The Bacon Podcast with Brian Basilico | CURE Your Sales & Marketing with Ideas That Make It SIZZLE!

Author and International Speaker, Ridgely Goldsborough, believes in solving problems and taking complex topics, and making sense out of them. He started his first business at 16 and since graduating from Law School has founded 45 companies.

This really happened. Well, the bar was at a country club. I had the pleasure of spending a Fore-Hour Nature Meeting with Larry Long Jr 🎤 where we spent hours trying to hit a little white ball into a hole.

If you’re wondering, sales beat marketing. This is not only true with that golf round, but I think it’s also part of the small to mid-sized business culture. After all, sales are directly tied to income, and marketing is there to support sales. However, marketing can be a second-class citizen and viewed as an expense.

But I want to make the case that marketing can be an income-generating activity when approached as a sales support system.

Why do many B2b businesses falter with marketing? It is because sales have a greater business impact, and marketing becomes an afterthought rather than an integral business system.

The issue here is business-to-consumer marketing focuses on transactional relationships, while business-to-business focuses on more synergistic long-term relationships.

In this episode, we will explore the holes (which all begin with “A”) that happen when you try to use business-to-consumer tactics for B2b marketing.

Forbes Top 50 Rated Host of 9 podcasts at the Chris Voss Podcast Network with nearly 700 Episodes – The Chris Voss Show has reviewed over 3500 products over 10 years and has over 400,000+ followers across a MULTITUDE of Social Media accounts and business groups it runs with over 22 Million Views. Our Podcast guests are the newest Book Authors, CEO’s and thought leaders. Interviewed guests include TV News Anchors, Correspondents, Journalists from CNN, MSNBC, Washington Post, WSJ, NYT, The Guardian, etc. Our network promotes content on Twitter accounts, 3 Linkedin Accounts, a 130,000 business class group on Linkedin and Facebook Pages & Groups pulling millions in impressions overall.

I have mentioned before, I am a fan of Malcolm Gladwell and his podcast “Revisionist History”. His last book “The Bomber Mafia” was about the race to use strategic bombing to end World War II. This was before the “Manhattan Project” which yielded the first atomic bomb that was built and used to change the course of history.

The book discusses the desire to “Drop a bomb in a pickle barrel” with precision targeting. The problem was its theory was not practical with weather, and other factors. The only thing that worked was using napalm to firebomb Tokyo at low altitudes, and then drop the two BIG ones!

You may or may not view business marketing as a war, but it does have a lot in common. It takes strategy, research, and recognizance missions to identify targets. It demands clear vision and boots-on-the-ground intelligence to get to the right person, with the right message, at the right time.

We have weapons that act like laser-guided knowledge bombs or weapons of mass distraction.

Your marketing content is the ammunition you need to convert business intelligence into sales.

You can actively create content that targets the wants, needs, and desires of your budding relationships.

Social media is forever changing. It gets noisy out there. B2b marketing is different from business-to-consumer marketing. Relationships and data should be at the forefront of your efforts.

In this episode, we will discuss how your content is like Knowledge Bombs… How they land depends on how you aim them.

Alain Hunkins helps high achieving people become high achieving leaders. Over his 20+ year career, Alain has worked with over 2,000 groups of leaders in 25 countries. He’s worked with 42 of the Fortune 100 companies.

In addition to being a leadership speaker, consultant, trainer, and coach, Alain is the author of CRACKING THE LEADERSHIP CODE: Three Secrets to Building Strong Leaders which was published by Wiley in March of this year. The book was endorsed by leadership luminaries Jim Kouzes, Barry Posner, and Marshall Goldsmith.

Alain serves on the Academic Board of Advisors of the New Delhi Institute of Management and is a faculty member of Duke Corporate Education. Alain’s writing has been featured in Fast Company, Inc., Chief Executive, Chief Learning Officer, and Business Insider. He’s a regular leadership strategy contributing writer for Forbes.

Have you ever watched the movie “A Christmas Story”?

There is a scene where Ralphie is helping his dad change a tire for the first time. He was holding the lug nuts in the hubcap, and his dad’s hand hits the hubcap, sending the hardware flying through the air, glistening in the lights of the passing cars and into a snowbank. Then, Ralphie releases an F-Bomb.

All my passwords were gone. Instead of deleting the subcategory, I trashed the whole database. I had that Ralphie (Oh Fudge) moment when I realized what I did.

