The Foundation to Supercharge Sales Growth!

This should create an energy that turns into demand. Demand, if handled properly, will turn into lead generation. How you create the internal branding so that you create tradition and culture and how to capture that and get that internal culture to break through the fourth wall out to the marketplace.

So the first step is to establish three to five core values. Everything that you do in your business. This is a decision that is made centered around those core values. Your core values should be the reality of what you do day in and day out. You can either have a culture by default or a culture by design.

By doing, we gave our sales team ideas of what they could be advising our clients to be doing. We want amazing results. We want to create a great brand experience. I’ve had this saying for myself. There’s one thing that all champions have in common. They get shit done. So welcome to the Get Shit Done Experience.

Well, well, you are in studio. This is John Morris, your host of the Get Shit Done Experience. Thanks for joining us. Hey, by the way, You can check us out also at our website, www. gsdxpodcast. com. Every episode gets uploaded there so you can go through, you could pick what platform you want to go on, get some inside scoop.

So check out the website and, uh, you know, stay. In tune with what’s happening here at the GSDX podcast. We’re so thankful and grateful for everything. Uh, we’ve gotten a ton of great feedback. Our guests are having a blast and they’re sharing content. I actually woke up, um, last week and flipped on LinkedIn and I saw, in the span of about five hours, I saw six different video clips from episodes.

All posted by the guest, meaning we didn’t have to post it here. It wasn’t on my platform. It wasn’t my posting. It wasn’t our company posting it or the podcast posting it. It was the guest posting it. And there was six of them that went out. That is absolutely fantastic and amazing. And thank you so much to our guests for doing that, to continue to bring attention, not only to your brand, but secondarily to our brands.

We really appreciate it. Keep doing that. Hey, today’s episode, I am going to talk to you about how you could put your. Brand on the map, make it an absolute magnet for top talent to want to join the organization and to attract the type of business that you want so that you can really kind of, you know, have your choice of the types of customers and clients that you want to interact with because you’ve got enough volume of opportunity to be very selective as to who you take on as clients.

This is a full brand picture. So we’re talking about creating brand champions. That means. Your go to market strategy, right? From how you create the internal branding, uh, so that you create an energy internally so that you create tradition and culture and how to capture that and get that internal culture to transcend, transcend the, the, uh, what is it?

I guess the fourth wall, right? To break through. I’m looking at you camera to break through the fourth wall. Out to the marketplace. So the marketplace feels like they’re looking into your brand and they feel like they’re part of it. They’re part of community, and this should create an energy that turns into demand and that demand, if handled properly, will turn into lead generation.

And of course we know if you have a vast amount of leads, then you increase the likelihood. If all things stay constant with your sales presentation, your closing percentage, you will naturally drive. So, what you should get out of this episode today is going to be very, very, very, uh, short and sweet. If I’m capable of doing that, I’m not sure that I am, but it’s going to be very succinct.

I’m going to give you four main things that I think are extremely important. And I’ll give you a little subcategories within that. Um, and I know these work because I’ve done them. So this is no longer proof of concept, uh, with some hopium. This is fact. I know that it works. We’re doing it for other organizations.

We could do it for your organization or you could do it for your organization. You simply have to take some of these helpful tips and apply them. All right, so let’s start off with the internal mechanism, your brand. Is your baby, right? It’s about much more than your products and services. Your brand stands for something.

It has purpose. There’s problems that the marketplace has that your set of products and services solve. Those solutions create joy, happiness, an amazing brand experience. Um, they create profitability and abundance for your customers. But there’s a way that you get to that. There’s a style that you have.

And there’s an energy around that style. And if you can take from the top down, if you can take that energy and upload it into your team, where they buy in, And they adopt the full brand experience. Then you really got something that the outside market will want to gravitate towards. Remember, branding is about creating a feeling.

That feeling has to start inside. So think of a brand a lot like your life. Like you can’t. Uh, really, truly love another person. If you can’t love yourself first, well, as a brand, you can’t really transfer amazing energy to the outside market. If that energy doesn’t exist in the four walls of your building first, there’s always savings, but it’s about way more than savings alone.

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So how do you do that? How do you build that? How do you build that culture? And we’re not talking about foosball tables, people. We’re not talking about a beer tapper. We’re not talking about those types of things. That might be a cool thing that you could do at your brand. But we’re talking more about how do you create culture?

How do you create, um, Traditions, and how do you get people to want to adopt and take those to the next level and share it with the world. Alright, so first step. I used to work at an organization, it was an investment banking firm. And, um, you know, we had a lot of different Uh, sayings, we had a lot of different things that we believed you could see that the organization was somewhat siloed from division to division because every division and division had kind of had their own thing and there wasn’t really like a unified thing across the board.

So the first step I truly believe that you should take is to establish three to five core values and the number three to five. Is important because I can’t imagine a brand having, uh, let’s say 10, 15 people and Having, uh, you know, 40 core values that 10 people are going to live out on a daily basis and memorize and transfer to the world.

It’s just too much, right? So the sweet spot would be 3 to 5 core values. Now, how do you arrive at those core values? What we really want to talk about. So if you’re an organization, let’s say under 50 employees. You’ve got an inner circle, you’ve got a circle around that, you’ve got a circle around that, you’ve got your general staff members, right?

Everyone’s got an opinion, everyone’s got a role within the organization, but let’s just be honest, your inner circle is really the heartbeat of that organization that is, um, that is essentially recruiting people, making sure that the customer gets the best experience, making sure that the employees are happy, and so on.

So the first thing I would do is I would whiteboard, uh, all the core values and principles that you, as an inner circle, believe that you have. Now, the reason I say believe that you have is because you’re gonna put down like 20 different core values, and then you gotta go through a process of really looking in the mirror and really having open, honest conversation amongst that inner circle whiteboard is hopes and dreams, not reality.

Your core values should be the reality of what you do day in and day out. It should be the foundation, not parts all around. Right? So, you’re going to want to take the 20 that you put up on the dry erase board, and you’re going to want to narrow that down to, let’s say, 10. And the reason I say 10 is because you can’t select the core values just through the inner circle.

You then have to invite in folks. That are in that next level of inner circle. So you might have your executive team first, then you’ve got managers, right? So then you’re going to bring in your managers. And you’re going to have your managers look at those 10 core values. And you’re going to say, okay, so collectively, what are we missing?

What should be added to the 10? And what should be subtracted from the 10? Like, we don’t actually really do that collectively. That is not something we really collectively stand by. It’s a great notion, but only one or two people in the business really vibe with that core value. Once you’ve got the leadership team, then you’ve got the managers, then I would bring in staff members from different departments.

And I would essentially say, okay, so we’ve narrowed it down, you know, you’ve gone through the process of you added some, you subtracted some, you should still be around ten. Then I would have the team come in and I would have a very open conversation and a vote on what are the three to five that everyone Really stands by pretty easy to do a vote, you know, just, uh, take the 10 rate it one through 10.

What are the most valuable? Do the averages and, uh, hone in on what you think the top three to five are. Once you have those three to five, then it’s time to get crazy. And when I say crazy, I mean we’re talking about three dimensional, uh, branding. We’re talking about signage. We’re talking about t shirts made.

We’re talking about tumblers that have the core values on it. We’re talking about your email signatures, having the core values on them. We’re talking about marketing collateral, your website, having the core values on there. We’re talking about doing a rollout party where you introduce the core values through some sort of video content to the marketplace where.

You essentially send a blast email to the marketplace to let them know that we are very proud that we’ve honed in on our three core values, our four core values, and this is what we stand for and why. You will see an energy just around that because people are going to respond back with like, yeah, that’s amazing.

You guys truly do live out those core values. That’s great. That’s something you have in common with our company. You’re going to give people a reason to have something in common with you. You’re going to take those core values. You’re going to put them into every recruiting document. If you have, uh, you know, uh, job postings, the core values need to be in there.

