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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, I share my angst for a very newsworthy word these days, Bill apologizes live for being less than uplifting to one of our callers, and we dip into the co-video mailbag for an audio question from Greg who asked, how do I create a funnel from absolutely nothing?
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Welcome to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest running sales training podcast in the history of sales training podcasts.
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My name is Brian Neal.
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I m Bill Kaskad.
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I just realized I forgot that little part about the longest running last time I did the open.
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The cold open.
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I think you got to do it.
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The cold open?
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Yeah, I m surprised you wouldn t have caught me on that.
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So start over from the top.
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Take it from the top again.
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Hey, welcome to the Advanced Selling Podcast.
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My name is Brian Neal.
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We re the longest running sales training podcast.
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We ve been doing this for a long time.
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Everyone knows.
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Interesting.
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We get new listeners all the time, people that are catching up through the library.
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If you re a new listener, go to the website, advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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You can sign up for a free thing, Ultimate Pre-Game.
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Go to ultimatepregame.com for that, I believe.
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Join our little email distribution list.
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Lots of good products to buy.
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There s a great one called All In that most of our veteran listeners have.
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You ll find that in the product section of the website.
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And a lot of people don t know this, but we ve been talking about it a lot, that we like to be on the road and come visit our podcast listeners.
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So I have a vocabulary question for you, Bill.
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It s on the edge of inappropriate, but I m just going to put it out here and see.
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So we don t need it.
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We can kind of talk around this.
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So there s, first of all, devastating news in Hawaii, right?
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Volcanoes blowing up.
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And I ve noticed the continued use of a word that is only used in two scenarios.
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It s the word fissures.
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Fissures?
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Fissures.
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Fissures.
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How do you say it?
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Fissures?
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F-I-S-S-U-R.
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I think it s fissures.
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Fissures?
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Okay.
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I don t know that though.
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I only know that this word is used in volcanoes and with a part of the human anatomy usually that most people don t like to talk about.
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I m thinking, you know what I m talking about here?
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No, I don t.
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You don t?
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Is Travis?
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Travis does.
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Yeah, Travis knows.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So if you Google the word.
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The universal sign there.
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F-I-S-S-U-R-E-S.
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You ll see that this word is predominantly used with volcanoes and a part of your anatomy that we tend not to like to talk about.
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Nothing overly bad or inappropriate, but it just has to do with your bum.
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So I ll say that.
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It s your bum.
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How s that?
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Nice and clean.
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What was the purpose of bringing this up?
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Was it the word that
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Yeah.
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Can we think of another name to keep saying?
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Because it bothers you that there s another.
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And that s all.
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That s the only other thing it s used for.
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And you know, I ve had a bad experience on the other side.
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So I m trying to, you know, shut that door on my life.
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And I m thinking, all right, you know, can we just say, you know, lava s flowing from a big crack in the earth?
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Can we just say a big crack?
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Do we have to say fizzer?
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Another four fizzers formed.
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Like, okay.
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So anyway, I just have a little rub on that one.
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I think you need to figure out how to pronounce fissure.
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I think I do.
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I ve never heard of fissure.
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It s not fissures?
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Fissure?
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How would you say F-I-S-S-U-R-E?
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Well, maybe with all this volcano talk, maybe I ve missed it.
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And this is a. The proper pronunciation, according to Google, is fissure.
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OK.
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Fissure.
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Yeah.
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Fissure.
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So I ve got.
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Yeah, I think it s what I always heard.
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There are three fissures.
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Fissures.
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And then I ve got bum fissures.
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My god.
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OK, we re going to change the subject.
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Yeah, let s go.
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You know, Brian, we ve been mentoring and training sales professionals for many years now, not only on the podcast, but also personally in our businesses.
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And one of the most important elements to career success is aligning yourself with a company that develops their employees, values customers, and has a portfolio of products that can compete with anyone.
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That s why we recommend our advanced selling podcast listeners have CenturyLink at the top of their list when you look for a new career opportunity.
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With the recent acquisition of Level 3, the new CenturyLink has become a world leader in the areas of cloud security, real time communications.
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managed services and hybrid IT.
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If you re a top performer who is looking for a fresh start this year, visit CenturyLink.com forward slash advanced selling and join the talent community there.
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Once you join that community, a member of the team will reach out soon to connect and see if a career at CenturyLink is the right next step for you.
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Those CenturyLink people, you said, were all over Denver, right?
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All over Denver, yeah.
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Level 3 and CenturyLink, and I felt like I knew.
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I would go up to them and say, hey, man, I m the Vanselling Podcast.
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And they looked at me like, OK.
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Like, you re Bill Kasky.
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You re the voice of CenturyLink, aren t you?
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To continue our parade of partners.
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We re going to dip into the Co-Video mailbag next for our topic today.
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So if you ve not done so already, if you go check out our friends at Co-Video, they have a wonderful, wonderful tool that will allow you to stand out like none other using little, small, easy to produce, not overproduced, very natural,
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of videos that you send us emails.
