Rav: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the BNI success link Podcast. Today, we will talk about finding your link to success in business with Bob Arzt. The official podcast of BNI success, your link to success.
Hello again, everyone. I’m your host, Rav Mendiratta from Socio Squares, where learning leads is where our business leads. Today, we are lucky to have an expert, business coach, and sales coach with us who will share some great insights on issues business owners face, and business coaches can also learn from, and we have with us Bob Arzt. Welcome, Bob. And thank you so much for doing this.
Bob: Thank you. Happy to help.
Rav: Bob, can you quickly introduce yourself because I won’t do justice to your intro and tell us more about your business as well.
Bob: Thank you. So my company is Polaris, one name for the North Star. So your Guide to Success. I’m a Business Sales Executive and Leadership Coach. I’ve been doing this for about 20 years. And I specialize in helping people, business owners and salespeople, and managers with time management, practice management, effectively working with teams, effective delegation; I help people overcome the challenges preventing them from achieving their goals. So that’s a specialty of mine. And I work mostly in the financial services and insurance field. But about 40% of my clients come from the private sector entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, people who are out making it happen every day.
Rav: That’s awesome. I’m sure that financial services are one of the toughest categories to work in. The viewers, today we would learn a lot. So let’s start with what would you say are the top three issues every small business owner faces, regardless of any vertical or sector they come from.
Bob: So actually, I’ll give you four, there’s a bonus one in there.
Unclear Vision or Mission :
They say you know; any road will get you there if you don’t know where you’re going. Right. So being clear about that leads to goal clarity.
Goal Clarity :
Without crystal clear goals, you become subject to distractions; those distractions lead to a loss of focus. And it’s that loss of focus that prevents you from achieving what you want to achieve and within the timeframe you want to achieve it.
General misuse of time :
Time management is an issue that so many people struggled with years ago; I wrote an online course to help business owners improve their time management.
Poor delegation :
If you are fortunate enough to have a team, most people often don’t delegate effectively. They say it’s so much quicker and easier if they do it themselves rather than delegated to somebody else. And they tell people it’s an okay, concise term strategy. But it’s a terrible long-term strategy.
So a lot of sub-issues in those four, but those are the four main one’s unclear vision or mission, the goal clarity issue, misuse of time, and ineffective or poor delegation.
Rav: That’s so true. And the last one I concur with is that I see myself and some of my senior team members also doing that; they would instead do things themselves because their team members might take longer. So thank you so much for highlighting that. Now. Let’s talk about and this might be closely connected to the issues –
What are the top three things you recommend every new business owner should work on or think about as they get started?
Bob: Well, let’s go back to the goal clarity piece. As crucial as goal clarity is and it’s super critically important. Even more important than that is the why behind each goal. I’ve seen people have beautifully written out lists of goals, but sometimes they’re only friendly to have things. It’s not gonna take it to the bank to make it happen. So the why behind the goal becomes critical. The next question is once you know what those goals are, I continuously ask my clients this question, what is the highest and best use of your time right now? And maybe that’s this hour, or maybe today or this week or month or quarter? But what is the highest and best use of your time right now to achieve what it is you want to achieve? When you ask yourself that question, I’ll often suggest you keep a log of those things you are doing that do not represent the highest and best use of your time. And that’s where effective team management and team delegation comes into play. But you need that Guiding Light of the goal clarity to figure out your highest and best use of time. The goal clarity helps you prioritize your decisions all day long about it’s not where you spend your time, just where you invest your time. You want to return on your investment, right? And so the goal, clarity, highest and best use of time. And then if you’re fortunate enough to have a team or someone you could delegate to, then can you do that most effectively and efficiently.
Rav: I love the way you put it: “spending time versus investing time”; I think that’s a great lens, anybody, especially business owners, should have because it’s our time at the end of the day, which will make us money. That’s awesome. Now let’s shift gears, from business owners to business coaches, you have been a business coach for 20 plus years, and I’m sure other business coaches can learn a lot from you, especially if they’re getting started.
So are the top three things which most business coaches miss out on?
Bob: So often, people get into this line of work in different ways, right.
Referral Strategy : Most people in business will tell you the best way to do business is through referrals. And everyone’s appreciative when they get them. But many do not have a specific referral strategy and how to get referrals consistently. So you could join a networking group, you could be part of the chamber, you can be part of your community. There are lots of things that you can do. But you need some goals around what your referral strategy is going to be? And so that’s one area I think I’ve seen lacking.
Effective Sales Strategy : Many people look at the word sales as a four-letter word. But it is not. There are many techniques and things people can do to enhance their ability to get people to see that their solution is the best solution for them. So they say yes, so closing the sale for most people is difficult. It should be the easiest step in the sales process if you’ve done everything else correctly. So improving sales skills and you need to work at it, you need to practice, right?
Work Life Balance : The last I would say, it’s both personal and business. It’s a work-life balance. You don’t want to be working thinking you should not be working, maybe home with your family or significant others. And when you’re with family or significant others, you don’t want to be consumed with I should be working right—so having that right work-life balance based on your goals. And what you want to achieve is critically important. So many times, people go out 150%, right. And you could do that for short periods. But if you do it for too long, something bad will happen, your body’s going to rebel, or you’ve taken on too many clients to be able to service them properly or effectively, you start losing them. So have that good work-life balance and unfortunately have to work at it all the time. Even after you get it right, you tend to lose it. You got to come back to it. So those are the top three. I see.
Rav: That’s awesome. Those are some precious insights. Thank you so much for sharing that. Now I have one last question for you. And I got to ask this just because it’s part of my day to day, right.
What is the best digital marketing strategy that you have used to be seen working for business coaches, or our sales coaches like you?
Bob: So that’s, that’s a great question, I can tell you what has worked for me. Many years ago, I wrote a book called “What Every Great Salesperson Knows – A no-nonsense guide to sales success”, and I was going to sell it. And you can still buy it on Amazon. But my wife convinced me, you got to give this away. So people could download a free PDF on my website that let me capture their email addresses. And then I was able to do my newsletter, my outreach. In my newsletter, I gave people a summary of the first paragraph. But if they wanted to finish it, they had a click that took them to my website. And hopefully, then on my website, they could explore around, see my other blogs, sign up for the newsletter, sign up for a free coaching session or download my free book. For me, the newsletter and the website with the things that worked best, I did pay for clicks, I hired a LinkedIn coach, and worked LinkedIn quite a bit for six months. And I would just say I did not get the results that everyone else seemed to be getting. So for me, the networking through my newsletter and website work best, but I’m open to hearing ideas; what am I missing? And how could I improve?
Rav: Sure, sure. Thank you so much for sharing this, though, it’s great to hear that newsletter marketing works for you.
Squeeze page : And the strategy which you used is what we call as the squeeze page in our digital marketing terminology with a free download.
Tripwire Funnel : The next step of a squeeze page, is called a tripwire funnel. And that is that you bring somebody in for a shallow cost sample of your product offering or service offering. And while they are sampling your service, you do the upsell of the more significant service. So what that might translate into for you could be a one-hour webinar, which is either free or low cost for business owners in your target market. And during that one-hour session, you talk about things that lead, which give them first a sample of what they can learn from what you have to offer and lead into a more significant program, which might be an upsell at the end of the program. So that’s a tripwire funnel. And that’s my one strategy, which you could probably try out and see if it works for you.
Bob: Excellent. Thank you.
Rav: Thank you, Bob. Thanks for doing this session. This was an awesome podcast, and I’m sure business owners and business coaches can learn a lot of things from what you’ve shared with us today. Thanks so much for doing this.
Thank you. Have a great day. Appreciate it.
