In a significant move to bolster small businesses' access to credit and spur economic growth, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has launched the 7(a) Working Capital Pilot (WCP) Program. Announced by SBA Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman, this initiative opens new avenues for small businesses to secure competitively-priced lines of credit, aligning with President Biden’s Investing in America agenda. Enhancing Access to Affordable Capital Administrator Guzman emphasized the importance of affordable working capital for small businesses to seize growth opportunities. She highlighted the SBA's efforts over the past three and a half years to expand access to capital and increase small-dollar lending. The new WCP program is a strategic extension of these efforts, designed to strengthen loan offerings and provide growth-oriented small businesses with the financial tools needed to scale their operations. “The Biden-Harris Administration continues to level the playing field, ensuring small businesses can compete, create jobs, and strengthen our nation’s economy,” said Guzman. Flexible Loan Products for Diverse Needs The Working Capital Pilot Program introduces a flexible loan product that meets the diverse needs of growth-oriented small businesses. By offering more options to SBA’s network of lenders, the program aims to provide businesses with a variety of credit lines structured to support their unique requirements. The WCP program features an innovative fee structure and includes two primary loan types: Transaction-Based WCP: This loan type allows small businesses to fund individual projects or orders, enabling access to working capital earlier in the sales cycle. This flexibility supports businesses in managing cash flow and pursuing new opportunities without delay. Asset-Based WCP: Designed to provide a cost-effective way for small businesses to access working capital against their assets, this loan type helps businesses better manage their cash flow while supporting supply chain resiliency. Speaking on the importance of accessible capital for small businesses, Brian Bond, Senior Vice President of Product & Strategy at Experian, remarked, "You’ve probably heard the saying, 'It takes money to make money.' This is especially true for cash-intensive businesses that occasionally need an influx of capital to seize new sales opportunities, prepare for the holiday rush, or pursue big, aspirational projects. By expanding the 7(a) loan program with the 7(a) Working Capital Pilot, the SBA has taken a significant step in offering a flexible way for businesses to access capital when they need it most. I encourage every SBA lender to take a close look at this program as another way to help their small business customers achieve their dreams." Supporting Small Businesses at Home and Abroad The SBA remains committed to offering a range of updated products for small businesses to access working capital under the 7(a) Loan Program. These products include SBA Express loans, CAPLines, Export Loans, and the new WCP. Small businesses can visit the SBA’s Lender Match page to find participating SBA lenders that offer funding with competitive rates and fees. For businesses engaged in the global marketplace, the WCP is tailored to support both domestic and international sales under one facility. Additionally, for companies participating in the Home Energy Rebate Programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, the WCP provides a new solution to help increase capacity and serve more homeowners with energy conversions. Opportunities for SBA Lenders Lenders approved to process 7(a) loans can begin processing 7(a) WCP loans starting August 1, 2024. Recognizing the specialized nature of this lending, the SBA has introduced a new type of delegated authority for WCP called Preferred Lender Program (PLP)-WCP. Lenders with existing delegated Export Working Capital Program (EWCP) authority will automatically receive delegated authority to make 7(a) WCP loans. Those without EWCP authority can apply for delegated 7(a) WCP status, following the requirements outlined in the Program Guide available on the SBA’s Training on Demand page. The SBA encourages lenders to seek support from their local Export Finance Managers for personalized counseling and assistance with WCP projects. More details on the program can be found in the Program Guide and on the 7(a) Working Capital Pilot program webpage. Standing in Solidarity with Small Businesses At Experian, we understand the vital role small businesses play in driving economic growth and innovation. That’s why we are committed to empowering small businesses with the tools and insights they need to succeed. Our comprehensive business credit solutions help small business owners understand and manage their business credit effectively. By providing detailed business credit reports, monitoring services, and educational resources, Experian ensures that small businesses have the knowledge and support to make informed financial decisions. In standing with small businesses, we aim to foster a thriving economic landscape where every business has the opportunity to grow and prosper. SBA Empowers Americas Small Businesses The SBA’s 7(a) Working Capital Pilot Program represents a crucial step in empowering small businesses with the financial resources they need to thrive. By offering flexible, competitively-priced lines of credit, the program supports businesses in creating jobs, boosting sales, and driving economic growth. As part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to leveling the playing field, this initiative ensures that America’s small businesses have the tools they need to compete and succeed in a dynamic marketplace.

In this article…IntroductionSetting up your bookkeeping and balance sheetWhen to use a balance sheetWhat is a balance sheet, and how do we know it is balanced?Example Balance SheetThe Importance of Balance Sheets in Business Decision MakingAssessing Financial StabilityAssessing Operational EfficiencyStrategic Decision MakingCommon Mistakes to Avoid with Balance SheetsCritical takeaways for rocking your balance sheet In the realm of business accounting, the humble balance sheet is what business owners can check to get a moment-in-time snapshot of their business's financial status. Regularly consulting the balance sheet ensures the business owner stays informed about the business's financial status and can make informed, strategic decisions. Financial coach Tina Edel from Picture It Profit & Financials says, “People often say to focus on the Profit and Loss Report because you want to know if you're making money. However, this is only part of the picture. The Profit and Loss won't tell you about the money used to start your business – such as an owner's investment or initial loan. It also won't tell you about payments made to reduce debt, like payments for a company vehicle or amounts you pay yourself as an owner. This can be found on the Balance Sheet. Setting up your bookkeeping and balance sheet Setting up bookkeeping software from the beginning makes it much easier to keep your books current. Many affordable options, such as QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and Xero, offer preformatted balance sheets to simplify the process. When to use a balance sheet Let’s begin by discussing when to review your business balance sheet. A business owner should look at a balance sheet for their business during several key times: Regular Financial Reviews: Monthly or quarterly reviews to track the financial health and performance of the business. Annual Financial Reporting: At the end of each fiscal year, prepare annual reports and tax filings. Before Major Financial Decisions: When considering significant investments, loans, or financial commitments, ensure the business can support these actions. During Financial Audits: Internal or external audits verify the accuracy and completeness of financial records. When Seeking Financing: Before applying for loans or attracting investors, lenders and investors will scrutinize the balance sheet. In Case of Financial Troubles: When the business faces cash flow issues, unexpected expenses, or declining profits, identify and address problems. Planning for Expansion: Prior to expanding the business, hiring additional staff, or launching new products, evaluate the financial capability to support growth. Monitoring Financial Goals: To track progress toward financial goals and adjust strategies as needed. What is a balance sheet, and how do we know it is balanced? To describe it, imagine a scale with two sides. On one side, you place all the items you own or control (assets), and on the other side, you put all your financial obligations (liabilities) and what’s left over for the owners (equity). For the scale to be balanced, the total weight of assets on one side must equal the combined weight of liabilities and equity on the other. This balance ensures that the business's financial position is accurately represented. A balance sheet is essentially a detailed financial statement that outlines a company’s assets, liabilities, and equity at a specific point in time. Tina Edel puts it simply: “A Balance Sheet is the net worth of your business.” Let’s familiarize ourselves with the balance sheet’s primary components: Assets: There are two categories of assets: Current Assets: cash, accounts receivable, inventory and prepaid expenses Current assets can be converted into cash within a fiscal year. Non-Current Assets: property, plant, and equipment (PP&E), long-term investments, and intangible assets such as patents and trademarks. Non-current assets are assets that will be used for more than a year. Liabilities: Liabilities are what the business owes to others. They are also divided into two categories: Current Liabilities: accounts payable, short-term loans, wages payable, and taxes payable. These are obligations the business must pay within a year. Long-Term Liabilities: mortgages, long-term loans, bonds payable, deferred tax liabilities. Equity: Equity represents the owner’s claim after all liabilities have been paid off. Equity can include: Owner’s Equity: Initial and additional investments made by the owner(s). Retained Earnings: Profits that have been reinvested in the business rather than distributed to the owners as dividends. Suppose we look at the above balance sheet for Crocker Industries. The total assets of $90,000 equals the total liabilities and equity of $90,000 for the company, confirming that the balance sheet is balanced. If we were making plans to grow, for example, having a balanced sheet would instill confidence, which we would likely exude if we sat down with our bank to discuss our plans. Conversely, if there were areas of our finances that were out of balance, we could be proactive in addressing any potential problems. The Importance of Balance Sheets in Business Decision Making Business owners need balance sheets to assess financial stability and operational efficiency. Tina Edel emphasizes the importance of proper bookkeeping from the start: “The IRS insists that you keep track of where your business money comes from and how you use it. To stay compliant with record keeping, do yourself the favor of setting up bookkeeping software from the start. It is much easier to set up books correctly and keep them current than to have to catch up at the end of your first year of business.” Here's how balance sheets help: Assessing Financial Stability Liquidity Analysis Current Ratio: By comparing current assets to current liabilities, business owners can determine if they have enough short-term assets to cover short-term obligations. A current ratio (current assets / current liabilities) greater than 1 indicates good liquidity. Quick Ratio: This ratio excludes inventory from current assets and provides a stricter measure of liquidity. It helps assess the ability to meet short-term liabilities without relying on inventory sales. Debt Management Debt-to-Equity Ratio: This ratio (total liabilities / total equity) shows the proportion of debt used to finance the company’s assets relative to the value of owners' equity. A high ratio may indicate excessive reliance on debt, which can be risky. Interest Coverage Ratio: Calculated by dividing earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT) by interest expenses, this ratio shows the company’s ability to pay interest on outstanding debt. Asset Management Asset Turnover Ratio: This ratio (net sales / average total assets) indicates how efficiently a company uses its assets to generate sales. A higher ratio suggests better asset utilization. Return on Assets (ROA): This measures profitability relative to total assets (net income / total assets), providing insight into how effectively assets are used to generate profit. Assessing Operational Efficiency Inventory Management Inventory Turnover Ratio: This ratio (cost of goods sold / average inventory) shows how often inventory is sold and replaced. High turnover indicates efficient inventory management, while low turnover may suggest overstocking or obsolescence. Accounts Receivable Management Days Sales Outstanding (DSO): This metric (accounts receivable/total credit sales) × 365) shows the average number of days it takes to collect payment after a sale. Lower DSO indicates efficient collection processes, improving cash flow. Accounts Payable Management Days Payable Outstanding (DPO): This metric (accounts payable / cost of goods sold) × 365) shows the average number of days it takes to pay suppliers. Longer DPO can indicate better cash management, but excessively long periods might strain supplier relationships. Assessing Operational Efficiency Inventory Management Inventory Turnover Ratio: This ratio (cost of goods sold / average inventory) shows how often inventory is sold and replaced. High turnover indicates efficient inventory management, while low turnover may suggest overstocking or obsolescence. Accounts Receivable Management Days Sales Outstanding (DSO): This metric (accounts receivable/total credit sales) × 365) shows the average number of days it takes to collect payment after a sale. Lower DSO indicates efficient collection processes, improving cash flow. Accounts Payable Management Days Payable Outstanding (DPO): This metric (accounts payable / cost of goods sold) × 365) shows the average number of days it takes to pay suppliers. Longer DPO can indicate better cash management, but excessively long periods might strain supplier relationships. Strategic Decision Making Investment Decisions Balance sheets help determine if the business has the financial strength to invest in new projects, equipment, or expansions. Financing Decisions Understanding the current financial position helps decide whether to raise funds through debt or equity and the terms that would be most favorable. Risk Management By regularly reviewing balance sheets, business owners can identify potential financial risks early and take corrective actions to mitigate them. Benchmarking and Goal Setting Comparing balance sheet metrics with industry standards or historical data helps set realistic financial goals and track progress over time. Common Mistakes to Avoid with Balance Sheets When reading a balance sheet, there are several common mistakes that business owners should avoid to ensure an accurate assessment of their financial health. One frequent error is overlooking liabilities, like ignoring a small leak in a dam – it might seem insignificant now but can cause significant problems over time. Misclassifying assets and liabilities, such as listing long-term assets as current assets, is like packing your carry-on luggage with items meant for checked baggage, leading to confusion and potential issues and failing to account for depreciation results in an inflated asset value, like valuing your car at its purchase price without considering its wear and tear over the years. Using an outdated balance sheet won’t help you navigate current conditions or detours – as if you are relying on an old map for a road trip. Buckle up. Another mistake is overvaluing intangible assets like goodwill or intellectual property without realistic valuation, akin to estimating the value of a recipe based on its taste alone, without considering the cost of ingredients or the effort required to make it. Ignoring off-balance sheet items, such as contingent liabilities, is like ignoring the submerged part of an iceberg – what’s beneath the surface can have a significant impact. Failing to reconcile the balance sheet with other financial statements, such as the income and cash flow statements, is like reading a novel and ignoring key chapters – you won’t get the whole story. Regular reviews of aged items and static balances are essential to ensure that amounts are appropriately recognized or released. These items can represent potential misstatements on the P&L, such as when a provision is established for severance, but the severance payment is recorded directly as an expense in a later period, resulting in double counting. Neglecting changes in owner’s equity, such as additional investments or dividends paid out, is similar to tracking your fitness progress without noting diet and exercise routine changes. Finally, misinterpreting financial ratios and metrics can lead to incorrect conclusions, much like misreading a recipe’s measurements—even small errors can lead to a flawed outcome. By avoiding these common mistakes and using metaphors to understand the underlying concepts, business owners can gain a clearer, more accurate picture of their financial situation. Critical takeaways for rocking your balance sheet Understanding and effectively utilizing balance sheets is crucial for small business success. A balance sheet provides a comprehensive snapshot of your business’s financial health, helping you make informed decisions, manage debts, and optimize asset usage. Regularly reviewing your balance sheet can reveal trends, identify potential issues, and ensure you maintain a balanced financial state. Additionally, consulting with financial advisors can offer expert insights and tailored strategies to enhance your financial management. Consider exploring additional resources and tools to deepen your understanding and improve your financial practices. Free online courses, financial management software, and balance sheet templates can provide valuable support. By staying informed and proactive, you can navigate the complexities of business finance and steer your company toward sustained success.

