Evolving From Company-Centric to Client-Focused Strategies with Andy Bounds

Michael Lander (00:16.394)
And three, two, one. Andy, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales to Podcast. It's great to have you.

Andy Bounds (00:24.281)
Thanks, mate, it's great to be here.

Michael Lander (00:26.434)
So I'm really looking forward to this. love, as you know, I love podcasting, I love the format. I love meeting people like yourself where we have fantastic conversations about the whole sales and commercial arena. So without further ado for our guests, who are you? What do you do? And something unusual about yourself.

Andy Bounds (00:43.778)
So I am a sales consultant, which basically means I help large companies to make more sales than they thought they could. And it might be through training or helping them create their sales communications, whatever it might be, works all over the world with some pretty impressive companies. And I'm very proud of that.

The unusual thing about me, my mum is blind. So as a small child, the person who taught me to speak can't see. So I became good at describing stuff to people who don't see the world the way I do. And that is pretty much what sales is, describing the world in the way that people are blind to your benefits and blind to why they should give you money, blind to why they should even meet you. Well, that's my unique thing.

Michael Lander (01:04.674)
Wow.

Michael Lander (01:24.206)
That's one of the best openings I've ever had in my entire life. Brilliant. Thank you. So we just prepared kind three questions in advance as topics to talk around, have a discussion about. So first one, how do you articulate the value of your solution and what it's going to create in terms of the value it creates for your prospects and clients, particularly as you said on the pre-record, they don't really care about what you do or how you do it, but they definitely care about the results and the outcome. So how do you articulate the value?

Andy Bounds (01:26.934)
Yay!

Andy Bounds (01:54.528)
So there's lots of ways to do this, but one way to always focus on is the word afters. In other words, why is the client better off after you? So after me, they're gonna make more sales more quickly. After the marketing campaign, they might get more leads. After the lawyer, they're not going to jail. But you see, if you were to call the lawyer in to do a sales pitch, the lawyer would probably tell you they were founded in the year 1922, and here's a map of the 12 offices. And there's this weird thing that salespeople often do is they talk about themselves too much.

And if I was to say, and I have said to many, many people over the years, what do you think is your best selling point? Almost always the answer begins in, you know, we, like we have great products. We have this, we have this, we have this. The greatest answers to the question, what's my best selling point is you'll sell more by the time I finished. So the best thing about me is the impact I have on you, which I know sounds obvious, but have a look at most companies opening slide of a sales pitch. Have a look at most companies opening paragraph and executive summary. There's no afters anywhere.

Michael Lander (02:39.426)
Exactly.

Michael Lander (02:51.342)
it drives me mad. When I review a lot of proposals around client briefs and around RFPs, the first two pages are basically about them as a company. And I said, that's fine, stick it in the appendix, someone might read it. But as your opening section, what difference are you going to make? That's what they care about. Do you know what my problem is? Do you understand it in some detail? And when you solve that problem, what's the benefit?

Andy Bounds (03:16.488)
Absolutely. And I mean, and it's the funny thing, because when you hear this, like people will be listening to us, Mike, and going, yes, yes, we know this. And we know this, but do we do it? You know? And, you know, very simple exercises, print out the most recent, I mean, here's an exercise for someone listening here, print out some of you recently created, like a sales pitch, a proposal, an RFP, whatever it is, and you get two different highlights of pens.

Michael Lander (03:23.618)
Yeah, exactly.

Andy Bounds (03:38.902)
The first color highlights a pen, you highlight all your after sentences, what the client's gonna be left with afterwards, know, more sales, less jail time, whatever it might be. So you highlight that in one color, wherever they are. And then the second color, what you do is you highlight where the customer's eyes go first, and the customer's eyes go first to titles, to visuals, and the top lines of paragraphs. So.

Michael Lander (03:57.922)
Yes.

Andy Bounds (03:59.028)
And it's really interesting because when you do this in two colours often never the twain shall meet because you have the colour where their eyes are going, no afters anywhere and all the afters are at the bottom of paragraph four and in the middle of page 12. No, shove them early. Stop calling it things like credentials presentation. You call it how we can save you 20 million pounds tax in the next year. Now I want to read it.

