Shira Abel, CEO of Hunter & Bard, is a self-described "sales-obsessed marketer" who works with companies to help them develop their go-to-market plans and align sales and marketing strategies and tactics.  

In this episode of The Grow Fast Podcast, Shira talks about some of the sales and marketing-related challenges many enterprises have including hiring an appropriate sales leader, aligning sales and marketing, developing strong customer relationships, and keeping up with changing market conditions.

You can find the whole episode of the Grow Fast Podcast with Shira Abel here:

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This is the transcript for this episode:

Mark Shriner [00:00]

Welcome to The Grow Fast Podcast where we talk with leading sales, marketing and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing and grow their businesses fast. Let's go, Hi, sure. How are you?

Shira Abel [00:15]

I'm good. How are you?

Mark Shriner [00:17]

Pretty good. Pretty good. Hey, we were just talking. I'm located up here in the Seattle, Bellevue area, and you're down in Lafayette, which is near Walnut Creek.  

Shira Abel [00:26]

Yep!

Mark Shriner [00:17]

What's it like there? I've never been through there.

Shira Abel [00:29]

So, right now, we're getting some of the smoke from the fires, but it's gorgeous outside. I just can't be in the air.

Mark Shriner [00:39]

Right, Right, we it's funny because you say that, and we've had just an amazing summer here, and the smoke is just rolling in today. The fires, the wind is finally shifting, and it's bringing the smoke from the other side of the mountains. And it seems like this is just a thing that happens every year now. And I mean, I grew up in the region, and it never happened. No, the only smoke we ever had was when St Helens blew.

Shira Abel [01:02]

I lived in Montana, when that happened.  

Mark Shriner [01:05]

Oh no kidding. Yeah, that was impressive, but now it's every year, and I'm wondering, is it the same in California? Yeah.

Shira Abel [01:13]

Yeah, I grew up in Southern California, but I have family that lives up here, so I came, I was coming up to the bay area all the time growing up, this was never a thing. This was never a thing. Also, it rained a lot more.

Mark Shriner [01:26]

Yeah, so maybe this climate change, maybe it's there's something to this thing. Hey, I'm really looking forward to our conversation. I want to talk to you about some of the challenges faced by SMBs and Startups and some of the best practices that they adopt to work through those challenges. But before we do that, you know, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your work at Hunter & Bair, Bard, excuse me.

Shira Abel [01:51]

So, Hunter & Bard, we are a marketing agency. We specialize in deep tech, and we work with Siemens UL, JLL and a whole bunch, and also startups in order and AI, smart cities, sustainability, cyber security, complex things that are difficult to explain, and we make them simple. So that's, so that the message can come across to the executive team that needs to be give the buy in in order to make the purchase. So, it's a startup or an enterprise that sell to, enterprise, large, complex sales

Mark Shriner [02:30]

Got you! When you say deep tech, please explain that a little?

Shira Abel [02:35]

Okay, let's say you've a digital twin. That's complex. Do you know what a digital twin is?

Mark Shriner [02:42]

I do not. Please do your marketing magic and break it down to me.

Shira Abel [02:47]

Do you know what a simulation is?  

Mark Shriner [02:49]

I know what a simulation is, yes!  

Shira Abel [02:51]

But a million of them together, you've got a digital twin.

Mark Shriner [02:54]

Okay, what's the application of this?

Shira Abel [02:57]

It would be, let's say you have a power plant and you want to optimize, and you've got multiple different sources of power, you run all these different simulations on a digital twin in order to figure out the best way to optimize, in order to have the largest delta between your cost and profit.

Mark Shriner [03:17]

Wow! So okay, a simulation is a great, great way to put it then, so it so I'm assuming then that you've one of your clients produces or sells digital twins, and your job is to make people like me or buyers, their buyers understand these applications. So how did you do that? You know, maybe walk me through the planning discussions, and then what your go to market was.

Shira Abel [03:44]

So primarily we do a lot of Account Based Marketing, because there is usually a buying committee, and there'll be different members of the buying committee, and you figure out what the ICP is, which is the, do I need to go to that deep?

Mark Shriner [03:17]

Okay? I hope.

Shira Abel [03:44]

So. then we define who the ICPs are, right? And in every complex sale, you're going to have the key stakeholder, you've got the one who signs the check, you've got the other, the others who help make the decision, and you've got the person who's actually using the product, and all of them have a say, and if they don't all have buy in, it's not going to work any type of, any type of complex sale that lasts between, let's say, six months to a year, you're going to have an implementation process, which means you have some sort of change management, right? It's never simple. It's never, we're just going to switch this out for something else. No, there's an implementation plan. And so that means you really need to think out all the different pieces and who it's going to affect, and how it's going to affect them, and what they're looking for, what they prioritize, in order to make sure that they get the buy in. So the sale goes through, we figure out how do they need to feel, and from that, we work with the team, in order to come up with the messaging and the materials and, of course, the ads and all of the content and everything else, the emails, the script for the phone calls, all of that puts together, as well as the design. Design is very important. It's a subconscious feeling we get that gives us a level of trust when we feel the design is good, you can have the most incredible, you can have the most incredible product in the world. If it's not to a level that your buyer trusts you, they're going to hold off like if you look like you have, if the design that you have looks like it comes from a three person shop in a garage, you're going to have a harder time selling to a utility company.  

