088: Best of Marketing & Sales: Season 1

1. Think about everything through the lens of your customer.

You are simply the guide who should be pointing them in the right direction. So always be listening to what they are telling you and talk back to them in that language.

2. Your first marketing hire should be a “marketing generalist.”

This person should become your brand expert. They should know what you are doing already and be able to replicate that. They should also have strong operational and planning abilities.

3. If you can’t hire for marketing yet, use the “market by committee” approach.

Identify all the things you want to be doing from a marketing standpoint, then divide them up among your current team. Everyone can wear a marketing hat until you are able to hire for that position later.

Tricia Sciortino on Instagram and LinkedIn

Lisa Zeeveld on Instagram and LinkedIn

BELAY’s Accounting service

(02:03) Think about everything through the lens of your customer. You are the guide.

(03:58) The best first step to take when you think about designing your website.

(06:08) How to choose the right marketing channels for your business and create a marketing budget.

(10:38) The first person you should hire for your marketing department is a “marketing generalist.”

(13:25) Your second hire should be a marketing specialist who works in specific roles.

(16:11) What does it mean to market your business by committee?

(19:46) A breakdown of what is the “sales leadership insanity loop.”

(22:32) Common mistakes leaders make when designing their compensation plan.

(24:30) Other incentives to offer outside of the comp plan.

Amy Appleton:

Because I literally had that conversation with someone the other day, where they said, “Oh no, I just spent thousands of dollars on a website. Now I’m looking at it and it makes no sense to me and I work here.” I feel like that probably happens frequently, especially after someone meets you or learns about the story brand framework, what do you tell them to do?

Ryan Fitzgerald:

Welcome to One Next Step, the practical business podcast that helps you run your business, so it stops running you. I’m Ryan Fitzgerald, and I’m on the marketing team here at Belay. Today, we’re walking you through some of the best marketing and sales advice that our guests have given us on the One Next Step podcast, over the course of the last 80 plus episodes. In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Wes Gay, a certified Story Brand guide at Wayfinder, Amy Appleton, Belay’s Director of Marketing, Colleen Stanley, President of SalesLeadership, Inc. and Lisa Seal, the Chief Revenue Officer here at Belay. You’ll get some amazing advice about improving your marketing and sales pitches, how to start building a marketing team, choosing the right marketing channels, creating a marketing budget, hiring sales people with emotional intelligence and motivating your sales team with compensation and commission packages. This is going to be a fantastic episode with so many nuggets of wisdom, but before we dive in, I want to take a moment to tell you about Belay.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

With modern staffing from Belay businesses and leaders can focus on growth without the unnecessary overhead or learning curves associated with hiring onboarding full-time employees. Belay is the incredible 100% remote organization, revolutionizing productivity with our Virtual Assistants, Book Keepers and Social Media Managers. Accomplish more, juggle less, and get back to what only you can do, growing your business with modern staffing from Belay. All right. I think it’s time to dive into the first clip.

Amy Appleton:

Give our listeners some practical things that they could implement today, like one thing that would help them find those right words or something they could start with right now.

Wes Gay:

Sure. So the big thing is, think about everything through the lens of your customer, right? Think through their eyes first. One of the things about the story brand framework is we talk about your brand is what we call the guide. In movies, like Yoda and Obi Wan classic guide characters in movies. And they’re the ones who come along and say, “I understand where you’re at, I know where you’re coming from and I know how to help you.” They have empathy and they have authority. Too often, we get so caught up in our own world, we just forget to see things through the eyes of the people we’re trying to sell to. So the first, so I would say, think about things through the eyes of your customers. What are they dealing with? What’s in their day to day world? Specifically, what are they struggling with? What are their problems that you know you can solve?

Wes Gay:

And sometimes, it happens often. People go, I don’t know what that is. Well, do you have any testimonials? Do you have any reviews?” Do you have emails from happy clients that say, “Hey, you helped us with this.” Find the language that they are literally already giving you voluntarily.

Amy Appleton:

Yes.

Wes Gay:

And Then now you have an idea of, “Okay, this is what I need to start saying to people, because this is what they’re noticing. These are the things that they’re responding to.” I just was reading a book the other day and he was talking about this, in one of his early businesses, that one of the first ones he sold, a customer commented about how fast their response time was and how great it was. And he said, “So I didn’t look to improve other areas of the business.” He said, “I actually looked to improve that because that was the thing I knew he cared about. So we started talking about that out more, and then we operationally figured how to speed it up.” Look at what customers are actually telling you already and use their language back to them and then look to see how you can make it as specific as possible because ironically, specificity is how you actually open the door to a broader audience.

