19th June, 2024 - Webinar replay

In conversation with Andy Bounds – marketing, sales and communication tips from a genuine master

Phil Bray

Good morning, everybody and welcome to another Yardstick webinar. In keeping with earlier on in the year, we have another fantastic guest joining us today. So earlier on in the year, we had Rory Sutherland, and today, we have Andy Bounds joining us. You’re in for a treat today. Marketing, sales, and communication tips from someone who is a genuine master at them. So, we’re really pleased to have Andy here. But before we get into it, Dan, do you want to do a little bit of housekeeping first of all?

Dan Campbell 

Sure thing. Right, I’m Dan, the Head of Branding and Design here at The Yardstick Agency. What do we need to know for today’s session? Well, looking at some of the names in the attendees list, we’ve got a number of fresh faces in the crowd, we’ve got some fresh meat. So welcome to your very first Yardstick webinar. The familiar faces among you will know that we encourage as many questions as humanly possible. So, get stuck in! Phil’s going to be leading with his own questions today but I’ll be picking up plenty of your questions to ask Andy as we go along. As always, it’s a safe space, challenge us, agree with us, tell us if we’re speaking nonsense or if we’re speaking the opposite of nonsense, you can tell us that as well. You can do that by using the Q&A box or the chat function. So I’m going to be monitoring both today and I’ll read all the things I see out at regular intervals. And depending on where we end up in 60 minutes time, we’ll sweep up as many as we can before we have to wave goodbye. To assist that effort, our Client Engagement Manager, Abi, will be answering a few of the questions directly in the chat today, and providing links to any resources or links and things that we mention as we go along in the session. At the end, she’s going to tell us all about July’s webinar, where we’ve got another very special guest, so make sure you stick around for that. And finally, no doubt you’re going to want to rewatch this, I know I certainly will, so, Abi will also be making sure that a recording of the session and any show notes will be arriving in your inbox later today. I think that’s it for housekeeping. So, over to Phil and Andy to get the session started.

Phil Bray 

Thanks, Dan, much appreciated. Right, here’s a little slide to introduce Andy. Andy arrives in my inbox every Tuesday morning. It’s an email that I look forward to getting every Tuesday and Andy is a sales and communication expert, a genius whose advice can’t be ignored. That was a quote that was given to Andy based on I think one of your presentations Andy? I wonder if you could just start by telling the audience, everyone on the webinar today, a little bit about your history and what’s got you to where you are today.

Andy Bounds 

Thank you. My job is to help people achieve more every time they speak. That might be selling more, or marketing better, or just generally being more effective at work. So I am someone who helps people be more successful through communication. The thing that people find most interesting is nothing to do with my normal credentials. My normal credentials are I’ve written books and I got voted Great Britain sales trainer of the year and lovely things like that, but the thing people are most interested in is the fact that my mum is blind. So when I was a kid, the person who taught me to speak can’t see. So I became very interested in and hopefully good at explaining things to my mum. Now, why is that relevant? Because when we’re marketing and when we’re selling people are blind to why they should see us, why they should choose us, why they should give us money and I guess that’s it. People tend to say, “Isn’t that the bald guy with the blind mum?” They don’t tend to talk about my awards as much as I’d like them to, but there you go.

Phil Bray 

The bald guy with the blind mum. That’s an epithet to be known by. I’ve said earlier, I first became aware of you, Andy, on your Tuesday email that arrives week in, week out, every Tuesday morning, you can set your set your clock by it. That’s where I’d like to start. Two questions, why did you choose Tuesday? Really interested in that, and how important is it, do you believe, that people remain consistent in their marketing – like you’ve done with your Tuesday email?

Andy Bounds 

Okay. The answer to your first question is depressingly basic and childish. I didn’t want to do Monday because everyone gets to work on Monday, they’re not going to read it. I didn’t want to do Friday because people aren’t going to read it. So I knew it was going to be Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, and I ended up going for Tuesday because it begins with T so I called them Tuesday Tips. There you go. So I’d like to say it was more learned than that, but it wasn’t. Yeah. Now as far as consistency goes, the second question, the most important thing is to do something that you think you can stick at, whatever that is. Now, I’m very happy to have the discipline of doing something every Tuesday. But if you’re one of those people who will do it for a bit, but after six weeks, you’ll get bored, don’t do it. So, the most important thing is to find something that suits you, and you’re happy to commit to whatever that might be. I love the discipline of having to create something every week. I love it. It’s very easy with the work we all do, sometimes you get to the end of the week and you haven’t created something. My passion is creativity. If I wasn’t creating stuff, because I was attending boring internal update meetings, I think I’d mess my life up in some way. So, for me, it helped me have the discipline to do something I wanted to do anyway.

Phil Bray 

Where do you get all your ideas from? Have you’ve got a bank of ideas? How do you find the ideas and know what to write about that particular week?

Andy Bounds 

I once heard someone say that stand-up comedians, the main thing that they often have is they have a pen and paper with them at all times or a little iPhone because funny stuff happens all around you and if you’re looking for it, you see it. So, they will always like make notes of “Oh, that’s funny. I must talk about that” and I suppose I’ve got my version of that. I work with some wonderful customers, I love them all dearly, and they’re the ones who often give me my inspiration. So they will say, “Andy, we’ve got a problem with X.” And I think, “Oh, that would probably be a good topic for a Tuesday Tip.” Sometimes I explain something and it happens to land really well and I think “I’ve not explained it as well as that before. Right, okay, well I’m just going to put that in a tip.” So it’s all based on my customers, I don’t sit at home in a little dark room thinking of things. It’s my customers’ feedback that helps me understand what to talk about.

Phil Bray 

So you’re living and breathing that “They ask, you answer” principle from Marcus Sheridan, someone like that?

Andy Bounds 

Yeah, that’s right. Sometimes, something will happen, which, because I’m looking out for it with my little comedian’s pad, when something happens, I think, “Oh, this is quite a nice story.” There’s a tip that’s coming out in the near future, I spoke about it at a conference recently. Child four, we don’t give our kids names there are too many of them, so, child four, he’s 11 and I thought he might like to see what his dad does. So I said to him, “If you want, I’ll try and get you out of school on Friday and if you want, come and see me at this conference. There will be a couple of 1000 people, it’s local. It’s dead good when you’re the speaker, you get in a green room, and I’ll introduce you to the other speakers. One of the people there is going to be Stephen Mulhern. You know, when we watch catchphrase, he’s the guy who is introducing it, I’ll try and introduce you to him. We’ve got some of the Dragons Den, there it’s going to be amazing.” And I did this massively long rant as to why he should come, and I said, “What do you think?” There was silence for a couple of seconds and he said, “Did you say I don’t need to go to school on Friday?” Unbelievable! So everything I’ve said was a total waste of time, apart from that, and I thought you can get a good lesson from that. Once the customer says yes, shut up. So, I thought that’s a nice little tip there. If something happens in my life, so it’s usually the customer asking, therefore the tip, but sometimes something happens and I think, “Oh, that’s my little micro light, but it make a macro point.” So I would never do a tip saying “This happened to my son, the end.” I would say “This happened with my son, but the macro point is this, this, and this.” So they’re my two things, have customers given me any guidance and/ or did something happen which I think I can make a macro point with.

