[Sales] Build trust at scale through content and social media with Rizwan Chaudhrey

When you ring someone and they're in the middle of a meeting, it's no point trying to force a conversation with them because they're not interested. They have got, they're distracted. You need to understand that and go right. Actually, have I called you at the right time? Can you talk? No, I can't. All right, when can I call you back? Then rearrange that call. It may sounds a really simple thing, but so many people just do not do that. They carry on with the call regardless. And then they wonder why that person cuts them short and puts the phone down them and never takes another call from them. So it's treating people as you want to be treated. You know, it's all about. And I always say to people, when I had sales teams and I used to run them, I'd say you need to treat them like they are. And when you call someone, try and relate to them and engage with them in a conversation, not just about what you're trying to sell them, because that is going to piss them off straight away.

Before we get into today's show, I wanted to tell you a little bit about what we have going on over here at Succession. So Succession is a life science sales membership that includes on demand courses to uplevel your sales skills, resources to plan and execute your sales process, a community for peer to peer networking and learning, and live workshops delivered by experts twice a month. You can get access to all of this as an individual for just 79 doll dollars a month. Or you can uplevel your entire sales team with courses and customized learning designed for each individual rep. Come and join us over at Succession Bio. Okay, let's dive back into the show.

Hey, welcome again everyone. Looking forward to today's show. Today's one, we got Rizwan Chowdhury and if I can stop stuttering over myself, then we'll, we'll get some good, good stuff out of this. I know Rizwan from our connections at elrig. You may have seen him around or various companies, always wearing orange, interviewing people. Really good guy. What did you get from this, Harrison?

Yeah, I think some of the main stuff that I took away here was that it's really hard to do outbound nowadays. And some of the stuff that he's working on is really helping clients leverage social media, video content as a way to instead of like personalize at scale or like do outbound at scale, it's actually to build trust at scale so you can share your opinions, share your viewpoints. And through that people will learn to trust you and then come to you when they need the things that you can help provide. And I think that that is the big takeaway here is that in a world where it's so noisy, outbound is so challenging, you have to supplement it with something like a content social media type of play where you build up your personal brand and you build trust at scale.

Yeah, great. Well, what do I always say that you say that. I say that sometimes. You tell me.

All right. All right. Yeah, let's dive on. Hey, Rizwan, welcome to the show. We're pumped to have you here.

I'm delighted to join you. Harrison and Nick, it's lovely to meet you both.

Good to see you.

Yes. And so we did give you a prep ahead of time and we ask you the same question we'll ask everybody else is give us a crazy or funny story that's happened in your career.

All right. Well, actually, I read it as in my job recently, so I misinterpreted the question straight away. But I suppose what's quite funny is how you bump into people who can help you in. In your job at any time. So I was flying out to Boston two weeks ago, and I happened to go to Costco on the Sunday before I flew out, and I saw this guy walking around. I said, I recognize him. He's checked me in twice at Gatwick recently, so I can't say hello to him. So I said, hi, how you doing? You don't remember me, but you check me in and I'll. The airline will remain nameless. You'll know why in a second. And I said. And he said, oh, yeah, I remember you. I said, great. I'm actually flying out tomorrow, actually, same airline. You're going to be there. He goes, yeah, I am. If you take my number, I'll upgrade you anytime. You fly it now.

No, from Catwick.

He did.

No way.

And it's. And I didn't even ask him for the number. I just said, oh, it's lovely how you do. You only work for that airline. Do you work for others at the airport? And he goes, no, no, I work for them. They're them. And I said, but yeah, I'm flying to Boston. You on the. I'm doing the 12 o' clock flight tomorrow. Because I'm working on that tomorrow. Because I tell you what, I can upgrade you. I said, well, I've already paid for the upgrade, so don't worry about it, but because I'll tell you what, the future take my number now, and if you're flying out with them, just call me two days before and I'll upgrade you for free. And I went, great. That's why I'm not naming the airlines. I don't want to get in trouble for that. Right. And so he gave me his mobile number and his name. And I said to him, honestly, I didn't say hello just to get this off you and do it. I'm not asking you for that. And he goes, no, no, no. We should help each other out, so don't worry about it. And then the next day I got to Gatwick and I saw him on the check in helping other people. I tapped on the window, he remembered and everything so great, because he wasn't in the suit when I saw him in Costco, he was like in jeans and in a sweat. And then I saw him as the next day, so, so. But what is my kid and my wife, my kids, my daughter said, I can't believe you got up to strange people all the time. I just started talking to them. And I said, well, that's what I've learned in my job, that if you don't ask, you don't get. And you never know when you start talking to someone.