Amy Appleton:

All right. So for the person listening, who has just paid to redo their website and is now listening to this podcast and thinking, “Oh, so maybe we need to relook at our website. Maybe the story is all about us and maybe we’re using words that people don’t even understand.” What is the best next step? Because I literally had that conversation with someone the other day where they said, “Oh no, I just spent thousands of dollars before I got here.” They spent thousands of dollars on a website.

Wes Gay:

Yeah.

Amy Appleton:

And now I’m looking at it and it makes no sense to me and I work here. So, what is the best first step? I feel like that probably happens frequently, especially after someone meets you or learns about the story brand framework, what do you tell them to do?

Wes Gay:

Right. So if you just spend a bunch of money on your website, you don’t want to spend any more money on anybody else and I get it.

Amy Appleton:

Right.

Wes Gay:

Right. So there’s a couple things I would suggest. One would be go back and look what you currently have and think, “How can I work with what I’ve got?” And the best better work that you’ve got is to figure out, well, first of all, buy Building a Story Brand and read that book. It’s one of the few business books you’re going to read that doesn’t actually waste your time.

Amy Appleton:

True.

Wes Gay:

I don’t want to call the other ones out, but there are a lot of business books where I finish and go, “That could have been about half as long and not lost a thing.” Story Brand is not that way. So read that book and what you’re going to find is there will be ways to infuse those elements into your website, right? The reality is, we are just changing words on the internet. We’re not shooting rockets to space.

Amy Appleton:

No.

Wes Gay:

We’re not performing emergency quadruple bypass surgery on a battlefield. We’re putting words on the internet. So the stakes are relatively low, typically.

Amy Appleton:

True.

Wes Gay:

So read that book and then you’re going to see some ways you could insert into what you already have, right? That’s the easiest way to do it without spending any more money. Obviously, you could hire somebody to bring somebody in to help you walk through that and then figure out, “Okay, how do I expand this?” You may have to hire a designer to add some sections or whatever, but start by reading the book and then figure out how you can infuse those elements into your own website. That’s the easiest way to go.

Lisa Zeeveld:

All right. So Amy, you mentioned two things about the wheel of marketing and how there can be way too many spokes. I feel like in order to limit the spokes, you need to know your customer. You need to know your client. So, is that where you would say if someone’s like, “That sounds great. You told me to limit it to two or three things.” I don’t even know what two or three things it should be. Can you give them just a little direction on how to pick those two things?

Amy Appleton:

Absolutely. So you are right. The number one thing is, know your customer.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Okay.

Amy Appleton:

Just know them, inside and out. And it’s actually, they probably already know this information, so that’s the good news.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Amy Appleton:

You probably already know what’s working really well.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Yeah.

Amy Appleton:

So I would honestly say, can then you double down there first?

Lisa Zeeveld:

Gotcha.

Amy Appleton:

And then pick something else that has worked before, worked in the past, is your second or third thing that you see that is working from a marketing perspective, and add that one. But you’re right, it’s all about knowing your clients and honestly, that’s what we do here at Belay. We will double down in things that work well while we go and try to expand things that do work.

Lisa Zeeveld:

So say if you know that you’re really high on referrals, say you’re just really big referral business, then you would say, doubled down on that, even though you might know that there’s some other people who are in this really cool, sexy thing called social media, you might not want to jump in that and waste a lot of money or resources of your team if 50% of your leads that are coming in are from referrals. You’re saying focus on that first?

Amy Appleton:

That is exactly what I’m saying, is that you need to focus on something that’s already working because you can probably have it work even better. There’s probably something else you can do to increase that, especially if it’s referral. Hopefully, that’s everyone that who’s listening though, their number one customer base is coming from referrals.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Yeah.

Amy Appleton:

That’s a different episode if we need to talk about that.

Lisa Zeeveld:

All right. So question number two, bonus question number two. As you said, a lot of this takes money and I know when you’re first starting out, you don’t have a lot of money, but even if you do or you don’t, you don’t know how much to allocate. I know when we first started Belay, that was one of the things that we spent a lot of time in. I, of course, managed our finances here. So I’m going to go straight for the money. We’re going to talk about money, but are there some benchmarks? Are there some things that are pretty typical? Now I know that everybody might not have this amount of money or this percentage of their revenue that they could spend, but are there any guidelines to even help them get started?

Amy Appleton:

That is a great question. I do remember we were scrappy back in the day.

Tricia Sciortino:

Scrappy is the word. Yeah.

Lisa Zeeveld:

We were. What do you mean we still are?

Amy Appleton:

Scrappy. I know. It comparison to where we were to where we are now. It doesn’t feel as scrappy.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Yeah.

