079-lisa-peskin

How to Organize Your Business and Optimize Your Sales

A discussion with marketing strategist extraordinaire Lisa Peskin

John DeBevoise:

Greetings everyone. And welcome to another serving of Bizness Soup Talk Radio. If it’s in business, it’s Bizness Soup. I’m your host, John DeBevoise. Lisa Peskin is joining us. She’s going to be sitting down the table from the Business Development University. We’re going to be learning about how to use the tips, the tools and the techniques around you to get the job done. She’s going to be coaching us and you, on how to get the best out of your sales strategy, your people. We’re going to learn about maximizing your ROI for your networking efforts and, one of my favorite things from that, is how to use LinkedIn. Pull up a chair, sit on down, Bizness Soup is on the table and we are serving it up for you.

Lisa, welcome to this serving of Bizness Soup.

Lisa Peskin: Thank you so much for having me, John.

John DeBevoise: Lisa, you are the founder CEO of a business that’s known as the Business Development University. It’s touted to be an international trainer and motivational speaker. What does that all mean? What is Business Development University?

Lisa Peskin: Business Development University, is a sales and sales management training, coaching and consulting company but we’re all about driving results, whether it be on an individual team or company basis. It’s all about filling the pipeline with good qualified opportunities, helping companies increase their close ratio, increase their average size sale, decrease sales cycles and have good game plans around what they should be doing so they do the right number of the right activities right.

John DeBevoise: Lisa, let’s just say that the two of us, we’re standing outside the elevator and I push the button and we’re about to go up to, well, my office is on the top floor as it should be. And I find out, or I see a badge and somehow I understand that you are part of what’s called the Business Development University. You know that in this ride, 90 seconds, you have 90 seconds to convince me to continue the conversation. What is Business Development University in that elevator?

Lisa Peskin: What we do is we help individuals, companies and teams drive results. And we do it in a very customized way to truly figure out what we call the three areas that if improved upon will have the biggest impact on performance and then we put together training, coaching, consulting programs to close that gap, ultimately drive results. As a leader, you got to make sure you’re maximizing performance and potential and that’s what we’re all about.

John DeBevoise: Well Lisa, would you care to continue this conversation in my office? Come on in. That’s an example of one of the many services that the Business Development University works on, and that is the elevator pitch. It’s that 90 seconds that you have to convince somebody to, when the doors open, go into the office. Let’s start this conversation and continue. Let’s continue. Business Development University came about as the result of after decades of your

experience in sales and management. Did your decision to go into entrepreneurship and creating the Business Development University, was that decision based upon an event or a decision?

Lisa Peskin: Well thank you for asking me that because the truth behind that answer is my father, who is my hero, who unfortunately passed away almost 24 years ago, gave me three pieces of advice as a little girl. The first one is follow your passion. The second one is don’t count on your husband for your money. And the third one was, and if you can be your own boss, because he was with a radio station in the seventies and after 27 years lost his job. And he said, “The way to true job security is to be your own boss.” Now, of course, I originally took that advice and figured I should be a doctor and went through all the pre-med classes up at Penn State only to realize I would’ve made a God awful doctor. Finished with a psychology degree and then got my MBA in marketing. But as all my other friends might’ve been playing school as a little girl, I was playing office. I always knew that I was going to be starting my own company. I just didn’t know when.

John DeBevoise: You spent decades teaching people around you and below you, sales training and coaching and such. At what point did you say, “You know what? I’m going to take my skillsets and I’m going to start a business.” Did you walk through the door and say, “Hi, hun, I’m unemployed.” Or, “I’m starting my own business?” What’s the story behind that?

Lisa Peskin: Actually, no. I wasn’t necessarily doing sales training and coaching as a profession, I was leading 40 person sales force for a very large company and I had four teams reporting into me with four separate managers. And I realized at that point that my passion and my forte was figuring out how to get the under performers to perform. If they were under quota, can I get them to hit their quota? If they were average, can I make them good? If they’re good, can I make them great? And if they’re great, can I turn them into a superstar? And that’s when I actually developed the triage methodology, which is uncovering either on an individual or team basis, what three areas that if improved upon will have the biggest impact on performance?