After the initial panic, I took a deep breath and said, “Now what?” When I thought about it, it was a blessing.

Okay, let me reiterate that I do not recommend that you do that to yourself. It was sheer terror at first, but then I found the silver linings and embraced the positives.

Starting over is never easy, but in the long run, the effort could be worth the investment in time.

I think the lesson here is passwords or contact information are only useful if they are part of personal connections with whom they are being collected and saved.

In this episode, we will discuss how you are managing your passwords… can help build better business relationships.

Steve Hoffman (Captain Hoff) is the Chairman & CEO of Founders Space, a global innovation hub for entrepreneurs, corporations, and investors, with over 50 partners in 22 countries.

Hoffman is also a venture investor, founder of three venture-backed and two bootstrapped startups, and author of several award-winning books. These include “Make Elephants Fly” (Hachette), “Surviving a Startup” (HarperCollins), and “The Five Forces” (BenBella).

In addition, Hoffman served on the Board of Governors of the New Media Council, was the founder and Chairman of the Producers Guild Silicon Valley Chapter, and was a founding member of the Academy of Television’s Interactive Media Group.

In my last post, I talked about how segmenting your audience can help your business communications but how it can often look like a junk drawer. I also stated that I was in search of answers. So, I wanted to follow up and share with you what I have learned and discovered.

It may have taken you years to get your list in the shape it’s in, and we all tend to look at updating your contacts as unproductive and tedious work. I can assure you that there is a lot of dead weight that hinders you from maximizing communications.

If you have segmented your lists before, it kind of creates a box. It makes it easy to add new contacts to the box yet hinders adding new segments.

You may find yourself adding to different sources at different times. New clients may get into your accounting system but not into your CRM. Prospects may be found in your email list but not be updated in your CRM.

The last phase of this is action. How can you use these segments to deliver more targeted and purposeful information to smaller groups? Is there value in sending emails to your vendors? Could you survey nonprofits for ideas? What else can you think of that may benefit your business and your network as a whole?

Think of it as using your inspiration and creativity, to encourage, engage, and initiate better business relationships!

In this episode, we will discuss how your contacts can be better tagged and segmented to help improve communications engagement and build better business relationships.

Mark S. A. Smith designs and implements customer acquisition systems that find and recruit customers for disruptive products. He speaks at entrepreneurial events delivering pragmatic ideas to grow and succeed.

He is an electrical engineer, media technologist, computer programmer, hardware salesman, software marketer, and business owner who works with leaders who must develop the best way to bring in the right customers, fast!

Mark wrote 13 books and sales guides targeting government, educational, healthcare, and the private sector, including three with Guerrilla Marketing author, Jay Conrad Levinson. He has authored more than 400 magazine articles.

With his engineering, sales, and business background, he can teach information in a way that customers, salespeople, and management understand so that they can clearly communicate with their customers.

Creates powerful and innovative sales channel tools, combining product knowledge with proven sales skills. Creates custom white papers and books to sell technology to top management. Delivered thousands of speeches on selling.

We all have one. Some of us have multiple. You may even have one in every room of your house. It’s the junk drawer.

True Story: I was looking for a piece of wood in my garage to prop up my desk for a project. It was not until I took and posted the image for this post, that I saw the perfect piece (gray on the right) in my junk drawer.

I think we all have two kinds of junk drawers. One where we place things we actually use all the time but don’t want to leave on the table or counter. The second is the one where we put stuff we think you will need one day, and ultimately forget where it is or that we even have it somewhere.

Business data (especially in marketing) is part of the lifeblood of business. Yet it is often neglected and lacks organization. It can be organized like a junk drawer or a workbench that is accessed when you need a tool.

Email – The collection of email addresses we get from our online forms, accounting data, and CRM.

Social Media – Connections can often be exported using a CRM. I use Nimble’s LinkedIn Prospector often for this purpose.

CRM – These can often be imported and exported from your online forms, accounting data, tradeshows, and other business interactions.

Segmenting success is in the eye of the beholder. You want to segment to make it useful to each branch of your tree. If accounting can find clients, and sales can find prospects that’s great, but further segmenting should have a purpose, not just a label.

You want to make it visible and useful as with your primary junk drawer. It will always have some things that you don’t use often, but when you need them, they’re accessible.

In this episode, we will discuss how your data can be treated like a junk drawer, and how you can work with it and your staff to make it more useful and relevent.