Google Partners

There’s no business without sales, so it’s no wonder that selling is of continuous interest to agencies and consultancies. It’s hard work, and as much as you learn, there’s always another layer of subtlety and expertise you can develop. The Google Partners Podcast now kicks off a mini-series of episodes that dive into different aspects of sales. You’ll hear ideas, insights and resources you can use to get better at pursuing the kinds of clients and contracts you want. We start by looking into the general rule that 80% of any business comes from 20% of its clients. While simple on the surface, the 80/20 phenomenon is deeply significant and can lead to powerful efficiencies and strategies when sales teams use it wisely. And Perry Marshall is the person to explain how. Among the highest-paid business consultants in the world, Marshall wrote 80/20 Sales & Marketing, a mandatory read in many growing companies, as well as The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords, the world’s best-selling book on Internet advertising.

Recent episodes of our podcast have talked about positioning, seasonality, landing pages, and digital assistants. With the complexity and fast-paced evolution of many topics in marketing, it’s easy to forget that so much of what we do all comes down to words. There’s a lot riding on our ability to find the right message at the right time for any audience we’re reaching. If we’re going to succeed, we need to create or curate copy that sparkles, engages, convinces—and converts. The good news is that like many skills, good writing can be learned. So this episode, we’re excited to welcome one of the best teachers around: Joanna Wiebe. Founder of Copy Hackers, Joanna is a highly sought after conversion copywriter who has worked with clients as diverse as brick-and-mortar stalwart, Tesco, and digital native, Nectar Sleep. A globe-spanning speaker, Joanna joins us to share techniques that make words work harder. Guest - Joanna Wiebe, Conversion Copywriter The original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe is the c

Twenty-five years ago, it was websites. Twelve years ago, it was mobile. Today, it’s voice assistance. By 2022, voice commerce sales are expected to top $45B in the US and UK, and even today 72% of people with voice-activated speakers use them as part of their daily routine. Clearly, if you’re in the digital agency space, you need to understand voice user interfaces (VUIs) and get yourself in front of the trend. Wally Brill, Head of Conversation Design Advocacy & Education for the Google Assistant, is a perfect guest to walk us through this subject. He has twenty years’ experience with voice, primarily in the design of VUIs, both as a consultant and in senior roles with companies such as eBay and Nuance. In other words, he’s been in the game for as long as there was a game. In this episode, Wally shares insights on voice-based actions, persona design and what he thinks the future will hold.

Since we’re nearing the holiday season and the annual retail apex of Black Friday/Cyber Monday, the Google Partners Podcast brings you an early holiday treat. Hana Abaza, Head of Marketing at Shopify Plus, shares insights about seasonal campaigns and campaign strategies as well as year-round wisdom for effective positioning whether you’re a digital agency or a marketer in the B2B or B2C space. A featured speaker at conferences about tech, startups and marketing, Hana is passionate about strategy and helping companies grow. And she’s the real deal with a track record of successful marketing strategy and campaign execution across a variety of companies. Now with her vantage point at Shopify Plus, she’s uniquely poised to share what she’s learned about what works in online marketing and why. Guest - Hana Abaza, Head of Marketing at Shopify Plus Hana has been involved in technology and startups for a number of years. She started on the B2C side before switching to a consulting role in marketing and growth in

The conversation about pricing can be a dicey one. Not only because what businesses charge is proprietary, but also because methods of pricing can vary quite a bit. Some have buttoned down processes that track expenses, calculate hourly rates, and arrive at a margin. Others go mainly on instinct or observations of what other companies are doing. But if marketers avoid looking closely at their pricing, do they run the risk of losing money? What are the gains of pricing more strategically? Pricing really comes down to two things: 1) What’s your value to your clients, and 2) How do you communicate that value? To answer these questions, it can be very helpful to get an outsider’s perspective. Our guest today is business coach Robin Waite. Robin has helped improve pricing structure, leverage value, and grow the bottom line for many businesses. Guest - Robin Waite, Business Coach From 2004 to 2014, Robin Waite ran a design and advertising agency that served more than 250 clients. During that time, he began deli

