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Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales

By: David Blaise
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The Top Secrets of Marketing & Sales podcast provides tips on how to increase sales, improve profit margins and grow your business. Each week, we address issues related to important topics like targeting your ideal prospects, fine-tuning your messaging, attracting the clients you need, monetizing social media, the MVPs of Marketing and Sales and much more. From mindset to marketing and prospecting to podcasting, the Top Secrets podcast helps B2B and B2C entrepreneurs, professionals and salespeople get more of the customers and clients they need so they can do more of the work they love.Copyright © David Blaise, Blaise Drake & Company, Inc. | TopSecrets.com | 463414 Economics Leadership Management Management & Leadership Marketing Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • First Contact with a New Prospect

    First Contact with a New Prospect
    Dec 23 2025
    What is your first contact with a new prospect? Another good question to ask yourself is how does that first contact happen? And is it proactive on my part? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing your first contact with a new prospect. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: Hey, it’s good to be with you again. David. When you say first contact, I always think about Star Trek with their first contact with the aliens, and I feel like you’re kind of sitting there going, okay, are these going to be nice? Are they going to try and destroy the human race. You know, there’s a lot of trepidation with first contact and sometimes that first contact, how it goes, determines the whole rest of the relationship. David: That’s exactly where I stole the term from Jay. That is exactly where I stole the term from. And the way that came about is that I was talking to somebody about cold calling. This was years and years and years ago. Well, actually we were talking about prospecting and one of the things that this person mentioned to me was something related to cold calling. And I said, “okay, well, cold calling is one way that you can reach out to people.” I said, “think of it like it’s your first contact.” And literally it was because I saw that movie about first contact and I thought it’s such a great concept. The idea of whatever, meeting an alien species for the first time is one thing. But for salespeople, you’re exactly right. It’s the same thing. We’re walking into an unknown situation. We have absolutely no idea how the person is going to react and that. Doesn’t matter whether it’s on the phone as a cold call, whether it’s meeting someone at a networking event, whether it’s through social media. We have no idea what’s on the other end until we engage. Therefore, the whole idea, the whole concept of first contact, I think is really highly appropriate. It is the very first contact that we have with a prospect. If you understand that conceptually, it can really sort of open up your mind to the possibilities and to the opportunities. Because there are a lot of people who view whatever it is they do as first contact, as first contact. What I mean is if all they do is make cold calls, they view that as first contact. If all they ever have done to generate customers is through social media, that’s what they view as first contact. When you recognize, that’s just a method, that’s just one particular method of first contact, and you realize that there’s a whole other universe. To continue the space analogy here, there’s a whole other universe of options. It really allows you to test different things to figure out what’s going to work best for you. Jay: Yeah. And I love the idea that first contact, when I first thought of this, I was thinking that’s the first time that I meet them voice-to-voice or face-to-face. And in today’s world, that’s probably not going to be the first contact. In my business, the first contact is our website. That’s the first time that they’re going to see us. Now, in my business, I’m very fortunate that our three main competitors, their websites are awful, David, they are terrible. They are designed terribly. They’re hard to read. And all the time I get people saying, literally saying to me, “I chose you because I liked your website.” We’re somebody that offers this high level of expertise and you chose us just because we have a really good web designer. But that was the difference. Their first contact with us is positive, because we spend the time to get that right. David: Yeah, it’s a lot more than the web designer too, because you could have a beautiful design, but if the words on that design are not resonating with them, it’s not going to work. Which goes back to what we talked about before, the MVPs of marketing. The message on a website will definitely determine whether or not they will be interested in what you say. Now, the way we present that, meaning the design, that’s all part of the messaging component. But if the words don’t resonate, if the imaging doesn’t resonate, they’re not going anywhere. But you’re right! So many times, people don’t recognize that first contact is happening all the time. Even with things that you’re not even aware of. You go onto social media and you post something, whether it’s a picture of your dinner or a comment about politics or something business related, that could very well be their first contact with you. And if they hate it, they’re not going to be revisiting. Jay: Yeah, exactly. And that’s why companies out there can help clean up your mistakes if you mess up. You know, we say this all the time. Once it’s on the internet, it’s never going away. Trying to clean that up. Going back to my competitors. They’ve decided that education is how they’re going to draw people in. And so they have pages and ...
