Honest Marketing

Matt Fagioli: The Art and Science of Networking

• Honest Podcasts • Episode 30

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Whether you're an entrepreneur, a professional seeking career growth, or simply looking to expand your social circle, mastering the art and science of networking can open doors to countless opportunities.

In this episode, we're joined by Matt Fagioli, a successful entrepreneur with vast experience in sales, events, and business growth. Matt shares his journey from sales to coaching, his experiences in pre-selling, and how to build successful connections through networking. He also highlights the power of live events and why corporate partnerships are essential for profitability and success.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to unlock the secrets of successful networking. Tune in now and elevate your networking game!

Specifically, this episode highlights the following themes:

  • Tips for successful networking and how to connect with high-level targets
  • Pre-selling as a sales technique
  • The four pillars of digital content marketing

Links from this episode:

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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. 

Matt Fagioli [00:00:00]:

We've entered a new era of digital marketing and content marketing in particular. I have had to go through a really big shift to keep up and learn what does it look like to be a digital content marketer in 2023. So I've discovered the four pillars of that is newsletter or email marketing, YouTube, podcast and book writing. Becoming a great content marketer is about starting and creating content and making every piece better than the one before and developing this muscle. That's the marketing world that we're in.

Travis Albritton [00:00:38]:

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 Albritten, and today is a really special interview with a very good friend of mine, Matt Faggioli, who has a coaching consulting business but has been in the business space and started and grown lots of businesses. And so what's really great about this interview is we touch on a lot of core principles that are applicable to all kinds of different industries. So his background is in sales and events and now coaching and consulting. So we talk about those things, but then the through lines connecting principles that have worked for him and how to apply them today to your business. Really, really great stuff. Make sure that you stick around to the very end of the episode where I give you my number one takeaway from my conversation. But here it is. Let's dive in. So Matt, we have gotten to know each other very quickly over the last month and a half, two months or so. It feels like I've known you forever at this point for how much time we spent together. So I'm really excited to have you on the podcast today. Really just talk about your particular expertise in your previous businesses, but also talk about what you're doing now, which is really cool. So just to kind of start off, why don't you walk us through your journey as an entrepreneur? Starting with your first job in business or sales or marketing, and then what you were working on right up until 2020, a year that people know for various reasons, may or may not have shut down the global economy, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, just kind of give us a big picture of your background in entrepreneurship.

Matt Fagioli [00:02:06]:

Cool. Awesome. Well, thanks for having me. Well, I'm one of those guys that started cutting lawns when I was ten years old and built piles of money and always bought stuff and did constantly moving. So I think I've been an entrepreneur since birth, but my first real career of sales from 21 or whatever it was, I was working for my dad and his business partner and we were manufacturers reps in a really sophisticated business selling a high dollar, very complex OEM electronic components. And I actually kind of had no business in that role because most of the guys that I was selling against were electrical engineers selling two engineers, a very technical job. But I did succeed and was actually hugely successful in that arena. But to say that I am or have always have been a serial entrepreneur is is very true. But in that role, which I did for almost a decade, I got to touch the inside of thousands of businesses, both all of the customers and then all of the products and services that we represented. Which the products and service that we rep ranged from small mom and pop, US based manufacturer to multinational, multibillion dollar global corporations from all over the globe. And the same was true on the customer side. So had tons and tons and tons of business experience in businesses that I participated in in some way as a product partner, but not necessarily just the businesses that I was running, which I've run a multitude of those businesses in my career as well.

Travis Albritton [00:04:13]:

So then walk me up to your events business, how that started, kind of the origin of that and what you specifically did, because events business is very niche and then you had a niche within a niche or a niche, however you want to pronounce it, for how you approach it. So I'd love to hear that story because then I want to tease out some principles that would be applicable no matter what kind of business somebody has.

Matt Fagioli [00:04:39]:

Sure, absolutely. I think that people greatly underestimate the power of live event as a business. And at the same time, I think we're in a place where in the world where the power of live event networking has been lost a little bit as well. And so both of those things were things that I cared a lot about. I think they're very much tied to who I am as a person and a businessman. And so one of the biggest lessons that I think we can share with your listeners in terms of the subset of those who are thinking, man, I'd like to maybe start a live event. Is that it's? Much better. To think about live events in terms of corporate sponsorship, partners and some level of scale versus most people that do a live event for their own business or for whatever are really just thinking about in terms of the audience and attendee dollars and very attendee focused business model. And of course the attendee and their experience is hugely important. But it's much more powerful to figure out who are the large corporate partners who are going to be interested in this audience and trying to build those partnerships in advance. And part of what goes with that is then the expectation from those sponsors that you're going to deliver something really specific for them. It's very important to have figured those things out in advance if you want to have a very successful, very profitable live event or series of events.

