Do you say yes to the right tasks and no to the wrong tasks? Do you even know how to tell the difference between the two? In this episode of Get More Done, we sit down with Bob “The Teacher” Sparkins, the Sales Marketing Manager at Leadpages.
Bob teaches us how to find (and stick to) the things we should be doing and delegate the rest. He brings his wealth of experience in teaching, hosting, and leading a marketing team to help us avoid wasting time on tasks outside of our scope of excellence. Tune in (or read below) to explore Bob’s productivity tricks, automation insights, and task management strategies.
As the Sales Marketing Manager at Leadpages, Bob Sparkins champions the customers of the top landing page and website building conversion platform and the audiences they serve.
A former high school history teacher and academic team coach, Bob has taught business owners around the world how to leverage digital marketing to impact more people with less effort since 2006.
He is the author of Take Action, Revise Later; and lives in Bloomington, Minnesota with his wife, Therese, and their amusing kids, Kira and Landon.
Connect with Bob on social channels via @BobTheTeacher.
Ben (00:00):
Welcome to Get More Done. I'm your host, Ben Dlugiewicz. Each episode, we will be meeting with folks from around the world as they talk through their day and how they are getting more done, how they use automation to level up build systems to scale, or how they help their teams be more productive. On this episode, I sat down with Bob “The Teacher” Sparkins, the Sales Marketing Manager for Leadpages, a lead generation platform. We discussed the importance of agreeing to tasks that are within your zone of genius and the power of delegation throughout his career. Bob has been at the junction between marketing and education. He brings this to life in his book, Take Action! Revise Later, as a framework to help people get started quickly. Enjoy.
Ben (01:02):
All right. Excellent. Thank you so much. Welcome back. This is Get More Done. The podcast about all things productivity and with me this week is Bob Sparkins, the Sales Marketing Manager for Leadpages. So Bob, welcome to the podcast.
Bob Sparkins (01:18):
Ben Dlugiewicz, It's good to see you. It's been a long time since I have been able to see your face.
Ben (01:21):
I know, it has been a long time and with the world being as crazy as it is, it's only added to the joy of seeing you. So great. Thanks so much for being with us. So how we usually start is with an icebreaker question to kind of break the nerves up a little bit, get a bit comfortable. So the question for you this week is: you're going sailing around the world. What's the name of your boat or your ship? And why did you pick that name?
Bob Sparkins (01:50):
That's a good question. That's a fun ice breaker, too. I'm going to stall for a minute because I'm responsible for our monthly team talks at Leadpages, icebreaker, and I might have to steal this one, this one's coming up. Let's see. I think “Revise Later” would be the name. We may talk about that title a little later. I have a book called Take Action! Revise Later, and it's a philosophy I've had for business and life and whatnot. And I think, you know, being I've not sailed, but I imagine revision is very important as you tack and as you go here to there. But in the sense that I would believe, I wouldn't really care so much the direction I'm headed. I think I would allow the revised later to be like, let's just enjoy the day. We can make a turn at some point when necessary.
Ben (02:48):
Brilliant, I don't really associate navigating the waters with waiting to do something for fixing.
Bob Sparkins (02:55):
I might be a very, the worst sailor in the history of sailing. I might qualify for the Titanic if there was an opening for navigation. Okay.
Ben (03:08):
I'm sure. That's awesome though. So thanks again for being with us. And as I mentioned, the big part of this podcast is all about productivity. So with you know hosting, podcasts, running webinars, speaking engagements, doing affiliates, partnerships, you know, managing and working with the marketing team over there at Leadpages, on top of all that, being a full-time dad. How do you manage your day-to-day work? How do you keep things kind of going forward?
Bob Sparkins (03:38):
Well, some days better than others. My daughter just turned five yesterday or today, actually, at the time we’re to have this conversation, and my son is three. So they definitely keep me on my toes. My wife is an Executive Coach who is also working out of home. So we do have quite a bit on our plate. And as you mentioned, a lot of hats that I wear at Leadpages. So a couple of things: one, I do keep a relatively accurate calendar that I stick to as much as I can. And I try to block off times for projects that are otherwise not meetings, right? Most of the time a calendar can be filled with somebody like yourself. We have an interview. There it is, it's a time for us to meet. And then the calendar is otherwise open, if there's not someone else involved. I've been as consistent as I can be to block out time so that there's no interference that comes in out of the way.
