Conquer Local Podcast

The sales funnel: everything you need to know about top, middle, and bottom of funnel.

Master Sales Series is back with another episode. This time we are exploring the various segments of the customer journey. We examine the top of funnel, middle of funnel, and bottom of funnel. The customer controls the journey as to where they are in the funnel. A staggering 83% of the customer's journey in 2020-2021 is now spent doing independent research, and 17% of the time is spent talking to a salesperson.

If we are looking at the lens from a content marketing perspective - The top of funnel is all about learning and exploratory; examples of this would be blogs, podcasts, videos, and infographics. The middle of funnel is the consideration stage where you build trust with the customer; this would include eBooks, case studies, gated content, and email campaigns. The bottom of funnel is all around buying and negotiation; this can look like product FAQs, free trials, demos, and presentations.

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Out of chaos comes innovation. Ecommerce has grown leaps and bound in the last year due to the pandemic, but it's clear - it's here to stay.

Conquer Local is in Amsterdam this week talking with Stephanie Kirk, Director of EU & US Operations at Spotzer. Stephanie doesn't disappoint; she brings invaluable information on ecommerce. She provides talks tracks, breaks down what ecommerce means, and offers advice to the business owner who may be reluctant to jump on board the ecommerce train. It is expected that by 2040, 95% of all purchases will be via ecommerce. The top reason why people make online purchases is that they can shop whenever they want, 24/7.

Stephanie did her degree in Theatre & Film, and gained skills in many transferable areas, even though she found being a Magician’s Assistant wasn’t as fulfilling as she imagined. But adaptability is key to a varied life. In 2010 she began a career in Tech, working her way through several key roles with Yell, the UK’s most prominent directory service. Steph’s remit encompassed customer service & process improvement, and, eventually, she headed up Yell’s Digital Agency, the flagship function after their transformation from print to digital. Being invited to join the team at Spotzer in 2018, after collaborating with them on various projects, was a pivotal moment in Stephanie’s career. In the last 2 years, she’s helped Spotzer continue to be successful through rapid change and expansion and now works on partnerships with 19 partner companies across Europe and the U.S.

At some point, she had time to travel and thoroughly enjoys exploring new places across the globe, mainly by trekking, biking, or sailing. She and her team are really excited to work alongside Vendasta, and she’s eager to inject a little Spotzer magic to ensure top-quality products and services support more SMBs.

Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

In the digital landscape, where businesses are heading in Singapore, digital marketing tools and techniques provide business owners the best chances for competition, survival, and even growth.

Get ready; our first guest from Singapore joins us this week - Fabian Lim, Founder of Click Media. He shares his interesting career path and how it led him to where he is today. We get a glimpse into what the digital landscape looks like in Southeast Asia, how their market is evolving into the same as western climates, and how they really dove headfirst in the DIY model to learn digital. Fabian shares how different countries have different levels of technology and understanding. For example, there was never a desktop and laptop phase. In Singapore, they skipped over it and went straight to mobile and tablet - the local businesses run everything off their phone.

Fabian Lim is a serial online entrepreneur with over 18 years of management consultancy & digital transformation experience. After a six-year stint with Deloitte Consulting, he ventured into digital marketing. Today, he is Founder of WorldInternetAcademy.com & one of Asia’s foremost Omni-Channel Marketing experts, having trained over 10,000 practitioners over the past 10 years worldwide; and LifestyleTrader.org - the World's first 'earn-as-you-learn,' ROI-based, lifestyle trading system.

He is also founding director of ClickMedia Pte Ltd, a digital marketing agency established in 2008 that specializes in Omni-Channel Marketing - specifically E-Commerce Marketing, Conversion Rate Optimization, Facebook Marketing, Google Search & Display, Search Engine Optimization, Content Marketing, Web Analytics, Usability Analysis, E-mail Marketing & Marketing Automation and ChatBot Marketing.

