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Bend The Healthcare Trend With Mark Gaunya

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

10.11.21

TSP Mark Gaunya | Healthcare Trend

 

No matter who you are or where you are in life, you should give kindness freely because leaders know how to adapt and blend with people. Learn and grow your business by being the right kind of leader. Join your host John Livesay as he talks with Mark Gaunya about the healthcare system, his passion for health and well-being, and its exponentially positive cultural and financial impact on businesses and organizations. Mark develops innovative solutions to complex challenges to save clients time and money. He is the Co-author of Bend the Healthcare Trend, a book written to demystify consumer-driven health and wellness plans with client case studies to share theory and show application. He discusses gratitude, learning, insurance and much more. As a leader, we need the inspiration to grow personally and professionally, and this episode boosts that and your leadership mindset.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Bend The Healthcare Trend With Mark Gaunya

Our guest is Mark Gaunya who is an entrepreneur on a lifelong mission to make healthcare easier and more affordable for everyone. He’s been recognized by the Benefits Pro as a Top 5 Broker of the Year finalist, and the Benefits Adviser as a Top 30 Thought Leader nationally. He develops innovative solutions to complex challenges to save clients time and money.

He’s passionate about consumerism, health and wellbeing, the exponentially positive cultural and financial impact on like-minded businesses. He’s the co-author of Bend the Healthcare Trend, which is a book that helps to demystify consumer-driven health and wellness plans. He is also the co-author of Inspire to Act and Inspire to Act For Kids, which are two books about living with an attitude of gratitude with 100 short stories about paying it forward. I can’t wait to know more about that. Mark, welcome to the show.

[bctt tweet=”Kindness has no age restriction. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

Thank you, John. I appreciate the opportunity to be with you.

Would you take us back to your own story of origin? You can go back to your days when you were at the University of Rhode Island or before that. How did you get interested in wanting to be involved in the healthcare world and insurance in particular?

My story of origin goes back all the way to my parents. My mom and dad were healthcare people. My mom was a nurse and my dad was a physical therapist by training. They were both very passionate about helping people and they are entrepreneurs. They built a company from the ground up. It was outpatient physical therapy. They had six facilities in three different states. After I graduated from the University of Rhode Island, I went to work with them for the first five years of my career. As a kid growing up, I learned all about the health care system, how it works, and how it was designed to help people. I learned how healthcare is delivered to people from the provider side of healthcare.

When I helped my parents sell their company and retire, I decided I wanted to learn how the insurance side of the business works. To be honest, the story was I want to go where the checks are written rather than where you wait to receive income. I went to go work for Blue Cross Blue Shield in Washington DC. That’s where I cut my teeth in the insurance business. I had a guy, my first mentor in the business, who put me into a leadership role with no sales management experience. He saw something in me and gave me an opportunity. Fortunately, I parlayed that into a career in insurance. I did a couple of what I call tours of duty in the insurance business.

I lived in Chicago for a period of time. I worked for Cigna Healthcare out there. I then left Cigna to be part of a startup health insurance company called Destiny Health, which is the expansion of an international organization firm that was based in Johannesburg, South Africa. They’re the ones who were pioneers in the whole notion of consumer-driven healthcare. It’s what we now know as health savings accounts. I moved away from Chicago back to the New England area where I’m originally from and met my now business partner, Jennifer. Through that journey, she and I became business partners in 2005. We run an employee benefits brokerage, consulting firm, and also a regional and national program called Captivated Health for a middle-market organization. The net of it is I’ve worked on the provider side, the consumer and the employer side. I have a 360-degree view of how healthcare works.

TSP Mark Gaunya | Healthcare Trend

Bend The Healthcare Trend: How Consumer-Driven Health and Wellness Plans Lower Insurance Costs

That’s a fascinating perspective. As a child, you had a front-row seat as to how it all worked and what was wrong, and then you decided to get experience in every area of everyone who’s at the table. That’s the way I would describe that.

That’s an accurate way to state that. I’m not a clinician. I never have science in me. I appreciate it. I was not clinically gifted but I am business gifted. The business of health care and decided to learn the business of healthcare from every angle so that I could do something about it in my future years.

Don’t you think that gives you empathy and credibility? When you’ve been in someone’s shoes, it gives you both empathy and credibility. That’s the case for me when I get up in front of sales organizations and speak. I know what it feels like to have quotas, deadlines and to not take rejection personally, and all those things that everyone is struggling with on a day-to-day basis. Suddenly, I know you also speak to the industry. You have so much empathy and credibility because you’ve been there. Before we started the pre-chat, we talked about your friendship starting before your business relationship with Jennifer at Borislow Insurance. Can you tell us a little bit about how that evolved?

Jennifer was on the broker advisory council for an insurance carrier who was looking to do a joint venture with that company, Destiny Health. That council had to approve the transaction and I was the sales leader for that insurance company. The two of us hit it off instantly. The transaction went through and they asked me to head back to New England to head up the strategic partnership. My parents were retired and they were living in Cape Cod. This would give me a chance to be close to them which was a great decision because my mom passed away. I wouldn’t have had that time with her hadn’t I done that.

I met Jennifer and we became very good friends with each other. When I landed here in the Boston area, she was the person I would call and say, “What’s the market saying about my product and service?” She would tell me things that I didn’t necessarily want to hear but I needed to hear them. Truth be told, if I’m being honest about it, she and I are both passionate golfers. We spent a six-hour round in the golf course which is long, in the same cart together. That’s where our friendship was formed. She then tried to recruit me to go work for her. I didn’t have any desire to be employee number fourteen for her. At the time, it was a small benefit firm. We talked about becoming business partners and came together. As I always say to everybody, our business partnership was born out of friendship as opposed to the other way around, which makes it special.

You have a second edition. You told me that you were quite innovative and mailed that out. I’m going to ask you about that in a second. This concept of, “Why is health insurance expensive?” It’s basic because healthcare is expensive. There is a way to give people some power and knowledge. That seems to be the intent of the book. Who’s this book for?

[bctt tweet=”Empathy and credibility are a winning combination.” username=”John_Livesay”]

The book is for employers who are sponsoring health insurance and health benefits for their employees. It’s written for CEOs, CFOs and leaders of HR who are looking for a practical guide to transform their culture into one that educates people. If you look at the healthcare literacy rate in this country, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, it’s 14%. That’s not okay that people are walking around not even understanding the language of healthcare. How are we going to expect them to be educated about making decisions if they can’t even understand the language?

We created this as a practical guide for employers to understand and demystify or debunk a lot of the myths that are promoted in the media or in the healthcare space by the players who designed the healthcare system. When you look at that, you say, “How do we navigate that?” What we did through this book is we created a practical guide that was ten chapters. It shared the theory in each chapter and then it would share a practical case story of a client who benefited and deployed that theory into practical application and what the impact was to their plan.

One of the things you have in your book that I love is this culture of health and wellness. Certain companies will give credit to help encourage people to join a gym and things like that. I’m guessing there are some other things that people can do when they have a company, big or small, to have a better culture for health and wellness.

