Videos are valuable tools nowadays for a company’s marketing. Thus, in this Expert Insight Interview, Guy Bauer discusses mistakes that B2B marketers make when creating their videos. Guy Bauer is a Founder and Creative Director of Umault, a B2B video marketing agency.

The interview discusses:

• Common mistakes
• Scripting element
• Creating a story

Common Mistakes

People usually rush into making a video and end up with a video that lacks strategy or creativity. Also, so many brands make fancy and expensive videos but still miss the message they are trying to get to their target audience. Since making videos is now easier than before, the rush to get them out as fast as possible trumps the strategic part. But with the rush also come low production value and low-quality content. Thus, brands have to overcome the “go fever” phenomenon, in which they overlook all potential barriers because of the huge rush to launch.

People remember the end results and not the effort that you put into getting there. Thus, if your video turns out to be a failure, your boss will not remember rushing you into it and how you did impossible to meet the deadline. Instead, what your boss will remember is that the video was not successful. The best thing to do is to slow down and prepare for the long journey of creating a high-quality video.

The Scripting Element

Scripting a business presentation does not give you enough knowledge and skills to script a video. A sales sheet with bullet points cannot become a video. The video is its own form of art with colors, sounds, music effects, etc. It takes an expert to make sure that the visual is in alignment with the audio part. An expert knows how to leverage all data streams available.

The Story

Many brands have videos that start great but finish badly. That is because writing a story is hard, and not everyone can do it. A video has to have a story that resonates with people. In this case, it is not about having much information but a significant few. People usually remember only around five percent of the content but 100 percent of how a video made them feel. Thus, do not try to communicate all the information about your product or service in a video but rather one or two main points. Then, shift the focus on creating a feeling for your audience. Allowing your audience to feel and connect with your video is the best differentiation strategy you can have.

And lastly, your video has to match your company’s voice and your values. You have to be brave and take the risk to be different, but it always makes an impact and brings you a win by default.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Every marketing company has its own marketing funnel. Thus, in this Expert Insight Interview, Shauna Armitage discusses why the Relationship Marketing Funnel will drive your brand growth. Shauna Armitage is a Fractional Marketing Director for early-stage startups and a startup-related Podcast Host.

The interview discusses:

Steps in the relationship marketing funnel
Brand partnerships
Brand relationships
Customer relationship

Relationship Marketing Funnel

The very top of the relationship marketing funnel is brand awareness. Brand awareness takes time, money, and effort, but it is essential for sales. Next comes the conversion event, which does not have to be a sale. For example, it can be a person leaving his or her contact information. The nurturing stage allows for building a connection with customers to bring them to the sale. And lastly, come retention and brand advocacy.

Brand Partnerships

Surprisingly, brand partnerships are magnets for brand awareness. Brand partnerships provide a win-win situation for both sides by allowing leveraging each other’s audiences. They are an excellent opportunity for new and small companies that are tight on advertising budgets. Usually, two brands that go into partnership have the synergy, possibly share the same values, serve the same audience differently, and find a way to cross-promote each other. For example, a company that builds a food product will work with companies that provide food ingredients. Another way is a partnership with companies that are different and have a unique offering for their customers.

Brand Relationships

Building relationships with other brands and doing brand networking is essential because brands have a significant influence. Thus, making sure to achieve a win-win situation for both sides is necessary to nurture brand relationships. When two brands collaborate, there are so many other ways to get brand awareness besides digital marketing. But it takes a good understanding of the brand you work with, brainstorming, and thinking outside of the box to find ways to stand out with the customers.

Customer Relationships

On the other side, building customer relationships is all about retention and brand advocacy. Customer retention means giving your customers a reason to purchase. Regarding brand advocacy, word of mouth is still a significant influence because people will always turn to other people for advice. Making your customers advocate for your business is incredibly valuable. But first, you have to build trust with your customers, and you can do that by constantly making them valued. One of the best strategies for it is communication. Do not communicate with your customers only when trying to sell them something. Be random and surprise your customers in a good way, and you will catch their attention.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Crises are a common thing within organizations. Thus, in this Expert Insight Interview, Mark Morey discusses management during a crisis. Mark Morey is an executive coach who specializes in developing thriving company cultures through enduring solutions.

This interview discusses:

• Practicing gratitude
• Improving communication and transparency
• Things that get overlooked
• Being prepared for the crisis

Practice Gratitude

In a time of crisis, we should make a routine to slow down and connect. One way to reduce the edge and create more connections is to have a protocol of opening a workplace meeting by saying things that make us grateful. Gratitude can be an instrument of leadership because it encourages intentional mind-focusing activity, and it requires you to embrace a positive mindset at that moment. Thus, it should be a part of a company culture that leaders pull out a connection practice right away when they feel a sense of urgency.

Communication and Transparency

Other critical things to have in crisis are regular communication and transparency with your employees. As a leader, to improve communication when talking to others, you have to shift the focus from your needs to the other person’s needs. Consider what they are going through right now, and ask open-ended questions. Asking an open-ended question allows a fresh answer that generates less transaction and way more relational conversation.