Amy Appleton:

It’s exactly right. Yes. But yeah, I think there are a lot of things that you can do that don’t cost a whole lot of money. So number one, just a perfect example is your current client base. It does not cost a lot of money to get referrals, you just have to ask them. Hopefully, you have a great product or a great service and they’re happy too, guess what? That’s free, that’s words, that’s voice, but in terms of guidelines.

Lisa Zeeveld:

So like five percent, ten percent and…

Amy Appleton:

I was going to say a lot of people take, I think it varies on the comfort level, honestly, of the owner, but how aggressive they want to do it and I have heard like 3% to 5% are pretty healthy percentage in there, but then it also can’t just depend on how aggressive an owner wants that, three to five that’s a safe average standard.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Well, I know our new businesses will definitely appreciate just being given some guidelines because you never really know how much to spend and I think a lot of people air on, getting roped into what is cool and what is sexy and sometimes, they can spend too much in the wrong areas. So I know getting advice from established businesses like Belay and wonderful leaders like you, Amy, is super, super helpful to our listeners and thank you.

Tricia Sciortino:

Yeah Amy. Thank you for this world class marketing advice.

Amy Appleton:

The first person that someone should hire for their marketing department is what I’m going to call a marketing generalist. So a marketing generalist is the person who is going to become, basically they’re going to know everything about their product or their service or their brand. They are going to be the smee of all things for that person. And this is the person who can do a lot of things because that part doesn’t change at first. There’s still a lot of things that need to happen for marketing. So a generalist is going to be that brand expert. They’re actually going to know how to do quite a few things that you do for marketing already. They’re going to know how to do it already.

Tricia Sciortino:

They’re going to spin. They’re going to hold a lot of plates. They’re going to do all the things. They’re going to have a wide skillset.

Amy Appleton:

They’re going to have a wide skillset except for one thing and here’s the differentiator. They’re basically operators. They have strong operational and planning abilities. So now, a title for that, I’m calling it a Marketing Generalist. A title could be anything from Marketing Assistant to Marketing Coordinator to Marketing Manager. It just depends, budget, experience level that somebody’s looking for, they can come with different titles, but all of those people are able to spin a lot of plates, plan and execute, because that’s the other thing about marketing.

Tricia Sciortino:

Execution. Execute is my favorite word. It’s my love language.

Lisa Zeeveld:

But you’re saying this is not going to be the person who’s going to be super creative then, because I think that for me, I would just assume that if I’m hiring someone, the first hire from my marketing team, they’re going to be super creative, but that’s not what you’re saying, right?

Amy Appleton:

It is and that’s not what I’m saying and the reason that I’m having them lean in that other direction is, what we’re trying to do is alleviate the owner or whoever it is who’s currently doing it. So we’re trying to alleviate and have things taken off of that plate and that’s typically more of those things of being able to run and do a lot of general things. On the creative side, they do exist, so all those creatives out there.

Tricia Sciortino:

You are one, Amy. Amy, you are an operating ,marketing person and that’s very creative. So, you do exist.

Amy Appleton:

All right. They do exist. But yeah, but that’s it. You can have a million ideas, but if you can’t make an idea come from the idea stage to like it actually happened, that’s not marketing, that’s just great ideas.

Tricia Sciortino:

Gotcha.

Amy Appleton:

So that’s the first person is that marketing generalist.

Tricia Sciortino:

I love it. So a broad knowledge, executor, operator, first person who can handle a lot of different types of marketing. Okay. So then, what’s number two?

Amy Appleton:

All right. So number two is looking at what you already do and they’re specialist. You’re going to specialize. For a specialist, what they do is they bring very particular skill sets. You can usually get about two really good specialized skillset per person in a specialist role, so going way back to the beginning of the Belay marketing as an example, our specialist role that we hire, we didn’t have anyone who could do graphics, you don’t want me drawing anything.

Lisa Zeeveld:

That sounds like a challenge. I’m going to have to ask you to draw something now.

Amy Appleton:

You need a stick figure. I’m your girl.

Tricia Sciortino:

Clip art. Ever heard a clip art?

Amy Appleton:

Yeah, clip art? Exactly. If it’s outside of Canva, which is just a super simple tool, yeah, you don’t want me doing it. But that was a great example. So we needed someone who had a graphic design specialty. Now that graphic design specialty, there are other skills that happen to be things like being able to build a landing page, help out with our website, those type of things. Now I’m just talking about what we needed, but typically what somebody would do is go be like, “Okay, so in order to do either more marketing or different marketing or improve our marketing, what are more specialized skillsets that we’re going to need?” And then, so the next two are our specialist hires.

