Transcript:

Bob Gentle: 0:06

If you want sales to be systematic, then you need a system and you need to be fairly rigorous with that system, and it needs to be like going to the gym, because it’s nobody likes it. There is not a single content creator. There’s not a single business owner that really, really enjoys sales. Putting together a system that allows you to feel like you’re approaching it from the perspective of bringing something positive into the world, without feeling like you’re hustling people, is probably the most valuable thing you can do in your business.

Brad Powell: 0:44

Welcome to the Standout Business Show, where it’s all about making a bigger difference by doing business differently. I’m Brad Powell, your Standout Business Coach, and on our show today we’re talking about how you can attract your dream clients, grow your personal brand and build a thriving, expert business that clients can’t resist and this is all without having to use pushy tactics and chase leads. And today’s guest the reason that I invited him on is because he’s created this very simple but very powerful formula, and I’m going to give it to you right now, so you don’t have to wait until the end. There are four steps to this. You identify your zone of genius this is something I talk about all the time. You find the people who need that the most, and then you do stuff and you share stuff that actually matters to them, and then you serve them in a way that not only feels natural but is actually profitable. So that’s it. You can take that and run with it. But wait, wait. There’s more, and this is what we’re really going to dive into. What if you took this formula and then you used it as the absolute core to your marketing? It as the absolute core to your marketing. What if you spent your time contributing generously to your prospects and giving them the actual experience of what it’s like to work with you.

Brad Powell: 2:14

Well, this is the exact framework used by our guest today. He’s business strategist, bob Gentle, and his work is all about helping experts, leaders and business owners build, market and monetize their personal brand. Bob is the creator of the Generosity Engine, and it’s a social selling framework designed to make everyone feel great, add to your brand and get results quickly. So stay tuned, because today we’re going to break down how you can create your own generosity engine, and with that let’s start the show. I don’t know about you, but I used to dread having to do marketing for my own coaching business. Seemed like every day I’d be sitting in front of my computer or sitting in front of my camera and I’m thinking what am I going to talk about today? Felt like I was constantly chasing down new content, ideas posting, commenting, dming on this never-ending gerbil wheel of trying to get attention and attract new clients.

Brad Powell: 3:26

But then this past few years, I’ve had a game-changing transformation in how I approach my marketing. I was already creating my best marketing content every single day. I just wasn’t using it. So I stopped treating marketing like a separate chore and I started letting my coaching do my marketing for me. By simply recording my coaching sessions, my Zoom calls and my client breakthroughs, I turned what I’m already great at into a high converting client attracting system, and next week I’m going to show how you can do the same thing.

Brad Powell: 4:05

So this is your invitation to join me for my free masterclass Make Coaching your Marketing. It’s happening on Wednesday, february 26, at 12 pm Eastern Time. Just go to awesomevideomakers.com/blueprint to register. Slash blueprint to register. And inside this training you’re going to learn how to transform your coaching into a marketing engine that works for you 24-7. And you’ll learn my proven system to attract and enroll dream clients without having to sell, and why the best coaches don’t market, they just coach. So register for free right now. Go to awesomevideomakers.com/blueprint. I can’t wait to show you my proven system for turning your coaching expertise into a client attracting engine. I’ll see you there. And now back to the show. All right, bob welcome to the show.

Bob Gentle: 5:07

I can tell you worked in show business. That is a really nice way to start the show. Nobody’s ever done that before. Thank you very much. It was great fun. I’m going to steal that. It was super cool.

Brad Powell: 5:19

All right, well, you’re welcome and we aim to please here. You know, ever since I was a little kid, I got influenced by the musical the Music man and actually my mother and my uncle took me down to New York City and we watched, on Broadway, this show. I think I was probably five or six years old and it just had this huge impression on me. I mean, this guy comes into town and he gets everybody all excited and there’s all this song and dance and all these people who really didn’t like each other all start singing in this jaded community in the middle of Iowa. Who’s? Everybody’s all grumpy, they’re all like jumping around and, you know, all excited about having a boy’s band come to town. I was like man, I want to. First of all, I want to be in the band, or I want to be the leader of the band, you know, or I just want to be the music man, like I want to be that guy who brings people together and gets them all jazzed about something.

