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John Jantsch (00:48): And welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is McKenna Sweazey. Her global marketing career has spanned the spectrum of startups to corporates her own management experience. Leading teams around the world has provided the foundation for her speaking and coaching around a structured approach to this new world of remote first work that we all live in today. She’s also the author of a new book. We’re gonna talk about how to win friends and manage remotely. So McKenna, welcome to the show.

Mckenna Sweazey (01:20): Thanks. I’m delighted to be

John Jantsch (01:21): Here. So I was so happy to see that right off the bat. You let hard news right out of the bag, that leadership is actually self development.

Mckenna Sweazey (01:31): it’s a lot about you, not you. Me, who is it? It’s about everyone. It is about everyone, but you know, you can’t do anything if you don’t get your own house in order. And particularly as a leader. And I think when we think about moving to remote or hybrid work, like if you let culture and I don’t mean like culture of the capital C, but like the culture of the way we do our work, you let it bubble up from the bottom, how we use slack, how we retirement on documents, how we share workspaces. Like you may end up with something that you don’t like. So as a leader, you need to like, be thoughtful about what it is you like check with the team, make sure that, you know, it works. You’re not a dictator, but yeah, it really like it, it takes some thoughtful, you know, some me time to sit and think with what would be good.

John Jantsch (02:16): Yeah. So, so what’s the biggest thing that you found people struggling with, particularly people that just maybe their entire career has been bring the team in together. We all meet, we have our one on ones, you know, I mean the kind of normal stuff what’s been the biggest, or maybe the hardest challenge for them to keep that relationship, that engagement, you know, going,

Mckenna Sweazey (02:37): Yeah, I think the, well, the biggest problem is that throughout the earlier parts of the pandemic, I think you have some fatigue, right? With like, I don’t know, happy hour over zoom, that is actually a terrible experience, but it was what was, it was what we had and now we’re left with like, well, that’s not a good solution, but then what, and I think you’re seeing some companies and some industries build up like really good ways to connect virtual and hybrid teams. But I don’t know, that’s super commonplace yet, obviously in a idealized world, even if you had a hundred percent remote team you’re gonna get together in person, there is no substitute for that, for the kind of work that requires, you know, a lot of interpersonal effort and teamwork.

John Jantsch (03:21): Yeah. So what do you think is what have we lost? And again, I don’t mean like the bonding and stuff like that, but I just mean from like a leader’s ability to have impact what have we lost?

Mckenna Sweazey (03:32): Well, I think on a very technical level, so they said they academics say that 97% of what, what we are communicating when we’re speaking to someone is not the words coming out of our mouth, obviously on zoom, I can see your facial expression, but we all know that’s not moving as quickly as the human eye can adapt. The audio quality is different. It’s coming directly. It’s not a 360 degree audio. So that’s different, particularly when you’re in a group setting, you’re not catching things the way you would. So you just actually have less information to use to get along with people you’re used to having, let’s say 10 times as much information. So that’s, I think what we’ve lost and that makes it

John Jantsch (04:08): Difficult. And I bet you, we really underestimate like the person playing around with their pen, sending the signal that, uh, get to the point, would you, right. We miss all that, right.

Mckenna Sweazey (04:16): Yeah, exactly.

John Jantsch (04:18): So do we need to adapt to that? In other words, do we need a new set of visual cues that we get good at sending? If this is all we got,

Mckenna Sweazey (04:30): I do think that, you know, being very cognizant and practicing and paying more attention and it, you know, I become second nature with time, but in the beginning saying, you know, am I getting, am I getting any tells from you the equivalent of the pen clicking? And particularly for ones that might be like, not annoyance, but like, oh, you seem a little blue today. Do I follow up later and check in, you know, in a, in a, in a way that feels respectful and what the appropriate space and see if I was right and start building up, you know, I think people camera on versus camera off. It means different things to different people. So you’re building up information that tells you, okay, she has her camera off today. What does that mean? Usually for, we have a hundred years of normal office behavior expectations. We do not have a hundred years of normal zoom office expectations.

John Jantsch (05:21): You know, I find myself the one I fall into that I have to like intentionally remind myself is, you know, you’d come to a meeting together, everybody’s getting their chair and you say, oh, what’d you do this weekend? You know? And, and zoom call is like, let’s get down to business, you know? And I really find myself having to stop and, and, you know, not just like how are, you know, kind of thing, but really try to, I think it’s, I think it gets at what you were talking about. You seem a little glued. I mean, we picked that up from just the casual conversation, don’t we?

Mckenna Sweazey (05:49): Exactly. And it’s building context and learning out how to build that context. Zoom only that’s, you know, how they look, that’s how they sound. Uh, and it’s not, it’s much more subtle than in person, right? Because I only have your face and maybe some hand gestures, I don’t have your toe tapping. Right. Your arms crossed. I don’t, you know, I always say, you know, in the office, if you heard someone fighting with their mother-in-law on the phone, or they’ve spilled a cup of coffee down their shirt, you have pretty much all the context, you need to react to their emotions. Right. But when you show up in that zoom call, if I don’t ask how you are, and if you aren’t comfortable being, you know, relatively honest with me, I don’t have any context for why you might be moody or a bully or anything. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:30): So are there some things that you see people doing that we would never do in person on zoom? Like I, I mean, I see people all the time, they’re clearly doing three things.

Mckenna Sweazey (06:42): yes. Doing three things. So I’ve been guilty of that in a real meeting too. So yes, I do think that we have this idea that video on implies presence and therefore you can go look at your email or whatever. I almost think that video on has done us a disservice because it might be easier to process just auditorily only. Yeah. The eating thing is really hard because in real life you might have eaten a sandwich in front of someone in a meeting. Like that’s I used to do that all the time. Yeah. Or sitting next to someone in the office, as long as, you know, wasn’t tuna fish. And now I it’s, I think it’s pretty inappropriate on a zoom calls. Disgusting, actually. So I think that, you know, just figuring out for some people that’s obvious and some people it’s not obvious and they probably have to be told, and which is, you know, sort of a crus in my book. It’s like, let’s think about the situations where we need to think about the etiquette. We can come up with it as a team. What platforms do we use? And you know, what bugs people and what is really working for them so that if you don’t get it, someone can in a nice way say that’s not like really the way we do things.

John Jantsch (07:43): You know, that’s a really great point because I think that maybe over time, some of those written or unwritten things have taken hold in organizations, but now everybody’s just winging it or feels like they’re wing it. And nobody has sat down and said, here’s how we do a zoom meeting. That’s a really great point.

Mckenna Sweazey (07:59): Yeah. It’s I think the etiquette probably has to be spelled out for the platforms. And, you know, I’ve worked in companies where we’ve used project management software, like Asana or JRO or whatever. And it’s another place where you can really, people can, some people are passive aggressive, maybe intentionally, maybe not. Some people tag too many people, they don’t tag enough. They put too much information too little and you need an etiquette. You need, this is what good looks like. This is how we, you know, this is who you tag, who you don’t tag. And this is true when you’re working on the same document, you know, commenting on a Google doc with someone, so many opportunities where we don’t have enough time for people to have learned passively how you ought to behave. So we have to be a little bit more like, uh, gosh, I can’t remember the opposite of passive. We have to be a little bit more prescriptive about how you should behave in these environments.

John Jantsch (08:49): Well, and I guess some organizations don’t do this, but a lot of our organizations have certainly prescriptive about how a meeting runs. So it’s kind of the same thing I’ve, we’ve been picking on or talking about um, zoom a lot, but a lot of people are doing a lot more communication via email or having forbid the dang slack channel that’s taken over email. I know that anytime I try to make a joke in an email and it’s somebody that doesn’t know me very well. It completely both . So how do we, you know, how do we make sure that, you know, short of the smiley emoji, you know, how do we make sure that we are not being misunderstood in that? And even if we’re just trying to communicate hedge need to do X, Y, Z,

Mckenna Sweazey (09:27): You know, honestly, I don’t know why you would say short of the smiley emoji. I think emojis are actually really useful. Yes. I know that there’s this idea that gen Z uses them differently than millennials and everyone uses them differently, but everyone also kind of understands the basic ones. Wink means that and mean that seriously, a smile means that, I mean, that kindly, I think,

John Jantsch (09:47): And this heaven knows what, at that point, a lot of things, it

Mckenna Sweazey (09:50): Means a lot of things, but I mean, it’s pretty easy generally speaking to parse out, like, will you do this thumbs up? Yes, I will. Thumbs down is more confusing. I won’t, I don’t want to, I don’t know. Well,

John Jantsch (10:00): What about the rock? What about the rocket ship though?

Mckenna Sweazey (10:02): The rocket ship. Okay. Well, again, back to, you know, it might in some organizations be helpful to use like a dictionary so we can say, yeah, like let’s spell it out. This is what we mean by Sarcas like put it in parenthesis and say sarcasm, if you need to, because you don’t have that context. I think that really is. I think the solution to find ways to spell out that you’re being humorous. Right. And again, it’s back to what I said before in an ideal world. Like you shouldn’t be relying only on email, if you’re trying to create real bonds and move things forward, because it can be really hard to understand jokes. And particularly if you’re working across cultures or, oh, right. I mean, there’s so many ways that you can just like, you know, stick your foot in it. And if you know someone, you know, that was never their intention, but if you don’t know them, you don’t have to go on.

John Jantsch (10:52): Yeah. We could do a whole show on diversity and communication. Couldn’t yeah, no question.

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John Jantsch (11:31): So we’ve been talking about, eh, tactics really let’s get to the heart of your book, which is really the core skill I think. And that’s listening and empathy because that’s really what all of this comes down to is. Yeah.

Mckenna Sweazey (11:43): And I think so I, digital empathy is this term that I, don’t not the first one to use it, but I’ve really hung my hat on it. And it’s really the idea of, and it’s, it’s what we’ve talked about, figuring out how to take the innate human skills, because this is like really wired into our lizard brain. Like, can I read your facial expressions? Do I understand what emotion you’re?

John Jantsch (12:01): Are you gonna hurt me or

Mckenna Sweazey (12:03): Yeah, exactly. Are you gonna kill me or are we gonna break bread and to figure out how to put that in place in a digital first world? And so something like the emoji is actually like really a part of that. What are we gonna use to be able to communicate in a way that conveys our emotions more effectively? So I think all the, we got thrown into the situation for so many of us, I had been working, not remotely, but working on global teams. So managing and being managed primarily remotely, even if I was in an office and had thought a lot about how do you connect with people? What do you use to build those bridges? And what are the important things? You know, I think about like team building, I put this on LinkedIn. People want bananas, but competitive team building is really useful.

People like, oh, I don’t like competitive, but like, you don’t have to like be, you know, it doesn’t have to be a fight to the death softball game. That can be really uncomfortable for people who are bad at softball. And it can be uncomfortable for people who lose, but something where it’s sort of an even playing field, let’s say mini golf, it’s pretty even playing field, you know, giving teams a way to connect and figure out what the other is, um, is a great way to build empathy. You want to sort of create that parochial team empathy, obviously giving them the context, whether that’s explaining what emojis do or being in person. So you have more context about each other. And we talked about this in the beginning, but like as a manager, you have to like really have yourself in order. Am I am on my best game? Because our computing power as a human, particularly our ability to understand emotions goes totally down. If you are in yourself in a bad mood. Yeah. If you’re retired, right. If you aren’t scheduling your day in a way that puts you on your best self, you can’t really be that kind of manager. And you certainly can’t listen and like reflect back what other people need to hear.

John Jantsch (13:44): Yeah. I think just to end that point on the competitive things, I think those little game type of things actually allow people to, to lower the masks. Mm-hmm absolutely. Then all of a sudden we’re kind of being who we are, because we’re in the moment of that thing. Do you, is there a rhythm for like, you know, for every five zoom calls, you need to have a, you know, phone call, I mean, is there some sort of rhythm that you think is working for people so that they’ve got the right amount of, of personal engagement versus getting work done?

Mckenna Sweazey (14:10): I think it, yes, but everyone’s is different. Right. And what do you need? And I think it can be helpful to keep a diary for a week or two and say, how are my energy levels? Do I feel lonely? Do I feel connected? And particularly for people who have control over say team building and offsite to sort of keep checking the pulse, where, how are we doing on this? How are we doing on that feeling? Okay. These let’s say that you’re using some sort of software in their scores. We’re starting to drop here on a feeling connectedness. We need to have an offsite because yes, absolutely. I think there’s a rhythm, but everybody’s rhythm is different. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (14:39): Yeah. All right. Let’s talk about the last one I wanted to touch on and this feedback. Mm. Um, so, you know, I can’t see the pictures on your desk. I can’t, I don’t really know what’s going on in your world. And yet I am going to tell you what you are doing right. Or doing wrong. And, you know, is that, has that really suffered or is there a way to make that a useful exercise when we’re not in person?

Mckenna Sweazey (15:02): I think the biggest problem is that if you’re not face to face, you can avoid things really easily. Right? Right. And the longer you avoid giving a piece of feedback, the bigger it becomes. You know, if I tell you five minutes after a presentation, Hey, I thought you went a little too fast, or you skipped over this one key element or you lost the room, whatever it is. And I tell you right afterwards, that is a very different piece of feedback than if I schedule a meeting with you two weeks later. And I’m like, I wanna talk about how that presentation went. You’re gonna perceive those very differently. And unfortunately, I can’t catch you after the meeting now to deliver it like that. I almost always have to schedule it in some sense. And that puts more weight, maybe on some, a lot of feedback that just needs to be given it’s an opportunity to improve.

