Building Strong Business Connections with CJAM Marketing with Behdad Jamshidi

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts, uh, to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10X ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, And today I'm very excited to welcome my guest. Now I'm going to read his bio to make sure I get this right. Behdad Jamshidi, or B for short, is the CEO at CJAM Marketing Matchmaker. He started out as an engineer, shifted into running a business without ever really planning to, but his passion has always really been around learning and growing. So he takes every opportunity to do just that, whether it's taking classes, learning from mentors, or reading a ton of books. Everything is tied to becoming the best version of himself, one that he won't regret being when he's 80 years old. He's really focused on learning to love the process, not the outcome. His current business, CJM Marketing Matchmaker, has generated over $10 million in value between his customers and the marketing partners he works with. He's been featured in MarketWatch, Bloomberg, National Post, and the Financial Post, and been on over 50 podcasts to date. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, he's currently living in the Netherlands, and he's visited over 50 European cities on his adventures. So, B, thanks so much for stopping by this, uh, Southern California city today. Thanks for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

Awesome. Well, you've obviously had a really interesting sort of arc and progression Tell us your story. How did you sort of get from where you were to where you are today?

It's a great question. The 1-minute story really comes down to, as you mentioned, I used to be an engineer. I used to work for a large telecom company called TELUS in Canada. And I used to work with like mid-market customers anywhere from about 50 to 1,000 type employee range. And a lot of my work was talking to C-level executives, IT, understanding what's happening in their businesses and then building out roadmaps, typically technology roadmaps of how you get from A to B to C. And it touched all different aspects of business. And I got to work with so many different types of customers. And I learned a lot from that, from business consulting, sales leadership, and technology. On the marketing side though, I really randomly got into building websites, Google Ads, SEO, and very quickly hated doing 80-hour websites on the weekend. Like it was not fun. I got paid very well as a sales engineer. So I started looking for different marketing partners to work with. And as I did that, I noticed that most marketing agencies didn't really understand business. most business people didn't really understand marketing. And so there was always this gap in the middle. And so I put people in the same meeting, they didn't speak the same language or agencies were really only good at like 1 to 3 things, but they would tell customers they're good at everything. And so I thought maybe I could build a list of 10 marketing partners and solve all the world's problems. That was a false belief because I've talked to 913 different marketing agencies and partners over the last 5 and a half years. And I work with about 11% of them in my network now that I've vetted And then I match businesses with the right marketing partners at this point.

That's great. So that's what CJM Marketing Matchmaking does, is it brings businesses together with the marketing agencies that they work with. So you're almost like a 2-sided platform, like a Yelp or something like that.

Yeah, it's kind of like the Upworks of the world, but the human version of it. And then we help with like agencies and fractional CMOs, high-level contractors. So it really just depends on what our customers need.

Interesting. Interesting. So one thing you mentioned in, in your bio was that you read tons of books. So I wanna take sort of a step aside. Tell us about a recent book that you read that you really enjoyed.

Yeah. So the book that I read recently was more around business mindset. That was kind of what I was trying to gather from it. And it's called The Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, I believe. And I really enjoyed that book because it just went through all the deep hard truths about business because he built a startup. The startup literally went— he had to like split the company at a certain point. He— there's like 3 or 4 different breaking points where he's like, we lost, like it's game over. There's like no steps forward. And he walks through his like thinking and how to like move forward from those times. And he ended up selling his business for over $1 billion.

Wow.

So a lot of like super interesting insights in there that I really captured. And I really enjoyed just the fact of like, hey, business is hard. The biggest thing is like how you go through the hard times and that's what creates a really good CEO. you like train yourself to become one by going through making the decisions. And at the end of the day, one of the biggest things I took away from it is that every decision that happens in the business ultimately falls on you regardless of if it's your, if it's, you know, marketing or product or whatever. You need to know enough about your business to help be able to make decisions in any area. And if things happen, it's 100% on you, not on your team.

