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We’ve got a client for you, Mark S A Smith, who is doing some cool things with his Selling Disruption Show Podcast, which is such a cool show. It’s got so many innovative things and ways to think about disruptive selling and about selling disruptive things, innovation, so it’s in my wheelhouse. Plus, Tom got to talk to him on his show already, so I haven’t got the chance to get to know him. We’ve invited him here and I am going to do the interview myself. I wanted to go over some of the great things that Mark has done because he has been working in marketing since 1982. He’s got a system and organizational brain, which I absolutely adore. When you’ve got systems, you have the ability to have a ground underneath you.

You’ve got a platform to work on. You’ve got things you can fall back on. You don’t have to be super highly skilled in everything. You’ve got something underneath you and he loves to build these. He’s got a pragmatic style involving strategies and tactics to rapidly grow your business and help companies create or survive disruption because that’s happening all around us all the time, when we look at the things that are going on in the social world, disrupting the way that we’re selling, the way that the world is marketing. Everything is upending itself and Mark has been at the forefront of all that for decades now.

He has a great understanding and insights into how customers think, how they make decisions and those things haven’t changed. How we react and how we buy things and what consumers and/or business to business and so multilevel purchasing, how that works. That hasn’t changed at all. It’s the strategy and tactics we use in the process along the way. Mark’s going to talk to us about some of those things as well as talk to you about why he started a podcast and how it’s been going for him.

Listen to the podcast here

Tactical And Strategic Podcast Selling Tips with Mark S A Smith

Mark, thanks for joining me. I’m so glad to get to talk to you in person. You’ve been a client for a while and everybody in the office had been buzzing about how amazing you are. I listened to your podcast, Selling Disruption Show because you’ve had lots of my friends there.

Yes, indeed. We’ve shared the coolest friends, don’t we?

That’s right. You’ve got some big ringers in the industry.

It’s fortunate to have some fantastic minds on the show. I’m delighted to be on your show as well to share these ideas with my audience and your audience too because we’re going to be sharing this show across the board.

The ongoing theme that I see in your show and on your website and what you’re talking about a lot is that selling disruption, selling things that are innovative, selling things that are difficult to explain or that are complicated, that requires a different strategy.

Completely different because if you’re selling something that’s new and disruptive, what do people know to put into Google or ask Siri? They don’t.

Tom says this all the time and it’s so true. More than 25% of what is getting put into Google every single day is brand-new. Google’s never seen it before. It’s because new things are coming up every day, new ways for us to describe it, and new terms that you’ve never heard of before.

I was talking about the search strategy when we have something new but also when we bring in new technology to market, one of our best ways of doing this is outreach. That is where we target the people we want to speak to base on our work. We know the avatar is and so we find those people and go fishing in those areas and we make ourselves a person of interest.

This is so critical and this is something that I talk about a lot in my column and on my podcast as well. I call it a hypothesis brand and a hypothesis avatar if you want to call it that or audience. Sometimes you have to go in when you’ve got something completely disruptive and new. You have to go in with this idea, “This is what they’re going to be like,” and you have to test it.

Hypothesis is a great way of saying it. You and I use the same language. I used to say, “I bet it’s like this,” now I say, “I hypothesize it’s like this.”

It sounds a little more scientific.

The reality is that no new product survives contact with the customer. Unless we’re developing customers at the same time we’re developing products, which is ideal. Once you bring a product to market, you’re going to pivot and this happens all the time with disruptive products.

Podcast Selling Tips: Once you bring a product to market, you’re going to pivot. This happens all the time with disruptive products.

I find this with my clients all the time, but it’s a lot harder to find an audience to fit your product than it is to find a product to fit your audience and I’m a product designer.

If we talk about the three classic horizons of innovation, horizon one is zero to six months and that’s a market chaser, where you’re trying to find products that fit a particular market. From six to eighteen months is horizon two and that’s a need secret. What we’re trying to do is figure out what the folks are going to want next so we better have a community that we’re building things for. That’s where all the money is made is in that chunk. The next horizon is 36 months beyond and that’s tech innovation. That’s when we’re inventing new things where the customers don’t know they need it yet. We can think of lots and lots of products that live that way. Ideally, we are going to be working all three horizons.

You want to do all three at the same time. You’ve got to have systems or marketing processes or sales systems that are doing all of the above.

