Finding Sales Success on LinkedIn w/ Merged Media Podcast #scottsthoughts

Welcome to success story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host Scott and today you are going to hear me on the so Lead Saturday podcast where we spoke about strategic marketing and branding. I hope you enjoy Hello everyone. Welcome to the episode 61 of So Lead Saturday. The guest we have today Scott B. Larry. He is a career sales and marketing executive. He rewrites the playbook on sales marketing brand and take to market Strategy from startups to enterprise spots work with executives and entrepreneurs to 10X their businesses. He has sold and marketed to the most iconic F 500, F 100 brands throughout his career. His work has been featured in over 100 plus news sites and publication. He speaks globally at industry conferences and has had articles and insights featured in Forbes Wall Street Journal, Hacker known for the startup and others. He currently runs a global sales and marketing organization and is the host of the success story podcast where he interviews inspirational people mentors and leaders. Wow. Thank you so much Scott for being my guest and really appreciate all your time and consideration being on the show. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate. I'm glad we're finally going to do this because as you know, we've been trying to organize this for a while. So I'm excited to speak about sales, marketing, my career, all that. Thank you so much and a warm welcome on the podcast of the show and I'm really excited to hear more from you because you are not more experienced for customers. So I would definitely learn more about marketing strategies plus something about the podcast as well. Yeah, to begin with our first segment is about fashion and interest. So how did you find your interest in marketing and sales and what motivates you to be in this spirit? Sure. So what got me interested first in sales was really just a great career opportunity at the time when I was still in what high school university. I've always been very charismatic. I always felt comfortable selling things. So what got me into my first professional sales career was actually a friend who gave me the opportunity to apply for a company called Bell Canada. So Bell Canada is a huge telecom so think phones and internet. And they're a huge telecom giant. So I started working for them when I was university. I was working in sales in retail. So in the stores in the mall selling cell phones selling internet plans. And I was always good at it. Now at the time I had no idea why I was good at it. I just was I had a lot of energy. I was very charismatic very outgoing and that translated well into selling. Now my, my family is not an entrepreneurial family, not even a very technical family like my, my family is very traditional in the sense that my, my father worked for government, my mother worked for universities, educational institutions. So moving into tech sales for me was moving away from what I really had known growing up. And it was, it was exciting for me. It wasn't the path that I was really planning on taking. I was actually planning on going into policing or law. That was sort of my undergrad and that was my career path. But, you know, like I said, I got the job in university. I was doing well. When I graduated university after my undergrad, I kind of had two options. I could go back to school. I guess three options. I could go into policing, which was something that my father, my grandfather, my uncle, they were all police officers at one stage in their career. I could go into law school. I'd go and apply for law school, which is about, you know, another, I don't know how many for another four years of education, or I could keep going on the path I was at, which was in tech sales. So Bell Canada, a lot of room for opportunity, a lot of room to move. I moved from retail into actual into actual head office. I was doing a small business. I was selling cell phones, internet. I was selling hardware, phone systems, networking and other other things that came along with that. So I was doing well, sort of moved up in the company, kept moving up, kept moving up, kept moving up. And kept just sort of doing quite well. Now still not a lot of formal sales training at this point, moving up in a large organization like that. Looking back, it's almost unfortunate that I didn't have more actual tangible sales training, but I did well, and I always succeeding my numbers over achieving on my targets, whatever those may be. So, you know, you find something that you're good at. It's probably the most money at that time that I could have made without, you know, again, I did another graduate degree in social sciences. So without going into law school, so many ways you can make a lot of money at that age. So moving up to my career, I did well in sales. After I actually one point I switched companies, I moved into sales leadership and started learning more about marketing because the company I moved into at the time was a smaller company called Digicom sales and marketing were much closer. It was a much smaller company. So when you start working in sales of the company, you have direct exposure to marketing and how you market how you brand an SEO and social and driving traffic, whereas at Bel Canada, you don't have that exposure because the company is enormous. So moving to a smaller company got a little bit of exposure. And then I went into consulting. So after I cited, you know, at this point in my career, I wanted to try and be entrepreneurial, wanted to help companies out. I've always wanted to do my own thing. So I went into consulting and that's really where I doubled down on marketing. That's sort of what led to my passion of marketing and sales because I was really good at sales. I sort of perfected my craft. I understood how to sell across a variety of markets, but I also understood how to lead sales people and grow sales organizations. I understood that marketing was component of that. And I started to do sort of more self education, more trial and error, more learning and incorporate that into my sales strategy because at the end of the day, a true strong sales leader or a true strong revenue marketing leader should have an idea of the entire scope of the revenue organization, the sales and marketing and that alignment is really crucial. And I understood that. And the way I'm understanding it is like, you know, it is like a sales evolving career journey that you have, you're pursuing your passion. And even though you had like awareness that this family is in the law firm or the other areas, you did not follow that particular field. This is like, you know, very important