In this episode of Missing Half, we sit down with Mike Cuperus, a University of South Dakota marketing professor with extensive industry experience, to uncover the gaps in modern marketing education. From his early career in newspaper advertising to leading biotech marketing teams and transitioning to academia, Mike offers a unique perspective on the skills students need but aren’t learning in traditional classrooms. Bill and Mike discuss 7 tips for marketing students and educators alike, the importance of industry-academia partnerships, and how to future-proof your marketing career in an ever-changing field. Whether you’re a student, educator, or professional, this episode is packed with invaluable insights to help you thrive.
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Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today I have a very special guest that I've been chasing down for a very long time to get on the show. A good friend of mine and colleague, Mike Cuperus. Mike, thank you for joining us today.
Mike: Thank you, Bill. It's a pleasure to be here.
Bill: Mike, go back a long way and one of the things we did together is we worked on some marketing together for one of our clients, somewhere where you worked in the past. But before we get into that, I really want to start and talk about your journey and your career. It seems like all of us who were, let's just do our high school graduation year so we're not really completely giving away our ages, but who graduated high school in 95 and maybe college in 99. We all had some ties in the newspaper industry. We all kind of had whether we were working with them, for them, whatever. Could you maybe talk about how you got your start in the newspaper industry and then how maybe that's kind of carried through to having you now teaching marketing at a university?
Mike: Yeah, well, sure. I mean, the start in the newspaper industry kind of ties together with, well, I don't know if it ties together, but all the changes being our age, you know, I mean, we grew up without the internet, without cell phones, and the newspaper was the number one source of information back in the day. And so yeah, my path, I studied marketing in college and got some of my first jobs with a newspaper in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in Minnesota. I sold advertising with the Star Tribune, which is the daily newspaper in Minneapolis. So like a lot of friends and colleagues in school, that's kind of where we got our start. For me, it was such an educational experience because I'm not just learning about selling advertising and marketing, but I'm learning about each and every different business that I'm talking with. They all have different customers, they all have different industries that they're in, and it's just a great way to learn a lot about, you know, business in general. And so that's where I got my start. I did that for a few years. And you know, I was selling advertising, had a background in marketing. Eventually, I ended up as a marketing manager for an exteriors company that did roofing and siding and windows and things like this. And that was, you know, kind of a traveling job because we did a lot of insurance work with when there was like hail storm and wind damage. And so I ended up starting some offices and pretty fun places to live in my 20s. Frankly, I got to, I lived in Denver for a few years and then I lived in New Orleans for a few years and Chicago and New York City. We didn't start an office in New York, but we went up there after Hurricane Sandy. And that's where I actually met my wife. Well, we grew up only a couple cornfields away from each other in Southwest Minnesota. And then I knew she lived up there. I got her number from somebody. We had coffee and we met and we had coffee that led to like three kids and 15 years later we're back in the Midwest and from New York I ended up going to, another job opportunity happened in southwest Minnesota for an animal health company and then this company I grew up on a farm too I should say so I'm pretty tied into agriculture. This company created vaccines for veterinarians and that's how you and I met when I took that role as a marketing manager for the vaccine company. I was looking for I was a one man marketing department in this startup biotech company. And we're, you know, we're not huge, we're not small, we're doing like $15, 20 million a year, something like that. But I needed help obviously to do it and I met Bill online. I forget exactly how we met might have been like a thumbtack or something like that. But we started talking and I immediately knew that that you got it. You got what I was what I was needing, like an understanding of the changes that we've been seeing in digital marketing and marketing in general and how we could take advantage of that. But yeah, just to go back to my initial beginning of the conversation, that, the advent of Google. mean, I remember using Google in 2006 and 2007 to get information on my customers and thinking, I know something they don't know because I can find all the information. It was such a game changer back then. It made my job so much easier than some of these execs that were like 20, 30 years older than me, couldn't even open a laptop. Didn't know what a laptop was. And I'm getting all this information because Google's got it. And think of that, where we were then. And think of where we are now with artificial intelligence and everything. It's constantly changing. If you blink, I've been out of industry. I've been teaching now for the last couple, almost three years. I feel like a complete space cadet when I think about industry right now. I don't, I don't, it changes so fast, you know what I mean?
Bill: Oh there's no two ways about it, Mike. Well first thing I want to go back to your story, I feel like, Mike, your story, there's a movie in there, some type of Hallmark movie. You know, farm kid from the upper Midwest goes and chases the big dream job all over the world, goes to Manhattan, meets the girl from back home. Like there's there's a Hallmark movie in there somewhere, Mike. So just think about that, get an agent and sell the rights to that, develop the screenplay. I think that could be like a third career for you is Hollywood bound. But I love that story.
Mike: Well, Anna has been eating up the Hallmark movies too, so we're ready for the screenplay.
Bill: Yeah, I think both of our wives enjoy those type of movies, as do many of the young ladies out there in the world. I've always boiled it down to, there's, the plot is there's a guy, there's a girl, there's confusion, there's a misunderstanding. And then at the end, there's a scene where there's snow, a courier knives Christmas, and they all live happily ever after. That to me.