You might look at it as that the zero to six months is your traditional sales force and your traditional marketing team. The six to eighteen months is your traditional product marketing team, which is going to be doing some customer visits. Then the folks that are 36 months and on, that’s your product long-term R&D team and perhaps a business development person. They’re separate teams with separate timelines that are rewarded in different ways.

Now, our businesses are so solo. We have small businesses. Sometimes we’re in business with our husbands or our wives because they hear somebody might be. I might not be the only co-creator in this conversation.

Not at all. That’s the way it works. It went from 35 down to two and it’s much better that way.

Isn’t it amazing? It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun. You wear a lot of hats and so that’s where I’m a big fan of systems. That’s one of the reasons why Tom and I started podcasting way back when we started it. We were doing that, we were in that area of like, “Is this a market and innovation product that we want to be in?” We were in that particular talking about 3D print disruption. We were at that stage of like, “Is this even a market we want to be in? If we are, is our audience right?” What we discovered there is we didn’t want to be in that business, which was a great thing to discover. We also discovered there was a business for our information and that’s how we ended up Brandcasters.

As entrepreneurs and smaller companies that do extraordinary things, the secret to doing this successfully is asking yourself this question, “Can I get out of bed willingly? I can’t wait for the next ten years about this topic,” and if you can’t, don’t bother.

You have done thirteen books and 400 articles. You’ve been a prolific writer.

More than that. The fourteenth book came out in April. I’ve got three books in the works right now. Thousands of articles since then. I write new stuff every day.

You’re also a podcaster.

Part of this feeding the brain that we have here is interviewing somebody smarter than I am, once a week on a topic I know not enough about.

Don’t you love that?

It feeds my soul. It feeds my brain. It gives me new content. It gives me new friends.

That’s my favorite part about podcasting and the part that I won’t give up and that is the interviews. I do a podcast, which is called Product Launch Hazzards. I do a whole podcast in which people are there to listen to my information. They want the direct information from me and I do that once a month. I spend the rest of the time talking with all the other experts because that networking and that referral process from talking to them goes, “I have a client for you. I have one for you,” and that feeding frenzy that happens because you’re reminding them, you’re right there. That is one of my best business builders.

Let’s talk about the power of podcast for disruptive products for a moment since that’s why we’re here. The reality is since we have this challenge that people don’t know what to type into Google when we first get started, this idea of having a conversation with people about the disruptive product and then creating the transcription and turning it into a blog. This means that we’ve come up with lots and lots of keywords as we described this new product. People who are doing the search, Google loves fresh content with those keywords and people are much more likely to find us in a search environment if we’re using podcasts with transcriptions in a blog format. Everybody that I talked to who has a new innovative product is, if you’re not doing a podcast, you’re leaving a lot of customers in the dark.

As we’re moving to a world in which Google especially but because of Amazon Echo, Alexa, Google Home and all of those things, they’re moving to serve us at more relevant content that is in the format that we prefer. For video watchers, they’re going to give us videos and if for audio listeners, they’re going to give us audios and a lot of us are mixes. I only listen to audio when I’m on the treadmill and I watch videos with my girls, so they are totally different video. You might be different. You personally might be that kind of person who does consume everything.

My audience, which tends to be executives of companies, people who are creating the future that doesn’t exist using methods that haven’t been invented where best practices haven’t been determined. Those people don’t watch YouTube videos of the content that we’re doing here. They listen. They listened when they exercise, when they travel in their car, when they travel on airplanes, when they travel on trains. That’s the place you got to be where the fish are that you want to cook. When it comes to bringing new technology, market search is going to be driven primarily by podcasts and lots of them.

Podcast Selling Tips: When it comes to bringing new technology, the market search is going to be driven primarily by podcasts and lots of them is the key.

We talked a little about regular cadence. The second one, we’ve talked about is outreach and the third one is word of mouth. Word of mouth is nice. I’ve talked to a lot of people, what’s your formal marketing plan? I don’t have one. That’s a predictor of failure. It’s a leading indicator of a failing business. A lot of people say, “We have a word of mouth.” The problem with word of mouth is number one, it’s uncontrollable because you can’t control your customers’ mouth. The second thing is it’s not scalable. When you want to grow bigger, how do you turn up the word of mouth? It’s true you can do some things, but I see word of mouth is more a bonus, not a marketing methodology. We have search, outreach and word of mouth and that spells SOW. If you want to remember the three fundamental marketing methodologies, it’s SOW. We reap in sales what we sow in marketing.

