Have you friends frequently and warmly connected with you…until they didn’t? Becoming former friends, ignoring and abandoning you, becoming silent and indifferent?
Sales prospecting can be similar. Someone eagerly wants your product or service immediately. But they delay in getting back to you, plead that other critically important issues have arisen, then go silent entirely, their former desire evaporated.
Evaporated. Imagen 4.
I’m sure some hard-boiled salespeople believe EVERY prospect can convert, but it ain’t so. And my earlier advice applies to business prospects as well as to personal relationships:
“If my former friends’ focus is elsewhere, my focus won’t impede on theirs.”
Companies ask you to register for webinars with your corporate email address and job title.
But how many companies NEVER confirm your registration?
There are at least three reasons why you may never get that confirmation email:
It was marked as spam by your email provider, which reflects poorly on the webinar host. Has the host earned a bad reputation?
The company’s confirmation system is messed up, which reflects poorly on the webinar host. If it takes forever to respond to a simple registration, how long will it take the company to deliver its product or service to paying customers?
And of course there’s a third reason: the company evaluated your registration and determined you’re not a qualified prospect. Maybe you work for a competitor. Maybe you won’t buy and will instead try to sell—which the company will deduce by my job title of “Product Marketing Consultant.”
Webinars feed the funnel.
Disqualification can be legitimate. The purpose of an awareness webinar, like an awareness blog post, is to identify prospects who will become buyers.
But over-disqualification has its price. If my registration for your webinar is never confirmed because of my “Product Marketing Consultant” job title…well, I guess I can’t talk about your webinar, can I?
TPRM on the farm.
Mitratech allowed me to attend its TPRM-focused “frame, assess, respond, and monitor” webinar…and I talked about it.
Case studies are powerful marketing collateral for companies.
Why?
Because if you select your subjects carefully, your prospects will say, “That subject is just like me. And the company’s solution solved the subject’s problem. Perhaps the solution will solve my problem also.”
Imagen 4
Ideally a company would want to publish dozens of case studies, so their prospects could find one case study—or perhaps two or three—that describe the exact same problem the prospect is encountering.
It’s hard to create case studies
But case studies are by definition more difficult for a company to create.
For other types of content, the approval process resides completely within the company itself.
But case studies by definition require approval by two companies…even if the end customers in the case studies remain anonymous.
Perhaps that’s why there are so few published, recent case studies.
On Tuesday I had the occasion to visit four technology websites.
One had 5 case studies, all written in 2024.
One had 4 case studies, all written in 2023 and all anonymous.
One had 8 case studies, all written in 2021.
One had no case studies at all, even though the company had clients who could be referenced.
And the approvals don’t just involve the end customer.
Imagen 4
A former friend interviewed many customers but was only able to complete one case study; the approvals from company legal, other company executives, and the end customers were overwhelming, delaying the other case studies.
So how do you expedite case study creation and approval?
Three tips for creating case studies
Here are three tips to expedite the creation of case studies.
Creation tip 1: Get the facts first
If the sales rep, program manager, or the subject itself can provide the basic facts beforehand, then the interview can simply consist of confirming facts and filling gaps.
Creation tip 2: Outline the case study and tell your story
Imagen 4
Whether you use the STAR method (situation, task, action, result) or some other method (I prefer the simpler problem, solution, result), take the facts you gathered above. Then fit them into the outline and into the story you want to tell. Then see what pieces of the story are missing.
Creation tip 3: Obtain a meeting transcript
Since the subject has already consented to the case study, they should consent to the meeting being recorded.
The most efficient way to do this is with one of the popular AI note takers, which lets the case study writer review the actual words from the interview without going back and forth through a video recording.
Here are three tips to expedite the approval of case studies.
Approval tip 1: Read the contract
The language of the contract with the subject may have clauses regarding publicity.
If the subject wrote the contract, then it may prohibit any promotional publicity whatsoever, or it may dictate that any publicity must be approved by a high-level governing board in a foreign country.
If the provisions are onerous or impossible, don’t use that subject and find another.
