How a Growth Mindset Drives B2B Marketing Success

In an increasingly competitive business environment inundated with digital noise, relying on “play it safe” tactics will only result in your brand drowning in a sea of sameness. The path to true differentiation, innovation, and standing out is not an easy one as it requires a significant mindset shift. For B2B marketing initiatives to succeed, you must create room for experimentation and data-driven discovery. How can B2B marketers approach this effectively and secure internal buy-in for it?

That’s why we’re talking toVincent Weberink (Founder, Pzaz.io),who shares expert insights and proven strategies on how a growth mindset drives B2B marketing success. In this episode, Vincent talked about why design experiments are crucial in B2B marketing and highlighted the need for structured, data-driven growth experimentation. He shared his proven methodology consisting of ideation, ranking, and rapid prototyping designed to quickly and effectively validate concepts. Vincent also shared some common B2B marketing pitfalls that teams should avoid and emphasized the value of iterative testing and learning. He broke down how teams can build an entrepreneurial mindset and get internal buy-in for experimentation-driven B2B marketing.

https://youtu.be/SlQa58iKf3k

Topics discussed in episode:

[2:09] The importance of running structured experiments in B2B marketing

[5:21] Common challenges marketing teams face when designing and executing experiments

[13:53] Key pitfalls marketing teams should avoid and some practical solutions

[20:36] How to align internal teams and consistently generate strong experimental ideas

[31:31] Actionable steps B2B marketers can take to run effective experiments:

Understand and acknowledge that what you know is probably wrong
Use ideation and designing experiments
Trust your team
Be creative in applying growth hacks
Get external help if stuck

Companies and links mentioned:

Transcript

Christian Klepp 00:00

In a B2B landscape that has become increasingly competitive and inundated with digital noise, using play it safe tactics will result in your brand drowning in a sea of sameness. That said, the path to differentiation, innovation and standing out is not an easy one, as it requires a change in mindset. You need to have room for experiments to truly create something that is relevant to customers. So how can B2B marketers do this, and how can they get internal buy in for it? Welcome to this episode of the B2B Marketers in a Mission podcast, and I’m your host, Christian Klepp. Today, I’ll be talking to Vincent Weberink, who will be answering this question. He’s the founder of pzaz.io who specializes in developing business growth through creative, structured data driven growth experimentation. Tune in to find out more about what this B2B marketers mission is.

Christian Klepp 00:51

Vincent Weberink, welcome to the show.

Vincent Weberink 00:54

Hello Christian. Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

Christian Klepp 00:59

Absolutely I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation. I think we’re going to have a great time. We’re going to have a great discussion also about topics, and a main topic in particular that I think is going to be so relevant to B2B marketers and their teams in general. So you know, without further ado, let’s not keep the audience in suspense for too long. Let’s just jump straight into it. All right. So Vincent, you’re on a mission to drive business growth through creative, structured and data driven growth experimentation. So for this conversation, let’s focus on the following topic, which is how B2B marketers can create a mindset and design experiments to understand what customers want. That kind of sounds like it’s very, I’m going to say pedestrian, but it’s incredible, and I’m sure you’ll have plenty of case studies to show that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t follow this process, and then they get into trouble. So I’m going to kick off this conversation with two questions, and I’m happy to repeat them all right? So the first question is, why do you think that design experiments are important for marketing teams? And based on that, where do you see a lot of marketing teams struggle?

Vincent Weberink 02:09

I think they’re very important because as human beings, we’re emotional when we make decisions. Problems is that, therefore when we try to drive growth. We have this idea about something, and then we tend to completely jump into it, build everything. Spend a lot of time and money and resources on building that thing that we believe is going to be very, very successful, and that takes a lot of time. And the reality is that most of the time you’re actually wrong, even though you think that you know your customer, even though you think that you know this is the best trick or marketing tactic that you’re developing. And what this experimentation model does, it sort of forces you to go through a very structured, almost scientific process, because there are some steps in there that help you to remove that emotion from your decision making.

