There’s no business without sales, so it’s no wonder that selling is of continuous interest to agencies and consultancies. It’s hard work, and as much as you learn, there’s always another layer of subtlety and expertise you can develop. The Google Partners Podcast now kicks off a mini-series of episodes that dive into different aspects of sales. You’ll hear ideas, insights and resources you can use to get better at pursuing the kinds of clients and contracts you want.

We start by looking into the general rule that 80% of any business comes from 20% of its clients. While simple on the surface, the 80/20 phenomenon is deeply significant and can lead to powerful efficiencies and strategies when sales teams use it wisely. And Perry Marshall is the person to explain how. Among the highest-paid business consultants in the world, Marshall wrote 80/20 Sales & Marketing, a mandatory read in many growing companies, as well as The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, the world’s best-selling book on Internet advertising.

Guest: Perry Marshall, Author and Consultant

Perry Marshall is endorsed in Forbes and Inc. Magazine, and is one of the most sought-after business consultants in the world for his ability to integrate technology, sales, art and psychology. His reinvention of the Pareto 80/20 Principle is published in Harvard Business Review; and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs at the California Institute of Technology uses his 80/20 Curve as a productivity tool.

Marshall’s Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords laid the foundations of the $100 billion Pay-Per-Click industry, and techniques he pioneered remain standard best practices today. As a consultant, he has worked in over 300 industries and has served as an expert witness for marketing litigation. Perry has a degree in Electrical Engineering. He lives in Chicago.

Host: Alex Langshur

Recent episodes of our podcast have talked about positioning, seasonality, landing pages, and digital assistants. With the complexity and fast-paced evolution of many topics in marketing, it’s easy to forget that so much of what we do all comes down to words. There’s a lot riding on our ability to find the right message at the right time for any audience we’re reaching. If we’re going to succeed, we need to create or curate copy that sparkles, engages, convinces—and converts.

The good news is that like many skills, good writing can be learned. So this episode, we’re excited to welcome one of the best teachers around: Joanna Wiebe. Founder of Copy Hackers, Joanna is a highly sought after conversion copywriter who has worked with clients as diverse as brick-and-mortar stalwart, Tesco, and digital native, Nectar Sleep. A globe-spanning speaker, Joanna joins us to share techniques that make words work harder.

Guest - Joanna Wiebe, Conversion Copywriter

The original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe is the creator of Copy Hackers and CH Agency, where she and her team write world-class conversion copy for clients like Nectar Sleep, Datastax, Canva and Sprout Social. She's been invited to teach conversion copywriting on 100+ international stages at events like StartCon, INBOUND, Mozcon and Business of Software. Along the way, more than 50,000 people at businesses large and small have turned to Joanna for copy coaching, and thousands more have taken her online training courses, such as Copy School. Find her at copyhackers.com or on Twitter @copyhackers.

Host: Alex Langshur

Twenty-five years ago, it was websites. Twelve years ago, it was mobile. Today, it’s voice assistance. By 2022, voice commerce sales are expected to top $45B in the US and UK, and even today 72% of people with voice-activated speakers use them as part of their daily routine. Clearly, if you’re in the digital agency space, you need to understand voice user interfaces (VUIs) and get yourself in front of the trend.

Wally Brill, Head of Conversation Design Advocacy & Education for the Google Assistant, is a perfect guest to walk us through this subject. He has twenty years’ experience with voice, primarily in the design of VUIs, both as a consultant and in senior roles with companies such as eBay and Nuance. In other words, he’s been in the game for as long as there was a game. In this episode, Wally shares insights on voice-based actions, persona design and what he thinks the future will hold.

Since we’re nearing the holiday season and the annual retail apex of Black Friday/Cyber Monday, the Google Partners Podcast brings you an early holiday treat. Hana Abaza, Head of Marketing at Shopify Plus, shares insights about seasonal campaigns and campaign strategies as well as year-round wisdom for effective positioning whether you’re a digital agency or a marketer in the B2B or B2C space.

A featured speaker at conferences about tech, startups and marketing, Hana is passionate about strategy and helping companies grow. And she’s the real deal with a track record of successful marketing strategy and campaign execution across a variety of companies. Now with her vantage point at Shopify Plus, she’s uniquely poised to share what she’s learned about what works in online marketing and why.

