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

Back in 1997, Deep Blue (an IBM computer) defeated Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion at the time, in a six-game match with a final score of 3.5-2.5 in favor of Deep Blue.

Almost 20 years later, in 2016, Google’s AlphaGo program achieved a similar victory by defeating Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top professional Go players, in a five-game match with a final score of 4-1.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been around for decades, yet they were not accessible to you and me. Now that they are, they’re predicted to change marketing (and life in general) forever. Experts, insiders, and reporters expect good and bad from AI. Some predict Skynet from the Terminator movies, while others expect it to cure cancer. Ockham’s razor would predict that it’s probably something in the middle.

Companies and their leaders are telling us that they are working to make your experience better and part of the greater good of humanity.

Search is supposed to provide the best answer to your search prompt, and social media is supposed to serve the content you want to see. In reality, it’s more about profits than principles.

Search is optimized to get you to click ads—that’s how Google makes over 75% of its revenue. Facebook feeds your friendships and shows posts meant to stir the pot and keep you engaged. Facebook makes over 95% of its profits from ad sales.

Ockham’s razor would show us that trying to find and win customers through search and social media would benefit the platform more than you. It’s like a casino with all that noise of winners on its machines, but the odds have been programmed to make the casino much more money than it’s paying out!

When it comes to marketing, we have been using AI since the beginnings of Google and Facebook. Both are run through algorithms.

I have always been entertained and enamored by magic tricks. When people see one performed, they usually have one of two reactions: amazement or curiosity. The amazement is, “How did they do that?” and the curiosity is, “How did they do that?” Some people will look forward to the next one, while others are distracted by trying to figure out the sleight of hand.

At every turn, your data is being collected, and how that data is used, sold, and utilized is still like a magic trick. The only way to truly opt out of everything is to simply stop using computers.

Yet, we are seeing success not in creating more content but in creating better content that is served to the right people. The right people are people who have been on your website in the past or are finding you for the first time.

Artificial intelligence scrubs the web and provides generic answers that combine multiple sources with articles that have been posted in the past. Quality content includes your own personal perspective and experiences with a topic, combined with the knowledge of the audience you are trying to reach (specifically, your current and prospective customers).

Do you remember life before Beepers, CB Radios, and Fax Machines? All three gained momentum and popularity in the ’70s and ’80s and peaked in the ’90s. However, all three fell victim to mobile phones.

Beepers became text messaging, faxes became email, and CB radios became Nextel phones and then standard mobile phones.

Artificial Intelligence is about to completely disrupt how your business is found on the internet, making it harder for small—and midsized businesses to stand out and be found. It will affect consumer businesses more than B2b businesses, but it will continue to get harder, not easier.

But there is good news. You can still take action to make sure you and your business are actively seen by companies that need what you sell.

I think creating a symbiotic relationship between your sales and marketing teams and between your sales and marketing data makes sense. You may need to hire (internal or external) to help manage the data and the sales relationships and create reports to help your company’s sales and marketing teams identify trends and opportunities, and maybe avoid missteps.

As Artificial Intelligence begins to overtake the marketing world, I think it’s a good idea to get nostalgic about marketing and see how we can infuse it with a modern-day perspective.

When you get down to the core of marketing, it’s about people. Marketing is creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society. At its core, it’s about getting people to buy something. Consumer marketing is often self-serve. People select and buy products and services based on marketing alone. A sales team and process usually facilitate a sale in the business-to-business world.

Business-to-business marketing is more about enhancing human-to-human relationships that lead to sales. It’s more like a door-to-door salesman selling vacuums than an Amazon drone delivering one before your current vacuum breaks.

Organic Marketing is often defined as content creation and distribution versus paid advertising to attract leads. It’s a digital marketing strategy that generates traffic to your website, builds brand awareness, and attracts potential customers. B2b Organic Marketing means the ultimate goal is to connect those potential customers with your sales team and process.

In sports (and in business), two factors affect success. The physical and the mental are two parts of the whole, yet one is easier to evaluate to predict success… especially in football.

In business, we tend to focus more on the mental than the physical of the people we work with. This is why artificial intelligence is both an opportunity and a detriment.

AI has the benefit of agility and speed with decision-making. It also has a bit more consistency and predictability than humans. If you take a robot with adequate physical abilities and supercharge it with AI, it can score wins in a more frequent and predictable model.

The scary part is that it learns from the past and tries to predict the future. When AI makes decisions based on an unforeseen circumstance, it will either shut down or fail. It may learn from mistakes but often lacks the emotion or empathy to evaluate its decisions from a moral or personal perspective.

Golf, football, baseball, and other sports are generally described as a game of inches. Golf is about the six inches between your ears.

