Sean Campbell: Close More B2B Clients with Virtual Sales

As the business world zooms forward in this digital age, face-to-face sales are now more face-to-screen.

And guess what? B2B sales aren't trailing behind; they're riding the wave of change!

In this insightful episode, I’m joined by none other than Sean Campbell, CEO of Cascade Insights, a leading authority in helping companies seize opportunities in the B2B technology sector. 

With his wealth of experience and expertise, Sean sheds light on the strategies that can supercharge your virtual sales efforts and help you forge stronger client relationships.

Hang tight as we unpack the keys to unlocking unparalleled success in the virtual B2B realm. 

So tune in, turn up, and let's revolutionize your sales success!

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

• Shifting towards relationship-driven B2B sales
• Strategies for shorter, more efficient virtual meetings
• The power of staying narrow within a niche as a business owner

Links from this episode:

• Know more about Sean Campbell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seancampbell
• Learn more about Cascade Insights: http://www.cascadeinsights.com
• Follow Sean Campbell on Twitter: https://twitter.com/sean_campbell
• Connect with Seam Campbell: sean@cascadeinsights.com

Want to give your podcast the boost it needs to stay ahead of the competition? Check out honestpodcasts.com and take the first step toward achieving your podcasting goals!

And if you have a guest in mind who you think would be a great fit for this show, drop me a line at hello@honestpodcasts.com. 

Transcript

Sean Campbell  [00:00:00]:

The temptations are so strong as a business owner to go broad, to go wide, to spread yourself, to engage with other opportunities. And what you need to do is you need to stay focused on that niche that you know you can serve and you can generate a lot of love from. And that makes sales conversations easier. That makes proposal development easier. It makes the whole thing easier. And if somebody's listening and saying, but I don't want to be a niche. I want to be like, massive. I'm like but then grow slowly outward as you go do that if the biggest piece of advice I usually give an entrepreneur.

Travis Albritton [00:00:32]:

Welcome back to the Honest Marketing Podcast, where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host Travis Albritton, and my guest today, Sean Campbell, really shared a lot of great nuggets and insights when it comes to selling and marketing online, both on a client side, on a team side. And so I'm really excited about digging into some of those specific things. Some of the big takeaways for me were how to really show up in a professional way when you're doing client side interactions and virtual meetings and things like that. Because let's face it, we're all selling things online nowadays. If you're in a B to B space, that's what you're doing. You're connecting with people. You're zooming, you're doing phone calls. So we share some really practical things that him and his team do to really show up in a fantastic way and leverage that to really make those interactions fantastic. And then we talked quite a bit about what he is doing with his business, just sharing his own practical things of things that they're doing to both position themselves and their company as the forefront of their niche and their industry. And then he shares some really counterintuitive, but I think very poignant and important thoughts around how to succeed in marketing and sales in 2023 and beyond. So can't wait for you guys to dig in. Here it is, my conversation with Sean Campbell. So, Sean, tell me a little bit about the origin of your company, Cascade Insights. And then just like a 62nd elevator pitch of what you do, just so anyone listening has a little bit of context about where you're coming from and where your expertise is.

Sean Campbell  [00:01:59]:

