Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

Jaksot

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  Is Customer Service Really Dead? 15.09.2026 14min

  Is customer service really dead? Technology can either help customer service a whole lot, or it can harm it a whole lot, depending on how it’s used. It’s like a weapon. You can use a knife to cut a steak, or you can use a knife to hurt somebody. And I think technology is being used the same ways. They’re trying to save themselves time, energy, and effort. But they’re forgetting the fact that there are other human beings on the other end of that technology. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of customer service. Is it well and truly dead? Welcome Jay. Jay: Well, I think it depends upon the industry, but I’m going to say it’s more dead than not as far as I can tell. David: Yeah, it’s sad. And I feel like in some businesses, in the best businesses, it’s not dead. And it creates a tremendous advantage for those who are still keeping it alive, whether on life support or just because it’s the way they do business. But wow. I have had so many experiences recently where it seems like not only is the customer service unresponsive, uncooperative, unpleasant… Jay: Mm-hmm David: And there’s just this level of apathy that seems to go with it, which when you combine those things, really does seem pretty deadly. Jay: Yeah. And I think there is a temptation, because there’s such great technology out there. There is a temptation to say, “look, we can cut our costs if we just implement this new technology that maybe answers questions online” or “press one for this or for that.” I can see the temptation, but I don’t know if they clearly understand the frustration. I’ll tell you one of my pet peeves right now are the chat bots. I’ll go online and they’ll say, “Hey, if you don’t want to sit on hold,” which is an admission already that you don’t have enough people, ” go ahead, just chat with us.” And I’m thinking I’m going to get a live person. And no, I get a chatbot and I type in my question and it sends me to a predefined link that doesn’t answer my question. And I’m like, “I’ve just wasted 15 minutes and I could have been on hold the whole time.” So, very cool tech, but on the customer end, I think it’s frustrating a lot of people. Does Technology Help or Hurt Customer Service? David: It really can, particularly because technology can either help customer service a whole lot, or it can harm it a whole lot, depending on how it’s used. It’s just like any other weapon, right? It’s like a weapon. You can use a knife to cut a steak, or you can use a knife to hurt somebody. And I think the technology is being used the same ways, where they’re trying to save themselves time and energy and effort. And they’re forgetting that there are other human beings on the other end of that technology. But even beyond that, tech aside, there are now situations where you leave a message for somebody, or you send them an email. I mean, that is obviously tech as well, but if the human being behind the email does not respond to the email or they don’t return the phone call or they don’t return the voicemail or they don’t return the text. Now it’s actually more human error than tech error. And that’s where I think customer service is really struggling right now. Because if you’ve got well-meaning well-intentioned people who are determined to use the technology to make customer service better, then those companies are not just going to survive, they’re going to thrive. But the problem is there are people in organizations who just don’t care enough about the customers to even do the basic minimum things like returning phone calls, returning voicemails, and that sort of thing. Jay: Yeah. And then there’s the question of, you know, how do you know if you’re a business? How do you know if those calls are being returned? How do you gauge your customer service? Do you have a system to follow up with customers to see what their experience was like? If you don’t have a system to gauge that, you may be in real trouble because of your customer service and not even know it. David: We were talking in a previous episode about the idea of when costs are increased and you have to look for places to cut back. When there are situations where a company is employing people who are not taking care of the customer, if you’ve got to cut back personnel, that’s the best place to start. If there are people who will not be educated, and who are unwilling to learn what it takes to continue conversations with clients, that is really problematic. And so for the people who are serious about growing and expanding their business, who are serious about maintaining the type of customers that make you want to go to work in the morning, instead of the type of customers that make you want to run screaming from the room? Then it really means that we’ve got to up our game. We have to up our game from a customer service standpoint, a management standpoint, and an ownership standpoint, to ensure that our people are being taken care of. And as consumers, I think it’s essential for us to let businesses know when we feel like they’re falling down on the job. Because you’re right. They might not know it. And they might not have the systems in place that they should have in place to track that. So if they don’t, really, the only thing that’s going to get their attention is the squeaky wheel, right? The customer who says, “Hey, listen, this is the experience I had, is this what you meant to do to me?” Jay: Yeah. And unfortunately, I think from the research and surveys I’ve seen, people are more likely to just stop using you than they are to tell you that they had a problem. Or they’ll go online and they’ll give you a nasty review. The nasty review can be a source of finding out where your problems are. But a lot of times I think customers just say, well, I’m done with them and they move on to the next guy. David: That’s exactly right. And most of the time that’s what I would do, I would say, “Okay, that’s it. Never going back there again,” I recently had a situation where we went to a restaurant that we go to pretty frequently. And I got an email from them saying that I had a $15 credit that was good till the end of the month. It was some sort of promotion or something like that. And I use their promotions frequently, so I was like, “oh, okay. I got a $15 credit. Let’s use it.” It was close to the end of the month. I said to my wife, “Hey, we should go here and grab some food.” It was, I think it was the 30th. It was going to expire on the 31st. We hadn’t planned to go out, but I thought, okay, $15 credit. I’ll use that. Right. Drop it on the floor. See how quickly I pick it up. And so we went to the restaurant, and had a great meal. Good time. The server was fantastic. Got to the end. Attempted to use the coupon. “Oh no. That’s only for people who took part in this particular promotion that went from this date to this date and who bought a gift card.” And I was like, “I don’t think it said all that in the email I got.” So she apologized and she was very nice about it. And like I said, I go there frequently, I like the place. But when I got home, I’m like, “this does not sit well with me.” So I submitted essentially a review, not an online review that people could see. I submitted it to their complaint department, which would go to somebody who could read it and address it. And I got a call back the very next day from the manager who apologized for the confusion. He said, “don’t worry, we’re going to take care of this for you. I see you’re a good customer,” I’m like a frequent rewards member, stuff like that. Go there a lot. So they saw how much we spent and the guy was great. He made it right. And in those situations you can say, “all right, whew. That’s good. Glad I was able to bring it to their attention and I’m glad they were willing to address it.” But there are a lot of businesses who are just like, “eh, yeah, too bad.” Gone. Jay: Yeah, and this is one of the things that bothers me. It’s that I think sometimes businesses, fear the customer that is complaining. And really they should be looked at as an opportunity. Because I’m going to bet that even though you had a bad experience with that restaurant, the fact that they called you right back after that whole process, I’m going to bet you’re more loyal to that restaurant. Because we all know that nobody’s perfect. All we want to know is that if they make a mistake that they’ll fix it, that they’ll solve it. And if we know that, we’re going to be more loyal, not less loyal. So having good customer service, especially when it’s complaints, I think is an incredible way to build loyalty. David: Yeah. And I think also when you’re complaining, you don’t want to burn bridges. Because if you’re a jerk about it, they’re going to be a lot less likely to help you. When I reported this incident, I talked about the fact that the food was really good. The server was great. It was a great experience, except for this one thing. And so I gave them an honest evaluation of what happened and they responded appropriately. But when we think about the idea of customer service, I like to believe that customer service is not dead, particularly among the companies that are smart about it and take it very seriously. I think that it does give a tremendous advantage to the people who are committed to fixing things that go wrong and who are committed to continuing to look for opportunities to make things better than what other people are doing. And to better serve their customers. With technology, it can and should be easier when we utilize it the right way and when we put that first. When we put the idea of engaging our customers, keeping them happy, and keeping them coming back, that’s going to do more to improve customer service than anything else we could probably talk about. Jay: Yeah. You talk about how technology can help improve things. There are so many situations like food delivery services or things like that, that I use now, where the minute my transaction is done, I get a prompt “please rate your service. Please rate the experience.” And I do it every time. I would never go to their website and do it. But because I’m prompted immediately to do it, I do it right then. It’s just become a habit because I want to reward those people that did a great job and they’re giving me a way to do it. But if I don’t see it right that second, I’m not going to be proactive and go out and find a way to do it. One of the other things that frustrate me with customer service is that companies are afraid to empower their frontline employees. Allowing them to make decisions. In your example with the restaurant, I believe that what the best situation would’ve been for that server to say, “I apologize for the confusion. I’m going to give you the discount anyway.” And… David: Mm-hmm Jay: so right then you’re like, “wow, that was the right response.” So I understand if it’s a big deal, you know, having to get approval from a manager or something like that. But I think the best situations are when that frontline person can just say, “you know what, you’re exactly right. Let me give you that discount.” And then you move on. You salvage the situation right away. David: Yeah, I agree. I think they probably had some latitude, but they didn’t have that level of latitude. They probably had the ability to bonus you a dessert or something like that, but maybe not take $15 off the bill or whatever. But you’re right. I think a lot of it goes back to the whole idea of the systems. If the systems you have in place are set up to empower the employee to fix problems immediately, it’s better than having to stew on it. Drive home, write something on a website and wait for a response. If it had been resolved immediately, you’d be like, “that’s great.” And even now, I mean, I’m happy it was resolved well. But I feel like every business should be able to learn from the good experiences they have and from the not so good experiences they have. And look at that and say, “how could I have done that better? How would I have handled that if it happened in my organization,” Jay: I think also looking for trends. People sometimes fear looking at the results, but if you do have a good system to harvest these things, you can change your systems, identify trends where things are falling down, identify employees that are representing your company on the frontline and they’re regularly getting complaints or issues. You know, if you’re just haphazard about your customer service, you may not know that you’re losing customers or that people are being frustrated. And if that’s the case, it may be too late by the time you find out. David: And it’s so easy to send an email to your best customers, just asking what sort of experience they’re having. “How are things going? Do you have any questions? Do you have any concerns?” It’s also a great thing to do with people that you haven’t heard from in a while. If there are people who have ordered from you regularly in the past, and you haven’t heard from them lately, You can just drop ’em an email, and ask them how things are going, because you can find out things that you might not know otherwise. And if they’ve already moved on to what they consider to be greener pastures, that’s not going to be good. So it’s not just a matter of providing the best service you can. It is a matter of finding out are people perceiving that as well? Because it’s one thing if we think we’re providing great service. If our clients don’t feel that way, then essentially we’re not. Jay: Yeah, it’s also a great opportunity for the upsell. And I think that’s where people miss out. So again, looking at customer service as an opportunity, I think is so important. Very good. So how can people find out more? David: Okay. Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call if you’d like to schedule a time or we can just discuss what’s going on in your business, and where you’re struggling. If you’re struggling with customer service, if you’re struggling with growing sales, growing profits, we can walk you through a couple of questions to try to find out where you are, where you’re looking to be, and see if we can help. If we can help. We’ll let you know that if we can’t, we’ll let you know that too. You can go to TopSecrets.com/call to schedule a time that works for you. Again, that’s TopSecrets.com/call Jay: Yeah, I love that you’re offering that service, David. Sometimes it’s just a matter of having people vocalize their issues and having somebody to talk about it. Or talk with other people in similar industries. So I think that this is a real benefit that you’re offering. David: Very good. Thanks so much, Jay. Ready to Growing Your Sales & Profits Faster? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.
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  How to Lower Customer Acquisition Cost and Improve Conversions 08.09.2026 16min

  What’s your customer acquisition cost? I’ve been accused of being a bit of a maniac when it comes to lead tracking and making sure that we know where everything is coming from. I was a bit of a tyrant about that in previous businesses that I had, because you have to know what’s producing and what’s not. Otherwise, you can waste enormous amounts of money. David: Hi and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing what it costs to get a new customer. Welcome, Jay. Jay: Hey, it’s so good to be here, David. And customer acquisition cost is a very important metric that all companies need to know. It’s almost as though it’s part of your cost of goods sold. And if you don’t know this answer, you may think you’re making money and you might not be. David: Yeah. It’s really funny when I ask audiences that question, if I’m in front of a group and I say, “What does it cost you to acquire a new customer?” I get some blank looks, I get some smiles, some nervous laughter, some looking around. It’s generally a very small percentage of any given audience that actually knows their customer acquisition cost. And I think it’s interesting because if you don’t know this, or if you don’t even have an idea of what that cost might be, then you really have no idea not just what you’re putting out, what you’re getting from it, but you really have no idea how to continue to build from there. And I think to the extent that I do get answers when I ask the question, a lot of it is just generalities. It’s like, “well, I spend a lot, Oh, it’s a lot, it costs a lot.” But what is it? And some people are like, “Well, I don’t spend anything because I get referrals.” And whenever someone tells me that, that tells me that they’re probably doing 10 to 25% of the business they could be doing. Because if they’re getting a lot of referrals, that’s awesome. But if they’re just relying on referrals alone, there’s a lot that they’re leaving on the table. What is Your Customer Acquisition Cost? Jay: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. If you don’t know what your customer acquisition cost is, you can’t impact it. And it should be a goal to try and drive it down if you can. And if you can’t, work it into your sales costs, work it into your systems so that you can make sure that you’re profitable. David: Yeah. I think something else that people often don’t think of, particularly small businesses, they may go to Chamber of Commerce functions, they may do different things, go to different networking events and that sort of thing. And they don’t really think of that as a customer acquisition cost. Because they don’t value their time enough in a lot of cases. And so even if you’re not putting out actual cash in the form of advertising, marketing, things to get you noticed like that, there are acquisition costs. It’s going to cost you a certain amount of time out of your day. It’s going to cost you in terms of energy. It’s going to cost you in terms of effort. It’s going to cost you in terms of what could I be doing instead of what I’m doing now that could potentially produce a higher return? So there are a lot of different aspects to this and that’s why I thought it would be a good conversation to have. Jay: Yeah, I do agree with that. And you’re mentioning all the different types of customer acquisition. I mean, it could be something that doesn’t cost a lot. Maybe you can make viral videos and that’s driving customers to you. But there’s still an expense of creating those videos. There’s a lot of time and effort put into that, and they’re not calculating that in. They would probably tell you we don’t have a customer acquisition cost. But they’re paying somebody to spend 30, 40 hours a week to create viral videos. That’s a cost. David: Yeah. Or they’re doing it themselves, and if their time’s not worth anything, then they’re not spending money, but our time is worth something. Everybody’s time is worth something. And so those are the things that have to start going into the equation. Also, I think a lot of times people don’t bother tracking to see what is their customer acquisition cost in terms of time, energy, effort, and of course, money. Now, if they are spending money to generate leads, maybe they spend a certain amount of money to whatever, buy or rent a list, or maybe they spend a certain amount of money on advertising. Maybe they’re doing Facebook ads, or YouTube ads, or billboards. I mean, it could be anything, any sort of advertising, Newspaper advertising, obviously not as popular these days, online ads, lots of different ways that one can advertise to get their information in front of people. So if you’re generating leads or clients on social media, there’s a definite cost associated with that in terms of how much time are you putting in while you’re online, even if you’re not spending money on ads themselves. There is definitely a customer acquisition cost involved. So these are the types of things that it makes sense to sort of think about as you’re going in on a monthly basis, weekly basis, if not a daily basis. Jay: Yeah, and I think actual individual tracking, I mean, maybe it’s even just a spreadsheet of each platform that you’re using, if you’re paying for Google AdWords. If you’re paying for boosting on Facebook or anything else. Track what you’re spending. And then the other part of that, and I think this is where a lot of people miss, is when that lead comes in, it’s important to ask. It’s important to know, “Hey, how did you hear about us?” Because if you don’t do that, you’re not going to know what’s working and what’s not working. David: Yeah, absolutely. You have to be able to track your customer acquisition cost on the back end once that happens. And once again, I think there are a lot of people who don’t do this. They’re just out doing a lot of different things, potentially. And if you don’t know the things that are actually generating the results, how do you know how you can improve? Because it’s possible you could eliminate a number of different things that you’re doing that just aren’t producing as much. You could double down on the things that are working and you could generate a lot more customers in the same or less time. Jay: Yeah. And the beauty is with at least digital products or social media products, it’s so easy to track where those leads came from. If you have Google Analytics that will help you. Or we kind of talked about it last time, where you used to have an individual phone number for each type of advertising. Now you could just send them to a unique URL for each advertising vehicle and know instantly how many leads are coming through. And then the next step would be, well, how many of those leads are we closing? Because that’s how you really calculate your customer acquisition cost. David: Yeah, and I think in a sense what you said, that’s the ideal. That’s exactly what everyone should be doing all the time. But even getting to that, if people were to do things as simple as pay attention to what it is that they’re putting out, pay attention to where those leads are coming from, even generally. If someone contacts you, however it is they contact you and you’re not sure where they came from, just to ask them, “Hey, where did you hear about?” Now, if they’re contacting you online, if they’re contacting you through Facebook Messenger or something like that, then that gives you a bit of a hint that they probably saw something that you posted on Facebook and they’re responding to that. So you should be able to track your customer acquisition cost that way as well. Without that information, you really have such a disadvantage over the people who are paying attention to those sort of things. Jay: Yeah, and I don’t know about you, but I’ve been really surprised. You know, we make assumptions about what’s going to work. And of course, people selling us advertising products, they tell us how it’s going to work. But when you do actual tracking, I’ve been really surprised. I’m like, Really? That was the one that I thought, that was just a shot in the dark. I didn’t think that was going to work at all. And that’s the one that’s really performing. So I’m going to dial that one up. And these other ones that I thought were going to perform, and they’re not, I’m going to dial those ones down. I mean, this is how you improve the entire process. And it should be a constant process, right? David: Yes. And that is absolutely the case. I know, I’ve been accused of being a bit of a maniac when it comes to lead tracking and making sure that we know where everything is coming from. I was a bit of a tyrant about that in previous businesses that I had. I had a direct mail catalog business. And it’s absolutely critical in a business like that, because you have to know what’s producing and what’s not. Otherwise you can waste enormous amounts of money, and so that’s something that I’ve just carried over. So even now, if I run ads. There are different types of ads that can be run through different organizations that’ll be doing email communications that can be coded and tracked to a specific page on a website, as you indicated. So if they opt in from that page, you know that it came from this particular ad. It’s very easy to do. And as you indicated, sometimes you think this one thing’s going to be great, and it turns out that it’s not. Sometimes you think it’s going to be great and it is. Sometimes you’re right. But what’s really interesting is sometimes you can have a lead source that will generate a lot of leads and you think, “Wow, this is great.” But then you find out that they’re not producing anything. They’re not converting into sales. So you can have fewer leads coming from one source that generates more revenue for you, more sales and more long-term customers. And then you have something else that’s generating a lot of leads, but they’re just taking up your time, and they’re not converting. All that plays into your customer acquisition cost. Jay: Oh yeah. I’ve totally had this experience. We had set up Google advertising and instantly we were getting leads like you couldn’t believe. And we started going through ’em and spent a lot of time with them, and none of them were valuable. Our close rate was like, 1% on this group. And we’re like, “that is terrible. ” So we refined the keywords. We did a lot of research and we were able to crank the close rate up to about 28%. And that’s just by watching and learning and you know, figuring out what works best. But it’s still a constant process. We’re still looking every day at that rate. And it will start to fluctuate sometimes. And we’re like, Okay, what’s going on? Is there an industry shift here? Are the needs of customers changing because of trends that we’re not seeing? It’s just a constant labor that we go through. David: What’s really interesting about that, is the idea that you can engage in an activity that will create a 28 x return, right? We were getting 1%, now we’re getting 28%. That’s 28 times… Jay: I know! David: …the result, right? And assuming, all things being equal, which of course they never are, but I mean that could mean a 28 x increase in overall gross sales. And the more you dial it in, the better it gets. But many people fail to even think of that sort of thing, let alone take consistent action on it. Jay: Yeah. And the incredible thing is that we’re actually spending less money to get those leads. Because we got the system so refined. So we reduced our customer acquisition cost and we improved our close rate at the same time. I mean, we were just jumping for joy when we figured out this equation. Now, not everybody is that simple. I’m in an industry where there’s a very specific type of customer and we were able to hone in and identify that individual. Not so easy in every industry, though. David: Right, but just the idea that that can be done. A lot of times what will happen is when people are running an ad or they’re doing some sort of outbound effort, if it doesn’t produce results, if you talk to a hundred people and you’re only able to close one, if you get a 1% closing rate. You may look at that and say, Oh, well this doesn’t work. And those three words, “this doesn’t work,” are deadly in marketing and sales. Because too often we blame the one thing, whether it’s the ad or whether it’s the medium that you’re using. If it’s Facebook or if it’s Google or whatever, you say, “Well, that doesn’t work.” “Facebook ads don’t work.” In the work that I do with promotional products distributors, there are customers for promotional product salespeople who say, “Well, promotional products don’t work for us.” And you can’t really just come out and say this, “Well, it’s your fault.” But it’s the truth. You can’t have an entire advertising medium that produces results for a whole lot of other people. That, for some magical reason, doesn’t work for you. It’s always a matter of saying, “okay, could this work? What can I do to tweak this? What can I do to make this work?” And you try some different things. It’s like the old story about Edison and how when he was asked about his many failures when trying to create the light bulb, or “you’ve tried 10,000 different things, they’ve all failed.” He said, “No. I’ve successfully identified 10,000 approaches that don’t work.” And then eventually he identified one that did. And that’s the reason you’re doing it. You’re not doing it for the failed experiments, you’re doing it for the one that actually ends up creating results. Jay: Yeah. Such a great point. And I do think it’s also important to talk about the closing process because you may have a great system that is actually generating good leads. But you don’t have the right closer, the right person on the other end, the right system on your website to actually get them to finally click that purchase button. So you may have actually a good system of generating leads of good customers. But then you’re falling down on the closing side. So there’s a lot of different aspects to this process that need to be looked at. David: Yeah, it’s true. There are lots of different places along the line where things can potentially go wrong. And the most important, or one of the most important aspects of this, is identifying that correctly. And not just saying, “Okay, it’s this,” when you haven’t actually determined that it is in fact that. Jay: Yeah, not guessing, right? Using key performance indicators, all of the information that’s available out there to make the best decisions about where you are falling down. David: Yeah. So I think for most people who haven’t really thought about this, take just a little bit of time, jot down a few notes in terms of, okay, what am I doing right now that is working well and how can I leverage that? How can I amplify that? What am I currently spending? In terms of money, in terms of time, in terms of energy and effort? If there are particular activities that you’re engaged in that just drain you and cause you to lose enormous amounts of time because you just can’t stand it and the rest of your day goes away, notice those types of things. But then also just look at those costs and identify what they’re likely to produce. And again, it doesn’t take a whole lot to be able to do this. But if you just pay attention to where those leads are coming from and which leads are closing, and you can literally do this anywhere. I get a lot of questions about this. Well, do I have to have a contact management system that I put this in? That’s ideal. You want to have a place to store all the information, have it all there so that you’re not looking around for different scraps in different places. So it’s good to have it all in one place, but within a customer record, you can identify this, Where did they first hear about us? And so if it takes three months or six months or a year to get them closed, hopefully it doesn’t take that long. But if it does, you can still go back and say, Oh, okay, this lead came from this particular source. So it just allows you to know. Because when you have some idea of where your existing customers are coming from, then you also have some idea of where to go to get more. Jay: Absolutely. Such great information. How do people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team. We can work through whatever it is that you’re currently dealing with, where you are now, where you’d like to be, and see if we can help you. And if we can, we’ll let you know. If we can’t, we’ll let you know that, too. Jay: All right, David, thank you so much for your time today. David: Thank you, Jay. Ready to Grow Your Sales & Profits? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
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  How to Monetize Your Sales Pipeline and Close More Sales 01.09.2026 13min