Mike: And sometimes there's royalty. There might be like a prince, you might have never knew this guy was actually a prince, you know.
Bill: Well, of course, for it to be that idyllic outcome, everything has to line up and the pauper must become the prince. There are no financial worries. There's no challenges with raising children. It's just all wonderful. So yeah, usually whenever those shows come on in our household, I usually find something better to do like go get a root canal, to each their own, right? We all have to endure those things. Well, Mike, one of the things and you alluded to, we went through a lot of that transitional phase in industry with, you you had a startup biotech, you were a marketing manager of one and just trying to deal with all of the traffic that was coming your way. And when I say traffic, all, you know, there are a million ideas back there, back then, largely unproven. Like we were trying to figure out what was going to work to activate your target market. And I think we learned a lot in those days, back five, six years ago. And we really were able to help that company get a foothold. I remember going through some of the reporting, how we increased brand awareness in some new markets, specifically the beef space in a very short period of time and just some really nice wins we had. But whenever you think about that early career. And I think really one of the things that you can provide a tremendous amount of insight into is what's going on in higher ed, specifically the marketing function, because this is something that's near and dear to my heart. I get very concerned about it because I'm as a marketing agency owner. We have now about 85 people in our team. We're constantly looking for talent and we're concerned about what we're able to find. And I think my son currently is in a business school, getting a marketing degree. And we talk a lot about, we've been having this conversation at 12:30 last night because he's home for the holidays. And those are the hours he keeps and dad was dying, but Hey, we kept having the conversation. When you think about your industry experience and now your experience in the classroom, what do you think is missing in the marketing classroom?
Mike: Well, think that first of all, your son, his marketing or other business professors, do you know how many of them have experience in industry or are they mostly academic experience?
Bill: See, that's a great question. So he's been very fortunate to go to a university that they have some type of chair position that's sponsored by a company that has brought in someone who owns their own marketing agency, is a published author who has a podcast, who's out there doing this stuff. So in his situation, I think he's getting a tremendous exposure to industry. When I went to college, every person who was in the business department save one was a pure academic and had never participated in industry. And the person who was in our business department was the chair of the department and he had done accounting and had been a CFO. So as we all know in marketing, we love our accountants and we love to deal with our CFOs, but we really try not to get any of that stuff on us while we're trying to get good marketing work done. So that was not valuable in my education as far as marketing. So I hope that kind of frames the conversation, Mike.
Mike: Yeah, well, and I think you touched on the point that I was going to make that's missing. I was lucky enough, we have a dean at the University of South Dakota that is, very much understands the value of having the connection to industry. So he has been, and that's why I ended up with the job probably because I've got a lot of market experience and I've been out there in the trenches. But the thing that you mentioned was, it was sponsored by a company. The chair of the department was sponsored by a company. And I think that relationship between industry and the educational institutions is key because you can bring people in that have got industry knowledge or industry experience like I do. And I can teach based on my experience. And students really, they devour that information. They don't devour the theory that's in the Principles of Marketing textbook. I don't devour that. I read it and I understand there's value to that for sure. There's value to understanding the theories of everything in marketing, but there's much more value to the application and understanding how to apply that to real world situations. And because like we mentioned, industry and the world around us is changing so rapidly. If you don't have an ongoing relationship with members of industry, with local businesses, with people like that, you're just falling behind eventually. I mean, my information and my experience at Cambridge Technologies is going to be relevant, I don't know for how much longer because things are going to change. I'm going have to tell them pretty soon. It's only been, I've been out of the job for like two or three years. And I'm going to say, you know, this is the way we did it in the olden times before artificial intelligence, you know. So I think the integration with businesses is key. And when I teach my students, I'm teaching, you know, very basic intros to marketing, principles of marketing. So it's really just a survey of everything. I'm also teaching marketing research where we kind of dive into that and then and then some digital marketing classes where I can get a little bit more specific. But again, you know, things are changing so quickly. So what I try to teach them is how to learn more than what's in the book. Like you understand that information is available because you're Generation Z. You've grown up with tablets and the Internet nonstop. You know that there's a YouTube video to teach you whatever you want to learn. But you need to understand like where to look and how to find that information and then how to apply that information to an actual business experience or a business context, something like that. And there's so many different, there's so many resources that are out there. Like I use the HubSpot Academy, for example, that's something that we looked at quite a bit in our early days. They're experts at creating content and creating educational pieces. And so when I look at, when I talk about marketing right off the gate, right out of the gate, I talk about marketing as, you know, basically like education in a lot of ways. You're educating people outside of your company. You're educating people inside your company. And for that, you need to be expert communicators. You need to understand the flows of information from different places internally and externally. So this, I think what's missing, if I had to pick one thing, it would be just a constant pipeline with industry and understanding what's going on and having businesses invest… If businesses are having trouble getting talent and getting young college graduates that are able to hit the ground running and are able to be productive, then they should be working with their local schools, their local institutions. They should be going down there. That's another thing that I think USD does well, is that we have basically requirements that we need to bring in industry people that are in jobs that can come and talk to our classroom about what they're experiencing, what they need, and what they see in the future. And I think those things are, like I said, just, that's the stuff, and that's the stuff that the students want. If you've got educators that are just talking about what's in the textbook and giving them multiple choice quizzes and just doing all this stuff, they're not learning what it is to be a marketer or to like, you know, where marketing really sits in in 21st century business.