Tricia Sciortino:

So would those two depend on your business or where your brand is thriving? I imagine different business types. If we look at the wheel of marketing, we love our marketing wheel. If you look at the wheel of marketing, I imagine each organization is strong in different parts and maybe those are the areas. Is that what you would recommend?

Amy Appleton:

Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. So I’m saying that you need to look at, what you need done. In the wheel of marketing, more to come in a probably separate episode, but yes.

Tricia Sciortino:

Just think Vanna White.

Amy Appleton:

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Tricia Sciortino:

All the colors.

Amy Appleton:

It is. It’s in it’s simplistic form, it is literally a list of all the different type of marketing that you need done and, or do. Let’s say you’re going to look at those and it’s going to be customized then to each individual business on what those next two people need to be, but the good news is if you have your generalist, they can help make sure that your specialists, they basically become the project coordinator for the two specialists. So whether they report to that project coordinator, your marketing generalist or not, they ultimately can coordinate all the different pieces that go into the marketing.

Tricia Sciortino:

We are excited to have Amy Appleton, the Director of Marketing for Belay, back with us for a continued interview. In part one, she gave so much information and knowledge, we had to continue the interview.

Amy Appleton:

So good.

Tricia Sciortino:

Yes. And we have a fun interesting topic for today, Marketing Your Business by Committee. Amy, what does that mean?

Lisa Zeeveld:

I’m confused.

Tricia Sciortino:

What is this? You speak of.

Amy Appleton:

I know. So Marketing by Committee means we’re going to distribute the marketing that business owners are usually already doing to their internal team instead of hiring.

Tricia Sciortino:

Oh. Okay. So a pre-hire tactic potentially.

Amy Appleton:

Exactly. It is a pre-hire tactic to make sure that you can do more marketing, but it’s not the owner who is doing all of the marketing.

Tricia Sciortino:

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Lisa Zeeveld:

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Tricia Sciortino:

Well, so what do you do? So what is the strategy, the tactic that if you’re limited on resources, limited on funds, cost is a concern, what is the strategy that you recommend?

Amy Appleton:

So that is the Marketing by Committee.

Lisa Zeeveld:

This is where that fancy word fits in.

Amy Appleton:

That’s where the fancy word comes in and it is taking, so we have this thing at Belay, we call it the wheel of marketing. So it literally was a super easy way for us to visually show all the different pieces of marketing that we currently do at Belay. So Marketing by Committee is a way for someone to say, “Okay, these are the things that we are doing in marketing or want to do.” But don’t put a lot on that list, or want to do, and then identifying how you might divvy that up within your internal team and actually giving individuals on your team, certain responsibilities that are going to help further the marketing function of the business. Again, also, it’s also about freeing up a leader, owner’s time to stop doing that. They are typically one of the best sales people.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Yeah.

Amy Appleton:

Sales people, leader, they’re trying to figure out how to grow their business. If we can give them more time to do that, then that’s fantastic and that’s again, the Marketing by Committee.

Tricia Sciortino:

So Colleen, you talk a lot about entrepreneurs, executives, and managers who lead sales people, how they get stuck in what you refer to as the sales leadership insanity loop, by the way, I love that. Would you mind talking to us about that, explaining it to us and really why is it so important?

Colleen Stanley:

Well, you know what I found in my years, not only being a former VP of Sales, but also now for 20 years, working with sales teams is a lot of well intended CEOs and Sales Managers are working on the wrong end of the sales performance issue. So let’s start with hiring top sales people. Now, rightfully so, they’re going to be looking at what I call the hard skills, I often refer to this as a sales IQ. So do they have industry experience, number of years of selling experience, but when you sit down and talk to a CEO or VP of Sales as to why this hire didn’t work out, you never hear things like, “Well, they weren’t prospecting or hitting quota,” Which is going to sound a little amazing for your audience today. You’ll hear things like, “Bad attitude, wasn’t a good team player, bull in a China shop and didn’t care.”

Colleen Stanley:

So it’s often, they’re missing vetting for the soft skills. They’re very, very important skills that lead to retention and organization. When you take a look at training and development, so myself included, I love training the hard skills, negotiation, prospecting, asking good questions, but when you really examine closer, why salespeople aren’t demonstrating the right selling behaviors, it usually goes back to lack of development of a soft skill, EQ skills. So that’s the insanity loop where we’re actually having people, it’s the old diet and exercise program. I can go out and run 10 miles but if I come back and eat a bag of chips, which I love chips, not going to do much good, right?

Tricia Sciortino:

Donuts? Can we have donuts?

