Show notes
We all need money to run the nonprofit that we lead, however many of us are timid when it comes to asking donors for funding. Clay will help to shift that paradigm in today's interview. He will teach the skills he shares with top business executives on closing sales so that we, as nonprofit leaders can approach donors with confidence. Clay Neves, is Owner of Personal Sales Dynamics, a consulting and coaching firm that empowers small business owners to attract, engage, convert and retain the variety of business relationships their businesses need to survive and thrive. He has over 33 years of sales management, VP of Sales, and Chamber of Commerce Executive experience, working with Fortune 500 companies and small businesses alike, Clay has consistently multiplied sales results using the variety of prosperity relationships. In fact, he increased sales for one multi-million dollar post-secondary vocational training school by almost 900% in just 3.5 years, resulting in an Inc. 500 award for that company. He conducts monthly networking clinics for several Chambers of Commerce. He also serves as Club President for CEO Space International Utah Chapter. He is a master wordsmith in business and personal life, and is a student of language and words and an avid writer of prose and poetry. His book, A Wealth of Friends, 7 Essential Relationships Your Business Needs to Survive and Thrive is schedule for release the end of May. He lives in the Salt Lake City area with his wife of 32 years. More about Clay Neves at http://personalsalesdynamics.com Here's the Transcript for the Interview Hugh Ballou: Welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange. We are going to talk about a delicate subject today. It’s money. I hear money come up a lot. People want to raise money for their enterprise but are bound up with the words or the fear of asking for money or the fear of rejection, or maybe we don’t think we should be asking for money because we positioned it wrong in our brains. Russell, we’re back together again. It’s Tuesday at 2, and we are broadcasting live. How are you? Russell Dennis: It’s a beautiful day out here in Denver. All is well. Yes, this is a great subject because the reality with money is that everybody has a relationship with it. Your personal relationship could impact your work, so we’ll talk about that today. Hugh: I met this gentleman recently. I watched his program on one of the learning platforms, and it’s a really well-done program. We had a chat just a couple weeks ago at CEO Space, and I got to know Clay. We spoke last week and learned more. I said, “Why don’t you come on and talk about this topic to nonprofit leaders?” We hit the wall when it comes to having the conversation about money. Let’s introduce Clay Neves. Clay is our guest today. Welcome to The Nonprofit Exchange. Clay Neves: It’s good to be here. Hugh: Tell people a little bit about yourself and your background and why you’re doing this. Clay: I started out in sales at the ripe old age of 12. My mom bought me a suit, thought it might be good for me to learn how to sell. She bought me How to Win Friends and Influence People. I read it. She taught me four things on how to contact people. It’s probably the most important sales training I’ve had in my entire life. Basically, eye to eye contact, then smile, then shake, then, “Hello, my name is Clay. What’s yours?” then ask them a question. Keep asking them questions about themselves. People love to talk about themselves. Go forth and sell these greeting cards. And I did. I had various sales jobs. When I was about 27, because I was finishing up my college work a little older, I got a job as a business to business telemarketer selling long-distance calling plans. Only the old people remember that. Long-distance numbers, we had to dial in the number and then connect to it, and then we could dial the number we wanted to dial, and then we had to put in another code. It was ridiculous. Anyway, I was amazing at that. About a week in, because it was a big project and they had to hire about anybody who could breathe, they promoted me to supervisor. I had ten, anywhere from about 18-23-year-old, women, most had no sales experience whatsoever. They had a handset to. Call on, and I had a monitoring phone with a handset. This started naturally, but it became systematized that as I was listening to their call, they would miss these opportunities that they would think were objections. I’d go over and whisper in their ear what to say, and it would turn the conversation around. I’d only have to do that a few times before they got the feel for it themselves. The timing of answering an objection, what to say, how to say it, to use the analogy of a tennis game, to keep the tennis ball going back over the net. All you need to do is hit the ball one more time over the net than they do, and you get the sale, right? Anyway, we were the top team every week. I ended up managing that entire program including instituting a statistical quality control program where we could statistically score the presentations. As I listened to hundreds and thousands of these calls, I built up over time an instinct in terms of what keeps the conversation going and what shuts down the conversation. With each script accordingly, put it back on the floor, listen and test