Christina Del Villar is a Silicon Valley marketing executive, consultant and author of the new book Sway: Implement the G.R.I.T. Marketing Method to Gain Influence & Drive Corporate Strategy. Christina has wanted to write the book for a long time, having worked on many teams and discovering that lots of people don’t understand what marketers bring to the table.

The G.R.I.T. Marketing Method focuses on helping marketing professionals to build smarter programs, be more efficient and exponentially grow revenue to improve overall company performance.G.R.I.T. stands for: Go-To-Market Strategy; RPN (repeatable, predictable, measurable); Intention; and Tools and Technology.

In this episode Christina discusses how and why she wrote her book, marketing strategies, and how to market your book.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Josh Steimle:

Welcome to the Published Author Podcast where we help entrepreneurs learn how to write a book and leverage it to grow their business and make an impact. I’m your host, Josh Steimle.
Today, my guest is Christina Del Villar. Christina is the author of Sway. I’ve got the book right here, Implement the G.R.I.T. Marketing Method to Gain Influence and Drive Corporate Strategy. Christina has more than 25 years of experience at fortune 100 companies and has worked with more than 20 startups. Christina created the G.R.I.T. marketing method to help professionals build smarter programs and be more efficient. Christina, welcome to the show.

Christina Del Villar:

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited.

Josh Steimle:

So I gave a very brief introduction there, but tell us a little bit more about your background and the companies you've worked for and with, and how you got to where you are today.

Christina Del Villar:

Thank you, sounds good. So yeah, I've been working in Silicon Valley for the past 25, probably, almost 30 years now, and, like you mentioned, with Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies and a lot of startups along the way. And for me, I've had amazing opportunities to work with amazing people like Elon Musk, Larry Ellison's Sebastian Thrun, who is known as the father of the self-driving car. And so, I've had some just fantastic opportunities to really sort of dive into what it means for go-to-market strategy and marketing strategies. And so, that is basically what has led me to where I am today, writing the book, really all about how to build that influence, how marketing professionals and sales professionals can build that influence inside their organization, so they can be much more effective and efficient.

Josh Steimle:

Cool. Now, what was – you've had this career, you're working, you can get work whenever you want it, why did you decide, you know what, I need to write a book, this is something I need to do?

Christina Del Villar:

Yeah, so it's been in my, you know, a lot of your listeners will attest to this, it's been in my head for a long time. It was probably about three years or so that I knew that I had to write this book. But I do think that there's the right time to write the book. And so, as I postulated, like, who is my target audience, what I really wanted to do was help the C-suite and executives really understand the value and the impact that marketing brings to the table. I think that marketing is a core component to any organization and the corporate strategy, and yet, we're often sort of thought of as this sort of nebulous group over here, nobody really knows what we do. And so, originally, I was thinking, how can I help executives, leaders, C-suite, even boards understand what it is that we bring to the table, and it was really convoluted. And so, I kind of flipped the table and tried to figure out how I can help marketing professionals better position themselves, and help them, both do a better job and articulate what those results and impacts were. And it just took a while to kind of figure out what that looked like, and in talking to some of my teams, they were saying, well, you have this process, like, whether you know it or not, there's a process that you have. And so, then it kind of took me a little while to formulate what does that framework look like, and how can I build it into sort of like a step by step process for others, so that they can implement it. So again, it took a couple of years, but at one point, it was like, I have to do this, and so, I stepped away, like you mentioned, stepped away from the corporate world and spent the past year writing it and publishing it and getting it out there.

Josh Steimle:

So as everybody knows, we're going through a global pandemic, and it seems like there are a lot of authors out there who are saying, hey, this actually ended up being a good opportunity for me to hunker down and write the book I’ve always been planning on writing. Was that part of it or was it just coincidental?

