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

Mark S. Babbitt is President of WorqIQ, a community and change management consultancy that helps organizations understand leadership’s impact on culture and the company’s collective level of Workplace Intelligence (WQ).

Mark is also CEO and Founder of YouTern. This career-focused community enables college students, recent graduates, and young professionals to find their first or next internship or job with the right organizational culture for them.

Mark co-authored A World Gone Social: How Companies Must Adapt to Survive and is co-author of the upcoming (September 28, 2021 | Matt Holt and BenBella Books) Good Comes First: How Today’s Leaders Create an Uncompromising Company Culture That Doesn’t Suck.

Followers also find Mark’s advice in Entrepreneur, Inc., Forbes, and many other publications. An in-demand speaker, Mark was named one of Inc. Magazines’ Top 100 Leadership Speakers.

S. Chris Edmonds helps leaders create and sustain purposeful, positive, productive work cultures. He is a speaker, author, and executive consultant who is the founder of The Purposeful Culture Group. He’s one of Inc. Magazine’s 100 Top Leadership Speakers and was a featured presenter at South by Southwest 2015.

Chris is the author of the Amazon best seller The Culture Engine and is co-author of the upcoming title, Good Comes First. Chris’ blog, podcasts, and videos are at DrivingResultsThroughCulture.com. Chris’ short, rich Culture Leadership Charge video episodes can be found on YouTube.

There is a famous saying, “What gets measured gets managed”, or “What gets measured, gets done”. It’s often attributed to Peter Drucker (but his organizations said it was not him initially).

But when it comes to measurement… what happens when you are measuring the wrong things? Does that lead to doing the wrong things and inaccurate data?

Humans will tend to engage anywhere between 30 seconds to 30 minutes on your website. What you want to measure is that engagement.

What you want to measure first is what are the engagers engaging with. That can be found by looking at what pages are getting around 1-3 minutes of time on that page. Keep in mind that bots can drop that to below 1 minute if they are the majority of the hits, so don’t immediately throw out data as says 1 minute or less.

One way is to ask questions. If you add a call to action (think, banner ad) that says “Got Questions? Click Here!” you can be sure that at least some of the page visitors will take you up on that.

Another way is to predictively answer questions. We do this with a Decision Tree. This (like the banner ad) gets people to click through. The difference, is they are not forced to give info to get answers.

This provides intelligence into their website visits and activity which can be analyzed and utilized by management and/or salespeople.

In this episode, we will discuss how to increase engagement by getting people to search and answer their own questions!

Avish Bhama is the founder and CEO of Sonia Automation, a technology company that builds A.I. to automate client facing workflows. Prior to Sonia, Avish co-founded Vaurum, a bitcoin exchange, and Mirror, a fintech startup. Avish began his career as a derivatives trader and worked at Apple on their foreign exchange team. He resides in New York and SF, where Sonia has offices, and enjoys reading, hiking, and helping early-stage founders.

Have you ever been in an endless loop or Mobius strip conversation with a toddler? You know… the endless circle of WHY?

When a toddler keeps asking “WHY?” in response to everything they hear or see, it’s called the “why stage” or “why phase”.

If you get frustrated, you can try to end the loop by saying, “Because I said so… THAT’S WHY!”

Simon Sinek explores the word WHY in such an exciting way in his book “START WITH WHY: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action”.

I suggest you ask yourself, “WHY do I want or need more sales?”, “HOW can I entice people to do more of what is already working?” “WHAT do I need to do to entice people to do more of what is already working?” and “WHY would that convince them to make a purchase?”

If you noticed, Simon Sinek starts with WHY, HOW, and WHAT. This is the power of three. So let’s explore WHY three choices help you increase the chances that your ideas and messaging will be engaged.

Ultimately, your WHY is going to be different than almost any other business. That means your HOW and WHAT are also going to be different than most other businesses.

In this episode, we will discuss WHY presenting your marketing with three choices can be the best way to increase engagment!.

Cloris Kylie, Marketing MBA, helps you build authority and attract the right clients online and offline. She shows you how to leverage connections with influencers and leaders of marketing platforms so that you can grow a magnificent business that produces positive impact and growing revenue.

A sought-after speaker, trainer, and author, Cloris has been featured on network television, and on top-ranked podcasts and YouTube shows, including the #1 podcast for entrepreneurs, “Entrepreneur On Fire.” Cloris’s articles have been published on websites with millions of followers, such as TinyBuddha, MindBodyGreen, and Addicted2Success.

