Improve Your Business Development Skills with Mo Bunnell, Author of The Snowball System

Welcome to On Record PR. I’m your host Gina Rubel and the Founder and CEO of Furia Rubel Communications. Today, I am excited to go on record with Mo Bunnell, CEO of Bunnell Idea Group, to discuss how professionals can develop their business development skills.

It is an all-too-common story early in your professional career – as a lawyer, an accountant, a financial advisor – and you are judged on the quality of your work and the ability to turn it around quickly. Then, after years of growing your experience and expertise, you are expected to lead client relationships and build a book a business. As a former practicing attorney, I can tell you that business development is not a skill taught in law school. In fact, they also don’t teach marketing, public relations or crisis communication in law school.

Mo Bunnell has trained more than 20,000 professionals to grow their book of business, relationships, and career at law firms like King & Spalding, Dechert, and Akin Gump. He has also worked with other professional service firms like BCG, Sotheby’s, and Willis Towers Watson.

Mo is the author of The Snowball System: How to Win More Business and Turn Clients into Raving Fans and he hosts the podcast Real Relationships, Real Revenue.

Other resources referred to during this podcast include:

• • bdhabits.com
  • growbigplaybook.com

Mo, how did you get started. You’re an actuary, right?

Yes, that’s right. For whatever reason, I fell in love with the idea of being an actuary when I was in high school. I went to school, and got a degree in it, a Bachelor of Science in actuary science. Passed all the actuarial exams. Takes almost a decade, at least it did back in the days before it was easy for these actuaries now. I moved from a role from being 100%, like you said, about billable client satisfaction, was I responsive, things like that. And was in the situation where literally in one day I went from all my metrics of success being that, to all my metrics of success being client retention, growth, and things like that.

I went to my boss the day of that transition, the promotion, if you will, and asked him for a playbook. How do we do this? How can I learn? I was used to studying as an actuary and I wasn’t prepared for his response. I thought I would get, “Here’s how we do it. Here’s how we do business development, a way that’s authentic and always has your client’s best interest in mind,” things like that. And I wasn’t prepared for him laughing at me, which he giggled, but I heard it like a Scooby-Doo sinister villain laugh in my mind, like, ha ha ha. Like there’s no playbook. He said, “Mo, there’s no playbook. Treat the client right. You’ll be fine.” I have spent the rest of my career building that playbook, science-based, authenticity based, client interest-based, so that how can you grow your book of business and your relationships in a way that the clients love, but it’s also not just waiting for random things to happen. Like the professional is in control.

It sounds to me that Bunnell Idea Group was founded because there was no playbook. Is this correct?

Yes. It’s almost like the classic entrepreneurial story that the thing I built for me became something other people wanted. Gina, like you, because you’re so good at this. You have been at it 20 years. Congratulations.

It’s amazing. At the beginning, I read tons of sales training books. It all felt manipulative and cheesy, like sliding a fancy pen across the table at a steakhouse and doing things in that weird way that certainly didn’t appeal to me. And then there were other great resources that were more about building trust and things like that. And they were better, for sure. But there was nowhere there was a system, like how can you boil it down to bringing in the work you want, deepening the relationships that you want and managing yourself, so you do those things when you’re busy like that’s the crux of it.

It’s been 25 years since I started tackling that, but 16 years since we started Bunnell Idea Group. We’ve developed a system, 17 modules, almost a thousand pages of IP, and literally every skill a professional needs to know to be great at retention and growth.

Gina Rubel: I am so excited to have this conversation. I grew up in a world where the word sale was considered a bad four-letter word in the legal industry. Even using the terminology business development is so important in professional services because of the negative connotation that the word sale tends to have in that space.

Is business development learnable, or are people born with these skills?

I’m so glad you asked this out of the gate. Business development is a learnable skill and the research backs this up and we’ve trained over 20,000 people. I’ve seen transformations happen, unlocks if you will. But the research first.

There’s a gentleman named Dr. K. Anders Ericsson out of Florida State University, who wrote a remarkable book called Peak. Before he, unfortunately, passed away two years ago, he spent 30 years studying the science of expertise and he studied everything from violin experts to business professionals, high-end litigators, chess masters, athletes, and anybody that was great at something complex. That’s who he focused on. And irrefutably, every single time a complex skill was both learned and earned.