Yeah, well, I'll start with Cascade and then how I'm related to Cascade. So with Cascade, I generally say the following. We are only focused on B, two B tech. So I sometimes summarize that as those things that are not sold in a Best Buy. And so it's all businesses buying software and cloud services from businesses. That's our target market. And for those organizations, we either help them position and I think of positioning as a verb, like, all of our clients are not in a position or trying to identify the position. They're always kind of moving around a little bit based on what's happening to them in the market. And so we will sit there and help them figure that out through really good research and marketing activation. But research at the top. We're a research first company. So that'll be like things like market segmentation, identifying your ideal customer profile, stuff like that. And then the other side of the business is helping people say the right things to the right people. And so once you know where your position is, how can you message effectively? And so we'll do things like buyer persona research and message testing and competitive landscape analyses and are you kind of pitching the right features to the right audiences and those kinds of things. And that's really the pillars of who we are. And so that encompasses a fair amount underneath that. But that's what we do for companies. And my journey, it's weird because I was going to be a college professor and that's what I thought I was going to do. I love teaching and 20 plus years later I've owned businesses for that amount of time. And just two, because you always meet the guy at the networking event that says, I've been in six startups in six years. I just want to say that person's not accomplished. Let's just put it that way. And so I don't care how they explain those six startups. If you're in six companies in six years and all of them started, I mean, anyway, that's my digression about the whole like fail fast BS anyway. But I have found that owning a business has a surprising and almost, say an amazing ability to turn you into an educator and teacher. And some of that is probably just how I'm wired. Like I've said for years, I'm pathologically incapable of learning something and not teaching it to somebody else. Even all my hobbies involve some version of coaching, educating, hey, I like fishing, so I'm going to go teach everybody around me how to fish. And I don't do that in an overbearing way and you'd all have to trust me listening, but ask my friends and family, but it's the way I'm wired. I like to educate. And a business, I came to realize, especially on the services side, does a lot of that. And then the funny thing is we do research, which is also typically the life of a professor. So I have this kind of weird thing that I found a very academic in a good way lifestyle, but it wasn't in the university setting and that's kind of been my journey. So it's kind of interesting how it.

Travis Albritton [00:05:07]:

Worked out well, and I appreciate you having that teaching mentality because I'm going to be peppering you with all kinds of questions that are completely self serving, but I imagine fair enough, other people will benefit from it too. The first question I have for you is you've been in the landscape for a while, longer than most typically you measure online businesses in months instead of years. Nowadays, it seems with how fast technology is evolving. How have you seen sales and marketing shift both in your specific niche, but then overall over the last couple of years with COVID and everything, that's kind of happened in the shift to remote and now kind of like back to hybrid and some of companies saying, no, we're fully back. How are all these cultural underpinnings and larger shifts impacting the way that B, two B businesses are marketing and selling to their clients that are experiencing these things on the other side as well?

Sean Campbell  [00:06:02]:

Well, I'll say one thing initially from a skills standpoint. I think one of the things that COVID and everybody going to work from home, which I'm incredibly passionate about, is the right way to go. And I'm totally happy to talk about that because I think there's so many things that are wrong in the discourse. Now. Just to give you one as a preview, if we ended up talking about it, everybody wants to talk about return to the office as like that's where productivity lies. What's interesting is implicit in that is, y'all, worker bees weren't productive. You know what I never hear in that is, hey, managers, did you know how to manage people when they weren't standing in front of you? Because that's a different skill because I've done that for 20 years and I can tell you it's different. It's different. And I've had an office too, so I've seen how it works in the other kind of view. But I would say the biggest thing from a skill standpoint that I would say is true of particularly salespeople, is it exposed the need and the ability to write. Well, the best example of this I could think of was a client of mine a couple months into COVID said to me, and he's a nice guy, this is going to sound really pointed, but it wasn't a jerky kind of comment, it was more like an educational comment. He said, I had no idea how dumb my colleagues were until they had to write me to convince me to do something. And his point was that office environment where you shuffle over to Bob or Mary and you start the conversation with like, hey, you know that thing we were talking about yesterday? And you just kind of ignore the first 20 seconds of that warm up. You can't do that in written communication. And so when sellers were thrown into I can't get on a plane, I can't go somewhere, I can't do that. What I noticed was anybody who had that figured out, particularly on the smaller services side, where a lot of it was like in person relationship building, you could dominate. We had a pretty darn good marketing engine at our size and I think that's probably being a little self effacing. I mean, just from what I've heard other people say about like in terms of what it creates. And we were really good at written communication and when everybody had to go use Google as their therapist to go find a vendor and they couldn't just go meet the guy down the hall, it really worked out for the I think that's the underrated skill. And the other thing is I think people give too much of a pass on writing for salespeople in particular because there's kind of this thing of like, well, I'm good at one or the other. The marketer says I'm good at writing, but I'm not good at speeches. And the salesperson says I'm really good at speaking, but I'm not good at writing. And hey, if you're over 30, you can't blame the educational system anymore. It's you. Right? It's you. You didn't get better at it. Right. And arguably, I would say even as I've trained sellers over the years, right. I would say it's the one thing if they got better at, they would do a better job. And I would say now that now that more selling is remote and it will be remote more than it was in years past. I mean, you could almost graph it. Like when I started 20 years ago, I'm 52, right? So when I started 20 plus years ago with a business, we decide that Microsoft is going to be our first account. And there's reasons that happened that I could get into, but it's kind of semi irrelevant. So my first experience was trying to learn how to sell Microsoft in the early aughts when they own 97% of computing, which is so weird to think about, right? I mean, imagine if 97% of phones were iPhones. We would think that's bizarre, right? But that's what they were, 97. I mean, it's, it's just hard to fathom even for me who lived through it. It's like really? Do they have that much dominance? I don't even know. We're never going to really get back to that and probably good that we're not going to. I was on a plane and I was in meetings and I was there and that was the only way to win a deal. And you could almost graph the size of deal that you can create without ever showing up, right? Seriously, I should have made a graph. I probably could have. And you can sell a deal of almost any size now, it seems like, without showing up in person. But what does that mean? Well, you're going to write a lot of emails, you're going to write a lot of communication and it's not all going to be in zoom. One quick second thing too. I saw some guy talking about this. I think this is related, but I'll just shove this in here at the end here. But I saw a post the other day that just kind of incensed me and usually I don't feel that way about posts. I mean, if you feel that way about the Internet all day long. It's going to be a short life for you, you know what I mean? But there was this post, I was just like, gur, and the guy was kind of softly slapping away at, you can't really build an awesome company unless you're in the same building. And I'm like, oh, fiddlesticks. No, that's not true. But at one point, he's like, zoom has this low pass filter on emotion, and you can't really engage in the same way. And I'm like, has this guy forgotten about YouTube? I mean, how many people watch YouTube? I think it's engaging. I think so does the planet, and that's when only one person is talking. So nine times out of ten. So I think it's a fallacy to say, like, well, Zoom is doing to it. No, there's so many reasons why that does or doesn't work for you virtually. But it's not just the idea that we're talking to a 2D screen and watching one. You can make it engaging. People could quibble about whether or not you're in my conversation right now is engaging, but I think we know there are plenty of engaging videos on YouTube, and we watch those and we engage with those. So it is not the idea of just two D to two D anyway. So I would add to that if you're a seller and you don't know how to build a really good audio visual environment for yourself, I would just stop right now and go buy those tools. Because too often I even to this day, get a phone call or an interaction with somebody, and I'm like, you're talking to me with the tool set of five years ago. I mean, there is no excuse for like $300, maybe even less. You could sound like you're sitting in a studio and there's no excuse for not having those tools.

Travis Albritton [00:12:59]:

Yeah, there's always been a tendency to villainize new technology as the scapegoat for why certain things don't go the way that you want them to, or why productivity goes down, or why you're not hitting certain metrics. It's like, well, in the past, I would fly out there and we'd close all these deals and handshakes and bars, and now I have to zoom. And so it Zooms the problem. I want to circle back to what you said about writing, though, because I think that's super key, especially in a B, two B environment where you have longer sales cycles from cold prospecting to closing, where you're not looking at a week of emails, you're looking at like eight months of emails. Like, maybe you get them right at the beginning of their budget, and you have to wait for the full budgetary year to finish up before you even unlock more funding to move forward. And how the persistence that you need to have in continuing to write those emails and continuing to foster that relationship on those longer sales cycles? I think also reveals a need for really strong writing skills. That's my dog in the background, if you're curious.

Sean Campbell  [00:14:00]:

No, fine.

Travis Albritton [00:14:01]:

I have a hound dog.

Sean Campbell  [00:14:03]:

They might show up at some point, too, so they like to be on.

Travis Albritton [00:14:07]:

Yeah, she loves to make an appearance just to let everybody know that she lives here, too, even though she's not on the show.

Sean Campbell  [00:14:14]:

That's cool. Well, I said through all of the return to home thing, our dogs love that we're home. Our cats aren't sure, because cats are like, well, my slave is here, so there's an advantage, I guess. I can get more done with my slave, but the dog is like, you're home all day. Really? All day? That's my aggression. I'm not an anti cat person. We have two cats, and we have two dogs. I have to admit, I think I love the dogs just a little bit more, but that's just me being me, for sure.

