6 Steps to Build Business Acumen

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Last week was a busy week with a keynote in NYC, membership training, 5 partner meetings, 6 sales calls, 2 client training and a bunch of content work.

That’s not to mention the fact that I went to the Patriots Hall of Fame induction ceremony for Tom Brady and the Celtics watch party at the Garden to see the C’s go up 3:1 on the Mavs as they go for banner #18!

It was a great week to be a Boston sports fan.  

I was going to write something about Brady’s speech related to leadership or something about the Celtics and teamwork for this week’s newsletter but I’m pretty sure I’d lose a bunch of subscribers if I did.

Trust me, if I wasn’t a Boston fan I’d hate us too.  

I did, however, want to write about a milestone that I hit this week because I think there are a few things we can learn from it. 

SALES FROM THE STREETS: 400k and climbing 

TACTICAL TIPS: Building your brand authentically 

SALES RESOURCES: Never have to take notes again

SALES FROM THE STREETS 

400k and climbing

I crossed the 400k follower mark on Linkedin this past week which I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around. 

I can’t believe that 400,000 people at some point found whatever I was saying interesting enough to follow along with my journey. It’s more than a little humbling.

A bunch of people have asked me how I was able to grow such a following without being a celebrity like Snoop or Gary V. 

Let’s be clear, a significant part of the reason is that I’ve been on the platform almost since the start (#36,541).  

But being one of the first doesn’t matter if you’re not consistent with it. 

I find consistency and focusing on the fundamentals usually wins in the long run like the Tortoise and the Hare story.  

Everyone is looking to go viral these days or find a way to manipulate the algorithm.  

One of the things I like about LinkedIn is that it’s not meant to “go viral” and it’s pretty tough to figure out the algorithm (although here’s a link to a report on how the algorithm works if you’re interested).

I’ve never cared that much about how many likes, comments or reactions I get when I post. 

Why?

Well, I learned a long time ago that you never know who is paying attention and therefore you never know who you could have an impact on and isn’t that the ultimate point?

For instance, a woman from Mexico came up to me at the keynote I was doing this week in NYC to thank me. She has been following me for a while and applying some of the content I share about the importance of building your personal brand. She’s now one of the top female sales influencers in the region.  

The satisfaction I get from that one piece of feedback and seeing her succeed is far greater than any viral post would ever give me.

To me, sharing content isn’t about telling people what to do or what you know, it’s about sharing your journey and what you’re learning along the way.  There’s always someone with less experience than you who would love to learn about how to get to where you are. 

In the next section, I’ll provide some tactical advice on how to share your journey and build your authentic brand while improving your business acumen along the way.

TACTICAL TIPS  

Building your authentic brand

“What should I post?” 

“I’m not a thought leader.” 

“Who would be interested in what I have to say?”  

“I don’t have time to share content and/or build my brand”

“What if no one likes or comments on my content?”

Sound familiar?  

I get these types of comments and questions a lot from reps when I’m training the “social selling/brand building” part of my Membership Training. 

I get it, I do.  Those are all valid thoughts and perceptions.  

However, that’s not exactly a “growth mindset” as Guy Kawasaki would say and you’re definitely not playing the “Infinite Game” as Simon Sinek would say.  

These are two mindsets that I think are critical for long-term success and happiness.

The main reason I think most people don’t focus on building their personal brand is because there is almost zero short-term benefit from it.  

If you think a week of posting or even a year of posting is going to immediately get you thousands of followers and you’ll be able to drive business from it, you’re going to get frustrated and give up pretty quickly.

However, there is a way to get short-term benefits from sharing content and building your brand if you look at it from a different perspective and make learning the main objective.

If you focus on learning first and then sharing your perspective on what you learned, your main priority (learning) is taken care of, so who cares how many people like/comment/share?

The main thing I suggest to all reps who ask me what they should be focusing on to improve their results is business acumen.

Here’s a tactical approach on how to improve your business acumen, identifying interesting and relevant content to share, and building your authentic brand along the way:

1. Identify the main personas in a specific industry that you sell to and need to learn how to speak their language (ex. CFOs in Financial Services)

2. Set up a Feedly account and create folders for each persona. 

   1. Feedly is an RSS aggregator that allows you to follow different blogs and content about specific topics in one location. Also, I am not sponsored by Feedly. 