Travis Albritton [00:06:32]:

Well, in pre selling is such a powerful tool once you learn how to do it and how to execute it right. So gauging the temperature of something before you go all in and commit a ton of funding to it. It's like, yeah, you could jump in and be like, we're going to create a live event in our local area about our expertise, all right? We've reserved the venue and we got the T shirts made, and now we just got to tell people about it and, oh, let's try and find some sponsors. And you've committed all this capital to this thing without actually seeing, oh, is there an appetite for this? Are we going to be able to secure things up front? And so being able to sell the idea of, like, this is what we will do, this is what we can do, and then kind of having all those pieces aligned ahead of time, so that way it's more of a certain success. Wink, wink. Well, that's called foreshadowing. We're foreshadowing something later in the episode. But I think that's really smart. It's like, let's secure the number one customer of this event up front. The company, the brand is going to kind of be the face of it, and then all the other pieces will fall into place after that. And I think that's just really powerful. If you're launching a new service or new product, it's like before you build anything, before you build a website or a landing page, just like see, people want it be like, hey, would you give me $50 to do X, Y, or Z? Okay, what about $100? About $200. And you are able to test ideas quickly and see, is this going to work or not? So that way you don't commit so much capital and so much of an investment to something only to find out it was just a good idea in your head, but not necessarily in the minds of the people you're trying to serve.

Matt Fagioli [00:08:05]:

Yeah, that's interesting that you touched on that, because pre selling, as you called it, I guess I've never used that particular term, but it's something that I've always done and always believed in, and it's been around a long time, and I learned it. I mentioned I had represented some large multinationals, and they taught me that. So here's these guys that sell products that require billions of dollars worth of capital investment in order to build said product. So let's say it's a TV. That's not what we did, but let's say it's a television set and the production line for that television set is going to cost a billion dollars. They sort of want to know before they do that if it's going to sell or not. And so they would come work with us and go come to our local region, and we would go and call on a bunch of customers and ask that customer if they would buy this thing. Part of the game of that is I learned after the fact we weren't really telling the customer that the product didn't exist yet because there was a spec and whatever, but I learned after a while that, oh, this is not going to exist unless there's enough customers for it and yada yada. So you get the idea. But I think that the way that people can use that model today, whether it's live event or a course you're selling online or anything else, is people always think they have to build the course. Well, they don't. I mean, you could run an ad to the course and see if the ad works first. You don't have to take anybody's money. You can build a list, hey, we're about to release this course and it's going to cost X and put your name on the early bird list and you get a free Travis's PDF or whatever it is. And so, yeah, there's lots of ways to presell and it's a huge thing. And live event I think is a really great example of that. It's a little bit of a challenge in that you need a venue and sometimes it can be a little bit of a challenge to pre sell an event if you haven't committed the venue. But you also can in a lot of cases, you can get preliminary commitment on the venue without too much risk as well.

Travis Albritton [00:10:30]:

Yeah, or doing it far enough out in advance that you can get a refund if you have to cancel or things like that. Yeah. And there are definitely honest and dishonest ways of pre selling. I've always been of the mind of be super transparent, let people know what they're signing up for and then also let them know, like, if I end up not making this thing, here's how I'm going to give you your money back. Right, even though you put this deposit in. But yeah, being able to test the market before you make something usually a good idea. Now, one of the things that I imagine must be true for an events business is that it really depends on who you know, especially if it's more B to B focused, finding brands, finding sponsors, and there's totally different sales cycles of B, two B versus B to C businesses. But your superpower is definitely, you know, lots and lots of people. And just in my brief time knowing you, I'm I'm always amazed at like, oh, well, I know so and so. I'll just text him right now. Oh, he just replied. It's like, wow, that's cool. I don't have that superpower. So I would just love selfishly for you to break down how you do that, how you think about networking, how you think about staying connected. And even more so, how do you identify the right people to pursue connections with? Because it's not about knowing everybody, it's about knowing the right people, at least the way that I think about it. But I'd love to hear your perspective and how you think about networking and staying connected.

