Mastering Marketing Strategy for B2B Growth

Last Updated on: 29th April 2025, 04:51 am

In this engaging conversation, Rob Downey and Michael “Buzz” Buzinski share valuable insights about mastering marketing strategies, particularly for B2B growth. The two get candid about how local business owners can grow this 2025.

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About This Huddle’s Special Guest

Michael “Buzz” Buzinski is a seasoned marketing strategist with over 20 years of business experience. A 10-year Air Force veteran and former recording studio owner, Buzz transformed his path from failed musician to successful marketing expert, eventually founding Buzzworthy Marketing in 2018.

As a strategy-first marketing specialist, Buzz focuses on helping B2B service-based businesses build effective marketing operating systems. His approach prioritizes data-driven strategies that create sustainable growth rather than short-term tactical solutions. Buzz is particularly passionate about helping businesses focus their messaging to attract their ideal clients and develop what he calls the “Perfectly Profitable Prospect Profile.”

Buzz is the author of “Rule of 26,” a guide to simple website marketing strategy, and is known for breaking the mold of traditional B2B marketing with his vibrant, authentic approach. His expertise lies in transforming “boring to buzzworthy” marketing that creates long-term revenue engines for professional service businesses, consultants, and advisory firms.

Simply Be Found would love to extend its warmest thanks and appreciation to Buzz for spending time with us. We hope to hear from him again soon. Meanwhile, if you want to reach out to Buzz, you can do so as these platforms:

Key Takeaways From The Huddle

Buzz opens the conversation by sharing his journey from a 10-year Air Force veteran to founding a recording studio that eventually transformed into a multi-million dollar creative agency in Anchorage, Alaska. In 2018, he made the strategic decision to reinvent his brand as Buzzworthy Marketing, focusing specifically on B2B service-based businesses. This personal evolution mirrors the transformation many businesses must undergo to find their most effective market position.

“We are a strategy-first firm,” Buzz explains, differentiating his approach from tactical agencies that focus primarily on implementation. This distinction becomes a central theme throughout their discussion – the critical difference between having a comprehensive strategic foundation versus chasing tactical solutions.

The Organic Marketing Tree: A Framework for Marketing Strategy For B2B Growth

One of the most compelling metaphors from their conversation is the “organic tree” analogy for marketing structure. Rob initially describes it with the root structure representing data and citations, the website as the trunk, and various marketing efforts as the branches.

Buzz thoughtfully expands this metaphor: “You ever seen a walnut tree? English walnut trees have two colors of trunks because they use a black walnut tree root system… and then they graft a walnut tree on top of it.” He elaborates that good data feeds strategy, which forms the base of the trunk, with the website forming the upper trunk before branching into various marketing channels.

This metaphor elegantly captures the interconnected nature of effective marketing – without strong roots (data) and a solid trunk (strategy and website), the branches (marketing channels) cannot flourish. As Buzz puts it, “People who create strategies without data, right? That’s a problem.”

Marketing as a Magnet, Advertising as a Bullhorn

Perhaps the most powerful insight from their discussion is the fundamental distinction between marketing and advertising:

“Marketing is a magnet,” Buzz explains. “It’s what pulls people in. That’s your messaging, your website, your social media organic side of things… Even organic search is marketing. It’s what brings people in when they’re looking for things.”

In contrast, “advertising is a bullhorn… you’re blasting out a message. And if you blast out a message that doesn’t already draw people in, you’re spending energy pushing something out that’s not going to have a return on investment.”

This distinction explains why many businesses fail with their advertising efforts – they haven’t developed the magnetic foundation of effective marketing first. “People who advertise before they market always lose unless they’re very, very lucky. And when they are lucky, they’re only lucky for a short amount of time,” Buzz warns.

Rob likens this misguided approach to addiction: “Advertising is kind of like a drug because you’re always currently searching for that very first fix, that very first high that you got from it. And you’re going to constantly chase it because you might not get it again.”

The Focus Framework: Finding Your One Thing

A central challenge for many businesses, especially in the B2B space, is trying to be everything to everyone. Buzz addresses this with what he calls the “focus framework.”

“A lot of people are trying to market all the things to all the people,” he observes. “If I’m out there with a magnet that’s got a positive polarization and a negative polarization alternating… I now have a surface that’s pulling and pushing over and over again.”

Instead, he advocates for marketing “one thing to one group of people.” This focused approach creates a stronger magnetic pull toward your ideal customers. Buzz emphasizes that “until you get past 10 million, there is more business than you can handle for one segment of the industry that you represent, period, end of story.”

This principle is illustrated through his pinhole camera analogy – focusing intently on one specific value proposition creates a clearer, more compelling image for your ideal customers. “It’s not that you only need to do one service,” he clarifies, “it’s that you need to sell the one solution that opens you up to permission for the rest of the services that then solve more problems.”

The I-We-You Paradox: Making Your Customer the Hero

One of the most practical insights Buzz shares is what he calls the “I-We-You paradox” in marketing communications. He suggests examining your website’s homepage to check the ratio of self-referential language (“I,” “we,” “us”) versus customer-focused language (“you,” “your”).

“You need to hear ‘you’ and ‘your’ four to one to every I, we, or us,” Buzz advises. “When you start using ‘you’ and ‘your,’ the sentences will start rewriting themselves because you’ll start putting the paradigm to them, pointing the lens back at them, because they’re there to fix their problem.”

Rob connects this to the hero’s journey framework: “Make your client the hero, and you are the person who guides them through that.” This approach shifts the narrative from being about your business to being about how you help customers achieve their goals.

The Perfectly Profitable Prospect Profile (P3P)

Beyond basic demographic targeting, Buzz introduces the concept of the “perfectly profitable prospect profile” (P3P), which incorporates culture and core values into customer targeting.

“In your marketing, if you can work in your core values, you’re going to attract people with similar core values,” he explains. “When that happens, your trust factor goes up, which then reduces the friction, which then speeds up your sales process.”

This alignment continues to pay dividends throughout the customer relationship: “If they have a good culture fit… how you guys go through projects are very similar. So then there’s less friction in actually doing the work, which then makes you more efficient, which means you get better output… and outcomes for the client.”

The real cost of poor customer fit becomes clear when Buzz states: “Every time you say yes to a bad prospect, you’ve said no to two or three other great prospects because they’re going to take up all of the bandwidth it would have taken to handle those other three good prospects.”

Authenticity in B2B Marketing: Breaking the Mold

A refreshing theme throughout their conversation is the importance of authenticity in B2B marketing. While many B2B companies adopt an overly formal, corporate tone, Buzz advocates for a more human approach.

“Just because it’s a business serving business, guess what? Who owns the business? People. And what’s the other business? Oh, bunch of people,” he points out. “Business is just an interaction, a relationship that happens to have some money tied to it. That’s all it is.”

