S. 3 Ep. 39 – Case Studies: Successful Speaker Business Systems

Intro: You know those moments when you’re doing what you love in your business, maybe it’s standing onstage or creating content, whatever it is, you’re totally immersed, and time just seems to slip-by? This is called The Flow State. At Speaker Flow, we’re obsessed with how to get you there more often. Each week we’re joined by a new expert where we share stories, strategies, and systems to help craft a business you love. Welcome to Technically Speaking.

Austin: All right, we are live. Taylorr, welcome to the show, dude. Thank you for joining us today. It’s so great to have you.

Taylorr: It’s really an honor to be here. I’ve heard so many great things. Yeah, just really pumped. Thanks.

Austin: Okay, well, we’ll see if we live up to those expectations.

Taylorr: Are you interviewing me today? Is that how this is going to work?

Austin: I think so, yeah. So, I had somebody this week tell me, he goes, look, I’m going to be really honest with you, in one of your old podcast episodes, you and Taylorr were talking about whether anybody would be crazy enough to go back and listen to every episode from the beginning.

Taylorr: Oh, no, they didn’t.

Austin: I am that person. I was like, oh, I’m sorry. Don’t do it.

Taylorr: Don’t do it. Those were rough early episodes.

Austin: The episodes are good. But, yes, we have learned a lot.

Taylorr: Oh, very awkward windows calls.

Austin: It did. Yeah, it did. So, yeah. The early podcast days.

Taylorr: After 150 of them, though; you get a lot more comfortable.

Austin: It’s true. Yes, that’s exactly right. Yeah.

Taylorr: So, this is a call to action. Do not go listen to the old episodes, thank you very much.

Austin: Well, or listen to them, but just don’t say we didn’t warn you. At least that.

Taylorr: Don’t tell us that. Yeah, don’t talk to me about it. We understand.

Austin: Don’t tell us about it. Okay. So, the context for this episode is that constantly we get asked the question, what are other people that are successful using the system doing? It’s the embodiment of the, I don’t know what I don’t know question. Which is perfectly understandable. This is already technology, sort of an abstract concept for a lot of people, especially those that don’t have some sort of background in business technology. So, in this episode, we are going to give you as many use cases as we can in 30 minutes for ways that systems can make your life easier based on what we see other people doing frequently successfully, right?

Taylorr: Yeah. The other thing I want to emphasize here is you don’t necessarily need to be using Speaker Flow for this stuff to work. You can figure out how to do this in any system on earth. So, these case studies we’ll be sharing with you are not platform specific, they’re just processes and technologies that you can piece together to make your life way easier. And if you’re not using Speaker Flow, my first question is why? And my second call to action is go book a demo. But this will work if you’re happy with your current setup.

Austin: Yeah, that’s right. If you are a client already and you hear something that you want to have built, reach out. Because we’ll help you build.

Taylorr: Hit us up. We’ll build it. Done for you systems.

Austin: Doneforyousystems.com. That’s not a thing, don’t Google it, people.

Taylorr: Okay. Do not on that.

Austin: All right. So, we’re going to start off with probably one of the most needed systems based on what people tell us their desired outcomes are for their business, which is business development. So, maybe, Taylorr, start by giving us context for the process of business development.

Taylorr: Correct. So, let’s just zoom out for a moment. Let’s think about your entire sales process, right? It’s pretty straightforward honestly. You either find a lead or a lead comes to you. A lead is defined as somebody you believe you could do business with but haven’t yet. And then you follow-up to see if they’re interested enough to usually have a sales conversation. That’s usually where our world takes place. You want to book a view for a gig, maybe hire you as a consultant, maybe look at some licensing stuff. We need to qualify their interest to have a conversation. 

Once that conversation is scheduled, we’re now in sales development, where we’re taking those people and we’re getting them to potentially buy from us and following up. And as we can see in some priority, yeah, business development is the top of our funnel, if we will, middle-ish. And then sales development is closer to them actually making a purchasing decision. So, business development, the mission is not to sell a single thing in this process. The goal is just to make contact with somebody, start building a relationship and qualify their interest and see if we can get them into a sales conversation. The biggest thing we hear from folks, especially as it relates to these two things, is if I can get someone on the phone, I can close the deal. How many times have you heard that in the last four years, Austin?