Travis Albritton [00:14:54]:

But I do want to talk about zoom and virtual meetings with clients because I know for me personally and for a lot of business owners where you're not geographically locked in to a client base. So if you have an Internet based business or a SaaS company or you're selling software and you don't have to only sell to people that live close to you, being able to leverage virtual tools to be able to create those interactions, develop those relationships, and get those clients is really valuable. What do you do? Like, how do you set yourself up for success when you're getting into those virtual meetings? How do you make those things a home run both for you and for the client? Their experience that they're like, wow, these guys have their act together. They know what they're doing. They're coming prepared. I feel like I'm being served even before I become a client or customer. How do you foster that kind of a sales environment where it's much more collaborative, instead of we're sitting across the table from each other and we got the stare down going on.

Sean Campbell  [00:15:52]:

Yeah, well, for one thing, try to build a culture where the minute somebody's on mute, eight people don't say you're on mute. I mean, there are so many things that are just, like, borderline annoying. Bob knows he's on mute. Bob keeps putting himself on mute. Just let Bob suffer. That the first three words of whatever he says for the rest of his life. No one will ever hear that's know? I mean, there's some dynamic things that just drive me crazy, but audio is king. I would say that I think that's a big deal. I police it all the time in my company, and even so, I feel like I still have to go around with a stick sometimes. There was somebody I can say this because I'm not going to say which employee. All of a sudden, I could tell this employee had, for whatever reason, decided that using their laptop microphone was like, okay, for client meetings. And I waited about 24 hours, and I said, can you stop using your laptop microphone? And the answer was, well, my AirPods died. And I said we'll get new AirPods. We buy those for you. I think we don't recognize how much of a distraction those things are when we just don't use the tech the right way. I think the other thing is, remote meetings are funny. I think we don't treat them the same way we do in person meetings, where we're a little bit more willing to have a four and a half minute meeting or a hallway meeting. It seems like remote meetings are always 30 minutes. And I would say as a company leader, one of the easiest things you can do to increase productivity and as a sales team member, the easiest way that you can get a lot of love from your clients is give them a seven minute meeting, right? Whether you schedule it shorter or you schedule it for half an hour, but you get out of it and you say, hey, look, I'm sure you probably need time to unbold your inbox, I'm going to be the guy that gives you 17 minutes of the 30 back, right? So I think that's one thing, too, is like making sure that you don't make everything a half an hour meeting, because I think it's just the way it is, and I wish it wasn't. I would also say, show up on video. I get it. Sometimes I don't. Occasionally, if I feel like I'm just a little too sugar low to really drive a good meeting, and I'm going to drive a better one if I don't have to be on camera and on audio, I will sometimes shunt down to that. I even use a conferencing solution called Uber Conference. They hardly ever call it anymore. It's now part of dial pad. But what I love about it, it's Pinless. So these guys went out and they bought a bunch of actual phone numbers, like a million years ago. I interviewed the CEO of it on my podcast when I had one, and it's a whole interesting story about how they ended up buying a lot of phone numbers. So for them, somebody just dials a phone number. There's no pin. So when I feel like, hey, this is my 7th meeting of the day, and I don't want to be on video, but I don't want it to be like, they're on video, and then I'm not. I'll set up the meeting just on my Uber conference and just be like, hey, I can only be on audio today. Which nobody questions, right? And then you just do a phone call. And last time I checked, we sold a ton of stuff in the aughts through the phone. So it's not like you can't win or move a deal forward through the phone, but then you get it out of that idea of, like, well, why aren't you on video? But generally speaking, I would say the more you can be on video, the better. Get out of the meeting before it's up. Don't hold on to the thing. Don't set everything for half an hour. Have great audio, have really good video, and be okay just doing a phone call. There's days where you just don't need to be in frame. Right. And that's okay, but just be engaged while you're just on the phone. So those are some things. I will say one thing about a client, though, real fast. You know, you're used to being told, like, wait for the, you know, Henry Kissinger. Whoever speaks first loses. Right. You know, kind of thing. But what I find is that people will do that in conversation, but they won't do that when they share a document in a meeting. And this is an open secret, by the way. What I'm about to say next. I'm not giving anything away about Amazon Web Services that the Planet doesn't. If you deliver a readout to Amazon Web Services, say, a research findings deck, they will spend the first 15 minutes of the meeting. It's not always precisely 15, obviously, but somewhere in that range, reading in the meeting what you sent them. And by the way, that is in absolute silence so that the next 45 minutes of the meeting can actually be productive, because it's not productive to have a meeting where Bob's read it, but Mary hasn't, or vice versa, because then we have this impedance mismatch. Right? Bob or Mary are trying to come up to speed on everything that Bob or Mary said, and only toward the end is everybody actually on the same page. So I've stolen from that playbook sometimes, and I've done it a couple ways. Like, if a client really looks like they haven't read anything we've sent them. I've actually sometimes why don't we reschedule this for tomorrow? I want to give you guys time to review it. I don't do that that often. I've done that occasionally, but more often, it's like, learn how to be silent for multiple minutes, perhaps, while you leave the client room to actually read what you gave them. It wouldn't seem so awkward in an in person meeting, but it's really awkward in zoom. It feels OD right. To sit there for 15 minutes in silence. And I don't think you always need 15. That's Amazon's kind of extreme way of doing things. But I have to tell you, when you get to minute 16 in an Amazon meeting, you get good questions, and they're uniform because everybody read it. Right. And there's a moral there when it comes to sending proposals, having people review contracts, all that kind of stuff. So there's just some different dynamic there that I think you have to take into account.

