Entrepreneur Files with Andrew Ellenberg
Entrepreneur Files with Andrew Ellenberg
Jonathan Fischer Discusses Trends in Sales Methods on Entrepreneur Files
With a nod to the communications models ahead of their time to the rise of live events, roundtables, workshops, webinars, vlogs, and podcasts in the 21st Century, position your brand years ahead of your competition.
Watch this hard-hitting vlog to discover the secrets to hitting paydirt with a more authentic and personable approach to attracting your ideal customer persona with rich multimedia content.
Andrew Ellenberg is President & Managing Partner Of Rise Integrated, an innovative studio that creates, produces, and distributes original multimedia content across digital touchpoints. Email andrewe@riseintegrated.com or call 816-506-1257.
Entrepreneur Files. Inspiration Inside. These are their stories.
We're back in the studio with another thought-provoking episode of Entrepreneur Files. When business owners discover new meaning in their businesses, they feel more connected to people around them. Executive producer Andrew Ellenberg created this fast-paced 30 minute podcast to inspire business owners creating deeper perspectives into their personal and professional motivations. Join the conversation with other entrepreneurs who give you the energy you need to power through the daily grind of owning a business.
And here we are; this will be an interesting conversation today. I have remotely, like you know, a reporter at large out there in the world. I have on the camera here Jonathan Fisher, and he is the founder of Bridgeview and one of the projects that I'm really excited about that he's working on.
There is a show that I listen to religiously every week because it's awesome. And watch sometimes I listen to, I'll admit it. I might be multitasking occasionally. But it's a show for a company named Overpass. And it's called Evolved Sales Live, which is a brilliant brand name, in my opinion, that really says what it's all about.
Because we are all in an evolution in the sales and business communications process, so he hosts this, and he's really dynamic and interesting and asks thought-provoking questions. And the company itself that he's doing it for is the leading vertical talent marketplace for sales, and that's his niche is sales communication. Am I right in saying that spot on, spot on? I'm doing well here right out of the gate. The technical issues aside at the beginning that you guys didn't hear but so tell me about Evolved Sales Live and how you became involved in that. Can you tell us that story?
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Yeah, I mean, it's really great. I had the privilege of working with Lavie Popack, the founder of Overpass, some time ago, and it was a brief engagement that went well. For both of us. We enjoyed what we were able to accomplish together in that project. And then later, he approached me to put this together. Overpass is a really great platform. They had a lot of good success, but like many startups, they didn't have that much visibility in the marketplace just yet. So he's looking for ways to extend the brand's reach, get some more attention, and eyeballs from the right people. And so he committed to the long term to have this value pack podcast, and I'm humbled to think he thinks of me as a good option to be his host for the show. We got started in December, and it's been growing by leaps and bounds ever since.
I see 1000s of attendees on there. It's hard to get five people to show up for an event. It's very true. Everybody's so time-starved and overwhelmed, and things come up and what have you, but you've got a sticky audience too. I've noticed it's the same people every week, and it's growing. Very true seems to engender some loyalty. So that's been really gratifying, and we get good participation with the live and so it's an interesting way to do things. I'm not sure if we made this up or when we ended up doing though in every podcast episode. I say it begins life as a live stream on LinkedIn. And so it really is actually live. In fact, you can post your chat questions right there during the show. We do get to interact with our guests. We've had a great set of guests come it'd be part of our program over these episodes. And then later, that's going to be re-edited, and it's going to continue to live on in the world of the podcast. Have that as an evergreen podcast episode. And the titling is slightly different when you get over to look us up. Whether that's, you know, Google podcasts or wherever you get yours.
It's going to be The Evolved Sales Leader is the name of the finished podcast episodes, but they pretty much run about two to three weeks after the lives, and I love the live energy that we get. You can't really match the same energy when it's pre-recorded. We've done both we started this the conventional way. And I've had guests return, and I can compare A and B tests, and when it's live, you just get a little bit more out of the conversation.