Austin: How many clients do we have? All of them.

Taylorr: Yeah. All of them. Yeah, 1200 times. Yeah. We’re all very confident; I think that makes sense, right? We’re the owners, the visionaries, we can sell the vision. If we got somebody on the phone, we’re in good shape. The biggest challenge for people is getting more opportunities to actually pitch. So, getting sales meetings scheduled. And for a lot of folks, it’s kind of a wait for the phone to ring kind of situation, a word of mouth, a referral thing. And for a lot of our clients, they want to have a more predictable mechanism for getting more sales calls scheduled. 

The biggest challenge, or at least from my perspective, Austin, feel free to fill in any blanks here; that we find with people trying to book more sales meetings is that it’s not really standardized how we follow-up with those people. Like you get a new lead, a form comes through your website or maybe you find something on the Intel engine or LinkedIn and usually it’s automated email if they submit the form or it’s the first email that goes out to say, Hey, you have an event, I’m a speaker, let’s talk. And then that’s kind of where it ends, there’s no follow-up past that point. And there’s also, if there is reinvention of how we’re following up. 

So, a new form might come in, you send an email and then maybe the next day you come back to it and you’re like, yeah, they still haven’t responded, so I don’t know, maybe today I’m feeling like I’m going to pick up the phone. Some days I feel like I’m just going to send a LinkedIn message. And there’s nothing really structured about the process of trying to move them through the process of booking a call. Especially if you do any amount of cold outreach, like what percentage of people are going to reply on the first response or the first email that you send out to them, 0%.

Austin: There’s data about that. It’s like, yeah, less than 10%.

Taylorr: Zero. Yeah. Right? No one is usually going to reply to that first outreach. In fact, there are many studies that show that the average touch points needed before somebody’s willing to book a sales call if it’s not inbound, is somewhere between 7 to 12. And I would reason to believe that, that has increased as we’ve become more digital over the last few years and as communications have gotten a lot heavier for people. And so, long story short, we can’t be reinventing the wheel over and over again when we have a new lead; because one, who wants to think about how to do that every single time. But two, we need a standardized way of following up so we know more importantly, when to cut bait. When is it not worth following up anymore so that we can move on to other leads and start following up with them. 

So, this first system is all about how do we standardize that process of following up and we have a resource for you, which we’ll point you in the direction for. And then how do we get our system to actually tell us what we need to do and when we need to do it so we don’t have to think about it. So, Austin, I’ll kick it back to you. Do you want to break down that process for folks?

Austin: Sure. Yeah. So, anytime we’re talking about some type of system, there’s a trigger and then there are steps that need to be followed. And that’s technical language here, but there needs to be a way to kickstart the process and then there needs to be a process to be followed here, right? And exactly what Taylorr is saying is the key, all it takes for a business development process to be a business development process is you need a standardized series of steps and enough of them. And I’d probably add another layer in here as well, which connects to the systems component here, because most people that are doing some type of outreach and follow up do it exclusively through emails. 

And so, you could accomplish a system like this simply by sending an initial email, snoozing that email and having it open up at a later date. Then you can just reply to that original email and everything could happen there. So, real basic simple of what Taylorr is saying right now, could theoretically be a standardized number of days between touchpoints and snoozed emails to help you accomplish that. But emails are typically not the best way to get in touch with everyone. They’re a way, but you want an omnichannel approach here; you want emails, you want phone calls, you want LinkedIn messages, you want Facebook messages, you want carrier pigeons.

Taylorr: SMS.

Austin: Right. As many different touchpoints as possible. So, to enact a system like this, it could be as simple as getting out a piece of paper and writing down how many touchpoints, what to touchpoints and at what cadence. So, today I send an email; a week from today, I make a phone call. Two weeks from then I send another email, then I send an SMS message, there’s my system. And that can be then translated into technology in different ways. Our favorite way of doing this is through what we refer to as task automation. Meaning that through a single action taken in a system, generally a CRM, a series of tasks that follow the sales cadence, the series of touchpoints, and the number of touchpoints on the timeline that we’ve decided. All of the tasks for that populate immediately. 

