A Different Perspective - Lou Hughes - The Revenue Maze - Episode #009

Lou Hughes is the Founder and CEO at MovingMinds.io. He has worked with many prominent companies and wants to help others figure out how to increase their ROI. Lou joins host Valerie Cobb to talk about how to increase the value of your company and work your way out of the confusing maze that is revenue.

Takeaways

  • There are so many things in marketing that can create tremendous ROI, and you might not know it so having someone come in and help point it out is a good idea.
  • You need to stay persistent. Change doesn’t happen overnight and you need to be consistent with your change and make sure it stays within your core and brand.
  • Neglecting your business pipeline is something that can be done at your own peril. It only hurts your company to not keep up with your pipeline.
  • You can be successful even with a small budget. You don’t want to stretch yourself too thin, so focus on where your customers are and make yourself strong there.
  • Data collecting and CRMs are more of a science now with all the tools that are available to everyone.
  • You need to remember that you aren’t selling to just the companies, you are also selling to humans and those who work in the office. You need to market your product to them as well.
  • You have to find what the pain point is for your customers and try to take that away and make their lives easier.

Quote of the Show:

10:44 “As long as you’re doing the right things you need to stay to it. And that’s true of your identity, your brand identity. People’s slogans change, their branding changes. You gotta kind of find the right mix and then be consistent with it.”

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A Different Perspective – Lou Hughes – The Revenue Maze

I have an amazing guest. I’m so excited about this one. I have to read the list of what this guy has accomplished. He has led mission-critical growth initiatives, strategic marketing, and digital initiatives for a diverse group of global clients. I need you to wait for it. Read this list, including Siemens, MasterCard, Citibank, Oxygen, Schweiger Dermatology, Thomson Reuters, Caremark CoStar Group, Northwest Venture Partners, Fannie Mae, Tesco, and the United Nations. Why not? We’re all being humbled. With that, I’m excited because he started his own company in 2006, I believe he’ll correct me if I’m wrong. It is MovingMinds.io, and it is to bring Fortune 500 experience to smaller companies. I’m super excited to meet and talk with Lou Hughes.

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Lou, welcome.

Thank you, Valerie. I appreciate the invitation. This is terrific.

I feel honored. Those are such great companies. As I’ve thought about you coming on, I and so do the audience, we want to hear all about you but first, we always start this show with, what is one thing that the audience can do to get out of the revenue maze?

There are multiple issues. You don’t know what you don’t know. As a small business, a new venture, you’ve got so many different things on your plate, and it’s important. Limiting factors are people and expertise, particularly disciplines. In our business, finding great talent, finding the right people for the right roles is critical in driving success and making clients happy, and being able to grow the companies that we work with.

Until you have an opportunity to work with a consultant or an expert in a field or discipline, there are so many things that you can do, particularly in marketing, that are fundamental, blocking and tackling that create a tremendous ROI. Sometimes, as a new business owner, new CEO or a new venture, you may know the things you need to focus on, but you may not have time to do those things. Oftentimes, you don’t know some of the things that would provide huge opportunities and upsides. Maybe that’s my tip for the day.

I have to unpack that because you don’t know what you don’t know is a lot. I was discussing the potential of doing a sales audit. One of the statements that were said was literally, “Can you tell me what I don’t know because I think I know, but I don’t know.” That’s where we moved into the whole realm of consensus buy-in decision-making. I tout the challenger model all the time. They probably should pay me but they don’t.

At the end of the day, I’m thinking to myself, “What are they up to that twelve-point something decision-makers to make a decision in Corporate America? Many of the small businesses don’t have the benefit of 12.5 decision-makers to help them figure out what they don’t know. I’d love to hear a little more about how they could go about that.

It’s interesting, I had a CEO of a hospital that we worked with say that in a meeting. We were presenting a strategy to them, a very comprehensive marketing strategy. He said that, and it was the first time he said something like that. First off, I had never heard that, and it took a while to sink in like, “What exactly do you mean by that?” As I have matured, grown, worked with clients, and run my own business, there are a lot of things you don’t know until I make that mistake.

There are a lot of things you don’t know until you make that mistake.