Guest - Hana Abaza, Head of Marketing at Shopify Plus

Hana has been involved in technology and startups for a number of years. She started on the B2C side before switching to a consulting role in marketing and growth in B2B SAS. It was while working at Uberflip in Toronto that Hana started looking for her next step, wondering if she wanted to stay with a startup or a more mid-stage company and if she wanted to stay in Toronto or move to the west coast. It was over coffee and “life advice” with Craig Miller, Shopify’s Chief Product Officer, that she found out about Shopify Plus. The new expansion of Shopify appealed to her desire to stay in the up-market space. Through that meeting, she moved into her current role as Head of Marketing where she pursues her interests and grows her talents relating to the entire marketing process from product development to commercialization.

Host: Alex Langshur

The conversation about pricing can be a dicey one. Not only because what businesses charge is proprietary, but also because methods of pricing can vary quite a bit. Some have buttoned down processes that track expenses, calculate hourly rates, and arrive at a margin. Others go mainly on instinct or observations of what other companies are doing. But if marketers avoid looking closely at their pricing, do they run the risk of losing money? What are the gains of pricing more strategically?

Pricing really comes down to two things: 1) What’s your value to your clients, and 2) How do you communicate that value? To answer these questions, it can be very helpful to get an outsider’s perspective. Our guest today is business coach Robin Waite. Robin has helped improve pricing structure, leverage value, and grow the bottom line for many businesses.

Guest - Robin Waite, Business Coach

From 2004 to 2014, Robin Waite ran a design and advertising agency that served more than 250 clients. During that time, he began delivering workshops and classes that helped more than 1,000 business owners improve their marketing, product architecture, pricing, websites and digital advertising. As a business coach, Robin combines creativity with logical, analytical and objective thinking to help entrepreneurs become more successful.

His best-selling books are Take Your Shot: How to Grow Your Business, Attract More Clients, and Make More Money and Online Business Startup: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Launching a Fast, Lean and Profitable Online Venture. When not coaching or writing, Robin loves nothing more than spending time with his wife and two young daughters.

Host: Alex Langshur

Whether we sell services, products or ideas, the first thing we need to do is find and understand our audience. Because no matter how effective we may be at communicating our value proposition and connecting to a need, we’re not going to see the results we want if we’re talking to the wrong people—or talking about our offering in the wrong way. Positioning is about defining your market and your relationship to it. So you can see why it’s a necessary process before effective marketing can happen. The challenge is taking a fresh, dispassionate, analytical look at your company, your service and your competition.

In this week’s episode, we hear from April Dunford, a marketing and positioning maven who has launched many products into market and served as a senior executive at IBM, Huawei, Nortel and other firms. Today she travels the world, sharing her wisdom and passion about positioning.

Guest - April Dunford, CEO Ambient Strategy

As a consultant, April helps technology companies position their products for market—in other words, she makes them easier to understand and purchase by the customers most need them most. As an international keynote speaker and lecturer, she offers trainings on go-to-market strategy based on the methodologies she’s developed over 25 years as an executive in successful technology startups as well as global tech giants. In that time, she has positioned and launched 16 products and grown the revenue of the companies she’s served from zero to more than a billion.

April is also a board member, angel investor and mentor to dozens of startups. The release of her book Obviously Awesome: How to Position Your Product so Customers Get it, Buy it, Love it is anticipated in early 2019.

Host: Alex Langshur

Entrepreneurs today can get a lot of inspiration from reading books by people like Dale Carnegie, Barbara Corcoran, Guy Kawasaki, Richard Branson—people who achieved exceptional things over the course of their lives. But for the generation now at the start of their careers, few figures could be as interesting as Brian Wong. At 27, has has already pioneered a category-defining rewards network that’s redefining mobile advertising. And he has amassed a level of savvy far beyond his years.

In this episode, Brian shares some of the insights he’s gathered and lessons he’s learned as a rising business leader and innovator.

Guest - Brian Wong, co-founder and CEO of Kiip

Author of The Cheat Code, Brian Wong’s talent has been recognized in Business Insider’s Top 25 Under 25 in Silicon Valley, 30 Under 30 in Advertising, Forbes’ 30 under 30 three times, and Mashable’s Top 5 Entrepreneurs to Watch, to name a few. He has also been called the youngest person ever to receive venture capital funding by CNBC and The Wall Street Journal.