Christina Del Villar:

It was just coincidence. I basically had started the process in January of last year, and set up my office space and my headspace, getting ready and prepared to write the book. And actually, my plan was to buy an RV and travel around the country, and my partner would drive while I was writing my book in the back, we're going to get some kittens, like, I have it all planned out, and then pandemic kit. And it was fine, it actually, I think, helped me focus and concentrate a lot more. But yeah, it is interesting, it definitely provided people an opportunity to have that that time and space to do that as well.

Josh Steimle:

Cool. So walk us through the G.R.I.T. method, because I think there's a lot in here that's going to be applicable to authors as well as the authors listening to this are thinking about writing their book, marketing their book, can you walk us through that method?

Christina Del Villar:

Sure. Absolutely. And it's a good point, right, I am a marketing and go-to-market strategist, so it's easy for me to now take my book and go market that, but that's not everybody's strength. But basically the G.R.I.T. marketing method, it's an acronym, and it stands for go-to-market strategy. The R stands for RPM, which I’ll talk a little bit about. The I stands for intention, and the T stands for tools and technology. So when I’m thinking about marketing and go-to-market strategy and how to get either a product or solution to market that go-to-market strategy is critical. And what normally happens is a lot of companies don't even have a true go-to-market strategy; they have a goal, they have their OKR or their North Star, but they don't actually have a good, solid go-to-market strategy. And so, one of the components of G.R.I.T. is really looking at that strategy, and the rules that everybody in the organization plays in getting those products and solutions to market – whether you're in sales or product or customer success or marketing, like, what is it that you can identify as areas that you can help, so that you can have, again, more impact and just be really laser focused on what that ultimate corporate strategy and goal is. The R of the RPM, as I like to call it, it stands for repeatable, predictable and measurable; and this can go for anything, in particular, for what I was writing about, it has to do with marketing; so what kinds of programs and content do you have that you can repeat, reuse, recycle, so that you can have that predictability, and then at the end of the day, make sure you're measuring those particular programs. And the I stands for intention, it goes back to strategy. You have to be really intentional and mindful about what it is that you're doing, where your resources are going, where you're spending your money, like, on a day in day out basis, it's really important to think about that. And then tools and technology, really, that's just how you're going to implement it, get it out there and measure it. And to your point, it doesn't matter if it's a marketing program or a book or anything, you just want to make sure that you have everything in place, that infrastructure, if you will, so that you can successfully launch whatever it is that you're focused on.

Josh Steimle:

Got you. So for thinking about the script marketing method for authors, if we talk about go-to-market strategy for an author, how might we apply that to an entrepreneur who wants to write a book that they can use to grow their business, but maybe that's all the thought they've put into it, how could they use [inaudible 00:07:01] refine that idea a bit more?

Christina Del Villar:

Yeah, it's a great point. And when I started this journey, as I think other people are too, I was like, I’m going to write a book, like, this is going to be amazing. And then I got into, there's so much more to writing a book, right? There's the writing, there's the publishing, there's the go-to-market, the marketing strategy behind it, and so, for me, it was there are all of these different pieces that I needed to think about and look at – do I write the book? Do I have it ghostwritten? How do I find a publisher? What do I do there? But obviously, for me, they go-to-market component was easier for myself than for others, but I still needed to really understand, first off, who my audience is. It's one thing to write a book, but if you don't know who your audience is, it's not going to help you, it's not going to really guide you along the way in making sure that you’re staying, your tone is the same, and that your story's being pulled through the entire book. So for me, and again, this is a big thing in marketing, just really understanding who your audience is, and always addressing them, so that was one of the key components.
The other thing really is just the networking and building that, you know, the folks who are going to be interested in reading it, the folks who are going to take the book and evangelize it, the folks who are going to review it and give good reviews, and so, similar to any product or solution you have or your company, in general, you want to make sure that you have those folks who are 100% behind you, who are going to support you. And so, that was one thing I started to build pretty early on was what I called my tribe, you know, other authors, other industry folks. And again, my target audience really was marketing professionals, so I did focus on them, but the intention of that was to help marketing professionals have that influence on the corporation. So I also started focusing on the C-suite, my CEO friends and C-suite friends as well, and trying to get them sort of interested in what it was that I was going to be talking about. And so, that's kind of like the setup that I had for that, and again, I started writing it over a year ago; and so, I started this process, engaging them, asking them questions, what would they want to see, what's sort of the format that they would be interested in.
And then, I think the other thing that's really, really critical, especially for entrepreneurs is, you have to make a decision in terms of the tone and voice of your book. I’m a kind of a sassy, snarky person, and so, I had to really think about that, is that the tone I wanted, because I still wanted to be the authority and I still wanted people to come away with, this is a framework that you can implement, but for me, that tone was really important. I wanted to keep it light, because the subject is pretty heavy, and there's a lot of things people are going to learn, but I wanted it to be a little more on the fun side. So you have to kind of balance and really know, again, your audience and your own voice and tone as well.