Approval tip 2: Get pre-approvals, or at least grease the wheels
Let your approvers know what’s coming, and when you think it will come.
Once I submitted a case study for pre-approval even before the results were available. This subject had a lengthy approval process, so I wanted the approvers to see the first part of the case study as soon as possible.
Approval tip 3: Use every ethical method to get those approvals
Imagen 4
While the case study may be critically important to you, it may be merely important (or even inconsequential) to the lawyer with 50 other tasks.
From the lawyer’s perspective, it may be better if the company does NOT publish the case study. Fewer potential lawsuits that way.
Do everything you can to expedite the approval. If the CEO is demanding a published case study in three days, say so.
If not…well, that’s why you’re a salesperson. Oh, you’re NOT a salesperson? You are now.
One final tip
You don’t have to go it alone. If your staff is stretched, or if your staff has never written a case study before, Bredemarket can help. Visit my content for tech marketers page.
Is there an easy way to detect potential business partners to avoid?
There are reliable business partners, and unreliable ones.
I’d like to share my thoughts on how to gravitate toward the former and away from the latter, and why this is critically important to your business.
What is a reliable business partner?
We all work with a variety of business partners: clients, prospects, vendors, agents, evangelists, and the like.
Some business partners are really good at:
Paying you. On time, or even early; Bredemarket has enjoyed working with 2 clients with “net 0” terms.
Setting expectations. While Bredemarket has its own system for kicking off a project, things work even more smoothly when a client answers your questions before you ask them.
Communicating with you. Outside of a project in work, partners who take the time to communicate with you are valuable. Maybe the communication is “check back in a few months.” Or perhaps the communication is “Sorry, but we have no need for Bredemarket’s services.” Even the latter is valuable.
Keeping in touch with you. Some partners go above and beyond the minimum. For example, an executive at one of my clients would check in with me and ask, is everything OK? Are we paying you on time?
When business partners pay you, set expectations, communicate with you, and keep in touch with you, you know that you can rely on them.
What is an unreliable business partner?
On the other hand, some business partners are really “good” at:
Not paying you. This one’s obvious.
Not setting expectations. Have you ever had a client who was vague about what they wanted, saying, “I’ll know it when I see it?” And then…they don’t see it.
Ghosting you. In the consulting world, you often get a prospect’s urgent and seemingly important request for services. When you respond to the prospect’s questions, you never hear from them again. Apparently that urgent request was not that important after all.
After you pull these shenanigans on me, I quietly brand you as unprofessional…and unreliable.
How to avoid unreliable business partners
So how do you avoid the unreliable business partners? Here are three tips:
Communicate your expectations. Take the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service as an example. I clearly communicate that I only offer 2 review cycles, you respond with comments in 3 calendar days, and you pay me $500 (as of June 2025) within 15 calendar days. (And some consultants insist that I should collect money up front.) And if you don’t meet my expectations, I gently let you know.
Expect communications. If someone says they will get back with you by a certain date, follow up. Maybe not on the exact date, but remind them what they said. But after a couple of these reminders with no response…
Don’t pursue lost causes. Many of us hold out hope for too long, reliving the movie quote “so you’re telling me there’s a chance.” Bredemarket has hundreds of contacts in its CRM, but the majority are flagged as inactive because there’s no longer a chance. If they subsequently reach out to me…we’ll see.
Why to avoid unreliable business partners
Obviously you don’t want to deal with unreliable people, but why should you be so proactive that the unreliable people avoid you altogether?
At Bredemarket, I continuously return to the topic of focus (ubiquity or docking or whatever). And if I focus on attracting reliable business partners, and convey that the unreliable ones should stay away, then Bredemarket’s reputation as a quality provider will be enhanced.
And the people that want me to halve my prices can go to Fiverr…or ChatGPT.
The reason that I redirected the purpose of my Substack posts is because much of my audience there isn’t familiar with the…um…minutiae of biometrics and identity. (For example, my reference to minutiae would probably go right past all but two of my Substack subscribers.)
My Substack audience is best served with awareness content.
But awareness content is not only informative and educational.
Awareness of you
It also makes prospects aware of your company…which is critically important.