  To monetize your sales pipeline, you need to fill it, prioritize it and tackle it. This whole idea of knowing what to do and not doing it, is rampant. It seems ridiculous. It’s like, “who would do that?” And the answer is nearly everybody does it. And none of us do it on purpose, but we all, to some extent, end up doing it. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing how to monetize your sales pipeline. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you, David. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I really can’t wait to talk a little bit more about this process. I see people who kind of think they have a pipeline. But they’re not sure exactly what to do with it. So a good, important topic today. David: Yeah. What to do with it or in a lot of cases, even what it is. I think even before we can talk about how to monetize it, you almost have to identify it. What is it? What is your sales pipeline? Who is it? Who are the people who are in it? Where is it located? Is it just inside your head? Because if it’s just inside your head, leaving enormous amounts of money on the table. Jay: Yeah, and we’ve talked in the past about key performance indicators, KPIs. First you have to know what that pipeline is. Then you have to know how to track it and where people are at in each stage so that things ideally trigger automatically. I think that’s the end goal, but getting there can be difficult. 3 Steps to Monetize Your Sales Pipeline David: Yeah, I mean I think of it in terms of filling it, prioritizing it and then tackling it. Because if you’re not doing it in that order, it’s going to be problematic for you. Jay: All right. Well then let’s start with filling it. Let’s get that going. David: Okay, Well, when we talk about filling our pipeline after we’ve identified what it is and where it is, filling it obviously is the biggest thing. And I think a lot of salespeople tend to think of this as being pretty important. Getting new leads into their pipeline. And of course, it is very important. It’s the number one step. Because until you know who’s in there, you don’t really have anything you can do. You’ve got to have the prospect first. So filling it starts with asking yourself, who goes in here? And what types of clients am I looking for? Are they in particular types of industries? Are they located in a particular geographic area? What are the different things that I’m looking for in terms of a good, solid prospect for my pipeline? So who goes in is very important. But who stays out is also extremely important. And we don’t think about this, but it is so critical. In my sales career over the years, particularly in the early stages, I just thought if someone was willing to talk to me then they were a good prospect. And I learned, not as quickly as I should have, that that’s just not the case. There are people out there who will be happy to talk to you again and again and never actually buy anything from you. So when you’re looking at who goes in and who stays out, think in terms of exactly that. When you are talking to someone, if you’re not able to get them qualified in as quickly as you’d like, to make sure that they have the need, the desire, the money, the budget, the willingness to spend. Then, don’t keep going back to that well and expecting to get water out if there’s no water to be found. Jay: You know, we had exactly this problem here recently with the company I’ve been doing consulting for. They wanted to start using Google ads and David: mm-hmm. Jay: So they just put out some general pay for click kind of stuff, and their phones and their online scheduling just lit up. I mean every single day, packed and full. But only about 3% of those calls were related to their actual focus and their product. So they ended up spending all this time. And then what they had to do was go through a process of, like you said, Okay. Identifying the core customer and refining your keywords down to a point where you’re not getting all of that other stuff. At first, they’re like, “look at all these calls. This is going to be great,” and it turned into a huge detractor very quickly. To Monetize Your Sales Pipeline, Don’t Overfill it David: Yeah. And so when we think in terms of filling our pipeline, and I led with that. I said, Okay, first we have to fill it, but we don’t want to overfill it. And we particularly don’t want to fill it with people who have no likelihood of becoming clients. So, a lot of times the thought process is, you know, where is the next lead going to come from? Whether it’s coming from online, whether you’re doing something with Google, whether you’re doing in person prospecting, whether you’re doing it through social media, where they come from is not as critical as making sure that you’re getting people into the pipeline that you can qualify in or out as quickly as possible. So that’s really the first thing. Fill it, but don’t overfill it. Because I know people who have what they think are sales pipelines. It’s basically a database of thousands of people that they’re never going to get to, because they didn’t do the second thing we’re talking about, which is to prioritize it and decide, you know, who are the people in here that I need to be in touch with now? We need to rank the contacts inside that database so that we can be in touch with the right people at the right time. I mean, that’s really all prioritization is, starting with the most important contacts first, and that’s a challenge sometimes too, is to say, Okay, well who is most important? is it what they refer to as the bleeding neck thing? You know, who’s in the most trouble? Or is it, hey, I’ve got a really good, loyal client who reached out to me. Do I reach out to them first, or do I reach out to the person who’s screaming, who I might not know as well? That’s a personal decision, but in a lot of cases, you need to do your prioritization based on what’s most important to you. If it’s serving a really good customer first, then that person has to come first. If somebody else is screaming for service, but they’re new prospects and you have no idea whether or not they can spend a dime with you, you need to decide how that’s going to fall on the prioritization scale. And to the extent possible, if you have help, if you’ve got an administrative assistant who can help with some of that stuff, that’s great. But prioritization is absolutely key. Is it our best customers? Is it the person with the biggest, most pressing need? Now, biggest and most pressing are also two different things, right? Somebody might have a very pressing need for a very teeny, tiny order. And so if that’s the case, does it make sense for you to step away from what you’re doing with a bigger, more important order or customer to deal with somebody who’s got something smaller in mind. And once again, you’ve got to make some of these decisions for yourself. But when you recognize that there are different criteria that go into this decision, then it really becomes more of a simple thought process. Because you make those calls for yourself and then you make those decisions accordingly. And there are always people who are going to have time sensitive projects. So where does that fall into the overall scheme of things? People, you know, say they need stuff tomorrow or they need it immediately. And sometimes that’s the case and sometimes it’s not. So finding those things out is also part of this process. Jay: Yeah. One of the ways I ‘ve seen this done, kind of what you’re talking about, is identifying where different leads are coming from. So I have leads that are referrals and I have leads that are from Google Ads. And then I’m tracking my close rate on both of those leads, and I’m realizing that the ones that come from referrals or my current database, my close rate is 30%, and from Google it’s 10%. To me, that’s a great way to be able to identify where you should focus your time. David: Yeah. And in those situations too, I mean, some people will look at that and say, “well, I got 30% here and 10% there. Let’s forget about that.” But hey, 10% is still 10% right? And if your qualification procedure is tight, and you can disqualify the unqualified as quickly as possible, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that in future podcasts as well, then it makes perfect sense to look at that. Because the 10% that you’re getting from one source might actually perform better than the 30% you’re getting somewhere else, depending on how large a customer it is and what they’re buying. So there are all those different factors involved, and it’s smart. What you’re doing is very smart. Looking at that and trying to make those best decisions based on what’s actually happening in real life, in your customer base, in your prospect base. Jay: Yeah. Such a great point, because I may be able to close 30% of this type of lead, but I’m only getting three of those a day. And then on the 10% side, I’m getting 20 of those a day, so David: Right. Jay: That’s part of that calculation, right? David: Yeah, 10% of 20 is two. So if you can pick up two customers from it, then, you don’t want to throw that away. Jay: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other part is you don’t have to ignore those smaller percentages or things. You can have systems to deal with those people. Maybe you put them in a drip program so that they’re still getting contact from you. There’s other ways you’re not going to just, you know, kiss those people goodbye. You just may have a different way to reach out to them. David: Absolutely. All right, so we talked about identifying it, well, identifying it first, but then in terms of the 1, 2, 3 of it, filling your pipeline, prioritizing your pipeline, and then tackling it. So we talked about filling it and prioritizing it. Now, when it gets down to tackling, it’s really just a matter of doing. Once you’ve done your prioritization, once you’ve decided who the next person is, or who’s the first person I need to be in touch with, then it’s a matter of executing on your plan. So your prioritization is essentially your planning stage. And then tackling it is just about taking action. It’s about doing it. And we’ll be talking about things like call reluctance and things like that in future podcasts. But this whole idea of knowing what to do and not doing it, is rampant. It seems ridiculous. It’s like, well, who would do that? And the answer is nearly everybody does it. And none of us do it on purpose, but we all, to some extent, end up doing it. It’s like, Well, I know I need to do this, but then something pops up on our radar and we do that. It could be shiny object syndrome. We’ve talked about squirrel before, right? Squirrel. That was from a movie, right? You had mentioned that in a previous podcast. Jay: Yeah. That was from Up In Disney’s Up. David: Right, okay. The dog. Jay: The dog, yeah. David: Yeah, and I think we can all relate to that. So it’s like we know what we need to do, but then we get distracted. And so tackling it simply means having the self discipline to, once you’ve made that plan, to stick to that plan. And follow your instincts in that regard, because if you’ve taken the time to identify who needs to be in touch next, then you want to make sure that that’s the person that you’re being in touch with. It’s very straightforward, but needs to be mentioned because a lot of times it just doesn’t happen. There are probably situations. I know I’ve been in this situation, probably anybody who’s watching this podcast has been in a situation where you’re like, Oh, I really need to call so and so. I really need to get in touch with this person or that person. And then days go by, or weeks go by, or months go by, and in a lot of cases it’s because you didn’t do step two, you didn’t prioritize it. You didn’t actually put that person on a list, at or near the top of that list where they would be seen, and it could be acted. And once again, going back to what we started out on this, if you’re doing it all in your head, you are going to miss things. There’s no way you will not miss things. It’s just the way things work. You get it down on paper, you get it into one prioritized list, you organize it, you sort it. You start at the top and work your way through. That’s about the best way that you’re ever going to be able to get these things done. So, the topic that we started out with was monetizing your pipeline. Now, all we’ve really talked about is filling it and prioritizing it and tackling it, but that’s what leads to the monetization. Because it’s the failure to do those things that puts you in touch with a lot of the wrong people at the wrong time with the wrong words. That leads to non monetization. So if you really want to monetize your pipeline, you still need to focus on these three things. First, you have to fill it, then you have to prioritize it, and then you have to tackle it and be ruthless about eliminating poor quality prospects. Jay: Yeah, I totally agree with you. And again, looking at tackling knowing your sales cycle is something that can be critical. Like if you, if you discover that, if you don’t get back to them in a week, then the close rate goes down. I mean, it depends on what type of business you have, but that timeliness is also something you should study and look at. Because you may learn, if I don’t get back to these customers in 48 hours, then my percentages go way down. David: Absolutely. I mean, I’ve always maintained that a hot lead is like a hot cup of coffee. It doesn’t get any hotter as a result of neglect. You know, you’ve got to get to it fast. And leads are like that. And I know I’ve made that mistake in my business over the years where something comes in, I get distracted. You follow up later and they’re like, “Oh, I already took care of that.” It’s like, “ugh.” Now I haven’t done that at all recently, but I know years ago, and in the early stages, I’d just have things falling through the cracks because I didn’t do this consistently, these three things. When you do it, it works really well. When you don’t, you really pay the price. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. How do people find out more, David? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call if you’d like to have a call with myself or my team to talk about how you’d like to grow your sales and profits. We can have a strategy session, discuss where you’re struggling, what you’re looking to do, and if we can help, we’ll tell you how we can do that. And if we can’t help, we’ll tell you that too. So I’d start with that: TopSecrets.com/call. Jay: All right, Dave, I love it. Thank you so much for joining us today. David: Thank you, Jay. Ready to Grow Your Sales & Profits? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.
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  How to Increase Sales, Profit, Cash Flow, and Personal Income 25.08.2026 15min

  To increase sales, profit, cash flow, and personal income, understand that money is always flowing in one direction or another. In a business, it needs to flow in from the customers. It needs to flow through to the employees and to the suppliers and to everybody who is providing you with services. And there needs to be something left over at the end to take home. And when you’re able to make those things happen consistently, everybody’s just better off. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing how to increase sales, profit, and personal income. Welcome Jay. Jay: Yeah. Thank you, David. I’m so excited, as usual, to talk about these topics that we discuss every podcast. I think that people often get caught up, especially small business owners, in one of these aspects, instead of having balance between all of them. And I feel like the one that they think about the most is sales. We have to increase sales. And if you’re not focusing on profitability in that regard, you could be generating all kinds of sales, but you’re not controlling your costs. And so ultimately those sales aren’t helping you. David: Yeah. Been there, done that. I think anybody, if you’ve started your own business, you’ve probably found yourself in this situation and gross sales is usually a good place for people to start. They’re thinking in terms of top line. Okay. I need to bring in as much as possible, which is true. You got to be bringing it in. But if you’re not paying attention to the rest of it, as you indicated, you could be selling a lot of stuff and losing money every day. And unless you’re keeping track of that, you’re not going to know it. I remember in the early days of my promotional products business, I would get together with my accountant once every 90 days. At the end of every quarter, actually the beginning of the following quarter, we would review the numbers for the previous quarter. And at that point, it’s too late to do anything about it. You feel like things are going well because you know, you’re selling stuff, but then you look at the expenses, the cost of goods, the cost of people, all your internal costs, your overhead costs. And you find out that you’re not making money on it. And 90 days later is too late. So once we got that in focus and we started doing it every month, reviewing what happened last month, where are our expenses too high and where are our gross sales too low? And which customers take up too much time and don’t generate enough revenue? Once we’re able to focus on the things that actually allow you to operate a profitable business, things got a lot better, a lot more quickly. And when we think in terms of these three things, how to increase sales, profit, and personal income, it’s almost like you’re starting here with the sales and then that generates whatever profit you have. And then after you’ve spent money on overhead and things, then you have some money to pay yourself, get some personal income going. But different businesses operate different ways. There are some business owners who are so focused on what am I going to bring in for myself that they may cut costs. They may short change people in terms of what they’re delivering in terms of product. They may choose less quality products. And so depending on where people’s focus is, determines where they’re going to be successful among those three things. Jay: Yeah. And I think you need balance. I mean, they’re all important. And so as you talked about looking at things monthly, I think having systems to identify and track each of these areas and have proper goals and benchmarks and reporting systems so that you can catch issues quickly. And pivot quickly is the only way you’re going to find balance in the force with these three things. David: Yeah, I agree. And I’ve operated businesses that had overhead that was too high. And that’s really hard. Because you feel like you’re trying to do everything right. And you’re trying to take care of the business and you’re trying to take care of your employees and you’re trying to take care of your customers. And if you don’t have the metrics right, it’s going to be pretty darn close to impossible to do that. And so finding the balance between the quality of product, which has to be high, the customer service, which has to be great. And the quality of client you’re interacting with, which also has to be great. When you get those three things lined up, you’re more likely to be successful, but if you’re not quite connected with some of those things, it’s a really uphill slog. Jay: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve kind of mentioned this in some other podcasts, but I see businesses when they need to increase their profitability. Their default is we need to increase sales or revenue. And I think that can be misguided. Because in order to make a dollar in profit, you may need to increase sales by $10. But if you focus on reducing cost, like for example, in a restaurant, if you can reduce your food cost by 1%, that immediately goes to the bottom line and increases profitability. So I find that the much faster route to profit than just to increase sales. And I don’t know that every business person understands that. David: Right. And I think it’s probably because there is a limit to how much you can cut. But theoretically, there’s not a limit in terms of how much you can generate. Now, obviously there is. If it’s a restaurant, you’ve got a certain number of seats or whatever. In a promotional products business, there’s a certain number of customers that you can visit with. Whatever your business is, there are going to be limits on the upper end. But most businesses never see that. They never get to the point where it’s like, I’m totally overwhelmed. I’m extremely profitable. I’m making a lot of money and I’m capped out. Because when you’re doing things well, when you’re doing things right, you’re generating the revenue, you’re generating the profit, which means you can hire additional people. You can add the staff, you can get the help and you can still continue to make money. But when you’re not in that situation, when you’re just sort of barely eking things out, and you’re saying, “okay, I need to increase sales. I need to generate more.” Yeah, you probably do. But as you indicated, if you are able to cut some of your overhead costs by even just a small amount, all of that drops, whereas gross sales don’t drop. Gross sales do not drop directly to your bottom line. And I can’t tell you how many people I’ve worked with who forget that. And when they think about gross sales, when they focus on gross sales, when they talk about gross sales, they’re like, “oh yeah, we’re generating all of this.” It doesn’t matter if you don’t get to drop it and keep some of it and pay everybody who needs to be paid. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things is knowing what your cost should be. What is the ideal cost that you’re shooting for? Because you’re right. You can’t continue to reduce costs. There is a line. There’s a threshold. My experience, like in the restaurant business, we had something called a theoretical food cost versus our actual food cost. The theoretical was if we had no waste, if we had no theft, if we had no shrinkage, if we ran perfectly, what would our food cost be? And then we compared that to our actual food cost. And so the goal was constantly trying to close the gap between those. And if you’re not an industry where there’s no shrinkage or things like that, then that’s not going to be as easy. But this was a great system for us to always be trying to achieve, to close that gap between the theoretical and the actual. David: Yeah, there are also a lot of business people who, when they start talking about this or thinking about this, it feels cold. “Well, I don’t like thinking about the numbers. I want to make sure I’m taking care of my people” and all that sort of thing, which is great. You do want to take care of your people. But the only way you can take care of your people is by remaining in business. Cause if you don’t remain in business, you can’t take care of anyone anymore. Can’t take care of your customers. You can’t take care of your employees. You can’t take care of yourself or your family. So, paying attention to this and recognizing that, yeah, this is a real thing and it’s not just driving gross sales is absolutely critical. I’ve operated businesses that generated huge gross sales, but they didn’t have the profitability they needed. I’ve operated businesses that didn’t generate a huge gross amount of money, but they had really good margins. And that works well too. And I’ve also operated businesses that generated a lot of sales and had a lot of profit. That’s my favorite. That’s probably most people’s favorite. That’s what you want to stick with. But if you recognize that that’s the goal and you’re taking the actions necessary to make it happen, then you’re going to be in a much better position. Jay: Yeah, totally. And then, you know, something like a pandemic can come along and your sales drop and now you’ve got to pivot dramatically to figure out how to increase sales and stay open. And so it’s not like you can assume that the status quo is going to be the way it always is. You’ve got to be prepared to identify issues quickly and pivot quickly. David: Yeah, you should probably assume that the status quo is never going to be the status quo. Because in life and in business, things are constantly changing. And some people were able to pivot extremely well and extremely effectively during the epidemic. And some people were just like, “I don’t know what to do.” And we’ve, we see the results of that. There are a lot of businesses that are no longer around because they couldn’t do it over. Even over the past six months. I’ve still seen a lot of that fallout happening, where there’s still businesses that are sort of merging with others or they’re being acquired, or people are retiring earlier than they would’ve otherwise because they just couldn’t figure out how to do it. And I think if you recognize that there are these three primary things, what am I making from it is the third part of it because you’re not making anything if you’re not able to increase sales and if you’re not generating profit, but looking at those three things and saying, okay, where do I need to focus my attention? Do I need to focus on how to increase sales? Do I need to focus it on trying to reduce my costs without reducing the quality of the product and the service that I’m delivering. I mean, if you cut food costs by getting cheaper, less tasty ingredients, then you can save some money there it’ll drop right to the bottom line. But then your gross sales are probably going to drop too. So it’s this constant balance. It’s this constant process of looking at, where am I, where am I trying to be? And what do I need to do to get there? Jay: Yeah, it feels complicated, but I think if you have good systems, if you have key performance indicators, ways to easily capture and process this information, I think that’s critical. You know, In my experience, a lot of restaurant operators don’t even know what their theoretical food costs should be. They don’t even know what a plate of food is supposed to cost. All they know is what their sales are and what they’re spending. And that’s it. So whatever your industry is, knowing what those ideal goals are, and then having systems to identify early issues, I think it’s the only way you’re going to find balance. Otherwise it’s an emotional process instead of a tactical process. David: Right. And knowing the how is extremely important. I know I need to increase sales and bring in more customers. How do I do it? I know I need to cut my costs. How do I do it without impacting quality? I know that I need to be able to increase my personal income, to be able to maintain the standard of life that’s going to allow me to want to continue in the business. I mean, I talk to people. Particularly in the last six months where they’re just tired of doing it. They don’t feel like what they’re generating for themselves is worth it. Because they’re doing all this work and they feel like it’s benefiting their suppliers. They feel like it’s benefiting their coworkers and it’s not dripping down to them. You know, they’re paying everybody else and there’s very little left. And so recognizing that in order to maintain a healthy business, it’s got to be healthy for everybody. It’s got to be healthy for the business owner, for the employees, for the clients, and not always necessarily in that order. Jay: Yeah, such a great point. I’ve seen this happen so many times. People start a business because it’s their passion. David: Mm-hmm, Jay: It’s a product that helps people or they love to cook for people or whatever it is. And then as things tighten up, it starts to be very stressful and it starts to feel like a job, not like your own business and you become a servant to that business. And that’s a tough place to be. So,, figuring out how to make it a love instead of a job, I think if you can balance these three things, you’re probably going to be able to do that more effectively. David: Yeah. Trickle down economics was actually the term I was struggling to think of before, ties to the idea of cash flow. In other words, money’s always flowing, it’s flowing in one, direction or another. And in a business, it needs to flow in from the customers. It needs to flow through to the employees and to the suppliers and to everybody who is providing you with services. And there needs to be something left over at the end to take home. And when you’re able to make those things happen consistently, everybody’s just better off. And I think a lot of it does come down to mindset too. If we recognize that our goal is to service our customers, whether it’s the people coming into a restaurant or the business owners, we work with, whoever it is, if we’re able to provide them a good quality product, a good quality service at a reasonable price that is profitable enough to us, that we can pay our people and pay our suppliers and pay ourselves. Then that’s a real win. Jay: Yeah, I love that you brought up cash flow and you might want to make it sales, profit, cash flow and personal income. It’s that important. David: Yeah. Jay: I worked for a gentleman who had a great business. I mean, he was making money hand over fist. But he wasn’t getting paid from his clients for three to six months. And so making payroll, being able to cover all your expenses becomes very difficult if you don’t have the money. You know, you can have the sales, but you don’t have the money. That can be a very difficult situation. And so cash flow is equally as important as these other things we’ve talked about. David: very true. So it’s going to flow from sales to cash flow to profits, eventually, when you get the cash flow in, and then eventually to personal income. So it does flow. That’s the point. And sometimes it trickles and sometimes it floods, and our goal is to try to get it to move at a steady enough pace that everybody gets paid. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. How can people find out more? David: Oh, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. If you’d like to schedule a time to talk with our team about how we can help you grow your sales and profits. If you’re an Inner Circle member, be sure to log in. We’ll be talking about that all this week. If you’re not an Inner Circle member, you can check out that service at topsecrets.com/ic for Inner Circle. That’s TopSecrets.com/ic. Yeah, thank you so much, David. I love that we’re sharing this information and hopefully just planting seeds and helping people think about things that perhaps they haven’t thought about before. So thank you for joining us and for sharing all your great insights. Thank you, Jay. Ready to Increase Sales & Profits? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.
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  Uncover Customer Needs and Sell More Effectively 18.08.2026 14min

