Real Relationships Real Revenue - Audio Edition | Invest in Relationships to Build Your Business and Your Career

Mike Deimler is one of the best client relationship developers on the planet. In this episode, Mo brings to light the three major lessons that Mike Deimler shared during his interview and how you can apply them directly to business development. Making progress every day is crucial. Mike went through an extremely traumatic event as a child where he lost his eye and a close relative gave him a key piece of advice that changed his life. Mike decided to focus on making progress instead of being stuck as a victim. As a partner at BCG for the past 30 years, Mike always tries to make progress in three important areas: with his clients, his leadership roles at the firm, and within his personal life. In business development it's very easy to have setbacks, maybe more than any other area of life. When setbacks happen it becomes easy to switch your focus to delivery and forget about growth. Mike's system for business development has been a powerful framework for getting results. Taking a strategic perspective and writing down the top priorities your client should be focusing on is a great way to get started. As great as your ideas for your client are, you need to think about how you can persuade them to move from their current position. Start off by asking questions so you can understand their world from their perspective. By doing things when clients aren't ready to hire him, Mike has created some of the most beneficial and profitable client relationships for his business. Making strategic investments into a client with a give-to-get is a great way to start a relationship. Investing in a person before they can hire you is another way to create demand for your expertise. The biggest contracts that are ever sold, by and large, are the ones created before there is actually a commercial opportunity. Moving without the ball will help you with a huge number of future client opportunities. The power of a system, when it's implemented, is that it creates incremental momentum that moves you progressively towards your goals each and every day. How are you staying focused on doing the work that's important right now but also always investing in the future? Proactive investing and give-to-gets, when done correctly, hit all six dimensions of Robert Cialdini's Persuasion framework. It establishes authority and creates a need for reciprocity. You may not get anything in return right away but you almost always get some value back eventually. Instead of just talking about what you can do, a give-to-get puts you into a position to actually do it. Your give-to-get should have a clear next step for the client. Don't overwhelm them by offering a number of options, make it clear and easy to understand what the simple next step is because people want to continue going down the road they are already on. People tend to spend time and money with people that they like so your give-to-get should be enjoyable. Build in some time to bond with the person on a human level. Try to include any potential decision makers on the project as part of the give-to-get meeting. Any sizable work often requires a number of decision makers to say yes to it. People want more of what there's less of. If you are genuinely busy, make it known how special it is that you are offering them a give-to-get. If you can create valuable and enjoyable give-to-get meetings where you are helping your clients and that naturally leads to a next step it will create demand for your expertise. Check out the mini courses down below to learn how to apply these business development ideas to your organization. The most inspiring thing about Mike is his consistent drive to continue moving forward in all areas of his life and focusing on improving his craft. If you can always have an open mind and always be striving to get better yourself, then you're going to continue to have a bigger and bigger impact on the world. Mentioned in this episode: bdhabits.com bdhabitsforteams.com winning-more.com