Josh Steimle:

So then when we apply the R to your methodology for your own book, this is such a meta conversation, right? But like...

Christina Del Villar:

It is.

Josh Steimle:

How did you apply that R in your situation to writing your book – I can't remember what the three were, it was repeatable was one...

Christina Del Villar:

Repeatable, predictable and measurable.

Josh Steimle:

Okay, repeatable, predictable, measurable, as you're thinking about your book and getting your book out there in the right hands and marketing it, how were you applying that to what you're doing for your book?

Christina Del Villar:

And for me, again, it's a little easier for me, because I am in marketing, so some of the other folks who are not – it's not their, sort of, what they think about on a day to day basis, a little bit more difficult to think about how they might apply that. But for me, so I wrote the book, and I can literally take the entire book, I can take it chapter by chapter, I can turn it into an eBook or I can turn it into, probably, I don't know, a 100 blogs. Right? The point is that you've written something, and you can call it your pillar piece or your umbrella piece, whatever that looks like, but it's your core message that you're trying to get out. And now, instead of writing, because I write a lot of articles as well, but I’m not writing articles from scratch, I’m taking components and pieces from the book and sort of repurposing them for that audience. So if I am writing for Harvard Business Review, I might take a chapter, but I might tweak it, because their audience is a little different than Inc. magazine or something like that. So really, it's all about, like, you've already, like, this is who I am, this is my message, and I want to make sure that it's consistent. And so, it's just taking that, and again, you can reuse it, recycle it, you can refine it a bit. So if you have different audiences, so, for example, if I were to take a chapter and really focus on CEOs, I might shift, sort of like, what it is that they can expect versus the marketing professional who's actually going to implement it. So that's just kind of how I think about that.

Josh Steimle:

Yeah, because I think there's a temptation sometimes, especially as a new writer, a new author, to feel like, everything I write has to be new.

Christina Del Villar:

New, yeah.

Josh Steimle:

Custom and unique, and I was actually just interviewing a guy named Paul Sokol, and he was saying, really, what you do is you write a book, and then you just tell people what you wrote for the next 10 years.

Christina Del Villar:

That's exactly, you know, one year, two years, five years, 10 years, exactly, because you've already written it, and what you wrote is what you want to say. Right? I mean, that's why you wrote the book. So it doesn't make sense to then go write an article either on a different subject or to try to spin it differently and uniquely. I mean, you definitely want to think about that audience, and so, you might, again, sort of refine it a little bit. The other thing I recommend for folks, in general, regardless if they're an author or not, but it really is to, again, take something that you've written, even if it was a year ago, and maybe just update it, like, maybe things have changed enough that you can update it a little bit, for – from the standpoint of corporate marketing, can you just put it, literally, put another title page on it or retitle it? So there's things that you can do that, it just makes it much more effective and efficient, because you already have the core message that you're trying to get out, you're just potentially looking at tweaking it and representing it and positioning it in different methods and formats as well.

Josh Steimle:

Got it. All right. So let's talk about the I for authors. How did you apply the I in your case?

