Episode 33: Prospecting With Purpose LIVE Results: Mastering Big Rocks And ABAV (Always Be Adding Value)

Prospecting on purpose is more than just a workshop; it's a mindset that propels you toward your goals, one big rock at a time. In this episode, our host Sara Murray shares the concept of “big rocks” and the art of ABAV (Always Be Adding Value). She explores the impacts of sales interactions and how embracing our authentic selves will resonate with us in building genuine relationships and adding value. Sarah explores the power of setting and pursuing your sales goals with clarity and focus through the big rocks that can shape our journey to success. She also discusses the winning trifecta that propels us toward sales success and meaningful connections — prospecting with purpose, embracing authenticity, and always adding value. Tune in now and begin your journey of growth and evolution in the world of sales and business!

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Prospecting With Purpose LIVE Results: Mastering Big Rocks And ABAV (Always Be Adding Value)

I am coming down from a huge adrenaline high because I wrapped up the 2nd out of 2 virtual events. It is the first time I've executed anything like that. Everything was so much fun. Everything went so great. I feel so lucky and blessed to have gotten through it, to be honest. I'm happy it's done, but at the same time, I am filled with so much joy because I was able to connect with a lot of readers from this show in a way that I hadn't before. I was able to meet new people. I was able to gain new connections and contacts. It's been so great. I feel so happy, blessed, and excited to share with you some of the outcomes from that session.

For this episode, I wanted to get a little bit behind the scenes on what went into planning it, not from necessarily a logistics side, but more how did these events work towards my overall business goals. We need to spend time and look at what areas are we spending our time because there's only so much time in a day, and time equals money. If you're spending your time with a certain customer who's not getting you to your sales goal, it's taking away time that you could be spending. We need to be very intentional and thoughtful with our time.

I wanted to share a little bit about why I wanted to host these events, what the outcomes were, what my own personal takeaways and learnings were from it, and then what some of the audience feedback said. That was a big motivator for me. It was to have the ability to get some feedback, and I got great feedback.

If you attended either session, we had Prospecting on Purpose LIVE, which was on July 14th, 2023. It was a Friday at 9:00 AM Pacific Time. It was a one-hour workshop all around confidence, mindset, and understanding your core values, your core passions, and your core competencies. What do you bring to the table in any type of interaction that sets you on the same level or the same pedestal as your clients or other people that you have to work with and interact with? This is not just in a business setting. It can be in a personal setting as well.

For both of these events, we did have a very specific work lens on it. In that particular session, it was a webinar format. We had great participation in the chat. We went through some of the mindset stuff from an individual perspective, and then how to get into the steps of relationship-building and what different tools can we use to harness those relationships. That event was called Prospecting on Purpose LIVE. That got us to where we landed the meeting. Once we get the meeting, how do we then take it through the sales cycle?

I had a second session that was over the course of three days. It was called ACE Your Sales. It breaks down the sales cycle into a very simple framework. ACE is an acronym. It stands for Action, Communication, and Execution. We spent a day on each of those topics with some pretty tactical methods. It was pretty hands-on on how to do it.

A lot of it is stuff that people know, but what I'm learning, and I'm getting this lesson every day in my business efforts, is we need to practice these things. You can't do one webinar and then you're done and you know how to do everything. This is always a work in progress. I want to appreciate the time that people spend sitting down and doing this work because it's only going to serve us as we continue in our own personal and professional development. Once again, truly from the bottom of my heart, thank you for joining.

Selling With Intention: Identifying Big Rocks

When we got into ACE Your Sales, I will share with you that Prospecting on Purpose has a lot of different meanings. One of the meanings when I think about Prospecting on Purpose, and I've shared this example on the show before in past episodes, means selling with intention and going into any type of business activity with an idea of what the outcome is going to be from that activity.

I’ll give examples of a networking event, for example. If you're attending a networking event, that's a prospecting activity. You're looking for new business. You're out trying to build relationships and drum up business activity and sales activity for your product or your service. If you're at a networking event, I encourage you to go in with a plan. Who do you want to meet that you don't know?

