Christo: Hi there and welcome back! In this episode, we have a lot of golden nuggets to share with you again. Things that hopefully you can apply to your business to make a difference for you in terms of making things more efficient, more profitable ASAP; so we got a tip around processes and basically finding more money and reducing expenses in your business. We got a customer question which was around, “How do I get labourers to get excited about their jobs?”, so this is from a landscaping business where they got labourers, and their staff turnover so frequently, so how we get them passionate, which I‘ll go through answers around and response around. We have team member Rusty, one of the Basic Bananas‘ awesome team members. He’s going to come in and give us a tip on how to advance a sale, it‘s a nice way of actually saying how to close a sale. Think about these questions and fees or get uncomfortable when it gets to the end of like a sales conversation, or it‘s about members or people we work with when they‘re talking to their customers, so how do you move the call forward, and basically close the sale, I guess. So he‘s going to share a tip on that.

And we got Aga, one of our team members, is going to share a book. So Aga looks after marketing and team happiness around here in Basic Bananas, so a really cool book around teams and productivity, and so on. And we have a word of wisdom to close the day.

So first up, the tip is around processes in your business. Now, what kind of kills me a little bit when it comes to business is, “process for the sake of process”. So what tends to happen as businesses are around for a while, year after year, they develop processes, which is an excellent thing to do; processes to get stuff done. But what can actually start happening is you continually do the processes really well and lose track of the outcome you are looking to actually achieve. So what do you want to do every now and then is look at it like a spending freeze in a business is a thing that we recommend doing, in terms of looking at all your expenses everything you spend money on, and have a review and look at it whole, basically every expense, doing it, is there a better way of doing this, can we get better rates from suppliers and things, same with your time. Your time is an expense. Every minute in business costs the business money, basically. Every minute you are around, if you‘re buying a coffee on the way to work, you‘re an expense. You buy lunch. You, every minute, you‘re a resource and every one of your team members. So look at the outcomes you want to achieve, are we doing the best processes with everything? Basically it‘s a good time to go, “Let‘s spend a month and review all processes”. Get all of your teams, say, “Try and find two processes, two things we‘re doing in the business, each that needs to be reviewed or could be improved or could be scrapped,” because we are doing it in some way where we just started doing it for the sake of doing it basically. So a good tip there for you to look at to increase efficiency in a nice way and position that with your team.

Next up, we‘re going to drag in Rusty. So let‘s grab Rusty and see how we close a sale. Let‘s get this man in. He‘s a very awesome team member, looks after a lot of our Basic Bananas members and helping them with their marketing and sales processes, and all areas of business. So let‘s get Rusty in here now.

Here we have Rusty, one of our awesome team members here at Basic Bananas Head Quarters. So, what do you think, what‘s your tip today? Obviously there‘s so much we can cover around sales conversations and closing and all these things. So what can we share in this episode?

Rusty: It‘s just a simple tip about closing. There is so much focus on closing in the sales process, like how to close the deal, how to draw the conversation to that point where you‘re ready to say, “Are you going to do this thing? Are you going to buy it? Are you going to join?” or whatever it is. It is just a simple tip of the series of questions that you can ask in the lead-up to the close, where you kind of build-up to the sense of momentum and how you do it is that you ask questions that you have already created in your mind that you know you are going to get a “Yes” answer to. So you‘re pretty sure that you‘re going to get a “Yes” answer to these questions. Probably something like a nutritionist, let‘s say, you have a nutrition program, someone has come to speak to you about it, and you would like them to join the program for a month or a six-week program. So you might say, the questions might go something like this, “We have identified that you have issues in XYZ area, surrounding your nutrition, do you agree?” and they will go, “Yes.” And then you might say, “Can you see that if you paid more attention to your nutrition, that this is a potential solution to this problem?” and they might say, or hopefully they will say, “Yes.” And then you say, “Can you see that this might be a good place to learn about this, do you feel like I would be a good person to teach you?” and then hopefully they would say, “Yes.” You have led them through a series of questions where they are bound to say “yes”, and then you get to a point where you go, “Okay, are you ready to join?” and at that point, as Christo‘s always pointed out, that‘s where you just zip your lips and you don‘t say anything more. You hold the tension and see that that will present the opportunity to potentially raise another objection, where they might say, “Actually no, I‘m not ready yet,” or “I don‘t feel like I got the money quite yet,” and so you can raise another objection which you can then deal with or ultimately what you want is for that momentum to have build-up to a point where they say, “Yes, I‘m in.”

Christo: Awesome! Very cool. And it can be applied to pretty much every business. Super cool tip there. And I guess for the viewers thinking about one of those questions, you can list them out, you can have them in front of you as an initial step so you have them there as a reminder to use when it‘s relevant, to use when it flows. So like any sales conversation, you don‘t come across like a robot, so you have them there, you just start using them naturally, by bringing those in. But if you try and make it up on the spot, it might come across a little weird, So it‘s good to list down a few questions that you can ask that are certain “Yesses” and then get that momentum as they move towards the big YES

Rusty: The big YES, which is the close of a sale.