Vincent Weberink 03:12

And an example of how decision making often is influenced is when you’re in a small team or a large team, you’re sitting around the table and you’re trying to brainstorm, say, oh, you know, we have this, this challenge. We’re launching a new product, or we’re changing something, and we need to communicate it, driving sales up. And then the people who are best sort of equipped with sales capabilities are the ones that you know will dominate the conversation, and what we tend to do is then listen to them, whereas there are other people around the table that you know, they might be more introverted, might say less, that also have really, really great ideas. So what happens is that you collect all these thoughts and ideas, and then the person that’s very good at selling is selling their idea to you, and you end up taking that one. But it has nothing to do with reality, whereas in the methodology that I’m sort of promoting, what you actually do is you try to capture as many ideas as possible, as quickly as possible, and then, in almost a democracy, you rank and rate them according to several criteria, and that will help you to make some of those ideas float. And the ones that pop up are the ones you should actually focus on, because now, within that democratic decision making process, you’ve tried to optimize the chances that one of those ideas will actually lead to much quicker success than any of the others. And you can also use it in the reverse, the ideas that completely sink because no one voted for them, maybe only just the person that was selling. You know that they go away. You just throw them away and forget. About them, because clearly they didn’t get enough support. And the other question you were asking, sorry focused on the first question.

Christian Klepp 05:08

No problem, absolutely, absolutely no. Well, that was a great way to, like, set up the conversation. And I guess it segues to the question, where do you see, based on what you said, where do you see a lot of marketing teams struggling?

Vincent Weberink 05:21

Well, I see them often struggling is that they tend to spend money and time on just the ordinary things that everyone sort of accustomed to, because depending on the type of company you work in, that’s the safe choice, and that ultimately doesn’t really help you grow. It’s typically the stuff that you would never expect to work. And I’ll give you a great example of this in a moment that might give you this amazing growth overnight or amazing success. It doesn’t necessarily have to be growth. It can be specific campaign where you just need people to sign up, because you’re trying to obtain information from them and to get those people to sign up. It could be a problem. You’re designing your funnel, and then something isn’t really working.

Vincent Weberink 06:15

So in my experience, what happens is that people will say, Okay, let’s build a landing page. Let’s build a website, and let’s make it beautiful. Let’s make it perfect. But while you’re in this early stage, you have no clue if it’s going to work or not. You’re now wasting all of those resources where it’s so much better to very, very quickly, design experiments, run them as quickly as possible, see where something is happening, and then sort of iterate upon that specific experiment that you were running. And then slowly, over time, you get to a point where that experiment can be fleshed out, can be refined. You might do some A/B testing, and especially in the world we’re moving into with the rise of AI speed is everything past early days of when I was starting to do, you know, growth marketing or growth hacking, depending on what you like to call it. Let’s say 15 years ago, you could simply run an experiment, and that experiment could would last for certain periods of time. You could get away with some of the experiments, even running them for months. But with the rise of AI, what we’re seeing is that experiments only work for very, very short periods of time. And what I see with a lot of the marketing teams is that, you know, they’re not accustomed to driving fast and quickly running and failing fast, so that you can very quickly learn to see what ultimately what ultimately works.

Vincent Weberink 07:55

So a great example of something that I experienced it when I was running one of my startups, which was a streaming service, and I believed I got everything right. I was just convinced that there was nothing wrong with the product, but I wasn’t getting any traction, nothing, literally, no one was signing up, and I just couldn’t understand. So what I started to do is just run one experiment after another. First obviously, I went out and spoke to people, because that’s the first thing you should do most of the time, especially when you’re in startup mode, either a startup or you work for corporate, maybe running a division or launching a new product, you have no data. But if you read all of the books out there, they all tell you, Oh, let’s look at the data. Well, guess what? You don’t have any data. So what you need to do is you need to go and speak to people and find the soft data to really understand, you know, what’s going on. How do I create a product that people will be willing to buy, and I did that, and then it sort of confirmed that there was nothing wrong with the product. And then months into that process, I still wasn’t getting any traction, and the startup was sort of moving to a point where it started to fail, because, you know, you’re running out of money, you’re running out of time. So I kept running experiments, believing that the methodology that I use simply works. You just need to keep running, running, running. And then one day, I essentially was close to giving up, and I decided to take on another project because I had run out of money. But on the side, I kept running experiments, and what I did is I put a play button on the homepage, allowing people to watch television for five minutes without signing up. And that simple trick got me 11,000 euros overnight. It took me 11 months. To uncover that, I had now proven that indeed, the product wasn’t wrong. The product was always right, but the way we were marketing was wrong, and it is always one of the two. It’s either there’s no product market fit or you’re selling it in the wrong way. Your marketing is wrong. And in a way that was very frustrating, because this very simple thing, almost as simple as a paperclip now gave me all the growth in one way. It was too late for me, because I had to go into that other project. The revenue wasn’t enough to sustain the business, but it did allow me to sort of keep the business afloat. And I was working this other project, and then I returned, after like a half a year or so, back full time onto the startup once I was generating enough recurring, recurring revenue there, and yeah, that’s sort of, you know, what I strongly believe in. You just need to keep running those experiments.

