Mindful B2B Marketing | Business Growth and Social Impact (Former: Forward Launch Your SaaS)

S2E6: How to transform sales through hyper-personalized networking, ft. Rhonda Dibachi, CEO of Hey Scottie

• Keirra Woodard • Season 2 • Episode 6

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Main Insight: Using hyper-personalized outreach creates business opportunities with higher ROI for time spent and fosters better relationships between salespeople and customers. 

Guest Bio: Rhonda Dibachi, CEO of Hey Scottie, has a diverse background in technology and manufacturing with experience in nuclear engineering and software development. She has co-founded multiple tech and manufacturing startups, including one that successfully went public. Rhonda is passionate about integrating technology into manufacturing to solve real-world operational challenges.


Key Takeaways:

Identify Successful Customers: Start by examining who your successful customers are, and identify their key attributes such as location, industry, product type, or size to categorize your ideal customer.

Find Adjacent Prospects: Look for prospects that are similar to your successful customers, particularly those that are geographically close so you can easily visit or engage with them.

Engage with Potential Connections: Identify potential points of engagement from their online presence, such as association memberships, and consider attending related events like annual meetings.

Leverage Personal Interests: Use personal interests shown on platforms like LinkedIn, such as hobbies, to create a more personal connection.

Look for innovators in a target company or industry:  Identify people who are ambitious and receptive to innovative ideas such as recent job-changers, digital natives, and people who attend industry conferences. 

Make Personal Connections: Make efforts to personally connect at conferences or through platforms like LinkedIn, reaching out to conference-goers and suggesting face-to-face meetings before the conference to discuss potential collaborations.

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All right, today I am sitting down with Rhonda. Rhonda is the CEO of Hey Scottie, which is a first of its kind AI -enabled manufacturing services marketplace.
She's co -founded multiple startups in tech and manufacturing, including one IPO. And she focuses on bringing tech innovation to real -world operations.
So Rhonda, I'm super excited to chat with you today and dig into your background. Thank you. Thanks for having me, and I'm very excited about this talk as well. Yeah, absolutely. So just tell me a little bit about like,
Hey Scottie and like, why you got into it and like, why are you, why are you passionate about what you do? So I got here through kind of a long route.
I'm a techie. I'm a techie. And I got my education. I have an engineering degree.
I have a nuclear engineering degree. And my first job was at a nuclear power plant and I loved it. It was big. It was a big machine and there was pipes and there was steam and there was nuclear power rods and it was just like really fun to look at,
really fun to walk around, really fun to really understand how it worked. It was fascinating. The nuclear industry, of course, went and dived. I changed direction.
I went into software, But I wanted to suffer, I wanted to suffer for manufacturing. I then worked for Oracle, I wrote one of the Oracle manufacturing suites,
and after that is when I co -founded and then I took a company public, it was a software company. We went public on NASDAQ. After that, I also co -founded and I ran very proudly a manufacturing company in the US.
It was in LA and we built LED lights for big things. We did parking lots,
parking garages, arenas, cold storage, that kind of thing. So we did this in a time when LEDs were not used for industrial. And it was fun because we had a metal shop and we had an SMT line and I could see what I was doing with software,
you can't see what you're doing, you know, go like this and you know, and then you can't really see what's going on. It's just, it's not as interesting and it's not as fundamentally,
it's not something that you can take pride in. But if you could point to something and say, hey, I built that. That really turns me on. I think that's really cool. So I love manufacturing, I love building things. And how I got to where I am right now is the biggest problem that we had when we were running this manufacturing company in LA was it wasn't how to build the metal,
it wasn't the software that we had to write, it wasn't any of those other things that you would think would be difficult. it was how to get metal plated. That was the hardest thing that we had to do.
We had this one job that required the screws to be nickel plated. And nickel is very pretty, it's very shiny, you know, and I thought, oh,
okay, we could get this job. I'll figure out how to do nickel plating. I called around hard to find people who knew how to do it, hard to find people who are interested in telling me how to do it, hard to find people telling,
even interested in talking to me about what the minimum price would be. It was very much of a, I have all of this information, not gonna share with you unless you're gonna give me a lot of money right now.
