Sales Talk for CEOs

Almost every company I know is struggling to bring new business in at the pace required. Why? Well, that is an interesting question but I think by now most of us know that our methods are outdated and simply don’t work. The better questions are how do we keep new business flowing in? What should be done instead of what we continue to do that doesn’t work? I’ve always had a fascination with weeds. They are amazing. Strong, resilient, persistent and they can literally take over an area. My friend Stu Heinecke and I share that same fascination only I know he is more fascinated than me because he wrote a whole book on them called How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed. Weeds have an unfair advantage and Stu wants all company leaders to understand what that is and how it can be applied to their business so that they can dominate the market. There are many strategies to gain that unfair advantage and Stu is here today to help you pick the best ones for your business. Find out why having the mindset of a weed will give your company an unfair advantage and possibly even market domination. Highlights:04:14 Having a network is very important. Being able to get introductions is very important. I mean, that works. That's a shortcut.04:37 [If you can’t get an introduction] You need to do something audacious, not just audacious, but also you need to do something that's relevant… something that has the person saying, Oh my gosh, who is this? I love the way you think.07:01 books are still a valid way to stand out, even if you haven't written one, send some of your favorite books…I’m helping you to learn…09:58 Alice Heineman says you can tell a lot about a person just by looking at their pipeline.[the caption on a cartoon that Stu sent to Alice ahead of the interview]12:36 one of your [Alice Heiman] great unfair advantages is that you show up usually as a speaker at events16:14 what is it about weeds that causes them to spread and grow and dominate and makes them such tough competitors? Do they have a unified model? And it turns out they do, they leverage a fierce mindset.17:11 if a business doesn't have unfair advantages, it won't exist for long.19:20 you want your competitors looking at your unfair advantage and saying how the heck are we going to beat that?22:23 Why would we talk about a mindset when we're talking about plants? They don't have brains.23:07 You can't grow your business like a weed if you don't have the right mindset. If we're still having our salespeople sell the way they sold ten years ago, it's not going to work.24:01 I should add a couple more attributes to mindset. Emotions get in the way. Your actions should lead your emotions, not the other way around. Don’t ask ‘Do I feel like going to the gym?’ Go to the gym and then see how you feel. Do everything at scale through collaboration.28:47 Here's the really cool thing about weeds. They thrive in disrupted ground. We are coming into a recession, another word for disruption, and it’s an opportunity to thrive if you have the right mindset.31:08 One way to thrive is to eliminate any 1 to 1 leverage. If you are part of the deliverable stream, you need to fix that because you become a bottleneck to your growth. Moving toward multi-channel collaborations is another way to thrive.About Our Guest:Stu Heinecke is a bestselling business author, marketer and WSJ cartoonist. His first book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time. His latest, How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, lays out a complete model for explosive business growth, based on the strategies, attributes and tools weeds use to grow, expand, dominate and defend

It’s been 14 years since Bob Vaez started EventMobi and he’s had considerable growth without investment from Venture Capital or Private Equity. How did he do it? It wasn’t always easy.EventMobi’s early sales model was classic founder led with Bob doing it all from mining his network for leads to closing deals. His decision to bootstrap versus take external investment meant that hiring an experienced sales leader was out of the question. Instead he hired young, hungry graduates who could listen and tell stories.His strategy worked. Growth was great, annual sales revenue soared.  Then the pandemic hit and revenue plummeted to near zero.Within a few months, Bob pivoted the in-person event platform into a virtual one.Sales rebounded and are stronger than ever with a return to in-person.Bob’s 14 year journey is a great how-to for any CEO looking to bootstrap their startup.Highlights:05:20 I had this passion for events and they would give you this tote bag full of paper and this show guide that's 300 pages. I'm like, why is this not on my phone?06:38 We were building a product that no one had ever heard of, software for events.06:57 I realized the other part of the product we have to build is a platform for planners and event organizers because their data was all over the place. 08:10 I think honestly at the beginning for a lot of startup founders, sales is not the main concern. But in reality, you want to make sure you have product market fit and selling is the best way to determine that.13:10 EventMobi is a bootstrap company and so very different from a VC backed company.13:43 From zero to the first $500K was very experimental. I didn't know if the company was going to exist in the next few months.  