Blueprint to $1.5 Million In New business (Copy this guy to become successful)

Hey guys, welcome back to yet another episode of Top Billers Toolkit where me and my twin brother interview top billers from all around the globe to unlock the secret to their success. Today's guest is Adam Tiberius. Adam brings in 1.5 to $2 million worth of new business every single year. At 22 years old, he managed to close 100 new accounts for his company over a two year period. At 24 years old, he's now gone out to conquer the US. He's absolutely obsessed with his craft. Today we're going to be speaking about the exact BD strategies that Adam uses in order to win 1.5 to $2 million worth of business every single year. We're going to be talking about market mapping and how vital this is to Adam's success. We're also going to be talking about how Adam has managed to systemise his BD strategies to such a degree that a recruitment graduate has come into his business and managed to build $700,000 in one year. Adam is an absolute beast, a fountain of knowledge and for his age, the wisdom this dude has is absolutely mind blowing. As usual, grab a cup or glass of wine depending on when you listen to this. Let's get into it shall we? Hey Adam, how you doing mate? Great thank you. How you doing son? Very good. Thank you for coming dude. I have seen you on another podcast. I've seen the amazing work you did so I had to hunt you down. And try and get you on the pod. So thank you for coming today mate. I really appreciate it. Nothing so awesome. Let's get into the first question which we ask every guest which is what's the number one tool in your toolkit where there will be a mindset strategy or software. What would you say Adam? I think I have to go with strategy and the reason for that is when it comes to software you can always iterate and improve on software. I think with mindset you can either write mindset you find anyway but when you try to build a team oftentimes that can be improved upon the thing with strategy is that what you decide to do now is going to impact you in two three five 10 years time if it compounds. So super important you get that right from the start. Love that mate. You are the first guest in a very long time that's chosen something other than mindset Adam. So got a tip my hat to you. I think mindset is the easy way out right. It's every you know of causing a good mindset with anything. Yeah but I think mindset means different things to different people. Yeah that's a great point mate. And going back to strategy you said if you don't have the strategy the right strategy which me and Ben know all too well of running running our own business. I completely agree with you but you said that if you don't have the right strategy it can impact you you know one two three years down the line was there a point in your career and where you were like where this became most apparent where you were like hey this is the biggest thing I need to focus on and here's why. Yeah it would be back when I first started doing business development so back then is we have an amazing internal database assistant right in the UK where I first started to work for those markets for 20 30 years or a long time. And when I initially went through you know the first basic mapping that everyone does not first started BD. I noticed that the majority of these companies we know about for a decent period of time you know for most of the time during us working that space. But we hadn't actually done the consistent outreach to them over a period of time so if we would have gone back right from day one you know 20 30 years ago and we decided these are the companies we're going to work with these topics of it we're going to work with this is how we're going to approach them. And we did that for about 10 years we've been in a different position than we are now so we kind of fixed that you know so three four years ago we've been that's what's an artist I opened up the US office open up a European division but if we got that right from the start we would have been able to do that a long time ago. Interesting so the just to confirm what I got there was the consistent outreach over long periods of time to the same accounts would have been the biggest needle mover Adam is that what you. There's there's that and also picking out which of those markets is going to give us the biggest the biggest bonds right across across that period so with anything within you know starting within our space it's all about compounds. So if you change your strategies specifically around markets specifically around roll type of the business you know where your people are it it can take you know two three four years for someone to become properly specialist within their sub niche and within their roll type. So if that changes frequently handle that right from the start all that time you're spending investing in those people and investing in your brand in that market investing in those kind of relationships and database and access information. If that changes to frequently then a lot of it's wasted you keep going back to square one so that's why I think it's super important in the right from the start. Interesting and I'm guessing you found the you were doing or you you observed the opposite people were kind of had a bit of a scatter gun approach they were shifting changing my right and saying that Adam that's what you observing. Yeah I think I'm super common though right I think there's a lot of shiny objects when it comes to this industry. There's shiny new markets that seem super appealing before you work in them and it's typical 360 bill especially in today's market where some markets are more turbulent than others you know you're looking at your call from four to results you might think try to I've gone down the last couple of courses maybe I've got this wrong. Often times you see people pivot way too quickly into way too many different directions and then you don't actually make use of the compound you really need to have a brand in the space to know the customers in the space to have enough candidate access all the things you need to actually deliver a good service to the end customer. You end