Why we want people that believe in those core values to come join our company. The reason you’re putting the core values out to the marketplace. Why we want buyers and partners that align with those core values to know that we have those core values. So they know what they can align with.

You’re going to want it visible as much as possible. And here’s the really cool part. Everything that you do in your business is a decision that is made. Um, are centered around those core values. So, for instance, if you’re going to promote somebody, you can evaluate them based on how much of those core values do they truly live in, uh, live out on a daily basis.

If you’re looking at potentially terminating somebody, the reasoning could be because they didn’t perform at the level they were supposed to, but on top of that, they also didn’t meet the core values. If you’re going to reward somebody with an incentive, a bonus, You do it on the premise of how they made those three core values come to life on a daily basis.

And therefore they’re being rewarded for it. So everything that you’re doing is centered around that foundation and you’re building an energy internally. You could also set up a recognition program where one employee could recognize another employee for having that core value. They could write a little note, and then you could do like a reward system where.

Depending upon how many times they got recognized for using one of those core values gives them points. And that could determine the level of bonus that they get at the end of the year. So we’re not creating compliance. We’re creating all of the reasons to adopt and buy into the core values and live them out.

Because the last thing you want to do is send it out to the marketplace. And it’s something that the owner or owners decided where the core values, but nobody else lives up to them or believes them. And so you’ve sent all this messaging out to the marketplace and the employees really don’t know what the core values are and they don’t have a memorized and they couldn’t tell you, and it’s not written into the sales scripts and it’s not in the marketing collateral and it’s not on their email signature.

And a customer goes, well, these are your core values. Like they don’t do any of those, right? So it’s a matter of defining a matter of communicating of repetition of communication, of making them visible in multiple different places and building them into your incentives, rewards, and recognition so that they become part of the daily.

The daily communication style and whenever somebody like Pavlov’s dog, whenever somebody does something good, you’re making note that the good that they did correlates with one of the core values. Every time they do that now, they know that there’s an award or reward at the end of it. They’re going to live those out.

They’re going to adopt instead of you having to create compliance. And we both know, we all know that people operate much better with sugar than they do with sour. All right, so that’s number one. You got to establish the core values and you got to get them moving internally You’ve got to create buy in and adoption internally and then you need to start to communicate that vision of values to the external world as much as possible and Make them part of the communication style from the sales department and from the marketing department.

They should be on websites. They should be on your content They should be on all of your social pages. They should be worn. They should be on tumblers on pens They should be visible to the marketplace and they should be conversation pieces from there. You want to create? traditions Traditions, symbols, uniqueness, differentiators.

Remember, there’s something about your business that makes you very different than a business that does the exact same thing as you. We don’t know that. Then the only thing we could judge you based on is the price and the product. And if the price and the product are very similar, ultimately somebody is going to lower the price and now you’ve got to race to the bottom where your market is only buying based on price.

We want people. To buy based on the total brand experience. We want them to buy the total company experience, not from a person necessarily, not from a product or price decision making standpoint. We want them to buy the total brand experience. That means. What the brand stands for who are the people bringing that to them?

What do they stand for? What do they believe in? What does it feel like to work with those people? What’s the energy that they send off and then you factor in products and price and now you’ve got something and you might be able To create partnerships at a higher price point because they have a stronger belief In the potential return on investment, meaning they’ll be willing to spend at a premium because they truly believe in the brand and they believe in the people that are stewarding the brand.

Therefore, they’re willing to pay a premium because they know that there’s security in doing so, that they’re going to get the results that they were promised and some. And it’s going to be a fantastic experience, a human experience to work with those folks. So again, that comes from the internal to the external, so.

What you have to do is you have to start to create some traditions internally. So previous organizations that I worked at, one of the, uh, at the investment banking firm that I worked at, they had something called, uh, headstones, right? So. You know, if you, uh, arrange for a business to be sold or you raise 2 million capital, what would happen is the person that was the director of, um, of analytics that would essentially go out and do these surveys would then sell a consulting project.

Once that consulting project was completed and we were able to help the business sell their business or acquire funds. Uh, the director would come in, stop the whole sales department, right? Everyone would stop, turn their attention to the director. Director would come in with this super thick file. And we knew based on how thick the file was, that gave us an indication of how large the project was, right?

They’d come in with this, this big thick file, and uh, they would tell the story. So and so started this whole process with a phone call back in April, right? So recognition, recognition to the VP of sales who did this recognition to the analysts who did this reckoning recognition to the consultants who did this.

So everyone would get their recognition around that and then they would break out this little gong and they’d hit the gong and then in about a month or so through a promotional company, there would be a headstone that would be delivered and it would have the name of the company, the company that acquired and all the people that worked on it.

And those headstones would go around the department. So man, when I walked in there and I saw, you know, uh, employee X and they had like, you know, 40 headstones by their desk. I’m like, I want to sit next to that person. That’s the person I’m going out to lunch with. You know, one person had two headstones, another person at 40.

I know that that’s the person. It also made it very clear the people that were performing at the highest level. And, um, those were The people that were recognized and that encouraged the people that were on the climb, new to the company, um, that maybe weren’t performing at the highest level to want to emulate the actions that that person took.

Uh, it created a great experience, but they were missing a part. And the part that they were missing was they didn’t turn it into content. So it only stayed within the four walls of the building. So it was really cool internally. Like we got super excited. Like, man, I want to be like, I want to be like Bob.

I want to be like Lisa, man. They’re killing it. Um, but it just stayed within the four walls of the building. It didn’t transfer energy to the outside. So it was a great process, but it was missing a step. I then later went to another organization that was. Wanting to grow and scale rapidly had a very strong sales department There was some folks that have been there for an extended period of time But they were kind of stuck in their career and you could tell that there was you know Maybe some folks that were kind of half halfway in halfway out meaning if another better opportunity came along they would have taken that better opportunity, but At the moment, that was their opportunity.

So we’re going to stay there. You could tell they were looking for a career path. They were looking for growth. You know, if an organization is growing, sales teams looking at that and going, Hey, that means that I have a chance to move up. Everyone else in the organization should be looking at that as well.

If the company is growing, it’s job security for the people in operations and admin and accounting. Um, and if the people in sales are growing, that means additional comp, but also means middle management roles, executive leadership roles, coaching, coaching roles. Uh, enablement roles, you’re right. So you want to be part of a growing organization.

So how do you stimulate that? So I took that same idea and I said, look, we’re going to get a big old gong. So we went and ordered this big gong, put it in the sales department. And we essentially identified that every sale that we made that was over. X amount or between X and Y, right? We recognize that was our highest profit margin.

And we also got the best feedback on projects like that, because for the amount of work that we did, the premium products that we were selling, the way that we handled the whole process, the customers looked at that versus the return and, and they really appreciate it. That seemed to be the sweet spot.

And we knew if we could get more sales at that level. That would mean that we could grow our company without necessarily even adding staff. So we set a number and every time you got a sale that was at that number or exceeded it, you got to go up and hint the gong. But there was one more thing to that.

We had an up and coming portion of our sales department that were needing to grow and expand. Well, how do you create that? You could, you could pull them off into a training class. Yeah, you could do that, but you could also do it through creating stories. So the top salespeople were more likely to hit that number exceeded.

Therefore, we wanted them up being recognized, hitting the gong, telling the story of how they made the first phone call, how long it took for them, how many revisions did it take? How long was the process? Like how many phone calls they have to make to get there. So they would tell the whole story of how they achieve this awesome sales, uh, goal and hit that number.

And the newer salespeople are the salespeople that weren’t hitting their numbers. While they were hearing this recognition, they were actually being trained. They were being inspired to stay in the game a little bit longer, make the extra touches, do the extra phone calls. It started to create an environment where the A players were, I don’t want to say policing, but I guess you would say kind of policing the sales department.

They were, they were training each other through their successes. So, You know, they say iron sharpens iron. They say, uh, success leaves clues. So I, I’ve always believed that you take your most successful salespeople and you put them on a pedestal, pedestal, and you give them a microphone, and you have them tell the story about how they’re so successful as much as possible.