After that, I couldn't do everything myself, so I had to hire someone to do online demos using WebEx14:49 We weren't really hiring traditional salespeople. We were hiring people that were empathetic. They were really good listeners and they were really good storytellers.15:12 I ran it like that until we had about 12 people on the sales team. I was still managing marketing and support with a few junior managers, and we hit 5 million. That’s when I realized it was too much for me so we promoted our first sales manager from within the sales team. That took us to $10M.17:35 I think a lot of early CEOs hire what I call full-stack salespeople - they take it from lead to renewal. This has to be divided into different roles as you grow. How you define those roles and the timing is critically important.22:46 When the pandemic hit, we went from $10M to 0 overnight because all of the confidence got canceled. We retooled our platform to support virtual and suddenly our leads grew by a factor of five.28:45 We had a two pronged strategy in terms of building the sales team. One was to promote from within. And the other was to hire staff from the industry.31:40] Customer demands are changing. They are expecting a different type of response and they have different pain points. We need to train and enable the sales team to be able to help them in a way that they can benefit from rather than let me show you 12 tools we have.32:05] Information overload is real. There's so much noise and there're so many competitors. The customers can't even remember who said what.About Our Guest:Bob has over 10 years of experience in software, semiconductor and mobile industry in various capacities from engineering to business development. He has worked for a number of small and large companies in Toronto, Canada and Silicon Valley, California such as BTE, ATI, AMD and Nvidia.Currently Bob is the CEO of EventMobi.com.EventMobi is an interactive mobile event guide app that h

Wrapping up my 3rd season and I still can’t believe I started and built a successful podcast. The thing I love most is the conversations with the CEOs. They are so willing to share their story in the spirit of helping others. Whether they are near the beginning or the end of their journey it’s always interesting to learn why they started and how they grew sales. In this Season Finale we revisit some of the main themes that are essential for every CEO to take into 2023 and beyond.Number one on the list - if you are using the sales strategies and methods that got you where you are I can guarantee they won’t get you where you want to be. Just doing more of the same doesn’t cut it. Strategies and tactics that worked just before the pandemic don’t work anymore. You need to stop and map your buyer's journey and adjust your strategy and tactics to meet that.Cold outreach yields abysmal results. No one answers the phone and no one wants your sequence of emails especially when they are all about you. Buyers who are looking for you expect to have access to your product information before engaging with your sales team. You need to understand what your customer wants, how they want to buy and meet them where they are. If buyers won’t take cold calls and they are deleting your email how do you generate leads? How do you ensure that your sales people are having plenty of conversations with people who can buy from them?The changing role of the CEO in the sales process was another recurring theme. Many of our guests are moving back to a founder led sales approach and have found huge success in being the chief lead generator. Imagine using your own network and the network of your whole senior team to make introductions for your salespeople so they don't have to go in cold. What is your role in sales currently?Tune in to this and every episode to find the answers. Highlights:01:15 A different structure for how to pursue revenue growth.02:03 How the customer wants to buy from you.03:03 So as a CEO, what are some of the things you can do to make it easier to be your customer? 04:26 Making content readily available to the people that want to buy from you.05:43 What is the CEO’s role in the sales process?07:17 Creating a conversation.08:16 A mindset shift.10:05 Increasing the effectiveness of your salesperson. You can learn more about and connect with Alice Heiman in the links below.Website: https://AliceHeiman.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aliceheiman/

Heidi Messer started Collective[i] with one goal: to bring more certainty and less volatility to sales and improve the livelihoods of every single employee.According to Heidi, sellers operate at 30% productivity rates. There is no other function in a company that is as unproductive as sales. Higher productivity equals more certainty, so why not improve it. If sales improves every other department has more opportunity. In order to bring more certainty and less volatility , Collective[i] focuses on two main innovations:Automate everything possible in the sales process in order to reduce seller admin work and improve CRM accuracy;Train teams on the agile sales process in order to scale revenue.This is one of the most comprehensive interviews on the modern sales process I’ve ever recorded.  Highlights:01:19 All of the time that is spent trying to fix the problems in CRM, we fix so that sellers can sell, managers can coach, and everybody else has absolute transparency into what's happening. 02:23 Nobody trusts the pipeline reviews. So let's just start with a clean capture of data into the CRM and have it done automatically. Nobody has to worry about trusting it.02:36 You know that sellers operate at 30% productivity rates. There is no other function in a company that is as unproductive as sales.03:16 Instead of trying to figure out what happened, we want people to focus on adapting to what's likely to happen.04:25 What was interesting about the mid 2000s is we actually saw marketing transform from being a gut based endeavor to one that was highly scientific, very adaptive and focused on optimization.06:54 We're going to own siloed data, not just within companies, but between companies. Everybody told us it wouldn't work. I'm convinced that if you haven't heard that, you don't have a good idea.07:33 Sales is the lifeblood of companies. Our entire economy depends on sales. If you can bring more certainty to sales