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Welcome to the scaling up h2o podcast the podcast where we scale up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems. I’m Tracy Blackmore, the host of this fantastic podcast, folks, I gotta tell you, I am so excited of what the scaling up h2o podcast has in store for you. There’s no doubt about it. I have a wonderful team, you got to hear from that team on episode 182. And again, I want to point out that I would have never recorded that episode had it not been from several requests from you the scaling up nation wanting to know what was involved in putting a podcast on each and every week, I thought that you would not be interested in that. Well, it’s a good thing that we don’t rely on what I think because so many of you wanted to hear about that. And when I did it, that was one of my favorite episodes. So I say all this because my team is fantastic. And I love being able to share how awesome my team here is with you. There is no way that I could do all of the things that you hear each and every week if I was doing everything on my own. In addition to making the podcast sound great, making sure that we have great guests, making sure that we’re always thinking ahead. Well, actually, that’s where I’m going, we’re always thinking ahead, we have a calendar. And we plan pretty much a quarter at a time we look at the entire year and we theme the year. But as you know from living in 2020, sometimes things change. But we look overall what the theme of the year is. And then we start looking to plan deeper into the quarter. Well, I just came right before recording this from one of those meetings. And I am just so excited about what my team brought to the table what we have in store for you. So stay tuned podcast is going to keep getting better and better and better. And of course you let us know what you want to hear on this podcast by going to scaling up h2o dot com. And navigating over to our show notes page is definitely going to help us bring that to you. A couple of other things that I want to make sure that you know are out there is we the scaling up h2o podcast along with the rising tide mastermind and the Association of water technologies is bringing you a business owners webinar series. So I want to let you know that Adam lean is going to be with us and he is going to help us understand our numbers. Folks, if you are in business, you have to understand your numbers. However, I don’t think anybody gets into business going after learning numbers. They’re not fun. They’re probably the last thing that you want to do. I know I teach math and people always dread it when I come up on stage to teach water treatment math. Well just like I tried to do Adam really makes
Sit fun, and he allows you to see the concepts behind the numbers. And why you need to know these things and makes it very simple for you to extract data from your numbers to help you make valuable decisions. We’re going to be holding that webinar may 28, at 11am. Eastern time. So if you want to register for that webinar, please go to scaling up h2o dot com forward slash business. Another thing that’s coming up actually, in my hometown here in Atlanta, the American Water Works Association in conjunction with the water environmental Federation is holding their utility management conference, as I said, it’s going to be here in Atlanta, August 1 through third, folks, this is an in person event, remember when we used to have those. So if you’re interested in that, if that’s the area of water treatment that you practice, I know, we’re all itching to go to conferences. I don’t know what their limit is, but you want to get your tickets early to make sure that you can attend. We’ll have links on our show notes page, so you can go directly there and learn all about that conference. Last week was this scheduled technical training for the Association of water technologies. This year, I was asked to do this sales training. And folks, I absolutely love being a salesperson. And I know some people out there and they hear me say that. And they think that being called a salesperson has a negative connotation to it. It drives up thoughts of that quintessential use car salesman. Well, folks, maybe that’s what sales was at one point of time, but I don’t think it is anymore. I think salespeople are more professional now. Because our customers are more professional now. Maybe at one point in time, our customers relied on everything they knew about industrial water treatment from us. Well, that’s not the case anymore. Somebody can find out anything they want to know about by simply going online. So I think it’s up to us to make sure we’re always at the top of our game. And we’re always trying to solve the client’s issues, rather than we’re trying to sell the customer a product. And I think that’s the difference. And I think that’s when people have that negative connotation that used car salesman in their head. That’s what they’re thinking of somebody is trying to sell me something I know, we all heard the expression. People love to buy, they hate to be sold. And that’s always great advice. But what do we actually do with that? One of my favorite authors is Simon Sinek. He wrote so many great books. And the one I’m going to talk about today that I think pairs so well with sales is start with why. And the whole premise around starting with y is how do we describe what it is that we do? Now every organization knows what they do for the company. That’s the products and services they sell. For the individuals in the company. These are the roles these are the jobs that they do. Now, some organizations actually know how they do what they do. And what I mean by that is these are the organization’s strengths, their values, their principles. I’ve spoken many times on this podcast about how important it is to have not only company core values, but your own set of personal core values. That’s what we’re talking about here. However, very few organizations know why they do what it is that they do. Now why is the purpose the cause for a belief that drives everybody in the company? So we talked about having a personal mission statement, this is your personal why you have a company mission statement or a company purpose. This is your company’s Why. Why do you get out of bed every morning? What is your organization’s Why? And probably here’s the most important question, why should any customer out there care and by the way, a Why is never about making money. That is always a byproduct of the actual Why? Now I love how Simon Sinek sets this up. He
