45. Steve Dodd – ConsultX Business Success Partner (Interview 2)

Steve Dodd – ConsultX Business Success Partner (Interview 2) [Everything Business Consulting EP 45]

We catch up with Steve Dodd in Brisbane on building his Consulting Firm. On this episode we discuss lead generation & the process for his new consulting recruits.

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Transcript

David: Hi, global consultants, David Thexton here from ConsultX and welcome to this week's podcast, Everything Business Consulting. A weekly podcast all about business consulting, where we talk about many different topics and interview really interesting people from our global network. If you want to be or are a business consultant, this is the podcast for you.

Hi everybody, David Thexton here. Today, we've got a guest, Steve Dodd. Now, for those of you who've been around for a while, Steve was interviewed something like about six months ago, as I remember it, and we went through a series of our standard questions with him. But today we're going to do something different, we're going to dive really deeply into client acquisition because he, Steve's got the record for being the quickest signup coming out of training. A couple of years ago it was, and now he's got a consulting firm in Brisbane, Australia, and he's got some new people that he's taken on in the last two or three weeks.

I'm going to get you to, well get him to talk to everybody out there to tell you about what he's doing, and how his success is continuing on through other people. You know, client acquisitions one of the most important, if not the most important thing about business consulting, because if you're not signing clients, then you're not doing any consulting at all, you're just sort of spinning your wheels.

So let's dive into this. Hi Steve. 

Steve Dodd: Hi everybody. Hi, David. 

David: Hi there, let's talk about client acquisition. Can we just go back, just for the benefit of people who haven't heard your earlier podcast, go back to what you did when you first started? Because I remember in training, you look me in the eye and you said that I'm going to follow the program perfectly and it bloody better work or words to that effect. And it wasn't a threat, but I thought, oh gosh okay, well that's good. So again, can we wind back the clock a couple of years and tell everybody what happened there? 

Steve Dodd: Yeah, absolutely. We, in those days we used to go to New Zealand and we used to do the intensive training all at once, six days. And I just left a very lucrative corporate job and I wanted to go out on my own. So I wanted to start earning as quickly as possible. And so when I returned back to Australia, I actually created a marathon plan. In fact, I actually created the plan during the training session, very comprehensive 13-week marathon plan. And when I got back to Brisbane, literally I just, I had nothing else to do.

I didn't have a job, this was my new job and I went out and followed the plan. And my plan suggested that every day, I'll knock on doors. I knocked on eight in the morning and eight in the afternoon. And as I went through the plan, obviously that the walk-ins would reduce as I started picking up meetings. Well, because I followed that plan to detail, I never actually got to finish it because it was so thorough that I started getting meetings by the first day I'd actually had three meetings booked, and I carried on following the plan. And, the following week, the second week I actually signed up three clients.

I'd actually got four meetings in the first two days, and I actually signed up all of those four clients. Although one of them, it took me eight months to get it across the line, because of the situation of the business. And actually some of those clients, in fact, two of those clients that are signed up in that first session, they're still with me today and that's a two and a half to three years later.

This I believe that they're still with me is because the success of doing the acquisition process was so honest and forthcoming that I had trust right from the first day, and that's continued all the way up to today. Fuck, my largest. Sorry. 

David: Sorry, I don't know how to jump in on this bit of software here so I just will, can you go back and can you go back to those first few days where you went out and you were banging on doors? Because a lot of people in the network, they kind of don't like it and I say, well you know if I was going to start on Monday, I wouldn't use any of our other techniques. I'd be out there and I'd be banging on doors. So can you go right back to the first moments of that first day when you went out, what did you actually do?

Steve Dodd: Absolutely, so my marathon plan, I had a couple of people to call, but the vast majority, a hundred percent of it other than two people to call, the other, the remainder that was to knock on doors. So I went around the corner, there's a big industrial estate, maybe it's two or three Ks away from my house. And, I actually parked up at the bottom of the estate, locked my car and I had a bunch of flyers and business cards in my hand. And I walked up and I knocked on every single door, on the left-hand side and knocked on the door, asked to speak to the business. I had my cold call script and everything prepared.