With over 100 million people listening to podcasts each month in the US alone, the medium has seen exponential growth, presenting a unique opportunity for businesses to expand their reach and deepen customer engagement. We wondered, can you make money from a podcast? Can small business owners drive meaningful business and growth? For this episode of The Small Business Matters podcast we delve into the transformative world of podcasting with the expert guidance of Molly Ruland, CEO of Heartcast Media. Molly, a seasoned veteran in podcast production. As you will hear from our discussion, she really understands this space, and knows what it takes to convert podcasts into lasting client relationships. Watch Our Interview Key highlights: Defining Success in Podcasting – Molly emphasizes the importance of clarity in a podcast's goals. Whether aiming for thought leadership, enhancing visibility, or generating sales, understanding these objectives dictates the podcast’s direction and content strategy. Efficiency in Production – Advocating for efficiency, Molly advises against business owners producing their podcasts. She stresses the value of outsourcing production to professionals to ensure quality and allow business owners to concentrate on their core responsibilities. Strategic Guest Selection – Choosing the right guests is crucial. Molly points out that the real value lies not in mass audience appeal but in nurturing relationships with guests who align with the business’s goals. These relationships are more likely to convert into business opportunities. Leveraging Podcasts for Business Development – Podcasts are not just marketing tools but also potent business development tools. Molly shares examples of how podcasts have facilitated valuable connections and partnerships, proving their efficacy in business strategy beyond mere content creation. Growth Through Quality and Networking—Growth in podcasting comes from quality content and strategic networking, not merely audience numbers. Molly advises focusing on producing high-quality content that guests and their networks would want to share, thereby effectively enhancing reach and influence. Molly concludes by reminding us that the essence of successful podcasting lies in creating meaningful content that resonates with both the business and the audience's needs, ultimately leading to sustained growth and business opportunities. This episode is a must-listen for any business looking to understand and harness the power of podcasting to expand reach and grow through influence and connection. Learn more about Heartcast Media What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our interview: Gary Stockton: Well, welcome back to Small Business Matters. Today, we're exploring the power of podcasting as a tool for business development. With over 100 million people listening to podcasts each month in the US alone, the medium has seen exponential growth, presenting a unique opportunity for businesses to expand their reach and deepen customer engagement. And joining us to deep dive into this topic is Molly Ruland, CEO and founder of Heartcast Media. Molly has been pioneering in the podcast production field for over two decades. Steering her company to become a leader in crafting top tier content for a diverse client roster that includes the Department of Health, DC Government, NATO, and even former NBA players. Under Molly's leadership, Heartcast Media has mastered the art of using podcasts, not just for marketing but as a strategic tool to boost revenue and build lasting relationships. Now, operating from her scenic base next to a volcano in Costa Rica, Molly embodies her philosophy that listening is the revolution, driving forward with passion and innovation. Molly, welcome to the Small Business Matters podcast.Molly Ruland: Thank you so much. That was a fantastic introduction. I appreciate that.Gary Stockton: You're very welcome. And we're glad to have you with us. So, for businesses looking to drive, uh, into podcasting, what are the first steps that they should take to effectively use podcasts as a tool for business development?Molly Ruland: Well, I think it's really important to be crystal clear on what the goal is, right? What does success really look like? What do you hope to accomplish with a podcast? Because visibility and, um, sales, right, are two very different things. If you're just looking for thought leadership and visibility. Then you're going to drive it in one direction. If you're looking to fill your pipeline and get in front of more people, uh, that you want to do business with, right? Not just who you want to know about your business, but who you actually want to work with. That's a very different goal. So I think identifying what success looks like, uh, what is, what is that metric for defining success? And then create a clear path on how to get there. Gary Stockton: Excellent. So, as a small business owner, I'm sure you can understand why some business owners might feel that podcasting presents a heavy time burden. How do you convince them that the time is worth it and that there are ways to podcast when you're very busy running a business? Molly Ruland: Well, the first thing I do is talk people off the ledge of trying to produce it themselves. Um, and I think that's the biggest misnomer. It's, um, you know, I was thinking about it this morning before our call, and I was thinking, you know, you would never tell a business owner, listen, just learn how to build a basic website and then just learn how to make basic graphics and then just learn to copywrite and slap something up and see if people like it. If you get any clients, then invest in your business. No one would ever say that to a business owner, right? You would never encourage somebody to try to wear so many different hats that they have zero experience in. But for some reason, in podcasting, it's expected for a podcaster or business owner to know what recording software to use, how to edit that content, how to make the graphics, and how to make the copy. In addition, it is important to understand the value of that relationship, who they're interviewing and why, and how they're setting the expectations. Are they doing any follow-up? It's like all the focus is put on production. Well, I think that's a, uh, a giant disservice to anybody who's looking to do a podcast. Your focus should be on your business and hiring somebody to outsource it. And then it's not a huge time suck at all. It's very limited because all you're doing is focusing on who you are interviewing and why, you know, doing the research on them. Like you did, you know, with me, right? You sent me some questions last week, so I knew exactly what to expect. Um, that solidifies our relationship. I'm feeling valued and heard and, you know, uh, ready to have a great conversation, uh, following up, you know, having all those things is where the business owner needs to put their focus, and they really need to outsource the rest because Um, people go to school to be audio engineers. People go to school to be graphic designers. People go to school to be good copywriters. This idea that you're going to do it all well and in any kind of timely manner, um, is just incorrect. And I think that a lot of businesses don't understand that when you try to do those things by yourself, you're actually cheapening your brand. You're doing a great disservice to your brand, especially if you have a high ticket item; if your average close is $10k or higher, you can't, you can't, you know, you can't put out bad graphics. You can't put out bad videos. You can't put out bad content. It literally works against you. So I think starting with like, you know, it doesn't have to be a huge time consumption thing, but what is the, why, what is your average client spend? If you did 15 episodes and you could close one deal, well, then it doesn't seem like a huge time commitment at all. Right. It was absolutely worth it. So I think it's perspective. Gary Stockton: And, and, and also, I think in this medium. Podcasting content itself tends to stay around for a while, right? I mean, I listen to podcasts that have, you know, 250, 300 episodes, and some of the early ones that I listened to, you know, they, they're, they're a bit rough. Even some of ours, you know, I, I, we thought it took us about a year to decide to, uh, uh, take on podcasting because it, it is so involved and working with an outside, um, partner. That's already got the knowledge that can set you leaps ahead of other people who are maybe just getting into it. Would you agree? Molly Ruland: Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean why, why reinvent the wheel? And then, on the same token, if you are a larger company, right? Podcasting is not the same as doing live streams or covering an event or something like that. So even large companies like The Atlantic Council, we produce all their podcasts because they recognize that even though they have an AB team No, they're doing live streams all the time. That's very different than a podcast. And it would have to move through too many different departments. And so it doesn't really make sense. It's like, let's just hire, you know, a podcast production company to do all of our podcasts, even though they have an entire team of people. Gary Stockton: If, if you folks can hear the rain in the background, Molly is, she's having some storms down there in Costa, Costa Rica. And that's what comes with the territory. We lost a little bit of signal there. Molly just was smoothing feeling. Yeah, it's okay. It's not, it's no problem. I got the gist of your response. Let's, let's move on to the next one about, about, uh, not all businesses will translate what they can do in, into an interesting podcast, right? I mean, it's a medium that will work for specific kinds of businesses. Are there businesses that are most appropriate and good candidates for driving business from a podcast? Molly Ruland: I think any business could benefit from a well-crafted podcast when really dialed into who they're recording and why. I think a lot of bigger brands have made the mistake of thinking that because somebody loves their product, they're going to love their podcasts. Like I love Slack, never going to listen to a Slack podcast. It's never going to happen. I work all day. The last thing I want to do is cozy up with the Slack podcast at the end of the day. So, you know, would that be a crowd favorite? Probably not. Could Slack get in front of a lot of really amazing people, do excellent business development, and see a lot of people up for their pipeline by having them on their podcast? A hundred percent. Is it a great sales enablement tool? A hundred percent. Are consumers going to listen to a Slack podcast? Probably not. Right? It's just, so I think, being really clear again, what the goal is and how that would benefit a company? Um, because a lot of times it's not, um, just about talking about your products. In that case, an internal podcast would be better, right? For example, if you have a big insurance company, maybe having an internal podcast would save you so much more time. It'd be much more effective for your internal team, where the interviewing of the potential guests is really more business development, and then you're not as concerned about downloads and things like that. So it really depends on a small business, though. It's going to be rare for them to pick up business because somebody listened to their podcast. It just is what's far more likely. Interview 15 people who fit your ICP and nurture those relationships. You're far more likely to close a deal than you are from people just tuning in. Gary Stockton: Yeah. Yeah, I agree. How can podcasting help business owners cultivate those relationships? Do you have some? Uh, examples of, uh, clients that have those because of my podcast business wins kind of stories. Have you got any success stories there? Molly Ruland: For sure. Uh, one of my clients actually hired a really amazing person because that person had listened to their podcast and reached out and said, I've listened to a hundred episodes. I like who you are. I like the company ethos, and I'd like to work for you. Uh, which is one of those unexpected, uh, you know, benefits of having a podcast. Um, In my own business, it works tremendously well. I interview CMOs on my podcast, and that leads to really great collaborative partnerships because they recognize that we're good at what we do. So I think, really, where it is, it's all about preparation, right? If you're going to go on a podcast, I'm sure a lot of people have experienced this. They get invited to be on a podcast. There's very little information. Half the time, you don't even have the link on the day of the recording. There's no follow-up. You never know if it's live or not. Sometimes, I'm scrolling through LinkedIn. I see my face. I say, okay, I guess that podcast episode went live. It's like the most important part of the relationship is being completely ignored and it's like. Volume, you know, like quality, quantity is being pushed over quality, and it's like, next, next, next, and they don't even notify the guests.Hey, thanks for coming on the show. Hey, thanks. Oh, here's some assets. Hey, by the way, can I get that meeting? Can I get an introduction? Would you like to see my new products? Something along, there's none of that, right? There's like none of that at all. It's just more about the next episode, the next episode. So I think I should do things like researching your guests and doing a really nice introduction like you did for me. Most of the time, people will just read whatever you send them. You know, communicating in advance what to expect. What people don't realize is that what it's doing is speaking volumes about how you do business. Gary Stockton: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I, that's something, um, 'cause I'm a listener too. I'm a fan of podcasting as a medium. And uh, I, I, who's next? Yeah, I look at it the same way as if I was going to sit down and have an in-person, uh, business meeting with someone. I really do take that posture when it comes to the podcast because everybody's going to hear it. They're going to see we do video as a component of our podcast. They'll see how we interacted. Uh, and if it was an engaging conversation where we passed on some learnings to the audience. So I, you really got to go into it with that mindset of, of you want to end up with a good experience for both parties. Molly Ruland: As if you were going on a date or an important sales call. It's it's, that's exactly it. Like, get into it, you know? Gary Stockton: Yeah. What if I didn't want to do my own podcast for my small business? Um, are there other ways to benefit from guesting on other people's shows as a strategy? Molly Ruland: There certainly is. I think, um, podcast guesting is a great way to, number one, build relationships, and I don't think people talk enough about that because these podcast hosts are like a treasure trove of contacts. They've been interviewing people who might want to do business with you. And so people really are just. It's almost selfish. They're like, I'm going to tap into their audience. And it's like, well, no, actually, they're the gatekeepers, and they're the ones with all the keys to the castle. And so it's not just about impressing their audience and hoping they come over to you. It's about really nurturing the relationship with that podcast host, like being grateful, sharing the content, following up with them, asking for an introduction, and asking for referrals. Uh, that's number one, and then number two, the social proof, you know, when other people are talking about you on LinkedIn, that's always good for business. It's one thing if you're just grandstanding and thought leadership all the time. When other people are talking about how great you are or the gem you dropped or the knowledge you have, that's really great, but it's not necessarily going to move the needle unless you go, you know you're really intense about an author, and you're launching a book if you go on as many Podcasts as you can for 90 days, you're gonna see some results. If you go on one podcast a month inconsistently, it's not going to give you any results, just like any other marketing. Gary Stockton: Yeah. Yeah. That's a point that you made there about, um, asking for, for, or providing a review or asking for a review. Um, I had a great one yesterday, and I hadn't really thought about it this way, but I'm asking for a review, uh, on LinkedIn. Uh, really, it could be just about your experience working with me on, on the podcast Um, but then, uh, the other element of actually sharing that, um, review on your Google My Business, uh, site as well, and just showing the, the person how they can copy, uh, the contents of what they had written about you on, on LinkedIn and putting it on Google My Business, and just being smart about getting those reviews out there. We mentioned monetizing a podcast, and for a small business, it may be difficult initially, but let's not discount that totally. Can you talk a little bit about some of the monetization strategies podcasters could have and how, uh, new podcasters could start generating income from their shows? Molly Ruland: For sure. So I think from a podcaster standpoint, you know, monetizing your podcast is extremely hard. It's just like, you know, You see these posts from musicians who are like rolling stones. And they're like, we made 27 from Spotify last month. This idea that your content is going to make money is tricky. Right? Especially when you're talking about Spotify and people like that, they're just really not trying to give up any money. So you're traditional, like spins, right? Like in the radio world, if you get X amount of spins or plays or broadcasts, you get X amount of dollars. Well. Your number has got to be really high for you to get any kind of money on things like having ads on your podcast and other things. You have got to be reeling in some serious downloads. And so if you're not trying to be a podcaster, I wouldn't really focus on that. I think if you are trying to build a personality, you could always go for sponsorships, direct sponsorships. Like, who is listening to my podcast? Who else is trying to reach those people? And let me go directly to them and say, listen, my audience is exactly your target audience. It's like. I can produce the content and I can, you can be the sponsor, yada, yada. Right. And so that's a great look, but in general, I'm kind of opposed to this idea of monetizing a podcast because the podcast is the monetization tool. It is the business development tool. And like, you're not going to make money off your downloads, but if you interview the right people and you nurture that relationship and you follow up with them and you close that deal, you're going to make a lot money off of closing one of those deals than you are off of getting paid for your download. Right now it's like an absolute bloodbath in the podcast industry, uh, even just over the last week, the databases have all changed. So, for podcasts that showed that they had 4,000 or 3,000 downloads, 132 downloads per episode were shown. Because what's happened is, you know, the whole Apple automatic download thing got taken away. And so all these huge contracts with these big guys, like big famous podcasters and stuff. It's an absolute bloodbath because Apple was automatically downloading the podcasts onto people's phones, but that doesn't mean they were listening to them. So this means the ad industry is on, you know, its head; all these big contracts are getting obliterated because they don't have 10 million downloads or 10,000 downloads an episode. It's really like a thousand people actually listening. So this idea of getting lots of numbers and being big in that, and those companies keep in mind, is putting tons of money behind those podcasts. They're paying to play. They're doing ads, billboards, bus stops, all that. And they're still not getting those numbers. So to me, it's like, you don't monetize the podcast. The podcast is money. The podcast is the money tool. It's not about monetizing it. Yeah. If that makes sense. Gary Stockton: Yeah. I think people do business with people that they know, like, and trust. Um, I've gone to conferences that Mike Stelzner, uh, put on his, you know, his social media conference.You know, I know, like, and trust Mike. Um, I know, like, and trust Ann Handley. I wanted to go to her conference. You know, I'd heard her, you know, I listened to the Marketing Profs podcast. I know, like, and trust that organization. That was business for them. And, you know, the value that I get, um, on a weekly basis is marketing training and, uh, thought leadership from them. So it can, it can materialize in, in lots of other different ways. How do we grow, um, the audience? What, what are your top tips for growing a podcast audience? Is it literally posting, you know, the short reels on, on Instagram? Is it, um, posting on Twitter? You know, how, how do you grow, get people to listen and, and subscribe? Molly Ruland: Well, you know, if I'm being fully honest, I don't really encourage people to worry about that too much in my space because, you know, the downloads aren't going to close deals. However, we make content that's meant to be seen. And so we make SEO-rich content and we make lots of social media graphics for that purpose. But the trick is to make good content. You know, if you interview somebody and they're a million-dollar company or ten million-dollar company, and you have a bad graphic of them, they're not going to share it. So, everybody knows people on LinkedIn that are like new podcast alert, new podcast alert, right? And most of the time you're probably just ignoring it, right? You're it's. The new podcast alert is not bringing me in. If it says something like how to overcome anxiety, how to double your revenue this year, or how to do this right, you're more likely to be interested in it. Now, if it's somebody you follow on LinkedIn saying, Hey, I was on this podcast, and we're talking about how to W revenue now, I'm even more interested. Right? So I think like the short answer is SEO-rich, like take that transcription of your podcast. Turn it into blog posts, turn it into newsletters. Like it's all about SEO. Rewrite all your descriptions and all your metadata. Get rid of all the adjectives. Tell chat GPT, no more adjectives, no more mavens, no more maestros. I've never met so many mavens and maestros of marketing in my whole life until I started using AI, right? It's, you know, focusing on keywords, less on adjectives, and really getting your SEO content. But the social proof is not going to come from my posting. Hardcast Media has 20,000 followers on Facebook. When I post stuff there, do you know how many people see it? Seven or eight, maybe, if I'm lucky. Right. It's, it's, it's, it's ridiculous. Right. But you know, what does get attention? When I interview somebody, I write a thoughtful post about it. I tag them in their company on it. It has a nice graphic that they're interested in sharing on their own LinkedIn profile. The video of them looks good. The video clips of them make them look smart. They're a lot more likely to share that content on their profile, which is going to get me a lot more visibility