Mark Shriner [05:48]

Yeah, it's interesting, because I mentioned to you before the call that I spent a lot of time working in Asia, and some of the challenges that we had early on working with Asian manufacturers that were producing things and selling them based upon their costs. They're like, we're the cheapest around. I'm like, Yeah, you might be, but you're gonna have problems selling those products in North America or in Europe, if you don't polish up the packaging, you know, put together some of the nice, clean marketing materials you've got, you know, broken English over everything and everything looks shabby. The product itself works amazing. But, you know, so it's interesting.

Shira Abel [06:25]

Did you know that broken English lowers trust by 50%.

Mark Shriner [06:31]

It would to me, because I would just assume that if you aren't going to take the time, and it doesn't have to be English, it's any language. I actually do a lot of work in the translation, localization industry, and so you're preaching the choir here. But, yeah, it's amazing, because you subconsciously, I think that if you're not going to take the time and effort to get the language right, you probably didn't do a very good job of the product. That might not be true, but that's the feeling, right?  

Shira Abel [06:56]

Well, it's often they're completely uncorrelated, right? Two different departments, and they also get two different budgets. But marketing is always underfunded, so, you know, so they end up thinking, oh, we'll put all of our money into the product so that our product is perfect. Part of the reason why I wanted to teach so badly at Berkeley. And I teach marketing for startups in the college of engineering under the major of entrepreneurship.

Mark Shriner [07:26]

Let's deal with some really smart people.

Shira Abel [07:28]

Oh yeah, it's, it's the kids are awesome. But the reason why I pitched this originally to my boss over there is that I really wanted to make sure engineers have been in this industry a long time, and engineers don't understand how long marketing takes, how hard it is, and how much it costs.

Mark Shriner [07:50]

And how important it is.

Shira Abel [07:54]

They kind of get it when they see something failing, but then they have this oh shit moment, and it's too late.

Mark Shriner [08:03]

Give me examples, or some examples of companies that you feel do it right. And maybe you can talk about, you can either talk on B2B or B2C, because B2C that then everybody has experience with some of the, you know, the big names out there. And then give me some, and you don't have to name the company, but some examples of companies that just got it really wrong, you know, and so people could kind of learn from that.

Shira Abel [08:26]

Okay, companies that I feel do it right, most of the time, most of the time, Airbnb. If we're talking about tech companies, Apple, always!

Mark Shriner [08:43]

You know, I was gonna say Apple, but I wanted you to say it first, because from the time I walk into the store, go to the website, whatever, I feel special, and then when I get the package, it's so fun. It's just, you know, and I don't, I don't feel stupid. I feel smart, because it's just like, oh, this is easy, and it's and all that. It's all just, it makes you feel like you bought something really, really nice.  

Shira Abel [09:07]

And, yeah, total unboxing. It's like, I watch every once in a while unboxings, and which is like a video thing on Tiktok and YouTube and Instagram or whatever, where they unbox really gorgeous items, and you get excited with them. That's how it is when you get an Apple product. So, it's every layer now, not every.

Mark Shriner [09:27]

You know, it's funny, I don't even want to throw the box away. I have no use for that box, but I don't want to throw it away. It's too nice to throw it away. I'm like, where can I put this?  

Shira Abel [09:35]

My son used to keep all the boxes. Yeah! Like, he wouldn't get rid of it because the packaging is so beautiful and it's such good design, and it's everything from start to finish. I mean it is really just stunningly done from the beginning to end. They do it right. Not every product may be perfect, not everything may hit the mark. But in terms of actual execution and the way it's the way. It's branded and the way it's marketed, flawless. Absolutely flawless.  

Mark Shriner [10:05]

Yeah, they did an amazing job. What about on a B2B side? Can you give any examples?

Shira Abel [10:11]

So B2B side, I would say some of the ones that I really like. Let me think about this. Siemens does a really good job. I think their brand is solid. They're very, I mean, they're also a client, but they are very, I would, I think their level of trust in the industry is extremely high. Another one I would say, I would say, into it, their, their marketing is good. Let's see, in terms of, let me think, JLL does beautiful but again, that's a client. Intuit is not a client, let's see, doesn't really market open AI doesn't need to market.  

Mark Shriner [10:55]

No, They're talked about in pretty much every blog post or LinkedIn post or these. Give me an example of you don't have to give me the company name of something that just they got it totally wrong and went sideways.

Shira Abel [11:12]

There was a recent one, with an advertising, from I can't, can't do it without giving the name, so it's that's hard. There are other large, okay, I'll give you the situation, change. I'll give you the situation. You have an enterprise. They've been around a really long time. They're used to getting everything because they've been around a really long time, then things start to shift, and there are newcomers that come up in the market, and they aren't doing the new things. They're not doing Account Based Marketing, which isn't new, actually, but because they've been able to be transactional for so long, they never built relationships that, that is, I don't want to put the name out there, but I would say one of the largest players in San Francisco, that's one of the situations that they currently have. They didn't put the places in, the pieces in place to be able to build the relationships. So instead of having relationships, they have very transactional situations, which means no loyalty on the side of the customer and other incumbents have been able to come in over time, and they are still the leader in the space, but they may not be in the future.

