Robin Robins is the Founder and CEO of Technology Marketing Toolkit, a leading marketing consultancy firm dedicated to VARs, MSPs, MSSPs, and IT service companies. She has significantly impacted the IT industry by serving over 7,000 clients, facilitating the largest MSP peer group with over 1,200 active members, and founding MSP Success Magazine, which boasts 18,000 subscribers and reaches over 45,000 MSPs and IT service businesses.
Robin is also recognized for her annual event, attracting more than 1,600 CEOs from the IT services sector. Her approach combines strategic marketing plans for IT firms with her expertise in digital and offline marketing, making her the IT industry’s leading seller of CRM and marketing automation platforms.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [05:27] Robin Robins’ inspiring origin story and entrepreneurial journey
- [09:22] The importance of emotional intelligence in business
- [11:18] How a background in sales and marketing shaped Robin’s success
- [14:48] The strategic choice of IT as a niche for technology marketing toolkit
- [21:36] Robin reveals the secret to client success and accountability
- [24:22] Implementing contests for engagement and recognition
In this episode…
In a world where marketing strategies and the pursuit of genuine business growth collide, one might find themselves pondering over the true essence of success. Is it possible to navigate the turbulent waters of direct response marketing without losing one’s essence, or must one succumb to the cutthroat nature of the industry to thrive?
Robin Robins emerges as a beacon of inspiration and ingenuity in the realm of direct response marketing. From a tumultuous childhood to becoming a pioneering force in direct response marketing within the IT niche, her story is a testament to the power of resilience and innovation. Robin shares the importance of emotional intelligence built from early hardships and how it played a crucial role in her entrepreneurial pursuits. As the Founder of Technology Marketing Toolkit, her implementation of a community-centric approach and the innovative use of accountability and contests has skyrocketed customer success and engagement. Her insights into marketing dynamics, alongside her unique perspective on masterminding and group collaboration, provide invaluable lessons for anyone looking to make their mark in the industry.
In this episode of the Timeless Marketing Podcast, host Brian Kurtz welcomes Robin Robins, Founder and CEO of Technology Marketing Toolkit. Robin’s narrative sheds light on the importance of emotional intelligence, resilience, and the strategic use of personal experiences to fuel professional growth. Moreover, her contributions to the evolution of marketing strategies and her role in shaping the landscape of mastermind groups highlight the intersection of personal development and business success.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Brian Kurtz
- Brian Kurtz on LinkedIn
- Chris Mason on LinkedIn
- Robin Robins on LinkedIn
- Technology Marketing Toolkit
Quotable Moments:
- “In my 20s, I never even thought about starting a business until I got fired from a job and had to do something.”
- “Meeting Dan Kennedy and learning direct response clicked for me; marketing can make people call me.”
- “We use our client testimonials better than anybody else I’ve ever seen, very intentional.”
- “Numbers don’t lie. They take the drama out of things like sales, making business very binary.”
- “You can’t stop competition; the only thing you can do is outperform them.”
Action Steps:
- Focus on emotional intelligence for sales and leadership.
- Learning how to manage emotional states can enhance your ability to influence and sell effectively, resonating with Robin’s early life lessons.
- Engage in active community or mastermind participation.
- As discussed, being part of a dedicated group of peers can accelerate personal and business growth through shared ideas and accountability.
- Celebrate and publicize client wins.
- Robin’s strategy highlights how recognizing your clients’ successes can promote business credibility and client loyalty.
- Implement structured accountability mechanisms.
- Robin’s method of creating accountability groups ensures everyone is committed to their goals, which can be mirrored in your own organization for better results.
- Choose a niche to concentrate on.
- Robin’s targeted success in the IT industry underscores the importance of niche specialization to solidify authority and market presence.
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is brought to you by Titans Xcelerator.
Titans Xcelerator is a private mentorship program for direct response marketers.
It is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business.
And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either.
Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind.
And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed.
As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one.
The bottom line: you don’t have to grow your business alone.
If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to BrianKurtz.net/help
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:03
Welcome to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz, your connection to insights from some of the top direct response marketing minds on the planet.
