Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.281)
If you're business owner struggling to pitch your services without feeling desperate or inauthentic, then our guest Lisa Fernandez is about to give you a simple win you can implement today. Lisa is a lifelong student of story and she brings that passion to help brands tell better stories. Lisa, so excited to have you here. This is going be a great episode.
Lisa Fernandez (00:21.666)
Yay, thanks so much for having me, Adam.
Adam O'Leary (00:24.215)
Absolutely. So I've heard you discuss how authenticity and being specific are key to successful pitching. Can you explain why focusing on these elements makes such a difference in overcoming the fear and frustration many business owners feel when they are pitching?
Lisa Fernandez (00:41.582)
Sure. So in a nutshell, it's a much more powerful mental anchor. And that mental anchor that I offer is specificity plus authenticity. It's natural and understandable that your nervous system is going to orient to the goal of I want or need the sale. But that doesn't have anything to do with the person that you're talking to and how you can serve them.
So my formula of specificity and authenticity is about specificity, what specific offer do you have that can solve a problem for them in the near to midterm? Authenticity is about how they resonate with you and sharing some of that admiration with them.
Adam O'Leary (01:30.593)
I love that. And can you go a little bit deeper on like what that offer is? Like if you're if you're reaching out to somebody or whatever it is, can you kind of go a little bit deeper into that for me just so the audience can understand it more?
Lisa Fernandez (01:43.512)
Sure. So I'll give specific examples for my business and hopefully it has some universal resonance. But I worked for many years with nonprofits and through conversation, firsthand experience, immersion, and just being in that field, I had that firsthand knowledge of knowing that a lot of nonprofits don't realize that there's this Google program out there for them where they can get a free Google workspace or get an ad grant that gives them
free ad spend for about $120,000 a year in free ad spend. So through my experiences with nonprofits, I knew this was like a recurring pain point that they were too overwhelmed, that they didn't have the knowledge, that they thought applying for it was gonna be such a big pain. So I already had that like specific value to approach them with and say, hey, are you aware of this? Do you have this? But I would start by saying, you know,
from an authentic standpoint of like, admire this about your mission. I really like this. You mentioned such and such on LinkedIn and it really resonated with me. And like coming from an authentic place, and if I didn't have those specific things that dialed in offer and that authentic resonance, I wouldn't even bother the outreach because it's been my experience that at least when it comes to outreach, it's not.
numbers game in the sense of spamming. At that point you may as well just save yourself the time and do 12 quality outreaches instead of 1200 bot outreaches. Yeah, so it's really about making impactful connections and you can kind of only do that if you've done your research.
Adam O'Leary (03:33.647)
I love that and yes, I agree with you 1 million percent guys stop scraping lists and emailing random people who you haven't looked up 100 % yes, so question about this Lisa is if let's say if we don't have a hundred and twenty thousand dollar type of a thing where you can get free ad spend, okay, how can somebody who maybe has a normal type of a service or something like this? How can they make sure that their offer is more enticing?
Adam O'Leary (04:06.988)
you're muted.
Lisa Fernandez (04:09.741)
Sorry, again, this does come back to your research and knowing your audience. You have to have specific knowledge of that industry and niche and recurring pain points. In the B2B space, a lot of the recurring pain points I see is like disconnected systems, siloed departments, overwhelm, too much on their plate. if you, whatever your value is that you have to bring, if it adds something like,
streamlined, connected systems, the left hand talking to the right hand, not having adding even more work for them to do, more of like a concierge type of service where you can kind of seamlessly fit into their existing ecosystem and serve them up value that way. But you have to at least understand that niche and the recurring pain points that they have to then connect the dots back to
What do you have to give to them?
Adam O'Leary (05:12.096)
Absolutely. And one thing I've heard you talk about before is to really channel your inner guidance to identify what truly excites them. And I think this was a fascinating concept that you were talking about and I definitely want to kind of go into this here. So when we're talking about pitching our services, okay, a lot of the times, especially for somebody who's not like a super salesperson or anything like this, they might feel weird or they might feel nervous or
a little frustrated of even how do I explain this properly? How do you get somebody excited to make the pitch?
Lisa Fernandez (05:50.7)
Yeah, so this is something that you can start practicing even before you start implementing and pitching, using it in your pitches. That thing inside of you that lights up. There's an inner spark or sometimes I call it an inner tail wag, a cord that is struck inside of you. Tony Robbins talked about this years ago about like how you get choked up watching someone do something tremendous at the Olympics or something like that.
And that's because that is your inner excellence, like begging to be heard or something like that. I think of it this way, that there is something that you're interfacing with that is striking a chord inside of you. And the result of that is resonance. And that means there's some potential for a kindred spirit, some likeness in between you and whatever your...
experiencing that's exciting you. And once you start cultivating that inner guidance system, a whole new world opens up to you of who to pitch to and who to approach. And the more you cultivate that, listen to it, test it, and see where it leads you, the more you can gain trust in yourself that that system is going to lead you in wonderful places.
Adam O'Leary (07:13.516)
love that. And one of the things that especially when I was first starting off, I got to say the fear of rejection, right? And the the the fear of somebody saying no, or whatever it might be, how do you go about detaching yourself from the outcome of that pitch?
Lisa Fernandez (07:19.949)
Mm-hmm.
Lisa Fernandez (07:31.532)
Yeah, so I tend to hate cliches because they can feel so hollow and empty and like cold comfort when someone's like really looking for some insight or yeah, comfort to help them. But the cliche, it's a numbers game. This is how I see that.