Mike Deimler shares three incredible business development lessons that he's learned over the course of his 30-year career at one the most successful consultancies in the world. Learn the secret to creating powerful client relationships, why empathy is one of the most important skills you can cultivate, and how you can apply the same transformation that Michael Jordan underwent to become the greatest basketball player in the world to your own career. Mike Deimler is one of the best business development consultants among over 15,000 people that the Bunnell Idea Group has trained over the years. Business strategy has been Mike's main focus for the past 30 years and he's been working, thinking, or writing about business development for pretty much his entire career. Being good at relationship development and business development is a lot like being a good father, they are learned behaviours and anyone can become better at them. Mike tells the story of his near-death experience as a child and the lesson he learned when the surgeon told him that his eye couldn't be saved. At the age of nine, Mike learned that he had a choice to make. He could be angry at what happened to him or he could make the most out of every single day of his life. Mike chose the latter and applies that lesson to all of the relationships in his life. If you've survived something difficult, you should look at it as a gift and make the conscious choice to value each day. You can pivot your strengths and learn new ways to thrive. Taking a strategic perspective comes down to taking another person's perspective by listening and understanding where they are coming from. When working with CEOs, Mike always strives to understand what their view is and what their strategic agenda should be. When you take someone else's perspective and internalize it, it forces you to think deeply about what they should be working on. For every client that Mike serves he writes down their strategic agenda on a single piece of paper. This requires him to be concise and sharp on the issues that matter most and helps establish a relative priority to the things that need work. To move someone to take action, you need to move them twice, both emotionally and intellectually. At the highest levels this takes persistence and the willingness to explore other possibilities, combined with the patience to see the process through. Some of the most important topics Mike has ever worked on took nearly two years for the change to really take place. If you're pushing a product or service, you're selling, and if you start with the client's perspective in mind you are obligated to move them and encourage them to take action. When you start with the other, selling is the consequence of doing the right thing. If you're ever uncertain in a meeting or a business development situation, just pause and listen to both the heart and the mind. You will rarely go wrong by taking a holistic approach to the other person's perspective. If you can think of the opposing pairs of facts vs. feelings and big ideas vs. tactics, you're going to make every meeting and comment better. More Judo, less Karate. Young partners often get anxious about business development and believe they need to push in order to sell. By coming at the meeting aggressively they end up defeating themselves. Sometimes the best thing to do in a meeting is to talk a lot less and listen a lot more. Talking is Karate, listening is Judo. When you're listening more than speaking, the other person is coming to you and sharing what's on their mind. Be comfortable with empty space in a conversation, not every second of the meeting needs a slide. There is always a balancing act between being proactive and waiting. Asking questions is important, but strategic perspective is about having a point of view. If you're going to be a trusted advisor to anyone, you need to do the work to have a value-added perspective. The art of knowing when to pivot from asking questions to proposing solutions is an art. There will be times where you have to take a stance and press your point of view. Asking permission is one way of opening the door and changing the other person's frame of mind. Don't be afraid of disagreement. Starting off a meeting by asking questions first allows you to understand the other person's position in their own words, which in turn allows you to propose a solution to their problem. Mike tells the story of attending the same high school as Michael Jordan and watching him develop as a basketball player, seeing what made him special first hand. During the course of Jordan's career, it wasn't until he transformed from the best offensive player in the world to the best complete basketball player in the world. He truly became the best when he learned to move without the ball. If you're building a sustained relationship with anyone, the most important thing you can do is create opportunity for the client as well as your business. Putting your client in the right position so they can win is more important than scoring on your own. Like most behaviors, when you try something new, you have to try harder but as you move forward it becomes more intuitive. Nurturing relationships outside of the usual business transactions is something that nearly all successful business development professionals have a system for. If you're just getting started learning these skills, it's best to have a more disciplined approach. Mo shares a personal lesson he learned from his father that he applies to nearly every area of his life. The most common question Mike gets from young professionals is "How is it you're so successful at building relationships with senior clients?" Think about your closest relationships and what you or the other person do to make them successful, chances are you're going to think about empathy, honesty, compassion, and asking for feedback. Relationships require frequency, both parties need to put effort into communicating. The best relationships are fun as well, where spending time with the other person makes you feel good and you do the same for them. The best relationships in your life are the ones where you are both willing to be vulnerable. In business, when a client is willing to be vulnerable with you, you have truly become a trusted advisor. If you strive to make your business relationships as good as the best relationships in the rest of your life, the business will take care of itself. Mentioned in this episode: bdhabits.com Blasting Through Plateaus - bunnellideagroup.com/blasting-through-plateaus/

Mo Bunnell breaks down the interview with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, and talks about why goals are not enough to achieve extraordinary results. Learn why your systems are the best place to start, how your habits shape your identity and not the other way around, and the essential framework for creating an exceptional business development system to get the outcomes you desire. Mo goes over a quick recap of the three major lessons learned in the interview with James Clear and how they can be applied to business development. Your current systems are perfectly designed to give you the current outcomes that you're getting. This can also be looked at as your past six months of systems are perfectly designed to deliver your current results We all have systems whether we realize it or not. What systems have you had around business development for the past six months? Those are the systems that are delivering the current outcomes you are getting right now. Use the Most Important Things (MITs) framework to build up your business development habits. Choose three things to focus on that have a big impact, are 100% in your control, and are growth oriented. It's easy to fool yourself to believe that doing your job well is growth oriented, but one small change can be the difference between regular service and generating additional revenue for your business. There are systems at individual levels, but you should also have systems at the team level that facilitate the outcomes you want as a team. Set up systems for setting goals as a team, how you are going to interact with each other and with clients, and for celebrating success. What are the metrics you can control as a team that you can use in your systems to know if you're on track for success? Identity and how we think about ourselves is potentially one of the most important things to bringing in business. You don't have to be the best in the world at business development; you just have to be better than the competition. Most people think that their identity changes when they change the goal, but it's more important to think about it from the habit perspective. Every time you execute on a habit that moves you closer to your goal, that's a small piece of evidence that you are the kind of person capable of achieving that goal. As you build those systems, your beliefs about your own abilities will change. Set your goals and then build the systems in a way that you can measure that can get you there. You should also build out systems across your team. Data transparency across a team can have a major impact on the overall results and takes a load off the team leader as the coach. As the results increase across the team, the team's identity changes as well. Use James' 4 law framework to help develop your business development habits and start off by auditing your existing system. No matter your discipline, there is a highly repeatable process that can be fine tuned and improved upon. Think of business development as a process that can be refined. Engage your potential clients in the process of a proposal. If they haven't engaged and helped you define how you're going to work together, then they haven't bought in. You can look at the entire business development process and measure the metrics in each of the steps in a way that allows you to create a system of improvement. Mentioned in this episode: bdhabits.com bdhabitsforteams.com

James Clear, author of the best-selling book Atomic Habits, delves into the transformative power of habits. He shares a harrowing experience from a life-threatening injury that taught him the importance of starting small for recovery. Clear emphasizes the difference between setting goals and creating effective systems through daily habits. He discusses how incremental gains in business can lead to significant success and offers practical strategies for cultivating lasting habits that enhance both personal and professional growth.