Most great leaders have a gut feeling. They know like, “Is this salesperson delivering? Are they performing at a high level? Maybe this one is. Maybe that one isn’t. I know that the quality of our execution is not there.” Most great leaders know that and that’s what makes them great leaders. I’ll give you a great example. In 2006, right before I came to Moving Minds and started our company, I took over an eCommerce operation for a company that was $1 billion and sold technology to the government.

I thought, “I’m taking this job. It’s going to be easy. Their interface is terrible. Their search engine is awful. Their product representation is terrible.” You think about Amazon, “We can fix this. This is a front-end issue.” I got there, did due diligence, and spent 30 days interviewing the whole company and talking about things. I was speaking to the CMO at that time because I was the Director of eBusiness, and he said, “We’re not driving revenue in the way that we want to. What’s the supply chain look like?” I said, “Supply chain? I’m not responsible for the supply chain. That’s their problem.”

After looking at it and I hadn’t thought about it. It dawned on me. I owned the whole thing from the initial visit to the execution and the delivery of that product but I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. You got to own it. I realized that it took 32 days for us to initiate an order and get that order processed. This is 2006. Even at that point, Amazon was still delivering within a day or two. We collapsed that time to two days. When I say, “You don’t know what you don’t know,” I walked in not knowing what I didn’t know, and then figuring out solutions to the challenges that are unforeseen. It’s a critical differentiator in who makes it and who doesn’t.

That’s fascinating to me because little alarm bells are not alarm bells. A-ha moments are happening as you’re saying that because you also executed. You didn’t go, “I don’t know, so I’m not going to do it.” You went in, figured it out and cut the day down to two days. You’d be shocked and amazed at how many will say, “It’s this slow-moving machine. I’m sorry, we can’t do that.” Someone would even say, “Amazon’s got us beat. Why are we even trying?”

At that time, we were competing with CDW. They were as equally as good as Amazon. We took that business in a span of eighteen months. Once we figured out we own the supply chain, we looked at different solutions. We thought about bypassing our existing supply chain through a relationship with a third party that could dropship faster and so forth. We looked at the full array of options, but we took that business from $10 million in 2004, and when we left, it was a $300 million portion of the business. We shifted a lot of the business from traditional orders to internet orders.

Now, that’s not as particularly interesting, but for companies that have not made the transition or fully digitized, or created the digitalization of their services, those are the challenges that they face. You got to figure things out. You got to roll up your sleeves, and you need people to have the same qualities. That’s important. Everybody lives in a silo in larger corporations, and there are so many interdependencies between them. You need all of them to work together to be successful.

TRM 9 | Sales And Marketing

Sales And Marketing: Everybody lives in a silo in larger corporations, and there are so many interdependencies between them. You need all of them to work together to be successful.

That’s something that you’re doing with your Moving Minds business because there are many silos, and they’re not working well together. In a small business, that’s a lot of waste if it’s not working well together. Waste through time, waste through duplicated efforts, whatever. There’s tons of waste. Tell us a little more about that.

There are multiple observations that we have when we work with clients. I’m not talking about the Caremarks and the Oxygens of the worlds, although they make the same rookie mistakes that new ventures make. They have the cushion to be able to make mistakes without falling flat on their face. Now, companies like Netflix who lose a huge number of subscribers in a quarter have dire consequences. You can live in a bureaucracy without a lot of accountability the larger the company is.

When your own venture or a small series A or series B, there are not a lot of places to hide. Generally, we see a few things. One is persistence and consistency. Small ventures test and experiment with things. Usually, when you’re experimenting, you’re putting all of your chips in one basket. In the case of particular clients, they might do a direct mail release. They may do some print ads and some dabble and digital.

They either give up too soon or their strategy may be the wrong one. You have to be persistent. They have to not cut bay but as long as you’re doing the right things, you need to stay to it. That’s true of your brand identity. People’s slogans change, and their branding changes. You got to find the right mix and then be consistent with it. The other thing is, I don’t think people realize how expensive sales and marketing are.

No, they don’t. They think, but for small businesses, that’s one of the reasons cashflow issues happen. It is 82% or 84%. I quote it all the time that they feel because of cashflow, but it’s cashflow due to lack of good brand exposure, pushing the product, and all of that stuff.

We’ve been guilty of this too. When we’re talking about the revenue maze, you’ve got to always build a pipeline. It’s a continuous process. Even our own business, as I self-assess, we’ve generated most of our business because of the great work we do with our clients, and then we get referred. You can get fat and happy. You don’t have to develop a robust sales pipeline. That has unfortunately caused us the inability to grow at a rate that some other firms that appear of ours have grown.