Vincent Weberink 10:53

Of course. The third option is that your timing is completely off, which is another thing that I’ve experienced several times. I’ve run many startups, most of them failed over time. I’m proud to say that I never had to raise money for any of those startups. I was sort of in the last 30 years of my career. Thank you. I always managed to, you know, make enough money to sort of sustain, but many of them never became the big winner. They were just doing enough, and then at some point, there was an end of life, because either the market was fooled or or just turned out that there was no point in continuing to run that company. An example is VPN product that I did in 2003 that’s when the first idea started. VPN was a business to business product, and we decided to consumerize VPN because our only competitor at the time was called hide my ass, and the technology was very, very complicated. And after sort of what happens after 911 where a lot of governments started to invade everyone’s privacy, we decided that, you know, it is also important for individuals to retain a level of privacy, you know, within the boundaries of the law, obviously. So we spent a lot of time in developing that technology, creating a product that was very, very easy to use and that was secure and safe. And we were very, very successful in the first year and a half. We even managed to get in Google on the second place, right after Cisco, which is the inventor of VPN, but by the time we had about 40,000 customers, that was it. That was just, we just couldn’t grow anymore. And I then decided to abandon that project. Over time, someone else continued it for several more years, and of course, now VPN mass market product, but over 20 years later, and it’s the most common product out there, and we were just too early. So even though it was an exciting, exciting adventure, it made us money. It was a profitable business. Ultimately, at the time, there was no point in sort of continuing, trying to sort of push it, push it further.

Christian Klepp 13:18

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely great points. And you know, thank you for sharing those, those experiences and the you know, those past successes and challenges, failures and so forth. I think it’s, I think it’s an important part of the overall process, right? I’m going to move us on. And you’ve mentioned some of these already, but like, what are some of these on the topic of design experimentation and growth growth marketing. What are some of these key pitfalls that marketing teams need to avoid, and what should they be doing instead?

Vincent Weberink 13:53

The key pitfalls they need to avoid is to believe that they’re always right. I mean, that is the first thing is, in essence, that you should learn that most of the time you will be wrong, and that success lies in the ability to admit that and to move forward very, very quickly by running a lot of those experiments, and by designing those experiments very quickly and having the ability to turn them into minimum viable products. And the pitfalls that most people fall into is that they think you’ll just read a book, and then you can just do it. It’s simple, right? Oh, it’s just like marketing. It’s the same way how I learn how to do advertising, I can simply learn how to do, you know, growth marketing. But the reality is, it’s then it is a thing or a trick so that understanding and the realization that you just need to start thinking differently, start thinking out of the box, be creative, because a lot of those hacks come from places that you simply will not expect.

