Word of Mouth with Matt Ward

eorge grombacher 0:15
left with this is George G and A time is right. welcome today’s guest strong and powerful Matt ward. Matt, are you ready to do this? Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Matt is a successful entrepreneur. He is a word of mouth and referral expert. He’s the president, the National Speakers Association, New England chapter, and he’s the author of several books, including The High Five affect, Matt, excited to have you on, tell us a little about your personal life some more about your work,

Unknown Speaker 0:44
why you do what you do? Well, thanks for having me, George. Yeah, my personal life, I am an avid side by side enthusiast, those are the dune buggy ATVs, I ride them all over the country. And next year is going to be a big epic adventure for me 40 days, over 10,000 Miles called loop around the USA, it’s gonna be a lot of fun. And I’m able to do that, because I implemented the practices that wrote my book, which is why I do what I do. So I believe in freedom from your business, designing a business that works for you, rather than being sort of strained by the business to work every single day, and work certain hours and work weekends and nights. And I did all of that when I owned a digital marketing agency for 16 years, I sold it. And that’s when I became a professional speaker in 2018. And I look back and why was I so successful in that business? It was because of referrals and word of mouth. And so I have delved into this world. You know, when you’re a kid and you’re in school, and they say, What do you want to do, and you start thinking about what I want to do. And then some adult will say to you, Well, don’t forget, you should probably think about doing what you want to do if you’ve never gotten. And now, that’s what I did, is that I get paid for it. So I help people understand how to build better relationships, get more word of mouth referrals in their service space. And that is long term, mutually beneficial relationship with people that they can truly, ifI that’s,

george grombacher 2:19
I love it. It’s a it’s kind of the the gold standard, the brass ring of of businesses, because finding new clients is really, really hard. And so if you can, when you do find those do an awesome job, and develop that strong relationship to the point where people will talk about you, and they will actually introduce you to others that would also benefit from what you do. That’s where we all want to go, but few of us get there.

Unknown Speaker 2:52
And depending on the business model that the person is in, they often think that the referrals come from the client. And then the service based business world like coaches, consultants, speakers, things like that. Referrals don’t come from clients, they don’t want to share it. They want you available, your web design company, they want you available when they call to fix their website. So they and they often aren’t talking about their website person over coffee, right. So what I teach people to do is go after the referral source, who has an opportunity to refer and is in a position to refer so Realtors talking to mortgage professionals talking to financial life, versus going on some networking event with the chamber and in, in, they’re talking about how they can help ever put in the room with a four one, this is not going where I can help by you help you buy a house or sell you what you know what we all know a realtor, probably our customer, right. So the reality is, is that they may not be that good, or they might not get a specialist in the market that we’re in. And so if there’s Realtors is networking and building relationships with the people who are already in the note, people are pre approving people for mortgages that are qualified to buy, and they can help them and be referred in. And that oftentimes means that the sale is going to happen with the customer. You know, and that’s that’s the challenge. Most people just think that customers they think that George because they have one good referral a long time ago from a customer. Now there are industries that the customer does refer a lot. And one example is solar, solar industry. They come into the house, they put solar on the roof, and then they incentivize the homeowner with cash, massive amounts of cash to refer. That’s the only time money actually works for a referral. And the business the business world it just doesn’t work because I don’t have enough time to market and sell your product or service or the commission you’re gonna give me because the commission is going to be pending. I can’t make a living. So that’s a challenge sometimes So that’s the world I live in every single day helping people navigate that world, navigate building referral partners navigate, how much networking to do, where to network, who to talk to, how often to talk to them, what to say. All these types of things are the types of things I help people do. Because they, you know, what I talked about, it’s not new. It’s not sending a handwritten card, it’s not new. It’s just what we shouldn’t be doing is at the end of the day, should we be caring about other people. That’s the goal here is to teach them. Love it.

george grombacher 5:41
So when I was growing up, coming up in in my career, we talked about that as centers of influence. So I’m a financial advisor. And so I’ve tried to cultivate relationships over over the time with attorneys and CPAs, and mortgage professionals and you name it, I’ve probably gone down lots of different pads. How, how do people screw it up?