Yeah.

How it might work out for you down the right road. So. So that was just something I just thought quite interesting that you just don't know. Out of the blue, you can say, see someone and you recognize. You say hello to him, and then something good can come out of it without you even knowing.

This is what I said recently, I wrote a post and it was about networking aimlessly. And that's what I mean. You're networking for the fun of networking, meeting people, having a conversation. It's just nice to talk to people. Right? Even in Costco. And nothing always come out of it. But when you do it aimlessly, like sometimes you help someone else to help you. This is what we all need to do.

No, it's one of the reasons I wear orange. As you know, Nick was, I told you before about this. And as is that people see me from a distance. And it worked one or two ways. They'll either come and talk to me because they follow me on LinkedIn or see me on LinkedIn and go, I know you. How you doing? And they always ask me why I wear orange or they don't want to talk to me, so they run away and hide. But either way, either way, either way I get a result. You know what I mean? There's a yes or a no out of it. There's no, in between. Which is. Which is good. And similarly, I found that the number of times I wear a sports jersey on a plane and it might be a Man United jersey. And if you. If you don't like Man United, I'm sorry about that. Or it could be a Dolphins jersey, actually. And I've had people literally start having conversations out the blue with me and they want to comment whether it's a security guard saying, oh, I support Liverpool, or they lost yesterday or whatever, or they start going, oh, where'd you get that jersey from? I really like that. I follow the Dolphins world. Do you go there? And he starts that conversation. It's just having that thing to give people an excuse so they feel comfortable talking to you.

Yeah, that's really good.

Yeah, I would. Never mind. You won't win the title again, but you'll play pretty football. That's the important thing.

That's funny. And we'll have to talk offline to get that guy's number, see what we can do for that. But no, I think it's a great story. It's a good reminder for everybody. You know, if you put yourself out there and you create a surface area for luck, you're more likely to have good things come your way.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's just. I think it makes life more fun as well.

Yeah, it is.

Right.

Because we stop and we talk to each other. There's no.

A hundred percent. Yeah, exactly.

All right, well, let's. Let's dig into some of the stuff we want to talk about. So I would love to hear a little bit more about your background. So you have a unique background, you know, starting in the media space. And I think you've seen a lot of changes over the decades. And so maybe we start there, get a little bit of your background, but then I think ultimately we're going to want to bring this around to the different ways and techniques, sales reps, individuals, founders, whatever it is, the things that they can do to stand out and actually like breakthrough, the noise and all of the other crap that's out there. And how do they actually, like, get people interested and want to talk to them?

I started out, as you can tell by my lack of hair and my whiteness on my beard. I started out in media sales, selling, recruitment, advertising on a weekly B2B magazine, Computer Weekly, way back in the 90s and in those days when we first started, he said, right, here's your phone. You've got to make at least 30 effective calls. And an effective call was at least two minutes long with a decision maker.

Wow.

That was what an effective call was. And you had a box of cards, I can't remember what size they are. They a six, a eight, I don't know what size they are. But the little cards which had the company name on it, the address, telephone number and a contact and that was it. And you would put your notes on that little card when you made the calls and stuff.

How many calls did you have to make to get 30 effective calls?

That's a good question. You'd have to make about 120 maybe.

That's crazy. Like you can't even connect to 30 people making 100 calls nowadays.