Matt Fagioli [00:11:52]:

Yeah, well, I appreciate you asking that. I think that is kind of a superpower for me. I think it's just the way I'm bent, but it's certainly a muscle that I've developed over some decades. And I think the biggest piece of that, you and I were talking off camera about sort of the local networking event where you meet the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, as I refer to it. Those networking events are generally not very helpful unless you're the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker and everything about your world is within a ten mile radius and there's nothing wrong with that. But if you're wanting to build a live event and maybe bigger than that, you want to build the right network in whatever your chosen career path is. I think people have a little bit lost the art of networking at the national level. And what that looks like is it's actually easy to do it's. Show up at the national level events for your industry, buy very expensive tickets to very expensive events, and you find that the people that are standing in that room are the people who could afford the ticket. And a lot of times they're the players. I've morphed my business and my channel and everything about my career many times in 35 years, but I've always found that to be true, that you can put yourself in the room and network your way to some very important people much more quickly than people realize. Podcasting is a new world for me that I'm learning somewhat from you. But I just bought a very expensive ticket to an event coming up in August, podcast event in Denver. And I promise you I will come out. Of there with a couple of handfuls of really important contacts. And then when you want to get something done, you want to text somebody and get an answer. If you had a beer with that guy or whatever it is, it's just a whole lot easier. And I think that that's a little bit becoming a bit of a lost art and some of that's due to the COVID season that we just went through and all of that. But I think there's a huge appetite for it too. I think if you're listening to this, I bet you that there's space not only for you to do the networking piece, but for you to build a very niche live event in your, in your space, for sure.

Travis Albritton [00:14:46]:

So a couple of things I want to follow up on. First one, this idea of showing up to a conference and leaving with a bunch of contacts that may seem like, oh yeah, of course I would do that. That's not a common knowledge thing, Matt, so I'm going to need you to tease out what that looks like. What does it mean to grab beer with somebody? How do you intro that conversation? How do you introduce yourself? How do you make that connection? Get that time in those initial conversations? What are your goals? They may be even, like, subconscious. Like, my only goal is that he knows I'm a great guy, and then we swap contacts and that's it. Or my goal is I want him to know who I am and what I do, and I want to get to know more about him and what he does so I can make a connection, to build some rapport very quickly. Walk me through the kinds of things you're thinking about when you go to an event where you're trying to make connections, who are you looking to connect with beyond the people that are there? How do you then self select down? Like, these are the 20 people that matter the most to me right now. And then how do you make that connection? What is your strategy? It's like pickup lines for business leaders, right? How do you pick up a girl at a bar? How do you pick up a business business leader at a conference?

Matt Fagioli [00:15:51]:

Yeah, that's funny that we're talking about. I love this conversation because it's been so long since I've really thought about how or why I do what I do. But I think maybe it's like, well, how do you not pick up a girl at a bar? How do you not pick up a girl you try too hard, you over impress her. All the things, right? We all know what we shouldn't do. I think it's very low key. My goals are always put as many cards in as many hands as possible. Another lost art that lots of people don't don't carry cards. I'm still a huge fan of cards, both giving and receiving paper cards, because I would walk out with this full of cards and sort of go through them next day or in my hotel room or like, what are the ones I care about? I've got cases of them that I'll never look at again, but that's probably interesting in and of itself. I would always get on the plane to go home, have 25 cards, and if I kept them all, I would pick the two or three that really mattered and then go deep on the follow up with those three people and never do much other than maybe a quick response, quick email to the other 25. But the three that really mattered. I would really do something memorable in my follow up to that person just to kind of make sure that I covered it. Yeah, I think you want to be just, hi, how are you doing? Shake hands. This is who I am. And then it's all in the post event follow up with the person or persons that you thought were the most important.

Travis Albritton [00:17:51]:

Yeah, because nobody loves being pitched to, especially when you feel like you're getting bum rushed into it. It's like, hey, how's it going? Are you looking for qualified leads in your business? Because we can totally do that for you. And it's like, listen dude, I'm here at a conference. I'm trying to go to a talk. I don't want to listen to a sales pitch. Right. And so I definitely think there can be a thought of strike when the iron is hot. I have them, they're right across from me. Make it count right now and you have again that high pressure mentality of close the sale right now instead of let's just plant the seed. He knows who I am now. She knows who I am now.

Matt Fagioli [00:18:29]:

Great.

Travis Albritton [00:18:30]:

They gave me their email address. They gave me permission to reach out to them. And then taking the time to think about what you're going to say, that's memorable. I think that too is really important because it's not about I get LinkedIn DMs all the time. Yours stood out. I actually responded to yours. That's how you found me. Or connected, but there are ones all the time. It's like, no, I'm not interested. I know exactly where this is going. Not something I'm interested in doing. And I think the higher caliber individual that you want to go after or connect with, they will appreciate just starting with that human connection without any kind of preconditions or hey, I'm only interested in you because of your business's marketing budget. Or I'm only interested in you because I think you can give me money. People can smell that. People can sniff out the motivation behind that if it's less than authentic. So I think that whether you've actually processed this is why I do what I do and why it works or why it doesn't work, from my perspective, that's why I think what you do is so brilliant.

