The "Don't Sell Me Bro" Podcast

When a small business (especially a service business) is getting up and running, often the sales team is also involved in making sure that contracts get paid and the business keeps running. How do you balance that need with the need to maintain proper relationships with your clients. Dave and I explore this for our Halloween Episode – because nothing is more scary than not getting paid.

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Dave comes in ready to rant today, What do you do when a client expects you to hold up your commitments but doesn’t hold up theirs? You hear “one more week” for three months, or “I’m out of town” and run into them later. Whose fault is that? How do you deal with it?

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In this episode, I bring up a situation we’ve run into where we are one of the vendors working on a project, but not the only one. When it comes to opinions about what is right and wrong for your customer, how do you cross that bridge?

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Joined by James Archer of Forty, we talk about how to sell to small businesses and recognizing that the unique time needs of a small biz CEO means that they aren’t always the decision maker. How to play that game in small businesses and does that scale out?

Abbreviated show notes while travelling since we’re travelling.

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Dave gets under my skin by bringing up my beloved (and hapless this year) Red Sox and their manager Bobby Valentine, to illustrate the point of someone who knows their business top and down, but isn’t a good leader and what that can do to your business efforts. What does having a clubhouse cancer do to your sales team? Or what if the sales manager loses the team?

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Dave came to the studio armed with an article he’d read about sales conversion rates from email versus search versus social media. They posit that email and search are significantly more effective than Social Media, which leads us to ask – should be you be selling on Social Media?

I’ve answered this before and laid out the First Rule of Social Media Selling – and Dave and I explore that a good bit.

We outline what the various methods are discussed in the article and pros and cons of each.

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Joining us a second time, Mike Leeds and I get a chance to let Dave do a bit of self promotion and talk about his “100 Day Challenge” event that he’s started up recently. We get into the ideas behind why Dave started this and the difference between a goal and a vision.

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Joined by local Phoenix sales and management coach, Mike Leeds the Bros talk through what it means to celebrate progress throughout the sales process. Mike starts us off with the lens of the longer, less frequent, sales process. I then ask if we can get that same result of motivation and energy in a more fast paced sales process. This extends out to a more in depth conversation about pace, timing, and making sure things are moving at the pace.

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A couple of days late due to a new addition to the DSMB family (my wife and I had our third daughter), we bring up one of my favorite topics: Zombie Leads! Those leads that fall off the map, stop answering your calls or emails, then suddenly after you’ve written them off, they’re back and ready to work. How do you deal with these types of leads? How do you get more of those leads?

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Joined this week by Stuart Preston from the Gangplank community, we dive into a variety of topics ranging from being a self-salesman/entrepreneur vs working for someone else. Stuart admits how many business owners suck at selling and we dive into some of the psychology of this. Other topics include the best ways to frame a problem you’ve heard, how to frame a solution, and even some of the best questions to pitch short term gains vs long term value.

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