Yeah, but that was, that was, that was the goal. And you'd have to do a call sheet and write down all your calls on a bit of paper and write it down. And we'd have a board with actually how many calls everyone's making as well. They'd record everything and you'd have to ring it. And actually every week, because we were a weekly magazine which at those days, magazines used to carry a lot of recruitment ads. Computer Weekly, we had about 80, 120 pages of recruitment ads, you know, big tabloid size. But we had a direct competitor, computing, and they used to have ads that we didn't carry. So every Monday when that came out, we'd have a sales team meeting. Everyone would be holding a copy and going through, right, you haven't got that company. Why haven't you got them in your. Well, how come they've got a job? That job's running. They're not with us. You got to pick up the phone down, ring them and find out why they're using it. And also find ways to say, well, actually you're looking for that purse, it's a high value job. So obviously you need to make sure. How many people have you had call in for that? We can help you do it, Here's a deal and stuff. So that was that. And then I moved on to doing what they call display advertising, which is product advertising services, which is the front half of the magazine, which is high value ads. And theoretically more senior people you're talking to like marketing directors. So you're talking to HR people and so on and recruitment agencies in the first job. Now you're talking to marketing people and sales directors and more and marketing agencies. When you do that, then gradually as time progressed, you know, you, the Internet came in and people started to use. Oh, actually, forget the Internet. Computers came in first of all. And then you actually started to use Word on your computer and you actually had spreadsheets and stuff and then you moved on to like the Internet and then started to use it on a very basic level and started to do Google things like that and CRMs. And so I've gradually moved on from picking up the call and doing lots and lots of calls. So obviously then doing emails and communicating to people, going to shows and communicating to people. And obviously the old, I say old days, it sounds terrible. But seeing people face to face has always been the number one thing though if you can get in front of someone, whether through a meeting at their client, you start to build that rapport. And obviously the skill, particularly we do telesales, is building that rapport over the phone. And I've learned over time when you're doing calls and it applies to people face to face is you have to deal with people as if they are you. And what I mean by that is even in my last full time sales job for someone else where we still had call targets, they expected us to hit the phone and call people. When you ring someone and they're in the middle of a meeting, it's no point trying to have force a conversation with them because they're not interested, they've got, they're distracted. You need to understand that and go, right, actually I'm gonna call you at the right time. Can you talk? No, I can't. All right, when can I call you back? Then rearrange that call. It may sounds a really simple thing, but so many people just do not do that. They carry on with the call regardless. And then they wonder why that person cuts them short and puts the phone down them and never takes another call from them. You know, so it's treating people as you want to be treated. You know, I know it's all about. And I always say to people, when I had sales teams and I used to run them, I'd say you need to treat them like they are. And when you call someone, understand how their stays going, say, you know, try and relate to them and engage with them in a conversation not just about what you're trying to sell them because that is going to piss them off straight away. You know, I get cold calls all the time if someone's trying to sell me. No, actually the worst of that, I'll just say I don't know, you don't call me again. You know, I'm shocked that people at B2B still pick up the phone and talk to someone they've never spoken to and have that conversation because they did do that when I was doing it a lot. But the world's changed and obviously people communicate now through email, through WhatsApp, through various means. And so from my perspective, you know, I've seen salespeople, the process has changed, but I think the way you sell to people should still be the same, is that treat people as human beings and engage with them and try and build a relationship and rapport with them when it's appropriate for them, not when it's appropriate for you. But the difficulty, I think, for salespeople is that they've got targets to hit. They've got targets to hit, whether it's sales targets, whether it's call targets, whether it's email targets they're going to get out. They've all got targets to hit and they're under pressure from management to achieve those. Because it's all that process. They say, right, you do 30 calls, you'll get X amount of leads, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the real world doesn't work like that, I don't think. And I think as salespeople, we have to understand our audience and our market and how people work, our audience work and try and then work our processes around them, because at the end of the day, they are the ones we have to sell to, they have to buy from us. And we may have something we want to sell to them, but we have to make sure that we understand how they work and what their needs are. Because if we do show them that, then actually it's amazing how you can engage with the customer. Because actually, I would argue that 99% of salespeople don't do that. They are driven by processes, what they've been told to do and just do it. And they don't actually think from a customer centric point of view and challenge that, and therefore they don't succeed. And that's why you actually stand out more. Because people go, actually, I like Rizwan rigging me up. He's got a personality. We have a chat about other things and that. And actually when I tell him, rizwan, I'm right in the middle of meeting, go away, I go, no worries, he's not going to carry on harassing me. Or if I say to him, look, I can't respond to you right now, but come and call me in four weeks time. And he does it then. He's listened to me and that is really, really important. But so few salespeople do that. Honestly believe even now, judging by the emails I get from salespeople I've never met in a million years, but they talk to me like they're my best mate and they're trying to sell me something that. Which is completely irrelevant to me because they've not bothered to even look at my LinkedIn profile and realize I am not a customer. You know, that that is still a rarity, I think. And that's how you could spot a good salesperson from someone who is just doing what they're told to do and not actually engaging their brain and trying to become more engaging with the customer.

