Author to Authority
Ep 389 - Purpose Driven Prospecting With Chris Baden
July 21, 2023
This episode of the Author to Authority podcast emphasizes the importance of having a clear purpose and taking action quickly to achieve desired results. Entrepreneurs are encouraged to focus on providing value to their customers, prioritize their efforts, and make meaningful connections. Additionally, the episode focuses on concepts such as Finding a Critical Number, Daily Minimums, Successful Business Systems, Building a Successful Business, and Creating a Book.
This episode of the Author to Authority podcast emphasizes the importance of having a clear purpose and taking action quickly to achieve desired results. Entrepreneurs are encouraged to focus on providing value to their customers, prioritize their efforts, and make meaningful connections. Additionally, the episode focuses on concepts such as Finding a Critical Number, Daily Minimums, Successful Business Systems, Building a Successful Business, and Creating a Book. These concepts emphasize the importance of understanding the numbers behind a business, setting daily minimums, creating a system to achieve desired results, taking risks to build a successful business, and dedicating time and effort to create a book. Finally, it encourages listeners to believe in themselves and take action quickly to achieve success.

Chris is typically thinking about building 3 things at any given moment: a life-long marriage, world impacting family and multi-million dollar businesses. The last three businesses Chris has started have done over $1 million each per year in revenue. In the last 10 years of being self-employed and employing others, he attributes Purpose Driven Prospecting as his key skill to solve problems and add value to others. Chris has thrived in B2B sales, B2C sales, and sales in numerous industries. He was recently featured in a new best seller in 9 different categories called 'Million Dollar Dads'. While business is growing, so is his family! Chris is a father of two boys and a new baby girl. Outside of business, Chris and his wife, Beth, competed on the hit TV Show American Ninja Warrior. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbaden-55/

www.flowchat.com

 

Episode Timestamps:

 

(00:00:02) Purpose Driven Prospecting

(00:07:04) Finding Critical Number

(00:13:20) Daily Minimums

(00:19:06) Successful Business Systems

(00:24:56) Building a Successful Business

(00:30:57) Creating a Book

(00:36:31) Creating Clarity in Business

Transcript

00:00:02 - Speaker A

You are an entrepreneur, a professional, a speaker, or a coach. And although you've come a long way, it's time for you to take it to the next level. We've got you. This is the author to authority podcast. We'll help you use authority and influencer marketing to build your business stronger and faster by publishing a book. You'll hear from guests that are thought leaders in sales, marketing, networking, communication, social media, promotion, and business leadership. Let's do it. This is the author to authority podcast. And now your host, the extraordinary word ninja, Kim Thompson Pender.

 
00:00:55 - Speaker B

Welcome to the author to authority podcast. I'm your host, Kim Thompson Tinder, and I am so excited to announce that in August, we will be having the 400th episode of the Author to Authority Podcast. And in celebration of that, I have decided to do the top 25 episodes of The Author to Authority Podcast for the whole summer. And we will celebrate the fourth hundred about mid August. So there'll be a couple of episodes after that. And I chose these episodes because they were the ones that I just personally felt were the ones that gave tremendous amount of value, that were going to help you as an entrepreneur, professional, a speaker, a coach to move your business forward. These were value packed episodes that are just going to give you action steps that are just going to really propel you to the next level. So I'd love for you to sit back, relax, and enjoy this top 25 episode today. I am so excited to have Chris Baden back with us. And on the last episode, we covered so much that we actually didn't get to some of the things that we were supposed to cover. And Chris told his story, and he can touch on it a little bit today, just as a review. But we wanted to talk about purpose driven prospecting, and we did start to touch on that, but he never actually got a chance to share the main points that he wanted to. Plus, we didn't even get a chance to talk about his book. So we're going to continue the conversation today. So welcome back to the show, Chris.

00:02:59 - Speaker C

Kim, thanks for having me on. I'm excited to hang out and we'll get into some more of the tactical and the training and the tools that people can take in their world with them today, right now, and start seeing results. So I'm excited for that.

 00:03:15 - Speaker B

So Chris, why don't you just give us a brief introduction to yourself because maybe people didn't listen to the last episode.