Michael Lander (04:03.484)
Hahaha!

Michael Lander (04:20.27)
Exactly right. So just over your kind of vast experience of doing this with clients, large, very, very large and small, just some examples, not the names of the companies, but just kind of examples of what would that look like? Because a lot of clients say, yes, I get it. You're right. I don't do it. But what exactly are we talking about here? How do I describe the value? Which is a bit of a weird question, because obviously if you don't know what the value is, as a salesperson, that's a bit of a challenge.

But give us examples of good kind of value benefit statements.

Andy Bounds (04:52.542)
Okay, cool. So anything at all that focuses on is on the client's afters and it goes far enough in the future. So if you were a website company, you might say after us, you'll have an online presence. Yeah, but that's not very sexy. Yeah, but after the online presence, more people will know about you. Yeah, well, that's not very sexy. Yeah, but after that, you're to get people who more into, yeah, but that's not very sexy. And eventually you go on until you say things like, you're going to make sales without having to do anything. You're like, nah, that's sexy. And so...

Michael Lander (05:06.616)
Correct.

Michael Lander (05:19.02)
Yeah, right.

Andy Bounds (05:21.012)
The thing to do is if you think of a timeline, start off with what you are, then add to it what you do, that equals what you cause, and then you say after that, after that, after that, until it gets quite sexy. So that is the simplest thing to do. And then you say it in reverse. So the website company could say, we'll help you make sales to people you've never met by the fact they know about you when they didn't. And the reason they know about you when they didn't is because you now have an online presence. And if you care, it's because you do websites. Yeah.

So that's the way to do it. You keep going after that, after that, after that, till it gets sexy and then you say it in reverse. That's how you do it if you're marketing, if you're talking. Yeah? Cool.

Michael Lander (05:52.82)
I like that. Now I like that. It's a bit like the Simon Sinek thing.

Andy Bounds (05:58.686)
It is like why are you doing it? But the slight difference is with Simon Sinek when he says the why it's very much like why we're here, you know, whereas I think it's why you're better off when I've done it. It's that sort of thing.

Michael Lander (06:05.758)
Exactly. The bigger purpose. Absolutely right. Now what you just described is much more tangible. So I work with a lot of marketing agencies and when you talk to a creative agency, they often really struggle to say, well, if we're working on a creative pitch for a client, then how do we demonstrate, how do we draw what I call the value waterfall? How do you describe the buckets of value that you create?

Andy Bounds (06:29.067)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Lander (06:32.942)
And a lot of creative firms go, well, that's really hard. It's about the creative. But all you're saying is, well, work that through. Well, why are we doing the creative? Well, we're doing it because we want ads that are beautiful. Okay. Well, why do you want ads that are beautiful? Well, people like ads that are beautiful. Well, why do they like them? Well, because they engage them and they remember them. Right? They remember them, what happens? Well, if they remember them, they tend to buy them. So really, we're doing it because they're going to buy something one day in the future and then work it backwards. Brilliant.

Andy Bounds (07:01.562)
That's it. And then going back to my little childish exercise with two highlighter pens, you can see that if you communicate that way, then the two highlighter colors do meet. Because if you say things in reverse, you say the sexiest thing to start with. So if you started off with an elevator pitch, your opening line will be something like, we've agreed we have three priorities with this project, colon, after, after, after. And we can help you achieve this for the following reason, bang, bang. So that's the way to do it. So you start at using your water ball thing, you start with the bottom one.

the waterfall, the sexiest thing and flip it around. Another simple thing Mike is have a look at the titles that people do. So when they send proposals, they often call them our proposal and wonder why nobody opened it. I want a piece of what you asked for an example. I want a piece of work recently from a pharmaceutical company and we always have debriefs when we win. You know, we don't tend to forensically analyze when we lose. It's too depressing, but we just have a big, you know, big debrief when we win.

Michael Lander (07:29.836)
Yeah. Yep. Exactly.

Michael Lander (07:40.578)
Right.

Andy Bounds (07:56.586)
And we spoke to the client, did you choose us? And they said it was your proposal title. And we said, what do you mean? He said, well, one of your competitors was called Our Proposal and yours have called How You'll Generate 50 Million Pound Revenue in Three Months. He said, who did we open first? And when we opened it, I was not thinking, I wonder what year his company was founded.