in the business world, which is exactly where I want to be, rather than me focusing on the downloads. Right. So I think it's, again, it's all. It's always going to boil down to that relationship, but also. Producing content. And we've all been there. Like when you agree to speak for something and they send you the graphic, and you think to yourself, I'm not putting this anywhere near my social media; this is terrible, right? This is it, you know, like, and we've all been there, or it doesn't match the aesthetic, or it's just, you know, it doesn't look like the image you're trying to portray. We all have, we have brand guidelines and marketing people. So you really gotta create something that's high quality. If you want people to reshare it, because. You know, nobody wants to bring their brand value down with your bad content or your poorly designed graphics because you wanted to save some money on Fiverr. Right? So I think it's, it's just like anything, it's like showing up to a business meeting in workout clothes. It's the same thing. You really want that content to be high end and to match the caliber of the people that you're interviewing. And that's how you're going to grow your audience. And that's probably the audience you want. Like, I don't really care if people on iTunes are downloading my podcast. I'm far more interested in the people on LinkedIn, understanding that I have a pretty revolutionary way of looking at, you know, podcasts and business development, and I'm showing people exactly how I do it. And that, to me, has much more value than looking at my RSS feed and saying, Oh, we got 500 downloads on that episode. Because, at the end of the day, those downloads are a one-way street. You can't communicate with people on downloads. You can communicate with them on LinkedIn. You know what I mean? It's immediate feedback on iTunes. It's like if you wanna reach those subscribers, you gotta make another podcast. So I, to me, and then iTunes isn't even paying you for that. You're building their database, giving 'em all this data, all this information, all this demographics that they're making G billions, and that's a technical term of dollars off of us. Right. And they don't give the creators anything. So, I think you shouldn't even focus on growing your audience. Focus on growing your influence, focus on growing your, your Rolodex, you know, and think about maybe not just interviewing people you want to do business with, but like who are aggregators, who are people that have lots of people, you know like I love working with fractional CMOs and interviewing them for my podcast because I know they probably have a couple of clients and they might want to refer me to those clients and maybe they have past clients and maybe they have future clients. So that's not just one person that might hire me. They could bring me five or six clients from that one person. So I think thinking along those lines and not thinking about, well, uh, people like to talk about failure, so I'm going to start a podcast about failure. No, you know, not at all. Your podcast is a great example. You're giving really great actionable business information. This is an interview right now. People can take this. They can start a podcast. They can fill their pipeline. They can see real results. This makes a lot of sense for Experian. It's right on brand. It's right on target. Your audience wants to know this content. But if you're an insurance broker, why are you interviewing people about failure? Gary Stockton: Yeah. I think you made an excellent point there also about growing your influence and really just making that the focus. Um, and that's really what we try to do here on Small Business Matters.We, we didn't really have, um, a true sense of, you know, who, who that audience was that's running. credit reports on their business. And we wanted to have more conversations about the actual small businesses and, and have, uh, uh, folks like you come on and share your, uh, your insights. Let's let's switch a little bit to the legal side of a podcasting. How important is it for a small business to have contracts in place for their podcast related to who owns it? Uh, where it's hosted, et cetera. You've, have you got any, um, case studies where business owners haven't covered their, uh, their bases legally? Molly Ruland: No, not a single one. And I work with guys who are; I work with the government agencies. I work with people who are attorneys. I work with the number one largest law firm in Washington, DC. Um, it's really, you know, sort of implied it's our content. You're coming to our show. I mean, you could have them. Are terms and conditions on a booking form or something? But I think it's pretty much well-known. I think more people are concerned about, uh, maybe having the first right of approval on the content. Like, you know, some of my clients are talking about like, you know, relations in the Middle East and like, but you know, very, very touchy subjects at certain times. Right. And so sometimes people might want to review it first before it goes out, especially lawyers, right? It's like they really want to triple everything before it goes out. But I would say that in regards to this, and I see this a lot in the podcast groups, people say I'm going to trademark my podcast. I'm like, Hey man, why don't you get through 20 episodes first and then get back to me? You know, because, right? Unless you're going to be doing, uh, uh, your podcast show live and making merchandise and stuff, you don't need a trademark. That's a waste of time and money. And I, I mean, you know, you could create just a little form that says like, Hey. But I've been on countless podcasts. We've produced countless podcasts. And I would say maybe 3 percent of people have a legal form. Gary Stockton: Yeah, I was, I was actually thinking about the, the scenario where it's, it's a person that wants to have this podcast. Uh, I've heard some horror stories about folks that had someone managing the podcast for them, like the feed and where the podcast took off and, um, But then the person was, you know, no longer with the organization or that they, they lost possession of the podcast.And I think as a business owner, I would want to make sure I would want to view that as, as an asset of the company. Um, and yeah, cause there's an audience that would come with that. If I did want to sell the company down the road, I was just thinking about it from, from that perspective. Molly Ruland: From that perspective, absolutely. I mean, we're really big on that because a lot of companies popped up, and they're like, we own your content, and we'll put ads on it, and then we get paid for some of the downloads. We're the opposite. Everything is in our client's name, and it should always be that way. You should own your RSS feed. You should have access to all these things. And it's another reason to, like, don't hire somebody on Fiverr, like, I, I get the inclination, but like, you can find very affordable services that are not predatory. And like, if you've hired somebody on Fiverr, like, next week they might not be there. And so you should never just like, hand over the keys to the castle to anybody. And so I would definitely encourage you if you're going to hire an agency to be very clear about that. Um, because there are some companies out here pulling some tricks, you know for sure, but I think it's probably the small unregulated editors because know, again, there's misnomers everywhere, but a lot of people think that just cause you can edit audio means you're good at marketing or means you're good at strategy. And it's like, listen, you can find a million people all over the world that can edit your audio and edit your video. That does not mean that they understand the key points each time in each conversation that mattered most to your audience. And those are very different worlds, right? And so, the best thing you can do to protect yourself legally is not to work with individuals. I do not work with people like that. And then be really clear when you sign your contract: Hey, this is my content. I own it. And I want, you know like we build websites for people, and we send them an email, and we say, here's your login and password, but for the love of God, please do not log in and touch the website, but you have it, you have access to it. It is yours, but just fill out this form if you want us to edit it. We always make sure that they have a login and password, and they can do anything that they need at any time because it's their website and they own it. And so it's the same thing with podcasts. We do. They have access to their RSS. They have access to the Trello board. They have access to everything. If they stop, if they move to somebody else, they're happy to do it. There's nothing we even need to release because we don't own it in the first place. Gary Stockton: Yeah, Excellent, well Molly this has been so enlightening and, and it's really got me thinking about the many powerful ways that, uh, small businesses can grow and scale through podcasting and grow in their influence. Uh, tell our audience where they can reach you and, uh, start a conversation. Molly Ruland: Absolutely. Well, you can check out the website if you want to see our, you know, offers and things like that Heartcast Media. It's a great place to see our content and what it looks like, um, heartcastmedia.com. And then, of course, on LinkedIn, I'm always open to chat. I love doing discovery calls with people and strategy sessions because a lot of times, even 20 minutes with somebody, I can really kind of, um, you know, one of my favorite quotes is you can't read the label from inside the jar. And so, you know, if anybody's thinking about a podcast, but they're just like, I understand it could be valuable, but I'm having a hard time connecting the dots to see exactly how that would work. Hit me up. I'm happy to spend some time with you and help you figure that out. Whether you hire us or not. Uh, I'm really good at the uh branded podcast speed dating. If you will, it's one of my favorite things to do. Gary Stockton: Great stuff. Thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing your insights with us. Molly we really appreciate it. Molly Ruland: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.

Identity theft is no longer a problem exclusive to individuals. Small businesses are increasingly becoming targets for fraudsters, leading to devastating financial and reputational consequences. If your business becomes a victim of identity theft, it’s crucial to act swiftly and effectively to mitigate damage and prevent future incidents. In this blog post, we'll explore what business identity theft entails, the common tactics fraudsters use, signs that your business may be compromised, and the steps you can take both immediately and in the long term to protect your business. How Business Identity Theft Differs from Personal Identity Theft While personal identity theft affects individuals by misusing their social security numbers, credit card information, and personal details, business identity theft targets the assets and reputation of a company. Personal identity theft is often quickly identified through anomalies in personal financial statements. In contrast, business identity theft may take longer to discover, often only becoming apparent after significant damage has occurred. Understanding Business Identity Theft Business identity theft involves the unauthorized use of a company’s credentials, such as its tax identification number, business license, or credit information, to fraudulently obtain goods, services, or credit. This information is typically sold on the Dark Web by fraudsters. If your business identity has become compromised through a data breach or inside actor, fraudsters will use the info, sometimes referred to as “Business Fullz” to apply for various forms of business credit. Another tactic fraudsters will employ is to use Secretary of State websites to find dormant or inactive businesses, pay the state to re-activate the previously incorporated business to be in good standing with the state, then use this information at some point to apply for credit. For those entrepreneurs who may have voluntarily closed a business, they can still be exposed to identity theft.Unlike personal identity theft, business identity theft can be more challenging to detect and resolve due to the complexity of business operations and financial dealings. A Drag on Small Business Growth The problem can also dampen small business growth. Some financial institutions are reluctant to introduce small business funding products, because of the elevated number of fraudulent applications, and a low confidence level in identifying fraud in the loan onboarding stage. Several Experian clients in the financial services sector have expressed hesitancy toward growth, particularly during these high interest rate times. The Growing Threat of Business Identity Theft To put the problem into perspective — according to Javelin, consumer identity fraud losses amounted to nearly $23 billion in 2023, resulting in a 13% increase in overall losses for U.S. adult victims of identity fraud, and since business owners are also consumers, it’s a problem that doesn’t discriminate between an individual or the business they may own. Over the past decade, the incidence of business identity theft has risen alarmingly. As more companies digitize their operations and conduct business online, they inadvertently expose themselves to greater risks. Advances in technology have enabled cybercriminals to execute more sophisticated schemes, leading to a surge in reported cases. These businesses often lack the robust security infrastructure that larger corporations possess, making them attractive targets for fraudsters. The rapid rise in business identity theft means business owners and their employees need to take an active, all-hands-on-deck approach in safeguarding the business and its valuable assets and sensitive information. It’s the new normal. Potential Consequences for Victims of Business Identity Theft The consequences of business identity theft are far-reaching:• Financial Loss: Fraudulent transactions can drain bank accounts and incur massive debts in the company's name.• Reputation Damage: Trust built with clients, suppliers, and partners can be eroded, causing long-term business relationships to suffer.• Legal Issues: Businesses may face legal action if they fail to protect sensitive information, leading to lawsuits and regulatory penalties. Common Tactics Used to Steal Identities Fraudsters employ various sophisticated tactics to steal business identities. Understanding these common methods can help businesses recognize and respond to potential threats more effectively. Below, we explore several prevalent techniques cybercriminals use to target businesses and compromise sensitive information. Phishing and Spear-Phishing AttacksPhishing involves sending deceptive emails to trick recipients into providing sensitive information. Spear-phishing is more targeted, often personalized to increase the likelihood of success. Both methods can lead to unauthorized access to business accounts and sensitive data. Fake Invoices and Fraudulent Vendor AccountsFraudsters may create fake invoices or set up fraudulent vendor accounts to siphon money from unsuspecting businesses. These schemes can be difficult to detect, especially in companies with high volumes of transactions. Data Breaches and HackingCybercriminals exploit vulnerabilities in software and network systems to gain unauthorized access to business data. These breaches can compromise sensitive information, including customer details, financial records, and proprietary business information. Social Engineering and ImpersonationSocial engineering involves manipulating individuals into divulging confidential information. Fraudsters may impersonate employees, executives, or trusted partners to gain access to sensitive information or financial resources. Business Email Compromise (BEC)BEC schemes involve fraudsters gaining control over a business email account to conduct unauthorized transactions. These attacks often result in significant financial loss and can be challenging to detect and resolve. How Experian Can Help To Protect Your Business Identity Experian works with lenders to identify Business Identity theft; here are ways to protect your business. First, be proactive by staying alert. Use a credible monitoring service like Experian’s Business Credit Advantage to notify you of changed items inside your business credit profile that could indicate suspicious activity and information that has been compromised on the Dark Web. Then, pay close attention to the alert notifications you receive. Take action to investigate any suspicious activity. Experian provides services to help investigate and restore your business credit. If your business does fall victim to fraud, take the extra precautionary step of placing a fraud notice on your business credit file for lenders to contact owner before extending credit. This is a free service offered free of charge by Experian. Business Credit Advantage Check your credit report Signs Your Business May Be a Victim of Identity Theft Detecting business identity theft early is crucial to mitigating its impact and preventing further damage. By being aware of the warning signs, businesses can quickly address potential breaches. This section highlights key indicators that your business may be a victim of identity theft, helping you to recognize suspicious activities and respond appropriately to protect your company’s assets and reputation. Unexplained Changes in Business RecordsSudden, unexplained changes in your business records, such as updated contact information, new accounts, or unauthorized transactions, can indicate identity theft. Regularly monitoring your business records can help detect these changes early. Sudden Drop in Credit ScoreA sudden drop in your business credit score without a clear reason could be a sign of fraudulent activity. It is essential to monitor your business credit score regularly to identify any suspicious change Receipt of Invoices for Goods/Services Not OrderedReceiving invoices for goods or services that your business did not order can be a red flag for identity theft. These fraudulent invoices may be part of schemes to siphon money from your business. Alerts from Financial Institutions or CreditorsFinancial institutions and creditors may alert you to suspicious activities, such as unauthorized transactions, new accounts, or unusual spending patterns. Pay close attention to these alerts and investigate any anomalies promptly. Suspicious Emails or CommunicationsUnusual or suspicious emails and communications, especially those requesting sensitive information or financial transactions, should be treated with caution. Verify the authenticity of such communications before taking any action. Immediate Steps to Take If Your Business Is a Victim of Identity Theft Discovering that your business has fallen victim to identity theft can be alarming, but swift and decisive action can help minimize the damage. This section outlines the critical steps you need to take immediately after identifying a security breach. Secure Your Systems and DataImmediately secure your systems and data by changing passwords, updating security protocols, and implementing stronger cybersecurity measures. Ensure that all software and systems are up-to-date and protected against potential threats. Notify Your Financial Institutions and CreditorsContact your financial institutions and creditors to report the identity theft and halt any unauthorized transactions. They can help you secure your accounts and prevent further fraudulent activity. Report to Relevant AuthoritiesReport the identity theft to relevant authorities, such as the police, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and local government agencies. This helps initiate an official investigation and provides a record of the incident. Inform Your Business Partners and CustomersNotify your business partners and customers about the data breach to maintain transparency and trust. Provide them with information on how to protect themselves and their data. Monitor Your Business Accounts and Credit ReportsContinuously monitor your business credit reports and accounts for any suspicious activity. Regularly review transactions and financial statements to detect and address any unauthorized activities promptly. Experian offers a business monitoring service called Business Credit Advantage. The annual service provides unlimited access to an owner’s business credit report, daily monitoring by Experian, change alerts and Dark Web surveillance Long-Term Strategies for Recovery and Prevention Strengthen Cybersecurity Measures Invest in robust cybersecurity measures to protect your business from future attacks. Implement firewalls, antivirus software, encryption, and multi-factor authentication to enhance your security posture. Implement Employee Training Programs on Security Awareness Educate your employees about security best practices and the importance of safeguarding sensitive information. Regular training programs can help prevent social engineering attacks and reduce the risk of human error. Regularly Review and Update Security Policies Review and update your security policies regularly to ensure they align with current best practices and emerging threats. Keep your team informed about any changes and ensure they adhere to the updated protocols. Monitor Activity on Your Business with Credit Bureaus Regularly monitor your business credit profile with credit bureaus to detect any suspicious activity early. Services like Experian's Business Credit Advantage provide daily monitoring and alerts to help you stay informed. Conduct Regular Audits and Risk Assessments Conduct regular audits and risk assessments to identify vulnerabilities and address potential security gaps. Regular evaluations can help you stay ahead of emerging threats and protect your business from identity theft. Conclusion Business identity theft is a serious threat that requires swift and effective action. By understanding the tactics fraudsters use, recognizing the signs of identity theft, and implementing immediate and long-term strategies, you can protect your business from potential harm. Stay vigilant, proactive, and committed to safeguarding your business's identity and reputation. For peace of mind, consider using services like Experian's Business Credit Advantage, which offers daily monitoring and alerts to keep your business secure. Together, we can build a safer environment for businesses to thrive. If you would like to learn more about the problem of commercial fraud and how to mitigate it successfully, consider these additional resources:• Mitigating application fraud: the rise of SMBs and commercial loan fraud• Account takeover fraud in lending services: key risk management considerations• Identity fraud in commercial applications: Experian Business Chat• View what business owners are saying about how Experian helps them protect their business By incorporating these strategies and staying informed, you can protect your business from the damaging effects of identity theft. If you need further assistance or want to learn more about safeguarding your business, reach out to Experian.

