In this podcast episode, Hannah Eisenberg, the host of TrustBuilders, recaps her key takeaways from the most recent Impact Live 2024 conference in Hartford, CT. Compared to the last one in April, the room had a sense of urgency. Organic search is drastically declining, taking lead generation efforts through inbound marketing down with it.

A lot of things have changed with AI. Buyers are now vetting us to death. In fact, buyers are now conducting 80% of their purchasing journey on their own, making it crucial for businesses to align marketing and sales efforts seamlessly. Companies to adapt and innovate, particularly in how they communicate and offer value to their customers. The episode also covers practical strategies for building trust, such as being transparent, showing your processes, and embracing a video-first approach. Ultimately, Hannah underscores that becoming the most trusted voice in your industry is not just beneficial—it's essential for success moving forward.

Takeaways:

• The Impact Live conference highlighted a growing urgency among businesses facing significant challenges.
• In these times of uncertainty, trust becomes the North Star and the filter for all business decisions. To build trust, companies must be willing to talk about, show, sell, and be more human than any other company.
• Disruption in traditional practices can create trust by aligning with customer needs and expectations.
• Video content is crucial; it should be prioritized across all marketing efforts for better engagement.
• The shift to AI-driven recommendations means businesses need to become better in sending signals to enhance their online visibility and reputation.
• Self-service tools are essential for empowering customers to make informed decisions without sales pressure.
• Finally, companies need to embrace their humanity in their content.

ABOUT THE HOST

Hannah Eisenberg is a business coach who helps companies achieve unparalleled results by disrupting their industry and truly becoming customer-centric. She has coached and trained marketing and sales teams for over a decade. She is a certified “They Ask You Answer” coach, a highly successful sales and marketing framework developed by Marcus Sheridan to help companies become the most trusted voice in their space, driving sales and revenue regardless of the economy.

Hannah is available for coaching, consulting, and strategy engagement. You can connect with Hannah here:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannaheisenberg/
• Podcast Website: https://trustbuilders.captivate.fm/
• Hannah's Website: https://www.3pcreativegroup.com/

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REVIEW THE PODCAST

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Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening depending on when you're watching or listening to this podcast.

I am so happy to be back.

I'm so happy to be hosting Trust Builders again.

I really missed having this conversation with you guys and I know I took a bit of a longer summer break than I anticipated, but it was well worth it.

Not only did I get to take some time off, I got to take my kids to Scotland on a trip of a lifetime and I got to take my girls and my mom to Norway to see the Northern Lights.

But I also spent a lot of time thinking and working through all the changes that are happening right now and really buckling down on what is the next two years or the next five years going to look like.

So I am super thrilled to be sharing with you over the next weeks and months what I came up with, all the things that I put in place.

But one thing I am excited to share now is that I actually have started writing a book on how to become the most trusted voice in your space and why that is such a North Star that we should have in all of our business decisions from now on.

Super excited about it.

I can't wait.

Now today's podcast episode though is going to be about Impact Live.

Impact Live is the conference that was just held in October 14th to 16th in Hartford, Connecticut and the second conference this year that Impact put on around the topic of the ask you.

And so usually it's just a yearly conference and next year I believe it will only be the one in April in Chicago.

So if you're after listening to this podcast, if you want to get your tickets, I recommend getting them soon because they're right now on an early bird discount.

And I'll put the link above all right, so let's dive in.

What is Impact Live as a conference?

So Impact Live is much smaller scale conference compared to inbound, et cetera.

But what is really nice about it is it's around 300 people in a room for three days, really working through like actively working through some problems.

So it's much, much more hands on and you have a workbook and you work through some of the problems the person on stage is discussing.

It's not just like just talking at you.

Most of the talks are delivered by either Marcus Sheridan or Impact coaches, but there's a whole lot of customers that come on stage or people who have done they Ask youk Answer, or industry thought leaders that also come on stage and share their knowledge, expertise, and their experiences.

