614: George’s Farewell Top 10 Episodes

After over 265 episodes, three awards and thousands of listeners tuned in from over 50 countries, the time has come to bid farewell to our host, George Leith. Throughout his time with us, George has brought a wealth of knowledge, insight, and expertise to the Conquer Local Podcast. With his distinctive voice and engaging style, George has tackled a diverse range of topics related to sales, marketing, entrepreneurship and business growth, as he always delivered practical tips and actionable advice to our listeners.

From his interviews with industry leaders and experts to his deep dives into emerging trends and technologies, George has helped us navigate the ever-changing digital marketing and sales landscape. He has challenged us to think differently, take risks, and strive for excellence in everything we do.

In this special episode, George takes a trip down memory lane to recap the top 10 most popular episodes of the podcast, and as we look back, we are reminded of the wisdom and expertise that George has brought to the podcast. Let’s hear from some of our industry’s most innovative and inspiring leaders to better understand the strategies and tactics driving success in today’s business world.

As we say goodbye to George, we are grateful for his contributions to the Conquer Local community and the Vendasta ecosystem. He left a permanent mark on the podcast and its listeners, and we will miss his wit, wisdom, and infectious enthusiasm. We wish him all the best in his future ventures and look forward to continuing the journey he has helped us embark upon. Thank you, George, “we’ll see you when we see you.”

Stay tuned, the Conquer Local Podcast will return with a new host and episodes!

Conquer Local is presented by Vendasta. We have proudly served 5.5+ million local businesses through 60,000+ channel partners. Learn more about Vendasta and we can help your organization or learn more about Vendasta’s Affiliate Program and how our listeners (like yourself) are making up to $10,000 off referrals.

Are you an entrepreneur, salesperson, or marketer? Keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

George’s Farewell Top 10 Episodes

Introduction

George Leith: Welcome to this episode of the Conquer Local Podcast. After five years, over 250 episodes and tens of thousands of downloads and all sorts of amazing guests, this will be my last episode of the Conquer Local Podcast. The brand will live on, and we’ll have more news on what that brand is going to look like and the strategic direction of the podcast very soon. But this will be my last version as I move on to a new role as the Executive Vice President and Managing Partner of Harvard Media, a local media company based in the Prairies. And I’m really looking forward to working with that industry and returning to my roots in radio broadcast.

It has been an incredible run over 10 years serving the customer-facing roles at Vendasta. I started as the first sales rep over 10 years ago and now over 240 people serve Vendasta customers all over the world. And I couldn’t be more proud and more humbled by what we’ve been able to build here in the Prairies. Vendasta is an amazing platform and an organization that has been built by amazing humans. I feel a personal connection to all of them, and deciding to leave was one of the hardest decisions of my life.

But my heartfelt thanks goes out to our CEO, Mr. Brendan King, for his encouragement and his 32-year friendship. And both of us agreed that this would be a very good opportunity for myself, my wife Nancy, and my family. And also a good opportunity for the folks at Harvard Media to take all the learnings that we’ve had over the last 10 years, working with media companies all over the world and putting them to work right here in the Prairies. So it’s definitely not goodbye because I am proud to announce that I will be launching a brand new podcast with a new lens and a new focus in the coming months. And our friends here at the Conquer Local Podcast have been kind enough to help promote that new podcast. So standby for more information on that podcast on Vendasta’s social channel soon.

Recapping the Top 10 Most Popular Episodes of the Conquer Local Podcast

But for this episode, as it is our last episode of the Conquer Local Podcast, we wanted to run a top 10 list and pick out 10 podcasts that have really stood out over the last over 250 episodes. So here we go, the top 10 podcasts from the last five seasons of the Conquer Local Podcast.

Number 10 – Episode 367: That’s a Wrap 2020, with Brendan King

George Leith: Here’s number 10 to kick us off, 367: That’s a Wrap 2020, with Brendan King. Kicking us off in our number 10 spot, we have Vendasta CEO, Brendan King’s annual year-in-review episode for 2020. And if you remember, 2020 was the pandemic. Remote work, e-commerce explosion and all of that. Let’s have a listen at Vendasta’s CEO’s thoughts on what was the most monumental year in technology thus far.

