Episode 253: Making Sales Social LIVE: Masterclasses

Intro 00:00

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live, as we share LinkedIn and Social Selling Training Strategies and Tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, every week, Making Sales Social Live! This is the recorded version of our weekly Making Sales Social Live Show.

Bob Woods  01:02

Thanks for joining us for this special episode of The Making Sales Social podcast. Throughout the year, we had SSL held monthly or twice-a-month masterclasses for our membership. During the sessions, we host the top voices in sales, marketing, and business as they share their expertise with our members. During our master classes, attendees get to ask questions to our special guest speakers. And we get to really dive in deep into the subjects they’re presenting. And since they’re all Zoom meetings, there are visuals too.

In this special Making Sales Social episode, we’ll highlight some of those masterclass sessions we held throughout 2023 minus those visuals, of course, and at the end of this episode, I’ll share how you can access both live and on-demand master classes for free. 

First off, we hosted Tom Poland in April, he’s a best-selling author and creator of the Leadsology method. Tom discussed using webinars to brand yourself as an expert in your field and get real sales from them. He also spoke about how to attract people to those webinars in the first place.

Tom Poland 01:35

Because so much of marketing produces rollercoaster results, you have, you have this flow of new clients coming in and they dry up. And then it’s kind of at the bottom of the roller coaster. And so very exciting when you’re going up the roller coaster at the top of the wonderful view. But as you go down the roller coaster and clients are drying up, it can produce a bit of anxiety. And if you scream, just get rid of this. 

So the idea here is that we have a systematic approach to lead generation. And there’s really two sorts of categories of lead generation if you want. One is the lead generation is one on one. Your initiating is your time you’re going to networking meetings, perhaps trade conferences, business, some business networking seminars, maybe you set up a booth at a trade show or something like that, probably a bad idea. But it’s that sort of thing, you get the idea. 

It’s personal efforts required. And it’s typically one on one. The other category is where you can generate leads at scale. And for that you need some sort of audience. And this is where OPM or other people’s universes come in. Essentially, the concept is this, let me give you the real big picture. And we can dive into why this is so cool, and so on. So the real big picture is this, you run a webinar once a month. And all of your lead generation comes from that one hour. 

You have hundreds of people in attendance. And the audience is being generated by other people who have email lists. And I’m choosing my words very carefully here. Those email lists contain subscribers, who for the most part would be interested in your style of service, whether you’re a weight loss consultant, or relationship therapist, sales and marketing person, whatever your intellectual property is that you’re a specialist, and they would be interested in that. 

That’s the big picture, one webinar a month, hundreds of attendees you need bulk in order to generate for most people need bulk in order to generate enough new client inquiries. The new client inquiries that you get from that one webinar are exceptionally high quality because they’ve already agreed that they can afford to work with you. They’ve literally checked the box saying yes, I understand your fees are X,Y,Z per month. 

And there’s so many months and I have that in my budget. And I’m interested in that. So we’re talking about bulk lead generation. That’s high quality. And that’s predictable, to the point where you’re getting those inquiries pretty much every week because with the webinar, you want to do a follow up not a replay because that’ll damage your attendance numbers.

Bob Woods  04:16

Much of sales is about messaging. If you don’t have a good message that’s brief and memorable. You’re way behind your competition in may copywriter and sales funnel strategies expert Dawn Apuan, joined us to discuss mastering your message for maximum impact. So you can say what you do in 10 words or less effectively.

Dawn Apuan 04:38

And so when I’m talking about messaging, I’m talking about your brand, message, the overall feel of your brand. In a nutshell, who you serve, and what results you get them is what I’m talking about with messaging. copywriting is more like the nitty gritty and we’ll get to that in a little bit. But to start with your messaging. One of my favorite stories a few years back, I was on Zoom and a meeting like this with a bunch of entrepreneurs. And one guy was sharing how he was just struggling to create his messaging. 

He’s like, I don’t really know how to talk about what I do. And he held up a couple of like cop notebooks. And he’s like, “I have 400 pages of notes. You know, I’ve been working on trying to launch his business for two years.” And then he’s like, “I wrote a sentence, it’s 42 words long,” and he starts reading us this sentence about what he does. And when he got done, it was a very long winded sentence. 