to understand when it comes to the passion or the aim of interest that you choose your area of interest and you are trying to see and or focus on it and really your career. So thank you so much, it is quite inspiring. Yeah, no, no, I was going to say I was going to say that's that is very important. And I think that as I like grew my career. I started to see pieces like it's it's fun to do things and to excel at them. But it's also very fun when you see how the result of strategy of understanding the different concepts and the drivers of what make people buy and make people interested in a brand. How those come together and how those can turn into a playbook that you can use in a variety of different organizations, industries, really agnostic of what you're doing. Understand like the higher level concepts of what drives sales drives the man drives revenue. And that's, I don't know if everybody who goes into consulting would ever connect those dots, but that's something that I did. And I found it interesting and I nerd it out at that stuff. And that's, you know, I still try and learn as much as I can about that because I just enjoy it. Thank you for figuring out and being on the bleeding edge of what's working in sales and marketing and building business. Thank you so much for sharing and definitely is useful for the students and professionals who are in their earlier career journey actually to see that, you know, how the experimentation. And that is important that our guide towards your passion. Thank you so much. Moving towards our next segment is about questions from the audience that I shortly said a couple of questions for you. So our first question is, you know, what are some of the best practices when it comes to media market social media market? Sure. So some of the best practices. I think I want to promise with this. That's what I have social media. And we're talking in B2B. So business to business social media. That's what I know well. And that's what I that's what I'm sort of working in now. A lot of what you see out there is not great. The bar for social media and B2B is quite low. And a lot of companies don't do a great job of it. Because they're worried about how they're going to be perceived. They're worried about crossing that veil from corporate to human. And they and they maintain this image, right? They maintain this sort of cold corporate image when they put out content. I think that that has sort of become the status quo, which is unfortunate because true, true good social media is not about talking at somebody. It's not about communicating at somebody. It's building a community and communicating with somebody. So the conversation, the framework of the conversation has to change the lens that you look at social media has to change from talking and communicating at talking about products, talking about announcements, talking about milestones, talking about we won this award. We made this much money. We achieved these revenue milestones. We launched this new product. We launched this new feature. We don't care about that stuff. What they do care about is as an organization, are you answering questions? Are you helping people with their problems? Are you helping with their problems? Regardless of whether or not it's going to serve you as a company. So you're building a community around the people like the tribe that you eventually will hope will buy your product. You can't have that in mind when you create content for social media or when you have a presence on social media. And that's what a lot of people do wrong. So to do it right, it's to communicate with your audience and to become more of a trusted resource for people to go to versus just like almost like an entity that just releases the latest news updates on what they're doing. It cares about that. People do care about somebody who can help them. That's that's like the high level about how you should approach social media and like you can go into each platform. You can go into what type of content works best on each platform, but whatever platform you choose, make sure that it is with that lens of helping answering questions, being there for your audience or community and being and creating content that supports them and not speaks at them. Does that make sense? Yes, yes. Definitely it makes sense and hope that audience also find it useful because there are a lot of people nowadays, you know, working on towards the branding and how it is important when you are thinking about the personal brand. How important it is to know stand for your communities. So thank you so much for sharing and the next question that we have from the audience is how one can have an effective strategy for their branding. Actually, I just tried to plug it together because there were some questions around specific products. So I just made it like you know general question that if in general you have to take like a effective strategy for personal branding or the professional branding or any like a product or services branding. Sure, so great question because it's important and I think that there's a lesson that you can learn from from I'm going to tell you that can be applied to a business is trying to create a brand or an individual that's trying to create a strong personal brand right because that's something that people are working on now a lot they understand the value of social selling. So when you are trying to create a strong brand, you have to identify who your brands communicating with who are you speaking to as a brand as a company or as a person. So identify the profile of the individual or the company that you want to be speaking to identify in sales or marketing at a professional level you'll consider this the ideal customer profile or the target customer profile and then the buyer persona. You have to have some idea of your customer profile the types of companies that you want to communicate with the types of people that you want to communicate with and the persona what is what what are they live what is the reality what is their job title what are the troubles that they're experiencing during a day. Because when you know who these individuals are now you want to tailor the content that you put out who these individuals and another thing to I'm talking about building out this these groups that you want to target with your brand. But you should know that if you're going to target these groups you should be speaking from a place of experience. So you shouldn't be coming and communicating with these individuals without knowing anything about what they do you are going to be building a professional brand I'm assuming to sell something or to market something. You should have experience