10 Negotiation Tactics That Work Every Time (From FBI Negotiator Chris Voss)

We will just kind of rock and roll into this, and I'll give you some background. We'll get to Q and A, and then I'll throw something at you at the end. So asking asked for the top 10 greatest negotiation responses. Number one is now bad time to talk. Now I'm going to. I'm going to dig somewhat into why you want to get people to say no versus saying yes. And there's a million reasons for that also. But I will tell you an initial indicator, in my view, because Dan talked before about if somebody says, hey, I got. I want to talk to you about something that's mutually beneficial. You know, that's a. That's a. An indicator, a behavior of a half. Hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. Dan's come to recognize that, and it immediately turns them off. We're actually developing, within my company, we've developed this. We get specific profiles of what do halves say, what's an indicator of a half, and why you should want to walk away as soon as possible nicely. The last impression is lasting impression. But if you got a few minutes to talk is one of those things. So, I mean, how long is a few minutes? When somebody said to you, have you got a few minutes to talk? When was it ever actually less than 5, which is a definition of a few. Right. So it's now a bad time to talk. In place of that, why is that one of our top 10 lines? There's only. There's only one of two answers. And this is. This is why Howard asked me to do a fill in a blank. So you could take notes if you wanted to, to write it down. Because clearly, if you write something down, you're more focused and you're more likely to retain it. It's an accelerator of learning. So there's only two answers you ever get. If it's now a bad time to talk. One of them is hesitation. And they say, why? No, no, it's never a bad time to talk. Go ahead. What do you got when someone responds like that, you've got 1,000% of their focus, which is what you called for in the first place. Their focus, their attention. As Dan said, you got their attention. Now, keeping their attention is a secondary issue, but you've got their attention. Now, what happens when you say, have you got a few minutes to talk? Well, they think, how long is a few minutes? What do you want to talk about? When's my next appointment? That's what goes through people's minds when you say, have you got a few minutes to talk? What does that mean you do not have their attention? You just blew the first seven seconds by clouding their brain with those thoughts. So it's now a bad time to talk. They stop, they clear their head and they go, no, what do you got? Or they say, yeah, it is a bad time to talk, but I can Talk Tuesday at 1. Now you just got an appointment for their focus and their attention, which is what you were after in the first place. That's what we say, that's what we get over and over again. I remember seeing this come up in a thread on LinkedIn once. And somebody on LinkedIn, you know the level of discussion in there of people clinging to their own beliefs. Someone wrote, well, I don't want to say, is now a bad time to talk? Because what do you do if they say yes? And my thought is, do you really want to talk to somebody who says yes to that? If they're willing to say yes, now is a bad time to talk. You want to keep talking, think about how stupid that is. So it's now bad time to talk. Any of you, that from this point forward, don't at least experiment with this. That loss is on you. I'm sorry, I'm blunt. All right, so extending. I never ask anybody if it's a good idea. We consistently ask over and over, is this a ridiculous idea? And this also will begin to get us some underpinnings of why no works. One of the reasons why no as an answer works is what we found from our own experiences. No matter how fatigued somebody is, somebody can say no and clear their mind. Every one of you listening to me right now, we all have the same problem. We suffer from decision fatigue. No matter who you are, you have capacity for X number of decisions in a given day. You start running out of gas at some point in time. It's between the decisions that you've made. The number of clicks, every click is a decision. Your circadian rhythm, where you've had to eat, what a good night's sleep you had the night before. Doesn't matter. You've all got so much gas in a tank. We see over and over and over again. And people on my staff are, especially my assistants are told, never ask Chris a how or what question after 1 o' clock in the afternoon. Because if you say, what do you want to do? What do you want me to do? How do you want me to handle this? After one, my reaction because I'm fatigued is going to be, I don't know, stop bothering me, go away. Don't bother me again. Which there's a couple of. You do not want to trigger that sort of response from somebody because then my last interaction with you was you annoyed me. And the last impression is a lasting impression. So it also begins to put you on a slippery slope, if you're working for me, of a downward spiral where I don't think you're that smart because all you did was annoy me. Now, all they, they've all been taught, and I explicitly say this, never ask me a question ever after one o' clock in the afternoon where I can't say no, because if you say, do you want me to do this? I'll say, no, do this, this, this and this. And I will in fact ask, answer. The question that they want to ask was how do you want me to do it? But something about saying no triggers my ability to think through steps. First time I ran across this Jack WELCH Book signing LA, I'm standing in line of 200 people. They're doing everything they can to minimize the amount of time that you spend with a book signer for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which I'm at a book signing a couple years ago, there are 300 people in line. The people orchestrating the book signing walk up to me and they go like, from the moment somebody walks up to you to the moment they move on, you've got 30 seconds. Otherwise we're going to be here for six hours. We don't have that much time. We got to get everybody through this line. 30 seconds per person. We're going to ask them their name before they walk up to you. We'll write it on a piece of paper. They will hand you a book with their name. It's going to take you 30 seconds for you to look them in the eye. Sign to Bob, nice seeing you. Good luck, Chris. And they're going to move on 30 seconds, doing the same thing with Jack Welch because I got to move everybody through the line. Plus they don't want me pitching Jack Welch. They don't want me asking him over to the house, they don't want me asking him over to dinner because my wife makes a great meatloaf. All that's going to happen, they're going to don't want pitchers. So I know I get seven seconds when I walk up to Jack Welch, I want to pitch him on coming to speak at the negotiation course I'm teaching at usc. I ain't got time to lay this out. And he doesn't have time to Listen. And it's late in the day. I walk up to him and I say, is it a ridiculous idea for you to come and speak at the negotiation course I teach at usc? And he looked at me in the eye and he started to squint. And then he looked up into the universe and he got this hideous scowl on his face. And he just. He just froze. And my first thought was, I just killed Jack Welch. He got so mad because he looks furious that he had a stroke and he died and he's getting ready to fall over. So when he initially doesn't die, I'm relieved. But now he looks furious. I mean, furious. I think he's going to start screaming, scaredy, Scott, get this guy out of here. I don't know what he's going to do. He finally unfreezes. He looks at me and he says, this is my personal assistant's name. This is special Twitter account we have set up to communicate with her. I will call her and tell her who you are. I think we're going to be in Los Angeles in the fall. If we are, we'll come in and speak at your class. Reach out to my assistant. I'll let her know what's going on. Decision fatigue. He said no. And he thought through all the next steps and he laid them out for me. Now, is it a ridiculous idea? And are you against the next two going back and forth with Robert Herjavec over him sending some people to one of our courses? I had lunch with Herjavec. Generous dude, sweetheart of a guy, completely generous. He paid for lunch. It's my favorite kind of lunch. On top of that, I was at a steak restaurant, so it was even better. He paid 90 minutes and he paid. Great guy. I look at him and I say, we got one of our in person sessions coming up in New York. Can I give you a ticket? He looks back at me and says, how many can we buy? One more indicator of a generous, decent human being. We're going back and forth on the tickets. My son, who runs my company, he doesn't care that it's Robert Herjavec. He's mad because we're going to sell out and he wants to sell the ticket. And he's hoping Herjavec doesn't take it so he can sell it. He's on the east coast, we're on the west coast in la. Herjavec's offices in la. I was living just up the street at the time. My son calls me at 4:30 in the afternoon. 7:30 in New York. He says, you get Herzvic on the phone and get a commitment for the tickets before the business day starts tomorrow or I'm selling his ticket and we're going to sell out because we're on the verge of selling out now and you're holding up the whole circus. And I can't wait to start of the business day tomorrow because the business day starts three hours later in L. A and by the time we get up in la, New York's going to lunch. We're going to be out of luck. So I get need a decision from herjavec now at 5:03 in the afternoon. I sent him a two line email. Is it a ridiculous idea for you to commit to three tickets for our course now? Second line. Are you against paying for them before the business day starts tomorrow? That's a 503 email. Again, decision fatigue. Five o' clock in the afternoon. When was the last time you tried to close somebody with a hard decision after 3 o' clock in the afternoon alone? After 5? The email response from herjavec comes back at 5:04. No, we're willing to commit to three tickets right now. No, it's not a problem. My assistant will be within in touch with you within the hour and will pay for the tickets. Tickets are paid for at 5:23. I've got all the emails, timestamped, our favorite negotiation one liners and why. All right, number four. Have you given up on what's the context? This is context driven. I see a lot of people trying to manipulate me who've learned this and they'll send me in an opening email. Have you given up on doing business with us? Well, now I have because you just tried to manipulate me with one of my tools. Now, I don't mind if you use my tools with me, but if you want to use them against me, I smell it really quickly. So any of you that want to try have you given up on as an opening line? It's going to sound harsh. It's out of context. You deserve to have that door slammed in your face. On the other hand, it is the most effective restarter for people who are ghosting you.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out and it's. If you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description or you can wait till the end of this video or you can simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can.