So for three days, we were in this room, and I went to the one in Chicago in April as well.

But there was a big difference I felt in this one, because in April, the feeling was, yeah, we have a problem, right?

We.

There's a lot of uncertainty.

There's a lot of things changing.

AI is coming.

Is blogging still worth it?

There were a lot of questions and a lot of thinking about it, but this conference felt different because there was a real sense of urgency.

Just to give you an example, Markus started off his talk on the first day asking the audience if they had seen a drastic drop in organic search traffic.

And almost everyone raised their hand.

And then he continued to ask, how about lead generation?

Have you seen a significant drop in organic leads, like leads through inbound marketing?

Almost everyone raised their hand as well.

You could really feel that there was a Houston, we got a problem.

We got to solve this because we're having issues in our business and a sense of urgency, of we're overwhelmed.

We can't keep up with this pace of change, and we need to figure out how to do this.

So some things in this podcast today that I will share are definitely going to help you if you're feeling the same.

First of all, you're not alone.

We all are in that.

We all feel overwhelmed.

We all are trying to make sense of this.

But I will share a bunch of very practical things with you that you can put in place.

And over the next few weeks, I want to really dive deeper into a lot of these subjects and tease them apart and explore them further so that you can make sense of them.

You can use that knowledge and implement it in your own company.

All right?

So having said that, there's one thing I have to send ahead, and one thing is really important to understand, because all the other things that I'm going to share have to be viewed in that context.

Okay?

We have to understand that our buyers today are vetting us to death.

When it used to be like when you walk in a shop, you know what you want to buy, but you don't have that knowledge, and you have to depend on the salesperson to give you that knowledge.

We know those times are long gone, but what most people don't realize is the extent we as buyers are vetting the companies and the products or the services or whoever we're going to work with to death, and we're going to do 80% of that purchase decision or that buyer's journey by ourselves using the material available without contacting the salesperson.

Now, the scary thing is most marketers would agree with that.

But if you ask your sales team how much of that buyer's journey they cover, they will probably say somewhere between 40 to 60%, right?

When in reality it's only 20% or even less because that number isn't going to go down.

So we really have to make sure that we don't say, oh, that's a marketing job or that's a sales.

We have to be aligned 100%, that marketing takes those 80% sales, then takes over the last 20%.

But this journey has to be one consistent, smooth journey, and we have to be 100% aligned between marketing, sales and management.

I just want to make sure that this is the thing I send ahead.

View everything else through that filter.

Okay?

Now the other thing I want to make really clear, and I've already hinted at that is you cannot build your house on Google anymore.

So this whole easy, oh, we're going to do some SEO, we're going to write some blogs, we're going to go for these keywords, forget about it.

Unless you're in a super niche where that still shows success, you really need to deprioritize that asap, because you have.

If you're building your house on Google, it's very much built on sand.

And you know what?

Even if you are in that niche, look for the big five and I'll link an article to what the big five is here, but try to cover those, but really focus on the other things I'm going to be talking about as well, because it's like building the Tower of Pisa on sand, at some point it will start to slip.

Okay?

Now the flip side of that is that you can't rely overly rely on lead generation by creating guides and white papers and ebooks and that kind of stuff.

Things that HubSpot and other companies have been telling us for the last decade and that we've been successfully doing for the last decade.

That playbook doesn't work anymore.

People want access to the information.

They want to see that you're transparent.

There was definitely a place for those ebooks, but now it's been so flooded and it's so easy to use AI to create ebooks with a click of a button that the value of those things has basically, it's basically zero.

Okay?

So unless it's something that you have your own IP and you develop by yourself and it's not replaceable through I, through AI.

That might still work if that really solves a problem that your customers are facing.

But other than that, don't overly rely on it.

It's a good thing to have, and you should continue to have those things as educational material.

But consider maybe to ungate more content and have it out there available just to educate to cover those 80% because people don't want to fill out a form if they're not closer to that 80%.