So one of the things that I've always told my team's doing and do myself in that vein is with that kind of like, follow up. So often you even get a call or a meeting with a customer and then you're gonna have to follow up with them, right? So even there, you can give them the option like, you just. Sam, I always been like, when should I follow up with you? My job's to follow up, right? We both know our jobs here. My job is reviews, when it's convenient for me to do that. So I don't harass you like four times before you.

100%.

When should I follow up? And they'll give you that timeframe. And then when you call in on them, they're not annoyed.

Yeah, 100%. And also, even emails, you know, I send people emails I know I've known for a long time and they don't deliberately ignore me. I know they're very busy and sometimes they go, right, I know, I'll talk to him another time. That's cool. But so often the subject line, I'll make my message the subject line rather than the email. And actually, sometimes what's worked best is I've emailed someone four times and not responding me. And I'll put the headline, have I upset you? Not responding to any of my emails. It's amazing how quickly people do respond to you when you put that in the subject line. Because they go, no, I didn't. I haven't upset you. I was just really busy. So I haven't had a chance to respond. But, you know, that's the last result. I won't do that immediately. But, you know, sometimes you have to do that just to make sure that you haven't. Part of my French might piss someone off. Because without knowing it, you know, you do need to know where you stand with people as well.

I think too, it's, you know, channels like email, phone calls are just so difficult right now. Right? It's like it's so hard to break through the noise that you have to, you just have to do things that are different or unique and you have to try new stuff to actually just break through if you're going to go outbound. But I mean, I think what you're doing with your company now is kind of flipping the paradigm and you're saying, hey, rather than us going outbound to these people, how can we build trust at scale? How can we create content, leverage social media to get people to trust us so then when they're ready to purchase or they're ready to use a solution like what we offer, they'll come to us 100%. And I think that's like you. I don't think outbound is never going to go away. You're still going to do that. You want to like, complement it with these sorts of efforts. Right. And I think maybe give a little background, you know.

Yeah, sure. So. So ever since I started in sales, I, I, as I said, I realized that I had to differentiate how I work with people compared to other people because they get, you know, I remember going to recruit an agency for recruitment advertising and I said to the girl, how many calls do you get a day from people trying to sell to you? And she said she got 2,000 calls.

What?

