Jason Bay - A Strategic Approach to Growth, Part 5 (#45)

This episode of the Maximize Business Value Podcast is the fifth and final of a series about growth strategies. Host Tom Bronson speaks with guest Jason Bay, Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting, about his many frameworks that streamline his prospecting process. They also discuss the importance of making an outbound sales effort, clarifying your ideal client profile and how cold calling has turned into multi-channel, intentional outreach. Check out the informative one pager that Jason made specifically for you at blissfulprospecting.com/tom. Want to improve your sales prospecting? Listen now!

Jason Bay is the Chief Operating Officer at Blissful Prospecting where he helps reps and sales teams who love landing big meetings with prospects—but hate not getting responses to their cold emails or feeling confident making cold calls. Sales is the only “adult job” he’s ever had, and he’s done everything from selling house painting services door to door, running outbound call centers, to helping hundreds of reps master cold outreach. Check out his podcast called “Blissful Prospecting.”

Tom Bronson is the founder and President of Mastery Partners, a company that helps business owners maximize business value, design exit strategy, and transition their business on their terms. Mastery utilizes proven techniques and strategies that dramatically improve business value that was developed during Tom’s career 100 business transactions as either a business buyer or seller. As a business owner himself, he has been in your situation a hundred times, and he knows what it takes to craft the right strategy. Bronson is passionate about helping business owners and has the experience to do it. Want to chat more or think Tom can help you?  Reach out at tom@masterypartners.com or check out his book, Maximize Business Value, Begin with The Exit in Mind (2020).

Mastery Partners, where our mission is to equip business owners to Maximize Business Value so they can transition their business on their terms.  Our mission was born from the lessons we’ve learned from over 100 business transactions, which fuels our desire to share our experiences and wisdom so y

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Tom Bronson is a serial entrepreneur and business owner. He is currently the founder and President of Mastery Partners, Mastery Mergers & Acquisitions, and the Business Transition Summit. All three companies empower business owners to maximize business value and serve business owners in different capacities to help them achieve their dream exit. As a business owner, Tom has been in your situation a hundred times and knows what it takes to craft the right strategy. Bronson is passionate about helping business owners and has the experience to do it. Tom has two books to help business owners on their journey to a dream exit: "Maximize Business Value Playbook," (2023), and "Maximize Business Value, Begin with the EXIT in Mind," (2020). Both are available on Amazon.
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Transcript

Announcer (3s):
Welcome to the Maximize business value podcast. This podcast is brought to you by mastery partners, where our mission is to equip business owners, to maximize business value so they can transition their business on their terms. Our mission was born from the lessons we've learned from over 100 business transactions, which fuels our desire to share our experiences and wisdom. So you can succeed. Now, here's your host CEO of mastery partners, Tom Bronson.

Tom Bronson (36s):
Hi, this is Tom Bronson and welcome to maximize business value. A podcast for business owners who are passionate about building long-term sustainable value in their businesses. In this episode, we're going to wrap up our five part series on growth strategies, and I'd like to welcome our guest Jason Bay. He's the chief prospecting officer at blissful prospecting. His friends call him Jay Bay. So I'm going to call him Jay Bay. On this podcast, I was introduced to Jay Bay by his friend and I and our mutual friend, Lindsey Pollock at a tax credit collective. You might remember that Lindsay was a previous guest on our podcast.

Tom Bronson (1m 18s):
When we were talking about a tax credits, Jason also has his own fun podcast called interestingly enough, Blissful prospecting. And after meeting Jason recently, I am, I was immediately impressed with his passion for helping sales teams develop great prospecting strategies, because we all know that prospecting is the lifeblood of any sales effort. So welcome to maximize business value. Jay Bay.

Jason Bay (1m 48s):
I'm excited for that, man. I'm not the most bald guy on this call either. Dude. I'm kind of excited for that too.

Tom Bronson (1m 55s):
You're usually the bald guy on the, on the podcast. I'm

Jason Bay (1m 58s):
Usually the baldest person. Yeah,

Tom Bronson (2m 1s):
I thought you said bold. Oh, I thought you said, well, I'm definitely the baldest guy on this podcast. If we were typecasting, I would just get bald guys to be on. Right. So, you know, I make, I make bald look good. So tell us about blissful prospecting.

Jason Bay (2m 19s):
Yeah, so we started, you know, I got my sales career started actually going door to door selling house painting services. So I've kind of always been the outbound cold, you know, approach type of person. And I ended up working with that company and really enjoying sales, which I never planned to get into. I was actually going to school to be a forensic scientist. So this is like a complete 180, you know, of that. And I was hooked on it ever since. And the reason why we started blissful prospecting is when I was working with that company, college works painting. I was a sales manager for them for three years. After that, I was their marketing director for a couple of years. One of the big initiatives that I worked on with them was starting an outbound call center.

Jason Bay (2m 60s):
So I didn't know anything about what software you use, how to set it up, who to hire anything. That's I figured out all of that from scratch. And you know, that was like a $35 million company at the time with no formal marketing department. Right? So we ended up hiring 15, 20 reps. I hired a call center manager and that right there, that was in 2013. I was like, you know what? I would love to do this for other businesses. So when I started my own journey as a consulting, really in 2013, 2014, to find my clients, I had to do a lot of outbound and this was now B2B outbound versus business to consumer stuff. And that was where like cold email and like LinkedIn and like all this other stuff came in and I just had people asking me like, Hey Jason, that was a really cool email.

Jason Bay (3m 46s):
It's kind of cool how you personalize it there. Can you just do that for us? And then that's how I kind of went from the consulting stuff I was doing into, Oh, it sounds like there's like a really big need because most businesses I talk to, like everyone knows they need to do more prospecting and everyone hates to do it. Right. So that was where blissful came as. Like how can we make this something that is more purposeful that is actually value driven for the prospect and not just a sales pitch, you know? And how can we get people to like pick up the phone and actually like set meetings from it versus, you know, being those like pitchy, sleazy, you know, kind of salespeople that are just cold calling all day. So that's what we do now at blissful prospecting has helped, you know, kind of remove the suck from prospecting and make it more about the prospect as well, make it less about you and like what you want as the sales person or the business owner, and more about like how you can help the other person.

