You're Going To Be Great At This!

I met Carl Willis a few years ago through LinkedIn and I immediately was struck by his generosity. He is always happy to get on a Zoom call or accept my invitation to appear on my podcast. He has even invited me on his podcast, as well as other online events like his webinar.  In this episode, Carl and I discuss working on skillset, and more specifically, communicating your business' mission online. Listen in and let me know what you think. And please subscribe/follow the podcast! Chris Castane s is a humorous speaker who helps sales people succeed through workshops and humorous presentations. His new book, "Nearly Motivated" is available on Amazon. For booking information,  click here . His new podcast,  "You're Going To Be Great At This!"  is available on most platforms.   He's also the president of  Surf Financial Brokers  selling life and disability insurance in several states.

As someone who is self-employed, I have found that a great way to get my message out and to network with people I want to meet. By joining my local chamber of commerce, I've met great people, become referable and learned about all kinds of businesses that I didn't know existed. In an episode of the "You're Going To Be Great At This" podcast, I talked with Wendy Malenfant of the Little River (SC) Chamber of Commerce and we discussed the perks of joining a chamber.  I sincerely hope you find value in our podcast and ask that you follow/subscribe.  Chris Castane s is a humorous speaker who helps sales people succeed through workshops and humorous presentations. His new book, "Nearly Motivated" is available on Amazon. For booking information,  click here . His new podcast,  "You're Going To Be Great At This!"  is available on most platforms.   He's also the president of  Surf Financial Brokers  selling life and disability insurance in sever...

This blog usually has actionable sales tips and advice to help you succeed in your business. This time, I wanted to take a look at another part of your business, which is scheduling appointments or sales calls or whatever you need to schedule.  Having a scheduling calendar that your prospects can make your job so much easier. Instead of calling back and forth to pin a time to meet down, you can let your prospect/client pick their own time. According to FinancesOnline.com, online scheduling can lead to 26% more customers, so sharing your calendar is a real no-brainer. I have a Google calendar that I use to book appointments, but I have also been using Calendly and sharing it on my website and social media. The two calendars are supposed to sync up to avoid double bookings, but recently I discovered an issue.  I had blocked out a couple of days on my Google calendar for a business conference, but Calendly was still showing those days as available. After trying to find a way to f...

Let me start with saying that there are only two times when someone is okay using profanities. The first is if the "curser" is under 3 years of age. There's something oddly adorable about a toddler dropping f-bombs, especially when the parents of said child feign any knowledge of "where she heard that". Fun and cute at the same time. The other situation would be if the person using blue language is over the age of 85 and female. Hearing grandma threaten to "stomp a mudhole in your ass!" would make every kid laugh because they knew she wasn't that serious. This example is only made better by memories of my Greek grandmother watching professional wrestling and yelling at the TV.  Get your copy of "Nearly Motivated" here  https://tinyurl.com/3tp37psa In other than these two situations, keep the cursing to yourself, or your friend group. And maybe that group of guys from church you hang out with. But definitely keep it away from work and prof...

Are you leveraging social media to help your business? Are you posting daily and creating content like the "experts" say to do? Most importantly, are you getting results? I've tried using most of the more popular platforms for my insurance business, as well as my writing and speaking business. To say the results are "mixed" would be generous. This may be because I really haven't invested much into advertising on these platforms.  The way I see it, when Facebook, for example, allows me to set up a free page for my business, that is like a "free trial" to see if I can get any interest in my product or service. After nearly 15 years of this trial period, I have garnered little to no business.  One can come up with two arguments here. The first is why would you throw money at advertising when you haven't seen any returns. The other side is that "you could have done better if you had quit being a tight ass penny pincher." Fair enough. But ...

As an author of a book on sales I am asked to speak to groups of sales people. There are times, however, when I give a presentation to a civic group or some other kind of organization that isn't necessarily a sales group. For those I adapt my talk to let everyone in the audience know that they are, indeed, in sales. I will usually ask the audience who is in sales. A few hands go up. Then I ask who is not in sales and more hands are raised. That's when I break the bad news to them. They are in sales whether they think so or not. As the old adage goes, the first step is admitting you have a problem. It makes me want to put the audience's chairs in a circle and have a "sales intervention".  As discussed previously, we are all in sales in some form or fashion. Luckily,  basic sales techniques are easily transferable to other parts of our lives. Anyone who has tried to convince a coworker to try a different approach to a problem is in sales. Singles bars (are they stil...

Several years ago I was arriving to a networking event a bit late.  I parked my vehicle near the back of the lot and walked past all of the other attendees' cars with their wraps and sign magnets. I noticed a few realtors had attached business card holders to their cars. For some reason I kept thinking about how smart it was to let people grab a card while I could be doing other things, like shop. A few years later I bought one of these card holders from a local office supply store. I measured out how much room I had on the back of my car as well as the size of the card holder. Next I went to Vistaprint and designed a sign magnet with enough room for the card holder to stick on without blocking my message. You can see the results below.   I quickly realized that the sun and rain would make my cards look "weathered" after a while so I learned to only leave 2 cards in there at a time. (Cards costs too much to throw out a dozen at a time because they got soggy.) This also ma...

