Jeremy Weisz 5:22
Wow, how do just security companies do marketing right? I mean, I think it applies to all companies, but we’ll speak specifically to security companies.
Alano Vasquez 5:33
What I’ve found really interesting is some of the best security companies are bred from a background of an engineering first background, right. So they’re not marketing first or not sales first, they’re just trying to build a really good products, really good services. And so they have this amazing product, which at times never gets to see the light of day because there isn’t the sales or the marketing engine behind it. But we see the companies that have really grown and scaled raised capital, hit that billion dollar mark plus having a strong product offering, and then eventually kind of growing into the marketing and sales component, right. But quite often, companies do hit a ceiling. And we’ve seen it at the $10 million mark, the $25 million mark, where they just stay engineering focused. And they never really are able to build a brand and generate the pipeline and awareness that they know, you need to scale to be the nine figure or billion dollar company.
Jeremy Weisz 6:29
What are common questions you get in that regard? Are they asking you, when do we start this? At what point or what do they ask you when they come to you?
Alano Vasquez 6:39
It’s such a mix. It’s such a mixed bag, and I think it kind of goes back to our own branding and positioning. Today as we’ve niched for cybersecurity, I mean, we’ve offered everything from branding, web development, web design, and content. So we see a wide array of leads. We’ve seen people come in that have needed the ground up build from brand web and content, but they’re coming in just asking for something like SEO, or ad spend, or like Ad Management. And then we just have to keep peeling back the layers of the onion to reveal like, well, actually, our CEO just increased our year over year growth by 20%. And we don’t have the leads to satisfy that. Our sales team isn’t set up to satisfy that. So beyond just better SEO and Ad Management, we need a good strategy, a marketing campaign that’s going to actually help hit these greater business goals.
Jeremy Weisz 7:30
What do you see as the biggest problems in the space?
Alano Vasquez 7:36
I would say, kind of going back to like, what I mentioned is these engineering first approaches are good at a product level, they’re really proud of their retention and building better products than others. But getting out of the engineering first mindset, and then talking to your audience talking to the prospects that you want to work with. And really getting to know those personas to see what it is that they want and need, and not imposing on them what it is you think that they want to need, and talking to them in a language that they don’t understand. Even a CISO, who is very technical, prefers a level of communication that is more like business to human and not just business to business, all the way down to like sock analysts, security architects, they have so many needs beyond what these engineering first companies think that they have. So really being able to understand that personas better is huge, and being able to take these engineering first companies and building them into market leaders.
Jeremy Weisz 8:36
I’ve heard you talk about Alano, speaking to the buyer in different aspects of the journey, right. And I’d love for you to talk about how you see content marketing for these companies and how it affects the buyer journey.
Alano Vasquez 8:54
Yeah, I mean, content should help serve the entire brand buyer journey. If you keep it in the simple buckets of threes of someone who’s either problem aware, solution aware or vendor aware. You can say they’re in the awareness phase, consideration phase, decision phase, there’s really like five to seven phases all the way past purchase, there’s retention, right, there’s loyalty. So you should be creating content that delivers value along each phase of the buyer journey, a blog, a podcast could be good for awareness. an infographic, a case study could be good for consideration. A battle card a comparison guide could be good for decision and then for retention and loyalty, there’s a bunch of other things that you can do, like inviting them to exclusive events content spiff programs, rewards and content you can create to retain these customers. So content is the fuel for the vehicle and if you run out of that fuel, you’re either going to miss out on certain areas of building out that buyer journey of content. And then what happens is it becomes a very heroic effort for the sales team to try to bridge that gap. And I did talk to a security company earlier this week that has no content. And they have turned over a salesperson after salesperson, because a cold call to chief information security officer who’s very busy at a fortune 500 or fortune 1000 company is not going to work, right? Especially if you need to have 10 to 15 touch points. And if they have five other decision makers who have to come in, you’re not going to win that opportunity.
