Business and Marketing Strategies That Work with Jason Van Orden #290

Business and Marketing Strategies That Work with Jason Van Orden #290

In this episode we meet digital marketing expert Jason Van Orden. Jason is the author and former host of the Internet Business Mastery podcast. Jason’s podcast and marketing course shaped Sales Babble in its early years. Jason and I babble about business and marketing strategies. Next we discuss the sales process and how to find the perfect audience for your products and services. Lastly, we discuss how marketing has changed in the last six years and what you can do to stand out from the crowd.

Not Leading the Witness

Don’t do this and say “I have this idea and I want to know what you think….” People will tell you what you want to hear. Instead search for an unmet need and then see i you’re a fit. Use their own words and language to market and sell to them.

When you use their words they will say “Wow it’s like you’re reading my mind!” Instead of telling, have empathy and walk in their shoes. Jason mentioned the book the Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you.

How To Find Jason Van Orden

You can find Jason here at https://jasonvanorden.com and you can find him on social media:

Selling With Confidence Online Sales Class

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Sales and Marketing Alignment

Here are other episodes that delve into business and marketing strategies from the past. Listen now!

July 30, 2019July 29, 2019

How To Be a Buyer Painkiller with Guillaume Moubeche #279

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How To Be a Buyer Painkiller with Guillaume Moubeche #279

Today’s guest is Guillaume Moubeche, and oh by the way thank you for listening to the Sales babble podcast, builder of the lemlist email outreach tool. Lemlist is based on dynamic personalization (text, images, videos, landing pages). It helps businesses get more replies to cold emails, and makes their sales process more contextual and human. In this episode Guillaume and I babble about the selling process and how it intersects with marketing. We chat about the power of having an Ideal Client profile and ways it can be used to automate the discovery of qualified leads. If you do it right, you can become a buyer painkiller that turns prospects into customers.

Marketing and Sales Intersection

Marketing is OK, but it’s sales that pays the bills. Quite a statement from our guest! He believes the world is getting more digital but it’s important to keep in mind that people buy from people not companies. From sales, you can learn about your customers, then use that knowledge to build marketing campaigns. Your value will then become a buyer painkiller. Let’s first identify the ideal client.

Ideal Customer Profile

It’s essential to build an Ideal Customer Profile. First start by talking to people and better understand their pains, needs, and what holds them back. Next use their answers to design your marketing campaign. In our babble, Guillaume shared his five step process:

Educate Customers – they have a rough idea on what they want, but not how to reach their goals. Educate them with examples and how they can achieve their goals, step by step.
Listen – the more you listen, the better you understand. Repeat back the question to prove you were listening. This builds trust.
Feel their Pain – if you emphasize the pain, they are more open to accepting your solution. You become a “buyer painkiller”! Don’t forget to address desire. Find the balance of selling desire and pain.
Connecting on the Personal Level – Social selling on LinkedIn works really great, Facebook too. Understand the buying process and how it’s built on trust. Social selling creates friends. People buy from friends.
Value Beyond Product – stay away from being feature oriented. Instead focus on desire and the value it will bring to the customer. Focus on the Return on Investment (ROI).

How To Find Guillaume Moubeche

Lemlist is a new startup in Paris. They state:

“Never rewrite the same email ever again. With lemlist you can automate and personalize your emails in just a few clicks.”

To thank our Sales Babble listeners, you can extend the trial by reaching out and mention “Sales Babble“. at lemlist.com

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Listen to past episodes on sales and marketing alignment!

May 21, 2019May 20, 2019

Finding Your Innate Marketing Genius with Christina Frei #269

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Finding Your Innate Marketing Genius with Christina Frei #269

Today’s guest is branding and marketing expert Christina Frei. She has developed a proprietary process that identifies finding your Innate Marketing Genius in business owners. In this episode we chat about the having the right marketing mindset through your avatar. Next we discuss practical tactics sellers can use to prospect and convert leads into opportunities.

Building Trust Before You Meet Them

The Innate Marketing Genius focus first on you understanding you through your avatar. Next it discovers if a lead is a good prospect for you. When meeting a lead ask these questions:

What is the core strategy that will give you a home of discovering your ideal clients?
What is this way of being (for you) that is so easy that it becomes an engine?” Start one way, that branch out.
What are the right conferences and tradeshows?
What are the right conversations?
Do you want to be a speaker?
Do you want to host a webinar to build trust.?