So it's been a lot of fun. Yeah, it's more authentic, and more inclusive. I noticed you get a lot of reactions and everything to the clapping and the laughing and all the emojis. Right? They're like cave drawings in the digital age. We're going back to that. Right? So we're going to be blowing up that live aspect even further. We are using a platform that would allow we can bring some other people on occasion. So since we actually have regular guests, we may experiment with what is sort of like an after show, the live sort of afterglow, we'll figure out how we're gonna brand it we may have a little bit of an overflow time where other actual faces could pop in and literally participate voice and face. Afterburn! Isn't that F-16 fighter jets and that with all those fighter jets, you have a good afterburner? Yeah.
That's what you call it. Yeah. So what do you attribute the show's success to? Why do you think it's hitting such a nerve and resonating so heavily? Well, I think part of it is we it's too full would be it's just an opinion, but I'm looking at it, experiencing it in real-time. So I don't know this, but my conjecture is it's two main factors number one Lavie and his team did a fantastic job of really getting deep on who is their ideal client profile. And this is a really good best practice for any company under the sun.
Specifically, when you offer B2B services or tech, you better narrow it down a lot further than just, yeah, we work with businesses, right? Or even if you narrow it down, like you know SME (small and medium-sized Enterprises) versus like Enterprise, you got to really know who your that ideal client persona actually is. They've done the hard work of doing that. And then they have a fantastic team that supports the show. I just do the hosting.
So there's a lot of support that goes on behind the show to make it be a success, and they do a great job of finding guests who have something to say that our specific audience is going to find engaging. So that may sound like it's kind of common sense. But that takes a lot of intentionality to really make that happen. Content Strategy, big time.
And I've noticed it's gotten more and more focused and narrow on the Software As A Service (SaaS) space, the SaaS industry. Yeah, that really is our niche. It's a fast-growing space. Everyone has high hopes that they're gonna be the next unicorn in that space. There's a lot of venture money coming into that space. So the pressure is to grow fast, but only on a little bit of budget.
And that's one thing that Overpass enables you to do. If you need to get a really great team quickly or with a small budget, you can definitely do that with Overpass. They're a fantastic service offering in that in that space. I mean, they're the number one talent marketplace on the planet. Hands down. Absolutely. I can't agree more.
So, the story behind how you got into this business, how did you become a media personality?
Well, probably by accident would be the correct answer to that question usually is, yeah, I didn't set out to do that. But years ago, I was very fortunate to be hired into a fantastic company that was at that time known as Chet Holmes International. It's once again known as that it briefly had an iteration. It was owned by Chet Holmes, with Tony Robbins in partnership. It was known as Business Breakthrough International.
He was international for about a five-year, run by the same people, same company, and Chet Holmes if you don't have his book, The Ultimate Sales Machine and you're involved in business development or entrepreneurship at all, belongs on your shelf. It's sort of in that, you know, there's a certain library of books that everyone should have, you know like your eMyth would be one of them on there. There's probably a whole bunch of others. Definitely the Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes, I recommend it to everybody. It's about how to build a systematic approach to growing any company, it's a great book. Pick one up if you say what if you actually want to get your hands on a signed copy I still am really close friends with Chet’s right-hand man. And I think he still has a few, so if you're curious and want to get that, direct message me, and I'll get you hooked up on that, but anyway, I got hired into Chet’s company to do these. He thought he invented the word webinar. This is way back in 2003.
Webinar! They took a boring word seminar and then put the web in front of it. So it's boring on the web. I think it could be better positioned or rebranded somehow, if you can all go back in time to it, maybe it was cool. We thought it was.
Well, that's all that matters. Right? Right. So, it was neat that we did that because Chet had a fantastic radio voice. So he had these radio spots playing on satellite radio stations. And again, go back in time, that wasn't an everybody thing that was pretty much in your upper-level cars, being driven by folks that probably were business owners.
That was what you could do for target marketing at that time. And it worked. It worked. We had people that were getting the radio ads while driving along in their Audi, Mercedes, Cadillac, or what have you. And the offer was a call in and leave your email on our voicemail, and we will send you this report on five ways you can double sales in 12 months or less.
