How to Optimize Sales through Marketing

PAT HELMARS

This is the SalesBabble Podcast, episode 319, how to optimize your sales through marketing. An interview with Josh Ramsey.

PAT HELMARS

Middle sales babblers. This is Pat Helmers. Today I want to tell you a little bit about what it was like when I first started in selling. The first book I ever bought was Stephen Shiffman’s book called Cold Calling Techniques That Really Work.

PAT HELMARS

I had that book. I had a spiral telephone book for leads. I had a telephone and that’s what I did to get my very first appointments. I didn’t know anything about marketing or ways of automating lead follow -up.

PAT HELMARS

And it’s something I was pretty ignorant about for many many years, which is one of the reasons why I started SalesBabble because I wanted to learn all about content marketing and how to leverage social media.

PAT HELMARS

Automated email lists and search engine optimization and things like that. So every so often I like to get an expert here on the podcast to talk about marketing in a way that’s relevant for sales people and that’s why I’ve got Josh Ramsey on here today.

PAT HELMARS

He’s a whiz at marketing and an expert at sales too and in this episode Josh is going to give us eight examples of guerrilla marketing that you can actually implement. We talked some about strategy but a ton of tactics in this interview today so I’m certain you’re going to find a ton of value in this episode.

PAT HELMARS

But before we get to the interview I’m really excited about the telebabbles. Last week went extremely well. People were very engaged. We talked a lot about advice on how to raise your productivity while working at home.

PAT HELMARS

Very engaging conversation. People were laughing. It was awesome. If you look into this episode show notes you can see that I’ve actually made a recording on a google live of the telebabble if you’d like to listen and I’ve I’m recording them now for posterity.

PAT HELMARS

Make sure and check them out. Again those are every Thursday at four o ‘clock central, five o ‘clock eastern, two o ‘clock pacific time. If you go to salesbabble.com/telebabble there you can go and register to get reminders and directions on how to attend the telebabble teleconference.

PAT HELMARS

Lastly I’m going to be hosting a live webinar Wednesday May 13th. That’s next week on the 13th and the topic’s going to be on how to launch a b2b podcast. Totally free. We’re going to talk about what it takes to start a podcast.

PAT HELMARS

We’re going to talk about what it takes to get on a podcast. How you can use a podcast to leverage. How you can use a podcast to boost your brand, your authority, influence and most importantly something we talk about all the time here on the podcast trust.

PAT HELMARS

Like I always say, don’t you know podcasting is the new blogging. The new content marketing. Again links to that will all be in the show notes. And so with no further ado let’s get to it. Welcome Joshua, you’re ready to babble.

Josh Ramsey

I’m ready, I’m ready.

PAT HELMARS

Joshua, you and I bumped into each other on LinkedIn. You said that you are a fractional CMO, Chief Marketing Officer. What’s that?

Josh Ramsey

Well, essentially a fractional CMO is a step in between a marketing person that works and has a pretty good idea what marketing is, but the company outgrows them and they need some help before they can really afford to hire the high powered, high level CMO for their company, a chief marketing officer.

Josh Ramsey

So I kind of carry that space in between the general marketing guy and a full blown, full time chief marketing officer for our company.

PAT HELMARS

Where exactly is that point where people need to grow when it comes to marketing? Because there are a lot of companies out there, they got one marketing person, they run their Instagram account, right?

PAT HELMARS

Things like that. But when is that when is the time to do that next step?

Josh Ramsey

It’s a fantastic question and and there’s no right answer Every company as you probably understand already They draw in different revenue So it’s hard to say that if the company’s at 2 million versus 10 million if they need that that next level I think some of it becomes a gut feel from the business owner of saying, you know What for the last two three five years?

Josh Ramsey

We’ve been plateaued and they’re trying to figure out kind of a new strategy a way to grow beyond where they’re at They basically hit that wall and they’re trying to figure out how to get to the next level, but they can’t really jump above Most of the clients that I work with have an ad agency and they’re trying to hold them accountable to figure out What the agency is doing right and wrong and how to how to hold them more accountable and still grow.

PAT HELMARS

This is a sales podcast. And our listeners are like sales managers, count reps, count executives, SDRs, those kinds of people. And I think there’s always a lot of confusion when it comes to what’s marketing and what sales, how the two go together.

PAT HELMARS

And that’s kind of what I wanted to bring you on the podcast, because I would like to get some clarity to that because it’s not clear.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. So I met with a client of mine that kind of had the same question last week. And he wanted to go out and just start pounding the pavement, so to speak, in the sales world, they talk about pounding the pavement and cold calling.

