2026 Virtual Planning Workshop Session 2

David Bush  0:00  
You could ask the question, do you know of anybody that would benefit from the services that we provide if you do provide their names below, and we would love to provide you with a referral gift if they choose to use our services. So just that, one strategy could be the thing that absolutely transforms the business that you're in right now. Welcome to the Business Builders playbook, the show that breaks down the systems and strategies behind Predictable Revenue Growth to win in business. In each episode, we're diving into the proven strategies that separate the winners who scale from the losers who fail. This show is sponsored by bdr.ai the AI powered business development platform that automates your outbound prospecting so you can focus in on closing deals instead of chasing leads. Let's get started.

Jenelle Friday  0:48  
I just want to welcome everyone to session number two of our business builder playbook workshop for those of you that are new to our sessions. My name is Janelle Friday. I am the Director of Client success here at BDR. I get to be your moderator, and today I'm going to be interviewing David Bush, co owner of bdr.ai, and marketing mastermind, and asking him some questions that business builders want to get answered so they can build a better playbook for 2026 so before we dive in, right, those of you that have joined us, if you would type in one word in the chat or comment that describes, how do you feel about your current marketing plan headed into 2026 just give me one word. Maybe one, one out of 1010. Being, I'm ready to go. I got it all put together. One being, I have no idea, right? One to 10, let us know how you're feeling. So yesterday, in session one, David and Jeff Bush, brothers, co owners, talked about and shared their valuable insights on the benefit of strategic planning in all areas, such as life time and business. I posted the link to the recordings in the business builder playbook workshop, our workbook, and all of the bonus resources will be sure to save that link. I'll get that there. And then we had a lot of great questions submitted by registrants, but we always love to have anyone who's live submit a question that you would like to get answered today. So if you are coming into today with really targeted, specific questions that have to do with marketing, please go ahead and throw those in chat, and I will be I will make sure to get those addressed as we go through our call today. So before we dive in, David, any quick little thoughts on how we're how we're going into today and how you're feeling.

David Bush  2:34  
Well, I tell you, yesterday we covered so much, and you know, it's one of those things where sometimes we try to pack so much into a two hour session, which you think about for two hours, that's a lot of time to take, but I think we could have gone for eight hours and still left things on the table. So I hope that people are not feeling like they're drinking out of a fire hose, but they actually are feeling like, you know what, I'm making me I'm making reasonable progress. I can see where my life plan, my time plan and my business plan, financial plan, is actually starting to take shape. I can begin to see that some of the foundations were laid yesterday, and now I can take it to that next level. So super excited to jump into a really exciting and very thrilling topic today, because we've got a lot to cover, we're just going to take marketing and we're going to spend two hours workshopping some really important things. So I hopefully you stay not I hope you get rid of the distractions, right? So if you've got lots of different tabs open and you're multitasking, I just would ask that you would give us your undivided attention as we really dive in and try to help you to create a better playbook for 2026

Jenelle Friday  3:49  
Yeah, love that. So we've got a couple we'd asked if you're just joining us, we'd ask, How are you feeling about your marketing strategy going into 2026 so those of you that are just joining feel free to give me a word. We've got Michael said he's evolving. Jason Croft said he's hopeful. Rick said he's focused. We love that, right? Because we're here to learn. So thank you so much for being here. We're going to

Unknown Speaker  4:11  
talk first the ladies. Thanks, Rick.

David Bush  4:16  
I see a couple ladies out. There's Martin here, super excited about talking to Martina later today, got us here. And yeah, there's a lot to do. Remember, I got it from our conversation yesterday was all I can do, is all I can do, nothing more, nothing less, just going to do all I can do. And hopefully today, you'll just do a little bit more than what you did yesterday, and you'll just keep compounding on that.

Jenelle Friday  4:42  
That's right. Okay, so let's dive in our first section. We're going to talk about are the costs and benefits of planning your marketing So David, my first question for you today is, what is the biggest challenge that entrepreneurs face when they try to grow without a marketing plan?

David Bush  4:57  
I think that it's probably a. Very similar to what we talked about yesterday. If you fail to create your own plan, chances are you're going to fall into somebody else's plan. And there's a lot of people out there that have a plan to get you to buy in to their plan. You know the shiny object syndrome. I mean, put a one in the chat if you have been distracted by a shiny object, that becomes like, oh my gosh, that's going to be the thing that's going to solve all my problems. And then you get it, and then you realize that it's an opportunity disguised as work. And you thought it was the magic pill, or you thought it was going to be the thing that was going to fix all your problems, and it actually created more problems, but you weren't aware of what was beneath the iceberg, which was oftentimes work and effort and time and trying trial and error and figuring it out. So I think that I could confidently say that if you fail to create a good marketing plan, and you fail to create a playbook that works, because the playbook works, not because you're working all the time, you're likely going to fall into the plans of other people you're going to be subject to, people that are selling and selling and giving you something that's sparkly, that you can end up investing in, thinking that you can set it and forget it. And I like to tell people that anybody that uses the word set it and forget it, I would set it and then I would forget it. I would just move on from it, because there are not a whole lot of things out there in the world that can be set and then forgotten in most of the time. The people that buy off of that phrase are people that are buying into the idea of get rich quick. And, you know, they think that somebody else has got it all figured out. I mean, I'm in the automated industry, right? We do marketing automation. I never tell somebody to set it and forget it. I'll tell them that it can save them a tremendous amount of time. If they follow instructions and they plug into our support, you can get a lot of impact for a very small investment of time and energy and money, but if you set it and forget it, you're going to have a diminishing return over time.

Jenelle Friday  7:03  
I love that too, because I also think we kind of live in this age of like Russell Brunson is a great example of I've seen Russell and his whole idea about marketing. And, you know, you you build this, you do it real quick, and here's the results. So I think there's a lot of get rich quick ideas that look enticing, and it's kind of like that shiny object. But what do you what do you think are the most common mistakes that you see business owners make when they rely on random acts of marketing?

David Bush  7:29  
I think the biggest thing is the inconsistency factor. You know, if, if you do something a certain amount of times with enough people, you are always going to get a ratio, you're going to get a law of averages, right? So if you do send out a specific marketing message to 100 people, you're likely going to get a different response if you send it to 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 so there's something to be said about the law of averages, having enough people seeing the marketing. And there's something to be said about consistency. I once talked to Ivan Meisner, who is the founder of Business Networking International. And, you know, he made the comments and he writes this in a lot of his content. So it's not like new information that was just given to David Bush, but he he says, so many people plant their tree, they get it all packed in, and they start watering it. And within 3060, 90 days, they uproot the tree before it has any chance to develop any roots. And they go move it to another location, and then they plant it, and then they pack it in with soil. They do all the things that are necessary to grow roots, but they never let the roots grow. And you know, if you think about what you know, some of the strongest, largest trees, it's not the size of the tree. That is the thing. That is the strength. It's the root system. What are they plugged into? Are they being nourished? Are they getting good information to be able to allow them to continue to thrive, or are they just constantly jumping from thing to thing because they're kind of the going off of the shiny object syndrome. That's their that's their marketing strategy is, you know, whatever's hot, that's what I'm going to jump on, and it's most likely not. And then they just constantly throw more and more money away. And then what happens is, is that it starts to impact their belief system. So remember, we talked about the beliefs. If you look at the word beliefs, lie is in the very middle, and most people will tell you something doesn't work. I mean, my brother Jeff built a $40 million revenue, top line revenue, $40 million a year selling direct mail, and many of the people that his people talked to said direct mail doesn't work, but he sold $40 million in one year to organizations that were investing in one half of 1% or even lower than that, because it did work when you did it the right way and you had. The right list, and you had the right message and the right offer and and so if you start telling yourself that things don't work, there's a difference between facts and fiction, right? The fact is that something that you've done, maybe you tried to do LinkedIn outreach, and it didn't work, and then you came up to the conclusion, and you talked to a bunch of other people that did the same thing, and it didn't work. And so collectively, you got together and you agreed that LinkedIn doesn't work. However, there's people out there that are making millions of dollars a year using LinkedIn as a digital outreach communication system to develop new prospects, new clients, and generating tons of revenue. So what's true? Well, your fact is it didn't work for you when you did it, and that could be because of the way that you did it, who you did it with, how you did it, how often you did it, how long you did it, whereas in somebody else, just continue to refine it. And I think that marketing, when I used to sell radio advertising, was my first job out of college, and it was a hard sell. I mean, it was a hard sell. You're selling air you're selling ads on the airwaves. It wasn't even a tangible product. But I remember one of the sales trainers that I worked with said, half of your marketing dollar gets thrown in the garbage can you just the important part is just knowing which half, which half, because if you don't know which half, you don't know what to double down on. But the reality of it is, is that you are going to throw some money away in marketing, but if you have the ratio right where you can limit it to 50% if the other 50% gets you the results that you're looking for, you can continue to throw away half of the money because you're getting the results that you're justifying the expense and the return on investment is worthy. So I hope that that's helpful for people. That's one of the big things that I had to experience. Yeah.

Jenelle Friday  11:56  
I mean, I love that we're talking about marketing, because so many of the conversations that we have with clients, you know, you get the feedback of, well, I'm not a market I'm not a marketer. I'm not a salesperson. I don't know what to say, right? And I just if you're, if you're feeling that right now, as we continue this conversation, I just want to say, first of all, I am David does not come from marketing. I do not come from marketing. But when I think about marketing now, in the business that we're in, I think about marketing as you're you're trying to engage someone in a conversation. If you, if you come from marketing, from a place of, I have to sell, I have to sell. And there's that feeling of desperation, right to me, there's a disconnect there of the true purpose of marketing, which is to connect with another human being on a very authentic, genuine connection level, and spark a conversation. That's what marketing is. It's getting the Yes and I think, David, you said something either yesterday, the day before, about collecting yeses. And I think it's also we talk about mindset, right? How do we reframe our mindset so that we're not feeling desperate or telling ourselves, I don't know how to market, because I don't come from marketing, right?

David Bush  12:58  
Yeah, you don't want to tell yourself something that's not true, and if you start telling yourself I'm not good at marketing, I'm not good at sales, well, that's one way of looking at it, but what's another way of looking at it? You know, it could also be that you're learning to get better with marketing. You're learning to get better with consultative sales. So when you start telling yourself something that's true in the positive, it could also be perceived on the negative, but sometimes words can affect us in a positive way. And I want you just to look in the chat. I'm going to type this out, and if you want to write it down, if you're watching or listening to this, I'll just say it out loud as well. But I want you to write down these letters. Okay, so just if you have something to write on, go ahead and just grab a pen and paper, or just take out your computer or your phone and write down these letters all right, and I'm going to put it into the chat. The letters are, O, P, P, O, R t, u n, i, t, y, I S N, O, W, H, E, R E, I'll give it to you again. O, P, P, O, R t, u n, i, t y, I S N, O, W, H E, R E, and if you have the ability to write down in the chat what it stands for. I'm going to put it into the chat to make it really easy on you.

