[00:00:18] EMMA: [00:00:00] I am gonna teach you some things today. We talk We talk a lot on this podcast, and I personally am a very practical learner, and one of the things that we have been trialing in our community is something called a BD Sprint. More on that later. First I wanna tell you a story. I had a lady come to me and she said, Emma, I've got a issue with my marketing.
And I asked her a number of questions and the issue wasn't with her marketing. The issue was with leads, the issue was with sales, and what I see is that women confuse. Marketing with sales. So marketing is all the content, all the pieces that point towards a conversation. Sales is [00:01:00] the conversation. Sales is having a relationship with someone and saying, would you like to play?
It actually doesn't have to be icky, and everyone thinks it's icky and it's not. It is literally just, I have this thing. I think it would help you. That is it. Now, when I break it down for people like that, they go, oh, that's actually not hard to do. And I'm like, yes, it's not hard to do, but we still don't do it.
We still don't carve out time to actually do it. So. Last year I created something called the BD Sprint. Now, BD stands for business development. It is just something that I, I don't have much creativity and I want the titles of my things to make sense to people. So a sprint means go quite fast.
And business development bd, pretty simple. But what we did was we ran it live, uh, three or four times last year and another couple of times this year. The last time we ran it live, we had. 80, a hundred women, and they're all pointed in the same direction. They're all doing exactly the same [00:02:00] thing on exactly the same day.
They're all cheering each other on, and I would jump in at the back end of the day and talk about what they had achieved that day. We start with a plan. We always start with a plan. You need to start there. After the 10 days, we had sold collectively about $530,000 worth of services. In a market where people were saying,
"It's hard to sell."
Do you know what? It's actually not hard to sell. You just need to make the offers. You need to talk to people. You need to either pick up the phone or you need to DM or you need to do text messages, whatever your thing is. It is not hard to sell if you're doing it every single day. And it's about consistency and we do it for 10 days straight.
And then I had a brain fart in my head and I went, what about if I put this on demand so that people can do it whenever they want, however they want in the comfort of their pajamas? Wouldn't that be amazing? And so we've put it [00:03:00] on demand so you can do it live with us. The next one, I dunno when that is.
It's on the website, but then we have a demand version. So you've got two versions. One, you show up live to one you do. That is self-paced. Now, I've also heard things like, oh, courses don't work unless there's a community wrapped around it. Totally agree. But I also know we've sold this thing now a number of times, and the dms that I am getting, or the private messages I'm getting are this thing works, which makes me so
happy.
So every day for 10 days, I drop a tip. You have a plan, and we work on that together. What I thought we'd do here. Is drop a couple of tips so that you can get kind of a sense and a feel for what that feels like and get on with it. Think of it as a free little piece of our BD sprint that I'm prepared to give you.
Now, hands up if you have time in your diary to do business development.
Excellent if you do, but everyone that I speak to does not. [00:04:00] They like, it drops to the priority of our list. They think they're doing. Business development. When they're writing content, they are not, and so they don't actually carve out time. Now, for nine years, I have been doing business development for an hour a day.
I don't know how many hours that is, but that's a lot of freaking hours. So I feel like I'm a bit of an expert in this, but it's also carved into my diary. In green, it says relationships because that's what business development is. It's relationships.
And so it's carved into my diary so that every single day I keep that non-negotiable appointment with myself and I get it done.
If you don't have it in your diary, step one, pull your diary. Put it into your diary an hour a day. Now you might be thinking, what am I gonna do for the hour? Great question. There are so many things that you could do, but let's keep things really simple and let's think about [00:05:00] what we would do in real life if we weren't doing a sprint, which is quite fast paced.
You need a plan. I don't sit down on the Tuesday for an hour and go, what am I going to do with my business development? Mm-hmm. I actually already have a plan sorted. So normally there are three plans that I build for people. In the business development sprint, which you can download, and so it's a focus on either LinkedIn or it's a focus on a holistic plan, or it's a focus on a personalized plan.