2,000 calls coming to switchboard. She didn't answer the 2,000 calls, but she got 2,000 incoming come by coming into the call to speak to her constantly. People ringing every minute, different media ringing her, trying to do it. But she looked after some big clients and everyone wanted to sell to her. Right. So you think, how do you get through to someone like that now? I think nowadays, thanks to social media, it's easier to do that in some respect because you can develop your brand. I mean, in the old days, I mean, it sounds silly, but I used to joke with people, I used to sing songs down the line to them or whatever just to they would know who I was and wacky, you know, I'd always ask about, you know, some personal stuff like how's your day one, what's happening with even remembering little things about their personal life because people then realize you're not just flogging them something, you're actually, actually having that relation with them and know them. I mean, some people don't want to have that. And that's fair enough. But some people go, I don't want to talk about my personal life with you. Come away. Why? Why do you want to know that? And that's perfectly understandable as well. But it's just finding out what each person likes. But in terms of self branding, when I started my business, you know, and I'll be honest, I stole the idea from Falla Packaging, so that, you know, if they're watching this, thank you for the packaging. I went to a farmer pack, which is a big show packaging show, and the whole team were wearing orange trainers. The whole team were. Every single person with bright orange trainers, because that's their corporate brand, right? And you notice them when they walked around, you know, they're all full of packaging, right straight away. And I said, well, when I start my brand, my business, how do I stand out from the crowd? I'm just one person and I don't have time actually, because I'm going to shows to invest in a lot of branding, get a lovely logo made up, do that. So how do I get people to recognize me and know it's me? So I stole their ideas around the way. Bright orange shoes and that's what I'm going to do. And even my business card was bright orange. Straight away. I just got in a week. I can't remember the pronto print or whoever is got my business cards. And, you know, it's interesting, when I started my business, you know, just to say how I started, I literally had this idea to work with exhibitors and exhibition companies to promote them on LinkedIn. That was the idea because I've been to lots of shows and done lots of videos with people for my previous magazine. And because I built up relationships, I literally contacted two event organizers who had shows in Boston the same week and said, as can I come to your show and do videos? And they both said, yeah, you can. You don't have to pay. Come along, you can do videos, no problem. And through LinkedIn, I messaged three clients I knew who were at both shows and said, can I come? It'll cost you this much, but I'm doing videos. How do you fancy it? They said yes. And September 2019, when I started a return flight to Boston, was $350 from Air Norwegian and an Airbnb for the three days was, I think, 400 pounds, right? And so that's 700 quid, my expenses, plus taxes, whatever. And the three videos already covered that cost. I went to Boston for one week, went to two shows, did nine interviews by bumping into people I knew from my previous role. I've started a new business and they felt sorry for me, so they said, I'll just start a new business, so of course we'll do A video with you, Riz, I will help you out. I ended up doing nine videos and I went after one week. I've generated this much revenue, it's cost me this much. I've got a business model, so let's kick on, you know. And so five years on, I've done over 1900 interviews, worked with over 300 different companies, maybe 400 actually. I've got grown my LinkedIn universe of connections from 4,000 to 18,800 in those five years, right. And now a lot of people, now that has happened because one, I'm not afraid to go and ask because I think the number one one thing I always say to salespeople is ask. The worst thing that can happen is they'll say no. But they've not changed the situation from when you started before. You've asked, you know, but they might even say yes. And you'll be shocked then and you'll be so pleasantly surprised you should ask. But I made sure that I branded myself effectively. So orange trainers start with gradually orange top, orange baseball cap, even orange rucksack, orange, which wash watch strap, not on this one. I've got to get a new one actually for this watch. But, you know, so that people know when the pandemic happened, I had to pivot because my model was all about going to shows and there weren't any shows from March on, so. So I pivoted to say, right, I'm not going to just do videos at shows, I'll do videos over zoom. And I would argue I was maybe the first or one of the first to do videos over the Internet in life science and pharma in March 2020 to do interviews and started that. And so that grew as well because no one could go anywhere and say, well, actually we'll talk to Rizwan. That's a great opportunity. Let's have a chat and highlight about who, what we are and what we're doing and then gradually creates more content. But it's about being not afraid to try things and not afraid to make mistakes. And I think social media gives you that opportunity to do that because you can do a post and you can be yourself. So, and you can try different things, even silly things, like, you know, I'm going to a show and I've got nine different trainers, or actually I've got 18 different orange pairs of trainers, right. I'm going to ask people to vote for which two pairs of trainers are going to take me to a five day show and then you make. That's a Silly thing. Well, how is that sales related? But what happens is one people realize I'm going to be at the show and they vote on the trainers and when I see them at the show, they look at my feet straight away and they go, I voted for the other one. Or you were in those ones. But it starts that conversation because it's all about starting a conversation with someone and giving them a way in to have that conversation, you know.

Yeah. It's one thing to say, like, you know, be yourself online and all that stuff. Right. But I think some people. Well, there's probably two, two areas that this can be challenging is why some people are a little bit more introverted. It's more challenging. Like, you know, you're obviously extrovert, willing to go out there, do all.

I used to be very introverted, I got to tell you, when I was a kid. So it's quite funny you should say that now that as a child I was very introvert.

Yeah, clearly that is true. You seem much more like Nick in the sense of go up and talk to anybody, try anything. But I think not everybody's like that. Right.

As well, though.

There you go.

But, yeah, so. But not everybody's like that. Right. So not everybody has like the ability to go out and do that. So how would like, I guess one piece of the question is what sort of advice would you give to them? How can they, you know, maybe leverage social media, sort of some of the branding stuff you mentioned. But then at the same time, how do they also make sure that, you know, we've talked a little bit of the pre show about the companies getting involved. Right. Like some companies are trying to like lock down, prevent, you know, reps from, you know, putting themselves out there. So, like, what would you kind of tell to those types of people?

What I say is funny enough though. I think there are, there are quite a few people who are naturally introverted who are very, very good on LinkedIn. And because being introvert means often that you're not comfortable talking to someone maybe face to face or starting the conversation with someone face to face. But often they're very good in terms of writing stuff and they are creative, but they're not creative in the sense that they're not comfortable in the social setting. And I think LinkedIn, for example, gives them a great platform to express who they are without exposing themselves in a sort of immediate vicinity of someone.

But it can be a little bit. Right, because you're putting out your thoughts and stuff into the world. It can be a Little bit of syndrome around that. It's like, oh, if I put this out there, people may not like it.

No, but I think, yeah, I agree with that. But I think where you get around that is that you start off by actually sharing content you like. So you're not giving an opinion, but you're sharing content that is you find interesting and relevant to the market that you work in. And it's more like, for example, sharing a research paper or sharing a news article you've seen in the space you work in. And then you'll find that people engage with that and like it, and gradually your confidence level go up. So then you maybe start commenting about making a comment about that and having an opinion, and that's the way you can start to do that.

