SHOW NOTES:

SUMMARY: In this episode, Craig Andrews and Matt Zaun discuss Craig’s book, Make Sales Magical.

CRAIG ANDREWS BIO: Craig is the Principle Ally and Founder of Allies4me, which is a marketing agency that helps companies find strangers and convert them into high-paying customers.  In addition, Craig is a speaker, writer, and will always be a Marine.

For more info, check out Craig here:
Website
LinkedIn

MATT ZAUN BIO: Matt is an award-winning speaker and storyteller who empowers organizations to attract more clients through the art of strategic storytelling. Matt’s past engagements have catalyzed radical sales increases for over 300 organizations that range from financial institutions to the health and wellness industry.

Matt shares his expertise in persuasion with executives, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs, who he coaches on the art of influence and how to leverage this for profits and impact.

For more info, check out Matt Zaun HERE. 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors

Matt Zaun

Last June, I launched a podcast episode called How Opinion Surveys Are Hurting Your Business.

That episode went exceptionally well and within 47 minutes, I learned a ton from my guest. That guest, Craig Andrews, recently put out a book called Make Sales Magical.

I bought the book and received the book right before heading on a flight, and I remember putting the book and a notebook.

Thank goodness to take notes in my carry-on from a trip from Philadelphia to Houston. Within that time, I read the book and took copious notes.

Now, I think this book might be one of the most impactful books I read all year. I learned a ton, and I'm really excited to have that guest back on to discuss this

work. Craig Andrews. Craig is the principal ally and founder of Allies for Me, which is a marketing agency that helps companies find strangers and convert them into high paying customers.

 

allies4me 

Welcome back, Craig. Matt, such delight to be here again. Good to see you.

 

Matt Zaun 

Good to see you too. And I am so glad I brought a notebook to take notes on that flight.

I for whatever reason, I put the book in and I don't normally take a notebook, but I put it in and I took a ton of notes.

In fact, the reason why I took so long to read the book is because I was going back and forth with notes and also thinking about my business and how to utilize it.

So this is going to be more of a manual now that I got to the book, more of a manual to continue to go back to and make making sure that I'm fine tuning what I'm doing in business that matches up with the system you created.

And I really want to dive into that now. Before we do, I want to throw this out there because people

Listening might think oh an author that writes the book make sales magical they must be a Natural sales professional like you must have come out of the womb and you know exactly how to sell so is that the case?

 

allies4me 

I'm not actually quite the opposite. I completely suck at sales and You know I'm a marketer. I love marketing and I love all that's involved with marketing but at some point I had to sell and I was This process is something I came up with just put food on the table because I tried different sales techniques I took some Sandler training I took some other training and What would happen is inevitably I would feel Uncomfortable during the sales call and one of the ways I described it.

feel like a lot of sales coaching It's like you have a a herd of cattle that you're trying to drive into a canyon and

till there's no escape. And you know you're driving them into the canyon. And you get them trapped until they can only say yes.

And I feel like that's so many of the sales techniques. I struggle with that. don't have a good that doesn't leave me feeling good.

And so when I would try that, would always fail. And eventually, I just had to try doing something different.

And I realized instead of selling, creating an environment where people want to buy. And it hit me that there's no sales pitch that can ever come a bad offer.

But a really powerful offer can overcome the worst of sales pitches.

 

Matt Zaun

That's a really good point. And you know it's interesting to me, a lot of companies refer to their strategy as sales funnel, creating a sales funnel.

But what's interesting is water, all of the water that you pour in a funnel goes through the funnel. And it's amazing that we're not focusing more on a sales filter, filtering out prospects that we don't want to work with.

And we're going to get to that in a moment for sure. But I want people to recognize that if they're trying to sell a very large commitment to a prospect, you mentioned in your book, a high ticket offer requires a complex first offer.

So what do you mean by that?

 

allies4me 

Yes, let me give two examples. And many folks, many of your listeners will be familiar with at least one of them.

So years ago, Columbia House Records had a deal where if you buy, could buy 13 albums for One Penny if you join their record club.

And this is great, because if you're the type of person that wants to build a record collection, One Penny gets you 13 steps closer to your goal.

That's the irresistible offer. My wife subscribe. to that. And I would call that a simple offer. And if you're trying to do high ticket complex, you also need a complex first time offer.

So here's an example of one that's complex. And trust me, I tried the simple offers for how those were the first thing I tried.

They don't work. So just save yourself the time. And here's another offer. I didn't put this together, but I like it because it makes a powerful point and everybody gets it whether they've seen the offer or not, whether they would buy the offer or not.