The personalized plan is picking up the phone. I know no one wants to do that, but that is the biggest bang for Buck. If you are prepared to pick up the phone and have conversations with people. Sales happen. I'm just saying, so before day one. I want you to think about what's your plan? Will you focus on LinkedIn?
Will you focus on Instagram? Will you focus on a bit more of a personalized plan? Will you focus on, picking up the phone? [00:06:00] They're kind of a couple of things that you might wanna think about, and then get your plan and document it. Who actually am I gonna call? I'm gonna call Sarah. I'm gonna call John.
I'm gonna call Alan. I'm gonna call. whoever it is, you need to know who exactly you're gonna call. So that's the first thing. When I first started in business almost nine years ago, I literally pounded the pavement. I've told this story before, if you heard on on the podcast. I'm sorry. I had one offer.
I mean, I'm a good coach. Let me just start there. I'm a really good coach. I have been coaching for. A long time, 15, 20 years. I've been coaching for a long time, so I'm a really good coach. But I had one offer. My one offer was working with me for three months for $5,000. That was it, just three months, five grand.
And I, my offer was for women in leadership, women in organizations. And so I had, when I started. Zero idea about how hard this might be, or zero expectation about how [00:07:00] easy it might be. So I basically pulled out my LinkedIn and went, who do I need to connect with? Who do I need to tell that I've gone out on my own?
And now I'm Emma McQueen, P-T-Y-L-T-D, and I pounded the pavement. Three months. I pounded the pavement, literally Melbourne every single day on the train, four to five coffees a day. That's committed. Stupid, but committed, right? So if you are like me and you're thinking, where do I even start? Open your LinkedIn.
Find out who you connect with. Go meet them. Tell them what you're doing. Ask them what they're doing. Be curious. All the things from that we sold and sold and sold. And we sold about a quarter of a million dollars worth of revenue in those 12 weeks. Now you might go, whoa, that's amazing. No. Whoa. That was stupid.
Should have stopped maybe at the halfway mark because I had to deliver that work, right? That meant like, I don't [00:08:00] know, 48 clients or something ridiculous in that first, in those first six months. Ouch, ouch, ouch. Not sustainable. That is not what I want you to do. But if you did half of that, I'd be very happy for you.
So I don't expect you to go and do that because. That's really not for the fainthearted, I promise you. So instead, we'll start off a little bit gentler. I tell you that story because I know this works. it's just a numbers game and I know it works. And I know people want human connection and people want relationships.
So what we really wanna do is we really wanna, day one, we wanna look at our current clients and we wanna take a little stock take of who. Are our current clients and how can we serve them more? Because it's much harder to go and find a new client than to service one you already have. So all I want you to do, just to get your sales and uh, muscle moving is reach [00:09:00] out.
Reach out to all your current clients, day one and say Thanks for your business. How's it going? Check in. It could be a phone call. It could be a text message. This bit is not scary. This is just the warmup stage, but we wanna focus on our current clients. We also wanna focus on the clients that maybe we haven't heard from in a little while.
maybe they weren't ready when we were having conversations with them, like go back over the people in your diary that you've had calls with and maybe there's some follow up as well. We know the fortune is in the follow-up, so if you are following up and you can. Help your clients in any way, your current clients, potential clients, older clients, all the things.
Let's say you're a web designer and you have had a client who you designed a website for two years ago. It's time for a ju up. It's okay to R them and go, Hey, how's your website going? Do you need it? Does it, is your up, that's okay. That's business development. It's not that hard, is it? You might be someone who writes [00:10:00] copy for someone and you've noticed that their copy is looking a little bit like luster.
It's okay to say, Hey, notice that maybe you might need a, let me help you. That is business development as well. The amount of people who are already doing business development and don't even know they're doing business development astounds me and the amount of people who are having lovely conversations and never offering a service also astounds me.
You have to make an offer at the end. And sometimes this is really hard. I was talking to a client who's overseas and she said, I'm just not closing the sales. And I'm like, okay. I said, well, you can send me the recording 'cause I really wanna see that, but are you being explicit in your offer? And she's like, what do you mean?
