Bill Caskey is a sales development leader and experimenter who has been improving B2B sales teams and executives since 1990. His counter-intuitive philosophies and strategies go against the orthodoxy of most sales approaches – the ‘convince and persuade’ doctrine. Instead, Bill takes a radically different approach to B2B sales – which includes using media as a lead device, creating personal empowerment for the salesperson by avoiding the antiquated techniques of amateurs, and a thorough understanding of ‘buyer behavior’ which helps the salesperson control the sales process.
His topics help: * CEOs of sales-oriented businesses who want rapid growth. * VPs of Sales who have sales teams needing to make their numbers. * Sales Professionals, who must reinvent themselves in the new digital economy yet who lack sound coaching from their managers. He is the author of Same Game New Rules, Rewire The Sales Mind, The Sales Playbook, and Email It! He co-hosts with Bryan Neale, The Advanced Selling Podcast (Top 30 Marketing Podcast on iTunes), a weekly podcast counseling sales forces and leaders worldwide, who seek to improve their business. The program is the top sales podcast with downloads of over 130,000/ month with 13,000,000 downloads in 13 years. He is also the creator of The High Achiever’s Mentoring Program, a small group experience for high-income sellers. He also hosts his own podcast – The Bill Caskey Podcast, where he dives deeper into counter-intuitive concepts for CEOs and sales professionals.
In this podcast, host Kerry Barrett interviews sales coach and trainer Bill Caskey. They discuss the common mistakes and misconceptions about selling, emphasizing the importance of creating an environment where both the customer and the salesperson benefit. They also touch on the need for unlearning outdated sales techniques and retraining individuals to approach sales more effectively.
Transcript
Kerry Barrett: Thank you for stopping by the Kerry Barrett show. It’s great to have you with us. And we have a fantastic guest today. Well, all of our guests are fantastic, but I’m super excited to talk to Bill Caskey today. Bill, thank you for being here.
Bill: Thanks, Kerry. Thanks for the invitation. I’m looking forward to this.
Kerry Barrett: So do you want to take a second and introduce yourself to the audience? Let them know a little bit about who you are and what you do.
Bill: Yeah. I’m Bill Caskey. I’m a hail from Indianapolis, Indiana, and I’ve been in the sales coaching and training business for about 30 years. I work with business-to-business companies primarily and individual salespeople too. I’ve got a couple of mastermind cohorts that I run. I’ve got a couple of podcasts, the advanced selling podcast and the Bill Caskey podcast, creatively named. Also, I have a YouTube channel. We do a lot online and I just find that it’s a really good way to communicate with people. And obviously, you know this, but we really are focused with our clients on sales skills, personal branding skills. Marketing skills. It’s not just the old grandfather sales stuff, like how to convince people.
Bill: There’s a whole lot more to it today.
Kerry Barrett: There’s the Bill Caskey show as imaginatively named as the Kerry Barrett show. I’m like, what can I call this show?
Bill: Well, you’re, you have a lot of leeway now. You can go in a lot of different directions.
Kerry Barrett: I’m really excited to talk to you because I will tell you as a business owner and somebody who has a journalism background, which is what I had prior to starting my own business, I thought I understood the process of selling to some degree because I was selling stories, basically, and information on the air every single day.
And I had to deliver them in a way that, you know, explained to the audience verbally and non-verbally why this particular piece of information was important. I was woefully under-prepared. In fact, I would say it was not prepared at all for selling within my business. And it is still one of those things that I find very tricky.
I use content like this to nurture, but making the sale, is something that’s hard, I think, for a lot of us. So let’s start sort of at that point, if you will, what do you see as the sort of top issue thing, mistake, whatever it is that is preventing people from making sales, achieving sales success, and then I guess ultimately business success as well.
Bill: that’s a question that a lot of people have about, you know, ’cause there’s a lot of entrepreneurs today who start businesses. And they think it’s a matter of putting up a website and, you know, people are going to flock, but obviously, at some point, you’re going to have a conversation with somebody and that conversation needs to be well thought out and you need to be mindful of what is there, what’s there, what’s the dynamic between these two people.
And I think salespeople in general, the pros think about that. The amateurs don’t, the amateurs just throw a bunch of stuff against the wall. And if I’ll just tell him these seven things, and this is 10, here are 10 reasons why he should work with me that he will, and that’s just not the way the human, that’s not the way human connection happens.
