Dive into the world of sales and marketing with Erik Huberman, a maestro in attracting and retaining attention in our bustling digital age.
In a world where attention is the new currency, Erik's strategies offer a blueprint for success.
This episode offers insights for anyone looking to elevate their sales and marketing game.
Key Takeaways:
1️⃣ Event Networking as a Top Funnel Strategy:
Erik emphasizes the power of attending events to meet new people and expand one's professional universe. He advocates for using these opportunities not just for direct sales but for building a broad network that can lead to diverse opportunities.
2️⃣ The Art of Follow-up:
Diligent follow-up is Erik's secret sauce for nurturing relationships. He suggests touching base with contacts every 90 days, ensuring you remain top of mind without being overbearing.
3️⃣ Social Media Consistency:
By posting daily across various channels, Erik maintains a steady presence, subtly reminding his network of his expertise and offerings, making it easy for them to reach out when the need arises.
4️⃣ The Three Pillars - Awareness, Nurturing, Trust:
Erik breaks down his approach into these fundamental elements, focusing on building awareness, nurturing relationships, and establishing trust through third-party validations like reviews and testimonials.
5️⃣ Sales and Marketing Synergy:
A unique insight Erik shares is the symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing. He views marketing as a support system for sales, with both departments collaborating closely to enhance the overall business outcome.
Whether you're in sales, marketing, or just looking to expand your professional reach, these insights are invaluable.
Remember, it's not just about grabbing attention; it's about holding it and converting it into meaningful relationships and business outcomes.
Dive into the world of sales and marketing with Erik Huberman, a maestro in attracting and retaining attention in our bustling digital age.
In a world where attention is the new currency, Erik's strategies offer a blueprint for success.
This episode offers insights for anyone looking to elevate their sales and marketing game.
Key Takeaways:
1️⃣ Event Networking as a Top Funnel Strategy:
Erik emphasizes the power of attending events to meet new people and expand one's professional universe. He advocates for using these opportunities not just for direct sales but for building a broad network that can lead to diverse opportunities.
2️⃣ The Art of Follow-up:
Diligent follow-up is Erik's secret sauce for nurturing relationships. He suggests touching base with contacts every 90 days, ensuring you remain top of mind without being overbearing.
3️⃣ Social Media Consistency:
By posting daily across various channels, Erik maintains a steady presence, subtly reminding his network of his expertise and offerings, making it easy for them to reach out when the need arises.
4️⃣ The Three Pillars - Awareness, Nurturing, Trust:
Erik breaks down his approach into these fundamental elements, focusing on building awareness, nurturing relationships, and establishing trust through third-party validations like reviews and testimonials.
5️⃣ Sales and Marketing Synergy:
A unique insight Erik shares is the symbiotic relationship between sales and marketing. He views marketing as a support system for sales, with both departments collaborating closely to enhance the overall business outcome.
Whether you're in sales, marketing, or just looking to expand your professional reach, these insights are invaluable.
Remember, it's not just about grabbing attention; it's about holding it and converting it into meaningful relationships and business outcomes.
Welcome to Mastering Modern Selling Relationships Social and AI in the buyer-centric age. Join host Brandon Lee, founder of Fist Bump, alongside Microsoft's number one social seller Carson V Heddy and Tom Burton, author of the Revenue Zone and co-founder of Leet Smart, as we explore the strategies and stories behind successful executives and sales professionals. Dive in to business growth, personal development and the pursuit of excellence with industry leaders. Whether you're a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this podcast is your backstage pass to today's business landscape. This is Mastering Modern Selling, brought to you by Fist Bump.
Speaker 2:Everyone, welcome to episode number 77, mastering Modern Selling. I'm here today, as usual, with my awesome co-host, brandon Lee and Carson Heddy, and we have a very special guest, eric Huberman. Eric welcome.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:So we're gonna talk about something today that I think is pretty important to everybody, which is attracting and keeping attention. Obviously, in sales and in marketing, right, if you don't have somebody's attention, you're gonna have a little bit of a problem. So we're gonna talk about some tactics and strategies for that. Before that, brandon, do you wanna shout a little bit about the upcoming webinar?
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely, I was actually just pulling up links for it. Yeah, so Carson and I are running a webinar on March 21st. It is gonna go through Carson's playbook with a little bit of my playbook built into it, but look, it's part of our Modern Revenue Generation series. This one's called the Playbook of a Salesman on Fire, mr Carson there, and that'll be on March 21st Free registration and all that register. You don't show up, you get access to the recording. But hey, look, this is everything that Carson's done and learned of his last 10 years with Microsoft and has done what Carson? Over a billion dollars in revenue in that timeframe.
Speaker 5:Billions and billions served. There you go.
Speaker 4:So, yeah, just invite everybody March 21st. You should see links wherever you're watching this. There should be a link in there somewhere, and if not, you can ping one of us and we'll get you a link on a problem. You can't wait.
Speaker 2:All right, so let's do it. So, Eric, again welcome. You're the founder and CEO of Hock Media in LA, correct or based in LA? So yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself, Hock Media and your background Sure background's.
Speaker 3:Ecommerce built and sold a couple Ecommerce businesses the last one over 10 years ago now and then started consulting and advising for a bunch of large and small brands on how to drive revenue growth using marketing, how to get attention in an attention deficit world and turn that into a sale, and started working with Red Bull, verizon, hp. A bunch of startups found that it was really hard to find people that got to execute this stuff and so started building a small team and that team's turned 10 years later into about 220 people. We've spent over $3 billion on advertising. At this point, we've worked with almost 5,000 brands. We've built our own AI system that is digesting 8,000 companies, marketing, media and revenue data in real time so that we can actually provide the exact insights by where the opportunity is in an individual business.
Speaker 3:We have a venture fund. We just closed our second fund at $20 million. We're invested in a lot of the major marketing tech stack, especially around Shopify, like Klaviyo, postscript, tapcard, faring, superphilia, sway, et cetera. So, yeah, we've just tried to make a marketing powerhouse and gold being working for a marketing foundation and seems like we're on our way.