Josh Ramsey

And my conversation with them was essentially how many of these prospects that you want to hit are sitting in their office and ready for you to walk in and talk to them. And he said, not many. I said, how do you think that they’re going to respond if you walk in cold and start trying to talk to them?

Josh Ramsey

And he said, well, I at least can get my face and my literature in front of them. I said, that works, but what if we could create a system that puts your toe in the door, maybe your knee in the door, and then your hand, and then you can literally walk in with your head and say, here I am, and we can magnify the effectiveness of your sales strategy.

Josh Ramsey

And you as a salesman, we can magnify it and what I call optimize and maximize your opportunity so you’re more effective. And his response essentially in short was, yeah, how do we do it? And that’s the difference between marketing and sales.

Josh Ramsey

Marketing is meant to magnify and highlight who you are as a sales person and your sales strategies as a company or individual. And when you have that magnification, companies tend to want to talk to you a little bit more, it just enhances your visibility and your overall strategy.

PAT HELMARS

So what kind of things can we do to get that foot in the door? And especially in the context of what if I don’t have much of a marketing department and I’m the sales guy? What kinds of things can I do to warm that up?

Josh Ramsey

There’s a lot of what I would call guerilla style marketing that you can use on your own without having to spend any money. One of the more popular ways to go about it is to start following their company on different platforms of social media.

Josh Ramsey

So whether that be LinkedIn or Facebook, Instagram, and then start your comments with them. As sales people, I guess a concern that I always had when I was back in sales was, am I going to keep my job month after month?

Josh Ramsey

Companies go up and down. We have a tendency to lose our position with the company just out of natural effect. If you can build yourself as a good salesperson and build up your marketing side of yourself so that you have a brand, you can do twofold.

Josh Ramsey

Build your relationship with the marketing side of those companies. Talk to their marketing people. Get your name in front of them so they start to recognize you. Think about it this way. If you have a friend and you’re on Facebook and they’re liking every comment and they’re responding to your comments in your posts, all of a sudden, your friend is now more aware or you are more aware of this person following you, commenting, giving suggestions.

Josh Ramsey

So that’s one very easy way to do it.

PAT HELMARS

What’s another?

Josh Ramsey

I think engaging them with a handwritten letter, I’ve seen this work many times. You can do your due diligence creating what a lot of salespeople understand the concept, but it’s a knockdown list is what I call it.

Josh Ramsey

The knockdown list is compiled information of your target persona of who you want to talk to and then following up with them, not only through the social media, but just sending them engaging articles with engaging content.

Josh Ramsey

I heard of one gentleman, he would understand his persona. He would then read articles about that industry. He would then print out those articles, hand write a note, put it in an envelope and mail it to his prospect.

Josh Ramsey

So he gives them information and then he follows it up with a conversation that says, hey, this is who I am and I read this article and I thought about you.

PAT HELMARS

I love it. I love it. I love it. What if you could explain something that’s super confusing, I think, but I think maybe I do not fully understand this, the distinction between a persona and avatar and an ideal client.

Josh Ramsey

You know, I was looking and researching a little bit about kind of a confusion in the marketplace recently and there’s two different ways to look at it, and I’m going to kind of change a little bit of your vernacular, if you will, for just a second.

Josh Ramsey

But you have market segments, let’s add.

PAT HELMARS

Please do, please change the internet killer, because I’m clueless. I was a bit clueless, but I’m confused.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, so essentially you start at the core and the core is b2b versus b2c Business to business is where you look for the persona. It’s who the actual person is and what Characteristics or traits that they have as a individual so That individual would be on you know on this type of platform and doing this type of industry and it’s more b2b of you can identify a specific person a Market a target market is different So the key word there is target market and the market is going to be business to consumer.

Josh Ramsey

So this is going to Talk about let’s just use the for instance of a pest control company. That’s looking after residential pest control You’re then looking at the market and you’re looking at an area of saying okay these houses in this zip code Range in the value of this and the median income Ranges in this so you have to change your messaging to who you’re targeting But understanding that core again is a core fundamental a principle Then you work on the method of what is our tactical side of marketing?

Josh Ramsey

What are we going to send to these people?

PAT HELMARS

I got it, I got it, I got it. Avatar is a word we hear a lot.

