B2B Marketers on a Mission

DEC 4, 2025

Ep. 201: How to Build a Winning Strategy for Your B2B Brand

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55 MIN

NOV 27, 2025

Ep. 200: How to Optimize Your PPC Campaigns for Maximum Impact

How to Optimize Your PPC Campaigns for Maximum Impact Every Pay-Per-Click campaign has symptoms. While some are mild, others can be critical. With the B2B marketing environment becoming more competitive and as budgets continue to shrink, ensuring your PPC campaigns are well thought out and “healthy” is imperative. So how can B2B marketing teams ensure they run high-performing PPC campaigns? That’s why we’re talking to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/serge-nguele">Serge Nguele </a>(Founder, <a href="https://www.yourppcdoctor.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Your PPC Doctor</a>), who shares proven strategies and expert insights on how to optimize your PPC campaigns for maximum impact. During our conversation, Serge emphasized the value of understanding PPC as a tool to test market assumptions and validate messaging. He also highlighted common pitfalls that B2B marketers should avoid such as launching campaigns without a clear strategy, relying on poor or incomplete tracking, and generic ad copy that doesn’t resonate. He advised that teams must fix their tracking, define what business success looks like, segment audiences with intention, and relentlessly test to discover what drives conversions. Serge stressed the importance of having a comprehensive, full-funnel approach to maximize the potential of PPC campaigns through Google and Microsoft ads. He also shared his “no excuses, no complaints, no self-pity” philosophy to illustrate the mindset required to drive stronger results and leverage the true potential of PPC. https://youtu.be/oSmgdh2Jfgw <h2>Topics discussed in episode:</h2> [2:13] The importance of PPC in B2B marketing [4:49] Some common misconceptions and pitfalls in PPC [15:04] How B2B marketers can avoid major PPC pitfalls [23:11] Practical steps to optimize PPC campaigns for predictable results <ol> <li> Fix your tracking</li> <li> Define success in business terms</li> <li> Segment your audience in a smart way</li> <li> Differentiate messaging based on audience’s stage in the funnel</li> <li> Testing relentlessly</li> </ol> [29:22] How AI is reshaping PPC and what B2B marketers must prepare for <h2>Companies and links mentioned:</h2> <ul> <li> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/serge-nguele" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Serge Nguele on LinkedIn</a> </li> <li> <a href="https://www.yourppcdoctor.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Your PPC Doctor</a> </li> </ul> Transcript<div id="target-id69457c1d2ea3d" class="collapseomatic_content "> Christian Klepp 00:01 Every pay per click campaign has symptoms. Some are mild, while others are critical. With the marketing landscape becoming more competitive and budgets shrinking, ensuring your PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaigns are well thought out and healthy is imperative. So how can marketing teams ensure they optimize their PPC campaigns for maximum impact? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers in a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Serge Nguele, who will be answering this question. He’s the founder at your PPC doctor who specializes in implementing PPC solutions for companies. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. Okay, and here we go. Mr. Serge Nguele, welcome to the show. Serge Nguele 00:49 Thank you for having me, Christian. How are you today? Christian Klepp 00:52 I’m great, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because I’ll be honest with you, I was looking through the archive of all the past episodes, and I have to say nobody has been on the show that is going to talk about this topic, so this is the first time. Serge Nguele 01:05 Oh, yeah, good to hear. We’ll try to bring some value to all the millions of you know listener out there. Christian Klepp 01:13 Absolutely, absolutely. So let’s dive in, because I think this is going to be an interesting topic. And I don’t know about you, perhaps you run across this many times, but in my space and in my network, the moment people hear pay per click or PPC, they get a little bit like, I don’t know. Oh, I’m not sure. And this is part of the reason, a big part of the reason why I’ve asked somebody like yourself to come on the show. It’s to take the ickiness out of this topic and get them to understand why it’s important, right? So let’s dive into the first question. Okay, so Serge, you’re on a mission to listen. I love this one. Listen, diagnose and prescribe the right paperclip solutions for B2B companies. So for this conversation, let’s focus on the topic of how to optimize your PPC campaigns for maximum impact. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with the following question, what is it about PPC that you wish more people understood? Serge Nguele 02:16 Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Thanks, Christian for your question, and to quickly touch on what you’ve said about PPC. That’s the story of my life. You know, when people are asking, what do you do? And I will say, Pay Per Click, I will start explaining, you know, and they will just nod, and I will be like, not quite sure they got it, but you know, the quick way would be just to tell them, whenever you search for anything online, you go on Google or whichever search engine. And we’ll touch on it, there is not only Google, you know, when we when it comes to PPC, you type your keyword, and you will see a lot of links coming and the one with a little ad, which means advertising that’s pay per click. Ah, they would say, Yeah, that’s fine. Serge Nguele 03:03 But to come to your question when it’s come to PPC, really, what I wish most marketers are understanding is that PPC, which stands for pay per click, and it’s pay per click, because whenever you type a keyword and you click on the link coming there is someone paying the advertiser, not usually the user. That’s why it’s pay per click. And what is good to I wish many people you know understood about it is that PPC it’s about buying time to test your market assumptions. Because, yeah, all of us, all the businesses, it’s really happening, not when you have the click, but it’s after the click. What’s happening there. So when done right? PPC is the fastest, one of the fastest way I know of to validate the messaging, your offer, your positioning, and I wish more marketers understood that PPC is in a silo. It’s a feedback engine, really, and when you use it to inform your market, product fit your sales messaging, or even your customer experiences. It really goes beyond clicks, and that’s where you get the magic out of PPC. Christian Klepp 04:30 Yeah, that’s a really good way of putting it. Serge, and thanks for sharing that. We’re going to touch on this, I think even more later on. But like just you know, from a very top level perspective. Why do you think a lot of people feel, even marketers, feel that PPC is a waste of marketing investment? Serge Nguele 04:49 Yes, with this one, if I’m taking from advertiser, let’s say you Christian, you are, you know, a business person, the way. Well. Yeah, when it’s coming to PPC, it’s fair to talk more about Google, because, yeah, Google is having 90% of the market. So we will say Google, but Google is not the world. PPC has rules here a bit later. So let’s say what Google has done over the year is to really make it easy for pretty much anyone on the planet to be in a position to choose a few keyword enter the credit card, and in a matter of minutes, they would have another running showing up to people. So that’s the easy part, but that’s not doing PPC, and what is happening out of it, soon enough, they will realize, Okay, we are having a lot of clicks, but not what we are expecting, which means sales, or whatever is that is making their bottom line. And a lot of client I would be seeing advertiser. It will be after that phase where they found them themselves, you know, out of pocket of 100, if not 1000s, of click. And they will all, all of them. They will come like, PPC doesn’t work. And I would say, yeah, it’s normal for it not to work, if you because it’s a job, you know, I’m not here to defend, you know, my job, but, yeah, it’s taking time to be a PPC expert. So really, for me, starting from the beginning, where people are doing what they are not meant to do is not like me. You know, tomorrow I won’t be going out there and say I’m a podcast host. You know, that will be an insult on, you know, all the learning you went through, you know, to be where you are. So for me, that’s really the key problem. So basically, it’s, yeah, it’s a West because a lot of unqualified people, and I’m saying this, you know, respectfully, are just, you know, wasting budget, essentially. Christian Klepp 07:16 Yeah, so what I’m hearing you say is, like part of it is certainly a lack of expertise. The other one is also, perhaps even a lack of strategy, and we’re going to talk about that later on in the conversation, but that is a great segue to the next question about key pitfalls that you think B2B marketers should avoid when it comes to PPC. So what are those key pitfalls, and what should they be doing instead? Serge Nguele 07:38 Yes, and this will be complementing my answer, because, yeah, I focus it on advertiser directly. But let’s say when PPC experts are doing are running campaigns for their clients. So this is to this question to as mainly PPC has said, it’s one of the quickest way to really generate clicks out there. That’s fine, but that just the beginning, but even before getting there. So it’s the strategy beforehand, because, yeah, it’s quite easy to set the keyword, generate click and realize the website is not ready. The offer is not what it was supposed to be, and it’s bringing us, you know, to really plan before even starting creating your first campaign. That means the strategy. What is your product? Are you understanding your market? What’s your positioning your competition. What are you bringing to the market? So that’s the strategy. Once you clear with it, it will make it easy for you to say, Okay, I’m understanding the market. This is my offer. This is what I’m bringing, different, you know, in the market space. And now this is the strategy, the approach I’m going to use to reach out to those people. Where are those people? Even, you know, searching for the product or service I’m going to promote online. Because, yeah, when we say PPC, it’s a full funnel. Serge Nguele 09:16 If we take Google, for example, people will be having multiple touch point to see your product. Yeah, I’ve been talking more about keywords, but there is a lot more than that. And if I ask you, how are you searching online? You are not only typing keyword, but you are self advertising because you’ve given some information about who you are, and search engine and marketing platform are having those information about you, your age, your job, how much you earn, all of those inside are what would be part of the strategy, how you approach market. Serge Nguele 10:01 Now, once that is done properly, and let’s say the companies, company is already running it’s how are you measuring success? And there it will be all the vanity metrics. So okay, it’s good to have impression clicks, but what about the bottom line? Because, yeah, if you are investing, who says investment? Expect a return out of that investment? So if you measure only how many people are clicking on your website, that’s you are missing the point. So question would be, how many are converting whatever is that you know you define as a conversion. Serge Nguele 10:44 Now, another part would be how you set your campaign. I said, how easy Google could, you know, make it to create a PPC campaign, they have also a lot of automatic function that have. This is not the point. I’m not here, you know, to do a very cheap Google bashing. But, I mean, yeah, this platform are having, well, I will say polite, just insane, you know, feature making it just kind of waste of budget, you know, where you’ll have the keyword targeting the, you know, network you shouldn’t be, you know, advertising on to sell it. So do setting and also aligning to the sales objective. So those are, you know, a few ways. So I said quite a lot. To bring it more into structure, I would say, first of all, it’s strategy before even, you know, thinking of creating the campaign. You have your strategy, and then once your company are there, I said, but yeah, I would keep on repeating it, the clicking, just the beginning of it. So what are you measuring? So having, you know, real matrix, not vanity metrics like click, CTR (Click-Through Rate) and then setting your campaigns. A lot of advertisers are on set and forget, you know, not doing anything. And guess what? It wouldn’t work, you know, because you have to optimize continuously and then align with business goals. Christian Klepp 12:33 Absolutely, absolutely no. I’ve been writing furiously as you’re talking, but like what I’m hearing you say, and I think it’s absolutely right but people