There was no trust. There was no trust. There was no communication. There was no education. And I found it, hey Scotty, because I think that the United States manufacturing infrastructure is an important part of the US economy,
and it needs to be supported. And I think one of the biggest problems is that there's no visibility in it. There's no visibility for pricing. If you wanted to make something,
there's no price list for it. You have to make each part individually. Everything is custom made. And as you put it together, you will have the biggest problem just trying to interact and work with other suppliers so that you can get your product to come together correctly.
So this little tiny thing, this little tiny nickel plating problem that we had became such a big deal that I,
after we were done with that and I wanted to do something else, I thought, you know, this is an area that I can really, really spend some time on and I can be passionate about bringing inclusivity,
bringing education, allowing people to learn and understand makes things easier. You can just, you can transact better,
you can come to an agreement more quickly, there's no back and is it is easier to do it, it's quicker to do it. And if we had more inclusivity,
if we had more visibility in the manufacturing value chain in the United States, we'd be faster at everything we do. So I'm starting, hey Scotty, with just this metal finishing stuff.
There's tons of kinds of metal finishing. You can do anodizing, you could do nickel plating, you can do passivation, you could do all kinds of stuff. There's all kinds of ways to do it, and there's very little way for you to be able to find that on the internet.
That information is just not divulged because people who are doing this feel like that's their only intellectual property,
and they don't want to share it because they think that they're giving away the family jewels. So I don't think that that's the right thing. You need to establish trust whenever you do any kind of transaction,
right? You know, I trust Amazon. I trust their returns policy, frankly. That's why I buy from them because I know that I can return it. But if there's no trust to begin with, it's very difficult to do any kinds of transactions.
Hey Scottie has been created to start establishing trust. And the way I do it is I give people information. So I kind of forgot exactly what the question was,
but am I getting close to answering it? - Yes, it was just why you wanted to, or why are you passionate about, hey Scottie and like what you're doing, which is, yeah,
that's fascinating. Like, and it's interesting to me, like how different industries have the same problem because I've encountered the same thing in the marketing landscape where I'll try to search up other people,
do the same thing I do, I'll try to see what they're pricing their services at, and just people kind of hold some of their "secrets" close to their chest. I think maybe you can't get away with it as easily in marketing because there's like that combination of like it being this very traditional industry,
like because of the high barrier to entry, there's only just a handful of companies that can, you know, do these very specialized types of manufacturing. And then it's just very difficult to like cross compare different,
you know, materials and pricing and trade between different vendors. That's very true and a lot of people in the industry think that to divulge information is to make themselves weaker and what I find in my interactions is the more you share,
the more you establish yourself as an expert. And if you are an expert and if you are very free with your knowledge,
that establishes trust. And that is the basis of all good commerce. So,
okay, so we're wanting to establish trust. So would you say that's kind of like the main thing that you wanna focus on? Like, well, we were going to talk about something along the lines of how do you empower customers to find you?
And I guess trust is a key component of that 'cause you're wanting to like attract people to you, especially in this industry where everybody's just very, very siloed.
So if you could just talk a little bit about about how you've cultivated trust in your own business and the differences you've seen between how you approach your business and how maybe some of your competitors have approached building relationships.
- Oh, sure, sure, absolutely. So, hey, Scotty's not very old, so I've only been doing this for about two years. And what I've tried to do is I've tried to establish myself as an expert in this field.
And the way I do that is I publish prices. So you cannot find, actually, you can only find one place in the United States on the internet where there are prices for plating.
People just don't publish that, they just don't do that. And if you don't have even an understanding of, I mean, how big is this bread basket? Is it going to cost me $5? Is it going to cost me $500? Is it going to cost me $5 ,000?
I mean, you don't even know that information. If you give them just a little bit of information, then people will let you in to their little trust club.
What I've done is I have gathered pricing from across the country from dozens, if not hundreds of different plating companies.
And I've gathered this in the database and I use it in my everyday thing. But I also publish that to anyone who wants it. And so I look upon this as a platform of abundance.
