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

VICTORIA SONG is the Leadership Advisor to successful founders and CEOs of the fastest growing technology companies in Silicon Valley and celebrities with power, platform, and influence.

Victoria began her career as a venture capitalist investing in technology startups, where she got to see first-hand what the most successful entrepreneurs did differently to win.

She was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for her investment success. After studying economics at Yale University and leadership at Harvard Business School, she received her most valuable learnings from over 24 of the best coaches, therapists, and alternative healers in the world who teach lessons not available in even the most exclusive universities.

If you want to build a successful business, you have to stay top of mind, provide value, and continue to learn, grow and change. What follows are three experiences I had in the last week or so that will help me make that point!

My friend and associate, Chuck Hester, has a habit that I not only follow but support. While I post a quote of the day in the morning, and a caption contest at night on Facebook, he does the same with a dad joke of the day!

My business coach (Marla Tabaka) and I had an awesome conversation about my progress and how I crushed my vision board (the dad part is coming). If you are not familiar with a vision board, Marla convinced me to buy a pin board, hang it on my wall, and fill it with pictures of what I want to achieve. I searched and found a big check (with a big number to make me debt free), a golfer, a for sale sign on my home, a new home, and pictures of my perfect customers.

Some people you meet online are Zoom-worthy, while others are coffee worthy. Coffee-worthy means I have to take a shower, get in my car, and meet them for coffee. I had such a Coffee-worthy meeting with a new friend and business associate Chip Royce. The main reason for the meeting was to help each other see our respective businesses through a fresh set of eyes.

Your life, business, and money tree need nurturing, care, and sustenance to keep growing. Maybe you want to try a vision board. Maybe search for a coach, mentor, or friend to help you see things from different perspectives. It may be a coffee, a beer or glass of wine, a round of golf, or just a walk, but seek out others for whom you can provide value, and whom you can find value with.

In this episode, we will discuss how to gain a new perspective on yourself and your vision (board).

Erika Andresen, CBCP, JD, MPA, is a recovering lawyer after nearly two decades of experience in both the corporate finance world and the military. Erika became a subject matter expert on national security and disaster preparedness and response while advising different commands on their authorities and during high-risk situations in Afghanistan. Her work with actual disasters led her to attain a Master of Public Affairs.

Erika left active duty in 2020 and has since started EaaS Consulting, LLC, with the goal of keeping businesses in business. To that end, she authored How to Not Kill Your Business: Grow Your Business in Any Environment, Navigate Volatility, and Successfully Recover When Things Go Wrong, a conversational introduction to business continuity enjoyed by CBCP practitioners and business owners alike. Erika is also a professor of emergency management for the MPA program at the University of Texas at El Paso. She has been quoted in articles for Forbes, Dark Reading, and MoneyGeek on the issues of business continuity and disaster preparedness.

After a career of working in actual disasters and high-risk situations where things changed every day and the consequences were actual life and death, Erika saw that business owners needed similar services to survive but did not know where to start. If you are a business that wants to stay alive and grow with security, Erika’s mission is to get you there!

was listening to “The Square and the Tower”, subtitled “Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook” by Niall Ferguson. It argues that most organizations are hierarchical. “It’s about emperors, presidents, prime ministers, and field marshals. It’s about states, armies, and corporations. It’s about orders from on high.” Networks have nodes and have always been with us. From our family, and founding fathers to Facebook, it’s about whom you know and whom they know that forms your network.

Most of us would think that if we can get the ear or heart of the CEO, King, or Owner, we can reach underlings with our messages. But this book talks about Thomas Cromwell who was the principal secretary to King Henry VIII. Cromwell had access to over 20,000 letters belonging to the dynasty, hence he had access, knowledge, and insight that few could have prior to the invention of the printing press.

The purpose of that peer-to-peer networking meeting is about who needs what. Not about, “does what I sell, meet their needs”, or “whom do they know who needs what I sell?” It’s 100% about whom I know, that’s a quality connection, who can help them solve a problem.

So back to my theory that maintaining fewer connections with quality networkers is much more fruitful than riding the coattails of those influencers with the most connections.

In this episode, we will discuss the difference between hierarchical and node networking.

Struggle with creating content? Jeff Herring provides tools, templates, software, and strategies to make content creation easy! No experience necessary.

Jeff Herring AKA The Content Marketing Guy is an internet marketer specializing in article marketing, teaching internet marketers, authors, speakers and self-employed professionals to write and market articles for more prospects, publicity and profits, and to create multiple streams of income with their content.