The trap people can fall into is let’s, like we both do a lot of work in law. Say somebody’s a seventh-year associate. They’re looking at that senior partner, that’s 60-something years old. They’re practice leader, top of their craft. We can look at somebody when they have their skills that are vastly superior to ours or that they’ve just been at it longer or whatever. And many people can conclude that, well, they were just born with it. There’s no way I could do what Sue does. The way she talks about money or the way she brought in that large matter or whatever.

But what we don’t see is how Sue worked her tail off over 30 or 40 years to learn how to structure a meeting, to learn how to stay in touch when the person’s not responsive, to learn how to hack her habits while she was super busy with other things so that her pipeline wouldn’t go dry. We don’t see that effort. And we don’t see that skill development. So, we can conclude that Sue was born with it. And it’s just not true.

What Erickson found in his research is that any complex skill is a roll-up of dozens, maybe a hundred plus micro-skills. Yes, one person’s born with three. Another was seven. Somebody got lucky, they’re born with eight. Nobody has all 100. They had to work at it.

Gina Rubel: I love the way you said that and I’m just going to repeat it for our listeners. Complex skills are learned and earned. That just became my mantra. I know you quote Ericsson quite a bit in your book, The Snowball System, and that in and of itself just said it all to me. It just gave me more confidence to do even more things after 20 years in business and congratulations to you for doing this for as long as you have as well.

Often you talk about avoiding selling, but instead creating a buy. What is that and how can someone do it effectively?

I’ll talk mindset and then process.

Mindset first, you already hit the nail on the head when you said most people don’t like selling. In the very first version of our materials, about 16 years ago, when we started, I used the word sales throughout, because I thought somehow single-handedly in the entire universe, I can redefine it for everybody in a good way. I failed at that. We switched everything to business development, to your point before.

But mindset first. I think a phrase people can have in their mind is that people hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. And that’s worth repeating. People hate to be sold to, but they love to buy. So that, because we experience that ourselves, we can conclude that I shouldn’t talk about my services to somebody else till they ask for it, for example. Well, that’s entirely false. Clients want to be brought new ideas. They want to have the expert help them see around corners. They want to be nudged and pushed in a proactive and positive way. While we hate to be sold to, we love to buy.

Gina Rubel: Please unpack each of those.

Mo Bunnell: Listen and learn, create curiosity, build everything together, gain approval.

Listen and learn, first. When people listen first, say I’m meeting a prospective client. I’m out for dinner. They’ve agreed to meet with me. And I’ve got expertise that they might need. We get a triple win when we listen first. The first is Dr. Diana Tamir found the pleasure center of the brain lights up when we’re answering what the literature calls self-disclosing questions. That’s just the meaning that when they share their personal perspective, something only they know, the pleasure center of their brain lights up, like the same area of the brain that lights up when we drink Red Bull, when we’re on stimulants, when we eat great food.

Win one is they love it. They’re on a high when they’re talking about their own goals and aspirations and things like that.

Thing two, we learn their priorities and their words. Whole lot easier for us to say, yes, that’s exactly what we do versus throwing spaghetti at the wall and starting with a 20-page PowerPoint of these are all the things we do and the transactional practices, X, Y, and Z firm. We’re going to learn their priorities and their words.

The third thing, super interesting. When people are answering questions where they share their personal perspective, other studies beyond Tamir’s work have shown those are highly correlated to likability. The more they talk and the less we talk, the more they like us. So that’s listen, learn.

Let’s say that we heard something. There’s a way we can be helpful. We’ve learned their priorities and their words. The next step, our second step is create curiosity. Now, this is conceptual at this point. We’re not talking about what an engagement letter or a statement of work or something like that works like. We’re more conceptually turning the lens back on us. We might say something like to transition, “Gosh, we’ve helped clients like that tackle that exact topic before. Would it be helpful if I described how another client in your exact situation solved that issue?” We get into that conversation. Now, that’s more at the conceptual level about how we might be able to add some expertise.

The science on this shows people are dialed in, they remember more when they’re curious, people select somebody if they were curious about their services before. We’re trying to wade into being hired, without doing it. At first, we’re just trying to be helpful.

Step three, we call building everything together. Now that’s where you’ll start talking about how we would specifically do the work in this situation for this client. For incremental yeses, we want to get, we want to be able to replay back to them what the goal is. We want to get a yes on that. We want to get a yes on the timeline. We want to get a yes on the team and we want to get a yes on the investment, the fees that they need to pay us. If we get those four yeses, the last step, gain approval, should be ridiculously easy.

The idea is there’s an optimal way to create buy-in when other human beings need to say yes, and it is those four steps, and they work amazingly well, and you never have to sell at all. You’re just helping the client in a way that their experience is awesome.