up losing because you're chasing you know full gold or the next shiny thing so that's also why I see that happen all the time in lots of businesses so getting it right from the start stick into your guns and following it through generally speaking is what I advise. Love that I want to jump into a bit about your story Adam because when you told when you told me your story and your age I have to say me and I mean this with the greatest respect like I had no idea how young you were and how much you've accomplished at your age is quite amazing. But can you can you bring me back to the decision of moving to the US at 22 and then you building a team from scratch and you've gone on to do amazing things since then but can you just take us back for people that don't know your journey because I'm just interested in learning a bit more about that. Yeah sure so I started I started 19 in the business and it was a typical 360 business. At that time you've got to pitch your life was like I was living next to a train station in this awful it's all apartment horrendous and I look just grin and so when you're in that environment and you're in recruitment really you're given an opportunity to change that right so. I went through that process and you know I was in the office at that point from sort of 7 to 7 working weekends and the reason for that is when you're in that tiny little hole and you're on about 16 round year base salary as an apprentice it's like well you can't really go out and you have to really want to stay at home so it gave me a lot of early motivation soon to make some impact to make some change so that allowed me to really push forward in my first 18 months in my career and really. I focus on how can I improve my life that's by onboarding you know a good amount of high quality accounts I can make some money out of and that was the original motivation after doing that and going through effectively a process of speaking to a lot of external coaches and improving my internal BD processes that then led me to doing the first full time BD role in the business where across the UK and the EU I onboarded about 100 accounts during that time. About sort of two years for various people in the business and that's where we got a lot of our standards in terms of you know while we onboard business the way that we do. Why we go after certain markets why work at certain fees why work with certain exclusivity that was really based in during that period of having hundreds and hundreds of discovery calls and getting things wrong. If you can drive that sort of step by step processes is how I was able to do that now at that point I you know I think once you do a kind of accounts in that space it was kind of done for me as I was the next one site to 500 at that point it kind of gets boring and I was sitting there I thought my director Liam about you know where the growth is and there really is no market in the world for us except the US. In terms of the volume the scale the size of the fees out there the vast majority of businesses that we work with the SMEs and good size SMEs is just rings and rings and rings to go through. It's a completely different landscape to the rest of the world and when you're looking to try and grow quickly with opportunity you don't have the same barriers that you have in Europe or APAC. Into the language in terms of currency in terms of cultural change it's very much one large country despite what they say the state is on that different. in each other. They're all pretty similar. So the opportunity was so vast. I went to Liam and I said, I want to do this and I'm maybe going to do this with you, right? And set up the subsidiary business. So I'm going to try and do it by myself. And he said, well, let's go out the shop and walk around. I know let's have a look. So he went down, we had an amazing time. You know, absolutely fell in love with, with South End Charlotte and this region. I was like, this is definitely what I want to do. And because of the historic success I've had, you know, in the UK and EU, I knew I could, I could on board accounts. I've done that for a long period of time. I looked at the markets in terms of the volume of potential customers in our core markets in the United States and it was vast, it was vast. So I knew given our conversion metrics that we had in Europe, that it wouldn't be immensely difficult to do the US market, but at that point, it's guessing. So it just took a bit of a leap of faith originally to get that going before I actually seen the outcome. Epic, mate. That's wicked. Got so many questions to ask based off that Adam. But I want to go back to the UK for a second when you, when you brought out a hundred accounts in two years, did you say Adam? Yeah. Which is insane. How were you doing your business development then? Like, what was the can you take us through a typical, a typical process that you would do to win a new account? Just so other recruiters thinking how the hell did Adam do a hundred counts in two years? How did you do that? Yeah. So a lot of that came around the mentality of what an account was, which is important first before I go through that process because I remember so, I remember what I do. I used to think, my very first meeting in the business, and I was a resorcer, someone brought up a couple of different Siemens. Now we all know Siemens, right? Huge OEM Blue Ship business. And I remember thinking in that point, I'd love to bring in an account like Siemens. And that's generally speaking the mentality of a lot of recruitment consultants, and it's chasing the blue ships. Now the way I was able to onboard so many accounts in such a short period of time, that quality accounts that were making us money, was redefining what does a good company look like, right? For us. It's not the shyness company in the world. It's not. We're talking about regional or nationwide SMEs where you can reach the decision maker straight away. We're talking high cash flow businesses that have recurring revenue, their stable businesses, and doing what I call maintenance highest. So we welcome Field Service. A lot of we do is Field Service. So in the UK, you might have a Field Service here