Hey Limitless Listener! We are back with another insightful episode on 'Effective Strategies to Counter a Sales Slump' featuring Bryan Mcdonald. Bryan is a revenue growth coach and a partner at On Purpose Growth. Bryan coaches entrepreneurs, founders, and consultants on how to grow their revenue. He has over 20 years of experience helping people turn their ideas into revenue-generating businesses with game-changing sales strategies and growth consulting.
Key highlights of the episode:
Hey all. Welcome to another episode of our Limitless Podcast series. I'm Nisha, a product marketer at Hippo Video and your podcast host. We have with us today, Brian McDonald. Hi Brian. Welcome to Limitless. Hey, thanks for having me on. This is fun. I'm excited to be here with you and talk today. Oh, it's great to have you here and we are even more excited to have you onboard.
Brian is a partner at On Purpose Growth and coaches entrepreneurs, founders, and consultants on how to grow their revenue. He has over 20 years of experience in helping people turn their ideas into revenue-generating businesses with game-changing sales strategies and growth consulting. Today, Brian will draw on his wealth of experience as a sales coach to share some effective strategies on countering the sales lump.
All right, Brian, so if you're okay, let's get started with the questions. Cool. Awesome. So, okay, here's my first question to you. There's a lot of advice around what a sales rep should do during, or even shouldn't do during and after a cold call, but talk much around what should be done before a cold call. So what, according to you, are some things that a sales rep must do before they pick up the receiver and start talking to their prospect?
Oh, wow. I think it's less about what you're gonna say and more about your mindset. My partners and I always have, we have a saying, that mindset always trumps technique.
And you know, before you make cold calls, I mean, it's a practice. I do, I check in with myself, and you know, get myself in the right mindset and the right mood and the right expectations. Because anytime I've done those three things, set the right expectations that, Hey, this is Cole calling, a very small return on your time is realistic thinking you're gonna get convert most people is just not the greatest thinking. Making sure I'm in a, I would say, a positive mood because I'm gonna get, I'm about to get bombarded with a bunch of nos and hangups and, and things like that.
And then the mindset of a combination of the two, of the prior two I talked about as well as the mindset of you know, I'm looking, I'm looking for nos because nos are my path to yeses. If I go looking for yeses right away, I'm gonna be immediately disappointed. You know, so those are things I would do like right before and, and I say that with the assumption that if that's all you're gonna do before the cold call, you've already prepared what you're gonna say, how you're gonna say it, you know who you're gonna call, and things like that. So I just wanna make that disclaimer.
Awesome. So, could you throw some light on that part as well? Like, you know, researching your prospect before calling them up, and yep.
Yeah, so a couple of things there, you know, in today's world, right, approaching a cold call like everybody else is gonna get you some pretty low results, right?
Because prospects if you sound like a normal cold call, prospects have a system that, they use to reject that call, right? So like for instance, instead of saying, instead of saying something like hey, did I catch you at a good time? Where people have an automatic response to that, you have to say things that are like pattern interrupts that break that where I can say, Hey, did I catch you at a bad?
Right? You, you want to, you want to kind of go towards the negative things, and so you wanna do that. You want to show up differently. So you catch people off guard and the basic, you know, responses they have to make you go away, aren't there? And I'd like what you said there to research your prospects.
Sometimes you'll realize that hey, this person I thought was a prospect, but they're not, because I did some, some research on that. Right? So definitely, you know, look at LinkedIn profiles, look at websites, and get to know the person. And you know, if you can customize that cold call into somebody's personality or something about them that you can, you know, talk about or notice because if you can, if you, how do I say this, people love to talk and think about themselves. Yeah. So when you become interested in someone else, you become interested to them. Yes. and if you can pick out something to talk so like for instance, in today's world, I relate a LinkedIn cold reach out to a cold call in the past.
Right. We have a new avenue of reaching out to people. Yeah. And when I reach out to 'em, I'll research their profile, and I'll ask them something that I see on their profile. Or I'll go to their website and ask 'em about something I saw on the website, something that I could be genuinely curious about to spark the conversation to get the word I'm thinking of is collaboration, but get some responses back.
Then the other thing is too is, you know, everybody tries to sell the service with the cold call. Mm-hmm. You don't try to sell, don't just sell the next step. You wanna s you want to get first, you wanna get permission to tell them why you're calling. So the first thing you do is buy the next 10 seconds.