Get a copy there. It's almost a 1,000% guarantee of a response in many cases from three to five minutes. The person receiving it, seeing it, I'm not kidding you, when you send that one line text or one line email, sit there and wait because the response may come screaming back at you. It will restart the conversation literally. I know of two or three instances and probably 10,000 when it didn't. One instance when the answer was yes. Now, context, Your system is perfectly designed to give you the outcome that you have achieved. If they're ghosting you, they're not responding, you're part of the problem, which means they've gone dark on you for one of two reasons. Number one, you're not listening to them. It's a larger subset of communication with them with you is doing them no good. The first problem is probably that you're not listening, you're pitching and they get tired of giving you the counterfeit yes or the maybes and they just can't take it from you anymore and they just stop responding because you're not listening to them. Number two, they've lost all influence on your side. Again, communication with you is doing them no good. If communication with you was doing them any good, they would still be communicating. What does that mean? Is your takeaway when you send have you given up on? And they respond five minutes later. If you go back to the same type of communication that you were using that led up to that point, you've just blown your one shot reset. I was coaching an ex girlfriend probably about five or six years ago. She says, hey, this guy, you know, we're pitching him on this investment. He's not returning our text anymore. And I said, perfect, shoot him a text saying, have you given up on making this investment? He's going to get back to you right away. She did. He got back to her right away. She went back into the same pitch that drove him away in the first place and she never heard from him again. If you send this, you have to rethink how you got into this in the first place, because your communication system is perfectly designed to give you the outcome that you achieved. You cannot go back to communicating with them the way they you were communicating before. Chances are you were pitching and you weren't listening. You've got to go into listening and using one of our skills, principally summary, to try to get back on track. There was another point I was going to make on that, but it'll come back to me. All right, we're going into 5 and 6. Actually, Howard has a question. Go ahead. No, no.

You.

You gave me an alternative to that.

Which is, you must have a legitimate reason for. He's saying, I don't know. Can. Can. Can anybody. Howard says, you must have a legitimate reason for. We'll get it. We'll get into that in a minute. But here's the one that I wanted to get into. We're coaching. We're coaching a guy in a negotiation with Coca Cola, selling them a healthcare program. He says they got to get. We gotta. We have an agreement, but they haven't signed a contract. Gotta get the contract signed by the end of the calendar year, or this is all gonna go down the tubes. And a guy I'm working with has heard this. So we say, perfect. You send. You send. Send the email, send a text. Have you given up on getting the contract signed by the end of the calendar year? So we get a response every time. Silence. This guy got back to us, and he said, you said, this worked. We don't know what's going on. I said, no, we do know what's going on. The answer is yes. And it's really hard for people to say yes, especially this one. That's why you got silence. So here's, you know, going from certainty, uncertainty to certainty, going with Dan Sullivan. Before, you didn't know if they've given up. Now you know, whether you like it or not, you have a solid answer. They have given up. You have to recalibrate all of your communication now to try to salvage this. And here's what's going on. I guarantee you that your counterpart has lost all influence on his side of the table. Coca Cola. And the guy we're coaching says, yeah, but if he doesn't sign this, it's going to hurt him. And I say, you know what? That's not good enough. Here's what this guy's looking at. He's trying to make a decision whether to get his hand cut off, which is losing your deal, or getting shot in the head, which is what he's faced with. I promise you, this guy's fighting for his life. Here's how you get him out of it. You send him another email saying, like, look, all this business nonsense, I can't take it anymore. Let's go out. Let's get a steak and a scotch. You know, we'll have a couple of drinks. We'll have a few laughs. I promise you, we won't talk business. He said, if you can get him out of the Office into a social environment. And you don't ask him a single business question. If you get him out of there and get him laughing, he'll tell you what's going on. You won't have to ask. Sends an email, they make an appointment to have dinner together. They have dinner. My buddy is not pressing business at all. A few drinks in, this guy begins to explain to him how he's fighting for his life in Coca Cola. He's worried about losing his job. They moved him. Somebody else has got the contract now. And he offers to tell him who it is and connect. So if you ask that no oriented question and you get a yes, you have to read what you're learning. You might not like the answer, but you're actually smarter, having gone from uncertainty to certainty. All right? Moving down the line, letting out know a little at a time to encourage collaboration. Read the book. You know that how am I Supposed to do that? Is a story of how the book opens. And a lot of people have picked that up as a way to bargain. Like somebody says, one guy got back to me at lawn service. Guy said he wanted X number of dollars to do all the landscaping in his house. And he just looked at him and said, how am I supposed to do that? And a landscaper immediately cut the price significantly. And a lot of people learn, how am I supposed to do that? It's a great way to get people to bargain against themselves. What it really is is a polite way to start indicating to people that the answer is no. Friend of mine, Ned Coletti, was a GM of the Dodgers. Those of you that are baseball fans probably know who Ned is. Great guy. And Ned and I were talking about this one time a few years ago and Ned said he liked to let out no a little at a time. What does that mean? Nobody should get blindsided with no. People should be given gently indicators that there are problems. If you got problems with what they're proposing, if you can't do it or you won't do it, or it's a bad idea to do it, no is an answer, but it's really about your fourth response and letting out no a little at a time. Now, how am I supposed to do that? A how question is principally designed to create implementation. If you don't want to do something because it's unimplementable, you say to somebody, how am I supposed to do that? Like, all right, I'll do it. Give me some implementation based on my constraints. Every now and then somebody says, well, what if they tell me how to do it well, you just push them to their limit without making them angry. Because when somebody turns around and gives you implementation as a negotiator, in many cases your job is to find out where the boundaries are. And maybe one time in 10, somebody will turn around and say, this is how you do it. Well, perfect. You've just learned a lot. You've been given implementation that they think is reasonable. Plus you push them as far as you can on that issue, which in many cases is your job as a negotiator. The other thing it is again, my son Brandon, he said, how am I supposed to do that? Is forced empathy. You don't ask the how question so much as to get an answer. As you get, you ask a question in order to make them think what Danny Kahneman would call triggering slow thinking. If you look at somebody and say, how am I supposed to do that? And you say it deferentially. You don't say like, how am I supposed to do that? Where your tone of voice says, I think you're stupid. You say it deferentially. You make them stop and look at you and see you as a human being, at least potentially as a collaboration partner who's looking to collaborate but just need some help. So it's forcing them to empathize with you, which is one of the things that's a good thing to do in your negotiations. So it's forced empathy. Number six, your offer is very generous. I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me. That hits a number of awesome psychological buttons. Positive attributes are reinforced by the recognition of them. If someone's being stingy with you to their in their brain, they're being generous. That's what empathy is about. What is it to them, not to you? You need more generosity at somebody. When they've given you a stingy offer, you start out by saying you've been very generous. It makes them want to be even more generous. And the story they're telling themselves in their head is that they're being generous anyway. We want to encourage more of it. It has a tendency to turn that dial up by saying you're being very generous. And to say, I'm afraid it just doesn't work for me, I'm afraid is important part of that statement. It just doesn't work for me. The beauty of that is that it takes away external criteria. One of the things that I think Bob Cialdini talks about a lot, or he may even speak of, because I think we're going to see him tomorrow. Some people say, well, in negotiations, go to external criteria. Go to an external set of criteria that you can both agree on. Well, look, what if the market price is X and you don't have the money, the external criteria is a market price. Does that mean you got to pay the market price if you don't have the budget or the funds? It's a stupid idea. So saying it just doesn't work for me. Takes away external criteria as a way to take you hostage. We have never had anybody say, I reported back in any response when someone said, that just doesn't work for me. Somebody fired back, say, yes, it does. You made a lot of money last year. No, it doesn't work for me. I've never had that fired back at anybody. What typically happens, one of the students in Georgetown was doing this in a negotiation in his day job in a business. And his partner sat down, some people across the table, they came in with a low ball offer. And he looked them in the eye and said, you know, you guys, offer is very generous. It just doesn't work for us. He said, the people on the other side of the table looked at each other and looked back at him and said, you're right, it is low, and gave him a higher offer. How often does that happen? How often does it have to happen? All right, number seven, you call a black swan group on the phone and you get my son on the phone and you say to him, how are you today? And he's going to say back to you, it sounds like you got a place you want to start. And you were immediately going to get into the conversation. Now, of the number of people that ask you, how are you? How many of them actually wanted to know what is how are you really? How are you? Is a temperature check where someone's trying to get a bead on what mood you're in to find out whether or not they can lay out what they called to talk to you about in the first place. You've just gotten around all of that, dancing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and gotten right to the heart of what they had on their mind anyway, which is what they went through in their head before they dialed the phone and called you. And you just put time back in your day and in their day. Now, the only time Brandon's ever gotten any pushback on this, he said one time, one guy did say, okay, I'd love to get into that, but really, how are you? The guy wanted to know he wasn't mad that he tried to get right into it right away. And my son was like, fine, you know? And then they had the social conversation this guy wanted to have, because then it was about serving the person on the other side of the phone. And that guy, who is a minority, wanted to have that how are you? Conversation, which, if it enhances the moments in the interaction, is cool. But at least two out of three times, they really don't care how you are. My back hurts. My. My legs hurt. My. I get. I get varicose veins. They don't want to hear that. What they really want to know is, are you in a mindset where they can talk to you? So how are you? Is really a probe on the other side's part to find out if they can talk to you about what's on their agenda. And when you say, sounds like we've got a place you want to start, bang, you just hack that and you move forward. All right. Responses to questions number eight and nine. You answer a question at your peril. Everybody knows the question behind a question is much more important. So why is answering a question at your peril? Well, number one, most people usually don't have the ability to ask a good question. Like, when I ask a question, I'm pretty good at it because I listen and I actually want an answer. But most people, they ask you a question, and you answer the question, they start talking about something like, good God, I had no idea that's what you were talking about. If I'd have known that before I answered, I'd have given you a completely different answer. What makes you ask. Again, not what makes you ask. What makes you ask. Upward inflection, genuine curiosity, inquisitive. You got to find out what's driving them. I'm in a presentation a couple years ago, while I'm still doing security stuff, insurance company thinking about getting into K and R. Insurance. Kidnapping, ransom. There's insurance for it. There's insurance for everything. They say, have you kept your government security clearance? And I have intentionally not. And what I think, for brilliant reasons, and I think the answer to that of no is so startling that people are going to ask me, follow, why not? What's going on? Have you kept your government security clearance? No. Conversation then goes in another direction. We don't get back to this topic in the entire presentation. I never get the opportunity to come up with my brilliant explanation why I don't have the government security clearance. It never comes up, and we don't get the contract. To this day, I don't know why they Asked, what makes you ask might have changed.

