Using Marketing to Scale Sales

Hello, Sizzlers. I'm glad you are back. So this week I'm going to be talking about how to use marketing to scale sales.

Now I've had a very long career in sales starting many, many years ago in, in the UK and I remember my first sales call. I was working for a pharmaceutical company selling various, products to treat. Depression. And I would go and knock on doctor's surgery's doors and  make a pitch. I remember the first day I was sitting outside a surgery in my car and I was absolutely petrified.

I didn't want to go in. I thought they think I was an idiot. Uninformed. I mean, for goodness sake, I'm going to go and see a doctor who spent maybe 10 years learning their craft, and here I am. I've had a few weeks training on how to sell, and I'm gonna try and teach them about the efficacy and capability of my antidepressant.

So I was absolutely terrified, but I did manage to get out of the car and the doctor was,  gentle with me, didn't give me too much and didn't destroy my ego. And after the end of the first week, I think I'd made 20 sales calls. After after a few you start to relax and you become more accomplished at your craft.

So I've developed a very strong capability to do one-to-one belly to belly selling, which for decades was my belief, was the only way that you could really be successful in sales. Ultimately, I came to the United States 26 years ago and I was selling to executives in Fortune 500 companies.

And every day I'd get on a plane, fly to a different city, meet with a different, executive, make my pitch,  get on another plane and, and fly around. So I would do that, did that 15, 16 years traveling. So accumulated so many air miles.

 The nice thing about sales is that you're very, very close to the revenue production.

So when the economy turns south the closer you are to revenue generation,  the more security you have in an organization because you are the people that bring in the revenue and keep the business running.

So I've made a lot of money selling and as you as Sizzlers rainmakers, you too have made a lot of money in sales.

But you know the true greats or if you are a sales maker leaning towards being a rainmaker, or you are a business owner with a team of salespeople, you know that the way to really create an exponential rise in your earnings, your scale, your business profitability, is to market your products and services.

And so marketing, whilst it's sometimes treated separately to sales, I think the greatest salespeople understand and harness the power of marketing, and they do it in one of two ways.  If you are a solopreneur or, or a salesperson in an organization that doesn't have much support, you learn how to get your message out to the market. Or if you're blessed with working in an organization, you'll have some people there who are helping you generate leads and start conversations.

So let's talk a little bit about the importance of marketing today. Because if you are not known, if you are invisible, people can't pick up the phone and call you, or if you do call cold, call them they won't know who you are or what your, what you stand for.  Your chance of making sense through all of the noise and distraction that your prospects get every day will be night on impossible.

Now here's, here's a couple of, here's a couple  of facts for you. I recently,  been participating in the Grant Cardone 10X business improvement methodology, and I believe in it so strongly that I'm becoming certified in the 10 x methodology. That's the ability to take your thinking, your business, your sales to the next level, 10 times your growth, 10 times your earnings, 10 times your sales. And the reason I gravitated towards the 10X methodology is it espouses many of the beliefs and convictions I've held for a long period of time.

So what I'm sharing with you today is a combination of material that I've gleaned from them and my own perspectives.

 Here's one fact. The average person today consumes more data in one day than a person did in a lifetime in the 15th century.  Can you believe that? How simple was life back then?

I know it was hard, but you went about your job. There weren't any newspapers. There wasn't any commercials. People weren't interrupting you. And, it was very easy to consider different things.  So your competitors today, who is your competitor? You think your competitor is somebody who offers similar services, but no.

Your prospect as being is being overwhelmed with data. It's consuming more in one day than somebody did in a lifetime. In terms of data, it's coming in the form of advertisements, banners, headlines, social media. The pace at which we are being bombarded with information is absolutely phenomenal. So it's just a noise. It's an absolute noise. And researchers told us that consumers today need 30 touchpoints before they can convert. So, Us reaching out, salespeople, reaching out once a month following up. It's, it's gonna be a long time before you can break through. So what you wanna be thinking about is how, how can you scale?

