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Why is sales hated so much?
Probably because it’s hard, nuanced, and most people do it wrong 🙅‍♀️

I sat down with Dr. Jim Kanichirayil, self-described “professional megaphone”, focussed on highlighting innovation in DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging) and HR tech, to talk about how we can begin to reframe our relationship with the act of selling. A VITAL skill as we stare recession in the face.

Think about this: sales from a functional perspective has been operating with the same playbook since the early 1980s. There are still large pockets of sales leaders who employ old plays. Many are completely ignorant of how buyer behavior has changed and how the world works post-pandy. And when you pair that with the state of the marketplace right now, with layoffs, fear, budget-cutting, and more, the numbers will not add up. “Sales is overdue for a radical transformation. And if that doesn’t happen, we’re dead as sellers.” Dr Jim says.

Where do we begin to look for effective revenue solutions in a recession?

First let’s look at what not to do! Her are three factors that will add up to a negative revenue outlook 👇

1. Treating sales like a numbers game
2. “Carpet bombing your entire prospect universe” to get attention (This will make for a lot of outbound actions that are not sustainable.)
3. Lack of knowledge of the purchase process among your customers

How do we start fixing these rampant sales problems? (and make sure our organizations are not guilty of continuing to waste our time on these ineffectual moves?) 

Step one: Construct a customer-focussed attraction model 

Dr Jim firmly points us in the direction of revenue. This means ditching the notion that sales and marketing are separate roles. Instead, the organization that will weather the recession trials ahead of us over the next 18 – 24 months, will be structured as revenue organizations. 

A successful pivot for small businesses, with revenues under 5M, will be to deeply leverage your intrinsic integration (and lack of silos). This along with agility will help you scale a strongly revenue-focussed organization that thrives in addressing the issues that your customers are facing much more easily than larger organizations can. 

Begin by debunking the myth that one guru can give you all the answers.
Instead, use all the available tools possible to connect with your customer and find those big hairy problems you can solve.

Step two: Build a clear and powerful voice. 

If you’re in a founder-led organization, or if you’re the leader of an organization who is closely involved in revenue, you need to be unafraid of having a strong point of view. The interwebs are chock-full of vanilla word-salads, and it’s really not that hard to show up with a clear and compelling perspective that will get people to remember you. 

(If you haven’t read it yet, this feels like a great spot for me to plug my book – UNboring: Take your content marketing from blah to brilliant. In it I give you 10 lessons to show up online in a way that isn’t an instant snoozefest!)

How to talk to strangers: A step-by step sales guide

If there’s one thing that’s hated most within sales, it has got to be “the cold call”. So I called Dr Jim to the rescue; asking how do we ease our discomfort around doing outreach in general – whether via email, phone, or carrier pigeon??! 

Here’s his recommended 8-step framework to make friends with almost anyone.

1. Have a clear process in place for your revenue attraction model 
2. Have a defined pool of people that might be interested in what you have to say 
3. Get committed to the process of earning a relationship with these people
4. Do this by GENUINELY being interested in the person that you’re trying to connect with 
5. Have a clear point of view on the subject at hand 
6. Open the conversation with one of 2 core pieces of information about them: 
   1. Knowledge, at a deep level, of the niche problems that the person typically faces (ie: the “pain point”)
   2. Knowledge of something that’s interesting about the individual’s background (this could be common past organizations, associations, school alumni. Maybe a common sport or life stage.) 
7. Get noticed by having an interesting or contrarian opinion – “poke the bear” or “pick a (non-violent) fight”! (A low pressure way to do this is on common ground – ie: a common connections thread; or an industry group event)
8. Once the openers go well, ask for their expertise on your content marketing platform (like a podcast, an interview for a book chapter, a YouTube video series). Invite them to the conversation with specifics on the problem you’re tackling and how their use case may be beneficial to your audiences (everyone loves to teach, so the answer to this will rarely be “no”) 

With this type of approach, can you see how instead of making yourself the star of the show, you’ve pivoted and made your prospect the star? The number one problem that sellers in small businesses (startup or scaleup) have to solve is ‘how do I get in front of more people and have more conversations?’ This intentional approach will get you there because it’s rooted in listening and relationships.

Looking to scale your revenue with intentional, relationship-based outbound marketing?

Inside of the Marketing Brain Trust, you’ll find my signature program designed to help women and non-binary entrepreneurs step off the hamster wheel of constantly launching campaigns and build a powerful outbound strategy. 