So there was a guy named Bob Stupach who bought a dumpy old casino at the end of the Vegas Strip.

And he wanted to turn it into a player on the Strip. Today, you would know that casino is the strat or the stratosphere.

And but when he bought it, it was just some dumpy old place. And he renamed it Bob Stupach's Vegas world.

He ran a special. He said, give me $396. I will give you three days and two nights in one of my deluxe suites.

When you arrive, there will be a bottle of champagne waiting for you in your room. All of your drinks home property are free, whether you're gambling or not.

Even if you're sitting in one of my lounges, you pay nothing more for your drinks. Not only that, but for your $396.

I will give you $600 of chips to use in my casino. So here we have what I would call a complex offer.

It has four deliverables. It's appealing to different interests, different needs. 396 was a 10% discount off the published room rate, bottles, champagne.

I don't know what that costs, but that's probably about $100. Three drinks for three days, two people at a casino in Vegas drinking.

for three days. I don't know. That's not my thing. But I imagine that's a lot of money. And then $600 of free money for $400.

included. And so that's an overwhelming offer. And it does a couple things. reason I like that example is everybody gets it.

You're like, you know what? If you're the type of person that likes to gamble and drink, it's hard to say no to that offer.

The other thing is really interesting and this ties into what you were talking about as a filter. Bob Stupack understood that he would make the most money if all the rooms in his hotel were filled with people who like to drink and gamble.

Because if he could get some money into the casino, that's where he really started making his money. if he could get them to start drinking while they're in the casino, he was about to make a ton of money.

And so that offer pulls in his ideal client while rejecting. the non-ideal client. And so kind of back to your question, what's simple versus complex?

Simple would be 13 albums for a penny or Sports Illustrated had a deal, you know, signed up for Sports Illustrated and get a football phone.

Those are simple offers. Complex offers usually have, well, as I lay out in the make sales magical, have to have a minimum of four and a maximum of five deliverables.

And then there's some details in how those have to be put together.

 

Matt Zaun 

So I can speak for the stratosphere. was there about two months ago. Again, is my second time being there.

It is an incredible casino.

 

allies4me 

That offer definitely worked for them, for sure. Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. what these offers, know, we want to, we want to design them so they attract your ideal clients.

But at the same time, we want them to repel your non-ideal clients. Now for me, I don't gamble. It's just never been an interest.

I mean, I'll play Perco with some buddies, but I don't think I've ever spent a dime in a casino.

Ever. I don't think so. I've done pachinko. I actually posted about that on LinkedIn, but that was only short lived until I realized how much money I stood to lose.

If I continued to play pachinko, this is when I lived in Japan. But I'm just not a gambler. And so that part of the deal is an interesting to me.

I do drink, but typically wine. And I don't think Bob Stupeck was offering the type of wine that we get me excited.

And so when I look at that offer, I'm like, basically, I'm buying a hotel room. And Vegas has 150,000 hotel rooms.

And maybe I'll stay there. Maybe I'll stay somewhere else. It's, you know, that's not the thing that's going to draw me in.

 

Matt Zaun 

Yeah, it's really good point. And I want to. I want people to understand the mentality in this. Okay, not just filtering out certain prospects, but the mentality regarding this large commitment, getting someone to the commitment stage.

So in a read a section of your book, because I think it really hits the mentality, and when I read this, I really had to pause and think about this.

It really, it's very insightful. It really gets you to think. So I'm going to read this section, and then I want you to dive deeper into why people should recognize this as a valid mentality.

you say salespeople have no problems bombarding my email inbox with solicitations. They try to touch the most intimate parts of my bank account upon first meeting.

It feels invasive, unwanted, and repelling. It reminds me of someone I knew years ago. He'd go into a bar and ask every woman in the bar if they wanted to sleep with them.

As you'd expect, most were repulsed and said, But he said, almost always, someone would say, yes. obvious question is,

What type of person says yes to a complete stranger? What are the consequences and downsides to sleeping with such a person?

Is it different in business? What does it say about the character of a person who writes a big check to a complete stranger?

Sure, it feels good in the moment, like the fellow mentioned above. What is this someone you really want to partner with?

What are the implications of this? I want you to dive deeper into that because I read this and I'm like, this makes so much sense.

And hindsight, it's 2020, thinking about everything that I've done when it comes to large commitments with different prospects, turning into clients in the past.

I read this and I'm like, this could have saved me from so many headaches in the past, not bringing on clients that I didn't work through a system that you had.

So, you speak to that? But it's not just about getting someone and then like, like muscling them into being a client.