 00:03:22 - Speaker C

Yeah, so I got thrown into commerce ten years ago and I've been commission only, employing myself and others for the last ten years of my life. And it has been fun and exciting and painful and scary and all this slew of emotion that I'm sure you listening or watching this right now have felt. Entrepreneurship is great, but it is also very challenging and very hard. And in the second month of my entrepreneurial journey, I'm working 70 plus hours a week for the whole month. And I made $800 for the whole month. And I learned an important lesson that shaped the rest of my journey so far. And that is I don't get paid to work. I get paid to produce results. And the way that I produce results is I have to get results for other people. I have to get results for the market that I serve. Business is just a systematic way of delivering a product or service. But the experience that you create in the business, but also the experience you create for your prospects and your customers, is the art. And that's the how. And so it's purpose driven prospecting. It's starting those conversations and it's leading into this experience that makes you stand out in the marketplace. But more importantly, it creates a culture and environment that you absolutely love. And so in the first two months of my journey, learning that I get paid to produce results and the way that I do that is produce results for others, it taught me a hard lesson, and it's very humbling. And you have to be very honest with yourself. Am I doing that or not? And if you're not, then you go back to work and figure it out and come back the next day when you're ready.

 00:05:15 - Speaker B

I loved what you said there and how you shifted your focus to not just selling a product or a service, but obtaining a result. And I think especially people who are in service based entrepreneurship, you have to get results for other people because that's your product.

 
00:05:43 - Speaker C

Yeah, and there might be some people listening. Wealth, health, and relationships are kind of the three main markets wealth, health, and relationships. If you throw any business at me, they will fall into at least one of those areas predominantly. And so even somebody that is in, say, the relationship market, it's like, well, how do you measure intangibles like love or more connection, and you can still tie it to certain patterns. What I'm saying here is don't let any mindset or thought take you out of what result you create, because that result will help you focus on why you're doing what you're doing, why you're sacrificing time from your family, why you're putting yourself out there and dealing with loads of rejection so it'll remind you what you're doing. It'll help your whole team focus on the actual right thing. So you'll dramatically reduce the sideways energy and frustration with team, and you'll also be able to market with full conviction on exactly what you're doing. Why does that matter? It matters because guess what? Nothing sells harder than the truth. People love hearing it. You don't need to convince anybody because it's true. They already know it to be true. And for you, it feels so much better. There's no resistance or anxiety that you have throughout your sales or marketing process, you have full peace in your heart inside, and therefore full conviction to go out and share that you're building and sharing and growing from a place of peace internally rather than complete utter chaos and turmoil. And it turns out people don't really want more of that in their life, so they don't want to buy from you when you're in that place. This all said, if you're in relationships, if it's marriage counseling specifically, hey, before I talked to this married couple, the last date night was six months ago. Now, they are consistently going on one date night per week, and they're saying I love you x amount times more. They're holding hands or kissing more throughout the day compared to what they were before. You might think I'm crazy or weird, and I'm not saying that's the best or right answer for marriage counseling or relationship, but I'm just saying that there's always going to be some type of outcome behavior or result shift because of the service or work that you're doing.

 00:08:21 - Speaker B

Yeah, there's something tangible. There's a tangible result. And by doing all of those things, they now have a stronger marriage. They now have a stronger relationship. They now feel more connected to each other. But the tangibles are holding hands, saying I love you, and going on date.

 00:08:42 - Speaker C

Nights like when we just got married or first started. Yeah, that's exactly the point. So anyone listening? I hope that if there's only one takeaway that you get so far, it's that, hey, some people will call those KPIs key performing indicators. It's your one critical number. And if you feel chaotic like, oh, there's too much going on. I got to do everything that's completely normal for any business owner entrepreneur. Know that you're not alone, and your saving grace will be that one critical number that gives you the permission to let those other things be set aside rather than you put them in the junk drawer or the junk room and you close the door and you try to pretend that it's not there. But meanwhile, in the back of your mind and emotionally, it's sucking all the energy from you by focusing on your one KPI, your one critical number. Hey, you know what? I closed x amount of deals, or we moved the company forward in the right direction. And when that happens, everything else is taken care of. You can give yourself mental, emotional, and physical time permission to not carry that negative or sideways energy. A great example to kind of close on this point is southwest. You know what Southwest's critical number is?

