It's Time to Sell Podcast: Strategies for 21st Century Selling

Today is going to be a solo episode. Now, I have been working with a client and we've been trying to get in the door of some new clients. I spent the last couple of weeks doing a little bit of research and practical application.

We are wanting to get in the door of new prospects and I thought of recording a short episode to share with you these ideas, ideas we have been deploying based on our research and practical application.

Larry Levine is the international best-selling author of Selling From the Heart and the co-host of the Selling From the Heart Podcast. With 30 years of in-the-field sales experience within the B2B technology space, he knows what it takes to be a successful sales professional.

Now Larry coaches B2B sales professionals to do what he did. Since 2015 Larry has coached both quota-busting tenured reps and green millennials just beginning their careers. Both appreciate the practical nature of his coaching.

Zach Messler is a product marketing guy at heart. For twenty years, he has been into product marketing, sales and product messaging for B2B tech. He left his corporate career over a year ago to pursue his passion for effective communication towards efficient marketing. Now, he helps entrepreneurs with their messaging, to know what to say and how to say it so that they make a bigger impact on the world, and a bigger impact on their wallets.

Our episode for today is going to be short and sweet. A lot of things have been going on in the past few weeks and I thought I'd share it with all of you.

Rewinding the tape: what I did before. Going broad in your business.

Last November, I made the big leap of faith and left my safe secure job working with one of the larger companies in the world – a multinational advisory firm. Prior to that I had launched my book, launched my podcast, grew a little bit of a following by delivering value and just putting myself out there in a very genuine and authentic way. I shared stories, tips and tactics that are pretty well-focused on sales, and growing business through human-to-human sales techniques.

At a certain point last year, I felt an ache in my stomach and I really wanted to jump out and do something on a full-time basis. So I took the leap of faith and in late November I finished my last day in KPMG and went out on my own.

Where I Am Today: Consulting and Speaking Engagements

I have a good group of customers and clients that I work with on a monthly basis, growing revenues for their businesses. Those clients range in size, you know, from $2-million dollars in annual revenue and up to much a larger $50-million dollars in annual revenue.

For some, I just run a weekly sales meeting where I meet with all the people who are doing sales within the company. I run an accountability meeting where we grow the pipeline and we work things through the pipeline on a weekly basis.

I'm actually attending meetings in some cases with certain clients, where I'm observing, chiming in, coaching after the meetings with prospective clients, and it's a lot of fun. I'm getting some great results for my clients and obviously getting some great results for me and my business – Chris Spurvey Consulting Incorporated. So that's that, that's what I've been up to in terms of my consulting business.

When it comes to speaking, it's been very organic. I get people and organizations reaching out to me on occasion, and a couple of times a month I give talks here in my home province in Newfoundland, along with a few people throughout the rest of Canada.

Dockridge Digital and the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast

I have two other initiatives I want to share with you.

I've co-founded another company called Dockridge Digital with my two pals – David Chesney and Dan Shay. These two, fine gentlemen approached me about a month ago, and I've now become a part-owner of the company.

I've also began collaborating with two very special friends of mine – Carol Bartlett and Jol Hunter.

To make the long story short, the three of us decided to collaborate on a new podcast, the Bottom Line Top Line podcast. We plan to launch a weekly show. The first 5 episodes are centered around Jol and his work.

Jol is a very special human being. He formulated some key learnings from having visited the owners of 500 businesses, and in the first 5 episodes we deep dive into his five learnings in terms of how businesses can scale and grow and reach their full potential.

I certainly welcome you to listen to that podcast, and subscribe to receive updates at bottomlinetopline.com.

I think you'll hear some very unique perspectives and hopefully some great things for you to take away and grow your business.

Mentions

Dockridge Digital

Bottom Line Top Line Podcast

A good business flourishes on a healthy mindset that you will reap what you sow.

Today's guest is Ellen Rogin, CPA, CFP, a renowned speaker, money expert, NY Times' Best- selling author and Abundance Activist. Ellen combines her financial expertise and creativity in motivating people to shift their viewpoints that businesses grow when it starts to create generous opportunities to make a greater positive impact.

Her books had helped a lot of business owners develop strong "financial belief management skills" to be a rock star not only in growing their business, but also giving back to the community and inspire others.

