Transcript
WEBVTT
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this is designed for a decision maker to read it, understand what it is that you do, how you could take a big, hairy problem that they're facing and transform it and give them a really bright.
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Future
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Welcome to Sales Made Easy, a podcast for business and personal growth.
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Join Harry Spaight, as he hosts sales experts and business owners who share their journeys of personal growth and business success now, here's your host, Harry.
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Hey, what is the good word?
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Have you thought about writing a book?
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Can a book actually help you grow a business?
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Well, we're in for this conversation today with my friend Steve Gordon.
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He is a two time entrepreneur and best selling author of five books, including unstoppable referrals, and his latest book.
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The million dollar book is available and he has got downloads and things that he could help you in writing your book.
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So Steve, I can't wait to get into this conversation.
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Welcome to the sales made easy podcast.
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What's the good word.
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I am just so excited to be here.
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Harry.
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Thanks for the opportunity.
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I always love talking about this topic and talking about sales in general, because, you know, nothing happens until the sale is made.
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So it's it's pretty important.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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It's funny.
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When people think of business, there's probably 2 things they're not thinking about.
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1 is the actual selling that needs to take place.
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And the other is, should I be writing a book?
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I mean, it's like, why not?
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So how did this all come into place for you?
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Because you have an interesting background, I believe as an architect, so that transition had to be something.
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So why don't you give us a little bit of your background?
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Yeah, I actually came out of a career in engineering and, and owned a consulting firm in that industry.
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For about 12 years and we grew that firm and had some success and I was the guy that was going out getting all the new clients.
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And so I just found that I really loved that part of the business a lot more than I did the technical part.
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So I left, started our current business and this is about 14 years ago now.
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I started working with other professional service firms, helping them Figure out how to get clients because that was a skill I developed and and about 2 years into that business.
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I wrote my 1st book unstoppable referrals.
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You mentioned it a minute ago when I wrote that book.
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I had no idea what to expect.
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In fact, I, I couldn't even get the book written on the 1st, 2 tries.
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So I had 2 that had gone in the garbage.
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And 3rd tries, you know, 3rd one was a charm.
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And we can talk about what made that 3rd one work.
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But but we launched that 3rd book in July of 2014, 10 years ago now, and, and I got to tell you, it's just astonishing what happened.
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I had 15 of my colleagues, people I'd connected with, they were in my network.
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They had some of them had small networks and a few of them had pretty good sized.
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Email lists, and I had these 15 people that agreed to share the book when it launched so launch week comes and I'd written some emails for them to send out and they send them out.
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And in about a week, we had 5268 prospects.
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Get a copy of that book and changed the business.
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Overnight, we went from a tiny little.
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1.
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5 person consulting firm in Tallahassee, Florida.
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And if you don't know, if you're listening to this, you don't know where Tallahassee is.
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We're the 11th largest market in Florida, which makes us really, really small.
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So I went from that only working with local clients to now getting inquiries.
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Like, really, within a week, I was getting inquiries from all over the US, UK.
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Canada, I think I would even have 1 from Australia just overnight and totally changed everything.
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And so some of the businesses that I was working with at the time saw this and they're like, wow, that was pretty cool.
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I've always thought about writing a book.
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Could you help me write a book?
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So.
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You know, we're in that stage of, of, you know, early stage business where you'll, you'll take any opportunity that somebody throws at you.
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And so we took it and we've, we wrote some, some short books for people and they had really great results.
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I have one guy, very first one we worked with.
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He was a financial advisor, and his target market were physicians who were coming out of residency, because that's the point for a physician where they go from not making a lot of money to really making a lot of money.
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So critical time for him to acquire them as a client.
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So he wrote a book and was having a meeting with.
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His very best doctor client about a week after we finished the book, and he said, how can I use this to get, you know, I want to get into to share it with people.
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So we walked him through a really simple framework for having that conversation and this doctor had not in the.
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The 5 years they work together, not referred 1 person in 30 minutes.
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He referred 11 people just by offering the book as a way to make the introduction.
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So we started noticing that.
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Anytime one of our clients had a book, they did way better than everybody else with their marketing.
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And so over time, we refine the system for helping people create them.
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And now, I mean, we went from sort of requiring it of our clients to just saying, no, this is all we do.
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We're just going to help you write a book and then we're going to use that to multiply your business.
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Incredible.
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Okay.
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So where do I begin with the questions?
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The first one is.
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What was going on in your mind when you went through book one or the first edition and then what happened with the second edition where it made you say I need to get a third edition going here?
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What was that process like for you?
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So I think I was probably like a lot of people.
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I get the idea.
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Hey, I want to write a book.
