In this episode, Harris and Shawn chat with David and Chris, owners of Cyber City Circtuits (https://shop.cybercitycircuits.com/). David and Chris are working to expand their contract manufacturing (for electronics and PCB assembly) business and need help reaching new customers. As a result, Harris and Shawn perform a live consultation with them to give advice on how to approach marketing and sales. In particular, Harris gives his thoughts on best ways to set up a sales pipeline, and Shawn helps brainstorm marketing ideas. Both Harris and Shawn agree that marketing and sales must be approached with a scientific mindset: experiment and learn from the experiments. One Powerful Quotation: * 58:45 – Shawn: “Everyone thinks marketing is fun colors and shapes and photographs, and while that is a part of branding, real marketing comes down to ‘what do customers engage with?’…you have to take a scientific [approach] to go ‘I have a hypothesis, I’m going to test it, and see the results.’” Key Topics: * 1:00 – Shawn asks David and Chris to explain what Cyber City Circuits does. * 3:40 – David talks about how he’s working to ramp up a contract manufacturing business within Cyber City Circuits. * 4:45 – Harris asks David and Chris about why shipping is a hard problem. * 9:00 – Shawn talks about automating shipping processes to allow for capacity and time to work on sales and marketing. * 12:00 – David talks about wanting to find more CM customers to help pay for his and Chris’s time and provides some examples about what ideal customers would look like. * 14:00 – Shawn askes David and Chris to define whether they want to be B2C or B2B. * 15:30 – Harris gives his thoughts on setting up sales pipelines. * 18:15 – Shawn asks David and Chris to elaborate where their current customers are coming from. * 20:30 – David mentions that they currently test 100% all of their boards. * 21:30 – Shawn and Harris help David define their current sales pipeline. * 23:00 – Harris gives some advice on setting up onboarding techniques when hiring a salesperson. * 28:30 – Harris talks about how a good, simple CRM tool can help Cyber City Circuits. * 32:00 – Harris and David discuss the various ways to position a brand when it comes to sales. * 33:45 – Harris recommends that David and Chris create marketing and sales personas and then use outbound marketing to validate hypotheses about those personas. * 36:30 – Harris talks about the customer acquisition process. * 37:15 – Shawn asks if Cyber City Circuits is seeing repeat customers for their CM service. * 41:00 – Shawn recommends following Hubspot’s tutorials (https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research) for developing personas. * 43:15 – Shawn and David talk about potential problems Seeed Studio’s CM service might run into. Correction in the show: Seeed Studio still offers their Propagate service (https://www.seeedstudio.com/propagate/) for low-to-medium volume manufacturing. * 45:00 – Chris and David talk about why tooling costs are so high for CMs. * 46:45 – Shawn talks about how to find potential customers outside of an existing network along with how to engage with people on Twitter. * 50:30 – Harris gives feedback on Cyber City Circuits’ Twitter profile page. * 54:30 – Shawn talks about what it takes to create good content. * 58:00 – Harris and Shawn talk about experimenting in sales and marketing. * 1:00:00 – Harris and David talk about the difficulty in setting up a bootstrapped business. David mentions that he used Shopify (https://www.shopify.com/) to build his ecommerce storefront. * 1:01:30 – Harris and Shawn talk about how to test and measure various sales and marketing tactics. * 1:07:00 – Harris and Shawn discuss ways to develop good content and apply search engine optimization (SEO) to appeal to a particular audience. * 1:12:30 – David and Shawn talk about the necessity of having a good product to start with before being able to market it. * 1:14:30 – David talks to Shawn about handling poor designs or customers that want things outside of what a CM can provide. * 1:19:00 – Chris and David talk about wanting to transition to being primarily a CM shop with electronics distribution on the side. * 1:25:30 – David leaves listeners with some words of wisdom. List of Resources * Hubspot’s Buyer Persona tutorial (https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research) * Shopify (https://www.shopify.com/) Guest Contact Information: Cyber City Circuits (https://shop.cybercitycircuits.com/) David Ray (https://helloblinkshow.com/guests/david-ray) Chris Williamson (https://helloblinkshow.com/guests/chris-williamson) Host Contact Information: shawnhymel.com (https://shawnhymel.com/) kennyconsultinggroup.com (http://kennyconsultinggroup.com) LinkedIn – Shawn Hymel (https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnhymel/) LinkedIn – Harris Kenny (https://www.linkedin.com/in/harriskenny/) Twitter – Shawn Hymel (https://www.twitter.com/ShawnHymel) Twitter – Harris Kenny (https://www.twitter.com/harriskenny) License Information: “Hello Blink Show” by Kenny Consulting Group, LLC and Skal Risa, LLC is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Intro and outro song is “Routine” by Amine Maxwell is licensed under CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) Special Guests: Chris Williamson and David Ray.