This is something I’ve had a conversation with. We’re on another podcast that Tom and I were both on and we were having a debate about sales, marketing and design. I’m a firm believer in them coming together and working more collaboratively. That’s what you’ve got going on here. Sales and marketing have to work collaboratively to make that happen.

There’s a term for it called smarketing.

I’ve never heard of that before.

Do you know G Leavitt?

I do.

G is the guy that owns the trademark on that.

I didn’t know that and I know him very well.

G and I are collaborating on how to make smarketing work for advanced technology. You’ll have to invite G back on the show.

I’ve got to have him on, how funny. We have Smarketing and Brandcasting. We’re getting into business now.

It’s good to invent new words to describe things that haven’t been created before.

You’ve been on the forefront of that because you’re one of the original Guerrilla marketers.

I am. I was so fortunate to write three books with Jay Conrad Levinson, the Father of Guerrilla marketing back in the mid ‘90s. I wrote Guerrilla Trade Show Selling and that’s essentially about running a three-second funnel. That’s what it is. You have a second and a half to grab their attention and then you’ve got a second and a half to sell them on stopping and having a conversation. That’s what that’s all about. I learned so much about rapidly moving people through a sales process when we wrote that book. The second book I wrote was Guerrilla Teleselling. The idea was how do you create a relationship when you can’t be there in person? It explores all those methodologies and it’s not telemarketing that’s a piece of it but it’s about teleselling. How do you formulate those transactions remotely?

We were having a debate about that, are we losing touch? Is our sales process suffering because we’re not in person anymore? It’s interesting because I started to think about it and I go, some of my services are done in person but 95% of my selling is done virtually. You can see me, but it’s virtual and so we have come into that world. Having had that early on, you’ve got a great framework for that.

We invented some interesting things along the way and I keep inventing. In fact, I’ve got a new process that I’m teaching people called How to Become a Person of Interest? It’s designed to have people call you back from a voicemail message. We might want to have that conversation. We don’t have time for this podcast but let’s do it on the future podcast.

I’m excited about that. You probably have a lot of these disruptive companies that you’re working with as well. Even though they may be executives and they’re big companies, sometimes the innovative departments are underfunded. You’ve got a lot of bootstrapping going on, so you’ve got to be creative in how you get the message out.

Guerrilla Negotiating: Unconventional Weapons and Tactics to Get What You Want (Guerilla Marketing Series)

Without a doubt, we don’t have unlimited budgets and quite frankly, the traditional marketing methods that are big and loud are ignored by most people. We have to go back to the Guerrilla marketing methodology, which is to do things that are unconventional. Back to the Guerrilla marketing, let’s finish up that idea. The third book I wrote with Jay was Guerrilla Negotiating. What makes this book different is that it’s the antidote to all the things that were taught by the other negotiating books used by buyers to get salespeople to drop their prices. All the other books are teaching the buyers to say when somebody gives you the price, “You’re going to have to sharpen your pencil to do business with us.” They’re saying, “I can get it cheaper somewhere else,” or they’re saying, “You’re going to have to do better than that.” How do you respond to those? That’s what the book is about. It’s about how to keep more and margin. I still haven’t seen any book that provides the antidote to those dirty tricks.

I had a conversation with one of our clients invited and he had run a webinar and he did the typical webinar trick of like, “Now it’s this.” I said, “If I were a client, which you did push this out through your client network asking them to refer friends to it, and I saw that you were taking what was a $5,000 program and discounting it down to $3,000, I’d be pissed at you.” I said you could have done something completely different, which was because it happened to be a webinar that was on 9/11. It was specifically in the health and wellness field that he could have done something where today you pay the full price for the program, but I’m going to give a program to a 9/11 responder, so they’re also going to be healed in this process. Now, it’s a two for one but it’s gifted to somebody else. You haven’t discounted your price, but you’ve felt like they got something that could only happen now so they feel compelled to buy.

