Podcasting Secrets

Welcome back to another episode with Shane Barker. In episode 1, we discussed Shane’s story to become an expert influencer marketer and some of his secrets for influencer marketing. In today’s episode, we will be discussing some of Shane’s secrets to product launches and content marketing.

Tips for Product Launches 

80% of the work is done before the product launch. 

Shane has had a lot of people come to him and say, “Hey, I just went live with this crowdfunding campaign, and I have 30 days to promote it. What do I need to do?” And Shane tells them they need to take it down. He says 30 days is just not enough time.

Many people don’t realize that 80% of the work is done before the product launch. In fact, the launch should be one of the easiest parts because most of the work is already done. Before the launch, most of the PR aspects such as a press release, talking to news stations, bloggers, or reviewers should be done.

Look at the History of Launches for Similar Products

The beautiful thing about the internet is we can find out pretty much anything. So, for a similar product to ours, we can look at other launches and see what they did and whether or not it was successful. We can see what kind of PPC ads they put up, what keywords they went after, who put up backlinks to their product, who interviewed them about the product, etc.

“We’ve got to figure out: what is my competition doing? What did they do successfully, or why did they fail? And how can we make things better and improve upon that?” - Shane Barker

Creating a Buzz

Product launches happen every day, so we have to establish what makes us different, why people should spend their hard-earned money on this, and why people should be excited. A lot of it is pulling on people’s heartstrings and educating them. 

“It comes down to messaging and having a very clear message, understanding exactly who you're going to go after, and then going after them aggressively.” - Shane Barker

We must create an audience that trusts us and likes us so we have a following, then create a great, unique product, and then have scarcity and urgency, so our audience has to act quickly.

Tips for Content Marketing 

Easier than Ever

Content marketing is a lot easier nowadays because there's software and there are all kinds of technology at our fingertips to help us. This interview was only possible because of video conferencing technology. There is a lot of great technology, software, and tools that make it easier to produce content than it was just a few years ago. 

Be Consistent and Patient with Ourselves

Rome wasn’t built in one night, and so it is with our businesses. When we’re doing content writing, it might take a long time. The important thing is that we are consistent and patient. We can’t put up two blog posts and expect to make history.

When someone wants to build muscle and get a six-pack, it takes time. It’s not going to happen after going to the gym twice. Content marketing is a long-term strategy.

Shane’s website has 160,000 visitors per month. While his team does do some outreach, it’s mostly inbound marketing. It often comes down to putting out consistent content, saying, “Hey, if I want to become an Instagram influencer, I’m going to take a year to do that.” Then we have to consistently put out content once a day or twice a day or however often that is. Many people start pursuing their goals to become an influencer but quit after a month or two. Therefore, if we are consistent and pursue it for long enough, we are likely to have success. There's no substitute for hard work.

Start Somewhere and Don’t Worry About Perfection

The first videos of those who are popular on YouTube now were terrible. They often had poor video and sound quality and were probably very awkward in front of the camera. But they started where they were at and improved with time. 

Shane hasn’t gone back and listened to his first podcast because he knows that it wasn’t good. He didn’t have great equipment. He just wanted to start interviewing great people and educating people, and now it's turned into something he can monetize. And he kept going and his podcast is number 33 and climbing on iTunes’ business category. 

Shane also has left his first blog post on his website even though he doesn’t think it was very good. He leaves it because it’s a reminder of his past and where he started. He also likes to show it to his students because it shows them they don’t have to start at a perfect level. 

Shane thinks of his first podcast episodes and his first blog posts as before and after pictures like on a workout ad. People can see that they can do it too when they compare those first posts or those first episodes with what he’s producing now.

Repurposing Content

Another thing Shane recommended with content is the repurposing of content. When we produce a core piece of content, we can cut it up and reformat it into other pieces of content to be published on many other social and marketing channels. For example, if I do an interview, I can post the video on YouTube. I can also turn the audio into a podcast. Then I can write a blog post about it and put it on my website, along with LinkedIn and Medium. I can cut that blog into pieces and turn them into Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter posts. So, I produced one piece of content, and then I repurpose it and publish it on many different platforms. 

Shane’s Home Runs

One of the home runs in Shane’s career is that he has had the opportunity to speak all over the world, such as in Sri Lanka and Thailand.