Michael Lander (08:04.099)
Ha

Michael Lander (08:18.99)
I laugh because it's so simple and brilliant. Yes, I completely agree. Definitely. When I like you, I mean, obviously I'm a consultant, I'm a trainer. I work in a bit of a different domain to you, but within the sales domain from a procurement lens. But when I talk to clients and I read their proposals, responses to RFPs and I mark the homework and I say, even with bigger companies, find they'll write a proposal.

which is a response to a client brief or an RFP. And they put all their thinking into it and they're proud of it and they should be proud of their work. But there are several problems. One of them is there's no exact summary. And I said, right, so let's say Andy, you're the CFO and I've got this proposal, another procurement director, and I give it to you and say, Andy, we've got proposal from XYZ. It's one of five. Can you have a look at it? And you're like, well, where's my bit?

I'm like, it's in there somewhere, Andy. It's 150 pages. It's scattered through the document. You're going to go, why are you talking to me? I'm busy. I'm not interested. So an exact summary with hyperlinks in the document that are relevant to certain stakeholders is really helpful.

Andy Bounds (09:27.306)
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Andy Bounds (09:36.83)
Yeah, I love what you're saying here. also there's a sense of, not a very nice word this, hypocrisy sometimes because people banging their proposal, how much they try and save the client work and they're always putting the clients at the heart of everything they do. And they send them 150 pages of bilge, which nobody can wait to, well, it's hypocritical. You've just said how nice you are and you send me something that I've got to wait through. So it just doesn't...

Michael Lander (09:53.859)
Correct.

Michael Lander (09:58.071)
Exactly.

Andy Bounds (09:59.424)
What's that saying? If I see crumbs on the in-flight table, I think the wings are going to fall off? If you can't write me a good proposal when you're trying to impress me and you know I'm watching you, then what are you going to behave like when you don't think I'm watching you?

Michael Lander (10:04.258)
You

Michael Lander (10:10.177)
Exactly.

Michael Lander (10:13.858)
Correct. So back to the value thing, really, really important right up front in your face, how much value you're to create, the title of your proposal, don't call it our proposal, how we're going to generate 50 million sales in three months for you. So lots of basically benefit statements, outcome statements. What's the outcome? What's the result of working with us? And then the other thing, Andy, is how do you, so saying it's one thing, but you've got to also kind of evidence it.

Andy Bounds (10:36.22)
Absolutely.

Andy Bounds (10:42.102)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Lander (10:42.79)
if someone makes a bold claim, we're going to make 50 million for you in three months, how do you kind of unpick that in a written document so that you kind of lead the reader through this interesting voyage of discovery about here's the outcome. Now, how are they going to do that without losing the essence of it's all about value?

Andy Bounds (11:04.787)
So there's three things that you need. mean, firstly, if you're gonna put any numbers in, the numbers have to be agreed with the client. So during the thing, so one of the questions I ask is, wow, that sounds valuable. What would that be worth if you got it right? And if they say 50 million, where'd you get the evidence for that number? So I really, and I don't let them get away with, well, we'll just know. And I say, well, come on, you're gonna have to go to the executive board and you can't just say, well, we just knew it was worth giving Andy some money. You know, we need to.

Michael Lander (11:28.001)
Exactly.

Andy Bounds (11:28.904)
So you get the number, but once you've done that, the three things that I will use are stories, teaching and timelines. So what I mean by stories is just give evidence you've done it before. So I can tell you that I can increase your sales by a big number because when I work with so and so, this is what happened and they are similar needs to you. So tell them relevant stories. And again, if you're to do a story, go afters first, put the sexy stuff at the beginning. So you don't say, I work with bank number X and 20 lines down, say, and they made some money, you say, I helped.

Bank X win four million pounds and this is how. So it's the same idea. So firstly is stories. The second one is teaching. Like teach them something they didn't know they didn't know. I the book, Challenger Sale is 250 pages of really good stuff, but you could summarize it all with one word, which is basically teaching. Like teach the client stuff. You know, challenge their thinking.

Michael Lander (12:03.288)
Exactly.