How can you scale so that you generate more leads into your pipeline, into your sales funnel? And one of the key messages in the 10X program is that money follows attention. So the more attention you can get, the more money you can attract, the more people. People have money. So you want to attract people to speak with you, to talk to you.

So you've got to get their attention. If you don't have attention, if people don't know who you are, how can they buy things from you.

Now back in the 15th century. We'll go back a little bit.  The way that you grabbed attention back then is you might have put a little , stall at the corner of the market that was held every Thursday and you said, Hey, I've got this wonderful elixir that will, remove your nagging back pain.

 And you, and you would speak directly to those people, one-on-one.

But today you, you've now gotten an ability to be able to magnify your message by using free Social media tools.  In the past, even 20 years ago, the only way to get your messaging out on in scale was either the, of an army of door to door salespeople like the, the Mary Kay's or the, or the , What's the, what's the plastic? The Tupperware people was the only way you got your message out or you paid for TV advertising?

Well, today a single person or a small business or a small team can actually get in front of hundreds, thousands, even millions of people using social media and grabbing attention. So you've gotta get attention before you can start selling to them.

 To come back to the The Grant Cardone, 10X I had noticed  Grant on the social media and I watched one of his podcasts and I found him to be very brash and abrasive and, and I didn't really warm to his style of communication,. And it was very, Contra to my own upbringing in the UK you were told to be seen and, and not heard.

 Don't toot your own horn, keep quiet.  So I've always had this kind of low flying under the radar type of approach, which was okay when you were selling one to one, you could get to talk to people and, and during that process, your personality, your knowledge would, come out and you'd bond and form a relationship.

And once that relationship was formed, you could tease out what challenges that prospect has, and then you could offer your services to address those challenges and you'd make sales that way.

But that's a one-to-one type of type of methodology and I'm looking at this guy and he's got millions of followers and, and millions of YouTube watchers, but I couldn't think my of myself ever doing something like that.

But after a while, I started to listen to what he was saying and I thought, you know, he's making a couple of good points. And so I started to follow him in a little bit more detail. And then went to a couple of his boot camps where he talked about marketing and sales, acquiring customers, developing a presence, developing a brand, being able to 10X your business and became consumed in that. Now I am able to deliver some of the training and philosophies that his organization have built over the last 25 years.  The key message  was that, first of all, I got attention. I didn't even got, my attention wasn't even that positive, but at least I now did see that person and he kept cropping up and, and I kept seeing him on different social media channels. So, and I bought a book of his and I listened to an audio book and I got into his universe and I began to know him and began to understand his organization capability. And , I had made a decision that I wanted to get to know that in much more detail before they really sold anything to me.

 The. Summary of that story is that the job, number one, even for a salesperson is you've got to get attention. You've gotta be out there on that street corner saying, Hey, hey, I'm here. And then people will look. And once you've got their attention, then you can begin your sales process. But you can't  begin the sales process until, first of all, you have garnered some attention.

So let's talk about the power of marketing and how you might use it to gain attention. I'm conducting my own experiment on attention. I have committed to putting out a post on social media every day.  I tend to spend most of my time on LinkedIn and I've also started posting on Facebook.

I know I need to be on the other social media channels, but I'm gonna start with those two. And then, each week I'm gonna create a video to put on my YouTube channel.  My, my ambition is quite reasonable. A daily post probably the same one, but in, in different words on Facebook and LinkedIn and a video every week on YouTube so that at least I get my message out there and I'm gonna see what kind of response I have

 and you should really do the same. You should be picking your favorite social media platform. And that may, whatever you may be on Instagram, you may be a Twitter person,  Facebook, but it should go where your customers are and start posting every day something that would grab attention and be useful to them.

The important thing is that you've just gotta keep doing it consistently because ,

the best known product or service always beats the best product or service.

You may have the best mouse trap, but if nobody knows about it and this one is being promoted over there, people are gonna buy the one that they know, that they see and is in their attention. So you've gotta get attention.

