Forget Me Not: How To Be Memorable

You must learn how to be memorable. People want to do business with you forever.  They know you. They like you. They trust you. However, they have forgotten about you. You must correct this.

That is the focus of this week’s 60 Second Sales Show.

Here is a transcript of this show:

How to Be Memorable

Hi there everyone and welcome to the 60 Second Sale Show. I’m your host, Dave Lorenzo and today’s episode is titled Forget Me Not or How To Be Memorable. The reason we titled it that is because most sales professionals, most business leaders actually don’t take advantage of their greatest asset and that asset is their list of contacts. That’s right. Your list of prospects. Your list of clients and your list of evangelists. That’s where eighty percent of your new business should come from and you’re not taking advantage of that right now. We’re going to help you take advantage today on the 60 Second Sale Show.

Those of you who are just joining us or joining us for the first time, we started a couple of weeks ago broadcasting the recording of the 60 Second Sale Show live on Facebook. We do that every Wednesday. You can go to Facebook at thedavelorenzo, thedavelorenzo, the word T-H-E-D-A-V-E-L-O-R-E-N-Z-O all run together. Watch us record the show. Watch behind the scenes. Jump into the sausage factory and watch the sausage being made. Or if you prefer, you can listen to the podcast as it’s recorded all edited and pretty on Mondays. The podcast new episodes come out Monday at noon. The Facebook live show is done every Wednesday at nine thirty or as close as we can get.

I want to introduce you to our wonderful and talented producer, the person who makes everything happen behind the scenes. Her name is Nancy Popp. Good morning Nancy. How are you doing today?

Good morning. I’m doing great. How about yourself?

I’m doing absolutely fantastic Nancy. I’m excited about quite a few things this week. You know what, I want to hear what you’re excited about. Tell me something good Nancy.

I’m just excited for being in New York right now. It’s a great time you know. The weather’s really nice. The changes. The fall. I’m excited for the fall.

Fall is probably the best time of year in New York. The weather’s getting a little bit cooler. The city kicks into high gear with baseball playoffs which are coming up. I know Nancy here is super excited about that. You’ve also got football season that just started. I mean, what could be better then spending fall in New York? I’m with you. I would be super excited about that if I was there too. You know, a couple things I’m excited about this week. First I have to tell you, my son, we are huge baseball fanatics as you could tell from one of the things I said I would be excited about from being in New York.

My son is starting to get some big hits in baseball games. He drove in the tieing and go ahead run in his game last week. He’s seven years old and his hitting is really coming on strong. I’m super excited about that. I’m also really excited, those of you who join me on Instagram at thedavelorenzo on Instagram, really everything you need to know about me for social medical just type in the word thedavelorenzo and you’ll find me. It you’re with me on Instagram you’ve noticed that I’m doing push ups every day. Some of you may be familiar with this. This is, the hashtag is 22kill, K-I-L-L, and it’s the push up challenge.

I was challenged by my friend Doug Comet weeks ago, a couple weeks ago, to do twenty push ups a day. The reason we’re doing them is to support our troops and to honor the brave men and women who return from serving our country and they have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. You see on average twenty-two people, twenty-two people each day, twenty-two returning veterans commit suicide due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This viral activity, doing twenty-two push ups a day to honor our troops has generated a huge amount of awareness. If you go to Instagram look at any of the videos where you see me doing push-ups-there’s a website in there. There’s a link to a website that’s in there where you can go and donate and support the cause.

This started about a hear and a half ago. Believe it or not, this has generated so much awareness the average has actually come down over the course of the year from twenty-two a day as far as I understand from people who’ve commented on my Instagram page to less than twenty a day. Now one member of our armed forces committing suicide due to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder each day is too much so we’re going to keep working to generate awareness for the cause.

The reason I’m excited is not just because I feel like I’m supporting our troops and I’m doing something good but also, Nancy, you’re never going to believe this. I’m losing my man boobs. I had probably like, yeah, I had probably like an A cup at the point where I started and now I’m two weeks in and my chest is actually flattening out. I’m also running a little bit, which I think helps as well but people are making less fun of me and I feel a lot better about myself. That’s another reason for me to be super excited this week.

I’m proud of you Dave.

Thank you so much. Let me tell you, when, the next time you see me when you see how fit I am you’re going to be even more proud. Today the main reason why I’m excited to be with you all is because I’m going to give you something that you can use immediately. You can jump on this right now. It’ll fill a big hole in your business and it’s going to generate more income for you as a business leader or sales professional.