tend to forget that PPC, and in fact, a lot of these other initiatives, they’re all part of an ecosystem, right? And it’s all you all. You have to think about it like, Okay, so where is this going to go? Because the, as you rightfully said, the click is just the beginning. When they click, where are they going? Where are they going to land? Is it going to be a landing page? Is it going to be an ad? And after they’ve scanned the content on that said page or that ad, what do you want them to do? So what’s the call to action? Where are you going to funnel them from there after that? What’s the follow through? So it almost seems to me like this has to all be mapped out. It doesn’t just stop with PPC, right? Serge Nguele 13:21 Yes, and even there quickly, before you asked your other question, yeah, sorry to interrupt. I will say it’s all tied to the strategy, because, yeah, could be a lot of things. You know, you can use PPC because you want to test something on your website. You can use PPC because you want to complement what you are doing with your organic traffic strategy. Most recently, I had, I was referred a prospective client, and they came to me saying, we are doing well on our organic search. Now we want to bring PPC to complement all of that and expand. So, yeah, you know, all of those things are part of the strategy. So, and it will be different if you are coming because you want to test something on your landing page that’s been, for example, your main metrics. To go back to what I’ve said, clicks. Your clicks wouldn’t be a vanity matrix, because you really want people you know to come there and you know, validate whatever you want on the landing page. Whereas, if you are there to generate leads, probably you want, you know, content yourself only with clicks. You will want people you know to fill your lead form. You know. Christian Klepp 14:43 Absolutely, absolutely so sales you’ve tried. You’ve touched on this already, but like, let’s expand on it further. So what do you think are the main causes of underperforming paid search campaigns? So from your experience, what do you think the real underlying problems are, and I suppose one of them is a lack of strategy. Certainly. Serge Nguele 15:04 Yeah, it’s starting from there. Christian, yeah, you said it a lack of strategy. But okay, let us assume you are there, you know, you are getting clicks. So there one of the main cause of on the performing campaign, I would say it’s that whenever I audit account, a lot of them are just flying kind of blind. That means the tracking is even, you know, wrong. This is something I should start with it, you know. But he has a good case to, you know, talk about it. It’s, yeah, when you have the campaign, so you need to make sure you track every single click. Otherwise, how would you even know what is performing? So this is the main cause of underperforming campaigns. For me, it’s weight tracking and measurement, and that’s mean, if you can’t trust your data, you can’t optimize and at this point, because, yeah, you have business people listening to this an important part, an important one, you know, a lot of people are not advertising. It’s also the invalid traffic. You have a lot of, you know, especially now with AI and all boats, you know, we have are there. And this there is a staggering, you know, number of invalid traffic so, and this is, you know, a proper study, so in certain vertical more than 20% of click received are all invalid. So that’s mean, if you factor that to properly understand that mean whatever you are receiving, 20% of those clicks are wrong. So that’s mean you’re working with wrong data. That’s mean everything that would follow after that are just, you know, assumption based on 20% of you know wrong information. So this is an important one. Serge Nguele 17:09 And I would say, has advertiser, and this is something, for example, yeah, I don’t want to oversell, but what we do in which your PPC doctor. Those are things I’m putting in place to really be working with, in value, traffic, you know, company. There are a few out there, but yeah, I’m working with lunio, for example, which is our partner. So those I would recommend, not necessarily, you know, but you find whoever you want to work with, but this is really important to make sure you are receiving, you know, the right information, so weak tracking and measurement and then ignoring the funnel in the process. So you know when, again as I was saying, depending on what you want to achieve, you will have different goals, and you will be optimizing your campaign differently regarding what you want to achieve. So a lot of campaign are only targeting bottom up funnel intent, but you know, and they will be missing all the other funnels. So yeah, to develop quickly about the funnel. So yeah, roughly, we would have the awareness and then, so that’s mean people are just discovering they want something. So they want to know what their options are out there into that phase, and then they would have the consideration where, okay, then they are quite definite about what they want. Now they are starting making, you know, their decision. And then it will be the conversion phase, where they are in a position to decide and buy, essentially. Serge Nguele 19:04 So when you set your campaign, you have to, you know, be considerate of all those phases, because they are someone who is in their awareness phase, they will just be there to consider their options. They won’t be buying. And you need to factor that so that your campaign, your strategy that’s tied back to strategy that’s mean, okay, you will plan your campaign to spend a certain amount, or invest a certain amount to reach people in their awareness phase, and then another amount to bring them to consider, and another one in consideration. And when you tie that to the wall ecosystem, we said, PPC is just a fraction of you know your the world, the world marketing ecosystem. So that’s mean, okay, awareness. How are you going to you? Know, once they click and you have that information, are you following up with an email, you know, to just keep them alive and making sure when, when they are in a position to convert if they see your ad, take that decision, you know. Serge Nguele 20:14 And then the third one, it’s generic ad copies all we’ve said so people, when they are considering they won’t be in the same, you know, set of mind, like when they are just there to discover, or when they want to buy. So you need also, you know, with your messaging, to differentiate all those phases people in the awareness you want them to to know you are there. They might even be coming, you know, online already having their assumption some, some of their preferred planned. You know, so if you come into that moment, your message should be to tell them we are here. We could be an option for you when they are there to consider your message. Need to be different and so on, when they are ready to, you know, to convert. And even there could be, you know, remarketing as well, you know, because they, if they already know about you, you won’t come again with the same message. You need to try something different. It could be, if you have a discount, or whatever, you know, could bring value. So a lot to say, Yeah, but here to to summarize, I know, yeah, I said quite a lot. But to summarize, you know, the main thing would be, really the tracking and measurement you need to track. If you don’t track your flying blind, then consider the funnel. So at which stage people are which micro moment? Are they there because they want to know? Are they there because they want to buy? Are they, you know, all those the funnel, and the third one would be having a differentiated ad copy to match all of that. Christian Klepp 21:58 Fantastic, fantastic. You did say a lot, but I think it was very important, because I what you’re, what you were explaining was you were expanding on, not just again, it’s, I think for me, it’s also beyond the PPC, because it’s understanding the buyer’s journey. First of all, who the buyers are, and what stage of the journey that you’re at. I think you mentioned at least three times, from what I from what I can remember, are they… No, no. And I think it’s important, because are they in the Discover stage where they haven’t, you know, they’re just looking around for us to see what the options are, or are they at the stage where they’re already bought in and they’re and they’re ready to buy two completely different motivations, different messaging, different copy, is required, right? And if people are using this, I would just call it like the one size fits all approach, right? That’s a recipe for failure, right? Serge Nguele 22:52 Exactly, exactly. Christian Klepp 22:53 Okay, fantastic. Moving on to the next question. So break it down for us here. How can you know based on everything that you’ve said, How can marketers optimize their PPC campaign. So what are the steps? What are the key components that need to be in that process to make this successful? Serge Nguele 23:11 So at this point, yeah, we’ll assume they had their strategies, right? So yeah, the first one would be, fix your tracking to make sure you are tracking the right things, and that’s been making sure your GFO (General Marketing Automation), which used to be Google Analytics, is there to or if you’re using Adobe, but GFO is the most common one, making sure your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integration is also right. I didn’t touch on it, but offline data are also important to really get the best out of your of your optimization, because, yeah, that’s mean, you are taking information from real your real customer, your real buyer, and when you feed the system with those information, offline information, it helping you get the best out of what you are currently doing. Serge Nguele 24:09 Then the second step would be defining success in business terms. I mentioned earlier, vanity metrics. But yes, really, what is that? What does success means to you as a business person you know not only clicks you know, so that’s mean making sure you have your return on your ad spend right, and even tied it to the profit, because their return on ad spend would not even be considering, you know, all the other aspects. So really, are you profitable or no? And once you consider all of that, it will help you properly optimize the campaign and make them work. Serge Nguele 24:56 Then the third step would be segment your audience smartly. This is touching on what we’ve said that’s been differentiator, who are decision maker, who are influencer, who are researcher, that they won’t be having the same impact, and if we identify them properly, that will also help you allocate the budget accordingly and have more efficiency on that part. I will take an example, one of our clients. When analyzing their channels, we found that on meta, they were having the highest cost per acquisition. However, when looking at the lifetime value of those clients, those were the most relevant. So that’s mean it wasn’t a problem to allocate more budget there, because we knew that’s where they are making more money if you don’t have that you know segmentation, you might just be saying, Okay, we have a cost per acquisition, which is one of the metrics. You could say cost per acquisition is too high there, but without having the offline information about the lifetime value, you will be missing the point. You could cut out, you know, that channel where, really, you know, it’s where you are getting the most value, and then it will be the differentiation on the messaging. Serge Nguele 24:56 So build a creative, creative and message that speaks directly to the pinpoint so. And this is, again, you know, understanding your audience, really, if you know, if you understand them, that means you will talk their language. And then the fifth one I would add, there would be test, test and test relentlessly. Again. You counting probably this is the 10th time I would say the click. Click is just the beginning. So that’s been once you have the click, what can I do from that point? You know, understanding your client, testing a few different, you know, different aspect of your messaging, on your landing pages. That how you know, really, and that’s why, coming back to where we started, yeah, a lot of advertiser, when they will be coming, they would not have the time to do all of this, because it’s a full time job, you know, to be testing different aspects, you know, for a few weeks to have to validate one hypothesis. If you are a business person, your job would not certainly be, you know, doing that, and that’s why it’s a recipe for failure. When you know business people start trying to do what is not their job. And even here, you could see, even has a marketer, there are a lot of steps, you know, to be taken. And all of us, you know, digital marketer, we are not necessarily taking those. Christian Klepp 24:56 Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, so I’ve written this down. Let me just quickly recap for the audience, yeah. So the first one you said is fix your tracking, so GFO for Google Analytics, with the CRM integration that should also be right, defining success in business terms. I think