and measure statistically again. This is program after program. I opened a call center for the company. I ran that for the company. It wasn’t very much longer before I was managing these five outbound, mostly business to business call centers. I picked that up. I have done a lot of inside sales, but I have also done key account selling to major corporations like Citibank and AT&T. I had a great set of clients that I managed on the east coast as a business account executive for a national company, as well as experience as a chamber of commerce president. That gave me some insight into the nonprofit world. The way that they were selling memberships and donations was terrible. I think a lot of that will apply. We may talk about that and how it applies to a nonprofit. We focus on that word “nonprofit” to the exclusion of the word that follows it. Nonprofit business. Right? Sales is still a very important part of any nonprofit business, at least that’s what I see. Hugh: Oh, yes. Clay: I also was hired by a company to take their seminar marketing channel. We took that from about 300,000 to about 3.5 million in about three years. We also earned an Inc. 500 award along the way. That was an amazing experience. But these principles of sales growth I think are universal. 33 years of sales management experience, there is not a lot of sales situations I haven’t seen. There is not a lot of sales problems I haven’t coached salespeople through. There is not a lot of deals gone sideways. You see patterns. There is a handful of things that you can correct as you start to categorize them and understand what’s at the heart of the problem. That’s a little bit about my background. Been heavy into networking and building business by building these relationships and partnerships and leveraging relationships I already have to bring new sales relationships. Been doing that very well. Of course, as a chamber of commerce president, that was my stock and trade. That’s why I’m here. Hugh: Love it. Let me reframe what you just said. We, meaning Russ and I and those of us at SynerVision Leadership Foundation, spend a lot of effort working with people to understand why this so-called nonprofit (by the way, that is the only organization that I know of that constantly defines itself by what it’s not), we describe ourselves by what it’s not, but really, we are a tax-exempt business. There are strict rules about what happens with that money flow. We have hit on a crucial point. We need to install good, sound business principles into this charity we run. I think we all melt down when we are raising equity money or a business, trying to pitch a new product. It’s not our thing, we think. What’s the biggest challenge with people selling- We are selling an event we are doing, we are selling a sponsorship, we are selling donors or grant-makers on why they should fund an initiative. What do you find is the biggest hang-up with anybody, but most especially those running this tax-exempt charity we were talking about? Clay: The biggest thing I see in nonprofits is we are so utterly convinced that our donors, our sponsors are the ones that are doing us the favor, that the value is only flowing one way. In a sense, it’s not selling, it’s more begging. It feels like that sometimes, you know? But if you go from the assumption that doggone it, this sponsorship has value, you start to look at it from the aspect that what I have to offer solves a problem, not only for the people my charity serves, but for my sponsors. What is that problem that sponsors have that make them pay money for a sponsorship? Well, the best way to do that is ask your best sponsors. What are they getting out of this? Why do they spend the money? What problem does it solve for them? When I first took over the chamber of commerce, we had a sales guy that would go out and basically shame people into joining the chamber of commerce because the chamber of commerce did so much good in advocating business interests within this city. They should be part of that. You can see why membership was lacking. I turned it around and said, “Why would a business owner pay money to become a member of the chamber of commerce? What are we doing for them?” The question was turned around. Not why aren’t you a member of the chamber that does so much good for businesses in general, but the question then became: What are you trying to accomplish in the Murray City area? Tell me what you are trying to get to here. Who do you need to connect with? What do you need to put out there? What constituencies do you want to be more exposed to? What do you want to accomplish here? We talk about their business objectives. In that, we found several ways that chamber membership could help them meet their objectives, could solve problems. We had to begin the discussion in terms of what do they want their business to be, what are their goals and objectives? Once you speak to your biggest donors and sponsors, you will find the problems that you solve for them. Then as you approach potential sponsors and potential donors, the questions that you ask evolve around those potential problems. You can ask them in what I call “Have you ever” form. “Have you ever wanted to be more connected in the community? Have you ever thought that it’s not just about making money, but it’s about giving