I have a lot to give you, okay? I have so much to give you that I'm going to give you all of this for free. And that gives, and so instead of coming into the conversation with,
I'm only going to give you these little tiny little things, right? You come into the conversation with, hey, let's collaborate. I'm going to, you know, I'm going to open the commode. That's probably not a very good analogy,
but I'm going, you know, I'm going to give you, you know, as much data as I can to empower, this is all about empowering, right? Because you also don't want to do any kind of a transaction when you think that you are the weaker of the parties,
right? You want to feel like you are in it as a partner. So what I've done is I've tried to do something different than anyone else is doing in the United States is I am publishing these prices and I am allowing my customers to get a without needing to commit.
And I'm establishing, hopefully, myself as a voice of reason and a voice of knowledge. And this is very different. This is very different than any of my competitors.
My competitors, they all say, you want to do business with me, give me a call. So it's all about them doing the inbound. And I want to do the outbound.
I want to say, look, I'm going to show you how I can do all of these things. And I can help you in doing the things that you know. The other thing that I do is-- and this has to do with efficiency.
Hey, Scott, he's a small company. I don't have an awful lot of resources. And what I do is I am very targeted in my marketing approach. I find my customers on a case -by -case basis.
And I do this in a way where I try and understand exactly what this person needs. And it's usually a guy, so I'm going to talk for the rest of this conversation in terms of a guy. So,
or maybe I could do a they, that might work. So, you And when I find somebody that I think will be able to be using my services,
I try and find about everything that they need. I find out where they are. I try and meet them at a conference. I do a very targeted email to them.
This is not one of those emails that you get. I'm sure you get them all the time. I hope this email finds you well. It's "Oh, please stop it. You don't care if I'm well or not.
You care if I'm going to buy. That's all you care about." So don't. I mean, you can smell that in sincerity as it comes through the email.
What I try and do is I try and make sure that, "Look, I know what you're doing. I understand that in They are metal fabricating shops.
They are people who make things. They make things like this, right? Metal stuff. Make things like this, you know, metal stuff. And they need it to be plated in some way. So I know what they do.
I look at their products. I see, oh, look, they do this kind of plating. I can help them with that kind of plating. And I craft a very, very, very specific email.
I get a great head rate on this. It's about 50 percent, and I'm able to engage customers at about 50 percent. If you were to do this through Google AdWords, you go yippee if you get a 1 percent conversion,
right? But I'm getting a 50 percent. It's a lot of time and effort in the beginning, but it pays off because my relationships are much more personal.
They're much powerful. And, and they're much stickier because I know a lot about them. Okay, so how does that like, yeah, I mean,
that makes perfect sense. I mean, the more like, the more you treat people as like human beings, like the more they open up to you, and that just kind of starts the relationship off, like on a good foot.
Yeah. Really? You know, from, you know, from the email that you get, whether the person who wrote that email likes their job or not.
- Right. - You just didn't know that. You know that their bonus is based upon the number of emails they send out, not the number of responses.
It's like, okay, don't even waste my time. I'm not interested in that. So I try and make it as personal as possible. And there's so much information about people on the internet right now. It's not like this is a difficult thing,
you know, but it is, it does take a little work and it does take thought. It does take thought and it does take effort. So how do you approach that type of process as you go about identifying a company you'd like to work with and finding out about them?
How do you know like you're spending like too much time when somebody might not be interested versus like spending not enough time. - Goodness, that's probably a $64 ,000 question.
Yeah, that's a really good question. I've got a deal that I'm working on right now that's like, not sure I should continue working on this. Okay,
so step number one is Take a look at who your successful customers are, and then identify the qualities. So could it be location?
Could it be that they're in a particular industry, they're making a particular product, they're a particular size, try and categorize your favorite customer,
and then do a search on things that look like that. So, I've got this metal company. That's my favorite customer. I love them. And they're local.
They're just down the street from me. So that's one attribute. The guy who's running it is fairly young. So he's not one of those old boys who doesn't like the internet,
who still wants to do everything on the fax machine. He's okay with doing things over the internet, it's like, okay, so that's another attribute. Okay, so a fairly young founder,
or I would say digital native, a digital native founder. And then the other thing is that this person wants to expand their shop.