So the takeaway that you would say for other, you know, CEOs, entrepreneurs listening, from that book is that it's even if you've hired a financial person or if you've hired an accountant, it's really on you. And so although that may not be where you prefer to spend your time in your business, you have to sort of, you know, grab that challenge by the horns. Is that accurate?

That's exactly it. Yeah. And it's really just the way that I work with my own team internally. And just, you know, I'll take— you take advice from everyone and you learn things, but like, if you're confused about something, you better figure it out and not just agree to what the person in front of you has said, right? Hope that they got it right because they're the specialist in it. But you should understand it enough to be like, this makes sense. I'm on board and I'm moving forward because it's your decision at the end of the day.

Yeah. Well, it's so funny because you hear the stories of, you know, like Billy Joel, his accountant took all his money and, you know, he, so he had to, you know, do all those, shows at Madison Square Garden to remake back his empire. But, you know, all the time that, and I've certainly worked with companies where they were abdicating certain choices that were really vital to their business to external partners that weren't as qualified as they expected them to be. And so that's an interesting thing. Also in sales, a lot we talk about, you know, eating the frog. I don't know if you've ever heard that phrase, but like everyone's got a little pet frog It's a big, ugly, slimy thing that sits on their desk that they, you know, just kind of keep not looking at because they want to just pretend it's gonna go away. But if you just eat that frog first thing in the morning, like it winds up not tasting as bad as you think it's gonna and really opens up your day for a lot of other things.

That's exactly it. Yeah, 100%.

So shifting to the topic a little bit around, you know, how you've grown, this successful business. One of the things that, you know, we talk about in B2B marketing and sales is sort of the importance of building, you know, trust and credibility with potential prospects. And one of the key strategies for that is, you know, building content, content that educates them, moves them through their decision journey. And I know that you've spent a lot of time building some content systems for your business. Tell us a little bit about, you know, sort of why, why you did that and sort of how you did that.

Yeah. So a big strategy of mine on my marketing strategy is social media, right? Like ultimately everyone wants to be a thought leader and, but no one wants to sit down and write the 5 posts a day or they're doing the videos or any of that kind of stuff, right? But for me as an engineer, like I was thinking, well, how can I make a process around this and how can I offload the things that I don't enjoy doing? I don't enjoy posting content. I don't enjoy editing my content, but I love writing it and doing it, right? And so initially when we started out with the content machine, we were in Trello. I kind of created a board and was basically writing out all my content, and then we're just moving across tabs as it kind of progressed through the content machine, right? From editing to getting the picture in to posting. And that worked for a certain amount of time initially just to kind of get some of our volume up. But then I had to make a switch over to ClickUp because now that's where our project management system is. That's where a lot of my databases are, that and Airtable. But I wanted to bring that system into ClickUp and bring my entire team into one place. And so we've got to the point where now ClickUp is running like a machine. Like we got videos coming in, videos will jump into other areas and get moved into other lists, and the video editor knows what to do, when to do it, what kind of post it is that they're editing. And then my social media manager will come in and edit posts, look over it, my fractional CMO will approve it. A whole system around it. But now we've gotten to the point where, okay, we got the volume up, we can post 5 times a week. If we need to do videos, we can do all that stuff and across multiple platforms, right? But the next piece of it is how do we increase the engagement? How do we get our content to go further? How do we get better at writing our hooks? How do we get better at making sure that people are following along the content and we're, we have the right amount of call to action, the right amount of lead forms a week. And so it's all of those like minute details now that we're constantly iterating on because we built the system. Now we're just trying to improve it. So we got to the 80-85% of the way there. Now the last 15% is gonna take us a while to figure out, but we're gonna constantly tweak and iterate until that flywheel hits the way we want it to hit. Yeah.