Jeremy Weisz 10:35
And you find the asynchronous content, it does something want to build trust without somebody have to be there by the time they get someone on the phone, they have satisfied some of their questions and learned a little bit more.
Alano Vasquez 10:50
Exactly, yeah, I was speaking with the CEO and founder of a content software platform called Hushly, his name was Geoff. And their tool allows you to kind of curate content, like on demand. So imagine we had created 12 pieces of content that serve all the way from awareness, consideration and decision. Typically, people are used to getting dripped content, there’s lead scoring, and it takes weeks or months to get all the content that’s there at your fingertips. So if we know that the security space just has long buyer journeys, and a lot of decision makers involved, what if you could almost serve up content like Netflix and Amazon Prime does, you get done watching one cooking show, and I recommend six other cooking shows. So if you consume one piece of content, like a blog, or a podcast with Hushly or a video piece of content, it’s going to summon up a bunch of other relevant content. And so by leveraging technology, like Hushly in particular, we’re able to then speed up the entire buyer journey, and get the sales process moving a lot quicker.
Jeremy Weisz 11:55
Yeah, I love that. I’m bringing up if you’re listening to the audio, you’ll see you can watch the video as well. And you can see I’m bringing up cyberwhyze.com because I wanted to show this for a second, Alano because you eat your own dog food in that respect. And so when I was poking around your website, we’re on the page where it says create cybersecurity marketing campaigns that attract ideal customers, and you have this cheat sheet. So I’d love for you to talk about that.
Alano Vasquez 12:27
Yeah, definitely. So we’re big fans of not just building a pipeline with leads that don’t matter. We want to be able to attract ideal customers, like we all have that one or two customer where if like, we could just scale copy and paste them, we would be happy. These are customers that pay on time, that pay what you expect to be paid, and that are just awesome to work with. So that’s what we try to model our customers potential pipeline after. And so with this marketing campaign cheat sheet that helps connect the dots of those more lofty business objectives like, hey, we really want to focus on working with this particular type of customer, whether it’s a persona type, or whether it’s a company type a company size, or revenue. And this marketing campaign cheat sheet, provides a high level way of doing that. So it ties in business objectives, assigns key results. And that points to several marketing tactics that you could use to implement to help get those results and get those ideal customers in your pipeline.
Jeremy Weisz 13:27
What we’re looking at too, is just several cyberwhyze.com/cybersecurity-marketing-campaign-cheat-sheet/, is there a specific icon people can go to? I guess, under the resources, people can check out marketing campaign cheat sheet. The other thing I want to ask about is when someone you know learns about this, like what’s the next step? Right? And you have a brand scale 360 consultation? How does that work?
Alano Vasquez 13:57
So here’s what’s cool. After you download the marketing cheat sheet here, you’re actually provided with a webinar afterwards that shows you how to use it. So you can begin to start to implement your own marketing campaigns if you have the team and the resources to do it. If not, we can help you. But usually, a marketing campaign is a bigger endeavor, right? So before a security company just says, hey, let’s get into bed with this marketing agency sign a big six figure contract, and then hope they could hit our ambitious pipeline goal of 10 to $20 million, there’s a crawl Walk Run approach, right? And instead of having an agency just prescribed some canned solution, we’d like to kind of build the proposal with the client. So we do a form of discovery, which is very common in the security space doing assessments much, many security service providers do it and so they’re pretty comfortable doing it. So we have the brand scale 360 opportunity assessment that we do. That helps us to better understand their business goals, their marketing goals. We audit their current brand, website and content so we could provide a marketing roadmap That ultimately lends itself to a successful marketing campaign. And in the process that allows them to get to understand our process, how we operate, get to know us as people, they get time with our subject matter experts, who are also cybersecurity specialists as well. And that gets them a much better understanding and a taste for what they can expect on the other side of much larger marketing initiative.
