Strategies for increasing Business & Marketing Performance in 2021 [with Simon Severino]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Simon Severino, as they will be discussing strategies for increasing business profitability and productivity, brand consistency, as well as specific marketing strategies that can turn around business performance. 

Simon has worked with leading brands like Google, BMW, Crayon, Roche, Deutsche Bahn, but more importantly, he’s fired himself from operations and enjoys now his life and business more than ever. He now helps business owners like you do the same, via One-To-One CEO Coaching. His 274 templates and swipe copies help dozens of teams every week scale faster than ever.

 

Connect with Simon:

Strategy Sprints: https://www.strategysprints.com/ 

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnSFgJd0CrsEdQdO21txR2A 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/strategysprints/ 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonseverino/ 

 

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro  

Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/ 

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu 

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency 

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/ 

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

 

Listen to the episode on your favourite platform:

▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube

▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show

▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean

▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify

▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer

▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher

▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox

 

Episode transcript:

Andrei Tiu  0:08  

Hello everyone. This is Andrei and you're on the new episode of the Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Simon Severino, who is an internationally renowned SEO coach and business transformation pro and founder of strategysprings.com. Today, we will discuss strategies for increasing business profitability and productivity, brand consistency, as well as specific marketing strategies that can turn around business performance. Without further ado, Simon, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show. How are you? 

 

Simon Severino  0:54  

Hey, Andrei, excited to be here. Hello, Marketing Innovation Podcast Show.

 

Andrei Tiu  1:00  

Hello, hello, hello. I like the energy we started well. It's a lot of interesting things that we can dive into today. And I'm looking forward to it. I know you have a wealth of experience working with CEOs across the world. So, it was really exciting finding out more about your work. What we're going to do is try to take as much as we can in this episode of your insights and knowledge, and apply it to our audience, which is in large proportion CEOs and founders of their businesses, but as well as Marketing Leaders. I feel there's a good synergy between the two subjects. And I think it's a lot of transferable skills and insights that can be brought to the surface. So, if it sounds good to you, let's have some fun.

 

Simon Severino  1:48  

It's tough times, Andrei, right now running a business is hard. It always has been hard, but COVID has accelerated stuff. If you don't work sprinting, now you have a problem. If you don't run your company in a very lean and adaptive way, now you have a double problem. And if you're not built like Lego instead of Duplo, in many small parts that you can recombine quickly, you have a problem. So, it was always tough to run a business. Now it's double tough. Let's share with your audience a couple of things that they can do right now, to get back on track. Because sales are much harder right now, and many of us need to change their offer, according to the new needs of their people, because their life has changed. So, of course, their needs have changed. We cannot do whatever we were doing before. Three habits that I use within my personal life, running a business as a CEO of a global company that works in 114 countries. I have certified Strategy Sprint coaches doing their magic every day with companies that are unicorns and are evaluated at a billion but also with solopreneurs running a one-person marketing agency and one-person SAS startup and one-person consultancy - IT consultancy, a management consultancy. What we help them install now is a system to get the right numbers of what's going on. Because most people don't have their data. They don't have market data. Some people have market research, the big ones have market research. But that's not your data. Because the data of if you say: "Okay, there is this market that can be exploited." Well, that's a theory that's not data because maybe Elon Musk can exploit it, but you don't if you don't have these people right now warm on your email list. So, you just won't get to this market. That's why market research is not helpful. What is helpful is having your data right now. By that I mean how many people were today on your website, how many of them are interested, how many of them are engaged, they're clicking a lot of stuff. So what's the one thing in your system that helps you with one click to connect to them, and to move them forward in the next stage and the next stage. This is the system that we need right now, we need to know who wants something from us, and what's the one button that I click that sends out the right template, the right message so that I can do it at times 100 times today. So that in total we will have around 900 conversations this week, and so next week, we can close five of them. That's the system that we need right now. We call it "the value ladder". I have just posted a video on LinkedIn and YouTube about how we do it. It will be a bit long, but let me tell you the core, the core is a daily habit, the weekly habit, and the monthly habit. Daily habit: How are you spending your time? You're a marketing manager, or you are an entrepreneur who has marketing duties? How are you spending your time? Write it down. So, 6:30 - running eight, breakfasts, 9:00 - LinkedIn, write it down, and you will find that not every hour that you put in, is on the highest leverage point. Maybe wasting 30 minutes on Clubhouse is a high leverage marketing activity for you, or maybe not, I guess not. It is only a high leverage activity. If it builds on everything else marketing, and it creates a conversation that in the next 30 days will become a high ticket client. Does it relate, or does it just create 15 Instagram followers? Then you're wasting your time. These are the examples. We go through the time how are we allocating it then in the evening, I asked myself two questions. So five-minute reflection of the day. Which one task should I give somebody else because they can do it better? The second question: If I would live more intentionally and more freely, what would I do tomorrow? That's my daily habit. If you install this daily habit, you have one foot back in control of this crazy ride that is this year, because, at least, you are in control of your time and you have more intentionality on how you spend your time.

 

Andrei Tiu  7:00  

Good insight. How about the weekly one?