at 40. They might be going out there and fixing some type of medical device. And they're going to lose between 10 to 20% of those stock of year. That's just the way it works, right? Just general churn. Wow. These small businesses generally speaking don't get as much attention by the recruitment world because they're not shy. It's very stable, very boring business. But the cause of the nature of that business, they need these people constantly to come in. And if you have a really solid candidate strategy, you can deliver very quickly for those customers and they've not had that level of service before and it's really a need. You can go in there, you can sell that pretty quickly, you can select directly to the main owner of that business, convert them and be working four to eight jobs for them a year exclusively. So the process of that was in mapping out how many companies like this can I find? So we call them score two or three companies depending on the size. And then we know based on the volumes and our historic conversions that for every 100 score, two or three companies that we find, we can onboard 10 of those exclusive over a 12 month period. So then that point is just find more these two or threes, stick them through the process and go for a minute and that will then spit out 10. That's it. That's so interesting. It's such a common thing to start with like, hey, what was the BD tool? What's the message you're sending? But you kind of pulled it back and started with the market mapping and it sounds like the market mapping was really the foundation to everything choosing a market that wasn't as shiny but was actually more profitable and easier to win. Am I right in saying that? Yeah, I think, yeah, yeah, it is that. I think at the end of the day, a lot of, I think it's a nature of our business where a lot of people are very self-involved with some degree about the markets they work in, you know, they think very sexy spicy markets are the way to go and that's what excites them and they want to have those logos on the website on LinkedIn. But at the end of the day, you know, we're here to solve people's business problems and the people with problems generally speaking are not going to be a blu-chip companies because they've got those solved internally. I mean, it seems like they've got some serious work to do. They should have already had that fixed internally, right? It's those mid-sized businesses where they have great cash flow, they're really historic, you know, but perhaps because they're, you know, 40 people, people haven't heard of them, right? It might be a great business, but they haven't invested in marketing, they haven't invested in staffing in general. They used to go a lot through word of mouth, right? And that's changed a lot of the last five years in terms of that actually working for these businesses. So you're actually going out there and talking to people that need your help, that need your service, not ones that you want to work for. And I think there's a slightly different mindset shift when it comes to, you know, why you would work with a company in general and then what your purpose is as a business. Yeah, I love that. I'd love to go into how, so you've picked this market, you can see it's profitable, you can see a lot of potential there, Adam. How did you then identify these people? Let's say you're kind of going to the BD process. How did you identify these businesses? Was it just like using Zoom info? Was there something a little bit more intricate? Like how did you identify these businesses? Yeah, so that's changed. So the way we used to do it is we used to, we love to build service again, so field service like most specialist industries, once you're in the industry, you don't really leave. And we noticed this on candidate CVs, right? They've been in field service for 20 years. So what we did is we looked through every single field service person, modeling team, not only at their current experience, but all their past experiences. So if you're a manager, we used to have someone doing that manually, I'm putting that in the sheet. Then we used some scraping tools to do that. So we'd normally end up with something like 100,000 lines of data. So this is like the company name, the job title, whatever. Once we take out to do because it's generally speaking, something like 10,000, 20,000 companies. And then I used to sit there every night, manually going through those and then spitting them out. So that's how I did. That's the best way of doing it because in theory, even these school businesses, they might have, you know, a handful of people on LinkedIn, but can be pretty safe to assume that at least one person on LinkedIn has that company name somewhere in their experience, right? Might be a previous role, might be the current role, but that was the only way that I found doing it 100% correct. Now, there's pros and cons of that. You can imagine me looking through 20,000 lines of data is pretty soul-bestering. But it's how we got those outcomes pretty early. When we found recently though, is some of the M&A tools that are available are getting better and better and better at finding the quality of these businesses and the data is significantly better than the recruitment tools that people use. And the reason for that is the quality or the barrier for quality is way higher in that industry than it is for us. Because if you imagine, you know, the threshold for a company like an investment firm buying another company is a lot higher than a recruitment company working with someone, right? Yes, much, much higher. So generally speaking, what you find is you could be a lot more restrictive in terms of your searches. The data quality come back is a lot better. So we use a lot of those tools now. And we can get about 60 to 80% of that 10,000 cut down. That would take me, you know, three months of evening is to get done properly. We can sort of get most of the way there within two weeks using these new tools, which I have my pros and cons with. I'm very, very focused on getting it 100% right. And so it's very hard for me to pull back from that. But when you're looking to scale and test the buoyancy in let's