And so I think one of the things that we do in our work and, you know, think about it, I get people who are, let’s say 40 years old, 45 years old, and they’ve been in sales for 15 years. And they’ve had all the training, all the contemporary training of the 80s and 90s. Some of the 80s and 90s training actually was created in the 50s and 60s.
So it’s not like it was modern even then. And the biggest thing I have to do is untrain them. They have to unlearn what they’ve learned for 15 years. And it’s hard enough to train people to do different things. It’s really hard to untrain them and then retrain them. It’s really difficult. And one of the biggest things is people have this impression of selling as a game of convincing or a game of persuasion. It’s not?
It is just not, the game of selling, if you were to define it the way I wanna define it the game of selling is creating an environment. It’s the creation of an environment where two people can decide if they both benefit by working together customer benefits because they get the value that you offer.
You benefit because you get a customer and you get to expand your skills and maybe some money involved. But it’s the environment that we want to create. And if you go into the environment, trying to sell and pitch and offer and convince and persuade, what does the other person do? and we talk about, you know, I work with a lot of engineers and what I will call accidental salespeople, people who weren’t brought up in sales and they know they don’t want to be like the sales team. But when they go out, they do exactly the same things they do because they don’t know any other method. And so what we teach our clients is let’s redefine what sales even is. Let’s not do it to somebody. Let’s take that out of the vernacular. And let’s say we are here with a service or value.
You sit there with a problem, maybe. And let’s decide together if there’s anything if there’s nothing there, we’re out of here. And you should be out of here. So we have to, it’s more of an aligned, conjoined thing rather than us doing something to somebody. So I don’t know if that helps, but that’s kind of the baseline framework that we need to re-kind of….
Kerry Barrett: It does. And I will tell you coming from the entrepreneurial side of things, I think one of the things that is tricky for me, certainly, and I don’t want to paint with a broad brush, but I will say with a lot of women that I’ve spoken with as well, is that the sales process feels. Sort of icky is the word that I hear thrown around a lot.
And I think it stems from that persuasion element that you’re talking about. And I don’t like doing it either because if somebody isn’t ready or it’s not a good fit for them, I hate trying to convince them that it is because, to me, it feels like. Well, I’m taking advantage of them. Maybe they don’t need this right now, or maybe they really can’t afford it right now, or whatever the case may be.
And that’s the part that feels like that pushy sort of yucky sales element that many of us talk about. And you’re pulling that totally out of the equation and you’re just setting an environment.
Bill: Yeah, because I don’t want, if I’m calling on somebody and somebody’s called me and they say, Hey, I’m interested in having you come in and work with my team or whatever. That’s the call I usually get. I don’t want to pretend I know more about their solution. That’s required than they do. I mean, I think that’s their traditional sales as well. I know what they need. And so I’m, you know, it comes in a red box and it’s nine, 900. So that’s exactly what I’m going to pitch to them. And it’s like, well, wait a minute. You don’t really know what they need. You don’t know their commitment level to fixing a problem. It’s a lot of people have problems. But a lot of people don’t want to fix them. So why would I spend a whole lot of time with somebody who’s not willing to spend money to fix a problem they have? And so I think what we want to do is we want to make this a co-equal thing where the sales professional, the salesperson, the business owner, and the prospect are on an even keel.
They’re not up here because they have money. We’re not up here because we have value. We’re aligned here. We’re looking for a solution that’s going to benefit both parties. And I think when you enter into it that way, the creepiness leaves, there’s no ickiness. Cause it’s like, we’re just two human beings talking to see if there’s anything here, if there is great, if there’s not great.
Kerry Barrett: It sounds like it’s partly mindset and then it’s partly how you’re framing that interaction. So do you go in then with a certain series of questions that you know you’re going to ask to find out whether this is a good fit? Do you have a specific process that you follow or does it depend?
Bill: Yeah. One of the things that we talked about a little bit before we hit record, I’ve got a document that I’d like to share with your listeners if they want it. And in that document, I talk about, it’s called the two X factors. And if you want to two X your results, these are 20 things that I feel like if you just get 10 percent better at these, you don’t have to get a thousand percent, 10 percent better, you will two X your results in a matter of time. One of the things on that list is your questions. What questions do you have? And I think you should document the questions that you’re going to typically ask people who are interested in working with you. What’s the core issue that you have? What are you hoping this program or this product will do for you if you fast forward a couple of years, what do you envision your life looking like in this area? Give me some experiences on some of the things that have gone wrong over the past couple of years. I mean, there are lots of questions, but if you don’t have those written down, you will not remember all of them.
