In this episode of B2B Brand180, Linda interviews Neil Rogers, a sales and marketing professional and owner of Rogers Marketing.
Neil shares his journey from working behind a bar to authoring the book ‘Bar Tips’, emphasizing the value of learning about people, organization, and sales in a non-traditional setting. Neil introduces the concept of ‘positive activity,’ combining mindfulness with productivity to see solutions instead of problems, rooted in his personal experiences. Neil and Linda discuss how businesses can apply positive activity to improve their marketing efforts, stressing the importance of getting one’s mind right, practicing gratitude, and the effectiveness of tangible marketing touches in a digital world.
Neil’s LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-p-rogers-cas-68a4a22/
Neil’s company website: https://rogmark.net/
Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/
Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: https://mill.agency
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency/
Linda’s Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/
Linda Fanaras:
Hi, I’m Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand 180 Podcast and CEO of Millennium Agency, where we talk about branding and growth strategies. Before I start, I just want to take a moment and thank our audience today. And if you like what you heard, please hit like, share, or subscribe to help our channel grow. And today I’m excited to bring in Neil Rogers. He has a great background in sales and marketing. He’s worked with a large variety of clients and verticals, including pharma, biomedical manufacturing, logistics, financial, and the list goes on. And he’s also the owner of Rogers Marketing. So welcome Neil. B2B Brand 180 Podcast. Thanks for joining me today.
Neil Rogers:
Hey, Linda. Glad,
Linda Fanaras:
glad to be here. Thanks for having me on. Absolutely. So I would love you to give our audience a little bit of an introduction from your words about yourself.
Neil Rogers:
Well, I’m a the seventh of eight of an Irish Catholic family. Grew up outside of Boston went in kind of had fits and starts after high school, trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life and wound up behind the bar and learned a lot about people, about organization, about, you know, proper greetings, proper send offs how to understand products, how do I, how to manage my time. And essentially on looking back in a retrospect said. Well, it’s a lot, a lot, a lot about sales. So I then through COVID as a COVID project wrote the book bar tips. And a lot of that as we, as we talk, if we talk a little about that kind of, kind of dovetails with my whole story. So, yeah,
Linda Fanaras:
that’s, oh, that’s great. I’m looking forward to digging a little deeper into that. So, you know, Napoleon Hill wrote think and grow rich. If you can’t do great things, do small things in a great way. Why does that quote mean so much to you?
Neil Rogers:
Because going back to my early roots, coming out of high school, I was 17 years old. Again, as I mentioned, the seventh of eight of a kind. Irish family. And it’s not like it was today where we’ve got our kids mapped out from DNA right up until they’re off and even then beyond, you know, sometimes. And I just became a philosophy that I just adopted that just once one foot ahead of the other. You know, I flunked. I mean, you’re talking to probably the only person, you know, that flunked out of two community colleges. So, as an example. So, at some point in time, I had, I decided, okay, I better get serious about this stuff or where am I going to go? And that’s the philosophy I took. So, when we read Think and Grow Rich, I think it’s about 15 years ago now, I was like, oh my goodness. So, a lot of this stuff that I wrote about, I innately did, you know, it was just, and some of it came from, I guess it couldn’t be the way, you know, it wasn’t really something that we were, we were encouraged as kids growing up. Hey Neil, just, just get a little better every day.
Linda Fanaras:
But as
Neil Rogers:
I, as I went out and created my own philosophy and figured, okay, do I want to be a loser or do I want to be something? Well, if I tried to take something on all at once, I got frustrated and I, and I, and then all of a sudden it’s like, wow. The heck with that. Let’s move on to something else. So I just, I developed the philosophy of, well, it turns out to be do small things greatly, but I just called it, just take one, do the one right next step and just inch your way forward. And I did. And here I am.
Linda Fanaras:
That’s awesome. I know. I always talk about incremental improvements, right? Yep, no. And you all go ahead. Nope, we’re not. So what is positive activity? What prompted you to create it?
Neil Rogers:
Positive activity is the marriage of two things. One, it’s about, where are we now? My daughter was a division one athlete and played lacrosse in college and she had a career ending head injury
Linda Fanaras:
Oh boy,
Neil Rogers:
and spent her natural senior year home with us in post concussion syndrome And this was not too long after you know, the the the 2008 bust And so our business still hadn’t recovered all that well. So we were feeling a little squeamish about that. And obviously we had her at home, we had all these things going on. And one of the things she was so severely injured that she really couldn’t drive. So this, this accident happened in October. She drove again in July.
Linda Fanaras:
Okay.