How does this change the, the, the landscape of a business when it comes to sales and the partnership that they're going to connect with?

 

allies4me

Yeah. And probably the first thing I need to do is differentiate the, you know, a couple types of business.

If you have a factory that turns out millions of widgets and you make more money, the more widgets you sell, this is probably less relevant.

But if you're in any type of, let's say if you're a consultant or any type of B2B service business, if you're in any type of business that has high customer touch, if you bring in a bad client, they can ruin your business.

They can absolutely destroy it. They will bring down the morale of your team. They will bring down the productivity of your team.

Uh, they will. be just horrible for the sake of your business. And it's funny, I'm thinking of a story.

So famous author, John Steinbeck, when he was writing travels with Charlie, he was driving across country, he stopped in Chicago, and he'd been living out in his camper van.

He stopped in Chicago at this very nice hotel, his wife was flying in the meet him, he asked if he could check into his room early so he could shower.

And they said, no, Mr. Steinbeck, your room isn't ready. And he said, no worries, I'll sit out here in the lobby.

Well, he was a little bit stinky, and he was not what they wanted in the lobby, so they quickly found a way for him to get a shower, so he wouldn't hurt their business.

Well, when we bring in clients into our business, that bring a stench, that stench impacts the employees, impacts other clients, it's just bad.

And so one of the things that you wanna think about when you're bringing people in is, is this some might I want a long-term commitment with?

And the, one of the things that I do, and I'll just openly say this is the way I structure my first time offer when people are coming to me, I'm using this time to evaluate how they make decisions.

And it's not necessarily judging that they're making decisions in the right way or wrong way. I'm evaluating, do they make decisions in a way that works well with me?

And one of the things I mentioned in the book, I value decisiveness. And so somebody that needs to deliberate ever what we call a obvious.

Yes. We filter them out right away because I started thinking down the road. If it's hard to say yes to something that's an obvious yes, what's it going to be like when we get to some harder things, they're less obvious?

 

Matt Zaun 

That's a really good point. It's amazing the amount of time we're going to save by implementing your different stages.

And I want to get to the stages because I think this is a lot clearer on what you mean going through the stages.

one of the things I really love about your book, love many things, but one in particular is you don't just talk about the why and the what, you do outline the how.

How do you actually implement that, which I really want to get to. So based on what I read that scenario, you mentioned the commitment phase to certain stages and you bring up the analogy of almost like dating to marriage.

What's interesting is Craig, the analogy you use is the exact quote unquote journey from my dating experience to marriage, right?

So I want to go through the stages and I want to break it down. So you have introduction, conversation, coffee date, dinner date, and commitment.

So introduction, I was introduced to my wife at a barbecue was the end of summer barbecue. So someone reached out to me said, Hey, do you want to come to this party?

I went to the party. I met my soon-to-be wife. Okay, so I met my wife Courtney. had a very long conversation at the party.

We really hit it off. And then after that, I said to her, Hey, I'd love to continue our conversation.

Would you like to go to Starbucks? So we had the coffee date. After that, I said, Hey, why don't we grab pizza?

This is like a week or so later. So we went for a dinner date. And then from there, we started the process of commitment.

So we went from introduction phase to commitment in just side of the year. think was one day side of the year from the moment we met.

But we still went through these. to five stages. So I love the analogy. So based on that analogy, let's talk about, well, before I get to that, what are your thoughts on that?

Because it hit to a T, it fit me. I want you to dive deeper into why you picked that analogy, why that's good for sales reps to think about.

 

allies4me 

Yeah, so typically we're talking to people that have five, six, seven figure offers, could be an eight figure offer certainly.

But when people are going in and you go for the big offer, and I'll give an example, I know a managed service provider who was trying to cold call their way into quarter million deal, quarter million dollar deals with three year minimum commitments.

And I just look at and they actually bought one of our first time offers and I said, know, that's not how humans

This is not a, you know, plan success. And they're like, yeah, yeah, we know. And then they continued to do it for, I think, another eight or nine months until they finally had to lay off their, their sales staff.

They actually increased their sales staff thinking we're just not cold calling enough people. just need to work harder at this.

And the, and the problem with that is, so back to your story, let's say that you had met Courtney at that event and you had asked something much more audacious at that first meeting, know, something much more committal.

Courtney would have thought you were a little bit creepy and run away. Well, guess what prospects do when you go in and you make the big ask at the beginning and, you know, and there's somebody listening saying, Oh, no, no, we don't do the big ask, we do this, this other thing.

And inevitably what we're describing is some version of what was that game? Leisure suit Larry, you're coming in and people see what you're doing.