In this episode, we talk about

• The importance of generosity as a business core
• the science and effects of giving
• The ways she incorporated generosity in personal and business matters

If you're a business owner who's ready to grow and make a positive impact, I recommend you tune in.

Generosity As a Core Value

People were hanging on so tightly to what they had, so afraid they weren't going to be okay. At the same time that people in their lives and charities needed their money more than ever. Now if you think your hands as being clenched, how can you possibly receive?

On the other hand, if you are always giving, giving and giving, some people have a money belief that it's not okay to have money. It's not spiritual or something not okay with people with money. And you're always giving in your palms or always open doesn't work either. Giving and receiving are both important. If you thought of a coin, they are other sides of the coin. You can't have a giver without a receiver.

I built my financial advisory practice with that in mind. When I first started, I didn't call it "generosity is the new currency in business." But I was lucky to be taught very early in my career about networking and told me that what you sow, you reap. That has always been my strategy for building businesses. If I want more business, I have to be out there giving more business to other people.

When you are out there giving, with no expectation of something in return, it always falls back to you just not necessarily from the same person whom you gave to. And I believe it works that way with money too. The more generous you are, the more that flows in to you when you're loosening that grip on your finances, things flow back.

The Science Behind Giving

Generosity is actually the physical manifestation of your gratitude. You don't have to have a lot of money to be generous. Take a breath a focus on what is working well in your life.

People have a complicated relationship with money, whether they have a lot of money or not. The things that made people more successful were a lot more about how they thought and felt about their money. If people could have a healthy money mindset and were more content about money, the whole idea of building their prosperity works so much more effectively.

One thing is they've found something called subjective wealth. When you give financially, your brain interprets that as "Oh, if I was able to give, I must be rich!" Giving 500 dollars gives you the same emotional buzz as getting a 10,000 dollar raise.

Volunteering has more positive impact on your health than people taking an aspirin every day for their heart. Kids are better generous as more successful as adults. They have lower depression rates.

It's not just because it feels good but there's a lot of science that shows that this actually does help us.

In terms of a business building strategy when you can focus on adding value, really being of service to other people in the work that you do, not only does it feel good and I think really boost your motivation, I also think it grows your business. My business grew 39% in a down market in a recession. I credit a lot of that to shifting my viewpoint.

Incorporating Generosity

At this point, my goal is to build significant business so that I am walking my talk but the ultimate mission is to make the world a more generous place.

Setup a systematic savings plan and a systematic giving plan for yourself. Whatever percentage makes sense for you and to wherever you want to give it. So it could be a family member, a faith-based thing, a charity that is really important to you. Our family has been able to take volunteer vacations all over the world because we have allocated money and we have taken it out of our giving account.

People want to do good business with good people. So when you think about your business how are you out there serving? Sometimes people are so quiet about that, and it's not necessarily needed. You could be inspiring people. It's a way to have conversations with people.

If you give gifts to your clients, you may want to consider making them charitable gifts.

Be authentic and consistent. You don't want you out there just giving to the community and being a jerk to the people that work for you.

There is so many science that the world is ready for this. There is so many social enterprises starting now and people want to do business with good people so whether you are doing it in your own personal way, or you're doing it through your business, having a positive impact on the world is really what is going to bring you business success but also personal happiness and that's what most of it is really about. How can you make a contribution?

Mentions

Connect with Ellen on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Website: https://www.ellenrogin.com/

Reach out via email: [email protected]

It's not just about telling a great story – it's about telling the right story.

Today's guest is Dom Cappuccilli, CEO and Founder of The Clean Sell. Dom combines the power of a trained storyteller with the real-world experience of an elite salesperson. In fact, he became an elite salesperson because he was a trained storyteller. His consulting firm has helped hundreds of entrepreneurs to not only tell a better sales story, but also built many of their sales efforts from the ground up.

FULL BIO: https://www.thecleansell.com/about-us/

In this episode, we talk about

• his journey from storytelling to sales
• the myth of the superhero salesperson
• the story you should be telling, and
• the right time to scale up.

If you're a business owner who's ready to scale your business, I recommend you tune in.

Scaling

Somebody starts a company because they see a problem in the market that they have a unique ability to solve and they understand the industry. Usually they are technical or a subject matter expert in that. That is their craft, that is their industry, that's what they have. That craft is not sales.