It.

Seems like you have a good reason for asking that same thing. You're not being disrespectful by digging into the motivation behind somebody's questions. Finally, number 10. Seems like you have a, a good reason for not doing that. When people are failing to perform and you want them to open up, this is what you've got to say. Seems like you have a good reason for not performing. Seems like you have a good reason for not meeting the deadline. They are never going to tell you what the real reason is or what's going on behind their side of the table. If you say, why didn't you do that? Do you know you failed in an agreement? All the accusatory stuff, they're not coming out of their shell to let you know what's going on. Contractor subcontractor negotiation in Washington D.C. subcontractor completely failing to perform. Contractor sits down with the subcontractor who's been making excuses, blaming it on other people for lack of performance, sits down with him and says, seems like you got a good reason for not performing as per the contract. Guy on the other side of the table kind of shrugged his shoulders, said, no, I don't. And they worked it out and they fixed everything. You don't sit down to find out what's stopping them because you want to hang them. Maybe you do, but you really sit down because you want to get people back on track.

So you said something that made me now question myself. So I've used this in business discussions with some of them I'm going to collaborate with. I've used this to acquire millions in real estate. And one of the questions I start with is, hey, I'd love to try to make this a win win. And I'll say so with that in mind, what would a win look like to you? And then what I've done is then when they respond is then I go to work to try to solve that and make that a reality for them. So my brain is kind of doing this because I thought that was a good thing as a way for me to ask, what are you wanting to accomplish? So then I can go to work to try to accomplish that for them. But now I'm hearing you say maybe to phrase that differently. So I'd love to hear thoughts on that.

June. Real estate.

I mean, a lot of things.

Yeah.

And these are price negotiations.

Well, not only that, but let's say, I'll give you an example, there's a three million dollar ranch for Sale. First time it's ever been for sale. And I went to them, I said, I'd love what would be a win for you on this. And they said, we'd like to sell this to somebody that's going to continue on our legacy. This has been in the family for hundreds of years. It's his family ranch. I said, great. And I said, well, my goal is to turn this into a historic ranch. I want to refurbish the farmhouse, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically, I was able to repaint their vision of what they wanted to continue. And so they chose me over another buyer. And they actually then ended up giving me even a better price and better terms on the property. And they've since been back, and I toured them around and I said, well, what do you think of what I'm doing with the place? And they started crying. So I'm like, well, great. We're doing the right thing. They're like, thank you so much for continuing with the legacy. So those are the types of things I'm trying to accomplish and solve is really satisfying what the other party's wanting.

Right, Right. So, I mean, you're not. You're not using it as a.

You're not.

What you're doing is you're swapping out value and you're delivering people a lot of emotional value and you actually mean it. You're also doing it.

Whatever. Whatever they want. I'm trying to get that for them.

Right. You're also doing it to get them soften up the price.

Well, well, no, now there's.

Because you. Because you're delivering additional value, that's okay. And because you're paying attention to them emotionally.

We already agreed on the price even before we got to that.

But.

