Ep604: Hugh Grover – Choose to Listen to Your Gut Feeling

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello, fellow risk takers and welcome to My Worst Investment Ever, stories of loss to keep you winning in our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. And that mission has led me to create the Become a Better Investor Community. In the community, you get access to the tools you need to create, grow and protect your wealth, you'll be able to join our weekly live sessions and you'll also get access to the risk reduction lessons I've learned from more than 600 guests just go to my worst investment ever.com right now to claim your spot fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz, from A. Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests. Hugh Grover, who are you ready to join the mission? Let's go. Let's do it. Let me introduce you to the audience, who is the founder of the digital sales community, he has helped fortune 100 companies and some of Australia's leading businesses massively turn the dial on revenue. And ladies and gentlemen, who doesn't want that, prior to this, who was a top 1% revenue generator for a fortune 100 company for four consecutive years, he also helped grow a retail business by over 36% in only five months and helped the brick to brick and mortar business club grow its revenue exponentially in the height of the global pandemic. Hugh has developed a proven sales system over the past decade that his clients are implementing right now in their different businesses. Let Hugh show you how you can apply that system in your business and massively turn the dial on revenue. My God, you, I want it. Take a moment and tell us a little bit about what's unique about you. And maybe tell us a little bit about your system, because boy, that was sexy.

Hugh Grover 02:02
I mean, you're making me sound a lot better than I actually am. So thank you. Thank

02:08
you. That's my job.

Hugh Grover 02:11
So effectively, the the business that I run, as you mentioned, the digital sales community, we help business owners. I think according to Forbes, there's 158 sub industries. And we've trained nearly every industry how to generate more sales, whether that be fumigation, whether it be promotion, insurance, financial services, Wealth Management, some of the most peculiar businesses, even waste management that we've worked with to help them kind of increase more sales. And we really kind of do it one of two ways, we either go in and teach them the process or a system to generate more sales, through automation through virtual assistants, and through systemization. Or secondly, we actually go in, plug into their business, and help them generate more See, leads have those leads booked into their calendar, and simply a business owner, or a salesperson literally wakes up each day, and has a conversation with those prospects that are qualified and educated about how a business owner or salesperson can help them.

Andrew Stotz 03:19
And for a lot of people like me, you know, I have small businesses, you know, maybe medium sized businesses, we look at something like this, oh, my God, that's gonna be super, super expensive. How should a small or medium sized business look at this type of service? Or is your service only for large companies?

Hugh Grover 03:37
Yeah, so I guess it has to make sense, right? Where we sit down with all of the potential clients really understand what they want to achieve. And if this fits in with what they want to achieve, then of course, the benefit of the result has to outweigh the cost. So usually, within the space of a month to two months, they've recoup the cost of their initial outlay. So from that perspective, it makes it a very easy offering to make sense of, but yeah, it has to with all of our clients and all the advice that we give, unless you're getting that ROI back in return in a short space of time, it may be worth reconsidering, right.

Andrew Stotz 04:19
And I'll have a link in the show notes to your digital sales community, where people can go and learn more, I just wonder if you could, you know, you've helped a lot of people, you've helped a lot of companies, you've seen a lot of things, what would be one or two things that you would like to share with the audience about what you've learned, you know, that could help us all become better at sales.

