When is the best time to talk money? Do you have to answer just because they ask how much you want?
These are important questions with important answers. If you ignore this advice, you might be leaving 10’s of thousands of dollars on the table.
When is the best time to talk money? Do you have to answer just because they ask how much you want?
These are important questions with important answers. If you ignore this advice, you might be leaving 10’s of thousands of dollars on the table.
You’re planning a high stakes event with valuable attendees, and every detail matters. The speakers you choose will determine how people talk about the event afterwards. My goal? Make you look like a rockstar.
If I do or say anything on or off stage that reflects poorly on you, the organization, or the event then you don’t have to pay me.
Most of the time I speak about creativity, innovation, and the psychology of sales, negotiation, marketing, and online business.
Every presentation leans heavily on audience interaction, live action demonstrations of the ideas, and unforgettable experiences that are fun, dynamic, and tweet-worthy. 👇
“It was one of the clear highlights of the Expo and Learning part of the conference. Most mentioned how they appreciated the presentation itself and the dynamic content.”
Theo, BP Executive
Whenever I talk with anyone in sales, this question invariably pops up:
Short answer:
Don’t do anything objectionable.
Long Answer:
Take a seat.
Objections can take many forms. Maybe it’s about budget. Timing. Needing to talk with a partner before making big decisions.
Whatever they’re telling you, it’s a smoke screen.
The reason they give is never what the objection is truly about. No matter what the excuse, here’s the real issue:
Maybe they don’t trust you. Maybe they don’t trust themselves. Maybe they don’t trust whatever you’re selling to do what they need done.
Maybe they don’t trust their ability to do what you say they can do.
Maybe they don’t trust their team to follow through.
You’re not a mind reader, so the only other option is to treat their objection as a request for more information. They need to know more about you, what you’re selling, other people who have bought from you previously, their results, how people like them have fared with your services, etc.
Objections are really only objections when you’ve done something inappropriate. Otherwise, they’re a request to build more trust.
Employees make mistakes, and even if you’re not new to the management game it can be difficult to know what to do about it.
You do the best you can. When you know better, you do better. ~David Hira
If someone under your care messes up, the first thing you should do is ask yourself:
If the answer is Yes, then this is an opportunity for you to continue their training. Help them understand why what they did was a mistake, what the expected course of action from this point forward is, and why. If the answer is No, however, then this is the time for disciplinary action. If they consistently are making the same mistakes even after proper instruction, then they are actively wasting your company’s time & resources.
Too often I see managers writing people up for simple mistakes that were the result of the manager’s own failure to properly train their employees. Disciplining someone who is genuinely trying to do good work will only erode any enthusiasm or loyalty they feel to your company. As a manager, it’s your job to tell your employees what’s expected of them, give them the tools to do their job, and empower them to use those tools.
Mistakes will be made, and that’s just par for the course. What you shouldn’t do is punish those who are trying. Otherwise, you’ll create an environment where honest hard-working people will be too scared to do anything, and that is the biggest mistake you can make.
There’s an entertainer’s proverb that goes a little something like:
Don’t believe your own promo.
It’s a subtle reminder to keep your head on your shoulders, and not get too carried away with the story of your character at the expense of losing who you actually are.
(Plus, if you choose to only believe the nice things people say about you, why don’t you choose to believe what all your haters say, too?)
This isn’t limited to the world of entertaining. It happens everywhere. And I get it, the neatly packaged soundbite is so much easier to handle than the (often) messy / unflattering truth. In an effort to maintain our image, we like to gloss over the parts that we don’t like, and pretend they’re not there.
Doing this will destroy your life & business.
Case in point.
CEOs, C-suite executives, and managers often think excessive turnover is just the nature of the beast.
It isn’t.
Sure, the world has changed to a more gig-focused dynamic, but employees who feel like their contributions matter (and are fairly compensated for it), will be fiercely loyal.