💻You’ll find the information (and application) on this page: https://cp.digital/marketing-brain-trust/ 

Come join an incredible group of fellow entrepreneurs! This program is insanely fun, and will land 5-figures+ into your bottom-line from stuff you’re not thinking about just yet just from ideas and solutions within the group. That I can promise 😊 I’ve seen it in action.

How do you craft a memorable personality online? Especially when it feels like EVERYONE is online ALL THE TIME.  

Let’s start by understanding a strategy known as ‘brand personification’. It’s a branding approach in which consumers imagine and describe brands as if they were actual people. According to research, personifying a brand and providing it with distinctive human characteristics improves customer loyalty.

Traditionally for brands, personification has been a compelling, creatively satisfying, and intuitive way of taking a step back and gaining clarity on what kind of impression they’re making on the world.

Large corporations and small businesses have used this over the decades as a powerful strategy to operationalize reputation goals. Investing resources and dollars to carefully examine consumer needs and behaviour to cater to them better. Many times, this manifests in marketing as spokespeople, and brand ambassadors.

Fast forward to 2023, and we are all brands.

The nuanced but monumental shift is done no justice by the overused and “jargonized” phrase “personal brand”.

Take a day in the life of a typical small business owner, or corporate lead… There is little privacy. We’re on audio or video calls a lot of the time. Digital cookies mount! When we’re not, we’re on some type of platform that’s recording all of our habits and computing it to deliver convenience; or make money.

It sounds dark and hopeless.
And it can be.

One way to rescue yourself from being a statistic in a “Black Mirror” like sci-fi future storyline is to get intentional about your voice and presence online.

Crafting a personality on the interwebs really comes down to 3 things for me. In my book “Unboring: Take your content marketing from blah to brilliant” I explore the age of entertainment in marketing, and make a case that modern marketing is a veritable snoozefest. I offer 10 lessons on how to change it and craft a memorable voice for yourself.

For the purposes of this piece of writing, let’s focus on personality.

There are levels of personality to an online voice

Levity

Historically in humankind’s most challenging times, like pandemics and recessions, people struggle with their mental health. As marketers, communicators, and anyone with a voice online, we shape the messaging that the world sees. Bringing some levity to the party is not going to solve all the world’s problems, but it is going to make people smile; even if just for a minute! And it’s going to make people remember you. 

Purpose 

The pandemic brought with it a higher state of consciousness, with many people reassessing their work, their lives, their clutter, their needs, and so much more. It’s unsurprising that 83% of participants in an 8,000 person global study conducted by Zeno Group on the “Strength of Purpose”, said companies should only earn a profit if they also deliver a positive impact. Exhibit A: Patagonia 💪 

At an individual level spend time crafting your purpose and making it easy for the world to find. Think about what you want to put out into the world that means something. People may not remember what you did, or how often you showed up, but they will remember what you stand for. 

Caution: This does not mean creating 50 Canva graphics with your mission statement on it and plastering it on all your social real estate! Instead, think much deeper and more purposefully. Make your purpose the spine of every piece of content that you put out in the world. And even further, allow it to guide every piece of content that you consume. This is what will give you a truly controlled digital footprint. 

Reciprocity 

I have spent an inordinate amount of time reading and interviewing people on the concept of reciprocity. Initially, I saw a reciprocity rather simplistically; as an equation. Someone does something for me; and I need to do something for them in return. Ideally the exact same thing. 

An example of this is from when my child, who is now a tween, was much younger. Often, other moms, particularly stay at home moms, would offer to pick her up and take her out for playdates with their own kids. And sometimes I would hesitate, and even say no, because I felt like I was unlikely to be able to repay that favor as an entrepreneur that was focused on scaling who worked 8 to 9 hours a day, and put my daughter in after school programs. 

It took me a long while, and a particularly Illuminating conversation on my podcast, The 4am Report, with Tiffany Dufu, who is the author of ‘Drop the ball’ to fully understand that reciprocity is a flywheel. Tiffany explained that I would benefit from looking at things from the perspective that perhaps the stay at home mom who was happy to include my daughter did not need me to repay her by watching her kids; instead perhaps she needed me to open up my Rolodex and make some introductions that make something else easier for her.

Between that, and opening my eyes to a “pay it forward” philosophy, and training myself to learn how to receive things, I’ve come to really enjoy the flow of reciprocity. I opened my eyes to the fact that people want to help and that it’s not a hardship to them. 