So before we got to what? I'm not going to disagree with you on that. And certainly, yeah, it works for that in price. I get where you're coming from. I guess it's because there's a lot of different ways to skin the cat. Right? So to me, I feel. I see it's all part of it. Another property I bought, I said, well, why do you want to sell? They're like, well, we haven't sold this building in how many years? I'm like, well, I'll give you full price. I'll tell you what, the bank covers 75%. Why don't you cover the 25% down payment and I'll pay you off in five years? So I gave them full price. I just was able to then use my capital to improve the Building and do other things. So it was a way to find a collaborative win. So, like, I didn't change the price on that. I was able to modify the terms and get them what they wanted. They just wanted the property off their. Off their books that wasn't selling. And here I was finally coming along after been sitting there for 12 months, languishing, and I was able to buy the property from them. A lot of different ways that it works out. So just the whole thing about price, I just want to put that in there because it's not always about price. It can be terms agreed. So what would be another way to, I guess, accomplish that and make sure? Because I feel like I'm really coming across as genuine as, hey, what is a win for you guys? And trying to solve that for them. But now, is there a different verbiage maybe to be using?

Well, could I say this? I mean, and it's one thing. If it's working for you, that's one thing. It's when others are using it on you in a way that, you know, makes them a half client. So is that.

Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, you're living the rest of the collaborative negotiation now. You can't help the fact that other people are using that exact same tactic in a very predatory fashion.

And maybe I'm naive because whenever people have asked me, I'm like, oh, great, well, this is what a win would look like. And then I map it out, and.

Then as we're talking about it, you're changing the words. You realize that, right?

Sure.

So how'd you change the words you're saying?

Right then?

Yeah.

I'm sorry. Maybe I missed it then.

I know, because, look, I gotta tell you something. You need to be warned in advance. I listen real good.

Okay, this is perfect. I feel like I'm getting my own session here. Sorry, guys.

So the discussion was, how can I.

Make this a win for you, Chris? Because I'm taking up all your time now.

Right. And so what's a difference between win and win win? Are those the exact same words? They are not. I mean, one word change is enough to make a change. And I said people would talk about, look, I want a win win, deal.

Right.

And you said, how do I make this a win for you? Those are, in fact, different words.

Agreed. All right. I guess I'll sit with that a little bit because I feel like I'm maybe still missing it.

No, no, that's cool. I mean, like, if you're. If you're. Ideally, this is just getting you to think, that's all. And think about, you know, what your intent is. And your intent is clearly to have people that after the fact are not destroyed, like some supply chain negotiators, but people after the fact, after they have done business with you. Instead of saying, yeah, that guy kicked my ass. Yeah. They're saying, like, no, I made a great deal with that guy. He paid attention to who we were, you know, he paid attention to what we wanted to get ultimately out of. We weren't selling a house, we were selling a home. You know, we had hopes and dreams that were involved there and he respected that. Cool. Thank you.

Yeah. Just, I mean, determine it, you know, someone else or they half. I mean, you can take a look. You can evaluate a lot of your clients with this sort of process. But in terms of scrambling his brain, we could. You, I think we. You should feel really bad about how you are utilizing these very manipulative techniques on other people. And if the shame hits you deeply enough, talk to Ken Wells, maybe Ned Halliwell, and we'll work this shit through.

That's.

It's good. I mean. Yeah.

And then, then if he disappears, we'll get Andre to find him. Because Andre can find anybody.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. How should entrepreneurs evaluate risk? And if a negative financial outcome does befall somebody, what can or should they do to survive?

Evaluating risk. Risk has three flavors. There's a probability that the bad thing happens. There's the cost impact if the bad thing happens, and there's the controllability that you do or don't have over the bad thing. I think that understanding all three of those is vitally important. And I think one of my jobs as a business owner is to, number one, identify the highest probability risk. Risk. So in your business, whoever you are, whatever business you have, there's a opportunity for you to think about what are the. What, what are the five highest probability risk that I currently have that would disrupt. Here's, here's the guardrail that would disrupt my future stream of earnings. What are the five highest probability risk? And assign a probability to them. So in your world, in the teaching world, a huge risk for you is you. You are the single point of failure in your business. And if something happens to you, that's going to disintermediate genius. And I'm the same way. Something happens to me, there's going to be. I in the teaching world am the product because it's my experience. So if we can Understand what the 5 highest probability risk are that we face and we're thoughtful about those, we can then say, well, is there a way for me to reduce the cost if that risk occurs, or can I make that risk more controllable? Is there anything I could do that would reduce the probability of that risk occurring? So W.C. fields said it W.C. fields said, I wish I knew where I was going to die and I would make sure to never go there. It's true for us as well. If we can have clarity about what the risks are, then we can minimize sometimes the probability of that risk happening or if the risk does happen or the cost in the event that risk happens. And I think one of the primary roles of a, a CEO of an owner is to think about defense.

Along.

With thinking about offense. We tend to be offense oriented. It's growth, it's maximizing, it's optimizing, it's 10xing. It's all the things we talk about. And rarely does a business owner think about what are the gotchas, where are the places that if a risk did happen, it would somehow cause a major disruption to the revenue stream or the earnings? And so I happen to be a big believer in being thoughtful about the risk. Now, if the risk does occur, you know, if it's failure, and that one's much harder. You know, Dan talked about taking four months off. I'm not quite as quick as Dan was. So it took me 18 months. When I went broke and lost everything, it took me much longer to get my mind screwed back, my head screwed back together. And part of the reason for that is because I have my net worth and my self worth entwined. And that's a deadly combination. You get who you are entwined with what you do. It's deadly, particularly when you lose on what you do, right? I mean, so those two are entwined. And so it was a brutal, brutal time period. And it took me a while. I use this example, when all this happened, I was between 38 and 40 years old. And that was 30 years ago. So those of you doing the math, I'm 69. The analogy I use is that time in my life, it was like being a basketball player. And it's halftime and I'm trotting off the court and I look back at the scoreboard and the score is 87 to 3, the other guys winning. And so here I am in the locker room at halftime, my midlife, and I'm trying to figure out, how do I win this game? How do I win this game? And a very wise person looked at me and after months and months I grew a ponytail, I got my hair, my ear pierced. That still hurts. It's been 30 years. Still got a little problem right there. I don't know why I did that. And a very wise person said to me, Keith, you're asking yourself the wrong question. You're asking yourself how do I win? And you should be asking yourself, how am I going to play? How am I going to play this game? It's not about winning, it's about how I'm going to play. And I made a decision right then. I'm going to play for excellence. I'm going to play for mastery. I'm going to play for keeps. I'm going to play for spectacular. This is my life. I'm proud of it. And I will gladly live it again if only given the opportunity.

What is the average sale of the person and then what's the, the lifetime value of somebody, say over the last three years?

That's a great question. So our average card value is about $100. Okay, here's an interesting stat. Non members, people who are just customers, are the lifetime. So lifetime value in the given 12 month period was I think was $160.

Our members.

Have a 8.1 more times propensity to buy the non members and their LTV is about 900. $888 or 889.

Yeah. So I think it comes back to like what's the first problem to solve? I love everything Dean's saying but like for me I go, okay, so the membership's proven itself. I'm not sure on your website the membership is a good enough gateway in you have one pop up. I'm not sure it's enough value. You know, I think something of a video or something that really promotes it besides free shipping. I mean I'm sure somebody wants the golf tip. I'm not a golfer, but I'm sure they want the tips or a video or something there. And so I would focus on getting as many on membership. Now do you have an outbound department that's doing outbound sales at all?

How do you mean? I don't know if I, if I've been understanding where you're at.

Like somebody that calls existing people on your database to find out how their golf game is going right now?

No, we do not.

Okay.