Turnover, then, is a symptom of a bigger issue and it’s costing your business dearly. Think about the gym industry. They have a turnover rate of 160% annually.
That means hire all new people. Fire everyone. Then hire 60% more new people.
Every. Year.
And they wonder why the industry is dying…
Think about your business. A solid worker walks up and hands you a typed resignation letter. (Or even better, just emails it on Saturday night.)
You know that the instant someone turns in their two weeks’ notice, their give-a-shit drops to less than zero. This means other people on your team will have to step in to take up the slack.
And when you really think about it, you’ll realize that process didn’t start on the day they handed in their resignation. Who knows how long they’ve been pulling back from their job? How long have you been losing out on their capacity to be productive?
It could be months of lost revenue due to lack of engagement.
Maybe you’ll have to reach out to a temp agency to find a replacement. That costs the staffing agency time & money in terms of their vetting process, employee costs of their own, etc. Do you think that all happens for free? Nope. They pass those costs on to you, their customer.
Further, you now have the tricky job of facilitating their transition out of your organization. Exit interviews, HR hours spent covering your legal ass, etc. That all costs a lot, too.
Sidenote: Exit interviews are less than worthless. If you’re waiting this long to care about what your employee thinks about your company, you shouldn’t be surprised they’re leaving you. Also, if you expect honest answers, you’re crazy. If you actually wanted the truth, your employee would have felt comfortable coming to you with their problem months ago. Instead, they disengaged from your company, coasted on your time, and will give you the answers they think you want to hear.
What else are you losing when that employee leaves? All that institutional knowledge and shared culture. This has a direct impact on everyone else in the team, too. If you’re a client-based dynamic, who knows how many of your clients they’ve culled from your database. Goodbye contracts!
So your company is hemorrhaging value with the loss of a single employee. Now you have to stop the bleeding. You want it done as quickly as possible, but if you don’t do it right, you’ll be right back in the same situation you’re in right now.
A lot of companies I work with don’t have a dedicated team to handle the hiring process. Instead, they dump it on some poor soul who already has a full plate. Now they have another hat they’re not trained to wear. Their client-facing work suffers. The client relationships suffer as they’re now focused on this new responsibility.
How can you expect stellar results when you hand one of the most important responsibilities a company has to someone that the dart landed on?
Knowing how to filter qualified candidates is a fine art itself. How do you get through the fluff, and to the heart of how your candidate actually works?
(Wouldn’t it be nice to have a mind reader on your side. . .)
How many hours are spent checking references? Leaving messages? Scheduling times to call back? Actually talking to references.
Multiplied by the number of candidates.
All before knowing they’re worth the effort.
So you’ve finally gone through the hiring process, found the perfect fit for the job & your company’s culture. Now what?
I don’t care how amazing someone is at their job; they’ll never be up to speed on their first day.
So.
What’s your onboarding process like?
Disney’s is a multi-day process. (I know because I went through it, myself!) It’s no surprise why they consistently have the best customer service in the world. They understand the value of instilling their employees with the right understanding of how their company works, and the culture they’ve built around their brand.
Again, what’s your onboarding process like? A couple balloons at their station and a handshake?
That’s going to cost you.
No wonder the cost of turnover can easily surpass the annual salary of the employee you’re replacing. You’d have to keep the newly hired person onboard for more than a year to just break even.
So, what’s the solution?
Keep your employees happy in the first place. Hire smart when you absolutely must bring someone new into the company.
How do you do all that? Glad you asked, because that’s exactly what I do.
When you truly understand what motivates your employees, you can custom-fit your strategy to what they want. This is one of those mythical win-win situations that I absolutely love helping clients achieve.
Let’s talk. You’ll find my rates to help keep your employees happy will pay for itself many times over. . .
I know one thing; that I know nothing. ~Socrates
Socrates was a master at looking like an idiot while being the smartest person in the room. It’s an incredibly effective strategy, and there’s even a term for it: The Socratic Method. It’s the process of asking innocent questions that trap your target before they’re aware anything’s wrong.