Christo: Thanks so much for joining us.

Rusty: No worries, it was fun.

Christo: It‘s always awesome to hear from Rusty. He has so much knowledge and so much care for all of our Basic Bananas community, all the business owners and marketers that he looks after and supports through Basic Bananas. Super cool to draw knowledge from him. And we‘ll get him in many more future episodes as well as with other team members as well.

So, now we have a customer question: How do I get labourers to get excited and do a good job, and get excited about their work? This is from a listener or a viewer, one of our audience members who have staff turning over all the time, you know, landscaping business, getting people that might not appear passionate about their job. How do we get them excited? A couple of points from this one. We‘ll go through four different points: #1 Make someone responsible for jobs. So if people go out of job sites, there are two team members working, one of them should sign off on the job. One of them should say “that‘s complete,” they‘re kind of like the boss of that, basically sign off at the end of the job, “Okay, it‘s done, it‘s complete.” So if you have two people in charge, “Okay, you‘re both responsible for making sure this job is done correctly,” it‘s like no one is in charge, no one is responsible. So there‘s going to be one person, and that‘s the contact you go to, “Okay, was that done well?” so that they feel a little bit of pride, a little bit of ownership in the job as well, and then the other person is kind of like, basically just to make sure they have done everything right because this person is going to sign off on it and report back to you. #2 Show them that there is progress in the business to advance. Everyone wants to know they can move forward in their role, so maybe they are starting in the bottom rank as the labourer, they can move to the one who is job site manager, who reports back to you, so there‘s some progress. And as the team grows, they might manage more teams. It‘s just letting them know that there will be progress if the business grows and everything goes well that they can see some sort of path maybe they could then advance to doing quotes as well as slowly move up and create some titles for the different levels as people move through and then maybe one day they‘re managing job sites. Show them progress. #3 Build Culture. Build a culture around your team as well. You want to make sure that people feel a part of something. So what are we actually doing here? We are making people‘s homes better. We are changing people‘s lives. When you hear Apple, the team members, they‘re called “Geniuses,” and the way that they get together and they basically feel that the work that they do is the way they communicate is “How many people‘s lives did we change today?” which is basically with their techie computer stuff, how many people‘s lives did we change? The same goes for business with labour, so how many people‘s lives did you change? You just changed their whole living environment. So feeling a part of the culture and doing something great is part of that business culture, what sort of impact are you making. And #4 Tap them into the results you are getting from real humans. So a good idea could be to create a “Customer Loving Board” or a board of completed jobs in your workshop or warehouse, or whatever you have, where you say “Jobs Completed” and you have images, you say how many people‘s lives you have changed and you can put the messages with people saying “Hey, Thanks so much!” or write up what they‘ve said, or, ask the customers for a testimonial, you can use those things like testimonials, a before and after shot for marketing, you are also marketing to yourself and to your team, the impact that you‘re making for real humans. You could just record on the customer loving board where you do these kinds of things. There you go, these are great tips, four tips, that you can implement right away to help keep the team motivated, get them inspired.

Now we are going to go visit team member Aga who has a book recommendation for us.

Aga: Hi everyone, this is our Basic Bananas mini library. We have a book club here at our headquarters where our team members can order any books they‘d like to read. This is actually I really love to reading recently. It‘s called “Smart Teams” and it‘s all about how to improve productivity as a team. So rather than focusing on how to increase your individual productivity, it‘s about how we can improve on ways that we work together. It‘s a really good read for any small business owner and yes, check it out!

Christo: So thank you, Aga so much for sharing that book recommendation. And Aga is a bit of a ninja when it comes to the team dynamic, and making sure the team is happy, she is definitely our team happiness rockstar around here. And now we have a word of wisdom for closing today. I‘m just going to open this Basic Bananas notebook randomly here which is full of amazing content, quotes, and things, and see what word of wisdom is our lucky tip this week. “Did you know that on Venus, a day is longer than a year. That is the length of time it takes to complete one whole orbit around the sun.” I didn‘t know that. So there we go, it‘s not really a word of wisdom, well I guess it is, it‘s a fact. So again, “Did you know that on Venus, a day is longer than a year. That is the length of time it takes to complete one whole orbit around the sun.” so there we go, we all got a little smarter, and if we ever moved to Venus there‘s going to be some really, really long nights. So until next time, feel free to send through any questions, any thoughts, any insights, any concerns, anything, anything, on any of the Basic Bananas social media channels and we‘ll look after every single question as fast as we can, course in through your enquiries to Basic Bananas or email [email protected] and hopefully we‘ll see you at some sort of workshop, online training, anywhere, or on the next episode. Bye for now!