Brian Kurtz 0:16
Hey, it’s Brian Kurtz here, host of the Timeless Marketing Podcast. Today’s episode is a clip from one of the two-hour calls inside Titans Xcelerator, my private mentorship program for direct response marketers. Before we get to that, I have one question for you. Do you have a marketing insurance policy? If you don’t, you need one. And that’s why I created Titans Xcelerator, which is one of the most giving communities and serves as the de facto board of advisors and marketing insurance policy for over 250 of the best and brightest direct response marketers, copywriters, media buyers, marketing agencies, senior executives, anyone in direct response marketing, who is committed to growing and scaling their business, the bottom line, you don’t have to grow your business alone. And you don’t need to spend 10s of 1000s of dollars either.
Titans Xcelerator is 1/10 of the price of most groups of its kind. I know because I hosted a group that was over $20,000 a year. If you want to see how Titans Xcelerator can help you grow and scale your specific business, go to briankurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N Kurtz [dot] net [slash] help. And with a private membership, you’ll receive access to the full presentation from today’s episode, along with the Q&A and discussion that followed. As an added bonus, you’ll receive access to a vault filled with many more private calls just like this one. Again, if you want to see if Titans Xcelerators are fit for you with no obligation. Go to Briankurtz.net/help. That’s B-R-I-A-N Kurtz [dot] net [slash] help. And feel free to email me directly. I respond to every email with questions about this episode. Or just to say hi, brian@briankurtz.net.
Now onto today’s episode. Robin, I’m going to put you on now and then we’ll get back to we have a hot seat to do, but we got Robin Robbins. I gotta, I gotta get to Robin Robbins. So anyway, I’m gonna introduce you, and then this is an interview so, and I’m going to stump you time and again in this interview. I know because I’m so much smarter than you are not.
Robin Robins 2:48
You might stump me. I don’t know. It depends. There’s a lot of numbers and things that have to go over. Yeah.
Brian Kurtz 2:54
Okay, good. So first of all, I love this woman. She is one of the best marketers and people that I’ve met in my 40 years in direct response. If you know her, she’s a fierce businesswoman, but she does it with heart. And when she has to go at somebody. She can go at somebody with purpose and with politeness. And she was actually, I, I don’t want to give her credit for inventing the $25,000 mastermind, but she’s the one that told Joe Polish, and Joe had one of the early $25,000 masterminds, when Joe was talking about, you know, frustration with his carpet cleaners and, you know, being able, not being able, to take it up a notch. And I think Robin said to him, you know, Joe, why don’t you just invite a bunch of your friends and colleagues and make them pay $25,000 and they will love to be with you. I mean, it was something like that. It was close. And Robin was the first one who signed up for Genius Network, I think, along with Richard Rossi, and just because she understood the power of masterminding a coaching group not group think, but group collaborations. And she was early on that, very early we’re talking, you know, 2005 ish.
But she was, she knew about it before then, too. So she is so equipped to talk about marketing from so many different angles, I have a bunch of questions lined up. Some of you sent in some questions, which I’ll try to get to all of those. But first of all, Robin, for those people on the call who don’t know you and don’t know your background. I’d love it if it’s okay, if you’re comfortable with it, to tell sort of your origin story a little bit, because I think it’s powerful. It’s inspiring. I mean, your childhood wasn’t great, from what you’ve told me, but basically you were born to be an entrepreneur, because you were so on your own early on. And I’d like you to tell that, because that says a lot about you and who you are and how you’ve been so successful. If you’re comfortable with that.
Robin Robins 5:29
Yeah, I don’t. I’d say, where do I start? Yeah, I would not say that I was a born entrepreneur. I, you know, so, you know, you know, parents, my mother actually belonged to a religious cult. My father didn’t end up in a divorce. He abandoned us, and so I was homeless for a period of time, about a year. And you know, my mother and my sister had three older brothers, but they had already left. We didn’t even know where they were. So, you know, from an early from very early on, I had to be, I sort of ended up taking on that role of being the responsible one, you know. And, you know, it’s funny, you know, I’m talking to Ken Wells Brian, you might know Ken.
Brian Kurtz 6:20
Yeah, yeah. He’s the trauma expert, yeah.
Robin Robins 6:23
And so Joe’s like, You got to talk to this guy. So it’s funny, because, like, Ken’s assessment is, you know, as a little girl, you basically went into this take responsibility mode, because there was no you, there were no adults. My mother was emotionally unable to handle things. And yeah, I was thinking about this the other day. So he’s like, “You got, you got into that mode. And I think very early on, I sort of learned how to sell influence from a very young age, because my mother was so emotionally unable to handle my father leaving, and she was in this church, and she didn’t have a job, and she didn’t have money, and it was just, it was just too much for and I remember sort of coaching her to you, I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, but sort of help trying to talk to her and manage her state, because she would just sit and sob uncontrollably.