 00:10:02 - Speaker B

What's Southwest and what is their critical number?

 00:10:05 - Speaker C

Great question. Southwest airlines sorry, should have put the Southwest airlines very, very good company to evaluate. And their big number one critical number is they say it in a phrase wheels up. Wheels up, meaning if the wheels are up on a plane, that means that the plane is taking off and they're serving their customers. And for wheels to be up, you need to manage the pilots and the crew and the flight attendants. Maintenance team needs to be on point. So to make sure they're on time, it's the one thing that pulls everyone together. Hey, if we create this one result, hey, this is on fire. That's broken, someone's pissed about this, and that person needs to be fired, or this person just had a horrible life situation and now we got to fill. There's always going to be some type. This is a business, for crying out this is the giant project we're talking about. Of course things are going to be messy, but if you have that one thing happening, hey, you at least know that you're going to live and earn the right to keep playing this game of business for another day.

 00:11:12 - Speaker B

Sort of reminds me of Peretto's Principle, that 80% of your results come from 20% of your action. And so if you can determine what's that 20% that drives your business forward, that produces 80% of your results, you can get rid of the 80% of things that are dragging you down, wearing out your energy, and not producing much.

 00:11:43 - Speaker C

Yes, that's it. I think the lie is that we have to do it all. The lie is that we have to do everything, and the truth is we can't. No, but we live in between that lie and that truth, and it's gray and it's painful and it's emotional turmoil, and so it's just having somebody say, maybe that's just what someone needed to hear today is just, hey, you know what? Here's permission to reset. Focus on one number, assess how you serve the business, and to accomplish something greater than yourself, it takes more than yourself. John Maxwell says it great. Hey, if you can ask for help or you can give up on your vision. The reason that your vision is overwhelming you, because it's greater than you. And it's not meant for you to do alone. It's meant for you to welcome others into that picture. And that's part of you're given the canvas, and that's your one color, and there's more colors that will be needed to paint the business and the service that you're putting together. So plenty of analogies, right? We could do this all day. I think the promise here is where do we start? How do we apply some of this stuff? And while we can this is my opinion good, bad, right or wrong, the last ten years of life has humbled me and taught me that I cannot control a lot of things, and I also can't control results. I cannot control when somebody decides to buy and when they decide not to buy, for whatever reason. I can lead a horse to water, so to speak, but I can't make them drink. But there are ways we can give the horse some salt to make them thirsty, so maybe they're more likely to drink. And I got a lot of analogies for some reason today, but hopefully this is making sense with everyone listening, watching today. So let me give you some salt. While we can't control results, we can control activity. We can control activity. I don't get paid to work. I get paid to produce results. The way that I produce results is I produce results for others and I talk to as many freaking people as I can because I got to go find the best person that I can get results for, and that's my and or my company's responsibility. And so I boil that down into activity I can control. And write this word down, daily minimum.

 00:14:34 - Speaker B

I like that.

 00:14:35 - Speaker C

What is your daily minimum? Daily minimum is a standard. In other words, you do not go below the daily minimum or there's problems. Right. Do not go below the daily minimum. Now for me currently, that is 15 new outreaches per day, five days a week, 15 new people that fit a set of criteria every single day. And I started doing that myself.

 00:15:07 - Speaker B

Nice.

 00:15:08 - Speaker C

And then it led to follow up and a lot of conversations and then even more phone calls. And then now I'm trying to do all of it, but then also run a company and it was way too much. And so I started building team and system, and so now I have a team that does outreach of 15 new people per day. It's my daily minimum, right? Can't dip below that. Dip below that. Hey, what happened? What fell apart? I can track that activity and I can tell you how many new people I talk to and can tell you how many people will respond. I can tell you how many people will book a call. I can tell you how many people will show up and then how many people will buy. I have my sales process, and every business needs to have their own sales process. And you need to be able to see your KPIs, your key performing indicators, which are really your activity indicators. And when you simply look at these and I have it up, I can share, screen and show people a rough process that I go through. If that's easier for people watching, I'm a visual person, but if not, I can talk through it in a simple way too. What do you think would work best, Kim?

