Jason: (00:06)
Coming to you from a small mountain town high up in the Colorado Rockies. My name is Jason Owens, and this is The Renewable Confidence podcast.  The  show that helps you build confidence in yourself and in your business every day.

Today’s episode is titled Three Wheels That Every Business Needs.

I am excited for today’s episode. Sit back, relax. Because here we go. All right. As I’ve been thinking through number of the people that I’ve been working with, uh, not only here recently, but have worked with in the past, I always go back to, gosh, what, what are the systems that just run and run and run for these people in their business? Or what systems should they have that run and run? All right, so when I say three wheels, what, what I, what I mean here is, let’s just go back to say the common definition. You guys have probably heard this term before.

Jason: (00:55)
It’s called the wheelhouse, right? Um, that is defined as the part of a boat or a ship that is kinda that shelter, right? Where the captain goes up and does all the steering. So that’s the wheelhouse. So what I mean by wheel or wheel house is I’m looking for some kind of a system or a process in your business that just consistently generates sales, leads, conversations or revenue. So I’ll say that one more time. A system or process in your business that consistently generates sales, leads, conversations or revenue. So let’s go into the three wheels. So what I’m thinking that every business could use that is an inbound process that’s always going to be generating sales leads for you or conversations for you or revenue, an outbound and then a referral. Okay? So let’s take those in order. Inbound, outbound referrals. So what do I mean by inbound?

Jason: (01:52)
Well, inbound is typically say if you do, um, some kind of advertising, right? So you do some kind of advertising and that is going to draw people into your store or that is going to cause people to pick up the phone or cause people to book an appointment with you, right? So advertising could be seen as inbound. If you happen to be into content marketing, right? You’re doing social media, you are doing Instagram, Facebook, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Any of these social media sites, um, you’re doing a email marketing, right? Okay. So you’ve sent this out and you are doing your best to draw people into some kind of a deeper relationship with you. That is inbound marketing. And what makes inbound so appealing to a lot of people is that they can do it hiding behind their computer screens most of the time.

Jason: (02:38)
Or you can kind of throw that ad over to the newspaper or, or you can throw that ad up online and it’s not really requiring a whole lot of you. Okay. Now, depending upon who you talk to, inbound may not be as effective as outbound, but I’ll tell you what, one thing that you can do with inbound, Holy cow, you can definitely make it up in volume right now. A traditional outbound, if you were to compare these two, so an outbound, you would think of that as just good old fashioned traditional sales, right? Whenever you think of an outbound salesperson, okay? So, uh, maybe you might have your, in your mind thinking of traditional corporate sales, right? Where you’re going to drive out to the client’s location or the prospect’s location, you’re going to pull in your briefcase and you’ve got all your samples and your demo pieces and whatnot.

Jason: (03:25)
Right? Uh, so that is traditional outbound marketing where you are in the field and you are out pounding the pavement, whether that’s the networking meetings or you’re going to trade shows, uh, making connections there, right? So it is your traditional get out of the office, go out into the real world and meet people and set up appointments. Right? That is typically what outbound selling is. Now, if you were to compare those to inbound, yeah, you can scale that like crazy and maybe maybe your success rate there may or may not be as high as outbound, but maybe with the ability to scale, right? Cause if you, you end up creating an ad and 500 people see the ad and four people click on it and you had to set an appointment with you or to come in to talk with you or come into your store.

Jason: (04:13)
All right. Okay. So that’s scale. Right? And these people may end up doing a deal with you. Now if you kind of compare that to outbound. Okay, so you’ve, it’s just you, you’ve spent this time to go out into the field to develop these relationships. Okay? Typically in an outbound world, those are higher dollar sales. They might be more complex sales. Uh, so while you can’t really scale yourself, you can’t clone yourself and copy and paste and send yourself out to five trade shows at once or 15 networking section sessions at once. What you do end up with there is you usually end up with a larger deal size out of the outbound marketing. Okay? So I just wanted to compare and contrast those two for you. So have some kind of inbound, whatever inbound works for you. If it’s putting ads in the newspaper, then let it be putting ads in the newspaper.

Jason: (05:02)
Do it well, measure your success, measure your response, which for me that looks like, Hey, it better be some kind of coupon that someone brings into your store, right? Um, if it’s going to be an online ad, well that’s going to come with all kinds of metrics that you can measure, right? If it’s email marketing, again you’re going to have metrics built into that process. You’re going to see open rates, you’re going to see click through rates. If you have that tied to an online store, you’re going to see purchases. If your emails are tied to appointment setting calendar or appointment setting app, then you’re going to be able to see your, your click through and your, your number of, of successes there. So a lot of, a lot of inbound stuff typically is going to come with some kind of metrics but make sure you are tracking it anyway, right?

