The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Are Your Leads Killing Your Business?: Post-Covid framework proven to attract, accelerate & activate the right clients to double your pipeline & revenues in 90 days for SaaS, Tech & B2B Services firms by Mark Osborne

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Are Your Leads Killing Your Business?: Post-Covid framework proven to attract, accelerate & activate the right clients to double your pipeline & revenues in 90 days for SaaS, Tech & B2B Services firms by Mark Osbornehttps://amzn.to/3P528Gy Modernrevenuestrategies.com CEOs, Sales & Marketing Leaders at SaaS, Tech & B2B Services Firms Covid-19 lockdowns accelerated major changes in the B2B buying world, fast-forwarding more than 10 years in less than 10 months. Businesses that have not adapted are being left behind. This innovative five-step method is built for B2B businesses struggling to navigate long decision cycles and complex buying committees to secure high-value contracts and grow monthly recurring revenues. It's a framework proven to DOUBLE pipeline quality and revenues in 90 Days by adapting to how B2B Buyers make decisions today. Attract the right leads to stack-up clients anxious to work with you and pay your worth Accelerate your pipeline for faster decision-making and deals that sell themselves Activate accounts to grow your market dominance through renewals, upsells, and advocacy Stop struggling to keep up with the deluge of growth hacks that don’t work and spending precious dollars on outdated lead gen tactics. Imagine instead having a consistent process to generate bankable monthly recurring revenue. Before, you wasted time chasing the 80% of prospects that delivered less than 20% of your revenues. You scrambled to generate leads only to find they were barely qualified, took too long to convert, required hard-to-deliver customizations, and inevitably churned. Your pipeline was lumpy at best and hard to predict for hiring and resource allocation. Meanwhile, your competitors pulled ahead. Now, relying on this five-step method, you can focus 80% of your efforts on the opportunities that move the needle. Magnetically attract the right customers who understand your value, are willing to pay a premium, and pre-qualify themselves before ever engaging with sales. The result is happy customers, eager to provide referrals as they grow with you, giving you the time to focus on building world-class solutions. This method is fine-tuned for how today’s B2B buyers discover, evaluate, and purchase high-value SaaS, Tech, and B2B Services post-Covid. It works, too. In just six months, one SaaS company doubled revenues, and gained a threefold increase in RFPs with zero additional advertising. Less than 20% of companies have implemented these approaches, but those that do report an average of more than 200% annual revenue growth. The Five-Step B2B Growth Framework and Go-To-Market Strategy Till the Right Soil: Create Clarity by setting goals for smart growth that deepen competitive advantage & speed up your revenue flywheel. Plant the Right Seeds: Uncover Strategic Insight into Who your audience is, What they care about, & Why you are the right solution. Nurture Growth: Focused execution puts your brand in the right places at the right times. Fertilize the Market with Demand Generation Water your seeds with Lead Generation Sun your seedlings with Account Based Marketing Hack the Weeds: Maximize success by measuring & optimizing against the metrics that matter, redoubling efforts that deliver the right results. Harvest & Replant: Continuous improvement through ongoing refinement of business strategy, plus growth & expansion of your best customers. Buy this book for concrete examples that distill thousands of hours of training & real-world experience into an easy-to-follow set of winning strategies. Evaluate the ideas, if they make sense for your business, implement this framework to create predictable revenues for your SaaS, Tech, or B2B services business.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the Chris Voss Show. Holy crap, I kind of hit a higher note there, man.

What's going on? I went all Michael Jackson there. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. As always, the Chris Voss Show is the family that loves you. All of you. We love all of you. We accept you all. You are one with us.

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Anyway, I don't know why that's a big deal, but it sounded funny in my head and it wasn't. So welcome to the show, my family and friends, uh, go to goodreads.com, 4chesschrisvos, youtube.com, 4chesschrisvos, linkedin.com, 4chesschrisvos, subscribe to the big LinkedIn, a newsletter, the 130,000 group on LinkedIn. And we're starting to make traction and be cool on TikTok, even though we're old and we smell like dust, the young kids tell us. So go to Chris Foss 1 on TikTok and the Chris Foss Show podcast on TikTok as well. We're going to be talking business, business leads.

And we have an author of an amazing book that's out called Are Your Leads Killing Your Business? And he gives you the framework that you can use to double your business, your pipeline, your revenues, especially if you're in the SaaS tech and B2B services. So we'll be talking to him today about his amazing book. And you're going to learn a lot and maybe some of you can make more money or learn to make more money. Those of you who are entrepreneurs out there or want to be entrepreneurs or people in the SaaS business as well, SaaS business is really huge.