  Knowing how to uncover customer needs is critical. Essentially, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs implies that when one need is satisfied, another one is likely to pop up. Once I’ve got this satisfied, then I’m going to be working on this. And then I’m going to be working on this. It’s human nature. So if you recognize the fact that the needs are constantly going to be changing and you adopt a policy of constant requalification with your people — staying in touch, building that relationship, and finding out what they need next — you’re going to be in much better shape. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of uncovering customer needs. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you so much, David. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I think that this is another great topic because a lot of times we just decide on our own what we think the customer needs, right? So we formulate that in our mind and we try and force that square into a round hole. You’re probably creating a lot more problems that you really don’t need to have. Uncovering customer needs in sales David: Exactly. When salespeople go in with the idea of “what I want to sell this person,” instead of “what does this person need,” they’re behind the eight ball right from the beginning. And I think there are some schools of thought in terms of sales, particularly if it’s a company that has one primary product that they’re looking to push, that, okay, you just have to go in and sell this. It reminds me of, you know, selling things door to door. If you’re a Fuller brush salesman and you’re looking to sell this one particular brush, well that’s my thing. That’s what I’ve got to sell. If you are sort of a one trick pony like that, if you’ve got one thing you want to sell, then this can still actually apply to you. Because when we think in terms of customer needs, I think a lot of people get stuck on the idea that uncovering customer needs means discovering which products they want to buy from us. And uncovering customer needs goes way beyond that. It’s more about what do they really need? Where are they struggling? What do they need help with? What are they trying to accomplish? Because even if you’re selling a Fuller brush, if you go in with the idea of “do you want to buy this brush,” the answer is no. But if you find out that what they’re struggling with is that they’re very busy and they don’t have enough time, and their life is chaotic. Then you may be able to let them know that this Fuller brush is going to allow them to clean things faster and be more economical in their time and accomplish some of the things that they’re telling you are actually important to them. So while that’s a rather extreme example, it really goes to the whole idea of what I believe uncovering customer needs is all about. Uncovering customer needs with questions Jay: Yeah. And I think there’s only one way to get to customer needs and that’s to ask questions, right? David: Right. Jay: If you start out with your sales pitch, you’re not going to know what their needs are. And I also like the idea of letting them talk and that helps you build the relationship and discover their needs. Is there another way besides asking question? David: I don’t think there really is. I mean, you’ve got to be able to get the answers from them. The only way that you can actually uncover what a customer needs is if they vocalize it. I mean, unless it’s something that you’ve observed, Hey, it looks like you could really use this. Right? Or if somebody refers you to that person and says my friend could really use what you’re offering here. But even then, it’s somebody else’s opinion. So that’s just the beginning of a point of conversation. Hey, your friend suggested I give you a call. I understand that you’re looking to accomplish this and perhaps this item can help. Wanted to see what your thoughts are about that. And then yeah, as you indicated, let them talk. Jay: Yeah, and letting them talk, I think you kind of help them understand why the customer needs your product. And like you said, it may not be something they’re thinking about. They may not know that they need your product. But like you said, maybe there’s something else in their life where they don’t have a lot of time. This product will save you time and so you can actually deal with other issues in your life better. So, figuring out how you can best serve them and then helping them come to that conclusion. I love to go down that path in the sales process. David: Yeah, I agree, and I think this really kind of ties to the idea of what a lot of people think of in terms of features and benefits. If I’ve got a phone what’s the feature of my phone? Feature of my phone is that it’s this big and it’s got a big screen and lots of colors and good audio quality. But what are the benefits? Well, you know, the benefits are that I can be in touch with the people that I care about. I can be responsive to customer needs. I can have the latest and greatest in terms of technology to allow me to connect better with everyone. So, there’s features and benefits, and I think that’s something that a lot of people talk about. But if we really want to get serious about it, it even goes beyond that. And it starts to get into sort of the emotions and the experiences that people want to have. Like we were talking about before, if somebody wants to clean their house, what do they want it to feel like? What do they want it to smell like? What’s the experience that they want people to have when they come in? And I mean, we’re not selling cleaning products here. Again, I’m using this more of an extreme example than anything else. But recognizing that there are a lot of different stages to this. And if you focus just on uncovering product needs, you are very likely going to be selling a much smaller percentage of the audience than would potentially buy from you. Jay: Yeah. And I think oftentimes, depending on what your product is, what you’re really selling is yourself. And once they trust you and believe in you, then they’re going to take your word for it, that that product will do what it says. So you got to realize that it is about relationships so often. David: Yeah. And it’s a lot easier to sell someone on you, if you are interested in them . Right? I think there was a, a brief synopsis I heard one time of How to Win Friends and Influence People. And it basically said if you talk to other people about themselves, they’ll think you’re the most interesting person in the world. Jay: Yeah, I can remember going into a situation, I had a partner at the time, and every time we went into that situation, all he did was talk about himself and then talk about his product. And people would just sit there and they would start to tune out and he never figured it out. I’d come in and when I led, I’d just ask questions and ask questions and you look for those nonverbal cues as well. You know, are they paying attention to me? If they’re not, I need to get their focus again. Are they nodding their head in agreement? Okay, that means they’re coming along. If they look confused, of course, that’s very hard over the phone, but if you’re doing it in person, I find those nonverbal cues to be essential in determining customer needs. David: Yeah, and a lot of people just don’t always do that. I mean, I think another important aspect of this whole topic is that customer needs are always changing. So when we talk about the idea of uncovering a customer’s needs, just because you did it today doesn’t mean that those needs are the same tomorrow. They’re not going to be. And if you are in the kind of business where you’re looking for long term business and long term relationships, and you want to be able to continue to sell to someone, then you really need to sort of get things in gear and recognize that it’s a constant process of requalifying and finding out where are they now? What did they need today that they didn’t need before? How did what they purchased from me before now create new situations that they need to tackle that could require something that I could provide to them later. I mean, a great example in the promotional products industry where we do a lot of business, is that some people use a promotional item to get people to come into a retail store, Come on in and you’ll get this free item. So let’s say it’s a car dealership. Come on into this car dealership and you’ll get this free key fob, right? And on the key fob, there’s a key, and you can try it out in the trunk of this car that’s in the showroom. And if it opens up the trunk, then you win some sort of prize. Right? So that would be designed to get somebody to actually come in. So once they come in, what’s the next thing you want them to do? The next thing you want them to do is probably to take a test drive. Because the goal is to get them to buy a car. They’re not going to come in for the free thing and then just immediately buy a car. So you say, Okay, what we’re doing today is for everybody who takes a test drive, you get a free dashboard cell phone holder for your car. And so then that would increase the number of people who’d be taking a test drive. And then it’s great, okay, so they’re in the test drive, they’re doing the test drive, they’re enjoying the feel of the car, the smell of the car, everything like that. And then the person says to them, you know, for people who buy a car today, we’re including a pair of Italian leather racing gloves that match the interior of the vehicle, right? Custom imprinted, of course, when that’s what you’re selling. So you can use your products to lead your prospects down a path that accomplishes their goals and accomplishes your goals, sells more stuff, and sets you up for future business. And when you do this type of thing, people look at you and say, Wow, you’re really thinking about not just what I said, I needed , but what I actually need. You’ve taken the time to think things through for other people, which is really essential and entirely endearing. People love that for long-term results. Jay: Yeah, I totally agree with you. You’re building that relationship of trust and it should be easier the next time you come to them with a product, right? You’ve already torn down some walls. You know, as long as they were satisfied with your last product. We have a guy, he’s a car salesman, and I went to him for a referral. He didn’t treat me like a normal car salesman. He got to know me. He gave me a great deal. I never, ever thought, David, that I would say I have a car salesman guy. Like people say, I have a mechanic or a doctor. In my family, we’ve purchased seven cars from this man over the last 10 years. And it’s because of that first interaction and that building of trust. I get emails from them, and I’ve reacted on some of those. But if that first experience wasn’t there, he would’ve lost out on six other vehicles, right? So to me… David: Yes. Jay: If he would’ve tried to cram me into that same hole as every other salesperson, I would’ve been out of there. I wouldn’t have bought the first car, and I wouldn’t have bought six more from him either. David: Well, I’ve got exactly the opposite experience that I can share with you very quickly, and that is that I purchased a car from somebody. It’s got to be 14, 15 years ago. And when I was ready for a new one, I went back into that same dealership and I saw that same guy, his name was Kerry. And as I was about to walk over to say, Hey Kerry how you doing? He came up to me and said, Hi, may I help you? Jay: Oh. . David: Okay. He had no idea who I was. He had no idea that he had sold me a car. And at that point I looked at him and I said, “no thanks, just looking.” right? Jay: Yeah. David: So instead of “Hi Kerry,” you know, we could have picked up the conversation where we left off years before, it didn’t happen. And I was just like, I looked around and I walked out and I’m like, Nah, I think I’ll go somewhere else. And I mean, it wasn’t like he was rude, it wasn’t like he was obnoxious, but it’s like, I’ve spent some money with you, you know? And… Jay: And you were going back to him for that reason. And when that reason disappeared, You did too. David: I did too. Just like the wind. Poof, . Jay: Yeah. So again, knowing your customer needs and if you can fill them, that’s so important. Oftentimes, we just ask questions upfront to try and get to know them. But I think asking questions the whole way. So like if you’ve presented your product as a solution, asking them if that really matches their needs before just going into your close process. I think asking questions all along the way, helping them come to the belief that your product is helpful instead of just telling them is a great way to go. David: Yeah, and when you think about needs, you know, there’s a whole thing about the hierarchy of needs and all that sort of thing, but basically what that says is that when one need is satisfied, another one’s going to pop up. Once I’ve got this satisfied, then I’m going to be working on this, and then I’m going to be working on this. It’s human nature. So if you recognize the fact that the needs are constantly going to be changing and you adopt a policy of constant requalification with your people, staying in touch, building that relationship, and finding out what they need next, you’re going to be in much better shape. Jay: Yeah, I totally agree with you. And it’s funny that you mention the hierarchy of needs. I find that when you’re not building a relationship, when you’re just going into your close or whatever, what happens is you drive price to the top. That’s all people will focus on is the price. But the more they get to know you, the more you build trust, the more your products do fill their needs, that price, or the need for money, or for the sale starts to go down. And they start to not even worry about that anymore because you’ve got that relationship. So I think you have the ability to determine if they’re going to only focus on price or if they will trust you in other ways. David: Absolutely. Jay: All right. How can people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. That’s TopSecrets.com/call. Schedule a call with myself or my team. We’ll figure out where you are now, where you’re looking to be, what you’re looking to accomplish, and if we can help, we’ll let you know that. And if we can’t, we’ll tell you that too. Jay: I love it, David, And often just talking to somebody else about it is just a great way to, you know, sometimes you’ll come to your own conclusions just hearing yourself talk, so I love that you provide that service. David: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I mean, I love talking to the people that we talk to. And it’s a similar kind of situation. Not everybody is qualified to be a client of ours, and that’s perfectly fine. We like having the conversations and if we can help, we like doing that. And if we can’t help, we’ll normally just redirect them to someone that we think can. Jay: Fantastic. Thanks, David. David: Thank you, Jay. Ready to Grow Your Sales & Profits? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.
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  How to Overcome Call Reluctance: Make First Contact Easier 11.08.2026 16min

  I would say the number one thing that helped me to overcome call reluctance is when I realized the people who are likely to yell or scream or be angry or be obnoxious or belligerent, they’re not the people we’re doing it for. We are doing it for the needles in the haystack. We’re doing it to find that perfect-fit customer that needs what we have to offer, and who was waiting for someone like us to come along. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the idea of overcoming call reluctance. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: So glad to be here, David. And I really want to hear your feedback on this topic, because this is something that I struggle with. I’ve been put in sales positions in the past. I have a list of leads. All I have to do is pick up the phone and dial those numbers, and I can’t bring myself to do it. Which is funny. I can do it, if it’s a qualified lead and they’re expecting my call, or if they’ve set an online appointment with me, all of that fear goes away. But if it’s a cold call, forget it. I can’t do it. I just can’t. David: Yeah, well call reluctance is a big topic for people who have to make cold calls, and that is one aspect of it. But you hit on a couple of other aspects of it. There are some people who still struggle with the idea of picking up the phone, even when somebody is looking to hear from you. So, we’ll touch on a little of all of that, but you went to the big thing first, which is the idea that there are a lot of people who struggle with call reluctance. They don’t want to pick up the phone, they don’t want to do it. And if we think about the reasons for that, a lot of it becomes kind of obvious. What would you say is your number one reason? Jay: I guess fear of rejection. It’s just hard for me to feel like I’m going to get them to want to hear me. David: Yeah, and one of the reasons that I struggle a bit with this topic is that I’m not a huge fan of cold calls. It’s not that we don’t do them , we do. It’s not that I haven’t done them, I have. But generally speaking, my approach is to try to lead with something of more value. So in those situations, if you follow up with a phone call, it’s a lot more welcome than if they’re not expecting your call. But yes, what I’ve found personally and also with a number of the people that I worked with is that a lot of people think, Well, it’s fear of failure. It’s fear of rejection. I’m afraid that this person is going to get mad or they’re going to get angry or they’re going to hang up on me, and all valid fears because those things happen when you’re making cold calls. And so part of it for me, because those of us who have been in positions where you had to make the calls, regardless of whether or not you felt like it, you have to come up with a way to get over that. And the things that helped me the most, I would say the number one thing that helped me the most, was when I realized the people who are likely to yell or scream or be angry or be obnoxious or belligerent, they’re not the people we’re doing it for. We are doing it for the needles in the haystack. We’re doing it to find that perfect fit customer that needs what we have to offer, that was waiting for someone like us to come along, you know, the knight in shining armor or whatever. Those are the people that we’re doing it for, and you can’t get to those people until, and unless you first get to the ones that might not be as receptive to your message, shall we say? Jay: Yeah, absolutely. My dad was a very successful salesman his whole life. And he always told me that every day he has a goal for how many no’s he’s going to get. He just knew if he’s going to have a successful day, he’s got to have a hundred no’s. And of those no’s, he’s going to pick up a certain percentage of yeses. And so that’s how he made it a game. He made it fun for himself. That tactic never worked for me, but I know it works for a lot of other people. Cause after 10 of those nos, I’m just worn out, you know? David: That is so true. And I’ve heard that and I know that that works for other people. And the fact that it does makes me say, Hey, listen, if that works for you, absolutely do it. For those of us who are like, eh, still not quite there for me, it’s like, okay, well we need another way of approaching it. We need another way to think about. Because really fear of success, fear of rejection, fear of failure, it doesn’t even matter. It all boils down to fear, right? And so if we recognize that it is really fear that’s at the core of this, or in some cases it’s a lack of confidence or a lack of certainty. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. It could be fear of uncertainty. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. And no one is. You can’t be. If you’re making a cold call, you cannot be at all sure of what’s going to happen. They may be great, they may be terrible. It may be somewhere in between. Most likely somewhere in between. But it could go any of those ways. So when you recognize that and I guess this is actually pretty similar to what your dad was talking about in the sense that he knows he needs to get enough nos to get to the Yes. If you think of that in terms of getting to the people that we’re actually doing this for, they are very similar. But for me there’s a mindset difference. The mindset of finding the right people that can be long term customers and recognizing that I kind of have to go through this. I have to sort of run that gauntlet in order to get to the people that I actually want to get to. Jay: Yeah, and also as I think about it, it’s just harder work to cold call because you have to first get them to stay on the phone with you, then you have to get them to believe in your product It’s a lot harder than if they’ve been on your website and they scheduled a free consultation, right? Now they’ve already kind of said, I need your product. So you’re way ahead in that regard. David: Yeah. I also think that call reluctance is not probably the best description of what people are dealing with, because in a lot of ways they’re dealing with contact reluctance. Sometimes it’s like, Oh, I have to email this person. I don’t feel like doing it. In person, I have to go to this networking function and I don’t feel like doing it. I mean, a networking function isn’t like cold calling, but it has similarities. If you’re going to this thing for the purpose of meeting people and introducing yourself and trying to come up with a prospect, then it is kind of like cold calling. So I think the idea of call reluctance is only a sliver. It’s really only part of the issue that people are dealing with. And if you recognize that it’s contact reluctance, or in a lot of cases it’s first contact reluctance, then it becomes maybe easier to deal with. Because if you’re not comfortable making a phone call and if you have the option to initiate other forms of first contact, then you can very likely come up with another form of first contact that works better for you. So you can accomplish the same or even better results without having to convince yourself that the only way to do that is to overcome your call resistance or reluctance. Jay: Yeah. I love how you described it, first, contact resistance. That’s what I have. Because it is the same, whether it’s on the phone. I’ve been at trade shows, and I’ve just got to go up to different booths and talk to people. And they’re there to talk. That’s why they’re there. Right? And that’s the scenario I struggle with. But if I’d been introduced to them or if they’d been prequalified, no issue whatsoever. So that puts me in a place where if I’m going to be in sales, it’s got to be a specific type of sales funnel where I can thrive in. Because you know, I’m not the person and I tell people this, I’m not the pound the pavement, cold contact guy. That’s just not where I’m successful. But I’m a closer. Right? So yeah, put me somewhere in that funnel and I can close. Don’t put me at the front of the line though, because that’s not where my skill-set is. David: Yeah. This is what we work with with our clients all the time in our Total Market Domination course. And one of the modules, I think it’s module five, is about first contact. And it’s about coming up with a first contact that makes sense for you. Meaning it’s something you’re not afraid to do, you don’t hate doing, you don’t dislike, you’re not afraid of doing it. It’s something that you’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m actually comfortable with this.” And there are lots of different forms of first contact that actually just position you a whole lot better than a cold call. Things like networking, that’s one approach to it. But also, if you have a list of prospects, it could be something as simple as sending them something in the mail and then calling to say, Hey, did you get the thing I sent you? Because a call like that is a hundred times easier than making that first call. And in a lot of cases, and again, I do a lot of work in the promotional products industry, so people who are sending out some sort of promotional gift in advance and then calling to say, Hey, did you get the item I sent you? It creates that gift of obligation, among people of conscience. Not everyone has a conscience, but among people of conscience, it does create a bit of a gift of obligation. So people are more likely to take the call and they’re more likely to be nice to you when they pick up the phone because you sent them something in advance. I mean, that’s just one example. But other forms of first contact can be things like social media. Your first contact with them could be replying to something that they posted on social media. Now at least you’re on their radar. They have an idea of who you are. And if you were able to continue that discussion inside a direct message, and then eventually that leads to a phone call or having them go to your page and then opting in for a call with you. All that type of stuff changes the dynamic from one of, “I am calling you because I need business” to, “hey, here’s an opportunity to talk with me about something that could seriously benefit you.” And so the whole dynamic shifts from “I’m a salesman calling to sell you” to, you know, “you are a person in need who’s seeking me out for potential help.” Jay: Yeah, I love this line of thinking. I work with a business where we do webinar training, right? David: Mm-hmm. Jay: And so people watch that webinar and at the end I’m like, “Hey, sign up for a free consultation. It will be me that you do the consultation with.” So now, when we eventually talk, it’s weird. They feel like they know me because they sat with me for this 10 minute video or whatever it is. And so we’re already way ahead in the game because they have already kind of started to build that relationship. And part of that is I was definitely giving them something of value in the webinar. It wasn’t just a commercial. I was giving away good information. David: Yeah, and you are positioning yourself as someone who knows what he’s talking about in that particular area, which is exactly what people are looking for. So while this really gets into the whole other topic of first contact and different ways to initiate that, to get more people into your pipeline, who could conceivably work with you. It all does tie together. This idea of contact reluctance and how we overcome it can be handled in lots of different ways other than “well just get over it and make the calls.” Jay: Yeah, I do think that we should have a much deeper discussion about first contact, because it definitely depends on what industry. I mean, if you are cold calling individuals, it’s a lot harder nowadays because we all set our phones to ignore calls that it doesn’t recognize. So that whole potential lead list may have gone away. And so you have to adapt and change to figure out whether it’s email or pay per click or something else. David: Yeah, absolutely. I think also part of getting over this goes back to what we touched on before. Which is essentially a focus on disqualification. In other words, if you overcome your call reluctance, you pick up the phone, you talk to somebody, and they’re rude, obnoxious, and belligerent. You can either be put off by that or you can be grateful that you found out that early on in the relationship that this is the type of person you’re dealing with. What’s worse is when you think somebody’s great and then you start doing business with them, and then they turn into Mr. Hyde, you know, they go from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. So the idea of focusing on disqualification and some sales managers will strongly disagree with me on this, and I’m not saying you use that as an excuse to eliminate your call list. What I’m saying is that if you go into this situation with the idea of coming out of it with a yes or no, qualified or disqualified, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you go in with the idea of, “I need to sell this person something,” even before you have any idea of whether or not they need what you’re selling. Jay: Yeah. And I think that’s going to reduce the number of rejections that you get. Right? So if you have to get 20 no’s instead of a hundred no’s, then that’s going to go better for you. It’s going to be easiest, right? I think one of the other things is I want people to know that I do believe that with repetition, you can overcome those fears. And oftentimes it’s just put your head down and push forward. And you’ll find, and I have found this, eventually, it’s not as hard. You can change, you can adapt. And so, you know, just don’t make the excuse that, Oh, I can’t do that and so I have to find something else. You can, you know, you just have to work at it. David: Yeah, and if you’re motivated by money at all, one of the things you can also do is you can start with the goal in mind. And you can even write down on a post-it note that you keep in front of your computer or in front of your phone, what’s the average dollar amount of the sale that is made? Now, you’re not going to sell that to every person you call, but you are absolutely not going to sell it if you’re not in touch with that person. So if you think of each of those contacts as being worth X amount of dollars, whatever that number is, if it’s $3,000, if it’s $10,000, whatever that number is, if you look at that and say, Okay, this call could be worth $10,000, you might be a lot more motivated to make it than if you don’t think of it like that. And I’m not really advocating the idea of thinking of it in terms of money instead of people. I’m thinking of it in terms of recognizing that in order to generate the money, you’ve got to have and initiate relationships with these people. And if this helps you do, go for it. Jay: Yeah, motivation is different for everybody. So if that’s your motivation, focus on it and figure out how many calls it’s going to have to take you to get to that dollar amount. Then you can motivate yourself. If you don’t know, and I feel like so many people in sales, it’s just kind of haphazard. I’m just calling. I don’t know how many calls it’s going to take and that makes it much. more of a slog I think. So figuring out some of those key performance indicators and testing them. And the other thing I would say is it really helps if you love your product, and you know it will help people. You know, that’s one of the things that keeps me going is I know that I’m helping people. I’m not just earning a living. And that’s very important to me. Not important to everybody, but to me that’s very important. David: Oh yeah. I’m the same way. I mean, that’s what gets me fired up in the morning. The idea of helping people pass these challenges and allowing them to get from where they are to where they want to be. And so anything we can do to help that, I’m all for it. Jay: Yeah, and that’s one of the reasons I love our discussions, because I know these will help people move forward. So I love that. How can people find out? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. That’s TopSecrets.com/call, and we can have a conversation about where you’re looking to be, what you’re struggling with. If you’re struggling with call reluctance, we can work with you and come up with different ways that you can initiate first contact that you will be comfortable with, that will potentially position you better and allow you to get to more of the people that you need to reach, a lot faster and a lot more comfortably than you’re doing now. Jay: Yeah. And don’t have call reluctance calling David, right? David: Yeah, that’s right. You have no fears with us, right? It’s easy. Jay: That’s right. Fantastic. It’s great talking to you today, David. David: You too, Jay. Thank you. Ready to Grow Your Sales & Profits? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here.
• 
  Turning Your Million-Dollar Ideas into Cash 04.08.2026 14min