So I think the best way to deal with that is to really get into a habit, a rhythm of giving feedback. And so if you have a one on one with someone you, every time you give some feedback or you say we’re gonna have an opportunity for feedback so that each so that you never forget, and that each one doesn’t have to hold that much weight. Yeah. And doesn’t have to be this big moment where you schedule it. Cause I think, you know, some people are sitting at home stewing, why did they schedule that medium? I hire, oh my God. Right. And some people are not good for them.

John Jantsch (16:15): but I, but I think a key thing that maybe people miss sometimes is feedback is received very differently based on the level of trust of the person giving. And so that’s really the, for it to be effective, trust has to be there. Right? Absolutely. So I that’s in a lot of ways, that’s what we’re talking about here. And empathy and listening is trust building, isn’t

Mckenna Sweazey (16:34): It? Absolutely. And I think there are ways to get, to build trust virtually, you know, you have some team building opportunities that are very like very emotional and very opening. You know, if you have life mapping where you’re sort of walking through with the team and saying all the highs, three highs and three lows of your life, you can only do that. Like in a kind of small group, you can’t do that across an entire organization. Right. And so I do think creating opportunities for people to get to know each other in person and creating formulas so that you can practice giving feedback. And again, if everyone gives more feedback, everyone gets better at doing it. And we need more feedback because you’re not getting any, you’re not getting any feedback of you tapping your pen during my presentation. I don’t know that I’m boring. People it’s completely silent on the other end. I can’t see their faces. I can’t hear them laughing. So I absolutely need that feedback. So I think getting to that place where we say feedback is not a bad thing, feedback is a great thing.

John Jantsch (17:28): Well, particularly I think if the, if it’s perceived and hopefully communicated, you know, over and over again, by the person giving the feedback is I want you to succeed. I want you to get better. Right.

Mckenna Sweazey (17:38): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (17:39): Yeah. So I think that’s the truth. So tell people where they can find, find you yes. First off, if they wanna chat with you, but then obviously how to win friends and manage.

Mckenna Sweazey (17:47): Absolutely. Absolutely. So I mostly I’m on LinkedIn, it’s McKenna Swayze, but I also have a website, of course, McKenna swayze.com and then how to win friends and manage remotely is available from all your favorite book sellers, including Amazon Barnes and noble, et cetera.

John Jantsch (18:02): And I assume one of the ways people engage you is to help them set some of these things up that we’re talking

Mckenna Sweazey (18:07): About. Exactly. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:08): So awesome. Well, McKenna, thanks so much for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Mckenna Sweazey (18:15): Absolutely. Have a great afternoon.

John Jantsch (18:16): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not.com.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Semrush.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

Everybody’s online, but are they finding your website? Grab the online spotlight and your customers’ attention with Semrush. From Content and SEO to ads and social media, Semrush is your one-stop-shop for online marketing. Build, manage, and measure campaigns —across all channels — faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen. Get Semrush. Visit semrush.com/go to try it free for 7 days.

September 8, 2022/by exposure

Google Is A Child (And We Need To Learn To Educate It)

Google Is A Child (And We Need To Learn To Educate It) written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

About the show:

The Agency Spark Podcast, hosted by Sara Nay, is a collection of short-form interviews from thought leaders in the marketing consultancy and agency space. Each episode focuses on a single topic with actionable insights you can apply today. Check out the new Spark Lab Consulting website here!

About this episode:

In this episode of the Agency Spark Podcast, Sara talks with Jason Barnard on how Google is a child and we need to learn to educate it.

Jason Barnard is an author and digital marketing consultant. He specializes in Brand SERPs (what appears when your audience Googles your Brand name) and knowledge panels (what Google understands about who you are and what you do).

His backstory – from playing the Cavern Club in Liverpool to touring Europe playing double bass in a punk-folk group to playing the role of a cartoon blue dog in a TV series to remote working from a tropical island in the Indian Ocean.

More from Jason Barnard:

Kalicube
Kalicube Pro SaaS
The Fundamentals of Brand SERPs for Business

This episode of the Agency Spark Podcast is brought to you by Monday.com, a powerful project management platform. Monday.com helps teams easily build, run, and scale their dream workflows on one platform. I personally am a user and big fan of Monday.com – I start my workday pulling up the platform and spend my day working within it for everything from task management to running client engagements. Learn more about Monday.com at ducttape.me/monday.

September 5, 2022/by exposure

How Leaders Are Using Systems And Processes To Grow Their Business The Right Way

How Leaders Are Using Systems And Processes To Grow Their Business The Right Way written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Jamie Jay

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Jamie Jay. Jamie is the founder and managing director of Bottleneck Distant Assistants. Founded in 2016, Bottleneck is an outsourcing agency that helps businesses identify, hire, and cultivate their workforce through a carefully designed systematic approach to growth. He’s the author of the book — Quit Repeating Yourself: How Today’s Leaders Are Using Systems and Processes to Grow Their Business The Right Way.

Key Takeaway:

Many business leaders don’t know how to get out of their own way. In this episode, Jaime Jay joins me as he shares how he built a seven-figure business by focusing on the power of creating systems and processes so he could stop doing the wrong things and focus on doing his best work. We dive into how building a solid culture and hiring the right people is extremely crucial to achieving success in your company.

Questions I ask Jamie Jay:

[1:40] Can you talk to me a little bit about your relationship to the idea of “culture eats strategy”?
[3:29] How has the concept of values have to have a mission statement changed for leaders?
[6:05] How does someone adopt a provocative point of view?
[8:00] What are some of the ways that you’ve found to make your values really practical?
[12:21] What are some of the things I need to be thinking about if I’m wanting to get digital assistance?
[17:27] Is there a set of best practices for vetting the right person and onboarding them the right way?
[19:46] How does your model work?
[21:26] What are the typical kinds of roles that you find yourself filling for people?
[21:45] Where can people learn more about your work and get a copy of your book?

More About Jamie Jay:

Learn more about his company — Bottleneck Distant Assistants
Get a copy of his book — Quit Repeating Yourself: How Today’s Leaders Are Using Systems and Processes to Grow Their Business The Right Way

Take The Marketing Assessment:

- Take the Assessment

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode or the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the nudge podcast, hosted by Phil Agnew and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from admired marketers and behavioral scientist. Nudge is a fast pace, but still insightful with real world examples that you can apply. Her recent issue. Talked about the, the idea of getting your customers, your prospects in the habit of buying from you or listening to you or following you habit based marketing, download, nudge, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jamie Jay he’s the founder and managing director of bottleneck distant assistance, a business he founded in 2016. It’s an outsourcing agency that helps businesses identify, hire, and cultivate their workforce through a carefully designed systematic approach to growth. He’s also the author of a book. We’re gonna talk about quit repeating yourself, how today’s leaders are using systems and processes to grow their business the right way. So Jamie, welcome to the show.

Jamie Jay (01:25): Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. John. Super, super excited to be here.

John Jantsch (01:29): So the first chapter is, um, a line. Many people were recognized. I certainly do. I’m a fan of Peter Druckers. In fact, I often cite him as my best biggest mentor, and that is culture. Each strategy. I think his was for lunch, but, uh, talk to me a little bit about, you know, your relationship to that idea.

Jamie Jay (01:49): Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I’m a big fan of strategy. Strategy’s super important. You can’t run a business without strategy, right? In my opinion, however, culture, in my opinion, and just so happens. I’m a big fan of Peter direct too. Culture really needs to lead the charge because if you’re charging the mountain all by yourself, that’s challenging to say the least, cuz you’re trying to do everything and everything’s done through you. But if you can get 10, 20, 40, a hundred thousand people charging that mountain, the same intentions, the same goals, the same drive, the same vision mission. It makes things so much easier and having a good culture allows for you to be able to do that. And it’s, it’s pretty amazing when, when that starts working and you get out of your own way, so to speak and that culture kind of takes over and it has everything to do with respect and giving people their own voice. We may have the same vision, but people go about doing things a little bit differently. Embrace those differences in my opinion.

John Jantsch (02:51): Yeah. And I think Drucker probably would’ve concluded that, you know, give like, like you said, culture E strategy, meaning that you got a thousand, like really gungho mission driven people. The strategy might be a little shaky, but they’re gonna outperform, you know, that company that has got a brilliant strategy, but doesn’t really have a whole bunch of people that are committed to executing.

Jamie Jay (03:12): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (03:13): So you then of course follow up with the kind of vision mission values, which has frankly been, you know, the staple of the leadership book genre, frankly, for, I don’t know, as long as I’ve been reading books, but so, but in the subtitle you talk about today’s leaders. So how has that concept of, you know, mission, vision values have to have a value sta or a mission statement, value statement. I mean, how has that changed for today’s leaders?

Jamie Jay (03:39): Well, I think we’re in a growing world. The world is shrinking because of technology. Any chance you have to differentiate yourself, maybe create your own category as we did here with distant assistance instead of virtual assistance. But anything you can do to kind of challenge the status quo or take something and tweak it in such a way that it’s kind of, you kind of make it your own. I think now because of technology and the competitive nature of the various industries that you come across without good foundational vision, mission, provocative points of view, it’s really challenging to do that. And I think one bad habit that we’ve had was we’re better. And one of the things, and this is from my good friend, Christopher Lockhead one of the authors of play bigger and amazing book by the way about category design was it was either, I think it was Pepsi.

You know, if you look at their commercials, it was all about Coke. You see the little kid walk up to the Pepsi machine and he gets two Coke bottles and stands on the Coke bottle so he can get the Pepsi machine. But all you’re thinking about is Coke. So we try to get that whole thing of better out. And mission is not just words on a wall. It’s a true belief, a true style. And the closer we can be to that belief and the more authentic we can be, I think you it’ll be easier to develop a culture and unite a team that has a similar drive or a similar understanding of yes, I love that vision. I love what this stands for.

John Jantsch (05:17): You. You mentioned it already. I was going to bring up the idea of the provocative, the point of view. I think that’s a, I think that’s a great way to look at, you know, categorizing, you know, that differentiation, um, years ago, you know, when I was actually trying to figure out, you know, a new way of bringing marketing services to small businesses, which is really just became my life works. I, I just, I think offhand, when in some talk I was giving to a group of small business owners. I said, look, first thing you have to understand is marketing is a system and you could just see all the heads pop off. They’re like, that’s it that’s, what’s been wrong with marketing. Well, you know, and I just, I mean, it was like vivid to me that it was like, wow, that, you know, that resonated, that hit, you know, you could just see the eyes and it really is. I didn’t call it a provocative point of view, but that’s really what I’ve been doing for 20 years. So talk a little bit about, you know, how somebody, I feel like I accidentally stumbled onto it, but how does somebody adopt a, a provocative point of

Jamie Jay (06:12): View? Well, thank you. And thank you for sharing that with so many, cuz that’s a huge lesson. I’m a huge fan, big geek when it comes to systems, processes workflows. Oh my gosh. But when you’re talking about a provocative point of view, two things need to occur with that provocative point of view. Number one is what is the challenge? What is the problem that needs to be addressed? And what is the outcome? What is the desired outcome of being able to overcome that challenge? So in our case, our provocative point of view is we guide business leaders or agency owners who are FOC, who are doing the wrong things, spending their time on the wrong things. So they can focus on doing their best work. Yeah. So that outcome is right, right now, they’re challenged, they’re overwhelmed. They’re trying to do everything. They’re doing emails, they’re doing all this, everything in their business. And we want to try and elevate them to where they can get rid of all that chaos in their brain so they can open them back, open themselves, back up to being creative again, mm-hmm and then take have somebody else who’s really good at it, by the way, do the execution.

John Jantsch (07:24): So let’s, let’s go back to, to values again, for a moment the, you shared your values in the book, you know, we’ve, I’ve been a big fan of that as well. I don’t think anybody listening to this or owning a business would say would dispute the idea you know, that you should understand what those values are. So you don’t get knocked off course. You know, you don’t get, you know, customers to push you around because you stand by your values. But I think where people get tripped up is it’s hard. I mean, you know, 24 7, stuff’s coming at you that is trying to knock you off course that you know, is easier to do a certain way, even though that doesn’t necessarily represent your values. So what are some of the ways that you’ve found to, because you have to live ’em you have to reinforce ’em every single day, every single meeting, you know, they have to be there, which can be exhausting, but it also is never going to work unless you do. What are some of the ways that you’ve found to make them real practical? You know, in the trenches

Jamie Jay (08:19): First and foremost, I believe in him a hundred percent. Yep.

John Jantsch (08:22): Yep.

Jamie Jay (08:23): As a founder, I wanted to share my belief system and speak in a culture like we did earlier so that others can come in and understand what my original core belief system is. And they could either buy into it or that’s not really me. And that’s first and foremost, be steadfast, super strong. What is your core values? And then practice it. Every single meeting, we go over what our vision is, what our mission is, what our provocative points of view are. And then we go ahead and go into the meeting and we often have different people lead the meetings at different times to give them a chance to participate. Again, we hear their voice. What they say is important to us, but also it’s not, I don’t believe in a work life balance. I just believe in life balance, right by extension. These core values that we have associated with bottleneck, our company are the same core values I live by in my life case in point we, my wife and I were going to buy a new truck.