 

 

00:16:12 - Speaker B

Well, show it and talk through it because this is on video and podcast as well.

 

 

00:16:16 - Speaker C

I guess it's that early bird gets the worm if podcast listeners. Hey, if you come to the Facebook group, you get to see it first and also see.

 

 

00:16:25 - Speaker B

YouTube as well.

 

 

00:16:27 - Speaker C

And YouTube. Okay. I think those share buttons on your side just changing like the videos. There it is. Okay, so you can see we do a three day sales planning intensive with our high ticket clients. This is what we go through. So this is a tool that will be provided to you guys for free. So you guys can use this. And please, by all means, use this. Increase and track your activity, impact your life in a positive way with this, not just for you, but for your relationships that are around you, for your team, for your community, for your state, for your country. I know that might sound dramatic or intense, but come on. Life is about more than just us. And we do affect more people. And it starts with discipline focused, result oriented activity that we can control. So day one, we're going to focus on day three. But day one is a really powerful have do be exercise. What do I want to have? What do I want to do? And who do I want to be? And you write those things down and you write roughly how much they cost. Some people, this really surprises. Oh, my gosh. All the things I wanted aren't nearly as much as I wanted. Whoa. They're way more than I thought. I got to get to work. But it gives you that relativity and it calculates the year before. Then once you know that number, you would essentially go to day two or the second part. And I know this is kind of small, but it's okay. You'll be able to see this whole thing with the link that's provided. Now you know how much you need to generate to live the life that you want. You would simply say, well, I got to create a business that generates a net profit of that or more. And this process will say, hey, what are the products and services that I'm selling and what amount of quantity to hit that goal? Just simply put. And then that ultimately leads to, okay, well, to generate a business that creates that type of results, what type of activities do I need to create? And so this is just a generic pipeline that we can look at. So I can give you some ideas of what maybe your daily minimums need to be in order to accomplish what you'd like. So hopefully that's a very simple to follow, logical process. But I want to draw your attention to here. This is really important. How do you know if your daily minimums are working properly or the right way? Well, what I'm giving you here are ranges. So if you're converting at these particular ranges, let me zoom in a little bit so it's easier to see it's so small. There we go. This is much better. If you look here at the ten to 40%, if you look here at the 20% to 50%, in the second phase, 70 to 90, what these are, are the ranges of what conversion you should be creating at a certain point in your pipeline. So let's walk through this together. As an example, let's say that this month. You want another? How many clients do you want, Kim? A hundred thousand?

 

 

00:19:38 - Speaker B

Let's say six.

 

 

00:19:41 - Speaker C

Six clients. Okay, well, let's play with this and notice below the range. I just put a percentage that's right in the middle of the range. So let's say conversion is average for all of these, and we want six new clients. Let's type in 1000 leads, 1000 outreaches. Well, that gets you 14 clients. Okay, so not 1000. I guess it'd be roughly half, right? Let's try 608. Let's try 507. I went the wrong way. Okay, so 400. Yeah, six. So I went 100 above half. Anyway, I'm getting all spun up in numbers in my head, but we got it. So six clients. So we just need to do 400 outreaches. And so if there's 30 days in a month, we take 400 divided by 30, that's just 13 new outreaches. 13.3. So call it 14 outreaches per day. That's it. You just need to reach out to 14 new people per day. And with that rate, if 25% of them say, hey, you know what? I will give you some form of communication, they become a lead. I'll give you some form of communication to continue the relationship. They would be a lead. And if only 25% of them said yes, you would have 100. Currently, ours is converting about 38.7%. You can tell I'm a little nerdy with numbers, and he's knowing our KPIs and activity is so important. But if it's just 25, that's 100. Of the 100, let's say 35%, say, yes, I'm going to jump on a call with you, and they book a call on your booking link. And of those 35, let's say only 80 actually show up, right? It'd be great if none of us got ghosted, but it happens. So that means we actually complete 28 calls. And if we only closed approximately 20%, that'd give us about six clients. Wow, there's some rounding up here, right?

