Tax Free Burgers, MorningBrew & LinkedIn
ROI Overload Sales & Marketing Newsletter.
ROI Overload Sales & Marketing Newsletter.
To get this newsletter delivered to your inbox, click here.
ROI Overload
Sales. Marketing. Growth.www.newsletter.roioverload.com
How’s everyone doing on this (slightly warmer), March afternoon??
Just a quick, notable (marketing) mention from a restaurant in my city of Toronto, Canada.
This is marketing done right.
Good Fortune Burger renamed some of their menu items as generic office supplies so that you can write them off without raising any suspicion.
Very clever… this is currently going viral.
Anyways, let’s get into it, so you can learn how to come up with some of these kick ass ideas for your own business
ps. if you have a good case study, send it over — I’ll feature it.
Here’s what’s coming up.
☕ Sales: The Morning Brew Sales Strategy
📈 Marketing: How I Went From 0–100k Followers On LinkedIn (In 1 Year)
💻 SaaS Of The Week: HandWrytten.com
🎧 Things You Should Listen To: Eric Siu & Greg Steltenpohl
📚 Things You Should Read: Leveling Up
🧠 Scott’s Thoughts: Measure What Matters
☕ Sales: The MorningBrew Sales Strategy
Morning brew is one of the fastest growing business newsletters started by co-founders Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief, from a dorm room at the University of Michigan in 2015 as a hobby — first as a means of engaging other students, then locals, and then a few years later around 2.5 million modern business leaders (MBL), eventually being purchased by Business Insider for $75m.
However before they could sell, before they built their business, they had to learn how to sell.
Neither of the founders had any experience in sales, ad sales, marketing or really any other kinds of commercial transactions. This was a major problem for the two full time entrepreneurs, trying to figure out how to make money.
First, they wen’t out and spoke to every single person they knew in their network who was working in agencies, sales, marketing and just focused on consuming as much information as they possibly could.
Rule #1. Sell with stories. Paint a picture.
The MB team did a fantastic job of building a profile of their reader, the “Modern Business Leader”. This allowed them to tell an incredibly impactful story of why advertisers should purchase ad space in the newsletter and who they would be communicating with.
Tip. Write down a few meaningful stories that you can quickly tell your customer while you’re pitching/demoing your product.
Rule #2. Sell the vision and dream. Don’t focus on the product.
Buyers want to buy products from people that align with their companies vision. The MB team focused on the lifestyle and audience that the ad buyer was tapping into. They didn’t speak about CPM, CPC, newsletter audience size or open rate.
They focused on selling the concept of the target reader/audience being a “Modern Business Leader”, and highlighted the perfect audience member that the buyer needed to get in front of.
As opposed to how advertisers traditionally sell, incorrectly focusing on product features.
Tip. People buy with trust, and justify with logic. If the buyer feels as though you are synced up with their vision, you’re honest and they like you. They’ll justify buying from you, even if you aren’t the cheapest / best option.
Rule #3. Solve business problems, and personal problems of people in the business.
Remembering that the people they were selling to needed to justify their purchase to their own managers so they focused on being the choice that would make the buyers look good. They also focused on agencies that were more open to taking risk and they identified their ideal customer profile, and part of that profile had more of a propensity to smaller, niche outlets that accepted new ideas and a little bit of risk.
Tip. Remember, even in B2B, you’re still selling to people. Remember that every person you’re selling to has personal problems they’re trying to solve for in their work. They all have managers they need to make happy. Solve the problems of the people you’re selling to, and they’ll be much more likely to purchase your product.
Sometimes the best way to learn something is to start with a blank slate. The MB team understood the value of identifying their USP (unique selling proposition — modern marketer), telling stories, building trust, identifying their ICP (ideal customer profile), solving problems and being human, when they sell.
This is a master class in sales.
📈 Marketing: How to Create Content That Took Me From 0–100k Followers On LinkedIn (In 1 Year)
There’s a few things I did to grow from 0–100k followers on LinkedIn in one year.
Here’s the basic content strategy I followed when writing posts (obviously important for a strong LinkedIn (or social) strategy.