Michael Lander (12:15.392)
You

Michael Lander (12:18.734)
When I talk to Matt next time, I'll tell him that and see what he says.

Andy Bounds (12:21.814)
Yes, that's right. That's all they need is to just put teaching in 250 pages. That should do it. You always want the client to look at you and go, well, I never knew that. Yeah, I've not thought about it like that before. So again, when you're trying to add value, say, look, 50 million, that's what you said. Here's the evidence is going to work. Stories have done it before. Here's three or four things you didn't know about the journey you're about to take. And then the final thing, the third thing is timeline. Show them what the timeline is. So the way I do it, nice and simple, Mike.

Michael Lander (12:30.786)
Yeah, correct.

Andy Bounds (12:48.468)
I've got an arrow across the top saying this is the duration of the project and the months. And then I have a row underneath saying these are the main things I'm doing. And very important, Mike, I have a row underneath saying these are the things you're doing, client. Now, obviously, there's a lot more things on my row than their row, but that gets rid of at least three objections. Number one, what does it look like? Number two, what am I getting for my money? And number three, it sounds too much hassle. Well, not really, but I've to do four things in six months.

Michael Lander (12:51.374)
Absolutely.

Michael Lander (12:59.662)
Correct, exactly.

Michael Lander (13:12.162)
then if I can add one thing, which you probably do already, but as a fourth line, the benefits realization bit, as in the value, when do you start to see the money coming through broadly as a range, then it's like on one page, it's like, wow, okay, that's pretty good.

Andy Bounds (13:14.24)
Please do.

Andy Bounds (13:23.562)
Yeah. Yes.

Andy Bounds (13:29.014)
Yeah, and give it a sexy title, don't call it timeline, you say our timeline to increasing your revenue by 50 million. You know, so it's just all over the place.

Michael Lander (13:34.326)
Exactly. Brilliant. Andy, you're one of the first sales coaches, trainers, experts I've met that makes it really straightforward, simple to understand, painfully obvious. And yet I look at my own work that I do. I write discussion documents for clients and I go, okay, am I living what I also talk about? Yeah, most of the time, but not all the time.

Andy Bounds (13:49.771)
Thank you.

Michael Lander (14:02.638)
because you miss things, you forget things, because we're So you're giving us a nice simple set of prompts. I love the, it was stories and things that don't, stories teaching timeline. Brilliant. Very good.

Andy Bounds (14:05.013)
Hmm?

Andy Bounds (14:11.936)
teaching and timeline.

Yeah. And just you said that this is just very recent and raw with me. Someone gave me some feedback this week and I think they meant it as a nice thing. I don't know, but they say, well, I hear your advice. I'm never sure if you're a simpleton or a genius. Although I'm glad you think there's some doubt. Feedback's a gift. I just said, I just said, I'm not sure whether to say thank you or shut up. So I'll just say thank you. And he goes like, yeah, believe it or not.

Michael Lander (14:34.316)
Ha ha ha!

Michael Lander (14:38.126)
How did you respond? Just out of interest.

Michael Lander (14:43.438)
Exactly. Brilliant. Okay, next kind of topic. How do you get to be effective and memorable in remote communication and selling? I.e. when you can't get in front of someone in person.

Andy Bounds (15:00.296)
So if you're doing remote, there's many things you have to prepare, but most of them are things you would have to prepare anyway. So you should prepare a good start because that's called your first impression. You should prepare how you're to remove objections because they're going to come up with any. So normal sales stuff is the same. So sometimes people think you don't have to prepare in the same way you do, but there's one thing you have to prepare more with virtual than anything else, which is the questions you're going to ask.

So you should all, mean, the best salespeople ask the best questions, right? So you should be good at questioning, but it's more important with this anyway, because it ensures it's a two-way dialogue and it's very easy when you don't have the natural aura of being in person, like stuff doesn't happen. You you have to draw people out. And I say to lot of salespeople, a question's important, and they look at me like, yes, of course, yeah. I say, right, so how much time in your life have you actually spent sat down with a piece of paper and a pen and written down brilliant questions?

Michael Lander (15:31.564)
Yeah, correct.

