Special thank you to our sponsors Planable.
Head over to Planable.io and sign up for free with the Tiny Marketing link. Don't forget the promo code mentioned in the episode :)
Ever felt like your networking efforts are more like shooting in the dark than a strategic game of chess? Join me, Sarah Noel Block, as I share how I turned a lackluster Q4 into a booming success, thanks to effective networking and sharp sales tactics. Sales virtuoso Mike Renderman joins, sharing strategies for scalable sales systems. Learn to rebuild your network, cultivate trust, and forge meaningful connections. Discover my transition to proactive networking that forges stronger industry ties. Grab your notebooks for battle-tested strategies for networking like a pro, even with a busy schedule.
Biggest Takeaways
Meet Mike
Mike Renderman is an Outsourced VP of Sales through his company, Powerline Sales Advisors which is powered by Sales Xceleration. Mike helps owners, presidents, and CEOs of small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) achieve their sales revenue goals. He leverage his experience and Sales Xceleration certification to design and implement customized sales strategies, infrastructures, and management systems that deliver sustainable growth.
Follow on LinkedIn
Resources
Last Chance! Sign up for our workshop, taking place 4/23 at 1:30pm CST.
Head over to leadfeeder.com and sign up for a 14-day (no strings attached) free trial!
Website: https://www.sarahnoelblock.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahnoelblock/
Newsletter: https://tinymarketing.me/newsletter
Tiny Marketing Community
Click here to ask a question about the episode
Special thank you to our sponsors Planable.
Head over to Planable.io and sign up for free with the Tiny Marketing link. Don't forget the promo code mentioned in the episode :)
Ever felt like your networking efforts are more like shooting in the dark than a strategic game of chess? Join me, Sarah Noel Block, as I share how I turned a lackluster Q4 into a booming success, thanks to effective networking and sharp sales tactics. Sales virtuoso Mike Renderman joins, sharing strategies for scalable sales systems. Learn to rebuild your network, cultivate trust, and forge meaningful connections. Discover my transition to proactive networking that forges stronger industry ties. Grab your notebooks for battle-tested strategies for networking like a pro, even with a busy schedule.
Biggest Takeaways
Meet Mike
Mike Renderman is an Outsourced VP of Sales through his company, Powerline Sales Advisors which is powered by Sales Xceleration. Mike helps owners, presidents, and CEOs of small to mid-size businesses (SMBs) achieve their sales revenue goals. He leverage his experience and Sales Xceleration certification to design and implement customized sales strategies, infrastructures, and management systems that deliver sustainable growth.
Follow on LinkedIn
Resources
Last Chance! Sign up for our workshop, taking place 4/23 at 1:30pm CST.
Head over to leadfeeder.com and sign up for a 14-day (no strings attached) free trial!
Website: https://www.sarahnoelblock.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahnoelblock/
Newsletter: https://tinymarketing.me/newsletter
Tiny Marketing Community
Click here to ask a question about the episode
I had to get laser focused in terms of who, but probably most importantly was also the volume.
Speaker 2:Hey, hey, friends, I am Sarah Noelblock and this is Tiny Marketing. I think I've told you this story before, but if not, I want you to understand how much networking can affect your sales. So here it goes In Q4, I just had tumbleweeds blowing through my business. It was dead, as sometimes it is. Q4 is weird for me. Sometimes it's popping and everyone's really ahead of the game and wanting to kickstart the next year early, and sometimes everyone's like you know what? It's the holiday season, I don't feel like doing a thing and it's completely dead. So this particular Q4 was one of those. It was one of those where everyone's just chilling, doing their holiday thing and it's absolutely dead.
Speaker 2:So I realized that I need to kick it up a notch. My business has been surviving on good vibes and friendships and I needed to actually have a strategy around selling. So I started implementing business development within networking and integrating that into my content marketing and while doing this, I was able to book myself out with 30 days of doing this for four months. So I was pretty pleased with myself. I hit my I have a good, better, best goal for my revenue and I hit my best goal for Q1 of the next year and I booked out for four months. So networking to sell really, really works, I'm telling you, today I'm talking to Mike Renderman, who is a killer salesperson, and you can actually hire him.