Don't assume anything about anyone. Use the tools that we talk about on this show to express interest and understand what that person does, how they live their life, and where the connection points are. If you go into a networking activity with a goal and a plan of what you need to get out of it, you're going to get so much more value as opposed to hanging out at the bar and talking to your coworkers who you already know. How are you spending your time? How are you spending your money or your company's money on business activities?

If you go on with a plan, you're more likely to get the outcome from that specific event. The same goes for a sales meeting. You go into a sales call. You have a plan of what you need to get to the next stage in the sales cycle. It's not only from an individual activity, but an overarching goal activity. There are two layers there.

I'll give you a little sneak peek into the content that we discussed. On ACE Your Sales, Action was the first day. Taking action is the most important piece in our prospecting efforts. It’s like dating. If our husband, wife, or partner, isn’t going to come knock on our door if we're sitting in our apartments or our homes, we have to go out and meet people. We have to go prospect. It's the same with our customers. We have to take action and take that step.

We also discussed action as it applies to your overall goal. The example I used in the workshop is we had a sales goal of $1 million. That was our hypothetical annual sales quota for the year. The way that we get to that goal is to chunk down and identify what are the big rocks that are going to get us to our goal. A big rock is anything that moves us closer to our overall goal. That can be a customer, a project, or a new prospect that we're chasing. Identifying these big rocks is going to help us see the vision to get to our full goal.

Prospecting With Purpose: A big rock is anything that moves us closer to our overall goal. Identifying these big rocks is going to help us seed the vision to get to our full goal.

A quick example I'll share is if our goal is $1 million and we have a customer who gives us 250,000 in revenue a year, that is a big rock. We need to be spending time supporting that client, nurturing that client, making sure they're happy with us and our service, and finding new opportunities within that account. How are we hunting and prospecting for new business within that big rock? We are using these types of clients as objectives to get us to our bigger goal.

When we start to sit down and look at this stuff, we may have a client who gives us $30,000 a year. We still value their business, but they might be asking us questions all day, every day. We might take their people out to lunch all day, every day. Is that the best use of our time? If our full goal is $1 million and we're spending a lot of time on an account that does $30,000, it doesn't mean we don't service that account, but we may need to look at and evaluate how we spend that time.

A big thing that we discussed is identifying big rocks to get us to our goals. I give you that backstory because I want to use the Prospecting on Purpose LIVE workshop as an example of a big rock in my business to show you how I break it down behind the scenes. Prospecting on Purpose LIVE was my free workshop on July 14th, 2023.

The ACE Your Sales folks got this document, but you could write it on a piece of paper easily. I overlay what is the objective, and I'm using the word objective very intentionally here. Our goal is X. The big rocks are these individual projects or objectives that we are working on to get us to our bigger goal. In this example, my entire business isn't Prospecting on Purpose LIVE. This was a project within my overall business goal.

At the top, I identify what is the actual objective. What's the event? Who's the customer? What's the project? In this example, Prospecting on Purpose LIVE was the objective, and then I give some specificity. My objective for Prospecting on Purpose was to get 200 people to register. That was my goal. That was my North Star. That's what I wanted to get registered for the event.

The next piece that I would encourage you to look at is I always sit and understand, “Why am I spending my time, my effort, and my money on this? What is the desired outcome? What is the why?” In this example, I had quite a few whys. Something that I've learned, and I've been practicing in my business, is a very cool concept. I hope this helps you. Anything you do, if you can get 3 times the return on it or if you can use it in 3 different ways, then it's worth doing. If you're debating on where to spend your time or you want to take on an extra workload, chase a project, or start a new project, think to yourself, “What are three other ways I can get value out of this activity or out of this big rock?” That has helped me.

Anything you do, if you can get three times the return on it or if you can use it in three different ways, then it's worth doing.

When I sat down and thought about, “Why am I wanting to do this? Why do I want to do this?” The first and most important thing to me is I wanted to be able to interact with the audience. Hosting has been fun. I've been learning a lot, but it is very one way in a lot of ways. I am someone who likes people. I like to hear from the audience. This was an opportunity to build on a platform and interact with the audience. I also wanted to serve the audience because I had quite a few requests come in to do something like this. It sounded fun. I thought, “Let’s do it. Let’s put this into action.” That was another motivator.

