Special Guest Bob Freytag

0:04 Thank you for joining us on the Winning It Selling Podcast. I'm Bill Helkamp of Reach Development Systems and with me is Professor Scott Plum of the Minnesota Sales Institute. And together we have launched franchise sales pro with a commitment to work with franchise wars and franchisees to drive sales and boost revenue. Most companies stumble when launching something new. Not because the idea is bad, but because they treat the launch like a one-time event instead of a repeatable discipline. Whether it's a product, service or strategic initiative, success depends on more than development. It hinges on execution. In this episode we'll explore why so many launches fall short, why

0:44 launch success matters, and how a few proven best practices can flip the odds in your favor. Keep your powder dry and your eyes up as you join Bill and me for launching best practices to help you win on episode 690 of the Winning It Selling Podcast. Well Scott and meagre to dive into this with Bob, he's been a friend of ours for a long

1:08 time and he hasn't really sat down and talked about this sort of thing. And I bet we'll find some things we could have done better when we launch franchise sales pro. That doesn't mean we're beyond it because we're still in the launching process. Alright, well no book club this week because we're going to give all the time to Bob, but next week we will continue with aligning strategy in sales by Frank Sesbades and we'll be doing chapter 6. So Bob Fritegg is a founding partner of introworks, a Minneapolis marketing agency that helps MedTech innovators launch and relaunch products, services, and brands.

1:45 From startups to Fortune 500s, introworks drives growth for companies improving health and well-being. Bob leads business development, marketing, and client success. Well-being known for bringing people together to turn bold ideas into action, he recently introduced the fractional launch navigator giving early stage teams critical go-to-market expertise. Bob chairs a CEO roundtable and is active at Medical Alley Association and serves on multiple advisory boards. Outside of work he enjoys golf, time at his family's Pelican Lake cabin, and his signature color orange. Bob, welcome to the Winning It Selling Podcast. Well it is great to be here and looking forward to dive into this and we can

2:28 always revisit launch. When we come back we do say launch and relaunch. So launch. Just to let you know we can always come back and maybe help with that. That's a great to be here. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Well and looking at launching and releasing and the difference between the two many companies pour a lot of resources in development but underestimate the complexity of the launch itself. So why do most launches struggle or just fail to get off the ground?

2:57 Well, it is hard to get exact stats because people do not like to talk about their failures. But the general numbers, you research it, you Google it, you ask chat, you beat 70 to 90 percent generally fail. And now you think about it when it comes to launch. What companies are trying to, I mean it is absolutely critical for launches long-term viability to be good at launching. Bring out new, whether it is new device, new service, new products, you need that to go, you need it to build momentum, you need it to succeed. But over the years, and we have been doing this a long time. This is the 33rd year of intro works. And there is three, I will say,

3:37 common problems we have seen over the years. And this goes, it is not just in the industry niche that we are in but we have seen this in manufacturing and we have seen this with technology companies. So three reasons, we have to have three of everything. So one is lack of aim. A lot of times companies, now think of this, maybe it is being led by a term I like to use is like the internal golden gut. Oh, we know this is going to be a great product. We do not maybe go outside. It is not necessarily based on, I will say market need, but it is a really cool idea product invention process. And they go out, there is a lot of internal momentum building up

4:20 to this thing. It hits the market and it just bombs, just crashes, right? And there is, I will throw out an example I do like to always use even a little bit old because this had some of the greatest minds at the time behind this thing. If you get anybody to remember the segue. Yes, yes. Oh, yeah. That was going to change human evolution. Revolutionized travel. Yeah. Right. Overhyped the best, smartest money behind this thing.