Whether we sell services, products or ideas, the first thing we need to do is find and understand our audience. Because no matter how effective we may be at communicating our value proposition and connecting to a need, we’re not going to see the results we want if we’re talking to the wrong people—or talking about our offering in the wrong way. Positioning is about defining your market and your relationship to it. So you can see why it’s a necessary process before effective marketing can happen. The challenge is taking a fresh, dispassionate, analytical look at your company, your service and your competition. In this week’s episode, we hear from April Dunford, a marketing and positioning maven who has launched many products into market and served as a senior executive at IBM, Huawei, Nortel and other firms. Today she travels the world, sharing her wisdom and passion about positioning. Guest - April Dunford, CEO Ambient Strategy As a consultant, April helps technology companies position their products for

Entrepreneurs today can get a lot of inspiration from reading books by people like Dale Carnegie, Barbara Corcoran, Guy Kawasaki, Richard Branson—people who achieved exceptional things over the course of their lives. But for the generation now at the start of their careers, few figures could be as interesting as Brian Wong. At 27, has has already pioneered a category-defining rewards network that’s redefining mobile advertising. And he has amassed a level of savvy far beyond his years. In this episode, Brian shares some of the insights he’s gathered and lessons he’s learned as a rising business leader and innovator. Guest - Brian Wong, co-founder and CEO of Kiip Author of The Cheat Code, Brian Wong’s talent has been recognized in Business Insider’s Top 25 Under 25 in Silicon Valley, 30 Under 30 in Advertising, Forbes’ 30 under 30 three times, and Mashable’s Top 5 Entrepreneurs to Watch, to name a few. He has also been called the youngest person ever to receive venture capital funding by CNBC and The Wall

For anyone even thinking about building and testing landing pages, Unbounce is an essential tool and the platform that almost single-handedly created the field. Oli Gardner, the company’s co-founder, travels the world speaking and evangelizing about the importance of the landing page experience in marketing. He’s taken a hard look at more landing pages than anyone on the planet, and he’s obsessed with identifying and reversing bad practices. His rants against marketers who send campaign-specific traffic to their general homepage can peel paint off an unpainted wall! Today’s episode explores how Oli got to where he is today, and how he turned a passion for crusading against marketing mediocrity into such a key online business platform. What are some of the important learnings he’s gleaned along the way? Guest - Oli Gardner, Business Coach Unbounce co-founder Oli Gardner is a prolific international speaker who’s on a mission to help businesses use data-informed copywriting, design, interaction, and psycholo

Building a business is hard, particularly when growing revenue depends on the staff needed to recognize that revenue. When growth is fundamentally tied to scale—as it is in service-based businesses—market cycles and other factors can create serious challenges. For instance, what happens when your enterprise becomes the hot commodity? How do you manage through meteoric growth without compromising quality? And when revenue drops, how do you protect morale and preserve the company’s culture through the hard choices of downscaling? As a three-time company co-founder, Ben West has lived through the booms and downturns of the past decades. Here he shares stories and lessons from his long experience in growing businesses and steering them through the unpredictable economic landscape. Guest - Ben West, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Eventbase Ben West oversees design, product management and technology strategy for the event app platform, Eventbase. Formerly, he was CIO at StockHouse.com, growing the compan

Big or small, regardless of industry or sector, most if not all organizations would say that they’re interested in innovation. But what does that actually mean, and how can individuals and companies innovate in ways that create value? Can we take a vague, overworked buzzword like innovation and make it practical? Enter Michelle Greenwald, CEO of Inventours. She has transformed herself and her career by making innovation more than just something to talk about. Now she shares strategically tactical steps, personal experiences, and driving attitudes for embracing innovation as a priority and a daily practice. Guest - Michelle Greenwald, CEO of Inventours Michelle Greenwald founded DigitalLatest, a summit designed to help executives understand the evolving digital marketing landscape. She runs insight-generating “innovation days” for blue chip clients. And she is steeped in marketing, having been SVP of New Products at Disney, VP & GM at Pepsi-Cola, Business Director at Nestlé and, prior to that, an account ex

