016: The Secret Tricks to Opening the Right Doors.

Hi, Mrs. Kopp, my name is Michael and I can be reached at 908-252-2308. Just a little bit about myself. I work with Emerald Financial here in Bridgewater, New Jersey. I work with my partner Ed Lee, and we represent a financial services company that offers insurance and related products and services. One of our main focuses is helping business owners like you save time and money. I know as a business owner you probably placed a great amount of time and effort into building your business. Well, the reason for this call is really to. To see if we could just schedule a 30 minute meeting with you to see if our organization can help you protect what you have in terms of assets and planning. And we'll be reaching out to you again. Well, thank you very much, Ms. Kopp. Have a nice day.

Bye.

End of message.

What is wrong with that message? Do you think that maybe your people work in your sales process ever leave messages like that? We're going to talk today with Karen Kopp. We'll talk to you about how never to be that kind of a sales opener and what a difference it can make to take the right approach to opening doors with your business. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and Gazelle's business coach, Bill Gallagher. We have on the phone today Karen Kopp. Karen is an award winning CEO entrepreneur, she's a best selling author, she's been one of our Gazelle's Growth Institute faculty video course leaders and she's all around awesome gal. She's going to talk to us today about opening doors, knocking on doors, opening doors, creating new opportunities. What does it look like when business development is done the right way and what difference does that make? So welcome to the show, Karen.

Thank you, thank you for having me.

All right, so let's get right into it. What are people missing? What is the secret? What do people struggle with here?

Well, people are missing several things when it comes to getting in the right doors the most efficient way possible. I mean, most of the time when they come to me and they say, you know what, Karen, we should be getting in more doors, when we get in front of the right prospects, we can close the sale. Most of the time we just can't get in front of enough of the right prospects and we don't understand why. So when they say that to me, I say that if you're not getting in all the doors you think you should be getting in, there is a problem in one or more of five key steps. And I call it the five Planks to door opening success. And I could go into what each one of them is, but I want to just stop and see where you would like to take the conversation.

Give us a quick rundown of the five. Lynn, let's talk about the application, share a story of. I think you've got one interesting one on the east coast there that you could talk about. And then maybe let's circle back around to the five so people understand how to begin it and what some places to turn to are.

Yeah. So what I'll do is I'll lay out the five and then I'll tell that story and then I can help everybody understand where this particular business went wrong and why they needed to fix what needed to be fixed. So the five plan. When you want to get in more doors and you're not getting in as many as you want, there's a problem in one or more of these five planks. The right target, the right message, which is not a marketing message, it's a sales message. The right answers for objections, the right door opener doing the work, which also includes the right door opening mindset and then the right execution, the right workflow by that right person. Those are the five planks. So what was happening with a company here in New Jersey is that they had hit basically a ceiling on their growth. And it's a 100 person company. They had several account managers and one business developer. But the business developer.

So hang on one second, let me make sure that the picture is rich for people. So you've got a hundred person company in New Jersey in. I think you said pharma tech, right?

Yes. They have a technology solution and target the pharmaceutical industry.

Great. And their problem was they were.

And their problem was they were good at their own accounts and they were able to resell to their current clients, but they weren't able to get in the door with new prospects. And they didn't really understand why because they have a great reputation, they have a great product and they had a person in place whose job it was to do that. But. But for a couple of specific reasons, those new doors weren't opening.

Got it, Got it. Okay.

Yeah. And so that became a ceiling for them and they weren't able to scale in a meaningful way and they didn't really understand why. So when I started talking with the business owner, yes, there were things they could do to refine their target and there were things they could do to elevate and create more emotionally based sales language. Their answers for objections were pretty clear. But where the Problem was their biggest problem was that the person that they had in place, whose job it was to open the doors, wasn't an opener. And so this is a blind spot when it comes to many businesses out there in their hiring practices for sellers. Everybody knows the difference between the hunters and the farmers, where the farmers grow the business and the hunters find the business. But the blind spot, and what most people, including the managers who hire these salespeople, don't know, is that within the world of hunters, there are different kinds of hunters. Some are great at going on the meetings and closing the sales, and others are great at opening up relationships where none existed before, but few. Right. So that's the blind spot. But few in my experience are equally good at both opening and closing. So the issue is if the business owner needs an opener but doesn't realize that they have to interview for one and find one, and we can talk a little bit about that if you want, then they're likely to hire a hunter who is a closer. And about six months into that relationship with the seller, they're going to want to jump out the window because nothing's going to be happening. And I see this over and over and over again that people just don't understand this difference and are able to hire the right people. And so they have the openers who know what to do and are intuitively good at this.