Christina Del Villar:

So the intention – I’m a very intentional person, I’m intentional with my go-to-market strategy, I make sure that my teams are very intentional, and I think that the key component there for me is that there's so much that you could be doing. And I’ll kind of give you an example – this happens in marketing, I’m sure it happens in other organizations, but we're always being pulled in different directions, people are always asking us for things here and there, we're getting interrupted on a daily basis. And so, one time I asked my team to, for one full week, I want you all to just record all of the interruptions that you have, all the things that are taking you away from focusing on what your key strategy, what our key goals are. Right? And so, I had them do that, and the average was 200 interruptions in a week, so whatever, 40 interruptions a day. It's insane. How can you be productive and efficient and actually make a difference and have those impacts towards your ultimate goal, if you're just getting interrupted every day? And again, I'm not saying this is just marketers. So if they understand, like, you have to be intentional, and you're transparent about that, you can tell other people too, it's like, hey, you know what, I know you need a T-Shirt for the sales you've got going on, the class is down there, but I’m in the middle of something right now, I don't have time to stop what I’m doing and kind of do and help you with other things. And I think it really helped my team understand the waste that they had, and again, they're great people, they're super nice, they're going to try to help everybody, but you really do need to be focused and, again, intentional with everything that you're doing. There's only so many resources, there's only so much time in the day, and if you're sort of unproductive because you have these interruptions, that’s what people are going to remember. Right? You're not going to be able to hit your results or they're going to wonder like, what are they doing all day, she's running around and trying to find T-Shirts, and not really focused on that that strategic component that they need to be focused on.

Josh Steimle:

It reminds me of the scene in the movie, The Social Network, where Mark Zuckerberg is wearing headphones while he's coding, and the signal is, if somebody is wearing headphones, you don't interrupt them, because they're in the middle of coding, and they can't be interrupted.

Christina Del Villar:

Yeah.

Josh Steimle:

And there are a lot of people who do that type of thing where they have some sort of signal to say, I’m in deep work right now, don't interrupt me. And especially, as an author, that's important, because you get into that state of flow sometimes, where it's just coming out, and you're like, wow, this is so easy, and then something interrupts, and you're like, dang, like...

Christina Del Villar:

Where was I, that was a brilliant, you know, it's actually funny, there's – I was pretty good, but there's one piece at the end of the book, and I had this brilliant thought, and I’m like, this is going to be the best way to end this book. And I got interrupted, and literally, to this day, I cannot remember what it was, and maybe it's what I wrote, I don’t know, I don't think so. But yeah, definitely, it's impactful. And I think that that kind of goes to one of the process things that I did when I was writing the book, was I literally set the time in my calendar for when I was going to write every day, and I did not look at my emails, I did not answer the phone, I had my headphones on for sure. Because that was really the only way – and not the only way – but that was a more effective way for me to make sure that I could concentrate and focus and, again, sort of be intentional about what I was writing and knowing that I had that time set aside every day. And it wasn't that much time, it wasn't like I set aside eight hours a day to write, but it was enough time and enough uninterrupted time that allowed me to get the book written pretty quickly.

Josh Steimle:

That's great. Because we really need those structures, we need to set up our environment to facilitate that writing. My friend Ben Hardy wrote a book called Willpower Doesn't Work, and we sometimes think, oh, I just need to have the willpower and the discipline to do it. And it's like no, that doesn't work. Nobody has that kind of willpower. I actually hired a guy who – and not just for this, but other things too, but part of his job description is to sit and watch me work on my books to make sure I’m doing it. And so, we actually – we sit on Zoom, and he'll do his own stuff, but he's kind of keeping an eye on me while we're on Zoom to make sure I'm working on stuff.

Christina Del Villar:

Yeah.

Josh Steimle:

And if he sees that I look distracted or something, he can be like, Josh, are you working on the book or did you get distracted...

Christina Del Villar:

I love that.

Josh Steimle:

Because I need that kind of help, and that kind of ongoing accountability because I’ve got ADHD, I'm riddled with it, and it's just so easy for me to go off on a tangent, like, I need somebody actually watching me.