Speaker 4:So, eric, you're saying you have a little bit of experience in this industry, is what I'm hearing.
Speaker 3:I'm starting to yeah exactly.
Speaker 2:Hey Eric, would you say that you focus more on B2C or B2B, or is it a mix?
Speaker 3:It's absolutely a mix. It's probably 65, 35, B2C and B2B. So B2C definitely leans more into marketing, so it's been a bigger part of our business. Also was my background, but now like we drink our own punch. Hawk Media has a massive sales and marketing effort and we also work with a lot of software companies, service businesses, et cetera.
Speaker 2:So let's see if we can set the stage a bit. This show is called Mastering, modern Selling and long story short, mastering or Modern Selling in this day and age, is about creating demand, building relationships. We're kind of the opposite of the SDR and Smile and Dial. We're really looking at how to use modern strategies to build pipeline and build forecast From. With that context, eric, what's your thought and what you see now, especially in the B2B world, in your B2B space? What are you seeing related as relates to attracting and retaining attention, and what are some of the strategies and techniques that you're seeing, you and your clients, employing in this sort of new world where attention is everything?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the nice thing is, I always caution people. I think that the world is changing to a craft because human nature is not, and so a lot of the things that have worked forever still work. And so you mentioned relationships. You mentioned, like, not the SDR Dial for a dollar, kind of thing, and I agree to take a step back.
Speaker 3:We kind of look at marketing like we wrote a book about this called the Talk about it, and look at marketing, which to me, marketing is basically a one to many sales strategy. But we talk about it in three principles awareness, nurturing and trust, which works for sales too. So awareness how do I let new people know I exist? How do I get new contacts? How do I get in touch with new people? That's number one. Number two nurturing how do I stay as people, get the sales cycle to actually convert and then keep them as a customer? So it's also customer retention strategies as well. And then trust, I'd say, is synonymous with brand, but in lieu of a brand, when you haven't built a brand yet, nobody knows who you are you need to find ways to build trust. That's usually through third party validation, reviews, testimonials, case studies, whatever that might be, and so all those together is really what drives a successful strategy, and so I wanted to set that framework and then I can talk to like specifics. You know, thankfully, and from what I've heard in terms of like from sort of the bankers in our industry, et cetera, like we have the most robust sales and marketing strategy of any marketing agency in the country, so we have more throughput, bringing more brands work with more people than anyone, and so how we've done that is drinking our own punch in that sense, but from a sales strategy standpoint.
Speaker 3:Number one how do I always make sure that I'm meeting new people? So you can have the SDR method, but let's be real, like I have personally never called or called emails, I can 98% certainty say I have never just reached out and be like can we work together and gotten a customer that way? That's just not a strategy I'm for. I don't know that's a really tough way to do it, but I do a lot of other things to make sure I'm constantly meeting new people. Number one, and this is legit, that's why I say what's all this new? I'm at events all the time. You know, I just canceled the trip because, frankly, my wife and baby have a cold so we can't go away for the weekend and I immediately replaced it with going to a conference tomorrow and it's like if I have some free time I'm going to find what's a good event. This would be the best CPG event in the country, called Expo West. But like I'm always on Sunday to Wednesday, next week I am at Shop Talk, one of the biggest e-commerce sites, like every couple of weeks. I was at South by Southwest last week, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3:So why I say that is like that is the number one top of the final strategy for me? Because it does two things. One, I get to meet tons of new people and I'm not the guy and I always try to emphasize this. I may seem like an extrovert and I am extroverted on a spectrum, but I am not the guy that walks into a room and knows everybody in an hour and I'm not the wife of the party. I meet a few people, I stay connected with them and this goes into the next part of the strategy, but I get those contacts. I make sure I get their contact and I am the most disciplined about follow up. So I will come in with a day or two. I'll get stay in touch with them and this could, by the way, I also try to turn every contact into potential business. So it could be a client, it could be a partner, it could be me, be a friend, but someone that may know someone else, etc. So it's like everyone's worth talking to and I because to me it's again top of the funnel I just am building this universe and I'm always growing that universe, because the other side of this that people forget this again goes for marketing and sales.
Speaker 3:People are going to move on as customers or potential customers for you for many reasons. They lose their job, they lose their life. I don't mean to be morbid, but it's just a factor that people forget. It's like, no, you're never going to be stable. So get that out of your head, that there's any sense of stability. I built my universe. I'm good. That universe is always shrinking and you always have to add to it just to maintain. Sorry, but we're all on a treadmill here or a hamster wheel. You got to do it.
Speaker 3:And so the next piece is nurturing. That's where I follow up with everyone on my contact list every 90 days and people that get to know me start to realize it, it's fun. They'll say like you know, come on, man, what are you doing? But it doesn't piss anyone off. And this is important because with our business, with marketing, you might not need what I do now or three years from now, but maybe seven years from now you will, and so it's about just staying in touch and staying top of mind, so then you can come to me.
Speaker 3:I never have to hard sell because they know what I do, they know we're good at it. I just stay in front of them so that when they go shoot, I really need help with this. So like, oh yeah, there, he is Perfect, and so that's a big strategy. As well as on that same nurturing idea I post on social media every day, across all my channels, about something to do with the business and marketing and stuff. So it's again another reminder oh yeah, that's what he does. We should talk, and people are that simple, and I don't mean that in a demeaning way. I mean it's just like you literally just lay it up for them and go oh yeah, that's right, you're the guy. That's how people work, and so you just make it easy for people while also having a very concise way of articulating what you do for us, where you outsource CMO and marketing team, like nobody has a hard time understanding what I do.
Speaker 3:Nobody has a hard time telling other people what I do. Word of mouth is a huge other aspect of this, because those intros if someone introduces you to someone else, that trust factor, that third pillar, that third principle is covered. You just got introduced. That is a huge part of human nature and this is a quick little side note. We talk about this a lot you guys watched how you think your mother.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so for people that don't, there's the main characters Ted. He's telling, like going flashing back to telling his kids in the future how I met your mother, and it's all these stories about his dating life and his friends and his best friend, barney, is kind of a complete womanizer and Barney's favorite way to get Ted to meet girls is to walk up to random girls and go, hey, have you met Ted? And it works every time. And so I've been talking about that with our sales team from like nine years ago, saying like just get an intro, like they don't need to even know that person. Confidently, that intro actually creates a lot of trust. I then happened about a year ago to sit across the table at a lunch from the show runner for how I met your mother and told her like, oh, that's what you like, we didn't know each other. She just so what do you do? Kind of thing. She's like, oh, I ran this show called how I met my mother. Okay, hold on.
