OVERVIEW:
In this special episode, we start with interesting stats and the latest business trends, how the pandemic has shifted the mindset of the majority, and what’s stopping businesses from growing.
We will also talk about what people want when they are looking to be part of an organization and how their values and vision are affecting their career decisions, why focus and mastery of time will be crucial for the following years, how micro-distractions are constantly eating up our productivity, and many more!
From market data, stats, and surveys, we’ll cover everything you need to know what’s holding you back from doubling your sales next year. What’s more exciting is the sneak peek of the new edition of The Ultimate Sales Machine, a very interesting Black Friday Promo, and a core story bootcamp that you can join for 9x the impact!
TAKING ACTION:
- Want to know what’s keeping you from doubling your sales in the next 12 months? Take our quick QUIZ to get answers: Howtodoublesales.com
- If you’d like to have a profound breakthrough in your business, schedule your breakthrough call with a LIVE expert here: Chetholmes.com/Breakthrough
- Claim your FREE chapter 4 from the top 10 most recommended marketing and sales books of all time! Visit: Ultimatesalesmachine.com to find out how you Create 9X More Impact from every move you’re already making to win clients!
TRANSCRIPT:
[00:00] Zebulon Thomas: Welcome to The CEO Mastery Show.
I am Zebulon Thomas, and for the first time going to be introducing Amanda Holmes, CEO of Chet Holmes International, which Amanda, usually you introduce the guests. So I’m honored to be able to introduce you on the show today.
[00:13] Amanda Holmes: Oh, I’m so happy to be here and to have you here with me.
[00:20] Zebulon Thomas: It’s awesome. This is fun.
Listen, I know you own Empire Research Group, a company that uses market data to assist businesses to market and sell more effectively. You just had a batch of new research come out and I’ve been hearing it really showed you some interesting things about trends that are happening for small and medium-sized businesses right now.
Can you share with us what exactly you found? What are the three things that are holding us back from doubling sales?
[00:45] Amanda Holmes: Yes. So number one, really fascinating. What’s happening right now. 4.3 million people left their jobs in August alone in the United States. We’re seeing this mass exodus of people changing where they’re working because they’re looking to better connect with a company that follows their mission, values, goals.
So for businesses looking to grow, and we know this from experience, right, we do this all day, every day. If you grow your organization and you don’t have the operations to fulfill and the fact that you’re marketing and selling, it’s kind of a problem, right? So hiring and staffing is a huge issue right now and we see that carrying forward into the new year.
Because what really happened is which I find really fascinating. I don’t know if you find this fascinating, but when the pandemic happened, it was as if the whole world struck down. We had time to think. We looked at ourselves in the mirror. We had – everything went silent.
And during that time, so many people thought, I don’t think I’m really doing what I was meant to do or what I feel called to do. And that’s why we’re seeing and it’s several months down the line, but it’s still very much happening. Do you know anybody that left their job cause they were looking for something more fulfilling?
[02:04] Zebulon Thomas: Yeah, absolutely. I know a lot of people that just, you know, they woke up inside. They’re like, hey, you know what, I’m putting too much into this or I don’t have enough family time. And they’re like, you know, I’d really, I want to kind of find that new balance. So to be able to come back to that. That’s big. So, you know, really learning about the problem of hiring right now, that’s really helpful to help us find that top talent.
[02:24] Amanda Holmes: Exactly! And another really interesting thing so when my research team pulled together the biggest issue facing CEOs last year, or this year, it was a thing called ESG. You hadn’t heard of ESG before I mentioned it to you, right?
[02:38] Zebulon Thomas: No, no, I haven’t.
[02:39] Amanda Holmes: It’s so interesting. Majority of people haven’t heard about ESG and yet Bloomberg voted it number one, several other large research papers did, and it’s called Environmental Social Governance. So basically. So social issues that we face this whole last year, right? Like George Floyd riots with the “Black Lives Matter” movement, right? So much more equality in the workplace. Women are screaming from the rooftops, breaking through the glass ceilings, right?