Gina Rubel:  Oftentimes as the owner of a marketing agency, we do marketing and public relations. We’ll get this question from a client before we’ve had the opportunity to listen to them. What will it cost? And I find that the answer always is, “It depends.”  Then I sound like the lawyer who used to sell legal services. It depends on what they’re looking for. When you are doing training, how do you tell them to get over those types of questions that don’t allow for listening first?

Mo Bunnell: Your question is s a great one. There’s a whole chapter on how to talk about money in The Snowball System, but I’ll summarize it, given the context you gave right now.

We’ve got seven key mental heuristics that people have in their heads about money. And there are things like you get what you pay for. There’s the science that backs up that we want to choose more expensive things, for example. And then we repeat little phrases, like you get what you pay for when we don’t, and it doesn’t work out. Audience, your spouse or your partner, has reminded you, you get what you pay for when you choose the cheap option that didn’t work. You want to have those mental heuristics in mind.

Given your exact question, though, I think what’s interesting is the person asking the question has a need for an answer. And the best way that you can move forward is answer it to the best you can and then move on to what you really need. We might say something like, “Gosh, Jane, that is a great question. I’ll tell you; we’ve seen this range from X to Y to do this well.” And you want to give legitimate numbers. And sometimes there’s a 10 X difference between those. We’ve done this for $10,000. We’ve done it for $100,000. Or $100,000 or $1 million or whatever. And because many times it really, the range, really is that big.

Then you say, “If I can ask you a couple questions about what our goals are, how long this might take and things like that, then I can give you a very specific number.” And we find going through a couple questions, I’ll guide you through it, typically in a few minutes, I can get to a point where I can quote this very specifically. Right here on the phone or with the answers to your questions, I can go back to the team and get back to you tomorrow or the next day or something like that.

You tick the box that I gave you an answer, but you’re really trying to think of what’s the lowest we’ve ever done this before, like it’s a super cursory analysis or something. All the way to, here’s how you do it over multiple years. It’s a big transformation or whatever. Then you say, “I need to know X, Y, and Z. And if I know those, I’ll be able to give you specific examples.”

The last thing I’ll say with that is, Gina, is how you talk about money is more important than the dollars and cents themselves. I’m talking to the audience, not you. You already know this. You’ve been successful for two decades. But most people wilt a little bit when they talk about money. And I want you to think about how your expertise is hard-won. I want those shoulders back. I want you to just talk about money as easily, audience, as easy as you talk about the team and how great they are, or the process or your accolades or whatever. I want you to talk about money with that framework or that context in mind.

Gina Rubel: I love that advice. And I will tell you as a woman entrepreneur, it’s much harder, in my opinion and from what I’ve seen for women, to speak about money, than it is for men, as well as people who don’t identify in either of those two categories.

Mo Bunnell: That’s accurate.

Gina Rubel: I find that interesting, and it’s something I’ve had to work on over 20 years. To speak my worth and to hold my shoulders back and not feel badly that we’re not the least expensive.

Mo Bunnell: Yes.

Gina Rubel: It’s really fascinating to hear how you said that and I especially appreciate it because it has been a struggle throughout the years.

Mo Bunnell: I love that. It ties back to our conversation before that business development is a learnable skill. In my mind, I’m thinking of a high-end law firm we do a lot of work with, and we did a very specific, in fact, two, very specific what we call impact sessions on this exact topic. How do you talk about money? And we taught those seven principles. We role played. We had breakout rooms, because it was on Zoom. Things like that. And you could see people, just over two hours, their confidence boost, as they practiced how to say, how to talk about money in a safe environment with their colleagues aside, which is sometimes harder than even with your clients. Because your colleague, because you love your colleagues so much.

As they worked through practicing it in a safe environment, the report back on the back-end months later is we have moved the needle on this. We’ve gotten better. And boy, what an important skill to get good at.

Gina Rubel: I love it. And one of the reasons I love this podcast is I love to learn from people and for everyone out there, no matter if you’re 20 years in a business, 25 years in a business, there’s always something to learn. And that’s why listening to podcasts, reading a book such as yours is so important. I know that I’m learning daily, and I hope to do that for the rest of my career.

How can we learn to be likable and foster meaningful relationships?