Unknown Speaker  14:25  
Oh, Theo, got it right. Theo,

David Bush  14:31  
Theo, it says opportunity is nowhere, and Theo said opportunity is now here. Now. Why did Theo say opportunity is now here versus opportunity is nowhere? Because it is spelled the exact same way. I just put all the letters in the same sequence, and I closed all the gaps. So while Theo his perspective determined his interpretation, and again, yeah, Amanda says because he's optimistic, or he could have just seen the letters in a certain way, and it jumped out at him. Where he saw the now here where some people, and I'm sure that there's people, if you want to raise your hand in by typing a one in the chat, you can say, I saw it. Opportunity is nowhere again, but it's all a matter of perspective. So your perspective determines your path. You can end up developing a completely different path in 2026 if you just say to yourself, I'm learning to get better, or I'm learning to improve my skills at marketing. As an entrepreneur, business owner, I wear a lot of hats when I'm first starting out. If you've built a business to the point where you can hire out marketing, or you can bring in an outside source, an agency or a partnership like bdr.ai, then obviously there's opportunities to leverage the experience of others to compress time and to decrease risk. If you can hire an agency, or you can internally build an agency inside of your you know, when Jeff was starting out in his barn, he wasn't actually paying people to be his marketing department, but once he got to the point where he was doing 20, $40 million a year in revenue. He hired copywriters. He hired other people to do the work so that he didn't have to do those roles. And that could be something in your future if you choose, whether you choose to run a lifestyle business and outsource through third parties, there's great resources. You know, Jason Croft is on this webinar. I believe he created our podcast, Business Builders playbook.com, I didn't do it, but I partnered with somebody that was really good at what he does, and I said I would like to have a opportunity to share content and to give resources and share interviews. And he said, That's what I do. I can make it look totally dope, and I can make it look like it rocks. And I said, fantastic. So you know, if Jason put your website in the chat, I'd love for people to learn more about what you do, and he takes people's content and beautifies it into a great looking podcast. And you don't have to learn how to become a technology person. He'll show you how to market it, how to promote it, how to leverage it, and that's one of the things that is just one area of marketing strategy that we'll talk a little bit about today. So if this show is resonating with you and you're ready to take action because you want to scale your business faster, smarter with more AI and technology and less labor, check out. Bdr.ai, we help entrepreneurs and executive sales leaders to automate the grind of prospecting so you can focus your time on closing deals and growing revenue where you should be spending your time with. Ai powered data, digital outreach, automation and done for you, prospecting systems. You'll connect with more qualified leads, book more appointments and build Predictable Revenue without adding more hours to your week or the week of your staff. Visit BDR today and discover how our AI prospect finder and digital BDR agents can help you to build your pipeline and your profits. Visit bdr.ai where business builders learn how to automate and scale their playbook.

Jenelle Friday  18:06  
I love that, and so my problem for everybody in the call is, as we've talked about marketing, we've talked about a shift in mindset. If you would give me one word, the question I have for you is this, what frustrates you most about marketing? I don't care what the one word is, throw out a quick one word answer. It's helpful to know kind of where people are coming from. So now let's shift into branding and your online presence. Because we live in an online world, most of us, a big majority of us, are working from home. We are online on Facebook. We have a Facebook presence, we have an Instagram presence, we have a LinkedIn presence, right? And and you can't just wave it away, and so it's no big deal. LinkedIn profiles are replacing resumes these days, right? We know that that's kind of the future of where we're headed. So let's just start with David, what's your biggest advice on branding and refining your online presence? Yeah, well,

David Bush  18:59  
there's a couple of different resources, and I'm going to share this in the or I already shared it, Janelle will put it back in the chat again, but on the let me just open up my

Unknown Speaker  19:11  
screen here.

David Bush  19:13  
So if you go to the link that Janelle put into the chat, you can go to the page that has all of the resources that we have available. So right here is what we call the AI digital outreach playbook creator. One of the simplest things that you can do if you are leveraging LinkedIn as a way of building relationships is to make sure that your LinkedIn profile says what you do for who and why people should connect with you. That's one of the simplest tests that you can do. And so if you would like to know how to, kind of like, spiff up your profile, we actually created this AI chat bot where you can go in here and you can pull up the chat. Chatbot, and it actually allows you to type in things. And the perfect thing that I would be looking at is, how are you leveraging AI? Because there's very simple ways that you can use AI. We built this chatbot based on some prompts that we found success with. So just a simple way of putting in contact information is that if you go to the playbook builder and you click in, click here to start building your B to B outreach playbook. Hopefully everything will work according to

Speaker 1  20:26  
plan, and I'm going to put that too in that chat right now. No, there you

David Bush  20:31  
go, and it's right below. It's right in the the main link, just a few portions down. So if I just put in my name and I put in

Unknown Speaker  20:40  
David bush, and

David Bush  20:42  
then it'll come up, and it'll ask me a little bit about or a little bit about me, starting with my website. If you don't have a website, you can maybe provide them more information, but I'm just going to put in bdr.ai, and then it allows you to identify what industry you're in. So I'm going to just put in there marketing

Unknown Speaker  21:03  
B to B, lead generation, digital outreach, automation, AI.

David Bush  21:16  
So again, you can put in specific industries, marketing, advertising, or whatever agency your model you're in. And then you can just take this section right here, and you could type in more information. Some of this stuff may not be as applicable to you, like you may not care about the number of employees, but a simple input, like CEO, Owner,

Unknown Speaker  21:40  
founder in the we'll call it the coaching consulting industries.

David Bush  21:49  
I'll just put in their business coaching and consulting. That's just one of the areas that we work on. And I'll just put in there in the US, because primarily we work in the US, but we have some clients all around the world who have approximately

Unknown Speaker  22:06  
two to

David Bush  22:07  
10 employees. Could be a strategy, or you can go in there and put in the amount of revenue so that have over

Unknown Speaker  22:16  
500,000 in annual revenue.

David Bush  22:22  
You could put in more details if you wanted to, but just for the sake of the testimonial or for the demonstration, I won't put in more information. So what the system will do is it'll actually create a playbook for you. So it'll take whatever you gave it, and it'll actually come up with an analysis of who you should be focusing in on what you should be using, as far as filters. And again, this can be something that you can continue to play with. And it'll actually tell you how you could rewrite your profile on LinkedIn. And I'm going to show you right here, this is what it came up with. So on LinkedIn, you have the ability to create a header. So I'm going to go in there and choose my profile right here. So when you come to my profile, you can see that bdr.ai, is a puzzle piece to business growth. So there's some clarification just in the header graphic, my profile graphic is a profile image, and I took out the background, and I made it blue in the background, because when people see my connection request, I look different than all of the other people that they're getting connection request from. You can also see that this is a customizable field, and I chose to use an emoji in both sides, and I also custom, customized my pronoun. Now, if you have personal desires to list your pronouns, you can do that. But there's also 25 characters that you can customize, and you can put in something that resonates with you and how you want to identify yourself. You also can see that I've got a link in here. This is an option, and it says something that is drawing people to our website. And I'm not this isn't a LinkedIn training, but what I'm trying to show you is your profile is your business card, right? When people go looking for you online, they're probably going to Google search you, and Google search is probably going to bring in your LinkedIn profile if you're offering some services, or you're a vendor of some some kind. So people are going to probably look at your profile on LinkedIn. They may check out your company profile, and that's fine too, but your company profile is not personal. It's organizational. But your personal profile should speak to what you do for who, business development, automation expert, Business Growth expert. So if people were to scroll down and read about my profile, they would see these emojis, and they'll see these capital letters with lots of white space. So I've tried to make it easier to read, and I've tried to allow people. To peruse it and to kind of catch their eyes. So my football story has a football to it. So again, using an emoji to catch people's attention, because if you don't use emojis and you just have a bunch of text, most people are just skimming and scanning. They're not reading. So maybe there's something that catches their attention, or maybe there's a hashtag or something that shows up here. So again, I'm not saying that My way is the way that you should do it, but if you want a simple way to kind of rebrand your online presence on LinkedIn, this would be a great way to do it. These featured posts, you have the ability to add featured posts, and there's some specific things that we focus on to bring featured posts, the right kinds of featured posts, to your online presence. And then there's content. There's content here. If you scroll through my content, you'll see that there's a variety of different content. Here's one with me and Jason, and you can go in there, and you can kind of catch a glimpse as to who I am and what I do, because I'm posting content, you don't have to post the same content that I do or the same consistency. But if I go to your profile and it's a ghost town, as far as content goes, I don't get a chance to do any research. And remember when you're when you're trying to build relationships with people. Those people are going to be looking for trust, credibility and authority. They're going to want to know that they're working with you and and why they should be working with you. So those are the three things that I'm trying to transfer. There's obviously a whole bunch that we could talk about on branding. This is not the session for that, but hopefully this gave you a little shortcut that you could use in that digital outreach. It also gives you a whole bunch of other things that we'll talk about later, but it's a great jumpstart to get you rolling and get you started.

Jenelle Friday  26:54  
We do have a blog post about that and about optimizing your LinkedIn profile. I went and threw that in the chat. Agata has a question of David, why did you just choose a blue background for your profile picture?

Speaker 1  27:04  
Just curious, can you see my eyes? We're playing off the color blue. Color blue.

David Bush  27:13  
Yeah, favorite color is blue. My company logo is blue. I have blue eyes, and it's one of the things that's unique about me. If you were able to see me up close, my generics gave me these blue eyes that kind of stand out. And you know, my shirt is blue, I just enjoyed. I forced Janelle to wear a blue shirt.

Unknown Speaker  27:34  
Now, yeah, you could do anything. And I will say

Jenelle Friday  27:39  
this too. Another really strong tip is, you know, I'm not someone that takes a ton of selfies. I just, I'm not that kind of girl. And so when I was working on optimizing my LinkedIn page, you actually can find organizations that do AI headshots. So you submit a bunch of pictures of yourself, or I just took, I took a lot of like, selfies at different angles, without glasses, with glasses, makeup, no makeup, and submitted them, and actually turned out pretty decent. That actually looks like me. So if you're feeling a little bit insecure about how you are coming across from a visual perspective, I think I paid $40 and I had 200 head shots to choose from it. I bet like 20 of them were actually pretty decent. So it's one of those options where, if you're really looking to up your gain and increase the feel of professionalism from your LinkedIn profile, that's another option as well.