They want to grow. There are certain people who don't want to grow. There's certain people who are very excited about just doing the same thing over and over again. So first of all, so you identify who you like, who you like doing business with,
then you find something that's adjacent. So, okay, so I need to find other people who are close because one of the key attributes of this relationship is this guy's close physically so that I can actually walk over,
I'm not walking, I have to drive, you know, you know, drive over there. So then the next thing is you identify all of the things that are on their website,
that are identifiable for use that you can follow up on. They're part of an association. Oh, look, that association has a yearly meeting.
I will attend that yearly meeting, for example, okay? This person posts on LinkedIn that they like to go fishing. Oh, okay, that's another thing that I can talk to them about.
This person posts on LinkedIn that they like AI, fantastic. I will send them an AI cheat sheet of what I use when I do my blah,
blah, blah, that kind of thing. So then what you do is you just become a detective, an online detective, and you try and find as many connections as possible. And in each one of these connections is kind of unique.
I find the one thing that I found very, very useful is conferences. So if you find a person who is interested in going to a conference and they are going to the conference,
they are already telling you that they are interested in outside ideas. They're interested in new ideas, right? They're interested in learning something. Okay, that's good. That's good. They are primed to listen to you then.
Okay, then what you got to do is you got to kind of stalk them. You got to go to the conference, you got to find them. And that sometimes works in that, but you can connect with them on LinkedIn and you can say, "Hey, I'm going to be here.
You're going to be there. Let's grab a coffee." And sometimes it works. So those would be the ways that I would suggest other people who are interested in this kind of a very,
very targeted marketing can go about actually making a personal connection with their respective customers. - Yes, that makes a lot of sense.
And I'm trying to figure out, or trying to parse how useful it is to different situations. Because your company, you only need a few very big deals in order be profitable,
which isn't like the case with everybody. And then you're like, you're like mostly like a solo person, you're doing all the marketing, essentially, I'm doing, I'm doing all the marketing.
And so the deal is, is that you, you have to be small before you're big. Okay. So yes, I would love a million dollar deal. I don't have that yet.
So, so what I, What I need to do is, and I think this is, you don't get a million dollar deal tomorrow, you just don't, you work up to it,
it takes years sometimes, but don't be afraid to be small before you're big. So I do think that this potentially can be applicable to larger organizations.
The reason that larger organizations use these email things is because it's easier to manage. And it's simpler for the manager to manage. So rather than having the manager coach someone through this fairly complicated and very unstructured manner of getting to know a prospective customer,
it's much easier to say, we're gonna craft an email and we're gonna hit send and dial for dollars. And you're not to do anything other than dial for dollars. That's easy to manage. But I don't think it's,
I really don't think it's, it's good for large companies. Because I get these, I get these emails that start with, I hope this email finds you well, even from large companies,
you know, I get them, you know, I get them from the big guys too. And I delete them just as quickly as I delete the little guys's. So. Yeah, there has to be like that internal trust within the company like from the manager to the sales Team as well as you know being able to cultivate that trust between the salespeople and the customers.
It's like a whole chain It is so true. That is so true. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if you've ever worked in you know, one of those robocalling You things, or like a tele sales organization.
I mean, that just, that sounds awful to me. I have no disrespect to the people who do that. But that's just not me. I mean, if that's you, that's great. I love that. That's fantastic. Go for it.
But but that's just not me. Because I think that I think that in order to really, you know, do any good, you have to mean it. And I don't think any of you, I don't think any of these emails mean it.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think like as businesses scale, like just in general, like with this and with other things, like,
they tend to get farther away from, you know, that human connection, like, what, like, what, what is a transaction is just like, you know, essentially two people coming together,
each one, each person needs something from the other person, and then they walk away happier afterwards. And so, you know, in a in a micro transaction, usually,
like, that's a personal friendly hello, and like a smile, and like, you get to keep up a relationship with that person afterwards, you see them in the street, you say hi,
and you wave to them. But with when you're so far away from that, that you're just like managing an employee, and you're trying to focus on your bonus, and you got to hit your marketing metrics.