Mo Bunnell: What a great topic. Let me say one last thing on that last topic before we move forward, because I just think it’s important for the audience and then we’ll move to the likability, is there’s some research that shows that the more complex a service offering, the more the decision-maker leans on price as a proxy for quality. It’s actually awesome if somebody says, “Oh man, you’re more expensive than I thought.” Audience, rejoice in that. That’s saying you’re good. Now, it may not feel that way when you hear it for the first time. But when somebody says, “You’re really expensive,” what is going on in their subconscious is you must be worth it. You must be good.

So back to the other things we talked about, Gina, that’s where somebody wants to have shoulders back, say, “Yes, I know, but I’ll tell you, I’m in real demand right now.”

Gina Rubel: And I like what you said. One of my red flags as a business owner is when someone comes to us with a low-price mentality. For example, they’ll say, “Well, we’re talking to a consultant, we’re talking to your agency and then we’re talking to a two- or three-person shop.” And you know automatically you’re going to be at the highest price. You also know automatically that they’re shopping price.

How do you get past shopping price or create the necessary value proposition that someone has to hear to get over price?

Mo Bunnell: Two answers. Avoid shopping price first and then the value prop.

As professionals, we can want to chase everything and what can be super helpful is the list out. Everybody, I’ll tell you how to do it right now, audience. List out in three to five criteria who makes a perfect client for you. You need to have it written down. This cannot be something that you have in your head. We have a whole module on how to do this. But if you have your three to five criteria and what makes a fantastic client, you can score requests coming in on a one to five scale. Five high, one low. If something is below a certain level, say it’s below a 3.5 or something, you just don’t chase it. If somebody’s shopping on price, that can be one of your criteria, like you do high-end work for high-end clients. Well, somebody isn’t satisfying those criteria, politely say, “No.” You just saved yourself 50 hours or whatever it would be to chase it. And now you have more time to go invest in the others.

Having a mechanical or mathematical ability to score and say, “No,” is huge. And then the second part, value proposition, tons of science here. People remember things in threes, and they believe interestingly, believe value props in threes the best.

What you can do is for each chase that you do decide to pursue, especially the big important ones, is boil down your value prop into the three benefits. You want to talk in benefits to the client, not in your own accolades. What are the three benefits the client are going is going to get for this exact work we’re going to do together at that deal level, at that matter or that project level. And then if you have three compelling arguments that position you uniquely, you’ve earned the right to be that high price person, which you want to be.

Mo Bunnell: Gina, your thoughts?

Gina Rubel: I love the way you put that. And in legal, with law firms, we’ve often talked in terms of a go-no-go evaluation. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about. You’re scoring. You’re shopping the client as much as they’re shopping you.

Mo Bunnell: Yes. Yes. I love that.

Gina Rubel: We have a go-no-go framework at Furia Rubel as well, where we’re looking at is this the right type of client? Do we have the expertise, first off. Secondly, are we a good cultural fit? There are times… We are professionals providing a service. And when you’re doing PR and marketing and crisis comms, you’re advocating for the client. You must be able to properly advocate, which means a good cultural fit.

Then we’re looking at a lot of those other things like, are they going to be difficult to work with? And there are a couple questions you can ask early on to figure that out, because if they are, your price better reflect that.

Mo Bunnell: Yes, and I’ll tell you, I mentioned we have a whole module on this. I usually don’t pull our workbooks off the shelf and read some things, but for the benefit of your audience, other things that we’ve seen our clients choose is the criteria. Are they innovative? Are they growth-oriented? Are they willing to take risk? What’s their total revenue? How much money do they spend on my industry? To ascertain is it easy for us to buy. How many employees they have could be important for certain? What’s the type of industry? Are they public versus private? We’ve got about 20 others. But by figuring out the specifics of what makes a great client for you and getting your whole team excited about figuring out what that is, that lets you steer your efforts in a real strategic way versus just chasing the RFPs that drop in your lap.

Mo Bunnell: Gina, so I love… You figured that out. That’s why you’ve been so successful.

Gina Rubel: I must get your workbook because I’m sure there are things I’m missing. Depending on your industry, there may be other things that you need to be asking. Do they value DE&I? Do they foster a true sense of belonging? Do they treat their employees with respect? That’s very important. I have let go of a client because of the disrespect that both my team and their internal team was treated with. It just was not a good cultural fit for us.

Mo Bunnell: Yes, we’ve done that too. Yep. Good for you.

Gina Rubel: While I may have run my agency for 20 years, I learn how to do it better and more effectively every day. And that’s why I’m here speaking to you, Mo, because I know there’s so much I can learn from you.

How can people learn to be likable and foster meaningful relationships?