  Million-dollar ideas don’t always create million-dollar results. Only focused implementation can do that. I remember the day that I got a phone call from a client who said, “Hey, we hit a million dollars in sales for this year. I’m really excited.” It’s a huge thing, because when you’re looking to grow like that — when you’re talking about multiplying your revenue in a relatively short period of time — there are very specific things that have to happen. Most people don’t know what those things are, and even if they do know what those things are, they don’t take action on them consistently enough to make it happen. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing million dollar ideas. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you, David. I have to tell you, this is a running joke in my home that I constantly have million dollar ideas. But I never do anything about it. And so I’ll have them.And then years later, my wife’s like, you told me about that, you know, five years ago, why don’t you do something about it? And I’m like, I don’t know. David: Yeah. And you’re not alone. I do the same thing. I think pretty much anyone I know who’s been involved in business in any capacity has had ideas. And then they see that somebody else did it later. And they’re like, “Oh man, I thought of that years ago.” And it’s like, yeah, well, unfortunately, as you indicated, thinking about it does not actually get it done. But it’s a fun topic because since we all pretty much have had them, we all have million dollar ideas, the question becomes. What are you doing with it? Or are you doing anything with it? And as I was thinking back on this in preparation for this podcast, it occurred to me that of the million dollar ideas that I might’ve had, and who knows, the ones that you don’t pursue, you have no idea what they’re worth, especially if nobody else then comes along and turns it into a billion dollar idea, but it occurred to me that I only took action on a few of them, and the ones that I took action on actually yielded some really good results. And the thing about a million dollar idea is… There’s a time component that really plays an important part in that, right? You could say, all right, my million dollar idea is to make $25,000 a year from the time I’m 25 until the time I’m 65. So if you multiply $25,000 by 40 years, it’s a million bucks, right? But if you’re earning $25,000 a year and it costs you $35,000 a year to live, then that plan is not going to work for you. But it is a plan. It’s an idea. It’s a million dollar idea. And so as we’re thinking about things that can actually get us from where we are to where we want to be. It’s a good idea to consider that. All right. Well, what’s the likelihood of generating revenue from this and how much on an ongoing basis so I can have an idea of where it’s going to take me? Jay: Yeah, it’s such a great point. I think for me, the fear of putting myself out there is one of the reasons why I haven’t pursued. And I’ve taken, some of them were good enough. I’ve taken a little stabs at them and I want to be successful by just stabbing at them and not really diving in a hundred percent. And it’s not until I said, “okay, I’m all in.” It wasn’t the idea that was bad. It was my desire to actually put any work and effort. I’ve just, I’ve always said, I want to have a company where all I do is come up with ideas and sell them. I don’t want to have to actually put the effort into, working on them. Why can’t I just earn the money from the idea? David: Right. Yeah. It’d be great if it worked that way, but somebody has to do the work that actually generates the revenue. But when I think about million dollar ideas, particularly as it relates to business. If somebody’s doing $250,000 a year in their business in four years, that became a million dollar idea. Now, again, if that’s your gross sales, it doesn’t mean that you’re making that much, right? It doesn’t mean that you’re pocketing that much, but it counts. It’s a million dollar idea, and then the question really becomes. Is my million dollar idea a million dollars in a lifetime? Is it a million dollars over 10 years? Over five years? Over a year? Is it a million dollars a month? Is it a million dollars a week? A million dollars a day? Because different businesses generate different amounts of money. I don’t know what Amazon is generating, how quickly it generates a million bucks, but it’s probably a lot faster than a million a day. It could be down to the minutes and seconds, probably is. Jay: Yeah, I really think a lot of what you’re talking about is your expectation, right? you’re just saying, I want to have this idea to make money, that to me really kind of feels misguided. And to be honest with you, a million dollars does not sound like that much money anymore, right? So it’s more a matter of, I think defining better what the idea is and what you want it to achieve. Are you looking for financial freedom to where you can travel and buy nice cars? Are you just looking to pay your bills? I think putting some better definition on it is more important than using this word million dollar and somehow that’s a sign that you’ve been successful. Cause as you said, you may be making millions a year in gross sales, but you could be losing as much, if not more. So, yeah, you have to be a little bit more specific than that. David: I remember when my daughter was young, we were talking about the idea of a million dollars at one point. And I said, well, think about this. Let’s say you make a million dollars. You’re able to save a million dollars and you’ve got a million dollars. You’ve got exactly a million dollars in the bank. And so you go out to celebrate and you go have lunch at McDonald’s and you spend $12. Now you’re no longer a millionaire. Right? Because you spent your twelve bucks. Whatever it is. And, I don’t know, just the idea of these money benchmarks being some form of accomplishment, I think is a little misguided. Jay: Yeah. David: And generally it’s misguided by people who look at it as a goal, think that it’s something to aspire for, and then if and when you get there, it’s like, oh, okay, now what? You know, now you go for more, right? And no matter what your number is, even if you’re Warren Buffett and you’re a multi billionaire, probably another extra billion or two never hurts. Jay: Yeah, I agree. For me, I kind of think about how I determine success in business. I have steps, like you said, benchmarks. So my first benchmark is, can I just pay my bills? Right? Can I feed my family, pay my car payment, keep the electricity on? If I can pay my bills, I’ve achieved a level of success because I don’t have to go out and have somebody else tell me how to do my job all day for an hourly wage. So that’s goal number one. Can I pay my bills with my business year round? Then I start saying, well, can I still make the money I’m making, but do less or spend less to make it? So maybe I only have to go into this business three days a week, and then two days a week I can be with my family or I can be tinkering, you know, with my car in the garage or something like that. So I start to look at it more in terms of time than I do in terms of actual dollar amounts. David: Yeah, the time component is huge and also consistency I think is huge. I had a client who signed up for our Total Market Domination course a couple of years ago. She was doing about $250,000 in sales at the time. She wanted to get to a million dollars. And so we went over the specific steps that she would need to take to do that. And she was a great implementer. She was able to do it. And I remember the day that I got a phone call from her and she said, “Hey, we hit a million dollars in sales for this year. I’m really excited.” Jay: Yeah. David: It’s a huge thing because when you’re looking to grow like that, when you’re talking about multiplying your revenue in a relatively short period of time, there are very specific things that have to happen. Most people don’t know what those things are, and even if they do know what those things are, they don’t take action on them consistently enough to make it happen. So for those who are looking to get to benchmarks like that, if you have a million dollar idea, if you know in your bones that this thing is likely to generate that amount of money, but you’re not quite sure how to get there, then we really ought to have a conversation. Jay: Yeah, and again, we talked about scary things and the fear of the unknown in our Halloween podcast. That’s what’s so hard, and one thing I keep telling people is, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. This is not the beginning of time . There are so many people out there who have done this and duplicated this over and over again. And often times, just coming up with a unique idea, that’s one of the toughest parts of the battle. Then if you can access and not be afraid to talk to people, see people like yourself, who have done this over and over again, and who have helped other people achieve it, if you can get rid of a lot of the unknown, and then just implement your idea, how much better is that going to be for you? David: Exactly. And so much of it just boils down to focus. It’s about what are the few things, what are the fewest steps I can take, the fewest number of activities that I can engage in to get me to my goals. And a lot of times it’s a lot simpler than people think. But they’re so distracted with all these different things they think they have to do that they end up missing the boat. And it goes back to your point earlier where, “hey, wouldn’t it be great if I could do less things, do fewer things, and still generate the revenue?” And the truth of the matter is that if you’re doing too many things, your likelihood of getting there goes down dramatically. Jay: Yeah, and we’ve talked about if the way you run your business is just putting out fires, or just, the squeaky wheel gets the grease, oftentimes those are not the places that you should be focused. And if you could identify those things, be very strategic in your mind and identify what the most important things are. Focus on those. You’re still going to have fires, but maybe you’ll approach them differently. That’s how mentorship, speaking with you, you always say give us a call. Sometimes just vocalizing and hearing yourself say it and having a sounding board is all it takes to get a little bit of clarity. David: Yeah, and we’ve had many conversations with people who were not a good fit for our program, but they still got a lot of great ideas for the call. They had some direction. They had some steps they could take. And sometimes what happens, we’ll have a conversation like this. They’ll implement a couple of things that we’ll tell them on the call. And then we’ll get a call back from them a few weeks later or a month or two later. Hey, listen, I did that. That really worked. I was able to generate more than enough to pay for the program. You know, let’s talk about that again now. And it’s about being able to help people to accomplish what they’re looking to accomplish when they either don’t have the exact knowledge they need, or if they don’t have the consistency in the approach. Jay: Yeah, it’s one of the reasons I love this podcast because, you know, I’ve been in business my whole life and I think, hey, I’ve got some level of understanding here. But you and I get on and we start chatting and either I say things that I’ve never thought of before, but this conversation triggered that, or you have a completely different perspective because you’ve been in different types of businesses than I have. And I walk away going, you know what? I’m going to use that! I mean, there are things that we’ve talked about just in this podcast that I’m implementing in my new business. And why? It’s because we talked. That’s it. We just, we’re bouncing ideas off of each other and learning from each other’s experiences. David: Yeah, and that’s one of the things that I love about talking with you. It’s also one of the things that I love talking about with my customers. Earlier this week, I was going back and forth with one of our customers inside the Total Market Domination course, and she referenced something that I had talked about years ago. She didn’t put it in those terms, but she was talking about the idea of sort of flying under the radar. And it reminded me of some material that I put together a while ago talking about moving from stealth mode to intimidation mode, like flying under the radar, getting everything in place, getting relationships set up with clients before your competitors even know anything is happening. And so you’re flying in stealth mode. And then you get to the point where you’ve got this momentum going under the radar. And then when you burst onto the scene, it’s very intimidating for your competitors because they’re like, “Where did this person come from?” So I believe these conversations, they’re helpful for everybody. When I talk to somebody for the first time on one of these strategy sessions, we have a conversation, very often it will remind me of something else that will help them. And it will also help me in terms of, yeah, wow. That’s something that we should talk more about because we know it works. Jay: Yeah, and kind of circling back to having that million dollar idea. One of the things that I’ve always wanted to do is have a million dollar idea and achieve it on my own. That way I don’t have to deal with employees. And is that going to happen? Am I really going to pull off a million dollar idea on my own? Probably not. Maybe as an internet influencer or something like that. But the reality is… The first step is having the idea. The second step is asking the question, “Who’s going to help me do this?” Whether it’s partners, staff, or consultants. I think the first thing you have to do is get that out of your mind that you’re going to pull this off on your own. David: Yeah, and maybe there’s some people who do that. I’ve never done that myself. I mean, any business that I tried to do by my, well, I never really tried to do any business by myself, I knew very early on when I would start a business, I’m like, “oh no, I need help with this, I need help with that.” But maybe there are some people who can do it, but I think the smart way to approach it, in my opinion, is that you look at what you need to have happen. You look at what you need to build and then who can help me do that. You get those spots in place, filling the seats on the bus. Good to Great. In the book, Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about getting the right people on the bus. And I think that’s really key. Jay: Alright, well, people who have their million dollar ideas or they’re already working on them, how do they find out more? David: Go to TopSecrets.com, schedule a call with us, actually TopSecrets.com/call to schedule a call with us, TopSecrets.com is the main website, TopSecrets.com/call is where you can go to schedule a call with our team and we can just sort of talk through things. What are you looking to accomplish? If you have a million dollar idea or if you know that your business should be hitting numbers that you’re not yet hitting. Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about where you are now, where you need to be in terms of visibility and sales and profits, and see what we can do to help you get there. Jay: And it’s a great first step, David. Thank you so much. Always great to talk to you. David: You too. Thanks, Jay. Ready to Convert Your Million Dollar Ideas into Cash? If not, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.
• 
  Are You Afraid of Being a Pest in Sales? 28.07.2026 11min

  Jay: I’m not lying when I tell you that I struggle with this idea that I’m being a pest in sales. So I think it’ll help my sales, I think it’ll help my daily attitude towards what I do. David: Well, I’ll tell you something, Jay, many of the most conscientious human beings feel this way. I mean, if you’re one of those sales guys who, “Hey, everybody loves me,” you’re not even going to think of that. It’s never even going to occur to you. So the people who are most likely to struggle with this are people who just want to help. They’re there to provide a service. Jay: Yeah. David: They don’t want to be a pest. And so really, most of the people who feel this way are the ones who are least likely to be a pest because they’re not arrogant to begin with. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast in today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland, and I’ll be discussing the topic of how to avoid being a pest in sales. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Oh, thank you for having me, Dave. This is a real problem for me. I always feel like a pest in sales, whether it’s an email, whether it’s a text, I always feel like they don’t want to hear from me. And. it’s been an ongoing problem. I’ll just be honest with you when it comes time, okay? I got to sit down and reach out to people. I’m like, oh, do they really want to hear from me? Am I going to bug them? How do I get over that? David: Yeah, it’s a great question. A number of years ago, I was doing a speaking presentation and Mary Lou Retton, the gymnast, was also speaking at the same event, and she told this story. It was just so great. I don’t know if somebody asked the question, but it came up in her presentation where people were saying to her, when she was doing her routine, the person who went on before her did a really, really good routine. And so at that point, the pressure would really be on her to deliver a flawless performance if she wanted to be able to get the score that she needed. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: And so the question was how do you deal with that when this person delivers a great performance and you have to go on next? Don’t you feel nervous after that? And her response, I’ll never forget it. And this was easily 10 or 12 years ago this happened. Jay: Yeah. David: Her response was, “you know, I watched her performance and it was great. And I looked at it and I thought to myself, wait till they get a load of me!” Jay: Mmmm. David: And I was like, “wow, how much does that apply in sales?” Jay: Yeah, David: I mean, I think it applies every bit as much in sales as it does in gymnastics. If you go in with the idea of, oh, that person’s better than I am, or they’re not going to like me, or they’re going to think that I’m annoying, or I’m rude, or I’m obnoxious, or I’m a pest, or whatever. If you go in with that mindset, then what you are likely to say, the way that you’re likely to position yourself, all of those things are going to reflect that. But if you’re able to go into a situation with the idea of “wait ’til they get a load of me,” or at least “I have something valuable to offer.” Now, any salesperson who doesn’t feel like they have something valuable to offer should be either in another line of work or selling a different line of product. Right? Jay: Yeah. David: You need to be able to feel good about what it is that you’re selling. And if you know that what you’re selling is, ideally, better than the competition. If you know that you’re going to deliver better than your competition, you know that you’re going to be more responsive, you’re going to be more concerned, you’re going to be more caring. If you know all those things, then you owe it to the client to convey all that. And if you don’t convey it to them, then you’re doing them more harm than good, and you’re doing yourself and them more harm than good. So, If you look at it from the standpoint of, “I’m here to provide a solution, I’m here to help,” then it’s a lot easier to not start thinking of yourself as a pest and just recognize that if you’re there to help, it’s very difficult to be a pest. Jay: Yeah, I’m not a pest. I’m a value. And I’m trying to pass that value on. It’s really interesting because, you know, I do these initial consultations and I’m going to toot my own horn. I am incredible at building that first relationship. But in that first relationship, it’s them learning. We don’t talk about costs a lot or anything like that. And then we schedule a second follow up, and that’s where we get into the other things. And it’s the second follow-up where I’m like, oh, now we’re going to talk about money. Now I’m going to turn into a pest. Now I’m going to do that. And I can see how what you’re talking about is, “no, I got them excited in the first meeting, and so why would they think I’m a PEs in in the second meeting?” And, and furthermore, maybe I should just get to the money in the first meeting and do it when I’ve got them excited initially. David: Well, yeah, that’s a great point. Because if they are excited and if they’re ready to move forward, then scheduling another call and having time pass in between and they get distracted, it’s probably giving opportunities for them to fall out of the process. So, Jay: mm-hmm. David: I think you just asked and answer a great question for yourself. Jay: Yeah. David: But if you think of a pest, I mean, I think of something like a mosquito, right? A mosquito is a well recognized pest. And it’s buzzing around you and it wants something from you. It wants blood, right? And so it’s trying to get to you so that it can take something from you and not give you anything except maybe a bump of your skin, right? Which is not pleasant. So, If you’re not doing those things, then you’re really not a pest. And when you are creating value in your communication, when you’re creating value in the relationship, there’s nothing pesty at all about that. If you’re talking to somebody about the products and services you offer and they’re interested, even if they’re not like really excited about it, if they’re like, “oh, okay, that sounds interesting. I’m open to this…” Jay: Yeah. David: And then you provide them the information on, okay, here’s how much it will cost. Here’s how it’s going to work. Then at that point they get to evaluate, does this make sense for me? Can I justify the cost of that for what it is that you’re offering? If the answer is yes, you’re going to be doing business together. If the answer is no, if they tell you that, if they say, well, listen, this isn’t for me, that’s not in my budget, and if you can’t come up with another solution, then at that point the conversation is over. The person is disqualified and you move on. The times where we’re most likely to feel like a pest is when we’re talking to somebody and they start ghosting us. Jay: Hmm. David: And when that happens, when they start ghosting us, then we feel like we have to follow up because they asked for information from us, right? Jay: Right. Right. David: They wanted to know stuff. They seemed interested. They said they were interested. Now I’m supposed to follow up on a certain day at a certain time, and they’re not taking calls and they’re not returning calls and all that sort of thing. At that point, if you are following up, you’re not being a pest. You are attempting to deliver what it is that they asked you for. It’s like if you called and ordered a pizza and I’m the pizza delivery boy, and I come to your house and I know you’re in there and I’m ringing the bell and you’re not answering it. Jay: Yeah. David: Well, am I a pest because I’m trying to deliver the pizza you ordered? I think the answer is no. And it’s the same thing here. If you’re trying to provide them with information they requested, if you’re trying to follow up because they said they have a particular in-hands date on an order and they’re not responding to you, then at that point, what you’re doing is not being a pest. What’s happening is that they are being rude. They are being discourteous. Right? They are wasting your time and wasting their time. They’re also creating frustration because you’re frustrated because you can’t reach them. They’re probably frustrated because they might see you calling and they’re like, “I don’t want to take this call.” So they’re creating unnecessary anxiety by doing those things. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: So I put out a post on social media the other day talking about my feelings about people who ghost. And they’re not good. I don’t remember exactly what I posted. It’s up there on social media. I’ll share it below this video. But when we are in a situation where people have an interest, express an interest, we’re having a decent conversation, then as long as you’re acting with integrity to try to get them what they said they wanted from you, I don’t think there’s anything pesty about that. Jay: No, I, think that’s a great perspective and you’ve helped me as I’ve got calls coming up after this podcast that I need to do, and I think I’m going to approach them with a little bit different perspective. And also, if somebody is ghosting you, they are systems now, right? I put them in a drip program and so they’re still going to hear from me automatically. I don’t have to do anything about it. And. If the time comes around where they realize again that they need me, well, I’m still in their face a little bit and they’ll come around and I don’t have to worry about it until then. David: Right. And so when we think about the topic to avoid being a pest, I mean, essentially if you are focused on them, you’re focused on helping them, you’re focused on getting them the answers they need, focused on helping them to create value to achieve the results they’re looking for then as long as you’re continuing to do that and literally just trying to provide them with the information they wanted, they should be totally fine with that. A lot of salespeople feel this way. They feel like they’re being a pest, but nobody’s ever actually said it to them. Right. Right. And I know salespeople who have left messages saying, “Hey listen, I don’t want to be a pest.” Jay: Mm-hmm. David: And I’ve said… Jay: Don’t do that. David: Don’t leave a message like that. Jay: Yeah. David: Because that might’ve never occurred to them. Jay: Yeah. David: It probably hasn’t occurred to them. And if you position yourself like that, you’re also positioning yourself lower on the scale, right? You want to at least try to be coming a people from an even level where we’re on an even playing field, “I’m here to help, you’re here to get help, let’s work together.” As opposed to, “oh, I don’t want to be a pest.” Because if what you have is of value to them, then they should want it, and you’re the person who can help them get it. Jay: Yeah, that’s such a valuable, valuable point. So I’m going to reassess David: Good! Jay: And I’m going to work on this this week and next week when we talk, I’m going to report back and… David: Cool. Jay: And let you know how this kind of new perspective goes. ’cause I’m not lying when I tell you that I struggle with this idea that I’m a pest. So I think it’ll help my sales, I think it’ll help my daily attitude towards what I do. David: Well, I’ll tell you something, Jay, many of the most conscientious human beings feel this way. I mean, if you’re one of those sales guys who, “Hey, everybody loves me,” you’re not even going to think of that. It’s never even going to occur to you. So the people who are most likely to struggle with this are people who just want to help. They’re there to provide a service. Jay: Yeah. David: They don’t want to be a pest. And so really, most of the people who feel this way are the ones who are least likely to be a pest because they’re not arrogant to begin with. Jay: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That’s a great point. All right. How do people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call, schedule a call with myself or my team. If you’re looking to create actual rapport with people, get into relationships that are going to be mutually beneficial, we’d love to talk with you about that. TopSecrets.com/call. Love to have a conversation. Jay: Yeah, and I’ve loved this conversation. I think it’s going to make a difference, David. So thank you so much. David: Cool. Thank you, Jay. Appreciate it. Are You Ready to Create More Value and Avoid Being a Pest? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.
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  How to Get Better Sales Leads (without Burning Time or Wasting Money) 21.07.2026 12min