Vincent Weberink 15:15

I guess Airbnb is a typical example. You know, as far as I remember the story correctly. Two guys set up Airbnb. It was literally an air bed in someone’s house. They were running the business. They had about 10,000 you know, customers, and they could have said, Oh, you know, we’re doing great. Our marketing is doing well. We’re making money. But ultimately, they were not satisfied, so they decided to continue, and then what happens is, this is before the big thing that most people have heard of, which is correct, Greg’s list. That’s when they really exploded. But before that, something else happened, and that was when one of the founders said, Well, how do we expand our capacity, and how do we get more people interested in our products? And it was around the organization of trade shows when there was always a shortage of capacity in hotels, and they decided to try that out. And if I remember correctly, they grew sort of from 10,000 people to 200,000 people in just a couple of months. And that was actually their real growth hack, the real spurt, whereas reckless took them to millions. And that’s the thing that everyone knows. But it was that mindset, that understanding of not being satisfied with what you’re doing, and the ability to pivot, because it was a complete pivot. It was no longer just an air bet. Now you were renting out a bed in someone’s house, and that was sort of the foundation what then became Airbnb. And I think most marketing teams have never been exposed to that way of thinking. You know, they’ve been taught the simple stuff on, how do you do advertising, how do you look at data, you know, how do I build a website? How do I organize a trade show, etc. But it’s these things where you take an idea, where you’re almost stepping into the entrepreneur’s shoes by looking at, how can I make the business grow through extraordinary ways of marketing?

Christian Klepp 17:30

Absolutely, absolutely. You know what? That’s a phrase that I also heard at a business meeting on Friday where I was talking to the branch manager of a bank. And one of the things that she said, why, how she helped the branch to grow, is because she came out of a business. She was a family business, and she was running her own business, so she came with an entrepreneur’s mindset. And I do think that there is that is really, like, significant, especially if you’re talking about and I don’t want to, like, use these, like, overused buzzwords, let’s say, but like, you know, if you’re entering this world of, like, the scrappy entrepreneurs or even the scrappy marketing teams, right, you can’t necessarily go in there with the corporate mindset. No offense to anybody that’s in corporate but if you’re stretched for, as you can rightfully attest to Vincent, if you’re stretched for time, bandwidth, resources and budget, you’ve got to, you’ve got to think more like a guerrilla fighter versus a conventional army, right?

Vincent Weberink 18:38

You need to test as early as possible whether or not the ideas or your hypothesis, hypothesis that you have are actually true, and especially when you’re an entrepreneur or in a product team. And I have an example for there was a famous UK bank that had an idea where they wanted to test if friends and family would be willing to become guarantors for young people that would want to buy a house in London. And you know, banks are very, very big, slow organizations, and typically, if not alone, figuring out how this legally works will cost them millions right to develop the whole full product. So how do you do something? How do you create this experiment where you can prove whether or not there’s any viability in even thinking of offering such a product? And what they came up with is essentially to build a landing page where they would simply ask people to sign up for the service. They ran a 500 pound budget against it, so the total cost of the whole experiment was maybe 1500 pounds, and now they’ve managed to validate it, which saved them literally hundreds of 1000s of pounds and the risk that that product might have failed. And I think that is exactly the entrepreneurial mindset that a market. Marketer needs to develop and understand, Okay, I’m not just responsible for selling this product, but I’m also responsible for understanding, you know, who do I sell it to? How do I sell it? What should the product look like? How can the product evolve so that there’s a good product market fit?

Christian Klepp 20:17

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You brought some of these up already, but let’s dig into it deeper and unpack it. I should say, like, so based on your experience, like, how do you how can B2B marketers get traction as early as possible? So how can they build experiments? What are those key steps that they need to take?

Vincent Weberink 20:36

The first thing this is, so I sort of use a methodology and which is very, very structured. And I use that because if I don’t, I get lost in ideas. Because it is very easy to come up with 100 ideas. A lot of people you know, can do that. So what we do is I sit down, either with a team, or I might take a certain periods of time, where all I do is just collect as possible. Then for every idea, I write down, what is the idea? What do I believe this idea will give me? So what is the outcome? How do I prove, potentially, as a hypothesis, that what I believe is true? And then I sort of make those notes, then I store them in cards. And you can do that in any kind of project management tool, whether it’s notion or cell or bunch. Just create those cards.

