Episode 82 | Secret Weapons for Business Growth - Ali Schwanke

In this episode, Ali shares her incredible expertise - and reveals specific tools you can use RIGHT NOW to use data and technology to elevate marketing and sales efforts for small and medium-sized businesses. (All links to resources Ali mentioned are in the show notes!)

Listen as we dive into the importance of leveraging tools streamline sales processes, the crucial role of follow-up, and the power of personal branding. Ali also sheds light on using AI for content creation and the necessity of building trust through multiple touchpoints in today’s hybrid sales environment.

About Ali:

Ali Schwanke is a marketing strategist, entrepreneur, and advisor, known as the "HubSpot Queen." As the founder of Simple Strat, a Diamond HubSpot Solutions partner, she helps companies worldwide to train teams, and scale their systems. Ali hosts HubSpot Hacks, the leading unofficial channel for HubSpot tutorials, and Marketing Deconstructed, a podcast and YouTube show guiding SMB leaders on marketing and growth. A blend of creative and analytical, she creates content-driven strategies that drive results. Outside of work, she’s a reader, runner, mom, and tech enthusiast.

Reach Ali:
linkedin.com/in/alischwanke
simplestrat.com

Ali's Personal Resources:

HubSpot Hacks YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@HubSpotHacks/videos

Marketing Deconstructed Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/3Txb55FyyhKa7k6GKuRJul

Newsletter:
https://marketingdeconstructed.com/

External Resources Ali Shared in This Episode:

Rev.com

Descript.com

Sybill.ai

The book Oversubscribed

Kay Miller interviews women in sales with proven track records, as they share their experiences, success strategies and tools you can use to crush your sales goals. Kay has a history of sales success, earning the nickname “Muffler Mama” when she sold more automotive mufflers than anyone in the world. Kay and her guests deliver actionable insights and real-world tools that will help you overcome obstacles, adopt a winning mindset, and maximize your sales results.

Kay is the author of the book, Uncopyable Sales Secrets – How to Create an Unfair Advantage and Outsell the Competition. Go to Amazon.com and search “Uncopyable Sales Secrets” to order the book, or click the link below.

Contact:
kay@uncopyablesales.com
linkedin.com/in/millerkay
Order Uncopyable Sales Secrets: amzn.to/35dGlYZ