Hugh Grover 04:43
I think the biggest thing is there's probably a misconception of what sales used to be in probably to some degree still is, which is the Gordon Gekko era, which is the Wolf of Wall Street era, and it's purely sales tactics and strategies. Over the phone with what we do with most of our clients now it's very much around how do you actually create a process through automate automation through systemization, that brings leads in, warms them up and gets clients each and every conversation, but then qualifies them. So a business owner or sales person isn't wasting the two most precious things that they have been time or energy. And also, you don't waste the prospects time. So for us, it's very much around creating systems that help the client and the prospect. So if you're a business owner out there, and you're thinking, you're relying on just word of mouth, which a lot of businesses are doing, or if you're relying on networking, which a lot of business owners are doing, or if you're relying on simply making cold calling, think about, are there better ways to be doing things? Is there a way we're in the we're in 2022? Through outbound messaging, which can all be done through a virtual assistant. And it was interesting, I was working with the largest med tech company in the world, only a couple of weeks ago. And they were trying to get a hold of doctors and think about doctors at the moment, super overwhelmed. We post pandemic working longer hours than ever beforehand and seriously under appreciated. So do they have time for a sales call from a salesperson? Probably not? Do they have time for an email response? Probably not. But where are these people their age between 35 to 55 years old, for the most part. And that when they do have oftentimes, they're connecting with their friends and family via platforms like Facebook. So when I suggested to this company that they're going to actually reach out to doctors via Facebook, there was a huge pushback, they're like this, this is this is what we do. And I said, this is a sign I teach all my clients, whatever everyone else is doing, do the opposite. Because if you're doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing, you're going to have cut through. So in the space of only two What sorry, two months after doing this link app Facebook messaging, we increase the amount of leads they're receiving by 10 times simply by utilizing our platform. So why don't think about to the listeners, outbound messaging through LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and cold email, it works but follow up is paramount. The other second one is opposed to selling one to one. Think about how you can sell one to many via LinkedIn lives one of the most powerful tools to generate leads. And then second of all through webinar, once you've educated customers, once you've provided value, my favorite saying is value is the antidote to skepticism. So if people are skeptical about you're the best financial advisor, or you're the best podcast or the best salesperson, once they hear and they can implement some of their strategies within their business, then suddenly they go, Oh, actually, this person is credible, or actually this person's helped me. So how do you go and sell via a webinar or via LinkedIn live, to help more people educate them, and ask nothing in return, but purely provide value value value. And then the third one would be very much around automation of processes. So once you've had a conversation with a client, there's a statistic that is 92% of satisfied, customers are willing to provide a referral. However, only 11% of salespeople or business owners actually ask for a referral. So how do you actually when the customer is at the top of their arousal level? How do you then ask for referral in a way that reduces sales pressure that gets the customer lean in? Opposed to push away? So they would be my three main tips around outbound messaging, but through automation, cell one too many opposed to one to one? And how do you when you already have a customer that is sold on the value of your offering? How do you get them to refer you more business, so you can help more people?

Andrew Stotz 09:20
That feels like gold there. So that I appreciate that for all of us, you know, outbound and one to many, and then the referral in particular was, I think, you know, something that I was just thinking about, I make some attempts at it. And I do ask for testimonials. But I think there's more I could do in that area of referrals. And I'm sure for the listeners. That's the case also.

Hugh Grover 09:44
And the really clever one that we work with our clients to do is, is how do you actually get the clients to resell themselves on the value of how much you've helped them. So what you might do is, you might actually going to a testimony With the client to do a testimony with the client virtually. So that means that over that five minutes or 10 minutes, you're asking you're doing the referral with them. They're reselling themselves the entire time on the value of how you've helped them, the results they've achieved, and they feel that sense of excitement or happiness or elation that you've helped provide them, then you're using that video testimony as a piece on your website. You're using it as retargeting content for all of your clients, you put it in an ATM to send to your email database. But then after they've resolved themselves, they now have an even more custodian of your business, then you ask for the referral in a way that they actually want to provide, because they're already resold on the value.

10:53
Wow. All right.

Hugh Grover 10:56
We're gonna drop on my getting too excited.

