Brian Gubernick breaks down sales and marketing as nine mechanical levers: sharpen your offer, create daily demand, communicate consistently, build a referral flywheel, differentiate your message, expand your value stack, remove friction, allocate time to high-value work, and focus on the 20% of actions that drive 80% of revenue.
Chapters
Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. If revenue in your business is inconsistent or slow or plateaued, most leaders have a tendency to look in the wrong place. They start to blame the market or the economy. Maybe they blame the leads or the people within their organization or the platform they leverage. But here's the deal. Sales and marketing are not mysterious. They're what I would call mechanical. Whether you run a team or you are, you are in fact the team, I think the same levers apply. And if you understand these levers that I'm going to discuss here today, you can fix almost any sales and marketing problem in 30 days or less. So let's walk through this diagnosis, this 9-step process to fixing your sales and your marketing. Step 1, you have to fix the offer. Fix the offer. What do I mean? If there are no sales, then your value proposition is not sharp enough. So, before you retrain your scripts and hire someone new or start to spend money on ads, you should be asking, hey, why should someone choose us? Why now? Why instead of our competition? If your messaging sounds like everyone else in your space, your results will mirror everyone else in your space. Sales problems usually start upstream and they start at the point of clarity or lack thereof. So, step 1, fix your offer, fix the offer. Step 2, create demand. No leads in your world? You don't have enough leads? You're not creating demand. See, marketing is not promotion. Marketing is, is contribution. What do I mean? Teach something, host something, give something useful away every single day. Make sure that you're out there. If the market doesn't feel your presence consistently, then it totally forgets about you. If your sphere of influence doesn't feel your presence consistently, they forget about you. Attention has a tendency to follow value. So I think that as a result, you could really, uh, uh, engineer demand. So, step 2 is to make sure you create demand, and that's by coming from contribution. Now, step 3 in fixing your sales and marketing: tell people what you do every single day. It's that simple. Most businesses don't have a marketing problem. They have a problem of obscurity. People don't clearly understand what you do. Who you help, why you're different. And so you repeat it every single day until they get it. Social, email, running events, being on a stage, creating conversations. Repetition like this builds authority, and authority builds trust, and then the trust is what leads to some revenue. So visibility is absolutely top of mind here. Again, step 3, tell people what you do every single day. Step 4 in fixing your sales and marketing, build a flywheel. If your growth feels inconsistent, then you don't have a loop. What do I mean? A healthy engine to a business looks like this. It's leads, lead to appointments, which create clients, which create results. Which along this flywheel create more testimonials. Testimonials create referrals. Referrals create more leads. See the, the flywheel effect I just described there? Each win feeds the next win. Leads feed into appointments. Appointments feed in the clients, and so forth. So if you're starting from zero every month, you're on a treadmill and you're not building any momentum. In order to compound you've got, you've got to architect that compounding effect. So, step 4 is build a flywheel. Step 5, stop sounding like everyone else. If emails aren't opened, if direct messages aren't answered, if your content doesn't resonate, then it's just because you sound like everyone else. Your generic language will get ignored. If your messaging could be copied and pasted by a competitor, then it's probably pretty weak. Different gets attention and, and specific gets a response. So, sharpen your hook. Stop sounding like everyone else. Step 5. Step 6, broaden the value stack. What do I mean? If clients of yours come and go quickly, you're only solving one problem. Let me say that again. If clients of yours come and go rather quickly, you're only solving one problem. I think the highest performing organizations solve ecosystems or create ecosystems. They ask, hey, what else does this client need? What happens after their first transaction? So instead of being just the product or the service, be the platform. And that sort of expansion in terms of your value stack creates durability. Step 7. In fixing your sales and marketing, remove friction. Remove friction. What do I mean? If, let's say, website traffic, if it exists but your conversion is low, it's because the issue is clarity. There's too many steps, there's too many options, there's an unclear next action. So you've got to simplify the path, you've got to remove friction. Every additional decision that you force a prospect to make reduces momentum. And your job here is to convert. And the only way to convert is to create more clarity, make it simpler for them to commit. So step 7, remove friction. Step 8, step 8 is fix allocation. What do I mean? If growth feels exhausting to you, then look at allocation. Are high-value activities crowded out by low-value tasks? If so, then you have to systemize, you have to delegate, and you have to eliminate. So fix the way in which you allocate time. Step 8: Are high-value activities crowded out by low-value tasks? Sales does— do not scale through just sheer effort. They scale through focus. And then your final step, step 9 today, in order to fix your sales and marketing, get maniacal about your 20%. What do I mean? When revenue slows or stalls, a lot of people start to diversify. They look for a new channel or a new offer, a new strategy. And I think that many cases that's wrong. I think the best of the best identify their 20%. The 20% that they're doing that creates 80% of the results or more. So they identify their 20%, the conversations that drive revenue, the messaging that's really working and converting best. And then they go all in on those things. And they go deep, right? Because that depth creates momentum and it's the distraction that ends up killing that momentum. So, in closing, just gave you 9 ways to fix your sales and marketing. If sales and marketing are underperforming for you, don't get emotional about it. Instead, just diagnose and then pull the right lever and then be sure to apply pressure on that lever consistently. I don't think that sales growth is, is, is magic. It's instead disciplined execution, but in the right place. It's, it's kind of part of this No Days Off ethos, you know, right? Like, we're not looking to just go do more in all these different areas. It's more about doing what matters repeatedly, right? So it's much more focused. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.