Bill: No, I love that Mike. I think when we look at the foundation of a marketing career, we certainly need to know, we need to go through principles of marketing. We need to understand the core. We need to understand the four P's. We need to understand how companies are organized. There's certainly a part of that. But I think exactly what you're saying, we need that information then to hit and be exposed to the edge of the market. We need to see case studies or work on projects with companies, to see how it's actually applied and how it actually interacts with the market. I love this idea and what you guys are doing there. I think it's so important, having speakers come in. We shouldn't just be having political speakers and philosophy speakers coming to college campuses. There should be business leaders. There should be marketing managers. There should be marketing VPs. There should be CMOs. There should be niche industry experts that are coming to the university, to academia and communicating with these young people. And then the other thing I think that's exciting about digital marketing is you don't need a 12 week internship to make an impact. I think we're seeing a lot of like micro internships where, hey, we need, we're a company and we need help with this thing. Well, in a month long project, a student can learn about that or take what they've learned and then go out to YouTube, learn about something, get a HubSpot cert and then make an impact on that company and get a small experience without. And the other thing is nice is they don't have to like move across the country to New York City, pay three thousand dollars a month in rent and eat ramen noodles for three months to get experience, right? They can do it from like you and I are doing, I'm in my office, you're in your office, we're having this conversation. So I think there's a lot of opportunities. One of the things I see that's missing though with a lot of the young people in academia is I feel like they are not aggressive enough in trying to get those opportunities in front of them. Do you see that we need to encourage these students to go for it more, not wait for that traditional like, McKenzie consulting job, like you can do something today. Like there should be students who you just give them finals to who hopefully are not mourning their grades too badly, who are now thinking about going home and working for 10 days around Christmas for a local company and doing some marketing to hone their skills as opposed to waiting till they graduate to do anything.
Mike: Yeah, no, I was thinking that while you were speaking, one of the things outside of bringing in industry professionals to talk to students are some of the student organizations that the students that are engaged, that are there to try to become really good professionals and develop their skills, that are there for those reasons, those students are involved in these student groups and these activities. I'll give you just a couple of examples. So there's a sales and marketing Five Sigma Epsilon, and it's a fraternity. Maybe you have some experience with that. I don't know. But so they do sales and marketing projects and competitions with other schools all over the country. And they've got these regionally, and they've got these nationally. And the University of South Dakota has got a really good chapter that competes. We're in the top five, top 10 nationally. And it's, we promote that in our classes, in our principal and marketing classes. We talk, we bring in people that are in that group. They come and they talk about the projects they did. They talk about the competitions that they were involved in. They go to Denver or Virginia Beach and that, and it's usually in Virginia Beach in March, which is a big draw when you're in South Dakota in March and you've had about four months of ice cold winter.
Bill: Hmm. That's a tough sell.
Mike: So that's a good one, you know. So that, I think making that not just more accessible to more students, but almost like, you know, you have an internship as a requirement in a lot of programs. This should be something that maybe could be thought of as one of those things. Another program that I've been involved with since I got here, because I like it, and it's a good way to connect industry to academia. We've got a consulting group that's called Coyote Business Consulting. Coyote, that's the mascot for USD. And this works with all sorts of small businesses throughout the state of South Dakota. Any small business can apply for essentially a free consulting. It's almost like a semester long, not quite. So it's about 12 weeks or so, 10 weeks, where you would work with a faculty advisor and two student advisors. And so they apply, they say what they need, if they need finance help, accounting help, marketing help, whatever. A lot of them need marketing help. I would say about 75% of them need marketing help. And if you're in the market every day talking with B2B people, right? And so you see every level of, we don't need marketing to, yeah, I got a marketer. I got somebody running my Facebook page. I got a marketing manager, we're good. So.
Bill: Well Mike, 75% say they need marketing help and the other 25% are lying. Right? Yeah.
Mike: Yeah, or they don't know it. They don't realize that's why their products aren't working. But, whatever. And and so that's a really nice project because we get to meet with the business owner usually or maybe sometimes there's a team and we'll spend you know the first week just getting to know them understanding how their business operates and then I always put, my students do like an industry analysis where I want them to find out everything they can find out about their customers, their region, their competitors, and everything else about their industry. So we tie that in with what they're doing as a business. And then we start from scratch. We start with the SWOT analysis and we find out what they need and then we deliver. But it's a great experience for these these students to see, like, where you start with gathering information from a business or from whatever secondary sources you can find online. And then use that information and to find where there's needs or where there's gaps and then find out what we can do to fill those gaps and satisfy those needs. And from there we build out a strategy.