I knocked on the business on the first one, went across the road, knocked on the second one, knocked on the third one, got a couple of nos, a couple of yeses. A lot of business owners weren't in. There was even, I even got to a meeting with a multinational business, which later he canceled purely because he thought we looked up to small businesses.

David, will remember that and quickly changed the website after that, but I just knocked on the doors, I approached business owners and I had my script in my head and I had it memorized and I used variants of that script and I just talked to people. And what I found and I tell, and we'll go on to what I do with my current associates in a minute I guess, what I found is that people are generally nice. You know, there's no need to be frightened and people will talk to you. In fact, probably 90% of them actually thanked me for coming and speaking to them, even though they've never actually took up my offer for a meeting.

So, don't be frightened, I get butterflies like the next guy. I get nervous as the next guy. I've been doing this for three years and I still get the butterflies before I go and knock on the door of a client. And that's good because my senses are alert, my brain's acting, it's the old flight or fight thing. It's a good thing, embrace it, and actually enjoy it. You're speaking to successful people or potentially successful people, you should be enjoying it and you should be learning from it. That was my experience in it, and it worked. I've got three clients in two weeks. 

David: What about the speed? Can you talk to everybody about the speed, bit more detail, the speed of getting those discovery meetings compared to other methods? I don't know if you used other methods, slower methods, but can you talk about the difference between walking in and talking to business owners and networking and pamphlet dropping and all those other ones?

Steve Dodd: Absolutely, knocking on the doors is the fastest way to get going. I've done various forms of corporate work and sales, cold calling is always a fact of life. But actually going and speaking to people and knocking on doors is by far the fastest way, there's been some other Thexton Armstrong consultants who have had relationships with, not relationships like that. But, I've, you know, called and kept in touch with and I've even tried to help him coach. And they have tried all sorts, they've tried the networking, they've tried to go to events, they've tried the Facebook and none of them have actually worked because, and I thought straight away that they're not going to work for me. 

The only way, the way to get done is to get out the car, go and speak to business owners. Your whole business is about helping businesses, the only way you're going to do that is to speak to business owners, sending them a letter, sending them an email, sending them a made facebook message is not speaking to business owners. You know, even a telephone call is better than that, but your success with telephone calls will be very low because now we've all got gatekeepers and people haven't got time. And it's easy to say no on the telephone, it's much more difficult to say no when somebody is looking in your eye and you've got a big grin and you're full of energy. 

David: That's a very good point, and if you start to get all technical about this, or I'm going to get all technical about this, everybody knows that a face-to-face communication is better than a telephone, and a telephone is better than an email. And an email is better than a pamphlet in a mailbox. And a pamphlet in a mailbox is better than an advertisement in the newspaper or on the radio or something like that. So the thing is if you want to really, really rev up what you're doing then choose the best method, because what happens is when you're face to face, and you just said this more or less, when you're face to face, you'll probably, well you'd score a hundred points on that or 10 points in our little chart that we've got. 

10 out of 10 face-to-face and eight out of 10 for a phone, or maybe even seven, and it goes down to nothing. Well, one out of 10, which means you got to do 10 times the work. So, if you say telemarketing, you won't remember this, Steve because you weren't around, but we had 16 people and a division in the Gold Coast in Australia ringing 8,000 businesses a week, every single week. Cost $90,000 a month to run that team and all the other stuff that went along with it. And the success rate with 16 people was just not acceptable. And we persevered on for a couple of years, spent about $1.8 million on this. And then we just dumped it because it was just, the return on investment was dreadful. And it was dreadful because even with all that horsepower and grunt, we couldn't get the conversion numbers up.

Like, we just couldn't get the appointments because telephones were so ineffective, and these people were trained like ninjas, these telemarketers, you know, they'd chop your head off with their tongue just about so, yeah, but if you'd keep coming back and yet even back in those days, I'm going back seven years ago, even back in those days the people that were doing the best in the network were the ones that park their car, lock the car and went for a walk really.