You know, there's no mystery why you're talking to them and they get it. And they're guards up the entire time trying to figure out what, all right, when's it coming?

know a sales pitch is coming. When's it coming? And so the whole idea, the reason we go on coffee dates and relationships, it's not because we expect them to fail.

go on them because we think there's potential here. We think there's an opportunity for us to have something wonderful together.

But I just don't know you well enough yet. And so I'm not going to make a big commitment. I want to have some safety levers in place where if things don't go how I hope they do, I can get out of this quickly.

And it's that coffee date where all of a sudden you start having an experience and when it clicks, it goes

clicks. You know, I remember I went out on a coffee date once with a wonderful woman, and it was just such an amazing time.

And on the on my way home, I was just blasting over the radio. You know, aria by Puccini, one of Puccini's operas.

And you know, that just really was expressing all the joy that I had and that felt in that moment, because I had such a wonderful experience.

With Amy was the girl's name. And so the natural next step is, yes, let's go do something more. But we went on that coffee date to figure out, is there something here?

 

Matt Zaun

That's a really, really good point. I want to dive into each of these stages. want you to make comments on them.

So before we get to the coffee date and have that incredible experience, you talk about introductions, introduction, I'm thinking lead generation, know, bringing in leads.

Through that introduction.

 

allies4me

What do you mean by introduction? Yeah, and it's it's a little bit broader and a little bit more basic.

So introduction can even be the first impression where somebody sees you in a linked impulse in a ad and in some other way.

Here's your name mentioned Often, you know introductions probably even though it's described as one step often it's going to be multiple steps you know where You know you talk matt about going on linked in and reaching out to people commenting on their post You know, that's where you're in the introduction phase and then eventually You know you get that DM from somebody saying hey matt You I really like what you're talking about can we talk and that's that you know, that's when you're moving from introduction in the conversation and so When when you think about introduction, you know think about uh channel

You know, LinkedIn is a channel, Facebook's channel, Google ads, mail, you know, a variety of means. You just have to have a mechanism to create that introduction.

And for the security of your business, for the durability of your business, I would recommend that it's more than one channel.

Never become too dependent on one loan channel to grow your business.

 

Matt Zaun

Do you want to set up an introduction to repel prospects you don't want to work with? Like do you recommend certain strategies to creating certain stories or messages that really fit within our ideal clients?

 

allies4me 

That can be a part of it. I would actually say to call out your specific client, your specific avatar.

And that's how I would lead. So, you know, one of the things that we do, we do long form Facebook ads.

work brilliantly well. And yes, they do work for B2B and if everybody thinks, well, that's a B2C platform. The reality is even people in business have a Facebook account that they go check.

But the quick side note, the key to working on Facebook, people go to Facebook to read stories about people.

So don't go to Facebook and say, hey, look at why I have to sell. Go to Facebook and tell a story about people that pulls people in.

But the first two lines of that story or first three lines as viewed on mobile needs to call out your ideal client.

They need to see that and say, hey, that's me. You know, it's like if you go into, you know, go down to the boardwalk and, you know, there's a bunch of people at the boardwalk and you hear somebody shout out, Matt, well, there be 10 mats on the boardwalk and you're presenting.

And every one of you guys is going to turn your head to see. Hey, are you talking to me?

And so instead of structuring it to repel, I would actually recommend structuring your ads to speak to your ideal client.

Probably my best, and this isn't even just for advertising of your services, this is also your employment ads. My best employment ad that landed a phenomenally awesome employee said absolutely nothing about the job.

I talked about her in the ad before I even met her. And I said, this is who you are.

And if this is who you are, let's talk. And later, this was Libby who worked for me and wanted to ask Libby, said, what made you respond to that?

And she said, when I read it, it was talking about me. And the ad did not talk about the job.

It talked about her. And so I would say that when you're doing your ads, whether it's for employees or for driving leads into your business, talk about your ideal client.

They should hear their name called out in the crowd.

 

Matt Zaun 

Oh, I love that you mentioned for hiring as well. There's so many companies that mess this up. So I really appreciate you mentioning that.

So once we get to the introduction, let's talk conversation. So can you dive deeper into conversation? And when you say quote unquote content marketing, what do you mean regarding the conversation phase?

 

allies4me 

So content marketing is a old concept. don't know when it started. I know at the very least in 1900, the Michelin brothers started using it to sell tires.

And most people have heard of the Michelin Guide. know a Michelin star rated restaurants a big deal. What they don't realize is that whole thing started back in 1900 as a way for the Michelin brothers to sell more.

for tires. And at the time, people who had cars in 1900, the people who had cars had drivers for those cars.