And Chet again, is this great voice. So that was a great pitch they would call in, but they had a team. We had a team that would take as many calls as possible. And if somebody was like, Hey, wait a minute, I thought the voicemail would answer. Oh, yeah, we can't take them all. So we'd rather not disappoint you. But hey, you got me. And while you're on the phone, hey, why don't you tell me, Andrew, what are your main challenges? I'll send you some additional great resources to help you so they started building webinars. Anyways he was using what he called education-based marketing. Now everyone's doing it, but that was uncommon back then.
Really, instead of trying to appeal to someone to buy something with very limited appeal, unless you're right there at the top of that pyramid, right? How about an offer to educate somebody on something, give them some information that's of value to them? You're gonna attract a far bigger audience. So Chet was really good about how to work your way down that pyramid of buyers. If you have any given market, you've got a pyramid picture that is 100% Top 6% Maybe he's ready to buy right now, Max, right? Another 3% is pretty close. Like maybe they know there's a bad tire on their car, right? They probably gonna do something in the next week or two, for example, top six, they don't drive it until they get the tires.
Pain! Yeah, pain that leaves you what 91% of the rest of the market, right breaks down, and 1/3 1/3 1/3 1/3 that at the very bottom doesn't give a rip at all. Right? The Middle third would be interested to learn more. And the top there maybe could be pushed up into that top sector with the right process. Chet was smart by saying look, if we only go for the low-hanging fruit, we're missing out on an opportunity to create future growth. So by offering this valuable education building, like you said, building a funnel, we didn't use that terminology back then.
You could pretty much prepare your future buyers with this education-based marketing language on here, but that's basically what he was getting at. So it worked really well they would get them to come on get the free report, and we pitched a webinar which was using Jay Abraham's risk reversal approach. If you haven't heard of that, Jay Abraham is another one of the greats, one of the grandfathers of current business consulting, and it works like this.
Basically, risk reversal means I'm gonna put the risk on myself if I'm the product offering, and you are the buyer, right? So with the webinar, it worked like this, so Joe business owner was just pitched the webinar. The person in the chair who took the call will just say why this offering is really great. It compares to like years ago you had to spend what $20,000 to fly out to Las Vegas; you're spending money on the flight, staying in a hotel, right? There are three, four or five days however long the thing is taking notes, getting great stuff. It's awesome. But with this webinar, Hey, you don't have to get on an airplane. All you needed was a computer, and you call them on the phone to get the audio. And instead of being stuck in an airplane seat or hotel room, you're in the comfort of your own favorite chair, and you can hear everyone else on the call you interact directly with the trainer during the information, and you're gonna get a fantastic value with none of the hassles. And it's just 229 bucks to come instead of $2000 or $20,000. And you only reserve your seat, but you don't pay until after the event is over only once you agree is worth 10 times what you paid to be there. What an offer.
That's awesome, right, so that's kind of like old-school pitching benefits, huge promises, and all that, but there is a big shift now more toward personalization and away from features and benefits towards solution-based selling. If you even call it selling, I think it's educating and guiding people through a decision that makes sense to them. That works. Ideas that work are the best kind.
But what are you seeing? What would you say to people who are kind of intimidated by all the video and audio stuff they're seeing at the webinars and roundtables? They're feeling pressure from the competition because they don't want to get smoked, obviously, right? But maybe they're afraid to step into the spotlight, or it doesn't feel natural to be so personal and come out from behind the brand persona and logo. Sure. I think there are several routes you can take. I frankly think that a lot of that methodology that I just was sharing still has legs today.
It would still work very well today, but some important tweaks are needed. We probably do need to make it even more personalized; for example, we probably need to actually talk about what are some of the actual outcomes you're going to walk away with rather than just the idea that you’re going to learn all these random ways to double your sales we would probably share a little bit more of the specifics and maybe share less, you know, a bit greater depth, which makes sense because there's so much clutter.