They’re in the trenches, they’re doing it. Sales managers doing it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because the sales managers are removed from that spot. They should be emceeing it, they should be setting it up, and they should be handing over the mic and the spotlight to the top performers that are doing it, and having the top performers talk about how they’re doing it so that the people that want to become top performers are emulating those actions.

So we created this environment. Then what we did was we started recording them. Next thing you know, we started putting them out on LinkedIn, Instagram, we started posting them. Created an energy in the marketplace. All of a sudden, the gong became a thing. Now, when we bring people in for tours, we come to find out that these people are coming in for tours.

They’ve been paying attention on LinkedIn. They’re asking where the gong is. They want to hit the gong, so we, we create this thing called the guest gong. So anytime we had a guest come in this, in the sales department, I would be giving a tour, I’d go, What do we do when we have a guest come in? And everyone would stand up and clap and go, Guest gong!

And then we’d hand the mallet to the guest, and we’d record it, we’d say, well here, there’s one rule. This is the sacred gong. We’re gonna have you hit this gong when you hit it. Don’t touch it. Let it chime out, right? Hit it as hard as you want, do whatever, any style, but hit that gong, and we’re gonna record it.

So we record it, and then we would send it to them, and they’d post it out on their social. We put it on the social, and it wasn’t about the products or services that we create. It was about the feeling that we create when you come out to see us. So it gave people an indication of what our brand was like, what the people were like.

Yeah. We talk about the term vibes. You know what vibes is short for vibrations. We’re all energy. Human beings are energy. We vibrate. So why can’t your brand vibrate? Your brand is run by people. If your people are running at a high vibration, high energy, and they’re excited and they’re happy. They’re going to transfer that energy out to the external world, you got to capture that.

Then what ends up happening is when you bring in a guest and they feel that energy, you know what happens? They leave with that energy. They get back to the office, people go, what was that like? And they go, oh my gosh, you wouldn’t believe it. They made me feel like a million bucks. It was one of the best experiences I’ve had, I thought I was just going in for a boring tour, I mean, I got this, they gave me this.

I saw their core values all over the walls. They had me hit this gong. I met all their people, their people all stood up and shook my hand. You create this full experience for them. It’s not just another day in the life of doing a tour of a company. By the way, you can get to the products and services. You can get to pricing.

You can get to the the features and benefits that you provide. You can always get to those things. But what you should be aiming to do is to get people to understand your greater purpose, to feel your energy, to feel the excitement at which you operate, so that they’re attracted to that, to buy you enough time to talk about your products and services.

And have them absorb that information in a positive mindset, increasing your odds of success. So next thing we did was we were like, okay, well, how do we reward and recognize the top performing salespeople? Because you want the bottom third to be chasing the middle third and you want the middle third to be doing everything in their power.

to get to that top third. I used to break the sales down, uh, sales department down color categorize folks. I’m not afraid to say this. People knew the situation and I had them as what I called the hitters, uh, the mid tiers and the on, on the way up or on the way out. And let’s just be frank. That’s how it is in sales.

So the hitters, you tell them you love them. You provide re rewards recognition. You throw blocks for them. You keep everyone out of their way. You wind them up and you let them go. They’re thoroughbreds. Let them rip. You hug them when they need a hug. You hold them accountable a little bit when they need a little accountability.

You listen to them. You love them. You incentivize them. You reward them. Your job as a leader in sales is to get the folks in the mid tier to gravitate to that hitter group. To want to be in that hitter group. That middle, that bottom third, on the way up or on the way out, your job as a leader is to either move them up to the mid tier and get them going, get them trained up, or to be open and honest with them, that based on their performance, they have X amount of days to get these things righted.

You’re gonna do everything in your power to help them, but it’s on them to do that, and if they don’t, there will be a more difficult conversation, and you should always be recruiting. Little sidebar there. So what we did was we went and got this championship belt. You could just get a belt and hand it to somebody at the end of the month for top sales.

But the problem is budgets are different. Territories are different. And do you really want to just reward people for outcomes? So you might want to consider when you’re looking at doing your incentives that you start rewarding people for outcomes and activities. This way you have an opportunity. on a, almost like a handicap system that you’d use with golf, you know, to make it competitive.

If you have a reward system where only the top performers get rewarded. You’re going to lose the middle third and the bottom. They’re just not even going to feel like they have a chance to win. They’re not going to participate. That’s going to create a terrible energy in your sales department. Every person in that sales department needs to have a chance to be able to win whatever that said monthly traditional reward is ours was a championship belt.

So it needs to be based on profit needs to be based on budget. It needs to be based on activities. There needs to be layers. That are involved there, their budgets need to all be different. So it doesn’t matter how big their budget is. If they performed at 200 percent of budget and they’ve only been there for three weeks, they get the belt.

I mean, that’s just kind of the way that it works, right? Um, and you want to create a conversation piece. So why not get everyone on zoom? If you’re remote, get as many people in the building as possible. Play some music. Have them pick their walk up song, man. Get some smoke, fog machine in there. Have everyone clapping.

Stop the whole company for 15 You can’t stop the company for 15 minutes if you’re a 15 employee company for a Zoom call or Or a little, uh, you know, meet meeting in the, in the sales department, have everyone kind of circle around, do a little speech, acknowledge the people that were in the top 10 that fought their tail off to get to that point.

How did they do it? Then you call up the winner, have the music playing, hand them the belt, take pictures. This is all being video recorded, right? You’re creating content. But moreover, you’re creating an amazing experience for the total team. The people that didn’t want, win, want that experience. The person who won feels like a million bucks and wants to go do it again.

But here’s the cool part. You let them give a little bit of a speech. If they don’t want to, then you tell the story on their behalf. And that story should be, you know, uh, somewhat sentimental. Right. That last couple of months, it was a little sketchy. We adjusted some things, made some modification deals, came through, hit the big number, got the big opportunity, whatever it might be.

But you tell that story, you’re going to give hope to the people that are struggling. You’re going to give fuel to the people that are so close to success. And you’re going to cause a competitiveness amongst the hitters who look at that person with the belt and go, Man, I should have won it this month.

You want that kind of energy. For me, that’s culture. Culture’s not a foosball machine and a foosball table or whatever. Like, these things are nice. Don’t get me wrong. It’s cool. Like, for me, culture is like A players wanting to dominate A players, but being purpose driven enough and kind enough. Like having a culture of kindness where They’re competitive, then when the whistle blows, they hug each other, they shake hands, and then once the whistle blows, they get back on the field and they go after it.

Like they’re constantly challenging each other. You know, for me, like I want a culture where if I create content and I send it to the team, the team all jumps on it, likes it, comments, shares it. And they know if they create content that I’m immediately going to do that as well. I want an environment where if you made 250 phone calls, I want to know that you made 250 phone calls by two o’clock.

Because from 2. 01 to 5. 10, I’m going to make as many phone calls as I possibly can to pass you by the end of the day. If you posted X amount of times, I’m going to want to post X amount of times or more, right? If you brought in X amount of people for tours, I want to know that. I want that on a board so I can see it.

I’m going to try and beat that by one or two. For me, that’s what it’s all about. Now, you don’t have to necessarily get a belt or a gong. We had one customer. That I think that we sourced a uh, like a a blue blazer because their brand colors were like a royal blue So they did like the masters thing their top performer their top regional manager, whatever Got the master’s jacket, the blue, but it was blue, sent to their house.

And they took a picture with it on, right, and it’s symbolic, and they hung it up, and so every time they were on a Zoom call, the jacket’s hanging up in the back, and the person on the Zoom call’s like, what’s the jacket? And they’re like, aw man, last month I won top regional manager of, of, of the organization for, you know, the month of March.

Super excited. You know what? You were a part of that because we ended up partnering during that month, so thank you so much. I owe you a thank you. And there’s another part. Here’s what’s crazy. When you have this belt thing, or this, this symbolic traditional thing that’s a monthly award that somebody could win, they’re gonna tell their customers about it.