And somebody once told me, one of our Melbourne guys, he said, you know, he said, what did he say? He said the most difficult door to open is your car door. Is that what he said, something like that? Yeah. And it's just, it's not worth letting that fear get a grasp of you because it's going to cost you a fortune. It's just an imagined, as you said, it's just an imagined fear. What's fear stands for, false evidence appearing real. And that's all it is, and the difference between allowing that to affect you and not could be a hundred, $200,000 a year. 

So, anyway, so sorry, I just want to jump in there, but to carry on. So you found yourself and you found with your new people who were only a couple of weeks old or so aren't they? Yeah, yeah, can you talk to everybody about that and tell them what, tell everybody who's listening what process you put them through, and then go onto their results so far? 

Steve Dodd: I guess because I've been doing this for so long, then obviously you lose clients and you gain clients. You're always actually prospecting and I'm always doing walk-ins. If I walk down the street and I see a particularly, I call them happy hunting grounds and I'll say a particularly good industrial area. I'll go and do some walk-ins just for just, just to keep my, to keep my hand in, I guess. But anyway, recently I pulled into two new associate consultants. I still like doing a face-to-face training, so I actually do two and a half days face-to-face training to start with.

And then I do the, another two sessions later for the rest of the program because I believe they're not earning when they come and join me, they need a hundred percent focus. This is the job, their job, eight hours a day, 40 hours a week, or whatever they've decided to work. This is a job for them. So, through the training, I go through all the techniques that you learn and you've seen them all on the videos that they've not changed much. I've learned a few things about my scripts and things like that. And I get the guys to develop their own particular scripts that suit their nature. And then I get them to do planning I show them mine and we tweak it to the, to what's best with them. 

There's things I've learned about, you know, different things in human nature about doing this. It's easy for me, I'm like a robot. I'll give myself eight in the morning, eight in the afternoon, and I do that, but not everybody's like me. So when I first had my first round of associates, I was saying do two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. And I found that they were getting drained, especially when there was a lot of rejections. So I've actually found that focusing on a particular number, and have that focus that this morning I'm going to do eight walk-ins and then this afternoon, I want to go and reward myself with a cup of coffee and a late lunch.

And in the afternoon I'm going to do eight. And once I've spoken to eight business owners, because that's the job, not knock on eight doors, spoken to eight business owners, or received the contact detail names of eight business owners only then can I stop. And I've done the same with my associates, I'd give them goals. And I go out with them and I observe them when they're doing their actual cold call scripts. And I advise them, I watch them and I watch the business owner when they're talking, I see how much interest and I help them guide them until their script is really, really slick. And then I'll let them go out and off, they go on their own.

And then knock on doors and they come back and they get, they come back with the numbers and I'd phone them every afternoon. We talk about their day, we talk about how many walk-ins, they tell me about particularly funny ones, the good ones, and they tell me how many meetings they've gotten. And we talk about the meetings and my consultants started, they finished on the Friday morning, I do a session on the tools and systems on a Friday which is our business tools, our emails, our storage, our servers, all that sort of stuff. And then on Monday off, they went and by Monday afternoon they had both booked discovery meetings.

Awful. Wow I said, is my record was gone and I've encouraged them. I've got the trophy and I'm saying, I'm waiting to hand this treasure out. And my record, my record had been smashed 4 walk-ins and meetings in the first day. And one of the girls had got eight and the boy had, Shawn, he got five discovery meetings booked, yeah.

Yeah, unfortunately, they haven't signed them up yet. Following the acquisition, and that's just the first part. So when you've got no meetings or anything booked, what you've got to do is you've got to focus on an objective and this is exactly what I tell my guys, everything we do in life has got to be an objective. Cup of coffee, there's going to be an objective and I've actually written blogs about this. If you're going to go and knock on somebody's door, there's got to be an objective. It has to be worth his while and that objective when you're knocking on doors or talking to business owners, wherever it may be.