 

 

00:21:45 - Speaker B

Yeah, of course.

 

 

00:21:47 - Speaker C

Because 10% is 2.8, but it gets you close. Maybe you need to do 412, but 14 new outreaches per day would get you six clients. Now you know your sales process. Now, here's the fun part, Kim. Let's say man, our outreaches man, we're getting 40% of people, so it's a lot higher. And our book calls are happening, but no one's showing up.

 

 

00:22:20 - Speaker B

We know exactly where it's broken.

 

 

00:22:23 - Speaker C

We know exactly where to go. There's no guesswork, people. Business is a systematic way of delivering a product and service. There's not any guesswork. So if you've ever had any amount of emotional or mental overwhelm or stress of wondering how you're going to make it or how you're going to hit your revenue goals, if you know your numbers and simply apply this sales activity projection here, it'll solve all that. You'll know exactly what you need to focus on and what outcome you need to see. So it takes all the guesswork out, which really frees up a lot of mental and emotional energy capacity. And then you start sleeping better, and then you start performing better, and then you're like here's something that I asked myself, Kim, because any given moment, I'm thinking about one of three things. Building a lifelong marriage, world impacting, family. I've got three kids under five and multi million dollar businesses, and what the world tells me is, Chris, you can't have it all.

 

 

00:23:29 - Speaker B

Yes, you can.

 

 

00:23:30 - Speaker C

You can't have successful see, I agree with you, but as, like, young Chris a while ago, and I still hear it today, hey, Chris, you can't have successful, healthy relationships. You can't be a husband, father, and know, run, I'd say, small to mid sized companies, companies that do seven to eight figures a year and revenue, right? You can't do that, Chris. And I didn't know anybody at the time that had ever even done that. So the world tells us all kind of stories, but something inside me said, that just feels like BS. It doesn't make sense to me. You're telling me that there's nobody on planet earth out of 7 billion plus people that haven't had a lifelong marriage that is healthy and passionate, that also has functioning society, contributing kids, and also has a successful business, meaning they're a quality leader showing up in a powerful, impactful way for their team? And you're telling me there's not one person on planet Earth that is that? See, that's where I went. Go ahead, Rick. Question. Or you're saying, I know somebody, or.

 

 

00:24:44 - Speaker B

You are that person, married 30 years to the same man, and we have a great marriage. I've got two wonderful, responsible, adult children, and my business may not be quite that big yet, but I run a successful business with.

 

 

00:25:03 - Speaker C

Thing. Hopefully, other people hear. What I continue to remind myself is, there you go, Kim's, doing it. It's possible. We've been only married seven years so far. We've got three kids, and it's, you know, first marriage, and and again, the goal is lifelong, passionate, fulfilling marriage and then building companies. I've I've built three companies in the last five years in three different industries that have done at least seven figures or more in sales. Per impossible. It was impossible to me. I was like, that doesn't even make sense. I don't even know anyone that's done that. But something inside me said, but come on, there's got to be at least one person. There's got to be at least more than one Kim in the world. And you know what? It wasn't but, like, a year, year and a half later where I found myself in a room where everybody was that there's in between 30 and 40 of them. It was a mastermind, right? But I was like, Now, I wasn't that yet, but I just found a way to get in the room. I was the odball, right? And I was like, wow, look at this. And then I met more and more and more. My point is, just be careful of the stories that you're telling yourself around who you are and what you can do or what's even possible, because what we believe often will dictate our trajectory. It's not our fault that we maybe have never seen what seems impossible to us, but it is our fault if we buy into something less than that.

 

 

00:26:47 - Speaker B

So true. We've got a few minutes left. So I've got one question for you on this wonderful worksheet, and then we want to get to your my one question is because people have a hard time getting started, so they look at this and they say, great. But I can already hear people in my head going, chris, what do you consider an outreach?

 

 

00:27:11 - Speaker C

Yeah, great question. Great question. A new contact. So, for example, specifically, what we're doing and what we're finding to be the highest quality, the most personable, the best connection is just reaching out on social, specifically Facebook, saying hi. You can look at their profile. You can see if they're potentially a good fit for what you're doing. And here's the thing. Treat other people the way you want to be treated. Approach other people the way you want to be approached. That solves about 99% of the problems. Well, it's scary, and I don't know what to say. That's okay. Those can be solved. All that can be solved. And you know what? It's free.