gives us the image of three overlapping circles. So there’s a larger circle, a smaller circle within that. And then within that is a smaller circle. So three overlapping circles. And what he does is he puts the Y in the smallest inside circle. In the middle circle, he puts how, and and the outside circle he puts what so I hope you have that visual inside your head. Now here’s the challenge. Most of us communicate what we do from the outside in it means that we start with what we do before or if ever, we talk about the why we do it. So here’s an example of that. What we are a water treatment company. So this is me talking to our customers. The how we have expertise in water treatment, we make water better one drop at a time. Now the behavior that we want to drive is the message, let us do your water treatment. The problem is what and how do not inspire action. facts and figures make rational sense, but people don’t make decisions purely based on facts and figures. We wouldn’t sell any sports cars if that was the case, starting with what is what commodities do. And folks, we know that our industry is far superior than just selling it as a commodity. So let’s rework that. So visualize that circle again. But now, I want you to start from the inside out of the circle. So we’re going to start with why we exist to promote the stewardship of the world’s most valuable substance water. The how we optimize how water works in your system by promoting its longevity and efficiency. We reduce our customers operating cost and water usage. The what? We are a water treatment company, the behavior, let us do your water treatment.
Did that immediately grab you differently than what I read in the beginning? So there’s a reason for that. We are set up to respond better when we start with why. And here’s why the outside of the circle the what speaks directly to the neocortex. The neocortex is the newest part that’s been developed in our brain. It’s the homosapien brain, it’s responsible for all rational and analytical thought. It helps us understand facts and figures, features and benefits. The neocortex is responsible for me being able to speak to you right now, the middle two sections of the circle, the why and the how correspond to the part of the brain we call the limbic system. This is the part of the brain that drives our behavior, and more importantly, it drives our decision making. It’s also responsible for our feelings, like trust, and loyalty. But unlike the neocortex, the limbic brain has no capacity for language. This is the biological reason we find it difficult to put our feelings into words. Maybe that’s why we say things like I love you more than words can say. Or maybe just I don’t know, I can just tell you, it felt right. Or I had a gut feeling. Well, now you know where that comes from. It’s a feeling we get about a decision we have to make, that we struggle to explain that feeling comes from the limbic brain. And the neocortex allows us to rationalize that feeling into a behavior or a decision. And finally putting it into words our language. Communicating from the outside in, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information, like features, benefits, facts, figures, it simply doesn’t inspire human behavior, though. This is the reason that Simon Sinek says we have to start with why. And the Golden Circle is what he calls this mental image that I had everybody draw in their brains and the book that all of this comes from, is called start with y. So in order for this golden circle to work properly
You must have clarity of what your why is the discipline to continuously do your how the way that you’re supposed to do it, and the consistency of what it is that you do. He also goes on to say that one part of the circle the watch the how or the Why is not more important than any other part of the circle. It’s a balance between all three. But in order to get people to understand and make decisions better to speak to those gut feelings, starting with Why is how we do this. So folks, when you’re talking about selling something, I hope this helps you organize your thoughts. So you can demonstrate all the benefits that your product or service has to offer. But now you can do it in a way that’s going to drive action. And when you do that with the customers issue, your first priority and being able to solve that, folks, why wouldn’t you be honored to be called a salesperson, nation. Another thing that I like to talk about when we talk about sales? is measuring. What are you measuring as far as your activities and your results for sales? Now, I know you’ve heard this before, but we have different indicators, we have leading and lagging indicators, lagging analyze past performance, where leading indicators influence what the future performance is. Now, lagging indicators are a lot easier to gather, because they’ve already happened, we can run a report and we can see exactly what happened. But they are in the past. They don’t necessarily allow us to forecast what’s going to happen into the