Barbecues, school fairs, or anything, they're all classed as walk-ins, you're face-to-face with the business owner. Your objective is to get the discovery meeting, there's nothing else you need to think about, nothing else. That's the only thing in the world. Okay, you've got to focus on getting that discovery meeting. Once you go through the discovery meeting, the acquisition process kicks in and we follow that acquisition process. So if one of my guys comes back with a discovery meeting, great. When he's had these diagnostics meeting for every diagnosis, when he's finished every discovery meeting, he should have booked a diagnostics and a proposal.

If he hasn't, if he hasn't, then he has to, he's done something wrong and I actually tell him, well, don't really count on getting that one. You know? So, for example, one of my guys he's done a discovery meeting, and he didn't pin down the diagnostics and the proposal meeting. And I said, I've told them, I say, you'd be very lucky to get that one. You've got to pin down the next two meetings and you've got to keep the meetings within two days. And these are skills that you learn by doing them, you know, when I started, I didn't know any better, so I just did it. I thought everybody did it, apparently, they didn't. And that's what I try and get into my associates is this is the way everybody does it.

If they don't do it this way, they don't become consultants. And it seems to be working in every, every discovery meeting to come back. And they say yep got my discovery, got my meeting booked here and here. And there's a couple of caveats in there as well. And if it's a partnership, you need to have both people there. If both people aren't there, you might want to delay it. And I've tried to do it that way, I tried to do it about probably 12 months ago. I tried to get, you know, I tried to close a deal without the other partner being there and it failed miserably. And it was such a shame because it was a $5,000 fee but you live and learn.

And but that it, it's a learning experience. It will take you 20 years to get good at this. You know, I'm still learning every day.

David: Well, I am too. I'm learning from everybody's who's at the coalface like I made a couple of notes down here from some of the things that you've said, and I'm going to follow up on, because the more I talk to people, the more I pick up all these little one-percenters, you know, and they all get fed back into the program and then people get the benefit of it. So we're all helping each other. 

But the whole idea of the three meeting close, this is what we're concentrating on in this podcast is that you come out of the discovery meeting with a whole lot of challenges, hopefully, eight and the business owner or the business manager is absolutely, that these challenges must be solved.

And then we sell the diagnostic as being, we need to do a diagnostic on this business. These challenges can't be allowed to continue as they are, like, some of these challenges are going to kill the business. So how about I come back next Wednesday and then I'll come back on the Friday afterwards. So yes, some people like Steve Potts in Auckland, he books all three meetings at the start of the discovery meeting and it continues on, and he books all three of them at the same time. Can you hear me, Steve?

Okay, so last year it must be storms in Brisbane. We've lost power three times this week.

Okay, I'll have to go do a little bit of editing, but what that's all right. But what I said was that Steve Potts in Auckland, he was the guy that brought to our network the idea of booking all three of these meetings, at the right at the start of the discovery meeting. And the reason was that he promoted it as five hours of free consulting. And we need to do this, this, and this. Because he pointed out. 

Steve Dodd: Right. 

David: That otherwise, if you don't do that, you've got three closers. You got to close the discovery for the diagnostic and the diagnostic for the, and so on, so on. Whereas he just booked them all through and he's an ex-policeman and he's got a bit of gravity, you know? And yes sir, yes sir, no problems at all. He's about six foot two tall and all the rest of it, but yeah, so it's very important that you get those meetings because every day between the meetings they go cold by about 10%, don't they?

Steve Dodd: Have to go and, you gonna have to go and get another meeting in effect really. But, Dave, can I just talk quickly about the discovery meeting? Because the discovery meeting is my favorite meeting. I love the discovery meeting, and my passion sort of flows over into the associates, because they're now, are thoroughly enjoying these discovery meetings and they're getting the next two meetings without fail. You know, they're doing it because it's a conversation, even though I love to use the PC. I know some guys don't, so we carry it as a conversation and I've had these discoveries go for two and a half hours. 

And I believe if you get the discovery meeting right, you've got the client. And I sat with Danniella, one of my new associates and we did a discovery meeting with a toy manufacturer. And he was, he was just pouring his heart out to us with these problems, with these troubles, and these things and his website that has been half going on for a year. And Danniella couldn't believe it, cause I said this in the training and I says, they'll tell you things that they've never told anybody else. And a such of trust builds up in that discovering meeting. One of the most important meetings, because the things that you learned in that discovery meeting, you will use all the way through the consultation and that life cycle of that client.