Transcript

Speaker 1 00:00:00  Welcome to UN Copyable Women in Business. I'm your host, Kay Miller, also known as Muffler Mama. Now, I don't know if you're an entrepreneur, business owner, sales professional, or part of an organization, but I do know that you want to be more successful, earn more money, and make a bigger impact. How do you do that? Stay tuned as I, along with my guests, give you marketing, sales, and personal branding strategies that will give you an unstoppable advantage. Today I have the pleasure of talking with Ali Schwanke. People often call Ali the HubSpot Queen, but she considers herself a marketing and sales nerd at heart. I love that, by the way. She helps small and medium sized companies get better and faster results from their marketing efforts. Ali is the founder of Simple Strat and host of the podcast Marketing Constructed. She's also the co-host of the popular YouTube show HubSpot hacks. Ali, that's a mouthful. All that stuff. I said welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2 00:01:10  Yeah, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 00:01:11  I'm so excited to be here.
Speaker 1 00:01:13  This is really great. We've had a little bit of a conversation beforehand, and I can tell already you are very bright and you're also wearing fuchsia, which is very bright. I love that I'm wearing orange. So hey, bright is a theme here. Why don't you talk a little bit to start out, what you do and and just the priorities that you have in helping companies be better at marketing and using data. All the other stuff you talked about.
Speaker 2 00:01:41  Yeah. I'll start with a couple of problems. And these are things that probably you hear, I hear them. Sales leaders hear them, marketing leaders hear them. And that is we need to know what to do more of and what to do less of. So where where are we going to double down? Where are we going to invest? And a lot of that's driven by what's happening in sales and revenue producing opportunities. So that's where all of our worlds collide. So Hubspot's a marketing technology. We it also serves as a place where people can track relationships, follow up with their customers, automate some of that sales communication.
Speaker 2 00:02:11  But ultimately we help people understand how to use that technology more effectively so they can spend more time selling and less time doing this stuff. So at the end of the day, if you're making money by being on the phone, being on calls, let's do more of that and let's do less of the behind the scenes thing and let the technology do the work.
Speaker 1 00:02:27  And you talked about data, and I don't totally understand HubSpot. I know you are a diamond. What do you call what's the official title that you have? Yeah, we're.
Speaker 2 00:02:35  A diamond HubSpot partner, but basically means we've earned our stripes to make sure that we know the platform and how to drive revenue with it. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:02:41  When I asked you about it, I said, but seems complicated to me. I've heard a little bit about it, but you said basically it's just a vehicle, right? For getting the information that you need for communicating with the right customers. And like you just said, spending your time on the right priorities that will drive results.
Speaker 1 00:02:59  How do you see that?
Speaker 2 00:03:01  Yeah, definitely. If you think about all the actions that we take. They all find them their way into, as James Clear talks about it, daily habits. And so if your habits and sales are calls, emails, touches, outreach, LinkedIn messages, all those things like those are your kind of those are your daily habits that you have to have. But if you're doing those daily habits against the wrong ideal customer profile, are the wrong moves in your case, if you're doing them against the wrong audience, like they're really not going to give you the insights that you need over the course of a month or a quarter on whether or not you're going to hit your sales targets. So our goal is to help people. When I say data, I mean, are you targeting the right companies? Do you know the length of their sales cycle? Are you staying in touch with them often enough, from a sales and a marketing perspective that they can build a relationship with you, and then are you giving them ample reason? And we'll call it like promotional opportunities to convert.
Speaker 2 00:03:50  So that, in a nutshell, is data. But too many people I see they're trying to do this. Let's say you're using AI to do forecasting. Or even if you're in a sales role and you're like, hey, I want ChatGPT to help me identify more opportunities in my CRM, which is, again, HubSpot. That's what it is. But whether you're using HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho, like pick a CRM name, I don't care. But at the end of the day, like what data you put in there is what you're basing future decisions on. And if that's wrong, I don't want to be in that situation. When you meet with your boss in 90 days that you're not meeting your target, so we help you as a company do that better, but then also at the sales role, like if that's you and you're using HubSpot, we can teach you how to be faster with the system.
Speaker 1 00:04:28  So do you. You teach people how to do that, or do you also provide that service for clients where you do that analysis for them?
Speaker 2 00:04:35  Yep.
Speaker 2 00:04:36  We'll do everything from analysis to build to setup to training. And like my husband uses HubSpot, he just started using it in this company. And quite frankly, I made him a couple of tutorial videos just because I love him so he can learn how to do it faster, because some people pick it up and some people, quite frankly, he's very good at sales, very good at people relationships? He every time he has to put something in the computer and it's a little bit harder than it should be. He's frustrated because it's less time selling and more time doing this stuff, like I mentioned at the top of the show. So our goal again is more human to human interaction is what drives business. Let's go ahead and see if we can maximize that.