Neil Rogers:
We, you know, she was, she was not reading and not driving and whatnot for a long time and, but she was listening to books and listening to things like Eckhart Tolle the power of now and said to my wife one day, Hey, would you, would you, does this, there’s this conference up at the, I don’t even know what it was called at the time, Clarion or the crown plaza here in Nashua.
Linda Fanaras:
Oh, yes.
Neil Rogers:
And it’s about mindful behaviors and what, would you take me? Laurie goes, sure. So we took her. So she’s walking around and Laurie started to get into the conversations with these people and talk about the law of attraction and mindful behaviors and, and all of that. So we. Started to adopt those things into our lives. We’re disciples of Sean, Sean, a core is happiness advantage. We’re also for agreements people.
Linda Fanaras:
So all of
Neil Rogers:
these books that, you know, when I, you know, when I talk to people like you or anybody that I’ve been interviewed and I bring those up, everybody just nods their head. Oh yeah, that’s a, that’s the one we use. And so we then took some of those, So some of those philosophies or the actual chores, that they outline and we put them into our lives. So we do, you know, so things like we, we. We’re both, we’re all yoga people. We meditate, we ever, we do the gratitude practice. We do all the things, four or five things every day to get us, our minds right. So the ditty that goes along with positive activity is, it is the practice, because we are yogis, right? It’s not, nothing’s a perfect, the practice of getting your mindset into a place where you are in creativity. So now you’re open minded, divergent thinking. Creatively thinking so you no longer see problems. You only see solutions and all this stuff started ringing true as to how we had been operating a lot to begin with, without the, you know, the actual practices, right?
Linda Fanaras:
Right.
Neil Rogers:
So, and then you have, once you’re in that creative mode and your solution providing, Now you can be productive. Now you’re in that productivity. So what are your productivity steps? So the ones that we have in the initial foray of positive activity, our business development steps, you know, here are the seven or eight things I’ve been doing for 37 plus years, both from when I was in the food business and when I was in the apparel footwear business. So we’re in the promo business for the last 27 years and it’s been the same things. And that has propelled our business. Whenever I got off of those things. That’s when I, that’s when it went south or we didn’t do as well. And so, so in this case, you know, it’s again, seven or eight business, business development practices, but I use it in, I use it in my personal life. I use it for my music.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah.
Neil Rogers:
So
Linda Fanaras:
how, how would you I mean, since this is a channel for our B2B clients or B2B listeners, how do you take that theory around positive activity? How do you apply it? To somebody who’s either in a marketing department, running a business. Somebody that handles the finances. I mean, can you articulate to our audience today, what type of value would that bring to those individuals when they’re, when they’re working?
Neil Rogers:
Well, the first of all, getting your mind right. And I think it’s a big topic today is paramount to starting off your day. If you’re starting with your head. In your emails, it’s not a good place to start in our view. Right. You know? Right. Get your mind. Right. Be be ready for the day. Shift your mindset to be happier.’cause we control most of our own happiness. Right. It’s not the stuff. It’s not the stuff we have. We just by shifting and thinking about three things that you’re grateful for in the last 24 hours, if you can intentionally recall something that that really, really was awesome. And articulated on a journal, you know, you start getting, you’re in that place. So now you’re in that place. You’re in productivity. What are your productivity steps? That’s up to you in our world. It’s about business development. Well, you know, how are we going to get new clients? How are we going to keep the ones that we have? How are we going to grow within them? And we have campaigns set up for each and every one of those.
Linda Fanaras:
Okay. We
Neil Rogers:
use digital, but because we’re in the promotional business, we’re big advocates. Of lumpy mail. So if you want, if you truly want to get noticed and believe me when I tell you, every day I get the next person that wants to sell me leads. From scraping LinkedIn calling me Neil P I guess we’re real friends. And it’s like, I always just say, does this really work? It can’t work. Can it, can it really work? And so this week I got caught on a, on an appointment with somebody else. I go, you don’t have an agenda for this, do you? You just wanted to get me on the phone and try to sell me something. This is not good. So anyways, I asked for an agenda each time now. so if you’ve got, as an example, if someone is new, a new territory, new business, new product set, they’re out in there, they’re networking, they’re going to chamber events, they haven’t going to cocktail parties. wherever they’ve got their talk track. They’ve got their 32nd commercial, whatever you want to call it now, just because, so this is it, this is, this certainly would be in a referred situation just because this person enjoyed your conversation and thought you were smart and you’re funny, or you might, they might be remotely interested, does not mean they’re sitting, waiting by the phone for you to call or your magic email. You better get in queue and you better systematically market to them. We believe. At least in the bare minimum of the seven theory, seven touch theory that you have to have seven significant touches in order to get somebody’s attention. And in this world, you know, it’s, it may even be beyond that, you know? So, so it’s and so that that’s, so that’s, in a referred situation. So even your customers who you currently have, if you want to sell them a new product set or something, I’d respect them. And I make sure I’m just going to call, Hey, you know, obviously you can call and try to get an appointment and see them, but absent of that, get them into, get them into queue, direct mail and I’m not selling direct mail today is, was up in 2023.
