What's up? I'm Rachel Spiewak and this is Rock Your Tribe Radio where community, fun, social media and business collide. I firmly believe that parties are the answer to all of life's problems. Seriously. Building a community, bringing people together for a common purpose and serving them, that's your mission as a business owner. Let's make it happen. It's time to rock your tribe.
(00:28): People get significant value by being part of a community. This, this is why communities are so powerful. Welcome to the show you just heard from my client and friend, Liz Dederer CEO of selling with service and founder of the sales school for entrepreneurs. You're about to find out why this highly accomplished sales coach wanted to work with me to overhaul her digital community. I don't want to ruin the surprise, but it turns out that focusing on her community has increased Liz's own conversions while decreasing the amount of time she spends filling her pipeline. What I love about Liz's approach to sales is that it's all about relationships. Just like building a community. If you want a strategic reason for why I do what I do, why I help businesses build powerful communities. It's because the most efficient path to sales is through community. But of course there's more, there's doing good work, providing a service and creating a space where your tribe feels included.
(01:26): One of you could do that while marketing less and earning more, get out your pen and paper because we're about to launch torpedoes of wisdom on you. Ready? Here we go. Rachel, how are you? I'm good. How are you? Fabulous. I'm so happy. You're here, Liz. Dederer you are such a bad. Every time I look at what you're doing on social media, you're like I signed up another university to teach my sales school. You have an actual sales school, like a sales academy. That's your baby that you contract with universities so you can teach people this stuff. I am prominently amazed by you. And I'm
(02:13): Honored that you reached out to me a couple of months ago for some consulting work with me to help you build your digital community in the forum of a Facebook group. So I wanted to have you on the show so we could talk about this story, cause it's so good. So welcome. Thank you for being
(02:31): Here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about this. I think more people need to know. Yes, because you go live on Facebook a lot and I try to tune in as much as I can because you always say amazing things every single time. I'm like, yes, that's a gem. And one thing that you talk about a lot is community sales is building relationships.
(02:55): Yeah. A hundred percent. You know, the way that I teach sales that's so is that I'm not even going to say so different. Cause then I'm like comparing myself to others. And the biggest thing is I work primarily with women, people who build relationships in order to complete transactions, men tend to be very transactional. So they're thinking just in terms of, I've got to sell this thing. So I've got to sell this thing and they don't think about all the other steps in between. So I work with a lot of women and help them to build relationships with individuals. I really teach networking in a lot of ways, teach how to connect with other humans and human, like ways to have conversations. And ultimately co-create a solution now, where do you get those people from is always the question because people always say to me, well, that's cool and I'm talking to people and you know, yeah, I can sell anything.
(03:52): Okay. But the close is only going to be as good as the quality of the relationship and the community where that person came from. I can look at anybody's close rate and start reverse engineering and identify where the break in the system is. And nine out of 10 times, sure. There's always like the, you're doing the sales conversation inside out and backwards, but like very slim to none. Right? Most people can figure out a sales conversation, keep reverse engineering backwards. And it starts with where they're picking the people from, oh, I need cold leads. Oh, I need new people. Or I need this, that and the other. Well, what about all those other people that you already invited to the party? And you're just sitting there forgetting about them. Like, have you asked them anything? Have you asked them if they wanted another drink? Do they like the music? Like let's do your DJ analogies, right? Like I'm trying to spend so long since I've gone anywhere, going back to the memory banks, what did we do when we went places? But like, you got all these people in your party already, somewhere in some capacity, you have a community. What are you doing with them? And why are you forgetting about them? You have to focus on it. And when you have a container for it, it makes it really easy to focus on it.
(05:03): Love it. Okay. Hold on. Before we dive any deeper, can you tell us about your business? What do you do? What do I do? I, my company is called selling with service. Our core program is the sales school for entrepreneurs. And we teach a methodology for how a service based micro business owner. Service-Based entrepreneur can grow a business literally from, I'm not even sure what I'm doing right now, or if I have a market or what even lane I want to be in, literally within the program that we're running right now, I have somebody within six weeks who closed a client started with, I'm not, you know, I like the idea. I don't know if I would ever have a business, but I figured let me sign up for the course. And at least I'll learn something going through it. Right. That's where she started. Now, this is an right, but just this one example was blowing my mind. Not really sure, but I'd probably want to have a business on my own. At some point starts, the program six weeks in has closed a client and not for like a dollar. She closed a client and I'm not saying who she is, but for 2,500, wow, I got a $500 from a, I'm not sure if or what I'm going to be doing. We talk all the time, but we talk to be heard and I teach people how to have intentional business conversations so that they can hear.