Andy Bounds (15:56.906)
How many times have you spoken to other professions which question underpins their success, like, you know, attorneys and barristers and counselors and coaches, and actually said, what are the best questions you ask? And that's when they tend to look a bit sheepish. So you want to be, you want to be doing everything anyway that you would normally do, but your questions have to be really on point and particularly early on, get the two way dialogue going. And so if you've got one of these things and there's four people and one person doesn't have the camera on, you know, I just call it out and say,

Mike, I've noticed you've not got your camera on. Would you mind at least putting it on for a second so I can see what you look like? You know? And then once you put it on, if you turn it off again, even you feel a bit of an idiot because you're turning your camera off. And so you just sort of call it out a bit. I mean, what's that saying about leadership? If you ignore bad behavior, you empower it. So if you ignore someone with the camera off, you're just empowering them to keep the camera off. And somebody else might turn their camera off in a minute because Andy doesn't seem to mind. So questioning.

Michael Lander (16:28.738)
Yep, exactly.

Michael Lander (16:35.009)
Exactly.

Michael Lander (16:47.566)
Yeah, exactly. So Andy, happens? So questioning really important. What happens when you're on? I've got an increasing number of clients. don't know about you, which are now having to do virtual pitches where the client, you you're in a situation, it's competitive. It's down to the last three. Normally in the old world, we'd do it in person. You could get some chemistry going. You can engage with them, but now you've got, you know, it's a virtual environment. There's five of them on the call.

Andy Bounds (17:00.0)
Mm-hmm.

Andy Bounds (17:05.28)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Lander (17:16.504)
before they were on screens off, really hard, really hard to sell in that environment. Any thoughts and tips, no magic wand, but what you kind of thoughts and tips.

Andy Bounds (17:26.432)
Well, I mean, the thing to do is, mean, I'll go back to my questions point I said before, but you really spend time on thinking how can I make this interactive? And most people don't do that. If you think about most how most people prepare pictures, 90 % of the time is on coloring in slides and 10 % of the time is having a read through. That is totally the wrong way to do it. If I'm doing it, 30 % of the time on the slides, 30 % on the read through, but 40%, most of my time is on how do I make this interactive? How do I make it fun?

Michael Lander (17:41.132)
Yes.

Andy Bounds (17:56.18)
How can I, so for example, if I'm doing a pitch for sales training, for example, one thing I'll do is I'll say, I just want to try out an exercise that I'd like to try on one of the trainings with you guys. Could you pretend to be one of your guys? I'm going to ask you this question. Just type in the chat box, see what you think. And I'm not saying this will be your answer. You're pretending to be one of them. Let's see. And that way, I can see what it looks like now. And then of course, if I say,

Michael Lander (18:09.134)
Huh?

Michael Lander (18:18.945)
Exactly.

Andy Bounds (18:20.49)
write down what you think your best selling point is, the chat box, they say, our people, our history, our da da da, our map of our offices and so on. And then I can introduce them to afters and show them how to do afters, say, right, go again. And now they're like brilliant things. And then I can say the chat box, you see the top half of the chat box, that's what your company's like without me. And the bottom half of the chat box, that's your company will be like with me. And let me just show you how that's gonna manifest itself, da da da. And so what you're doing is you're trying to think.

Michael Lander (18:26.33)
You

Andy Bounds (18:46.9)
How can I draw them in to make this an interactive thing? Because I easily could have done a 10 minute rant about afters, but that's not as good as getting them to type in the chat box. And also Mike, when they go, well, we did it. I go, hold on, this is what you wrote? So don't deny it, you wrote it, your writing, it says your name under it. And so it's quite not, you can have a bit of banter and bit of fun about it, but you might do that if you were face to face, but I think you've got to do it if you're virtual.

Michael Lander (18:50.702)
oooo

Michael Lander (18:59.95)
Yeah.

Michael Lander (19:06.04)
Exactly.

Michael Lander (19:13.678)
Brilliant. we won't go on for hours because there won't be a lot time. That'd be rude. But being memorable. So was it Mayor Angelou said, they'll forget what I wrote, they'll forget what I said, but they'll never forget how I made them feel. In a virtual environment, how do you, they're seeing three different teams. They've already gone to seven, they're shorted to five.

Andy Bounds (19:30.728)
Mm-hmm. Fail. Yeah.