We went to the first dealer, three of the four core values where yes one was no, we left that dealership. We went to the next dealership. All four were checked off. We bought that truck. And so I practice what I preach every single day. And I’m a big fan of life balance. And if we can introduce what I feel into life, again, being real authentic, it’s so much easier to pass along those core values and have other people, if they didn’t think of something like that, perhaps adopt them or realize that yes, indeed. That’s part of their core values.

John Jantsch (10:00): Yeah. You started off by saying you believe them deeply. And I think that’s the challenge for some people is we’ve all been told. You gotta have these core values. So people sit around a room, think up core values, right? and it, it obviously has to be something that it, you know, that’s real or you certainly are never going to live it.

Jamie Jay (10:17): You know, I was in corporate America for about 12 years. Took me about 11 years to figuring out how to get out. I’m proud to say I’m unemployable anymore and no disregard or no disrespect to corporate America or corporations in general. If that’s what you like good for you. For me, I wasn’t a good fit. We had the big wigs coming from San Francisco to visit our little radio station in central valley, California at the time. And our manager gave us a piece of paper with a mission statement on it and also said, do not raise your hand. Don’t ask any questions.

John Jantsch (10:53):

Jamie Jay (10:54): And I was like, wow, that was just so crazy to me. And they’re coming to inspect as a leader. I would wanna know if there’s challenges in a certain branch or a certain area or a certain thing. Yeah. And it seems a lot of people get closed off on that. And if you have to get a piece of paper to read what the mission statement is, there’s a huge disconnect there.

John Jantsch (11:15): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, today everybody’s online, but are they finding your website, grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with Semrush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen, get some rush, visit Semrush that’s Semrush.com/go to try it free for seven days.

Yeah. Let’s uh, let’s pivot a little bit and talk a, a little bit about the idea of distant assistance today. You know, so, so many business owners, I mean, the world has changed in such that, you know, the idea of having a remote team, of having people that you work with, that you maybe never meet in person having clients that you don’t go to their office. You know, I mean that, that is something that, you know, some people in certain industries have been doing for 20 years, but it’s really come to the forefront for pretty much everybody now. So, you know, what are some of the things that if I’m sitting here thinking, you know, everybody else is doing it, I need to get a digital assistant. You know, what should they be thinking about? Or where are they gonna go wrong? You know, where you see people that go, they get this brainstorm and, you know, idea, and then they blow it.

Jamie Jay (12:37): Oh boy. So there, there is quite a bit to unpack there, but I’ll try and be as precise and short as I can. As Christopher Lockett taught me. It’s not a long story, shorter, it’s a long story longer. But what I’ve found is there’s two things. I’m a firm believer in what I call is the 10% role. I am a hundred percent remote. I practice what I preach. I haven’t met anybody except for two people in my organization, in person, my wife and another gentleman that lives here in Springfield, Missouri, yeah. That we hired and everybody else is remote. And I’ve been doing this for 16 years. And so what I found is the first thing is we, as a business leader should understand what that 10% rule is because of COVID. If you look for the silver linings, we’ve found an identified four key roles that can not only reduce overhead, but increased productivity. Several studies have proven this. And so I really liken that because now again, with introduction of technology, boy, oh boy. Imagine where we were 16 years ago. Oh, it was nothing compared to what we are now. So now you have the capability of getting a lot of things done, meeting on zoom or doing all of these really cool things because of the interwebs and all that kind of stuff.

John Jantsch (13:56): Yeah. When I started, we met by phone and fax.

Jamie Jay (13:59): Yeah. we had a magazine and we would fax over the proofs.

John Jantsch (14:05): like,

Jamie Jay (14:05): Okay. You know, and we didn’t even have color at the time. It was crazy. But yeah. But yeah. So that’s one thing. The other thing that I think is really critical is you have to start planning, hiring from day one. A lot of people wait too long and then all of a sudden they it’s chaos. There’s overwhelm. And then you hear one of two things, oh, I’ll just do it myself. I can do it faster. Or I don’t have time to train somebody. Right.

that’s the worst mindset to have. Yeah. In my opinion. And I hate saying that to people, but I’d let them know because you really have to kind of shift that mindset. If you see the Epilog in the book, quit repeating yourself. It says, um, do something as if it’s the last time you’re ever going to do it. Mm. Uh, the good friend of mine, Scott Bebe said that. And I put that in there because you need to start documenting on day one. Yeah. What is it that you’re doing? Document it step by step, record a video, do whatever you can so that when it does come time for you to hire somebody, and here’s the beauty of it, doesn’t matter if it’s in ter in your office or remote, as long as you document it via video written, whatever it is. Yeah. It’s so much easier for somebody to come in and take over because they see exactly what you want. The expectations are set.

John Jantsch (15:22): And I think one of the things that people underestimate, because I, you know, we have a network of consultants. I train a lot of them are just getting started. And that’s one of the first things I tell ’em is look, you, your first job is to get a couple clients. Once you get three clients, your next job is to then create the fulfillment system. You’re gonna teach to somebody else, you know, be because what happens is they get five, six clients. And then they’re like, now I’m just running crazy. And I, you know, so they get, go get a VA and they fail, right. Because you know that

Jamie Jay (15:50): They just wanna hire the rock star. They know how

John Jantsch (15:52): To do everything. Like here, do all this stuff. Right. So it’s it. I love that. Do something as though is the last time you’re gonna do it. But I think one thing that, that I’m sure you agree with on this, but I wanna bring this point back is that when we got really good at outsourcing this stuff, especially me as my business started growing, there was a lot of stuff I didn’t do. Well, I didn’t like doing. And so consequently, it made me grumpy, which then consequently made me not a very good leader, you know, . And so when I got that stuff off my plate, I became a much better leader because I was doing the stuff I was meant to do. And so it really impacted the culture.

Jamie Jay (16:25): You know what, our provocative point of view, you just sum that up. Yeah. Stop doing the wrong things. Yeah. So you focus on doing your best work. The wrong things are spending 90 minutes, you know, two hours a day on email handling your own calendar, you know, booking your own travel, you know, making sure all of your projects are being coordinated with your vendors and your team. Like this is a lot of stuff that takes up a lot of that brain room. And if you can just kind of alleviate that. If you remember the, when you were really creative, when you first started out, you didn’t have any clients or anything like that. Right. You had all these ideas that’s

John Jantsch (17:02): Right.

Jamie Jay (17:03): Well, that’s because you didn’t have all this other stuff yeah. Going on in there. So if you can delegate that with confidence because you have systems and processes in place, because you’ve documented everything, it frees you up to be creative, let somebody else worry about the execution. You do what you do best

John Jantsch (17:21): All. I’m gonna ask you another like multi multier or type of question, but is there a kind of set of best practices for, you know, maybe vetting the right person, but also onboarding ’em the right way?

Jamie Jay (17:36): Absolutely. Absolutely. And I feel after 16 years hiring over a thousand people at this point that we’ve pretty much nailed that down. Yeah. We have to pay close attention to what’s happening because obviously when you create a system, things change and you have to, you know, add, you identify friction points. So there’s always that going on in the background. But yes, for as a general principal, it’s really do your background checks or outsource this to somebody else that can do the background checks and do the reference checks and take care of all of that stuff, because it’s really time sensitive. And it takes up a lot of time doing all of that calling. And then we, I just talked to someone three days ago, three days ago, two days ago, Monday. And he said I had 13 people scheduled to come in and interview one showed up. Oh

John Jantsch (18:25): Man.

Jamie Jay (18:26): Imagine all of the time that took. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So figure out what that is. Do you have the bandwidth to do that or does it make better sense to hire somebody who’s really good at doing that? And the second thing is when you’re getting ready to hire, make sure that you have the tasks written down that just totally drain you of energy. I call this the delegation roadmap. Yeah. And so what we do is we write down every single task we do in a given day. And then we assign two values. Number one, is it something you must do? Or can you delegate this? And number two, does it give you energy or drain you of energy? Anything that you can delegate and drain you of energy. Now start putting those tasks into a description. Now the next part of that is knowing whether or not that’s one job role, two job roles, three job roles. Because if you wanna protect the integrity of your brand that you work so hard for, and it’s your baby, you have to make sure that you put somebody in the right position. Yep. So you don’t wanna hire a personal assistant and say, oh, can you design all my graphics for my social media and post those? Well, no, because this person’s expertise is answering your phone, handling your email, maybe writing proposals for you, whatever that is. Yeah. So you have to be really co careful there, we call that the golden goose rule. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:46): So talk briefly about your model then. Do, does somebody come to you and you find a person and then you place them as a full-time person or do they come and buy hours? How does your model work? Because I know a lot of people have different models.

Jamie Jay (19:57): Yeah. And, oh man, since COVID came these companies are popping up. So, so what’s good about that. There’s a lot of good companies out there. There’s also a lot of maybe companies that are a little more challenged. They don’t have the systems in the place. Yeah. Yeah. Because they’re so new. That being said, the way that we work here is we are a full 100% subscription based organization. We keep it really simple. We do full time. We do the re research. We write job descriptions for our clients based on 30 minute interview with them. So we take a lot of that work off. And then we invite three candidates that have gone through a vetting process. By the way, gone through an academy, they’ve been trained through nine weeks of training. They’ve graduated from that. And then we introduce three candidates to our client and they get to pick which one they like. And we move on from there. Then we do a 60 day onboarding the first 30 days, phase one, take an hour a day and train them. Yeah. Phase two, they maintain that the rest of the time they’re working by the way. Yeah. Right. The next 30 days, they keep that same hour and they do documentation. They take all of the tasks. That’s been delegated to them and document it two weeks prior to the end of 60 days, they deliver that to our design team. And we design a workflow manual branded for our clients with a table of contents, with every single task documented. And that gives our clients the confidence to delegate even more responsibility. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:25): Yeah. No, that’s awesome. What are the typical kinds of roles that you find yourself filling for people?

Jamie Jay (21:29): There’s three main roles, personal assistant customer service representative and project coordinator. And we’re gonna be launching a bookkeeper in Q4 of this year as a time of this recording. It’s August 31st. Yeah. Of 22. So yeah. In about another two months, we’ll launch the book bookkeeper commission.

John Jantsch (21:45): Awesome. Well tell people where they can find out to all the ins and outs of a bottleneck.

Jamie Jay (21:49): You can go to bottleneck.online.

John Jantsch (21:51): All right. bottleneck.online. And then the book itself quit repeating itself. I know is on Amazon, probably other folks, other places as

Jamie Jay (21:57): Well, pretty much anywhere you wanna get a book, you can go there, but yeah, Amazon’s usually the easiest, but yeah. Thank you. Quit repeating yourself. Dot com. You can learn more about it there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:07): Awesome. Well, Jamie, thanks for supp by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the

Jamie Jay (22:12): Road, John, thank you so much.

John Jantsch (22:16): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing ssessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Semrush.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

September 2, 2022/by exposure

Never Miss An Opportunity Again With Automated Communication

Never Miss An Opportunity Again With Automated Communication written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show. I’m talking about the many forms and channels of customer communication that exist and the strategies I believe is critical for small businesses to implement today. I share a little bit about a solution I’m working on to help small businesses with unifying their communication channels that way no customer opportunities are missed in the future.

Key Takeaway:

There are a million ways to communicate with customers today, and because of that, so many opportunities fall through the cracks. The holy grail of communication is having one unified source to manage your customer communication – and it’s a problem I’m working on creating a solution for which I discuss more in this episode. Join me as I dive into the many ways customers communicate with businesses of all sizes today and how implementing automation in your communication with customers is the key to not letting opportunities slip through the cracks.

Topics I Cover:

[2:34] Where business owners are missing tons of opportunities today
[3:27] The holy grail of communication today
[4:00] How SMS is one of the drivers of change

Resources I Mention:

Send me a note: john@ducttapemarketing.com

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): Today’s episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I’m a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that, Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let’s try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I’m doing another solo show today. I wanna talk about communication and business and working with customers and all the other various forms of communication. that go on in our business? I’m gonna make myself sound really old here, but back in the day, when I first started my business, the only thing we had to worry about was we got mail in the mailbox and we got phone calls, and then we got really fancy and got a codone or a, whatever. We called those things. And we got voice messages recorded. That was it. We checked the mail, we checked the message box on the phone and that was it. Or we answered the phone and we talked to people today. We do still get the occasional phone calls. We get voicemails, we get text messages.

People are now chatting into us from our Google business pages. Obviously we get email by the droves. People write reviews and we get notified about those. Facebook messenger is a way that people can get ahold of us. Instagram, DMS, I don’t know WhatsApp chats. So the point is we now have opportunities coming at us from 55 different places. I won’t even mention the fact that we got all these social platforms we’re supposed to engage in. And so, you know, what is a person to do? Because I contend because of this and because people want to communicate the way they want to communicate with us, we’re missing tons of opportunities. Business owners are missing tons of opportunities. People expect today to get instant replies or to, as I said, communicate in the way that they want to communicate. So of late, the advice I’ve been giving folks is we need to start using some of the technology to automate our communication.

