Conquer Local Podcast

Digital Ad Spend is a vital piece of the new marketing stack for local businesses—and therefore, a must-have service to offer as a marketing agency. Zach Johnson, Founder of FunnelDash, co-host of the Rich Ad Poor Ad Podcast, and author of the book Rich Ad Poor Ad, joins George Leith this week. Zach is here to talk about Digital Ad Spend. Zach sheds light on how to best prepare clients for the outcomes based on their budget. He wants to share the message of understanding the core messaging behind your product/service before you throw money behind it on an advertising channel. Make sure the rest of your online presence ducks are in a row, and keep them in that row for your advertising leads to fall into that purchase funnel. No single tip will work for every business, as every business is unique. The best thing to do is test, track, rinse, and repeat to unlock that "secret advertising sauce" for you and your clients.Zach Johnson is the Founder of FunnelDash. Under Zach's leadership, FunnelDash has grown to over 5,350+ agency partners managing over $1 Billion in ad spend across 51,000 ad accounts. Zach's private clients have included online influencers, SaaS, and e-commerce brands such as BigCommerce, Dr. Axe, Marie Forleo, Dan Kennedy, Dean Graziosi, to name a few. Zach is a noted keynote speaker co-author of the book Agency Growth w/ Ryan Deiss @ Digital Marketer.Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.

There is no possible way to scale, manage, and optimize every channel to ensure a company’s story is being told without a dedicated content marketing team.What does a content marketing team look like? Dan McLean, Director of Content Marketing at Vendasta, knows a thing or two when building one. Dan has not only developed a content marketing team in one organization but four organizations. He often sees stories getting lost when creating content because there has been a focus on content specifically based on SEO value. Dan makes a shift in the organizations he has worked with to tell the story that solves the problem. A content marketer needs to be purposeful, understand who they are writing for and the objective they are solving. Writers can lose sight of the audience; he reminds teams to deliver value, not a pitch. Dan's words of advice, give a damn about what you do. Don’t think something is good enough, always do the best work you can do.Dan McLean is the Director of Content Marketing for Vendasta Technologies. He is a seasoned communications professional whose previous experience as a content and corporate marketer includes stints at OpenText Technologies, Intelex Technologies, Rogers Communications, and Cisco Systems. Dan has a 25-year career in information technology as a journalist with IDG and the Globe and Mail, market researcher with IDC Canada, and executive communications manager who worked with the Canadian CEO for Cisco Canada.Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.

A stellar LinkedIn Profile contains five key areas: Profile picture, job title, about description, experiences, and endorsements. From picture quality to endorsements representing you, your professional brand is the key to all new opportunities to build your brand and set yourself up for success.Morgan Hammer, Relationship Manager, Mid Market - Sales Solutions at LinkedIn, joins us from Chicago's windy city to talk about how to rock your LinkedIn Profile. Morgan shares how to create a LinkedIn profile that brings your personal career story to life, whether you’re just starting, seeking to advance, or making a career change. Morgan offers tips on tailoring each section, starting with the key insight that a LinkedIn profile is unique and shouldn’t be approached exactly like a resume.Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, Morgan has been living in Chicago, IL, for the past 5 years. Her LinkedIn journey was not a typical one, as she was a nontraditional hire coming from a retail background. Prior to LinkedIn, she managed several different shoe departments at Nordstrom throughout the Midwest. This is where she found my passion for working with other people in a sales environment and ‘style flexing’ to learn what makes each person happy. In Morgan's current role as a Relationship Manager at LinkedIn, she gets to help clients revolutionize their selling process to optimize their time and capitalize on all potential revenue. My priority is to help each client build their process through our leading-edge technology, embedding social selling as part of their sales cultures and processes. She loves learning about her clients' goals and how they can create a plan in place to achieve them. When she isn't working, she is trying out new restaurants in Chicago and playing with her adorable 6-month old Covid puppy, Max.Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.