What this means in the marketing world is this: 

1. I start by constantly offering education and entertainment in all of my content 
2. I make myself available to speak to people who want support/an ear/a speaker/someone to educate students.
3. I take a great deal of pleasure in being part of communities to offer my knowledge and network to 
4. And perhaps most importantly, I have learned to ask for help and introductions easily and often. 

Curated brand examples of the 3 levels of personality at play

Here is some inspiration as you start to consider putting that framework into action. 

If you have the book UNboring already, I’ve indicated which chapters delve into the details. If you don’t have UNboring, (buy it here on Amazon!) I have put in a few snippets from the book here 👇 to show you how some interesting brands are putting it into play.

How Bruce made pandemic health communication fun 👇

How Emily crisps PIVOTED hard and attracted enormous audiences with their magnetic and confident voice 👇

How Bumble rose to the pandemic challenge and kept their product which relies on face to face, alive. And well. They also set up safety standards for the industry and took firm stances and opened their wallets to support women. This is their UNboring voice 👇

Remember! This gets MUCH easier when you are an individual, and not a brand.

How will you use these principles to show up powerfully, and UNboringly, on the interwebs this week?

Drop me a note on email or on LinkedIn.

 

Remember Jarvis?
Jarvis is Iron Man’s AI (artificial intelligence).
The one that was overpowered by Ultron in the Avengers movie of the same name.
Stark talks to Jarvis, learns from Jarvis, has Jarvis do stuff for him, and generally loves Jarvis almost as much as Potts!

We’re not quite there yet, in real life, as it relates to AI.
But we ARE in a good place.

Hand up if you’ve heard of ChatGPT. (I’m willing to bet most of the readers of this column have their hands up)

GPT or Generative Pretrained Transformer is a top-notch language processing AI model. It was developed by a firm called OpenAI (which is now 49% owned by Microsoft). It can create writing that is human-like and performs functions, including language translation, language modeling, and creating text for chatbots and other applications. With 175 billion parameters, it is one of the most sophisticated and substantial language processing AI models created to date. We are currently on GPT-3 or third generation GPT. It’s rumored that the 4th generation will blow this one out of the water.

At its core, GPT is a predictive tool. It’s a way of automatically generating text based on machine learning. What this tool is doing for you is searching vast amounts of content, based on your prompts to give you a sequence of words that it thinks will follow. ChatGPT has become a phenomenon because it takes this technology and deploys it in a way that’s extremely easy, and intuitive, for the average human being to use.

Now most commonly on the interwebs right now, you’re seeing people post about how they’re using ChatGPT to generate blog posts, or articles. So let’s focus on that specific niche.

GPT is a tool, not a person. Use it intelligently.

For years, there has been widespread fear of artificial intelligence and its impending takeover of the world (probably not made any less sensational by Hollywood). Instead, especially as a small to medium business, look at it as firepower that you’re providing your people with!

So here are a few things to keep in mind as you use it – individually or as a team.

1. Treat your chat like a real conversation. Better questions in a conversation lead to better conversations. The same is true for AI.
2. The quality of your prompt is pretty key. Give GPT detailed and clear input. If you don’t know where to start, try this general prompt framework: “I want you to act as an expert in (put in a short description of your industry + niche). I will provide the following information: (put in more detailed information on the task at hand). You will use your expertise to create: (put in the specific output you want here)” (Bonus tip: save that the first time you use it so you can edit it later for future uses.)
3. Provide style guidelines to the tool if you want to edit a more complex piece of writing. For example, if you are editing a new blog, first feed in a previous blog post into ChatGPT and ask it to analyze the style and give you a guide. Now copy that style guide into your new prompt and ask it to edit the new post in the style of (insert its own analysis of the style here).
4. Part of the power of this tool is that you can ask it follow up queries. It’s not a one and done interaction, you can refine your parameters for better results. (That’s where us humans come in). So continue the conversation in your thread.
5. Think of AI tools as a way to make the grunt work easier. A lot of foundational stuff that we do over and over again. Like robotic process automation (RPA) for the creative space. The process of creating any kind of content involves a lot of work like pulling together facts, making sure things are accurate, looking at research, making sure tone and voice is right, and so much more. Many of those steps can be simplified when you use tools like ChatGPT, and you can free up your mind to bring out your best thinking instead.

Look beyond the sensational headlines

Remember ChatGPT can generate content super fast. This is why you see a lot of sensational headlines like: “I created all my blog posts for the month in 30 minutes using ChatGPT” or “I documented my marketing plan for the quarter in 15 minutes.”

Yes, all of that is possible.
But they’re probably not going to be very good blog posts or plans!