And I'm still using, I've got clients for three years since I've started, and I'm still using items that I've picked up in the discovery meeting. It's so, so important. And if you do it right, you will get the next two meetings, but the way I tell my guys to do it when they go in because the objective of the walk-in is to get the meeting. So they think they come for one meeting. What I say, because it's a very soft sell is hi guys, as I said, we're going to come to do the discovery meeting, as we mentioned, you get a report at the end of it and you'll have a good understanding of your business, but this is the first of three meetings. 

We'll cover this one. Okay. And by the end of it, if you're still comfortable to move forward, we'll book the next two. But I guarantee by the end of that first meeting, the next two meetings is just, okay, thank you very much for that. What I need now is your financials ABCD, and I'll be in to see you tomorrow for the second meeting we talked about, and then I'll pop in on Friday to give you the reports.

And then, yeah, that's cool, that's cool. Can we move it a bit further back? I don't even assume they're going to say, and I don't give them a chance to say no, they're just it's automatic. It's almost like they've already signed in for it. I still haven't mentioned the proposal, yeah, sorry. Yes, that's right.

And then I haven't even mentioned a proposal or any review in these fantastic reports we're going to give them on their business. And then when we go in the next day, okay. Because the third meeting is for, to hand over the report, not the proposal. It's the reports, but by the time you've got through the diagnostics and you've done everything there and we start talking figures and this and that and the other, they've normally asked you by the second meeting, ah, how much is it to work with you and stuff like that?

And I'll say, oh well, we'll talk about that later. And by the end of it, you said, I remember you asked me how much is it. What I'll do is I'll go back and I'm going to prepare a, quite a detailed proposal. And we'll go through that when I bring the reports tomorrow. So as well as going through the reports, we'll probably go through the proposal as well.

David: Here's a 1% like I've been talking about. Like we don't have that in our training, but I can follow the flow of that through and I like it. 

Steve Dodd: Oh, good, it works for us. I mean, it doesn't work in every case because you do get the difficult clients. That's how I've figured in doing it, it's a very, very soft sell. It's just, it's not even a sale, it's like if they say no, it's like, oh really? What's the problem? Is it the fee? Is it this, is it that, and then you go through your normal sale and the proposal meeting is where you really need your traditional sales techniques. You're handling objections, you know, figuring out the values and presenting the value of your return and all that sort of stuff. And really that's the only time you need to sell it, it's not a sell. 

The other thing, which is really important for you as well. Sorry, Dave, I get very passionate about it, I love doing it. I love teaching the guys about this. The other thing I, and I always tell my associates cause good consultants are not good salespeople, unfortunately. I wish they were, my consultants are much better consultants than me, but that's what I want them to do. I want to be able to, and, and get them going much quicker.

And the more that they're earning for the firm, the more I'll be able to do that. But one of the things I always tell my consultants, and we can talk about this in another podcast, but when you actually get to the consultant phase, which is phase three of the program, company's employee you, because they want to do a number of things. One of them they need to grow, the other one is that they need to get out of trouble so they're actually a rescue, or they need to consolidate. 

So the first two, okay. They need sales and that's probably 80% of the people that you've already come across. So you're going to have to consult to them and tell them how to sell. Well, you can come if you do the acquisition process well, you can come to them from a position of authority. And most of my associates that I've employed have never sold before, before they came to me and I've trained them through the process as everybody else has got the access to, to sell.

So now when they're growing their business, they're coming from a position of authority and they also know how to sell. I also buy every one of my associates, a SPIN Selling book, and SPIN Selling although it's a sales book, it's actually a book about asking questions. And one of your biggest skills that you need to improve on as a consultant is asking questions and the SPIN Selling book it's just master of that. Some of you may have done it before. 

David: Boy Steve's story's really great, isn't it? Shame about the lightning and thunder that's going on in Brisbane, that's causing a little bit of static on this recording, but never mind, we'll get through, we're troopers. We'll be back in about a minute after this short break.