We believe in the five-element construct of creating a culture of health and wellbeing. It even transcends wellness into overall health and wellbeing. Our five elements are physical, financial, workplace, community, mind and spirit. We look through those elements at any client we work with, and any business can do this and meet your people where they are. You can make progress in each one of those and we call that the whole person concept.

If we think about it, everybody wants to be physically and financially well. They want to understand the purpose of the work they’re doing and are tied to a bigger vision than that of themselves. They want to give back to the community and they need to spend some time taking a breath, meditating, doing yoga or whatever the case might be because life is still very busy. When you wrap all those five things together, you can transform the culture of any organization or elevate a company that’s already focused in those areas, but help their employees and family members ascend to an even higher level of wellbeing.

One of my favorite phrases is, “If it’s not measured, it doesn’t get done. If it’s not scheduled, it doesn’t get done.” We have something in chapter eleven called The Report Card. What is that about?

TSP Mark Gaunya | Healthcare Trend

Healthcare Trend: A manager is somebody you have to follow, and a leader is somebody you choose to follow.

 

The report card essentially is our way of coming back to measuring the data, so taking a baseline assessment. When we work with a client, the first thing we’ll do is get any data analytics we can get our hands-on. It depends on the size of the employer, but demographic information, claims information, and we’ll do an environmental survey. We’ll go and look at the environment that the employers are working in. Especially with COVID, you see a lot of people are working at home. That environment has been somewhat challenged, but understanding the environment. The third is interests. What are the employees interested in? It’s those three data elements. Financial and data metrics, environment metrics and employee interests that you can then use as your raw material to measure, “What areas do we want to focus on and improve? What does the data tell us? What are the areas where we need to focus and improve?”

You and Jennifer went on to co-author Inspire to Act. You talk about how important a simple act of kindness is. When I speak to sales teams, the old way of selling is ABC, Always Be Closing and coffee is only for closers. I did that with ABK instead of ABC, which is Always Be Kind, starting with the way you talk to yourself. We can’t possibly be kind to our coworkers, let alone clients, if we’re not starting with some kind of internal thoughts ourselves. You collected this wonderful book of which all these stories of how positive connections with people have a direct impact on how we feel about ourselves. Is there a story in Inspired to Act that you want to share?

This idea or this book is born out of our culture of living an attitude of gratitude. We held a holiday party every year for our employees and we decided to shake things up a little bit. What we did was two weeks before our holiday party, we gave everybody $100 with a letter of instruction. At the time, we had twenty employees roughly. We had them go out into the community and do random act or acts of kindness. The only requirement was they had to come back to the holiday party and tell everybody what they did with the money.

The stories, many of them made you tear. One story, in particular, I can remember is one of our employees who went into the hospital emergency room. There was a family, they had a $100 copay at the emergency room and this person was fighting for his life. They didn’t have the money to pay the copay and the hospital was giving them a hard time. Our employee walked in and paid the $100 copay so that the family member could get the care. At that moment in time, he happened to be in the emergency room when something like that happened. It made a real big difference in that person’s life.

I always say when you tug at people’s heartstrings, they open the purse strings. That’s the power of storytelling. You start to imagine yourself in that story and what it would feel like that $100 could cause someone you love to not get the care they need to live. How would you feel if you were in that situation? On the flip side, how great would you feel if you had the money to help them? That’s a great example of that story. Many people say, “I don’t know if I’m a leader.” You have got this great quote in your book from John Quincy Adams, “If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you’re a leader.” I love that so much because you and Jennifer didn’t have thousands of people working with you when you first started, but yet you were both leaders. Can you speak to aspiring people who want to become leaders?

First of all, Jennifer was one of the kindest people I know on the planet. She shared with me a quote that I’ll never forget when we first started working together, “No one cared about how much you know until they know how much you care.” When she shared that with me, I stopped and looked at her. I’m like, “What makes the two of us a great partner is that’s what we both not only believe but how we behave.” Leaders are somebody that people follow even when they don’t have to. A manager is not that. A manager is somebody you have to follow and listen to. A leader is who you choose to follow and listen to.

Jumping back to your other book, I want to close that open-loop I created. You sent copies at your own expense of that book to whom and to help them understand what they were dealing with because they weren’t healthcare experts. Can you tell that story?

[bctt tweet=”Creating a culture of health and well-being is a must. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

This was back in 2009. I co-authored the book and we were debating the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare at that point in time. I wanted our senators to stop, think and understand how the healthcare system works and from a prescriptive standpoint, how they could understand the principles that would set the foundation to change things for the better for people. I authored a letter and sent it out to all 100 US senators.

Sadly, I only received three thank you notes. Not even one from my home state of Massachusetts. That’s the sad part of the story. I did get three. One from Senator Collins up in Maine. She’s a wonderful human being. She’s become a friend of mine because I do a lot of work in the public policy area. I’m the Legislative Chair for the National Association of Health Underwriters. I get a chance to work with her and other people like that. I got a thank you note from Senator Hatch in Utah who was a very big believer in health savings accounts and consumerism. I also got a thank you note from Senator Inouye in Hawaii. A pretty good geographic dispersion but nobody from my own home state. I’m pretty sure most of them did not take a look at the book. Nonetheless, we made an effort to make a difference there.

We got to acknowledge the people who did send you a thank you, which is great. One of the reasons we’re aligned is the power of kindness and storytelling. I was working with an orthopedic surgeon who has created some new products for his industry and wanted some help on crafting stories to explain that to potential investors and other doctors. He said, “One of the benefits of learning how to become a better storyteller is with my child.” He has a seven-year-old daughter who used to say, “Daddy, tell me a story. Don’t just read me one.” He said, “Honestly, I was a deer in the headlights. I didn’t know how to tell a story until I started working with you. Now, I cannot just use storytelling from my career but with my child.” You and Jennifer took this Inspired to Act and have a new edition for children with the line, “Kindness has no age restriction,” which has got to be one of my all-time favorite quotes. How are people using this with children?

If you think about the whole notion of gratitude, it’s not something you’re born with. You have to be taught how to demonstrate gratitude. We believe that starts at a very young age. I have three children and I had them contribute stories to this but the idea would be, you don’t have to have $100. It doesn’t even have to be about money. How about you opened the door for somebody, or you say please and thank you when you want and get something, or you offer to be there for somebody as a shoulder to cry on when things are not going well? That book was written for kids 6 to 16 so that they can develop that habit of gratitude.

When you develop the habit of gratitude, it then becomes something ingrained in you. As an adult, I still write handwritten thank you notes and I do it every week. I do it because no one receives mail now. Most people don’t or a text. That’s a part of that person. In my case, it’s me. I’m putting a part of me on paper with my handwriting, telling you that you impacted my life in some magical way, or I’m amazed at how you conduct your life or whatever the case might be. That practice gets you out of yourself and focused on other things, which I think many of us get trapped in our heads. I know I do from time to time. That’s why the act of gratitude or meditation has been a huge gift.

That leads to helping children and what you’re doing as a Founding Principal and CEO of Captivated Health with helping schools. Can you tell us how you’re helping schools get control of their health care future?

