“Playing comedy is hell. The necessity to have an audience love you is perhaps more overwhelming than in any other form of entertainment. With singing, dancing, acting you don’t know until it’s over if you’ve had acceptance or rejection. The comic knows sooner. The audience laughs or it doesn’t.” – Imogene Coca
VIEW EPISODE HERE.
One might describe marketing and business development similarly. In fact, there is one unicorn in this industry who is adept at BOTH: Brenda Pontiff. We are thrilled that Brenda is joining host Roy Sexton to talk about how business development and stand-up comedy are in fact two great tastes that taste great together!
Born and raised in Texas, Brenda Pontiff left for graduate school in Kansas and wound up touring the country with the Complex Improv Theater. She returned home and began working on her stand-up comedy skills at The Houston Comedy Workshop’s Comixh Annex, the infamous club that spawned the likes of Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison. A few years later, she moved to Los Angeles and became a New Face at the famed Hollywood Improv. She was also a regular at Igby’s and toured as a feature act for franchise clubs including Punchlines, FunnyBones, and Laff Stops. She took a 14-year break in the early 2000s to focus on her global business development career but has happily returned to bring her Texas meets California perspective to the stage. Brenda believes comedy is like the Mafia, you can never leave.
During said global business development career, Brenda founded Partner Track Academy after years of watching young accountants and lawyers, often part of a group challenged with inclusion barriers, panic over business development expectations related to making partner. So often firms’ marketing staff members are not trained to support non-partners’ revenue generation efforts or they simply do not have the bandwidth to do so. This missing component can be filled through individual, customized coaching or periodic workshops and presentations that provide tools, tips, and best practices that lead to improved networking habits, client satisfaction, revenue growth, and ultimately, a coveted seat at the partners’ table.
Brenda has:
· More than 25 years in accounting and law firm sales and marketing.
· Sold services on behalf of an AmLaw 100 firm, exceeding sales and new client acquisition goals for almost eight years.
· Worked as a professional speaker, stand-up comic, writer, and actress, winning several national awards.
· Created a new sales process for a Big Four accounting firm, taking revenues from zero to $3.7 MM in the first year.
· Led a Big Four sales support team during the demise of Arthur Andersen, winning 67% of the regional client base while competing against three other international accounting firms.
· Maintained a 100% success rate while working as a Big Four global strategist to retain critical, at-risk clients.
· Created a cross-selling client team that increased an AmLaw 200 firm’s revenue by $900,000 through one pitch meeting.
· Spoken frequently at association events and corporate retreats regarding account-centric methodologies, best practices for networking at conferences, diversity and inclusion change management, harnessing stress for better productivity, navigating the book of business demand, and embracing resiliency.
And thank you, Joel Epstein, Leslie Smithson, Jennifer Kluge, Alexis Yaeger (Jakowinicz), for your friendship and support on this. I appreciate you all very much!