Speaker 1 00:05:12  Well, the interesting because I'm in that category, I love people, I feel like people skills are good data and analysis. That stuff's kind of boring. But without that you can't meet and sell the right people, right? Your husband has.
Speaker 1 00:05:26  He's probably. I don't need to figure this out. I have Ali it is.
Speaker 2 00:05:30  Yeah. He looks like me images. And I was like, okay, your company needs to hire our firm. Like, I'm not working for you for free anymore. The free help is done. But I love him, so I'm gonna give him some free help.
Speaker 1 00:05:39  But, yeah, that's, like I said, salespeople. I think that's one of the people I'm doing a program right now in follow up. And really, some of it just gets down to not being organized. We're all about, let's pick the sale, let's talk to people, and then we don't want to do all that other stuff that that's critical. So this applies to the end result of any company is getting more sales, right. My husband likes to say if you're not making money, it's a hobby. And so I don't think anybody listening is probably doing this as a hobby. and as you talked about, you just put a post today on LinkedIn saying, hey, what are your best sales tips? And like you said, you got a whole bunch of activity.
Speaker 1 00:06:19  I know you had it on Twitter as well, so why don't you share a little bit of of that and what happened?
Speaker 2 00:06:24  Yeah. Two things that I love to do on social. And if you're in a sales capacity and at any point like this is a super hack and a super hack is ask a very open ended question to your audience and see what their perspective is, because in this post. So again, if you go to my Twitter account or X, I'll never call it X, but or LinkedIn. And then I ask this question. There's everything from just be relentless, make lots of calls. It's a numbers game. And then you got this person over here that says if you're in sales, that's dumb already. Get out again. So, like, everyone's got their own little advice, but really like the central theme. So I actually took a lot of the comments from the response on that tweet. There's several tools that I can use to scrape that information, run that through an AI generator to synthesize the themes and the themes that come out of that happen to be build relationships.
Speaker 2 00:07:10  And that means don't worry as much about making the sale as you are about being a person of value. And I think that it's really hard to think about that when you're looking at a quota and you're looking at your boss saying you're not hitting it. So then you have this, we call it in my house. I think a lot of people call it this, like the smell of desperation. It's like the teenager with axe body spray. Okay. Whoa. There's too much going on right now. So you don't want to be desperate. You want to provide value. But I think when you're thinking so much just about the product versus now that you and I are acquainted, and I said if I wanted to get a gift shop and I saw this cutest moose on the gift on the shelf, if I just took a picture of that moose and I texted it to you and I said, thought of you today. This is so cute. And I bought it so that I gave it to you at the next time I saw it at a conference.
Speaker 2 00:07:53  That is how to build a relationship. And then obviously I got to be more than that. So I might share some podcast episodes or something. But that's at the heart of sales. And then the really good next part of that is what you just alluded to. And people talked about follow up. So you can't assume that just because someone didn't answer an email once that they're not interested, it's not the right time. Whatever. Being a trusted partner, following up, and then being someone that ultimately has a process around that, the comments are entertaining to read by themselves. But those are the summary of what shook out well.
Speaker 1 00:08:26  So I have to unpack some of this stuff now. I'm trying to keep up with Allie here, but first of all, your description of going into a gift shop, buying a moose, taking a picture and sending it to me, that's like a masterclass in relationship building. And as I told you, we just we just had a book come out called Unstoppable You, which is personal branding.
Speaker 1 00:08:47  And when it comes down to it, we're all people. And so if you can make that person feel special, important, remembered and giving them give them that kind of really personalized is not even a good enough word. Attention. That's brilliant. Anybody listening? If you can pick up on those clues. Ali I can see her right now looking at my background. When we got on the call, the first thing she did is said, oh, wow, you've got this really set up. Well, with all your books being displayed, I have a picture of a moose with a with a light shining on it. So you're gathering a lot of information didn't, aren't you? And you did in the first few minutes. And of course, I actually give myself props too. I also looked at your background because what I'm. What can I learn any. I think good sales person will do that. How can you learn information that you can use to develop that relationship? And I've been under the gun, I've been a sales rep and I know there is a lot of pressure, but if you don't look at the long game, you're not going to win unless you're selling solar and you're going door to door, and it's a one time sale, right? The other thing I thought was interesting, I'd like you to talk more about when you put something on LinkedIn or X.
