Podcasts about welcome bill

Ford Mustang community, we are here to talk about two of my favorite things when it comes to Classic Mustangs. First, the build. A 1967 convertible named Isadora. Second, the amazing Mustang community, coming together at the 42nd International Mustang Meet in Boise Idaho. Here to talk both topics is Bill Eisinger. Welcome Bill to Ford Mustang, The Early Years. Ford Mustang, The Early Years Podcast Do you own a early year Mustang?:  yesIf you own a Mustang, how long have you owned your ride?: 49 years for the first oneWhat do you do for a living?: Retired electrical engineerIf you own a Mustang or classic car, have you named your car? If so, what is his/her name?: Our 67 convertible is named IsadoraIf you've made improvements to your classic car or restored it, what work have you done?: www.theisadorabuild.comWhat plans do you have for improvements/restoration/modification of your classic car?: Always building new cars Connect with Bill Eisinger:International Mustang meet in Boise, Idaho September 3-6www.imm42.comFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/IMM42Boise/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/imm42boise/ Get our episodes in your inbox follow the link in the show notes: www.TheMustangPodcast.com Our Instagram Page is new and exciting. Lots of great pics. https://www.instagram.com/mustangpodcast/ Get The Expert's Guide to Maintaining Your Classic Mustang: www.TheMustangPodcast.com/repair Join our Facebook Group: Classic Mustang Connection https://www.facebook.com/groups/185146876036328 Thanks for listening, keep it safe, keep in rollin' and keep it on the road! Until next time.  Cover art photo credit: Instagram Bangin' Headlights https://www.instagram.com/banginheadlights/

In this episode Britton and I have a very special guest joining us, one of the four original founders of Zephyr Real Estate. Zephyr is where Britton and I both started in real estate, and some of my earliest memories are of hearing war stories from This industry veteran over lunch in the break room. Our guest built Zephyr Real Estate from brand new in 1978 to the largest independent real estate brokerage in San Francisco, with seven offices, more than 300 agents and over $2 billion in annual sales at its peak. While serving as President of Zephyr his creative leadership approach celebrated the company’s unique independent spirit - a driving force in its success. In 2020, Zephyr Real Estate became Corcoran Global Living, a franchisee of Corcoran Real Estate, and sadly, the end of the Zephyr brand.Now retired from day to day operations and enjoying his time split between Hawaii and California, our guest was once a collegiate wrestler, is a US military veteran, a fellow Past President of the San Francisco Association of Realtors, and is also a husband and father. Joining us today from Hawaii is a man we’ve long personally admired, Bill Drypolcher. Welcome Bill, let’s jump into this! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week we have an awesome conversation With Bill from NerdNest. In what might look like a game of “how many different topics can we cover in one sitting” we chat about the upcoming Pokemon snap, legos, polaroids, Xbox, games we'd get on a tight budget, and of course Metroid Prime 4. Big thanks to Bill for coming on! Links to his stuff are below. As a reminder we are coming close to the one year Anniversary of the Nintendo Pals Podcast. Thanks so much for your support in listening to our show. May 29th will be Nintendo Pals Day!!! We will be hosting a community game night, a special edition of our podcast and MUCH MORE! -INTRO Introduce ourselves -welcome Welcome Bill from SwitchCraft! https://mobile.twitter.com/RunJumpStomp https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCiC38Llz5e3qR6EaQAGlWvw -Whatcha Playin? Here we talk about what games we are currently playing. -Nintendo News: Latest trailer of New Pokemon Snap gives details. Retro hires another big resume'd artist (Chad Orr) for metroid Prime 4. Luigi Lego set announced, to be released in August. Mario maker 2 is currently doing it's last Ninji speedrun event. The great Ace attorney chronicles announced for release July 27th. Celeste devs working on new game Earth blade. April 27th a new monster hunter presentation Fuji film embracing pokemon snap with mini pikachu smart phone printer!45 -The Rumor Mill: Switch appears in the background of Xbox official videos Sonic colors and other Sonic wii games rumored to be coming to Switch -Community Corner From ElPeeDee: If you knew you could only get a few games for the rest of 2021 (on the Switch), what would they be? Figure 4-5 top-tier retail games (Xmas, birthday and saving up) or maybe split some and choose some indie games. And, if you're feeling spicy, take into consideration your retail purchases so far this year to factor into what you're saving for for Q3 & Q4 From TwoDollarHero: Have you ever had a game or genre of game that you initially disliked, but came back to later and enjoyed it? From Solo something for Bill: 1) is the PAC Man in the background that mysteriously moves around behind Bill a silent warning to all to beware those who test him in Super Smash, for it will not end well? 2) Do Bill's students ever ask him for gaming advice or tips after class for games they are stuck on? From @hamboneJonny: A couple questions for Bill, Are there any games he learned about from friends on 143 Pixels that he never played before, but then went and tried after the show? Has he been able to find more time for gaming with his show down to one episode per week? -Outro Thanks for Listening -Links Follow us on the Social Medias: * Discord: https://discord.gg/Zw6MfCsrHj * TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nintendopalspodcast * Twitter: https://twitter.com/NintendoPals @Nintendopals * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Nintendopalspodcast/ * Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCetcvuiNd1zWD9pIkwjS9NA? Special Thanks to VGR (VideoGameRemixes) for the amazing Intro Tune used in the podcast, Check out more VGR on: Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/videogameremixes Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3pCoHlohSNQdXBNDxuWd12 * Itunes: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/vgr/1038344283

https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/f8xrd8/IAJ_BillPieroni_040821.mp3 Stewart: What is Acord, and what do they do? Let’s find out today with Bill Pieroni, CEO. Welcome Bill. Thanks for being on. Bill: Oh, thanks for the invitation. We’re very excited to be part of the podcast and to speak to your listeners. Stewart: It’s great. My name’s Stewart Foley. This is the […]

I get to talk with Bill Foster about his new movie and his an wife's vineyard. Welcome Bill! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/Brandy Joy/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/Brandy Joy/support --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/brandy-singleton-episodes/message

Call us: 530-675-4102 Email us: info@JeepTalkShow.com This Week In Jeep: How is Jeep is doing fiscally over the last quarter?    We’ll also find out what Jeep just lost the rights to.  Contributor Segment: Jeep Weather Jeep Life with Jeep Momma: 3 Day Motor Re-Build Wrangler Talk: WE start our New Wrangler Talk Segments with a new host! Welcome Bill, as he talks about Differential Gears Interview with: Brett Peterson joins us from J-Barr.com, the company reinventing the way we remove and store our Jeeps hard top. www.j-Barr.com Tech Talk With Jeep Talk: Getting to the Bottom of the 3.6L Pentastar V6 operating temperature debate  Must Have Stuff for your Jeep: The Original, Arc Off Road, Window Channel, Jeep Door Hanger Bracket - https://amzn.to/30JIBin Nicky G: Is sharing Jokes Jeep Weather - Mitch  Wheeling Where:   Who/What: Annual Sasquatch Hunt!  When: November 2nd - 9am - 9pm Where: Badlands Off Road Park - Attica, Indiana More Info: https://badlandsoffroad.com/Explore/Events The Sasquatch Hunt has become a favorite day to ride at the Badlands. The world's only off road motorized Sasquatch Hunt with Games & Prizes.  This year we are adding a Night Ride to the event.   Who/What: Vegas Valley Four Wheelers - 10th annual Hump 'n Bump When: October 31st - November 2nd Where: Clark County Fairgrounds in Logandale, NV More Info: https://vv4w.org/hump-n-bump/ Hump ‘N’ Bump is an internationally recognized, low-speed, two-day event, where participants in full-sized 4×4 off-road vehicles are guided over existing trails of varying difficulty in and around the Logandale trails and Valley of Fire recreation area. The open nature of the scenic trails and very low speeds allows for larger groups with negligible impact to the environment.