and less volatility, you impact the livelihoods of every single person employed by a company.08:17 There's no entrepreneur I've met who isn't a great salesperson.10:21 When you start out with a new product you have to find out what's important to their (you customer’s) business? How am I going to persuade them to try this new thing? And then somehow I think what happens when you grow is you get out of that habit of thinking that way,11:12 There's a significant portion of companies that still believe sales itself is a process, meaning sales is an assembly line. It’s not, it’s more like a sport that needs a playbook and lots of practice.13:51 So imagine now you have to hire salespeople who sell to people who sell.15:53 You have to hire salespeople who are able to be trusted advisers. Do they have fundamental sales skills? Do they have enough knowledge that they can provide people with advice on how to move forward and not just explain something?16:58 I think there's a massive defining line that happened after COVID, and I don't think we're going back.17:49 There's a particular kind of sales leader who can sell innovation and there's a kind of sales leader who wants to sell the status quo.22:33 If you're a good founder, you pick advisors who are smarter than you. I want to hire an expert in something that I may not be an expert in.25:39 We have to do a better job of training our sales teams.27:13 We drink our own champagne.27:57 We switched to Agile.29:11 Agile sales describes an organization that's working perfectly in sync to adapt to changes that are happening real time in marketplaces.31:46 We automated everything that they were doing that was low value. So there's not a seller that spends more than 10 minutes a week in CRM. 32:37 We don't do annual sales conferences, we do quarterly, we call them ARCOS r

Sean Burke shares his knowledge of building high performance sales teams gained through nine startups, seven exits and billions of dollars in value creation.The first rule, you can only attract the best if you can show a definitive path to hitting quota. If you can’t show the math, why would they join your team?Next, you are building a team not a collective of individual contributors. Part of this is defining your role and the role of every part of the company in contributing to the sales team's success.And finally, you need to build metrics around each salesperson to compare and help share best practices across the team. Why is one person’s close rate higher or time to close lower?Sean goes on to talk about mentoring and the difficulty of getting people to take the essential first steps. If you follow his advice, you will never have to worry about getting a job or earning a living.And these highlights only scratch the surface of the wisdom Sean shares with us.Highlights:20:52 If you can't share with them the math of how people get to their numbers, why would they ever join your team?23:26 Every single salesperson on my team has those numbers in a customized dashboard.23:37 The sales velocity formula basically tells you, "Am I going to hit my number or not?"24:38 "Joe, here's what your close ratio is. Bill's close ratio is 10% higher. What are you guys doing differently? By the way, why is Jane's time to close 60 days shorter than yours? Why is our time to close existing business longer than new business? It should be shorter."25:31 What does the data know that our sales leaders don't know, and what do our sales leaders know that the data doesn't know, and we can combine those two together to get a much more accurate forecast.26:42 I will coach anybody on my sales team, but very few people will do the things that I ask them in coaching.28:53 I can guarantee you this, anybody who takes the effort to follow my plan will never have to worry about money the rest of their life,29:06 I do deal strategy work and I will sell, my CEO will sell, everybody sells in our organization so the sales team knows that they have an absolute support mechanism.35:44 From the CEO down to the individual customer success representative we define how we're going to work with each customer.About Our Guest:Sean has devoted his career to practicing, testing, learning, measuring, failing, and triumphing in the pursuit of sales & leadership excellence. The knowledge he shares is from doing the work every day. So unlike consultants, influencers, and experts – Sean still has a number to hit and over 2,000 people across the globe who expect him to make the right leadership decisions as well as help them achieve their own life’s mission.Connect with Sean here:LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanhburke/Website - seanburke.bizTwitter - https://twitter.com/seanburke

After eight years of trial and error, Daveed feels he has finally figured out the sales model for, Valens Global. He heard about the rainmaker sales model from a very successful law firm. The senior partner initiated discussions with clients that demonstrate the firm's expertise and ability to solve a particular problem. For Daveed it meant taking the lead with the customer to define the problem and the framework to solve it. His teams, often working in parallel, taking charge of delivering the solution. We love to solve problems and when we are focused on doing that the sale comes naturally. Highlights:02:01 Valens Global solves problems that involve the intersection of evolving technologies, changing global society, often changing ecology or environment, and manifest in ways that are different as patterns than they were in the past. Disinformation, for example, is one such problem set problems involving climate change, problems involving terrorists, and evolving technologies.03:53 We use simulations and games. What is different about our games is first we've invested significantly in storytelling and world building techniques. So there's a cinematic or novel