So what are some of the ways that you could create attention? What are some of the posts that you could put? Cause social media is free. Why wouldn't you take advantage of it? It's like having your own newspaper or TV channel if you are using video.

It's so powerful to be able to communicate your message. And we get a little bit reticent about going on there and shooting videos, and we feel we're gonna be embarrassed. Our friends are gonna say, well, that was stupid. I know I put a video out the other day and  I'd made a spelling mistake on it, and I had some person was desperate to speak to me, to tell me, Hey, you'd spell the word wrong in, in the subtitles of your video.

 But the point is it doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be out there and, quantity beats quality. I mean, I'm not saying put rubbish out there, but don't worry about it being absolutely perfect. The more times that you iterate your content, the better it's gonna be. So, I'm just gonna give you a couple of ideas of the types of posts that you could put out there.

The one that I advocate to, my clients is let's start with you you are an expert in your field. You may be an HVAC installer or a commercial flooring installer. You know what goes on? I mean, if you take a commercial floor, for example, there's always problems with moisture. So  what I advocate is that they put posts out about the problems that people might be experiencing with their existing floor.

It may be uneven, it may be bubbling because of moisture, and you could put a little post out saying how to prevent and deal with moisture in troublesome floors and say a few words about that. Take a little picture of want, put it out there. Now, when somebody is looking, looking at that and thinking, yeah, I've got a problem with my floors, that person seems to know what they're talking about.

If I put a new floor down, I wanna make sure this problem doesn't recur or you might even give them some ideas as how they might mitigate that problem in the short term, you are helping them. So think about the problems that your prospective customers have, and then you talk about those problems, how to solve those problems, and then make an offer as to how you could help them deal with those problems.

Another one would be , a numbered list. people always are very curious about lists. You know, the five ways to generate more prospects for your business. The Seven Secrets to.    Increasing your wealth, the four things you can do today to alleviate your back pain, and you need to just list those out, people absolutely fascinated by, by numbered lists.

So there's a couple of examples that you could do. So what I want you to do, is that you. Post three times, maybe daily for a week. But you've gotta do that for 30 days.

Now. It is gotten so easy these days. You could actually go onto the application ChatGPT   if you haven't heard about it, I'm sure very few people have not heard about it.

It's an artificial intelligence tool and you can ask it to write things for you. For example, you might say to it give me 30 blog posts on the subject of Personal fitness and it will write 30 blog posts for you.

 That blog post will not be in your voice. It won't have your humor or intensity or style, but at least it'll give you 30 ideas. So what you can do is take those 30 ideas, modify them a little bit to your, your own voice, and you've immediately got a month's worth of content that you could put out there. So very, very easy. It's an, it is almost an easy way to do research.

So you've got the research, you get the ideas, but then you're gonna put your own storyline and message around it.

Building a story around it is we should do a separate podcast on, on being able to tell stories because someone is 22 times more likely to remember a fact when it's in a story than when it's just written down.

I'll give you a very, very simple example.

Here's a fact.

The King died. The Queen died.

You might remember the fact that the king and the queen died, but you might usually just forget that. But if we put it into a story,

The King died. The Queen died of a broken heart.

Oh, immediately tugs at your, your emotions and your heartstrings.

You're feeling, you're feeling sad for the queen, and you know that the queen and the king obviously loved each other dearly, and that the reason why she died was because her lifelong love had  passed and they were gonna meet up again in the afterlife. You will never forget that story. Never. That's the power of story.

So when you're writing out these posts, paint a little story, put a bit of humor in it, put your own style in it, and you can really, really engage your audience.

So here's the thing, marketing is absolutely critical for scaling your sales. You've gotta become a little bit of a marketer.

Either use the resources inside your organization or simply use your own sales nouse to be able to write interesting articles and posts, short posts that you can put out on your social media.

Do it. Do it frequently. Give them ways to connect with you. Give them ways to buy things from you, and you'll be stunned at the fact that that will fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads.

Well, once again, I've enjoyed talking to you this week and we'll see you next time.