Stop being afraid to lose.

This is my Newsletter series on LinkedIn where I aggregate the best content from sales and marketing influencers each week. If you enjoy it, you can hit the "subscribe" button to get this automatically every Sunday and start building a bigger and better LinkedIn network.

Happy Sunday, LinkedIn family. It's time for the first Weekly Content Rundown of the second half of 2019. Remember, if you're building big revenue teams, you're already 8% of the way into this quarter and 4% of the way through the back half of the year. Time to get moving.

If you need help boosting your company's revenue, feel free to book some time with me, and I'll walk you the exact strategies I used to go from $0 to $50M in ARR in less than five years.

My goal for this week's rundown is to mix it up a bit. I'm featuring some sales & marketing specific content that is truly actionable - stuff you can implement tomorrow. I'm also sharing some content that I found entertaining and wanted to pass along to my audience.

This week we'll cover:

• The mindset of champion salespeople
• Why features and benefits aren't what matters in marketing
• How top influencers stand out on LinkedIn
• Getting out of your "head trash"
• 10 tips for new managers
• Doing anything vs. doing everything
• The best marketing books ever written
• BONUS: Earthquake footage!

The content this week comes from Keenan, Mark Kilens, Shay Rowbottom w/ David Moricca, Bryan Elsesser, Vala Afshar, Scott Barker, Dave Gerhardt, and Estie Rand. If you're not following these folks, do it now.

Let's dive in.

At PatientPop, we're all big fans of Keenan's book, Gap Selling, and if you're looking to crush your sales quota, you probably should pick up a copy. In this week's video, Keenan talks about something that is near and dear to my heart: the mindset of not caring about losing. When you have that mindset, you execute better on nearly everything. When you treat every opportunity like it's the end of the world if you lose, you have no leverage. You negotiate poorly. You sell out. You lose your values. Watch the video below from Keenan and get out of that losing mindset.

I came across this post from Mark Kilens over at Drift (one of two people from Drift I'm featuring this week) and his theory on writing content and copy really speaks to me. Anybody can take your spec sheet and "one-up" you, but only GREAT brands write copy and content that truly speak to the buyer. They tell stories that move the buyer closer to the outcome they are desiring, rather than speak about specific features and benefits. Is your brand telling the right story?

If you don't know who Shay Rowbottom is, you're likely living under a rock. She is one of the top content producers across all of LinkedIn, and her videos are always helpful, entertaining, and hilarious. In this interview with David Moricca, the CEO of Socialive, she talks about the video style that helps her stand out from the competition and get people to engage through her entire videos. As a Socialive customer, I can't say enough about leveraging a platform like theirs to go live across social media, including LinkedIn.

We've all been there. The situation where you know what to do, but your fear stands in the way. You convince yourself that instead of doing what you NEED to do, you should instead spend your time doing something easier...more comfortable. That's what Aircall's Bryan Elsesser calls, "head trash". Read more about his take on being different, and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.

When you promote someone from an individual contributor to a manager role for the first time, you don't realize how steep the learning curve is. I've watched great salespeople crash and burn as managers when they weren't sure how to navigate the new role effectively.

Insert Vala Afshar, the Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce. He posted 10 pieces of advice for new managers, and they are absolutely spot on. The whole post shows that Vala really gets what it takes to be a strong manager, but I especially love number six through number ten on this list. Save this one for continual reference.

This isn't Scott Barker's first go-around on my Weekly Content Rundown, and for good reason. He's always posting high-quality content, and last week's post is no exception. The reason this post resonated so much with me is that I've always believed I could do anything, but often find myself in the unhealthy habit of trying to do everything.

I can tell you from personal experience that this is a recipe for disaster both mentally and physically, as Scott alludes to below. I recommend sitting down and really outlining what you want to accomplish in your life and career. What do you need to focus on and what can you give up?

Learn more about Outreach.io and Sales Hacker.

I want to call out this post from Drift's Dave Gerhardt because he offers up some real value here. He lists his top 7 marketing books and links to an 11-minute podcast about them, which I listened to while hanging out having a cup of coffee. All of this information is free and coming from arguably the top marketer in the game right now. What's not to love?

I'd recommend getting a few of the books he's recommending on your Kindle and listening regularly to Dave's Marketing Swipe File Podcast if you want to build a killer brand and community.

BONUS: Lastly, I want to give a major shoutout to Estie Rand, the Founder of Strand Consulting, who is my new hero after enduring the 7.1 magnitude earthquake here in Los Angeles while she was on a 25+ person coaching call. Yikes! I was lucky enough to be out of the area when this happened, but you can see from the video how shaken up she was. She kept her calm, did the right things, regained her composure, and marched on. What a champ!

Well, that does it for my weekly content rundown on July 7th, 2019. I hope you enjoyed it, got some value, and added some new connections to your LinkedIn network.

Before you go, remember to connect with me on social media and subscribe to my personal newsletter, where I talk about all things sales and marketing, using the links below:

• Personal Newsletter (new website coming August 20th, 2019)
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Quora

Also, don't forget to subscribe to my Weekly Content Rundown using the "subscribe" button at the top of this page. Until next week....happy creating.

Cheers,

Justin