Josh Ramsey

You know, I’m gonna be blunt with you. I have not really researched a whole lot of the avatar other than looking at the Looking at the strategy of you’re building a persona of a person Um and in the marketing world everything that i’ve researched I I just haven’t come across a whole lot of conversations about avatars And again, I will say that I stick more to digital media In my core focus because that is really where we find people but I just don’t run across a lot of agencies or marketing professionals that cover the information of the avatar.

PAT HELMARS

That’s all right. That’s okay. So he gave some guerrilla marketing techniques for salespeople. Let’s say if you want to up it. Let’s say we want to step that up. What could we do?

Josh Ramsey

I think creating a series of postcards or, and I say postcards lightly, creating a series of automation helps. First of all, understanding who you’re targeting and then creating what’s called the strategic message.

Josh Ramsey

The strategic message is what you say and how you say it, but more importantly, what’s overlooked is what’s perceived. You know, we try to have good language, we try to have good content, but the perception oftentimes is missed and we don’t focus on what is perceived by our messaging.

Josh Ramsey

So working through that messaging, they say, I hear all different theories, but essentially it’s seven touchpoints in marketing before you really capture someone’s attention.

PAT HELMARS

Yeah, I’ve heard that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Josh Ramsey

So when you look at it that way, and I go back to one of my initial parts of this podcast, you look at how you’re going to interrupt somebody. So for instance that I used when we were going after Target Market was we created a postcard, a very simple postcard.

Josh Ramsey

It cost us about 55 cents to print and mail, and it just did an introduction. It just basically said, this is who we are. The next step was a larger postcard that we knew was going to catch their eye.

Josh Ramsey

So we did a larger postcard about six by nine, and this oversized mail piece landed in their office and it became more of an identification and an introduction, and we threw an offer in there. And then we took it to the next level where we really wanted them to pay attention, and we really wanted to ensure that we were going to be in front of that business owner.

Josh Ramsey

We were going to get that information to them. And what we did with that strategy is we took a box which only cost us about $5 .50, and we inserted something really interesting and engaging and interrupting into this box, and we mailed it out to them, and we ended up getting about six phone calls initially from this campaign.

Josh Ramsey

And what we had done is we were a pest control company focusing on companies that we knew had to have pest control. So restaurants or multifamily living, and we said, hey, what can we put in there that’s going to really shock and awe but not put them over the edge where they hate us?

Josh Ramsey

And we ended up putting a six -inch rat and a six -inch roach into this box, and we got such an overwhelming response. We kind of had a mixed result. We had about three people call us and politely cuss us out.

Josh Ramsey

The secretary was not happy. And then we had another three people laughing so hard that they thought it was the greatest thing, and we ended up setting four appointments out of those six phone calls.

PAT HELMARS

So even ones that were unhappy, you were able to convert them into an appointment.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, we basically had scripting ready and we knew what we were going to say and how we were going to say it. So we kind of prepared for the persona of they could be angry or they could be happy. So knowing that, again, in the sales world as well, understanding what could happen as you create your messaging and you walk into an office.

Josh Ramsey

I used to script that when I was doing heavy sales. I would script out what are going to be the objections and what are the advantages? How do I overcome their objections? And I would focus on that as a core.

Josh Ramsey

What objections are they going to have and what options do I have to overcome their objections before they even name them?

PAT HELMARS

So I wonder if you could give us some ideas or some rules of thumb on what kind of expectations when it comes to metrics, like if I send out X number of, let’s say, postcards or something like this in a campaign similar to this, what kind of conversions into a conversation can I expect, and then from that, what kind of sales closing can I expect?

Josh Ramsey

So there’s going to be different strategies and it all is going to start with your persona of who you’re trying to target. And I can’t say that enough because when you don’t lay the groundwork well enough, then your execution will essentially fail you.

Josh Ramsey

And I know a lot of people don’t have a huge budget in the sales world because now you have to convince your marketing team if you have one, you have to convince your higher ups to allow you to do this campaign.

Josh Ramsey

But the execution really has to come down to what is your persona going to pay attention to? And that’s where I would focus is no matter what your industry, what you’re doing, what your budget, what is it that they’re going to pay attention to?

Josh Ramsey

Is it mail? Is it a box? Actually get a letter? It’s handwritten. And then you really want to work through your messaging because once you get that opportunity to be in front of them, what you say in those first few seconds is either going to trigger and they’re going to want to talk more, they’re going to want to pay attention more, or it’s going to fall flat and you’ve lost your opportunity.

Josh Ramsey

But as far as conversions go, you really have to pay attention to your messaging because that campaign I told you about with the Roach and the rat, we ended up closing 12 of 150 targets. But we ran the second year a new 150 targets, same everything, but a different 150.

