Lilach Bullock was Anatolii Ulitovskyi’s guest on the UNmiss podcast in an episode called “The Future of Marketing and Sales,” published on YouTube on 22 December 2023. It is a 56 minute conversation between two people who disagree in a friendly way about how hard it is to start from zero today, and it comes down to a few things Lilach says repeatedly: you cannot generate sales without both marketing and selling, and most people hide in marketing because selling is scary; timing is one of the biggest reasons any business succeeds and nobody likes to admit it; views, likes and followers do not equal sales, so write content for the lurkers who buy; and if you don’t ask, you don’t get. The video is embedded below, followed by the key takeaways, a summary and a cleaned transcript.
Watch on YouTube: The Future of Marketing and Sales with Lilach Bullock. The show’s home is unmiss.com.
Key takeaways
- Marketing and sales are a jigsaw; remove one piece and it falls apart. Entrepreneurs over-invest in marketing because it is fun and under-invest in selling out of fear and lack of skill. Everyone should be able to sell and keep improving at it.
- Do not copy competitors. You never see behind the scenes: how much time and money went in, when they started, who they already knew. Exhibitors at trade shows often cannot name their ROI and admit they are there because competitors are. Stay a step ahead by understanding what turns your audience on and off.
- Timing is one of the biggest reasons a business succeeds. Lilach once got a hundred downloads a day of a free ebook with zero promotion; that is not repeatable, and neither is MrBeast from zero today. Big brands’ online results rest on already being known. Be honest with yourself about that instead of comparing.
- Views and engagement do not equal sales. Anatolii’s 300,000-view LinkedIn post produced no sales; a 50 million view TikTok that made a book a bestseller left about 8,000 reviews. On LinkedIn the sales happen in the inbox, not on the wall. Create content for lurkers, and remember people are scared to engage with sales posts in case they get pitched.
- Roughly 80 percent value, 20 percent selling, adjusted around launches, and only as much content as you can sustain with real value; 95 percent of what she reads on LinkedIn has none. Test everything, including things people claim to hate: turning off a pop-up always lowers results.
- Her AI use in late 2023: accounting, tricky emails, organising long documents, SEO keyword research, content in her own voice because her large body of work lets the model recognise it, meeting summaries for follow-ups, skimming video transcripts, and image ideas for Canva. Not images. She expects companies to settle on a handful of tools, more niche and offline relationship building, more short video, more SEO, more honesty and more case studies.
- Starting from zero she would be different and memorable, learn enough of everything she outsources not to be taken advantage of, focus on numbers and sales activity over popularity, plan and work backwards, trust her gut, ask for everything and follow up until she chooses to stop. Proof: 30,000 in podcast sponsorship raised in a week from a list of 2,500 and a HubSpot Sequences trial.
Marketing versus selling, and why you cannot copy the competition
Anatolii opened on adaptation: marketers who adopt AI faster are replacing those who do not. Lilach introduced herself as originally from the UK, five years in Israel, nearly 20 years as an entrepreneur across digital marketing, content, sales and lead generation, agencies and speaking. Asked why she covers both sales and marketing, she said you cannot generate sales without either, marketing is the easy route people love and selling is what they hate, and entrepreneurs get sidetracked into marketing out of fear as much as anything. On strategy, she attacked the habit of copying competitors: nobody knows what results the other company gets, and she has met exhibitor after exhibitor at trade shows who cannot name their ROI and are only there because their competitors are. Understand your audience instead, and remember that the sales funnel length is set by what you sell: a 100,000 product can take six to twelve months to convert. Her current view of the wider picture is in the AI marketing trends that are changing how buyers decide.
The timing argument
The two disagreed, politely, about how hard it is to start today. Anatolii pointed to a client taken from zero to 2,000 organic visitors a day inside ten months in a competitive niche by using AI. Lilach said she was not diminishing that, but traffic and engagement are not sales, and cash on a consistent basis is much harder to generate for a brand new business than it was a few years ago; she was open that she could not duplicate her own success starting today. Her evidence for timing: a free traffic ebook that once got a hundred downloads a day unpromoted, enterprise clients whose online results depend on a brand they already have, and the TED talk that names timing as the number one factor. Anatolii’s counter: anything is possible, look for content gaps, do not chase follower counts because the algorithms serve people what they watch regardless of subscription. Lilach agreed numbers matter for some models, advertising, influence, investment, but pointed out that she watches hours of video and has never bought from one. They agreed on patience and perseverance (most podcasters quit before episode eight; Anatolii has 700-plus), and on her number one sales strategy: ask. Just sell.
