Mo asks Dorie Clark: How can we hold ourselves accountable, hack our own habits, and keep doing what we know we should be doing? The first chapter of the Long Game deals with the question of why we seem to be so busy in our modern lives. One of the most critical aspects of senior leaders is setting the strategy for their organization and yet when asked, 96% of senior leaders say they don’t have enough time for strategy. We need to be honest with ourselves and realize that many of the constraints of “busyness” are in many ways things that we put on ourselves. For many of us there is a culture of busyness and research has shown a link to busyness and self-worth. We can set up structures in our lives to create pre-commitment and push us towards better behavior. Accountability groups are great examples. Creating accountability structures for yourself enables you to make habits of good behavior instead of negative patterns. High achieving professionals generally hate breaking commitments. Having activities in your calendar that you know you should do will make it much more likely that you will actually follow through. If you do the hardest but most beneficial activities early in the day, the rest of your work will sort itself out into your schedule. This avoids the chaos of the day from pushing those activities off indefinitely.   Mentioned in this Episode: dorieclark.com/subscribe

Mo asks Dorie Clark: How can we use the concepts of The Long Game to establish and build the relationship advantage? Turning down offers and clearing your plate is how you free up your time and space to connect with the right people. The more successful we become as professionals the more in demand we are, and the people who want to spend time with us may not be the people that we should be spending time with. Being able to say no more often and being comfortable while doing it is the key to being able to dedicate your time to the right things. One of the easiest ways to deflect well meaning people that you don’t want to commit to is simply asking for more information. Just by making them jump through some simple hoops and provide some more info you can screen out the tire kickers. The next step is to ask for a certain level of granularity in the request. Asking for an agenda is advance can be very valuable so you can focus directly on the important topics and cut out the fluff. Ask if it’s possible to discuss things asynchronously where they send you their questions and you reply with a voicemail when you have time. It’s also an option to simply invite someone to something you are already doing, which makes creating these kinds of connections scalable.   Mentioned in this Episode: dorieclark.com/entrepreneur

Mo asks Dorie Clark: How can we use The Long Game to grow our book of business and create more opportunities? One of the things that frustrates a lot of people with big goals is that the goal seems so unattainable in the moment. 20% Time is a concept that a number of companies use to make it easier to achieve those larger, more long term goals. Business development professionals can use a similar concept within their own careers and pursue ideas that are interesting and have potential. You can accomplish almost anything, the key variable is the runway. Planning methodically to achieve your goal can make incredible things happen. You don’t have to make a leap of faith, if you have an audacious goal and give yourself enough runway while devoting small amounts of time to it consistently, there is very little risk involved. 20% Time is a way to achieve big goals in a way that derisks the proposition. Your 20% Time can take a number of forms from networking, to creating a podcast, to crafting a compelling keynote speech, and more. If you want to build a business development process that works it’s going to take time and you have to dedicate the time to make it happen.   Mentioned in this Episode: dorieclark.com/toolkit

Mo asks Dorie Clark: What’s your big idea when it comes to business development? One of the key things that professional service providers need to grapple with are the long term and short term needs of business and life. Long term relationship building is what really drives results, but in the short term we still need to generate business. When it comes to networking and building your network of relationships, there are three ways to go about doing it and the first is the most commonly thought of and also the reason the majority of people dislike networking. Short term networking is all about making the sale and what you can immediately extract from someone. When you already have a relationship with someone you can be direct and ask for the sale, but it’s not conducive to creating a real relationship. With long term networking you’re not trying to immediately get something out of the other person, and in Infinite Horizon networking you cultivate relationships solely because they are interesting and you never know where people will end up over time. It’s about having an infinite perspective of what’s possible. It’s about being helpful and meeting interesting people. When we think about networking most people think of it as a chore, but reorienting it towards meeting new and interesting people can change how we feel about it. Just getting to know someone is more than enough to build a great relationship. We are all pressed for time but we can all find an hour in our week to make this kind of networking possible, it’s just a matter of prioritizing it. In the era of the pandemic it’s also possible to host virtual cocktail parties to get to know people. Optimize for interesting, instead of money. Follow your curiosity, meet with interesting people, and you will go in interesting directions.   Mentioned in this Episode: growbigplaybook.com dorieclark.com/join

Pat Quinn shares his incredible insight into how to explode your conversion rate and get more people to say yes to you with the Storybrand structure. Find out how to win more clients and business by telling authentic stories that make your offer so compelling the client will be thinking “I’d thought you’d never ask!” Structure matters. Pat’s goal when he’s working with a speaker is for the audience to engage with the speaker after they’re done which means you need to structure your presentation differently. Engagement can take the form of doing business with you, using your service, or subscribing to your newsletter. The Storybrand formula has four steps: Heart, Head, Hand, and Heart. The first part, Heart, is your opening story where the purpose is not to sell, but to connect. The second, Head, is when you teach and help the audience. The third part, Hand, is where you ask the audience to do something with your call to action. The last part, Heart, is to finish with something inspiring. When you put all these things together you will have a presentation that will make people want to engage with you. Mo used to skip too early to the teaching part of the training but after going through Pat’s training he discovered that the personal story at the beginning is the most important part of the presentation. Everyone wants to be a leader and teach the audience, but you can’t lead until you have paced with someone. Pacing is not teaching or leading or selling, it’s saying that you’ve been where the audience is and understanding how they feel. Every communication you do in your business should be in the four part story format. You have some goals with a presentation but the biggest one is to connect and the best way to accomplish this is through episodic storytelling. The three goals of your opening story are to be ordinary, be extraordinary, and to show your why. Ordinary means showing you’ve struggled with the audience’s problems as well. Extraordinary means that you’ve solved at least one of their problems. If you can show your why and your passion about what you do, you will connect in an emotional way that will make them want to engage with you. Episodic storytelling is telling a story from a first person point of view. The first sentence is incredibly important. The secret is to start in the middle of the action which is the same way that great movies begin. This is very attractive and pulls people into your story in a way that reading off your resume can’t compete with. When