If you are like me and carve out time from your schedule to work the phones booking appointments, you know how frustrating it can be when people don't show up. I'm not sure what the statistics are but if I book five meetings, there's a good probability that only three or four will actually keep their appointment.  Yes, there are legitimate reasons why people don't always keep their appointments. Emergencies happen. Cars break down, people get sick and a litany of other reasons can keep your prospect from seeing you. However, the reason that most often prevents me from seeing someone is that they forgot about it. Apparently, these folks don't think that the appointment is important enough to put in their calendar. When you are "smiling and dialing" to fill your calendar, you can tell by their tone if someone is actually going to keep their appointment. If they say something like, "I may be busy but you can come by." In my opinion that doesn't ...

A couple of years ago, before Covid arrived, I was asked to speak at a breakfast meeting of a local civic organization. I brought a few copies of my book along just in case someone wanted to purchase one. The person who had invited me to speak apparently had a last minute appointment or something and couldn't be there, but he let the rest of the group know who I was and why I would be there. As I walked in a young professional looking man approached me and introduced himself. "Hi, I'm Bob. We're looking forward to your talk," he said. "Please feel free to eat something. It's on us." He pointed to a table filled with store bought muffins and Krispy Kreme doughnuts, my favorite. Since I had not eaten breakfast at home (I was told there would be food) I thanked him and treated myself to an assortment of the delicious round treats. In retrospect, I probably had too many, but hey, you only live once, right? The young man was the president of the group and...

Have you ever watched a comedian bomb onstage? If done correctly, it can be both horrific and entertaining at the same time. Sometimes you actually feel sorry for the poor idiot on stage with their crappy material and defensive attitude when the heckling starts.  But sometimes when a comic has been especially bad and even more defensive, watching him or her fall without a parachute can be gratifying. I once saw a comic in Raleigh, NC who was mediocre at best. He had this crappy "I shouldn't have to be working this crappy club in North Carolina, I should be in Vegas," attitude. At one point he made a racist joke that more than irritated a very large African-American gentleman on the front row. "That joke sucked!" the man said with a very loud booming voice.  The air had been sucked out of the room. The comic lost his train of thought and blamed us, the audience. At this point, he should have been trying to win us over, but instead he decided to push us away. It w...

As mentioned in the previous post I have worked with a lot of different companies over the years, and a few had a sales training course which I was required to attend. The one I discussed earlier focused on memorizing a sales pitch word for word and indoctrinating the class into a "cult" of positive mental attitude (PMA). I think the latter was because their product was so horrible we had to keep a plastered smile on our faces while trying to sell it. About 15 years later I went to work for another insurance company which had a completely different approach to their training. All they taught us for a solid week was their products, which were okay, but made the training meaningless since we weren't given much other pertinent information.  Imagine I gave you a toolbox and said, "This is all you need. Now get out there and build me a house!" If you had no construction experience, you wouldn't know which tools were appropriate, how to plumb pipes, saw wood, when...

There is a family in a nearby town that is pretty affluent and owns multiple businesses. These folks have been involved in an array of organizations, from the chamber of commerce to local government and anywhere in between. The third generation of this family is now in the process of running their operations, with the adult children taking over some of the responsibilities.  Over the years I met a few of these people at various functions and I felt I had built some sort of rapport, as I had worked alongside them at cookouts and fundraisers. My relationship with them was friendly but not personal. However, I had become a bit closer with the one young lady, who I will call Ann. Ann was married to one of the adult children (we'll call him Frank) who was starting to take over the business.  Ann was also involved, in an ancillary way, with some networking groups I attended. She and I, along with a few others, would sometimes grab a bite to eat or discuss businesses that were refera...

Years ago when I worked for a large life insurance company we were encouraged, and sometimes badgered, to buy their products. The manager of the office would say, "I can't tell you how it works, but if you own it, you'll sell more." Apparently there was some magical force in the universe that we were all unaware of. At the same time, there was a huge increase in credibility when I would talk to a client about disability insurance, for example, and they would ask, "Do you have a policy?" Of course I did, but if I had said that I didn't, it could be a deal breaker.  "Why should I buy it if you don't think it's good enough for you to buy?" Awkward. When I left that company and went to another company the new manager said, "We sell on need. If you don't need it, don't buy it." He was right. Of course, he would lie and tell his clients he owned everything. Needless to say, I left that company after a few months.  But does o...