Phil Bray 

Okay. A lot of people on this call will struggle with content creation, we all lstruggle from time to time, don’t we?

Andy Bounds 

Yeah.

Phil Bray 

And having that list of ideas that you can go back to means that you’re not faced with a blank sheet of paper so that’s a great tip.

Andy Bounds 

Can I give you other tip? Sorry, I should have said this before a mistake I made to start with is I always wrote them Monday evening, because I thought they’ll be so fresh and current. But the stress on me on a Monday evening was awful. Now I always write them at least one in advance because I didn’t like that stress. What you do is you find something that works for you, from a logistics point of view. So I don’t do them on Monday evenings anymore, it’s always two or three days before. Sorry, I interrupted you but I thought I should add that.

Phil Bray 

No, to be fair Andy, that’s what I was going to ask. Where do you do your writing? I sit, because I’m a sad so and so, on a Saturday morning in a Cafe Nero writing my blog for the next week, that’s my writing space. Where’s your writing space? Where do you go and write?

Andy Bounds 

My writing space is very simple. I love that you’ve got your way to do it. The way I think about this is, if you think of what you’re like as a person, everyone listening, think what you like, there’ll be your A zone time when you’re good, your B zone, and your C zone is when you’re rubbish, so many people are quite A in the morning, and then they have lunch and they go to a C straightaway because they’ve had too much food and then they might go to B later on in the afternoon. Now I’m not saying everyone’s like this, but a lot of people are. So, what I do is I want to do my creative time in my A zone. Therefore, I will always put it in my diary early on on a Tuesday or a Wednesday, and write in the morning when I’m already on it. It’s a bit like if I’ve got something which is quite contentious or complicated to do, I’ll do it first thing in the morning because that’s when my brain is at its best. When I’m writing books, I even will set my alarm for five o’clock in the morning and write from 05:00 until 07:00, because that’s when I’m at my best. It’s easy and tempting to think I’ll do it later on in the day but as all my customers will tell you, I am rubbish later on in the day. So I tend to do things in the morning.

Phil Bray 

Do you enjoy writing? Do you enjoy the creative process?

Andy Bounds 

Yeah, I do. I find that I enjoy it but it’s not enough of a hobby that I would do without some sort of pressure on me. So I like the positive tension of every Tuesday. When I’m doing the books, I like the positive tension of I’ve got to do 40,000 words by three months on Friday. So yes, I do enjoy it but I’m not sure I’d be as productive if I didn’t have some deadlines.

 

Phil Bray 

One of the things you do every week in your emails is add value. There’s no sales in there, it’s all added value. Dan and I were talking about this earlier, there is a new podcast out where Simon Sinek is being interviewed by Steven Bartlett, it landed a couple of days ago. One of the things Sinek talks about is permanently adding value without expectation of return. That’s clearly working for you, just constantly adding value every Tuesday morning.

Andy Bounds 

Yeah.

Phil Bray 

Just talk a bit more about that, if you would, Andy? And why you follow that approach, as opposed to overtly selling?

Andy Bounds 

Part of it is my personality. I’m not very salesy, I’m very privileged and happy with my level of success but I’m not someone who’s a hard core salesperson, I’m not like that. I like creating, like we just said, I like sharing stuff. One of my customers said that what I do is what they call verbal puke, it just like comes out of me all the time. So I’ll take that as a compliment, even though I’m not sure you’re meant it as one. I’m always careful with this, because I understand what they’re saying, I find it easier to be all lovely and altruistic now that maybe I don’t need the money as much as I did. When I first started, I wasn’t too generous because I thought, I’m not sure I’m going to be able to eat this month. So you have to decide on where you’re based in your life, how happy you are, and all that sort of stuff. But I’ve been doing it since 2010, these particular Tuesday Tips, and I wasn’t as successful then as I am now. So I think they’ve worked hand in hand. But when I started my business in 2003, I wasn’t doing it then because I was hungry.

Phil Bray 

So what were you doing then?

Andy Bounds 

That it was a bit more overt salesy but it was talking to more people. Selling, very simply, is three things. Number one, get an opportunity, number two, try and close it, and then number three, turn sale one into sale two. Most people don’t focus on the third one, but that’s the easiest one. Once somebody likes you saying, “How else can I help you?” is probably more likely to lead to a sale than writing any Tuesday Tip ever. If somebody already likes you, “how else can I help you?” Well, you can or you can’t, right? And if you can’t you say, “Well, that’s fine. Would you be interested to know what other customers are asking me to do for them at the minute?” And everyone goes “Yeah all right then Andy.” So I can now talk about other products. So that’s all well and good. To start with it was much more needs-must I need to work so I was focusing very much on how I could get in front of people and how I could hopefully convince them to buy something.

Phil Bray 

If you had your time again, would you change that or would you do it in the same way?

Andy Bounds 

I would do it very similarly. I might have done my Tuesday Tips earlier, because I enjoy doing them so much. The main thing I would do differently is this and anyone who speaks to me about starting their business, this is the first piece of advice I would give them. The biggest mistake I made was copying what I saw other people do. It sounds like a good idea, but if you only copy what you see other people do, the only thing you copy is the visible stuff. So I’d see everyone posting on Facebook and on LinkedIn, etc. and I just thought I had to do all that and I thought I needed quite a good expensive website, and needed to do X,Y,Z and join the Institute of Directors or whatever. I made that mistake of looking at every visible thing and copying the visible stuff. So, the advice that I would have given my younger self and that I give to people now is this: the easiest way to get started is look at everyone you know, look at all your main contacts. Let’s say we’ve got 100 people because I can do the maths. You look at 100 people, and you think “How much do they like me?” And then secondly, “How much power do they have to help me either because they might buy something or they’re well connected?” So those two things love and power. How much do they love me and how much power do they have? For example, my mum loves me a lot, but she doesn’t have much power to give me any business. Richard Branson doesn’t even know me, but he could probably give me a million pounds if he wanted to. So if you go through your list of your top 100 contacts, you’ll find some people who love you and also probably have the power to help you. So the mistake or learning that I made was for the first year I hadn’t realised that was a thing. So I copied all the stuff and I spent money on this website and other things but what I should have done is gone through my 100 contacts, found the people who loved me and had power to help me and then contacted them and said, “I’m just starting in business, can I ask your advice?” So that was a mistake I made. I didn’t use my existing contacts well enough.

Phil Bray 

Love and power, love that.

Andy Bounds 

Love and power, that’s it. And if you grade everyone, ABC, I like ABC because that’s all my brain can cope with. Everyone who’s an AA, they love you and they’ve got the power. So not my, Mum, she’s probably an AC, not Richard Branson, he’s probably a CA, but I did know people who worked for big banks and I knew people who used to be  Chartered accountants who had stayed in Chartered accountancy. And I just found that was my way forward, the love and the power.