Equality, equality. There’s so many more social issues that we faced more than any other year. Right? It’s a huge top of mind for us right now, as well as environmental. So Biden put billions of dollars to companies that were looking to be better about the environment, to give back to the environment.
You’re seeing different companies that are raising funds, right? There’s extra money to be had if you’re looking at climate control, if you do something that helps with recycling. So all of this ties back to: What are you going to do to create a culture and a workplace that attracts the kind of people that you want in your organization?
And there’s three things that Edelman found. So they’re actually coining it the belief-driven employee, which I find fascinating. Right? So there’s three things that people are looking for when they’re looking to be a part of your organization. Number one is traditional salary, right? That’s obvious.
Number two is career advancement. So for small, medium-sized businesses, that’s a little bit harder when you only have one degree of management. But how can you, so that gives you the opportunity to craft. How can I create a path for somebody to grow in their career? Within a small to medium-sized business.
And then number three, a focus on vision and values to make them feel that they’re actually doing something positive in the world. And they also really are looking for flexibility and freedom and the ability to have some kind of remote workplace. So those are the three most important things you should look for when looking to hire and staff and retain your people.
[04:51] Zebulon Thomas: I mean, that’s huge because like, you know, as everything shifts in our market, we always have to be ready for that. We have to be aware of that. And if with every new breakthrough, there’s an opportunity. So I mean this right there is a huge opportunity to make a big shift in your business and align with your culture with your community and build that up.
I think that’s amazing. So number two, here I have is, you know, I have the shiny object syndrome. What is it about the shiny object syndrome that is stopping us from growth?
[05:18] Amanda Holmes: Oh, my gosh. So we found a market data that said that on average, people look at their phones 96 times a day on average. 96, how can you ever focus?
How can you get your staff to focus? Three out of four. Gallup says that three out of four employees are disengaged at their job. And it’s because of this focus.
Another research firm showed that – really interesting. So when you focus on a task, let’s say, and you get, let’s say, a notification brings up. And so your focus deviates to that thing. When you come back to focus again, it takes on average 45 minutes for your brain to get into that place of concentration.
And during that 45 minutes, it’s as if it’s the equivalent of having only had four hours of sleep in a night. We are operating. So this shiny object syndrome of, Hey, got a minute. Hey, here’s a notification. Hey, here’s a pop-up even, even text messages. 95% of text messages are responded to within the first three minutes.
What? How are you getting the things done that you need to get done? If you’re perpetually distracted, we’re actually operating at a lower capacity of our brain because the focus isn’t there. So focus for this next year is crucial.
And if you haven’t for those that are listening don’t know our time management secrets of billionaires, I highly recommend that, right? Because my father working for billionaire, Charlie Munger, he realized that the thing that Charlie had mastered was his time. So if there’s one skill that you can really focus on this next year, it sounds silly, but mastery of time is crucial.
How can you shift your day from being reactive, answering everyone else’s demands versus being proactive about your time? And there’s some, obviously we have people that listened to this podcast that are successful and do get their jobs done. The question is how can you improve even beyond that, right? How can you train your staff to be better? Because we’re all drowning in this shiny object syndrome world. It’s all around us. So, the six time management secrets of billionaires, how to increase your, I’m sorry, the six steps to increase your productivity by 500%. That’s a really crucial one. I’ll give them to you really quickly. And then you can go and find it.
It’s in Ultimate Sales Machine, we have a blog on it as well, but step number one, touch it once. Step number two, list your top six things that you need to get done, not 20, just six. Step number three, allocate how much time for each task. Right?
Number four, putting it into your schedule. So allotting the time within your schedule so that, you know, by the end of your day, before you even started your day, you know if you’re going to actually achieve the six things because you’ve already put it into your schedule of how you’re going to get those things done.
Number five, prioritize, make sure that the things that are most important do get scheduled ahead. One of my wonderful mentors used to say I do the thing I hate the most, the first in the day, every single day for 10 years. And that’s what helped me grow my business.
And then number six, will it hurt me to throw this away? So there’s a whole long bit about this, but just to give it to you really quick, those are the six steps to increase your productivity by 500%.