Speaker 1 00:10:01  Like you said, I don't like that either. I like to say Twitter. Still, people want to help you say, what is your opinion of this? They want to be help. They want to help, and they also want to be heard. Right. So you've got, you know, what a such a great way to put something on LinkedIn instead of just posting it and not asking for people's opinion. But let's talk about the next step that you talked mentioned, and that's using AI to dig into that data. You've got data. So what would you do next? What do you do next with that.
Speaker 2 00:10:36  Yeah, there's a couple of ways that I was telling you this morning. I was actually speaking on sales and AI at an event in person, and we were talking about how, like the things you just mentioned that I picked up, like through my observational experiences, like I see in movies or whatever. But the things that we as really good sales professionals pick up on tone, they pick up on situation like if you would have come to the call and said something about, wow, it's really hot today.
Speaker 2 00:11:00  I may have thought, oh, maybe hurt. The room that she's in is going to be warm. And so she might be rushed. Like, you just start to connect those dots and I think I can help us make those connections. So I use it to both decipher a lot of information to get sort of the themes of what people are talking about. So if you want instance, let's say you go to a company page and you're going to sell to this company and you go find all the top executives, you find all the things they posted about in the last 30 days and synthesize that. With AI, you can get a sentiment for what they're talking about and come to a sales meeting prepared and not saying I read the last 30 posts. If you say that you look like you're a brown noser, but you want to come to the call with contacts, and that's how you do that. The other way that I was talking about this morning is we use a couple of different note takers in meetings, And there's one particular note taker that we use is specifically designed to give you sentiment on the sales conversation, what are their pains, what are their interests, and so on the interest.
Speaker 2 00:11:54  It's interesting if every single call that I have this week and I'll have to send you like an example to put in the notes, but it'll say, okay, it talks about this and these were for interests and these were her pain points. And if I kept a record of that relative to our products, I have so many upsell cross-sell conversations already pegged. And if I do that across the portfolio of the clients that I'm managing, I now have themes that I can address when I'm looking at how to open up new sales opportunities, because it's not about, hey, okay, how's it going? Like, we're past those days, it's, hey, three months ago, you talked about X. I wanted to follow up because it's been about 90 days. And if my sense is right, you're probably working on X and they're going, oh, I totally forgot that I said that. Thank you.
Speaker 1 00:12:35  That's such a great point about keeping your sales intention right. Top of mind. And I think we get confused about the relationship building.
Speaker 1 00:12:46  Like you said, sometimes that seems disconnected from closing the sale. But always having we we talk about that next step. What is the next step that you want to have happen? The kind of information that you are able to glean. It's just amazing. I really hit the big time just a couple of years ago. Of course, HubSpot companies like that were already using those tools, but man, anybody listening? I know that some we work with some business owners who are down in the weeds of running their business. They don't. They say, I don't have time for AI. I don't have time to figure all this out, and it's worth your time, right? On a tactical level, how would you go about getting information from websites, whatever, or your note taker? Which I'd love to know what that specific one is. So how do you go about that?
Speaker 2 00:13:35  Yeah, there's a couple tools that we use. So if you don't use HubSpot you can still use this tool, but it's called HubSpot and it's a sales extension that goes inside your Chrome browser, so in your Chrome browser it'll tell you all it'll summarize things for you for that company.
Speaker 2 00:13:47  It will summarize some of the technologies that they use. Depending on what you're selling, it may or not be, may or may not be helpful if you're using a tool. So the the one that I mentioned that we're big fans of over here is Sybil. Sybil. And that's a pricier tool than a lot of the note takers. But because it is designed specifically for sales, my goal in using it is, again, the specificity of the the interest in the pinpoints. And then I can generate an email that outlines our next steps and speaks to those things so quickly that I can get a follow up email out the same day, sometimes within the same hour, and speed to communication and sales. Especially today with information overload, people want to be directed into a next step in. If I got an email in the next day with specificity, and then I can take those meeting notes and I'll throw them into a walled version of ChatGPT and say, build me a quick roadmap of the things they discussed in this meeting, and I can share a draft roadmap with them of the steps we need to take to achieve their ideal outcome.
Speaker 2 00:14:47  That right there is masterclass on communication and value. And if they don't work with me, fine. I say, listen, if you don't work with us, I understand. Feel free to use these for your notes, but I want to let you know that I do understand where you're going, and this is a thing we can work on together. It's probably your use case. Varies. First, I usually start on paper. What do I want to get better at? Is it follow up? Great. How can I use it? How to do that? What can I do? I want to get all the sentiment from a bunch of executives. What tools can I use to do that as opposed to seeing I just is like a sprinkle on top of all the things you're doing, because that that just makes everything sticky and sweet. It doesn't really make it effective.