  Want to get better sales leads? It starts with tracking what works. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the topic of where are your best leads coming from? Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you. And I’m just going to answer the question. I don’t know. (laughing) I’m just… David: Short podcast. Thanks for listening. Jay: Yeah, I’m just going to say it straight up. I mean, I do have some systems. We do try and use Google Analytics and things like that, and that helps a little bit. But I’ve never done a deep dive yet on this is the source, this is the well or the font of where my best leads have come from. So I’m looking forward to this discussion. David: This is really a good one to look at and to dive into a bit, because I’ve always maintained that if you don’t know where your best leads are coming from, then you don’t know where to go to get more of them, and when you are able to identify it, everything else gets a whole lot easier because now you can go fishing in the same ponds, rather than just trying to put stuff out to anyone and everyone, which is very expensive to do. You can really tune in and focus in on what people are doing, where they’re coming from, how they’re hearing about you so that you can go find more of them. In addition to… well, a number of the businesses that I’ve been involved in over the years, one of them was a retail mail order catalog business that I owned. And in a business like that, it’s absolutely critical to know where your best leads are coming from. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: We would run magazine ads and we would get people out of different magazines. We had ads running on television that were designed to get leads for our catalog business. And every single one of the ads we ran had some sort of mechanism to let us know where they were coming from. If it was calling an 800 number, we had one primary 800 number, but we would give them an extension to ask for. So we’d say, call this 800 number extension 214. Right? And 214 meant that it was coming from this particular TV station or whatever. If they were seeing something online, there would be specific links that they would click through that would tell us where it was coming from. If it was a magazine ad, it was a similar kind of thing on the back of the magazine, it would say, call this number, dial this extension, or go to this web address, and there would be a slash with a suffix on the url.. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: And that would tell us where it came from. And when people would call in, one of the first things that our people were required to ask them is, “where did you hear about us?” And there was a box there that they would fill out. Where did you hear about us? Oh, I saw your ad on such and such a magazine, or, I saw your ad on such and such a TV station. And so we would have the data that the computer said based on what they came in and said, and then we would also have the data corresponding with whatever the person said. So I was pretty pathological about it, and to this day I’m still very pathological about determining where leads come from. Even now when, you know, at the end of this podcast, when you say, how do people find out more? And I give out a link that link tracks back to the podcast, it lets me know that the people who register on that link, Came from the podcast. And if they’re coming from some other ad, then it’s going to have a different code and that sort of thing. So it’s not that hard to do when you discipline yourself to do it. And most people don’t do that until and unless they realize how much it is actually worth to you when you do that right. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And in today’s world, honestly, there is no excuse. It is so easy. There is so much data out there. If you want to target a specific group, you can target that group. And that’s kind of the process, right? You’re going to send out a link for this podcast, you’ll know who you get back. You’ll know age groups and those types of things. And then you’ll be like, well, let’s adjust it this way, or let’s adjust it that way. I mean, never in our history has there been such an easy way to say, I want this age group who’s interested in this type of thing. Then you can target that group. And then based upon that new batch of information you can target in even more. I know we all kind of complain that we’re being tracked everywhere we go, but at the same time, we’re all asking for it. We’re subscribing to newsletters, we’re hitting the like button. We’re feeding all of that information. So it becomes this circle, right? And I think it’s incredible personally. And if I am going to get sent an ad, I want it to apply to me. When I get something that I’m like, there’s no way that this is something that I would ever consider. I almost get angry. Like, come on, get your algorithms together here. David: Yeah. And what you’re talking about is probably a level or two above what I’m even talking about. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: I’m talking about simple things that most small or medium sized businesses can integrate into their own business, just so they have an idea of where the people who are paying them money are largely coming from. And I don’t mean every site they’ve visited over the past 20 years. Jay: Sure, sure. David: I mean, where did they hear from us most recently? Did they hear about us from the podcast? Did they hear about us from an email broadcast that went out through an email broadcast platform? If so, which one? If there is some sort of ad, which ad did they click on? There are some ads that we run on some websites where there’s an ad at the top of the page, there’s an ad on the side of the page. The ads say different things. We track those separately so we know which message and which ad. Does the top position get more of a response? Does the side position get more of a response? Because that tells us where to focus our attention on getting more people. And a lot of it, in the early stages especially, is just about seeing where the people are basically coming from. But then when you see who’s actually buying, that narrows it down even more. Jay: Yes. David: Because you may be getting more leads from one source than another, but you find out that the leads from that source aren’t converting. Jay: Yes. David: At which point you can stop advertising there and put your money behind the ads that work. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And when I mentioned how easy it is today, I even mean for small businesses. I mean, we started a small business and I don’t know anything about pay per click or, you know, anything like that. But I looked on Fiverr, you know, the website, Fiverr and Upwork, and I found somebody who said, I’ll do this for you for a month for 30 bucks and I’m like, it’s 30 bucks. I’ll try it out. We did the $30 and the results were dramatic. So we’re like, wait a minute, if we do 30, let’s do 60. Now we’ve got this guy we spend about maybe 250 a month with him, and we get constant leads that convert from him. I don’t know how he’s doing it and I don’t need to know how he’s doing it. Right? Now I can spend my time focusing on those leads. The other thing he’ll do is come back and say, okay, you’ve got a lot of people who are landing on your checkout page, but they’re not converting. So we’re like, “oh, wait a minute, what’s going on?” Is it the language we’re using? Is it the pictures we’re using? Are we not conveying the message? These things can be done for relatively cheap nowadays, and so even if you’re at the smallest point, I would definitely try some of those things. David: Yeah, it’s simple enough to be able to at least get an idea of where most people are coming from to be able to go back and get more. And obviously, we’re talking quite a bit about online, but there are a lot of offline sources. If you do networking, you go to networking functions, you may find that one networking function does much better than another. You may find that you go to one particular networking function and you don’t get any leads from it. You go back again and again and again, and you’re not getting leads. Everybody’s just schmoozing. That happens a lot in business. Jay: Yeah. David: Particularly in B2B. Well, B2C as well. So in those situations you can make determinations if you’re keeping track of it. But very many small businesses in particular will just go out, go to some sort of networking function or go to something that’s supposed to generate business, and they use that as an excuse like, “I’m doing something.” But if you go out to something like that and you’re not going out there with the idea of coming back with leads that you can follow up on, it’s really just a waste of time. So there’s a focus aspect to this. There’s an online versus offline aspect to this. But ultimately what it boils down to is the subject of this podcast. Where are your best leads coming from? Jay: Yeah. David: Where can I go to find more? Jay: Yeah, and I see this a lot and I’ve been a victim of it. Movement for the sake of movement. You know? I’m doing something, I’m going to these networking events. Going to these shows. Placing these ads. So when is it going to start working? Movement for the sake of movement is of no value. Right? There has to be some intent. It has to be trackable. It has to be adjustable. And I think it’s so easy to fall into that trap of “I’m doing something!” And so, where’s the result? David: Yeah, it reminds me of that Zig Ziglar quote, “Don’t look for your ship to come in if you haven’t sent one out.” Jay: Yeah. David: And very often we’re trying to do things that are generating results. We talked about goal setting in a previous podcast, and a lot of times we’re so focused on the goal, “I need to generate X dollars per month or X dollars per year.” And what am I going to do to do that? And we just run around in a lot of different directions trying to generate that amount of money. Well, what we need to be doing is saying, “okay, what is going to get me to that?” In other words, how many leads do I need to generate in a month in order to get to my number? If I know how many leads I need to generate in a month, because a certain percentage of them will convert and a certain percentage won’t convert. If I know how many people I need to initiate contact with on any given month, then we can track those metrics and say, “okay, well today is the 20th of the month” or whatever the date is. How many people have I initiated contact with so far this month? And if it’s less than the number that you know, you need to reach to hit your numbers, then okay, I need to initiate contact with this many more people. Because when you focus on those lead metrics, the things that you can actually control as opposed to the lag metrics, like how much actually came in for the month. You can focus on the lead measures and then the lag measures will follow. Jay: Yeah. And again, the focus of this podcast, the high value leads. So if you’re just not fishing in any pond, but you’re fishing in that pond where you know you’ve gotten some good leads before, maybe you won’t get as many leads, but who cares, right? Because you’ve got quality customers who are going to come back to you. And we’d all rather have that than, you know, a hundred little minnows on our line, right? David: Yeah, and it absolutely ties into the topic of what we’re talking about. Because when you find those really popular or those really productive fishing holes, then you say, okay, well if I go here, primarily, I can get fewer leads and know I’m still going to hit my numbers, so why would I want to waste time bringing in more leads over here if it’s not going to produce at the same level? Jay: Yeah, maybe ’cause some people like movement. It feels like you’re busy, so that’s a good thing. It’s not always a good thing, right? David: No. It’s an easy trap to fall into. Jay: Yeah. Well, how do people find out more? David? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call. Schedule a call with myself or my team. We’d love to have a conversation with you. If you’re looking to attract more high quality leads in your business. If you’d like to start focusing on the high value, high dollar leads that can do better things for your business, it’s probably worth a call. TopSecrets.com/call. Jay: All right, as always, great conversation. Can’t wait till we talk again. David: Thanks a lot, Jay. Are You Ready to Determine Where Your Best Leads are Coming From? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.
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  Grow the Value of Your Business: Make it Worth More 14.07.2026 15min

  To grow the value of your business, consider this. If your business burns down, you’ve got whatever… desks, furniture and things like that. That stuff’s all insured. You should be able to come back from that okay. But if your book of business burns down, right? If you still have all this overhead, but you don’t have that book of business anymore, you are really in trouble. Because if you have desks, and furniture, and technology but you don’t have the ability to sell to the people that you need to sell to, what’s that really worth? All of that is just overhead. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing building the value of your business. Welcome back Jay. Jay: Hey, I’m so glad to be here, David. Once again, you hit me with another term, Do I really know what the value of my business is? And value has such a different meaning for so many, right? Value could be. Well, it gives me free time. I hate my business, but it gives me free time. So it’s of great value. Or it’s of great value because I have all these shiny toys, you know, those types of things. So I think value could be very different for different people. David: Yeah, it absolutely can. Particularly when we’re thinking about business owners versus salespeople. When I think about business value, I mean what is it worth to someone else if they wanted to buy it from you. For a business owner, what would someone actually pay for the business? For a salesperson, what is your book of business worth? If you’re building something up and somebody wanted to buy your book of business, what would that be worth? That’s what I was thinking of in terms of value. But you touched on a lot of other great points regarding the term. Jay: Yeah, like I said, there’s so many other things. I’ve talked to people who have said, yeah, I’m thinking about selling my business. And I ask them, well, what’s it worth? They often look at me like I have no idea whatsoever. In fact, I was working for Kinko’s way back when, when they wanted to sell. And they wanted to go public first, and the SEC came in and said, you don’t know what you own. You don’t know what you owe. You don’t know anything about your business. And you have the worst paperwork system we’ve ever seen in our lives. You’re not going public. And so they went and found a private buyer, which was FedEx, who went and bought FedEx Kinko’s. So just in how you manage your business can affect the value of that business. David: Yeah, absolutely. And for a lot of people, the value of their business isn’t going to be FedEx Kinko’s worthy, very likely. Jay: Yeah. David: But still, it’s good to know. And, for some it might be worth more than that. But for most people, particularly small to medium sized businesses, when they’re looking to sell, they really don’t have any idea of what the business is worth or what it could be worth to someone else. And in different industries, there are different metrics and multipliers that people use. They say, okay, well, we’re going to take a multiple of your net value. In other words, what is, bottom line, after owner’s compensation and things like that. They have a number of different metrics that people use. But in a lot of cases, that’s what it boils down to. What’s it likely to be worth to someone else? Glen Holt was a professional in the promotional products industry for a long time. He was one of my mentors in the early days. I remember him saying that when people are looking to buy a business, what they’re really paying for is the likelihood of future business. Because the only way I want to spend a dime on a business is if I know it’s going to generate a high multiple of that over a period of time. Whether it’s two years or five years, or seven years or ten years, whatever that multiple ends up being. At some point I know that I’m going to be able to recoup my investment and make more going forward. Jay: Yeah, exactly. Maybe you envision running this business forever and then you hand it off to your kids and their kids. But a lot of parents find out their kids don’t want the business. So it’s not easy to offload it that way. But I like the idea of even if you’re never considering running your business, things happen. Right? Medical things happen. Emergencies happen. You may find yourself someday saying, “I don’t want to sell. But I have to sell because of my circumstances.” So I think always running your business in a way that if you had to sell, you’d have your numbers in line. You’ve built your value, you have a clientele. I think that may be just a good mindset. David: Yeah. It’s also a good mindset if you think about the fact that some people don’t want to sell their businesses. That’s perfectly fine. But the thing that you have to realize is that if you don’t sell your business, then who bought it? You did, right? Jay: Yeah, yeah, yeah. David: You bought it with your time, your energy, your effort, all the hours that you put into it. So it’s good to be able to say, “okay, I know what I’ve put into this.” If you even get a value of what it might be worth to someone else, you can say, “would I be willing to pay that for this business?” Right? Or the amount of time and energy and effort that I put in, would I want it to be worth more than that? So I think it’s a good metric to know from our own standpoint in terms of what’s the business worth or what’s the book of business worth to someone else. But also how am I doing in terms of what I was hoping to build when I started out? Jay: Yeah, that’s a good question. What were you expecting to build and where are you now and what more can you do? I think there’s also some sticker shock when you think your business is worth one thing and someone comes in and says, “oh, I think it’s worth half that.” You’re like, “wait a minute, this is my baby! I built this thing. It has to be worth more than that.” David: Right, but there are metrics that you can use to make those determinations. And chances are, if you go to sell your business, somebody’s going to tell you they think it’s worth less than you do. But that’s where you have to make a determination as well and say, “okay, well look, if you were to buy this business, in three and a half years, you would be able to get your money back even if you just maintain it,” right? So, and if they say, “well, I only want to pay, you know, a year’s worth,” then you can say, “all right, well we probably don’t have a fit here,” or whatever. But as long as you’ve got the metrics to back it up, to say, okay, we’re doing this amount of sales after our costs, we’re doing this amount. If you take out what the owner’s being compensated, then this is what you would have left at the end of each year. And then you use that as some sort of multiple to say. Is it two years? Is it three years? Three and a half, five, seven, whatever you can get. Now, there are some companies, particularly in the tech space, and particularly if they’re recurring revenue companies, that they can sell for high multiples of what they’re bringing in each year. It just depends on what people feel that it’s worth and also, what they think they’ll be able to do with it. Because if somebody has a book of business and they’re selling whatever, a quarter million, half a million dollars a year, I’m talking about a salesperson and they want to retire. If they were to sell their book of business to someone else, and that person was going to look at it and say, well, I think I can probably maintain that for a certain number of years. Then they would value it based on that. If they looked at it and said, I think I can do twice what this guy’s doing with this book of business, then they might value it higher. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: So a lot of it has to do with the person that you are looking to potentially sell to as well. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And I also think just some of the more simpler things like staffing, you know, who’s running the place when you’re not there? What does the place look like? Is the equipment updated? Because, you know, that’s what I’m thinking. Am I going to have to come in here and update all of this equipment? Will I have ongoing capital costs? Am I going to have all of these things? You may think you’re saving a dollar now, but if you do have to sell, it’s really going to hurt yourself in the long run. David: Yeah, and we didn’t even really talk about things like that because it depends on the kind of business that you have. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: If you’ve got a lot of overhead, if you’ve got furniture, fixtures, real estate, all those types of things, those are all going to play into it. I was really thinking more in terms of small businesses or a book of business that a salesperson has, where it’s primarily their book of business that they’re selling. Because in those situations, when people buy businesses too, they very often prefer to do an asset sale. They only want to buy assets of the business so that if there were any potential issues with the business before, if somebody was going to try to sue the business or whatever, that wouldn’t potentially come with a sale. So they’d say, “I just want to buy certain assets. I want to buy your customer base. Maybe I want to buy certain furniture and fixtures. I want to take along certain employees.” So they can sort of cherry pick the things that they want to buy from the business. But I don’t want to get too much into the weeds on this. I think for anyone who has been considering the idea of, okay, what is my business or my book of business worth? What do I need to look at? And so some of it would be to say, okay, what type of clients do I have? Do I have a base of high value clients? People who spend money with me consistently? Because if I do, that’s going to be worth a whole lot more than if I’m getting one-off and two off orders from lots of different people, and it’s coming from all kinds of different sources and I can’t say where it’s coming from. Jay: Right. David: When you know where your clients are coming from and you’re selling to them on an ongoing basis and you’ve got a lot of repeat and referral business, that’s a whole lot easier to sell. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, you know, I’m just going through this process right now. I am basically starting a company that is mirroring the company I work for, because they’re going out of business, and I was able to cherry pick the things that I liked, so, David: mm-hmm. Jay: Yes, give me your customer base. Yes, give me some of your systems with your website and things like that. Throw the rest away. I don’t want any of the other stuff because I didn’t feel like they were doing it right. So I really came away, like you said, with this book of business that I know is going to be of high value and high dollar for me. David: Yeah. And what a lot of people lose sight of sometimes is that that is really the primary value of a business. There are a lot of people in the print and promotions industry where they’ve got printing equipment and they’ve got all that sort of thing, inks and all sorts of things like that, which for the most part reflects overhead. That stuff that you’ve got to pay for, that then has to be paid back. And all of that’s going to be paid back by the customers that you’re able to bring in. So it’s all going to be dependent upon the business that’s coming in. So a lot of times the things that some business owners and also most banks, the thing that most banks look at as assets are to most business owners, actually liabilities because it’s overhead. And I’ve, said this a number of times when I’ve been speaking in public about this. One of the things that I’ve said very often is the fact that If your business burns down, you don’t want that to happen, right? But if your business burns down and you’ve got whatever, desks and furniture and things like that, that stuff’s all insured. You should be able to come back from that okay. But if your book of business burns down, right? If you still have all this overhead, but you don’t have that book of business anymore, you are really in trouble. Because if you’ve got desks and you’ve got furniture, and you’ve got technology and everything, and you don’t have the ability to sell to the people that you need to sell to, at that point, what’s that really worth? All of that becomes overhead. So it’s just good to think about. Jay: Well, and I also think, and I don’t know if this is on topic, with what you’re thinking of, but it really pops in my mind, is if you have different salespeople in your business and their book of business is treated as their book of business, if they leave, you’ve lost a portion of your clientele. And so it’s very important to somehow incorporate that into a customer management system where you can see everything that’s been going on, maybe have non-competes. Because in the situation I was in, I attained a certain level of knowledge that no one else in the company had. And so when I went to leave, they’re like, “we’re going to have to shut down because he is the only guy who knows this stuff.” And so offloading their information, offloading their customer base, making sure that it’s treated as your property if you do have a sales team, I think is absolutely critical. David: Yeah, absolutely is. In the promotional products industry in particular, a lot of businesses hire independent contractors. And when you’re an independent contractor, unless there are documents that say something different, you pretty much own that book of business. Jay: Yeah. David: If you’re an employee, if you’re a paid salesperson, if you’re on salary, then it’s very likely that the company owns that book of business, unless there’s some sort of documentation saying otherwise. So regardless of however you’re set up, it’s really smart to have some sort of clarification upfront when you join an organization. Okay, who owns these clients? Is it the salesperson? Is it the business? Because if you’re unclear on that stuff, that could lead to expensive legal issues down the line. Jay: Yeah. One person could walk out the door and that’s it. Then you’re rebuilding from scratch. David: Yeah, we have a manual system, that a number of businesses in the print and promotional products industry have used. And when we were promoting that at one point, one of the points that I made with that particular product was that if someone were to walk out of a bank with $250,000 that didn’t belong to them, that would be called bank robbery. It would be a crime. Jay: Yeah. Yeah. David: And they would send the police after you. But if a sales representative walks out of your business with $250,000 worth of business, if you don’t have the paperwork in place, there’s no crime there, right? Jay: Nope. David: You just lost it, and that person has it. Jay: That’s right. David: So you really want to make sure that stuff is nailed down in advance. Jay: Absolutely. I love this discussion. How can people find out more? David: Well, you can go to TopSecrets.com/call to schedule a call with myself or my team. If you’re thinking about building up the value of your business, one of the best ways to do that is to have the systems and processes in place that will allow you to be able to sell it, move away from it, and have the person who buys it be able to expect to continue to grow that business and obtain a high return on investment. That’s what’s going to allow you to sell it for top dollar. If you don’t have systems and processes like that in place, it’d be great to have a conversation. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. David, once again, it’s always a pleasure. David: Thank you very much, Jay. Want to Grow the Value of Your Business? If so, check out the five primary ways we help promotional product distributors grow: Just Getting Started? If you (or someone on your team) is just getting started in promotional products sales, learn how we can help. Need Clients Now? If you’re already grounded in the essentials of promotional product sales and just need to get clients now, click here. Want EQP/Preferential Pricing? Are you an established industry veteran doing a significant volume of sales? If so, click here to get End Quantity Pricing from many of the top supplier lines in the promo industry. Time to Hire Salespeople? If you want to hire others to grow your promo sales, click here. Ready to Dominate Your Market? If you’re serious about creating top-of-mind-awareness with the very best prospects in your market, schedule a one-on-one Strategy Session here.
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  Get Responses: Create High-Value Communication 30.06.2026 13min