Bob Sparkins (04:35):
Same thing with my wife and her schedule. We have a room that I'm in that she also does her calls in since we're still working from home. And so we schedule each other's sessions, basically. So we don't overlap the need of the room. That's helpful and just communicating, you know? There's gotta be a lot of communication amongst my Director of Marketing, around people that I'm connecting to, of course, with my wife, and other people we're talking to. So between communication and accurate calendaring, I think those are pretty important ways to stay on top of things, not let things fall through the cracks, and keep things moving along.
Ben (05:13):
Yeah, absolutely. I think you nailed it with the keeping your schedule tight and keeping those blocks in place, and then that communication on top with everybody working cohesively as a team, not just internally in your house, but you know, throughout Leadpages as well. It's just, yeah, great to see. And, you know, you've been in marketing a long time. So in your time within that marketing space, how have you seen automation evolve over the past few years? You know, and how are you leveraging automation currently in your marketing role? With Leadpages?
Bob Sparkins (05:46):
Yeah, well, I'm no Chris Davis if you ever get a chance to talk to him on the podcast.
Ben (05:49):
He’s actually going to be on, yes!
Bob Sparkins (05:52):
Awesome. Awesome. So shout out to Chris L Davis, one of the masters of automation. I learned a lot from him working as a colleague at Leadpages. So yeah, automation has changed a lot. I can’t say that I'm a master at it by any stretch. But from a marketing standpoint, you know, you obviously have things like email with a drip, which I still use quite actively. Even with landing pages, having count down timers that automatically refresh to a different offer or to a different price point or whatever the case may be. And you can set that up ahead of time. That's really nice, especially if you're going into like Black Friday, Cyber Monday promotion, and you want to have a cool campaign and you don't want to be by your computer, flipping the dials and everything at the time, you can actually enjoy a vacation.
Bob Sparkins (06:37):
That's kind of a cool thing to do. You know, simple things too though, automatic responses to your emails when you're on vacation or even when you're not, you know? If you have a busy project window and you want to tune out for a few hours, setting up some responses there just for the communication calendar apps like YouCanBook.me. Obviously, very important to my life because I, you know, having an opportunity for somebody to book time and be able to not go back and forth, you know, three or four emails to find the right time to meet with somebody. That's important to me, quite actively. Those are some of the big things I know Chris and others might tell you that some other ways that they do ifs and zaps and all this other kind of stuff. I haven't gotten that nitty-gritty yet, but I remember working with some folks at Leadpages in the office where they walked in the building and all these bells and whistles started happening to their computer.
Bob Sparkins (07:34):
It's pretty phenomenal, but there's just a lot of options I guess, would also be there, but it can be overwhelming. And some things are not super necessary, but definitely good to keep an eye out for them.
Ben (07:47):
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, when you talk about the unnecessary stuff, in your LinkedIn profile, you talk about helping people make an impact with less work, you know? So what are some of those core strategies that you help folks with?
Bob Sparkins (08:00):
Yeah, well, it's saying yes to the right things and no to everything else, as much as possible. I think I learned a lot from my wife in her role as a personal development trainer and coach, they -
Ben (08:13):
Does she charge you for the lessons?
Bob Sparkins (08:15):
She does not charge me. Well, she did. Once I did pay for the program that I took from her. But the idea though, is that if you can be really clear about what you’re up to doing in your job and your life, whatever, you know? Understand what your core values are, all that kind of cool stuff. When somebody comes to you with an offer, an opportunity, a project, whatever it is, being comfortable saying no. And saying yes. And if you're saying yes, be full in on it. So one thing about the less effort part is to not struggle and procrastinate and all these things, but those are all symptoms of not doing stuff you're not supposed to do. You know, if you take on a project that you're not supposed to do, and I don't say not like you shouldn't because somebody told you not to, but just internally, you know: “hey, this is just the wrong thing for me.”