4:46 Absolute bomb. That that's what I mean by lack of aim. It was they wouldn't tell you what it was or what it looked like. Right. They just talked about how great this was going to be. And that turned about this little two wheel thing that you're going to wander around on. It's like, what the heck? Exactly. No. So the word needs for it. Nothing like what they said though, right? But that's what I mean when I say lack of aim and that happens again, that's just one of the big ones. But I mean, that happens small companies, large companies all the time. The next one, I'll go into it's lack of alignment. And this is really lack of a team alignment inside the

5:22 organization. So these typically fail even before the product might see the light of day, right? This is marked by there's missteps, there's overruns, this is where the product gets delayed. They can't decide what features actually want to build into this thing. Right. A lot of team just, you know, you could have a disconsent. They got it's getting to the marketing. They can't decide what the overarching value of props should even be or they're arguing over that. So it just kind of plots along, never really sees it light a day. And it really never even gets launched. It just kind of it might get into the marketplace, but it's, you know, it's not the right product. It's not the

6:00 right time. It does another right message behind it. Things like that. Now the last one, and these are the ones actually specifically we like to get involved in when we can, because this is when it's a lack of communication. Right now, this is you could have done a lot of the right that you could have a great product development team. Right. You could be the right product for the right moment, but the misstep is where they don't take the time to really actually understand how that, how it values, I'll say that end user and bring that to light in a way that they're going to care about.

6:32 So they're going to want to be like, tell me more about this. They go out, they use the same language everybody else is using it's kind of may even be a little bit build and they will come mentality. And they just launch it out there into the white noise. And it just disappears and nobody cares because they don't know why they should care. Yeah. But those are the main, I'll say, reasons we've seen companies where it kind of lacks from or why they fail.

6:56 Well, we love, we love good failure stories, don't we? They're more fun than success stories. I get we want to sit everything went perfect. It's like, Oh, well, good for you. I remember I worked with another company as an associate. And we worked for two months on a sales training program for a delivery company, shipping company, we got down to Florida to the big event. We were supposed to have three quarters of a day to teach them how to do this, this training. The first thing that the CEO gets up and says, you know, basically look to your left half of your going to get fired.

7:30 That was the opening message. And instead of doing any training at all, we had a catharsis afternoon where we just everybody said, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? I couldn't believe that we spent all this time and money for this person to get up and just totally changed the game. Well, and training overall, I mean, that is another huge part of of launching. And I think a lot of companies do miss there too, right? Because again, it's one of those they think about it too late, or they wait until it becomes an issue before they actually start training people on it. As a trainer, they don't believe in it. They won't do it. Just another quick

8:11 story. I worked on it for a for a large medical device company. We spent months, months on a two-day program, then they cut it down to a one-day training program. So we had to cut it all down. Then we got into the big meeting where we were supposed to teach them how to do it. And they said, well, we're only going to give it half a day's worth of training. So what we're going to do this afternoon is cut it down to a half a day and take all it. And they took it from a really nice training program with examples to a slideshow. And that's what we're left with at the end because they just didn't want to make the investment. So what are other things where you see companies not wanting to

8:44 follow through and what the real investment is in launching something correctly? Well, I think there are companies, I'll say when it gets to launch, they kind of think it's short-term

9:00 thinking. Maybe the thing is specific event, but it's a launch day. The launch is not an event. It's a process. It's long-term thinking. It's not even just a series event or it's launches this week and then it comes and goes, it's over. You've got to kind of take this with a longer-term perspective. Companies, I'll say maybe it's event-based thinking they bring to the table. There's things like that. So that can have a big impact. Another thing I'll say we've seen a lot, and this is in a little bit larger organizations, but they have a launch at all mentality.

9:39 So they think, are they'll call everything a launch? It's an end cap with a new color and they call it a launch and we go, that is not a launch. The term we use is release. That's a release. There is actually a situation where this is a company we went into and literally we're saying, well, so how many launches do you do a year? And they told us 24. I mean, we're looking going, there is no way this company can pull off 24 launches a year. Maybe you do four launches, everything else is a release. So that's a lot where it's not you spend, you kind of pick and choose, put the time energy resources behind the launches. It can have a big impact on the company.