Tom Bronson (4m 38s):
We take the suck out of prospecting. Yeah. I just came up with that. Actually. I've never said that before. Yeah. You're going to start, you're going to work that into your conversations over the next few days. So you told us a little bit about your background. I have to ask a $35 million house painting business. Is it, is that what I heard you say?

Jason Bay (4m 58s):
Yeah. So college works painting. What they do is they hire college students and essentially it's an internship, but I learned how to essentially like, it was like, Hey, run a house, painting business was kind of the pitch, right. Make 10,000 bucks over the course of a summer. And I was like, ah, you know, sign me up. That sounds awesome. I didn't know that I'd be going door to door. And I also didn't know what sales was. You know, I didn't really have anyone in my family that did sales. So I didn't realize that there was like a process to it. Just like anything else. Right. It's not just show up to someone's house and quote them the price and just give it to them and then take off like every other contractor does it's they actually taught us how to let's spend an hour and a half, two hours with a homeowner.

Jason Bay (5m 41s):
Let's let's talk about what is building rapport. How do you find a need? Like how do you point out peeling paint and then talk about what happens if you don't take care of it, how do you talk about, and like really build trust with them, you know, and talk about the process and how you stack up compared to other people. And then how do you go in and like close in, like objection, handling all that other stuff. Cause to paint your house. I don't know if you've ever paid anyone to do that or how that's worked. It's not cheap. It's it could be three to $10,000 depending on the size of your home. So I'm like a 19 year old kid with braces, you know, selling to people that are like literally over twice as my age. And what I loved about it was the reason I would always ask people why they hired me, which I think is a really good thing to do as a company.

Jason Bay (6m 25s):
And as a sales team is like, always make sure, you know, why your customers hire you. What they always said was it was never, you were the cheapest price or I thought you would have the best quality or anything like that. We're just like, Hey, you seem knowledgeable, but I just like you, like, I trust that you're going to like do whatever it takes to like do a good job for me. So I'm like winning business over people that are like, you know, the contractors. I mean, there's no shortage of contractors that have been doing stuff for 20, 30 years. And I'm like winning business over these people. And that psychology part of it was really interesting to me. That's, that's really what I love about selling.

Tom Bronson (6m 59s):
That's awesome. You know, like and trust. Right. And then, so I, I had a sales guy that worked for me one time that it was all about getting the customer to like you. Right. And, and I said, it's important to like, but you have to transfer that like into trust. Right? It's because people will only buy from people they trust instead of wait. That's no wonder it's a $35 million, a house painting business that hires college kids because apparently they took the time to teach you guys how to do it. Right. That is amazing. Now I put myself through college painting houses, but mostly cool friends and stuff like that.

Tom Bronson (7m 41s):
And so, you know, it's really interesting back in the day. I, of course I was out there selling it, you know, mostly it was friends and family and stuff like that when I was out there selling it. But then of course my, my best friend and I did all the work and back in the day, you know, I'm 19 years old and I'm up on the second story of a house and, and this is just another couple inches. And I, if I think about the way I was, you know, I'm leaning off the ladder and reaching as far as I can to paint something. And, and today how we change right today, if I get on the third rung of a ladder, suddenly I'm going, Oh my God, I'm getting too high off the ground.

Tom Bronson (8m 24s):
Yeah.

Jason Bay (8m 24s):
I don't like Heights either, man. I don't want to be up. Like after all that house painting I did. Cause I did a lot of it, myself just training people and stuff. I'm like, I'm not going to, I'm not going to ever paint your house.

Tom Bronson (8m 36s):
Yeah. I want to pick up this big, this house, painting service to come pay your house. You'll see if their techniques still work. So, all right. So we're talking about prospecting and cold calling, but it isn't cold calling dead. I hear that all the time. Isn't it dead?

Jason Bay (8m 55s):
Yeah. I think we have to talk about like what, how do you define a cold call? You know, cause people have kind of different definitions of it. A cold call to me is like Amy time, you call someone and they're not sure expecting your call. That is a cold call. Right? So the party, the, that process that is dying is really the smile and dial. Let's get a random list of a thousand VPs of HR or whatever it is, your target. And then you just pick up the phone, Hey, this is Jason with ABC. HR solutions dedicate you to good time. Hey, I'd love to set up a time to meet with you and talk about our solutions and all the companies we work with and all like that stylist like that's, that's dying a very, very quick, quick death.

Jason Bay (9m 39s):
So the approach is really not how can I cold call people? It's how can I be really intentional and move from this mass blast? Either that through email or phone into more of a quality, first approach and think about who are my best customers like over the last six or 12 months, who's been the easiest to close with the shortest sales cycles who best represents our ideal client, who did, we were able to get case studies and referrals from like, what are those companies that best represent what our next best customer will look like? And then if you're going to create an ideal client profile and your screen to start looking at like commonality and industry maturity of business, employee size size of a department technology that uses all kinds of stuff you can look at and then reverse engineer the sale and sales, they call it a dealer review.

Jason Bay (10m 27s):
You want to do the same kind of thing there. When I closed the sale, who was the very first person that I interacted with, what was their job title? And then who had to, you know, interact with me throughout the sales process, what were their job title? And then now you start to like basically retrace your footsteps and look at what does that look like now? And you're going to reach out to people, these HR solutions, as an example, let's say you sell HR solutions. Cause you brought up an example of this. You sell HR solutions to, I dunno, fortune 500 companies and manufacturing, let's say right? So now you'd be like, when I do this cold calling, which is really we'll talk about, you know, all the pieces involved with that.

Jason Bay (11m 11s):
I'm only going to look for companies that are manufacturers that are a certain stage in business or a certain revenue that I can reach out to this person and say, Hey Tom, I don't know if you're like these other manufacturers that we've worked with with sometimes what we hear them say is that they have a really tough time getting their employees engaged in their employee benefits program or whatever HR people help with. I'd love to share with you what we're doing with some of those other companies that might be helpful for you. That is not a cold call. That's not some random thing that you're doing. You're being incredibly intentional about the companies and the people you're engaging with to make sure that they best represent the companies that are you're already successfully working with. One last thing on that is that prospects, like, people want to know what other people like them are doing.