that’s an extremely important one. Like, why are we doing this right? Like, what’s the objective here? Right? Serge Nguele 24:56 Yeah. Christian Klepp 24:56 Segmenting your audience smartly, back to what you were saying earlier. Like, at what stage are they at? Right? How many, how many different groups, especially in B2B, right? How many different groups are we targeting? Differentiation in terms of messaging. I think that’s another big miss with a lot of these campaigns, right? That the messaging is just too generic, or perhaps they’re just using whatever ChatGPT gave them. And Testing, testing, which leads me to another question, Serge, because I’m pretty sure it’s impacted your area of expertise as well. And we are in 2025, at the time of this recording. But AI, how has AI impacted PPC, and where do you see this going? Like, how can AI help or hurt? PPC. Serge Nguele 25:42 Yeah, that’s a good one, you know. And I didn’t have it this issue added. I was like, okay, Christian is, you know, just uncommon. Not asking anything about AI. I was surprised. No this. So there we go, yeah, AI is, you know, it’s a part of our lives, all of us, and now it’s starting from the beginning. So, why so? So the question I’m asking myself is, you know, why do I, why do I even need AI, you know, for because, yeah, guess what, if it’s just, you know, to be following the trend, it will be just noise, more than anything. However, coming to PPC, AI has been in PPC for a long while, even, you know, long before ChatGPT. We have more and more, you know, smart bidding, all those AI influence, but I remember when I started PPC 16 years back, not making me look younger. But yeah, don’t worry. I’m 25. Christian Klepp 26:06 For those that are listening, you know, they’re only listening to the audio version. I mean, Serge is a young looking guy. Serge Nguele 26:06 There you go. Yeah, yeah. I would say PPC used to be manual, you know, where you could freely influence but AI now and automation are part of the question to answer in a very simple, you know, term to your question about AI, it’s, yeah, AI is there. It’s a tool like any other tools, and it’s what you do with that tool that really matters. And also it what I’m what I’m trying to avoid it, you know, being, yeah, being lazy, as you mentioned, you know, when talking about the ad copy differentiation and people just getting what they are, you know, receiving from ChatGPT, yeah, the question is, using it as a tool, which means it could be doing a lot of stuff, you know, calculation, pulling together information, all those things that are boring, you know, let’s use the word, you know, I can say otherwise. So AI would be doing that and freeing us, you know, space to be strategizing, doing all you know, the steps we mentioned, understanding our market, the competition, segmenting, differentiating, you know, our messages, putting together the strategy. Because, yeah, AI won’t be able to do that, at least not properly. Serge Nguele 26:06 So yeah, that’s for me. You know, how, how I’m, yeah, you know, positioning, you know, ourselves with AI, but yeah, we are using it definitely, you know, to make our life easier, not the other one, not to replace us. And actually, this, this one, yeah, I was at the conference last week in Manchester, and that was, you know, the very topic, and also a personal experience. It was my birthday last week, and so when there we had Ed Sheeran, you know, the singer, you probably know, we had his impersonator, you know, who came at the event. Now, at a personal level, I’m just one of those guys who can walk past any celebrity, you know, art. So I went for my selfie, and I was pretty much convinced, you know, that it was the real one, because I went, had a chat, told him it was my birthday. Oh, so he sung me, you know, a happy birthday, which I was pleased to publish. Like, okay, I had the real Ed Sheeran, you know, singing me happy birthday. But it turned out, you know, it was a fake one. So coming back to AI, one of the I had an academic who was discussing on that topic, and he said one of the main competency we need in the future with AI would be for expert to really be expert to drive AI and, you know, tell it when it’s wrong or right. And that was a, you know, perfect example, you know, with that HR experience. Christian Klepp 26:06 Absolutely, absolutely and belated Happy Birthday, by the way. And so I did see the post, and I looked closely at the picture, and I’m like, Yeah, that’s not the real guy. Serge Nguele 26:06 You were, right? And the thing is, I didn’t have a lot of people, you know, coming to say it looks like for a lot of people, you know, I wasn’t scummed, you know, on my own. Christian Klepp 26:06 Fantastic, fantastic. Okay, so we get to the next question, which I call the soapbox question, what is the status quo in your area of expertise? So, PPC, that you passionately disagree with and why? Serge Nguele 26:06 Okay, yeah, one of those we already touched on it. For me, it’s PPC, it’s set it and forget it. And a lot of campaigns auditing just that way, so you could see people, they just, you know, created the campaign. And they are expecting the system, you know, to turn it magically, you know, positively. So, yeah, that’s, I disagree. So you know, when I mentioned that the step to go, the very last one was, you know, to test, test and test. So, yeah, this is where the real magic is happening. You know, within PPC, when we testing. So if we set and forget, we won’t be able to really see what works. And at this point, I would also, you know, blink, the diversification, you know, Google is 90% of the PPC ecosystem. That’s fine. However, it’s not the world, the entire ecosystem. And on this one, we have just the second search engine, you know, in the world, Microsoft Art, which is getting ignored, sorry. And so with that, I would just use metaphor to say, if PPC, it’s a brain, and our brain is having two hemisphere, Google will be the left one, and then Microsoft will be the, you know, the right one. And I’m seeing a lot of PPC or advertiser just running on one hemisphere. So if you have one hemisphere, you will never know, you might even be successful on Google, but it will never be complete. You know, once you have a functioning PPC brand where you have Google’s running, and then Microsoft, who is coming, and the way is working, because it’s two different search engine would be coming incrementally to what you are achieving on Google. So that’s really where, you know you have the magic of, you know, the full potential of your PPC. Christian Klepp 26:06 Absolutely, absolutely. And you know it was, it goes back to what you were saying earlier on the conversation. It’s a set it and forget it. It’s also a very dangerous mindset, and it could lead to, it could lead also to a tremendous waste of money if you don’t know what you’re doing. Serge Nguele 26:06 Yeah, exactly. Which is some time for when business owner are managing the Google ad that just, that’s just naturally happens, because, yeah, it’s not their job, you know, they are focused on, you know, running their business, doing what they are good at. So they will be like, Okay, we have some PPC running, and that just, you know, was for everyone. Christian Klepp 26:06 Absolutely, absolutely, okay. Here comes the bonus question, which I kind of like, I hinted at it already previously. But you know, the rumor, the rumor on LinkedIn, is that you’re a runner, and I’ve seen some, I’ve seen some videos of you running, and you’ve clearly, like, participated in some marathons and the like. So my question to you, Serge, is like, what is it? What is it about running that you’ve learned that you’ve applied in your professional life? Serge Nguele 26:06 Oh, yeah, that’s a profound one. Okay, so yeah? Well, I would say yeah, the rumor on LinkedIn is right, yeah, running is an important part of my life, and even exercising, it’s an important part of my life. I’m coming from a football background, and most gradually, I went into running, and past six years, I’ve been more of a runner participating to that, I participated to three marathons, so Paris, Eden trail and London this year, and most recently completed a half marathon the Royal Park one in London. So with with running, long distance running, remind me just the way life is. So life is a marathon. So it’s not a, you know, it’s not a sprint, and which is running it. You know, if, when you get that mindset, a marathon, a marathon doesn’t mean you are going the distance that’s in you, that means you need to really well, I will bring it back a bit to the PPC. So we need to strategize if you are to cover 42 kilometers while it is becoming serious. So you need to make sure you really manage, you know, time your effort, you have a proper strategy, because you can just, you know, wake up and say, Okay, I will cover 42k you will be, you know, really going into trouble. So strategizing and then planning and that will be influencing, you know, even your worth living, because, yeah, how you rest, how you recover, how you eat, and so, yeah. Serge Nguele 39:59 And then it’s also pushing you to the limit. That’s mean your mindset, which is actually the most important you know when doing this, because to run a marathon, it will be, yeah, a bit about you need to turn that for sure, but it will be about going beyond the physical battle, and at that point it will be more what you have in your mindset. Or no, do you believe you can do it? Or no, you know, are you fighting to keep on going when your body is saying, Okay, I can’t take it anymore. So and all of those things, when you bring them back to to normal life is just, you know, on a daily basis, your business person, you know, we have up and down. You will have no client, you know, sometime. So how are you behaving? You know, with when all those things are happening. And in between the running, I also developed my proper tools, one of them being what I call my three nose philosophies, which I’m happy to share with our listeners here, could be helping. It’s working for me. And yeah, I’m sure if you guys are testing it, it will be working. So the first, no, it’s no excuses. That’s been whatever you set yourself to do. You just go for it. You don’t find excuses. So it’s a respect you give to yourself. The second, no, it’s no complaint. Life is, you know, life is throwing us a lot of stuff. Not only is, you know, chocolate, if I can say but yeah, you have to face it. When is there? If you complain, it won’t change anything. So that’s mean not complaining set you to finding the solution. And the third one is no self pity. You can still say, Okay, I was born in wherever it is, this or that, that won’t change anything. The question it’s, are you willing to consider that however, whatever your condition is not what defines you, it’s what you do you know next that will be the important step. So yeah, my train of philosophy, Sophie would be the bonus for our listener, Christian Klepp 42:31 No excuses, no complaints and no self pity. So not only is sales a PPC expert, but he’s also a philosopher, no, but it’s awesome. Awesome. I love it. But, Serge, this has been such a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on and for sharing your expertise and your experience and your running advice with the listeners, and quick introduction to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you. And I did notice, you know, there were a couple of hints in the conversation. There were a lot of, like, medical terms floating around. What’s the story there? Serge Nguele 43:06 The story so, yeah. Quick Intro about me, yeah, I’m search your PPC doctor. I’m called the PPC doctor in the industry, I do quite a lot of public speaking in the digital marketing space. I’m George award at the search award in the UK, globally and at international level. I have 16 years experience in PPC, and I run my agency called your PPC doctor, if people want to be in touch with me, they can type my name online. I’m quite active on LinkedIn, so Serge Nguele, you will find me, yeah, wearing, you know, something with this PPC doctor. This is the branding. And to your question, why your PPC doctor? So there is a real story there. I’m a former Med student. So I studied medicine to become a proper doctor, but for some reason, I will spell spare the details. I pivoted into marketing and specialize into digital and PPC. So when I was creating my agency, the name was natural, your PPC doctor, which is also a real way of doing stuff. I don’t call the client. I still call, you know, my patients, and I’m having the doctor mindset within your PPC, where we really listen and then we listen, then we diagnose, prescribe, and from the prescription, we follow up with care. So yeah, that’s the doctor mindset at your PPC Doctor. Serge Nguele 43:52 Fantastic, fantastic. The only thing you don’t do is tell people to breathe in, breathe out and cough for me, please. Serge Nguele 43:58 Not yet. Christian Klepp 43:58 Not yet, fantastic, fantastic. So once again, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. Serge Nguele 45:09 Okay, yes. Thanks Christian, thanks for having me. Christian Klepp 45:12 Thanks. Okay. Bye, for now. Serge Nguele 45:13 Yeah. Bye. </div>