The threshold of me wanting to give up my time, my attention, my bandwidth has not gotten higher because I'm being bombarded left and right which is part of the reason for what you were just saying there Andrew that you know, we need to get into media we need to get more visible out there. That's largely what's going on. I mean, this I can remember when I used to, you know, turn down a couple of calls a day on this thing.
And now it's like, about every hour, I'm getting a call from somebody I don't know, right? And that's, I think it's a COVID thing. It really just ramped it up dramatically. It really did. It disrupted the phone as the first touchpoint in the sales process for that, and if you’re going to use it, the call better be really important. It's got to be a big deal. Yeah, it's got to feel like that long-distance Uncle Henry's calling long distance, and then everybody's running around the room, elbowing each other and everything, trying to get to the phone. It's got to feel urgent. Yeah, and you better have a very, very specific niche with a fantastic lead-in, and you can still, you can still use this as a first touch. I'm not going to buy into the idea that that is impossible in all situations.
However, it can't be done the way it used to be. You can't just play it as purely a numbers game you will fail. So you're gonna have to have more sophistication than that. At a minimum, you'll have to have SDRs (Sales Development Reps) who can round out their efforts on the phone to learn, so can you explain what that is? For people that Oh, yeah. Well, so an SDR is going to be basically it's the idea that you're generating appointments for other roles within your company. Appointments. Let’s just use the word appointment setter. That's typical, their role is appointment setters. They're the front end of the spear in trying to generate sales development representatives. SDR stands for Sales Development Representative, which doesn't still tell you that as it is usually that terminology now. No, it’s meaningless like most titles.
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Their title sales development representative that's about as yes like it's like an I mean, the Pentagon does a better job with their acronyms in that. But the rule typically is going to be, let's say, it's like a first rung on the ladder. Most organizations, for lack of a better word, typically you're going to want to advance from that if you are in a grind, right typically KPIs for an SDR role are going to be how many dials, how many touches you know, however many you can those KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) can maybe be spread across like social outreaches emails, phone calls, they receive phone calls, sent out and so forth. It's the grind of trying to stir up something good right first, which we'll move up to as other roles within most companies. I have found in my own work as a consultant and running Bridgeview global that the reality is every vertical does have a lot of its own language, its own nomenclature. It's hilarious to me because I've worked in many different verticals, home services, financial services, business, B2B services, tech, and SaaS, even are two different worlds. And so, when you're talking about Software As A Service (SaaS) companies or SaaS, this is very common. SDR will typically have what they will call a senior account executive, which might mean they're more like the closer role, right? There are also BDRs, and business development representatives might be differentiated as somebody who is working on leads that are sent to them for marketing.
Now, these are all just, you know, every company then takes that does their own thing with it. So but a very typical scenario might be you have both sales development reps with SDRs. SDRs are responsible to do things with not that much support if any, from marketing. Okay, they are marketing pretty much, you know, as human effort.
Got it. Have you noticed by the way that they need to be more multichannel now? They have to have skills in email in LinkedIn messaging. They have to know the navigator system on LinkedIn and that kind of thing for targeting purposes and, maybe, even send out a videogram to somebody once in a while. Yeah, I mean, yes to everything. You just said that that is the new world of business development. In that space, you can't just work the phones, but you can use the phone effectively as long as you have this well-rounded set of efforts that you're putting in, so yeah, if you're wanting to get into sales and begin a great career SDR you want to work in tech or SaaS has a great role. And you can do it from anywhere in the world.
That's what's fantastic about it. If you can get a great internet connection and get yourself a little bit of equipment, a decent microphone, a decent computer, and it is not expensive to begin a journey into a fantastic career by doing this, and those are skills you could use even as a founder yourself, by the way, oh, many of the founders did that over in Silicon Valley. Okay, they did this themselves to make their companies into the eight and even nine-figure businesses that they are.
So definitely, Amen to what you just said they're gonna if you're gonna be effective, though, you can't just get a list of business numbers and try to drill through and do it as a numbers game. You're gonna need to get really, good on LinkedIn specifically. Learn those tools, and there are many, many hours of free video training available from LinkedIn and from other sources.