Jason Bay (11m 56s):
So what are other businesses like them doing? What are other job roles like them? What are they focused on? What are they worried about right now? What are the trends like? That's, that's what you can share when you're prospecting.

Tom Bronson (12m 8s):
That's awesome. You know, honestly, that's, that's all about kind of defining your niche market, your focus. I, I coach a lot of our clients on your market's just too broad, right? You're you're not only, not only does it help you narrow in your prospecting, like you're talking about, but it also helps you really narrow your focus on your marketing efforts, right? Yep. You know, headlight, I've spent a lot of time and restaurant suppliers and whatnot and, and I always tell them, look, what type of restaurants are asking? What type of restaurants are you focused on?

Tom Bronson (12m 49s):
Where do you have your best success? You know, who are you dealing with? Because if we're trying to be all things to all restaurants, you know, there's 400,000 restaurants plus or minus during COVID, but there's 400,000 restaurants in America and you got pizza restaurants, coffee shops, sandwiches, breakfast places, you know, where is it that you live? Because that's where you want to focus all of your efforts. And it's not just the marketing effort, but what I'm hearing from you is that that's your sales effort too. Too many companies don't go through the process of identifying their ideal client profile.

Tom Bronson (13m 29s):
And I just feel like if that is one of the most important things you can do in sales and marketing, how do you go about defining that?

Jason Bay (13m 38s):
Yeah. Like an analogy. I would use this, like, you know, dating, you know, I don't think that very many people, if you're looking for an actual partner, someone to get married to you just don't just wing it. Don't don't most people have a pretty good idea of like what they're looking for. Do you want kids? Do you not want kids? Are you into the outdoors stuff? Or you're not? Where do you want to live? What kind of family do you want? I mean, it's the same thing right here. So if you don't like have some intentionality behind what you're looking for, you're like, people are going to look at your thing, your product or your service, then you'd be like that. Doesn't really relate with me. So it's not about saying no to things as much as when I do outbound and I'm reaching out to people proactively, they need to look at me and be like, Oh Jason, like, he looks like he knows about our industry because they have all these cool case studies with all of these companies that like, are exactly like mine.

Jason Bay (14m 24s):
So the framework to answer your question, that I call it the perfect fit identifier. And it's three parts we've talked about. Two of them. One is the company level. So that's, I'm going to look for companies that best represent the companies in our current client portfolio. So again, I'm looking, who's the easiest to close shorter sales cycles, maybe largest, average deal size, most referrals, best results, et cetera. The next layer of that is the persona. So the persona, those job titles I was talking about, there's a couple of things that people tend to overlook. Everyone wants to go after the decision maker, right? They want to go after that VP or C level person, that's going to sign the check. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but just know that every single other person is reaching out to them too.

Jason Bay (15m 8s):
And there's other ways to get your foot in the door. There's two really underrated, you know, sort of positions you can go after one is a champion. So I'll give you an example. Like I'm typically working with the sales departments at companies and at large companies, my champion is typically a sales manager. It's the person that stands a lot to gain. If I come in and like can help their reps and it's gonna make them look really good, but they don't sign the check. They don't even control any of the budget. But in one of my recent, like really big deals with a pretty decent sized company, biggest deal that we've landed so far. This person, the sales manager, like he was able to set up all the meetings for us, with his VP. He was able to loop in the other people like he was advocating on my behalf because he cared a lot about it.

Jason Bay (15m 50s):
So think about who your champions are. So it doesn't always have to be top down approach. You can go bottoms up to, you can start at a manager level and gather some Intel and, and get some introductions up. And the third one that gets overlooked too, is the influencers. So an influencer and I'll use my self. As an example. Again, people in marketing are in charge of lead generation, but they might not be the people I interact with during the sales process. They might have a lot to say though, around the prospecting and how that gets done and how their messaging gets portrayed in a cold email. So I need to be aware of other people that might have their hand in the pot that might be influencing the decision that I might not interact with.

Jason Bay (16m 30s):
So those are the two parts. The third part that's that's most commonly overlooked is values. So I'll give you an example here. I work with a company. I don't like being branded like this, but I won't share their name. They essentially helped companies outsource their customer support. So a Yeti is a company here in Austin, right here in Austin, Texas. So when Yeti, yeah, really great company. So when Yeti brands, yeah, you got the cup too. So when Yeti runs a special or cyber Monday or black Friday or whatever Christmas, they get bombarded with customer support requests, right? People chatting, emailing, and all that other stuff. What they cannot afford is slow response time.

Jason Bay (17m 11s):
Cause that makes the brand look bad and they lose sales. So this company comes in and says, Hey, instead of hiring people during the seasonality type of stuff, we'll come in and just like take over for you when you need it. And you can turn this on and off really cool value prop. But you know what, if the business doesn't value, great customer service in delivering a VIP experience to people, it doesn't matter. There's a lot of companies out there that don't really care about like quick response time. They're like, you know what? We sell our stuff and people are just going to have to wait for this. So what you're looking for, like when they're prospecting is I'm looking for three things I'm looking for, what does the company brag about? So what do I see this company I'm reaching out to that Alliance?

Jason Bay (17m 52s):
Like what do they brag about? That's related to us. So is it, are they bragging about how good their customer services, how great their products are funding that they recently got? The next layer that I'm looking at is where do they spend money? So that's like, are they hiring right now? Are they acquiring companies? Right. All that kind of stuff. And the last one is content. So the content is what are they educating their customers about? So I think what you need to think about when you're selling and prospecting is think about how your product or service helps the people that you serve, help serve their customers better, like think like a layer deeper there. So that values piece, like, look for alignment in what do they brag about? What do they educate their customers about?