Okay, all right.

And then we talked about the uncertainty.

There's a lot of uncertainty out there.

So if you're feeling the same thing, just know that everyone feels this.

However, having a lot of uncertainty and not knowing what the next six months will look like.

Because honestly, I was very surprised between April and now how much things have changed.

So it definitely will change to next April as well.

And at an exponential rate.

We have to have something that sort of guides us right?

What helps us make the right marketing decisions.

And with attribution becoming a lot harder and with our marketing world moving into a zero click world, we have to make sure that we have a good filter to make decisions.

And for me, this will always be does it induce more trust with our buyers?

If the answer is yes, go for it.

If the answer is no, it's probably a waste of time.

I want you to view trust as your North Star that you're going for.

Becoming the most trusted voice in your space, being the most trusted teacher out there.

Because that is the only thing.

If you strip everything else around away, all the noise, all the social, all the tactics that will actually help get you somewhere, that will help you make sales, increase your revenue, increase profitability because you increase your customer retention.

All these things.

If you just focus on building more trust, how do you become that voice of trust?

There's four pillars that we can keep in mind.

You have to be willing to talk about the things that others aren't willing to talk about.

And that's your big five.

For example.

So pricing versus and comparisons, potential problems, reviews and who's the best of those are your big five.

I'll link to an article that you can if you're not familiar with the concept that you can look at.

Okay, so that's number one.

Number two is be willing to show things that others aren't willing to show.

What is your process like?

What is it like working with you?

If you are a modular house company, give a factory tour, show how things are built.

If you are a software company, show the inside of your Software, show how your.

I'm not saying show the code, but show people how you solve problems using your software.

I have one client who completely opened up their software as an online demo that you can just go and log in and you can explore their whole software without having to sign up.

That's a great example of showing what others aren't willing to show, because a lot of people make you jump through a lot of hoops to even have a trial.

Third one is you have to be willing to sell in ways that others aren't willing to sell.

And that means being educative, being an advisor, not having cold outreach in a general pitch for everyone, but really taking the time to super personalize and then assign a piece of content.

Be the one who educates.

Also be the one who is willing to step away and say, you know what?

You're not a good fit for us.

And that's okay because we want to make sure we're the right fit for you if you go with us.

But if you're not, that's okay too.

And then there is a the fourth pillar of how to become the most trusted voice in your space is to be more human than others are willing to be with.

That might sound funny at first, but if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.

A lot of people are now using AI to create blog posts.

Great, we get more blog posts out there, but they all.

You can tell pretty quickly that's written by AI.

But being imperfect, having stumbling blocks in this podcast is full of them.

Having some imperfections in your videos, in your podcasts, in your sentence structure and your punctuation in general, the content that you put out.

I'm not saying put out grammar mistakes, etc.

But make it sound human and show that you're a human and develop your own ip.

That's really massively important.

Really focus on what is your expertise, what do you do different, what is the value that you bring to your customers and show that.

Make that really transparent.

All right, so that is the number one thing that we do know in this uncertainty, right?

You have to build more trust.

Rely on the four pillars of how to build more trust.

And I will go into that in a lot more detail over the coming weeks.

The second thing is disruption, and it goes along with that trust.

Because if you think about it, a lot of industries have done things in a certain way for a long time and a lot of times that isn't necessarily good for the customer.

For example, one thing that comes to mind is if you buy An H VAC unit, for example, the warranty, the two year warranty that you have on it starts on the day it was manufactured, not on the day you buy it.

So that's not great for the customer, but you've been doing it for this long and it's good for us as vendors.

So we're not going to touch that because we are going to protect ourselves.

Now if you are thinking about this from a customer perspective and you really want to align with what's best for your customer, again, building trust, then you could go out and say, you know what, I'm going to change that.

I'm going to do this thing differently.

Even though I'm going to make everyone else upset, but it helps the customer and that's why I'm going to do it.

Okay?

