Franziska: Hi there and welcome back!

Christo: Welcome back!

Franziska: Are you excited?

Christo: I‘m excited. Well, yes, I‘m excited.

Franziska: Hopefully you are. I am very excited. I just have a little bit of a sniffle. So, if you see my red nose and my watery eyes..

Christo: We‘ll get you a tissue.

Franziska: Yeah, I‘m not sad. I‘m just, I got a cold.

Christo: So, in this episode, we‘re gonna roll through a bunch of exciting things. Quick overview, we‘ve got a tip on presenting and the importance of presentation skills, we‘ve got some snippets from our annual event, The Experience. So a couple, 2 and a bit days that we spend with the whole Basic Bananas team, spending with a hundred business owners in Manly in Sydney, we‘ve got a question from one of our awesome audience members which we‘ll roll through on how to generate sales and use cold calling and so on, we‘ve got an Instagram tip from Hanna on our team, so the tools she‘s using to get the most out of Instagram which is really, really handy and then we got a little bit of fun to share with you at the end of this episode. It‘s actually a bit funny, almost a little embarrassing on our behalf.

Franziska: Just a little.

Christo: And a word of wisdom to share in the end, you‘ll enjoy that. So enjoy the show.

Franziska: Enjoy!

So you just came back from Bali from a speaking gig

Christo: Yes

Franziska: and you have a little tipsity tips to share, right?

(1:18) Christo: Yeah, tipsity tips. I was at a, presenting at an event for the travel industry, basically. It was really cool. We have about 120-130 people.

Christo: The good thing with presenting is and this is part of the tip is it‘s high impact when you do it because if you can present to a room full of a hundred people, you build a really good rapport when presented well and everything goes smoothly. You build a really good rapport with say a hundred people in this space for an hour. So the tip here that I wanted to share is learning to present, learning to speak. I believe it‘s pretty good for anyone, in any industry when you can present, you can present yourself as an expert, you can speak on your topic, and speak as an expert on your industry. It will help you promote your business because a very important tool or a resource that you have available to you is yourself. So consider yourself like a tool or tools. We want to use our self as a tool to promote your business, to promote your brand.

Some of you, your brand will be your personal brands, even more powerful. But consider yourself, if you have a different brand like you have a business brand, for example, you yourself, you‘re like a personal brand, but you‘re also like a marketing resource that you use to promote that business, promote that brand. So learning to present, learning to speak, it will help you with confidence in lots of different areas in life, I believe. But also a great way to promote yourself, promote your business, promote your products or services whether you‘re B to B, B to C, it doesn‘t matter, product or service, it‘s a great thing, a great area to up-skill yourself and it‘s a skill you can use for the rest of your life.

(2:52) Franziska: Actually, Rusty here on our team, he also is a musician and a singer and we‘re gonna go cut now behind the scenes at The Experience, our annual summit where he also is running a session on how to use your voice.

Rusty: Hi everybody! Today, I presented at the Experience, the idea of my presentation was to help people who are presenting. They may be talking to large groups, they may be presenting online, it might be video marketing or it might be phone conversations. But it was a voice enhancement workshop. So the purpose of it was to help people project, learn how to project their voice using the foundation, the core so that they‘re not putting too much strain on their vocal chords and that they can reach a large amount of people without using a microphone and without actually damaging themselves, losing their voice. The second part of the presentation was about resonance and how to resonate. So how to use your body‘s resonance so there are pockets of air on our body that vibrate, in our nasal, in our throat, in our chest and in our mouth. How can we activate those, bring them to life and then take up more space. So rather than just talking out of our mouth like most people do, you know, in a very small contracted way, we can actually talk more like this, it‘s almost like we‘re filling this room with sound so we get more volume and we get more of an expansive tone.

(4:15) Franziska: Okay, I hope you enjoyed looking a little bit behind The Experience behind the scenes. We certainly had a ball at The Experience. We always do. It comes once a year. So hopefully, you can come next year. So now we‘re going to answer a question that has been sent in. Thank you so much for all the fabulous questions that we have received. We always love hearing from you. Today‘s question we‘re going to address is from Gay who runs Konichiwa Kids Club, which is a Japanese language program. The question was around cold calling and what we believe about cold calling and how we go about it. Now, instead of cold calling, what we teach here also to our Clever Bunch members is we prefer to do warm calling. The difference is that instead of, cold calling means you‘re calling somebody who doesn‘t know you, warm calling means you first warm them up with something, you add value before you give them a call. Normally, then you will be way more received. People will be more receptive to your call. So there are different ways..