And what happens then is you will get off the phone with a potential customer and you’ll say. I forgot those three questions because you’ll feel it. You’ll feel like, Oh, that was a good call, but yeah, something about it. And then you realize, Oh, I didn’t ask these questions. So I’m not dealing with all the information. I like to think of sales as a puzzle. You’re a puzzle master. You need to put together this jigsaw puzzle. The customer has all the information has all the pieces. What you have to do is ask the questions that help you put this puzzle with all the pieces up on the table so that you can piece it together and figure something out.
If you don’t have all the pieces, then you’re not going to be able to create a solution that’s really targeted.
Kerry Barrett: So yeah, you’re right. It’s changing your mind and changing your thinking and changing the structure as well. That all goes together. And I’m sure changing the structure is what helps bring about that sort of mindset change so that sale becomes.
It’s easy if you will, or effortless and it becomes that because you’re not trying to persuade someone or push them into a specific product or service that may not be the right fit. I love the change that you’ve offered. And by the way, that link to Bill’s document is in the show notes. So feel free to run down there and click on that link and grab your questions.
Bill: Yeah, you can get it at https://billcaskey.com/changing-your-belief-system-episode-200/,
Kerry Barrett: https://billcaskey.com/changing-your-belief-system-episode-200/,
Bill: Yeah.
Kerry Barrett: I was going to say, let me ask you then what are some of the blatant mistakes that you see sales professionals, and maybe their companies as well, making in that client? Acquisition, is it, and I hate, I don’t even like really honestly saying client acquisition, ’cause this sounds so impersonal, but is it that structure, is it not going through your questions and knowing you know exactly what you need to figure out?
Is that the biggest mistake people make or is there another element to it?
Bill: Yeah, I think that’s probably number one is they don’t have the proper mindset for what their role is. I always say that your role as a sales professional is to guide the prospect from where they are to where they want to be. That’s really the role. And if you see your role that way, then you won’t be trying to be persuasive and creepy and all that stuff that we associate with amateur salespeople you’ll be asking the questions, where are you today? Where do you want to be tomorrow or down the road? And then I’ll tell you if I have a solution or a vehicle that will help you get there. So that’s one thing that I think we need to redefine our role based on what we just talked about. The second thing is you need to have a map of the process. This is the first thing that I would do when I work with companies is I always walk in first meeting or virtual Zoom and say, what, show me your process, show me your sales process, show me your market, show me any process that you have.
And do you know that 80 percent of companies cannot produce a document? They cannot produce a document that outlines their sales process. So what happens when you have no process? The customer owns you.
You are a hostage to their needs and to their timeline. The sales cycle stretches out. You’re not talking to the right people inside the company because you have no process to get to them.
So, and then we end up with a closing rate of. 15 to 18%. I think the average closing rate of all the deals you proposed all the deals you close about 15 to 17%. Well, it’s no wonder because we haven’t done it. We’ve done a lousy job in the sales process because we really haven’t had a sales process. So point number two is you have to have a process, even if it’s step one. Is a 30-minute phone call where we discuss, you know, what your problems are, what you’re trying to accomplish. Step two is a one-hour phone call where we bring our smart people and you bring yours in and we have a collective Zoom call. Step three might be an analysis. Step four, whatever it is, every business is different. You need to have a process. And you need to follow that process. Most sales professionals are not processed people to create, although they will use one if it’s designed for them, people will be process-focused. If you’re correct. So I would say for the VP of sales, one of the things that is a must is to get thinking about what’s the sales process.
And if you say, oh, my people know it. No, they don’t. If there’s, if it’s not written down, it’s just not, it’s just not a process.
Kerry Barrett: Is part of that process figuring out how to construct your message so that your messaging sells also?
Bill: It’s exactly right. I mean, we’ve got, yeah, that’s part of the process is how are you going to communicate the value that you bring, which is messaging? How do you communicate that? Do you communicate it through stories? You know, like you were talking earlier about your business and the, in the TV world, the journalism world it’s nothing but stories. most people aren’t very good at stories. We are good at talking about stories, but we’re not very, I mean, everybody’s talking about stories today and nobody’s really saying, here’s how to do it. So you communicate through stories, you communicate through problems. I’ve got a client who I’ve trained them with a lot of stuff.