Speaker 3:So I've been talking about this for a while. She's like oh yeah, we used to do it all week. We'd stop filming and go out to the bars and we'd like do it in the bar. It works every time. So for you single people out there, just get a random intro, it works. But for business it works as well. But again, that comes to that trust factor. People inherently want to trust who they're talking to, and the way you do that is third party validation. The irony is I do this as well. My favorite thing on the marketing side is I go who here shops on Amazon? Everybody raises their hand when I'm doing public speaking stuff. Okay, and out of all of you who here reads reviews on the products you buy, everyone raises their hand. Great, and how many of you believe that on Amazon, most of the reviews are probably fake? Everybody raises their hand. Just sit there for a sec, you're like isn't that funny.
Speaker 3:You all like the reviews. You know they're fake, but you still do it. Human nature can't be fought. And that's back to that trusting, like people really want to trust. And so, again, thinking about sales strategies, it's continue to fill my funnel aggressively all the time. I want to constantly know, like I thankfully have thankfully in some ways, I guess, have built almost an anxiety when I don't have, I'm not meeting new people and I'm not trying to find. Okay, I got to get out there. So, like for me it's become automatic, like I just need to see that I'm funneling in new contacts all the time. And then I built a system that I'm going to stay in touch and top of mind with them. And the trust side is really then where the effort comes in, which is being on this podcast, doing interviews, getting press, showing testimonials, reviews, case studies, all that stuff, and that is it. And then you know I always articulate.
Speaker 3:Hopefully this is helpful because I think it will be for anyone to put into their contacts. But for my team, I explain our job is not to tell people that they need marketing. Everybody should know, every business owner should know that they need marketing. That should be staple stakes. So like I'm not here to explain to you why marketing will help your business, that's crazy. Hopefully you understand that I need to tell you why we're the best. You need to decide to choose us over every other option you have. That's my job, and so how do I do that? That's where the credibility and differentiators come in. You know, that's where our different systems, our success, all these things. But that is a constant effort that it never goes away, that we have to constantly reinforce why we're the best and that is where our marketing strategy comes in, and then from that, sales can actually do their job. Well, that's really yeah.
Speaker 5:So much goodness in there, eric. First off, I feel like we're all kindred spirits because you talk about a lot of the things that we talk about on the show. You know the intentionality, the discipline, the true follow up. You know earning those relationships. I also I quote, barney, a lot from how I met your mother, but I always say challenge accepted. Something sounds impossible. I always say challenge accepted and I'll go out and figure out a way to get it done. You said something that really struck a chord with me and I think it's. It's a unique message for a lot of our listeners and it's that kind of that marriage between sales and marketing. Sometimes sales and marketing don't jive. I've done some success in my career because I've always found ways to go out and serve marketing, leverage their content, but also the report back to them in meaningful ways, are going to help them be successful, promoting the things that they're doing, etc. How can sellers today wrap their head around how they could and should better partner with?
Speaker 3:marketing. Yeah. So I would say the onus in that situation is on the marketing side, not on the sales side. Sales you know what sales want to do and I think marketing forgets. In my opinion, when you have a robust sales team, marketing is a support system for that sales team and that's how we operate and that's how our team operates and it works really well. They all get along well because when sellers are like this is what I need to do my job well, or marketing team listens when they say I'm getting bad leads, it's not the.
Speaker 3:You know, when we're going Ross, the leads are and shit your shit. It's like, ok, well, explain to me what's going on. Why are they bad? Let's fix this, let's see what we can do, tweak. We don't want to lessen our lead flow and end up throwing the baby out with the bath water, but like, let's figure this out. So it's a collaborative effort that we, I think, pretty consistently had that culture on that piece of the business is like just making sure that that is understood.
Speaker 3:Like sales on their or sorry, marketing on their own will go. You know, we think that the collateral that sales is using is not good enough. We're going to go redo that, like they're thinking how do we make our sales people more powerful? And then I would say vice versa, our marketing especially is very active in what, watching the pipeline and going hey, why do you need to call this guy back? You want it like what's going on? He's almost a secondary sales manager in some ways, because he cares about the outcome. He wants to know that I did all that work to drive all those leads. Those leads are good because now we have a lot of qualifying insight into them. I just heard him this morning. He's like we got a lead that wants to spend 50 grand a month with us and that's a decent number for us. So he's like, hey, what are we doing here? What's the strategy? Hey, sales director, I think you should jump in here and help. There's no reason not to put a little reinforcement on this. He's like a good one.
Speaker 3:But that's how they think about it. It's like we're all on the same team here. We're all connected, we're going to collaborate, and I have seen other organizations that it's like oh God the marketing, oh God the sales. That's just a bad cultural problem that is hard to solve, but you solve it. We had that problem here for a long time between sales and services, which I see happen a lot. Where sales would sell, someone in now services has to manage them and it's just more work. But it took a lot of work to change the culture to be like no, no, no, you want. Even though it's logical, it's like you want us to have business to pay you right. This is a good thing and I think it actually took a couple. It took kind of a COVID hit and then a hit in 2022 when everyone got scared of oh God, is everyone going to stop marketing? I think those made people realize do not look a gift horse in the mouth. Getting a new client signing a new deal sometimes takes work, but that's a good thing.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I feel, guys, for everybody listening, if you just stopped right here and actually applied and really thought about what Eric shared in the first 15 minutes. That's the show, that's the meat of what we, what every company should be doing, I think we're just not that, we're done. I'm sure you got a lot more to say, but and then also just one trick.
Speaker 3:Tony, I'm out. Yeah, we're done.