Bill plays a strategic role not only in role-based development, but how people, systems, and departments can positively impact the success of the Sales teams, and ultimately their companies. He believes salespeople come to work every day to be successful in their role, and there is an opportunity through architecture to enable their roles in a meaningful way.  WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE: How to use Storytelling in Sales How to build Storytelling Sales library within your company How AI and Video Will Change Sales  SHOW NOTES [01:03] Welcome Bill [01:09] Introducing co-host, Sahir [01:26] Business success stories that inspire Bill [01:58] Creating a Coaching culture within the organization [03:52] Call recording as game films [05:08] Gary Milwit story  [06:50] Working as a group [07:50] Creating a sustainable system (library of stories) [08:51] Sport and sales analogy [09:00] How Bill got into sales [13:46] Learning to be brief and specific [15:25] Speak and write in bullets [16:33] Tailoring messages [17:16] The importance of mentors [17:49] Expanding your network [18:15] Self-development [19:00] Taking a cue from your network [19:30] Education and learning [20:13] Learning and development [20:20] Digital Intelligence Systems  [22:18] Institutional knowledge [23:33] How storytelling affects sales [24:34] Behavior change [25:05] Customer [25:56] Neuro-coupling phenomena during  [26:44] Encouraging salespeople [27:32] Talent [27:37] Environment [28:24] Compensation and incentives [29:23] Pipeline review [30:48] Sales trends to watch out for [31:19] The role of Videos and AI [33:19] new Prospecting models [33:33] The art of storytelling for Bill  [34:14] Contact info Show transcript   Ed Bilat :                        00:31                Hello, this is Ed Bilat Joining me today is Bill Ball, the director of learning and development. of digital intelligence systems. Bill Is also a founding member of sales enablement society and he's very passionate about sales talent management, sales enablement, and sales effectiveness. Bill plays a strategic role load on them in the role of the development, but how people, systems and departments can positively impact the success of producers and ultimately are companies deal with. Welcome to the show. Bill Ball:                        01:05                Hey, thanks for having me. Ed Bilat :                      01:06                Absolutely great to have you on the show. I will be joined today by Sahir Ponderay is my co-pilot and the cohost as well here in Ottawa today. Bill, I'm thrilled to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. We would love to hear your story, but before we do this, I will ask you all a traditional question. What type of business success story inspires you and why? Bill Ball:                        01:30                So I thought about this and there are quite a few entrepreneurial stories that excite me, but I thought one that maybe I was a part of where I wasn't the ultimate success, but I was really proud to be a part of it is something that I thought I would share. Ed Bilat :                       01:43                Sure. Bill Ball:                        01:44                Great. So most businesses from a sales standpoint strive most modern businesses, and I'm throwing this out as not just a shared truth among sales organizations, but I think it's probably a universal truth at this point that many sales organizations are striving to have a coaching culture of some kind. So late two thousand I was working for an organization where we had one. We were really proud of it. You know, the job market at that time I think helped us a little bit where we had to people with greater tenure who are willing to give their time back. You know, they were brought in and they knew if they were sitting next to great other people doing their job, they'd be able to cross-pollinate and learn things from each other. So we created a circle of veteran peers who were coaching their peers and everybody was getting coaching from the leadership as well. But it's just, you know, as well as I do, people tend to make changes when they see their peers making those changes. They'll take guidance from the leaders, but they really make changes when they see peers making changes. Ed Bilat : 02:43                Absolutely. This is something useful. Let's see. Okay, I need to this for myself as well. Bill Ball:                         02:48   Exactly. So that got a little bit more challenging when the job market improved because you know, we were fine, but at the same time, we had people sort of circulating in out, because we're hiring a lot of recent college grads and so we had people circulating in and out, no fault of theirs. They were learning, you know, what they wanted to do or coaching culture was still solid. But you know, eventually, even with a coaching culture, you can't rely on entirely new people to carry a torch of that pure coaching because they don't have the experience and at some point, it becomes a little bit of the blind leading the blind. You don't know who was a real leader. Yeah, it's the last thing that you want to have happened is yes, great coaching culture, but you have what's called rogue coaching where it's like, well, hey, I don't know how everybody else is doing this, but this is how I do it. Bill Ball:                       03:38                Start multiplying that across the workforce. You know, it wasn't total pandemonium or anything like that, but it was just not like it was. At the same time, we started looking at technology to help with this kind of thing. We were an early adopter of thinking about, I mean this is an inside sales organization, so we're thinking about call recording as game film, which was very progressive at that time. We're talking mid to late two thousand so a little bit of a different story now, but very progressive. Then where you know, you bring up call recording. I think in some organizations now anyway, and they're still thinking, okay, this is the big brother, you know, why do you want to listen to my stuff? Versus thinking like, okay, most athletes watch game film to get better. But being a younger company and being noodle this and being sort of, you know, pioneers on are trailblazers. Bill Ball:                        04:27                We didn't roll it out very well. So some people you know appreciate it. Some people did and the technology wasn't where it is today. It was a little bit of a struggle. And so this forced us to learn a lot about change management, but we eventually did get to a place of where we were reviewing at least as leaders one on ones with people and listening to their calls and talking to them about their game film. And that was great, but we still weren't back to that pure coaching level. You know, like if appears going to review the game, fill them with another peer and they're both, you know, three to six months in like there's only so much advantage that can be gained from that. So we had a lot of friends. The previous business owners that I worked for a long time, we're pretty well connected within the inside sales world. Bill Ball:                        05:07                And there was one gentleman, his name's Gary Milwit, he works for a financial firm in Maryland. He's the sort of prototypical ex-football coach. Really tough guy that you know you either love or hate, but his people loved him. I believe he was an AI espy award winner for a sales leader one year too. Yeah, sounds like a really good combination. I mean I would see someone in those boats feel, especially coaching athletes would have a really good understanding of how to communicate with someone and actually help coach and various aspects of sales, like how to close a deal or how to pitch properly for certain. And so he like us had started embracing call recording may be a little after we did, but either way, he was starting to use it with his team as a group. And so we went and visited him and wash that an action. Bill Ball:                        06:01                And it's not as simple as you think there are rules, you know, everybody has to know. It's a safe place. Like there are certain kinds of comments that aren't allowed there. Certain kinds of comments that are allowed. There was, you know, in some way, like I think he had sort of stumbled into something that was tremendous. We brought it back to our organization and that was the whole reason we sat in, you know, we're like, hey, we want to see what's happening here. We want to see if this is something that's viable to bring back. And ended up being something that was really viable to bring back. So we started testing it with the CEO leading and testing out those rules. And it started out as a one-way conversation. But what it ultimately branched out to was I led them and our managers led them and our peers led them and we started breaking down those moments of the conversation where something really valuable happened. Bill Ball:                        06:51                And when you can do that as a group, it's so much more powerful than when you know you're sitting next to your neighbor as a sales peer and you're saying what happened? And you know, everybody remembers that last objection. But maybe three minutes before that, the call, you know, went off track somewhere. So being able to do that as a group and start establishing business specific best practices around that was a huge, huge win for us. The ultimate thing that happened though was it became a pure coaching thing again because we identified the key elements of conversations and we identified how to get better at them as a group and the top of the mountain ended up being every month we actually hosted a call competition where people would submit calls to their managers, the managers would submit them to myself and the business owners. We would judge and in some cases you know down the road, left appears judge and play them all back, you know, in a group meeting once a month. So using that and then actually taking these call recording elements and putting them in a library where people could say, okay, I want to hear what good objection handling sounds like or I want to hear what a good introduction sounds like. By doing that, we were able to bring back a pure coaching culture because we're able to, you know, get new people onboard fast, understanding what good looks like. Ed Bilat :                       08:09                I love that example. I think that's a great story. And I see you combining two elements here. So one is a starting your own story library, right? So like that's what we're trying to teach our clans that instead of having those separate stories, why don't you create a company-wide library that at any given moment any member of your team can go and borrow a book, have the particular volume on the situation, their work you with. Right? Right. And another one is starting your own objection collection. The library, right? So this is what exactly you have done with his help or that coach. I think that's a terrific story. So thank you so much for sharing. I think it's the actually good segue to my next question. We just talked about the combination of sports and sales and then I do look at your Ed Bilat :                       08:56                own background. I see you been majoring in English and creative writing before. How did you even get into sales world yourself? Bill Ball:                        09:04                Good grief. So I grew up with a father as a traveling sales rep who worked for himself. Nowadays, it's not so exciting when the phone rings in your house, you know, whatever you say. I got it, I got it, I got it right. You know, back and forth caller id, that was a really big thing. But literally, 80% of the time the phone rang at my house. Everybody would run to get it. And it was from my dad defeating. So you know, between that and you know, me being a free spirit, you know, I think I thought more about how much I wanted to play in a band my last year and college. Then you know what I was going to do the next steps and hopefully, my parents aren't listing. Bill Ball:                        09:42                But when I finished school he was like, Hey, you want to come work for me? You know, I tried to say in the nicest way like, are you crazy? Why would they do this? Yeah. But you know what? You can't deny personas and DNA to some point. So I was always that friend who had to recommend music to other friends or restaurants to other friends. Like I was that connector friend. You know, I had a vision of what I wanted and what I liked. And I would say probably my wife would say I'm pretty outspoken about those things and sometimes to my own detriment. But eventually, I just needed to find something that I was passionate in. So I played in bands and I ended up working in a recording studio, which I thought was, you know, what I wanted to do, you know, meanwhile, I mean this was the probably late nineties so meanwhile there's a lot happening with technology. Bill Ball:                        10:30                At that point. There was the megahertz race and this was before gigahertz with apple and IBM. There are all kinds of interesting things. My friends and I were getting excited about that. One day I went into the studio and I was working there as initially an intern and then a second engineer because I wanted to learn how to document music. That was a big passion of mine and the band was late and it was myself and the head engineer, you know, he was like, Bill, I'm x, Y, Z years old. We're talking about technology and lots of things, different things happening and kind of the future, you know, eve absolutely. Flash was exciting, iPods were exciting. You know, like this was probably even right before those. So lots of the talk about, and he said, you