Well, I totally get that. And I can think of one company that I did some work with a couple years ago and I coached them through a couple things, and they had something like this. I think it's what you're talking about. So they had somebody who just did the door opening who was on the phone setting appointments for the people that were sort of proven closers. And then they had somebody else who worked on kind of the execution. So they had somebody who maintained executed once they got them, and they had other people who were closing, but those guys were all getting set up by somebody who loved working the phones.

Right? And it's not just about the phones, although in some industries it is about that. But what I've found, and I've owned this company for 17 years, and this is all we do here, is we have the door opener service where we get our clients in the door with their prospects, their wish list prospects for these initial meetings. But we do it at a really high level. So it's really more about opening up a conversation with the exact right person and creating a reason why this meeting should take place. Why is it that a prospect should not put off A meeting. And that goes to not only the person who's doing the work, but the person who's doing the work having the right language, where it's emotionally based, but there's urgency components there too. What I found interesting, and it's not always about what people need. Like, you can get at a prospect's need with language, but need doesn't always mean motivation. They can have a need, but they are not motivated to take a meeting to act, or there's not motivated to close the sale to act. But if you can dig at the urgency. And why should somebody not only take a meeting, but take a meeting now and not put this off? That's really where some of the big secret sauce lies. And we have a trademark process for developing this kind of sales language called the moment of yes. And we've worked on this for quite a long time. And it's a huge part of why we are successful getting in these stores when other people struggle.

All right, so tell us some of those secrets that help you get to that. How do people use this? How do they figure out their own moment of yes?

Right. So it's about digging. And when we work with clients, we help them do this. It's not a quick process. But for the people who are listening, who want to try to get to this on their own, here are a couple of tips for them. So take a look at. You know, a lot of times people will think about why their A level clients, their best clients, are satisfied with them, but that's actually not the right area to focus on for developing language that gets the door open. Where you really want to focus is why did your very best clients originally want to speak with you, even though they knew other people who do what you do? And they might have been using someone who does what you do, and maybe they're even related or have friends who do what you do, but for some reason, they felt that they couldn't live another day without having a conversation with you. Why is that? So we dig at this why? And then the second piece of it is why, after all of that conversation, and out of all of these options, including where one of the options is doing nothing, why did they choose to move forward with you? And so what we do is we synthesize all of this information. We talk to our clients clients, and we analyze this with our process using messaging strategists on our team, and then we come up with the words and the phrases that are the right ones to pique the interest of the right people. But if Your listeners focus on those pieces. They may be able to dig at some of that on their own.

So I can think of a client example of mine who really wanted to grow his company and felt like he was at a plateau and needed to shake it up. And he knew our world and he knew other coaches and all of that. And what he said to me was, what I recall is, I thought you would make it sort of easy and fun. Your personality, your approach would be a fit. Somebody that I could stand to work with through this, what will be a challenging process. And I can think of a few who are like, oh, he makes it easy and fun. Now, that's what, like, I got. But I wonder if I'm right about that or not.

Mm. Well, it's interesting because in the line of work with coaching, fit and personality, the personality piece of it is so critically important. And being a business owner myself, I could tell you that if you're thinking about hiring a coach, you just don't want to have to do it again. You want to make the right choice the first time so that when you do this work, it not only is easy and fun, but it produces what you expected it to produce and hopefully even more so. It's interesting that you start with this, but what I would recommend is ask two or three of your other representative A level clients those questions that I just said before. Why did you originally feel that you wanted to talk to me out of all the people you could have spoken with? And then why did you ultimately say yes and give them a chance to think, give them a chance to talk. And then as you're doing that, see if there are parallels across what different people are saying.

Yeah. Yeah.

There was a time a couple years back we were doing some messaging for an accounting firm. And what they said is they were getting lots of meetings, but they wanted certain kinds of meetings. They wanted meetings with people who would sign on the dotted line quickly and were fee insensitive. So that's nice, right? If you can get people like that, that would be really nice.

Well, I suppose the clients I want people just give me money. I don't have to do anything. How about that one?

Yeah, right. That's great. Your whole motto could just be sign. So that's what they wanted. So our job was to figure out the message that would get them meetings with those kinds of people. And what we did originally is we started interviewing some of their key CL and asking them the questions I spoke about. And what was fascinating to us as well as to our client is that these people basically all felt that accountants were all the same. And any monkey can do the month end reports and the year end tax preparation. So if you can't do that, you might as well go home. But what they really were interested in and the reason why they said yes and they were fee insensitive was the fact that this particular firm was willing to go with them to the bank and present the story and get them the funds that they needed. And they were doing all of these other things that many accounting firms can also do. They just don't talk about it. And so that became an insight that was incredible for the development of the messaging that got them to these kinds of clients.

