Going Long Podcast_SOLO Episode 440_Billy Keels

Wed, Jul 24, 2024 12:13PM • 13:46

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

clients, talk, company, sat, focusing, working, framework, expenses, helping, understand, compliant, solutions, feel, hustle, revenue, moving, billy, euro, literally, share

SPEAKERS

Billy Keels

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Billy Keels  00:00

Today's conversation is sponsored by the Billy keels advisory program. If you want to learn more about how to make your nine to five optional, just go to Billy keels.com, forward slash advising. Once again, that's Billy keels.com, forward slash advising. You'll get to a certain point where you're absolutely exhausted. And you just want to figure out what are the three proven areas that make your side hustle the most successful as possible and doing it in a way that gets you there most efficiently. And also, with the least amount of, let's call it trauma? Well, because you are constantly moving forward, and you're an executive in a company or your small business owner, and you're feeling stuck, and you realize that you want to try to do everything. And because you're trying to do everything, actually not things are not moving in the in the progress or making the progress that you expect them to make. It's because you're trying to focus on everything. And one of the lessons that I learned in corporate life, right, because I mentioned before, many times, you know, managing large businesses, 100 million dollar businesses, and having many people that reported to me, things like that, there's a certain point where you have to really use your focus. And so today, I want to talk about the three proven areas that make your side hustle when you focus on them, not just focus on them, but drive the activity that helps to support them, focusing on these three proven areas that make your side hustle successful, will also help you feel a lot less exhausted, help you feel much more in control, and moving in the right direction. So as I started thinking about this, this is really about the corporate lesson that I learned that I applied to my my small business now help help my clients today figure this kind of stuff out is really focusing on a framework. And this is a framework that I actually, I'm going to share with you. So stick around for the framework, but because when you focus on it, it's going to really literally make your side hustle more successful. Because it's the exact same one that I use, like, how did I make my side hustle successful is by focusing on this framework, right? And so I think about being back in my, in my corporate days, I'm in my late 30s, almost 40. Right, and I am transitioning from where I was in a role where I had lots of responsibility in a remote sales motion, a lot of people call it inside sales, they call commercial sales whatever today. And in moving from that into a field sales organization. But before I moved into a field sales organization, this was the area where we, my team was a big team. And we were working with some of the largest companies that you can imagine I'm talking like the really big companies globally around the world, whether that are those are companies like British Petroleum BP or a Royal Dutch Shell shell in all Telefonica in Spain, but across Europe, Middle East and Africa, we were able to work with these large clients. And at this point in time, I was a bit, I guess it was probably a bit nervous, because now we were moving into the largest of large, like the most important clients in terms of spend and port in terms of relationships around the globe, with the company that I was working for, which is a very large enterprise resource planning company that I think most people would know, it's a really large German company. And if you don't know it, just ask Jen GBT foreign and ceppi 20 Before I will tell you about it. Anyway. So as I am now leading this, this team of highly specialized sales executives, in this very strategic type of relationship with these clients, I realized that I didn't feel I guess I was probably ready. But I just didn't feel that I was prepared to sit in the rooms with these really important executives. And so I thought to myself, well, what can I do? I had mentors in the business. And one of my mentors, who is even a friend or a mentor to this day, was running the large emerging markets in the company that I was working for, it was probably responsible for about half of the revenue that was coming into Europe, Middle East, and Africa was I don't know how many billions of euros at the time. But I remember sitting down with him and having a conversation and one of our it was every six months, we had a a meeting, every once in a while I was we spoke every three months. But at this point in time, I was talking to him about this, this move that I was making, from one one leadership position to another leadership position into this very specific role. And so I sat down with him because I thought, man, you know, there's now we're finally going to start working with these really strategic customers. The the price list that we're going to be working with was like over 30,000 different products. And I was I'd been in leadership and I started to understand more about our solutions and the things that we were selling but there were so many things and I wanted to lead this team in the most strategic clients and so everything was piling up on everything and I felt like I needed to understand and learn everything. And so I sat down with him and I was ready and you know, I always went in with my with my pen and paper at the time and sat down was ready to take notes. And so, as I wanted to be able to really make this really massive positive impact and close the larger deals because at the time we were closing, like five figure deals, sometimes we would have six figure deals every once in a while. But now that was moving into this specific area of the business, it was going to be like the multimillion euro type of opportunity. So I wanted to be be closing those really large deals, having my team close those deals be associated with those. And at the same time, like for me, what I really wanted to do was just feel confident that I was leading my team in the right direction, and feeling prepared to sit down with these really large, important people, as it related to the client relationships, people will get some of the names that you would know. And so I guess part of the reason that I was feeling a little bit intimidated even to reach out to my mentor was other managers that were around me at the time, they were super technically sound like they understood all of the solutions, because they had already come from the field sales organization, and they knew all the stuff on the price list, or at least that's what they portrayed, like, that's what I felt I was like, Oh, my gosh, I will I can't How am I going to sit in front of these most important clients, and I still don't understand all the different solutions. We're gonna sell Bobo. So I talked to my mentor at that time and told him about these, you know, I wasn't prepared to have these technical conversations. And you know, sitting down with these, you know, Matt, really important CIO CTOs, some chief marketing officers, CMOs, CROs. And I just remember, I realized, like, there's got to be a better way to do this, because I was, I was starting to freak out, even though I've just taken this promotion. And so fortunately, I sat down with with him, and he sat down, and he told me about, you know, really how I needed to sit down and think about these conversations and think about them differently. Because I was moving from a small, medium sized enterprise to literally the most