Jason Bay (18m 33s):
And what did they spend money on that are like these kind of indicators that like, Oh, they might value what we value in this example, great customer support. They might value that because I can find indicators of, Hey, they brag about how good their customer support is. They get tons of great online reviews. They're hiring in their customer support department right now. And those are things that when I call someone and be like, Hey Tom, you know, Jason was blissful prospecting. Yeah. Know, I'm kind of reaching out, you know, out of the blue here, but you got a minute for me to tell you why I'm calling and you can let me know if you want to keep chatting. Tom says, yes, well, Hey, I was actually doing some research on you guys. I noticed that you really value customer support. And particularly I really loved that article that came out around how you guys highlighted a lot of your best customers thought it was really cool.

Jason Bay (19m 17s):
And that was actually the reason I was reaching out is since you really value customer support, that's something we really value as well. And a problem that we oftentimes hear is there's a cost of delivering great customer support. It takes a lot of time. It can cost a lot of money and we're helping companies offset some of those costs and make it less stressful to deliver great customer support. Do you have a minute? I can ask you a couple of questions. See if you might be, this might be relevant for you. So like that pitch is like, I didn't say we are so-and-so company. We do this. We're so awesome. Cause we worked with all these companies, right? It's like, Hey, I see that you value this thing. We value that a lot too. And here's a problem that we sometimes hear from people when they're trying to accomplish this. It's all about them. So that's, that's the approach that I'm talking about.

Jason Bay (19m 59s):
You got me on a roll right here.

Tom Bronson (20m 2s):
Yeah. That's, that's brilliant. I love that. That to, to, when you talk, when you center your attention on what I call the hero of the story, right? End of story. Story branding and who many companies think that they're the hero, right. But they're not, it's their customer. That is the hero of the story. I want to be their guide. That that makes a great superhero. Right? I want to be Alfred behind Batman. Right. So that's awesome. So let's, let's pull back in and talk a little bit about reaching prospects. You know, there's a million ways to reach prospects today. You can do email phone, LinkedIn, snail mail, smoke signals, whatever it is, what channel do you find the best

Jason Bay (20m 48s):
Way to reach customers? Yeah. So I don't think there is a best channel. The, the approach here is really like multi-channel. Yeah. Is what you want to do. Now, if you think about this, the reason for that is if I'm reaching out to you, Tom, I don't really know what your preferred method of communication is. I don't know if you're more of a phone guy. I don't know if you're more of an email guy. I got some prospects that don't answer any of my emails or calls, but they'll chat with me on LinkedIn. You know what I mean? So it's like, you don't really know. And what you can do is like kind of create this like multichannel experience. So like the prospect, everyone's got a smartphone these days.

Jason Bay (21m 29s):
So normally everything is getting like thrown into that smartphone. So when you can combine those touches together, LinkedIn that pops up a notification on their phone and email, that's a notification, a voicemail that's notification. So the framework that I have around this, I call it kiss. It's keep it simple sequencing. People like really overthink this. So the, keep it simple sequencing, it looks like this. You're going to follow this same pattern for three weeks in a row. And so day one of the sequence, let's say it's Wednesday right now. So on a Wednesday, I'm going to call you Tom. And if you don't pick up, I'm going to leave a voicemail. And that voicemail is going to sound a lot like that cold call pitch. I did except for at the end of the voicemail, I'm going to say, Hey Tom, if you want to call me back, my number is (503) 310-9318.

Jason Bay (22m 14s):
But I'm about to send you an email right now. And the subject line is, hi, Tom, just left a voicemail or whatever the subject line is. So I'm going to use the voicemail to point them to the email. So the goal is not necessarily to get a call back. Cause most people won't call you back, but most people listen to voicemail or they get it transcribed and it like gets emailed to them, right? So they're going to see it in one form or the other. And then your email follows a very similar language to what I said in that cold email. So this whole week's one worth of touches that focused on that one problem, like the cost of delivering great customer support is the example I use. And then I'm going to send a LinkedIn connection request. So I'm gonna do all three of those at the same time. One day, one call you leave a voicemail and then I'm gonna send you an email right after that, they're going to send you a LinkedIn connection request.

Jason Bay (22m 56s):
I'm going to create a little bit of noise and then two days later, so this would be Friday. Cause today we're talking on a Wednesday, I'm going to call voicemails optional. And then I'm going to send a short email on the same email chain. I'm going to reply all to that first email and say, Hey Tom, any thoughts? Question, Mark, Jason, that's it. And you just follow that same pattern three weeks in a row. So week two, you're going to pick a different angle. So maybe it's not the customer support angle in this case, maybe it's the, the revenue angle. What's the, what are you missing out on by not responding quick enough? Like what's the cost of that from a revenue standpoint. So your product or solution probably fixes two or three really big problems for your clients.

Jason Bay (23m 37s):
So each week is going to focus on a different problem. Run that three weeks in a row, you got 15 touches, which is kind of the magic number with outreach. You're doing a way that's fairly spread out. You don't have to come up with like an insane amount of content because each week is like, you're basically repurposing the phone message into the voicemail, which gets repurposed into, you know, you're a cold email, you know? So kind of think about like, this podcast is being repurposed between video and audio. And if you want it to, you could even repurpose parts of it for a blog post. Right. So like kind of think about it like that. I'm like catering to the different mediums.

Tom Bronson (24m 15s):
Yeah. That's I love that approach. Wow. Cause you know, they say that you have to hear the message at least seven times, but even 17 better. Right? I mean the minimum of seven course, that's probably old, you know, we, we are so inundated with information today that perhaps it needs to be 16 or 18 at times until you can, can actually break through. I used to call the kiss method, something else, but I like seeking all substitute sequencing in the future. When I use that, I like the a multi-channel approach. So many businesses use what's called inbound to drive traffic and leads. And that kind of thing, of course, prospecting is really outbound.

Tom Bronson (24m 55s):
Right. So first, why should we do outbound if we're, if we've got an effective inbound and second does outbound compliment inbound efforts.

