Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a good one today on the show, we have Rob Bedell and he is with Badel Enterprises. Welcome, Rob.

Rob Bedell: [00:00:44] Oh, thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your practice. How you serving, folks?

Rob Bedell: [00:00:51] Oh, I’m a business advisor and coach. I’ve been doing this for a while now and I basically help business owners find the money that they’re leaving on the table.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:59] Now, what’s your back story? How’d you get involved in coaching?

Rob Bedell: [00:01:03] It’s funny because I got to the top of my profession for 40. I was publisher of a satire publication called The Onion in Los Angeles. I did not start the onion, but I was publisher of when they came to Los Angeles, and then I was publisher of a magazine group when I realized I still wasn’t really happy. And so I said, What really makes me happy? And I was like, I like making other businesses and people more successful. So for the past decade, I’ve been an outsourced VP of sales, helping a couple of businesses at a time set up a sales process. But it leads scoring. Make sure everyone follows the same process to get the same high results. And then over the last few years, it kept having people come up to me. You do coaching. And as I was like, No, I don’t do coaching. And then last year, in October, three people in a week walked up to me, said, Do you do coaching? I’m like, Maybe I should look into this coaching thing because people keep asking me about it. And so I found a platform that I just love that have all the tools that any business owner needs to really grow their business. And I’ve been doing that for a bit now.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:58] So now how is your work when you’re advising people different than coaching people?

Rob Bedell: [00:02:05] Well, when I was doing a advising coaching, it’s pretty much the same thing, I mean, basically with the coaching. It’s more coaching people on how to how to get more out of their business with the advising, it’s more of a structure infrastructure of how you lay your business out.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:21] So when you’re working with them, so obviously that’s one of the first thing you’re trying to determine if you’re coaching them as a you want to be a leader or or B you want to grow your business, those are obviously you would take two different approaches for that.

Rob Bedell: [00:02:36] Yeah, but it’s funny. The first thing I always look at when I work with any business is their value proposition because a lot of times they have it wrong. I worked with an insurance inspection company. They were around for 40 years, father, son, team. They had a great product there. The best thing in the industry. I sat down with them, unlike what’s important in your industry. They’re like, we’re we’re all about. We have the best time service and full time service and quality. Ok. I went out to their three best clients is sat down with them like, Hey, listen, insurance inspection companies, they’re a dime a dozen. Why do you work with these guys? And they all said the same thing. They’re like in this industry, Rob. There’s always going to be problems. And when they’re problems, we can call or email them. They’ll find out what happened, who is involved and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again and get back to us within 24 to 48 hours. And it was like, Well, that kind of sounds like customer service and communication. They also get that they have it and not of a lot of other people do. I asked all three, what about time, service and quality? They all said the same thing. If you’re not doing time, service and quality, you’re not working in this industry. So we went back, we changed the value proposition from we have the best time service and quality that everyone else in the industry is screaming about where we have the best customer service and communication. Hey, guess what, in this industry, there’s going to be problems when their problems were with you that next year the grew twenty six percent you after that sixty three because they were speaking to the market in the markets for us, not theirs.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:53] Now is that an exercise you recommend to other businesses doing just kind of asking your customers or maybe hiring a third party to ask the customer, Why are you doing business with these folks?

Rob Bedell: [00:04:04] I highly recommend doing it. I’ve been doing giving that out for free for anybody. It’s like, here, go out to your three best clients and your best clients, not the ones that pay you the most. Because really, as we know, sometimes the people that pay the most are the big pain in the rear ends. But the ones that you love working with, they love working with you. It’s just you want more of those people. Ask them, What value did you bring that you expected? What value did you bring that they didn’t expect? And what’s just the best thing about working together? Let them phrase your value proposition. I’ve done this for like five or six businesses this year, and they always come back to be going. I never thought of that because now they’re speaking in the market’s voice, not in their voice, and it’s a hard thing to do. It’s hard to get out of your own head and think in your customers voice.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:47] Now, in the first example, you mentioned that that the client was aware that problems occur and they were very concerned about or they were very happy that their the the your client helped them solve those problems when they do occur. Do you find that a lot of business owners don’t even consider that when they’re creating their value proposition, that to assume that problems are going to occur because theoretically, the business is in the problem solving business so that they don’t want to even think about problems. Once you’re starting to deal with me so that they’re missing an opportunity, they’re just allaying some fears that, hey, problems happen, they’re going to happen when you deal with us, too, but we’re going to be on top of it.