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Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I if you're familiar with the Colby index, I'm, I'm a high quick start, which means the minute the idea happens, I don't need any research.
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I'm going nice and it's a strength and it can also be a weakness.
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But you know, I jumped into the projects pretty decent writer at that point.
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I had been doing marketing copy for a couple of years.
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So it wasn't like I was going into uncharted territory, but writing a book's a different animal and.
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I'd be great, you know, I'd get hopped up on caffeine at the start of both of those 1st, 2 additions and all this motivation and went into him and I wasn't super organized and I get to the 3rd or 4th chapter and fall into a rabbit hole and then I'd pop my head up and go.
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Where am I going with this?
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This doesn't make any sense.
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I need to start over.
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My idea wasn't that good.
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And really, the thing that made the difference by the 3rd edition was I figured out.
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Okay.
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I've got to have a system to do.
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This is where the engineering brain kicked in.
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I got to have a system to do this.
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I had heard someone describe their process for writing a book.
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I thought, oh, that's pretty good.
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I, I would, I'd change some things, but that's pretty good.
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And you know, That resulted in me going away on a Saturday into the home office, telling my wife, you're not going to see me until I've outlined this book in extreme detail.
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And so I was in there from probably 7 a.
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m.
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to 4 or 5 o'clock in the evening.
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And I outlined the entire the 3rd, what ended up being the book that got published and it was the 3rd try.
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And the key there was really getting it down to a very specific level of detail.
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So that when I would wake up in the morning to write, all the thinking was already done.
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I had a road map and this is what we teach our clients to do now.
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It's really cool because after 2 or 3 days, so our, our whole process is, if you can devote 30 minutes or an hour to writing your book.
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We'll show you how to get it done in 30 days in 30 minutes to an hour a day.
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Wow.
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And if you don't want to do that, we'll write it for you, but that's a whole other process.
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But you know, 30 minutes to an hour a day I found was sort of the sweet spot because that works with the way your brain wants to work anyway, short burst, really well organized and our clients.
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Now tell me they find what I found in that first book.
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I would wake up, you know, after writing for a day and I'd look ahead.
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Okay.
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These are the next few key points that I'm going to do.
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I would wake up the next morning and my brain had already written it.
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And now I had to race to the keyboard because it was coming out.
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So good.
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Yeah, this is really, really interesting.
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So when I wrote my book, it was 30 days times eight maybe nine.
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So I could see it being done, but I mean, I'm not really sure I can, but you, if you're telling me that you could write a book in 30 days, now my curiosity is really peaked here.
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What, first of all, what size book are we talking about?
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Just so I can put this in perspective.
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So I like to call these.
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Plane ride books, you know, this is designed for a decision maker to read it, understand what it is that you do, how you could take a big, hairy problem that they're facing and transform it and give them a really bright.
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Future and so that's what we're trying to communicate in the book.
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We're not trying to teach them how to do what you do, because clients don't want to learn how to do what you do.
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They want to know you have a process.
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To help them.
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And those are different things.
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I call it the difference between a textbook, which is a terrible business book to write and a transformation book.
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People that write checks want transformation books, not textbooks.
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So we're talking about a book.
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That's between 100 and 150 pages and final printed form.
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That's a great consumable size.
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It's.
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Long enough to feel authoritative, but not so long that when it's sitting on their desk or on the coffee table that it looks like a project.
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Beautiful.
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So the book was the 3rd edition.
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Was it the same concept about the referrals to the unstoppable referrals?
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Or are they completely different?
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No, it kind of evolved.
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Some things happened in the interim.
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That I right before I wrote the referral book, the summer before that I had taught a whole series of workshops on referral marketing here locally and had about 300 business owners come through.
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We did different sessions over many weeks and, And it was great.
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People loved it.
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We were teaching all the kind of, you know, old standbys for how to get more referrals, which basically boils down to ask your clients more often and follow up with the people they refer forever.
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So we did that and about 6 months later, I was, you know, running into some of the folks who were.
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In the, in those workshops, and I was asking him, okay, what's happened and I ended up talking to about 20 people who have been through the process.
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I gotta tell you, I mean, these Harry, these were the most depressing conversations I've ever had, because I'd spent all this time.
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I had all this great feedback from people about the workshops.
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And then I find 6 months later, they've done nothing.
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Oh, yeah.
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Yeah, okay.
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And, you know, and they're all telling me, no, it was great stuff.
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And I need to do this.
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I know I need to work on referrals, but they weren't doing it.
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So I started asking questions, trying to figure out what what didn't work for them in that.
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And really, what it came down to, and this is sort of the, the impetus for the new book was that that, you know, most business owners understand that they need to ask for referrals, but they also know that the people that are going to ask.
