Master Deal Maker Secrets

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. This week we are recalling another top episode of the year. We are going to talk about implementing new strategies. Trying something new is always challenging. Businesswise, if you want to implement new strategies and new ideas to your process, you’ll find yourself dealing with new circumstances too.   They may work better for you and your clients or they may not, but believe me, there are some things you should be aware of if you want to give new ideas a chance. Otherwise, you may not be able to take full advantage of them.  What I find is that people are creatures of habit, they tend to only use what works. That's great! because you should stick with what works, right? But bear in mind, if you only do what you've always done, you'll only ever get what you've always gotten.   So, you do have to try new things if you want to get a different outcome. I know this may not go as smo

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Firstly, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for listening to the podcast this year. It really does light me up to get such positive feedback and makes it all the more rewarding for taking the time to make the podcasts each week.   We have covered a stack of ground in our conversations relating to the single focus of Master Deal Maker Secrets - growing revenue in your business.   Inevitably, there have been some episodes that have been more popular than others and over the next 5 weeks we will be revisiting the 5 most downloaded podcast episodes for this year.   We are going to start with episode 94, where we talk about 4 Ways to Get Better with Names. Forgetting a person's name is something that we've all encountered at some point in our lives, either professionally or personally and it can not only be embarrassing, but it can also cost you business or relationships.  If th

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. The year is almost at its end. Over these 11 months, we've talked about a lot of things you can do to improve your sales, optimise your sales systems, and maximise revenue in your business.  I've had a really good response to a number of the different shows that we've done this year so, today, we are going to be recapping the Top Five episodes of 2021.   These five episodes have been really well received and have gotten more downloads than any other episode this year and I am sure that you will get a lot out of listening to them if you haven't already.  If you are familiar with these episodes, go back and listen to them again, it is always useful for you to revisit them so you remind yourself of how the methods and strategies you use in your businesses work; that way you can assure you don’t overlook any aspect of your processes that can cause trouble later on.  I’m also going

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. In previous episodes, we’ve talked about creating a dream client list of people that you would love to work with but aren’t coming to you through your existing marketing.   Once you have set up that list you must get in front of them, right? Today, I’m going to tell you about two very precise strategies that you can use to do it.  Here’s a scenario, let's say you're going after painting contractors. A great method that you could use to get into a conversation with those people, is to ring them up and say, “Look, I'm calling every painting contractor in town and I'm interviewing them, finding out how they're actually doing things.”  This strategy consists of a survey in which you are going to be analising how every business of a given guild in a particular place is positioning themselves to succeed, and trade through the current economy that we're in.   You are going to provide a

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. In today’s episode, we're going to be talking about the difference between process and outcome. This is a mindset thing, and one thing we know about mindset is that behaviour is a huge part of it. Behaviour is defined by what you say, how you sound, what you write, and how all that is perceived by your potential client. Your behaviour ultimately determines your result. If your approach to sales is focused on process, instead of outcome, you can expect a particular result; if things are the other way around, your results are going to be different. Very different. Let´s elaborate on that. Process is focusing on activity and focusing on making sure that you're using a winning process to work with your clients. You are certain, focused on the service you are providing to your client, focused on the needs and the value that you can create with a client and on what would represent the best out

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Today, we are going to be talking about how you can position yourself differently from your competitors so you can generate remarkable dissimilarities that give you a notorious advantage over them.  One of the biggest things that I get a lot of the time is people saying, “our business is commoditised, our clients are getting three quotes, they're definitely shopping us around”.  When you are talking to somebody, that person has most likely already been contacted by two or three other companies. This underlines the need to be able to position yourself differently from your competitors because otherwise, the only criteria people are going to take into consideration is the money they will have to invest.  In this episode, you’re going to learn how to stand out from the crowd so that price does not become the only thing your clients are thinking of.  It is a very simple thing that y

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Today we're going to be talking about how to handle the three most common objections that you are likely to get.  My philosophy on objections is that if you use the system that I teach, and you use it properly, you are very unlikely to experience objections in the first place. But if you do, it is essential to have a strategy.   The first one is the finance objection. When someone says “look, this all sounds great but it's more than what I had to spend”, the first thing you need to do is to qualify it. People may not see the value in what you're offering, that’s why they can state that your fee is more than what they were prepared to spend.  In which case, you need to do one of two things; you need to establish why it's valued the way it is, or you need to go back to the actual pain and the cost of doing nothing.   You need to ask them, “Is it simply more than what you were prep

