What To Say Now: Episode # 1
Welcome And Intro To What To Say Now

Prefer the PodCast version? Here you go!

Show Notes and Links:

Full Show Transcript:

Dan Stewart (00:13): Hey everybody. My name's Dan Stewart. And today I have Melissa McHone joining me for our very first episode of What to Say Now. Welcome everyone, and hi, Melissa. How are you today?

Melissa McHone (00:27): Hi, Dan. Happy birthday. It looks festive behind you.

Dan Stewart (00:30): Hey, there you are. Yeah. Well, today is a day I turned five. I'm five years old today. That's pretty exciting stuff. So Melissa, first, I want to say thank you for joining me today. This is a special day, and not just because it's my birthday. It's a special day because we are going to start a project today that could be very transformative for you and a lot of people who are choosing to listen to this broadcast. So once a week, every week, on Monday at 2:00 PM Eastern, we're going to go live and we're going to be discussing what to say now.

Dan Stewart (01:12): Now this is really critical because have you ever, for example, wondered why it is that your prospects treat you like a sales person instead of simply a person? It turns out that decades of running scripts on people, decades of learning to be a master manipulator, instead of a master servant, have cost those of us in the sales profession a very great deal. So today what we're going to do is start an ongoing conversation that's going to help you break through all that clutter. It's going to help you get to the heart of what it is that people really want. And so you can deliver your message more effectively to them, which helps them first and helps you second.

Dan Stewart (01:58): You see, I think a huge problem that many salespeople have is they get so focused on needing to hit a goal for their own income. They want, they want, they want. And the problem is they're not putting their customer first, because the way to really grow a tremendous business, the way to really have a happy life, is to serve other people first and then to be blessed with everything that comes after that. If you only focus on providing enough value for people, they will find a way to bring prosperity to you, I promise you.

Dan Stewart (02:31): So once a week, every week, on Monday at 2:00 PM, we're going to be answering these questions about what to say now. And your job, quite simply, is to join our Facebook group. It's called What to Say Now. You can just search for that on Facebook, and tell us the things you need help with. So this could be absolutely any sort of communication issue that you have. If it's communicating to your employees, to recruits, to prospects, to people you've been nurturing in your database forever, that you can't seem to get to respond. If it's even just how to figure out how to put your database together in the first place, those are all things that we can help you with.

Dan Stewart (03:10): By the way, I'll give you a little bit of a background and introduction for myself. Happy Grasshopper's my seventh company, I am a serial entrepreneur. Happy Grasshopper is nearly 10 years old, and over this time we've helped thousands and thousands of sales professionals figure out how to communicate with their database in a way that allows them to attract more business in a very effortless way. So right from the start, we've said we're the easiest way to keep in touch, and today we're going a step further by teaching you exactly what to say. So, Melissa, how are you doing?

Melissa McHone (03:54): I'm good, I'm good. I'm really excited about this new project we put together. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

Dan Stewart (04:00): I'm glad that you are. I'm glad that you are-

Dan Stewart (04:03): There's like a 30 second lag there a little bit. I thought you were totally frozen. There's a big lag right now, between when I'm talking and when you start. So I'm going to start [inaudible 00:04:15] there.

Melissa McHone (04:21): No, I'm excited about this.

Dan Stewart (04:22): I'm not getting you at all, Melissa. You've got a rough connection there.

Melissa McHone (04:23): I think there's going to be lots of good questions, and lots of different angles.

Dan Stewart (04:30): All right. So-

Melissa McHone (04:30): Yeah, you're fading out.

Dan Stewart (04:32): I'm getting a message right now saying that my internet connection is unstable, which... We are currently having a lot of storms in the Tampa Bay area, that might be it, but we're going to soldier on and get through this. So again, if you're tuning in today for the first time, what you need to know about me is that I'm a person who's created multiple successful companies and all of it has not been because I'm a great salesperson. It's been because I've been great at helping start conversations that lead to sales opportunities.