45 MIN

NOV 20, 2025

How a Growth Mindset Drives B2B Marketing Success

How a Growth Mindset Drives B2B Marketing Success In an increasingly competitive business environment inundated with digital noise, relying on “play it safe” tactics will only result in your brand drowning in a sea of sameness. The path to true differentiation, innovation, and standing out is not an easy one as it requires a significant mindset shift. For B2B marketing initiatives to succeed, you must create room for experimentation and data-driven discovery. How can B2B marketers approach this effectively and secure internal buy-in for it? That’s why we’re talking to<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentweberink" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Vincent Weberink </a>(Founder,<a href="https://pzaz.io/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> Pzaz.io</a>),who shares expert insights and proven strategies on how a growth mindset drives B2B marketing success. In this episode, Vincent talked about why design experiments are crucial in B2B marketing and highlighted the need for structured, data-driven growth experimentation. He shared his proven methodology consisting of ideation, ranking, and rapid prototyping designed to quickly and effectively validate concepts. Vincent also shared some common B2B marketing pitfalls that teams should avoid and emphasized the value of iterative testing and learning. He broke down how teams can build an entrepreneurial mindset and get internal buy-in for experimentation-driven B2B marketing. https://youtu.be/SlQa58iKf3k <h2>Topics discussed in episode:</h2> [2:09] The importance of running structured experiments in B2B marketing [5:21] Common challenges marketing teams face when designing and executing experiments [13:53] Key pitfalls marketing teams should avoid and some practical solutions [20:36] How to align internal teams and consistently generate strong experimental ideas [31:31] Actionable steps B2B marketers can take to run effective experiments: <ul> <li>Understand and acknowledge that what you know is probably wrong</li> <li>Use ideation and designing experiments</li> <li>Trust your team</li> <li>Be creative in applying growth hacks</li> <li>Get external help if stuck</li> </ul> <h2>Companies and links mentioned:</h2> <ul> <li> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincentweberink" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Vincent Weberink on LinkedIn</a> </li> <li> <a href="http://pzaz.io">Pzaz.io</a> </li> <li> <a href="https://www.cisco.com/site/hk/en/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Cisco</a> </li> <li> <a href="https://www.airbnb.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Airbnb</a> </li> <li> <a href="https://chatgpt.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ChatGPT</a> </li> <li> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Failures-Later-What-Hack-Entrepreneurs/dp/B0F9SY9KF5?ref_=ast_author_dp&th=1&psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">13 Failures Later What The Hack?!</a> </li> </ul> Transcript<div id="target-id69457c1d3015d" class="collapseomatic_content "> Christian Klepp 00:00 In a B2B landscape that has become increasingly competitive and inundated with digital noise, using play it safe tactics will result in your brand drowning in a sea of sameness. That said, the path to differentiation, innovation and standing out is not an easy one, as it requires a change in mindset. You need to have room for experiments to truly create something that is relevant to customers. So how can B2B marketers do this, and how can they get internal buy in for it? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers in a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Vincent Weberink, who will be answering this question. He’s the founder of pzaz.io who specializes in developing business growth through creative, structured data driven growth experimentation. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. Christian Klepp 00:51 Vincent Weberink, welcome to the show. Vincent Weberink 00:54 Hello Christian. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. Christian Klepp 00:59 Absolutely I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation. I think we’re going to have a great time. We’re going to have a great discussion also about topics, and a main topic in particular that I think is going to be so relevant to B2B marketers and their teams in general. So you know, without further ado, let’s not keep the audience in suspense for too long. Let’s just jump straight into it. All right. So Vincent, you’re on a mission to drive business growth through creative, structured and data driven growth experimentation. So for this conversation, let’s focus on the following topic, which is how B2B marketers can create a mindset and design experiments to understand what customers want. That kind of sounds like it’s very, I’m going to say pedestrian, but it’s incredible, and I’m sure you’ll have plenty of case studies to show that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t follow this process, and then they get into trouble. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them all right? So the first question is, why do you think that design experiments are important for marketing teams? And based on that, where do you see a lot of marketing teams struggle? Vincent Weberink 02:09 I think they’re very important because as human beings, we’re emotional when we make decisions. Problems is that, therefore when we try to drive growth. We have this idea about something, and then we tend to completely jump into it, build everything. Spend a lot of time and money and resources on building that thing that we believe is going to be very, very successful, and that takes a lot of time. And the reality is that most of the time you’re actually wrong, even though you think that you know your customer, even though you think that you know this is the best trick or marketing tactic that you’re developing. And what this experimentation model does, it sort of forces you to go through a very structured, almost scientific process, because there are some steps in there that help you to remove that emotion from your decision making. Vincent Weberink 03:12 And an example of how decision making often is influenced is when you’re in a small team or a large team, you’re sitting around the table and you’re trying to brainstorm, say, oh, you know, we have this, this challenge. We’re launching a new product, or we’re changing something, and we need to communicate it, driving sales up. And then the people who are best sort of equipped with sales capabilities are the ones that you know will dominate the conversation, and what we tend to do is then listen to them, whereas there are other people around the table that you know, they might be more introverted, might say less, that also have really, really great ideas. So what happens is that you collect all these thoughts and ideas, and then the person that’s very good at selling is selling their idea to you, and you end up taking that one. But it has nothing to do with reality, whereas in the methodology that I’m sort of promoting, what you actually do is you try to capture as many ideas as possible, as quickly as possible, and then, in almost a democracy, you rank and rate them according to several criteria, and that will help you to make some of those ideas float. And the ones that pop up are the ones you should actually focus on, because now, within that democratic decision making process, you’ve tried to optimize the chances that one of those ideas will actually lead to much quicker success than any of the others. And you can also use it in the reverse, the ideas that completely sink because no one voted for them, maybe only just the person that was selling. You know that they go away. You just throw them away and forget. About them, because clearly they didn’t get enough support. And the other question you were asking, sorry focused on the first question. Christian Klepp 05:08 No problem, absolutely, absolutely no. Well, that was a great way to, like, set up the conversation. And I guess it segues to the question, where do you see, based on what you said, where do you see a lot of marketing teams struggling? Vincent Weberink 05:21 Well, I see them often struggling is that they tend to spend money and time on just the ordinary things that everyone sort of accustomed to, because depending on the type of company you work in, that’s the safe choice, and that ultimately doesn’t really help you grow. It’s typically the stuff that you would never expect to work. And I’ll give you a great example of this in a moment that might give you this amazing growth overnight or amazing success. It doesn’t necessarily have to be growth. It can be specific campaign where you just need people to sign up, because you’re trying to obtain information from them and to get those people to sign up. It could be a problem. You’re designing your funnel, and then something isn’t really working. Vincent Weberink 06:15 So in my experience, what happens is that people will say, Okay, let’s build a landing page. Let’s build a website, and let’s make it beautiful. Let’s make it perfect. But while you’re in this early stage, you have no clue if it’s going to work or not. You’re now wasting all of those resources where it’s so much better to very, very quickly, design experiments, run them as quickly as possible, see where something is happening, and then sort of iterate upon that specific experiment that you were running. And then slowly, over time, you get to a point where that experiment can be fleshed out, can be refined. You might do some A/B testing, and especially in the world we’re moving into with the rise of AI speed is everything past early days of when I was starting to do, you know, growth marketing or growth hacking, depending on what you like to call it. Let’s say 15 years ago, you could simply run an experiment, and that experiment could would last for certain periods of time. You could get away with some of the experiments, even running them for months. But with the rise of AI, what we’re seeing is that experiments only work for very, very short periods of time. And what I see with a lot of the marketing teams is that, you know, they’re not accustomed to driving fast and quickly running and failing fast, so that you can very quickly learn to see what ultimately what ultimately works. Vincent Weberink 07:55 So a great example of something that I experienced it when I was running one of my startups, which was a streaming service, and I believed I got everything right. I was just convinced that there was nothing wrong with the product, but I wasn’t getting any traction, nothing, literally, no one was signing up, and I just couldn’t understand. So what I started to do is just run one experiment after another. First obviously, I went out and spoke to people, because that’s the first thing you should do most of the time, especially when you’re in startup mode, either a startup or you work for corporate, maybe running a division or launching a new product, you have no data. But if you read all of the books out there, they all tell you, Oh, let’s look at the data. Well, guess what? You don’t have any data. So what you need to do is you need to go and speak to people and find the soft data to really understand, you know, what’s going on. How do I create a product that people will be willing to buy, and I did that, and then it sort of confirmed that there was nothing wrong with the product. And then months into that process, I still wasn’t getting any traction, and the startup was sort of moving to a point where it started to fail, because, you know, you’re running out of money, you’re running out of time. So I kept running experiments, believing that the methodology that I use simply works. You just need to keep running, running, running. And then one day, I essentially was close to giving up, and I decided to take on another project because I had run out of money. But on the side, I kept running experiments, and what I did is I put a play button on the homepage, allowing people to watch television for five minutes without signing up. And that simple trick got me 11,000 euros overnight. It took me 11 months. To uncover that, I had now proven that indeed, the product wasn’t wrong. The product was always right, but the way we were marketing was wrong, and it is always one of the two. It’s either there’s no product market fit or you’re selling it in the wrong way. Your marketing is wrong. And in a way that was very frustrating, because this very simple thing, almost as simple as a paperclip now gave me all the growth in one way. It was too late for me, because I had to go into that other project. The revenue wasn’t enough to sustain the business, but it did allow me to sort of keep the business afloat. And I was working this other project, and then I returned, after like a half a year or so, back full time onto the startup once I was generating enough recurring, recurring revenue there, and yeah, that’s sort of, you know, what I strongly believe in. You just need to keep running those experiments. Vincent Weberink 10:53 Of course. The third option is that your timing is completely off, which is another thing that I’ve experienced several times. I’ve run many startups, most of them failed over time. I’m proud to say that I never had to raise money for any of those startups. I was sort of in the last 30 years of my career. Thank you. I always managed to, you know, make enough money to sort of sustain, but many of them never became the big winner. They were just doing enough, and then at some point, there was an end of life, because either the market was fooled or or just turned out that there was no point in continuing to run that company. An example is VPN product that I did in 2003 that’s when the first idea started. VPN was a business to business product, and we decided to consumerize VPN because our only competitor at the time was called hide my ass, and the technology was very, very complicated. And after sort of what happens after 911 where a lot of governments started to invade everyone’s privacy, we decided that, you know, it is also important for individuals to retain a level of privacy, you know, within the boundaries of the law, obviously. So we spent a lot of time in developing that technology, creating a product that was very, very easy to use and that was secure and safe. And we were very, very successful in the first year and a half. We even managed to get in Google on the second place, right after Cisco, which is the inventor of VPN, but by the time we had about 40,000 customers, that was it. That was just, we just couldn’t grow anymore. And I then decided to abandon that project. Over time, someone else continued it for several more years, and of course, now VPN mass market product, but over 20 years later, and it’s the most common product out there, and we were just too early. So even though it was an exciting, exciting adventure, it made us money. It was a profitable business. Ultimately, at the time, there was no point in sort of continuing, trying to sort of push it, push it further. Christian Klepp 13:18 Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely great points. And you know, thank you for sharing those, those experiences and the you know, those past successes and challenges, failures and so forth. I think it’s, I think it’s an important part of the overall process, right? I’m going to move us on. And you’ve mentioned some of these already, but like, what are some of these on the topic of design experimentation and growth growth marketing. What are some of these key pitfalls that marketing teams need to avoid, and what should they be doing instead? Vincent Weberink 13:53 The key pitfalls they need to avoid is to believe that they’re always right. I mean, that is the first thing is, in essence, that you should learn that most of the time you will be wrong, and that success lies in the ability to admit that and to move forward very, very quickly by running a lot of those experiments, and by designing those experiments very quickly and having the ability to turn them into minimum viable products. And the pitfalls that most people fall into is that they think you’ll just read a book, and then you can just do it. It’s simple, right? Oh, it’s just like marketing. It’s the same way how I learn how to do advertising, I can simply learn how to do, you know, growth marketing. But the reality is, it’s then it is a thing or a trick so that understanding and the realization that you just need to start thinking differently, start thinking out of the box, be creative, because a lot of those hacks come from places that you simply will not expect. Vincent Weberink 15:15 I guess Airbnb is a typical example. You know, as far as I remember the story correctly. Two guys set up Airbnb. It was literally an air bed in someone’s house. They were running the business. They had about 10,000 you know, customers, and they could have said, Oh, you know, we’re doing great. Our marketing is doing well. We’re making money. But ultimately, they were not satisfied, so they decided to continue, and then what happens is, this is before the big thing that most people have heard of, which is correct, Greg’s list. That’s when they really exploded. But before that, something else happened, and that was when one of the founders said, Well, how do we expand our capacity, and how do we get more people interested in our products? And it was around the organization of trade shows when there was always a shortage of capacity in hotels, and they decided to try that out. And if I remember correctly, they grew sort of from 10,000 people to 200,000 people in just a couple of months. And that was actually their real growth hack, the real spurt, whereas reckless took them to millions. And that’s the thing that everyone knows. But it was that mindset, that understanding of not being satisfied with what you’re doing, and the ability to pivot, because it was a complete pivot. It was no longer just an air bet. Now you were renting out a bed in someone’s house, and that was sort of the foundation what then became Airbnb. And I think most marketing teams have never been exposed to that way of thinking. You know, they’ve been taught the simple stuff on, how do you do advertising, how do you look at data, you know, how do I build a website? How do I organize a trade show, etc. But it’s these things where you take an idea, where you’re almost stepping into the entrepreneur’s shoes by looking at, how can I make the business grow through extraordinary ways of marketing? Christian Klepp 17:30 Absolutely, absolutely. You know what? That’s a phrase that I also heard at a business meeting on Friday where I was talking to the branch manager of a bank. And one of the things that she said, why, how she helped the branch to grow, is because she came out of a business. She was a family business, and she was running her own business, so she came with an entrepreneur’s mindset. And I do think that there is that is