But when your friend gets to fifteen people and all of a sudden – I don't know if he has funding or what happened – and he wants to scale, he now is in a really tough predicament. Because that scaling and that sales function and that sales piece falls on his shoulders/her shoulders.

So what do you do?

The Myth of the Superhero Salesperson

Generally, what I see happen are one of three things.

The first one is inhouse outsourcing. They hire a VP of sales who has this relevant experience, they have this big resume that they worked in the industry and they promise this rolodex of people they may reach out to.

It sounds like this great dream and they have this fantasy of the founder who gets to meet with their VP of sales and just see their numbers go up and they don't have to anything except this weekly meeting where they get a report on the good news.

"That is a fallacy, it's like the myth of the superhero sales person that's how a colleague of mine calls it. This is a big trouble spot for a lot of companies.

The second thing that they do is they hire too young, hungry people or one young hungry person and they say, "Go do this!" The problem there is those people don't have the expertise to build a sales process on their own, so they will struggle unless you get a really good person with great potential and can really do it.

But those are executors generally, they're kind of junior level sales talent at that point. They haven't been through enough to really build that from the ground up, and they're going to struggle without structure, and you're not able to give them structure.

"The third one is they do it themselves and I would recommend doing it yourself.

If it's between that and the other two choices and do it yourself successfully, twenty times before you hire someone else. You need to be, in these early days, be out there talking to customers, you need to understand the product, what's going on, what their needs are and really build that.

The Story to Tell

We've talked about storytelling in the past and how you can leverage your story that so people can connect with you and your business. But Dom has a different take on storytelling.

Let's start with the story they shouldn't be telling.

"If I could summarize what I do pretty clearly it's that I teach companies to tell their client's story, and the story of the problem they solve – not their own story.

Any story is interesting if you care about it, and like honestly, nobody gives a shit about my story unless it relates to a problem that they have and it's something that helps them within their lives then my story matters.

So what I teach my clients is the first thing that you have to do even before you tell the story is make sure you're telling the right one. Tell the story of the problem that you're going to solve for this client that goes beyond the initial sales conversation – that goes to your marketing, your content marketing.

Be the person to talking about that problem so people will come to you when they need to solve it.

Mentions

Connect with Dom on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Website: https://www.thecleansell.com

Reach out via email: [email protected]

The Art of Acting by Stella Adler

Trustworthiness is a skill that can be learned. There are 8 principles at the heart of a customer's decision to trust a company. Saying that, I will give you a caveat, for business leaders especially, customers don't buy from companies they buy from people, so that is really important. -Natalie Doyle Oldield

The research I have done and validated over 7 years of testing through the scientific process in academia shows that there are 8 principles and when you learn these 8 principles and learn how to apply them in your business you will build trust, manage, or protect the trust you have with your customers.

Today's guest is Natalie Doyle Oldfield. She is a trust authority, consultant and keynote speaker who works with companies to grow their business and build customer loyalty and trust.

A former Chief Marketing Officer, she is the author of THE POWER OF TRUST: How Top Companies Build, Manage and Protect It, and creator of The Client Trust Index ™ and the online Becoming a Trusted Advisor program.

Natalie was named a 2018 and 2017 Top Thought Leader in Trust by Trust Across America.

Natalie talks about the power of trust and the 8 underlying principles at the heart of a customer's decision to trust a company.

This is definitely something that you have to tune in to.

Trustworthiness is a skill that can be learned.

In my research, what we found is that there are 8 principles at the heart of a customer's decision to trust a company. Saying that, I will give you a caveat, for business leaders especially, customers don't buy from companies they buy from people, so that is really important. Specifically from people who are informed, empowered, can solve customer problems and issues, and what I would suggest they are trusted advisers.

You can learn to build trust. Some people are more natural than others. The research I have done and validated over 7 years of testing through the scientific process in academia shows that there are 8 principles and when you learn these 8 principles and learn how to apply them in your business you will build trust, manage, or protect the trust you have with your customers.

These 8 principles are part of a model to build trust. On my paper, I am drawing a circle, in the middle of that circle, I am writing on my notepad the Customer Centered Trust Circle. Because for me, it all has to start with the customer.