Another big win for Shane is when people come up to him and they say, “Hey, I read your content, and you helped me do this thing!” Shane is a humble individual and feels like he’s still trying to be the person that has accomplished all that he has. So, it means a lot to him when people reach out because it shows him that he’s really making a difference in people’s lives and helping them with their businesses. It’s valuable for him when he can use what he’s learned, leverage it, and then educate others with that knowledge to help them in their businesses.

“If I went to bed knowing that I wasn't helping anybody, I don't think I'd go to bed.” - Shane Barker

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Shane for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. Prepare for product launches before the launch. Most of the work should be done beforehand.
2. Look at how launches have gone for similar products, and see how we can learn from them and improve upon them.
3. Focus on what makes our products different from the many products that launch every day.
4. Content marketing can take a long time, so we should be consistent and patient.
5. We must start somewhere with our content marketing, even if we’re not where we’d like to be with it. We will get better over time.
6. We can repurpose our content to be used on many different platforms to give our content much more reach. 

Connect with Shane

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Shane or connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanebarker/ or check out his website at https://shanebarker.com/. 

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

Where have you found success in your product launches? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/79-6-tips-for-product-launches-and-content-marketing/ 

What businesses say about themselves is no longer credible, and influencers have become highly credible sources that customers look to and trust instead. In this episode, Shane Barker, an influencer marketing expert, is going to share some of his secrets about influencer marketing. 

About Shane Barker

Shane Barker is a UCLA professor. He teaches a class about personal branding and how to become an influencer, and he's developing a course that will be available for anyone to take online and learn the things he teaches in his class. Shane is a consultant. For example, he created a startup that reached more than a $25 million valuation in two years. His consulting practice specializes in influencer marketing, product launches, content marketing, sales funnels targeted traffic, and website conversions. 

He consults with multiple fortune 500 companies, and he has some A-list celebrities as clients, including Angela Bassett and Shane Sparks. Shane writes for Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Huffington Post. The infographics he’s created have been viewed more than 350,000 times and have been featured in more than 950 articles and publications. He publishes the marketing growth podcast. Marketing insider group named Shane one of the top content marketing influencers, and Salesforce named him one of the industry's top influencers. He also has published a series of ebooks.

2 Influencer Marketing Secrets 

We don’t have to have a million followers.

We don’t have to have a crazy, huge audience. Shane knows of influencers who have followings in the thousands, but they have courses where they are making hundreds of thousands of dollars every year. We also don’t need to be on every social media platform. We can still be successful without having millions of followers on every platform.

Influencers need to educate brands. 

About a year and a half ago, Shane did a big event, renting out the floor of a hotel with Amazon and 35-40 brands. They did the training, and Shane realized there was a big disconnect between brands and influencers. He needed to get in the middle and educate people on both sides so they could start having a lot more successful influencer marketing campaigns.

Many influencers don’t understand the value they have. This can be a problem because they don’t know how much to charge brands for their sponsorship or how to campaign products for brands. They often wait for brands to come to them instead of pitching their services to brands. Influencers should be able to educate the brands on why their services are valuable.

To do this, influencers should be able to say “I’ve worked with these brands, and here’s the data from their campaigns.” They should be able to show brands the number of clicks or views their content usually receives. They should be able to tell them exactly what they are going to do for their campaign: a blog post, podcast episode, YouTube video, etc. If they are going to put content on their website, they should be able to tell brands, for example, “My website indexes well for these certain keywords, and 10,000 people look at it monthly.” Influencers should know their data so they can tell brands exactly what their value is.

Shane said, “The good thing about influencer marketing for a brand is there are millions of potential influencers. But the problem is, how do I know who's better than the other person? It’s the influencers that are educated and say, ‘let me show you how to put this campaign to really show you how this was successful.”

Shane’s Passion: Helping Small Businesses

Shane is passionate about many things, but right now he is focusing on his passion to help small businesses. Currently, he’s working for the SBDC (Small Business Development Center), trying to help businesses that have been put in a difficult situation because of COVID. He aids them in transitioning to online from offline, or in figuring out how they can have other revenue streams or keep their doors open. Shane wants to give small businesses the information he has learned in the last 25 years. 

He started working with the SBDC because a friend of his is a director for them. They went out for drinks, and Shane said it was like a Jedi mind trick. “I had one beer, and then all of a sudden, by the end of it I was working for him.” When Shane told his team he was really excited to work there, they were skeptical, especially when they learned Shane would be taking a significant pay decrease. Shane told them it wasn’t about the money though; it was about helping people.