Brendan King: We’re really going to provide a full tech stack. So I don’t care if it’s HRS or insurance, like our human resources software or accounting, all of that, our partners will be able to provide. We’re going to build out that business in a box and really let our partners provide that. The second thing is this idea of a peer-to-peer network. I call it the gig economy disruption. Well, a lot of our partners are telling us, from time to time, they need to use out external labour and they’re using Fiber and Upwork, not finding it to be satisfactory because they get different people all the time and they get varying results. And what we want to do is do what they do in the real world and let them build that offline relationship. So if you were in a city and you’re great at websites and somebody needs e-commerce, you can go become the general contractor and build pure relationships with other vendors in your ecosystem and you can provide them as yours to the customer. So you can really be the trusted expert for that customer and bring in all the other contractors, if you want to use the general contractor analogy, to deliver that solution. So that’s sort of a gig economy disruption. We’re providing all the FinTech underneath.

Number 9 – Episode 401: Finding a Sales Mentor, with Stephen Defina

George Leith: Number nine, episode 401: Finding a Sales Mentor, with Stephen Defina. Coming in at number nine, we have our very first guest for season four of the Conquer Local Podcast, VP of Revenue at Clearbanc, Stephen Defina. Stephen shares with our audiences his take on what it means to be a sales mentor and how to coach your team to qualify those leads, meet your sales and capture opportunities.

Stephen Defina: It’s true. It’s funny, a lot of people have an allergic reaction to the word script, both at the executive level as well as candidates that you’re interviewing. And when you break it down, the whole goal of having a script is really a baseline coaching tool that enables you to optimize for behavior. And I think that anyone that has allergic reactions to that, it’s usually because they’ve never done it before and it’s just scary, or they just had a bad experience and they have buyer’s remorse. So I think that like anything, it’s really important just to be open-minded and truly understand what it is that you’re uncomfortable with. And that’s probably been one challenge I’ve always had to overcome from any job that I’ve had is being able to deal with that objection.

Number 8 – Episode 345: Lighthouse Strategy, with Dennis Yu

George Leith: Number eight, episode 345, the Lighthouse Strategy, from the world-famous Dennis Yu. Next stop at number eight, we have our good friend Dennis Yu, who joined us to explain his legendary lighthouse strategy. Dennis is CEO of BlitzMetrics. And he explains how companies can succeed by honing in on our particular niche that they aim to serve. Let’s take a listen now at a few of his top tips.

Dennis Yu: So a real brief, the lighthouse is the client that does the selling for you. And if you’re lazy like me, then you want them to do all the work. So when we got the Golden State Warriors, an NBA basketball team as a client, that gave us a bunch of other NBA and professional sports teams as clients, because it draws others. It’s a demonstrated example that’s taught publicly, executed step by step, that other people can see where you can repeat a process to achieve the same results.

Number 7 – Episode 354: Customer Deciding Journey, with Tim Riesterer | Part 1

George Leith: Number 7, 354: Customer Deciding Journey, with Tim Riesterer, part number one. Coming to us with 20 years of experience to back him up, author and chief strategy officer of Corporate Visions, Tim Riesterer joins us on our number seven spot as he explains the customer-deciding journey. In this episode, Tim explains the psychology and science behind why this methodology works. Let’s listen in.

Tim Riesterer: What we found is that there are four distinct moments of value in the customer journey, and some people call it a buying journey. Old days, they called it the sales process. But we turned that 180 degrees around and said, “What is the customer doing versus what are you doing to the customer?” And the customers answering questions for themselves. And the first question, the do not pass go, do not collect $200 sort of Monopoly question is the customer is asking themselves before any decision is made, “Why should I change? Why should I do anything different?” And if we net selling out to anything, it’s trying to convince somebody to do something different tomorrow than they’re doing today. And this idea of creating value is you have to create enough value, enough sense that they need to change and they need to do it, something different to moral than they were doing today. And it is the first form of value that you must master as a seller is how do you create enough value to create momentum. I like to say create a buying vision. And the question you’re answering for the customer in their mind is, why should I change?

Number 6  – Episode 402: Finding your Ideal Customer | Master Sales Series

George Leith: Number six, 402: Finding your Ideal Customer, from Master Sales Series. Next up in our number six spot, we have the always popular Master Sales Series around finding your ideal customer. Too often, marketers and salespeople think a customer is a customer and a sale is a good sale. Let’s listen in for the how and why you need to break out of that mindset.

George Leith: So first off, the first step and the first strategy as you figure out who you should serve is some old-fashioned brainstorming. I want you to brainstorm the problems of your ideal customer. It’s the first step in defining who you serve. Ask yourself, “What specific problem am I trying to solve for this customer?” And then, “Do I knock it out of the park? Is this something that I truly have figured out?” Once you’ve determined your problem, you want to be thinking about the gender, the age, the interests, the hobbies, the occupation, where they’re located, relevant behaviors, because I think what we have is if we’re selling solutions and we’re good at it, we’re like, “I could sell this to anybody.”

