Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
02 Dialing in Revenue with Trygve
61 Plays2 years ago
Trygve Olsen is the head of sales at BizzyWeb, and he spills the beans on what makes him an effective revenue driver in today's podcast. From tricks to get in front of decision-makers to tried-and-true connect methods, Trygve has done it all. In this episode, we cover sales tips, how Inbound Selling can break through the noise and build trust, and some of Trygve's favorite stories.
Dial It In Podcast is where we gather our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue - through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
Connect with Dave on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dave1meyer
Connect with Trygve on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/trygveo
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Dial It In Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In.
Interview with Trigby Olson
00:00:26
Speaker
Today, I am super excited to be interviewing our very own Trigby Olson, our Director of Buzz Development. If you don't know Trigby, Trigby has a wealth of experience in marketing after running his own digital marketing agency, servicing both national organizations and helping to grow local businesses across the country. Trigby has extensive experience in web development, branding, organic SEO, you name it, he has done it.
00:00:51
Speaker
Trigby is an active speaker and trainer on HubSpot, where he is featured frequently not only in inbound office hours, inbound sales office hours with Kyle Jepsen on LinkedIn, but also he is a professor of the pipeline generation bootcamp for HubSpot, which is a incredibly exclusive team of, I believe, six inside of the entire HubSpot world.
00:01:19
Speaker
It's up to like 20 now, but North America, North America, there's only five of us. Perfect. See, okay. Great. So if you have not seen trig V in action, he is classically trained in improv and his humorous slant on digital marketing topics, educates his audience while putting them at ease when he's not driving business and sales for busy web, for which I am eternally grateful. Trig V so delighted to have you here. Welcome.
00:01:49
Speaker
Thanks, Dave. Long time listener. Yeah. First time guests. Um, second time first time guests on my own podcast, second time host. Well, thanks for, thanks for making the time to get together with me here because I think as we build out the dial it in podcast, one of the most important things is finding out how experts are truly
00:02:13
Speaker
creating and excelling in their fields. You have just exploded in what you do for not only BusyWeb, but for hundreds of businesses across the world through your work with HubSpot. You are the king of dialing it in. Thank you. Thanks. That's kind of you to say. Absolutely. Before we get going, so far in the format, we're doing a little bit of history.
Trigby's Journey from Job Loss to Entrepreneurship
00:02:42
Speaker
So I mentioned earlier that you had your own agency and why don't you give me a little bit of background into not only what that was about and maybe how you got started on this whole marketing side, but then also how we came to know each other and started working together.
00:02:58
Speaker
So, wow, that's a long story. So hopefully we have enough tape. I started my own business primarily because much like you, I didn't feel like I was going to be a good employee. And I still don't feel like I'm a good employee. I feel like I'm a pain in the ass to most of the people I work with at BusyWeb.
00:03:18
Speaker
And I like building things. I like making things. I like seeing something go from nothing to something. Back in 2010, I lost my job and a buddy of mine had asked me to help him out with what he had created, which was a conversational search engine for Twitter. So you could enter in a term and then it would tell you everybody who's been talking about that term.
00:03:48
Speaker
And what I thought was just an amazing use of that tool was a social use of that tool. So we had tried talking to schools and use it as an early warning system to try to hit kids who were in trouble and give them an opportunity to kind of have a crisis intervention. Great. Wow. And yeah, it was really neat. I worked my, I think the proudest that I'd ever been really at the time was
00:04:18
Speaker
We worked with a ministry in Harlem and it was half a dozen guys who were convicted murderers but had since become ordained priests in prison.
00:04:28
Speaker
And what they had found was that at the time, because of all the law and order shows, all the gangs understood that you could get hung by a cell phone tower. So they had moved to Twitter. And so they were coordinating a gang activity on Twitter. And so what we had done is figured out, okay, so based on what we're trying to do here, we could put priests in front of people before they were going to commit a heinous act.
00:04:56
Speaker
Wow, cool. And so the guy who I'd worked with who had since passed away told me once that he had 55 guns in his office because of me.
00:05:06
Speaker
I don't know if that's because he thought I was going to visit or just because it was a good job. But the problem with that was that saving the world really didn't pay well. And especially as you were talking to the schools at the time, so this was 10, 11 years ago, they wanted absolutely no part of anything social media. Anything that happened off school grounds, including the internet, they were putting their head in the sand.