(06:33): I love that. And that resonates with me so much with my strategy for building community online. Because so much of it comes down to just asking powerful and thoughtful questions, creating conversations, allowing your members to speak up. And then you come in with the follow-up the questions and the cheering them on and pushing them towards solutions. So every time you talk about your philosophy of sales, I'm like, that's my philosophy of community. I love this. So when you approached me, you had a Facebook group and it needed to make over. It needed a refresh. So what was on your mind at that time? Why were you thinking? I need to do something about my Facebook group right now.
(07:15): The big shame spot for me to be honest for a while. Cause I teach sales. My company is selling the service. I run the sales school for entrepreneurs. So somewhere in my brain, over the years, I developed this story that I should be really good at attraction, which is marketing. And I've never been the great door opener. I'm the great closer. I'm a great strategizer, I'm the great person at the sales process. Right? But I've never been great at getting people in. I can do it. We can do anything, but it's not my strength. So I have this Facebook group and I'm like hanging on by a thread and I've got people in there, but I'm the type that typically will invite people to the party and then be like, all right, you guys are here. Now. Figure it out. And that's what I was doing in my group.
(08:00): It's not that I don't want them to have a good time, but that's just, that's not my thing. So I have these people in my group. We've got no activity going on. We've got nothing happening. The energy's weird around it. I know I can do more with it. I know it's under utilized. I was doing weekly Facebook lives. At that point, I've been doing that for quite a while. Teaching Tuesdays, I was getting engagement. I was running challenges in there to give value, but it just wasn't fun. It wasn't exciting. It was going to take me to the next level and I knew something was missing. And because like I said earlier, I can look at any closing conversation and reverse engineer and figure it out. I'm not the door opener. I'm not the party starter. So I don't know what I don't know there.
(08:47): And I know that that's a hundred percent in your lane. So I was like, Rachel eyes on it. What's going on, fix it, Jesus. Fix it. Like, just tell me what is the deal with it? And you just took it inside out. And it wasn't even like inside out and upside down. It was, you helped me to understand that the way that the group had been positioned is exactly meeting them where they are, the way it was named everything about it. It was for exactly who my people were, meeting them exactly where they are. And you helped me to see that that's cool, but you want to position it for where you want them to be. I was like, dude, I didn't. Yeah. That no one goes to let me think of an analogy here.
(09:32): You don't go to the gym because you want to stay out of shape. You go to the gym because you want to get fitter and stronger and you know, whatever your fitness goals are. So it's about your desired future self. It's not about your actual current reality. And that's the, that's the distinction I make in the world. Mostly, you know, in solo preneur world where a lot of people are delivering a service, some kind of transformation there's. And I think part of the problem is there's this emphasis on pain points. And I think that a lot of people in the solo preneur world don't know what they're supposed to do with the concept of pain points. Like you, you should know what your ideal client's pain points are, but we don't play in that space. We can like you sprinkle it in some times, but like the bulk of my marketing and selling is about what people want rather than what they don't want.
(10:23): Positive problems gotta be aspirational if I'm talking about, you know, and, and I heard someone say this yesterday in a networking group, you know, I'm looking for someone who's, you know, really frustrated with her branding is that, are we talking about that a Starbucks? Is that the conversation? Like, I'm not going to know who that is. Nobody's showing up saying, you know, I'm really frustrated with my branding. Like I know I can't, I can't direct somebody into that. But when I, when you helped me to position my group to the one 20 K club, because what I, the positive problem that I talk about is that entrepreneurs are setting their entrepreneurs. I work with, they typically set their revenue goal too low. They set it to replace their most recent income. And now we're talking about business revenue and it's a different ball game. So I tell them, I'm not even going to ask you anymore.
(11:13): We are working towards what I call the entrepreneurial minimum wage of 120,000. No one's ever told me no one's ever argued with me since I tell them that that's the first revenue goal. Let's get you to that one 20 K and like, cool, it's these, the math. And then we reverse engineer, the invisible business model, their business plan and all of their sales processes, et cetera. So that's where we named it. The one 20 K club let's get them to where they want to be. And they know they're in a community of others who are not going to be the seven figure earners who are going to be talking about funnels and flame throwers or whatever else goes on in the internet marketing space. They're going to be talking about ways to build a high touch, low tech, a boutique service business. That's going to get them to 120,000, that golden six figures, and then some, and they're very happy and proud to join. And I know this because they invite other people in to do it. They grow it for me,
(12:14): Rocking a digital community. That's the future of marketing. Do you want to get ahead of the curve? Let me show you how to use real life, community building strategies to grow your brand, your authority, and your army of marketers. Head over to Rocky tribe.com to send me a message. Let's get this party started.