really, like, significant, especially if you’re talking about and I don’t want to, like, use these, like, overused buzzwords, let’s say, but like, you know, if you’re entering this world of, like, the scrappy entrepreneurs or even the scrappy marketing teams, right, you can’t necessarily go in there with the corporate mindset. No offense to anybody that’s in corporate but if you’re stretched for, as you can rightfully attest to Vincent, if you’re stretched for time, bandwidth, resources and budget, you’ve got to, you’ve got to think more like a guerrilla fighter versus a conventional army, right? Vincent Weberink 18:38 You need to test as early as possible whether or not the ideas or your hypothesis, hypothesis that you have are actually true, and especially when you’re an entrepreneur or in a product team. And I have an example for there was a famous UK bank that had an idea where they wanted to test if friends and family would be willing to become guarantors for young people that would want to buy a house in London. And you know, banks are very, very big, slow organizations, and typically, if not alone, figuring out how this legally works will cost them millions right to develop the whole full product. So how do you do something? How do you create this experiment where you can prove whether or not there’s any viability in even thinking of offering such a product? And what they came up with is essentially to build a landing page where they would simply ask people to sign up for the service. They ran a 500 pound budget against it, so the total cost of the whole experiment was maybe 1500 pounds, and now they’ve managed to validate it, which saved them literally hundreds of 1000s of pounds and the risk that that product might have failed. And I think that is exactly the entrepreneurial mindset that a market. Marketer needs to develop and understand, Okay, I’m not just responsible for selling this product, but I’m also responsible for understanding, you know, who do I sell it to? How do I sell it? What should the product look like? How can the product evolve so that there’s a good product market fit? Christian Klepp 20:17 Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You brought some of these up already, but let’s dig into it deeper and unpack it. I should say, like, so based on your experience, like, how do you how can B2B marketers get traction as early as possible? So how can they build experiments? What are those key steps that they need to take? Vincent Weberink 20:36 The first thing this is, so I sort of use a methodology and which is very, very structured. And I use that because if I don’t, I get lost in ideas. Because it is very easy to come up with 100 ideas. A lot of people you know, can do that. So what we do is I sit down, either with a team, or I might take a certain periods of time, where all I do is just collect as possible. Then for every idea, I write down, what is the idea? What do I believe this idea will give me? So what is the outcome? How do I prove, potentially, as a hypothesis, that what I believe is true? And then I sort of make those notes, then I store them in cards. And you can do that in any kind of project management tool, whether it’s notion or cell or bunch. Just create those cards. Vincent Weberink 21:31 Then what I do is I rank and rank them so, and I ask the team to do that, or the people I work with, for example, if I was doing consultancy for clients, we would have a specific, specific group of the clients do doing the same thing, and then all we would do is see, Okay, which of those ideas are floating. And we would take the top 10, again, it was very easy to then generate, like, 100 different ideas, and you take the top 10, and then for each of those, you’re now going to discuss them and essentially say, Okay, if I need to turn this idea into minimal but viable products, allowing me to prove that I am right or wrong, what is the least amount of work you can then do? And you know, so in my book, I publish a whole list of MVPs (Minimum Viable Product), but actually, with ChatGPT, you could probably just type, give me a list of all the different type of MVPs and explain how they work. So for example, you have a Wizard of Oz. A Wizard of Oz is, is an MVP, where everything happens behind the scene. The product really doesn’t exist, but the customer thinks it exists. And you do everything manually. That’s just an example. Vincent Weberink 22:51 So what you then do is you then going to think about, okay, who needs to do what? And then you run a short sprint. You design the sprint. Say, Okay, next Monday, with the three of us, we’re just going to spend one day on building that thing. And I, most of the time use distribution hacking, or in other words, advertising, to drive some traffic to whatever that experiment is to then prove of my whether or not my hypothesis is correct. And from there onwards, you then, of course, have some analytic tool, or, depending on how you how, you then prove it, and then you start to iterate and but I promise you, most of those experiments will fail, which is great, but if you run 10 very quickly, maybe in the course of two weeks, if you have two or three where you see the needle moving a little bit, now you have something to take the next step. And a classical mistake that I’ve seen is that people always tend to make it too complicated. So what they do is, rather than designing an experiment that gets you one answer, they try to get as many answers as possible. And that doesn’t work, because you know, if you have any exposure to data, if you have multiple data points, then it’s now up to your interpretation, and then you’re selling it to yourself, because you want the hypothesis to be true. So it’s very difficult to then again, step back and say, Ah, you know, can I really be honest with myself? So test one thing at a time. Once you’ve proven that one of those things work, you just design the next one and the next one and next one, and then within this very short periods of time, you’ll get to a point where, where it starts to work or fail. You could prove that the product simply is not viable. Which, which I’ve had many times, and then even pivoted afterwards, given up on many products, because simply, even though I believed, you know, was going to be amazing, yeah, it turns out to be wrong. So, yeah. Christian Klepp 25:00 Absolutely, absolutely. Like, it’s really a fine, a fine balance between speed, but also like, like, the quick experimentation, as you say, and you know, as you were, as you were discussing your process, it actually just made me think of another question, which I’m sure you faced countless times, and you brought it up in the beginning too. How do you get this internal alignment? You talked about, like a team getting together in the room, and I’ve been in one of those teams right, where there were a couple, like, we used to call them the stars of the show, because, you know, when they get up on stage, they want the spotlight to be only on them. Forget about what everybody else says. My idea, my baby is the most beautiful baby in the world. And how dare you insult my baby, right? Vincent Weberink 25:48 Exactly. Christian Klepp 25:49 But, but the reality, as you rightfully pointed out, which I’ve also seen firsthand, the reality, is that the one that shouts the loudest doesn’t necessarily have the best idea, right? It’s sometimes these people. It’s sometimes these people that don’t say anything, that don’t contribute to the conversation, they actually have the solution that perhaps the market is looking for. But unfortunately, their voice is drowned out by these so called, I’m just gonna call them the Divas in the room, right? So back to the question, how do you get that alignment? How do you get those ideas out of everybody in a way that it’s not just fair, but it’s also like more, more in line with what the market is looking for. Let’s put it that way. Vincent Weberink 26:43 The people around the table that typically don’t speak up, you know, some of them are the deep thinkers. They really think about something, and they have really great ideas, but they’ll then struggle to properly defend their idea and to explain it, whereas the other person on the table, who’s good at selling themselves, you know might they’ll do everything to defend their idea, and therefore they will attack the other ideas. And what you sort of see is by implementing this rank and rate model by definition, you’re externalizing the decision making, so you’re agreeing with everyone on the around the table, that everyone writes down their idea on the paper, on a piece of paper, and you define what that structure should then look like, which means is no one has to defend it. They just write it on paper. You then gather those pieces of paper and you add them to the tool. Then you ask everyone to rank and raise which, by the way, could be done anonymous, which I’ve done many times. And that way you just look at the one that floats, and you just, if the team look, we don’t know who’s right, we can’t afford for this venture to fail, and therefore, we’re just going to focus on the ideas that have the greatest potential of propensity. And that’s how I do it, and it’s always worked well for me. There’s, of course, when I would introduce this to new startup teams, very often it’s the entrepreneur that is the biggest problem. You know that they’re the hardest to convince, because they typically have the strongest opinion of all. Christian Klepp 28:34 So you’re talking about the founder, right? The founder Vincent Weberink 28:36 Yeah. About the founder? Yes, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, because they look, you know, there might be a great marketer or great salesperson who have very strong ideas, and they might, you know, accept inputs, but it’s typically the founder that will then say, yeah, now if you know, it’s my money, so I’m going to just do it my way, and it’s wrong, because you’re now letting your emotion again, getting In the way. And this example that I gave you with the play button that was sort of happened while I was in the process of creating that methodology that I use, which is sort of based on me having read 1000 books where I really struggled that most of the books, even though they’re written for startups, if you really dive into it, they’re actually more for startup teams and corporates, very often, the way they’re described, that you just can’t apply them to normal startups, because normal startups work differently. And what I then did is I sort of took all of the models in there, and then figured out, what if you combine them, crunch them, and then create this methodology. And I was doing that for myself, because I really struggled, having done so many startups, and then I found, okay, so now I have this methodology. I just kept doing it. Kept. Believing that ultimately, it would work with the idea that sometimes you know on this path and that other people need to help you to sort of step out of your comfort zone and sometimes think from the left, from the other side, because your growth might come from a different direction, and which could even be true within your customer persona. You think you have the persona, right. But while you’re digging and running the experiments, it might be the persona next door which is the true, real customer, and you just need to uncover that by believing in that methodology. So… Christian Klepp 30:40 Absolutely, absolutely. You know, we did one of those exercises in Q2 with a client that had was very convinced of their ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). And then we went through this exercise where we did, um, we did a diagnosis on the ICP to determine, like, is this the right is this actually the right ICP you should be going after, right? So I’m 100% with you on that one. Okay, my friend, we come to the point where we’re talking about actionable tips, and it’s really just a recap of all the great recommendations you’ve given us already. So just imagine that there’s a SaaS (Software as a Service) marketing team out there, or somebody in B2B marketing that’s listening to this conversation. They’re like, wow, that’s exactly what I’m going through right now. So what are the maybe three to five things you would say they can take action on, like right now? Vincent Weberink 31:31 First of all, understanding you know, coming to the realization that whatever you know is probably wrong. Which is, which is the hardest thing to do. The second thing is you should really start working by using ideation and designing experiments, create MVPs fail as fast as you can, because that’s the way you learn as quickly as you can. And I sort of describe that in my book that I just launched, because it, you know, yes and into the same problem. Also, you know, trust your team. Trust that other people have great ideas as well. And very often, the great ideas come from the people that otherwise wouldn’t, wouldn’t say anything and be as creative as possible. Try to prime yourself by just, you know, search online, what are great growth, growth hacks or other marketing tips and tricks, and then try to figure out, how can I apply those? How can I use those as potential experiments? Because that way you can just simply move forward. But you know, if you’re stuck, get external help, because they’re like people like yourself, you know, who can really help to sort of leapfrog this, because otherwise, you’re just stuck and trying to learn, and while you’re running out of money, you have no time. Most starters will last for six months, and then they’ve run out of money, prove that you’re right before you build anything. And that is really, I think, the most important. And so the last tip I want to give, don’t just start building any product, because you will fail. It’s not for nothing that 95% of startups fails within within the first couple of years. It’s because, you know, you believe that people will flock and will love whatever you’re building. But the reality is just very, very different, and it might be the smallest thing that you get wrong, but you know that’s enough to fail, so… Christian Klepp 33:46 Prove that you’re right before you build anything. I mean, if there’s anything that the audience should be taking away from this conversation, I think it’s that sentence, right? Absolutely, that’s fantastic. Thanks again for sharing those tips, and I hope the audience is taking as many notes as I am during our conversation. Okay, two more questions before I let you go, Vincent, so here comes the bonus question. So you’re, this is the understatement of the year, but you’re a bit of a nomad, right? Like you’re originally from the Netherlands, you’ve lived in Greece, and now you’ve relocated, I think the last time we spoke, you were in Florence, and now you’ve moved somewhere else in northern Italy, right? So how has this lifestyle impacted you, personally and professionally? I mean, it’s clearly changed your view of the world, I’m sure. Vincent Weberink 34:39 Yes, so somehow I felt I was always stuck in the Netherlands as an entrepreneur. Because especially in the past, there is this thing, and I like to joke about it, where the Americans have the not invented syndrome, not invented here syndrome, the Dutch people have the invented hair syndrome, which means it’s all your Dutch. So therefore it can’t be good. And I felt I was very often, sort of, you know, locked up. And at the same time, the world is getting smaller and smaller every day. And I was lucky, being in technology, that we were able to then start moving abroad. And in all fairness, some of the moves we’ve done were actually caused because of the failures we’ve had, not that we run away or anything, but it was sort of, I was trying to do something locally. It didn’t really work. And then it was time for new challenges. And I found, always have found a lot of energy being able to now live in a completely different country, with a different language, with a different culture, and that really enriched my life. I started to look at things very, very differently, especially learning that everyone has a different view, whereas as a young person, I always had a very strong opinion, and the world had to be the way I saw it. But nothing is further from culture plays an incredibly important role on how people perceive things, how to behave, what kind of products they buy, how you should sell. Language plays an incredible, incredibly important role. So, yeah, I guess I was, I can’t say I was lucky because I created my own luck. I created my own decisions. I was lucky that my lovely wife and son have always supported me and that we’ve been on this journey through seven countries in the last 20 years. Yeah, and we’re in Italy at the moment. Indeed. Christian Klepp 36:35 Wow. Seven countries. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. That’s about the same number as in terms of my own experience. Like, I live in Canada now, and that’s country number seven. So there’s more, there’s more of us out there than you think, right? Like, exactly. So it’s very similar to my story. But, like, how’s your Italian? By the way. Vincent Weberink 36:57 It’s getting there. I’m studying hard at the moment, and, yeah, we sort of arrived here in January. Officially, my son is studying at university, and he’s finishing. But I guess, you know, I speak some Spanish, so Italian is slightly easier. Yeah. Christian Klepp 37:16 It’s, yeah, it is helpful. I realized, like, I also speak a certain level of Spanish, and that helped me get by even in a country like Portugal, where, Let’s appreciate it’s a complete it’s a different language, but there are some similarities. So they can understand what I’m saying, they’ll just answer in Portuguese, as long as you also understand what they’re saying, more or less. Yeah, I mean, I try to figure it out, and then they, they’ll, they’ll speak slowly, and I’m like, okay, okay, I got it. Obrigado, all right. Like, fantastic, fantastic. Vincent. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your experience and your expertise with the listeners. So please, a quick introduction to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you. And by the way, I really love that we’re color coordinated. And for those that are listening to the audio version of this, we’re both wearing, like denim colored outfits. Vincent Weberink 38:11 Well, thank you Christian. Thank you very much for having me. It was a real pleasure. Yeah, of course. You know. My name is Vincent Weberink. My email is [email protected] and if anyone has any questions or potentially is interested in the book that I’ve just released, which is condensing 1000 books and failures and success, then of course, please, please get in touch with me. Thank you again. Christian Klepp 38:42 Fantastic, fantastic, and we’ll be sure to include a link to your book in the show notes. So once again, Vincent, thank you so much for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon. Vincent Weberink 38:53 Looking forward, Christian, thank you very much. Take care. Christian Klepp 38:56 Thank you. Bye for now. </div>