It's interesting you say that, because when we train sales teams around, like using LinkedIn as an example, one of the things we talk about is we have like a 4C process that we do for, for, for LinkedIn, right? So it's connect with people, it is comment, and it's curate content and then convert them into the conversations. Right? And so, but the section that we talk about is curate, and we use it differently from creating content is. Because creating content can be challenging. And it's really hard to come up with new, novel, interesting ideas all the time. Like, I mean, you do this all the time, I do it all the time. It's hard, right? Like, if we're trying to post something every day or every other day, like, it's a lot to come up with new ideas and interesting things to share all the time. And so to your point, think about how you can curate existing content, share your point of view about it, and then if you don't feel like posting in, you know, all of that stuff too, you can comment on other people's posts that are interesting.

I agree 100%.

Your clients and your connections are going to see your comments. Right? So I agree.

I mean, I know, in fact, you're right. I mean, if you're, if you're unsure, first of all is like you said, engage with other people's posts in terms of liking and, or using the light bulb or whatever you want to do, whether you agree with it, how you agree with that. And as you said, yeah, put the comments in, or if someone's at a show, say, I'll be at that show, I'd look forward to seeing you there, or listening to your talk or whatever and starting that. And like, but as I said another way, as I said, from a company Perspective, and also from a salesperson's perspective, is just to even see a post about an event you're at and re share and say, I'm going to be at this event. I'd love to come and talk to you. If you come to our booth, it's such a simple thing to do, but so few salespeople actually do that, where they actually say, right, I'll share the post of an event we're attending and I'll put our stand number at the top and say, hey, I'll be there too. Come and talk to me. That's not hard work. That's just putting a line in which you're going to be there anyway. So that's really simple to do. And then gradually. I mean, what I find very frustrating, though, you know, just one of my bugbears is when people share on LinkedIn a picture of their stand, but it's an empty stand. And you go, we're at this show, but it's just a stand of an empty stand. And you go, who cares? Put your face in the stand. Because people like to see your face. You know, that's the number one thing that they want to know about. And actually pictures on LinkedIn and your own personal pictures, you know, you know.

They have a better chance of what they have. More engagement, more impressions.

I did, you know, as I said last, I was delayed coming home from a show in Portugal last night by three hours. I was in Portugal. The flight was going to leave at 8:25. It ended up leaving at 11:40. So I got home at 4 in the morning. But I did a picture of me at the airport looking miserable, say, and with a. With the EasyJet delay screenshot to say, your flight was this now that and said, I'm now stuck at this airport for another three hours, by the way. What's the longest you've ever had to wait? And the airport and stuff. And you know, that had, you know, it's had about 1500 views so far. I did that last night. And people commenting on it saying, rizwan, I hope you have a safe journey. God, I've been through that. Whatever, you know, it's just something. But again, it's about engaging with people so they remember who you are. And it may not be right now that it leads to business, but down the road you'll lead to business, hopefully.

I guess the other piece along this line too, I mean, you've obviously invested a lot in video for your business. How have you seen video play a big role in sort of the brand awareness sort of bringing people coming to you, breaking through the noise. Like how have you seen that be relevant for your clients?

Video obviously is a very important tool, but again, it is only one element of the whole mix. You know, I think the difficulty sometimes in marketing and sales is that something suddenly becomes the magic bullet and everybody does it and thinks they're going to get the results. And the truth of the matter is that you need to have a mix of activity to engage with people. And even with video, there's different types of videos you can do. It can be a quick 10 second video, 30 second video, a longer type video, whatever it may be and it doesn't matter as long as you're doing something to get out there. And you can try different things which work for your audience because every audience is different and every individual is different. And some people actually like a will only watch 10 second video. And some people go, actually I like more in depth stuff. I like the fact that it's got timestamps against it like the podcasts. Obviously you've got timestamps against it and you can do that. So I don't think there's a hard and fast ruling video. Although some marketers will be quick to tell me that no, we don't do anything more than two minutes and other than that it doesn't work or whatever. I would disagree with that. I think it varies from person to person. But yeah, video plays a very important part because it allows people to see the real person.

There you go. Yeah, there.