He received his Bachelor of Commerce from the University of British Columbia at age 18 and co-founded Kiip the following year. Kiip is a mobile rewards network that leverages “moments of achievement” in games and apps to simultaneously benefit users, developers and advertisers. Backed by American Express, Interpublic Group, Verizon Ventures, and others, the company has raised $15.4 million in funding to date. Kiip has earned a place in Forbes’ 4 Hot Online Ad Companies to Watch, Fast Company's 50 Most Innovative Companies in the World, and the Dow Jones FasTech50 List.

Host: Alex Langshur

For anyone even thinking about building and testing landing pages, Unbounce is an essential tool and the platform that almost single-handedly created the field. Oli Gardner, the company’s co-founder, travels the world speaking and evangelizing about the importance of the landing page experience in marketing. He’s taken a hard look at more landing pages than anyone on the planet, and he’s obsessed with identifying and reversing bad practices. His rants against marketers who send campaign-specific traffic to their general homepage can peel paint off an unpainted wall!

Today’s episode explores how Oli got to where he is today, and how he turned a passion for crusading against marketing mediocrity into such a key online business platform. What are some of the important learnings he’s gleaned along the way?

Guest - Oli Gardner, Business Coach

Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner is a prolific international speaker who’s on a mission to help businesses use data-informed copywriting, design, interaction, and psychology to create a more delightful experience for marketers and customers alike. He became a marketer the day Unbounce was founded. As an early pioneer in the realm of content marketing, his goal was to position Unbounce as the global leader in everything related to landing pages and ways to deliver high-converting and delightful marketing experiences.

Host: Alex Langshur

Building a business is hard, particularly when growing revenue depends on the staff needed to recognize that revenue. When growth is fundamentally tied to scale—as it is in service-based businesses—market cycles and other factors can create serious challenges. For instance, what happens when your enterprise becomes the hot commodity? How do you manage through meteoric growth without compromising quality? And when revenue drops, how do you protect morale and preserve the company’s culture through the hard choices of downscaling?

As a three-time company co-founder, Ben West has lived through the booms and downturns of the past decades. Here he shares stories and lessons from his long experience in growing businesses and steering them through the unpredictable economic landscape.

Guest - Ben West, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Eventbase

Ben West oversees design, product management and technology strategy for the event app platform, Eventbase. Formerly, he was CIO at StockHouse.com, growing the company from 2 to 250 people worldwide and making it, for a time, the highest-trafficked website in Canada. Ben also founded digital agency Intergalactic and co-founded a digital rights protection software company used by leading record labels.

Ben is a previous winner of the “Top 40 Under 40” award by Business in Vancouver. In his spare time Ben volunteers with branding, marketing, and knowledge-worker training, and he funds a granting program for small businesses to build digital tools as well as a scholarship program. For this work, he was a finalist for the Prime Minister's Canadian Volunteer Awards in 2016.

Host: Alex Langshur

Big or small, regardless of industry or sector, most if not all organizations would say that they’re interested in innovation. But what does that actually mean, and how can individuals and companies innovate in ways that create value? Can we take a vague, overworked buzzword like innovation and make it practical?

Enter Michelle Greenwald, CEO of Inventours. She has transformed herself and her career by making innovation more than just something to talk about. Now she shares strategically tactical steps, personal experiences, and driving attitudes for embracing innovation as a priority and a daily practice.

Guest - Michelle Greenwald, CEO of Inventours

Michelle Greenwald founded DigitalLatest, a summit designed to help executives understand the evolving digital marketing landscape. She runs insight-generating “innovation days” for blue chip clients. And she is steeped in marketing, having been SVP of New Products at Disney, VP & GM at Pepsi-Cola, Business Director at Nestlé and, prior to that, an account exec at JW Thompson.

She currently teaches marketing at Columbia, NYU Stern, Cornell Johnson and other graduate schools, and she’s a regular columnist for Forbes. As if all that weren’t enough, Michelle Greenwald wrote the book Catalyzing Innovation, wherein she advocates systemic approaches to fostering new thinking in organizations of all sizes.

Host: Alex Langshur