165: Master Your Top of Funnel with Christian Banach

https://youtu.be/rvIyW_STWuM

Christian Banach is the Principal & Chief Growth Officer of Christian Banach LLC. He helps agencies land 6 and 7-figure opportunities predictably through consulting, training, and outsourced lead generation services. We discuss the benefits of mastering your top-of-funnel, ways to provide customized value to clients, and the future of communicating with prospects.

— Master Your Top of Funnel with Christian Banach

Our guest is Christian Banach, the owner of Christian Banach LSC that helps technology enabled marketing agencies to predictably land six and seven figure opportunities. Christian, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me on Steve, looking forward to this conversation.

So before we plunge into your frameworks that you teach and you practice, let’s talk about how did you get here? What led you to establishing a business development consulting business?

I can’t say that I grew up and decided, you know what, this is what I want to do when I get older. It was definitely an interesting journey that I had gone on, but I had always been entrepreneurial. I was a kid that growing up was buying and selling baseball cards. I was cutting the neighbor’s lawn. And one of those businesses actually started sort of accidentally where a group of friends of mine got together and we rented out a banquet hall and booked some DJs and we decided we were going to throw our own teen dance party and invited a bunch of high schools and colleges and boom, it went off really successfully.

And we made some money, we had a lot of fun and I ended up doing more and more of these events and ended up, that’s how I paid my way through college. Got out of college and went to go work as a marketing coordinator. Was still doing these events on the side but realized I was having more fun making more money doing these events.

So I ended up leaving that coordinator job and went all in. I got an office, hired some of the people that were helping me on the side full time. And what started as banquet hall parties turned into major concert venues. And we worked with Lady Gaga, we worked with Pitbull and some really big artists. And along the way, I started getting involved in experiential marketing and working directly with brands and with agencies, Allstate, Toyota, some really big companies. So that essentially was my entrance into more of the agency space. And things buzzed along really well for the, you know, 15 years. But then the 2008 recession hit and business dried up. And like a lot of companies, I was struggling and I didn’t have a sales process or a framework at the time. It was really a word of mouth and referrals type of business.

So I went out and I hired a consultant to come in and help me and they really started to give me what is today a ground work of my company and I really gravitated towards BizDev. So after like a couple more years of still struggling a long ago I decided I was going to close down my business and I was ready for a change and I went to go work at agencies doing business development. Had done that for about 10 years, really loved it. Discovered along the way my superpower was really generating those top of funnel opportunities, generating those initial leads with big enterprise type companies.

Fast forward, all of this is leading up to how we got here today, the pandemic hit. And in the back of my mind, I always knew I wanted to do something on my own again, but I wasn’t sure what, when or how. And I saw agencies and other businesses were really struggling because of the pandemic. And I felt this time though, just like that consultant had helped me a decade earlier, I felt I could help others and ended up leaving the agency I was at and formed this company and here we are two and a half plus years later and things are going great.

That is a really interesting, really amazing story. It happens all the time that a business hits a roadblock, a constraint, and then they wreck their brains, they somehow figure it out and then it becomes a strength.

Yeah.

And actually I recently came out to this book, Strategy OS, and this is one of the tenants that I discovered through my research that for the big companies, they actually became big because they had constraints and they overcame them and they turned it into a strength. So that’s fantastic. So, so let’s talk about the framework, some of the frameworks that maybe you’ve got taught by your consultant at the time or something tha...