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

Mulch is made by shredding trees. Finer shredding improves the soil over time. As organic mulches decompose, they can add nutrients and organic matter to the soil, enhancing its quality.

Mulch is not only decorative but also functional. It helps plants by regulating soil temperature, retaining water, and preventing weeds and erosion—all from recycled trees.

I think of creating content as an ecosystem, just like a tree. It starts with an idea or a seed of thought. It grows and builds roots in your business marketing. Then, it provides nutrients to help feed itself and your business.

Running a business is hard. The bigger the business, the more complex it is. You have to manage issues like people, finance, supply and demand, sales, marketing, and what I consider the most challenging part… finding customers and keeping them happy.

Like a tree turns CO² into oxygen, you can turn lessons into relationships. This means converting those lessons into strategic marketing ideas that facilitate sales.

Reinvention is based on results. It requires critical listening and critical thinking to understand the subtleties. You can hear how the bass drum and bass guitar build a foundation while the strings on the chorus lift the message to a different level. It has to become a habit of consuming fuel that drives you forward to success.

You may not think about it, but we are surrounded by messages and ads all day long. In today’s digital age, the average person encounters between 6,000 and 10,000 ads daily. We are bombarded with billboards, snail mail, radio, and TV, not to mention all the social media content, spam emails, and robocalls.

All of that noise has one goal: to get you to spend or give your money to them. The never-ending battle for your attention and dollars is waged relentlessly daily. This works because we are personally tied to our beliefs, egos, and needs. We all want to be right, liked, and sustained without being taken advantage of. We face a lot of noise that is trying to persuade us. We tend to pay attention to what we find relevant.

If you think about it, each change in our economy has created new opportunities while the status quo has deteriorated before our eyes. People who refused to reinvent themselves and their businesses fell by the wayside, while others saw their fortunes explode.

Revolution is based on promises. Promises are like music that we have already heard. You may have an emotional connection, but the next song forms a new connection once the song ends. It’s a sugar high that peaks and falls.

Reinvention is based on results. It requires critical listening and critical thinking to understand the subtleties. You can hear how the bass drum and bass guitar build a foundation while the strings on the chorus lift the message to a different level. It has to become a habit of consuming fuel that drives you forward to success.

If you have been involved in online marketing in any way over the last 10+ years, you have been fed a steady diet of more. More followers equals more sales. More hits to your website equals more sales. More social media engagement leads to more sales.

Almost nobody would argue that more sales are bad, but people have conflated more with better. I am here to say that better is worth more.

In the world of relationship marketing, sales begin at connection. A connection can come in the form of a follow, a friend request, a connection request, a message, a website form submission, or whatever each platform uses to start, generate, and maintain conversations and relational connections.

The main goal is to stay top of mind and maintain a connection so people will see your content, consume it, and hopefully learn something, and then engage in a relationship at the time of their choosing. That is the promise of social media. They do this for free, so people will pay for advertising to do just that!

Trust has to be planted and grown. It is a seed planted through a personal relationship. It needs to grow roots and be nurtured through light and water to produce fruit. Trust must be watered by honesty, warmed and fed through the light of integrity, and rooted in consistency. Strong roots and branches provide shade and shelter in the stormy weather of doubt.

It would be great if there were a way to measure trust. You can calculate the number of people who know or connect with you. You can measure likes by the number of people who interact with your social posts or open your emails. However, trust can only be seen when a transaction happens.

There are five stages to go from like to trust: Connection, Caution, Consistency, Courage, and Commitment.

No tool, system, or software program can automate trust. You may think that sending emails, keeping people in the loop, and sending them direct messages may help, and they do. But the only way to maintain and nurture trust is through human-to-human interaction.

Going from Know to Trust requires a stepping stone, and that’s called a Like. You can try to jump over that stone, but it leads to a transactional two-step. You may make a sale, but it will not build a relationship.

Relationships are key in the B2b world because businesses need to be reminded that you are there to serve them when needed and that they can continue to trust you.

Like is a connection. Online a connection is a follow, friend request, or whatever a social platform says its phrase is defined as a positive affinity, rapport, or fondness with someone in a digital sense.

In the literal sense, like means you have something in common. For example, I like dogs, golf, music, humor, motivation, family, and business. The more you have in common with certain people, the more they will like you.

So, it is the activity that gets someone who knows you to know you better. It’s about informing without dividing. It’s about making them feel something. It’s about forming a bond around subjects that matter to both of you. The goal is to stay in touch and be top of mind. The goal is not just to sell something.