00:05:32
Speaker
before.
Transition to Social Media Marketing
00:05:33
Speaker
So what I changed from that is I started talking with people and realizing that social media was a thing and I could do that. I'm a creative guy and I can write and start to take meetings and then people ask, could you do that? Could you do X? And I'd say, sure, no problem. Then I'd go out to the car and I'd Google what I just agreed to and then figured out how to do it. Yep.
00:05:54
Speaker
And then sooner or later, to get back to the idea of me being a bad employee, when I was trying to figure out what to do next, I realized I don't need a job as much as I need a certain amount of money every month. And as long as I was doing activities that were interesting to me and gave me the opportunity to be curious,
00:06:15
Speaker
I was able to, you know, commonly gather a living and it was fun and it was interesting. And I think one of the things that I'm particularly good at, not a lot of people are, is starting with nothing and then making something up.
00:06:31
Speaker
Huh? Absolutely. So I managed a pro wrestler for a while. I designed t-shirts in which I had to learn graphic design, and then I started doing web stuff. And then pretty soon I had a nice little recurring income. And so that's why I was running my own business. Yeah, excellent. Well, and I think it was very
00:06:54
Speaker
You were doing really well. It was a little bit of a grind as far as doing all of the related things, but we met through constant contact.
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, I had gotten out of it for a couple of months. The reason I had gotten out of it is my wife became pregnant. I thought, well, I can't do this anymore. I have to grow up and get a real job. One of my clients had hired me at the time, and I was still doing work for Constant Contact. You and I were on a panel together where we didn't really talk.
00:07:31
Speaker
It was a panel of four people. I think it was you, me, and it was Kerry, and probably one other person. I don't remember who the fourth person was. And the moderator, who's a dear friend, every time somebody had asked a question, he'd answer the question. And we kind of looked at each other and then. That's weird.
00:07:52
Speaker
And so my son was born three and a half weeks premature. I had just moved out of the craziest house you'd ever did see. I wasn't doing really well at the new gig. And so when you and I met, I thought, you know what? Yeah, I'm going to ask this guy if he has space for me.
00:08:10
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and as we've covered in a previous episode, it was very much a interesting road for us for business development. And so it was perfect timing for us to be chatting. And we really needed someone with not only the chops to get it done, but with the kind of cultural fit and the kind of go-get-igness
00:08:34
Speaker
that would really make things happen. And we've been able to grow this together quite successfully.
00:08:41
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the things that I had sort of come to understand much, much later in life is I really didn't have a good sense of my own identity because I was trying to be what everybody else wanted me to be. So I didn't pursue as many dreams as I wanted to because I thought I had to get a job and then I had to get a house and then I had to do this and then I had to do this. And then sooner or later I lost that job and I was like, well, what am I supposed to do now?
00:09:09
Speaker
So I was internally lucky that I had a wife who is unbelievably patient who just let me sit and think for a while and then figure it out. And then once that happened, then that sort of started me on the marketing path. And then which is what brought me to Busy Web.
00:09:27
Speaker
Excellent. Wow. I don't think we've ever had that compartmentalized conversation about the full arc, so that's super cool. Yeah. As Dial It In, as the podcast, one of the goals is to identify how people improve their process and or their results over time, however that is. When we started together,
00:09:50
Speaker
business was entirely different than what it is now. So we were a website building organization primarily and sort of did some marketing mostly by lip service. Explain to our listeners how you grew the business development role as BusyWeb broadened in scope and or went deeper into relationships with customers.
Creating a Recurring Revenue Model at BusyWeb
00:10:15
Speaker
Well, I think it was like in most business development, it was, and we're using business development, but that's a fancy way of saying sales. I think it was in large part due to failure. And I had just come on board and I was rebuilding my network and I really wasn't, I was doing okay. But what I realized is that there was this sort of other element to our business that we could create
00:10:38
Speaker
recurring revenue from, you know, at the time we built websites. That's what we did is we were a website builder and that was it. We had this other thing that we did, but we build websites. And so typically when you sell a website to a company, if you do it right, you do it well. And which is something that we do is you shouldn't really have to worry about it for a good period of time. It should be up, it should be working, it should be functional.
00:11:07
Speaker
for, you know, let's say five years. So then we did this, I sort of inherited this package program and I think they were really even like something as trite as silver, gold and bronze, gold and silver.
