How to get better at business and sell more? Do these things. The Business Storyteller - Ep.03

In this episode, we talk about 3 things. One thing that happened to me on a call and you need to improve. One thing that happened to me when I purchased something and I hope that doesn't happen to you. And one thing that you should stop doing as a vendor to your clients. Are you ready? Let's start. Hello everyone, welcome back. This is episode number three of the Business Storyteller. My name is Neil Zabal. Today is a very emotional episode. Why? Because we're gonna talk about emotions. By the way, I often say this in my talks: This is the most important currency we trade. I'll say it again: The most important. Currency we trade, and yet we forget about it. And I want to talk to you today. Let's see if we can do maybe a conversation I had. Let's do something I bought, and maybe a service I'm getting. How's that? Does that sound good? Because there's a million things I want to talk to you about today. You know, I had this interesting call with a nice young girl, one of the accelerators. We jump on the call, and the first thing she told me was, "Hey, would you like to tell me a little bit about you? Because I have no idea who you are." Throughout the call, I couldn't stop thinking about it. The only thing I was concentrating about is how does this make me feel? Now, mind you, probably you don't even know who I am. Most people don't know who I am. That is fine. But stating that made me feel very small, not important. The interesting thing is this call was a connection between the third party and they were hoping that I'll give That person sometime. I'm coming in. I'm not selling anything. I want to help. I'm interested. No homework, zero homework. In today's day and era, from LinkedIn to social on I know Instagram or whatever it may be, you can find me anywhere. Imagine if she would have come into the same call and said, "Hey, how's it going? I'm sorry, I don't know much about you, and I haven't had enough time because I'm new in my job." I saw you wrote a book. Can you elaborate a little bit? And I'll be like, oh, she did her homework. When you go on a call, it's a chance to give someone a feeling. It's up to you. Why not make it a good feeling? So please don't go on calls if you don't know who they are. I'll share with you another thing about this. For years, I would go on calls and people thought or expected that I would come prepared for that call. But it's a discovery call, so the point is to discover if they're relevant or not. And I would tell them before, when we started, hey, just so you know, in order to help me be more concentrated, to help me stay focused on who you are, what you want, and your needs, and to be able to listen, I didn't read anything about you. And the reason is because in my line of work, I want to hear how they present themselves, what is really the problem, how they make me feel about strength. Certain things. Make sure that you come prepared. And if not, in terms of the emotion you want to evoke, make sure you tell them why you're not prepared. Don't make people feel small. I thought about it, then I said something and I told her, hey, I'm not saying it because I was insulted so much, but I think it will serve you if you keep doing this in a bit of a different way. By the way, she was really cool about it. She was nice. Again, it's not because I'm someone. It's because she could have looked so much better on that call. A couple of weeks ago, I decided I want to renovate this office. Why not? It's a new office. Let's have fun. I wanted to buy something. I didn't want to buy from a Chinese website. I decided I'm willing to pay a bit more. I want to buy it local. I want to make sure it gets here. I want to make sure I have someone I can talk to. Simple. What I didn't know is after the purchase, I get a text message from a foreign Chinese website to tell me that my delivery is on the way. And I was like, I never buy from that website. This is very odd. And I was really, really hoping that it's some sort of a mistake and it's not what I think it is. A week passes. I get a notification to go pick up my My package from the post office, and guess what? That website does dropshipping. So I bought what I could have bought from a Chinese website, which I didn't want to do, for roughly three or four times more expensive. So terms and conditions—if you start digging, you can find that they're dropshipping website—and I feel ah. Hustled. I feel like I got scammed. I don't even want to open it. I'm thinking about returning it and buying it when I fly to the U.S. You can do the same thing and say, "Hey, a lot of people are struggling, so we can make sure you get the products. You have someone that you can talk to. We're here to help in anything." And yes, we purchased it from Chinese website, and that's why we charge a bit more. They could have. Which is a bit more expensive, but for the amount of profit they have, it's nothing. They could have sent it, okay, to their warehouse, exchanged the package. They could have sent me a text message from their company, and I would have been completely fine with it. But the fact that I feel that they're a mediator that charged me 3 or 4 times more is killing me. I can't deal with it. I'm thinking what to do. If you've had this happen to you, please let me know how you reacted. I'm thinking about asking for a refund and going to buy it somewhere else just so I don't feel hustled, like maybe a little bit. So it's kind of a weird thing. You get a chance to choose how you want to make people feel. It's a choice up to you. So what if in every interaction we