There’s customers who have skin in the game. They want their representative to win the belt or to win the jacket. Speaking of jackets, it’s, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, man. So I’m rocking my green jacket. I love this thing. But, you know, you can only wear a jacket like this so much, especially if you podcast because it’s like documented.

So I, I want to wear it like every week, but I create so much content that if I wore it every week, you guys would think that I’m icky and I don’t wash my clothes. So I have to space it out. Anyways, if you create this type of, uh, tradition, these symbols. What ends up happening is it starts internally, but then when you push it out on content, you have your sales team send a, um, an email blast to all of their customers, thanking them for their participation in them winning X award for the month of March.

I’m so grateful that all of you contributed. I couldn’t have done this without you. I’m so blessed to have amazing partners. Now you’re really creating a brand story. That transcends the internal, hits the external. The customers feel like they’re part of the brand. They’re part of the success journey of the representative.

They feel like they contributed, right? They have a, they have some skin in the game to that. You’ll start to create an environment where your sales team is reaching out to people in the 25th and saying, Hey, I got a real good chance of hitting that, hitting it back to back. I could win the belt or I could win the.

The trophy or I can win the award or the jacket or whatever the symbolic thing is. I got a real good chance of hitting it. I just need a couple amazing deals to come through. I know you were talking to your manager or you’re talking to your team. Um, if you guys think there’s any chance that we could move forward with this agreement, then there’s a strong chance you’ll play a part in me winning the award back to back, right?

So then all of a sudden they feel like they have a little more skin in that game. It’s about something other than, you know, Price or product, right? It’s about being part of something. So there’s some fun ways to do that. Certainly not something that you want to abuse. You don’t want to be overusing that, but you know, if you really have a strong partnership and a relationship with somebody and they are in fact on the verge of making a buying decision, especially if you’re an account manager and it’s somebody that you’ve done multiple projects with.

And, uh, you know, they’re kind of moving at their pace. You might be able to create a little urgency to get them to move at a faster pace. If they feel like they’re going to benefit you somehow, and you’ve done great work for them, they want to see you win. That’s what it’s all about. So again, core values, then you have to have cultural traditions.

These cultural traditions create content worthy moments to people. That’s up to the CEO and the leadership team we’re talking about. You can either have a culture, uh, by default or a culture by design. We want a culture by design. So you’ve got to create these symbolic and traditional moments. You’ve got to document them.

You’ve got to turn them into an event. You’ve got to get energy centered around them. You’ve got to put people up on a pedestal. You’ve got to, you’ve got to create the content worthy Situations that you can document because those are far more exciting to the marketplace than your happy memorial day Graphic that you put out there.

Nobody cares about your happy fourth of july graphic marketing departments hate to say it And by the way I, I don’t know why we’re putting out happy birthday, uh, sim. Like these are internal, uh, things that you think the external, like the market, external market is not going to be intrigued by happy Memorial day or happy birthday.

Sharon, like in just a graphic, like if you’re going to do something for Memorial day, like why not create some content around something that you’re doing? Like an event. If you’re having a, If you’re celebrating Memorial Day, the Friday before, why don’t you have some sort of event where you can capture some moments?

Do some really quick interviews with some people and ask them like, what does Memorial Day mean to you? And then create the content and send it out. The graphic of just happy Memorial Day shows nothing about who you are as a brand and what you stand for, what you believe in. I mean, it’s just. It’s like checking a box, it’s a waste of time.

So we want to create moments in the brand where we can show the traditions and the belief systems and live out the core values that are content worthy, where we can capture those moments and turn them into videos. And slides and really cool pictures that fuel the culture internally because people like to see themselves on camera and they like to be recognized.

They think it’s really cool. They hit the company page and what a great moment. You created an experience about a burning experience. They like to see those things captured. So one of the things that we started doing as well is we came up with, you know, different sayings, right? You can have your core values, but you can also have other things that are powerful statements that you believe in.

I personally had, when COVID happened, was trying to get the sales team that I had recently hired to, and then had to send home, uh, and I was trying to get them to kind of stay in the game, and we were trying to You know, minimize the fear and create positive energy was happening. So we came up with a slogan, you know, opportunity grows from the roots of adversity.

We made this really cool logo. We put that graphic up on the wall. When people came back into the office, they take pictures in front of it because it was like the rallying cry is what we stood for as we worked our way through COVID. I know so many companies. Had to work their way through COVID, no different from us.

But we create a rally cry that turned into a t shirt, that turned into a slogan, that turned into signatures, that turned into a conversation piece with the marketplace. And it turned into a conversation piece where companies were saying, Hey, we need to come up with stuff like that. We need t shirts that have these positive thoughts on it.

It helped our sales team to expand their mind because we became proof of concept that if you put slogans like this up, you put them up on your wall of signage, and then you put them out on t shirts and tumblers and pens and everything else. Well, that was what we were selling at the time through that organization.

So we essentially. By doing, we gave our sales team ideas of what they could be advising our clients to be doing. IT Decision Makers, this might sting. Frustrated with IT issues, security threats, and the stress of your technology infrastructure? Your technology should blend seamlessly with your business objectives.

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We shared that out in, in real time as it was happening. I’ve had this saying for myself, desire to inspire. I feel like anything that I’ve ever done where I’ve really done it. Well, at some point I mastered it enough. That the favorite part that I had about that mastery was teaching other people to do it and to get them excited to go do it.

So I’ve always felt like if you were really going to be an amazing advisor, whether you’re in sales or as a co consultant or a coach, you have to have a desire to inspire. You have to want to move people to create emotion, have them feel something bigger because they’re part of it. So we had that big logo up desire to inspire.

And when we walk people through for a tour, we would take pictures in front of it. We had a conversation piece. Companies will say, well, what is desire to inspire me? And we, well, here’s what it means. We don’t sell products and services. We change lives are the mantra of our, of our team. And the way I think is that we need to be searching for the right product to place with your organization that is going to inspire some sort of action.

Out of the end user that you’re handing said product to. So whether that’s an employee, you’re trying to motivate a new hire, you’re trying to retain or, uh, a potential customer you’re trying to impress. You have to have a desire to inspire that transcends the products or services. That’s what they’re going to remember.

People don’t remember how smart you are. They remember how you make them feel. Well, a great feeling to leave with people is inspiration. So, we have that up as a reminder. We had a reminder of be obsessed with being the best. Be obsessed with being the best. Creating transactions, that’s fine. You can create transactions to the days.

The days, uh, are long, but transactions doesn’t, a transaction doesn’t move anybody, right? If you’re obsessed with being the best, you’re trying to create as many transactions as you possibly can, but you’re also trying to create an experience, a brand experience. You’re trying to move people. You’re trying to solve some real problems.

You’re trying to make a difference. You need to be obsessed with being the best, not just putting transactions on the board, but actually changing lives. Well, how are you going to get your team to truly believe into that mindset, that concept, if you don’t have that, that type of initiative, you don’t have that visible.

We had things on our, we put a wishboard up, right? The wishboard was designed to have people go up. I believe in, you know, visualization, right? If you could see it, you could be it. So we put this wishboard up in the sales department. You go in there and you could write up any wish. I want to pay off my debt.

I want to be out of my parents house in two years. I want to get engaged in three years. I want to break the all time sales record. I want to bring in five customers, new customers in the next five months, one new customer a month. At X amount, you could write up anything. I want a new car, but you wrote it up at dry race board and it was visible.

It was right out in a huge board, right on the middle of the sales department. Now, every time we brought a customer in the customer, we go, what’s this? We go, it’s our wishboard. We believe in visualization. We believe that we should, as a team, be helping our teammates to achieve. Their maximum level, their highest level of success, and we want to encourage that type of belief system.

By the way, do you wanna write on our wish board? And customers would come in and they’d write on our wish board. So now we had their wish on the board, our employee’s wish was on the board. And when the wish came true, we’d erase it and we’d write it up with permanent marker. And the idea was to create a wish board that was full of permanent ink because it was all wishes that came true.

