Chapter 12One motion

Most companies run sales and marketing as two departments, with two budgets, two leaders and a long argument about whose fault the quarter was. I think that split is a mistake, and the show is how I stopped making it. I know that sounds like a line off a consultant's slide, so give me the chapter to earn it. When your sales conversation is also an episode, the conversation that qualifies a buyer is the same conversation that markets you to everyone like him. Marketing stops being something you buy and becomes the exhaust of conversations you were going to have anyway. I said it to a founder in September in one breath:

by making that sales process into a podcast. You're essentially collapsing sales and marketing into one motion.

Everything else in this book feeds into that sentence. The give, the invite, the pre-interview, the debrief, the calendar. This chapter is about why they add up to one thing instead of five.

Two departments, two kinds of waste

Start with sales as it usually runs. I've been doing it most of my working life, and the shape never changes:

See, I've been a sales guy for almost 20 years. I mean, we all are, right? We're all selling, but sales is. Numbers game. Oh, I pitched twenty people; I closed one. Oh, I pitched two hundred people; I closed ten or whatever.

Look at what happens to the nineteen. They disappear. Somebody did an hour of research and had a good conversation, maybe even made a real connection, and it came to nothing. The notes go into a CRM nobody reads, and the salesperson moves on to the next name. Sales throws away most of what it makes.

Marketing has the opposite problem. It produces plenty, and almost nobody wants it. A company pays to put its own story in front of strangers: the ad, the case study, the post about how great the product is. That's the broadcast from the start of this book, the one that says I'm awesome, give me money, with a bigger budget behind it. Marketing makes things nobody asked for, about the one subject the audience cares least about.

So one department wastes its conversations and the other wastes its money. I spent years inside both, and I never thought to ask whether they could be the same thing.

The switch is a button

The change that collapses them is almost embarrassingly small. You stop holding your sales conversations on a meeting tool and start holding them on a streaming tool. Same laptop, same camera, same person on the other side. As an engineer I find this the funniest part of the whole method:

Like, what's the difference between StreamYard and Google Meets? Nothing. It's using voice over IP, same exact technology. The only difference is I have 10 viewers or 20 live viewers

Ten or twenty live viewers is enough to make it a show. And once it's a show, the call produces something. I described one of those calls a couple of weeks later:

Just by like switching from Zoom to StreamYard, it's the exact same thing, but I just created 20 minutes worth of marketing material. It went across 6 platforms.

Nothing about the conversation got harder. I asked the same questions I'd ask on a discovery call. The difference is what was left on the table when we hung up. A discovery call leaves notes. The taping leaves an episode, which keeps working after both of us have gone to bed.

The host's job

This works because hosting and selling ask the same things of you. I didn't plan it that way. I noticed it after a long run of tapings, and once I saw it I couldn't stop seeing it:

And if you really think about it, podcasting is very similar to like running a sales process, right? Like you have to do outreach, you have to invite. You have to listen, you have to do research, you have to ask effective questions, you have to find pain points, you have to, you know, be someone that's helpful

Read that list again with a sales manager's eyes. Outreach, research, listening, questions, pain points. That's a discovery call. Now read it with a producer's eyes. Booking, prep, an interview, a story with tension in it. That's an episode. Same list.

And in both jobs, the person asking the questions holds the wheel. Most founders think the guest is in charge of a podcast because the guest does the talking. It's the other way around:

So the beauty of a podcast is that you are the one driving because you're the one asking the questions, right? What are you building? What's the hardest part? So you're the one driving, even though it feels like your guest is in control.

What are you building? What's the hardest part? Those are the two best discovery questions I know, and on a show they don't sound like discovery at all. They sound like interest, because they are. The best salespeople I've worked with talk less than anyone else on the call, and I've become the same:

And ironically, Yeah, I don't talk much on my sales calls. I don't talk much on my podcast. But guess what? I'm asking all the questions. That's what a good sales guy does

The exhaust

Here is what comes off the back of one conversation. On every taping we cut the clips, write the editorial, put the full episode on the site and on YouTube, and post it across the platforms the guest's market uses. I listed it for a founder in September:

not to mention every conversation we create clips, written pieces, newsletters. Plus the guest shares it with their network because it's about them, not about us

The last part of that line is the one I'd underline. The guest shares it because it's about them. Content about you travels as far as your own followers can carry it, which for most founders is not far. Content about your guest travels through their network, to their team and to their investors. You didn't buy that reach. You earned it by making someone else look good.

Multiply that by a full calendar and it adds up fast:

So imagine if I'm doing 15 interviews a day and every piece of content has like 10 things trailing it. It's, it's kind of hard to run from us.

Hard to run from is the point. A buyer who met you once on a call forgets you by Friday. A buyer who keeps seeing your guests, his peers, in his feed for a month starts to feel he knows you before the second meeting.

Misses that keep selling

Now go back to the nineteen. On a normal sales calendar they're waste. In one motion they're inventory:

You might not become my customer. Like maybe 20 people I talk to don't become customers, but the 21st might. But all those misses on net now become art. They become conversations. They become shorts. They become editorials. They become LinkedIn, YouTube.