David Bush  28:26  
I'm going to just show you one more thing is that let me, I'm going to come back to Agata here, and when, when you go to your My Network page, you get this invitations if you click on this button right here that says, show all. So when you scroll through, you can see that there's some people that are inviting me to subscribe to their newsletter. There's some people that are subscribing or asking me to connect on a basis of just wanting to build a connection with me. But when you look at these profile photos, which of these profile photos stand out to you? Just, you know, Dima has white background, but when you look through this one here, Michael, he stands out because there's no clutter in the background. Martina has a darker color in the background, so her picture stands out this individual Ray. I'm sure he's a great guy, but I can't even see his face in this profile. So again, does that mean that I'm not going to connect with him? I've got good connections. Bob Berg's a good friend. I like him, and so because he's connected to Bob, I might check out his profile and I might accept his connection request. But a big part of connecting with people on LinkedIn is transferring trust, credibility and authority. And if I was to go in there and I was to audit your online presence,

Unknown Speaker  29:56  
would I say that you

David Bush  29:59  
are credible? What I have anything to go off of that would say that you are trustworthy. Let me just show you one more little tip, and then we'll move on, because this is a whole training in itself. But if you go to your network right here, I'm sorry, go to your profile, click on your little picture, and click on View Profile, and then scroll all the way down to the bottom, where it says recommendations. So I have 46 people that have given me a recommendation that talks about what I do and how I've done it and how they have reaped the benefits of me doing it. Now you could look at that and go, Wow, there's a lot of people that maybe some people that I know that have done or that have done business with David. So that could be one part of it. The other part of it could be the fact of I wonder how David got these Well, I asked people for a recommendation, and I gave other people recommendations. So if you give recommendations, you can also request recommendations, and what happens is, is that now your profile becomes a little bit more trustworthy. You have more credibility, and you have more authority to talk to people about what it is that you do for who, because other people have said that you're good at it. The other thing I like about it is that you can send this link inside of a LinkedIn connection request, and people can go directly to all 46 connection or all 46 recommendations. There's Janelle. She did a nice one for me. That's cool. You can also go in there, and you can copy and paste all of this stuff into a Word document, and then you can format the Word document and you can send it to people with your proposal and say, here's just a few of the recommendations that other people have written for me. I thought it would be beneficial for you to know what others have said about the work I do. Again, trust, credibility and authority transfers a higher conversion rate when you're doing any kind of marketing.

Jenelle Friday  32:02  
So all of those, David, you gave me the advice too, when we first started talking about this was start by giving so start by giving recommendations and promoting your the people in your network, because then most people will reciprocate, right? So a way to kind of build your credibility is to first pay the compliment forward. I think, yeah,

David Bush  32:22  
just, I mean, that might be the jotter downer for today. This is a workshop. So it is the season for gifts, right? It's the giving season. Regardless of what your traditional holiday is. You could use this as a holiday season of giving. So, you know, there's 21 days left in the month of December, as of today. So could you give away 21 gifts? Could you give away 42 gifts? Because if you were doing double, two recommendations per day, and if you use AI, you can use AI, you could go out there and just copy it and say, help me write a LinkedIn recommendation for David bush@bdr.ai if you have the person's web address, and AI would give you a great strategy, because on their website, they say good things about them. So you could go out there and you could take their industry, you could take all the things that are on the website, and then you can customize it to be fit to you. And most likely, they're going to do the same thing to you. And if you give people an idea of what they can say and what other people have said. So I can I can send a link to my recommendations page and say, Hey, Janelle, would you give me a recommendation? I just sent you one. I'd love to reciprocate. Here's a link to what others have said about what I do, just for ideas. And so now I make it really easy for them to say yes, and you'll hear this as a common theme from me today, is make it easier for people to say yes. Make it lower risk, make it more irresistible for them to do what it is you're asking them to do. And watch how 2026 starts to evolve into becoming the best year ever in terms of lead generation

Jenelle Friday  34:00  
collecting yeses, I love it. Okay, so we're gonna ship now into a section I think a lot of people are excited to talk about, which is defining your ideal customer profile. We call it an ICP. So before we do that, I'm gonna ask everybody to take a moment and tell me in the chat, what do you do and who do you do it for? If you don't know. It's okay to say, I don't know, but we really want to understand, what do you do? Who's your target audience? What is your ideal customer profile? As it says, Today, we're going to help you get into that. So as you are answering that question, my first question for you, David, on this topic, is, why is defining an ideal customer profile the cornerstone of all affected marketing. And what element should every business owner include when describing their ideal client?

David Bush  34:48  
Yeah, well, there's a whole section inside of the Business Business Builders playbook workbook, and I'll show it to you really quickly here. So for those of you that weren't here yesterday, the link is inside. Of the chat Janelle, put it in there, and you can download the workbook. But simple thing is, go in here, make a copy, save it to your Google Drive, or download it as a Microsoft Excel or as a PDF, and then you can print it out and fill it out. But if you download this, there's this little bar over here. Once you've made a copy of it, you can make edits to it. So if you go over and scroll down to the marketing section, which is the ideal client profile, there's 15 questions in here that if you answer these 15 questions, you're going to be more specific, it's going to be painful, because some of the questions are going to be hard to answer, because in your mind, you serve everyone. In your mind, you can help everyone, or you can help a lot of people. I was just on a phone call or Zoom call the other day with a client that talked about, you know, well, we can help men and we can help women. We can also help couples. If you focus on everyone, you'll help no one. So who is it that specifically would have the greatest benefit from the services that you provide? How can we get them identified? Because there's a lot of other fringe people that you can help. But if you focus your messaging, you focus your list on a specific target audience that you know needs what you have. They can use what you have. They can afford what you have, and they want what you have. Now you may not know all the answers to all four of those questions, but when you find those people that have all four of those qualifications, you have a qualified prospect or a qualified sales lead. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to use these questions to get more specific about who we're targeting. And if you get to the point where you're filling out a lot of information, that is kind of opening up the filter to a lot more people, I'd say that you're spreading yourself too thin. You know. Think about it in terms of water, right? Is that you want to dominate the puddle before you try to swim in the ocean. There's a lot of people that are swimming in the ocean, and they're drowning in the ocean because there's just so much, there's so many people, and they're basically spraying and praying, they're selling and telling and they're just not getting any traction. But if you can get really specific about dominating a particular puddle, I work with online coaches that do 500 to $2 million in revenue, and

Jenelle Friday  37:33  
two good ones in that chat. David, if you want to read, we have two good submissions here, which I think are great.

David Bush  37:39  
No, I help small businesses turn around their business when they are stuck in the daily vortex. ICP managed service providers 1.5 to 5 million. So I'm sure that if John took it even further, he could get more specific about geography, or maybe he wouldn't be limited by a certain geography. But I'm sure that there would be something he could say about geography. He could probably share some things that are common values and common themes that he's had. If he was to go back and John, I imagine if you went back and looked at all of your past clients, there would probably be some themes about the ones that you enjoyed working with the most, in terms of the number of employees, or what were some of the problems that they had, what were some of the things that motivated them? What were some of the common requests of them? And I'm talking about the ones that were your ideal clients, not all clients, but if you go in there and again, use chat, GPT, or Claude, or perplexity, and all the different tools, grok. I know Janelle is more of a grok person, but you know, you could go in there and just copy these as a prompt, and you could go into a

Speaker 1  38:50  
chat, and you could just pop it in here and say, help me answer these questions to clarify my ICP or edr.ai,

David Bush  39:11  
and again, you could use augmented intelligence to help you to be able to identify what are some of the things that AI is Finding about your audience. Again, it may just be erroneous information, because maybe there's not a lot of content about your website, or there's not a lot of content in your website, but you could start playing with AI to gain more clarity. And again, these questions were all answered by AI. I could go in there and just look at I could validate it. And I could say, provide me with more statistical data, or give me some references and some sources to justify your answers. I could be asking AI to give me more answers to help me to be more concise about the messaging and. The list and the offer that I'm trying to to offer to the marketplace, and then I test it, and I stay consistent for a season. I don't say consistent forever, but I do it for a season, and I say I'm going to follow through with this particular campaign for 369, 12 months. I mean, that's one of the reasons why we ask clients for a 12 month commitment. Because if you're going to go out there and try to do digital outreach on LinkedIn, and you're going to commit to see how it goes well, let me just test it and see how it goes well, it ain't going to go good because you don't have any commitment, and you're not willing to work the process. You're just looking at spraying and praying, and if it produces a harvest for you, then you'll end up continuing to do it. And sorry but it doesn't work that way. There's a lot of things that don't work that way. And even if it did work, it doesn't mean that it will work continuously. So you may go out there and do something for 30 days, and because you were, you know, just jumping on LinkedIn, you may burn through your first degree connections, and you go, man. It really worked well with my first degree connections, and then it stops working, because it was just luck. You got lucky with something that you did in a 30 day period of time, so you got to give it time to really be profitable with it. Amanda, well,

Jenelle Friday  41:14  
and I think when we, when we talk about ideal customer profile too, right? If you're struggling to, because I got two responses from everybody on the call, and that's okay. And thank you to Amanda and John for coming. To Amanda and John for contributing. But if you struggle to answer, what do you do and who do you serve, and you haven't identified your ICP, that's where you start, because if you don't know what you do, if you can't define what you do, and you can't find who you sell it to, that's at a very basic level. And that's why we're diving into this, because we want to help you get there, we want to give you tools and ideas and inspiration and and really incredible insights and how we're using AI as an assistant, not a replacement. It's there to enhance and make us better and to challenge us in the way that we only know what we know. If you don't know how to define that, we're here to help you. So let's keep the conversation going, and I just want to hear from any of you put ICP in the chat. If what David shared got you excited about either refining your ICP or defining it for the first time, I'd love to know if this was valuable. We're going to move into conducting a SWOT analysis. So first of all, David, could you help us understand I'm going to ask you why it's such a powerful tool, but let's define it for our audience first.

David Bush  42:25  
Yeah, for those of you that know the answer, put it in the chat. What does SWOT stand for? Because I'm curious to know if everybody has done a SWOT analysis, or if you've least have heard of it. You know, there's some people that are fans of SWOT. Some people are not fans, but I think that it's a good exercise to go through and you're coming up with your marketing plan. So strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. So when you think about your strengths, good job. Theo, yeah, so. Michael, great job there. So when you think about your strengths. Michael, what are the things that if other people were to report back on you as an individual or your business as an organization, what would they say your strengths are? I'd love to see it

Jenelle Friday  43:16  
question too. Well. We're thinking about that, right? Why is this analysis such a powerful tool when you're planning marketing strategies, right? Why is this the tool, and how does it actually help craft a unique value proposition? What? What's the background here?

David Bush  43:31  
Yeah, so ultimately, what you're trying to do is you're trying to find out what's different about you and where your opportunities lie, and then maybe where there may be some risks that you might need to identify, because sometimes you're swimming in a what do they call that a red ocean versus a blue ocean? If you've ever read the book Blue Ocean Strategy, red oceans are where you have a lot of competition, and it's kind of like the ocean where there's a lot of sharks feeding off of whatever the fish that are in that particular location. So being able to think about swimming in blue oceans is where you'd get away from the competition, and you create a separation. There's something that's unique about you. So John threw in there, when I asked him the question about his strengths, he said practical, executable solutions. People focused solutions. So the question Michael that I was asked when I gave an answer to somebody that asked me the same question, the person that asked me the question, his name was Jay Abraham, and he wasn't there in person. He's a marketing guru. He was, I was just reading the book, and the book said, and he uses the word unique selling proposition. I like unique value proposition, and I've seen that used as well. But his question was, can anybody else that's your competition say the same thing? Because you. If they could say the same thing, then it could be true that it's one of your strengths. But some people use the word customer service is a strength of ours. But do you think that the people that are competing with you say, Well, you know, one of my weaknesses is customer service?

Unknown Speaker  45:16  
Oh, a lot of people get sold, right?