you start your presentation in a predictable way, your audience will tune out and stop listening. When you start with a compelling story, you will stand out and rise above the crowd. After your story you still have to help your audience. Give away your best information because if you don’t help them at this point, you don’t build credibility and trust, and there will be no reason for them to believe that you can help them in a longer engagement. Most people think that you have to teach everything you know about the subject but that’s not the case. The person who teaches the most does not win the sale, they just leave their audience scared and confused. The person who wins the sale is the one who helps the most in the time they have. When asked to speak, the very first question you should ask is how much time you have. So many presenters try to cram as much material as possible into a time slot but that’s probably the biggest mistake that presenters can make. It’s vital you know how much time you have to speak. Use less of your time to teach and spend more on connection time and next steps. People do more business with those they like, so spend more time fostering the relationship. Have one simple, clear, and obvious single next step when putting in a call to action. Offering a menu of options leads to confusion. Tell the audience the right next step and make them say yes or no to that. A great presentation is like a sidewalk, it leads the person in front of you down a path to a single point of decision. The fewer options you give, the more people you will get to say yes. Don’t leave the audience wondering what to do next. You’re the expert, tell them the next step and the price that works. The right number of topics is three for the teaching portion of a presentation. Get to the stuff that actually helps people and give them a mix of real solutions that are both simple and complicated, short-term and long-term solutions. Short-term solutions give you instant credibility and long-term solutions lead to lasting results. You should make whatever you are talking about both simple and complicated. Simple so that they believe they can do it. Complicated so that they never try to do it without you. Your offer should be weaved into your content. If you get to the offer and it’s the first time your audience is hearing about it, it’s already too late. Our brains physically change when we detect a sales conversation. There is a second dialogue going on in every room. If your presentation is well designed, organized, and simple the audience is listening with about 20% of their brain. The remaining 80% is made up of everything else going on in their life but a good presentation can steer the second dialogue toward your offer. If you don’t introduce your offer early enough, you’ll surprise people. When you get to the offer at the end of your presentation, the response that you want from the audience is “I thought you’d never ask.” All great presentations have visuals which can take a number of different forms. Concrete deliverables will increase your conversion rate. When you have a deliverable, don’t just touch it and show it, do an “Is, Does, Means”. Tell them what it is, tell them what it does, and then tell them what it means. The money is in the meaning. Introduce the next step early on in your story and presentation. Limit the choices to the option of working with you or not working with you. Avoid declaring that everything will change, instead tell them the things that won’t change. The status quo is the comforting blanket around your offer. Actors and actresses are on stage pretending to be something they’re not. Pat teaches people to be themselves and make themselves more attractive to the companies they want to work with. If you do this you’re not selling, you’re just telling them how to get something they already want. There is no one right way to present. You don’t have to be funny, or glib, or quick witted. You have to know your story, have content that actually helps people, have one thing for them to do next, and every time you speak you will get new clients, more business, and make more of an impact on this world. There are two types of decision makers in every audience, tactical decision makers and emotional decision makers. If you only talk to the tactics you’re only going to get yes half as often as you should. Tell the audience what the offer is and also how it will feel. Close with emotion. The Hand is the tactical close, and the final Heart is your emotional close. Research shows that the emotional close doesn’t last as long as a tactical close. The goal at the very end is to have both aspects of the mind hot and ready to go.   Mentioned in the Episode: advanceyourreach.com/growbig GrowBIGplaybook.com

Mo Bunnell reviews the most important and timely insights from season 1 and talks about how to set yourself up for success during this time of the pandemic. Get clarity on how to stay focused, make consistent progress, and motivate yourself and your team to achieve even greater results while everyone else is binge watching their favorite TV shows. The last episode covered the timeless truths that every business development professional can use at any time with fantastic insights into the four major components of successful business development habits. Not addressing the realities of Covid-19 leaves a huge opportunity on the table. The Covid Clarities still fit within the timeless truths discussed earlier, but will be focused on the practical things to keep in mind in the latter half of 2020 and early 2021. Lots of the changes that have happened in the last seven months are here to stay. Get your own copy of the worksheet and the CliffsNotes of the Timeless Truths and Covid Clarities by going to bdhabits.com. The four main themes of season 1 were mindset, vision, accountability, and habits, split between the two perspectives, internal and external. Being helpful and top of mind is what our clients need right now to navigate their change. The number one thing that Mo is focused on is helping others learn to be helpful in this new world we find ourselves living in. The thing you have to realize is that you are not being annoying by reaching out and following up. The only time you shouldn’t follow up is when you’re not adding value. It doesn’t always have to be a sales pitch or thought piece, it could just be showing that you care. Frequency is important for relationships to develop, so we’ve got to take it on ourselves to reach out and be helpful. Mo retells a story of a major realization that a client had regarding follow up. Your clients need you right now, they need you to check in, and they need to know you care. If you’re adding value, you can’t follow up too often. How can you add the most value and stay top of mind with your most important clients? Certain aspects of our new virtual world are here to stay. If you treat the changes like they are permanent then you’re going to act rather than delay. Think of the difference between the first place you rented versus the first place you owned. If you’re waiting for the pandemic to end, or certain aspects of it to end, you’re renting your time. If you take the extreme position of assuming the changes are permanent and own your time, you will be way better off a year from now. Take advantage of the things that are easier now and do more of those, and you will have immense success. What do you need to learn to leapfrog the competition? Focus on that and keep improving. Avoid the mindset of “I can’t wait until this is over” and instead think about what skill you need to learn to be more efficient. Your most important clients are going through immense change and relationships are going to shift faster than ever before. You need to be in front of that trend by adding value and having a vision for their business. Help them navigate the change. A Value Group can be very valuable for both the people involved and for your business development efforts. Put together a value group of your most valuable clients and you will have success. What do you want your top clients to say about you a year from today? How do you want them to describe your relationship? Define that and start doing things that line up with that. Any time of immense change creates winners and