Christina Del Villar:

And it's interesting, because I had a book coach Stacy, who was amazing, and one of the things early on, first off, I would say, like, for me, writing my outline is critical, I’ve always been that type of person. I need to have an outline, and I would rather rewrite my outline six-seven times, then rewrite my book six or seven times. So I was very, very focused on the outline. But there were definitely times where I would get to a chapter, and I would be struggling about how to represent it or how to write that. Because again, it is a tool, it is a teaching book, and there is a framework that people can use and steps and stuff. So at one point, I was like, I'm going to skip this chapter, and I’m going to go to chapter five, because that's an easy chapter for me to write. And Stacy was like, no, like, if you do that, you're never going to write chapter three or whatever chapter it was. She's like, if it takes you two-three weeks of no writing to figure out what that looks like, that's what you need to do. And she was right. I don't know that I ever would have gotten back to chapter four, gotten back to that chapter, if I hadn't just been able to like, it's okay to like, take the time and you don't have to write the entire time, but you need to be thinking about what that is and doing it in order. And again, that might not be the right thing for everybody, but it certainly helped me. And then, once I figured it out, then I was like, oh okay, I got this, and the rest of it was easy from there.

Josh Steimle:

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So the T in G.R.I.T. stands for tools and technologies. What tools and technologies did you use for writing your book, how do you prefer to write?

Christina Del Villar:

So I used to write like handwriting. Obviously, I knew writing a book that way was going to be insane. And so, I actually just used Word for that. I definitely leveraged Word Hippo and some other tools online to make sure that I was getting, I was choosing the right words, and again, sort of keeping that tone, and yet, not sort of being repetitive, which you can start doing in a book. The other thing I found really interesting was I used Hemingway, which sort of helps guide you in terms of grammar. And then, the other thing I did was a lot of people say, so I didn't edit it at all until it was fully written, I didn't go back and – and I know that there's a lot of different camps, like, some people write a chapter, and then they edit it, and edit it, and edit it. For me, I just wanted to get it – I wanted to get it all down. But the key thing that I did do was make sure that there was that thread throughout the book. And so, that was one thing that both Stacy and my coach and my editor Robin did, was just make sure that the thread was there throughout the writing. So I didn't get too – go too far down the road. But again, there's so many online tools that you can use and leverage today to help sort of manage versions or again sort of help you with grammar and words and verbiage and stuff like that. I think there's a lot of opportunity out there for people, who don't feel comfortable with writing, to get the kind of help and tools that they need to make them successful and feel comfortable.

Josh Steimle:

I love that you mentioned Hemingway. Hemingway app is great. Just for those who have never heard of this, Christina's not talking about reading Hemingway and books as a tool to help you...

Christina Del Villar:

Smoking cigars and drinking.

Josh Steimle:

Yeah, there's an app out there called the Hemingway app, and it helps you write very concise, clear language, and I love that tool.

Christina Del Villar:

I love it too.

Josh Steimle:

And also Word, Google Docs, there are tools out there like Scrivener that people use which is a book writing app that a lot of people swear by still, used to swear by, but Word and Google Docs really can do so much these days. And then you can plug in these other apps like Word Hippo or Grammarly, and they help clean up the writing and get rid of some of the technical stuff, and it really makes the writing process so much faster and so much easier because you don't have to worry about all that stuff like, oh, am I saying this the right way...

Christina Del Villar:

Right, did I spell that right...

Josh Steimle:

Just get the idea on paper, and then Grammarly will fix it for you.

Christina Del Villar:

Right. And the other interesting thing about those like Grammarly, I use Grammarly too, as a matter of fact, and Hemingway, and so, as you're going along, it'll give you recommendations. And at first, I was like, you just kind of have to get used to like sort of these little things popping up, like, did you really want to say that. And that's fine, but the other thing it did is it really helped me find that voice and keep that tone consistent. I don't know if there is like AI and machine learning involved with that, like, it starts to learn my patterns and my tone and stuff, which would be great if it did, but it definitely helped keep my voice and my tone consistent throughout as well, which was really important.