Interesting. Yeah, well, I don't find too many accounting firms that are offering to do that audit and tax, baby, that's what they want to do. And a few really awesome ones will do consulting and added services and stuff. But that's, that's great. So you went and helped them hone the questions in to find that and that exposed the people then that somebody else could go in and close.

Exactly. And so they were able to present a message out to the market that attracted certain people that they wouldn't otherwise attract, which were these fee insensitive kinds of people. And that gave them larger clients that were higher profit than they would have gotten had they not changed the message to be that.

So what's that actually sound like? What did you ask them? What sorts of things did you end up saying in their case? Can you make that a little more real for us?

Yeah. So while I can't give you the exact message, what I can tell you is that we made all the other accounting firms like what I would call baseline. So anybody can do the month end reporting and the year end tax prep, but what you can't get is. And then we went into the other piece of the message and when we said that, people would nod along and say, you're right, I can get the other thing from anybody. That's where everybody is price sensitive and they only care about that. But if they are expecting that anyway. But what they really want are these other services and they're willing to pay almost anything for it. We were able to separate the people who were price sensitive from price insensitive and the people who would value this, this additional service offering. Does that make sense?

Well, let me make sure I got it. So are you using statements or questions to get this? Are you. If I'm doing this door opening right in your model, am I calling up potential leads and Saying, hey, are you looking for this or that? Or are you struggling with this or that? Or am I saying, hey, talk to me about your business?

All of the above. So when we're reaching out, it can be a voicemail, it could be live dialogue with either the decision maker or with the assistant to create the relationship. And it's also email support. So it's email voicemail combination. And so that can take a variety of different formats. It's not always the first call or the first email that gets you the response and the meeting. Wouldn't that be nice? But it's just not. And you can't use the same message every single time. So when we're developing messaging for our clients leading into the door opener service, we're coming up with different phrasing and talking points and success stories and answers for objections and questions. When you get somebody live on the phone, you have two sentences and a question, then the question has to engage them in particular dialogue, not just any dialogue. So the exact question that you choose is really important. But when you're leading up to getting somebody live on the phone or you're engaging in email dialogue, you need to build on your story over time. So the first message may be a little bit more general, the second message might incorporate a story. But all of these things are quick. Nothing can be lengthy. Not the email, not the voicemail, and certainly not when you're conversing with someone. It's a couple sentences and a question.

In the cases of the folks that are using this opener, closer partnership flow, whether they're doing it with you or on their own, does it matter much if those subsequent meetings are intended to be in person or on the phone? Like, are you opening the door to a phone meeting as much as you're opening the door to a physical? Like physically opening the door, hey, you've got an appointment at this time. Or.

It can be either. And it's entirely up to our client whether that person wants an in person meeting or a conference call. And it's really fascinating to me that over the last, I'd say five years or so, more and more business relationships are exclusively done over the phone. And enterprise wide million dollar sales are closed entirely over the phone without people actually meeting each other in person. If you would have asked me five years ago if that would ever have been a possibility, I probably would have said, but it is happening. It's really up to our client. I would say always, if you have an opportunity to meet somebody in person, it creates situations that can't Exist over the phone. It's that relaxed kind of what about this and what about that? Where you can dig at opportunities that conference calls don't often give you the opportunity and the time to dig at that. But, but having said that, there are many of our clients, for a variety of reasons, who choose to have the full initial meeting by conference call. And either then they can choose to have an in person meeting after that, or they just do their entire business relationship over the phone. I've seen it both ways.

Yeah. And I can see both ways both in all kinds of professional services and B2B relationships. There's certainly a value and opportunity to seeing a richness to the connection in person and a million little cues that you can get just sitting in someone's business and office. However, the amount of time it takes to schedule that, set it up, get to them, travel to them like that, all that adds a great deal to the relationship. It takes away from the effort and takes away from the efficiency in time of boom. I talk to one person, I roll on to the next call, I talk to the next person if I'm sitting right in my office or wherever I am.