Bob Gentle: 6:19

Yeah, that’s the most showbiz introduction I’ve ever experienced. So top marks.

Brad Powell: 6:24

That’s high praise. Thank you so much. Well, all right, so I’m just being generous, right, and that’s what we want to talk about today. So this theme of generosity, I mean, a lot of people in the marketing world talk about giving value, but you’re really leaning into this in a very deep way, you know, with this generosity engine framework. So when you think about that, like from a high level, what are you really talking about?

Bob Gentle: 6:53

Well, my approach to sales, or my core approach to sales, and the approach that I work through with most of my clients and I have to say I’m not a sales coach work through with most of my clients and I have to say I’m not a sales coach, but all of my clients need to sell, so my job is to help them build, market and monetize the personal brand, and I take all three of those strands very seriously. Most of my clients are in what you would call the consulting space. In one way or another, they’re consulting or coaching shaped businesses. They’re often as well moderate to high ticket. They’re not selling on the whole like $50 memberships. They’re selling premium consulting services or coaching.

Bob Gentle: 7:41

And so my philosophy is invest in a sales process that really demonstrates your value in a very deep way so that by the time somebody has been through your sales process, they really trust you and those people who are into who you are and into what you do, and they have the means and the motivation to work with you. It’s going to be a no-brainer for them. And I think a lot of people are very scared of investing a lot in potential clients without a reciprocal commitment, and my argument there is, if you haven’t really invested in a marketing system, in a visibility system so that before people ever show up on a call with you system and a visibility system so that before people ever show up on a call with you they already feel like they know you quite well, then you’re going to have a lot of wastage in your sales machine. For those people who are focused on being high profile and creating content, so people like you having a sales process that catches the ball at the other end. So those people who think you know what, this guy’s kind of cool.

Bob Gentle: 8:47

You have a vehicle to build, the, not just the know like and trust, but the know like and trust and try and buy. How that’s done is different for everybody and perhaps we can get into some specifics because this is a process that thrives in specifics, for the listener as well, or the viewer, because we’re on on the linkedin in it. Um, this is the subject of a book that will be ready sometime in the second half of the year, called the generosity engine, and it really is designed for people in the expert space so they can design their own process. This process works best when it’s specific. There are some fundamental landmarks or parts of the machine if you like, but the parts are going to be very specific to you and where you are in your business.

Brad Powell: 9:37

Yeah Well, first of all, I really like the idea. I’m a big proponent of what I would refer to as experiential marketing, which is all forms of literally people get the experience of you. You know they see your face, they hear your voice and but beyond that, they’re actually getting. You’re helping them get the results, or at least pieces of the result that they’re absolutely looking for. Get the results, or at least pieces of the result that they’re absolutely looking for, and they understand that. Oh, you can help me. I know you can help me because you’ve already done it.

Brad Powell: 10:11

But the thing that I’m really intrigued by and this is the part like you know, so we’re talking about that’s the know, like and trust part, but the try and buy part. Like everyone, when it comes to the sales process, they’re is thinking well, I need to have a script, and if I just get people and I have more at-bats and the more people coming through and I have a lot of people in my funnel, then if I have the right script that’ll handle their objections and lead them into whatever like the close, then I start winning. It’s just a numbers game. People say, oh yeah, it’s just a numbers game, but your process is really different, and this is what I’d like you to start describing for us.