That’s about creating a culture where people are living out their dreams. They’re achieving their greater good. The brand is just a vehicle to help people to achieve their greater purpose. The I’m sorry, people, but your brand is not the greater purpose of other people. If you’re the business owner, it might be your greater purpose, but even that being the case, you’re using that as a vehicle to achieve even bigger, greater purpose, raise your kids.

Donate to charity, build a community center, you know, give back. So all of us that work at a brand, we’re using that brand as the vehicle to achieve our greater purpose. So we had a saying above the wishboards that dream big, live bigger. I’m proud of this work. This work helped to create. A culture of tradition, an environment of winning, a growth mindset.

And it was, it was living and breathing within the four walls of the building. It, and adoption took place and people believed in it and they started using it in their sales vocabulary. It started being used in the way that we wrote copy for our marketing collateral. It went up on our website. It became a conversation piece with every single person that came into our building for a tour.

They started using the vernacular. They started, especially like our suppliers and vendors would come in, and, you know, they like were bought into the culture. They knew the culture. And they were part of it and that was pretty cool because we created something that was bigger than the logo the icon That’s an icon.

That’s an icon. That’s just a logo. It’s recognizable You see it, but it’s seeing the icon that brings you to the energy and the vibration that vibe So, you know when you see that logo, you know when you go to the podcast, you’re gonna get a vibe You’re going to get a level of energy. You’re going to get some thought leadership, some entertainment.

So similar to your brand, no matter what you do, people see the logo and they associate that to a feeling. So what if your, your internal brand is boring and stale? They see that logo. They don’t feel anything, but if your brand is like an. A battery, man. The inside of it is like a energy boost and people are operating with similar values in a similar way.

And they know the culture. They speak their own language. They walk with a different pace. Man, when people see that logo, they associate it to a feeling, and that feeling causes them to remember the brand, but it also causes impulse. And that impulse doesn’t necessarily mean that they reach out and buy, it just might mean that they comment a little deeper on a post.

It might mean that they become an advocate or a fan of the brand, so they’re recommending people to your brand. It might mean that they have Up here, who’s looking for a new job and they go, that’s the company you want to go work for. They become a recruiter for your company, even though they’re not in recruiting because there’s an energy around your business.

This is all being done internally. So how do we get this message out externally? Well, you’re listening to one of those ways. If you have not created a podcast for your brand yet, I wonder what it is that you’re doing. There’s all types of different podcasts that you could do. You could do a podcast like this where it’s just you talking to a camera.

You pick a couple topics and you go, you could do a very informative type of podcast where maybe you pick one subject, you dissect it, you break it down and you go, you could do a round table where you bring in, you know, two or three key employees in your organization and you just have a discussion about what’s going on in your brand, what’s going on in the industry.

And what their thought leadership has to say about the business and the industry, and you capture those moments. Or you could do what I normally do on the get shit done experience, which is to bring in. A guest. Now, the model of that is pretty simple. We bring in our current customers because we want to make them feel like a million bucks.

So we bring them in. We thank them. We give them a tour. We put them on the microphone. We prop them up. We help the marketplace to understand what they stand for, what they believe in. They want, the market wants to know who’s steering the ship. So we help the market to understand the owner, the founder of that organization a little bit deeper.

We then promote their business for a week. Because we take the long form content and we clip it. Into 25 to 30 clips, so whether you want to do a 15 minute long podcast where maybe you’ll get one power clip out of it or an hour and a half or two hour long podcast podcast where people might not watch the whole hour and a half to two hours, it might come back to it in increments, but you’ve created a situation where you have.

25 to 30 clippable moments that you can use for volume and repurposing on all platforms for content. That’s the magic trick right there. Now here’s the really cool part. The podcast is all about your personality. It’s about edutainment. It’s about getting people to feel something about you and your brand beyond your products and services.

They’re gonna get to the products and services. Why do we have to rush to it? Let’s get them to know, like, and trust us first. And if you’re consistent with the podcast, you’re putting it out weekly, or bi weekly. But it’s gotta be consistent. Because we, we consume podcasts like we consume TV shows. When I was in college, we did not go out on a Thursday night until we watched Seinfeld.

And we knew Seinfeld was on at 8 o’clock. So you drank some beers leading up, you did whatever, you played Caps or Quarters or whatever game you played. You stopped, you watched Friends, you watched Seinfeld, and then you went out to the bars. That’s what we did on a Thursday night. Well, that didn’t pay off so well for me from a degree standpoint, but that’s what we did.

So your podcast has to be consistent like that. Has to go out every week, bi weekly, whatever it is. You can’t miss the date. It’s gotta go out. And over time, the volume of times that it goes out, you start to build a snowball effect of community. And that community starts to know what to expect. They’re coming for the host.

They’re coming for the content. They’re not coming for your brand. They want to know what this person’s perspective is on things. They want to have a little fun. They want to be edutained. They want to laugh a little, cry a little. They want to learn a little, you got to sprinkle it all in. If you’re going to do an info type podcast, you probably want that to be 15 minutes long, 20 minutes long, 30 minutes long.

In and out, boom, done. And I would make it very much known that, Hey, here’s the topic. We’re going after this topic. We’re going to break it down. We’re going to get you the answers you deserve and we’re on with it. Get out an op ed. If you’re a podcast like mine, I’m in it more because I want you to understand the origin story of a brand.

I want you to feel something. I want you to know what we stand for, what we believe, what our greater purpose is. And I want you to know that about our guest. And I want it to be loose and fun, because quite honestly, that’s how we do business here. We do great work, but we’re a fun bunch. We’re loose, we’re fun, you know?

We live to fight another day. We don’t take everything so darn serious. We want amazing results. We want to create a great brand experience. If we make a mistake, we want you to know it’s not a big deal, we will correct it. We will correct it, we will correct it. We want you to know that we care more about you than we do the holy dollar.

We want you to know that we want to grow with you, not because of you, right? So that’s kind of the whole feeling of the podcast. Now, I can tell you this, and you won’t believe me, maybe you will believe me, but you could do a virtual podcast. It’s a little bit easier to do, but you’re never going to create.

The brand experience through a virtual podcast that you will if you take a room at your office, you put four microphones in it, you paint the walls, you put up a couple signs, you get a bunch of books, you put some hats in there, get one of these bad boys here. I know who to call for it. And you create a studio because it’s about the experience when a guest comes into your facility and takes a tour and meets the people and they look up on the screen and they see their face on the screen.

With their company logo frame around their picture, their beautiful smile, and they introduce themselves to people and people make them, you know, comfortable and won’t feel welcome and warm. And then they come sit down in the podcast room and they feels professional. Um, and then the questions are all about their success, their journey, how they’ve overcome adversity.

Helpful tips that they would have, how they’re dominating in the industry. And, um, you know, you create this full experience, you take pictures, you give them a guest gift, right? They leave that office, man. I’m telling you right now, if they’re a, if they’re a current customer, it makes it very, very hard for them to consider not being your customer.

Without a really, really deep conversation. So look, they might, they might go somewhere else, but they’re at least going to give you the benefit of the doubt to have a really deep conversation first to remain in the partnership. But it’s likely, man, if you treat your partners like a million bucks, you promote them, you put them on a pedestal.

Um, you’re not even going to get to that point. They’re going to want to have great conversations. They’re you’re, you’re now really sticky. You’re creating great benefit for them. They’re, they’re not going to want to leave. They’re going to want to know how to emulate and duplicate what you did. If they’re a prospective customer, that’s the second thing you bring in prospective customers, folks that you found on LinkedIn or you found in business or through networking that you think would be a great person to collaborate with that could potentially really use your service, have them come in and be on the podcast.

Promote them, prop them up, tell their brand story. Telling you right now, here’s what ends up happening. You’re going to promote them for about a week. They’re going to, you’re going to send all of the clips, right? If you record an hour and a half to two hours, you’re going to send them 25 to 30 clips in a WeTransfer.