David Bush  45:18  
So, so what Michael would want to do is to think about, and again, well, he's a client of ours who I'd love to go into a little bit more depth on this, but I'd be thinking about, if you were to go and you were to kind of stand on something, that you could say that others in your marketplace could not say the same thing, because it's personable to you. It's a strength of yours that is not duplicatable. So it could be the fact that you know you served in the military that could be a strength of yours, because people oftentimes trust people that are veterans. So there could be a strength of that. So think about the areas of experience. So an experience factor, if you've been doing something for 20 years, you probably have a certain level of expertise and experience that most other people couldn't say. And if you have a certain number of clients that you've served inside of those 20 years, and you could do some mathematical equations, you could probably come up with the number of clients that you've served or the number of transactions that you've completed, and that can be something that's unique to you, and it could be a strength. So when you're thinking about opportunities, there might be a specific niche of individuals. So if you are talking about being a veteran or being active military, you could say that's one of the opportunities that I have, is that I can go out there and focus on business owners that are owned by military veterans, and I could share my strength and my experience in being active military or being a veteran, and the journey that I learned the disciplined I learned how to serve customers and how to how to be respectful and how to be on time, or anything that would be back to this is unique to me. And not everybody in my marketplace could say the exact same thing, because it's my story that's unique. So again, this is going to take more time, and if you spend some time inside of the Business Builders playbook, you could go in there and you could shift to the next page, which is SWOT in unique value proposition. So you could begin to think about Strengths, Weaknesses, threats, opportunities. And then you could go in there and make up your statement. Now, again, using AI, you could use this exact same thing by putting in

Unknown Speaker  47:46  
your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and you could say, do a SWOT analysis on bdr.ai

David Bush  48:16  
and it would go in there and do research about bdr.ai that I would not be able to take the time to do so again, if you're putting in the prompt so deep expertise and sales management, 30 years of experience. So it's going to go through the whole process of collecting data, and it's going to provide me with information that would give me an opportunity to select Do I want to present that as a strength? Is that really true, that it is a weakness? Is it true that it's a threat, or is there something that I miss, and I want to continue to move that process forward manually, not allow AI to tell me everything, but again, augmented intelligence is going to just accelerate your path to developing your unique value proposition so you don't have to do it all manually. I put in a place where some people want to type some things in themselves, but I would encourage you to use AI to accelerate that process. Now I

Jenelle Friday  49:12  
want to call it Michael made a comment that says, my competition can absolutely and parentheses and does say the same thing. And so if you're kind of stuck in a market where you've got multiple people who all offer kind of the same thing, that's when I'm going to come in here as an emotional intelligence executive business coach and say, This is how you learn to understand your tone, right? What lights you on fire in the morning? What gets you out of bed? For me, it's meeting new people. It's having conversations like this with David. So how do I phrase that and format that in a way that's going to speak to somebody and differentiate me from my competitors? It's all about finding your tone, finding your unique voice, and putting myself out there so that people can look at me and another competitor. And the difference is there look. For is my personality. It's I'm animated, I'm passionate, I'm outgoing, I'm right. All these, all these pieces about me that I try to surface as often as I can, because at the end of the day, I truly believe that people don't buy the product first. They buy you. So if you are someone who is comfortable with putting yourself through on a video or putting out a quick LinkedIn video where you're talking about what you're passionate about and why people should want to work with you. Again, you're setting yourself apart from your competition by being more vulnerable and putting yourself out there. And I think that's what draws people in, especially right now. So just Just a comment for you, Michael, specifically. So we're going to keep the conversation moving, and now we're going to talk about marketing budgeting. Because I think we did talk a little bit about financials yesterday with Jeff. It was a really good conversation, but I think really, I want to get more into this with you, David, so we're going to shift a little bit. My first question for the audience is this, do you currently have a marketing budget? I'd like a yes, a no, or sort of, you can have a sort of budget, right? But so the first question for you, David is, how should business owners approach setting a marketing budget if they've never done it before?

David Bush  51:13  
Yeah, well, I think the good thing is just to start, right? And so if you don't have a marketing budget, start because your marketing budget is kind of like the seed for the farmer, right? If you if you sell off all of your seed and you got no seeds to plant, then you don't really have any harvest to reap when the time is right. So you want to make sure that you have some budget established for seed money or lead generation or business development, or referrals or networking or Chamber of Commerce. I mean, there's got to be something established that says this is what I'm going to reinvest back into the business in the area of business development, right? Because if you never work on your business, you're always in your business, you're basically going to get to the point where you're going to run out of opportunities, unless you've just built a solid referral machine. But even then, is that people have choices. And you know, some people will find things that are competitive to yours, and those people may be cheaper, they may be faster, they may be using AI, right? Like, what is his name? Jensen Huang from Nvidia, says you're not going to go out of business because of AI. You're likely going to go out of business because you won't choose to adopt and adapt to using AI while somebody else is and so if you are having a great strategy with referrals, and you say, I don't have to spend a dime in marketing, well, I would say that that would probably be a threat, because somebody is going to spend money, and somebody, some people, will spend a lot of money to buy your customers, and so you better be doing something to make those referral partners continuously raving fans, because a lot of that stuff comes down to, you know, what have you done for me lately? And it was Janet Jackson, something that was known. You have something that needs to be continued, to be fed. And if you kind of go back to the analogy about having a flock, your your clientele is kind of like your flock, and you're the shepherd of that flock, and you protect those sheep, you feed those sheep, and then you also get the opportunity to shear those sheep, and you can use the wool for your benefit, whether that's finances or protection or clothing. And then there's obviously, you know, things that you need to help the sheep when they're hurt. And so you are the shepherd of your sheep, and so if you have resources to continue to feed the sheep, you can kind of be you can basically benefit. I'm trying to figure out the right way to say this, you can benefit from the reproduction of sheep. Because if you have Happy Sheep and you're feeding them and you're caring for them, they oftentimes will reproduce new sheep, right? We're getting a

Jenelle Friday  54:00  
lot of really good yeses and sort ofs in the chat, but, but I also know we're working with small business owners and entrepreneurs with very limited resources. So let's translate that into what's a practical way to budget marketing spend if you have very little to work with. Yeah.

David Bush  54:17  
So the first thing that I would do is, is that I would know where it goes, and I would tell my marketing budget where it's going to go. And there is a tab inside the business biller playbook workbook that you can go in there, and you can start identifying where you're spending your money. So these are the different targets. This is underneath the Marketing Plan tab. So you've got the different targets. You don't have to have eight different targets, but if you have you know a specific target, one is your current client base. Target two is your referral partners. Target three is referral marketing, or doing something in regards to generating more opportunities from referral partners. And you could put in different. Targets, and then you could identify, what am I spending to do these things? So, and most people have an email system. So if you're investing into an email system or a CRM, there would be a cost associated with that, and that would be typically related back to marketing, maybe some operations. If you're doing things like if you have Sales Navigator, that would be an additional marketing cost. If you are using bdr.ai, services, then that would be a cost. And so if you put in the cost in these individual boxes, it'll total up, and it'll tell you what your marketing budget is. And you can get a little bit more aware of, you know, what am I spending and how am I going to spend it? And then the big part Janelle is understanding, did it work? Because if I continue to invest something, and this is oftentimes where we find a lot of our clients, is they, they're investing a lot of money in things, but they're not really sure if it's working or not, because they're not tracking where their leads are coming from. So that's a big challenge for all of you. For 2026 is, or even just looking at 2025 as you're coming to the end of the year, if you were to go back and look at all of the new client business that you acquired, or business that was upgraded and expanded upon. Where did that business come from? Do you clearly have it documented, where the business was referred from? Where did it come in from? Most CRM systems will allow you to collect that information fairly easily. Some of it's automatically used because you're using a website. So we have systems in place where we can track where our marketing dollars are being best spent. And sometimes it's humbling, because I feel like I have a really good marketing strategy, and I'm investing a ton of money in it, and it ain't working yet. And so you have to come back and, yeah, pressure.

Jenelle Friday  56:49  
And this, I think this goes back to, you know, I remember when I kind of kicked up Lionheart CS and was trying to do this by myself. When you're you, you yourself, and I me myself, and I right. I'm the program, I'm the director, I'm the or, you know, operations person. Accountability is a make or break. You either are going to hold yourself accountable to where your money is going, how your time is going to be used, or the business is going to run away with you, and you're going to look back and wonder, what the heck happened. So let's transition that into the three marketing phases. We know that the three marketing phases are acquisition, retention and expansion. So David, could you break down those three core marketing phrases, phrases, phases and why each one matters?

Unknown Speaker  57:32  
Yeah, well, if you think

David Bush  57:33  
about from this is a great exercise that I went through a long time ago. Is that if you were to take kind of an A to Z approach, and you were to craft out, and you'd say, what would be if I could only choose four strategies, or three strategies, or five strategies to acquire new clients, and I could use those three or four strategies to reach my goals? What would those three or four strategies be? And I'm asking everybody that's live or watching the recording, that's a serious question. If you could go into 2026, and you could limit yourself to 357, 10, at most strategies for client acquisition, what would be the prioritized order, based upon results, based upon past experiences, based upon data, not just based on how you feel, right? Because you might think that your blog is really cutting the rug and it's making it happen, and it ain't bringing anybody in, but it's something that's a passion project for your for you, and it's okay to have a passion project, right? Some of you have committed to doing a podcast as a strategy, and the podcast is under 100 episodes, and you're just, you know, you're paying your dues, you're trying to get the market out, and you're having fun doing it, and you're building relationships with people that are your guests. That's a great strategy to do it. It just is not going to typically be the immediate return on investment, unless you have a good strategy to turn it into a return on investment. So what are the strategies you're going to do to acquire new clients in order of priority? The next question is, what are the things that you're going to do to retain the clients that you have and to generate more referrals from those current clients? So do you have strategies that are in place where you provide some sort of a gift or some sort of a wow customer service experience. So one of the things that I have learned over the years is that when you wow people, you'll create raving fans. And I also learned the phrase that all clients are not created equal. Usually, if you were to one of the greatest strategies I've ever heard is to do a two question survey. I'm sorry, I think that it's yeah, it's a two question survey. So the first question is on a scale of one to 1010. Being best, how would you grade our your experience with our company on a scale of one to 10? I. Um, the second question, if not a 10, what could we have done to make it better? And what I have learned is, is that most people will not give you a 10. A small percentage of people will. 30% of the people that you ask that question to are probably likely to give you an eight, nine or a 10, 30% some people won't even answer the survey, so you're not going to get and then there's going to be some people that you're going to be like, absolutely shocked. Their expectation was here, and you delivered here, but you thought you delivered over here because your expectations were different than theirs. So if you ask that question survey, and you say, after the if we could have done anything better, and you offer them if you're allowed to compliance wise, if you're allowed to offer them some sort of a gift card or something for returning the survey, just so that you can get more information right at the bottom of that second question you could ask the question, do you know of anybody that would benefit from the services that we provide if you do provide their names below, again, optional, and we would love to provide you with a referral gift if they choose to use our services. So just that one strategy could be the thing that absolutely transforms the business that you're in right now, just one retention referral strategy, or maybe there's one retention strategy that says we're going to do a back when I was in the mortgage business, 20 some years ago, I would do an annual client review. So it wasn't really a marketing cost, it was a time cost, and I was willing to go in and offer a Marketing Review, and anybody that completed the market, I'm sorry, the mortgage review, not the marketing the mortgage review would get a prize for scheduling it. So I invested some marketing dollars, and the reason why I did that is because I wanted to have more conversations with people about their home mortgage, because that would give me an opportunity, or our staff's opportunity, to see if they had a need for purchasing a new home. Maybe they have a daughter or a son that's moving, or grandchild, or maybe a friend that's moving to town, and maybe there's a referral for a purchase, or they might be looking to sell their home, and I could refer the person to a real estate agent, but all of those opportunities were revenue producing opportunities, and so I paid a referral fee or paid a fee for completing a specific task. So retention is the second category. The third is the expansion. So what are you doing to expand on your opportunity, to grow the number of accounts that a client has with you. Or maybe they're offer you're offering different services, and maybe you get them awakened to different services that you offer. Or maybe it's that you are offering larger services. Maybe there's an upsell in terms of additional services that you now offer that you didn't offer when they first signed up. So thinking about the three different phases as a progressional from point A to point Z, if you were to start with a person as a prospect, or we'll call it even a suspect, I don't even know if they're a prospect yet, but I suspect that this person is going to be interested in what I'm doing. So these are the 357, 10 Strategies I'm going to use to move people into the top of funnel, and then I'm going to do these things once they become a client. I'm going to invest in these marketing strategies. I'm going to offer a podcast, I'm going to offer a blog, I'm going to do a video channel, I'm going to post a social media and then the last one is expansion. How are people going to know about the new services, the new products, the bigger bulk discounts that I offer, unless I do marketing to awaken them to do it right.