And don’t turn off the the recording yet. I’m not necessarily saying that we never talk to human beings, but I think what we need to do is we need to start automating even the flow of how we get these conversations, how we can be checking in on them, how we can respond. Imagine if you had like one place that you had to go to, or an app on your phone that you went to, and all of that stuff was sucked into that. That’s what I think that’s the holy grail of communication today. And the good news is the tools are there. The tools are getting there at least with a little bit of work and is my blatant pitch. That’s a tool that we’re working on. We’re actually building this unified communication. It’s not there. I can’t send you to a website, but if you’re listening to this and you think I want that, for my business.

It’s just John at duct tape, marketing.com. Send me a note and we’ll start talking about it. But one of the drivers of this, I think as well is SMS text messaging. Everybody’s got a phone, every single one of those phones is equipped with that functionality. And it’s becoming there’s surveys showing that 50, 60, 70 pan upon the generation, you were born in 60, 70% of folks prefer to communicate via text, especially early on. I mean, if you were trying to close a deal and finalize some things, but if we’re just trying to get information, we’re just trying to say, Hey, I have an interest in getting X or I wanna schedule appointment for X text. Is it? I mean like it or not, there’s still some people that don’t think it has a place in business, but like it or not, it is a huge driver today of communication.

And if you are not using that functionality, that technology as a part of your overall communication or overall customer journey, you are missing tons and tons of opportunity. In fact, I would suggest there’s some buyers out there that are, that are just gonna say, oh, you don’t have text. I’m not gonna do business with you. I can’t schedule automatically. I’m not gonna do business with you. That’s just where we are. So rather than fight it, , let’s start talking about ways that we can do it on your website. There should be a text to, there should be a chat functionality. And frankly, that’s been around for a while. I mean, 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago, people were putting those on, but they quickly found that if they weren’t sitting there and somebody said, Hey, I have a question. Not much good was going to happen from that.

In fact it might be negative. So then version two became the bots. Everybody loves those, right? you ask a question, it spits out, you know, some pre-programmed answer. You ask another question. You’re, you know, your 10 texts in and you still haven’t gotten to close to where you want. You’re just like, let me talk to somebody. And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load, handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need online marketing, no problem. Some rush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try some rush free @ Semrush.com slash. Now that’s Semrush.com/.

Now, today, what I think the, what we wanna be doing is if you think about this idea of text or SMS, being the huge driver of the hub of communication, what about having taken that chat bubble and driving people to a text conversation? So now first off you’re getting, you’re capturing that information. You’re starting a conversation and theoretically, anybody in your organization, walking around with the app that, that has that info coming to it can respond. I’m not saying that they necessarily have to sit there and respond, but you know, you imagine you have a technician out in the field that, that, you know, instead of being there, sitting in front of a desktop on a computer, wait, waiting for people on your website, they’re able to respond through that. I already mentioned Google business profile. Google is very well. I was gonna say very smart.

They’re not necessarily innovative , but they certainly read the writing on the wall. And so in their overarching effort to never have anybody actually leave Google, they are capturing or attempting to capture all the forms of communication. So if your Google business profile is showing up at the top of a search results, increasingly, and I’ve seen this time and time again, one of the functionalities that they’ve added recently is text messaging. So somebody who’s on their phone, they’ve done a search instead of calling you, instead of going to your website, instead of just getting directions to your business, they can send you a message where those are going. Quite frankly, many people don’t know or they’re having to put in of somebody’s mobile device. Well, again, capturing those in that unified communication platform is going to become increasingly important spec, particularly for local businesses.

Here’s a, another functionality that can be built into this idea. I wonder how many phone calls you miss because you’re on the phone or because it’s after hours or because whoever was supposed to be answering the phone, didn’t get to it. Now, maybe the phone’s equipped with a voicemail and so great. You captured it there, but now that person has to go and listen. And you know, maybe it’s a insurance pitch or better yet an SEO person that wants to sell you services. So you still got all that time invested. Imagine if you had the functionality and I’m not saying you never answer the phone, but imagine if you had the functionality that every time a call was missed and not picked up, that person got an immediate text back. Not everybody calls on a mobile device, but I don’t know, probably 90% do so they immediately get a text back and it says, Hey, I saw we missed your call.

What can we help you with now, if it’s that person selling SEO services? Well, they’re probably not gonna respond, but if it’s a customer, especially a customer who would actually prefer to, to use a text anyway, it’s like cool text away. And now you’ve got a conversation going calendars, you know, are a big part of what is going to make this work. Imagine if people could on their mobile device, have the ability to not only, um, schedule an appointment, but that you would then have the ability to text them. And you’ve probably all gotten this. Your dentist probably does it, right? Dentists are crazy about this, but you get the, Hey, your appointment’s scheduled. Hey, your appointment’s in a day. It’s in 10 minutes. I mean, it, I’m not saying you should do that to the, to that extent, but the ability to actually have that follow up automated as a part of it, and there are platforms out there that, you know, that kind of scheduling and things have been going on for a long time, your dentist does it, your hair salon, does it, you know, maybe your, uh, H V a C contractor or plumber does it.

But I think every small business should have that ability now reviews. So you go, you do the work you’re done. What if you just had to press one button in that app that we’re talking about? And all of a sudden the person gets a text that says, we love reviews. We’re so happy that we did business. You please review us here, automate the process of that. And then when that person did review right there in your unified communication platform, you’d have the ability to respond to that review a Facebook review or a Google review. So this technology is all there now, and I’m not selling G whiz technology. I’m selling the fact that I think you’re missing. Most people are missing massive amounts of opportunities because they haven’t automated this because it’s hard to go find all the places people are leaving clues. It’s, there’s no question that if somebody gets followed up with in five, 10 minutes in maybe one or two different ways, they’re far more likely to convert.

We’re all busy. Life is inconvenient. Sometimes, especially getting stuff done is inconvenient sometimes. And so that company that responds first, that company that responds in the way that I want to talk to them, or the way that I want to be communicated with. I mean, we’re going to give that company, our business. So today, increasingly I’m not talking about, you know, I’m not talking about messaging today. I’m not talking about your overarching strategy, but a huge part today of the customer journey has to be automated. And you have to get much more efficient at tapping into all those communication avenues that are coming at you and SMS and text is going to drive this for the foreseeable future. If you’re not, if you’re not participating in this, and I’m not talking about the spammy, sending out text, I’m talking about in ways to drive the customer journey, to serve your customers, to get reviews, to get repeat business.

If you’re not using that technology for that, you are missing the boat. As I said, this is such an important thing. We’re building it. We’re building this engine that will allow you to have that beautiful unified communication place will allow you to have the app that, that you or whoever all of your team can carry around. And the person who, who needs to reply can reply. But I think that’s a place where we’re at today. That software has to be installed in small businesses today. Every small business, I don’t care what industry you’re in. All right, that’s it for today. Please hit me up, John, at duct tape marketing. If you wanna hear more about this unified communication, beautiful way to run your business, take care out there, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it@marketingassessment.co not.com.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co I’d. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Semrush.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

Running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same! Semrush is an all-in-one platform that will lighten the load. Handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place. Attract new customers, save time and money on marketing, and get ahead of the competition. New to online marketing? No problem! Semrush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try Semrush free today at semrush.com/now.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=2160

September 1, 2022/by exposure

Clone of The 5 Stages Of Marketing Every Business Moves Their Customers Through

Clone of The 5 Stages Of Marketing Every Business Moves Their Customers Through written by Kyndall Ramirez read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show, and I’m gonna talk about something that I’ve been talking a lot about lately called the Customer Success Track.

Key Takeaway:

After working with tons of small businesses and clients for the last 30+ years, I’ve realized that there are five stages of marketing that many businesses go through. I’ve been able to identify the milestones that businesses need to move customers or clients through and consequently the tasks associated with each of those milestones.

I’ve mapped this out in what I’m calling the Customer Success Track – a concept I talk about deeply in my latest book – The Ultimate Marketing Engine. In this episode, I’m diving into the five stages of the customer success track – Foundation, Level Up, Organize, Stabilize, and Scale – and how to advance a customer or client through all five stages over the course of a long-term business relationship.

Topics I Cover:

[1:28] What the Customer Success Track is
[1:41] Stage 1: Foundation
[7:46] Stage 2: Level up
[11:36] Stage 3: Organize
[14:23] Stage 4: Stabilize
[18:36] Stage 5: Scale

Resources I Mention:

Get the Kindle version of The Ultimate Marketing Engine for just $2.99 (during the month of August 2022)
Learn more about my book The Ultimate Marketing Engine

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): Today’s episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason Bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I’m a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that. Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let’s try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:46): Hey, hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and I am doing another solo show, just you and me and the radio, as they say, I guess somebody probably said, I’m gonna talk about something that I’ve been talking a lot about lately called the customer success, track little plug for my latest book, the ultimate marketing engine. I talk about it in depth in there, and there’s all kinds of resources. And if you’re listening to this show in August of 2022, you can pick up the Kindle version for 2 99. Okay. There’s a commercial today. But if this topic resonates, go get the book because I go so deep in into it. So here’s the basis premise behind this customer success track. Over the years, I started to recognize, and again, I didn’t wake up on day one and say, this is how the world is over tons and tons of experience, years clients, prospects.

John Jantsch (01:45): I’ve started to realize that there are about five stages of marketing that many businesses go through. And some of them rush through them. Some of ’em hang out in one stage or the another for a long time, but I’ve been able to recognize the characteristics of a business in that stage based a lot on what’s going on in their marketing or what’s going on in, you know, increasingly in their online presence. I know what challenges they’re probably facing at that point because of where they are. But I also know have been able to identify the milestones that we need to move them through and consequently, the tasks associated to each of those milestones. And if we do that, I mean, it’s basically a task list of things that need to be accomplished. If we do that, we can also say, but here’s the promise of moving through that stage.

John Jantsch (02:37): I’m gonna go into some depth from a marketing standpoint. So if you’re a business owner out there thinking, okay, he’s talking about me right now. Maybe it’ll give you some clues to what you need to be looking at in your marketing. If you’re a marketer, if you’re a consultant listening to this and you work with folks on their marketing, this is a great way to start thinking about how you would retain clients for a longer time, because you’ve got a roadmap that you’re working from. And again, as I said, the much, much more depth on this in the ultimate marketing engine and a lot of things that I’ve been writing about, but I thought I would bring it out today because I think what happens is a lot of times people can’t really identify the problem or they think the solution is I just need more leads.

John Jantsch (03:19): Well, what I’m gonna share today is that’s not always the challenge. There is sort of a linear order. to how things need to be done, how things need to be built, how your business will evolve. And I think to some degree you can start recognizing it’s hard if you get stuck because a lot of businesses get to a certain point, frankly, and they’ve grown. They’re doing some things that maybe now they’re juggling a lot of balls dropping a few plates, but outwardly they appear to have succeeded some. And so they, a lot of times dig in and just try to do more where they are and what I wanna suggest through this idea of the customer’s success track and the stages and the customer success track is there’s certain things you as the owner, the founder, the head of marketing, whatever your role is, need to start doing differently at each of these stages.

John Jantsch (04:06): And I think sometimes that’s what trips people up. There are a lot of people that, that they love tinkering. They love DIYing. They love getting in and digging under the hood and figuring things out. Even if it takes ’em all day long to do it. And that has to change. If in fact you wanna move through these stages. So that’s a little bit of what, what I’m gonna talk about today. All right. So let’s talk about the stages. I’ve given them names. There are five of them. I’m gonna go through the characteristics and I’m hopeful that you’ll listen and go, oh, wait a minute. That’s some of what I’m experiencing. So that must be where I am. All right. The stages are foundation level up, organize, stabilize, and scale. Now those are arbitrary names. That’s just a name that we pinned to each of the stages.

John Jantsch (04:53): If you’re thinking about developing something like this for your own practice or for your own offerings that you go out there, obviously five’s even an arbitrary number, but we just found that who we worked with that was a good way to delineate. All right. So what are the characteristics of that foundation business quite often, sometimes, but not always. They’re in a startup mode. They’re very founder driven. All the sales are typically happening from the founder, going out there and knocking on doors. Almost. There’s no website leads coming in. They’ve maybe built a website. It’s kind of a brochure, but no leads coming in. They’re talking about their company. They’re talking about their products in most of their marketing. There’s not a consistent online presence. I mean, we see this all the time. Maybe they’ve got a LinkedIn profile, they’ve got a, a, you know, Google business profile page and there’s off branding off names off what they call it. I mean, there’s just, it’s a lot of inconsistencies. And typically it’s because they’ve not attached any value to participating in social media. They’re not using email in a consistent manner. Even if they’re getting clients, they’re not using email to nurture those leads, to nurture those clients, to actually get repeat business.

John Jantsch (06:05): Part of the reason, some of the challenges of being in this stage, marketing’s changing quickly, or at least it really feels like it. I think it, we run into folks all the time and this part of their, and they just don’t know where to invest. I mean, somebody tells me I need to buy this. Somebody tells me I need to be here. Social media in a lot of cases feels like a way, particularly when you use it the way you see so many people using it, repeat business is not coming your way. And frankly, you’ve got too many tasks.