We'll get into what that means here in a bit. He's the author of the newest book that just came out, April 6th, 2023. Mark Osborne joins us on the show today and his book, you can find wherever fine books are sold, stay away, there's alleyway bookstores. Are your leads killing your business? A post-COVID framework proven to attract, accelerate, and activate the right clients to double your pipeline and revenues in 90 days for SaaS tech B2B services firms. He joins us on the show and we'll be talking about his stuff, but he's got an amazing bio. I think you're going to be very impressed by it and him when he finally gets around to coming on the show because I'm going to read his bio first. See how we do things

on the show? Anyway, he was named by Ad Age Magazine as a marketing technology trailblazer in 2017 and author of the number one best-selling b2b marketing book on amazon this year mark has over two decades of experience creating revenue system for sas technology and b2b services firms he's built marketing solutions for many of the fortune 500 and for successful business partnerships for multiple companies with metaa, Google, and other platforms. He has an MBA from the University of SoCal, and he focused on marketing and participating in the startup incubator at the School Center for Entrepreneurial Studies. He works as a fractional CMO, just a fraction, so we'll get into what that means, For B2B firms, guiding CEOs and sales leaders with systems and strategies they need to adapt to today's challenging B2B landscape and achieve predictable business success.

And when he's not talking about marketing sales and appearing on great podcasts like ours or the greatest podcasts like ours, he enjoys creating tiki drinks in his home bar and sport fishing for marlin tuna and dorado no sharks welcome to the show how are you mark i'm doing great chris thanks so much for having me there you go no sharks no sharks you know sharks are uh sharks are part of the ecosystem so you certainly bump into them yeah uh but you don't don't typically target those as a sport fish there you go i try not to bump into them either especially so mark give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. Modernrevenuestrategies.com. And in fact, for all of your listeners today that are interested in the book, if you add a forward slash free download, the book is available there for your listeners exclusively for free. And they'll also get bonus calculators,

templates to sort of put a lot of the practices from the book into play, as well as they'll get a follow-up email with some bonus videos and some other free trainings as well. There you go. So what motivated you to write this book? Yeah, so it's funny.

I've been working in this space for 20 years and there's been a lot of sort of long term trends that were taking place. And then when the COVID lockdowns happened, a lot of companies just kind of put everything on pause. But in fact, trends that were already happening sort of accelerated by, you know, people say by 10 years and 10 months. I think McKinsey consultants sort of made that statement. And then, so a lot of the companies just sort of put things on pause when they came back to it, you know, a year and a half later, they were 10 years behind their competitors that had adapted to these sort of changing sort of trends in the marketplace. And so that really sort of brought a sharp focus on the real difference

between those businesses that are doing things right and those that aren't. And so I wanted to kind of put together a framework that would make it easier for businesses to adapt and then for businesses that are at an earlier stage in their process to do it right from the beginning. And it's all about, you know, really systems and creating systems that work instead of chasing growth hacks or, you know, trying to game the system, you know, game the algorithm, as a lot of people are doing. You know, I've worked in, you know, marketing and technology and data for so long, as you mentioned, you know, advertising age, name me a trailblazer. So I have all of the sort of tips and tricks and hacks under my belt. But what I have seen is it's really creating systems that drive success and building systems like that will also really set you free from sort of the worry of what's going to be the next hack that's going to drive growth for my business. So you can have a system that you work.

There you go. And would you say that's a good 30 foot, 30,000 overview of the book? Yeah, for sure. So, you know, it starts with, you know, kind of an overview of what's really changed in the marketplace and really sort of highlighting, you know, the things that we've seen and what those long-term trends are. Trends around businesses using more technology, less face-to-face interaction, businesses taking longer to make decisions, businesses having even more complex buying committees with even more people on there

as they make decisions around SaaS tech and B2B services. And then what companies can do to adapt to that, which is around sort of creating clarity on what your goals and objectives are. I call it, sort of put it through a growth mindset of tilling the right soil and then planting the right seeds and then nurturing those seeds as they grow, hacking out the weeds does really sort of optimize those things that are going to make an impact. And then, you know, really harvesting and replanting to maximize your success and grow as you go forward.

There you go. I'm going to tease out some things here because there's some funny stories coming up. We're going to tease out. But we're going to talk about the time you burned a customer's business down. You baked 100 cakes. But let's talk about your origin story. Did that start with John Mayer, the guitarist and singer? A little bit. You got into marketing.