Jason Bay (25m 7s):
Yeah. I'm glad you asked this question in that way because it's, that's kind of the big question I get. Like why, why even do outbound? And I'm not going to lie to you, man. I mean, in inbound, I'd rather do a call for an inbound lead than an outbound lead because they're coming to you. They're a little further along in the buyer's journey, right? They're kind of in this phase where they're considering solutions are looking for ways to fix their problem versus outbound. I could catch you at a time where you already purchased something recently, right. Or you're not even thinking about it. So the there's pros and cons to both, to me, it's not about doing one or the other. It's about doing both of them. So what you're going to get with outbound that you're not going to get with inbound is I don't know if anyone's ever seen a company where you're like, Oh, that company, like that would be such a game changer for our business.

Jason Bay (25m 52s):
If we landed this logo and that company may not know about your company and the likelihood of you being able to just sit there and have them reach out to you or for you to get a warm introduction. Cause you don't know anyone is very low. That's where outbound comes in is like, how could you start to like look and hunt for companies that might not, you know, that you might not normally be on their radar and like how can you get on their radar and educate them? The other thing too is most high growth companies have outbound sales teams. It's just quicker. The growth is much quicker than, than inbound. Like it takes a long time to create an inbound engine and nurture those folks and do all that others. And again, I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but on the other end of it too, if you've got salespeople out there just, you know, leading with value based messaging, like we're talking about an and really being proactive about those companies that you really want work with, you could do both at the same time.

Jason Bay (26m 46s):
So the way that they compliment each other is, and I'll give you some, some examples. So like I post content on LinkedIn. So when I post a post about cold calling on LinkedIn, but I'd be a hundred people like it, you know, maybe a couple dozen comments, guess what one or two of those people fit my ideal client profile. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to then reach out to Tom who commented on my cold calling post. And Tom let's say runs a company or as a sales leader. I'm like, Hey Tom, thanks for commenting on my post. How are things going for your reps right now? What are you guys hearing? And now I'm in a conversation that I started with Tom, where I'm doing some outbound there.

Jason Bay (27m 26s):
I could reach out to you on LinkedIn. I could give you a call. I do this a lot too. And this is the warmest cold calls ever. I'll be like, Hey Tom, Jason, with blissful prospect of you commented on my LinkedIn post earlier. Oh yeah, yeah, Jason, what's up. And then, you know, it's like, that's how you can get those two to work together. So if you're creating content or people, what might be more applicable to your audiences, people go on the website and download a white paper or sign up for a webinar, whatever it might be. Don't just let those people sit in an email list, start conversations with them. And they may not be ready to buy stuff, but like introduce yourself and educate them. Hey, Tom saw you signed up for the webinar. I'm really curious. What were you hoping to get from it? Or what did you get from the webinar? What kind of stuff are you running across right now?

Jason Bay (28m 7s):
Hey, well, we're working with some other clients like that that are dealing with some similar situations. Do you want to hop on a call when I'm not calling you in the middle of the day here? And we can talk about what some of those companies are doing and can share some insights with you. So I can like be a little bit more proactive about getting those conversations started prior to the point of the person raising their hand and saying, Tom, I want a demo call or Tom, I want to do a sales call with you on a TA and talk to you. You can hit people that are a little earlier in that funnel, but that aren't completely cold because they've been consuming your content

Tom Bronson (28m 40s):
And, and, and content. And of course having a content strategy and calendar and all of those things are so very important because you gotta be consistent with your content, right? I mean, it's, you know, you, you can't go post one time on LinkedIn and think that, ah, okay, that's gonna bring me leads. You know, it's people start looking for and thinking about, and you mentioned re-purposing stuff. We actually do that with a podcast, just starting, I think a week or two ago, this was an idea that came out of our marketing team. They said, Hey, you know, your podcasts are, are fairly lengthy, right? I mean, it's a, it's a commitment to listen to your podcast. And of course, many of our consumers of the podcast will listen to it, you know, to, and from work or, or driving around or whatever, running, whatever they're doing.

Tom Bronson (29m 27s):
And, and I've always said, you know, I don't care the length of it. There's a lot of comments about, you know, they should be short or, or they should be long. Yeah. There's, there's many ways to go. But what our marketing team just came up with is a new concept that we started last week. And I can't believe how it's caught on fire for us. It's, we're calling it a pod snacks when you don't have time to digest a full podcast meal, have a little pod snack and love it. And we're taking like, like anywhere from two to five minute clips out of our podcast, wrapping them in a new little wrapper. And then we, you know, at the end we say, Hey, if you, if you, if you're hungry for more, then go listen to the whole thing and we give a link to it.

Tom Bronson (30m 12s):
Right. And so I love that. So yeah, it's a lot of fun to do that, but I can take the same content that we already have. We can repurpose it in several different ways, posted on every different type of social media, you know, Facebook and LinkedIn and, and, and we, you know, highlighted on Instagram, all these different places, but it's the same content that we're using and people will start hearing that message. Right. And then Bryce books back to us. These are some great, great nuggets we're talking with Jay Bay. Let's take a quick break. We'll be back 30 seconds.

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Tom Bronson (31m 56s):
We're back with Jason Bay, chief prospecting, officer of blissful prospecting. And we're talking about prospecting strategies to Fuel growth. So before the break, we talked about inbound versus outbound effort. What is working right now with outbound prospecting?

Jason Bay (32m 16s):
Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. And we've talked about some of these sorts of things. Multichannel multitouch is really important where you need to at least combined phone and email together, the social part's kind of optional and it needs to be multitouch right. I need to reach out to a person more than a couple of times. And the interesting thing that I'm seeing a trend with that's, that's pretty cool. I see if you can provide more visual elements into your prospecting. So I, you, an example, you could use a tool called video card and it allows you to embed a video into your email. So instead of you writing the email, you could have a video of you waving saying, Hey, Tom, Jason was blissful prospecting here, thought I'd put a face to the name, same pitch, right?

Jason Bay (32m 56s):
Here's the reason why I'm reaching out. You could also in that video. So let's say you have a really good insight to share. So you got some really good studies or a white paper or something like that. That would be really educational for the prospect. Well, you know what? I hate Tom, I hate getting a, an email with a 30 page PDF in it. I'm not gonna, I'm not going to read that. Right? So with that video, what you could do is you could share your screen, hit record on the video, and you could say, Hey, Tom, you probably don't want to read this whole 30 page document. So I wanted to clip out this little piece for you and explain it. It looks like you're a blank position. And a lot of times what I hear is people like you care a lot about this. Here's an insight I thought was really interesting.