Speaker 2:He does fractional sales work for organizations that were founder-led or biz dev-led and they're ready to take it up a notch. They need a system in place, they need real sales strategy. That's where he comes in. We kind of come into organizations at the same point where an organization has outgrown their founder-led marketing, or the person who wears 10,000 hats and got stuck with marketing and then they bring me in. That's where he comes in, too, is when the person who's a project manager also has to be the salesperson. He comes in and he builds a strategy. All right, beautiful humans. So before I share my conversation with Mike, I am going to share a little something from my sponsor, planable. Hey there, fellow marketers, before we dive back into the conversation, I've got a game changer for your content strategy. Imagine a world where the headache of coordinating, reviewing and approving content for social media, blogs and newsletters just disappears.
Speaker 2:Struggling with team collaboration on content We've all been there, and it's precisely why you need to hear about this tool. It's named Planable. Planable is revolutionizing the way teams collaborate on content. Picture this Crafting and seeing your posts exactly as they'll appear live across different platforms, all from one dashboard. Yes, please, the beauty of Planable. It drastically cuts down the approval time for your posts. What used to take hours can now be wrapped up in minutes. Whether you call Planable your unfair advantage or secret weapon in your content creation toolbox, it's changing the content collaboration game With its beautifully designed interface you'll wonder how you ever did content planning without it.
Speaker 2:Ready to upgrade and streamline your approach to content creation, head over to plannableio and sign up for a free plan today. That's plannableio. And here's the cherry on top. Plannable is giving you 30% off for the first three months when you upgrade to any plan that fits your needs. That's right. Any plan. All you need to do is use the code PLANNABLE30. That's P-L-A-N-A-B-L-E-3-0 at checkout and you're ready and all set to transform the way you manage your marketing content. That's Plannable 30, to lock in your 30% discount for three months. From a sales perspective and tactics that can be applied immediately when things feel broken. So what would be the first thing that people can do when they start to see that slowdown in referrals or people they know feeding them business because they already trust them and know they're awesome?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think there's a couple of different ways and it kind of depends on how you're approaching the business right. So there's the idea of growing your own network or expanding your network and you know, like someone like me, that's what I would focus on. Is, you know, when I first kind of got this business going, I leaned into my current network, like who do I know that can help me find, maybe opportunity or find the right people to talk to, and I had, I felt like I had a pretty rich network coming into this Um, and that that kind of uh, uh dried up pretty quick, um, where, like, okay, I, I've gone to the people that I feel very comfortable tapping on the shoulder and ask for help, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the friendlies we call them in my case.
Speaker 1:So then for me now it became okay, I almost have to rebuild, I have to completely rebuild a network that's going to have to look very different than what I've had in the past.
Speaker 1:I've spent 25 years in corporate, mostly in tech, sales, and, um, you know the, the people that were in my network, you know, were former bosses, former colleagues, people that work for me, people that I work for, former uh clients, and when I started this business I was like, well, that is not the audience that I'm going to build this business on, so I had to just rebuild it from the start, and so that was my big focus. In a business like mine and consulting, and probably like your business as well, it's um, you, you've got to grow to a point that people know you right, they, they, um, they trust you, they enjoy working with you, but ultimately they, they need to feel really comfortable that if they, you in front of a potential client or client of theirs, that, whether you end up working with them or not, it's still a positive, and it takes time to kind of grow to that point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it takes a hot minute to earn trust with people, especially in the networking world where you're meeting so many people. I feel like I'm speed dating sometimes with the amount of people that I meet through networking.