But give us your origin story so people can hear a little bit into marketing but give us give us your origin story so people for those of you who were old like me uh in the early days of the internet you might remember that uh there were usenet and bbs billboards because you couldn't get onto the internet every day in fact maybe once a week you had access to the internet so you'd go to like a billboard you you'd post a note and your username was your email address. There's no such thing as spam. Didn't exist yet. And so people would go on and they would trade bootleg concert tapes from bands that they had seen that they had the concert tape. Well, I was managing bands at the time, playing in some bands. And so I found these groups and then I realized, well,

if you've got Dave Matthews in Birmingham, you like bands that sound like Dave Matthews and you live somewhere near Birmingham. So I started building databases of people that were fans of these different genres that lived in different areas. And then when one of my bands, you know, went to that area that sounded like Dave Matthew matthews that sent them all an email i was selling out uh concerts for unknown bands which led to a job at a record label read to it led to a job at a radio station uh and and really sort of the rest is history that's how i got into marketing but along the way i had the extreme privilege of you know sort of meeting john mayer and played a few shows with him and the guys in the Zach Brown band

and a number of other folks that are out there really doing great work today. That's funny. I had the same sort of journey. I mean, it didn't get me into marketing, but I was a Rush fan. And so I would buy collectibles of Rush and you would find people selling them. So I would create groups of Rush stuff. Okay. So I would buy collectibles and I'd buy two of everything and I'd keep one for me and then I'd sell the other, usually for double or triple what I'd buy it for.

And I used, I think this is a gold mine thing. But yeah, we do those other things. And I actually said to my business partner at the time, I'm like, you know, these we you know you'd run an auction right and i'm like these auctions are amazing we should do a thing where we scale this to something much larger and within two years ebay came out so we like the idea for you but those are those are fun times back then it was wild man i run auctions the wild west of the internet. Yeah, there you go. So this leads you into marketing. And then where do you go from there? You start working for some people or working for yourself? Yeah. So, you know, I actually had a sort of stable career in broadcast and was running a top 10 station and a top 10 market. But the thing that got me

really passionate about marketing to begin with was sort of creating these, you know, one to one relationships at scale and using data and technology to understand customers. I read Seth Godin's Permission Marketing in like, you know, 99. And, you know, he talks all about sort of the sort of customization at scale. And that's what had gotten me excited. And so I moved from broadcast media into the digital domain where you could do so much more of this, you know, sort of customization at scale, did my MBA focused on analytics, worked for a company that put some of the very first ads on Instagram, as part of a as a partner with Facebook. And we were doing some things where we were using all of the data on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram to make predictive models

using machine learning on whether or not someone would respond to an ad. So we were the first people to sort of game that algorithm on Facebook and Instagram to try to get more results. But as I got deeper and deeper into sort of these technology things and worked with, you know, larger and larger brands, I realized that it was all of that sort of minutiae wasn't where the results came from. The results really came from focusing on, you know, building a system that you could work and optimize, founded in really sort of uh you know traditional strategies that

were proven to work that's where the real market leaders were emerging from not from people who were chasing hacks or you know trying to you know game the algorithm there you go so uh coming back to the book you titled it are your leads killing your business so how how does that work how can the business leads prospective customers sales opportunities actually kill your business. So how does that work? How can the business leads, prospective customers, sales opportunities actually kill your business? Yeah, it's a funny story. So in business, there's obviously an obsession with growth. Businesses are meant to grow like sharks that we talked about earlier. They always have to be moving forward. And so that has led to this sort of obsession with, I need more leads. I need more leads. I need more leads to grow.

But what I have seen over the past couple of decades working with companies is that if it's not the right leads, it can actually be really detrimental to you. And the reason why is the wrong leads will, you know, sort of they're the worst customers in the marketplace. And they will distract you from sort of building the products and solutions that the marketplace really wants. They'll make you build for them. And then that pulls you further behind your competitors who are building for the market instead of building for one particular customer. Likewise, if you're sort of chasing leads, you don't have a system for attracting the right folks, then you are expending even more energy on trying to chase those leads, trying to close those deals. When if you were going after the right folks, they'd be ready to buy because they'd understand your value proposition and they'd want to work with you.