Google’s marketing machine is truly massive, operating across a huge range of fronts at an incredible scale. They not only use but also pioneer analytical tools that enable them to work in groundbreaking ways to reach audiences in the “moments that matter.” In this episode, Fab Dolan, Head of Google Marketing in Canada, pulls back the curtain and shares insights into how Google runs its marketing. And he ties what Google does to strategically tactical steps that companies with a fraction of the budget and staff can take to make their marketing more effective. The truth is that while scale and technology make a difference, the basics of good marketing remain the same. Guest - Fab Dolan, Head of Google Marketing, Canada Drawing on his background at General Mills, where he led direct marketing for iconic brands such as Cheerios and Green Giant, Feb Dolan has helped Think With Google, the market research and insights platform, surge to more than 60,000 Canadian subscribers in just the past few years. His team

Google has a well deserved reputation for being an innovative organization, and that’s by design. Because while it’s a popular buzzword, innovation as an enterprise-level priority really does make a difference in a company’s capacity to adapt, grow and thrive. That’s why Google does so much to foster creativity. It informs who they hire, how they acculturate employees, how they design workspaces, how employees collaborate, and so on. We’re excited to have as our guest Frederik G. Pferdt, Google’s Chief Innovation Evangelist and Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. In this episode, Frederik helps us unpack the twin topics of innovation and creativity and shares approaches to sparking innovation at every level. To learn more about Google’s approach to fostering innovation, check out resources on the re:Work website at https://rework.withgoogle.com/subjects/innovation/. Specifically re:Work guide: Foster an innovative workplace and re:Work guide: Practice innovation with design thinking. Guest - Dr. Fred

Ask just about anyone how they’re doing, and an all-too-common answer is “busy.” Being busy—or too busy—seems like the normal state of things. Maybe that’s why mindfulness is becoming a more predominant subject in our culture as a response to the high levels of stress so many of us face in our professional lives. If we aren’t giving attention to our personal state and to our close relationships, our lives can fall apart regardless of how successful we are at work. This episode sheds light on how mindfulness meshes with high performance in the corporate world as Ben Feder talks about the difference that meditation and mindfulness have made in his life. Take a deep breath. The adventure begins. Guest - Ben Feder, President of International Partnerships, Tencent Games Prior to joining Tencent (makers of China’s super-app, WeChat), Ben served as co-founder, partner and vice chairman of ZelnickMedia Corporation/ZM, a media investment and management firm, and was also Chief Executive Officer and board member a

Is there a mindset that engenders success as an entrepreneur and a leader? Certainly the right combination of beliefs and aptitudes emerges from our upbringing, our background, our culture and so on. But the power of personality also comes from what we tell ourselves, the ideals we adhere to and the experiences we seek out. Jean Lin, a powerhouse in the world of digital marketing, shares five potent ideas that have led her toward the success and recognition she continues to achieve. If you’d like a mantra or two to help you on your path, listen to this episode now. Guest - Jean Lin, Global CEO, Isobar Jean Lin established wwwins Consulting in 1999. After she joined Aegis Media in 2004, the agency became Isobar’s first Greater China office and was the driving force behind Isobar’s expansion in the Asia Pacific region. Promoted to Global CEO in March 2014, Jean is now based in Shanghai and leads one of the fastest growing digital agency networks in the world, with 6,500 people in 45 markets globally. In 2

For Karen Brown, it started with the audacious goal of competing in the Ironman World Championship. An active recreational athlete, she nevertheless held herself back from that big dream for many years. Finally, she dove deep into the study and psychology of limiting beliefs—and conquered her own. She competed in the IWC in 2012, only two years after concretely deciding to pursue that goal. In this episode, Karen talks about five essential ways to get beyond limiting beliefs, starting with recognizing their presence and power in our unconscious minds. Listen now—and prepare to be inspired. Karen Brown, CEO Velocity Leadership Consulting Karen Brown is CEO of Velocity Leadership Consulting, a Denver-based business psychology executive coaching company. With more than 20,000 business coaching hours under her belt, she founded Velocity Leadership Consulting in 2012, after finding her own divine potential while training for and finishing the Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. Velocity Leadership C