Matt Fagioli [00:19:31]:

Well, thanks. I think it's so baked in. It's not that I'm not conscious of it anymore, but it's so baked in that once you develop any muscle, it's not something that you have to think too much about. But it's really an important conversation. And I think for all you young there and I'm fast forwarding a little bit, but now that my business is much more digital and I'm having tons of interactions with younger entrepreneurs who are in the Insta DMs and all the new methods and it's so salesy and so pushy and so over the top. And what I'm telling you is the exact opposite. Like, I don't want to feel any sales from you at all and you're actually going to be way better off. You're going to have much better sales. Result. I was actually really nice to must be getting nicer in my old age. But this person who I had had some interaction with on Instagram, I think it was a sheep anyways, like hitting me, like over. And this is something that I'm mildly interested in, maybe interested in it next month. And it was just like every 5 seconds and I'm like, you would probably get way more from me if you would just ease up a little bit. Anyway, and you made the point earlier that the bigger the target, the higher level the target, the more critical that is and the fewer words you want to say about anything. Because that guy I have a guy in my mind that is an actual billionaire that I had the opportunity to have a meeting with, oh, gosh, probably six months ago now, but introduced to this guy, and I said, like, literally nothing. And then I mean enough to hello. Shook his hand, but I was like, I'm not going to say anything to this guy about anything. But after the event, I had the person that introduced me ping that person just teeny tiny bit, sent that person something that I hoped would be memorable, which obviously isn't about the cost of the item because guys, a billionaire can't impress him that way, right? But just touched him, hey, remember I met you here's this thing. Would you spend time with me? And then I got to spend some time with him. And I think this is informative. We talked about going to the national events, whatever. I got to spend time with this guy because I found out where he was going to be. I flew to that event, which cost a fortune, but I got to spend 90 minutes with the billionaire target that I specifically was interested in. And people just don't do that.

Travis Albritton [00:22:32]:

No, because it's relational selling, right? It's not transactional selling. And you have to go into it with the mindset of, I'm willing for this to not go anywhere professionally, like business wise. I'm totally willing for this to fizzle out and to be an investment or an at bat that may turn into something and it may not. And I have the patience to let these things play out because I know in the long run, this is going to turn out better. But that is so counterintuitive to the way that I've seen a lot of businesses start operating, which is much more like, what have you done for me lately? What are your sales figures this week? How do we tweak this, optimize this? And again, it's getting away from the long game of relational selling and marketing your business through word of mouth, mouth and recommendations, which is still how most businesses grow. Like, that's. Their number one marketing lever is people talking about them and recommending them. But it's so powerful because we all love to be sold that way. It's like, I would love for someone I trust to recommend a product that will help me. That's how I want to buy all my stuff. But instead, most of the marketing is, you're terrible, you're a loser. You're so sad and depressed. Buy this and you'll be so happy.

Matt Fagioli [00:23:46]:

Right?

Travis Albritton [00:23:46]:

And that's like the opposite of what's good for me and beneficial for me. And so if we could just kind of take a step back for a second and take a deep breath and be like, how would I want someone to treat me and consider me and my needs and what I'm going through and what I'm dealing with before they roll out the sales pitch? I think we'd be much better off.

Matt Fagioli [00:24:06]:

Yeah, I think. Wow. It's really just an interesting conversation in the context of all the stuff that you, you know, especially the art digital sales space where it is like, your life is absolutely horrible and it would be way better if you did X, Y and Z. It is intentional and it's not that I certainly didn't fly to that event expecting anything less. I mean, I was on target on purpose. Like, I had a sales intent, but it's more I guess what I was delivering is just that people don't appreciate the power of that face to face meeting. And I think a little bit to one of your points there is that everyone these days expects to you wouldn't go to the meeting unless it was like, done deal, or you're sure and like, no, that's not it. You go to the meeting, meaning to get the deal. So there's a little bit of a lost art there for sure.

Travis Albritton [00:25:09]:

So before we wrap up, I want to transition and start talking about what you're doing right now. We've kind of alluded to it a couple of times. But talk to me about the new coaching business that you've been starting up, how you decided to do that, how you're building on the success you've had as an entrepreneur in the past to serve other entrepreneurs and tease that out a little bit. Because I think a good number of people listening to this podcast will enjoy your new podcast and your newsletter as well.