We created Captivated Health in 2014. We do a lot of work with private schools where you might send your child to what you would be called a prep school. You pay for your child to attend the school. It could be a boarding or day school. We work with over 100 of them all across the country and growing in that space. We had three risk consortiums, three groups of schools that were buying together in their state but not buying together on a national basis. What we did is when Obamacare came into existence, it was going to make it very challenging for those schools to continue to purchase together.

Yours truly had to go and figure out, “How are we going to keep these guys together and help them overcome some of these challenges?” That’s how Captivated Health was born. Ten of our schools decided to be the founders of this program with us. We didn’t build this on our own. We collaborated with our school clients to create a community that was focused on four principles. Those four principles are members first, consumerism, health and wellbeing, and self-governance. If you look at those four principles, it’s table stakes.

The first principle of members first, I ask our team all the time, always ask yourself this question before you come in and advance an idea, “If you are a member of this health plan, would you want whatever it is you’re about to tell me?” If the answer is no, then please don’t bring it forward even if you know it will save us money. Principals and consumers, and everybody in the program, the employers offer a health savings account, which these plans have been beaten up by the media that they’re high deductible. Who wants to buy a high deductible plan? Nobody does. Who wants to buy a lower premium plan? Everyone will raise their hand. The idea of using words to help people understand healthcare.

TSP Mark Gaunya | Healthcare Trend

Healthcare Trend: If we step back from the healthcare system and understand that it wasn’t a system built for the people, we could be aware that we can take control of our future by first acknowledging that.

 

As I mentioned to you, the literacy rate is 14%. Making sure people understand the language of healthcare is how you help liberate them to make better choices in the future because they understand the language. We use the slogan, “Knowledge is in power,” but if you look at the reflection, “Knowledge is me power.” The third element is creating a culture of health and wellbeing, which you and I already talked about in terms of the five elements. The fourth and final principle is self-governance. These groups and schools are taking the risk of what we call self-insuring the medical expenses of their people. They reinsurance to protect them from any person who might have a bad year or bad illness. They use other protection to give them a little bit of their financial liability but there’s risk involved based on how their plan performs from one year to the next.

What the self-governance principle does is created a set of bylaws. Those bylaws mirror our own US Senate, where it doesn’t matter the size of the school. They have one vote. Our Northern New England schools, their original ten pioneers, were very passionate about this because they said, “As this grows in scope and scale over time and larger schools come into the next, we don’t want our voices to be lost.” They created a structure with a chair and a vice-chair, and then they created four committees. Governance, membership, finance and engagement.

Those committees are staffed with HR and CFO executives who collaborate together in areas of concentration and represent their members. They have an annual meeting of the membership every year we hold in October, where they get together. They share stories of the programs that they’re running and the differences they’re making in the lives of their people. Is saving money and creating margin cuts for all non for profit important? Yes, but it’s not the driving force. The driving force is to make healthcare easier and more affordable for their people and schools.

At the end of the day, everybody wants to feel, be seen, heard and appreciated. Whether you’re managing people, your children or in this case, schools, everyone’s voice is equal regardless of the size. Mark, if people want to reach out to you in any of these areas, whether it’s learning more about gratitude, about how you can help them with their insurance or other schools, what’s the best way?

[bctt tweet=”No one cares about how much you know until they know how much you care.” username=”John_Livesay”]

My personal email address is [email protected], or they could go to our website, www.Borislow.com or in the example I shared with you about our program Captivated Health if they wanted to learn more about that. It’s spelled exactly as it sounds, www.CaptivatedHealth.com.

Any last thought or quote you want to leave us with?

If we step back from the healthcare system and understand that it wasn’t a system built for the people, understand that we can take control of our future by first, acknowledging that. Secondarily, understanding that the key to unlocking our future is to educate our people. We can find the interest of the people in the organization so everybody can get the same or higher quality healthcare at a fraction of the cost. They can reinvest those dollars in other areas to make whatever value proposition they’re providing their area a lot more powerful.

Thanks again, Mark.

Thank you, John.

 

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Lighthearted Leadership With Lizette Warner

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

03.11.21

TSP Lizette Warner | Lighthearted Leadership

 

The world we live in can sometimes be really depressing. We turn on the TV, watch the news and all we see is pain and suffering. Learn how to convert those depressing thoughts into something more lighthearted. Transform your stress into positive energy. Join your host, John Livesay and his guest Lizette Warner as they discuss lighthearted leadership. Lizette is the Head of Clinical Science Global, MR Therapy of Philips and the Executive Coach of Optimum Vobis. Join in the conversation to learn how to take things slower. To take a break and just let things be more lighthearted. We don’t need to be stressed out for eternity, join in to find happiness today.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Lighthearted Leadership With Lizette Warner

Our guest on the show is Lizette Warner, who has a whole program about how to be a lighthearted leader. Whatever things are, start your meetings off with music. She has some wisdom from sixth grade about, “The news is depressing. I don’t want to be.”

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Our guest is Dr. Lizette Warner, a wife, mother, Executive Coach, Podcast Host of Lighthearted Leadership and a busy global leader in healthcare. She’s passionate about helping people reach their best and unleash their inner superheroes in a fun way. She started her Lighthearted Leadership podcast as a way to shed optimism and lightheartedness on the pile of heavy topics bringing down her busy healthcare leaders. She’s got an Electrical Engineering background and has worked in telecom and pursued her PhD at the Mayo Clinic. She was then snatched right up by a healthcare company and has worked there ever since. Welcome to the show.

John, thanks for having me.

I always like to ask my guests to take us back to their own story of origin. You can start in childhood or school, wherever you want to start this story of how did you get to be you.

I feel like you’ve already given the readers a good overview here. I could go all the way back to the beginning like when I was a little kid. I was pretty much like the butt of everybody’s jokes. I was the youngest too, which always makes that difficult. The thing with that is that I grew up very super serious and always expecting people poking fun at me. I was also super gifted, only I didn’t know it. I assumed everybody else did math problems without having to write them down. I assumed everybody could read and remember everything about all the homework and things.

[bctt tweet=”In coaching, you learn to love that feeling of bringing out the best in people.” via=”no”]

It was surprising to me like, “You can’t?” I just assumed that. As a result, I went for my Electrical Engineering degree. I graduated and went into work in telecom. That was fun. I lived in different countries and meeting a bunch of different people. It was exotic from that perspective. My mom graduated from third grade. That was as far as she made it. The thing is my mom is one of the smartest people I know. She can do like geometry because she’s a seamstress. She was always good at these math things.

Growing up, I didn’t know this. I picked this up later in life. I never knew she didn’t have this concept of being able to do the math. It was something assuming everybody else can do stuff and know stuff. I remember going to her with this intractable problem that I had in high school. I went up and I don’t know I’m explaining the whole problem, telling her what’s going on in class and she’s sitting there essentially coaching me through this whole thing. What can you do? What is possible? All of a sudden, I walked away thinking my mom is the smartest person on the planet because she helped me solve this problem.