  To get responses, create high-value communication. When you're doing this, obviously, you're not actually telling your customer "I'm here to create value in our communication." You're just doing it: Adding value in the conversation. You're thinking about, "what can I say when I reach out to this person the next time to make this communication more interesting, more beneficial?" By doing that, you're going to create that in their brains and they're not even going to know why or how it's happening. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland, and I will discuss how to get responses by creating high value communications. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David, once again, great to be here with you as we talk again about a topic that I know in my business career, we probably haven't had this conversation a lot. Communication is just something that happens. And it may depend on whether you're old school or new school. Old school, we're just making phone calls and picking up the phone. That's high value communication. If it's new school, we're texting and emailing. And that's the extent of the thought process. David: Yeah, and I think the adjective here, the high value part of it may be what we're bringing to the discussion today. Because you're right, communication in business is expected. It comes with the job. Mm-hmm. And we're always going to be communicating. But the fact of the matter is that particularly now, as people are more and more likely to skip over communication, if they don't like what you're saying or if they don't feel like it's worthwhile to them, it becomes more important for us to ask ourselves "am I creating value in this conversation?" Am I creating value in this email, this text, this phone call, this podcast, right? Because if we're not communicating value in the discussion, then we're doing our listeners a disservice. We're doing whoever it is that we're calling a disservice. Whoever we're emailing, we're doing them all a big disservice. So, If we consider the idea that we need to be engaged in high value communication as much as possible, it will very likely change what we're saying at any given time. Jay: Yeah, such a great point. I think that most people now are engaging these new technologies that make the communication part automatic, right? Like drip campaigns, newsletters, automatic texting or whatever. So that part of the equation is fairly easy to implement. But then the real question, as you're bringing up, is if I'm not providing value in that communication, I am training the customer or the potential customer to block me out. Because that's the other thing that's so easy. It's so easy to automatically communicate. But on the other end, it is so easy for me when I hit delete in my messages. It says, do you want to block this sender? And that's it. It's done. It's over. So that's why you want to focus on that word value. David: Yeah, and particularly now when people are using AI to help generate communications. And my belief is that's going to cause a lot of communications to start looking like other communications. Mm-hmm. And everybody's going to be saying pretty much the same things. But if you are operating with the intent of creating value in the communication that's going to be a component that you might be adding that other people aren't going to be adding into their algorithm, whether it's with AI or whether it's what they're doing themselves. And you also raised a great point, which is the idea of if you're not doing this, you are training people essentially to ignore you. And wow, that's not what we want to train people to do. Jay: Right. my email service now, I use Mac right at the top now, they put the unsubscribe button, like that's the first thing I see. So it is so easy, and I just think about it. There are newsletters that I keep, that I allow to keep coming, and there are those that I unsubscribe to immediately. And I kind of do this thing where I, okay, I'll scan down quick. And I'm looking for value for me. Because I have a time to value, you know, ratio. So I'm looking, is this something, is there anything in here that this person's sending me that I really care about? And if I get one or two and the answer is no, they're done. That's it. You'll never get through to me again. David: Right. And when you think about it, particularly with something like email, but it also applies to texts or whatever, When you're looking through your inbox, you're going to see two things. You're going to see who it's from, and you're going to see the subject line. Mm-hmm. What is it that they're trying to communicate? So sometimes people will look at your name and they'll say, "oh, it's from Jay. I'm going to open this." They don't even care what the subject line is. Yeah. But if you don't have that sort of relationship, they're going to say, "okay, it's from Jay. What does he want?" Right? And then they might go to the subject line and say, "does this subject line interest me enough to open this?" And if the answer is yes, then it will get opened. But that combination is going to be huge. And if you're not thinking in terms of adding value in your communication, then you're very likely not going to have any value mentioned in your subject line, and you're going to dramatically reduce the likelihood that it's going to get opened. Jay: Yeah, I agree. So we're kind of talking about the drip campaigns or the ongoing attempts to kind of get in and remind them about us. That's one part of communication. But I also think it's important to assess the value of the regular ongoing communication that is happening. Like when somebody calls in, are they getting a phone tree? When somebody on your staff or you talk to somebody, is somebody going to hang up the phone and say, and we've all had this happen. I hang up the phone and I go, well, that was a big fat waste of time, right? And so clearly I didn't have a high value conversation with the person who I was talking to. David: Yeah, exactly, and I think we've all been in that situation where we've either been on the receiving end of it or we've been on the ascending side of it, where we just feel like, "oh wow, I clearly didn't create enough value in this communication." If they're ignoring us, if they're ghosting us, there's always a reason for it. Now that reason is not always us. maybe it's not your communication. Maybe you're doing everything right and this person just has different things going on, or they're afraid to say no, whatever that is. We're never going to completely get around that. But if you recognize the fact that most people are going to be looking for "what's in it for me? What's the benefit to me in pursuing this conversation?" Then we can change what we're doing. And the really great point that you raised there is, yeah, we're not just talking about drip campaigns, we are talking about every single bit of communication that you put out. And that's sort of what we led off with, is that you need to create high value communication in everything. Telephone calls, voice messages when you're leaving a voicemail message. A lot of people don't get calls back when they leave a voicemail message. And some of the reason for that is very likely the fact that there may not be enough value created in the message that is being left. If the message is, "Hey, give me a call back," and I don't know why I should, because I don't know how that will benefit me, then the likelihood of me calling back is dramatically reduced. But if I recognize that I need to dangle some sort of carrot there. Why should they want to contact me back? Why should they want to return the call? And if I can add some value in there, give me a call back so I can, dot dot dot. What is it? What can you do that would be beneficial to them? Because if you say that in the communication, they'll be a lot more likely to reply. Jay: Yeah. I think today it's so funny how we respond to things. When I get an email that I don't feel like had value or that I didn't ask for. I feel invaded. I feel like somebody has come into my house and forced their will upon me. And when I get a text, it's even worse. We judge these communications so aggressively and one of the other things that jumps into my mind that is so important about high value communication, one of the things I hate is when I call and whoever I'm calling goes right into the sales pitch, like right away. We don't want to misinterpret value as the minute I get on the phone with them, I'm going to tell you what my value is to them. My preference is that they spend some time getting to know me so that they can properly explain to me how their product or service fits into my situation. If they're just going to start cramming stuff down my throat, the minute we start talking, I'm going to be gone pretty quick. David: Yeah, and that's an excellent distinction. Because there's the value that we will create if and when we do business together, right? If I'm trying to sell you something, there should be value created if we're doing business together, right? Otherwise, there's no purpose in that happening. But I'm talking about the value that has to happen to even have that conversation. When you dive right into "here's who I am and here's what I sell," they don't understand the value at that point, right? Because the value has to come, to some extent, from the relationship that we are establishing in that call. And so to the extent that we're going to lead off with value in that call or in that communication, we need to do it in a way where they get the value upfront and it can't be related to the fact that they're already buying something from us. Jay: Yeah, such a great point. This is one of the things I do every day as I do sales consultations....
• 
  The Follow-Up Mistake That Costs Sales 23.06.2026 15min

  The follow-up mistake that costs sales (and kills communication) is a lack of sequencing. If I've got a sequence in place that says, all right, when I get a lead from a networking function, I'm going to initially, either same day or next morning, send out this email message, which essentially says, "it was great meeting you at the networking function. Nice having a chance to talk." Then, you include something in that email to elicit a response. Some will initiate a dialogue, some of them won't. So from that point, if you don't hear back, you could have another one that goes out a couple of days later saying, "Hey, never heard back you on this, but something else occurred to me that I didn't mention..." and then you add something else to the conversation that could potentially be of interest to them. So you're not just hitting them with "call me, call me, call me, call me." You're actually creating value in the communication, which is particularly key when you're doing sequencing like that. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the topic of sequencing your communication. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. Great to be with you again. I really love that we dive into these things that can have such an impact on your daily business. Oftentimes people will focus on the large things, not understanding that sometimes the smallest tweaks can make all the difference. David: Yeah, and things like this really are kind of diving deep. And many times I know other people in podcasts or in stuff that's actually going out to the public, they'll just keep it all high level and not really get into too much. I think we've done a reasonably good job over the years of diving a little deeper and getting into things in a little bit more detail. Because it's important for people who watch this or listen to this to recognize that there are a lot of aspects to all of this. And we touched on this in the previous episode. We were talking about sort of the high level goals, we were talking about the high level concepts versus the nitty gritty of what do I have to do on a day-to-day basis. And this really gets more into the idea of the nitty gritty. But sequencing is something that I don't hear many people talk about in business. And I think it's a real game changer for people in the sense that when you get this and you start implementing it, it changes the way that you interact with your prospects and clients to make what you are doing better and more appealing than what your competition is probably doing. Jay: Yeah, such a great point. And back to the idea of focusing on the smaller stuff. I'm weird. I call myself lazy because I want to avoid steps and reduce steps, but in the name of that laziness, I will spend weeks trying to create a system, whether it's a software system or a planning system or something, just knowing that over the long run, it's going to have such a dramatic impact. And I can be lazy about that thing after that. And I focus. I mean, if I can reduce one little step, I'll spend weeks trying to figure out how to do that. David: Yeah. But that's smart. I don't think that's lazy. I think it's far lazier to just go into each situation, not knowing what's going to happen, not knowing how to respond to the common objections you get, not knowing how to create a system that will allow you to bring clients through the door like clockwork. And when you do that, you're basically going into work every day with no idea of what's going to happen. So I think that's really lazy and really sloppy and I don't think what you described is lazy at all. Jay: Well, I don't, you know, I think you're probably right, but it is something that drives my wife crazy and it's really bad. Like when we go grocery shopping, I have a route, and that route has a very specific design. It's based upon how the groceries are going to end up on the conveyor belt. And that's important because that determines on how they will go into the bags, because I want the bread on top and all of those things on top. So I have this all planned and thought out from years of experience. It brings me joy, David, it's, it's a little, probably obsessive compulsive, but that's the way I am. David: That's funny and she still lets you come along. That's amazing. But it's a great example though, because when you think about that, and there are two schools of thought when it comes to outcomes, right? You described a more outcome driven approach. And it reminds me of the expression, the road is better than the inn, if you've heard that one. Jay: Mm-hmm. David: And I remember hearing that years ago and thinking, no, I kind of like the inn, right? I like, where are we going? Let's get there. Mission accomplished. Onto the next thing. But there are people who just enjoy the experience. Shopping is a great example of that. I have never been a good shopper. Jay: Mm-hmm. At least before online shopping. I was a terrible shopper. As a kid. My mom would drag me around to different stores and she could just look at stuff for hours. I got bored three minutes in. As a kid, I could go to the toy section and I could look around for a few minutes, maybe see something I liked or whatever. Then I'm done. Right? And people are just wired differently in that regard. But I think if we really get down to the core of it, and we start thinking in terms of creating the systems and processes that will allow you to get results in your business, and tying it again back to our main topic, sequencing your communication, what this will allow you to do is to leapfrog your competition. Because you won't have to think about each step of it. And it really ties to what you were saying about, you know your process in a store. Well, imagine that in business. Imagine a situation where you create a sequence of communications to send out to the prospects that you want to convert, in a specific order, in a specific sequence, at a specific timeframe. You can automate that as well. And design it to accomplish a result Too often in business because we're sort of focused all over the place, we're here, we're there, we're everywhere. We think in terms of sending a message out to a prospect and waiting for them to reply. And when they don't reply. We become confused and annoyed. It's like, why didn't they reply? I sent you an email. Why didn't you reply? And it's cause that's not the way the world works anymore. Right? I sent you an email. Yeah, it'd be nice if it were like tennis, where you bat it across the other person bats it across, and you bat it across and you have a nice volley going. That happens sometimes, but more often than not, it's not happening. And if you're depending on getting that volley hit back to you right away, you're setting yourself up for failure. Where instead, if you recognize, you may have to send it across the net 3, 4, 5, 7, 10 times before it gets lobbed back, you'll be prepared. And if you prep that in advance, you are so far ahead of what your competition is doing. It's just not even funny. Jay: Yeah, I, have this situation going on right now where somebody has sent me an email inviting me to do something. I don't know who this person is. I've never heard from them, and then I don't respond. And then like four days later, I get an email that says, Hey, you didn't respond. And I'm like, Well, that should tell you all you need to know. And then I got another one. I've sent you two emails and you haven't responded. This person is sequencing, but they're doing it in a horrific way. I mean, by the third email, I'm like, who do you think you are? That you can sit here and demand a response from me? And I don't even know who you are. The whole thing has soured me. I am never going to call them back based upon that type of sequencing. David: Right. And if that's the type of sequencing we're talking about, then yeah, don't do that. That is not what I'm talking about. It's interesting you should mention that because over the past several months I have received so many messages from people, pitching guests for this very podcast where they're saying, Hey, I think you should interview this person who's talking about this thing, and let me know if that's of interest to you. You know, I've listened to your podcast. I think he'd be a great fit. And most of the time I get, you know, pretty much the same pitch for different speakers. So I'm on some kind of list and I normally ignore them. But they've got sequences set up where it's the second one. Hey, just bumping this up to the top of your inbox again, you know, do you want to consider so-and-so for the podcast? And so finally, I just put together the response that I'm sending to people, which is to say, if you listen to this podcast, you would recognize that we are not an "interview of the week kind of thing." You know, there are two of us who do this. Jay: Yeah. David: If we were a podcast that had a lot of people on and we were interviewing what you said would make sense, and I don't get into all that much detail. But they're basically not pitching the right thing to the right person. And so in those situations, yeah, sequencing is not a great idea. But when you've got somebody who is engaged or would like to be engaged and you want to find out whether or not they're on board with you, when it's done right... And that ties into the MVPs, the messaging, you know, is the messaging going to be good? Which combination of marketing vehicles you're using to reach them, and who are the people you're reaching? If you've got those three things in sync, then sequencing is going to work extremely well for you. Jay: So let's talk a little bit more about. Sequencing. I can guess at a, couple of these things. I'm guessing like so many of the things we're talking
• 
  How to Achieve Your Goals: A Practical System for Success 16.06.2026 15min

  Wondering how to achieve your goals? Well, achieving goals is quite different than just setting them. So while the first step may be to set the goals you really want, then we have to prioritize our actions from high to low. What is the most important thing that I need to do in order to get there? Because generally, you can come up with a dozen or a hundred different things that you're going to need to do to achieve your goals. But there's probably one to three things on there that are going to be more important than the other 97. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss how to achieve your goals. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, so glad to be here, David, and once again, I'm looking forward to this discussion. We hear people talk about goals all the time, and I know for me it's something that I struggle with because what will happen is I'll set those goals. I really haven't defined how I'm going to get there, and then when I don't achieve them, it becomes something that deflates me. So I think for a lot of people, goal setting can work against them. David: I think it can too, because I believe there is a lot of focus on goal setting, and it's something that we do, particularly at the beginning of a new year. A lot of people focus on their new year resolutions, which are their goals. And while there's been a lot written about goal setting, the importance of goal setting, writing things down, reviewing it regularly, having your affirmations and things like that. All of those things are certainly helpful, but they don't actually, directly connect to the idea of how to achieve your goals. And that's why I wanted to title this the way that I did, because setting your goals has been done to death, but how do you achieve your goals? I think it's interesting to explore that aspect of this topic. Jay: Well, yeah. And one of the things that frustrates me is, when people talk about goal setting, they tend to assume that everybody's the same. Oh, just follow this and you're great. It's like, I read The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and what was never mentioned or considered in that was, it was also seven habits for highly organized people already. You had already achieved a level where all you had to do was put these things in place and you're good. You can achieve your goals. Well, what about me? I wasn't raised with systems and those kind of things, so what about me? I didn't feel like there was any place that I could implement that. David: Yeah. And that is very common. I mean, I think everyone probably deals with that because unfortunately, when you're writing a book that's going to be on a shelf for a long period of time, you have to include things that are essentially timeless. And The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I mean, it's such a great book. It's a very inspirational read. But when you've got rules, like "Be Proactive," that's a big, broad rule, right? And in many cases you can be proactive, but what does that mean? It gets down to the nitty gritty. We've talked in the past about Michael Gerber, the author of The E-Myth. I love that book. The E-Myth, The E-Myth Revisited. I read the original copy a long, long time ago, and I just loved it, because this was all about processes. And that book talked primarily about the fact that you have to have processes. But then what are those processes, right? Because that's the part that people like you and I need. It's like, what are the processes? How do I do that? How do I make that happen? And so much of my career has been focused on that. How do I turn this great recommendation, "be proactive," you know? Jay: Yeah. David: "Work on your business, not just in your business." How do I take broad statements like that? To some extent, they become platitudes, and how do I turn that into something that is actionable? Because that is the only way you can ever achieve your goals. You have to be able to convert those great ideas into actionable tasks. Jay: Yeah, such a key point. I think for me, what I found is I have to break it down enough to where I can feel that feeling of success instead of failure. Right? So it's got to be minute enough to where I can say, okay, I did it. I accomplished something. And it could be something very simple. But that motivates me to the next step. I find if they're too big, then I'm setting myself up for disappointment. David: Absolutely. But I think anyone who reads any sort of self-help material or business material, if you can take what they're giving you and then just ask yourself right away, "how do I apply this right now to my business?" Again, Seven Habits, "begin with the end in mind." Jay: Right. David: I mean, you could find that in a fortune cookie, couldn't you? It's brilliant advice, but it's like, oh, hey, yeah, that's really great. Now, again, in fairness, because it's an excellent book... Jay: Yes. David: And he goes into a lot of detail about some different ways that you can do that. But in some sense it has to be general. And that's why, if you're able to ask yourself that question, "how do I apply this right now?" It's going to get you a lot closer to being able to achieve your goals. Because now it's not about concepts, it's about you: Your activities, your focus, and what your next step is. Jay: Yeah, so let's get into a little bit more detail. I've asked myself, "how do I accomplish this now?" Is that a list you would write down or how would you recommend people proceed from that point? David: Well, yeah, I think what I would generally want to start with is thinking in terms of resources. What are you going to need to achieve your goals? Okay. because once I've written down the goal... say my goal is X amount of dollars in sales by the end of the year. My goal is to sell X number of customers by a certain date. Whatever your thing is, now you've got the goal. All right. Well, as I said, the goal is kind of the easy part. Now we need to think in terms of, okay, what are the resources? What are you going to need in order to be able to achieve your goal? Can I do it by myself? Am I going to have to hire additional staff? Hopefully you're not. But you need to know upfront. Because if you don't take the time to consider the resources that are needed, versus the resources at your disposal, then you won't even know if you're taking actions that are not going to allow you to get to your goal. But if you take the time to think upfront, okay, what are the resources I'm going to need? Who am I going to need? Right? It's not just about the things. It's also about the people. Am I going to need additional help with this? And if so, what kind of people am I going to need? There's an excellent book called Who Not How, by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Ben Hardy. It talks about the fact that when we're looking to get things done, a lot of times we think in terms of "how am I going to do this?" When in fact we're often better served by saying, "who can help me with this, who can help me get this done?" And that goes back to the resources. If you have a clear idea of what you're going to need and who you're going to need, then it's going to be a lot easier to achieve your goals. And then ultimately, how much am I going to need? How much am I going to need in terms of resources, in terms of money, in terms of people, in terms of time? Time is always one of those resources that you need to evaluate upfront, and if you don't do that, you're never going to get beyond the fortune cookie aspect of what it is we're talking about here. Jay: Yeah, you've kind of brought up negative emotions with me because it reminds me, I grew up in the restaurant business. And before I became an area manager and a regional manager, I remember my area manager coming in every year and we'd have to set sales goals. And so first of all, it was a complete shot in the dark. It was based upon air. Right? Just how much do you want to increase your sales? And second of all, there was never any instruction on how you're going to do this. And so, how do you do it as a restaurant? I'm not in control of the marketing budget because it was a chain. So what am I going to do? Nobody ever said, well, you can increase your sales by doing A, B, C, and D. They just came in and set this arbitrary goal, and at the end of the year I was beat up because I didn't reach that goal. And I'm like, this just becomes a bludgeon that creates disappointment. David: Right, because the focus there is on the what. Jay: Yes. David: What is it that I want to accomplish? Just like we're talking about with goals. This is the goal. Okay. The goal is established very early on. But then every day, every hour preceding that, you need to ask yourself, am I on track? And that's going to go back to, first of all, do you have a plan in place? Because if you don't have a plan to achieve your goals, then it's not going to happen. But then beyond the plan, do I have the resources? Do I have them in place? Am I firing on all thrusters? Jay: Mm-hmm. David: Are we doing the things that we need to do in order to accomplish it? And then also just adapting, recognizing that, let's say you establish your goals today, you lay out a plan today, and you're starting on it tomorrow. Well, as soon as you start it, it's like that old quote, I don't know if it was Colin Powell, some military general talked about the fact that "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy." Jay: Yes. David: And it's the same thing with a goal in business. It's not going to survive contact with prospects and clients. You set your goal in terms of what you want to reach, but every day you're going to be taking actions, some of which will work and some of which will not. At which point you need to be able to discern what's
• 
  Increase Revenue with Upselling and Cross-Selling 09.06.2026 13min