There are three final points that I believe need to be addressed.

Know is a beautiful word. People ask, “You know what?” They text IYKYK (meaning if you know, you know). Know can also be a derivative of knowledge.

Know is a two-way street when it comes to marketing. You want people to know about you and your business. You may also want to know who knows about you and your business.

Knowing who knows what is almost like the old Abbott and Costello bit, “Who’s on first.” Or, what came first, the chicken or the egg?

Just because someone becomes aware of your business or gets to know you exist does not guarantee that they will remember you a week, month, or year from now.

That means that you have to remind them that you are there and that you are still relevant.

As I mentioned, there are three kinds of marketing: awareness, education, and sales. Awareness is about being top of mind. With awareness marketing, your goal isn’t to inform, educate, or convince. It’s about raising your hand and saying, “HEY… we’re still here!”

The concept of “Know – Like – Trust” has been around for a while. It is commonly attributed to author Bob Burg (Endless Referrals and The Go-Giver).

Another person attributed to the concept is sales trainer Michael Goldstein, who talked about buyers needing to experience “confidence, affinity, and empathy” before making purchases.

No matter who originated it or how you phrase it, it’s undoubtedly a foundational process to making a sale. When I say process, it’s one foot in front of the other sequence. Yet many business people try to hop over the like part and go from know to trust.

Know, Like, and Trust has three distinct phases when it comes to marketing to build relationships.

One of the critical principles that muddies the water when it comes to business-to-business relationship marketing is the concept that your business is trying to appeal to the largest audience possible.

In business, sales are the KPI that drive everything from employee compensation, innovation budgets, and, in some cases, investor and shareholder enthusiasm.

The concepts of Know, Like, and Trust are intertwined, yet each has its own purpose, process, and performance metrics. One last key thing to remember is that marketing people are part of your sales team, and salespeople are part of your marketing team.

Networking has been around for a long time in business. Some of the names you may recognize (Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller) were prolific advocates of networking.

As we know it today, networking started taking hold in the 1970s. More formal groups like BNI (Business Networking International) started in 1984.

Tradeshows, associations, and even chambers of commerce are all forms of networking.

One of the best philosophies I have ever learned about networking is that business is not B2B (business to business); it’s H2h (human to human).

Humans are complex beings. They have emotions, biases, experiences, expectations, fears, hopes, and random acts of kindness or stupidity (depending on the planet’s alignment and inspiration from higher powers). In face-to-face networking, we get a tiny glimpse into the complexity of a person’s overall being.

Think of networking as a relationship bank! You have to make deposits to create interest. Every quality network you can tap into creates a foundational asset that can and will help grow your sphere of influence.

One of the foundations that’s stuck with me through the years is, “Businesses do not do business with other businesses. People do business with people.” There has never been a corporation that has ever paid cash or written a check. People do that. Yes, companies try to put you on autopilot by making you subscribe to things, but it still takes a human to enter the data and make the initial purchase.

What had been the Horatio Alger dream of the Nineteenth Century, starting in the mail room and ultimately owning the bank or factory, now had even more scope. How many loyal workers dreamed of climbing the corporate ladder to become CEO of a multinational corporation?

Part of the evolution of business is about teaching ourselves how to really network. There are many options, from associations to chambers of commerce to people who do informal and semi-formal free and paid events.

Those events lead to people suggesting other networking opportunities. That could expand your Golden Rolodex even further, but how do you find value in networking?

Top view on pan with fried egg with bacon

Babies are cute, puppies are cute, and bacon is not cute, but I bet your mouth watered a little bit.

What if someone recently lost a baby? Maybe they are a cat person? What if they are an animal rights activist or vegan? Then, those first statements could not be any farther from the response you had hoped for.

Brands, like cute, are in the eye of the beholder, but as a business, our brand is our image.

Branding is complicated. It’s more than your logo, your corporate fonts and colors, and how you advertise to your perfect customers. It encompasses everything from the stock images you choose to how you answer the phone (or not) to what platforms you choose to distribute your content.

Speaking of content, your content comprises text, images, and media (audio/video).

So, what does BACON (Building Authentic Connections Online Networking) mean or look like to you and your business? I can assure you it is different for almost everyone, but all have some things in common.

For B2b businesses, this means investing time in nurturing a long-term relationship. This may mean providing them with information in the form of articles or even providing them with connections that may turn into leads and sales for them first.