Jason Bay (33m 38s):
Here it is. I'd love to unpack this with you a little bit more in, in a quick discussion. If, if you think it's relevant, let me know if you want to chat, right. So I can visually show you something. The other thing too is like, think about how you could visualize data versus just putting numbers. So for example, like with Lindsey, we were working on this cause she helps with tax credits, right? It's like one of the things that we were talking about was like the opportunity that is missed by most small business owners. She talked about this on your podcast, right? Like 83% of business owners under $50 million that qualify for tax credits don't even take advantage of them while you could say it like that, or you could show the person a pie chart and say, Hey, here's the 83%.

Jason Bay (34m 24s):
Like, that's the opportunity, right? So there's, there's some things that you could do, like with a thumbnail or a video and that sort of stuff, think about how you can make your stuff more visual. So get outside of the text-based stuff and the word-based stuff and, and try to incorporate more visual elements because attention spans are just getting shorter and shorter and shorter. So just having something that can kind of catch the person's attention and keep them engaged for a few seconds.

Tom Bronson (34m 48s):
That's really cool. Does that, does the video like using vineyard? I've heard of that. And of course I get emails, occasionally I like that this does that tend to get people's attention or is it only a percentage of people that will look at something?

Jason Bay (35m 2s):
Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's just like anything else it's, it's not going to work with with everyone, but you know, Tom, like for those of you listening, you know, if I held a piece of paper like this and the thumbnail and it had, it said, Hey Tom, and I was waving like this and the thumbnail, I think you might click on it, you know, or if the background was your LinkedIn profile and I was like, Hey Tom, you know, check out this video. I ha I recorded it for you. A lot of people are going to click on that, you know? And it depends on your industry, right. And how tech forward your industry is. Right. But you can still embed an image into an email as well. Hey, saw this stat. Were you aware of this or, Hey, here's a screenshot of something that one of their competitors, Hey, did, did you know that they were doing this?

Jason Bay (35m 44s):
I'd love to share with you some more stuff about how you can prevent this or whatever, you know, the call to action is. So yeah, I would definitely test these visual mediums and, and, and no different than if you were white boarding, you know, with a client in person that you were selling to. And you're, you know, I have a whiteboard here and I was like drawing stuff on the whiteboard. You could do that too. There's all kinds of fun stuff that you could do.

Tom Bronson (36m 10s):
That's really cool. You know, I used to, gosh, years ago before we were using a lot of the electronic ways to connect with people, because I've been around for a few years, we used to invest in these massive, you know, booklets that were about our software and stuff like that. And they were beautifully done, but they're like 16 pages. Right. You know? And, and the sales reps, I, I, when I, when we introduced this, I, I gave them a stack of them and I gave him a bunch of Sharpies. And I said, here's the, what? You don't send this out to somebody with a letter attached to it.

Tom Bronson (36m 50s):
You know what I want you to do? Cause we gave you a lots of blank space on the front. I want you to write with a Sharpie on the piece, you know, Hey Tom, I was thinking of you flip to page 12 and I highlighted something that would be of interest, right. Because then that'll get their attention. Now you've thought about them. You were intentional and you're not just giving them something. I've actually had people do that with me by, by seeing an article somewhere, actually printing out the article and mailing it to me. Right. Cause now I'm going to open it. And, and I've got a great friend who actually does a lot of sales training with the Sandler program. He's been on our podcast before Tom Neeson.

Tom Bronson (37m 31s):
He sent me an article one time. It was like a, I don't know, an article that he flipped out or, or, or top photocopied out of make magazine or something like that. But he wrote a note, you know, sticky note and put it on there and said, Hey, when I, I thought of you, when I read the highlighted part and I've, you know, flip it and I see the highlighted part, well then these got my attention. I'm going to read the whole article. Right. Because he actually related it to me. And you're talking about the electronic ways to do the same kinds of things. And I think that that is really important to make that connection. So you work with a lot of clients and you're considered kind of their coach.

Tom Bronson (38m 11s):
So how would you coach somebody to approach objection handling.

Jason Bay (38m 16s):
Yeah. So I have a framework for that too. It's called Evo. Why

Tom Bronson (38m 21s):
Am I not right? Yeah. So

Jason Bay (38m 23s):
That, it's a, the Eva objection, handling framework and Evo is an acronym it's empathize, validate offer. So I think the mistake that most people make when the objection handles is they do it in a way that like really like almost offends, the prospect. So like, Tom, if you gave me an objection, like, Oh, I don't need sales training. I'm wondering, we're already working with Sandler. And I'm thinking to myself, well, Hey, I could do a better job than these guys was prospecting. And I'm just using this as an example. I really like Sandler stuff. But if I made you feel like an idiot for using my competitor, you'd be like, dude, what are you? What's your problem, man? And that's how most people objection, handle. It's like, so-and-so is like, Oh, I'm using ABC competitor.

Jason Bay (39m 4s):
Oh, interesting. I haven't really heard good things about them. Like if you had to improve one thing about them, what would you improve? And it's like, it's really personal. And it's really invasive. And what it makes the prospect feel like is like really misunderstood and just like kind of disrespected. So there's like this loop that we get into where prospect gives us an objection, we feel kind of bad and misunderstood about it. And they're like, why don't they see the value in us? Or someone says not interested. And you're like, how could you not be interested when I haven't even told you about my company yet? And it goes into this loop the other way, too, where the prospects, you respond with this weird rebuttal and the prospect's thinking is Jason, even listening to me right now, like I already have a solution. So the way we can break that loop is with empathy.

Jason Bay (39m 45s):
So what I need to do is instead of trying to like talk to you in logic, why it logically makes sense to do something else or do something differently. I need to actually engage you on an emotional level to disarm you and get you actually open. I can have all the best advice in the world, Tom. But if you're not in a mode where you want to actually take that advice, it doesn't matter. So if we can use non interested as an example, so that's like more of like a shallow objection. So if someone says, you call them in a cold call and then you're like, Hey, not interested. Not right now. I'm busy, whatever it may be, what I'm going to talk to is what I think that they're feeling. So when someone says not interested, what they're probably thinking is who is this person?