But there’s a lot of toil in there, it’s called spinning cycles. And when you spin cycles, at the end of the day, there should be some sort of outcome. And we’re in business, right? So it’s an economic outcome, where you’re solving the customer’s problem, they reward you by paying you an amount, and that amount has profit, and then that profit goes to building the value of your organization. So that’s why this is so important.

Number 5 – Episode 348: Adapt to Digital or Die, with Paul Plant

George Leith: Number five, episode 348: Adapt to Digital or Die, with my friend, Paul Plant. Coming in at number five with my dear friend, the late great Paul Plant. Paul was a co-founder and director at BigFive Digital. It was an honour to know him and work with him over the years. In this episode, we dive into why organizations are reluctant to adapt to digital and the risk this poses on their very survival.

Paul Plant: Some of the best learning you get is to look at small businesses. Small businesses, if they’re run properly, are agile, they can spin on a sixpence, they can make change, they can focus their efforts on customers very quickly. And I think a lot of larger companies are now starting to wake up to that mentality and organizing. They’re structuring their organizations around their customers as opposed to levels of spend or product or process. And again, that’s another paradigm shift that you’ve seen as a consequence of digital. The silo-based businesses are slowly and slowly moving into the sunset, and you’re seeing businesses with much flatter structures built around customer cohorts with cross-channel, cross-functional teams that can react and respond quickly to customer needs and shift forward. So you are seeing a lot of transformation driven by small business thinking in small business processes.

Number 4  – Episode 431: Outcome-Based Selling, with Phil M. Jones

George Leith: Number four, episode 431: Outcome-Based Selling, with Phil M. Jones. Coming in at number four, we have business coach and expert Phil Jones. Jones shares his take on outcome-based selling, exploring how understanding an audience’s capacity to understand your message can help you shape a successful career in business.

Phil M. Jones: Wow, it’s a big question that probably requires a bigger answer. Firstly, I’ve been doing this a long time. So the prep and the experience are a little bit merged and meshed together in that you’ve got reps in something. The prep that mostly goes into all of my work is trying to see the world through the audience’s eyes. If I can hit a very special button in the bulk of my work, then I’ve done my job right. The button I look to press is what I call the, show me that you know me button. So my prep goes into understanding what is happening within the heads of the majority of people in that audience.

Here’s what most speakers think. They think their job is to deliver their speech. My job is to deliver a meaningful conversation to 1,000 people at the exact same time, one on one, that just happens to be delivered. So if I can understand what’s going through the heads of those people, starts to help me be able to show up to that moment with a little bit more integrity and be a touch more present because I’m not worried about what they’re thinking, I have confidence that I understand what they’re thinking. The other things that then go into prep is I’ve built almost a content, like an ingredients list. So if you’d ever seen me prepping for a speech, I’ll have just a number of bubbles on a page with words in them. What I’ve built through the years is I’ve built a number of bits. I’ve never delivered the same speech twice. Yet, I also have a number of pieces that could all go into the making up of a speech. So it’s like Lego only have a certain number of components, but what you can build is indefinite.

Number 3 – Episode 353: Elevate your Personal Brand, with Nina Blankenship

George Leith: Number three on our list, episode 353: Elevate your Personal Brand, with Nina Blankenship. Coming down to our finalists now our, second runner-up for our top podcast of all time is Nina Blankenship on the power of personal branding. This award-winning marketer has a background working for LinkedIn, and in this episode, she shares how companies can activate their teams to become ambassadors of the brand and how individuals can accomplish this for themselves online.

Nina Blankenship: Absolutely. LinkedIn ends up being the number one most trusted platform time and time again. And one of the things that’s really interesting that I think has really evolved from LinkedIn is that initially, it was viewed as a place for people to connect and for people to look for jobs. And now it’s really changing where people go there to learn. And that’s why I think everybody, as a business owner, can really take advantage of their knowledge from their own experiences and teach people something new. Every single one of us has our own experiences and something unique that we bring to the table. And you probably even yourself, George, you have three tips that you can teach somebody about whether it’s podcasts or just entrepreneurial lifestyle. People want to learn from you. And so if you’re able to package this up, you’ll be surprised how many followers, how many new conversations that are inbound that you’ll end up generating for your business.

Number 2 – Episode 403: Prospecting 101 | Master Sales Series

George Leith: Number two, 403: Prospecting 101, again from the Master Sales Series. Now, for our second most listened-to episode of all time, by popular demand, another Master Sales Series episode. This one covers a topic that’s arguably the foundation of all sales motions that come after it. Let’s have a listen to this excerpt from Prospecting 101.