John Jantsch (06:37): Any of that sound like you , those are the challenges. Now here’s the payoff. If we can fix, if you can fix those challenges, if you can start addressing the fact that you have to look at your website, for example, in a much different way, you have to actually start telling stories. You have to actually start using email. You have to actually start understanding the problem you solve for your customers. Some of the strategic things that go into actually creating a consistent online presence. The promise of that is that you’re now gonna have a website that’s prepared to not only a attract leads, but convert them. You’re gonna get traffic flow from the search engines because you’re creating useful content that people want to find. People wanna read. You’re addressing the problems they’re trying to solve. You can start generating reviews, perhaps automatically using some of the tools that are available today. And you can start thinking about re-engaging past customers. That’s the promise of getting just the foundational stage built.

John Jantsch (07:39): Now, obviously that may not make the phone ring that may not actually take you from a revenue standpoint where you want to go. So what’s the next level of maturity. The next stage, we actually call that one level up. A lot of times people will get that website built that work with a marketer. I mean, they’re starting to produce content that they’re starting to optimize some of their assets out there, but they’re not really converting any of that web traffic. I mean, I guess the first trick is to get some traffic there , but it’s not converting. So, so frankly, if you get things out of order, let’s say at this stage, you wanna start running ads. Well, you’re gonna be wasting a lot of money because until you’re converting traffic that comes to your website, there’s no point sending or, or getting traffic that comes there.

John Jantsch (08:25): You’re not getting into page one. You know, search engine results are on maps in for local businesses there. There’s still okay. You’ve bought into social media, but there’s no engagement, which is really the only thing that matters leads are coming in, but you don’t have any real systematic way to follow up on them. You’re starting to think about online advertising, but not really sure what to do. And then this is what another thing we commonly run into at this stage. There’s no sales process, not one that’s repeatable. Anyway, that just kind of happens as it happens. Now, again, part of the challenges of being in this stage is maybe you’ve got customers, maybe you’re fulfilling orders, but you don’t have enough time to produce content or at least the volume of content that marketers say you need today. You’re not really sure what content to produce online.

John Jantsch (09:16): Advertising seems both complex and expensive. You’re not converting enough leads. You’re starting to have those conversations, but you’re not really converting them into customers. And unfortunately at this stage in many cases, because there aren’t systems built for fulfillment, you’re not retaining those clients. So at this stage, what we’re working on doing now is creating landing pages, creating and narrowing the focus of an ideal customer, creating ways in which we can make content for really, for all stages of the customer journey, creating trust on the website, creating an actual journey with calls to action and maybe some free downloads. So you can start capturing those leads that are, or that traffic that’s coming to your website because they’re interested in something you’re putting out there. So if we can get that now we’ve got the foundation built and now we’re starting to layer on conversion. I mean, we’re starting to layer on, okay, we’ve got people coming now, what’s gonna turn them into customers or what’s gonna at least put them into our pipeline.

John Jantsch (10:19): So the promise there is that, that now first off you’re gonna start attracting higher quality traffic and leads because that’s one of the real challenges in that foundation mode is you might be attracting some leads, but they’re the wrong leads. So you’re gonna get more ideal client interactions at this phase. Search engines and maps are gonna start noticing you, you all, you will create because at this stage, you’re now ready to create some automatic lead capture and follow up. You’re going to create a solid sales process at this stage so that you can start to consistently converting leads that, and in those sales conversations that you’re having,

John Jantsch (10:56): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition.

John Jantsch (11:15): If you need it online marketing, no problem. Some rush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try Semrush free @ Semrush.com/now that’s Semrush.com/now,

John Jantsch (11:31): all right, now we’ve got somebody up and running. So, so you can see we’re kind of building on this. So once we’re up and running, we’re gonna move into organized. Now what’s happening here is okay. Now I’m starting to get leads. I’m starting to have sales conversations, but now I’m kind of a mess. now I’m not tracking client relationships. I’m not really fully tracking my marketing results because I’m running too fast. I’m not upselling. I’m not cross-selling, I’m not taking advantage now of the fact that if I just drove more traffic there, say through advertising, I’m really in a, in many cases, I’m still fighting that competitive dynamic. I’m not seen as a leader necessarily.

John Jantsch (12:11): Now again, the challenges that, that this stage brings quite often is that your lead cycles are really up and down. Sometimes it’s busy. Sometimes it’s slow. sometimes you can keep up. Sometimes you can’t. I mean, marketing return is hard to understand. There’s so many things that go into it. If you’re not really accurately tracking, it’s a challenge. Client acquisition seems really hard or maybe expensive sales processes still at this point are very manual and customer service now has become an issue and is in inconsistent. So what are we gonna go to work on here? This is a place where we certainly are gonna start talking about the need for a CRM. at this stage, you need to be using some of the tools that allow you to automate some of your marketing, to track some of your clients to segment who’s coming to your website.

John Jantsch (13:03): We’re gonna set up a dashboard. You know, at this stage, we want to know what’s working. What’s not working. We’re gonna track calls. We’re gonna track emails. We’re gonna track ad spend. We are going to start thinking about campaigns now to retain customers campaigns, specifically, to sell more to existing customers. We’re probably gonna start talking about referrals here. We are. Certainly at this point can take advantage of some of the online advertising, but we also have to really focus on what happens when somebody becomes a customer. This is the stage where we certainly could go to work earlier on this, but we find that this is where it becomes so crucial that we can make it a priority. And that’s the customer experience, the onboarding, the follow up, the communication, the orientation. I mean, all those as set intentions that we can repeat, you know, time and time again.

John Jantsch (13:56): So we do this in this stage, and now we’re gonna see a consistent lead flow. We’re not gonna be wasting money on advertising because we’re gonna understand what works, what doesn’t, we’re gonna automate some of the lead nurturing, not as a way to shield ourselves from having to talk to customers, but as a way to actually create a frictionless better experience for prospects and customers, we’re gonna be converting the right customers. And we’re gonna have much higher retention and referral. This is the place where a lot of businesses, I mean, getting to this space is really the goal. Many businesses don’t even reach this stage, but also this is a place where now all of a sudden, if we’re gonna go beyond this, we can’t just add more revenue. We just can’t add more sales because we’re not gonna be able to handle it. We have to add team.

John Jantsch (14:44): We have to add delegate delegation. This is the place at which quite frankly, the marketer, the doer, the task doer, who has maybe moved to being task manager. This is the place where we need actually a real CEO. we need the head of the organization to form because this is the, you know, I don’t know where the revenue is, but it’s certainly when we’re gonna go north of a million in revenue, obviously that’s an arbitrary figure because types of businesses are different, but this is the one to 10 to 50 million range where short of a leadership team, short of, uh, you being a CEO and no longer being the marketing manager or the marketing doer has to happen. So what’s happening here. You know, we’re using the characteristics now are actually more positive because you’re using a CRM for sales. You’ve established some marketing KPIs.

John Jantsch (15:40): Maybe now you’re starting to get the room, the breathing room to think, Hey, we can develop new products, new offerings. We’ve got online advertising, working for us well enough. Maybe we’re starting to feel like, Hey, we’re a bigger player. We need to get more involved in the community, more involved in our industry. We need to start developing internal marketing roles. Now the challenge, of course, at this stage, that all those characteristics sound lovely, right? Profitability starts to vary at this stage. We maybe were really pumping in expenses cause we’re buying advertising. We’re adding team. So expenses are increasing rapidly.

John Jantsch (16:19): It’s tough to maintain marketing momentum with the growth that’s coming and even harder to maintain fulfillment. It’s time to actually probably bring on a strategic marketing hire as well. And this is the point where a lot of founders actually have to start analyzing, am I the right person? to be in this seat to be the COO, do I need a COO? Do I need somebody? Who’s actually not only running marketing, but to somebody who’s actually running operations or at least creating the delegation and the systems and the processes for getting all the work done. So in many cases, this is where we’ll definitely go to work on trying to automate things in an elegant way. Again, not to just shield the, the business from ever having to talk to anyone. This is where we’ll make significant talk about making significant investments in both marketing spend.

John Jantsch (17:15): And then I guess a third one operations spend, if in some cases, this is the place, you know, for many of our consultants, for example, this is the place where they need to start adding account managers. They need to AC actually start adding managerial levels in, in, you know, several places because businesses there. But if it’s going out the back door as fast as it’s coming in the front door, you’re not really gonna gain any traction, but the promise here, if we can get this done, if we can build systems for both marketing and for fulfillment here, we can start replicating what we’re doing. We start replicating what you used to be doing maybe as the founder and the startup, and this is gonna actually lead to consistent lead conversion, which certainly is going to lead to consistent growth. This is where word of mouth and referral generation just starts happening.

John Jantsch (18:04): Steadily your business really becomes start starting at this point to become an asset to the owner of the business, because it’s not as dependent on you. And frankly, if you ever wanna talk about exiting your business or selling your business, I mean, that’s certainly one of the criteria. Somebody has to be able to see how this would run without you. You know, there are many businesses that get found by an individual grown by an individual. And really a lot of the relationships are with that individual as opposed to the systems and the framework of the business. All right, the last one as we call scale, and really this one, probably this stage, you know, probably fits somebody that is maybe, maybe thinking in terms of exiting the business or certainly of maybe exiting their role as a, you know, day to day CEO or something, you know, kind of moving to a board type of role.

John Jantsch (18:57): So what’s going on here typically, is that again, more positive characteristics, but still same challenges. So lead flow is pretty consistent and predictable starting to build an internal marketing team. You’re sales management driven, not just a couple sales people out there, right? There’s an entire selling system. You’re starting to become recognized as a leader or in your industry or in your town. There’s a bit of financial mastery. So at this stage, while again, some people who are more financial oriented, you know, maybe start this in the first stage, but this is where profit and your cost of acquisition of new business. This is where you’re starting to have capital needs. I mean, so financial mastery is, has become a much bigger piece of the puzzle for success here. And you’ve really almost built and established, uh, uh, an internal org chart of roles of management roles.

John Jantsch (19:53): Now, the challenges here of course, is anybody who’s grown to this. I mean, we might be talking about 20, 30 people or more here. We might be talking about 10, 20, 30 million or more here. And so all of a sudden culture, the thing that maybe was a great thing, not only for those people that work there, but for your customers, um, rapid growth sometimes really comes with a deterioration of culture. There’s staff turnover. There’s no emphasis on employee branding. There’s a challenge to innovate, to continue to grow that bring new products and service offerings can add a lot of stress at this stage. So in terms of many of the things that that I talked about as characteristics, I mean, now you’re gonna go to work on you. You absolutely are gonna build team. You’re gonna build leadership team here. You’re going to formalize structure around people, operations.

John Jantsch (20:46): You’re going to need to give more and more focus to fulfillment and more and more focus to innovation. In fact, a lot of leaders in this stage of business, actually their primary job is to innovate, becomes the, you know, you’ve got that operations higher in place that is that managing the people that you’ve got. Somebody that’s focused on culture. You’ve got somebody that’s focused on sales. You’ve got the finance piece figured out. So in many cases, the role of the leader at this stage is ideas is innovation is to figure out how you can get more market share. Again, the promise, the value of the business will continue to grow. Cash flow will be consistent if need be. You’re gonna be set up in now to raise significant capital. A lot of folks go out and raise a whole bunch of capital based on money or I’m sorry, based on an idea, but a business that generates consistent cash flow can demonstrate an ability to grow is going to have a really easy, um, access to a lot of cash.

John Jantsch (21:49): Should they need it? And certainly this is that are seen as leaders have a much easier time attracting experienced talent to, to the organization as well. So all of that to say, you know, many companies, many businesses come to us say, I wanna grow, I want more business. I want more leads. And what we’ve discovered is certainly that’s, we’re gonna get there but first we’re gonna develop more clarity. First, we’re gonna develop more confidence in the systems, more control over what works and what doesn’t work. And there is a linear process for this. But for us having this roadmap is such a, you know, becomes the mission, becomes taking folks from where they are to where they want to go. In terms of training, in terms of hiring, in terms of even sales messaging, being able to demonstrate that you have a path to build on for many particularly service businesses is a pretty compelling differentiator and a compelling offer for somebody who is just had so many people selling them the tactic of the week.

John Jantsch (22:52): So while I just went through kind of our customer stages and I could do a whole nother show on every milestone involved in accomplishing moving people through there, but my feeling is that just about any business I’ve done marketing here, right? But just about any business that sells to other businesses, maybe even individuals could develop this idea of stage growth of staged evolution or maturity. So that’s what I wanted to share today. As I said, if you pick up the ultimate marketing engine, you can pick that up. Wherever books are sold, all the electronic book. If you’re listening to this in August of 2022 is on sale now for $2 and 99 cents. So when you get the book, you’ll actually the entire show that I went through has a, has this roadmap in a form. So when you get the book, you’ll actually get all the forms and tools that are shown in the book as well.