Andrew Stotz 10:58
I got the mic, right there. And I love those ideas, particularly because sometimes people aren't great at leaving video testimonials. That's one of the things I've found. And particular, if you're trying to do testimonial, if you're in multicultural, multi country, you know, you may have students and others that have gone through in clients that may not speak English that perfectly and so they may not come across that great, or they may be hesitant to do it. But when you have a discussion, I think you can facilitate that a lot better. So that's, that makes me think one of the things that I'm trying I'm thinking about to overcome that is that rather than I have testimonials and that but what I've, I've identified for one of my products, the valuation masterclass boot camp, I've identified it, there's four type of students that have come in boot camp. So what I've done is now pick out one, you know, person who fits in each of those types. And then I'm telling the story of that student, how they found it, the questions that they asked in the beginning, what they went through in the transformation that they got, you know, at the end of the bootcamp, and so that way, it's the hero's journey, it's the students journey. And I'm the facilitator, but also, I just love it too, because it's like telling the story, and then they got a job right after that, and now they're a successful, you know, analyst, or they're got a successful job. And it's pretty fun. And I'm thinking about either doing LinkedIn live where I talk about, you know, if you're a young graduate from business school, and you can't find a job, maybe you need to listen to the story of my particular student, you know, Sue, it came to me, and you know, was having a hard time getting a job straight out of school. And within the fifth week of the boot camp, he had a job offer, because I connected him with a head of research of a company of an investment bank, and got him that, and that's part of what's the magic of the boot camp. So I'm just thinking that I'm thinking about doing that on LinkedIn live. I don't know if I should do that, or whether I should do it LinkedIn live or

Hugh Grover 13:02
why thinking LinkedIn live? What's the thinking there? Well, like is thinking around, like, why is that the modality opposed to another platform? Potentially?

Andrew Stotz 13:16
I haven't done LinkedIn live for a little while. And I kind of felt like, LinkedIn seems to favor that content.

Hugh Grover 13:27
Your audience here as well, on LinkedIn? Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 13:29
Let's say I have 30,000 followers on LinkedIn. And a lot of young students also following you. So it may be the place to meet them. I also have YouTube where I could put that, that recording on YouTube, I could stream on both, you know, but when YouTube, you know, maybe I'll get 300 to 1000 views on that. Yeah. And they may or may not be that targeted. So I don't really know. Any thoughts?

Hugh Grover 13:54
No, I think the best thing about LinkedIn live, as you've obviously experienced beforehand, is you get to choose, you get to invite the people who are your target audience, so opposed to, you know, just streaming. You know, like lots of people streaming, you might get lots of views, but it might not be your right target audience. With this. It's your target audience. So if you've got this great following of 33,000, which, by the way, is very impressive. So well don't think if you've got this really great following, then yeah, the way that I would do it is, is utilize that platform that you have these following on, invite, you know, 1000 people per week to the event, you'd structure over six weeks, there, six out 6000 people that you can potentially invite to your event. If you've got a virtual assistant or other people in your team, they can add more people as well. And then as you said, then use that piece post. The session is an evergreen piece of content on YouTube on your website, emails, as a way of kind of getting that one soundbite of 45 minutes or an hour masterclass to more people.

Andrew Stotz 15:00
It sounds like what you're telling me also is to do it as a set it up as an event. Correct. Okay, which I never did in the past, I just did streaming, let's just go live. And then you know, yeah, so that's a great

Hugh Grover 15:12
and that's probably the biggest mistake for you go on to LinkedIn after this, you'll see the amount of events that are around. Most people will have like 20 people registered for their event. And then when they actually go live, on average, if you go through them, there's like four people watching it, or five people watching it. I ran a LinkedIn live two weeks ago called How to make millions on the phone. And I think we had, I don't think I know we had 80 times more people watching it now registered than the average LinkedIn live. And it was like 150 times more people watching it than the average LinkedIn live. So you definitely want to schedule it, an event for six weeks out so you can promote it promote through your podcast promoted to your database, and obviously to your amazing 33,000 Strong LinkedIn audience.

Andrew Stotz 16:09
Six weeks,

Hugh Grover 16:10
six weeks, yeah, I don't know.

Andrew Stotz 16:14
Well, anyways, enough about my worst investments and mistakes. Now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to and then tell us your story.