This philosophy is reflected in Buzzworthy Marketing’s branding choices – vibrant colors and a more casual tone that stands out in the typically staid B2B landscape. “We have these vibrant, contrasting colors that you don’t normally see in a B2B space,” Buzz notes, explaining how this approach attracts clients who are a better cultural fit.

Technology as an Enabler, Not a Replacement for Strategy

Toward the end of their conversation, Buzz and Rob touch on how AI and technology fit into the marketing ecosystem. While acknowledging the efficiency gains technology can provide, Buzz emphasizes that “AI only speeds things up. It doesn’t make things better.”

The real value comes from combining technological tools with sound strategy: “We use AI to make you Superman,” Buzz says, describing it as “Amazing Implementation” – a tool that enhances human capabilities rather than replacing strategic thinking.

Throughout the conversation, both speakers emphasize the importance of building marketing systems that create sustainable, long-term success rather than chasing short-term wins. This approach requires patience and discipline but ultimately leads to more predictable growth and higher profitability.

As Buzz notes about the journey beyond the first million dollars in revenue: “There’s only so much hustle, especially in the B2B world… You have to create systems that leverage your time, leverage your network, and leverage what you have to offer to the people who absolutely need you.”

Building for Long-Term Success

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Transcript

• 0:01 | Welcome to the Huddle — Meet Buzz and Rob
• 0:14 | Buzz Introduces His Journey from Air Force to Marketing Expert
• 1:14 | Transitioning from Recording Studio to Marketing Agency
• 2:21 | Building a Marketing Operating System for Long-Term Success
• 3:39 | The Problem with Pop-Up Agencies and Short-Term Tactics
• 5:05 | Difference Between a Marketing Firm vs. Marketing Agency
• 7:05 | Data Feeds Strategy — Building Your Business Foundation
• 9:00 | How Good Data and Strategy Build Strong Marketing
• 10:08 | Branching Out Your Marketing Efforts for Growth
• 11:02 | The Problem with Over-Reliance on Paid Ads
• 12:08 | Marketing as a Magnet vs. Advertising as a Bullhorn
• 13:36 | Building Funnels and Retaining Clients After Sales
• 14:31 | Social Media’s Role in B2B: Trust Over Leads
• 15:54 | Building Authority and Trust Through Consistent Presence
• 17:01 | A Lawyer’s Dream: Making Divorce Marketing Positive
• 19:14 | Finding Hidden Gems in B2B Marketing Strategy
• 20:04 | Focus Framework: Targeting One Core Audience
• 21:09 | The Power of Specialization Before $10M Revenue
• 22:36 | Focused Messaging: Why It Matters for Business Growth
• 24:19 | Apple’s Secret to Success: Storytelling and Purpose
• 26:18 | Learning Storytelling from Pixar: How Jobs Evolved Apple
• 27:08 | Using Hero’s Journey in Marketing Messaging
• 28:36 | Making the Customer the Hero, Not Yourself
• 29:55 | The I-We-You Paradox in Copywriting
• 31:01 | Homepage Mistakes and Messaging the Wrong Way
• 32:24 | Why About Us Belongs in the Footer
• 34:00 | Choosing the Right Website Strategy: Journey Mapping
• 35:40 | No Website is Ever “Done” — Continuous Tweaking Needed
• 37:00 | Pretty vs. Practical: What Works in Website Design
• 39:27 | Authenticity in Branding: Be Real, Be Relatable
• 41:00 | Culture and Core Value Fit in Marketing and Sales
• 43:00 | Saying No to the Wrong Clients to Protect Growth
• 44:48 | Tech-Enabled Services vs. Full Service Models
• 46:00 | Pricing Transparency in B2B Marketing
• 48:00 | How AI Supports (Not Replaces) Strategy
• 48:45 | How Simply Be Found and Buzzworthy Marketing Align
• 49:00 | Where to Find Michael Buzinski and Final Thoughts

0:01 | Welcome to the Huddle — Meet Buzz and Rob

Rob: Welcome to the Simply Be Found huddle. You have Buzz and Rob Downey here. We’re going to talk about everything marketing, business. We’ll see kind of where it goes. We do everything raw and uncut. Buzz, how are you doing?

Buzz: I’m doing great. It’s a sunny day here in Richmond, Virginia. The wind is blowing, the leaves are green. I’m on the right side of the earth. It’s a good thing.

Rob: And you don’t have, as we were talking in the green room, you don’t have all the allergies going. I’ve got a ton of allergies going here in Colorado, but I always love having somebody on that is kind of in that same space we are. And I love competition. I love how many people are inside of web development. I think you’ve been doing it for a lot of years. Can you kind of introduce everybody kind of to what you do, what you’re about, and all the good details?

0:14 | Buzz Introduces His Journey from Air Force to Marketing Expert

Buzz: So yeah, Michael Buzinski, everybody calls me Buzz, and I’ve been—let’s see, I’ve been in business now for 20 years. The long and short of it is that I started out as actually a recording studio. I’m a failed musician, a 10-year Air Force veteran, grew up on a farm until I was a teenager type of guy. Okay, so been there, done that stuff.

1:14 | Transitioning from Recording Studio to Marketing Agency

Buzz: And over the years, when I first started my recording studio, I quickly realized that surviving, starving musicians was a horrible business plan. So we pivoted quickly into being a media production house. Over the years, my marketing prowess kept surfacing up into conversations, so we then turned that—that pivoted into a creative agency.

And at the end of 2018, decided I was done with the agency life, and so I shut down a multi-million dollar, 13,000 square foot facility in Anchorage, Alaska and started over, started the brand over as Buzzworthy Marketing. And ever since then, we’ve been working with B2B service-based businesses.

2:21 | Building a Marketing Operating System for Long-Term Success

Buzz: And we are a strategy-first firm. So where a lot of people will be focused on a particular tactic, or they’re the architects that say, “Yep, you want that tactic, that tactic, then that tactic working together in this phase, and then once you get to this phase, we’re going to add, you know, the strategy is going to call for some more tactics or maybe one goes away and another one gets put in, those types of things.”

And so we’re helping people create a marketing operating system and eventually into a revenue engine that works for the company, not the other way around, so that we’re getting founder sales out. We have retention up. We have closed loop systems where our clients are actually helping us get to the next client through referrals and their advocacy, those types of things.

It’s a long game, right? But you know, as you’re getting to—you know, we always talk about like it’s really easy to hustle yourself to about a million dollars, right? You don’t have to have many systems. But when you start getting past a million dollars, there’s only so much hustle, especially in the B2B world that’s nuts for that.