Let me give you an example. If you are a law firm and you go into ChatGPT and say something like, “write me a blog about five reasons why entrepreneurs need a lawyer”, you WILL get a blog post in SECONDS. 

At first it’ll look pretty impressive.
In some cases, maybe it’ll even be a piece that reads better than what your junior blog writers can give you.

But there are a couple of cautionary things that you want to pay attention to.

1. Remember that while ChatGPT is advanced, search engines – primarily Google, have tools (and are making more) that are able to spot a body of text if it’s generated by a machine. Think about it like anti-plagiarism tools. So you really don’t want to be using entire bodies of text that are spit out by AI. Be warned.
2. Further, for artificial intelligence to become truly intelligent, it needs continuous input into how humans want it to function. And the more us humans use it to rehash sh!tty content that already exists with no takers, the less we’re going to train artificial intelligence.

So, the article about why entrepreneurs need lawyers. You would need to think about a few foundational things that marketers would think about automatically. Who is the audience, what’s the goal, how does this link back to results from what was done before, what are the problems the audience wants fixed, how does this answer those problems…

Pretend we have all that information.
Feed those things into ChatGPT so that the deep research work that you have to do, and the outlining work, for example can get taken care of for your “sh!tty first draft”.

I would provide a prompt that’s a bit more custom like this: “Write me a blog post about five things entrepreneurs, making revenues between 1 and 2 million need to think about as it relates to their corporate legal structures. Assume these entrepreneurs are in Canada. Also, please use the following style guide (information on analysis of previous content goes here)”

Now, can you see how this second prompt is going to give you a piece of content that is far more advanced than what you would get with that first prompt, which said “write me a blog about five reasons entrepreneurs need a lawyer”!!!

And that’s just the beginning of it. You can continue the conversation asking it to make specific improvements and deletions.

My follow ups would look like this:

“Give me 5 headline options in active voice”
“Make those headlines under 5 words”
Expand on paragraph 2 (and copy in the para)”
“Make this section less wordy”
“Consolidate these facts into 2 key points”

What that gives you as a marketer, or a writer, or really any kind of person who is influencing the creation of content out there is that you’re not starting from a blank page, instead you’re focussed on bringing together a series of ideas to make a powerful whole, more robust than anything you’d do on your own; or that a machine would spit out on its own. 

Think laterally with your GPT

We often think about tools, which promise to make our lives easier, like a writing tool in absolutes. We want a perfect tool that’s going to fix all our writing problems, and just take ALL THE writing off your plate. 

I’m here to burst our bubble and say that is rarely possible.
That’s probably not even possible if you hire high level, external fractional support for content creation. 

But what you can do with tools like ChatGPT is make specific areas of your work simpler.
Like researching a ton of material you need for a blog post.
Or pulling together multiple models as you’re planning something.
Or creating agendas and outlines for meetings and interviews.
Or writing out the logic for your quiz that just won’t work right on your website.

Don’t forget to use it in your personal life

During the holidays, I had a bit of time set aside to do some deep cleaning of our home. As people who live and work in the same environment, we feel for our poor, neglected home that is coping with the kind of footprint that it never really signed up for! Enter the need to  clean way more often than we did pre-pandy. So to keep us organized, I used chat GPT to generate a cleaning list. 

Here’s the prompt I gave ChatGPT: “generate a deep, detailed cleaning list for a home with the following specifications.The tasks will be done by two adults and an 11 year old child over two days with lots of breaks and downtime. The home is a townhouse, and has four floors. The first floor has a small entryway, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” 

And I proceeded to describe the home, and ask it to allocate time as well as include indications on what my 11 year old could help with.

Here’s what it came back with:

Fourth floor office space: one hour. Wipe down all surfaces including desks, shelves and decorative objects with a mixture of water and mild soap or gentle cleaning product. This will take 15 minutes and it’s appropriate for an 11 year old. Then vacuum all floors including carpets, rugs and Hardwood laminate. This is appropriate for an 11 year old with some supervision….”

And so it went, giving me a 100+ list of items we needed to tackle.
And we got about 60% of it done in the two days!!!
The rest got done over the weekends following.

I gotta say this is unprecedented in my cleaning history.

That customized, clear list took away a lot of the time I waste in trying to decide what to tackle next (and watching cleaning videos on TikTok instead).

This kind of artificial intelligence is here to stay. It’s only going to get better. There are a number of other tools that exist with less of a cult following. It’s really worth spending some time getting your teams to gain mastery over what’s out there. And as you play, you’ll find your favourites! 

Looking for more UNboring ways to up-level your content?