that will allow you to create content that speaks to the pain points and the problems of the personas that you're trying to communicate with if you don't have that experience and go then go do research and go understand so that you're speaking from an intelligent place. Because you want to be again it's all about answering questions providing value to the people that you want to communicate with and when those people see your content they will recognize you and I don't love the word but it is it captures what you're doing. They'll see you as a subject matter expert or a thought leader in a certain particular space answering questions communicating on social media about certain content and when you do that that's creating a really strong personal brand because you know what you're talking about because you've either lived it or you've done research on that particular topic. You will build a level of trust because what you're saying is resonating with the people that you're communicating with and that's how you build a strong brand and that's again it's all value right you're not asking for a sale you're not asking to buy something but you can be damn sure that when that person is looking into a solution to solve one of their problems they're going to they're going to have a level of trust with you as a brand or as a person as you've been building that content you've been building that level of trust with them over a period of time. Thank you so much and definitely it's inside because I see that it is not more popular nowadays because a lot more people are acting on creating their own brands whether it is a personal professional or specific to their data like you know product services. So thank you so much definitely it's inside moving towards our next section is about the consignment that I'm going to give you like the keywords and which are more over associated with your profile and the experience and you have to tell me what comes to your mind immediately. Okay let's do it. Yeah maybe just like abstract content. So the first word is marketing. Marketing authenticity. Wow that's a very good one. The next one is branding. Branding only one word or can I be a. Yeah you know not one word you can. What comes to mind branding is controlling people's perception of who you are as a company or as a person. So you want to do it and you want to brand yourself as a person or brand yourself as a company because if you don't they'll have a perception of you anyways. And the third keyword is like growth growth. Yeah. I would say growth would be effective strategy to align align people's problems with with your strengths. Wow. Yeah I want to give context to that just because growth can mean a lot of things but I firmly believe that if you can understand somebody's problems and you fill that void as a person or as a brand you will always experience growth. Thank you so much and our next segment is about exploring your career work and volunteering. Already you mentioned couple of very interactive things about your own career. But we are going to explore little bit specific about your work. So the first question under that segment is you are a member of revenue collective and exclusive global global community or commercial growth operators. We like to share more insights to the audience what that means and how we work for that. Yeah sure so revenue collective like you mentioned is a community of sales and marketing leaders. It was founded by Sam Jacobs. It's an incredible community basically what it's doing and the gap that he's filling is he's creating a community for people who have career questions who have process questions who have day to day job questions. Because he's found that once you get to a certain level in your career, the only person you can really ask for help in the company that you're working at would be the CEO right if you're if you're high enough up. There's really no one else like you have a perception that you know everything you're hired to know everything so sometimes it's hard to go to this and you should always feel comfortable going to your CEO and asking questions but. If you have a question on a sales processor marketing strategy or whatever. Maybe you rather rely on different peers right versus your CEO who may not even know what the best possible opportunity is so there's a couple options you can go get a mentor or what you know what revenue collective is is this basically a group of peers and mentors that you can rely on 24 7 365 that have all done it before so. Everything from negotiating a job contract you obviously are going to have a hard time negotiating a job contract or the legalities of a job contract with your CEO who has a vested interest in the company versus you who has a vested interest in yourself so it's easier to get advice from peers that aren't working with you right aren't involved in in the company you're actually working yet and that's what revenue collective is for now the value of revenue collective. It's immense but the value is because it's a group of people helping one another so to to extrapolate that to people who are listening here to take away really is don't do everything yourself everybody at every level sees value and finding peers are mentors to help them figure figure stuff out right if they didn't and revenue collective would have never taken off but the fact that revenue collective took off is because certain levels of executives it's hard. It's harder to find people who are at your level in the same company or working yet so that's why it took off but it doesn't matter what level you're at align with people find mentors who can help you so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel that's sort of the takeaway and that's what I enjoy about it at least. And that is like an important highlight also that dimension that how important is to get the proper mindset as well so it is like you know important aspect I guess it comes to business or inside the business or the revenue in the company. So thank you so much moving towards our next question is you are a city of marketing and sales so while dealing with any customer how do you handle the reduction? Sure rejection is a daily a daily part of anyone who's selling anything depending on depending on it if you're in marketing sometimes you don't deal direct with the customers although I would argue that you probably should at some point to understand the conversations that they're having with with your sales team but how do you deal with rejection how do I deal with rejection. Well, I don't take it personally because it's never personal it's it's a misalignment between what you're so there's many reasons for projection right like there's