Phil Bray 

That’s fabulous. That’s something everyone can take away from this call, and go and start doing this afternoon. Dan, I can see a couple questions, a couple of comments. I saw a sharp one from Paul, you want to go with that?

Dan Campbell 

Certainly. We were talking about love and power and Paul’s given a lot of love in the comment section, saying Andy’s energy and passion for his work is wonderful and infectious. The point here is that really successful salespeople don’t sell, they just help and the sales then come to them. Chopin asks the question that’s probably on everyone’s mind. “You have to number your children. Andy, how many do you have?”

Andy Bounds 

Well, I think it’s four. Yeah, I’ve got four children. I was going to say their names then, they’re just called Child 1, 2, 3, and 4. I have two grandchildren, because I’m that old but I give them names because I quite like them. The children I don’t  seem to like, enough.

Dan Campbell 

Brilliant. A great question in from Andrew, who asks, “How have you grown your distribution list?”

Andy Bounds 

A few things. One of them is every time I would speak at a conference, and you often have hundreds of people at a conference, I would say as a follow-up to my conference keynote, “Would you all like to receive my Tuesday Tips, if you would just send me an email.” Before GDPR, I would ask the conference organiser for everyone’s email address, and we’d sign them up. so that was one thing we did. After GDPR, I would put the link on and say, “Here’s the link, go on this.” Then I thought I can make this even easier for people rather than having to go to a link. Now what I do is I put on my final slide my email address and I say “There’s my email address, please email me if you want my slides, put the word slides in the subject line, don’t even say please just write “Slides”. If you want my weekly tips, just write “Tips”. And if you want both just write “Slides Tips”, you don’t even need to say the words “and” or “please.” I just want to make it really easy for people to do. Sometimes, I try and have a big upsurge and once every two or three years no more often than that, in my Tuesday tip I’ve sent out, I’ll say, “I’d love to get a few more people receiving these tips. They’re all free, please could you forward this link to someone you think might benefit.” The last time we did that we had, there’s about 30,000 – 40,000 people on the list now but we had about 10,000 people I would send it to and of those 10,000 we got another 2000 signups almost in the same day. Because everyone had forwarded the link to their mates.

Dan Campbell 

I’m a really green emailer. So I don’t think I’d ever be able to email without saying please, I don’t think I could physically send the email.

 

Do you know what someone did say please and we still we still read their email. I haven’t explained myself very well here. I just want to ease the path, right? Sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, I loved your presentation, loved your energy, love the concept… please can I have the slides?” That’s fine as well but I don’t want people to think it’s going be hassle to get.  I love this idea of easing the path. It’s like when we do proposals at work, we don’t really have statements to work with us, we only work with people who seem quite nice to us. What we do is we say “Here’s the proposal. To accept it, all you have to do is hit reply and say yes. Just yes, that will do will count as paperwork. As soon as we get your email saying yes, the next steps are we’ll do this, this, this, and this.” So even with our proposals, it’s really easy for people to accept it. I think sometimes in marketing people make it too hard for the customer to buy stuff.

 

Phil Bray 

That takes us to where I wanted to go next. Andy, what for you is the difference between marketing and sales?

Andy Bounds 

I don’t really know and I don’t really care actually. The thing I’m most interested in is, is it going to generate more opportunities for me to help more people? I suppose you might say marketing is letting the market know about you. The the endpoint of marketing, is you have an opportunity and the endpoint of selling is the opportunity turns into a sale. But ultimately, the two work together to generate an opportunity for you to work with someone and, I love what you said before, Dan, the way I look at selling and business is very simple. It’s two circles, a big one and a small one. If someone decides they’re going to work with you, they are going to get a big circle worth of value, and they’re going to pay you a small amount of fees. That’s the way I think life is. So marketing, ultimately, and selling ultimately helps that transaction happened, whereas they get that much value, and they give you this much money.

Phil Bray 

The audience here are largely financial advisers, financial planners, mortgage brokers, the people on this call. We might have had a few other people sneak in, but that’s largely who they are, and they offer huge value to their clients for a relatively modest fee. I suspect, in fact, I know, most of the general public, consumers, will struggle to differentiate between one financial adviser, and another, one financial planner, and another. How important for you is differentiation? And what tips have you got to help people stand out?

Andy Bounds 

Differentiation is absolutely critical, unless you’re the cheapest out there. Because if you’re the cheapest out there, it’s fine. But as they say, the bargain basement is not a very pleasant place to trade, you can always find somebody cheaper, someone is always willing to buy the business. Differentiation is critical. If the customer finds it hard to differentiate between us, that’s on us, that’s our fault. We need to be clear with this and work out why we different. If we can’t figure out why we’re different, then we’re always going to lose someone who’s cheaper than us who does the same thing as us. We have to really spend time on it. Sometimes, it’s really clear what your differentiators are and sometimes it isn’t. If any of you are listening to this thinking “I’m not sure why we’re different.” There are two things that I find work well with my customers. Number one is a features table. For example if you’re buying a car, and it says “These are all the features in the different cars. If you buy class one, you get tick, tick, tick, you buy class two, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, class three, tick, tick. What you’ve got to do is list all the features down the side, and list you and your competitors across the top, and you tick or cross, to see where you’ve got things that they don’t have. That’s one thing to do. If you don’t have anything ticked that they don’t have, you will always lose if they’re cheaper than you because you’re not offering extra value but you are charging extra money. So, that’s the first thing do, a features table, that’s a good thing to do. And / or do this as well, think about what extra things you couId offer your customers which is two things, number one, something they would find very valuable, and number two, easy for you to do. So you want something high value for them, really easy for you. For example, what I realised when I did this is, I had quite a few different features, but I thought I’m sure I can add more value in a way it will be easy for me to. I don’t have very many skills, I can’t even grow hair, look at that, that’s ridiculous. One thing I do seem to be quite good at is reviewing people’s proposals very quickly. I don’t know why I’m just really good at it, people will send me a proposal, I can look at it and within two minutes, I can give people five ideas, which will help improve their next proposal. Therefore, one of the things that I will do when I’m talking to someone is say, “What you get with me is this, this, this, and this, one extra thing you get with me is my free proposal review thing. So I want you to send me your three most recent proposals and also talk to me about your very next proposal and I’ll review those three for you, I’ll give you a list of things you can do better next time, and I’ll give you some insights into how you can write your next one really well.” So the customers go, “Oh my word what an amazing value add that is.” And it is if you think back that’s a pretty big circle. You can rewrite someone’s proposal template and it can be business-changing but actually it takes me about 20 minutes. Do you see what I mean? So, I would urge everyone to think here, what’s your secret sauce? What’s the thing that you can do that maybe some other people don’t do? And you can either offer that or throw it away as something that we’ll do. Another thing which I find very easy is I say to my customers, “After we finish working together, you have access to me for three months after we finish. So any of you can ring at any point about anything and I’ll give you free advice as long as you want.” And it sounds really lovely and it is really lovely and people take advantage of it. But to be honest, it’s not that hard for me because it’s just a few five minute phone calls.