So you know, I think the new world, especially Covid, has pushed it where people are starving for connection. So if you could put an outbound department, I mean you could outsource this. But every time somebody joins the membership, somebody's calling in to congratulate them, welcome them and then starts. Because one, I'm not a golfer, my partner is and I watch two golfers and they just vomit golf talk for like ever. So if you could get someone on there and in between the golf talk you're like, well tell me about these shoes you're doing. Like you're not, you're not using like Walmart clothing to go golfing with your buddies or something. So, so you can increase sales there exponentially. And the last thing is. Well, there's two more. One, do you have a formal referral program that's either in place or working now?

No.

Okay. So I think that's low hanging fruit to have a referral program that I think there's two types of referral programs. There's one that's like hey, refer someone, you get something. And then there's the like charity program. Right. The one plus one model that tom shoes like for everybody that buys a pair of shoes or does something, I'm going to do something good for the world. So I would consider that. And the last part, if you're still convinced that it's really a lead generation problem, which I'm not convinced at all. I think based on your members outbound like you to me, I could see 10 million quickly here. But affiliates of course are going to be quick ways. I would imagine Tesla drivers, Mercedes drivers, genius network members that work with people that could afford or play the game of golf where they're regular or groups like Tiger 21 or financial advisors. I think they're, you're going to have a place where you have easy fishing ground without spending money on marketing. So maybe a couple of points you could take from it.

Great, thank you for the feedback. And one of the things that we heard many times like affiliates, affiliate programs, but I mean I have no clue how to do that, any of that stuff.

Well, let's do it like you could do it real quick here. One, you could just ask people in the chat bar, hey, does anybody know anybody's golfers? Is there some way that we would be able to give them value? So I think you have an audience already here. And then the other thing is how do you get buyers to buy more, understand how buyers think. So I believe surveying is now outbound. Survey is going to be great because you're going to get that connection. But also just doing an email survey of what do you like best? What haven't you purchased? Have you seen this? Or whatever type of survey that gives you a little Emotional intel into how they're thinking about you. And I also don't know your based on your website. For me, it looks like any site you'd go to buy a bunch of stuff. So I'm not sure there's what we would call like an X factor positioning. Something that makes you very, very unique. Like hey, our golfing stuff, you know, you're never going to have to worry about like some crazy beetle coming through it or you know, some crazy rash you're going to get from it or we have sweatshop making it like so I don't see that competitive uniqueness in there.

I agree with that totally.

You know, you know what I forgot to do. And Mike and Dean are obviously know each other. Mike, I didn't introduce who the hell you are and what you've done. So Mike has actually built, you know, very big businesses. Give the quick bio bragging about who the hell you are, what you've done.

All right, cool.

So I built a plumbing, H Vac electrical business. Took it from under a million to 32 million under 10 years. So I had 200 employees, 165 trucks, double digit profit. I sold that in 2017. In 2014, I started a company called CEO Warrior where we coach the blue collar space. In 2020 we did 40 million in coaching. We sold. I sold that company in 2020 to a PE firm. I'm still a shareholder. And now I own a company called Food Dog Group. That pretty much my theory is in order to 10x anything, you got a 20x yourself. So I help people 20x themselves today. And then I have a company called Business Forge where we take equity and companies to help them grow and exit in the next three to five years.

Yeah. So I just want to give some context because he's super smart marketer and he knows how to build a business and he's been super supportive of genius recovery and what we do in addiction recovery. So just cool, dude. So I. And he was posting a whole bunch of stuff that I thought. Yeah. And when, when someone has some insight here. I mean that's, you know, I, I never tried to make this around. Yeah, this is the easiest thing for me right now too. I just, you know, Dean, what should he do? That sort of thing. Mike and I just sit here, people think I'm smart. It's actually kind of funny. But yeah. So that's. So Dean, go ahead and add to what, you know, what Mike has suggested and stuff. How do you see it right now?

Yeah, I saw. I don't look at them as, as separate things. Either or I look at, you're going to drive all of it, right? So you're going to have the, you know, what Mike's describing, of course, is some after unit strategies. And part of the thing that, you know, is the sort of wisest thing you can do is separate them as separate units of your business. Even just, you know, the way you think about them. Not, you know, you look at your after unit as the sole business. The only thing is to come up with ideas just like what Mike was saying that can further what you do with the people that you already have a relationship with. Right. So through different, you know, product lines that you might expand or different relationships, different people that you might affiliate with to introduce new things to your existing clients, to orchestrate referrals among those. I don't know whether you measure that as a separate thing or how you sort of approach the idea of generating referrals. So it's certainly an amazing way to grow then the before unit. We look at that separately. And the best way to think about your before unit, and I'm speaking to everybody now because these things are universal in whatever business you're doing, the best way to think about your before unit is, is as a supplier to your during unit. So the job of work of the before unit is to supply new customers to the during unit, right? At a profit. That's really what it is. If you could have a, you know, if you can kind of create a metric that, you know, what would you be happy to, you know, pay for a new customer? And that depends on, you know, knowing the lifetime value of what your customers are, knowing what your margins are, your, you know, how much you can allow to acquire a customer. Have you ever thought or looked through to see like, what would you cheerfully pay for a new customer?

You know, Dean, we haven't looked at it on a, that granularly of what we would pay for a customer. We've had numbers before. I think you met earlier. You mentioned about like, you know, doing digital marketing and if it was profitable, everybody, you know, that was. But that's short sighted. You know, we used to do the same thing. If we sold something for $100 and our margin was $50, you know, 50% of it, you know, plus the cost of advertising. As long as we made 1X, we were like, you know, it was, we gained the customer, you know, and we thought, you know, the number that we kind of came around was like 20. If we could get a customer for $25 and then convert them into a member.

Yeah, well that's the thing that becomes then what you're in your during unit. The moment somebody buys for the first time, what are you deploying to immediately advance them to buy. The next thing to become a member, to continue on that path that's going to turn them into a long term customer. And you know, looking at the things, one of the, if you have good margins on things, often one of the easy things to is a gift card to offer people. So if I'll give you an example. So my girlfriend owns a studio here in Winter Haven called Amazing Brows and Lashes. And we built a list of thousands of women just within a 15 mile radius of her studio in downtown Winter Haven by offering people a gift card for microblading. So microblading is, you know, a real popular thing that ladies do to get permanent eyebrows.

Right when Dean is saying Dean, you're starting to get a little fuzzy here right now. But he's. Is he, is he locked for everyone? I mean you're locked in your. We're just looking at your perfect, your perfect.