Shane’s heart is with small businesses. He’s always had small businesses and been able to grow them. Unfortunately, with where he’s at in his career, he is too expensive for most small businesses to afford his help. Shane thought that wasn’t fair because he has knowledge he can give to people for free. But now he can do that with the SBDC.

Shane realizes that entrepreneurs are strong and can get through difficult times. But, it becomes more difficult when you have something uncontrollable like COVID or government. It’s not that these entrepreneurs aren’t working hard enough; it’s that there are other forces stopping them. 

Shane’s Entrepreneurial Journey

Chevy’s Mexican Restaurant

Shane started off as a busser for Chevy’s Mexican restaurant when he was 16. Eventually, he moved up from bussing tables to becoming a waiter, then a server, and then they wanted him to become a manager. Instead of being the manager, Shane traveled around the country opening new restaurants. 

Hot Pad

While Shane was in college, he started a business called Hot Pad, which sold reusable, non-toxic heat packs. He opened kiosks, got investors, hired freelancers for the logo and the website, and put the whole project together. They started doing different kinds of hot pads: ones for the shoulders, ones for the back, etc. The business did really well.

After graduating from CSU, Shane started his own business. There was one business he took from 0 to $25 Million in 2 years with 130 employees and 3 or 4 locations. That business was actually sued by the Attorney General for about $60 Million. They ended up settling on the case, but Shane learned from that experience more about being an entrepreneur than a degree from Harvard or Yale ever could. Ever since then, Shane has been doing consulting, helping businesses drive traffic and convert traffic into online sales.

Influencer Marketing

Soon, Shane jumped into the influencer space. He had a client by the name of Zoe Rodriguez. She was a fitness influencer making about $40,000 a month, and Shane’s business helped take her from 400,000 to 1.6 million followers. She already had a very engaged audience, so when they redid her website, logo, and sales funnels, it accelerated the growth.

Content Marketing 

Shane now writes for 150 different websites including Forbes and Huffington Post with the help of his team. He also has a podcast that just reached number 33 on iTunes for the top business podcasts. 

How does he do it?

So how does Shane manage all of his ventures? For many years, Shane was the bottleneck in his processes, always wanting to approve everything. But, there were simply not enough hours in the day for him to catch up. He’s learned the value of delegating, having really good processes in place, and having a strong team.

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Shane for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. Influencers are credible sources with reach that customers trust.
2. We don’t need millions of followers to be successful in our influencer marketing. A small, but engaged, following can often give us a lot of success.
3. Both brands and influencers should be educated about all the services an influencer can provide. An influencer that is knowledgeable is more likely to be hired by brands to promote their products.
4. Writing for a lot of other credible organizations is a great way to establish our own credibility.
5. Delegating, having good processes in place, and having a strong team can help relieve entrepreneurs’ stresses and give them more free time to do more of the things they love.

Connect with Shane

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Shane or connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanebarker/ or visit his website at https://shanebarker.com/. 

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

How have you seen influencer marketing used effectively? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/78-secrets-from-an-influencer-marketing-expert/ 

Feeding a Baby Giraffe

I’m on a business trip today in Fort Worth, Texas, and I’m so grateful that my youngest daughter was able to come with me on this trip. After our business meetings were completed, we were able to get to the Fort Worth Zoo about an hour before it closed. USA Today has ranked the Fort Worth Zoo is the top zoo in America, and it has a vibe similar to Disney’s Animal Kingdom, without the rides. 

My daughter’s favorite experience was feeding a baby giraffe. The Fort Worth Zoo has an enclosure with a bunch of giraffes. The giraffe enclosure has a walk-up platform near eye level with the giraffes. Near this platform, the zoo has an employee selling leaves of romaine lettuce. 3 leaves of lettuce for $6. That’s a great profit margin, and he was selling a lot of lettuce. Then, zoo guests can hold the leaves of lettuce out over the fence, and the giraffes walk up and eat the lettuce out of the guests’ hands

So, I purchased lettuce leaves for my daughter, and a baby giraffe walked over and ate the lettuce directly from her hand. The giraffe tongues are surprisingly long and caused a squeal of delight from a little girl who was next to us.  On the YouTube video version of this episode, I’m including video clips of my daughter feeding the baby giraffe. That simple feeding created an amazing, memorable experience that my daughter and I will remember for a very long time. 