Phil Bray 

And those five minute phone calls could lead into referrals and other sales, I guess from those clients.

Andy Bounds

They might and it’s lovely when they do, but the most important thing is it makes their big circle even bigger because they’re getting more and more value from it.

Phil Bray 

So giving something away extra for free that is relatively low friction and isn’t going to take a lot of time. What are the key things – you talked about reviewing proposals, what are the key things that people get wrong?

Andy Bounds 

Oh god, where do you start? Number one, here we go. I feel this quite strongly and this is the most important one, before you send a proposal, agree with the client what the client wants to see in the proposal. Nobody does this. If someone says to me they want a proposal I say, “Right, okay, well, I don’t want to send you anything irrelevant. So can I ask you some questions?” If I said that to you, what are you going to say? You’re not going say “It’s alright, be irrelevant” are you? You’re going to say, “What are your questions?” And I say “What are the main things you want to know?, What are the main headings we should have in there? If I just put the outcomes are this, the deliverables are that, the price that, the return on investment is that, next steps are that, would that be enough?” You go, “Yeah, that’s fine.” I say “That might only be one side of A4 Is that alright?” You go “Yeah, that’s fine.” I say “Do yu want me to colour it and design it, or do you just want in Word?” You say, “Word is fine.” So we have this chart that takes a couple of minutes and then you get a really tailored thing, which is exactly what you want and people are very wedded to things they’ve come up with. You feel you’ve sort of told me what to write, so, it’s hard for you not to buy the thing when we’ve already agreed it anyway. I have already agreed with you, what you’re buying, what you’re paying, what’s going in the proposal, then the proposal comes a short written confirmation of what we’ve already agreed, it’s not this long exploration of things we haven’t talked about yet. If I’ve agreed everything verbally, then the proposal is going to be short and tailored, and we should be fine. That’s the first thing most people get wrong. They don’t agree stuff verbally so the proposal has too many surprises in it. One of the reasons customers go straight to the price section is they don’t know what the price was. that, to me, seems a bit nuts. You’re better at describing your price than a piece of paper is, so, you should describe the price. If the customer’s got any price objections, you can deal with it verbally and when it’s agreed, your proposal then says “As agreed the price is going to be £50,000.” That’s the main thing people get wrong with proposals, that trumps everything else. Second thing to say with proposals is this. When you send it is easy to get ghosted so what you do is this, you say the next two steps are number one, say “I will put in writing what we’ve just agreed.” Don’t call it “My proposal”, call it “Our agreement.” So write what we’ve just agreed, that’s the first step. The second step is saying “We’ll need to have a quick chat about it to make sure we’re both happy with it, and neither of us are having any second thoughts about what we just agreed. So if I get it to you today, what time are you free tomorrow for us to have a quick five minute chat about it?” In other words, what I refuse to do is, number one, send a proposal when we haven’t agreed anything, because that’s gonna be a long guess so they’re not going to like it anyway, and secondly, I refuse to send a proposal without the follow-up call pre-booked, because if I don’t do that, I’m just going to get ghosted. If everyone listening to that just did those three things agree everything verbally, (write it in a propsal named Our agreement) and agree when you’re going to have a follow up call, most of their problems with proposals would disappear.

Phil Bray 

Fantastic. There is some very practical advice there that Yardstick can use and I’m sure everybody else on this call can use. For the financial advisers, planners, or mortgage brokers on the call, before they get to that proposal stage, they generally have this free, no obligation meeting with potential clients. That first date getting to know the potential client and working out if the fit is right. What tips have you got there to increase the probability of the person then becoming a client? So, before the proposal stage.

Andy Bounds 

Great question. The only aim of that first meeting – they’re not going to buy anything in the first meeting, unless you’re lucky. The only aim of the first meeting is that you get a second meeting. That’s it. So, don’t get too far ahead the only aim of meeting one is to get meeting two. The way I look at first meetings is two words beginning with I. By the way, I can hear people beginning to think he doesn’t do very complicated things does he, Andy. No, I don’t really! One of my customers said to me the other day, I’m not sure with you, are you a genius or a simpleton? So I can tell you the the answer to that. The reason I do things like the two things beginning with I is because it means it’s not very hard for my head. The two things begining with I are this: invaluable. The first meeting has to be invaluable with a client, they have to think that was a really good use of my time. Usually, but not always, the best way to make something invaluable is to teach them something. So, teaching them something they didn’t know. In my first meeting with a client or a potential client when they say “I never knew that that’s really useful.” Or “I never thought about it like that.” Or, “Wow, is that really what people are doing?” Anytime they’re a bit surprised in the first meeting, I’ve ticked the invaluable box. That’s the first thing to say. They don’t find it invaluable to find out the year I was founded, and how many offices my company’s got. Nobody cares! But they do find it invaluable to know the three main problems people have in the sales world, they do want to know the three best questions people can ask if they want to sell pensions to people. I want to make sure it’s invaluable, that’s the first I, and the second I: incomplete. By incomplete, I mean there’s a sense that we need to meet again. Let’s say you and  are having a conversation and as a result of this, I realise that you want some extra help about tax or something and I’ve got a lovely thought-leading white paper in the office, what I could say to you is, “Oh, that’s good. If you want to know that I’ve got a white paper on this, I’ll get back to the office, and I’ll send it to you. Have a look at it and ring me back if you want.” But you see, if I send you the white paper, that’s now complete, you don’t need to speak to me anymore. Because you had a question and I’ve answered it. We have a desire o please people so we try and complete stuff. Don’t complete it, make it incomplete. If you said to me, you have questions, and I’ve got some stuff that will help, what I would say is “Alright, cool. This is what I’ll do, there are some things in the office, let me dig them out. These things always make more sense verbally than by email, so I’ll take out the relevant stuff, let’s get together again, in a couple of days time, I’ll bring that with me and then I’ll run through it.” Now. That’s what I mean by invaluable and incomplete, you’ve learned stuff, you thought it was useful, you absolutely want to see me again, and the next meeting, I’m going to bring some new stuff, therefore, you need to meet me. If I complete it in my desire to please you, then there’s no reason for you to meet with me again. So, invaluable and incomplete are the two main words for people listening with first meetings.

Phil Bray 

During that first meeting, presumably, at some point you’re talking about that proposal question. “What do you want to see in the proposal?” Is that towards the end of that first meeting?

Andy Bounds 

It depends on how the first meeting is. The way I think of sales is, it’s like a series of steps, all you need to do is go from whatever the first thing is to the next thing. If it’s going to be meeting one, meeting two, proposal, then I’m not thinking about the proposal in meeting one. With my business all I’m thinking is, “Are we going to have meeting two or not?” Because the proposal is not going to happen until after meeting two. All I want to say in meeting one is “I’ll tell you what, we should have a chat again about this” blah, blah, blah. At the end of meeting two, there may be a proposal. In which case, I’ll say “The next two steps are, i’ll put in writing in what we just agreed, and then we need to have a call about it.” Don’t worry too much about the proposal in meeting one. All you worry about in meeting one is whether you can get meeting two; all you worry about in meeting two is if you’re going to have meeting three or is it getting to a proposal? Or, is it something where you think I’m not interested, so we need to qualify this out?