Dan Stewart (05:04): So the purpose of this whole project is to teach you those very same skills. And the way that you can get involved is just join our Facebook group. On Facebook at What to Say Now. So you can go there and you can ask any sort of question at all. And we're going to take the time every Monday at 2:00 PM to answer those questions live for you. Like we are today. Now, Melissa, the first question, do you have this one queued up for us?

Melissa McHone (05:30): Let's see. I am just looking here. You know, it looks like... Oh, I also want to remind people it's Eastern time, 2:00 PM Eastern time on Mondays. Being a West coast girl, I always have to remind myself of the time zones. So I'm really excited about this group. I mean, like you said, I think people need to just get on Facebook, join our group, come hang out with us and, like you said, ask any questions. I mean, again, I forget to reach out to people on a regular basis and then I just don't know what to do. And I get nervous or embarrassed by that. And that's really what I think we need to talk about and overcome and help people to feel comfortable with.

Dan Stewart (06:21): That's a really great segue to the first question that we've been asked, which comes to us from a person who, like a lot of us, is probably feeling a little guilty because they haven't reached out to people who are already in their database. As sales professionals, it's so easy to be focused on those new leads all the time. Because, "Oh, it's new, it's fresh, they're ready to buy. Let's hope." We want that to be the case. And yet, there's almost always more opportunity for us within the group of people that already know who we are. So sometimes you get so busy with those new leads, you forget to really nurture the relationships that you already have. And it leaves you feeling guilty. If we have a relationship and I haven't reached out in a long time, I tend to have a feeling like, "Oh my gosh, I hope they're not mad at me because I haven't reached out."

Dan Stewart (07:11): And what's funny is I actually have these feelings, as the king of keeping in touch.

Melissa McHone (07:16): You do.

Dan Stewart (07:17): It still happens to me. It's easy to get so caught up in the day-to-day that you sometimes don't reach out to people like you need to. So when that happens, when you find yourself in that situation, you need to have some language that's going to reach out to them and not make them feel alienated. And whatever that language is, it should never be anything that makes them feel guilty. You don't want to try to offload your guilt to them. It should be something that expects a reply. So I'm going to model an example here for you. Let's imagine that Melissa and I have known each other for, let's say eight, nine, ten years, because guess what? We've known each other for eight, nine, ten years.

Melissa McHone (08:02): Exactly.

Dan Stewart (08:03): And during that time, you've worked at companies like RETechnology. You worked at companies like DocuSign and sometimes we'd see each other at conferences on a very regular schedule. And then sometimes we might go for a year, even, without seeing each other or without having a conversation. So when that happens, I have a choice that I can make. I can reach out to Melissa in a way that makes her feel as awkward as I do. Or I can just reach out to her and pretend everything's fine. So because we know each other, we can assume that we've got familiarity within our relationship. This should not be some sort of formal, "Dear Melissa," it should be light. It should be friendly and it should be the kind of content that makes it easy for her to reply to.

Dan Stewart (08:57): So something short like, "Hey, Melissa, was just thinking about you. How have you been?" "Hey Melissa, I was just thinking about you. How have you been? Signed, Dan." If that's an email, could be a text, could be a voicemail. I mean, there's all sorts of ways to get that message out there, but it feels completely nonthreatening. It feels like a human being reaching out to a human being, not like a sales professional, reaching out to a prospect. Okay. So that's the key tip here, is if it looks like sales, if it smells at all like sales or marketing, it becomes very safe to ignore and you can't be safe to ignore if you're going to build real relationships.

Melissa McHone (09:41): Definitely.

Dan Stewart (09:42): Yeah. That's how to handle that one. Absolutely.

Melissa McHone (09:45): Fantastic.

Dan Stewart (09:47): Next week, on Monday at two o'clock, we're going to have a whole bunch of fresh new questions and we're going to answer those for you during a live segment.