Linda Fanaras:
Yeah. So just, just speak about the, you know, the seven steps or whatever the case may be. Can you give the audience some examples let’s say you meet somebody in the elevator. There may be potential, there may not be potential, what would be what would you envision as part of those steps?
Neil Rogers:
So let’s say we do get contact information, so I would, I would clearly, I’m not opposed to digital, I just don’t want it to be the, be everything. Certainly a follow up email, certainly great, you know, it was great to see you, yadda yadda yadda. Here’s what, here’s what I, here’s, here’s some of the things we talked about. Love to chat with you another time, but just a little, just a little follow up, simple follow up. I’m not talking about again, just, you don’t have to get all creative and whatnot. Just do it quickly. At least within 24 hours, otherwise they’re going to forget you.
Linda Fanaras:
Right. Right. Real
Neil Rogers:
memorable.
Linda Fanaras:
Right. And
Neil Rogers:
then beyond, then obviously you, the most obvious thing is that you want to have proper contact information in order to do all this.
Linda Fanaras:
Right.
Neil Rogers:
Then sure. Why not leave them a voicemail? You’re going to get voicemail most of the time.
Linda Fanaras:
So leave them a
Neil Rogers:
nice voicemail. Don’t bug them. Do not be, don’t be overbearing. And then, then somewhere in the next two weeks, 10 days, make sure they open up a piece of mail from you. We send things like this, simple pen with a QR code on it. This is my bar tips. Find these ones I give out to waitresses and bartenders and all that. And you might well imagine the QR code goes right to my, right to the website to buy my book and but the whole notion is, is that it’s going to come in some sort of dimensional mail.
Linda Fanaras:
You
Neil Rogers:
want to have tracking because once they have it, you want to talk to them. Within 24 hours. A new thing I’ve, I’ve discovered that we can do with QR codes and that is we have a new product that we’re working with merge bots where that QR code takes you to a merge bot and then the engagement starts the analytics from that, from what I’ve heard from my research with this vendor is staggering that the length of time people go back to that, to stay engaged, for instance, in this, in the, in this certain presentation he made was, it was where somebody gave out something like this at a trade show 90 days later, they were still talking to the bot.
Linda Fanaras:
So basically. You know, you have seven touch points and does that happen over a certain period of time or not necessarily?
Neil Rogers:
Sure. I mean, I think it’s really up to the business, we usually do two a month, right. And then hopefully, you know, you get contact,
Linda Fanaras:
Right.
Neil Rogers:
Some sort of engagement, but we also, we always have the piece, the resistance is a last ditch box, which is completely. Decorated with their logo outside with multiple things inside with the stuff with your one sheeter that you want to walk through. And then the hope is right, Linda, we got them before that
Linda Fanaras:
we bring
Neil Rogers:
the box with us. We take them through it and then leave them with all of the fun
Linda Fanaras:
swag. So you try to touch it, touch them at least twice a month.
Neil Rogers:
Yeah. At least, you know, from a, from a physical standpoint and then, you know, the digital stuff we don’t like to, I’m not a big, I mean, some of these, this, the stuff online now, it just staggers me. The amount. Of emails I get from one group, one person.
Linda Fanaras:
Have you done any studies around the success rate?
Neil Rogers:
All of what we do and what I’ve written about is anecdotal. I just go from my experience and how we’ve grown most, most people I’ve tried to get, you know, direct mail in and of itself has got, you know, a decent response rate, nobody. And I’ve tried my darndest to find somebody that’s got tracking, get, get data on lumpy mail. Even in the, even in the, our, even our associations, they’ve really not, not done a good job of tracking that.
Linda Fanaras:
Right.
Neil Rogers:
I can just tell you that, you know, again, it’s, it’s from my, our experience and our success. You know, nobody’s going to get mad at you because they opened up and you gave them a mug.
Linda Fanaras:
Of course. So you’re, so you’re 7. touch point process is typically like a physical product. It could be a direct mail, or it could be a pen. It could be a mug. It could be box of cookies. Is that accurate?