And the drivers were looking for ways to ingratiate themselves to their bosses. And so the Michelin brothers decided to make a guide of ends and restaurants in the French countryside.

And they would give these guides away for free to the drivers. And so the chauffeur would go to his boss and say, I've read about a wonderful end up in Doville.

And there's some wonderful restaurants there. Would you like to go there this weekend? And the restaurant owner would, or the business, or the owner would say, yes.

And so they would drive up to Doville, wearing down the tires on the car, spend the way we can Doville, then drive back to Paris, wearing down the tires on the car.

And when the chauffeur needed new tires for the car, natural one, the natural person. call was Michelin. And that's how Michelin grew to be such a powerful brand.

But it's about helping people solve problems. I like that example of the Michelin brothers, because it was a little bit hard to connect the value they were delivering to the sale.

You know, there was a connection, but if we think about starting conversations, your prospective customers have problems in their life.

And you know how to address these problems. And content marketing is simply offering content that helps them answer that.

know, Matt, one of the things that we talked about was you said that you've started focusing on a blog and your traffic has gone up significantly.

Well, the reason it's gone up significantly is your blog is answering questions that people have. It's not going up.

 

Matt Zaun 

Sure. No, absolutely. appreciate you mentioning that. I started focusing on that so about six months ago and that it's funny that you mentioned that that is literally what was bouncing around my head.

Here are the certain questions.

 

allies4me 

Let me answer them in blog form. So that was spot on with what you just said. So that's the first step in content marketing.

And you know, often what happens, you know, the way we like to do things is if you have a blog article, we like to have a piece of content paired with that blog article or paired with a group of blog articles that get people engaged.

And so for you, you're obviously always talking about storytelling and the power of telling stories. And one of the questions that somebody has in their mind when they see that is, I don't have any stories in me.

And so I, you know, I assume that in your blog, there's probably a link saying, hey, I have a guide of 150.

one story ideas that will help you get down the road, click here, fill out this form, I'll send it to you.

And when you do that, fam, you have a lead.

 

Matt Zaun 

Here's what I love about the mentality. of the many things that I immediately implemented after reading your book was, and it's not just semantics, this really was a mentality shift for me, I always refer to it as, as lead magnets.

After reading your book, I am going to continue to refer to them now as conversation starters, because the mentality is different.

It's that gotcha mentality, right? It's a magnet, it's a target. And I really think the mentality of what you just said, Craig is coming up with something to start the conversation.

There's 150 storytelling prompts. I want to start a conversation with someone because that's just very small regarding the value that can be offered through other different avenues on my site.

And it's a really good conversation. mission starter. So I appreciate you mentioning that. Now, one of the areas, the coffee date, and this is one of the reasons why this book is going to be incredibly impactful to me.

I was really messing up on the coffee date phase, okay? And I was jumping right to dinner day. I needed to have something in between.

You mentioned in your book, you say, you can close deals much faster once your prospects experience what it feels like to be your customer.

So can you dive into that more?

 

allies4me 

Absolutely. just for clarity, in case folks have missed this, a coffee date in every nacular, as we're talking about right now, is that offer sort of Bob Stupack's Vegas world.

It's an offer that you dangle out there that's an insane value that when you present to a qualified buyer that actually has a need, has a problem that you can solve, they're going to say yes.

Yeah, that's the only. answer that can come out of it. know, so Bob Stupack, if you're somebody likes to drink and gamble, free booze and free gambling money for the cost of a hotel room.

Yes. And so the so the and the other thing on my emphasize is it has to be an impulse purchase that means the coins in the cushion, your couch, the money in your wallet, or the B to be equivalent of that.

If anybody has to ask permission to spend that money, it's priced too high. If anybody will ever be held accountable for how that money is spent, it's priced too high.

If someone has to do a mental calculation to figure out if it's a good deal or not, it's not a good enough deal.

And so what that does, it's like the coffee date. The reason I stress that is you're taking risk out.

You know, so if you're talking to somebody and you There's a lot of debate about the economy strong. Is it weak?

I don't know. But the fact that there's a debate about that says that people are a little bit scared.

They're a little bit cautious. And because they're cautious, when they're making a purchasing decision, when they're getting ready to spend some of the company's money or some of their own money, they're trying to figure out, is this going to come back to bite me?

And so you have to take that risk out. Now, I never recommend doing this for free. And there's some reasons we could go into there.

You should always, always, always charge something. It's very important. It flips some psychological levers. And, you know, there's no end of people that will say yes to something for free.

