John Phillippe | Prospecting Hacks

It's about going in, understanding the situation, understanding someone's problem, having a solution to that problem, and then working through that with them. Fix people's problems, listen to people. Be an aspirin, don't be a vitamin.

This is the Authority Builder podcast. This is the place to come if you're building a professional practice and you want to be seen as the leader in your market. We're going to interview the top experts throughout professional services and we're going to share insights with you to help you grow your firm and be positioned as the only choice that clients ever want. Welcome to the Authority Builder Podcast. I'm your host, Steve Gordon, and we have got an amazing interview for you today. If you're at a place where you want to figure out some out of the box ways to attract clients, this is going to be the interview for you. I am talking today with my friend and client, John Philippe. He is the new author of a book called Prospecting Hacks. And there it is. If you're watching us on YouTube, I highly recommend you get a copy of the book. We're going to talk about some really interesting ways to prospect as we go through this and we're going to share a brand new way for you to follow up with prospects that's automated and very powerful. We'll talk about that as well. But really excited to have John Phillipe here. John, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Steve. Thank you so much. I'm a huge fan. I think I'm the only person who's ever watched every single one of these, so I can't believe I'm on here now.

Well, you're on the other side of the camera now, so. And I gotta tell you, I love the book. As I was going through it, you know, we got to collaborate on it together. And as I was reading the earlier, the early drafts, I was like, man, this guy's just smart. Like, he's just figured out like some really interesting ways to get people's attention and attract clients. So you've got this great background. You've been a producer on Discovery Channel and tv, Houston, all kinds of stuff, Hollywood, all this stuff. How did you get to the point of like uncovering all these prospecting hacks and really developing some of them?

Well, I never planned on doing anything. I've never had a job. And when I was 17, I got a chance to do Discovery Channel projects. And by the time I was 20, Discovery Channel sent me to almost 100 countries producing, directing, documentaries for different TV shows. And when I, when I that experience kind of ended. I was 20 years old. I'm like, I kind of have to make a dollar now, figure this out a little bit. And I realized, you know, no one's going to help me. I need to go help myself. I need to hustle. I need to figure things out. And so a lot of trial and error and just a lot of possible, you know, everything's possible today. Just because 20 people may say no doesn't mean the 21st person is going to say no. And that mentality every day just kind of got me through things. I've done everything from get $10,000 clients in the line at the grocery store to going cold call, build it four by four up, down a high rise building. Just whatever it takes to get things done, because at the end of the day, no one's going to do it for me. So let's go. And the people that are on my team, I think that's rubbed off on them too, because they see me like that every day, so they realize everything's possible every day. And that's just kind of how that's always been, is just hustle all day, every day. It's never too late to hustle. You're never too old to hustle. And I just wake up with that. I'm 54 right now, and I wake up every day feeling like I'm still 17 and I can do anything today. And that's kind of how that's worked out. Writing the book, I finally got time to breathe for a moment, and I just started putting down all my favorite ways of how I've gotten clients in the past. And that's where the book came from.

So, yeah, and there's so much gold in the book, I think the place I would like to start, I'd like to have you share a story. So early in the book, you have this story that you had a salesperson working for you in your web design business. Can you walk us through that? Where you came in and rescued the situation?