Bob Gentle: 10:56

Well, I think that success in business requires two core activities. So we have operations, but the left and the right hand of the body are sales and marketing. When I ask a lot of people what’s your sales strategy, they’ll start telling me about their marketing. This tells me a lot, because it’s actually very rare, when I ask somebody what’s your sales process that they tell me what their sales process is. So I’m going to back up a little bit and I’m going to begin on the marketing side of things. For anybody to sell anything number one we need to know what we’re selling and number two, we need to know who we’re selling it to. So let’s really crystallize what this means. So, number one, what is it of all of the things that you do that people value the most? You mentioned your zone of genius. What is the spark here, the thing that really makes you stand out, the thing that makes you sing? And then, who is that for? Of all the people you could serve, who needs it the most? Who do you want to serve the most? Once you have those things, it’s like you have the front and back sides of a rifle. You know where you’re going. Rifle makes it sound very aggressive and I haven’t thought of a better analogy yet, but we now have the two points on a vector, if you like. What that means is when we start pouring energy into our marketing, it’s going to be much more effective because it’s very directional.

Bob Gentle: 12:31

A lot of people, when they look at who they’re for and what they do, they get very anxious because in order to get really focused, we have to exclude an awful lot. And people think, well, if I’m going to niche which is the way it’s often described I’m excluding a lot of people. But what you actually find is you’re creating a very powerful beacon for that person and actually everybody else’s head flips around as well and thinks well, what’s that? So you become much more attractive to everybody, but, in particular, the person you most want to serve. A lot of people get that right, but then they stop. What I encourage my clients to do is okay, you now know, from a niche perspective, who they are, but I want you to go out and find those people and I want you to put them on a list and I want you to start building relationships with them and I want you to become very proactive in this, and sometimes that’s as simple, as we’re on LinkedIn. So it’s structured, taking a structured approach to building your network on LinkedIn and not leaving it to chance. It might be creating lead magnets specifically for these people and being proactive in how you offer them.

Bob Gentle: 13:37

There’s many ways that we can begin building relationships, but unless we know who it’s for, it’s just very untargeted activity. So the first stage of the sales process is putting people on a list. The second stage is starting conversations, because if we don’t have conversations, we can’t then pivot those conversations into sales processes. Now, with my process, I’m looking at how can we start conversations with people from a position of having been generous first, and there’s lots of ways that we can accomplish this. And for content creators my audience, who I serve they have a secret weapon here, which is they have a platform. So using your platform to build relationships with your ideal customer is a wonderful way to approach this.

Bob Gentle: 14:27

If you’re an expert in what you do, you know enough to have really an expert in what you do. You know enough to have really good conversations about what you do. So you could use a podcast to begin conversations. Similarly, I know plenty of people who will write a book once a year based on interviews with potential A-list clients. This is another way you can begin a conversation by giving rather than asking. It could be and Brad is a great example of this invited me onto a live stream.

Bob Gentle: 14:56

I guarantee you afterwards Brad’s going to say Bob, what’s your video strategy? How are you optimizing your video? Well, brad, we can talk about that later. Brad’s primed the scales of reciprocity in his favor of me welcoming that conversation and a lot of the time the work that I do with clients in the beginning is working out what’s the vehicle going to be for them to have these conversations. With potential clients that don’t feel like sales calls but they feel like they’ve given a tremendous amount of value, because pivoting from there is actually quite easy into a sales call. Most people will tell me if I can just get the conversation, I’ll win the business 60% of the time. So let’s focus on getting that conversation, but not necessarily going in saying, hey, I’d like to sell you something, but hey, I’ve got this thing. I think you’d love it. It’s going to make you look good. Everybody’s going to think you’re awesome.

Brad Powell: 15:49

Yeah, this idea of starting conversations with whoever, it is like that list, creating a list of absolute dream clientele who are out there. If you do anything like like you’re describing some people, like the idea of doing podcasting, like I do and you do, that’s a really straight ahead way to do it. But the other thing, for the people who are, you know, microphone shy or don’t want to be so public with their voice, writing a book is another really great way, because this is how all the big, great, amazing books you know Malcolm Gladwell, you know all these authors that are huge this is exactly how they create these pieces of content. They go out and they interview the coolest people that they can find on a particular thing and pretty much when you make that offer, it is a generous offer. You’re inviting someone to join you on this platform that you’ve created and you are going to help showcase their wisdom and their knowledge that you’ve created, and you are going to help showcase their wisdom and their knowledge and there’s hardly anyone other than just time and their busyness who’s going to say no, they’re to say, well, let me see when I can do this.