38 MIN

NOV 13, 2025

How to Leverage Storytelling for B2B Marketing Success | Matthew Pollard | EP 198

How to Leverage Storytelling for B2B Marketing Success We hear it time and time again in the B2B marketing world: You must differentiate your brand and specialize in order to stand out in a highly competitive business environment. B2B companies should master the art of storytelling, craft a unique message, and sell authentically without pressure, cringeworthy small talk, or competing solely on price. So how can B2B companies achieve this, and what role can the marketing team play? That’s why we’re talking to <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewpollardspeaker/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Matthew Pollard </a>(Founder,<a href="https://matthewpollard.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"> Rapid Growth®</a>), who shares expert insights and proven strategies on how to leverage storytelling for B2B marketing success. During our conversation, Matthew discussed the significance of storytelling and specialization in B2B marketing. He also emphasized the need for differentiation in B2B companies by focusing on a specific niche rather than targeting everyone. Matthew highlighted the importance of creating a unified brand message that appeals to the target audience, and advised companies to remove generic content from their websites. He elaborated on how B2B companies can leverage their unique skills and insights, shared common pitfalls to avoid, and how marketers can help define their business’s specialty and value proposition to improve their B2B marketing strategy. https://youtu.be/W-G4-SvFRyg <h2>Topics discussed in episode:</h2> [2:35] Why specialization is the key to success in B2B marketing [10:17] A story of how Matt helped a client develop a “Unified Message” that effectively transformed her business [12:21] Common pitfalls B2B marketers face when specializing: – Tendency to focus on one’s own interests rather than the client’s needs – Trying to appeal to everyone [20:10] The role of functional skills and unique market insights in driving differentiation [31:21] Actionable steps B2B companies can take to create the differentiation and specialization that will set them apart from their competitors <h2>Companies and links mentioned:</h2> <ul> <li> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewpollardspeaker/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Matthew Pollard on LinkedIn</a> </li> <li> <a href="https://matthewpollard.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rapid Growth®</a> </li> <li> <a href="https://matthewpollard.com/growth" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Download the Rapid Growth template</a> </li> <li> <a href="https://matthewpollard.com/theintrovertsedge/networking" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Download the first chapter of The Introvert’s Edge</a> </li> </ul> Transcript<div id="target-id69457c1d31aa7" class="collapseomatic_content "> Christian Klepp 00:00 We hear it time and time again. In B2B you need to differentiate your brand and specialize in order to stand out in a highly competitive business environment, B2B companies need to master the art of storytelling, craft a unique message and sell authentically without pressure, cringe worthy small talk industry jargon or competing on price. So how do B2B companies do this, and what role can the marketing team play? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketer in the Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Matthew Pollard, who will be answering this question. He’s a recognized growth expert, author and an award winning speaker who’s out to prove that storytelling will sell more than facts ever will tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is. Christian Klepp 00:51 Okay. I’m gonna say. Matthew Pollard, welcome to the show, sir. Matthew Pollard 00:54 Mate. I’m excited to be here. Thanks for having me on. Christian Klepp 00:57 I mean, you know, we’ve been on a pre interview call a couple of weeks ago, and we got on like a house on fire. I kind of feel like I’ve known you for like, 30 years or something like that. Matthew Pollard 01:08 No, I’m glad. I’m glad we got a chance to meet when I was 11. It was a big defining moment for me. Christian Klepp 01:14 Fair enough, fair enough. Matthew Pollard 01:18 I guess if, if you didn’t have a Canadian accent, I didn’t have an Australian accent, right? Christian Klepp 01:22 Yes, yes. There is that too. There is that too. But Matthew, really excited to have you on the show. I’m really looking forward to this conversation, because we’re going to dive into stuff that you are clearly very passionate about. But that aside, I think we’re going to discuss a topic that I think is highly relevant in the world of B2B marketing. So I’m going to keep the audience in suspense just a couple of seconds longer as we dive into the first question. All right. Okay, fantastic. So Matthew, you’re known as the Rapid Growth Guy, and you’re on a mission to transform 1000s of struggling or plateaued businesses into momentum and growth. So for this conversation, let’s zero in on the topic of how B2B companies can create differentiation and specialization. It sounds like such a pedestrian thing, but it’s amazing. And I’m sure you’re going to talk about this at length in a second. It’s amazing how many companies are still getting this wrong. So I’m going to kick off the conversation with the following question, so if memory serves me well, in our previous conversation, you mentioned that if B2B, companies and their marketing teams can specialize, they can generate more clients. So can you elaborate on that a little bit more please? Matthew Pollard 02:35 Yeah, absolutely. I think that the reason I use the word specialized rather than niching is a lot of people have in their mind that niching is this thing that everybody knows that they should do but doesn’t work for them. And while, of course, they’re wrong, they’ve created a bunch of really great excuses in their mind for why that is. And so that the best example I can give you is I worked with an insurance guy who also dabbled in wealth management, and he would go to networking events all the time, and he would talk to them, and he learned how to be interested before being interesting, which is heavily important when it comes to networking. And he did his research as well. I mean, he read my books and other people’s books, and really mastered that piece. But what he said when people reached out to him was also when, when people asked him what it was that he did, he would respond that he was in insurance. And it was like their eyes almost exploded. It was like, How do I get away from this person? They knew that they were, they were going to get this massive sales pitch. And I said, Look, Nick we’ve got to step away from you commoditizing yourself like that. As soon as you say insurance. People know what that is. They put it in a bucket. It’s like me saying I’m a sales trainer. They put me in a bucket. They’re like, most people think that sales training, you know, a lot of people feel like sales people are scam artists. So they’re like, You know what? I don’t have anything to do with you. But they’re but then the opposite is, if I say I’m in marketing, people go, Oh, I need marketing. How much do you cost? Right? Neither are positive. But when you say you’re an insurance salesman, or you’re an insurance people know that the word salesman was the next thing that was supposed to come out. So because of that, they’re trying to work out how to get away from you. And so we need to look at how you can sidestep what people think they know about your industry. Matthew Pollard 04:26 And so I said to do that, what we need to look at is how you can specialize, how you can speak to a different group of people that see you as the only logical choice. I said. So help me understand, like I believe that in today’s world, especially, the fact of the matter is, you can create rapid growth out of anything. So there’s nothing worse than rapid growth business with customers you don’t like, in a business you can’t stand so let’s focus on a group you absolutely are passionate about helping. And secondly, let’s focus on a group that you can actually serve more effectively, because if you’re in a space where you feel that you. You don’t have a great product, well, then go sell something else. Right? In today’s world, there’s always something great to sell, but think about the space that you want to work in. He goes, Well, Matt, I’m really passionate about insurance, but I really just want to help everyone. And I said, Okay, well, if we’re going to lean into passion, because I know the word passion now we’re using two words, right? Passion, which everyone’s like, well, I’d love to focus on my passion, but that’s not realistic or niche in which people think that don’t work for them. And I said, if we focus on who you’re passionate about, and we leaned into that for just a second, tell me who you would think about working and he’s like, No, seriously, Matt, everybody. I said, truthfully, everybody, what about somebody that earns 50,000 versus somebody that earns 250 he said, Well, no, the person that earns 250 why? Well, they make more money. They can buy more insurance, not what I’m talking about, Nick. Matthew Pollard 05:46 So let’s take a step back and say, let’s pick two people at random that make 250,000 the first person is maybe somebody that grew up poor study, got into Harvard through scholarship, maybe now works for a C level executive, or they’re a C level executive, C level executive that works for a big corporation, versus a person that maybe even dropped out of school. But now they’ve started up their own business and makes 250,000 a year. One has 10 staff, the other one has 10 employees. Which one of those do you want to work with most? And his response was interesting. He said, obviously the small business owner. And I said, why? Obviously the small business owner? I mean, I grew up with the reading speed of a sick grader until I was diagnosed with Irwin syndrome. There was no way I would have been able to break through some of those barriers. But I definitely wasn’t getting a scholarship to Harvard, like and getting into a C level executive job, you know, good for him or her. And he said, Well, no, I just feel like the small business owner deserves it more like, Okay, explain that for and he said, Well, you know, I had this grandfather, and my grandfather actually did save up some money and started a business. He started, he owned a farm, and he said that that farm had to have a huge amount of cash flow on hand because of the seasonal variations and things like that, Said, but he always prioritized his team making sure he had cash flow, he said. But then later in life, he got sick and he had to sell the business because he couldn’t afford to support it. He couldn’t work as hard in it anymore. And he said, I just watched my grandfather spend the last years of his life in his tiny apartment fading away in front of a TV. I just felt like he deserved more than that. And I said, you sell insurance. What could you have done to help him? And he said, Well, there’s these insurance products that you can stuff cash in when, and that give you a high yield return, but give you access to it really easily, and that he could have used the returns of that to spin into actual property in a portfolio, and if he hadn’t just done that, he would have had a really happy retirement. And I said, so it’s like, why do you know so much about this? I was blown away at how much he knew. And of course, it was because his grandfather, he saw it could help, could have helped him. I said, well, then how would it feel to wake up every morning helping these high cash flow businesses not end up in second class, like, you know, retirements, like your grandfather, he said, I mean, that would be amazing. So I said, Well, okay, then why would when somebody asks you what it is that you do instead of saying, I’m in insurance, why would you not call yourself? This is what I call a unified message. Why would you not call yourself something like the hustle lifeguard. And then when somebody asks you what that is, you can then respond with something to do with how you don’t want people to end up in second class retirements like your grandfather, that have high cash flow businesses. And then all of a sudden, you’re having a totally different conversation with them, and that changes everything. Matthew Pollard 08:42 But it comes from a place of specialty, like when I moved from to, you know, from the US, from Australia to the United States, I made the decision that I wanted to help introverted, service based business owners, predominantly highly complex businesses. And because I decided I wanted to do that, because I felt like there was something heroic about a person with enough talent, skill and belief in themselves to start a business to their own. But the moment that I started talking about sales training, they saw me as a sales trainer. The moment I started talking about marketing, they thought I was talking about marketing, general stuff, and because of that, they said, Oh, do you do digital advertising? How much do you cost? And so what I realized is I needed a hook at the beginning, and so I call myself the Rapid Growth Guy. And then when somebody said, what exactly is that? Because that’s powerful. For the first time, you’ve actually got an opportunity to respond because they genuinely interested, as opposed to the elevator pitch. I do this for this group of people, even if which sounds so transactional. So it gets people to lean in and ask. And then I would say something as simple as, one of the things I love to see more than anything in the world, is an amazing, introverted service provider with enough talent, skill and belief in themselves to start a business of their own. What I find, and I just hate seeing this, is they get stuck in this endless hamster wheel, struggling to find interest to people, trying to set themselves apart, trying to make the sale, really, feeling like people only care about one thing, price. Do you know? Want anyone like that, and when they respond in the affirmative, I said, Well, I’m on a mission to help people like yourself realize you really can have a rapid growth business doing what you love, just not by getting better at your functional skill. You’re probably amazing at that. Instead, by just three things outside the scope of that, they really allow you to build a business that revolves around you, your family and your life, not the other way around. Matthew Pollard 10:17 Actually, let me give you an example. Then I would tell a story. The difference you’ll notice is there’s not transaction. Transactional. I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about the change I want to see in the world, the difference that I want to make. It’s all about helping others. You just can’t do that without having a specialty. Otherwise, I really want to help people with everything that they could possibly hire me for. And really it comes down to well, I just want to work with people that treat me well that let me help them with what I want to help them with, and get paid really well for doing it. I mean, that should be a starting point, but it shouldn’t be the end. And so that’s why I get people to lean into a specialty, because as soon as you focus on a specialty, all of a sudden everyone’s like, Oh, I’m like that. Can you help me? The biggest fear people have is, oh, but what if they’re not like that. And here’s the truth. When you say you specialize, if you go to a doctor, they’re a general practitioner, you’re like, oh, they can help me with everything. When you go to a specialist, you assume they have a specialty in that thing, but you also assume that they have a better general knowledge than everyone else. So you’re used to paying a specialist a premium, but you also see them as the best generalist. So it actually doesn’t exclude you from working with anyone else. Since I started working with introverted service providers, I have more extroverted clients than I ever had because they understand the benefits of sales systemization. Because you’ve got a business you’re trying to sell, there’s no way you’re going to sell it if you’re the primary sales person. I work with some of the biggest billion dollar product based companies in the world, but yet introverted service based business owners and my specialty, and because of that group, it’s opened up so many doors to all of those other groups. So a lot of people say, Well, I want to work with lots of different people. Well, you get to but only by speaking to a smaller few at the beginning. And I know it sounds counterintuitive, it’s just the fact, though. Christian Klepp 11:57 Absolutely, absolutely and what a way to kick off this conversation. Thanks so much for sharing that anecdote. I would say the next question would be around the key pitfalls for these marketers and these individuals, like business owners, of these key pitfalls that they should be avoiding when it comes to specialization and what should they be doing instead? Matthew Pollard 12:21 Yeah. So I think that the key pitfalls is people start saying, What am I passionate about, rather than the difference that they can make? Right? So especially if you’re on the introverted side, you kind of feel uncomfortable thinking about who you want to work with. So if you make it about others and say, Well, who do I make the biggest impact for? Who can I make the biggest change for? What change do I want to see in the world? How can I make the biggest effect on the world? The other thing that I see is people get stuck on that. As I said, I just, you know, I just love helping all people, and that’s never true. You can’t possibly have genuine care equally for every person, and you personally can’t have equal amounts of experience helping everybody. So, you know, for someone like myself, I grew