Vincent Weberink 21:31

Then what I do is I rank and rank them so, and I ask the team to do that, or the people I work with, for example, if I was doing consultancy for clients, we would have a specific, specific group of the clients do doing the same thing, and then all we would do is see, Okay, which of those ideas are floating. And we would take the top 10, again, it was very easy to then generate, like, 100 different ideas, and you take the top 10, and then for each of those, you’re now going to discuss them and essentially say, Okay, if I need to turn this idea into minimal but viable products, allowing me to prove that I am right or wrong, what is the least amount of work you can then do? And you know, so in my book, I publish a whole list of MVPs (Minimum Viable Product), but actually, with ChatGPT, you could probably just type, give me a list of all the different type of MVPs and explain how they work. So for example, you have a Wizard of Oz. A Wizard of Oz is, is an MVP, where everything happens behind the scene. The product really doesn’t exist, but the customer thinks it exists. And you do everything manually. That’s just an example.

Vincent Weberink 22:51

So what you then do is you then going to think about, okay, who needs to do what? And then you run a short sprint. You design the sprint. Say, Okay, next Monday, with the three of us, we’re just going to spend one day on building that thing. And I, most of the time use distribution hacking, or in other words, advertising, to drive some traffic to whatever that experiment is to then prove of my whether or not my hypothesis is correct. And from there onwards, you then, of course, have some analytic tool, or, depending on how you how, you then prove it, and then you start to iterate and but I promise you, most of those experiments will fail, which is great, but if you run 10 very quickly, maybe in the course of two weeks, if you have two or three where you see the needle moving a little bit, now you have something to take the next step. And a classical mistake that I’ve seen is that people always tend to make it too complicated. So what they do is, rather than designing an experiment that gets you one answer, they try to get as many answers as possible. And that doesn’t work, because you know, if you have any exposure to data, if you have multiple data points, then it’s now up to your interpretation, and then you’re selling it to yourself, because you want the hypothesis to be true. So it’s very difficult to then again, step back and say, Ah, you know, can I really be honest with myself? So test one thing at a time. Once you’ve proven that one of those things work, you just design the next one and the next one and next one, and then within this very short periods of time, you’ll get to a point where, where it starts to work or fail. You could prove that the product simply is not viable. Which, which I’ve had many times, and then even pivoted afterwards, given up on many products, because simply, even though I believed, you know, was going to be amazing, yeah, it turns out to be wrong. So, yeah.

Christian Klepp 25:00

Absolutely, absolutely. Like, it’s really a fine, a fine balance between speed, but also like, like, the quick experimentation, as you say, and you know, as you were, as you were discussing your process, it actually just made me think of another question, which I’m sure you faced countless times, and you brought it up in the beginning too. How do you get this internal alignment? You talked about, like a team getting together in the room, and I’ve been in one of those teams right, where there were a couple, like, we used to call them the stars of the show, because, you know, when they get up on stage, they want the spotlight to be only on them. Forget about what everybody else says. My idea, my baby is the most beautiful baby in the world. And how dare you insult my baby, right?

Vincent Weberink 25:48

Exactly.

Christian Klepp 25:49

But, but the reality, as you rightfully pointed out, which I’ve also seen firsthand, the reality, is that the one that shouts the loudest doesn’t necessarily have the best idea, right? It’s sometimes these people. It’s sometimes these people that don’t say anything, that don’t contribute to the conversation, they actually have the solution that perhaps the market is looking for. But unfortunately, their voice is drowned out by these so called, I’m just gonna call them the Divas in the room, right? So back to the question, how do you get that alignment? How do you get those ideas out of everybody in a way that it’s not just fair, but it’s also like more, more in line with what the market is looking for. Let’s put it that way.