George Leith: Your prospect is being hammered by everyone else that’s trying to take money from them, everyone else that’s trying to show them value, everyone else that’s trying to sell them or help them. The graphic that I like to use on this is something that I saw a few years back, and it was a picture from the International Space Station and it basically shows every satellite orbiting Earth. And Earth is your prospect. And every satellite is everybody else that’s trying to take their budget. Everyone else is trying to sell them something even right down to the logoed t-shirt that they wear. And if you are going to be successful in communicating your message to that prospect, you need to put heat all around the earth. You need to get yourself like eight death stars, and you need to just heat that prospect up a little bit. Like not so much that you blow it up like Alderaan, that’s not going to work out for you. I like the Star Wars analogy. But enough heat around your prospect so that they think of you before they think of any of the other people that are sending messages to that prospect.

Number 1 – Episode 406: Lead Generation Guide, with Brock Andony

George Leith: Drum roll, please. Our number one, episode 406: Lead Generation Guide, with Brock Andony. Without further ado, you asked for it and you shall receive. Our most Listened to Conquer Local Podcast episode of all time, the ultimate guide to lead generation episode featuring marketing expert Brock Andony. I remember Brock taking months and months to research and write that guide. Let’s listen to the tried, tested and simple ways actually that you can start generating leads for your company.

Brock Andony: It’s a different type of lead. What I would call this is an informational lead, a lead that is not transacted, but converted on an informational asset. And the alternative to that would be a transactional type lead. So a lot of the campaigns and the promotion that we do at Vendasta is around generating transactional leads. So this would be marketing things like free signups and demo buttons, the likes of that. So with these, obviously the intent is a lot higher, it’s a lot more bottom of the funnel in nature as opposed to somebody that maybe downloaded a lead generation guide. But the only difference is really time span. So it’s what a lead like this, an informational-based lead requires, is a lot more nurturing. So generating the lead is really just the first step, and that’s just one of many touchpoints. So after the lead has been generated, after they’ve downloaded the guide, we have a bunch of email automation set up that are triggering campaigns, sending them correspondence for weeks after the download, pushing them towards additional Vendasta and Conquer Local Based assets. We also have remarketing campaigns that are running on social. So any of the people that converted on the lead generation guides on social are getting remarketing messages surrounding the market use case.

George Leith: Amazing that all that hard work that Brock put into that lead generation guide led to the most listened-to episode of the Conquer Local Podcast of all time.

A Tribute to the Team Who Worked on the Podcast Over the Years 

George Leith:  I’ll tell you, we could not have done this show without you, our audience. And not a day goes by that I don’t run across somebody reaching out to me on WhatsApp or by text or by email or on a social media channel that says, “Yeah, I listened to this episode of the podcast. It was great. I really appreciate it.” Or I’ll go to a convention and somebody will walk up to me that I’ve never even met before and said, “I listen to your podcast every week.” Over 270 episodes, six years later and here we are.  

And I got to give special mention to all of the talented individuals who’ve worked on the podcast over the past six seasons.  I like to say I just show up here one day a month and read. The team does all the work, which really is what’s happened. And I’m pretty proud of what the group has been able to put together. 

As I reminisce over the years. I want to give a shout-out to the producers who really do a lot of the work. Josh Baker, Zach Yuzdepski, Brock Andony, Colleen McGrath, Bret Klarenbach, and Suliman Adam.

Special thanks goes out to Zoey Schneider and Jacob Solie, who worked on guest discovery, and promotions by Tianna Euteneier. Kudos to our marketing and design by Rory Lawford, and our writer, Nicole Lauzon. The Executive Producers of the show are Jeff Tomlin and Brendan King. A massive shout-out to my good friend, Nykea Behiel. She helped develop our dream team of talents this last season. Kudos to our sound engineer, T-Bone, who I’ve worked with for over 20 years and the last five years as our sound engineer.

And to our current team of digital content producers and technical engineers who helped us make the leap to video, and putting a face to the name, Edward Sedgwick, Jason Coutu, Jon Miller, and Suliman Adam. 

“I’ll see you when I see you”

This might be my farewell for now, but conquerors, know this isn’t the end. So stay tuned as we take a short break and the Conquer Local Podcast will be coming up with a new vision and new hosts in the months to come. And I’ll be keeping you up to speed on my new venture, and the new podcast will be coming in the next 90 days. But remember, keep conquering, sales is a noble profession, and my name is George Leith. I’ll see you when I see you.