It's like, you're so far away from that, that you're not thinking in terms of like, I'm talking to another human being right now. Agreed. Yeah, agreed, agreed. And,
and I don't know, this might be a bit of a tangent, but I think it's because of the bonus structure is incorrect. You know, the bonus structure, I've managed when we were When we were doing the manufacturing company in LA,
we did have a tele -sales organization. And the problem was is that it was very difficult to tie the bonus structure with the actual behavior that we wanted to reinforce.
And so we said, OK, well, how about we do as many meetings, you know, if you do five meetings, if you set up five meetings for my sales guy to go to,
I'm gonna give you, you know, a hundred bucks a piece, whatever, right? Well, what they would happen is that would be the end goal. And they would lose sight of,
like you said, the personal connection. They would lose sight of being able to actually have a relationship with this person. And so they would diminish or they would jeopardize the relationship in order to get that meeting.
And you're cutting yourself off at the knees. So when you have, and it's very, very difficult to set up a bonus structure that really makes sense because the problem with group dynamics is if you have a group selling situation,
which you usually do, how much is each sale dependent upon person A versus person B versus person C versus person D, right? Everybody thinks that they're,
because they see it from their point of view, they think they are the most important person in the chain and it's a difficult thing. But anyway,
to summarize, I think that mass marketing is evil. I think it's dehumanizing and I think it's lazy.
I frankly think it's a lazy management tool. - Yeah, I mean, to be fair, I won't go as far as saying it's evil just because I understand why people do it.
Like if you don't have any other models on how to achieve your goals, then people feel like they're kind of between a rock in a hard place which is which is why I want this podcast to exist essentially.
I'm trying to find people who've like found another approach and is actually successful so they can they can show you know what this is the process I went through.
Here's how I actually I got the goal that you want to get to and I did it in a way that you know made me feel joyful. I made everybody else around me feel joyful.
Oh, that's lovely. Yeah, lovely. I mean, that's gosh, that's lovely. I have this, this, this, this saying,
it's like, you're going to spend basically, well, I don't know about these days, but you used to spend eight hours in the office, right? And why would you do that with something you could barely right?
Yeah. I mean, really, I mean, it's your life. Do you really want to do that? I mean, that's just, that's just, that's just, you know, do something that,
that turns you on, you know, do something that rings your bell, you know, do something that you can feel proud of, you know, I just, I feel I have, I have,
I have derived a great deal of personal satisfaction and personal pride in coming to the,
well, coming to the office. And working. I love what I do, not all the time, of course, not every day, but I am proud of what I do. And I can't,
and I have had those jobs where you come in And you do your work, you know, and you hate your boss, you know, and you try and goof off as much as possible, you know.
And then you go home and then you, you know, your bad mouth, your company, you know, and it's like, really, what, God, that's terrible. I mean,
that's a terrible life. You know, you should be able to do something better than that. You should find something better than that. Your life is worth more than that. Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you. And your goal of making something as difficult and as amorphous,
as marketing, more personal, more meaningful, I love that. I think that's necessary. Gosh, it's so needed right now. Yeah,
100%. I would like to kind of dig in a little bit deeper and make this even more like I like to get into the weeds at some point make it even more like practical and tactical.
So you know you gave this list of like steps people can go through to identify someone they might want to reach out to. So I guess if I had to summarize real quick I'd say you know figure out who your best people are that you're excited to work with,
we're going to buy from you. And then, you know, see what they're posting on social media or like see, try to think through kind of what they need. And then,
you know, connect with them, see if they're going to a conference and you can meet up with them or like send them some some stuff that's valuable for them, like knowing, you know, the kind of stuff that's typically useful for this type of person.
And then, you know, just kind of build up that relationship from there. Don't miss any like steps. - No, no, you were paying attention. Thank you.
- Okay. - Yes. (laughs) - Perfect, perfect. So if I go like step by step within that, like this first part is kind of identifying,
you know, the right people for your company. So are there any like pitfalls and challenges people might come across as they're trying to like, you know,
figure out who's this ideal person that you're excited to work with that's also gonna be good for your company? - Oh, okay, yeah. So one of the pitfalls is marketing only to the job title.
So I am going to only sell to procurement managers, okay, because they have the budget, they have the authority, you know, and it's like, okay, well, that works,
but you're missing the easier way in. Because if you're going with the procurement manager, the procurement manager gets a gazillion, "Hey,
buy from me" emails every single day. But If you go to that person's staff, there's probably one person who's hungry for a promotion and try and be the person who gets them that promotion.