For 30 years, I've produced just over 18,000 websites. And my team and I built everything from scratch and all this kind of stuff. And I had a sales commission, only salesperson work for me. And I kind of gave him two rules. I go. I live in Houston. And I'm like, I hate going downtown. I hate it. I never want to go downtown, and I never want to be called into a meeting unless it's just, you got to have me because I'm so busy with other things, you know, I can't Be going to every meeting with you. And it was like some rainy Tuesday or something. And I get this call from my sales guy. And he. He's like, I got this client. He's right on the edge. Please come with me to this meeting. Just lock them in, you know, okay, fine. Goes. And it's downtown. I'm like, fine. So I go downtown, and we go to the 20th floor in some office building. And after about 10 minutes, you know, this guy is not ready. This guy is not. He doesn't want to spend the money. He's not organized. He doesn't have a vision. He doesn't know what he wants. He doesn't know why he wants it. This guy's just not ready. And I am, you know, livid. I'm being quiet, but I'm livid. So we go out, and my sales guy's like, well, gave it a go. We tried. There's a bar downstairs. Why don't we go down there and have a drink? We talk about it, and I'm just kind of disquiet in an elevator. I hit the button for the 19th floor, and he kind of looks at me for a second, and we go to the 19th floor. We go to the office under that guy, and there's a sign outside, and I Google that sign, and I kind of do a little bit more googling about the industry and that particular company has. For what they do, they retranch, will come up in about a month. And so then I walk in, there's the gatekeeper at the desk, and I said, hi, I'm John Philippe. I'm here to talk to such and such who I read on the website out in the hall about your website for the trade show. Oh, yeah, yeah. They were talking about that the other day. Hold on just a second. And she goes down the hall, and I stand, and my sales guy's just kind of looking at me. And the guy comes down and kind of perplexes. He's like, yeah, what do you do? And I gave my godfather pitch, you know, my elevator speech. And he's like, yeah, come on back. And about 30 minutes later or so, I walked out of that office with a check for $17,000. And then I look at my sales guy. I go, now, let's go to the bar. Now we can go downstairs. Don't tell me. Oh, that's it. You know, I drove all the way down here, did all this stuff, and, oh, well, no, I'm going to go make some money today. I'm going to figure this Out. I'm going to create my own possibilities. I'm going to. Let's go. And if I would have had more time today, I probably would have gone to the floor underneath and did it again, but I just didn't have time. Yeah, I mean, I'm just everything, everything's right in front of you. You just have to give yourself permission, you know, and so many people don't realize that.

And I think that's just such a mindset. And you know, I think for a lot of business owners who didn't get into it because they loved sales, it's hard to flip into that mindset and actually make it fun. So what, what I hear there is that you turned the whole thing into a game. Yeah, I, you know, I didn't win on the 20th floor. Well, I'm going to go to the 19th floor and let's see if we can win there.

And yeah, if you don't ask, the answer is already no. So.

Right. You know, and I think that's, that's the, to me, the big important mindset shift in being successful with a lot of this stuff is just not really worrying about whether it's yes or no, but just getting an answer.

Yeah. When I go out socially with friends of mine, they're always shocked at all a little bit because I only go up and talk to the most beautiful women in the place. And they're like, how do you do that? I'm like, well, worst case I can do is tell me to go away. And to this day, I've never had an ugly girlfriend. I've always had beautiful girlfriend because it works. The same thing with clients. I only have X amount of clients. Well, right now we're booked for a long time. My programming company is because I'll talk to anybody. I mentioned the grocery store before. I was buying oranges and the line was on. I started talking to the guy next to me. By the time we got to the register, I had him on a fifteen hundred dollars a month retainer to do his online marketing. I had nothing else to do in line. I mean, I could stand there and. Or I could, you know. Well, so what do you do? You know, like, oh, we specialize on that. And no matter where you are in your life, just billions of dollars right in front of you. You just have to justify it. You just have to.

So walk us through a couple of the. A couple of your favorite prospecting hacks from the book. What would be maybe your number one or two methods that they're your go.