Speaker 4:Okay, everybody, thanks for coming. No, but anyone listening to we forgot to let everyone know. Bring your comments, bring your questions. Eric is a wealth of knowledge. Please ask questions and let us know what else we could do to help you or share with you. Eric, I am a little curious too. Can you ask how is how do you guys coordinate that like the marketing type of content used by and I don't even like calling it marketing content. How is marketing, or whatever the team is, help, that's creating content? Are you creating that with sales and sales utilizing it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, great question. So I so the content strategy started with. I've been writing for like Forbes and Entrepreneur and Rolling Stone and a lot of other publications for a long time and a lot of the things I would write about go to our sales team like, what are you dealing with? What's your challenges? They think, oh man, like everyone keeps saying they're going to bring their marketing in house. I'm like, oh well, that's a stupid idea. We all know that. We've seen how that turns out. I'm going to go write an article with the research on why that's a bad idea. Now, guys, here's your article. Next time someone says that, be like, yeah, we actually discussed this, here's all the data and so just give it. That's what I mean by the marketing and sales collaboration is like having that open communication about like, what is your challenges right now? What are you dealing with?
Speaker 3:And, frankly, having enough senior people that we have some really good sellers. When they tell me they're having an issue, I can take it seriously. You know, on the junior side sometimes it's a training problem. You have to differentiate that. But when they're telling me some of these things thankfully I come from you know I'd say one of my superpowers is sales. I ran. I did all our sales for three and a half years before we built a team. So, like we built the team to like 70 people on me selling and so I know what they're doing and so I'm kind of able to, when they tell me something, I can kind of differentiate between like yeah, I see that you need some third party like ammo there to really help, or yeah, they probably said that because you said this.
Speaker 3:Like there's, as we know, in sales, like once you get into the weeds on my company, what are their 10 objections and that's it. So like you start to go, okay, well, they give you that objection, you probably didn't do this, this and this. Like you can start to get there too. So there's a combination there. But we also like we pump out, I think, a case study a week now for guys. So there's always something fresh and new. Which is funny because I talked to my team. Like you realize, like the hundreds of case studies we already have, none of our new clients have seen. So like the fact that we like they want new ones. I mean, you don't need new ones I'd use one years ago, it's fine, but sure, we have like that momentum and we also share on social and stuff.
Speaker 3:But we win one or two awards a month. We're and, by the way, people always ask what's the secret to winning awards? Number one a pie. So that's a big part of it is like we have a PR team that looks at what awards should we win and where are we outpacing, let's go apply for them, and so we get a lot of awards we get to share.
Speaker 3:We constantly make up content and data on the industry and like all these things that are just and then the sales person. The other part of this is we have a certain cadence and style and process that we try to teach people and then, as they get better, everyone ends up falling into their own unique way of doing it that works for them and that's been. I would say that's probably counterintuitive to a lot of sales organizations where it's like follow the process, but we're dealing with founders of companies, all types of companies etc. Like you start to see that different strategy, having different people running different strategies, actually works really well for us. For that diversification For one strategy is working really well in one period, another one will work in another period yeah.
Speaker 4:I'm going to pause for everybody listening, because Eric said something I think is extremely important and we don't highlight it nearly enough. He started that whole section saying they go to sales and say why are you hearing? Ask what are you hearing? Really, really simple Go to sales and say what questions are you hearing? What objections are you hearing? That's rich content. And then when your sales team and the entire brand is sharing that content whether it's in social, whether it's an email, whether it's direct message, they're sharing that content you know that you're answering the questions that your, your total, addressable market has, because sales are hearing it routinely. Just pause a little bit, this isn't that hard. Ask them what they're hearing and create content around it. I love that part.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it is that simple. That's the thing is. When you over complicate, this stuff is when you get in trouble. Keep things simple. It's just like what does our sales team need? I don't know. Ask them. Don't get me wrong. I always remember the quote Henry Ford if I ask people what they wanted, they say faster horses. You got to be careful in some sense as to some of it has to be strategic and you have to have a vision of. I hear you and this is where we're going, and but a lot of it is really easy in that sense.
Speaker 2:Let's. There's a good question here from Tom Taylor. I want to bring up next Tom's asking or saying I have no issues getting attention in face to face interactions. However, I struggle with social platforms. I have a lot of great information from Brandon who's Brandon? Is that somebody, anyway? And have adopted my profile. How do you get those new connections and grab their attention? So, thoughts on that Eric.
Speaker 3:I think it has to do with. Like you know, I think people forget about putting themselves in their audience's shoes and, like I, get spammed all day, every day. I think I have 700 unchecked connection, big requests on LinkedIn, just like can't keep up anymore. And you know, I've got 30, something thousand connections and followers, and all that on LinkedIn. I get messages all day, every day, and most of them have not taken any time to think about why it applies to me. And so my number one rule and I try to teach my team this like, if you're actually reaching out to someone cold, if you're going to do that which, again, I don't do that, as you said, I have no issues getting attention in face to face interactions then maybe you should spend your time on face to face interactions. Why are you going to go down a path where you're? Why are you going to fight an uphill battle? That's my same experience, by the way. I you know, but what I did was everyone I meet. I added on social. So now my social content creates top of mind. Sometimes they share it, that sends it to their audience, etc. But in terms of actually cold outreach, I'm super concise and super specific to that. I'm not reading your page essay about why we should connect, about your new product or why you want to talk to me. I'm not interested in being sold by you. I'm busy, I have other issues. This is most helpful. If you can tell me very quickly something that you make me interested, then great, and if you can't, then stop, you know, again pushing the boulder up the hill like, just go find another way to do it.
Speaker 3:I think that people try to replicate. People think that they need to utilize every tactic to build a company Like they're like. Well, this guy does great social selling. This person's doing events. This person's a public speaker. This person wrote a book. I'm going to do all of it and it's not tenable. It's a problem in society we have these days where everybody is trying to replicate. Replicate the highlights of everyone else versus you know, figure out your best strategy. So again, on this new social connection side, my social connections are people I usually meet or connect with, either through introductions or directly, and then we end up connect and then I connect on social. I don't just blindly connect with people on social and try to touch base with them. I don't think that's ever worked for me.