Jenelle Friday  1:03:52  
So my question for everybody in the audience, because I love that we've got people that are engaged. Which phase do you most need to focus on for 2026 give me an A for acquisition, give me an R for retention, or an E for an expansion. And quick question from let's see here. Quick question from John for you, David, what is your success rate when you survey current clients?

Unknown Speaker  1:04:20  
Survey current clients. So here, what's through

David Bush  1:04:25  
a lot of acquisition focus? Yeah, so I don't know if the question is the success rate, like the number of surveys, that

Jenelle Friday  1:04:33  
how we survey our clients? I will tell you John for BDR, we're not at that point yet, but I will tell you that it's called a net promoter score, or NPS score. That's what I'm coming in with, 15 years of of customer success in the tech industry. So it's, it's exactly what David said, which is you ask on a scale of one to 10, you know, how satisfied are you, or how likely are you to refer what, however you want to phrase that, and then, depending on. Rate. Give me feedback as to why you gave that on average. We want about 60% is the goal to have a positive NPS score, because you know, you're gonna have clients that are not going to answer you. But as an industry standard, we thought we were hoping and shooting for 60% at a very minimum. So that might be a metric that would help you. I love how many acquisition focus people were getting, because it shows us that you're in that first phase. You're focused on the acquisition process, and that's where your goals are for 2026 which means we're able to kind of dive in a little bit deeper. So let's shift now, David into the core four marketing quadrants, and I think we're going to dive into our Excel spreadsheet. But can you give a really quick overview of those core four marketing quadrant and why each one of them matters?

David Bush  1:05:49  
Yeah, so when, when it comes down to thinking about all the different marketing strategies that you have, because there are so many different things that you could possibly do, it's a little overwhelming, right? When you start thinking about all the different ways that you can develop your business. So you know the four, the core four, or the marketing quadrant, if you just want to draw a square on a sheet of paper, I'll show you a visual here in just a second. But just for your own benefit, if you want to just draw a square and just divide it into four quadrants, so you have two columns and two rows right. So the far left hand corner is what we would call warm outreach. So this is where you're talking to people that know you, like you and trust you. It could be you know past clients. It could be people that have shown interest, the nurturing, the relationship marketing that you're doing because people are already connected to you. They're already awakened to what you do. They know you, like you, trust you, and that's usually one to one, so it's not always a large blast email or something of that nature. It's more of I'm sending this to this individual person because they know me, like me, and trust me. And I'm asking them for referrals. I'm offering them value. I'm inviting them to events. That's the one to one outreach. Right below that is also the area that would be considered to be low cost, and that would be free content. So providing free content, and free content could be a webinar, it could be a virtual Zoom meeting, a group meeting such as this. It could be a live event, it could be a blog, it could be a video channel. There's a lot of different things that you can do. And when you target your ICP and you know who your people are, then you would identify where are those people? What social media platforms do they use? Because it's very inexpensive to do social media content. It's expensive from a time standpoint, but it doesn't have a hard cost. That's extremely expensive in comparison to, you know, running an ad on the Super Bowl, right? That's a very risky investment. And if you're going to spend all of your marketing budget on a Super Bowl ad, you better hope it performs well. So the first area, the first column, is the one to one warm outreach, where you're talking to people that know you, like you and trust you, and they say that the average person has about 250 people in their direct connections that knows them, likes them and trusts them. Some people may have less. Some people have more. But if you look at your connections, this would be a good thing to do right now as an interactive exercise, go to LinkedIn, log into your LinkedIn account and go to my network at the very top of your screen, and over on the left hand side, you'll see the word connections. Let me see if I can do it on mine quickly. So if you go to your profile and you just click on your LinkedIn, sorry, I gotta move my Zoom meeting around, so it's hiding my picture. If you click on View Profile, I'm sorry, I'm clicking on the wrong thing. If you click on my network, which is where I wanted to go, click on my network, and right here, you'll see that you have this many first degree connections. So out of those first degree connections, how many of those people know you, like you and trust you? The number would be greater if you were providing consistent content that they thought was valuable, and if those connections were people that matched your ideal client profile, because you know, you can't say the wrong thing to the right person. If somebody is not interested in your contact or your content because you're the wrong person or they're the wrong person, it doesn't mean that you're wrong, it just means that they're not the right fit for what it is that you are doing. So you want to make sure that you remove those people, and you want to surround yourself and build that first degree connection network, especially on social media, because those are the people that have the best chances of seeing your free content. So. You build a foundation on your first degree or your one to one warm outreach, that's a very inexpensive way to build your influence and to build your business just sending good value and offering an invitation to take advantage of the services that you offer, asking for referrals, and most people don't have a good marketing plan. Janelle for that particular section of the quadrant. And then when it comes to free content, it's all over the place, right? You're posting on Facebook, you're posting on Instagram, you're on X, you're on LinkedIn, you've got a YouTube channel, you're so diluted that you have a hard time actually delivering to the target market that you've identified, because you're trying to serve everyone and in the process, most likely serving no one. So if you can get more specific about who's my target audience, what platform are they on? If they're on LinkedIn, great, there's ways that you can automate it, using bdr.ai, as a strategy, but I want to show up in these people's world, and I want to be connected to the people that I want to know like, or that want them to know like and trust me, and I want to deliver content to them. And I know that if I'm engaging, the way that social media works is if you're engaged in people's content, their posts and their videos and things of that nature, they're going to be more likely connected to yours. So if you can automate and delegate that to software like or a system or a virtual assistant, you're going to be more likely getting seen by them when you post free content in the area of warm outreach. That's the left hand side of the column, the right hand side of the column, and if you have questions, you can put it in the chat the right side. The top right hand quadrant is cold outreach. So those are the people that don't know you, don't like you and don't trust you, yet. Now it doesn't have to be ice cold like I'm not saying that you should be reaching out to people who are total strangers. One of the best strategies that you can use in 2026 is who are the people that are connected to the people that know me, like me and trust me. And how can I leverage that connection to build trust, credibility and authority with people that don't know me, like me and trust me and those in the LinkedIn world, those are called second degree connections. And you can do filtered searches using LinkedIn basic search filters. And you can go find people that match your target audience, that live in a certain area, they have a certain job title, they work for certain companies, they have certain characteristics, they've had certain education, you can isolate those people as second degree connections, that are connected to somebody that you're already connected to. And if you start reaching out to those people with good messaging and a good offer, and you have a good profile, you're going to start filling that top of funnel that Rick was talking about graduated some clients, and need to replace them with new Well, if you're not bringing them in from your warm outreach one on one, and you're not bringing them in for your free content, where are they going to come from? And most people have a limited number of people, and they have a limited amount of free content. So that's why they're looking at that's why they're attending this session right now. They're saying, I need more leads. The leads that I'm getting are not enough to justify the goals that I have, and I need a better strategy, and your better strategy is shore up your warm outreach with your one to one. People that know you, like you, trust you, make sure that they know what you do and who you do it for, and how they can benefit, or how other people that they know could benefit. Have a strategy around free content so that people are, you know, top of mind, they see your post, your you know, present. They can find you on social media. People are sharing your comment or content. And then think about who are the people that are people that know somebody that I'm connected to, that knows me, likes me and trusts me, and how can I start connecting with those people, either through referrals or using outreach that is targeted on LinkedIn or other social media. There's other social media strategies you can use on Facebook to connect with Facebook friends. That's not my area of expertise, but you can connect with friends of friends on Facebook and expand your friends there. You can also use groups that have a shared affiliation or shared interest, and then the last box. I'll just sum it up and say the last box is paid ads. I'm not an expert on paid ads. Jeff is an expert on paid advertising because he sold $40 million of junk mail, and he has a pretty good idea of how to spend money, and a lot of money. He had people that were sending him, wiring him a million dollars a month for paid ads. That is a strategy that works. It's not my area of expertise. I'm more of a warm relationship cold outreach and free content guy, and I've built a business that's very successful on those three strategies alone. You don't need all three. If you get really good at one, you don't have to do all the other ones. But I would recommend having a balanced approach.

Jenelle Friday  1:15:08  
So how should someone choose which Croft quadrant, sorry, to focus on based on their ICP and their current goals?