Bill: Mike, that's a great opportunity. And I think there are so many opportunities because so many companies need marketing help. And let's be honest, not every company can afford a professional marketing agency. So help from students may be the only help they can afford.
Mike: Our program is free.
Bill: Exactly. So that's what they can afford. So it's better than nothing.
Mike: And if my students are nervous about it at the beginning, I always tell them, well, you know, if you're nervous, just remember this, that they get what they pay for.
Bill: If they ask for a money back guarantee, we will absolutely give them 100% refund. Well, Mike, we didn't really talk about this before, but I think there's we could come up with a brainstorm list right now of maybe like whatever the number is, five, six, seven tips for students who are pursuing a marketing degree about how to get the most out of their education and prepare them for their industry job. And I'm just going to rattle off a couple here and then let's maybe unpack. Number one, I think students should focus on their academics and not, sometimes business school and marketing classes or the business degree is like made fun of by the engineers or the STEM people because it's easier or whatever. Right. But if you apply yourself to your business classes, it will give you a foundation that gives you an edge whenever you go to your job. Can you maybe comment about that as kind of like maybe our number one tip is do take your academic seriously?
Mike: Yeah, well, I I look at this and I mentioned this early on in all my classes is that you're gonna, if you wanna be successful and if you wanna have a good life where you feel like you're delivering meaningful value to society, then you're always gonna need to be learning and you're always gonna need to be developing. You don't stop when you graduate, things are always changing. And so as much as you want to learn the content that I'm going to tell you in this class, I want you to think about how you learn and what works for you the best. So if you can learn how to learn in this class and in the early years, it's going to benefit you way more than memorizing any of the terms that might be on the test. So think that's the first thing, learning how to learn.
Bill: Absolutely. Yeah, the second thing and you hit on it, whenever you're at these universities and this varies by university. So we're not here to like pick on any university or whatever. But like it sounds like you guys have some amazing opportunities with these competitions, these clubs, these organizations. I know my son is involved with something called CUE and it's their entrepreneurial organization, which is very parallel to what you're talking about. Mike, they have engagements they can do with companies. They bring in these speakers. They have these little micro internships. So like you said it before, but if you're a student, don't clock in nine to five. Get involved in the experiences and the campus organizations specifically involved with business opportunities, consulting clubs, entrepreneurship, marketing, whatever. Is that maybe number two?
Mike: Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah, we've kind of touched on that. And USD's got, we've got really good opportunities and we got a lot of students that take advantage of them. Not just the club, the sales and marketing club and the consulting, kind of business consulting, but we've got competitions for new business ideas. We've got an incubator decoded discovery network where if you do have a business idea, you can go there and you can use office space and you've got all sorts of resources that can help you grow this business. I know some of the major research institutions do the same thing, but just as much experience in actually like conceptualizing and growing and thinking about doing your own thing as you can possibly put into a program. I mean, that's when for me personally, and people learn differently, but for me personally, when I've got my own you know, skin in the game and I'm trying to build something myself, everything just comes into sharper focus and it's just much more real if you could take some ownership in something. So encouraging and finding opportunities, I think, for students to take ownership in their learning and see how it's gonna benefit them by actually doing, I think that's kind of what we want.
Bill: No, I love that. And then maybe our third tip is, OK, let's get beyond the campus, right? We need to look, we need to recommend that students are engaging like internships and whether that's a micro internship for like you talked about that 10 week consulting experience that is kind of maybe a hybrid between campus experience and an internship. But then truly there are other businesses in the market that may only pay you $10 to $12 an hour or $15 an hour, but you could become their marketing intern for a semester while you're on campus or your summers, your breaks, going out there and getting in industry. And one of the things I want to encourage young people is that you might not get the job you want, but you have to get the job to get the job that you want. You have to do the first thing first. So don't be so proud that you think you're going to get the cushy Manhattan skyline apartment and you know have all of the stuff. You got to go in and work hard and build it from the ground up. So looking for internships like maybe small internships or like dream or larger internships. Mike, what have you seen as you've encouraged some of your students and some of those probably more upperclassmen to go and look for those opportunities to really go out there, put themselves out there, take a risk and probably feel uncomfortable but go for it?