Even if you have mastered the physical skills, your mind can keep you guessing. The question is, what data are you paying attention to, and how fast can you make an educated decision?

I find that capturing, processing, and utilizing data is key to success… in sports and in business.

I was just in Chicago at the American Marketing Association’s Leadership Conference, where 400 people from around North America, representing 50+ chapters, came to learn and grow with and from each other.

Conferences are great for networking, learning, and getting out of the routine work rut, but they are also very peoply. Sometimes, too peoply.

Like social media and audio amplifiers, my brain has a self-preservation technique of shutting down when I spend too much time with people.

As a salesperson, peopling is your job. The barrier is that you are reaching out to people you probably don’t know and trying to converse at a noisy dinner table.

Promoting your brand is not 100% about what you sell. It’s about you as a person and how business and the personal interconnect. LinkedIn is one of your best platforms for sharing and caring if you are in the business-to-business sales world.

Growing up in New York, Yogi Bera was one of my favorite characters. He was a good player but even more of a philosopher (well, sort of).

Some of his most famous “Deep Yogi Thoughts” include:

Baseball is a sport. It’s not quite as life-or-death as a gladiator in a Roman coliseum, but some people feel like it is (especially in the payoffs). But it’s certainly not war, or is it?

Speaking of war, Donald Rumsfeld had a Yogi Bera moment during a press conference in 2002. Rumsfeld was the U.S. Secretary of Defense in the period right after 9/11 when our leaders were contemplating attacking Iraq for possessing weapons of mass destruction.

The direct quote was, “Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me because, as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know, we don’t know.”

While that quote may be a bit confusing, the underlying concepts of “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns” have been used in various fields like project management, risk assessment, and strategic planning for decades. I would like to look at it from the perspective of marketing in today’s multigenerational, AI-infused digital online marketing world!

When you think of unicorns, I am sure the first thing that comes to mind is a mythical and colorful horse with a single horn. Although there are no living, breathing unicorns that I have ever seen, I know unicorns are REAL!

Real unicorns in business refer to an elite privately funded startup that has crossed the $1 billion valuation mark, usually in the technology field.

When you think of business leads, I am sure the first thing that comes to mind is a real-life person who needs and wants to buy what you are selling. Although there are living, breathing people who buy what you sell, I am proposing to you that most business leads are NOT REAL!

A business sales lead is a person or organization that potentially needs what you sell (products, services, or a mix of both). You can define leads as cold, warm, and hot.

I understand that business needs leads to create new sales, but I propose that you have options other than buying names or researching people who are cold leads that require your sales team to spend hours and thousands of dollars trying to qualify and pursue them as prospects.

Chances are, you are not selling to unicorns. Believe it or not, you can buy Pixie Dust on Amazon. Either way, the road to our business-to-business realities always begin and end with people. Happy customers and great relationships lead to referrals, which are often sprinkled with the Pixie Dust of trust!

One of the most recognized sounds computer lovers remember is the dial-up connection and AOL’s announcement that says, “You’ve Got Mail!” It was like a sugar high whenever you heard that sound. Nowadays, most of us feel like we have the stabbing pain of a cavity when we hear our Outlook or Gmail inbox notification saying, “You’ve Got Mail!”

What changed?

The biggest difference is that many (if not most) of the emails we get today have one goal: to sell us something. Some of that is subtle, like email lists we have signed up for, while others are just blatant phishing, which is a random solution (or at least they say so) in search of a problem.

It’s hard to have the time and resources to optimize data, but that is one of the single activities that can impact email marketing success.

All too often, we import names and emails into email programs and lists because it’s easy. What’s a bit harder is collecting more detailed information and tagging contacts along their lifecycle on your email list.

I hate to break it to you, but people don’t want your newsletter. Newsletters are about you, and they are interested in what benefits them. Yet companies create emails with five or twenty stories (some or all with links).

The real challenge is finding and creating content relative to your audience when you send it. It is so important to create fresh, specific, and timely content.

The best way to prime your business for the AI revolution is to learn how it works for you and your company in the current business environment and then adapt as the tools become smarter and more accessible (and affordable).

Let’s face it. We are living in a world that is overwhelmed with information.

Getting your messages in front of any audience is getting harder and harder, let alone the perfect audience who might care about what you do or sell.

Okay… Take a deep breath. It’s not all doom and gloom. All of that information is only a problem if you are trying to outperform companies with deeper pockets and more cutting-edge resources.

You can totally zig while your competition zags. While most businesses are hunting for new clients in the internet marketing space, you can grow your business better and faster using relationship marketing principles. These principles are based on psychology, sociology, and human-to-human principles that date back to the beginning of time.

Let’s dive into five myths and remedies that may help you achieve your desired outcomes while spending less money and making more in the long run.