Rob Bedell: [00:05:33] Yeah, and it’s dealing in reality, you know, guess what, if you have a business where there’s never been an issue regulations, write down how you did it and sell a book and you’d be a billionaire. But the reality of situations is there’s always problems in business. There’s always little hiccups. And as long as you address them and deal with them, it’s not an issue.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:54] Now how has your business changed now that you’ve kind of leaned into coaching? Is this personally feel different for you to do this kind of work? Is this something that you’re like? Oh, I was always meant to do this? Like, personally, how is this kind of work appealing to you?

Rob Bedell: [00:06:10] I love doing it because I love and Lee. I’ll say this. You know, again, a lot of the things that I talked to business owners about, it’s not rocket science, it’s all stuff that they said. I knew this. I knew this like, OK, now that you know it now, it’s time to apply it. And in a way, it’s just I help them talk through their issues. And yeah, I love it. You know, right now, I’m actually looking at building a group coaching platform because I am having so much demand for me, people coming and saying, Hey, I want to work with you, that I’m, you know, trying to go from the one on one group coaching so I can help more people. And at the same time.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:45] Now you mentioned you have a platform. Is this something that you bought or hired someone to create a methodology or this is your methodology, you’re just kind of reworking to make it more scalable.

Rob Bedell: [00:06:59] It’s a platform that was built already by some guys who have all the tools at any business. Owner would need to grow their business, the marketing side of the operations side of things where we can kind of go in and really kind of look at your business, you know, department by department and really kind of fine tune it where you grow. How many leads that are coming in yet you streamline your operations. And so it is a platform that was already out there, built and again, I found it loved it and it’s been very, really helpful.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:27] And then on top of that, you add your jazz hands to help them in the areas of your specialty, which are a lot of it is sales and marketing.

Rob Bedell: [00:07:36] A lot of it is sales and operations. Yes.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:38] So now let’s talk about sales a little bit. Are you seeing kind of business owners make the same mistake over and over where you’re like kind of rolling your eyes and go, Oh, here we go again, this same kind of path that a lot of other folks have fallen into.

Rob Bedell: [00:07:53] I wouldn’t say I rolled my eyes, you know, a common mistake. Again, it’s a value proposition. It’s like they all think they’re speaking in their voice. I mean, especially with technology companies, it companies, they get so much in their head trying to explain exactly what they think. The customer would like that they don’t ask the customer. And it’s funny, too. That’s all part of sales is ask a question and let them answer. That’s part of business. As a business owner, you should be talking to your customers on a regular basis. What are we doing? Great? What more can we help? What more can we do? I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard it. Did you ever read the book Delivering Happiness?

Lee Kantor: [00:08:26] Yeah, the Tony Hsieh.

Rob Bedell: [00:08:29] Yes, Zappos. Right? You know, in every, you know, business should think about that. How can we make things better? Every time someone comes in, how can we help a customer? Because then you become the go to customer, the go to person, to go to business. And that’s really what you want is business owner.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:43] So now is there anything you do to help them kind of clarify that like, you know, there’s one thing you’re listening to the customer, that’s one thing. There’s obviously some incongruity sometimes where, like you said, the the business owner believes one thing and the customer is saying something else. How do you kind of help that all kind of work symbiotically?

Rob Bedell: [00:09:07] Well, and again, a lot of it’s just sitting there talking through, you know, sitting down with a business owner who who who is your ideal client, who do you lose your customer? And it’s so funny. I love when business owners say everyone like, no, everyone is not your customer. But Nike and Coca-Cola do not go after everyone. You shouldn’t either be a waste of your time and money. So really focus on, you know, and I always tell them, reflect on the business that you currently have. I’m sure there’s, you know, clients that you sit there and you just love working with. That’s your ideal client. And so once you get that focus, once you have everyone and the value proposition is not just for your sales team, it’s for every single person at your company. Because if everyone’s on the same page with the value of what you offer, the company will grow. And I get I get pushback sometimes on that. A lot, the business owners say, Rob, why does someone in my warehouse accounting need to know my value proposition? And I explain it this way. You never know when they’re sitting at lunch next to somebody and say, Oh, what do you do? Well, I’m in warehouse. Oh, who do you work for? I work for ABC Company. Oh, what do they do? And if they can spit out your value proposition now you went from having a sales team to having a sales company. Plus, they take greater pride in the work that they do when they understand the value of it.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:16] Do you think that in today’s world you have to have a sales company? Everybody has to kind of be on board when it comes to selling because it’s just so competitive nowadays?