Josh Steimle:

Yeah, some amazing tools out there, and then you think about people like Ernest Hemingway actually writing stuff out on a pad of paper and then typing it up on a typewriter in his shack in Cuba. It's like, we are so lucky today with the tools and technologies that we have, it's just made it so accessible. It's kind of like filmmaking too, where people are making feature films on an iPhone, whereas 30 years ago, you had to invest millions of dollars just in the tools and technology to even be in the game. Whereas today, you can literally make a feature film on a piece of equipment that costs 1000 bucks; or, get an old iPhone for 500 bucks, you can still make a movie on that. And it's the same with writing, the opportunity that's there is great, which, of course, means you end up with a lot more books that aren't that great, but you end up with a lot of great books, because there are a lot of great authors out there who would have been discouraged by the lack of tools and technology just a few decades ago.

Christina Del Villar:

Absolutely. Yeah, and again, I think with COVID, I saw a ton, I just saw a ton of new first time authors coming out with books or getting ready to publish their books right now. And I think that, again, those tools and sort of that, not necessarily downtime, but it's just I think last year and a half has given people the opportunity to embrace the fact that they have something to say and can publish their books. So it's exciting.

Josh Steimle:

So let's talk about the publishing process a little bit here. So I'm looking at the back of your book, and it says an Inc. original on the back, so are we talking about Inc. magazine there?

Christina Del Villar:

We are. That is correct.

Josh Steimle:

And most people would think, well, wait a second, Inc. magazine makes magazines, they don't publish books. So tell us how that relationship works.

Christina Del Villar:

Yeah, so for me, this is one thing, and again, this is just, this is me. Right? I am a go-to-market strategist, so as I’m starting to think about this book, I want to know who's going to publish it, who I want to have as a publisher, based on the audience that I have. So I started doing a lot of research in terms of publishing early on, and obviously, I looked at, if I wanted to self-publish, or go a traditional route, or do some hybrid, some kind of a hybrid way of doing it. And for me, traditional, I think would have been easier than it was, but my concern with the traditional route was that they then own your content, they own your IP. And for me, this is a methodology and a framework that I can now either teach or make available to other folks. And if I had gone a traditional route, they would have owned, they would have owned my framework, the G.R.I.T. marketing method, and I didn't want to do that. On the other hand, self-publishing, again, I’m in marketing, so sort of the biggest hurdle for a lot of folks would have been the marketing and sales component, which I can do, but I also knew what it would take, and I didn't want to do that. So I went with a hybrid model, so that was kind of my first decision. Then the next was to figure out like, what is the best sort of publisher out there that can help me with that, and I ended up with Greenleaf as the publisher, who then focuses on Inc. magazine Fast Company and a couple of others as the imprint. So they're the ones who do the imprint for an Inc. original.
And so, for me, the audience that Inc. has is my audience. I’m very focused on B2B, startups, entrepreneurship, founders, and go-to-market strategy, and I felt like Inc. magazine and their arm of that with their book publishing was a good fit for me. And so, I started talking to them sort of early on, as I’m in the process of writing the book. And then that was really – they were really the ones that I wanted to publish the book. And so, they're the only ones that I actually ended up approaching in the end with the manuscript, and luckily, they liked it. So again, that's not the same route that everybody is going to take. I do know people who write their book, and then they send it out to multiple people, or they write part of their book and then they try to figure out what a good publisher is, or some people go the traditional route and try to find a publisher or an agent and then they write to that audience or what that publisher is looking for, for that timeframe. So it just sort of depends on your time, your commitment, your background and skills. Again, I have the skill set to kind of do a little bit more research on what that go-to-market looks like and who I would want to publish it. But I think there's a lot of different options for folks out there as well.