Then tell 'em why you're calling to buy the next 30 seconds. And in the next 30 seconds, if they, if they say yes, they want to continue after that, then it's like you start diving more into, you know, a deeper understanding of why you're calling, right? So don't sell the end on a cold call.
The thing that you sell is the next step that you have to go to. Awesome. Okay, so I think we can see a pattern here, right? Or kind of a framework for a cold call, like the sort of thing that you follow. Could you elaborate more on that, the framework that you follow for cold calling?
Yep. I mean, here is what the framework is: the first part is just selling the next 10 seconds. Hey, hey, Nisha, it's Brian from on Purpose Growth, did I catch you at a bad time? And you go? No. Okay, so now I'm Mike. Hey, Nisha. Can I explain to you why I am calling and in the next, you know, 15, 20 seconds and you can decide if talking past that makes sense? Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Hey, here's why I'm calling, blah, blah, blah, blah. Would you like to learn more about that, or would you like to continue the discussion? They go, yeah, right. And then you dive deeper into, you know, into that. And after that third step there you're, you're pretty, you've got an engaged person and for a cold call. That's what you're looking for. You're looking for an engaged person. That's the first step in the process.
Awesome. Okay, so my next question to you was supposed to do you have a cold call opener that you normally use? But I guess this is what it is, right? Did I catch you at a bad time? I think that's your go-to opener.
Yep. And here's another one. I'll call out something obvious. Okay. As a pattern interrupt. So I'll say things like, Hey Nisha, this is Brian McDonald from On Purpose Growth, and I realize my name doesn't ring a bell. Okay. Did I do it right? Uh, can I tell you why I'm calling?
Okay. So this makes your prospects think, okay, you know, you get that window a few seconds that you can. Yep. And I'm calling out something they're already thinking. Yep. Right, so we're already in agreement on something. Oh my God. That's a great tactic. Like it's, it's almost evil. Okay. Yep. Yep. Because when you use the general principle, when you name things, you typically diffuse them, right?
I talk to clients all the time, it's like, Hey if you feel it, say it. I'll give you a real-time example with a client yesterday. He was talking about a situation. A client had questions around his moving business, and having insurance. The lady never said, do you have insurance? But she asked questions around it like, what happens with this if this gets broken, or what's your replacement policy?
And he said he lost the deal because he didn't have insurance. And I, and I asked him, I said, so did you sense based on her questions that she. Really? That's what she was asking. Do you have insurance? He said, yeah. I said, so next time notice it and say, Hey, it sounds like you're asking questions around insurance.
Is that your concern? And when you name it, they'll go, oh yeah, it is right. And it diffuses it. It diffuses the tension in the room or what's the word I'm looking for? It's like she was doing a bad way of negotiating. It's like dysfunctional negotiating. It kind of does away with that.
Dysfunction negotiating. Okay. That's a good term to know, I guess. I know I just came up with that one, so, no full disclaimer. I just, that just came outta my mouth. Okay. So yeah, maybe we should make it a thing going forward. Yep. All right. Okay. So also you seem to use video a lot to connect with your audience.
Like I've seen your LinkedIn posts being full of videos, a lot of video content on it. Why do you do that over, you know, normal text posts? What made you move to videos? Wow. Couple reasons. One, It sticks out, as you know, I mean, I've been using Hippo Video for a couple years and the one thing about your platform is it's not just video.
It allows me to stick out in a couple of different ways by leaving thumbnails in messages and things like that. But in posts, it sticks out. It breaks up the mono. If you study anything in regards to content creation and algorithms on any platform, the algorithm algorithms love when you mix up mechanisms or forms of content.
So just going from a regular post to some video and back and forth is just a way to one, a way to stick out and get my content out there. Another way is, you know, people, as much as people buy services and products. What they really buy as a person. Yeah. They buy people. Right. So, for instance, I've been in a couple different industries and done.
More than 50% of my business has always been referral, networking and I've been able to get referrals from people when I switched industries because they knew me and they trusted me. It wasn't necessarily about what I sold, what I sold had to be relative to them and their network, but it was me.
Same thing, you know, with clients when I left the insurance space. And started On Purpose Growth with my partners. There were some people that were clients in the insurance space that had conversations with me about getting sales help. Oh, okay. Yeah. So it was, it's all about, um connecting with your, your network and your people to know that you're real and for them to get to know you.