know what, I love this job, but I'm in a dark room for a really long time and I don't make very much money. Speaker 1:                    11:18                It's a labor of love. But honestly, if I had picked a different trade, you know, I think I'd have more options now in this guy was one of my heroes. So it really made me think, you know, and I grew up, you know, even as misogynistic as it is watching James Bond and be like, I want to have awesome sports cars and I want to travel and meet amazing people. And so that really made me think like, okay, you know what? Maybe this is not my way forward. So I made a hard pivot. I did a few temp jobs. I eventually started working for a retail store that sold Apple products, and this was before Apple even had stores. So this is kind of like a small business consultant place and I was rough at first, but by the end of my first, let's say the month and a half, I was leading the rest of the company in sales and it was because I had found something that I was passionate about. Ed Bilat :                       12:10                Well, what was the need to challenge earlier on that? Obviously, you haven't been trained in sales, right? So you just have to see that this is your passion, this is where you can sort of how that alignment through the 11 goals. But what was, was he a major challenge Bill Ball:                        12:24                earlier on? Well, earlier on I didn't have a lot of challenges. It was easy for me to say, okay, this is what I have in inventory. These are the people coming in. If I ask them for what they want and I don't have it, I'm going to lose. Right? I mean, it's that straight forward. I need to just talk to them and break. Sort of the typical mold of the salesperson. I mean we had competitions with us, you know, how quickly can you get this middle-aged woman, you know, on a first name basis that comes into the retail store. You know, just those kinds of things because it wasn't a big mental challenge once you have the product knowledge. But after that, you know, thinking that okay, I'm doing great here, I'm off for my next sales job. And that ended up being a traveling rep job where I had to do a lot of self-motivation. Bill Ball:                        13:09                I wasn't prepared at all. I had no idea. I was used to people coming into me. So that was hurdle number one. But I think it's a big thing that really clicked for me because I went from retail sales to outside sales and then back into inside sales where I was like, okay, you know what? I haven't done this. I really like technology. I need to take a step back to take a larger step forward. And what I really learned first was because I wanted to advance quickly in that business was how to make a business case. And I didn't know because of my degree that you mentioned I was an English major. I'm clearly talky. I'm very verbal. So learning how to be brief and specific, Ed Bilat :                       13:47                which is not a bad thing at all, right? Bill Ball:                        13:50                Sure. But you have to learn how to annotate yourself, right? So learning how to be brief and specific and point to deliverables and measurables. The CEO and I did not get along well at first on that level, but once I learned how to communicate and speak that language, you know, I ended up being an email coach for a lot of other sales reps. Ed Bilat :                       14:10                This is where the real writing helps, right? Yeah. And unless soul, good copywriters, like extremely, extremely valuable now. And then like every little sentence, every little inclination that told humor, everything that comes into place, like the real art to creating something, what people will pay attention out of all the noise will even today. Right, Bill Ball:                        14:31                right. What's breaking the mold of all of the other vendor noise, right? Absolutely. We did say you were alone. Yes. I was a lot more verbose than I needed to be. You know, I thought I needed to tell the story of my work. Say I wanted a promotion or I wanted to see a change happen. Getting changes to happen in business, you have to completely translate what you're trying to achieve to the audience of the person you're reaching out to. So if you're talking to a CFO, right? Being an l and d person right now, if I go in with a bunch of Jingoistic Ellen Detox, you know I'm going to be talking to a wall. You have to translate what you're saying to the audience that you have. So I didn't understand how to speak to a CEO. I didn't understand, hey, these are the things that I've accomplished. This is why I want this promotion. This is what I expect to accomplish. And be able to point to actual results and speak and write in bullets and easily digestible things versus a diatribe I really had to learn that sat here. Ed Bilat :                       15:32                Yeah, absolutely. Look the white spaces and formatting as so many times, you know, when we're talking to the sales leaders and they say, okay, one of my sales are up, just send me an email and I'm reading it and I understand that it's a good idea. I just don't have 50 minutes to actually read it and the really, really comprehend it. And then you get another email where everything is bullet points, you know, concise. And there is a what the coke engagement call to action. Even the internal communication and say, well Kelly, I want to talk to him. I'm going to call him right now and we'll figure this out. Right? And as simple as it sounds, that's the entire decision making. And it happens internally. And of course, it happens when we see some customers. So I think it's a tremendous skill view house. So that's great. So thank you for sharing this. Bill Ball:                        16:18                First of all, it's making the message about the person, right? So it's the first thing that name mean to see that why is this relevant for me? You'd have to put yourself in their shoes. Anytime you're creating something for somebody else, even in a first sales email. So individually tailoring your message for your specific audience. Yes. And making it about them, not making it about you. So speaking in a language they can understand, but also if it's an initial message, if you're talking about a prospect, it's gotta be about them. The first thing, think about this. Think about what you do and what you think about when you're scanning your LinkedIn messages or you're listening to your voice mails or you're looking at your email box, you're looking at your subject line, you're looking at the length of that email. You're looking at who it's from, all of those things. You're looking for a reason to sort or flag, do I need to pay attention to this or can I dump it because you already have too much of it, right. So we have to be relevant as communicators internally or externally, really quickly. Ed Bilat :                       17:13                Absolutely. I love it. Idea. Cool. Do you follow in sales, where did you learn their craft? Bill Ball:                        17:19                Who was helping you? Oh Man. So there's been lots of people along the way. Naturally. I spent a lot of time at this business called Vorsight, which is now associated with a business called ExecVision. And I have to think all of the people that I work with, they're including the cofounders, Steve, Richard and David Stillman, David Stillman as the person who I really, you know, struggled with to learn how to speak to an established business case. And once I did it, yeah, we're still good friends. But I think, you know, this is a chance where there are people that I follow. What I would advocate is constantly expanding your network and going to events and getting out of your day to day because that's where you know, you're actually taking a pause to work on your own self-development. So people are helpful. You know, there are lots of really smart people out there, but just being able to take a little bit of time, you know, whether you're reading something or whether you're actually going to an event because at that one point you're finally just focused on your own self-development. Bill Ball:                        18:17                It's very difficult in your job to do that. You know, you may be thinking that you're getting developed and your job, and you certainly are for people like me, from sales managers, from your peers, but if you don't do that extra layer, it really doesn't help you establish perspective that you can bring back inward with the things that you learned. That would be my thought on who do I follow. You know, I meet people all the time. The other thing that I've learned along those lines, and we may talk about this a little later, is if you think that you have to have all the answers, you're in for a struggle. So knowing that I'm part of a group outside of my work in my profession called the sales enablement society, and there are lots of advantages we're trying to define that, take the profession forward, a number of major objectives. Bill Ball:                        19:00                But the thing that's been best for me is saying, you know what? I want to try this. You know who in my network, somebody in my network has tried this before and failed before me many times. So just realizing like you don't have to have all the answers and reaching out to somebody in that network that you've built to try to get that answer just inherently expands your perspective here. Two points. The first one is basically education is what other people trying to do to you and the alerting is what you're doing for yourself. So go into those events, finding something really valuable for yourself, those golden nuggets you can use right then the second one, not to underestimate the power over your network because we already have that connection. You already have your own think tank where you can go in. The old you've got to do is just to ask cause anyone has done that before. Bill Ball:                        19:54                These are correct and that was way more succinctly than I put it and it was okay. Great. We are always looking for golden nuggets, flow listeners in a certain shirt just right. Then we just in the middle of the interview, so let's move to the second area, which was really interesting on the profile, which is the learning and development and then, I've read one of the statements and obviously you work for a technology company, digital intelligence systems, will you guys do global staffing and 90 consulting? How did you get to do that with technology? For somebody in my profession, even though my title is one of the more generic titles, it's director of learning and development. I'm a salesperson by trade. Certainly, that's evident in my background and some of the things that we've discussed, but I'm also enablement focused, meaning that I'm looking to help our people in our organization, particularly our salespeople and our delivery people. Speaker 1:                    20:46                So I'm technically field enabled that sales enablement. I've got to care about the recruiters too, so they're part of my key audience. It's helping them with what they need to know and what they need to show and removing those hurdles out of the way, whether it's things that they need to get better at or you know, how other people in the organization are affecting them. So for me, I chose technology, not necessarily because of the industry, but partly because the work, because of the type of job, the type of job that I wanted to do and the type of challenge that I wanted to have was here. But for me it's also not just industry, it's people. When I came through the interview process, it staffing is a consolidated industry. You know, it's a tricky play right now for some of the organizations. A lot of people are being acquired or you're acquiring organizations. Bill Ball:                        21:34                We acquired another organization earlier this year, so I heard two things from the CEO that were very heartening to me. One that because of differentiation, he saw learning and development as a key strategy going forward to motivate and develop our people here. And he saw that as a differentiating factor to second. You know, he shared that same bit with me that I just shared in it. Staffing people are being acquired or they're acquiring others. Diocese is in the business of acquiring others. They want to grow. So those the two things that got me on board, the institutional knowledge, it was hard though. One thing I'd like to point out, I was at a previous organization for nine years and in a series of different roles, so being a part of the institutional knowledge to coming to an organization where I had no institutional knowledge, it was definitely intimidating and an interesting choice. Bill Ball:                        22:25                So I had to feel right with the direction the business was headed and for the type of work that I was going to do. Absolutely, because you're also a leader in your organization, right? There's a manager as a director, as a mentor, as a trainer, console him, coach. So you do know those things. So I owe loading in the operational technology, but I spend the majority of my time on development and talent. So I thought those were really interesting. Look, many people could formulate it like that. Well, that was a little bit of knowing my audience on Linkedin, right? So I teach salespeople how to be more effective, but certainly, salespeople are going to be looking at my profile and asking questions. I kind of wanted to set them up and say what I really care about is spotting gaps and then going to the technology versus like if you hit me up with, you know, a one trick pony email over Linkedin, I'm probably not going