074: How He Launched a Speaking Career Through a Daily Sales Blog (w/ Anthony Iannarino)

Summary: Anthony Iannarino is an international speaker, bestselling author, sales leader, and entrepreneur. He specializes in the complex business-to-business (B2B) sale. He is also a founder and managing partner of two closely-held, family-owned businesses in the staffing industry, leading both entities in strategic planning while growing sales.<br> <br> Anthony is best known for his work at The Sales Blog, which has helped him gain recognition as a top thought leader in sales strategy. He is the designer of Level 4 Value Creation and Building Consensus methodologies that help sales organizations achieve transformational, breakthrough results.<br> <br> Period in full time business<br> <br> He has been in full time for 10 years now.<br> <br> Core revenue streams<br> <br> Anthony has very diverse revenue streams. He still has a role in their family’s staffing business and he is a partner in another one of the family businesses. He just started an accounting and finance group (specialised in staffing) where he is a partner. He is also a speaker, coach, consultant and an author.<br> <br> He says he believes that we are in the age of constant accelerating disruptive change which keeps coming faster and is more disruptive especially for business people.<br> <br> The speaking, coaching and consulting revenue stream makes up about 75% of his overall income.<br> <br> Tip 1: You shouldn’t give up any revenue streams, you should have multiple revenues streams going at one time<br> <br> Tip 2: You should really think deeply about how you can create additional revenue streams<br> <br> Starting out in business<br> <br> Anthony used to run their small family business of about $3 Million a year, and with about 6 sales people, he built it up to $50 Million a year. That got the attention of many people who wanted to know how he achieved so much with such a small team. That business was a competitive displacement business which took big companies away from big competitors. People wanted him to help them in that same way but Anthony wasn’t interested until at some point when he felt that he could something to help people succeed in building and growing their businesses.<br> <br> So he started waking up an hour earlier than he used to every day, to write down everything he knew, and publishing it on his new blog. His goal at that point was to become a keynote speaker within a year. He worked very hard on building awareness on what he did and within 10 months, he got his first speaking gig.<br> <br> In those 10 months, he used to get a lot of inspiration from Seth Godin, and he applied what he learnt from him in his own work. Overtime, he got introduced to a group of people who had a sales content sharing group. That sharing ended up amplifying all of their messages.<br> <br> Tip 1: Because of the internet, as an entrepreneur, you have audiences worldwide and they are looking for you. Google will help them find you provided that you publish your best ideas, and people can tell how you create value and what you are all about<br> <br> Tip 2: One of the things that entrepreneurs struggle with when it comes to sales and marketing is the consistency of doing the work every single day<br> <br> Motivation during the first 10 months of the blog<br> <br> Anthony knew that the idea for the blog would work because the statistics were good and kept growing. He had confidence, faith and was willing to play the long game with the blog while building a body of work. He started by getting 7 people reading his blog posts up to the current 2,500 readers that visit the blog per day. On Mondays, the number goes up to 4,000.<br> <br> Tip 1: Stay with what you are doing for a long enough time that it actually sticks and you will get some traction. A lot of people give up right before that point where they get the traction because they start to worry it’s not going to w...