Mike: Yeah, well, I tell them, first of all, like what you were saying, that you're not locked into one particular job. You're most likely, and these days it's becoming more and more apparent. I mean, I went from sales and marketing 15, 20 years to now education. Kind of a big shift, not super. I mean, once I got into it, there's a lot of parallels. But a lot of people, like our parents' generation. You got a job and you worked there for 45 years, got your pension, you're retired and good to go. That's just not the way it is anymore. I mean, people are switching companies like every three to five years. I mean, that's showing stability, three to five years. It used to be like 10, 15 years was stability. And so I don't envy being in the hiring seats right now, because I know it's a challenge. But what I tell my students what to look for, to first of all understand that you're gonna get a lot more education when you're in the field, when you're working in an industry. And to never stop learning. Once you get into an industry, that's when you know what to study. You study up on all the trade journals in your industry, you read all the websites of all the competitors in your industry. It doesn't matter what position you have. If you're in shipping, if you're in, if you're writing copy for the marketing department or you're just managing the social media pages or whatever, I shouldn't say just because that's kind of a big job now. But whatever it is, whatever you're doing, you should understand everything you can possibly understand about your industry because if you've got that knowledge, invariably you're going to be in meetings with your boss and with your colleagues. And there's going to be conversations. If you've got this industry knowledge in your head and you can bring that to the meetings and bring insightful ideas and other insights to the meetings, you're going to get noticed. And that's when you're going to get your opportunity to take on more responsibility and do more things. But it starts with you educating yourself on the industry that you're in. So understanding everything you can about your own company and everything that's going on on the outside around your company that impacts your company. So if you just do that, dedicate some time to do that every morning, maybe, you're going to put yourself in a very good position to grow. And then the other thing I talk to them about is that it is, you know, it's a competitive job market for finding good employees right now. And employers know that and some students have that idea. But what you should be looking for, and one of the things that you could ask your potential employer is, what kind of development opportunities do you have for your staff? Because like I said, you're going to really, your learning is going to take on a new level when you get into that job. And some companies do a great job of developing their people and some companies do not do a great job of developing their people. When I started, my first job, it was like my colleague said, it’s trial by fire around here. That's what, that was the turn. That was it. I got pointed to a desk and then they showed me a map, showed me where I can go. And then they showed me where the marketing materials were. And they said, get out of the office and we'll see you on Friday. That's how they did it back then. So it's a little different now. It's, and then like I said, some companies are doing it better than others. So that's the other thing I would look for is like how, how can you develop your skills as you go in your early stages of your career?
Bill: No, Mike, think there's a lot there. One of the things you said, and I think it ties back into our like tip number one, when you start talking about researching your industry, if you want to have a deep understanding of your industry and bring insights to the boardroom, to the meetings with management and leadership, you not only have to understand marketing, but you're going to have to understand how accounting and finance and HR work and how those departments interplay. So that, you know, that goes back to taking your academics seriously. So whenever you're, you know, a marketing major and you have to go through principles of accounting one and two and principles of finance and, you know, part of you is like, why do I need to know this? I'm never going to be a CFO. Well, whenever you're asking the CFO for money for the budget, it's great to understand how that customer of yours, because they're your customer, they need to buy into your marketing plan to fund it. It's good to understand how their brain works and what the pain points and pressures that they're experiencing are so that you can, you know, get to what you need to do to win for your job. The, the other thing, and I love that research because I think so many people and not, this isn't just students, this is professionals are so lazy anymore. There is so much information out there. If you dig deep, you can find nuggets. You can find gold that you can then leverage to help you accomplish your marketing goals. And that continual research and understanding of the industry is so important. Let's talk about the next maybe tip we could offer. And I know you and are both passionate about this. Outside of academics, there is now a proliferation of resources and certifications that young marketing students can participate with to validate their experience and knowledge and elevate their careers. When we came up through, Mike, you just said it. Here's a map. Here's some marketing materials. Go West, young man, go West. It was just go. And there was no support. Now you can get certified in just about everything. And while they aren't academic certifications that have a university behind them, there's HubSpot Academy. There's every field, whether it's SEO, social media, content marketing, inbound marketing. There are boot camps or courses that you can go through and establish a baseline credibility and a baseline aptitude to execute. So what are your thoughts on encouraging these students to get certified and learn as much as possible from these third party resources?
Mike: Well, I'm glad you brought that up. That was one of the first things that I started doing when I realized I can kind of create these courses however I want. It wasn't just like, you have to use this book and you have to teach this material. I've got good colleagues where I work and they're like, if it's your class, you teach it how you want to teach it. And so that was like one of first things I did was have my students complete HubSpot digital marketing certifications. And that was a requirement in the course. And at first I had them, if they hadn't already, I said, you have to create a LinkedIn profile. And I want you to create a LinkedIn profile. I want to see it. And then I want you to do this certification, and you have to post that on your LinkedIn profile in order to get credit. And I explained to them that hiring managers, if I was hiring people, and I had a choice between somebody that got all A's on all their courses and somebody that got maybe a couple A's, a couple B's, maybe even a C or something like that or whatever. But they had certification for Google Analytics4, and for HubSpot or for Salesforce or for SEMrush or for MailChimp or for SurveyMonkey or for any of these. I would say, okay, they understand the kinds of tools that they're gonna be using. This is what I'm gonna have them use. I'm gonna go with that guy or that gal, whatever. And so, yeah, I think there's so much value in that and it's so accessible. That's one of the things I really try to stress when I talk to them about developing themselves and learning how to learn. I talk to them, I go through, you know, just the list that I just gave you just off the top of my head. All of these companies are creating educational material. That's called content marketing. That's what content marketing is. They do it so they can build trust and build credibility. And by the way, they've got some tools that they can sell you that they can make some money off and exist by. But these resources are free. And if you take advantage of them, you're going to have a huge advantage over the people that don't. And so I just try to explain that to them and make them aware of it and show them some places where they can get their start. And a lot of times when they get their start, they are coming back and asking me for more. Where else should I look? Where else should I look? Because these are done well and they're actual tools that we'll use.