Rob Bedell: [00:10:26] I wouldn’t say you have to, but I would say the ones that think that way do a lot better than the ones that don’t.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:33] Now, so let’s go through a situation, maybe share a story where you were working with someone and maybe they didn’t have their sales value proposition kind of complete and walk me through what their challenge was, how you landed on that and then help them get to a new level.

Rob Bedell: [00:10:52] I was working with an Australian company that was in the U.S. for a few years, and they did marketing for orthodontists. They got the leads into orthodontist and sat down with them and they their value proposition was off and their whole sales process was off. They had this deck that was 20 pages deep jam full of information, and I sat down with them. They flew into town, I sat down with them, I looked at the deck and looked at them and said, I’m not going to read this. And they said, What? I said, You’re paying me and I’m not going to read this. Do you think an orthodontist? Why do you have all this information here? And they’re like, Well, Rob, it’s everything they need to know to make a decision. And I was like, No, it’s not. It’s everything you want to impress them with with your knowledge, but it’s not what they need to know. And so we did exactly that. Little simple exercise went up to the three best clients. We reduced that 20 page deck to a one sheet with four bullet points on it. The next week, sales rep called me up to up. They’re reading it and like what, Brooke? They’re supposed to read. It was Rob. They never read anything I’ve ever sent them before. And so again, by sitting them down, showing them how this, you know, streamlining their sales, we took a different approach on the sales side of things, too. We didn’t go in there saying, Hey, Doc, we can do this for you. We called and said, Hey Doc, we want to see if you qualify to work with us made a huge difference in it. So it’s just and as soon as I was able to show them the process and show them the difference and how it shorten the sales cycle and increase their customer base, we shorten their sales cycle eight to 10 months and increase their customer base 33 percent in four months by doing this. And again, it’s simple little exercises.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:26] So now you mentioned earlier that kind of to be very specific when it comes to your ideal customer. And and sometimes people are I don’t want to use the wrong word, but they they maybe are skeptical that that’s the way to go because they feel maybe that they’re missing out on opportunities if they are that kind of, you know, within a specific niche. How do you kind of help them overcome this? Is there a way to test that theory? Like if you say, you know what, you should be targeting orthodontists and not just everybody that’s in dentistry? Do you kind of experiment and say, OK, let’s do a test to see if if this kind of theory is going to hold water or not?

Rob Bedell: [00:13:11] Well, and I kind of put it this way. It’s if you’re trying to reach a Spanish or Mexico Hispanic audience and you’re just speaking English to them. Well, yeah, you might get some of them because they understand English. But if you spoke Spanish, you might get all of them. So if you’re targeting an audience and you’re not speaking their language, so therefore, if you’re trying to reach too broad of an audience but you’re not speaking the language that your specific niche can understand, you’re losing out on more by not focusing on your niche audience, your targeted audience, then you are when you’re trying to cast such a broad net. Does that make sense?

Lee Kantor: [00:13:47] Yeah, I mean, I’m a big believer in niches like way of saying here niches bring riches and and the thinking is that too. I’d rather be the go to person in my niche than I would just be another kind of vendor in a in a big pool. You know, I’m shooting to be the go to person, not just another person that can do that. So I want that mindshare if I can pull that off. So. But not everybody kind of is like, Oh, that’s a greatest idea I ever heard. They’re kind of skeptical that to go to be bigger is you have to be smart, you know, aims in a smaller target.