Mark Shriner [12:43]

So, I think there's a really important lesson there in terms of the value and importance of relationships. And it's not just the continued business. I think that, you know, if you have a relationship, you get competitive market intelligence. People tell you they'll share with you. Hey, you know what? We've been approached by these other players, and they're telling us this, what's your solution in there. And some of these old, you know, the top dogs, they'll look down their noses, they're like, Oh! We don't care about these, these upstarts, like, like, the automotive industry reacted to Tesla in the beginning. I mean, I have, I'm friends with some very senior executives in the automotive industry, and they, I was buying Tesla stock, and they were like, Oh! It'll never work. It'll never work. And because Mark, trust me, we know the industry like, you know what that company, you know, love him or hate him, I don't care. You gotta say they changed our world. I mean, now every you know, it's amazing.  

Shira Abel [13:33]

And American manufacturers said the exact same thing when the Japanese manufacturers started to come in, right? Nobody took Toyota seriously? Because, of course, the things that Toyota brought over the first time around, they were so tiny, they were made for Japan, and then gas crisis. Guess what? Toyota's awesome! They took it over.

Mark Shriner [13:52]

And then they move upscale, and now we have Lexuses. So, let's go back. I kind of cut you off because you were starting to talk about the work that you doat the university in the engineering students, and you know, you have to kind of change their perception and awareness talk a little bit more about that.

Shira Abel [14:12]

So, what I did in my class was I had the kids, every week would do some other type of marketing and create a deck and present the deck as if they're presenting it to a board. And this way they had to figure out, all right, how does this type of marketing apply to what we do? How much is it going to cost to do it? How long is it going to take to implement it? What ROI do we expect to get from it? And so, we did that for PR. We did that for Account Based Marketing. We did that for ads. What kind of ads? Where are you going to put the ads? All of these things, and that was, that I could see how much it changed so many of the students in the. Class, because they finally realized this takes time. It's really not so simple, and honestly, you know, you want that. That was my goal for the class, because these, these are going to be the leaders of tomorrow. They're going to be starting these companies. I want them to be successful. That's my only goal. How do I make sure they're successful, that they understand the importance of and the fundamentals of marketing? Not so they, you know, they're not going to do the marketing themselves. They're not going to do the marketing themselves. They're going to do some sales in the beginning. Maybe, maybe they'll have one of their co founders do it, but they need to know enough of the language so that they don't hurt themselves, which happens so often. So many companies move slower than they should on the marketing or they just they micromanage it to death, so they kill the any incentive the marketer that's working for them has. There are so many different ways to just destroy yourself, sabotage yourself, in terms of marketing, and it's so critical to every company. If nobody knows you exist, you don't.

Mark Shriner [16:17]

It makes a lot of sense. Definitely, you're preaching to the choir again here. Let me, let me ask you. You know, with what I've seen with startups, a lot of startups are founder led, and the founders, more often than not, come from a technology background. So, you have a tech, tech founder who, like your students, probably doesn't have a lot of experience with sales and marketing, and in my experience, oftentimes kind of discounts, discounts those skills as, oh, we'll just get a sales guy. And I come from a sales and marketing background, and for me, one of the most critical hires that you can make is getting the right salesperson to lead your sales and it and working with the right marketing people who really understand it and it. But when you are so deep into technology, you're so, you know, I love this product. I built it. Now we just got to get a sales guy to go sell it. Our salesperson. Tell me, I mean, have you encountered that scenario before, and how do you work through it?

Shira Abel [17:18]

All right, have you read the hard thing about hard things? Okay, so you have to read the hard thing about hard things.

Mark Shriner [17:26]

Okay, it's like, I'm writing it down right now. The hard thing about hard things, okay, they're hard.

Shira Abel [17:31]

Yeah, so, I want to, I'm pretty sure it's by Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz. And he talks about, so, he talks about how, in there, there's one story about how they brought in a guy to interview with him for the head of sales. He didn't look like a head of sales. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen companies make that mistake, where they hire the guy who looks like a head of sales instead of the guy who should be the head of sales. So, they hired the tall, no offense, I'm this is basically, I'm probably describing you, but tall blonde.

Mark Shriner [18:13]

This is white, no offense taken.  

Shira Abel [18:16]

But they hire, you know, the tall blonde guy who's really hungry, and maybe he was the lead sales guy before. Just because you are really good at selling doesn't make you a good manager.

Mark Shriner [18:28]

Definitely agree with that.  

Shira Abel [18:31]

So, you know. And then they get in this situation where there's a lot of fluff, because especially this happens a lot with foreign founders who come in and aren't used to how good Americans are about talking and they make themselves sound incredible. So, Ben Horowitz meets this guy who does not look like a head of sales. He's short, he's you know, he's whatever, and but he comes in with a entire playbook, a playbook that's like this from the description, okay, of all the different things and how they should be doing it. So, he hires the guy who turned out to be absolutely phenomenal. You want to look for the person who doesn't look like they should be doing well in the role, but they are anyhow, because, you know, that person has had to go through so much to get to where they are.

Mark Shriner [19:26]

What are some of the key questions you'd ask that person if you were interviewing them?  

Shira Abel [19:32]

Well, a lot of the questions that I end up asking in interviews are things like, tell me about something that went well, tell me about something that went badly. I want the one that went badly. I want them to attribute it to themselves. I want the one that went well, I want them to attribute it to the team. These are the things I'm looking for.