Are you looking to make AI work for your small business? You have come to the right place. This week, our Small Business Matters podcast dives into AI with expert and author Pam Didner. Pam is a powerhouse in the marketing world. She's not just a marketing expert; she's a problem solver, a digital enthusiast, and a lover of all things tech. With a rich background in B2B marketing, Pam is a much sought-after keynote speaker and trainer for B2B marketing teams. She's the host of a popular podcast, B2B Marketing and More, where she dives into marketing strategies and trends that shape modern business. Pam's also the acclaimed author of three insightful books: Effective Sales Enablement, The Modern AI Marketer, and Global Content Marketing. Each book is a treasure trove of knowledge, offering practical advice and cutting-edge strategies for marketers everywhere. If you would like to learn more about AI and how it can increase productivity for your small business, be sure to listen and subscribe. Watch Our Interview Key highlights: Understanding AI's Capabilities and Limitations Pam highlighted that while AI can significantly augment marketing strategies by providing tailored answers and insights, it's important to recognize its limitations. AI operates based on the data it is trained on and thus can inherit biases or produce less-than-perfect outputs. Small businesses should utilize AI tools critically, ensuring they understand the technology's scope and its potential biases. Integrating AI into Marketing Strategies AI's ability to handle data and generate creative outputs has made significant strides. Pam discussed using AI for practical tasks like drafting emails and ideating campaign ideas, which can streamline operations and enhance creativity. However, she emphasizes the importance of marketers setting boundaries and refining AI-generated content to ensure it aligns with the brand's voice and goals. Leveraging AI for Data Analysis and Personalization The discussion highlighted the transformative potential of AI in analyzing extensive datasets quickly and efficiently. For small businesses, this means being able to personalize marketing efforts more effectively if they maintain clean and updated databases. Pam stressed the importance of data quality, noting that 'garbage in, garbage out' holds true in the realm of AI, where the output quality depends heavily on the input data quality. AI's Role in Enhancing Customer Experience AI can assist small businesses in various sectors by improving the customer experience, whether through automated communications, personalized recommendations, or efficient service delivery. For example, a dermatologist uses AI to manage appointments and communications effectively, demonstrating that AI can streamline operations in businesses of all types. Future Trends in AI and Marketing Pam predicts that AI will continue to integrate deeply into the marketing landscape, potentially taking on more autonomous roles in crafting marketing strategies and customer interactions. She also suggests that as AI tools become more sophisticated, they will offer unprecedented levels of personalization in marketing efforts. Those highlights were just scratching the surface, and our conversation underscores the evolving relationship between AI and small businesses. We emphasize the need for strategic integration while being mindful of the technology's current limitations. As AI continues to develop, it promises to offer more tools and opportunities for businesses to enhance their efficiency and competitiveness. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our interview: Gary Stockton: Welcome back to the Small Business Matters podcast. I'm so thrilled about today's guest and what we're going to be talking about.The first time I met Pam Didner, I had just listened to her talk about AI at the B2B Exchange Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, just prior to the pandemic. That was just over four years ago. And a lot has changed. Open AI with chat GPT. Claude and Google Gemini and other popular AI tools are now considered mainstream. Pam is a powerhouse in the marketing world. She's not just a marketing expert, she's a problem solver, a digital enthusiast, and a lover of all things tech. With a rich background in B2B marketing, Pam is a much sought after keynote speaker and trainer for B2B marketing teams. She's the host of a popular podcast, B2B Marketing and More, where she dives into marketing strategies and trends that shape modern business. Pam's also the acclaimed author of three insightful books, Effective Sales Enablement, The Modern AI Marketer, and Global Content Marketing. Each book is a treasure trove of knowledge, offering practical advice and cutting edge strategies for marketers everywhere. Pam, Welcome to The Small Business Matters podcast. Pam Didner: Thank you so much for having me, Gary. I love your voice. It's so soothing. I was listening to it. I was like, Oh my God, this is, it makes me relax and I'm yelling in my voice. It just have this it's like a bulldozer I tend to overwhelm people. Gary Stockton: That's very nice of you to say, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that about you because, as I've seen you present, you're, just a really great communicator and also consistent, content creator. And I think that's really what it's about in our game is always being out there with, insightful information, helpful information. Now you've been in marketing for quite some time, but what sparked your interest in AI and, how did you start integrating it into your marketing strategy? Pam Didner: Yeah, that's actually a great question. And, I think, I, the first time I heard about AI was back in 1997, long time ago. It's basically when, IBM has this machine called Deep Blue. I think you probably know that and is like a chess machine that actually be the human chess master. I don't know his name, Gary Kasparov. I think that's the remember. So they actually have multiple different games, I think in 1996 and 1997. And of course machine did a fantastic job. And I was like, Oh my God, one day. One day this machine is going to do a whole lot more. I don't know what that is, but it's going to happen. So that's how it got started. And, to answer your question. The second question, how did I start integrating it into say overall marketing strategies or implementation? Just like you said earlier, in November, 2022, Open AI launched ChatGPT that literally just took the world by storm. I think a lot of us are using ChatGPT to get our questions answered and also find a way to leverage that to say to make our marketing a little easier. For example, writing email. And, or, ideate, with, AI about some of the campaign ideas. So when you ask AIs about questions because they search the whole internet, it tends to give you its best answer. It may not be right 100 percent of the time, but it helps tremendously when it provides just one tailored answer to you. Gary Stockton: Yes, I agree. And I've been dabbling myself. I started using ChatGPT, I actually using Jasper, which was before. Yeah. So I'm a little old school. I've, I got dabbling in, in, Jarvis and Jasper and, introduced it around the business. And then people were like, Oh, this is really interesting. This saves us some productivity. But, it being a, I'm a writer, I like to write my own content. I've been in two worlds, since it's come out. And it's, good for the ideation side of things. I think, it really helps me with some subject lines. You can test different subject lines and titles and optimizing a blog post, but, I'm literally setting some own personal limits. What are some common misperceptions about AI that small businesses should be aware of? Pam Didner: There are several things I want to share with everyone. the artificial intelligence obviously, is artificial intelligence and it is trained it because it was trained by human feeding massive amount of data to it. So they only know what they know. Like humans, we only know what we know, right? So they are, they only know what it was trained for. So the data sets that feed into AI is very, important. And, you have to understand it also has a bias like us. And not every single answer provided by AI is what I call perfect. And you need to have a point of view. So AI has a bias. You need to have a point of view to know that you can gauge the answer they provided and number the last one is I doesn't know your business. You do. And you need to make sure that when you use AI, you don't use it blindly and have a point of view about it and then know that what to take, what not to take. It's like what you said, Gary, you are a writer. So you've been writing for a long period of time, and you know what good writing is. You also know what writing is more like a business writing. You also know when you write for your clients, what clicks, what makes your target audience click or not click. And having that point of view is very, important. When you say you set boundaries, I think what you meant is you have a specific point of view. Like when AI writes something, you will look at it and say, I don't think so. And you modify, you edit it as you see fit. And that I think is the mindset you need to have when you work with AI. Gary Stockton: Yeah. I agree. Put, your own fingerprints on your work. Someone that really uses AI, I've seen use AI in a smart way is Scott Galloway for his, newsletter. he has a great, he has a great newsletter that he does, on the weekend's, "No Mercy, No Malice." And he'll get into a bit of storytelling in that, he did one on AI, but he actually talked about, the, Oh, the, the Luddites and, destroying weaving machines. Because they thought that was going to put all of the. texture work, textile workers out of, business back in the day. But he'll start with that story and give, do some research on the Luddites and then weave that into what he wants to say about AI. Pam Didner: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very nice. And AI cannot do that for you. If AI wants to write the opening and, it's just probably write a very common opening or very business like opening, but there's no personal touch to it. Yeah. Gary Stockton: So the title of your book, The Modern AI Marketer, suggests a transformative approach to marketing. Can you share a pivotal moment when you realized AI was going to change the game for marketers? Pam Didner: That's a great point. First of all, the book was written before ChatGPT became popular. So it was written in 2019. It's a bit dated and I'm in the process of rewriting it. And, I think, when I realized it, really has, impact on marketing is I was looking at how Amazon and, or how's Google actually use AI.So way back then, I would say in 2015, 2016, or even earlier that, the using algorithm. To provide personalized, recommendation like Amazon does all the time, right? You purchase this, therefore you might be interested in that and you watch this film, so you, therefore you might be interested in that. I think things got me interested way back in terms of recommendation and also in terms of how Google continuously optimize its search that will try to anticipate that the phrases that you will say when you type into a Google search, that's also artificial, intelligence in training, but they are, but that's more kind of enterprise usage. And that was not widely available to consumers or users, common users like us. And of course the open AI, ChatGPT opened that door for everyone. Gary Stockton: Yeah. Data plays a crucial role in AI and as they say garbage in, garbage out. How can a small business ensure that they're collecting and utilizing data effectively to feed their AI tools and, get the best results? Cause it's, gone beyond just putting a text prompt. You can, put spreadsheets of data in there now and have it analyze What should a small business owner be thinking of there in terms of data? Pam Didner: I think, this is a problem, honestly, that every single business encounters, it's not just small businesses. Yeah, if you can take a spreadsheet's worth of information and then upload it to an AI application and have them do analysis for you, fantastic. Or even write a summary of that, that analysis. Or you can just, get a bunch of data and dump into AI and, ask a specific questions, have them do analysis. From my perspective, the most important thing is you need to make sure that your data is clean. And, this is an issue that every single marketer encounters, including myself. I have, I, I encourage people to subscribe to my newsletters. However, how often do I clean that newsletter database? How often do I enrich that database with the latest information that can be associated with the people that subscribe to my newsletter? I think the most important thing for any businesses, including small businesses, is if you have a limited amount of data sets and you and it can be captured in Excel or in database and yeah, you use AI to do further analysis. Everybody can do that. How do you make sure that data set or that quality of data is being kept up to date?, that will be something that we all have to take into consideration if you want to use AI for further analysis, but I, me included, honestly, I'm just using myself as an example.I'm not doing a very good job of that. So that's something that I think moving forward will be faced by every single business. Gary Stockton: Yeah. and I think also when it comes to personalizing campaigns, if you've been, dilligent and disciplined about, like you said, appending, data to your email list and just getting, whether it's male or female followers or subscribers, and doing, you wouldn't do, a clothing or a fashion, type of story or promotion. to, to males, if it's, women's fashion, so yeah, so it's a great point. And also I think because third party cookies are going to be going away or being phased out, I think the marketers themselves really have to take some responsibility in, gathering that information on the front end. Would you agree? Pam Didner: Yes, I do. In fact, I, when you mentioned about cookies at that time, I was thinking I wanted to talk about first party data.So you brought a very good point. And, just for all of you watching or listening, obviously the first party data is the data you collect yourself directly from users in a very simple term. And, not just with a party, I'm sorry, not just with cookie, going away, like Gary indicated is. Is your ability to collect the first party information directly from user and you always have to make assumption that your user are going to give you like more accurate information, but do you know how many times when I look at information I know it's that user just doesn't want me to know his or her first name. They just attach the last name and leave the first name field empty. And then with that being said, when you gather that information, there's already one field of information missing. And the question is, what can you do as a marketer to gather that piece of information? Moving forward, a lot of information that we're going to gather from our customers, you have to earn it, they want to get something in order to give you something that's assumed they want to give, right? So what are you going to do to get that information and hopefully the information they provide to you as a first party data is also accurate? And I think that would be the challenge that the marketers will encounter in the