Speaker 5:Those are various student observations, and I liked what you said to Tom Eric about you know playing to the strengths and sometimes you can leverage social as a way to ultimately orchestrate those face-to-face conversations. That's how I've leveraged it. You know thinking about ways that you can uniquely engage your target audience. Yes, you want your LinkedIn profile to be spruced up. You want to show it and showcase it as your. You have a perspective, you have stories, you have a vantage point for your desired target audience. Furthermore, there's ways that you can go out and leverage commenting on your target audience's posts. Go out, follow those people, ring the bell in their profile so you get notified when they post and then you can go out and engage with them. You know they're talking about things that they care about. You can engage consistently and, to Eric's earlier point, those are the ways that you can stay top of mind and nurture those connections.
Speaker 5:I've got a situation where I met a CEO of a customer organization after six months of commenting on every post he made, and then I got a meeting with him when the time was right, because he already knew who I was, because we had developed a rapport in his posts and comments.
Speaker 5:And then, lastly, you know the ways that you can message folks do almost do like the counterintuitive approach. You know, to Eric's point, we get spammed so much on some of these social platforms You're not going to get a response unless you show up uniquely. You show up immediately, with value. You don't verbal vomit all over their inbox and talk about all the great things about yourself and your company. No, it's more talking about them, maybe something that they posted or that you saw in their profile that there's some commonality, there's some synergy where you can create a conversation. You want to create a conversation and if your strong suit is getting in the room together, create that coffee, create that lunch, sit down, think about unique ways that you can engage them with video, with blogs, with articles. You've got a unique perspective. Use it and funnel that into getting face-to-face meetings.
Speaker 3:And I think you nailed it with like think of social media if it doesn't work for you for awareness. It's a nurturing and trust piece. Utilize it the way it's benefiting you, don't force it to be something. It's not Same thing with like PR and getting articles now does not create awareness. There's too much content out there. You kind of get the attention deficit world Like there's billions of articles coming out every day. You getting an article on Rolling Stone will not do anything for you. I literally had a TV show. Did any of the three of you know that I had a TV show on cable TV this past year? I didn't Sitting here. Wait. Literally on a mainstream show was Cedric the Entertainer and me building his barbecue brand. This is on A&E like primetime great show, super fun, 12 episodes.
Speaker 5:Nobody saw it because Cedric the Entertainer and I worked at the same Schnucks. There you go, a grocery store in the middle of that, perfect, and St Louis, it keeps your honor actually 100 months.
Speaker 3:Stop here, there you go and so yeah anyway. So, that being said, I just had to tell you guys that I have a TV show. That's how ridiculous the world has gotten in terms of attention. So understand, I looked at it this way too. I actually, when I signed up, I thought that this was going to be a big thing, that it was going to get us a ton of attention. But thank you, tom. But we ended up. But now we have all these clips of, like Damon John introducing me to Cedric the Entertainer, and telling him that I'm God's gift to marketing. Like the trust and validation that this created was huge and so pivot it to be like, okay, that's the benefit of this. It wasn't to create new awareness for the company, it was to build trust. So really identifying that's important too.
Speaker 4:That's really smart. Yeah, and Tom, I know Tom's got to go, but for anyone else, you know, I think people get stuck in Carson Excellent advice, go and comment. People say, well, I go and look at my target audience and we do know that 98% of people on LinkedIn don't comment, don't post very often, if at all. And then a lot of them, when they do comment, it's things that are like hey, look at our new brochure, look at our new product. Like how do I comment on it? Go look and see who they're reading. So go look and see who they've liked.
Speaker 4:There's always the consultants, the authors, the influencers, if you will, who produce content every day and your audience is going and looking at their content and you can see by what do they like and what do they comment. Go comment on that stuff and you start using these digital channels or LinkedIn, like what Eric saying, you stay top of mind. You're getting that credibility Because when you go and start commenting on somebody who's very influential in a specific industry and you're comment, you comment, you comment, you ring their bell and you're commenting all the time. Guess what you get implied? I don't know what you call it endorsement. You get applied authority and trust, because you're commenting on that person's content all the time.
Speaker 3:Yep, totally agree.
Speaker 5:Yeah, early on, I started trying to gravitate toward, you know, those folks that were out there doing what I wanted to do or what I wanted to be known for, and it's almost like setting up a billboard between your customer and their destination, right? So you're basically to Brandon's point. I'm going to go out and I'm going to find, like in my case, you know, I'm a firm practitioner of sales. I spend a lot of time in the sales ecosystem working with sellers and leaders, and so I gravitated toward people like Jeb Blunt, mike Weinberg, jeffrey Gettimer and, fascinatingly enough, you know, when you go in and you comment on their threads to Brandon's point their followers will also take notice of you. But over time, what's even a more amazing is I've done shows with all of those three and then some, so you never know where it's going to go.
Speaker 5:I've even gone so far as to reach out to customers, trying to sound different than everybody else and stand out from the noise and the attention deficit world, and instead of asking them to a meeting where I can do a discovery about how we might be able to add value to their organization, I've invited them to be on my podcast to talk about leadership and culture and things that matter to them, and then they've turned into opportunities later. But the relationship came first. And that's what I think people should think about is how do I create a relationship with this person? Relationships to get deals it's not about you know, going after the deal. First and foremost, it's how can I best add value and collaborate with this person. You'll be surprised as to where these things can go.
Speaker 2:You know what I'm and tell me if you guys, if I'm looking at this right, what I'm hearing everybody say here is going back to the title of our show how to Get Attention and an Attention Deficit World. Getting attention is not an event, it's a journey and it's something that has to continue and be sort of a perpetual process versus, hey, I sent you a direct message and I got your attention and you followed up. And I think a lot of times you know even maybe Tom's question earlier there's a lot of idea that, well, attention is an event, I'm going to do something, I'm going to get your attention and all of a sudden you're going to become riveted on what I do. It doesn't work that way, it's? Am I hearing that right from what we're saying here?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think. Well, there's the initial attention, which is the awareness piece we talked about. There's no training, staying in front of people, Like people. Again, the biggest thing I see missing in marketing is the idea of a consideration for a sales cycle Like in sales it's so in front of you it's hard to miss, like it's taking.