In fact, let’s dig into this for just a moment because it’s a critical concept, especially when we’re selling disruptive products. There are two fundamental ways that we can look at a product. Is it a tactical product or strategic product? A tactical product is purchased to perform a task. A strategic product is purchased to perform a mission. With tactical products, discounting is part of the sales process. Strategic products are never put on sale. Let me illustrate this clearly. Have you ever seen Apple put a product on sale? Never. It’s a strategic product. Have you seen Samsung discount their phones? Everyday. That’s a tactical positioning. If you sell something that’s scarce and rare and considered to be mission-critical, you do not discount. Let me say it the other way, “Does your favorite perfume or makeup ever go on sale?”

No, not the good stuff.

Gift with purchase, but it never goes on sale. If you want to position something as valuable and high-end, you never discount, you only add value. We can dig a whole lot deeper into the model of the tactical versus strategic. That’s an interesting model that I’ve created, that illustrates these four fundamental ways to go to market and most people go to market the wrong way.

Let’s do that because I’m curious. We have a lot of people here who have two things that are going on. Sometimes their podcast that they’re building or their brandcast that they’re building is a strategic plan. It’s a mission. They have a passion, they have an authentic brand and they have the passion they’re building around something. They have that problem and some of them, it’s very tactical. Let’s go into that because that would be fantastic.

Let me give you a couple more pieces to qualify them. Tactical products are usually viewed as a cost or an expense and strategic products are usually seen as an investment. Tactical products are usually mass-produced versus strategic products are typically or highly customizable. A tactical product doesn’t require a lot of cognitive capacity to sell it because it’s fundamentally a commodity. The only differentiation that you create with the commodity is going to be either delivery or price.

Tom and I call it, when you’re creating something truly innovative, it’s me-only territory. When you’re in me-only territory, you have an opportunity to be more strategic about it as well.

Tactical products are typically sold very fast because people are familiar with them and it’s just a matter of selecting the vendor versus strategic products. There’s enough differentiation that you have to figure out how it applies to your scenario, your situation.

The Betamax-VHS problem, where you spend all this time and energy educating the marketplace on how great this technology and this disruption is and then someone swoops in with something slightly better because you spent all this money and time on education.

That’s a classic example. Betamax was certainly better than VHS, but why did VHS win the war? The reason why is because they were cheaper and people couldn’t tell the difference.

It wasn’t differentiated enough.

It wasn’t differentiated the way the market wanted differentiation. Keep in mind, different is not enough. What we have to have is desirably different.

This is what we go for. When we design products and when we design podcast for that matter because we consider them a design, we strategically look at them. When we do that, we look at the same things. Is this what the audience wants? Is this what people want to buy and is it going to be very apparent to them? We try to find the process by which it is a sell selling. In other words, when you have a physical product, when it’s on the shelf, there is no one there in retail to sell stuff anymore. You can’t have something that explains it. Maybe you could have a little bit of POP, which is the point of purchase, for those of you not in the industry. For the most part, you don’t have much opportunity to explain a product. If it can’t sell itself, then it’s not worth putting a lot of money into. That’s what we look for.

In retail, if a customer cannot look at it and make a decision in a few seconds, it’s not suitable for retail. It has to be sold a different way through either online or in person channels, depending on how much margins available to make that happen. Yet the more disruptive and the more strategic the product, the more customer education has to occur before they feel comfortable. The situation is every new product is risky. I want to clue you into a little secret about selling to corporations and that is the only way you make money in a corporation is by getting promoted. Those little raises you get from year-to-year is not enough. You’ve got to get promoted.

There’s only one way you can get promoted and that is by illustrating consistently that you have good judgment. Let’s say that you’re talking to a vendor about a new product and you realize that if you choose that product and it fails, your career is at risk. Even if you can pay for it out of your pocket, you’re still going to have to explain to somebody why you made that bad judgment. If it has to be approved by a committee, you have to sell it to them and they’re thinking about the impact on their careers if they’re seeing a signing off on something that’s risky.

Podcast Selling Tips: Even if you can pay for it out of your pocket, you’re still going to have to explain to somebody why you made that bad judgment.

That’s why there’s no innovative there. You’re right. Like what we call the retail buyer world, the buyers, the gatekeepers are who decides what’s on the shelf. For those of you who are not familiar with that world, those are people who are not thinking about innovation or risks at all. They do not want to take risks. They want to do moderately better than the last guy so that they can get that promotion. They do not want to make a big hit. They do not care about selling the hottest toy, the hottest game. The fidget spinner was the last thing that came out. They don’t care about that. They want to make sure it’s a sure thing.