This strategy that I’m going to teach you right now is something that I was completely and totally remiss. I wasn’t doing this. I was about a year and a half into my own business. I had been successful other places. You guys know all those stories and if you don’t know them, go back to the previous podcasts. You can hear all my stories about places I’ve worked. I had been successful in other businesses and I was missing out on something. It was pointed out to me and it changed my business life forever.

Here’s the thing. We meet people all the time at networking events or you’ll do some speaking and you’ll meet people at a speaking engagement. Maybe dozens or hundreds of people. You’ll write an article and people will reply telling you how great the article was or they’ll comment and tell you how fantastic they thought your writing, they think your writing is. You don’t capitalize on that in any way except to say thank your to shake their hand or to accept the pat on the back and go about your business.

Well, that’s a missed opportunity. So too is the missed opportunity from the client that you took great care of last year. That you sold that big engagement to. That you sold that large order to. Then just moved on and forgot about it. You didn’t stay in touch with them. Missed opportunity. Here’s how you’re going to capitalize on that opportunity. You have to go back and think to yourself there’s one thing. There’s one thing your clients give you before they ever give you their money and that one thing is they give you their trust. They give you their trust.

That’s the thing that carries through after the money is long gone. That client that you’ve taken extra special care of. Those folks who you dazzled in your speaking engagement. The people that you meet and you connect with at a networking event. Those folks now, they know you and they trust you. Hopefully they like you as well. But you’re not able to capitalize on it beyond the point where you had that initial contact or where you closed that first deal.

Here’s how you can capitalize on it. There are three opportunities for you to connect with and stay in touch with these people. Think about this for a moment. Think about the most precious, the most treasured relationship in your life. Maybe you have someone who’s a significant other to you. A spouse or a boyfriend or a girlfriend. Or maybe it’s just a family member, a brother or a sister or just a friend who’s so important to you. Think about how frequently you’re in contact with them. How frequently you interact with them.

Now, I know with my spouse, I talk to my spouse, my wife, multiple times a day. Carrie and I constantly talk from the minute we get up until the minute we go to sleep. In fact, my home office, the studio that I’m in right now, is in my home and I’ll walk out of the studio after I’m done recording this episode of the 60 Second Sale Show and Carrie will be right out there and we’ll have a conversation. We talk dozens and dozens of times each day. You, with the people who are special to you or important to you in your life, you probably communicate with them multiple times each day.

Now let me ask you, would your relationship with them get better if you stopped communicating with them? Let’s say you talked to them today and then you didn’t talk to them for, oh, I don’t know, six months or a year. I know my relationship with Carrie would be, it would be a disaster. If I didn’t talk to her for six months or a year she would stalk me and eventually she would track me down and really be angry and that would not be a pretty sight for me or for anybody around us.

Relationships are built on a foundation of trust and frequency of communication increases trust. Let me say that again because it’s really really important. Frequency of communication increases trust. Think about that client to whom you sold a huge order just a year ago. Sold the order. You probably took everybody in the office out for drinks. You got a lot of pats on the back. Maybe you even won some sort of award or you used your commission or the money that you took home after the sale to buy something really nice for yourself. All of that’s fantastic. Then what happened?

You forgot about that person for a year. A whole year went by. Now it’s time for you to make your quota or you need a little extra money and you’re looking around for that extra money. You’re thinking to yourself, “I got to go sell somebody brand new. How am I going to do this?” You don’t have to sell somebody brand new. There’s somebody out there who already trusts you who probably has a need for an additional product or an additional service but you just forgot about them.

All right. Here’s how you’re going to stay in touch with them. The first thing I want you to do, so I want you to think about how you can stay in touch with these folks on an annual basis. Once a year how can you stay in touch with these folks? Some companies have a holiday party each year and they connect with their customers during the holidays. The customers come over. Food and beverages. Maybe a little entertainment. Everybody has a good time. There’s the spirit of good cheer in the air. Fantastic, right?

I would encourage you in addition to the holiday party or instead of the holiday party to pick your slowest time of the year and do a client appreciation event. Invite your clients over to your office. If you’re an independent sales professional or you’re a sales professional at a big company you can find a place to have a party to invite your clients. Whether you have ten or twenty or thirty or a thousand. Invite them over. Have some drinks. Give a little talk saying how much you appreciate them and thanking them. Don’t pitch them on any business. Let them introduce themselves to one another or better yet you introduce them to one another so they can do business with each other. Connect with them at least once a year in person to show your appreciation. Even if they haven’t done business with you in years, invite them to that annual event.

Now the second opportunity you have to connect with these folks is on a monthly basis. There are a couple of things you can do on a monthly basis to stay connected with your clients, with your evangelists, with people who are out there promoting your services and with the folks who are just really really engaged dedicated people to you and your company. People who’re your highest level prospects.