“Technology marketers, do your prospects know who you are?
“If they don’t, then your competitors are taking your rightful revenue.
“Don’t let your competitors steal your money.”
Perhaps steal is a harsh word, but it’s accurate.
Or perhaps a better word is indifference: your actions indicate that you don’t care whether customers buy from you or not. If you cared, you’d actually market your products.
Who needs marketing?
“Nonsense, John! We have a sales staff. Who needs marketers?”
But your sales staff cannot be everywhere. If your prospects don’t know about you and aren’t reaching out to you, then you have to reach out to them.
And the calls? “Hi, I’m Tom with WidgetCorp.” “With who?”
So how is that current quarter looking now?
You need marketing, now
Your current quarter and future quarters would look better if your secret salesperson were working for you. As Rhonda Salvestrini said:
“Content for your business is one of the best ways to drive organic traffic. It’s your secret salesperson because it’s out there working for you 24/7.”
But the secret salesperson won’t engage your prospects until you act to create that content.
Um, how do you know that you will blow the world away?
“Our leader says so. And she knows what she’s talking about. She attended Stanford.”
But is anyone checking your assumptions?
“Of course. All 23 employees…forget I said that number.”
But what about your prospects? What are they saying?
“We know they will love it!”
Did they say they will love it?
“We know they will!”
What if the prospects learn about your stealth product and decide it sucks? And all the years you’ve spent developing in isolation are in vain because of a lack of true customer focus?
“That won’t happen. Our leader knows what she’s talking about. She founded one successful company, and uses that experience to guide us remotely from Texas.”
Who is this leader?
“Elizabeth Holmes. Have you heard of her?”
Elizabeth Holmes picture public domain.
Ending the Isolation
There are potentially valid reasons for entering stealth mode, including protecting trade secrets and keeping the competition away.
But…there is a risk if you also keep the prospects away from your stealth mode operations and fail to engage with them. Who knows—maybe your prospects might have some ideas of what they need, and that information might be good to know. Your unicorn rockstar fearless dear leader may not know EVERYTHING.
If you want to work out a strategy for getting prospects engaged, let me ask you a few questions. Book a free meeting at https://bredemarket.com/cpa/
A few of you know the particulars of this story about avoiding long-term risk for short-term gains. But the particulars aren’t critically important to most readers.
The business risk of new markets
One time a company wanted to enter a new market. This new market would completely change the way the company did business, both from a technological perspective and from a business perspective.
While the technological challenges were daunting, as usual the business challenges were even more so.
The biggest risk to the company was that the new market operated on a different revenue model, one in which revenue was deferred.
In the company’s current market, revenue started at contract signature.
But in the new market, the company would have to wait over a year and a half after the contract was signed before it received a dime of revenue.
In a publicly traded company, or even a privately held one, the powers that be are reluctant to undertake an initiative where they won’t get any revenue for 18 months.
“The quarter ends in less than 8 weeks. We want revenue NOW!”
So the company hemmed and hawed about entering the new market, scared of the financial risk. Finally it told its prospect that they’d enter the new market…if the prospect would make an immediate down payment. The prospect was not pleased and went with the company’s competitor instead. And the competitor continued to dominate this market.
For a time.
A few years later, the original company decided to accept the financial risk and, in the words of Devo, “go forward” and “move ahead.” And luckily for the company, it wasn’t too late. The company successfully entered the new market and became a dominant force.
Quarterly gains via risk aversion
We see this today, where a number of companies are struggling to survive. They do the prudent thing, letting go of the employees who don’t provide immediate revenue and concentrating on those who do. The engineers who can code something NOW! The salespeople who can get contract signatures NOW!
This isn’t necessarily the wrong thing to do. If your firm is about to close its doors, you have to do whatever you can to keep the business operating.
But what after that?
Continue to act in a reactive way, chasing the next short term deal?
Plant sex. It’s difficult, because the stationary nature of flowers complicates sexual reproduction. But as you will see, the solution to the plant sex problem can also solve the marketing problem of your Inland Empire firm.