Jeremy Weisz 15:26
People who go through this, what do they say is the most valuable piece and it was probably a lot of valuable pieces. But what sticks out to some of the companies you work with it goes through the brand skill 360?
Alano Vasquez 15:40
I would say once they finally see the dots connected between what it is that they’re actually asking for, if a client is saying, hey, I want to improve SEO, but after we talk to their CEO, or their CTO, their CRO, we start to uncover that there are several other things driving that ask that are even well beyond SEO. And by the time we end up autopsy, and everything from the marketing spend, we start to reveal things that were causing their problems before that they didn’t quite understand. So while they thought that maybe they just needed more air in their tires for their marketing vehicle, they needed a new engine. So we’ll go on, we’ll look at their spend and say, hey, why are you only investing 10% of your marketing budget, in content marketing, and you’re also complaining that you’re having poor SEO performance? Let’s get that up to 30 40% of your total marketing budget. So there’s a lot of aha moments and just looking at the data, and then connecting the dots and saying like, well, how many MQL and SQLs do we need to actually hit our pipeline goals? And we bring all of that together. And it’s things that they don’t always do, soup to not but they have disparate data points, and we bring it together in a comprehensive way. And it really offers that aha moment.
Jeremy Weisz 16:55
Yeah, I see. As I’m scrolling through here, I see Cisco on here, I see Webroot on here FireEye, Westcon. Webroot sticks out to me. Talk about Webroot for a second.
Alano Vasquez 17:08
Yeah, we worked with Webroot from the beginning of the pandemic, they were doing tons of events every year at BlackHat, and they were showing up with their physical booth presence, as you can imagine, and that was a big channel for them for sales opportunities and leads. And they sell largely through a channel, right. So they have a lot of service providers value added resellers that resell their security software solutions. And so once the pandemic hit, they had to get creative and figure out a way that they can continue to exhibit. And much of us as we know, during the pandemic these quote unquote virtual trade shows were just snooze fests. People would just have their avatar pop up and actually attending, they were just going because they were forced to and it was not engaging. So we actually ended up developing a virtual booth that was completely interactive. So you get to go through this web portal, there’s a booth attendant, and then there’s this very conditional path, you can go down if you’re MSP, you could go this way. If you’re a value added reseller, you could go down this path all the way to the point of being able to figure out how do I better sell Webroot? How am I supported, and it was very tailored to their specific buyer journey. And that virtual booth experience was really cool. And I know they’re still promoting it today. And yeah, that was just something so outside of the box of what we had seen in the past, and it was fun to collaborate on that project with Webroot.
Jeremy Weisz 18:34
So I wonder why cybersecurity? I want to talk about niching for a second.
Alano Vasquez 18:39
Yeah, it’s interesting, we knew the market was growing quick. Like I said, it’s a $200 billion market today. And it’s expected to grow 10 times. So there’s a lot of good economics behind it, which an agency should typically look for when they’re niching down. But there was also us just autopsy on our current revenue. And as you can see here, Westcon, Cisco, FireEye, SecurityScorecard. There was a point when we finally were like, we need to look at the current revenue of customers we have because years ago, we were just focused on b2b tech. And it was kind of all over the place. And we realized we had about a 60% concentration just in working with cybersecurity companies. And so we decided to niche down. And then within a year, we arranged like, number one ranking on Google for cybersecurity, marketing agency, cybersecurity content, so on so forth, and then that really just brought an influx of demand for us. And it’s worked out really well so far, not even just for the prospects Jeremy, but also for the talent. So we recently have brought on a gal named Danielle Duclos, who is former SVP of marketing over at Bluefin, a security payment company. And she found us just on Google, after she had left her company like literally the next day, she said, and she was so inspired by what it is that we’re building here. And what it is we’re trying to do to kind of help this space at a larger scale. She asked if she could come and work for us. And now we have her plugged into really cool projects. Like web overhauls and brand overhauls. We’re doing with companies like SANS Institute, SecurityScorecard, and so forth. So it’s helped us to niche down and specialize both in terms of growing brand awareness pipeline, but also just in attracting like world class talent.