3:39 | The Problem with Pop-Up Agencies and Short-Term Tactics

Buzz: And so you have to create systems that leverage your time, leverage your network, and leverage what you have to offer to the people who absolutely need you. And so we help people get focused and get a strategy that’ll actually work for them in the long run.

Rob: Well, it’s crazy. So I mean, that’s one of those things to where you and I’ve probably—we might have crossed paths along the way. I mean, I’ve had multiple different marketing agencies. I’ve been running and operating marketing agencies since 2008. I decided to get out of it 100% and kind of go directly into the tool space and the SaaS market.

And the problem is, is I’m seeing a lot of these popup agencies is what I like to call them, that are these, you know—I watched a video online, I designed a website, now I’m a website designer, and I can do it. And the problem is they don’t have the blueprints to be able to know what’s going to work, what’s going to get them where they’re going.

And in the B to—in the B2C world, I’ve got a ton of templates that come from that, that, you know, we can put into place and do it. So I’m like—Dean and I were having the conversation about a month ago, and we’re like, all right, let’s start—we’ve kind of done it for on and off for people coming into the platform as they asked, but we’re going to start bringing it back in because I think a lot of businesses need it and they—and it doesn’t need to all be about Google ads. It doesn’t need to be about Facebook ads. You can do it organically.

The B2B space is really interesting. So I’ve had companies that went off and sold to venture capital groups, and I’ve restarted my agencies a few times in my life and redeveloped what they were and sold them off, and also had my losses in there and my—we all do—fall on your face, but that’s how you learn and how you—how you develop it out.

So, and I didn’t—I didn’t look—I don’t think you’re one of the agencies that use Simply Be Found, are you?

Buzz: No, we’re not a Simply Be Found agency. We’re not even an agency. We’re a marketing firm. So—

5:05 | Difference Between a Marketing Firm vs. Marketing Agency

Rob: So it’s—I think there’s a big distinction between that.

Buzz: Yeah, I mean, agencies are the proprietors of all the tactics, and you do have like marketing agencies who will work in strategy, right? But they’re not strategy-first usually. They’re usually firefighters, and they’re like, “What’s your biggest pain right now?” And they—and rightfully so, they—they put out that fire. And then it’s like, “Okay, what’s the next fire?” Instead of turning around—

So I just brought on a new financial advisory firm, and they wanted to—they want to rewrite their homepage. They don’t necessarily want to redesign it, update the design, stuff like that. And they’re actually going to do the design. So we’re like—that’s the nice thing about being a firm—agencies, the model is to do all the work, where when you’re a marketing firm, you only do—you only do in-house the things that you know you can do best, and then you have a network of other firms that do the same thing.

Right? So they’re like, “Hey, if somebody is a—like, we’re not a big Meta ads—and in B2B, it’s not as big of a thing—but PPC, shoot, we’ve been doing that since 2007, right? We’ve been doing SEO since 2008.” Actually, the other way around, but I mean, still 18 years.

Rob: I was going to say, I don’t think Facebook came out until 2008, but I could be wrong.

Buzz: 2005. It didn’t start becoming popular until about 2008, 2007-2009 is where like Facebook ads became—and that’s where all your pop-ups came from because they’re like, “Oh, shoot.”

And then in the teens, that’s where—but the thing is, is that so—back to what I was saying is that—so now this firm started, “Yeah, can you write this copy?” I’m like, “Well, what are we going to write the copy based on?” “Well, I, you know, we’ve got our owner’s been here for 20 years,” dota-di. It’s like, “Yeah, if the owner could just write the copy from his notes, then you wouldn’t need to rewrite the copy.”

Because it’d already be there, he would just iterate it. And says, “You need to dig into what your strategy is. Who do you want to bring in? Why should they be talking to you? Why are you the people who have this, you know, the solution? What’s your why? Why should people care?” I mean, there’s all these questions, right?

And it’s just like, we need to start with your strategy of how you’re going to deploy your website even if it is written right. It needs to be structured in a way that fits into your marketing operating system. So we backed them up and we’re like, “Okay, now let’s do a marketing diagnostic and create a 90-day roadmap that you can now start—now let’s eat this elephant one bite at a time.”

And I think a lot of agencies forget to do that. I know as a creative agency, that’s not what we did, right? No, it was about all the things right now, let’s go. It was about designing ads, it was about designing this really beautiful thing, but they didn’t drive traffic, right?

7:05 | Data Feeds Strategy — Building Your Business Foundation

Buzz: So that missing piece that I think a lot of agencies have—and where we kind of have really fit in for a lot of the agencies that do use us—is that citation, that data piece. And I would say that we’re not really a strategy firm first; we’re a data firm first, where it’s all about that data.

Rob: So we describe everything—we describe everything for us as far as being in like an organic tree. So at the very bottom, you have your root structure of that tree.

Buzz: Sure.

Rob: You have all of your data pieces, your citations. We rewrote how that entire piece works. So we go up against Yext, Moz, all these big boys that are out there that have been doing the same thing for years, right? I mean, we’ve all crossed paths. We probably all—you’ve probably used all of them. I’ve used all of them throughout the years, and I got tired of it not working. So we redeveloped that out, and that’s our listings engine.

And then your website is your tree trunk. That is where your data sets and what kind of makes all that come together. Then everything else is branches at the top. When you’re putting it in for that strategy piece, I think that—I like that piece in there. I’ve always called it being data first, but I think it’s kind of that same piece. And I think—I think the data feed strategy. I think data feeds strategy, so—

Buzz: You know, I would probably—you ever seen a walnut tree?

Rob: Okay.

9:00 | How Good Data and Strategy Build Strong Marketing

Buzz: So walnut trees have two color—English walnut tree has two colors of trunks because they use a black walnut tree root system because it goes deeper and wider, and then they basically hybrid a walnut tree onto or graft a walnut tree on top of it. Okay? And so in your analogy, I would say that your—your data set is that—is the root system. It’s feeding the first trunk, right?

And so that base of that trunk, though, is your—is actually your strategy. So data feeds strategy. Like people who create strategies without data, right? And then we graft from a strong root system, so good data, a strong trunk to support everything above it is a strategy, right? And now you graft your website is the—now the the rest of the trunk, right? The upper trunk. Right? And then that branches out into your sales and blah, blah, blah, however you want to keep it going.

10:08 | Branching Out Your Marketing Efforts for Growth

Rob: And I think your—your branches could be all kinds of different things. It might be cold calling. It might be—

Buzz: Oh yeah.

Rob: Ads. I mean, you do all kinds of things for your business. And that—and that goes in place for B2C and B2B. But I like that for that whole entire graphing piece.

Buzz: Yeah.