Travis Albritton [00:22:32]:

Yeah. And learning how to really lean into the platform's strengths instead of complaining about its weaknesses. Right. And how do we leverage this to make an even better impression? Because you could sell this as you don't have to mark out time for me to fly in and meet with you for, like, a full day. It's like we're just going to grab 20 minutes on your calendar. I'll work with your assistant to find something that works, and we'll just hop on and whatever makes sense to you.

Sean Campbell  [00:22:59]:

Well, it's a little bit these tools.

Travis Albritton [00:23:00]:

Can unlock other opportunities.

Sean Campbell  [00:23:02]:

Yeah, when it's a little bit like, I remember what happened when we started our first company back in 2000. I've only had two, right? But I had one that I grew and sold, and then I've owned this one and the first one, we were remote, like 100% remote, pretty much for a number of years. In 2000, when that was really OD, even Tech thought that was OD. And we would fly to client sites to close deals. I agree with that much. But everything else was at home. And I remember clients would say, and this sounds so OD now, but they used to say it back then, so you don't have an office. Hear the tone. So you don't have an office. So you must not be real. Right? And I would be like.

Travis Albritton [00:23:51]:

I said.

Sean Campbell  [00:23:52]:

It with a smile enough that I could get away with it. I go, no, but you could pay for it. And they would go, what did you say? Yeah, you could pay for it. I mean, we'd be happy to add it to the statement of work. Yeah, you're right. Okay, so somebody's got to pay for it, right? Yeah, I think it's the same thing, right? Let me just grab 20 minutes of your time remotely, and you don't have to meet me in the lobby. You don't have to come down. You don't have to cross six buildings on the campus to go find me. We don't have to go find a place to meet. Yeah. So back to a point you raised earlier. I think not being present is a poor excuse for not being successful in sales. I'm not saying it doesn't help occasionally, but you can be as successful as the guy who's flying everywhere 100%. You do not have to get on a plane to close deals. I'll just leave it as firm as that. And I know there's somebody listening that's just screaming right now. Yes, you do. And I'm like, you don't you don't have to get on a plane to close deals. You don't just leave it at that. So you're getting on a plane for different reasons, totally legitimate, whatever those may be, but you do not have to get on a plane to close deals. I don't care what the deal is.

Travis Albritton [00:25:13]:

Yeah, well, I mean, if you got per diem, use it or lose it, right? When you're not the owner of the company, you think that way, and you.