Get your copy of my book, “UNboring: Take your content marketing from blah to brilliant”. It takes readers through 10 lessons on how to use humour and other forms of entertainment to stand out among the clutter online, post-pandy. The book is available on Amazon and all other book retailers.

It was a dark and stormy night in the city. One of those nights when you couldn’t be entirely sure if the stuff falling out of the sky was rain, or snow.

It was late.
The streets were empty. 

A lone figure trudged through merciless rain-snow.
A woman.
She walked fast towards a car, like a woman with a problem to solve.

The woman’s name was Jasmine, and she was the CEO of a consulting company that offered services to large corporations. Unbeknownst to many, the company was struggling in the aftermath of a pandemic; and the blaring news that regularly tells Jasmine she is now in the midst of a recession offers no comfort. 

Business was down.
Morale was at an all-time low.
For her and her full-and-part-time team of 6.

Jasmine knew that she needed to do something drastic to turn things around, and fast.
She had heard rumors of a woman, a mysterious figure known only as “The Advocate”. 

They said on the marketing street that “The Advocate” could make even the most troubled of companies shine again, using the power of brand advocacy.

Jasmine decided to take a chance and seek out The Advocate.
What did she have to lose?!

She’d fed the location pin into her share-ride app. The ride took her to the seediest part of town, to a dingy little office in a rundown building.
“Great!” she thought to herself. “Exactly what I need on a night like this.”
She was here. She may as well do what she came for.
She pushed the buzzer. 

The door was answered by a nondescript man who gave her a once-over before nodding and letting her pass by as he turned the two locks on the door back resolutely.

There was no turning back.

Jasmine went up the stairs to find herself in an office.
The Advocate was a surprisingly regular woman.
Jasmine wasn’t sure what she expected but all-black track pants, tee, and runners, with glasses was an oddly comforting look. So when she asked Jasmine what her problem was, Jasmine couldn’t wait to spill her stressed-out guts.

The Advocate listened in complete silence to Jasmine’s story.

Jasmine paused.
15 seconds passed.
Then 30.

Jasmine forced herself to say nothing.

After 54 seconds The Advocate spoke.

“Ditch the brand account,” she said. You’re wasting time creating too much content that speaks to everyone and no one. Instead focus on your people. Starting with yourself; and everyone you know by first name who is a supporter.”

Jasmine was skeptical.
That sounded like too small a pool.
She had already dismissed a lot of that pool!

She held her tongue.
“Tell me more”, she said to The Advocate.

“Don’t dismiss your relationships.” The Advocate said.
“Building connections and trust with a smaller group of people will take you much further. See how those people can help you. Seek their advice and custom.”

Jasmine thanked The Advocate and left the office, feeling hopeful and confused all at once.She knew this would take hard work and dedication, but she needed to gather up her people. And allow them to speak for her.

As she waited for her ride back home to get to her that stormy night, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had only scratched the surface of this mysterious woman’s true power. 

But that was a story for another day.

What was that about? 👆

That was an UNboring account of how brand advocacy cannot be ignored by small businesses in a recession. (pssst: I am the author of “UNboring: Take your content marketing from blah to brilliant”. If you’d like a copy, you’ll find it on Amazon.)

The reason I’m bringing this to mind today is because the question of whether small businesses should use brand accounts or those of co-founders, leaders, and team members to distribute all the content marketing material that is created is one that comes up very, very often from clients and partners. 

My response to this question is almost always the same. 

Start with people (over brands), no matter how small or big you are.

Yes, it is 100% possible to build successful brand-driven infrastructure. That said, it is not the path of least resistance. In 2023, with the rise of artificial intelligence, the latest mainstream star being ChatGPT, people like to see PEOPLE at the front. A person is always going to attract more connection than an institution. 

Content marketers, particularly those in the technology-friendly space, have been using multiple modalities of artificial intelligence whether through words, visuals, or editing of audio and video for a while now. And we’re eventually going to get to a place where “a genuine voice” will be hard to come by in marketing content. 

So, focus on using people to spread your message.

~~~

Before you know who your advocates are, you need to know what content you have.

I am offering an intensive review workshop for small business publishers. A deep dive into your content so that you know exactly what documents and systems you have (and might have forgotten), what formats you own, and where you can find the original pieces so that you CAN USE THEM MUCH MORE. 

You’re going to need it in a recession. If you’ve got over a 100 pieces of content from the last 12-18 months and still find your team creating a lot of new stuff, you may want to dig deeper.

Learn more about the Program