say 50 markets, I can't do that 50 markets. It's just not feasible timeways. So we are able to use these new tools that have come out to effectively build out, let's say, 30 markets within, you know, Montalso, do some buoyancy testing, pick out the three to five most weren't ones and then run with those. Love that. I've got to ask, sorry, before Sam drum to go ahead, probably everyone is thinking the same thing. What are these tools, Adam? You mind sharing some of the ones that you used? Yeah, there's Invent.ai. That's a really good one. I recommend that. Invent.ai. Okay. How do you spell that? Sorry, Adam. That's I and the, I think the Swedish company. That's one to look at. It's super cheap. It's actually really on the price because it's a new entry. That's one I was certainly looking at. That's the main one that I'll go into. So today that's probably the one that if you want to do this to start with. Cool. It's really easy to use. And the AI on it is pretty decent. Right. So I've, I've, I've asked a lot of how a lot of AI in the recruitment world is pretty dire. And the, the reason for that is the issue they have with the recruitment AI is it's relying on candidates in putting correct data, which they never do. Obviously, they're people, but on the M and A side, it's very different in the data sources they pull from. So to more accurate, interesting. Interesting. Great. I'll go and plug it. Yeah. I'm going to check that out as well. Adam, so thank you. I'm sure everyone else is. That's great. Um, cool. So we kind of went to market mapping. I just want to go back to the BD process. So you started with market mapping. You used to do it a bit more or a lot more manually back then. But you said something that, um, that sparked my interest that a lot of your BD was candidate led Adam and Mara and saying that. So to get through to decision makers, would you find good candidates and then spec them? How did you get hold of these decision makers? No, it was, it was the opposite. So we didn't do any candidate led outreach whatsoever. Wow. Oh, wow. That's, that's crazy. I've got to hear this. This sounds interesting. Yeah. So all of the prospects we do is problem based. And for those small businesses that you work with, you know, I spoke about how the maintenance hires, they need four to 80 year. They have the same challenge all the time. And the challenge they have in our industry is finding people who willing to travel, finding people who aren't in a costume and I'm going to do that because they got fixed price on the service contracts. And then people who have a short ramp time, because if they lose someone, they've got a service contract and come in and fix it straight away. So these are evergreen problems. And again, in this particular market, they're always around. So it meant that by buying the best data for that owner, those score two or three companies constantly speaking about those problems, specifically using coal-cool based outreach. We were able to then get about a 10% conversion rate on our outreach from outreach to meeting. And then once they're in the meeting, because of how niche that was and where we done that mapping in the UK at that time, I've got 50% conversion rate. It's dropped down to about 40% now to, to new account in. But because we focus on specifically the problems that owner face, we knew they were consistent. We knew a lot of other people were talking about them because finding filled service for SME just not very sexy. So you know, when you're talking about it, they actually, you know, most of the time, the first guy to say that to them, men, our conversion rates were so high there. And the other reason we don't really leave with the candidates is I'm very accounts focused, not job focused, so the way that we map out the size of our teams, the size of our markets is based on the volume of accounts in the space, the average fees, the fill rates and the vacancies per account per year on average. Right. So if you go in with a candidate, what you're immediately doing is you'll certainly sell it effectively as a CB shop. Well, here's someone that's going to interview them. Whereas in order to get an 80 to 100% fill rate, which we have in our contingent teams, you have to be able to sit down with the customer and basically tell them why they can't get what they want and what all terms of options they can get. Right. And if you leave with a candidate each time, it's very difficult to position yourself to have that conversation. If you're just saying interview this guy, talk to this guy, this guy's interesting, rather than you face this problem eight times a year, let's solve it forever. That's pretty fascinating. Yeah. So you're essentially creating a stronger relationship with clients because you're going in and and positioning yourself as the problem solver as opposed to the CV giver. So to speak, which is really, really interesting, small detail, but really, really interesting. I've got to ask Adam, you're obviously very problem centric. You obviously understand the pain points that you're addressing with these decision makers. What did you say on the code call? Did you pick up and like, you call call them what are the first 60, 30 to 60 seconds that you say in order to get them interested? That's that's changed so much because in the UK, I used to do the stand, but this is a cold call, you know, hang up now, give me 30 seconds. Like that classic one. Yeah. I love it. It was always so fun to use that. I remember in our in our UK sales team for doing the outreach. It's always more fun when you've got people around you to do, you know, really silly things like, you know, get a jumper. It's this is a cold call stuff like that. It's just, you know, we just like throw silly things out there for the US market, generally speaking, I found that didn't work at all. And that was something that I had to fix immediately. Yeah. I'm not sure why perhaps my I had a very blunt, probably tell a lot of times when I was doing a lot of my cold outreach to the UK. And to this, like my ICP at that point was like 60 year old Dave, you know, who run the service team in the UK, very direct guys work really well, you