made sure that they feel better than They know what's happening and so on. There's an amazing book. I really like it. I think I read it. I did 2 audio rounds of it and I love it. It's called Same as Ever by Morgan Housel. And it is the assumption that every person on the planet wants this one thing. No one on the planet would get that one thing. And that is certainty. And it stuck with me for so long that I'm now implementing this in almost every client, every customer journey we have. In some of the processes. I'm even asking that from my vendors. Certainty makes you feel better. It's very simple. And oftentimes when we lack that certainty and we don't know what's happening, it's funny, our subconscious kicks in. We don't feel so good and we don't know exactly how to explain it. And my suggestion to you is go over your customer journey. Where are you instilling certainty and where are you lacking at? And it's very easy to look at it. I know you're probably asking me, yeah, we don't really have a customer journey. Should we? Yes. Yes. I think it's going to become my thing in 2026. Need, sorry, no, must have a written customer journey. In a talk I'm going to give in a couple of weeks, I'm going to teach them how to create a better customer journey and why their marketing sucks if they do not have that. Some of the examples are how we doubled a business's revenue in 8 weeks by changing that one thing, how we turned the company from number 2 or number 3 to number 1 in 3 months just by changing the customer journey, and a lot of other examples I've been working on. So please sit down, write your customer journey, and make sure that at least you know where do I create certainty Or lack certainty. And I'm now working with a new vendor, which is great, and they're really nice. One thing I noticed is I had to ask for timelines. When are things going to happen? A day or two is not a timeline, my friends. Wednesday at 4:00 PM is a yes or a no, black or white. That creates certainty. I know what to expect. If it lands at 3:00 PM, I feel even better. But if you tell me it's gonna happen sometime next week, now I'm at a loss. It's getting harder. And you know what I mean? Because if I'll tell you I'll send you $1 million one day, what do you say? Ah, if I tell you, hey, I'm gonna send you $100 if you do this one thing by Wednesday at 4 PM. It is completely up to you to start making a list of emotions next to everything you do with your clients. Trust me, the change is quick, simple. More than that, it allows us a new way of measuring things. It's not just about the numbers. And I'm now working on putting everything into a template. And the reason is because we want to try and create certainty about what's going to happen internally in marketing for management teams. And one of the things is they want everything to happen, right? We need a website, the landing page. We want to have a podcast and a webinar, everything. But we don't have enough time. There's not enough manpower to do everything. And then they ask, what are you working on? And you're saying, we're busy. I'm now creating a structure of how do we take the same concept of a customer journey, but only internally for marketing teams. And it's been interesting because with one of our clients, just by writing everything, who's doing what, why is it important, what are the priorities, what are the small tasks? Why are we using 850 man-hours a month, or women, a month, and that's all we have? So we need to allocate. So instead of saying, let's do everything, we're slowly starting to create something. So a newsletter, a landing page, the landing page will become the text on the website, the website improves, and so on and so forth. So we can't do everything, but we can control how we make them feel in every step of the way. Internally or externally. I'm enjoying these shows and I have one ask, if it's okay with you guys. Ask me anything. If it's about your brand, marketing, sales, customer journey, if it's about your messaging, if you want to brainstorm together, please. A few have started to send the messages and it's exciting. It's something I always wanted to do and I'm happy to help and support. The Business Storyteller Show is more about helping you guys. And the assumption was that I, I jump on calls, I help people. That's great. But then I helped one. And if you ask a question together, I'll help you. But more than that, I can probably help another 99 people who need the same thing. It's about stopping all those talks just for the sake of doing another keynote. And it's more about my opportunity to help specific things and specific problems. I am inviting you to join this. I'm thinking about starting this on a live version, but let's wait a couple more episodes. And one thing, if you see the episode until here, please, can you leave this thing in the comments? I'm thinking about starting a newsletter on LinkedIn, which will be based on these shows. Do you think it should be the newsletter, the original one, the story letter, or should it be a new one? So if you saw it, please feel free to leave a comment on YouTube so I'll get a bit of a glimpse. And if you're not signed up for the story letter, I think we're now 70, 72, something like that. Every Saturday you get a newsletter with one important thought, something I'm thinking about that you can implement today in your business, a little bit about building in public. The things I'm enjoying, my struggles and stuff, and it's getting better and stuff. And fun, fun stuff is the last piece. I'm here, ping me if you need anything. My name is Nir Zavaro. Episode 3 done. See you next time. See you next time.