Flowering plants reproduce sexually through a process called pollination. Flowers contain male sex organs called stamens and female sex organs called pistils. The anther is the part of the stamen that contains pollen. Pollen contains the male gametes. Pollen must be moved to a part of the pistil called the stigma for reproduction to take place.
Because flowers cannot cross-pollinate by themselves, they need to attract bees (or other insects) to help. So the flowers just bat their little flower eyes, and the excited bees take the pollen from one flower’s anther to another flower’s stigma/pistil.
By The original uploader was Y6y6y6 at English Wikipedia. – Original image located at PDPhoto.org. Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Drilnoth using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7365698
Surprisingly, plant sex has EVERYTHING to do with your Inland Empire firm. Your firm is “a flower attracting bees.” So I’ll show you how your firm can attract the bees to spread your pollen and spawn results.
What is inbound marketing?
Now you don’t need to be like a flower and have an anther with pollen to attract prospects. The business equivalent of plant sex is inbound marketing. HubSpot defines inbound marketing as follows:
Creating tailored marketing experiences through valuable content is the core of an inbound marketing strategy that helps you drive customer engagement and growth.
Unlike outbound marketing in which your firm goes out and grabs the prospects (hopefully not literally) through trade shows or cold calling, in inbound marketing the prospects come to you. And because the prospects are in your invisible trust funnel, you don’t have to log them in your customer relationship management system or track them (and their precious metrics) in your traditional sales funnel.
Your traditional funnel where you know everything about your prospects. From Venn Marketing, “Awareness, Consideration, Conversion: A 4 Minute Intro To Marketing 101.” (Link)
Or your non-traditional sales funnel with a “messy middle.”
The “problem” for those who thrive on marketing analytics is that you don’t know who is in your trust funnel. I know from experience.
Most of Bredemarket’s work and most of my full-time employment positions came from people coming to me, rather than me soliciting people. They just popped up.
As I previously mentioned in my trust funnel post, Kasey Jones has acquired customers who have never engaged with her in the past, but who suddently expressed a desire to work with her. Again, they just popped up.
But if your business can get that trust funnel working, the revenue will come. Not immediately, and not when you expect it, but it will come.
How can your Inland Empire firm create your own trust funnel?
Inbound marketing can attract “trust funnel” prospects to your firm by creating content that speaks to their needs.
And Bredemarket is ready to help your Inland Empire firm create that content and ask the necessary questions to drive results. Click the picture to learn more.
The infamous content calendar says that today is proposal day, but I’m going to ignore the infamous content calendar and talk about a bunch of things other than proposals. (Well, I’ll mention proposals once, I guess.)
First, I’ll talk about the new glasses that I received yesterday.
In addition to a new frame style, this new set has the transition sunglass tint but WITHOUT the computer tint. (The Costco optical person said that I didn’t need a separate computer tint these days. I don’t know if he was right, but I trusted him.) My last set of glasses had both the transition sunglass tint AND the computer tint, which meant that they had a purple color at times. Now my tint in the sun will be brown rather than purple.
But enough about that.
Let’s get to the meat of this post, in which I’ll talk about the communities that I’ve joined since starting Bredemarket, what led me to purchase something from one of those communities, and one of two actionable items (and an action) that I took from that purchase.
Communities
Before I became a free agent, I was an employee of a multinational firm with thousands of employees throughout North America and thousands of additional employees throughout the rest of the world. One of the company’s VPs established an online community to support her nationwide organization of people, including myself in California, my direct supervisor in Massachusetts, and a bunch of people in those states, Minnesota, Tennessee, and everywhere else under the sun. I was able to participate in that online community even after I moved out of that VP’s group due to a corporate reorganization. (Thanks Teresa.)
With free agency and sole proprietorship came the loss of that community. (No, the VP obviously wouldn’t let me engage with that community when I was no longer an employee.) But over the next several months I joined three other communities. As it turns out, I interacted with all three of these communities over the course of the last two days.