future, which is just like you indicated. And, with that being said, we have to work harder. When I say harder, it's Oh, it's like we work in longer hours. That's not the point. It's working harder in terms of we have to think how can we get that information, but at the same time, that is not intrusive to our user and provide the information or, relevant information that they need. And there's a fine balance. I think every single marketer is going to deal with that in the future, me included. Gary Stockton: So AI can help all kinds of small businesses or can it? If my business was a typewriter repair shop, I'm sure Ann Handley would be raising her hand to, to do business with that person, but perhaps a hair salon. Can, AI still help these kinds of businesses to grow? Pam Didner: I think so, and let's think about it. If you are a small business, and, say you are a typewriter repair shop or even you are a hair salon and, you have to think through in terms of what kind of, customer experience you want to provide to your customers. That's assumed that you are, you don't have the website and, everybody comes to you is still word of mouth. And you don't have a digital presence, but your business is booming. That's just because everybody loves you. And then you, then everything is manual. The whole process manual and communication tend to be in person. So you have to think through in terms of how you communicate with your audience and also how you get your name out. Once you understand that process, it doesn't matter if it's manual or it doesn't matter if it's digital. You have a solid understanding how that works, and then you can determine how AI can help you.Is that helpful? I'm not answering your question directly, more or less, understand how your business works. Once you identify that process and you can articulate that very clearly, then you can see like how AI can help you. That's number one. Pam Didner: And, for example, I do actually have a, a doctor that I go on a regular basis and, giving, and I have a minor skin problem. So it's dermatologist and, for this specific doctor is obviously a small business and serves the local area. And, It's one doctor and one receptionist, and the receptionist serves as a nurse as well. So the, it's, actually a fairly decent sized business. He has a lot of patients, but there's only two people. That's it from my perspective. That's amazing. And he got the process down. Our communication is always through text, It's like the meeting, the appointment confirmations through text and, the appointment reminder is through text, even his, like instruction, like what kind of ointment I should use and the where to get it and how the frequency of it. It's a through text. And so I can tell that everything is very digital for him. And, but it's very interesting that, I respond to an appointment like I say, Oh yes, I will. I'll come tomorrow. I will. Yes. But there's a three standard email, honestly, three standard email that you just send it to everybody. He can obviously use AI to personalize that if he chooses to, because he's already have a process workflow build up. Now he just have to source possibly another tool or looking at the tools that he's using right now and see if there's AI feature that he can turn on. So, look at your workflow and look at what you do and then determine how you want to use AI to help. And the best way to do it is looking at your existing tools and see if they have AI features associated with it, and then leverage that as much as you can as a starting point. Gary Stockton: Very good. So you've been following AI for some time. What's been the most surprising development for marketing or marketing use case that you've seen? Pam Didner: It's actually not necessarily so I want to share with you. It's not necessarily a marketing case study. And, first, sorry, this is not like a marketing case study. But I thought when I read this specific article, I was like, completely in awe. Microsoft has this AI tool. Okay. actually, many enterprises they do.They work with other enterprises. like the lithium batteries and the materials of building the battery and, is, is limited and for the enterprises and a lot of scientists are thinking about finding a new materials for, the lithium battery, according to the Microsoft AI tool, there are 30 million theoretical materials that can be used or substitute. If you think about it, because that's 30 millions, if just a human has to go through that, it's going to take months and years. So Microsoft AI tool was able to actually narrow the 30 million materials option to 18 in just 80 hours. And I was like, whoa, this is amazing. Gary Stockton: That's incredible. Pam Didner: This is awesome. This is to me from my perspective, like AI at the best light. And so that is something from my perspective that caught me by surprise in terms of how far AI can do for scientific research. And, I personally think if we use. AI or a predictive model correctly and feed them with a high quality data set, what marketing can do is really can really, dial up that personalization type of communication with our prospects. And I think that's probably the ultimate Nirvana. All the marketers would like to accomplish, but it still requires a lot of work and our end to make that happen. Gary Stockton: So you're a prolific content creator in your marketing business. How are you using AI to maintain such high visibility for your consultancy?Pam Didner: That's actually a great question. So Gary, before I answer that question, let me, ask you a question. How do you use AI to maintain such a high visibility for, your content creation? What do you do? Gary Stockton: Yeah. I can share that. I come up with ideas for blog posts. I look at, topics that we've written, about. And we do a gap analysis on competitors to see what our competitors have written about where we, may have got some gaps there. I use it for outlines for talks that I'm going to, give, I can whip up an outline for podcasts. If I were to be completely honest, this podcast that we're doing here, I fed your bio into it and I asked it, what are some questions that, that would be good to ask Pam and I've done this with other, guests on the show. And I know it's, I just want to make sure that, we have a good interview and we asked some substantive questions versus softballs, so those are some of the things I've been using. Yeah, Pam Didner: I love it. So we follow similar paths. And, I use, chat GPT or even Gemini or CoPilot. I use, all sorts of, say, the AI chatbots because I want to test them out and then see the results, if you will. So I do, whenever I write something and I was like, this is a very rough draft. I will feed into the AI and have it rewrite and see if they do a better job than me or not. And of course, a lot of time they do. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they don't. So you were talking about building like an outline for your presentation using AI.Interesting enough, I have I don't have a huge success on that. I guess that just because the way I think about how I want to speak and how I want to do the opening and also ending. And I usually give a lot of thought about the opening and the ending. And, I have tried to use AI to come up with the opening and ending, but it tends to be very dull, if you will. So I have not had a huge success using that. And the other thing I use is, there is a tool I'm not here to promoting any tools and I'm not affiliated with them. It's called Opus Clip and it's basically you can just, enter the link of your YouTube or just any kind of TikTok link. It will do shorts for you, and I know that there are tools out there can do exactly the same thing. And so I've been using Opus Clip, just want to see if AI can do a bunch of shorts for me based on my long form content. And I can tell you the results are mixed and, they will usually give me, probably about seven to 12 shorts examples.And, it still requires human editing to make sure that it's very professional. You know what I'm saying? Gary Stockton: Yeah Pam Didner: So the cutting or the editing of the long-form video, it's fine. But I don't think it's at the prime time yet. And for example, I using OpusClip and they come up with 10, 12 examples. I have to personally watch them. And, at the same time, you, I, my video editors still need to do some editing. There is a convenience to it, for example, the captions I can add that in no time and that you can modify, you can edit. They do actually have editing tools within the platform that was good, but it still requires human touch.You still have to touch it, right? It's not 100 percent automatic. Gary Stockton: I've heard some good things about OpusClip and, getting the shorts out there. Cause I think the short form content that's been very good for us. we use, Descript. I still do the edits, on the main video for the podcast in, Premiere. But once I've got a finished edit I can put that into Descript and that generates the transcript for me. They're billing that as AI. I don't know if, transcription software is truly AI. but the thing that I like about, Descript is that you can ask it to write some social posts about that content. You can ask it different questions about it. but, also you can apply those templates, the short form video templates to it. And that takes multicam output, like what we're doing here with, Ecamm. And, do the camera changes. So it, it does save time, but, I think you do have to be discerning on, what it is that you're putting out there and trying to put a really juicy, short form clip, a really great salient point. I thought it would be fun for us to finish maybe with a quick lightning round. we'll go through a few of these. If you have time, ChatGPT or Claude. Pam Didner: ChatGPT. For me. Okay. Actually, by the way, can I, know his lighting. I also like Claude . Gary Stockton: Mike Szelsner, he swears by Claude. He, told me all about Claude and I've been using that too. Pam Didner: yeah, I, using, so I using both in interchangeably, like for example, easy writing. I tend to go to ChatGPT, a little bit more complex writing. I tend to go to Claude, so I use it a little bit differently. Gary Stockton: Yeah. one, one thing that Claude did for me once, I fed, I was going to do a webinar and I wanted to know what industries, the folks were in.Cause I didn't have the, a lot of data handy other than just the email addresses. So I had it strip out the domain names of the companies. And I just asked it, I said, tell me what industry each of these companies is. And I created a crosstab and a chart showing. All of the industries that were gonna be, and the percentage of audience that were trade accounts. Pam Didner: Oh wow. They, if figured it out.? That's amazing. Gary Stockton: Yeah. And it did it with very little effort. it, was, maybe the whole thing ran in less than 60 seconds. Pam Didner: It's interesting. there's a tool I'm using called Magai. It's M A G A I. Gary Stockton: Yes, I've heard of it. Pam Didner: So they actually, they put all the, LLMs into kind of the friend, which is the friend user interface and, you can choose which, which one you want to use. You want to use Gemini, use Facebook's Llama, you want to use Claude, you want to use, say, chat GPT. You can choose which one you want to use and then you can enter your prompts and then you can see what they come up with. So I've been using Magai which is M A G A I, and then just tested, because they build a user interface already and that you can access basically any different, large language models. And I just try it different LLM and see what kind of results that I get. Gary Stockton: Yeah, we got to leave a link to that in the description for the show. That's a good one. What about podcasts? What's the best AI podcast for marketers? Pam Didner: The MAICOM, which is the marketing, AI institute and by Paul Roetzer it tend to be pretty good. And, they did a fantastic job from my perspective. Yeah. Gary Stockton: Will AI be more transformative than the printing press? Pam Didner: Oh, totally. I think printing press was very transf transformative at that time. And, but AI, look at, AI is in everything. Everything we do you buy something on Amazon. There's a recommendation coming to you. You listen to a music and there's a Spotify will tell you and what else you should listen. You when you drive Wayze is that it's tell you which route to take. And, and, my husband listens, actually search online and then, and say, Oh, yeah, you know what, Google said, or, the recommendation said it, we should go to that restaurant. We literally listen to AI, almost every single second, if you think about it. Gary Stockton: Yeah. Pam Didner: So I think the, it's, definitely very expansive and also, that weave into our daily lives more than we think and realize. Gary Stockton: Should I use AI, an artificial video presenter or film myself? Pam Didner: Like a lot of people use, avatar or this, synthetic, type of, figure. Gary, can you imagine, moving forward, 10 years, two years down the road, it doesn't have to be 10, like, when we have an interview, we don't interview each other, it's actually AI, Gary's AI talking to Pam's AI. Gary Stockton: Oh, no. maybe it would be a little bit better looking, maybe, Take five, 10 pounds off. that's the draw for me. Pam Didner: Gary, you look fabulous. I wouldn't worry about it. Seriously. Gary Stockton: it's such a transformative time. And it really feels like in real time that, everything is changing all at once. What's your prediction for how AI will transform marketing in 20, 20, 34, in the next 10 years? Pam Didner: Oh my god, I hate prediction, Gary, you put me on the hot seat. it really depends on, like open AI they were talking about to develop humanoid. like a physical form of robots, not just like this software embedded into your computer or your mobile devices. So can you imagine and that there is a humanoid, but is that do marketing functions? It's not just okay, they are doing the daily tasks. But they actually can perform marketing functions like a physical form. That is something I feel, it's going to change, marketing forever. But if we're just still part of embedded into kind of computer or the devices, it's basically software. If they are just software inside and that there are things they can do for us, but they are, they don't have a physical form like you and me to take over to manually move things from one place to another. And that means that AI's contribution to marketing is still very limited. Gary Stockton: Yeah, Pam Didner: but there's a physical form, then that's a completely different story and conversation. Gary Stockton: Pam, as a fellow marketer and AI-curious person, I'm feeling less anxious about using AI in my business. Tell our audience where they can learn more about you and where they can reach out to work with you in some way. Pam Didner: Great, pamdidner.com if you are interested in terms of the services I offer pamdidner.com is a great place to get to know me. And I'm also very active on all social media channels, like Gary indicated. So connect with me on LinkedIn. YouTube. I have a YouTube channel if you want to subscribe to learn more about B2B marketing, and I'm also active on TikTok. Gary Stockton: Awesome stuff. Pam, thanks very much for your generous responses to those questions and thanks for taking time out to come on Small Business Matters. Pam Didner: Thank you so much for having me.