Brad Powell: 16:58

It’ll be sometime in the future, and it’s just a great strategy in there. This is just right now, with the ability to communicate like we were talking before we started recording. We’re both talking with people from all over the world on a daily basis. I mean, and this has been going on since the invention of Skype. You know that it’s free and it’s easy and you can reach anyone anytime and have real, genuine, meaningful exchange with them and then turn that into any number of things for you and whether or not the people who you’re like yes, you don’t want to turn these conversations into a sales conversation, but everyone is some kind of connection. I mean, you’re really just growing your network and you never know what amazing cool stuff will happen as a result of your meeting and building, like basically finding a new person to hang out with.

Bob Gentle: 17:53

Yeah, I think I wouldn’t want this to sound really mercenary, because it isn’t.

Brad Powell: 17:58

No.

Bob Gentle: 18:00

I think a lot of experts kind of shy away from content marketing because this whole thing of, well, where’s the ROI? The ROI is right here. I see people starting podcasts, doing great things, but they will commonly sort of fade out. Everybody’s heard of pod fade. Well, I say everybody, every podcaster has heard of pod fade. It’s where people start a podcast and then they gradually fade out because they couldn’t find the value to their business beyond simply persistent visibility. This will allow anybody to turn their podcast from simply content marketing and when I say simply content marketing, it’s very powerful content marketing.

Bob Gentle: 18:42

I’m going to return to this but it makes it a direct revenue generator and I want to emphasize that I’m not hustling my podcast guests. It’s a very natural thing and for me the podcast isn’t the only play, not by any means. There’s many ways of approaching this. I think there are many tiers. So one of the things I’m looking at with clients is, essentially, we have two styles of approach. So tier one approach would be something that I’ve created once and I can offer it out many times. So if I’m reaching out to somebody, often the first thing would be hey, I’ve produced the personal brand business roadmap. You seem to be in the expert business space Would you like a copy? And if people say yes and they’re interested in that, they will often come back to me and ask questions and I’ve begun a conversation that way. If I see somebody as potentially an absolute gold star client, then I’ll use my podcast sometimes to begin a conversation with them. But again, that’s probably only one in five podcast guests where I would have even considered that they might be a good client.

Bob Gentle: 19:55

I’m going to back up to the book idea, because the book one for a lot of people is almost as intimidating as the podcast if you’ve never done a podcast. But it’s actually one of the easiest because all you really need to do is rock up on a Zoom call with some standard questions, record the calls and then you can give the whole folder of conversations to an editor or a ghostwriter and say make me a book out of this. The book for you is the byproduct, it’s not the main event. But I’m going to circle back to the content piece, because who’s selling has a direct bearing on how welcome that sales approach is, and this is where the whole virtuous circle comes in, where, if you’re not, if you don’t have a visibility platform or a discoverability platform like a podcast, and you’re not regularly associating with well-known people.

Bob Gentle: 20:53

So my audience, for example, are going to see hey, I’m hanging out with Brad today. Brad must be really fancy. Bob looks even fancier now Over time. This is going to aggregate up over time to my status increasing. So when somebody lands on my LinkedIn profile after receiving a connection request, they’re going to think, oh, this Bob looks. I’m going to use the word glamorous, I’m going to use that word quite intentionally Bob looks more glamorous than that other consultant I was looking at and Bob’s reached out to me for a conversation. Ooh, he looks kind of fancy. I’m going to say yes to this. We’ve tipped the scales in our favor. So our content marketing and our sales process has a direct bearing on how welcomed our sales approach will be, if you see what I mean.