Speaker 1:Yep, I knew nothing of this world coming into this so I kind of came in with blinders on. I'm really not necessarily how difficult, but the amount of work that needs, that needs to go in to uh rebuilding a network but also, um, how you know, like I had to really shift to becoming real super laser focus and almost like it, um, uh, get scientific about it, cause I can sales I'll, like I I'll. I usually will tell clients like sales is art and it's science, but it's actually mostly science Like you can. I think you can be successful if you're not so great at the art part of it, but you are really really good at the science part of it.
Speaker 1:And that's what the networking piece for me started with was just like the science piece of it, one I needed to be really smart about who I should reach out to that I can benefit them and eventually there would be a benefit for me. But it you know, so you had to be. I had to get laser focused in terms of who. But probably most importantly was also the volume. And it's funny how the sales acumen. I haven't directly sold in 20 something years and all of a sudden I was like, oh my God, I'm a salesperson and I have to think like a salesperson and I have to get into metrics like a salesperson. And since I'm my only boss, I had to become my own sales manager. I had to become my own salesperson and I have to get into metrics like a salesperson. And since I'm my only boss, I had to become my own sales manager. I had to become my own salesperson and it took me a hot second maybe to kind of get my feet underneath me. Well, once I did it, you know it felt pretty good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is kind of crazy how, when you are wearing all of the hats, you have to be that salesperson and it does not come naturally to most people. It's super uncomfortable and, honestly, it's embarrassing to say it. I was riding a wave of getting lucky. For four years I didn't have to sell anything because my clients would refer me to new clients or people found me organically because I've been creating content from the very beginning, and it took me until this year to realize how important networking was, and this is the first year I've actually made an effort to meet people outside of my immediate network or the people that I interview on my show, which ended up being my network. The trends see which people you're able to help but also that are more likely to refer you, that likely work with the same customers as you. Is that what you mean by science?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the science part becomes. One is is ultimately, where are you going to provide the best service for somebody, like for a potential referral partner, and ultimately, where you'll? It'll come around at some point Right, and so some of it was by trial and error Oftentimes, like how a CMO is evaluated and how a CRO is evaluated. They're completely different metrics. So hence you get the fighting right Because and then it becomes, if you just boil it down, it just becomes about job preservation. It really does, and it comes down to like monetary. And if you can, if you can eliminate that from the decision processes, you can get the two working well together. All right, tangent over, all right.
Speaker 1:But marketing for me, big, huge, very, and also finding people that that focus on the right type of industry. So I have a pretty heavy tech background, so that's probably where I end up playing a little bit more. And then, like ancillary, there's there's certain parts of like manufacturing businesses that I feel pretty comfortable with. So finding people that that focus in that and they focus from an HR standpoint, from a marketing standpoint. Marketing is key for me, hr is key for me. Probably the most important role that I can connect with is somebody that does interim CFO work, because for somebody, if I'm going to help fix sales, an interim CFO is looking at the inflow and the outflow of money and they see where all the cracks are at.
Speaker 1:So, this is something that I just kind of found through my trial and error is that someone that plays that role is like they really understand and they can understand when, when things are broken in sales.
Speaker 1:The other role that's really that I found that I didn't even honestly just didn't know they existed was, uh, it was like executive coaches or business coaches, people that are kind of directing a sales, a founder, owner, ceo and, um, and so for me those were.
Speaker 1:These were all kind of like roles. One I didn't even know that this world existed all that much too, um, and it took some trial and error, but once I got into a rhythm of it, now I've identified who was sort of who are the right people to focus on, and then it became a numbers game for me what I started doing, because I had no client engagement, so all I had was time available to me and if I, the way I was going to spend that time was to fill it up with one-on-one networking calls, really learning and understanding, um, uh, the sort of the, the, the world of businesses that are out there and and try to was. I used LinkedIn Navigator. I'm by no means a LinkedIn representative here, but it is a fantastic tool when you're starting to build a network, because you can go in there.