Paul's buddy. You're looking at my perfect eyebrows. I got it. Well, you know, you got, I got an in house eyebrow expert. So it all helps. But didn't know that the difference between $100 gift card and 20% off is nothing. Practically, you know, it's nothing. It's the same exact amount of money. But $100 gift card sounds like I'm getting something. Which is a really an interesting approach where it's much easier to offer someone a gift card than 20% off on something to incentivize a now purchase. Because most of the time when people are doing a 20% off on something, they're saying if you buy before June 30, you're trying to put a deadline on it to speed up the sale to get somebody to buy right now. But if they're not going to buy right now, but they're interested in microblading, that's still a valuable person to have because maybe they're saving up to get microblading or they want to do microblading, they want to do it in the future. They're just about to go back up north for the summer, but they're going to come back to Florida in the fall. You can grab and bookmark a future intention, a desire that you have by downloading this gift card. And now we've got a list of visible prospects who live within 15 miles of her studio who are 30 to 65 years old and are women and are interested in microblading. So much so that they downloaded $100 gift card for the purchase of getting microblading. Right. So that became the driver of how to. Of building the list. And we were able to give away gift cards for under $2 on. On Facebook ads, you know, so, you know, to. You spend $2,000 to build a list of a thousand ladies who. That's the core of her business. Now every week she sends out email to them, you know, offering all of the things that she does with her super signature. She's been able to grow the spa, continue to add new machines or equipment. They've got all these facial devices and things that they use that cost thousands of dollars, but they're all enhancing now all of these ladies that they serve from the neck up, basically, you know, everything to do with your eyebrows and lashes and facials and permanent makeup, all of the adjacencies to what started out as just microblading. So when you look at. If you were to think about even the golf shoe, you know, a gift card for, you know, if you say you've got a 50% margin, if you give somebody a $50 gift card to use towards shoes, your cost on that would be $25 to build a new customer. Just like what you're saying was your happy number, you know, but the. The thing for people to download, it's such you get everybody, right? Anybody who's interested. Well, I don't need new shoes right now, but I'm going to get this because I'm going to need them in six months or I'm going to need them. You know, these ones I'm almost ready for or I do need another pair or whatever it is, you know, that you're gathering people who are doing that now. That's just one thing. But information is another way, you know, if you were to put together even a, you know, the summer 2022 golf shoe catalog. Yes. That information is a great thing where that in combination with a gift card or, you know, even if it's a $20 gift card or a $10 gift card or whatever it is, when somebody downloads a catalog, I've discovered that catalog is like a magic word. You know, we were doing some. I've got a client who does bathroom remodels and in Miami, and we were doing ads offering a kitchen and. Or a bathroom planning guide, a bathroom planner. We were generating leads for about $2.40 for. Yeah, for. For bathroom remodel leads. But we switched to the 2022 bathroom vanity catalog and the leads went to $1.30. Same, same audience, same, you know, sending them to the same people. But what I've really discovered in that is that a catalog has objective data, objective information. Right. It's not me trying to get them to steer them towards any kind of bathroom. A planner sounds like I'm not sure of what I want, but a bathroom vanity catalog gives me an economy of information that is going to be very valuable to me. You're going to get pictures, you're going to get a variety of. Of choices. You're going to get all the technical specs and the prices. So instead of just an idea book or an inspiration guide, you're getting something, you know, your people are, you know, anybody who downloads, of course, a bathroom vanity catalog is the only reason somebody's doing that is they're in the market for a. A bathroom vanity. Same thing with anybody who downloads a gift card for microblading. The only use for it is to get microblading. Right.

So, Dean, does that look like you do Facebook ads? And then you send them to a landing page where they have to put in their email address, and then we.

Use the lead ads product on Facebook where they don't even have to leave Facebook. And Facebook auto fills the form with their name and email and phone number if you want that, but they automatically fill it with the Facebook information that they have. So all they have to do is click the button to say, yes, I won't send me the catalog or send me the gift card or whatever. Whatever you decide to offer, you know, and you can offer. If you think about one of the ways that I would think about this as a lead generator. All they have to do is, oh, I say, you know, looking at, separating the compelling from the convincing. If I keep my eye on the prize of building a list of golfers, that's who we're looking for. So now I would look at who else wants golfers. You know, I did some work with a company in Canada that did party rentals and Party rental company. So, oh, yeah, you're from Toronto. So this was McLean party rental in. In Toronto. So that at that time it was the father who had built up the business the kids were taking over. I believe they've sold the company now again. So. But this was in, you know, late 90s, early 2000, where we were working together that they, you know, I asked them, what's the. The best thing? What's your largest check? What's the jackpot thing that you could do if you could get any kind of customer. And they said an outdoor wedding is like the big ticket thing because you get the tent and all the furniture and the tables and the linens and the dishes and the porta potties and luxury porta potties and generators and lights, all of the stuff. It's like a big ticket thing. But picking a party rental company is not a sexy thing. And it's not a decision that brides are in a hurry to make. Right. It's like further down. If you take the timeline from will you marry me? Yes. To where, you know, I do. That can be a year or 18 months of a timeline. And picking the party rental company is a long way down the list of priorities that you might have. Right. But what are. If we go upstream, what are the things that must also be true if you're going to need a party rental company to, you know, fulfill your outdoor wedding? The base thing is that you're getting married and you want to have an outdoor wedding. That's the thing. So what we did was we put together a directory of 100 Great Places to have an outdoor wedding in Toronto. And we would advertise that in the newspapers, in the bridal magazines, and there's a whole bridal subculture in Toronto. I mean, there's lots of places to get in front of people. And it's not very sexy to advertise your party rental company in a bridal magazine. Right. But when you are getting people who are just in the process of planning their outdoor wedding, I mean, it's pretty high on the list. As soon as somebody decides they're going to get married and they're going to have an outdoor wedding, the next thing is what's the date and what's the venue? Right. That's. Those are the two top priorities. So why not put yourself right up at the front of the line, knowing that we're thinking like a chess master here. You're not thinking about that. We want them to use us for this for their party rental company. But we also do the. We also do get all the information. Now we're able to turn that into a profit center because there are other people who are not party rental companies that also want to find brides early in the process, including the venues that we're featuring in the directory. Some of them want to stand out and have a feature ad in the publication. Florists, music DJs and band bookers. All of that stuff that we were able to align with and turn the lead generation into a Profit center. And that's where when you think about the before unit, if somebody's outside of the logistics and the stuff of the during unit of your business, where because if you're running a business that's doing $5 million, you're. You're probably stretched with a team that's very busy on. There's a lot of logistics of running the during unit of a business. Right. So separating it and having somebody only be worried about how can we get more people on the list and having somebody who's a driver of the after unit whose only concern is nurturing lifetime relationships, orchestrating referrals, presenting, you know, other ways that you can expand and deepen the relationship with the people who buy that. Those are really, you know, those are big strategy kind of decisions that you can, that you can make. Right.

It's funny you mentioned that. One year we give away, we're giving it, we give away a free pair of golf shoes on Facebook.

Right.

We generated like about 6,000 leads of course.

And you think about that one thing, a free pair of golf shoes. We did that. I worked with a summer camp in Toronto just a couple of years ago. We did right before COVID We offered a free week of camp and generated thousands of leads in the GTA of people who now have kids that they want to go to camp. And it was just like, you know, a huge explosion. That's the driver is getting new golf on your in the before unit. But as Mike pointed out too, the, the big and immediate opportunity is getting the people you already have a relationship with to buy more buy again.

Yeah, I think we do a decent.

Job of that part of it. We, we squeeze up. I mean there is still some low hanging fruit like he mentions 100 getting more database is.

Yeah. And I like the way Wimbledon. Like I. And I may look at some of these experiences too. I sat at Wimbledon a few years ago with a friend who owns fuzzy yellowballs.com which is a tennis instruction site. Will. And you know, I was in London because I was doing a breakthrough blueprint event. I do small, you know, boardroom style events where we have 10 or 12 people and we spend three days focused on applying the eight profit activators. And I drive it all by sending emails saying, hey, I'm coming to London for a marketing mastermind and we're going to spend three days applying the profit activation business. Would you like to join us and fill the room by email that way? So here I am at Wimbledon with Will. I was explaining what I was doing. He's got all of these tennis players that he could do the same thing for them by offering experiences that people could do at major tennis tournaments.

Right.

Imagine, you know, if you create a master's experience for all of the golfers that you have, or you look at all the majors or the Phoenix Open or the, the fun tournaments kind of thing, that you can create that kind of experience for people, high end experiences. Because you've got a rich of. You got a list of 100,000 people. There's rich people on that list.

There are. Yes, there are.