Bob Sparkins (09:05):
Either somebody else should be doing it or it’s just not my wheelhouse or whatever. But if you say yes cause you're trying to be a nice person, then what winds up happening is you put all this effort at a 70% capacity or worse, and then the output is just suffering and then you lose confidence in the project, whatever, it just snowballs. And so one thing is just saying yes to the right things and no to everything else. Another aspect is using the technical tools available to you to get the job done faster. We already talked about a few of them but keeping an eye on that. And then a third is actually asking for help, you know, whether it's a virtual assistant or bringing on a team member or more full time or whatever the case is, you don't have to do everything yourself.
Bob Sparkins (09:48):
I learned that lesson very hard. It took me a long, long time. I don't know how many buddy, how many else, that's not even English, how many others listening to this episode have been drilled into their head. If you want something done, right? You gotta do it yourself, right? I mean, I heard that all the time. And the reality is for some things that may be true, you know like you might be a super expert at something, but even if somebody else does something at 80% or 90% of what you would do it, but it frees you up to do the things you're a master at, man, the world changes and it opens up a lot more possibilities. So the less effort really is about doing the things that you're strong at. You can do them quickly, you know, always be learning, but also be thinking, what can I hand off to somebody else? And that can include housework too, cooking, cleaning the house, you know, doing the kind of home routine stuff. These are the things that are important to consider when thinking about the big picture of what life is like, not just business-wise, but also in your personal.
Ben (10:50):
Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, you nailed it with the delegation cause that's what a lot of people maybe are reluctant to do because they're saying: “oh, I can do it. I got it. I got it.” And coupled with that, asking for help is vitally important because you know, you need other skill sets to bring it on. And we talk about a team that's all working cohesively there. So I mean with that, how do you get to your core of excellence? How do you determine what that is or how have you done that?
Bob Sparkins (11:17):
Well, it's always a work in progress, right? I don't think there's ever a time when I feel like I'm…
Ben:
Self-actualized?
Bob Sparkins (11:23):
Exactly, exactly. I mean, I think there's self-actualization in the moment and then there are thoughts of like, what else can be done? So one is just listening to my own voice. The voice in my head, gut, heart, whatever, wherever it is in your body, it probably shows up in different parts at different times. But just listening to it and actually giving it some credit. Now there's, again, I'm going to talk like, I'm just parroting my wife here, but there's this idea that your ego tells you things to do that, it's trying to keep you safe. It's trying to keep you without any kind of risk. And because that's what the ego does. It keeps us from dying basically, from getting hurt. And when you listen to some of the self-talk though, that can be negative then it can give you the wrong impression.
Bob Sparkins (12:13):
Then those conversations are not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the conversations where when you're doing something and you get that Michael Jordan, in the zone [feeling]. You're just floating through the air, doing stuff. Pay attention to that and do more of that. It shouldn't be every week, it's maybe five minutes of your week that you feel like that. It should feel like you're in the zone throughout your day. And obviously, it comes and goes, but when those things happen, pay attention to that and do more of that and just keep stock of it. And then the things that are the opposite, where you're feeling like you're really struggling. Some of it's just, you know, maybe you're tired. Maybe you need a break, a reprieve, whatever. But if it's a consistent pattern of feeling like, “why am I doing this?” If you hear yourself say that, that's a clue, that maybe you shouldn't be doing that. So it's listening to more of what you love more and not doing the things that are really holding you back that are important in this process.
Ben (13:10):
Yeah, absolutely. And I've recently read a book, Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. And it talks about just that negative inroads that just get into your brain and it's like, just break free of that. Find a flow state. And then it ties back to that old quote of, “when it's what you love, it's never work,” you know? And you're like, that's what you're going towards, that Michael Jordan. I think you put it perfectly, that Michael Jordan feeling just in that flow state. That's what we all should be trying to get to every day. So that's awesome. So kind of on that level, you know, if you're taking in this excellence and, you know, being coined Bob “The Teacher” from an early time in your career as a high school teacher before and now teaching folks about lead generation, how do you feel that your teaching background assists you in that marketing capacity?
Bob Sparkins (14:00):
It helps a lot. You know, I think I've been a teacher in some way or another since like third grade when I was helping students understand what the teacher was saying and like putting it in different language. But you know, after 10 years in the high school classroom, 10 years of working on my own business as a teacher, and then obviously now 7 years, Ben, at Leadpages. I mean I'm 35. So how, I don't know. I'll be 40, I'm 46 now I think is the math of it.
Ben (14:30):
46 is the new 21, right?