As soon as you introduce just a small charge, you're applying some of that filtering. And what happens is the way we structure them is it's usually a mini project and you're actually coming in and you're working with them.

them solve something. And as you're working with them and helping them solve something, they're experiencing what it's like to work with you.

And you're answering real time some of the questions that people usually try to answer during the sales conversation. Let me give an example for my own business.

So I, fractional CMO, do marketing consulting and so forth. I know that some of my gets on a sales call with me.

I know 100% certainty. They have a bad marketing experience in their past. Just like every one of us has a bad dating experience.

We've all dated that crazy girlfriend or that crazy guy. You know, there's rare few people, but most of us have that bad story.

And when we go out on the coffee date, we're trying to figure out, are you a psycho killer? are you potentially my future spouse?

 

Matt Zaun 

For sure.

 

allies4me 

And so the beauty is when you You actually get to sit down, you start working on something together, small, much smaller than the big scope of your core offer.

When you're working on something together, you're helping them answer that question for them. But also, you're helping answer that question for you.

You're figuring out, is this a client that's going to help me grow my business and that we're going to work well together?

Or is this a client that in six months I'm going to regret taking on as a client?

 

Matt Zaun 

You mentioned something little bit earlier that I really appreciate it. You said that how they make decisions. you also said, do they make decisions in a way that works for me?

When it comes to the coffee dates, you're basically offering them an absurd amount of value for a specific price point.

You outline in the book the different price points that you recommend. What are some of the decisions you're looking for?

you looking for speed? Is the offer so good that they have to be literally out out of their minds.

Of course, you wouldn't want to work with them at their hesitant on that.

 

allies4me 

Like, what are some of the decisions that you're looking for through the process of them receiving that coffee date and then through you executing it?

Yeah. And so that's, I mean, for me, it's really decisiveness. That's just, and that's especially true for my personality.

If you want to torture me, put me in the room with an indecisive person. And there's some in my family who I love deeply, who goes into these spirals of not being able to make a decision.

And when I'm around them, I, and they're in one of those spirals, I just got to and quietly leave the room because it's painful.

It's just, it's literally painful for me to be there. And so that's one of the things I'm filtering out when somebody's coming in.

I'm trying to figure out, are you a decisive person? And so if I dangle this and say, a good deal in front of you.

And you need to think about it. And I had this happen last week. I had somebody, you know, I'd go through it.

They had a problem we could solve. And, you know, present and they say, can you write that up and send it an email?

I said, yes, of course. And, you know, I had it all templated. So literally it took me 30 seconds to fire it out.

But when I did it, I also knew they would never be a client. And because that's just not a match.

I'm like, if you need to take more time to dig into the details of this, you know, and this is an offer that I've been presenting for years.

I have enough feedback to know this is a good offer. And so if you need to dig in and think about a little bit more, we're not going to be good together.

Well, you know, we're just I don't say that. I give them the opportunity to self-select out. But I know that.

And as a matter of fact, as soon as I got off that call, went into, you I use HubSpot and I went in and marked the deal closed, lost because I knew that that one come through.

And so that's one of the things that I tried to decide. Something else I look at is are they teachable?

And again, this is just for my own business because at some point, at some point, I'm going to ask them to do something that's going to make them uncomfortable.

And I'll give you an example. This is a funny example. A number of years ago, we had a client that was a kind of a small, mid-sized financial investment firm.

And in the process of working with them, I found out that their chief investment officer used to be a gambler, spent all this time in Vegas.

And I was like, oh, this is gold. And they had truly a remarkable story. And so I went off on my own, rewrote their About Us page and I said, hey, I'd like to re-write your About Us page.

Sure, sure. That's actually a brighten it. Here it is. And they get in there. And at one point, we reveal that, you know, John used to be a gambler.

literally, in one paragraph, we devote one paragraph with two sentences that say twice, John was a gambler. You know, we're not hiding it.

We're actually featuring it. And when the client read that, that scared them understandably so. Understandably so, they're like, Craig, this makes us a little bit nervous.

I said, I understand. I said, that's actually going to build trust. And they said, we don't think so. I'm like, you know, and it did.

know, the outcome of that was somebody said, hey, do you have a way of testing this? And we put the test, the test came back wonderfully.

But that's an example of, I understand their fear. But because they were teachable, we were able to do that.

And it made a huge impact to their businesses, as matter of fact, their revenue tripled in 18 months.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow.

 

allies4me 

Yeah. So if I'm dealing with somebody that's not teachable, at some point, we're going to do something in marketing that's going to make them very uncomfortable.