As I went through school, I didn’t even know what a coach was. I went to school and work. I was living in all these different countries. I wanted to get my PhD and for some reason, the Mayo Clinic accepted me. I ended up studying there still with this mindset of everybody knows more than I do. When I finished, I was snatched up by a healthcare company. I was exposed to a certain extent before that to coaching but that’s where I got a picture of coaching. As I climbed through, I had a team of my own and I started coaching them.

I fell in love with being able to bring out the best in these really bright people and bringing able to bring out the best in them to unleash great stuff. What I discovered through all of that, I started laughing with my clients. That’s why I do this whole Lighthearted Leadership is because in working with my clients and trying to curate topics, content and articles for them, I was looking up lighthearted content. The whole thing about being lighthearted is people think that you can be lighthearted or you can have fun but not at work. That’s for that after-work stuff. Being lighthearted doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun.

Also, that you’re not smart. You’ve got your PhD. Let’s talk about some of the work you do at Philips and then we’ll talk about some of the work you do with coaches. Your head of clinical science globally, not the US around oncology, which is not normally a topic people think, “Cancer, let’s have a blast.” You’re working with scientists. Your job is to manage these studies and see what is possible in terms of fixing things, I’m imagining or improving things. Do you have a story of a particular research study that you’ve worked on that you were able to put some humor in?

TSP Lizette Warner | Lighthearted Leadership

Lighthearted Leadership: People think that you can be lighthearted only after work, that it’s reserved only for after-work. But being lighthearted means you can have fun wherever, whenever.

 

That’s the thing. We’ve worked with a number of collaborators globally. The thing about putting, let’s say, a lighthearted spin to it is even starting off the meetings. Because some of the topics that we get into are very heavy or they’re very physics loaded. It means there’s a whole lot of thinking but there’s also this aspect of let’s back off and see what’s the ramification, the global outlook for this. There’s not a specific story that comes to mind. It’s more the aspect of when we launch in, checking in. There’s sometimes where I have like music going at the beginning of a call. It can be people globally. I ended up speaking to a lot of lawyers and regulatory people. They’ll log onto the call and there’s music going. It’s a thing that’s like, “Where am I?” People start grooving a little bit and it breaks the ice so that we can start talking about these deeper topics that can be legal, regulatory or a clinical study that’s ongoing but that habit tends to bring people a little bit closer together. Bringing people together and telling a story that people can be a part of. With that music, that tells us sometimes. This is not a specific humorous story.

You also talk about on your show this concept of long working hours killing us. Certainly, people can be workaholics. Now with the pandemic, a lot of people that found that blur between work and home, that they’re working more hours than when they went to an office. What are your thoughts on that? What can leaders do to prevent people from burning out?

You’ve seen a lot of this with working with a lot of the people that you talked to as well and the space that you work with but that is the thing. There is that blurred boundary of having all your work now at home. Instead of being chained to a desk, you’re now chained to your home office or your kitchen table or whatever and not being able to step away. One of the things that we did as a leadership team when the whole pandemic first started, my organization, at least my team, we have always been remote-based. We were able to tap into the wisdom from my team on, “How do you guys do this?” That was the thing. At the very beginning, people were able to appreciate that, “You guys do this all the time.” Now people are starting to appreciate that, “This is tough.” Some of the takeaways that we had shared as a leadership team were this concept of putting things in your calendar including a break time where you work for a chunk of time and then stop, pause, step away, go outside, take a breath of fresh air, go walk the dog or do something away from the workpiece.

I’ve heard of this in terms of changing your state. If you’re sitting, stand up. If you’re standing, sit down. When you physically change your state, it also helps mentally hit a reset button.

It does and even doing different things like having that music break. One of the things that I talked about on the podcast were these back-to-back meetings that people schedule and I think that is an energy suck. It’s like that vampire at work. It pulls all the life out of you. There are ways to deal with that too. If it’s a case of like making that mental commitment to yourself that, “I’ve got another meeting following this one.” For my sanity and everybody else’s, I’m going to have to bail 5, 10 minutes early so I can prep.

You have something on here about your sixth-grade wisdom, “The news is depressing and I don’t want to be.” Tell me a little bit about that. That’s hilarious.

[bctt tweet=”Start off your meetings with music, schedule breaks to prevent burnout.” via=”no”]

It was funny. I was having this conversation with a client. When I was in sixth grade, that was the first thing that was weighing heavy on my mind is the news. Every day I would come into school and I’m like, “This is so depressing.” I was in sixth grade and I don’t even know what was going on but I knew it was heavy. Psychologists recommend to people read, do not watch the news. We have these mirror neurons. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this. It’s a finding from neuroscience. This concept that what you see, what you envision, what you pick up from others, you take that on yourself physiologically. If you’re watching a stressful, scary movie, your body is picking up on those stressors as if you were there.

It’s not good to watch the fire or when 9/11 happened. People were constantly watching that happening over and over again and reliving it every time you watch it.

That is exactly what’s happening. Your body is releasing all of these neurohormones, neurotransmitters and you can be having a stress reaction. My sixth-grade wisdom somehow picked up on this. I’m like, “This stinks. I am not watching the news ever again.” Since then, every once in a while I’ll go back to watching the news. It’s about since sixth grade. I started watching the late shows and comedy. I started reading comedy things. That’s where the whole lightheartedness came from this Lighthearted Leadership Podcast. It was something simple. I was trying to curate lighthearted articles to send to my leaders and I was coming up empty.

I found an article from a few years ago. I found another article from over here. I found a book here but when you’re trying to curate stuff, to give it to your leaders so that they can have something to read, I was like, “This stinks.” I was reminded of my sixth-grade wisdom. I’m like, “That’s going to change.” That’s why I started Lighthearted Leadership. With all these heavy news topics but I could bring a lightheartedness to it. I do take on topics like, “Are Long Working Hours Killing You? Let’s talk about it.”

You were coaching some executives and what I love about what you do there is it’s very niche and you’ve also been in their shoes. Can you tell us about that?

TSP Lizette Warner | Lighthearted Leadership

Lighthearted Leadership: People need to have a calendar and put a break time where you work for a chunk of time and then stop. They need to go outside, take a breath of fresh air, and do something away from work.

 

It is intriguing. Being able to bring in the native knowledge, having worked in the field and knowing what it’s like to have back-to-back meetings, to have them yourselves at the same time as I’m coaching certain clients. Having that, there’s an ability to be able to relate. It goes back to your story of giving that story that people can feel that they’re a part of is them being able to relate that, “I know exactly what that’s like.” I’ve managed a household with little kids moving across the country and trying to go to school. I remember when I was trying to get my PhD, I already had little kids at that time and everyone else who was going for their PhD did not.

They came straight from college into the PhD track and maybe they got married during that timeframe but we already had little kids. They all looked at me like, “How are you doing this with kids?” I’m like, “They are the great equalizer. They’re the ones who keep me on track. At home, I’m doing my thing and I have a time limit. I get all my stuff done. Somebody is taking a nap so I have this much time to work on this. My colleagues were more of the aspect of like, “Let’s go to the bar. Let’s go do this.“ I was always very focused again a little bit of the serious and bringing in that balancing with the kids, that whole life parted aspect of somebody drew on the walls of the house with a permanent marker. That’s fun.