I unmuted and I was like, So what you really do is, and in seven words, I was able to encapsulate what he did, and he is faced just kind of like, had this look of shock. And he was like, “How did you do that?” So little words, you haven’t even read my notebooks yet? Like, “I don’t need the 400 pages, we just need to boil it down.” Because the thing is, with your messaging, if you have more than 10 words, that’s why I say 10 Words or Less, people aren’t going to remember, they’re not going to remember what you do. 

And they’re not going to remember to refer you because that’s a big part of business is relationships and referrals. And they’re not gonna remember 42 words or 400 pages, to tell someone “Oh yeah, I know, this guy. He does X,Y,Z.” So to finish off that story, he was his seven words where I help homeowners eliminate their electricity bills. And he’s in the States, he’s in the Phoenix area. So if you’re familiar with that area of the country, AC in the summer, he said, “People’s electricity bills can be as high as $2,000 a month,” which is crazy. 

Amanda shaking her head. So in his geographic area, that was a big deal. If you could eliminate $2,000 a month, I’d be like, “Hey, yeah, tell me about that.” Right. So he was into solar. And he produced and installed solar panels on people’s homes. Now a couple of things I want to point out about this 10 Words or Less statement, the number one, it doesn’t tell you what he did, in those seven words, it didn’t say anything about solar or anything. It told you who, and what results. 

So the who are homeowners, and obviously, it would be in that Phoenix area, because he’s a brick and mortar, but the who and then what result, he got them eliminate their electricity bills. So the thing that I see get people caught up so much with messaging is trying to explain all the things Right in one sentence, or like I can cram it all in because I do 15 things for my clients. And I get that I get that lots of us have multifaceted ways that we serve people, but you really want to boil it down. 

Number one, so that they know exactly who you’re talking to homeowners, because they would be the decision makers that could invest in solar and eliminate electricity bills. So other things might be I help brand new moms fit in their skinny jeans, again, again, very specific. With their specific result, I help people lose 21 pounds in 30 days, that kind of thing. I help people build a business for 10k months, in 90 days or six months. And in those examples, you’ll notice I also have not only the specific result that they get, but a timeframe. So if you can timeframe it people love fast, quick, easy results. Right?

Bob Woods  08:45

Pricing a product or service is as much of an art form as it is data driven. No matter if you work for a large company, if you’re in business all by yourself, or anywhere in between. In October, we hosted author and sales trainer Bill Caskey. He detailed a strategy to stay out of what he calls the commodity dungeon by pricing any product or service at the right level, so that it’s not seen or thought of as a commodity. And it all starts with mindset. 

Bill Caskey 09:13

So number one is you gotta have a mindset of detachment. And this is kind of I mean, this is one of these areas that people I was even giving a speech about a year ago and the guy who came after me basically said this basically said you don’t know what you’re the guy, the speaker before me and I was sitting in the back I was right there. He maybe didn’t know and he goes he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. 

You can’t detach, detach means you don’t care. You’re not going to make a sale if you carry that attitude of I don’t care. Well, he obviously didn’t listen to my speech because detachment has nothing to do with not caring. Detachment is your ability to unencumbered to unencumbered yourself from the outcome. 

So the instant you become attached to the sale or to the result, your behavior changes, you start to do things that are not on track that are not part of this journey, you start to take shortcuts, you start to read buying signals differently when you’re attached, a person might say, Yeah, I think we’re interested in this and you run back and tell your boss, “Oh, man, they love this stuff.” Well, that’s not what he said. 

He said, “He might be interested, but because of our attachment to an outcome, we hear things we shouldn’t hear.” So one of my first goals is to help you get to a place where you can detach from the outcomes. To watch, you’re going to say, “But Bill, if I detach from the outcomes, nobody’s going to buy anything from me.” And that’s just false. When you detach from the outcomes, you’re stronger in the process, you will ask the questions that need to be asked, you’ll challenge them where you need to challenge them.

You’ll demand to see the people in the company who make the decision. Without fear, when you’re detached, there is no fear, you will be a better guide when you’re detached from the outcomes. So my tip here, and I’m gonna go through these 10, there’s three of them, I want to dig deeper on this one. The tip is, and and again, I know this is like, you know, well, of course, if you release all your attachments to the outcome, you meditate, you ruminate, you think on it, you give voice to it. 