Jason: (05:45)
Because you have to know what’s working for you. Likewise, I think every business should have some kind of outbound marketing and that looks like you work in the phones. It could, it could be that you have a list of wholesalers, right? That you need to go contact. So if you’re in the retail world and you know that there are some new products you need or you know that there are other people who could be offering your products, right? Other retail locations that you might want to drop ship to or drop ship for, right. So there are just a ton of outbound calls that you can make. Go out, find a list, whether you have found it at a trade show or you bought a list somewhere, you end up finding some way to go out and work the phones or get out to the networking events or go to the trade show.

Jason: (06:32)
Right? So you sign up for the trade show. Either you’re attending there just as a soloist or you go and you set up a booth at a trade show. Okay, well how do you choose what trade show to go to? Am I just going to do this one or should I line up five or 10 of them to go to? There’s one company that I was working with here back in the spring. They do over 40 trade shows a year. That is their machine. That is their wheel that works for them. Because when they are out in that world, they thrive. They end up bringing in the leads, they do the deals, they have the business, they’ve got a machine down Pat that works for them. Okay, so that’s inbound, that’s outbound. Let’s talk about referral. So here you have people who have come into your world, they have done some kind of business with you.

Jason: (07:20)
Having some kind of referral mechanism in there would just be dynamite. Now there are traditional referral systems that you can go through and you can learn. And uh, one that I was taught was you sit down with, uh, a sheet of paper, right? That has kind of all these categories on it and you’re walking your prospect through this. So let’s just say this is back in my financial services days. Mrs. Jones. Gosh, this is fantastic. Thanks for doing business with me. Really appreciate it. Hey, do you mind if we do a little bit of an exercise here? This is something that I walk all of my clients through. It’s about helping grow my business. I love working with people like you. And, gosh, this thought exercise has been really helpful. So do you mind if we go through it? Right? So you kind of check for permission there and then you just kind of walking through, Hey, when, and this paper just kind of has all these just individual, I’ll just call them seats.

Jason: (08:08)
It has individual seats. Hey listen, when you are out at church and you’re going through some of the, the church social functions, you mentioned a, whether it’s your small group or the, the quilting group you’re part of, is there anybody in that group that you can think of that might be, um, that I might be able to help in that world? Okay. So you just kind of walk people through different categories, Hey, listen, when you are out and about at such and such, when you are, um, or there’s the women’s voting league or whatever it is, you know, you just kind of walk people through this whole list. And what that’s meant to do is it’s kind of meant to prime the pump for them to go, Oh my word. You need to go talk to Sally. Yes. Sally was just talking the other day that her husband passed away and she’s got money that she needs to roll over or whatever or needs managed.

Jason: (08:51)
So, you know, it’s, it’s that kind of thing that is one kind of referral system. And again, that’s more of a traditional sense, but there are tons of referral systems that you can put in place, right? I mean, you can do, um, yeah, you can have, if you’re into email marketing, you can certainly set up a referral system that way. I have seen a couple examples of people doing decent referrals through social media, but that’s a little bit of using, he’s in the [inaudible], you need to have a sales relationship there. It’s not just for, Hey, while if you like me or if you’ve ever heard about me, refer me business and I’ll give you money. Sometimes that works. But most of the time where you’re gonna see a lot more of the strong results from it, that’s going to be from someone who’s already done business with you.

Jason: (09:35)
So just kind of think through that. If you are in a retail environment, it might be something as simple as they refer a friend coupon, someone’s there at the register, they’ve done business with you drop that coupon in the basket. Gosh, I would love for you to pass this off to one of your friends. They get 15% off or 20% off or a free tee shirt or whatever, right? I mean, whatever the offer is going to be for you, um, that would be dynamited. So then of course you can track that whenever someone comes back into the store, they’ve got this coupon, Hey, wow, my referral program must be working. Okay. So anyway, there’s just, there’s a ton of ways, and I’m not really trying to unpack every last option in every last of the three categories here, but I just wanted to offer this out to you to get you thinking.

Jason: (10:15)
I would love for you to go ahead and send me an email and in that email, by the way, they send that to support AT renewableconfidence DOT com and the subject line of that email, just say My Three Wheels and what I’d love for you to put on there are just three bullet points of outbound. Boom, I’m going to go to three trade shows, inbound, boom, I’m going to commit to email marketing referral. Boom, I’m going to turn on a referral mechanism or I’m going to turn on a referral system in my business, right? So just let me know what you’re going to do for each of those three categories. Should only take you like, I dunno, maybe 20 words or less for the whole email. So again, that’s support AT renewableconfidence DOT com the email, uh, that was the email address. The subject line is My Three Wheels and then open that thing up and just give me three bullet points. One for inbound, one for outbound and one for referral. All right everyone. So hope this has served you. I am looking really forward to hearing any kind of feedback, any responses from you and goodnight. Go out there and make it a great day and keep your confidence high. Everyone take care.