 

 

00:28:05 - Speaker B

Yeah.

 

 

00:28:06 - Speaker C

So when we bring a new product to market, service to market, that's exactly what we do, because the cold market is the most honest. They'll tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. They'll tell you why they love it, and they'll tell you why they hate it. And so we like to do that. What we did is we started doing outreach. And in fact, if I scroll down here, our first campaign of doing that type of outreach, what we know, you get one type of contact information. We just invited them to a Facebook group, and then we built some relationship. We had multiple steps in between here, but eventually when things were warm and we qualified the person enough via profiling and convert chat, we had invite them to a call, and we actually had 88% of people show up to our calls. And so we ended up getting 17 people into our high ticket mastermind. So this took about a six week period. We wrote just over $100,000 in business. We had no webinar. We had no funnels, we had no marketing. We had a Google Doc. We had a clear problem we solved, and we just started outreaching to people, and we followed up, and we built relationship, and we listened. And, yeah, after about six weeks, we wrote over $100,000 in business. And since we've refined the process and increased price and it's worked out well, eventually we'll probably do paid ads and summits and challenges and other things that are very powerful, very good. If you enjoy those things, look, all of them are good. All of them can work. How do you want to grow your business? We like to start with the least amount, hear me closely, the least amount of effort. Not in trying to get away with anything. It's just we got to move quickly. If we don't get revenue into the business, we're out of business.

 

 

00:29:59 - Speaker B

Some entrepreneurs, too, who have very extremely small, like your small entrepreneurs, your solopreneurs, and that what you have just said is golden because it costs no money to create a Facebook group. It costs time, some time to create content. But I usually block out like maybe a two or three hour window a week to create content for my groups and my one page. And one of some of the things I'm doing can be recycled through. So I'm building out a 90 day cycle of content that will just continually repeat because people forget it anyway. And you can do it and all it costs you is some time. Make those connections and get it out there.

 

 

00:30:50 - Speaker C

The answer is time or money. You can use your time or you can use your money. It's going to take one or both of those to grow. And here's a phrase that people, they don't talk about, everyone hears. Hey, it takes money to make money. It's a true statement. It's fine, it's true, but they don't tell you. The second part of that is in the clarifying part of that, which is he didn't say it has to be your money to make money. True. So you can raise capital. It's one option. It's not my go to. And so it takes money to make money. Why? It should be the market's money. It should be the customer's money. You solve a problem. You're giving your time to solve a problem. You do it so well. In exchange for that, they give you money. Now you have money, and you can use that money to make money if you really want. But I would start there. Another part of that that's really powerful is guess what? We're talking about a conversation. It's just a conversation.

 

 

00:31:48 - Speaker B

Yes.

 

 

00:31:48 - Speaker C

The best copywriters are the ones that pay you, not the ones you hire. Hey, here's why I'm paying you. Like, they'll be honest with you. They'll just tell you they're giving you all the answers to the test. You're connected to your market. I know how to solve lead gen in a very free and efficient way, and I know how to scale and build sales teams because I'm talking to coaches and consultants and agency owners. I've talked to almost 500 in the last six months. I know what you're thinking. I know what you're feeling, and I am that person still. So it's just a very natural conversation and you will feel the same way. You Kim. Yes. But you listening and watching when. You're doing that type of work, there's no shortcuts, right? But this is the systematic and you can see our first campaign, man, we only had 17. You know why? It was ice cold. It was ice cold, but we were still above 10%. And now we've since got this up to 38%. This one's still around 37, 38%. This one's actually closer to, like, 82, 80% now because there's just more volume. And actually, we tripled prices. And then our close rate went to about 12% to 15%, which we're totally fine with because it still equals a lot more revenue, even though we're not closing as much, but we're making more money, and we're with just more quality clients as well, so it's a better combo for us anyway. I know we got to talk about the book. Please keep I know I talked too much. Kim, keep guiding me. Hopefully this is helpful for somebody listening, though.