Rob: Now, Dean would be alive if he was on this one. He’s going to be disappointed they didn’t get to put his input into there. So he’s an ex-arborist. He can’t call himself an arborist anymore because he dropped out, and you can’t—once you drop out, you can’t get back in. It’s not like being a marine, right? Where once a marine, always a marine. No, it’s—it’s not like that. All of a sudden, you don’t know anything about trees. Like I—I stopped, I stopped studying trees. So now I don’t know anything about trees. I don’t know. He gets all weird about it when we talk about it. So I’m like, what is this? It’s a, you know, secret, you know, piece.

But I mean, it’s one of those things to where it—that’s where it all comes together. Every—I—I would say 90% of most agencies and—and people who call themselves marketers inside of the world don’t put—don’t put in the long game, and they don’t look at the organic. They try to feed it with all this ads, and it doesn’t work.

11:02 | The Problem with Over-Reliance on Paid Ads

Buzz: No, there’s no—it ends up—it ends up costing a fortune to keep it going. It works for short term, but the minute there’s any kind of algorithm update, anything that happens out there, or a new competitor wants to spend more than you, all you’re doing is you’re just feeding a money machine.

Rob: Oh yeah.

Buzz: Well, and I tell people is like, listen, marketing is a magnet, okay? Your marketing is what pulls people in. That’s your messaging, your website is part of your marketing, your social media organic side of things is your marketing, right? Even search, you know, organic search is marketing, okay? It’s what brings people in when they’re looking for things, okay? Because there’s a lot of competition for everybody. You know, you and I have competition up the wazoo, right? We’re highly competitive. Everybody’s got competition, right? But you got to love your competition.

Rob: You got to love your competition—have search volume, right?

Buzz: Right, exactly.

12:08 | Marketing as a Magnet vs. Advertising as a Bullhorn

Buzz: So the thing is this: people who advertise—so advertising is a bullhorn, okay? And so you’re blasting out a message. And if you blast out a message that doesn’t already draw people in, you’re spending energy pushing something out that’s not going to have a return on investment.

People who advertise before they market always lose unless they’re very, very lucky. And when they are lucky, they’re only lucky for a short amount of time period, right?

Rob: No sustainable—they wonder why it didn’t work because they’re like, “Boy, I’ve been doing—why’d it stopped working, right?” And they just keep putting money to it. It’s—I—I look at that as marketing is like—especially advertising, it’s kind of like a drug because you—you’re always currently searching for that, you know, that very first fix, that very first high that you got from it. And you’re going to constantly chase it because you might not get it again.

And this is where most small businesses—so we specialize in the B2Bs that are in that 1 to 10 million mark when we’re building out these marketing operating systems. Anybody under that, we’re working towards that. We’re working through strategies that will get them there. But when we’re talking about an operating system, usually you need enough lead flow to make it make sense to have one, right?

13:36 | Building Funnels and Retaining Clients After Sales

Buzz: And with it, though, is that you have to make sure that you are one attracting. So when you talk about the leads, right? And you’re like, you—your advertising is only as good until—until you stop paying for it, if it’s working at all, right?

And so if you haven’t tested with the organic, like you were saying, and getting money from your organic to prove what messages are going to work, you’re going to burn more money than you need to acquire those clients, right? But then the next place with that is that you should be using advertising to fill a funnel that will feed you a while. You need a hopper.

Now, a lot of people think that their marketing stops when they acquire their client. They use advertising to attract them. They use their sales process and some of their marketing operating system to acquire them, right? But now the real marketing happens. You got to stay—you got to stay on top of them. They have to know you’re there. Got to retain them, right? You got to retain them.

That’s where—that’s where email comes in. That’s where—so, you know, get them to follow you on social media. I don’t—look at social media. And tell me how you feel about this. I don’t look at social media as really a way to go find new—new customers. I look at social media, Facebook, Twitter, most of those—yes, you can find new customers. So yes, you can have that. But I look at those as tools to stay in contact with your current customers. Do you agree?

14:31 | Social Media’s Role in B2B: Trust Over Leads

Rob: I think that there is an element of that for sure. I don’t disagree with that. In the B2B world, I call it the peekaboo effect. See, when you’re—nobody’s following your CPA. Nobody’s following their—sexy—the B2B world is not sexy. It’s not—

Buzz: Well, we make it buzzworthy. We take it boring to buzzworthy, but yeah, but that’s—that’s our goal, right? That’s our vision, is to make it fun. Not—it doesn’t have to be sexy, but at least to have it fun, right? Like just because it’s B2B doesn’t mean it can’t be fun, right?

So with that said, we have this peek-a-boo effect. So when I need something as a business owner, I have a problem, okay? And all B2B service-based businesses do one thing: we solve a problem, okay? And so if we understand we fix this one clearly urgent struggle for other people, okay, and so what happens is that person has that struggle, and now they’re out looking, okay?

15:54 | Building Authority and Trust Through Consistent Presence

Buzz: Now you’ve used your marketing, maybe some advertising, whatever it is that got them into your ecosystem, they are going to look for social proof. And this is where social media comes in. So they’re going to go over to your LinkedIn, your Facebook, whatever—wherever you’re at, wherever they usually go for their confirmation, right? They’re—they’re looking for confirmation bias. They want to feel good about reaching out to you and feel that they’re—they’re going to be taken care of, right?

And so they’re going to go in, they’re going to peek around, they go, “Oh, yeah, look at that. He’s—he’s got authority. People like what he says, so he’s got—he’s got trustability. He’s got expertise. He’s teacher. He’s a guide.” Okay, great. And then they close the book, and then they go and reach out to you. And then they never see another thing you do until they do sign up, and maybe they follow you.

But I don’t follow my tax accountant. I promise you that. And I’ve had them for two years, and the accountants before that for the last 20 years—not single one of them did I ever follow on LinkedIn, Facebook. Maybe Facebook because I was friends with one of my—my accountants. But other than that, had nothing to do with that nurture. But that’s in the B2B world. It’s a completely different story.

Rob: Yeah, it’s a complete different story. Unless—so I had once—this was probably 10 years ago, I had a lawyer that was a divorce lawyer come to me, and he goes, “I want to make the marketing message fun, and I want everybody to want to be able to join me and be able to learn all this knowledge about what I do about divorce.” And I’m like, I’m looking at him inside the—[Laughter]

17:01 | A Lawyer’s Dream: Making Divorce Marketing Positive

Rob: I’ve been through a divorce, and the ones that I’ve—never seen one be fun. I’ve seen some that kind of go, you know, kind of good that, you know, they stay friends and they can actually get along, but most of them are shows. Oh yeah. And I’m like, well, how do you expect to pull this off? He goes, “I don’t know. I had this dream, and I want to be able to get this done.” I’m like, no, I don’t want it—I don’t want it. No.

Buzz: Yeah, I—I don’t see how this is going to play out that’s going to be fun.