 

Simon Severino  7:02  

Weekly habit: get your numbers, collect your data, your data, not the theoretical data, the benchmarks because as soon as their benchmark, this is all the data. Even if it's currently that doesn't mean that you have access to these people. So, forget market research. Collect your data, what's your data? Collect the main three numbers for marketing of this week, operations of this week, sales of this week. Pick your three but usually marketing numbers. "How many conversations did we start? How many engaged people did we have? This week on our website? How many Subscribe to our newsletter or download the periods?" For example, three numbers and you track these three numbers every seven days. We do it every Friday, in the Friday meeting three weekly numbers. What do we learn? Why do we have 14 more subscribers this week? What happened? Was it a video? Was it a person? Was it the process? What is working? Because we will double down on what's working? What's not working? Because we'll stop doing it. Same with the operations numbers - How many clients did we fulfil this week? How many needs did we completely fulfil? What else do they need? How many of that did we build this week? Sales numbers - How many conversations on the calendar? How many sales called were scheduled on the calendar of our people or sales team or my calendar? How many of them did we convert into a client? How many follow-ups did we do with the ones we didn't convert? Can be three very relevant numbers, very simple to track, you can track them in a spreadsheet, we do it in a spreadsheet in a Google Sheet. Simple as that three numbers. But, every seven days, you collect these numbers, you discuss these numbers, what works - you double down on it, what doesn't work - you stop doing it.

Andrei Tiu  9:03  

You mentioned also, I'm just driving a bit to go into the monthly habit now. I just get a feel of something that has been very much in conversation amongst us the marketers, which is trying to automate a lot of the communications that we have, and getting people like through that funnel, and trying to deliver the right message at the right time. I feel there's an element of this in what you are saying as well, and I was wondering if you can give us a bit more insight into how you coach your clients to do it. Well, if they already have a bit of that in place. I know you're doing that already because I received your email sequence after reboot. You are on top of it, but I would like to let people know a bit about the insights into what you're proposing. 

 

Simon Severino  10:04  

Email is a core of the sale system. Because you know that for a high ticket b2b complex sales, you need eight to 14 touchpoints before you close. Now how to create eight to 14 touchpoints? You cannot fly, you cannot go to conferences, you cannot drink 12 coffees with them. So, what do you do? The email comes in really handy because with a good email, funnel, and we implement this with every single client, a sales time, which was maybe 12 months or six months, you can turn it into 12 days by intensifying the relationship. So you want to build trust, expertise, and curiosity. For us the most important piece is curiosity. So we try to always write only about relevant things very respectful, very relevant, very valuable, never selling, and then always inspiring curiosity. We want to shift to an open curious conversation, says: "Oh, I want to know, let's let's discuss.", and emails as often as possible and as vulnerable as possible. Real stuff I never write: "This is the company speaking to you. This is the CEO speaking to you. It's Simon. Hi, Simon. What's going on right now? My goodness. Did you know this? Oh, my friend Nadeem did a video Do you want to see it?"  That's what I sent out one hour ago. I have a newsprint couch, and he did an amazing video. I'm curious what you say about it. In this video, these seven minutes are gold. This is better than an MBA, just the email I sent today is better than an MBA because it's a full checklist of a full-funnel. Other people would sell this. I just give it away to everybody on my email list. This is how important the people are for me on the email. The email is the heart and centre of everything. That's the only place you can sell in this funky year. Everything is changing all the time the Facebook algorithm will change in June. Google algorithm can change whenever it wants. Clubhouse might not be there in two months from now, because there is enough competition, but your email list will always be there.

 

Andrei Tiu  12:37  

 Make it clear for everybody here. We are talking b2b, and also b2b high ticket clients, corporations, and everything, and not only.

 

Simon Severino

 Both b2b and b2c. The video today was about how to apply this for b2c. That's what Nadeem did because he is our SAS and b2c whisperer. I do only b2b, for example, and the same principles apply. It's always a human-to-human conversation. The only difference b2b b2c is that in b2b unit five clients per year in b2c unit 5000. That's the only difference. But you are always hopefully, thinking of one person, whatever you do. When you build a feature, you think of this one person and you care and you do a great job with love. When you write an email, you write to one person. Maybe it goes to 5001 person's, but it's one person you are writing to. Always intimate, it's always personal. So, b2b, b2c is a differentiation but it's not that offer different. If you think from heart to heart, and this is how we should run businesses as entrepreneurs from heart to heart, like you will talk to your kids, to your friends from heart to heart, and something valuable then it's the same b2b or b2c. That was a nice inside bullet. Now let's move to the monthly goal. Because we are Strategy Sprints, so we have to talk about strategy also, but do not spend too much time on strategy. Strategies that, you need just strategizing which means once a month take half an hour and do these two things positioning and mindset. Positioning in this half an hour - with our tools you can do it in half an hour, with other tools I guess you need three days, but you can get our tools at "strategysprints.com/tools", they are open source. So, with our tools half an hour, you think: "Are we selling to the right people? Are we solving the right problem at the right price in the right way?" These are the positioning questions. So, you check your positioning. if it is the case everywhere check, you're done in half an hour here. If not, then you have a one-hour workshop more to go and solve that. The second question is confidence, which is a mindset element: "How confident are we that we are solving these as the best possible solution? Our thing is the best thing that can happen if you have this problem, from one to 100%, how sure are we?" And we need 100% from every single team member, if one says 99% or below, that's what we need to solve next, nothing else matters. But he else will believe in it. There is always a gap between your confidence and what other people believe. Imagine Michael Jordan, of course, he has these kills, but if he goes into the game with just 60% confidence, he can only get across 50% results. That's not enough. At that moment, you need 100%. Because if you are in a sales call, and they ask you: "How you showed it is the right thing for me?", and you are not sure, whatever you say, they will feel it and they will not bite.  You have to be at 100% so that they can get across, let's say 80% or 60%. Because there is always this transfer gap between your confidence, their confidence. Ask yourself this question very truly in the team: "Is this the best solution to that pain? And do we believe 100% in it?". Otherwise, go and improve the product or improve the messaging.

