Persistence Wins Long Term

Persistence Wins Long Term

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome back to the Business Development Podcast. Today we are at a little bit of a milestone episode, so I'm excited. We are at episode 25. Everyone. We are just about at our three month mark for the Business Development Podcast, 25 episodes deep and loving it. Appreciate all the support we've had so far.

Today, we are chatting about persistence and why persistence wins long-term. Stay tuned.

Intro: The great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal, and we couldn't agree more. This is the business development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and broadcasting to the world.

You'll get. Expert business development advice, tips and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business brought to you by Capital Business Development capitalbd.ca. Let's do it. Welcome to the Business Development Podcast, and now your expert host. Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Business Development Podcast. It's an absolute pleasure to be on here with you today. Today. I just wanted to start out the episode by giving a quick shout out to Dale Shaw in our previous guest episode. Test your Idea with Dale Schaub it was amazing to have Dale.

He's a lead entrepreneurial consultant with NAIT Mawji Center here in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, an entrepreneurial expert, and it was an absolute pleasure to have you, Dale. Thanks so much for coming on our show, and if you have not heard that show yet, it is our previous episode. Episode 24, Test Your Idea with Dale Schaub.

I just wanted to give another quick shout out and thank you to everybody who has nominated us. The nominations are now closed for the Quill Podcast Award. They've been closed for about four or five days now. But I did just wanna say thank you so much to each and every one of you who did nominate The Business Development Podcast.

I do appreciate it. No idea if we placed or anything yet, but just wanted to give a quick shout out and a thank you to everybody who did take time out of their day to nominate us. We could not do this show without you. It is appreciated greatly and thank you so much for doing that for us. Okay. Well today I I have an episode I'm kind of excited to chat with you about cause I think it's a bit of a challenge that a lot of business development people face is, I think a lot of us are given up a little bit too early.

It's true, it's true. Guys. I've experienced. Some interesting insights into this over some previous contracts that I've done in business development, especially with these larger oil and gas clients. But we have some stories kind of as we go on further in the episode. However, I wanna just touch on what persistence is to start, and then we'll kind of move into why it's beneficial for you to spend a little bit more time before you dump that prospect.

Okay. Alright. What is the definition of persistence? Well, persistence is firm or obstinate, continuance in a course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition. All right, guys. Difficulty or opposition. We know all about this, right? If we're in bd, if we're entrepreneurs, we've probably faced a little bit of adversity.

We've probably ran into a challenge two. We've been told our product sucks or it's not something that they want today, or whatever. We've ran into some objections, right? But the reality is we are always going to run into those objections. We are always gonna have a little bit of opposition, and it is up to us to be persistent and consistent in order to be successful.

Okay? Most BD people give up too soon. Good relationships take time and effort to create. Look at the best personal relationships in your life. Did they take time or did they happen instantly? Come on guys. We know this, right? Our best relationships in our life, whether it's our wife, whether it's our, our girlfriends, our fiances, our best friends, the people we spent time with, right?

Those relationships didn't happen immediately. Yeah, they happened quickly. Maybe in some cases, maybe with a girlfriend or something like that, but the reality is, Trust and a good relationship takes time to develop. Just like trust in a good relationship with a client, with a prospect also takes time and trust to develop, right?

It's something that we have to put a little bit of effort into in order to be good at, in order to create that bond that we need to create in order to, to have enough trust that when we do pitch our product or service, it's not immediately Ah, no, no. It's not an immediate no. Right. So we have to take a little bit of time in order to do that.

So what I find, I think a lot of BD people, we get on a phone or we get a prospect list or whatever. We're kind of going after we we're ripping through our crm. Maybe we're in the weekly contact stage, right? I talk about my stages and I will get into this later on in this show. However, we're in the weekly contact stage and you've called this guy or gal maybe 3, 4, 5 times.

Maybe you got the voicemail every time, or maybe she was busy, or maybe you got reception and you're like, ah, I don't know if I really wanna do this another time. Well, guess what guys? Here we go. According to research in sales and prospecting, it takes on average, Eight touches to book an initial meeting or have an initial conversation with a new prospect.

Eight touches, guys. Eight. Come on. Like I know a lot of us are giving up way before eight. I know this for sure. And guys, just think about this three more weeks on the call list. That's all. It would've took three more weeks on that call list. And you would've gotten that conversation. You might've booked that meeting, but you, you, you disqualified them too soon, right?

