Host Scott Love Interviews Coach David Greer on “Creating an X-Factor to 10X Your Competition” on The Rainmaker Podcast. Be ten times better than your competitor, with David’s proven methods, by focusing not only on products but also the overall customer experience, from initial interaction to final delivery.
Provident Security built its reputation on a five-minute response time, which exposed a dirty industry secret which was that nothing happens when your alarm goes off. Build trust with your prospects by having measurable response times to inquiries and phone calls.
To achieve the 10X factor, David suggests three key steps: pause to reassess your business, examine your sales process from first contact to final product delivery, and understand your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Rather than success or failure, treat everything as an experiment to learn more about your business and your markets. Take action now. Listen to this episode of The Rainmaker Podcast and 10X your business.
Transcript
Announcer (00:10):
You are listening to the Rainmaking podcast, hosted by high stakes headhunter, author, and professional speaker Scott Love.
Scott Love (00:24):
You’re listening to the Rainmaking podcast and my name is Scott Love. Thanks for joining me on the show. Before I tell you about our guest and our topic today, lemme tell you what happened During my conversation with them, I had a problem in my business and I was looking for resolution and he didn’t even know it, but in my mind I was asking questions related to the issue and he delivered. I was able to solve my problem and he doesn’t even know that, by the way. I need to tell him about that too. Our guest today is David Greer. His mission is to take his 40 years of entrepreneurial experience and share it with other entrepreneurs and rainmakers to help them accelerate their success. By the way, David’s book is called Wind In Your Sails: Vital Strategies That Accelerate Your Entrepreneurial Growth. I read this book, it’s an easy read, and I came away with specific actionable ideas that made a difference in my own professional services practice and I think it will in yours as well.
(01:22):
Make sure you connect with David. He’s got a very generous offer in his interview. I’m going to put all of his contact information on the show notes. I’m also going to put the link where you can order his book and like I said, I’d highly recommend it. Thank you for listening to the show. As always, this show is sponsored by Leopard Solutions legal intelligence suite of products, FIRMSCAPE and Leopard BI. Push ahead of the pack with the power of Leopard. And now here’s my conversation with my friend David Greer. Thanks for listening. Hey, this is Scott Love with the Rainmaking podcast. Our special guest today is David Greer, the author of Wind in Your Sails. David, thanks for joining me on the podcast today.
David Greer (02:04):
Thanks so much, Scott. I’m really looking forward to this
Scott Love (02:07):
And I’m excited about this topic and I can’t wait to hear what you have to say. Creating an X factor to 10 x your competition. And so David, let’s get some working definitions here. You talk about 10 x your competition. What exactly does that mean and why is that something we should care about as professionals who are involved in client development?
David Greer (02:26):
So some aspect of how you work with your company is 10 times better than how your competitors do it. For example, my background comes from business to business selling of software and especially larger end systems. The process change for an organization to introduce, replace an existing piece of software if it’s only two times better, no one cares. Because the cost to the organization, if you can swap it out and somehow it’s plug and play compatible with you’ve got, but still gives a lot of benefits that might be a five x or right there because the cost of change compared to your competitors is so low. And again, in the software B2B sales, I’d say if you’re not five X or 10 X better, no one’s even going to consider you because the change management that getting involved is just so painful that you have to be able to show that they’re going to get that kind of benefit. I just don’t think two x, even in consumer things, most of us won’t switch like we’re used to what we’re doing. You think a lot better?
Scott Love (03:37):
Yeah. Do you think it’s always been like that or has it just become hyper competitive and now two X is table stakes, everybody has that, but now you’ve got to be five x to 10 x?
David Greer (03:46):
I think a lot of things have become kind of commodities, and so as some things have become commodities, then the non commodities have to show up better, much better. And I think even our phones, I mean, if you are a long time Android user, you’re not really likely to switch off the Android platform Again, the cost of change is too high and less Apple can show you that it’s just so much better for you and what you do that it’s worth the switch.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
I get it. Yeah, that’s great.
David Greer (04:21):
The other thing I talk about, and it’s in my book, actually two of the case studies in my book talk about this, people often assume it’s just purely about product or about the service you’re delivering, but I really encourage entrepreneurs and salespeople to look at it in the entire experience from first interaction to learning about who you are to closing a sale, to implementing it, to actually getting the benefit.