How do you do that? Well, give them an opportunity. So, for example, I've got a customer who is,
and I found him, I've got a customer who is not a traditional customer of mine. It is,
so I do metal finishing, right? So we're talking metal. This is a woodworking company. So they do wood panels for for large office buildings,
high -end homes, hotels, hospitality industry. You've got these panels that have the metal around them and the wood in the middle.
I found that there was this one company who's close to me that is expanding their product line to this new area of this metal surround panels.
They're called, I don't know what they're called, but they're architectural panels and they use aluminum extrusions in order to do this. This is a new product for them. This is a new opportunity for them.
I did try and reach out to the procurement manager and say, hey, I know a little bit of how to do this, but I didn't get anywhere. So, what I did was I found a guy who was newly hired into the place.
He had a junior job title and I gave him my pricing list and I also did the next step. And the aluminum extrusions that they were buying,
which I was hoping to plate for them, which I was hoping to treat for them. I gave him a couple of ideas of where else he could go with them. And I said,
look, I know that you guys are looking into going into this new line of business. I know a little bit about this. Just wanted to let you know that I'm in the area.
If you need me for anything, give me a call. So, I gave him some pretty good emails and I gave him some good contacts and he called me back and we're working on a big deal right now.
So what I have found is if you find somebody who is ambitious, they are much more interested in talking to you,
then if you find somebody who is comfortable in their job. Because because the last if you're comfortable on your job, you know what you wanted, you get you're getting an eight o 'clock, you're you're you're you're punching the clock,
you know, and you don't want to talk to anybody new because that's hard. You know, you got your friends, you got your buddies, you know, that kind of thing. So so that would be one tip and and and one level of detail in that summarization that you did so well just about five minutes ago.
Yeah, so that would be one thing that I would suggest. Yeah, that's fascinating. I hadn't thought of it from that angle of looking at other people like adjacent to the person who's actually going to be doing the deal with you,
But that makes sense when you put it that way. - It's, yeah, you know, it doesn't, you know, it works in theory, you know, sometimes it works in theory.
Yeah, but I have found that people who are comfortable in their job aren't interested in new relationships. - Yeah. - Yeah.
- Yeah. - Yeah. - And it's gotta be pretty difficult to like identify who that person is, who is the like ambitious one or just open a new ideas type of person?
I find that if they are a job hopper that is going into a different industry than the one that they left, there's a new opportunity that they've found that there's something new for them,
that they want to go into a new place. So, so that I think is is a big deal. I think the digital native is also a big deal. In my industry,
manufacturing sector, I'm sorry, in my sector, manufacturing, they still use fax machines. Yep. I'm not surprised by this.
No, still use fax machines. And hey, Scotty is an online marketplace. So, marketplace. So when I talk to somebody who is quite happy in their job,
who's a procurement manager who's happy in their job, and they have their contacts, it's very difficult for me to say, look, the internet can be your friend here. So you need to find somebody who's hungry.
And But sometimes, and typically, it is someone who's younger, but it is also someone who's a job hopper who's just hopped into a new job and is looking to prove themselves.
Hmm. Okay. Yeah. And that's interesting to hear that talked about as like an opportunity as opposed to like some kind of negative, which it is in the recruiting space,
but I guess from the sales angle and like the thinking of it in terms of like, oh, I want to make it, I want a new partnership, I want a new collaboration, looking for those people specifically,
could be really, really useful. Oh, I definitely think so. I think so. And I think that that is, that is the key to creativity. You know, if you're doing the same thing over and over again,
that's not creative. And, and you can't be creative all by yourself. You have, I mean, if you have a bubble around you, you're not you're not going to be creative. So if you have somebody from a different industry, if you have somebody coming in from a different background,
they cannot help but give you new ideas. I think that's extremely important. I've been in a number of different industries.
Like I said before, I've been in a nuclear, I've been in software, I've been in manufacturing, and I feel like I'm person for each, in each one of those, because I know about the other ones.