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And it s a wonderful product, advancedsellingpodcast.com slash covideo, C-O-V-I-D-E-O.
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And they ve got a little trial for you, extremely reasonably priced.
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I know a lot of our clients are finding, trying to find a way to stand out and be different.
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If you start to use covideo to communicate via through an email platform, but using video instead of email, you will get all sorts of comments from your prospects and your clients about how great it is.
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go to advancedsellingpodcast.com slash co video.
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Let s go to the co video mailbag.
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My name is Greg and I have recently taken a new position with my company as a location manager for a new store we just opened.
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The company is comprised of 12 locations that include feed stores, grain elevators and feed mills.
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The new location is a feed store and a town 20 minutes from two of our other locations.
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We ve only been dealing with current customers from those locations, but no new leads.
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You talk a lot about the funnel of new leads and how to develop those relationships,
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But my question is, how do you create that funnel of new leads, especially when your targeting group isn t typically online?
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I ve got ads in the farm sections of the local newspapers and radio station, but I m not sure it s effective.
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Is there a better way to create a more active funnel of new leads?
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Thanks.
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Good question, Greg.
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Thanks, Greg.
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Greg s an ag guy.
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Ag, A-G, ag, right?
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Correct.
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He s an Aggie.
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An Ag guy.
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Yeah.
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So that s an interesting question.
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You kind of take us back a little bit away, because I was going to go to the web for the answer, and then he said that his people are not on the web.
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One of my initial reactions there is, don t be so sure of that.
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I know that they re not maybe on LinkedIn.
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I don t know.
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I m not in the farmer s ag community, but I doubt if they re on LinkedIn.
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But don t be surprised.
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I mean, today s savvy farmers are online.
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They re doing things in the cloud.
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They re managing their businesses online.
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So the notion that they re not online, maybe they re not hanging out on YouTube every day, but they are there.
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So I would be careful about selling yourself short there.
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Yeah, so Greg s question is, how do I fill the funnel?
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And I think kind of step number one is you ve got to think differently about what has always been is step one to this.
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As Bill s talking about, I think you d be really surprised.
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This happens all the time.
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We go talk to groups.
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People will have, and it s not everybody, but these pockets of industries that think that their customers aren t aligned.
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Medical is one.
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So I have a group that calls on nurses.
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Nurses aren t on LinkedIn.
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And I don t like to do this, but I m like, well, OK, let s just check that out real quick.
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And you type in RN or nurse, there are
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Tens of thousands of nurses on LinkedIn.
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Absolutely.
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There are lots of farmers on LinkedIn.
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There just are.
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Or they re on Facebook or other places.
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So switch that thinking, Greg.
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And for those of you who find yourself saying things like that, well, my group doesn t or my customers don t.
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How many times have you heard, well, my customers are not on Facebook or on LinkedIn?
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Totally.
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If everybody, I mean, there s got to be somebody on Facebook.
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Oh, wait a minute, there s 3 billion people on Facebook?
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I think you or your customer might not be on, but their families are or their friends or their neighbors and their, yeah.
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So, come on.
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Your customers aren t on, and they should be on.
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So then you go to them and say, hey, Farmer Ed, you need to be thinking about this for, what, recruiting, marketing, whatever it is, sales.
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You should be here, and you d be the one that leads them to that.
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So think about that differently first, Greg.
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Yeah, I agree.
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You have another one?
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I do.
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Go ahead.
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I ve got one here, too.
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And we had a client who was a podcast listener, a guy named Craig Dick, who worked for a company back then called Calcium Products.
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We spent a lot of time going out to see who was in this ag space.
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And so I actually got a little head start on this particular caller because I got a little inside scoop to their world.
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And so I can drop some ag words here.
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Oh, good.
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I m going to have you, first of all, Greg, you re going to generate leads and new relationships.
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Think about creating a next gen grower peer group.
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So what that means is the growers or the farmers, they re the ones that grow stuff and buy the seeds and the fertilizer and that sort of stuff.
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And there s a baby boomer bubble.
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that s about moving on.
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So there s going to be generational transfer in the farming community.
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You need to go out to all those next-gen farmers, the people who went away to college, to Purdue, or to Iowa State, and they got their ag degree.
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Now they re back running their third-generation farm.
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Those are millennial people that want to be part of a period.
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group.
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So go out and start a next-gen grower peer group, and get together once a month with the guys.
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That s awesome.
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And talk about some ideas, share best practices.
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And I m telling you, you start to do that, you ll see the funnel fill right up with things, because you re in the middle of that.
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That s all I would do.
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Right?
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I mean, you d have 10 peer groups of 10, 8 to 10 people per.
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Totally.
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And you d want to have the best in there.
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You wouldn t want to have the losers.
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You want to have the winners in there.
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And you d have a peer group for losers, maybe a separate one.