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Today we're going to talk about how you can find out if you are in the front running position to win a sale.   Here’s the scenario; you have been contacted by somebody, and they have requested that you send through some sort of a proposal. You're trying to work out whether this is worth your time or whether you are doing what's sometimes referred to as the bad singles dance, lining up only to be compared on price and commoditised.   I find extremely interesting that about 95% of request for proposals go absolutely nowhere. The way that this typically goes down is someone says, “okay, we need to talk to x type person, we need to get somebody in to do this particular job”, or “we need to call somebody and buy this particular product”.  What happens most of the time is that this is tasked to an executive assistant, a lower-level type employee, or a middle manager, etc. The list of pe

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Recently, I have been talking a lot to people about price objections. I find that it’s pretty common to have issues with this matter, and today I want to share with you four reasons why you are experiencing pushback when it comes to your fees.  The first one is, you haven't uncovered enough value. People will not be prepared to spend any more money than what they perceive as valuable; I know value itself can show up in a number of different ways but as a very global-type statement, this is a fundamental reason that you're getting pushback on price.   The first way that it shows up is you haven't uncovered enough pain. If there isn't enough discomfort in what the person is already doing, they won’t see the point of doing anything about it.   Human beings are really interesting characters, they will not move from where they are until they become uncomfortable enough to do so; you pr

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. In this episode, we are going to talk about five situations in business where sales training doesn't work and what to do about it.  It may seem very unusual for me to be talking about this subject today, especially, since we just went through the importance of training, and the differences between generic and customised training last week.  However, it is essential to evaluate every situation and determine if sales training is the way to go, or if it’d be a waste of time and money.  To illustrate my point, one of the situations where investing in a training program is a bad idea is if you have high staff turnover.  Often companies will come to me and say, “we need to do some sales training”; I ask them, “how long have these people been with you?”  If they say, “Oh, we've just replaced everybody”, that's an alarm bell! That says to me that there is a cultural problem that needs

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Today we're going to talk about the difference between generic sales training and customised sales training.   I want to start by saying both are useful, but generic training can only deliver up to a point. A generic sales process would be something you learn from somebody who didn't really have a specific niche. It's basically a one-size-fits-all; the person that you have learned it from has essentially applied this particular process to different people, whether they were butchers, bakers, or candlestick makers.  I’ve noticed that this kind of sales training has derived from car salespeople training. It’s basically what they teach those guys, and it’s a really good system… if you are selling cars. The thing is, it is sold to other niches under the assertion that it’ll work for everyone, which it doesn’t.  Despite the fact that this is not a tailormade process, having a generic s

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Today we're going to be talking about an incredible success story in which we were able to help a business grow by $15 million over three years.  The guys that run this business came to me one day because they saw me speak at an event. They have a manufacturing business, and their product has a rural, mining, and oil and gas application to it.  What was happening is they were getting a heap of leads, mostly because they are great at marketing and invest a lot of money in it. Even so, the number of clients that were converting into paying clients was a lot lower than it should have been.  The first thing that we did once we started working with them is we looked at how they were engaging leads. Effectively, what was happening is that they were getting an email from a potential client asking for a quote for a product, and they would just email them back with the quote attached.  

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Today, we are going to talk about the three most useful resources to fix your mindset.  Mindset is such an important thing, and it is really at the core, and at the foundation of all good sales outcomes. Why is that? Well, in simple terms, your certainty will overcome your potential clients’ doubt. Put even more simply, you cannot give away what you don't already have.   If you want to have great sales outcomes it is imperative to get up to a point where you are a 10 out of 10 regarding a couple of things: in terms of how you feel about yourself, in terms of how confident you are, in terms of how you feel about the product that you sell, and in terms of how you feel about the company that you represent and their ability to deliver on the promises that you're making to your clients.   Have it any other way and you will definitely be compromised.  Think of this scenario, you've g

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Today we're going to be talking about the sales and influence continuum. Very interesting topic, especially if you're in the process of working out which clients you want to deal with in your business.  I've been in sales for 33 years, and I've been teaching, coaching, and training salespeople for over 17 years. Over this time, I have made sure to be ultimately aware of everything that's out there around sales, persuasion, and influence.  I have read, watched, and listened to all the best sales training courses out there, and by now I have pretty much road-tested everything that I've learned. This has allowed me to work out a couple of things.   One of them is that the rabbit hole really does go down as far as you want to take it around sales training influence. And here's where it starts to get a little bit blurry in terms of the two ends of the sales and influence continuum. 

