Episode 80: How to Stand Out in a Crowded Marketplace with Emma Schermer Tamir

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Today we have Emma joining us all the way from Vegas where it is stinkingly hot. And when I say hot. Here in Australia we normally think we know heat, but we work through about the temperature it is from Fahrenheit to Celsius and we got to about 46, so that's hot for anyone anywhere. So and it's mid afternoon, so I suspect it's right in the heat of the day. But Emma's inside so we can all rest easy. She's not going to pass out in the middle of the podcast recording. But let me tell you a little bit about Emma before we get into today. So Emma's all about helping businesses in really high competition environments. Those environments often we have really fast levels of transactions, but super, super competitive. I like having someone like this on the podcast because we know that the competitive strategies that these type of people need to build have to stand the test of time because you're gonna be again, again, again and again tested against your competition. So Emma, through her proven techniques and her strategies that have had helped her across over 2000 businesses, she's been able to really make an impact to those clients of hers around boosting their sales and building their brands online. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that today. Emma's thought leading experiences, it's very much around E commerce and the Amazon space, but I know extends out into the broader business world and her strengths are really around marketing, E commerce and branding. So really nice to sales leaders that we're going to be able to take some of that across into that hyper competitive environment, into our sales teams. So I'm really happy to have Emma on board today. Really looking forward to seeing what we can talk about. But first of all, Emma, welcome to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast.

Thank you, Ben. I'm very excited to be here with you today.

Excellent. So before we get in today, can you please tell me a little bit about what you do and who you are? Sure.

So I, for the last eight years, have been running an e commerce marketing agency with a specialty in helping businesses on Amazon, and I run that with my business partner and husband. And we. It's fascinating because in the world of e commerce, you can instantly see how what you're doing has an impact. And so it's a great scientific experiment that's always happening in real time, where even just a slight tweak of something can have a very significant impact on the outcome that you're looking to achieve. And also, the world of e commerce is just constantly changing, so it's certainly never boring. So that's what I spend most of my days doing. I'm writing a book. And also I speak on these topics. And so. So I love talking about these things. I love helping people that may not think that they're marketers realize that they actually can be and are if they just shift how they look at all of it.

Yeah. Excellent. Okay. Really, really like that as an approach, particularly the piece you said around making small changes that can have a significant impact. We speak a lot in sales strategy around how small little pivots or little 1% movements when we do them again and again and again and again can make such a substantial change to your business. So I love looking at the nuances around our strategies and what we're doing to be better. And in fact, today that's really what we're going to focus on. And that's about standing out or how to stand out in a really crowded marketplace, because often to stand out, they're just little things that we need to do. But really keen to hear your thoughts and perspectives on that today. So let's just get things rolling before we start to talk around how we do stand out. Can we set the scene and how do you think that sales, marketing, and even branding need to work together to put ourselves into the position where we are going to be able to stand out?

Yeah. So I think that people do themselves a great disservice to look at all of these as separate verticals because they should all really be feeding one another. Every one of those departments, if you will, is gathering different bits of information and making different decisions that are then feeding the next one. So if I were to say where we might start this loop it would really be the branding, because branding is about becoming very clear about who you want to be as a business and the kind of impact that you want to have on all of the different people that interact with you. Not just your potential customers, but really anybody that you're interfacing with as you go about interacting with the world. Marketing is how you actually get that message out there, and it can look like a lot of different things. Also, advertising would be under that umbrell, you have the organic or the paid side of things. And then the sales is really that filling in the space between what marketing and branding are doing and helping the customer understand what is the best choice for their needs. And so all of those are feeding into itself, because if you don't have clarity about where your customers are, then you could do all the marketing on the world, but if it's not where they're hanging out, then you're not really getting anywhere. And so all three of those need to be very dialed in and united in order to set you up to be not only converting as many customers as possible, but also converting the right customers, which is, I think, an aspect that is oftentimes not really considered. But not all sales are good sales. And so you want to make sure that there's a really fantastic fit between your offer and the customers that you are targeting. And there's a lot that goes into that, obviously, but they all feed each other constantly. And because the sales is getting direct feedback, then they need to also be bringing that feedback to the branding and marketing so that everybody can continue to iterate. Because especially in the world that we live in, things move very rapidly. And so it's imperative that you are taking that feedback and constantly refining and integrating to have an even better presence and strategy.