Josh Ramsey

We took a different strategy and we got zero. Absolutely nothing. Not even one phone call. We couldn’t even get people to answer the phone when we called them as a follow -up. They would not take our call.

Josh Ramsey

And I told the business owner ahead of time that I strongly felt that it was a bad approach. I felt like it was not going to work. And he argued with me and said, ultimately, he said, I’m the business owner, we’re going to do it my way.

Josh Ramsey

And I said, okay, but I don’t want to have this blowback if it fails. And I said, when you ask me what is a fractional CMO and what do they do, this is part of it. Part of it is understanding the persona and understanding the experience that I bring, so just using myself as a fractional CMO and a marketing guy for as many years as I have, which is, man, I started in 2003, having that experience and all these different campaigns under my belt.

Josh Ramsey

A lot of times I know what people are going to do. I’m tuned into it. I’ve seen different campaigns. I see what’s going to work. I see what hasn’t worked and what isn’t going to work. And it doesn’t mean I’m always right, but there are a lot of times that we kind of know when we see this information, we kind of know what’s going to happen, what’s going to trigger.

Josh Ramsey

So your results are really going to matter more on your strategic side. What you say, how you say it, and what’s perceived by your key audience.

PAT HELMARS

Josh, how can people find you online?

Josh Ramsey

So my fractional CMO website is jrcmo .com. So you can always go to my website, get a lot of information there. I’m launching a new marketing strategy room through my website, and it’s got a ton of content and ideas that will spark your thought process to create better marketing.

Josh Ramsey

So jrcmo.com. I also have a book online that I just published a couple months ago that they can download either specific chapters specifically about sales, specifically about writing, or any other topic.

Josh Ramsey

So there’s about 13 head topics in the book that they can download, or they can email me through the website, and I’ll send it to them if they mention this podcast.

PAT HELMARS

I’ll make sure to do that, Josh. I’ll make sure to put that in the show notes. If they send you an email, I’ll put your email in the show notes. Unless you know the link off the top of your head.

Josh Ramsey

josh@jrcmo.com

PAT HELMARS

I mean, is there a link on the website that you can think of?

Josh Ramsey

There is the contact and even my cell phone is actually on the header. So when you go to the website and you see the phone number that is my cell phone. So you can call or text me anytime.

PAT HELMARS

Awesome, awesome. I should say it’s been fun talking to you because you’re actually outside, sort of, on what lake are you on?

Josh Ramsey

I’m on Lake Lewisville, just north of Dallas. I live in McKinney, so I keep an office outdoors to keep my interest and keep me in a happy place as I work on tough stuff like marketing and ideas. I work on a lake, I have a boat dock out here, so it’s kind of fun.

PAT HELMARS

It looks great. Thanks so much for visiting us here on SalesBabble. I really appreciate it, Josh. Thanks a bunch.

Josh Ramsey

Thanks, Pat.

PAT HELMARS

SalesBabble is sponsored by Abanero Media, a podcasting agency for B2B brands. Podcasting is the easiest way to turn your executives into thought leaders, with content that reaches your ideal clients.

PAT HELMARS

Haven’t you heard that podcasting is the new blogging? Start a podcast today. Go to abaneromedia.net, that’s Abanero with an H, like the hot pepper. It’s a hot idea. Go to abaneromedia.net and start podcasting today.

PAT HELMARS

To connect with Josh and to get his ebook and all the things that he mentioned here in the podcast, I have links to him and his website in the show notes at www.salesbabble.com/319. There will also be links to the TeleBabble webpage, so you can sign up to get reminders on the TeleBabble that’s held on Thursdays at four o ‘clock central, five o ‘clock eastern, two o ‘clock pacific.

PAT HELMARS

And again, this week we’re gonna be chatting about marketing and sales. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, I’m going to be hosting a live webinar on how to start a B2B podcast, how to get on a podcast, things like that, how podcasting can grow your brand, authority, influence, and trust.

PAT HELMARS

Links to that you can also find in the show notes. Did you enjoy this podcast? Did you find value? Please share this with your friends. Give us a five -star review. I would really appreciate it. And of course, if you have any questions or comments outside of this, if you wanna contact me privately, you’re welcome to do that.

PAT HELMARS

Just go to the Babbel.me page on salesbabble.com. That’s all I got for this week, folks. And I know that’s been a lot. So until next week, take care and have a highly successful and profitable selling day.

Thanks for watching!
Thank you for listening to the SalesBabble podcast. Find us at www.salesbabble.com/319.
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