Mo Bunnell: For context first, this is the number one thing we see in our training. Again, like you mentioned, over 20,000 folks have gone through these workbooks that I just pulled off the shelf. This is the one thing that people think is not learnable that is. Anybody can learn to be more likable. It’s not that you can become the most likable person in the world. That’s not the point. It’s that can you improve in a way that has commercial results?

We see three big levers to learn likability. And this is based on a ton of research. I’ll quote it. Dr. Jerry Berger out of Santa Clara University was the first person ever to statistically and with research prove that people chose service providers that were likable more often than they didn’t. It was a groundbreaking study. In a follow up study, he and his teams looked at well, gosh, if likability matters, what determines likability?

This is our first of our three things. What Berger found was commonality was the number one correlation to likability. Do we have things in common? They can be work related things. We both like change management. We both like business books. There can be non-work-related things. We both like gardening, cooking in an Instapot, a certain sport, anything. What the literature shows is anything works. In general, the more uncommon the commonality, the stronger the bond. So that’s thing one.

Mo Bunnell: Meaning not just I serve you, but we help each other succeed. Incredibly powerful. Asking for help or asking for just little bite size pieces of help, we can give some examples if you want, based on timing, can be powerful to blend with your helpful nature that you’re providing the service person or you’re providing as the service provider.

The third thing is frequency. It’s why we say things like out of sight out of mind. You don’t want to be that. The frequency of interaction, the science behind that’s called the mirror exposure effect. First studied in Germany in 1876, no joke. The science has seen three centuries. And what the mirror exposure effect says is the more often I see a person or thing, the higher likelihood that I will be to like them.

If we power all those, we can all do to be better. Can we find things in common and reinforce them? Can we not only help, but ask for help? And can we do that often? And if people do those three things, they will win the relationship advantage to a higher extent than they had before.

Gina Rubel: There’s another takeaway quote. Win the relationship advantage.

Mo Bunnell: Yes. Yes.

Gina Rubel: You are so skilled at talking in soundbites. I just love it.

Mo Bunnell: Well, you’re a pro in the biz, so that’s great. Thank you. Some of these phrases, we knew the broad concept 16 years ago when we started, but it took forever to find out some rhyming way or whatever to say it, in a way that’s memorable.

Gina Rubel: It does. These things are not easy when you are positioning your company. We used to talk about the ten second elevator speech, which I’ve never liked.

Mo Bunnell: I haven’t either.

Gina Rubel: It’s one of those things where you really must learn to speak about what you do in a way that’s memorable, but not cheesy. As a lawyer, I’ll say, “Oh. So, hi, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Gina Rubel.” And they’ll say, “Oh, I’m so and so. What do you do?” “I’m a lawyer.” And you want to go silent and say, “Yes, so what?” Or “Yes, so am I.” The next, it’s always the follow-up question, as opposed to, “I’m an intellectual property lawyer,” and allowing the other person to say either, “Oh, what does that mean?” Or “Oh, that’s great.” And get more into the conversation.

Mo Bunnell: You got it.

Gina Rubel: One of the things I notice that you talk about quite a bit is creating habits and habits to implant these ideas that you’ve talked about in our day-to-day lives. And I’m a big proponent of the book, The Power of Habit. It’s one of those things that… I keep saying I’m going to create better habits and sometimes I start, and I do it and then, like with gym memberships, you join in January and by February, you’re no longer going.

How can people create better habits to implement business development strategies into their corporate lives?

Mo Bunnell: I love that you asked this question. It’s one of the questions I’m most passionate about. We’re just on a phone call with Ryan, one of my team members and facilitators, and he is going to teach this exact thing at a big law firm retreat. Really excited about it.

Habits are huge. And what I can give your audience is a simple three step process on how to do it right away. I’ll give it to you now. We’ve even got a no charge course, a gratis course on this that’s much lengthier, but the short version here.

The managing of your habits comes down to three things. How do I manage my opportunities? How do I manage my relationships? And how do I manage myself? Sort of super-fast, pro ninja tips on these. Think of opportunities as anywhere someone else needs to say yes. And then you can think of those steps that we had earlier in this podcast, like we told these are the steps someone needs to experience and say, “Yes.” Listen and learn, create curiosity, build everything together, gain approval.

What you can do is just write those down. I’ll say it this way. No one can manage an important process in their head. I can’t, you can’t, the audience can’t. Just think of the robustness somebody puts into managing an important matter or project they just landed. We want you to think of that level of robustness and project management to your business development and writing down your opportunities is step one and knowing where you’re at and what you do next.