TRM 9 | Sales And Marketing

Sales And Marketing: When we’re talking about the revenue maze, you’ve got to always build a pipeline. It’s a continuous process.

We’ve also made choices in that regard. Being neglectful of building a pipeline consistently is a detriment because that drives cashflow, depending on your churn and relationships. Our relationships are anywhere from 5 to 8 years generally. We’ve had a luxury, but neglecting the pipeline is at your own peril. You need great salespeople. You need to be out there. You need to support your salespeople. Oftentimes, sales and marketing don’t talk to each other and don’t know what each other is doing.

That’s pretty common if you look at new ventures and all types of opportunities to improve what folks are doing. The other option in terms of marketing is, we had a client in New York City that was a roll-up of dermatology clinics, and they had made eight acquisitions. Let’s say they bought a dermatology clinic with $10 million in revenue at a 10X multiple. If you look at what the return on that investment is from a VC or a private equity company, you get to hit 20% to 40% growth targets.

We sat down with them and said, “How can we grow 20% to 40%? Let’s start with your marketing budget. You’re a $63 million company on an aggregate basis. How much do you spend on marketing? Again, all of your practices are in New York City.” They said, “It’s $400,000.” I didn’t laugh but I had sweat coming down my face. I’m thinking, “You guys have bought these companies for $100 million plus, and you’re going to spend $400,000 to grow the company.” This is a pretty sophisticated crowd.

People don’t realize that $200,000 of that is just personnel to execute marketing. Generally, it’s a 50/50 split in terms of investments. That’s for marketing, not including sales and sales organizations. You got to be realistic. In healthcare, generally, what you see is 1.5% of revenue. In technology, you see a much more aggressive growth strategy and less concerned about profitability and more about customer acquisition. That’s in the neighborhood of twenty-plus salesforce spending up to 45% of sales and marketing revenue.

You’ve got manufacturing, but on average, it shouldn’t be about 8% to 9%, between sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue. We do a lot of education with executives and clients. It’s not always easy because they don’t understand the level of investment that’s required to do it the right way. They scamp and cobbled things together. They do something here and there, and then they wonder why the cumulative investment hasn’t made a dent in the growth of the business.

The point is that you haven’t applied the resources. Does that mean you can’t be successful with a small budget? No, not at all. There are ways to go to market and be successful. The other lesson is that people get stretched too thin. Oftentimes, you don’t have to have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and this and that. Focus on one. Focus on the one where your customers are and do that well. Don’t even set up Twitter if you can’t manage it.

We’re guilty of this ourselves because we’re running those programs for our clients. We neglect it for ourselves. It’s like the cobbler’s kids have no shoes. It’s true of a lot of agencies. People ask for a portfolio, and I’m like, “We’re too busy to make a portfolio. What are you talking about?” Those are the observations that I’ve learned. That’s what makes a CMO, a Chief Marketing Officer, or a VP of Marketing.

That’s why they only have 23 months in tenure because there’s an outsized expectation for what marketing can deliver. Oftentimes, they get into the role, there’s a misperception of what they’re supposed to be doing and their growth rate versus what the resources are that they’ve been given. That causes a lot of churns. Endangered species are being CMO these days.

It’s similar in the CRO and CSO space to an extent. Typically, what happens is I grow a company, and they see it as an expense that’s not returning anything. The challenge is changing perception. Part of the reason I talk about small businesses so much and their failure and why they fail isn’t to tout what I’m doing so much. It’s to say, be smart about what you’re doing and know that that’s probably going to be one of your biggest investments you can fix.

I love all my operations friends, so don’t get mad at me. You can fix operations, but if you have no sales coming through the door, they’ll spend an abundance on operations. Yet, in this job market, several of the companies I’m working for try to bootstrap, and I can’t get the top talent needed to grow it at the multiplier that they need. It depends on where they want to go, first of all, when I’m talking to them. You’ve already discussed that.

You talked about their multiplier, and you’re going to spend $400,000. It depends on which industry. You are correct. In manufacturing, you might be able to do 6% to 8% of revenue. In the tech space, when it’s all people selling ideas because it’s very intangible sometimes, especially in the SaaS space where you’re not going in and buying a pair of shoes. At the end of the day, it could be quite high because they are your force that is bringing in all of that.