And then the only thing that we have to do to get somebody through the process is complete the tasks that populate on the day that they’re due. And if you do that, then you’ll be able to consistently follow that sales cadence provided that you’re disciplined enough to go in and do your tasks every day, listeners. And I think that one of the key components here and why we like task automation outside of just the ability to be reminded is that the nature of tasks and automation like this, or a template of some kind that’s attached to it, is that the standardization equals data. And this is one of the big things about business development that prevents people from improving here is that if you’re not doing the same thing every single time, you can never know at what point in your process are things falling apart or things slipping, right? 

But if we have the same series of tasks that we follow every single time for the same scenario, then we can see at what point in the process we’re either getting wins or we’re getting losses. For example, if I see that one email template that I send out each time gets opened every single time, but another doesn’t, then I know that one template is good to go, but I should make improvements to the other. We’ll never be able to know whether or not that type of situation is unfolding though if it is not standardized and almost certainly documented in a tool that can help keep track of this, because doing it manually is a giant pain.

Taylorr: Right. And there’s an important element to what Austin’s talking about here, and it’s that this doesn’t need to be perfect, right out of the gates. I think we kind of get stuck in our perfectionist mindset sometimes, where it’s like we need to have the perfect cadence, the perfect emails, we really focus on all of the right messaging and blah blah blah. And I think that’s valuable because it shows you care; you’re not going to spray and pray, you really care about helping people out and getting the results. But it’s okay that this is iterative in nature, that’s the whole point. The goal is to get something established and then improve it along the way. 

A perfect example over here at Speaker Flow, just from our own experiences and selling is I found out recently, I’m not doing much SMS stuff, and not mass SMS marketing, but if I’m not able to get in touch with somebody, maybe they scheduled a demo and then they fell off the face of the earth. I realized recently, well, maybe I could just send them a text, maybe that’s an easier way for them to communicate. And Austin’s talking about this omni-channel approach, not because we want to inundate people, but we want to figure out what channel they’re most responsive on. And for some that will be email, for others, that’s LinkedIn, for others, that’s SMS. 

And I found particularly at Speaker Flow, LinkedIn and SMS are vastly more responsive than just emails. And so, we said, okay, well, there’s a hole in our process right now. We don’t have any SMS follow-ups in there if someone ghost us, so let’s throw one or two of those in there and that way we can improve the process. And we’re constantly iterating on that. It’s not perfect, we’re still figuring it out as we go, but it gets better and better over time because we can lean on our data. And the really cool thing is now I don’t really have to guess about what to do every time we have a new lead. There’s a process to follow, I don’t need to think about it and the system can hold me accountable to getting those things done, rather than letting things slip through the cracks. 

So, if you’re looking for something like this and you don’t have it yet, if you go to speakerflow.com/resources and you scroll down a little ways, there’s a resource called watertight selling. If you can’t find it, hit us up, we’ll send it to you. But it’s just cadence that we’ve already built out for you. It’s seven touchpoints over a few weeks with different channels and different messages and things you can use. So, if you’re looking for a starting point, we have significant evidence that thing works just right out of the box, and then you can take that and then start making tweaks to it. 

Really, the goal here is to prevent anything from slipping through the cracks and start collecting data to improve the process. On that note, I think another really common one that comes up, task automation-wise, is let’s say after you close a deal, right? You think about all of the things you sell; you sell speaking, you have virtual and in-person versions of that, sometimes hybrid, maybe you have consulting, maybe you have coaching or group coaching. When we onboard somebody, when we close the deal and now we have to deliver for them, there are always a series of things that need to get done to ensure the same experience over and over again. 

And for a lot of people, we reinvent all of the things that need to happen every time we close a new deal. But let’s talk about selling a speaking gig, maybe it’s in-person. What are all of the things that need to get done every time you sell an in-person gig. We have to book the travel, we have to book the hotel, maybe organize ground transportation, maybe put that in a tool like TripIt or Travefy. We have to create the slide deck. Maybe we have to do some pre-event questionnaires or pre-event interviews to do customized content. We want to run a debrief call afterward. We want to get the lead magnet setup, think about all of the moving [Inaudible – 14:49].

Austin: And the client gift and collect the survey.

Taylorr: Collect the survey.

Austin: Make sure that the balances are satisfied.