Scott Love (04:50):
And by the way, your book is fantastic, and I like the way that what you just said, you break it down into a systematic model that I pretty much guess can be replicated based on what you’ve seen. Yep. That’s the plan. Yeah, I’m in sales, I’m in client development, so I naturally turned to page 79 sales strategy. But as I’m flipping back to the previous chapters, innovation strategy, marketing strategy, entrepreneur strategy, corporate strategy, I see how all those things affect the sales strategy. So let me ask you this then, and I didn’t mean to cut you off, but we as entrepreneurs or as professional service providers, even though we work in an organization, it’s our practice, it’s our book of business, we should be looking to deliver a value that’s 10 x compared to our client’s current providers, that kind of our mindset. Yes. Yeah.
David Greer (05:39):
Like great salespeople, they return calls within a certain period of time. There’s a certain amount of responsiveness, which can be very challenging when you’re in client meetings, but I think as a great salesperson, your responsiveness is that will be one of the big differentiators against your competitors. That’s, I mean, that’s an aspect of the process where you can be a lot better than your competitors by just consciously being aware of that and structuring either using a CRM system. Well, so that you getting reminders, okay, I’ve got to follow up with this person on this day and your calendar system. Because in that early stage, I think it’s all about trust and you have to build a trust before you can go forward. And some of the trustworthiness is that you promise a prospect you’re going to do something and then you actually do it. When you said you would do it, that actually engenders trust, right? It’s like, oh, I mean, we had an agreement about what was going to happen and then you kept up your side of the bargain.
Scott Love (06:53):
Yeah, you gave him a slice. You gave a slice.
David Greer (06:55):
All of your competitors may not be good at that.
Scott Love (06:59):
Right. So let me ask you then, and I know that you do this in your book, but if we could break our goal down into components, if we want to show 10 x value to our prospects compared to what they currently have, are there certain buckets that we should put things in certain categories or segments? How should we kind of pick it apart in terms of where we should think about improving?
David Greer (07:21):
Well, the first place I encourage people to think about is they’re a massive industry secret, and oftentimes we’re too close to it, so we don’t actually realize it. In my book I talk about Mike Jagger and his security company, Providence Security, and it turns out that the security monitoring business has a really big secret, which is when your alarm goes off at your business or your home, nothing happens. What happens is some call center probably in Texas or some other place, maybe offshore, they call you, oh, Mr. Greer, your alarm is going off, and I might be halfway around the world. And that’s actually the industry secret. And what Mike did is he founded a company on the brand promise five minutes to your door or your money back.
(08:08):
And then he built a system that actually promised that when he first did it, when I was interviewing him, he hadn’t realized how long a streetlight could be. Oops. A minute and a half of those five minutes just got consumed and he built a completely automated system. So when an alarm goes off, like the appropriate closest security person that works for their firm will automatically receive a message on their phone of where to go and what to do. And this is unprecedented in the industry because that’s not how the industry works. And so this is what I mean where that’s one starting point, is there a big industry secret where you can actually expose the secret and then do something about it?
Scott Love (08:51):
Okay. That’s interesting. What are other examples that you’ve seen in other industries that you’ve consulted to?
David Greer (08:57):
So another one I feature in the book is Doug Bunker and Clevis Solutions. They’re a workforce mobility solution and they specialize in co-op hydro companies, organizations, but really it has broad application. So people are going out and working on lines. They need to get a work order, they need to be able to fill in when they’re onsite, what they’re doing, what happened, and one of the big challenges at the time was that when Doug was head of sales and when he went to trade shows, no one including Clevest could demo end to end how the whole system worked. And because they had built everything up on the latest kind of Microsoft platform client server, so this was early two thousands, he was able to take a laptop that could act as a server, and he was able to take these workforce pieces of hardware and he was able to hook them all together at the trade show.
(09:55):
So someone standing in the booth could go in, take their mobile device, enter in an update to the work order, and then Doug would turn to his laptop and then show if you were a manager, how that change showed up in the system. And at that time, no competitor could do that. No competitor to trade show could show end to end interaction of the solution in the field with the solution in the office. So again, was it a specific product feature? Not per se, it was just that it was a 10 x or bigger because no one else could demo a trade show. And trade shows were your primary way that you created belief and you really started that salesperson and created the leads that mattered.