Basically, it’s the skill of being stupid like a fox.
“Stupid like a fox,” is one of my favorite lines of all time, and it perfectly encapsulates the strategy we’re going to explore together.
In some ways, Homer is the epitome of the Socratic Method. He’s a bumbling idiot that everyone underestimates, yet everything seems to work out in his favor.
Over the years I’ve used the socratic method mixed with a healthy dose of human psychology to create something I call “Socratic Espionage.” It’s the closest you’ll get to being a master spy who can find out everything you need to know about someone, without them being able to stop themselves from sharing it.
How many times have you been at a coffee shop, and overhear an incredibly personal conversation between two people? It’s amazing what people will share when they think nobody else is listening, isn’t it?
The instant they know you’re paying attention, though, they clam up. And, what would happen if you were bold enough to ask them a point blank question?
They’d tell you to get lost, right?
People hate telling you things. (Especially if they think it can be used against them!)
That’s why they won’t answer your questions. Information is power, and by refusing to answer you questions, they’re trying to maintain control of the situation.
Ask someone what their budget is for hiring speakers? Forget about it. They’re not going to tell you. They want you bid low because you’re desperate. They save money, and you miss out.
Need to know what the political landscape is in an office? Nobody’s going to take off the gloves and tell you what they really think of their manager. . . unless they’re an idiot. They don’t know where your loyalties lie, so they’re going to play it safe.
The more you appear to need something, the less willing people are to give it to you.
I wish it weren’t true, but it is. That’s just how things are. So how do we get around this?
Humans laugh for only 2 reasons:
That’s it. I’ve just ruined your ability to enjoy anything funny from now on. I don’t care what situation you propose, if it’s funny, it’s because it’s one or both of these things.
People hate to tell you anything, but they love to feel superior.
That’s the secret formula.
By using strategically incorrect statements (instead of fact-finding questions) you are going to by-pass your mark’s in-born hesitation to answer questions, and trigger their deep desire to demonstrate their superiority over you.
Let’s say you’re trying to find out how your friendly competition has been getting so much work lately.
You could ask them, “What’s your marketing strategy?”
Since it’s a direct question, you’ll get a vague answer. No good.
Try this instead.
Say something like, “I’ve been using Facebook marketing, and it’s pretty much useless.” You’ve demonstrated you’re failing which allows him to feel superior.
He will respond with one of two possible answers:
Either way he’s told you a very valuable piece of information about his marketing strategy.
So who cares that he thinks you’re stupid?
They don’t know you’re stupid like a fox.
When a magician is creating something new, there are 2 parts of the equation.
In a good show, the magician puts most of his time into answering the first question as clearly as possible, and then devoting excessive amounts of time & effort to figuring out the second question.
He allows the effect to dictate his choices.
When it’s a decision between two options:
The good magician will choose the second option every time.
It’s not unusual for a magician to spend a couple years working on a method if it’s the difference between an ok trick and a perfect trick.
Sometimes, however, a method can be so ingenious, novel, or fun that a magician tries to come up with a trick that would justify using that method. This, however, rarely creates something truly spectacular.
To use a common saying, “This is the tail wagging the dog.”
Many people who aren’t where they want to be suffer from “Method First Thinking.” They allow where they are to dictate where they want to go.
So often when I ask clients what they want, they can’t tell me. If you don’t know where you want to go (the what), focusing on the how isn’t going to do you any good.
Get absolutely clear on what you want in your life, and then figure out how to make that happen. Not the other way around.
Focus on the effect, first & the method becomes secondary.
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
That’s an excerpt from Sir Conan Arthur Doyle’s “Silver Blaze,” a Sherlock Holmes novel, and it highlights a particularly curious hiccup in how our brains work: we’re exceptionally bad at noticing what’s not there.
In the story, detectives search everywhere for clues. They dust for fingerprints, look for fibers, etc. They’re looking for the presence of evidence.