Taylorr: What are the chances we’re going to remember to send the client gift when we’re inundated with all of the other stuff we have to do to run the business? If we can standardize how we deliver every single time we write that down, all of the things that need to get done, it can even be based on when your event is. So, booking travel 30 days prior to when the event is, right? We can get really clever here. If we can standardize how you deliver for each of your different offerings, now we can plug that into a system and every time you move that little block to I won that deal, boom; all of the task loads, all of the things that need to happen can happen right there and we won’t let anything slip through the cracks. 

So, I think this is another system where task automation can be particularly useful. And there are other things you can automate in that, some emails that go out pre and post events; there are some areas where it doesn’t need to be fully manual. But having a roadmap that tells you how to onboard and deliver successfully for a client every single time just removes more guesswork. And the thing I really want to emphasize here, I know I’m on a bit of a soapbox, bear with me. I talk about this all of the time, especially in demos or really early on about systems, I think when we’re thinking about systems, we immediately think about all of the features, is it easy to use? Does it have X, Y, and Z? Can it do this function? Is it going to save me time? Is it going to make me money? And those are all valid things for sure, and we want to be looking out for those when we’re looking at our systems.

But really the core point of systems is alleviating everything that’s in our head and putting it somewhere safe. If you don’t have to think about what to do when a new lead comes through, if you don’t have to think about what to do every time you close a speaking gig, a coaching engagement, a consulting engagement, there’s less stuff to think about. And you get to stay in your creative zones of genius; you’re in flow more, which is the whole point of why we’re called Speaker Flow. It’s so much less about the technology and so much more about the psychological benefits of having a place to keep things safe and being held accountable to. 

So, when you’re thinking about systems and as we go through some of these case studies, kind of think about that idea, what are the things that you’re keeping in your head that are just consuming space that if we could put somewhere else and know it’s safe, now we can start moving up quite literally Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and start thinking more creatively about our business.

Austin: So true. Maslow’s hierarchy is the perfect connection there.

Taylorr: Yeah.

Austin: This is all about psychology, really. Forget about business performance, there’s an element there, but the business can’t perform if you are not at your best. And systems are about helping you get to your best; this is the whole thing here. I also want to point out something before we run through a couple of other scenarios here. So far we’ve covered two; we’ve covered a standardized business development process and another one that we’ll label as a sales to operations handoff. Meaning that you’ve sold something and now you’re standardizing the steps that you follow to fulfill on whatever it is that you’ve sold to somebody. There’s a process for creating a system in and of itself. 

Every single thing that we’re going to talk about today is going to flow through these exact same steps, which is, A, you have to identify the need for the system, which is exactly the point of this episode, we’re giving you context and use cases that can help you identify the need for a system in your business. You identify it, then you have to standardize the steps, meaning that you have to know what needs to happen each time. And we’re giving you some ideas here, but this is going to be different for everybody. Everybody’s going to have to define their own process. Identify the need for the system; standardize the steps that it takes to do it. Document that somewhere, ideally in writing; could be video. 

I’ve seen different ways to go about this, but the best possible thing you could do is write down what that process looks like somewhere. And then you can either create automations to help assist in the following of that process or you can delegate it to somebody. And that could be yourself if you’re a single person in business, but if you have a team, you can then hand that system off to another team member to help with. And I think the reason that I feel the need to point this out is that we’re talking about systems here and systems almost always are translating to technology, but technology actually isn’t really the point at the end of the day. The technology, it’s a tool, it’s a medium, it’s a vehicle, it’s a way to enact a system. But more important than the technology itself, it’s who’s involved and what is the process that they’re following, and then technology just assists in that.

Taylorr: That’s right.

Austin: All right. Taylorr, we’ve both had a soapbox. I think we’re probably good there. Should we come through another couple of scenarios?

Taylorr: I think we’re good there.

Austin: All right.

Taylorr: Yeah, for sure. This is actually one of my favorite ones. I’m going to plug talk it out here. What’s up, [Erel – 19:33], if you’re listening? I’m sure many of you listening to the show have heard about this or this works also with just a standard form opt-in. Speaking particularly is an incredible revenue stream. Not because it can, obviously, make you some good money, but because it’s also marketing at the same time. It’s the only vehicle where you can get paid to do marketing. And a lot of people in our industry talk about how do we create spin, more referral, right? 