quality to our games.05:30 For our university clients, we get a lot of students coming back and saying that this was the most profound educational experience that they'd had during their university career.06:36 Last year we did a racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism workshop. It was a series of workshops that used a Valens simulation tabletop exercise to anchor the conversations.08:32 Given the life and death nature of the topics that we deal with, practicing self care for your team is very important.09:09 I started Valens Global because I was tired of correctly predicting outcomes that were against the consensus opinion. Valens allowed me to productize my subject matter expertise and rise above group think consensus.21:39 Our sales model has shifted from a sales team model to a rainmaker model that I learned from a famous law firm.33:19 It’s really important to listen and learn about a customer's problem. And in many cases, we deal with big problems and we can’t afford to fail. Solving these problems is my sales model.About Our Guest:Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is an entrepreneur, practitioner, and scholar with specialized knowledge of violent non-state actors and terrorist groups. He is the founder and CEO of the private firm Valens Global, which has twice been named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s E360 list of the top small businesses in the United States. He is also on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and Duke University. Among the many projects that Daveed has undertaken for Valens Global, he led the company’s efforts to support the drafting, threat assessment, and crafting of priority actions for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s 2019 Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence, which received widespread acclaim. The New York Times, for example, editorialized that the strategy represented “a shift that is both urgently needed and long overdue.” He holds a Ph.D. in world politics from the Catholic University of America and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law.About Guest Company:A few sentences about Valens Global: Valens Global was founded in 2014 on the belief that the private sector is vital to addresing key twenty-first century challenges, including advancing the national security interests of America and its allies and to saving lives by protecting the public from terrorist attacks and other threats. Valens's high-quality analysis is paired with numerous interlocking capabilities, including in physical security, training, threat assessments, detection of insider threats, and messaging. The company's goal,

Years of trust can evaporate in a matter of moments if you forget this simple rule. Dmitri Leichik learned the hard way that customers are not buying your product, they are buying your commitment to their success. The moment they perceive a transactional motive, you’ve lost.Utilizing a founder led sales model, Twistellar has grown globally and still relies on Dmitri’s long term relationship strategy that in many cases takes years to mature from conversation to trust to a project.If you sell B2B, you have to assume that a potential customer already has a trusted supplier. They may say no to you on a Monday and yes on a Friday because something changed in that relationship. Timing and luck are everything and that’s why you have to be tireless in maintaining relationships over long periods of time.Highlights3:24 You need to clearly understand how people interact, how people communicate, how your sales people actually work every day to make their customers happy. Only then can you automate the process.5:14 A professional consultant must focus on the customer’s business processes, not the solution features.  Sometimes our role is to convince the customer not to spend money on a solution because the business is not ready.8:27 In sales, the first step needs to be defining “What difference can you bring to the table?”9:49 To be successful, three factors need to come together at the same time: You need luck to be in the right place at the right time, you need to be very active to be in as many places as possible, you have to be working hard to make every customer successful.11:49 I still do most of the selling myself since I am the best person to match business needs to technical solutions. I am a technical advisor and am never trying to sell a specific solution.13:47 In B2B, a potential customer already has a supplier to solve their problems. You have to get to them at the exact moment where they have some reason to consider a new partner.14:45 We work 12-14 hours a day so that we can always be available to give friendly advice. That’s how we ‘sell’.18:48 To win business, you have to demonstrate that you bear the responsibility for the project’s success.20:49 It can take years to build a relationship before the first project. On the other hand, one wrong action can spoil that relationship in one day.23:01 You must consider all of the people in an organization who benefit from your work. They are part of your word of mouth referral network especially when they move to a new company.26:50 The sales process ends when the work is done and the customer is happy.28:10 Mistakes can be made and it's critically important to take responsibility for them. We recently underestimated a project by 400 hours and we accepted the loss.About Our GuestDmitri Leichik is CEO and co-founder of Twistellar,  #1 Salesforce Consulting Partner in Denmark. Dmitri brings more than a 20-year background of being a co-owner and CEO of a group of trading and production companies, providing hands-on management experience.For now, Dmitri is a business expert who's responsible for corporate strategy, finances, business development, customer relations, and general operational efficiency in Twistellar. He managed to gather a team of 100+ motivated professionals in just 5 years.Dmitri is a master of business & service processes automation and optimization. He ensures that the customer is always the key figure at Twistellar.Connect with DmitriLinkedinTwitter About Guest CompanyTwistellar is a #1 Salesforce Consulting Partner in Denmark, working with customers in the USA, Europe, Asia, and Australia. The company pro