She and this get real personal, but like, just so you guys, you know she would, she would call me, I used to work at a flower shop, and she would call me and say she was going to commit suicide and it would be my fault, and I would come home and find her and it would be my fault and like and so she just like, looking back now as an adult on that I can see she just was severely depressed and unable to cope with what was going on. And so early on, I think I learned emotional intelligence, whether I knew what I was doing or I didn’t read a book about it. It was just kind of like, all right? I knew how to talk her off a ledge, right? That was kind of and managed her state enough to get her to be functional, to be an adult, which I know, at 14, you need someone to drive you, like, you know, or we didn’t have a car, but you know what? I mean, like, you have to have an adult in the room, so to speak.
So I, you know, no big deal, I mean. And you know, I’ve heard somewhere someone says, in your 20s, your first 20 years of life, you just like, don’t screw things up. And in your your 20s to 30s, I think it’s like you gotta establish your career in your 30s to 40s, you know, or 30s to 30s to 50s, maybe you make your money, and then in your 50s, you learn how to how to live your passion, and then beyond that, you learned to be charitable or something. There’s some, someone had said something like this the other day to kind of and I thought about that. And the reason I’m sharing is because, like in my 20s, I never even thought about starting a business until like, late in my 20s, and I only started because I got fired from a job and I had to do something, so I just started consulting.
And so, you know, that was back in 2001 you know it was, well, actually, like, kind of 2002 and that’s where I that’s kind of where I started my business. And so, you know, I didn’t, I had a sixth grade education because I never finished school. I found Dan Kennedy, and because I was in sales, I was at a sales job, I was one of the people at the Peter low event, you know. And I bought the, you know, magnetic marketing, right, right? And that, really, you know, that really, I consider Dan one of the pivotal people in my life, because meeting him and learning direct response and having a sales background, it clicked for me like, oh, wow, I can actually do marketing, and people will call me, right? You know, I felt, you know, you call yourself t-rex, I’m becoming a dinosaur. Like, like, I’m like, I gotta come up with my non-extinct dinosaur, the nice one, one of my cool dinosaur names or something. Because, you know, I remember sending out a letter and getting facts back, right? And being like, holy Like, there’s a fax coming in with an order on it, you know? And it was like, See, I mean, I was like, wow. I can’t believe this, you know, so you know, that’s when I started the business. I ended up in the IT space.
Brian Kurtz 10:08
Yeah, I was going to ask you, why, how do you get to it? And you know, your company is called Technology Marketing Toolkit, and obviously you chose a good niche, or I believe that you could have chosen any niche and you would have dominated it, but you chose one that you dominate completely. So, how did you choose it? And, like, why? That would be my first question.
Robin Robins 10:34
Yeah, well, I had worked in a company that was a big IT firm, so I wasn’t it wasn’t a foreign concept to me, and when I was thrust upon greatness, was thrust upon me, and I was fired from this job, what I just started calling my network, because I didn’t have sell. And I just called my network, hey, who needs help? Who needs help with some marketing kind of thing, you know, sort of like a warm outreach and cold outreach beyond that. But there was an association that I was familiar with and they knew me from my work at this previous company called CompTIA, and it was a big industry association, and I reached out to them and sold them on the idea of hiring me to do a webinar series. Really, actually, back then, I was a teleseminar, because webinars weren’t even like a thing yet, and I did a teleseminar series.
They paid me to do that for six months and then come and do a workshop in person at their big event. And I sold that to them, and I used that to get customers. I wasn’t selling on the teleseminars. It was purely for member engagement, but I started picking up private clients, one, here, two, here, three, and before I knew it, you know, I had all these at the time they call themselves bars, value added resellers, and, you know, like fledgling MSPs managed service providers. And that’s kind of how I got started, like I was that first year I was on my own. I did marketing for an MRI imaging center, a self test software company, a medical billing company, a trucking and shipping company. So it was all over the map that first year, and I was looking for my niche, and when CompTIA hired me, and I started getting clients, I just made that decision. And I wish I could say it was very strategic, and I knew the industry well.
Brian Kurtz 12:15
It was, in a way, because they were, you know, you always go to the people who are sending you the biggest checks.