Colleen Stanley:

Yeah. So we’re actually only working on 50% of the success equation in many sales organizations.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Yeah.

Tricia Sciortino:

So why is it so important to then get out of that loop?

Colleen Stanley:

Well, if you like big headaches and big bruises, that’d be your first reason there, but I would particularly say in these tough business environments where everything’s getting more competitive, you have a lot of industries where there’s the commoditization factor happening faster and quicker. You really don’t have the luxury of being average. I don’t think you ever had the luxury being average, but today’s business environment is not kind to average sales people, average sales organizations. So if my team is only equipped with 50% of the skills, they’re probably not going to win a hundred percent of the business that they could or should. So it’s really giving them a hundred percent of the skills to be successful, not only in sales, but in life.

Lisa Zeeveld:

So, what are some of the common mistakes leaders make when designing the plan?

Lisa Seal:

First and foremost, I’d say not giving direction to the salesperson. They may have a plan, but they don’t go as far as actually the execution of the plan. So they need to make the salesperson have that target so they can be effective and so they can actually achieve it or come close to achieving it because if you send somebody out there without that direction or that target or an achievable number, you’re going to lose momentum very quickly and you’re never going to see the value of what that salesperson could effectively bring your organization.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Right.

Lisa Seal:

That would be one of the biggest ones that I can see. And then the other one I see quite often is capping a salesperson’s potential earnings. If you set it up correctly and they’re paying for themselves by the sales that they bring in, then why cap them? The more they sell, the more they make, the more you win as an organization. So that would be probably the biggest one.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Yeah. And here at Belay, I think that we accomplished that with even some accelerators, right? I feel like it’s a double motivation to not go to that, what people would see maybe is just their quota, but to exceed their quota.

Lisa Seal:

That’s right. Absolutely. Yeah, you never want them to, and we talk about this a lot is, you never want them to have a reason to what we say, sandbag. If you stop the incentives, they’re just going to hold wins for the next month or the next quarter, because you’ve capped them.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Yeah. I feel like that happens in a lot of maybe automotive industries or, sales folks that do that. I just let the cat out of the bag about one incentive that we do here at Belay, that accelerator, but let’s talk more about other additional incentives and what business owners should consider before even putting them into place.

Lisa Seal:

Yeah. So, before you put it into place, the word that comes to mind there is integrity. And the reason I say that is sales people are Uber competitive, and you mentioned this earlier, they’re super competitive and they’re super driven to win. So having a salesperson or a team with integrity is key because you can dangle the carrot and you want to make sure that the way they get to that carrot is actually in line with the visions of values of your organization, so that is key. Once you’re certain of that, ask yourself if the incentives that you have in place are encouraging the behaviors that you actually want.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Sure.

Lisa Seal:

Like I said, does that monthly quota encourage sandbagging? Or are you setting it up to where it doesn’t matter where they bring it in, June versus July, they still get to see the accomplishment and it’s not hurting anybody by them not reaching it in one month versus the next.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Right.

Lisa Seal:

That would be a big one. And then the accelerators that you put in place, are they realistic? Because if they’re not, again, you’re just going to see that motivation and that momentum that the salesperson potentially has, just dwindle away because they don’t feel like they can reach a goal. They’re just going to stop trying. So making sure that those incentives are actually achievable, not all the time, but they’re there to be reached.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

What a fun look back at some of the best marketing advice we’ve heard here on the One Next Step podcast. I particularly loved the advice that my boss Amy gave, all about hiring a marketing generalists as your first internal marketing hire. I think that advice can change your business as you are growing your team and focusing more on how to grow your marketing.

Ryan Fitzgerald:

I hope you’re enjoying the One Next Step podcast, as much as we are. And if you haven’t already, we would love for you to subscribe so that you never miss an episode. Thank you for listening and thanks to our guests for generously sharing their time and wisdom with us. If you’re ready to start accomplishing more and juggling less, go to belaysolutions.com. Join us next week for more practical tips and actionable tools to advance your business one step at a time, start by making today count.

Lisa Zeeveld:

Join us next week when our guest will be Nathan Artt, Owner & President of Ministry Solutions and the author of the new ebook, “Target Corp and The Flexible Church.” He’ll chat with us about what business and churches can learn from a major shift that Target made in 2014. Take a quick listen…

Nathan Artt:

The power of the digital platform is not 1990s TV advertising broadcast, taking my product that maybe 98% of you don’t want, but if I get in front of enough people, at least 2% of you will want it. That’s not the digital platform. Digital platform is about relevance. It’s about being able to give you what you are looking for at the time you need it most.

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