Speaker 1:You can get really laser focused on where they're located, what they focus on, if you're already networked through them either like first or second degree. So I use that and then I would look for like fractional CMO or outsourced HR and um. And so the rhythm I got into on that was I wanted to get set up four meetings a day for future days and essentially run 20 networking calls a week. It felt like that was a really strong number and that was probably about the extent of what my brain can handle. It's uh, and I'm I'm a bit of an introvert to begin with, so it's a lot of energy for me to go into a working call, even though I'm good at it. It's it, it just it's exhausting. So I'm like okay.
Speaker 1:So 20 is where I want to go per week, which means if you get into the right rhythm, you're running about four meetings a day. Right, and in order to do that on a continuous basis, I'm setting up four meetings a day for future days and weeks. So the rhythm that I got onto this was okay if I put out and what I focused on was connection request. So I didn't use in-mail because it's always. I mean, have you ever gotten an in-mail that?
Speaker 2:you go, god, that's great.
Speaker 1:I love this.
Speaker 2:I never, ever respond to in-mails.
Speaker 1:Well, it's just creep factor stuff. I don't know why I mean it doesn't. It doesn't work. So connection requests are the way to go. At least that I felt.
Speaker 2:That was my experience.
Speaker 1:What's that? Oh, that's your experience I had the same experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's expensive if you lean into doing in-mail. But if you do a connection request, essentially you're paying for that LinkedIn license or LinkedIn navigator license, but you're not having to pay for additional in-mail, and so your hope is that people will connect with you, that people will connect with you, and so what I found is, in the language that I used, one is I would only focus on first and second level connections. I didn't want to go to third because I just felt like that was too far of a world away. Oftentimes, if you have a second connection, you're usually attached to a couple of people. So my language in my message on the connection request was hey, we're connected to some of the same people. So my language in my message on the connection request was hey, we're connected to some of the same people.
Speaker 1:I see your focus on outsource marketing and the key, I think, in all the messaging and actually, sarah, this is how you connected with me is that, and it needs to be truthful and heartfelt. But the key sentence of all this is hey, I want to learn more about your business as a potential resource for my clients, and so let's connect and and um, I think people that understand like um. You know I'm focusing on other consultants. They understand that building a network and continuing to build a network is important and if you're coming across as more of like, I want to learn about you and I want to see if I can help you. People are more apt to want to connect with you. But you also can't do that and then turn around and go, okay, give me, give me, give me, give me, yeah.
Speaker 2:Whenever I go into a connection call I'm, always I look for what I can give first and I like jot it down like who would make sense to introduce them to? What communities am I part of? That would be beneficial for them.
Speaker 1:I just try and have a couple things ready to give them yeah, I mean if, if anything, just understanding to, to listen to their um kind, what they focus on, focus on their business, understand maybe what's going well, but also understand where are they trying to grow, where do they maybe, where are they lacking or and if there's something that you can do to help there. I mean, you know, as I'm building a business, it's not like I had hundreds of clients already that I can lean to and say, sarah, I'm going to connect you with this person right away, but there's a uh, but I also have 25 years of a network.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you're actively building your network, so you're meeting new people. You can introduce them too, and that is hugely valuable for anybody who's listening and doesn't think that's valuable. Um, you just introduced me to someone last week and they did turn into a client, so thank you, oh good, well, good, okay, I know, she, she, uh, she, she actually uh, emailed me.
Speaker 1:Um, she was like oh, sarah's, great, thanks for connecting. I'm assuming that was you were going to probably work with her, but I didn't want to pry, so well, okay, there you go, let that work to you anyway, we're starting tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Awesome. So to get back to the science piece of it, so I've identified the who and then I've started identifying. What do I want to do? You have to kind of play within the rules of LinkedIn Navigator, meaning you can't really put out more than 20 to 25 connection requests a day or you start getting flagged. It's true. And you don't want that to happen.
Speaker 2:No. As someone who is active on LinkedIn. I can definitely tell you that gets flagged.
Speaker 1:Yes. So if you stay within those parameters, what I found is you're okay and also your messaging is really important, so people are also flagging you as a stammer.