They’ve got to make sure it’s a sure thing. A lot of times what we consider to be a sales cycle is not that, it’s a consideration cycle. It’s how long does it take for the decision-making team to get to the yes. In that environment, sales is simply one thing, reducing perceived risk.

This is probably the core of what we love about podcasting, but also what I write about in my column is that the core part of it is proving that. If I can sustain an audience here on my podcast, then I am a great person to bring in as a keynote speaker. There’s a lot less risk for that here. If my articles are well-read, then I’m going to make a great author.

Proof is one of the seven Ps for reducing risk.

You have seven Ps for reducing risk and I have seven Ps for design and development too. That’s my process.

There’s something powerful about the P process.

What are yours? Let’s hear them.

First P is indeed proof. You’ve got to have proof and you do that with case studies, and you do that with proof of concepts. You do that with all those things that illustrate that you can deliver what you say you’re going to deliver. The thing you have to keep in mind is the proof has to be absolutely within context to your customer. If you’re selling something to the banks, you can’t use a transportation company type of case study. They can’t make the leap. It also has to be proof that’s going to be relevant to the decision-making team up the food chain, so it cannot embarrass them.

The next one is process. You have to show people the process. If you’re doing something that’s complex, show them the process of how you do work together. A powerful way of doing this when you have some project that has a lot of risks, you break things down into phases. You have phase one that’s a low-cost, low-risk and proves the point and allows you to move to phase two, had a little more cost, a little more risk, phase three, pull the plug at any point in the phases so those processes give a lot of comforts. Here’s an important concept. No executive would ever say yes to a project they don’t know how to manage. We have to show them how to manage a disruptive process or a disruptive product. Otherwise, they cannot say yes.

The third P is progress and that one was inspired by a conversation with G Leavitt. The idea is that you illustrate that every time they have contact with you, their clarity improves. Look at all the process that’s involved since you contact us. You can do it better than ever before and it’s a natural extension of this process that we’re going through to take us to the finale.

I love that because sometimes there’s some immediate gratification necessary. Think about like a diet or any program. If you don’t get an immediate result, they’re not going to stick with it. You’ve got to have some progress along the way.

There should be progress before they will buy from you. We call those things quick wins. The fourth P is position. How are you positioned against everybody else in the marketplace? If you can prove that you’re higher quality or that you’re better vetted by the educational institutions or sometimes it’s how you position yourself in the world of business. For example, I was working with a man who was selling a recycling process, a processing project that can cause customers to make money from their garbage. He was going in there and trying to sell it as a green thing. I said, “Stop that. You walk in and you say one thing, I am here to buy your garbage.” That’s a position and it changes the risk completely.

The next is price. If you can radically reduce the cost, it’s worth the value of taking the risk because they can always fall back on the old vendor. You’re not always going to use that, but there should be some radical improvement in their productivity or their efficiency in some way so that the people who say yes to the risk are rewarded. There’s a risk-reward pay-off here.

Podcast Selling Tips: That fear that you’re feeling right now is the fear the customer is feeling before they are buying from you.

Then the next one is prestige. Is doing business with you going to give them brag power? The last one is probably the most important for many buyers and that’s parachute. That is if something goes wrong, how are they going to save themselves and how are they going to save their career? To do that requires outrageous guarantees such as if it doesn’t work out the way we’ve promised, we’re going to rip it out. We’re going to bring in at our expense, another third party, a consultant that’s going to assess this. We’re going to pay the difference between what you paid us and getting the proper item in place. That should scare anybody in the audience, but the thing is that fear that you’re feeling right now is the fear the customer is feeling before they are buying from you.

I’ve done a lot of warranty stuff and things like that around furniture products and other things that I’ve designed. I can tell you, it’s so rare that they ended up taking advantage or doing something like that. It just doesn’t happen. If you’re great at what you do, then it’s not going to be necessary.

Keep in mind this one simple fact, the IRS will take more money than any of your customers.

Mark, you have got a font of knowledge but I’m very curious how has it been for you? Has it helped your business? Has it helped you personally? What has it done for you?

