who would say yes. But I was so consumed with following up with the maybes that I was never actually doing a great job at finding the people who were a great fit. And when you realize that nos are not rejection their protection, and it’s like, hey, it’s like if you’re gonna spend all your time with people who are actually never even gonna get back to you you’re never able to actually serve the people who need what you have, who want what you have that you can build relationships with, friendships with, because you’re just stuck in this email cycle that actually is going nowhere.
AJV (28:39):
And so there is a lot of power in what you said of no being a gift, so that you can move on. And what I’d love to hear from you, and I, and I bet what a lot of people struggle with is what needs to happen in our brains for no to become a gift? ’cause There is this fear of rejection, there is this fear of no, and, and honestly for most of us, it, it’s what stops us from ever starting. And so I would love to just kind of hear your thoughts as we’re kind of like, you know, approaching almost the end of our conversation. I think this is one of the most powerful things that can really help people embrace this concept of, well, how do we overcome this fear of no.
Dr. C (29:22):
So the first thing is I really believe that a full pipeline will set you free. Hmm. So it’s about not falling in love with the 10 prospects, but falling in love with the entire yellow pages of X, Y, Z, not page 72
Dr. C (30:12):
Mm-Hmm,
Dr. C (31:07):
We don’t know what’s happening in their world. We don’t know why. The answer’s no unless we find out. But it’s not about you. It’s actually about them and about what’s going on with them. And so when you let that go, then it actually frees you up to go and seek the people. You can help more impactfully. Because remember, if you stay in that moment of no and push them, that becomes the icky sale. We don’t wanna be them. So that’s kind of freeing in that regard where it’s like, okay, that’s a no. Let me understand. Thank you so much for your time. Appreciate you, and you move on to somebody that you really want to help and wants your help. And I think if you reframe it that way, it’s great. And then this is something I do at my workshops where I always ask the group, I’m like, okay, who’s ever been told no in your life?
Dr. C (31:55):
And, you know, every hand goes up and I think y’all survived. Yay. You didn’t melt still here, like
AJV (32:41):
No, I love that. And I, I love what you said too, is that a full pipeline will set you free. It’s like when you have so many people to get to next, this one is not as, you know, life consuming. Right? And I think that’s a huge, and I think that’s a really important element. Like we brought earlier there’s 7 billion people on planet Earth, roughly 365 ish million people in the United States. There’s lots of people to call
AJV (33:45):
And I love what you said too about this whole idea of like, no is research. And it’s like the more nos you get, the more research you have, the more answers you have, the better you can equip yourself to cover it next time. And those are just like mindset shifts that are so powerful, no matter again, what your role is, customer service, sales, leadership, executive team, parent, whatever. Of like, yeah, like every one of those is research. So I love that. This has been so helpful. And I’ve got one last question that I wanna dive into and then I’ll let you go before we run out of time completely. You talk about this whole thing of the like unofficial sale. And I’d love for you just to kinda like, share with everyone, like, what is the unofficial sale?
Dr. C (34:31):
So the unofficial sale is the one that you’re making every single day, but you’re not even realizing you’re doing it. I call it kind of the, hey, by the way, sale. And it is that nonverbal exchange a lot of times, but it’s also the one where it’s so natural for you and it’s such an opportunity for both people to get something out of it that it just feels right. You have these all day every day where it’s, you know, you’re negotiating who’s gonna pick up the littles or who’s gonna feed the dog? Who’s gonna take the dog out? Who’s gonna do the laundry? That’s the home piece. At work. It’s the same thing. It’s the, you’re gonna make the copies and you’re actually gonna go ahead and send that email and you’re gonna do this. It’s that quick exchange where it’s just so casual. But look at it as a sales win.
Dr. C (35:17):
Because the more you start identifying those as a sales win, it builds your confidence of a sales person. I believe every job is a sales job. I believe you have to sell yourself. They’re not just the names of books like I really do believe this, but embrace your inner five-year-old and recognize that these casual sales are also your opportunity to truly sell yourself. So for example, let’s say that you’re at a community barbecue block party and somebody is talking about needing your services. If you’re not ready to bring that up in that moment and you’re not ready with what you wanna say to differentiate yourself, they cannot become an advocate for you. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (36:10):
Oh, I love that. Be ready. Never know. Be ready.
