Category: Books

A seasonal series that profiles recent books in the field.

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Episode 68: Scale at Speed with Felix Velarde

Has this ever happened to you? You’re working as a Marketer, either in-house or as the agency serving another business. You work earnestly to do what leadership asks. You might even be part of the leadership team, directing the marketing efforts. But inside, you’re bugged by a question. While you architect campaigns, answer emails and sit in meetings, the question is there in the back of your head. You wish it had an answer, but that magic bullet keeps eluding you. It’s “How are we going to grow?” 

My guest says that growth can happen, but it’s part of a larger challenge, and not just one that marketing has to tackle. For growth to happen, both marketing (who’s got a pivotal role here) and the whole company have to retool themselves into an entity that can scale.   

Felix Velarde began as an entrepreneur, starting a web design agency in 1994, when websites were just starting to be a thing. He then became a journeyman CEO for a string of digital agencies, eventually moving onto a role where he chaired those businesses. He has also been an adjunct professor at Hult International Business School and UK lead at Vint Cerf’s People-Centered Internet coalition.

In 2014 Felix broadened the advisory role to other companies like tech startups, at which point he boiled the growth principles he’d learned down to a system that any businesses could use. In 2021 he published the playbook of his two-year program that he claims will triple a company’s size, called “Scale at Speed” 

Listen to how instrumental  Felix  considers the role that marketing plays in building the firm’s proposition. Also watch who he says should be in charge of growth; it’s probably not the roles you’d expect to be most effective at it. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot. https://scaleatspeed.com/ assessment (20 questions, under 5 minutes)

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Episode 67: Human Centered Communication, with Ethan Beute

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

Our talk doesn’t start out sounding the way most sales & marketing talks do. That’s because of the alarm being raised by our guest on the forces around us that are polluting our digital environment. Why does this matter? Because this sludge messes with our innate ability as humans to relate to each other, and without that personal  connection, the ability for a buyer to  gain enough trust to put their faith in your business is out of the question.

The book in question is Human-Centered Communication. It was co-authored by Stephen Pacinelli  as well as our guest, Ethan Beute. He is VP of Marketing at BombBomb, a software company in Colorado Springs, CO that helps people create simple video messages. Prior to that: he ran marketing for local television stations on-air and online. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Episode Reboot.

For another take on communicating with video, check out Ep 54 with Tyler Lessard

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Episode 56: Content Inc. with Joe Pulizzi

The book we talk about in this show is #15 on the Amazon Best Seller list for Internet Marketing. Not to take anything away from past guests, but if you only listen to one of the 50 interviews we have done, I hope that you choose this one.  

I think most marketers have heard of the Content Marketing Institute.  The public figure at the centre of CMI, Joe Pulizzi, started it all with a blog post on April 26, 2007 “Why Content Marketing” His hypothesis in 2007 was that companies who put content on the internet would build relationships that blossom into future customers. He then went about literally putting out content that taught others how to do this. Once they came to the CMI site and got this free content, he would sell them everything from newsletters, to magazines, to training, and an annual Content Marketing World event.

For me personally, the story picks up in 2014 when I started listening to Joe’s podcast with  Robert Rose  on the podcast series, This Old Marketing. I found this giving-away-expertise tactic to be quite unorthodox, as I was accustomed to thinking that companies should mainly communicate with their audience through advertising. Listening to them influenced how I’ve come to see content marketing’s value. 

While CMI was evangelizing how to grow a business on content, Joe didn’t keep any secret about how well he was doing with growing his business. Already a bestselling author of several books, he came out in 2015 with Content Inc, that gave out the blueprint he was using. A year after it came out, he sold CMI in 2016 to the International Events company UBI. 

He may have finished with CMI, but over the next few years, he stayed close to both corporate and entrepreneurial content creators. His keen focus on them led him to pitch his publisher on a second edition of the book, which  rounds out the model by sharing the rest of his own journey of monetizing a Content-based business. the second edition that came out this year. I was amazed as I read it; so many new examples, all the updates on marketing channels, it’s a total overhaul from the first edition. 

This is one high-energy conversation. I was already pumped to talk to Joe, I’m not going to lie, and it seems we both got pretty keyed up as we spoke. 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Shift away from the Glengarry Glenross revenue-generation model

Episode Reboot

To get another perspective on audience-building, see Kevin Kelly’s post on 1000 true fans

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Episode 55: Content Marketing Engineered with Wendy Covey

No matter where you look around in today’s world, you use things that were conceived and built by engineers.  There were engineering-minded thinkers in ancient times like Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci. industrial age thinkers like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford built on their ideas, to manufacture many things that improved the quality of our daily lives. Since then, engineers like Alan Turing, Thomas Watson and David Packard ushered in an electronic revolution that gave us the technology that makes possible the communication we’re having right now. 

Engineers are great. But, they are also a breed apart. They have a stereotype of being way too exacting for most people’s liking. They put a new spin on the proverbial glass half-full or half empty debate. While the Pessimist says “The glass is half empty” and the Optimist says “The glass is half full,” The Engineer does some measuring and pronounces “The glass is exactly twice the size that it needs to be.”

They also have a reputation for being notoriously tough to market to. Today’s guest knows how to reach engineers, and in her 2020 book Content Marketing, Engineered, she gives us a formula so we can reach them as well. 

Wendy Covey is a co-founder of TREW Marketing, an Austin, TX-based agency that serves technical industries such as engineering design and hardware manufacturing. Prior to starting the agency in 2008 Wendy produced global marketing and services programs at National Instruments. Another side of Wendy you should know about is how she loves outdoor recreations – in fact she is the current holder of a Texas fishing record.  

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm

SWOT Analysis: 

  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses
  • Opportunities
  • Threats

Episode Reboot

Figure from Wendy’s book (used with permission) showing channels where engineers prefer to get their content. Note how high YouTube and LinkedIn are on the list.

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Episode 54: The Visual Sale with Tyler Lessard – Summer Books

Disclaimer: The company featured here is not a sponsor of the show, nor have I affiliated with them. They simply bring a perspective that I think you’ll get some use from.

The newest book in our #SummerMarketingBooks series talks about how to take sales & marketing beyond the printed or spoken word.

Our guest Tyler Lessard has worked at high-flying tech companies like BlackBerry and lives in the Waterloo Ontario high-tech hub with his wife and four kids. Whenever he speaks on stage or is a guest on a show, he talks about how to modernize the way sales and marketing people communicate. I consider him to be a marketer’s marketer. What I mean by that is he’s dialed in to marketing tech, so seeing him come out with a book in 2020 called, The Visual Sale, I knew I needed to pay more attention to video. 

Listen in the show for the reasons why he thinks today’s buyers expect us to show up visually, not just in text they read or orally over the phone. He walks us through how to make videos seen when prospects are researching a purchase, when they are ready to decide and even after the sale. Most importantly, take it from a guy who describes himself as a hacky video creator, how little you need to get started shooting video.   

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

4 E’s of Video:

  • Educational
  • Engaging
  • Emotional
  • Empathetic

Marshall McLuhan assertion that “The Medium is the Message”

How Walt Disney appeared on video (we’ve moved past this kind of talking head video)

Episode Reboot

Great quote from his book: “If you don’t think that video can do a better job than text on a webpage or text in an email, think again!”