And so you start thinking, how high is high? Like, what would be the, you know, Neiman Marcus approach or whatever, you know, the cat. What could you put that would be like a high end experience for people where they could, you know, I did a golf trip in Scotland. I've done, you know, three or four times. But the, the one that stands out in my mind is our third annual once in a lifetime golf trip to Scotland. And that was a. We used a company called Perry Golf, which is like a luxury golf provide. They've got these coaches that are like private jets with, you know, eight facing club seats. And they do everything, they organize. We played all the, all the British Open courses in Scotland. We stayed in the best hotels. They handle everything. And that kind of, you know, you could, with somebody, as a division of that, have an opportunity to do things like that. So Will came back, put together an experience for the DC Open in. He lives in Washington and It was a $10,000 experience. And I forget how many people he had, but it was like a big hit that he put together. And he started doing those things now. The US Open, Wimbledon, Australian Open, where people could come. He'd set up an experience with a player, like a meet and greet or a clinic with Martina Navratilova or with the Bryan Brothers or whatever. So you get tickets to the event, you get accommodation, you get. They basically handle the, the trip there. And so you start thinking creatively about all the things that you could, you could put together there. You know, that's fascinating.

You said. Because we have friends. Like, I don't know if you're a golf junkie, like, with regards to golf, like technical, like shafts and stuff.

Right.

Are you.

I'm not really. I'm not really. But I mean, I, I'm an avid golfer. I love. But I'm not a technical, like, you know.

Right.

So I'm not eight handicap. I'm gonna shoot between 78 and 82.

No, no, right.

I'm not interested. I Don't have the discipline or the technical thing. I don't and I don't think that it's an incremental increase in my happiness if I was a three handicap or what I'm not able to put in the work that beats.

So I don't really share this with a lot of people. But I have friends in the golf industry like, like clubfitting.

Yeah.

And shafts manufacturers like that. Have you heard of KBS chefs? Kbs? Yeah. So kbs, he's a personal friend of mine.

Oh wow.

So I was thinking and they're both like, they're all personal friends. Like giving an experience that a club fitting experience. Like hey, for X amount of dollars you get to meet you know, Kim from KBS shafts you get to meet Mark from the, from cool clubs. You know, for X dollars you get fitting plus you get a new set of clubs.

Yeah.

Plus a golf.

You know, you start thinking about what that is. You know you could. I thought about in Toronto one year I met someone who was a regional guy for the golf. What's the golf store?

Golf Town.

Golf Town. Right, right. You know and I thought about Golf Town should sponsor like the Toronto's greatest golfer competition. Like the big break on the Golf Channel. And that's just an idea that only takes somebody to drive the idea. I mean you've got the list, you've got access to everybody. It's like it would be, you know, a profit center could expand. Nike Toronto, when they came to Toronto, they set up these run to groups where they did a series of 5k races. But they built a list of 25,000 runners in Toronto. Right. Like avid people who are run enough that they would compete in a 5K. Right. And that's where you start thinking about. You're separating the, what I call the compelling from the convincing. The compelling is just getting them to raise their hand for their own self interest and then convincing them to buy what you've got.

So Dean, how about like a webinar? So if we had like Kate, the founder of kbs, like we had like a, like a webinar, put it on Facebook and people could sign up for the webinar. Was that, is that a sound idea?

Yeah, perfect. All of those things, I mean you, you can live stream anything that you could imagine. You know, you look at the Golf Channel and anything you could set up those things, anything you can stream. There's nothing stopping you from doing any of that now. You've got a built in audience and that's where driving and growing that audience is the big opportunity. You're going to be able to incrementally, you could probably double your business just focused on the during and the after unit. But to really grow it, really, like, truly expand it, you've got to have a dependable accelerator pedal that you can add new people and build the universe, you know?

Wonderful.

Much appreciated, sir. And a few years back, Jay Leno held up one of these things on the show, and he said, you know, we do everything with these things. Everything except call people, right? So I'm going to ask everybody to hold up your phones. Now, Joel and I went over this six times, and I know earlier Jerry told everybody to put away their phones. So, like, all right, we got a little glitch. But if you have your phone, please hold it up. And what I'm going to ask you to do is to go to your contacts, just like me, and go to the Z's. Okay? So just hit the Z and then scroll all the way down to the bottom. So as you're scrolling down to the bottom, what's gonna happen is when you get to the bottom, you're gonna see a number, and that's how many contacts are gonna be in your phones. I ask you to put that number in the chat box, please, and I'm gonna start my presentation now. All right? So, Tim, can you just confirm you can see the slideshow cell phone?

Yes, sir.

Okay, excellent. So, as Tim said, the name of this talk is there's a gold mine in your pocket. And the goal for today is to help you to extract some of that gold from the mine. So you guys have probably seen now, if you look at the feed, 300, 500 thousands, you know, thousands of contacts in some cases, and we're typically in touch with anywhere from maybe 5 to 10% of those people. So now I want you to look at your CRM, which is your contact relationship manager, through that same lens, however, you know, and that's. That's going to be your database, right? Infusionsoft, constant contact, whatever you use. However, these CRMs typically have a lot more people, right? Like 5,000, 10,000, 50,000, probably in this room. Some of you have 500,000 people just sitting there. So we do a better job with our CRMs. We know that, but it's usually maybe 25%, 40%, and with good automation, up to 50%. So the question really for you is, how many of those people are you in contact with now? Or maybe a better question is, how many of those people fell through the cracks?

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

So Dean Jackson calls these people the unconverted leads. I like to call them the gold mine opportunities. Because there's hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars just sitting there waiting to be extracted. So the next question is, McKenna, how many of you now use your phone to make sales calls? And if you're using it all the time, put a 10 in the chat. If you never do it, use a 1 and then anything in between. Okay? And then McKenna, let me know when you have a number, an average. So the purpose of today is really to help you to close more sales by reconnecting with some of these people. You know, and I understand some of you may or may not be taking on new business, which is fine because you'll create some other opportunities by reconnecting with these people.

David, the average is seven.

Okay, so this is a pretty strong group, but we still have some opportunities, so that's excellent. So for everybody else, there's a great opportunity now to go reconnect with some of those people. And I know we all have systems in place, you know, systems like the nine word email, which is. Which is.

I use it.

It's fantastic. We also use Facebook ads, same thing. I use them both. The challenge with these tools is they work great until they don't work and then you get nothing. See, what we're trying to do is get into a conversation and then we get in a conversation. We know we can control that conversation. And the next thing we're going to get is feedback, right? When you have feedback. Now we have a way we can handle objections. We can move forward, we can move backwards. We can make suggestions. You know, Bright Local did a study on Google Pages a few years back, and they showed 60% of people preferred to be in contact with their service providers over the phone, over other communication sources like email, chat, or text. So my goal today is, listen, I'm not saying stop doing what you're doing. The purpose of this is to enhance what you're currently doing. A few years back, worked with a real estate group. They were doing about 17 million a year in volume by simply helping them hire an isa, which is an inside salesperson. This is A person professionally trained to make calls and having their top three agents just spend 45 minutes a day on the phones. They took their business the next year to 28 million. That's a 35% increase in sales. Let me ask you this. Who would like a 35% increase in sales? Okay. Like, one person. Okay.

Well.

Okay.

Excellent.

Well, great.

So now that you are thinking about this, and you're probably getting excited about it, a little thing called call reluctance is going to kick in. And that's that little voice in your head that's going to start saying weird things, Right?

We've been trying to reach you concerning your.

That's the little voice right there. He's trying to reach us right now. So the little voice. Because we all have one, right? And how do I know that it's exactly what Tim said? Because I've been doing this for 35 years. So what I want to do is I want to give you a gift.

Okay?

The gift is a copy of the sales playbook.

And.

