Work Passion Fit

Michael Greenberg talks about reaching clients in a way that generates trust, how to unplug, and defines success as having freedom over time with John Francis on the Work Passion Fit Podcast.

John Francis 0:15

Welcome to work passion fit. I’m John Francis, your host. Each week I speak with innovators and leaders to understand what they’re truly passionate about. I get beyond the what and discover the who and the why behind their stories. As regular listeners know, I, myself, am an owner and operator of a recruitment retention firm called Theo neera. But regardless of what I’m doing. I’ve always been fascinated by the stories behind the people in the companies. Work Passion Fit is all about discovering those stories. Today, we’re off to beautiful Colorado. We’re talking with Michael Greenberg, CEO of Call For Content. How are you, Mike?

Michael Greenberg 0:55

I’m doing great john, how about yourself?

John Francis 0:57

I got no complaints, and I greatly appreciate you joining me and the listeners. I’m always intrigued when I’ve got guys like yourself coming on board because whenever I’m talking to a thinker, an individual involved with the business to business, and author, he wrote a book on marketing. Anytime I’ve got an individual like yourself, it’s always intriguing to understand how you got to the point where you are. And there always seems to be some type of pivotal point. So first and foremost, I want to ask you, how did you get to this point as CEO of Call For Content and also being an author of the Authority Marketing Playbook?

Michael Greenberg 1:36

Yeah, so I’ll start with the easy one, the author of the Authority Marketing Playbook by starting Call For Content and needing to show off what we did, and also how we did it. So we put together that as our first like,” Hey, this is one of the strategies we sell. If you want to do it. Here’s the whole book, do it yourself or come to us and we will do this exact thing for you”. But I ended up as CEO of Call For Content when I saw in my work as a b2b growth strategist, with SAS, and with digital agencies, that they were experiencing the same problem and b2b, which was a lack of trust with clients, and a lack of ability to reach clients in a way that generated trust. And as a consultant myself, I knew that to be a major issue in b2b sales. And so I started Call For Content to solve that problem for myself and tangentially for my clients as well. And eventually, solving that problem turned into the main business, and we had to put consulting on the side while we focused on building out the agency.

John Francis 2:58

Yeah, I want to ask you this. When you’re saying a lack of trust, I want to explore that a little bit because I know from my perspective and dealing with my clients. Especially when I’m first introducing myself and getting to know them. My longest-term clients are the ones that I meet face to face at a conference here, there even sometimes in a social setting. It’s harder to try from my perspective to get business and to sort of tell people what I do when I’m emailing or whatnot. Have you found from your business, some of the challenges with the clients? Is it that lack of face to face relationship that is creating that lack of trust, or what have you found is that lack of trust between business partners?

Michael Greenberg 3:48

Yeah, so I think face to face does build a stronger relationship. But that is not to say you cannot build a relationship without it. I work with partners that I’ve seen three times in the five, six years, we’ve worked together. And we’ve met a few times in person, and it’s a whole lot of phone calls. And at least when it comes to digital, that’s where I’ve grown up. Especially in marketing, and in remote teams and operations. So I start with the assumption I’m never going to meet somebody face to face. And move from there, to how to market to them. And so, phone calls are still going to be our next best option. Video calls are still great for building relationships. But we really like to use the content. And so if I want somebody to trust that I’m an authority in how to position people as authorities using content, and how to get them leads you after achieving that positioning. I’m going to do those two things. I’m going to do that myself. And I’m going to write about it. Yeah. And so we created the Authority Marketing Playbook to show that off. Because if I