00:11:24
Speaker
where we do X amount of social media posts and then we do Y amount of blogging and then Z amount of this. And so as I was trying to sell that, one of the things that I discovered is people would, they'd hitch on it. They couldn't, they couldn't wrap their minds around it because what if I needed five things and what if I needed less? What does that mean that I have to spend less? And the answer was always no. And then they were like, well, I can't, I can't thank you enough for all the time.
00:11:54
Speaker
and so i can remember where i was and who i was with i was with jen your wife and i was explaining this to her and then she and i.
00:12:03
Speaker
revolutionize the entire digital marketing landscape on the whole. And we created this brand new concept of monthly stipends. So every month you pay us a certain amount of money and then we do a certain amount of work for that. The work is completely dependent upon the success metric. If you need to go up, great. If you need to go down, fine. But you're going to pay us every month and then we're going to do a bunch of work for you every month.
00:12:31
Speaker
Now we just thought this was the greatest thing ever.
00:12:35
Speaker
and come to find out that we had invented something that somebody else had invented years before. We just happened to stumble upon it. And then that, soon after that, that's really what one of the first explosions of the business was. And I almost killed Jen as a result of that. Because BusyWeb was so successful at building websites, I had a good 150 clients to call. I think I sent 25 within about a six-week period.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yes, yes. The big crush and those were for the initial like strategy part, right? Where we would get things going. So it was like, I don't think we called it a game plan back then, but. Well, that was part of it is no, you'd sign up for it. And then the first month we would do a strategy and figure out what we were supposed to do. And then the second month and we would build it. And then the third month we'd actually get started. Right.
00:13:30
Speaker
And then that was another hitch in the giddy up there because then people were like, so I'm going to pay you all the time. And then in 90 days, I'm only going to get one more month worth of marketing effort. Like, yeah, I can see how you'd feel that way. And so we sort of stumbled through that. And then I can then what as, as Jen and I were in the busy web conference room trying to promote this to a client.
00:13:57
Speaker
I went rogue, which I am known to do from time and again. And I said, well, what if we just do the strategy for you? And then you can decide whether or not what you want to do or not. So I basically invented a new product line on the spot.
00:14:12
Speaker
So I talked earlier about there was that one time where I tried to kill Jen. That was the first time in which Jen tried to kill me. Because she's like, but to her credit, she stayed quiet and then didn't didn't yell at me till later. But what we ended up coming to is this idea that
00:14:30
Speaker
Every business is different, really, based on a number of things. Number one is your differentiating value proposition. How you enter the landscape is really different than anybody else. And sometimes that involves a tremendous amount of deep navel gazing where you really have to understand how you're different and what you offer that's different. If you say your customer service is different, it makes you different. That does not make you different.
00:14:58
Speaker
you know, if you're describing yourselves in the same way that you can describe my dog, which is then you're not different, you know? So if you say things like, well, we're really go getters and we really have attention to detail. We'll drop a tackle on the floor and he's going to go get it. He's going to have great attention to detail. So that doesn't really apply. So the second thing is geography is on how super search engines work. Respecting the geography has to, has to be notated. And then the third is,
00:15:27
Speaker
competition. So what are your competitors doing? How are they trying to gain market share? And then what are some things that you can get? And then what are some things that you shouldn't really go after as a result of that? And so if we understood all that, then really what it became is less about trying to assign a client and more putting us in a position of
00:15:50
Speaker
Well, if this was our money, how would we spend it to get an actual result? And that's kind of the model we have now, which is let's try and figure out what's actually going to move the needle for you. And then let's do that. Now, within that, there's always going to be a certain amount of error rate. Some things are going to work.
00:16:09
Speaker
some things aren't going to work. And so let's just give credence to the idea that some things aren't going to work. And instead of saying, oh, just wait longer, Mr. Client, it's going to be great because a lot of people do that and that irritates me. Let's call it out and let's put ourselves in the position to say, this isn't working the way we want. But this other thing that we're doing is, so let's stop doing the thing that's not working. Let's double down on the thing that is working.
00:16:36
Speaker
Absolutely. And so as a result of that, the clients who can buy into that get a tremendous rate of return because really what you get, and this is part
BusyWeb's Evolution to a Full-Service Agency
00:16:45
Speaker
of the value proposition of working with busy web is if you get to the point where you're actually paying us, we genuinely want to make your life better. We don't take people on because we think that we can melt them for money or because they're a good paying client. We pay them, we work with the people we really want to make a difference for.