Josh Steimle:

Yeah, for sure. One of my clients that I’m coaching actually is going through Greenleaf, and so we're going through that process with them as well. He probably won't do Inc., but he's going through Greenleaf because he wanted to get his book out fast, and looking at traditional publishing, it was just – it's just too long. His book is on innovation and technology and stuff, and we said, well, if we have to wait 18 months for this book to come out, then some of this might be obsolete by the time the book comes out, we want to get this book out fast for that reason. So hybrid, but at the same time, we didn't want to just self-publish his book, because we thought, we want some help on this, we want somebody who's been there done that to help him through that process. And so, we turned to Greenleaf for that.

Christina Del Villar:

Yeah, it is, I mean, it's definitely a process. There are things that I had no idea about, like, in order to get into an airport bookstore, you need X amount of words in your book, and then, do you even want to be in an airport bookstore, because that's really difficult to get into as well. And so, it was great, Greenleaf and an Inc. original, Inc. magazine really helped guide me in terms of like, what I should be doing, and the best way to do that. Again, totally, you know, I’ve been doing marketing for decades, but never for myself and never for like a book, so it was a very different process and things to think about for sure.

Josh Steimle:

Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about the marketing plan that you've got for this – well, first of all, when is the book coming out? We're recording this on July 20 2021, and I was lucky I got one of the advanced copies, I got a galley copy there, advanced readers copy, not for resale.

Christina Del Villar:

Hey, you know...

Josh Steimle:

I can't go sell it on the black market.

Christina Del Villar:

I hear it's a hot item right now. It's coming out August 3, both the hardback and the eBook, and then the audio version will be out probably a couple of months after that, working on that right now.

Josh Steimle:

So probably by the time you're listening to this podcast, the book is out, you can go buy it, go get it right now, Sway by Christina Del Villar. So talk to us a little bit about the marketing plan that you've put together for the book; and there are hundreds of different ways that people can do this, so I’m always curious to get author's plans on this, because everybody's got a unique plan for how they're taking it to market, launching it and marketing it afterwards.

Christina Del Villar:

Yeah. So for me, the book is sort of a starting point, because again, it is that framework and that methodology. So what I really wanted to do is get people to start thinking about, like, what does this mean, what does it look like, how is it going to help them. And then I have a course that's going to come out that kind of complements what we talk about in the book, and again, that framework and the steps that you need to take. And then, I’m also going to be offering corporate workshops as well, so going to corporations and helping not just individuals, but teams, whether it's a marketing team, sales team, go-to-market team, if they have something to that effect. So for me, it's not just looking at how to get the book out there, it's looking at how to get the script marketing methodology out there to folks. And so, it was really important, again, to kind of think about the different audiences for those different aspects. Again, marketing professionals will really enjoy the book, as will, I think, sales professionals as well. But as we sort of go up into the coursework and the workshop, the audience increases, it doesn't change, it just increases, because now you might have product people or customer support and success. So for me, it was really important to build out my database, so I started building that out over a year ago, in terms of the folks who I thought would be interested in what I’m talking about, and I can segment that in my CRM, it's super easy for me to segment, and then send different – again, we're talking about the same content, it's just a different audience, so I might tweak the verbiage a bit, so I can repeat and reuse my content.
And then, social was really big, and this is interesting, because one thing that I think – I had a lot of people go, you got to get on Instagram, and Instagram is huge, huge, huge and TikTok. And I’m like, well, those are great for certain audiences. Like, my audience, these are, again, marketing professionals, sales professionals, product managers, and they're not on TikTok trying to learn how to gain influence in their corporation. That's just not really, you know, I don't know why they're going to TikTok, but that's probably not why. And same with Instagram, right? And so, I had to be really mindful about, do I want to go spend more time on LinkedIn, which is where I spend most of my time on. And then the other thing too is because it's very specific in terms of what I’m trying to tell people, writing content, again, taking the book itself, but basically, having contributed articles, was really key. So I started focusing on that about a year ago as well, just getting content out there, you know, I have a column in CMSWire, I’ve been in Harvard Business Review, a bunch of other marketing specific, entrepreneurs specific publications as well, because again, that's where my audience is. And so, starting to kind of build that myself up as a thought leader was really what I was focused on. And then, obviously, we'll be doing some ads.
One interesting thing is the giveaways on Goodreads, I see it a lot as a reader of fiction, I haven't really seen it a lot with nonfiction, but it's been really helpful to get people to understand that this book is out there, have them add it to their must-read section. And not only that, again, there's all sorts of funny things with Goodreads and Amazon who owns Goodreads in terms of the algorithm, so it's kind of playing around with that, just trying to make sure people are – if they're not purchasing it, at least they're searching for it, both on Amazon and Goodreads. And then have been really focused on the reviews that I want people to start publishing. And again, there's all sorts of funny things with Amazon, so like, having 50 reviews on Amazon is great, but if it's all that first day, and then there's nothing after that, then Amazon, they weigh that and take that into consideration. So again, it's sort of this go-to-market strategist, I’m like, okay, everybody whose name starts with A through D, publish on the first week and E through H whatever. So I’m just trying to be really mindful about when people are doing their reviews, and when those are going to come out, so I can kind of continue that momentum. So there's a couple kind of funny things like that, that I’m playing with, plus I'm just trying to beat Amazon's algorithm like everybody else.