10:18 Not the little releases, just because you're, hey, this is new. We've always called the launch, so this is a launch and we can check it up for our list going forward. So I don't know how big to make this question Bob, but what are the main pieces of the launch as you're making this distinction between a launch and a release? Oh boy, well, to us, there is a, there is something we call an MVL, right? Minimum, minimum viable launch, right? And those have to be made up of different, and when I said it's a discipline to begin with, right? This is what I mean by that. And not to get too process oriented here, but there's the six components we make up. And some of these are pretty obvious, but I'll tell

10:59 you, you want to talk about missteps. They don't do them all the time. The first one is you got to establish a launch leadership team. This is a cross-functional team. And again, this is why everything is not a launch in there because it takes resource, it takes people's time to do a cost money. And you do, you want, generally it's a little more market-facing, I'll say then the product development team, but you want product development people on it because A, and you want that communication going back to the organization. So that's number one.

11:28 Now, the second step of a MVL, which is going to sound horribly obvious, but you have to define success. We call we say define point B. What does success look like and when and get the team aligned around that? I cannot tell you how many times we go in there, we do a lot of individual interviews, right? And we talk to different team members. They all have a different idea of what success is. Well, if you're starting down that path and you haven't clearly defined and it's written down and people understand it, you're setting yourself up for failure from the beginning.

12:03 And then, you know, this is again a little process, but you got to follow a defined gated launch process. Just some people are feeling their stage gate and then there's the waterfall method. There's different ways to develop products. There's not a lot of different ways to develop launches. And how do you improve something if you don't have a defined process? And we do, I mean,

12:23 over the years, we have a very defined process that we follow. Another big one, begin early. You don't start a month out before your product's going to launch. You start a year out, maybe 18 months out to start the planning, the discipline of that. So you got to begin early. Another big one, you got to get customer insight. Our process specifically gets at a couple of times, we get it early on and then we test messaging and test creative later in the process to be sure it's hitting the markets resonating, it's connected with that audience. Now, there are companies, a lot of times, love a pretty good discipline of testing product concepts with customers. But when it gets

13:03 to the marketing piece, like the messaging, they miss the ball on that, they miss the mark on that. And then the final step of this is we say launch internally first. Right? I have seen companies do this now. This is where you really, I think you're connecting sales and marketing. And by the way, I should say, and that's it on that launch leadership team, always include sales, at least one member of the sales team. But launch internally first, literally this was a story somebody told me is one of the big, big banks in town.

13:36 It was a new commercial product they were going to have. And literally this person, who was one of the top commercial bankers, said they walked into a client meeting and they started asking him about this new product, he had no idea what it was. They never, you know, basically trained if you want to use this, you know, trained them, told them, even told them about the new product coming out. Now, how embarrassing would that be if you're walking into that sales meeting with your customer and they know something about the company that you don't?

14:04 Yeah. Yeah. Great story. So, did that kind of get to answer your question and get to your? Absolutely. You're looking for it. Yeah. It's almost like the sales people get to sit at the kids' table and they're like, the last to know what's going on. And all of a sudden they're going, hey, go out and sell it. It's like, sell what? Why did we build this? You know, who's it supposed to be sold to? Bill and I were talking to somebody last week that's in the franchise business and they were saying, you know, it seems like when I say something, nobody listens. When somebody else says something, everybody listens. And I said, wow, that reminds me of the same message, same voice,

14:40 same outcome. Change the message, change the voice and you're going to get a different outcome, good or bad. But you mentioned the stage gate. What is the stage gate when it comes to releasing products or new services? Well, you get into different amounts of effort you put into it. Let's say it's going to be a release. Well, okay, this is going to be so you're going to update the website update. Maybe there's a sales deck. There's a new sheet that's going to be created. It is more, I'll say cut and dry. I'll call it Markov. A couple of deliverables you go out. It's more, it's more event based, quite frankly, because you're not putting the time and resources behind it.

15:16 When it gets into it, now, now you're, you're starting, if it's going to be a launch, you know, we're going to form this team, we're going to go deep with them, we're going to, we're going to go out and talk to the ideal customers. We're going to get their input insights around what this thing is. How does it impact them? What did they think about it? Like our own process, if you want me to go and do a little bit of that, if that's kind of that's interesting, some people might like it.

15:38 Some people might. Yeah, sure. But so we go in, you know, it's the standard, I'll call it discovery that a lot of people do, but we like to do these specifically in specific orders, individual interviews. We're not big believers in, you know, big group conversations because, you know, typically the loudest person in the room kind of dominates a conversation. We like to get at everybody's perspective. And a lot of times the quietest person might have the biggest insight.