And you know what? Yeah, I've been guilty for this too. So I'm not just knocking on all my BD people and saying, ah, you guys, you need to try a little harder. Like, I used to do this too, so I'm not knocking on you. I'm just saying. We were so close, and if we would've just put in that little bit extra time, just that tiny, tiny bit of extra effort, we might have closed more deals.

We might have had more meetings. And so before you disqualify that prospect, make sure that you are giving them an adequate amount of time. Right. Let's let's chat briefly about what is a touch, because I know I have people saying, well, what do you mean? What is eight touches? A touch is any way that you reach out to a customer.

Okay. It could be a formal email, it could be a LinkedIn message, it could be a phone call. Typically though, they're more kind of considered when you have a direct contact. So a touch is typically leaving a voicemail, sending a formal email when you have the customer's proper email address, so you know it's going to the right person.

It is implying however, that we are getting to the right person and that we are actually. Delivering some type of message to them, whether that be an email, whether that be a d, a dm, or whether that be a phone call or, or a voicemail. Okay. It, it implies a direct contact. Okay, so eight touches, eight direct contacts, direct contact.

By the, by, by. We know for sure that the message is getting to the right person. Okay. So what does this mean for you? It, it means that we have to make sure that we are doing that weekly follow up, that we are sending these direct messages, we are doing the right homework to make sure that we are getting to the right person, right.

BD people. We're like little detectives. Okay? I want you to think about yourselves as detectives, cuz we really are, we have to find the right people within an organization to be effective, right? Finding the right people takes a little bit of sleuthing, takes a little bit of detective work, right? You need to make sure that you're doing the right digging to get to the right person.

Okay? How do we make sure that we are doing enough? I think this is a question that a lot of us have, is that, Okay, well, we got these processes in place. We made eight phone calls. Was that, was that it? Should I, should I, did I do enough? Well, the secret to that is, guys, is we need to make sure that we have a good process flow.

What is a good process flow? Well, you guys know I harp on this guys. You need CRMs. Okay? If I'm talking to entrepreneurs, new entrepreneurs, new business owners anybody selling products to people, BD people, BD managers, guys, you need CRMs, customer relationship management systems. There's tons of them out there.

My favorite is Pipedrive. I'm not pertinent. They don't pay me for anything. I just, I've used Pipedrive for this point, like 10 years of my life. I, I love the program. I think it does absolutely everything that it needs to do. And it does, it cost effectively for me, which is important. Okay. So it, it meets, it meets a criteria for me that is, I don't mind spending the money on Pipedrive.

I think I get a lot of value for the money I spend on it, and it delivers all of the process flows and. Basically options that I need to be effective. So for me, I like Pipedrive. However, there's Salesforce, there's an absolute metric ton of CRMs, and you know what? Choose whatever one works best for you.

I'm not, I'm not hating on any of them. I think they're all valuable. I think they all do what they need to do, but I just, I like Pipedrive. If you don't have a CRM right now, I would highly recommend that you utilize Pipedrive. However, like I said, I'm not affiliated with them. I just love their product. So we need to be using a crm, and then we need to make sure that our CRM has a good process flow.

Okay, so I talk about this quite a bit. You always want your initial stage, the first stage in your CRM to be your digital introduction slash LinkedIn introduction stage. So this is the stage that we've sent our digital introduction. We've added these people on LinkedIn. We've sent a quick introduction message.

Very, very short guys, like five, six lines. Very, very easy. Just introducing yourself. And maybe briefly what your company is. Okay. And then we add them to that CRM stage and we put in their customer contact details. We put in all the information that we have for them at that time. And then as we do the detective work, figure out their contact location.

Maybe we get the phone number for the office they work at. And we, we know because we call, we ask for them, they transfer you to their voicemail, and then you're like, great, I know I have the right contact. We move these people into, The next stage, which is contact made. Okay? This is what I like to call your weekly follow up stage.

Everybody you put into contact made you want to be following up with on a weekly basis. So one call a week, guys leaving voicemail, sending the direct email, whatever you guys want to do to have a direct contact with them, and you want to be doing that on a weekly basis until two, one of two things happens.

They either want more information and you were able to secure a meeting or they disqualify themselves and say, you know what? This product isn't for me right now. Yeah, maybe some other time or, or, or just maybe not, right? And then great, one or two things happens. You either move them to the meeting stage, which is great.

That's what you wanna get to. Or you disqualify them, which is also great because it means you can move another person into this weekly follow-up stage. Cuz the reality is there's only so many people that you can contact on a weekly basis. So you wanna make sure that the, the contacts you are contacting have a high probability, right?