losers. Learn fast and you’ll be a winner. Write down what you’re worried about regarding your own skills and use that as a starting point. Your identity changes by taking small considerate actions so create a purposeful plan that you can do every day. How can you leverage digital to accomplish more? Don’t judge yourself by pre-Covid measures, judge yourself by what makes sense now. What we were comfortable with is gone and you can no longer control those things. Reset your expectations on what is accomplishable now. If you don’t do that you can talk yourself into believing you’re a failure. What specific numerical outcomes should you choose that will let you know you're successful? Pick something realistic and don’t beat yourself up over things you can’t control. Keeping focus and accountability on a daily and weekly basis will create momentum. Create a visible process for invisible actions. Visible feedback gives you the motivation to achieve more. Focus on what you can control and you will make it through Covid. Figure out your MITs and other subjective actions you can control and start tracking them. What metrics can you track to keep you focused on daily and weekly sprints? Creating automation at scale is the key to getting more done, especially in a digital world. This can be tech solutions like a text expander, but the real power is in bespoke automation. If you’re ever asked something more than once, take the time to create a template for it and make it as valuable as you can. What templates or systems do you need to build where you can add 10x the value for the time spent? Having the right habits will determine your fate, especially in times of immense distraction. If your habits are moving you in the right direction, you will be much better off a year from now, but the same is true in reverse if your habits are moving you backwards. You need to focus on the right things so that you are in a better spot tomorrow. Assume this pandemic will never end, and keep focus on things you can do today. If you do that everyday, you will win. What are the most important rituals you need to have on a daily or weekly basis to stay focused?   Mentioned in the Episode: bdhabits.com Season 1 Summary Poster - sign up at for our free weekly newsletter at growbigplaybook.com and/or at bdhabits.com for our training course, and you will immediately receive this summary poster via email as an instant download

Mo Bunnell goes back through the incredible first season of Real Relationships Real Revenue. He pulls out the timeless truths and nuggets of lasting wisdom from each guest and applies them directly to business development. Listen and discover the transformative advice from the masters of mindset, vision, accountability, and habits. Interestingly enough, the recap episodes of season 1 of the podcast were more popular than the interviews themselves. During the interviews Mo tried to make them as timeless as possible so that the lessons learned will be as applicable in 2050 as they are right now. Mo went back and condensed all the nuggets of wisdom and lessons learned throughout the first season into a three page document which you can download at bdhabits.com. The timeless truths break down into four major themes spread out over two different perspectives. The themes being: mindset, vision, accountability, and habits. Servant sellers serve first and sell second. By serving first, you have the legitimacy to sell your solution and solve their problems. (Dan Pink episode 9) Of the 15,000 people that Mo has trained worldwide, Mike Deimler was the best business developer and trusted advisor that he could bring onto the show. According to Mike, if you start with the client’s perspective in mind, you are obligated to move them and encourage them to take action. When you start with the other, selling is a consequence of doing the right thing. (Mike Deimler episode 5) One of the most important things you can learn about business development is that if you start with the other and put your goals and objectives to the side, and instead focus on helping, you will do the right thing, which will always result in next steps, momentum, and trust. Business development is a learnable skill. If anyone tells you that you’re just born with it, they’re wrong. Any complex skill is both learned and earned, and that’s backed up by the science involved. Another way of reshaping your identity, is to reframe your goal into a question. Instead of assuming you’re not good at business development, ask yourself what a good business developer does and then use that to determine your next right action. Many people think an identity is born from a lofty goal, but it’s really made up by routinely doing things that make up that skill. As you do those things over time, your identity starts to transform. The external key is to be focused on the other person’s perspective and find ways to follow up with them. The internal key is to realize that anyone can learn the skills to be a world class business development expert. Business development is awesome. It is creating a different future for other people, and it is something to get better at, and if you do get better at it, it is generally the number one correlation to people having career success, having relationship success, and being able to control their life. You can move farther, faster, with a clear client vision. Don’t be afraid of disagreement. There will be times where you will have to ask permission to open the door to changing another person’s mind. Mike Deimler writes down the things that each of his clients should be thinking about to move their business forward. The act of writing those things down and seriously considering what those clients need compels him to share his vision for where they could be. It also forces him to be concise. Don’t let your expectations dissuade you. Bring it back to the little things you can do right now to get back on track. (Kelley O’Hara episode 1) Just keep doing the next right thing to help create the vision you want to help your client get to. Accept that you will have setbacks and just keep going. Your vision gives you the courage to say no to trivial distractions. One of Michael Hyatt’s big insights was that your quarterly goals inform your daily priorities, and that by writing down where you want to be in three years and then using that vision to determine the daily actions needed to get there is very powerful. Michael Hyatt’s framework of Drift, Driven, and Design is a useful way to understand how you are operating and where you are heading. Write down what you want to be known for in three years, how much business you want to bring in, what your daily habits look like, and what relationships you want to have. Those four things are enough to have a strong internal vision. You want to measure your outcomes and your results. The trick is not doing it too often. Goals are obviously powerful, but because there are often other external variables involved, it can actually be harmful to review your goals too often. Tracking something important subjectively is better than tracking something unimportant accurately. If you want to bring in more business, measuring how many Give-to-Gets you think that went well is a solid metric to track, even if it is subjective to your feelings. Having a mix of metrics between your full control and external variables is a good way to stay motivated and assess your effectiveness. Whatever results you have right now are by definition the byproduct of the system you’ve been running. (James Clear episode 3) You can’t hide from the results of your daily habits. If you love your results, that’s great, but there is always more to learn and improve on. If you don’t love your results, tweak your system. Measure the efforts you can 100% control often. Focus on the things you can control every single day and don’t outsource it to someone else because you will miss out on insights and immediate feedback that will keep you on track. Accountability happens by tracking the things you can control. If you lead a team, build out systems and start tracking the results for the whole team transparently. As results begin to change, the identity of the team will begin to change as well. The one universal thing to track are your Most Important Things (MIT) each