Overlooked Things

In a crisis, leaders forget that waiting and pausing are options too. They should allow themselves moments to breathe and recharge their mental faculties. It only takes a second for things to change. Thus, it is critical to gather all the information, monitor the statistics, and catch the trends to plan further. Leaders usually think that they have to be doing something, but taking a pause and evaluating the situation sends a way better message and builds trust in employees.

How to Prepare for a Crisis

Crises happen all the time, so it is essential to have enduring solutions and enduring cultural practices. Some communities are more resilient than others because they have a lot of horizontal connections. All people within those communities have the sense in which direction the community is going, are deeply interconnected, share resources, and have distributed leadership.

The point is that people who work within the same company in crossfunctional departments get to know each other, so their collaboration becomes faster when the crisis demands it. Nowadays, with independent contractors and distributed leadership, we have so many people working together and experiencing collective disconnection. Thus, the key is to work on human connection as a part of company culture without waiting for the crisis to force it.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

Do you follow up with your leads properly? In this Expert Insight Interview, Tom Jackobs discusses lead follow-up and getting them booked for the calls. Tom Jackobs is a sales, public speaking, and stage selling coach. Also, he operates a call center, working primarily with medical doctors and fitness centers in booking appointments, webinars, etc.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• Approaching and working with leads
• Following up elegantly
• Staying motivated

How to approach and work with leads?

Following up with a lead is essential for the sale, but people still think of it as such a low-value activity. And the reason for it is that leads often tend to be rude, forgetful, or impossible to catch on the phone. However, salespeople also tend to give up too quickly. The key is to stay consistent and persistent.

The best time to contact the lead is within the first 20 minutes from the moment of entering into your system. Nowadays, people are too busy and distracted by everything that is going on around them that if you do not catch them quickly, you lose them. So, if you see a lead coming to your system, feel free to pick up the phone and call immediately. After all, they requested to hear back from you.

Follow up with Elegance

The scripting that you have for follow-up should align with the tone of your company. But, even though you have a script, you should adjust that script to your own thought process language to make it look more authentic. The more natural that conversation sounds, the better connection you will create with a person on the other side of the phone. Being committed, engaged in the conversation, and believing in the product or service you are selling is critical for the success of the phone call.

Three days after a first phone call, leave a voice or text message. If you receive a negative reply, you can close the case. However, some people do not rule themselves out explicitly, and in that case, you can continue to stay consistent and persistent for around 30 days. It does happen that people get interested by the end of the 30 days period, but most of the leads get triggered during their first call.

Stay Motivated

Giving constant calls back can be tiring. However, even if you make your 100th call for the day, that is still the first call for your lead. Thus, you have to make every call count. Recording and listening to your follow-up call should be a regular activity to help you improve your performance. People would be surprised by what they would hear because there are small mistakes that we are not aware of until we listen to ourselves talking on the phone.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In the past 12 months, we experienced a massive transformation to the digital world in almost all areas of life. Thus, in this Expert Insight Interview, Mark Hodgson discusses building a personal brand online. Mark Hodgson is a CEO, mentor, coach, speaker, and author at Mark Hodgson Leadership Consultancy.

This Expert Insight interview discusses:

• Having an online professional brand
• Creating online presence
• Embracing the change

Online Professional Brand

Having an online professional brand is like having an online shop window where you show the world what you know, who you can help, what value you can add, and how you are different from others. For most business professionals, that online shop window is called a LinkedIn profile. Also, this calls for a shift from being a subject matter expert to a market influencer. Naturally, this shift represents a barrier for many to put themselves “out there” and build the same professional reputation they had in the analog world – but now online.

Create Online Presence

People tend to underestimate and lack confidence in their skills and experience. We all have a couple of areas that we excel and can become specialists in them. And then, we need to focus on bettering our LinkedIn profile. Many people think that their LinkedIn profile needs to be a digital version of their Resume in which they put all academic achievements upfront. Instead, sharing your life experiences and basic things that are unique to solely you resonate much better with the people and add much higher value. Posting short content but through your own lenses will help you in any market to find the community where you can help, add value, and solve problems.

Your profile should serve as a natural conversation starter, but that does not mean that it has to take over your entire life. Posting content one or two times a week is enough for starters, but it has to be consistent. Start with small steps, find joy in it, and then slowly increase posting activity. It is critical that you create your content and not outsource that task. The reason for that is because by creating your own content, you make yourself think, and by evolving your thinking, you ultimately grow as well.