Rob Bedell: [00:14:29] Well, there’s always that FOMO, the fear of missing out, and it’s you have to get through it and say, OK, guess what? But have I talked to and again, the way I always look at it and explain to the business owners, a lot of times are like, Well, my sales team needs to be making one hundred calls a day, and I’m like, Well, if they make one hundred calls a day every day for the week and they don’t get any sales, are you happy? And they’re like, No. So, OK, well, then they have to do, you know, 10 presentations, so they do 10 percent and they don’t get a sale. Are you happy? No, I said, What do you really want? I want sales and ask for sales. If you have a good sales team and they’re good salespeople, they will make the calls, they will do the presentations, they will do everything needed to make the end goal, which is the number of sales that they need.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:11] Now do you find and we use the term cosmetics in this regard that sometimes organizations are aiming at these metrics that sound good or maybe make headlines in an in an article but aren’t really productive for themselves. Like you said, when you ask them, is the metric sales calls or is the metric, you know, dollars in the bank? You know, which one do you want more of you? They want the dollars in the bank, but they think that the sales causes is going to be that lever that they can pull to get more dollars in the bank where that may not be the case.

Rob Bedell: [00:15:50] Well, there is some correlation to it, I mean, and again, if you use it as a tool, meaning your sales people are not getting to the numbers, then you say, Hey, you know something I noticed when you were making 10 more calls a week, you were getting to the numbers when you cut 10 calls off. Use that as a metric. That’s fine. That’s that’s perfectly good. But if you lean on it as a crutch, you’re going to have people making the hundred calls yet not making an effort. And that’s really what you want out of your teams, whether it’s sales, whether it’s operations, you want the effort to be there.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:20] But you also want the effort to garner the result they desire.

Rob Bedell: [00:16:25] Exactly.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:26] Because a lot of times when there’s a metric, I find that people stay focused on that and then they start gaming the system to hit the metric and they’re not getting the result. But they’re saying, Hey, you know, it’s like if if you have one of those watches that count your steps and you’re like, You know, if I just shake the watch, I get the steps, you know, like the object isn’t to get 10000 steps, it’s to lose weight, you know, so you got to take the steps. If you want to lose the way, you can’t just move the thing.

Rob Bedell: [00:16:56] Exactly, and again, it has to be the focused effort. It has to be, you know, and exactly what you’re just saying. It’s like, well, I made a hundred phone calls, so the market must just be not or a product must network know that, you know, and that’s that’s the thing that a lot of business owners I work with when they don’t understand what sales is, they have a hard time talking to their sales team and their sales team can make every excuse in the world. Hey, look, we did the numbers, but it just wasn’t there where if you actually understand what sales is and how to get your sales team to just go out and have a conversation to see if people need what you have. Make sure that your marketing team sets up lead scoring for your sales team to where it’s like, OK, these leads coming in are good. They’re getting through the process. These ones are bad when you set up lead scoring, especially for small business owners. I can’t tell you how much of a difference this makes when a lead comes in. Do they need your product and service? Is a contact information correct? Were you able to get a call with them? Were you able to show them what you had? Did you close them? If all the leads are not getting past those first two stages, stop getting those leads. The best way to burn out a sales team really fast is it give them a bunch of unqualified leads to call.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:04] Now, talking about sales, you wrote a book on sales, can you talk about what let’s talk about the book, but what what kind of compelled you to write the book?

Rob Bedell: [00:18:15] Well, what compelled me to write it as I was actually doing a webinar for a bunch of business owners about what’s setting up a sales process is setting up a sales process that your whole sales team follows, get you more customers more often and faster. And they kind of like the idea about more money, more often faster. And when I opened it up for questions at the end. Well, Rob, when we set aside time for our business development, our customer acquisition was like, Wait, you mean sales? We you could hear them groan. And I was like, We stop. Sales is the lifeblood of what do you think sales is? And I got some hold old standard answers. It’s influence. It’s controlling the conversation. And I was like, OK, stop, you know, you guys know, Zig Ziglar Dale Genius is giant among men to this day, but sales has changed dramatically over the decades with the internet and with social media. All sales is is having a productive conversation to see if there’s a reason to work at it. Sales just like the human body, two ears, one mouth. Here’s how you run a sales meeting. It’s not about policies and procedures, it’s about goals. It’s about wins. It’s about success stories.