Mark Shriner [19:51]

You know, it's funny, especially in a leadership role, it's so important, and it's so I've been a what, way they call it soul producer. And I worked my way up the food chain, and I've led teams, regional teams, and what I've seen and what I've learned is the traits of your top individual performers are very, very much different. Those people like you said they're hungry, they're driven by a couple different things, compensation, recognition, right? They want that recognition. Look at me, I just closed this deal. And yeah, exactly right. But when you're in a leadership role, you can't be fighting your team for account ownership. You need to delegate. You need to support them behind the scenes as much as possible, recognize them, and it's hard, because, you know, we're all human beings, human beings. And sometimes I want to say, like, hey, you know what? Let me tell you how I helped Shira close this deal. And she's like, Oh, you didn't help me. And I'm like, but I did. But I want to, you know, but you just got to zip it sometimes and say, No. I mean, hey, great job. And once you get the habit of that, it gets easier. But in the beginning, it can be a challenge.

Shira Abel [20:58]

Yeah, and so, you know, and they also, the other thing is, you have to make sure that whoever your head of sales is, they can work with the head of marketing, because they have to, if your head of sales is sitting there deriding your head of marketing doesn't work with them, won't take time to brainstorm, and doesn't take them seriously And isn't making them part of the team. You that there's a problem. There's either a problem with whoever you chose for your head of marketing because they're not doing what they should be, or there's a big problem with the head of sales because this person is threatened or whatever and isn't doing what they should be. Yeah, marketing have to work together, especially in an enterprise sales environment.  

Mark Shriner [21:44]

We totally agree. What I've seen is kind of almost the opposite. More often than not, it's the marketing people, and I can, I come from the sales side, but the marketing people who don't want to get, you know, they don't want the, maybe, aren't as receptive from the requests of the sales team. Because salespeople, what they want is leads. You're right. They want quality leads. And then they want collateral that, you know, and if they don't get it, if they don't get it in the right language, on the right time, you know, they can be frustrating and so, but when the two teams align, it's awesome. It's so fun.

Shira Abel [22:25]

Magic, yeah, so I would consider myself a sales obsessed marketer. I've taken multiple sales courses, right? So, Kellogg, which is where I have my MBA from, they have a sales institute, and they have these executive courses, which, if somebody is looking to learn about sales, take these courses, they are phenomenal. So, the Kellogg sales institute and Craig, I can't remember his last name, Craig is a professor for this and just second to none, quite frankly, I've taken several sales courses, and they were, they've been the absolute best. And with that, like you learn, a marketer needs to learn in an enterprise sales environment. It depends on where you're working, right? Sometimes marketing takes the lead. Sometimes sales takes the lead. In an enterprise sales environment, sales takes the lead, and the marketer needs to learn sales as language, because very rarely does marketing, unless they're at a trade show, they don't meet the customer.  

Mark Shriner [23:36]

So, that was going to be my next thing is, how important it is for marketing to get out and touch the customers?

Shira Abel [23:41]

Oh, my God, access. Nobody gives them access. Oh, can I interview? No, you can't. How am I supposed to magically know what their words are then? Well, you build the relationship up with sales, you get them to record calls, and you take it from there.

Mark Shriner [24:00]

Yeah. And I, one of the best sales organizations that I ever worked with. Our marketing team was just lockstep with the sales team, and we would take our representatives from marketing team out on sales calls or customer visits, especially with sometimes with new prospects, just so they can see what that's like, but then also with the customers that we have that deep relationship with and say, Hey, we're gonna be some favorite marketing team. They're gonna ask you some questions, just kind of more at a strategic kind of understand level, to understand, you know what, where you see the market going, and things like that. And it was incredibly valuable, because they would come back and be like, okay, you know what? You guys have been telling us, you need this. We agree now you need it; you know? And, yeah, so.  

Shira Abel [24:41]

But it's more than just that. It's also they understand the language of the customer. They're going to be able to message correctly, right and target better. It's a win all around. And yet, so often it doesn't happen.

Mark Shriner [24:57]

No, so, let's go back to the startup scenario. Let's assume now you know, you're working with a startup in Silicon Valley, and you kick off your engagement. How do you how do you figure out? Because there's like, 18 different things of marketing you can do, and marketing, there's a slightly kind of nuanced go to market strategy, which can be, you know, it's related to marketing, but it's kind of overlaps between sales and marketing. How do you kind of work through that and figure out where you should focus?

Shira Abel [25:29]

Depends on the stage of the company. If we're talking super early stage, where they don't have anybody, and it's the CEO who's doing the sales, then I will work with the CEO like it's more of a consulting role, role. Quite frankly, it's like a fractional CMO. And I will work almost like a fractional CRO actually, because I will sit with the CEO in the meetings. I'll observe what's going on. I'll give him my feedback after my feedback is usually bringing in things, that, because he's so focused on what he's doing. He's not able to see everything. So, my feedback is a little more nuanced. We think we will look at every part of the business. It's not just a marketing thing. It is everything on how is product, where's where is the competition going in terms of product? Where are we looking to go in terms of product? How does that work? With the overall goal of the company, are we getting to where we need to go for the next steps, for funding? It's, it's a very holistic consulting.

Mark Shriner [26:36]

Okay, but then in terms of specific marketing activities, there's some, that every company should be doing, or is it really just?