Bill: No, I love that. And I think that's so important because in other professions, there are CE requirements. You have to do continuing education. I have a niece who's becoming an accountant and she has to pass these tests to achieve that certification. And then there's continuing education credits that are required throughout her journey. Well in marketing historically, there's never been that like a professional engineer has to do that or a doctor or a teacher has to keep going. Well, this is our opportunity to as a marketing profession to do this without one having to pay as much for it, like because you don't necessarily have to go back and get a master's or get a PhD. You can do this more in the micro in a smaller chunk. It's relatively inexpensive and you can stay more relevant and current because you can choose the courses that are today, not ones that were written 20 years ago or developed a long time, you know, that may be out of date. Mike, I want to pivot to another tip that I give to my children. And I think this is so important for our marketing students is soft skills. The ability to do public speaking. And I'm not talking about, I'm not saying you have to be Tony Robbins and be able to command, you know, 30,000 people in a stadium. If you are presenting to your manager and two or three executives in a boardroom as a young marketing manager, you are public speaking. And to me, that skill is something that has to be practiced and it is being neglected by this next generation. Also just things like, I mean, you gotta be able to go up and shake a hand and look people in the eye and have that presence in the room. I know that my son's, this next semester has a class, it's a one credit class where they're basically just taking people through business experience. Okay, here's what it's like to go into a meeting. Here's what it's like to have etiquette and those type of things. My eldest was very fortunate, both of my older two sons have interned with us here at the agency. They have been in boardrooms with clients. They have been on those corporate experiences and dinners and lunches and all of those things. And they have commented many times that those are experiences that are not common for many of their peers in their classes. And I think those are the type of experiences we need to encourage these young people to get into to have those soft skills because again, they can know the stuff, they can do all the research, they can get the certifications. But if there's a sharp edge that exists that they're not able to then communicate and interact with people, there is going to be a tremendous challenge for their career development.
Mike: Absolutely, and I think and when we talked to you know, talked a lot of business leaders in Sioux Falls and asked them what what are the main needs what what do you guys need more than anything from our marketing students our Beacon School of Business students, and the number one thing that they say across the board is communication skills. And communication is really it's everything. It's effective communication. It's not just like blabbing out buzzwords, but it's actually like it's it's creating some kind of meaning and some kind of value with what you have to say. It's not just talking blah, blah, blah. And so when I first start my, day one of marketing class, I'll draw this hub flywheel like a lot of people in marketing do. They put marketing at the hub, right? And we talk about the departments that we deal with, R&D, customer service, sales, production. Those are just the internal ones. So you talk about all the stakeholders. You got the executives inside. You've got customers on the outside. You got thought leaders and industry experts on the outside, all that stuff. But what connects all of those to marketing is communication and information. You need to be able to go to your customers and get the information that you need that's going to help you be a better marketer. You need to understand what they need, when they need it. Why they need it for their own customers. But just as importantly as that and the other external, you have to go inside and understand what the senior vice president or the COO, what they are prioritizing, what they think of on a day-to-day basis. And so you can communicate with them. If you understand their needs, you can communicate with them what your ideas are better because you can frame them inside of their needs. You get their attention by having that same frame of reference. And so I think that it's hard to get this experience in college, right? But at least trying to frame the idea that first you need to understand people before you can communicate to them. So I quote Stephen Covey from Seven Habits. And I say, one the habits is first seek to understand before you seek to be understood, right? I think that's a very good quote. And that idea of understanding people first before you try to be understood is very important. And if you can make young people understand that, that starts internally and then goes externally in a business organization. Because one of the biggest challenges I think that still exists and one that I certainly have, and you know this very well, is working internally with some of the internal machinations that are going on and trying to get them to understand what marketing is trying to do and how this is going to create an ROI for the overall business. You can't just throw ideas at people without understanding and building relationships internally and then that opens a door for you to explain to them why this program or initiative might work well for the company. So it all starts with communication and information. And I think you get that in the classroom from just working with groups and maybe assigning roles. And I've got a colleague that teaches a professional selling class. And he does heavy role play. And he will bring, for the final assignment, he will bring in industry people from Sioux Falls and around South Dakota that he's built relationships with, they'll come in and they'll play their actual role in their actual jobs. And his students will have to sell them stuff and all these types of stuff. I think, especially with this generation having grown up with so many screens and communications, chat and Snapchat and the way people write and communicate is a little foreign from a professional business standpoint. So teaching that I think is key.