It's going to look different than what everybody else is doing in their industry, which by the way, if you're doing what everybody else in your industry is doing, your average.

But I need to see if they're teachable. And so that's something else that we use during that process is to figure out how teachable they are.

 

Matt Zaun 

So let's say through this process, through the coffee date from start to finish, you find out very quickly, they're decisive, they're teachable.

Are you quote unquote, I hate to use the word pitch. What are you offering them the dinner date during the coffee date?

Or do you wait until that is completely completely installed?

 

allies4me

Let's say at the end of the coffee date. We recommend doing something very old school. We take the results and we put it in a binder.

We have it printed, professionally printed, and shipped to them. And presented. And, you know, I've had people try to talk me out of that, say, Craig, it's, you know, it's a new century.

Just send them a PDF and like, no, no, we're intentionally doing it in binder. And there's a few reasons for that.

One is we know that they are rarely the lone decision maker. You know, there are other people that are going to have to say yes for this decision.

And so what we're doing by putting things into binders, we're giving them away to go explain to others what's about to happen.

And why they should say yes. And when it comes in a highly produced binder that looks very professional, that's, you know, that starts triggering in, you know, we can get a little bit of here, but.

It's triggering the back part of the brain, which is the system one thinking that looks for patterns and that patterns says, hey, this is well thought out.

This is professional. And all of a sudden that starts giving them ease and comfort for the people that have to also agree on the decision.

The other thing that the binder does is when somebody pays, you know, let's say $500 for this binder, the one thing somebody never does what they bind or they paid for is throw it away.

And because they probably don't have a natural place for it on their shelf, they put it on their desk.

And so that binder just sits there and does something no salesperson could ever do. It's just there and says, call me.

Call me. It's the constant reminder that they have a pain. There's a solution to their pain. All they have to do is call whoever sent them that binder.

Typically what happens at this phase. and then we, you know, we schedule call to review the binder. Usually what happens is that

They just say, hey, what's next? You know, that's what we call the ideal sales conversation, where they're asking for you to close, instead of you asking for the close.

We've seen this before in relationships. Reminds me of a conversation my wife had with me, twice, while we were still dating.

I'm sure you had a similar conversation. My wife came to me and, well, then girlfriend came to me and said, it clear that if I asked, the answer would be yes.

And also made it clear that she was ready for me to ask. And so all of a sudden it's really not about selling.

It's just, she agreed that she was ready to move forward. I agreed that it was ready to move forward.

That was just a matter of figuring out the details.

 

Matt Zaun 

So there's no proposal in the binder, that the next step of offering up. the dinner date comes with the review of the information in the binder.

 

allies4me 

Yeah, for us, one of the things that we do is we usually propose next steps. Yeah, here's what you do.

And it's actually this kind of gets into something else. Yeah, so we talked about how there should be four or five deliverables, no lesson for no more than five deliverables in your first time offer.

And the final deliverable, and this is going to sound very complicated. And I promise I will immediately simplify. The final deliverable needs to be the solution to a problem that's uniquely created by the successful delivery of the preceding deliverables.

That's the complicated version. Here's a simple version. Matt, you know, grew up on the Chesapeake Bay. And, you know, there's lot of people have boats.

Once you get a boat, you have any. new problem. You actually have a lot of new problems. But if I was a boat broker, if I was selling boats and somebody came onto my boat yard, I would talk about one problem in particular.

And I would say, you know what, we're going to help you find the perfect boat for you. But once you have that boat, you're going to have a new problem.

You're going to need a place to dock it. Well, guess what? We know all the marinas in the area.

We know all the yacht clubs in the area. We know they're pricing. We can make introductions for you. So we will help you find the perfect slip for you for you to dock your boat.

And not only that, if you'd like, we can have your boat delivered directly to your slip. So all you and your family have to do is grab your cooler and your ice and your picnic basket, get on the boat and have a fantastic day.

So that's an example of solving a problem that's uniquely created by the successful delivery of the priest. seeing deliverables.

But what it does is it shifts their mindset, it moves them into a future success mindset. They start vision envisioning what it felt like, what it feels like to have successfully gone through the other steps.

And so back to the your question about the proposal. When we're going through and solving different problems, those solution, those problems create new problems.

And so usually our final deliverable is an action plan. And often they start realizing, wow, this is more than I can tackle at once.

And so we help them prioritize. We promise we're going to help you prioritize what you should do first. That's the final deliverable.

And that ends up being the closest thing I would say that we do to a proposal. It's really more fill in the blanks because we know what we do so well that we can just go in and fill in some ways.

planks and saying, this is what we recommend that you do next. But what we tell them is you have three choices at this point.

