3 Ingredients for a Delicious Brisket (That Can Also Improve Your Sales and Marketing)

This past week I cooked three briskets for a community event. I’m a systems guy, so since I had 40+ pounds of delicious-smelling brisket and multiple days of cooking to ponder this, I came up with three keys to success:

1. You need a process. Don’t wing it or make it up as you go. The more consistent you are with your process, the better your results will be.
2. Trust the process. You’re going to be there a while (think an hour or so per pound). I use a Meater meat thermometer and love it. But early in the cook, it will tell you something crazy like your 15 lb brisket will be done in 4 hours. Or you may get impatient because it feels like your brisket is taking forever to cook. You’ll be tempted to go fiddle with the vents and adjust the temp. Don’t do it. At about 160 or 170 degrees, a brisket will “stall,” and just sit there for hours. This is all how a tasty fall-apart brisket is made.
3. Consistency. Austin smoked meats guru Aaron Franklin points out that while the ingredients in your rub make a difference in the flavor, the biggest factor in taste and texture is the consistency of your cook. Simply put, if you’re constantly tweaking the temp, it will have a negative impact on the outcome – no matter how good your rub is.

These same three ingredients can also be applied to marketing. You need to have a process, trust the process, and be consistent.

You need a process. I love the recent move to combining sales and marketing into the term “Revenue Operations,” because it takes the emphasis off a crazy gifted salesperson who can sell water to a fish, or an uber-creative marketing person. These are great to have – but they’re expensive to hire and keep and it’s hard to replicate their methods to your other staff. If you have a PROCESS (preferably somewhat automated), you don’t have to rely on particularly gifted individuals to hit your monthly targets.

Trust the process. It’s often tempting to treat every prospect or lead as a unique scenario. There are times when a step doesn’t make sense (if they’re ready to buy, stop selling, no matter how many more sales steps there are!). But in my experience, SMB’s lose far more sales by getting creative than sticking with the process.

Finally, consistency is key. If you’re inconsistent with your marketing efforts, it will be difficult to see results. Don’t try to come up with a post that “goes viral.” Instead, design a consistent drip of social, email, videos, etc that keep you familiar and make sure you’re there when your client is ready to buy. As any good financial advisor will tell you, the compound interest of small but consistent investments will almost always outperform the one-off cash dumps.

If you can follow these three ingredients, you’ll be well on your way to a perfect brisket (and successful RevOps ).