Or even go get some of the paid training that's out there on some of the platforms. Get yourself boned up, master the LinkedIn space to begin to find who your best prospects are, and begin a very systematic process of outreaches there try some cold email, do some calling, and yet before you know it, you're gonna be able to stir up some really, really good opportunity.
Yeah, I'm noticing that you need to hit somebody seven to nine times on touches. Yeah, before they'll respond. Sometimes people give up too soon. Yeah, they do. Now, this, but this is a good that's a good segue back to what you asked me earlier and your, what is you know, this whole media thing? I think that can shorten that curve dramatically if you have a lot of great content or a lot of great personality in your company. I think you can shorten people's curves where they don't need so many touches.
Or the searches are happening with a lot less effort. Maybe that's what's really happening, right? They're encountering you, but it doesn't take the same kind of push as it does conventionally. Because now they're coming to you. They're attracted to your LinkedIn live and your YouTube videos. They're attracted to your posts on Instagram.
And I've seen companies and some of the guests that have come on the show have shared their success of having kind of a dual track like their company has a great set of social initiatives where they're posting really great content. Maybe their CEO is giving some very, let's call it for lack of a better term, very professional style, business communications that are a real high value. A good sort of solid brand PR and marketing effort is in place. But concurrent with that, they have empowered some of their other players, their vice presidents and other leading consultants within the company, to play a little bit to be a lot more fun and be humorous and kind of more blue jeans as opposed to the suit jacket, you know and build their own following and kind of the two together they're seeing some really powerful results where, you know, they're getting calls, and they're getting contacted from folks. They don't even know its from some specific channel.
Or the traditional networking events where everyone is rattling off their elevator pitches and trying to out-expert all the other subject matter experts on the floor, probably with conflicting agendas. And that is not a great way to build trust, which explains why many people don't know who you are when you call them after the event. They just ghost you. It's brutal. Very true.
So what advice would you have as a media coach I know you do that too to people that have never really been on video or in the limelight at all. Who has never done a podcast, and they're nervous about it because they've never done it before. Yeah, and that's it's understandable. So I mean, I have coached folks for presenting work and different kinds of communications. A lot of times, I'm coaching some startups. To go get funded by VC firms, by Venture Capital players, working with them to develop their pitch deck and then working with them to present that that's even more nerve-wracking, right, because now they're, you know, they're really on the stage, and there's a lot at stake because if you can't get funded, hey, their dream is not gonna go anywhere.
So that's been gratifying. A lot of what I do is just work with simple communication basics. And what does that mean? Well, speak in a way that's very clear and have a very clear message you're going to convey. Don’t overcomplicate it. When you begin by just going to those basics, your confidence level rises because you've set the bar somewhere you can get to you're not trying to be, you know, not some major media personality, you know, whether you're trying to be a star Well, that's okay. I do it all, but you know, yeah, yeah. But you know, you're not worried about being a celebrity. You're just communicating well, and the good news is you don't have to be a, you know, magnetic radio-level personality or something to get really good attention on any of these platforms, whether that's YouTube or social media. You need to be a real person who's willing to kind of really just engage with other people. Just be your best self, and people find that appealing. I mean, authenticity really is the order of the day, and just make a beginning. Give it a start. I have found there's another track you can take to if you are a busy founder, okay, or if you're a busy business development person and you don't have the bandwidth.
Then bring somebody in who has someone willing to take that on, who will buy into your vision, who loves what you're doing, and with whom you can trust your brand and let them take that ball and run with it. That's what Lavie did at Overpass. He’s a very busy guy. I mean, he's got other things going on, and he does not have the time. He doesn't have time for Forbes! That's how you know you're too busy. Let's see here, but let's make a list, turning down interviews with Forbes that might be on that list. Now, in all fairness, the reporter that I set it up with the writer was late. And it just discombobulated the plan a little bit, I think.