First of all, I kicked myself for not starting this thing a decade ago. I produced podcast style shows with my client back in the early ‘90s. They were distributed in audio cassettes. We had a Tape of the Month Club where I would do this exact same thing and it was awesome. I’ve also been editing audio since 1976. You can tell I’ve got a radio voice. It’s what I’ve done. I’m a radio guy and so I kicked myself for not doing this because I have ten times the audience from my podcast than I do in any other social media that I do.

That is exactly what we found. I would rather podcast than I would spend time tweeting. It’s not worth my time.

Number two, since working with you and the Brandcasters team, my audience size has doubled. Thank you very much.

We love to hear that, but why is that?

The reason why is because I was doing the SEO work half-assed and as my wife, Molly says, “You’ve got to go for it.”

You don’t have time for all that.

I don’t have time for all that, but your team nails the SEO work and so people are finding me. Whereas before, my regular promotion, it brought me a decent audience. What we’ve changed here is, “I’m a client for life unless you screw up.”

We will make it right because we believe in that parachute, we do. At the end of the day, that content is yours. That’s our parachute. Our content is yours. We’ll help you to shift over if you decide not to work with us anymore. We’ve done it, we had two clients who left and they left because they took them internally. I was like, “Good, your prerogative, here you go.” We shifted them, we said, “We’ll help you. We’ll make it pack. We will send you back to where you want to go.” That’s great because they were our most problematic clients.

It’s good they fired themselves then.

The thing is that I believe that we have to. That’s one of the things that I like about your show is that when you’re tapping into the experts and you’re asking them these questions that you’re asking them, you’re talking about it dialed into this specific niche. I want to know how am I going to sell something hard to sell? How am I going to sell something disruptive and innovative and hard to sell and you’ve got that dialed in. When I’m asking for something on Google, I’m not asking for you to tell me how to sell widget A or another Amazon product.

When you get those things combined together, that’s an SEO understanding that is a lot deeper level than most of us had time to get in the weeds for because we’re running our businesses and helping our clients. I am not a fan of doing that myself. I don’t. That is why Tom and I built this because I didn’t have time to keep up with it then and I was not happy with doing a half-ass job. I wanted to go full force into it and that’s why we built our team and then people begged us to help them and said, “Would you do it for me?” That’s how we ended up dragged into business.

It’s a great way of going into business when people say, “Could you do that for me?”

The last thing I want to touch on and ask with you is, you’re doing more than just helping bigger corporations and executives, you help small businesses too. What advice could you leave with them for growing their brands?

It’s very simple. Go as sharp and as targeted as you possibly can. It reduces the risk for the buyer. It means that you’re an instant expert when you show up to speak and you can charge more compared to other people that are doing something that’s more generic. That combination of proven authority, authority is one of the key elements to higher prices. Authority is the key element to getting the door open. The fact that I’ve written all these books is the door opener. I can get a meeting with anybody. I have to send them the right book. My recommendation is to get as sharp as you possibly can, as tightly targeted in as you can in your offering.

Podcast Selling Tips: You’re an instant expert when you show up to speak and you can charge more compared to others that are doing something that’s more generic.

I want to offer you this one last idea and that is logic leads to a conclusion, emotion leads to action. Until your customers can feel safe and feel like doing business with you is the best possible thing. I don’t care what your arguments are, I don’t care what your specifications are, I don’t care how good you claim you are, none of that matters. All that leads to is a conclusion and we can’t cash a conclusion.

You were so right about that. Mark, it has been an absolute pleasure to get to know you. The office has been raving about you. I begged for this chance to get to interview you.

Tactical And Strategic Podcast Selling Tips – Final Thoughts

I could have talked to Mark all day. There are so many things that we could dive into. In fact, as soon as I turned off the recording, he started to talk to me about the different types of business acumen that we have as executives and whether or not we’re abdicating some of our responsibilities as leaders of our companies because we don’t feel competent in areas and we honestly don’t always have the time. He’s running some interesting things that you guys should check out. Definitely check out the Selling Disruption Show, his podcast.

He’s got a new executive strategy summit that he’s running. He runs events and online events and all kinds of things all around, where you can engage with him and understand more about his process of figuring out how to sell something complicated. How to sell something that is so innovative that it requires education and description and we’d sometimes over complicate things. You know you do it. You over-complicate how hard something is or you talk in the speech that you’re comfortable with. You talk in the language of your industry and that doesn’t help you overcome things.