You can take, you can take this action plan and implement it yourself. Your second choice is you can take it and have someone else implement it for you.

The third is if we mutually agree, we'll help you implement it.

 

Matt Zaun

Wow. Okay. just to, to, I want to make sure that I'm adding little bit more clarity for myself with this.

So in the coffee date stage, you have four to five deliverables. The very last deliverable answers, the problems you created by the other deliverables.

That's the action plan and that action plan is, hey, here's, here's the dinner date. That's the action plan.

 

allies4me 

Is that correct?

 

Matt Zaun 

Yep. So the dinner date or the core offer, it depends upon how big of a step you're taking.

 

allies4me 

You know, You know, if, if, if your core offers five figures, a good chance you don't need. eight a dinner date, you can go straight to the core offer.

But as soon as you're into six or seven figures, you probably want to have a dinner date.

 

Matt Zaun

Yeah, it really depends. Okay. And then what would you define as a clear, valuable dinner date?

 

allies4me 

Well, a dinner date has many traits that a first-time offer has the coffee date. And let me just kind of rattle through those quickly.

It's with coffee date, it's an impulse purchase, the coins in the cushion, the couch, the money in the wallet, the dinner date, it's a discretionary purchase.

You move from impulse to discretionary, but not yet budgetary. The second thing is it delivers disproportionate value to price.

And so you want your dinner date also to be a great value. But you want to leave the big problems unsolved and you want it to naturally lead to your core offer.

And so dinner date would be like a different level, a deeper level of engagement. And that moves closer there.

So if we were talking about, let's say that Manchin IT company that's trying to get people to sign a, well, that's probably not the best example because the quarter million dollar contract, that's over three years.

so you break it down, that's less than $100,000 a year. But if you're moving someone to the stage where they're going to have, maybe they're going to have to make big infrastructure changes or do something like that, your dinner date is something, think of it as a little bit more due diligence before you make that big commitment.

So put yourself in the CEO role of whatever company you're trying to sell to, before they make big changes and before they make big commitment.

is to use you, they're going to do different levels of due diligence. The coffee date is the first level of due diligence.

The dinner date is the next level of due diligence. Well, I believe most companies do what they mess up is they they kind of muddle and combine the coffee date and the dinner date into the due diligence.

But without the careful structure, they end up doing it for free and it just takes a long time and they're doing all this proposal work while they're not actually solving problems.

The reason we jump to the coffee date is it gets you solving problems sooner. And the sooner you solve a problem in somebody's life, the sooner it causes the release of oxytocin in their body, which is the bonding hormone that bonds baby to mother.

 

Matt Zaun 

All right. So people could do what you just said or they can keep doing cold calling. I think I would rather do what you just said for sure.

So everyone listening. I highly highly They recommend you go read this book, make sales magical, close more deals faster and at higher prices by Craig Andrews.

Highly recommend it. There's so many different other insights in this book. We didn't even cover today. We could probably talk for hours and hours and hours about the implementation of this Craig or people could just read the book.

Highly recommend people read the book. Today, I got three specific things out of our conversation. I already read the books.

already understood a lot of these concepts. But you said three things today that really made me think further. So the very first thing is you say that during the first time offer, it's how they make simple decisions.

Do they make decisions in a way that works for me? Are they decisive? Are they teachable? That is very important.

The second thing is you mentioned in the first few sentences, you need to speak to your ideal client. So I've always preached about stories speaking to your ideal client.

But the first two or three sentences. That's really important for people in sales and marketing to recognize, especially not just sales, but also hiring.

I thought those are really good point. And the third and final piece, I really appreciate you mentioning the four to five deliverables in the coffee date.

But more importantly, at the end, said the answer the problems you created by the successful delivery of the other deliverables.

That's the action plan. That is such an incredible insightful strategy. really, really thank you for your time today and everything that you mentioned.

If anyone wants to get more information on what you do, they want to reach out to you for a coffee date with you.

 

allies4me 

Where is the best place they can go to get that information. Yeah, so they can come to my website allies for me.com.

That's a l l i s the number four me.com. Or they can find me on LinkedIn. Craig Andrews. I think the last time I checked, if you just Google Craig Andrews, the number one search result is my LinkedIn page.

And so they can find me on LinkedIn.

 

Matt Zaun 

Those are probably the two best places. Yeah, highly recommend people follow Craig on LinkedIn. have for over a year, his posts are so unbelievably valuable, you will learn a ton.

I will include that in this show notes. People can just click and go from there. Thank you again for your time today.

 

allies4me 

Thank you, Matt.