Content for lurkers and the 80/20 rule
Anatolii’s 300,000-view LinkedIn post that sold nothing set up the content question. Lilach’s answer: on LinkedIn the sales happen in the inbox, in relationships and calls, not on the wall, so create content for lurkers rather than for engagement, because engagers rarely buy. Roughly 80 percent value and 20 percent selling, with the mix turning much more sales-heavy around a launch, which is why a content calendar matters. Only post as much as you can sustain with real value. Test what converts, not just what gets liked, and decide for each piece what action you want: a sale, a lead, an email, a like or a comment. Her pop-up example makes the point that what people say they hate can still convert. People are afraid to sell partly because sales posts get crickets: audiences will not like them in case they get a follow-up message. The written version of that approach is how content marketing produces leads rather than applause.
How she uses AI, and what comes next
She laughed at the people who say never write with AI and visibly do. When ChatGPT launched she was concerned too, as someone who offers content writing, but she thinks the flood of hundreds of new AI tools a day has overwhelmed the market and slowed adoption. Her own uses: accounting, tricky emails, organising and reformatting long documents, SEO keyword research, some content, which she edits and can ask for in her own style because her online body of work is large enough for the model to recognise it, meeting summaries after Zoom or Google Meet calls for quick follow-ups, a YouTube transcript plug-in for skimming video, and image inspiration for Canva. She does not rate AI images. She has mixed feelings about AI as she does about social media, which she thinks now does more damage than good, and about LinkedIn’s reciprocal liking game; she comments to disagree and start real conversations, and finds lurkers message her afterwards. On the future she is sceptical of gadgets (remember smart watches), expects people to narrow to a handful of tools, sees more niche and offline relationship building, more short video that is addictive but hard to convert, more SEO, hard decisions for many businesses, and more honesty and case studies. Her practical list of what she keeps is in the AI tools she uses every day to run her business, and the content side in how to use ChatGPT for content marketing without sounding like everyone else.
Starting from zero
Anatolii’s closing question was what she would do starting from scratch. Be different and memorable (she hated her name for years and now loves it because there is only one). Keep learning, and understand every skill you outsource well enough not to be taken advantage of. Know your numbers, ignore likes, and ask of every activity whether it generates sales or just popularity. Be disciplined, plan, work backwards, trust your gut and stop comparing. And ask. Her case study: everyone said a new podcast with no downloads could not get sponsors, so she built a list of about 2,500 prospects, asked HubSpot for a two week trial of Sequences, and raised around 30,000 in sponsorship in a week, then paid for the tool because it worked. Follow up not once but until you decide you no longer want that person as a client.
Frequently asked questions
What does Lilach Bullock talk about on the UNmiss podcast?
Why marketing and sales are two halves of one jigsaw and most entrepreneurs neglect selling; why copying competitors fails because you never see behind the scenes; why timing is one of the biggest reasons businesses succeed; why views, likes and followers do not equal sales and content should be written for lurkers; the 80/20 value-to-selling rule; how she uses AI for accounting, emails, SEO research, meeting summaries and content in her own voice; her view of short video and the future; and what she would do starting from zero, including how she raised podcast sponsorship in a week by asking.
How did Lilach Bullock raise podcast sponsorship for a brand new show?
Everyone told her a new podcast with no downloads could not get sponsors. She built a list of about 2,500 potential sponsors, asked HubSpot for a two week trial of its Sequences feature so the outreach would land reliably, ran the sequence, and raised around 30,000 in sponsorship within a week. Her motto is if you don’t ask you don’t get, and follow up until you decide you no longer want to work with that person.
When was the episode published and how long is it?