Jon Loomer's story is not just about digital marketing; it's a tale of resilience, adaptability, and finding success amidst life’s unpredictable challenges. His journey through various career paths, personal struggles, and ultimately, his establishment as a leading figure in advanced Meta advertising is a testament to his determination and entrepreneurial spirit. This article explores how Jon Loomer turned his passion for fantasy sports into digital marketing success by running JonLoomer.com. Humble beginnings Jon's career began in a conventional enough manner. At the age of 24, soon after getting married, he took a stable job in insurance to support his new family. However, his heart was elsewhere—in the world of fantasy sports. This passion led him to create his own website during the early 2000s, which marked his first foray into the digital realm. Though he confesses he was not a great employee in the insurance sector, this divergence into digital content was the beginning of a larger shift. A passion for fantasy sports and working for the NBA A significant pivot came when Jon seized an opportunity to work for the NBA, overseeing fantasy games. This role not only fulfilled his personal interest in sports but also introduced him to new possibilities in digital marketing, particularly through a partnership with Facebook in 2007. His experience with the NBA's Facebook initiatives during the platform's early expansion beyond academic institutions was particularly formative. Prioritizing family during a severe health crisis Despite professional highs, Jon's personal life faced severe trials. Around the time of his career shift, his oldest son was diagnosed with cancer, a life-altering event that brought into sharp focus the importance of family. These personal experiences profoundly influenced Jon's career decisions, leading him to value flexibility and time with family over conventional job security. After stints at a startup and the American Cancer Society—both of which ended in layoffs—Jon was at a crossroads. Reluctant to return to insurance, move his family again, or face another layoff, he decided to leverage his skills and experiences differently. With no initial intention of becoming an entrepreneur, Jon launched jonloomer.com in late 2011 as a platform to showcase his skills and hopefully secure employment. However, the site quickly evolved as Jon recognized the potential to serve other advanced Meta advertisers, creating resources and training materials that turned his website into a thriving business. Diversifying his suite of digital marketing services Jon’s entrepreneurial journey was marked by a shift from desperation to a deliberate lifestyle choice. His priorities shifted from merely making ends meet to providing a stable and involved presence in his children's lives. As his children grew, Jon's role transitioned once more towards focusing on his business, including developing paid communities and one-on-one coaching through platforms like powerhittersclub.com. Jon Loomer's path is a powerful reminder that success doesn't always follow a straight line. His career evolution—from an insurance employee to a digital marketing guru—demonstrates that embracing change, staying true to one's passions, and prioritizing what truly matters can lead to unexpected and fulfilling outcomes. Today, Jon continues to influence the world of digital marketing, providing insights and resources to those looking to navigate the complex terrain of Meta advertising while still placing family and personal well-being at the forefront of his priorities. Related Posts Share Your Story

Navigating the Basics: Essential Steps to Setup an LLC In our latest episode of the Small Business Matters podcast, we dive into the topic of forming and managing Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs) with legal experts Carmel and Camellia Imani, co-founders of Imani Law. The sisters, both UC Davis School of Law graduates, specialize in helping entrepreneurs establish their businesses and secure trademarks, emphasizing preventative legal measures to avert potential issues. Watch Our Interview Episode Summary We start off with a spotlight on the rising number of small businesses in the U.S., highlighting the surge to 5.5 million new ventures in 2023, and a popular choice among entrepreneurs is to form LLCs. The Imani sisters share their transition from litigation to transactional law, which aligns better with their goal of aiding small businesses before legal troubles arise. Their approach, characterized by flat rate fees and transparency, has resonated well on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. During our conversation, the Imani’s detail the advantages of LLCs over other business structures, primarily the flexibility and protection they offer. Carmel explains that LLCs are ideal for individuals starting alone who wish to avoid the complexities and formalities of corporations. Camellia outlines the steps to setting up an LLC, which vary by state but generally include conducting a name search, drafting articles of organization, and subsequent filings such as the statement of information and obtaining an EIN (Employer Identification Number.) The discussion also covers the financial aspects of forming an LLC, with emphasis on the variability of costs across different states. For instance, California has a relatively high annual tax fee for LLCs. The benefits of LLCs, such as limited liability protection and tax flexibility, are highlighted as major reasons for their popularity among small business owners. We explore tax treatments and the customizable management structures of LLCs, allowing business owners to tailor their setups according to their specific needs. We also touch on potential pitfalls and common mistakes in forming and maintaining an LLC, such as the improper separation of personal and business finances, which can jeopardize the legal protections offered by an LLC. The Imani sisters stress the importance of an operating agreement and regular compliance with state requirements to maintain the integrity of the LLC’s protective structure.For entrepreneurs looking to minimize startup costs the Imani sisters conclude by mentioning a offer resources for entrepreneurs with limited funds, including a tutorial series designed to help individuals set up their LLCs independently at a lower cost. Key Takeaways: Flexible Structure: LLCs offer a simpler and more flexible structure ideal for individual entrepreneurs or small partnerships. Preventive Legal Support: Engaging with a law firm specializing in business formation early can prevent future legal complications. Cost Considerations: Understand the initial and ongoing costs associated with forming an LLC in your specific state. Separation of Assets: Strict separation of personal and business finances is crucial to maintain liability protection. Resource Availability: Utilize available resources such as tutorials from experienced attorneys to reduce setup costs. We invite our listeners to watch the full video interview on our platform for more in-depth insights and expert advice from Carmel and Camellia Imani. Their practical guidance could be instrumental in navigating the complexities of business formation and legal compliance effectively. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation Gary Stockton: Each year, there are roughly 4. 7 million new small businesses created in the U. S., but according to the U. S. Census, that number shot up to 5. 5 million in 2023, the highest year on record. And many of these new ventures are limited liability corporations or LLCs. And with so many small businesses being created, we thought it would be a good time to talk about LLCs. How they differ from other business structures and what advantages you have as a business owner by forming one. Our show research on TikTok led us to discover Imani Law, co-founded by Carmel and Camellia Imani. This forward-thinking law firm specializes in aiding entrepreneurs with business establishment and trademark security. The Imani sisters, both UC Davis School of Law graduates, have shifted from litigation to focus on transactional and preventative practices to safeguard clients. Notably, their firm is recognized for its flat rate fees, transparency, and approachable manner, effectively engaging with the online community through platforms like Instagram and TikTok.Carmel and Camellia, welcome to Small Business Matters. Camellia Imani: Thank you. Thank you for having us. Carmel Imani: Thank you. Gary Stockton: it's so great to, to make new connections for Experian through our social media channels. and we've been so impressed with your approach, particularly on TikTok. What is your favorite aspect of, practicing law? Maybe we could start there, especially in the context of helping small businesses and entrepreneurs? Camellia Imani: Yeah, it's really nice now that we don't litigate anymore, everything we do is transactional. What's nice is we get to help people, before. for the problems start and then advise them on what to do so that they don't have to run into problems. I think people, when they think about law, they think of litigation, they think that there's, going to be, complicated and costly, but we get to work with people and tell them it doesn't have to be like that. yeah, I think that's one reason why we really like our jobs. It's a very happy environment and we get to help people every single day. Gary Stockton: So, what are the main differences between an LLC and a corporation and how do these differences impact small businesses and entrepreneurs? Carmel Imani: Yeah, that's, a great question. we, we talk to people who are starting up their businesses every day. and they have that same question, and it really depends on, what their business is, what their goals are. it's really not a one size fits all, and that's why there are that those options out there. and so when we get on the phone with the potential client, we go over the differences, for them in their, depending on what type of business they have. And there are different rules that will apply depending on what type of profession you have. But the biggest difference is that, corporations, there are more formalities that are involved. LLC is more of a simple structure. So if you're just starting out on your own and you don't want to be a sole proprietor, and you want to file paperwork. Usually LLC is the best way to go if you're not, trying to sell stock in your business and have investors, we usually recommend the LLC route. Gary Stockton: What are the basic steps involved in setting up a, an LLC and how might these steps vary from a state to state? Camellia? Camellia Imani: Yeah, every state has a different process. I can tell you with California and what seems to be common with other states is the first is obviously we want to do a name search.You want to make sure that your name is not taken with your state because two different LLCs can't have the same name. After that, draft the articles of organization, you file them with the state, you wait for the state to get back to you, and then where I think a lot of business owners, don't, what they don't think about, and we don't blame you, how would you know this, is that there is also steps you take after the filing, And that can include, for example, in California, you have to file a statement of information within 90 days. I know other states have that as well, where there's that additional filing you need to do. And then there is, filings you have to do or things you have to do that are related to the LLC. So now there's also that beneficial ownership information requirement that needs to be filed within 90 days. There's also getting an employer identification number with the IRS in order to identify your business. And then there is getting a business bank account and a business credit card. So that's what I would say is very common with every single state. And then there's like the minor things that every state does different, but that's a pretty good overview of what every state requires. Gary Stockton: Understanding the cost vary from state to state, can you give us a sense of the kind of cost enter entrepreneurs should expect when forming an LLC, including both the initial setup and ongoing expenses? Carmel Imani: Every state has its own filing fee. so in addition, first, So for example, in California to file your LLC, the filing fee itself is 70, and then of course there is the added cost. If you go to work for a third party service to do it for you, there's an added cost for that. Or if you have an attorney draft your paperwork, there's, there's, more money associated with that, of course, more fees. but then there's also yearly tax fees that everybody has to pay regardless of if you make money with your LLC or not so let's say you just have an LLC in California every year you have to pay $800, and every state is different so California it's a higher fee than most states to have an LLC but you have to pay it regardless of if you make money or not. Gary Stockton: What are the main benefits of operating as an LLC compared to other business structures and what are some of the limitations business owners should be aware of? Camellia Imani: Yeah, great question. So limited liability companies LLCs. The biggest thing is that limited liability. So for a lot of business owners, there's risks they may want to take and making your personal assets and your business assets separate are really great because you can take greater risks. And then of course, if something does happen, unfortunately in your business and you get sued, if you're doing everything properly with your LLC, then you will have that limited liability. So your personal assets will not be at risk. That would be the biggest, pro of having that LLC. And then as far as, another one would be tax benefits. So one thing that LLCs can do is that they can choose how they want to be taxed. So a common tax election people take is S-Corp. So you can save a lot of money on your business and by choosing to be taxed differently. And that's something that you wouldn't be able to do if you were a sole proprietor. Now, when it comes to the cons of having an LLC and limitations, really the biggest one is just cost. but that's with everything in business, right? There's always going to be a cost to something. So for majority of business owners, the pros always outweigh the cons. Gary Stockton: Now, you mentioned taxes, a second ago. Let's get further into that. Can you explain, the tax treatment of LLCs and how business owners might decide between being taxed as a sole proprietor, a partnership versus electing, S-Corporation tax status? What are the tax advantages? Carmel Imani: The way that you are taxed when you file an LLC really depends on, how many members are in your LLC. So let's just say it's just one person, then you will be taxed as a sole proprietor or taxed as a disregarded entity, just because you are a sole member. but if you have more members in your LLC, let's say you and your partner, start an LLC together, then you will be taxed by default as a partnership.but the good news is that, there are these default tax statuses that you are given when you file for an LLC. the good news is that you can always change your tax election, which a lot of people do. instead of accepting their default tax status, they file additional paperwork to file, to, be an S-Corp, to be taxed as an S-Corp. So you have that option as well. Gary Stockton: And you, mentioned partnerships, a second ago, let's talk about management structure. How does the management structure in an LLC work and how can it be customized to fit the needs of different businesses? Is it customizable? Carmel Imani: Yeah, so you can always be, have a member managed LLC or a manager managed LLC and the laws differ per state. But in a member managed LLC, every single member of an LLC has total control and then in a manager. member LLC, the manager, there's only one person who's doing everything. And then, and then you have members of the LLC it's, more of like a corporation structure, but by default, most people elect to have that member managed where it's all members of the LLC, so both partners have equal, say in the voting and equal say in, decisions of the LLC. Gary Stockton: Okay. Thank you. So liability protection, that's a big one with, LLCs. How does an LLC protect its owners, personal assets? And are there any scenarios where this protection might not apply? you mentioned a few in, in some of your, TikTok videos. Camellia Imani: Yeah, this is a great question because I think that this is something a lot of business owners don't know about until it's too late. So with LLCs, again, the advantage is that you're separating your personal assets and your business assets because now what you're doing is you're operating under your business as opposed to you personally. And you're telling the government, Hey, we're separate. I'm a person, but I also have this business. A common way that people mess up and they don't realize it is, one, when they sign contracts, they sign it on the behalf of themselves personally as opposed to on behalf of the business. And so we actually have a couple TikToks where we show exactly how to sign business, how to sign under your business, right? You want to make sure that you're showing that you are the owner or whatever management structure you have. that's your role within the LLC and you're not signing the contract personally, because if you do sign it under yourself personally, and then you have to go to court, it might show that, you're doing this as a personal transaction versus a business transaction. And then the second issue that could come up is a lot of business owners think that filing their LLC is all they need and they're good to go. but this kind of goes back to what we talked about earlier, which is that filing your LLC isn't enough. You want to make sure that you have that business bank account and that business credit card so that you're really showing the state that hey, we are actually separate. I'm not just hiding behind my business. So you fully have to take all of the steps when filing your LLC to make sure that your LLC is actually protecting you. Gary Stockton: So what are the requirements for maintaining the limited liability protection of an LLC? And what actions could potentially pierce the corporate veil? Camellia Imani: Yeah, you want to make sure that you always keep your LLC active. And again, this varies from state to state. with California, LLCs have to file their statement of information every one to two years. You want to make sure that you're keeping up with the franchise tax that you have to pay yearly and then you want to make sure that when you have a business transaction, you're doing it through your business bank account or your business credit card. You don't want to co mingle your funds because then that could tell, the court what might happen if you get sued is something called piercing the corporate veil. And if somebody does take you to court, and then they're subpoenaing all your documents, they can say, Hey, look, this person is one in the same with their business. They're using their business bank account for personal transactions and vice versa.So that's a big no. No, you don't want to do that. Keep everything with your business separate from your personal stuff Gary Stockton: So how important is the operating agreement for an LLC and what key elements should be included in that document? Carmel Imani: An operating agreement. is the best way to think about what an operating agreement is that it's a rule book for your LLC essentially. So it tells, if anything happens, and you go to court, there's two things that can happen. If you don't have an operating agreement, the state law will apply on how to treat your LLC. But if you have an operating agreement, now that operating agreement will apply instead of the default state laws. And so in that operating agreement, it's really important to have, what are the rules of each member? especially if you have a partnership, what happens if, you want to dissolve your LLC? How are those proceeds distributed at the end? How do you want to wind down the LLC? There's a lot of differences, when we do the operating agreements, we make sure to have every single scenario that could happen. What if a member dies? there's a lot that can happen and you want to just make sure you're covered in every scenario so that, when you, if you ever have to end your LLC or, wind down, you know exactly how to distribute those proceeds. Gary Stockton: So what are some common pitfalls or mistakes that you see entrepreneurs make when setting up an LLC and, how can they be avoided? Camellia Imani: thankfully that a lot of the common mistakes that could occur with setting up an LLC and having one can be avoided. You just have to, make sure you know what to do cause you don't know what you don't know. The main one is not following the steps. So after the filing, make sure you're keeping up to date with the LLC. the other one is commingling funds like we talked about earlier, make sure that all of your business expenses or any income is in a business bank account versus a personal one. Just keep everything separate is a general rule of thumb. And then make sure, yeah, you're up to date on any state filing, because if your LLC is inactive, then that's going to be a huge problem. and then the other last one is sometimes, not all business owners need an LLC, right? There is a different type of business structure that's actually required by the state. Southern California, for example, if you're a professional, you actually aren't allowed to have an LLC. You need to have a professional corporation. So that's actually been an issue where a lot of people will come to us after their business is filed and they want to come to us for a trademark. And then what ends up happening is we look up their business with the state and we tell them, Oh, actually, this is not the correct business structure for you.So then we have to refile all of the paperwork for them. And it's costly, because now they're doing this process all over again when, unfortunately if they had just had it set up properly the first time, they wouldn't have to go through this. But, all of that can be avoided, right? making sure you have the right information, talking to a business attorney can help that. But, yeah, all of it can be avoided. There's just a couple things you need to know, and once you know it, you're good to go. Gary Stockton: So a lot of these businesses that are starting up, a lot of them are bootstrapped. A lot of them don't have, let's say that they don't have the, a big, bank account with funding for attorneys.Do you have. Any recommendations for entrepreneurs who don't have a lot of money to pay for lawyer and set up of their LLC? Carmel Imani: Yeah, we actually, we actually came up with a tutorial, that we pre recorded where we personally walk. through walk you through exactly how to set up your LLC, exactly how to do, file all the documents, how to fill them out correctly, with the state of California. And we, have it up on our website. So that people can do it themselves so that they're not spending, sometimes even thousands of dollars on an attorney instead of attorney having to do it. We walk you through exactly how to do that for, a small fee. and so that is a great way. It's like having an attorney by your side without really paying hourly for that attorney's time. Camellia Imani: And in the videos too, because we've been doing this for so long, we've had every question come up. So we've been able to preemptively answer these questions in those tutorials, whether it's what to put on certain spots of the filing, what to do next. And then on top of that, we also include, for example, the operating agreement because every LLC needs one. So then we just put that in there because we want you to have that. So it's fully comprehensive. You won't need to then outsource and go to an attorney for anything else. We give you, we tell you what documents you need for your business bank account, exactly how to get one, exactly how to get your EIN, your employer identification number. So it's fully comprehensive. there's nothing that you would have to do on your own. So we were very proud of it. We spent a lot of time, perfecting it. and we've had a lot of business owners come to us and say that has been really helpful and they didn't have to shell out thousands of dollars for their business. LLC Liftoff Course Finally!! A step-by-step guide for the California based entrepreneur who wants to correctly set up their LLC without paying the attorney price tag! Learn more Gary Stockton: Excellent. Ladies, this has been very enlightening for me. thank you so much for coming on, Small Business Matters and sharing your legal insights. Again, we're going to remind our listeners, this podcast episode isn't official legal advice. For legal advice, you should reach out to an attorney. But if people want to reach out to you, Camellia and, Carmel, how do they find you? Camellia Imani: I was going to say, we're very active. you can follow us along on social media. We're very active on our Tik TOK, as well as our Instagram. and then Carmel, you probably want to get into exactly how to sign up. Carmel Imani: our handle is @Imani.Law, and so people can, when, they go to our social media profile, we have a link where you can chat with us. We have a link that you can click on where you can book a consult with us so that we can give legal advice. Cause again, like you said, this is not legal advice that every business is so different, and we advise differently based on the type of profession the client has. we, definitely recommend scheduling that one on one call where we, really dive deep into your business and talk about all the things you need, contracts, and, the business structure you need as well as trademarks and all of that.