 

 

00:33:30 - Speaker B

Well, we're over the 30 minutes mark. We usually go about 30 minutes. So I want to ask you one question, and then I want you to answer that quickly and then tell people how they can connect with you. So in a couple of sentences, tell me what was the good, bad, and ugly of creating that book, of that chapter, that book, what you had done and what it is.

 

 

00:33:54 - Speaker C

Okay, well, you said good, bad, and ugly, and we joked about this before, and you don't have to keep sharing screen if you don't. And Kim, I'll make sure I get you that link for everyone listening watching today. Okay, you say good, bad, ugly. We were joking about actually the experience was ugly, bad, and then the the ugly part was, oh, gosh, there's so many. I've got three kids. I'm building a business. It's like, where am I supposed to I already don't sleep enough. How am I supposed to do this? And so it was just ugly, it was uncomfortable, and I calendar blocked first. It's like, okay, the bad part was I have to write, and this is just being completely vulnerable. There's a good chance that I'm severely dyslexic. I haven't known this my entire life. Even if I find I might go get tested. I did like, this preliminary test. They're like, I'm 34. I did well at school. I hated school. I'm a very slow reader. There's a lot of insecurities around all that writing and just very difficult for me. I do audiobook for everything. The point is, how am I supposed to be an author? That was the bad part. And when somebody told me that ghostwriters exist also, I can just go for my morning walk and record my voice and my thoughts. And then there's smart people that know how to put that into words, aka editors. I was like, so from my experience and my process, it eventually landed on good because I have so many ideas. I got whiteboards, and I got notes everywhere. And every app that does all the notes, and it's this constant flow. It's really overwhelming a lot. To be honest. It was cool to see my thoughts crystallized into a tangible product that's valuable to other people rather than just living in my world and no one understanding what I'm solving and what experiences I'm having. And it's an experience I'd highly recommend everyone going through, even if you don't sell it and it's not for anyone else. Do it for you.

 

 

00:36:11 - Speaker B

Yes.

 

 

00:36:13 - Speaker C

I didn't realize how much of a mess my head was, and it was very kind of frustrating at points, but very helpful. I'm like, okay, this is a good point. I see where you're coming from, Chris, but this needs some work. And to be able to kind of third party experience that and then go through it, it really helped give me clarity on what I am solving and what I am offering and what I am doing. And outside of it, did become a bestseller in nine different categories. We had a great team that was marketing it again, all these nice achievements really don't come from me. They come from smarter people than me, just to be real. But even if I didn't have all that, it really helped. My messaging conversations I'm having, like, this marketing efforts shortened our sales cycle. There's other good benefits. So ugly. Bad good was my experience.

 

 

00:37:08 - Speaker B

Cool. So, Chris, how can people connect with you if they've been listening to these last two podcasts episodes and they're like, I need to talk to Chris about my business.

 

 

00:37:18 - Speaker C

How can they get a hold of Facebook? Just send me a message on Facebook. That is the best way. If you'd like to email me, it's Chris. [email protected]. And Ascenders is ascenders salescenders plural.com. You can email me. Messaging me on Facebook is ideal. Is great. We can just again, it's I want to create, with all this, my ethos, my mission is to create more human connection in the world. And I think that that just starts with the conversation.

 

 

00:38:00 - Speaker B

Thank you so much, Chris. This has been an amazing two episodes. So make sure if you missed the first one, you go back and listen to that as well. So this has been Kim Thompson Pinder and Chris Baden on the author to Authority podcast. Thank you so much for listening and we will see you on the very next episode. Bye now.

 

 

00:38:22 - Speaker A

You've been listening to the Author to Authority podcast, the extraordinary Word Ninja. Kim Thompson Pender has helped over 200 entrepreneurs, professionals, speakers, and coaches write and publish their books that have become incredible marketing tools for their business. And many of those have gone on to become Amazon bestselling authors and have used their books to land high level clients and get on big stages. We hope you've enjoyed the show. Make sure to, like, rate and review, and we'll be back soon. But in the meantime, hit the website at www.authortoauthoritypodcast.com. See you next time.