And I remember the first time we ever met with them was up in Chicago. And the first 10 minutes of our meeting, I taught them this technique, which I’ll share with you. And they’ve still, they’re still using it. Sick nine months later, they still, I say, what have you learned today? Well, I’ve learned that, but that was still the most important thing.
And the most important thing is here’s why people use us. Here’s why people come to us. Here’s why people seek us out. Number one, they’re trying to figure out a better way to X. Number two, they’re trying to solve some of these problems that exist like A, B, and C. So what you want to do is you want to craft your message around customer interest, preferences, and problems, not around your value.
And a lot of times we, it’s easy for us to say, well, I say what’s the value of working with you, Kerry? And you might say, well, you can save time and you can save money. And I’ve been in TV for the last 20 years and I’m really good at helping people with their brand. And I’m like, okay. That doesn’t help me.
So you’ve got to really articulate your value in my language, the customer’s language and it’s very difficult to do because we live our lives on our own, with our own perspective on things, and then I’m asking you to change perspectives and look at it from the customer. It’s very difficult to do, but it’s a key
Kerry Barrett: Right. They’re not necessarily waking up and stressing about growing, let’s say their personal brand, but they’re waking up and stressing about opportunity and revenue and visibility and all of those other things that, that branding can help with.
Bill: That’s right. That’s right. And I’d like to talk about the personal brand at some point today if you’re game because I know that’s your specialty. You’re really good at
Kerry Barrett: I mean, it, you know, it helps us future-proof our business, whether we’re working for ourselves or whether we’re working within, you know, another organization.
Bill: So why do you think people struggle with, or do you think they do? Maybe it’s just me, but I see people struggling with the concept of personal brand and taking action. Why do you think that is? I’ll get your take
Kerry Barrett: My take on, well, I think there’s a couple of things that go on with that struggle. And part of it, at least. From the clients that come to me, I see, that one of their biggest struggles is that they’re just afraid to share those elements of themselves. And it may be that their personal brand is not directly about business.
It really, maybe it’s business adjacent if you will, but it’s something that they are known for. And so I’ll use this example. I. Have a real estate client who wants to get better on camera, and wants to create social media content, but it can’t just be about house listings. So this particular person also happens to have a very green thumb and is great with landscaping and gardening. So what we’ve created is a personal brand within the real estate industry for her that focuses on her ability to not just buy, list, and sell homes, but also to help people figure out how to landscape and do their garden. But a lot of people see it as a personal brand.
I have to talk about my directly about the business. And I’m also afraid to share these other elements. That’s what I see coming to me.
Bill: Yeah, that’s good. That’s really good. Cause I was just thinking as you were talking about that, I totally agree that fear or whatever word you want to use there. Anxiety stops us. And it’s part of that is that fear of what other people are going to think. And if you’re in a company of 10 other salespeople and I’m coming along saying you need to build your personal brand, I think there’s a, what are the other nine going to think if I start shooting LinkedIn videos? And then, but I like that idea of embracing your lanes. You know, you have like, I’ve got several lanes. I’ve got this coaching sales lane. I’ve got fitness. I love fitness. I work out a lot. I’m, you know, I love that lane. I like the creative lane. I like media and things like that. I think sometimes I’m reluctant to go into those other lanes because I feel like, well, no, my brand is all about sales and coaching.
And it’s like, well, well, but that’s not me. That’s not me totally. Me totally is all these other lanes and then we hear this thing where you gotta stay in your lane. You gotta stay in your lane, which I abhor.
Kerry Barrett: There are certainly, you know, I like to think about. You know, if somebody is working in an organization and sometimes you do get pushed back, we don’t want our employees to build a personal brand on LinkedIn or wherever it is because we’re afraid they’re going to leave us because they’ve established a connection or they’ve established I don’t know, runways, perhaps other people outside of the four walls of their company know them.
Let’s leave it at that. And at the end of the day, I mean, that’s certainly a possibility, but it’s personal brand either. And what it actually does is it brings people to that person. When that person can talk about the business, talk about the product, talk about the offer, the service, whatever it is, it’s a way to expand your network and expand the people in front of you and connect with them in a way that is beneficial to you and either your business or whomever you’re working with.
It’s what people say about you when you leave the room. So what did they say about this real estate person? Oh yeah, she’s real estate. And by the way, She does awesome with gardens and landscaping. Like you got, even if you don’t buy a house from her, you should check out her stuff because she has all these good tips or, you know, this, that, or the other thing.