money away so that you can save money on taxes, too? Just talk about it from their interest rather than the interest of the nonprofit first. Now, that being said, what nonprofits offer is also a huge psychological and emotional value exchange. People want to give back. We want to talk about how they feel about that and what some of their objectives are. What criteria do they have in terms of giving and sponsoring? What availability do they have as far as time and money? These kinds of questions are coming in and exploring a little bit where they are. I spent two years on an LDS mission in Japan. Basically, what I was doing there was trying to persuade people about an anthropomorphic god to a culture that believes in a very mystical, pantheistic concept of God. I had to start from where they were. I had to start from their understanding of the word we used for God. A word that might not have had the same meaning to me that it had to them. I had to start with their meaning. We have to come at them from their interest, from their language, just like in any sales situation. But we should not be coming at it from the aspect that we have nothing to offer them, that there is nothing they get out of this sponsorship, and they are just doing it out of the kindness of their heart, and that’s it. We are doing as much of a favor for them as they are for us. That is why it is a value for value exchange. Does that make sense, or am I just rambling here? I never know. My wife says, “All right, Clay, we get it.” Hugh: I am going to go to Russell. Russell comes up with this topic often. Not only in raising money, he is an expert at creating value propositions and attracting money, but also in recruiting board members. Russ, talk a little bit about the conversation is like in finding out what they are looking for. Russell: I am glad there is people out there that embrace that dreaded “v” word. When you get in nonprofit circles, it’s a word that nobody utters. I went to an event put on by a chamber of commerce where they actually had nonprofits pitch what they were doing. At the first annual event we had zero out of 12 nonprofits mention the word “value.” Value is what you bring to the table. Values are what drives you, what is at the root of everything you do. It’s very important to look at values as well as value. That by the way, I have four steps to building a high-performance nonprofit. Step four is clearly communicating the value you bring. You have to do that in language that resonates with the person you are talking to. It could be a board member, a volunteer, an advisor, people getting your services. Value is in the ear of the beholder. You are talking to them about how you solve their problem, and everybody has a different thing they are interested in. It’s finding that. Part of that is being clear about who you are. Communicating that in terms that are meaningful to them so that they see you as somebody that can help them. You are offering a partnership. We are partnering and collaborating to solve this problem. It’s not a hat and hand process. Nobody gets any training on any of this. We are all selling. We are solving problems, but somehow this notion of selling makes us feel like used car salespeople, not that they are unethical. I know a couple of folks here. There is a young lady by the name of Lisa Malick, a good friend of mine, his wife. I know a young salesman here in the Denver area, a six-figure salesman, Aaron Cabot, my godson. He and Lisa could sell shoes to a man or woman with no feet. It all seems like it’s a mystical, magical skill, but it sounds like it’s something, too, that could be taught. I think our relationship with money has an impact on how we approach sales. What has been your experience with that kind of dynamic? How does that impact you? Clay: I said it a little differently, but it’s music to my ears when you said value is in the ear of the beholder. I teach that value only exists in one place, and that is behind the eyes and between the ears of the perspective relationship that you are trying to form. And only there is the value of what we’re offering found. It has nothing to do with the price of what we’re offering, other than the fact that the value had better be greater than the price or you’re going nowhere. How do you establish value? Are we conversant in the language of the donor or the sponsor who are often coming at it from a “business” decision? The good news is there is no such thing as a business decision. Every decision a businessperson makes is for personal reasons. They may couch it in a business decision, but if a decision is made, it’s for a personal reason. Either they think it will help their situation, help them look good, or help them look better to whomever it is they need to look better to. It may be something that’s important to them intrinsically, a value they have that this will really help and they have established a certain level of contribution or donorship that they either can or want to put toward that value to be seen as a good person, or to have exposure, whatever their motive. Their motive might not always be altruistic. It may be flat “I need a tax exemption, a tax deduction, and if I can make myself look good and get exposure in the community at the same…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