It’s hard to get sometimes CEOs to not see marketing as an expense. I say the same thing about PR. I get challenged. I’ve turned people away and said, “You need PR because you have no brand. Nothing out there that anybody can know who you are.” They’re like, “That’s so expensive.” Throw a sales team at it who you’re unknown, and they’re banging their head up against the wall. I always call out Jeb Blount too. He should probably pay me, but he doesn’t even know who I am. Anyway, there are 20 to 50 touchpoints for familiarity. Do you want to pay the most expensive resource for that familiarity or pay PR? I try to deal with that.

We often say, “No one buys a product from a company they’ve never heard of.” It’s interesting. I was on TikTok and I saw a quote from Elon Musk. It was maybe an audiogram or something. He’s certainly the world’s richest man. He’s infinitely smarter than I am. He said something I thought was funny and wrong, and it was, “I’ve never spent a dollar marketing any of the companies I’ve ever had like Tesla and SpaceX.” Advertising, we’ve never spent any money on that. It’s a waste. I’m thinking to myself, “You haven’t spent any money on advertising, but the amount of editorial coverage that you’ve generated is worth billions of dollars.”

He’s gotten great PR and PR is considered free. It’s not free because it is an art form and science to get companies placed in trade media and create a thought leadership position. It is a lot of hard work, but it’s viewed as free, like, “Tesla has never spent any money on advertising.” I’m sure they have a huge marketing team, probably in the hundreds. They may not have bought an ad on CNN or something, but they get a ton of publicity that is far worth more than a percentage of their revenues. The other reflection is we built a pipeline, and then over the last few years stood up sales operations. Without a doubt, sales is the hardest job. It is by far. Salespeople think the marketing people are having all the fun.

Without a doubt, sales is the hardest job.

No. Marketing is an insatiable beast. That’s what I call it. When I have to cover marketing as a CRO, the marketing team is there, and I’m like, “It’s so much work.”

It’s a process. Everything is disposable now. You post something witty and interesting on LinkedIn and four hours later, it’s never to be seen again. It all starts over again. It is an insatiable monster and you have to feed it. What I spoke to earlier is people give up, and they try something. They say, “It didn’t work.” You hear that about LinkedIn too. In terms of writing organic content, self to perpetuate your personal brand on LinkedIn, people give up. They don’t get traction, even with SEOs, Search Engine Optimization, it’s a long game.

There is no instant gratification to this. You have to be consistent and persistent over time. Think where people make mistakes, and they don’t know what they don’t know as they get too diversified. We’re a diversified marketing multichannel company. The thing is to reign it in and become good at certain things. It may only be PR, a broader mix, and as you move from a sales-oriented organization at an early stage, and then you start to say, “Now we need marketing on top of that.” Whereas you could go direct to a customer and sell directly without a lot of air support, then you grow into a later-stage company where you do need sophisticated marketing.

Sales is by far the hardest job. It is brutal. As a marketer, I have a lot of appreciation now for living in that role and doing it day-to-day. It’s hard. Marketing needs to appreciate that. Also, sales probably don’t have an appreciation for the science that is now part of marketing in terms of measurement and KPIs and things of that nature. Whereas everybody thinks it’s a pretty picture on a banner ad and things like that.

The beautiful thing about being a CRO is you’ve seen all sides of that fence because we cover new product development, marketing, and sales service. Quite often, when you’re dealing with stuff like that, I wasn’t kidding when I said it was the insatiable beast because you have to have that process in play to do that to keep you at the top of the rinks and front and center. When you were saying an early-stage company, they all want to get an SDR and a salesman, but their marketing would make PR and the sales job infinitely easier.

There are not that many salespeople out there that can be that one-man show. It was Mike Weinberg who said less than 20% or 15% can do the end-to-end cradle-to-graving type sales that we call the door-to-door salesman where they get their only gen. They go all the way through the process. Nobody has time because you’re yesterday’s news to do that anymore. One of the companies I’m working for is trying to do mid-market and enterprise.