Getting someone with an outside perspective on that who is good at deciphering that and putting in strategies and tactics in places is ultimately necessary. For you, you could try to do it yourself, but having someone with an outside perspective to come in and shine that light on it for you is useful. I urge you to listen to his podcast, the Selling Disruption Show and get in touch with him and check out all the different things he has to offer. He’s got a lot of articles and information out there for you to access as well. This is my favorite part of being a podcaster is getting to learn something new every single day and getting to meet someone new. I hope that you came along for the ride with me, getting to meet Mark S A Smith.

This is the best part of being a Brandcaster is getting to know someone, getting to add people to your network and getting to add their people to your network. That is the most fabulous part about it and it’s why I urge you all to be interviewers as a part of your show. It is also why I urge you to do both and do what I’m doing right now, which is framing up. If you’re not going to do solo episodes at minimum, do what I’m doing right now and frame up the interview that you had. Put it in context. Put the thoughts that are going through your mind out there for other people to hear. Mark has my mind spinning about the importance of making people understand and feel safe and the seven P’s. I keep thinking, do we have all that covered in our Brandcaster business? Are we covering that? I know we have process. I know we have progress but is it enough progress? That’s the one that I’m thinking about is trying to dial in and saying are we providing enough quick results, enough quick wins as Mark put it?

I’ve got to think that through. Can we provide some more quick ones for you? I know that we take work away from you, so that’s got to be a quick win, but can we provide even quicker results within 30 days? What could we do there? Are we positioning ourselves well? I keep thinking that through in my mind is we’re positioned against some big entrenched marketplace and when you think about it, it’s like the marketplace is seven, eight years old. It’s not that old and yet we’re still less than a decade old and we’re worried about someone who has an entrenched position and I’ve got to figure out how to position against them. I know we’ve got a price value proposition that’s good. Are we prestigious enough?

This is something that you could check and we’re in the process of doing that because my sister-in-law and one of the experts on Product Launch Hazzards, Laura Hazzard, she is running some research and she’s out there contacting and interviewing some of our podcasters to get feedback and understanding. Maybe I should add this question to the mix. I want you to hear that and the parachute. I know we’re adding a parachute because we will take your show and we’ll move it back wherever you want at the end of the day if you’re not happy here. Thinking about those things and framing that up for myself, you guys should be doing that too.

That’s what your takeaway should be from every show that you do and if you’re not sitting there then maybe it’s not a great podcast to be listening to. If you’re not sitting there and it’s sending you with these thoughts afterward and you’re not sharing those thoughts with your audience, then you’re not doing them the service of helping them move along that way and taking action from the show that you gave them.

I hope this is getting you to think about your businesses and your brands and how you’re providing all of these things and how you’re selling you every single day because you want to make moves in the world. You are selling disruption. If you are making a mission, if you have a passion project, if you have all those things that you want to accomplish with your show. In addition to perhaps selling goods and services and things that you have, that you personally want to accomplish for your business goals, that’s okay. Both of those are absolutely okay missions and reasons to be running a podcast. If you want to do either of those things, you better start thinking about it as selling them; selling and marketing together. Mark made us think about that. You can find us on social media at @FeedYourBrand, specifically on Facebook. I look forward to connecting and communicating with you there. Reach out to us, let us know how we’re doing and let us know what else you would like to hear.

Important Links

• Selling Disruption Show Podcast
• Tracy’s Inc. Column
• Product Launch Hazzards
• Guerrilla Trade Show Selling
• Guerrilla Teleselling
• Guerrilla Negotiating
• G Leavitt
• Brandcasters
• Laura Hazzard
• @FeedYourBrand on Facebook

About Mark S A Smith

Mark designs and implements leadership, sales, marketing, customer acquisition and client conversion systems that find and recruit willing buyers for products and services ranging from common everyday to high-end unique and disruptive. He is often invited to speak at entrepreneurial and corporate events because Mark delivers unique, valuable, and pragmatic ideas to grow and succeed. With a deep understanding of international business, he has delivered events in 54 countries. Mark is the author of 13 popular books and sales guides and has authored more than 400 magazine articles. He is a genuine Guerrilla Marketing guru, co-authoring three books with Jay Conrad Levinson, and is a certified Guerrilla Marketing Coach. A renaissance man with many talents, Mark is passionate about leadership, team building, teamwork, sales, and marketing.

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