His online marketing clients include multi-national companies, public sector organizations, and top regional and local brands in the telecommunications, high technology, education, and retail industries, including Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Polytechnic, Estee Lauder, Asia Pacific Breweries, Bausch & Lomb, Fujitsu, Pet Lovers Centre & FarEastFlora.com. In 2016, he founded FlightSchool.sg - Singapore's first private flying school for aspirating aviators. From Sept 2017 to Jan 2019, he led Yellow Pages Singapore on a digital transformation journey as Chief Executive Officer. In fact, in just 8 months, he turned Yellow Pages from a traditional print publisher into a profitable digitally transformed organization.

Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

Sales is among the most challenging of occupations, even during the best of times. Toss in a global pandemic, and now we have to switch gears to remote selling. 

Countless hours and resources are spent identifying potential customers, nurturing leads, and closing deals. Much of the working world in a time of pandemic is living through the awkwardness and frustration that can come with remote work in 2021. That is the exact reason we are bringing the next Master Sales Series of 10 Tips for Remote Selling. George Lieth wants to share his knowledge with what has worked with his sales teams and pass them along in hopes the Conquerors can leverage them.

1. Join early
2. Share an agenda
3. Dress for success
4. Be aware of your surroundings
5. Become the master of mute
6. Stay seated, stay in frame
7. Minimize distractions
8. Have empathy 
9. Plan for an effective kick-off and wrap up
10. Shutdown other programs. 

Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

Lead Generation to generating business leads the inbound way. Learn how lead generation fits into your inbound marketing strategy and easy ways that you can start generating leads for your company.

We welcome the Conquer Local Podcast's first Producer, Brock Andony. Brock started as an intern and now is a Content Marketing Strategist at Vendasta. He brings to life what it means to write a "Big Rock" content piece and the power it holds to continue to bring value and leads for your organization. Brock brings some shocking stats with him - 61% of Marketers say lead generation is their top challenge and 55% spend half their marketing budget on obtaining leads. He shares why organizations need to develop Big Rock pieces of content, create a release strategy, continue to gain leads of a large piece of content, and share what's next for lead generation.

Get the guide here.

Brock is basically a digital marketing Swiss Army knife. What started as a childhood passion for fine arts has blossomed into an affinity for the more imaginative parts of demand generation. His expertise spans email marketing, performance content marketing, content syndication, paid ad strategy, SEO, web design, and everything else you need to generate leads in today's business landscape. From co-founding early-stage startups, to winning the largest cash case competition in Canada, to pioneering new content strategies at large enterprises, he is always looking for the next immovable obstacle to overcome. Oh, and he also answers to Archie—for obvious reasons.

Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

Small and medium businesses can learn how to leverage the power of Amazon with our help. 

We are bringing Lisa McNab, CEO & Co-Founder at Canbaba Network—Canada's only wholesaling and dropshipping marketplace. One of the things the Conquer Local Podcast has made its mission here in the first six months of the year is to align around the user journey that we are seeing as common themes in our channel partner network worldwide. We all know is that e-commerce has now come to the forefront. We are learning that people are thirsty to learn more about best practices around e-commerce. Business owners are trying to figure out, and they have this e-commerce entity now, how can we help really make it hum? How do I turn it into a store that rivals the revenue that I get through my physical doorway? Lisa McNab will give the inside scoop on how to compete with dropshipping and how to Leverage the Power of Amazon.

Lisa's goal is to unlock Canada’s manufacturing through ecommerce to make it more efficient for business buyers to buy high-quality unsaturated Canadian products for low Canadian dollars.

In 2013, Lisa graduated from Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC, with a business degree majoring in marketing with minors in international business, linguistics, and opera. She did 4 exchanges in Quebec, France, Croatia, and China. Her love of travel and language mixed with business has fueled her supply chain passion.

Lisa has spent almost a decade learning about and participating in online product sales on Amazon, Shopify, eBay, social media networks, and many more. She's one of the few people in Saskatchewan's whole province that is a dedicated Amazon merchant and wholesaling ecommerce specialist. She's looking forward to revolutionizing businesses worldwide with Canbaba’s unlimited marketplace syndication and leveraging tools.

Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

To reduce churn is an ongoing struggle and will continue to be for however long your company exists. But that doesn’t mean that you should give up the fight.

This week on the Conquer Local Podcast, we have Josh Glantz, former CEO of SinglePlatform which was acquired by Tripadvisor. In this episode, Josh gives us a little bit of everything, so get ready for it. We explore retention strategies, reduce churn, the Do it For Me model, inbound sales strategies, and Josh digs into what he looks for when interviewing a potential employee, if they fit in the culture, and if they have grit.

Josh Glantz has 20+ years of experience scaling teams and businesses. Successfully selling, acquiring, and integrating several during his career, Josh most recently led SinglePlatform through its sale to Tripadvisor. Josh was the CEO at SinglePlatform for more than 4 years and turned around its financial performance making SP a Rule of 40 company. Before SinglePlatform, Josh led the digital business at the iconic marketer Publishers Clearing House. During his 4 years leading that organization, Josh’s team achieved 5x revenue growth to more than $100MM while delivering significant margin contribution to the parent company. Josh is an active fundraiser for cancer research and started an open water fundraising event that has raised more than $20MM for research and treatment.

Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

Prospecting is the first step in the sales process of identifying potential customers, aka prospects. The goal of prospecting is to develop a directory of likely customers and then systematically communicate with them in the hopes of converting them from potential customers to current customers.

George Leith is back for another Master Sales Series for Prospecting 101. He uses his sales experience of 30+ years to share what works and what doesn't from tried and tested methods. George shares different tactics, failures of unsuccessful attempts and digs deep to show each tactic's value. The historical reference of the term “prospector” refers to individuals' effort to find gold by scanning creek beds and rock formations. When flecks of gold were spotted, the prospectors would spend time sifting through dirt to find the valuable nuggets. That’s what modern-day sales prospectors do – sift through large lists of potential customers to try and uncover those who are interested and ready to buy.

Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

All too often, marketers and salespeople think: “A customer is a customer. Any sale is a good sale." It’s time to break free from that mindset. In reality, there is a stark difference between an ideal customer and less-than-ideal customers.

Master Sales Series is back to explore Finding your Ideal Customer. Our host, George Leith, walks through six steps in finding your ideal customer.

1. Brainstorming
2. Surveying existing clients
3. Digging through Google Analytics
4. Social listening
5. Social media analytics
6. Spy on your competitors

Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

The goal of a sales mentor is to create an environment where team members feel self-motivated to grow, excel, and take greater responsibility for what they do. An effective sales mentor is the key to long-term performance improvement and organizational success. It is the most important job a sales leader has.

Our first guest of Season Four is none other than Stephen Defina; Stephen is the VP of Revenue, GTM at Clearbanc. He joins us this week to discuss what it means to be a sales mentor, how to do it with a team and one-on-one. Stephen refers to himself as the pusher, and he isn't afraid to keep pushing his mentees to keep striving for more. Now more than ever, sales teams are struggling with unqualified leads, missed sales goals, and lost opportunities. Increasingly, company and sales leaders are turning to finding a sales mentor as a solution—that and more on this episode of the Conquer Local Sales Podcast.

Stephen Defina is the VP of Revenue, GTM at Clearbanc, the world's biggest ecommerce investor. Clearbanc has invested $1 billion into 3,300+ ecommerce and software companies using data science to identify high-growth funding opportunities in less than 24 hours. This data-driven approach takes the bias out of decision making and has helped fund 8x more female founders than traditional VC. In his time at Clearbanc, Stephen has helped grow the sales team and revenue while funding some of the most exciting brands in ecommerce, including Haus, The Sill, and Untuckit. Prior to Clearbanc, Stephen has been the VP of Sales at 4 different startups, two of which, TradeGecko and Yodle, have been acquired for a total of over $430M. Stephen is also a founding member of the Toronto Revenue Collective, a private members-only organization consisting of top senior commercial leaders in the Ontario area.

Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community and keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.