Speaker 3:It takes people time to actually buy something. You know most salespeople got this. Marketers missed this, and so what you do during that period, how you keep people coming through the funnel to the point that they actually purchase, is super important and that's part of that attention. Keeping their attention is a big part of it, and then once they're in, depending on the business, you probably want to continue to keep their attention, to keep them coming back and back.
Speaker 4:Hey, eric, I have a question for you. I know, like we hear you, you're a machine, like you love networking and that's kind of just in your DNA and what you do. What are some of the some of the ways you said there's different systems you have and then people on your team kind of create their own little strategy and what works best for them. What are some of those strategies that they use? So, if you have somebody that's more in, like Tom Taylor shoes, where you know he's a sales guys and he's working his butt off trying to get more attention, what are some of those types of tactics that producers are doing in your company?
Speaker 3:Honestly, a lot of the same. They're all out of the offices, like half empty on the sales right now, because they're all at different events. They're going out and meeting people Again. So we have a really big partner program too, where we, you know, if you're not going to be a customer but you know a bunch of people on the industry always make you a partner and a referral partner. So to meet both the best thing to do is go to all the different events and there's just, we also are selling something that like there is a massive total addressable market.
Speaker 3:Like what who needs marketing? Every single company in the country. Like, so we can go to, you know, tomorrow I can go to a CPG event. Next week I can go to a commerce event. Next week I can go to a farming event. I was in Kansas City for farm con I key noted there in January. So, like, the industry size is really big.
Speaker 3:So our people are networking in those industries, figuring out where those spots are, where people have demand for what we're doing and where we can actually make a difference. And they're, you know, building those pipelines. And what's nice is, once you build a few relationships in those industries, now they're saying like, oh hey, I'm going to this event tonight and one of this thing tomorrow, like that is part of it. But I do think that ground game like people think because of COVID, we've replaced in person with digital and it's BS it's not that, it's not even close. And the reason we've had recent success is because we've really ramped up our visibility at all these things, because that also gets you over that trust hurdle way more. You get a random email or random LinkedIn message. You don't know who the hell this is, but you meet them in an event. There's just that little extra step of like your real person. You know you're in the same room as me, okay, let's talk and that little extra step actually could be a huge difference in terms of bringing in business.
Speaker 4:Yeah, just to give an example of that, the last two days I was in an event and I was there with a client. But I also knew, going into it, that somebody who I've met on LinkedIn had engaged with LinkedIn, use that to create a call. We had a zoom just to meet each other, no selling, just meeting him, knew he was going to be there, went over to his booth, met him, shook his hand, hung out with him a little bit, went back, saw him again and then he said hey, what are you doing tonight? And I said I have any plans. You know Atlanta's hometown for me I was just going to go home. He's like well, why don't you come to this event with me? And I said, sure, and I went to the event and while I'm there, I met the CEO and the CRO of the company that was throwing the event, hung out with them, got to know them, exchange cards, connected with him on LinkedIn, and now I'm having conversations with them next week as well.
Speaker 4:This stuff, it's not, it's not hard. We just got to keep doing it, just keep putting ourselves out there. And that's what, for me, started with come, you know, publishing content on LinkedIn. I can, you know share the story, the whole thing, the content. I created somebody my client now notice me at another event and came up and said, hey, you're Brandon, right? And I said, yeah, he's like, I follow you on LinkedIn. And I said, yeah, I'm doing your stuff. I said, great, we had a coffee. A month or two later he becomes a client. Now I'm serving him at a show and then there's will is there and then will introduces me to somebody. All of that isn't hard, it's just work. You know doing the work, put in the effort.
Speaker 5:You also can't be rigid in your expectations. You know these things can go anywhere. And that's a very great point, brandon, because you know if you go in thinking, hey, this relationship has to look this way, you might be disappointed. But if you go in, you know, I spent the last few days at a very large convention and I didn't know, going in, what it was going to be like. It was my first time attending it in my new role. It looked different than it has in years past. I went in completely open minded. I did take business cards. I always think it's funny because I always don't seem to have business cards when I want them or need them. But I actually did, just because it is good to have that extra personal touch. But you know, I think the long and short of it is you run into people and if you think about it from the connection mindset, how can I add value to this person, how can I introduce this person?
Speaker 5:and sometimes it's also about being very opportunistic. If I see two people that could meaningfully connect, putting them together and getting out of the way so the magic can happen At the time, that's what you do and they will always remember that hey, you were the person that put those folks together. So I think it's always look at how can I, how can I invest in a relationship, no matter what that might look like, even if it's just putting two people together that might be able to go out and do beautiful things together.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 4:And that's Eric's earlier point. They may not need you now and they may not need you in three years, but maybe they need you in five years. But it could very easily be three months where they may hear somebody talking about a need and go. You know what you got to call Carson. That's what Carson does like all of this stuff, it's just creating that opportunity. We just got to be consistent.