Unknown Speaker 6:07
So the first thing they do is they sell this, that’s the biggest mistake, and it drives me. But let me just reference something that everybody will be accustomed to LinkedIn, you get a connection on LinkedIn, you accept the connection request. And within 24 hours, you get a sales. You know what I call that? George? You’re being pitched slack. It’s ridiculous, right? We hate it. They don’t know anything about us. I get the offers that say, Hey, have you ever thought about written writing a book? Are you kidding me I’ve written to, like, you don’t even know who I am. This doesn’t make any sense. Block law. Right? We despise cold calls. As consumers we discuss, we despise cold calls, but we love to buy just reference Amazon, we spend so much money on things like that all day long, right? Uber Eats and DoorDash and all that type of stuff. It’s not that we don’t spend money. It’s not that we don’t do financial planning with financial advisors. It’s not that we don’t buy houses and other services, we do all of those things. We just do them with people that we trust. And if you don’t build that trust, you’re making a huge mistake, because I’m looking at it as a sort of like a bank account, you’re making small micro deposits over a long period of a long period of time. When you take withdraw, you’re taking the big you’ve your bank account goes negative, got a huge problem. It’s very difficult to recover. So the biggest mistake people make is selling and not caring about other people and trying to provide value in the second biggest mistake is they focus on the wrong people to build relationships with they build them with those end users design customers thinking that that’s where the referrals are going to come from when they shouldn’t be building them with the COI is at Samsung. Once we get people to rethink that approach, then their efforts are a lot more rewarding and effective.

george grombacher 8:15
We’re not going to gel with everybody, right? How do I know when to for lack of a better term cut bait like this just this person isn’t isn’t a good fit.

Unknown Speaker 8:25
So that’s what my second book is all about is is the high fat fat doing business with people who bring you joy. So my barometer are simple and everybody everybody’s barometer or measurement level is going to be different. But mine is because I’m a I’m a social drinker. Mine is do I want to have a beer with you cool enough in any respects to sit down at a bar and that’s it. I want nothing else for me to then have a beer building friendship. Will that move to some other level like we watch a football game at my house a hockey game or your house we go to the arena once you’ve seen that happen? Are you cool enough to hit that level? Then you need my stamp? Sure not cut bait. Now I don’t necessarily Cut cut cut bait I just slow down the fishing process. Right? So I just might reach out might be a lot longer in between it might be six months they might be a year that may be a small interaction on a social media channel versus an actual like zoom 30 minute catch up call something like that. But in general Yeah, you do. You can’t you know I got connected with somebody who was talking about referrals. And the person who connected us believed that our philosophies were very similar so it’s not for sure we’re gonna mesh and we get on the call. And he’s literally telling me about how he’s using people from his past to get connected to high people and C suite positions. And yet, never use the word use. But then when I use the word use, I didn’t use it in the, in the form that he was doing it. But he immediately got defensive, which shows me and internally, that’s exactly what he’s doing. The funny thing is, oh, it was a story about how he’s they grew up together as kids, and they play baseball together. And that’s great. Then talk to him for five years, and he reached out recently, LinkedIn was like, Hey, can I use your name to talk to this person? Oh, no, I’ll make an introduction. As using somebody, you haven’t talked to them for five years? If you truly want that introduction, which we all want something out of this whole thing, and I get it. Why don’t we just reconnect with the person over a period of four or five, six months, start a conversation again, see how we can help them? And then maybe they’ll help us? But why do we have to go there and ask for that, ask well, right off the bat, without providing any value. You know, and I think a lot of people missed the mark on. And that may have worked in that case, because he played baseball with him as if they were childhood friends, and the person probably thought nothing of it, they would probably do that for them all day long. They wouldn’t do it for me. They would do it for them. And so we do have those type of people in our lives. But what I see happen often George is people will do that extended past that close circle, and that’s where it starts to get gross, isn’t it just. And that’s what we don’t want salespeople to do is to grow things.

george grombacher 11:46
Yeah. And we’ve certainly all experienced that. And you mentioned the pitch slap on LinkedIn, and now how it’s all easy to automate and everything else. So time is extremely valuable. And the older we get, I think, the more successful we get, the more we recognize how valuable time is. So how do you counsel people coach people to, to fit in nurturing.