David Bush  1:15:19  
Well, the first thing I would do is that, when you think about your ICP, which strategy, if you were to bet your mortgage, house payment every month, if you had to bet on that particular strategy, which strategy do you think? What from a gut perspective, which one do you think would give you the best chances of improving to create your desired outcome. You know, there are certain things that you know about your people that I don't know. So if I had to, you know, bet on my marketing strategies. The first thing that I would be betting on is myself. I would be betting on making sure that the people that are in my first degree connections were well served, that I was caring for them like they're part of my flock, and I would be showing them how they could bring more people to the flock that could benefit from my services. That's the first thing that I would shore up. And again, I like people. I like relationships. Not everybody likes that. Some people are really passionate Janelle about producing free content. They're not really one on one people. They're one to many people. They like the idea of being a content creator. They're not a relationship based person. But you know, maybe the idea of doing more free content and attracting the fish to chase the boat is something that you really resonate with. And if you do it well, and you do it right, you could attract more people to you. So a lot of this has to do with more personal preference budget, how much money you have to invest, how much time that you have to invest, and then what's your capacity and mindset? If you go into the cold outreach and you go into the paid ads, you're going to get paid in experience, and then you're going to get paid in profit. And a lot of times, people quit when they get paid in experience. So the paid in experience is, stop spamming me. You're a connection of Janelle Friday's. I was reaching out to you because both of us are connected to Janelle Friday somehow, some way, I caught this person on a bad day. And so if you allow that experience to be your truth, and you go, Well, that's what cold outreach is. I don't want anything to do with it, then you'll never reach the person that goes, Man, you know, I've been praying for a solution, and I just finally found I heard from you, and you called and you messaged me on the same day that I was really struggling and I needed some business development. I've had those conversations with people, and I've become, I mean, close friends with people that were a cold outreach that turned into a close friendship. And that's my truth. That's what I choose to do, and how I choose to think

Jenelle Friday  1:18:01  
you and I met near my cold outreach, David, I reached out to you because I was looking for podcast guests, and there you were, and here we built this beautiful friendship and working relationship. And you know, I we shared this with a client earlier today, but I was doing cold outreach, and I reached out to someone, and I usually address women and I say, Miss, and then I use your first name, because I like when someone greets me that way. So I was just using that. This individual had a PhD, and she got mad that I didn't address her as doctor, and she sort of ripped me apart for it, and it really kind of set me back on my laurels a little bit. And I went, gosh, I don't understand how you could be so triggered by that. But I'm so, you know, I definitely gave an apology message, but I like that you're addressing. You're gonna get those people. I mean, you have a saying that hurt people. Hurt people, right? And one of the things that I teach through emotional intelligence is when you allow, when you allow, an emotional response from someone becomes overwhelming that you quit, you take a big step back, you doubt yourself, you stop your momentum or your forward progress, right? We don't know the why behind that emotional response. We don't know the triggers that other people have. And so if you've attempted cold outreach and it's been difficult for you, you've gotten negative feedback, right? I want to encourage you that that unfortunately, is part of this business. Don't let someone's trigger or emotional response or negativity hold you back from continuing to push forward, because there's nobody else like you. The relationship I with David, his coaching and mentoring in my life, there's no one else like David that can speak to what I need to hear in my life, I'm so glad that we connected. And there is that person like David said, waiting to hear from you, because no one else can speak to their pain point or offer them exactly what they're looking for, but you and so if you let a negative experience, a one individual offer a couple responses that are negative, discourage you or hold you back. Back, you're missing out on opportunity and a calling that's a part of your business. So let me just,

David Bush  1:20:05  
let me wrap that up, because that's a great I appreciate the comments too. But are you? Are you marketing according to your feelings? Like, I feel like this should work. I feel like this is the right way to do it. I know that when we talk to people in our business, people say, Well, you know what I feel that I want to say it this way, and it's great to understand your feelings. But feelings are not always facts. Feelings are emotions that you have connected to experiences. And so if you build your marketing plan based on your feelings, you might just realize that the marketplace doesn't really care too much about your feelings, and even though it felt right, it didn't work right. And you have to embrace that truth. And I'm not saying that you should dismiss your feelings 100% I'm just saying validate your feelings, validate them, but also validate the fact that the reality of the marketplace is the marketplace works based upon things that work. They don't. It doesn't work the way that you feel like you should do it, or they'll feel the way you feel like you want to do it. And if you go back to thoughts, change feelings. So if you have certain feelings and it's causing you to do certain actions, and those things are not directly connecting to success. What happens is, is that's going to shape your thoughts, and you're going to start thinking negatively, like, maybe this isn't going to work. Maybe I need to think about a plan B, or maybe I need to try to do something totally different. If you start shaping your thoughts and you start reminding yourself of the vision and the mission of why you're doing what you're doing, it'll start shaping your feelings, and you start learning more, you start becoming more, you start achieving more, then that will start shaping your actions. And that's how you get to the place where Jeff talked about yesterday, about going from being, you know, a person in a barn that didn't have much to grow on to a person that has a $40 million business because he learned to think different, and that chose him to make him feel different, and then he started to act different, and that he became the $40 million entrepreneur. It wasn't because he felt like doing it every day. Hopefully, that makes sense,

Jenelle Friday  1:22:15  
yeah, and I think also too, I want to highlight that people that people that we market to, people that I was marketing to, right some people like direct a direct selling approach. And Jeff is very good at the direct selling approach. I am not a direct seller. I don't like that approach. I don't like when people try to direct sell me. And so I tend to market the way I want to be marketed to. So I also want to challenge you that if you're in the business where maybe you're working with engineers and technical people who are very math and logic heavy, but you're trying to lead and connect emotionally, that may be a miss. So also you got to, you got to really consider your ideal customer profile. Who are you marketing to? And if you're communicating in a different method that you would prefer, like, that's again where AI can really help you temper your message. Is to say, here's how I would like to share this message. How can I how can you help me reframe this for an individual who's a little bit more logical, driven direct selling approach? So just some feedback there. Okay, the cool part

David Bush  1:23:14  
of how does it have to look a certain way? You can make it look the way that you want it. You just have to embrace the truth that comes with that. And it may take more people before it actually plays out right.

Jenelle Friday  1:23:24  
I'd love to know from you in the comment section here again, some engagement. Is this helpful? Are we hitting on a topic when it comes to how we market emotions that are involved, feeling discouraged or frustrated and pushing through that is this helpful information? Or David and I kind of hitting a nerve here. We'd love to hear from you. So we're going to dive now into crafting an irresistible offer. And I love this topic, because David, I feel like that's, it's the golden ticket. I'm a Willy Wonka fan man. I love it when he finds the golden ticket in the chocolate bar. That's what we're going after, is we're going after this crafting a irresistible offer, collecting the Yes, right? So first of all, can you walk us through your cursors framework and how it helps business owners to craft that irresistible golden ticket?

David Bush  1:24:14  
All Yeah, so if you just spell out the word cursors, see, I'll just put it in the chat so everybody sees it. So cursors, that was easier for me to do. So if you spell out the word cursors, it's just an acronym, and the acronym is applying specific principles to your offer. So when you think about an irresistible offer, what's the first thing that comes to your mind? You ever heard that song by who is that person? Simply Irresistible. I can't remember the singer, the bat. I don't even know I was a young kid when I got that in my head, but it's simply irresistible. Robert Paul. Oh.

Unknown Speaker  1:25:00  
John Robert Palmer, good call, John. No.

David Bush  1:25:04  
You want to make your offer so easy to say yes to that more people will do it because it qualifies inside of this framework. So the very first letter is the word C. So can you compare your service, your product, to what other people are already buying or already using, and can you make it sound better to a significant amount than what they're currently doing? So an example is, there's an email company out there that was very successful. The owner had a very big exit, and he went out there and targeted an email company, and he said, Can I do your email? I mean, he basically went up there and signed up to all of these different distribution groups and these Newsletter Lists, and he got these people's emails, and then he followed back up with them and said, I recently launched this email company, and it does this, this and this, in comparison to the company that you're using. It's a 10th of the cost. So he used comparison to compare what they were used to to something that was better. And the better could be price, it could be service, it could be speed of delivery, it could be a lot of different things, but when you compare yourself to something that is already known, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You just tell people you have a wheel, I have a better one, and here's why it's better. And you talk about the benefits and the features of what you have, and you make it to be so attractive that people want to know more about it. So the very first thing in your offer is you want to look at, can I use a comparison to something that they're already used to, already paying for, that it's already known and so you oftentimes hear people say, Well, it's the Uber of right? Because investors know Uber. Investors know that Uber was a very successful business. Now it's been kind of cliche to say, well, we're the next Uber of whatever target industry they're in. The second one is urgency. So urgency is where you actually put a fact that it's got a deadline. So like right now, if you were to use the urgency factor. You could craft a sense of excitement around your offer, because you're going to do something by a specific deadline, or you're going to offer something to somebody by a deadline. So in your example, I'll just throw out there, John, you could say, I've got a special offer that's available through the end of the year, or through, you know, the holidays or whatever they do. It on Black Friday, right? Black Friday, Cyber Monday. There's a sense of urgency. Prime Day has a sense of urgency to it. You get a massive discount on this particular day. And the reason why you create urgency is that it gets people to get off of their fear of making a mistake, gets them out of, you know, contemplation, and gets them into decision making mode. So just giving people a deadline is going to give them a better reason to decide on your offer, especially if the reward is worth it. The next letter is R. R is reciprocity, so offering something of gifts and giving something to somebody to get them to do something. So I'll show you my cards and say that you know, when we offered this course, I offered you something of value to get you interested in a conversation about what it is that I do now. I'm delivering six hours of content because I want to give value to the people that registered for this course, and in that process, my hope is, is that I earn trust, credibility and authority. So people want to meet with me to talk about their business development, because if they're developing a business plan, my target market are is business owners that have a business development desire and who have a business plan. If I can talk to people that have a business plan, they're already thinking about making investments in business development. And if I can deliver value, and I can get them to trust me, and they can see me as an authority figure. I may have an opportunity that I wouldn't have if I didn't give that reciprocity gift of a free webinar or a free gift or a digital playbook Creator. The next one is S and that is scarcity. So the next 10 people that sign up for bdr.ai are going to receive $500 and the deadline to do it is December 31 if I was to extend that offer to you, there would be a sense of fear of missing out. I want to be one of those 10 people if you were in the market for what BDR does, if you were interested. Interested in the services that we offer, you would probably be a lot more interested in what we did if it was $500 off, and you probably would act, or at least respond to the offer if you knew that there was a limited amount. And people do this all the time, you just have to make sure you do it with authenticity and transparency and you're not manipulating people because you wouldn't want to offer something and consistently offer these manufactured cursor offers to make it to be something that becomes dishonest, or, you know, manipulative, leave the sleeve out of it. Leave the sleeve that sleeves out of it. And again, you know, work through these things. You don't have to have all of these things in an offer. You can use scarcity as the only thing that's offer, as long as it's irresistible. If your scarcity principle is not motivating people, then you don't have an irresistible offer. So again, you have to use these principles, and then you have to test them, and you have to see which one works well for you. The next one is the O, which is opportunity. And I like to use the word opportunity is if I'm giving you an opportunity. So an example would be, I saw that there was somebody on here from first steps financial, Amanda. I think it was So Amanda, they offer outsourced control or control or comptroller type services, CFO, fractional CFO, kind of services. So if they wanted to make a exclusive opportunity, they could craft a program that is a pilot program. Hey, we're launching a pilot program in 2026 and we're opening it up to five clients. We're still confirming all of the benefits, but here's all the things that you're going to get, and we're offering it at a significant discount in exchange for your feedback. That's creating an opportunity that is unique or exclusive and people feel valued. And the way that you can create scarcity to it and create a little bit of fear missing out is that I could come to you and I could say, Amanda, we've created this program for fractional controllers and fractional CFOs to help them to do business development, and we've created a year long program. Our normal price of what we normally charge is $5,000 but for the next five businesses that sign up before December 31 for this pilot program, they're going to get a special discount of $1,000 off. It's going to be a significant savings. It's only going to be 4000 versus 5000 I know you've been interested in what it is that we do, I thought I'd reach out to you first before I open it up to other people that haven't shown interest. Would you be open to responding back to me before the end of tomorrow, just so that I know that you received this message, I have a much better chance of getting Amanda to respond to that message and that offer, because the invitation was given to her, and if she doesn't respond to the invitation, it's not only, you know, taking money out of her relationship equity bucket, you know, she has a certain relationship with me, and if she doesn't respond to it, it's a reflection on Our relationship. And if she values the relationship and she wants to be kept in the know for future opportunities, she may come back and say, You know what, Dave, I love the idea it's not a right fit for me right now, but please keep me in mind. Still worked. She wasn't ready to make the decision. I may have a conversation with her and say, Is it the price? Is it the timing? I mean, I may have another conversation to see where I can take it, but at that point, I've at least got a response from her, and I've engaged her in a conversation. So my irresistible offer became a conversation starter. The next one is risk risk reduction. Thank you. I need to look at my cursors risk reduction or risk elimination. So what could you offer that would be a absolute elimination of risk to meet with you. So if I was to offer you an example, I guarantee, I guarantee you, I can find you an additional $10,000 of additional revenue inside of your business development plan, and if I can't find you another $10,000 in revenue, I'll pay you $100

