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

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 business, people are often looking for that one guy or company with superpowers to solve their critical issues. They are looking for Superman (or Superwoman) when what they really need is the Justice League.

The Justice League is brought together to solve big problems and combines the superpowers of multiple men and women to keep the world safe. It’s what I have found working with business.

Marketing alone cannot solve business and sales issues. It takes a concerted effort of a cohesive team of superheroes.

You may already have parts of your Justice League on staff or in place, but I will explore this further in another post about how to turn on your Bat Signal, and call them to action. Each has its own superpowers, but when you combine them, they will give you the best chance to scale and grow your business.

In this episode, I will discuss why finding a Superman (or Superwoman) is great… but forming a Justice League is important to business success with sales and marketing!

Brian E. Kinghorn, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Curriculum, Instruction, and Foundations at Marshall University. He earned his doctorate in educational psychology and educational technology at Michigan State University. Dr. Kinghorn teaches courses in Educational Psychology, Human Development, Elementary Science, and the Psychology of Social Media.

His writing and research interests include learning from teaching, social media in education, and the psychology of social media. He also presents inquiry-based science assemblies at elementary schools with Junior Science World, a company he founded in 2009. He and his wife Leah are the parents of 8 children.

Brian is also the director of the National Youth Science Camp and the licensee and lead organizer of TEDxMarshallU.

I don’t know about you, but the past two years have been a challenge for everyone, and we are no different. It’s not only made working from home more acceptable but an embraced lifestyle. People are transitioning from living to work to working to live.

Now, I know this is a business blog so I won’t bore you with all the details but bear with me.

It’s already shown me that running a business teaches you lessons that can be used to help in day-to-day life. Also, life lessons can help you run a business better.

What does buying and selling a home, and running a business have in common? They both are fraught with emotional decisions. One thing is clear. Both require purpose, people, performance, product, and process to be successful.

In this episode, I will discuss how buying and selling a home has direct correlations with owning and running a business!

Chris Martinez is an entrepreneur, speaker, author and the Founder of DUDE Agency, a company specializing in helping digital marketing agencies with their people, processes, and education so they can take on more projects and scale profitably.

An entrepreneur from a young age, Chris has been running his digital agency since 2015. Discovering the advantages of hiring web design and development professionals in Tijuana, Mexico, he quickly scaled and then started to help other agency owners grow at previously unimaginable rates.

Today, DUDE works with digital agencies all over the US and Canada, providing them the perfect outsourcing solution for digital agencies.

Having earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology from the University of California, Chris dedicated his career to creating new technology jobs in Latin America and Asia. Passionate about creating win-win scenarios, Chris’ company helps digital agencies to scale through his unique process of hiring and selecting talent as they provide staff with cutting edge skills to agencies based in the US and Canada.

In 2021, DUDE won a Gold Stevie Award from the American Business Association for Minority-Owned Business of the Year and a Silver Stevie Award for Most-Innovative Companies Under 100 Employees. Chris is also a sought-after speaker who spoke at events such as the prestigious Traffic and Conversion Summit in 2021.

Passionate about giving back, for the last nine years, Chris has been mentoring a young man who lost his mom to breast cancer at age thirteen. A talented soccer player and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighter, Chris works toward excellence, philanthropy and balance in all aspects of his life. Originally from Torrence, California, today Chris lives in Tijuana, Mexico with his wife and two dogs.

Past Bacon Podcast Guest Ryan Weiss, gave a presentation and workshop last week to a larger audience. The constant them and the biggest takeaway was that your processes have to align your purpose, people, and processes to achieve success. All three of them are intertwined in a way that has to work for you, your employees or contractors, and your clients or prospects.

Marketing has always been a function to drive sales, but there is a difference between business-to-business and consumer marketing. Consumers don’t need or want a relationship with toilet paper, furniture, or their cars. Although you do see more and more people speaking in their cars than ever before? I would love to hear some of the conversations, but I wouldn’t want to get that personal with a motor, wires, and aluminum!

In this episode, I will discuss how process, people, & purpose helps to engage your sales team to have more and better sales conversations!

Tiffany Prince, founder of Prince Performance LLC, is experienced in providing coaching, workshops and consulting around leadership, performance, change management and building high-performing teams for leaders at all levels of organizations that are facing challenges due to technology transformations, skill gaps within employees, globalization and building inclusive workplaces. Tiffany obtained a Master’s degree in Business Administration, majoring in Global Business Management, from Pepperdine University. She has served in multiple board member roles for the Association of Talent Development (ATD) including the President of the Metro DC Chapter, VP of Membership of ATD Chicagoland and recently served as a National Advisor for Chapters for ATD. She is serving on the Business Intelligence Council of Chief Learning Officer. She is the author of, “Top of the Mountain Leadership- The Future of Performance and Productivity in a Technology Changing World”.

How do you people feel about your CRM? Is it a Bankers’ Box in the basement, or is it a loved and actively used tool?

CRMs are often thought of as managing data, but in the middle of Customer & Management is RELATIONSHIP! You have humans in your sales team who are building and maintaining relationships with other humans (prospects, customers, and past customers).

Relationships take time, commitment, and data. if you capture little things along the way like someone’s birthday (wish them a happy birthday), favorite things (food, sports, music, hobbies), or simply what they reveal during small talk, you have data that can be retrieved and used to nurture a prospect into profit.

It all begins with how you set up, train, and nurture your people and data capture systems to maximize relationships.

In this episode, I will discuss how to engage your sales team to capture better data into your CRM and how that can 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.

It’s hard to believe that two years ago we went from a kind of normal to total chaos in our businesses. We were mostly all chugging along, filled with hope for a new year, and BOOM.

One thing has become clear. The change was becoming a constant accelerating fact of life. Some of us (a small few) were prepared, some were adaptive, and some just crumbled under the pressure. During the flurry of change, one thing became undeniably clear. People needed to feel valued, heard, and comforted.

Business and sports have often been referred to as battles and wars. British political philosopher Herbert Spence often talked about “survival of the fittest” and a battle between the “haves” and “have nots.” A soldiers’ motivation to enlist is not as much about a desire to kill, as it is about a need to belong.

Your staff are people first and workers second. They have all been transformed by the recent events, and desire to belong, but that is fed by their search for a greater purpose. That is where empathy comes in.

In this episode I will discuss how empathy with your sales team can model that behavior with you customers to creat longer and better business relationships!