And that’s awesome. We want to do that, we want to lighten up on the outbound stuff and really build a strong inbound machine. And the best way to do that is by garnering the interest of the people you’re already talking to. Think about it, if you get hired by an association, let’s, I don’t know, the American Marketing Association and you go into that association, everybody in that audience can potentially buy something from you and we want them to know about that. And so, what’s cool about something like Talkadot, where let’s say you have a QR code onstage at the end, where people can submit a form and give you feedback, kind of does everything all in one so you can get feedback on how you did and give them a reward for submitting that, basically; a lead magnet. This also works with a form. 

So, we do this all of the time where we set up a simple form, there’s a QR code that goes to that form, they fill it out. What’s nice about this is after you collect that information, one of my favorite things I’ve seen done, I won’t name names here, but it’s super cool and if you’re listening say what’s up? But after somebody, let’s say submits that form or downloads that lead magnet, we can ask a question that says something to the effect of, I want to hire Austin, I want to refer Austin, or I just want Austin’s content. And they can select all of those options. They can select one of those options or none of those options. 

And what’s nice about asking that question is your audience turns into a lead generation machine. And we’ve seen it where people will walk out of an audience and have 12 people saying, I want to hire Austin to speak. Maybe 20 people saying I have a referral for Austin. And now we have 22 opportunities, 32 opportunities, potentially, to tap into just from asking that question. And there will be some audiences, let me be clear. If we brought you in at Speaker Flow, could all of our staff members buy from you? Maybe not the high-ticket stuff, maybe some consumer stuff if you have it. So, this will depend on the audience that you’re speaking to and how that performs. But if we use it every single time, then we’re going to get our audience to turn into lead generation machines for us. 

So, now, anybody that said, I want to hire you or I want to refer you, they become a lead. If you’re listening closely, from that first system we talked about, the follow-ups automatically show up of how to follow-up with that person and then we move them through the process to get them to buy from us. It’s an incredible mechanism to get your audience to turn into lead generation machines for you. But there’s an added element to this too that we’ve seen that I think it would be a shame if we didn’t mention, and it’s this idea, we learned this from a client of ours actually, we’ve never seen it done before until recently and it’s turning out to make people a lot of money after a sale. 

But they put together an offer where after that form is submitted and they’ve checked they want to book or hire or refer you, they’re now then redirected to a page with an offer to book a meeting with you that is paid. And you can set the price on this; we’ve seen ranges from a hundred to $500 on this. You can kind of select your price point, whatever you deem is worth an hour of your time. For some people, they’ll also include a workbook or a book or an assessment to breakdown afterward and your audience can then buy this thing from you after they’ve submitted that form. 

And so, we’ve seen it where our clients will make an extra few thousand dollars on the backend of a gig. And what’s cool about that is chances are, let’s say 10 people sign up for that meeting, one or two of those people usually can buy more things from you. And because they’ve gotten a taste, now that kind of turns into a sales call and that turns into more business as well. And so, it’s a full system for not only getting your audience to turn into leads, but also get them to buy something from you, and because of that taste, now they’re going to be buying more stuff from you. Which is absolutely beautiful, it’s one of my favorite things on earth.

Austin: It’s freaking genius. Well, they say that somebody that’s bought something from you once is 85% more likely to buy from you again than somebody that hasn’t bought from you before. So, even if you’re giving away an hour of your time for a hundred bucks to meet with somebody, that person is then 85% more likely to buy something else from you than somebody that hasn’t, right? And so, I think that this is one of those areas that are a loss leader in a grocery store. You can afford to take a lower cost for an hour of your time with this specific scenario because it’s very likely to lead to additional purchases. 

So, yeah, it’s an awesome system and shoutout, you know who you are if you’re listening to the show and you’re the one that gave us that idea; so, thank you. We’ll promote you to the world if you tell us we can. Okay, so this so far has been in the context of building relationships with the buyer at the end of the day or managing a relationship with somebody that’s already bought. Another type of relationship that’s typically managed where this type of premise can be involved is nurturing bureau relationships. And you’ve had a really cool experience with a client seeing that system play out, so maybe you can share that story.