00:17:05
Speaker
So you find a lot of people are genuinely interested in your own success. Right. As we started the BizDev solutions and as we're having the conversations, it occurs to me that we made a pretty seismic shift and I know that you were instrumental in this. We moved from, as you said, being a widget maker or someone that we build websites, boom, done, talk to me in three years.
00:17:33
Speaker
to being a consultative partner. So how did we lead through that or what were the big questions that we needed to answer in order to get to that space to know that we needed a big change?
00:17:49
Speaker
Well, I think that was part of my entrepreneurial spirit because I kept running up against these much bigger agencies. And I kind of thought about it and I thought, well, what really makes an agency? Well, it's people who can do things and then they charge for it and that's pretty much it. So why aren't we calling ourselves an agency? So then I sort of, by force of will, decided that BusyWeb is now an agency.
00:18:14
Speaker
Then all of a sudden, that took a big leap forward. I think the second thing was that we really tried to look at the full lifecycle of what a client needs.
00:18:27
Speaker
and not just a website, because that's bopping in and out and bopping in and out. And so that really is based on volume and we don't really do volume at Busy Web. I mean, we do a fair amount of business, sure, but we are not transactional in the sense that we are trying to get you in and get you out as fast as possible. What we're trying to do is get you in as fast as possible, which by the way, if you'd like to, please see me after the show, but also make sure that we're doing a difference for you, making a difference for you.
00:18:57
Speaker
So instead of being transactional where we had to have a certain amount of people in order to fill that void, let's actually figure out what do these people need and how can we provide them? Well, a lot of times they need content. Well, that's great. We have writers on staff.
00:19:14
Speaker
Well, and a lot of times they need connections to social media. Well, that's great. We already have development people on staff. And oh, they need email marketing help. Well, that's great. Dave and I are experts in email marketing. So we had all the tools in place, I think.
00:19:33
Speaker
I was just really the first person to sort of look at it and go, oh, okay, no, let's do this in a different way. And let's offer this in a way that puts the client in the driver's seat. Not what we want to sell them. Let's focus on what they need to buy and what they really need help with. Now, come to find out there was this other company called HubSpot that was doing that longer for us. So once again, we revolutionized the industry by doing something that somebody else has already started.
00:20:04
Speaker
Right? And that's worked out all right. Right? I did not want to do HubSpot. Yeah. It was $1,000 a month. David's cuckoo bananas. Why on earth are we doing this? This is horrible. And $1,000 a month, right? At a time when we were looking at... We did not have $1,000 a month. Right. We were looking at, okay, well, what do we have to do and trade off to make payroll?
00:20:28
Speaker
And that happened a lot back then. And why on earth are we going to chain ourselves to this? And then I kind of, I describe it to people kind of like when I got my first iPhone, because I didn't want the iPhone. I had to get an iPhone because my wife works at a
00:20:47
Speaker
building that has an AT&T tower on it. So an AT&T was the only one selling iPhones right back then. So fine, I'll get an iPhone. And then I started using it and I went, Oh God, all right, fine. This is nice. Yep.
00:21:02
Speaker
And it was the same thing with HubSpot where I started using it and got, fine, this is nice. So from a business development standpoint, I don't have a phone in my office anymore because I just have a studio mic and I talk to people through the studio mic. So all my calls are already recorded. I don't have to notate anything because I'm calling out of the HubSpot system.
00:21:27
Speaker
So all that's tabulated for me anytime I write an email, it's always included. So everybody else already knows what's going on. Right. Now, any salesperson worth their salt is now rolling their eyes or has turned off the podcast by now because they want to say, well, why on earth am I going to let other people know what I'm doing? Well, that's a valid point. But the converse of that is
00:21:57
Speaker
If you don't let people know what they're doing, then they're not going to be able to help you. Right. Right. There was a time in which, and I think it's happened a couple of times, I think four times people called you and complained about me. And I can remember the last time they called and complained, you and I were walking down the hall, the busy web, and you sort of met through it out as sort of an offhand thing. I'm like, oh yeah, somebody called and complained about you. And I went, what? He's like, no, you're like, no, no, it's fine.
00:22:26
Speaker
What, no, no, no, no, no, no. What, what, what, what, why are they calling you complaining about me? And you said, and you kind of looked at me and went, all right, fine. So somebody had referred business and, and then that person who did the referring call because the referrer.