From these answers you line it up against your own personal marketing genius avatar. The process that is two-fold:

Figure out your type with the assessment tool
Six step process that identifies the marketing genius. Defines your archetype and create the core strategy.

I completed the assessment and this was the result:

Go to https://innatemarketinggenius.com/ and click “Take the assessment”

How To Find Christina Frei

Christina is easy to find online!

https://innatemarketinggenius.com/

https://www.facebook.com/innatemarketinggenius/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-frei/

Lastly, the tool I use to find and guess a strangers email is hunter.io. Good luck!

Sales and Marketing Alignment past episodes

Check out these episodes about marketing that’s focused on sales!

April 16, 2019April 16, 2019

Perfect LinkedIn Strategy with Brian Basilico #264

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Brian Basilico is a long time marketer, author, speaker and online strategist who became interested in understanding the process of prospecting on LinkedIn. After a year of experimentation with LinkedIn Navigator he found it doesn’t work. After a bit of research he came to learn about a series of tools that work with LinkedIn. Together he calls this the Perfect LinkedIn Strategy.

Three Prospecting Sales Tools

According to Brian, Nimble, Crystal and 366 give you direct access to your customers in the shortest amount of time. Collectively these tools capture data on your prospects and allow you to contact the person in the style they prefer.

Nimble CRM

Nimble is a CRM Gmail plugin that leverages and manages contacts stored in your Gmail. We’ve discussed this in the past. Just last year Jon Ferrara was a guest on Sales Babble . $20/mo for a subscription and it’s the foundation of Brian’s system. Similar to Saleforce, Insightly and Base, this CRM contains the lions share of your customer contact demographics.

366 Tool

366 is a tool that can best explained as a combination of LeadPages, Mailchimp, HootSuite, and email drip marketing campaigns (Similar to Active Campaign). It can feed from Nimble, and build targeted emails campaigns based on tags. Tags are based on the Crystal profile (see below). $50/mo for a subscription.

Crystal Tool

Crystal uses Linked and social media to create an instant DISC personality profile using AI. Creepy and cool all at the same time. It will recommend you on how to approach a sales call. According to the company it’s 83% correct, $29/mo for a subscription.

Evernote

This is a phone app that can scan business cards. Once scanned it sends out a welcome email. Next it sends a LinkedIn request using Zapier push the information into Nimble. $69/year for a subscription.

OPEN Prospect Stages

Brian mentioned the OPEN process he uses to walk prospects down a sales pipeline. OPEN is an acronym:

Oblivious – clearly not qualified
Pondering – interested in learning more
Engaged – plan on buying soon
Need – needs to buy now

Depending on the stage, you give the prospects different content (email drip campaign from 366) until they reach the need stage. Once they arrive at that state it’s time to call them. This requires three different levels of campaigns.

Social Media

According to Brian, Social Media is a relationship building tool first, content delivery platform second and a sales too last. Too often sellers focus on the latter vs the former.

10-10-10 Strategy

Spend 10 minutes/day or 10 people (new or existing) and 10 words. “Just wanted to say hi. How can I help you.?”

Do this daily and you will generate new opportunities. Slow and steady wins the race.

How To Find Brian Basilico

Brian is all over the web. You can find him:

This is his Perfect LinkedIn Strategy.

These are Brian’s books:

Brian was a guest on Sales Babble MANY years ago and episode 34

How to Prospect and Generate Leads

Here are past episodes on lead gen. Check them out today.

February 19, 2019

How AI Can Give Sales Superpowers with Lars Nilson #256

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How AI Can Give Sales Superpowers with Lars Nilson #256

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a topic near and dear to my Sales Babble heart. Most AI conversations center around the great possibilities that it brings to the world. Good examples in selling includes processes that automate, save time, increase quality. This includes ways to decrease frustration with more automated and intuitive software. But AI conversations can also center around the darker side. By that it means concerns of automation taking away our jobs and our humanity. In this Sales Babble sales podcast episode we meet Lars Nilson. Lars wrote an article on LinkedIn titled “Will AI Replace Sales Development, NO but it will give us Superpowers”. Because of the concerns and interest of AI, Lars and I discuss emerging tools and processes that you can use to become more successful in sales.

