First published 15 May 2023 on Your Best Year Starts Here with Nigel Risner.
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I started this one by being deliberately thick. Nigel asked me who manages Wrexham and who scored the goal that got them promoted. Nope. Then whether I knew who'd bought into the club. Still nope, even with Ryan Reynolds (I was being ignorant on purpose). His point was that people recognise sport even if they don't follow it, which is why he uses it so much on stage.
Then golf. The ball doesn't move, and if you're right-handed the target's always to your left. You just have to hit it about 300 yards. Nigel reckons he's good with a driver and hopeless at putting because he never practises it, and the putt is where most people lose the game. His French golf coach in Florida told him that if you hit the ball short it can never go in the hole. He did the accent. It was dodgy.
His business version goes like this. You've done the marketing, you've won the work, you're seven feet from the hole, and then you get tentative and fluff the last bit. The parcel with the wrong stamps on. The email that starts “Dear Mr N”. I thought he was going to say people forget to ask for the business. He said that's a separate problem.
So I asked him what the $2 hot dog on his $1,000 plate was. It's from a book I'd read, Unreasonable Hospitality, and I did say my memory of it might be a bit off. A New York restaurant with Michelin stars, about $1,000 a head, overheard a guest saying their one regret was never getting a hot dog from a street vendor. Someone ran out and bought one and the head chef plated it up. Guess which bit they raved about.
Nigel came back with Michael McIntyre taking food out of a woman's freezer and having one of the Roux brothers serve it to her at Le Gavroche. She told him she normally puts a bit more flavour in her soup.
We also got onto calling people back. Marcus Sheridan, who wrote They Ask You Answer, says 80% or more of a sale is often done before someone even contacts you. Nigel still gets people amazed he replied so fast. His answer is that he wrote a book called The Impact Code, so he'd better make an impact. And he's just sent one of his books to the daughter of a client he first met in 1997. Her dad had to leave Nigel's session because she was being born. She's now an HR director.
What I took from this one
- Make your B game stronger than everybody else's A game.
- Deals get lost on the small stuff at the end. Wrong stamps, a name spelt wrong.
- If someone gets in touch, they've already done most of the work. Get back to them quickly.
- People you don't call back while you're busy will remember it when things go quiet.
If you make your B game stronger than everybody else's A game, you'll always win.
Neil Martin
It doesn't take much, but it means so much to them.
Nigel Risner