And I said, well. Which offers do you have? So she told me she had four offers. I'm like, okay, we're confusing people. So first of all, just offer one thing. Your job on a sales call is to actually say to them,
Here's what
I've heard. Here's what I can offer. Here's what I think suits you. Do you know, she did that the next day and she sold it.
Yeah, it works. Amazing. Amazing. So day one, we wanna have a [00:11:00] plan. We wanna have an hour in the diary and we wanna contact our current clients and just say, thanks. You're amazing. And keep the relationship going. It is that simple. That is day one.
All right. Day 2 Day two, I want you to think about the journey you take your clients on. We are so busy as business owners working in the business, doing the delivery of the business that we never stop to like look up and go. Really what journey am I taking them on? We don't have our CEO time to go, Hmm.
How do I go from cold outreach through to warm lead through to sign up Today? What I want you to think about is your potential client journey from cold to sold. I just made that up, but you know what I mean. So you don't know them and then they sign up. What touch points can you put in there to make sure that they feel connected to [00:12:00] you?
And so we wanna build trust with people. And we wanna do it in a systemic way so that we don't burn out and we don't have to keep rethinking about it or keep making the decision. We really wanna go. if you're watching on YouTube, I've got a big circle and we really wanna go, what are the touch points that we've got that will help our clients get from cold to sold?
So it might actually be, that you, help them with something. So they might come into your world, you might have a call with them. You might then go, what do I do next? You might offer them something and they might say, no thanks, or you might offer them something and they might go and need to think about it.
So what are the touch points that take place through your business? I've got a whole map, which is round and pretty and pink, and it's basically, here's what we do first. Here's the call, here's what we do next. Here's what you do next. Here's what we need to do next. And the research says that people, there needs to be like.
[00:13:00] 10 to 13 of those before people buy. And in today's economy, people are reticent to spend their money. And so we need to just as the CEOs of our business, as the salespeople of our business, we have to work a little bit harder to get them to know who we are, trust who we are, and build a relationship with them.
So I wanna let you in on a little secret. What do you think we are doing now? Now we are dropping content for you at the top of the funnel in the hope that you get to know, like, and trust us. And then you drop into my world, you get added to my email list, you go through the process, you might do a call with me, you might download something, you might binge listen to our podcast, you might do all the things.
Bang, you're in our world. Yay. Welcome. It's fun over here. So what you wanna do is you wanna grab a piece of paper, literally just grab a piece of paper, draw a circle big enough to fill an A [00:14:00] four sheet of paper, and then you need to put in, I don't know, 10 points around the circle and you need to go, right?
So when someone has a call with me, then what happens? Okay? And so then I send an email, and then what happens? By the way, I'm just giving you the little touch points, and then what happens after I send an email? what value am I adding? And so you go around the entire circle with all the things that you can systematize.
I didn't say automate. I said systematize. And so that someone has a really beautiful, consistent experience with you and your business and your brand. Now you might be thinking, Emma, that's gonna take ages. No, it's not. It's gonna take you 20 minutes. Grab a cup of tea, grab a piece of paper, draw a circle, start thinking about what does my client journey map look like.
and this is, this is how I do it. This is how I do it for each thing that I'm selling. So if I, if you have different target audiences, you might wanna have a couple of different client journey maps for that.
The touch points [00:15:00] are so important, so important. Google did some, analyzing of data points and they concluded that in order for a customer to make a purchase, a. They must consume seven hours of content. That's seven hours of this podcast, right? interaction or engagement with your brand.
They can be reading your blog posts, they can be looking through your website. They can can be participating in masterclasses or webinars or watching your videos across 11 touch points, which means. 11 different instances where your buyer comes into contact with your brand. That's a lot. So we are just talking about the sales element, but all the marketing stuff has to happen at the same time.
So if your potential clients can't get to know you, there's no chance they're gonna buy from you. So I want you to think about that as well. Today we're talking about bd, but there are so many other things that you need to do to make sure that they're coming into your funnel.
