Why Did I Create the Pipeline Ops Podcast?
How many times have you read a business book, listened to a podcast, or read a blog article and gotten to the part about how Apple did it, how Starbucks did it, or how Salesforce did it?
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Examples from large, well-known brands are prevalent in keynote addresses, books, classes, and online.
However, while these stories are very entertaining, make sense, and may resonate with you, there is still a problem. Only a fraction of the advice from these parables apply to you, as a company with a small marketing team and a small marketing budget.
It is less exciting (and less effective) to tell an audience about a small company that increased lead generation, doubled its customers from 100 to 200, or increased repeat sales from existing customers.
Since there is no brand recognition, readers and listeners can't validate and verify the results in their heads to determine that the story is credible and the results are real.
With most advice being pulled from (and geared toward) large brands, that leaves a deficit of marketing advice for businesses with smaller teams.
Reality Drives Me (and My Advice for Marketing Smaller Companies)
I created the Pipeline Ops podcast to provide a realistic, actionable path for growing your business.
As someone who has run a small marketing team for the past 6 years, I’ve had to learn, test, and implement processes to grow my company without a big team or a big budget.
The most read marketing advice online leaves many business owners and executives confused.
There are specific systems that small marketing teams can put in place to get found, generate leads, and close more customers without big advertising spends and hiring more people.
However, most books, podcasts, and articles don’t lay out advice in terms of systems. Marketing processes are much too complicated to explain in a single blog post or interview.
Go back through the last few articles you have read. They’ll have titles like:
- 5 Ways to Increase Blog Readership
- How to End Your Sales Calls with Momentum
- 10 Must-Try Display Ad Formats Guaranteed to Increase Sales
I have to admit that I read and share these articles just as much as you do. They contain useful information.
The problem with this content being so pervasive is that it isn’t connected to a workable system. They are disjointed tactic, which can be super-useful if that is the specific challenge you are trying to tackle.
However, this advice is incomplete and can be a distraction if you don’t have a workable growth plan already in place.
Headlines like “10 Must-Try Display Ad Formats Guaranteed to Increase Sales” are borderline misleading. They imply that that is the only tactic you need to grow your customer base.
In reality, if all of the other parts of your marketing and sales funnel, messaging, and positioning are right, and getting people to click on display ads is the only weak point in your process, then this advice will increase sales.
The combination of being told to use strategies that companies with multi-million-dollar marketing budgets employ, and the frustration of implementing disjointed marketing tactics spread online, can leave small business owners and people who run small marketing teams feeling unnecessary pressure.
The pressure to get results from incomplete tactics or to act like a big brand takes time and effort away from marketing plans that work. Along with wasted money and time going down the wrong path, I’ve even seen this situation lead to months of analysis paralysis where marketing and sales executives bang their heads against the wall trying to fit into the wrong mold.
The Good News About Growing Your Business
If you are stuck without a growth plan and starting from scratch, or if you have spent valuable time pursuing an effective approach, I have great news for you.
Growing your customer list is very doable…more doable than you might think.
This silver lining gets me really excited and it is the reason why I launched the Pipeline Ops podcast.
The processes, channels, and metrics for companies with small marketing and sales teams are different that those used by bigger, more well-funded companies.
It is as simple as that. If you know how to implement and optimize these specialized marketing and sales systems, you’ll be able to grow your business without the big marketing teams and budgets that you associate with marketing today.
Each week, I am going to lay out exactly what I did to grow my business with a marketing team of one. I know firsthand how to increase leads 10X and compete with companies 20 times my size (and win!).
I’ll share what tried, how I tested it, what worked, and what did not.
This is a two-way conversation. I’d love your questions and feedback on the Pipeline Ops Facebook page.
You can also get free tips, training, and templates at Pipelineops.com.