Shira Abel [26:47]

Oh, in the very beginning? Reach out to your network. And having a wider network is better. And that's, I mean for, I'll give an example. One of our clients is morph.ai, it is an AI company, and obviously, and they are basically an AI software engineer assistant. So, I reached out to my network. I've been in startups and tech for a long time now, and so I know a lot of people, and I know a lot of early adopters, I reached out to my network and say, hey, does this interest you? You want to have a call, and..

Mark Shriner [27:29]

Would you bring them on as like a beta tester? Or, actually, would you bring them on as a customer, initially?

Shira Abel [27:35]

You try to do it as a customer, and if that doesn't seem to be feeling its way out, you bring them on as a beta tester.

Mark Shriner [27:42]

Awesome!

Shira Abel [27:43]

But you always try to tell first.

Mark Shriner [27:44]

It's funny, because I'm running a software startup that's you know we're seed funded, and the company's breeze docs. We're an RFP response platform, and that's exactly what we've done. We've leveraged our investors network of customers, who could use the platform that we're building, and we brought them on as beta testers, and we got an amazing amount of quality feedback, but we also, I think there was five of them converted into customers. So, it was, it was, it's a learning process, but it also pays off. But once you get through that initial network, how do you take it to the next level?

Shira Abel [28:28]

Okay, so my personal recommendation, although it is, in my opinion, one of the hardest to do, because you really need to have a sense of commitment and understanding of content, is thought leadership, and build your network and the cult of personality, you're going to find the leaders in the space are almost always somebody who publishes all the time on LinkedIn, if it depending on what the technology is, of course. So, for something like what you have, the more you're publishing on LinkedIn, the wider the more people who are following you everywhere, the more podcasts you're on, the more PR you get, the more awareness you build. That's going to be your power.

Mark Shriner [29:13]

Interesting. So, make more noise. Okay!

Shira Abel [29:15]

Make all the noise. Get it so that everybody knows who you are. This guy, Ruben Hassid, I don't know if I'm pronouncing his last name properly. Could be Hassid, I don't know, but he has 400,000 followers on LinkedIn.

Mark Shriner [29:32]

How did he do that?

Shira Abel [29:34]

All of his posts are either ai, ai hacks, like ai prompts and things that you could do this way, Recommendations on how to grow your LinkedIn audience, etc., and so forth. He is selling EasyGen, which is his platform, and it's a little plug in and I used it yesterday, but I won't be paying for it. But that's a whole other story, because i know how to use AI well enough where I don't need it. If somebody isn't really advanced in using AI, like it would be very helpful to them. So, I understand who his audience is, in terms of buyer, somebody that's less advanced than I am. But, back to 400,000, 400,000 followers on LinkedIn. That is, you can't beat that!  

Mark Shriner [30:24]

No, and then, and then you think about those 400,000 people, if you create a glimmer of awareness in their minds, and then they happen to have a conversation with somebody. So, it's not just the 400,000 it's the people that they talk to, either you know, through online or in person. So, that's really impressive and inspiring, and it makes me feel lazy. I gotta get busy. I gotta do more.

Shira Abel [30:48]

The thing is, if, let's say, you build that up and then you funnel them into your website and you get them to sign up for your newsletter, your newsletter is absolute cold, morning brew is something I read every morning, and it's a newsletter. It's a newsletter, and it got bought a few years ago by Business Insider, and it's just a really solid newsletter. So, when you bring them in and you get them to your website, once that, once they're on your website, that's your property, right? LinkedIn, can one day decide, Ruben has done something against their terms and conditions, or they change something in their algorithm, and they no longer like him, and suddenly he's cut off unlike but that's, you know, that could happen.

Mark Shriner [31:32]

So that's interesting. And I had a conversation with I think it was with Nathan Yeung, about the same topic. And I asked, you know, because we're looking at a newsletter on LinkedIn, because it's easy, simple to start, and you can get, you know, 10,000 followers, very, very quickly, or subscribers to a newsletter. The downside to that is one, there's so many newsletters on LinkedIn, two, you don't have their email addresses. So, what we're thinking about is doing an abbreviated newsletter on LinkedIn, and say, if you want the full content, come over to our website.

Shira Abel [32:09]

That's exactly it. That's exactly what you do. You funnel them over! Right now, I have a newsletter on LinkedIn, but I only have the newsletter on LinkedIn because I haven't finished. I'm also building up keynote speaking. Okay, because I no longer have littles at home, so now I can go travel everywhere. So, I want to go back to keynote speaking, which is something I used to do and so with that, I'm building myself up on LinkedIn. And part of that is, I'm posting a blog post about the perception formula once a week. And the perception formula is, perception is a function of heuristics, hormones and history. And if you think about it in terms of sales and marketing, how do you want somebody to feel? How do you want to be perceived? Right? Well, all right, do you have any idea what their heuristics are? Heuristics are mental shortcuts that we take, in order to suss things out really quickly. An example social proof, I have sold this to this many people. They have given us all five stars. Hence you will be very likely to give us five stars as well. Come and check us out. That's a heuristic, right? I've read the reviews. I like the reviews. I trust you enough to make a purchase. Hormones, so you've got dopamine, cortisol, all of these. How do they end up influencing things? So, this could be something that could be gamification, which brings in dopamine, or it could be, are we having a lot of life events right now? Is our cortisol a little high? Are we getting triggered by the news on a daily basis? Maybe we want to give a lot of feel-good things in order to bring that down a bit. And then, of course, history. How many times have you interacted with them? Have the interactions been good? Have they been memorable? Who have they interacted with in your industry previously? Were those interactions good and memorable? If they weren't, you gotta compensate for that. So, all of these things are way for you to figure out how you're going to create the image right, for the perception, for your client, for your customer.