Jeremy Weisz 20:29
Love it. This is something actually you instruct the companies you work with to do you have a niche funnels product.
Alano Vasquez 20:38
Yep. Niche Funnels is the product that we’ve built for companies that have not currently or have not done a great job of trying to target specific audiences. I’m saying like, all the way to the point of on your website, saying, here’s the industries that we serve, you could be a service provider, you could be a SaaS company. And if you were to autopsy any service provider, or to autopsy, their current client mix, they’re typically going to see that they’re working anywhere from healthcare companies, FinServ, government, manufacturing, agriculture, and then kind of reflecting internally and saying, are we built a little better to specialize and work with a particular vertical, not saying you have to say no to any particular prospects that come through, but saying, we’re willing to take that leap of faith and launch a marketing campaign, targeting a specific vertical, like, let’s say, financial services. So you go down this path of creating, let’s say, 10, to 15, pieces of content from blogs, case studies, comparison guides, use cases, threat reports that are completely focused on financial service, then you forklift that into a very targeted ad campaign somewhere, like on LinkedIn, where you can target groups that have chief information security officers or sock analysts, in groups specifically for financial services, and then you just see such a greater conversion rate and level of engagement with the content because it’s so tailored to them. So that’s what that niche funnels product or program is all about today.
Jeremy Weisz 22:15
You know, I see a lot of advantages and benefits to niching. I’m sure you come across people who have a hesitation, right? They feel like they’re going to alienate Well, we still have another like, in your case, is 60%, you still have another 40% of other customers, and you’re almost not speaking to them anymore. The messaging isn’t? What do you say to people who have that hesitation? Who may say, we have all these clients, we don’t want to alienate them?
Alano Vasquez 22:43
Yeah, I would say that that’s what a majority of people do say. I almost think it’s a biological thing, right? We’re not built, I feel like as humans to laser focus in on any one thing, because we typically operate from a place of scarcity at times. And we want to be able to say, we can serve anybody. And so it’s kind of putting aside that pre-wired mindset and saying, you know what, maybe there are riches and niches as the saying goes, and then being able to do it in a way where you’re not taking your entire marketing budget, and sinking it into one vertical. But being very strategic about kind of piecing enough of a chunk out of your marketing budget so you can test out verticals. And there’s a way to do it at an MVP level, you don’t have to rework your entire brand to make it seem like you’re only serving one customer type. But you do need to create content that allows them to believe that that is a focus of yours. So it doesn’t have to be on the homepage. But it could have a landing page, and it should have relevant content linking to that page. And the other thing I see typically is people that are unwilling to niche down and may just be because they’re too new of a business, and they haven’t had that experience serving enough different customers. And at that point, it’s totally fine. And I probably wouldn’t recommend niche funnels, and I would prefer for them to kind of continue to live out the business and see which industries they like working with. So there isn’t enough data that is required. I feel like to kind of take that vertical leap with niche funnels.
Jeremy Weisz 24:21
Yeah, on one of your points is you don’t necessarily have to go all in, you could have different landing pages that serve the niches, and in which case, great. So you have one for manufacturers, you have one for health care. And so when someone of that particular niche, you go, hey, check out this information that does speak to them. So you’re saying you have to revamp the whole website, but you could have a specific page tailored to them.
Alano Vasquez 24:45
Exactly. Yep. A funnel is we could call it Yep. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 24:50
You have a company, a service provider in the security space, and I’d love to learn more from that standpoint. Just getting into the weeds a little bit more about kind of how you serve competition.