If you're a small business owner, understanding SBFE—Small Business Financial Exchange—is essential. But what exactly is SBFE, and how does it affect your business? This article helps to answer those questions. What is SBFE? The Small Business Financial Exchange (SBFE) is a reputable business data exchange that collects payment data from commercial lenders (including banks, credit card companies, and alternative lenders), and is known as a data exchange. “SBFE is the largest repository of small business credit payment performance data, which includes the top 10 commercial banks and card issuers, which contribute data to SBFE and represent over 98 million lender accounts covering commercial term-loans, lines of credit, and credit cards,” said Greg Carmean, Director of Product Management at Experian. “SBFE Data is used by many lenders to evaluate small business credit risk. While not all lenders contribute their payment performance data to SBFE, those that do play an integral part in helping small businesses secure the credit they deserve.” This data is NOT publicly available. Experian is one of the four authorized commercial credit reporting agencies, known as Certified Vendors by SBFE, who currently license this data to create credit scores and business credit reports for small businesses. Who runs SBFE? SBFE is governed by a board of directors made up of representatives from some of its member organizations and is run independently from credit reporting agencies. SBFE operates with full-time staff and flourishes with the support of their Board of Directors, Member organizations, and industry experts on their committees and task forces. Why does SBFE exist? The data collected by SBFE provides a more accurate and complete picture of a small business's creditworthiness, which can help lenders make better lending decisions and offer more competitive rates to qualified businesses. Who reports data to SBFE? SBFE’s members contribute their payment performance data directly to SBFE. These members are typically lenders and merchant acquirers who contribute information about their small business borrowers and customers. This data includes loan and credit card payment history, along with other relevant financial data. Small businesses cannot directly report anything to SBFE. The companies that lend money or extend credit to small businesses will report data to SBFE (if they are members of SBFE). Not all commercial lenders are members of SBFE. Then your payment history and information is available in your business credit report, and reflected in your business credit score. You can check your business credit report and score at any time. So if you are a business owner, and you have any kind of credit—from a business credit card to an SBA loan—your lenders may report your payment data through SBFE, which is part of what determines your business credit score and makes up your business credit report. Small businesses don't have direct access to SBFE. Rather, your access to view your information or dispute inaccuracies is through a business credit report like those offered by Experian (link to business score page). Take control by making payments on time, and fulfill any financial obligations you have with your creditors and lenders, whether they report directly to Experian or to SBFE. You can stay informed about your business credit by requesting and monitoring your business credit report from Experian and making sure it’s correct. If there are any inaccuracies on your credit report, do not contact SBFE – please contact Experian or your lenders instead. Why should a small business owner care about SBFE? Although small businesses don’t interact directly with SBFE, it’s still an entity you should be familiar with. Here are a few reasons: Improved Credit Picture – SBFE data creates a more complete picture of your small business's creditworthiness, which can help lenders make more informed decisions, which could include better loan terms and approval rates for businesses with good payment histories. By using SBFE data in conjunction with bureau data, lenders might go beyond traditional credit scores and consider alternative data points, which can be beneficial for newer businesses or those with limited credit history. Businesses can dispute inaccuracies in their credit reports through the authorized credit reporting agencies, such as Experian. Better Products and Services – Information sharing and collaboration among SBFE members can lead to the development of new lending products and services tailored to the needs of small businesses. What is Experian’s Role in SBFE? "As a Certified Vendor of SBFE, Experian utilizes SBFE’s Data representing tens of millions of small business accounts, dating back decades, to create specialized products and services for SBFE members,” said Dirk Yoo, Director of Product Marketing at Experian. “Certified Vendors must comply with a stringent certification process and ongoing oversight to receive and maintain this designation. Among the SBFE data-driven products and services that Experian has developed are highly predictive machine learned financial risk scores, trended attributes, and consumer-to-business linkage.” Learn more about Experian's SBFE Products and Services Stay In Control of Your Credit by Staying Informed By building and maintaining a positive payment history with your lenders and educating yourself on your business credit profile, you can leverage your business credit to your advantage. Remember, responsible financial management paves the way for fairer credit assessments, better loan options, and ultimately, the growth and success of your business. Take control of your financial future – stay informed, be proactive, and keep building your business credit. Ready to assess your business credit? Check your business credit report today and take control of your financial future!

In this week's episode of The Small Business Matters podcast, we talk to April Dunford, a leading authority on product positioning, to delve into the art of creating compelling sales narratives. With a rich background spanning over 25 years as a VP of Marketing in fast-growing technology firms and collaboration with giants like Google and Epic Games, April brings a wealth of knowledge to the table. Her books, "Obviously Awesome" and "Sales Pitch," offer invaluable insights into positioning and crafting sales pitches that resonate with customers. April shares that the inspiration for "Sales Pitch" came from her observation that while marketing teams could effectively use positioning to craft messages, sales teams struggled to translate this into engaging stories for their pitches. This gap led her to develop a structured approach to building sales narratives that bridge marketing and sales efforts, ensuring the unique value of products is communicated effectively in sales situations. We touch on several aspects of crafting winning sales pitches, including: The importance of having a constructive attitude towards selling and understanding the customer's buying journey. Common mistakes in sales pitch development, such as relying on outdated materials or focusing too heavily on features rather than differentiating value. The distinction between helping customers to buy versus selling to them, emphasizing the need for sales reps to offer perspectives on the market and assist customers in navigating their options. The phenomenon of decision paralysis in B2B purchases, where the abundance of choices leads to inaction, underscoring the role of sales in simplifying the decision-making process for buyers. April emphasizes the need for sales pitches to start from a point of market insight, positioning products uniquely rather than leading with generic problems that competitors can also claim to solve. She also discusses the pivotal role of confidence in the buyer's journey, where effective communication and education about the market can significantly impact purchasing decisions. Watch Our Interview The following transcript of our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity. Gary Stockton: When you talk to customers about your products and services, do you find yourself getting tongue tied with jargon? Do you have trouble getting your customers to clearly understand the value you or your product brings? Today we're going to talk about making sales through captivating stories that land with your customers every time. Joining us is April Dunford. She is the world's foremost authority on product positioning. With her expertise as a consultant and author, April helps companies make complex products easy to understand and love. Boasting an impressive 25-year career as a VP of Marketing at various rapidly developing technology firms, she's collaborated with hundreds of growing technology companies such as Google, Epic Games, Postman, and others. April is also the acclaimed author of the bestselling book, "Obviously Awesome," which delves into the art of positioning. And her just released book, "Sales Pitch", which unveils the secrets of crafting a winning sales narrative in the market. April, welcome to the Small Business Matters podcast. April Dunford: Hey, so great to be here. Thanks for having me. Gary Stockton: Thanks for joining. So, let's talk about your latest book, "Sales Pitch". Was there an experience, with a salesperson or. organization that gave you the idea to write this one? April Dunford: Yeah, the idea for the book came from the work that I've been doing with clients on positioning. So, my background is positioning expert. I work with companies on their positioning and what I found is that, when I was working with companies on positioning, which is getting really tight on why they win in the market, what their differentiated value is, who their best fit customers are. I was finding that if I had a cross functional team together and everybody understood that marketing had what they needed to go and build great messaging. But sales, even if the sales team was in the room and involved in building the positioning, sales team would go back, and they'd be like, I intellectually understand the new positioning. I'm just not really sure how to tell the story. And so, they would go back to the sales team and the pitch wouldn't change. So, I thought, there must be a way to build a good sales pitch. We must have a structure for doing this, that I could teach people to make sure that positioning survived the jump from marketing to sales. And when I went looking for it. It didn't exist. So, I decided, okay, at this point, I had worked with a lot of companies that built a lot of sales pitches. So, I thought it would make sense to build a book that would teach people. Here's what the components of a good pitch look like. And here's how to map your positioning to a sales pitch so that we do a better job of explaining why pick us over the competitors when we're in an actual sales situation. Gary Stockton: At a high level can you share what the book covers? April Dunford: So, it covers a couple of things. First of all, it gives people a way to think about selling and kind of an attitude to have when they're in sales, which I think is really important. And then secondly, it describes an eight section sales pitch structure, and how to, take your product, figure out what your differentiated value is and how you're, and who you're trying to target in the market. And then it will teach you how to actually map for your product, the answer for those eight sections and put it together into a sales pitch that really helps you stand out from the other alternatives in the market. Gary Stockton: Interesting. so, what are the common mistakes that. Sales and what are the common mistakes that people make in sales pitch development? April Dunford: The first thing is, I've worked with 250 companies and it's interesting to see what the sales pitches look like at 250 companies because, we don't see these things. They're not out in public, so we only get to see them if the company shows them to us. the first thing that's really interesting is, if you ask most companies, like they'll send me the sales pitch and I'll say, where did this come from? Like whom built this? And people will look at me like, I don't know, man, this thing has been here since the year of the flood. We don't know. And every time we put out a new release or we add something to the product, we add a slide, or we move a slide around. But nobody ever throws the pitch out and starts from scratch. So that's one thing. The pitch evolved over time. Nobody really knows why it's structured the way it's structured. And I think that's a mistake. I think we can do much better than that. The second thing is that I work mainly with technology companies and, for the most part, the sales pitches are what I would call a feature walkthrough. If you can imagine a tech product, you can imagine we have a menu across the top, and there's five drop down menus. Most sales pitches consist of a salesperson or a sales engineer saying, okay, today we're going to show you the product. Look, we have these five drop down menus. Let's click on everyone. And I'm going to explain every single thing that's in each of those drop-down menus. I think that's a mistake for a lot of reasons. One, it's overwhelming for customers on the receiving end of that. And two, it doesn't necessarily answer the question that the customers have. Often when we're selling to businesses, the customers are not trying to answer the question why pick you? They're trying to answer the question, why pick you over the other guys I'm looking at? If we're showing everything like all these features are equal, we're not really homing in on what makes us different and special. So, I think those are the big two things that people miss on. Gary Stockton: In the book, you say it’s not so much a book about sales pitches, but more about helping customers to buy. How are the two different? April Dunford: Yeah, so like I mentioned before, the book starts by talking about the kind of attitude we must take in sales, at least in my opinion. And I think we've not thought a lot about how difficult it is to buy our product. And it is really difficult. If you think about it, most of the time, if we're selling a product to a business, the person that's buying that product on the business side, most of the time, you're talking to a person that has never purchased a product like yours before. Imagine we're selling accounting software. It's the controller or somebody inside the company. This is probably the first time they've ever purchased accounting software. So, they don't know who the players in the market are. They don't know what their list of purchase criteria should be. They don't know what the state of the art of accounting software is. They don't know what's possible and what's not possible. All they know is the system they've got right now. Maybe they used a different one at a different company, but that's about it. Now, don't get me wrong. Customers have done a lot of research before they talk to a salesperson. They've usually Googled like crazy. They've read anything they can get their hands on. They've gone on comparison websites. They've looked at all kinds of stuff and what they're generally feeling is overwhelmed. So, they have so much information. They have too much information. And so now they're trying to figure out, Hey, I got to make a recommendation to my boss about which one of these things we should buy. And I don't know what to do. If you look at the research on this, what customers actually want from us is not for us to show every single feature of the product. What customers actually want from a sales rep in a sales situation is they want perspectives on the market. They want help choosing between alternatives. And most of the time we're simply not giving them that. Gary Stockton: Overwhelm. You mentioned overwhelm a minute ago. It reminds me of a scene from a movie starring Robin Williams, it was called "Moscow On The Hudson", about a fellow that comes to America to live. April Dunford: I heard of this movie. Yeah, maybe. Gary Stockton: He goes into a grocery store and he looks at the shelves and he, ends up and passing out in the aisle because of the choices, just so many choices, it completely, it just blew him away. And I can, yes, I can identify that particularly with a category like accounting. Now we focus on B2B here in, in this group at Experian. I'm curious why so many B2B purchasing decisions end in no decisions. April Dunford: This is an interesting thing. If you look at the data on this, it ties into this idea that the buyer is overwhelmed with choices and not really sure how to make a good choice.If we think here, we've got this poor buyer, most of the time the person has been assigned the task to figure out. The thing to buy so let's go back to my accounting software example, maybe the Vice President of Finance went to the Controller and said "Hey, I hate our accounting software we've outgrown it. Go look at it figure out what we need to buy and then come back to me and make a decision." Like that person who is tasked with making a short list looking at all the alternatives making a recommendation to their boss that's a really on the spot kind of a job. It's risky making that decision. If that person, let's say they pick something, they take it to their boss and their boss says, no, that's terrible. No, we would never buy that. They’re afraid, right? And they're going to look stupid in front of their boss. Maybe they pick something and all the end users in the department hate it, or maybe they pick something, and it turns out it doesn't do something critical that they should have known about, but they didn't know about that person that feels like a very risky decision. And so if we put it in that context. It's easy for that person to look at their choices, feel overwhelmed, not sure what they should pick, and then simply go back to their boss and say, "you know what? Now's not a good time. Like the thing we're doing right now is okay. It's not perfect, but we have a lot of stuff going on right now. Let's just delay till next year." And what they're doing is they're crossing their fingers that next year, the boss doesn't point at them and say, look, you're it. You're the person that needs to go figure this out. So, if you look at the data on this, it shows that 40 to 60 percent of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. And if we scratch down on that to see what's actually happening, it's not that the buyer looked at all their options and decided, you know what the thing we're doing now is actually fine, it's better than anything else. We'll stick with that. That's not it. In the majority of cases the buyer looked at all their options, could not confidently pick one of these all of these options that look the same. They're worried about making a bad choice and they simply say "you know what? I'm not going to do anything here. This looks too risky. I don't know what to pick so I'm not going to pick anything here." I think in B2B as sellers, we really need to think about what can we do to help a buyer feel comfortable about the purchase decision that they're making? And part of that is educating them on the entire market, not just us, but where does everybody in this market fit and how do we fit relative to everybody else so that they can feel confident that they understand their options. They understand their choices and we've made the right choice for this business. Gary Stockton: Keeping that confidence going, making sure that they still feel good about it. It's about effective communication, right? Like you said, instill confidence. April Dunford: yeah, it's, about, in some ways it's about teaching. If you think about it, again, I've got this buyer that knows a lot about their own company and their own company's pains and their own company's requirements. And they've done a lot of research, so they know stuff about what's possible with all the different options out there, but what they don't have is what we have which is a perspective on the market, and a perspective on, look, these kinds of solutions are good for these things, but bad for these things. And these kinds of solutions are good for this, but bad for that. Like, most of us operate in markets that if you came and asked us, draw us a picture of the market, we could draw you a little picture. A buyer has a really hard time drawing that picture. What they see is, they go to Gartner Group. There’s a top right quadrant and there's 30 companies in there. And