Embrace the Change

While Covid19 has brought many challenges to society, it also created new opportunities as accelerating digital transformation. Thus, the place where you want to build your reputation nowadays is online. Having 30 years of experience without Social Media is not an excuse for not starting to have it now. Instead, those 30 years, if used wisely, can add so much value in being proactive and keeping up with trends.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Nicole Laino discusses the psychology of sales and the mind-shift that will change the way you sell and your results. Nicole Laino uses neurolinguistic programming and rapid manifestation methods to help entrepreneurs create magnetic brand messages and break past their limiting beliefs to achieve life-changing success.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The psychology of sales and what it means
• Why it is crucial to adapt your mindset to focus on the ‘internal’ rather than the ‘external’
• How and why to upgrade your mind’s ‘operating system’

Psychology of Sales

When some people come into sales, they think that there is some magic recipe such as a perfect script or something similar. While there is a structure that people should be taught, it’s mostly about making sure that you’re bringing your psychology into the sale and understanding the psychology of the person you’re trying to reach.

You want to get past the surface levels needs and wants of both you and your prospect and reaching their internal problem so that you can help solve it. Think of yourself as an operating system that will experience bugs and glitches if it is not upgraded.

Internal vs. External Approach

Sometimes salespeople overlook that they have their own mindset and their own psychology. However, those are the only things that are totally within their control to change, enhance or adapt.

The psychology of sales is about what you bring to the process. It is about all of your experience, all of your beliefs, and all of your baggage. Sometimes our minds can get clouded, and we get too hung up on the ‘external,’ such as needing more prospects, instead of focusing on the ‘internal’ and adapting our mindsets.

Focusing on Yourself First

People, unfortunately, don’t seem to spend enough time figuring out their baggage and the triggers that can knock them off course. Therefore, success requires a significant amount of self-awareness.

Many people enroll in courses and hire coaches but end up disappointed because the method didn’t work. However, if they can recognize their internal problems and shortcomings, and decide to work on these first, all of the external tools suddenly begin to work. The truth is that the problem is not within the tool but within its operator.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Arjun Rai discusses his digital marketing platform HelloWoofy, and the ways in which small businesses can use their authenticity to their advantage in competing with large companies. Arjun Rai is a New York-based entrepreneur and founder/CEO of HelloWoofy.com

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• The advantages of being a small business owner
• Why authenticity is crucial for small businesses
• The innovative nature of the HelloWoofy platform

Advantages of Small Businesses

Small businesses are much better at telling their story than big companies. The upside of being a small business owner is that you know every customer by name, taste, need, and want. Plus, whatever you used to do as a brick-and-mortar business owner, you can now do through digital marketing and scale up your business.

On the other hand, unfortunately, most CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are entirely removed from the customer at this point. They rely on focus and discovery groups for information about their customers’ wants and needs, but this tactic can never be as effective as knowing your customers personally.

Authenticity

The only thing small business owners need is an intelligent and affordable digital marketing platform, and they can create better results than any Fortune 500 company ever could despite its unlimited marketing budget. Yes, large companies have a lot of money, and they aren’t afraid to use it to achieve their marketing goals, but there’s one thing they don’t have — authenticity.

People crave authenticity nowadays, and no matter how much money they spend, large companies can’t artificially create it, while it comes naturally to any small business.

HelloWoofy

Small business owners are generally very good at what they do. Small restaurants make great meals, small teams of fashion designers make incredible apparel, etc. What they often don’t do very well, simply because it is not in their area of expertise, is marketing, specifically digital marketing.

Considering that large restaurant chains and clothing companies employ dozens of skilled people in their marketing departments, small business owners find it hard to compete. This is where a platform like HelloWoofy comes in. It can give small businesses the edge by focusing on their advantages and outshining their rich and powerful competition.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.

In this Expert Insight Interview, Cactus Raazi discusses his latest book and how you can price your products and services more appropriately. Cactus Raazi is the author of Price: Maximizing Customer Loyalty Through Personalized Pricing.

This Expert Insight Interview discusses:

• More sophisticated ways to determine to price
• The pitfalls of adapting your price to your competition
• How to use personalized and adaptive pricing to make your customer feel special

Discount Junkies

The current commercial environment has trained people to be discount junkies, searching for the lowest price in every available opportunity, both in B2C and B2B commerce. Businesses know that they’re never going to pay list price unless they buy only one piece of a given item, which is seldom the case.

Pricing has become a considerable part of the sales cycle because there’s a lot of negotiation involved, and pricing rarely determined using the same attention to detail as, for example, product, branding and marketing.

Adaptive Pricing

Pricing is often done simply by looking at what your competitors are doing. Although there’s nothing to say that these prices are the correct ones, people still adapt to them and take them as gospel. This shows us that pricing is almost an afterthought to a certain extent.

It almost seems as if everybody is simply adapting to the price that someone else put out, while nobody is actually putting in the required analytics or research to determine what the optimal price is.

Personalized Pricing

We live in an increasingly commoditized world. For example, let’s look at business hotels. There’s very little difference between the different brands, and they’re even often placed right next to each other, which means there are very few things to differentiate between them, apart from the price.

Therefore, if you’re a loyal patron of one of these chains, you should have the opportunity to receive a discounted price as it shows the hotel’s willingness to make its long-time customers feel special. As we enter a hyper-personalization period, pricing should not be left out of the conversation and should move with the times.

Our Host

John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.