The UNmiss episode with Lilach Bullock was published on YouTube on 22 December 2023 and runs for about 56 minutes. The host is Anatolii Ulitovskyi.
Full transcript
Cleaned and condensed from the episode’s auto-generated captions. Filler, screen-sharing pauses and crosstalk removed, obvious caption errors fixed, meaning kept. Lines are attributed to Anatolii (host) or Lilach only where the speaker is clear.
Anatolii: Hello good people, welcome to our show. Today we are going to discuss marketing and sales and the future, because it is important to adapt fast. Technology is growing fast, and if you cannot adapt, competitors can replace you. After ChatGPT launched, marketers lost jobs, not because the tools replaced them but because people who adopted the tools faster got better results. We are going to talk about marketing, sales and the future with Lilach Bullock. How are you?
Lilach: Hi, I’m great, thank you. Great to be here.
Anatolii: Before we start, tell us about yourself, your experience and background, and why you pay attention to both sales and marketing.
Lilach: I’m originally from the UK, I moved to Israel five years ago, and I have been an entrepreneur and business owner for nearly 20 years. My background is digital marketing, content, sales and lead generation. I have built and run agencies, I’m a professional speaker, and I love everything to do with business. It is in my DNA.
Anatolii: Why both marketing and sales? They are separate niches. I usually get great results with marketers who have a sales background, because they care more about sales than engagement.
Lilach: You can’t generate sales without either, and ultimately we are in business to make sales. Marketing is often the easy route. People love to market, people hate to sell. I think it is so important to be able to sell, everyone should be able to do it and constantly improve. They work nicely together, they complement one another, and it is like a jigsaw: when you don’t have one piece the whole thing falls apart. Particularly with entrepreneurs, they get sidetracked and focus too much effort, time and resources on marketing and not enough on sales, and often that is fear, as well as a lack of skill, strategy and expertise.
Anatolii: I couldn’t agree more. If you create a marketing strategy you need to think about monetisation, about sales. Even if I get a million visitors I’m not sure I can get sales from that. Better to get less but quality traffic that sells. I want to start from marketing strategy and think about sales at the end. Marketing is huge, and I see companies implement generic strategies: analyse competitors, see how they get traffic and sales, replicate them. I tell them don’t, because if your competitors are successful with something it doesn’t mean you can be. They are good at something; you can find something they ignore that fits your strengths. Why do companies chase generic strategies, and what is your method for creating the right strategy?
Lilach: You said something very interesting that I want to address. A lot of competitors spy on other competitors and think, if they are doing X it must work, so I should copy it. That is the biggest problem and the biggest myth online: the majority of people are copying each other without knowing the results the other company is getting. For example, I have done a lot of exhibitions, as an influencer and speaker and also exhibiting for my own companies, and I have been fortunate not to have to pay because it was part of my influencer deal, but I have spoken to so many exhibitors, and when you ask what ROI they get, many don’t know, and many admit, we just have to be here because our competitors are here, and if we’re not here they will hog it all. It highlights that a lot of people follow like sheep and it is very hard to break that mould and be bold. So my biggest advice is always stay one step ahead of your competitors. It is good to understand what they are doing, but you don’t see behind the scenes. You don’t know how much time and money went in, when they started, who they were already connected with. There are so many variables you are not aware of. So when you are looking at strategies to generate more sales, don’t just focus on your competitors; really understand your target audience, get inside their mind, what turns them on and, more importantly, what turns them off, so that you resonate and speak their language. In terms of strategies, that is an open question, because it depends on the business and who they are targeting. Sales is a long funnel, and every business is dictated by how long theirs is. If you sell a hundred grand product it could take six to twelve months to convert; if you sell something cheaper or high volume, the conversion time is very different. And the longer the funnel, the more breaks and problems can occur.
Anatolii: I love that we don’t see what happens behind the scenes. Take MrBeast. He spent years crafting his skills, he got his first thousand subscribers after 18 months. Today everyone knows him, and watching his videos you might think, I can do the same. You can, but you need to get that experience.