  If you want to increase revenue, upselling and cross-selling can help. So what's the difference? Upselling means selling a better or a higher priced version of the thing that they're looking at. Whereas cross-selling is making a recommendation of something that's compatible. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the topic of upselling and cross-selling. Are you doing it? Welcome back, Jay Jay: Yeah, hey, thank you, David. Listen, have these bad memories when I was a kid and I was working in a fast food place and the manager was always pressing me, "ask them if they want a Coke, ask them if they want fries." And I got to a point where it's hard to upsell and I think this has grown into my adulthood. You know, I just barely got the sale and now I'm asking them for more. It's not an easy thing to do for people. David: You know, it's interesting you should mention the fast food example because it's the perfect example. It's the one that everyone can relate to. "You want fries with that?" Jay: Yeah. David: Or the shortened version that you hear a lot of times, "want fries with that," as the four word upsell. And it works extremely successfully for people in that sort of industry. Because it makes sense. Somebody's coming in, they're ordering whatever, a burger or something, or they're ordering a burger and a drink, "want fries with that" makes perfect sense. And some percentage of time they're going to say yes. And whether that is 1% of the time or 80% of the time, it's probably maybe 30 to 60% of the time, I would guess, they're going to say yes. Because it's like, "oh, all right, sure. Why not? I'm already here." Jay: Yeah. David: And you hit on a great point, which is that we can feel funny about upselling, if we feel like the purpose is to simply get more money out of a person. If it feels like it's completely one-sided, if it feels like it's manipulative, then we're not going to want to do it. So I personally believe that the times that we should upsell and cross-sell are the times when we truly believe that we have an additional solution that is going to be better for them. Now, in the fast food example, are french fries better for you on top of the Coke and the hamburger? Jay: Yes! David: Probably not from a, health level, but certainly from a satisfaction level, yeah, it's better. People are likely to want that. But in business, if you're selling something, and somebody comes to you and they have something very specific they want to buy, and you have something that would be complimentary to that, or something that would go with that really well and would increase the value to the buyer, then you kind of owe it to them to at least ask them if they're interested in that. Jay: Mm, I love that. I love that idea that if you are feeling uncomfortable, maybe you should ask yourself why. And how do you feel about your product? Are you really providing a value to them or are you just trying to sell something and get a paycheck, right? And I think we all have to ask that question about our own careers and what we're doing and what we're selling. But, you know, if you can just feel great that what you're providing them is going to improve their situation, then you're just passionate about what you're doing and that's going to come through. David: Yeah. So when you are talking to somebody like that, if you've got something that is actually going to be a benefit to them, if it's going to help them, then it's a lot easier to do it. So that really just boils down to motives. What is the motive? And unfortunately, I think sometimes managers, like in the situation you described in the fast food restaurant, the manager says, "just do this. Ask them if they want this. Push it, push it, push it. Sell, sell, sell." When instead, if the manager had said to you, Hey, listen, when people come in here, they're hungry. They want something good. You know, they've ordered this, they've ordered that other thing, so they might want it and maybe they didn't think of it. You might want to suggest that. Maybe they want dessert, maybe they want an apple pie at the end, right? Jay: Mm-hmm. David: Apple pie. I'm saying yes to an apple pie, right? And if you don't ask, you don't get, and it's very easy for them to say no. Now, there are situations, and I've heard it referred to, particularly in online situations, where there are online upsells where you buy something and then it asks you if you want to buy this and you want to buy that and you want to buy this. Yeah, I've heard people refer to that as upsell hell. Now, if you get somebody involved in that, then that's not good. But if you make a recommendation that makes sense for them, then I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I also have heard this, you know, back to the fast food example, when the person who's embarrassed to do it, they say, my manager wants me to ask you if you, and I'm like, oh, that's just the worst situation. But I think, you know, I've also had like servers say, " you should try this because it's really good." David: Yeah. Jay: And that's different, right? That doesn't sound like an upsell. That doesn't feel like an upsell. So how you go about it, and are you passionate about it? Do you really believe that? David: Right. Jay: That makes all the difference. David: When my son was traveling, he was in Italy with some of his friends and they went out for dinner one night and they went into this restaurant and the waiter was very happy to see them. Americans there to spend money, and the waiter came over to take for order and one of the guys ordered chicken and he said, "no, no, no, no. You don't want the chicken. It's terrible here, get the steak," right? Now there's an example of an upsell, I guess. Jay: Yeah, David: Upsold them from the chicken to the steak. The steak was a lot more expensive. Was the chicken there really terrible? I have no idea. But he presented it in a way that made them think, all right, I'll get the steak. And it was entertaining, too. So I think there are ways of engaging in this type of behavior where if it's not manipulative, and it actually gets them a better result than you might as well do it. You know, another thing I think that people should consider is that when it comes to upsells and cross cells, it's not something that always just has to take place at the immediate point of purchase. I mean, obviously that's a great time to do it, but if someone buys something from you... in the promotional products industry, I mean the, examples are kind of easy. Somebody buys t-shirts or sweatshirts, "want caps with that," right? Would be the equivalent of french fries. And you can ask and they can say yes or they can say no, whatever it is. But if you don't do it at the point of sale, you could contact them back maybe a few weeks, a month later. Hey, I just wanted to let you know we just got this new product in. I think it would go perfectly with those shirts you got. Would you be interested in having a look at that? Right? And that's an example of an upsell or a cross-sell that could take place later. So it's not like, If you didn't do it the first time, you can never do it again. There are plenty of opportunities to do that throughout the sales cycle. Jay: Yeah, I agree. And the other thing, I've seen some research and it's something that I've implemented that has helped me get over the upsell thing, is that research that I've seen shows that the time when people are most willing to spend more with you is when they just spent with you. And that seems counterintuitive, right? Like, I just got this money out of you. You just spent money and you're willing to spend more. That doesn't feel exactly right. David: Yeah, but again, if you go back to the fast food example, it does make perfect sense. I'm getting this and I'm getting that. Do I want this too? Yeah, sure, why not? So there is that aspect of it. Now, outside the fast food example, it might not be quite as obvious and there might not be as much of a connection. But once again, I think if we get beyond the idea of selling product, and we get more into the idea of satisfying the customer, what is the customer looking to get from this experience? So in a promotional products example, am I looking to buy shirts? Not so much. I'm looking to buy awareness of my business. Maybe I'm looking to have people wear this thing and have people see it and recognize my business. Perhaps I'm looking for a sense of affinity, that the people who wear it feel good about my company. So there are very deep things that I could be looking for in this purchase. And so if I'm able to connect my additional recommendations, my upsells and my cross cells to those types of things, the things that motivated them to want to do it in the first place, then they're going to be a lot more likely to say yes. But they're also going to be a lot more likely to appreciate the fact that you thought about what they actually want and you're trying to deliver it to them. Jay: Yeah, and then you're avoiding that salesperson feeling and you're more like a consultant, as we've talked about so many times in these podcasts. I think the other thing that you have to remember, just from a pure business standpoint, we talk about customer acquisition costs a lot, and if you can upsell somebody, That's product on top of your initial acquisition cost. And then if you can cross-sell them, take your existing lead database and cross-sell them into other products, that by far is a better way to do business than constantly having to find new customers and always paying that cost to get those new customers in the door. David: Yeah, absolutely. One of the other things that we've done in our training is al
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  Still Chasing Prospects Who Will Never Buy? 02.06.2026 12min

  How much time do you spend chasing prospects who will never buy? If somebody is not responsive, you can decide, do I want to continue to pursue this person? Or do I want to leave them to my competitors? Let my competitors chase that person. If they're disqualified, you don't have to spend time with them at all. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the idea of converting more sales: turning leads into customers. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, David. Such a pleasure to be with you. This is kind of the secret sauce, right? I mean, if we could all increase our conversion rates and bring down our customer acquisition costs that's where the rubber meets the road. David: Yeah, in a lot of cases it's a really critical part of it. I think some people make a mistake upfront when it comes to conversion. They want to try to convert everyone. You know, they just meet somebody for the first time and they immediately go into sales mode. And I think that they can really save themselves and other people a lot of time and a lot of aggravation if they actually start where it really should begin with a little bit of qualification. Trying to find out if they have the need, the desire, the money, the budget, the willingness to spend, those kind of things. Because a lot of times there are salespeople who will spend weeks, months, years pursuing somebody, just to find out once they get an appointment with them that they weren't qualified to buy to begin with. And you can eliminate that right up front. Save yourself a world of heartache. Jay: Yeah, I love this point, David. I can't tell you I've had this happen, you know, I'm on the phone with somebody and talking about the product and things like that, and then after asking some questions, I realize this is not a good fit. I don't have the services they're looking for. And I could have saved us both a lot of time if I had done a little pre-qualification before we got started. David: Yeah. Or if that's happening on the first call, then you're pretty good at that point. But literally, I know there are people who have gone to networking functions for a long period of time, and they're talking to people and trying to get them to agree to an appointment, and then they finally agree to the appointment, and then you get out there and you're talking to them. I had this experience myself early in my career. I'll never forget it. There was this guy and I thought he was going to be a great prospect, so I tried to get an appointment with him. He agreed to the appointment. I showed up at his place. His place was a dump and he didn't show up for the appointment, and I was sitting there looking around and I was thinking, "okay, why am I here?" And so a little bit of diligence upfront and a little bit of qualifying goes a long way. Jay: Yeah, I agree. And I also think technology can do a lot of that pre-qualifying, right? We had the experience where our Google ad buy was not targeting the right people. And so I was getting all these calls and I'm like, "wow, look at these leads we're getting." And it turned out I was just wasting time. So I'm wasting money on the Google ad buy. And then I'm wasting money fielding all of these calls. That's just, you're spinning your wheels at that point. David: Yeah, absolutely. And when you think about it, pitching unqualified prospects is the single biggest time waster on the planet. So if we can avoid that, we're going to be a lot better off. Jay: Yeah. I think there's a tendency though to think, "oh, we can sell anybody." Or I think the other side of that is if you're not pre-qualifying, then you don't have a really good idea of how effective you are as a salesperson, because you're comparing it to every person you talked to. Like, I've talked to a hundred people, my close rate was 20%. Well, if 5% of those were never going to be a lead for you, or never going to be a customer, then you're not really using accurate numbers. Right? David: Yeah, exactly. Everything's skewed when you're doing it that way. So, I mean, I believe qualification upfront is really important and systematic follow up is another thing. If you're not following up systematically with people, which means that you are in touch with them at the times when you need to be in touch with them, then you're also going to be at a big disadvantage. Jay: Yeah. and that's really an area where I struggled a long time ago, and that is if I didn't get them right away, then I'm going to move on to the next person. David: Mm-hmm. Jay: And like you said, it's about relationships. And again, I love technology that can do a lot of this stuff for you, drip campaigns and those kind of things. David: Right. Jay: But because somebody down the road, they don't need you now, that doesn't mean they're not going to need you in the future. David: Yeah, and so if you've qualified them and you know that they would still be a good prospect for what you're selling, then at that point you want to make sure that you've got something in place, whether it's inside a crm, however it is that you're doing, so that you know that you are in touch with them until they're ready to buy from you. And when we talk about systematic follow up, it goes far beyond the, "are we there yet" approach that a lot of people take where it's like when you're traveling in a car with small kids and they keep saying, "are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?" And there are some salespeople who do that. They just call and say, "Hey, you want to buy, you ready to buy? You ready to buy? Are we there yet?" And that's not what I mean by systematic and or strategic follow up. Jay: Yeah. I think part of that is you start to seem desperate, right? And I think what we need to avoid, and I'm really learning this, is the feeling that I'm a salesperson and they're a potential lead. If they feel like I'm a salesperson, then I've already lost kind of the battle, right? So, whereas if I'm a consultant, if I'm somebody who can help them grow, if I'm somebody who they have a relationship with, who they feel really cares about them, then that's a real advantage. But if they just feel like this is sales to potential client relationship, that's a much harder road to go down. David: It definitely is. And when we think about it, you know, once you've qualified somebody and you've got your follow up in place and you're interacting with them. You know, part of the deal then is persuasion. You know, what are we saying that is going to entice this person to want to move forward? Essentially, are we hitting their hot buttons? What are their hot buttons? What are the things that are motivating them to either take action or not take action? Because if you're not doing that, once again, you're going to have a lot of difficulty converting. Jay: Hmm. Yeah. This kind of goes back to the pre-qualifying you talked about. You're not just finding out if they're a fit for your product. You're finding out what their specific needs are. Because how often have you been in or anybody been involved in. I'm pitching a sales strategy to them and it doesn't meet their needs. And what I've done is I've conveyed to them that I didn't listen or that I don't know their business. There's nothing worse, in my opinion, if somebody's trying to sell me something and they haven't taken the time to really figure out who I am, what my needs are, what is my business model? That can really be a detractor to the process. You can lose the sale if you are going down the wrong path. David: Yeah, you definitely need to keep it focused on them. A lot of times we make the mistake of talking about ourselves and our product and our capabilities and how great we are and it's like, you've lost me at hello. When you do that. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And I've been there like with somebody else and we walked in the door and we were both supposed to be part of the sales process and before there's even a hello, they're like diving into the product and opening the book and this is what we have and what we have. And. I'm just like you got to at least take a few minutes to set some baseline relationship and ask some questions and pre-qualify even there, if you've pre-qualified them before you've arrived. I think that pre-qualify is really, I think there is a pre part, but there's a constant requalifying that happens as you go along. David: Absolutely, and people are constantly cycling through the five levels of qualification. Sometimes they're ready to buy right now. Other people have specific dates in mind. Still others are open to it. They're generally receptive. Sometimes they're disqualified, and sometimes they'll just ghost you. They're just unresponsive. When you recognize that they're five essential levels, then you know exactly how to follow up with each one, and it becomes a lot more systematic. Jay: Yeah, and I love that you've broken these things down into different levels. Because that makes it really easy to classify. And that's the problem is you may have a sense that you want to do this, but you really don't know which buckets to put people in. What are those buckets? If you can have a system where you're not giving a lot of thought, you're just like, boom, this one goes here, this one goes there, then you can spend more time working on the right buckets, I'm guessing. Right? David: Exactly. Because if somebody is not responsive, you can decide, do I want to continue to pursue this person, or do I want to leave them to my competitors? Let my competitors chase that person. If they're disqualified, you don't have to spend time with them at all. But if you focus on those first three buckets, the ones who are ready now, the ones who have specific dates and the ones who are generally receptive,...
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  Social Media in Business: Conversations Over Clicks 26.05.2026 13min

  A lot of people think the goal is to get likes and engagement, but when it comes to using social media in business, conversations and conversions are the metrics that matter. That's what results in sales. The rest are vanity metrics. Those who think it's all about views and clicks might be missing the point. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the best use of social media in business. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, thank you so much, David I feel like this is one of those areas where I don't feel confident in myself, but I'm not in a position yet where I'm going to hire somebody to do it. And so, it's hard to get motivated every day, because I know it's an important part, especially in my business. Most of our leads come from the internet and social media, so it's like I don't know that this is something I should be handling myself. David: I think a lot of people feel that way, and for many of us, social media can be a huge distraction. And in some cases, like, well, the best use of social media is to keep it turned off if you have to actually get things done. But there are benefits to it when it's used properly, and part of our Total Market Domination course involves working with our clients to help them through the best forms of first contact with a new prospect. And one of those methods is social media. I mean, you can be doing it via cold calls, you can be doing it via networking events, direct mail, lots of different ways to initiate first contact with a new prospect. But many people like the idea of using social media, particularly because it is a one-to-many method of reaching people. You can post something on social media one time, and hundreds of people could see it, or thousands of people could see it. And so it allows you a great deal of leverage much more than if you're making one phone call at a time or meeting one person at a time. So there are definitely benefits to utilizing it. Of course, with the benefits come the flip side, the detriments that go along with it in some cases. One of the things that a lot of people seem to struggle with is that they go onto social media with one purpose and they end up doing 10 other things that they didn't plan on doing when they got in there. They don't end up doing the thing that they actually wanted to do. And so a lot of it, I think, boils down to the fact that we're not sure what to do. In a lot of cases. We're not sure, well, what should I post? What should I say? What should it be designed to do? And there's so much talk among so many people about creating content, and I've done classes on this. The fact that content is kind of a misunderstood word. If you think about what is content? Well, content is whatever's in something, right? If you've got a bag, whatever's in that bag is the content. Could be something good, could be something very bad, right? But whatever's in the bag. So if you think of it like that and you say, okay, I have to create content. Well, yeah, but you need to do more than just content. You want to make sure that whatever it is that you're dispersing to the masses has enough value for people that they say, wow, that was actually worthwhile. That was worth my time. So a lot of what we focus on in the communication aspects of what we do with our clients is related to how do we do that? How do we create value in our communications? And I know I'm sort of rattling off all kinds of different things that could be entirely different podcast subjects. But coming back to the idea of the best use of social media, if you think about what it is, I mean, I've got an idea of what I believe it is. Do you have any thoughts on that before I spill the beans on what I think here? Jay: Well, I think it's going to be different for everybody and what type of clientele you have. I'm guessing a key part of this and we've spent a lot of money on my end doing this. Is identifying who our end user is, what, what type of client are we trying to attack? When we first started it, we were and I've told you this story before, we were attacking so many leads. It was blowing us out of the water. But the leads were not closing, and so we had to narrow that field, finally to a point where we could just get potential leads. In order to do that, we spent a lot of time around a table figuring out who that potential client is and what are the keywords that are going to be interesting to them? And when you talk about posting content, if you're just shooting in the dark and you haven't identified who your target is, then you're going to spend a lot of time on social media spinning your wheels, and you may be chasing people away or just making them disinterested because you haven't put in the time ahead of time to really have an impact. David: Yeah. When I think about having an impact on social media. And I want to be really transparent here too. I have not used social media nearly to the extent that other people have to get clients. We have other methods of first contact that are extremely effective that work really well. And so don't look to me as the expert on this, but what I can tell you is that to the extent that we have done this effectively, the way that we've done that is using social media for the primary purpose of initiating conversations. So when I think in terms of the best use of social media, For me, but I also believe for most other businesses, the best use of it is to be able to initiate a conversation with someone else. So if I'm able to post something that's interesting enough to get someone to comment back, and then I can reply to that comment and then they reply to that, now we're actually in a conversation. And of course, conversations is exactly where sales happen. You don't have sales generally, if you're a salesperson without having a conversation. Now that could take place via text. It could take place via Messenger. Maybe it takes place in comments. It could take place on the phone, in person. Lots of different ways to do it. "When it comes to social media in business, most people focus on likes and clicks. And while that might feed the algorithm, I still believe the metrics that matter are conversations and conversions. Conversations and conversions result in sales. The rest are vanity metrics." -- David Blaise But if we think about it from that standpoint, it makes things a little easier, because when we're on social media, we are programmed to think in terms of likes and think in terms of shares and things like that. And likes and shares are fine. Shares are probably better than likes in my view, because it gets it in front of more people. And if the content is good, then it expands your horizons a bit. But if a bunch of people like your stuff and it doesn't lead to conversations, then what really happened? Their likes might get it in front of more people, because I think that's how the algorithm works. But, if people are not actually engaging with it and initiating conversations with you, then I believe there's a lot of opportunity that is lost. And when you talk about delegating this kind of thing, hiring other people to create social media for you. If they don't know what the goal is, then the stuff they create is not likely to produce the result. When they think the goal is to get likes, then they're going to create content that is designed to get likes. If the goal is to interact with people, initiate conversations with people who could potentially buy from you, then what we're doing on social media has to be completely different. Jay: Yeah, such a great point. I also think you know, you talked about conversations. It actually has become a very important part of the algorithm that you get comments and more importantly, that you reply to those comments, whether or not they're important or not. If you could reply in such a way that they respond back then that's going to increase the algorithm. So that's an important part just to get it seen by more people. But then if they're actually interacting with you, you're now building the relationship. And I think oftentimes we forget relationships are the most important part of our business. Anytime I close a sale, when I'm done, I almost feel like I've gained a new friend. And in a lot of ways, I have. Somebody that I'm providing a service for, they appreciate that service. And it all starts with a conversation somewhere, like you said, on the phone, in the comments, that's where it's all going to begin. David: Yeah. I think also tracking what's going on is important, and a lot of people don't do that. They have a vague idea of, oh, this got a lot of likes. I got a bunch of comments here or there. People seem to like this one or that one. But none of that is really tangible enough to be able to justify, in some cases, the amount of time that goes into it. So if you track how much time you're putting into it and you're able to track how many leads you get as a result of it, and by leads, it may just be something as simple as having a conversation with someone, whether it is in the comments or whether it is through DMing, that type of thing. Then you've got some metrics. You've got some basic metrics to look at, to say, "okay, I put an hour and a half into this and I had two people enter into conversations with me." Is that worthwhile? Well, let's keep track of those two people. What happened? Were they even prospects? Did you get them qualified as quickly as possible? Were you able to sell to anybody who might have actually been interested in buying? Was it worthwhile? Because if you can make a decent volume sale with an hour and a half involvement on social media, then you can say, all right, that was worthwhile. If you put in an hour and a half on it and you have no conversations with anyone,...
• 
  Are Your Priorities BS? Aligning Actions With Goals 19.05.2026 13min

  Are your priorities BS? Well, focusing on that area in particular, looking at what are the things in my life that really are important to me? What are the actions that I want to take and need to take that are important to me? Even if they're not urgent, how can I get those things scheduled so that they have a better likelihood of getting done? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss the topic Are Your Priorities BS? Welcome, Jay. Jay: Hey, David, as always, such a pleasure to be with you. And another great topic. I think that it's so easy to just do the squirrel thing or the squeaky wheel gets the grease and we don't really know what our priorities should be a lot of the time that's half the battle I think. David: Yeah, I think that's true. Knowing what our priorities are and recognizing that a lot of times they're not really what we think they are. And most of the time when I talk about stuff on these podcasts, it's not because I'm particularly smart, is because I feel like I've made every stupid mistake that anyone can make. And so if I can help our listeners and viewers to avoid doing some of those things, then that's a pretty good service. And when I think about priorities and I reflect on the priorities that I've had over the years and over my life, I recognize that we have priorities that we really put out there. We say, okay, this is what's important to me. What's important to me is my family. What's important to me are my friends. What's important to me is, whatever, losing weight, like if we have goals, my my priority is to do this and to do that, and all these different things. And then when we look at our actions and we realize that our actions don't really line up with what we say our priorities are, it raises the questions are our priorities BS? And I think in some cases, even when we don't realize it, they might be. Jay: Yeah. First of all, I'd say there's nothing wrong with learning in the school of hard knocks. I mean, sometimes those are the best lessons we can learn. But I also think it, we can spin our wheels a lot trying to reinvent the wheel, so learning from other people can help expedite that process. Right? Which is why I'm glad you're so willing to share the trials that you've had. I think that that's so critical. But I think you're right. We've talked a lot in the past about self assessment. Can you really look at yourself and know what your weaknesses are and what your strengths are? And oftentimes, I think you're right. We think something is a priority for us, but in the grand scheme of things, and according to our own actions, it's really not. And we're kind of fooling ourselves. David: Yeah, and the way that I've actually sort of worked through some of this is recognizing that there's a really big difference between our stated priorities, the things that we say are priorities to us, and then our actual priorities, meaning the priorities we act on the things that we do, the actual steps that we take or don't take. Because if our priority is to spend time with our family and our actions are that we're working all the time and we're not spending time with our family, then we have two different sets of priorities, our stated priorities that always sound good, and then our actual priorities, which is what we're doing on a daily basis. Jay: Yeah, I see this all the time in like TV reality shows. I don't know why this comes to mind, but you see people saying, my family is the most important thing to me, and they're working 80 hours a week at their career, or their job. And I'm sitting there thinking, Hmm, no, I don't think you really understand what your priorities really are. David: Yeah, and most people are sincere, I think, when they say those things. It's just that in many cases, life interferes. And when we allow life to interfere, then it turns out that our actual priorities are different than the ones that we're telling ourselves and telling other people. Jay: So how do we sift through that? How do we do that self assessment and really identify what our core priorities are, and maybe we need to identify them as BS and head in a different direction. David: Well, I put together a worksheet. You can download it here. It's very simple. It's basically got stated priorities on the left and actual priorities on the right, and what you do is you list down on the left hand side all the things that I tell other people and that I tell myself are my actual priorities. And then you just keep an eye on what you're doing every day. Did I take action on my top priority on the left hand side of the page? And if I didn't, what did I do instead? If my goal is to write a book and instead I slept until 10:30, then I've got a stated priority and I've got an actual priority. And so when I'm working with clients, these are some of the things that we look at. What is it that is most important to you? What is it that you believe, that you truly believe is most important to you? What do you believe your priorities are, and then what are the actions that demonstrate what your actual priorities are? Jay: Yeah, and I think, people have specific priorities, but they get trapped in the every day. So it's not like it isn't my priority and the priority's not really BS. What is BS is that I'm, not doing anything towards it. I'm letting my business run me instead of me running my business. David: Yeah, I mean, a personal one for me is like I've been losing and gaining the same 10 pounds for probably 20 years, right? So if my priority is actually to lose 10 pounds or whatever it is. But then I have a conflicting priority, which is, "oh, dessert!" Right? Then those two things are in conflict. And every time I choose the dessert, which is the actual priority, it's the action that happens over the stated priority of losing the weight, then it really is BS. It's BS to say that this is the goal, if the actions on the right hand side of the sheet are not going to correspond to that. And that's where I feel like, by calling ourselves out on it, it might encourage us to take the actions that we need to take to accomplish the results we're looking for and to really get our priorities in order. Jay: Yeah, and let me tell you, there's nothing to be ashamed of, of breaking even on weight loss. David .Losing 10, gaining 10, at least you're not completely losing that battle. So that's something to be proud of. So we talked about the worksheet and identifying your priorities. And making sure they're not BS. I'm guessing then you want to set a path, you've got to break that down into smaller chunks or something. You can't just say, "oh yeah, that's my new priority," or that I've identified it. You've got to talk about how you're going to get there. Right? David: Right. So when we look at the left side of the page and we compare it with the right, and we determine that, okay, our actions are not in line with our priorities, then it's a matter of looking at each of those priorities and breaking each of those down into projects and tasks essentially. So a project is anything that requires more than one action. A task is basically one action, right? That's the way I break it out. So if there are a series of three or four things that I need to do to accomplish that, then those are three or four tasks. If there are three or four or five or 10 related things that belong to an entire project, then I put it in the form of a project. And the way that I manage my time is that I use a time planner that allows me to use different colors for different things. So I use one color for projects and another color for tasks because I can look at it and say, okay, here's a task. This is something I can knock out relatively quickly. And when you know which goals, which priorities your projects and tasks line up with, then you can always be taking action on something that is actually important to you. Jay: Yeah. And I think you've hit on something very key as part of this process is by writing things down, by having a color code, by doing those things, you're giving yourself kind of back testing, right? So you can look back and say, okay, you know, do a monthly assessment. I know people who spend a couple hours on Sundays just reflecting back on their previous week and saying "Did I really make my priorities, priorities?" And so that process of writing it down, whether it's digitally or some people still use day planners, you know, they actually still use paper. That drives me crazy. But I understand, because that's got to be an important part of the process. David: Yeah. And I think the calendar is really an important part of the process because we could do another podcast called "To-Do Lists are BS," right? Because I feel like in a lot of cases they are. If you have a to-do list that has a hundred things on it and you don't get to most of them... If you're getting to the most important things, then it's worthwhile. But if you're not, then how do you fix that? And generally, the only way that I've ever been able to fix it is to budget time on the calendar for those specific activities, block it off just like you would any other appointment and say, "okay, from this time to this time, this is what I'm doing." Turning off the phone, not answering calls focused on doing this just as if I were having a meeting or an appointment and making that appointment with yourself. I'm sure I'm not the first person to recommend something like that, but for me, just moving things from a to-do list onto a calendar helps a great deal. As long as you're willing to follow through on what's on your calendar. And if you're not, yeah, then you got some real issues. Jay: Yeah, it's really a place where I struggle. I kind of have a good idea where my priorities are, but moving them into a schedule,...
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  Stop Wasting Time on Unqualified Prospects 12.05.2026 15min