to respond to you. Bill Ball:                        23:16                It's all about the business strategy and working with the business to identify the gaps and then mapping the technology back versus saying, hey, there's some sexy new technology I need to run after it. I want to get this. And speaking of getting the attention, as a leader, as a coach, how do you think storytelling could help to motivate your sales team and actually drive the success in terms of reaching Oh, evil, Sebastien quarters or objectives? I think it's in three ways and if I get lost while I'm explaining this, hopefully, you'll hold me accountable. Okay. First off, it ties back to the story I told at the beginning of our conversation where peers make changes because appears I'm going to make changes because of what I learned from another enablement person. You know, salespeople are going to make changes from other salespeople that they admire or respect in the organization. Bill Ball:                        24:06                So when I do an in-person training for example, or if even online being able to have people have wind stories associated with the learning objectives, you know, even if it's just about a skill like objection handling or it may be something as small as setting agendas for meetings. Just seeing peers key in on that and see that behavior change is huge, but you have to tee that up with peer sharing that to peers. You know, I'm a little modest about talking about behavior change because I don't know if we necessarily need to change somebody's behavior. It almost sounds like we're brainwashing them a little bit, just changes in their game. They're going to learn that by hearing other peer stories. This is where I was, you know, this is what I discovered about myself. Hey, I'm just like you. So facilitating a way for peers to share stories is how you get them to try new things. Bill Ball:                        24:58                So that's the first way. You asked me about a few different ways. I would say the second way is with customers, right? And this is something that, you know, we have to challenge marketing with what story moves one customer from learning about you to being a little bit more curious, to want to have a serious conversation. Those are stories that drive each of those steps in their buying process. And it's the same for the salesperson. What stories can you tell that is going to drive a customer to everybody wants to see themselves in somebody else's shoes? It goes back to talking about messaging, how we were talking about messaging before you know, you want to quickly say you're looking in your email inbox. How is this relevant? To me, the most powerful way that we can make something relevant to somebody is through a story. Bill Ball:                        25:46                If they can see themselves in that story, they're captivated. It's in a conversation, it's in a training environment, it's in content. It's imperative, wonderful things. Captains, one would fill the story and the look of love that you will, the science one is assumption gold in euro and another one is called [inaudible]. So when you were accomplishing means that they actually made a research letter, good stories fold the Bulls brain, set up your rate on the same frequency and the person that you're telling the story too, they see themselves in that story. Right? So like it's happening to them. And so that's one and another one they actually feel you are empathy created, right? Because they understand the feelings and the neuro your emotions and you can't create as little was anything else marketing wise. So that's why it's so powerful. I'm so glad he already utilize it within the organization. Bill Ball:                        26:39                That's terrific. So here I think you had the questions. Yes, Bill, I was wondering what is the best way to motivate salespeople? There are obviously many bays like there are a bonus says exotic Krebs as like a VIP club. But what do you think is the best way to the morning where it tells people? I don't think there is a way. I think it's a combination of elements that end up driving performance and driving people. There's you being the best judge of talent if you're bringing the wrong kinds of people. And it may just be roles. You know, someone's not inherently good or bad, and I know that's a Duh, but you know, if you're looking for an account manager and you've got a hunter, I've actually seen that backward. I know a lot of people say, you know, I want hunters and not account managers. Bill Ball:                        27:22                Sometimes that's a backward thing. If you have somebody who just wants to break accounts and they don't want to do the work afterward to go broad, deep, you don't have the right person for the role. So talent would be one sec. The next would be the environment. You know, are people motivated by what's happening around them? Do you have an office where like nobody shows up because everybody's working from home? You've got to figure that out. How are people staying connected and staying motivated environment's huge? I'm a big advocate for loud and for people being able to hear each other and for that spring, everybody's development. I'm, you know, open, public transparent with information, data stories, that kind of thing because why not communicate it? Why not share it? So environments a big key, you know, I think we can debate the whole open office thing, but that's not where I'm going necessarily. Bill Ball:                        28:12                It's just a, you know if people are doing the same role, like they need to be able to see each other's work and be a part of each other's work to expand and grow their work and drive things. Obviously, the incentives, if the compensation and the incentives aren't in line, then you're already fighting a losing battle that makes it tough to hire. That makes it tough to retain people. Even if you do a great pitch in the interview process and you don't have incentives, then you're not motivating people. You're going to lose, you're going to have just a treadmill of new hires over and over again until you know Glassdoor eventually calls you out. Finally, there are a few other pieces, but understanding what good looks like and what success looks like in a job from activities to objectives to results and being able to show that employee what good looks like from these are the things you need to do day in and day out and this is the equation of things that you need to do to be successful. Bill Ball:                        29:02                What does success look like from a benchmark? Yes, results, right? A lot of people do it, but what's the map of activities that lead back to that result? There should be an equation there. And then finally, how are they using those activities and objectives and results to self-performance manage. You talk to managers and I think the quintessential thing is the idea of their one on ones being a pipeline review and those things are great, but you know what I would say is a, certainly use some of those pipeline reviews as coaching sessions instead on a particular skill that you've inspected. But B, if it's a pipeline review, have the employee do it, have them own that data and have them drive that conversation. You know, that lightens the lift on you and it also lets you know that they're hearing you if you guys have the same vision of objectives and results. Bill Ball:                        29:51                So I think it's a combination of all those things. And then when you start throwing out, I think you mentioned you know, Presidents Club, that kind of stuff. Yes, like that's key to a culture, but that's also a tricky one. It's a moving target. You're not going to motivate the entire group of people with one kind of incentive. So you need to keep it going. You know, for more senior people, maybe it's time off for monetary incentives or trips or escapes just so they can unplug. For junior people, it's doing activities together, but it's also like getting out early. You know, like that's the one that I've seen time and time again be the thing that like presses the button. It may not be money, it may just be like getting their time back. So all of those things, great. Sahir :                           30:31                Why not think about trends, technologies that are rocking the sales end street today. You have the rise of artificial intelligence, automation, the rise of generation Y as they're becoming a rising powerhouse as both buyers and sellers. There is a trend towards account based selling. I want to ask you what sales trends do you think we should watch out and 2019 as the new year is coming by. What do you think we should watch out for in this industry? Speaker 1:                    30:56                I think all of the things that you mentioned, ABM and AI are are important as a simple one that's possibly obvious and possibly not as just video. There are lots of applications that aren't expensive, where are free for salespeople to shake up the typical email, voicemail saying and use video and some of them give you teleprompters. I mean they get pretty involved, but we can't deny that videos now and becoming a big part of selling. You don't have to be a social seller to use video. It's huge. And Ai certainly too, right? Scaling, you know that coaching and inspection are helpful, but what I would say is with AI you always run the risk of creating too much rigor. We need to look at AI and how it flatters the architecture that we've built. There's still needs to be some kind of jazz band in there. Speaker 1:                    31:42                Without it, there isn't any creativity. I've seen both sides with new hires and experienced people and if you really locked down too hard what good looks like and a machine can certainly do that. You start limiting what people can become. So finding a strike, a balance between the organic and the architecture I think is huge. And then how we use AI in it. But you know the people that say AI is going to replace sales coaches or you can let the AI do the work. There has to be the organic human touch in there too. Ed Bilat :                       32:13                This, this is so true Bill. So look, don't they just tried to use AI for scheduling sales appointments and the natural salespeople just start using AI mean though to send those appointed one sentence. Right, right. Let's see what actually happened. There's would be angry customers to tell me, okay, if my business is so important to you, but why did you throw them into the robot? Could continue to ask me some questions at the end and trying to see where I'm available like just call me and you know, let's talk because that's the reason that you wanted to talk to me. Right? So to have that conversation, why do I have to deal with the machine, which doesn't understand my responses? So like what are you trying to sell me at this point? Right? Bill Ball:                        32:58                That's misplaced, right? So maybe right now, where are we are a hair appointment and not a sales appointment. Somebody wants a sales appointment with me. I'm thinking like I'm the scale, right? One Hand has to fill up with value and it has to outweigh the amount of time in the other hand that it's going to take on my calendar. And I think it's really difficult to convey that through Ai. I know prospecting is possibly the hardest and most painful part of selling, but that's absolutely the reason that we shouldn't leave it up to AI. Ed Bilat :                       33:27                Absolutely. Thank you. You've been terrific and so really appreciate it. I'm going to ask you one last question. What does the arc of storytelling mean to you? Bill Ball:                        33:36                I think it's all of the things that we hit on, right. But when ultimately audience can see themselves in what you're conveying, that's where the empathy, that's where the change, that's where the way forward happens. It's such a key to our communication and frankly, communication and lack of it is where we go wrong. And our roles were way too committed to outputs versus communication. And if we can use more communication and stories to tell that that's what captivates people, that's what gets people engaged and that's what creates business and moves us forward. Ed Bilat :                       34:12                Excellent. Thank you so much. So Bill, what's the best way to connect with you or follow you on the social media for our listeners? Bill Ball:                        34:18                I think, you know, hopefully, you been entertained if he looked at my Instagram. But what I would say is professionally I'm just good old. Linkedin is fine. I'm happy to connect and talk to anybody as long as it's not a sales development representative who asked for a meeting on the first guy Ed Bilat :                       34:32                with using Ai. Yes. Okay, perfect. So we'll make sure we'll include your information. So conduct, I'll Lucentis. So I'm thrilled to have you on the show, so thank you so much for the great ideas. I think it was a lot of golden nuggets here. So again, thank you for coming to the show. So happy to have you here, Bill Ball:                        34:51                and this was absolutely a delight and my pleasure and really appreciate the content, the direction of the conversation, and the questions. Hopefully, somebody at least amused by it. Sahir :                           35:01                Thank you so much. Bye. Thank you. Thank you. That does it for this episode of storytelling for sale. You'll find show notes and links on our web page, storytelling sales.com you can subscribe to the podcast on Itunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening.  