future. Whenever I teach sales, people always asked me what they need to measure. And that always leads to the conversation between leading and lagging metrics, I can record something but what’s the difference between leading and lagging metrics? Well, lagging metrics is probably what most of us record because it’s easier to get the data, we can run a report on it because it’s already happened. So it’s an indicator of past performance. Now, leading metrics are indicators of future performance. And I think these are the indicators that are key in a sales person’s success, because they know what is going to happen. Or they know what needs to change. So what’s going to happen? changes as well. So what are what are some of those things? Well, think of all the activities that you do? How many calls do you make? Well, you can measure that? How many emails do you send? You can measure that? How many posts do you do on social media? How many presentations do you do? Or how many surveys do you do? You can measure all of that? Folks, one of the best ways to sell to a new customer is to get a referral from an existing customer. So how many referrals are you getting? So when you’re doing that survey, how many of those surveys actually turn into a solution interview, I like to call it where we come back. And we’re able to talk with all the people that are involved in the decision making process. And then we’re able to hopefully close the deal. So how many of those types of presentations are you doing? How many closes? Are you doing? So I did four proposals this week. And I close to By the way, that’s a 50% closing ratio. That’s also something that you should track. Out of all of those things. I hope you see that we have to measure the activity, not just the results of the activity. Now here’s what makes that fun. Let’s say I did have a 50% closing rate. Well, who can I work with? Who has a higher closing rate? And do you know what the closing rates are in your office? I think it’s great to have friendly competition, because what you’re going to find is certain people do certain items better than other people. So why not learn from each other and really streamline what your process is. And you can use each other’s successes to help drive that so
So if somebody else in my office has a higher closing ratio than I do, maybe I go on some sales calls with them, maybe I do some roleplay with them, what do I need to do to get some information that obviously, I need to make my closing ratio better, I’m sure that person will want to help me. And then as my closing ratio goes up, well, it’s not just my success, it’s the success of that other person, perhaps the success of the team. So I hope you look at these numbers, that the numbers are really something to help us out with. And I know a lot of people think that it’s just mind numbing to report all of these numbers. And I will say I’ve seen better systems than others. But if you have a system of just an Excel sheet, if you mark it down each and every evening, folks, it’s not as bad as if you did it each and every month. But don’t just mark numbers down. Now I coach a lot of people with the rising tide mastermind, and outside of the rising tide mastermind. And something that I’ve seen people do is they turn in reports to their bosses. And it’s normally numbers like these. And when I asked them what they personally do with these numbers, they don’t do anything but turn them in. Well, folks, that’s valuable data, this could be a game for you where as you record these numbers, you now change something and you see how those numbers change. So I urge you if you’re not keeping track of your numbers to keep track of your numbers. And if you are keeping track of your numbers, and you’re not doing anything with that, or you’re simply just turning them into somebody that supervising you, folks, you can get better because of these numbers. Now, I will admit, I’ve seen better ways of tracking the numbers than others. And folks, if you’re not using a CRM to track these numbers, your your, I don’t wanna say you’re wasting your time, but you really are wasting your time on manually inputting this data, and then having to compile each and every calculation. There are so many CRMs out there. And I know you’re saying, well, Tracy, I can’t afford a CRM, my company’s not providing it for me, and I can’t afford to go out there and buy one. Well, folks, I’m going to take that right away from you, you don’t have that excuse anymore. There are so many CRMs out there that you can use for free. Yes, I said free. Now the goal is is that you’re going to get hooked on that CRM and then you’re going to want some of the more automated features that they have within their paid services. But I’m going to tell you, the free services are pretty robust for being free. Here are a couple of CRMs that you can look into if you’re looking for one. One is Monday, CRM. Pipe drive is another one. HubSpot is a very popular one. In fact, we had a HubSpot expert. Come on and speak with us on episode 139 Risa Gooding, and she talks all about CRM. So if this is something that interests you, I urge you to go to Episode 139 and listen to that. Another one is Zoho, and there’s probably dozens more folks, all those they will start you out with a free site. And tracking something is better than tracking nothing. I would love to hear if you can comment or send me a message on our show notes page, what you’re tracking and what successes that you’ve actually seen since you’ve been tracking it. nation, something I hope you have kept on track with is James’s challenge course if you’re not up to date, no worries, all of those you can find by going to the website scaling up h2o comm we have every single one listed there. Well, here’s another challenge from our friend James McDonald.