Good Time To Get Into Sales

Its not B2B it’s P2P, people to people. Because of this Lars believes it’s never been a better time to get into sales at a venture backed B2B company. If you pick a company with great management, great onboarding and a set of great selling techniques, you can be successful.

Account Based Selling

Account–based selling is a multi-touch, multi-channel strategy coordinated across the entire company to pursue a target number of high-value accounts. Marketing and Sales work together from the very start, and throughout the revenue cycle. Because prospective buyers take themselves down the sales cycle by accessing information online, sellers need to target individuals (stakeholders) who make buying decisions. Next target specific companies and a person which counters the past practice of branding and sending out messages to random people. We now consider that spam.

Tools to Target Opportunities

Lars mentioned a number of sales engagement tools that provide sales superpowers for sales reps. These tools use AI to target ideal accounts:

Discover.org
Zoom.info
LinkedIn navigator
Outreach.io
Salesloft
Insidesales.com
Outreach.io
Gong.io

These tools can be used to do a one to many (1:M) cardinality of outreach. Meanwhile the goal of each of these tools is to personalize and automate your:

messages
emails
voice messages
direct mail
social media

Because humans are still needed to make it all work, one of the best sales superpowers is the old fashioned warm introduction curated out of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is still one the best ways meet people and yes it used AI too. Next find people that have the titles who might best represent your company. Humans are necessary here! You have to do the work to find your ideal clients and the titles of the people that are relevant.

The CRM is still a solid technology to keep sales reps organized. They leverage read receipts on email and chatbots. Lars recommends that sales reps also turn to the tools leveraged by LDRs and SDRs. The more they work in an account-based selling environment, the better.

How To Find Lars Nilsson

Lars mentioned his company Sales Source

(415) 840-5168
lars at salessource.com

This was the LinkedIn article we talked about. “Will AI Replace Sales Development? No… But It Will Give Us Superpowers”

Sales Tools Boost Productivity

Here are some past Sales Babble sales podcast episodes on sales tool that make a difference.

November 20, 2018November 19, 2018

The Day Marketing Held Sales Accountable with Darryl Praill #243

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The Day Marketing Held Sales Accountable with Darryl Praill #243

Our guest is Darryl Praill. Darryl is the Chief Marketing Officer of VanillaSoft, and a high-tech marketing executive with over 25 years’ experience. In this episode Darryl and I have a raucous conversation discussing the how marketing and sales departments commonly engage (or better put, fail too). This engagement commonly involves finger pointing, name calling and other bad behaviours. Darryl states that sales is not doing it’s job. Secondly, marketing should hold sales accountable for the leads it provides. In the end we find the topic is much messier.

Question Asked of Sales by Marketing

Answer the question….

Have you followed up on those leads?
What do you mean those leads were crap?
Why are you asking me for more leads, I just gave you a boat load of leads?

According to Darryl, too often sales fails to honor the leads it gets. Nor do they share what makes the leads of poor quality. He believes there should be a set of Mutual Rules of Engagement e.g., when sales gets a lead, they will follow up. There should also be a dialogue describing what makes a good leads and how quick and vigilant sellers will work on the leads.

Issues with Lead Follow Up

What happens today:

48% of new leads never get contacted
<2 call attempts are made
Average time of follow up 35-60 hours
1 hour is the optimal time to follow up
8-12 attempts is optimal

So it begs the question, if sales it not doing it’s job the day should marketing holds sales accountable? Darryl believes it’s not all sales fault, it’s technology issues. CRMs for marketing are very different systems then CRMs used by sales organizations. If only they worked better.

How To Find Darryl Praill

Website: www.vanillasoft.com
Twitter: @vanillaSoft & @ohpinion8ted
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/vanillasoft/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/vanillasoft/& https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrylpraill/

October 23, 2018October 22, 2018

Marketing Skills Sales People Need with Whitney Cole #239

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Marketing Skills Sales People Need with Whitney Cole #239

Whitney Cole works with mission driven health tech companies. She finds that companies struggle to relate to the consumer, despite having terrific technology. At many levels they understand the problems, yet struggle to explain it. Whitney calls herself a mission mavin, an expert that makes the complex, simple. In this episode Whitney shares the marketing skills sales people need to generate highly qualified leads.