Bob Sparkins (14:31):
It is the new 21. So, but in that timeframe, you know, being a teacher means a couple of things. Number one, it means paying attention. If somebody else on the other side is getting it, right? Whether it's a 14-year-old who I taught for so long, staring back at me like, huh? Or a 45-year-old doing the same thing, you pay attention to the feedback loop of instruction. And I think in marketing, especially in this day and age where we have so many automation tools, we have so much blast of, you know, Twilio enabled text messaging, or we have all this, you know, stuff where we're just blasting stuff out. If you're not listening to the feedback of the respondents, you're not going to get very far, right? They're not using your product. They're not getting benefits from it. They're going to competitors.
Bob Sparkins (15:20):
They're not doing anything at all. Apathy is a huge problem in this area. And so, first of all, it's listening to the impact that your teaching has or your marketing has on the world. And then secondly, teaching is all about understanding. What's the end goal? You know, Stephen R Covey, I'm sure many of you have read Habits of Highly Effective People, right? Beginning with the end in mind is something that you have to know to do as a teacher, whether it's teaching to the test, which is why I don't teach anymore. Or just like, there's a lesson you want people to learn and then working backwards. So when it comes to marketing, when it comes to developing software, when it comes to doing whatever kind of entrepreneurial pursuit you're having, you want to think of what's the end point.
Bob Sparkins (16:01):
And that might not be the final end point, right? There's always more end points to work on. But once you know that, as this “working backwards towards,” what should the starting point be? Where are the checkmarks along the way? Where are these pop quizzes that you might give yourself of how you're doing? Accountability, checks, measuring metrics, knowing that you're on the right path. And then if you're not then revising, right? This is the take action, revise later aspect. It's like, do the thing that you know to do now, but be willing to revise it based on what you're doing. And teaching is a skillset that I've been able to leverage into a nice career, but anybody I think has taught somebody something in their life. And whether you're formerly trained as a teacher, or you just want to take on some of those traits, you got to listen to what they're telling you verbally and non-verbally, and you want to begin with the end in mind working backwards towards the starting point and just paying attention along the way that you're doing your job the right way.
Ben (16:58):
Yeah, absolutely. That feedback loop, I think, is important. Cause you know, when you're talking about revising and tweaking, because in marketing, you may not get it right the first time. It could be a spaghetti on the wall situation, but having the attentiveness and the tune in with your audience. Get that feedback and iterate and change things. And I think you nailed it on the head with having a proper plan in place because if you don't know where you're going, you're going to end up there, right? Like that's the thing. So it's good to have a roadmap. Even at least a skeletal roadmap, you know? Get you there from point A to point B. So that's awesome. And I mean, go back to really quick on the getting out of teaching because it was just the standardized testing and just, it was becoming too kind of a bottleneck, or what was the reason for the career change?
Bob Sparkins (17:43):
Yeah, it was. It was a combination of several factors, but my last year of teaching was 2007. And so we had the testing from 2001 onward basically got more and more assessment driven instruction. And as a history teacher, you know, I wanted to teach about current events. I wanted to teach about how that connects back to things 30 years ago, 50 years ago, a hundred years ago. And the framework was, well here's a county and statewide set of things that you should teach. They are independent of anything actually going on in the world right now. And after 9/11, it was super critical, super important for me to make sure that the students I was teaching had an understanding both of what are some of the root causes of why the last 10 years were the last 10 years, but also, how do you make sense of this on an ongoing basis?
Bob Sparkins (18:36):
And, you know, going back to 1979 and 1956 and all these other places and we weren't, that's not on the curriculum. So that was a big part of it, was helping teenagers actually understand their world was not really very possible at the time. And then, because I was in social studies, you know, that's just not a priority. It's all STEM, which is great, science and tech and all this stuff is important, but we were getting less and less importance when it came to electives, when it came to the priority of budgets and all that kind of stuff. So I saw the writing on the wall. Decided to branch out beyond the classroom. And initially it was like, I'm not going to do anything about education and wound up after two years of zig-zagging around that well teaching is the thing, but it's just a different thing that I wanted to teach people how to do.