In fact, I would even suggest you give voice to it to the prospect. So I had a call yesterday, which I’ll tell you about a little bit later. But I had a call yesterday with somebody, he’s got a team of 10 people and they listened to the podcast. And they said, “Yeah, I want you to, I want you to come in and I want to talk to you about working with my team.” And whenever I hear that, I always slow down and say, “Well, well, wait a minute, you don’t know me, I don’t know you, you don’t know what I charge. You don’t know what I teach.” 

Now, in this case, they did because of your podcast listeners. But I always want to start up front by declaring my detachment. And you should do this too. And the way you declare it is very simply you give voice to it and say, “Look, I know this is what we do. I’m not sure whether I can be of help to you because I’m not really clear on what you want to accomplish. So let’s talk a little bit today, let’s ask each other some questions. And at the end, one of two things is going to happen. Either we’re going to see that there’s a fit here, or we’re going to see there’s not.” 

And I’m okay with either answer. When you operate from that point of detachment, everything is on the table, the prospect relaxes, their guard goes down. They’re not seeing you as everybody else that comes in their company or gets on calls with them. Now, if you’re going to do this, you can’t back it up two minutes later with some kind of plea to buy something from you. Because now you’re a con man, now that that declaration of detachment didn’t mean anything. So my first mission here in commanding a premium is to detach from the outcomes and have the mindset of detachment. 

When you do that, it frees up your energy, you’re going to be much more able to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done in the sales process. Everybody cool with that? Give me a thumbs up thumbs down. I know this is if you haven’t heard this before, it might feel like well, what is this some kind of trick, it’s not a trick I don’t want I don’t want you to detach as a trick. I want you to be detached from all outcomes in your life. I think your outcomes get better when you do.

Bob Woods  13:38

Did you ever think if I could just tweak a couple of things about my business, I’m sure I can do better. Well, we hosted expert sales trainer, Amanda Abello, last September, and she brought us three tweaks that you can add to your business to triple your sales without cold calling or direct messaging. One of those tweaks has to do with AI. 

Amanda Abello 14:02

You know, I’m currently pumping out about five videos a day, sorry, five videos a week on YouTube. It’s taking me maybe a couple of hours a week to give you an idea because I’ve been in digital marketing since 2010. I think something like that. Man, it used to take me literally hours. To get four videos done, edited, uploaded to YouTube with the right SEO, it would take a whole weekend just to do four videos. 

Now I can do four videos in a couple of hours, thanks to AI. So one of the things that’s really cool right now is that we do have AI. It’s a newer domain. AI technology isn’t new, but I guess AI to the masses is newer, and it saves you so much time and helps you become more efficient. So what we’ve done in my business is we’ve basically taught AI to be our marketing team. We taught AI to sound exactly like us. So all I gotta do is go into Chat GPT. 

Chat GPT has already been trained with social media content, video testimonials, emails that performed very well and recreated a brand voice style guide. And I’ll have an idea like, oh, follow up is really important. Here’s how to automate follow up. I just put that into Chat GPT and Chat GPT, spit out emails, video scripts, social media, you name it, right. And I broke 30 emails in 30 minutes. Two weeks ago, I actually had a video on YouTube Live today specifically about how I did that with Chat GPT, 30 emails in 30 minutes. Thanks to AI now why is it so important? It’s important for a few reasons. 

Number one, you reduce your marketing costs. So as I said, right, we reduced Mike when I started building out these systems, and really leveraging AI and thinking about working smart instead of hard, or basically creating an automated salesperson, which is essentially what I did, what I what started happening was I started decreasing my expenses, I went from having a business that cost me at least $15,000 a month to run. Right. And that was with marketing help. That was with sales help. That was with all the software and systems and all that stuff, I can now run this business for less than $2,000 a month. 

That’s massive. That is a huge savings. And it all has to do with building a machine and automations. And using AI. Because the minute I learned how to use AI, and people have come after me for this, but I say this as a former content marketer, I fired all the marketers on my team that weren’t getting me as good results as AI was, or the output that I needed. So you immediately slashed your expenses. When you learn how to do this. That’s the rule number. That’s Pro Number one, Pro Number two, right is the fact that you’re able to do more output and less time.

I don’t know if anybody saw Alex Hormoz these 100 million dollar leads a few weeks ago, but one of the things he talked about was building a brand and video and goodwill and really putting a lot of content out there. Thanks to AI, I can literally triple my content output from what I was doing before. But it doesn’t take me triple the time, it actually takes me less time to do and that has all been because I trained AI to be my marketing team. Or I use AI tools for editing or I use AI tools for repurposing content. So AI has been huge for us. 