Whereas instead, when you're sort of chasing the wrong leads, they take up even more of your resources. And then after they've burned up a lot of energy just trying to get them to be a customer, then distracted you from your core business when they were customers, they don't renew and they don't grow and they don't serve as a referral or testimonial for you in the marketplace. So that becomes sort of this death spiral where you're sort of chasing more and more of the wrong quality of leads, which then sort of distracts your business and pulls you down. Meanwhile, your competitors that have systems to attract the right prospects and then systems to accelerate those prospects through the decision-making pipeline are growing because they're building

the solutions that the marketplace wants. They're getting customers that are advocating for them in the marketplace. They're getting more and more renewals and upsells. And so if you're not bringing in the right leads, your leads could be killing your business because they're pulling you further and further behind the market. There you go. And there's certain, you know, there's an adage that the customer is always right, but it depends on the customer, I think, and what they're up to. There are some very, I don't know what the right psychological term is, but there are some clients that you can do business that are very abusive. They don't really value your services. They just, they're just trying to, they have no win-win sort of mentality.

They're just, they're just trying to just strip you for everything you can. And I see a lot of people that do business with them, a lot of coaches and consultants and different things. My friends on Facebook sometimes complain about a client that they chose that turned into like a nightmare client. And, uh, and being able to identify those things things i'm really good at identifying those people up front you know they they look every gift horse that comes across you can offer them the best thing in the world and they'll still you know have 5 000 questions they'll want to get on like a two-hour

call and uh and you're like dude if you can't if you're not smart enough to recognize what we're offering here as a great deal move along i don't have time for you because those people will always be the ones that if you agree to do business with them they will constantly drain you pick at you nickel and dime you they will come up with they're like they're like walking sabotage machines just like you talk about and they will sabotage your, just like you talk about. And they will sabotage your business. And usually, you know, if you're dumb enough to go do business with them, you get halfway through and you'll just be like, you're fired if you're smart.

But usually, learning to recognize them up front, like you say, attract the right customers. You know, one thing you seem to talk about a lot and you mentioned this is systems how important are systems because you know automation and and and being able to have a system you know there's an old adage if you plan to fail or if you fail the plan you plan to fail i didn't plan that uh quoting that i did actually i'm old uh so tell us about why systems like yours are important and building them. Yeah, for sure. So for starters, we do our best work when we can follow a system that can be optimized. And so without a system, even if you're an expert, you can have a bad day.

A system never has a bad day. And so if you can use a system to sort of hold yourself accountable to doing your best work, then you'll you'll always do your best work. And also by creating a system, then you see those opportunities to layer in technology, to layer in data, because it's part of an overarching strategy instead of it's the only sort of thing that you're doing. And so it is the strategy. And data isn't a strategy. Technology isn't a strategy. They're tools. They're tactics that can be used to advance the strategy. The other thing that I find with creating systems is not only does it help you do your best self, not only does it help you sort of identify opportunities to optimize and get better,

but it creates a lot more harmony and alignment within an organization. Because as a marketing leader, if you can create a system and then people work that system, you don't have to come wag your finger at someone and say you did a bad job. Instead, did you follow the system? Well, yes, I did. Well, then what? Let's fix the system together. What's broken about the system?

You can really sort of empower your employees to do their best work. And it even becomes sort of part of their job description that they're working on improving the system. And then if they didn't follow the system, it's, well, is there something bad about the system that didn't fall that you, you know, aren't able to follow it? Or did you veer away from what you sort of intended to do? And, and so it brings into sort of sharp relief, you know, really how to get better as an organization systems also sort of make it easy for you to not have sort of single person dependency. A lot of businesses, no one can go on vacation because there's just enough people to do the job and people aren't cross trained. But when you have systems and sort of documented systems in place, then someone can go on vacation and someone else can do that work. move on to a bigger opportunity or retire because the system is doing so, or the company's doing so

well, you've now got a system in place that's going to continue to maintain that high performance. There you go. And now inside the book, you have a system called the five-step B2B growth framework and go-to market strategy. Let's tease a little bit out of that if we can. People need to buy the book so they can get the deets, but let's tease a little bit of that out. Yeah. So, you know, when I was first working on it, I kind of was just sort of writing a playbook, like to tell businesses that I've been consulting with and people that I work with, like, here's the nature of the world today. And here's how we need to respond to it if we want to find success.

And so I sort of wrote these things down. And then as I decided like, man, I should kind of put this into a book, might as well publish this. And so then someone I was talking with about the book was like, you know, like go ahead and do the cute thing. Like make an analogy around growth and use some plants. And so I did that and sort of worked that framework within there.

But the five steps are really, you know, first is tilling the right soil. So you create clarity by setting smart goals, getting your team together and team alignment. Then the next is sort of planting the right seeds, which is around sort of getting insight into who your audience is, what they care about, why you're the right solution. The real deliverable there is this sort of really differentiated positioning strategy. Then you get into nurturing the growth of these seeds by fertilizing the marketplace with demand generation or getting people to sort of want solutions like yours. And then you water your seeds with lead generation where you're really sort of capturing that interest so you can have those one to one relationships with prospects.

