[00:00:00] Emma: Hello and welcome to Tea with the Queen. Today I'm going to take you on a little journey, a behind the scenes journey of a challenge
[00:00:26] that we did with our Thriving Woman Gang and also with other beautiful, beautiful ladies. But first I want to tell you a story. Do you love sales? Your answer's probably no, and that's okay, but do you love building relationships?
[00:00:39] Do you love building connections? Do you love chatting to people about what they're up to? The answer's probably yes. And that's all sales is, right? Connecting with people, building relationships with people. so many women that I speak to are so frightened of sales. Sales is scary. Business development is scary.
[00:00:56] On day with the queen, I did my keynote. And for those of you that have followed along, we do day with the queen once every two years, 120 women in the room, beautiful women. They have a luxe time. They learn. They are in relationship with each other. They have fun, all the things. And one of my stories was a story about when I first started my business way back when I had no cash, no idea and no clients
[00:01:21] and I literally just pounded the pavement. I had a lot of cups of tea with people and I caught up with people and I just talked to them about what it is that they need and what I could have provided. And I do and still do now an hour of business development a day. And I've done that for the last seven years and it's held us in very good stead.
[00:01:41] there is no doubt in my mind that the work that I did in those early days and now still do lead to success and to results. Now a secret for you all. I was terrible at sales. I had a boss who told me, Greg, that I was terrible at sales. And so I had this narrative in my head that I was terrible at sales.
[00:02:01] So the only way to get rid of a, uh, A narrative that plays in your mind or a story is to actively go and change the story and flip it around. Now, in those first few sales meetings or those first few meetings, I can tell you, I was not picking up what they were putting down. And sometimes they had to say to me, Emma, I'm trying to buy.
[00:02:19] And I'm like, really? Wowzers. And so, you know, even if you. something, you can absolutely improve and improve and improve. And now I work with women all the time and they say, I just don't have enough clients. My cashflow is lumpy. I don't want to do sales. I don't want to feel like a used car salesman, but ladies, we got to get good at this.
[00:02:38] We have to get good at And so after day with the queen, the thriving men gang and I decided that we would do an
[00:02:45] hour of power a day for a month
[00:02:47] and partway through that, they were getting some such amazing results. I wanted to share it with the rest of the world and invite other people into our inaugural business development sprint.
[00:02:57] And so I had this, this P of an idea and I messaged my friend Nikki from Cinch Training. And I said, Nikki, I've got this idea. What if we could get a whole stack of women together to do business development at the same time? She's like, yes, let's jump on an Instagram live. And I'm like, So we jumped on an Instagram live and you can see it on Nikki's feed.
[00:03:15] You can see it on my feed. It was amazing. And we just chatted about what the BD Sprint would look like. I had written a couple of business development plans, mainly around LinkedIn, Instagram, and personal outreach so people could pick and choose. And we said to people, if you want to come and join this BD Sprint and do an hour of power a day, Awesome.
[00:03:35] That's the commitment you make. I created a Google Doc and we use an app called Marco Polo so that everyone can check in each day. Nikki and I ran that at about 1. 30 in the afternoon. By five o'clock, we had 17 women enrolled in that. And it was a free challenge, by the way, absolutely free. I just wanted to have a ripple effect.
[00:03:54] And I knew that if I could get a ton of women faced in the same direction, working on the same thing that we might just have a chance of one, getting some amazing results, but also cracking the code of sales So that was great. We had that. And then I realized I haven't gone to my list with this. And this whole thing started because I sent an email out to my email list and said, this is what we're doing.
[00:04:16] And I had some people say, Oh, can I join? And I'm like, yes, you can. So we sent it out to the list and we got about another 40 people who wanted to do the challenge. So I was managing a couple of different groups, the thriving women gang, and also the general public and, and women who were in my world.
[00:04:33] And so their commitment to me was I'll do an hour of BD a day and I'll report on it so that we could capture the data. And my commitment to them was I would show up on Marco Polo every day. I would give them a sales tip every day and then we'd round out the day and I'd answer questions as we went.
[00:04:51] Look, it was so much fun. I think some of these things just feel hard and massive and arduous, but when you chunk it down into small chunks, actually spending an hour on LinkedIn a day is not a big deal. having one phone call with someone or one zoom call with someone is actually not a big deal. I feel like we make it bigger than it needs to be.
[00:05:13] So if you can imagine, you've done zero business development in your business for. a month. A lot of women have never done business development. They have all been about the referral and ladies referrals are freaking amazing. I want more referrals, but that is not a proactive sales strategy. We need to be proactive about going out and having a bit of a sales strategy, right?
[00:05:38] some of these women had never done business development before. So they spent 10 days. Doing 10 hours of business development. Some of them found it really tricky. I'm not going to lie because you have to show up. You have to show up. You have to be in service. A lot of the, things we talked about was people getting stuck on.
[00:05:59] I'm connecting, but I'm not moving it along into the next conversation, or I don't know how to do this authentically, or how do I do this and still be me? Now I've been doing it for a long time, so I feel like sales comes relatively easy to me and I don't feel like I'm ever selling if people come and have a chat with me, I help them with whatever their issue is at that point in time, and then I'm like, here's how you work with me.
[00:06:21] And I offer it up and if they choose to take one of those options, awesome. If they choose not to take one of those options, also awesome. But I like to gamify business development I love a game. I love a challenge. I also think we're better when we're doing something together. And I wanted to get rid of this, Silly notion that sales is scary.