So, here a monetization framework a learned from feeding a baby giraffe today:

1. Create a Product or Service Around Something Our Potential Customers Already Want to Do. It seems like every zoo has signs telling guests not to feed the animals. They have to post these signs because people naturally love to have encounters with and connect with animals by feeding them. Usually, zoos try to prevent these animals from feeding. However, the Fort Worth Zoo embraced it and decided to turn that natural desire of guests to feed the animals into a revenue stream. 

1. Turn an Expense into a Profit Center. The zoo already had to buy lettuce and other food to feed the giraffes. So, the Fort Worth Zoo took an expense of lettuce for which they were already paying and turned it into a profit center when they started selling lettuce for the guests to feed the giraffes. Not only did selling the lettuce reduce an expense, but it also generated a lot of profit. By selling lettuce, the zoo is also able to control what type of food their guests are feeding to the animals. 

1. Turn the Product or Service into an Experience Through Which Customers Can Better Connect with Us. By allowing my daughter and me to feed the giraffes, the Fort Worth Zoo allowed us to engage with and connect with the giraffes and the zoo itself. This was very different than just looking at the giraffes from a distance. After that experience, I bought my daughter a mug and a shirt, and I called my wife and we planned to bring her back so I could share that experience with her as well. My daughter and I both like giraffes and the Fort Worth Zoo far more now than we did before that experience. These things never would have happened if we had just looked at giraffes from a distance. 

Application to Our Businesses

So, how do we apply the three principles of this framework to our businesses? Here are a few examples:

Are you a popular speaker at events, and you try to avoid people mobbing you after you speak? Then, maybe you could start charging a small group of fans for a chance to speak with you after your events. This fee will make you more money for something you are already doing. And, you will create a unique experience with fans who can better engage and connect with you and are willing to pay for it.

Or, do people constantly email you with questions, looking for free answers. I’m not talking about pre-sales questions. Maybe instead of ignoring these emails, or resenting the fact that answering these questions takes so much time, we could turn this expense into a profit center. Maybe we could start charging customers a flat price to answer a question with a video, and we could post the video answers online, to create more pages of content in search engines, and establish more credibility with customers. In addition to a new revenue stream, these direct answers would provide more engagement and connection with our customers. 

Or, do people regularly call you wanting to do lunch and pick your brain about their businesses? Then, maybe you could start charging these people for a chance to go to lunch with you and get your advice on their business. 

Let’s find what our potential customers want most, and instead of trying to prevent it or avoid it, let’s embrace it, by offering that product or service as a new revenue stream, and allow them to better connect with and engage with us. 

That’s all of today. I wish you success in your monetization efforts. 

Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

What business lessons have you learned during the pandemic? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/77-what-we-can-learn-about-monetization-from-feeding-a-baby-giraffe/ 

There are 3.5 billion social media users, which is about 45% of the world’s population (Source: Oberlo). That number is only growing. Social media is one of the best ways to reach our customers. In today’s episode, Warren Whitlock and I discuss 3 of his secrets to using social media effectively and more.

Warren Whitlock is a digital business development strategist. In 2008, he wrote the first book on Twitter and mobile marketing called Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online. He was also named one of Forbes’s Top 10 Social Media Power Influencers. Warren helps businesses transform into a new way of doing business. His breakthrough strategies to integrate mobile marketing, public relations, and lead generation with conversions to return on investment for lifetime value have helped hundreds of businesses achieve rapid and continuing results in the marketing process. 

Warren’s Top 3 Social Media Secrets

Be a Thought Leader

Warren said the biggest tip he can give is to be a recognized expert in your field. To do social media well, we need to pick a niche and be an expert in that. We want to be a recognized thought leader in our niche.

Warren himself is a recognized thought leader. He’s an author and has regularly been asked to speak at events.

Be Authentic

Warren tries to be the same person all the time on social media. He wants to truly be himself, even if that means making a dumb joke because that’s his personality. People will connect with us easier if we don’t try to put on a fake personality for the sake of our following. Our followers want to see a real human being.

Engage with Our Following

Liking others’ posts is important, but it often isn’t what Warren focuses on. He wants to have conversations with people through social media. He asks himself, “What can I do to show some love?” He then adds to the conversation wherever he can, and he expects reciprocity.

Warren’s Passion: Giving

One of the things Warren is very passionate about is giving. There is a moral and spiritual side to give, but putting that aside, Warren firmly believes the more we give, the more we get.

Sometimes in business, we can be too focused on beating out the competition and doing whatever it takes to succeed. Warren has learned that it doesn’t have to be that way. It is much better when you have people who want to work with you and hear from you because of the value you have given them. It’s human nature that when people do things for us, we naturally want to do something for them. 