When you think about that, I know the perception is, “We’re going to bootstrap and be able to throw this up.” What we were inbound at first, all of a sudden, we’re going to be able to move to the enterprise. That’s a long-haul sale. The two don’t even go hand in hand. Those dry pipelines, when you’re talking about 30 or 90 days later, you’ll notice when that pipeline is dry. Sometimes, with that job of trying to do when you were saying the KPIs and the metrics because you’ve got to be able to track things other than revenue at the beginning to see if you are even off base for that.

When you’re dealing with finite resources, and every marketing budget is finite, you have to 3make allocations. The only way to make educated allocations is to be able to analyze and evaluate the investments that you’re making. The only way to do that is to put measurements in place. One of the other misperceptions is that marketing is not measurable. I deal with this all the time with CFOs. They view marketing as a cost center instead of an investment, which is also to do that is frustrating.

TRM 9 | Sales And Marketing

Sales And Marketing: The only way to make educated allocations is to be able to analyze and evaluate the investments that you’re making. The only way to do that is to put measurements in place.

It’s because of the world that they’ve grown up in, they started as a controller or an AR or an AP and then they went to a controller. They don’t have a world of pressure and a growth mentality. They have a cost mentality. The analogy I usually use is that sales are the folks. Think about the Battle of Normandy storming the beaches. You’ve got the sales team hitting the beaches with a modest amount of firepower and climbing the sand and hitting the bunkers.

Without the air cover of the B-2 bombers or whatever it might be pounding those positions and softening their customers or their prospects with proper marketing, it’s hard. You’re on an island. Those two things have to work well together. We’re in a situation now where B2B marketing has evolved significantly, where you can support sales in a very structured, cost-effective manner. Most of the platforms that have been built are for consumer advertising. TikTok, with the exception of LinkedIn, of course, Twitter, Google Display, and Facebook, all of these things were built.

The measurements and the ability to target and filter are not as good for a B2B audience targeting a purchaser. As you said, if you’re selling into a hospital system and you have 8 to 12 people that are part of that decision-making process, how do you reach all of them other than cold calling them or going to a trade show, where they discover you somehow? How do you employ these tactics? B2B marketing has evolved significantly such that you can do account-based marketing, which means you’re targeting an individual company.

You can target IBM’s headquarters if you’re selling a solution to IBM or another type of company. You can also use contact targeting, which is the ability to target individuals. For those twelve decision makers at the hospital, you can target them and do a combination of sales outreach with LinkedIn outreach and air cover, which is digital ads that are targeted to those individuals. It’s come a long way, and sales have evolved a lot too. There are so many different tools now to help facilitate whether it be contact data or cold outreach automation tools, CRMs, but all of it is measurable. That’s one thing that people don’t understand. It’s a fault so much. It’s no longer an art, but more of a science now than it ever has been.

It’s interesting that you say that because everything is measurable. When I am teaching what I call goal playbooks, every year, they have to forecast their upcoming year. You get a salesman who goes, “How can I measure the intangibles?” I’m like, “You’d be shocked. You can measure an outcome.” I’m very big into The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Sean Covey and 4XY by 1 framework. People have to get to thinking that way.

I was laughing when you had Citibank on your list because I remember it was a team of 3 salesmen with 10 Citibank guys around the room, and you’re pitching. I have appreciated that we’ve moved into what we call account-based marketing. I remember programming my first CRM. It was Microsoft Dynamics clear back when and I’m going, “We’re not selling to humans. We’re selling to companies. How do you bridge that gap?” A lot of the CRMs have come forward with a lot of good ways to tie with relationships and then track those personas because the same is true. You can’t always remember all those things. There are some great tools out there to help you get there. I love what you’re saying with all of that.

We’re all human beings. When we talk about targeting business-to-business prospects on these platforms, they all go home and are sitting in front of a television, scrolling through Facebook, and checking out Twitter during lunch and all of this. B2B buyers are human beings, and they buy on emotion too as a consumer would in terms of an impulse to buy a candy bar as you’re sitting in the grocery line. The sales cycle is so long, generally.

B2B buyers are human beings, and they buy on emotion too as a consumer.

It’s a combination of being persistent and being omnipresent through advertising and marketing, and then you have to have a good sales team. That’s when your value proposition, your support in terms of the customer journey, and the nurturing that needs to happen through that process. Part of it is great content, whether it be testimonials, case studies, videos or what have you, to be able to stay in touch with that prospect and continue to touch and nurture them. You need a great sales team to do that without bothering them. It’s a very careful delicate dance.