Jason Bay (40m 25s):
Oh God, another salesperson. Oh God, I'm in the middle of something. I thought you were summing up all of those things. Right? So I'm going to empathize with you. And then I'm going to validate that. So that's what this, this, this might sound something like this, Tom says not interested. Oh, Hey Tom, it sounds like I caught you in the middle of something. And if that's the case, I could totally understand why now might not be the best time to take a call. And immediately you're like, Oh, okay. So he's actually acknowledging what I said. He's not trying to like rebuttal me or anything like that. And then the offer piece. So the, Oh, and this is where you mentioned Sandler. They call it upfront contracts. I call it permission-based, you know, questions are permission-based openers, same kind of concept. So I could say, Hey, sounds like I'm at a couch in the middle of something, Tom.

Jason Bay (41m 8s):
You know, if that's the case, I could totally understand why now might not be the best time to take a call. But you know, this might be a long shot. Like, would it hurt if I took like 30 seconds to tell you why I'm calling? And then you could let me know if you want to keep chatting, or if this is even relevant for you, eight or nine times out of 10 and all the thousands of call recordings, I've listened to people do this like that, that typically works. The person's typically open to hearing. That's kind of the beauty behind it. So that's one way of doing it. If someone says we already have a vendor, that's a, that's probably the more common objection we need to again, think about the fact, like, why would this person be saying that? And what are they thinking? Well, they're probably thinking I either, Hey, I really like the person that I'm working with and I don't want to betray them.

Jason Bay (41m 50s):
And I don't even want to entertain another possibility or two. It was a lot of work to like, get this vendor involved. And like, last thing I want to do is disrupt that process. So let's, let's just talk to that empathize validate, Hey Tom, sounds like you're already taken care of. And it sounds like you've put a lot of thought into like the system that you're using to accomplish X, Y, and Z. And the last thing I'm sure you want to do is like completely disrupt that. So I could totally understand if you're not looking into like new vendors right now, but Hey, this might be a long shot. I'm actually working with a couple of your competitors. And what we're figuring out is how they're doing X, Y, and Z, would it hurt if I shared some of those things with you, and then you could, you know, maybe take that back to your team.

Jason Bay (42m 31s):
And in worst case scenario, you, if you hear it and you're not interested and you tell me to go bug off, which I'm happy to do as well.

Tom Bronson (42m 40s):
I love that you give you give multiple times, I'm hearing several points of who, when you're describing what you're doing, giving them permission to say, Hey, you know, I don't have time for you right now. And, and too many sales calls. They're, they're pushing. And, and, and they're, they're trying to argue, but if I can tell you in my own experience, when people actually get me on the phone, in that very same scenario, if they give me a chance to give me, put me back in control of the conversation, I'm still going to give them an opportunity to sell me something, right?

Jason Bay (43m 16s):
Yeah. Well, you bring up something so, so important that this mental block that we have in sales is that we feel like we need to control the conversation. And we feel like if we give the prospect a choice to say yes or no, will, then they could say no, and that's bad when the opposite is actually true. And this is another framework I call the five desires, but I'll just share that one. It's like a desire that everyone has is a desire for autonomy. So like when people feel like they have a choice are so much more likely to comply when they feel that they're doing that out of their own will versus being forced to do it. So you actually want to give prospects choices. That doesn't mean that you sound like an unconfident or incompetent, whatever the word is, like, lack of confidence.

Jason Bay (43m 57s):
I'm not saying well, and then Tom, like, maybe you could decide, you know, cause you probably don't want to talk to me, but maybe then you could decide if you want, you're not doing that. You're just giving them a choice.

Tom Bronson (44m 8s):
That's, that's a perfect opportunity. Right? And, and as I used to, one of my mantras that I tell salespeople all the time is that people love to buy. People love to buy. They just hate to be sold. And if you let them control it, then by asking them good questions and allowing them to control the conversation. I think you've got a much better opportunity. I just, I love your approach. I'm sitting here thinking, I want to hire you to prospect for my clients, but you don't do that. Yeah. You teach people how to do it. So there are lots of businesses out there that teach sales techniques and, and, and some of them might offer, you know, prospecting services, things like that.

Tom Bronson (44m 52s):
What differentiates your business, blissful, prospecting from other sales consulting companies?

Jason Bay (44m 57s):
I think it depends on like what you're looking for, you know? So if you're looking for like the type of feedback that I get, like the way that I train is very fun. So I, I try not to be super serious about stuff. To me. People take sales too serious. I, I think it should be more fun, especially prospecting. So I'm definitely in, in, in tune with that. The other thing too, is like, as you can tell, I'm very framework focused. So it's not just scripts and templates. It's like, why does this work? What should I do? AKA, those are the framework pieces. And then let's get into the how of like what that script says or what your email says, but you need to understand the psychology behind it. So really like, that's a really big thing that I focus on is that framework type of type of approach.

Jason Bay (45m 43s):
And then the other thing too is like reinforcement. So I'm not going to come in and meet with your company for four hours and download, upload all this information to you. And then take off, we work with our clients on a longer case basis, you know, six, eight weeks, you know, three months, like let's actually make these habit versus me just saying all this stuff. That sounds really good. And then your whole sales team forgets about it.

Tom Bronson (46m 12s):
Oh, okay. So even the name of your company, blissful prospect, he gets sort of puts me at ease, right? I'm sure that that was intentional, right? Oh, it's this full prospecting, right? It kinda, it reduces your anxiety a little bit. When you think of it that way, I love your approach. Let me ask you one last business question before we wrap this up and that is, this podcast is all about maximizing business value. What's the one most important thing that you would recommend to any business owner to build value in their business.