Brad Powell: 21:43

All of this, to me, boils down to basically having a body of work, in whatever form you have it. It can be a platform, it can be a book, it can be all of the content that you have archived on a particular platform like LinkedIn, so that when people do hear about you in some way or you reach out to them in some way and they go and check you out, because this is what everybody does. You contact someone. Because this is what everybody does. You contact someone, they’ll go look up your LinkedIn profile and they’ll see what’s this person about. And if you have this body of work there that they can go and check out.

Brad Powell: 22:21

And for me, like I’m a big advocate, this is why short form video works so well is because if you have three or four videos that people can watch in three or four minutes, that’s a very quick nugget of you, yeah, and they’ll get a very strong feeling of who you are and what you’re like in no time at all. And this is all to the good. Like, you can look as glamorous as you want. You can make yourself awesome if you set yourself up right for that kind of thing. And so, given that you know we were establishing and saying we have this body of work. Now I want to, in the time we have left, move into okay. So now someone is raising their hand and they’re saying I’m interested in what you’re about. What’s your next step? That you work with them.

Bob Gentle: 23:08

There’s one thing that I think is worth mentioning, which is a lot of people have anxiety about their personal brand online because they think, well, what happens if people don’t like me? This is a big barrier for most people, but when you play the numbers, it’s actually really important to filter those people who are not into you out. So this is where leaning into your personal brand really assists you, because by the time you get on a call with somebody, they weren’t into you. They’ve had plenty opportunity to decide that. So the people who actually show up to your calls are probably your kind of people. So what that means for me is I can safely invest in these people.

Bob Gentle: 23:52

What I encourage clients to do and what I do is, if people actually make it through to a call with me, there’s a good chance. They know who I am, they know what I do, they’ve got a good idea of what, how I approach things. Um, so I’m not going to have to necessarily sell me. I’m going to try and fix problems. When I have somebody in front of me on a what some people will call a discovery call, some people would call a sales call, I just call it a call and I treat that call the same as I would treat the first meeting with anybody that was paying me. There’s nothing held back. I will give them as much value as I can in an hour or an hour and a half so that at the end of that time they know what the plan is, they could go away and they could execute it.

Bob Gentle: 24:39

All my calls are recorded with Fathom. Afterwards they get an email with a summary, the recording and all the action points so they could go. They’re empowered. There’s nothing held back, just in case you pay, and what that tends to lead to is complete trust. So if they have the means and the motivation to actually say yes to working with me, they’re probably going to ask me how to make that happen. When I do that, my success rate is probably something like 80%. Most people who get that far really, really wanted to work with me. That’s what this is all for. So I have very it sounds like, bob, you’re pouring an awful lot into a very speculative sales system. For me it doesn’t actually work like that, and for the clients who get it right, they see the same results.

Brad Powell: 25:36

Well, that’s a really good track record. Getting up to 80%, a close rate on any kind of call, probably make a lot of salespeople envious and wonder, like what’s your secret?

Bob Gentle: 25:49

There are a couple of little things I’ll mention. Okay, I don’t have big long sales scripts, but what I do have are plans for the standard moments of impact. The most common things are okay, we want to move from a general conversation to a conversation about what I do for money, and I would encourage people to script that because everyone will recognize this. I’ve been to a networking event or we’ve had a really nice conversation. I kind of know they want what I do. I kind of really want networking event or we’ve had a really nice conversation. I kind of know they want what I do. I kind of really want to sell it to them, but I don’t know how to move from the small talk to the big talk.

Bob Gentle: 26:27

So I script for that and something along the lines of hey, is it all right if I just talk about what I actually do for a minute? It might not be for you, but would it be okay if we talk about my product for a moment? That’s a bit sort of loosey-goosey, but scripted. And similarly, when you’ve gone through your presentation, if you like, and you get to that point where you’re both looking at each other waiting to see what’s going to happen next, scripting a little bridge for yourself. So something that I would often use is does this feel like something you’d like to say yes to? It just crosses that bridge and now you have the different conversation. It’s easy again, it’s not complicated, but these are the moments where people tend to freeze and they tend to change the subject and they tend to kick it down the road. Lock those moments in, because those are the moments that really matter.