know, cutting through the bullshit. It's rather a small show. Yeah. It's a good find. Like, does he want? But, you know, it comes straight through that work. Excellent. I found speaking to the American market is a lot on the throne off. Perhaps it was tone like 90% of the cold call open is based on tone. So I changed that slightly, right? So I'd either call them and say, hi, I spoke to this person in this space. Yeah, this one talking to you. I would say hi, this Adam, but I would try and what was the different things I found a software approach in the US was much better than my very, very blunt, very rough. Approximately. Yeah. I honestly would have thought the opposite for some reason. I would. You asked, but it's really interesting. And so what did you learn? So I go ahead, Adam. I was going to say like, it got to the point I had to get a USB sales coach. I was like, what is going on? I was like, what is what's wrong with this? Because it just wasn't, I wasn't getting the same conversion raise. And it was just the opener because the rest of it was fine. As soon as you go from the open, you run through the three problems, ask of which problem has, you know, is most common in their world. They'll tell you you stretch the problem. You ask about impact, stretch the impact, ask if you know, wrap up on a bow, ask them if it's worth solving. They'll say, yes, any book of meetings. So once you get through the opener, it's exactly the same. Wow. Yeah, I just found that first bit different. So anything, is that what the sales coach said, Adam, or did you kind of come up with that conclusion on your own from the cause? Well, yeah, I mean, the guy who I worked with, he'll just say, yes. I was like, okay, fine. And so I tried a couple of his ones. I wasn't too much for the fan of them, but it was more, I've always found that because obviously no one I'd work with in the business had done the US market. It was a lot unknown to some degree. And whilst most of it is exactly the same, you don't really feel that your guts and to gone through it. So you start questioning yourself all the time. Like, is this wrong? Do I need to change this? Does there are cultural difference? All that's wrong, by the way. It was probably my tone. I look back, but I think it was more having the sounding board, someone who'd done it before that way. I found most useful. Interesting. So just to confirm, because I find this absolutely fascinating, 90% of the coal coal stayed exactly the same from UK to US. The biggest thing you change was the tone for US. Yeah, that's so fascinating. And it was it was specifically with tone. Was it just coming across less, um, blunt and more sit like more empathetic? What was the tone change? If you had to kind of describe it, Adam, probably happier, like I was smiling. Interesting, pretty honest to you. I think I remember listening back to my teams, like sales calls in the UK. And when they sounded too happy, go lucky, like the, with our ICP, they'd come down straight away. I don't know what it is, but they're amazing. It's UK thing. UK, yeah, so fun. That's the typical UK. The club is. Yeah. I'm joking. Why are you so happy to be miserable? Right. That's, that's kind of the way. It's like, so funny. I think, yeah. So I think, um, I think the rest of it is definitely the saying is, literally just a bit happier. Sound like you want to be there. And it is nine times out of 10, though. I find that so fascinating. Yes. It's funny because it's like that you, you're, you're, you're right. Adam, like for 95% of things, the culture difference between the US and the UK is not that different. But there's little nuances like that that actually make a, you know, a massive difference by the sounds of it, which is interesting. I've got a room. I've got a funny story on that just quickly because I didn't need a single one of those accounts. I'm more than in the UK and EU face face not one, not a single one. And I've now been living in North, we had the US business for two years. I moved out permanently three months ago. And one of our US customers advised me to his family home for a barbecue within his daughters. And then following two weeks later, his daughter came to my birthday event. Wow. So just to give you a little bit of cultural difference, like, that would never have happened in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. So there is a lot, I mean, I am in in Charlotte. So there is a bit of something there. But that's a little cultural thing that was very stark. This is not to do with sales. This is asking with the account you've been working with them for a bit of time. Yeah. But the way more inclined to do that kind of stuff with you. Yeah. So, uh, I was going to say Southern hospitality. I know it's famous. I wonder if it would be in other areas of the UK of the US. like you. We get in front of you now all the time. Really? All the time? Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, and because of the nature of the work we do our clients are sporadically based all across the United States. Interesting. Not really in one hub. Yeah, which has pros and cons, but it made that difficult, but I'm probably going to be flying a lot this year. So interesting. And I'm guessing you didn't get invited out much from UK clients. He said it never happened. Never happened. No, I'm never so crazy. So funny. That's funny. Vogue. It's so fun. It's really a great little details there. Adam, thank you. Cool. So I would love to jump into Stefan. He is a fascinating case study on how creating a system, a very well-awilled machine-like system can allow someone to build high amounts in a very short space of time. Can you tell us a bit about Stefan and the journey that he's been through with you, Adam, and then what allowed him and his numbers and just everything around that? That would be amazing. Yeah, sure. So Stefan, Stefan, the case study for us, as you say, in terms of when you get the trust you arrive from day one, how important that is. So he's been with us just over 18 months now. So he's pretty fresh. We immediately put him into the imaging team, which is, it's a film service for X-ray, MRI, all that stuff, but it's super niche. We