[00:06:42] Sales can be amazing. Sales can lead to conversations you never thought you would have. Sales can connect women together. Collaborations happen. More business happens. The sneaky thing about. bringing a group of women together is they needed to tell us who they were. I know that they have got those women have gone on and got relationships with each other.
[00:07:06] So they were out there doing the same thing, but also they were making sure that they, were showing up as themselves in the group and they got clients out of it. How awesome is that? So we had a full on week. I won't lie. When I thought about this business development sprint, um, I was smack bang in the middle of launch for Thriving Women.
[00:07:28] And I thought, Oh, can I take another thing on? But I love sales and I love helping people get over their fear of sales. So I knew it was so in my wheelhouse to do this. We had full on two weeks I also ran an event called go get a day, which I do in Melbourne.
[00:07:45] It was a sold out event. So at the same time I was launching thriving women. I was getting ready for go get a day, our final one for the year. And I was finishing off this sprint and there were some incredible smart humans in the sprint. I don't think you can beat. So as I was putting the plans together, some of them focused on their LinkedIn, some of them focused on the Instagram.
[00:08:09] I focus on personal outreach. Who can I actually speak to? Who can I get belly to belly with? Who can I get eyeball to eyeball with? There's nothing that speaks better in terms of credibility. If you can show them what you do. And one of the beautiful things for us is go get a date. I facilitate a room full of women and they're getting stuff done on their business and on the side I'm coaching them if they've got any issues that come up throughout the day and they love that.
[00:08:39] Last go get a day, I sat down with a woman and she said to me, Emma, I need a new revenue stream. I'm like, awesome. We had 15 minutes together. We scratched out a new revenue stream. I showed her how she can make 108, 000 from the new revenue stream. Do you reckon she was happy with 15 minutes with a business coach?
[00:08:57] Oh yes, she was. But it also showed her that actually it's not that hard when we break things down. Now in my email list, if you're on my email list, you would have seen a bit of the behind the scenes sneak peek at some of our stats, but I thought I'd round out the challenge with the final two weeks, although four for our thriving women gang.
[00:09:18] And if you want to see this because you're a visual learner on Instagram, just jump onto my Instagram page, Emma Armour Queen, and you'll be able to see it there as well. But I thought I would share all of the data from those business development sprints. Okay. So the numbers by the numbers, this gang spent 101 hours connecting and engaging on LinkedIn now there is a caveat to this. I should have said this. Some people didn't fill in their results. So these are only for the results that I got. If people filled in their results, right? So 101. Hours spent connecting and engaging on LinkedIn, which turned into 1,502 LinkedIn connections made
[00:09:55] 1,502. Amazing. There were 322 phone calls made. They are my favorite. With 97 meetings booked these stats don't lie. From that 26 proposals were sent, 51 hours spent connecting and engaging on Instagram and 402 new followers on Instagram. But the creme de la creme, the piece de resistance 103 pieces of new business secured
[00:10:30] let me say that again, 103 pieces of new business secured. Whoop whoop! You bet I was excited. Now, you might say, what does 103 pieces of new business secured mean, Emma? Well, it means a new client, a new retained client, a new membership, a new registration. It could mean any of those things because everyone has very different business models.
[00:10:54] But ladies, the alternative is no business development. and no business secured. And in the economy as it is, everyone has been saying to me, Emma, no one's buying. That is a load of BS. People are buying if the messaging is right, if the marketing is right, and if you're doing the sales. Now, a little thing that one of, my ladies really understood very well in this, the fortune is always in the follow up.
[00:11:21] We know that buying decisions are taking longer at the moment, which is called And I've tested this out. I tested this out throughout the Thriving Women launch. 11 touch points. That's what people need to buy. Now, not everyone is doing 11 touch points. Not everyone is following up. So if you're the person doing the touch points, doing the follow up, chances are you're going to secure new business.
[00:11:46] As I said in my email last week, there are no surprises here. When you show up consistently, the work comes in. You can also see that when you put in the effort, you are absolutely rewarded. And boy, oh boy, have we been rewarded. It was a fabulous experiment and we will be running it again, throughout Thriving Women next year, but also with the public.
[00:12:08] So if you're listening to this and thinking, Oh yeah, I need a bit of a zhuzh up in my business development. We have a, challenge that will run in February of 2025. People are tired now. people are still buying now, by the way, people are absolutely still buying. So if this gives you some impetus and you think, how do I do it?
[00:12:26] Just reach out to me in the DMs. I will share with you how we did it. but we will be doing it three times next year because what we know is everyone got a little bit more momentum, a little bit more comfortable with BD. And so we're going to do it three times next year. Amazing. So if you're frightened of business development, or you think, Oh, I don't want to sound too salesy.
[00:12:48] Can I say, pick up the phone, show up on LinkedIn, show up on your socials, be okay with BD. Buggering it up. Oh my goodness. I buggered it up so many times. Now it doesn't even feel like a sales call to me. Now it just feels like a conversation that I've having with someone and I have an offer at the other end.
[00:13:10] I hope this has helped. This is an unusual one for me because I don't normally do behind the scenes, but I loved this experiment. I know this experiment's got legs. Also, if you're listening to this and you're like, Hmm. Change the name. Yes. I want to change the name. I don't think BD experiment is the best thing or BD sprint is the best name for it.
[00:13:29] So if you feel like there's a better name for it, let me know that doesn't lose its essence because essentially this is all about showing up and focusing on business development. Hey, if you choose to take any of these tips, please let us know. Love to hear about them.