16:04 Yes. Right. And the group settings, that doesn't come out. Right. So we gather all this information internally and externally. I think that is big. Right. We get the customer insight, we blended together and part of this is we're trying to see how aligned the internal view is with the external view. Right. And we go into what we call exploration. This is more the, you can think of the positioning, the highest level messaging we can get to for whatever the product service company, whatever this thing is. And we start formulating different directions. These are big, you know, theme oriented, the big directional stuff of where we can take this thing. And keep

16:37 in mind when you're doing a launch, it's not features. A lot of times people will lead with a feature. You lead in position, your launch on a feature, as soon as that feature gets beat, you're dead in the market. Okay. So you never do that. That's, um, now from there, we'll get it down to a handful. And we don't like to think, and we've been doing this a long time, and I can tell you, we even get this wrong, we think we know what that message is. But we always go out with a handful of them to test again in the marketplace. We let that the core target audience tell us and react to those different messages. And what starts to come out of this is a kind of a message hierarchy.

17:13 So we know what's that big directional or position as we think about it. Think of it as your highest level messaging and kind of your main sub points that come out of this. Now from that is where we start constructing, you know, message guides, brands or you know, bring the brand to life based on those insights that are driven by the market. It is not driven internally. It is not driven by what somebody inside the organization liked. It is driven by what the external audience, well, what resonates with the external audience. I think that's a huge piece of it.

17:46 So then from there, you start building up your core assets pieces, then it gets into the marketing. Think of your, your content calendars, your digital strategy, digital plan, all the stuff, I'll call it, that's going to get into the marketplace. But now all of that where your long term spend gets made, that investment up front is critical for that down turn, that down stream investment. But you know what's right, you know, the message is going to resonate and you know, the brand's going to resonate. So we have a lot of small businesses in our audience and we'll always try to do in small businesses. We try to do it ourselves before we call an expert like you.

18:21 So, so if we're going to try to do some launching ourselves and even to take Scott and my example of launching franchise sales pro, what are some easy steps somebody can do if they're going to launch a new product and they're going to try and do it without calling an expert? What, what are the first three things they should do? Well, a lot of them, I think they should attempt to do a lot of things we've been talking about, right? Be sure you get customer insight on it. Don't just sit in the room and then launch it. You go to the 10 people that you think are going that fit what this product is for. You know, depending on what it is, you know, if it's not a high cost thing to give it to

19:00 give out, you know, to product testing with it, right? And then you can come back and just ask them the questions, well, what did you think? How did it work? How did it impact your workday? What are you going to do differently now moving forward? You know, you can do those things on a smaller scale, right? And I think do those things yourself and then input those in, you know,

19:22 it's more of an iterative process then, you know, and then make changes. And then, and then you see how those changes work in the marketplace. You know, it's almost a constant set of learning and to degree, I think anybody can do this, right? Or they can, they can take that method. Sometimes I think we get so maybe just stuck in the idea itself that are, we don't open our minds to say maybe there is another pathway, another way to do this, or they don't know what they're talking about it, it needs to be like this, you know, because if it's our baby, we think it's perfect.

19:57 Right. Bob, if I can pull a few strings together, and I think our salespeople are hearing different messages that are related to their day to day lives and the companies that they work for and the products that they sell is, I love the statement, what do you do for who and why? So what do you do is a unique selling proposition for who is an ideal customer profile, and why is the motivation that you just talked about? Can you build a little bit, what you're sharing with our audience in sales is the back end product development, how a company thinks about something before they ask the salespeople to go out and sell it. Any, any advice on creating that, you know, building on

20:38 that statement, what do you do for who and why? Well, a those are great, great questions. And if you don't know the answer to those and if the company cannot answer those with a unified voice, you get back together and you talk about it first of all. And one of the, you know, it's kind