Michael Lander (19:43.116)
decided on three, you're pitching and then at the end of it, they're going to make some random decision probably. Not random, it would be well thought through clearly, but how do you make you and your team stand out following that thread through so that when the buying panel sits for a big deal and they're looking at all of the data they've got, they keep coming back to that bloke Andy and

Andy Bounds (19:44.596)
Mm-hmm.

Andy Bounds (20:04.074)
Mm-hmm.

Michael Lander (20:12.236)
some of his team members. Remember when they did this thing? I can't get that out of my mind. Any thoughts on that?

Andy Bounds (20:18.644)
Yeah. Yeah, so I'll give you a few of those so that I mean, the questioning is good because it's interactive and so on. But one of the reasons you do questioning is because let's use the challenge yourself with a word teaching again. So that is a really good thing because nobody else will have taught them something. Nobody else will have. They might have said, the other guys are a bit slick and like Andy doesn't have any doesn't even have any hair. Like what does he know? It's ridiculous. But fair enough, he did make us look a bit daft with that chat box, didn't he? You know.

Michael Lander (20:39.287)
You

Andy Bounds (20:46.946)
And what I'll do is I'll also give them homework and I say whether you use me or not, what I strongly suggest you do is look at the three most recent proposals you've sent and see if they were more like the top of the chat box than the bottom. So it's almost like I give them homework, you know, just like try it out. So that sort of thing. Other things that work, let's go back to this idea about teaching. The more you can...

Michael Lander (20:58.497)
Exactly.

Andy Bounds (21:07.63)
throw them early on because that's first impressions, the better. So for example, I was asked recently to go and do a pitch and they wanted some employee engagement stuff, whatever that is. Right. And so it's a company. So I know one person who works for the company, went on LinkedIn and found six of my contacts used to work for the company. So I spoke to all these, my one, my person who works there on the other six, so I spoke to seven people.

And I said, they want to do some stuff on employee engagement. And all seven of them said in slightly different ways, the directors always think it's to do with employee engagement. They're totally wrong. What happens is the boardroom in our place is like an office in the middle of an open plan thing. So every time there's a boardroom, you see all the directors going into this central hall. And they come out and they never say anything about the meeting. So we all go, they're all talking about us again. And there's nothing.

And so they come out and go, why aren't the employees engaged? The reason that no one ever shares any information is because the bosses don't and we cop with the boss. So anyway, so they gave me all this stuff. So I went in, I'd done me slides and everything. And I said, before I start, in preparation for today, what I did, you want employee engagement. I spoke to seven employees, past and present, and they gave this piece of feedback. want to share it with you. And I want you to tell me why you think they said it. So I'm not asking if you agree. I want to know why you think they said it.

Michael Lander (22:03.043)
Yeah, yeah.

Michael Lander (22:16.31)
No, Yeah, brilliant.

Andy Bounds (22:18.164)
And I gave this stuff and I basically watched these people have a 20 minute conversation about, yeah, we do do that, don't we? We do do that, don't we? And that's pretty memorable. Whereas everybody else was saying, our employee engagements has got a seven step process and it...

Michael Lander (22:30.318)
Absolutely. Very good, Andy. Very good. And again, that bit of, I did a piece with a client two weeks ago. I don't know if they'll win or not, but we started having a conversation and they were prepping for basically submitting a document. So it wasn't the actual presentation, but we started talking about industry insights. And I said, look, if I was on the buying team,

And it's a, this is about building market share. Say I'd want to know, well, what do you know about my competitors and what do you know about the market and what do you know about how you do drive market share increases and what's that worth and how big is the market? And they're like, but they haven't asked for that. I said, no, exactly. They haven't asked for it, but if you can do some background and you can present something with some really unusual insights in it, same thing that they get, that's going to stand out. They're going to go, wow.

didn't ask for that, didn't expect that, hadn't thought about that. And it, same thing, it makes you memorable. The research point, back to the one, what you just did. You do research in advance, you make sure that it's well thought through, you go above and beyond. Because if it's worth a million dollars, that's worth a bit of research, it?

Andy Bounds (23:31.818)
Mm-hmm.

Andy Bounds (23:38.261)
Yeah.