And I'm going to ask you right now if you could take out a pen, and I want you to write these pages down, pages 34 to 39. Because there's going to be an exercise that's going to help us through call reluctance. And there's really five types. Okay? There's five different types of call reluctance. I'm going to touch briefly on each one. The first one is fear of rejection, by far the most common. No one likes rejection. No one likes being told, no, we all want to look good. We want to be right. The key to this one really is just to take your ego out of it and make the conversation about the other person. The next one is lack of role acceptance. Right? So here you're actually making calls, but in your mind, you're like, man, these calls are kind of below me. Or maybe your parents said things like, wow, you know, when you're a little kid, you heard them say things like, those damn telemarketers just won't stop calling the house. So there's an incongruency here. The next one is not knowing what to say. Right? This will take a fearless salesperson. Turn them into a deer in headlights. The good news is an easy one to fix. The next one is over analysis. Right? This is the one that actually tells you you're doing your job. You're getting ready to get ready to get ready. You know, you're getting ready so much, nothing ever gets done. It's a form of procrastination. And then the fifth One is what we call fear of success. It's a tricky one. So let's say you had success in an area, but it was way harder than you expected. Now you don't do that again. So you can see these are all mindset tricks. So my tip for you today is to come from contribution. Because when you're coming from contribution, you can't lose. So I'm going to share two simple reconnection scripts. The first one is the apology script. So we start the conversation with people by simply apologizing for not following up sooner. It's great for people we had conversations with. It's for people we had relationships and we did not do a good job staying in touch. They fell through the cracks. What it does is gets people to put their guard down. I've even had people say, no, no, I apologize to you. This sounds like, hi John, this is David giving you a quick call from abc. You know, I know it's been a few years and I want to start off by apologizing. You stop there, let them respond and then get right into it. You want the response. The next one is the closing the loop. Very similar to the apology. We start the conversation by getting right into it, being clear and concise. It's great for people we had conversations with. And again, we didn't do a good job of staying in touch or maybe they didn't return our calls. Right. It gets people to put their guard down and then we get to ask great questions like have you bought yet? When do you plan to buy? And we can set up a follow up plan. Sounds like this. Hi Mary, this is David from abc. You had requested info on our site last year and we wanted to close the loop. Have you?

Whatever.

Right. Like magic. People are going to tell you what they plan to do next. I've even had people thank me for calling and closing the loop with them. So there's two call to action today. I already gave you the first one. It's to read pages 34 to 39 in the sales playbook and do the exercise. The second one is a challenge. I want to challenge you to make 20. I want to not make content. I want you to have 25 conversations over the next 30 days. Okay. Even if you're planning to hire somebody to make these calls, it's important for you to experience the value of these calls for yourself and you're going to see the opportunity that's in making these calls. You know, this is a normal challenge I put out and we get great results. This is Not a normal group, though, right?

This is.

This is not an ordinary group. This is an extraordinary group. So here's what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to say I want you to make three. That's it. Have five simple conversations over the next five days with people. And if you do that, I would. I think it's virtually impossible that you won't find at least one piece of business. So the most important thing I want to leave you with today is come from contribution. Because when you come in from contribution, you just can't lose with these calls. Oh, hey, there's a call coming in right now. Gotta go.

David, do you schedule the calls via.

Email or message, or do you just go and call?

Yeah, I mean, we still. Well, we do time blocks, so we'll block times to make calls. Are you referring to, like, specific calls or.

No, I mean, if you're gonna call.

A prospect, are you gonna let them.

Know you're gonna call, or are you just gonna call them cold?

Oh, no, you were. Yeah, we're called. We're calling. Well, I wouldn't say cold because, remember, a lot of these people are people that we've had some engagement with in the past. But, yes, I want to get that person on the phone so that I can control the conversation.

Thank you. All right, who else? Just go ahead, unmute yourself, Dive in.

Whose idea was it to have the.

Phone ringing at the end?

Was it yours or Joel's?

I think.

I think it was mine, but actually it was Joel. Joel. You know what's funny is I pulled it out and Joel said, no, you got to put that back. And I said, all right, Joel. Joel's awesome. Joel's the man. Joel's awesome.

Tim Garrigan had a question, which is, how do we connect when people are working from home? I have office numbers, but they don't have a mobile number. What's your strategy for that? And do you have any training tools you use that you use to track people down and gather phone numbers?

Yeah, I mean, a lot of the people we're going to be contacting are people whose numbers we already have, because, again, it's like a reconnection. However, if you want to connect with people, maybe you don't have their numbers, then there are definitely some tools out there. I mean, we use a tool called Vulcan 7, which I think that's more probably. Probably real estate specific, but they definitely can get phone numbers. There's skip tracers that you can certainly get phone numbers from. You can go on, like Upwork and hire what's called a skip tracer. They'll get you pretty much anybody's phone number for a couple bucks. So definitely ways to get phone numbers. But this is more geared again towards going back into those. That database, those people that we already have those connections with in mining that gold. But by all means, yeah, listen, I built a business on cold calling as well. So that's how this all started.

Great, great.

Well, I just brought up Vulcan 7 for anyone. This is that service. So it does look like this is probably. Yeah. Real estate.

Yeah, it's real estate. The owner's a friend of mine. So I mean, if somebody's interested, I'm sure they're happy to, you know, they can get any phone number, so.

Okay, great.

Anyone else? Guy Costin is here. Hey, Guy, how you doing, man?

Mike, how you doing? Good, good.

I can't wait to see you. Yeah, let's hear it.

You're doing a spectacular job. One misconception that people don't realize during COVID is we have all the office lines. And most office lines right now are being forwarded to people's cell phones. So you don't need the cell phone. Use the office line.

It's being forwarded. Yeah, great point.

That's awesome.

Really good.

Jenny has a question, which is what are your thoughts on voice message texts?

Yeah, I think voice message text is great. Again, like I said, I'm not trying to tell anybody to stop doing what they're doing. It's really just about enhancing. So if you're. If you're in con. If you were in contact with somebody, you haven't talked to them in a while, I want to try to get them on the phone. That's like my.

So you can.

If you send a text and they don't respond, then I would definitely follow up with a phone call. I mean, I'm not saying I'm not against voice message text. I think it's a brilliant way. We talked about loom earlier, which is a great way to just kind of send a message to somebody, say, hey, here's an update. But the purpose of this is to get into a two way conversation with somebody. And I think when you get into those. When we get into those two way conversations, you'll see a lot of magic happen.

Okay, good.

So here's one from Richard Wilson and he asks. I get a ton of incoming calls. I don't have time to pick up the phone for 99% of these. Do you have any software for my mobile phone? So I Can see the value of the person calling, who they are, where they are, estimated value of the lead, etc. Something that uses big data machine learning AI to tell me which 1% of these calls I should actually take. Any ideas?

Richard? Let's invent that because that sounds amazing. I do not know of that right now, but yeah, I think that would be fantastic. I think although thinking, I mean if you have a CRM, we all have CRMs, right? So if our CRMs are connected to our cell phones and then we're going to see the phone number that's calling. So maybe based on that phone number you could get some data that would say, okay, here's a client that was looking at a $200,000 product or something. It's a great idea, it's fantastic. But I'm not familiar with anything right now.

There are a couple. I just saw one. If I can ask my team, either Aaron or Marisa, I know we have it in our tools Slack. There's a couple that analyze and look at incoming, either traffic or calls that provide real time data. But that's. Yeah, let's see if we'll see if we can dig that up. But that's a really good point. There's always room for products like that.

Absolutely.

Okay. I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful in. Awesome, awesome. Click here. Go ahead, you're over here.

Do it now. Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.