I have an actually interesting, another real estate client. They are in commercial real estate, but we’ve created a show for them called the brokers and they, we do a video. Once a month or once a quarter, depending on the year. And we talk about market trends and they’ve established a brand for themselves within the commercial real estate space where people are tuning in from all over to watch them. In fact, I had a shoot with them yesterday as of this recording. And he said I was in Canada at a real estate conference. And somebody came up to me and pointed me and said, you’re the broker. I watched you on video and now they have a brand outside of just their company and just what they do.
And people know them as the videos to watch and the podcasts to listen to if they want to understand market trends going on specifically in the Northeast.
Bill: I’ve been playing around with this a lot because I have people in my training programs who actually do embrace this and they take off I’ve got some people that have just taken off their business because they’re more conscientious about building their brand.
But 80 percent of the people no, not really. So, what I’ve done is break this down into three elements. One is what I call them first-order branding, and I’m going to define brand as reputation. It’s just, you know, what is your reputation? First-order branding is the basic stuff. It’s like, how do you communicate with another human being?
Do you show up on time? Do you look good or do you look disheveled? You know, are you fit? Just what is that basic interaction between human beings? So we all think that we’re really good at that, but we’re not all really good at that. I mean, we’re just not. And so you have to, I think that’s the first checklist and that this checklist that I’m talking about here is also on that two X factor that I shared earlier.
So that’s the basic stuff. The second order of branding to me is the education level where you are. Posting LinkedIn videos. You are writing articles. You are posting insight. You’re getting, you’re taking your information, your expertise, and you’re putting it out to the marketplace and educating people.
That’s the second order. I think that’s typically where people like you and I start, but really the start is the basic stuff. It’s just, how do I interact? Because how you interact individually is probably how you’re going to interact with the camera. I mean, there are a lot of commonalities in the third order is kind of the advanced stuff.
This reminded me of your story reminded me of this. And that is, are you on a stage that positions you? So it’s market positioning. So we’ve got the basics.
I’ve got a couple of podcasts when people listen to the podcast long enough and I wear them down and they call me and they say, I’ve been listening to your podcast.
It’s time for us to talk about you coming in and working with my team. There’s no selling there. There’s not, I mean, they feel like I’ve been in their ear for the last year or two. They feel like they know me, What stage are you on? I’ve got one client who’s now becoming a guest on a lot of podcasts, kind of like you and I are doing.
They’re a guest. I’m sure you’re a guest on podcasts. So are you on a stage, either your own stage that you’ve created or some other stage, you talked about your real commercial real estate guy. He’s got a stage. He’s got a show that’s taking it to even the next level some kind of consistent show podcast, YouTube channel, whatever. But if you think of personal branding and I wouldn’t start there, I think I would start with one and two, make sure that you got the basics right. And then start with the second order brand building, which is that you know, educate your customers, take the common questions, and create content around that. Soon enough, you can start a podcast. But the idea of me coming in and saying, you need to start a podcast. People are like, Oh, you know, it’s just too much. It’s too much.
Kerry Barrett: Agreed, and it is a challenge. I mean, it doesn’t have to be, it doesn’t have to be that hard, but you are absolutely correct. If you don’t lay the foundation properly, then the rest of it is gonna crumble. And it doesn’t matter how much you’re in their ear. If they don’t still don’t get a sense of who you are and your value then it’s not going to work.
And I do like the podcast because it does bring those warm leads. They’re already there. They’re already sold by the time they reach out to you. Let me ask you, when I know one of the things that you talk about is humility, and humility getting in the way of building that brand.
We’ll get back to sales here in a second, but why is that, in your opinion?
Bill: I think our messages growing up have always been. Don’t be too big for your britches. Don’t stand out. You know, you got to conform. If the teacher says this, then you have to get in line. I mean, all, you know, but that’s just growing up. I mean, that’s, but I do think that. our parenting, we can teach kids how to take risks.
We can teach them how sometimes you can stand out from the crowd and the crowd follows you instead of you following the crowd. But those are hard. I mean, those are hard lessons. So when we, if we’ve grown up in this, don’t be a tall poppy out in the field cause you’re going to get sliced off. If we’ve grown up with that, it’s hard for us to look into a camera and think we have anything of value. Cause you’re like, nobody else is doing this in my company. Who’s to say that I should be doing this? So I think that’s where humility kind of stops. This is because we’ve learned all these lessons about who am I? You know, Marianne Williamson, who am I to do this?