probably too many reasons to really just even understand and go over right now but it's a it's a misalignment between what you're offering and what the customer wants to purchase or feels they need to purchase so every time you get rejection. If anything it's really just a learning opportunity as it should be in life whenever you fail something you learn from it you get better but in a commercial context a lot of people take rejection as I lost the deal well you know I lost the deal we were too expensive or they went with another provider whatever. And that's that that is that could be the case but if you just leave it at that then you are missing out on the benefit of losing that deal and what I mean by that is of course you're not going to get the money in the bank you're not going to get the revenue but you can learn you can you can you can reach out to customers you can conduct interviews surveys you can if you built a really strong relationship with the customer which you should have at an enterprise level at least. It's not it's not a odd or awkward request to just have a casual conversation with the buyer or your contact or your decision maker and ask like why are we losing that deal what made you look at another company and it could be like you didn't position you didn't position your product properly you didn't you probably didn't help the person understand the value perhaps you weren't speaking to the right person the company perhaps it could be a branding exercise or a message. There's so many variables what the point is you learn and that's that's how you deal with rejection you make an effort to learn from it and to improve whatever part of the business wasn't at you know performing at peak level that caused you to lose that deal and if you handle all rejection that way I can guarantee you you're you know six months from now a year from now you're first of all your clothes lost ratio the amount of deals you're losing is going to be much less. But also you're going to have a much stronger business because you've learned every time you lost a deal and not a lot of businesses do that so that's something that I would definitely ask you to do if your sales leader marketing leader customer success leader CEO doesn't matter focus on understanding why you lose and not just understanding. Everyone's like oh why do we lose a deal but do something about it take actionable steps and and and bring it into a post mortem so that you can become a better business. Wow this is really very useful for me as well so thank you so much for sharing. It's something that you know sometimes people are more serious or take things personally it's like a very valid point and how to handle the relationship is the most important aspect of anything I is anything in the life they have something to do yeah I'll tell you one more point I'll just add one more thing real quick if it is because of you say you are not great at selling say say you said something wrong or you rub the customer the wrong way or you wrote a bad email or whatever and say it is because of you even if it is literally because of you if you are going to take the rejection and not improve then you're missing you're missing an opportunity and you will be no better in your career 10 years from now 20 years from now than you are today but if you screw up it's really not that big a deal because there's always going to be another deal always going to be another customer and if you learn from it there's a really good chance that you won't have a repeat loss like a repeat you know repeat occurrence if you've actually tried to take what happened. and and and improve yourself so even if it is you that literally lost the deal yes okay fine you could be upset but learn from it that's really that that's really what you got to do yes and there is always a lesson. so thank you so much for sharing and moving towards our next segment is about tips and advice it is not more like you know tips and advice actually you already heard a lot of things from your career journey but only to summarize in this section what kind of any tips or advice would like to give to the students or the professionals who are looking to specifically get into this trend marketing and sales and looking for these as their long term career options. yeah sure number one piece of advice that I would give you is don't wait for your company to teach you something train you something or help you level up so. Now in 2021 it is more important than ever to turn yourself into what's considered a linchpin in a company so somebody that can do. a lot of different things and do them effectively so that you are so valuable that a company probably won't replace you so and also not just in in like across different business units because of course if you're in sales you're not going to you're not going to transition into HR most likely or into finance but. You have to level up if you're an SDR and you want to move to AE you want to move to direct sales lead team lead sales manager director VP like take the steps to learn the things that you need to learn to make you effective in the next role and start doing them but don't wait on your company there are companies that sponsor education but go to you to me go to you to go to podcast you know audible books and just start learning. And start implementing and start doing the things that you're going to have to do in the next role before you actually do it or start or start improving the things that your companies taught you start writing better copies start writing better subject lines in your emails start start start like. Maybe putting together a better outbound cadence start a variety of things you can do within your role obviously don't want to step on other people's toes if you're a peer your peers not going to like it if you start telling them how to email better. If you're a peer, unless they ask you for help so don't maybe don't do that but do things that can affect you and learn so that you can implement things and improve yourself without waiting on your company to train you and also if you want to grow in your career. So to pass for growth right to pass for growth you can grow in your career or you can grow doing your own thing so we covered you know doing you know the proper term is is auto direct where yourself taught you're doing your research you're going to YouTube you to me whatever you're learning now you want to grow in your own career ask your manager. What steps or what things you have to take on when you get to the role that you eventually want to be promoted into and ask that manager if you can start doing some of those tasks while you're in your current role that will show initiative