Speaker 1 00:15:24  So using that as the foundational part, like you said, I like that. Don't sprinkle it on top, but use that from the very beginning.
Speaker 1 00:15:32  This podcast is sponsored by my latest book, which I co-authored with my husband, Steve. It's part of the UN Copyable series and this one is called UN Copyable. You create a personal brand that gets people to know you, like you, trust you, and remember you. Order it now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble or your favorite independent bookstore. So you mentioned Sybil, which if you're older, if you're as old as me, that was like the name of a book. Did you know about that Sybil kind of movie? It was a woman with split personalities, and she had eight different personalities. It's just all coming back to me now. I hadn't thought about that.
Speaker 2 00:16:12  I wonder if they know. Maybe they do. Maybe that's why it's name that. That's funny.
Speaker 1 00:16:15  That's why it is. But if you don't have Sybil, you mentioned that's an expensive tool. How? If you start with ChatGPT, which is something I use, there's so many choices, but how would you use ChatGPT or a free tool to give you this information?
Speaker 2 00:16:31  Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:16:31  So the things that you need in order to synthesize calls are transcripts. So you need a recording of the call and what happens. And you need to know who is in that meeting. So you need the tool. That's the basis of that would be any sort of tool that records the audio and then can identify the speaker's post call. So if you're recording your call is just on zoom. Wonderful. I think zoom inside of there paid subscriptions has transcription as well. I don't know that the extent to which it labels it speakers, but you can if you took a call and uploaded it to Rev.com, they trans, I think they translate or transcribe. I think it's like a dollar a minute or something.
Speaker 1 00:17:06  And by the way, that's rev.com. You said it fast, but Rev.com.
Speaker 2 00:17:09  Rev.com dot.
Speaker 1 00:17:11  Com. So you were just looking to hire someone or it probably. I think with Rev there is an AI option and then a yeah human options option.
Speaker 2 00:17:21  Yeah. There is also a lot of these tools are very low cost.
Speaker 2 00:17:24  So it's not like it's a big lift. But we do love a tool. It's called descript and descript. We use to take I'm sure that maybe that's something you use with the podcast, but that's where we do our transcription if we don't have meeting notes, so sometimes I'll have a meeting in person. It isn't as common, but if I do, I'll record that on my phone and then I'll drop that audio file into descript, get the transcript, and then do my process from there. But the goal is for maximum engagement in a sales conversation. And to demonstrate that I'm listening. Sometimes it can be difficult to take notes and make sure you're listening and not have your own agenda. At the same time. I got to follow this flow. So recording does allow you to really be there, be present, and then do the post sort of synopsis on the back side, assuming that you've got good like the hygiene here is know how to open a meeting, know how to make sure that you're getting customers to go deeper and then be very good at wrapping and setting.
Speaker 2 00:18:21  Next step in action items. If you're not good at those three things.
Speaker 1 00:18:24  That's a great point as far as allowing you to listen and to be really tuned in to the person or the group that you're talking to. Even as I've gotten my podcast going and I know that you have a podcast also, and I'm going to put all of these links and the specific tools that you're talking about will all go in the show notes. But when I started my podcast, I it was hard to listen to someone and respond to what they were saying. I had my agenda, okay, I've got to say this or I'm going to get lost. Descript actually, is the tool that I use for this podcast. And so yes, it you could upload the recording. And one of the amazing things about that too is that you can edit it like a word doc. And so you change into script and then that edits the video as well. Crazy technology that we've got going. But let's see what was I going to say.
Speaker 1 00:19:13  The note taker okay. The next step the moose. What where would you go next with this conversation. Because it's blowing my mind.
Speaker 2 00:19:22  Yeah. These talks about the importance of follow up. So I'm curious in your book, you're talking about making sure that your personal brand is the one that kind of stands out. Is there anything in particular that I can definitely find alignment with? How we use technology to follow up. What's your belief on follow up and how do you coach clients to do that?
Speaker 1 00:19:37  Like I said, one thing is being organized because I think salespeople aren't. And of course, with the world of technology, you can record the meeting any time and use that. So having that information, knowing your customer, making the follow up about them because I think it's like, oh yeah, here's something else that we have, something else that we have I really like. And I recommend referring back to a conversation that you've already had, but also keeping that intention of where do you want to move with this sale? Also, during the follow up process, either either before or even after the sale.
Speaker 1 00:20:14  Depending on your situation, you need to be discovering all the way along that. Is that your moose? Is this somebody worth your time? Because like you said, you could take a picture or buy a moose at a gift shop. But if you're dealing with somebody who isn't really your ICP, your moose, you're not going to want to spend the time and the effort to do that. So if you really have the right client, I think that all the things that you mentioned, but also standing out your personal brand and we have our moves, we have language, we have color, what we stand for, your vision. So it's really keeping all those things in alignment. But as I said, bottom line is just have your plan and what are you going to do and how are you going to move to the next step?