As the leader for 500+ great employees, Bill Jensen always strives to be a difference-maker for the people who work with him at Mediacom. He enjoys developing managers and supervisors in reaching their full potential as well as creating a true TEAM atmosphere in administrative as well as field operations. Bill focuses on excellence and attention to detail as well as "doing it right the first time.  WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE: How to use storytelling to build relationships and trust How to formulate a Multibillion-dollar investment strategy? How Bill comes up with Stories that excite his customers and partners History of a cable industry How Sales Leaders Sell Can you use Storytelling to motivate people? The mindset you need to compete today The importance of preparing your stories ahead of time Why there is a shortage of qualified applicants? What does the Art of Storytelling mean to Bill? SHOW NOTES [00:07] Introduction [01:26] Welcome Bill [01:49] Business stories that inspire him [02:06] Multi-billion dollar investment strategy [03:32] Cable industry [04:12] How Bill got into the cable industry [06:16] Local access television studio [07:13] High-speed data and video-on-demand [07:20] Fierce Competition in the cable industry [08:35] 18-inch dishes [08:49] Telephone companies [09:47] Video, high-speed internet, telephony [10:08] Stories that excite his customers and partners [13:20] Why manage people? [13:28] The role his father played [13:57] Leadership opportunities [14:54] Responsibility, patience, and experience [15:20] How leaders sell [15:41] Selling everyday [16:18] Motivating people [17:32] Leading and teaching by example [20:00] Preparing ahead of time [20:17] Challenges facing today’s leaders [20:36] Shortage of qualified applicants [21:51] The necessary skills for graduates and applicants [23:27] The art of storytelling [23:37] Inter-personal communication

Download the mp3 file. In this episode, we discuss the power and potential of LinkedIn for business development in manufacturing organizations. Bill Sterzenbach from Upward shares ideas, suggestions and real stories about how you, the manufacturing marketer, can and should use LinkedIn for business development; more qualified leads, higher conversion rates and a full sales pipeline. or go to mfg.mmmatters.com/ebook   Guest: Bill Sterzenbach, Partner at Upward Brand Interactions Highlights: There seems to be a bias against social media, therein lies a huge opportunity for the industrial enlightened. [2:50] LinkedIn is a place where professional go for growth. [5:50] 62% of B2B marketers find LinkedIn to be the most effective way to engage with their target audiences. The people who get the most benefit are those who understand the people who make up their target audience. [7:00] It's about people talking to people more than a brand talking to an audience. [9:30] Bill shares a case study about Parker Hannifin and Caterpillar are using LinkedIn well and having had great success on LinkedIn. [12:20] Here are three things you can do right now to have better success with LinkedIn: [15:20] Put in a practice to get more followers and set an objective. Post at least weekly on a regular basis. Use your internal team to help promote the channel. Learn about how paid or sponsored content works on LinkedIn. [19:10] It's a good practice to use both pay-per-click and LinkedIn sponsored content. [25:40] Get out there and do it badly, don't wait until it's perfect to start. [26:50] Interview Questions: Question 1 – Let’s start of broadly and talk about social media in general. How should manufacturers view social media when it comes to their business development? Is it table stakes in this day and age? Is it a good way to grow awareness? Is it a waste of time? Question 2 – Let’s zero in on LinkedIn. Rather than assume everyone knows what it is, would you first share, what is LinkedIn? How does it work? Real example of how a manufacturer might use LinkedIn… Question 3 – Sounds like it could be a pretty powerful business development tool. Suppose there is a manufacturing marketer out there listening, they have a LinkedIn company page, but aren’t doing much with it. What are 3 things they could do right away towards using that page for business development? Question 4– I know LinkedIn offers paid advertising. How does that work? A couple of examples would be great. Is there one ad type you recommend over others? (which one and why that one?) Is it for everyone? Challenge Question: Send in your challenge question! This week our challenge question comes in from New York, a manufacturer of industrial gases. Here it is, “I’m the VP Sales and Marketing at a company that manufactures and delivers industrial gases. I listened to your podcast a couple of weeks ago about sharing content to differentiate. Would that work with a commodity like Nitrogen or Oxygen used in an industrial environment? If yes, could you throw out a couple of examples on your next podcast?” Helpfulness is a great differentiator for commodity products. In a survey, purchasing and buyers will choose a company offering helpfulness over all others. The larger, more premier companies value helpfulness most. Better customers value service on the front lines and all around helpfulness. Use social media to prove your brand is helpful. TOMA + credibility + reciprocity = differentiation and bigger market share Takeaways: Set some goals for your social media program. Get buy-in from stakeholders. Offer from Bill and Upward - free lunch and learn in person or via webinar.  Prefer if you can bring at least 20 people. Fill out the form here and request to learn more about LinkedIn. Transcript: Bruce McDuffee: Welcome to Manufacturing Marketing Matters, the podcast produced by the Manufacturing Marketing Institute, the center of excellence for manufacturing marketers. I'm Bruce McDuffee. Thank you for listening.   Hello, manufacturing marketers. A quick reminder today, I'm still offering a free digital copy of my book. It's called "The New Way to Market for Manufacturing." You can get one with a short registration form at mfg.mmmatters.com/ebook. I'll put that in the show notes, too. Now on to the show. Our guest expert today is Bill Sterzenbach. He's a partner at Upward. Welcome Bill.   B. Sterzenbach: Pleasure to be here, Bruce.   Bruce McDuffee: Great to have you on the show today. Looking forward to it. Folks, the topic today is about how manufacturers can use social media. Mainly we'll be talking about LinkedIn, how you can use it for business development. I saw Bill present this topic at FABTECH down in Los Vegas back in November, and I can tell you it's powerful stuff. If you listen up, you can really learn how to use a tool that's available in social media to really grow your business. Before we get in to the interview, Bill, could you please introduce yourself to the audience and a little bit about your expertise and experience around using LinkedIn or other social media to grow a manufacturing business?   B. Sterzenbach: Sure. I'm a partner at Upward Brand Interactions. We've been doing online marketing primarily for about 10 years. I've been at the online marketing business for about 15 years myself. I primarily focus at our place on business growth for global industrial brands. We tend to look at tool systems and processes that can grow the business without respect to channels so much. That's kind of how LinkedIn made its way into our world. We were just looking at the different channels that are available objectively that may help businesses grow their pipeline.   Bruce McDuffee: Great, thanks for background. Bill, I know a lot of manufacturers have put up pages on social media. Probably the most common are Facebook and LinkedIn. I don't hear of too many manufacturers or industrial companies who are on Instagram or Pinterest or Snapchat, for example. Before we can get in to the questions, are you seeing the same type of thing? Or what do you see as far as adoption of social media by industrial companies?   B. Sterzenbach: I do see a strong sentiment or a bias against social media by a lot of the especially industrial B2B folks out there. I see that as a great opportunity for the enlightened marketers ...   Bruce McDuffee: There you go.   B. Sterzenbach: ... because there is quite a bit of opportunity out there. A great example, we'll talk to clients or I'll even talk to guys I know in the space, and they'll say, "Well, okay. Maybe I can do something on LinkedIn, but I'm certainly not going to be on Instagram." I'll say, "I personally just bought a $2,000-tool because of a company I follow on Instagram.   Bruce McDuffee: No kidding.   B. Sterzenbach: It was a B2B tool. So Instagram is a powerful channel as well. I would be hard pressed to name a channel that I wouldn't recommend. People say, "Is this the answer?" I say, "Well, we just need to help you with the question. The answer's always, 'Yes.' You just need to know what's my question. Each channel has its fit in your mix."   Bruce McDuffee: Got it. Good. That's interesting. Frankly, I didn't expect that answer, so we're already off to a great start here.   B. Sterzenbach: Good.   Bruce McDuffee: Let's start broadly and go more into that topic and talk about social media in general and develop [begin 00:03:50] what we were just talking about. How should manufacturers view social media when it comes to business development? For example, is it table stakes this day and age, or is it a good way to grow awareness? Is it a waste of time? Where is it on the spectrum?   B. Sterzenbach: I think it's table stakes if you have a pretty well rounded platform for your marketing. I think the companies that are out there doing it well today are in all the spaces. So I would say if you're playing in a space where they're doing it well, it's table stakes. If you're in, I'll pick on somebody, powder coating, for example, you look at powder coaters, a lot of those guys are working for OEMs and they don't really need to do a lot of marketing, and so it really isn't table stakes for those guys. They're getting most of their business right from two or three large OEM clients, and they're just chugging right along. But if you're in a space where you need to find those new clients, it's a must have. It really is. I think a lot of the folks that are out there doing it but they're doing it so badly that it doesn't really even count as doing it at this point.   Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I see the same thing. That's interesting. You mentioned earlier that there's a big opportunity here, and I agree with you. It's like everything in manufacturing, not everything but a lot of things in manufacturing marketing, there's so much bad practice out there that there's an opportunity for those, what did you call them, Bill, enlightened.   B. Sterzenbach: That's right.   Bruce McDuffee: A huge opportunity. In this show, folks, we're going to talk about how you can capitalize on that opportunity. Let's zero in on LinkedIn because I know that's a specialty of yours, Bill. I guess we probably shouldn't assume that everybody knows what LinkedIn is, so maybe, Bill, give a good, quick description of what is LinkedIn.   B. Sterzenbach: It's broad. It's a social network for professionals. I used to say it's Facebook for grownups, but now everybody on Facebook is a grownup.   Bruce McDuffee: That's true.   