00:22:43
Speaker
didn't get the outcome they liked, which is basically, I didn't want to give him the price that he wanted to spend. He called and complained to his buddy who then called you and complained. And so unbeknownst to me, the call came in, the complaint about me, you had gone into the guy's record and HubSpot and went,
00:23:02
Speaker
Okay, here's three emails that he sent. He's half a dozen resources that he sent. There's two 45-minute phone conversations that he had with me. And you coached me a little. You said sometimes I got a little snippy, which is probably fair. But the idea that I wasn't helpful just simply wasn't true. And all the evidence was just sitting there. So you were kind of like, well, come on, I told you it was fine. Let it go. Right.
Professional Growth through HubSpot
00:23:26
Speaker
Oh, okay. So that was the first thing. And the second thing is I've always, and I tell people all this night when I teach this stuff, I tell people is that really good salespeople are very much like baseball pitchers. They are out on their own and they can either win or lose the game on their own, which is
00:23:49
Speaker
really exciting and sometimes it's stressful and sometimes it's lonely, but it is a unique position to be in if you can handle it. And so what I found with HubSpot, after all my kicking and screaming, I quickly got into a program that HubSpot offered, which I now teach, which I found all of these other people who do what I do. And now all of a sudden I had to try it. Not only my busy web tribe, but all these people around the world
00:24:17
Speaker
who do what I do and have the same issues that I do and have the same questions that people ask all the time. That helped me on a personal level have another great leap forward because now all of a sudden I wasn't by myself and I had people to crowd source beyond the support I had at Busy Web. Right. That thing that you do that you alluded to is introduce yourself to a whole ton of people and ask them for money.
00:24:47
Speaker
Yes, but there's a little bit more to that than that. But ultimately the job of any salesperson is to get money out of somebody. That's the result that the salesperson really wants. And there's two ways to do that. Number one is by being the most clever person in the room.
00:25:08
Speaker
of which I would say just about any room that I'm in ever, I'm more than likely the most clever person in the room. But that doesn't give you results because what that gives you is a bad reputation. And I think you see that a lot, especially in the car industry, there was sort of the stereotype of salespeople that
00:25:29
Speaker
car sales people were going to screw you. And then all of a sudden the internet came along and the Kelly Blue Book values came along and then all of a sudden informationally it wasn't adversarial anymore and it was flat. Because now everybody was dealing from the same deck and having the same piece of information.
00:25:48
Speaker
Now what's happened over the last 25 years or so since the dark days of the internet, the time in my life I like to call college, is that's permeated in other industries as well. And now people are much more inclined to believe that a salesperson is going to screw them. So they're not going to let the salesperson screw them. They're going to do all the information themselves, and they're going to do all the research themselves. And they're going to look at websites, they're going to look up information, and they're going to get educated on that.
00:26:17
Speaker
Well, the smart salesperson understands that and grants that premise that if somebody thinks you're going to try to screw them, there's really no way around it. So the only way that you can combat that is just by being a decent person and listening to what they have to say, talking to them about what their problems are, not what you want their problems to be.
00:26:41
Speaker
and then trying to help them find a solution that makes sense. And oftentimes that's not the solution that you want to sell, it's the solution that makes the most sense to them. Right. And so it's kind of the difference between being a traditional salesman and being a consultant or a helper. Someone that's going to ask questions, almost like a psychologist for the business.
00:27:05
Speaker
I think that I really don't know how to describe it except this way is I used to practice martial arts a lot and I used to be really into martial arts. And it got to the point where you could recognize just by talking to somebody, no matter how much bluster they had, really whether or not they could handle themselves in a fight. And oftentimes what you find is the toughest guys, the guys you need to be the most afraid of are the people who act like puppy dogs.
00:27:33
Speaker
And so I think in sales that same way is true is the person who is going to give you the most amount of bluster is the least amount of practice in the thing. But the person who's genuinely interested in you and generally just starts talking to you
00:27:48
Speaker
That's the person that you gravitate to. And then after a while you say, say, let me ask you a question. And then all of a sudden you're talking about a product offering or a service offering, but you don't get there unless you have a tremendous amount of experience, which I'm unfortunately due because I think about my mistakes all the time, but also
00:28:08
Speaker
just being a decent person. And being interesting to talk to and somebody who's willing to help, not because I'm going to make a buck out of it, just because it's the right thing to do. And then you get to the point then where the money follows.