And then you sun your seedlings with a sort of account based marketing and really sales actions that pulls them through. Then you get into hacking the weeds by focusing on and measuring the metrics that matter so that you can optimize success. And then you harvest and replant by really sort of expanding the growth of your best prospects. There you go. And once again, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. And so having a strategy keeps you engaged. There's so many different distractions we have, too, on everything we do. And all great businesses have systems. Any of my companies that I owned, you know, you focus on what's the system from customer entry point or lead entry point to final business transaction and where that goes from there and perfecting that system in between.

And so that it just runs like a fine-tuned machine and can get things done for you. So you act as a fractional CMO, I think, for companies. Tell us what that means for the layman out there who don't understand what that means and what SaaS companies do. I mean, let's define that, lay a foundation for that if we could. Yeah, absolutely. So in the B2B space, so these are companies that build solutions for other companies. And oftentimes these solutions are, you know, software as a service. That's what SaaS stands for, which is, you know, fundamentally it's like a technology solution, but it's not sort of hard technology

that you hold or that you install in your machine. It kind of lives in a cloud. And to use that technology, you need some service to go along with it, sort of train you and show you how to use it. That's really what SaaS companies do. And technology companies do something similar, but maybe in some different formats. And then B2B services like advertising services or marketing agencies, ad tech. These companies are typically dealing with sort of pretty large contracts. So they might have sort of a large deal that they'll close that'll last like a year or even multiple year contracts. And whenever there's a large contract in the B2B space these days, there's a pretty complex committee of people that are going to weigh in and evaluate.

There's a decision maker whose team is going to use the solution. There's the person who's going to oversee the actual implementation of the solution and get the results. Oftentimes there's a technical person that says, well, will this work with our data and our systems? And so all of those complex people mean that it's a long decision cycle. And so this dynamic of large contracts with a large complex buying committee and then a long buying cycle has some specific needs to it. And so that's where I've developed a number of these systems to account to sort of suit those needs specifically. And the sort of fractional CMO thing, what I have seen is, you know, a lot of businesses, someone's an industry leader, they see a way to do things better in their industry. So they go found a company to do that. And they build a product and

they find a few of their initial customers or people that they knew in the industry, find that product market fit, replicate themselves with a sales leader and kind of go to market and get to that sort of $1 million mark or $2 million mark. And then they're like, well, how do I get to $10 or $20 million? And that's where they really need sort of executive leadership. It's hard, though, to bring in a full-time CMO. CMOs are expensive, comes with some politics, they want equity, there's overhead costs of getting them a laptop and a desk and all those things. And so as a fractional CMO, I can come in and provide all of that value without all of that overhead costs. ROI B2B growth guarantee that I'll guarantee you'll see a 10x return on your investment with me within six months because you come in and be really focused on what's going to grow your business rather than, well, let me figure out what the office politics are and get to know everybody

and some of those other things. And that growth guarantee might be focused on, you know, building, hiring, training your team. It might be focused on, you know, just documenting and putting systems into place that we can then optimize. But because I'm focused really on delivering results, I can make that guarantee. Whereas a full-time CMO that might have a $250,000 a year price tag, you're probably not going to see a 10X ROI on that hire within the first six months. There you go. So in your book, you talk about a post-COVID framework in the title. That's right. What were the significant things that shifted in the business post-COVID? Yeah, so a few things happened. So it's funny. Humans moved to this sort of desire for more connectivity from lockdown.

So during lockdown, like we all felt isolated and we wanted to be a part of something. But businesses saw the efficiency that came from not having that personal interaction and moved to many more Zoom calls and a lot less going to conferences and a lot less going on site to meet with clients. And so there's an interesting dynamic there of the humans that are making these business decisions have one sort of desire, but the business context has a different sort of framework. And so there's this drive towards efficiency within the business space that means less human interaction. A lot of buyers have said they would like to not interact with a human at all. I want to be able to just essentially go online, see your pricing and see your pricing and then a decision, and then only interact with a human where I need it. Whereas a lot of B2B companies are very used to, you know, a company would start to evaluate solutions in your marketplace, and they'd call you and be like, hey, so I'm evaluating solutions, what should I care about? What should I be looking for? And your salespeople would get a