Each month you have an opportunity to wish someone well for a specific holiday. I encourage you to send out a holiday card each month. Now, so you don’t think this is an idea that’s brand new to me I’m going to tell you that I stole it from a guy named Joe Girard. Joe Girard is known as, in the Guinness Book of Records, the greatest salesman of all time. He was a car salesman and he pioneered this strategy. Here’s what Joe did. Each month he would send out a card to his past clients. The card would have some sort of a picture on it and it would just have a handwritten note from him inside that said, “I like you. Joe Gerard.” It would be personalized at the top.

Now you don’t have to do that. What you can do is you can wish them well for a holiday each month and I’ll give you an example. Obviously you know the holidays like Thanksgiving. Send out a Thanksgiving card in November and a holiday card in December. Well in January there’s New Year’s so you can wish people a Happy New Year. Send it out the second week of January when people are all done receiving their cards. In February, my favorite holiday is Ground Hog Day. You can send out a card with a cute little ground hog poking his head out of the hole and it can say inside, the inscription could say something like, “I hope you don’t see your shadow. Here’s to an early spring. Hopefully your business is springing up with more profit for you. Give me a call if I can ever be of help.” Sign your name and you’re done. That’s February.

March, there’s the luck of the Irish. St. Patty’s Day is in March. You can send out a card with a four leaf clover on it and say, “You don’t need the luck of the Irish to help you with your business. I’m here to do that.” And put your name on it. You get the idea. In April, April showers or spring rebirth, renewal. May is Memorial Day so you can honor our troops with a card and send it out to your clients, your evangelists and to your prospects. In June there’s Flag Day or the beginning of summer. Grass is on the field, let’s play baseball. That type of things.

July, declare your independence. August is the dog days of summer. Don’t let the dog days of summer get you down. September, back to school. Everybody loves back to school. October, obviously Halloween and then November we started this whole thing off with Thanksgiving. Every month there’s your opportunity to stay in front of your clients with a holiday card. I’ll tell you the strategy works regardless of whether you’re in business to business sales or business to consumer sales. Everybody appreciates the recognition.

Okay. Now, if you want to stay in touch with people on a frequent basis and generate tons of business, here’s the strategy that knocks the ball out of the park. This is the home run right now. Weekly emails. Write about a topic that’s in the news. Write about a book that you read or a movie that you’ve seen. Write about events that are going on in the community. Do some educational pieces from time to time. Vary your topics each week and send out a weekly email newsletter to everyone on your list.

Not everyone will read it. Only twenty percent of the folks will read it. But those twenty percent are the most important to you because they’re the most engaged people on your list. They’re the people you want to connect with the most. They’re the people who are the most valuable to you. They are most likely to refer business to you. They are most likely to do business with you again. You stay top of mind with them and you will reap the benefits.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Dave, that’s a lot of work. An email newsletter once a week. Well, it only has to be about three hundred or four hundred or maybe five hundred words. You can dictate it into a transcription software and have it transcribed and sent out if you want. It couldn’t be any easier. You can speak five hundred words in ten minutes. It’s so easy. Just talk about what’s on the top of your mind. Write about something that’s going om in the community. Do a book review, a movie review, and occasionally educate your clients and just remind them that they have someone in their family who does what you do and this will result in a ton of business for you.

My clients who do this, who do the weekly newsletter strategy, weekly email newsletter strategy on average get eighty percent of their business off their weekly email newsletter list. That’s phenomenal. Eighty percent of their business. Imagine right now you’re not doing this and you can up your business by eighty percent. Who wouldn’t sign up for that? My friends, you are crazy if you don’t do this. I’m going to recap these strategies for you again because they’re so important. They’re so powerful.

Number one, the annual event. We call it a client appreciation event. Do it during your slowest time of year. You can invite people into your office. Bring in some food, some drinks, some entertainment. You can do it in a restaurant. Be as big or as reserved as you want but recognize people once a year.

Second strategy, monthly. Send them a monthly card. Phenomenal. Huge impact. Monthly cards. You can automate that whole process. You can go to any print shop and they will automate the process for you. They’ll do the printing and mailing. You can go online to a service like SendOutCards. SendOutCards will automate it for you. Just Google automated card delivery services and you’ll be amazed at the people who are out there who will take this over for you and you can put it on autopilot.

Finally your weekly email newsletter. You can use a service like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Icontact, GetResponse, any of these services. Put the newsletters in. Format them. Send them one day a week. Same day, same time. The business will come rolling in. You have a hole right now in your business. This strategy will help you plug that hole. It’s powerful. It’s phenomenal. Do it and reap the benefits today. This is probably the one strategy I tell everyone, if you can only implement one strategy in your business this would be it.