Lilach: That is a really good point, and there is more. He is in a very different niche. B2B is the hardest niche, and that is dictated by ads too, because B2B ads are totally different and there are far fewer, so it is much harder to gain traction. Look at the niche, because it is a massive factor. And timing. I would put money on it that if he was starting today with absolutely zero, he would never duplicate the success he has achieved, simply because of timing. The market today is incredibly saturated and competitive. I have been in business nearly 20 years and it was so easy. I remember putting out a free ebook on traffic generation, not promoting it at all, and getting a hundred downloads a day from doing nothing. I couldn’t do that today. I really empathise with people starting out today or in the last 18 months, because everyone perpetuates that it is so easy, people share all these stats, and others think, well, I don’t have that. Timing is one of the most important things in business. I have consulted, mentored and done marketing for some really big enterprise companies, and I’m always shocked at their marketing, because the reality is that if they didn’t already have a recognised brand they wouldn’t achieve any of the results they get online. They rely on already being known. When you are not known and you have limited resources it is very hard to break out. The ones who have done it in the last 18 months, with zero online presence and zero network, those are the businesses we should be studying.
Anatolii: Lilach, I can’t fully agree, and it doesn’t mean I’m right. Of course it is extremely tough to start from scratch today. It is not like when the internet appeared, or social media. But I think there are a lot of opportunities because of AI, and someone who adopts AI can win the market because many companies still ignore it. For example, we work in trading and investing niches and compete with billion dollar companies, and in about ten months on one project we went from zero to 2,000 people a day of organic traffic from Google, in an extremely competitive niche, because we use AI.
Lilach: Let me dig into the numbers: 2,000 a day of what? Organic traffic, okay. I’m not talking about traffic or engagement, because engagement can be gained. It is so easy to get likes and comments. I have always said it is your lurkers that buy, not your followers. Gaining followers, likes and engagement doesn’t equal sales, and that is the fundamental difference. It is harder today to generate sales online for someone brand new with zero audience. I’m not diminishing what you have achieved, I think it is brilliant, but if we are talking about real, tangible sales, cash in the pocket on a consistent basis, it is much harder today than a few years ago. There are also many opportunities, and that is great, but I have to acknowledge that timing is very important. I have always said I could never duplicate the success I have achieved if I started out today. It would be impossible.
Anatolii: I think anything is possible, including on social media, even from scratch. For me it is important to focus on specific channels and search for the marketing gap, the lack of quality content. And it is not a good idea to chase followers and subscribers, because social media recognises what content you like. Some accounts have a million followers and low engagement, some have very few and high engagement. If I subscribe to a channel and never watch it, YouTube will never recommend it, and I often see recommendations from channels I don’t subscribe to because Google knows what I want. Same with TikTok.
Lilach: That is a valid point, but you need both, and numbers do matter depending on your business model. If you sell advertising, subscribers matter. If you are an influencer, follower numbers are very important. If you are trying to raise investment, followers and traffic matter. It depends, and it is important to have a balance, because followers also build trust and credibility. I’m not saying it should be that way, but realistically it does matter and we can’t ignore it. And just because I watch a video doesn’t mean I’m going to buy. I watch hours of videos every day and I have never bought from one of them. Not one. Which goes back to where we started: there is a lot of marketing and not enough sales.
Anatolii: You remind me of the quote: the best time was 20 years ago, today is the second best time.
Lilach: I’m not knocking it, and for some niches and sectors today is incredible. But I want to give people this: we compare ourselves, we look at others, we think they are so successful, I’m doing what they are doing, I’m posting every day, why am I not getting these results? We have to be honest. There is so much nonsense online and we have to rip it apart and look at the realities. There is an amazing TED talk on what makes a business successful, and one of the number one things is timing. I have worked with so many businesses of all shapes and sizes all over the world, and one of the key reasons they have been successful is timing. If they did the same thing today they wouldn’t gain the traction they did.
Anatolii: I agree about timing. I think patience is also very important. Most people give up. Most new podcasters don’t record more than eight episodes because they don’t get results from the first seven. That is why I have 700-plus episodes.