And at the same time it also let's meet people who are not your prospects. Know who you are so they can properly make the assessment that they don't wanna have anything to do with you. And I'm okay with that because I'm always trying to spend more time with the right people and less time with the wrong people.
Yeah. And video helps you qualify the people that you want to spend time with. Totally. And, communication. Mostly tonality and body language, and there is zero tonality and zero body language in text-based posting, right? That's why there are some people that talk like, Hey, let's not text this conversation back and forth because you can't really understand what I'm saying, because it's not the words, it's the inflections or the body language, so that communicates that clearly.
Yeah. And it's also a matter of building trust, I guess. Like people trust you more when they see you. Yep. You can, you can. I mean, there are, there are a few people out there in the world that can work around this, but my opinion is you can tell if somebody's trustworthy, worthy or not by watching video.
Yeah. So since you are a Hippo Video user, I'm pretty sure you would've used video for sales and prospecting. So how has your experience been there using video in the prospecting stage or anywhere in your sales? Oh, it's, you know, it's awesome. I'll talk specifically with Hippo. Video is Okay you know on LinkedIn in Sales Navigator.
It's the only video system that shows a thumbnail in the message. And that's most important to me is there's an option to get a link that shows a thumbnail and, and that catches people's eyes. Right? It also tracks when people are watching the video and you can also personalize the thumbnail.
I'm sure you know that already but you can personalize the thumbnail. You can do a lot, right? You can do a lot with it. So I've used it, I've used it that way on LinkedIn. I love it. And then two with follow ups with prospects instead of I'll say it this way, okay. So the Kool-Aid that I ask my clients to drink isn’t be better than the competition. Be different. If I'm asking people to drink that Kool-Aid, I have to drink the Kool-Aid too. So I need to figure out ways to be different. I just can't, you know, be on my ivory post telling people what to do and, and doing the opposite.
So I'll do that in the sales process. I'll send somebody maybe a thank you video after an initial meeting. Sometimes I ask clients to, or prospects to do things in between the steps in my sales processes and maybe I'll make a video and explain to them what to do or, or remind them.
I mean there's tons of ways you can use video. In sales processes and that the rate we're going video content is going to dominate any other form of communication. Right. Uh, versus face-to-face. Yep. So also, how has your response been, have the response rates improved with video, over text, emails or LinkedIn?
I would say, Man, close to 50% better. Wow. Because now I'm thinking about this. Cause I don't have the exact, that's a gut instinct because when I'm using video, I'm actually using it with the hottest prospects. I'll prioritize video with people. I really wanna work. Like, oh, this is a great person. This is a great fit, so I'll take the time. You know, I'm not using video as follow ups a hundred percent of the time, but that solidifies the relationship. It makes them feel that I care and different and, thus they're clicking on it.
And they're helping the video's helping me get, you know, let's just say around 50% better response rates. That's a great number. So do you have any specific example that you could cite, like, you know, a deal that you could close just because you used videos, like somewhere in the process?
One that I closed because of the video. I'm trying to think. Oh there was one client of mine she is, I wasn't gonna say was, but she's a past client, but she's still doing what she's doing is outsource COO and outsource HR and during the sales process towards the end, you know, I sent her a video thanking her and saying, Hey, I was thinking about our conversation. Here's some more advice.
I was basically kind of, I'll say, giving her free coaching just cuz I wanted to help her. And she had said that that video put her over the top and she was talking to somebody else at the same time who was more than, how do I say this? Less than half the price of my services.
And she decided to go with me because she said, Hey, that video helped a lot. She goes, it made me trust you even more and I'm gonna go with you even though that person's cheaper. That's amazing. That's an amazing story. Totally in a video helping your vanity, even though your competitor. Yeah.
Priced half as much as you, so yeah. That's amazing. Awesome. Okay, so now on to the core of our topic. But yeah, the other stuff was more interesting than this ones gonna be a guess. So there's a lot of talk procession all around and organizations are more reluctant than ever before to buy stuff. So how can sales reps and sales leaders write the slump and keep a steady stream of revenue?
How can they use video to keep a steady stream of sales going? Is that your question? Video or otherwise? Like anything, you know at a high level. Oh. So what else can people go to? I think it's back to that thing that I was saying is think about how you can be different and show up different.
Okay. You know, we were exposed to something like, I think it's crazy, like over 500 marketing impressions a day based on email, internet phone and text messages. So there's a lot of noise. For your prospect's attention Yes, in the world, whether it's something else or something similar to what you're doing.