Andy Bounds (23:47.326)
It is and be clever with the research workers. Sometimes people think research is a bottomless pit and you're going to have to invest hours and hours and hours and hours. Sometimes it's just doing things in a slightly different way. They wanted employee engagement. So it sounds obvious. Let's talk to employees to see if they're engaged, which sounds really obvious, but it would be very easy to read all the annual reports to see what the boss is wanting.

Michael Lander (24:05.761)
Exactly.

Andy Bounds (24:06.614)
Another one, sorry, I want give you too many examples, but I quite like this one. One of my dad's friend has a legal practice and he said he doesn't think his people are very good on the phone. And I said, I'll check it out for you. He goes, well, how are you going to do that? said, well, I'll ring them. I mean, brilliant, right? Yeah, I get the ring. So what it is, I've run six of them. So I just like run, carrying on getting different people. And to each of them, because one of things that it was like road traffic accidents. I said, I just messed up, I've just been in a really bad car crash.

Michael Lander (24:20.31)
Exactly. Give him a call. I'll give him a ring.

Andy Bounds (24:35.698)
I wonder if you could maybe represent me. And then I was giving feedback to this guy and I said, and do you what every one of your six highly trained people did? They all asked good lawyer questions, put lawyer winkers on and they said, were there any witnesses? Is there any CCTV? Did you call the police? Did you call the insurance company? Did you get the person detailed? I said, you know what? Not one of them asked me, are you all right? Are you all right?

Michael Lander (24:56.534)
Are you alright? Exactly!

Andy Bounds (24:58.516)
So I'm gonna suggest they don't have very good emotional engagement with your customers. And he just bursts out laughing. goes, God, they don't, do they? Yeah, well, clearly I'm 10 minutes away from working with them. You know what I mean? Because once you've done that, you've just, but you cannot, you cannot add the differentiating value you're talking about unless you go the extra mile. Everyone thinks they go the extra mile, Mike. Everyone. And I have to point out if everyone did it, then it isn't extra.

Michael Lander (25:05.729)
You

Michael Lander (25:09.888)
Exactly.

Michael Lander (25:24.919)
It's expected.

Andy Bounds (25:26.154)
Yes, that's right, that's called the same mile everybody else is doing.

Michael Lander (25:31.756)
Okay, we've got one last topic and we've got about three or four minutes. How to leverage your existing relationships to generate new leads, kind of ahead of cold outreach, new relationship building. So it's about existing relationships. How do you leverage that?

Andy Bounds (25:34.836)
Mm-hmm. Go.

Andy Bounds (25:46.614)
Yes, okay. So my general rule with this is warm beats cold. I'd rather talk to somebody who likes me than somebody who doesn't know me. So warm beats cold. So if I have to do, I don't know, half an hour of lead generation, I'm going to speak to existing people. I'm not going to speak to strangers. So this cold calling and cold emailing and cold LinkedIn and cold networking, I just can't be bothered because I'm inherently lazy and I don't want to do stuff that's not very likely to work. my...

Michael Lander (25:52.728)
Definitely.

Andy Bounds (26:11.286)
Three main sources of business for me are number one, existing buyers, because they might want to buy more stuff. Number two is what I call switches. So previous buyers who've moved jobs, because obviously when people move jobs, they want to make the mark and they know that I'm good. So all that sort of stuff. And number three is referrals. So you've got like upsells, you've got switches and you've got referrals.

And that is by far, so anyone listening to this will go, yeah, I know. So let me just ask everyone who's listening to this, do you have a target? I have a target every week, it's what I call three and one. And so every single week, I am gonna ask for three of up sales or switches or referrals. I don't have to do three of each, so just do three. And so it could be three up sales one week, don't care. So I'm gonna ask for three and I wanna get at least one.

Michael Lander (26:52.11)
Yeah, yeah.

Andy Bounds (26:56.916)
And the reason I'm able to do this is because what I do is I've got some time set aside in my diary. This is another thing most people don't do. They get to the end of the week and they go, I didn't have time to have referrals. It's always like they say, it's not my fault, it's time's fault. It is your fault because you didn't put it in your Outlook calendar. If you put stuff in your Outlook calendar, you have time to do it. And if you don't, you don't. So I have this little Outlook calendar thing which says three and one.