The second thing, manage your relationships. What people can do here is just spend… We do this in our workshops. It takes 90 seconds. Blank piece of paper, put a timer on your phone. 90 seconds, that’s all you’ve got. Write down the top seven to 10 relationships that are important to your future success. What everybody will do before that exercise is they’ll anchor their mind. A lot of science around anchoring. They’ll anchor their mind on who they already know. Well, that’s status quo bias creeping into your thinking. Flush that. Think a year from now, who do I want to know? And you write down that list. Seven to 10, no more, definitely not 20. And we’ve got a specific worksheet and things like that for that and seven steps to the path of raving fan, lots of cool stuff.

Well, once you’ve got your list of opportunities that you’re going to refresh, you’ve got it out of your head, you’ve got written down. You’ve got your list of key relationships for the future that you want to invest in. That’s step two. Now in step three, the managing yourself part. What you do is you put 15 minutes on your calendar once a week, same time every week. I’m a Friday at 3:00 person. I’ve done this over 300 weeks in a row. I’m still mad at the one week I messed up and had to restart my count years ago. But anyway, 15 minutes, once a week, Monday morning, Saturday morning, Sunday night. I’m a Friday at 3:00, whatever. But you spend 15 minutes refreshing your opportunity list, refreshing your relationship list. And here’s all you do. You pick three things you’re going to do the next week to advance either opportunities or relationships. Just three.

You don’t want to choose more than that because if you have more than you can do, you’ll choose the easy stuff. You want to choose three big things every week. We call those most important things. You can do more than that if you want. But you do those three first. And you pick three that satisfy three criteria. They spell B-I-G. Pick three things that have big impact. Write them, so they’re I, in your control. Not have lunch with Suzanne. Ask for lunch with Suzanne. And then G, they’re growth oriented. It’s nothing to do with delivery of things you’ve already been hired to do. It can’t be. You’re going to do well on that.

If you choose three things a week that have big impact and you write them so they’re in your controls, so you get three out of three every week. And they’re always growth oriented. It doesn’t seem like much, but that keeps you doing a little bit all the time. And over the course of a year, it’s not three a week. It’s like 150 things over a decade, 1500 things. And because these are the big impact things, you will see progress being made just after doing this for a few weeks.

Gina Rubel: This has been a fantastic conversation. Mo, I am so grateful for your time today. We can go on for hours, I know, but there are so many takeaways for our listeners to digest that I’m going to ask you to tell us about bdhabits.com and the Grow Big playbook because I want to make sure that we get that in before we both must go.

Mo Bunnell: If you want a deeper dive into everything we talked about and including, especially, that’s sort of, how do you manage your opportunities, your relationships and yourself, go to bdhabits.com. It’s a free course. And it walks through all the stuff I talked about, but about 10 X the content. Worksheets, tools, posters, everything are all in there.

That will sign you up for our weekly newsletter as well. I spend about two or three hours a week, writing an 800-word article on how to advance your business development habits. If you want that just directly, everybody, you can just go to growbigplaybook.com and that’ll sign you up there.

Gina Rubel:  These tools, your time and your podcast, your book, all are resources. For the starting entrepreneurs who may feel that, “Oh, well, I don’t have a budget for that.” Go to get these resources. This is what they’re here for.

And like Mo, I believe that we must give a lot of our expertise away. And meanwhile, we’re still developing business with the people who need us to do the work, to enhance their teams, to bring another level of expertise.

Don’t be afraid to write the article from the PR perspective that helps the person to not only understand what you do, but to do it themselves. Because that’s a fear that I hear day in and day out. “Well, I don’t want to do a podcast. I’m going to give my expertise away.” And Mo, like you, we have a podcast. I’m interviewing you on it. And one of the things I do is I shoot for the stars. I say, you know what? I just read this book by Mo Bunnell. I want to get him on my show, and we reach out and look, we’re here today. So.

These are the types of things that when you talk about thinking big, that B-I-G that you talked about, this interview in and of itself is an example of that and having that opportunity to have this kind of discussion.

Mo Bunnell: I’m really excited about having you on our show because I think strategically, we can help people learn how to align marketing with business development. Because far too often, they’re siloed. And marketing says, oh, we’re creating all this great content. Nobody’s talking to clients about it. And BDs like, ah, we need more people to talk to. And it’s like, when you combine them all together. So, I can’t wait to mash our minds together. I’ll have you on our show, Real Relationships, Real Revenue, and we’ll show people exactly how to do it. It’ll be glorious. I can’t wait.