Yeah, there's so many things to unpack there. I'll try and start at the beginning, but something really, really big on this podcast is that we take thoughts and then we position them in a slightly different context so that those listening get to hear them in slightly different ways. Often, as we're learning, we need to see things in different, be it visual, be it listening, be it trying for ourselves. For me, what you're actually talking about here is what we talk about a lot, is that branding is about getting people to know who you are. Marketing is about getting them to contact you, and then sales is about getting them to work with you. Right. So if all three of those are aligned straight down, be careful to know my microphone here. If they're all aligned, then we're going to have a far better quality of customer coming through that funnel, which we're going to talk a bit more about in a moment, if that's okay. But the piece I think that you jumped on that often gets overlooked is that sales then becomes that feedback loop that goes all the way back up to branding. And so instead of it being a line, a vertical line, branding into marketing to sales, it's actually a circle where we start with branding, we move across the marketing, we down or around that circle into sales, and then back up the top with that feedback loop. So I think that's super, super impactful in understanding that if all three departments don't work together, then we're going to really struggle to get those quality customers into our business. And I absolutely agree with you. Fifteen years ago I wouldn't have, but now I absolutely agree with you that not every customer is a good customer. Customers that don't pay, customers that take up an exceptional amount of time, customers that you're just not going to be able to deliver to meet their expectations because they're different in terms of alignment to your business. Right. So particularly in fast growth businesses, we actually want to be approaching those customers that are the most appropriate for us. Now, you touched on in there, we have a prospecting framework, five steps in it. You probably covered three of those five steps off a couple of minutes there. But there was one that was really important and that's around how we're getting our ideal customer or our target customers into our business. So can you talk through some of your experience with how we go about repeatedly and consistently making sure we get our ideal customers in front of our teams?

Sure. So this might sound like an obvious place to start, but funny enough, very few people do this step. So I think it's really important to just take a moment to talk about, which is that you have to get clarity about who that person is and you need to be really specific about it. Because a lot of times what I'll get when I ask clients that question is, oh, somebody living in the United States between the ages of 20 to 60, which is really not helpful when it comes to having any type of clarity of things. And so developing out a customer avatar or essentially a customer profile that is very, very thorough allows for a couple of things. One is we were talking at the beginning of this conversation about the unity between sales and marketing and branding. And I would actually extend that out to even customer service and really anybody that is interfacing with the public having that clarity of who your target customer is and having everybody on the same page with they are is going to inform how you interact with them. Because somebody who is very busy business person, who has a two hour commute and just a few hours with their family at the end of every day is going to have a different set of needs and even expectations around communication style than somebody who is a solopreneur, who works from home, who's move to more affordable city because they also value lifestyle. And even that isn't as specific as I would encourage you to get. But those are the types of things that you need to be pulling apart. And so that allows for that decision making throughout the organization. But what that also does is that allows you to really tailor all of your marketing and messaging to be speaking directly to that person. Because those two profiles that we just spoke about, they're going to have a different sense of humor, they're going to have a different set of cultural references that they're pulling from, they're going to have different even expectations for what that product or service that they're purchasing is going to do for them and a different set of problems that they might even be looking to solve and how they value the solution to those problems and what they're willing to see spend on that. And so your full strategy is going to be illuminated in some ways even dictated by who that customer is. And if there isn't an alignment, then you're not only going to be missing out on your full potential of what you could be generating, but you're going to be wasting a lot of time and resources just not being as specific as you need to be.

Absolutely, completely agree with you there. It doesn't matter if we are a sales hunter, if we're a sales key account manager, if we're an appointment setter, if we're in marketing, communications, marketing, branding, marketing, lead generation. Today we all have more data to access than we can process. We have more things on our list to do than we can get through. The modern way of working has changed significantly in that it's not just about now getting through a volume of work, but it's recognizing where to apply our focus. So the more we are aligned between our marketing and sales teams and then within those teams, the easier it is for us to apply where we're going to focus. Right? So understanding who your target customer is, it takes away so much of that noise that can result in all different areas of the business doing very, very different things. So I think that is super impactful and really, really important. When we're out there trying to understand our target customers. The other piece to jump on what you said that I thought was really important is that, and you spoke about this without spelling it out, is that if our target market base is too broad and we're marketing out to or we're selling through lead generation, right? So sales doing their lead generation versus marketing doing their lead generation. If we're going out to markets that are too broad, we'll get the leads in, but our conversion rates out the other end will be really small. And that's where it can really hurt a business. Because it's not just wasted money on your marketing spend, it's wasted hours in your sales team. And those wasted hours in your sales team mean you're spending not just those hours that get tied up and thrown in the Las Vegas trash, Right? Last time I was in Vegas, I got into a lot of trouble. Every time I hear about Vegas, I think, oh my God, this is. I can't do a professional podcast about getting to Vegas. But I think I'm alike just about anyone that's been there that when I say a lot of trouble, I was just young and out really late and drank too much and had lots of fun. But when we talk about wasting time, it's not just wasting time for your salespeople, but it's the opportunity cost of them being able to talk with your really important prospects. So really love that. Okay, so let's say we've got our target market, right? What's the way that we can really make ourselves the obvious choice when it comes to our product amongst our competition?

So that's where we take this clarity about who your customer is and we amplify that. And we are currently in this very different environment that we were in even a couple of years ago, which is that one of the low hanging fruit with AI is that everybody can now create massive amounts of mediocre content. And so just getting somebody to listen and to pay attention, let alone actually be interested in what we have to say is increasingly more challenging. And in addition to that, once that even happens, people's thresholds are just almost zero. You know, like, I don't know about you, but for me, my inbox has become flooded with all of these newsletters that I've never subscribed to, because now there's something called that allows for newsletter arbitrage, where by subscribing to one newsletter, you've now essentially agreed to subscribe to many others. And so the sacred place of the inbox is now being even More flooded than it already was. And so maybe in the short term that's good because these companies can build their newsletters. But in the long term, what does that mean? It means that email is not also going to be a great place to be reaching customers. And so if that is the environment that we are operating in. So trust levels are low. Tolerance or interest for something new is low. How do you create connection? And that's by really identifying what your customers care about and really putting them in the center of things. So one of my favorite books that talks about how to do this is Building a Story Brand. Are you familiar with that book?