You know, if you only do one thing in your life, you know, you're missing about, you're missing out on all of the other lessons that you can learn, right?
Okay, and like, moving on to another aspect of this, when you're trying to figure out kind of what to send when you're reaching out to people.
I mean, there's an element of creativity to this, right? Because sometimes it's like sending them something that's a resource for them. Sometimes it's just like straight up inviting them to a coffee or like at a conference or something like that.
How do you kind of determine, you know, when you're doing that initial outreach, or as you're trying to follow up and build a relationship, you know, what are you going to say to this person?
Good question. So how, how do you, how do you, so if there's a little gift that you're going to give them, a little friendship gift, right?
You know, here, let's, let's, let's start a relationship. I'm going to give you a little friendship. It has to be germane to what they do. So it can't be just like, Oh, here's some slippers, you know,
you know, it's got to be, it's got to be something that will make their job easier. And so, you know, when you get, you know, like little marketing charge keys in the mail,
or when you go to one of those trade shows, you get pens and stuff like that. It's like, Oh, those are fine. But that doesn't say anything about me. So I And I'm data driven,
very data driven. So I don't typically send physical objects. I do send really nicely formatted charts.
And I label it for the company that I'm sending it to. And I label it for the person if I can when I'm sending it to. So I try and make it like a present. And I was like,
oh, look how pretty this is. You know, do you want to unwrap it? You can unwrap it. You know, it's like, oh, look, look, that's really nice. And, and if there's a way to make it pretty, you know, people,
people respond to aesthetics, right? So if you send something that is really formatted and, you know, doesn't have, it's just black and white, it's like, you know, delete, you know,
but if you've got something that's got, you know, well, well, well, well, well designed graphics with, with attractive, oh, use their logo colors in your marketing,
and that allows them to reuse it in their marketing. Hmm. Oh, I love that. That's nice. Yeah.
Yeah. And you've seen those marketing things that have the space where you can put your business card.
It's same kind of idea. Okay. That's interesting. All right. And then I suppose the last part of this is kind of following up with the person and kind of closing the deal like how do you how do you for one thing how do you like manage your like time and energy to like keep following up with people please tell me how and I would love to know how to do that right yeah yeah you know um the uh let's see who was
it I think it was Bill gates who said, Oh, no, no, it was Warren Buffett focus. You have to focus. You only ever have one priority one. You have multiple multiple priority ones,
you're not doing it right. So every week, I, you know, and I don't do this all the time, I'm not perfect at this. But the weeks that I frankly,
I meditate the beginning In the beginning of the week, I'm just like, "Okay, close my eyes. What's bothering me? What are all the thoughts that I've gathered up over the last weekend? What's bothering me?
What are the things that I'm anxious to do? What are the things that I'm not anxious to do? What do I hate?" And I just sit and I just think about it for a little bit. I don't do this all the time, but when I do do this, I have a great week because I've got my list of things to do and I work them and at the end of the week,
I review it, not all the time, but when I do, I get more done. I am, that's my little, and I've got my little note taking, oh, you know what I do.
I'm probably the last person who actually writes things down, but I've got my own little note taking stuff, so I write things down, and the stuff that, action items, I put a star next to,
then I review it, it might go back and stuff like that. But what I would say is the most important thing is focus. You should only ever have one primary goal and everything that you do should support that goal.
If you're doing something that's not supporting your goal, you're wasting your time. Okay. So how does that apply to reaching out to people who would be good sales partners partners for you,
like, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, good question. So the trick is to do the right goal, right? And that's an art, and that's not a science.
So how do you articulate your goal? My goal for this quarter is I have a number of new partners that I want to sign up for this one initiative that I have.
I'm selling my pricing engine, my pricing engine that I've been using for the last two years, I'm selling it so that other people can put that on their website. That allows them to expose their knowledge to the world,
and that will make them much more powerful participants in this ecosystem. And I'm going to land 10 of them.
So everything that I do has to support that goal. Okay, well, if I have a goal of 10, then I need to have 100 prospects. Where are my 100 prospects?
Then you see you go backwards. Okay, I need 100 prospects. Okay, how do I prospect? Well, here's my one customer that I like that's working really well for me. Then I do the adjacency.