 

Andrei Tiu  16:56  

I feel this goes a bit into what you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation, and everybody actually in business, faces this moment, when there might be a problem that seems to be big, or we don't know where to start solving it from. I feel this would help to deconstruct a bit the issue. For example, if there's a lack of confidence across the team, trying to identify where that comes from, specifically which team member or which issue of each team member, and then trying to work it out bit by bit and reconstructing it again. Because, as you said, some, in the beginning, having like this puzzle that you can be constructed a bit, solve the issues, reconstruct marks stronger in a way. 

 

Simon Severino  17:39  

Absolutely. Yes, ask everybody, but when they answer, don't make it a personal issue, don't discuss it about that person, because that person is only the cannery singing the song that is in everybody. That will be a symptom, the person, whoever it is, that is below confidence will be only a symptom. Bring it back on the whole team level on the system level, and everybody owns it. Together, you solve it. That's important. 

Andrei Tiu  18:13  

Also now, there's another thing that I captured my eye when I was reading through your credentials, and I'm wanting to touch on a bit and that was creating, or maximizing your return on luck. Can you tell us more about that and where the concept has started from as well as you know, like a little bit of how we can take it and apply it within businesses and maybe specifically marketing departments?

 

Simon Severino  18:38  

 Jim Collins coined the arrow L, the return on luck, and says that some people just have so much more results from the same resources than others. He started this research, and he said, they execute more. I took it, and I went: "Alright, how can we create a blueprint, a checklist, an applicable piece, so does everybody can execute more? What is it execute more? What does it mean? How you break it down, how can you execute more. The principle is to divide the work into chunks that are so small that they can be built, measured, and reflected upon in seven days. That's the principle of how we build all these templates. The idea of Jim Collins was: there is luck in the world, but it lands on some fields and not on others. How can you prepare the field for luck to land on your field? The idea is simple: If you do just one thing, then it's unlikely that this is a full field, how you create a full field? Well, you try out 50 things, and then one will hit. That's how you do it. The theory is simple, but how you do it in practice. And that's why we created templates that are so small like Lego that you can run 50 experiments in parallel. If you have 50 people, you can do 50 experiments in one week. If you have 25 people, you can do 50 experiments in two weeks, etc. You can do very quick, parallel experiments until you find the one thing that works. That's how you maximize your return on luck.

 

Andrei Tiu  20:50  

Perfect. Again, for the templates, they are for free, and they are on strategysprings.com\templates, right?

 

Simon Severino  20:59  

Tools, strategysprings.com\tools.

 

Andrei Tiu  21:01  

Super! We have a link to that in the description of this episode. Simon, as I know, you are going into a meeting right now and we have to wrap it up. I would like for the people that are on here and would like to find out more about your work as well as. Guys, the templates are for free. So, make sure you head over to this link. I had to look through the website and these and they are helping many If you are not sure about what you're doing now marketing-wise, but also business so, it's always a good chance for you to look from another angle and see where opportunities might lay for you to do better. As Simon said, in these strange times, which continue to happen even one year later from the pandemic started. Simon, if people want to get in touch with you and maybe discuss a bit more their business strategy or things or areas they think you might be able to work together what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you or to find out more about what you are doing with your company?

Simon Severino  22:00  

 I hang out in our Facebook community which is called entrepreneurship in Sprint's you can tag me there with your current sales problems marketing problems, I'm happy to answer there, and otherwise, it's strategysprints.com.

 

Andrei Tiu  22:17  

 

Perfect. Thank you so much. Simon, it was a pleasure to have you here on the show. Thank you for joining us, and until next time, wishing you all the very best thank you for the insights and words of information. This was helpful. Let's keep in touch. Guys if there's anything that we touched upon, and you'd like us to maybe explore a bit further let us know either myself or Simon and we'll probably try to make it happen, Simon, if you offer for a second round.

 

Simon Severino  22:46  

Always.

 

Andrei Tiu  22:48  

 Super, will try to organize. Until next time, guys keep rocking it. Thank you for tuning in today again, Simon, thank you for joining us.

 

Simon Severino  22:57  

Thank you, Andrei. Thank you Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. 

 

Andrei Tiu  23:01  

See you next time. Have an awesome one, keep rocking it, and stay safe!