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

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.

Most of us have fallen victim to the allure of FREE stuff.  I had a freezer full of big bags and boxes of frozen food from going to Sam’s Club and being a victim of the FREE sample person standing in the aisle.

When you offer something FREE, you generally appeal to a person’s consumer mindset. People will often seek free stuff or advice when they don’t have the budget to pay for someone to complete a task for them.

In Business… free is never FREE! Time is money. Keep in mind that the average CEO knows that 1 hour of their time is worth $500 for every $1,000,000 of value that they bring to their business. If you want to get their attention, then you have to provide value.

– Steve Jobs

In this episode, I will discuss the difference between the consumer and business mindset, and the difference between FREE and INVEST!

Dr. Jim Barry is the author of Social Content Marketing for Entrepreneurs, a textbook used in the instruction of MBA courses. He has served as Professor of Marketing at NSU since August, 2004 where he teaches courses in social media marketing, consumer behavior, and integrated marketing communication. He won the 2019 President’s Distinguished Faculty Award and was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi earlier this year.

After graduating with a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, Jim completed an MBA in Marketing at DePaul University. He then received his doctorate from NSU.

Jim’s publications have appeared in many leading marketing journals primarily about social media marketing, content marketing, humor, storytelling, cross-cultural relational marketing and emerging markets. He serves on the editorial review boards of top journals like the European Journal of Marketing and the Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing.

He joined NSU after a 25-year career in executive marketing positions with AT&T Bell Labs, Gould Electronics, GE Aerospace, BFGoodrich Aerospace, Rockwell Collins and two start-up firms. His primary responsibilities as a director of marketing and strategic planner included mergers and acquisitions, business development and global marketing development for high tech electronics firms.

He and his wife, Claudia, reside in Delray Beach where they serve as pastors for Trinity Church International and facilitate a number of classes on biblical world views.

Did you know that the American bee is actually digital? Yup… It’s a U.S.B.

So is it a conspiracy theory, or a bad dad joke? Perspective is reality in the mind of the beholder!

Some people think that marketing has some secret formula that someone knows that others don’t. That’s why you hear that word so much in marketing.

Just because something is a secret, does not mean that it’s true, or that it universally applies to all. So let me tell you a secret… the secret to success is unique to you and your situation, circumstances, and definition of success. There is a song by Joe Jackson called “You can’t get what you want, till you know what you want.” But people often attribute an activity or a theory, or a strategy to success without defining what they actually mean by success.

– Frank Lloyd Wright

In this episode, I will share The 3 B’s that I use to make sure I am in complete alignment with my perfect customers!

Vlad Calus is the co-founder @ Planable, the command center of social media collaboration for marketing teams, digital agencies, and freelancers to collaborate with their teammates & clients on the content calendar in the most visual way. Planable is used by more than 5000 brands worldwide, including Mini, BMW, Volkswagen, SkyTeam, Wendy’s and many others.

Vlad founded two non-profits at the age of 16, then dropped out of college, moved to another country with two 2 his friends, built Planable (Techstars London ’17) at 19 y.o and became an honoree Forbes 30 Under 30 at 22 y.o. And he’s been featured as a guest writer & marketer by multiple publications including Social Media Examiner, Entrepreneur, WeRSM, Freshdesk, Subsign, Digital Agency Network and many others.

What do my best clients have in common?

That question can be answered by looking at the Pareto Principle. 80% of my best clients come from referrals. and 80% of my income comes from 20% of all my clients. So 80% of the income comes from my best clients who were all referrals.

Each one of those people who referred me was not a recently past client, but people with who I invested tin o build the Know, Like, & Trust. It took time, and often years, to get to the point where they felt comfortable enough to put their reputation on the line to give my name to those best clients.

In this episode, I will share how questions my clients asked me lately… can wall be answered with three simple words – Know, Like, & Trust!

Founder of Crystal for the past 4 years, a personality platform that offers free assessments and industry-leading psychometric predictions.

Focused on helping people communicate effectively, resolve conflict, manage stress, influence others, and make better decisions in their professional lives.

Always looking for software engineers and talented people-people to join the Crystal team. Email me if you’re interested: [email protected]

Started multiple businesses before then, including an event software company (Attend.com), a pizza box advertising agency, and a bed bug extermination company. Private pilot, songwriter, runner, and local diner aficionado.

Good professional speakers and good marketers know that the most effective way to get people to remember what you said and to take action is to KEEP IT SIMPLE! Even if you have a very complex topic, it’s easier to digest in smaller chunks of three.

We all tend to store information in our brains less like a computer, and more like a sequence of things.

There have been many famous threes in our lives. Think of the Three Musketeers, Three Little Pigs, Three Act Plays, Cheaper, Better, Faster (pick two), Three Strikes, and the Trinity (Father, Son, & Holy Ghost.)

Three is a prime number, but more importantly, it’s easy for our minds to process, and remember. We often can remember three points, three steps, or three easy pieces. Even our existence as humans is built around threes…

It’s all about having deeper, relationship KNOW-LIKE-TRUST conversations with your current or past customers and prospects… “HEY? That’s another three!”

In this episode, I will share how marketing and sales are easier to master when you use the power of three. In 3 segments of three minutes, I will teach you three core concepts.

Brent Keltner, Ph.D. is the author of the April 2022 book The Revenue Acceleration Playbook: Creating an Authentic Buyer Journey Across Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success published by Page Two Books and distributed by Macmillan. He is the founder and President of Winalytics LLC, a go-to-market and revenue acceleration consultancy. Winalytics helps clients reach their top growth potential by shifting from a product-driven to a value-driven go-to-market strategy by aligning sales, marketing, customer success, and product teams around buyer-defined value.

I hate the process of making sales soI hired a sales coach to help me overcome my fears. I was filled with the guilt of asking people for money. Also, I lacked the self-confidence to ask what my hourly time was really worth to my clients so I always underpriced and undersold what I was doing for my clients.

No amount of marketing can make a sale if the sales process is broken. Similarly, sales need to be supported by a cohesive marketing story throughout the buyer’s journey. both have to be aligned for sales to grow and gain more of those “certificates of appreciation”.

I have to say that my greatest sales success was convincing my wife to sell our house and build a new house in another state.

In this episode, I will share how marketing and sales are intertwined in a dance, and how the buyer’s journey can lead you to a soft landing and repeat business.