So that is disruption and it's really important because it is so much harder to get found nowadays.

So we have to find ways to get notes.

I want you to think about disruptive content in a sense that content or industry norms or industry standards that align with the customer, that make people stop in their tracks and say, who is this person?

Who is this company?

Because they are solving a problem for the customer, they are doing something good for us and they're willing to make the industry upset in order to do something good for us.

Okay, a lot of things we're going to explore in a lot next few weeks with that.

But really think about that.

What do you do?

What is making you angry at the moment in your industry that you think needs to be changed?

All right, so that's number two.

Number three is video first strategy.

We need to stop thinking.

And this is me having written blog articles for the last 15 years and passionately because I really think through with writing.

But we need to think like a media company and we need to think video first.

So how can we, whenever we see something or whenever we think of something that we could show, our next thought should be how can we show this?

How can we make this transparent to the customer?

And if you're not convinced that video is a good strategy to go for, 82% of the Internet traffic is video based.

Now think about how much and be honest with yourself.

How much video is on your website right now?

Most companies don't get past the 10% and it really needs every product pillar page, every service page, the about us page.

They should all have video in addition to videos on your website.

You need to think YouTube shorts, Instagram Reels, LinkedIn video, any type of video on social, sending one on one video as a sales tool can be extremely helpful because it's an amazing thing where people meet you before they have the first meeting.

They've heard your voice, they've seen your face and they feel like they know you before they come into that sales conversation.

So definitely use one on one video in your sales.

And fourth is signals.

So what do I mean by signals?

We used to in the good old days go for keywords in SEO or we used to write blog posts to when people search for a certain word that we would come up as a answer to that question.

Now people are using AI like ChatGPT.

They have used it as a creation engine.

But nowadays more and more are using generative AI as a recommendation engine.

Meaning they go and say who is the best?

They ask you answer coach or what is the best contractor for H Vac and plumbing in Richmond, Virginia.

Or you get the point.

So they're asking AI these questions rather than going to Google.

Or they're using generative AI search within Google and they're asking for recommendation.

So now if we don't show up, that's a problem, right?

Because we're more and more going to that AI search.

Google organic normal search isn't coming back.

So we need to be really good in sending signals to the AI to rank us as a trustworthy and recommendable company or person.

Now I don't want to be misunderstood.

I am very much.

I always struggled with keyword stuffing that people do that anything that can be gamed and that is not what I'm talking about.

If you're trying to game the algorithm, that's not going to work long term.

It's going to get you in trouble and you shouldn't do it.

What I'm saying is create signals that reflect your real life expertise and knowledge and experience so that AI can pick up on it.

But you do need to be good at sending signals.

How can you send signals?

So we again will explore that in detail in the next few weeks.

But there is a lot of signals come from social.

So you got to be active on social.

And I'm not talking LinkedIn company page, but have your employees.

If you're a B2B technology company, your salespeople and your management should be building personal brands and thought leadership on LinkedIn.

If you are more a B2C company, be in Facebook in terms of videos.

Instagram reels is an enormously great way TikTok.

There's so many ways to get Signal out there.

YouTube Shorts is going to become a major way to find and discover new companies and new brands.

So Definitely invest in YouTube shorts, your website, like putting in a large language model, like a chatbot that has a knowledge base on your website and that acts as like a generative AI search on your website.

I talked about this before, but stuff like that is going to be massively important in the next year or so.

So those are just three things out of many things you can do.

But you get the gist of it.

You get the idea that's number four signals.

Number five, something that you should absolutely do in this uncertain world is self service tools.

Now self service tools there, if you think about that, we want to do 80% of the buyer's journey by ourselves.

There's a lot of decisions we to make, a lot of hoops we have to jump through in our research to go to the next stage.

Right.

If I want to buy, let's say I'm going to take up running.

I'm not a runner, but let's just go with that.

And I want to research running shoes.

I have to probably say, okay, so where am I running?