I know the Story Brand framework. Yeah, absolutely.

So what's so fantastic about it is that we make the mistake that when we're thinking about our brand story, we put ourselves, the business, as the center of that story. But really our goal is to put the customer at the center. And so when we put the customer at the center of every single decision that we make, that's how we begin to build trust, establish authority, understand what's going to resonate and connect with them, figure out how to actually foster a conversation and a relationship with them. And so allowing the customer and. And who they are to drive that. And then from the other side of that, getting specificity about who you are as a brand, what values you have, how you're wanting to show up, and then thinking about ways to really be able to create a conversation and connection between those two. That's where you're not just making a sale, but you're building a relationship that can also have an increased value by either being a repeat customer, by being a referral base for other people that are looking for products like yours, leaving reviews. So there's so much value in that relationship beyond just the initial purchase, that if you're really thinking about how can I serve them and how can I build a relationship with them, that then you amplify the value of that very significantly.

Okay, great. So we've spoken about three things so far today. We've spoken about truly aligning between branding, marketing and sales. And I don't mean here just to once a quarter we sit down and we talk about what's marketing up to, what sales up to. That's not that type of alignment, but it's actually getting involved together in your strategic planning and making sure before you kick off any year and when you go to review your facets of operations throughout the year that you really are on the same page. Much harder to do than it is so easy to Say very, very important. The second one is getting clear on your target market. And again, that's not just saying 18 to 39 year old American females who have kids and work in this industry or procurement managers who work in businesses over $50 million in size. Right. That's just not specific enough. We need to be a lot clearer on who we're targeting to make sure that we're making the most effective use of the resources that we have available to us. Third piece you've spoken about is putting the customer at the center of your journey. And I often talk to the businesses we work with in particular around having both a sales process, so we map out our sales process, but also having our customer journey mapped so we know the steps that our customer goes through on that journey and we can then find the gaps and work out exactly where we need to fill them. So really, really powerful three areas that are big ticket items in businesses, but hard to get. Last question for today if we can. Let's put yourself into the position of being a sales leader of a business. Your remit is to grow, right? Competitive market. Your remit is to grow. What's the number one thing you'd recommend they focus on when it comes to standing out in a crowded marketplace to help their business grow?

I am a big fan of building authority in your industry and also in seeing a lot of what's happening in the world of personal brands. I think there's immense impact and power there. I've seen recently some articles saying that now personal pages for companies are getting significantly more reach and engagement than corporate pages are, which isn't surprising because we're all looking for that human connection which I think will only continue to grow as AI becomes more integrated into our daily lives. That desire to be connecting with real humans is so important. And so in thinking about establishing authority, I think it has a trickle down effect into so many different aspects. It has that awareness of just everybody kind of seeing you around, which is very significant when it comes to trust and likability and some of those elements that you need in order to have people want to buy from you. It of course can attract leads and sales opportunities. It's also really great for partnerships and, and it helps to build out more of the relationships that you might have with other colleagues within your industry that oftentimes those relationships can be far better lead generation tools than just going after each individual customer. So as far as biggest bang for the buck, that's where I tend to lead. Want to say, keeping in mind that you need to Be very clear about where your industry and where those types of decision makers and thought leaders spend their time. And so it's not just getting on Facebook because if your industry isn't on Facebook, then it doesn't really matter and it doesn't necessarily mean becoming an influencer. I'm not, I'm not saying that either.

Yeah, look, I get it. And you've knowing where your customers hang out. Right. I think that's the fourth step of our prospecting frameworks. Absolutely agree with you. I love asking that question because you'll go to eras episode 80 or 81, I think, and I don't think I've had the same answer to that question since I've asked and I've probably asked it 30 times over those episodes. So personal branding is becoming really important. Fundamentally agree with you that in a world where trust has deteriorated across brands, we need to be building trust at a personal level ourselves. And there's no time, there's never any time wasted in building out your own personal brand. Because any person in this world who has a network, in fact, Robert Kiyosaki says this really well. People who build and maintain networks are never, ever out of work. Those who don't are always looking for work. And I paraphrase it, he says it better than that. But you build your network and you've got a career for life. So thank you very much. Emma, can you share with everyone where can we learn more about you or Marketing by Emma?

Sure. So our website marketingbyema.com has all of the information as far as where to find us if you also like this type of content. I have a YouTube channel where I get a little bit more granular with many of these ideas, which is at Marketing by Emma. So I would say those are the two main places where you can find me if you'd like to connect or ask questions.

Excellent. Fantastic. Well, stay cool. The opposite to where many people in the world are listening to this at the moment. Lovely to have you on today and look for everyone listening, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're onger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help. Please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.