On Thursday at 10:00 am, I joined the weekly “town hall” for the employees and associates of SMA, Inc. I am officially an associate of SMA, albeit with a very specialized skill set (more on that later). To support its people, SMA convenes a weekly “town hall” that addresses company issues and also addresses the interests of SMA’s leadership. Every week, for example, there is an “art talk” that delves into a particular artist or artistic topic.
On Thursday at 6:00 pm, I joined the monthly meeting of the Orange County, California chapter (“SPARK OC”: Facebook, Instagram) of the Freelancers Union. This monthly gathering happened to be a “happy hour,” although I disregarded the injunction to bring my favorite cocktail.
Finally, today at 8:00 am, I joined a paid workshop hosted by Jay Clouse of the Jay Clouse empire of entities. The topic? “Invisible Selling.” Due to early hour, I didn’t have a beer, but had a Nespresso instead. The rest of this post deals with that workshop and the results from that workshop.
The invisible selling of “Invisible Selling”
I’m not going to recount that Clouse covered in his one-hour workshop. After all, I paid for the course, and (most of) you didn’t. But perhaps it would be helpful if I described how I was invisibly sold on “Invisible Selling.”
I first encountered Jay Clouse via LinkedIn Learning. (Another thing that I lost when I was no longer an employee was access to my employer’s online courses from Udemy and others, but LinkedIn Learning has filled the gap.) I had long since forgotten which Clouse course I took and when I took it, but I checked my LinkedIn profile and found that I had taken his “Freelancing Foundations” course back in September 2020.
After taking the course, I ended up joining his “Freelancing School” community, participating in various online meetups, and engaging with Clouse’s offerings in other ways.
All for free.
Then I received a couple of emails from him about his (then) upcoming “Invisible Selling” course.
I deduced from the description that it would meet my needs, and figured that $40 was a reasonable price. Plus, I trusted Clouse based upon my interactions with him and his community over the last several months.
The first task, which could potentially be worth between five dollars and tens of thousands of dollars to me, was to make sure that I am anticipating potential client objections up front, and addressing them. I’m going to devote some time to that in the future. And as you can see below, I started to address one objection even before I heard of Clouse’s workshop.
The second task is one that I cannot discuss publicly at this time. However, it could potentially be worth more than tens of thousands of dollars to me. Maybe I’ll talk about it someday.
Service Offerings
One potential client objection that I’m already addressing is that my offerings do not fit my potential clients’ needs. I’m addressing this by broadening my offerings.
But much of my business today doesn’t derive from these prepackaged services. Well, technically it does, if you read the description of my Bredemarket 4000 Long Writing Service:
The long writing service does not have a “standard” offering per se, because of the variability of what may be needed. Work is billed at an hourly rate.
Some of Bredemarket’s more lucrative work comes from ongoing hourly relationships that I have established with several clients. They use me as needed, sometimes more frequently, sometimes less so, but I’ve kept them happy.
“I just wanted to truly say thank you for putting these templates together. I worked on this…last week and it was extremely simple to use and I thought really provided a professional advantage and tool to give the customer….TRULY THANK YOU!”
Why do these customers work with me? Well, while I have a number of customers employing various technologies, the vast majority of my customers are focused on biometrics. And I am the biometric content marketing expert and the biometric proposal writing expert, because I said I am. (The other John Bredehoft, the one who owns Total Plumbing Services, taught me the importance of self-promotion.)
But what if a client wants to pick my biometric brain and not pay hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to do so?
Well, for the past month I’ve been addressing that price point also via Bredemarket Premium. Certain posts on this Bredemarket blog delve deeply into my quarter century-plus of biometrics knowledge. These posts are only available to subscribers, at the cost of $5 per month. Here’s an excerpt from the public view of one of these posts:
So to my mind I’ve covered the “Bredemarket doesn’t address my price point” objection. (Prove me wrong. Please.)
As I said before, I need to do a better job of anticipating and addressing other potential objections to using Bredemarket to help you communicate your firm’s benefits. And I’ll work on that.
But if your objection is that you don’t like my glasses, I can’t help you. You can’t please everyone.
And a reminder that if I’ve brilliantly addressed all of your potential objections, or even if I haven’t, and if you’re ready to talk about how I can help you:
Bredemarket 