Ben (19:23):
Right, yeah. A little bit more blue sky, a little bit more creativity than...yeah. Stuck in the classroom. Because I mean, I've known you for a while and I've learned so much from you just on conversations we had and just your approach to understanding complex stuff. Like you mentioned, you can break it down and get it into a nice package that people can digest. So it's really awesome to see. So on that, teach me something else, teach me a productivity hack that you have. What is the hack that helps you just save some time?
Bob Sparkins (19:56):
Yeah, well I'm not going to actually teach this, but I just want to give a shout-out to mind mapping because it's been a huge part of my life as a teacher and as a business owner. And then now at Leadpages, I use mind maps to plan out just about anything, webinars, whatever. But I can't show that to you right now, very well in a podcast. So instead I'm gonna mention that I have just some ridiculously simple things that have helped me save some time around your keyboard. So number one, know your keyboard shortcuts because going to the mouse and moving it around just saves you seconds, which doesn't sound like much but seconds, every two minutes, it makes a big deal. But I'm talking mostly though about the keyboard shortcuts that you would have from typing in a few letters.
Bob Sparkins (20:42):
And so you might've already seen this on a Mac. You go into your settings, your keyboard, and you can see that you might have some auto-correct features and things of that nature. And you might've done some things you commonly misspell, and then you might think, well, if I do a couple of unique combination letters, I can get something else. Like my address, for example, I can type in 9601 and boom, the rest of the address will go in, but I take it another step forward. I get asked a lot to do podcasts and speak on stages and so forth. And I love doing that. But then that nagging email comes in and says, “Hey, we need your bio.” And in the past, you know, I went back through my email and I read through, it was like, when was the last podcast I was on?
Bob Sparkins (21:24):
What did I write up? Did it sound good? Copy-paste, adjust. Well then I found out that you could do pretty much an unlimited amount of text in these little T word shortcuts. And so I type BTT bio and then out spits this hundred-word carefully crafted and always revisable bio. And so when somebody sends me that email, which would normally take me like five minutes to search for the last one and type up the review or the revision and whatever three seconds, BTT bio boom. And there it is. That's a big one when I'm on webinars and I obviously do webinars for Leadpages where people will be presented with an offer. We often use a special link or a coupon or something to track who bought during that webinar, maybe have a special deal or whatever.
Bob Sparkins (22:11):
I have an LP COU and I type that in it spits out the entire link with the coupon attached to it. And I can go in and change what that is each time inside a drip. We have this super long snippet of code to represent a button with certain features embedded into it, liquid texts, and all this stuff: there's brackets, there's slashes, there's percent signs, whatever. So I type a few letters in for that and out comes the standard form of what that snippet should look like. So those are just, think about your day. What do you usually think about are, what do you usually have to write? That's more than a sentence long, and don't think that your auto-correct is just about, you know, two or three words. It can be, like I said, entire paragraphs worth of content and with just a few letters that are not going to be accidentally typed, right?
Bob Sparkins (23:03):
You don't want to type in like “about,” as your thing about you, and then every time you write the word “about” it spits out. Right. So, but think about some key letters can be numbers as well. And just be careful, because the one downside of this is you are - not downside - but the one restriction is you do need to remember them, right? So you can only do as many of these as your brain can hold. But once you start getting in the habit of that and practicing and doing a very logical indication of what that three or five-letter shortcode should be, then it'll make sense, right? It should pop back into your head. And again, it'll save you seconds every couple of minutes or minutes every couple hours. And that certainly adds up in the productivity world.
Ben (23:48):
Yeah, it definitely does. I mean, the power of text expanders on those repeating snippets that you're using all the time. I can attest to that even from a support capacity of needing links or like you on your webinars or needing something really quick and not having the time to go look for it. Just real quick, bang. Great tip. Great tip.
Bob Sparkins (24:07):
That's right. And I think, you know, I mean, you and others at Leadpages support, I learned about these macros you guys would do in Zendesk and other systems, whatever it's like, oh, that's just a good way to live, right? What if we just had macros in other areas of our life? And when you look at it that way, I think it's important. I'll throw in a bonus one, too, inside of Gmail. I didn't know this was there. So maybe you don't either, but in the bottom corner of an email, there's three little dots, and here's a clue: anytime you see three dots and a software program, just go explore and...
Ben (24:40):
Hover and discover, yes.
