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

Jon is a CRM and Relationship Management entrepreneur and noted speaker about Social Media’s effects on Sales and Marketing. He has re-imagined CRM by building a Simply Smarter Social Sales and Marketing platform, his most recent venture Nimble.com. It is the first CRM that works for you by building and updating contact data for you, then works with you, everywhere you work. Ferrara is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software categories for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs).

Nimble combines the strengths of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, and marketing automation into a powerful relationship management platform that delivers relationship insights everywhere you work. Discover email and contact details for prospects in seconds! Scan business cards to add contacts, send templates, track email open rates, and more from mobile. Experience social CRM and turn relationships into revenue!

The business card’s origin can be traced back to around the time of the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock. Visiting Cards were used in the 17th century. Although they were standardized in size to fit in business card holders and Rolodexes, people have been trying to improve on them or make them stand out with odd shapes, creating a book from them, and even going 100% digital.

But, just as live viruses remain and evolve over time, business cards are still the go-to tool for exchanging information at in-person meetings.

Just as people predicted that social media made websites irrelevant, the DEATH of the business card has been highly exaggerated!

The 2″ x 3 ½” paper-based card is still king. They fit in your pocket, are easy to hand over and store, and have more than enough space to get your brand and your contact information across.

You can try one of those digital cards that you can tap on a cell phone. It creates your contact information in their device, but I bet you less than 50% of recipients could find it on their phone, and less than 10% would ever use it.

The main goal of a business card is to be remembered and have your interaction continued and acted upon. So why not make it as easy and actionable as possible?

.In this episode… We will discuss how to improve and maximize the use of business cards in your business!

Deb Krier is a LinkedIn Strategist, social media advisor, and professional speaker. For more than 10 years, she has work with professionals to optimize their use of LinkedIn. As the founder of Wise Women Communications, a full-service marketing agency, she sees LinkedIn as a vital marketing tool for professionals at any level.

Throughout her career, Deb has worked with corporations and nonprofit organizations developing and maximizing their marketing and public relations efforts. But, senior executives often don’t see themselves as something that needs marketed. Drawing on her experience in working for small businesses, one of the largest corporations in the world, the nonprofit realm and as an entrepreneur, she demonstrates how LinkedIn is a strategic tool that enables everyone to improve their business, whether large or small, and create an impressive personal brand.

With more than 20 years of experience, Deb has a Master’s Degree in Marketing as well as a Master’s Degree in Communication Management. She has the experience and knowledge to help busy executives make an impact with their LinkedIn Profiles.

I think I can safely say that you don’t go into business to lose money… unless you intentionally do so for a tax write-off.

Yet making money is not as easy as it’s often characterized. It takes a great idea mixed with execution. It takes hard work mixed with luck. And, it takes money mixed with convincing people to give you more.

A CRO is something I just made up, but it’s what I have found that gives SMBs a competitive advantage.

While other marketers focus on website hits, SEO, lead generation, and TikTok videos, CROs focus on business relationships and use creative content and methods to optimize how those activities affect sales.

Marketing is about people. It’s about the relationships you have with customers, prospects, and vendors.

That means A CRO should integrate people and technology to collect and utilize data pulled from and by your current staff, to optimize communications with people who already interact with your company.

That is one of the best ways to predict how prospects will view, consume, and act on the marketing content you produce and distribute.

In this podcast, I will explore how to implement A CMO marketing plan and philosophy, on an SMB marketing budget!

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Perry Marshall is one of the most expensive business strategists in the world. He is endorsed in FORBES and INC Magazine. He’s guided clients like FanDuel and InfusionSoft from startup to hundreds of millions of dollars.

He founded the $10 million Evolution 2.0 Prize, with judges from Harvard, Oxford and MIT. Launched at the Royal Society in London, it’s the world’s largest science research award.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs uses his 80/20 Curve as a productivity tool. His reinvention of the Pareto Principle is published in Harvard Business Review.

His Google book laid the foundations for the $100 billion Pay Per Click industry, and Ultimate Guide to Google Ads is the world’s best selling book on internet advertising.

