THE INSIGHT

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What’s the one marketing trend that you wholeheartedly disagree with?

Community without intimacy.

So I think you’ve, you’ve got a lot of folks that are confusing community building an audience building.

And brands should be doing both. Both are very good things, but they are very different things.

So the things that you do to build an audience are different than the things that you do to build a community.

To build an audience, you create content that gives your target market an unfair advantage in their work. And then you get that content in front of as many of the right people as you possibly can. So smart distribution.

But to build a community, I think you have to create experiences that allow people to connect with not just you and your company, but in with with other people. And it’s creating those spaces for people to connect with their peers to connect with other people that they have this thing in common with.

I don’t see a lot of people doing that.

They’re they’re shouting that they’re building a community, because they’ve got a lot of followers on LinkedIn, or a social platform, I would say that’s an audience. And that’s a great thing to have.

So one way that we built community, earlier this year, we started these things called

Marketing squads. And we started, I think, seven or eight different groups, each group had five to 10, b2b marketing leaders in it. And we just facilitated these monthly zoom calls.

But it’s, it’s creating much more intimacy in these experiences. And it’s in an environment where folks can connect with one another, not just learn from the subject matter expert or the thought leader.

And so that’s that’s a trend I’m seeing a lot of people say community, but coming from church world myself, like the church has figured out community, and community means intimacy.

If you could talk to all B2B revenue leaders in the world for 1 minute, what would you say?

So in 2022, going into 2023, as we’re recording this, awareness is not good enough anymore.

There’s way too much content on the internet now.

And so you have to focus on affinity.

You’ve got to focus on becoming your target markets favourite brand.

What’s that mean? It means you have to have a really sharp point of view, a lot of people talking about that. But you’ve you’ve got to get crystal clear on what your point of view is.

That point of view is has to be unique and differentiated. I think a lot of people think that they have something unique and differentiated when really they sound like everybody else. So you’ve got to have a sharp point of view, it means a lot more fun and creativity in the way you go to market.

There is massive opportunity to inject more fun, more joy, more creativity, in in the way you’re going to market, whether it’s outbound inbound client experience.

It means having a mission that excites your ideal buyer so much that they want to lock arms with you and join you in that quest on that mission.

And it means having a really clearly defined enemy that your market wants to partner with you to destroy. And so if you do those things, those are the things that actually build affinity and those are the things that allow brands to dominate their category.

What’s the most important character trait that helps you succeed in your career? Why?

So Craig Groeschel, who was my pastor back when I was in college now, I think his church is like the largest church in the world, at this point, written a lot of books.

His most recent book is called Lead Like It Matters. And it’s a book written for church leaders, but it really applies to leadership in general.

And he talks about how when he was studying leaders that had this “it factor” organisations that have this it factor, they either had “it” or they didn’t have “it”.

And he said, as they studied these organisations and the leaders of these organisations that had this it factor, they just had momentum, they had energy, they had like a drive they had, you know, they were mission oriented, they, you know, people were following them and, and there was just traction behind what they were doing the movement they were building.

He said we analysed all of these leaders and of these organisations, and they tended to have two or three of these very, it was a combination of two into intensely different character traits.

And so he talks about like, humility and confidence.

A lot of these leaders, they’re extremely humble. Like intensely humble, but also intensely confident.

So it’s like you look at those two things, and they’re very opposite. But somehow the leaders that have this “it” factor, encapsulate both on both ends of the spectrum.

And I think for me, one of the ones that he talked about was this combination of intense urgency with intense patience.
And I think I certainly still trying to work on being more and more patient.

But consuming content from folks like Alex Hormozi, Gary Vee, they have helped me have a longer view.

What am I trying to build over the next 30 years, and by anchoring myself to what I’m trying to build in 30 years, it gives me a whole lot of patience in the micro, if, you know:

“Hey, man, you know, we wanted to do 10 million in revenue this year, and we did 5 million”.

But I’ve got a 30 year vision of what I’m wanting to do, which, which like, makes those micro things hurt a lot less. But I still have to have urgency in the micro.

And so if you have such a long view, but you don’t have this urgency, like actually get things done, then it ends up, you end up not creating that future state that you want to create for yourself. And so I think if I were to think about it, it would be two character traits, that I’m really trying to be intense on both:

I want to be intensely urgent, but also intensely patient and I think it’s in the in the opposite by pressing into the opposites.

Those two opposite character traits, is, I think where some magic is going to be.