Like asphalt or in the forest or am I going to be just in a gym practicing, going back and forth?

Every runner is going to laugh at me right now.

But you running shoes for men and women are different.

Then you have probably different the type of foot that you have, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's a lot of product knowledge that I have to gain in order to make the best decision.

For me self service tools are amazing because they help me make that decision.

There is a self selection tool that I could be using for running shoes to help me understand what would be the best running shoes for me in terms of modular housing or anything that you can configure like cars or whatever.

A product configurator would be amazing because you have an enormous amount of options.

And with a product configurator you can put these things together, see what the cost is at the end.

But you also learn the pros and cons of each of these options and you learn how to make a decision what is right and what is not right for you as you're going through that process.

FDomes has an amazing product configurator.

I'm going to link it here.

I love that thing because it really makes you.

You can be in that dome, it's like a geodesic dome.

And you can be in the dome and walk around and understand, but you can change the options and it will update.

Just try it out.

It's amazing self pricing.

So people really don't want to talk to a salesperson and they certainly don't want to fill out a request, a quote when they press on a pricing page.

But astonishingly, only 10% of B2B companies currently have a proper pricing page on their website.

And that's not acceptable.

Because if we as buyers come to a website, one of the first things that we want to see is how much is it going to cost?

Can I afford it?

Is it going to be a waste of time, me looking at all those features and then it's out of my budget.

And the thing is, we know what the company is charging.

We know they know.

So if we know they know, but they're not sharing it with us and they're making us join a sales call, et cetera, we feel a high level of distrust because they're hiding something from us, right?

They're not sharing it with us.

So we have to have a pricing page on our website.

But what helps even more if you have a lot of options or if you have a complicated pricing model is to just put a pricing calculator or self pricing tools on your website.

Where I can just enter a few questions or answer a few questions and you give me a price estimate.

I understand that's an estimate.

I understand I still have to get a proper quote from someone.

Or maybe you can actually nail it down and make a quote right there.

But it has to be self driven.

Now self scheduling is an easy one.

If I want to book an appointment, let's say with a financial advisor or with someone, I need to have the ability to schedule that.

Again, if you're a software company, you want to have on your demo page, instead of having a whole fill out this demo page and then we call you and we schedule, just have a calendar and let people pick their spot right then and there.

Cut through a lot.

Like, there's nothing that kills a sales process faster than losing momentum.

And by putting a self scheduling tool on your demo page, you are gaining momentum and your likelihood to close is much greater.

Additionally, there was this really cool case study that was mentioned.

Opus Partners in New Zealand, they're a financial advisory company.

They did something amazing where they actually let people choose their financial advisors that they want to work with.

They say choose your financial advisor and then you can schedule the first meeting with them.

And a lot of those financial advisors had a video about themselves, so you actually get to meet them, a bio page, etc.

They saw a double in booking just by doing that.

Absolutely amazing.

All right, and the last one is self assessment.

So, for example, if you have a decision to make that you can't make on your own because you're lacking that background knowledge.

Right.

For example, can I repair my H Vac unit or do I need to replace it?

You're usually not a plumber or an H vac specialist.

You only do this once.

That a self assessment tool would be a great one because you can really make that decision very fast.

Or is business coaching for me, am I going to get something out of it?

Would be a great self assessment tool.

Now that is the fifth one, so self assessment tools.

The last one, I'm just going to hammer it home here because it's so important, is you got to be more human.

Anything you can do to show your people, to show you're not perfect, to just have people experience that you are a human in this AI driven world is going to become so important.

All right, so that was a quick rundown of the most important findings of IMPACT Plus, I look forward to the next few weeks to dive into these points deeper.

But I hope you find this useful and I would really love to hear your comments.

Where are you at?

Are you losing traffic?

Are you struggling to get enough leads?

I would love to hear it.

Until next time, my name is Hannah Eisenberg.

I am the host of Trust Builders and remember, ultimately in business everything comes down to trust.