(12:33): This makes me so happy because this is what I'm talking about. I'm talking about engaged and profitable communities that grow on autopilot. And this is part of the strategy is empowering and mobilizing and organizing your current members to do the recruiting for you. One of the terms I use a lot is your army of marketers. Your community is your army of marketers. You don't have to build a community of clients only, or potential clients only, but you can build everybody who cares about your brand because some people are never going to buy from you. That's totally fine, but everybody knows somebody.
(13:11): They give amazing value, like shameless, humblebrag. I give amazing value in my group. We do a teaching Tuesday, obviously every Tuesday where I'm talking on something that has to do with how to get you to 120,000, right. Mindset, money, mindset, and money particulars. We did one about, you know, how the prices get so weird, like $97, $93. Like what in the, what is that? So I did a training on what there is a legit psychology behind all the numbers. There's one training for you. Like every week, we're giving amazing value. Some people are in there who want to support me? Who've been following me for years on social, on the outside. And they're like, well, we know what she says on the outside. What are you going to say on the inside? So they come, the others are in there cause they're like, all right, this is real.
(13:52): We saw, you know, something that you were posting and they come in and they're getting tons of free training. Other people are in there and they're getting free training. And then they're like that's when I see the invitations start coming and they're like, oh, Sally invited me here because I, you took a look at my three questions that Facebook has set up. So we revise those to make sure we're asking, like, you know, how did you find us? Who can we thank for inviting you? So now we're knowing like who the rock stars are that are constantly inviting people. Yeah. And it's got a good energy to it. You know, the colors we redid and everything. Like I made it very like Florida on a little different than my traditional branding, because I want this to have a much more fun vibe to it.
(14:35): And my selling with service is very black, white, and yellow. And I wanted this to have a less stuffy structured kind of vibe. I want people to feel comfortable to let loose a little bit. I want them to feel comfortable to answer sometimes weird bizarro questions, you know, not bizarro totally, but like more fun, conversational, just engaging things. I was actually not a hundred percent on board to do those questions. I was like, I want to keep this a business group. You know, people come here to learn stuff and they really want to grow their business. I don't want to ask if they stay in pajamas all day or if they, you know, actually get dressed for work when working from home. But I tried it and I got like all of these comments on it. And I was like, okay. They were interested in telling me that great for engagement. Cool. So now I know that that's a post that gets a lot of engagement. So it goes back in the recycler and it'll come up in another 45.
(15:32): I love that. And I was going to ask you if you've had any aha moments since we worked together, new things that you've tried. I mean, that's, that's great. And I do run into this, you know, with people who really come from a more B2B kind of worlds, making that shift into dealing with individuals, micro business owners, how do I make things friendlier? Am I sacrificing my professionalism to do this? You know, what do I look like if I ask these sort of like softball questions, if you need to put it in corporate speak, it's an ice breaker. I'm going to ask you another question. What's it going to be? How has focusing on your community transformed your business so far?
(16:16): I think it was the first month I saw a signet. The kids increase in people coming into the group in engagement in the group. Like the literal screenshot of the chart was like the dream where it's like straight, straight, straight whoop. It was like that perfect graphic. I was like, this looks like the emoji. So that was like almost instant was seeing the growth. And then from there, the transition to sales was really, really seamless. I wasn't having me, Liz CEO of selling with service founder of the sales school for entrepreneurs. I was not having sales conversations with people. I was just kind of fielding a couple of logistical concerns and questions, and then they were enrolled. That's amazing. Cause they didn't saw me delivering. They saw the engagement, they saw how I run crowd control. They saw how I'm answering real questions in real time. And some of the people who converted early hadn't really been engaging. They weren't the ones I would have put on the hot list, but they were the one, the quiet lead don't always watch the quiet ones. It was the quiet ones who were watching everything and they were like, we've been studying you and we see how you're engaging with everyone. We want it
(17:42): Incredible. I actually have an episode of this podcast all about not eliminating your inactive members and your lurkers because you just don't know. I second that I, a thousand percent, that absolutely what new opportunities are presenting themselves as a result of your big focus on your community.