The art of interrupting their day.

You have to create a sense of urgency. We had a call with a client, and they’re one of the leaders in their space, but they sell the hospital systems and the capital investment process is twelve months plus. They will only make a certain number of investments each year and can only handle a certain number of initiatives each year that are technology-related. You have to, as a company, figure out how you create such a strong value proposition based on KPIs and proof points such that you get that particular solution into their top 3 or 4.

That’s why marketing is so important. That’s why the content that you create and propagate is so important and a variety of tactics are important to get you shortlisted. That’s the key. If you can’t get shortlisted, you’re finished. If they don’t know about you, you’ll never be shortlisted. That goes back to another client we had a conversation with. They are wondering why they aren’t generating any inbound leads.

You look at their keyword position tracking using a tool like Semrush, and they’re not on Page 1 for any of the industry terms that are specific to their services. If you’re on Page 3, you’re not going to generate any inbound volume. It’s a combination of all these things working together to drive a particular outcome. I don’t think people necessarily understand all of these things and how they work together, but a lot of people do. It’s hard to sometimes assemble the resources to be able to do those things.

It is getting a mindset of sembling the resources because a buck is too much if we don’t have it. I use this analogy all the time. We are all in debt to our homes in the United States, and we pay three times the price in mortgages. How do we make it digestible? What I like about what you’ve been saying and what I feel is so hard in the marketing realm, and it’s always plagued me is, people buy from people they trust and people buy for their reasons. You’ll hear that on my show all the time, which I can’t coin that one.

One of my mentors always says, “Get a sales team. Why do people buy and they’d all come up with these reasons?” You were like, “It’s their reasons.” That’s the only reason they buy. It’s very simple but as you look at that, that is talking about many different personalities and personas. We know Simon Sinek, they buy on emotion whether we like it or not. I’ve worked with engineers and all things. You can give them to the facts, come home, and eventually, what pushes them over the edge is the emotion.

For marketers, you guys have such a difficult job because a salesman can read a room and assess it if they’re good, and realize, “This person is the blogger. This person is the one who wants to talk about the big truck.” I’ve been in construction. “This one wants to talk about healthcare. This one wants to talk about those things.” We’re not talking about being fake or anything, but it is trying to tap into things that connect that human connection that then says, “We can build a bond. We trust each other enough to transact because I trust my mom, so I transact with her all the time.”

That’s the job. You can’t walk into a room as a marketer. You have to use data, buying behaviors, their journey, and that thing. Some may be input from reps who have talked to people to survey to then figure out what they really want. That’s what I think is the hardest part. I can talk and figure that one out but you can’t in the normal channels.

That’s one of the reasons why I say persistence and consistency. Part of it is timing. You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know whether a particular hospital system is looking at a particular type of EMR solution. Those are things that you don’t know. It’s important to have breadth and scale in your marketing and sales. Sometimes it’s good fortune. Everyone is sitting around that table. The CIO has a different perspective. He’s thinking about, “I don’t have any resources or personnel to take on this initiative. How do you deal with that?”

You talk about the integration and the onboarding process and the lack of disruption to their other initiatives and the IT ecosystem. The CFO is interested in what he’s interested in. It’s reducing costs and increasing top line. How does that solution relevant to their needs? You’ve got the champion typically that one single person within the organization that’s pushing it. The goal is to make all of them a hero because it’s, “What’s in it for me? How does this make me look better?” We even tell companies that at CoStar we created this thing called power brokers, which highlighted those that were excellent in their job.

We created awards that would help create recognition for them. Part of it was to generate customer testimonials because most companies are restrictive relative to their ability to communicate about a particular product or see it as an endorsement. It’s like, “How do you get around corporate communications to get a testimonial?” There are all kinds of different ways, but you have to be able to elicit the champion and their perspective such that you can continue to sell to other champions.

It’s always, “What’s about me?” If you can’t hone in like a laser on each one of those folks sitting around the table and what is going to motivate them to reach a consensus, then you’re in real trouble. That’s important. Each one has a different language and a different motivation. That’s part of what we would develop as a sales platform or a toolkit. We call it a battle card, which is a messaging document that we give to our salespeople to represent that content or the solution to that particular audience.