Another piece that I am needing to do for my business is to start building an email list. Hosting a free event gave me an opportunity to start an email list. I'm not sure yet what that list is going to do at this point, but I do have a lot of fun things cooking behind the scenes that I'm working on. I don't have a way to communicate it to you outside of the show, so having the ability to start to gather email addresses as a form of outreach and communication is one of the other motivators. That's part of why I chose to do the event.

Getting Feedback And Testimonials

Another piece that I wanted to prioritize is getting feedback and testimonials. It is a one-way application in a lot of ways outside of the lovely reviews that people have left. Thank you so much to those who have left a review. I was able to get really specific feedback, and I'll share what that feedback was. That was invaluable to me.

Those four big things were my motivator to launch Prospecting on Purpose. One of the biggest is that that was the foundation laying for ACE Your Sales, which was a paid workshop. I'm not sure yet how it fully fits into my business, but one thing that I've said on this show that I take to heart is that business is fluid. You have to be open to go with the flow and see where it takes you. I had enough requests for this type of format that I thought, “Let’s try it.” It forces me to figure it out and deliver. Those were all of my whys. I had 4 or 5 that I rattled off.

The next piece, and this is so important in moving any big rock forward to your goal, is we have to have end dates. Personally, I am very much motivated by external accountability. This has always been my way of operating. I can execute something, but I need something on the line. I need some skin in the game. I need to have other people having eyes on it because otherwise, I won't do it or it doesn't get me there as fast as I need to execute.

One of the things that has always helped me is I put a date on the calendar and then I have to get it done by the date. This is not just in business. This is in every sales role I've had. It's like, “Team, I want to host a hotel tour on this date. Let me lock in with the venue and let's go. We want to do a showroom opening. We want to do a panel discussion. I want to do X, Y, and Z.”

Get it on the calendar and then work backward from there. That has been something that has worked for me in terms of external accountability. Get it on the calendar and then you have to do it because you put it out in the world. That's how I operate. This is part of why I wanted to do it, too. I then have to reverse-engineer it and work backward from there.

In the final step in our big rock planning, we went through specificity. We went through our desired outcome or why we're doing it. We addressed the end date and leveraged that external accountability. The last piece is what very specific actions are we going to take to get us to that goal? An example I could share to execute is Prospecting on Purpose LIVE. If you registered for the event, you'll notice there was a landing page that gave you more details and had a registration form.

I found an awesome guy in India. His name's Pawan. Pawan tunes in to the show. Shout out to Pawan. Pawan built two beautiful landing pages for both events. I knew I could probably figure it out, but that's not my zone of genius. That's not where I wanted to spend my time because I could outsource and have Pawan help me. That was one of my action steps. I knew I needed the landing pages.

The second piece is all the backend software and infrastructure. It is so much work. I can't even tell you. I am shocked at how much time it took. I outsourced support there as well. From the landing page, you have your website. You have your CRM tool. You have the Zoom registration. You have a checkout page, and all of that stuff has to automate on the backend. It is not my zone of genius and not what I'm great at, so I had to outsource help.

I met a woman named Veronica. She has a digital marketing agency. If you were on Prospecting on Purpose LIVE, Veronica was on the call with us. She was managing the chat. She was dropping in the link. She was picking prize winners. I needed Veronica to help me execute Prospecting on Purpose LIVE. Those are two different pieces that I outsourced there.

I then had to build out the content. I had to promote the show. All of those specific things took action steps to get there. Your big, overarching goals for your business or your roles, if you can break them down into smaller, digestible chunks and reverse-engineer them in this way, everything gets done for the most part.