And that's it. You can see someone. Yeah, and you can see. But the key thing with video, I think personally and the way I do it is anyway we're having this conversation is non scripted. I mean obviously you have a structure maybe to the questions, but you don't script the answers of the because you want people to be authentic. I think the difficulty is apart from if it's a corporate video you're selling to investors, too many companies are too scared to do natural interviews. Yes, 100. You know, I interviewed someone from Cell Ready. Ignacio is a great guy. He's the CEO. I got his job title wrong and the post had to change it. But he's a CEO of Cell Ready and he's a really great guy. And we were having a chat and I saw, I interviewed him in June at a show and he's a massive Real Madrid fan. He's Spanish, he's a Real Madrid fan. They were going to play the Champions League final on the Saturday we were in Vancouver and He was rushing off to make sure he watched the final on Friday night. And I was saying, who's going to win in the video? He said, of course, Real Madrid going to win. I'm going to look forward to it. So we started the video. I interviewed him this week, and I said, so for people who want to know the result, what happened with Real Madrid? Did they win? Of course they won. You know, we started the conversation about that, and then we went into the conversation about the company, why he's here and everything like that. Because he. He. It's his personality. He loves it.

He.

He's relaxed when he's talking about it, but it's also the real him, you know? And again, when you're watching a video with someone and they bring something personal into the conversation, when you meet them, you have something to engage with them, apart from work, which actually makes it a lot easier to do.

What was the first thing I said to you when we jumped on this call? Right. It was like, hey, is that an Oilers jersey?

Exactly.

And then it was like, why do you have a Panthers? Because that doesn't make any sense to have both.

Exactly. But. But actually, again, you know, when I interview people and I know which sports team they follow, besides, they said, I collect jerseys.

Yeah.

If I have the city team there, I'll put it on my door. Because again, I mean, I interviewed someone who was a big Orioles fan before they were winning. So we're talking four years ago when they were really bad, and he saw the Orioles jersey, my door, he goes, wow, you've got an Orioles jersey. He was so happy because no one ever talks about the Orioles. Do you know what I mean? So, yeah, it's just about trying to something. And then sometimes I put something go, I don't like sports. I really do. You like. Then actually, I love sci fi and I love Star Wars. I love this. I love whatever. And you go, great. Well, I like that, actually, to be honest. Let's have a conversation about that as well. So it's about making people at ease, isn't it? You know, doesn't we talk about relationships at the end of the day?

Yeah. We were talking to somebody the other day, and he had, like, a whiteboard right behind him. And on the whiteboard, which he actually uses, apparently, but on the whiteboard was this giant smiley face. And I was like, what's with the smiley face? It turns out his. His daughter drawn it on the board, and so he just left it there. And then now when he joins calls, like, people just ask Him. What's with the smiley face? And it's like a little icebreaker. And so they have a sensation. He gets to tell about his family, they get to, you know, learn about it, they tell about their family. And so it's a nice little icebreaker that can kind of start the conversation.

Yeah. And I think in terms of video calls, whether you're recording it for an interview or just having a call, I think that's really important to have something personal behind you, if you can, because it does break the ice. I mean, I was speaking to someone who was a very senior director. He wasn't a sales guy. He was a senior director for a company. And he said to me at Interfex, a show I was at, he said, look, one of my sales guys said to me, can you talk to this lady? She's a really awkward customer. I can't get anywhere with her. And this was, you know, this was during the pandemic or whatever. And I can't talk to. She won't talk to me. Can you see if you can talk to her? So he had the video call with her, and he looked on a wall. She had a leg, arm in a cast, and she had guitars behind her. So he said he spent the first 45 minutes talking about guitars, how she hurt her arm, blah, blah, blah. And then they said, maybe we should talk about business now. Now, that client is now one of their biggest clients. Yeah, but he wasn't a sales guy, but he could. He saw the guitar, said, hey, well, what instruments do you play? That's really cool. He wasn't. Whereas unfortunately, a sales guy will go, right, here's the agenda. Let's talk about what we're going to talk about, and. And let's go in and going cold. And there's no empathy between them in any shape or form or any relationship between them. And it is, like you said at the very beginning, how do you establish trust? Because ultimately, people buy from people they trust. And who do you trust? You trust your friends. I'm not saying you're ought to be best friends with every person you ever meet. That's not. Not the reason. But if you find some common ground, then you can have a more meaningful conversation. And also you can be more honest with each other as well, because they're going to be more honest and ask you more detailed questions which you can answer. Because as a salesperson, the worst thing is you sell someone, they say, yes, yes, yes, all the way. Then. Then when you go back to them, they go, oh, we weren't interested. They ghost you and you go, what happened? I thought you liked everything. Oh, well, I didn't want to say anything, you know, or they were too afraid to give you any objections. What you want is someone to object so you can actually answer those questions and explain. Right? Okay, well, that's a very, very valid question. Let me explain to you how I can solve that problem for you, and if I can't solve it, how we can get around that particular problem. What, and be right. It's again, being honest and creating that trust as a salesperson is really important.