My email newsletter list for me is gold. It’s absolute gold. I never miss a week. Every Wednesday at noon my email newsletter goes out and every Wednesday afternoon the money comes rolling in. All right, speaking of money rolling in, we talk about a business topic each and every single week so that I can help you make even more money rolling in. Today I think Nancy has a question that she was able to source for us. So Nancy, tell me about the question that you have for us this week.

All rightly. My good friend Nate, he just graduated from NYU Business School. He wanted to know, he said, “Business is oftentimes a male dominated industry. As society continues to change what is the best way for both women and men to open up the field and achieve gender equality? Can we achieve gender equality in business?”

All right. Well thanks Nancy and thank you Nate for that question. Congratulations on graduating from NYU. It’s a great question. You know, one of the things that is hot in the news right now because we’re in the middle of the election season is gender equality. We have a candidate running for President on the Democratic side. She’s the first woman candidate ever and Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side we have Donald Trump. This is, the gender question is one that is thrust to the fore front because of this.

Here’s something that’s interesting about what we’re seeing in the political climate now. What we’re seeing in the political climate now is people are talking about the person who’s best qualified. Best qualified to be President. They’re talking about that because of the credentials I think of Hillary Clinton and also because of Donald Trump’s credentials. Donald Trump comes from the business world. He’s got no experience in politics or foreign affairs. Hillary Clinton has spent her entire career in politics and spent the last six years prior to running for President after taking a year off, spent six years prior to that as Secretary of State working on foreign affairs.

There’s a question as to who’s better qualified and there are great arguments being made on both sides. I see this as something that’s analogous to business right now. I think in this day and age there’s still some bias toward men and we see that in pay. Any time you do a pay survey you see that women are, for whatever reason, compensated at a lower level than men. However, things are changing. Things are improving. I think part of this is because women historically have been raised to be less promotional. They don’t promote themselves as well as men do.

There are a lot of women out there who feel like it’s not their place to talk about their skills or to brag about their accomplishments. I think that’s just wrong. I think women are, women need to promote their skills as well as men and they need to brag about their accomplishments as well as men and I think we need to embrace the fact that if you don’t talk about your accomplishments, nobody will ever know about them. Now society will have to catch up. Society will have to adjust. Men who brag are known as promotional and women who brag are known as pushy.

I don’t think you need to worry about that any longer. I think if you’re going to be labeled as pushy as a woman, your going to be labeled as pushy regardless of whether you brag or not so you need to brag. You need to talk about your accomplishments. You need to force the issue of pay. Now, for the business world’s part, businesses need to do a better job of recognizing that talent comes in all different shapes, sizes, colors and genders and the business world needs to be more sensitive to the fact that women can be just as good if not better executives, chief executives as men.

You see it now all over the place. You see women executives who are super successful. Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook is one of them. There are women everywhere right now who are forcing this issue to the forefront but they shouldn’t have to. They really shouldn’t have to. In terms of Nate’s question, will we ever achieve gender equality? I think as women are thrust into the forefront in more prominent roles, I think you’re going to start to see more and more women embracing these roles and some of the stereotypes that women are subjected to will begin to break down.

Certainly the gender barrier being shattered with a major party having a women nominee for the first time. I think that’s fantastic and I think as we get into presidential debates you’re going to start to see people evaluate these two candidates based on their own qualifications and gender is not going to be an issue at all. If it is an issue it’ll be an issue for a minority of people rather than for a majority of people.

Nate, very directly, I think it’s a long road but i think we’re making some progress. I think the responsibility is on the business world to recognize that talent comes in all different shapes, sizes, colors and genders. It’s also incumbent upon each of the candidates who are candidates for not only political office but candidates for promotion in business to be more assertive and to promote themselves without shame. Unabashedly promote themselves so that they can be recognized for their true talent.

Don’t play into the stereotype. Whether your a man or a woman, you have to promote yourself because if you don’t, no one will know how really good you are. Nate, thank you for the question. Nancy, thank you for sharing the question with us. This is the 60 Second Sale Show and my name is Dave Lorenzo. You can find us each week on iTunes. You can find us at davelorenzo.com and for the second time you can now find us on Facebook live. We do this show live each Wednesday at nine thirty or as close as we can get and the show is broadcast. It’s released on iTunes every Monday at noon.

Go back and listen to the past episodes and I welcome you here each and every single week. Until next week I’m Dave Lorenzo and I’m saying I hope you make a great living and live a great life.

Go behind the scenes of this episode of the 60 Second Sales Show. Follow the link below to the Facebook Live video recording from inside the studio behind the scenes when we recorded this episode.

How to Be Memorable: Behind the Scenes