chance to, you know, really talk to them about what they were looking for, really understand their needs and then talk about why their solution might be a good fit for their needs or not. and went to a very matter of factual interaction within the B2B space, you have to be influencing this decision-making process independent of salespeople. And so you have to have the content that's going to really speak to the different stages of decision-making from, well, do I need to solve this problem at all? To, well, there are probably five ways to solve this problem. Which one's the right way for me? Well, I've decided to solve it this way. What are the best providers that solve it that way? Well, what's the difference between provider A, B, and C? Whereas that used to be a conversation with a salesperson, now it's done through content and it's done through a lot of automated

behaviors that if you haven't adapted to that as a business, you're really being left behind. A lot of businesses, their approach to the marketplace is let's write a white paper once every quarter and let's put it on our website. And if you give us your email address, we'll give you the white paper. And once we get that email address, it's a qualified lead. And then the salesperson starts talking to them. But 70% of the buyer's journey is done before they talk to a salesperson today. And so if you're not impacting that 70%, you're just getting left behind. You're left with only the worst customers. And that's how your leads can kill your business because the best customers, the best providers have understood.

So those best customers are making decisions like this. We need to influence their decision-making like that. And so they're doing that. But if you're still stuck in these old school approaches, you're only left with sort of the worst customers out there because they aren't willing to pay the premium to work with the best providers. And so you're left with those. That the entry point yeah that's very interesting and and it makes sense because uh you know people that are smart like you know i i don't know that i'm that smart but i can recognize value and maybe it's because i've always been a salesperson or maybe uh you know like i i used to you know i i've i've always you know uh if if someone sells

me i'm probably a little bit more open to it and a little bit more empathetic than if somebody doesn't. Unless you come door to door anymore. I don't deal with door to door anymore. I'm nice and I'm polite on my ring, but I'll just be like, no, we're not interested. But yeah, that's the one thing I'm just not going to take your pitch. But this is really important. And I like how you mentioned to take your pitch. But, you know, this is really important. And I like how

you mentioned the game has changed. And maybe a lot of people are here complaining about bad clients or toxic clients they get into. This is a great lesson for them. And so let's get into some of the teasers that we teased out. How the hell did you burn down on your customer's business and why? So one of the things that happens when you're not chasing a high quantity of terrible leads, when you attract the right leads to your businesses, you can give them the attention they deserve. And so you can really be customized in everything that you're doing with that particular customer and really stand out, which is how you then win the business of your best uh potential customers but sometimes those efforts to stand out are a little ill-fated so survivor is still a pretty popular show but yeah when it first came out it was you

know a behemoth like everyone talked about it at the water cooler every day. It really dominated pop culture in some really interesting ways. So as part of a pitch that we were doing for a company, we decided to dress up in pith helmets and dress like Jeff Probst. And we had tiki torches, and we were going to come in and do this story, you know, sort of blended into the pitch about, you know, being the last one on the island and surviving. So we went into the lobby and we said, we're here to see so-and-so. Okay, we'll let them know you're here. And so we all lit up our tiki torches. And I don't know if you know this, but tiki torches actually make a little more black smoke than you wish they did. And we were standing right under a fire detector.

And so within a few minutes, the fire alarm went off, the sprinklers went off. We didn't wind up burning the building down, but we did cause it to evacuate. And so then we sheepishly are in the parking lot, see the buyer that we're there to meet with. And we're like, so we're the reason that you had to evacuate your building today. But we explained, look, your business means enough to us that we wanted to really, you know, sort of customize and they were forgiving enough to then listen to the pitch. And and then we actually wound up closing the business. So there you go. But it was one of those things that if we were just pumping through a high volume of of leads and not sort of picking out those really well qualified and those high value,

you know, ideal customers, we wouldn't have had the opportunity to really customize it. Now, maybe we wouldn't have, you know, set off the fire alarm, but maybe we would have never gotten around to really giving that customer the time they deserved. There you go. Well, I mean, you know, effort, uh, you know, in the old days, I always used to, I would go out for a company and visit, uh, you know, these, these industrial places and you'd have to talk to the buyer for the big industrial stuff. And there was always the two or three gatekeepers that were like, you know, you couldn't get by them, no matter how many flowers you bought or candy or whatever.