Well, I guess it shows that even when you're as highly regarded as Forbes, it still comes down to the individual player on that day, right? Yeah. And respecting the time and taking it seriously. Yeah, you're a reporter and a big-time Forbes writer, but I'm Lavie Popack, and I’m busy too. Well, I respect that about Lavie, right, because that he any, and that's that's probably the hallmark of really good founders anyway, is that they don't have to be on the webinars or live events. Right that they did, and I've had a lot of really cool founders come on to Evolve Sales Live.
And they've all had that in common even when they had a lot of personality and had a lot of great thought leadership to offer, they were not afraid or threatened by sharing some of the I don't know for like it's not really limelight but it could feel like that. You could you're also typically talking about folks with a decent amount of, let's just call it, confidence. You might call it ego, but you certainly have to be very confident person to run a company, but it doesn't mean you're egotistical. And if you are too egotistical to share, maybe you're doing it wrong, actually, you know, I think maybe you're missing some things, so I give Lavie credit for being both confident and humble.
Lavie is extremely authentic. He tells personal stories. I just saw one post on LinkedIn about getting kicked out of camp. I was trying to find out why he wouldn't tell me! But he got kicked out of camp, and his dad punished him by making him lug these gigantic bags of heavy stuff like, let's just call them bricks. Yeah, and he had to run them upstairs walkups in New York and everything in New Jersey in the summer. That'll teach you some work ethic right there.
So yeah, most CEOs are not comfortable sharing a story like that. You got kicked out of camp?? Yeah, you know, but this he has a case in point for the kind of authenticity that really rings back to your question. I mean, if you are, if you have a company and understanding you need to get into this more of a media-savvy mode of promotion. Then just go for it. Start to tell some stories. Tell your own personal story. Where did you come from? How did you learn some of the key lessons that guide you today? Enable some of your key people to do the same thing. And it's great if you have more than one voice, but you still share a great common vision.
You're going to get that much more pull because, at the end of the day, a lot of the overly polished, overly corporate stuff doesn't have the pull. You go to LinkedIn and look, and you can find some really good brands that have been around for a long time. And they'll put stuff on LinkedIn, and it's gorgeous. Okay, it's like, you know, XYZ report on XYZ super interesting sounding topic, blah, blah. It looks perfect, has slick production values and great footage, and has transitions and looks like a Hollywood production. I know exactly what you're talking about it gets five likes, and two of them are the CEO and the COO, right?
It looks like a commercial. People don't want to watch commercials. They want to experience branded entertainment. Apples to apples just even go into major media. I mean, what are some of the most successful ad campaigns, even among the corporate giants? It's the ones that are a little quirky and fun. Right? Those are the ones that last I mean, how long has GEICO been able to stay top of mind? It's amazing. I mean, they are marketing legends. Now and how they've done it because they've retained this kind of quirky approach to marketing that goes back to the late 80s.
I think they started with this whole kind of semi-goofy approach with, I remember, some, like cartoon drawings. We all do dumb things, and some cartoon figure does something really klutzy like that to be paying too much for car insurance, you know, or whatever they just own it. It's always quirky. Now they've got the Gecko, which is just silly, but it works. It’s sticky. People remember the brand because the names are very similar. Yeah, that's a brilliant campaign. I agree that the best advertising campaigns also have authenticity, show vulnerability, and make fun of themselves and have fun. So I agree with that. But an interesting conversation about the future of business communications and brought us some great insights today. I really appreciate you coming on. Jonathan Fischer Bridgeview Global. I guess for busy people. You don't have to say the global part.
Thanks for coming on Entrepreneur Files today. Make it a newsworthy day! Yeah, thanks for having me. Talk to you shortly. Entrepreneur files. We hope your inside look into the entrepreneur file of today's industry titan left you inspired to bust through any walls between you and success. Not literally, Entrepreneur Files is not responsible for any property damage caused by uncontrollable zeal. Well, our job here is done. You could be the next entrepreneur we feature on the podcast Call 816-506-1257 or visit riseintegrated.com to schedule a quick meet and greet with our producer. Now we're off to visit Quotability, our creator community, where we share what we love and love what we share. It was designed for creatives by creatives to collaborate and grow media projects like Entrepreneur Files. Find Quotability on LinkedIn and continue the conversation there!