Speaker 2 00:20:59  Yeah, I think for people that struggle with so they get what you're saying and they're like, okay, great. I do it a couple times and suddenly I'm like, okay, I got way too many tasks and I'm overwhelmed.
Speaker 2 00:21:08  I think the benefit of having. So one of the things we help, help clients and teams with is if you are in a very specific CRM. So if you are in HubSpot, if this resonates with you, how you talk us through, how you do your day, and then we will create the environment for you to do your best work. So here's where you save your tax. Here's where you go, here's how you do this. And that way you learn to organize yourself against the system that your company wants you to use, as opposed to now trying to retrofit backwards, and you spend the rest two hours of your day putting all your notes in and all that kind of thing. But I do think what you said is golden when it comes to like, your own personalities. We've got templates that will often set up for sales teams that. Here's an example of a follow up email that you could use. Now you should probably never use that the way it's written because it was written by a marketing team.
Speaker 2 00:21:53  Let's be honest. Introduce your flair if you like. I tend to be a person that loves using interesting subject lines, so one of my follow ups back in May was April showers bring my HubSpot flowers and it was just random. But the guy emailed me back immediately and he was like, this is the most interesting email in my inbox today. And so it's that kind of thing where you're going, how do I leverage my own personality? I'm a very unique person. I like unique subject lines. I have another associate who is definitely not that sort of person. They're much more process oriented, they're much more technical. And so they tend to be a follow up from meeting on X that we discussed why? Okay, that's the type of subject line you're going to see from that person. You wouldn't expect to see what I use, but I think those personal brand things are important. But you got to start with at least a template. It helps you overcome that blank cursor issue where you're like, what do I say? What do I say? Start with something.
Speaker 2 00:22:44  Have things set up so you can just swipe them kind of swipe files and then personalize it with how you want to do it.
Speaker 1 00:22:49  And that's one thing that's so great about AI is that it's not looking. You're not looking at a blank page. You should be you should definitely not be. Even if you have to generate an email, you could put something into AI. You can ask it questions. I just I tell you, even if I can't figure out something on a word doc now I go to I say, how do I move this to there? It's just it's really amazing. But as far as content creation, that's huge. But yes, using your own personality, as I mentioned, people do business with people. We don't do business with businesses. It's really people and everybody's different. And of course you want to. Your best way to stand out is to be yourself. So that's really. That's great. What is one? We're almost out of time, believe it or not. But what is one of the biggest challenges that you see that you've got another specific thing to help with it sales or marketers face?
Speaker 2 00:23:46  Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that sales faces today is the move from I'm going to take your order to I'm going to be your value trusted partner, especially if you're in a sales role where you're not.
Speaker 2 00:23:56  The executive executives who also sell have a hidden benefit of carrying that authority with them just because of their title. If you're in a sales role where you're an account executive and everybody knows your name is account executive, but your role is sales, right? So you have to lead the field with as much thought leadership as your executive team is, and you have to be out in front of your customers helping them uncover what's the market doing and how is that going to change the way the product works or the service or something? And to assume that you have all the answers is wrong. So this is where salespeople that maybe our account managers talk to a customer and then gain some insights and share that on LinkedIn. I was talking with one of our customers who happens to work in manufacturing yesterday. Here's three trends they mentioned. Are you seeing the same thing? That's the type of content that we now have to be creating as sales professionals, especially when you're trying to build that trust and authority with people who maybe are at a higher level of job title than you because you want to create this illusion, or at least a feeling of being a peer, even though you maybe aren't at that same executive level.
Speaker 1 00:25:00  Those are those are great ways to give yourself credibility and provide value, even what you posted on LinkedIn today asking for people's opinions on sales. I wanted to read through those too. And and everybody has a different way of looking at it. Some of the themes are similar, of course, but yeah, giving value up front, offering marketing insights. And of course, sharing stories and specifics are always more engaging than just data or saying this is the way it is. So what else should can you add to this conversation? Like I said, you've got so much and that you're so much great stuff you're sharing. Where would you go next with this?