They’re going to take those clips, they’re going to post them one every three days for 90 days. They’re going to get such amazing feedback from being on that episode, from how smart they sounded on the episode, and how great their perspective is. It’s going to help them to earn business. It’s going to help them with their content creation consistency.

It’s going to help them to come across as a thought leader and an amazing human being. It’s going to fill a void that they might have when that void typically is content creation. They don’t know what to create. They don’t know what to put out there. So every, every third day for 90 days, 30 clips, right?

They’re putting out a clip. They’re going to get people from high school texting them. They’re going to get people from college sending them messages. They’re going to get previous employers reaching out to them. They’re going to get suppliers and vendors. They’re going to get people that come out of the woodworks that they had no idea, even were paying attention saying, Hey, I saw your episode.

It was absolutely amazing. And it’s going to spark up conversation. You know, what’s going to happen. That law of attraction, that positivity that came to them, they remember where they got that positivity from. So the minute that they need. Any of the products or services that you offer, you are immediately in the top three that they’re going to call at the end of the day is, isn’t that all we can really ask for is to be in the top three to have a shot to quote on the job.

Just let me have, just put me in the, in the top three, just give me a shot. I’ll earn your look. I’ll earn your trust. I earn your respect. Give me one shot. I’ll earn the next 99, right? We just want to be in the running. Well, having a podcast where you’re being in perspective, customers, will help you to do that.

But here’s the trick that you have to understand. When they come in for the podcast, they’re only coming in for the podcast. You can’t bring them in and give them a sales pitch. That’s rude. That’s the shell game. Shame on you if you do that. I had one podcast I was on as a guest, and the person wanted to release the podcast, Until I went through their like, heard their sales pitch like two days later.

So it was a virtual thing. It was a virtual recording recorded like 45 minutes. I poured my heart out, told my story three days later, comes back, goes, Hey, um, this thing is set to go. We’ll give you, we’ll hand you all the, the information in the video and the clips. But first you have to go through our sales presentation.

I was like, don’t release the podcast. I want nothing to do with you. What do you mean you want nothing to do with me? What was the beat and switch? That’s why. You’re not authentic. You’re cheap. I don’t want to be with cheap. If you’re going to put a podcast out, you’re putting a podcast out because it’s a mutual collaboration that you’re doing together.

So when that person comes in for the podcast, it is all about the guest. It’s all about making them feel like a million bucks. It’s all about their experience. It’s their day. You’re giving them a day. Make them feel like a million bucks. Nobody feels like a million bucks getting a sales pitch. Come on, people.

So you bring them in, make them feel great. Then you promote them for a week, tagging them constantly on all of the video clips. They’re going on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube channel, LinkedIn. They’re all over the place. It’s the most vibe they’ve gotten. The energy coming to them is amazing. At that point, you just remain in conversation with them.

When they’re ready to buy or they have an opportunity to buy, they’re going to put you in the running. But you know what’s really cool? In the meantime, they’re going to introduce you to their network. The people that are viewing their clips they’re putting out now start to recognize your brand. They start to follow your show.

They start to follow your company brands. They start to hear your message. Next thing you know, they make soft introductions for you. You become sticky. Then you remember the guests that you had on told the story about all the services that they offer. If you come in contact with somebody in a networking group or through content creation, you send them some opportunities.

Hey, let me make an introduction. You’ve now broken the ice. You’re starting to become friends. You’re building a relationship when the timing is right. People, the deal will come through. Not every deal needs to go into the traditional sales cycle. Phone call, five emails, touch, touch, touch, touch, overcome objection, revise.

It doesn’t always have to be that way. It’s an average sales cycle. So, some might take a little bit longer. But you’re in, you’re being noticed. You’re being remembered. You’re front of mind. It will come. Some accelerate really fast. I’ve had guests that have come in here. They had no idea what we did. We recorded the show, part of recording the show.

We typically would go for a tour. It’s just custom. It seems nice. You bring somebody in your home, you show them your home, right? As part of that, they ask about the business. You tell them about the services at the end of the recording. Oftentimes you’re walking them out. You’ve taken the pictures for the thumbnails.

Everyone feels good. They go, Hey, we talked about the thing with the copy machines. And by the way, we could probably use some marketing services. Then you, you say, okay, cool. I can set that up. What’s the timeframe? Next thing you know, you’re going out to their facility. And you’re putting together work and they’re happy to do it because they’ve already seen the proof of concept of what you’re capable of doing and the experience that you offer and what it feels like to be in your office and associate with your personnel.

They’ve, they’ve, they feel it. So if you are, have not started a podcast yet and you want to know how to just send me a DM, let’s talk about it. Number one, I can help you out with that. But number two, this is pretty simple. Nobody knows your business better than you do. Nobody knows what you stand for better than you do.

Nobody knows your core values and traditions. Remember the first two things we talked about that you should be building. Nobody knows those better than you do. Nobody knows your expertise better than you know it. Nobody knows your business better than you know it. Right? So all of that is enough for you.

To record a podcast, because that’s all you have to talk about. You don’t have to be Joe Rogan, and you also don’t have to be stiff and boring. Where we feel like you’re giving a PowerPoint presentation. Be entertaining, talk how you talk, laugh, talk about topics off the topic, get back out of the topic, laugh, it’s not overly complicated, just get the content out there.

But by the way, it’s not even about content for your company, it’s about content for your listeners. It’s about making an impact. It’s about, you know, giving them. The information they could use that’s actionable. It’s also about making them feel something. So, it’s a branding play, folks. There is some marketing to it, but it’s more of a branding play.

If you have a call to action in your podcast, it’s probably go to your website, it’s probably follow, it’s probably subscribe, it’s probably, hey, send me a DM if this would be of interest to you. It’s not gated content, right? We’re not doing any gated stuff where people are putting information in. No. Make it a show.

Slow your roll, make it a great experience for the guest, let it come to you. It will. The content’s good, and you’re consistent, it will come to you. Alright, we’re going to finish with this last thing. Content creation. Ladies and gentlemen, content creation is king. Content creation does not need to come only from your marketing department.

In fact, Your marketing department is struggling right now to come up with content. And I will tell you a lot of marketing departments also are stuck in the 10 years ago of marketing website, SEO, newsletter, website, SEO, newsletter, a webinar, right? Repeat event, trade show, handout. Promotional products.

Repeat. Right? Graphics. Remember we talked about the Memorial Day? Happy, uh, Happy Thanksgiving graphic. Happy Anniversary, Barb! Graphic. We’d like to spotlight this employee. Graphic. Two minute read. Graphic. Two minute read, no engagement, all on the company page. It’s all company page stuff. Come on, people, we know that people follow people.

They don’t follow company pages. And if you want your company page to be successful, you need to personalize it. So if your business was a person, what would it look like and what would it sound like? That’s how your content should come across. Is your company funny? Like, is there a lot of funny banter going on in your company?

And your company page should probably have some funny banter on it. Is your CEO like one of the best public speakers? And sometimes we’ll just walk into the sales department and give this like amazing 10 minute tutorial on how to inspire customers into buying that should be on your company page. Is your director of sales an absolute expert at question asking and knows exactly how to pull out of a prospective customer what the problems are and then knows exactly how to advise them into the solutions?

That should be on your company page. Uh, is Jim in the back the best forklift driver ever? But Oscar in the back thinks that he’s the best forklift driver ever? Perhaps we need to have a forklift race. And that, my friends, should be on your company page. Mixed in with informative information. Testimonial.

Jane had this problem.

We offered this solution. It created this outcome. Repeat. There’s nothing you could say about your company that will ever match what a successful customer, happy customer, will say about your company. That should be on your page. But what if it wasn’t just a graphic that had the person’s name with their last name initial or I don’t know if you just made that up.

What if actually you created an incentive for your customers. You know what works for incentive money? What if you ask them to tell some stories, by the way, we’re going back to the podcast, have them on. To tell some stories of why they love working with you, turn it into a clip, put it on your company pages.