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    15 mins
  • The Trouble with Targeting in Business

    The Trouble with Targeting in Business
    Dec 16 2025
    The trouble with targeting in business is that a lot of people don’t do it well. It reminds me of that line from one of the Godfather movies where Michael Corleone says something along the lines of, “if history has taught us nothing else, it’s that you can get to anybody.” Right? And that is now true in terms of advertising. You can get to anybody, but what is the cost? David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, co-host Jay McFarland and I discuss the trouble with targeting. Welcome back Jay. Jay: Hey, David, once again, I’m excited to be here and I’m really excited to get your feedback on this, because when you first said we’re going to talk about the trouble with targeting, I kind of thought in my head, well, isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing? Aren’t, aren’t I supposed to be targeting? David: Oh yeah. Yeah. We definitely have to target. We definitely need to target. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with targeting. The trouble with targeting that I was thinking about is that a lot of people don’t do it, and a lot of the people who do do it maybe don’t do it as well as it can be done, and as a result, they don’t get the results they’re looking for. Some people think they’re targeting and they may be doing that, but if you’re not targeting to the point where it’s resulting in better quality prospects, better quality clients, and conversations that lead to sales, then you might need to hone in a little bit better in terms of your targeting efforts and your targeting approach. Jay: Yeah, so as I think about targeting, there’s a lot of work to be done upfront, right? If you’re going to target somebody, you’ve got to know who the target is. And that can take a lot of research on your own part. A lot of experimentation, a lot of looking at past contacts, how those contacts came into your funnel, and understand those things before shooting arrow in different directions. The odds that you’re going to hit anything that looks like a target are pretty slim. David: Exactly. And I think a lot of the reason for that is, many people think of the term targeting in terms of what you said, targeting’s like aiming at something. But it’s not just aiming at something, it’s having an idea in advance of what it is that you want to hit. And if we think in terms of some of the more common ways of targeting. Some people don’t even get this specific about it. But if you look at the different ways to target, I mean some people target geographically, I’m going to target everybody within a certain geographic area. If I’m a realtor and I’m working in a particular neighborhood… Great example of geographic targeting. Some people target by industry. If I’m selling B2B, I might target a particular group of people in a particular industry. I might target companies that deal with technical kind of things, or I might target education, or I might target finance, right? So that’s a different way to target, by industry. I can target by need if I’m selling something like whatever, insurance, and I’m targeting people who need insurance. Okay. They could be wherever they are. Now, it’s harder to do that when you target by need because so many people might need it and you might have to pare things down a little bit to be able to get to the people that you want. In the promotional products industry, where I do a lot of work, people can sell by program specialty. In other words, people who are looking for a specific result. If you’re selling to people who are looking to increase safety in the workplace, then you could potentially be selling them a safety campaign, a safety program. There are some people who target by product specialty. There are different companies who might be looking for a specific kind of product. There is a company that’s been in the promotional products industry for ages. You’ve probably received pens from them in the mail, and they’ve been doing that for years. There’s a cover letter. Very often the pen will have your company name on it, and they’ll send that to you in advance. And then there was just a sheet of paper and a place where you could say, all right, if I want 200 of these, I send a check, I mail it in. And that was an example of targeting by product. So you can have a very successful business that does just that, right? Targeting by a particular product. And then some combination thereof. I could target a particular niche, a particular group of people. I could target financial institutions within a certain geographic area, or I could target a certain type of industry with a specific need. So, industrial companies that need safety programs. So lots of different ways to slice it, but if you don’t think through your options, then a lot of your targeting can just leave you confused. Jay: Yeah, absolutely. But I think it’s important to know, I mean, never in the history of the planet, have we had the...