To I kind of mentioned one of them already. My favorite thing is, no matter where I'm at, I've considered possibilities always around me all the time. I never just say, okay, from nine to five, I'm going to prospect. I'm never ever like that. I've never spent a dime on marketing in my life. I've never spent a dime on Google Ads. I've never spent a dime on trade show booths. I've never spent a dime on any of that stuff. Everything I've ever done has always been, hi, I'm John, what do you do? And then probably the other thing is once, once you give yourself permission to see possibilities all around, you realize you're not your story. People could care less about. They care about their problems, they care about their story. They care about. And so if you tell them, okay, hi, I'm John the Specialized, then just let them talk and just let them. And they're going to tell you eventually where their pain is. I mention all the time I want to deliver an aspirin, I don't want to deliver a vitamin, I want to deliver an aspirin. I want people. I'm going to take people's pain away. Because if I take people's pain away, they're going to give me a dollar tomorrow and they're going to tell five, ten friends, hey, that guy fixed my pain and et cetera. One of my favorite stories is I had a big project for a client here in Houston. It's like $100,000 website. That guy then went to London and had some big thing and he's had some event and at the event somebody was complaining about their new website and he turned around, he didn't even know these people and said, well, you should call John down in Houston. And that is like a month later that guy called me. So I talked to this guy in London about you at this thing and that turned into $175,000 project. So just because I took that one guy's pain away and I didn't sit there and say, oh, I've won every award and I've done 18,000 websites and I didn't say any of that stuff, I listened to what he needed, I listened to his pain and I developed a strategy to fix his pain. And more salespeople, and I don't even think myself as a salesperson, but more salespeople go into the situation of where, you know, I've sold millions of dollars and da, da, da, da, look at my cool suit, look at my car, it's not about that at all. It's about going in and understanding the situation, understanding someone's problem, having a solution to that problem and then working through that with them. And that's how you create that relationship and that's how you get the next dollar. And that's how and more people don't look at that that way. So that's probably it. Fix people's problems, listen to people, be an aspirin, don't be a vitamin, and everything's a possibility all around you, no matter what. That's probably the biggest things I really rant about in the book a lot with a lot of examples.

So, John, I think that's one of the biggest things for people is just to, like you say, give themselves permission. Kind of have the mindset that I'm doing this to, to really take pain away from people. And I'm not going to get attached necessarily to any of the yes or no's. I'm just going to see if they want their pain taken away.

Absolutely. And there's been, I mean, there's a number of times, probably a couple times a year where I'll turn down a project. I'm like, you're not ready or I'm not the right fit or something. There's some issue. But I'm just not going to, you know, oh great, here's money. I'm going to grab it, go. You know, if I'm not, if the whole thing isn't, isn't set up the right way, then it's going to be a terrible experience. I'll never get a referral. They're going to give me a bad review somewhere. I mean, I'm not going to go down that road and whereas I know a ton of people that will just go grab anything and sign up anybody to do anything. You know, look, look, all the money I made today, but it's going to be a terrible slog going through it. And so I really try and work on, okay, is this a good fit? Do I want to spend my time on this? You know, we, time is valuable. It's the only thing that we don't have any control over. So make the most of it. And that's probably something else I see a lot of people get in trouble with, at least in my industry is they'll just go grab any client or sign up into client, not realizing that's a lousy fit. You shouldn't be doing that. You know, the client's expecting this and you can't deliver that or something, you.

Know, so well, so we've talked a little bit about kind of the mindset of prospecting. What would be maybe another one of your go to methods that you'll use frequently.

Yeah, there's at least that I'm aware of. A lot of people don't put a lot of effort or something, whatever you want to call it, into video or video email. Video email is, I think, one of the most revolutionary things that has ever happened. And I list a number of different services in my book. There's Dub and there's Bombbomb and there's Vidyard, there's a bunch of them. But video email, to bring that personal touch across. I have more people that will get a video email from me and they're like, you know, no one's ever done that for me before. No one's ever taken 20 seconds to record a video for me to say, you know, happy Birthday or something, you know, or whatever it is. One of the things I do with prospects and with clients is I'll sing Happy Birthday on video and email it to them. I'm not a good singer, so they appreciate the effort, but it makes them laugh. And, you know, but no one else is doing that. You know, clients will send me little notes about something about some project. I'll send them a video email back. It might be five seconds, it might be five minutes, but I get my point across. I can use my hands, I can get this relationship going. It's just not some cold email. Video email I think is just fantastic. And all these services have what called an API where you program the video emails to do different things. So if someone hits a contact form, they can get this video email. Someone takes this action, they get that video email, et cetera. And you can record a bunch of these all at once and then just have them out there 24, seven working for you. Anytime someone takes any kind of action on anything. Video email I think is just so underused in the sales and marketing community and it's one of the greatest tools ever. So I highly recommend that.