And the question is, who are you not to your, you know, our experience in life? Like I’ve got I have some addiction background, not in training addiction, but in being addicted, gotta be careful about it. But anyway, it’s, I’m not laughing at it because it’s serious, but I was in my twenties and I was, I had some problems.
And so I stopped the behavior. I was an alcoholic and I stopped and life today is very different than it would have been had I not stopped. Life would not exist if I hadn’t stopped, but. I don’t have to say anything about that experience. I know what life was like in my twenties and I talk about it with a perspective that’s very different than somebody that didn’t have that experience. So. If I’m pitching sales training and three other people are pitching sales training, and I’ve had that experience in my life, I’m going to be different. I’m going to have different things to say. my tone is going to be because all of our experience leads us to where we are today. And yet we’re still not, we don’t embrace it like we should.
Think about you, you know, you, I’ve just known a little bit about you and your background in journalism and TV and you have the whole package. I mean, Kerry, you’ve got the great voice and their looks and their camera ready.
But think about it. All of that training that you did, that’s for something, there’s something there. And I think sometimes we discount our formative years and we discount all the things that we’ve done. And we say, you know, I’m just, but that’s part of that humility. I’d say you don’t have to be proud of it.
I know pride’s one of those things we don’t, but you can be pleased. Satisfied that you’ve got some experience. You’ve got something to say. I think that the thing is, do we have something to say that the world should hear?
And if we have something to say and we don’t say it, I think that’s rude. I think we’re withholding our voice from people who could really be helped by what you and I and the audience say. So that’s, I kind of take a different framework for
Kerry Barrett: No, 100 percent I agree with that. It’s very hard to and we’ve had that messaging to sort of stand on the mountaintop and shout our value or what we’re offering. I mean, we’re just we’re not. Most of us are not trained to do that. I certainly wasn’t. And the truth is there’s so much noise out there and there’s so much competition and there are other people who are doing what you do, who are less qualified to do it and are making more and having more impact because they’re willing to climb the mountain and shout from the top of it. And that’s, that can be really scary.
Bill: And I think with that, then comes the objection of, well, but that’s just not me. I’m not arrogant and I’m not, I always say, being you is fine. Don’t try to be, you know, if I start to try to be Grant Cardone or Dale Carnegie or, you know, Patrick Bed, David, or some of these guys that are big on the stage, that’s not me. I’m just not Grant Cardone and he’s not me. And that’s, it’s their space for all of us but sometimes I think there’s a reluctance to embrace that. Real us. And then a person like you or I comes along and says, you need to shoot more video. let’s work on some approaches. And there’s always that I think there’s just always that background voice in their head that says, you shouldn’t be doing this.
Your mom told you not to be a big shot, So I always say, you know, If I go into a room of 100 people, I’ve got a program next week, going to be about 100 people there. I’m going to, I always ask this question. How many of you are really good with customer service? You think, man, I just, love customers. I love serving customers.
Every hand is going to shoot up. And then my next question is, how many of you have shot a video in the past week? For LinkedIn, where you share some tips with your customers. And of course, no hand goes up. So I always say, well, you’re not as into customer service as the first question indicated you were.
You, you think you are, you’re really not. You’re reserving customer service and serving your audience for only those people who are paying you. And I think that’s unfair. I think some of your, now I’m not saying go give away all your best stuff, but people need to hear from you at least. Understand what you do so they can decide whether they want to connect with you
Kerry Barrett: Yeah. And I do think, you know, when you were when you’re talking about So much can be replicated. Services can be replicated. Even the process can be replicated. But the one thing that cannot be replicated, even with AI. Are you Bill or me, Kerry, or, you know, Sam over there or Diana over there? It’s that element that can’t be replicated and you do have something to offer, even if you think it’s boring, I promise you there’s somebody out there that wants to hear it and there’s more than one somebody.
So I 100 percent agree with you. Don’t let that nagging voice sort of shut you down or hold you back or keep you from sharing your value, skill expertise with the world.
So thank you for underscoring that. I want to sort of take this idea of content that we’re talking about and personal branding. And if we can weave it into the role of social media, you know, creation, what is that doing right now? How is that playing in terms of generating discussion with prospects? I mean, for you you know, how you encourage perhaps your clients to use it as well. And has it changed? Are there different trends that you’re seeing?