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    13 mins
  • Breaking Through Your Sales Plateau

    Breaking Through Your Sales Plateau
    Dec 9 2025
    Particularly in the early stages, breaking through your sales plateau may just mean doing more of what you’re doing. But generally, at some point, we hit a plateau that is created by the fact that we can’t run any faster. We can’t do any more by ourselves. So we either need to implement new procedures and new processes, we need to get some help, or something needs to change fundamentally in the business in order to get us to that next level. Identifying the Real Causes of a Sales Plateau David: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. In today’s episode, cohost Jay McFarland, and I will be discussing the idea of breaking through your sales plateau. Welcome back, Jay. Jay: It’s so good to be here again with you David, and as always, I’m very excited about this topic. I know businesses that hit these thresholds. Breaking through can be a monumental task to get to the next level and they’re not sure how to do it. Is it marketing? Is it adding new products? I think that’s what a lot of them try to do. They’re like, well, let’s add 10 more products to the lineup and then we’ll do it. And oftentimes that can just make the situation worse and not better. David: Yeah, it’s true. Most businesses, I think it’s safe to say, at some point run into a sales plateau. They hit a level of sales and they can’t get past it. I believe in small businesses this is particularly true, where you’re just working and pushing and you’re trying to get to that next benchmark. And you just can’t reach it. There are thresholds in small business, getting to your first hundred thousand in gross sales and then your first 250, and then you hit 500 and then a million and then 2 million and going from there. In the early stages, you can generally do pretty well, like to get from a hundred thousand to 250 is often easier than it is to get from a million to 2 million. But most of us, at some point, will encounter some sort of sales plateau. You get there, you see it, you’re targeting it, you’re working toward it and you just can’t seem to hit it. Breaking through becomes a challenge. You May Not Know How You Got Here And so it’s really just a matter of getting stuck. It’s like, I feel like I’m stuck. I’m here, I need to be there and I’m not sure what to do next. Jay: Yeah. And I wonder how much of it is that they’re not really sure how they got to the first sales plateau. I mean, they may think that they know, David: That’s true. Jay: But it could be something completely different. And this could go back to something we talked about in a previous podcast: following up with your customers. Find out why they purchased, how they feel about their purchase. Are they returning customers? Are they not returning customers? So if you didn’t understand why they bought in the first place and how they felt about that purchase, it’s going to be hard breaking through that next sales plateau. David: It is, absolutely. And the biggest hangup that I see for most people is not knowing, “what do I do next?” And as you indicated, people get to a certain point in some cases, they’re not sure how they did it. What’s that referred to as? Unconscious competence? Jay: Mm-hmm, David: Where I’m doing things and it’s working, but I’m not even sure of what I’ve done. So I haven’t gotten around to building a system around it, to put that into place so I can replicate it. But there’s also the idea that what gets me to here will not necessarily get me to there. Right? So breaking through to level one won’t necessarily get me to level two. When Hard Work Doesn’t Result in Breaking Through That’s not always the case, particularly in the early stages, you can do more of what you’re doing to get to a higher level. But generally, at some point, we hit a sales plateau that is created by the fact that we can’t run any faster. We can’t do any more by ourselves. So we either need to implement new procedures and new processes. Or we need to get some help. Something needs to change fundamentally in the business, in order to keep breaking through that sales plateau and get us to the next level. Jay: Yeah, something that can be very hard for people, delegation, right? Letting go of your baby, right? David: Yeah. Jay: That you worked so hard on. And now you’re going to trust some new employee with some new aspect. It’s not easy to hand those things over. But often, if you’re not willing to do it, you’re not going to grow through that next sales plateau. Refusing to Delegate Can Lead to a Sales Plateau David: That’s true. And some people don’t want to. Some people are like, okay, look, I don’t want to have employees. I’m comfortable with the way things are. And if they are, then that’s fine. If they want to get to another level of sales though, then it’s really going to be a lot more about processes. If you’re determined not to get additional help, at least in terms of human resources,...
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    16 mins
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