Separating Marketing and Sales

Marketing gets the leads, but people buy from people. Buying is sales. Marketing is the content you create to nurture a lead. Sales is getting two people to actually speak to one another. The sales team may use some of the content to help close the deal. But closing is mostly a sales responsibility.

Marketing Founded on Your Avatar

An Avatar is an ideal client (for service based businesses). Build an Avatar by thinking of somebody you’ve helped or somebody you know needs your help. Ask what does it look like the day AFTER they buy your product/ services.

Consider and list the results and outcomes from your ideal client. Once you have an avatar sellers can do the following to raise their marketing skills:

Learn how to write and hone communication skills.
Learn how to use emotional language to persuade e.g. skyrocket, unlock the secret, discover, etc…
Google how to write a good blog post and use those skills in all you write.
Listen to your buyers and speak in the language THEY use.
Learn how to write a good headline. This includes email subject lines. Write clickable subject lines with content that will back it up (the opposite of clickbait). Some tools recommended: CoSchedule.com – free email subject and blog post analyzer
Use the Flesch-Kincaid test to simplify your writing or use the hemingwayapp.com
Create different kinds of blog posts and discovered and consumed in different ways: podcasts, videos, infographics, ebooks, articles in Inc. or Forbes Not everybody reads. Not everybody likes videos.
Don’t be everywhere posting, only be where your customer hangs out.
Put content on Quora. Companies should find related questions and do a stunning job of answering the questions with well thought out and researched answers. Make sure and include facts and statistics. Don’t get too salesy.
Reuse blogs on your website on blogging platforms like LinkedIn and Quora.
To get published on Forbes, start by guest posting Business2Community. Google “how to write for Forbes”. to learn the process. Find people in your network who already are published on your target publication. You must write in what fits their publication.

Take Action

Design a content plan. Have a strategy when writing your blogs. Create a set of pillars with topics with content in different formats.

How To Find the Mission Maven Whitney Cole

The Mission Maven website

Free gift for Sales Babblers can be found here!

You can DM Whitney at https://twitter.com/Mission_Maven

Sales and Marketing Alignment

March 20, 2018March 19, 2018

Stop Guessing How to Sell and Use Market Research with Corey Hammer

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Stop Guessing How to Sell and Use Market Research with Corey Hammer #208

Many companies fail to understand the drivers that motivate customers to buy. Through luck and pluck these companies have found a level of success. Yet they know they’re leaving money on the table. Now if there was only a way to know for certain our prospects are thinking. In this episode guest Corey Hammer shows how companies can stop guessing how to sell and instead use market research to know for FACT, the drivers for selling success.

Corey Hammer has 15+ years as an insights professional across multiple industries. This includes CPG, education, hospitality, pharmaceuticals, and consumer services. He holds a PhD in Experimental Psychology and is a longtime Boy Scout and Scouter (Be Prepared).

Market Research Process

Companies looking to roll out a new product or service should thoroughly investigate the new market. According to Corey, there is a methodical market research process. This process will provide insight into the drivers for converting prospects into consumers, customers and long time clients.

Look at the data you currently collect: sales, overheads, marketing campaigns, conversions, and repurchase. It’s costs nothing to investigate and analyze data already in-house. Analyze and parse the data. For example”
- Look at marketing ads with different, copy and channels. Next look at conversion rates. However too often people fail look across channels Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest etc….
- Also focus on internal sales data. Know what’s selling in what channels
Next look at your customers. Accept that 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Use a customer experience measurement tool to know how they think. Ask quick questions on recent purchasing and owning experience of you products and services. Make it a transactional survey of a recent purchase, especially B2C. A relational survey makes more sense in the B2B space.
Value Engineering is the process of optimizing the value of a product of service to a customer by lowering costs or improving the functionality. Market research creates the opportunity to successfully complete a Value Engineering activity. Segment audience and align products and services.

What Do Startups Do?

If you’re new to a market place you can’t rely on existing customers for market research. Instead, Corey recommends you go the library. Many local libraries have the following databases you can use for free:

AtoZ Database sales lead research guide
D and B Hoovers business research database

Next, look outside of the library at the App store to investigate competition.