up really introverted. I fell into door to door sales. So I specialize in helping introverted service providers, because I created a methodology for myself to help introverted service providers, because I was selling introverted services, and before that, I was selling products as an introvert. But the truth is that, can I still help extrovert? Yes, but I can help introverted, service based business owners more. So why would I not want to focus on that? And people say, Oh, but I don’t want to give up the opportunity to get any customer, especially if you’re struggling, if you’re listening well, any customers, a good customer. Why would I turn down someone? Well, the truth is, most of you get most of your customers from repeat business or referrals, and they’re not checking out your website anywhere near as much as you think, if at all. Right, the fact is, no one’s going like Christian. If you put I am now a dentist, on my website, your current clients would not stop working with you. And if I referred you to somebody like they might say, look, I checked out your website and says you’re a dentist, but Matt said, you’re really good at, you know, my bookkeeping and accounting services. Could you still help me with that? Of course, they’re trusting a referral. So nobody cares what you put on a website. What you’ve got to realize is, from the outside, it’s a, you know, specializing is a new customer acquisition strategy, so if you focus just on that, and don’t worry so much about losing referrals and repeat customers because they don’t care, you’ll be fine. Matthew Pollard 12:21 And the third thing is, people tend to focus on their functional skill, and everybody’s had the same training on the functional skill, and that’s where things go wrong. So what I mean by that is this, actually, let me give you another quick example. I worked with a client, Wendy. She was a language coach. She taught kids and adults Mandarin, and she’s like, so how I’ve got this big issue? There are people moving into California charging 30 to $40 an hour for private consultation. There are people on Craigslist offering to do it from China for $12 an hour. And now there’s even technology. I’ll teach you Mandarin and you teach me English. We just won’t charge anyone anything she’s competing against free. So she said, Well, how do I compete this crowded marketplace? And of course, I could have said specialty, but first I had to look at the unique skills she had. So I said, Look, if I help you with sales, yes, absolutely, we’ll be able to close more deals. But instead, let’s look at how we can avoid the battle altogether. So what I did is I looked at all the customers she worked with over the years, and what I realized is that for a small number of them, really it was only two. She helped them with far more. She really helped them understand the difference between E commerce in China in the Western world, these are executives being relocated to China. She helped them understand that the difference between the importance of respect, like how to handle a business card, why to reduce your accent, not just learn the language. And she also helped them understand the difference of rapport. Like, Christian, if I was trying to sell you something in the Western world, I’m really bad at sales, I might say something horrible at the end of 45 minutes, like, do you want to move forward? If you say you want to think about it now and next week, my chances of getting that sale are pretty slim. In China, they want to see me five or six times before they discuss business. They’re probably going to want to see me drunk over karaoke once or twice. And it’s just the character of the person that they sorry. They want to understand the character of the person they’re doing business with, because they’re talking about 20 to 50 year deals, not transactional contracts. And she helped understand all of this. Christian Klepp 15:49 Fantastic. That’s one heck of a story. And you know, coming from somebody like me who has spent time out in China, I can definitely attest to the fact that business deals aren’t being done with alcohol and karaoke, right? Like not all of them, but many of them are. I did have one follow up question for you, Matthew, and it’s really just for I guess. Let’s just say I want to play the devil’s advocate here, just a little bit. Right? Everything that you’ve said to me makes a lot of sense, but there’s people out there, without question, that are like doubting this approach, right? Like, and what I mean by that is like you’re calling yourself the growth consultant, when, in fact, you’re an insurance salesperson. She’s calling herself the China Success gal when she’s actually a mandarin teacher. What do you say to people that challenge the way that you’ve packaged this approach? Matthew Pollard 20:09 And like, when you for these two people, you’re doing far more than just language tuition. What are you doing? And she’s like, well, there’s just a few things I’m just trying to help. And this is where people get stuck. They actually focus on their speciality based on their functional skill, as opposed to what they do great. And I said, Look, Wendy, is it fair to assume as a result of decisions you’re giving these two people, they’re going to be more successful in China? I mean, yeah. I mean, that’s the point, right? I said, Great. Then let’s call you the China Success Coach. Forget about Mandarin education for a second. Let’s create what we ended up calling the China Success intensive. So we leaned into a skill set that she had beyond her functional skill, that complemented her functional skill. Well, now she’s like, well, you know, I’m, I’m ecstatic about this. Like, who do I sell it to? What she’s asking is, who do I get networking to me, what’s, you know, what niche am I supposed to go and talk to? And I said, Well, who do you think it is? And then she went with something broad, like executives. And I said, Well, I mean, that makes sense. I mean, executives going to China. I mean, I moved from Australia, the United States. I was United States. I was terrified. Imagine going to China. I just don’t think it’s your ideal client. It’s not what, obviously, the companies are paying. So let’s go with something broad. Like, everyone goes broad. I don’t know why. Like, when you’ve got less economies of scale, less proof of concept, especially, why would you want to go like for like against somebody that’s faster, quicker, better and got more testimonials. But even when, even when you’re bigger, why would you want to do that? Matthew Pollard 20:09 I said, companies don’t go broad, firstly, but secondly, they might have millions of dollars riding on an executive being successful. I just don’t think it’s the right fit for you. And she said, Okay, now she’s frustrated with me. Oh, who? Then I said, I think it’s the immigration attorney. Then she looks at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. I said, think about it. These people have they may make five to $7,000 for doing the visa or the paperwork that comes with it, all the bureaucracy that comes with that. They’d be lucky to make $3,000 for any successful visa. I said, why not offer them $3,000 to match it for any successful introduction to the China Success Coach? They love the idea. They’re like double my profit for a simple introduction. Sure. What have I got to say? She just had them say, congratulations, you’ve now got your visa. I just want to double check you’re as ready as possible to be relocated to China. They’d always think they had their visa. They’ve learned the language. Kids are getting pretty good at two. They’ve got their place sorted. They’re set that she would just have them respond with, there’s a lot more to it than that, and tell them that they think that they should speak to the China Success Coach. She got on the phone with the easiest sale in the world. They were terrified to go. The organization was motivated to pay, and that’s why she was able to charge $30,000 instead of $50 to $80 an hour, minus a $3,000 commission, she made $27,000 for the easiest sale in the world, all by leaning in to her actual skill set outside the scope of a functional skill, leading into a specialty and then creating what I call a unified message on top of it to help her be seen as the only logical choice. Matthew Pollard 20:10 Absolutely, and I believe that everybody should challenge everything they hear for the first time. They should try it on if it fits them. But absolutely, you need to validate first. And so for me, I look at if you’ve got a vanilla message, just like everybody else’s, then you have to be the loudest in the room, not because you can’t be the clearest. So how do we actually be the clearest? Well, if we talk about our functional skill, are we? Are we actually being clear? Because who here can possibly define themselves by their just their functional skill that doesn’t make any sense. Like you are a lifetime of experience, a lifetime of past customers and up. You’ve had different upbringings, different education because of that, you are a byproduct of all of these things. So what was interesting is the language coach actually became the China Success Coach because that’s who she was to these two people, and then we fixated on getting more clients. Yes, she taught the Mandarin, but she taught them other ways to be successful. Help the kids be ready, so the whole family unit could be successful. Because, truthfully, if the kids aren’t successful, good luck. Matthew Pollard 21:18 Now, if you think about me, I mean, I’m a master in neuro linguistic programming, I’m a business coach, I’m a branding expert, I’m a Sales systemization expert. I specialize in helping introverts. I mean, I’m too many things. The only thing I know for sure is nobody cares. They don’t care how hard it was for me to learn these things or how long I spent learning them. So the Rapid Growth Guy simplifies it for them, but it’s also a better, definitive explanation of what I do. I’m far more aligned. Like I don’t like a lot of sales training. I feel like it forces people to focus on more dogmatic and Bulldog techniques, and that’s just not me. I also know my ideal avatar, the introvert, hates sales so it’s not in their best interest to hear that I’m a sales trainer either. Matthew Pollard 21:57 Now, from a marketing perspective, I know that most marketers these days, unfortunately, see marketing as Facebook ads, and they see the bro economy of a bunch of people with jets they rented for the hour, saying, You can be like me too, and I don’t want to be in that bucket, so I want to be in a category of my own. Now, a lot of people struggle with that. They’re like a category of my own, but that means I have to explain to everybody what I do. Well, wouldn’t that be amazing to not be in a category that’s full of other people that are destroying the industry or fight on price, but actually be in a category of my own, but that means I’ve actually got to explain what I do. Now think about the science behind this. If I’m interested before I try to be interesting, people feel like they have to be interested in me as well, right? It’s about being reciprocal. Then I say I’m the Rapid Growth Guy, and people’s brains explode, because our brains are programmed to understand who what something is, to work out, what box to put it in, whether to exclude it or include it. And because of that, that then leads to a massive issue for them, because they’re like, I don’t know where to put this person. So because of that, they have to ask, because they’re interested, because our brain wants to solve issues with what exactly is that they’ll ask. And then I say, Well, I love to see this. I hate to see this. I’m on mission to do this. But notice I didn’t even tell you what I did. I just conveyed who I care about. So now I’m like, Wow, I’ve never heard anything before like this. Usually I hear this self gratification elevator pitch, or somebody say, Well, my day job is this. Nobody wants to hear that. Now, smart people say, Well, I don’t tell them what I do. I just ask questions. I’m like, Oh, great. Everybody loves to be interrogated the moment that they ask somebody what they do. So none of those things are helpful. So by sharing who I care about, even if it doesn’t fit them, they’re starting to think, Wow, I like this person. Who can I introduce them to? And then I say, which is why I’m on a mission to do this. Let me give you an example, and when I move into the example, I’m then giving them the exact framework of what I do. I might tell them the Wendy story, and I explained the Wendy story, and at the end they say, does that make sense? And they’re all now I get it, because here’s the thing Matthew Pollard 24:07 If I try to educate you on what I do or why I’m different, first thing is, it comes across as I’m bragging. Second thing is, they won’t remember it. The statistics say if I embed it into a story. First thing is, it doesn’t come across as bragging. Secondly, people remember 22 times more information when embedded into a story. And thirdly, it activates the reticular activating system of the brain, which actually causes our brains to synchronize, and that actually creates artificial rapport. And because of that, people feel like they have an uncanny connection with me. It’s a total advantage. Everyone feels like, even when you’re in the sale, my job is to explain all the options so they can make a decision. No, you’re up. You did if your product or service benefits them. Your focus should be about getting them out of their own way to make a decision. You’re the expert. Tell them a story of someone just like them that wanted what they wanted and how you got them to an amazing outcome. The goal isn’t about talking about variables or educating the customer or. Hitting them with all these functional skill piece jargon. Your first job is to explain why you care and who you care about, then convey a story that educates and inspires people to act in their best interest, even if they don’t hire you. Because the truth is, if you can be the clearest in networking room, you don’t need to be the loudest, and it’s the same online, if you don’t want to be that person taking a photo of a dog or donut for something to say online, you can’t be as vanilla as everyone else. You have to be unique. You have to be different. And that’s what my goal is for everyone listening today. Christian Klepp 25:31 Mic drop. That was a bit early in the conversation, though, for the mic drop, but like, I’ll take it well, fantastic. Fantastic. Fantastic. And I do absolutely see your point. I do absolutely see your point in terms of, like, how do you stand out in that, you know, use whatever analogy you want, right? I’m in that sea of sameness. How do you become that signal amidst the noise? And, you know, for those people, because I’ve gotten that as well, like, you know, but you’re just packaging it up with all this fluff, and you’re using fancy words, but then, if you scratch beneath the surface, what you’re actually selling is a genuine area of expertise where you help, to your point, transform the client, right? Whether it’s their business, whether it’s in your case, whether, whether it’s their skills, and so on, right? Matthew Pollard 26:21 Well, one of the things that’s always interested me is people want to explain what they do. Christian Klepp 26:25 Yeah. Matthew Pollard 26:26 I don’t know anybody that doesn’t prioritize their own interests over somebody else’s. Christian Klepp 26:31 Yeah. Matthew Pollard 26:32 And I know there’s a lot of people that say, well, that’s not true. You know, I prioritize my kids that that’s different. I’m talking about in a business situation. People always prioritize their own business future over somebody else’s. And so if I said, Hey, here’s all the stuff I do, my expectation is that they have to figure out how that applies to them. That’s laziness. If you sit there and go, Well, how does what I do change them help them. What outcome do they even want? Like, if I start with, if I want to specialize in this group, what outcome can I deliver them? And then all you want to do is articulate to that outcome. Because when you explain the outcome that you get someone or the pain you remove someone from people are far more likely to go, you know what? Matt, that sounds amazing. I want to do that because now they’ve tried on the outcome. They don’t care what you do. I could then say, You know what? All that it takes for you to get this outcome is to put this stapler on your desk. They don’t care if that gets the outcome. I’m putting the stapler on my desk. They just want to know that you’ve worked with someone in the past to get the outcome that they want, and you’ve got a system to do it. That’s it. They don’t actually want to know what the system is. Christian Klepp 27:46 Well, the procurement team might, but, like… Matthew Pollard 27:49 It’s been really interesting. I do a lot of sales kick off events, and when you’re looking at a group of people that are on board. They’ve heard the story, and they want the outcome. So the procurement team wants a statement of work, and they want the statement of work to be really simple, right? They want we’re going to focus on these are the number of days. These are the number of hours, and these are going to be the outcomes in each one of these things, they actually don’t want to know what you’re going to do in each one of those things. They want to know what they get, because a computer, a procurement team’s job is to say we have a budget for x. Now, if you’ve marketed yourself correctly, if you’ve articulated your value in the networking room correctly, they’re creating a budget for you. You’re not going into a tender, like, for like, against everyone else. So because of that, you’re the only person going through the amount of times I have worked with procurement that they have said to me, we have been told that we have to push this through. So what we’re missing inside your Statement of Work is these things. Can you fill this out for us, because