Have you ever thought about putting your DOO skills to work for a corporate client? Have you attempted to secure corporate contracts yet, or do you lack the confidence?
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Today, we are having a conversation with someone I look up to, Liz J. Simpson. We are both very passionate about helping women leverage their gifts and put them into the world so that they can create a space, an income, and a life that fuels them.
Meet Liz
Liz J. Simpson empowers women business owners to secure 5, 6 and 7-figure corporate contracts for their professional services and expertise. She’s known for her clients closing multiple six-figure and 7-figure corporate deals within less than 90 days of working with her. Liz has been recognized by LinkedIn as a Top 15 Sales Influencer and named an inaugural Linkedin Sales Insider. She is a member of NSA’s Million Dollar Speaker Group. She has been featured in NBC, CBS, SXSW and 40 under 40. She is an inaugural Hubspot INBOUND Fellow, a Demand Gen Thought Leader award winner as well as a SalesHacker Top Sales Leader and Female Speaker. NAWBO has recognized her as a Women Business Owner Award Winner. As founder of the consultancy, Stimulyst, her mission is to stimulate economic growth and catalyze social change by connecting women entrepreneurs to corporate supplier opportunities. Since 2020, Liz has empowered over 15,000 women around the globe to take up space and shatter gender disparities. Her team has graduated over 219 women entrepreneurs through their highly-acclaimed 12% Accelerator (formerly known as The #BigMoney Movement). When she’s not training professionals to become “fluent in #bigmoney talk”, you’ll find Liz with her husband and three children, aged 6, 17 and 18 in San Antonio, TX.
How do you help people to see that they have what someone else needs?
- It takes a lot of time and effort to educate the market because most people have imposter syndrome, and most people check out the moment we say “corporate”
- Her background is in sales, but she needed to something a bit more fulfilling
- She read a report that stated that less than 12% of women achieve six figures per year
- Latinas averaged $51,000/yr and Black women $24,000/yr
- She became obsessed with why women weren’t creating revenue success in business
- She found that so much of the positioning in the market was a B to C model
- Because of her consulting expertise she could see her clients profit and loss and the cycles
- A lot of the people teaching the B to C model were not surviving on the same model they were teaching
- The clients who were doing the best were those who had multiple contracts with corporations
- They didn’t have to hustle at the beginning of the year because they already had clients
- They also weren’t in a never-ending content and visibility cycle
“It would be so much simpler to package your expertise and have high value conversations with a few people in the market who actually have a budget, a check, and an identified need, and offer your system to them, than it is to decide you want to be in business, and build a model… ” – Liz J. Simpson
- She decided to build this model, launched it in 2020 and it has grown exponentially
- You have to understand what is happening in corporate America
- Corporations already spend $.58 of every dollar with external suppliers
- The question is, do they know you exist?
- They are already cutting a check, do they know they could cut it to you?
- In the last few years, corporations are committed to spending so many dollars to women owned businesses
- Corporations are looking for small businesses to spend their dollars with
- Women and small businesses need to understand that these opportunities exist and understand how to position themselves
- Corporations already spend $.58 of every dollar with external suppliers
- She trains people to position their expertise so it is compatible to corporate
“You don’t have to change what you do to serve corporations, you have to change how you talk about what you do.” – Liz J. Simpson
“If the idea of content visibility or being the CEO of your company feels like something you aren’t interested in, I want you to walk away knowing you have another avenue…” – Natalie Gingrich
How can operators fit inside of corporate, especially if they don’t have that type of background?
“People aren’t buying you, they’re buying your system.”
- Operators have a distinct advantage, because they have been exposed to systems and frameworks
- Your system creates a defined result
- An operator looks at a situation and assesses:
- What are the challenges
- What are they symptoms and how do I diagnosis
- How do I operationalize this and improve it
- Operators talk to people who have problems to understand,.,.,
- what is going on and develops a path to help them get to their goal
- Operators can land everywhere because every division needs operations
- There is so much opportunity but you have to tell the market what you can do, so you need to get really clear on what problems you want to solve
- Her clients use a market ecosystem map which identifies what kind of problems you like to solve, what industries you are interested in
- Start Googling the problems you like to solve and see if any reputable studies come up, and where the money trail is
- Pay attention to how corporate talks about these problems, and mirror that
- The biggest problem for most people is the mindset shift
- You have to be so bought-in to the problem you want to solve and parrot the corporate way to talk about things
- Don’t build an offering, have a few conversations a week with individuals in the right positions who you can build trust and credibility
“When you go to corporate, you have to really shift your thinking about the value of your solution and pricing” – Liz J. Simpson
“The difference is you understanding the opportunity that you have in front of you, and stretching yourself.” – Natalie Gingrich
Connect with Liz
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