Neil Rogers:
Anything dimensional. You want them to open because it gets open. You know, it’s think of it as you’re the multiple emails you get is the same thing as you get multiple. pieces of mail that have got you just toss them. I mean, we do it. I mean, I think the average person does. And again, I’ve got no data on that, but I’m just anecdotally saying I toss this stuff. And so we know that when people, here’s one, here’s an example for you. You can’t see my name. So here’s something that we do every year. You can’t see it all that well, but my name is on that, on that beer, dough, whatever. And people wait for these every year. It’s, it’s the digital age, right? Nobody uses paper calendars every year. Every year. We’ve got at least a handful of people that call us, you guys sending the calendars this year? You think it’s the thing we get most thanked for and it’s the cheapest thing we’ve ever done.
Linda Fanaras:
Awesome. Well, before I get to my last question, let me, I just want to take a moment and thank the audience. For listening in today. And if you like what you are hearing today, please hit like share or subscribe. So is there anything else you’d like to share with the audience before we wrap up today?
Neil Rogers:
Yes. I’ve got a beautiful one today because I’ve experienced it today. And if you buy my book, bar tips, everything I needed to know in sales, you’ll, I learned behind the bar, you’ll get this little tip. It’s called taking ownership. When a business problem arises, so, the guy who, who was my mentor in the food business, you know, I’m chasing him around trying to follow him, get all, get, cause he’s tops of the trees in the, in stack rankings and all that, what the magic magic, magic pill is. And he he said, after all this other stuff, and he’s kind of a little bit of a wise guy, but you got in front of him, a chef or, or hotel manager, whatnot, he completely changed. In the end, he said, Neil, if you learn anything, nothing else from me, remember when anything goes wrong, start here. What was my role in this? How could I have done better? Did I give the order right? Before you start in those days, it was, it could be the warehouse person, the guy in the truck did it. That customer service girl doesn’t know what she’s doing. Who looks good in that? Nobody. You know what? Let me just. And if you can solve that problem without them even knowing. All of that. Now, nobody looks bad. Just go solve it.
Linda Fanaras:
Right. Don’t,
Neil Rogers:
don’t, don’t argue about it. Don’t this don’t get in the back and forth. And if you’ve got one bar, if you want one bar story before we go, the, the great example of this was Dennis Mayer. I worked at a place called Kia’s in Boston. Yeah, I
Linda Fanaras:
know where that is. Yeah,
Neil Rogers:
I opened it 42 years ago.
Linda Fanaras:
Okay.
Neil Rogers:
And Dennis was this guy way too smart to be hanging around with us pouring drinks, but he was working right to my side. And I heard this woman came up to the bar and asked for a vodka martini, extra dry. And for your audience, a vodka martini, extra die is vodka. All right. So Dennis poured it just the way he always does. Puts it, you know, ice is down the glass, pours it over ice, strains it into the glass, puts it down in front of the woman. This isn’t dry enough. Of course, Dennis walks by me and he goes, I’ve been doing this 15 years. Haven’t put a drop of vermouth in a drink yet, in a martini yet. So what does he do? I sit down a glass, puts it in front of her, pours the vodka. Not, not, not in a showy way. Not in a look at me way, not look at, no, no he just poured it so that she could see. Put it over, poured it into the glassware, put it in front of her, and she goes, that’s the one. So, the lesson here is, he could have gotten a beef, he could have told me his story, he could have, you know, the same story he told me. And then next thing you know, the other customers are hearing this and the place lost two ounces of booze.
Linda Fanaras:
Right.
Neil Rogers:
That’s it.
Linda Fanaras:
Right.
Neil Rogers:
So,
Linda Fanaras:
so these are the
Neil Rogers:
types of things that we talk about. They’re not, they’re not nationally studied or, or I’m going to show you a backup with all this data, but I tell you what, you talk to a bartender about this when I hand out this book.
Linda Fanaras:
Well, people
Neil Rogers:
that are in sales that worked in the hospitality business. It’s like, Oh yeah. I remember that. So
Linda Fanaras:
that’s good.
Neil Rogers:
So this is the pearl of Wisdom. Okay. Okay.
Linda Fanaras:
Awesome. Thank you. So thanks very much for sharing your insights with our audience. Can you tell them how to get in touch with you?
Neil Rogers:
Sure. It’s a Neil, N E I L at positiveactivity. net and that’s where you’ll find me, my book, my program, and Yeah. So there you go.
Linda Fanaras:
Great. Well, thank you for tuning in to the B2B Brand 180 podcast today. We hope that you found the insights and strategies shared to be valuable and actionable. Again, I’m Linda Fanaras, host of the B2B Brand 180 of Millennium Agency. You can visit us at mill. LinkedIn. It’s a couple of books I’d love to share with you. You can pick them up at Amazon. One is called claim your white space, why it’s critical to your business success. And the second one is passion plus profits. Build a powerhouse brand that sells. And just as a reminder, if you like what you heard today, please feel free to like, share or subscribe. for listening in.