we need to check these couple of extra boxes, or you’re working collaborate with someone and say, Okay, help me understand your KPIs (Key Performance Indicator) so I can match this exactly. But they’ve already said we’re hiring you. You’ve agreed on budget, and now we’re turning it into something functional, if we need to through the statement of work to get procurement to agree. But what you’ll find is the decision is already made. Procurements job is to either find a vendor once a decision for what is needed is already found, is already decided, in which case you got to the sale too late, you didn’t convince them of your value and create a category. If you’re just going into a tender process, you can use story to highlight why you deserve to be a little bit more expensive, but you’re already into a category, so you’ve already lost that’s okay. You can use other techniques and highlight your specialty to still get the business. But if you can sidestep that and be seen as the only logical choice, people reach out to me and say, Matt, we want you to do this initiative that we heard about. We want you to do what Wendy, what you did for Wendy, for us, or we want you to speak on storytelling, because we heard about this amazing thing that you do. Tell us, tell us how you can help. And at the end they’ll say, Okay, so now we’ve got to work together to get you through procurement. And here are the changes with what we’ve got to do, because we’ve got to tick these boxes in procurement, but the customer is working with me to get it through procurement. That’s a much better situation to be in. Christian Klepp 30:21 Absolutely, absolutely, all right, my friend, we get to the point in the conversation where we’re talking about actionable tips, and man, you’ve given us so much already, like my hands getting a little sore from all the note taking, but yeah, thank you, Otter. But if there’s somebody out there in particular, like either a B2B marketer or a team within a B2B company that is responsible for putting the brand out there, for lead generation, for all these marketing initiatives. What are like based on everything that you’ve said, just think of this like a recap, question, right? What are three to five things that B2B companies and their teams can do right now to create that differentiation and specialization that will truly set them apart right, that will pull them out of this. What’s that term that you kept using? Vanilla? Right? The vanilla landscape, the vanilla content, that vanilla, that vanilla set of assets, and so forth. Matthew Pollard 31:21 Absolutely, I think the first thing is, if you look at your website, and I tell everybody, especially in digital marketing, to look at their website, because usually when I look at especially somebody in digital marketing, to the point that you just made their website looks like a Cheesecake Factory menu of services, and it’s, oh, we provide SEO (Search Engine Optimization). We pay digital marketing. We do this, we do this, we do this. It’s you just tell me what you want to buy, and I will sell it to you. It also says, Hey, we do everything, which means there’s no way you can do everything well. And it also is just a list of industry jargon, of the functional skills that you’ve got certifications on, none of that helps the customer. That’s you saying, This is what we do. Tell me what you need. And that’s lazy sales. It’s lazy marketing. Matthew Pollard 32:10 So for me, the first thing I always suggest to most marketers is to rip their list of services that the customer won’t understand off their website, then highlight what you specialize in. Pick an industry group and then say, what are the unique skills that we have above and beyond our functional skill? Outside all the jargon words for helping this demographic, it’s going to be unique care, unique insight, unique understanding, unique experience. There’s a template that I can give you that will help with that, because you don’t need to hire me for this. What you need, you know, actually, funnily enough, I did this template at the National freelance Association nearly 200 people in the room a few years ago, and at the end, I said, Look, do me a favor. Put your hand up if you believe that now that we finished this, you have a group or a specialty that you know that will pay you a premium. They’ll be excited to work with you. And you’ve created your version of the rapid growth guide, the China Success Coach. You know, the unified message that looks and inspire people to want to know more about you. Like 97% of the room put their hands up. The sad part was when I said, Look, do me a favor. Just keep your hands up. If this is the most time you’ve actively spent working on your marketing since you started your business, like 85% of the room kept their hands up. I mean, the whole session was less than 90 minutes long. So the key is that this will work if you spend the time doing it. So if you go to https://matthewpollard.com/growth, then you will see a you’ll be able to download a template, and that template will take you through the five step process to do this. Matthew Pollard 33:40 Now, I would suggest, heavily, recommend, that you do not do this in isolation. Get a friend of yours that is doesn’t have your same functional skill to listen to this podcast as well, and then you help them and get them to help you, so they get you out of your functional skill, and you can do the same for them, because what happens is we get into our own industry jargon, so a business coach will get another business coach to help them. The next thing you know, they’re both just as bad as each other, because they’re both inside their box. Now, I’ve spent so long getting this certification, I want people to know that I’ve got it. Nobody cares that you’ve got it, except for you. And the truth is that because you’ve done that certification, you’re so into the industry jargon, especially if you were just certified, that all that you want to talk about is that, but you’re far more than that, and that’s what you need somebody external for. So go to https://matthewpollard.com/growth, download that template, and then work with someone, spend about an hour on them, and then swap over and get them to spend an hour on you. You’ll be miles different just by doing that. Matthew Pollard 34:37 And remember, just because you can help everyone doesn’t mean you should, and that’s a really important thing to learn, to know doesn’t mean you don’t get to you might get referred to someone, and you don’t need to turn down the referral. But when you’re talking about reaching out to the people that you specialize in, I would much prefer to have 10 of my absolute right clients come to me and I can charge them a higher premium because they appreciate my specialty. And they want to move forward straight away. Then get 30 people to show up, where my closure rate is 30% it’s the same number of customers, but much higher profit, because there’s less money wasted in customer acquisition, because I haven’t spent my time on the phone with 20 people that didn’t buy plus, I can charge more, which means I make more profit. And then thirdly, most people refer me to other people that are the exact right fit, and a whole bunch of other people that aren’t, but don’t question me because they were referred by somebody that they know, like and trust. Christian Klepp 35:29 I love it. I love it like I think one of the things that really stood out to me was, let me see if I can quote you accurately here. Just because you can help everyone doesn’t mean you should. Amen of that. Amen of that. Because, like, you know, as tempting as it is, like you said that, as tempting as it is to try to, like, say, everybody’s my customer. I mean, going back to the insurance guy anecdote, I can help everybody, right? Um, it’s, it’s, it’s just, just think about all that time that has been burnt, that has been consumed, that has been spent focusing on the wrong clients or focusing on the wrong prospects. And it’s going back to your point, right? Hence, the reason for needing to specialize. Matthew Pollard 36:14 I think what’s really interesting is when you ask someone to specialize, the first thing is, oh, I want to specialize in people that can afford me and to treat me well, I’m like, that’s not a special that’s about you. Number one rule of marketing is it’s not about you. Number one rule of sales is it’s not about you. And once you’re being on a podcast, right? It’s not about you, right? It’s the sooner, like, the amount of times I’ve seen people that get on a podcast interview and a question is asked, and then they answer it with all this functional information, and they haven’t, for once, said, are people actually going to be able to consume that like the truth is, I could have shared a whole bunch more on this podcast, and if we had more time, maybe I would, but the truth is, I probably wouldn’t. I would probably go deeper into these primary topics, because the fact is, I know that I can teach you a lot more, but I also know that you won’t apply any of it, because you’ll be overwhelmed at that point. So you really have to make it about the other person. And I think that what happens is mainly because it’s we’re fear of not having enough clients, or our want to help everyone else, depending on whether we talk about it, from a move towards or move away from either way. It’s all about working with everybody we can to make money, because we’re in business to make money, of course, but the truth is that we get to help our clients more, and we get to help more people, while it sounds counterintuitive, by focus focusing on helping less people, at least in our initial messaging, as I said, I get to help more product based companies than I ever did, and more extroverts that I ever did by focusing on introverted service providers, because they open so many doors for me because the results I get them and now you know, I’ve got some of the biggest tech companies in the world that sell hardware as clients of mine, where they learn my introverted sales system, or my total sales system, and I’ve got whole bunch of extroverts that are learning my sales systems too, because they know they can’t sell their business unless they’re not the primary sales person. And the best person to hire and train is an introvert, because once they’ve learned your sales system, they ain’t going anywhere else, because they hold on to the sales system for dear life, right? So the focus is, for me, is helping people understand that if they stop focusing on themselves and start focusing on others, and not everybody but the groups, they actually can provide the best impacts for it’s like the world all of a sudden realizes and opportunities to show up. And the reason they show up is because, when you talk about things in a bland way, how could opportunities ever present themselves? You’re not even asking for them. Christian Klepp 38:42 Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, Matthew, two more questions before I let you go. All right, so here comes the bonus question. You. This was probably the understatement of the week, but here we go. You’ve traveled all over the world to provide training and deliver keynotes and conduct workshops. And I think on your LinkedIn profile, it said, from Thailand to Las Vegas. So the question is, what was that one place that you’ve gone to for any of these right that has left a lasting impression on you? And why? Matthew Pollard 39:14 So it’s an interesting question, because I don’t particularly love Las Vegas, especially as a speaker. You find yourself in Las Vegas, way too much. And Thailand also, I have, I have different opinions on there. There’s a couple of places that I absolutely love, but one of them got me out to Iguazu fall. So I spent some time in South America and Iguazu. I’m hoping for the South Americans listening, I apologize if I’m pronouncing it wrong, but hopefully it you’ll forgive me when I say it’s the most impressive thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s about 320 waterfalls that converge in one place, and it is extraordinary to experience. And I say experience not see, because it really that you feel the water when you’re there. It’s just, it’s phenomenal. Christian Klepp 40:02 Wow, wow. Yes, yeah, I have heard of those waterfalls, and it is, it is a sight to behold, right? Matthew Pollard 40:09 Yes, and I know that I’m probably saying the wrong thing, promoting a different waterfall to somebody in Toronto. So I hope you forgive me. Christian Klepp 40:17 That’s all right, the Niagara Falls are nice too. But, like, I got what you mean. Matthew Pollard 40:24 Yeah, why I see Niagara Falls from both sides? I’ve spoken in Buffalo, saw it from that side, and then got to see it from the Toronto side. And I mean, it’s definitely extraordinary. I think it’s definitely grand Iguazu Falls is it’s in absolute nature. It’s actually a trek to get there, and it’s so I wouldn’t it’s just different, it’s unique, and it is a lot easier to visit Niagara Falls. Christian Klepp 40:50 Yes, yes. I mean, I suppose Iguazu it was more like, it’s, it’s, it’s a bit untouched by civilization, if I can put it that way, right? Matthew Pollard 40:58 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I, yeah, I, and I feel like one of the other differences, and maybe that’s just a me thing. I’m definitely I love water, but the Brazilian side is what won the one of the most beautiful places on earth top 10 list. Maybe they were just better at marketing, but I loved the Argentinian side a lot more. And now I’m going to get hate mail for a bunch of people from Brazil. I love Brazil too. But the Argentinian side, you get to sit or stand in the mouth of the waterfall like the largest waterfall, and it’s such an extraordinary experience. And I’m going to get the science wrong, but this thing, I think it’s ionization or whatever that happens at that point. But you lose, you can’t not agree to anything. Like, if I feel like, if I wanted to close a really big deal and somebody hadn’t said yes to me for the last 10 years, I would fly them to the mouth of that waterfall and ask them the question there, because there’s no way you can say no to anything in the mouth of that waterfall. Christian Klepp 42:03 Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. Well, Matthew, this has been such an incredible conversation. And yes, you’re right. We probably could have been chatting for another five hours. But in the interest of time, I want to thank you for coming on the show, for sharing your experience and expertise and those incredible anecdotes with the listeners. So please. Quick introduction to yourself and how folks are thinking in touch with you? Matthew Pollard 42:24 Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate that. So firstly, for those people that want to get in touch. I mean, go and check https://matthewpollard.com/growth. That templates what’s going to help you most. But I’m known as the Rapid Growth Guy. As I mentioned, I’ve the author of the best selling book series, the introverts edge, which is now sold, I’m delighted to say over 120,000 copies. It’s in 16 languages, and I it just, it’s predominantly focused, and my publisher is going to hate me when I say this, but you don’t need to buy the books if, for instance, if you’re interested in sales, just go to the introvertsedge.com. Download the first chapter, and there I’ll give you overwhelming evidence to help you believe that introverts make not just great sales people, but I believe, beat the extroverts hands down. And then it will give you a methodical process that if you just grab the chapter head, like the chapter headings I talk about in the introduction, and put what you currently say into it, you’ll quickly realize that there’s a bunch of things that don’t fit. Stop saying that to customers. Then you’ll realize there’s some things out of order, and then there’s some gaping holes. If you fix that, you’ll double your sales, no problem in the next 60 days. And the introverts edge to networking. You can download the first chapter there as well for my networking book. But, you know, I spend my life, you know, helping introverted, service based business owners rapidly grow. And then I also do a whole bunch of sales kick off events. And I, you know, I saw, I spend a lot of time speaking at big corporations, helping them use storytelling. Because the truth is, I believe, especially if you’re doing technical sales, which a lot of introverted service providers are selling in a technical way as well, honestly, you’re one story away from the rapid growth business or career that you deserve. The problem is, most people think their job is to educate a customer. Think about the Wendy story that I told you earlier, if you instead, just motivate, inspire action. My story educates and inspires, but it also kind of embeds me as the only logical choice to do something with right now, my goal is to help, because I personally couldn’t help everybody anyway, is to inspire lots of people to try and do it on their own, and do it on their own. But of course, there’s always people that are going to want you to do to want you to do it for them, or if you sell a product or service to go, Okay, I now know I need this type of product or service, why wouldn’t I use the person that changed my thinking to do it with, you know, to do it for me? And so storytelling is a really powerful resource, and I feature, I go deeper into the storytelling topic in both of my books. Christian Klepp 44:43 Okay, fantastic, fantastic. And we’ll be sure to put those links in the show notes for this episode. So Matthew, once again, thank you so much for your time. Take care, stay safe and talk to you soon. Matthew Pollard 44:55 My pleasure mate, thank you so much, and it was I was excited to be here. Christian Klepp 45:00 Thanks bye for now. </div>

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Ep. 197: How to Create a B2B Message That Can’t be Ignored

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