In the first episode of season two of the Revenue Café, Breadcrumbs co-founder and CMO Gary Amaral and Director of Sales Joe Aicher are joined by Sam Stiles, Director of Marketing Operations at Summit7, to discuss finding your niche market and his experience working with US federal contracts. 

As a marketing/business development professional, Sam Stiles has worked in marketing operations, creative design, go-to-market strategy development, business continuity, national supply chain sales, financial market development, and more. Sam’s ability to articulate technical expertise and his knowledge of relationship management has landed him as the Director of Marketing Operations at Summit 7. 

Summit 7 (S7) is a Microsoft Gold Partner and a cloud-focused company supporting over 500 federal contractors in the United States. S7 helps contractors generate the most ROI from their Microsoft investment and protect their data and the U.S. Government’s data. Summit 7’s most significant efforts are currently assisting businesses to configure their cloud environments to NIST 800-171, CMMC, and DFARS 7012 compliance. Summit7 also helps break down the basics for their clients on understanding their military contracts and documents. 

Key Takeaways

1. Find your reason to be passionate about your endeavors. One of the critical components to positive results in your business succeeding is coming down to the passion of you and your team. It isn’t infallible, but it’s a great starting point to have your team on the same page with the same tangible goals. 
2. Imitation is flattery, but it gets really old after a while. That’s especially true when going niche, as it can involve fighting off a lot of direct competition. A tactic could be to take a unique approach. I.e., make it easier: Summit7 has a niche-based blog helping break down government documents and information into something more accessible for those in each step along the way of the DOD contract to understand. 
3. If you want to stand out, you have to make it fun. Even if sometimes the topics you work on can be tedious, you need to get that information across to your audience. How do you do that? You keep them hooked with a creative approach. I.e., writing along with innovative delivery tools can help bring the attention you need and translate that topic for your clients and prospective buyers. This is a perfect approach for niche market topics that might be overlooked otherwise. 

Some topics we discussed included

• Sam shares what it’s like to work in a fast-growing company as Summit7 has been experiencing 3x growth.
• More on Summit 7 and DOD contracts: the importance of protecting military and DOD information, clearances, and of having a secure cloud, especially when working as a government contractor. 
• The pros and cons of cornering a niche market like DOD contracts and the concept behind distilling information for their niche topics, including taking technical content, making it palatable, and delivering on it. 
• How Sam relates transferring passions into problem-solving for others and how he’s making a career working with niche markets like the DOD contracts. 
• Sam tells us his perspectives on why it’s so important to sell with intention. (Yes, people can sniff out when your company is fake about a pitch!)
• Gary discusses his perspective on sunrise & sunset businesses with Sam and the importance of weighing your priorities in personal relationships and business. 
• Everyone needs to have a “why” in business: Gary and Joe discuss their whys in founding and joining Breadcrumbs.io and their passions for what their start-up can do to help companies grow faster and more efficiently.
• Sam talks about the difficulties of hiring ‘unicorn’ professionals for Summit7.  
• Gary talks about what it’s like to experiment and try new things in marketing with Breadcrumbs.io.