Bill: Yeah. Most of my clients use LinkedIn as their chosen platform. And some of them are on Twitter. I’m on Twitter, but I’m not on Twitter for business. I’m just observing silly things in the culture and commenting. So, LinkedIn is the primary.
And so I always tell people, look, you know. LinkedIn has changed its algorithm too. And it’s a pay-to-play algorithm, just like Facebook and YouTube. And you’re not going to get much if you have 10,000 connections, you know, 1500 of them are going to see any particular post. So you’re not going to get too much, but I do think it’s important.
Here’s the way I look at social media and content building on that. I think every time you build a piece of content, you become a better communicator. If you shoot a video that’s got to be condensed to three minutes and you’ve got to have a hookup front, you’ve got to have three bullet points and a call to action at the end or whatever the format is. I think it makes you better when you get in front of someone physically or virtually and have a conversation with them. You just get better because you’re more refined, you’re more condensed your conversation is richer. So I almost don’t care whether you shoot a video and anybody watches it for you.
You just got better. And I think if we take that approach, then we don’t get wrapped up in the shares and the likes and the comments and the numbers, the views, which mean nothing. Now I also think that if you, like, I’ve got a guy who’s in the nursing home financial business, he finances nursing homes.
And of course, that’s a tough market right now because the interest rates are way up and he started going to these conferences and he would shoot videos standing outside these conferences, talking about the speaker he just heard. You know, if you didn’t get a chance to hear John Smith, he spoke on this.
Here’s what I really liked about him. And now he walks into a convention and everybody knows him or not everybody, but a lot of people know him and now he’s getting connections and now he’s having meetings even high-interest rates, people are still wanting to buy and sell nursing homes. And so sometimes I think We try to outthink it. Something as simple as just standing outside a conference and saying, here’s what I learned today, doing that three or four times during the conference, posting it on LinkedIn. People see you as an expert. People say I want to be around that person because that person has my best interest in mind. It’s really simple. I don’t think you need to advertise and do a whole bunch of pitches on social media. I think it’s better if you just create content. And I would like your take on that. Cause you’re more into that than I am probably.
Kerry Barrett: 100 percent it is not about selling and pitching. I mean, if somebody cold pitches me on LinkedIn and the DM and we’ve never, I mean, I won’t say never, but it’s not about pitching and the content is definitely not about pitching every now and then, for example, I will talk about, you know, a masterclass that I have coming up or a new program, but those Posts get far less engagement than the ones where I’m sharing, you know, whether it’s inspiration or motivation, or I’m sharing some educational value so you absolutely don’t overthink it.
We do, it’s gotta be all fancy production and all this other stuff. Really? It doesn’t have to be that at all. And the story of your client going and shooting a couple of videos. On his phone when he’s at a conference and sharing what he’s learned positions him as somebody who trusts somebody who’s giving value, somebody who is in a thought leader position because I’m guessing there are probably some elements where he says I really agreed with this.
Here’s one slight change that I might push back on and that positions him as a thought leader, which in trans, you know scales his visibility. It scales the trust factor that people have with him and it scales the messaging as well.
Bill: I have something that, I do not do every day, but probably two or three times a week. It’s just, I just call it a walk in the woods and every morning I go work out and then I go to this little park area and I take my phone with me, and if the urge strikes, if I’m feeling inspired, I’ll turn it on and I’ll walk in the woods.
And I was talking to a guy Last night who I hadn’t seen in years, he was a fraternity brother. And he came back in town, a bunch of us got together and he goes, Hey Bill. He goes, I watch your walk in the woods every time you do it. And I’m thinking a lot of people have said, you know, I watched that.
It’s really good. It’s really peaceful. And sometimes I get really deep and sometimes I don’t, and just little things like that. You don’t, I’m not branding it or anything, although I thought about it, but it’s just, sometimes you just. Be in your natural habitat, you know, be, do what you do. And if it’s on the way to the gym, great.
But don’t go to the gym just so you can shoot a video. If you go to the gym, shoot a video. If you walk in the woods, shoot a video. If you are sitting outside on your porch, doing some kind of creative endeavor, shoot a video about it and let people into your life without, you know, you don’t need to tell them what you had for dinner and all that. But there is a way to find those lanes that you’re passionate about and let people in to see that.
Kerry Barrett: Absolutely. And there’s your personal brand. Let me ask you, while we’re talking about social media, and this is, you know, aligned with it, but maybe adjacent to it, what are some of the digital trends that, you see, that you think all of us should be concerned about when it comes to, you know, impacting income, personal, corporate, whatever?