  Unqualified prospects can be a huge waste of time. Lately, I've been on a bit of a kick in terms of commitment versus interest. If you're interested in the possibility of working with us, that's very different than if you're committed to getting the results you want in your business and working with us to do it. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the pursuit of unqualified prospects. Welcome, Jay! Jay: Hey, it's so great to be here again, David, and I always love the topics that we get into. I think usually, I'm in pursuit of just any prospect. I don't give a lot of thought to are they qualified, are they not? It's like, just send me all the leads and I'll sort through it. I'm sure I'm wasting a lot of time doing that. David: It's funny, isn't it? It's like just looking for warm bodies. Anybody who can fog a mirror, right? And to some extent, that's part of every process. Because we really don't know who's qualified and who's not until and unless we have a qualification procedure in place to figure that out. Or if we just get good at it from having conversations and hearing what people say. So I think you're right. I think no one really sets out to pursue unqualified prospects. But to some extent, we all do it every day. Jay: Yeah, exactly. I will tell you that as a company, we've done some things. when we first started using Google ads. It was crazy. I mean, we were getting so many responses. And then after taking all of these leads and calls, we realized that 90% of them were not good. Because, our key words that we were using for Google were bringing us the wrong type of client that we couldn't help and that we couldn't close. So once we just did something as simple as figure out our keywords, wow, that saved us a lot of time and money. David: It really helps to dial it in, doesn't it? When you're more specific and it, you're right. It could be the difference of one additional parameter, one additional thing that you're saying in the messaging that you're putting out there. Because all of that's going to contribute to the type of people who respond to your ads when we're talking about leading with advertising. Jay: Yeah, exactly. The other thing we found is a seasonality to it, and you and I have talked about seasonality a lot when it comes to sales. But we've found that the same keywords don't work the same all year long, that there's different motivations that things change. And so, we're kind of starting to keep track of that now for the first time, and I'm excited. You know, we probably won't reap the benefits of that until next year. But that's how far ahead we have to be, to know when and how to start pivoting and adjusting. David: Yeah, I can see exactly how that could be the case. And it's something that you discover through doing it, right? Through iterations. You try different things and you say, Hey, this isn't working. This used to work. What's the reason for that? So a lot of it too is sometimes talking to people. One of the things that we've done for a long time is when people make a decision not to work with us, or sometimes, if someone expresses interest in working with us, but then doesn't follow through, we'll reach out to those people and find out. "Hey, it looks like you were thinking about contacting us. Looks like you were maybe thinking about scheduling a strategy session with us. You didn't do it. What was it that held you back? And the answers you get from that can be extremely helpful in terms of finding out what might also be holding other people back. Jay: Yeah. That is so powerful. I think sometimes people are afraid. They've turned you down and they're afraid that if you make another phone call you're going to be bothersome to them. But if you do it in the right approach, or it can even be done in a form, a survey after the fact. You know, some way to kind of gather and harness that information. Something really obvious might rise to the top and you're like going, "oh my goodness, why didn't we think about that? It should have been so easy for us to see," but we get that tunnel vision so often. David: Yeah, and everything's obvious in hindsight, right? Once we figured it out, I was like, "oh, of course. How did I not know that?" You know, one of the things, too, that I think about unqualified prospects is that they're everywhere. Right? They are everywhere. And I know one of the early mistakes that I made in my business was assuming that everybody was going to be qualified until they proved otherwise. And that's a tough mistake to make, too. Jay: Yeah, totally. I mean, you have to be proactive about this process. If you're letting them decide if they're qualified, well then again, you're going through a pile of paper, a pile of leads, whatever it is, and you're honestly just wasting time and time is money. And if you can get that down to where, your close rate you know, instead of one out of a hundred, you can get, five out of 20 because you've got 20 good leads instead of a hundred anybodies. That could change your whole life. It could change your whole business with just that one simple adjustment. David: Yeah. And numbers like that frequently do. They change everything. They change your life, they change your business, they change the number of sales you're going to make. They change everything. And when we look at it, and think in terms of the fact that, yeah, we have to determine if somebody's qualified to do business with us. But on the flip side, they are also deciding whether or not we are qualified to do business with them. So as you pointed out, sometimes people think they're qualified. They think that perhaps they want to do business with us. But then when we have questions, when we ask them some things, we may determine that it's not a good fit on our side. It has to go both ways. One of the things that I've always maintained is that when two parties to an agreement want to put something together, they will figure out a way to do it. But if one of them doesn't, it's not going to happen. If you and I are talking about putting something together and we're both pretty excited about the idea, we'll make it happen. But even if he or she's not saying it, if one of us doesn't want to make it happen, there will be excuses. Things will come up and it just won't end up happening. So when you realize that and you say, "okay, well these people think they're qualified to do business with me, I'm either going to have a conversation with them or not." I mean, if you can determine that somebody's not qualified ahead of time, you can potentially avoid a conversation. Normally, if somebody is excited about doing business with us, we want to at least have the conversation. But very early on in those conversations, you can usually figure out whether or not it's going to be a fit. And if is, then great. You move forward and you work with them. And if it's not, you determine that as early as possible. Then you either recommend another solution for them, or everybody just sort of moves on and goes from there. Jay: Yeah. This is such a unique and powerful, perspective. David, I was talking to a financial planner the other day and I was asking him, "so what is your criteria for a new client?" And he said, "well, we sit them down and we interview them to see if they meet our standards for a new client. I was sitting there going, wait a minute, you interview them? Isn't it supposed to be the other way around? That they're assessing you to see if you're good for their business? And he's like, "No, we decided years ago exactly what our potential client looks like. We know who we can help and who we can't. And if we choose the wrong client, then both sides are going to be dissatisfied because we didn't do the work upfront to see, like you said, if there's going to be a cohesive, kind of gel between the two parties. David: Right. And the other reason that I think he's right is that we can only ever decide if we feel that someone is qualified to do business with us. We can't decide it the other way. So if you think about it from the standpoint of a financial planner, yeah, they need to decide is this person going to be a good fit for us? Do they have enough money to invest? Do they have a similar philosophy to the way that we operate? And if those answers are yes, then it makes sense to work together. On the other side, the client is thinking, "okay, is this person on the same wavelength as me? Am I going to trust this person with my money?" But those are the decisions that that person gets to make, right? The client makes a decision. And the organization, the salesperson makes a decision. They both have to come to positive decisions if they're ever going to move forward. And the thing is, we can't decide for the person. We can try to convince or persuade them to do business with us. But generally, it's far easier to find people who you resonate with and who resonate with you so that you can just put it together. Everything becomes a whole lot easier when you're on the same page. Like I said, when two people want to do business together, they'll figure out a way to do it. Jay: Yeah. An d it's because, you know, and we've talked about this so much, it's about relationships. no matter how you slice it, there's going to be a long-term relationship between the two of you. It is going to be about more than just picking up the phone and calling you. It's going to be, "Hey, how's it going?" There's going to be understanding of each other's lives and each other's needs. I will tell you another point is I'm getting really good, because I spent so much time on the phone, at figuring out which clients are going to be so demanding that they will be problematic well through the process. ...
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  Stand Out from Competitors: What Makes You Different? 06.05.2026 12min

  To stand out from competitors, start with what makes you different. Identify your ideal target market. It's largely going to consist of people who want to do business the way that we do business. Then matching up our style of business with the way that they want to do it. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will ask the question, what makes you different? Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Thank you for asking me to be with you again. David. I love this question. Because if we don't know what makes us different, I think it becomes harder to sell or to present yourself or anything else. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses, and playing to your strengths is key. That's obviously something we should be doing. But I've met a lot of people who don't have self-awareness. They wouldn't be able to answer this question. So they don't really know where to focus and they're kind of haphazard. David: Yeah. In the promotional products industry in particular, people struggle with this. You have all these distributors who are essentially representing very similar lines of product. Often it's the same lines of product from the same manufacturers. So a lot of people look at that and say, "how can I be different if I'm selling exactly the same products as all the other people that I'm competing with?" And if you ask that question in a rhetorical sense, "how can I possibly do it?" You're doing it wrong. You need to actually ask yourself that question in a way where you demand results of yourself. Sit down and bullet point it out. What is it that makes me different? What could make me different? Many times I ask the question in live seminars. I say, what differentiates you from your competition? Sometimes people will shout things out and somebody will say service, right? And I'll say, who here feels their service differentiates them and sets them apart? 40% of the hands in the room go up! And I say, okay, keep 'em up and look around. Can you all be right? Can your service differentiate you from the other people who have their hands in the air? And it's kind of a rhetorical question, but the answer kind of has to be yes. It has to be yes. I have to be able to differentiate myself in a way that justifies my existence in the market. And so I can be different. I can be different than you. We can both be great potentially in different areas. You know, if you think in terms of the Walmart approach, you know, their thing is cheapest price. Ideally, we don't want to be that in our market, right? But there is probably something that we can do that will better serve the clients that we're looking for than what other people in our market are doing. Jay: Yeah, it's such an important question if we're all selling the same product. Then what's going to make somebody choose me over somebody else? And we talked about it in the last podcast. Relationships can be a, a certain part of that, but our systems are turnaround. You know, there's so many things we can look at internally to say that we live up to that. I think the other hard part, and maybe it's an important part, is to figure out how to assess what your competitors are doing. If you're losing sales to your competitors, can you try and assess what they're doing that is making them win and you not? David: Yeah, and for a lot of people, the difference between an online business and an offline. Is like night and day. Very often there are offline businesses that are trying to compete with online businesses, which have a completely different set of rules and a completely different set of benefits. So very often, rather than saying, how can I compete with this website or whatever, it's often better to say, how can I be competitive among the people who aren't really interested in buying from a website, the people who are actually interested in buying from a human? If I'm selling as a human, right? If I'm selling through a website, then I have to ask the opposite question. But there's always something that we could and should be doing that will differentiate us from our competitors, and that's what we need to find out. Dan Kennedy, the marketing legend, I remember he said in a seminar one time, the question that we really need to ask ourselves: Why should I do business with you versus any and every other option available to me, including doing nothing? And I was like, wow. Mind blown. Right? But I've considered that question so many times over the years. And the last part of it, "including doing nothing" is huge. Because the biggest thing that people tend to do when they're not buying is they're deferring. They're delaying, they're not doing anything. So the answer to that question has to position us in a way where doing business with us is better than them continuing to do what they're doing or doing nothing. Jay: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And such a great point. I'm just sitting here thinking about ways to differentiate myself. I personally am somebody who I don't want to talk to anybody. I want to do it all online. In fact, I will look for every last option to do it online. But if I'm looking for it online and then suddenly I get something in the mail that is a free piece of, you know, talking about promotional products. No website is going to do that, right? And so now I have something tangible and there's a name attached to that. And if that gets followed up by a phone call, then that's a way in the door, that a website is never going to do. A website is going to sit there. They're going to do their Google ads and everything else, and they're going to be competing for the same space in those search engines. And so for you to try and rank even at a place where you're going to get seen can be very difficult. So, the website path, I think in many ways is the harder path if you're not already dominant in that area. David: Right, and so many of the people that we work with are individuals or small businesses that are looking to get attention. They're looking to create awareness in their market. They're not sure how to do it. They look at all the online solutions and they get overwhelmed by that. But it really is apples and oranges. And one of the analogies I use very often is it's the difference between the kind of person who is going to hire a contractor to put a deck on the back of their house or go to Home Depot, buy the lumber, buy the nails, buy the tools, buy the saws, and do it themselves, right? The people who end up going to the websites are the do-it-yourselfers. And so for most business, If you don't want to compete with that, then you need to make sure that that's one of your differentiators. That you're looking for the people who would much rather interact with another human being. And even those who might prefer to do business online, like you indicated. If I can do it quietly myself, I'm happy to do that. The only time that's really different is that if you're going to buy something and you know somebody and you trust somebody in that realm, then you're actually kind of excited to pick up the phone. When you want to buy something from somebody that you know and like and trust, as the old saying goes, you're excited to do that. You'd rather do that than go online and find it. Which also goes back to our last discussion about relationships. So, When we think in terms of what makes us different, a lot of it should be addressing who is our ideal target market? And it's largely going to consist of people who want to do business the way that we do business, and then matching up our style of business with the way that they want to do it. But identifying those people and disqualifying those who don't meet those criteria are really the quickest ways to do that. Jay: Yeah, I love that because I think so often in business, we feel like we have to sell to the whole world, like everybody is our client and that makes it very hard to zero in, very hard to market to. You're going to dilute your marketing power when you do that And what also occurs to me, David, is that you can do both. I mean, in the business model I'm in, we have a website that gives information. But we also offer a free 20 minute consultation. So now you've got kind of both. If they just want information from the website, then great. If they want to talk to a human being and have specific answers to their situation, then great. And we do well off of both of those models. So it's not like you have to pick one over the other. But one of the things I think is very important is you have to have somebody during that consultation who is good. And if it's you, then great. But if that 20 minute consultation is a sales call, then you'll have blown your credibility. You need to make it a legitimate consultation where you provide a value and a service. If they just get a sales call, man, I will hang that phone up so fast, you know, and move on to the next person. David: Right. And I think for a lot of people, a lot of businesses, a lot of salespeople, the website is a good place for them to be able to deliver information that will advance the sale, advance the conversation. So if you've got access to resources like that, you can say to someone who would like to interact with a human being you can go to the website, you can download that, or if you'd like, I'll email it to you. And the people who want to do business with humans might say, "yeah, just email it to me. I'd rather do that." So identifying your target audience, letting people know the way that you do things. Those are the big differentiators that people are looking for. And at that point, a lot of it becomes simply finding the right audience. Not trying to convince or persuade people who are not interested in doing business the way you do business to change their minds. You another great analogy that I love is,...
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  Strengthen Client Relationships & Increase Repeat Business 28.04.2026 15min

  Strengthen client relationships if you want to increase repeat business. Some people feel like they can get more attention from a salesperson calling than they get at home because maybe they feel like this person's listening, paying attention and then asking about it. David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today's episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will discuss how to strengthen client relationships. Welcome back. Jay: Hey, David, once again. It's great to be here and I think that this is another really, really important topic. The key word for me is relationships. I think that oftentimes you see people with a business model who want to "turn 'em and burn 'em," so to speak, and they don't think about that word, relationships and how important it is. David: Yeah. And very often, even if they don't intend to do it, the tendency among many salespeople is to get in there, make the sale, move on, get to the next one, get to the next one, get to the next one. And when it happens this way, it's very difficult to really maximize the value of those relationships in terms of dollars, but also just in terms of the relationship itself. When you do that, when you just get in there, you sell something and then you move on to the next one, you're not really building and nurturing a relationship, which is critical if you don't want to have to constantly replace the clients that you're losing because you're not maintaining those relationships in the first place. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is that there is for most companies a customer acquisition cost. And so if you've already paid that cost to get that customer, well, that goes away if you can build a relationship and they continue to use you. That to me is just such an important approach. If you're just doing it one at a time, you're going to pay that cost every single time, and it's going to lower your profit margins. David: I completely agree, and people talk about that sort of thing all the time. We all know that it costs a whole lot less to resell an existing customer than it does to find and sell a new customer. We all know it intellectually, but it is rarely practiced as well as it could be and should be within most businesses. You know, an analogy that helped me a lot was when I realized that when we're building a client base, it's a little like building a brick wall. You know, you get that first brick in place and then you get the next brick in place and the next brick in place, right? So your first year in business, you've got this sort of layer of bricks. These are each of the initial customers that you brought in. And then, your second year in business, if you're able to maintain all the customers you brought in the first time, then you can add on, you can layer in another layer of bricks, another layer of customers, and then your third year you can build in a third level and you can continue to grow it like that. And eventually you've got this great monolith of exceptional clients who continue to pay you money on an ongoing basis. But the problem is that we are not able to retain those customers. You get a crack in that, one of the bricks disappears from the first level, then your second year in business, you're starting out by plugging the holes. You have to replace those missing customers. And so everything takes a lot longer. You're essentially reconstructing your customer base, and a lot of it is unnecessary if we would just focus on strengthening and maintaining those client relationships. Jay: Yeah, and there's several ways to do that, right? Phone calls, emails, drip campaigns from your customer management system. There's a lot of ways to do that. But I got to tell you, you know, as somebody who's on the phone all day long doing sales, when I already know that person and they know me, it's just easier all the way around. I mean, it just feels so good when I call 'em and they're like, "Hey Jay, how's it going?" Instead of, "what do you want?" You know, "I don't have time for you." It doesn't just affect your sales, I think it affects your peace of mind, right? To work with customers who know you and like you, and know you provide a good service. That's just a great feeling and it really helps motivate you, I think, to move forward. David: Yeah, and so much of it is a mentality issue. If we go into that call with the idea of "I want to sell this person something." With every single call, then that's not going to build and strengthen the relationship. Sometimes those calls are just designed to find out how they're doing, what they need, what they're struggling with, how the last thing that we sold them worked out for them, what's working for them, what's not working for them. Because those are the types of things that many salespeople never bothered to do. They're just so busy, as you indicated, just sort of churning and getting from the next customer to the next customer, to the next customer that they miss out on, okay, well what happened with that order? What happened with that thing you bought from me? Did that work out well? Are there things that could have been done better? If you're buying something for me, and this is particularly true in the promotional products industry, where sometimes people will buy promotional items and we'll contact them back and say, Hey, how did that promotion go? And they say, you know what? It's still here in a box by my desk. We haven't given them out yet. Well, that's not going to get the job done, right. Not only is that not going to get you a reorder, it's not going to get them whatever result they wanted from buying that product in the first place. And so those are the types of things that need to be corrected. So very often, what I recommend for my clients is that when there is follow up, effective follow up on a sale, it's not just about, are you out of the thing you bought for me yet, and do you want to buy more? It's about how did that go? What might have worked better? What other alternatives could and should we consider? Because that's the type of thing that allows them to recognize that we're actually trying to solve a need for them. We're trying to solve a problem as opposed to just providing them more and more stuff. Jay: Yeah, I love this concept. Something as simple as a follow up call to say how did that work out? And if it didn't, help educate them on how they could do it better and come up with strategies together to make it work, and not make it sound like I'm just pressuring you for more product. I think that that builds a powerful relationship. And maybe they don't need more product right now. But because you've taken the time to do that, it's one of the things I love about your brick wall concept is you may not even be calling the first layer right now. But you're going to get surprise orders from them that you weren't expecting because they're starting another campaign or whatever. So it stops being just when I call, I get an order. And starts being this constant income stream from all of these relationships that I've built over time. And that's a lot less work, right? David: It is a lot less work, yes. And one of the things that we focus on in our Total Market Domination course with our clients is the idea of creating value in every communication with a prospect or client. So if somebody bought from you previously, when we're reaching out to them, it's not just about asking for the order. It's about creating value and asking yourself a question, how can I create value in my next communication? Whether it's an email or a text, or a phone call. Not just the idea of "checking in" or "seeing how you're doing," but being able to say something that will actually create some value for them in terms of an idea, a thought they didn't have, a concept they hadn't considered before. Something that allows them to think, "oh wow, that's great. I hadn't thought of that." And then for a lot of people, Potentially automating that sort of thing. And that's another one of the things that we get involved with in our program, is allowing our people to create, set up drip campaigns that are designed to create value for the prospects and clients, even when we're not physically in front of them. Because too often, one of the reasons that follow up doesn't happen is, oh, well I don't have time. I'm too busy. I'm distracted. Right? I'm busy dealing with other clients. But when you are able to. Create value in your communications and potentially stack that value in the form of messages that are going out on an ongoing basis to create value for the specific purpose of creating value for those customers. It creates a level of loyalty that most people never see. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. And I also think, you know, when you talk about value in emails, I know from my own personal experience, going through all the emails we get, and let's be honest, we get so many emails. When they're just like, "Hey, we've got a special on this." I'm like, "delete." But when for example, if I got an email saying, here's a promotional product success story, right? Something like that, to me I would be much more likely to read that if I rely on promotional products. Because I know that's going to help me. And educate me a little bit. So we try that in every one of our drip campaigns as well. We've got to have something more than just a price point or a sale, something valuable that will draw them in. And also, I think it helps them know that you care, you want to educate them. So again, it changes that relationship. So, so important. David: And when we think about the idea of building relationships or strengthening relationships, obviously it involves communication. Business relationships are very much like personal relationships. So it requires communication. And sometimes we can even build into our nurture campaigns,...