Bob Sparkins (24:41):
Because the engineers put Easter eggs in and people didn't user test into this being the top priority, but they're usually really cool things. And inside of Gmail or G suite types of emails, those dots hide a templates feature, which allows you to write out whatever kind of email you want. And then you save it as a template. And then the next time you go in and you have to write somebody back, something you can go in and just plop the template in, and whatever your email is, it'll add that in there. So it's kinda like the keyboard shortcut, but it can be formatted better. It can have all kinds of structures there. And, you know, as the person who's directly communicating with affiliates, you know, when I look after the top 50 or top hundred affiliates, we like to personally outreach to them instead of just using drip.
Bob Sparkins (25:24):
So I'll have this, you know, carefully crafted email of: hey, we got a thing coming up, we're getting ready to move affiliate platforms, whatever that email might be, five, six paragraphs long. It needs to have bold, needs to have hyperlinks, needs to have all these things saved as a template. And then I don't have to copy-paste it because I'm copying a person's email address and I'm copying the subject line. I don't want a copy of the email as well. I just use the template and then it's two clicks, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It saves a ton of time when you're doing per more personal communication styles.
Ben (25:54):
Yes. I'm going to have to steal that one. Cause that's really powerful. Like you said, you have those niche-y kind of things that you're repeating all the time. Like yeah, saving time. As my wife calls it, a time shaver.
Bob Sparkins (26:07):
Time shaver, I like it!
Ben (26:09):
Awesome. So what's next for you?
Bob Sparkins (26:13):
Well I, you know, as I mentioned, I'm hitting my seventh anniversary at Leadpages here in September and we're doing some cool stuff, right? I mean, we've come out of the pandemic stronger than ever. We have a CEO who joined us late last fall. Right. It's like we didn't even see her for six months before in person because of COVID. We got acquired last year by Redbrick, a Canadian company, and they're just doing great work with us and the three other portfolio companies for helping people with their tech and such. And so we're looking at expanding a bit of the feature set of Leadpages. I'm looking forward to getting back on stage at events. I have an event in Little Rock, Arkansas coming up. One in Miami later in October. So finally getting out into the world again, masked up, vaccinated, all that kind of stuff. And hopefully, we'll be nice and safe, but just continuing to tell the story of customers who have an idea for impacting the lives of their clients, using Leadpages to do so. And just having that impact that they’re really loving. Just more, more of that. It's a lot of fun to be able to do that and continue to master the art of that storytelling.
Ben (27:26):
Yeah. And you're well on your way because I mean, you've made a huge impact in everybody's lives that interacted with you and took a webinar from you. And you're just getting started at the ripe, old age of 21. Was it 25? Something like that. And yeah, it's exciting stuff. And again, congrats on the acquisition from Redbrick and the continued growth of Leadpages. It's really awesome to see and keep up everything, you're doing great!
Bob Sparkins (27:49):
Thanks, Ben. And it's always good to see what you're up to doing and you've got some good buddies that you're working with over it and YouCanBook.me, too. So yeah.
Ben (27:59):
Yeah. We're scrappy. We're a small team but we do big stuff. Would you be willing to come back maybe a bit later and give us an update?
Bob Sparkins (28:07):
I would absolutely be open to that. And depending on with this, when this is released, we are a part of Twin Cities Startup Week. So anybody listening in the Twin Cities area, make sure you're connected to us for that. We're thinking about doing it remotely instead of in-person in our new office. So time will tell if we're going to do that, but anybody in the local scene please do get connected to Twin Cities Startup Week.
Ben (28:30):
Twin Cities Startup Week, awesome. And yeah, I'm going to have to come check out your new digs up there in the North Loop and come say hi to everybody.
Bob Sparkins (28:36):
Yep. We'll have some lunch in Monte Carlo. Just come across the street and we'll show you around.
Ben (28:41):
Fancy pants, Bob Sparkins. Thank you so much for your time. Great to see you, my friend and I hope you have a good rest of your week.
Bob Sparkins (28:49):
Thanks, Ben. All right. Cheers.
Ben (28:52):
Thank you for listening to Get More Done. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to subscribe anywhere you get your podcast. If you have something you would like to share or know someone who does, reach out to the YouCanBook.me team on Twitter or on our forum, forum.youcanbook.me. Hope to see you around.