Yeah, I agree. And you know, we use it quite a bit just to communicate things with clients and also with potential clients. Sometimes it's very hard to communicate the true kind of intent and emotion and, and motive behind something just in text, that things can be misinterpreted pretty easily. And it's not that they, you know, it's not that there's not the opportunity to misinterpret a video, but you remove a lot of that because you've got voice Inflection and they can see you smiling and all of credibility.

Yeah, it's credibility. And in fact, my app, if I'm allowed to mention my app, I don't.

Yeah, I was going to say I want to, I want to talk about this because there's a second piece, right? Yeah. So there's prospecting and generating the lead. And then in all the years I've been doing this. Yeah, all the years I've been doing this, then there's this big gap right after that. People will put all this effort into trying to go generate the lead and then they'll fail to follow up, they'll forget. So tell us about Rev Alerts.

More. More people mess up the follow up or they mess up the urgency of now, so to speak. My app is called Revalers. Revalerts.com. revalerts.com and what it does is we give you a phone number you can put anywhere in your website, your social put anywhere you want. Someone calls that, your, that phone number calls your business. And if you're too busy to pick up, they're going to go to voicemail or they're just going to hang up. 62% of businesses in America at all kinds of levels, from the, from the hairdresser to Exxon, 62% of businesses in America miss phone calls every single day. Busy. They're in a session, they're out of the office, they're driving, something's going on. My app takes all those missed calls and texts them back. So the person that call, if I call you and you don't answer and I hang up, I'll get it automatically with my app, automatically get a text from you saying, hey, John, I'm so sorry I missed your call. Here's a link to my calendar, let's talk. Or here's a link to my website. You can get some more information. Here's a link to my YouTube channel, whatever. But it's a text message with a link, so. And then you can also add a video element to that. So instead I call you, you don't answer. I get a text message back and it's a 10 second video of you saying, hey, John, this is Steve, I'm sorry I missed your call. I'm in a session right now on Zoom with this amazing guy. You know, here's a link to where you can text me back, or here's my email, email me back or something. But so you can do it with video, you can do it with text. And it works 24 7. And it's just instead of catch all net for all your missed calls, no matter what you're going to do. And then we've also created a way where you can have like a library so you can have like, I'm in a meeting video, I'm in, I'm out of the office video, I'm on vacation video, whatever. And you can pick and choose which video will automatically text back to that person. So I say, hey, I'm sorry, I'm on. I'm in Greece for the week. You know, I'll be back. But it's nice to have this nice little video of you telling me what's going on. You know, click the link below to get on my schedule for next week or something like that. So it's called revalerts.com it's video, text, message back. Very simple, very easy. It's a utility. It's very economical and it catches all those opportunities that you're missing, even if it's one a day. Now, if I miss one call a day, for me, that's potentially 10, 20, 30 grand a day I'm missing out on. So we take that over a year. It adds up. And if I can have an app that catches all that for 89 bucks a month or something, cool. It's a utility and I just know it's out there working for me all the time. So that's what Rev Alerts is. And it's just a great way to find those opportunities to catch those opportunities that 62% of people in America are missing now. So I highly recommend it. Yeah, yeah, well.

And that follow up is so critical and the timing of it is important too. So a few episodes back, I interviewed Jay Baer about his new book and new research on the importance of speed in response and that the speed of your response needs to be sort of proportionate to what people are expecting for that kind of interaction. And a phone call response they're looking for, really a quick reply from that to at least let them know that you got the message or you knew that they called and you're going to.