David Bush  1:34:31  
would you give me a chance to have a conversation with you? Because what's the worst thing that you could risk time and if I'm willing to pay you $100 now, if somebody is making $5,000 an hour, they're probably not going to meet with me, but if they were making 100 bucks an hour, they might devote 30 minutes to time. So the next one would be the s, which stands for social proof. So people do what people do. So if you. Give them a reason, or you give them a list of reasons, including some of the people that they know, like and trust. That's why people use influencers to try to get their products out there, because they think, if you know Justin Bieber does it, then I want to do it. So what is it that you could do? And going back there to the recommendations, you know, if you were to send out 42 recommendations in the next 21 days, two per day for the next 21 days, and you were to get, let's say just 10% of them came back, would you have a different outlook, and would you have a different opportunity to say, you know, you could display those as social media posts and say, here's what. And again, if you talk to the people that were the most influential, and you have relationship equity, you have trust, credibility and authority with those people, and you give them an endorsement, and then you ask them for an endorsement, and you do that with 42 people, it'd be probably pretty impressive of what you would get back.

Jenelle Friday  1:36:01  
Yeah, Agatha has a question, which is, what do you think about the why concept, instead of a comparison, I'd be interested

David Bush  1:36:09  
to know what you mean. What do you think that she means by that? What do you think about the why

Jenelle Friday  1:36:13  
concept, instead of comparing your business to another business, right? I can do what the goo, what the email provider does, but I can do it for cheaper. You're comparing instead maybe giving the here's why, oh, maybe she's Oh, yeah, yeah, the why, oh, and it says the Simon Sinek concept, the why, yeah.

David Bush  1:36:32  
I do think that there is something to be said about, you know, kind of story, branding and building your story, and you know, why people choose your service. It kind of depends on whether that resonates with them. So I don't know if I would. I wouldn't say that. It would be not something that could create irresistible offer. I just haven't seen it used in a way that would make me have evidence that would demand a verdict that says, Yes, you should use the why statement. I do think that you should tell your story in a motivating way, and you should give other people something to buy into, because some people will buy your product because of the mission and vision and what you have shared with them of why you're in business. And that's exciting. I mean that that's definitely something

Jenelle Friday  1:37:18  
that can get the why, though, sometimes you need to get right to here's how I differ. I'm cheaper, I'm faster, I'm more efficient, I'm, you know, more credible, whatever it might be. Sometimes the comparison is a really quick way to get someone's attention who doesn't have a lot of time where they're being bombarded right by cold outbound so it sets apart really quickly. But you have

David Bush  1:37:38  
to remember that people are in, people are in six different stages. And this is a good one to write down if you just draw a circle, and if you start off at the eight o'clock pm portion of the circle, and you write down pre contemplation that's a person that's thinking about making a change, or thinking about investing in your services, or from somebody else that's servicing you, or certain providing services. If you go to 10 o'clock, that's where you actually have people 10 o'clock PM, that is, you have people that are in the contemplation. They're not just thinking about it, they're actually comparing, and they're looking at options. So a comparison option for somebody that's in the contemplation mindset. They're comparing options. And if they see something side by side, and they said I was gonna use this, I get a lot of people that say, you know, I was gonna sign up for XYZ company, but then I got your email, and I like you. I know you, and I trust you, so I decided to go with you, versus this other company that I was contemplating, because I got them at the right time. 12 o'clock noon is the decision making phase. So when somebody gets to 12 o'clock noon, they're making a decision. And so you know, none of these things are typically going to get people that are in pre contemplation to make a decision. But you can move people into the contemplation by giving them an irresistible offer, because it it forces them people do things, because the pain of not doing it becomes greater than the pain of doing it. So that's typically when you get people to move, is that you have to create pain or pleasure, or both. If you go to two o'clock, that's two o'clock PM, or two o'clock, yeah, two o'clock PM, not well. I guess you could say it's two o'clock AM.

Jenelle Friday  1:39:24  
You started at 8pm maybe you might start at 8am 10am 12pm noon.

Speaker 1  1:39:28  
Yep. There you go, as there you go. Thank you. Am, what you say? 8pm 10am 12 noon,

David Bush  1:39:37  
closing in, 2pm thank you for helping me with my analog clock. So now you're at now you're at 2pm now you've got somebody that's already taken action. So I talked to people that have already signed up with some sort of Business Development Service. They're in a contract. They're already in process. It's working for them, and I've got to nurture that relationship, because at some point that may not be the. Solution that they want. It may be too expensive. It may be they have a customer service nightmare. Something Right? People, the earth continues to change, right? It continues to rotate, and every time it rotates, a year later, something changes. And it might be that they just didn't like the service. It's not working anymore. So I want to stay in touch with people that are in action, who have made a decision. Now we'll go to 4pm right? So now you're at 4pm and that's a person that's in what I call maintenance. They've made a decision, they're in action, and it's working. They're not, you know, thinking about making a new change, because they've taken action, it's beginning to work for them, but again, I'm staying in touch with them, because the next stage is 6pm and that's relapse, or that's when things don't work. And this has to do with, you know, making decisions about business. It has something to do with relationships, you know, health, all of these things go back to it's called Prochaska stages of change. And so you have to understand that you have all of these people that are going to be part of your marketing plan, that are part of your ideal client profile. All of them are in one of those stages. And you have to understand that the more consistent you are with doing your one to one messaging and your cold outreach and your free content and your paid ads, you're going to have a better likelihood of getting more of those people if you're using cursors as a concept to become connected to your company versus allowing them to go to your competition, because you work smarter, not harder.

Jenelle Friday  1:41:38  
I love that. Well, Alyssa did comment and said she loved your sorry, not a list Amanda. Amanda said she loved your idea. And have you talked to Alyssa? I'll let you two sync after that, but just know Amanda kicked up and said she loved the idea you prompted for her. So let's stay in touch there, and then before we move on, we're talking about irresistible offers. So on a on a scale of one to 10. Everybody throw one being I don't know what I'm doing. To 10, I have a irresistible offer, and I'm excited about offering it. So give me a number one to 10. Now we're going to talk for just a couple minutes about how to build your marketing calendar, right? So I am a I'm an action person. I like concepts, but if the concept doesn't come with a how to you're probably going to lose me, right? So let's just first briefly, David, you could touch on why a marketing calendar is essential for creating consistency and momentum. Yeah, if we

David Bush  1:42:38  
go back to the marketing plan, so you've listed out these activities, and I just want to show you that all of these activities are listed over here, and you can edit these activities as I've listed over here, and you can plan out whatever activities that you want, so social media frequency, if you're doing it daily, weekly, semi annually. Or you can add an additional time frame over here, that's custom. And then you could put in your cost associated with it, and you can just get your strategies for each individual marketing target. So if target number one was your warm market or past clients, then you could just type in their past clients. And then you could build out your marketing phases and your activities to give yourself a really good understanding of this is a great marketing strategy for this particular target. And once you've gone through that and you've created your strategies, now you can shift over to the marketing calendar. And the reason why I highly encourage business owners to create a marketing calendar is that you can delegate it. So if you take the time to create a marketing calendar, most of the time, you're not going to have to make a lot of massive changes every year. So once you create a process that works, because the process works, now you can hire somebody to manage that process. And so, you know, one of the things that I found when I was running my mortgage company. This is when I first got into this idea was I want to know that things are not going to get missed. And if I go out there and have to spend money on a very expensive advertising agency, it's going to cost me a lot of money. And some people that's a better strategy for them. But one of the things I thought about is that I can create a marketing calendar based on these strategies, and I could just transfer these strategies into my marketing calendar, and I could go in there and say, I'm going to do this on social media. Here's the notes, here's when it's due. And I could create a chronological order, and most likely, that's going to be something that I could copy, and I could paste into these different areas, and then I could customize it, and then I could delegate it, and I could give it to somebody and say, This is our marketing calendar. I could create standard operating procedures on each one of these actions, and I could train somebody on how to do it. And then I could get out. From underneath doing it, and it would be something that I could just oversee and somebody else could manage. So that's the power of a marketing calendar. It's not too, you know, technical advance. It's just a matter of, will you commit to doing it, and then what's your method, or what's your strategy on how to review it? So I highly encourage people actually go in and put a appointment into their calendar as a recurring appointment that says, review marketing calendar and put a link right into your business builders playbook, so that you can pull it up and you can review it with yourself, or you can review it with your spouse or whoever is doing the work, and you can say, Okay, what do we have planned for next month? Do we need to change anything? Because right, there might be opportunities if somebody brings an opportunity. I just got an email today that said, Hey, I've got a speaking opportunity for you in Phoenix in the month of January. Wasn't part of the plan, but the opportunity is now here, so I'm not going to say, I'm not going to do it. I'm going to go look at it and say, Does it match my calendar, does it match my values? Does it match my personal plan? And if it fits, I'm going to take, I'm going to take up on the opportunity, because it's going to put me in front of a room of people that are going to see me as a trustworthy, credible and authoritative source well.