that will give you exposure and that will basically tee you up. To you up for the next obvious choice to move in a career and if you want to advance in your career yes that's one way to grow. The other way to grow is through entrepreneurship by starting your own thing by doing a side hustle very popular don't quit your job just start to understand and build something in your spare time build a YouTube channel right and you know you know goes I don't know like go go sign up for five or and take some clients on. After five or on the weekends go i don't know go write a write a book on what you know and go sell it on gum road like there's a lot of entrepreneurial ventures that will give you great exposure to how to build your own product build your own brand market yourself sell yourself sell a product that will not compromise your nine to five. And you do not have to go all in and stress yourself out when you have so many extra hours in a day so I would say if you want to grow in your career learn and set yourself up with your with your manager so that you can move that way you want to grow into entrepreneurship and doing your own thing. Then just start with baby steps and make the most out of the time when you're not working in your nine to five don't compromise your nine to five you don't bite the hand of feeds you but you have weekends you have from six to nine every night depending on whether or not you have family and kids and whatnot but there will always be some time for you to start moving in that direction so I'd say do that and stop watching Netflix for like two hours every night. It's really very wise actually because whoever earns like whenever you look for the success stories of other people this is something we call it as a smile actually going ahead even though you are stuck with your job or something as you mentioned that you know don't compromise and always you know you have time actually. You always do always have time so definitely that is useful and the wise for students and the professional thank you so much for sharing and to end the show we have the last section which is about the leadership so you are truly leading your area of interest. So what is your leadership style and any specific leader that you always follow are at my and why. Sure my my specific leadership style it's something that I've had since I was well one of my one of my first jobs I was very young was actually coaching tennis I used to play a lot of tennis and I used to I used to coach it at a summer camp but what I what I got from that is when I when I set people up and I help people succeed in their life in their career that is one of the most fulfilling things that I've ever done in my life and I and you know it started when I was coaching kids at tennis camp and I would I would see them improve and I would see them progress I see them to get I'd see them get to milestones and achieve things that a couple months before they couldn't do. The same thing goes for when I manage a team if I haven't helped you improve it's a professional in person and you haven't achieved what you want to achieve then I failed you and my leadership style is to is to know what those goals are know what those long term milestones are and always try and help you achieve those it's not like every day I'm perfect there's like you know there's work to be done we have to hit milestones we have to hit revenue KPI that's fine but have that top of mind so that you always know that whatever whenever we you know sit down on one on ones or we chat and grab a coffee whatever let's set your life up to where you want it to be and let me use all the resources and power that I have to get you there and to help you level up yourself so you can get there and I think that I don't know what the style is like the name of the style but it would be it would be enabling and and setting people up for success and it's it doesn't take away and I see a lot of leaders that are selfish and they don't care about that kind of thing and I think that that kind of leader first of all I wouldn't even call them a leader but will never truly be successful because you won't you won't get the people who work with you to care about you and for you to be truly successful in business to to hit your revenue numbers to achieve X percentage of growth you have to have people passionate about first of all their work people they work with so their peers leadership and the goals that you set up for them and if they are passionate about that and they won't be passionate about that if they don't think that those goals align with their interests. So you have to know what those interests are and I think that if the leadership style or management style is more or less activity based management that's an actual technical term for when you align the activities of the business so everything from the amount of phone calls you're making, the amount of demos you're booking you have meetings you're taking you align those with revenue targets and then you sort of basically show people how if they have their own you know their own things they want in life how the activities that they can do on a day to day can lead them to generate X amount of income and then eventually let them achieve success in whatever they want to do purchase a new house a car whatever get married doesn't matter that's activity based management so aligning everything so that it all syncs up. But I think that that's just to have that that human interest and that and just be completely selfless and there's days when it's hard it's the days when it's hard as hell to be selfless because you have so many of your own things going on but to always come in every day with that attitude I think that that's something that I I try I try my best to embody and that is the leadership style that I'll always I'll always aim to achieve. And thank you so much. This is definitely a best leadership side to have because it is not more about serving others than you know thinking about the selfless reasons and the other chance as a mentioned actually enabling others to click to their success. So thank you so much and just to end I'm going to end it with a quote which says that success is not final failure is not part of it is the courage to continue that counts definitely that is something I would like to conclude through all these cards journey career journey as well as the way it is leading his passion and kind of leadership he falls under. So thank you so much Scott appreciate all your time and concentration being on the show and hope audience you will enjoy this show and I'll always say until we meet happily reading let's look together stay safe. Bye for now. Thanks so much. Bye now. .