Rob: Yeah, I mean, I could see a divorce lawyer working through the opportunities of divorce. Like—

Buzz: Correct, you’ve done—you’ve done what you need—knowledge, education.

Rob: Yeah, but I mean, and even—I mean, so what—I see where he was going with it, though, because you could—you could—you could frame it in that divorce is not the end. It’s just a door closing and another one opening. And you—and—and through that paradigm, you now are working through the lens of abundancy and opportunity because what has ended is not coming back. That’s why you’re getting a divorce, okay? So now he’s talking about mindset.

19:14 | Finding Hidden Gems in B2B Marketing Strategy

Rob: So instead of it being fun, it just doesn’t have to be hell. And that’s exactly the direction we ended up taking it. We made it to where this is where your journey can end up. You’re—you might be in a really bad place right now, but we’re going to help you get through that. Because I ended up learning afterwards, he had counselors set up, certain classes set up of how to cope, all that different stuff.

So you could end up taking it that way. But when he first said that, I was like, I knew what the hell are you talking about? So talking about—make some—you get some like divorce comics, comic strips, and stuff like that to make a little bit fun. But I mean, other than that, that’s about it. I—I mean, you want to talk about a strategy call, and it took forever to be able to figure all those different pieces out that would end up being able to make it somewhat a happy different piece. Because it was like—

And inside of the B2B world, you probably experience this all the time. It’s a matter of trying to figure out where those little hidden gems are to be able to actually make the marketing work and make everything kind of come together, put the right strategy that makes that business—because just because you are one set business doesn’t mean that your strategy is going to be the same exact blueprint as somebody else over here. There’s going to be pieces you’re going to be able to take from other blueprints. It might not even be the same industry to be able to make yours work.

20:04 | Focus Framework: Targeting One Core Audience

Buzz: I go through—so we have what we call the focus framework. And I liken it—so a lot of people are trying to market all the things to all the people, okay? That’s the problem with most entrepreneurs. “But I do this, and I do this, and I—and—and—right?” And I’m like, “Okay, so if I’m out there with a magnet that’s got a positive polarization and a negative polarization alternating, right, back and forth, I’m now have a surface that’s pulling and pushing over and over and over again, right, versus what if we had one magnet that was pulling one force, right, looking for”—so say there’s negative charged—”and know now the only thing it’s going to attract is positive charged magnets, right? Okay, boom.”

And so when we help people do is say market the one thing to the people and that’s one group of people. Start there because if you’re under 10 million, there is more business than you can handle for one segment of the industry that you represent, period, end of story.

21:09 | The Power of Specialization Before $10M Revenue

Buzz: Until you get past 10 million, there is no reason for you to be—not look at one segment of your industry, okay? And you can have like—so like for us, we do—we may—I can’t even talk right now—primarily, we work with business consultants, advisory firms, and professional service businesses, okay?

Now that seems like a lot, right? But they’re all the same type of business. They just—people—but they call themselves three different—but it’s the same group of people, right? Now, would we be better to just say advisory firms? Except that not all advisers call themselves advisory firms. So it’s like, we—we—there are exceptions to that. But we’re only working with those B2B, basically consultants, really those—your professional services or CPAs. They’re not wanting to do your bookkeeping. They want to do your tax strategy. They want to figure out your cash flow strategy. They’re looking to consult with you, okay?

And that’s really who we serve. Right now could—when I was an agency, we did everybody. We had car washes and e-coin services, and I mean, you name it, we did it because we were an agency, right? But once we got focused and we found that that one—like fix one clearly urgent struggle, and once we identify that, right, and from there, we get pinpoint accuracy.

22:36 | Focused Messaging: Why It Matters for Business Growth

Buzz: And so I’m going to—I’m going to give you an analogy real quick of what—what this means. So when you’re trying to blast everything, we said that you’re—you’re—you’re basically becoming noise because there’s nothing to listen to, too many conversations happening at the same time, right? But if we get really focused on one thing, I liken it to those old shoe box cameras. You remember those? Did we?

Rob: Oh okay.

Buzz: So for those who are a little younger, they probably don’t know what we’re talking about. This is before the digital camera. We could make our own cameras with a shoe box. And so in—on one side, you would cut out a—a—a hole, and you put some—and tape some foil—tin foil on the end of that. And then you would poke a hole right in the middle of it, and then you would cover it up with some black tape. Then on the inside, you put some photosensitive paper on the backside, the whole back side, and then you would put the lid on, tape it up really tight, you take it outside, point it at what you wanted to take a picture of, and then you would remove the little tape over the pinhole and let it sit there for 20-30 minutes. And then you’d come back, and you would, kind of like a Polaroid—

Rob: Yeah, kind of like a Polaroid, right.

Buzz: And then you would go in, and—and you develop the—the piece of paper that was there. And from that one pinhole, you would get this entire picture. So I tell people it’s like it’s not that you only need to do one service, it’s that you need to sell the one solution that opens you up to permission for the rest of the services that then solve more problems. And if you can do that, regardless of your B2B, B2C, doesn’t matter, right? Unless you’re a grocery store, okay? Grocery store, you actually do have one problem: I need to go to one place and get as many things as I need for my house. It’s why Walmart created Supercenters.

Rob: Yeah, exactly. Still, there’s that—and also the family wanted to make more money, and once Sam—Sam Walton died, they’re like, “We have this whole marketing plan that we’ve been wanting to do that he wouldn’t let us do.” But there—that’s a whole another topic, right?

24:19 | Apple’s Secret to Success: Storytelling and Purpose

Rob: But I mean, even if you look at that though, if you look at Apple, what does Apple solve? What is their why, why do they exist? Because they only own 3% of the market, yet they own 90% of the oxygen in the marketing area. So what is it that makes them any different than Dell, HP, Hewlett Packard? They have a why. Their why comes from challenging the status quo.

Buzz: That’s, you know, where their why came from. That—that was from Wozniak and—was technically mainly from Wozniak and what he wanted. He wanted to challenge the big enterprises with putting a computer in everybody’s home so that the—that you wouldn’t have that oligarchy of those with computers and those without. And do you know what—do you know what ended up making Steve Jobs be able to learn how to tell the story?

Rob: Well, there’s a couple of different ones. So I’m going to let you tell the version that you’re thinking of.

26:18 | Learning Storytelling from Pixar: How Jobs Evolved Apple

Buzz: So if he wouldn’t have—if he would have never went into the coffee shop and ended up creating Pixar and taking—taking some of the—or I can’t remember what they’re called—animators or whatever from Disney that wanted to go digital, and Disney was still saying nothing will ever go digital, we can’t go down that road, we’ve been doing it this way for this many years.