week, determined by them being Big Impact, In Your Control, and Growth Oriented (BIG). Create systems that automate and scale. Automation extends beyond software. Keep templates of questions you get asked often and processes you use. 90% of the benefit of automation is in taking things that require human intervention and creating a process around them. Templates allow you to increase your productivity and get more done each week by adding hours of value in minutes of time. Write down what you do for business development and then think about which parts of that can be automated. If you view business development as a process, you can create templates that will pay immense dividends on your time. Create habits that celebrate consistent progress moving forward. There are three main things that impact your outcomes in life. The first is luck, the second is your choices and strategy, and the third is your systems and habits. If you master the last two, you increase the surface area for good luck to come your way. (James Clear episode 3) Dan Pink used to focus on the big hairy audacious goals, but he realized it always came back to habits. It’s about the small wins everyday. Do the things today that your year-from-now self will be happy you did today, and if you do that over and over again, it has a cumulative effect. (Dan Pink episode 9) Business development is the learnable skill and project that never ends. If you focus on the things you can control and keep making progress every day, you will find success.   Mentioned in the Episode: bdhabits.com bdhabitsforteams.com Season 1 Summary Poster - sign up at for our free weekly newsletter at growbigplaybook.com and/or at bdhabits.com for our training course, and you will immediately receive this summary poster via email as an instant download

Mo Bunnell breaks down the incredible insights shared by Dan Pink and talks about how to be truly successful in business development. You’ll learn why big goals aren’t motivating and what you need to do instead, the mindset you must have to consistently build valuable relationships, and why most people have the ability to be good at sales, they just don’t realize it yet. B2B sales is essentially management consulting. Mo doesn’t distinguish between sales calls and calls where he is working directly with a client. Both involve servant selling and coming from a place of providing value first. There isn’t much of a difference because at all stages of a business relationship the focus is in figuring out their priorities, in their words, and how you can help. It’s all about understanding what the next step should be and advancing the relationship in a way that's a win for everyone involved. The servant selling mindset is one of the reasons Mo’s company has grown so much. When you take away the stress of being hired or not and just focus on being helpful using expertise, that’s how we can be successful. No matter your profession or position, if you can shed the idea of only selling or fulfilling and instead embrace being helpful, that’s when you will be your authentic self and will start advising people on what’s right for them. Be targeted on how you spend your time and who you spend it with, be proactive and intentional, and be bold enough to ask for the next step if it makes sense for the person on the other side, while staying in the perspective of the servant seller. Most people are not extreme introverts or extroverts and often the ones who have a little bit of both personality types find success at selling. This means that most people have the potential to be great at management consulting and it doesn’t require being a natural-born extrovert. Any complex skill is both learned and earned, and that includes business development. Anyone can learn the skill and there is always a new plateau to reach. Mo has had more advances in his business development expertise in the last few months of the Covid-19 pandemic than he’s had in the last several years because it has forced him out of his comfort zone and to try new ways of approaching business. Business development can be learned, we all have it in us to get better at it, and no matter where you think you are on the introversion/extroversion spectrum you can use that to your advantage. The majority of us have everything we need to succeed, we just need to keep getting a little bit better every day. Dan Pink used to be oriented around setting Big Hairy Audacious Goals but now he’s focused on small wins. The Progress Principle states that the people that are the most successful are the ones who focus on incremental progress. They also tend to be the happiest as well. Mo wasn’t always good at celebrating his progress until he put systems in his life that allowed him to go back and see how far he has come. Celebrating your small wins leads to improved efficiency and a higher level of general satisfaction. Business development has one of the least amounts of quick feedback in all the areas and fields that Mo has studied. Most disciplines give you immediate feedback on your performance which motivates you to do more of the right things. The more you disconnect the action from the consequence, the more likely you are to not do the action anymore. That’s why it’s so important to create your own business development reward system to get that feedback. If you keep being intentional, keep being proactive, keep being helpful, then you’ve got a chance to grow your relationships and book of business. If you delay taking the next step until you close the feedback loop you will get distracted and lose your focus. Be HIP! (Helpful, Intentional, and Proactive) No more than a week should go by before you go back and look back on your progress. If you keep doing the things in your control, you will be successful.   Mentioned in this Episode: bdhabits.com The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile

Dan Pink, New York Times best selling author of To Sell is Human, discusses the power of sales and why most people have the ability to become master sales people even if they believe selling is not for them. He also breaks down the science behind perfect timing and why small wins everyday are more powerful than the occasional home run when it comes to business development. Dan Pink tells the story of how he first became a New York Times best selling author and how even successful authors encounter self doubt. Snowballs can be both good and bad. An emotional cascade with small things going wrong consistently creates a negative momentum that can completely derail your life. Everybody struggles in some way. Writing a book is extremely difficult and everyday the Resistance is there trying to prevent you from doing what you know you should do. Dan keeps a card on his desk with the words “Beat the resistance” to keep him motivated. When you’re in a hybrid sales and business development role it becomes very easy to fall back on the delivery work and let the resistance to focus on business development beat you. We’re all in sales in some sense, whether we like it or not. The common perception of selling is that it’s duplicitous or underhanded, but research shows that effective selling is nothing of the sort. We are now in a world of information parity where buyers and sellers have the same information, instead of the information asymmetry of the past. In the B2B sales world, buyers are gathering more information before ever talking to anyone in sales. There is a premium on expertise as well, with B2B sales basically boiling down to management consulting. The world of B2B sales has become much more intellectually sophisticated and draws on a whole array of different skills. Gone are the days where a good handshake and a good golf game could close a deal. Leadership literature in the 1970’s changed the way we think about leaders and introduced the idea of servant leaders, this idea applies to the best sellers as well. Servant sellers serve first and sell next, and by serving customers first it gives you legitimacy to sell and solve their problems. People often believe that sales skills are inherent in some people who are born with it. Research shows that being extroverted is not the only way to be able to sell. Introversion and extroversion is a spectrum and people on both extremes were found to be