Unknown Speaker 12:16
So it’s really shouts these things, what I refer to as rejection syndrome from another speaker friend, which was five by 10, to five a day by 10am. And I am not naive enough to believe that everybody can do five by 10. You just can’t get organized. It just doesn’t work. For some people who are generally organized it’s going to work others is not. So I would argue five by seven five reach out well, what’s really five by five, five retails by the end of the day, once a reach out, it can be to anyone about anything. But it’s not sale. Typically, it’s Hey, George, how are you checking in want to say hi, via Facebook with Hey, I saw your post, congratulations on that mid LinkedIn message. Hey, congratulations on your 18th anniversary agent job. Glad to see you they haven’t begun, you know, be funny about it. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s just a reach out your your, I call these touch points. So when I coach people run this out, there are two things to talk about. One is trigger points and the other is touch points. trigger points are the things that trigger action. touch points on the ACT. So an example trigger point, you want to check that we’re going to touch point, the link. trigger point, somebody’s birthday. Your Facebook wall fills up it’s your birthday. Literally my birthday just happened a few days ago. I’m getting all kinds of messages in my in my private message and they’re all the same Happy birthday. Happy birthday, happy birthday happy. It’s like you buying something on Facebook marketplace is this available. So this will help so because it’s a pre canned message so they can give you so they just hit the button. It’s nothing special. You know what special when my speaker friend Phil Gerber shack picked up the phone and called me on the phone on my birthday. I’ve talked to Phil and for five months, and the last time I talked to him it was probably just via Facebook Messenger. When he called me on the phone and wished me happy birthday. You know what I tell my clients to do. Instead of sending a message through Facebook Messenger, press and hold the camera button in the messenger and turns the video feature on sing them happy birthday, you will be the only one to sing a happy birthday video to somebody and send it to them. If you take just a little bit of time to just do something a little bit different than what everybody else is doing. You stand out. That’s how you get referrals you care about other people. That’s how you get referrals you’re standing out that’s just take all those marketing dollars that you would spend on the Billboard which is Coleman you know On top of mind awareness, and instead apply them to doing handwritten cards, and calling people saying hello and leaving money, voicemail messages. be memorable. And be genuine be who you are. And when you do that, you crush it. And the referrals will come, they will come tomorrow, they take time that trust takes time to build, but work you do now pays often say

george grombacher 15:25
I love it five a day by 10, five by 10, or whatever your version of that is, you know, I’m fine to saying when something’s a problem, make it a process, and it’s not a problem anymore. And so that 100% answered, answer the question, because I’m sure that there’s a lot of people probably most people would express the same thing I just expressed, I’m busy, I don’t have time for this. Well, you can make it, you can make anything work as long as you you know, just make it. This is what I consistently do at this time, and and then put it to work. So

Unknown Speaker 15:59
I suggested to a client the other day, who made a LinkedIn post that reference all the people he met over the summer, and it got it wasn’t viral, but it got way more activity than any other LinkedIn post in May. And I suggested to him, hey, Ricky, what do you think about maybe just making that similar post on Monday, recapping week? Could you take 1520 minutes just to write that up, tag those people in it, see what happens. Because when you tag us on social media, we go look, by the way, that’s why the new tag that’s been around for a while that everybody started using Facebook groups. The at every one tag is horrendous. Because it says you can tag and then you go look for your tag. So you get this dopamine hit that someone mentioned you then you go look at it. And you weren’t actually tagged. It was everyone and you’re like, Oh, this is ridiculous. Same thing happens on Tik Tok. When people post videos where they go live, and it says they actually put the caption as mentioned you what they’re trying to do is get you to interact with them. But that’s under false pretenses. And you’ve literally just lost my trust when you do that. No interest in dealing with people who aren’t J.

george grombacher 17:16
Amen. I love it. Powerful stuff. Matt ward. Thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage? Where can they pick up a copy of the high five effect? And for those out there who are running organizations and conferences and looking for speakers? How can they engage you to speak at their next event?

Unknown Speaker 17:39
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for asking George it’s about work speaks pretty much everywhere met word speaks.com That word speaks on all the the channels on YouTube on ticky tock, which is born my personal stuff on Instagram On Facebook, you can find me on all these all these things have a ton of YouTube videos out there that just are short little snippets about how to improve your relationship building techniques and things like that. All my speaking videos are all on YouTube as well as on my website. It’s it’s it’s been a good run George I really love what I do. And and and I’ve written two books. The first one in 2018 was about referrals called more word of mouth referrals. You can find them on Amazon as well as the High Five effect can be found on Amazon. It’s all spelled out the high five effect. And it’s all on Amazon, under my author name that word. And as I always like to say George forget to live happy. smile a lot. And high five. Everyone around.

george grombacher 18:41
I love it. You enjoyed this as much as I did show your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to Matt Ward speaks ma TT W ard speaks.com Check out all the great resources check out the YouTube channel and find Matt all over social media and then pick up a copy of the high five effect at wherever you buy your books but also the high five effect.com Thanks again, Matt. And until next time, remember, do your part by doing your best

Transcribed by https://otter.ai