have 103 score two and three companies in that sub-measure. We got to go after about 20 or 30 accounts in that area, something like that. Judging that one sub niche, we got 12 of those, so that kind of gives you some clarity there. Now, when he came in, I was Adam from the start. I don't, we had no clients at that time. I think one, I said in the US market, I said, this guy, I don't care if we get a million clients, elsewhere. He is just talking to these candidates and he's just talking to these clients. Turns out, it's our best market, so he kind of lucked out there. But he just spoke to those candidates and those clients, which meant he's basically working the same job over and over and over and over again. It meant that we interviewed in that year over a thousand engineers who just did certain from this agreement. Now, no one had that level of data. And to give you context, we were talking, we worked that same industry in the UK, the two decades. I think over that period of we have 600 engineers all right in that sub-measure, which is our interview. So that's some contact in terms of just the volume of work he was doing in that space. Well, that meant it was a movement after six months of going through learning how to fill roles and recruit all the rest a bit with that sub-nation in game candidates, all that fun stuff to then move into the BD order and pull through the BD order. It also meant that he immediately got 10, 15% conversion rates from his call to his discoveries, which is really high for someone super new. It meant that because of the nature of the US market as well, there are a lot more chassis between each other. We've got referrals coming in very quickly. We're talking in six months or so from starting. It meant that he is now part of the imaging service group. So there's about 30 of these companies in that Corniche, I spoke about, of the right side, who meets all the times and mean him with down a throttle as part of that group, again, all within 18 months working in the market. So we were able to establish ourselves with such pace and his knowledge was able to compound at such pace that he was credible and fluent, which is the most important thing being fluent in the market very, very, very quickly, which led to the high levels of conversions. That market then produced, I think it was like $780 or $1,000 in that first period. He's now got onto the business development. He can on board two three accounts a month, no problem at all. Each account to us has worked between 50 to 200K, depending on the value of those accounts. So that's really the success of that guy. We hired someone here, US recently, who Stefan has got the job. They met at Vegas this week, which is really nice for the first time. But it's allowed us to then success. Which is something people don't do enough in the recruitment world, whether they don't invest enough in succession planning for those markets, but him being able to do that so quickly and so confidently and, you know, actually doing it the way where I know he's going to continue to get those conversions based on the volume of two and three and how he goes through that, how much faith investing in more talent for that division. Right. So he's a really interesting guy and I'd also say that like he's quite charismatic, but he's definitely very chill. So a lot of the, you know, hard yards of early prospecting did not come naturally to him. So that's something I'll say. Like he certainly wasn't natural at those initial discoveries, getting things to close to pushing on those calls and past the initial objections. So he wasn't that natural guy that goes and smash his story, he's excellent. Right. Wasn't that natural guy had to learn all that, but we're still able to get these results through being super focused and following that process. Really fun indeed. Love that. And is Stefan using exactly the same BD tactics that you are? I don't like literally, is it literally just duplicating it and rinse and repeat? Yeah, if he did something definitely have worse, I think. But I think, I think, you know, again, he's only like 18 months, the two years into the business, right. He's been doing this development about 12 months now. So he's very much full of the style of that process. As a guy from Dan who I worked with UK for a while, he's now kind of two or three years and he's now iterating on what we do. But when when when you that mood just follow it and then want to get properly good, you know, doing two or any year, then you can start looking at changing it. Cool. So I get the feeling that the the the point of the conversion point is that coal call, isn't it? Like the coal call, hitching and then getting them, getting them as a client or booking that second call and not sure what your process is at that point. But am I right in saying that one of the most important parts of that process in order for him to close business is getting good at those coal calls. Am I am I right in saying that? Am I missing a bit Adam? No, no, yeah, I'm with you and I hate the rhetoric that a lot of people who can't do coal outreach have, which is basically I'm really going to close in your meetings but I can't book any of them. Right. It's that ridiculous rhetoric being here all the time from people who think they're great at sales. You know, I'm pretty average, but you know, people who think they're amazing, but you can't book a meeting with your coal customer and say it's the same thing. You know, a prospecting call is very similar to discovering some of the structure. It's just way shortened in less depth. So you talk about their problems, their impact, how they're trying to solve it. If the problem's worth solving all these other things, which is what you do in the discovery anyway, but you just have a little demo of the end, you ask them, it's going to fix their problem and equip clients in a price. So I think I wouldn't be comfortable putting anybody on a discovery call. We're really masters with that customer. If they can't convert them onto the coal the first instance and ask why do you. Yeah, interesting. And given that this is such an important part of the process and you kind of already talked