Oftentimes, if they don’t have that guidance for marketing, they’ll create it on their own. Sometimes they’ll create their own collateral if marketing isn’t supportive of their efforts. That’s why it’s important for marketing and sales to always communicate with each other and live in each other’s shoes for a day. You’d be shocked how little that happens.

It’s important for marketing and sales to always communicate with each other and live in each other’s shoes for a day.

At one company, I started a shout-out because they were so divided. Every week you need to pick somebody to shout out so that you understand what’s going on. In other words, start observing what’s going on in that world. Lou, this has been so exciting. I understand that you have a few things. You started in California and ended up in Florida. I’m a Californian, although the Idahoans that I live with would totally object. Tell me a little bit about you. People want to know about you. What do you like? You went to the University of California. You also graduated from Alabama. I understand you are quite a sports fan.

I’m a huge football fan. I love Alabama football, and I’ve been very fortunate. It’s easy to love Alabama football because we’ve been good for the last few years. I’ve been all over the place. My dad was a salesperson and marketing person, and we had the opportunity to move. I lived in Houston, Birmingham, Cleveland, and California, but I grew up my formative years in San Francisco Bay Area. I started college at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and then I ended up transferring most of my family from the South.

I ended up transferring and finishing at the University of Alabama. We have moved around for a variety of different other companies that I mentioned at the outset. In 2006, we relocated to Florida, and then we relocated moving miles about a few years ago to West Palm Beach. In terms of the things I enjoy, I enjoy working. I love what we do. This sounds crazy, but we do boating and all the fun stuff that you might expect in Florida. I’m always committed to learning. There’s not anything in this particular field that isn’t new every single day. It’s hard to get atrophied if you’re interested in the subject matter.

I wish I was more interested in corporate finance and investment banking, but I chose marketing instead. I love what we do for our clients. We get a lot of gratification from, as you probably do, Valerie, seeing them grow, having them listen to you, applying the recommendations that you can provide to them, executing them, and seeing the end result, which is very exciting. We love to learn, and we continue to do that. Again, we try to apply those things for the benefit of our clients constantly.

If you had to pick a book, what book would be one that you would tell the audience to read next?

It’s funny you asked that. This is a great book and I started reading it. It’s a book that’s written by Donald Miller. It’s called Building a Story Brand. Even as a marketer, you can get caught up in complex representations of clients, products, and services. You can overthink things. I don’t think I’ve ever met a client that was happy with their messaging. I started reading this book and it is fantastic. For anybody that’s struggling with messaging, how to go to market, and telling a story, it’s a fabulous book.

TRM 9 | Sales And Marketing

Building a Story Brand

It’s not a particularly long book, so it’s an easy summer read by the pool. It’s well worth it. It’s about simplifying your message, creating a narrative that’s compelling and interesting, and thinking about your company like the script and the arc of a movie to pull them in and create. It has a lot to do with articulating a pain point and the resolution of that pain point using a particular solution that you happen to represent. That’s a great book. I highly recommend that.

I wrote it down. It’s like, “I’m going to write that one down.”

It’s a super easy read too.

This has been super fun. I have enjoyed this episode so thoroughly, Lou. Where can the readers reach out to you?

We’re based in West Palm, but we’re on the World Wide Web at MovingMinds.io. Certainly, we’re on LinkedIn. I’m personally on LinkedIn, so you’re welcome to reach out to me individually. Visit our website, and we’ve got a toll-free number. You can call us if you have any questions, but we’re more than happy to help any of the readers that you have. Valerie, I’m grateful for the opportunity to share with you our experiences and hear your own as well.

It’s been great. Everybody, this has been another wonderful episode of The Revenue Maze. I’m super excited. Thank you all for reading, and thank you again, Lou, for being on our show.

I’m glad to do it. Thank you for the invitation again.

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About Lou Hughes

Lou Hughes

Lou Hughes is the Founder and CEO at MovingMinds.io. He has worked with many prominent companies and wants to help others figure out how to increase their ROI. Lou joins host Valerie Cobb to talk about how to increase the value of your company and work your way out of the confusing maze that is revenue.

Here at Revenue NorthStar, we are passionate about sharing experiences and first-hand knowledge from the trenches. No fake gurus or consultants; we get into the execution of well-proven steps, strategies, and frameworks to help your business grow faster and more efficiently. Stay connected with us on social media for regular updates, tips, and insights:

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About The Author : Valerie Cobb

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