Market Watch online business and stock market news
Seeking Alpha online stock market news

How to Find Corey Hammer

You can find Corey online at the following websites:

Website: www.talismaninsights.com

Blog: wow.talismaninsights.com

Personal LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/coreyahammerphd

Company LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/talisman-insights/

Market Research and Value Propositions

Here are past episodes that talk about the power of understanding your ideal client through market research. Listen today!

October 17, 2017March 22, 2021

Why Do I Need a Brand with Kim Speed

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Why Do I Need a Brand?

In this episode brand expert Kim Speed digs deep into the question “Why do I need a brand?” Everyone says having a brand is critical for success. But is it? What is the fundamental value branding provides you and your company? How does a brand make it easier for you to acquire new customers and prospects? That’s the topic for today!

Brand vs Branding

According to Kim, your brand is who you are and what people say about you when you’re not in the room. Branding is all the elements that supports your brand: website, ads, emails, logos etc… Let’s focus on the former, before the latter.

Sales and Branding

Your brand is useful for your sales process. When done well it open doors and creates trust. But it’s not an easy path to understand your brand. It’s built on knowing and viscerally understanding your ideal client. This requires companies to go through a value proposition process. Instead of focusing on logos and fonts, focus on who is PERFECT for you product or service.

Who Is Kim Speed

Kim is the owner of Purple Moon Creative, Branding and Marketing Boutique where she helps start-up companies and small business owners to become visible to their prospects, and to turn those prospects into clients.

P 647.558.1962

C 416.992.9701

Kim is the author of the recently published book, Branding on a Shoestring: How to Re-Create Your Small Business Identity and Increase Sales Results in 83 Days or Less. Go here to get it purplemooncreative.com and answer the question “why do I need a brand!”

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Discovering Your Ideal Client

Here are a number of past episodes discussing the importance and process of discovering your perfect customer. Listen today!

May 2, 2017May 1, 2017

Flawless Follow Up with Steve Rosenbaum #162

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Flawless Follow Up with Steve Rosenbaum #162

In this episode the original backend specialist Steve Rosenbaum joins us to discuss the importance of flawless follow up. Steve walks us through a simple 5 step process that generates leads, gives you an advantage, filters out unqualified prospects and nurtures a conversation that stimulates interest. Steve is a boat load of fun and informative to boot. I’ve been interviewed on Steve’s podcast, Back End Conversions and Marketing and I’m excited to have Steve on Sales Babble too.

Backend Conversion Specialist

Steve calls himself the original backend specialist, a term he coined working with his first client babaloo.com. In his mind he’s all about the process AFTER you get a lead. It’s at the backend where you qualify, nurture, and build a relationship.

Differentiation – too many marketing firms focus on the front end e.g FB ads, SEO, Social media etc… Steve focuses on the backend. This is where you close sales.

Flawless Follow Up Process

Steve walked us through a 5 step process (starting with step 3, what a wiseguy). Its goals is to work with prospects at the Right Time, Right Place, with the Right Message.

#1 Grow Your Connections: Build a following, build a list. You can cast a wide net if you know your audience
#2 Capture Home Field Advantage: Move your audience to your email list. Get them away from LinkedIn or other social media venue.
#3 Filter for qualified leads: Ignite interest with an email that sparks interest “Are you looking for A B or C?”
#4 Ignite the relationship: Put hurdles in front of people to stay on your list. This way they will self qualify.
#5 Follow Up Forever: and ever, and ever, and ever …..

This system was designed to improve Steve’s odds of putting himself in a lucky situation again. Frequent follow up creates opportunity. Prospects are not going to remember that they’v once talked to you. Don’t expect to hear from them on their own. They’re not going to call you back. YOU need to take the lead and keep following up. Remind them. When you remind them always Entertain, educate and engage. This makes sales go up!

Take Action Advice

Follow Steve’s 5 steps to the letter! Start at step 3. If you’re having conversations everyday the timing is going to work.

How To Connect With Steve Rosenbaum

SteveRosenbaum.com
Direct phone: 512-553-5154
skype: stephen.j.rosenbaum

Back End Conversions and Marketing podcast

Go to SteveRosenbaum.com/SalesBabble for the FREE video series. Click today!

Marketing Episodes

Here are some pass episodes where we talk about marketing and the overlap, with sales. Listen to them today!