But what if you just set up a situation where you said, Hey, we’re going to fly you in or we’re going to drive you in, we’re going to create a great experience. We’d love to ask you three questions about why you love working with our organization. We want to capture that on camera. We’ll have you sign this little waiver that so long as you think it’s okay for us to have this up on our site, we’ll keep it up on our site.

The minute that you feel that you don’t want it on the site, because maybe you left the company or whatever, or we’re not partners anymore, we’ll take it off the site. But so long as you agree that this can be on the site, we’ll keep it up on the site. It’s not like terribly difficult. Create a little incentive off 5%, 10 percent off their next order, 5 percent off next month’s whatever.

Little bit of incentive, you know and have them come out. They probably won’t even take the incentive to be honest with you They’ll probably be happy to do it if you’re making them happy and they’re a great customer Have them tell the story

little little two minute vignette vignette put it on there that content But here’s what I really want to get out and this is like I gotta get this out because I’ve, I’ve seen it happen at multiple brands and I think it’s just getting going. And I think that there is some serious value to being an early adopter or first in.

What I’ve seen is, um, a lot of organizations that scaled rapidly do this, but typically in the tech field or coaching field, I haven’t seen a ton of, you know, small to midsize companies. Let’s say a 10 million company. That’s got 70 employees. I haven’t seen them do it really well. I haven’t seen a whole lot of companies that are in construction, or architecture, or industrial engineering, or food, uh, service, or trucking.

I haven’t seen them do this terribly well. And I think that there’s some doing it not enough, which means that there’s still a ton of space to do this. Here’s a question I have in this market right now, and I know it’s a question that’s happening often. What does an SDR or BDR do anymore? What do they really do?

Because I was always taught that if the market zigs that you should zag. I was always taught that, you know, the company that wins typically is ahead of times, they’re ahead of the curve.

Um, I was taught that it’s not just how good your people are, but it’s how active. All of your people are, how often your story’s being told, like the law of averages factor. I was always taught that the first key to sales is you gotta get their attention. I was taught people buy from people they know, like, and trust.

Well, I don’t know how somebody can know you if they’re not aware that you exist. I don’t know how somebody can know you if they only get the surface level of what it is that you do. They have no understanding of what you stand for, what you believe in, and why you do it.

You can’t know somebody unless they’re visible, you can hear them, you’re aware they exist. You can’t really know somebody unless they’re vulnerable and authentic. And you can dive deep into that. So that’s the first part. Know, like. Like, like, how can I learn to like somebody if all they talk about is their offering?

Like, I don’t like anybody because of their offering. I like them because of their delivery style. Their smile, their energy transfer, their compassion, their empathy, their communication style is critical in that. Their tonality, how they, how they transfer that energy is going to be huge. Are they, are they somebody that can make me laugh?

Are they inspirational? Like, how do I get to like somebody if you don’t give me reasons to like them?

Like, I can’t like somebody on LinkedIn if all they talk about is the thing they sell. Give me something else. What if I never want to buy that thing they sell? Should I just not follow them? But what if I follow them because I really like them and then I tell 15 other people they should buy from them even though I never will?

So I’m now an advocate, a fan. Because I like them. So know, like, trust. Can’t get to trust if you only know the surface level of somebody and only know what is it that they do. And if you’re not even sure if you like them. So, in order to have trust, I need to, I need to, uh, have things in common with you. I need to know how good you are when you’re bad.

You know, they say it’s not how good you are when you’re good, it’s how good you are when you’re bad. Like, what are you going to do when a mistake happens? How do you handle client situations? Are you going to be there when I call? Like, your responsiveness. You know what’s really interesting? I’ve been doing a bunch of interviews with, uh, Gen Z.

Gen Z, boy, they’re terrible at establishing trust because I’m interviewing for people to be part of the social media marketing team here. And first off, people came in with, uh, without their resume to hand to me. I know I’m old fashioned, but like you should come in with your resume on like really nice stock paper.

Right. Um, on top of that, after the interview, none of them sent a thank you. Email. Can’t believe that. And we’re talking about a social media marketing role. None of them went to the social media platforms before coming in for the interview and only a few after. And only very few liked or commented on posts for the company they’re interviewing for.

It’s very difficult for me to trust that that person is right for the role. If they’re not living the role before they get the role.

So how do I know, like, and trust somebody if I’m not given any reasons to trust them?

You could do that through your content creation. So here’s what I would do. If I had a sales team of 10 people, and you may not like this, but I’m going to be real blunt. If I had a sales team of 10 people, and I evaluated those 10 people, and all 10 of them were hitting 100 percent of budget or higher, then shame on me if I don’t go hire 2 social media marketing people.

to support them, right? Here we go. But let’s say I had the 10 salespeople and only 7 of those 10 were at 85 percent or higher of budget. If you’re like below 85 percent of budget and let’s say for an extended period of time, I’m sorry, as a sales manager or an executive, like, ah, you’re kind of, you’re kind of in a situation where I’m looking to replace you.

Okay, I said I’d be blunt, so I’m gonna be blunt. If you’re in the bottom three of ten, you’re always replaceable. And you should be afraid. And you should be staying later and fighting harder. And you should be coming in early. And you should be going the extra mile and you should be doing everything in your power.

And if you’re not doing that and you’re in the bottom three, sorry, you got to go. I don’t mean to be harsh, would never want to, uh, say that somebody should lose their job, but you might be setting somebody free that shouldn’t be in sales. Because if you’re in the bottom three for an extended period of time in sales, that means you’re probably not very competitive either.

You should be fighting your tail off to get out of that bottom three. So if you’re there for an extended period of time, sorry, but you’re replaceable. So what would I do with that savings? If I got rid of those three people, I would go hire two social media marketing people. Why, John? Why would you do that?

And I wouldn’t replace the three that I terminated. I would keep the top seven. I would give those top seven to social media marketing people. to essentially document the sales journey, document the journey between the account manager and customer, document the journey of the sales team, bringing people in for said podcast, document the team bringing in prospects for tours to come in and do the ceremonial and traditional types, things that become content.

I would. I would create a team of social media people following around the sales and the leadership team to create content for them and for the company pages that truly amplifies and shows the traditions, the culture, the core values. The, the products, services, solutions, the interactions amongst customers, the current events that are happening, the line out the door of recruits that want to come in and be at the business.

I would, I would document pre and post podcast recording to capture the guest here. to send them the content to put on their company pages. I will be creating content in a documentary style for the sales team and the leadership team, because they are resistant to do it on their own. And I’m going to influence them to want to buy into this idea of social selling by creating content for them that I would put into a G drive.

So they have to go in there and grab it. I would make it part of their KPIs that they have to social sell. Sorry, call what it is. I’m done with this. We just make phone calls and we just send out emails from the marketing department and mark in an email cadence. I’m done with that. When they zig, we zag.

What I’m not, what I’m not saying is to stop making phone calls and emails. What I’m saying is, in addition to, if you’re making 150 phone calls, you’re getting three people on the phone, you don’t need to make 150 phone calls then. Let’s reduce the amount of phone calls and let’s, that time saved. Let’s put that into actually going and dropping off really crazy.

I’m going to drop it here. Hey, Dale Dupree, right? Sales Rebellion, the crumpled letter, right? Get some sort of promotional product. Do the Dunkin Donut box. That’s got, you know, 11 donuts, uh, 11 and a half donuts gone. There’s half a donut in there and crumbs. And in there it says, Hey, look, I’m sorry. I. Got hungry, waiting for you to accept my appointment.

When you’re ready, I’ll come back with more donuts. Here, take my appointment. Like you got to get crazy going out and pulling door handles. I would document all of that. I would have the social media marketing person following around the sales team in different schedules and capturing the moments of interaction between the director of sales, the sales management team.

And the salespeople now you’re going to say, well, our salespeople are remote. Cool. Cool. Let’s get the social media manager out on the road to them. Let’s get on zoom calls with them. There’s a lot of ways to figure that part out. Let’s get that salesperson in to be on the podcast with one of their customers and document that you could spend 10 hours with one salesperson.