John Jantsch (23:43): So that’s it for today. Hopefully we’ll run into one of these days out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we create it a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Semrush.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

August 27, 2022/by exposure

Committing To Your Niche And Owning Your Market

Committing To Your Niche And Owning Your Market written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Brent Weaver

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Brent Weaver. Brent is on a mission to help 10,000 digital agency owners achieve freedom in business and life by helping them own their market. Brent is the founder and CEO of uGurus, a business training, and education company dedicated to this mission. He also hosts one of the leading podcasts in the business niche—The Digital Agency Show and is the author of Get Rich in the Deep End: Commit to Your Niche, Own Your Market, and Audaciously Scale Your Agency.

Key Takeaway:

Brent Weaver is known for and on a mission to help digital agency owners own their market – whatever that may be. Too many agencies rely on word-of-mouth referrals or waste advertising dollars to grow their business. In this episode, we dive into Brent’s framework that can help you attract the right customers, establish your authority, and build a marketing engine that will help you acquire a solid, growing client base.

Questions I ask Brent Weaver:

[1:32] Are you all in on the idea that you must pick a niche?
[5:31] How do you define scale, and how does it differ from growth?
[7:59] In the agency world, there’s a lot of conversation around retainers versus project work — what’s your take on which path to go down?
[12:49] Can you dive into your 5 A framework from your book and also talk a little bit about how you see the role of content today?
[16:09] Can you give us a 10,000-foot view of what uGurus is and what you offer?

More About Brent Weaver:

Get a copy of his book – Get Rich in the Deep End: Commit to Your Niche, Own Your Market, and Audaciously Scale Your Agency
Learn more about Brent’s business – UGURUS
Brent’s Podcast – The Digital Agency Show Podcast

Take The Marketing Assessment:

- Take the Assessment

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Brent Weaver. He’s the founder and CEO of you gurus a business training and education company in the digital agency space. And he also hosts one of the leading podcasts in that niche. The digital agency show he’s the author of get rich in the deep end, commit to your niche, own your market and audaciously scale your agency. So Brent, welcome to the show. Awesome. Be here, John. Thanks. So did I say niche, right? What do you think , you know, I’m a ditch man, myself. No, you know, it is what it is, right? I mean, I it’s, it’s it’s maybe my Texas comes through, right. Well, you, it goes better with the riches or in the niches right. Than, uh, than in the niche. It just doesn’t rhyme at all.

Does it? So let’s talk about that. However you, uh, pronounce it. Let’s talk about that, cuz that, that is certainly common advice. Now I narrow down to, to a niche get really good at serving that niche. I find a lot of people’s particularly people that are starting out or trying to grow, they get really focused on thinking, oh, I have to pick dentists or whatever it is. And you know, I have to only work with them and then they find out six months later, they hate it. So, you know, how do you, are you all in on that, obviously it’s part of your ti title of your book, but are you all in on that or do you temper that in any way that that would be more helpful? I think, uh, to particularly people getting started. Yeah. I, I mean, there’s definitely pros and cons to, to being a generalist versus a, a specialist, right?

Yeah. I mean obviously if we are thinking about analogies, I mean, I have a, a general practice doctor that I go see on a regular basis and it’s really easy to get an appointment. I can just kind of pop in there. He kind of knows a little bit about a lot of things, but you know, when it comes to like getting heart surgery, I’m obviously not gonna go to him. And I have a, a sneaking suspicion about which one is a member of the better country club. Yeah. But, but you know, I think that when it comes to agencies, if you don’t, if you don’t love the market or the type of business, I mean, I think it’s, it’s good to separate like the market from the client. I mean, if you work with 10 dentists and you realize like you just don’t like seeing pictures of people’s mouths, like that’s totally cool.

I’m on my 13th market working with digital agencies. So this idea that you’re gonna find the one, you know, the first time you go out there, I think is, is probably not a good expectation. So I think people should be willing to, to try it. But the reality is if you do work with, uh, a specific market, that’s a lot more repeatable, you can build processes. Yeah. You can find team members that understand what you’re doing. You can create fixed offers. Yeah. There’s a lot of upside to having a, a fixed market. Yeah. And I think something, you said there’s an important distinction. I mean, what I always kind of bristle at is when people, I work with a lot of folks starting, you know, jumping out of corporate and wanting to start an agency and they’ve been told you need to pick a niche.

And so they, they try to, but they don’t don’t have the experience yet to do that. Mm-hmm and I think what you just said, you know, a lot of times you find what you like working with. And I actually, you know, I think you can find a narrow focus in types of like within a niche types of business or types of business owners or behaviors, you know, of businesses, you know? And, and I think that’s, I think that’s a key part of it, but there’s no question once you find that, as you said, you know, you can a Facebook ad campaign for, you know, somebody in Milwaukee is probably gonna be just as good for somebody in Omaha. So , you know, so, and like, you know, I think it’s good to also, you know, you kind of brought up the niche within a niche.

Yeah, yeah. Concept. So like one of my clients, he, he actually does focus on dentist. I don’t have a lot of clients that focus on dentist, but he has 27 clients in the market. Right. Yeah. They all pay him about three grand a month and he gets most of his clients from one Facebook group that has 38,000 members. Now I I’m, I don’t know what 27 over 38,000 is, but you know, he has a thriving business with 27, like it’s tiny little like sliver of the market. Right? Yeah. So I think ultimately what happens when people start to focus on a market is they do find themselves drilling down even further, either through a channel or a type of client, a range of clients. And I think if you are the type of person that likes variety, you can also look at a horizontal market, which would be, you know, if you were, let’s say an expert at Shopify stores.

Yeah. Hey, cool. We’re gonna build websites for a lot of different Shopify stores. Right. Could be jewelers, could be, artists could be, you know, clothing manufacturers, right. It doesn’t have to just be a vertical. Yeah. I think I kinda like the variety is part of it. you get kind of bored after a while. So in the title also you have scale your agency. I run into a lot of people that confuse growth and scale, you know, and a lot of, for a lot of people, when they talk about scale, what they really just mean is getting bigger, you know, having more clients, how do you define scale first off and, and does it differ from growth?

Well, you know, that’s a great question. So I think that, you know, you used that term board yeah. Earlier, too, which I love. Right. So, so to me, scale is we’re actually creating systems and processes that are repeatable and that we’re growing the business by getting the owner out of the stuff that they’re getting bored of. Right. And, and I know a lot of agency owners that are in really successful growing businesses, but man, like I have a lot of gray hair, but like they’re stressed out, they’re overworked, they’re involved in every meeting they’re involved in every client. Right. Like they have growth, which is awesome. Right. But they don’t have anything that’s really scalable. Right. They’re still like the wizard that’s spinning all the plates. Yeah. And so I think within whether it’s, it’s choosing a market vertical or horizontal or a fixed offer, like you have to find that element in your business, that lows, common denominator, that atomic unit for scale.

And I don’t think that’s as necessary if you’re just interested in growth, but if you’re trying to create something really scalable and get yourself out, I think that you’ve gotta find some common denominator. And I think most people, you know, you start getting 10 team members and, you know, 25 clients or something, if you don’t have those systems or processes, I mean, it’s just gonna be growth will actually be a problem. Won’t it? You know, I’ve talked to a lot of agencies, I’ve done a lot of field trips and, and, and site visits and hand on interviews. I mean, you know, we were at effective UI. Gosh, it, it probably seven or eight years ago. And they had, you know, 120, 130 team members. They worked with corporations across a huge myriad of the fortune 500 and fortune 5,000. They had a very diverse set of people that worked there.

Their lowest common denominator, I guess, was kind of two things. One, it was around the UI UX of, you know, these different businesses and that kind of problem solving. But the other was Deb billable hour. Like they were unapologetically focused on maximizing the billable hours that, that business sold, you know, they weren’t confused on their model. They knew what their model was. They knew generally how much clients needed to spend for them to be a client of their business. And so I think that, you know, they achieved insane growth, but like, it was really complicated. They had to have a lot of really smart, a lot of really expensive salaries. And so while I saw they, they got a lot of growth. I don’t know if I would’ve looked at their business and said, wow, that’s a really scalable system. I could see that growing to a thousand people.

Right. Yeah. Like it was impressive, but like, I don’t know if I would consider that to be scale. So there in the agency world, there’s a lot of conversation around retainers versus project work. I mean, where do you fall on? I’m guessing, you know, if you’re gonna own your market, if you are going to, you know, brand and package your offerings, you know, you’re probably going to be more towards the retainer. I mean, I, I think it depends what your goals are. I mean, there’s some pros and cons, you know, you know, usually a retainer relationship ends when there’s, you know, some unhappiness , mm-hmm with the client and vendor relationship. Right. What a retainers ending. Yeah. What am I getting again? Who’s this person we’re paying, why are they billing your credit card every month? Right. And so I think that you can, you know, there are some pluses to a project where you’ve got this fixed life cycle.

Yeah. Yeah. And you can really create a choreographed experience for your clients in that space. What I would level it up to without even thinking about whether retainer is best or whether, uh, project best, I think there’s different types of, of, of work that lend themselves to both. But I think as an agency, it’s how do we create a killer offer? How do we make something that when we’re sitting in front of a customer, it’s like, it’s so good. You know, it’s like, it can’t be refused. And so I think that should be always be the goal, right? Whether it’s, you know, a, a, a big $50,000, you know, pitch, you know, how can we remove risk for the client? How can we mitigate risks? How can we promise or show proof of results to where we’re gonna really blow ’em away and just make them so excited to move forward.

And so I think once you figure out like what that offer is, and, and I think that’s one of the reasons why I love people that are focused on a vertical is because we get to really understand that customer mm-hmm , as it, you know, as they relate to the entire market, we can craft an offer. We can understand what our churn is. We can understand what our refund rates are. We can understand what our success rate is, right. We can actually look at that stuff at scale and we can create better and better offers, you know? And so I think when you get to the point where you can make an offer, where you say, you know, pay me 5k a month, and if you’re not getting, you know, if you didn’t get 10 clients in the next 90 days, I’m gonna give you a hundred percent of your money back.

You know, I mean, or, and, and one of my friends, he actually even will write a check for five grand. He says, I’ll give you all your money back and I’ll pay you $5,000 if I don’t get this result. And I think if you’re gonna get to that point of being able to get with create offers, like you need to know your customer, like better than they know themselves. Yeah. You need to know your processes and your results better than, you know, anybody else. And you need to be so confident to be able to offer something like that, where it’s truly an offer that somebody can’t refuse. So I always push people to focus more on their offer and, and also build the model. That’s right for you. If you want peace of mind and you want that consistent cash flow, then you know, it’s probably better to be on a retainer kind of model. You know, sometimes people say that that projects are easier to sell the retainers. I, I don’t know.

Yeah. I tell you, the model that I love is you sell a project that leads to a retainer, you know, because they it’s lower risk. , you know, it’s a lower risk for them. They get to see the value, you know, they’re bought in now, like they have a relationship and they’re like, how can we keep working together? That that’s generally the model we take, because it is, you know, somebody just meet you, you made, ’em a pitch and you say, now it’s gonna be $5,000 a month. It’s like, I don’t know what I’m buying. You know, I don’t have, I don’t have any experience of it. I mean, yeah, you got proof. You know, you got other people you’ve helped, but that’s, to me, I think a lot of times people go for that long term retainer too fast in a lot of ways, even if that’s their model.

And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load, handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need online marketing, no problem. Some rush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try some rush free @ Semrush.com/now that’s Semrush.com/now. So you have a framework in the book, five A’s, you know, every good book has to have a framework. I will say, when I was reading about the, kind of the layout of your framework, I was very happy to see that you were telling people they actually needed to think about content differently. That it wasn’t about more content.

It was about content that was strategic and it wasn’t just blog posts. So I, I guess maybe comment on kind of how you see the role of content, and then maybe we can get into the five A’s. Yeah. Well, I think that something that should be thought about with any content is distribution. Yeah. And I look at, you know, if you are trying to get into a new market and you gave that example earlier of, you know, people leaving the corporate world and, and not having the experience. And so I think a mistake that a lot of people make is they, they start their business and they start their agency and think, oh man, I need to do content. Right? So they create a Facebook fan page or, you know, a business page and they create their website. They start to blog on their own site.

And, and in the book, I kind of talk about this garage band effect, right. It’s like, imagine if the Beatles, like, they’re like, all right, we’re gonna, we’re gonna make it big and night after night, they play in the garage. Right. And they just like hooked people with like, come and watch. ’em obviously they were all good musicians and they had a plan, but they, you know, what made them big was they went and pitched themselves to like the local clubs, the local venues. And that’s what differentiates them from like the hobbyist bands that just get, get together on Friday nights and jam and, you know, smoke weed and drink beer together and have a good time. Right. Which there’s nothing wrong with that. Right. They’re probably having a really good time, but if they wanna make it big, then going out and putting yourself in front of a judge and a jury is really important.

It it’s so important to get that rejection. And so when you’re thinking about content for your agency, I think it’s equally, if not more important to think about that distribution component, right. I’ve got an idea. I have something to say and I need to go out there and find somebody who’s willing to put my stuff on their platform. And I think every time you then get a blog, post published, every time you show up and do a webinar on somebody else’s platform, the amount of credibility, right. The amount of refinement, right. You have to show up a little differently when it’s somebody else’s, you know, somebody else’s stage, right. They’re a filter, but they also have higher expectations. And so I think if you’re gonna approach content as a new agency, you know, and it’s harder, cuz you’re not gonna, like at first, it’s gonna feel like you’re not getting anything out there.