So in some ways we wanna disqualify them sooner rather than later so that you're not wasting your time on people that aren't gonna be valuable to you. And you're spending a lot more time on people who will be valuable to you in the future. Right, so we want to have, we always want to have our LinkedIn digital introduction, our contact made.

I like to then have a, a like a, a no opportunity or, or lost opportunity or what I like to call back burner. I like to call it back burner. If it's like a no, sometimes I'll just move them into that back burner stage, or if it's not, not right now, maybe next year move 'em into back burner. Then I like to have a future opportunity stage.

Then I like to have a meeting stage and then a follow up stage to that meeting stage. And then, or what I like to also call next steps. So next steps comes after meetings in, in my crm. And then the very last stage is always current customer. And then at that point, that's for your account management guys to handle.

Okay. But you always want to have a good process flow in your C R M and you wanna make sure that you're consistently doing enough follow up to either get the people on the phone and book the meeting or disqualify. So what this is saying, guys, what the research is saying is that at bare minimum, once you get them to that contact stage, at bare minimum, you should be trying at least eight times.

Okay? At least eight times. Set yourself like a little rule before you disqualify these people. Give yourself at least eight times at Capital. I like to give them 10. Why? Because it always takes a little bit more time than what you think. You know that, right? You know that projects never complete exactly on time.

And guess what? People never answer in exactly eight calls. Maybe they answer in six, maybe they answer in nine. But the reality is, Give them enough time, make sure that you're doing enough follow up to give yourself the best possible chance. Because the statistics are pointing to eight, which means it's the average guys.

It doesn't mean it's the rule, it just means it's the average. So if you wanna give yourself to 12, give yourself to 12. You wanna give yourself. To 10, give yourself to 10, but give yourself more than eight or at least eight to make that average. Okay? We have to make sure that we're doing the follow up calls, right?

We have to make sure that we are doing the follow up calls and following a consistent process on a weekly basis, right? So I talk about this a lot. Consistency is what is important in business development, right? If you set yourself a rule where you know you have. 40 people on your weekly contacted stage.

Make sure that every week you are doing the due diligence to make those 40 phone calls. Make sure that you are sending out the right amount of emails. Make sure that you're adding the 30 new LinkedIn digital introductions every week. Every week, because that's what wins. What wins over time is persistence and consistency.

We need to make sure that if we are holding ourselves to account, If we are saying, okay, we're gonna add 30 new LinkedIn digital contacts every week, we're sending out a hundred invites on a weekly basis to to new prospects. On LinkedIn and we're adding them to the LinkedIn digital, digital introduction space at like 30.

And then say we have 40 people in our weekly follow up stage, we make sure that we make those 40 calls, right? Because yeah, maybe one week you leave 40 voicemails, that shit happens. Totally. It happens. But guess what? The next week you might book 20 meetings. And I get that. That's like super optimistic and I'm, I'm really embellishing here.

It's pretty unlikely you're gonna book 20 meetings, but the point is that, Even if you book five, right? Like the reality, that's how it works. It, it works. You know, you'll have a, you'll have an off week and you'll have a great week, right? And you'll never know unless you are consistent, unless you, you hold yourself to account and you make sure that you are giving yourself a fair opportunity every single week.

That is what's going to make you amazing. That is what's gonna make you very, very great at business development, is you just need to make sure that you are persistent and consistent. Okay. Let me chat about this briefly. Okay. I've had some interesting experiences in my BD career where persistence has incredibly paid off.

Okay. I used to love doing physical brochure drops. You know, I still do. I get it's, it's not cost effective. That's why I tend to do it a lot less now. But sometimes if there's a high value prospect in the city and I have some client brochures, I love to just swing by the shop. Drop a brochure by the desk, grab the business card for the right person.

Cause I've already done the homework. I know who the right person is at the business. So I'll say, I'll leave the, I'll leave the brochure for him and I'll say, Hey, give this to John Doe in Ops manager and, and I'll grab, I'll grab his business card and I'll, I'll put him into the CRM and follow up. Right.

But a funny, funny story that I have from this is as you guys know, I worked in inspection services for a long time and one of the clients that we had, I got a call like two years after I dropped the brochure on the desk. I kid you not, I'd followed up with this guy probably every six months or so, more than like, he'd essentially disqualified himself, but said, yeah, try me back every six months.

So I did, I tried him back, stay every six months and I got a call one day. And the call was, Kelly, I've had your silly brochure on my desk for two years. It's been in the pile. You were number one if this, if this service was ever required and today's the day, and now I need you. And so this just goes to persistence, guys.