But after 12 years in corporate America and 12 years of weekly quota, what I realized is I had no quality of life. I have a 23 year old daughter, I don’t even know her first words or first steps. And I always knew that I had to start a business following my passion. That’s when I started my business back in 2003, helping companies from the outside, do exactly what I was doing on the inside, within the company I was at, to really drive performance. And that was the genesis of Business Development University, basically with my whole goal and passion, to help as many people as possible be as successful as possible in sales or business development.

John DeBevoise: As far as becoming an entrepreneur, you were trained to be one. You weren’t an accidental entrepreneur, you were trained to be one by your father and you

made that leap saying, “I can do a better job for more people and have a better quality of life.” And I hope that getting back into your own business, improved that quality of life.

Lisa Peskin: It absolutely did. And I say, “I’ve got the hardest boss in the world because she made me work till 9:00 o’clock last night and I started at 6:00 AM. She really is a slave driver. She makes me work on the weekends.” But typically if I say, “I want to take a three day weekend,” she’ll let me do that as well. She’s a very cool boss, yet she’s very demanding. There’s something to be said about being able to be in charge of your own destiny, but quite honestly, John, it wasn’t so easy in the beginning years. I bootstrapped this, I took $3,000 out of my savings account and started the company. And for years I was taking people out to lunch. I didn’t even know how I was paying for the lunch. I couldn’t rub two nickels together. And when they talk about faking it till you make it, I absolutely experienced that firsthand.

John DeBevoise: We’re talking with Lisa Peskin of the Business Development University. She’s an international trainer and motivational speaker. And one of the areas, there’s so many areas that you cover and that you coach that I want to get into in just a few moments, is what I consider to be one of the most underutilized business tools and that’s LinkedIn. But first if I come through your door and I have a problem and I say, “Lisa, I need your help,” what kind of business am I? Small, medium, large? Over the counter? eCommerce? What?

Lisa Peskin: Great question. Typically we work with business to business companies. The exception would be banks and financial institutions, because for some reason we play a lot in that space as well. We deal with all different size companies from the Fortune 50 and 100, but our sweet spot is companies from anywhere from $2 million in revenue to a $150 million in revenue with anywhere from one salesperson or business development person, up to a team of 50 or 100.

John DeBevoise: All right. If I have a company and I’m going to use myself as my own victim here and let’s say I have less than five employees and I want to bring us all together and create a better sales presentation and generate more revenue, what is the first thing that you do to get us back on track or get us at least on the rail so we can go down the track?

Lisa Peskin: That’s a great question. So there’s two major things. The first thing is we got to figure out where the areas of improvement can be because I might go into a company or speak with an individual and uncover 10 areas that they need to improve upon. Well, we can’t focus on 10 areas at a time. If I ask my husband to get me milk, eggs, cheese. He could remember milk, eggs, cheese, but if I start adding a fourth, fifth or sixth item, he’s not going to be able to remember it all. I’m a big believer in uncovering the three. The first thing we’re going to do every single time with whomever we’re working with, is to really try to figure out where we can make the biggest impact. The second thing is, once we uncover

that and uncover what’s going on within the organization, then it’s coming up with a 30, 60, 90 day game plan.

I would say that most sales professionals, as well as non-selling professionals, lawyers, accountants, architects, engineers, consultants, wing it every single day. They check their voicemail, they check their email, they see what appointments are on their calendar and from there they’re just winging it. I’m a big believer in counting the minutes and figuring out what that 30, 60, 90 day game plan’s all about. Those would be the first two things we would do. And then if we think it’s a training issue, we’ll come up with training. If we think it’s an accountability issue or a coaching issue or a game plan issue, whatever it is, we’re going to focus on that area to really drive results.

John DeBevoise: From my own personal experience and for my audience who are small business owners, too many times we literally can’t see the forest because we’re too tangled up in the trees. That we are running from shadow to shadow, trying to make sure that we have our inventory, our employees, we have all these balls that we must juggle at one time so we really can’t look out and see the forest. And that forest has that 60 and 90 day and six month plan there. It sounds really good but how do you set the foundation for someone like myself who was at an earlier age, the spokesperson for ADD?