So you have to figure out how to be different. And, one of the ways we help, and I help clients do this is come up with something called a mafia offer. Create an offer that is your ideal that they can't refuse. Okay.
Can't refuse. Right? It doesn't have to be, you know, crazy but I mean, I've got one client who two weeks ago had a hundred thousand dollars a week which he got a hundred thousand dollars in down payments. Okay. And secured five, $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue because he had a mafia offer.
Wow. Okay. So, right. This isn't anything to take lightly and kind of throw around, meaning you, you have to think about this. You have to figure it out. You know what it was and you're taking a little risk in some of these offers, but the payoff is huge and everybody around you, everybody around us is trying to do it faster, better, whatever.
But very few people are trying to do it differently. So another way to do it differently is think about how you like your product or service is different to you, like how, how you are unique and think about ways how that can fit into your ideal client profile. So, like for instance I got one client who is an outsource CFO.
Good and a fractional CFO and instead of him going out and talking to all these companies different types of companies of a certain demographic, he comes from the construction space. So all he does is outsourced CFO for construction companies in the construction industry from 5 to 30 million.
And he's killing. Because he's not trying to compete with my other client who's an outsource CFO that does all different types of businesses. This guy is super unique and there's more than enough business to go around, right. The construction industry is huge and he came from the industry so he knew how underserved this part of the businesses for CEOs in the construction space.
He's like there's not a lot of, I say good help. I don't know if that's the word I'm looking for, proper advice in that space. So the advice here is to, you know, cow out, niche of niche for yourself instead of trying to be everything for everyone. I would highly suggest never being, never being everything for everyone You will be, it's like the jack of all trades master of nothing.
Your pro, if you try to be the kiss of death is when I hear somebody say, just introduce me to this space. Right. The mind, here's the problem with it. When it comes to referrals or when it comes to sitting in front of a prospect and trying to be relevant to them, when you go wide, people don't know how to fit you into their world.
Yeah. Even though the mind wants to go that way. It's too general the way more specific and clear you are about that niche the better you'll do it. It may take a little bit longer to pick up speed, but once you get that speed, nobody's gonna be able to knock you out.
That's great advice. And you also don't base resources, right, like chasing after unqualified leads. So this way you can save upon resources. And also the ROI is probably. And on top of this too, embedded in this is also knowing how to say no to somebody who's not a prospect, right?
Like, not trying to, you know, if we are really gonna hop into a recession, I got my thoughts around that. But if, if we really are, you need to figure out how to use your time wisely if you're in sales because you need to be able to focus and, and grab a slice of the market. And if you really know who you work with and who you serve, you know who it isn't and it's actually empowering and free. Telling somebody, Hey, I don't think I can help you.
Right. I get referrals from people who I've told that too because they respected the fact that, Hey, Brian wasn't just gonna sell me something. He knew if he could help me or not. This wasn't about Brian selling me for something. Yeah. This was about Brian actually being able to help me.
That's great. Yeah, you can focus the energy instead on a prospect that will actually convert. So what are some metrics that sales reps say to start measuring, you know, to close more deals or to be more efficient in what they do? I'll probably go not to a specific metric, but a mindset around it.
Okay. And what that would be is Figure out what the most important metric you have is that drives a result. And figure out how to improve that. Another way this is said is to figure out where your bottlenecks are. Okay? And where you have throughput and focus your energy on the throughput. So like for instance what's a good example? So I'll talk about the client that had this a hundred thousand dollars a week. He realized that it wasn't about the number of events that he went to, okay, to meet people. He realized it wasn't the number of podcasts he did. He realized that all he had to do the more people he got in his target market to hear his offer.
The more he sold, right? So it was all about, it was all about the step of him making this mafia. Right. It wasn't about how many referrals he got. It wasn't about how many cold calls he made. Right? When what, when he is looking at that metric and he's saying, okay, what's happening for people to get to that step?
Where are they coming from? And he consistently focuses on doing more of that, whatever it is. Awesome. Okay. All right. You know, and and I guess because here, I'll give you the opposing side of that. There's clients I've worked with, and when I meet with them, they've got a network of people who do not match his ideal client profile, right?
There are people out there networking. But they weren't spending time or serving his ideal client profile, and he was tracking the number of networking meetings he was having. And it didn't matter because, because it was a flawed metric. The context behind that metric was flawed, right?
