Marketing Guru Brandon Steiner: Consistency Over Time Equals Credibility

 Bonus resource for this episode: “How to Establish Credibility” which includes fill-in-the-blank notes and reflection questions for you to complete throughout Brandon’s teaching.

If you ask him what makes a person successful over a career, Brandon Steiner will tell you the story of standing next to Yankees pitching legend and first ballot Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera during a spring training game. At one point, as Steiner and Rivera were exchanging small talk, Steiner casually referred to the game as “just a spring training game.” Rivera stopped him dead in his tracks.

“What are you talking about? Why does it matter if it is a spring training game?” asked one of the greatest closers of all time. “I pitch the same way in spring training as I would in game seven of the World Series; the same way I’d pitch in a game that’s a blowout or a close one. The way I see it, there is no such thing as a big game or big inning.”

We hear of greatness when it shows itself at seminal moments like championship games, but Steiner, who built the largest sports marketing and memorabilia company in the country, learned an important lesson on that day. “One of the most important sports lessons I’ve learned is that consistency over time equals credibility,” said Steiner, founder of Steiner Sports Marketing and Memorabilia. “Anybody can be great on any given day. I’ve seen a lot of players have one great season or a great month or a great game. But when you can do it over a long period of time, you become someone who has more credibility.”

Steiner has proven himself to be not only a good learner but also a great teacher, one credible enough to earn invitations to speak on marketing strategy at some of the top business schools in the country, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Northwestern. At such gatherings of future business leaders, he says that one of his mantras focuses on mastering the basics, day after day. “When you look at the great ones, the ones that did extraordinarily, they were all about fundamentals,” he insists. “They were masterful at it and always looked to do the extra.”

In the podcast, Steiner shares some of the fundamentals he mastered in learning how to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, including:

• The letter of gratitude he wrote to his fifth-grade teacher that changed the teacher’s and his own lives.

• What Ritz-Carlton Co-Founder Horst Schulze taught him about standing out from the competition regardless of what industry you’re in.

• How to turn the unpleasantness of stress into a teaching and learning experience that brings you out immeasurably stronger in the end.

“Nobody is dying to do business with you because you’re good,” Steiner noted. “Good doesn’t get you to extraordinary. People are uniquely suited to be able to constantly learn what it takes to separate them and make them stand out. How to be amazing. How to be different.”

Check out the full Corporate Competitor Podcast interview archive including Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian, Disney CEO Bob Chapek, FanDuel CEO Amy Howe, and more!