Many companies sense the value of inbound marketing and use it to some degree. But beyond simply posting articles, keeping up an obligatory blog, or investing more in SEO, what can we do to build real trust and grow business? Marcus Sheridan, author of one of the definitive books on the subject, They Ask, You Answer, is generous with concrete, practical ideas on how to use inbound marketing to drive growth. In fact, his advice is so useful and plentiful, we split his interview into two parts. Guest - Marcus Sheridan, Keynote Speaker, Author, Partner at IMPACT The story of how Marcus saved his swimming pool company from the economic crash of 2008 has been discussed in books, magazines, and university case studies. Today, he is an international speaker known for his unique ability to excite and motivate audiences. In fact, Forbes named Marcus in its list of “Speakers You Don’t Want to Miss.” The New York Times dubbed him a “Web Marketing Guru,” and he has been written about in Inc., The Globe and Mail, Cont

Many companies sense the value of inbound marketing and use it to some degree. But beyond simply posting articles, keeping up an obligatory blog, or investing more in SEO, what can we do to build real trust and grow business? Marcus Sheridan, author of one of the definitive books on the subject, They Ask, You Answer, is generous with concrete, practical ideas on how to use inbound marketing to drive growth. In fact, his advice is so useful and plentiful, we split his interview into two parts. Tune in to listen to the second part of this episode on Wednesday, April 18th. Guest - Marcus Sheridan, Keynote Speaker, Author, Partner at IMPACT The story of how Marcus saved his swimming pool company from the economic crash of 2008 has been discussed in books, magazines, and university case studies. Today, he is an international speaker known for his unique ability to excite and motivate audiences. In fact, Forbes named Marcus in its list of “Speakers You Don’t Want to Miss.” The New York Times dubbed him a “Web M

Many are getting into the podcast game in order to connect with an interested audience and build a brand. But creating a successful podcast is a lot more complicated than buying a couple of microphones and clicking “record.” If you’re in the marketing world, there’s a good chance you’ve heard John Wall on the “Marketing Over Coffee” podcast. In this episode, John shares five strategically tactical ideas for people venturing into the podcast world. John Wall, VP of Marketing, EventHero John speaks, writes and practices at the intersection of marketing, sales, and technology. He is the producer and co-host with Christopher S. Penn of “Marketing Over Coffee”, a weekly audio program on new and classic marketing. The podcast has been featured on iTunes, has hosted luminaries like Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott and Simon Sinek, and has been profiled by Forbes, CBS Evening News, The Associated Press, NECN, The Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and DM News. John is the author of B2B Marketing Confessio

High performers: they can transform an agency and handle huge, difficult deals all while publishing, speaking and being active in their communities. How do they do it? What are the factors that enable them “to exist on a different plane of productivity” (to quote Charles Duhigg)? Elite athletes give us a good example of the mental preparation required to achieve that powerful, energized focus. In this episode, elite coach Razor Ray Franklin shares what top athletes do — from a strategically tactical perspective — to gain the competitive edge. Guest: “Razor” Ray Franklin, Elite Coach Trained in martial arts, “Razor” Ray Franklin pursued a career in kickboxing as a young man. After leaving the sport, he transitioned into coaching and worked with Dallas Cowboys players on strength and conditioning. He moved to Las Vegas where he worked for the Department of Veterans Affairs to rehabilitate blind veterans. During his time there, he met legendary boxing coach Kenny Adams, who asked Franklin to work with some o

You’ve had a good run on a lucrative business, but it’s time to move on. Selling your agency is a (typically) once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and a very complex process, so you have to make sure you do it right. Should you hire an advisor? What makes you attractive to potential buyers? How do you know it’s a good fit? Tom Crowley joins us to share his expertise and advice on the most important steps to selling your business. From how to get organized to how selling is like marriage, he spares no details in the arduous process. Tune into hear his 5 pieces of advice.