So that second thing to help you double the size of your company in the next 12 months. Avoid the shiny object syndrome and really get into focus.
[08:56] Zebulon Thomas: Well, I love how you put that too, because like, you know, a lot of us think of the shiny object syndrome is a lot of other things that are flashed that’s not just simple, like notifications on your phone like that is a shiny object that is distracting. It’s distracting. It’s pulling you away from your focus. It’s disrupting that focus. And, and I do agree with you a hundred percent on the focus this year.
If you have consistent focus, you’re going to thrive. You’re going to be able to attach to things that are going to give you that opportunity. You’ve always got to micro-focus on and keep your mind open on the things that are going to be opportunities for you. So between that and time management. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I myself, even time management, if, you know, we can always get better at that. So even if you’ve got this down, you could always get better.
[09:40] Amanda Holmes: It’s not about doing 4,000 things. It’s about doing 12 things, 4,000 times. And repetition is the mother of all skill, right? Okay.
[09:46] Zebulon Thomas: Yes, it is. Number three. Listen, the multiplicity of marketing channels. What exactly is that?
[09:52] Amanda Holmes: Yes. So this came about actually through all the research we did for the new edition of Ultimate Sales Machine.
I have been working on this for the last three years. Me and my team it’s been quite, I mean, it took my father 50 years to write that book and it became in the top 10 most recommended marketing sales books of all time. So it’s okay if it took me three years, but what we came to find when we started analyzing the data was for half a century, we had two innovations in marketing.
We had radio. It took 38 years for radio to hit 50 million users. Then we had television. Television took less than half of the time, it took 13 years to reach 50 million users. Then the internet came, right? And that took seven years to reach 50 million users. And that’s right around – the 50 million user mark was right around when my father’s book came out.
So a lot of his background, especially chapter seven, with the seven musts of marketing, it was like billboards, radio, television. And so since this book has come out, the amount of innovation that we have experienced is unlike any time in history, right? So the last 15 years, since Internet. Facebook, can you guess how many years it took for Facebook to reach 50 million users?
[11:12] Zebulon Thomas: Maybe five, 10.
[11:15] Amanda Holmes: Two. It took two years for Facebook to reach 50 million users. Tiktok far surpassed 50 million users in its first year, it now has a billion users. Facebook gets 500,000 new users a day. It’s up to 3.4 billion users. So the amount of innovation that happened in the last 10 years since my father’s book came out is absolutely absurd.
And the way that it relates to you, business owners, business leaders, executives here, listening to this. So on average, the reason why my father called it the seven months of marketing was 15 years ago, the average company would go out with on average eight different marketing mediums. Today, the average B2B marketer does marketing on 13 different marketing tactics. Plus if they’re in B2C, best-in-class does 15 marketing tactics, eight social media platforms and three paid advertising mediums.
So if we look at this, we went from doing seven to 15, 19, 21, right? We’ve doubled the amount of work we have to do and for a fraction of the results, because so today, there’s so much information out there. We’re drowning in all of that information. It is just noise and our prospects are shutting out all of that information.
So when it used to take four touches to get a prospect’s attention. Now it’s taking 12. So no wonder we’ve been having these surveys that we keep sending out about. What’s the biggest thing holding you back from growth? Majority of small to medium-sized businesses are saying that it’s generating sales over sales. I’m sorry. Generating leads over sales over time. Generating leads is the hardest thing. No wonder it’s because the amount of innovation that has been experienced in the last decade compared to the last half-century is absurd.
How do you keep up with all of those shiny objects? All of the different possibilities that are popping up left and right.
I mean, in December, we had Clubhouse. Clubhouse grew faster than any other social media platform in history. And yet two months later, it died off as if it never existed. So we’re perpetually trying to integrate. And that’s really difficult for CEOs moving into this next year, especially with the pandemic, how it pushed us all online, the amount of innovation that happened in this last year and a half is more than what an entire, I would say an entire decade would have taken worldwide to see that kind of progress.