B. Sterzenbach: It is a social network for professionals, but more importantly in terms of how we would look at LinkedIn as industrial marketers it's a place where professionals participate for growth. They might be growing their career, growing their business, or just trying to grow knowledge around the industry, but typically people that are out on LinkedIn participating are trying to grow in some way. If you keep that in mind and everything you do in LinkedIn, you're going to find a much higher success rate as opposed to just yelling at everybody on LinkedIn. If you know they're there to grow, you can tailor what you're putting out there to meet the needs of someone who's trying to grow in one of those three ... or some other way I haven't thought of but primarily in one of those three ways.   The crazy thing about the social media and the LinkedIn space is the greater majority, probably three quarters of B2B buyers are halfway done with their buying process before you hear from them. If they're out there making more than half of the decision before you talk to them, you have to ask what percentage of that decision is being made in the LinkedIn space? Without exception, when you stack LinkedIn up to all the other platforms, it's not even close. I think the latest statistic I looked at said 62% of marketers find it to be the most effective social channel for B2B marketing.   Bruce McDuffee: LinkedIn?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah.   Bruce McDuffee: Wow.   B. Sterzenbach: There's numbers that are even more telling than that, but LinkedIn is an extremely powerful network. Again, the people that are getting the most benefit from it are the people that understand their target. I tell people sometimes that if you were going to go deer hunting, it's so much more convenient to do it in a Walmart parking lot. You could get your little chair and you could put it in the parking lot. You could have your little cooler and just sit there and be comfortable all day, but that's not where the deer are.   It's a little like LinkedIn. If you're not in it, you have to go in the woods to get the deer, and these people are in LinkedIn. You have to go in to LinkedIn. You have to actively participate. Then one thing I recommend to people all the time is don't be in such a hurry to drag them out of the woods. If you can engage them in LinkedIn and stay in LinkedIn, you're going to find that the engagement's going to be longer and more meaningful as opposed to immediately trying to pull them to your website.   Bruce McDuffee: Interesting. That's a great metaphor: the LinkedIn forest.   B. Sterzenbach: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Bruce McDuffee: Love that. What about, Bill, LinkedIn versus Facebook? Let my share my impression and tell me if you think it's right or wrong. I feel like Facebook is where people go for ... share pictures of their grandkids or their kids. They do family things and talk about vacations and non-professional things. Whereas I see LinkedIn as where you educate yourself on professional aspects. You improve your career. You make professional connections. Is that a clear separation? How do you see it?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah.   Bruce McDuffee: Yeah?   B. Sterzenbach: I think you're right. I think when you're prioritizing or you're triaging your marketing efforts, you have to start with the most obvious things. If you're just getting started in a social space or you have a limited set of resources, I would definitely start with LinkedIn. But once you've played out the LinkedIn space, once you feel like, "I think we're doing everything we can do on LinkedIn," then I think it does make sense to have a look at Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter. I should have changed the order. Twitter would have been number two and then the rest of the guys. I'm not saying that I feel like your position is this way, but I don't think Facebook is without merit for the B2B.   There's a guy, I think he works at [Etón 00:09:20]. He has this ... I don't know if he came up with it or if he just shared it with me, but he calls it B2I. He says it's business to individual. You have to stop looking at ... No one wants to be talked to by a brand, and nobody wants to talk to a brand. His point is as a brand let's stop talking to demographics and let's stop talking to categories. Let's just understand that people are on all these networks, and it's a matter of using the network in way that's comfortable for the person. If you are going to market on Facebook, you just need to craft your message to fit within that ecosystem. But there is still a place, even on Facebook, for industrial B2B activity.   Bruce McDuffee: You've seen some industrial folks have success on Facebook then?   B. Sterzenbach: I certainly have, yeah. They've been ... I guess the word would be sophisticated in their use. Again, it's an enormous channel. You just have to understand what the audience is there for and what they're after, and there's use there, for sure.   Bruce McDuffee: I guess that's the key. If someone says, "Which channel should I be on?" You should ask, like you said, the people who are in your target audience where are they, and what are they doing on the channels? Is that fair?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, that's right. I would start with if a person said to me, "Which channel should I participate in?" I would say all of them starting with LinkedIn, then Twitter, then Instagram, then everything else. You're not probably going to attack them all simultaneously at least not with the same fervor that you would one. A case could be made for going after them all cohesively, but I think it's a little like to go to someone who's just getting into social and say, "Yes, you need to be on LinkedIn, but you also need to be in these other spaces, and let me start telling you about all the work it's going to talk to get there."   It's a little like advertising a Caribbean vacation by showing the guy sitting next to you coughing in the airplane the whole way there. Nobody is going to get excited about the trip. They're going to get excited about the destination. It's nice if they can get in one of the platforms. LinkedIn, obviously, being probably the most immediately effective and they get to sample the destination a little bit without going in to all of that background work that it would take to approach all of the channels simultaneously. While that might be academically a better approach, I just don't think you're going to influence people to do it by having them go through all of those fundamental steps just to prepare for approaching all channels.   Bruce McDuffee: That makes sense. That's good advice. Let's get back to LinkedIn. I strayed a little bit on that. I got excited about you sharing that information. On LinkedIn, could you share a real-life example of a manufacturer or industrial company who's having great success on LinkedIn and how they're getting that?   B. Sterzenbach: I would go straight to Parker Hannifin. They're a pretty large company. They're probably a, I don't know, $9 billion manufacturer. You don't get as industrial as Parker. They are in there. They are doing the stuff in the industrial space in a big way. They've a great brand, and they've got phenomenal products. Their presence on LinkedIn is staggering in a word. I mean they really have done a phenomenal job. They've got ... I haven't looked recently, but a shocking number of followers for their company page, and they get a very high level of engagement from their followers. They're really, really thoughtful in how they use LinkedIn.   We don't do Parker's LinkedIn stuff so this isn't a plug, but when they put something on LinkedIn, you can see the thoughtfulness and the care that they put in to the post. I believe that the readers see that, too. People respect your organization if you show some respect for them and what you put in their feed. They'll tend to stay with you a lot longer if you're putting quality things. Maybe not every single post that you put out there is directly applicable to their need, but if every single post looks like you put some effort into it and you respected their time, they won't unfollow you, so to speak. So I think Parker does a really nice job of working LinkedIn. I'm trying to think if there was another manufacturer that I saw out there. I think Caterpillar actually does a really nice job. I don't know how ...   Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I've seen that.   B. Sterzenbach: I don't know how orchestrated it is. I don't really follow them too closely but I see them in my feed. Just anecdotally, I've always had a pretty positive impression of what they were doing out there. I don't know what kind of results they're getting, but I feel that there's a couple of companies that are really capitalizing on LinkedIn well.   Bruce McDuffee: Is it fair to say that Parker Hannifin ... are they not pitching their products so much in their feeds and they're more sharing helpful information? Is that one way they're being more thoughtful and engaging?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. It's a little bit of a mix. Every now and then you'll see something pop in there that is pretty directly tied to a valve or an assembly or a product, but it's always, not always, but most often when I see it, it's couched in some sort of usefulness or at least plausibly objective usefulness to the reader.   Bruce McDuffee: Fair enough.   B. Sterzenbach: I think that's the key is not being overly pitchy.   Bruce McDuffee: I've heard folks talk about a formula where you share four to one or three to one where four posts for helpful information and then one pitch for your product. I do that with some of my clients. It's pretty effective.   B. Sterzenbach: Then we'll talk a little bit about paid advertising. There's a whole nother channel within LinkedIn there that's even more directly and quantifiably effective. But I know I'm jumping ahead of you a little bit as far as ...   Bruce McDuffee: That's okay. That's okay. It sounds like LinkedIn could be a pretty powerful business development tool. Let's imagine there's a manufacturing marketer out there listening, which I hope there are a lot of them, and they have a LinkedIn company page. They put up the information; they're not doing much with it. Maybe they haven't even posted much at all. What are three things that that person, that manufacturing marketer with a LinkedIn company page could do right away to start leveraging it for business development?   B. Sterzenbach: I would say if you're directly approaching how do we build our company presence on LinkedIn, the first thing would be to start building a list of followers so think about what activity should you be engaging in to just get more followers. Because if you have followers, people are going to see your posts and engagement's going to increase so creating some sort of an objective around building followers.   Now the second thing would be post at least weekly to get started. If you're not posting regularly, habits can't be formed. That's where number three comes in, which is promoting your LinkedIn presence internally. I tell a lot of our clients support starts at home. What often happens is you'll have these marketing groups start a LinkedIn presence and the members of the marketing team aren't even supporting the posts they're putting out there.   Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I've seen [crosstalk 00:16:12].   