00:28:25
Speaker
Well, and one of the things in getting the money to follow is sometimes in order to get past a gatekeeper or to break an impasse, you have to get creative.
Creative Sales Strategies
00:28:36
Speaker
And this is one of my favorite Trigby things. No one's as creative as Trigby Olsen in connecting with the right audience and getting to some sort of a response.
00:28:49
Speaker
Can you share one of your favorite examples of how you got to someone when otherwise you just weren't hitting anything other than a brick wall?
00:28:59
Speaker
So I don't want to give a lot of my secret sauce, but I'll give the one that I normally give when people ask me that question. Again, you have to realize that there's been a new evolution in sales in the last two and a half years too. It really started around the pandemic where you could have a really good phone conversation, you could call somebody up and you can go visit them, but somehow that kind of went away.
00:29:23
Speaker
And so what happened was is everybody sort of went to email and now everybody's emailing and there's all these scripts out there of and all these lists of 10 best email scripts and of which Everybody uses we all get the same 15 emails every single day
00:29:39
Speaker
So your job as a salesperson is to make a connection by any means necessary. You can do that by being insulting or you can do that by being a friend. And so one of the most important parts of the class that I teach for HubSpot called Pipeline Generation Bootcamp is how to talk to a gatekeeper.
00:30:01
Speaker
somebody whose job it is to not let you pass them and how to make friends with them. So there's two things. Number one, keep in mind when you're talking to a gatekeeper, realize that that gatekeeper is almost universally hated by everybody they talk to. And their job is to be, no, I'm not going to let you in. No, Dave is busy. No, you can't talk to Dave. Their job is to say no.
00:30:24
Speaker
Now you want them to say yes. So oftentimes what I do is after the second, third or fourth call, if they're really good at their job, call them out on it. Don't say, hey, you're being mean to me. Say, you are just a tremendous gatekeeper and I really appreciate that about you. Ask them their name, talk to them as a person.
00:30:46
Speaker
be warm and be genuine and say, okay, this was great. I can't wait to see you on Friday when we have this call again. And maybe they laugh and maybe they don't. But at the end of the day, they're gonna be a little softer to you because you're treating them as a person and you're saying, hey, I respect what you do. Absolutely. The second thing is you can never underestimate the value of a dozen donuts.
00:31:10
Speaker
So that person in the organization is often overlooked and often underappreciated. And so if I need to get past a gatekeeper, what I will do is I will have a dozen donuts delivered to the office.
00:31:27
Speaker
And then I'll call that gatekeeper and I'll say, Hey, Dave, you should have some donuts that were delivered today. And they'll say, well, were this for me? No, they're from you. And then everybody else in the office with those donut who enjoyed those donuts are going to go back to that gatekeeper and say, Oh, thanks for the bringing in donuts today.
00:31:46
Speaker
And then all of a sudden, the next time you call, it's a little bit easier and a little bit easier. You said something really important earlier today, which is, ultimately, what my job is, is to get people to give us money in order to let us do things for them. And to a large extent, that's true, but that's usually the end of something.
00:32:05
Speaker
Before then, there are all sorts of microsellings that have to be done. I have to get by somebody's trust. I have to get them to believe in me. I actually have to believe in them. There have been, I don't know how many dozens of people who have come to us with ideas that I just don't think are going to work and I'm not in a position to help them in that instance. So the littlest things that you can do tend to be the most valuable. And one of the most important is just simply treating people like people.
00:32:34
Speaker
and respecting them from where they're coming from. Right on.
00:32:39
Speaker
Well, I think donuts. Donuts are always good and making sure that you have a little bit of a variety can be super helpful. By the way, I'm super glad that I don't work out of the office anymore because there's a donut place right across the street. And so after about one o'clock in the afternoon, the whole area smells like warm cinnamon.
00:33:05
Speaker
And I feel like I'd be Pepe Le Pew, I'd just be led by my nose across the street. That is correct. It can be brutal. So I think as we round third and get right before, right before we close out with our questions, I want to ask you one more thing that really, I think gets to the heart of what business development, AKA sales is. And that is how do you
00:33:33
Speaker
generates enough interest in a person that it becomes automatically reciprocal. Does that make sense? Like, how do you build that up? How do you generate the interest in a person so that it comes through the phone on your first conversation with them? I think you have to be genuinely curious to learn about people and you can't read it off a script. Yeah.