Sean Campbell  [00:25:22]:

Can learn about clients. I used to say I was a corporate cultural anthropologist because I learned a lot by being in the building of a big tech company. Right. I learned kind of how the company was. And sure, that would help in some ways. But once I kind of had that zeitgeist in my head and I'd been doing it for long enough, I mean, only so much of that changes over time. And so there's kind of background radiation of a sort that you can pick up. But yeah, to me, I would much rather just be home and having all the joys of that and still closing deals, for sure.

Travis Albritton [00:26:02]:

And then kind of as we start to wrap up, I would love to just hear about your companies, like how you are leaning into these platforms to grow yourself. Right. Because it's obviously one thing to say on a principal level or practically, these are the things that we've seen work or that we encourage other people to do. But I'm always curious, what are the specific strategies that you are utilizing now to grow your company with sales and marketing? Because those will obviously be really refined through trial and error. And we tried this thing and it didn't work, and then we tried this thing and it didn't work, and this popped off. So we've really leaned into that. So what are some of the things that you're really focused on now for connecting with your niche customer base, continuing to stab yourself as a market leader, and then kind of greasing the skids for the deal flow? What are the things that you're focused on right now?

Sean Campbell  [00:26:53]:

For me, it always comes down to staying narrow enough. We have so many things that want to make us be broad as business owners. Right. I mean, there's so many pressures to be broad if you own a business, right. Your staff wants to go tackle different things than they're working on today. The market wants to give you opportunities that are just a little bit outside what you typically do. Right. And maybe a lot outside what you do. You maybe do have plans for world nomination. I don't, but I'd like to grow, but I don't have world nomination plans. And so you just see everything as an opportunity. For me, we engage in a lot of activities, whether it's email outreach and blogging and SEO and thought leadership and all those things. But if you were to ask me the thing that makes it work, it's staying narrow, because I think ultimately that has a trillion benefits, right? I mean, one, the customers are easier to refer to each other. The testimonials have more resonance. You get better at serving a certain type of client, so your costs go down. You can actually charge a premium at the same time while your costs are going down because you have all the social proof of serving a particular space. You have a tool set. That's fairly optimized for serving that kind of market. And at the same time, I feel like you're lining up with an interesting cultural trend that sometimes I've just called the age of narrow just to give it a name. And I don't mean it's like narrow thinking. What I mean is it's like we have the ability to access narrow streams of entertainment and thought somewhat to our benefit, right? Like, if you want to watch historical British period dramas, you could just watch that for the rest of your life. We haven't had that kind of opportunity, right? You've got media streams that can be extremely narrow that you can look at. You've got even purchase funnels, right? You want to order a bunch of potato chips from the UK off of Amazon and that's the only kind of potato chips you want to buy. And you live in the States. Well, you can go do that. If it sounds like I've done that as a gift, I have. It's an interesting little free trick. If you're struggling to find a gift for someone, go to an Amazon portal that isn't the US and type in the same thing you normally buy. Like, I've got a brother in law who loves weird chips, so I just went to Amazon Co UK and was like, Popular chips in the UK. Go figure. None of them are sold here. Two days later, they're sitting on my um. But you've got this narrow ability to kind of engage with things. And I think what it does is it forces people to think, well, maybe in my business life I want the same thing. I want the niche supplier. I believe they're out there and once you're in that niche, it makes everything easier. So that would be my big piece of advice. As straightforward as it is, I think the challenge is people don't stick to it because the temptations are so strong as a business owner to go broad, to go wide, to spread yourself, to engage with other opportunities. And what you need to do is you need to stay focused on that niche that you know you can serve and you can generate a lot of love from. And that makes sales conversations easier, that makes proposal development easier. It makes the whole thing easier. And if somebody's listening and saying, but I don't want to be a niche, I want to be like, massive. I'm like, well, but then grow slowly outward as you go. Do that. It's. The biggest piece of advice I usually give an entrepreneur is narrow up and it makes everything better. So that would be my big takeaway for people, is especially in a time when, as we're recording this, at least there's all the discussion about, are we in a hot economy forever? Are we not in a hot economy? What's that going to mean, right? When you're in a cycle of somewhat fiscal instability, it's even more important because people want to work with vendors that they can really trust. And you declaring to the world, this is where my limits are. This is where I feel I serve the market the best, and this is where I don't that creates that trust right from the get go. They don't have to go look for somebody else to tell them what you don't do. You're basically helping educate them on that from the beginning. And we do that to very good effect in all of our marketing. I mean, if you look at our marketing, it is super clear. If you're not the right fit, don't even bother showing up. And I don't know how many times people have told us, that's why I picked you guys, because you made it clear what you don't do. It's this very weird thing. Probably a good place for me to close, unless you got other questions. I mean, I probably generated better deals by telling people what we don't do than what we do. And that's happened for me my whole life. And it took me a while to figure out actually what it was and why that was happening. It seems kind of obvious, but underneath it, I think what emotionally is happening is people instantly feel a sense of trust because whenever you buy something, what is the thing that you're looking for? You know, marketing lies to you, right? I mean, you know, it does you know, there's an element of that. So you go to Amazon and what? Do you sort by the five star reviews that say sponsored next to them? Hell no. You go sort by one star reviews or you see how many one star reviews are. Right? It's this horrible thing where, in a way, we search for the negative. We search for the limits of the thing. And so if you go around and you say, I'm in this narrow space and I punctuate that like the period at the end of the sentences, and this is who I don't serve, it's like you leap past all that. They don't have to go look for who is like, educating them or telling them or appear on where these guys shouldn't be used. You just took that off the table. And the amount of trust that you're at at that point is huge. So I'd say that's the final piece of homework. Go look at your website. If anywhere in the website does it say what you don't do, is there any limit to what you offer the market and try it out, put some limits, a little bit of crayon around that. And I bet what's going to happen is the minute you start doing that, you'll actually get better deals and more deals in the space that you actually want.