Scott Love (10:43):
That’s great. I think all of us, we should be thinking about what is that big industry secret within our industry niche that we can expose and then show how we can provide a solution around that? Is that how we would work that?
David Greer (10:56):
Well? That’s one thing. I guess the second piece from the Clevest solution highlights to me is what is the experience of the prospect and eventual client from beginning to finish? So from first interaction to trying it or how they interact to how they get quoted to how they make a decision, to how it gets implemented to how they actually get the value out of your service solution in the end. So which part of those processes are you or your competitors really stuck on? Which aspect of that really creates a lot of challenge? And is there a way you could innovate or change or think differently or behave differently or do things differently vis-a-vis yourself and your competitors? That breaks open one of the log jams in that process or gives completely different experience.
Scott Love (11:55):
So let me ask you this, and I know we might be kind of going deep just in this first variable that we’re talking about. Do you think that we can even see it? Are we even too close to it? Do we know which questions to ask ourselves to find that variable? That’s a big secret. You know what I’m saying.
David Greer (12:12):
Yeah, I know what you’re saying. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to bring an outsider who can work with that. I will say a lot of my work is with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs tend to get very buried in the business and they can never see it when they’re responding to the next email, responding to the next quote, responding to the next client close. They have to, what I call work on the business was take a giant step backwards and see the bigger picture, see what’s going on and do the strategic thinking. My belief is that if you really want to grow your business as an entrepreneur, as a sales leader, you need to spend a certain significant amount of the best time you have every week thinking strategically. And I coach entrepreneurs like, where’s the best hour of your day? And put that in your calendar and focus on the strategic goals that I’ve helped you create for the company and move those ahead maybe before you answer the first email, before you take the first phone call.
Scott Love (13:18):
How about that?
David Greer (13:18):
It’s always a real behavior change, but that’s where the leverage is. The leverage is actually working on the key most strategic aspects of what you’re trying to develop. I mean, first of all, you have to do some work to decide what it is, which is again, that stepping back and figuring that out. I mean, I’m also a facilitator. I facilitate strategic planning. That’s a lot of what I help entrepreneurs and their teams come up with.
Scott Love (13:44):
Yeah. Well, this is good. I mean, this is just the first one, right? And so tell me what are some other variables that we really need to look at if we want to 10 x this?
David Greer (13:54):
Again, I think you have to look at your market space, what the problem is that you’re trying to solve and what you are really, really good at. And that Venn diagram and that kind of circle in the middle, that’s where you need to focus a lot of your time and attention.
Scott Love (14:16):
That’s great.
David Greer (14:19):
I do a lot of work in marketing as well, and marketing is about positioning yourself, but you can’t position yourself against a vacuum, so you still need to know who your competitors are because your prospects will figure it out and your clients will figure it out. And then you have to know, again, you have to contrast and compare to something. So it’s partly the 10 x thing is what am I 10 xing against? So some of it is becoming more aware of what is it out there that other people are seeing.
Scott Love (14:49):
Right. Are there any pitfalls that people fall as they’re trying to go through this process?
David Greer (14:53):
I think we give up too easily on the two x, I’m twice as good, so that’s good enough. I think it’s really challenging ourselves to at least get to that five x. What does five times better look like in this marketplace around this pain point? And sometimes you might even be doing a lot of it. It’s just you got to tell people more and you’ve got to show them, right. My rule of thumb in sales and marketing is don’t tell show. Right? Just show demonstrate. People will figure it out.
Scott Love (15:27):
So give me an example of that. What have you seen with somebody that you’ve worked with where they were able to show a prospect what you’re talking about and it resulted favorably for them?
David Greer (15:35):
I’ll take another one. This 10 x idea comes from a guy Verne Harnish. It got a couple books and Verne talks about, oh, again, we’re probably talking 20, 25 years ago, but there was an Australian lawn care company, and again, it was the sales process was the 10 x factor. So at that time, if you’d quoted to lawn care for someone, you had to book an appointment with the homeowner, you had to send someone out. They took one of those rolling tapes and they went and they measured the whole property. And then they went back to the office and they computed how much square feet it was and came up with a quote. And that process might take three weeks.