I've had three mantras that have served me, not just in the business but as I was employed as well that I hope serves you. The first is I always get everything done. I'm looking at it. I have it on a Post-it note above my desk. I always get everything done even *if it's not perfect. That’s a big thing that prevents people from taking action. It is that they either don't know how to do it, they don't know how to figure it out, or they're worried they're not going to have enough time to make it perfect so they don't even try. Messy imperfect action is what's going to get you to your goals. Action brings your dreams closer. Action brings clarity. I didn't mean to go into all these other mantras, but those are two others that I like.

The last two that I'm going to leave you with have resonated with me. I heard them on a podcast by a woman named Jen Casey. Her podcast is called The CEO Psyche. These two have helped me when I am tackling something new. The first is I am already a master at making things happen. The second is I give myself permission to be a beginner.

When I think about Prospecting on Purpose LIVE, I've never launched a webinar with my own content like this in this way, representing my business before, but I have presented a ton. I've built a bunch of presentation decks. I love presenting, holding space, and being an energizing person for others. All of that is stuff I've already done before. I needed to spin it in a way where it was new.

Figuring out all the backend software was new. It was a huge pain in the butt if I'm being honest. I can't believe how not easy that stuff is, but it forced me to figure it out. That's where that external accountability piece comes into play. I've built the machine. I figured it out. I got feedback from the audience that it was valuable and worth the effort. I can workshop this, change, and pivot in different ways because I did all this work on the backend. That is a big rock that's moving me toward my goal.

I hope that framework helps you when it comes to big rocks. From a logistical standpoint, I usually pick about 3 big rocks and I do it on 2-month cycles. I'll identify what are the 3 biggest things I need to do in the next 2 months to move my business forward. That can be broken down biweekly, bimonthly, quarterly, and so on. It helps me. I print them out and put them right next to my computer. I look at them every day and take the steps I need to do to move the big rocks forward. It helps me and I hope that helps you.

Prospecting With Purpose: Pick about three big rocks and do it on two-month cycles.

I want to share a couple of the feedback pieces and takeaways from the audience. I was a little surprised at some of the feedback that I got but in the best possible way. One of the biggest pieces of feedback that I was happy to hear is that I gave a lot of very specific examples. In the show, my workshops, and my presentations, I give a lot of very specific examples, but for the most part, they're all from my own experience. With 16-plus years as a corporate professional and then 10 years working at the local country club and schmoozing all the clients and schmoozing all the members, we learn this as pivot points throughout our whole lives.

To be very transparent with you, I was pretty anxious about it because I actively tried to get more generic examples, but it wasn't communicating the message in the way that I wanted to get the point across or the takeaway. I've been a little bit insecure about the fact that I've only been using my own examples. That's the only lens and experience I have.

One of the things that was so cool to receive feedback on, and almost consistently everyone gave me this feedback, is they loved the very specific examples, including the pain points. I've shared areas where I've made some big mistakes before. I share them because I would never want somebody else to make the same mistake.

Having that feedback and that two-way communication of saying the specific examples were incredibly helpful. That helps me. It removes a little layer of insecurity and fears that I had so I can continue to share real-life examples. As I continue to build the business, there's a lot of value in learning along with me as I go. I'm making mistakes left and right, but I'm also getting a lot of great wins, which has been the fuel to keep me going. That was a great piece of feedback, so thank you to everyone who shared that.

The other piece that was consistently across the board the most important piece of feedback is this concept in sales. We've all heard it. ABC, Always Be Closing. When we look at sales from a relationship standpoint, the way that we build genuine, authentic relationships is we always have to be adding value to the other person. ABC, Always Be Closing is important.

Always Be Adding Value

A more impactful way to look at it is an acronym that I created called ABAV, Always Be Adding Value. That's how we need to look at any type of exchange. When we prospect on purpose, we always need to be thinking ABAV. It is like, “How am I adding value to the other person?” If you start to do this work and understand your own values, what you bring to the table, what you're good at, and what your company's good at, it's a lot easier to be confident when you're going into these meetings because you're adding value to people. It can be in all sorts of ways.

At my very first meeting when I started my company, I went to this lunch with someone who was very successful and impactful. They've been a guest on the show. I felt uncomfortable because I didn't have anything to add to her, but at the same time, I know how to practice these things. I knew she was working on a personal project. I saw a magazine article that reminded me of the personal project she mentioned. I cut the magazine article out and put it in an envelope. When we were at lunch, I gave her the envelope.