When an organization starts with the culture of trust that's focused on the customer, the organization has clearly articulated values, purpose, vision and mission. And I really believe that at the center of any organization's focus and purpose should be a customer strategy. Every organization is created to serve a customer.

On another ring I will draw on that circle, is that the organization has the capabilities and competencies so they can do what they promised to do. The next ring is interactions, interactions with people. Trust, as you know, is at the basic quality and the heart of every human interaction. We know when it goes off or when it is damaged. Basically this ring is about how we communicate, how we behave and how we serve.

#1 – Listen carefully with empathy and compassion. Question and involve the customer and stakeholder in the dialogue.

Communication is the gateway to trust. Listening is the gateway to communication. Taking the time to listen to the customers and stakeholders without bias and without filter and demonstrating empathy and compassion and involving them in conversations that affect them is foundational to building and sustaining to trust.

#2 – Communicate using clear, concrete, conversational language

Clarity inspires trust and we feel confident when we understand what's happening around us; when we don't understand we tend to glaze over and when we glaze over we don't understand oftentimes that means we don't believe so that leads to distrust.

Confidence, clarity, simplicity inspire trust. I suggest to my clients that they communicate in simple, everyday language that customers and stakeholders understand.

Trusted advisers are often very good at describing issues in the customer's terms and understanding the customer's language.

#3 – Be honest and transparent. Honesty is always the best policy.

This one is proactively sharing and communicating as much relevant information that you can with your customers. One simple phrase that encourages trust is the simple but difficult admission of "I don't know." Trusted advisers acknowledge they don't know every answer but when you do this that encourages confidence and humility which shows self-awareness so that's one thing that builds trust. Nothing builds trust like the truth.

#4 – Being consistent, predictable and reliable.

What's significant about this principle as it relates to selling is that when we combine when we combine consistency, predictable and reliable behavior, communication and how we serve it reduces risk and vulnerability. It's a lot easier to buy from a person or a company or to support where we are not at risk. Customers don't want to be at risk, they don't want to be vulnerable. It's extremely important for trusted advisers and for people who want to become a trusted adviser to really focus on being consistent in all their messages predictable and reliable. One way you could do this is to follow-up.

The one thing we want to do with building trust is it goes hand in hand with showing someone respect.

#5 – Act in the best interest of customers and stakeholders and the public.

This is where we get to the heart of intentions and motives. Your customer must believe that you are putting their interests first. Trust only succeeds when a customer's expectation is met and motives are clear. We know as a customer when a company is doing the right thing for us when they are acting in our best interests. As an example, they might recommend another company's product or services if they don't think that they have the right solution for you.

#6 – Doing the right thing

When you make a mistake, fix it. Nothing's gonna clearly project your values, integrity and ethics than doing the right thing. This is one thing that you should never compromise even if it cost you a sale or business for a short term. When your organization makes a mistake, just communicate how you will fix it and do so in a timely manner. Fix it in a way that if it happened to you, you'd want it to be fixed and something you could be proud of.

#7 – Deliver on your promise.

This is about walking the talk. Demonstrating integrity by delivering on what you say you're going to do, keeping your commitments, behaving and having the capabilities you say you have, measuring continually to stay up to date with your skills, and honoring your word. Every customer wants what we promise to deliver.

#8 – Commit to the long term.

Time is a major factor to this. This is so important because trust is assessed and reassessed continually over time through our experience with an organization or a person. We all want to deal with people who are committed to us for the long-term. It's about setting goals, innovative, being knowledgeable, achieving and measuring results, a continual focus on building and strengthening and protecting relationships with customers.

Mentions

Connect with Natalie on LinkedIn

The Power of Trust: How Top Companies Build, Manage and Protect It by Natalie Doyle Oldfield

Building Trust with Customers: A Workbook Eight Guiding Principles by Natalie Doyle Oldfield

Website: https://successthroughtrust.com/

Cultural competency opens a lot of doors.

"Most people don't have the insight to step into somebody else's frame of reference to look through their eyes, which means companies and entrepreneurs who want to build a successful business will really have to learn the different skills cultural competencies that can open the doors for them." - Dr. Richard Nongard

Relationships are built on something shared between two people – maybe a hobby, a favorite sports team, the school they graduated from, or a vision. And when it comes to sales, relationship-building is so much easier than prospecting.