00:34:02
Speaker
Hey, how are you today? Pause, pause, pause. Great. My name is Trigby from Busy Web. Let me tell you about some exciting opportunities in web design that we can offer you. Now you have to ask people. And so when they talk to you about something or they make an offhand comment,
00:34:17
Speaker
Ask them, what's that like? And I try and learn from everybody that I talk to. I try and be helpful to everybody that I can talk to. And oftentimes I would say 75% of the time that isn't a busy web-styled solution. I might know somebody who can help out. I might connect them with somebody else that I know and sort of make a love connection in that way. But
00:34:42
Speaker
It's not by feigning interest, it's by genuinely being interested in the lives of other people. And not in a creepy way, but ways in which you can help. One of the things that we've done from our business development process is when we do research on companies that we want to talk to, we have a good reason for calling. Not because we want to sell them stuff, but because we see something that we think we can do better.
00:35:10
Speaker
Or they can do better. And maybe they'd let us do it. Maybe they won't. But even if they say no, then we've at least ticked the karmic checkbox of the day. And we've done something good for somebody else.
00:35:30
Speaker
Agreed. And there are a number of things that we have differences in styles for sales, but that's probably the biggest one that's the same is that we both genuinely just try to help people. Yeah. And then let the chips fall where they may, right? So if it winds up in a sale, fantastic. And that's so delightful and I'm glad to be able to work with you. But at the end of the day, I think both of us kind of approach this and say, I just want to help. And if there's something that you get a value out of it, then my job is done.
00:36:00
Speaker
Well, and I think to your credit as a leader is you and I are very, very different people. How we talk to people are very, very, I wouldn't say very, very different, but we have incredibly different styles. And one of the building tenets that we've grown on at BusyWeb
00:36:16
Speaker
is by making sure everybody's genuine, who they are shines through. And we don't have scripts. We don't have things that we demand people say all the time in order to present the same experience. We hire people based on their expertise and we give them tools to succeed. And then we trust that they're going to deal with people in the way in which we would deal with them, which is by being genuinely helpful.
00:36:47
Speaker
So you've never tried to make me as Dave 2.0, you've just let me be me. And even my wife, I think a year into me being here said it's,
00:36:57
Speaker
What a wonderful thing that we found that we found a place that just lets you be you and has figured out how to profit off of it. Right. And there's been no shortage of that. So thank you. Yeah. This has been tremendous fun. I want to bring it back and kind of the through line as we move forward on our podcast here is we're going to have some questions that we ask of our guests every time. So it's cool. I'd like to hit you with a few of those and see how it goes.
00:37:25
Speaker
Yep, I'm ready. First one, what's your most used app? Probably the chess game is the thing I do the most. Yeah. Fascinating. Is that like a downtime thing or before bed or sitting in lines or is it just kind of everywhere?
00:37:41
Speaker
Uh, just kind of anywhere. It kind of helps me set my mind, uh, clear, um, is just by focusing on another problem. You know, the problem is summertime is really hard for me because usually I'm using that time to think about something or clear the mechanism. And if my wife walks by and walks through my office, she'll, she'll go, Oh, well, you're not doing anything here. Why don't you vacuum?
00:38:04
Speaker
Yeah. Then I'm completely gonzo for a while. But yeah, probably chess and then photos because I'm one of those dads that takes way too many photos of my way too cute kid. Very much. Very much. And I agree wholeheartedly. It's a cute young man that you've got rolling there and he's a great kid. Thank you. Thank you. We made him ourselves. I know. I heard.
00:38:29
Speaker
So let's get into, since you're in sales, you deal a lot with value and time and money. What's the most expensive thing you either have ever bought or own that is 100% worth the money? Well, I just did seven days in Disney World, which was an expedition, I guess.
00:38:57
Speaker
12, 14 hours a day. You have no concept of money. It was fun and happiness all the time. When it all added up, I had a shock moment of, oh my God, I can't believe we spent that much. Then I realized I would do it again in a second. Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. That's a deposit in memories that you'll always have. Yes. Wow. I've seen some of the pictures.
