Living The Red Life
The Wedge Strategy To Land Fortune 500 Companies With Terry Rice
Mon, 20 Jan 2025
Terry Rice, a business consultant and expert in helping entrepreneurs scale their offerings to attract larger corporate clients. Terry shares his journey of transitioning from small-scale engagements to working with big-name brands, providing listeners with practical advice on how to navigate this shift. He emphasizes the importance of understanding corporate culture, simplifying complex knowledge to add measurable value, and positioning yourself as a cost-effective solution compared to in-house teams.Terry also reflects on personal challenges, including being fired from Facebook, which led to a transformative period where he redefined his identity and success outside of traditional corporate roles. He introduces actionable strategies like the "wedge strategy," which involves using audits, training sessions, and speaking engagements as entry points to bigger deals. Terry’s candid insights on pricing, confidence, and delivering ROI make this episode invaluable for entrepreneurs looking to elevate their business and secure larger clients.CHAPTER TITLES 02:35 - The Importance of Understanding Corporate Language04:32 - Breaking into Bigger Deals with Small Wins06:18 - Lessons from Walmart: Creating Value Beyond the Obvious08:12 - Why Simplifying Your Knowledge Wins Clients10:04 - Building Client Trust Through Transparency12:15 - Adjusting Pricing for Maximum Value14:22 - Charging Your True Worth: Context and ROI16:08 - Navigating Pricing Objections with Confidence18:14 - Lessons Learned from Being Fired at Facebook20:30 - Three Wedge Strategies for Breaking into Big ClientsConnect with Terry Rice:https://terryrice.co/SOCIALS - itsterryriceConnect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter
Chapter 1: What general tips can help me land corporate contracts?
What are like three or four just general tips if you had 30 seconds with someone and they want to get more into these big corporate contracts?
I think the most important thing is to use the wedge strategy. Just if you've never chopped down a tree before, the easiest way to chop it down is not by just hacking at it for hours. You want to drive a wedge into one side, just a small wedge, and then from the other side, pull it down. So what McKinsey does is they offer audits as a wedge.
Chapter 2: What is the wedge strategy and how can it help?
So instead of saying, hey, give us millions of dollars for this huge project, they say, hey, give us a smaller amount for this audit that we'll do. And then afterwards, they'll say, hey, look, if you want help implementing this stuff, then you have to give us a bunch of money.
My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life.
What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Today, my friend Terry Rice is joining us on the show. Terry, you may have seen in the past, if you've watched my Amazon show, Amazon Prime 60 Day Hustle, Terry's a guest. He's an editor and writer for Entrepreneur Magazine. And like me and probably you, he's an entrepreneur and he helps businesses grow.
And today we're going to dive into how he helps big businesses grow. So he He's doing some Fortune 500 consulting or big billion dollar brands. And we're going to talk about if you're in the marketing space, how do you land clients like that? So Terry, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Great. Well, let's dive in.
Chapter 3: How can small audits lead to bigger contracts?
I know we've known each other for a while, but if my audience listening don't know who you are, you mind just giving a minute overview of yourself and how you got here?
Yeah, sure thing. I spent the first 10 years of my career in corporate working at companies like Adobe and Facebook and some agencies. And then in 2015, I left to start my own company actually got fired to start my own company.
Chapter 4: Why is simplifying knowledge critical for winning clients?
And that's when I just really got scrappy in regards to building my own business, primarily doing digital marketing consulting, and then moving on to helping other entrepreneurs. And now I'm focused more on lifestyle design for high performers and have a program called Savage that helps people with that.
Right. And obviously, I know there's a lot of things we could dive into. And we met through, you know, more on the entrepreneur side. And obviously, our relationships growing from there. But for today, we're talking like you've done, you know, and every time I chat and catch up with you, you're doing another kind of consulting gig or something for like this big, massive brand.
Chapter 5: How can I build client trust through transparency?
And I know a lot of people in my industry say, you know, even myself, right? We saw in doing marketing, consulting agency, we get a lot of small brands, but we always want to get the big brands because generally they have, you know, more reach, bigger, bigger contracts, all of those things. So can you talk a little about some of the companies you've worked with and how they came about?
Yeah, yeah, sure thing. And I'll start by saying this all happened by accident. And I'll tell you that backstory in a moment. But, you know, all the things, Walmart, Amazon, Google, like, you know, I can keep going, but hopefully that helps. And on my end, it's great to have access to companies that big because you have such a bigger impact. And as a result of that, you can make more money.