3. Search in Feedly for people or companies who are sharing content related to each persona/industry 

   1. You can also google “CFOs, thought leaders, Financial Services, 2024 blog list”

   2. You can also ask ChatGPT - “could you provide me with a list of the top thought leaders for CFOs in the financial services industry who have blogs?”

4. Review the content from the people who are identified as thought leaders and find a few that you like. Then add their blog (RSS feed) to the folder.

5. Create a morning routine (30 minutes a day) to review this content and see if you come across any articles that are interesting to you.  

6. Read the articles and then share them on social with your key take-aways and perspective on what you learned.

7. BONUS TIP: Take some of the people on your list that you are prospecting into who are the same persona and ask for their insights on the article. 

Remember, you don’t have to be the content creator, you have to be the content curator.

Think about it, this newsletter takes me about 1-2 hours a week to write.  If this was a LinkedIn post and you liked it and then shared it on social and one of your followers read my content and got value from it, who do they thank?

They thank you for sharing the content, not me for creating it. 

You get all the credit, I did all the work,

AND, with a focus on learning first, again, your primary objective is met so who cares what happens after that?

Start authentically building your brand today.

SALES RESOURCES  

Never take meeting notes again

I started using OtterPilot for Sales and it’s been a game-changer.

As I’ve said before, I will never take on a sponsor from a company whose product I don’t use myself or genuinely believe will make a difference. 

This is why I’ve decided to partner with Otter.ai for my call recordings and meeting intelligence platform.

I’ve seen other people use Otter on Zoom calls and assumed it was just another call recording platform but boy was I wrong. 

I’m pretty old school when it comes to taking notes during a sales call. As much as I love all this tech and AI stuff, I still like to take my own notes and summarize them to send summary emails after each call.  

The main reason is that I don’t trust the tech/AI to take notes and pick up on the things that my 28 years of selling have taught me to pay attention to.

That’s now changed with Otter. I legitimately haven’t taken any physical notes since I started using it. 

Their OtterPilot for Sales has already saved me a ton of time and given me insights into meetings I’ve never been able to efficiently gather before. 

It takes notes and transcribes them in real time during your call and you can just highlight portions of the notes right on the screen that you want to make sure you don’t forget. 

It then summarizes all the notes and puts them into an email format that includes action items and the next steps.

The part that blew me away though was the ability to just ask the OtterAI Chatbot anything you want about the meeting itself or the collection of meetings with that same client.

This week, when I was preparing for my keynote, I was trying to remember what type of tech stack the client had so I could reference a few things during the presentation.  

I scanned through the notes that I had taken and couldn’t find any information about their tech stack for some reason.

I then remembered the chat functionality of Otter and asked it to tell me what their tech stack was and within seconds it gave me the answer I was looking for.

I know that sounds like a small thing, but think about being able to ask a chatbot about anything related to any meeting you’ve ever had and it will give you the answer in seconds. 

There are so many other use cases to think about. 

Coaching, forecasting, and persona pattern recognition just to name a few. 

I’m just scratching the surface on this platform but I’m absolutely loving what I’m seeing so far and highly recommend you check it out. 

Definitely give it a try if you’re looking to get more out of your conversation intelligence. They’re taking care of my audience by getting you access to their new OtterPilot for sales platform (it integrates with Salesforce/Hubspot, and gives you analytics and access to the chatbot I was telling you about before). 

Until next week,

JB

ADDITIONAL WAYS YOU CAN LEVEL UP YOUR SALES GAME 

• The JB Sales Membership is where you’ll get access to my live training, workshops, AMAs and OnDemand catalog so you can level up your sales skills every day!  3000+ Sales pros have already joined. Are you next?

• The industry-leading Make it Happen Monday Podcast where you’ll get insights and inspiration from some of the most interesting and influential people in the world of Sales and business. (this is where you’ll hear the Guy Kawasaki episode on May XYZ)

• The JB Sales YouTube channel with practical tips that you can apply immediately to drive results along with interviews and content that is guaranteed to get you to think differently.