00:39:24
Speaker
Well, I mean, I met Chewbacca and I piloted the Millennium Falcon with my son. As you will, yeah. As much as I keep trying to ask your wife, I do that at work, but if I could do that at work, but she keeps saying, no, we do not need a full-size Millennium Falcon. Right, right. And she's such a killjoy. But I will say, one of the things that I learned from your wife, which I had on my latest trip to Disney World was,
00:39:52
Speaker
There's a time where you just say, screw it. And you order the dessert anyway. And our first night there, I ordered the, I ordered a fit back to the question of the most expensive thing, $50 dessert. I think it was the most I'd ever spent on one course.
00:40:10
Speaker
in my life. And I told my wife, I ordered the $50 dessert. She's like, you did what? And then it came and it was a, it was a Mexican restaurant in Epcot center. And it was a six inch by six inch, translate, chase cake with a eight and a half inch chocolate Aztec temple on top of it.
00:40:36
Speaker
which once you broke into the temple with a spoon, it was filled with chocolate mousse. And then the entire thing had a caramel ice cream circle around the edge of it. And then it had sparklers. So sometimes in life you live smartly so that when those opportunities present, you just go, yep, add to cart. Right on. Yep. I'm doing it. I'm that guy who orders that thing. I don't, and it's, and it was worth it. I love it.
00:41:06
Speaker
Let's flip gears. How about a mistake that you wish you had back or you could do over? I cheated on a girlfriend in college. And I've hated myself for it for 30 years. Because it didn't need to happen. And I could have been a better person for it. I've never done it since.
00:41:33
Speaker
I think that kind of ties into what you were talking about with relationships, right? Yeah. So it hammers right back on integrity. Yeah. Yep. I should have been a better person to her. Right on. Got it. Three songs, Desert Islands. What are you taking? The Show Goes On by Bruce Hornsby and the Range. Ooh, good one.
00:41:59
Speaker
So by Stevie Wonder from Songs in the Key of Life and Purple Rain, the long version. When Prince died and it was the weirdest thing here in Minnesota, it was a two-day torrential rainstorm.
00:42:21
Speaker
And it hasn't happened since. I mean, we get rain here, but we don't get too straight, hard rain days. It was like the world was, like the entire state was crying for Prince. And I can remember it was one of my fondest memories. My son, who was, I think a little under a year at that point, I let him out on the deck and he just danced in the rain.
00:42:40
Speaker
and purple rain was on the radio for some reason and that song is just always stuck with him and i've told him since you know you live in minnesota you have to like prince and he's like no i don't prince but you know he'll he'll come around eventually of course and he can't not being in minnesota and and not be a fan right uh what's your least favorite cliche one that you're like yeah that's bullshit um
00:43:09
Speaker
don't take no for an answer in sales. Number one, it's wildly inappropriate, especially as you deal with women to be that guy who doesn't take no for an answer because you're never going to get back in if you do that. So instead, what I like to think of is the answer is not now. The answer is no, the answer is not now.
00:43:35
Speaker
And so build yourself out, be gracious and defeat, and always come back to it when you can and when it's appropriate. Sure. Sure. Now that being said, there's some people that just cuckoo and you want to run away from. Yeah. There was one lady who came into the office once who had this, I forget, it was this machine that
00:43:58
Speaker
It was supposed to line your line your back and she had me use it and it was it warmed your butt. It was like this big egg thing that I sat on and everybody came by and took pictures of me that I don't think that ever went anywhere. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Just be genuine. And if somebody says no, don't take it as no to take it as not right now.
00:44:21
Speaker
Perfect. Love it. Okay. Thank you. I have one more. Okay. What's something that nobody would expect knowing you unless they're like close friends, something that they'd find surprising. I am a gambling addict in 17 years in recovery. I love to win so much so that I had a job that I was going to Las Vegas for
00:44:51
Speaker
a week every month. So, you know, you'd go and have a nice work day. And then five o'clock, they're like, okay, see you tomorrow. And you're like, well, what do you mean? And they're like, well, we'll see you tomorrow. And then you're left by yourself with the strip. So I don't do it anymore. But, you know, it's, it's humbled me. So I don't, I talked earlier about being the most clever person in the room.
00:45:14
Speaker
I don't need to be that. It doesn't matter. Because that's not what real winning is anymore to me. Right on. Oh, I love it. Thank you, Trevie. Thanks, Dave. Yeah. Well, this has been Dial It In, and we've got a whole bunch of fantastic guests coming up. So stay tuned. And until next time, thank you very much for joining us.