Marketing maverick Dan Kennedy says, “If you don’t know who Perry Marshall is — unforgivable. Perry’s an honest man in a field rife with charlatans.”

He’s consulted in over 300 industries. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and lives in Chicago

I was excited and honored to be the keynote speaker at a national conference where the words… CRAP, SH!T, and POOP are in every presenter’s speech and are spoken openly and frequently in almost every conversation had with attendees.

It was the 2023 APAWS National Conference in Myrtle Beach South Carolina. APAWS is the Association of Professional Animal Waste Specialists (or maybe better known as Professional Pooper Scoopers).

There is ‘Big Money’ to be made in poop (especially dog poop).

When I mentioned to friends and colleagues in Raleigh that I’d be speaking to pooper scoopers, they had no idea that was a thing. First, they did not know that people paid for a scooping service, and second that it could become a profitable business.

My presentation was titled, “Turning your CRM into an ATM”. Most scoopers use programs like Sweep & Go or SOHO to run their businesses. Although these capture data, it’s not a CRM.

I explained they are like a Swiss Army knife. Great when you need them, but not the right tool for every job.

On the closing day of the conference, I was the only speaker. The first day’s presentation laid the groundwork (pun-intender) for my wheelhouse, “Optimizing Business to Business Marketing”.

My final edict to them was to go home and do something.

We all have had a post-conference high of excitement and best intentions, only to go home and act like a bowling ball that rolls down the gutter groove back into what we have always done.

In this podcast, I will explore what I showed these business owners about how to use LinkedIn to expand (and even 10x) their businesses,

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Pam Didner is a marketing consultant, writer, speaker, podcaster, and author of 3 books: , Effective Sales Enablement, and the Modern AI Marketer.  She has given future trends, content marketing and sales enablement presentations and workshops in the US, Europe, South America and Asia. Her forte is to create successful global marketing plans that meet local marketing and sales team’s needs. She is strategic in nature and tactical in execution. She also specializes in sales, marketing and internal/external communications consulting, keynote presentations, corporate training and planning sessions. Her clients include Intel, 3M, Sunstar, Cisco, TE Connectivity, Southwest Airlines to name just a few. She shares marketing thoughts at pamdidner.com.

I have had multiple people ask me about using AI in marketing. They had this perception that I would show them how it works so they could replace my services with this Golden Ticket of marketing that has a psychological or hypnotical effect to magically convert the internet to an ATM.

I would be happy to show them what it is and how it works, but I think they would be very disappointed with the results.

AI goes back in time to grab knowledge produced by humans to tries to predict what is relevant today.

To prove my point, I asked ChatGPT, “What will be the 5 most important marketing concepts in January 2024?”

It said…

So if your clients are concerned with the rising prices, staffing issues, and AI taking over their jobs today, ChatGPT is writing in the context of remote work, pandemic, and supply chain disruption perspectives.

In this episode, we will explore how Ai really works and weather or not it may work for you and your business!

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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.

If you manage your own or other business websites, I imagine you are using Google Analytics or another data manager to explore the traffic to your website.

Generally, you measure how much traffic you get, how long people stay, and which pages or posts get the most traffic. Another key indicator is where the traffic is coming from. This includes organic search (Google searches), direct (typing or clicking a URL), referral (link from another website), organic social (multiple social media sites), and something called unassigned (catch-all for all others).

I have seen customers and clients who pay attention to numbers that have little to no connection to reality. What I mean is, how can you tell when a human is really getting to your website and spending quality time?

Google considers engagement as someone spending at least ten seconds on a page or post. Considering that is what most people need to read a headline, look at a picture, and decide if this is for them, that’s a pretty low bar.

Most content is posted once, and then forgotten. That assumes that it was only right for the audience who was following your business at the time it was posted.

What you have is an asset. That asset can be reposted to social media more often than once. It could be posted 10-15 times and seen by a different set of eyes each time.

That’s what happens when I repost my Baconisms. I post the same 30+ image sayings every month. I see random comments and likes each month that I have not seen before.

In this episode, we will explore how to increase views on your content by the right audience… at the RIGHT times!

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