ineffective salespeople. The best salespeople are a mix of both. People who are the most extroverted were poor at sales because they talked too much and listened too little. The idea that strong extroverts make better sales people is not true. Most of us are in the middle of the bell curve of introversion/extroversion which means most people have the native personality to be good at sales. The distribution varies a little bit by culture, but the vast majority of people fall in the middle of the curve. There aren’t any massive differences between cultures that makes sales an unreachable skill. Our cognitive abilities are not equal over the course of a day and we tend to move through the day in three stages: peak, trough, and recovery. Your peak is the best time for analytic work and high focus activity. The trough results in a considerable drop in performance across the board, and your recovery time is best for insight work. Most people should be doing analytic work in the morning, routine and administrative reports in the middle of the day, and insight work during the evening. For people in a hybrid role, this schedule can be optimized to fit their goals. There are individual variations in the optimal schedule but there are general rules that almost everybody can use to make the best use of their time. If you’re looking to better connect with your clients, Dan’s book A Whole New Mind is a great place to start. If you want to think about what motivates others and building a team, Drive is the book to get. If you want to understand how to optimize your schedule and energy When is the place to start. Go to danpink.com/pinkcast to get access to Dan’s compressed video insights. Dan is a big believer in small wins because they often cascade into something bigger. The real question you should be asking yourself is “What is one small thing I can do today to make things a little bit better?” Starting small and getting small wins is the secret. It always comes back to habits. It’s not about big home runs once a year, it’s about small wins every single day. Do things today that your year-from-now self would be happy you did today, and if you do that over and over again it has a cumulative effect.   Mentioned in this Episode: bdhabits.com To Sell is Human by Dan Pink Drive by Dan Pink When by Dan Pink A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink

Mo Bunnell breaks down the incredible insights of Michael Hyatt and shares how to use them to transform your business development efforts. Find out how to live your life by design by creating a compelling vision of where you want your business to be while eliminating, delegating, or automating tasks along the way. One of Michael Hyatt’s greatest strengths is being able to distill complicated things down into simple, easy-to-follow models. Michael said there are three ways you can live your life: drift, driven, and by design. There are many reasons why you might end up drifting, but the cumulative effect of drifting has a major impact on your life. You often find yourself unhappy and unsure if you’ve been doing the right thing most of the time. You don’t know if you’ve made progress because you haven't defined where you want to go. When it comes to business development, drifting is when you don’t have a plan for how you want to improve your book of business, your relationships, the techniques, or the platform you are using. Being driven is when you succeed in one area of your life at the detriment of others. That can take the shape of being hyper competitive and can end up harming yourself, your relationships, and your business with a focus on short-term gains over long-term gains. When you are living your life by design, you are following your established vision of what you want your future to look like. Living by design is probably when you are the happiest and most productive. There are two major intervals of Mo’s life where living by design transformed everything. He wrote down a brief description of what he wanted things to look like ten years in the future. There are four major aspects your vision should include based on the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument that covers the four ways that we think as humans. Your vision requires a theme, specific numbers, your day-to-day life, and what the people around say about your life at that point. Mo wrote down his goals and carried his written vision down with him for the first couple of years. The fact of writing it down and keeping it with him allowed him to reach his ten year goal in only eight years. The most recent ten year plan includes a spreadsheet and annual benchmarks. After creating the ten year vision Mo broke it down into smaller versions of that for each year on the way. Creating themes for each year makes it easier to implement new ideas at the right time and know exactly what you need to do to get where you want to go. Our brains are trained to think in weeks so make weekly the cadence of your progress. The happiest people, and the most productive, are the ones that celebrate incremental progress. The Rule of 72 is a shortcut for calculating compound growth rates and an easy way to predict how many years it takes for something to double. If you can get only 1% better every single week, after 72 weeks you will be twice as good as you are now. Most experts that have to bring in business, if they have time to invest they will probably spend that time getting better at their craft. But if they spent that time getting better at business development, that’s something the client will notice immediately and will have a bigger impact on their business. Focus on your business development habits and your craft will improve as a result. In order to free up time, you need to either automate, eliminate, or delegate most of the activities in your business. This is important because every minute you spend on business development is far more valuable than the average hour spent on delivery. Look back on your numbers for the last year and calculate your Grow Big Index; then, use that as your litmus test for what you should be doing now. What are some tasks that you can completely eliminate? Use your Grow Big Index to figure out if it’s valuable enough to be worth your time. If not, say no nicely and move on to the next task. Work with your team in a way that makes the most of your time while still being helpful to other people. Most people think of automation in terms of technology, but it extends beyond software. Think of the questions you get most and create well thought-out templates that address those questions. Extremely valuable and well thought-out templates allow you to give someone hours of value with only a few minutes of time. Write down what you do for business development and break it down into separate pieces like lead generation, creating demand, and staying top of mind. Then, consider which parts of that process can be automated. Business development is the project that never ends. It fuels your team’s and organization’s growth and it’s exciting to always improve it. The people that Mo has seen improve the most all have the same thing in common. The ones that stick to business development week in and week out, making incremental progress while improving themselves, are the ones who find success.   Mentioned in this Episode: bdhabits.com Vision Driven Leader by Michael Hyatt Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt

Michael Hyatt shares the power of a compelling vision and how it can completely transform your business. Find out how to craft your Vision Script and turn it into a roadmap for your business’s success, while giving you the perfect filter to avoid the trivial many and stay focused on the vital few. Michael tells the story of how he struggled early on when he and a partner started their own book publishing company. Michael’s company had a lot of success and opportunity for the first few years, but a disastrous partnership led to them being $1.2 million in debt and having all their assets seized, leaving them with nothing. People don’t always see the history of those who succeed. Great things come all of the time when we hit our low points. Never waste a good crisis. Crises are an opportunity to dig deep and be reflective. One of the major issues Michael had with his business was the lack of a clear vision as a company about where they were going. Without a clear vision it’s very hard to discern the difference between a distraction and an opportunity. Michael’s company found itself fracturing its focus and attention, spread its resources too thin and everything fell apart. Michael went back to work for Thomas Nelson and was given responsibility for one of the 14 divisions of the company, specifically the worst performing division in the whole company. This was where Michael first implemented the Vision Script and described what that division would need to be to turn it around. The Vision Script became so inspiring for the team that the division managed to become the highest performing division in the company in only 18 months and stayed that way for the next decade. No matter where you are in an organization as a leader, being a leader presupposes that you are leading people somewhere, which means you must have clarity and vision. There is a big difference between a Vision Script and a Vision Statement. A Vision Script is a detailed document that describes your future business in detail three to five years in the future written in the present tense. A Vision Script is broken down into four different sections. The team, the product, the marketing and sales, and finally the impact. This is essentially a whole brain description of your future vision. Before executing your vision, you have to create alignment in your organization around that vision. This is not something you can outsource as a leader, you need to do it yourself. Start with the highest level and then cascade it down. To get buy in from your team solicit their feedback. People buy into what they help create and this takes the burden off of you as a leader. Your Vision Script should be the first thing you check in at your annual planning meeting. You must have a cadence of review in your organization because vision leaks, you need to be constantly repeating the vision and reinforcing the path. When you come up with your annual goals, ask yourself what are the seven to ten things that will move you towards your vision and when they are deliverable. Your quarterly goals will inform your weekly priorities, and further down to your daily MIT’s. Limiting yourself to three major goals each quarter is more effective than aiming for a higher number of goals at the same time. A vision helps you identify what you’re going to focus on but it also allows you to exclude what you’re not going to focus on if you use it as a filter. If something falls outside the scope of your vision, it becomes an easy “no”. Strategy answers the question how you are going to get from where you are to where you want to go, and should be revised as often as necessary. All progress begins with an honest assessment of where you currently are, because it’s hard to move beyond where you are until you get honest about where you are. Establish hard boundaries around your work. When you restrict your work time you force yourself to get things done in the time allotted. With a clarity of vision you are able to create boundaries and choose what is the most important. In line with the Pareto Principle, what are the three actions that are going to drive the biggest results in your business? A lot of people think that to get more you’ve got to do more, but it’s not what you do, it’s about doing the right things. It all comes down to your vision which gives you the courage to say no to the trivial distractions. In order to serve your clients fully you have to be able to say no to lesser opportunities. Michael describes the systems he uses to protect his time and deliver his best every single day. Any structure is better than no structure at all. Michael has a powerful system of automation that simplifies his responses and saves him an incredible amount of time that anyone can apply. Michael uses the Power of No formula to make sure that he protects his time and honors his commitments without closing any doors permanently. People are used to not getting a response so they end up appreciating this kind of response. Most people can handle a no, what they can’t handle is no response. People are vision starved. As a leader, if you have a clear, compelling vision you will be amazed at how confident you will show up and how well your team will respond.   Mentioned in this Episode: businessaccelerator.com/big bdhabits.com

Mike Deimler is one of the best client relationship developers on the planet. In this episode, Mo brings to light the three major lessons that Mike Deimler shared during his interview and how you can apply them directly to business development. Making progress every day is crucial. Mike went through an extremely traumatic event as a child where he lost his eye and a close relative gave him a key piece of advice that changed his life. Mike decided to focus on making progress instead of being stuck as a victim. As a partner at BCG for the past 30 years, Mike always tries to make progress in three important areas: with his clients, his leadership roles at the firm, and within his personal life. In business development it’s very easy to have setbacks, maybe more than any other area of life. When setbacks happen it becomes easy to switch your focus to delivery and forget about growth. Mike’s system for business development has been a powerful framework for getting results. Taking a strategic perspective and writing down the top priorities your client should be focusing on is a great way to get started. As great as your ideas for your client are, you need to think about how you can persuade them to move from their current position. Start off by asking questions so you can understand their world from their perspective. By doing things when clients aren’t ready to hire him, Mike has created some of the most beneficial and profitable client relationships for his business. Making strategic investments into a client with a give-to-get is a great way to start a relationship. Investing in a person before they can hire you is another way to create demand for your expertise. The biggest contracts that are ever sold, by and large, are the ones created before there is actually a commercial opportunity. Moving without the ball will help you with a huge number of future client opportunities. The power of a system, when it’s implemented, is that it creates incremental momentum that moves you progressively towards your goals each and every day. How are you staying focused on doing the work that’s important right now but also always investing in the future? Proactive investing and give-to-gets, when done correctly, hit all six dimensions of Robert Cialdini’s Persuasion framework. It establishes authority and creates a need for reciprocity. You may not get anything in return right away but you almost always get some value back eventually. Instead of just talking about what you can do, a give-to-get puts you into a position to actually do it. Your give-to-get should have a clear next step for the client. Don’t overwhelm them by offering a number of options, make it clear and easy to understand what the simple next step is because people want to continue going down the road they are already on. People tend to spend time and money with people that they like so your give-to-get should be enjoyable. Build in some time to bond with the person on a human level. Try to include any potential decision makers on the project as part of the give-to-get meeting. Any sizable work often requires a number of decision makers to say yes to it. People want more of what there’s less of. If you are genuinely busy, make it known how special it is that you are offering them a give-to-get. If you can create valuable and enjoyable give-to-get meetings where you are helping your clients and that naturally leads to a next step it will create demand for your expertise. Check out the mini courses down below to learn how to apply these business development ideas to your organization. The most inspiring thing about Mike is his consistent drive to continue moving forward in all areas of his life and focusing on improving his craft. If you can always have an open mind and always be striving to get better yourself, then you’re going to continue to have a bigger and bigger impact on the world.   Mentioned in this episode: bdhabits.com bdhabitsforteams.com winning-more.com