Come on. Most people would've disqualified this person. You know that I probably should have disqualified this person given the time. But the reality is I didn't. And I gave him a call every six months. And you know what? Eventually, That guy kept the brochure on his desk and eventually he called and we made a sale.

And if I remember correctly, that client actually went on to repeatedly buy over and over and over again, and it would've never happened if I hadn't been persistent in that case. Let me give you another one. I worked for some pretty high level oil and gas clients nowadays in Alberta. Okay? Alberta is very much an oil and gas province for my.

My friends in the United States and around the world. Alberta, Canada is an oil and gas economy. Okay? And it's funny because our politicians here are always advocating for clean energy and this and that. But the irony is, is that right down to McDonald's in, in Alberta, Canada, it all relies on oil and gas money.

It just, it is what it is. And oil and gas clients here are incredibly hard to get. It takes a lot of effort. They're being essentially solicited by everybody. And it takes a lot of time. And I wanted to just kind of chat to this because some of my oil and gas clients that I, that I've marketed here in here in Alberta, trying to get into the big oil and gas companies.

In some cases it took 25 plus reaches before I even talked to somebody in these large oil and gas companies, guys, 25 reaches. That means like I left like. I don't know, 20 voicemails. Might've got the receptionist five times, probably sent like another, I don't know, five or six emails before they ever reached back out.

And we're like, you know what now? Yeah, we're interested. We'd like to talk. And I booked that meeting. Okay. And so it can take, you know, I mean, what I'm saying here is they're saying the average is eight. Right. But what I'm saying is it really depends on the client, right? Know your client. If you were dealing with high level companies, let's, let's pretend you guys are dealing with Microsoft, IBM in my case, you know, dealing with some of the large oil and gas companies here in Canada, CNRL, Suncor, things like that.

It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of time, a lot of reach out and consistent effort. And so if I basically, if you disqualify these people in, like in in eight, if you were to disqualify these people in eight, you would probably never have a chance of ever getting into them. It's going to take you considerably more.

So what I'm saying is, Judge your client have an idea of the size of the company. And if it's a large, large company, guess what? I need you to anticipate a little more time, put a little more effort into it guys, and don't disqualify them so early. It may take you 25, 30 touches before you get anywhere with them.

And staying persistent and consistent is what is going to make you incredibly effective. In that case. Right. One of the other funny ones that I had was, I, I showed up to a meeting on behalf of one of my clients once, and I kid you not, I must have, I must have reached out to this, this particular company probably 25 times.

Same as, same as all the other oil and gas ones. This wasn't a big oil and gas one, but I put in some effort. Okay. I put in some effort cuz I knew we wanted them, they were an oil and gas service company. They had high, high value to my client. And so I put in the effort to get it. Okay. So funny when when this woman showed up to the meeting, she goes, Kelly, you are the kindest, most persistent business development person I have ever met.

And we all had a great laugh because, It was funny, right? Like the reality is is that yeah, for sure if I wouldn't have put in that effort, it wouldn't have happened. But every time I left, remember I talk about this guys, you have to always make sure that when you are leaving messages, that you were leaving messages that somebody would want to call back.

So I'm always leaving my messages, right? It was always, Hey, it's Kelly with Capital Business Development. I'm really, really excited to meet you. Would love to line up an introduction meeting. I think I have a client that would provide you guys a ton of value and really looking forward to your callback.

And I left like, like I kid you not probably 20 messages like that. And so I built a rapport with this, with this woman. I built a rapport that, that. Even though, even though as you probably heard my voice on a weekly basis, it was never annoying. It was always kind and fun and upbeat and uplifting and asking for a meeting.

And guys, I got it. I got it. It took a lot of time, but I got it. And I want you to be consistent and I want you to be thoughtful about the messages and the emails and the direct contacts you are making. Always do it from a standpoint of would this person call me back? If it was me on the other end of this, would I want to call this person back?

Make sure that the messages and the emails you were leaving are emails and voicemails that you yourself would be like, would get maybe a little laugh out of, would put a smile on your face and you would want to call them back. Okay? So how do we create the best relationships? Okay. We need to be persistent and consistent effort.

All relationships take persistent and consistent effort. You cannot. Let them slide. You cannot, like, you know, call a guy for a month trying to get the message and then stop and wait six months and then pick it up again. You're not going to be effective that way. You need to make sure that if you have a target you're working on, give them, give them the respect to follow up on a weekly basis until you either disqualify or you get what you want.