Lilach: Wow, impressive. People give up, and part of the reason is that they are reading online that it is easy, do this in X amount of time, they pass that time with nowhere near the results, and they give up. The reality is you need perseverance, grit and consistency. And the number one strategy in sales, I believe, is to ask. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Ask for the sale. People are so scared to ask for a referral, scared to sell in their content. The biggest strategy is to just bloody sell. Just do it.
Anatolii: Love it. About content strategy: you mentioned that engagement and traffic don’t mean sales. How do you create a content plan that covers the sales funnel and the buying journey? I got 300,000 views on a LinkedIn post and no sales. I would rather have 100 views and a few sales than a million views without any. Today you have to bring value, educate or entertain, but we also need the call to action. How do you do it right?
Lilach: Congrats on that number of views, that is incredible, and it highlights that it doesn’t equal sales. In my experience, on LinkedIn the sales don’t happen on the wall. They happen in the inbox, in building and nurturing relationships, having conversations, and often taking things off LinkedIn onto calls. I always say, when you create content, create it for your lurkers, don’t create it for engagement, because the people who engage typically aren’t your buyers. It is very rare that someone comments on my post and then messages me saying I really want to buy. If only it were that simple. I used to get that, and that shows how much things have changed. I’m a great believer in the 80/20 rule for content: 80 percent value, 20 percent selling. Ultimately it is about knowing your audience and being consistent. If you intend to post every day and you are struggling to come up with great value rather than filler, take it back and only create the amount of content you have the resources to sustain. Content, like everything in business, is about testing, measuring, tweaking and improving. Understand what your audience loves, but also what converts. A random example: everybody hates pop-ups on websites. I shut them down, sometimes I exit. But I have tested it, and I have worked with many companies who have tested it intensely, where you position them, the messaging, what you give away for the email address, and when you turn the pop-up off you get fewer results. So with content marketing you have to have the sales in there and ask what is going to convert. Everything we do has to be conversion, and there are different conversions: a sale, a lead, an email address, a like, a comment. Decide what action you want from this piece of content, then work out how to get people to take it. What types of content perform best, do people prefer video or switch off, do they prefer imagery or plain text? The lines get very blurred on social media because we are so used to posting to get likes, we all want to be liked, and we have to balance content that maybe gets less engagement but generates more of the action we want. If you create webinars, what is the sales funnel like, how many follow-up emails, what content on the website? Then there is the language, what turns them on and off, the sentiment, how memorable and different it is, how bland. There are so many moving parts. And you have to be prepared to take risks with content, otherwise you can’t test, because you are always doing the same thing.
Anatolii: About the 80/20 rule: do you create 80 percent value posts and 20 percent sales posts, or combine both in one post?
Lilach: It depends on the business. My goal when I use LinkedIn or any social platform is to drive traffic to my website. That is all I care about. If I’m launching something, a programme or an offer, I change my whole strategy and it becomes much more salesy. That goes for everybody, which is why a content calendar is so important: if you have a launch, an event or a webinar, your content around that period will be very different and much more salesy, and it is working out how many salesy posts versus value. That is where people get afraid to sell. They also get afraid because they worry they will get crickets: they are used to lots of engagement, and when they try to sell they get nothing, because people are too scared to like and engage in case someone messages them with more information they never asked for. They were just liking to be supportive. Everyone says on average it is 80/20, but really you have to give huge value. I would say 95 percent of the content I read on LinkedIn is of no value whatsoever. If you are going to write content, make it worthwhile, highly valuable. There is so much fluff. Part of the problem is that we now have to create so much content so consistently, which doesn’t help. But ultimately, give as much value as possible in the 80 percent and put more salesy posts in between.
Anatolii: Some questions about AI. We create tools with AI and get great results, in speed and even quality, though many content creators complain it is just a rewriting tool. Used smartly you can get quality. How do you use AI today to improve marketing and sales results?