Well, so smart. And one of the things that, you know, oftentimes people miss when building a system is that feedback loop of, is it accomplishing the KPI that, you know, the key performance indicator, the metric that That we really care about. Instead, it's just like, well, I did it. And it's a checkbox. It's like a binary yes, no. But instead, like, well, what was the whole point of doing it? The whole point of doing it was to get some business outcome. And so, and also, I love that you have broken down, you know, the process and the system to have sort of key performance indicators at each stage. Like, did we get people to engage with the content? Okay. You know, yes or no. Did that engagement actually lead to, you know, commercial conversations? Yes or no. And so that's the, you know, real sort of key to having, you know, quality systems like that. That's so important. I also noticed you talked a little bit about, you know, sort of working with other team members and using those team members to kind of help you grow and scale. How hard of a transition was that to go from You know, sort of you doing it and owning it all and you had it all between your head and so you could just do it. You didn't have to explain it to anyone else to actually sort of defining a system so that someone else can take it off your plate and so that they can start to do it and you start to let some of that go. Talk to us a little bit about that, that process for you.

Yeah. So in the beginning, I kind of was trying to figure out what I really disliked doing, right? So as the business was kind of growing, right, I didn't have the budget to hire an entire social media team to come take over stuff.

Right.

It just wasn't possible. And it still kind of isn't like I don't want them to generate my content and write my thoughts. But ultimately what it kind of came down to is there's little pieces that I didn't enjoy doing. So initially it was, I don't wanna be posting all my content. So let's bring someone in to just do that posting piece, right? And then after that becomes, well, I don't actually wanna edit that content anymore either. Like I wanna just put my ideas down, structure it, and then have someone else edit it for little grammar mistakes and things like that. And so I started offloading that and then I went, okay, well, I don't like also doing the design or the photo aspect. Can I build a system where I just drop my photos, organize it in a certain way, and then let people choose the photos that make sense? They're already all pre-approved because I've chose it. You just need to have someone that knows what to choose for which posts that we're using. The next piece is gonna be, I don't even wanna organize my photos. I just wanna throw it somewhere and someone comes in, organizes it all for me, and then the team just kind of runs with it. So I have more time to think and do the creative stuff that I really enjoy doing. And so it was kind of like piece by piece. But if it really depends, I guess, like if my business was much larger, right? And I had entire teams and people I could hire, I'd offload the whole function. I just say, well, I don't even want to touch the social media stuff anymore. I'm outsourcing it. It's gonna cost $5,000, but I get this much extra time and it's worth it. So it really depends on the stage of business that you're at, if you're building from ground up or if you're already established and you're just like, I don't like doing this piece. How do I offload it? Put your processes somewhere into an SOP or something along those lines, or the person you're hiring is usually an expert. See if they bring something in from their side, verify that it's gonna work for you and tweak it and then let them run with it.

Well, so smart that you talk about, you know, sort of defining these standard operating procedures and, you know, sort of this critical flow because if you don't know what that flow is, you can't offload any of it. If it, if everything sort of lives between your ears of, well, I come up with the idea and then there's a post. But instead it's like, come up with the idea and then I write the content and then I find the imagery to go with it. And then I decide, you know, where to post it and then I tweak it based on that different platform. Now you've started to define a process that you can offload and that someone else can do for you, which really sort of creates that scale. I also thought it was interesting before that you were talking about, you know, sort of some of the different software you use, but that you had sort of an evolution there. You know, as an engineer, I'm curious about your thought process on, you know, how you sort of knew now's the time to empower this process with this software versus when it was time to escalate to others, because one of the challenges we see a lot of times is companies will sort of buy a piece of software thinking that's gonna be the solution. And so talk to us a little bit about your process going through that.

Yeah, I mean, I think whenever you're buying some sort of software, it's going to likely stop working for you at some point, right? Like what works for you in the beginning, you're gonna need to upgrade as you go through it. And so it gets to a certain point where you're realizing, okay, this system is breaking and it's breaking because the software doesn't have certain features or certain things that will make our lives easier. And so as I kind of like look at it, I'm like, well, if that's not working, how do we start making that migration point? And I always actually look at like, what's the load on the team before I make this shift, right? Like, I don't just do it right away. I go, okay, well, it's breaking, hasn't fully broken yet, but I know that we're gonna slowly need to start making these changes, right?