A macro conversion funnel is the most important part of any sale procedure on any website. In fact, the macro funnel conversion is almost the final step before a sale is sealed. The Conquer Local Podcast is in sunny San Diego this week to talk to Frank Cowell, CEO at Digitopia Agency and author of Building Your Digital Utopia. He found his passion for technology in the 90s, creating a webspace on AOL and built an information superhighway. His passion is sales and marketing, so he knows when to get technical in a conversation with a potential customer. Frank takes us through what a macro conversion funnel should look like, obsessing over the bottleneck in your conversion funnel, and how to get the testimonial from your customer. With 20 years of digital marketing experience, Frank regularly works with executive teams who are looking to create amazing brand experiences while accelerating growth. Frank is the author of Building Your Digital Utopia, which details a concept he pioneered to help brands create digital experiences that systematically accelerate growth. Frank regularly presents an energetic and entertaining speaker to regional and national organizations on topics related to revenue operations, business strategy, and digital marketing. When Frank founded his first agency in early 2004, his primary focus was website development and Internet marketing. He started by developing a successful website content management system (CMS) from the ground up. Over the past 15 years, he has helped his agency morph into a digital marketing agency that works in the areas of digital strategy and execution. Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.

MSP Marketing troubles start with not knowing how to spend their allocated marketing dollars to make the real magic happen. Ayan Adam, Founder of CX Atelier, joins us this week to discuss MSP Marketing troubles. Marketing for MSPs requires a different approach and a deep understanding of the industry and technology trends. Ayan offers her insights on technology-focused marketing support to answer the MSP capabilities' prevalent gap to execute marketing activities in-house. Ayan's specialty focuses on the customer experience and cultivating relationships with the MSP and the world of marketing. In this episode, you'll learn why the IT reselling service layer is important and how they become the most trusted asset you can add to the products and solutions you offer. For the longest time, channel marketing was the "poor relative" of all marketing branches, cookie-cutter campaigns and activities, and very little focus on the end customer experience. Meanwhile, the B2B landscape is shifting dramatically, and buyers now expect high-quality digital services when making a B2B purchase.Ayan Adam is an experienced leader in the B2B IT Technology industry. She designed industry-recognized brands and delivered high impact marketing and branding campaigns for IT industry leaders. She has a deep understanding of the B2B technology space both from the OEM’s standpoint and at the VAR and MSP level. She is passionate about fulfilling the promise of digital marketing for B2B technology companies and meeting the next wave of digital transformation with customer-centric and experience-focused marketing. Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.

Time is the biggest obstacle when it comes to inside sales training programs, but we can look at proven sales training best practices to help make sure that your team is set up for real success.We hop the pond to talk to the newest Vendastian: Ian Jones, the VP of Sales Training and Enablement at Vendasta. Ian brings his vast knowledge to the listeners on what it takes to build an inside sales training program. His approach is widely adopted in the learning development of the 70/20/10 model. We dig into the forgetting curve and what information sticks in a 24-hour period, why it's important to walk through the journey with new hires and what it takes for them to become a sales rep, and how crucial it is to apply consistent training company-wide. This means having a repeatable and scalable training model. You can't scale suck.Ian is an experienced sales leader with a track record of delivering transformation and change across a wide range of functions, including Sales, Operations, Training and Enablement, and Digital. He acquired his broad range of experience and knowledge working in a variety of industries over the past 20 years, including insurance, finance and banking, consultancy, media, and tech. Ian has a passion for people development and has led the development and implementation of a number of significant sales talent development programs for frontline sellers and sales leadership. To prove that he practices the personal development mantra that he preaches, Ian is constantly looking for opportunities to develop himself. In recent years, he completed an Executive MBA at The University of Cranfield and became a member of the Chartered Management Institute in the UK.Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.

The membership economy is focused on teaching people how to create their own. At the same time, it includes some deeper marketing and human behavior principles that are useful to know in other contexts.We have Robbie Baxter, Founder of Penisula Strategies, author of The Forever Transaction and The Membership Economy, with us on this edition of the Conquer Local Podcast. Robbie coined the term membership economy to describe a massive transformation in every organization, from nonprofits and associations to the most profitable of companies. Which of the following companies do you think uses the subscription revenue model: Netflix, NBA, eBay, Oracle, Electronic Arts, or Microsoft? Trick question, they ALL are. We learn how an SMB can establish a subscription revenue model, the best way to target your audience, and why recurring revenue is the holy grail.Robbie Kellman Baxter is a consultant, author, and speaker. She is also the author of The Membership Economy and The Forever Transaction and hosts the podcast Subscription Stories. Robbie has more than 20 years of experience providing strategic business advice to major organizations, including Netflix, Fitbit, Microsoft, and Consumer Reports. She has been focused on subscription and growth strategies for the past decade. Baxter has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and on CNN. She earned her MBA from the Stanford GSB and graduated with honors from Harvard College.Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.