Vincent Weberink 26:43

The people around the table that typically don’t speak up, you know, some of them are the deep thinkers. They really think about something, and they have really great ideas, but they’ll then struggle to properly defend their idea and to explain it, whereas the other person on the table, who’s good at selling themselves, you know might they’ll do everything to defend their idea, and therefore they will attack the other ideas. And what you sort of see is by implementing this rank and rate model by definition, you’re externalizing the decision making, so you’re agreeing with everyone on the around the table, that everyone writes down their idea on the paper, on a piece of paper, and you define what that structure should then look like, which means is no one has to defend it. They just write it on paper. You then gather those pieces of paper and you add them to the tool. Then you ask everyone to rank and raise which, by the way, could be done anonymous, which I’ve done many times. And that way you just look at the one that floats, and you just, if the team look, we don’t know who’s right, we can’t afford for this venture to fail, and therefore, we’re just going to focus on the ideas that have the greatest potential of propensity. And that’s how I do it, and it’s always worked well for me. There’s, of course, when I would introduce this to new startup teams, very often it’s the entrepreneur that is the biggest problem. You know that they’re the hardest to convince, because they typically have the strongest opinion of all.

Christian Klepp 28:34

So you’re talking about the founder, right? The founder

Vincent Weberink 28:36

Yeah. About the founder? Yes, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah, because they look, you know, there might be a great marketer or great salesperson who have very strong ideas, and they might, you know, accept inputs, but it’s typically the founder that will then say, yeah, now if you know, it’s my money, so I’m going to just do it my way, and it’s wrong, because you’re now letting your emotion again, getting In the way. And this example that I gave you with the play button that was sort of happened while I was in the process of creating that methodology that I use, which is sort of based on me having read 1000 books where I really struggled that most of the books, even though they’re written for startups, if you really dive into it, they’re actually more for startup teams and corporates, very often, the way they’re described, that you just can’t apply them to normal startups, because normal startups work differently. And what I then did is I sort of took all of the models in there, and then figured out, what if you combine them, crunch them, and then create this methodology. And I was doing that for myself, because I really struggled, having done so many startups, and then I found, okay, so now I have this methodology. I just kept doing it. Kept. Believing that ultimately, it would work with the idea that sometimes you know on this path and that other people need to help you to sort of step out of your comfort zone and sometimes think from the left, from the other side, because your growth might come from a different direction, and which could even be true within your customer persona. You think you have the persona, right. But while you’re digging and running the experiments, it might be the persona next door which is the true, real customer, and you just need to uncover that by believing in that methodology. So…

Christian Klepp 30:40

Absolutely, absolutely. You know, we did one of those exercises in Q2 with a client that had was very convinced of their ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). And then we went through this exercise where we did, um, we did a diagnosis on the ICP to determine, like, is this the right is this actually the right ICP you should be going after, right? So I’m 100% with you on that one. Okay, my friend, we come to the point where we’re talking about actionable tips, and it’s really just a recap of all the great recommendations you’ve given us already. So just imagine that there’s a SaaS (Software as a Service) marketing team out there, or somebody in B2B marketing that’s listening to this conversation. They’re like, wow, that’s exactly what I’m going through right now. So what are the maybe three to five things you would say they can take action on, like right now?

Vincent Weberink 31:31

First of all, understanding you know, coming to the realization that whatever you know is probably wrong. Which is, which is the hardest thing to do. The second thing is you should really start working by using ideation and designing experiments, create MVPs fail as fast as you can, because that’s the way you learn as quickly as you can. And I sort of describe that in my book that I just launched, because it, you know, yes and into the same problem. Also, you know, trust your team. Trust that other people have great ideas as well. And very often, the great ideas come from the people that otherwise wouldn’t, wouldn’t say anything and be as creative as possible. Try to prime yourself by just, you know, search online, what are great growth, growth hacks or other marketing tips and tricks, and then try to figure out, how can I apply those? How can I use those as potential experiments? Because that way you can just simply move forward. But you know, if you’re stuck, get external help, because they’re like people like yourself, you know, who can really help to sort of leapfrog this, because otherwise, you’re just stuck and trying to learn, and while you’re running out of money, you have no time. Most starters will last for six months, and then they’ve run out of money, prove that you’re right before you build anything. And that is really, I think, the most important. And so the last tip I want to give, don’t just start building any product, because you will fail. It’s not for nothing that 95% of startups fails within within the first couple of years. It’s because, you know, you believe that people will flock and will love whatever you’re building. But the reality is just very, very different, and it might be the smallest thing that you get wrong, but you know that’s enough to fail, so…