Mike Deimler shares three incredible business development lessons that he’s learned over the course of his 30-year career at one the most successful consultancies in the world. Learn the secret to creating powerful client relationships, why empathy is one of the most important skills you can cultivate, and how you can apply the same transformation that Michael Jordan underwent to become the greatest basketball player in the world to your own career. Mike Deimler is one of the best business development consultants among over 15,000 people that the Bunnell Idea Group has trained over the years. Business strategy has been Mike’s main focus for the past 30 years and he’s been working, thinking, or writing about business development for pretty much his entire career. Being good at relationship development and business development is a lot like being a good father, they are learned behaviours and anyone can become better at them. Mike tells the story of his near-death experience as a child and the lesson he learned when the surgeon told him that his eye couldn’t be saved. At the age of nine, Mike learned that he had a choice to make. He could be angry at what happened to him or he could make the most out of every single day of his life. Mike chose the latter and applies that lesson to all of the relationships in his life. If you’ve survived something difficult, you should look at it as a gift and make the conscious choice to value each day. You can pivot your strengths and learn new ways to thrive. Taking a strategic perspective comes down to taking another person’s perspective by listening and understanding where they are coming from. When working with CEOs, Mike always strives to understand what their view is and what their strategic agenda should be. When you take someone else’s perspective and internalize it, it forces you to think deeply about what they should be working on. For every client that Mike serves he writes down their strategic agenda on a single piece of paper. This requires him to be concise and sharp on the issues that matter most and helps establish a relative priority to the things that need work. To move someone to take action, you need to move them twice, both emotionally and intellectually. At the highest levels this takes persistence and the willingness to explore other possibilities, combined with the patience to see the process through. Some of the most important topics Mike has ever worked on took nearly two years for the change to really take place. If you’re pushing a product or service, you’re selling, and if you start with the client’s perspective in mind you are obligated to move them and encourage them to take action. When you start with the other, selling is the consequence of doing the right thing. If you’re ever uncertain in a meeting or a business development situation, just pause and listen to both the heart and the mind. You will rarely go wrong by taking a holistic approach to the other person’s perspective. If you can think of the opposing pairs of facts vs. feelings and big ideas vs. tactics, you’re going to make every meeting and comment better. More Judo, less Karate. Young partners often get anxious about business development and believe they need to push in order to sell. By coming at the meeting aggressively they end up defeating themselves. Sometimes the best thing to do in a meeting is to talk a lot less and listen a lot more. Talking is Karate, listening is Judo. When you’re listening more than speaking, the other person is coming to you and sharing what’s on their mind. Be comfortable with empty space in a conversation, not every second of the meeting needs a slide. There is always a balancing act between being proactive and waiting. Asking questions is important, but strategic perspective is about having a point of view. If you’re going to be a trusted advisor to anyone, you need to do the work to have a value-added perspective. The art of knowing when to pivot from asking questions to proposing solutions is an art. There will be times where you have to take a stance and press your point of view. Asking permission is one way of opening the door and changing the other person’s frame of mind. Don’t be afraid of disagreement. Starting off a meeting by asking questions first allows you to understand the other person’s position in their own words, which in turn allows you to propose a solution to their problem. Mike tells the story of attending the same high school as Michael Jordan and watching him develop as a basketball player, seeing what made him special first hand. During the course of Jordan’s career, it wasn’t until he transformed from the best offensive player in the world to the best complete basketball player in the world. He truly became the best when he learned to move without the ball. If you’re building a sustained relationship with anyone, the most important thing you can do is create opportunity for the client as well as your business. Putting your client in the right position so they can win is more important than scoring on your own. Like most behaviors, when you try something new, you have to try harder but as you move forward it becomes more intuitive. Nurturing relationships outside of the usual business transactions is something that nearly all successful business development professionals have a system for. If you’re just getting started learning these skills, it’s best to have a more disciplined approach. Mo shares a personal lesson he learned from his father that he applies to nearly every area of his life. The most common question Mike gets from young professionals is “How is it you’re so successful at building relationships with senior clients?” Think about your closest relationships and what you or the other person do to make them successful, chances are you’re going to think about empathy, honesty, compassion, and asking for feedback. Relationships require frequency, both parties need to put effort into communicating. The best relationships are fun as well, where spending time with the other person makes you feel good and you do the same for them. The best relationships in your life are the ones where you are both willing to be vulnerable. In business, when a client is willing to be vulnerable with you, you have truly become a trusted advisor. If you strive to make your business relationships as good as the best relationships in the rest of your life, the business will take care of itself.   Mentioned in this episode: bdhabits.com Blasting Through Plateaus - bunnellideagroup.com/blasting-through-plateaus/

Mo Bunnell breaks down the interview with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, and talks about why goals are not enough to achieve extraordinary results. Learn why your systems are the best place to start, how your habits shape your identity and not the other way around, and the essential framework for creating an exceptional business development system to get the outcomes you desire. Mo goes over a quick recap of the three major lessons learned in the interview with James Clear and how they can be applied to business development. Your current systems are perfectly designed to give you the current outcomes that you’re getting. This can also be looked at as your past six months of systems are perfectly designed to deliver your current results We all have systems whether we realize it or not. What systems have you had around business development for the past six months? Those are the systems that are delivering the current outcomes you are getting right now. Use the Most Important Things (MITs) framework to build up your business development habits. Choose three things to focus on that have a big impact, are 100% in your control, and are growth oriented. It’s easy to fool yourself to believe that doing your job well is growth oriented, but one small change can be the difference between regular service and generating additional revenue for your business. There are systems at individual levels, but you should also have systems at the team level that facilitate the outcomes you want as a team. Set up systems for setting goals as a team, how you are going to interact with each other and with clients, and for celebrating success. What are the metrics you