Phil Bray 

So everybody on here, mortgage advisers, financial planners, financial advisers will have their own sales process. So if anybody’s got any questions about your sales process right now and wants to put them in the chat, do that and Dan will read them out.

Andy Bounds 

Yeah, send them in.

Phil Bray 

And you can give a bit of feedback for them. But at some point, the adviser, planner, and potentially mortgage broker is going to send a proposal out to the prospect assuming it’s a right-fit prospect. Actually, lets pause on that. Wrong-fit prospects, people you meet that aren’t right for the services. What tips have you got there to sort of hand them off elegantly to make sure that they get a good experience?

Andy Bounds 

Use the past tense. So you say, “I’ve really enjoyed meeting you.” at some point; you might say that right at the end or penultimately. “I’ve really enjoyed this meeting, I hope you have too.” but then what you want to say, with charm, is that you’re not going to work together. I find the best way to do this is say “I’ve really enjoyed meeting you but as I hear more about what you’re interested in, I don’t think that we’re going to be really good partners for each other. I do know a couple of other people who I think might be better for you, so, I think the best way I can help you would be to introduce you to them. Would that be okay?” So, I don’t say “You aren’t worthy of me.” And I don’t say “I’m not worthy of you.” I just say “I don’t think we’re good partners for this.” And I like the phrase “We aren’t good partners”, because in that, you’re saying there’s nothing wrong with anyone. it’s just we’re not compatible. I was talking to somebody recently, they asked me to do something and we had a chat about price and return on investment; their return on investment was going to be in the millions of pounds and I set my price for what you want doing. It was quite high value, it was quite high input for me and it was going to be £50,000. So they were going to pay me £50,000 but they were going to get back £5 million, so, I think that’s quite a good return on investment. They said they didn’t have a budget of any more than £5000. I thought “Ha! okay, here we go.” And I said “We only have a couple of options. One of them is can we have a talk about where you might be able to get the extra £45,000 budget from? Or, if you don’t think that’s a goer, we’ll just have to go our separate ways but I do know some people who are much cheaper than me and I can hand you over to them. What would you like to do?” See, it’s still helpful and charming, it’s not saying “If you can’t give me £50,000 I’m not interested.” And I don’t want to argue. I remember someone saying to me once “I’m sure you’ve got a really good price objection response but the fact is, I quite want a Rolls Royce and I can’t afford that either. So I just don’t have the money for it.” “Well, that’s absolutely fine but that means we aren’t going to be good partners for each other; it’s no one’s fault, we just aren’t. So therefore, you might want to go and have a chat with them.” So do it with charm and you have to know what you’re going to say because if you don’t know what you’re going to say, you’ll probably mess it up. One of my number one learnings that I wish I’d known earlier is to think about things I’m dreading, like the price objection, or if we’re going to qualify them out and work out what scripts I am going to say if it comes up. If somebody says “We can’t afford it.”, I know what to say; if somebody says, “Drop your price.”, I know what to say; if I want to qualify someone out, I know what to say. One of the skills needed as a professional salesperson and a professional marketer is you really need to have prepared how to respond for the things that you don’t like.

Phil Bray 

Preparing for objections, so you’re well-versed in being able to handle them before they come along.

Andy Bounds 

Absolutely.

Phil Bray 

How would you suggest that the advisers, planners, and mortgage brokers on here handle that objection about price or value?

Andy Bounds 

Okay, cool. There are two words. If anyone’s making notes, please write down these two words, “Scripts” and “Practice”. You have to think about what your scripts are going to be – and I’ll give you some example scripts now – but then you have to practice saying them. Objections are verbal things, so you have to practice them verbally. For example, when people learn how to drive, they don’t just read the highway code and go, “That will be fine.” they actually go behind the steering wheel and give it a go, right? They try on half the car park and when that’s okay, they might go on a slow road, and then they might go on a faster road. So, it’s the same thing with objections. What you want to do is practice what it’s like in real life, but do it in an unscary way. You need to drive around Asda carpark, work out what your script is and then try saying it on your own; then maybe roleplay with someone else – people who don’t like the word roleplay, call it practice. Practice with someone when it doesn’t matter so you don’t mess it up when it does matter. In this practice, you’ll be playing roles, lets not call it roleplay for anyone who kicks off about roleplay, it’s just a practice where you’re playing roles. Anyway, what we need is a script and I can give you as much or as little as you want about this but there are various things that you can do. One of them is don’t talk about price early, you want to talk about price late. You know those two circles I mentioned before? I don’t want to talk about my price, until they’ve already told me their big circle. So, if someone asks early on, “Andy, how much is your price?” And I’ve not talked about what they want from me yet, I say, “I don’t know.” This is my script. “How much is your price?” “I don’t know. It depends what you want me to do and I don’t want you to pay for things you don’t need, that would be ridiculous. Let me ask you some questions, when I understand what you want, I’ll then be able to tell you the price.” So that’s basically “I’m not telling you the price.”. In the financial planning world, I’ve worked with lots of people and they know that if they say to someone, “What’s the most important thing here?” They’re going to say “price”. So, use the words “other than”, say, “Other than price, which of course we can look at later, what’s your main priority here?” So, “Other than price, what’s your main priority?” and when they go “Price.” I say “I’ve just said other than!”. So what you can do is script how to asnswer their questions. If someone says something to me early on about the price, I go, “I don’t know what you want yet. Let me ask you questions.” and if I want to ask them about their priorities, I say “Other than price, what re your main priorities?”. Later on, if somebody then talks about price I’ve got scripts. If somebody says, “Your competitors are cheaper.”, I’ve got an answer for that. If somebody says, “Can you give me a discount?” I’ve got an answer for that. It all comes down to scripts and practice, you’ve got to know what to say. Now I’ve given the example of ‘other than price’ it’s quite straightforward but if you didn’t know the phrase “Other than price”, it feels impossible.

Phil Bray 

What’s your discount answer?

Andy Bounds 

If someone says “Give us a discount” I mean, I don’t do discounts so I’m gonna say my answer but other people would say different thing. So if somebody says, “Can we have a discount?” I say, “Oh, thanks for asking but we don’t do those because it isn’t fair. We have customers who pay these rates and if you did want to pay less, we’d have to reduce the scope in some way. We can talk about how we can best do that but if you wanted everything, the only way that’s fair is you’d have to pay the rate of just quoted. Which do you want us to do?”

Phil Bray 

Okay. We’ve got a few people putting their sales process in the chat and we’ll come to those in a second and make sure we get we get people’s questions answered. But it sounds to me that you’re saying first meeting is a proposal based on what the prospect wants to see in the proposal but you don’t send that until they agree to the second meeting. Is that right?