Dr. C (36:14):
You,
AJV (36:14):
You’re gonna run into that next potential client. And I do, I believe that’s so true. It’s like inline at Starbucks grocery store, t-ball game. It’s like, be ready and be aware. And I want those kind of concepts of the unofficial sale. And this is one, I feel like this whole time I’ve been having flashbacks to like all my different sales experiences, and I love these conversations. ’cause I feel like most people who are listening would not consider themselves salespeople. And that is something that I hope as you’re listening today, you leave this going, no, I am a salesperson and I need to embrace that. I need to learn it. I need to, you know, educate myself and I need to become aware of all of these sales moments that are around me every single day. And so I thought this was an amazing conversation. I hope that people continue this conversation. So, Dr. Cindy, if people wanna connect with you, follow you buy your books, where should they go
Dr. C (37:12):
For cindy.com, D-R-C-I-N-D y.com or orange leaf consulting.com and I’m on all the social media platforms at one St. Lady of Sales, and I love to hear how people take this and do something with it. My favorite thing in the morning is when I get up and I see social media and somebody says, I heard you on this podcast, or I read this part of your book and I did this and it worked. And I love that. So I want to hear those success stories that just, it fuels the mission more of helping more and more people. And when you become a salesperson, guess what? You’re gonna help somebody else to become a salesperson too. And I think that’s the way we bring our amazing superpowers to the world, is we help elevate each other.
AJV (37:53):
Amen. I could not agree more. I’ll put all of those links in the show notes. Dr. Cindy, so amazing having you. So many golden nuggets, so thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and you guys heard it. Learn more, stay in touch with her. Go to dr cindy.com, follow her on socials, check out more and embrace that inner sales person that is already within you. We’ll see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand. Bye guys.
Ep 515: Turn Stage Fright Into Spotlight | Terri Sjodin Episode Recap

RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. One of the biggest fears that people have is speaking in public. One of the things that will reduce your fear is realizing that the more you prepare, the less fear you’re gonna experience. So I wanna share with you and just walk you through the six step process that I personally use to prepare to customize every single presentation. Okay. So step number one is my pre-program questionnaire. My pre-program questionnaire is a set of questions that I have developed over the last 20 years of speaking all around the world.
RV (01:06):
And it’s a set of questions that I ask. And I realize that if I get the information, if I get the answers to these questions before I go out on stage, I can use the answers that the client gives me to customize certain parts of my program and presentation that’s unique just to their audience using their lingo, their language, their, their nomenclature, right? That the connecting it with terms that they understand that’s unique to them, even though it’s based in the principles of my content. The second step is the pre-event call. This is something I think should be mandatory for all speakers if you’re not doing it already, that you must do a pre-event call to plan your content with your client before you actually go deliver the program. And the key to this call is that you should not be talking, you should be listening, you should be asking questions.
RV (02:00):
And specifically what I do is I think of my program and I take the outline of my speech. And then for every core idea that I teach, like every technique that I teach, every big moment where I go, here’s a big idea, I ask the client on my pre-event call, how does this big idea apply specifically to your company, to your team, to your organization in this exact moment? And then whatever they tell me there is like, they’re giving me the answers to the test, I can take their answers, and then I drop that in during my presentation shortly after I teach that part, I customize it using the context that they have given me. It’s so simple and it’s so easy, but it creates a magical experience for the people in the audience. And it makes the people who hired you look like champions because it, it makes it look like they hired a speaker who spent years and years learning all about their company.
RV (02:57):
Really, it just took a few minutes and a couple key questions on a pre-event call. Now the third one is obvious review their website, right? So just go to their website and actually read what’s on their website. Very few speakers do, this is the easiest thing just to go to their website and look, which ties into number four, which also you would think is obvious. But so many speakers don’t do this because they’re lazy and they don’t take the time to customize their presentation at all, which is social media. Go to their social media profiles. You will learn more about a company from their social media profiles, like their cultures, their values, and what’s happening internally. You’ll learn more about it from looking at their social media feeds than you will from reading their website, right? Like their website is basically a stagnant brochure with a bunch of a bunch of fancy marketing speak.
RV (03:51):
Their social media is like the insider secrets of like what’s going on every day and what’s important to them and what they’re promoting like right now in this moment. So I always try to go look and see if they have social media. Step number five, this is one of the secret secret steps is to use the Google news function. So a lot of people don’t know this, but in the Google search bar, you can, you know, type in anything obviously. But underneath the search bar, there’s a specific little button that says news. And what it will do is it will search for that term only as it appears in the news. And the news is really, really valuable to learn things that are going on about that company from other people’s perspective, what’s the coverage they’ve had? Did they just go through a merger and acquisition?