Yeah.

And then once we get to a certain point where we finish the big project or we have some time, I'll go, okay, this is now a priority because this is, this is not gonna work for the next year. So that's when we make the shift. And so the shift from, for example, Trello to ClickUp was something my fractional CMO did for me, right? She knew the entire system. She's been playing with the processes and she was able to replicate that model better in ClickUp for us. And now we're just constantly iterating on ClickUp as we go through it. And I think that system is gonna work for a long time now. Like, I don't see us shifting out of it. There's other things, for example, that we used in ClickUp like databases that hit a limit. And so now I'm slowly shifting over to Airtable because it's got way more functionality on that aspect. And so now I'm kind of like playing in the middle of like 2 different environments, but that's totally fine because at some point I will either transition fully over or find a way to integrate Airtable back. And so it's all in kind of one place, but it just, you sense it as a business owner, you just have a pulse and you're like, things are breaking, I need to be aware of it. Is it gonna matter in the next 6 months to a year? And if it does, like start moving once you have some bandwidth.

So you've probably heard about, you know, sort of like the golden triangle of transformation of like People, process, technology. And I was chatting with someone the other day that was talking about, you know, so often companies start with, well, I'm gonna buy this technology and that's gonna solve everything else. But instead it's, you gotta start with the people and then you build the process and then you layer in that technology that sort of enables that process to run better, faster, stronger and all of those things. So it's so interesting to hear you describe that in action.

That's 100% it because when I used to work for TELUS full-time, like we were always, here's the technology, we had all the technology in the world. But some of the questions that we would ask in our consulting sessions is how adaptable are your people to this new technology? Like, are they ready to adapt this new technology? Because we can give it to you, it's got all these features, but if the team's not gonna use it, what's the point, right? And so a lot of times when we ask that question, you notice people kind of stumbling and go, oh, I don't think our team would actually adopt this fast Or like, who can you find that champions this change, right? Like, if you can find a couple of people within a team, and usually I don't like to find one champion because that, let's say you have a team of 10, right? And you find one person that's against 9 other people. But if you get 2 to 3 people to champion, now it's like, oh, there's a movement. And everyone else goes, oh, there's a movement that I might as well jump on because everyone else is kind of moving together. So those are some of the things that you need to think about when it comes to like people shifting and people changing is like, Don't single out a single person, bring in multiple people, and also just always be engaged in awareness of like creating that environment of change and adaptability within your team. Like, even as we're doing social media changes right now, I'm constantly saying on the calls, hey, we're making changes, but these are likely not gonna be final changes. We're constantly iterating because we haven't hit the point where we're running a really, really smooth machine. We're gonna learn stuff, and then we need to iterate and feed back into the system and change it when things don't work. And so everyone's in that mindset that it's gonna change.

That's so, that's so interesting that, that phrase of iterating and you've talked about that a couple of times. And so oftentimes when we talk to business owners about like building a system and they're like, I don't wanna stifle creativity. But in fact, we see, you know, oftentimes that once you establish sort of a baseline of a system, it creates the opportunity for a lot more creativity. And then you can bring in someone that has ideas you never would have thought of. And they can add on to your existing system. Has that been your experience?

100%. It's like you need to create space to have creativity. Without space, you don't have any creativity because you're reactionary. And so the space to have like time to think, like all these systems that are there is just giving me more time on my business to like go for a walk, have a coffee because I come up with these ideas and then I go on my strategy calls and go, hey, what if we did this, this and this? The systems weren't there, I wouldn't have that time. And so I'm always trying to figure out like, how do we build systems? How do we build some sort of automation to get things rolling so that I have more time to think?