You can apply this to like dating or I used to be an actor and went on many auditions I would almost do like a mind wipe like I would prepare to the best of my ability Go in leave it all on the table and then walk out and like give myself amnesia as if it never happened so you can't do this to the same degree in Business because in those examples, it's like don't call us. We'll call you so you can be on the receiving end You have to be a little bit more
proactive in the business world, but it works in the sense that the more reps you get in, the less precious every rep feels and you're not looking for one bicep curl to give you the bicep of your dreams. That's not how it happens. And the more of those reps you do, the less precious everyone is. And honestly, like it has this amazing way of opening up all these other paths and you start to see that
to like mix all kinds of metaphors, that there really are so many fish in the sea. And you might have your sights set on that fish and maybe you went after that fish, but in the pursuit of that, you started noticing your reticular activating system or whatever started to open up to this whole new world of other fish that you would like to catch.
Adam O'Leary (09:16.162)
I love that analogy of the one bicep curl because that was actually, I just started going to the gym like three months ago. And once you started saying the reps, was like, that's, I was thinking the gym. Bang on the money there. No, this is awesome. And a question for you. So if we're going ahead and creating pitches, okay. we're,
Lisa Fernandez (09:21.837)
You don't like-
Lisa Fernandez (09:25.633)
Yes, yes.
Adam O'Leary (09:37.795)
We're trying to go land as many deals as we possibly can. One of the fears or I guess one of the things that happens is that people rehearse, they rehearse, they rehearse over and over and over again and then they go out to go make a pitch but they don't feel authentic. How do you go about making sure that your pitch sounds authentic and that the person comes across confident in what they're saying?
Lisa Fernandez (10:04.341)
Yeah, so I won't even make a pitch unless I have this criteria fulfilled. Number one, the specificity of the offer that I have to give to this person. And number two, the authenticity. I authentically have a familiarity with them and want to help them. So from my vantage point, if you can't fulfill a certain...
level of those requirements, you're kind of like whistling in the wind and maybe you should be nervous, you know, because you are spamming a little bit. And sometimes you have to go through that. Like some reps are ugly in the beginning, right? To get to a better place of like your form is better and you're, getting your sea legs a little bit more and you understand what you're doing. But I always feel like you can't really skip that step.
Like learning to walk is never going to be graceful. Learning to do anything better than you currently do it is never gonna be pain-free, easy, seamless, cool-looking. And that's not the point. The point is to get better. And the point is to take a look at the data that you're getting as you're testing it and seeing what's working. And you can't skip that step.
of those awkward early phases in my experience.
Adam O'Leary (11:39.21)
Absolutely, everything has to be done manually at first you should not be using any softwares until you've done it about 10,000 times It's just it's the rule I mean because if you don't go ahead and like for example for my side, I'll just share a little
Lisa Fernandez (11:42.093)
Mm-hmm.
Lisa Fernandez (11:47.628)
Yeah.
Adam O'Leary (11:53.742)
background and what I've done is that whenever I would do any sort of cold outreaches or anything like this, a lot of people will go start. They jump into these cold email platforms or whatever, and they send out a thousand emails in a day. And they're like, how do I warm up my emails? And for my side, I'll send 20 messages a day manually. I send it every single one completely manually. And then I optimize and optimize and optimize. And my goal personally is to get to at least a bare minimum of 50 % response.
rate on those types of cold emails. It is just hyper focusing that message in making sure that you get it and then once you have that hyper focused in only then can you start automating some parts of the process and it's basically about building it in slowly and slowly and slowly over time but the core component there is like if you just go ahead and start blasting people the problem that you're going to face is basically what Lisa is talking about here is that you might for example you might have so many reps but nobody's responding you're not getting any conversions and then
Lisa Fernandez (12:35.437)
Mm-hmm.
Adam O'Leary (12:53.025)
your no rate is way too high. So no, yeah. Thank you so much for sharing that Lisa. And I guess just from you working with clients, what sort of results have you seen from your clients going ahead and implementing this and where can people go to learn more about you?
Lisa Fernandez (12:55.553)
Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Fernandez (13:08.171)
Yeah, so for me, this all starts with messaging. So whether it's in your marketing materials or in your sales process, you know, lines of value that you want to offer during the sales process, you have to have that positioning like really dialed in. And like we've been saying, you can't always jump to that end result of having those lines of connection that converts seamlessly, but
that is the most important thing to get right. Especially B2B buyers are becoming a lot more like B2C buyers where they don't want to interface with the sales process like kind of until the very, very end. They want a self-directed, frictionless kind of experience where they do all their browsing and learning on their own. And then when they're ready, they raise their hand and they find you.
or they respond to some kind of outreach or they comment on your posts. So that means that everywhere that our messaging is disseminated has to work extra hard for us. And it's more important now than ever to have that dialed in and have the authenticity, like what is your true brand DNA and how do we atomize that into all your communications?
so that the people that are meant to find you resonate with you. They have their own inner tail wag and they follow the breadcrumbs along the way to find you. And that's how you find your community, your audience, your prospects.
Adam O'Leary (14:46.271)
Absolutely, and what is the website people can go visit you at?
Lisa Fernandez (14:49.801)
It's LisaFernandezAgency.com. You can check me out there and on all social platforms, Lisa Fernandez Agency.
Adam O'Leary (14:59.018)
Amazing. Lisa, thank you so much for your time. This has been such a wonderful interview. Well, thank you. Absolutely. And thank you all for listening and I will see you on the next episode of Simple Wins.
Lisa Fernandez (15:02.657)
Thank you, Adam. It was lovely talking to you.