Then I identify the people. Then I try and get to know the people. then I try and get it in on the person. So that's that's how you do it. I've got these pet projects that I want to do. So for example,
there's a certification called ISO 9000. I don't know if you know it, but it is used in manufacturing. And it is a way of standardizing continuous process improvement.
It's called ISO 9000, International Standards Organization. And I love it because I'm a process -oriented person, I think, in terms of flowcharts. I love it.
And that's not going to help me get the 10 new customers. So even though I really want to do it, and even though I really want to put that little badge on my website that says I'm ISO 9000,
I'm not going to do it. I'm not going to work on that. I've got several organizations in India, the country, of course, who are interested in selling into the United States,
who are who've got fabulous prices and very compelling quality plans that I think can do a really, really good job. That's not going to help me.
I'm not going to talk to them for the next two and a half months. So it winnows you down. So it so so the So pick one intelligent goal,
stick to it, review it, get better at it. - Okay, yeah, that makes sense. You just have that one overarching goal and then everything is just flowing back to that.
Like you filter out stuff that's not that. And then when you see opportunities that will get you closer, even if you hadn't thought of them already, you jump on if they're gonna get too close or to your priority.
- Exactly, exactly, yeah. I mean, what would your, could you even start articulate? I'm sure you know what you wanna do. I'm sure there's like a thousand things you wanna do,
right? - Yes. - Yeah, how can you gather that? I mean, and it could be, it could be something as amorphous as be more popular,
you know, getting, you know, you know, grow my audience, you know, it could be, it could be any, anything, or it could be, you know, find one new customer, you know,
it's up to you to define it as big a goal as you have, it'll make you bigger. Yeah, I know, I think I know what my goal is for my business over the next couple months,
but I think hopefully this conversation will give me the courage to just only focus on that, as opposed to all of the other things that are probably fuller thing around in my head. Oh,
sure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's yeah, all kinds of stuff. Yeah, all kinds of stuff. Just for me. Yeah. No, I'm sorry. No, no, I interrupted you.
Please go. I was just going to say that I wanted to revamp my My service offerings because there's I'm really passionate about this project.
I want it like starting, incorporating web accessibility and digital privacy and cybersecurity into my marketing system. And I want to really educate myself on those things so that as I'm serving clients with my marketing services,
I can be educating them on how to do those other things as well and helping them set up systems to like keep incorporating that into their marketing. And just like figuring out how to do that and then getting the first couple of people to like test the system on is my main goal.
And I'm kind of stuck. I don't know how to do it yet. It's just like this big ambitious project that's in my head. And I try to explain it to other people and they stare at me blankly, which means I know,
I need to spend more time working on it. But yeah. But yeah, what were you going to say? Cool. I was going to say, I'm sure you know this,
you know, if you have a goal, you know, if you talk about it with other people, that's your halfway there. You know, if you write it down, or if you just think about it, it's harder to achieve. But if you if you if you write it down,
that's good. actions, actions, actions, actions, you You know? Yeah. So the fact that you're able to articulate this, you know, you kind of halfway there. Okay.
I just need to get the other hand. Nice. Okay. Well, you know, thank you so much, Rhonda, for your tips and insights.
You know, I think this is a good, like, natural stopping point to wrap up, but like if there's, you know, anything you want to promote any projects you're working on or just anything about your company you want to share or people can get in touch with you.
Oh, certainly. Well, thank you. Thanks for the opportunity. I've immensely enjoyed this. You're awfully fun to talk to and easy to talk to.
So thank you. Thank you for being a wonderful host. Thank you. Same to you. Oh, thanks. And I just told you what my goal was, I need to find and land 10 of these customers for my pricing engine.
I think the pricing engine is very interesting because it allows people to entree into the manufacturing world know,
you don't need to be in manufacturing to be able to use it. So, so if you're interested at all in this, please check out Hey Scottie, H -E -Y -S -C -O -T -T -I -E dot com.
And, and, and you can get ahold of me, my contact information is all there. Or follow me on LinkedIn. It's Rhonda Dibachi . So, all right. Well, thanks so much,
Rhonda. This is amazing conversation. Well, thank you. I enjoyed it very much, Kira, very much.