strategic type of clients that we had at the company that I worked for. And so he helped me to figure this out in a really simplified way. Like it, he mentioned to me that, Billy, no matter what happens, especially the more executive, the higher that you move up an organization, the simpler the conversation needs to become. Then just like, I didn't understand anything, or what, because again, the higher you move up in the organization, the simpler the conversation needs to be, because you're going to be speaking with people that make massive decisions that impact their organizations, every single day. And it needs to be you need to deliver a message in a way that demonstrates that you understand what their issue is, you can challenge some of their thought process, and also be able to provide them with some proposed solutions and the solutions, they need to be focused on these three key areas. And now these are the types of transferable skills that I talk a lot about that, especially for those of you because you're listening, and you're watching, and you're already in a corporate role. And you're thinking, How do I even use the knowledge that I have outside and this is a crystal clear example. Because this is a framework that I used in corporate and it is a framework that I still use to this day, working with and helping clients and I'm going to give it to you so that you can also use it, implement it, or talk to me about it, right? So we sat down, they said, Look, Billy, the conversations need to be around. Once you give your solution, they have to focus on three key areas. First of all, you've got to help clients understand how you can help them make more revenue. Right? How can you bring more money into what he called the top line of the organization, bringing more money into the company, because the executives on the other side, especially in this work, like brilliantly whenever I would speak to CEOs, there was two CEOs in particular, one was a family owned company, the other was a it's a publicly traded company on the on the ibex 35. But these companies, when I spoke to the CEOs, and these are companies that did 2 billion euros or more, and this framework works like clockwork, literally. So I'm sharing it with you. So number one thing about their top line are revenue that's coming into the company. The second thing has to do with the amount of money that's flowing out of the company. And usually you see this in the way that they either they talk about inefficiencies, or they have to find synergies in ultimately what that means is helping your client understand the expense line. So the specifically on the operating side of the of the expenses. So helping a company either talk about the revenue that's coming in to the top about the expenses that are going out, or also and most importantly, is to look at how you can help them do things in a way that's going to help keep them out of jail, ie do it in a way that's compliant. And so I said what? And he literally, I was winning, and I was ready to write forever and ever and he's like, Yeah, you need to worry about he, I mean, he explained it in two seconds. He's like, either you need to worry about their help explain to them the top line, you need to talk about their expenses or compliance. Right? As simple as that. And I thought to myself, Okay, well, really that's it. And so I gave a couple of examples. I started talking about the some of the solutions because I wanted to talk about solutions because that's what kept it simple. And I was like, Yeah, well, so what if we want to help themselves? CRM and he was like WHAT WILL CRM? What specific solution CRM? If you don't know what you probably do, because you're already watching and listening is customer relationship management. That's the terminology we're using at this at the time. And so this was really he I gave him the example. He said, Well, yeah, so if you want to be able to attract more clients provide a better journey. Ultimately, that is for what reason? I said, well, so that you become a client said, yeah, so if they become a client, then what has happening? They're paying you money to be a client. So there's an exchange of currency exchange of money. And so that's helping the top line. So that's the revenue point that he was talking about. I was like, Okay, well, yeah, this is simple. So I was actually thinking about it from one of those three buckets, either revenue, expenses, or compliance. And then it was about going out to put that into action. Now, of course, I fumbled and I got this wrong in the beginning, because I was trying to put in a new skill or practice it. I went over and over and over. But the important part was I learned this framework. Now. The team that I was, was leading at the time, when we never closed multimillion dollar, or multi million euro deals at the time, and the team got shut down relatively quickly. The thing that was really critical, and as a personal growth for me, that I'm sharing with you now is, I learned this framework in this framework, although the team didn't last very long. And we never got to the multimillion euro deals that we're playing that we thought we were going to do. This framework is one that I took away, and I used it afterwards. And I moved into Field Sales and moved into roles where I was closing deals that were well into the eight figures and 20,000,020 $5 million using this exact framework. So focusing on revenue, focusing on expenses, and also focusing on doing things in a compliant way. So that the clients so that you're able to, you know, I'm talking to you about this specifically, so that you can help to accelerate it make your side hustle successful. But this was also a transferable skill, because I learned it during corporate. So I want to leave that with you. Because these are three proven areas that will make your side hustle successful, focusing on revenue, focusing on expenses, and also be able to focus on doing things in a compliant way, I'm sure I'll talk to you a lot more about this. There's some things that I'm going to do to actually break some of these down into the future, or in the future. But for the moment, I just want to share these three proven areas that are going to make your side hustle successful. I would love to know how this is working for you. There's something that's come across your mind, if there's something else that you've also thought about great, always feel free to share that in your honest written reviews. But as I've left this with you today, I want you to think about this, I want you to see how you can actually what the service that you're offering today, the product that you're offering today and your side hustle, which one of these three areas? Are you helping your clients ultimately? What issue are you helping them solve is the one that's going to bring in more money to their company? Is it one that's going to take out unnecessary expenses from their company, and or making sure that they're doing things in a way that will allow them to be compliant? Let me know I would love to know, if you have this episode, you know, somebody wants to hear it needs to hear it, feel free to share it with them, talk to them about it. And once you're doing that, as you share that with others, and you're talking about it, take it from theory to practice. I'm going to be here preparing for the next one of our episodes. And so until then go out and make it a great day. Thank you very much for today's conversation was sponsored by the Billy keels advisory program. If you're looking to make your nine to five optional and need some help, just go to Billy keels.com forward slash advising once again, that's Billy keels.com forward slash advising

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