Hello scaling up nation. The next James’s challenge is we grow as an industrial water treatment professional drop by drop his
research risen or saturation or stability index, RSI. A month ago, the challenge was to research the Langella saturation index. Now the topic is RSI. Having noticed that two completely different waters can yield the same LSI with one being far more skill forming than the other
risner wanted an index that could more accurately determine whether a water would form scale or not. An interesting note, if you read wristers 1944 paper is he intentionally designed his two pH minus pH saturation equation to always give positive results for all waters. Quote, in order to eliminate the possibility of misinterpreting a positive saturation index as being non corrosive or scale forming in quote, be sure to share your experience on LinkedIn by tagging it with hashtag jc 21 in hashtag scaling up h2o. This is James McDonald. And I look forward to seeing what you share.
You know, I think one of my favorite things to teach is the LSI. The RSI and the psi the Langley or saturation index, the reasoner saturation index and practical or precarious scaling index. It’s one of those things that they say the exact same thing, they just go about it a little bit differently. And I I’ve talked about this before, and somebody asked me, Why is that one of my favorite water treatment, things to teach. And I finally figured it out and teaching math for the Association of water technologies. This was one of the first things that I decided I wanted to break down and teach the why. So we were talking about letting people know what the why was why we do what we do. Well, that’s how I teach math. I like to explain the why behind all the equations. And if you understand the why you’re now able to understand the equation, but more importantly, you’re able to understand the answer the equation gives you. So LSI RSI and psi were the first things that I really dove into, and started working backwards through all of the different water treatment calculations that we have to figure out what the Y was. So if you’re ever struggling with math, that’s something I want you to do. I want you to think about why the equation is set up the way that it is. I also want you to think about why you’re doing James’s challenge and you’re not posting it on social media, folks, you got to hashtag those things because I want to see them. We got two places to hashtag them. You can go to hashtag j c 21. And hashtag scaling up h2o. Folks, I hope this episode inspired you to look at your numbers a little bit differently, to look at how you explain what you do to people a little bit differently. And I definitely hope that it inspired you to tune into next week’s episode of scaling up h2o.
scale up nation I recently asked Chuck Hamrick CWT, what are some of the benefits that he has realized as being a member of the rising tide mastermind. Here’s what he said, actually, since we start I started with the rising tide group, our sales have probably went up around 25%. And a lot of it’s due the fact that it started to make me refocus and rethink about how I’m going to run the company. Things are running a lot smoother with all my guys and the ladies that work in our office and so forth. We learned a lot on you know, standard operating procedures, how to make sure they’re all written out. We’ve learned a lot from our books that we’re reading, like traction, and the 12 week. So it helps to be able to be better organized and to be able to make things run smoother in the organization. Well, as you can see, if you are a serious member of the rising tide mastermind, if you pour into people the group will pour into you and what Chuck just shared with us about the benefits of how his company has grown, how his team has grown. I know that’s because Chuck is doing the right things and I love that he credits part of those right things being some of the things that he learned within the rising tide mastermind. So folks, I urge you to learn more about becoming part of a group. It’s my hope that the group is the rising tide mastermind that you choose to become a member of. As Chuck just said, it pays for itself if you use the tools that we teach each other go to scaling up h2o dot com forward slash mastermind to see if this is the right group for you.