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Steve Dodd: So, they're not going to hide anything from you. So when I go through the discovery, they've obviously, we've talked about a little bit of these things in the discovery. So when we're doing the diagnostics, whenever they are scoring themselves, and I've had people who want to score themselves very high and we always just bring it back to the discovery and we'll say, well, you know, you, you told me, he says, yes, you had a vision, but you haven't looked at it for six years. 

Do you really think it's working to perfection? And they become very honest. And that actually they have found they actually have conversations about the various things and they really get into detail and they get so engrossed in it. It's you know, because this is their business, this is their livelihood, this is their passion, their love, they get so. And I give them a lot of free reign in the diagnostics because I've got confidence that the diagnostics is going to come up with some decent numbers because I've done so many of them that are not even if they mark themselves relatively high they're still going to get a good profit leakage.

Because of the way the system, because of the way the algorithms work, I've never had any pushback, from any of my potential clients that I've done diagnostics with. Never ever had any pushback, they've got really, really into it. And at the end of it, I've never had to actually use, when at the end of the diagnostics, when you get the number of their profit leakage, I've never had to use that as a tool to say, well look at it, you'll actually recover my fees in the next 12 months because we've got such a, cause we've done it well, we've got such a rapport going, that never comes up. 

If I'm about to lose a client, I might say that. But, you know, I've never really had to focus on that. It's just so easy and flowing and you go through, especially with the two new tools, with the current ratio and the projected growth sessions. They're really just, they're like a little bit of ice, and then the cherry on the top that just really gets it, gets it down. And then obviously, at the end of it, the reports are actually really worth having, you know, that the reports are worth having.

When I have friends, who've come to me, who I don't really want to work with, and they say, oh, I'll give them, I'll do that. I'll do a diagnostics and a discovery on them as a mate and say, okay, there's your business. And they love that, you know? And, they'll refer people to me and things, but it's not, some friends you don't want to work with. And, but if, instead of just giving them free consultancy, I'll just do the reports for them and I get a good understanding of their business. Now that I have associates, I can actually pass them on to one of my associates and win them over. But when I was by myself, there was certain people that I didn't want to work with, because they were too close, too close friends.

But yeah. So that's the discovery, but it flows on so nicely. Like I've worked for a couple of companies and I've been a lot in sales, but this acquisition process, if you do it right, you've got an 80% hit rate. You know, the only thing that, the only thing that brings a person's hit rate down is they don't have enough discovery meetings. If you do a bad discovery meeting and doing a bad discovery meeting is not necessarily your fault. It could be the fault of the client, the circumstances, and things like that. But absolutely the acquisition process is one of the finest I've come across and it'd been developed.

David: Well, I can only take credit for the skeleton of it because it was all the people that came into the franchise, when we used to be a franchise, that put the flesh and the skin onto the skeleton, you know? And it's still happening, I've written down three things here that you said that I'm going to come back to you next week on, which I think we need to make some minor adjustments to the program. And I can only really do that every six months because there's 25 hours of training videos and some of these videos are an hour long and it's a huge job to do it, but anyway, it's gotta be done.

That was going to improve things. Hey, we have to wrap this up because I try to keep these podcasts down to under 40 minutes and I've got these other things that I have to include in here. But look, really, really appreciate you coming on and sharing all your experiences with everybody. It's just, you've been number one in the network from that early client acquisition for a long, long time.

I lost that crown now, but at least 20-year-old people. So it's like one of your kids, isn't it? 

Steve Dodd: Thanks so much, David, and good luck everybody.

David: I'll let you get back your storms in Brisbane and I'll talk to you next week. Thank you. If you're a business consultant, coach advisor, ex-corporate, or exbusiness owner, and interested in becoming a business consultant, then you should check out the ConsultX Business Success Program. You can find out more today by visiting consultx.com.

That's consultx.com, and be sure to subscribe to this podcast Everything Business Consulting. It's on iTunes or Stitcher. See you next week and thanks for listening.