20:55 of funny, it's it's people so, you know, this, you know, has been around a long time, the success, why are you guys successful? Well, we talked to people, marketing needs to talk to sales. I think in a lot of companies today, there's still that, there's still that, that paper wall where half the time I think you go out with marketing, you go, you talk to the salespeople, you bring them into the process, you start understanding, well, what are you, what are you hearing out there from your customers? They're part of the, the, the due diligence and understanding the discovery. You need their insights combined with what you, the audience is also saying, and you know, you're kind of

21:32 asking a little bit different questions to kind of start trying to thread that needle of the messaging, if you will, because though, I think the important part, when you come down to why, like if you ask a surface level question, well, why do you, why do you want? Well, it's, it's, cheaper, it's going to make us more money is more efficient. Okay, if you stop there, that's what everybody's going to say. But you say, okay, we'll wait now to the, to the audience.

21:55 Now maybe you get that from internal sales, say, okay, go your odds. Well, why is that important to you? Well, at the end of the day, it might make it down. So you know what, if I use your product, I actually get to leave the office at five o'clock every night, not seven, like, because last time I was having so many problems with it. Oh, okay. Now how do we take that and formula that into the why? That makes sense. Now, there's still going to be your, your conversation about how it works, and there's going to be the feature conversation, but it's what you lead with that attracts them and pulls them into the conversation. Right? Facts and, and, and features do not sell anything

22:32 until you know why I should care. The why is why I should care. How does it impact that customer? And, and that's where I think sales and marketing need to be on the same team. Like, hey, we've done the research, we understand this. This is why this works. Let's get out there and sell it. That's where the training and all those things, I think, come back into play as well. Because if it's just marketing and thinking up some cool campaign in their room and they flip it over to sales and it's not tested, not proven, if sales doesn't have confidence in it, and you guys tell me you're going to use it out there, you're going to rewrite your own sales deck, aren't you? Exactly.

23:06 So we can sell. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, you talked about, you talked about it a little bit with that disconnect, but we've often seen a sales person will get a lead based on marketing. They'll get into the meeting and they'll say, well, tell me about this thing I heard about in your marketing and the sales person will say, well, we didn't do anything like that. Yeah. We stopped saying that years ago, but let me tell you what I do know. It's like, well, that's kind

23:33 of screwed it up. But yeah. Well, you know, and you start thinking again, this is a sales and marketing thing. And I'll say this was a former client. They went a little bit different direction. They wanted to bring in. I'll say more. It was one of the whiz bang latest greatest digital campaign things to use. And this is about a year afterwards, I met back with my contact at the time. And I said, so and they're being and I'm talking about more lead, just purely generation like you're talking about, right? So I said, so how do they go and they said, well, great, our leads doubled, in a year. Now I said, okay, how did that impact sales? Well, our sales really didn't move.

24:22 And again, with sales, do you want to chase down more unqualified leads because they just filled out a form that maybe used a little gimmick to get to or somebody that has gone a little bit down that sales process because they've been educated a little bit on why they need this, what the benefits are, they might have talked to a few people already. Now they're coming in as a lead source and they're an actual interested buyer. I don't know about you guys. I like the second.

24:48 You know, I'm not big on on I'll come to vanity numbers that just drive, hey, look, our, you know, websites hits went up, you know, 42%. Well, it's the wrong people for the wrong reasons that doesn't impact companies, right? That doesn't create momentum. That doesn't sell product or services going forward. It doesn't make you better at launching either. One thing that you mentioned earlier is that the specifications of a product do not define value.

25:15 It's the application of the specifications of the product that define value and value is defined by the prospect buying it and the greater the value, the more they're willing to pay. But communicating that always seems to be the challenge. And sometimes there's not enough real life scenarios that a sales team can use when they're demonstrating a scenario and imagining the application of a product or service in creating interest and curiosity where somebody goes, tell me more. Like you said earlier, any any advice for salespeople that, you know, can really build on delivering that value based on the research that you showed the application and the value that the customer received.