Well, agreed. So one of the things we'll typically say to our clients is if they ask for conference calls, we'll ask them if that helps or hinders their ability to get to the next step and close a sale. So we'll be able to advise our client as to what might be the best way to go. But what's interesting about what you just said is that it creates the need for the person who's doing the sales over the phone, whether it's door opening like we do, or whether it's having that meeting over the phone and bringing it to a close. There's a certain skill set when it comes to being that person on the phone, and not everybody's got it. Some people really need to have those verbal cues and the non verbal cues that you get from being in person with somebody. And other people are really good at hearing it over the phone. For example, when somebody's cadence of their voice picks up, you know, you may have one or two more questions you can ask before you need to switch the discussion or end the meeting. And if you're not, if you don't know to listen for that, you could miss that and not develop the relationship that needs to be developed.

Yep, totally got it. All right, so give us and a sense of recap the steps that you've got again then how do people pursue this?

So if they want to make sure they're getting in as many doors as they could possibly get in, and they know their offering is good out in the market. That's a piece that's important, too. The five planks include the right target, and we're talking about the right target in a very narrow way. So even if you have more than one target, how can you narrow the group of people that you're speaking to to have similar and commonalities amongst the issues and challenges that they face that make you the exact right solution for them? They wouldn't take another step without you. So if you can narrow the group to that, that is the right target.

So that goes a lot to our core customer conversation and Bob Bloom and the inquiry that we do there.

Yes. And that was one of your podcasts. Right? I listened to that before. Yeah, before our podcast, I listened to that, and it really resonated with me because that is exactly the experience of success that you had as well.

A rich picture of a tightly defined ideal client.

Exactly. Some people will say to me, how do I meet more of the right prospects? And I say to them, well, stop spending your time on the wrong ones.

Yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

It seems so simple, but yet so many people are doing it wrong.

Well, my coach told me that myself this morning. So.

Yeah, you know, people tend to spend time at 30,000ft when it comes to this. And my experience is that it's very rare that an entire sales process or an entire team needs to be pitched and started again. But yet the issues that people have with not being able to get more usually lie in the minutiae.

Yeah.

And if you. And put people don't want to look there because it's not sexy to look there, but often that's the problem. So, anyway, so the right target and then the right message, which is the sales message, not the marketing message. So the sales message is the spoken word. It's the email meant for one person. It's what you're saying that is personalized, that would encourage one person to move from point A to point B in his or her thinking. So that's the sales language. The answers for the objections is the third plank, because if you can't overcome the objection, you'll never close a sale. So you have to be prepared with not just answers for the objections, but the right answers, because the right answers will move you along. The wrong ones will stop you in your tracks. The fourth one is the right person doing the work, which is this door opener that I'm talking about. This is A certain kind of business developer, a certain kind of hunter. And it's very hard to find them, I can tell you, because I've been hiring them for 17 years and this is all we have on our. I have 21 employees and 17 of them are door openers. And it's hard to find them, but when you find them, everything magical happens. I could tell you that.

But, you know, it's interesting because I have a brother who's a great door opener. I don't know if he's a great closer. I don't know if he's a lot of different things, but he's a great door opener.

Tell him to call me.

I will tell him to call you. He's fantastic at getting. He's the sort of person who walks in an elevator and he walks out sat with five friends and I walk in an elevator and I walk out with five thoughts and opinions about the people around me.

Yeah, it is telling what I'm myself there. There is a difference between somebody who has been handed relationships and is wonderful at growing them. And these people are very valuable, but they're not openers. Openers are people who create relationships from scratch. So one very common mistake that people make when they hire what they want to be openers is they'll hire somebody with a Rolodex. But the Rolodex doesn't necessarily contain the names of the people you actually need to meet. And if they're not openers, they can't navigate from the people they know to the exact right people. So they're the wrong people for the job. But unfortunately, the hiring managers don't know to ask these kinds of questions. So they don't. And then they end up with mis hires and which is extremely expensive. I'm sure you tell yourself your clients that all the time, but that's the fourth. The fourth plank is the right door opener, and the fifth is the right execution, the right workflow. Is it an email? Is it a phone call? How are you keeping track of your progress? And importantly, how much time are you spending opening up new relationships? Because if, let's say, a lot of people have time on a Friday, so they'll make a bunch of calls and send a bunch of emails to new prospects on a Friday, but then they get busy and they don't come back to them for a month or two, well, you might as well have gone to the beach that Friday because calling and emailing once doesn't do anything. You might as well not do anything at all.

Right? You got to keep on it, you got to touch, touch, touch. Because people are busy. And especially if a salesperson calls me and then if I'm making a sales call, I always expect it's the salesperson's job to keep following up. So I don't always return their calls, I don't always answer their emails, I don't always. Because I just count on that. If they're any good, they'll reach back out to me once or twice.