RV (04:41):
Do they have a new CEO? Are they rolling out a new product? Those things you find easiest in the Google news search function. So make sure that you’re using that. And then number six, which is probably the, the best and the easiest of all, and still something to this day, it blows my mind that speakers don’t do this, is get to the venue at least an hour early before your presentation. Ideally a few hours. And I don’t just mean like you’re staying in the hotel that the presentation is at. I mean, go downstairs and sit in the back of the room. Listen to what people are saying, listen to the speakers before you listen to what people are complaining about. Has it been too hot? Is it too cold in the room? What did, did some speakers say something, you know, very controversial? Did they roll out a, a, a new program or a new plan?
RV (05:34):
And then find one or two nuggets from what people are talking about that morning or that day and pull it into your presentation. It doesn’t have to be genius. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You just have to reference something that signals to the whole audience. You’ve been paying attention. And the only way you could know that little tidbit of information was from being at the conference in a moment where you were not on stage. It’s really, really important that you do that. And I’m gonna share with you my extra special insider secret on this. The, the real thing that you want to be listening for is what we teach in our humor training. It’s called callbacks. Callbacks. We, we talk about nine psychological triggers that cause laughter in our formal training. One of them here is callbacks, and here’s how a callback works. These are, these are the easiest ways to be hilarious in front of an audience.
RV (06:35):
All you have to do is sit in the back of the room, listen to the, the, the, the main speakers before you, and listen for the moment when the entire audience laughs and whatever it was that made them laugh. All you have to do is reference that when you are back on stage later that day, or you know, that afternoon or the next day or whenever that’s called a callback. You don’t even have to be funny. You just have to reference back to the thing that was funny. You will look like a hero. Everybody will laugh. It’ll increase your confidence, and it’s the magic of customization. If you do these simple things, you’ll be better prepared, which means you’re going to deliver, and then you’re gonna get invited back and you’re gonna get referred to other places. This is one of the simple secrets of the best presenters in the world.
Ep 514: The Science of Persuasive Presentations with Terri Sjodin

RV (00:02):
Well, it’s always an honor when I get to bring to you someone who is a friend, a longtime friend, and someone that I’m a fan of, someone who I would consider a mentor and a coach, somebody that I’ve learned from for years and years and years. And that’s what’s gonna happen today. We have TerriSjodin actually Terri and I both share a history with the National Speakers Association, and she also, like me, she was inducted into the CPAE, the Council Peers of Award award for Excellence, which is the National Speakers Association Professional Speaking Hall of Fame. For 25 years, she has worked as the founder of SHO Dean Communications. She specializes in public speaking sales training. It’s a consulting firm, and she’s a New York Times bestselling author. She’s been featured on the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, and just lots of other major, you know, talk shows, TV, radio also has become really popular as a LinkedIn learning instructor. And she has a new book out called Presentation Ready. Improve your Sales Presentation Outcomes and Avoid the 12 Most Common Mistakes. Terri, welcome to the show, friend. Thank you,
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Rory. I adore you. Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity. It’s fun,
RV (01:18):
So, one of the things that we were talking about is this book in a sense is a little bit more academic, I guess we’ll say, than some of your other books. So talk us through what, how the academics land, why the academics land, and exactly what was some of the research that went into putting this together?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Oh, I love it. Thank you for asking. So yes I’m going on almost 30 years now as a full-time professional speaker and trainer. Come on,
RV (01:49):
Come on. 30 years, full-time. We need to get you a watch or something, man.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
I, I know. It’s crazy. And, you know, and I think as you and I talk about the evolution of a speaking career, you know, each piece builds on the next piece. And so you can grow and expand in a variety of different ways. My emphasis has always been in the area of public speaking and persuasive presentation skills. And the first book that kind of put me on the map, if you will, was called Sales Speak, which addressed the nine biggest sales presentation mistakes that professionals make. So fast forward, as we’re rolling into 2019, I’m like, wow, you know, we’re, we’re coming up on almost 20 year anniversary of that book. It would be wonderful to do a deep dive research study and do a formal study and ask, are these still the, the most common mistakes? And if so, why? And if not, why not?