So the best thing that business leaders can do in this next year is go back to the foundation. Go back to what it takes to become a strategist. As my father said, right? A strategist will slaughter the tactician every single time.
So when you’re looking at, okay, I want to generate a sale. What is your goal? Is the only goal to get that sale? Or let’s take you a level higher. Would it be valuable if you thought before that sales conversation “Yes, I would like to be respected as the number one in my field”? Wow. How would that change the dialogue that you’re having with your prospect? Or what if you ask, how can I create a relationship that is so meaningful that they’ll want to refer my business?
How about “How do I set myself up as an expert in the industry instead of just my product or service”? There are strategic objectives that if you are clear on what those 12 strategic objectives are, and if you lead every tactic with that checklist in mind, you will get nine times the impact compared to just, “Okay. I have to do a Facebook post today. Okay check. I’ve written something and I posted it. Okay. Now I have to do an ad. Okay. What do I need to do for that? Okay. I’ll just do this, this, this – okay check.”
It’s checking off a list because we have double the amount of work to do, but we’re missing the foundation of what it means to be strategic.
And with that strategy, create sales at a much, much more rapid pace for a lot less work.
[15:44] Zebulon Thomas: And it sounds like, you know, with applying all that, instead of being behind the sale, we’re always behind the sale pushing forward. You’re able to get ahead of that sale to set your goals, think ahead. And like, what does this sale manifest into? Not just on a short-term game, but on a long-term game.
You know, we’re always like, what does this sale doing right now? Long-term is where we’re trying to go. So I really liked that leverage.
So listen, I want to talk about the labor of love of you working diligently on your dad’s book, your father’s Ultimate Sales Machine. Let’s talk about that.
[16:16] Amanda Holmes: Yes. Well, Penguin kept asking since my father passed nine years ago, they kept asking to do a new edition because we sell so many copies and I just didn’t feel I was there or ready until three years ago, I finally said yes. And it’s been, if anybody follows me on social media, they’re like enough already Amanda, we’ve been seeing, you’ve been working on this. You know, for years.
So I’m really grateful to say that it’s finally done. The manuscript has been approved by Penguin. The only thing is when you come out with a book with a traditional publisher, it takes time. So it’s going to be between six and nine months before the book is able to come out.
So what the team decided, which I thought was brilliant, was why don’t we put together a special Black Friday? Where we offer the ability to be a part of a boot camp to learn everything that we’ve put in the book and a longer format. That’s not just reading a book, right? It’s interactive, it’s Q&A.
We’re going to film it. It’s going to become the home study for the book, but you get first look at it, front row seats to the show. And like I said, interactive, so it’s really this whole process. We’re calling it nine times the impact, because like I said before, so many shiny objects were lost in a sea of information and tactics without coming back to the foundational principles for how to grow sales.
And as I started, as we were writing this book, I realized my company has brought more companies to number one than any other. I mean, we’ve done it in every industry. You could imagine from SAS to real estate to finance to MSPs. I mean, you name it, we’ve been there, we’ve done it.
And there is a process. There is a repeatable system for how to do this. So that’s what we’re going to train on in this nine times the impact is get rid of the shiny object syndrome. Let’s just get down to the foundation because it’s proven and it’s timeless.
So that over this next year, over the next several years, if you have this in place, if you truly understand how to be a tactician and how to follow the foundation, you can take that to any marketing medium. So it’s not just this cluster of all these different people saying all these different things, especially in organizations that grow and start to flourish. Then you have a section. You have the sales group that’s saying something completely different from the marketing team who’s saying something completely different from the press releases and the press never get back to the Facebook ads and the Facebook ads have nothing to do with the email campaigns.
It’s bringing that all into one clear message, one clear strategy. And I get this a lot when we launched the Dream 100 course, everyone kept asking me “This whole market data thing is so fascinating. I really need it for my business. I see how valuable it is to validate points and tie them in with story to make it compelling, to break through that clutter.”And I kept saying yes, but that’s a different course. We’re not quite there yet. This is that course. We’re going to look at data. We’re going to show you how to utilize that so that you can market and sell more effectively using messaging in that core story messaging so that it can go to all your mediums so you can train all your staff.