Well, they should. And if they don't, they don't really deserve the business. But that's the point of having somebody who loves this job so much, who is willing to put in the time and do the research to personalize a message for an individual decision maker and then to create a relationship and stick with it. And that's what we do for our clients. Because our clients realize that like the company that we talked about at the top of the call, what they realized is that wasn't the person they had on their team, but that person was good at the meetings and she was good at closing, as was the business owner. But what they didn't have is the skill set to get the door open. And they made the strategic decision for themselves that they didn't want to develop this capability internally. They didn't have the talent for that, they didn't have the extra management for that. So they hired out for it. For us, where we do this at a very senior level, our people are very senior level business developers who previously held corporate decision maker roles. And these are the people who represent our clients and get these senior level discussions open on behalf of our clients. And when it makes sense, we go ahead and schedule either the in person meeting or the conference call to get the ball rolling.

So let me ask a follow up question or even an objection that I'm sure comes up a great deal and that is, is all right. But wait, what about the level? So I know that if I'm going to door open a manager or a buyer, or I'm talking like a purchasing agent, or I'm going to door open a C suite person or the CEO, I always feel like each of those is very unique level. A person can reach out to them and is good at them. So you've talked about the difference between the door opener and the sale closer. Is there also a difference between who can work sort of what level of prospect opportunity you're working on?

Do you mean from an opener perspective or going on the meeting?

No, from the opener.

Right from the opener. You know, it's an interesting question because we only hire senior people here who can have those conversations at high levels. So while I don't have that issue with my team, our clients who have previously hired lower level people do have that issue. In fact, their. There was one time somebody who came to me who couldn't get in these senior doors and he had hired a lower level person and just didn't understand what was going wrong because he felt their message was strong. So he recorded some of the calls and I listened. And while she was great at delivering the initial message and she was able to get the CEO on the phone, so kudos to her for that. But when he gave her what I felt was a very fair objection that she should have anticipated, she giggled. So she already had the answers for the objections, but she couldn't deliver it. So you know, you, when you hire.

So sometimes giggling is a good thing, but in this case it didn't work.

Yeah, giggling did not work. He actually hung up on her, which is very rare in our line of work. It's very rare for somebody on our team to be hung up on. People are not usually rude at work. You know, home is a different story. But work, they're usually pretty professional.

But.

But she deserved it. She should not have giggled. But she wasn't prepared and she wasn't the right person for the job. But having the wrong person in that job has a lot of consequences aside from wasting time and aside from missing opportunities that you could otherwise have. Think of the reputation of the company and if that CEO.

No, no, no. If I thought somebody laughed at me, I would think badly of, of the whole company. In fact, I had. There's a company I respect recently and I dealt with one of their salespeople and I thought the person was a bozo and it diminished my view of the whole company. And I realized it's probably one bozo in the mix. But.

But that was, but that was the person they used to open up a relationship with you. I had one guy call me from a company that's a couple towns away and he was a low level guy. He left a terrible message. And in fact, if you've ever sat through any of my seminars for business owners and companies, I usually play this message and I ask people what is the worst part of the message. And there are so many bad parts of the message. But in the end I tell people that the absolute worst part of that message is the fact that his boss had no idea that he left it for me. And the impression that it has left me with of that company is very poor, as is all the people who sit in my audience when I play it. But I would feel that at this point in the relationship they should want to impress me at this point in the relationship, more so than any other part of the relationship. And if they felt so little about developing the relationship now, how would they service me as a customer? I think that they probably wouldn't do a very good job. So my general impression of that company is I wouldn't do business with them only because they chose the wrong person for this job.

Totally get it. So we're going to put a couple follow up links. We've got links to your, I think to your book and to you and to your company that we're going to put in the show notes as a follow up. So COP Consulting USA, is that right?

Yes. Kopp Consulting K O P consultingusa.com will get people to the website where they can read about the door opener service. They can also get lots of tips about getting in the door with prospects. If they're not ready to hire an outside service like ours, they can certainly get a lot of tips and help their own team do better.

So we'll put a link to Biz Dev Done right cop consulting, your LinkedIn thing and all that right there in the show notes. So you can go look for it from here if you'd like to know more and you'd like to sort of feel your way through this, process yourself or reach out and connect with Karen. Karen, thank you so much. This is a terrific interview and eye opening thing is certainly appropriate for me and I can think of many clients that this is going to be a helpful thing for. So I look forward to getting it out there for them. Thanks again.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.