You’re like, oh man, wouldn’t it just be easier if I could just tweet on my own account. Right. So you’re not gonna get a lot of stuff out there, but what’s gonna happen is when you do, you’re gonna build audience like that. So within the first six months of launching you gurus, you know, we were a nobody. And we had a list of over 10,000 people, a hundred percent organically because we went and got articles and content published on other existing platforms that have been around for 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. I’m a huge proponent of being guests on podcasts. That, to me, that’s one of the best solves so many issues on top of getting your word out there and getting somebody else to say, you have something to say, it’s great for SEO. just because you know, I’m gonna promote the heck out of, of this episode and probably point back to you Gus.

And that’ll be a nice link and, and now that I have a list, right, I can promote it too. Right. I mean, which, which that happens, right. That does happen. I mean, after a while you get to build up some assets and then you get to use those assets to create partnerships and to put feature other people. And to, you know, there, there is some stuff with that, but I, I always say like there’s own media and there’s kind of media that you rent. And when you, when you first start out, I think if you go into like the rent media space, it’s gonna help you build platform for yourself later. It’s a really long road to build your own audience. Yeah. Uh, I’ve only been doing it for 30 years. so, so just like John, right. Just putting your 30 years in and you, you too can have a platform like duct tape marketing so let’s talk a little bit about you guru.

You do, you’re doing, obviously you’re doing consulting with agencies and helping them grow, but you also do events, pretty good size events. You have an academy there. So maybe just, uh, obviously invite people to check it out, but also kind of give a little, uh, 10,000 foot view of what you do at ERs. Yeah. I appreciate that. So, so we’re a coaching training and community program for digital agencies to grow their business. We use that, you know, that market driven model that we kind of talked about with five, a framework and, you know, finding your market is kind of our baseline to help agencies scale. And we have a, a one year program it’s kind of a three year vision that people sign up for a year at a time. And I always tell people, you know, it took me like, it took me eight years to like uncover all of the really big mistakes running an agency.

And then it took me five years to really, you know, fix accelerate and kind of grow a successful business through it. And so our vision from day one with you Guus is always to see how, how can we take that? You know, that 12 year grueling, you know, experience right. And shorten it up into a much smaller learning cycle and also give you some friends and some peers to enjoy that journey with, I, I had no agency friends except for my business partner, which he was in the boat with me. Right. We had no agency friends for the really the first eight to nine years. We ran our business. I mean, I didn’t know, I didn’t regularly meet with, have lunch collaborate with in any meaningful way, really, any other agency owner for the first eight years of my business. And it was lonely and it was hard.

It was stressful. And in entrepreneurship was a lot more fun when you have friends. Yeah, yeah, no, I think there’s no, you know, especially the world we working today, you know, COVID aside. I mean, people, you know, don’t have offices that they go and sit in, you know, with the 20, even if they have a team of 20 people, it can be kinda lonely. So, so having, just, as you said, somebody else who can say, well, here’s the mistakes I made, you know, maybe you can learn something from that, you know, just kind of shortens the, uh, the curve for, for sure. And it’s just you gurus.com, right? That’s right. That’s right. All right, Brent, thanks so much for something by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into each other one of these days out there on the road. Awesome, man. Thanks John. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it@ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Semrush.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

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August 26, 2022/by exposure

What You Should Be Tracking In Your Marketing Efforts And Why

What You Should Be Tracking In Your Marketing Efforts And Why written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show, and I’m gonna talk about the topic of analytics — specifically tracking results, either for your own business or for clients that you may work with.

Key Takeaway:

Tracking and analytics are critical to understanding what’s working and what’s not working in your business. But – figuring out the right things to track is one of the greatest challenges for many businesses and marketers. Identifying the correct data to track is far more important than just tracking a bunch of information in an unorganized manner that isn’t going to allow you to take any informed action on it.

In this episode, I work through the three parts of the marketing funnel and what data you should be tracking at each level to help you identify what’s working and what’s not so that you can better invest your time and energy (and money).

Topics I Cover:

[1:41] The point of tracking anything is to know what’s working and what’s not
[2:58] Breaking the marketing funnel down into three parts
[3:32] What to look for at the top of the funnel
[4:55] What it means to look for trend-based data at the top of the funnel
[7:18] What to look for at the middle of the funnel
[8:23] The elements to look at that indicate engagement
[11:39] What to look for at the bottom of the funnel

Resources I Mention:

The Marketing Assessment — Marketingassessment.co

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

Hello, welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I’m gonna do another solo show today. I’m gonna talk about the terribly sexy topic of analytics tracking results, either for your own business or for clients that you may work with. And I know that that’s not everybody’s favorite topic, but I wanted to give you my point of view on it at least. And who knows, maybe this will be a shorter show today because for me tracking and analytics in some ways less is more, I mean, figuring out the right things to track is far more important than say just tracking everything that you can or worse yet, building a dashboard that just brings you a bunch of irrelevant information or information. That’s not organized in a way that’s gonna allow you to take action on it. That’s really the point of tracking anything is to know what’s working.

What’s not working, what you could do better at where you should invest your time and energy. So the dashboards that we build for clients, instead of just tracking everything and just throwing it at them, we like to build it in some ways, in an order of relevance, I do think tracking and using dashboards, we use a tool called agency analytics for what it’s worth. There are many tools out there now that allow you to bring in and integrate a lot of the things that are worth tracking, various ads, your social media, your email response reviews, things like that. But the way we like to organize it is traditionally people today are talking about marketing in terms of funnel still again, you know, I talk about it in a lot different way, the hourglass, but it is helpful from a marketing to the point of conversion.

There’s certainly lots of reasons to then also be tracking things like your repeat sales or your average customer, your customer, lifetime value, amount of referrals. You know, things that happen after somebody becomes a customer. But when thinking about customers per se, or creating customers, per se, we like to break the funnel into three parts as not rocket science. People are doing this now, you know, talking about top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, just with the idea that P as people move along, different metrics matter. I mean, there is some value in tracking, like where are we getting our traffic from our website? But ultimately the reason for tracking that is to then say, okay, of the channels, for example, of our traffic, what of that traffic is ultimately converting to a customer. So there is a, there is kind of a linear order to this.

So in top of the funnel, we like to tra my, one of my favorites really is to track in analytics. Our are trafficked by channel. I wanna know how much traffic’s coming from organic search from just direct that we’re sending people there paid search. Obviously that’s a big component if you’re running paid, and then social to a degree is a component as well. So top of the funnel, we just want to, we wanna measure, you know, are we growing? There is our organic search becoming a bigger percentage, say of our overall bucket, things like that. That’s the reason for tracking the metrics a again, yay. We got 2,330 sessions from organic traffic. Doesn’t really matter. but it’s the growth. It’s the maybe time, average time that we’re tracking. It’s the goal completions that we’ve set up in analytics. That is what we are really trying to understand at that level.

I wanna track newsletter opt-ins is that list growing, for example, that might be one, again, these are vanity metrics, but likes and followers say on Instagram and Facebook, they can give us some top level. Are we moving in the right direction, kind of data, but you know, the fact that our Instagram followers are up by 2% is not really that relevant. It’s certainly not. You know, we’re talking to clients, you know, we’re not saying you gained 25, Instagram followers did, you know, look what we did for you. It’s irrelevant. but we’re trying to track trends. And so that goes in top of the funnel. I also wanna know, and quite often I will stick in there, the popular page, one indication of that we’re doing things right in some ways is, you know, is, are we getting growth at the contact us page? What, you know, we start actually recognizing, are there certain blog posts that maybe have taken off at the top of the funnel?

All we’re looking for is trends. We’re looking for useful information, things that, you know, if we created a new page on a website and we’ve been driving a lot of traffic to it, we wanna see that’s become a popular page. We wanna get a little more granular at this level. With our popular traffic sources, who’s sending us traffic is, you know, this is where I might put our Google business profile listing. Obviously I want to track various, uh, social networks. If I’m on five different social networks, now I’m gonna get a little more granular, which one of them’s actually starting to send us some traffic. And then finally keyword ranking. I will bring Google search console ranking or, or some other tool like we use Semrush all the time. And I can put that into agency analytics. And all I’m looking for there is, Hey, there are 27 keyword phrases we’re tracking.

Did, did we make any progress? Did we lose any ground? We might put bang in here as well as Google, but there, we’re just trying to keep tabs. And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need it online marketing, no problem. Some rush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try some rush free @ Semrush.com/now that’s Semrush.com/now. So you see all of those things I just went through are what I would call top of the funnel. They’re all high level. They’re all trend based.

They’re all things that are meant to show us, okay. Are we making some progress? Be obviously progress in, in the, you know, the real world is till we get a clients. And none of that is really giving us that data. So now we start now we move to what I call middle of the funnel. And now we’re gonna start tracking the things that we believe are people more engaged? that? Yes, they came to the website, but what did they do? They clicked on an ad, but what did they do? So middle of the funnel, we are definitely gonna start tracking ad conversions. We’re gonna look at ad conversions by if you’re running multiple ad groups, we wanna see which one of those ad groups are, are converting at a high level. And we might do, obviously the tools give you the, you know, we’ll look at 30 days, but then we’ll look at ’em comparison to the last 30 days that quite often can give you a little more data as well, the goal completion.

So this is making the assumption that you actually set up goals in your Google analytics, which everyone should do so that you know that if you know, whether it’s a phone call or it’s a fill out a form or is download some free report that you’re tracking those events that are happening as well. Because then what that’s actually able to do is now you can start breaking down, okay? Here are the goal completions, but here are the goal completions by channel. And it turns out that gosh, that paid search that we thought was so expensive is actually producing 70% of the goals. So it’s working, or at least we feel it’s working because we’re seeing that people are picking up the phone. People are filling out forms. Now we don’t know yet. If they become customers, this is a place where we might also break down campaigns, ad campaigns.

So we’re just looking at, has our average cost changed? Are we getting clicks or what’s our conversion rate looking like how many conversions what’s our cost? I mean, it’s all the basic stuff, but this is not just how many ads are we running, right? This is how much money are we spending to create X amount of conversions. So we’re getting more granular. Now we use call tracking for just about everything and actually form submission tracking as well. Meaning that, that we are tracking where our phone calls are coming from by channel. We’re tracking where our form submissions are coming from by channel. Now these are big buying signal actions. I mean, you have to have everything else generated awareness, middle of the funnel, we’re generating leads. So we’re looking at, you know, things that are much more engaged folks. I, I like to throw over reviews in the middle of the funnel as well.

They, they probably don’t officially go in there, but we love to track those. And it’s showing that we have happy customers. It will ultimately be engagement, you know, in, in say Facebook a review in Facebook. Although I must admit it’s become very spammy. Facebook doesn’t seem to have any desire to do anything about it. That’s just a little side note , but it, it shows more engagement. So we’re gonna look now at not only the reach say in our social platforms, but the likes, the comments that’s the shares. I mean, those are engagements that, that, that might have a tendency to demonstrate that maybe people are paying attention to what we’re putting out there and it’s causing them to do something that, uh, that we see as a positive, not necessarily buying signal, but a bit of the buying process. Now, all of those things are where a lot of marketers stop because ultimately we generated the lead.

We generated the phone call. We generated the, uh, the form fill, but let’s face it. The bottom of the funnel is what we’re really after understanding quite often in our case, that means that we have to get from a customer, which one of these phone calls, which ones of these forms filled out, actually turned into a customer. And obviously if you’re looking at this in your own business, that’s the link you’ve gotta be able to make. And that’s why I love call tracking so much. I mean, we rerecord many of the calls. You’re able to actually listen to a phone call and go, yeah, that was a sale . So, so you can actually say this lead generated from this source turned into a client, and that’s really the, that’s the holy grail. I mean, that’s what we’re after, because then we can literally say that, you know, that’s what, that, that’s what it cost to generate that client.

It’s nice to know what generated that lead, but I wanna know what generated that client. So now we’re tracking at the bottom of the funnel. How many depend upon your business? How many scheduled consultations were there? How many of those consultations or sales calls, you know, turned into, you know, were converted, we’re turned into clients. We can back that then into the cost of client acquisition. And then we wanna start measuring things like what’s the average revenue per customer. Obviously every business is gonna have different things that are going to make sense, but average revenue per customer in many cases is a great metric because you can, I, you can influence that if you know what it costs you to get a customer and you know what the revenue average revenue per customer is, you can start going to work on CRE increasing average revenue per customer.

Heck raise your prices. that might actually increase your average revenue per cost per customer, and maybe even decrease your cost to generate a customer. So if you think about the whole point of today’s recording is to start thinking about your metrics and your tracking as a way to turn somebody who visited your website into a customer. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do with marketing. So let’s start thinking about our metrics, what metrics would be seen as top of the funnel, what metrics for you would be middle of the funnel that would be truly lead tracking. And then finally, what metrics would be bottom of the funnel that you could have access to that would show really the customer metrics. That’s understanding that journey. At least that part of the journey is how you really can better understand where you can invest your marketing dollars, where you can cut out investing your marketing dollars and where you can really double down on what it is that’s actually working instead of just throwing a bunch of stuff out there.