Chapter 6: What pricing strategies should I use for maximum value?
So I'm looking forward to guiding people towards their process of getting these big contracts as well.
Yeah, great. So let's dive into the tactic side, right? Like this show is all about, you know, tactics and implementation and short episodes. So let's start with a bang. What are like three or four just general tips if you had 30 seconds with someone and they want to get more into these big corporate contracts? Let's start at the top. What would three or four big tips be?
Yeah, I think the most important thing is to use the wedge strategy. And this was made popular by McKinsey. So just if you've never chopped down a tree before, the easiest way to chop it down is not by just hacking at it for hours. You want to drive a wedge into one side, just a small wedge, and then from the other side, pull it down. So what McKinsey does is they offer audits as a wedge.
So instead of saying, hey, give us millions of dollars for this huge project, they say, hey, give us a smaller amount for this audit that we'll do. And then afterwards, they'll say, hey, look, if you want help implementing this stuff, then you have to give us a bunch of money. On my end, I accidentally discovered that strategy.
Chapter 7: How do I navigate pricing objections with confidence?
Years ago, this private equity company reached out to me and they said, look, we're about to buy this e-commerce company for like $40 million. We know you're a digital marketing expert. Can you just audit it to make sure we're not buying a lemon? And I'm like, yeah, sure. So I went through that process, give them the audit, and they're like, it seems like you've never done this before.
And I was like, yeah, you're actually kind of right. They're like, can you give us a format that you can use over and over again? Because we want to use you to pre-qualify all our deals going forward. I was like, okay, cool. I got to create a system around this. So I did that. And that's why I'm encouraging everyone else to do this too.
Chapter 8: What lessons can be learned from being fired at Facebook?
Because once I did that, they're like, can you give us quarterly audits to let us know how we're doing based on your previous recommendations? Okay. So the cool thing about audits is you land one that can easily turn into four. And then on the back end, you could say, hey, look, if you want help implementing this stuff, I can consult you as well.
So for anyone listening, that's the easiest way to get involved with big companies. Just offer them an audit, you know, smaller dollar value, prove your value. And then from there, you can ramp up to bigger deals.
Chapter 9: What are the three wedge strategies for breaking into big clients?
Yeah. And I mean, even like we teach similar in a different way. Like we always, you know, even with our sales teams and stuff, we always follow like what I call a teach to sell method, right? Where we're here to genuinely help show you everything you're doing well, show you all the gaps, show you things you should be doing.
And then look, if we can be a part of filling those gaps for you and help you do that in a quicker, faster and more accurate way. Great. Here we are. Right. And I like that's the only way I really like to sell. We don't pressure sell or anything. And it's kind of the same here. Right.
Same psychology of, hey, this is everything that you may be missing and why that can make a big difference and how much you can make if you implement those things. And if you want my help to do that quicker and faster and, you know, following my strategies so you have more certainty, then I can come in and do that.
Yeah, and that initial interaction builds that trust, making it so much easier to get big deals. And another wedge that I discovered on accident was working with marketing agencies. So I would do workshops on Facebook ads, digital marketing, so on and so forth for the new hires. But the thing is, agencies sometimes have a high turnover.
So they're calling me back like the next month, the next month, the next month, train more people. And people tend to leave agencies as well. So when people go to a different agency, they would say, oh, yeah, bring that guy, Terry, in to go ahead and train us. So, again, I would do these workshops, but then I'd also stand with a retainer to consult them going forward.
And they're working with big brands, right? They're managing these multimillion dollar contracts. So, therefore, I could charge in proportion to that as well.
Yeah, that's great. So that works for the bigger agencies that, you know, like the New York agencies and stuff that have these big deals. You know, if they're getting a million dollar contract, they don't mind cutting you a check for 50 grand or whatever, right? To come in and make sure it's on track.
Yeah, it's funny. One time this company reached out to me, they had like, it's like a small budget, like an $80,000 budget for some Google campaign. And they call me the day before it's supposed to go live and like, what should we do? And I'm like, yo, give them their money back. Like, I don't have time to teach you how to do this in a day. But that's what happens.
Like, if you can just fill that void for people, because this was a branding agency, they had no idea how to do direct response marketing. So if you can find an organization, in this case, an agency that already has access to these big companies, but they're missing something you can fill, then it's a done deal because they need you to retain that client.
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