(18:03): So it's interesting. I run a sales school for entrepreneurs, clearly that some sort of a group program I've never really adopted the membership model mindset because for me, the way I've seen it in the coaching world is that it's very self-serving for the person who's running the membership that they want to have all these people in so they can make all this a month. And I'm like, yeah, but where's the value for the person. And what I've really seen through this group is just like we were talking about with kind of the lurkers in the backgrounds. Like people get significant value by being part of a community because it's a curated group of people getting together around a specific topic with a certain vibe, with certain value systems, with a certain way to communicate their own kind of vernacular. It's a one 20 K club.
(18:58): And we were going to come out with the members only jackets. It has its own vibe and tribe and the value they get from that just kind of being in a place where they know they can come to asks specific questions, seeing each other come together and practice the things in real time that we're teaching, even in the free classes. I know without a shadow of a doubt that a membership model is the next thing I'm going to be introducing into my business. That is a hybrid between the free version and the full-on sales school for entrepreneurs. The other thing is it's not hard for me to do if not exhausting. It's not another thing it's fun. If I don't comment on everyone's posts, nobody dies. Right. Nobody's crying. And if they need my attention, guess what they do. They tag me again, guess what they do.
(19:58): They show up on the live. And they ask me if they're really on fire, they'll email me or DM me. Like if it's that urgent, they will find a way to get me. They are grownups. So it's really opened up a whole new revenue arm for me. And it's also helps me a lot in my existing program of the sales school for entrepreneurs that I can actually sit back because I'm a, I'm a teacher speaker, right? I can sit back and hold space as a facilitator in a lot of these conversations in my classes to allow them to do their own thing and the third brain to happen. I don't have to be fully on. And I've seen that because of what's going on in the, in the Facebook community.
(20:45): That's so exciting. A membership would be perfect for you. So here's a, like a totally self-serving question. What's it like working with me? It's easy. It's we're all on Facebook. We're all in a Facebook group somewhere, but there are so many nuances to it from how to run it and how to organize it and how to streamline it. And you just get it all and you really break it down in a really simple way. So it's easy to digest. Understand. And then the bigger thing is the WTF. What's the function of this information. What am I actually going to do with this? Like, that's cool, conceptually, like, you really want to have this be kind of like this, but you don't leave us hanging in there. You're like, now go do you know? And it's very do this, do this. Like one of our first sessions was we literally renamed my group. Like I think I still probably have the piece of paper floating around somewhere where it was just like, scribbles of what about this?
(21:41): What about this? What about this? And then it was like one 20 K club boom done, like did not end the session. And so we actually had the name of the group. So that kind of tactical hands-on stuff, instead of just like, well, you might consider changing the name and you know, let me know how that goes. He thinks by that doesn't happen. It's this is what you need to do next real time results. The way you run your group, you've shown that it doesn't have to be a full-time job to have really high quality engagements where generally speaking, I think everyone feels included.
(22:17): That's what I'm going for. So thank you. It's extremely validating. And you know what? I'm not here for like busy culture, you know, hustle culture. It's unrealistic, especially for moms with like small children. Like I cannot, and I think it's a little, I don't know, presumptuous to think that somebody is going to come back to my Facebook group for three posts by me in one day, that's a lot like a great high value conversation. And then maybe one post on top, which could be just the welcome post. Cause you got new members that should be enough really for your day to day.
(22:55): That's why I was so hesitant to do a membership for so long is because we're all just inundated with so much that if I give I'm going to jump on this bandwagon, I really need to make sure that it's like super significant value. And just the type of person I am, the way that I over-deliver on everybody all the time. I was like, I roll out a membership bottle. It's going to kill me. I will be so committed to everyone that I will. I want a time for anyone. But what this Facebook group has shown me is that they get significant value. When I give them, let me think about how many hours a week I actually put into the Facebook group, the actual Facebook group, not scrolling. Hmm, three, three to five on a busy week, three to five, five and five. Really got a lot of, with a lot of engagement. And I really want to engage with people or I'm doing like the web reviews or something like that. But I would say probably closer to three tops in my Facebook group, three hours a week in your Facebook group, I would say. Yeah. And it's contributed
(24:00): To some of the best revenue. Yeah. I mean, it's, it is the pond and it's a tight pond, right? I don't have a bazillion people in my Facebook group, but I, they are highly engaged and I know who my new people are. And the next time I do a converting activity, I already know who exactly is going to convert.
(24:23): So where can people find you? One 20 k.club is my Facebook group and come join the party and it's okay to leave. Like I said, but come check us out and selling what service.com is the website,
(24:36): Amazing Liz debtor. I am a fan of you. Thank you. You're welcome right back at you. Thank you. Well, thanks so much for being here. Can you tell everybody you rock? Like they rock you guys. Rock gas, factory.com.
(25:05): This is the podcast factory.com.