Jenelle Friday  1:46:19  
And again, I'm gonna, I'm gonna highlight AI here, right? So another term people are using is content calendar. So I'm a user of Canva. You actually can use Canva and AI together to create a content calendar to kind of shorten that time of how much you're creating and stay on target, especially if you're a one man show you don't have an assistant. If you don't have a spouse, that's helping you, and it's just and it's just you. This a content calendar, using AI to drive, maybe the topics, but also then using a tool that will create the calendar for you and help create the posts, or create the visual social media posts, things like that. That's an also a really quick thing. I would love to hear from you. If you're willing to submit an answer to a question, what's one thing that you need to add to your marketing calendar? Right? We're talking about preemptively planning for 2026 now is the time to think about what's one area of marketing that you can add or that you need to add to your calendar to contribute to your success. And because we're running just a little bit behind David, we're going to talk about the seven steps to build a team of strategic referral partners. So can you give us just a really quick breakdown of what those seven steps are to build a reliable referral partner team for people? Yes, I'm

David Bush  1:47:33  
going to have you write it in the chat, and we'll make sure that it shows up in the description of this video for those people that are watching the video online afterwards, but the seven steps are first and foremost is to identify a list of referral partners, and so we talked about this yesterday. But who are the people that stand to benefit as much as you or more than you by referring their clients, their friends and family members to you. So if you were to think about the key roles, the key job titles, the key businesses, you don't have to think about the person, right. But if you are a business coach, having an accountant that has people that are in the business world as a referral partner could be a very great strategy. Having a financial planner, having a management consultant, they're not a business coach, they're a management consultant. So or, you know, having somebody that does a lot of business with a business would probably be a pretty good strategy for you. So think about the people that would stand to benefit as much or more than you by referring their network to you. So identifying is the first one. The second one is the approach. And there's a simple approach that you can go with that I've been very successful with, and that is asking if or asking about the person and and telling them that you work with business owners, let's let's just say. Amanda, from first steps financial is that we work with a lot of business owners, and from time to time, they're looking for marketing and lead generation and business development. David, I was curious to know if you could tell me a little bit about your business to see if we could be good referral partners, because there's people that may need what you have that I'm working with, and there may be people that you have that need. So rather than going out there and asking for a referral, ask them if they'd be open to talking about reciprocal referrals, and posture your value of bringing people to them more than it is about you getting people from them. Because a lot of people go out there and say, Hey, I'd love to get your referrals. I'd love to help your clients. And they have a me first mindset, so I'm always out there, going out there saying, Hey, I have some needs. And again, you may think, Well, I don't have that many people that ask about business development. Well, if you found somebody. That was referring business to you, you'd probably be a little bit more proactive about asking people, Hey, do you need help with business development? We have a great person that we can refer you to. So identifying as the first one approaching with a value driven strategy. And this is something you can do on bdr.ai, with your digital outreach campaigns, or you can do it manually. The third one is your needs analysis. So when you go to meet with them, you go with a list of questions that you ask skillfully, and you listen carefully, and whether that's on Zoom or whether you're meeting face to face, but you go in there with the questions that you'd like to know answers to. And I have a list of questions I can share with you, but those list of questions are the questions that I want the person to ask me, and so I'm going to be the one that leads the way, because most people don't have a plan for how they're going to refer business to me. So I'm going to go in there with a plan of how I'm going to ask them about them, and then I'm just going to stop talking. And if the person doesn't ask me any questions, they're not a good referral partner, and I usually have about five to seven questions that are open ended questions that allow them to tell me all the cool things about them and about all the reasons of why I should refer my business to them, because it treats it like I'm in the position of Power. I'm interviewing them to see if I should refer my connections to them, and then they'll reciprocate and ask me the same questions. The fourth step is presenting. So here's where you're presenting your solutions. A real simple strategy is what I call the good, better, best. So every time I have a referral partnership conversation. I give them options based on their interest and commitment level. So good is is that we refer people back and forth to each other. When we have an opportunity, it's not our most focus. It's not the thing that we're strategic about. It's just, hey, we like each other. We have a reciprocal relationship. And when there's an opportunity, I'll use your name as the person I think of now that's good. Better is, is that when we become strategic, and we actually meet up once a month or once a quarter, and we talk about, who have you met recently? Who would be a good introduction, we can go ahead and we can ask for introductions strategically, because we're more strategically partnered. And oftentimes it starts off with good and it moves to better. But some people might just hit it off with you. I've had some good conversations where the person shifted right into better because they were looking for, I was the lunatic they were looking for, to quote Billy Joel, I just mean the lunatic you're looking for,

Speaker 1  1:52:39  
or the very musical group. If you got very musical, yeah, not well, not musical. We like music. Lyrical, we're lyrical. I'm better.

David Bush  1:52:47  
The next one is the best strategy. And the best strategy could be where you actually have a strategic partnership, where maybe you're doing revenue sharing, or maybe you're doing referral fees or other types of things. And again, don't get too caught up on good, better, best, but I kind of like the idea of the Goldilocks option, because most people will lead themselves to better because they don't want to be good. They want to be better, and most people are kind of a little sheepish about becoming best. But I want to cast the vision that I'm a bigger thinker, so I give them the best option so that they know that they've got room to grow. So even if they start off at good I've got a process of how I move people to better and to best. So presenting the solutions, what would be that be identify approach needs analysis. Presenting the solution is four. Overcoming objections is five. So you need to know that every referral partner, I've already got somebody that does that. So if you were to tell me I already got somebody that does that, I would be prepared for that. I understand how you feel. Janelle, many of the people that I talked to have felt the same way, but what they found was is that I was unique. I brought them something that nobody else was bringing them. I could provide them with premium data. I could provide them with technology skills. I could provide them with a digital outreach system that was far surpassing anything that their other referral partners were offering. Would you be open to exploring it further? Or if you're with somebody that's really good, I want to respect that, but I'd like to stay in touch. And I'll play number two. I'll play backup, because at some point I know my skill sets, I'm going to be better than your number one, and that's kind of a competition for me. So using the using the toolbox that, and I'll wrap it up here, using the toolbox that we have with the business optimizer, is that you can go, sorry, clicked on something, you can go here to the drop down menu, and you can go to referral sources, and you can see that I've created a depth chart. So for me, business owners, is a major category. I've also got another major category for top clients. You can choose to change the names of those, but in my foot. Ball world, there was always a depth chart. There was always the starter, and then there was the backup, and then there was the backup to the backup, and then there was the backup to the backup to the backup, and then usually there was the rookies. And the rookies were the people that were just joining the team and they hadn't proven themselves yet. And so if you build your own strategic team of advisor depth chart, and you identify people on this list, you can prioritize them using this little drop down menu, and you can choose them as A, B and C. A is starter, B is backup, C is a rookie. I'm not sure if this is a good fit or not, but you could start identifying who are those strategic partners in these major categories, and you can change the category names if you want to. And then you can go out and approach them. And then you could do a needs analysis, which is having a conversation, having coffee with them. And then you could present the good, better, best option. Here's how I work. Here's some things that we could do together. We could do a joint webinar together. We could do a zoom meeting. We could cross promote each other on social media. And then you overcome objections when they don't necessarily move forward, or maybe they just go, why don't we talk after the first of the year? Great. I understand how you feel. Many of the people that I work with felt the same way. Here's what I found, is that if we didn't have something on in writing, we probably wouldn't put it in our calendar. So can we book an appointment? Can we talk next January, 5, and can I put it into a calendar so that I can move them through the process, because, again, if you fail to create your own plan, chances are you're going to fall into somebody else's plan. And guess what your referral partner prospects have planned for you? How much so if you're more focused on moving that relationship forward, and you follow up after you overcome the objections, then you can begin to coach them up, coach them on how to do a better job of referring you. And that's a process. It's not an event. So strategic partnerships are an investment, and you have to be willing to invest in those to actually get them to produce a continuous annuity stream of referrals.

Jenelle Friday  1:56:57  
Okay, so quick. What are number sixes and number seven

David Bush  1:56:59  
identify approach needs, analysis, presentation, overcome objections. Start up, get them going, get them something that they can do to move them into the good, better, best options. Give them simple things that they can say yes to, that will move them, move them forward, and then coach them up on how they can shift from good to better to best. So the art is in the start, you got to get them started. You got to give them something to do, to move them forward. And I have a whole process that I'd be happy to share with you if you'd like to have a conversation about it. Further, reach out to us and I can walk you through that a little bit more.

Jenelle Friday  1:57:40  
Okay, so we're down to our last couple minutes. Just David, 60 seconds. What should participants do after today's session to get ready for tomorrow?

David Bush  1:57:49  
Yeah, the first thing that I would do is I would go back to those sections of the Business Builders playbook, and I would make sure that you are working through those and doing all you can we talked about a lot of different strategies here, but if you go back to ideal client profile, and you start here, and you start answering these questions, or you use AI to complete this, this is going to be a great start. And if you just spend a little bit of time with this each and every day, you can get through some of these other tabs and move yourself into a higher state of consciousness, competence and competent, confidence and competence. Consciousness, confidence and competence. You want to have that high level of all those C's to move you into a state of dominating the competition. And if you do those things now, you can begin to look at, you know, vendors and solutions, because now you have a plan, and now you're going to fit people, hopefully, like bdr.ai, into your plan, because it matches what it is that you're trying to accomplish. And if we haven't earned trust, credibility and respect and authority with you. We'll keep bringing the goods tomorrow, and we'll talk a little bit more about sales and how to build a sales funnel and a sales process, how to become a better leader, and then some of the operational strategies that are going to help you to scale your operation that's going to make it function more like a business rather than a job.

Jenelle Friday  1:59:19  
I love that. Theo, I did see your question earlier on a conversation about messaging, generic messaging, you and I can talk about that offline during your onboarding, but I also want to open the floor. We have a couple minutes left. Does anybody have any questions that are just brimming that you want to kind of address? I'm going through a chat. Also, I'd love to know in one word, everybody, what's your biggest takeaway from today? Right? Our goal is to bring you the best of the best. That's why David is here. Our goal is to provide a wealth of knowledge and resources that are going to impact you and encourage you and inspire you as business leaders heading into a new year with some foundational elements. So really appreciate. All of you who are here with us today, we're excited for what we're going to bring to the table tomorrow, and just really thrilled to be able to serve our community in the way that we're serving today. So Ralph asking, Will replays be available? Yes, Ralph, we will be posting the replays and recordings of these sessions for you, so stay tuned. For sure they'll be available.

David Bush  2:00:23  
Deal, yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow. And yeah, save the link to the recordings, and hopefully this will become a consistent tool for you. If you want to reach out and talk to bdr.ai about your lead generation strategy. I know I saw a couple of people that were commenting in there about needing a lead generation strategy. We'd love to just display what it is that we do and how we do it, whether it's using LinkedIn automation and, you know, sequences and AI, or maybe it's hosted webinars, or maybe it's just creating a really attractive lead magnet or a custom website, or maybe a digital dialer, is the strategy that you could best benefit from. But we are bdr.ai which is business development rep, powered by AI, so if you need somebody that's going to be doing business development for you and you want them to do it more than you're doing it so that you don't have to do it, you can do something else.

Unknown Speaker  2:01:15  
We'd love to support you Absolutely.

Jenelle Friday  2:01:18  
Thanks, David, for you being you. Thanks for being so generous with your time and your knowledge. We so appreciate it, and we're so excited to see everybody tomorrow. Thanks.

David Bush  2:01:26  
Janelle, thanks for tuning in to the Business Builders playbook. If this episode gave you some plays that you can start running in your business today, hit subscribe and share with another revenue leader who's tired of the pipeline grind. Building Predictable Revenue isn't something you figure out alone. Whether you're looking to automate your prospecting with bdr.ai, or you just want to talk through the growth challenges you're facing, reach out. We help business leaders just like you to build systems that actually scale. And if you're ready to stop being your company's Highest Paid Prospector, let's have a conversation. Reach out to us@bdr.ai until next time, let's keep building you.