Travis Albritton [00:33:28]:

Well, I think that's a great place to wrap. Sean, where can people go to learn more about you? Learn more about Cascade insights. Where would you like people to connect.

Sean Campbell  [00:33:36]:

With you online, cascadeinsights.com is the easiest place if you want to reach out to me directly. Just Sean. Sean@cascadeinsights.com and to be clear, while I've made a big jump up and down in the trampoline of Be narrow, I absolutely am happy to talk to anybody in an entrepreneurial role who just is just curious about how to make things work for them. If any of this resonated, I don't need to talk to people who are just a client. Right? From that standpoint, I'm always happy to pay it forward. But if you are a B, two B technology company, drop us a note and we'd be happy to help you with positioning and messaging and all that good stuff.

Travis Albritton [00:34:18]:

Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Sean thanks, man. So I hope you enjoyed that interview conversation as much as I did. I think my number one takeaway from my conversation with Sean was towards the end we started talking about going narrow as a way of making everything easier. I've certainly seen that to be true for myself when I first started the business, the company I have right now, it had a lot more things going on. There were a lot more things that I was offering. There was a lot more things that I said I could do for clients and then over time just realized that, hey, if I just really hone in and focus on the things that people are asking me for, which is podcast production and leave social media marketing and email marketing campaigns and other things like that to other companies to do, Then I can double down on the thing that I'm really special at. That my superpowers, my unfair advantage, and that has become the reputation of the company. And I'm really grateful for that. And so I've seen that advice work for me and myself. And so I hope that you take it to heart as well. Really get clear on the things you don't do, the things that your company doesn't offer, because that's only going to create clarity in the minds of your prospects when they're coming in and they're interacting with you because they're going to see, okay, this is what they do really well. These are the things they don't do. So now I have a clear sense of what they offer to me and my business and my company in order to move forward in a great working relationship together. All right, so I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Sean. Definitely go and check out Cascade Insights if you're in the B, two B tech space. If not, connect with them on LinkedIn. Send them some love. And we're going to be doing these interviews more often now, so ah, recently we had shifted to an every other week.  So every single Tuesday you'll be getting me in your podcast app, which I'm super excited about. Got some phenomenal interviews lined up some phenomenal solo episodes coming down the pipeline the rest of this year, so I can't wait to share those with you. And until next time, be honest.