So instead of having soloists sing this, sing that, and it being their own song, it becomes an orchestra. The symphony sounds so loud that every prospect, every client loves you and gravitates towards you because you’re unified, you’re clear, you’re focused and you’re pigheaded.
[20:08] Zebulon Thomas: Yes. The pigheaded discipline and determination.
Listen, when you talked about, when you told me first about the Black Friday opportunity, I was blown away. I was like so excited because this is exactly what businesses need right now. And the fact that you’re opening this up to a group, small group experience. It’s going to be great. It’s going to be mind-blowing and just so many businesses are going to be able to advance so quickly and, and play that long-term game along with their short-term goals.
So I think it’s incredible.
[20:36] Amanda Holmes: I agree. That’s why I’m so excited about it. To be able to get it or go and find out about it. I don’t think it goes, it won’t go live until, Black Friday. So depending on when you’re watching this chetholmes.com forward slash 9x. So the number 9 and x as in Xavier or chetholmes.com/9x.
Go ahead and get in. So that you’ll find out when it happens. You’ll get that first seat. And I recommend getting a first seat because there’ll be a special bonus for those that do sign up quickly, there is going to be an opportunity to just get your name in the Ultimate Sales Machine, the new edition.
Very small group and it’s going to go fast. So make sure that you sign up at chetholmes.com/9x. I would love to see you there. It’s a crazy discount. If you’re watching this after Black Friday as well, tickets will still be available for the next month. It’ll just be at a higher price, about $1,500 more. So make sure you get it on black Friday. It’s a great opportunity.
[21:45] Zebulon Thomas: Nine times the impact it’s coming. It’s going to be awesome.
Listen, Amanda, thank you so much for allowing me to introduce you to the CEO Mastery Show. You’ve been so awesome so far doing all the other stuff. And all the great, incredible people we’ve had on the show, but to have you on here is an honor for me to be able to introduce you.
So I thank you so much for your time on this, and I really hope our prospects and everybody listening to the show has gotten some really good information, take some notes and get involved in that nine times the impact coming out. It’s going to be great. So I look forward to seeing you guys and thank you again, Amanda
Do you have anything else to say you want to say before we sign off?
[22:18] Amanda Holmes: Yeah, I do. I want to thank you. So for every person that’s been watching these episodes, Zebulon’s our content strategist and he is a freaking rockstar, obviously. If you’ve been seeing our videos and gone, wow, Amanda really stepped it up. Yeah. It’s called Zebulon Thomas, just so everyone knows, he is the mastermind behind the beauty of what’s going on video-wise and more than just visuals and capturing it the mind for business.
Standing the point of content, because so many people like we’re going to teach in the 9X course. So many people are lost in content today. They’re forgetting the point of what all this content is. They’re losing the purpose of how it ties back to sales. And it’s been such a pleasure and an honor to work with you as Zebulon because you understand the full scope of it.
Right? You understand that we’re here to generate leads and sales, so whatever can help us get to that point through our content with that strategic objectives in mind, I just, it’s been such a pleasure and I’m so grateful to have you on the team here at Chet Holmes International.
[23:26] Zebulon Thomas: Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you so much. And you know, just with that being said, you know, it’s really, even in my own life, and my career. It’s about aligning with the right people. So, we are an incredible fit. So I can’t be more grateful for this opportunity, so it’s great. I’m happy to serve.
[23:45] Amanda Holmes: And I also just love, just for everybody who’s here, Zebulon was with us years and years ago, sales before you went off and became this amazing videographer.
So, I know that we have some openings right now to be part of our sales team. So we should also put that in the notes if you’re looking to have a fantastic career in sales. We’ve trained the best and we have some really great opportunities there.
[24:15] Zebulon Thomas: Yes, definitely get involved. We’d love to see what you got and have you join the team.
[24:21] Amanda Holmes: Thank you, Zebulon! It’s been such a pleasure and everybody makes sure our ChetHolmes.com/9x. Get in there fast so that you can get to be a part of the 9x the impact boot camp.
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