can control as a team that you can use in your systems to know if you’re on track for success? Identity and how we think about ourselves is potentially one of the most important things to bringing in business. You don’t have to be the best in the world at business development; you just have to be better than the competition. Most people think that their identity changes when they change the goal, but it’s more important to think about it from the habit perspective. Every time you execute on a habit that moves you closer to your goal, that’s a small piece of evidence that you are the kind of person capable of achieving that goal. As you build those systems, your beliefs about your own abilities will change. Set your goals and then build the systems in a way that you can measure that can get you there. You should also build out systems across your team. Data transparency across a team can have a major impact on the overall results and takes a load off the team leader as the coach. As the results increase across the team, the team’s identity changes as well. Use James’ 4 law framework to help develop your business development habits and start off by auditing your existing system. No matter your discipline, there is a highly repeatable process that can be fine tuned and improved upon. Think of business development as a process that can be refined. Engage your potential clients in the process of a proposal. If they haven’t engaged and helped you define how you’re going to work together, then they haven’t bought in. You can look at the entire business development process and measure the metrics in each of the steps in a way that allows you to create a system of improvement.   Mentioned in this episode: bdhabits.com bdhabitsforteams.com

James Clear, author of the best-selling book Atomic Habits, shares the importance of creating a system of habits that makes reaching your goals simple. Mo applies the principles of Atomic Habits directly to the world of business development and shows you how starting small can create huge results in your business. James Clear recounts the story of the high school baseball bat incident, how he realized that something had gone horribly wrong and how he found himself fighting for his life. People are building habits all the time, but when your life is completely changed by a traumatic injury, you have to start as small as possible in order to rebuild them. Scaling down to what James could manage was how he was able to regain a sense of control over the life that he’d lost. You don’t have control over the random events that come your way, but you do have control over how you respond to those things and that usually comes down to your habits. Most people start with one foot in expertise and become great at what they do but once they reach the next level of success, they find themselves in a completely different world. This can often lead to them feeling defeated since they aren’t as skilled in the new area. Goals are helpful for setting a direction or a filter but they come with a lot of drawbacks. Your goal is your desired outcome, but your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. If there is ever a gap between your system and your goal, your daily habits will always win. Whatever results you have right now are by definition the byproduct of the system you’ve been running. It’s common in business for people to focus on the position or outcome, like doubling revenue or leads, but it’s more important to look at the system that’s running and the trajectory that business systems are driving towards. We want our results to change, but it’s not the results that need to change, it’s the habits that precede the result that need to change. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. Goals are useful as check-ins, but more time should be invested into the system of habits that lead to the outcome you want. The Snowball system’s structure of lead and lag measures is very similar. Everybody is running systems whether they realize it or not. The questions you need to ask yourself are “How do I design a good system?” and “Which habits should I build?” This is where BIG goals come in to send you in the right direction. There are three main things that impact your outcomes in life. The first is luck, the second is your choices/strategy, and the third is your system of habits and behaviour. When you master the last two, you increase the surface area for good luck to come your way. People will often conflate the outcome they want to achieve with the person that they want to be. James believes you should shift the focus to the identity you desire instead of the goal because the real reason habits matter is that they can shape your sense of self. True behaviour change is really identity change. Another way of reshaping your identity is to reframe your goal into a question. Instead of trying to close more deals, ask yourself what a successful sales person would do and then use that to select the action that moves you in the right direction. Questions are superior to advice because advice is contextual and situations change. Life is dynamic and advice will not always fit the circumstances. Identity-based questions guide you based on the situation. There are four fundamental things that increase the odds of getting a habit to stick. The first is to make your good habits obvious and easy to see. The second is to make them attractive and appealing. The third is to make them easy and convenient. The fourth is to make your habits satisfying and associated with a positive emotion. If you want to break a bad habit, just invert those four. When it comes to business development, we should look for one-time actions we can take that will help the cause every day from that point on to help mitigate the roller coaster that businesses tend to ride most of the time. A lot of business development is done through a screen. Is there an app or a tool that you can use to make business development more obvious and prime yourself and your environment for that use? James talks about the idea of the Temptation Bundle, where you combine a task that you know you should do with a task that you want to do in order to encourage the more important action. Don’t let one piece of silence prevent you from following up. A failure should not be desired but it should be planned for. When following up, there will also be people who ignore your efforts, but by writing down your next follow-up in your calendar, you will be many times more likely to keep following up. Life has a series of seasons and your habits should be different depending on the season of life you’re in. The same idea can be applied to your career. When you reach a new level it will probably require new habits in order to succeed. As your career progresses, typically, your responsibility increases. When your responsibility increases your ability to say no to things and to prioritize also needs to increase. Saying no to something is only saying no to one thing, but saying yes to something means saying no to everything else. Everything comes with a trade-off. If you’re going through a change of season in your career or your life, it may be the perfect time to reread Atomic Habits. The process of building habits is essentially rebuilding and getting started over and over as your life changes. In business development, the goal is not to be the absolute best in the world, it’s just to be a little bit better than your competition. Business is mostly a winner-take-all proposition so put yourself in a position to make more shots and improve your craft, and each day you will be more likely to win. Start with doing something small every single day when you don’t know where to begin. Any goal you have can be broken down into a two-minute chunk that will help you master the art of showing up. A habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize and scale it up and expand it into something more. One of the most motivating feelings for the human mind is seeing progress. A simple strategy to improve your business development habits is to create a way to visualize your efforts even if you don’t get any direct feedback. A visual cue is a powerful way to see your progress and increase the odds of you keeping pushing forward.   Mentioned in this Episode: Bdhabits.com