Andy Bounds 

I don’t agree the proposal until we’ve agreed everything. I don’t send the proposal until the end. I’ve got a little piece of paper and a chunky pen, we’re going multimedia here. This is how – for my business a sale works like this. If you can see it instead of my face, it says meeting number one. Can you see that alright?

Phil Bray 

It’s a bit blurry but talk us through it.

Andy Bounds 

Okay. It looked very good for me anyway, so I’m happy. It had a number one sign and then an arrow, a number two sign and then an arrow, then proposal. So number one, this proposal thing, I don’t think about the proposal until we’ve already agreed what they’re going to buy. In fact, let’s get the word proposal out of everyone’s mind and replace it with the word confirmation. What I think a proposal is, is a written confirmation of what we’ve already agreed they’re going to buy, and they’re going to pay me. I don’t put anything in writing until all that’s agreed.  In meeting number one, nothing’s agreed it’s just an exploratory trial to see if they want meeting number two. I’m not thinking of a proposal, because I’ve got nothing to confirm. When I get to write my proposal, it basically says, “We’ve agreed you want these outcomes; we’ve agreed, this is how I’m going to help you get them; we’ve agreed you’re going to pay me this amount of money, and we’ve agreed the next steps are X Y, Z.” That’s all I want to see in the proposal so I’m not thinking of the proposal in meeting one. All I’m thinking in meeting one is “Can I be (I) invaluable? Can we make it (I) incomplete? And should we get together for meeting two?” I’m not thinking of the written confirmation because we haven’t agreed anything yet. I don’t think about the proposal until we’ve already agreed what they’re going to buy.

Phil Bray 

Okay. So you agree what they’re going to buy, the proposal goes out, how do you handle the next steps?

Andy Bounds 

As I said before, the two things I say are “I’ll get it in writing”, and “We need to have a call tomorrow.” I book in the call and invite you to the meeting that you’ve agreed, we’re going to talk tomorrow at 10 o’clock for 10 minutes. I title it “Meeting with Andy bounds to agree next steps following our proposal.” that is the subject line of the meeting. It’s not called catch up; It’s not called demo; not any of that rubbish. It’s called “Meeting with Andy bounds to agree next steps following our proposal.” I don’t say “his proposal” it’s “our proposal” because I’m working with the customer. When I have the call tomorrow, the first question i ask  is “Did you get the proposal?” “Yes” “Did it make any sense? Did I include everything you think we agreed?” “Yes.” And then I’ll just say, “Are we good to go? Or do you have any final concerns?” So: did you get it? Was it right? Are we good to go, have you got any final concerns? That’s my favourite closing script. If they say we’re good to go, my golden rule of sales is when the customer says “Yes”, shut up! They’ve said yes. If I say, “Are we good to go? Or do you have any final concerns?” if they say, “We’re good to go.” I say, “Brilliant. In that case, it’s dead easy to move forward, we just do this, this, and this.” If I say “Are we good to go? Or do you have any final concerns?” and they go, “We’ve got some final concerns” I say, “I’m glad I asked, what are they?” and they say, “Can we have a discount?” then I’ll use my discount objection script. If they say “I’m not sure we can do it right now, we’ve got a problem.” I’ll use my priority script. Let’s work backwards. Meeting number one, all that matters is getting meeting number two, the way you get meeting number two, is to do the invaluable and incomplete method. You then have meeting number two, it all goes well and they say “Yes, let’s do it in writing.” I say “Right, what do you want in the proposal? When are we going to have the follow up call? 10 o’clock tomorrow for 10 minutes?”. When we have the follow up call I say, “Are you happy with it? Did it include everything you wanted or are we good to go? Have you got any final concerns?” I deal with the concerns if they have them, then as soon as they say “Yes” I say, “Good. in that case, these are the next steps.”. It’s as simple as that.

Phil Bray 

That’s great. Dan, you have some comments and questions in the chat. So do you want to go through those?

Dan Campbell 

I certainly do. Where should we start? A short while ago, Matt asked a great question. Matt’s question is all about how hard to push benefits. Matt says, “When writing content for potential clients, I often feel that pushing the benefits too hard, can make them stand off and hesitate. I think this comes from the many industry warnings to the public, such as don’t be rushed into a decision and if it seems too good to be true, etc. What are your thoughts on this, Andy?”

Andy Bounds 

The first thing to do when talking about benefits, or what I like to do is phrase it from my customers’ priorities point of view. So I will say something like, “Our objectives, we’ve agreed this is what you want to achieve.” and then we write down what their priorities are. So in effect, that’s the benefits they’re going to get from it. But I don’t call it “My benefits”, I call it “Your priorities”. Let’s say somebody wants a very good pension and they want to retire at 60 or something, then I’d say, “We’ve agreed your priorities are you want a good pension, and you want to retire at 60. For that to happen, we’ve agreed the best way to do it.”. So, I don’t talk about benefits, I talk about their priorities, which are the same thing, right? Because the benefits they’re going to get are the things they want to prioritise. That’s the best way to do it. Then, the more benefits I can put in, the better. When I say “As we’ve agreed, this is what you want to achieve.” the word “agreed” is key. You’ve told me this, so as we’ve agreed, and then I just list out the priorities – if there’s 10 of them, I don’t care – You want a good pension, you want to retire at 60, you want to buy your kids a house, you want to do all this. Just list them all down, there’s nothing wrong with that. It feels like you’re forcing it on them if you’re saying these are the benefits of me, but if you say “These are the objectives you said you want.”, well, that’s a much nicer way to do it. So I suggest you start with that and then underneath you say, “We’ve agreed that the best way I can help you achieve all these benefits is by doing this.” So it’s saying this is what you want, the priorities you’ve got, and this is how we’re going to deliver it. So I love that question from Matt, and that’s how I overcome it.

Dan Campbell 

To add to that, Mike has put a comment in the chat saying, always use the clients phraseology, because they’re always going to take their own advice. So it goes hand in hand with that, doesn’t it?

Andy Bounds 

Yes.

Dan Campbell 

The next question I’m going to ask is a question from Coleman, who says, “Our initial meeting is free and the goal for us is to get the prospect to commit to come on board, which involves them committing to pay our planning fee. How can we make the meeting incomplete in that context?”

Andy Bounds 

If it’s working for you anyway – the reason I wanted it incomplete was because I wanted meeting number two, it sounds like Coleman doesn’t really want meeting two, he just wants them to buy something, in which case, then you do probably want to complete it. The advice I was giving before was assuming you wanted a second meeting. If the output of the first meeting is you want to move on, but there’s going to be a planning fee, then the close is going to be slightly different. The close is going to be something like this, “I’ve heard your priorities are this, this, this, and this… we can best help you with this… and for us to do that, the next steps are quite easy. All that happens is we do this, you do that. Our fee for kicking things off, it’s going to be this.” So, you try and close it that way. So I think in Coleman’s example, it sounds like he’s not necessarily after a second meeting, he’s after a sale in the first meeting. So he’d have to do it that way and it becomes complete.