Mark Shriner [34:27]

So, it sounds like all of those kind of if you understand where the customer's coming from in those dimensions, and then you are putting together a strategy that will address them, then you're one, I guess you're building trust.  

Shira Abel [32:45]

Yeah, that could be one of them, that could be one of many things.

Mark Shriner [34:50]

Yeah, and so, and that's also comes from that whole experience we talked about earlier, like with Apple, how you feel good, and you feel like you trust them. But yeah, I mean, it's maybe you can just talk about, because if it all comes down to trust, how darn important is trust? And then you just talked about the, I guess, the factors behind the trust building mechanism. But how important is trust, and how can companies do a better job of establishing trust, because trust building takes time, right? I mean, it takes all those different factors. So how can you accelerate that and amplify it?  

Shira Abel [35:31]

Consistency, consistent message, consistent look. When you say you're going to do something, do it. If you answer them, answer them quickly. If they reach out, reach back. Quickly. I worked with, okay? I worked with someone. I work with someone who had previous management that wasn't as good as the management they have today. This is going to sound odd, but I can't give any details. I met someone else who wanted to work with this company. She had reached out to the company three years ago, previous management, nobody responded. I met her. I said, hey, have you thought about working with x and she, that's not the company.  

Mark Shriner [36:15]

I know. You got to be careful.

Shira Abel [36:18]

XYZ, okay! Have you thought about working with XYZ? And she went, Yes, I've reached out to them, but they never answered. I said, you know what, let's fix that. So, I did, and now there's a meeting. She has trusted me because I was personally referred. And I have a good I think I have a solid reputation in the industry. So, with me being personally referred that that came in with a level of trust. Ah, that's another thing. Personal references, yeah, if you're trying to get in somewhere and you know somebody who knows them, nothing is better than hey, by the way, I know this guy. I like how I got on the show, Nathan. Yeah, right. So, you trusted Nathan, because Nathan is awesome, and I know I love the guy, so you trusted Nathan, and so he referred you to me, and here I am. If I had reached out direct, who knows if I would have gotten on, so.

Mark Shriner [37:19]

No, but that's awesome. So, you know, a warm introduction is so important, building your brand on, you know, that social validation or verification. Let's talk about it from a company level, though. Let's, you know whether it's either a startup or enterprise company, you're going in there and you're like, hey, you know what you know what you need to establish credibility and trust. And these are the mechanisms to do this. That, again, you said was the heuristics, the hormones, the history, history formula, yeah. So how do you break that down into specific activities? You know, give me some examples.  

Shira Abel [38:01]

Okay, so, what I do is, well, it's, it's my formula. So, there are recipes, and the recipes are, what is it that you want in the end, What? What? How do you want to be perceived? And then from there, we figure out, what heuristic, what hormone, and what are we going to do in terms of what the history is and what the future will be? Right? Because history kind of works both ways in terms of this. And then we'll just map it out into a plan. So, if somebody's more interested, they could contact me directly.  

Mark Shriner [38:32]

Awesome. Okay, well, just few more questions. If we go back to the startup scenario, and you know, you mentioned this, that there's the addressable market that you're trying to go after, but there also is the marketing element in terms of going after the next round of funding. Okay? So those, those are kind of different activities, right? Can you talk, maybe share some best practices in terms of going out for investors or trying to find the right or appropriate investors.

Shira Abel [39:05]

Same type of thing, right? Where is the market that you're going after? The investors are just another market. So, what do investors read? I don't know that they're reading tech crunches as much as they used to. I don't know that they're reading Venture Beat as much as they used to. I think they are going to certain conferences. I know that they have their own events. Go after the investors. Where the investors are.

Mark Shriner [39:30]

Makes a lot of sense. I was just at Tech Week in Seattle last week, and it's not for profit. It was, it's just open to founders and funders. And it was an amazing, amazing week. I met so many people, both on the founding and on the funding side. Got a lot of great advice, built the network, learned a lot. Learned, you know, sometimes when you don't know something, it creates this learning opportunity. I got asked questions that I didn't know how to answer, and. It's a great question. You know what? I want to do some research on that because, and it was like, wow, you know, it's good to be in a kind of a friendly environment, and, and we're not actually actively looking for funding right now, but we're kind of like, what's the word, laying the groundwork so that when we're ready, we know what we need to do. And that event was, was amazing. So totally agree with you. Speaking of events, I know that there's a tech week in San Francisco. Are there any other events that you would recommend?  

Shira Abel [40:28]

So, there's a million. Oh gosh!

Mark Shriner [40:32]

Can't go to a million but give me a couple.  

Shira Abel [40:34]

Okay, so, there's Monty, but I can't remember his last name. He's British. He's got blonde hair.

Mark Shriner [40:42]

He has a filter on LinkedIn Monty, British blonde. He'll come up.  

Shira Abel [40:48]

He lives in and, watch me get his first name wrong. He lives in Palo Alto or Silicon Valley, and every week at like, one coffee house or whatever, they'll have a founder meet, investor meetup.  