In, uh, you know, a month and create a month worth of content, if not more, but if your team isn’t being seen and isn’t part of the conversation, those phone calls they’re making where they’re going to make 150 phone calls, they get ahold of three people. That’s the reason people can look at their phone now and see who’s calling.

If they don’t recognize the brand or the phone number, they can screen you out. Then your salespeople are leaving a voicemail. That’s essentially giving them a reason to screen you out further instead of creating content. So they’re seen constantly and then going through the back channels of DMS, video DMS, and audio DMS to stand out, be unique and different, and going on to company pages and following.

The perspective customers that they want to work with their company pages, clicking on people, looking at all the people that would be potential buyers for them within the organization or peers to the buyer, influencers to the buyer and connecting with all of them. You can connect with a hundred people a week on LinkedIn.

That’s what they allow you. Are we maxing that out by Tuesday? But what I would be doing is I would be Having this social media managers essentially become documentation videographers. And they would be, remember that, that belt ceremony we talked about? That gets documented. Remember that new candidate coming in for an interview?

Right? That gets documented. Remember that guest that came in for a tour? To sit down with you and the director of sales? That gets documented. Now all of this can be done without, without upsetting. You know, the, the, the guests that comes in or whatever, or, you know, putting people in a position where it crosses their, their lines.

It’s just a basic conversation, right? It can all be edited, but you’re capturing all the content. It creates an energy. And then you’re sending that out to the marketplace. You’re putting that on your company pages. You’re giving, uh, the videos edited into a G drive. And you’re saying to the sales team, Hey, look.

You don’t have to worry about thinking of content anymore. You are the content. Grab this content piece, put it out there. CEOs, I’m going to leave you with this. If you want your team to become a brand champion for your organization, which means that in every channel, every mechanism, every method, they’re telling your brand story to the world, which you are the beneficiary of the success.

Of all that attention and awareness and demand and lead generation that converts into sales, it starts with you. You got to get on podcasts. You got to get on camera. You got to have somebody following you around with a camera and creating documentary style content of what your day looks like. You’ve got to capture moments where you give a little speech to the sales team and there’s tears in people’s eyes and they stand up and roar and cheer because they can’t wait to run through a wall for you because you’re so brilliant and you care so damn much about them and the business and the customers and everything that you do, that’s gotta get captured.

Leadership team. If the CEO is doing it, you better damn well jump in and do it too. But I will tell you, CEO, if your leadership team is doing it and you’re not, it’s very difficult for them to sustain. They won’t sustain it. They won’t sustain it for an extended period of time. If they do, they’ve sustained it, and it’s probably leading to another opportunity for them at another, uh, uh, organization.

But if you’re doing it together, you’re in it together, you’ll build together, you’ll grow together, you’ll scale together. So CEOs, it starts with you. You gotta buy into it. You gotta adopt it. It will then go into your inner circle. Your inner circle will adopt it. They’ll buy into it. They’ll run with it.

When that happens, you can then make it part of the day to day operations. It’s part of the KPIs. The team will have to adopt it because ownership and leadership is adopting it, and they’re getting success from it. They will want to emulate that, but you can also make it a KPI, because if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander, right?

You can make it part of the job description and you’re even going so far as to provide them with the resources. All they have to do is cooperate, stand in front of beautiful logos and traditions. They’ve got to go through this culture. They’ve got to work the core values. They’ve got to have the conversations.

They’ve got to invite people as guests on the podcast. They have to work the total brand experience and create moments. And we capture those moments and we send it out to the marketplace. And we create an energy around the organization. And here is the deal. If you can get the market talking about your organization, you’re winning.

If you can get the market to see your key personnel as characters in their daily feed, you are winning. The business will find you, it will come. You are winning. But it starts with those four things. Just to recap. And thank you so much if you made it this far into the podcast. I really appreciate it. I hope this has been helpful.

So it’s pretty simple, folks. You got to establish those core values. Have the meeting, whiteboard it, make it into a fun thing. Take a Friday off, get pizza for people, make it into a thing, make it fun, jam music, get into a creative space, get outside the four walls of your building, figure out those core values, three to five of them, and then get them visible.

If they’re visible, they can be memorized. When they’re memorized, they will be repeated. When they’re repeated, they become habitual. When they’re habitual, Boy, you’ve changed your culture. That’s next. Cultural traditionals. Traditions. You need symbols. Uniqueness. Differentiators. You need things that are your thing.

Doesn’t have to be a gong or a jacket or a belt. What is your thing? It could be your thing. And guess what? It’s great if the rest of the world makes fun of it. I hope they make fun of it. Have it be something crazy, like go get a gym shoe bronzed and make that the trophy, you know what I mean? Like do something crazy.

Get a goofy statue of a pig or something like that and just like Doesn’t matter what it is. It’s your tradition. And if, if P other people look at it and think it’s crazy, then it’s beautiful because it’s doing exactly what it should. It’s getting you to rally around something collectively and internally and getting the outside world to kind of giggle, laugh, or be moved by it.

Or think it’s cool or want to emulate it if they want to be like you they’re going to want to be with you If they want to be like you they’ll want to be with you

next Number three create that podcast Go create that podcast. In fact, create three podcasts, CEO podcast, director of sales podcast, key sales team podcast, marketing squad podcast, get multiple podcasts coming out of your building. You know, get crazy, multiple different hosts. But get your message out there and creative, impactful, fun ways.

I’m telling you right now, the energy that you will feel within the building will be just as good as the conversation that is happening outside the building. It gets your people riled up, it’s exciting. Gives them something to talk about beyond products and services. Imagine if they could lead with a conversation of saying, Hey, look, I was reaching out to you.

I’ve been looking at your, uh, your LinkedIn and all the things that you do. I see that you’re the, uh, the vice president of procurement. Have you ever thought about coming on a podcast to talk about your story of how you went from college to this amazing level that you’re at right now? And like, what are the attributes that you need?

To to achieve in order to get to the level that you’re at, you’d be a great guest in a podcast. You ever thought about that? Imagine your sales team getting people to come in to be on the podcast as a point of entry to start the conversation so you could potentially partner with that business and imagine if it wasn’t just left up to chance by a salesperson, they get the person who came in as a guest met.

The director of operations, the COO, the CEO, the VP of marketing, the podcast host, all these people that come in and they meet and they go, wow, everyone that I’ve met at this organization makes me feel a certain way. They’re pretty smart. They’re really cool. They’re really, I really hit it off with them.

They leave, they bought into the brand, not the sales person’s pitch. You got a much stronger likelihood. Of bringing a new partner in. If the partner buys the total brand, instead of just buying from a person, they’re going to start off with a person. Cause people buy from people and that’s how you got to originate it.

But then you want them to buy into the total brand and then all the people in the brand. That’s how you’re going to keep them as a partner for an extended period of time. And last it’s all content people. Everything is content, but you can’t leave it up to your team, your sales team, or your marketing team, or whomever, just to always be taking pictures and thinking that they should be doing this.

It takes a really unique and special person. To be able to do their role. Plus recognize the power and importance of creating a personal brand and getting that message out consistently to the marketplace every single day to tell that story, it takes a very special person. And those very special people are on LinkedIn and they’re fantastic.

And they’ve turned themselves from role XYZ into side gigs and multiple roles and coaching and all these different things. They’re outstanding.

They’ve proven that this is the way. They build businesses on it. Well, some of your people don’t want to build businesses. They just want to be ultra successful within this business, turning them into the content to tell the brand story in a really interesting way is going to make your company pages far more compelling and you’re going to be empowering them.

to build their personal brand, which makes them sticky. And it makes them realize they have an opportunity for some real career path. It creates conversation, and it will lead to revenue that converts. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. I hope this has been beneficial. I had a blast doing it.

By the way, I gotta remind myself, I got shit done. Have a great day. Cheers.

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