Dan Campbell 

That’s a good point. Let’s say the goal of the first meeting is to then get a second meeting. Anne asks a good question, saying, “Out of curiosity, how long would Andy spend on that first meeting?”

Andy Bounds 

Now, that’s a good question. With the first meeting, I tend to go for 30 – 45 minutes. I’ve got myself quite quick at it so I quite like doing that. That’s how long I tend to spend and because of the word incomplete, it’s different in Coleman’s example, but if we haven’t finished the meeting after 30 minutes, I don’t care because I wanted it to be incomplete anyway. So you’ve got to say “Oh look at the time! Look at how much we’ve covered already there are still a couple more things that I feel that I want to talk about with you. Would you have any objection to us having a quick follow-up tomorrow?” I suggest you go a little bit shorter because it’s another reason for it to be incomplete. I’ve trained my PA quite extensively on this and she’s really good at it but she’s taken it a bit further than I wanted her to; someone rings speaks to Emma and they say “We really want to have a one hour face-to-face meeting with Andy.” she’ll say “That’s good. I can put something in the diary, we don’t need to take an hour of your time, though. Andy’s really quick at this thirty minutes should be fine. Also, if you want face-to-face, his diary is pretty rammed So can I suggest we do a team’s call because that way you’ll see him tomorrow.” So she’s really good at that they wanted one hour face-to-face and end up with half an hour on the phone. So it’s really good. The thing that she’s started doing now Dan, is if somebody says, “I really do prefer face-to-face.” she just says, “Have you seen his face? Trust me phone is better.” Thanks, Emma! But it works really well. If they ask for an hour of face-to-face you don’t have to say yes, you can say “He really wants to talk to you as well but he’s pretty quick, we don’t need to take an hour of your time.” So there you go that’s my bias. It’s almost like some of the stuff I’m saying, if I had power over you I would order it. I would order you to agree the proposal before you send the proposal, I would order that if I had any power over you but 30 minutes is just my personal bias.

Dan Campbell 

It’s a great answer and I’m also hearing that we’re incredibly lucky that 20 minutes ago, you didn’t escape out the window because we’ve got an hour today. Okay, let’s go for a question from Sally next. Sally talks about discounts. Sally asks, “What about a discount on fees if the client would go on to provide future business either from themselves or via referrals? Which goes back to who loves us and who has the power to help us that you mentioned right at the start?”

Andy Bounds 

Absolutely. You can do that if you want to Sally, I don’t but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t Sally, this is personal bias. I can absolutely understand this because I don’t give discounts because it’s not fair for other customers, but I suppose you could look your other customers in the eye and say, “Yeah, but they gave me three referrals and they gave me this and that so there’s a marketing element to that.” If you feel comfortable doing that, the only thing I would suggest Sally is it’s very easy for people to say, “I’ll give you referrals, I’ll give you this, and I’ll give you that” but then it doesn’t happen so, you just need to make sure you’re comfortable that you trust them enough that they will follow through. My personal bias is not to, I wouldn’t be able to look my customer in the eye and say, “You paid me £10,000 well, they did not pay me £9000, don’t worry about it.” That’s my personal bias but I can absolutely understand the desire to do that Sally. So fill your boots but make sure they hold their part of the bargain.

Dan Campbell 

It’s a good point. And I know that there’s a few people in the comments saying along the same lines as you, Andy, such as don’t undervalue what you do, don’t beg for business discounts, not giving them shows integrity, etc. So there are definitely two sides to that aren’t there? I’m gonna go to a question now from an anonymous attendee, which always sounds really mysterious, doesn’t it? I promise it’s not me asking this

Andy Bounds 

Asking for a friend. Go on.

Dan Campbell 

The person says, “If Andy was starting a financial advisory business, how would he market it and attract clients if he had a tight marketing budget?”

Andy Bounds 

Okay, the first thing I would do is the thing I said before, is, I would go through my existing customers and find love and power. That’s the first thing I would do and that would cost nothing, literally nothing. That’s the first thing I would do, that is actually, the only thing I would do to start with, I would look at my existing customers, partly because you said about a tight budget and that actually costs nothing, it’s literally free, it’s likely to work and it’s very quick. Even if it doesn’t work, you find out quickly they’re not going to help you. So that’s the first thing I would do. The second thing I would do is I would ask for advice from people who already had a business and I would ask, “Who are you finding it easiest to sell to at the minute, who seems to be the people who were buying most quickly? Who seems to have the money? What are the common characteristics?” When you’ve done that, you would sort of market towards those you weren’t back from your target market. For example, you’ve decided that you want to work with dentistss who’ve got their own practice and are between 50 and 60, where do they hang out? There’s probably a magazine called Dentist Weekly and there’s probably a Dental Society, they probably have some trade magazines, they probably get together once a month to talk about particular things. So work back from that. So they’re the two things and they are miles cheaper, I would absolutely avoid spending money on something unless it was extremely likely to work.

Dan Campbell 

Brilliant. Right let’s do a few more questions, because I’m aware of the time. Ian earlier asked about some scripts, we’ve done that. That’s brilliant. Let’s go to a question from Shabbat, who asks, “Are proposals necessary? Or can you discuss these in person and then agree them at the end of the meeting? So would you still send one in this case, a lot of the time the client is buying us and the relationship.”

Andy Bounds 

The proposal is not needed if you and the customer are happy to go without it. My favourite proposal I ever sent was a text. I’d only been working with someone for six months and they said they wanted to extend the retainer; I said, “Well, I don’t really want to waste any time writing another proposal. Can I just send you a text in six months saying this is the rate and you hit reply?” That’s probably my favourite ever proposal, because it was like a two line text. It’s a great question by Shabbat, I don’t want to write anything until it’s all agreed and the main things that I want to agree are, what their outcomes are, secondly, what my deliverables are going to be or my products are going to be, what the timings are going to be, and what the price is going to be. So you want this, I’m doing this, the timings are that and the price is that. As long as I’ve got those four things, you could agree them all verbally. I personally like to put it in writing, even if it’s just four bullet points. I quite like it in writing because I can say “My understanding is this, please let me know if I’ve got anything wrong.” Shabbat, it doesn’t have to be a big, formal, 20 Page colouring in thing, it could just be four bullet points, but I always just like it in writing because it could be me who forgets what we’ve agreed three months down the line. These things happen, so that’s my bias, but I don’t I don’t write anything until we’ve agreed it verbally.

Dan Campbell 

That’s a great answer. Let’s do one more. I’m aware that there’s also a question from Sally in the Q&A box about how to get those due date tips. So I will talk about that right at the end because I’m sure you’ve got a link for everybody to follow. As opposed to people just shouting tips at you in your email inbox.

Andy Bounds

Just open the window and shout “tips” that should do.

Dan Campbell 

Last question from Mike, “How does Andy rein in the tendency to give too much away in the first meeting and leave the client wanting to hear more?”