And from—from the story I heard, he met them, and they—they were talking inside of a coffee shop, and he goes, “I like that idea.” Well, the very first Pixar film was—so he left Disney, they started Pixar, Disney knew they were going to do it. And he was—he got some funding and all that different stuff that came into the whole piece. But the very first story was Toy Story.

Well, during that process of working with the—Disney engineers or Disney designers or animators, whatever they’re called, he learned how to be able to tell a story, right? So he got kicked out of Apple, lost almost everything, went and started another company, it failed, went and started another company, it failed. I think he had two or three failures in between, started Pixar, learned how to tell a story, and Apple’s like, “Hey, we’d really like to have you back to come in and take over.” He sold Pixar over to Disney, went back into Apple, but he learned how to tell a story because Disney knows how to be able to tell a story, right?

27:08 | Using Hero’s Journey in Marketing Messaging

Buzz: And with anything you do inside of any kind of marketing or any advertising or anything like that, if you don’t have a good story that hooks somebody in, and they understand what you do, and they can vision themselves using the product, they’ll never be able to get it. They’ll never be able to move to that next step, exactly. So if you wouldn’t have had that step, Apple wouldn’t be what it is today.

Rob: I think that’s a good—that’s a good—I would say that’s a good analogy. I think that the—the thing to take away from there is that why is, folks like Pixar and Disney so good for so long? And it’s because they use a formula called the hero’s arch, okay?

Buzz: Yep.

Rob: And when you’re looking at your—you know, to let people like, “Well, I don’t have a story. I’m a bookkeeper.” I’m like, everybody has a story. Everybody has a story. But really, it’s not about your story. It’s about—it’s about the person. It’s about the person’s story, bringing them into the story and making them the hero, right? Make them the hero. So that means you the guide.

28:36 | Making the Customer the Hero, Not Yourself

Rob: So I—you—I love to use Star Wars. I’m a big Star Wars fan. And in every single one of the Star Wars—all six of the—or is there seven now? I can’t—I’ve lost track. But all the six of the ones that we recognize as actual Star Wars movies, there is a—an unsung—there’s a hero, right? And there’s—and they’re about to go on a journey, and they end up finding a guide. And through that, they guide them through the journey. And at the end, they end up discovering something that was unexpected. And that’s the hero’s arch, right?

And with that, though, you are the guide, right? You have—in your messaging, make your client the hero, and you are the person who guides them through that. Now you might use—like we—we don’t like to say help, like help is very soft. Like I don’t help people do stuff. I build marketing machines. I—I do not help.

I might—I might say guide, like I’ll guide you through the process if that’s what has to happen. But really, we want to take those action steps, right? You’re going to discover something through us, right? Or we’re going to fix this so you can be the hero. So you don’t have to be the carpenter to build the the cart. You’re the driver who drives the cart, right? So you’re making them the person who’s doing the action where they want to go. So I think that that parallel is awesome. And yes, the 1984 commercial, very cinematic, that’s what put them on the map.

29:55 | The I-We-You Paradox in Copywriting

Rob: Well, it did, and it didn’t say anything about them, didn’t have anything about their product if I remember correctly. It was their purpose. It was the breaking the mold of going against the man. Again, that was their why.

Apple doesn’t make the best product. Well, they did for a minute, but they don’t anymore. There’s—there’s people who are more innovative now. But their why has not changed. So the people who have bought into the why of Apple will continue to buy a subpar product for a while because of the why. If they only bought because there was the best, they would be like me where I went to Samsung. I consider their stuff more innovative, and so I buy Samsung now, right, because I was tired of overpaying for stuff that wasn’t innovative anymore, right?

Now, it’s one of those things to where a lot of people end up going through is they try to make themselves the hero inside of any of the marketing messages. And as a business, you can’t—no matter if we’re talking B2B, B2C, you’re not the hero. And we all fall down that same path. We’ve all—we’ve all messed that up inside of our marketing messaging. I was looking at some of our own marketing messaging the other day, and I’m like, well, we’re messed up right here. But when we designed it the very first time, didn’t see it because we’re too close to it, right?

Buzz: And that’s—and that’s one of the biggest and hardest things. Someone goes, “Well, you know, you design a website, and you have comments about your own websites all the time.” Like I can look at my own stuff that I just designed the day before and find problems and tweaks that I’d want to make to it in a day, right?

31:01 | Homepage Mistakes and Messaging the Wrong Way

Buzz: I mean, there’s—there’s a quick—now, there’s something that’s really easy. You can be as close as you want to it, and it’s a little trick that I—that I teach folks when I do speaking gigs. We talk about the I-We-You paradox, okay? The—okay, so when you were just talking about, I was like, “Yeah, we’re”—and “we do it”—”shoot, I—I—I caught myself just the other day going, ‘Wow, we have a bunch of I-WEs in here'”—right?

And it’s—it’s the—you go and read your homepage, the easiest place to look for—it’s usually where consultative—consultative people and people who are service-based will be there. And what they’re talking about is they’ll end up first saying that we are the best, we have all the tools, we have the best people, we’ve been around long enough, or it’s founder-led. I—I—I—I—I can go to your website and you get hear and us and I more than you see—and I’m talking like four to one. Like you need to hear “you” and “your” four to one to every I, we, or us. If you don’t like that, then you do need to look at it.

And you will—and when you start using “you” and “your,” the words will—the—the sentences will start rewriting themselves because you’ll start putting the paradigm to them, pointing it back—the lens back at them, because they’re there to fix their problem. If you make the homepage about them, you can then get permission to talk about yourself in the subsequent pages.

32:24 | Why About Us Belongs in the Footer

Rob: I like that. That’s—that’s a good analogy there. And—and that’s also why that falls into the same piece. You don’t put an “about us” page inside of all—inside of your main header because it’s all about you. It’s all about you. You put the “about”—you put “about us” either at the bottom of a homepage after your call to action because some people do want to know who they’re talking to, but you want to put it after the other heroes. So they always say best leaders eat last. So when you come to your messaging, you get talked about last.

I’ll steal the piece from Donald Miller for the Story Brand approach and say it needs to go into the junk drawer. I love when he called it the junk drawer because really, that’s what the footer is, especially in the B2B world. It’s the junk drawer. It’s where you shove everything.

Buzz: Oh yeah, well, and you have to because no one—very few B2B companies do one thing, right? They’re known for one thing, but they’re—the way that they’re known for that is for all the things they do.

So a well-marketed firm is got one thing. Like right now, we’re looking at our website, and we thought we were talking about how—like the whole choose your own adventure, which is what we do. We’re a choose your own adventure marketing firm. So we meet people where they’re at. They want to do it themselves? Great. Here are the tools to do it themselves, and we have DIY strategies and all that stuff that goes along with it, da da da. You want to do it with us? Okay, great. We’ll do it with you. Boom, done, done, done. And or no, I—I’m not the expert. I don’t want to be the expert. I want you to do it for me. Okay, great.