Lilach: It makes me laugh, because everyone says don’t use AI to write, and you can see they have written it with AI; the more you use it the more you recognise the wording. When ChatGPT first came out, about a year ago, there was so much panic, and even I was concerned, because I also offer content writing services. But what we have seen is so many AI tools now, hundreds of new ones every day, and they have saturated the marketplace and overwhelmed everyone, which has slowed the growth down. I think we would be in a very different place had it not been so saturated, and I’m grateful it turned out this way. How do I use it? All the time, for anything and everything. I use it a lot for accounting, which I didn’t expect. It is very helpful for tricky emails. For long documents I can put things in and it organises them and I copy and paste. I use it for SEO, for keywords and research. I have used it to write some content, and I must admit sometimes I have to edit it quite a lot, but I’m lucky because it recognises my voice: I have a large online profile and lots of content online, so I can say write it in Lilach Bullock style and it does. I have used it for personal things, recipes even. And I’ll admit something: I’m not a fan of watching videos, I like to skim, so I use a YouTube plug-in that shows the transcript and I skim that. Another thing I love is when you have a Zoom or Google Meet call and it summarises it. Then I can send a quick follow-up email and I have a record. I don’t use it much for imagery. I have experimented, but it is not strong enough for me and it is easier to do it myself.
Anatolii: I’m not a big fan of watching videos either. I can scan articles for bullet points, but you can’t scan a video. On images, I agree, though I tested Bard for infographics: if you feed it data it can draw an infographic.
Lilach: That’s interesting, I’ll test that. ChatGPT’s imagery is a bit rubbish. One thing I have done that I found handy: I create all my imagery in Canva, so I have uploaded blog content or a LinkedIn post and asked for inspiration for an image, and then gone to Canva. But I have mixed emotions about AI, the same as I have about social media. I’m not a fan of social media any more; I think it does more damage than good right now, and we will probably see that with AI eventually. Right now I’m seeing a lot of good. Let’s see.
Anatolii: I like LinkedIn. It is business oriented and I don’t see a lot of hate.
Lilach: I’m seeing a lot of personal stuff on LinkedIn now, people taking photos of themselves, and I think it is a game. People gamify it. It is a very reciprocal game: liking and commenting to get likes and comments back. I think it is a load of nonsense, a back and forth game. The magic and the real stuff happens in messaging people, targeted outreach and building relationships. The liking and commenting and posting is a bit of a game now. That is my personal take.
Anatolii: I like commenting because it works well for me. You build relationships and a more loyal audience. Though Seth Godin says he stopped reading reviews of his books on Amazon in 2011.
Lilach: I can believe that. When I comment I try to find things I can have a discussion about, or disagree with, because then it is a real conversation. Commenting “I totally agree, wonderful” has no value. Everyone is agreeing, everyone says the same thing, I find it boring and it doesn’t get results. I like to do what everyone else isn’t doing. If I go on a post where I disagree and leave my comment, I know I will get lurkers who private message me saying, I totally agree, thanks for having the courage to say that, or there will be more back and forth. For me that is more beneficial in terms of ROI. I’m very ROI focused.
Anatolii: About the future. Apple is launching a headset, Ray-Ban and Meta have smart glasses. These gadgets can affect buying decisions. What do you forecast for marketing and sales, and how can we adapt?
Lilach: There are always gadgets coming. I remember when smart watches came out and everyone was going to use them, and most people don’t; they find them a distraction. Maybe I’m old school, but I feel everyone is very overwhelmed right now with all the technology and tools, and people are going a bit old school and limiting themselves to the ones that really help them. More companies will use AI, but they will focus on a handful of tools. On social media I think we are becoming more targeted, more niche, building more relationships, and I see things becoming more offline, because it is easier to build relationships that way, though I’m not sure how that works with a global world. Video is very popular, and short form content, which highlights that people will watch. I love reels because they are addictive, but they are really hard to convert. I have watched some of those silly Amazon must-have products, I scroll, I think I must have it, and I can’t find them again because they have gone so quickly. I don’t know how they convert at all, but from an engagement and views perspective they are great. So more short form content, things going round in circles, a lot more SEO and ways to drive traffic. Next year I think a lot of people will make big decisions about whether to continue their businesses or get jobs; with COVID and AI, a lot of content writers are nervous and the market is tough. I really feel for people. It is a hard time for many, and others are having an incredible year. I think we will see a lot more honesty and transparency online, and a lot more case studies, because people love case studies and right now that is not saturated.