I remember talking to a colleague once. She said, “Do you know how much energy it takes to come to work and be fully present in the meetings and sales calls? That’s how much energy it takes when I go home. That’s my second job.” What do you think about that? Is that your experience as well?

Maybe a little bit different. I didn’t take that tactic with the kids. With them, it was stressful but also fun in a certain way because here you are helping someone else grow and get that wisdom and learn. It’s almost like coaching. There’s always a discovery moment for the coach, as well as for the client in any conversation. It’s the same with parenting. In parenting, it was always the same. I was constantly learning something else about myself. Whether it’s, “What are my limits? I’m going to murder this child if he does not get out of his pajamas and get some clothes on so we can go to school.”

What are some of the big struggles you see with the clients that you’re coaching? Are there unique stresses or challenges if someone’s in healthcare that they’re seeing people sick and die that typical people, let’s say, maybe in accounting don’t deal with?

The issues may be different but the overarching is there’s a lot of similarity between different areas whether you’re talking finance or physics. Especially now, some of those things are being so busy and having to do so much more with less. That’s something that pervades both healthcare in the industry as well. Even some of the entrepreneur clients that I have, happens as well. I have some non-profit clients that I work with and that’s a thing. Along with a work-life balance, it’s the multiplicity of things whether those things are personalities, conflicts and different tasks. It’s the weight of all that compounded and then one person to deal with all those complexities.

[bctt tweet=”The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” via=”no”]

That’s the piece that intrigues me because for my day job, for the work that I do, that’s my role. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past several years and that is what clinical science is essentially. You sit in between all these different stakeholders. Everyone’s pulling or pushing you or knocking you down in a certain direction and you have to stay upright and keep your sales going and keep somehow moving forward with this delicate balance of all these different pieces.

What advice would you have for people who want to make their leadership more lighthearted besides music and maybe sending articles that are lighthearted? Is there something they can do to get people who are overwhelmed and stressed out to find the humor in something?

Ordinarily, I would say, “Tap into your unique wit and wisdom. You don’t have to be anyone other than who you are. Everyone has their own unique wit, wisdom, humor.”

A lot of people go around going, “I’m not funny. I’m not a comedian. I don’t have wit. I’m not witty.” You’re saying we all have some level of it.

Absolutely because to be lighthearted doesn’t mean you’re a comedian. A comedian is their own profession. Nobody’s asking you to be a comedian. For me, it’s bringing some music in. It may be asking, “What fun thing did you do this week or where did we fail this week as a team?” It doesn’t have to be funny all the time. You don’t have to have a marching band running through whatever the not office, which sometimes it is the kids or the dog or whatever but it doesn’t have to be those things. It can be what is unique to you and bring that out because there’s beauty in that.

TSP Lizette Warner | Lighthearted Leadership

Lighthearted Leadership: Do not watch the news. Read the news because what you see is what you take on to yourself physiologically.

 

Is there a favorite quote or a book you’d like to recommend before we sign off?

There are many good books. Some of the quotes that come to mind are there’s one from Albert Einstein, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.” We live in a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift so tap into that intuitiveness.

It doesn’t get better than that. If people want to reach out to you, follow your podcast or hire you as a coach, where should they go?

They should check me out at LightheartedLeadership.com or send me an email at [email protected]. It’s either/or.

Thanks for that wonderful closing quote. It’s a perfect fit for who you are and what you’re bringing to the world. Thanks for being you.

Thank you so much for having me, John.

 

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Don’t Get Stuck In The Spam Dog House With Patrick Baynes

Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments

22.10.21

TSP Patrick Baynes | Email Spam

 

Annoyed by your emails getting caught by spam filters? You need to have a go-to-market plan so you don’t get stuck in the spam dog house. Stay on the right side of the internet and build a positive reputation as a sender. Join your host John Livesay and his guest Patrick Baynes as they discuss how you can increase productivity for better sales. Patrick is the CEO of Nerdwise and he is helping clients by giving out solutions that will help them on their sales journey. Learn how to generate leads and use the internet to your advantage.

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Listen to the podcast here


 

Don’t Get Stuck In The Spam Dog House With Patrick Baynes

Have you ever wondered why your emails end up in the spam doghouse? Our guest Patrick Baynes, the CEO and Founder of Nerdwise has the answers for how you can avoid that happening. He’s got a lot of other answers too in terms of how salespeople should be spending their time to get those numbers where they need to be. He said, “Stop hitting brick walls by having bad systems in place. Find out how you can help companies transform their open rates on emails as well as their sales.” Enjoy the episode.

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Welcome to the show. Our guest is Patrick Baynes who’s the Founder and CEO of Nerdwise. He’s an award-winning entrepreneur and marketing executive. His career started at LinkedIn in 2007, which led to the founding of Peoplelinx in 2009, which was acquired by Frontline. In 2015, Patrick became the CEO of Nerdwise where he leads vision, execution and customer relationships. Welcome to the show, Patrick.

Thank you, John. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

I’m always interested to hear people’s stories of origin. We’ll get to this interesting way to start your career at LinkedIn, which is quite intriguing. Take us back if you would to childhood or school when you went, “I’m interested in computers or connections.” Was it always a dream to run your own company? How did that all start?

I had a moment when I was 16 or 17 sitting in class when I became self-aware. I don’t know if this happens to other people but I remembered having an out-of-body experience and recognizing who I was as an individual and how I was maybe different or unique from other people. I can still remember it clear as day when it happened. I had a little bit of enlightenment around wanting to find my own path and do things my own way.

That’s always been there but the other factor, which is a big opportunity for everyone, is when I was growing up, I only knew about 2 or 3 different career options. My dad was in the military. My neighbors were in financial services. Maybe I knew a football player or a WWE star. I didn’t know a few other people besides what you see on TV. I had an uncle who owned his own company and that made it accessible to me. I could see that path. Tech wasn’t a thing at the time. When I was in high school, AOL was coming up but you don’t think about getting jobs at startups. In any case, the dots connected for me in terms of my career in tech.

In 2006, I saw a video about what it was like to work at Google. They promoted a lot of free-thinking creativity. You spend 20% of your time on the things that you want to work on. You wear what you want to work. Culturally, creatively, it seemed like the best fit for me to look for opportunities in the tech startup sector but also aligned with my interest in starting a business and having my own business one day. That sent me to the search engines looking for tech startups. I got very lucky. That was clever at the time.

I use Google News search regionally. In the regions I was considering moving to, I was typing in a startup tech company, seeing who was making headlines in those various areas. That landed me at an article about LinkedIn opening a customer service headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. At the time, I didn’t even have a LinkedIn profile. There was like, “If you’re interested in applying, email April Kelly.” It had her email address on there. I sent her a very polite email. I said, “I’m considering moving to Omaha after college and would love to come to check out what you guys are doing.” It was in Omaha because it’s the same founder as PayPal. A lot of the same people. They have about 4,000 employees in Omaha. In any case, I found my way into LinkedIn in the early days and started my track into tech and entrepreneurship.