Rob Bedell: [00:19:16] Or how did you get this one? Let’s get the next one. You want your sales team so pumped when they walk out of the meeting that they feel like they could run through walls. And when I was done with it, I was like, Are you afraid of sales now that I know that’s actually kind of easy. And so when I got off the phone, I’m like, That’s the book I need you read. I need to write a sales book. But for business owners, so business owners have a good foundation of what sales is, and I have a workbook that goes along with it. But here’s how you find your value proposition. Here’s a different types of salespeople. Here’s questions you ask your sales team. And so it’s so funny to me because I get people that read the book and can call me up or email me like, I knew this. I knew this, and I started laughing like, good. Now I play it. There’s a theme that I have throughout the book as saying that I created which I love. It’s like, Yes, what I tell you is all common sense. But when common sense becomes common practice, that’s when you find success.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:05] Yeah, that’s where the magic is. I mean, the days of ABC always be closing, you know, we’re in a different world now.

Rob Bedell: [00:20:13] Yeah. I mean, unless you’re in a multi level marketing where that still applies. Yeah, in regular business now it’s about building relationships, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:20:22] I tell them, I tell them the new ABC is always be connecting or always be curating. That’s the new ABC.

Rob Bedell: [00:20:30] I love it. I love it.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:32] Because, like you said, I mean, to me, sales is is just about fit. You know, can I help you or, you know, I want to help you and I might be the right fit or I might not be, but I’ll try to help you get the right fit for you. And I think I think when you have that attitude, it’s a lot less stressful and it’s a lot less kind of icky. The way that some people feel about sales that it’s icky is because they’re forcing people and it doesn’t have to be. You’re really a resource in helping person achieve the outcome they desire.

Rob Bedell: [00:21:04] And that’s what me and some of my colleagues in sales are trying to do, because a lot of times people think of sales and they think it’s a four letter word. And I always tell people, No. Sales is a five letter sale if you do anything at any cost. Get that one sale. Yeah, that can be a bad thing. But again, there’s you know, and that’s not called sales, that’s called a con man. And and there’s bad people in every industry. There’s bad politicians, bad lawyers, bad police, but there’s also great ones. There’s ninety five percent of them that are incredible. The same thing with sales. There are few bad people out there that are saying things that they shouldn’t be saying. But a majority of salespeople, if I call you up and it’s funny, I’ve called clients up before and I’m like, OK, I can’t help you. One of the first clients that I ever worked with when I was selling classified advertising that just dated me showed me how old I when newspapers were all having classified advertising and I was selling a legal directory and I called this lawyer up and I was really excited about it and, you know, got him excited about our demographics and everything.

Rob Bedell: [00:21:56] Oh, OK. And it’s like, So what type of business or lawyer are you? And he goes, Well, I do business business transactions. I was like, Oh, I was like, Well, then this isn’t going to work for you. It’s like, What do you mean? I said, Well, this is more for DUI criminal divorce lawyers. I don’t. We don’t do a lot of business. Mean, we’re not a business journal. And he’s like, So you’re not going to take my money. I say, I’m a sales guy. I’ll take your money, but I’ll tell you, this isn’t going to work for you, right? You know, any lawyers that are like that give me a call. And later that week, I had three lawyers call me up, sign up. They didn’t even question me. One of them became my biggest advertiser because I was willing to sit there and talk to us later and say, Oh, you know something, this isn’t for you. And, you know, basically he referred a lot of business my way, so that’s really what salespeople are. Does this work? Will this work for you or whether it’s not right?

Lee Kantor: [00:22:39] It goes back to your original value proposition? Part of the conversation is my value is I want to be a trusted adviser, whether it’s selling you what I have or not. I mean, I want you to think of me as somebody you can trust to help you achieve your goals. And that’s that’s your business. It’s not, you know, whatever it is, the, you know, activity you’re selling.

Rob Bedell: [00:23:02] Exactly.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:03] So now, if somebody wanted to learn more about the sales, book about your practice, what is the website to learn more?

Rob Bedell: [00:23:12] You know, my website, which is WW Dot Info Number for your business or probably the easier way to get me is on LinkedIn. Just look for Rob or OBE Adele. Bed in bed, L-l on LinkedIn. I pop up really fast there and I’m on there daily.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:32] So well, Rob, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Rob Bedell: [00:23:38] Well, I appreciate you having me on.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:40] All right, this ad Lee Kantor will sail next time on Coach the Coach radio.