Speaker 2 00:25:37  Yeah, the so we discussed LinkedIn a little bit, and I think I was mentioning to you at the top of the call before we jumped on that so much of our sales world has changed from we were in person then, we were all virtual, and now we're in this hybrid, and I think so. One of my friends, he did his head talk on trust and they talked about these kind of levels of trust.
Speaker 2 00:25:57  And it's been a lot of books written on trust. But everybody is that consumers are the all time low of trusting people, trusting brands, trusting companies. And so while we talk about all the things we can do to stay in front of our customers and stay on top and enter the CRM, all that technical kind of stuff we're really trying to do is get people to trust us when they don't have a reason to. And so one of the things I like to do with our clients is Just write out all the questions that your customers might ask you, and all the things that even if they don't ask you, that you wish that they ask you. These are very common exercises and sales training, objections and overcoming and all of that sort of thing. Do you have a piece of content that addresses every single one of those? Because the best thing you can do today, if you can't be in a sales meeting is have your digital avatar, aka you want a video, you want a podcast, you want a blog.
Speaker 2 00:26:51  If you can have that version of you in a meeting, which means someone interacting with your content when you're not physically there, that's the next best thing to a meeting. So in addition to driving in person meetings, zoom meetings, phone meetings, is there a version of you in a piece of content that is addressing that same question? So if they happen to have it when you're not around, they can still get the answer and build trust with you.
Speaker 1 00:27:13  That's that's brilliant because then it's living in perpetuity, as they say, right. You've got a whole bunch of videos online. Of course we've got books and programs, videos. But yeah, that's great. So it doesn't even have to be you. Representing those answers every single time you've got that in the bag, so to speak. And when you talk about building trust, that is one of the biggest things to me about follow up, especially if you say, I don't have that answer, but I will get back to you or get back to you at a certain date.
Speaker 1 00:27:43  Anytime that you say, I'm going to follow up at this time or on this date, and then you do it, that's a trust builder. And then building your value like you're talking about. One of my best compliments ever was a letter that a customer years ago wrote to my boss and said, K has become an asset to our company. We don't know what we do without her. And like you said, knowing the market, having stories from other companies, keeping yourself on the cutting edge of whatever technology all of those things give your customer, like you said, that impression, that perception that you are knowledgeable, the one that they should do business with. And so I think it is it's a hybrid to use that word of being having a personal brand, but also obviously delivering value.
Speaker 2 00:28:29  Sure, if there's a book I usually reference in this conversation, it's called oversubscribed. I didn't write it. I can't even remember the author at the moment, but he's talking about how a trust is built and how people earn what they feel as a relationship with the company or brands.
Speaker 2 00:28:43  And it was citing a study from Google. So again, like go a couple levels deep to find the research to support this. But he was talking about building relationships over seven hours across 11 interactions in four different channels. So if you think about that, how long does it take for someone to spend seven hours with you in 11 different touchpoints and four channels? So that might be they see you at a conference, they see you on YouTube and email and phone call. Those are your four channels. Seven hours is how many times have you met and how many different things did you do? And then 11 touchpoints across all those things. So if you think about modern selling and you think about, I'm going to see you in person. So I'm setting an event this morning, I'm going to be on an event again in three weeks. They watch some of my YouTube videos. They recap, rewatch the virtual event as a webinar we emailed back and forth that's called That All Comes Together, and that's where I really do think that the in-person gets really solidified, because you spend six hours with someone sitting next to them at a table at an event and suddenly it's, oh, I now, I've been watching your videos for two years, but I now get the value that you provide.
Speaker 1 00:29:39  Yep, that's put that all together in a package. And with the the amount of time, the pressure on our time and how we are all running in a million different directions, you can't be everywhere at once. I think I like that really strategic look at how you can have all those touchpoints with or without you, like you said before. Then you say, okay, I'm at a gift shop of you. I text you a picture, even if you don't take the time to buy it and send it whatever. Even just seeing something and saying it can be so quick with a text or a call or a touchpoint like that. All excellent points. The book. We will also get the the full name of that and the author and put that in the show notes. I will have all your information and like you said, you're welcome to. Are you welcome to connect with you on LinkedIn?
Speaker 2 00:30:27  Absolutely. Yeah. That's one of the best places.
Speaker 1 00:30:29  Okay. Follow or connect with Ali and check out the resources that we've got.
Speaker 1 00:30:35  Thank you so much Ali. I've really enjoyed our time together and I appreciate you being on the podcast.
Speaker 2 00:30:41  Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 00:30:45  Thanks for listening to this episode. And by the way, I invite you to join my Facebook group, Unstoppable Women in Business the next time. And always remember to be unstoppable.