Anthony Iannarino has some bad news for sales leaders who are depending on 20 year old sales models. They just don’t work anymore. “Tell me about your problems and let me tell you about my solution” won’t even get you a second meeting.”Alvin Toffler, who wrote The Future Shock, said that the future is going to be dominated by people who can learn, unlearn and then learn again. The hard part is unlearning.Sales teams must be retrained to create value not sell benefits. Anthony calls this becoming a One Up. The core value creation is ‘'I know more about this decision than anything else.” Let me start a conversation with you about that.Unlearning old sales habits is only the beginning. Anthony takes us through his three, non-negotiable, steps to hold salespeople accountable. Number one, a set amount of time per week prospecting. Number two, reporting on the actual conversations that are ongoing. As a sales leader, your job is to establish the criteria for what represents a quality conversation. And finally what is the next conversation that we should be having and our strategy to get there.Listen to the entire episode to learn how to build your modern B2B sales strategy and team.Highlights:2:21 I'm not disrupting the industry. All I'm doing is documenting the strategies and tactics that work because the buyer has a different problem than they've ever had before. They're more confused, they're more uncertain. They have a difficult time getting consensus.3:07 The most common problems that sales teams have: I don't have enough opportunities. Opportunities aren't moving fast enough through our pipeline for us to reach our goals. I don’t understand why salesperson A is doing well while salesperson B isn’t.4:47 If you're training your team in a legacy approach where it's looks like solution selling and we start with let me tell you how great our company is and look at all these logos…8:21 …one client said to me, we did $10 million. Our goal next year is $12 million. And I said, that is probably the worst goal I've ever heard…9:26 The part of the vision that I care about is what do you want your team to be?10:03 The best salespeople create more value in a conversation than others.10:52 There's a chapter in the book about alignment. It’s when the CEO has a vision that is tangible, proven, and clearly understood by customer success, marketing, and sales.12:39 I would describe churn as the devil.14:16 We can get the first meeting, but we can't convert it to a second meeting. What that means is you didn't create enough value.14:54 Let me give you another lens, my lens is not filled with false assumptions. I'm showing you what reality looks like and what you need to do.15:30 We transform your team to a modern approach that means they're going to be what I call One Up. And One Up means I know more than you and I have greater experience than you do about this decision, not about everything.Helping them understand what's going on, what it means for them, and what they need to do. So that means you're going to have a different sales force on the other end that can create greater value.17:13 So it's not about what you sell. It's about how you sell. And if you get the ‘how’ we sell right, then you have a better shot of reaching your full potential.18:29 Alvin Toffler, in The Future Shock, said that the future is going to be dominated by people who can learn, unlearn and then learn again. So that's where we are right now. So the hard part is the unlearning.19:09 the most important thing for you to work on is increasing the effectiveness of your salesperson in the conversation with their client.20:39 That's where growth comes from. It's the conversations that we're having.23:34 I have two chapters on accountability…It's a very, very different kind of accountability. And

Jake Dunlap takes us from founding Skaled Consulting to his first successful sales hire. And yes, it did take 10 years to get it right.It’s great to be a founder led sales company but founder led services delivery is a problem. This was the first major hurdle that Jake encountered in his fledgling sales consulting business and a barrier to scaling. It took years to structure a scalable services delivery model. The first big lesson, young, affordable, full-time staff didn’t have the requisite skills to replace Jake and properly service the accounts. It turns out, contract, part time senior team members could deliver.As he grew globally, it was time to expand the sales team. His next big challenge was finding salespeople who could sell even 80% as well as he could. His hires kept failing until he realized it was because the sales process was in his head and needed to be on paper. His second big a ha moment was realizing that selling a product is different from selling a service. Jake only recently cracked this problem and hired an experienced services salesperson.The biggest takeaway that every B2B company needs to understand, customers want everything on their terms and this includes learning about your product. Sales teams can no longer be gatekeepers of the buyer's journey.Highlights:1:57 We are a revenue strategy, operations and enablement company and really what that means, we've got 40 plus people globally and what we do is we help organizations optimize the sales process. 