Bill: So there's a ton of value in what you just said. I want to hit on a couple of points. You know, the Missing Half podcast is discovering what's missing. And I think I've just discovered another thing that we need to encourage ourselves and our young people to do better, which is listening. So, whenever I started talking about communication, I'm talking about public speaking. Well, that's going this direction. Well, what about, you know, listening? And I think you're right. We get so enamored in this culture with all the social media channels, we want to be the first to speak. We want to get it out there on our podcast, on our social posts, et cetera. But when, you're going to be an effective, if you're going to have effective soft skills and if communication is one of those, you have to recognize it's bilateral, not unilateral, and you have to listen and you have to understand what someone is saying and then what the meaning and pain points and problems are behind what they're saying to get things done in marketing. And Mike, another thing you said there that's so important with communication is marketing has become very, very technical. There is a lot of different options and let's be honest, a lot of different theories. When we're in the industry and we come up with a marketing plan, we're coming up with theories of how your industry behaves, about where your customers hang out, about how we're going to communicate to them, about what offers they're going to respond to. Those are all things we have to test. Because we're not just going to the trade show and having the five word theme and then that's our marketing for the year, right? There's interactions all the time. So when we're testing these things, we have to be able to communicate them and not in the old like marketing lingo, bingo card words where, you know, everybody could have a card and while someone's making a presentation, you hit all the words that don't mean anything, but that everybody uses and all the acronyms. So we have to be able to do it in plain English and frame the communication about what we're trying to do in a way that the listener will understand. And we all know these people are very intelligent and educated. These professionals who are in finance, accounting, production, technology, R&D, but they just don't know our space. The other thing I just want to hit on, which you talked about there, is whenever we're communicating, we need those experiences. I love role playing. I think that as a tool for developing public speaking and specifically sales and negotiation are absolutely critical tools. I used to in one of my prior career prior lives, I ran 40 salespeople on the road and we did role playing of our presentations every week together. And that changed our business because we, everybody learned what they were actually saying, listened to it, critiqued it, and the performance improvements were tremendous. So I can't recommend that enough when you're thinking about preparing your communication skills is actually going out there and practicing it.
Mike: Yeah, and most people don't like it. And they don't like it because it's hard. It's uncomfortable. But you put yourself in uncomfortable positions, they become comfortable after a while. And why not do it in the classroom or do it in the office and not do it in front of a customer that's gonna probably not open the door or answer the phone next time you come by. So yeah, put yourself in uncomfortable positions is huge.
Bill: Yes. Well, and if if you're in sales and marketing, you are going to have to eat a lot of the stuff that cows and hogs make in feedlots, right? Like it's going to come at you. And it is better to practice that in a friendly environment and get good at it because you are still going to eat it. But going out and spending the first 20 or 30 presentations and being bad at the presentation makes it 10 times worse. I mean, I've sold a lot over my career. I still sell to this day. I still remember the first thing I did. I started a wholesale brokering business back in the early 2000s and I made 300 cold calls to sell my first deal. That was brutal. I will tell you this though. By the time I got that sale, I had practiced that pitch and that process so much. I was really, really good at it. And then once I got that first sale, I grew that business to $10 million because it was like, okay, I figured it out. I've got those reps in. Well, let's talk about maybe our last tip because we could come up with a lot of things here, Mike, but I'm like settling on the number seven, which is the number of perfection. So let's just let's close this like tips section with, I think the other thing we need to encourage students to do, they take their academics seriously, they get involved in campus experiences, they look for small and large internships, they do a lot of research, right? They dig deep, they know all the stakeholders. We look for outside of academia, like education and certifications, super important. Six, soft skills, really work on those, the etiquette, the public speaking, the listening, scheduling, showing up on time, doing what you say you're going to do, kind of like those fundamental soft skills. The last thing I think that's so important and it has never been more available, certainly wasn't available to us in the same way is networking with people in industry, with their fellow students. And you can do that by going to the events, going to the trade shows, going to the, you guys have career fairs at the universities. Those are tremendous opportunities. Going up whenever they have a hosted speaker and introducing yourself to that speaker and shaking their hand and becoming a face and a name and someone that's memorable. That's important. But then LinkedIn did not exist way back in the day. Like we had to get printed business cards and hand them out. I mean, LinkedIn is such an opportunity for these young professionals. And it shocks me how quickly young people are engaged in these social platforms that are all educational or non-business relational. And then they are not aggressive and active on LinkedIn. So maybe Mike, talk about networking as a hack or a cheat code for them to really accelerate their careers.
Mike: Yeah, no, I mean, networking has been important since we were coming up. I mean, it's always been important. It was just different back then. I mean, some things are still the same, but I can remember going to my first Chamber of Commerce meeting when I was probably 19 years old or something like that. And it just kind of feeling a little bit awkward. Wasn't sure I had the tie on right and all that stuff. But there's still those opportunities. I mean, still the Chamber is still a great opportunity for lot of people to get experience to listen and to talk. And so I think it starts with, you know, teaching students that it's just about having a conversation. It's about a relationship and how you start a relationship. If you've ever gone on a first date or thinking about this, what has been your advice? What advice has been given to you? Probably if you're a guy, ask a lot of questions. Ask questions. I mean, and this is good for all genders. Asking questions is how you start a relationship. It shows that you care about what they have to say. It shows that you're interested. It breaks down barriers, and people love to talk about themselves generally, especially at networking events. So if you can teach yourself to ask questions, that is the best way to learn how to network, and you start to get good information. So learn how to ask questions. Also, learn how to introduce yourself. Just, you know, what is your name? What is your... What are you doing? What's your reason for being there? So yeah, I'm a marketing student. I'm here just trying to get some information on the industry because I want to grow into this role when I grow up and I want to hear from some people like you what's important. That's all you need to do. You tell them why you're there and what you want to learn and then go. So but LinkedIn, that's huge. Game changer, complete game changer. Like in every sense of the word. I've got some people that come in sometimes and they just talk specifically about social selling on LinkedIn and how you can use the tool by itself. It's so robust. There's so many things you can do with it. But in terms of networking and building your own personal brand, that's where you do it. You don't do it on Instagram, well, I guess there's a lot of business to be done on Instagram too, but for my professional experience, especially in B2B, LinkedIn is unparalleled, really. And so we go back to those certifications, how you build up your story with certifications, how you can find out what industries are talking about. You can find out what thought leaders are posting about. If you can understand that, then probably, you know, if you've got other, you know, get-after-it types at your competitors, they understand that too, because they're looking at it too. And so you can use all that information to just be more informed. And you can reach out to people instantly.