Andy Bounds 

I love that question, Mike. So, the thing that- the thing you want to do is use something to shut yourself up. That’s the important thing, you have to know how to shut yourself up because I love what I do so I can talk about it and like Mike says, (give too much away). I used to find this quite hard actually because the answers to your questions are already inside my head and you know they are and I know they are so it almost looks rude if I say, “If you give me money, then I’ll tell you.” Alright, so I have to overcome that as well. So I had to find something that shut me up so what I did is put a limit on the time of the meeting, just like we all do and if someone says, “How do we go about this?” I’d say something like this, “Well, there’s a few ways. Let me go back to the office and see what’s worked well with my other customers. Let me go and ask people who’ve said the same thing that you’ve just said, What was most beneficial for them? That way, I’ve got a better answer for you and when we get back together, Mike, and I’ll bring that with me.” That’s my preferred way to do it. Use the end of the meeting as a cut off point but also have your sentence lined up for “I’ll tell you what, let me go and ask around.” For example, my version of this is a while ago, I was talking to Mike Fielding, Manchester United’s assistant manager at the time, I really liked talking to him and I was quite pleased with myself talking to Mike Fielding but I also wanted to meet with him again. One of Mike’s questions was “If I’m doing an after dinner speech, how much should I charge, how much do people charge with this stuff?” I know a bit about that, but not everything, so I said to Mike “Well, let me give you a headline rate, but how about this? Let me go and ask around and speak to other people I know on the speaker circuit, let me go and speak to people who hire these people, I’ll find out a much better answer and then maybe we could grab another coffee and I’ll bring all that detail for you.” And he said, “Oh that’s very good of you Andy.” And it was very good of me but what happened there is I could have probably answered enough that Mike would have said, “That’s fine, I never want to see you again.” But I’m going to do a bit more than that and that way, he did want to see me again. We ended up doing a joint webinar and it was all lovely, but it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t done that thing Mike. The thing is, know that you’ve got an endpoint of the meeting because that forces you to shut up, but also know your script to say “I can’t say everything now because I need to go and find out for you.”

Dan Campbell 

That’s great and who would never want to see you again, Andy? Who?

Andy Bounds 

Child four, child three, child two, mostly child one. Sally said before about Tuesday Tips, let me just answer that. My email address is my first name and then my whole name. It’s just andy@andybounds.com. If anyone wants my tips, just email me andy@andybounds.com and say the word “tips” don’t say please unless you want to. Obviously Dan will be saying please, nobody else needs to. So andy@andybounds.com, tips, and then we’ll just sign you up to the Tuesday Tips, you’re very welcome to them.

Phil Bray 

Thank you, Andy. All right, one final question from me and then we’ll let you get on with your day because we’ve all got a lot of work to do after the last hour to improve our proposals, our objection handling, etc. Okay, the proposal goes out, and I can’t imagine it ever happening to you, Andy, but it certainly happens to us and other people on the call, they get ghosted, the prospect doesn’t come back to them. We wrote an article a few weeks ago where we included one of your tips, putting you in the subject line, the Chris Voss magic email, the Michael Sherridan email. What tips have you got for when people get ghosted?

Andy Bounds 

You minimise the chance of getting ghosted, if you do what I said before and pre-arrange the follow-up call. The reason you often get ghosted is you send the proposal, wait for them to come back to you and then they don’t and you’re not sure whether to chase them or not. But if I say to you, before I send the proposal, “Let’s pre-agree when we’re going to have the follow-up call.” I’m less likely to get ghosted. If you say “It’s alright Andy, we won’t shedule, I promise I will come back to you.” I don’t like that because I’ve lost all power. So then I use the phrase telephone tennis. I say “That’s very nice of you but we’ll end up playing telephone tennis because we’re both busy. Let’s just put it in, 10 o’clock for 10 minutes, we can always cancel it if need be.” I bust a gut to get the follow-up call booked in. That’s the first thing. If it turns out that they don’t dial in when they should have done, my favourite way to chase when I’m being ghosted if I have someone’s mobile number is to send them a text or a WhatsApp. What will happen is this, I sent you the proposal today, we’re supposed to have a 10 o’clock call tomorrow but you bloody cancelled it, then what I’ll do is send you a text sometime later on in the day which says “Sorry, we missed each other this morning…” which is more polite than saying you cancelled. “…I’ll call you at 4pm today instead, text me a different time if that doesn’t work.” I’m texting, not emailing and I’m not saying “can I call you at 4pm?” it’s “I’m calling you at 4pm, text me a different time if 4pm doesn’t work.” Sometimes people will come back to you and say, “Sorry, I had a doctor’s appointment, these things happen, can you make it 5pm?” That’s all I do. The most important way to reduce the chance of being ghosted is to pre-arrange the call. The problem is when you don’t pre-arrange it because then you’re chasing them. So, pre-arrange the call if you can, but then you chase it by text if something goes wrong.

Phil Bray 

I understand. Thank you so much, Andy. Before we say our goodbyes and our proper thank yous to you, Andy, I’m gonna go multimedia again, as you call it Andy, and try and share my screen so that everyone can see our next webinar. Hopefully that works and you can now see a slide. Over to you Abi to explain what we’ve got coming up next.

Abi Robinson 

Thanks Phil and thank you Andy, that was amazing, my notebook is pretty full. I think we’ve learned a little bit today about the fact that content is king and we’d argue yes, but only if you know how to distribute it and promote it properly. We’ve found in our experience that a lot of people perhaps on this call, perhaps outside of it, don’t get the balance right between production and promotion. So to learn more about that next month, we’ve got another amazing guest, we are speaking to Ross Simmons. If anybody saw Phil’s giveaway on LinkedIn the other day, Ross’s book is Create Once, Distribute Forever; if you’ve enjoyed today’s session with Andy, that’ll tick loads of boxes for you as will July’s webinar. He’s a global marketing expert, he’s an author and an entrepreneur. I will put a link in the chat now if you want to have a look at what we’ll be chatting about with him. We are slightly breaking the norm. Ross is joining us from Canada, so it won’t be at 10am on a Wednesday, you can stay in your office, you can retire to the living room, it’s your choice, but we will be joined by Ross at 6:30pm on Tuesday, the 16th of July. Phil and I had a chat with him last night, we’ve got it all outlined and we’re really excited to share his company for an hour. The link is in the chat, it will be in the follow-up that I’ll send with Andy’s recording later today. So yeah, get signed up and we will look forward to seeing you there.

Phil Bray 

Thank you Abi. Contact details on the screen, Andy’s website and his LinkedIn profile. Andy give me your email address again so people can get your tips.

Andy Bounds 

andy@andybounds.com

Phil Bray 

Fantastic. All that remains is to say thank you, Andy, from the bottom of Yardstick’s heart, thank you for spending an hour with us. There are so many valuable tips there that people can take away and put in to their sales process. That’s going to mean they run more successful businesses and more people get financial advice, financial planning that value that you spoke about Andy. So Andy, thank you so much for today, everybody on here, really appreciates it.

Andy Bounds 

You’re welcome.

Phil Bray 

Thank you Andy, cheers. Goodbye everybody.

Dan Campbell 

Okay guys, bye.

Phil Bray 

Bye.

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