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But don t mix the two.
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The losers will always take the winners and bring them down.
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So yeah, I would do that.
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I love that idea.
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I love that.
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That s awesome.
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Here s one I have.
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And that is, the question is, can you buy a list of these people?
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The notion of advertising on radio and in the farm magazines, it feels like that s so 2000.
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I mean, it just feels old.
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So the question is, can you buy a list of the farmers who buy a certain amount, or maybe it s an ABC list or something of people who buy the kind of thing that you sell, and can you call them the old-fashioned way, call them, and invite them to something, invite them to an open
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house at your building.
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You got that?
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I do.
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Good job.
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Invite them to us.
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Have a speaker in from the city.
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Yes.
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City slicker.
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Yeah.
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Have a speaker in, and do an open house, and then have a nice setup there with good audio, of course.
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Of course.
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And invite people.
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Invite people into your sphere, which is kind of what you re doing in the peer group thing.
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You re inviting people into your aura.
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But that s what I would do is, can you buy a list?
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If you can, call people up and offer them something, an invitation, a gift.
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Maybe it s a checklist or something that you ve published or written that is useful for them, something of value.
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Create something of value and call them and see if you can mail it to them.
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It at least starts the process, and it s much more pinpointed than a radio ad.
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Yeah, and I know we think, well, it s a thing.
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We think, well, you know, farmers, they all still get the newspaper, and they ll listen.
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And they do, and like, what does that do for them?
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So you ve got to find a way to combine those things, I think.
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I wrote down, taking a page out of the Bill Kasky School of
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marketing and sales, that thing, too, is I like this idea.
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And I m getting kind of specific with it, because he s in the ag business.
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But everyone can do this.
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There s this idea of precision anything.
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And so in the farming world, you think about precision farming, where the technology on these combines, these planters and things, they can put seeds at different depths based on the soil with GPS.
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I mean, it s just literally the farmer kind of hop in the cab and hop on.
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He s not online, though.
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He s not online, no, because his cab now has Wi-Fi.
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And he s on Facebook the whole time he s in the cab.
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No, it never happens, of course.
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So yeah, think about what you could write or your group, your sales group, this particular new location you just opened up, what could they write or what could they share in terms of a content piece?
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So a little article about precision farming or.
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I like that.
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anything like that, or record something like we record this podcast about that.
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We ve got a lot of listeners who have started their own podcast.
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And they will tell you it s been the best thing they ve done in terms of filling the top of the funnel.
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Because all of a sudden, you get access to people you didn t have access to.
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So that sounds like sometimes for some people a big stretch.
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It s really not.
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Are you talking about the podcast as a stretch or just the writing?
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Just all of it.
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Just any sort of media sort of thing people think is a stretch because they think, well, I don t really know anything.
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But they do.
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All you do is ask your customers stuff.
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And here, if I had that piece, whatever that piece was, that s the ad I would run then to,
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If you re a farmer and interested in this new piece on how to blah, blah, blah, call this number, and they ll send it to you.
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That s right.
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So now you re offering something.
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Instead of just a generic institutional ad, you re saying it s a direct response.
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I ve been reading a lot of direct response stuff lately.
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And it s fascinating how we live in a direct response world, but we don t see it that way.
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And so Coke and Apple and all those people, they have plenty of advertising budget to just do
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Yes.
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You never see an Apple ad that says, hey, send for this free document, because they don t need to.
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But for the rest of us who don t have massive ads, we need to make sure that a dollar of advertising or promotion or whatever it is, Facebook ad, creates something on the back end.
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For sure.
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And so that s why I like your idea, Brian, and infuse that into your radio ads and into your farmer magazine ads.
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That s it.
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And I wasn t, when I made that comment there, I was kind of being a jerk when I said, well, but he s not online.
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Oh yeah.
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That was not very nice to our listeners.
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So sorry about that.
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I don t think it was too bad.
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That s what a lot of them do though.
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And they believe that it s not, that s not a bad thing.
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Just believe it.
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We re just trying to get them to believe differently.
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That s why we have the podcast.
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By belittling them.
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It s always a good strategy to belittle our listeners.
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Usually not.
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Hey, we do want you to tell other people about us, though.
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You know, we have thanked you in the past for doing that.
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I don t think we ever make a big push for it, but that is how we ve grown this thing over the last 10 or 11 years.
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We got 600 and some episodes.
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We get 100 and
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some thousand downloads a month of the podcast.
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And it has grown specifically because you tell someone and they tell someone or you send out an email to your list of colleagues.
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And that s really how we ve been able to grow this.
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So if you do that, we really appreciate it.
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And if you want to send us a voice question, you can send it to listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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And when you do, we will send, just like we re going to send him a sticker, a little treat that you ll be getting in the mail.
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So yeah, it s great.
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Thanks for the call.
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Do you have anything else?
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No, we re taking it out on that.
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All right.
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We ll see you next time.
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OK, bye.