Mark Shriner [41:06]

Wow, cool.  

Shira Abel [41:07]

Hana house in Palo Alto has events regularly. Llama Lounge is from Jeremiah. Oh Yang, if you're in AI, that would be another event that you could be going to. He does events every month in New York City. They've got different events. It depends on where you're at. There's you with Luma is an app. Luma has you could do a search on Luma, and the odds are you'll be able to find a whole bunch of different things in your area.

Mark Shriner [41:44]

Awesome. Okay, right at the kickoff of the show, I mentioned that I wanted to, you know, hear or talk about some of the best practices for SMBs. I know you work primarily with enterprise customers, and I'm wondering, are there any differences in terms of those basic principles that you talked about and or the tactics that are that are used by enterprises. Are there any or is it the exact same for SMBs, or is it a different approach?

Shira Abel [42:10]

So, for SMBs, it depends on who you're selling to, right? But you base it's the approach is the same, and that you want to be where your market is, and you want to have a message that resonates with your audience, so let's say your SMB. Give me an example of what kind of SMB we're talking about.

Mark Shriner [42:29]

Let's say that they are making playground equipment, and they sell to local municipalities, schools, you know, on a kind of a regional level.

Shira Abel [42:42]

Okay, so if they sell to municipalities and schools, most likely because it's playground equipment, I am going to assume that the PTA would be able to pay for this, rather than at if in the areas that don't get as much funding from the state, because the people who live there have higher taxes. Let's put it like this.

Mark Shriner [43:04]

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Shira Abel [43:07]

Because I could tell you, like, one place that we used to live raised 4 million every year for the schools, but you couldn't pay teachers with it. You couldn't use that money to pay teachers, but you could buy equipment. So, in that case, I would say, you want to be on every single mom and or parent you know. You want to find every single mom or parent group, right? And you want to find things like, in Lafayette, we have seed, which is special education, like the PTA for the special education. So, you want to get in contact with them, and you want to get in any specialist and any mom and dad group, and you want to start engaging without selling, no selling at this point. You have to build trust.  

Mark Shriner [43:56]

So how do you engage with them? I mean, let's just say you get a list of all the different PTA associations for a given region, and you want to start some kind of outreach. What would you do?    

Shira Abel [44:09]

I would actually, I would just start with, I would start slow, because if you start selling in this, you get blocked. So, one of the things you can join the local Chamber of Commerce. Makes sense, yep, joining the local Chamber of Commerce. That may cost you more if you don't live there, but you can still join, they will promote you. The people who follow the local Chamber of Commerce on Instagram are all people who live locally. Okay? They are the PTA people. They are the people who are involved in the school board. They are the municipality. They are all of the things, all of the people that you are trying to get to, are there, that Chamber of Commerce will promote you on their social channels that builds trust. You've already put some money into our community. The other thing, start funding things like doesn't even have to be huge amounts. Quite frankly, it could be really tiny amounts. Yes, but start funding, you know the, I don't know, local school sports or whatever, put a banner up, get a put, help them buy their uniforms, something small, so that that also, and that's less expensive than advertising overall. It's less expensive than advertising.    

Mark Shriner [45:21]

Yeah, what I like about that approach is versus advertising. Advertising you might see in a magazine, if anybody reads magazines anymore, but online, and you just kind of glance over it, pass by it, unless there's a really dramatic hook there, or effective hook. But when you're engaging by participating in meetings, contributing something, you become part of the community, and there's that level of appreciation, and you're definitely much more noticeable. So that's I it goes back to that earlier discussion about, how do you accelerate the trust building process? You've just done it. Yeah, you show up in person, you make a contribution, and they're like, hey, these guys are pretty nice.

Shira Abel [46:01]

So a lot of the time they have to do things based on price, but they can also write the requirements to fit exactly what you have, so that you're the preferred. You know what I'm saying?  

Mark Shriner [46:17]

Yeah, no, that's, I mean, we advise customers with Breeze docs, if they are responding to RFPs, the best way to respond to the RFP is actually get there early and help the vendor the RFP, to write the RFP right? And I've been involved in that process before, and it's awesome, because you know, you're basically saying all the key features that you should, you know, and they somehow aligned with what you're offering,

Shira Abel [46:41]

More expensive, but we offer all of this. So, we offer all this. Yeah,

Mark Shriner [46:46]

Just a couple more things. You are active, both on the sales and marketing side. You're also keynote speaker, so you've got a lot of interests. What is the one activity in amongst those, and anything else you're doing work that you enjoy the most.

Shira Abel [47:05]

Oh that's hard. I would say it's a toss-up between the consulting side, where I get to help them really solve the hard problems, and the keynote speaking, because you get to then help a wider audience solve their problems all at once, right? Yeah, it's, it's getting I like the teaching side. That's the reason why I approached Berkeley in order to start teaching there. I started with, it came from me reaching out to my friend Ken and going, Hey, Ken, can I come and give a guest lecture? He went, great. I said that was really awesome. How do I teach a class? Well, I'm the person you talk to, fantastic. So, from there, I taught a class, and I was a fellow. The class went super well, and I became a lecturer. I'm not going to do that full time because it's not fiscally it doesn't make any fiscal sense, but it brings me joy.  