Matt Fagioli [00:25:35]:

Cool. Well, thanks for bringing that up. And we've covered a little bit in my background. But I've had so much diverse business experience and got all this silver in my beard at that season of life where I'm like, I really would love to help A. Bunch of other entrepreneurs level up their business to a new place and help them not step on some of the million landmines that I've stepped on in my career. And you and I met and have talked a ton about faith, but I think that there's not only a new hunger, but a needed hunger in the US. And elsewhere for a real understanding of what faith in Jesus Christ is and has always been what what he actually said versus the way it sort of gets practiced in the world these days and how that relates into your actual business and your day to day life and tying those two pieces together. Our new podcast for the certain success brand, we say, standing at the intersection of business and faith. And I spent the last 20 years as an entrepreneur trying to walk out that balance of, like, hey, I want to go win in the world. I want to feed my family. I want to do all these things while I'm here on Earth. But at the end of the day, I'd like to have become what God made me to be and get to the next place and feel like I accomplished as closely to what he had in mind as possible. Yeah.

Travis Albritton [00:27:25]:

And I had the opportunity of being a guest on your show, and it was a lot of fun. And we talked about a lot of those themes of bridging that gap of faith in business and how do they interrelate? They're not mutually exclusive. Like, they they work together if we're intentional about it. And so, yeah, if if you were definitely like a like a spiritually minded, faith oriented entrepreneur, and you want to explore what that looks like, but also hear business tactics and things that are working, like the conversation you just had with a different Travis. So I'm already a fan. Got two Travis guests early on in the podcast, you know how to pick them, talking about AI tools and things like that. So if you're interested in those kind of things, definitely go check out Certain Success podcast, which I'll link in the show notes, and then also talk about your newsletter, which is you'd never really done anything like that before you started it, but now you have this daily newsletter going out. Tell me about that and what that process has been like, starting that as a new endeavor and what you've been learning through that.

Matt Fagioli [00:28:19]:

Sure. Well, I think maybe this will be helpful, too, to some of the seniors like myself that may catch this podcast. I've been a tech guy my whole career. As we've talked about, always try to stay on top of things, but we've entered a new era of digital marketing and content marketing in particular, and I have had to go through a really big shift to keep up and learn. What does it look like to be a digital content marketer in 2023? And so I've discovered, with lots of help from smart guys like you, in my view, there's the four pillars of that is newsletter, or we'll call it email marketing, YouTube, podcast, and book writing. And I think anybody who wants to do anything going forward in the next ten years had better be winning one or all of those pillars at a high level. And I had never really been a writer, been a speaker and a salesman and a marketer and a lot of things, but I've never been a writer. And I set a goal to write every day starting January 1. And so I just started writing a newsletter, and that is still an embarrassingly small audience, but that was not my objective. My objective was to learn how to write, develop the voice for this new brand, certain Success, and. Really try to get clarity on what the heck am I saying and selling and what's the message of this new company and who do I want to help, what's my Avatar and all those things come out of writing. Well, I'll be completing the fifth month of writing every single day, and I've got a book and process and everything else. But what you learn is that becoming a great content marketer is about starting and creating content and making every piece better than the one before and developing this muscle. And so, for me, that started with writing has moved into the podcast. And I think that's the marketing world.

Travis Albritton [00:31:06]:

That we're in certainly is. That's why we're here right now, right? To host these conversations and be able to share them with others that would find it valuable. Well, Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to share your wisdom and expertise, all the links to the newsletter, podcast, everything else that you're doing or be down in the Show notes. But again, thank you so much for your time.

Matt Fagioli [00:31:24]:

Yeah, man, thanks a lot.

Travis Albritton [00:31:25]:

So my number one takeaway from my conversation with my friend Matt was about the power of face to face interaction that in our ever growing digital world, zoom and Google, Meet and Skype have become synonymous with networking and connection. But there really is nothing that can replace that face to face, knee to knee over coffee interaction connecting with someone at a human level. It's so easy to forget that as businesses, we're serving people, and people want to feel known. They want to feel like they can trust you. And all of that reputation and that trust gets built over FaceTime. And so, as much as possible, get FaceTime in person with people that you can serve, either existing clients or potential clients, networking at conferences and so forth. It is in a lost art form, but it is certainly not less effective than it's been in the past. Now, make sure that you go and check out Matt's podcast, specifically my episode on Matt's podcast, which I think you'll find very informative. That's all linked in the Show Notes below. Well, I hope you found that interview insightful and helpful. And until next time, be honest.