There are too many times when we meet a client, get some information from them and, for a myriad of reasons, never bother to give them another call. Maybe they didn't seem interested in what you were offering or they didn't fit into your target market. Or maybe you thought they said "no" when they really wanted to think it over. Whatever the reason is, you need to pick up the phone and give them a call back. When I meet a client for the first time, I do a "fact finder" questionnaire, which sounds formal but really is just a track to run on to get a conversation started. Open ended questions help get the client talking.  When they talk, I listen and ask follow up questions. It sounds easy, but our human nature makes us want to sell our product instead of hearing about someone else's issues. By listening to the client and getting them to open up, we build trust. People love it when others laugh at their jokes and are genuinely interested in their lives.  B...

Growing up in North Carolina, we were like most kids on April 1, who would carry out mildly dumb jokes and pranks on our friends and teachers. "You're shoes are untied!" was a classic to use. The other person would naturally look down to see that their shoes were tied just fine, only to get "April Fools!" yelled at them. It was even funnier when the other person had shoes with no laces, like loafers.  In my opinion, the best jokes were simple and harmless, like the above example. No one got hurt and it was over in a few seconds, so we could move on with the rest of our day, or to the next victim. And the most important rule was that if you were going to dish out a joke, you better be prepared to take one as well.  However, there were those people who just couldn't take a joke very well. For instance, there was a tightly wound kid (I'll call him Bill) who lived in the dorm room next to me. I spoke to him rarely because I always sensed he had all the attri...

This past weekend I had a conversation with my sister. We hadn't spoken in a few weeks and she likes to check in on me because I'm still her "little brother". As usual, my work came up and I told her about a mutual friend of ours who has been jerking me around lately on some insurance policies. At first the lady wanted policies, now she won't return my phone calls. "I didn't know she was like that," my sister said. "She always seemed to have her act together." Then my sister asked, "Do you get that often?" "Often enough," I said. People can be great, but there are so many that are just complete flakes.  I have never understood why people do things. For instance, I told my sister how I will meet people who ask what I do for a living. About a third of the time, when I let them know that I am an insurance agent their response is "Give me your card. I have been looking to get more insurance." I hand them a card and...

As I have mentioned in several of my previous posts, I started my sales career selling accident insurance plans door-to-door in rural communities. We had a crappy product that would cover someone for six months for a mere $30, so you can imagine how awesome that plan was (sarcasm is my forte).  When we were able to find someone who was home and was willing to listen to our presentation, the entire process took about half an hour. Our sales manager insisted we give 10 presentations a day, or my interpretation, which was to talk to 10 people a day. The only way to give 10 people presentations was to group them together. For instance, if I could find a small garage with a couple of mechanics, I would try to talk to them at the same time.  The point of all of this was, as my sales manager would say between his frequent tobacco spitting, was that sales is a "numbers game". This genius, who also would tell us not to get "flustrated", whatever the hell that meant, was tryi...

One of my old sales managers had been in the insurance business for about 40 years and had probably forgotten more about sales than I will ever know. Every Monday morning during our weekly sales meeting he would open up a discussion on any topic related to our work. If one of us was having a hard time closing a client, we would analyze the situation as a group and try to find ways to help solve the problem.  On those occasions when a new agent was having a hard time presenting a product our manager would say that a story would help. In some parts of the sales community, a good story is needed for every situation. If you are selling a car, you need to have a story about someone who bought that car and was the happiest person ever after. Selling homes? You probably have a story about how someone bought a fixer-upper and flipped it for a nice profit.  One note: Don't make up or embellish a story. Someone may actually want to verify it, so make your story truthful.  In the in...

We finally made it to the end of the year. For some people (like every realtor I know) 2020 was a fantastic year. But for the vast majority of us, it just sucked. The pandemic ravaged the economy, closing businesses and, in turn, causing massive unemployment. I may be wrong here, but most people without a job don't typically buy more stuff. As we start a new year, I usually recommend that this is the time to assess your business and see what worked and what didn't work in the last 365 days. In this case, an autopsy may be more appropriate.  But it's not all doom and gloom. Their were those who adapted to the "new normal" by readjusting the way they worked. Zoom and other virtual meeting platforms created a way for sales people to see their clients without having to physically meet with them. The "contactless" sales approach kept many a good sales person afloat.  As the vaccines begin to get distributed and the pandemic slowly ebbs, I predict the economy ...

With the exception of my infamous toddler years, I've been in sales all of my life. When I was a child my school would have fundraisers that involved sending the students into the wild to sell magazine subscriptions. Luckily for me I lived in a fairly safe residential area and my older sister would walk with me as I knocked on doors. As I was harmless and probably adorable, I sold more new subscriptions than 95% of the other kids in my class.  I changed tactics when I was in college. Looking for some extra cash, what we called "beer and gas money", I stumbled upon a company that was looking for someone to, once again, sell magazine subscriptions. It's funny how that was such a big deal at the time. Thinking back, I got a few dollars for each subscription. We also had credit card applications that struggling college kids felt they needed.  This company sent me a kit filled with display materials and applications. Each application had a numerical code printed on it whic...