Alano Vasquez 25:02
Yeah, like I said earlier, I mean, we thought once we niched down in cybersecurity that, it was going to be very linear. But after jumping into it, we’re like, hey, we’re working with brands like SANS Institute on the education side, to distributors, like Synix or Comstore at the time, to software manufacturers like SecurityScorecard. And then several other service providers who usually are called managed service providers or managed security service providers MSSPs. But as the market evolves, they’re starting to focus more on managed detection and response. So we have a service provider we’re working with, that was focused originally on the service, MSP side of the business, and now they’re focused on managed detection and response. And within that they had not really tried to claim their space, their vertical, or their niche at that point. And they did come to us with a very tactical marketing request, that we then discovered that they actually need to roll out a larger marketing campaign. So after going through the whole brand, scale, 360, and the opportunity assessment, we developed a few marketing campaigns that would help them identify a few key verticals that they could go after. And that’s helped them tremendously, like I said, in just engagement with their content, conversion rates, recognition as being the thought leader, because at the end of the day, it really is about those people willing and bold enough to choose a focus, and then to articulate a consistent claim of expertise. And then finally, kind of add the missing skills. Whereas most people believe, and they become complacent, saying, once we become experts at this particular vertical, then we’ll go and we’ll market it. And we say, hey, maybe there’s a way to kind of go to market while still also learning and adding those missing skills as you can go. And that’s what they’ve done. And then there’s been such a great feedback loop and how it’s helped evolve their product, because now they’re building it around a very specific type of customer.
Jeremy Weisz 27:02
Love it, your background starts off in sales and selling. So I’m sure this comes up when you’re doing your brand scale 360. And when you’re talking to companies, what are some of the advice you’ve given on selling?
Alano Vasquez 27:23
Always be closing? Just kidding. Yeah, I think a big thing for me, and it’s funny, because I use the otter app on my Zoom calls to see what we’re saying, afterwards, I get that transcript. And I’m always looking at how much am I talking versus letting the prospect talk? Right, I think if we can be more of elephants and less of hippos, meaning big ears and not big mouths, then we can get so much more value out of the conversation, just letting them talk. Prospects will try to get you on the call and say, hey, tell me about your business. But that’s not what they really want. They want to tell you about their problems, their pain. And I would recommend, talk to them about your business towards the very end once you’ve understood all of their problems and pain points. And that will help you better position your offering. So that’s been a really big one for us, since we take a very consultative approach. And I think a lot of security companies in the service space should focus on that as well, too. And it just builds a ton of rapport.
Jeremy Weisz 28:25
So just talk about that, right? Someone comes on with you on and they go, the first thing I say, hey, Alano, how you doing? Can you tell me more about your business? How do you flip that?
Alano Vasquez 28:36
Yeah, well, I usually tried to leave the call, I do pre indoctrinate the call a little bit, I send a video over prior to hopping on the first meeting, telling them like, hey, before we get on this call, I’m just going to prep you. I’m going to ask you a few questions about your business before I jump into us. So I can have kind of enough context to make sure that I’m recommending the right services or solutions for you. So that by the time they get on the call, they’re kind of expecting that. But in the event that I don’t, I’m not able to communicate that to them and right out of the gates like so tell us about your business. I typically flip it by just asking them, well, first, before I get into us, how did you find us? And they usually tell me that well, I was looking on Google. What were you searching for on Google? What else were you searching for on Google? Why were you searching that? And then all of a sudden, the conversations now flipped on them telling me about how they’re going to lose their job if they don’t double the pipeline in the next six months. And then of course, we’re here to help save them, right.
Jeremy Weisz 29:37
Yeah, I love that you said that because that is really understanding what their major issues and pain points are. And you can’t really speak to them without understanding them first. Right. So, I would love to hear more about, as far as when you’re talking to the client, what are some of the things you want to understand first before you kind of go into making recommendations or telling them more.