Hugh Grover 16:29
So I think for may be very much around, I grew up in a family where mum was a chief executive of a well known Australian company, dad was in in aviation and grew up in a fairly well to do household went to a private school. And so what everyone was doing at school was, you know, you're either going into medicine, which is what my sister ended up doing, you either go into finance, which is what you're in, or you go into, or you go into law. And so I was naturally someone that was probably more a people's person, you call it communications, you call it psychology. However, I felt this, this sense that I need to belong to the herd. And the herd very much in their schooling days was telling me one of those three things medicine, finance, or law. So I left school in year 12, never a very good student across accounting economics. And not because I probably wasn't not intelligent enough, but I had no passion I had no, I had no understand why was learning how it really applied, or why I wanted to apply. So I took a university degree at Bonn University in Queensland, and really, for the first 12 months, I failed my accounting subjects three times, which is actually no toe and for the third time got through, it was a bit of a disaster, that was a lot of money wasted on on, you know, subjects that I just didn't, didn't understand why I was doing it, and also didn't actually apply the time and effort. So for me, it was really from school, not listening to a gut feel of what intuitively, I was good at, and what I wanted to do, to university, getting to university and doing what I thought I should do, as opposed to what I wanted to do, then to my first serious job working. So I had a job in recruitment, and then got into a job in finance. But I was doing a job based on optics, I was doing a job based on how I was perceived by others, and how I potentially wanted to be perceived myself. And the cost of that over kind of five or six years I would have been would have been very much around a sense of being unfulfilled a sense of being very unhappy in what I was doing. And I'm a I'm a naturally optimistic person. So it would never have occurred that way. But it would have been a period of time of just going through through a job, a career through a university through schooling, trying to be someone that I thought I need to be opposed to who actually was.

Andrew Stotz 19:37
And when was it that you know, eventually you broke from that and change the path that you were on? You may or may not have really had much awareness then. Yeah, it could have been that you had awareness then or it could be later that you really realize that this was, you know, let's say your worst investment ever, as opposed to let's just think about a typical investments like you get to a point of capitulation where you thought, you know, I, you know, did this because I thought it was gonna work and it just hasn't worked, hasn't worked hasn't worked hasn't work. And now I'm on the ground, crying because I'm about to lose everything. You know, there's a very clear moment. But can you come up with a moment in time either then or, you know, since then you could say, you realize that there was a lot of wasted time there.

Hugh Grover 20:23
Oh, there was there was a huge amount of wasted time, in a sense, the two most precious commodities for everyone is your time and energy. And he can't put a value one time and what that equates to. So for that, that six year period, seven year period, or even longer extent, how much time was wasted pursuing someone else's goals or ambitions. And during a transition to what kind of maybe the turning point was, or? Yeah, so I think, you know, I was so fearful of what I was doing. I didn't know why I was doing it. But I kind of stayed on the hamster wheel. And it was my wife actually, we just come back from we got married when on this seven week honeymoon in Italy, in Greece. And I got back from the honeymoon. And Marlo says to me, she goes, I think I want to quit my job. I thought Oh, fuck. Okay, right. We've just had this really amazing. Wedding, this really amazing honeymoon. And now you decide that now we're married, that you want to quit your job. So I said, Hey, darling, in a week's time, if you still feel like you want to quit your job, then absolutely. I think it's what you should do. And I remember the following weekend, it was a Saturday morning, I turned to Marlo in bed. And she gave me this big smile. I thought to myself shit. So you're quitting your job, aren't you? Yes. Yeah. So So Marlo went quitter. quit her job, she was working as a project manager for one of the largest media companies in the world at the time, earning any really good money, quit, quit her job, gone into fashion into retail business. And really through her going through this self exploration period of time, then she went and did a number of different careers, a number of different jobs, really made me realize that there were other options out there, there, the grass was actually potentially drainer if you fell in love what you did. And so simply from Marlo being brave enough, I call it to go, you know what I'm going to go and try and find my purpose and my calling and try a whole bunch of different things. Even though society at the age of late 20s, early 30s, probably doesn't think that I'm going to do what makes me happy. And so simply by Marlowe's bravery, and her going after what she wanted. That was the catalyst for me making ultimately, the change.

Andrew Stotz 23:06
So how would you describe the lessons that you've learned from this experience?