Speaker 2:Sounds like a flywheel, Brandon. Sounds like a flywheel to me. So, hey, I want to transition a little bit over this. Is you know, Eric? Questions we get all the time. Is you know what about AI? Right, how do we use AI? Is AI going to change the game, especially as it relates to get attention? I know you mentioned in your intro you said you're working on, or have an AI platform. Can you explain a little bit what you're doing with AI and then your thoughts in general about how you believe AI will really change the game or impact the game or affect the game, especially in this attention deficit world?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I thankfully came across AI and the idea of what was coming like eight, nine years ago, and I mean more the actual pragmatic. We all saw Terminator, but we, and so I realized pretty quick that that was probably going to be the biggest innovation to disrupt what we do as on the marketing side, and so. But what I also realized was I'm not going to be the guy to build chat, gpt or Gemini or these things like. I don't have billions and billions of funding to go build AI and nor am I the engineer to lead it, and so. But I so I was like okay, well, let's assume that world exists in the next decade, what do I need to do to have a strategic advantage? And what I found was well, the other piece of the eye is educating it. Like, how do I do that? Like, how do I teach it so that it cannot? I can have that advantage, and so that comes from data, and I think data gets overused. But in my case, we have all the insights on what works and doesn't in marketing and how to do great marketing. Now all I need is the data to educate, like, what is happening in real time? Where are people succeeding? What does success look like? So I can actually measure an individual company against the benchmarks, basically, and then advise on how to do better and target that way when you're through it. What that meant again in sort of a tactical level is I need a ton of data in real time. So, starting I think it was about eight, nine years ago started digesting tons of companies marketing, media and revenue data and at this point we have over 8,000 brands marketing, media and revenue data running through our pipes in real time. We've done tests on it compared to the market at large and it's actually statistically significant. So we can actually use our data to see how Facebook is moving, how Google is moving, how Shopify is moving all these things which then, when we plug in an individual company into that, we immediately can see where is their opportunity, like, oh look, they can make 20% more money if they just fix these three things like that, versus what traditionally would be a CMO pulling their hair out, running through data, trying to figure out what to even look at and sorry, but most marketers are not that bright so most don't ever figure it out and they run down the wrong path forever. Now we have objective measurement of. This. Is where you're failing compared to the market. This is what we can focus on and, by the way, here's how much money the opportunity is worth. And so that's been the way we've leveraged AI, because we have that now plugged into all our clients in real time, so we always know where the best use of time is. This is where we can make 100 grand and this is where we can make 20,. This is where we can make a million. So we're going to go focus on the million dollars and fix that. That is what we spend our time on and we know that compared to, again, the market, which we've already validated as statistically significant. So we know exactly where your shortcomings are and that's how we've leveraged it and chatGPT's plugged into that. So you've leveraged the large language model which all chatGPT is. It's just a language model. It just makes it feel sentient, which is where we're at.
Speaker 3:We're not going to have true AI for another five to ten years, but we have things that feel like AI, which, if you read Ray Kurzweil, who's one of the biggest thought readers in that space, he literally called this a decade ago. He said by 2018, computers will process at the level of a mouse brain. I think it was by 22 it'll be level of a human brain and by 2023 we'll start to have things that mimic AI, that look like AI. And that's where we're at. And he said by 2029 we'll have true AI. And I think he keeps changing that last piece of the timeline, but it's again. It's five, ten years. We should have what looks like AI.
Speaker 2:So you're aggregating data from multiple, from all of your customers, taking that aggregated data, looking at the benchmarks and then comparing it individually. So we only have let's say, about 500 active customers.
Speaker 3:It's also past customers, it's partners, it's all sorts of other data sets and we've built out a lot of other data than just who we're working with.
Speaker 2:And did you build your own model or are you just using that to tune existing models? Or? Okay, interests, yeah, we built our own model.
Speaker 3:Now again, chat GPT from the language side of it so you can just have a conversation with it. We use their language model, but from an algorithm model for what's working, what's not, the actual insights part that we built based on. Again, that's where our proprietary information and our skill set came in, where it's like we know what to be looking for and what matters. So we you know tons of interviews with our marketing execution team and our tech team to figure out what that should look like.
Speaker 5:I think, it's a course you know Eric kind of pointed out that you know the concept of AI is not new. I mean, we've leveraged lead scoring and things like that for years. It kind of points us toward where there might be some propensity or there might be some lower ish hanging fruit, but one of the things that I become fascinated about it it might make for a good episode. You know, I'd love to hear from our audience like how they're continuing to leverage some of these AI technologies in order to improve their efficiencies or gather data. I think it's fascinating that in real time, you know, I can be on a customer call with someone and combing their LinkedIn profile or combing their company website and they're about me and funnel that directly into a chat GPT model and ask it to come up with some just conversation prompts, things that I could ask, based on what matters to that person and that organization. It's not about me, it's not about my company, it's about it. In fact, I tell my team all the time don't even mention products or solutions. Let's try to uncover what might matter to this organization and how, with my vast amount of resources, I'd be able to be of better value to them. One other thing that we're doing a ton right now because we talk all the time about this and I work in an environment where I've got a lot of customers and we're probably talking to consistently 20, 30% of them. Right, it's impossible to really effectively scale, or is it? So we're going out and we're trying to find ways, and I've talked on this show before how we create newsletter lists and build community around what we do.
Speaker 5:But one of the things that's really advantageous that we've leveraged AI for recently is you can go out to a company's website. You can feed there about me into the chat. Gpt have it talk about how your organization might be able to be a more valuable partner to these organizations. On the flip side of that, a lot of times my organization, my team, we're beholden to these very siloed conversations because historically we've been a technology company, so we get stuck in IT or procurement.
Speaker 5:But the real transformation happens with chief strategy officers, chief financial officers and if I'm going out and creating those relationships, if you go out and you do an internet search for the email address configuration of an organization, it will tell you with 80 to 90 percent accuracy. You can guess what anybody's email address is based on their sales navigator when you pull these folks up by title, so going out and finding like 20 executives that you can message very quickly with that type of a message. It's law of averages If I message 20 executives or something that sounds interesting to them, I'll probably get a meeting, and I've been doing that left and right over the last few weeks and it's been working like gangbusters. So food for thought about how you can leverage AI to meaningfully show up with something that matters to your customer. Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 2:So, as we wrap up here maybe I think a good way to kind of wrap up here would love to hear from all of us really what would be if we could give sort of one tactic or strategy to people about as it relates to getting and keeping attention right, attracting and retaining attention. What would that be, Not only now, but what we think is going to really be a key tactic or strategy for the next, you know, at least the rest of the year in the next year ahead.
Speaker 3:For me it's. I mean again the tactics have a post on social media, stand top of email, stand in front of people, do everything you can. But it's the number one thing I think is sustainability. Like do something you can do all the time, consistently, forever, Like there's no finish line, Like I've been running Hawk for a decade. Nothing's changed. In that sense, In fact, I look at like other ways to add to it, other ways to step it up, other ways to improve it, but I've never taken my foot off the gas, which I can do that because I created it in a sustainable way.