Bill: Yeah, one of the things we're seeing is, so for instance, I've been doing thought leadership, posting online, growing my LinkedIn community, growing my followers. And one of the things that's funny is my son also does the same thing as a marketing student. If I post something, I might get 500 people that look at it. If he posts something, he'll get 5,000 people. Like it's 10x. Now one, he's better looking, he's younger, he's thinner, more hair, all the good stuff. But what I want to encourage the audience, if there's students listening to this, the appetite for information and posting for the younger generation is inelastic right now. There's inelastic demand because there are more consumers of information on LinkedIn in the 18 to 25 year old demographic than there are suppliers. Now that is inversely, like that's the opposite of what we're seeing in Instagram, TikTok, all the other ones, right? But in the specifically in the business community on LinkedIn, if you are a student or a young professional who posts engaging and relevant content to young up and coming professionals, you can absolutely see 10x, 100x growth in your followers, in your engagement, in your online presence. So that's a tremendous opportunity for young people today to establish, know, put their flag in the ground. Like don't put it in the middle of the field because I guess now we're fighting about that at football games. Like stake your claim in your field early. And that could be a hack that could get you 10 years ahead of your peers who don't really get in the game until they're 30 or they're established. Like they're starting at 30 and you already have 5,000 followers in your market and who perceive you as an authority. You're already booking your first speaking gig on a stage and they're looking to get their first or next thousand followers. Like that's a tremendous hack that I think everybody should be looking to walk through, especially young people on LinkedIn. Mike, I'm going to call it a bonus tip that you hit on and I think it may be the biggest thing that's missing and you hit on it. And I'm going to use the word this for tip number eight, empathy. If you're networking and you are empathetic and you actually care about what the other person is saying, if you actually care about their problems and are authentic, I don't care what profession you're in. I don't care what you're trying to accomplish. You will be more successful than the person who's trying to be unilaterally, like unilaterally communicate their thing and get what they want and get their price for their product. Provide value to solve that person's problem and understand where they are and you will go so, so far. And that is something that's absolutely missing.
Mike: Yep, that is the word I repeat over and over. It's empathy. That is it. I mean, that makes all the difference because it creates that authenticity and credibility. And it really centers you on what you want to do as a marketer or in the sales profession is you want to create value. And if you got that, if you understand that, I'm going to understand as much as I can about this customer so I can find a way to create value for them. Then a marketer, a real full-fledged middle of the hub marketer can go inside their company and talk to the production and the R&D people about their customer's need and how we need to create something to solve that. We can find a way to do it profitably, but we need to create value. And if you've got that mindset of creating value by understanding your customers, you can't fail.
Bill: That's right. No, Mike, this. So Mike, I told Johanna whenever we scheduled this podcast that who knows where Mike and I are going to go. We could go off the rails and we will talk for forever. And there are like four or five topics we didn't get to. So, Mike, I am going to hold you to coming back on and talking again in the future because we're already in an hour and 15 minutes and I feel like we just got started. So I wanted to talk about some agricultural marketing, NAMA.
Mike: We didn't even get to ag yet. Yeah.
Bill: Yeah, so like we like on my outline of things to talk about, we are a third of the way through and we're at an hour and 10. So but Mike, this has just been a fantastic conversation. Congratulations on what you're doing with your students. I think the approach you're taking by customizing your classes to what, to like a marriage of industry and academia is what is needed today for marketing students and encouraging them to not only focus on like these tips we've developed, this list of maybe hot takes or hot tips or whatever, but making sure they understand the knowledge and the application have to be married together for them to be successful. I think you're spot on. I'm really excited to see how you continue to develop that. And go coyotes, I guess is right. That's the thing.
Mike: Don't ever say coyotes, I learned that in my interview. It's always coyotes, you got it right.
Bill: Coyotes, yeah, so I'm trying. I'm learning the local lingo. But Mike, thank you so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it. And we are going to run this back again so we can get through some of our other topics and continue the conversation.
Mike: Sounds good. Always a pleasure to chat with you, Bill.