Yeah. Well, and one of those systems that I know that you've built is around sort of tackling churn and, you know, the sort of net revenue retention is actually one of the fastest ways to build, you know, company value. And a lot of companies really overlook that because they're just focused on bringing, I just need more customers. But If they're all leaving out the back door, you're never gonna get that growth. And I know you've built some systems around that specifically. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah. So I do have a 2-sided marketplace. So I have customers on one side and I have agencies and fractional CMOs and stuff on the other side. And so on the customer side, the number one thing for me was always like, how do I set expectations on the front end to make sure that this relationship works better? Because a lot of the times when businesses go into relationship with marketing partners, The expectations aren't actually properly set, even though the agencies say they set expectations. They don't set it at the level that they need to. So a lot of the times when I'm like on the front end, I'm doing a lot of business consulting to say, look, like if you're turning on this channel or doing this, like it relies on these other things. Have you even thought about that? So that's number one. And then I'm giving my customers like insights into, okay, well, look, you're about to go into an agency interview. Like, how do you approach those interviews? Do you just have typically most businesses have like one meeting. The good ones will have 2 or 3 where that initial meeting is the agency just asking the business owner a bunch of questions and then business owner might ask one or 2 questions, get a proposal and then they sign and they go, well, this didn't work out.

Right.

Well, my number one thing is like you need to have at least 2 meetings, one meeting where you're asking the agency a bunch of different types of questions and then another one where the agency is learning about you and then giving you a proposal. And so when they're going into that meeting, my next kind of question is, Do you have a set of questions that you ask that's set up so that you can go through interviewing that agency properly, just like you would do any other employee interview? Would you just go in blindly and not have a set of questions you want to ask around your company values, what you expect of them, their experience? It's the same thing with agencies. So I've built out sheets that I basically, if customers are working with me, you're about to go into a website interview. Do you have any questions? No. Well, here's the sheet that you need to use and add on your own questions as you go through it. And so those are some of the systems on the front end for businesses that I do. And then I have an entire other system on the agency side where it's like the vetting system, right? And so I'm constantly getting feedback from, okay, well, this didn't work. This question would have been a better question to ask. And so, I mean, after vetting over 900+ partners, you start iterating quite a bit and then you add other layers to it, right? And so it's all part of that process of like, Constantly, as I like using the word iterating, is iterating on things to continuously make it better so that you have a higher chance of success when it comes to the matchmaking process. Because as you know, in that whole marketing world, the matchmaking and people working with agencies, not very good. People are not happy usually.

Yeah, low success rate there for sure.

Yeah.

So obviously these are topics we're both super passionate about and you've done such an inspiring job of sharing with us today some of your systems that have helped you scale and grow. But I gotta be mindful of your time. But before I let you go, why don't you share with us something that's on the horizon for, you know, CJM Marketing Matchmaker that you're really excited about?

Yeah. So the core business I'm really happy with. So I'm continuously growing that. But I have started building a marketing agency group because I know so many different agency founders and I know so many different partners that I'm like, well, I need to start having my own community. Like, I like basically a secret community where it's gated. Everyone has to meet me before coming in. I want to make sure people are at a certain level. basically wanna build like the top-notch agency community that like no one else has built yet, right? Because a lot of people, there's like their fundamental community is the main aspect of their business. So their whole thing is like get as many people in as possible.

Right.

For me, it's not my core business. It's a supplement to my business. So my whole thing is like I wanna just bring in really, really quality people into this group and build it out. And so that's what I'm building right now and excited about. As I continue to do my matchmaking service, I believe that once I build this community out to the level I want to build it at, it's gonna make my life and my team's life way easier when it comes to matchmaking.

Oh yeah, for sure. Well, so for our folks that are listening and thinking about, wow, I'd really love to work with B and CJM, how can they get in touch with you? What's the best way to connect?

The best way is one, I'm always on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn via my full name, Bedad Jamshidi. or catching me on my website at www.cjammarketing.com. And CJAM is spelled C-J-A-M. And then if you do go there and you go to the footer, there's a bunch of resources for businesses as well in terms of like questions you can ask and all that different type of stuff. And through there you can send me a message, book a call, and I'd be happy to chat with you.

Awesome. Well, B, thanks so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Thanks. Thanks for having me and thanks for all the great questions.

Yeah, talk to you soon. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story, send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.