Dan Stewart (09:56): Now, for those of you who are watching this now, I'm doing something very special tonight at 5:00 PM Eastern, when I'll be going live on Facebook with my friend and real estate coach, Jared James. So you probably know Jared James, because he's amazing. He has made a huge, huge, huge improvement to the way coaching takes place in the real estate world. And I'm super proud of his progress as a professional.

Melissa McHone (10:23): He's kind of a big deal.

Dan Stewart (10:24): And I'm very fortunate and grateful to call him my friend. So to join us tonight, live at 5:00 PM, all you have to do is come to Facebook and go to Jared James Today. That's it. Facebook.com/Jared James Today, at 5:00 PM. Jared is going to be putting me in a hot seat so that I can help you guys know what to say now. All right. So Melissa, can you tell me about a time in your sales career when you struggled to come up with some sort of content?

Melissa McHone (10:55): Oh yeah. I mean, it happens more often than you think. And typically, I try to find something that's familiar and I try to remember something like, "Do they have five kids? Do they have 12 dogs? Do they live on a ranch?" I mean, what is that ice breaker going to be? Make it personal. And so, I want to start with a personable because you and I talk about this all the time. But people want to do business with people that they like, people they trust, and people they think are smart. And so, if you just follow that path and keep those relationships close. Then I think that's the first step in moving towards a sale down the road or making money at some point.

Dan Stewart (11:45): Well, for example, in our relationship over the years, going back to your RETechnology days. You guys were fantastic. We'd write a blog post and you would share it. It was great for us to have that sense of exposure. And I want to bring this up because there's all sorts of things that were in alignment with what you were doing then with the things that we're teaching here. Because, like the concepts of induced reciprocation, you were giving us exposure first, before there was any sort of ask for some kind of financial arrangement between us. That often makes sense. There was an establishment of rapport. There was all this time that would go between when we talk or see each other, there'd have to be something to bring that relationship back into perspective. So one of the things that you mentioned, like the name of their dog, or how many kids that they have, something like that, that's great information to store and keep in your CRM and have it there.

Dan Stewart (12:48): But a lot of times, you're out and about, like you might go to the grocery store and go, "Oh my gosh, I know that person, but I can't think of exactly where I knew them." Or, "I know that person's name, but oh, I can't remember exactly what that is." Or, "Did they have the dog or was it the... I don't remember for sure." That's called real life. And you can't just pop up in your CRM there. So you need to have a strategy to be ready to have those kinds of conversations at a moment's notice. And the strategy that I'm going to share with you for that is called shared observation. So wherever you happen to be, there's something that you both can observe at the same time.

Dan Stewart (13:27): And all you have to do is call attention to that thing.

Melissa McHone (13:30): It's like bread, at the bread aisle at the grocery store.

Dan Stewart (13:32): If you're in the... It could be, "Hey, I just saw there's white bread here that's labeled wheat bread. What's that all about?" That's a shared observation. It's something to bring up a conversation about. So folks, here's what we're going to do. Every single Monday at 2:00 PM Eastern, we're going to go live, with the exception of this coming Monday. It's Memorial Day. So we're going to be off with our families just like, hopefully, you are.

Dan Stewart (13:58): So we'll be live on Tuesday next week, at 2:00 PM. So until then, please get your butts over to our Facebook group. It is What to Say Now. So you just have to go to Facebook and search What to Say Now. And it's your job to pop the questions you'd like answered in there. Give us as much detail about the communication situation you found yourself in, and we'll read your questions. We'll come up with the right answers and we'll share them with you and the rest of the world at 2:00 PM next week. So have a great day everybody. And guess what? I'm old. Yay.

Melissa McHone (14:35): Yay.

Dan Stewart (14:37): Bye now.

Melissa McHone (14:40): Bye.

Brian (14:40): Happy birthday, Dan.

Dan Stewart (14:42): Thank you, Brian.