[bctt tweet=”Spend time on targeted follow-through.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Many people have a dream of making these lists, 30 under 30, Forbes. You made 40 people under 40. Tell us about that.

I’ve coached a few other people who had asked me how I did it. A lot of those lists have a dark side to them. A lot of accounting firms post these top entrepreneurs regionally, nationally and so do a lot of publications like The Business Journals, Forbes, Fortune and Fast Company. The dark side to it is they want to get all of these up-and-coming companies submitting their information so they know who the CEO and founder are. They know all their financial data. Court is a polite word. They court you into being an advertiser, essentially. They give you an award and invite you to dinner. The dinner is $250 ahead if you want to come. They treat you like a piece of meat, to be honest, but it is nice.

Was it Ernst & Young? Is that who you were trying to think of?

That’s what it is. They’re building their database. For Ernst & Young, there might be 40 but they get 4,000 applicants. They get the CEO, founder, their email, financials and a lot of great info. The point is if you want to make one of those lists, you have to know what they’re looking for and they’re looking for prospects. You want to pump up. If it’s a media publication, they’re looking for ad dollars. You want to show that you’re making some money. You can spend some money. They care about things like headcount and revenues.

Maybe if you align a little bit with their brand or their image, similarly for the accounting firms. At the end of the day, it’s the story that you can tell to get those awards. The work that you’ve done, the work you’ve put in to tell those stories is what’s going to get you noticed and get you those awards but there’s a dark side to them.

Were you already at Nerdwise when you got that?

I was at PeopleLinx, if PeopleLinx shot my profile to the moon for a few years when we raised a bunch of venture funding and things. At Nerdwise, we’ve been bootstrapped so not quite as much attention.

The thing that also was interesting to me is the kinds of clients you have at Nerdwise. The one that jumped out at me is years ago. I was selling LexisNexis as a service to lawyers. The premise was if you go into court and your competitor, opposing counsel, has access to the latest case and it’s not in the library yet, they’re going to have a huge advantage over you. It was crazy expensive per minute way before Google Search words on how to find those cases. That is a fascinating company. It’s not the car company for those of you who heard Lexus and thought of the car company. It’s spelled slightly differently. Tell us about that client and what made them pick Nerdwise.

LexisNexis, an amateur where you’re pulling that as a client reference, they’re PeopleLinx client. They were a great client and a great partner. They were a reseller of PeopleLinx, as well as a customer.

TSP Patrick Baynes | Email Spam

Email Spam: In professional services, it’s your people that are driving the business. They are in many cases, the brand, the sales force.

 

You’re one of the few people I’ve interviewed and I’ve done over 350. When you have someone who’s a customer and a buyer on the other side of the fence, investors love that because you would love it enough as a customer to want to invest in it and vice versa. Maybe let’s back up and explain to people what PeopleLinx did that made LexisNexis want to work with them on both sides of the table like that.

We were the first enterprise level. We could work with smaller companies. LinkedIn focused LinkedIn management platform to help optimize your employee profiles, the types of connections they were making and then the content that they were sharing. We get companies to control over. They could configure, “John, you should have this description of LexisNexis. You should share this article. You should connect with general councils or principals at law firms,” whatever it may be. You could figure those types of recommendations and have teams within your organization that were on a leaderboard competing to be the best on LinkedIn against each other.

It allowed us to provide all this interesting data around how we were improving branding, connectivity into the marketplace, content reach and distribution. We were a little bit early at the time but we were the first in that category. We took off like a rocket ship in professional services because, in professional services, it’s your people that are driving the business. They are, in many cases, the brand, the salesforce. We had all the big four management, consulting companies. We had a lot of the Am Law 100. A lot of financial services companies, Prudential, Allianz, all of them were using PeopleLinx.

We were the most famous company that LinkedIn ever cut API access on as well, which is a whole another story. LinkedIn, not knowing how they want to do, build their ecosystem of partners. They opened up their API. Like any good developer, we built on it. We were a learning platform. We started adding LinkedIn inputs and then LinkedIn said, “We think we want to be in this business. We’re not sure but we think we do.” I spent about six months petitioning them. They cut us off along with dozens of other people. We were a few years ahead of everyone else. That led to the selling of PeopleLinx and getting out of that game.

Was LexisNexis the first customer?

They approached us. They had their eyes on us because we were getting so popular in the legal industry. When either ILTA which is a legal technology conference or another one came around, we had a booth at it. They beelined right for us and said, “We’re so-and-so. We want to learn what you guys are doing.” They knew that it was a hot space. They were hoping we could be a connector between LinkedIn data. They have a CRM at LexisNexis as well. The name is escaping me but it was their CRM group that contacted us initially.

They liked our current client base. They said, “We like reseller programs.” It was like an inbound partner lead. I learned a lot at this stage of my career. I was 27, 28 years old and I was leading partnerships at a fast-growing company. I was learning a lot. They flew up to Philly. We all went out to dinner and then our CEO was right as we were in the room about to sign the reseller and partner papers. Our CEO goes, “Shouldn’t you guys be a customer if you’re going to be reselling us?” They go, “Yes, we should. What does that look like?” We drew up the customer contract right there. They’re getting ready to arm their sales team to resell us. It makes all the sense in the world.

Two weeks later, I flew down to their headquarters. I was training their sales teams on reselling our solutions. It was a great customer and partner for us. For the time being, we’re still very good friends with the whole exec team over there. Many have moved on but we’re all still buddies.

Let’s cut to January 2015. You see a need in the marketplace. Let me ask you the story of origin because I love this as well. What made you come up with Nerdwise?

I made a lot of mistakes out of the gate. In 2015, I was a little bit bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I learned a lot at my last venture and I’m thinking, “I can do this on my own. I don’t need to raise outside capital.” I had a little bit saved up from my days at LinkedIn and PeopleLinx. I thought, “Building a business is going to be easy this time around.” Essentially, what happened is when I started off, it was a little too product-focused. I’ll spare some of the details but it took me a couple of years. Maybe in the first year, I started to pivot. I listen to our customers and to the market a little bit more.

[bctt tweet=”Don’t punch a brick wall with a bad sales system.” username=”John_Livesay”]

One thing I was good at was generating leads for myself. I learned how to build a lead gen engine at PeopleLinx. I knew how to run sales operations and that side of the house I was pretty good at. I had a good lead flow. One of our first customers, a company by the name of Reflective Energy Solutions, saw me winning all of these new franchise clients. We had a franchise revenue stream that we were going after. He said, “How are you guys getting all of these customers?” I explained my system for generating leads. He said, “Could you do that for us?” I said, “I could do that for you guys.” That moved us.

What we were doing at the time was a form of social media content automation. We had some other bolt-on services and then we started implementing a prospecting system into this one client. It went very well and I realized these guys were willing to spend more money. They get more value out of our service than where I was focused. Over the next few years, we’ve been building out that solution stack, including our own software platform and services. It was a constant iteration. Not maybe the sexiest story there. I’ve learned a lot.