Speaker 2 (02:42):
So I reached out to a colleague of mine who’s the head of the communications department at San Diego State University, full confession, my alma mater. And she said, yo, this would be really interesting to do a joint venture as an alumni pairing with faculty and students at the campus. So we ran the first phase of the study, and it was focused on a specific question. Does making a sales presentation mistake matter? Does it cost someone a win or a deal or an opportunity? And we did it using a formal Qualtrics platform. Again, almost 2,500 professionals participated in the study, and we garnered all of the content from people who only sold a product service or cause, meaning that their livelihood depended on their ability to build and deliver a persuasive presentation. And my promise was, if we were gonna do this kind of research, then there should be no research about us without us, all of it should come from salespeople. So that was really the underpinning of where the research came from. And then the findings of course, evolved over time.
RV (03:47):
Mm-Hmm,
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Yeah, great question. So yes we found, we were able to verify that the nine mistakes were still playing out. There were three new additional mistakes that added to the list and what was really painful and, and shows, you know, it’s just about resilience. And you and I can talk about this, but, you know, so we were really excited. We launched the first phase of the results report on March 5th, 2020, and it was amazing for all of two weeks,
RV (05:18):
Hybrid or in person, doesn’t matter.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
Did not matter. All the 12 mistakes still played out.
RV (05:25):
Fascinating. So which one, which one of the original nine do you think is most applicable to personal brands? Right. So, so, you know, anyone who’s speaker, author, coach, or a, a lot of professional service providers listen to this, right? Chiropractors, doctors, lawyers, anyone using their personal brand to like, grow their business, direct sales real estate, mortgage,
Speaker 2 (05:55):
All of
RV (05:55):
It.
Speaker 2 (06:04):
So so I believe, and very passionately in the power of the spoken word, no email, text message, or viral video will ever replace it. One, human being speaking to another in real time can shift everything. So to your point, whether somebody sells or promotes a product, a service, or a cause, wherever they are, they, they made up the body of these research participants. And there were actually three mistakes that rose to the top, regardless of gender, regardless of generation, regardless of how many people, how many years of experience people had. So the number three biggest mistake that most people self-confessed, which was also in phase one, was that most people had a tendency to conclude at the end of a presentation, but they did not close. They didn’t have an ask the number two biggest mistake that most people,
RV (06:56):
People, sec, hold on a second. Can I just wanna double tap on that and zoom in there on that one. So what’s the difference between concluding and closing?
Speaker 2 (07:03):
I love that question. So a conclusion as a wrap up, right? A close is your specific call to action. What do you want people to do as a result of the message? So what you’ll notice is when somebody’s giving a presentation, they might say, okay, so do you have any questions? And the listener will say, Nope. And you’ll say, great. Okay, thank you so much. So if there’s anything we can do, like, don’t, you know, please let us know. Call us. Call us. Isn’t a close, A close is an action step. What do you want the people to do as a result of the message? So a simpler, easier line, and we can get into that
RV (07:58):
So you’re, and you’re for a dec you’re asking them to make a decision in some regard also. Yeah. Right.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
Whether you’re asking them to set up the next appointment time, whether you’re asking them to make a commitment to give you a referral or asking them to make a decision right then and there to say yes and move forward. Cut a check, sign the contract. Mm-Hmm.
RV (08:20):
Speaker 2 (08:44):
It’s horrifying. And, and we, I mean, I work with some incredible people and they’ll say, oh my gosh, I’m alu, I’m not a closer. Oh, don’t,
RV (08:54):
Don’t concluder. Don’t be a concluder, don’t a con. Okay. All right. What was, what was the second most
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Number two biggest sales presentation mistake that people self confess? Remember, these are be based on self-identification. Okay. is that they are far too informative in nature rather than persuasive. They data dump. Mm. Overly informative versus persuasive.