Brad Powell: 27:16

Yeah, I think that’s critical. It definitely feels awkward to lots of folks. You see it, I think, most strikingly on webinars, where the transition happens. You know that moment of well, I’ve given you all my content. Let me tell you what I can sell you.

Bob Gentle: 27:32

Yeah, I think webinars are a difficult one. There’s one more. There’s one more moment of impact which is going to come when we stop recording. For me it’s in the podcast interview, it’s in the book interview, it’s even in the blog post article. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing.

Bob Gentle: 27:50

But I have three questions I ask after every podcast interview and it doesn’t really matter if I’ve got a sales goal or not, but it’s going to be number one who in your network would you like to shine a light on? Because it gives the person that you’ve just spoken to an opportunity to go and gift that visibility to somebody else, and generally it’s going to be somebody they respect. Question number two I have a framework that I would really value your input on. Sometimes you would get value on it yourself for your business, but actually I would really appreciate your reflection on it as an expert and then I would invite them to a conversation to look specifically at the personal brand business roadmap. And the third question if the guest is somebody who has an audience, I will also say hey, if you’re ever looking for somebody to show up on your podcast, live stream, book, whatever, I will turn up to the opening of a paper bag and that usually within a few seconds, results in an invitation.

Brad Powell: 28:52

Those things I think are critical from the point of view of when you’ve done something like this, what’s occurring in that moment, in that post-conversation moment or towards the end of your conversation. If you actually have been generous, if you have been giving, if you’ve been helpful, you’ve created what I call the campfire effect, where you and the other person are feeling like, oh, some really good stuff has just happened. You know, this feels good, and so it leaves the door open for any number of things in terms of exchanges. The question that I like to ask, which I’ll ask you after we get off, is are you part of any online communities that you know of that are kind of hidden, that I should know about? And that’s another good thing to go find out about, because there are many, many you know.

Brad Powell: 29:39

When you’re talking about going out and finding where your people are, well, they’re out there, but they’re in like Slack groups and on discords and stuff that you would never know, or you need an invitation to get into. Yeah, all right. Well, this was really cool. We’re kind of at the end of our half hour here. If there’s one more thing you want to talk about generosity, to kind of put a bow on this, what would that be.

Bob Gentle: 30:01

For me, the most important thing is, marketing is not a sales strategy. If you want sales to be systematic, then you need a system and you need to be fairly rigorous with that system, and it needs to be like going to the gym, because it’s nobody likes it. There is not a single content creator. There’s not a single business owner that really, really enjoys sales. Putting together a system that allows you to feel like you’re approaching it from the perspective of bringing something positive into the world, without feeling like you’re hustling people, is probably the most valuable thing you can do in your business.

Brad Powell: 30:41

Yeah right, exactly. Be generous when you market and be generous when you’re selling. All right. Well, bob, if people want to reach out to you and glom onto all your stuff, what is the best way for them to do that stuff? What is the best way for them to do?

Bob Gentle: 30:57

that I have a podcast called Building your Leader Brand. But if people want an easy life, just search Bob Gentle. Wherever you hang out, I’m very easy to find. If you’re on LinkedIn, please do connect with me. New connections are my favorite. Yeah, linkedin and the podcast, those are the two big asks for me, and if anybody is interested in building, marketing or monetizing their personal brand, they can get the personal brand business roadmap completely free on my website. They will ask for an email address. I’m not going to apologize for that, but it goes deep. It’s 50 pages.

Brad Powell: 31:34

Wow, right, that’s quite the roadmap, all right. Well, I’ll make sure that links to that are in the show notes. And, bob, thank you so much for coming on today. This has been great.

Bob Gentle: 31:44

Oh, thank you very much, I really appreciate it.