It was a whole game. But that's a great way to maybe get the buyer to meet you is you just uh set up the fire alarms and then he comes out and and he has to talk to you because you're just standing around the parking lot waiting for all the stuff to dry uh tell us about the hundred cakes the time you bake a hundred cakes sure so a similar kind of exercise but this was actually um a product launch for a company uh where they had realized that their best customers were at ad agencies. And so, and their competition wasn't really focusing on these ad agency

prospects. I don't know if you have much experience with working with folks at ad agencies, but they tend to work long hours and they don't get to leave their desk. So food is always a valuable sort of asset there. And so by identifying that their best prospects and ideal customers were ad agencies, we actually timed a press release to sort of hit the hit the web at a certain time. And we timed a personalized cake to be delivered to every one of these ad agencies with a link to the press release talking about how our service was specifically designed to work well for ad agencies and different from everyone else in the marketplace that was trying to cut the ad agencies out of the equation and go direct to brands. And so when that arrived, along with the press release, and then we had a call campaign that immediately hit those people within 15 minutes of the cake being delivered, to sort of say, did you get the cake? Did you see the press release? Can we tell you about how we're sort of perfectly suited to delivering for your services? It made a real big impact.

And their competitors were spending a ton of money on big glossy ads and trade shows and really dominating a lot of the industry conferences. And this company really couldn't sort of compete with that level of spin. So we had to be a little more aggressive and a little more guerrilla by finding that really niche audience that we could serve better than the competitors. And then by crafting our messaging to really sort of speak to them and then take it to them in a really neat fashion, we actually doubled their revenues in less than 90 days with no additional ad spend. All those cakes were paid for with stuff that they had been spending on. Well, all of our competitors are at this conference. We got to at least buy a banner. And rather than

wasting that money to be, well, we're also here. We made a really big difference and stood out in the way that took them to their first half million a month that they'd ever experienced. There you go. That is brilliant. It's a lot of cake, but it's a lot of cake, but you know, if you feed people, you know, we used to throw pizza parties for, uh,

some of our clients. Uh, but, uh, there you go. Uh, so how do people do business with you? Who are your clients,

uh, that you, that work best with you, you know, size, size, what is their size and what is their spend maybe, or wherever you format that. And then how do they onboard with you?

For sure. Yeah. So reach out to you to onboard. Again, I work pretty much exclusively with B2B companies that are experienced those long sales cycles, complex buying committees for large contracts. That's really where I add the most value because that's where my expertise lies. And typically when they get to about a million or 2 million a year in revenues, that's when they really value some external expertise. So that's where I add the most value. And then once they get up to about 20 million in revenues, they should have a full-time CMO on board. But I can set up the sort of people processes, technology, those systems so that when they do hire that full-time CMO, they can, you know, hit the ground running and

really catapult to the a hundred million in revenues rather than just trying to get everything together. So that's sort of who I work with. The way to engage with me, you know, again, as I said, this 10x B2B growth ROI guarantee where I will pretty much guarantee that within six months you'll get a 10x return on your investment with us. Wow. And the reason we can make that guarantee is because we're using systems that create a lot of leverage, we can really identify the biggest opportunity. And sort of the first place that people engage with us is, you know, let's do a 30 minute call. See if I've got the, you know, the expertise that you need and sort of to solve the problems that you have. If we do, we'll do another free strategy session. We'll spend an hour together really sort of talking about what you're what you're trying to do, what your current blockers are.

I'll come up with some ideas for you that at the very least, you'll walk away with some interesting ideas. And then pretty often at that point, we'll do what we call our sort of half day collaboration session. And I'll spend two weeks auditing all of your marketing as part of your business that sort of exists today. And we'll come up with a 90-day bulletproof marketing strategy that I know will make a 10x impact on your business at the end of that half day. And then you can go and do that on your own. Or if you need some help implementing that in your business, then I can be there to help you on an ongoing basis. There you go. There you go. And they can reach out to your website and do a number

of things where they can click for services, brochure, schedule a free consultation. You offer different things like half-day B2B growth strategy sessions, fractional B2B CMO partners, B2B revenue advisors, and some different case studies people can look at there where they can check out your services. So this has been really insightful. I was looking at your LinkedIn. I noticed you talk about some different tie-ins with Barbie and how to hijack. I call it hijacking when people, you know, take a marketing concept and hijack it. I think you call it newsjacking. Barbie newsjacking works in B2B marketing.

Let's tease that out a little bit for the fun SEO of Barbie, the Barbie movie. For sure. I guess we're newsjacking at this point. That's right. Well, and so, you know, one of the things that I've actually done a lot, so we talked about, you know,

that your buyers aren't engaging your salespeople very early. So you need to be where your buyers are. And oftentimes they're interested in topics that, you know, are impacting topics that are impacting pop culture. And we talked about the human aspect of the B2B buyer, the actual person there. When you really understand that person by building out a persona or an avatar of who your buyers are, you can understand the content that they care about. And so, for example, if your customer is the type of person that's interested in Barbie

for whatever reason, they tie into the themes of the movie or they just like movies or whatever it might be, creating content that talks about how your business fits in with that is going to get it on their radar. It'll give them that hook that will then give you enough time to then talk a little bit about your business so that now you're creating, you're generating some demand for your type of solution. And so, you know, a common thing that people did, you know, with the Barbie thing was talk about how Barbie was marketed as a way of, you know, talking about how, you know, that pertains to their business or whatever it might be.