Christo: Sounds like a bit warm than cold, isn‘t it? We prefer to be warm at all times.

Franziska: Not at all times.

Christo: Well, I prefer to be warm than cold.

Franziska: So let‘s look at beautiful ways how we can go about warming up people before we call them.

(5:33) Christo: So a couple of different ways you can warm them up. Direct mail is one good strategy. So if you want to get in contact with someone, it‘s direct mail is writing them a letter first explaining the benefits of what you‘re looking to achieve and to get their attention, basically. You can send direct mail with a little lump in there. We call that lumpy mail like you put a little gift in the envelope. Because then they will definitely open it, they‘ll pay attention to it. When they open that letter, you‘ve got their attention for that moment. Then we suggest to follow-up with a follow-up call. The follow-up call usually says, “hey, I sent that thing. I got that information saying hello.” So they‘re already a little bit of aware and you can reference something off the call. It‘s not just like calling totally out of the blue, out of thin air. That‘s a cold call. The purpose of the call usually will then be to set up a meeting. So you try and keep things short. It‘s like mail to warm up for the call, the call you say hey, just send through some information. I‘d love to come, I might be in your area, I can swing by for five minutes and say hello. Be valuable and try and set a meeting. So don‘t just say can we book a meeting because we get scared of that kind of thing.

If you are going straight into a cold call, to just call someone out of the blue, or send an email to them first or a direct mail to them first, try to look them up. The more personalised the call is the better. If you send, say, an email or a letter that says, “hey, I love what you‘re up to and I love that how you did this article, or you did this in the past or how are you guys working on this in your business. So stalk them a little bit, learn something that they‘ve done, reference that so that they feel acknowledged. People, if you give them a little compliment, or feel acknowledged, they will be more likely to want to talk to you.

Franziska: Yeah, exactly. So just basically, give value first and then make the call so that they feel like you are adding value before you are asking for a meeting or their time.

(7:20) Now, we‘re going to look at a little bit of Instagram and some of the latest Instagram tools with Hanna. So let‘s go take a look with Hanna right now.

Hanna: Hi guys! Today, I want to share a little hack for you for Instagram, specifically for Instagram stories. Instagram stories are something that you should definitely be utilising as a business owner on social media. The app I want to share with you today is called Unfold which lets you create really beautiful stories and just to make you sort of standout a bit more and make them more engaging for your audience. We‘re just gonna have a look at the app now and I‘ll show you how to use it.

So the app we‘re gonna look at is Unfold and Unfold lets you create some really cool Instagram stories and I‘ve already put in some photos here. Essentially, it lets you choose from different sorts of frame and there‘s all different kinds of frame to choose from. These are just the ones that I was working with before. But there‘s other packages and other frames that you can purchase. It just lets you create some really unique-looking, interesting stories. But there‘s also lots in here that are free that you can choose and then add some photos, too. You can also change the background of the canvass. So to do that, you just click on that little icon down here and then on the colour symbol, and it lets you change the background of your story. This is just a really quick and fun way to make your stories stand out and engage your audience.

Franziska: Thanks so much, Hanna. Hanna is such a ninja here. She runs all of our social media and really grateful to have her share some of the tools with you. We‘ll get her back for sure.

(9:05) Now let‘s finish up with a little bit of fun.

Christo: Ready, roll that freakin‘ thing

(9:40) Franziska: Okay, let‘s finish up with a word of wisdom. Today‘s word of wisdom is from Elon Musk. You know why? Because I recently read an article, an interview with him and he shared 15 points that are the most important things in his life that he thinks that made him the success he is. One of the points was all about the importance of knowing marketing. So he basically said, even if you have the best thing in the world, which we know that‘s why you‘re here. Even if you have the best thing in the world, if you don‘t know marketing, if you don‘t know how to market, it doesn‘t help you. So he said one of his key points why he is successful is because he knows marketing, and he does. Now the quote though that I like is, one of his quotes is, “Failure is an option. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough. So dare to fail, dare to be brave. Our theme for The Experience was “courage”. Our invitation for you is to be brave and to fail more because if you‘re not failing enough, it means that you‘re maybe not innovating enough, you‘re not maybe pushing enough. So failure is okay.

Christo: Being too shy of failure and therefore not progressing and not innovating at all is what tends to happen.

Franziska: Exactly.

Christo: So let‘s feel the fear and do it anyway.

Franziska: We‘ll see you on the next episode.

Christo: See you soon.