Today's guest is Dr. Richard Nongard. Richard is an expert in business leadership and business psychology.

He started out in car sales in the early 1980's and parlayed his sales experience into leadership experience by moving on as an entrepreneur and executive in both the healthcare and educational sectors. He is a licensed psychotherapist who views his training in counseling as a degree in "problem-solving".

Richard is a serial entrepreneur and has owned several restaurants and multi-million dollar e-commerce platforms. He shares a pathway of engaging community, changing culture and building identity as the formula for leadership and business results.

FULL BIO: https://richardnongard.com/dr-richard-nongard/

In this episode, we talk about

• diversification,
• the ups and downs of entrepreneurship
• cross-cultural awareness
• cultural competence,
• goal-setting vs intention, and
• morning rituals.

Richard also gives some great real-life examples and tips on how to leverage cultural competence in your sales conversations, and some rapport-building skills related to cross-cultural awareness.

This is a good one, so make sure to give it a listen.

Diversification

"Multiple streams of income is absolutely important for everybody. I've learned that the hard way.

September 11th, 2001 was devastating to my business, and the reason why is because largely, at that point, I was on-site, providing services, and suddenly I had travel restrictions, I had customers who were unable to travel.

I had a business model where I went and spoke and I got paid and I got paid well, but I never got paid after the fact.

Everything was live and everything was one-shot, and by 2001 I had learned that I really needed to develop the online presence and build that business so that I could create residual income alternative revenue streams.

Today, our company actually provides tax services and infrastructure for other mental health and healthcare organizations.

Cross-Cultural Awareness

I've always been interested in cultural awareness. I realized early on that it was going to be important in my ability to create a sustaining business, to be able to create rapport with people whose experiences were different than mine.

"I really want to be able to sell to everybody.

Put it in a political context in America, I want both Republicans and Democrats to spend money with me.

"Navigating a minefield of different beliefs while being able to be true to your own core values is a really important cross-cultural challenge.

People think of cross-cultural challenges as "this racial group is different than this racial group" or "this ethnic group is different than this ethnic group," or "this language group is different than this language group."

But cross-cultural awareness deals with inter-generational differences. It deals with financial differences. It simply deals with the different experiences that different people have, and ultimately, everybody has differences.

By using the tools and the resources that might come from cross-cultural leadership or cross-cultural engagement, and applying them to entrepreneurship and sales, specifically, produces what I've identified as six very specific outcomes, and those outcomes are incredibly positive.

3 of 6 Outcomes

"Cultural competence creates rapport. Every salesperson early on in their sales training learns about the value of rapport.

Rapport is being able to share a space with another person with both mutual respect, but an exchange of ideas. That moves us from small talk into what might be called "search talk."

By engaging in search talk through rapport, I can do a better job at selling because I'm meeting my client's very specific needs.

I was in grad school when I was actually selling Honda's, so I was practicing being a therapist while I was selling cars and I fashioned myself as the car counselor.

When I truly helped my customers meet their needs with their automotive purchase, then I ended up actually having some pretty big commission checks.

"Cultural competence, it's far more efficient when I can understand my customer's vantage point and viewpoint. When I can share a space with them, efficiency becomes part of the sales process.

And efficiency is important because I like to move on to other sales processes, and of course, even a little bit of cultural competence can open potentially new markets.

Those are three out of those six things that I think are really important.

Mentions

Connect with Richard on LinkedIn

Transformational Leadership: How To Lead From Your Strengths And Maximize Your Impact by Richard Nongard

Website: http://viralleadership.com

The new gets old, and the old is new again. That's just how the world works.

Gone are the days of the door-to-door salesman. We don't need to leave our offices anymore to get a potential customer into a sales conversation. We now have a myriad of communication tools at our disposal – email, social media, text...even chatbots.

But you know what's really effective?

Face-to-face conversations.

After exploring the world of email marketing and online selling, I found that nothing works as well as calling up a client for coffee, or treating them to dinner.

Today's guest is Brandon Bruce, COO and Co-founder at Cirrus Insight, a plugin for Gmail and Outlook for sales people. It's an all-in-one sales productivity platform with world-class Salesforce integration. 250,000 people use Cirrus Insight and its sister products Attach.io and Assistant.to to work faster and smarter from the inbox and calendar.