Alano Vasquez 30:11
So I usually try to hit all four points of a BANT, budget, authority, need, and timeline. It’s so easy. If you don’t have that, like post it, note it on your monitor. And when sales conversations get going, we as salespeople can get happier. And then the conversation just is over before we know it. And we’re like, oh, man, we didn’t even schedule a follow up call. We didn’t ask if they’re the only decision maker, we didn’t even ask the budget. So I typically try to hit on all of those. And we’ve done it either through the form of phone calls, or even like an intake. So we’ll send over like a 10 question intake, just a Google sheet that they could fill out. And we have dozens or hundreds of leads it have populated this before even talking to us, where they’re willing to kind of tell us their revenue goals, what hasn’t worked with their marketing, their current marketing budget, what they’re willing to invest, how soon they want to get started. So in some cases, before we even hop on the call, we’ve kind of knocked the whole band part out of the park. But hitting on those budget authority need and timelines are crucial, especially in the security space. When you’re providing a service that costs six figures and there’s four to six decision makers. You really can’t go past go and tell you hit on those.
Jeremy Weisz 31:30
I’m curious Alano, we take you back to Alano in high school, in college, okay. Most people are like, I want to be an agency owner when I grew up. What did you want to do when you’re younger?
Alano Vasquez 31:46
So in college, I majored in econ, I think I was just kind of following the herd of a few other friends who were in finance at that point. But once I got there, there was a program over at UC Santa Barbara where I went for econ. That was called the technology management program. And it was taught at the Bren School of Engineering, which is a really beautiful part of campus. And the professors weren’t just professors. They’re actually like venture capitalists, like from Santa Barbara, Montecito. Like some really big time people, I think we had a few special guests like the founder of doubleclick.com. Kevin, I can’t remember his last name, but like a multibillion dollar company come in. And we were just spending all of our classwork time putting together business plans, concepts, and then really just going down the path of operating like small business owners, and having these really talented professors and mentors pour into us. And then it was between this summer of junior and senior year, I actually took an internship for a marketing company called octagon sports marketing. And that was all the way out in South Africa. So I went to Cape Town. And I was there for almost three months, I went all by myself. So that was quite the adventure. And I worked with this firm, and we were focused on launching several activations around the World Cup. At that time, that was back in 2010. And so it was just so surreal being in such a different place in the world of going from Santa Barbara to South Africa, and just getting thrown into this mega agency, and huge responsibilities put on me, even as an intern, like I was cold calling people trying to set up pretty big meetings. And I even had just maybe one or two wins amongst that and got positive feedback from some of the leadership team, were a must have implanted something in my brain. And then fast forward a decade later, I’m running a marketing agency. So that’s how I’ve kind of tried to connect the dots of the past. And how did I arrive here? I think it was building blocks along the way for sure.
Jeremy Weisz 33:49
So, it sounded like you knew you want to do something in business at that point? In general?
Alano Vasquez 33:55
Yep. I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur of my own. At some point, I just didn’t know what that launching off point would look like. And I was actually laid off after my first job. And I was like, really kind of down and out. And I was like, man, maybe I shouldn’t be going down this path and working for startups and trying to do sales. But I got picked up by another friend of mine at the time. His name is Paul Hashemi, over at spinTouch. He put me in charge of sales. But when I started the company, I’m like, there’s no marketing here. So I had to put on my marketing hat, learn everything about brand, web, lead gen, building websites on WordPress, getting what I used as Photoshop at the time and running Google ads. And that gave me a lot of those kinds of notches on my belt that made me felt like I could eventually run my own agency. And after a few years of doing that, I branched out to launch our own agency.
Jeremy Weisz 34:48
What I find fascinating about you from my research, we’ll see if this is accurate because everything I Google is true. You put yourself through college? And how did you balance putting yourself through college? Paying for college? Actually, it’s a lot of work in education part.