3:13 If you've got a marketing organization that's compensated on one thing and a sales organization that's compensated and there's no overlap, you're not going to have marketing and sales alignment.6:27 When I started my business, I started cold outreach from Crunchbase. I found people that just raised a seed series A, series B and started reaching out cold to CEOs. Hey, you know, chances are you're probably thinking about these challenges. I've faced them multiple times. Let me know if you need help. And sure enough, within the first 45 days, I had a few customers. I’ve just been figuring it out since then.9:59 I thought everybody had to be full time because if they were contractors, they wouldn't care. And boy, was I wrong.11:57 Over the years we hired a few different sales people and it never worked out. Obviously as a CEO, everything's my fault. I didn't really know the DNA of the person that I needed. Selling a service is much different than selling a product.15:05 I can count on two hands how many founders I've seen that didn't have to figure out the Go-To-Market themselves before hiring the first salespeople.17:18 It's your job to fix these problems no matter what department. You can't outsource fixing your problems.20:36 And so another mistake that I made when I was scaling early is I kept hiring junior people and putting them in roles that they were not set up to be successful in. 22:03 Get it right and then get it off your plate.23:27 Some of our first big deals were through partnerships where the other partner didn’t provide the services that we did.26:21 Handing a job off to someone without the training or process is abdicating not delegating.30:40 I didn't ever really define what made a good partner for us. I took probably hundreds of calls with people who were never going to be a fit.35:46 ​​Revenue Operations is really a good synopsis of what we do. It's looking at the end-to-end customer journey and experience.40:03 We live in a world of now on my terms. I want to consume information when I want to. The problem is B2B sales is in the Stone Age right now. We've created a process where the salesperson is a gatekeeper for information instead of giving it to consumers on their terms.About Our Guest:Jake Dunlap consistently designs repeatable, sustainabl

Matt Fok came up with his idea for eZ-Xpo, before the pandemic. He thought, what if you could continue the dialogue started at conferences virtually? Since his company was already selling an eLearning platform, he simply went to his existing customers to validate the idea. And then the pandemic hit. His founder-led sales approach paid off as he uncovered more and better ways to address the market need. By providing content and ongoing interactions between companies and their prospects, the platform could be used to build communities. eZ-Xpo provides the middle of the funnel nurture interactions virtually. Rather than hire a sales force, Matt has employed two sales strategies. He has hired and trained a team of 20 Digital Collaborator Champions to guide customers through the setup and management process. Each champion specializes in a niche such as fintech or blockchain.And instead of trying to clone himself, he runs boot camps to teach customers what he has learned about creating successful implementations.An unexpected consequence of his approach is improved SEO as a byproduct of the enhanced content and interaction on his customer’s websites.“The lack of in person events taught us that we needed a way to maintain interactions started at in person events!”Join us to learn more about how quickly Matt scaled eZ-Xpo with his sales model. Highlights:2:13 We help companies get more organic traffic and leads by leveraging hybrid events, both in-person and virtual and on demand not just for lead generation, but actually for ongoing engagement.3:26 One of the big challenges or huge untapped opportunities for companies is to leverage the same platform to do in-person events or hybrid events.5:31 We started thinking that there is a better way to get virtual traffic. We actually started the virtual trade show before the pandemic.6:33 Sales is about educating your clients about new ways to do business.6:59 You bring the leads at a trade show but then you have to nurture. Instead of spamming them with promotional material, have a virtual summit with subject matter experts to show the benefits of your approach to solving their problem.8:27 Bring people back for more content boosts your SEO ranking for free.9:10 After our initial sales focus of promoting SEO benefits to existing customers we reached out to channel partners. The platform itself is really good at creating a partner ecosystem network.12:19 Our first target audiences were communities like associations that have captive audiences like the Chamber of Commerce. They don't have a solution to connect all the local chapters.14:22 We do some outbound marketing through social media and, SEO, but of our lead generation comes through channel partners. 15:26 Instead of growing a sales force, we rely on 20 Digital Collaborative Champions. They specialize in verticals such as fintech or blockchain and work directly with channel partners to design the community programs.19:00 Instead of looking for new customers, focus on expanding your offer to existing customers.21:30 Instead of cloning myself to get out of the founder-led sales role, we created digital bootcamps to pass all of my knowledge to potential customers.22:38 Any B2B company with a channel partner ecosystem can take advantage of this platform to enhance the front end experience versus focusing just on backend API integrations.27:48 Companies and communities are looking for thought leadership in order to think outside the box.29:47 A company that brings a community along with their solution will have a major competitive advantage over their competitors.32:21 Hybrid events or in-person events is like e-commerce. Remember 20 years ago asking should we just have a brick and mortar company or just e-commerce? The short answer is both. We need both h