Jeff began as a marriage and family therapist, with a thriving practice for over 25 years… He began writing a weekly syndicated column and found that he became the “Therapist in the Paper” and grew his private therapy practice into a thriving business, with people and groups on his waiting list and filling the practices of his colleagues with the overflow. Afterlife happened and Jeff found himself divorced, his children have moved away from Florida to Georgia so Jeff moved to Georgia as soon as possible and in addition to some long-distance therapy clients, he began teaching other people how to quickly and easily create content to promote their businesses. When the internet took off, he found the same type of articles from his syndicated column worked wonders for bringing targeted traffic to his (and his client’s) websites. And the Content Marketing Guy was born…

Jeff’s students and clients discover how to write more articles in less time, get their information in front of more eyes in as many consumable forms as possible, create a massive web presence, build a highly qualified and highly responsive list, and create multiple information products to build their information empire with their content.

When Jeff turned his content marketing expertise on the internet, he created a flood of traffic to his web sites that he could not stop if he wanted to, and he doesn’t want to. He is perhaps the most prolific Content Marketing expert in the world, practicing what he preaches with well over 1.5 Million article views online. See some of Jeff Herring’s articles here.

In this final part of the series, I wanted to show how and why following traditional marketing thinking can hamper your success in B2b marketing.

B2b marketing differs from consumer marketing because it’s more relational than transactional, and it often takes longer to go from awareness to trust. That means that there are more steps, and more interaction required. It also means that it requires more patience, which is rewarded with bigger paydays.

With that said here are some things we have learned over the last few years (through actual client experience):

What that tells us is that people in business are too busy to read long posts. It’s short, to-the-point content like images and gifs that get the most clicks. Once people click, they continue to want short, quick engagement or actions to take.

Once you get people on your website, the holy grail is always getting their contact information. But what if they are not willing or ready to? That is where a Decision Tree help.

In this episode, we will explore… how to keep your customers engaged in your content, and track their buyer’s journey!.

Shawn Finder has always been an entrepreneur at heart. At age 24, Shawn entered the entrepreneurial world after competing as one of Canada’s top-ranked tennis players. He started out importing packaging from the Orient and selling to top retailers in North America. However, knowing he always loved selling and list building, he founded ExchangeLeads in 2013 which helps his company build quality lists for outreaching new prospects. This was followed by his new venture Autoklose in 2017 that combines both sales engagement and list building all-in-one platform

In part 1 of this series, I hinted that in this post I was going to outline a system we are working on that helps capture data from visitors in a way that traditional methods are either missing or lacking. I decided that before I devolve the system, I should add a little context as to why it’s so important and needed. So, this will now be a 3 part series.

I also mentioned, your website is kind of like a mousetrap. It has food for thought and attracts creatures who sneak in and out. You may be able to see them scurry, but it’s hard to trap them (meaning their data).

The goal is not to just capture information and badger people, but to follow their journey, to understand their needs and wants better, and how they go about using your website to investigate answers to their questions.

All businesses have one main goal, to make a sale. In the B2b world, that generally requires interpersonal communication (a conversation between a salesperson and a prospect). All of those tactics can generate leads, data, and sales, but there is a caveat. It all assumes that someone sees your stuff at the exact time they are deciding to buy. I believe that the best method to really achieve that is through relationship building.

Understanding the path that websites, email, and social have taken will help you better understand how to integrate all of those into your overall marketing plan

In this episode, we will explore… a little history of the web, search, email, social & more!.

Julie Migliacci has over 17 years of high-touch customer service and event planning under her belt. There isn’t an event type she hasn’t planned before, from large celebrity fundraisers, virtual conferences and premier cooking shows. She is always up for a new challenge and creating unique experiences for clients and their guests. Hailing from France, Julie has lived in 4 countries and considers herself a global citizen. She currently resides in Boston, MA and is always looking for an opportunity to jump on a plane to do something new. If left on a deserted island, Julie would bring her sourdough starter (named Steve) and her cats.

Lastly, a fun fact: Chip was the first to place a keyword ad buy in 1997 (Yahoo!)

In our last house, we had a small problem. Mice!

If you think about it, your business is like my garage. Specifically your website. It has food for thought and attracts creatures who sneak in and out. You may be able to see them scurry, but it’s hard to trap them (and you certainly don’t want to kill them off). You want to be able to capture them (or at least capture their data).

The ultimate goal is to get people to exchange their contact info for quality content like an ebook, training videos, and such. You will only get a small number of website visitors who are willing to do that. It may take two, three, or more visits to your website before they are willing to engage in that way. It makes sense to try and track use with cookies, so when they scurry into your form or email, you have the opportunity to trace their path (understand how they got there in the first place).

Unlike the mice in our garage, you don’t want to get rid of them, you want to create conversations that keep them coming back. But you still have to feed them and track their path, or journey to your cheese while keeping your content safe and inviting!

P.S. With those mice, I used peanut butter which lasted longer and was stickier 

In this episode, we will explore… How to attract and capture your website’s users’ attention… and data!.