It doesn't have to be huge. It doesn't have to be something like, “I'm giving you this magazine article because one day, I might ask you for a favor.” That's not it. We always need to be thinking, “How can we support the other person in their business, their goals, and their life? How are we always adding value?” If you get to this place where you're always adding value to others, when it comes time to cash in the favors and ask for things, it's easy to ask.

Prospecting With Purpose: If you get to this place where you're always adding value to others, when it comes time to cash in the favors and ask for things, it's really easy to ask.

I felt zero guilt or yuckiness asking for feedback because I had enough deposits in their bank accounts to ask for that feedback. I feel like we get into this feedback loop whereas if we're always adding value to each other, work becomes more fun. It becomes a lot more seamless to execute things together as partners and we get to do it by being our authentic selves. That's my third and final takeaway from this. Our own superpowers are what make us special, likable, and memorable. That's why people want to work with us. The relationship is the most important piece. If you can show up as your authentic self, it's going to shine through in your interactions.

The final example that I'll share is years ago when COVID was rounding out and we were able to get together outside with my team, we did this Secret Santa. I was at this store called Paper Source. They had all of these little tiny hand-finger puppets and I bought 1 for me and 1 for my Secret Santa. I thought we could do little virtual high-fives on our Zoom calls or on our team calls.

I could not stop laughing at this little tiny hand. It was cracking me up, so on the way to the Christmas party, I stopped and bought hands for the whole team. We were in tears laughing at these tiny little hands. This show is on YouTube. I'm playing with a little tiny finger-hand puppet if you want to go watch it on YouTube. I love the tiny hands. They're hysterical. They make me laugh every time.

I found ways to play with the tiny hands throughout the workshop. It was super fun. Somebody won a set of tiny hands. She ended up sending me a great email. Shout-out to Holly there. It was so fun to be able to play with the little hands as part of my business. The little hands have evolved and they have different shapes. There's one with a middle finger, one with a thumbs up, one making an okay symbol, and then one that makes this rock on. Your center two fingers are down and you got the Rock On symbol. That's one of my tiny hands.

I had a follow-up meeting probably an hour after Prospecting on Purpose LIVE ended. It was with a great guy. He has a popular LinkedIn Live show. I was introduced to him by one of my guests. We had a meet-and-greet discovery call. I hop on the call and he says, “You had a big event this morning, didn't you?” I said, “Yeah, I did. You're catching me on the comedown. I got a lot of weird energy going.” He laughed and said, “I understand that.”

He says, “How did the event go?” Deadpan, I threw up the little tiny hand emoji with the Rock On symbol and said, “I'd say it rocked,” like the weirdest little girl. This guy died. He was laughing so hard. He was off-camera. He lost his mind. It was so funny. We were both laughing so hard. We then got into his audience, his show, and what they were looking for. We were talking about sales messaging and whatnot.

He says, “I got to tell you. This was such a fun conversation. Our audience needs you. Let's lock it in. Please bring the tiny hands.” I gave him the okay symbol. I was like, “No problem.” It was one of those things where it was a cool full circle moment for me personally because I get to build a business and a conversation where I get to play with my little tiny hand puppets. It's fun. I did this in corporate, too. Embracing your authentic self in how you connect with others, people are here for it. It makes it way more fun to work and collaborate.

Prospecting With Purpose: Embrace your authentic self in how you connect with others. People are here for it. It makes it way more fun to work and collaborate.

I want to say thank you so much to those who attended. If you missed it and you want to be notified of future events, you can sign up for email notifications at the website. It's called Connect.SaraMurray.com. I don't have anything planned coming up, but it was so much fun. I got so much joy out of it. The feedback and the testimonials were amazing. I'll add them to my website soon.

A wholehearted thank you. Thank you for tuning in to the show. Thank you for attending the live events. Thanks for being along with me on this journey. I hope that it's providing value to you. From the bottom of my heart, I am filled with joy and where we're at. Thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.