Yeah, for us, we have our beautiful [00:16:00] podcast. We have socials on Instagram, we have LinkedIn. I write blogs, I write articles. All the things. I do so many things, but that's also after nine years. So just pick one thing and stick to that thing. But for right now, you wanna map the client journey. You wanna show people how you can take them from A to Z in 10, 11 easy steps.
So let me get really practical about the client nurture sequence that I'm talking about. Let's pretend that you have chosen the LinkedIn plan as your plan of action while you do the BD Sprint, right? Number one, you connect people on LinkedIn.
That's pretty easy. Now, you can personalize the invite or not personalize the invite. I've done both. The numbers wash out the same, interestingly enough, so that's number one. Number two, you might have some conversations with them in the direct messages. That should be simple enough. Number three, you might try and get on a Zoom call or a phone call with them after a couple of [00:17:00] messages in the dms. This doesn't happen after a day. By the way. This is your client nurture sequence and you need to be patient and you need to have a way to make sure that you're mapping this so that you don't lose, Time and so that you don't worry about, oh, I haven't heard back from them. It doesn't matter. We just have to connect with them. And then you might have a phone call or a Zoom call and you might go, yeah, we should work together, and you might offer them something or you might not. If you offer them something, I would hope that you do it in a beautiful, clean way.
This is what I've got, this is what might work, and this is how much it costs. Cost is very important to talk about. And then you might get off that call and you might send them a proposal. Beautiful proposal on Canva or whatever collateral you've got, and you put a little line at the very bottom that says, if I haven't heard from you in a week, I will follow up because that's our job to follow up and it leaves you on the hook and it makes them think, oh, she's gonna follow up.
Awesome. then You might have something to invite them to. So we run masterclasses all the time here at M McQue, so I might come [00:18:00] along to the masterclass. You'll love it. Whatever it is. And then you might add some more value. You might do another follow up You might also shoot them a text message. You might check in. You might just have heard something that they said in the call. Let's say they were talking about one of their kids who has anxiety, let's just say. And you might see an article about anxiety. You might think of them and instead of just thinking of them and letting it finish, you might actually send them the article and say, Hey, I thought of you.
That's it. a client nurture sequence is about having a system, but also just being thoughtful. Yeah, Now as we wrap up, what I wanna say is this, I have given you day one and two.
I'm gonna go through the steps very quickly about what we discussed so that you can go right, check, check, check. Okay, so number one, have a plan. Are you gonna focus on LinkedIn? Are you gonna focus on Instagram? Where are you gonna focus on two book an hour in your diary every single day that you name "relationships".
Day one, we are looking at current clients, older clients, [00:19:00] prospects, all the things. People that are sitting in your diary that maybe haven't heard from you in a while, and we're sending them gratitude. We're thanking them, we're just checking in with them. It's as easy as that. And then day two, we wanna map your nurture sequence because you wanna know how you take people from A through to z.
We've given you day one and day two and the plan. Of course, you can have a look at all of this. The BD Sprint on demand is available and it's very cost effective, and instead of waiting for the next tips, you could just grab it, run yourself through it, and get on with it. And also then let me know how you go.
I'm so keen. I'm so keen for women to not feel like sales is icky and for them to do it in an aligned way Now. Little footnote on human design. I've got clients who love human design, and if you haven't heard of human design, feel free to go down that rabbit hole. I'm not gonna discuss it here. But what I do wanna say is that some women say to me, I [00:20:00] can't do business development because my human design is A, or My human design is B, or My human design is C.
so what I would say to you, if you're sitting there going, that's not me use. Chat, JPT some AI tool to say, here's my personality, or here's my human design. Show me some examples of how I might do business development in a way that's aligned to me. Ladies, there is no excuse to knob do bd, none whatsoever.
If you want your business to grow, if you're serious about results, if you want revenue in your bank account, it is a non-negotiable. We cannot sit and wait for things to drop in our lap. So I hope you found this super practical, super useful, and uh, let me know how you go.
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