RV (09:16):
So
Speaker 2 (09:17):
There’s a lot of reasons for that. Like, the biggest one is there’s no risk in being informative. We don’t hear, no, we don’t get pushback while we’re being informative. And it’s like, somewhere along the line, people started feeling like, I know maybe if I just give enough information to people, then they’ll just be able to sell themselves. And, and that’s lovely. But that’s, that’s not how adult decision making processing works. So
RV (09:39):
So how does it work then? Like what, so I think I know what informative looks like. I’m basically just spewing in information and facts and you know, ideas at you.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yes. Data dumping is part of that overly informative phase. But okay, so I’ll get really academic here. In communication, there are three types of presentations, informative, persuasive, and ceremonial. An informative presentation by design is supposed to be unbiased. It’s supposed to tell all sides of the story. It’s supposed to be cooperative versus competitive, and it’s sole purpose is to promote learning. That’s why you’re there. So unless you’re going out into the field and you’re like, hi, Brett, all the material of all my competitors, because I just wanted you to see everything that’s out there, and you can pick anyone you want to, because quite frankly I’m not attached to the outcome. It doesn’t matter to me. I’m not gonna profit. I’m not gonna do any, like, I’m just here to be a philanthropist of information. I mean, if you, that’s the only way that you’re really authentically informative.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
A persuasive presentation by design has intent. It means that you want somebody to do something as a result of the message. And if you are working on promoting your personal brand, if you are selling a product, a service, or a cause, you are very intentional. You want them to work with you, you want them to work with your company, you want them to do it now. So I, I’m trying to help people to just love that, like own it and love it and roll around in it. And sometimes people say, Terry, are, are you selling me? I’m like, yes. That’s what I do. Like no one’s shocked, right?
RV (11:28):
How do you get past that fear part? Like, I, I think, like you said, you know, are you selling me? Yes. I think a lot of people would say, are you selling me? No, no. I don’t, don’t think of me as a salesperson. I’m not selling. I don’t wanna sell to you. Oh, no,
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I, I I own it. I love it. How do you, I
RV (11:42):
I know that you do. How do you coach? I I know that you do, how do you wrap your mind around that? Or how do you help other people wrap their mind around that? Like, I don’t wanna be thought of as a pushy salesperson,
Speaker 2 (11:58):
And, and I love the, that you put the emphasis on pushy Look I believe in the power of the sales professional. We move commerce. Nothing happens until somebody sells something, but we do, we shrink from it. And so I think what makes this book different and what makes this conversation different is, you know, my, my training is in academic focus. I was on the speech and debate teams in high school and in college, and I use debate strategy in a selling environment so that I can apply persuasive arguments to move a transaction forward. I don’t think it has to be hard sell. I don’t think you have to have a negative connotation of what a salesperson is. I think you can craft a beautiful, elegant, persuasive message and move people towards action without being hard sell. So to kind of circle back to your question, how do you get them to lean into owning being a sales professional?
Speaker 2 (12:56):
And I think if you, if you own it and you believe in it, then it’s a lot easier to have that conviction. Somebody asked me, okay, Terry, in all the research that you’ve been doing, what’s the hardest product to sell? And I’m like, the hardest product to sell is the one you don’t believe in. Mm. You know? So if you, if you believe in, in yourself and the services that you offer, then the bigger question that I’m trying to help people with is, you can’t just give people a laundry list of the things that you do. You have to construct a logical, persuasive case to move them towards action. And so there is a clean process. Again, I don’t use any weird, crazy manipulative closing tactics. I use strategies that are based on logic and evidence and social proof. And I think that when you give people those tools, they can feel better about being persuasive and being, and crafting a compelling message. They’re like, woo. Like I hear all the time people going, woo, I, oh, I wish I would’ve known this 20 years ago. Like, I, it freaks me out to think how much money I must have left on the table. But once you give them, then they’re liberated. And I just try to teach people to fish so that they can go and do it on their own.
RV (14:06):
How do you close, like how do you, we were talking about that just a moment ago too. Like, do you like, like if, if you had to give someone like, you know, a five minute crash course on closing you gave us that question earlier, which I think was, do you wanna move forward? Something like, something to that? Yeah. Would you
Speaker 2 (14:27):
Like to move forward?
RV (14:29):
Is that at the end of that? Is it as simple as that? It’s like one, here’s one, just one question. Boom, that’s a close.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
Well, yes or no, but
Speaker 2 (15:19):
So when you, and, and it starts with, you know, did you create an awakening? What are the needs steps? How do you address satisfaction, visualization and change? It’s called Monroe’s motivated sequence. And it’s really based on a human being’s a authentic way to make a decision so that they feel good about it. And so it’s really kind of a very big topic to address right here, but it goes back to the number one mistake you have to prepare. You have to block it. Just like anything, you wouldn’t just, you know, throw content up on your website and think, oh, yeah, that’s gonna be compelling. You don’t just you know, if you’re creating a brochure or you’re creating your demo video, or you’re creating your narrative on your website, whatever it is, if you always have that persuasive mindset and you use this pattern, then you’ll think to yourself, okay, what’s the awakening? What’s the need step? What’s the satisfaction step? The visualization step, and then the action step. And with that consistency, you get the outcomes that you’re looking for.