(16:14):
Their 10 x insight was at that time the city they were in was starting to do detail to aerial photography of the city, which many municipalities do. And with that looking at an aerial view of a homeowner’s property while they were on the phone, they were able to get a fairly accurate measure of the lawn. And it wasn’t always perfect. They might not see some obstacles or some things that were going to take more time, but they decided that was worth the risk. They actually used that area of photography to do the estimate and gave it to the person over the phone, and they closed 10 times more sales because it was immediate. So anyways, again, it’s just another, it’s an industry where this is the way we’ve always done it, and they were just innovative and creative about, well, I mean actually there is a different way we could do it.
Scott Love (17:09):
Yeah. Well, it sounds like this is something that can apply to everybody.
David Greer (17:13):
Yeah, I believe so. Again, we get stuck in our ways, we get set in how we do things, and I encourage listeners to really think through that whole process from delivery to how you show up to how the stories you tell to look for opportunities to again show up in a way that you may already be or you’re just not showing people that you’re 10 times better than them.
Scott Love (17:43):
Tell me a story then of somebody that you’ve worked with, someone that you’ve coached, whether it’s an entrepreneur or a high level sales professional. You don’t have to mention their name of course, but what was their situation when they came to you? What was the advice you gave them? What did they do? What was the major inflection point where it really started taking off and really accomplishing the goal and what was kind of the end result? Can you give us that arc, David?
David Greer (18:09):
Yeah, simple one is a long time client of mine, two young guys who in high school started a t-shirt printing business and now they’ve built it into a Canada wide multimillion dollar business with two production facilities, one of Vancouver, one in Toronto. And they’re still really young guys because we’re a decade and maybe just a little decade and a tiny bit from when they started the business, they are just fanatical about their quality
(18:39):
And fanatical, and they’ve built relationships with all the top brands of garments. So Nike, anyone you can think of. And I really challenged them on what they were charging. They were charging what the low cost, low quality competitors charge. And I really challenged ’em that. And I think on their top products, they did 15, I think they did a 20% price increase and absolutely no change in volume, no pushback from any of the prospects and obviously much better top line. And there was no incremental costs doing this. They just had to change the website. So profits increased proportionally to the new prices, and that was money that was just there for them. They already did all this. They’re way better at quality than their competitors. They’re way better at customer service than their competitors. So again, it’s like they were doing all these things that made them at least four or five times better than their competitors, but they weren’t charging an appropriate charge for the value I think that they were delivering.
Scott Love (19:54):
Do you think, was there anything where they had a big industry secret that they exposed or anything like that? Was there anything that they did that really moved the needle in terms of getting the results they wanted to?
David Greer (20:06):
No, I don’t think. The other thing was they have opened up two production facilities so they could be closer to the client and reduced shipping costs for their clients. I mean, it was a major decision to do that and probably one of the few t-shirt printing businesses in Canada that have dual locations and they’re still exploring how they can exploit that to give them a higher competitive advantage.
Scott Love (20:32):
Got it. Okay, good. And so tell us then, if people can take the ideas that you’ve mentioned and they’re going to start working on this, they really want a 10 exit, and if you could put it in three action steps, what would those three action steps be? David?
David Greer (20:46):
The first action step is you have to slow down, stop what you’re usually doing and step back and look at this. So nothing will happen if you don’t take that action. The second is I would ask you to really consider somehow involving someone else, maybe even someone outside of your business. And maybe you don’t even pay for it. Maybe it’s just a mentor you can find or an expert in the industry who can be a sounding board, who can help you gain bigger perspective on where you fit and what your competitors are doing. And then the third action is to really understand end to end, how people find you, interact with you, become prospects for you, how you actually sell and deliver, and anything you can glean from your competitors about that process.
Scott Love (21:39):
Got it. Okay, good. And let me ask you about some of these. I had some other questions for you. Let’s say somebody’s listening to this and they want to really do some work, and they take number one, they’re going to slow down, they stop what they’re doing and they’re going to step back and they’re going to look at this. What do you think they should do? Should they look at their internal protocols? Should they look at their customer lists? What do you think they should really start in stopping what they’re doing and looking at what their business is?