Are there digital trends? That is, that you’re seeing either now or that is percolating sort of on the horizon that we need to be thinking about.
Bill: I guess the easy one would be to say AI, but I don’t know enough about AI or the future of it to really comment. So I’m going to pass on that one. Although that’s probably the most obvious one. Here’s what I think in terms of content. I still think content is king. I kind of follow the Gary Vaynerchuk model of, you know, content. The question is if I were to shoot a piece of content. And it’s a 15-minute content, and I give them everything that I have in 15 minutes. Is that more valuable than shooting a two-minute piece of content where I give them a tip on one little part of the sales process that if they implement that, their whole world can change? And I think byte size, and micro-content are where it’s at. And so I’m doing, I’m getting ready to, in fact, I’m involved in Amy Porterfields. I know, you know, Amy, right? Her course confident thing today. And, one of my struggles is I want to do some more digital courses, but I don’t want to do like a 26-video course, because I feel like. You get two videos in and you stop watching it. So how can you create something that’s very specific? Like if you’re a business-to-business salesperson, how do you shoot video so that you make the phone ring? Something very specific like that. And so I’m. I’m forever trying to figure it out. And that, I think that’s a digital trend is people want, they want it straight away, they don’t want to wade through 26 videos, which we’ve all bought those courses and they’re all good, but we never make them through it, make it through them.
So I think, these people put, I mean, Brendan Burchard, I’ve bought some of his courses and he does a great job. And, you know, Brendan’s pretty watchable. He’s not boring at all. And he’s funny. And I found him a trip, but even 26 videos of him at some point, and of me, I couldn’t watch. couldn’t watch me for 26 videos.
Kerry Barrett: They’re watching now. At least the ones on YouTube are.
Bill: At least this one. Yeah, I appreciate that question. I think there’s a lot of changes and there’s also, and I’ll just kind of finish up and I’ve got to run here in a minute, but I, there’s this idea that we have one foot in the past and we’re trying to get the other foot in the future. And there’s a saying I don’t know who came up with it, but you can’t get to second base if you keep one foot on first, you have to leave first. And I think we have to leave the past behind, but it’s really hard to do. It’s really hard to do. And so, as you said earlier, I don’t know if we were on camera off when you said, you know, some sales managers don’t want their people doing personal brand work and I feel like, yeah, you’re right.
They would rather them doing wasteful cold calling. They’d rather sit, have them sit in a room for six hours a day, and make a thousand cold calls and hope that just one person would see me.
And I feel like, well, that’s keeping both feet in the past. And so I think the navigation here is how do we start to move towards second base and start to take that foot off first and say, you know what, we’re going to. We’re going to go down this path and second base is always going to be different two years from now. It’s going to stretch out. So you never get there, but I think we got to be mindful that get out of the past, get into the future.
Kerry Barrett: I 100 percent agree. Bill I could talk to you forever because I have learned so much from listening to you today. I’d love to have you back on if you’re open to it. Before we wrap, If people are interested in learning more about you or going to find that the document or, you know, learning how to work with you where should we send them?
Bill: Yeah. The best place, Kerry, is billcaskey.com. C-A-S-K-E-Y.com. And you can get access to all the YouTube channel, things like that. The document that I wrote is called the Two X factors. And it’s again, there’s 20 factors that I think if you employ most of those, you’ll be able to two X your business. And at the bottom of that, there’s this personal branding document. I’ll send you the link so you can put it in the show notes, but in the meantime, you can go to billcaskey.com/twoXfactors.
Two X factors and that will take you right to a Google doc. There’s no email. You don’t have to, pay me money or give me an email address. It’s just a Google doc. You can then save it. You can look at it and it’s free and it’s easy. And it’s, I think it’ll help you. It’s kind of a checklist for what you need to do in the next six months to two extra businesses.
Kerry Barrett: I love it. Bill, thank you so much for not just being generous with your time, but also your knowledge as well. It’s great to have you.
Bill: Awesome. Thank you, Kerry. Good luck to you. You’re you’ve got the perfect package for podcasting and video. And I wish you well, I know you’re going to do really well and I would love to be back sometime in the future if we can make that
Kerry Barrett: Absolutely. My pleasure.
Places to follow up with Bill:
- LinkedIn: Bill Caskey
- Facebook: Bill Caskey
- IG: @bill.caskey
- Youtube: Bill Caskey
- Website: billcaskey.com