Mo Bunnell breaks down the three most important lessons shared by Kelley O'Hara and applies them directly to growing your business and winning more engagements. Learn how to cultivate a growth mindset, create a powerful feedback system that steadily builds momentum, and why preparation is your ultimate confidence-building weapon. There are three major pieces of content that Kelley O'Hara talked about in her interview that apply directly to business development: having a growth mindset, focusing on what you can control, and preparing to make progress. A common mistake that business developers make is in preparing to win engagements instead of preparing to make progress towards the goal. It can't be said enough, business development can be learned. It doesn't matter where you start or where you are now, there is always another level to grow to. Business development is such a complex skill that no one is born with it. Any complex skill is the roll up of dozens and dozens of skills, and because of that, no one is born with all of those. Nobody is born with everything they need. Business development is so in depth and requires so many hard and soft skills that it's impossible to be excellent in all of them and there is always more to learn. Self-reflection is crucial to a growth mindset. For Kelley, the off season is when she really hones her craft. For business developers that want to get better at a skill, build in some time each week to decode how you did because your off season is in between meetings. Use a journal to track your progress and see where you are improving. Build in feedback loops for anything you want to become more skilled at. Any time something important happens and other people are around, ask them two key questions. When you frame a feedback loop in that way you will get really good information and it will help you improve. The problem with vague feedback is you will usually get positive feedback without the area to improve upon. Remember, asking better questions will give you better answers. Business development has less feedback than many other aspects of life, which can make it very difficult to know what to improve. Aim to disconnect yourself from the outcome so that you can keep moving forward. Perception, action, will. Whenever you're in a moment that doesn't seem to be going well, pull back and get some perspective, do something about it, and then keep at it. People often quit sooner than they should, don't get discouraged. Track what you can control and use it as your motivation. Decode what you need to focus on to get results and develop a system to track what you can control to reach the goal. Even subjective measures are better than not tracking anything. Another common mistake business developers make is either tracking way too much and getting overburdened and burning out, or not tracking things that can move the needle because they're too subjective. Start with simple tracking measures and build it out from there. There is no way that someone else can do the tracking for you. When you document what you do and your business starts to take off, you can go back and see what you were doing prior to the growth to connect the dots. Build in some time on a quarterly basis to do some deeper reflection and figure out what you need to prioritize in the next time period. Focus on preparation instead of perfection. If your bar is perfection, you will end up disappointed and in a negative thought loop. If you feel prepared going in, you are far more likely to perform better. Alternatively, if you feel unprepared, you will spend a large amount of time and energy just being stressed instead of performing at a high level. Do everything you can to prepare and walk in confidently. Do you know what your set pieces are? Think of a meeting as a bunch of set pieces that are put together in a random order. Prepare for those scenarios and you will be ready no matter what happens. There are several things you can do to prepare for a meeting. Write down your goal for the meeting and how you can frame it for the other attendees. You are going to win meetings in the first five minutes, not in the last five minutes. Plan for dynamic changes in every meeting. Think of the things that you are most afraid of happening and prepare for them and you will feel much more confident going in. Think through the most interesting questions you want to ask the person on the other side of the table. Also think about some of the questions they might pose to you and how you can engage them in a compelling dialogue. Think about the aspects of relationship building and how you can show commonality. There is a lot of research that shows commonality correlates to likability and likability correlates to purchasing. Preparing for weeks is the most important thing to keep up your business development progress. The week interval is so ingrained in our minds that it's the perfect cadence for planning. Consider what actions you're going to take in the next week to make progress towards your goals or move a client through your pipeline. Rainmakers are the people that plan their weeks out and do a little bit each day to grow their business. Plenty of business owners end up in a roller coaster effect where when they get busy, they stop pushing business development forward, everything dries up. A quick recap on three major things learned from Kelley O'Hara. Mo retells the story of a company his team worked with and how they attacked a particular problem. The team figured out the three most important metrics to track and how those metrics improved over time. Learn the concept of the Give To Get and how to create a 60- to 90-minute strategic investment in a relationship. Mo's team picked a few Give To Gets to build on and included those in the metrics they tracked. In terms of business development hours spent each week, the organization saw a 710% increase in time spent in only a few short weeks. They also almost doubled the amount of meetings requested with a jump from 60% to 96% in acceptance rate. They also saw a decrease in the Give To Gets scheduled because they became so busy with work. Just by tracking a few key metrics can lead to some incredible, business transforming results. After getting through the first few months it can generate a huge amount of momentum. Mentioned in this Episode: bdhabits.com The Snowball System Dr. Anders Erickson on Freakonomics Radio Peak by Dr. Anders Erickson The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday Measurement Case Study

In a dynamic discussion, Kelley O’Hara, a celebrated soccer player with multiple Olympic and World Cup titles, shares her journey of resilience and focus. She highlights the power of controlling what you can in high-pressure situations, drawing parallels between athletics and business. Mo Bunnell applies Kelley’s insights to relationship-building and effective goal-setting. Together, they dive into the importance of tracking progress, cultivating a learning mindset, and overcoming challenges, transforming obstacles into opportunities for growth.