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Are kind of like the goose that played the golden egg in their business, and they don't want to go back and take too many of those golden eggs too quickly.
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You don't want to kill that goose.
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And they know that asking for referrals is taking value out of that relationship the way that it's traditionally done.
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Right?
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It's all about me.
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And how can you give me more business?
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Right?
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And unstoppable referrals flips it on its head, and it's how to use an asset like a book.
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To put all your best ideas into it, and then go to your client and say, you know, we've been able to help you with this problem or that problem.
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And you really, you told me you really appreciated this approach.
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We have that approach.
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Well, I've written about all of that out in this book, and I know that here, you probably know people who would really benefit from getting these same ideas that you've gotten so much success from.
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Why don't we sit down and brainstorm together?
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If you're open to it, who we might be able to give this book to as a gift from you.
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And what we found is that approach, it's a giving approach that unlocks a lot more referrals.
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Our clients average about 7 introductions every time they have that conversation.
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Wow.
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Yeah.
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So the, what I love about this is that it takes so much of that awkwardness out of the just asking for a referral, right?
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So now it's a gift, right?
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Who doesn't want to give a gift to somebody?
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Number one.
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And when you mentioned earlier about the relationship can be Strained a little bit by asking for the traditional referral.
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I don't think you use the word strain, but are you following along here?
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How that can absolutely.
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Okay.
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Can you talk a little bit about that as to why that is?
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Or what do you mean by that?
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Well, there are a few reasons behind it.
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Number 1 is risk.
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And if we don't acknowledge the risk, it's really hard to it.
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Understand why referrals don't work.
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So when you're asking for a referral, 100 percent of the risk falls on the client or the referral partner.
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Because they're going to put their reputation on the line for you, and it doesn't take much for the, the interaction you have with the person that they refer to go sideways.
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I mean, it might not even be your fault.
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It could just be that that person's having a bad day.
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It just didn't receive it.
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Well, and so there's all of this risk.
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There's really no upside to making the referral and, and even if you're paying a referral fee or something like that, which generally those don't work, And there are situations where they do, but by and large, in most situations, they don't work.
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That it just all that risk ends up suppressing the number of referrals that you're going to get.
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The other piece of it that I think people overlook is that you're asking your clients or your referral partners to really become your unpaid and untrained sales force.
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And you're asking them to do the thing that is the most difficult thing in any business, which is prospect.
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And if you're not doing it successfully, how in the world are they going to do it successfully?
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Yeah, there's so much on that.
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It just, the simple thing of returning a phone call being respond.
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We, we assume so much that people are like us and we talk to someone and say, wow, this guy, Steve's a really nice guy.
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I might have a reputation where I return emails in an hour, right?
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And now I'm referring Steve and Steve says, well, I'm really busy.
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I'm traveling.
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I'll get my emails in the next couple of days, inside of 48 hours.
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I'm not saying you're like that, but someone may be that way.
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Now, the referral that you gave is so used to you, the way you do business.
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Now they see, Hey, this guy is different than you.
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And now.
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There's more questioning that takes place.
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So when people ask for referrals and they say, well, we just met.
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So I'm going to tell you all about me.
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So we, you could be referral partner for me.
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It's like, are you crazy?
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We just met.
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I don't know how you respond to emails.
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I don't know what you do on the phone.
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I don't know if you stick through problems.
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I don't know if you'd lose your temper.
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I don't know.
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I don't know what your billing is like.
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I don't know any of this.
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So for me to risk my, my relationships and someone who's a stranger, it's a real risk.
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And so I don't think people get this and the whole network community.
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And so your approach on this is it's so much softer.
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And you're working together with your client on this which is really a nice way of doing it.
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What's your, what's your thought?
00:17:21.950 --> 00:17:23.130
I'm not that random.
00:17:23.150 --> 00:17:25.480
Well, you're, you're, you're absolutely right.
00:17:25.529 --> 00:17:34.470
And, and the, the thing that we've found with this is that because you're just giving a book away, I mean, have you ever been really angry with someone who gave you a book?
00:17:35.549 --> 00:17:39.119
No, I don't get really angry with people who give me gifts.
00:17:39.934 --> 00:17:44.664
Yeah, I mean, I can remember, like, 1 time somebody in a webinar.
00:17:44.664 --> 00:17:47.105
I said that and and somebody put in the comments.
00:17:47.105 --> 00:17:49.045
Well, what if they gave you a book on weight loss?
00:17:49.045 --> 00:17:57.984
And I was like, well, okay, maybe then if I was really sensitive about my weight, but even then I probably wouldn't be super upset about it.