B. Sterzenbach: It's not out of some desire to be malicious. It's just everybody's so busy and you can't mandate it. If you tell your team, "You're required; your review will include how many times you've liked our posts," that's not going to work. But you can influence the behavior, and there's things you can do to incentivize your team to participate in your company's presence on LinkedIn without making it feel like some sort of fundatory activity, because nobody wants to participate on a social media platform from a mandatory perspective.   Bruce McDuffee: Fundatory. That's a good word.   B. Sterzenbach: That's right. That's right. It's fundatory.   Bruce McDuffee: So you just got a company page. The three things are, number one, make an objective to get more followers.   B. Sterzenbach: That's right.   Bruce McDuffee: Number two, at least a weekly post on a regular schedule.   B. Sterzenbach: Correct.   Bruce McDuffee: Number three, use your internal people, your employees, and encourage them to share without making it mandatory.   B. Sterzenbach: Exactly. That's why number two comes in to play because if you're not posting regularly, you'll never get your internal teams into a habit of supporting it. If you're only posting once every quarter or once every blue moon, they're not going to get in the habit of jumping out and looking for your posts so they can support them. So the consistency allows them to develop habits as well.   Bruce McDuffee: Makes sense. Can I ask on number one, in addition to posting on a regular basis, are there any other tricks you could share about getting more followers?   B. Sterzenbach: A big one is having folks in your organization that have an existing network to participate. For example, if you have a couple of people on your sales team and they have a pretty good LinkedIn network, going out to them and evangelizing your LinkedIn activities a little bit and asking them, "Could I ask you as a favor to help support our LinkedIn presence? It's going to bring you new leads. It's going to grow our business." So you're generating that activity.   There's a couple of just tactical things you can do. One of them is there's a button that you can download from LinkedIn. It's just a little piece of java script code. You can place that on your webpages of your website, and it just can live anywhere on the page. If the viewer of your website if they're logged into LinkedIn, the button'll say, "Follow." They can click it, and it'll just automatically follow the company without too much fuss. There's a couple of other things like that you can do to promote follows, but the idea is that first you have to start engaging in some activities that could even create an interest.   Bruce McDuffee: Sure. Okay, great. Thanks for that. Finally, I know LinkedIn offers paid advertising. You alluded to it a little bit earlier when you were trying to jump ahead. Let's talk about how does that work. I know a lot of the social channels now you have to pay to play when you're a business to show up. How does the LinkedIn paid advertising work? Maybe a couple of examples would be great.   B. Sterzenbach: I'm a big advocate of the sponsored content campaigns. There's a couple of ways you can use LinkedIn. You can do essentially display advertising, which are the ads that live across the top and down the right side. You can use their InMail platform, which is essentially sending mail. LinkedIn sends mail on your behalf to a list that you've created. Or you can do sponsored content, which essentially places a post in your followers' feeds, and it looks very organic. Now, when you sponsor a post, they're not your followers. They're anyone that you've targeted with the post.   There's some pretty funny stories about how specifically you can target ... The story I like most is a guy who was trying to get a startup going and he was looking for investors. He had a specific investor that he wanted to attract. He went in to LinkedIn and he created a sponsored content campaign. I don't remember the guy's name. Let's say it was Ted Phillips. He created an ad that said, "Ted Phillips, this is next your company. You should invest in it and here's why" or something like that. In the targeting he said, "I want to target my ad to this company, this role, and some other criteria." LinkedIn requires that your list be of a certain size, so it first said, "Your list isn't big enough." So he said, "Okay, also this role." It was CEO and vice president. He had to add vice president. It added two more people to his list. Pretty soon, he was putting this ad right in that person's feed regularly. He actually did secure funding. Ultimately, he said he spent $1.80 on the advertising.   Bruce McDuffee: That's awesome.   B. Sterzenbach: That's how he secured his funding. That's how finitely you can target your advertising. We'll run ads for clients that we say, "Engineers that have eight years of experience that work for companies that have 500 or more employees or 10,000 or more employees that are in these states." I mean you can get really specific. That really is, in my opinion, probably the most powerful aspect of LinkedIn is how tightly you can control that filtering. You're not getting the waste that you get on so many other platforms. You really are putting that ad right in front of the people you want to see it. You're always going to have some people who either accidentally categorized themselves incorrectly or intentionally categorize themselves incorrectly, but by and large the majority of the people who see your LinkedIn ad are exactly the people you want to see it.   We see that evidence playing out time and time again in these campaigns where we'll run a LinkedIn advertisement either for ourselves or on behalf of a client, and the people that arrive at whatever ultimate objective that we set for the program are exactly the kind of people we targeted with the ads. It is remarkably accurate in the targeting. It's one of the things, I think, LinkedIn has done really well.   Bruce McDuffee: Yeah, I agree. I've done some sponsored ads myself, and it's amazing how specific you can get.   B. Sterzenbach: That's true, yeah.   Bruce McDuffee: It's incredible. You're right. That's the real power of LinkedIn paid ads is that selection because I don't think any other platforms get that granular.   B. Sterzenbach: No, they certainly do not. Again, if you're targeting these ads in a way that speaks to someone who's there for growth reasons, you not only target the people that you want to target but you get an actual response. So many platforms, their click-through rate ... and in a lot areas, a 1%-click-through rate is phenomenal.   Bruce McDuffee: That's great, yeah.   B. Sterzenbach: So you're getting a great response rate and the type of people that you want to respond are responding. Another thing that's interesting about LinkedIn, if you're in a business where you would like to attract clients that are growth-oriented or that like to try new things or would like to learn or even if you target a demographic of prospect by the sheer fact that they're active on LinkedIn ...   Bruce McDuffee: Can you?   B. Sterzenbach: Oh, yeah. If they're active on LinkedIn, they are probably interested in growth in some way.   Bruce McDuffee: That's a good point, yeah.   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. For example, I know a guy who advertises on LinkedIn. He doesn't work through us. He just does it on his own. One of the reasons he uses LinkedIn is that he wants people who are working to better themselves in some way, and so it's a perfect platform for him because most of the people on LinkedIn are there just to do that.   Bruce McDuffee: That's a great point. I never even thought about that. But it does; it's almost a self-selection segmentation.   B. Sterzenbach: It is, yeah.   Bruce McDuffee: That's great. Is one ad better than another? You mentioned sponsored content, InMails, the ads. Is one better than the other have you found in your experience?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, sponsored content is head and shoulders above everything else. Now, I haven't done much with the InMail yet. I just haven't really found a good case for it. Not that there isn't one. To be honest with you, we spend so much time on the sponsored content campaigns, we really haven't had a reason to venture into the InMail yet. And people are a little uncomfortable with what they perceive as interrupting their prospects or their clients. So I suspect that InMail might be pretty effective. Personally, I haven't used much of it. We've used it a little but not a lot.   The other thing on the sponsored content, you can choose whether you want to pay by click or by impression so CPM or CPC. Paying per click, at least in our experience, is much more effective. It just looks like you get more at bats when you pay per click because I think economically LinkedIn looks at it like, "Well, if I'm going to get paid every time somebody clicks this thing, I'm going to show up more." It just seems like your ad gets shown a lot more when you go on the pay per click advertising basis.   Bruce McDuffee: I've seen the same thing.   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, that's funny.   Bruce McDuffee: I've heard also that LinkedIn cost per click is a lot higher on LinkedIn than it is, for example, on AdWords. Is that true?   B. Sterzenbach: It might depend on the company, but our experience has been that that is true. As a matter of fact, we ran a campaign for our company, a test campaign. I basically took on one of my AdWords guys. There's a guy in ...   Bruce McDuffee: Oh, yeah?   B. Sterzenbach: His name's Jerrod, and he's ridiculously competitive. I said, "I'm going to run this LinkedIn program against the AdWords program you're running. I think I'm going to whip you." He was like, "Let's do it. Let's see what happens." He cleaned my clock.   Bruce McDuffee: He did?   B. Sterzenbach: Oh, yeah. The cost per click AdWords, it wasn't significantly lower but it was lower. The difference being, though, that a lot of the clicks on LinkedIn, I still maintain, were probably more directly targeted to the people I would want to see, but I think you can get more looks for the same money on AdWords. I tell everybody it isn't one or the other. It is not an either/or. If I were advising a manufacturer, I would say, "Don't even go near LinkedIn if you don't have a working AdWords program." Start with AdWords because that's just a good foundational advertising activity. Then go to LinkedIn but I wouldn't try to replace AdWords or Bing or [Thomas 00:26:00] with LinkedIn. I would at it as one more channel that I'm using to promote my business.   Bruce McDuffee: Got it. That makes sense. It sounds like from our discussion here, Bill, that every manufacturer out there should be using social media and at least using LinkedIn. Is that fair?   B. Sterzenbach: I would agree with that statement, absolutely.   Bruce McDuffee: That's what I'm getting here. I agree. This is the world we live in. This is the age we live in nowadays. Email's still powerful. You got to still do your email marketing, but you got to be out where your audience is. They're doing that investigation. They're checking out options. You have to be there so they can find you in that 50% of their first part of the buying phase.   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah, I would agree. I would encourage, especially your manufacturing, your industrial marketers, just get out there and do it badly. We work with enormous global brands. It would be easy for us to say, "Don't do it if you can't do it well." But quite honestly, so many things would never get started if that were the requirement.   