You saw the big problem. You were solving it for yourself and people started saying, “Can you help us grow faster than we currently are? We’re not sure if the problem is we don’t have enough leads, we’re not closing those leads, the competition is beating us in presentations because our technologies maybe not be the best or our pricing’s too high. We don’t know what the problem is but we know that we have to figure out how to hit our goals.” Why it’s so successful and needed is because you don’t take one part of the funnel. You’re tapping into getting more meetings to drive more potential in the pipeline. I don’t see other people doing this.

The increased productivity, how to get two or more selling hours a day is a great premise and what a smart foundation. Every salesperson I have ever worked with when I was in the field, we hate meetings. It’s a waste of time. Do we need to listen to everyone else’s projections for the next three months? Yet you’re supposed to be a team player. We’re going to have another meeting on this.

Sometimes when you burn people out on meetings and many of them being virtual, the core reason for having a meeting is like, “Let’s practice what we’re going to pitch and customize it to this client.” The energy’s not there because there’s another meeting and they’re not differentiating them. That’s my experience and observation. I would love to hear if you agree with that or if you say, “The real problem is or how we help people spend more time selling instead of being in meetings is.”

I do one thing personally that drives 7 out of 10 of my prospects from nuts, which is a surprise to me. It shows where the world is going. I don’t do Zoom calls until I have to. My first call is a phone call and I want to know, “Is this a fit? Is this not a fit?” We then can move down to what I would consider being more of a structured meeting where we block the time. We plan on going through a little bit of a deeper dive. I have prospects sometimes who say, “Where’s the ZoomInfo? I didn’t see ZoomInfo the meeting.” I’m like, “I got five of these. I want to talk first and let’s figure out if it makes sense to do that.” Have a process that you can put people through that make your day and your life that much easier.

I could put on a blindfold and earmuffs and run through my sales process over and over again at this point. It’ll be effective because it’s taken a long time to get it there. In terms of giving salespeople more of their time back, as it turns out in 2020, in 2021 and beyond, there’s a lot of great technologies out there that can augment the activities that we do and the way that we go to work every day. The problem is those technologies require other resources to come together for them to work.

The classic example I use is people will spend tens of thousands of dollars on Marketo, Pardot and Outreach. They’ll buy these expensive platforms for their teams and never get used. It turns out that the sales reps don’t know how to use them, don’t want to use them or the marketing leader tried it for a little while and it fell by the wayside.

I’m starting at a high level. We could put a system here that will take sales activities, make these tools productive and take sales activities. Drive them on behalf of teams using technology but also give them a roadmap so it’s repeatable. We can go back to the well anytime and continue to drive that productivity. I’ll give you an example. If you’re selling into local healthcare, you’re working the old way, pounding phones, researching the next health care company, digging around on their website, figuring out the email and doing all those mundane rat wheel activities. You don’t have to be doing that anymore.

TSP Patrick Baynes | Email Spam

Email Spam: In 2020 and beyond, there are a lot of technologies that can augment your everyday activities. The problem is that those technologies require other resources to come together for them to work.

 

That’s why ZoomInfo is a $15 billion company because people don’t want to spend their time doing list research. Right there, you’ve taken a valuable sales activity by providing qualified lists to your reps so that they can work off of those lists. What if you could also augment their outreach using an Outreach tool like Outreach.io or Mixmax and so forth? It turns out you need messaging, plan and all these things.

What we’ve done at Nerdwise is almost like a prescription. We interview our clients, learn about where they want to be in the market, where they have the most traction, what their value prop is or what they think it is and then give them a prescription around, “Here’s a system that we can implement very quickly that will help your sales team do these activities that you want them doing anyway.” The key is that there were augmenting real core activities that they should be doing to give them that lift and also give them more direction on how they should be spending their time and taking it off of some of those rat wheel activities.

That’s what we do at the end of the day. A sales rep who’s using Nerdwise doesn’t have to do a lot of the initial research, the initial outreach and follow-up. They get a regular flow of replies meetings. Where we’re going is around marketing intelligence tracking who’s in your funnel but not taking action and giving that to the individuals that we’re working with so they can do what we call targeted follow-through. That’s where reps should be spending their time on the follow-through on opportunities, not on the outreach and follow-up to create those opportunities. They need to have a lot of that work done for them in advance. At least if you can, you should.

I’m looking at one of your case studies with Tech Advisors. You were able to get them an average open rate of 50%. Fifteen is usually way higher than the norm. Are you crafting the content for the emails per client that gets those open rates that the reps maybe don’t know how to write?

In marketing and sales, people will say, “There’s always this tension between marketing and sales.” They’re right. Those two worlds don’t always play nice together but there is so much magic when they do. More and more so, marketing and sales are holding hands and skipping down the street together. That’s happening more often than it used to.

Down to the emails that the reps are sending, we are bringing marketing best practices and marketing elements into their emails that most reps would never have the acumen or experience to do themselves. One example is the go-to-market plan that I talked about. That enables you to know who your audience is very explicitly. If I know that I’m intentionally going after financial services companies, I’m going to use a unique language that’s unique to financial services companies. I’m going to talk about the outcomes that they care about, not generic outcomes.

In financial services, they don’t want sales. They don’t talk about funnels or even leads. It’s about relationships and clients. Maybe pipeline gets talked about a little bit there, effectiveness, closing, reducing, cycles or timeline to your next client, whatever it may be. That language is going to be different. The outcomes are going to be a little bit different. To get those 50% open rates, 50% as low, we’ll go. We have clients at 70%, 80% open rates. It takes a number of factors to get there but you have to start small. There’s lots of testing. I can tell you some fun subject lines if you want.

Let’s hear those. I tell people, “If you think of an email like an ad, a headline that grabs your attention, that subject line is everything.” Most people don’t spend any time on it. They’re following up or whatever, something boring.

The subject line can get you the open but then you got to have the rest if you want to get some action. One thing that we use pretty universally that’s effective is the recipient’s name in the subject line but not in a generic way like, “John, are you interested in this?” We don’t do that but it might be like intro, John Smith/Patrick Baynes. I’m like, “Is this an intro? Am I getting introduced to somebody?” The one that triggers a lot of action and high open rates is sending a reply to that first email so it goes out as a legitimate reply. It’s like, “John, did you see my email? Please, let me know if this Thursday at 2:00 PM works for you.” Some go, “This isn’t automated. That person went back and replied to that.”

[bctt tweet=”Marketing and sales should join hands.” username=”John_Livesay”]

There’s another one that’s fun. This one got me a few months ago and we brought it to our clients. It’s cute and clever touching base. It’s like, “What are we touching base about?” I clicked it. As soon as I clicked it, they got me. Some of those work. I got one with no subject from somebody trying to sell to me and that got my attention. I’m like, “What is it?” Only people who know you might send you a no subject. I pay attention and see what gets me but then you got to have the rest of the story in there.

I want to go back to what you said about how important it is for salespeople to be spending time on targeted follow-through as opposed to trying to find leads. One of the keys to my success, when I was in sales, I was adamant about the follow-through. If I promised somebody I’d have a proposal to them and they said, “Call me back in a week,” or whatever it was, I would do it. I was amazed at the number of people who didn’t.