“Since you get more joy out of giving joy to others, you should put a good deal of thought into the happiness that you are able to give.” - Eleanor Roosevelt

Reciprocity

Warren recommended a book called Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. I recommend it as well. It details a study where participants were paid to take a survey. After the survey, the facilitators talked with participants for 10-15 minutes. In the control group, the facilitators would then ask, “Do you want to buy some raffle tickets? You could win a car, and I could win the prize of best salesman.” In the other group, five minutes before asking, the facilitator would say, “Hey, I’m going to go down the hall and get a soda. Do you want one?” Then they would give them the same pitch. The ROI on the second group was 10 times the amount spent on soda, and it sold twice the number of raffle tickets as the first group.

This is a great example of reciprocity. Warren said, “We normally think of reciprocity as I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. But, that’s not how reciprocity works. It works when you give without expectation of return.”

This doesn’t mean we can just give all of our time, products, or services away for free. As with this interview, Warren spent his time with me, giving me value. In turn, I will promote this, promoting Warren with my audience at the same time. If we all practice reciprocity, then we can all benefit from helping one another.

One of Warren’s Failures and What He Learned

Warren had a small business selling laser printers. He was advertising, getting good ROI, and using the internet when a lot of people weren’t yet. Warren thought he would offer a money-back guarantee because he knew a lot of people would say, “I'm going to buy this because I can just ship it back in a week.” When they got the product and it was okay, they would say, “this may not be everything I want, but I'm not going to go through the trouble of shipping it back.”

The business was doing well, and Warren got used to spending a lot of money on advertising. He was so focused on advertising, however, he didn’t prioritize giving himself a salary. He was also spending more money than he had. Then one day, Google made a change and their advertising results fell flat.

This led to Warren moving to Las Vegas. When he eventually reached the point where he had enough money, he got into the real estate side of the business. This was about 13 years ago, shortly before the market crashed. Warren got hit pretty hard; he couldn’t pay for things and made some bad decisions about where to borrow money. From this whole experience, Warren learned that when something works he should keep doing more of that. 

Now that Warren is advising startups, he has realized there is a marketing chasm, a big hurdle that startups have to get over. This happens when a business starts doing well and expanding, and when the market dips for a while. One man Warren interviewed said, “No matter what you're doing, you're going to reach that point where you're in the chasm, and you think you're just going to die and many businesses just go away.” If we can push through that hard time, we can survive the marketing chasm and really grow our business.

Businesses might try to get through the chasm by offering deals. For example, a tech company might have a one-day-only sale where their software is 75% off. This might help them for a while, but it won’t work long-term because the customers who come for that are either bargain hunters or those with a lower income who really can’t afford higher prices, and so they are much less likely to become long-term customers. 

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much, Warren for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. The more we give, the more we get. But we should also give without the expectation of return.
2. When something works we should keep doing that, scale that, and do more of that, and stop doing the things that hurt us.
3. Marketing strategies offering big deals can help our businesses with short-term cash flow, but they likely will not work and will hurt us in the long term.
4. To grow our social followings we must be thought leaders, be authentic, and engage with our following.

Connect with Warren

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Warren or connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/books/ or visit his website at https://warrenwhitlock.com/. 

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

How have you seen someone find success through becoming a thought leader on social media? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/76-3-social-media-tips-to-help-us-grow-our-following/ 

Customers today are more informed than ever before. With the accessibility of online information before they make a buying decision, they study their options and educate themselves. By the time a sales rep contacts a customer, they have already identified specific solutions for their needs (Source: CSO Insights). Research has found that customers are 57% through their purchase process before they make any meaningful contact with a sales rep (Source: Gartner). 

Brian Mitchell is a Sales Challenger Model expert. The model is a sales approach in which the seller challenges potential customers. Brian is also an associate partner with Leads Online Marketing. He served four years in the United States Marine Corps before he worked at AT&T leading a team that transitioned the company from Yellow Pages to the digital world. Brian led the sales enablement team for YP.com, which was a top 30 Digital Property. His department sold more than $300 million in digital ad revenue annually. 

Today, Brian and I discuss the tectonic shift of the Yellow Pages which he has witnessed. Brian will also teach us about the Challenger Sales Model.