Especially in today's world, if someone takes the time to find your number and dial it in and call you, there's some urgency on their end because most people will just email or text or something nowadays, they won't actually call you. But if there's a reason to call you, there's some urgency there. And that report you're talking about, it's like if you don't, if they don't get an answer within, like the first three minutes after they hang up, they're calling someone else in your space and you've lost that. That's why that's so important. So within the app, we built in a CRM and a contact manager and some other cool things that'll help you organize all the contacts that come in. So if you get a bunch of calls while you're asleep or you're out in a convention or something, it'll organize all that for you. Every time something does happen, it gives you an alert automatically. So you can take that action right then and there if you want to text them and you can text them and video them, everything, all from our app, which is really cool. It's just a great catch all for all those missed opportunities that everybody has somewhere. You know, if you, if you catch one call a week with my app, you're making more than you're paying for the app, you know, no matter, no matter what you do. So it's a great thing. We're really excited about it. Revalerts.com if you all want to sign up. And I'm gonna put a little promo thing on there. So if you put in, you know, Steve Gordon on the promo code, you get, you get a prospecting kit that I put together. So just FYI.

Awesome. Hey, that'd be great. Yeah, so, I mean, all of these things fit together so well. And what I love about the book is that it's not necessarily a book that you're going to sit and read cover to cover. You can, and you'll get a lot out of it. But I almost look at it like it's prospecting inspiration. Like it's Wednesday and I need to generate some leads and I need something that I can do today.

If you wake up and you have nothing in your pipeline and you got a quota coming up, my book will give you 27 different ways of how to make a dollar today. And shame on you if you don't do it. Because at the end of the day, it's hustle. At the end of the day, it's giving yourself permission. At the end of the day, it's no excuses. If I can go cold, call someone in an office building on a rainy Tuesday and walk out with 17 grand. Anybody can do it. Anybody can do it. That's why I wrote, I really wrote it as a here's a guide. Here's exactly what you do. Instead of just lots of stories of my life and that kind of thing, because it's not about me, it's about delivering Aspirin to a pain. The pain is I need clients, I need to make a quota, et cetera. And I give you that aspirin in all those steps, 27 different ways throughout the book. And then Sign up for Revelance.com and you'll scoop up all the things that you've missed while you're in those meetings.

Yeah, well. And I think it's so important to have both of those elements. You've got to have a robust way to prospect and. And sometimes you need some creativity around that.

You know what I used to do back in the. I hate saying this, but back in the 90s, what I used to do is like, November, right before Thanksgiving, when things are always kind of weird and slow and people are kind of checking out things like that. I would find like four or five CEOs that I wanted to get in front of, and I would buy some big thing like a big remote control sailboat or big remote control airplane or something, and I would send it to them, but I would keep the remote. And this is an old sales trip. And I say, you know, I hope you have a great holiday coming up. Christmas with your grandkids and everything else. Thought your grandkids would love this. If you'd like the remote for this, can we talk before Christmas? And, you know, two out of five times I'd get a meeting and I'd close my end of the year numbers with sales I wanted to get because the guy didn't want to go shopping, didn't have time to go shopping. This was cool, you know, and, you know, it always worked.

No, yeah, well, and it's, you know, it's things like that. When you're trying to get to somebody who's very hard to reach, that little bit of creativity will often be appreciated. Like, okay, yeah, I get that this is a sales thing, but this guy went above and beyond. He went, you know, kind of out of the box here. I at least want to take this meeting to see what's up, because maybe there's more than meets the eye.