To me, that’s table stakes. That alone separates you from half of the herd of those who don’t follow up because they’re so distracted by 101 other things. They don’t have a system in place for that targeted follow-up. What have you found works when people are following up versus have you said yes or no yet? Sometimes the follow-up can be like, “Congrats. I saw your quarterly earnings were up. I saw you got some great press.” It doesn’t always have to be pitching something.

It shouldn’t be, almost never pitching something. One of my favorite sayings in sales is, “How do you catch a cat?” Do you know how to catch a cat, John?

I know you don’t grab its tail.

You let it come to you. Even if you’re following up, you don’t go to grab it. You don’t go, “Are you interested? Are we moving forward?” You don’t try to go forward. You got to play it cool. You also have to give them time. You got to be a little bit cool about it. When I do my follow-ups, typically, I’m saying something like, “Does it make sense for us to connect later this week or sometime next week?” It doesn’t make sense. Another one is you can ask, regardless of the sale, “Do you have ten minutes to connect this week?” It’s a quick one. Also, give people an out. If you’re not interested say, “Let me know. I don’t want to keep bugging you.”

Can we talk about the other case study you have here a little bit before I let you go, which is Lynk? I always love when a case story starts with some exposition. Paint the picture. How long ago did they approach you? Where are they? The problem is they’re not growing as fast as they want you to get market share. How do they find you? Where were they in their market share? How did they even become aware they had that problem?

We found them using the same system that we sell to our clients. We generated our own lead from Lynk. When we reach out to clients, from our perspective, we’re offering a way to help them generate more leads, accelerate their pipeline and get them to market faster. There’s a lot of that language in there that resonated with them. They’re a very interesting company. It’s like a blockchain FinTech, very cutting-edge stuff. What we were able to do for them is get them out of their own heads where they were so heavily focused on the technology that they had, where the market was going and all of these things but their target client doesn’t care about any of that stuff.

There are two dots I want to connect. One of your early mistakes was focusing too much on your own product development, which is a common thing that most tech people do. They love it. Their head is down on that. I’m assuming that what’s important to me is important to the people who will need our products. You’re not speaking the language that grabs people’s attention is what I’m hearing. When someone like you comes in and goes, “You got some cool stuff here, blockchain and all that other stuff but nobody cares about how it works. They just care about the outcome.”

TSP Patrick Baynes | Email Spam

Email Spam: You don’t have to do Zoom calls until you really have to. Your first call is a phone call and then you can move down to a more structured meeting.

 

Even if I had gone back to when I started Nerdwise and I knew that lesson a little bit in a more hardened way, I may be a different business because I would have been so much better at marketing and selling the stuff that I was doing but they got us at the right time. We met them at the right time as well. There was the whole system that we put into play. There was an accelerator but the biggest change that we made to their sales process, their sales outreach, to the stuff that they were doing was getting them out of their heads, showing them, “This is what this should look like to your target client.” The case study says 90 meetings for 30 days. It was outrageous. 1 in every 8 people we reached out to took the meeting.

Did you find a lot of people that work with you don’t have a system in place or the system they have in place needs to be tossed out and you start using yours? Are you starting from scratch? Are you redoing something that exists?

It’s a mix. When I went to a trade show in San Francisco, it was a lot of tech companies and people would say, “What do you do?” I said, “Does your company run outreach sequences for you guys? Do they do any sales orders?” They go, “Yes.” I go, “How’s it going?” A lot of people say, “It sucks. Sometimes it’s good. I don’t know.” Most people don’t know how it’s going. When you get to the person who’s running it and you said 15% open rates, if you have 15% open rates, that means for every 100 prospects you reach out to only 15 of them are even reading your email. You’re punching a brick wall. You’re never going to make headway with that type of performance.

When we engage with the client, either they have no system in place or they’re not getting the performance that they need. I always wish I had like, “Here’s a crystal ball, silver bullet. This is going to get you guys.” People always want to know like, “What messaging you’re using? What subject line is it?” I won’t tell you all my messaging. I’ll tell you all of the subject lines. There were about fifteen things you have to get right for a program like this to work well. I could try to go through all fifteen. There’s a lot of them. Did you know that if you have multiple links in your email, it’s going to get caught in spam filters? Did you know email signatures oftentimes carry 3 to 4 to 5 URLs? Did you know that there are volume issues and trigger words?

Some people are using the wrong technology to do things. Some people have hurt their reputation by throwing 100 prospects into a machine and blasting them and suddenly, they’re in the spamdoghouse. It all starts with a good go-to-market plan. You have to know who your audience is. There’s something called warming up a domain, which is critical. You can Google that term. Microsoft, Google and all of the big players provide clear instructions on how to do this right because people do it so wrong. It’s how you stay on the right side of the internet and build a positive reputation as a sender. That’s how you can get and keep a very high open rate engagement rate with your emails. All of these factors are critical.

The thing that comes to mind is you’re like a master chef. If you only want to make a basic hamburger, that’s not that complicated but if you want a gourmet meal with multiple courses and having it all get done at the right time, that’s a big part of serving a meal.

If you want to serve 100 customers, 5 people, 10 salespeople or 3 markets.

You leave one ingredient out. The temperature’s wrong. You open the oven and it doesn’t rise. That analogy is helpful. It’s not just one thing that makes a great meal nor does one thing that makes a great campaign. Therefore, you need your expertise because you’ve been moving those like what a master chef does. Put one more sprinkle of salt and it’s going to ruin the taste. Without it, it’s bland. That helps people understand what your secret sauce is playing on that analogy. There’s a recipe that you’ve created and it’s your own proprietary. You clearly are getting stellar results that people don’t even know are possible. If someone wants to figure out, “Are we good for what Nerdwise is offering? Will it work for us or not?” What are the criteria? Is it only B2B?

It’s anything in B2B that we can work with. The only challenges I run into are when folks are working on super niche industries like government contracts or something where this may not be the right fit. Sometimes the people don’t have enough of a sales operation, meaning that it’s still an owner-operator, maybe nine folks on delivery or whatever the mix maybe. Even though that can work well, a little bit of maturity around your sales ops helps.

TSP Patrick Baynes | Email Spam

Email Spam: What Nerdwise does is learn where their client wants to be in the market. What their value prop is or what they think it is. Then they give them a prescription of activities that will help them in their direction.

 

The other thing to go with that chef analogy and I love that I’m walking away here with a story that I can use to go and sell with is chef prep. They need their ingredients the day before. They need to prepare and line up those ingredients. They need to know where they’re going with everything. There’s so much before that comes before the dish, before the next dish and so forth. All of that is critical as well.

Most companies don’t even have a sous chef in sales development or they’re going to the farmer’s market at the wrong time and all the good stuff has gone. That means it continues to work in a lot of ways. Nerdwise.com. You’ve got your own website, PatrickBaynes.com. Anything else you want to leave us with a quote or a favorite takeaway?

A big high five and a thank you, John. I appreciate the opportunity. Great conversation.

Thanks for sharing your insights. What a wonderful story. Thanks, Patrick.

 

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