Jason Bay (46m 47s):
This isn't sexy, but this really fits into the theme of your, what you do, right? The business like the resale value, like how sellable is your business it's systems, man, it's the unsexy part of the business that like every single job you have in your company should have like a Wiki. You should be using some sort of thing with like, here's this person's job description. Here's step by step directions for all the tasks that this person performs on a weekly basis with your sales team. It's the same thing. I see this like complete, just winging it with the salespeople they come in and like they, when they don't have like talk tracks and like emails, templates, it's like really systemizing everything, making sure everything's got a framework that it's got an approach to it that it's documented.

Jason Bay (47m 28s):
All of that stuff is extremely important. You should able to lose a leader in one department and someone else should be able to come in and pick up right. Where they left off

Tom Bronson (47m 42s):
Documenting processes is perhaps one of the most important things a business owner can do. I am so glad that they, you said that it's not only sales processes, processes throughout the organization. You know, in fact, I would argue, I hear this a lot. I hear this frequently from business owners on man, it's hard to find salespeople. And then it takes us, you know, six months or a year to get them up to speed. And I always retort with, so do you have documented processes? And that the answer is no, I always, and by the way, the answer is almost always no, right? If the answer is no, I said, well, that's why it takes you so long to get somebody up to speed because you're teaching them on the job and you don't have any processes documented.

Tom Bronson (48m 28s):
If you take the time and really document Bulletproof processes that people can follow step-by-step, you will cut the time to get somebody up to speed and firing on all cylinders in half. Maybe more. Do you agree with that? Oh,

Jason Bay (48m 45s):
Totally. That's where a playbook, you know, comes in. So Cameron Herold used to be the chief operating officer at a 1-800-GOT-JUNK and also college pro painters. One thing that he always says is like, anytime someone on your team does a task, it shouldn't feel like the next time they do that task. Like the first time they're doing that task again, like there should be an outline of like the step-by-step directions for, for everything in your business.

Tom Bronson (49m 11s):
Absolutely. And that's, it's so hard to think about because, you know, if you think about processes in a business there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of processes, and it gets overwhelming by thinking about documenting all of those things, but it just starts with documenting one, right? I mean, have the person who is the best at doing this is to have, have a trainee sit beside them and just document what they're doing and how you can clean it up. And next thing you know, you've got a good clean, documented process. It doesn't have to be that hard. So, so you have been a great guest, but of course I can't let you off the hook. People who listen to our podcast are always waiting until my bonus question.

Tom Bronson (49m 52s):
And I always ask the bonus question. And now I'm, I'm fascinated to hear what your answer is going to be. Jay Bay, what personality trait has gotten you into the most trouble through the years?

Jason Bay (50m 4s):
Well, I think like, I just think like trouble with my wife, just like, honestly, that's like lack of open-mindedness around like certain things, you know, whether that was like a big sticking point in a relationship for a long time, it was like, I just had this need to like everything I ate had to be organic, you know, kind of thing. And it was just like really unnecessary. So like, stuff like that is, is, you know, just stubborn and not open-minded about certain stuff. It's like, I might sound like I'm super open-minded on this interview. But like, dude, I just like anyone else, you know? So that that's, what's got me in the most trouble.

Tom Bronson (50m 40s):
I love that. That, and just like usual guilty. Yeah. That's definitely one of the things that's gotten me into trouble through the people. Cause you know, you say stubborn, you say I'm a strong-willed pigheaded is a good description. Sometimes the way that that I can be, I understand it's gotten me into plenty of trouble. How can our listeners and viewers get in touch with you?

Jason Bay (51m 3s):
So I actually put something together for you guys that you could check out it's at blissfulprospecting.com/tom. So we kind of talked about like emails and cold calls and like the messaging. We have a framework called the reply method. So it's a framework for like writing those cold emails and like the messaging. And I broke it down into like a one-page guide. So it's got like a lot of good stuff. And then that kind of summarize or what we talked about today and it's free because download it's a one pager at blissfulprospecting.com/tom. And then you just go to our website, blissful, prospecting.com. So there's tons of free content on there for you or your sales team. If you have one. And then we also do bootcamps and stuff like that, where we help people sit really good for a little bit of support to check out the website.

Tom Bronson (51m 46s):
I love that. I I'm that's where do you think I'm going next? I want to see the free stuff. And, and by the way, you know, that is really important. You mentioned, you know, lots of free stuff on your website. We do the same thing. As I, as I tell people, business owners who wants to use our services or who want to think about preparing their business for transition. If they just go to the website, I give away so much free information there, you could almost do it on your own or you really couldn't do it on your own with all the free information. And people ask me all the time, well, why don't you give all this stuff away for free? I said, well, first of all, everybody could go and do it on their own, but they won't right.

Tom Bronson (52m 31s):
They're not going to probably, but I keep giving them value. I keep giving them value here there, you know, this podcast is a great value. People listened to it are going to have a great value in improving their prospecting process. And when people want my service or need my service, who do you think they're going to call? They're going to call the guy who's been giving them value over and over and over again, without any expectation in return. So I'm glad that you mentioned that you have been a great guest Jay Bay. Thank you for being on our podcast.

Jason Bay (53m 3s):
You bet. Thank you for having me. You

Tom Bronson (53m 9s):
Can find Jason bay blissfulprospecting.com, but I would encourage you to do the blissfulprospecting.com/tom, to get some free stuff. You can also find him on LinkedIn. And of course, as always, you can always reach out to me and I will be more than happy to offer a warm introduction. This is the maximize value

4 (53m 28s):
Podcast, where we give practical advice to business owners who are passionate about building long-term sustainable value in their businesses. Be sure to tune in each week and follow us wherever you found this subscribe to us on YouTube or wherever you found this podcast. And if you want to comment, then we love that we love comments and we respond to all of them. So until next time I'm Tom Bronson reminding you to develop great prospecting habits and a great prospecting strategy while you maximize business value.

Announcer (54m 6s):
Thank you for tuning in to the maximize business value podcast with Tom Bronson. This podcast is brought to you by mastery partners, where our mission is to equip business owners to maximize business value so they can transition on their terms. Learn more on how to build long-term sustainable business value and get free value building tools by visiting our website, www.masterypartners.com that's master with a Y masterypartners.com.

Announcer (54m 52s):
Check it out. <inaudible> that was perfect. I wouldn't make any changes on that.