So figure out, you know, what is most important. You do that, produce the result and figure out how to expand those. And it's different for everybody, right? It's different for everybody. It's not, there isn't one, there isn't, the philosophy is the one answer the actual tactic is can different for everybody.
Yeah. It's because a lot of sales ships, you know, have revenue or I don't know the number of deals they close as their ultimate metrics. Yeah, it's the process that matters, right? Yeah. That is correct. That matters. But if you don't know how you produce that result, yeah. You're never gonna be able to repeat it.
I wanna be clear, it is all about results in sales, and you have to be able to duplicate. 'll give you an example. So my very first client ever was, he was a banker. He was friends with me and came to me and said, Hey, Brian I'm moving to financial services and I would love for you to coach me.
And I helped him make that transition. And the moral of the story is he was telling me a story about an advisor that worked with him in the state of Minnesota. Right. They sold four funds. Right. Okay. And another they sold bonds. Well, the advisor in that was assigned to Minnesota in whatever year this was.
This company's bond program opened up and it, and it's one of the most sought after bond programs in the financial services world, and they hardly ever open it up. Well, they opened it up for some reason and Ironically, at the same exact time there were a bunch of something happened in the state of Minnesota where it triggered a bunch of the funds the school funds or the municipal funds they had to go up, buy a bunch of bonds.
They had to make a financial transaction and they were forced to go buy bonds. Right. Did not get the details of it. Well, this guy had like a billion dollars a year. Oh, outta nowhere. Like maybe he was doing a, like let's say it was, if it was 2020, right?
In 2019, the guy had a hundred million in revenue. And that was in 19, in 2020 he made a billion. And what, and what the leadership did at this organization was the next year, 2021, they moved this guy's quota up from a hundred million to 500 million. And then they fired him after the next year because he didn't make his quota because the metric was flawed.
Yeah. And he just got lucky that you're right. He got lucky. He got lucky and then got punished for it. We call that using metrics as weapons, right? You don't use a metric to help somebody produce a result. You use a metric to micromanage or I guess let's just call it micromanaging people, right?
So that's why I say this is more philosophy based rather than specific tackling based. Because of that exam, as you just heard that example, it was flawed, right? The people making, deciding what the most important metric was, didn't even look at the data. Yeah. It was a one time thing and they just based all their decisions on that.
Yep. Based all your decisions on that on an outlier. Yeah. Outlier. Yeah. That's the word. Outlier. Okay. So I think we have almost reached the end of our session. And so Brian, this is my last question to you. What are some books and podcasts that you'd recommend to aspiring sales leaders or that you yourself read or listen?
I really like, oh God, you're asking me and I'm drawing a blank, hardcore closer. Ryan Stewman has like a three to five minute podcast. He does it for long periods of time, then he stops and does it for long periods of time. That's been great. I think that's a great one for you know, for somebody to, to listen to.
Awesome. And here's one, here's an outlier one I can't call out a specific one, but I have to say that if you can find a podcast or information about continuous improvement and Theory of Constraints, I highly suggest every salesperson understand those concepts and philosophies because they are highly relevant to the sales world.
It's an outside subject, but it applies. They apply it to manufacturing and lean Six Sigma and things like that. When you understand those principles, And understand how systems work. Okay. You'll be lights out in sales. Okay. So does this, okay. Does that have to do with some internal constraints or is it constraints that are constraints in general.
Constraints in general. Okay. It's because there's this growth mindset theory, right? Like that's been doing the rounds, so I was just wondering Oh yeah. If it had something to do with that. Ok. Yeah. Definit. Okay. Alright, so I think Brian, that brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for the incredibly insightful session and you've given our listeners plenty of sales advice to think about and, you know, for example, how to use video or yeah, how to, what not to measure and what to measure.
So I hope they start acting upon it and see immediate results and yeah. Thank you. Yeah, thank you listeners for tuning in today. We'll be doing many more of these podcasts with more such stellar sales leaders from around the globe. So stay tuned for our upcoming episodes. We are on Apple, Spotify, Google, and also Stitcher.
Subscribe to get notified when a new episode is out and please leave us a review of your own Apple. Thank you for listening. Bye. Have a great day, and thank you, Brian for being here once again.
It was great. Oh, thank you. It was awesome. Yeah, take care.
All right, you too. Take care. Bye-bye.