In just six years, Brandon has helped Cirrus Insight grow to to $12m in annual revenue, 58 employees, and #41 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies.

In this episode, we talk about

• how they started their company,
• what's working (and not working) in sales today,
• sales in complex environments
• when to form a sales team,
• and the different paths to closing the deal.

If you're looking for ways to improve on your selling skills, I recommend you tune in.

Sales Enablement

Seven years ago, I don't think the category that we're in existed. No one was going around at conferences talking about sales enablement. That was the phrase that people were using.

There was this new category that's emerged, sales enablement seems to be the dominant phrase; sometimes people would often call it sales acceleration, sales operation – there's a lot of titles there.

"There's a lot of people now working in that field to essentially equip the producers, the salespeople, with the tools they need to be successful, which I think is a recognition by all these organizations and corporations that sales is hard.

Otherwise, you just hire a bunch of people and say, "Just go sell the thing. Just go be a salesperson."

But instead, now there's this industry of enablement and operations professionals whose job is to go out and source the right tools, the right training, the right process, to make sure you're getting out of the way, but also facilitating what the salespeople are trying to accomplish out there.

Email Lists and Voicemails

Back when we started, the things that were working – it's whoever built the biggest mailing list wins. If you had more emails, then you're early in the automated marketing game, so you're just getting in front of people and your competitors' work.

"Does it still work to have a great opt in email list? Absolutely, it's still extremely valuable.

But the volume that all of us are seeing in the inbox, the volume of voicemails that we're getting – so much higher now.

I didn't get a lot of voicemails everyday back when we started; now, it's like all the time. Thankfully it's a digital voicemail, right, so you don't actually listen to them. You just scan it.

But those are the challenges for the salespeople. People don't pick up their phone because they have caller ID. They don't listen to voicemail because they have digital voicemails – they just delete it. And there's such a high volume of email that even if it's a great email, they may or may not actually see it.

Thankfully email still works really well.

The Path to Closing the Deal

We're finding LinkedIn is a good channel. Certainly not a cure-all, it's not like, "Oh I went on LinkedIn and all of a sudden I started killing it." But it's a good way to break through for certain people, the folks that are on there a lot.

"It's a good way to get around or supplement the inbox with another message on another platform.

But to your earlier point, it's not door-to-door anymore. It's one of those "What's old is new" again. A lot of the stuff that seems to be working is in-person – getting out to events, shaking hands, taking people to dinner, getting to know about them, their goals, their career, their organization, their business, and then seeing how do we fit as a product or a service provider.

Then the key is in that last 30 seconds of the two-hour dinner.

You say, "Hey, this has been great. We've all learned a lot." But too often there's a parting of ways and there's like, "Now how do we followup?"

You just go back to the old, "Well, I'll just send a bunch of followup emails."

Probably not.

Yes, you want to email them, but I think it's that last 30 seconds of,

"Hey this has been great. Who else do we need to talk with?" Loop them those folks you mentioned earlier, great, let's all get on the same channel.

"Let's find out quickly if this is gonna work, because if it's not we'll leave you alone. Here's my cellphone number, can I get yours? That way we can text."

Text is the best. If you can get someone's cellphone number, then they want to hear from you, and you want to hear from them, and you're connected now.

People don't ignore that. There's not really a SPAM filter for text message. You don't get a message from Apple or Google, "Hey we just blocked this text message."

If someone's truly interested and they're willing to share that mobile number with you and say, "Yeah, definitely text me. We'll get together, I wanna followup" or "I wanna loop in Jimmy or Sally on our team and we're gonna all take a look at your product or service," then it's game time.

"Make the connection on LinkedIn, do the email, but a text message is a great way. First in-person, then text – you're rolling.

Mentions

Connect with Brandon on LinkedIn

Reach out via email: [email protected]

Check out Cirrus Insight on Facebook

Website: https://www.cirrusinsight.com/

Miller Heimann Sales Methodology (Conceptual Selling)

Dreamforce Conference (September 25-28)

"Video is one of the most compelling and impactful ways to capture that more authentic version of a brand." – Jason Hsiao, Animoto

Curious about how to use video effectively to market your business? Hit that play button right away.