Lisa Peskin: Basically we’ve formulated a methodology that we can literally get the game plan done in an hour or an hour and 15 minutes. Done. Completed.

John DeBevoise: Not an hour and a half, but an hour and 15 minutes.

Lisa Peskin: Well, I can sometimes name that tune in three notes, but no, we typically could get it done within an hour. And it’s a great starting point for any individual or company to really know exactly the activities that they need to be doing in order to achieve the results that they want to get to. And I learned back in the day, weekly quotas, that it’s all reverse engineering. Once we know how much we want to make, then we know how much we need to sell, we subtract out our repeat business that we could count on from our existing companies or companies’ clients or customers, subtract out what we think we could upsell and cross sell. That’s going to give us our net new business then we determine how many singles, doubles, triples, home runs and grand slams that we’re going to get.

And then we can reverse engineer to know how many proposals, how many appointments and then what we need to do to generate those net new appointments, which happens to be one of the key stats that everybody needs to know. How many new appointments do you need to have each and every month in order to achieve your numbers? And when I say net new, that means that all follow up appointments don’t count, it’s just the first appointment with a new prospect.

John DeBevoise: Have you found that the pandemic that we’ve all been suffering through has been a benefit or given you different tools or use a tool differently than you have in the past? Because now everything is so virtual as this conversation is doing on a Zoom call.

Lisa Peskin: When this pandemic happened, the first inclination I had was how can I help all these salespeople who are really stuck? They’re used to going out, they’re used to networking, they’re used to going to trade shows, they’re used to having business lunches and breakfasts. And everybody kept saying, “I can’t do that and I can’t do this.” Well, I wrote a blog.

John DeBevoise: That sounds like a child. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. You wrote a blog as you were starting to say.

Lisa Peskin: And I said, “Let’s get rid of the apostrophe tag. Instead of focusing on what you can’t be doing, let’s focus on what you can be doing.” To answer your question, during these times, what can salespeople be doing? What can business owners be doing? Well, all I know is I got a whole bunch more time on my hand, all my commuting is done. I’m really back to back with my appointments. The other thing is I get to connect with either my clients or my prospects or my centers of influence is a whole different way. I learned all about your horses before we even started our conversation. I get to connect with them on a more personal level and I believe that people work with people that they’d like to work with, that they trust that can honestly help them out. I do get an opportunity to form those relationships.

And there are so many opportunities to network now that it’s virtual, you never have to worry about commute to get to and from of your networking events. The next great advantage is, the world is your oyster, because you could work with anybody, whether they’re in Las Vegas or California or in China, because now our territories have gotten expanded greatly. There’s so many different things we could be doing nowadays. And last thing I’m going to put out there is video. Video is a great way to get your prospect’s attention. There’s so many different tools to be using, but nowadays in this climate, try using video for your prospecting efforts or add that to your cadence and multi-touch program and that can make a huge difference as well.

John DeBevoise: I’ve spent my life in a padded booth looking at nobody and now they’re going to be looking at me. And so yes, video is very important. And of course, the implementation, as my audience knows about, 5G is giving video the capability that 4G gave audio. We’re talking with Lisa Peskin, Business Development University. Lisa, a lot of my audience are, as I tell everybody, home based business entrepreneurs. Everybody should have their own home based business. It doesn’t matter what it is. My audience knows this, mine’s horses and cows. You may not want to live next door to me after it rains, but you know what? It smells like money to me. I turned my passion of horses into profit by turning it into a small business, but many times a small business, I am not only

the CEO, the chief accountant and I’m also the floor sweeper. How do you advise somebody on keeping that focus, being able to get that 30, 60, 90 when you are everything to a one person company?

Lisa Peskin: Depending upon what type of company somebody might have, if the pie represents all the time that this person does have on their hands, there’s a certain slice that they have, that they could focus on business development efforts. When we do put together a 30, 60, 90 day game plan, it needs to be based upon how big that slice is. If somebody only has 10 hours on a weekly basis to focus on the business development, well then we’ve got to figure out what the smartest use of that 10 hours can be. The other thing, it was interesting, I was coaching a business owner of a landscape company this morning and she said to me, “In the past three months of working together, I finally am now always thinking about business development and I’m always keeping my eyes and ears out for opportunities.” And that may just sound like such a little thing to you, John, but there are so many opportunities that we don’t take advantage of.