25:54 Well, yeah. And when you when you asked me that question, what I think about what's the economic story, which is going to be part of that part of that sales conversation and might not be right up front. But it's going to be at some point, you got to get down to the economic story and the value it's going to deliver to the company and have a way to communicate that. Don't leave that up to everybody to make up on their own. I mean, one, you need actual, you know, that's could be case studies, things like that, but in consistent ways that you've demonstrated value that you have this economic story by other clients or customers implementing this. I think that's a good way to get those things across in a course testimony of a video

26:34 is going to be pretty impactful around that. But in elements like that, I think it'd be pretty effective. So Bob, a couple of times you've you've alluded to what does success look like. We have salespeople in our audience. And of course, they only can think of sales. But there's other factors involved when the company's looking for a launch. What are some of the other things they should look at to determine what that success of that launch was?

26:58 That again, I think is a great question and something people don't think enough about. And usually it is just a sales number. And a lot of times I ask them, well, where did that sales number come from? And they kind of just picked it out of the air. And they don't have a lot to back it up. They don't have a lot to think about. But we like to think of things in, you know, soft and hard metrics. Because part of the sex, you might have to launch something new because you need to be maybe perceived as an innovative leader in the marketplace, let's say versus not having that product available. That might be the success metric is just to get out to have people

27:34 know, even though the sales of it might not be that large. Again, that might be a success metric. There might be some internal drivers around those that you need to measure that that can be like we're seeing as that innovative leader, we're seeing to be doing something. I think those can be some we actually do have we call it an A to B worksheet. And actually that has some of those elements on there. And it could be, you know, we want to grow, maybe it says we want to grow our social campaign. So by launching something new gives us something to talk about so we can grow those numbers. That might be one of the success factors. Again, it's not just the revenue

28:10 number, which companies I do think get hung up on that on that revenue number a little bit too much. Well, Scott, if I think of this, this conversation with Bob has taught me anything,

28:20 it's I know nothing about launching. I don't know. I mean, you know, it's funny when you work with something for years as you have Bob, the nuances that you you learn about and you understand. And we think these things are easy because, you know, it's like that, well, I developed a better mouse trap and now everyone's going to want it. And unless they know about it, unless they can understand how it brings value to them, it's really not going to do much for them. So I really appreciate all the the ideas that you're bringing to the forefront here. Oh, more than welcome. This is this is fun. I think this is awesome. Talk about this all day. It's like, let's go. A lot of our listeners are in sales,

28:58 sales management, or they run an organization and they want to be involved in sales. What are some of the reasons or what are some of the motivations or how can some of our listeners take their existing products or services and be able to get their head and arms around launching or relaunching some of their products or services? What are some of the motivations that they have of doing that? What are some of the outcomes that that you've seen or maybe what are some of the challenges or sharp edges that they should look for if they want to take on that project?

29:26 Well, that I think you need to look let's say let's talk about relaunching because we do probably 40% percent of our business is actually relaunching. We're taking a product that should be performing better. They try a bunch of things internally. Now they want to go out and look at it. And those can be number driven. If you know this product, it is its best to breed. It's things and it's not at the market share level it needs. That's a good indicator that maybe you need to come back and really look at the messaging and how we're talking about this product in the marketplace.

29:58 We do, again, we're for any market communications agency, we think in terms of messaging, differentiation, things like that. And those elements, I think, come into play much more when they're commoditized, when the products are a little bit more commoditized, where the story becomes more and more important. If you truly have a unique product and nobody else in the world has it and for a little bit of time, you're going to have a ramp that will give you a competitive advantage. Now I'll tell you, and I've seen this time and time again where companies don't take that time then to define, position, know what part of the mind they want to own in the marketplace. It could be two years

30:41 later, a competitor comes in and they just take huge amounts of share right away because it's viewed as a commodity. There's not that brand relationship. There's not that thing in my mind. It's the whole way of things. You never get fired for hiring IBM. It's almost what you need to think about it. How is that going to be there? And is that product, is there a big enough market in our business for it? And can we increase it? Those might be the ones you want to step back,

31:09 take another look at and maybe take another run or position. And sometimes, maybe a company needs to be repositioned and relaunch. That is how we think about it. We've gone in, and this is just to share another story. We brought in to launch a product by going through the discovery process and the insights. What we learned is like, we don't think this next new product is going to be your big thing. What we learned in the marketplace, your company is actually fundamentally changed. The market doesn't think you are the same thing of you anymore. We actually think you need to reposition the company. And as part of that, we're going to bring this product along.