RV (16:26):
Say those again. It’s a, just the five. It’s awakening.
Speaker 2 (16:29):
Awakening, need, satisfaction, visualization, and action.
RV (16:35):
Uhhuh,
Speaker 2 (16:36):
So when somebody comes to me and they say, okay, Terry, will you watch me, watch me? I’ll say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, I listen to their whole talk, and then I’m asking myself, did they create some sort of awakening in my mind? Like, people think that the attention step is about having a pithy quote or maybe some statistic or some dramatic story, but that’s not what a listener needs in a buying situation. I’m not saying that you can’t use those things, but they should create an awakening. The listeners should go, wow, you know, I’ve heard this before, but the way you’re saying it, it’s landing in my mind in a different way. And now I’m curious, you know, that that awakening curiosity step is what helps you to convert someone who maybe didn’t even initially want to be there.
Speaker 2 (17:27):
So you have to make them intrigued and inspired to want to move forward, and you wanna do it in a way that makes you feel good about it. So that’s that whole essence. And that kind of weaves into the second part of the book. So the first part of the book is focused on how do you build your persuasive case? Okay? The second part of the book is focused on creativity and how do you really bring that message to life? How do you drive connection storytelling, all of those elements, timing, how do you use time effectively? And then the third piece is everybody’s favorite part, right?
Speaker 2 (18:14):
Like there are four mistakes that fall under case four that fall under creativity and four that fall under delivery. And I confess, you know, Rory, I have personally made every single one of these 12 mistakes, and that’s why I know they’re so costly. In the 5,000 participants that were in the study, there was really only one human that said, I don’t make any mistakes.
RV (19:27):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (19:28):
The number one mistake that people noticed in others is that that talk was boring. Boring, boring.
RV (19:33):
Uhhuh
Speaker 2 (19:36):
So don’t you think that’s interesting that most people self-identify as being overly informative, but other people are boring.
RV (19:43):
Call it boring. Yep.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
It’s like, yeah. So we say that in
RV (19:46):
Communication. Sorry, break it theory. Sorry. To to a sweetheart. Yeah. Boring. You’re boring. We’re sleep over, we’re sleeping,
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Right? Yeah. And that’s, that is the, the, that was where things really got super crazy interesting was because we did a, a comparison of what people self-identified with what they noticed in others. And you, what you just said, Rory in instinctively is what really hit it on the head. We don’t tell people, you don’t tell someone, oh, you know, I, I thought that was really good, but you’re boring. We don’t tell people, you know, you, you have all kinds of weird, strange body language and gesturing when you speak. We don’t tell people, did you know that you say or like, or, you know, every other word. Hmm. We don’t say to people, oh, you know what, you use so many industry acronyms and I had no idea what you were talking about. I don’t, we don’t tell people. So what was fascinating is what people self-identified versus what they called out in others. And in those observations, you know, that’s where we get the learnings.
RV (20:54):
Well, and here’s something I would just say for those, if you’re listening and you are a professional speaker wanting to like, get more gigs or get higher fees, or if you’re aspiring, if you’re not getting gigs, that is people telling you you’re boring
Speaker 2 (21:42):
Alright. And let’s take it even to your, your seasoned pros that are on the call. You know, we have a burden to evolve our content. Mm-Hmm.
RV (22:56):
Taylor Swift. Swift, our rocket ship, swift Taylor Swift man era’s to her, even though she’s young. She’s, she’s reinvented so many times. I’m a Taylor, I’m a swifty. I’m a swifty. I’m in court.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
Who isn’t? How can you not admire that woman? I
RV (23:09):
Mean, yeah, you got, you may not like her, but you gotta respect her. I mean, there’s, there’s lots of people like that in the world where I go, I don’t, I mean, I happen to like Taylor Swift, but like, there’s other people where I go, I don’t like this person at all,
Speaker 2 (24:18):
It isn’t, and it’s not going back. So yes, there’s a whole chapter that’s dedicated to technology and demonstration failures, and they can take place in either a virtual or hybrid environment. I think one of the opportunities in virtual is, is the reach. I mean, you can really yeah. Meet with decision makers in a variety of different locations all at the same time. I mean, from a sales perspective, again, I’m asking people to put their, their sales hats on, but we used to say, oh gosh, it’s so challenging. ’cause Now you can’t just walk into their office and meet with that person. That’s true. There is a limitation to that. However, the opportunity is you can schedule a virtual call and meet with multiple decision makers in, on multiple continents Yeah. And accomplish more in a shorter period of time. And you save not only time, but you can save a great deal of money. And so there is an efficiency when you schedule it correctly. The downside is the time factor. We know that the amount of time you’re given in a virtual or hybrid environment is significantly reduced. You get maybe 30 minutes and then you get a really hard stop. Right? Like we, what is the hard stop? We never used to get this hard stop factor. Yeah.