Mark Shriner [48:00]

So, you're giving back to the community. You're, you know, and some of those entrepreneurs are going to go out and they're going to spread the word, spread the love and no, I enjoy being in a position where I can share my knowledge or experience and help, to hopefully help to either an individual or a team, to somehow improve when, when you're in a formal, structured environment like that. Another benefit that I found is it forces me, or whoever's doing that, to learn. You have to prepare, you have to organize your thoughts. You have to go out and read. And because you can't just go and say the same thing that everybody else is saying, You got to kind of curate that knowledge and give it to the audience in a way that yeah, does that? Does that make sense?

Shira Abel [48:42]

I absolutely do, and that's part of the reason that I love these things. It it just yeah, that type of thing brings me joy.

Mark Shriner [48:51]

Awesome. So, to do that, again, you have to kind of keep abreast of all the latest developments. And in fact, I saw a post today from you regarding some of the new AI tools that are out there in terms of, I think it was in terms of understanding your customers personas and then messaging them in a way that's appropriate for their persona. But how do you, how do you keep abreast? Because, again, you're active in so many different, you know, asset facets of sales and marketing. How do you keep abreast? Do you just, do you love to read? Or do you go to websites? Do you have a favorite? Do you have a book recommendation or website recommendation, newsletter recommendation?

Shira Abel [49:27]

Well, I do several things. One, I'm in pavilion, which is a, it's a think tank, okay, you pay for it. It's a think tank. And being a part of it, you get a whole bunch of information basically compiled all at once, right? They have CMO calls, they have CRO calls, where you get people who are sharing best practices or their experience, and all of this together, and that builds you up much quicker, quite frankly, because you get to a. Pull together everybody's best practices all at once, or feedback, or whatever. I tried this; it was great. I tried this, it sucked, whatever.  

Mark Shriner [50:09]

And that network is so important. I when we are on this journey of launching breeze docs, I had just a couple, like five minute conversations that literally saved me months of pain just by somebody saying, use this product, use this bank here, you know, just little things and, you know, and it was like, Oh my gosh, I was it wasn't even on my radar. And, and it just solved so many problems.  

Shira Abel [50:33]

That's exactly it, so that's one, and another thing that I do. Of course, I'm on LinkedIn every day seeing what's on there, but I also curate my feed. I have 20,000 connections. I'm not reading everybody's stuff, if it doesn't have to do with work, I'm hiding. So I'm curating my feed to make sure that everything that is on there has to do with work, another and honestly, I watch a lot at TikTok.  

Mark Shriner [51:01]

TikTok, really, I thought that was for the kids. I'm joking part, part, partly, but partly I'm not.

Shira Abel [51:09]

I've also curated my feed on TikTok. I follow certain people who are experts in AI, others who are experts in, well, actually, no, I don't follow any marketing experts. It's really just marketing. It's just AI and a couple of people that I find really amusing, because they make fun of all the things that happen in startups. And I've been in startup land for so long that, like, they make me laugh. I also follow others, but that's irrelevant to this conversation, so I follow them, and they talk about different things, but wrench, which I talked about today, on linkedin.ai, Crystal, I've known about for years, right? So crystal is Crystal knows, and it's a plugin for LinkedIn. And on Crystal Knows. You put the plugin on LinkedIn, then you see somebody's personality on the side, and it tells you how you should or gives you recommendations on how you approach them. Wrench is very similar to this, but gives a different kind of information, explaining the differences between honestly, it doesn't take a long time to go. Try both. Go figure it out for yourself, but the difference..

Mark Shriner [52:18]

Do you find them to be accurate?

Shira Abel [52:21]

I found, Okay.

Mark Shriner [52:23]

Your post, I remember your post. Your Post said, this is what Reg says about me. What do you guys think? And I'm like, What do you think? Because you're the one who knows, right?

Shira Abel [52:31]

So, my response, which I responded to on LinkedIn, my answer was, I think that I take uninvited feedback actually pretty well. It says that I shouldn't, but I actually, I mean, it depends on the feedback, right? If it's actually helpful, I want the feedback regardless of if I invited it or not, but I generally invite feedback because I feel like feedback makes you better. It's hard to hear. I may like, I may like, shriek back when I first get it, but then it sits in the back of my head and it plays, and then I'm like, Okay, I will admit I have a hard I may have a hard time with it in the very beginning, but I always think about it after.

Mark Shriner [53:11]

So basically, wrench is the information that it generated about your persona. It was pretty accurate?  

Shira Abel [53:22]

For the most part. Yeah, I would say one line was, I was like, not sure about this, and I would never call myself a role model, but that has more to do with an ego thing.

Mark Shriner [53:31]

You're too humble, hey!

Shira Abel [53:33]

I don't know if I'm humble, but I still wouldn't call myself a role model.

Mark Shriner [53:38]

It's a big responsibility. So, I appreciate all the recommendations. I've taken so many notes like, and I don't want to compare, but, like, I learned a lot when I spoke to Nathan, but I learned a ton from you today. And I, what I like to do is, after the show, I reread my notes, and then I actually listened to the episode, because I always find, It's like, Oh, I forgot about that. I forgot about that. But, I may come back to you with some questions offline about some of the recommendations that you made. But hey, Shira, I really appreciate you taking time out and coming on The Grow Fast Podcast.   

Shira Abel [54:15]

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.  

Mark Shriner [54:18]

Cheers.

Shira Abel [54:19]

Bye!