Michael Lander (27:18.222)
correct

Andy Bounds (27:22.302)
And basically I'll ring three existing customers or three switching customers or three of my friends who ask if they'll refer me. And as long as one of them works, that'll do.

Michael Lander (27:29.538)
Yeah, absolutely. Brilliant. mean, again, the simple things are because you've spent many years trying things out, practicing things, seeing what works and what doesn't work. And that's beauty of podcasting, to be honest. I invite very clever people onto the podcast and they give their insights based upon 20, 30 years of experience. Or in your case, Andy, clearly less than that because you're not as old as me.

Andy Bounds (27:55.977)
Well it's nice if you're bald because no one can really picture your age so somewhere between 20 and 80 we'll leave it there.

Michael Lander (28:01.268)
Exactly, correct. And yeah, the three in one. Absolutely. It makes perfect, perfect sense. But you have to do it every week. An old boss of mine, many years ago, guy called Gary McElwraith, who was a partner at KPMG. And they have this book. And I go into his office quite a lot and I was working for him as a junior consultant. And I'd be like, what's in the book, Gary? He said, it's really simple, Mike. Every week.

Andy Bounds (28:11.734)
You do and so, sorry, go on.

Michael Lander (28:30.306)
I get the book out and I call someone that I used to work with or someone that, you know, has been a recent client or someone that's an ex-employee that's moved to a big organization and I call them and I have a chat and I see how they are and I see if there's anything that they might know about any work that's coming up. And every week I do that and then when I get to Z, I go back to A. And that's about, I think it was about like a four to six month cycle. I'm like, really? said, yeah, that's how I generate business.

And I'm like, wow, that's a simple but clever technique. Same thing.

Andy Bounds (29:03.698)
It's either that or cold calling 20 strangers. Why would you do that?

Michael Lander (29:07.905)
Absolutely.

Andy Bounds (29:09.206)
I mean, I love that. It's a great story. The thing I always think with this is if you want to generate leads, if you think of three words ending in I's, prioritize, so work out a thing that's most likely to work. So in my case, it switches maybe. So you get prioritized. Secondly, diarize, put it in your outlook calendar, 15 minutes a week, 30 minutes a day, whatever it is wanna do. And the third one, and this is really important, because as you said before, mate, you've gotta make sure you do it. The third word is socialize, like ask someone to hold you to account.

Michael Lander (29:37.122)
Right.

Andy Bounds (29:37.894)
So it could be your boss. mean, in my organization, like the company is called Andy Bounds Limited and I'm Andy Bounds. So I'm kind of important in my company. So I guess I'm the boss. So I asked my PA to do it. And I say to her, without fail, every Thursday, just say, you done your three and one? And if I, if I haven't the first time I hadn't, she did the parent thing, like we're not angry. We're just disappointed, which was quite upsetting. But then when I started giving excuses, she was brilliant. Cause she was like, I'll stop you there.

I don't care why you didn't do it, you said you were going to do 3 in 1 and you haven't done 3 in 1 so it doesn't matter to me why you didn't do it but probably you're going to want to do 6 in 2 next week. Anyway, I've done my job now, bye.

Michael Lander (30:13.358)
Exactly.

We're not angry, we're disappointed. I think on that note, Andy, I think we should close. Andy, it's beyond my expectations. I've had a laugh. We've got great practical things that we can try out, really good insights, and you've shared really openly your experience and insights. So thank you ever so much. Andy, where can people find out more about you?

Andy Bounds (30:17.086)
We're just disappointed. Still feel bad about it now.

Andy Bounds (30:28.052)
thank you. Good.

Andy Bounds (30:39.54)
No, you're Easiest way is just on LinkedIn. So it's undy, A-N-D-Y and bounds like out of bounds. So just on LinkedIn, undy bounds, or my website is called undybounds.com. We didn't spend long thinking of these things, Mike. So that's the easiest way to find us.

Michael Lander (30:57.012)
It's been amazing. It's been truly amazing. Thank you, and I'm sure we will talk again very soon.

Andy Bounds (30:58.474)
Thank you.

Andy Bounds (31:03.008)
Yeah, great stuff. Cheers.