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Episode 23: Qualifying Prospects with Martin MacArthur

Remember as a kid at the amusement park – you must be this tall to go on this ride? This closely parallels a key part of all complex sales – Qualification. 

So when marketing gets a lead, capping off their piece of the process, sales is far from the end, it’s actually the beginning of their work with the lead. The main question that sales has to answer is “Is this buyer capable of buying from us?”  Are they tall enough to ride this ride? 

The process of answering that question requires a rep to do offline research as well as having one or several conversations. In larger sales where multiple internal people are needed, the lead may not progress to involve anyone else, because the rep spoke with them and determined they aren’t a sales-qualified lead. The process varies depending on the company, but in all cases, it takes a bit of human intuition. There’s a whole art to it.  

To get a salesperson’s perspective on how to do this, I spoke with Martin MacArthur, who is passionate about getting on the phone and helping companies fill their pipelines with qualified leads that  drive sales. Let’s get into that discussion.

Cover concepts including how we arrive at a qualified prospect. 

CRM

BANT

MQL

People and Products mentioned:

LinkedIn profile reviews

Retinitis pigmentosa (condition which affected Martin’s sight)

Martin MacArthur’s LinkedIn profile 

Reboot:

Look into these good books about conversation:

Crucial Conversations

How to Talk to Anyone

A More Beautiful Question

 

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Episode 22: Digital Marketing Through Uncertain Times

Today’s episode is a simple solocast of me talking to you. I’m recording in an extraordinary time when stress is being put on healthcare, public institutions, whole industries and even entire economies. All the uncertainty out there is invading our digital marketing world. What’s going to happen? Just thinking about current events can induce fears about budgets getting cut, teams getting shrunk and we feel an existential threat to our very career. 

To help, the first part of the episode goes through how uncertainty affects everyone’s mindset. I share what some authors like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Kurt Vonnegut have observed about these reactions change over time. By understanding them, we’ll hopefully cycle through these emotions more quickly. 

 

Peter Drucker said we shouldn’t scale back at times like this, but to make investments that “enable a business to make its future. That, in the last analysis, is what planning for uncertainty means.” So having dealt with how we respond to uncertainty as humans, I devote the rest of this episode to how we can respond as marketers.

I talk about investments we can make around planning, doing, analyzing and improving processes. I share resources that have helped me during crises so the way I market fits with new outside realities. Hopefully it helps propel you to act in a way that you can look back on with pride when it’s all over.

People/Products/Ideas Mentioned:

Mr. Micawber from Charles Dickens’ “David Copperfield”

Pandora’s Box

Andrea Bassi, co-author of “Tackling Complexity”

Apollo 13

The Shawshank Redemption among other ‘Man in Hole’ movies

Craig Ferguson final “Late Late Show” monologue

SWOT analysis

Porter Five Forces Model

Business Model Canvas popularized by Alex Osterwalder and Ash Maurya

Anzoff Matrix

“An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth” by Chris Hadfield

Mark Schaefer’s Content Shock

Shell Oil’s There Is No Alternative (TINA) Scenario Planning

Dr Flint McGlaughlin, Founder MECLabs, on marketers using their art to help others in crisis. 

Reboot:

Go find another group who would benefit from clarity on their strengths and ways to express their value to their audience.

 

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Episode 21: Writing Persuasively for your site visitors, with Nik Paprocki

In this episode we talk about how to write persuasively for prospects. Our guest is Nik Paprocki, the founder of Websuitable,  an ROI driven digital agency serving small businesses all across Canada.

Like many in the agency space, he has seen enough bad copy to almost expect it, but when he was researching some product purchases, he found himself being drawn in by the copy they wrote. It wasn’t hard-hitting, buy-my-product Direct response writing that worked on him, rather it was copy focused on helping a buyer, giving answers to their problems.

He feels this use of copywriting is just as effective in terms of generating leads, because it speaks to everyone, not just those who are in-market to buy from you now. He felt so strongly about how it works that he swung his whole agency around to this writing approach.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to find insights on what problems buyers have, and tactics to write in a way that convinces buyers you can relate to them.

People and Products mentioned:

Reboot:

Nik’s preferred places for insights on what problems buyers have, so you know what to write copy about:

 

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Episode 20: Using Video to make Content more engaging, with Casey Li

Today we’ll talk about the production of videos to use in your marketing, all the way from the planning stage to the appearance of the final product.

Casey Li is the CEO and Founder of BiteSite, a Custom Software and Video Production Firm based in Ottawa, Canada. He started the company in 2012 after years of passion for the two fields and today, BiteSite serves small to medium businesses in the Ottawa area helping them execute their vision.

Listen as Casey takes us through the steps that his production company follows for making any video. You don’t have to involve an outsourced firm to make your videos, but you can use the same principles at any scale so your final product ends up telling a story that will keep viewers engaged.

People and Products mentioned:

 

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Episode 19: Legal and not-so-legal aspects of digital marketing, with Megan Cornell

In the fast pace of digital marketing, we sometimes brush up against legal issues. 

  • We might sometimes take risks that have legal repercussions. 
  • Other companies may harm our brand and we need to defend ourselves. 
  • We may do things where legal frameworks haven’t caught up and it’s not clear what is legal. 

Today’s guest is here to help marketers make sense of these situations. Megan Cornell is the founder of Momentum – a new kind of business law firm dedicated to providing law solutions in a way that works for clients. She explains data privacy, trademarks, spam, intellectual property and other legal issues we all face, giving plain-English explanations (a first for lawyers, as far as I know) of ways we marketers can stay on the right side of the law. 

People and Products/Resources mentioned:

Reboot:

See what aspects of Intellectual Property (IP) apply to you by referring to this Infographic:

Site containing more information on Canada’s approach to IP.