Alano Vasquez 35:14
Yeah, well, I mean, my parents took care of me as best as they could all the way through high school. So I was pretty blessed. I got to go to private Elementary School, Catholic High School. But as you can imagine, that’s so darn expensive that almost zaps the entire education budget just in the first 18 years of life. So I enjoyed a glorious three or four years at a junior college here in Sacramento. I remember just taking art classes playing guitar, and doing other hippie things in between the breaks. And then I was like, Alright, I need to get the show on the road. And I was like, I’m just going to apply for some good schools. So I tried to UCLA, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, UC Davis, and I landed that, I got accepted at Santa Barbara. And I was like, I need to take this, this is a really good school. But I was like, I don’t have any money saved for college. So I had to go through that exhaustive effort of applying for grants, which I unfortunately didn’t get any at the time. And then just applying for private and federal loans. And so I racked up a pretty big college debt bill over just two years, but I was like, hey, this is expensive, I better get in and out of this higher-ed stuff pretty quick. And along the way, I had friends that were working at Starbucks, pizza shops, minimum wage, I was like, I didn’t think I was the quickest at learning some of these complex econ courses like game theory, and accounting. So I was like, I need as much hours to study as I can. So I ended up getting into personal training while I was there, and I would go over to different fraternities and sororities, and just try to meet people and put on these boot camps. And I found a gym owner in Santa Barbara, who gave me some space at his MMA gym, Valhalla gym in Santa Barbara on State Street. And I remember, I was just doing like two training sessions a week with like, 10 to 15 people in boot camp and making like a week’s wages, so that I could get back to focusing on studying and a little surfing in between.
Jeremy Weisz 37:14
So you really did have your own business? You started your own business in college.
Alano Vasquez 37:19
Yes, yep. Exactly.
Jeremy Weisz 37:22
I’m surprised you didn’t go on to like, own a chain of gyms or something like that after that.
Alano Vasquez 37:27
Yeah, I’ve mentored my brother in law and starting his gym, I helped him build his brand and website and we talked about going in and ownership with it. But it’s been fun, just kind of helping some people in the fitness space. Like my brother in law, he has a fitness company called Advanced Basics. And just seeing like, if we applied the branding that I know, and the content marketing, it’s really helped blow up his business. So I think that would be if I ever did sell the agency, that would be something I might look back at doing. Even if I was just a personal trainer working for someone else. I love the fitness space so much as you and I talk about quite a bit. It really is where my heart is at.
Jeremy Weisz 38:07
Alano, first of all, I want to thank you. I have one last question. And I know you read a lot. So I’d love to know, resources or books that have helped you. Before you answer that I want to point people to cyberwhyze.com to check out and learn more. And so Alano, talk about some of the books or resources that you’ve learned throughout the years that other people should check out.
Alano Vasquez 38:37
Well, I’ll give you the spectrum. I’ll give you the first book I read in business ever, all the way back to when I was in junior college, to the more recent book that I’ve read that I think is really valuable too. So I mean, everyone’s heard of it, How to Win Friends and Influence People, right, you can cover a lot more territory in just five minutes showing genuine interest in somebody else than you could in five years trying to get them interested in you. And that’s why it’s always so flattering when people just keep asking us about ourselves. Even if we’re a little more introverted, which I can be at time. People are really trying to get to know you and you get to open up. And that book taught me a lot. So I always highly recommend that book, even if it’s the first business book you pick up to more recently, I have read this on a couple occasions now. But Blair Enns The Win Without Pitching Manifesto. Blair Enns also has a really good podcast called the 2Bobs podcast, where they really talk about value based pricing and helping out agencies not just give away their services as a time and material billable, but trying to develop something unique enough to offer a unique audience where you can remove yourself from time and materials and sell based off of outcome. With the furthest extent of that being, can you get a percentage of success for what your client is going to ultimately achieve? And beyond the upside on the profit side and maybe even reduce some of your initial costs. And so that book has taught me a ton, The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, that is just, I feel like I’m still trying to absorb a lot of it and apply it. But that’s a really good one I’d recommend too.
Jeremy Weisz 40:14
Alano, I want to be the first one to thank you. Check out cyberwhyze.com more episodes of inspiredinsider.com Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Alano.
Alano Vasquez 40:23
All right, take care. Thanks, Jeremy.