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Today is a really special day because Jade Green is on the show with us.  Jade has built an international reputation as a hard-charging, rule-breaking, high-performance serial entrepreneur, speaker, and coach.  She hosts the surf and business podcast Barrels and Business, she’s a transformational teacher, bestselling author, learning junkie, spiritual being, adventurer, certified trainer, and facilitator for Mindvalley and The Genius Group.  As you can see, her background is pretty impressive, and I am thrilled to have her on the show because she is going to share with us some incredible information about how to build a kick-ass team.   We have already talked about hiring, building teams, and building culture in previous episodes but believe me, Jade just takes this to a whole other level!  She is going to share with us how she has been able to help purpose-driven business own

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. We are all aware of the massive impact this current pandemic has had, both on a personal level and on the global economy. I know some businesses have been struggling a lot, that’s why today we are going to talk about three things that you can do to stay competitive if you are currently in a place where you don't have access to your customers.   Unfortunately, this is happening for a lot of people at the moment, and I doubt that this is going to be the last time that we see it happening. These are very powerful things you can do to be proactive in this type of situation.   The first one is revisiting your offer. Come up with some new ideas as to what you can present; it might be a contextual offer, in terms of what's going on right now. It could also be a different take on your existing offer, the important thing is to come up with some different ideas and ways to support your client

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Recently I was looking through my book High Stakes Selling and I arrived at this particular chapter where I talk about a conversation that I had some time ago with one of the biggest sunglass chains in Australia at the time.  There was a lady who worked as a buyer for this chain that had been in the industry for a long time and certainly knew her stuff but had a bit of a reputation of being a tough nut to crack.   It seemed near impossible to get into that chain.  As you can imagine, a lot of companies really wanted to get their products into this store, and in front of their thousands and thousands of customers. Instead of just wishing or “trying” to get a deal, I managed to book a meeting with this lady, hoping to make the deal.  The guy that I worked for knew her through a previous company that he represented, and he said to me, “All the best, but don't be surprised if she sh

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Today I'm going to share with you a very interesting client case study that will help you understand the relevance of the seven leverage points we talked about last week.  I worked with this guy last year; he has a carpentry business and does a lot of commercial carpentry work. He's a great trader and has a fantastic product. When he came to me, he was doing around about 200k per month, and he said, “I have grown this business without really having to talk to anyone, I hate sales and I need to get over it.”  We did a number of things, we essentially put all of the exact verbal and written systems in place at each stage of the seven leverage points in his business.   April through June, he had an increase of 900,000 on what he was doing last year, for the same period this year. By then, he already had 900,000 booked in for the July through September quarter.   That is a phenomena

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Today, I am going to share with you the seven leverage points that I look at when I am working with a business to improve its sales process. There are a couple of different places that you can look to improve your conversions, improve the offer that you create, and move people through your process a lot faster.  What I do when I first sit down with a new client is we go through a checklist to figure out what we are going to work on to give them the fastest shift in their sales results. What I am sharing with you today is, essentially, this checklist.  The first question I ask is my clients is how are they getting leads? How are people finding them? We look at this process in detail, we focus on their website, their landing pages, we look at what people know about them before they complete an inquiry form. That's essentially what we might call the indoctrination path, what is it that

Visit http://JohnBlakeAudio.com to Learn How to DOUBLE Your Enquiry-to-Sale Conversion with The Lead Flow You Already Have. Emails are a very powerful way to grow your business. Contextually what we're talking about is to put pen to paper on some kind of recommendation; maybe a proposal for something, or a quote for a particular product or a particular service and send it to a potential client.   The biggest mistake I see people make is this. They attach the proposal or the quote, they send it through, and at the bottom of the email they write, “If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me.”  Why is this a huge mistake? Because it is the lamest call to action ever!  Many businesses, hoping they can get clients on board, usually approach them in a very cautious manner, but that cautiousness gets often mixed up with passiveness, and their emails end up being pretty uninviting and bleak.  Some people don't have the time to ring and ask questions. Most don't have the time to take your c