about it in at high level, could we go into a little bit more detail? Like what have you found? If you were to go back to the training that you that you and Stefan had, what were the things that you were teaching him that were like, Stefan, you've got to know, you've got to do it in this way and you've got to make sure you do this in this way and at this point, what's the kind of structure that you found works? So the way that we do all, do we go to the coal called structure or what his problems were? Maybe problems first and then structure if that's a game? Sure. Yeah. So generally speaking, what you find with most people doing, they weren't learning how how to cross-bag is they skip steps. So when you're looking at the step from basically taking a client cold through to wanting to meet you, there's a lot of low friction steps along that process that make them actually feel like they should meet you or realise them themselves or they should. So a lot of those is spending the time to expand on impacts. Most people will say, these are three problems, which one do you have? The customer or a prospect will say, I have this problem. They get super excited, they're like, it's right, let's meet and talk about it. Whereas they need to step back and spend the time qualifying, it is actually a problem for them. What actually is the broader business impact? Is this something they actually want to solve? And by going through those steps and actually having that conversation, having the prospect open up about how long the problem has been there for, what's the impact to themselves, their bottom line, their team, their retention, their end customers, the quality of the service contracts, whatever it happens to be. Unless they go through and actually verbalise that through speaking, they're not going to be emotionally invested enough to actually meet you. So that's when most people go wrong. These are happy years. They'll hear the first yes on that low friction ladder and then try and jump straight for the call. Interesting. That's great feedback. Should we get into the call call structure now? Was there any other problem, Stefan, as before we jump into it? Was that the main one? I've coached about nine people through the call calling process in and across the EU and the US. That's normally the biggest one that you other one of people get wrong is they don't once they found out like the problem the impact You wrap it up own and so he just told me you have this problem It's got this impact for this long Well, they don't do which you need to do is ask is this problem worth fixing Again that in first yes because if they say yes, it's worth it It's worth fixing then you say right as meat to talk about how that potentially could be fixed They're always gonna say well most of some are gonna say yes If you don't ask whether that's worth fixing you're gonna get the objection like all that is an important right? Right so that's normally the point where they've done all the hard work within five to minutes on this call They've done the problem and the impact amazingly and then they just didn't ask that final closing question to get them easy Interesting and so assuming someone like I'm guessing the the sign for to move forward is this was fixing someone says yes What are the other answers that you might get that would say this isn't a good prospect or this isn't a person that you want to be meeting Would they just say no would they make up some sort of excuse? What what do you think Adam yeah? So with that final close it all comes down as I mentioned before the impact in the problem right? because let's say we have the conversation with home and We'll talk about Experience in terms of the actual implementation of working on and let's say they told me that I can't find people who are working on these instruments that means that my other engineers are flying into that territory That's costing me a load of money in terms of flights and expenses That means that they're getting burnt out and they're more likely to leave my downtime is harm my instruments right if you Have that actual technical conversation at that level on the phone You know and you allow them to actually expand on the impact you will only ask though is that problem worth solving once is pretty obvious It is so if you get to that point in the call You've done and they say no you haven't done the first two parts correctly Interesting. That's really valuable. Yeah Should we jump into the call call structure Adam that I'm really fascinated just to understand the structure to that Yeah, it's really straightforward. It's the opener. It doesn't matter what it is just keep on the phone there There's a problem menu. So you say generally speaking. I talk to people like you They tell me they have one of these three problems make sure they're correct by the way of those three problems Which one of these is causing the most headache? So you don't have getting to say there is one of them you assume they have one of the three As in which ones causing the most headache. They'll give you the one now you have a problem So in that instance I spoke about the instrumentation experience you then Expound on the problem, you know in terms of what exactly do you mean by that? So you get snish like what instrument experience? What exactly do you mean how long has that been an issue for all the other things expand the problem Once you've expanded the problem you go into impacts. So what's the impact not find this person For the team what's the impact of again yourself your customers your wine of business your wine of staff All that good stuff so they've then told you that you can't find this person This is killing, you know our customer service blah blah It's impacting all these things in my business. I'm losing loads of money. They're crying into their coffee How what point you then wrap it all in a bow and you say you've told me this this and this is causing this this and this is that something worth fixing That obviously say yes, and then that's when you say that's books and title so that's how that love it Oh, and I think you might have already said you might have already says before but what part of the