Taylorr: Yeah, for sure. So, this was probably three years ago or so. One of the goals of this client was to build more bureau relationships, get booked with more bureaus. And I think at that point he had, maybe a handful, five different bureau relationships. None of the top dogs either. And over time, one of the things I’d tasked him with was, go find other bureau agents and bureau reps at companies, engage with them and see if they’d be interested in sharing your content with their clients. And so, today, after three years, now has a list about 200 different bureau agents and reps and once a week, he produces a lot of research, but this works if you don’t produce research, you can just share content. But basically says, Hey, I produced this new thing, here’s why it’s valuable to your clients. 

Feel free to share it in the context of this thing that they may be looking for. And every single time this happens now, he sends the email out and 5 to 10 new holds at $15,000 plus come from bureaus. And it’s because he’s staying top of mind and there’s no ask inside of that email except just share this with your clients if they could find it valuable. And I think one of the underutilized elements of our industry is treating bureaus as partnerships. A lot of people have, I think a little bit of entitlement when it comes to bureaus, if I’m being a bit blunt about it, where it’s like, oh, they’re just going to book me like, I’m great, they should be representing me, blah, blah, blah. But bureaus are looking for partners; people that they know can deliver for their clients. Because their butt is on the line, their buyer who’s hiring that bureau to hire you as a speaker, rhey’re the ones that’s contractually obligated to you delivering.

And so, when they have confidence that you’re delivering when you’re top of mind, it makes them easier to pitch you because they know what you do and then they’re going to consistently book you over and over again. And now this person is represented by over 25 different bureaus and the vast majority of the revenue is coming from that. And he’s doubled the business year over year for three years straight. There is no cold outbound in this business model. It’s all inbound from his websites and managing bureau relationships. And that’s when your word of mouth becomes predictable. 

And I think if you’ve listened to our previous shows and our other guests that we’ve brought on, we really kind of toot the horn about always having an active revenue generation piece to your business. And for a lot of people that does translate to doing cold outreach because you’re in more control of that. But active revenue generation can apply to having an inbound approach. You’re being active in nurturing those bureau relationships so you’re top of mind so that they continue to work with you. And he just updated his website so he is able to say, Hey guys, just updated the site, what’s the best way to update my profile with you guys? And everybody’s responding with, all of this is great, super helpful. And now there are more holds coming in just because of this little milestone of a new website getting created. 

And so, because of this idea of treating bureaus like partners, really establishing a relationship with them and staying top of mind, this is how you can really establish yourself in the bureau world so long as you have what a bureau is looking for. And there are some things that need to be accounted for there like fee range and volume of your own bookings. But if you’re already past a six-figure point in your own revenue generation, most bureaus are really eager to have folks that they know they can deliver and they would be happy to work with you. So, if you’re looking for a mechanism to boost up the bureau relationships, this is an absolutely perfect one. And with enough time it really turns into an active machine that becomes predictable and we can start weaning off more of the outbound stuff.

Austin: Yeah. So, I think we have one more system that we could touch on here, but I think, maybe let’s land the plane on a higher-level idea that I think all of you can use here. Every system that we’ve shared so far, business development, sales to operations handoff, onstage lead capture, and then this last bureau relationship development, let’s call it process. These are all related to milestones that have to get hit inside of the customer journey. For example, business development is how you treat a new lead to get them booked into a sales meeting, right? So, the customer journey involves them getting into your system, your process somehow, and the steps that you take to get that sales conversation scheduled. 

Another milestone moment, sales to operations handoff means that they’ve already gone through the sales process, they have purchased from you, and now you’re focused on the client experience. With onstage lead capture, this is addressing how people get into your database to begin with. It’s a way to start the customer journey with somebody. Same premise for bureau nurturing, it’s a mechanism to get additional leads into your business at the end of the day; based on relationships, so let’s not just think about it in terms of outcomes. 

But if you’re asking yourself the question, where in my business are systems relevant? You could start by documenting your customer journey. Meaning where are all of your leads coming from? What happens when they become leads and how do you move them to the sales conversation? What do you say? What’s the script? What’s the process that you follow in a sales conversation? How do you take somebody from that sales conversation through your sales process to make the decision? When somebody buys, what happens? When you’re getting closer to, in the event, if it’s a speaking gig, what are you doing? What do you do after that happens? 

These are all components that you’re already, if you’re running a business currently, doing inside of your business. And so, write it down, create a flowchart of what happens when somebody goes through your business. And what you’ll find is that every single step in that customer journey will have a system attached to it.