Today's guest is Jason Hsiao, Chief Video Officer & Co-Founder of Animoto. Animoto is an award-winning online video maker that makes it easy for anyone to create professional-quality video.

Used by millions of consumers, businesses, photographers and educators, Animoto is deeply rooted in the belief that making videos should be simple, cost-effective, and accessible to everyone.

FULL BIO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonhsiao/

In this episode, we talk about

• how Animoto started,
• niching down,
• how to be customer-centric,
• video as a sales tool,
• video as a marketing tool,
• how to use video to build relationships,
• why you should be using video to promote your business, and a lot more.

If you read my show notes, I often say "there's a lot to learn from this episode, so stick around."

I meant it the last 106 times, and I'm going to say it again today:

There's a lot to learn from this episode – not just about video marketing, but also about business. So stick around and enjoy the show!

How Animoto Came To Be

My previous life was as a TV producer. I was doing a bunch of stuff for MTV, Comedy Central. My friend, who is now my co-founder, Stevie, he was actually also working in TV, doing documentary work for ABC – a big network here in the States.

We actually both had pretty successful careers going for us in TV and film. The backstory is we actually went to high school and college together with a couple of other co-founders. We've been friends for a long time; we always loved video and the magic of video. We were always making all sorts of videos in the evenings and weekends, and in school.

Fast forward 10 years after college, the fact that we were both going to be in New York City, living our dream jobs and working in television was pretty cool.

But I think for us, it was this time of anxiousness. We could see how quickly everything was changing around us. Technology was just changing everything, and these mobile things – they were getting smaller and smaller to the point that you could fit them in your pocket and even fold them up.

It just seemed inevitable that these things would probably one day have internet connection or maybe even a camera. And then this whole emergence of cloud computing right then, they just blew our mind about what could be possible with all that.

It felt inevitable that everything was going to change very soon, and that video had to be central to a lot of that, that video would no longer be reserved for these big, huge, giant companies like Viacom and stuff that could afford 200-person teams to put out one minute of video.

"Everyday people should be able to embrace and enjoy the power of video."

When I say that today, it's like, "Well, duh?" But 12 years ago, that was not the case. Phones did not yet have cameras or internet or anything like that.

Niching Down

This is probably the best thing you can do for your business. A lot of people would give their left arm to have multiple lines of revenue and customers, but in the early stages of small companies and startups, it's really important to have that laser focus.

"In the beginning, we had a lot of "faux" success."

But here's the thing – I think this is a great lesson and not something uncommon to a lot of entrepreneurs out there.

When we launched Animoto, we had a lot of different people using it; more people creating videos than we could have thought. We had photographers, moms, travelers, churches, nonprofits, realtors, restaurants, marketers – all sorts of businesses – and we're like, "Oh my gosh! This is amazing!"

Who wouldn't want their product or service being used by everyone?

Fast forward a few years after that, I think what we realized is not only did it become really hard for us operationally to run a business where we were serving a little bit of every one –.

"When everyone's asking for different things, how do you prioritize and who are you actually good for?"

To be honest, we became a bit of a patchwork quilt, kind of like a Frankenstein of a product and organization, because we're just a little bit all over the place and it was reflected in the product experience.

So we had this big moment maybe five years into it, where we said,

"Listen, would we rather be kind of good at a lot of things, or best in the world at one thing?"

Imagine if every single person in our company was pointed in the exact same direction – not kind of generally in the same direction, but laser-focused in the exact, same direction – how powerful our impact could be?

Video as a Tool to Amplify Your Marketing

I think the other misnomer [sic] is that

"Oh yeah, videos on social media – it's just about capturing awareness, very top of the funnel type of thing, just come and get people's attention."

But what's happening is, increasingly, you can serve more and more parts of that customer journey before people even get to your website. You can not only create that awareness; you can get people interested, you can actually even educate them about what it is you have to offer.

It's amazing. Increasingly we just hear people, "Oh yeah, by the time I get to their site, I just buy because I've already learned everything."

We work with a bunch of younger folks, they don't even go to websites anymore.

When they hear about a new brand, the first thing they do is they go on social to see what's happening on Instagram or Facebook. And they're like, "Oh yeah, I love this company."

"Have you ever been to the website?" "No, why would I?"

Because it's all on social, right?

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