David Greer (22:08):
I would start with what have you got internally vis-a-vis your competitors? What documentation do you have? What do you know about your competitors? What do you don’t know? I’d probably start there because again, it’s this whole idea, you can’t beat 10 x your competitors if you don’t know who your competitors are and what they’re doing. I’d start with the outside piece and then trying to understand where you can gain some insights from that to then work on the internal piece as to where you can start to make that biggest difference. The other thing I do as a coach is try and remind everyone that in my opinion, everything is an experiment.
(22:52):
So go, even if you start really small, try some experiments and I don’t see if experiments don’t succeed or fail. I mean they do. You have a theory, if we do this, we will get more prospects or we’ll get more leads, or there’ll be higher value. But if you come out of that and it turns out your thesis was wrong, so you didn’t get the outcome you were hoping for, it’s just learning. It’s like, okay, now I know more than I did before, so what’s the next experiment I need to take and just keep experimenting. I think this is the thing we lose is that we stop experimenting, we stop trying new things, we just assume that what we’re doing is perfect and this level of kind of introspection challenging ourselves, how could we do things better or different? And what experiments could we run? My client, the T-shirt business was very nervous. The sales volume was going to go way down when they increased their prices. The experiment was increase the prices and see what happened to the volume. And the answer was no change, but that’s not what they were expecting. I mean, in that case, the outcome was the desired outcome, but if it turned out the volume started to go down, well then we would have some different discussions. We would’ve looked at things like maybe it was too big a leap. Maybe there’s still some value to be had, but it’s not as much as you thought. So what’s the next experiment? There are no failures, they’re just experiments, just learning.
Scott Love (24:20):
I think that’s good. And I’d even talk with my colleagues in my own business about let’s try a different type of voicemail message. Let’s test a different type of outreach
David Greer (24:28):
And
Scott Love (24:28):
Then measure it. Let’s do 20 of those and then let’s see what the response is.
David Greer (24:31):
Exactly
Scott Love (24:32):
What I’ve seen in our business, in the recruiting industry, it is hyper competitive and what used to do good work and make placements five years ago, it’s not like that anymore in terms of how you connect with people. So you always have to be evolving, and I think what you’ve shared with us today and even your book Wind In Your Sails, I think that’s a good starting point for people to buy your book and to read through it. I really like the way you’ve structured it. It’s easy to read. I learned things in reading your book and I’d highly recommend that. And so that leads me to ask you this question. David, tell us about your business. What do you have do that you think could help our listeners? And tell us a little bit about that and we’ll put all of your contact information on the show notes, wherever anybody’s listening to the podcast, go to the show notes and you’ll be able to connect with David directly.
David Greer (25:19):
Thanks, Scott. I’m a 40 plus year entrepreneur, and for just about the last decade, I’ve been an entrepreneurial coach. I work directly with entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs in their teams or with really high performing individuals, often involved like in sales who are stuck or challenged or in a crisis. And I work with them to achieve the goals that you want in business. And after we work for a while, I’m usually in life as well, and I like to make it easy. It’s always hard to tell whether you can work with a coach like me. I offer a free one hour coaching call. So if you’re stuck on something, book a call with me and we’ll go through it. And my brand promise is if you spend that hour with me, you’ll have three ideas to accelerate your business in the next 90 days. And I’ve never had a failure on that brand promise so far. And to make it easy, if you just go to my website, coach dj greer.com, that’s Coach D as in David, J as in James Greer.com, top left corner is my phone number and my email address on every single page, just send me a message and let’s set something up. I would love to be able to help one of your listeners over whatever challenge they’re facing.
Scott Love (26:40):
That’s great, David. Thank you for that and I appreciate your generosity of that to our listeners and also the generosity of your time for being here and sharing your wisdom with us today. And like I said, we’re going to put all your contact info on the show notes, and I’d love to have you back on the show in the future. David, you’ve done a great job for us today.
David Greer (26:57):
Great. Thanks, Scott. I really appreciate it.
Scott Love (27:00):
Thank you.
Announcer (27:04):
Thank you for listening to the Rainmaking podcast. For more information about our recruiting services for international law firms, visit our website@attorneysearchgroup.com to inquire about having Scott speak at your next convention conference, sales meeting, or executive retreat, visit
