A Small Business Development Tip With a Big ROI

Hi, it's Mo Bunnell, your business development expert and author of "The Snowball System: How to Win More Business and Turn Clients into Raving Fans". Have you ever wondered what would be a really high ROI tip that you could have and implement immediately and has this big payoff? Maybe the biggest payoff of any little relationship thing I can think of? I'm gonna give it to you in this video. And in the end, I'll share how I actually implement it myself. It's super simple.

Here's the deal. There's a lot of people that would be helpful to know their name, but you don't really have a super ongoing relationship with them. And we tend to be pretty good as business development professionals at remembering the names of people that are our clients and our prospects. We put them into our CRM. We keep their business card. We stick them to our wall to think about them. If you've gone through our system, you would even have a list of the top six or eight or ten people that are the most important to your future business development success.

We call that a Protemoi list. It's a Greek word that means first among equals. So most people have six or eight or ten people that are disproportionately important to their future success. And our system teaches people how to invest in them. But there's all these other people out there. Some of which we don't even have contact info for, but it'd be really helpful to know their names. And these are simple little relationships. Maybe it's your UPS driver. Maybe it's the maître d' at a restaurant you frequent often. Maybe it's somebody at an organization that supports you all the time. It could be someone at a hotel that you go to frequently. And all these names could be really important and helpful to remember and completely change your dynamic with the person if you remember their name.

And what you can do is just keep a short little set of notes for those kind of people's names. No reason to put them in your CRM or anything like that. You maybe don't even have a phone number or email for them. Just keep one little folder that has everybody's name in it, and you can type these in super quickly on your phone. And then what I found is, once I write their name in once or twice, I go back to that say restaurant later; I'm like, "Man, I wish I would remember that person's name." Well, once I had it in there and I look it up one time, then I usually remember the person by the third, fourth, or fifth time.

Here's how I do it, which is what I promised at the beginning of the email. I just keep an Apple note open on my phone. It syncs to my computer, my iPad, everything else. And I just have an Apple note that says 'NAMES TO REMEMBER' in all caps. And then people's names that I wanna remember, but I don't have a business card yet. It could even be somebody I met at a conference very quickly, because I sat next to them. Anything. I pop 'em in that 'NAMES TO REMEMBER' file. Then I skim it. I don't know, I probably see it on a plane once a month or maybe twice a month. I look at it or before I need it. Before I go to the restaurant and I'm trying to remember that waiter or waitresses' name or something, I'll do a quick scan.

And as I see the others, I tend to then remember their names more often. It's a super helpful tip. And what happens is you remember people's names. They remember you. They treat you better. I mean, the whole world around you starts to get more positive when you remember a few important people's names more often.

So that's this video. Super simple trick. I don't know of any research behind it. We usually quote research. There is none. I don't know what it is, but it's just something I found really helpful that I thought our audience would enjoy. So if you enjoyed it, please feel free to share it with others.

That's how people find out about us. And as with all our videos, we hope this one helps you help your clients succeed. Well, that's it for today. Thank you so much for watching. For more content like this, check out my most recent video and be sure to like them so other people can find out about us.

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