Sales organizations can increase business by challenging customers — delivering customer interactions specifically designed to disrupt their current thinking and teach them something new. It’s not just about selling something anymore,” (Source: Brent Adamson, Distinguished Vice President, Advisory, Gartner, and co-author of The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation)

Helping Small And Medium Businesses Grow

Brian grew up in a household where his father owned a small business handed down to him from his father. From an early age, Brian was exposed to the ins and outs of owning and operating a business. 

Working for AT&T

While Brian worked for  AT&T, a huge portion of the company’s revenue came from selling Yellow Page ads. I asked Brian how efficient this advertising model was, and he told me at that time, it had a good return on investment. Brian said that sometimes a small column ad would generate enough business for a year for their customer. Based on how the return was, the customer would evaluate their marketing budget for the following year.

Brian understood the challenges which separated his customers from being great, and he consulted with them on areas where he thought there was a good opportunity. He would try to drive more exposure by taking out a bigger ad and diversifying into digital ads. 

In order to measure how effective a campaign was, Brian would set performance indicators like setting a number of leads that should come in each month. If this number wasn’t met, they would place additional advertising to reach the goal of leads. 

The Challenger Sales Model

In 2008, despite the recession, there were still companies with record-breaking sales. Brian said those companies were scrutinized to understand how they were able to be successful during a recession. 

As it turned out, the sales teams that worked for those companies were doing a better job of understanding their customers and the challenges they were facing. Based on their understanding, they developed plans and solutions that served their customers’ needs, whether it was better branding, getting more traffic, or growing their market share. In the end, these methods led to a solid ROI for their customers.

The Challenger Sales Model is about following a process. Even during challenging times, like 2020, the Challenger model still worked. It didn’t matter if people were an introvert or an extrovert, the model worked just as well. In fact, Brian said introverts can often make better salespeople because they pay more attention to details and usually are well-prepared. The challenger model drives hard conversations with business owners about their pain points and what is holding them back from being great.

The Challenger Model vs. Relationship-Driven Sales

When I looked up some numbers prior to my interview with Brian, I found that “40% of high sales performers primarily used a challenger style, and that high performers were more than two times more likely to use the challenger approach than any other approach.”  (source: Gartner)

Brian agrees that although he’s traditionally a relationship person who builds rapport and develops trust with his customers, he’s come to see how a blend of relationship skills and the Challenger model has allowed him to become more successful. Brian says it’s not enough to be successful in relationships. It doesn’t always close sales. The Challenger model is more about doing business, which comes with knowing our customer’s industry and every parameter within it. 

It’s important to have challenging conversations with business owners about what differentiates them from the competition and how they’re willing to change. Brian says the most remarkable thing about the Challenger model is there isn’t much room to fail. It’s built on engaging with the decision-maker with facts and data. Even though it sounds simple, the Challenger Sales Model takes practice. We can’t read the book and just expect to hit the ground running. 

What made the Challenger Sales Model easy for Brian is he had been selling that way his entire life without realizing it. Having grown up doing sales in a small business environment made this sales model feel natural to him. 

Pros and Cons of the Challenger Sales Model

Brian believes that the Challenger model makes it possible for us to be present with our customers, no matter where they are in their buying cycle. We’re always trying to educate, inform, and make recommendations that are going to benefit our customers and drive sales. Another advantage Brian sees in the Challenger model is how it enabled him to grow digital ad revenue. This sales model allows sellers to come up with a fresh and insightful approach that is new to their customers.   

Brian thinks the Challenger Sales Model needs to be managed appropriately. It has to be followed by proper training and role-playing with the sales reps in the front lines to show them how they should communicate and talk to the client. If this doesn’t happen, sales calls can go in different directions and down a path that will not lead to a close. 

Brian believes instituting the Sales Challenger Model is a process that's been proven. As we follow and develop it, it's going to continue to help us help our clients.

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Brian for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. Today, customers are more informed than ever before. That's why we need to offer our customers a buying experience that goes beyond product selling. 
2. The Challenger Sales Model helps us engage with our customers at any stage in their buying cycle. 
3. Relationship skills are very important, but the Challenger sales model maybe be able to provide even more results.
4. The Challenger model is more about doing business, which comes with knowing our customer’s industry and every parameter within it. 
5. When we follow the Challenger Sales Model, it brings us up to speed in a short period of time, even if we don’t have the experience.  

Connect with Brian Mitchell

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Brian or connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/briansmitchell or visit his website www.mitchellbrian.com 

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Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/75-how-to-close-more-sales-with-the-challenger-sales-model-which-is-used-by-40-of-star-performers/