That's that sort of newsjacking idea. Yeah. And I mean, when you when you hype on stuff like that, you know, everyone's searching for it. You know, there's there's lots of hype around the movie. I think the movie is broken a billion and probably do really well. That's right. I mean, I don't know why someone didn't do this movie beforehand. I mean, women from, I think, I don't know if Barbie started before my generation,

but, you know, we grew up with G.I. Joes and girls had Barbies. And, I mean, that was, I'm old, so that was like 40 years ago when I was a kid, 45 years ago when I was a kid. And so all these generations of women had grown up with Barbie. Like, why not make a barbie movie like duh that seems like a big duh i don't know it's funny i i saw a an interesting article so um my wife actually has her own agency too and she works with a lot of the movie studios

as clients um and um so we pay attention to you know variety and know, variety and a lot of the stuff around movies. And they were saying that a lot of people are taking away the wrong lesson from Barbie. The lesson isn't we should make more movies about toys. The lesson is we need more movies about women by women that tell, you know, sort of women-centric stories, which I thought was a really sort of interesting perspective and lens uh through which to to look at you know what makes a movie a phenomenon yeah it's you know i mean it's it's kind of funny too i guess they addressed in the movie i didn't see the movie but yeah definitely newsjacking i love that i call hijacking but i gotta i gotta start using newsjacking because

the fbi calls me every time i say hij jack and that's never good um but uh you know especially don't i'm just not going to do an all akbar joke uh but anyway there you go uh so any final thoughts as we go out you want to share with the audience yeah i mentioned this at the beginning but uh again just for your audience and exclusively for your audience anyone that wants a copy of the book uh i'm going to make 100 copies available. So just go to modernrevenuestrategies.com slash free download and they can get a copy of the book there.

Again, I'll send some free videos and training as well as some templates for the first 100 people that download that. But happy to provide it and happy to answer any questions. As I said, the first 90 minutes is free. And so I'm happy to sort of add value. And I love learning about businesses and thinking about ways that they can grow. And so my favorite part of the job is really sort of getting to know entrepreneurs and sales leaders, CEOs that are trying to grow businesses

and help them come up with creative ways to do that. And especially if you can identify bad customers from good, higher quality people that value your services. I mean, I've had customers for our companies that have been with us for 10, 15 years and from the very beginning. And they're loyal as hell. They're great people and they value what you do. And they're great people and they value what you do

and they stick with you because they value what they do and you know they get approached all the time by uh competitors and hopefully if you built a good enough system like what you've taught taught about and talked about is is they can't leave your system because they're addicted to such a great system um you know they look at other people's like no this you know you know chris got me tied up i mean we never had contracts for our early companies at all but we would keep customers for 10 to 15 years because uh we were just so good at what we did and our services were so good at what they did no one could compete with us and and we'd innovate a lot of our systems and and that makes all the difference you know

a comfortable client who doesn't have to think about you know babysitting your inability to you know have a good system and do your job right and stuff they love that and so you know we used to our one company silver street express we used to call the big uh the company you know about but you never see um because we would have an overnight service and delivery system that was unlike anyone else. And it serviced our clients. I think I wrote about my book, Beacon's Leadership. Anyway, thanks for coming on the show, Mark.

We really appreciate it. Hey, yeah, Chris. It was a real pleasure. Give us a.com again, so people can find that on the interwebs, please, as we close out. Sure. ModernRevenueStrategies.com. There you go.

Order up the book, folks, on top of that, wherever fine books are sold. Are your leads killing your business? The post-COVID framework proven to attract, accelerate, and activate the right clients to double your pipeline and revenues in 90 days for sas tech and b2b service firms available april 6 2023 uh thanks to honest for tuning in as always go give us a five-star review over there on itunes we certainly love you guys we do and we should read them on the show because they're so lovely and they warm my heart and i feel touched and i just i just curl up with a a couple of them in the bed at night and just go, oh, people love me. They like me.

What is that old SNL skit? Anyway, go to goodreads.com. Forrest, that's Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com. Forrest, that's Chris Voss. YouTube.com. Forrest, that's Chris Voss. See what we're doing over at Chris Voss 1 on TikTok.

We're starting to make some traction over there. Even though we're old, decrepit, and we smell like dusk, according to the kids. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time.