Speaker 3:What I'm not like good example is I'm not the guy that's filming you know 30 second videos every day on marketing tips because I don't have the time, Like I'm not going to. I'm not like I've looked at strategies that other people do and I go. That's awesome. The essays people write on LinkedIn. That works for them. I don't have the time or energy to go write an essay every night to post on LinkedIn, so I'm not doing that Now other people will do that.
Speaker 3:So I think that's right and I go back to do the things that you can do consistently, because the drum roll is what wins, not the spike of like, oh, now you're posting, Like it's the years Joe Rogan had his podcast. For what? Seven years before he got the sort of spike that he had, Like that's and that's the pinnacle seven years of content every week. So like, yeah, you just got to do it for a long time. It's the same thing with my podcast, or a hundred and something episodes, and now it's starting to hockey stick. You know it. Just, you just got to commit and know that, like, in the long run, that'll probably be worth it.
Speaker 2:Awesome, Brandon. What's your take?
Speaker 4:You know, I feel like I'm an apperent. I think, just because we're so LinkedIn centric, I would say get out of your own way A lot of people by saying we tried LinkedIn before and it didn't work, and realize that things have changed a lot. And when we're talking LinkedIn, I mean you know we talk about looking at LinkedIn through the lens like a conference. It's a 24, seven, 365 conference. How do you act and behave and what are your goals at a conference? Do those things inside of LinkedIn, you know meet people, create conversations, exchange business cards. You don't pitch people as soon as you meet them.
Speaker 4:So that whole old school mindset around LinkedIn being a thing that we can just go blast people and, by the way, if blast is still in your vocabulary, stop it. Nobody, nobody. You're not going to win by blasting anybody, so just stop it. But yeah, I think, from a LinkedIn centric standpoint at least and it really applies to any other medium or channel you may use it's about offering value and having conversations, meeting people and building those healthy relationships. The selling will come. Trust the process, stop being in such a hurry, stop looking at everybody with a target on their back and enjoy the process, and I actually find you sell more Like my. Inbound leads are so much better now because it's people that when they're ready they come and talk to me. But if I tried selling them when I talked to them, I never would have got them to come back when they were ready.
Speaker 2:Great point.
Speaker 5:The things that have helped me tremendously with getting attention and keeping attention are standing out from the crowd and the noise, doing it in a unique way, finding ways that aren't being leveraged all the time, like video and personalized outreach to folks focused on the relationship. Also, taking that multi-channel approach we talk about sometimes on here, like having that diversified portfolio, like a stock portfolio. You don't bet it all on LinkedIn or email or cold calls. You find where's your audience and you find meaningful ways to engage them. Eric, it's something that's got to be said again and it's the consistency element. You don't go out and just started to create relationships once and it works and you're done. I mean this is a constant deposit that you're making.
Speaker 5:That's why I've leveraged passive education models like newsletters and webinars, where, when they're ready to work with us, they will, and then you start to hear from them and they'll react and respond. And then staying at the pulse of what matters to people as you have these conversations react and respond to that right, be responsive, but stay at the pulse of what matters, stay informed, read up on whatever industry you're focused on. Those types of things are super, super important. And just making sure that you're being provocative sometimes. Ask questions, engage people with caring about their thoughts as opposed to just talking about your own. Yes, tell your stories and share your experiences, but ask them to share theirs as well. And sometimes I've found the best relationships from sharing learnings from losses or bad experiences, by showing up as my authentic self as opposed to just acting like everything is always gravy. I think finding the relationships based on common ground is a great way to build a foundation.
Speaker 4:Can you tell them before you end this? Can I echo one more thing, just because I think it's worth repeating, and both Eric and Carson did say this in slightly different ways Find what works for you. Find your creative ways, but find what works for you. There's so many people on any social or anything, saying this is the way you do things. It may work for them, but if it's not your style, don't do it. If you don't like writing content, don't be a blogger. You don't like being on video, then don't use video. But if you love those things, you prefer to talk than write, well, then figure out ways to talk. If sending messages to people, you can send an audio message in LinkedIn, you can send a video message in LinkedIn or you can write it. Find the one that works for you. Don't pair it with what a bunch of other people said works for them. Find it, try it, test it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and my take tonight is kind of what you're saying, Brandon, but I'm going to go with a little bit of a mindset issue. How many people do we hear all the time ask us the question I need more pipeline, I need more demos, I need more whatever. From a mindset perspective, what you really need is you need more high quality attention. I think the biggest tactic I can say is look at the world from this attention first perspective and then do what you guys just said, which is, do what you do well to attract attention. But if you're not thinking in terms of attention and you're thinking in deals or pipeline or demos or whatever, you're most likely going to get, if anything, negative attention or no attention at all. And then even just what Al was saying here, right, this ties into what you all have said love it, inform it not sell, Inform not sell. And that's how you will get the attention as you go forward.
Speaker 4:That was awesome, Eric. I know we're wrapping up. This was excellent, Absolutely excellent. Every time I think we've hit our best show, then we end up having something else. I think the content, the meat of it. Eric, anyone out there that wants to reach out to you, to your company, learn more about you. Where should they go?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean, if you want to get some help on the marketing side, hawkmediacom is easy H-A-W-K-E media, but we're on LinkedIn. I'm on pretty much every social channel adder slash or Cuban, so pretty easy to find.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, thank you, Eric. Really appreciate you being here. Carson Brandon, any final thoughts before we wrap here? No, this is Graham Mark, good to see you. I want to say hello to Mark and good to see him here. Mark's our friend from IBM, so we've got some big headers here as well. So, Carson, take us home.
Speaker 5:Eric, thank you, Audience, thank you and until next time happy, modern selling. Thanks everyone, Bye everybody.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us today on Mastering Modern Selling. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe for more insights, Connect with us on social media and leave a review to help us improve. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will continue to uncover modern strategies shaping today's business landscape. Learn more about Fist Bump and our concierge service at GetFistBumpscom. Mastering Modern Revenue Creation with Fist Bump, where relationships, social and AI meet in the buyer-centric age.