I screen-shotted a few LinkedIn personalities as examples, (these are people that I learnt from, giving credit, where credit’s due).
Writing a post.
When writing a post, to start, grab the reader’s attention with a strong first line.
The first line of a LinkedIn post is just as important as a title is to a blog.
When a reader is scrolling on LinkedIn and they see your post, they can only see the first 5 lines before they see a “see more” prompt.
When you attach a video or image to the post, you’ll see a “see more” prompt after 3 lines.
As you can see, with a strong intro sentence that really gets the reader interested in the post combined with the “see more” button creates an incredibly compelling reason for the reader to click and read.
Just remember to give the reader just enough to pique their curiosity, and get them to continue reading.
Once you’ve got the reader’s attention, you now can deliver your message.
Now, if you were writing the way we’re used to writing, you’d format your posts in paragraphs.
Chunky blocks of text that look similar to this (no hate on Adam, he has amazing videos!)
We have to understand that this isn’t appealing to read.
We generally (incorrectly) assume that people WANT to read our content on social media, therefore they’ll invest the time in reading paragraphs of text if we have something incredibly brilliant to say.
The problem with this, is that social media is inundated with incredible individuals, all with incredible things to say.
The way to win social, is definitely with quality content, but the true battle is to grab attention.. and chunks of blocky text are a high effort, high energy investment to consume.
This is assuming that your reader is a native english speaker as well.
I’ve posted enough to know, as well as have researched hundreds of other LinkedIn titans, to understand that spaced out text, always outperforms huge blocks of text.
Creating spacing in between each line makes it easier for the reader to consume.
It makes the text fun, light and digestible — even if the post contains a highly prolific and intelligent message.
In terms of content, there’s endless varieties of content you can actually write about, but just remember a few rules
Tell a story.
Write like you speak.
Have a specific audience.
Be human.
Of course, content is a major component of social growth on a platform, but profile optimization, networking and consistency are also all key in growing successfully on a platform.
I’ll put out some more short LinkedIn guides in the future.
It’s definitely still my favorite B2B social media platform.
💻 SaaS Of The Week: HandWrytten.com
Hand written notes.
Whenever I send these out I get 100% open rate, 100% reply rate.
Personalization at scale is the hidden secret in B2B sales.
In a world where decision makers get inundated with email and phone follow ups almost non-stop, a handwritten card cuts through the noise and makes you stand out.
It get’s the persons attention.
So how do you do these at scale?
How do you use them for all of your main leads, decision makers and contacts (like I do).
Possibly the most scalable, cost effective hand written card platform I’ve ever used.
Choose a card, customize it, write a message, choose the writing style, push send.
The recipient will receive a custom HAND WRITTEN card via post.
Yep, I did a video on it as well.
🎧 Things You Should Listen To: Eric Siu & Greg Steltenpohl
I had the honor of sitting down with two incredible business leaders.
Eric Siu (CEO of Single Grain, Author of Leveling up)
&
Greg Steltenpohl (CEO & Founder of Califia Farms)
Check. Them. Out.
📚 Things You Should Read: Leveling Up
I first started researching this book to prep for my interview with Eric Siu on the podcast, but the more I read into the book, the more it resonated with me.
In the book (Leveling Up) he outlines 15 personal power-ups that will help you unlock your passion and level up your life.
Every chapter brings insights and stories, advice from others who have succeeded, and a quest that you must undertake. Master all 15 levels, and you’ll even unlock a special bonus to help you build the life of your dreams.
What’s refreshing about this book, is that it really breaks life down into simple, achievable milestones.
It makes success seem very attainable and a little bit less overwhelming, when you start to gamify it.
🧠 Scott’s Thoughts: Measure What Matters
It’s time to measure work done, not hours spent.
In a new article by Bloomberg, 66% of companies that have adopted a 4-day work week have grown productivity.
People are..
- Motivated
- Energized
- Refreshed
- Valued
It’s time to measure what matters.
Have an awesome week, y’all.
Scott ✌️
If you want to write for ROI Overload and get your articles featured in front of 19,706+ sales people, marketers and entrepreneurs… click here.
If you know someone who would be a great fit for the Success Story Podcast (my podcast) … click here!