Christian Klepp 33:46

Prove that you’re right before you build anything. I mean, if there’s anything that the audience should be taking away from this conversation, I think it’s that sentence, right? Absolutely, that’s fantastic. Thanks again for sharing those tips, and I hope the audience is taking as many notes as I am during our conversation. Okay, two more questions before I let you go, Vincent, so here comes the bonus question. So you’re, this is the understatement of the year, but you’re a bit of a nomad, right? Like you’re originally from the Netherlands, you’ve lived in Greece, and now you’ve relocated, I think the last time we spoke, you were in Florence, and now you’ve moved somewhere else in northern Italy, right? So how has this lifestyle impacted you, personally and professionally? I mean, it’s clearly changed your view of the world, I’m sure.

Vincent Weberink 34:39

Yes, so somehow I felt I was always stuck in the Netherlands as an entrepreneur. Because especially in the past, there is this thing, and I like to joke about it, where the Americans have the not invented syndrome, not invented here syndrome, the Dutch people have the invented hair syndrome, which means it’s all your Dutch. So therefore it can’t be good. And I felt I was very often, sort of, you know, locked up. And at the same time, the world is getting smaller and smaller every day. And I was lucky, being in technology, that we were able to then start moving abroad. And in all fairness, some of the moves we’ve done were actually caused because of the failures we’ve had, not that we run away or anything, but it was sort of, I was trying to do something locally. It didn’t really work. And then it was time for new challenges. And I found, always have found a lot of energy being able to now live in a completely different country, with a different language, with a different culture, and that really enriched my life. I started to look at things very, very differently, especially learning that everyone has a different view, whereas as a young person, I always had a very strong opinion, and the world had to be the way I saw it. But nothing is further from culture plays an incredibly important role on how people perceive things, how to behave, what kind of products they buy, how you should sell. Language plays an incredible, incredibly important role. So, yeah, I guess I was, I can’t say I was lucky because I created my own luck. I created my own decisions. I was lucky that my lovely wife and son have always supported me and that we’ve been on this journey through seven countries in the last 20 years. Yeah, and we’re in Italy at the moment. Indeed.

Christian Klepp 36:35

Wow. Seven countries. Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. That’s about the same number as in terms of my own experience. Like, I live in Canada now, and that’s country number seven. So there’s more, there’s more of us out there than you think, right? Like, exactly. So it’s very similar to my story. But, like, how’s your Italian? By the way.

Vincent Weberink 36:57

It’s getting there. I’m studying hard at the moment, and, yeah, we sort of arrived here in January. Officially, my son is studying at university, and he’s finishing. But I guess, you know, I speak some Spanish, so Italian is slightly easier. Yeah.

Christian Klepp 37:16

It’s, yeah, it is helpful. I realized, like, I also speak a certain level of Spanish, and that helped me get by even in a country like Portugal, where, Let’s appreciate it’s a complete it’s a different language, but there are some similarities. So they can understand what I’m saying, they’ll just answer in Portuguese, as long as you also understand what they’re saying, more or less. Yeah, I mean, I try to figure it out, and then they, they’ll, they’ll speak slowly, and I’m like, okay, okay, I got it. Obrigado, all right. Like, fantastic, fantastic. Vincent. Thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing your experience and your expertise with the listeners. So please, a quick introduction to yourself and how people out there can get in touch with you. And by the way, I really love that we’re color coordinated. And for those that are listening to the audio version of this, we’re both wearing, like denim colored outfits.

Vincent Weberink 38:11

Well, thank you Christian. Thank you very much for having me. It was a real pleasure. Yeah, of course. You know. My name is Vincent Weberink. My email is vincent@webberink.com and if anyone has any questions or potentially is interested in the book that I’ve just released, which is condensing 1000 books and failures and success, then of course, please, please get in touch with me. Thank you again.

Christian Klepp 38:42

Fantastic, fantastic, and we’ll be sure to include a link to your book in the show notes. So once again, Vincent, thank you so much for your time. Take care. Stay safe and talk to you soon.

Vincent Weberink 38:53

Looking forward, Christian, thank you very much. Take care.

Christian Klepp 38:56

Thank you. Bye for now.

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