Q&A: Teaching startups how to sell

To Mickeli Bedore, what other people call “sales” is just effective communication.

A longtime veteran of corporate sales teams, Bedore took a different branch with his career after coming in contact with the Twin Cities’ growing startup scene. First as founder of sales agency Bedore Media Group, and later as founder and host of the Coffee & Closers podcast, he’s made it his mission to give every company, of any size or age, the tools to make the case for their value to customers, investors and employees. In 2019, Coffee & Closers received a Twin Cities Startup Week Impact Award in recognition of the work they’ve done with local entrepreneurs.

Now Bedore plans to grow Coffee & Closers, and share that message, even further. He’s hoping to expand next year into additional cities, and is rolling out a new online platform for sales trainings, community content and more.

Coffee & Closers can be found on iTunes, Spotify and other podcasting services by searching “Coffee Closers.” Finance & Commerce spoke with Bedore on March 3, shortly after the podcast held its first live theater show at the Music Box Theatre in Minneapolis. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Explain to me how you got started on this, and what the business model is for Coffee & Closers.

A: I’ve spent 15 years in high-ticket enterprise software technology sales, went to work for IBM, and IBM did not have an office here in the Twin Cities, so I bought a membership to a coworking space called CoCo, which is now called Fueled Collective. In that space, a lot of the members were really bright text startup founders, and they were amazing. And they would talk to me about what I did, which was sales, and they would look at me with the same light. So we would kind of exchange. They would show me all this cool stuff they could do and I would help them sell their dreams, their products or whatever they were developing, because they couldn’t.

I got inspired to start my own sales and marketing agency, Bedore Business Group, and one day, my assistant said, look at your calendar. All of these are coffee meetings that you’re having with all of these folks that are not paying you to help them. So we booked a room at CoCo, and we said, we’re gonna have all these people come to us, and I’m going to have a Q&A and help answer all their sales questions.

We had 50 people sign up, which was larger than we expected, and guess who didn’t show up? The people I was helping. But guess who did show up? Salespeople! Not what we were targeting, but we had the conversation anyway. And two and a half years later, we have outgrown the three largest coworking spaces in the Twin Cities, and today, we sold out the Music Box Theatre and we had Kris Lindahl on as we debuted our theater show.

Q: How did that go?

A: It was packed! It was incredible. It exceeded every expectation. I didn’t actually believe we could pull this off. I mean, at the end of the day, we’re just two knucklehead salespeople having a conversation. There’s no magic or juggling, but it was powerful. Kris Lindahl, by the way, is a completely different human being than most people realize. They know him from the billboards, but they don’t realize his business prowess is insane. He’s one of the sharpest business minds I’ve met in a long time.

Q: So is Coffee & Closers a subsidiary now of Bedore Media Group?

A: No, Coffee & Closers was just a hobby that has since dwarfed the agency, so we put the agency on hold and put an LLC on Coffee & Closers about a year or so ago, trademarked all of our marks, and now Closers Media is its own entity.

Here’s how our business model works. We have two event pillars. Coffee & Closers is tagged for inspiration. That’s the show that’s now grown into a theater show. The other one is Cocktails and Closers, which is also trademarked, and it’s fun, loose events, but then we have kind of a value-tainment edge to it. And then at the center of that, we’re in the middle of a rebrand. We’re building this platform that is going to be an online community in which we’re going to be offering virtualized, bite-size trainings.

Q: Like little sales TED Talks?

A: You know what? Yes. And that’s actually the next thing we’re rolling out is a Coffee Closers Community Edition, which is going to be our community members interviewing each other.

Q: Have you done any podcasting before? Or was that a new journey for you?

A: Tech.mn had tasked me to put on a four-part series around startup sales. This is about four or five years ago, and I thought, this is fun. Coffee & Closers was going to be just a monthly event but our COO now, Garrio Harrison, put it on camera. That is exactly how the podcast started.

Q: It sounds like you’re now working more with the pure salespeople than the startups that needed sales help. Are they still a target for Closers Media?

A: The first year, when all it was all salespeople showing up, that was not what we intended. We really did embrace it, but our goal has always been to serve the underserved. We want everybody to feel empowered to be able to communicate their value effectively, which is what sales is. Sales is competent communication. All the movies about the Wolf of Wall Street, that’s not real. No one buys from anyone like that.

Now we do, after two and a half years, have tech startup folks coming. Now we do have developers and creatives and people that probably wouldn’t have come, and our whole message is everybody has to tell their stories and share their value effectively.

Q: Where do you see the biggest growth for Closers Media?

A: We want to take this into new markets, and we’re not there yet, but I think we’ll be there. 2021 is when we’re going to probably launch. There are two markets that we’re on right now, Denver and Nashville, and Austin’s on the hook.

We have found that our audience, 32 and under, they love the content. They don’t love to network, but no one’s training these people anymore. And then the people 32 on up, they’re like, “well, I think I know everything,” (and I’m one of them, so I’m guilty as anyone else), but I love the opportunity to be a mentor. I love the opportunity to get on a stage or be featured as a thought leader, and I love the network. So we’re trying to reach both those audiences by offering to them what they’ve told us they want.

By finance-commerce.com/