34:00 | Choosing the Right Website Strategy: Journey Mapping

Buzz: And so we built this 35-page website that lets people choose their own adventures, like those old choose your adventure books we used to flip through and figure out—and like, well, what if I did it this way? Oh, I died. Oh, what if I did it this way? Right? That’s—that’s what we allowed for. And so we built the whole website that way.

But we found out that people—that’s not what they need. They don’t need to to choose their adventure. They need to identify how they’re going to solve their perfect—their—their biggest problem right now. And so we’re rewriting the entire website right now to focus on that one thing.

Rob: Right. We’re doing the same thing. That’s what I’m going to be working on for the rest of the day after I get done doing podcasts, because we’re—we’re changing up what we’re doing. We have mistakes that are inside of there. And I’m going to go through, and I’m going to play with it.

And I was thinking about the whole journey map. And what made me kind of think about the journey map, and I haven’t looked at your website. I’m going to look at it because now I’m curious of how you guys are doing it. What made me think about that same kind of approach was my 10-year-old daughter went through, and she got—believe it or not, book from school. And inside one of those things, what are you—you know, you pick one, and then you go to the next step. I was like, I kind of like that. Are you looking for this? Because then you can figure out where you are. That’s no different than building a journey map inside of marketing.

And I was watching her. She’d never done one before. She goes, “I don’t know what this is.” And I’m like, “Oh, this is gonna be really fun. We can really—” and I—maybe I was thinking, I was like, “Man, that would work really well for our website.” Yeah, and it’s one of those things to where everybody’s journey—they’re in a different spot for where they’re going to start.

35:40 | No Website is Ever “Done” — Continuous Tweaking Needed

Rob: It doesn’t matter if you are a car wash, if you are a big multi—if—if you’re a big—big multi-million dollar public company. You’re—you’re playing on a different game field, for one. You have a whole entire marketing for—agency—firm that works for you. They’re all independent. It’s a marketing department, right? I mean, they don’t even understand how everything else kind of works outside in the real world.

So I mean, it’s one of those things to where that journey is everything as far as what it is. And you’re going to make mistakes along the way, and you’re going to have to tweak it. That’s why no website is ever static. You have to be able to tweak it based on that data.

Buzz: 100%. And it’s not always the prettiest website either that works.

37:00 | Pretty vs. Practical: What Works in Website Design

Buzz: Yeah, like I tell people all the time, like, you know, I’m a designer at heart. I’m an artist at heart. And so I like things to look good, right? But I have launched ugly websites because it didn’t need to be pretty. It did—it wasn’t a pretty business. And anybody who thought it was—if—if you came to the website and it looked too pretty, it was probably too expensive, right? Because the people were competing on price and not on quality, right?

And so I think that pretty and—what do you want to call it?—elegant and all those—those words that we use—yes, in the B2B world, you actually do have a lot of that. Unfortunately, what happens is that it ends up getting stuffy. So when you go to look at my website, you’ll see we have our loud colors, the big blue. We have the—the dark blue, but the—the bright—we have a bright blue that goes off of that, a white. It’s a bright—or a burnt orange that’s a bright burnt orange in there.

And so we have these vibrant, contrasting colors that you don’t normally see in a B2B space. And our logo is—is a script logo. It’s a calligraphy logo, right? Okay, very simple, “buzzworthy,” and then “marketing.” That’s it. There’s nothing else—no—no like we have a little hexagon for an O, and that’s about it. And that—there’s a story behind that, but nobody cares, right?

Is really that the first line that’s going to be replacing right now, which is kind of a we statement, right? So we broke our own rule as far as that goes. But with that said, after that, it’s all about, “Hey, marketing’s hard. Marketing sucks. There’s so many people out there selling snake oil, and blah, blah, blah. Let us help you figure out what’s actually going to work for you. Let’s meet you where you’re at.” Here’s our choose adventure. And it’s like so we got the DIY, the DWY, and the DFY—all of that, right there.

The images of those are very a—not abstract, but they’re very simplified, right? They’re not staunchy, that you know—so the colors are fun. The layout is not—doesn’t take itself so seriously, where a lot of people, they get into these really bold, like maroon colors and very serious colors. And you’re just like—and now I feel like I’m gonna have to, like, get a suit and tie just to talk to these people on the phone, right?

39:27 | Authenticity in Branding: Be Real, Be Relatable

Buzz: And I’m like, dude, people buy from people. Just because it’s a business serving business, guess what? Who owns the business? People. And what’s the other business? Oh, bunch of people. And they’re going to do business together. Business is just a interaction, a relationship that happens to have some money tied to it. That’s all it is.

And people try to to dilute themselves to thinking, “I have to have this certain personification.” It’s like I’m wearing a polo shirt. For those who are just listening, I—I—I wear a polo shirt. I don’t—and when I do wear a jacket, I went to a client, and I did wear a sport coat and a button-down shirt—no tie. You—I—for what I do, you don’t need it. And if you need me to wear it, we’re probably not a culture fit. And that’s okay.

Rob: 100%. Because I—I mean, if you look at—if you look at most of our podcasts, and Dean was picking on me about this the other day, he goes, “You’re almost dressed the same thing every time.” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, I am.” It’s a—normally, I’m wearing my black t-shirt. Doesn’t even say the company name on it. Decided to mix it up today because we were talking about it yesterday.

But I’m wearing my black shirt. A lot of times, I have my Nike pullover jacket that I wear, probably way too much because it’s still a little—that chilly in here in Colorado, especially in the basement office. But it’s—it’s one of those things to where it doesn’t really matter because I’m not here to impress on that level. I’m here to bring my expertise and to be able to help you.

And inside of your piece, if we’re not a fit, I—there was a time—if we go way back in—on the way-back machine and look back, there was a time I cared about all that. But now I’m more about—if we’re not a right fit, great. I can’t make everybody in this world happy. Can make some of the people happy some of the times, you can’t make all the people happy all the time.

41:00 | Culture and Core Value Fit in Marketing and Sales

Buzz: And in our focus framework, we talk about culture and core value fits. So in your marketing, if you can work in your core values, you’re going to attract people with the similar core values. And when that happens, your trust factor goes up, and which then reduces the friction, which then speeds up your sales process.

And then once they become a client, if they have a good culture fit, that means that they—they operate in the same vein as you do, meaning that now how you guys go through projects are very similar. So then there’s less friction in actually doing the work, which then makes you more efficient, which means you get better output, usually, and—and outcomes for the client. And that means that you have less overhead because now things are running smooth because that friction costs you profit, okay?