Josh Steimle:

That's great, some awesome ideas there for authors to take away. So now that you've got this book under your belt, it's written, it's about to come out, are you already thinking ahead to more books that you're going to write in the future?

Christina Del Villar:

Yes, absolutely. So I have about three other books in the pipeline, but I really did want to see the reaction from the readers and the people who are going to implement it to get a better sense of what is the next best book to write. But some of them are – one of the books is about, now you have this methodology, how can you, as a marketing person, develop more efficient and effective marketing programs and content. So looking at that, and I talked about this early on, it's like, how do you help the C-suite and leaders and executives really understand the importance, significance, and impact of marketing, and how to set up marketing organizations for success, so that's another component.
The other thing that I think is really important is everybody in a company should be playing a part in that go-to-market strategy. And so, one of the ones I’m looking at is, I call it the accidental marketer, and it's really helping people in organizations understand how they can help marketing be more successful, and therefore help the company reach its goals. And then I have this other idea for historical fiction series, nothing to do with marketing, not nonfiction at all, but looking at doing some historical fiction writing as well.

Josh Steimle:

Fun-fun. What facet of history – curious.

Christina Del Villar:

So it has to do with my great grandmother, who came from Spain, went to the Philippines, and ended up in San Francisco, and kind of like her journey and the things that she experienced in the 1800s, during the Gold Rush, and during some World War 1 type things as well. So a couple of [inaudible 00:37:13] components.

Josh Steimle:

That sounds fun.

Christina Del Villar:

Yeah.

Josh Steimle:

Because it's not just fiction, but you're researching family, and family history is like a treasure trove of material because it's unique. And if you know it, you know nobody else has got it.

Christina Del Villar:

Exactly. And it's interesting, because I’m taking pieces of my great grandmother, my great aunt, like, a bunch of different people and kind of melding it into trying to figure out how to meld it into one story. So it'll be interesting, let's see how that goes.

Josh Steimle:

Fun, fun stuff. Well, Christina, thanks so much for being with us here today on the podcast. If people want to reach out and connect with you, where's the best place for them to find you?

Christina Del Villar:

They can go to, if they go to swaythebook.com, that will get them to my landing page for the book, and that will also get them to my website. That's probably the easiest, fastest way for them to find me and reach out. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m happy to chat too. I think that there's a lot, either for authors or for marketing people, go-to-market strategists, just having that community and that network is really important, and I think valuable for everybody right now.

Josh Steimle:

Perfect. Well, thank you so much, Christina, for being with us here today on the show.

Christina Del Villar:

Thank you.

Josh Steimle:

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