Don't be inconsistent in your efforts, okay? Don't be inconsistent in your efforts. Treat your clients like you would treat your friends. How do you build friendships? Guys? You build friendships by being friendly, by being fun, by being a human, okay? I talk about this a lot in the podcast. I want you all to be human in a world of robots and ai, be a human right?

Talk about life. Talk about your loves and and your family and the things you like to do in your hobbies. And heck, if they're nerdy, even the better. Right? Be real. Be. Be human. And if you're having, maybe if you're having some, some challenges or you're having like a, an open conversation with a client, don't be afraid.

Don't be afraid to don't be afraid to be you. That's all I'm saying. At the end of the day, don't be afraid to be you because. It was you that your friends loved, right? It's you that the people your coworkers love to spend time with. It's, it's you and your clients are no different. They want to get to know you.

Yeah. They may need your product or service there, there's a business case behind it. But at the end of the day, you wanna build real relationships with people, and you do that by being human, by having regular, everyday human conversations with them. Okay? Deliver the product or service that you say you will and do not lie and do not.

And you know, people will say this, you want to underpromise and over-deliver, right? Basically you don't wanna bullshit your clients. And I think that that's fair cuz you don't wanna be bullshitted, right? So I kind of feel like if you li, if you work in an industry where you feel like you have to bullshit your client to sell your product, Guys get out.

What are you doing? What are you doing? Ask yourself that because you were probably selling a product or service that isn't valuable, isn't useful, right? You're not, you're not providing a service. You're providing a disservice. So, There's a thousand other places that you guys, or products that you could sell, or places that you could work where you don't have to sell crap products, where you don't have to sell a service that isn't valuable to your client.

The reality is the service itself, it pretty much should sell itself because your clients should need your service. They should need it. It should be something that will provide them tremendous value. Do not bullshit your clients don't don't, don't have to temper expectation, right? Have a product, sell products, or work for companies that are reputable.

That provide services that are actually truly valuable. Okay? That's neither here nor there. Today I'm talking to the, to the my BD people who are also doing account management. Okay? Make sure that you have a consistent follow up schedule with that client, okay? Once you had those, that initial meeting, once, maybe they've purchased your product once, make sure that you were following up with them.

Make sure you're booking a lunch with them maybe every couple months just to check in. I like used, I used to call it like, Essentially seasonal, seasonal meetings. So I'd book like Fall 2023 meetings, spring 2023, meeting summer 2023 meeting where we'd just get together and we would chat about, Hey, what was going on over the past couple months?

You guys have upcoming opportunity. What's new? And you would just stay in touch and consistently build that relationship. And you build that relationship over time by doing things that friends would do, like going for lunch and having great conversations and chatting about life and. That's how you do it, guys.

That's how you do it. You have to build friendships. If you go into it all business, you're not gonna, you're not gonna succeed. People want human to human interaction. They want human relationships. Make sure that you are doing your follow up consistently and once they are a client, that you are doing your account management consistently as well, which means at bare minimum, you guys should be meeting with that client probably every two months.

Okay? Okay. Being persistent following process on a weekly basis will make you effective. Don't give up after four or five attempts. You may only be one call away from success. Okay, this week I got some more shout outs. Chard Joseph, John Murphy. Mike Mandziuk and Zach Weissbach all of these people reached out over LinkedIn or or on the podcast and just said, thank you.

And I just wanna say thank you guys so much. I really appreciate the support, I appreciate all the comments, reviews, like subscribes, they're, they're amazing. And I read them all, guys. So just just a heads up. We don't always get feedback. Okay? So feedback is very important for a podcaster and we hear very little of it.

You would think we get a ton, but the reality is we get very, very little. So I appreciate every review left guys. I appreciate every email. I appreciate every message on LinkedIn. Thank you so much. If you guys are doing that, thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. You guys are amazing. And I couldn't do this show without you.

It truly is what keeps me motivated and keeps me excited about the next one. And so if you have a moment today, And you wanna give back to this podcast? That's how you do it, guys. Head over, head over to my website, or head over to Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Leave us a review, leave us a rating, shoot me a message on LinkedIn or or feel free to reach out directly to the podcast at podcast@capitalbd.ca.

That's podcast capital bd.ca, and if you shoot me any questions or maybe some show topics on there that you would like me to discuss, I will definitely acknowledge you and I will definitely acknowledge that on the show for you. Thank you so much. This has been episode 25 of the Business Development Podcast.

Until next time, I'll catch you on the flip side.

Outro: This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry, and founded his own business development firm in 2020. His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development. The show is, Brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.