Starting from scratch, Cloris has grown a large network of influencers, who have played an essential role in the growth of her coaching and consulting business.

She has interviewed best-selling authors and world-class entrepreneurs such as Chris Brogan, Dorie Clark, Neil Patel, Mel Abraham, and Serena, Saje and Skye Dyer, the 3 daughters of Dr. Wayne W. Dyer.

I am always amazed that 80 tons of people, luggage, metal, and fuel, lifts you up in the air and flies you 1000 miles in about 2 hours, and it’s almost 1000 times safer than driving in a car.

On top of that, most people don’t give a second thought about how complex our air travel system is. During the last year, we saw how planes that could not take off caused delays, cancellations, and even a collapse of certain airlines’ systems.

If not having the right airplane at the right gate at the right time can cause chaos, imagine how not having the right person, at the right web page, at the right time could affect your business systems.

A B2b business usually has a very niche audience of specialists in search of a solution to their problem. You want to help your website visitors land at the right gate. That way they can make their connecting flight (talking with your sales staff) or reach their destination (buying from your company).

So the question to ask yourself is, “Do I need more traffic or do I need to have better conversations?”

Website creators often look at a website as a linear experience. You arrive at the entrance (home page), read the departures board (menu), then navigate to your gate (pages or blog). I like to think of your website as a non-linear tool.

If people have questions, they walk up to the gate staff and ask questions.

Your website can also accomplish this by using links and banners (on pages, blog posts, and below videos), to point people to more information.

In this episode, we will discuss how to get travelers at your website to their gate (destination) faster!.

Bob Kastl is the son of a Military Attorney and Judge, so he grew up in many places including: Texas, Alaska, Alabama, New Mexico, Virginia and Panama. He majored in Mass Communications at James Madison University, and, while in school, served as the Assistant Program Director at WMRA, Public Radio for the Shenandoah Valley.

After college, he took a job as an Advertising Sales Executive at the alternative newsweekly, Creative Loafing, in Charlotte. Eight months after his hire, Bob was promoted to the role of Sales Manager. He served in that role for five years, eventually being promoted to Associate Publisher. He left Loafing in 1997 to work at The Charlotte Observer, eventually returning to launch a weekly edition of Creative Loafing in Sarasota Florida in 1999.

After a stint out of the media advertising world, he returned in 2008, and joined AT&T, the publisher of the local Yellow Pages and yellowpages.com for Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Goldsboro, and several other markets. He joined WUNC in 2018, and was promoted to the Corporate Sales Manager job in August of 2019.

The first thing that happens when you get to a restaurant is you are guided to your table and handed a menu. Menus are generally organized into appetizers, meals, and desserts.

Could you imagine if the menu included articles about how each meal is prepared, where the ingredients were sourced from, and what cooking ware is used to prepare your meal?

Your website is like a menu for visitors. It is generally categorized based on how your visitors want to eat, but all too often they try too hard to over-explain the options. That’s what the wait staff is for. Wait-staff serves as the primary interaction point between your customers and your business.

Your website visitors may come to your website with a goal, a problem, or a question.

If all they want is to get to know your business (products and services) it’s the brochure they are looking for.

If they are looking to make a purchase, they may want to know the price and availability, That’s when the store model (similar to Amazon) makes the most sense.

If they are researching their issues and possible solutions, they will be looking for your card catalog with the Dewey Decimal System (search box) and expect your website to act like ChatGPT (with detailed expert responses).

All too often, you will find small business websites that try to incorporate all three modalities to reach the broadest audience. But sometimes, “If you make the choose, they get confused!”

In this episode, we will discuss how to get visitors to your website to strike up profitable sales conversations.

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.

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How often do you find yourself getting ads for something that you just searched for? It can be both creepy and annoying.

I went to a local golf shop to have some clubs regripped. While I was waiting I was shown an area where they will evaluate your swing and give you a mini-lesson. I booked it and came back a couple of weeks later. What I learned is that my ball flight is good but my swing speed is slow. Swing speed = distance.

So you are probably asking yourself, “What does golf have to do with marketing?” Well, I believe that to better your game, you have to master the system. or SYS-TEM

Building a SYS-TEM means creating a synchronized marketing system. Trying just to implement a simple fix or change is not going to do the trick.

You have to master all parts of a golf swing to make solid contact. The same goes for marketing. The goal is to make solid contact, and that makes it easier to get the ball in the hole (make a sale).

In this episode, we will discuss how you can build a SYS-TEM around your marketing.