John DeBevoise: That’s no little thing. Believe me, I’m looking at it all the time.

Lisa Peskin: Yeah. For instance, a client might say, “Oh my gosh, Lisa, I hit 17% increase in my business last year. I never thought I could hit that number and I couldn’t have done it without you and your help with my guys.” Well, that of course made me feel fantastic.

John DeBevoise: Well sure.

Lisa Peskin: And how do you take that and what I call squeeze the lemon? How do you now get the most out of that and be purposeful? Squeeze the lemon might be, oh my gosh. That makes me feel so good. Could I ask you the biggest favor? Could you put what you just said into a LinkedIn recommendation for me? Or you could ask for a referral or may I use you as a reference? Or may I quote you up on my website? Or would you be so kind as to do a video testimonial for my website? That would mean the world to me. If we are always looking for those opportunities where we can potentially squeeze the lemon and be purposeful about whatever our efforts might be. In addition to that little sliver of time, we could be doing business development in every interaction that we’re having with everybody that we speak with.

John DeBevoise: How do I divide up within that slice of time, the allocation of from business development, into the day to day operation of this 30, 60, 90 trek through the forest so I can see the trees?

Lisa Peskin: All right. The first thing you need to do, no matter what your business is, unless it’s a brand new business, take a look at where the business has come in from. Has it come in from a podcast? Has it come in from a speaking engagement? Has it come in from your LinkedIn reach outs? Has it come in from an email

campaign? Or you picking up the phone? Or are you doing a snail mail campaign or a video campaign or a blog or an article or you being on another podcast? First take a look at your source of business. And by the way, I’ve got a ton of tools on my website, I know you’re going to be giving out that information, businessdevelopmentuniversity.com, but under BD utensils, there is a source of business analysis or have your CRM do this. That’s the first step I would take.

Then based upon where your business has come from, so for instance, 65% of my business comes from client referrals and centers of influence referrals. A big part of my game plan is having consistent conversations with my existing clients and also with my existing centers of influences. Make sure once we determine where the businesses come from, then we set smart goals around it. If I know that speaking engagements are fantastic for me, well then I might set a smart goal specific measurable line realistic time around how many speaking engagements I might want to do within that sliver of time. Or if I know that I’m getting a lot of business from Vistage Chairs or CEO peer groups, well now I’m going to set a goal around getting to these Vistage Chairs or peer groups and making sure that I develop relationships with key centers of influences, especially my A’s and my B’s, the ones that have already referred me business, A’s or brought me opportunities, B’s.

John DeBevoise: Lisa, you touched on one of my favorite subjects and what I consider to be a very underutilized business to business marketing tool and that’s LinkedIn. I know I personally do not use it enough. What are some of the tips, tools and techniques that you can provide my listenership to expand into and utilize the resources of LinkedIn and its business to business communications?

Lisa Peskin: For every meeting that you have moving forward, you should be linking in to the folks that you’re speaking to ahead of time. In fact, John, I just sent you a LinkedIn invitation prior to our conversation today. And it could be, I’m looking forward to talking to you. I’m looking forward to meeting you. I’d like to add you to my professional network. Now, why do I want to do that? Well, first of all, before every meeting, I’m checking out and I’m looking where you went to school, I’m trying to find out something interesting about you that I could bring up in the conversation so that I could properly build business rapport with you. I’m looking at where you’ve worked before so I’m fully prepared for our conversation. Once you’re connected with someone, there’s two things that you could see. Not only can you see mutual connections, but you could see their other connections.

Their first connections would be your second connections if you’re already connected to them. It would be once removed. The power of LinkedIn is your second connections because does this person know anybody that you may want to know? And so at the end of your conversation, you might say something like, “Oh, feel free to check out my LinkedIn connections and if I know of anybody that you want to know, let me know, I’ll be happy to make the connection.” Typically they’ll say the same thing. Now, if you’re good, you’ve come fully

prepared for that conversation and you’ve already got a listing of three to seven people that you think might be fabulous for you to know.