And that's what video email does, too, is when something as simple as a video email shows on. Just on that small level, you're going above and beyond all the email and junk. People get their email all day long. I guarantee you're gonna be the only video email. You can be the only one said, I reached out to Steve. This is what, da da da. This is why da da da, you know, et cetera. No one ever else is just sending them a form letter, et Cetera, which all those form letters I put in my book, by the way, if you want to use them. But, you know, and now there's ChatGPT out there. You can make your own form letters really easily. But. But that video email takes that away from all that noise and really differentiates you in a big way. I do video email for prospecting. I do it for follow up. I do it for thank yous. I do it just. Hey, I was just thinking of you. I saw this thing the day I thought of your company, thought you might want to know about it. In fact, just last night I had dinner with a client and over the weekend, I mean, I'm sorry, weekend Friday, I saw an interview with an author who wrote this new leadership book and I got it and Amazon delivered it on Saturday because I knew I was going to have my dinner last night with the client and I said, hey, I saw this book on Friday on tv. I got it because I thought of you and I thought you would really get a lot out of it. And last night at dinner they were just, oh my God, thanks for thinking of me so much. It wasn't a big deal. It was a full $10 book about leadership and stuff. But they loved that. They were on my mind. A couple days ago, I reached out and did something like that, et cetera. Anything like that goes a long, long way. 98% of projects I do, I try and throw in something extra that no one was saw coming or they weren't expecting or it made their life easier or something because that's what creates the memory, that's what creates the referral, that's what creates, you know, the end result is what they remember more than how it started. So anything I can do towards the end to make things a little easier or nicer or less of a headache for them to figure out, you know, if it's a website, don't worry, we'll take care of the IT and we'll take care of the hosting. And for 30 days after it goes live, I'm gonna provide free support in case you have your change of mind. Anything. Don't worry, it's all gonna be fine, you know, just. Okay, great. I'm gonna think about that now, you know, instead of, hey, this doesn't work now let's go track down John or something like that. Anything I can do to. Down here on the Gulf coast, we call it Lanyapp. A little something extra, the whole New Orleans phrase. Any Glenn Yap we can throw in there on some level to make People's life easier to give them that aspirin. They have their own life to deal with. They have their own problems. Anything they're doing with me shouldn't be an issue, shouldn't be a problem, et cetera. And video email does a lot for that too. And following up quickly, like with rev alerts, following up quickly fixes their problem. Because now I'm following up with them as fast as possible. I'm taking that issue off their plate for the day. They can move on to something else. I'm not going to make them keep calling me back. I'm not going to make them keep whatever all that has to do with that.

Yeah, absolutely. So where can people find the book? What's the best place for them to go to get the book?

Amazon. ProspectingHacks.com is right on the COVID there. ProspectingHacks.com in fact, I made this, an AI kind of cool, worked out kind of good. Yeah. ProspectingHacks.com if you go to, if you go to the ProspectingHacks.com I put together a prospecting kit that's free. It helps you organize all your prospecting on LinkedIn or your prospecting on Facebook or your prospecting on Twitter. It helps you on YouTube. It helps you organize all your prospecting methods with that, how to get past gatekeepers, etc. So you just put your email in, you can download, I think it's 11 different PDFs, all for free. And then also on prospectinghacks.com I created a sales calculator so you can see how much household you've got to do to meet your quota. You can play with the calculator there a little bit too. So all that's on prospect and hacks. And then if you want the follow up app, it's revalerts.com when you sign up for that, it's $89 a month on the promo code you type in. Steve Gordon and I put together a nice little prospecting toolkit there for you as a free gift also. So if you sign up for that, that should be something just like your electric bill. And that's just a basic utility. Catch all. You know, no matter what is going on with your life, you're not, you're never going to miss an opportunity with that. So that should be just a basic need with Everybody. So, so two things there. Prospectinghacks.com Revalerts.com and that's kind of all my stuff.

That's awesome. Well, hey, thanks for sharing a little bit of your wisdom with me today, John. And, and thank you for the, you know, that generous bonus with Revelerts. That's, that's Fantastic. Check out ProspectingHacks.com and RealAlertz.com and John Philippe, congratulations on all your success and thank you again for being here with us.

It was a pleasure.

Matt, thanks for listening to the Authority Builder podcast. Here are three ways you can expand your authority. Number one, get a copy of the Million Dollar Book. In it, I show you how to multiply your authority by writing a best selling book in less than 90 days, guaranteed. After all, you're the best spokesperson for your ideas. Go to authoritybuilderpodcast.com book and get your copy. Number two, join me for an upcoming Write youe Million Dollar Book accelerator and let's jumpstart your authority Building book now. For upcoming dates, go to authoritybuilderpodcast.com accelerator and number three, work with me and my team to get your book done and bring in business. Email me@stevethoritybuilderpodcast.com and put I want to write a book in the subject line See you soon.