Sherlock is the genius because he identifies the absence of a clue; thereby making it the most important clue of all. The dog’s silence means it recognized whoever was committing the crime.
Every time you’re making a choice, you’re evaluating what it is going to cost. There’s the marginal (or face value) cost, and full cost.
Here’s how it plays out, and trips you up.
Consider you’re starting a business, but you don’t have a big budget so you get free business cards from VistaPrint.
At face value it’s very low cost. There are no dollars involved.
You hand them out to prospective clients who you’re perfectly suited to work with. They have a huge budget, want the service you’re providing, and you guys would do amazing work together.
They look at your card and see the watermark on the back.
Get your free business cards from VistaPrint, too!
They’re considering putting you in charge of a massive project involving a lot of money, and you’re showing them you’re not willing to invest in the essentials.
They never offer you the job.
You won’t know why. The phone just won’t ring.
You’re paying the full price of your decision, but you’ll never see it.
Every choice you make is paid for in full whether you know it or not.
Every time you choose to do it the cheap way instead of the right way, you wind up paying more.
“If you need a machine and don’t buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it and don’t have it”. ~Henry Ford
When I talk with potential clients who would rather do it on their own, I see that they’re signing up to pay twice for results they’re not going to get. They think, “Boy, that’s expensive! I bet I could do it myself!”
Cut to 3 years later and they’ve missed out on all the payoff from investing in themselves compounded by 3 years. (You’re not just farther behind: You’re farther behind multiplied by how far you could have gotten with what you learned in those 3 years.)
Penny smart and a pound foolish.
Every time you consider investing in yourself, it’s difficult to identify the costs you’re not going to see. Trust the people who have been where you are & can tell you. They’re desperately trying to save you from making a costly mistake trying to avoid a marginal expense.
You can’t afford not to.
If I’m going to have surgery done, the single most important factor in deciding who my surgeon is (besides what insurance I have), is whether or not I trust they can get the job done right.
I don’t care how terse they are in the consultation. I don’t care that they didn’t ask about my hobbies.
Trust is all-important.
But that’s not the end of the story.
I took debate as an elective in high school a whopping 6 times, and participated in tournaments enough that I earned a membership in the National Forensics League (NFL).
NFL debate tournaments were hosted at a variety of surrounding high schools (complete with trophy ceremonies, and everything). This is where I learned how to be comfortable speaking in front of a crowd.
The set-up is like this: There’s a “should” statement called the Resolution. For example, “We should respect the right to life.” Then you’re assigned the Affirmative role (you support the resolution), or the Opposition role (you argue against the resolution).
The Affirmative debater would go first to build their case. Then there’s 3 minutes for cross examination where the Opposition could ask clarifying questions. The Opposition could choose to go with the straight refutation strategy (only focus on why the Affirmative’s case doesn’t hold water), or the Refute & Build strategy (argue against Affirmative, and then present their own case to go against the resolution). Then Affirmative has a chance to speak again before the Opposition has the closing remarks.
That’s my whole world from 9th grade on through into college.
Everything, really. The question of whether trust or likability is better is a perfect example of a beginner’s debate tactic:
The false dichotomy: A logical fallacy that artificially assumes there are only 2 outcomes when there are, in fact, many other possibilities. Often called black-and-white thinking.
The question “which is more important” tends to direct your thinking into focusing solely on one or the other, instead of realizing you’ll do a lot more business with both.
Turns out, doctors who spend a little more time with patients, being personable, paying attention (instead of only looking at their charts), etc. are sued less often than doctors who are more to-the-point.
It’s in everyone’s best interest is the doctor is, in fact, trustworthy and likable.
Same goes for you.
Sure, I can do business with someone I don’t like if I trust they’ll deliver what they promise, but I’m going to continue doing business with someone I like and trust.
Being one doesn’t preclude your ability to be the other. It’s not a binary system. Being likable and trustworthy will gain you business, as well as prevent you from losing business in the long run.