Anatolii: On short videos and converting: an author published a book 11 years ago after 16 years writing it, spent on marketing, nothing. Then his daughter posted a TikTok from an account with zero followers, it went viral, 50 million views, and today the book is a bestseller on Amazon. Nothing special in the design, just a short story that provokes curiosity.
Lilach: I love that case study. Was it a consumer book or a business book? Consumer is totally different from B2B; things go far more viral in consumer. And it is a brilliant case study, but I would love to know how many sales it produced so we understand the conversion. How many reviews does it have on Amazon? About 8,000? So this is the ROI and conversion geek in me: let’s say one in three buyers left a review, that is 30,000 sales out of 50 million views. Which goes back to what we discussed earlier: views and engagement don’t equal sales. Those are incredible numbers, and it highlights what a short video on TikTok can achieve, but remember that we watch so many of these videos and scroll past, and often it is only when we see one many times that we think, the signs are telling me to buy. And it is a low ticket item, and consumer, so it has a lot of ticks for conversion.
Anatolii: Of course B2B is different. In B2B, to win with short video you need to film a lot of them, share value in all of them, and if you touch your customers seven or eight times they recognise your brand. My final question, a very important one for my audience. I get great results with customers who understand what I do. If a customer doesn’t, I tell them to go to Google, YouTube, my course, any course, and learn the basics, because then you can work with anyone. And I have students who want to learn from scratch. You said it is tough to start today, but many people have no other choice. If you started today with no experience, knowledge or skills, what would you do to become the person you are today?
Lilach: I love this question. We all make mistakes; that is how we learn and constantly improve. What has helped me is to always be different. What everyone else does, I try to do the opposite. I always try to stand out and be memorable. For years I hated my name because nobody could say it or spell it, and now I love it because it is so unique. There is only one Lilach Bullock in the world. I’m always learning skills. It is so easy to outsource, and I’m the queen of outsourcing, but everything I have ever outsourced I have had some understanding of. I may not be an expert, but I understand how it is done, whether that is the website, content or bookkeeping. When you run a business it is really important to understand how things are done so you don’t get taken advantage of, because people do take advantage of you in business. Focus on your numbers; so many people don’t know theirs. Don’t chase the likes and engagement, focus on sales activities, and for everything you do ask, is this going to generate sales or just make me more popular? You have to be so focused and disciplined, have a plan, know what you want to achieve and work backwards. You will always get people who agree and people who don’t; listen to your gut instinct. Try not to compare yourself, because so much of what is online is nonsense. And my biggest thing, with a case study: don’t be afraid to ask. I launched my podcast a year or 18 months ago and realised very quickly it is very expensive to run, so I thought, let’s see if I can get sponsorship. Everybody said, you will never get sponsorship for a brand new podcast with no downloads. I didn’t listen, because my motto is if you don’t ask you don’t get. Within a week I raised 30 grand of sponsorship, purely from outreach. I put together a list of two and a half thousand people I thought would be a good fit. I realised that if I sent it as a newsletter my conversion would be low, because not everyone would receive it, so I asked HubSpot, which I already used, to upgrade me to a two week free trial of their Sequences feature. I loved it so much and the results were so incredible that I paid for it afterwards. So my motto is if you don’t ask you don’t get, and I invite everybody to adopt it. You don’t want to be spammy or annoying, but you will never please everybody, and what is annoying to one person another may be grateful for. And the final one: follow up. Not once. Follow up until you decide you no longer want to work with that person.
Anatolii: Love it. Lilach, it has been a big pleasure to learn from you. What is the best way to keep learning from you and follow you?
Lilach: My website is lilachbullock.com: Lilach is spelled like lilac with an h, and Bullock like Sandra Bullock. I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. I should be on TikTok but I’m not there, I have an account but I’m not on it. Come and say hi and connect. I have a ton of free resources, trainings and learning on my blog.
Anatolii: Guys, you can find all the links in the description. Listen to us on Apple, Google and Spotify. I recommend everyone follow Lilach on social media, open her website and subscribe to her newsletter, because you can become a much better marketer. See you.