Back in the day, I remember an incident where I had seven names on a three by five. It definitely drifted from my hand, he said, “You don’t want to meet this person. You don’t want to meet this person. Oh, Keith, he would be fabulous for you.” Two weeks later, Keith was my client. He was so thrilled with the impact we had on his business that he referred me over to four other people, got all four of those. Three of them referred me to one other piece of business and I got all three of those. Basically dealing with a 100% close ratio and it was literally a 10 minute exercise to write those five to seven names on my three by five card and I got seven pieces of business from a 10 minute exercise. Talk about ROI.

John DeBevoise: Yes. And you talk about ROI in your training material. In the ROI for networking efforts, what should be a percentage or an acceptable ROI for my networking efforts, whether it be money, time or such?

Lisa Peskin: Do you go fishing ever?

John DeBevoise: Yes.

Lisa Peskin: Okay. Do you fish with a fishing rod or you fish with a net?

John DeBevoise: With a rod.

Lisa Peskin: And how many hooks?

John DeBevoise: Usually just one.

Lisa Peskin: And at the most you could catch how many fish?

John DeBevoise: If I’m lucky, one.

Lisa Peskin: Okay. And then you go into that same pool of fish with a whole big net. How many might you be able to catch? Multiple, correct?

John DeBevoise: Oh, absolutely.

Lisa Peskin: The way I look at this is prospecting is fishing with a fishing rod and networking is fishing with a net. Would I rather get one? Or would I rather get a net that could potentially give me one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10? And in fact, if everybody, all of your listeners could find five people that could refer them five pieces of business throughout the year, the great thing is your close ratio if you’re networking could be north of 50 to 70%. I just gave you an example, it was a 100%. Where prospecting, your average close ratio for business to business sales is three out of every 10.

To answer your question, I should be focusing on my networking efforts, but don’t do what I did when I started this. I tried to just gather as many cards and talk to as many people as possible and I wasted a whole lot of time. You got to figure out who are your best centers of influences and really focus on those and try to develop five to 10 of those that are going to be referring you on a consistent basis. I had a Vistage Chair in Philadelphia, he gave me seven pieces of business in one year and I got all seven. Those are the type of relationships and that is the most fabulous use of your time.

John DeBevoise: You have mentioned Vistage on several occasions. What about these other networkings? Whether it be meetup or a mastermind or somebody’s organized, even your chamber of commerce? Are there specifics on how to approach those meetings that you want to get the best out of them as opposed to people to sell you their stuff? How do you network and use those connections at those various meetings to your benefit?

Lisa Peskin: The reason why I keep bringing up Vistage or CEO peer groups, the alternative board, Entrepreneurs Operating System is because they deal with CEOs that are the right size companies for me.

John DeBevoise: Those are the decision makers. You want to be in touch with the people who make the decisions.

Lisa Peskin: Exactly. But if we are going to a chamber, for instance, it does depend upon what you sell. If you are B to B, then it’s one thing. If you’re B to C business to consumer, then you might have a different approach when you’re networking. You’ve got to find the groups, the organizations, the informal groups that are going to be the people that are going after the same size clients that you are, going after the same type of clients, the same title and the same geographic area. For instance, I was involved in a great networking group and it was one person from each area, but they were all going after CFOs of companies that had $30 million in revenue and above. The $30 million in revenue above was great for me, but I rarely get work through CFOs so it wasn’t a good use of my time. And our time is our most valuable resource as a business owner, a salesperson, or a sales leader so we’ve got to figure out where we’re going to get the biggest bang for the buck and what’s going to make the most sense.

John DeBevoise: Excellent answer. There are so many other questions that I could throw at you, but we have run out of time on this serving of Bizness Soup. Folks, if you’d like more information on Lisa and Business Development University, visit the one site in business where business goes and that is Biz Soup. B-I-Z S-O-U-P.com, where business comes for business. Lisa Peskin, thank you for being on this serving of Bizness Soup.

Lisa Peskin: Oh, you’re quite welcome. It was such a pleasure.