And so what we tell people, we call it the perfectly profitable prospect profile, or the P3P. And it takes an ICP, and it starts injecting our core values, our culture, and a couple other ingredients in there to make something like the—like when we talk about a target market, we’re like, “Okay, yeah, you have the bullseye. Then you got the circle inside the bullseye.” So the red—the red ring around the green dot, we want to create—take a Sharpie and put a dot in the center of that red dot, and that’s your P3P.

Now, the distance from that is very—is much greater before you get out of the bullseye. Because if you’re just looking for the red or the green circle in the center, you’re just going to hit a lot of twos and fours and threes and 15s and stuff like that, right? But if you are—if you’re laser focused—remember, we talked about that pinhole—we’re just looking at the pinhole; we’re going to—when we miss, we’re more likely to hit the greens and the red dots and the circle versus the twos and the threes and stuff like that. And you’re going to win not just from the sale, but from your onboarding and your retention and your expansion and your advocacy. It’s going to pay over and over and over again.

43:00 | Saying No to the Wrong Clients to Protect Growth

Buzz: Every time you say yes to a bad prospect, you’ve said no to two or three other great prospects because they’re going to take up all of the bandwidth it would have taken to handle those other three good prospects.

Rob: I agree 100%. I had somebody the other day go, “Well, since you’re bringing all these done for you in that are going to be a package that’s going to be in here, we want to be—we want to move more people that way.” And I said, “No, our prof—our profitability is a lot better if we bring people into the listings engine and help them in the coaching side, and we have them inside that listings engine. And it’s a—done—they’re doing it for themselves. For one, they’re going to get better results because they’re going to learn how to do it. They know their business better than anybody else knows their business. They know the problems they’re solving. So if they follow our blueprints, they’re going to be a lot better off. And we make more money, right?”

And they’re like, “Well, how do we make more money? These other plans cost more.” I said, “They cost more, but they also take more staff, and they take more time for us to be able to go through and do. That’s right. And that—and that’s why I love having the tools to be able to go in and be able to do. And if I was to guess, you probably are in the same boat.”

44:48 | Tech-Enabled Services vs. Full Service Models

Buzz: I have—we have tech-enabled—martech, what they call it—marketing technology—for those who need that. We reserve a certain percentage of our bandwidth for done for you in our fractional spaces. And those are going to be people who are ready for it.

See, a lot of people try to sell a service that people aren’t ready for. And so what we do is if I’m on a call with somebody and they’re saying, “Well, this is where I’m at.” And I go, “Well, then you’re not ready for consulting yet. Right? You’re not ready for a done for you—one, you might not have the cash flow; two, you just don’t have the systems that are required for our done for you services to help you.”

Now, if we’re building out their CRM or something like that, and they’re like, “Hey, I’m not a techie,” that’s fine. That’s a one-time cost, right? And we—get—plug that in and, “Okay, now here, use this other technology that’ll get you more sales calls to put into that CRM. And then once you get to this certain point, then we’re going to talk about the next step. But let’s not build out a Ferrari, when we—or let’s say a Cadillac—when we have a Chevy—uh—budget for one, right? And let’s not get a Corvette when we actually need a minivan right now.”

Rob: I agree with that. And it’s—it’s also why you—you put a starting price at least, or put some of your pricing out there, especially in the B2B world, in my opinion, because I—I hate the B2B websites that put it behind a whole entire gate that I have to talk to somebody. All that does is makes me think it’s going to be super expensive, and they’re going to gauge me. They’re going to price me on what they think I’ll pay for it.

46:00 | Pricing Transparency in B2B Marketing

Buzz: Well, it’s not as much of that. I mean, that’s—that’s a cynical way of looking at it. And there are people who will do that. So I’m not saying that you’re—you’re wrong. But the reason they don’t put it out there is they don’t want to compete on price. And this is going to be a premium product. So if you’re going to—if you need to go through a two-step process of sales, you’re usually not buying something that’s $99 very few people out there, right?

So now I have software out there that you can buy. Cheaper versions of—I still put my $389 a month on that because I know that people who understand getting 12 sales calls for $389 a month is cheap in the B2B world. It is, right? They’re going to—they’re coming into for the demo going, “How are you doing it for that cheap?” And then we can show them how we’ve leveraged AI to save them the time so that they’re only talking to people who are actually ready to be talking to them on, say, LinkedIn, right?

Rob: Correct. When we got AI, AI’s changed that whole entire piece.

Buzz: Oh, yeah. But the thing is, is that the AI only speeds things up. It doesn’t make things better. So what makes us different is that we actually get their messaging—uh—set up properly in the system and then let the system do what it does—like help them with the conversations with AI saying, “Hey, this is the personality type you’re talking to.” “Oh, okay, so I don’t want to be pushy. I need to talk about this and that,” you know? And—and doing full profiles, these are things—these are—this is way tech can help people become AI optimized. That’s what we’re looking to do. We want to use AI to make you Superman.

Rob: Right, we want you—what AI is an assistant.

48:00 | How AI Supports (Not Replaces) Strategy

Buzz: It is—well, we call it Amazing Implementation.

Rob: Yeah, yeah.

Buzz: Well, and we—we use it as a serum, right? It’s a leverage point where it’s like, hey, if I wanted to get to know about you from LinkedIn, I could have to go through your whole profile, then maybe go over and see what you’re doing on Facebook, maybe go over and see what your website—but in our system, it has all of that right there when you connect. So now when you reply to whatever we’re trying to get you to start talking about, all I got to do is look to to one side and go, “Now that—here it is.”

Now we—we—we got off this tangent here, too. So I bring it back is that—that technology is built around a strategy of we want to talk to people on LinkedIn to get them on a sales call. But you don’t just go out and ask for sales calls. There’s a strategy behind it. And we use the technology—like you were coming back to what we were talking about, we use that technology to let people help themselves by letting AI help them be the best version of themselves in front of those people that we’re getting them in front of automatically.

48:45 | How Simply Be Found and Buzzworthy Marketing Align

Rob: I love it. That’s a good way of looking at that side. I mean, there—there’s all these different pieces, and there’s all the pieces that are out there. I mean, we could go on about how AI’s kind of changed stuff. We could have a whole another—whole episode about that one. I know you do have a hard stop, so I want to be able to, you know, respect you on that side.

49:00 | Where to Find Michael Buzinski and Final Thoughts

Rob: If anybody is inside of the B2B world and they want to get a hold of you, Buzz, how do they do that? What’s the best way and what’s that approach?

Buzz: Buzzworthy.biz is a great place to start. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Michael Buzinski. Or if you want to check out a strategy book, a really simple website marketing strategy book, check out my book “Rule of 26” at ruleof26.com, get a free copy.

Rob: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I—I almost said “us,” but Dean’s not on this one today. So, you know, habits across the board. Thank you so much, Buzz.

Buzz: Thank you.