Speaker 2:Keep in mind, people will flag you in their minds as this person's just contacting me so they can sell to me.
Speaker 1:Right, yep, yep. So the rhythm I got into is what I realized using that messaging, using my sort of the focus, the focus on the right type of people, I would get about a 40 percent connect rate. So, which was good, I thought it was really good. Honestly, you didn't know what to expect, right. And then what I found was for the people that would connect with me, because I know some people will just blind connect, you know they'll just accept and move on. But half the people that connected with me took a meeting, took a, you know, just kind of get to know you type of call, kind of get to know you type of call. So the rhythm I got in basically was well, if I put out 20 connections a day, I would get eight connection requests. Half of those would turn into some type of call, meeting, whatever, and so that was my formula to get to four per day.
Speaker 2:I love data. I have an air table for this exact thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, I, you know what it's, you know it. It took me a little time to find the rhythm of it, but once I, once I did, now it's, and also as I'll go through the ebbs and flows in my business, now, as I'm getting my first wave of clients, I'll have more of the challenge like you had, sarah, right, like, okay, I'm busy. Now I gotta. Like before, I had all the time in the world to build a network, um, and I took advantage of it of the time. So now I'll I'll have that challenge of putting the time aside and making sure that you're still having a level of priority on it. Um, because that's the other thing I hear, especially from all of the different consultants and fractionals that I've talked to, is how they've got so busy they completely abandoned.
Speaker 2:I can walk you through how to make it work.
Speaker 1:Do it.
Speaker 2:I have my Monday marketing. So for the first four hours of every Monday I do all of my marketing for the week and all my biz dev. So I'll do all of my outreaches at that time too. And I schedule out all of my connection calls within the first two weeks and I schedule all my client work the two weeks after so that I can fill in the gaps. And all my connection calls are 15 minutes so I can fill them in in between client work. So that's how I make it work when I'm busy.
Speaker 2:I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Mike and if you are interested in working with him, all of his links are in the show notes page. He is brilliant salesperson and he can really help you go from willy nilly selling to actually having a strategy and making it work for your business. Because you know I say this all the time, but we're in business to make money and you're or if you're a marketer, the whole point of the business is to make money and we're here to drive revenue and make it easier for salespeople to get those sales calls. So that's what it's all about. So make sure to check out Mike and if you enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend. You guys are amazing and I just want to thank you so, so, so, so, so much, because I feel like I know all of you. I get emails from you and I see my stats going up every week and it's so beautiful and lovely and I feel like, as someone who works alone the vast majority of the time, I'm not really alone. I have you guys and I see you, I appreciate you. Every Sunday on drop day, which is what I call my podcast release day, I see that it's doubling every week. It doubled last week and it doubled from that again, and it's thanks to you guys.
Speaker 2:You guys talking about the show, you guys mentioning it on social media, you guys sharing it with a friend, and I just want to say thank you. You guys are amazing and I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you. So please continue sharing and telling friends about this show and rate review if you feel so, and I don't want you to forget, it's the last chance to sign up for our live workshop with Jenna Kimball, who I interviewed on last week's episode. She's going to be our expert in this workshop and she's going to teach you how to network, really intentionally, without being awkward Because I know I feel awkward when I'm not working. It's so it feels cringy, but she has a way that makes it feel really authentic and real and you're making friends with people. It's not like icky and feeling like you're being like a slimy salesperson. It's building genuine relationships with people.
Speaker 2:So I have that link in the show notes right below and you can hang out with me and Jenna live. And that is on April 23rd, I think. I'm just going to look real quick on my calendar so I'm going to blah, blah, blah and chitty chat while I just double check. Yep, it is April 23rd, a Tuesday, and it's 1.30 to 2.30 pm Central Time, and that is three days after this episode drops. So make sure to sign up ASAP so you can join it, because it's going to be really hands-on so you can watch the replay. But I think it'll be so much more beneficial if you could be there live. All right, I'll give you back your day. I love you, thank you, goodbye.