process have you notice takes the most amount of skill in terms of Listening tonality timing would you say it's all even or would you say there's a certain part that takes the most skill No, I'd say I'd say it's the the impact and the fluency of the image Because what people generally get wrong is they'll get a problem But they won't delve deep enough into it. They made the impacts hit home. So And the clothes at home. So for example if I'm talking to someone and then the issue they have is finding someone who traveled And we don't call if I will that means you mean nation-wide travel Do you mean staying away five days a week? I would exactly do mean by that if they don't go into enough detail there When it comes to the clothes they can't be specific enough to cause enough pain to warrant the meeting happening So Generally speaking it's Spending the time taking a breath, you know sitting back now you know they've got a problem the talking to you about it Use the opportunity to get very specific So when it comes to building a nice little bow and doing the clothes you can be asked specific as possible to that specific person And that's going to be the rest of versions. So that's that's the skill part. So Love that love that really interesting and it's just interesting the emphasis on pain in order to get them to commit That's kind of what I'm getting here. It's like you have to stretch the problem You have to stretch the impact you have to kind of cause enough pain. I'm guessing Adam in order to get them to commit to Meeting them are I insane that I say I'd say there's also causing pain, you know, I say you want to uncover where it is I'd say a lot of the time in every I mean you guys though businesses are paying things go wrong constantly right then we're just going to be paying somewhere and you know In sales and like when you're booking these meetings, it's about uncovering where that pain is And figuring out how you can solve that through your solution. So it's more uncovering it than creating it I really hope to create pain and make a lot of money Oh, it's my poor my poor wedding now, but yeah, I completely get you But that's really helpful and I can't help but think about this whole foundational Strategy Adam which is really understanding their problems because if you didn't understand their problems in the first place They probably wouldn't even stay on the call would they like if if you if you couldn't open and articulate exactly what they're going through At least in three problems choose one then they'll be like hey, fuck off. It doesn't know my it doesn't know my industry so we We we were about the year or so into the BD team and we got aggressive with it and we thought you know what let's let's bring someone in after only three months in the business They fought so badly. They probably had a hundred calls without booking a meeting. It was actually a bismal I've never seen anything like it So you wouldn't do that again Oh, sorry, so it's super important that they have a level of fluency Around their southerners around whatever the in our case the engineers are working on it will be the same in whatever market When you're fluent about it a it comes across in your tone In the jargon that you use in the jokes that you tell right because you're a certain sub you know Little jokes by different different companies or different equipment or you know little things you'd only know if you work from that industry That you can just kind of float like kind of float in you know quite slightly and it's like well this guy Clearly knows what he's talking about. He's just said this little thing now How got that level of fluency you just bashed in the phones and hoping to get the conversions What what we also find is within that whole process is if you do it right That's the reason why our discovery called conversions is so high Because we're only talk to people who genuinely have issues that genuinely want to fix them within our soft niche Like if you got that person the meeting you don't convert them. I don't know what's going on Right so yeah really fascinating it Um cool. I can't believe how Quickly this pod's gone Adam we only have seven minutes left all like five because we probably need to give each other some time to prepare for the next meeting But last five minutes is there anything we haven't spoken about Adam that your This on your mind that you're passionate about or do you think we've covered pretty much everything about um about Your process today We've spoken about a lot. I think I want why I'm probably saying what I'm hearing a lot of rhetoric about in the market from Reporters is there's a lot of people who are concerned Right now about the you know their buildings they're concerned about their growth. They're concerned about the industry at large And I'd say that most of those people is that you know Take a more long term mindset on what you're doing Right actually have a through to five-year plan not a four-week plan Right actually spend the time to find people that genuinely need your help Rather than those that you're just fancy working with and remember why The recruitment exists in the first place we're a service We're a supplier We're there to help people grow their businesses people who perhaps don't have access to talent that they want to have access to That's what it is so Find people with that particular issue and whatever something you share in and you'll fly Focusing on the next shiny brand is going to get you nowhere So that's that's one thing if someone's listening to this and they were having a tough time I try and reset a little bit of that and focus on why the industry exists in the first place Yeah fantastic way to end the pod Adam. Thank you so much for coming. May absolutely pleasure An absolute pleasure to speak to you. You're obviously an expert at what you do and so many golden nuggets today So thank you, mate. I really appreciate your time It's fun Hey guys, thanks for tuning into this episode. If you enjoyed it, please don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and Spotify tune in for another episode next week and we look forward to seeing you again very soon. Peace and love