And basically the main thing today is to learn how to use technology in your business to yield you more money, and also give you a better quality of life. Because if you’re able to do more with technology, you’re able to make more money very quickly simply because you’re getting in front of more people a lot faster. And at the end of the day, this is a game of getting in front of as many people as you possibly can. And in addition to that, if a lot of the menial tasks or a lot of the tasks that take up a lot of time are taken care of or they’re automated, then you can spend more time really cultivating deep relationships.

Bob Woods  18:14

We’ll wrap up this look back with a master class taught by our own Brynne Tillman on a new trend that we’ve been heavily discussing. Being a micro influencer is much different from the traditional definition of a social media influencer, the big difference, you’ll likely get sales conversation started by being a micro influencer.

Brynne Tillman 18:36

Micro influencers are building rapport, providing real value, developing trust and credibility by being a resource. Macro influencers don’t really build rapport, macro influencers are untouchable in most people’s minds, right. They’re out there influencing, but it’s really hard to communicate with them because they have this huge following. Where math a micro influencer is building rapport with their network. It’s a smaller group, but it’s more of the right people. So we have five micro influencer tenants. 

So the first one is detached from what your audience is worth to you and attached to what you are worth to the audience. Their reason is really this next one. We are typically salespeople, and that’s like a micro influencer for business development, right? We have a whole litany of things that we want our prospects to know. But that does not make us an influencer that makes us a salesperson. We need to make sure that what we are sharing is content. they want to consume.

So rather than sharing content that you want them to know, share content that you want them to consume. Find other influencers that are attracting or bigger influencers, even that are attracting your audience that are not necessarily a competitor, right? And then engage with both. And we’ll talk more, but engage with both the influencer and the people that they’re attracting. They have comments and reactions, this is your network, and they’re engaging on content all around your topic or similar topic. 

Chances are, if they like their stuff, and you do a good job, they’ll like your stuff. So you are actually proactively building a readership. That’s another micro influencer, a macro influencer, big influencer just as a magnet period. Right? And stop telling your audience how you can help them and simply help them. And that’s a huge one. So, Bob had I done in our last since our last conversation and updating? Oh, you are muted. 

Bob Woods  21:20

There’s only four here. 

Brynne Tillman  21:21

Oh, there’s a fifth. Engage 10 times more than you post. Oh, yeah. Right. This is it. If you want to become an influencer, engage, engage, engage. So let’s talk about this for a moment. First, the algorithm, when you engage 10 times more than you post, your post will show up in front of the people you’re engaging with. I’m going to repeat that, I’m going to reframe it, you have some control over who sees your content.

When you engage, we’ll talk about this, but when you engage with specific folks, their content, you’re reacting, you’re sharing their content, you’re commenting, when you share content, they are more likely to see it. So not just engaging, but engaging with people that you want to see your content. Bob, do you want to add anything to that?

Bob Woods  22:27

No, I think that that went through, that went through everything that I would definitely go through to accept when it comes so so the whole micro versus macro thing, I also think is really important, because macro influencers are just people who we think of our influencers are looking for specific audiences, but they’re looking for more like general depth demographic audience, you know, like females 12 to 25, or, you know, young young people in general and things like that, when we’re talking about our micro influence. 

We’re talking about audiences, composed of people who we want to have conversations with, and that’s not going to be anywhere near the number of people that these macro influencers are looking for. So I would suggest always keeping that in mind too when it comes to thinking about micro influencers. 

These are highlights from just five of our masterclass sessions over the course of 2023 we had a social sales link produced 13 master classes that had the same kinds of takeaways and AHA moments. If you’d like to be in the know with not only live access to future master classes, but on demand access to our three most recent sessions, sign up for our social sales link library membership at socialsaleslink.com/library. 

Again, that’s socialsaleslink.com/library all one word. And remember, this is absolutely free. Here’s hoping your 2023 was a success for you, and that 2020 either meets or exceeds your expectations. I’m Bob Woods from Social Sales Link. And when you’re out and about, be sure that you’re making your sales social. 

Outro  24:19

Don’t miss an episode, visit socialsaleslink.com/podcast. Leave a review down below. Tell us what you think, what you learned, and what you want to hear from us next, register for free resources at LinkedInlibrary.com You can also listen to us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website socialsaleslink.com for more information.