RV (25:38):
Well, it’s like I have another meeting in two 10 seconds, not, yeah. I need to walk down the hall and drive in my car and there’s flex. It’s like, no, it’s, it’s right now I have to go. Yeah. That’s interesting.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
It’s so just like we were talking before about winging it, we can see that in virtual calls or in hybrid calls, that winging at issue is a huge problem. You cannot just jump on a call and wing it. When you have really strict time parameters, you have to kind of block the time and then you have to try to rein it in if it starts to go sideways. Right? I mean, we’ve all had those moments where, you know, someone on the call will take you down a path that’s gonna pull you off your agenda. So you have to have an awareness like, okay, this thing’s gonna close in like five minutes. Yeah. So what do I need to accomplish before we hit that hard stop? Mm-Hmm.
RV (26:34):
Can’t, you wind it down and sort of land the plane gracefully.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Yeah. And then the secondary factor is one of the biggest mistakes within this chapter is this
RV (26:44):
Is mistake number 11. So it’s techno technology and demonstration failures. That’s what you’re talking about here.
Speaker 2 (26:51):
Exactly. And the hybrid environment. So you might be with five or six people in front of you, but you could have five or six people offline. And navigating that hybrid opportunity is tricky. Especially if you’re doing, let’s say for your speaker colleagues, you know, how often are they speaking in front of a live audience and then they have participants. You could have a hundred fifty, two hundred fifty people offline in a hybrid. Yeah. The number, guess what the number one complaint is? They ignore the virtual or speaker.
RV (27:24):
They ignore the virtual.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
They ignore the virtual Mm-Hmm.
RV (27:33):
The problem. Even if there’s, we’ve done events where we’ve had events for clients, like with Ed Millet’s event, there were 400 people in the room, there were 16,000 watching online. And we still naturally default to playing to the people who are right in front of us. Even though it’s like there’s 16,000 people. It’s like, it’s, it’s just, it’s, it is hard to, it’s hard to do that. It’s hard to play to both. It
Speaker 2 (27:57):
Is. And so that’s why I really committed this book, because there’s these things that you and I, we know, but I say this all the time. I was just with Brandon Steiner and he said, you know, Terry, I, I know this stuff. And I said, Brandon, it’s not that you don’t know, it’s what you do. What I’m fixing is a lot of times not things that you don’t know but you’re not doing. Yeah. And how do you integrate what you know into your behaviors on a consistent basis so that you can get the outcomes that you want? And I think it’s, I think it’s really fun.
RV (28:29):
I love it. I love it. So presentation ready. Improve your sales presentation outcomes. Avoid the 12 most common mistakes. Terry is one of the best trainers in the world on presentations, persuasive presentations specifically including speaking skills, sales skills, and check this book out. Y’all go, go get it. I promise you’ll love it. Terry’s a pro. Any, Terry, where else should people go? If you want, if you want them to sync up and connect with you.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Oh my gosh. Please visit my website. You can just go to teri sine.com. That’s T-E-R-R-I-S-J-O-D-I n.com. You can access all the information about presentation ready. It’s available in bookstores worldwide, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, all of the above. And I do have a newsletter. If you would like to receive a complimentary copy of each of the three research study reports, you can just visit my website. You can download the research summary reports, and you’ll see the data that really underpins all of the content that’s in the book and subscribe to the newsletter.
RV (29:36):
Really cool. Really cool. Of course we’ll link to that in the show [email protected] slash podcast. Terry, thank you for this. Thanks for being here, friend. And I wish you all the best.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
I adore you. Keep doing all your magic. Roy. You’re such a star and I’m honored to be your friend. And thank you for having me on your show. It’s a privilege.