That changes the arithmetic of a sales week. The person who said no still gets a good episode, and I still get a recorded conversation with someone squarely in my market, talking about the exact problems my buyers have. His episode goes on selling while I sleep. I put it this way in August, and it still makes me smile:

And now every miss is also something that, you know, a little Sunny that's out there in the middle of the night showing a short to somebody and selling on our behalf.

And the miss is often only a miss for now. The video doesn't expire:

Like even let's say you don't become a customer, that's okay. Like now you have some content, I have content, maybe one year from now someone sees this video and buys from me

Relationships first, views second

There's a trap here, and I've watched founders fall into it. They hear "every call becomes content" and start optimising for the content, so views pick the guests and the thumbnail gets more thought than the buyer. That kills the motion, because it turns the show back into a broadcast.

So I hold a strict order. The show exists to build relationships with the people I want to do business with. The content is a by-product, and a welcome one, but it never chooses the guest:

I would say most people see it as like a distribution. mechanism. We see it as like a relationship building mechanism.

I've been blunter about it than that:

We don't care if 10 people watch it or 100 people watch it. All we care about is that relationship.

If ten people watch, the guest is still on my calendar, still telling me his thesis, still sharing the episode with the investors I'd like to meet. If ten thousand watch, the same is true, and that's a bonus. Some of my episodes do get thousands of views over a few days, and I enjoy it. But a podcast with one listener that puts me in a room with my ideal customer every hour beats a podcast with a million listeners who will never buy anything.

One build, three lifebloods

Once sales and marketing are the same motion, a second collapse follows. Most founders run a separate hunt for each of the groups that keep a company alive, with a different list and a different pitch for each. On the show, every one of those people is simply a guest:

And in one motion, one build, you can Target customers, Partners and investors while creating essentially marketing [content].

The investor who would have read your deck with one eye on the next email comes on your show instead and spends an hour telling you what he looks for. The partner who would have ignored a cold pitch shares an episode with her whole team. The customer you would have chased for a demo talks for forty-five minutes about the problem you solve. One build, one motion. It is the cleanest answer I have to the chicken and the egg from chapter four:

So, sales and marketing, like I said, collapse into one motion. And the customer needs investors and the investors need customers. What we say is invite both of them to your show.

Who is asking

There is one more thing the motion changes, and it is the one I feel in my body. Walking into a meeting to ask for money puts you a step down before you open your mouth. I admitted as much to a founder in September:

when you show up to an investor meeting, I mean, to me at least, I can't help but feel that I'm less than. Why? Because there's a context which is set that I'm asking you for money and anything I say, it's an uphill battle.

I've raised money and I've run companies, and I still feel it. The context does it, whatever your track record. On the show the context runs the other way. The investor wants the episode, so he arrives ready to be interesting, and I get to be curious. Same two people, same hour, opposite posture. In that same call I said I was talking to about fifteen investors that week and hadn't pitched any of them. They were pitching me, and I was learning more about how they decide than any pitch meeting would have taught me.

That posture is part of the marketing too. A founder who sits across from investors as a peer, week after week, on camera, starts to look like someone investors want to sit across from. The audience sees who comes on the show. Nobody sees who turned down your deck.

Three circles

People sometimes file us under cold email shop, or podcast agency. On a debrief in September I told a founder we are neither, and then described the picture I should have opened with:

So if I had to draw 3 circles, cold email, podcast, money. In the middle, in the middle, that's where we are. I should probably just have that as my presentation.

Cold email alone is an uphill battle. A podcast alone is a hobby with an audience problem. Money alone is a wish. Where the three overlap, a cold email carries an invitation and the invitation turns into a conversation. That conversation becomes an episode. After the debrief, the episode and the person in it add up to a relationship that pays. Every step is giving, and every step is also selling. That's the one motion.

It changes what a founder's day feels like, too. I don't wake up wondering how to impress anybody:

Instead, all we have to do is just be good listeners, be interested in other people. And ask effective questions, which is essentially what you do in sales anyways.

Be interested in other people, and press record. That's the job.

Try this week

Take a sheet of paper and draw two columns. Head one Marketing and the other Sales.

1. Under Marketing, list everything you did or paid for last month to get attention: posts, ads, events, sponsorships, the newsletter. Next to each, write what it cost in money or hours. 2. Under Sales, list every conversation you had with a possible customer, partner or investor. Next to each, write what came out of it. For the ones that went nowhere, write "nothing". 3. Draw one line from the Sales column to the Marketing column. Pick one recurring conversation, a discovery call or a first investor meeting, that you could run as a recorded show with the other person's agreement. Write down what that one conversation would produce if it were an episode: the clips, the editorial, the post the guest would share.

Then run it once before next week is out. Use a streaming tool, tell the person it's an interview about them, and ask the two questions: what are you building, and what's the hardest part? Count what you have when you hang up.

If every conversation you already have could be your marketing, what is your marketing budget for?