Hugh Grover 23:11
The main lesson would be, and this is something that I really base everything off now is gut feel. So if something doesn't appear, right, as opposed to running from it, listen and unpack why your gut feel might be off, whether it's a client that you're potentially about to work with, and you go, This doesn't feel right, then maybe question why you feeling that way. If you're about to invest in you know, a friendship or relationship get a really good gut feel. So my biggest takeaway in this day and age is still work unbelievably hard. You have to do that. Yep. Still, there gonna be things that are challenging. But listen to your gut, you know, humans have been around for 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of years. The reason why we've survived as a species, is because we're very intuitive. And we make good decisions when we choose to listen to our gut feeling.

Andrew Stotz 24:11
Great lesson, and I think I'm going to just summarize what I took away, which is the one of the questions I have is like, when do you know that you know, you're suffering through something for benefit, or you're suffering through something for the wrong reason? Like, like, if you just tell someone that says, say, like, yeah, if something's just not fun, or you know, it's not what you're, you know, you don't need to do it? Well, okay, then you may not learn math. And like, there's this, there's part of it that you want to think that, you know, I've got to devote myself to some things I don't like because there's benefits to that. But then there's a part of you that says, No, this is this is this suffering is unnecessary. Do you have any thoughts about how you reconcile that?

Hugh Grover 24:58
I think it's a really good question. And I think, for me with the with the suffering in in the job, the fortune 100 company, for me was very much. At the end of the day, what I wanted to acquire was the ability to sell to influence and persuade. And once I felt like I had done that and was congruent and authentic with who I was, and really comes down to human psychology, asking really good questions. Once I had learned that skill set, then I felt comfortable to move on. So I think being really clear with if you are going to continue pursuing it, what are you actually getting out of it? And what are you happy to sacrifice for that thing?

Andrew Stotz 25:41
Great. So based upon what you learned from this story, and what you continue to learn, let's imagine a young person in your situation as you were, what action would you recommend our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Hugh Grover 25:55
The biggest thing for me would have been listening to gut feel and being brave enough to when something doesn't feel right. QUESTION it, look into it. Seek unbiased advice and counsel in terms of how to navigate through it.

Andrew Stotz 26:12
Yeah, I guess when you were saying that I was thinking in my head, start the discussion.

Hugh Grover 26:18
Yeah. 100% 100%.

Andrew Stotz 26:21
Great advice. So what's a resource that you recommend for our listeners.

Hugh Grover 26:25
So this is this is a little bit woowoo. I sound like a young, Australian Tim Ferriss for all of half a second. But they listen to your gut feel, listen to your intuition. Over the time, I've read 1000s of self help books, I've read 1000s of books on human psychology, and human behavior. And they're all great things if you want to become better at sales. But if it's about making better decisions that make you feel happy, congruent with who you are, as a person, listen to that biological thing that has been helped humans survive for 1000s of years, which is your gut feel.

Andrew Stotz 27:07
Great advice. And for the listeners out there. Also, you want to think about the difference between emotion and intuition. You know, emotion is an ongoing feeling that we have an intuition usually is a fleeting moment. So one of the lessons I've learned after interviewing many, many people on this podcast is pay more attention to those intuitions, it's easy to pay attention to emotion, because it's something that really can physically, like, bring us into that moment. But your intuition is something that kind of flashes by us, and so start to pay more attention to that. All right. Last question. What is your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Hugh Grover 27:46
The number one goal is Wednesday's. Wednesday's streaming. When's this coming out? Live just so I know for for so

Andrew Stotz 27:52
come out. This will come out in October maybe? I don't know around mid October 2022. Not 2023.

Hugh Grover 28:00
So I can announce it. My I've just found out that my wife is pregnant, we are expecting our first child. Wow. So for me, it's very much around, leaning into being present, being more balanced with what I'm doing. And really putting the customers and the clients my family first.

Andrew Stotz 28:22
Beautiful. And you better get out there and tell everybody because the whole wide world is going to know when this goes live. All right, well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. If you haven't yet joined the Become a Better Investor Community just go to MyWorstInvestmentEver.com right now to claim your spot. As we conclude you I want to thank you for joining our mission. And on behalf of A. Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Hugh Grover 29:00
I think you said it perfectly. We'll leave it there. Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate it. Yep,

Andrew Stotz 29:05
that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate that today. We added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your words podcast hos Andrew Stotz saying, I'll see you on the upside.