31:47 So that ended up being the solution and it did end up being incredibly successful for them. But it was, they were actually going to launch the wrong thing. Because again, they didn't talk up to the market. They thought they were missing a product. Well, the market had moved, the company had been viewed differently. We were almost, in that case, we're actually launching a new relationship with the market. And this product was a proof point of that relationship, if that makes sense. That was what ended up being the solution. So a lot of different ways you can go and I think use this, think about this as your audience is doing that. And it's not what,

32:28 I always think the difference between sales and marketing a little bit, sales is about, okay, what can we like sell right now? And like next week, marketing is more like next year. But guess what, those things got to be tightly aligned. Otherwise, you're never going to go anywhere. Right? And as I'm sure you guys know, you know, you can't be just spending all the time and not marching in a direction. And that's where I think that's where those two, when those two disciplines come together, that's where the magic is. That's where the company is. It's like, well, geez, how did you get, you know, 10 years of 20, 20% growth rate year over year? Well, those two functions

33:06 are tightly intertwined and working well together. It doesn't happen if just one of them are. Right. Yeah. You can have a great quarter, great year, not, not sustained growth over time. Yeah. I think a marketing is everything that occurs before a prospect identifies themselves and starts a conversation with a sales rep. Now we're starting to convert the conversation into a commitment. And that's a sales job. So marketing, in my perspective is the past, you use marketing as we sell now, and then we market into the future for future sales in it. So it's a different it's interesting perspective. Is there any techniques Bob that you've seen that are more

33:46 effective post COVID than they were pre COVID? Well, yeah, post COVID. Quite frankly, I think the human touch is coming back quite a bit here here. COVID, it was everybody switched to all digital. And what we're seeing is there is an altitude because I am, of course, been doing this forever, and I'm old, old school techniques coming back. Yeah, they are. Hey, how about send somebody something in the mail? And I don't mean a postcard. I mean, 3D attention getting something. Yeah, works. But again, has to be high value of what you're doing because there is a cost to that. But things like that are becoming effective again. Yeah. You know, that going out and meeting somebody

34:28 face to face is becoming effective again. And I think people are yearning for it. Yeah, that's why I saved all my sales cassettes. I still have them in the garage and I know that they're going to come back and I know they're going to be relevant again. Yeah. Well, maybe convert those to digital display. But hey, as we start the wrap up, Bob, every time we have a guest, got one question that I ask him. And that is, you know, what book or person or author has had the greatest impact on your life or career? Oh, boy, that actually is it. Well, you know, probably for marketers, it's the classic. It's Simon Senate. Start with why? Okay. I mean, which I still believe resonates today. It to me, it's the ultimate question. And if, and as they say

35:09 and tell somebody knows why they should care, they're not going to care. Right. Yeah, very good. Well, appreciate your being on the show. Yeah, been great talking with you. And I'm sure we could talk for hours. So I really appreciate this was a lot of fun guys. Yeah. Well, connect to Bob at our show page at winning at selling.com. We'll have a connection to his, his company page, intro works. And let's wrap it up with our golden nugget. A couple other things. I heard this over the weekend. I would rather be the oldest guy in the gym than the youngest guy at the nursing home. That's and attributed to many different people on the internet. But that's why

35:49 we spend two hours in the hot tub. Right, Scott? Exactly. That's my California workout, get my blood pulse up and really builds my cardiovascular system. But yeah, I'd be able to walk to the hot tub. So you might want to start exercising. Exactly. I love that. That was great. Everything we talked about would be at winning at selling.com. So look for our show notes there. Next week, aligning strategy and sales by Frank Cespa des, chapter six. And then the topic is creative, B2B prospecting ideas. Maybe we should talk to Bob about that. I just got some.

36:22 Please subscribe and share the podcast with your colleagues and on your social media. And if you're so inclined, give us a five star review. This is episode 690. Go out and get better one skill at a time. Joyful selling.