they're like, I don't know, are these for big businesses, small businesses? Is this the right choice for me? How do I narrow it down to three? I don't actually know. And so we as vendors, I think need to adopt the attitude of we're really here to guide the customer. We're here to educate them. We're here to help them understand their options. And we're here to help them make confident, good choices. Even if sometimes that choice is that they don't pick us and they pick someone else, that's okay too. Gary Stockton: So is Market Insight, is that a good starting point for a good pitch? And how do we figure that piece out? Is it literally a Venn diagram of the competition and seeing where you stack up? How do you use Market Insight? April Dunford: I see market insight as a little bit of something we do before we draw the picture of the whole market. Like it's, our point of view in the market that informs how we placed people on the picture that we drew. Put another way. If you think about the way most tech products get built, most tech products get built because the founder looked at something and said, let's take accounting software. Since we're talking about that, the founder looked at accounting software and said, you know what stinks about accounting software? Accounting software doesn't work good when we have this particular thing going on. So, I'm going to make accounting software that works for companies that operate like this. And then they build something around that point of view. And so our insight into the market is that it's, it's our way of saying, look, we understand a lot about this market and we built the product in a very specific way because we had a very specific point of view about the problem that we're solving. I can give you an example. I worked with a company called Help Scout and what Help Scout does is they do customer service software. Think Zendesk is the big product in that market, but when they built that product, they were specifically working a lot with e commerce businesses and what they, their insight into the market about e commerce was that if you're an e commerce business, you don't have salespeople and you don't have stores. Customer service is one of the few times you get to interact with your Customers. What they understand is that, if we can deliver a really amazing customer experience and customer service, that's actually a growth driver for the business. Now, if you look at most customer service software, it's not designed for that. Most customer service software is designed to get you off the phone. It's designed to push you to self-serve channels. It treats customer service like a cost center, not a growth driver. And Help Scout's insight and the way they start their pitches is they'll talk to a customer service person inside e-commerce business and say, Hey, you are e-commerce. You have slightly different requirements for customer service. Like you really want to deliver an amazing service here. Because it's one of the few chances you get to interact with your customers. Now, if I start from that insight, then I say, look, what are your options here? You could use a shared inbox and a lot of e commerce businesses start by just using a shared inbox. That's the easiest thing to do. But then if they're growing, eventually they want to be able to do more advanced service things like prioritizations and assignments and things like this. Then what have they got? They've got traditional helpdesk software and traditional helpdesk software. Has all the bells and whistles. The problem is it's not designed to deliver amazing experiences. Like it assigns you a ticket number. You're not a person anymore. You're a ticket number. It's designed to push you to low cost or to low-cost channels and basically get you out of, get you out of there as fast as possible. And in a perfect world, the e-commerce businesses would have a solution that, you know, is as easy to use as a shared inbox, but delivers an amazing customer experience, unlike this help desk software. So that's how they start their pitches setting up, we're different. We have a different point of view on this market. And that's why we built this product differently. And we believe it's a really good fit for a customer, like you, if you happen to be an e-commerce business. Gary Stockton: Many companies will start a sales conversation by asking customers about their pain points, about their problems. Why do you not recommend this? April Dunford: I was taught that when I started out. I was taught that we should come in, we should, define the problem. Or even before we define the problem, maybe what we'll do is we'll just ask the customers, what are your problems? What are your pain points? What are you looking for? Do you have any requirements? What are those requirements? And we would start by asking all those questions. I think there's a handful of problems with starting with the problem or starting with what we would call sales discovery, where we're asking a bunch of questions about what the customer's doing. The first one is, the way I was taught was we would start with the problem, but if you looked at the pitches that we built, we defined the problem in this very vague way. One of the first products I ever worked on was a database product. And we started with this definition of the problem was, Hey man, there's a lot of data and the data is growing exponentially and you're going to need a way to manage all that data.The problem with that definition of the problem is that. Any of my competitors can solve that problem too. So, I'm not really differentiating myself at all. If I start with that definition of the problem, I solved the problem. They solved the problem. We all solved the problem. I'm not really helping you pick me over anybody else. So that's an issue. I think starting with, again, if we go back to the Help Scout example. Starting with my particular insight in the market is a much better way of starting that conversation because it's all about my point of view and it's particular to me. The second thing is, we start with a bunch of questions and ask the customer what is their problem? What can we do for you today? The problem with that is, again, if I go back to my example of this buyer looking for accounting software that's really overwhelmed, part of their issue is they're not really sure what their requirements should be. They're looking to us for perspective on that. If we come in with this idea, okay, tell me all your problems. And then we try to, on the fly, customize a pitch and say, oh, we solve those problems nine times out of 10, we're going to give the same pitch that our competitors would give. But part of what we really want to do here is have a back and forth with the customer. So, I think a better way, if we want to do discovery, which we absolutely do in a first sales call, a better way to do that would be to start with our insight. So, if I take the Help Scout example, I'll start with this insight into, customer success is a growth driver. You customer, do you agree with that? Is that true for your business? And then when we get to the discussion of alternatives, that's a perfect place to do discovery. So, we could say, look, we work with a lot of e commerce businesses. And what we've seen is most of them start out with a shared inbox, but then they have these issues, and they need more features and then they graduate to help desk software. How about you? What are you folks using? Are you using a shared inbox? Is that working for you? Are you finding that you're running out of steam on that? Are you finding that you need advanced features? What sort of advanced features are you looking for? So, I can do it within that structure in a way where It's a give and take. So, the customer is educating me about their specific situation, but I'm also educating them about the overall market, my perspective on that market. And I think that just works a lot better. Gary Stockton: Now, Salesforce, they're quite a force in CRM, right? Why do you think they are so successful in designing and selling their products? It’s an Enterprise level B2B solution. What is it about how they position their offering that makes it so unique? April Dunford: I think Salesforce does a bunch of stuff that's great. But, interestingly, years ago I worked at a company that was the absolute leader in the CRM space before Salesforce came on the scene.And then when Salesforce came on the scene, it was neat to watch them position their product at the beginning. So, at the beginning they were only CRM and they attacked a part of the market that Seibel, the leader at the time, like a couple billion in revenue. Gary Stockton: I remember. April Dunford: Siebel was very strong at the high-end enterprise part of the market. Salesforce came in and said, we're going to go into the part of the market that Siebel doesn't serve, which was the very, low end of the market. So, when they first launched, they were targeting companies that had less than 10 salespeople, which, I was at Siebel. We would never have sold to a company that had less than 10 salespeople. That is way too small for us. Part of the reason we wouldn't sell down there is because those companies that were that small didn't even have an IT department. Our product was on premise software. So you needed an it department to get the thing stood up and to maintain the thing. Salesforce came on the market. And they were Software as a Service, one of the first big Software as a Service products. They came on the market and sold down at the very bottom and said, Hey, little guys with less than 10 sales reps, you can get the same thing that the enterprises get. And you don't even need an IT department to do that because, hey, guess what? “No software.” And so they were very successful at establishing a beachhead in the market that, the leader in the market was unable to reach and didn't care about, frankly. And then once they had established that beachhead, they just gradually moved up market. and then started also adding on to other things, beyond CRM to their portfolio and stuff they could do. I thought they were really smart in how they started. And then for years after that, they even developed such a dominant position in the CRM space. Even after they had service cloud and marketing cloud, as additional offers the way they sold the CRM for decades I think it's a little bit different now is if you didn't have any Salesforce products at all, they wouldn't try to sell you everything all up front. They would just try to sell you the CRM because the CRM in their opinion was the backbone. You needed to get your customer data, right? And then they were so dominant in that market It was an easy sell to come in and sell you the CRM not so much with the other things. So, they would come in and instead of trying to sell you everything all at once, they'd come in, they'd sell you on the CRM. And then once you were all going good on the CRM, then they'd come back in and try to sell you the marketing stuff. So the neat thing about that is that if they had tried to sell you the marketing stuff at the beginning, then they would have had to position their marketing product as the best marketing product in the world better than all the other marketing things out there, which, arguably they were or were not, but there's a lot of big players in that space. Instead, what they do is they'd sell the product that was the winner, which was the CRM, then they would come in and cross sell you the marketing thing and position that. Not as the best marketing product in the world, but the best marketing product for someone that's already running Salesforce in the CRM, much easier sell. For decades and decades, and they did that now, it's interesting to watch them now because the portfolio is much bigger and now they have other products like, Slack or mule soft or some of these other things that potentially a customer could start with Slack and then move to the CRM and do other things. So, you're seeing them move towards more of a portfolio approach and maybe having the AI stuff bring it all together. I think they're still working through that positioning, but it's interesting to watch that positioning evolve as they've grown up as a big business. Gary Stockton: Yeah, “No Software.” I remember that. And I remember Siebel, I think it’s interesting that you mentioned marketing platforms. HubSpot has maybe taken a page out of Salesforce's playbook because they introduced a CRM, a low-end CRM and they're really branching out from that product. April Dunford: Yeah, I think it's a genius move because it makes sense to have marketing and CRM go together. If you have one, you want the other. And so as they moved up market in the marketing automation space, at some point you could see, like it would make sense for them to have a CRM and they, I thought they did a really great job of launching the CRM, having it be fairly full featured, and making it free for a very long time anyway, and then now it's interesting how much HubSpot CRM out in the market, you see a lot of it. Gary Stockton: We like to test different approaches here at Experian. How do you test the sales pitch? How do we know if it's working? we would know. A drop in sales if it's working really badly, but is there, some science around testing pitches? April Dunford: Yes and no. So, I'll tell you how I do it. I don't know if it's particularly scientific, but it's worked for me. When we make a change in positioning, what we'll do is get a cross functional team together and we'll work through the positioning. So, who do we compete with? How are we different? What is the value we can deliver that no one else can? Who are we going after? What's the market we're going to win? Then we will map that to a sales pitch and usually we'll start by building a sales narrative and we'll do that with a cross functional team. So, we've got marketing, product, sales together in the room and we're working on that narrative. Once we feel like we've got it, then usually what I would recommend is we have marketing and sales come together and build a deck, a demo, and a script. Demo is optional. We don't always demo things, but if it's a demonstratable product, we'll have a deck, a demo, and a script. Then we want to go and let it loose in the sales team. Now, one thing to realize is that. Sales teams, even they, even if they complain about the pitch that they have right now, they're comfortable with that pitch. New pitches are usually bad, even if the new pitch is good. We have to be careful. It's not a fair test to just take the pitch, throw it over to sales and say, do you like it? Or do you not like it? The answer to that is going to be, we don't like it. A better way to test the sales pitch in my opinion is we will take one salesperson. And what I like to do is take the best one. Let's take the best salesperson we've got, somebody that's been successful with the old pitch. We're going to spend some time training them on the new pitch, giving them lots of time to work with a script and try it out internally before we let them loose on prospects. Then let's do some practice test pitches on prospects. And what we want to do there is have the rep do the pitch on a qualified prospect. And at the end of that pitch, usually I would do this sitting in the room with the rep. We're both there live for the pitch. And then afterwards we could deconstruct what's working and not working in this pitch. If I hear the magic words, "it's better than the old one." Then I say, we're good to go.April Dunford Usually what we've got is some tuning to do, oh we didn't like this word or, Oh, and we said that they were confused. Or we have this slide, we actually need to bring that forward. So every time we do these, pitch and then we tune it we pitch and then we tune it And then after we've done a bunch of this tuning, it feels like we got a pitch that's you know as tuned as we're going to get it, and then at that point I’ve got the best salesperson in my team, and at that point the salesperson says, yep, that's it. It's done. I don't think we can tune it anymore. And here's what I’m looking for that salesperson to tell me. Yes. We're done tuning it. I like it. I'm going to use it and it's better than the old one. If I hear the magic words, "it's better than the old one." Then I say, we're good to go. Now what I've got is a salesperson that's all trained up on this pitch and I can use them to help train the sales force and not just train the sales force, but to convince the sales force that this is better. So, you've got the best rep in the land comes back and says, look, this pitch is better. I've got this, bunch of deals in the pipeline and I got them with this pitch. Everybody should be on this pitch. Here's how you do it. Here's some advice. We can record them doing it. We can base the script off how they do it. And that's so that's generally how I test the sales pitch. Gary Stockton: Let's talk about jargon. This is the last question. How do you convince product teams to limit jargon when describing what they'd work so hard on because they want to, they want people to be impressed with the feature set and the speeds of the feeds. But what's the turnoff for that, for the buyer? April Dunford: I have a thing about jargon. There is a time and a place for some jargon in certain situations. One of the things I like to remind teams of is I think sometimes marketers get this idea that everything must be dumbed right down, the, I'm often using this example, like people use the expression, they'll say, we should, describe our stuff so your grandmother can understand it. And I'm like, unless I'm selling to grandmothers, I'm not sure that's true. So, if I'm selling an advanced database product to database administrators, it's okay if I'm using some terminology that your grandmother doesn't understand, but every data administrator in the land does, that's okay, in my opinion. What we don't want is jargon that’s meaningless or unclear. So, when we start talking about something being next generation or innovative, it usually means we haven't got the right word for that yet. Like when you say it's the next generation, but just say what you mean, say what you actually mean. If we’re saying it's innovative, innovative, how innovative, where, why, what, I think the more specific and clear we can get on this stuff, the better. But if we have to use industry terminology to do that, as long as it's accepted industry terminology and everybody understands it, then I'm okay with that. And I think it helps customers develop a feeling that we understand their business. We understand the market that they're in. I think it's okay to use market stuff, but I think we must be careful. Like, we can't just assume. That customers understand a term, we need to know it. So, we need to test that. We need to have feedback that tells us, yes, everybody in our market knows what this is so we can use it. And then I think we must be really careful about using just mushy marketing language, innovation that doesn't necessarily mean what we think that it means. Gary Stockton: The book is "Sales Pitch", April This has been so helpful. I really enjoyed listening to the audio version of "Sales Pitch." Where can our audience learn more about your thinking on sales pitches and positioning? April Dunford: Sure. My website is aprildunford.com. That's easy. And there's a few things there. So, I have a podcast, like if you folks are podcast listeners, it's called “Positioning with April Dunford”, and you can check that out. It's really on that podcast I'm doing a lot of solo episodes where I'm picking a particular topic around positioning or sales pitches and going deep on that topic. So that might be useful. I also have a newsletter. You can see it when you go to my website, but a newsletter where, again, I'm giving some very specific examples of things that I've done with some of my clients are going deep on a particular topic. And then of course, there's the books. I have one book called “Obviously Awesome” that's focused on positioning. And then the other one is “Sales Pitch”, which is focused on translating that positioning into a sales pitch. And you can buy those wherever you buy books. Oh, and then lastly on social media, I'm on LinkedIn. That's the only place where I am actually ever active, but you can follow me on LinkedIn. That's easy. Gary Stockton: Awesome. Thanks so much for sharing so generously on our podcast. April Dunford: Thanks so much for having me.