My rebrand (work in progress)

I always shake my head and roll my eyes at so-called marketing experts who suck at marketing themselves— but here's my turn to be the one who sucks.

I've been very slowly working my way through a rebrand… The kind of thing I would probably do for other people in a week without breaking a sweat, but when it comes time to do it for myself, of course it's taking me way, way longer than it should.

So I'm going to share my work-in-progress here as a forcing function to myself to finish this shit, and hopefully share something that helps you get over a hump that you've been stuck on.

To make a long story short, I'm rebranding as a fractional CMO because that's much closer to the work I actually do for my clients— much bigger in scope than my old positioning of “LinkedIn and YouTube.” And I'm focusing on B2B services companies, because that's the world I know backwards and forwards.

My core idea is this:

For B2B services companies, sales is the oxygen for the entire company. If they don't sell, you're all out of a job.

Therefore, your entire marketing effort needs to be focused on helping the sellers sell. In particular, creating a steady flow of two moments for sales people: The First Impression followed by Permission to Pitch.

Pretty simple, right? They can't work with us if they don't know who we are. Then, once they know who we are, we build a relationship with them until the time is right and we get permission to pitch.

Once we have permission to pitch, we still need to close the deal, and we still need the deal to go well. Let’s not take those as a given, but for most companies, that’s not the hard part— deal flow is the hard part.

And if they had a system to reliably create these two moments? That would change everything for their business.

But here's the problem: Typical B2B marketing is almost totally useless at creating those moments. No shade, but the majority of what they do on a day-to-day basis is a waste of time.

And you're probably asking yourself, "Cool— but how do we create these events? Are you telling me this is something that can just be engineered?" The answer is yes— you can absolutely engineer them with this model:

Use your Assets to create Moments which happen at Places and connect you with Prospects.

• Assets: all the raw materials you have to work with, such as social media, case studies, network, etc

• Moments: Defining interactions between us and the prospect

• Places: IRL or virtual venues where we have the chance to interact with the prospect

• Prospects: The people and companies we want to work with

I feel like I could use some alliteration or come up with some clever branded name for this, but here's how it works:

You start with the prospect and work backwards. For example, let's say that you wanna work with the VP of marketing at Company X. How are you going to help her find out that you exist and make a great first impression on her?

Well, let's say that we have a couple of people in our network who know her or have worked with her in some capacity. Get them on your podcast, share those episodes on your social media, tag the connections, and maybe you she’ll see them.

For the people you don't know well enough to get on the podcast, maybe you do breakdowns of successful companies on LinkedIn and tag those people. Chances are they'll comment on them because everybody likes it when you say nice things about them online, and then maybe she'll see some of that in her feed.

If so, we've got our first impression!

If not, that's okay too, because we know that there's a conference coming up where she's going to be on a panel. And from lurking LinkedIn, we also know that some of our network connections will also be there— some of the same people that we did company profiles on.

Now we just find the right time to go introduce ourselves to her and say, "Hey, we had so-and-so on our podcast who says you're brilliant, so I thought I’d say hi.”

That's our second path to a first impression— we can even come up with a third and fourth option if we really want to.

Now, we need to create our next moment, which is permission to pitch.

For the sake of keeping this under a million words, I won't get into too much detail about how that might happen. But I think you get the idea. It's all about using your assets to create these moments at the right place that create a constant flow of First Impressions, then building towards Permission to Pitch.

As you can see, I've got a few TBDs on this chart, and there's a few places where this is probably a bit rough around the edges. But it's starting to come together, and I'm going to force myself to hard launch it in the next week or two, even if it's not perfect.

Which brings me to the big takeaway:

Don't get stuck in the strategy and planning phase forever. I feel like I'm dangerously close to that here, but I'm not going to let it happen. You don't want to launch with something completely half-assed, but the best strategy in the world doesn't matter unless you get it in front of people.

And nine times out of ten, the answer is not to do more planning and pontificating; it's to take action— action is almost always better than inaction.

Which ironically leads me back to my own model: unless you are putting yourself out there, you're not creating First Impressions, and if you're not creating first impressions, then you can't get to Permission to Pitch.

I'm going to sign off for now because it's late and I'm on hour 12 of my shift at the content factory— but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this model, and stay tuned for the hard launch soon!

PS - If you like my emails, reply to this and say hi! I don’t have any room for new clients right now so I have nothing to sell you, but I always like talking with people.