Whether you are a new start-up or an established business, brand visibility is always key. If people don’t know about the new things you are doing, how can you make a sale?We have Chris Dickey, CEO and Founder of Visably AND Owner and Founder of Purple Orange, on the podcast this week. Chris shares that 89 percent of B2B marketers labeled brand visibility and awareness as the most important goal over sales and lead generation. In this day and age, with so many communication platforms, advanced technologies, and modern ways of thinking, what are the most effective methods of getting your brand out there? In this episode, Chris unwraps the ROI for PR, the important pieces to measure brand success, and relates it all to the customer journey.Chris Dickey has a resume that spans publishing, in-house marketing direction, public relations, and software development. Chris is the Owner + Founder of Purple Orange Brand Communications, a PR agency specializing in outdoor and active lifestyle brands. Chris started exploring the intersection of search engine marketing and public relations using his agency clients as the guinea pig. Chris started by having his agency audit search results for PR opportunities, eventually scaling that strategy to win over large swaths of highly valuable organic search results for his clients, using PR tactics.In 2019 Chris took this strategy a step further by founding Visably – a new marketing / PR SaaS platform that audits search results for brand mentions and provides an analysis of a website’s “channel” for further segmentation and list building (so PR practitioners can extract clean media-only lists out of the keyword data).Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.

Episode 356 brings you the importance of emotional intelligence in sales. Low emotional intelligence prevents salespeople from achieving their success potential, impacting many areas of their sales performance.We bring back an alumni to the Conquer Local Podcast, Mr. Jason Forrest. Jason, CEO of the Forrest Performance Group, is back to talk about his new book: How to Sell Through the Coronavirus, and emotional intelligence in sales. Jason walks through the four attributes of a great salesperson, the GUMP methodology: Goal-oriented, unleashed, motivated, and procedural based.  Having a high level of emotional intelligence in sales allows a salesperson to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power of their own emotions during interactions with buyers to improve sales rather than derail them.Jason Forrest lives on the leading edge of the sales industry. As a behavioral change expert and maverick entrepreneur. Jason believes the only way to break your sales plateau is to change the way you look at sales completely, that means an extreme focus on pulling the future of sales into the present. His mission is to give every sales professional, manager, and executive the tactical, real-world knowledge so they can remove any limiting beliefs keeping them from breaking their plateaus. In the course of that decades-long mission, Jason's trained billion-dollar companies and everyone from high-powered CEOs to frontline salespeople to increase their effectiveness by driving more profit. Jason established his speaking and training career as a top 1% sales professional. Still, as he is trained others, he realized something the rest of the training industry had yes to understand: the sales techniques widely taught at conferences and seminars were installing mental limitations in others.Listen to Jason's previous episode on the podcast.Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.

The Customer Deciding Journey, part two: Expand. Acquisition vs. Expansion are complete opposite messaging, and we must treat them as it.Tim Riesterer, author of The Sales Expansion, and Chief Strategy Officer of Corporate Visions is back! We dive into part two of our two-part series, the Expanding portion of the Customer Deciding Journey. The expanding portion's methodology is: "Keep them happy from the beginning to end." Tim walks us through his new book and why acquisition is not the only lifeblood of organizations. We learn if you give an existing customer the same messaging you would give to prospective customers; you can have them questioning if they should stay. Reinforce and remind them of the impact you have made by showcasing the value and demonstrating their ROI.Tim Riesterer is responsible for leading the strategic direction of Corporate Visions in thought leadership, positioning, and product development. He also leads the company’s consulting team globally, including staff and certified contractors. Tim has more than 20 years of experience in Marketing and Sales. Before joining Corporate Visions, Tim co-founded Customer Message Management, LLC (CMM Group), where he was CEO until Corporate Visions acquired it in 2008. Before CMM Group, Tim was CMO and VP of Strategic Services for Ventaso. Additionally, Tim was President and CEO of Brady Marketing Group and has worked in marketing, communication, and sales support for world-class technology manufacturers such as Rockwell Automation and GE Medical Systems.Tim is co-author of Customer Message Management: Increasing Marketing’s Impact on Selling (Thomson/AMA), Conversations that Win the Complex Sale: Using Power Messaging to Create More Opportunities, Differentiate Your Solution, and Close More Deals (McGraw Hill), and The Three Value Conversations: How to Create, Elevate, and Capture Customer Value at Every Stage of the Long-Lead Sale (McGraw Hill) and has a degree in Mass Communications and Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.Join the conversation in the Conquer Local Community, and keep learning in the Conquer Local Academy.Read the full transcription here.