You have to be authentic in terms of if you are something, you have to be genuinely interested.

People can. 100. Yeah.

After asking it, because someone has advised that that's good sales process.

Yeah, Yeah, I agree. 100.

I often go to food because most people, especially if they're not living, love food. And I love food, too, so.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's right. I mean, but I think it's very true. But I think the great thing about working in sales is that you do get to meet different people and you get to learn great stuff about countries and people that you would otherwise do if you were doing your job. And so if you have an open mind and you're happy to ask people, because also the other thing is it's not doing the talking, but getting them to do the talking and telling you what they're interested in, telling you what they like, because that opens the door. Same old adage isn't you got two ears and one mouth, and in sales, you should be using in that order rather than dominating the conversation with the customer.

Yep. Awesome. Well, Verswan, this has been awesome. A lot of great tips you've shared with everybody here on all sorts of things. But maybe you could leave everybody with one last tip. What would you say if there's, like, you know, one thing that people could do right now where they could go try and build more trust with some of their clients? What's something that you would recommend they do?

I think number one thing, I think is just be honest with clients. Yeah. That honesty, I mean, is, you know, it's not something you easily do. But I think when you talk to someone, just be very honest and straight with them whether you genuinely can help them at that moment or not. Because if you can't be honest and say you can't help them, but you can recommend someone who can. If you can recommend, you may not be able.

And then they'll come back to you when they need that other thing. Right? Because they.

Yeah, you know, there's a number of people who go in the past have said, all right, we want to work with you. Because I worked on a particular magazine, they said, we want to do this. I said, we're not on the right audience for you. You know what? I'd love to take your money. It's all right. Genuinely, I'd love to take your money. But actually, I'm lucky. We've got a sister magazine or I've got a competitor who are more focused in that area. Go and talk to them. And they go, really? Yeah, I've got no problem with that. Go and talk to them. But when you know. Because I know even if it's not for that company, if they move jobs and they have something which is relevant to me, they will remember he was the guy who was honest with me and I'll go and talk to him. And the only. And. And the example of that. I worked in my old job, there were certain clients who I could never, no matter how hard I tried, get them to advertise with me. However, when I started on my own and I approached them, they said, we'd love to work with you. I said, well, hang on a minute. You always said no to me. For the last three and a half years, every time I asked you, you said no. Yeah, but actually, we like you, we trust you, but we didn't. We didn't believe in the magazine. So it doesn't matter how much you could tell me the audience wasn't. We didn't believe it was right. But actually, what you're doing now, we believe in you and we know you're going to do a good job for us, so let's do it. So that's the important thing, I think, is being honest and authentic. So they actually trust you and believe in you.

Yeah, I think it's undervalued when people say add value, and I think often people believe when they're saying add value, they mean add value from your service, from your product, from whatever. Whereas I've been in meetings with people at large pharma and I've gone in and I can't send them anything yet. What they're working on is something I used to be an expert in, let's say, so I can help you troubleshoot your protocol. You're talking about. There's nothing that has no value to me other than the fact we have a connection here. 100 person will speak to me next time because I didn't try and push down that throat or I supported them. So you, like you say, it can be a competitor that can help them. You or you can't. It could be you help them with your technical knowledge, but that actually add value and then you get a better relationship.

100. I think that's very true.

Well, thank you so much, Bisman, for being here, coming on the show, and I think we're going to see you at the El Rig event here in a couple of weeks.

I am there, yeah. I've already get my interviews lined up. So if you're watching this, here's my plug. Plug. If you want to do an interview, contact me. There's still time. And I'll be happy to help you talk about how you can showcase your products. But gentlemen, Harrison, Nick. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk today. You know, as you can tell, I love talking and love talking about sales as well, so. So thank you for the time. It's been great. Good luck with the podcast series.

Thank you. We'll talk soon. See you in a bit.

All right, see you soon, Ra.