Bruce McDuffee: Absolutely.   B. Sterzenbach: A buddy of mine I worked with for years used to say ... His parent company was in another country; I won't say where because I'm sure it's not true, but this is how he felt. He said, "They will start nothing perfectly." He said they're masters at planning and planning and planning until it's not even important to do anymore. I think people get caught up in that sometimes. I'd said go out there and do LinkedIn badly for a couple of years. If your option is to do it perfectly or not do it at all, I would say take option three, which is just get out there and start doing it badly. It's better than not doing it at all.   Bruce McDuffee: Absolutely. One of my favorite quotes was by Voltaire, I think in the 17th century, and it's, "Perfect is the enemy of good."   B. Sterzenbach: That's right.   Bruce McDuffee: That's one of my favorites.   B. Sterzenbach: I would agree with that.   Bruce McDuffee: Great. That takes us to the second part of the show here, Bill, and that's the challenge question. Folks, send in your challenge questions. Email them to me: bruce@mmmatters.com or hashtag them on Twitter @mfgmarketing. Any question you have about business development, marketing, even sales, send it in. I'll pose it to one of our guest experts. This week our challenge question comes in from New York. He's a manufacturer of industrial gases. By the way folks, these are usually anonymous. I just give a little bit of background. Here's the question, Bill. "I'm the VP of sales and marketing at a company that manufactures and delivers industrial gases. I listened to your podcast a couple of weeks ago about sharing content to differentiate. Would that work with a commodity like nitrogen or oxygen used in an industrial environment? If yes, could you give me a couple of examples on your next podcast?" Bill, what do you think?   B. Sterzenbach: Absolutely. Every commodity still has differentiators. As the builder of your brand, you get to pick what those are. The one thing I would say that we see time and time again, especially in commodity-type spaces, is a big differentiator is going to be service, or more accurately what we call helpfulness. We recently interviewed a group of, I don't know, I think 11 enormous B2B industrial buyers so procurement and purchasing folks from companies that buy things like valve seals and the components that make up products. One of our questions was, "What's one of the top criteria you have for working with a discretionary partner?" so someone who isn't on some list of 'go here first.' By and large, they said, "Helpfulness."   Bruce McDuffee: Really?   B. Sterzenbach: Yeah. What we heard time and time again was the vendors that are able to help us solve problems and are helpful in walking through our decision process are the vendors that we'll typically select. I was surprised. It isn't surprising when you really think about, but I was surprised to learn the larger, more premier organizations tended to value helpfulness and service, and the smaller, what you might call your core customers, tended to value speed and price. There's no crime in valuing speed and price. It's just when there's a lack of anything else, speed and price are important in a commodity, but if you can illustrate helpfulness or customer service, you are going to differentiate yourself from most of the people in the commodity space.   One of the things that we do with our program is we listen to all calls, and so we listen to literally thousands and thousands of calls every month. One of the things that we find is the evidence that we had ... Actually this is what led us to do this study. We found that better customers typically value services. So you end up with the self-fulfilling prophecy situation where you have organizations that maybe they don't value helpfulness or service and they don't include it in their brand, they don't talk about service, so when customers call, the customer doesn't typically experience great service. So the customers that are wonderful move on, and the customers that are core stay. They end up getting more and more core customers, hiring more and more people who really don't value service because they customers really value price and availability first.   Bruce McDuffee: Self-fulfilling.   B. Sterzenbach: It's just a terrible cycle. It's not a terrible cycle. Some companies really do want to serve those are only after price and availability. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you want to move up that quality of customer ladder a little bit, the go-to is going to be service. It's not easy either. The first thing that has to happen is your team has to understand that helpfulness and friendliness is part of who you are as a company. If they aren't taught that regularly, they're not going to demonstrate that day-to-day.   To circle back to your question, it feels like we've taken a big loop here, but my point is you can use social media to illustrate that a core component of your brand is helpfulness and service. It's not so much talking about how helpful and what great service we provide, but talking about the things that support that element of your brand. If you say, "98% of our industrial customers have been with us for three years or longer," that says that there's something that's keeping those customers. That's the kind of you can share. Now, that might be a little salesy, but that's the kind of thing you can share on social media where people can scan through, see that, log it away, and move on. You're communicating something other than the typical commodity elements about your brand.   Bruce McDuffee: Great, great answer. I'm going to add in my two cents here, folks, is on that helpfulness aspect. The way you differentiate with content is to develop content that addresses a problem or a pain point that's common to the people in your target audience.   B. Sterzenbach: That's right.   Bruce McDuffee: We've been talking about that today. You've got one company out there that says, "We've got this feature, this feature, this feature. We're low price, and we're fast." Then you come out and say, "Well, let's understand our audience. Let's understand a problem or a pain where we have expertise. We can help you. We're going to help you solve that problem." The problem, of course, is related to the thing you're trying to sell, naturally.   Solve that problem and you get three things from your audience. You get credibility because they're going to say, "These people know what they're talking about." You get top-of-mind awareness because they're going to remember you. Just like Bill mentioned in the LinkedIn feed, you start to see a regular trickle of helpful content. They're going to remember you. You're going to be top of mind when the day comes and they're ready to buy nitrogen or oxygen, you're going to get the call. The third thing they get that you get is reciprocity. When you give a gift of knowledge, helpful content, useful content, the person who received it wants to reciprocate. The way they do that is by buying from you even if it's at a higher price. That's what I would look at. Anything to add there, Bill, before we move on?   B. Sterzenbach: No, I would agree with every bit of that. It's one of those things you almost have to experience to truly believe.   Bruce McDuffee: You do. Once you experience it, boy, is it powerful.   B. Sterzenbach: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Bruce McDuffee: The final part of the show, Bill, is takeaways. I always ask our guest expert to share one or two takeaways. It could be a summary of a couple of things we talked about, or it could be a couple of actionable nuggets to go forward. What do you have for our audience today, Bill?   B. Sterzenbach: I would say the first thing would be to set a goal today. It's going to take five minutes. Sit down and say, "By July, I want to have posted this many posts and gained that many followers." Even if you say, "By July, I'd like to have 10 posts and five followers," set some goal. Then get buy-in from your internal team. You can't force them to do it but you can influence them. Bribe them, beg them, do whatever you have to do to get them to participate in your efforts, but start by just setting a simple goal and move forward with it. I share this people and often they'll say, "But it's just something I write on paper." I say, "Yeah, but it's like a diet." A diet is just an empty wish until we don't eat the first thing. It goes the same way here. Until you do the first thing, which is write your first post, even if it's terrible, you're really not doing it. It isn't that hard if you set out to just do something. Even if it's wrong, just get started.   Bruce McDuffee: And give yourself permission to be bad at it, right?   B. Sterzenbach: That's right. Because you're not going to be as bad as the worst no matter how hard you try.   Bruce McDuffee: That's right. That's true. Great, two great takeaways. Thanks Bill. Before we sign off would you like to share anything about yourself or your company with our audience?   B. Sterzenbach: Sure. To your point of reciprocity, we are big on giving. If there's anyone out there and they have a sales force of 20 people or more, that's where it gets worth it for us to do these complementary lunch and learns, Upwards does offer ... it's a free lunch and learn if you can get 20 teammates to come to either the webinar or in person, and we'll take you through specific things you can do tailored to your organization to grow your pipeline through LinkedIn. You can bring your sales guys into the call. You can bring them into the meeting, and we'll give them actual activities they can start engaging in right away to build their personal pipelines. We've found that either in a webinar or in-person formats, the sales guys walk away feeling like it was a really, really effective use of their time. You can just go to our website at goupward.com and you'll see there's a 'Contact Us' link and just say, "Hey, I'd be interested in having you guys talk to us about LinkedIn."   Bruce McDuffee: Great. That's a great offer. Thanks Bill. I'll put that in the show notes as well, folks, so you can ... I'll put a direct link and you can go sign up if you feel the want. Bill, thank you so much for being a guest today on Manufacturing Marketing Matters. I know I learned a lot today. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and experience and just thank you.   B. Sterzenbach: Thank you, Bruce. It was great being here.   Bruce McDuffee: That was Bill Sterzenbach, partner at Upward. For more information about Bill and Upward, visit the guest bio page and check out the show notes at mmmatters.com. By the way, if you are subscriber on iTunes for this podcast, consider leaving us a review. It helps us get found and helps us spread the word to help manufacturers advance their practice of marketing.   Thanks for listening to Manufacturing Marketing Matters. If you find this podcast helpful and useful, please subscribe at iTunes or Stitcher.com. You can download this episode of MMMatters and get the show notes and learn more about the podcast at mmmatters.com. I'm Bruce McDuffee. Now let's go out and advance the practice of marketing in manufacturing today.  

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