Chapter 15Give so much they have no choice

You don't close on the call. You get to the next step, you find out whether there's a date that matters, and you keep giving until the other person wants to give something back. Reciprocity does the closing. Your job is to keep the conversation alive long enough for it to work, and to measure the result in money that reaches the bank.

The old contact who asked for help

In January I described a call I'd just had. Our outreach had reached people from my own past network, and one of them got on a call glad to hear from me after so long. At the end, with almost no setup, I mentioned what we do now:

Anyways, so at the end, I just said, hey, look, let me tell you, do we help raise? And he was like, I need help. I have a company I'm launching next month. I need help.

I didn't push for a close. I set up the next step and let the process carry him:

And I've already put it together, and he's in the funnel.

Why did he ask? I don't think I closed him. By the time he heard what we do, he'd had a warm call with someone who was glad to hear from him and asked about his work. Most people I meet now get even more than that before the pitch: a pre-interview and a taping, an hour of somebody listening to their story and a pile of content with their name on it. Chapter 3 called it the rule of reciprocity. This chapter is about running that rule on purpose, every week, with everybody.

The next step, never the close

I said it in the same breath, back in January, before the show was the centre of everything, and it's still how I run every conversation:

I don't try and close them. I'm always about just getting them to the next step.

What's the next step? After the pre-interview it's the taping, and after the taping it's the debrief. After the debrief it might be a call with the partner, or a follow-up once they've talked to their board, or a check-in after their raise. There's always one more meeting that makes sense. Your only job at the end of a call is to find it and put it on the calendar while both of you are still on the line.

Chapter 9 calls it the infinite game: if there's any interest at all, the next meeting is on the calendar before you hang up, and when the answer is "not now", the meeting moves six months out instead of disappearing. It's become how my head works on every call:

my mind works in terms of like next steps.

A conversation with nothing on the calendar is a conversation you're letting die. Most founders don't kill their deals with a bad pitch. They kill them with silence after a good one.

The date that matters

A next step tells you the deal is alive. It doesn't tell you when it closes. For that I ask one question on every serious call, and I taught my team to ask it too:

A good salesperson never leaves a meeting without knowing when this is going to close. So, we go, okay, is there a date that matters in terms of like the fundraising or whatever?

Every founder has a date, whether it's a round closing, a board meeting or a conference where the product has to look alive. Once you know the date, you know how hard to lean and when. Without it, you're guessing.

The date also tells you who else needs to be in the room. My AI listens to my calls, and when I asked it where my deals get stuck, I agreed with its answer:

That's where I'm getting stuck on most deals is the second partner.

The founder loves it, and then he has to go convince a co-founder who never met me. So I stopped waiting for that conversation to happen without me:

one artful way, I mean, I have 4 or 5 ways, but one is just invite them to the debrief. Another is to cold email them.

Paying into the account

Chapter 3 put it as plainly as I can: asking fails because you haven't paid anything into the account with that person. So picture a bank account with everyone you meet. Every ask is a withdrawal. Most founders try to withdraw on the first email, from an account with a balance of zero, and they're surprised when the bank says no.

So you make deposits first, and you make a lot of them. A pre-interview counts as a deposit, and a taping counts as a big one. So does every episode page, thumbnail and Short, every post that tags them, and the email three days later saying it's live. The old marketing rule says people need to see you many times before they notice you. My version:

people see you for the 11th time for the first time. So our system is all about, like, value, value, value, value, value.

By the time someone has met me six, seven or eight times across a pre-interview, a taping, a debrief and the content in between, the relationship is real. A week after the taping, after the clips and the page and the thank-you email, the messages that come back are mostly some form of thank you.

That's the moment the account is full. You haven't asked for anything yet, and they already want to give something back.

Give away the first step

The best deposit is a slice of the thing you sell. If a customer gets ten steps from you, give the first one away before they pay for anything:

I try and give away the first step.

For us that's usually a short strategy report with real leads in it, built from what they told us on the call. I offer it before we hang up:

I'll put together a little strategy report for you, which we do. And it kind of just lays out, you know, what we talked about, but also like samples of, like, leads of the types of people would go after

I find it does something a pitch can't do:

giving that away is like a really smart way of just like getting people to kind of feel the sale

They don't have to imagine what working with us feels like. They're holding a piece of it.

The same goes for speed. Every prospect I talk to gets something built for them right after the call, a page about their company and their needs, whether or not they ever pay me:

I will build a website for you for this call, and you're someone that's a prospect. I've never made any money off of you.

And when someone can't become a customer, I still find a way to give. Intros are a deposit too. So are referrals to other shows. Right after a taping, an automatic email goes out with one question:

hey, I know tons of other podcast guests podcast hosts. Do you want me to refer you?

Almost everybody's like, yeah.

No choice but help

Here's where it all leads, in the sentence I say most often about this:

And so the idea to just give, give, give, give, give so much that at one point, you know, they, they have no choice but help

Help can mean buying. It can mean an intro to the investor they had coffee with last week. It can mean telling three founders about you at a dinner you'll never hear about. The person decides how to help. You only decide how much you give.

I know how that line sounds. Giving so much they have no choice can read like a tactic dressed up as generosity. It only works when it isn't one. If you give with one eye on the return, people feel it on the call. I said it to a founder in October, right after explaining why asking investors for money head on doesn't work:

So, it has to come from a place of serving and gratitude and giving.

The follow-up is a gift too

Most follow-ups are withdrawals in disguise. "Just checking in" asks for their time and gives them nothing. I learned to make every follow-up carry something:

when I follow up with them instead of being like hey ... just catching up I could be like and this is what I do at scale now

here's a little strategy report that we put together and it'll have literally like 50 leads with emails and the names and the titles of the people like based on what we talked about

The debrief works the same way. It gives me a reason to see someone again that is about them: the clips, the thumbnail, the page we built. None of it needs a long meeting. I said it on a podcast in September:

And all these are just like excuses to build a relationship, just to be like top of mind, but not like long drawn-out meetings

The trap is the gap. A good call goes quiet for a month and the warmth drains out of it. Back in February I caught myself doing exactly that with a whole list of people, and I told my business partner we needed a net:

I gotta stay top of mind and I gotta work the funnel.

Money in the bank

Giving is the method. It's not the scoreboard. The scoreboard is money in the bank, and I'm blunt with founders about it, because shows and content make it easy to confuse attention with progress:

Money in the effing bank. That's why people hire us.

Views don't count. Followers don't count. A beautiful episode with a guest who never hears from you again counts for nothing.

I don't care if you got 10 views or 10,000. What I care about is did you close that person on the back end?

That's why the follow-up matters as much as the gift. Back in the summer I looked at my own funnel and saw the leak:

our top of funnel is beautiful, but we're not pitching enough.

I made it a rule after that:

never leave a meeting without pitching. And never ever not follow up.

The gift turns into a wire when you keep booking the next step and keep following up until the answer is yes, no or six months from now.

Try this week

1. List every open conversation you have. Next to each, write the next step and the date it's booked for. 2. Next to that, write the date that matters to them: the round, the board meeting, the quarter, the launch. 3. If you can't fill in both columns, that conversation isn't open. Book the next step this week or let it go on purpose. 4. Pick the first step of what you sell and package it as a gift. Send it to three people who haven't paid you. 5. For every deal waiting on a second decision maker, invite that person to your next call. 6. After every meeting this week, send something within the hour that they didn't ask for and can use.

Who in your pipeline have you asked for something this month without paying anything into the account first?