You know, even if your revenue’s growing, even if you’re happy with sales, if you’re not doing this level of tracking, you’re not maximizing, you’re not optimizing what your business could be doing. So whether or not you are a small business owner who needs to track this for their own marketing or a marketer out there who needs to get better at tracking in your position, or you’re a consultant who has many clients that, uh, that, that you should start getting on this way of thinking when it comes to analytics. So that’s all I have for today. However, I’ll throw out one thing. If you are a consultant, if you are thinking about starting a consulting practice, we just launched a new free assessment. Go find out. Can I analyze where you are in your consulting journey @ consultantassessment.com. It’s free ask you about 15 questions. It’ll give you a free report to give you some ideas on where you might to take your business to the next level, whether you’re just getting started or you’re an existing consultant who is trying to find better ways to do things, or you’re a senior consultant who now is actually struggling with scale more than just getting clients or just serving clients.

You’re adding team, you’re adding process, you’re adding systems. So go find out where you are on that kind of continuum of consulting at consultant, assessment.com. That’s it for now. Hopefully we’ll run into you all one of these days out there on the road,

This Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Semrush.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

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August 25, 2022/by exposure

How To Turn Your Customers Into Lustomers™

How To Turn Your Customers Into Lustomers™ written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

About the show:

About this episode:

In this episode of the Agency Spark Podcast, Sara talks with Bryan Rutberg on how to turn your customers into lustomers.

Bryan Rutberg, founder and president of 3C Communications, guides and inspires leaders and their organizations to develop better communications skills, including public speaking, to build stronger relationships with customers and other key audiences as a path to deeper loyalties, greater market share, and way more fun for everyone.

How To Create A Culture Of Learning And Growth

How To Create A Culture Of Learning And Growth written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Whitney Johnson

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Whitney Johnson. Whitney is CEO of the tech-enabled talent development company Disruption Advisors. She is one of the top ten business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50. Whitney is an expert in smart growth leadership, and she co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard Business School’s late Clayton Christensen. She’s also the author of the book — Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company.

Key Takeaway:

Growing is the goal. Helping people develop their potential and become the self they want to be and are capable of being is what leaders strive toward. And as individuals grow, so do organizations. If you want to lead and scale an organization, that transformation starts within. In this episode, I talk with Whitney Johnson about how to grow a business — the smart way — by cultivating a culture of learning and growth.

Questions I ask Whitney Johnson:

[1:26] How are you applying the S Curve of Learning to growth and leadership?
[2:48] Sometimes, there’s a point in the S Curve of Learning where even though it takes off, it can actually nosedive. Is this something you see happening with personal development?
[4:09] I’ve owned my own business coming up on 30 years. And I feel like there’s not just one S curve of growth – what’s your view on that?
[6:50] Would you say your book is as much about personal development as it is about leadership development?
[8:14] What are some of the new habits or questions that people need to start asking themselves instead of just saying this is the new way we’re going to do things?
[9:54] What advice do you have for people trying to get through the long part where they may not be seeing any advancement?
[13:25] How can a leader or someone trying to develop personally apply the ‘collect like a child’ idea from your book?
[15:43] Do you think the leadership part in your book might be harder to install because of the varying cultural aspects inside of different organizations?
[17:19] Your book is filled with interviews – is there a story in the book that you feel has really nailed it?
[19:37] Where can people find out more about your book and your work?

More About Whitney Johnson:

Her book – Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company
Disrupt Yourself Podcast

Take The Marketing Assessment

Take the Assessment

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): Today’s episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by blissful prospecting, hosted by Jason bay and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network host Jason bay dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. Recently, they did a show on the four day work week. I’m a huge fan. I think everybody should be looking towards trying to create that. Hey, we get most of our work done in like two hours every day. Anyway, so let’s try out the four day work week. All right, listen to blissful, prospecting, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Whitney Johnson. She’s the CEO of the tech enabled talent development company, disruption advisors, one of the top 10 business thinkers in the world as named by thinkers 50. She’s an expert at smart growth leadership. She co-founded the disruptive innovation fund with Harvard business. School’s late Clayton Christensen and she’s the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today. Smart growth, how to grow your people to grow your company. So Whitney, welcome to the show,

Whitney Johnson (01:22): John, thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:24): So Clayton Christensen is probably the person that, you know, people that have been doing this, as long as me hold up there is like, that’s the first person that like said stuff that made sense to me. so, so let’s start with the S-curve then, and just kind of, I’m sure a lot of people have been exposed to it in various statistics classes or something along those lines, but let’s talk about how you’re applying it to, to growth into leadership.

Whitney Johnson (01:46): Yeah, so I was exposed to it in investing with Clayton. So we all have our, our place that we learned about it and it’s been around for a hundred years and we used it to help us figure out how quickly an innovation would be adopt and trying to make investment, buy, and sell decisions. And as we were applying it for investing, I had this insight that we could use the S curve, not only to think about how groups change over time, but how individuals change over time. Yeah. And every time you start something new, you start a new project, start a new job. You are at the base of that S and growth is happening, but it’s gonna feel slow until you reach a tipping point or the knee of the curve. And you move into the sweet spot that steep, sleek back of the curve, right? And then you reach this place called mastery where growth starts to taper off. And my aha was is that we could use it to understand the emotional arc of growth. And when we take on something new, it allows us to say, okay, if I know where I am in my growth, I know what’s next. Yeah. So that’s how I’m applying it.

John Jantsch (02:46): So unfortunately, you know, while a lot of people accept this idea of yes, oh, there’s this point where it takes off, you know, there’s a lot of times, that’s the point where it actually dives nose dives too, right? Mm-hmm we get through the hard part and now we’ve kind of outgrown our, our abilities. D does that, do you see that happening with personal development in the same way?

Whitney Johnson (03:04): Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that was interesting to me is as you have now, surmised, I’m very steeped in disruptive innovation. And what we saw with disruption is that even if you were going to pursue a disruptive course and your odds of success increased by six times that went from 6% to 36%. So there was still a 64% chance that it wasn’t going to work. And it’s going to be similar. When you decide I’m going to jump to this brand new S curve, I’m going to do something new. There are, there’s a large possibility that you’ll decide this curve isn’t for me, or this is not going to work. And so one of the things that I recommend is at the launch point, you have this Explorer phase of deciding, do I even want to be here? Whether you decided to jump or were pushed, but then you’ve gotta go through this collection phase. Yeah. And that’s that place where you say, I do wanna be here, but can I get the resources that I need from this ecosystem in order to accelerate into the sweet spot?

John Jantsch (04:06): So I’ve own my own business for, um, coming up on 30 years. And one of the things I’ve realized is that I’m constantly in about 47 S-curves at any given time is what it feels like to me. I don’t feel like there’s one S-curve of growth. Yeah. I feel like there’s everywhere. So mm-hmm how do I mean, I think it’s, I think it’s easy for people to sort of oversimplify this idea of oh, here’s where we’re on the curve. Mm-hmm but how do, I mean, what, what’s your view of, I mean, do you feel like that’s a reality or is that just me being psychotic?

Whitney Johnson (04:38): I think that the S-curve is a fractal that you can think of your life as an S-curve. You can think of your career as an S-curve. You can think of a job as an S-curve and then within that job, you’ve got roles and then projects. And so you can continue to drill down. And to your question specifically, once you start to say, okay, well, where am I in my role on the S curve overall, everything that’s required of me, but it very much is a portfolio of curves that you are going to have a number of different curves that you’re on within your work. And if most of them allow for you to be in the sweet spot, then you can say in aggregate, you’re in the sweet spot. And if you think about your life, you’re balancing your portfolio of SSC curves, where you’ve got your career. Maybe it’s a really steep curve. So in your personal life, maybe you don’t want quite a steep of a curve. So you’re putting together that portfolio. I have a background in investing. So I do think in portfolios to answer your question, yes, we’re on multiple curves. You want to balance them. So you’re not, you know, only on the launch point for all of your curves or only in mastery, but to, to create that balance portfolio,

John Jantsch (05:42): I’ve, I’ve actually referred to it as seasons. I feel like, you know, businesses go through seasons. You know, they’re not, they’re not annual linear necessarily, but they’re, I think it’s kind of what you’re describing. Isn’t it? It’s like, okay, now we’re in this gathering, you know? Yeah. You know, because then that’s gonna produce, you know, fruit. I feel like that is something almost tangible.

Whitney Johnson (06:03): Oh, I love that. I love that metaphor. So, and I love talking about growth. And as you can see our, our listeners, can’t see, but I’ve got behind me, botanical prints of strawberries and peaches because we grow raspberries and strawberries, et cetera. But if you, if you wanted to pull that metaphor, you could argue that the launch point that’s the spring and that’s the time where you are planting. And then you’re going to move into the summer, which is a sweet spot where you’ve got that bountiful, you know, everything’s growing. And then you’re gonna start to harvest when you get into mastery. And then when that decision’s made to do something new, you’re gonna go dormant. There’s gonna, there’s this period of latency where you’re quiet and it’s the winter. As you start to think about moving to your new curve.

John Jantsch (06:48): So, so the subtitle book, how to grow your people to grow your company would imply that this is a book about leadership. Mm-hmm I will tell you that as I read it, I was like, no, this is about personal development

Whitney Johnson (06:58):

John Jantsch (06:59): So is

Whitney Johnson (07:00): That so you are very astute it’s both. Yeah. Let me tell you there, there was a study that came out recently from a ego Zender that surveyed a thousand CEOs and the thousand CEOs strongly agreed that to transform the organization, they needed to transform themselves. Sure. 80% strongly agreed. And so my whole premise, my thesis is that if you want to lead an organization and we talk a lot about how to grow your team and grow your organization in the book, but it always starts with you. The fundamental unit of growth is the individual. And so I purposely wrote this book so that if you only care about personal growth, then you just read the narrative and you can get that. But if you do care about growing your team and your organization, then we’ve got these interludes that are very practical, very actionable on how to do that. But yes, you are, right. This starts with you as the individual.

John Jantsch (07:57): Yeah. Cuz really, without a great deal of self-awareness you’re probably not gonna be a great leader. Right?

Whitney Johnson (08:02): no.

John Jantsch (08:03): So are there some, I I’m sure this is like a lot of things, you know, people read this book and they go, we’ve gotta do this. you know, at our company. Right. So are, what are some of the first kind of new habits or questions maybe that, that people need to start asking themselves as you know, instead of just saying, okay, this is the new way.

Whitney Johnson (08:23): Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love that question because I believe in setting small, ridiculously small goals, I read atomic habits and you probably did too. Had em on a podcast.

John Jantsch (08:34): One of my questions actually

Whitney Johnson (08:36): Well, there you go. So yeah. So what I recommend you do is if you find yourself thinking, oh, this model makes sense to me. Yeah. And it is purposely simple. It is purposely visual because that makes it useful. What I would say to you is just get out a piece of paper and draw the S and say to yourself, where am I on this? S yeah. And then have a conversation with a person, a colleague, a person on your team and say, where do you think you are on the S now we have an assessment tool that you can use, but you ask me a simple way to start. Yeah. That’s where you’d start is you draw it out, you have a conversation and then you can plot where your team is. But that initial spark of just drawing that curve and talking about where do you think you are, that orients yourself, orients, you orients your team and you can start to have a very robust conversation about growth and the growth upside you see in this role in your organization.

John Jantsch (09:33): So this leads me to my James clear moment as a matter of fact. Yeah. So you just talked about orienting yourself and I, and I suspect that there is a point, I, I think people probably can orient themselves in the sweet spot and they probably can orient themselves into getting started. It’s that messy middle, that sometimes is really long, boring slog mm-hmm . And one of the things that, that James puts in, in atomic habits is that a lot of times people are successful. Not cuz they have better goals, but because they can tolerate boredom because that’s a lot of what it, you know, we get tired of the stuff. We don’t wanna do it anymore, even if it’s working. So, you know, how, what, what advice do first off, I guess I have to ask you if you agree with that assessment, but if you do, you know what, you know, what does allow people to get through that long part where you’re not seeing any advancement necessarily? And so you don’t really know where you are.

Whitney Johnson (10:22): Yeah. It’s a great question. And what I would say is I wouldn’t necessarily call that the messy middle, cuz I think when you’re in this sweet spot, that’s where you’re exhilarated and you’ve got this optimized tension of it’s hard, but not too hard. So you’re feeling this sense of, of competence and autonomy and relatedness. I think what you’re referring to is when you’re at the launch point and you’ve made the decision, Hey, I’m gonna do this and growth is happening, but it’s not yet apparent. It’s like the, the Lily pads in a pond, like there’s one and then there’s two and then there’s four. But ah, there’s not very many pads in the pond. And so what I recommend you do there is number one is know psychologically what’s happening is that you are at the launch point. It is going to feel like a slog.

And that helps you talk yourself through the impatience that you feel. But then to your James clear or James clear moment to make things clear is if you think about what’s happening in your brain, whenever you do something new, you’re running a predictive model. And so with the launch point, you’re running this model and you’re making lots of predictions, most of which are inaccurate. And so your dopamine is dropping a lot and that is not fun. And so what you can do is you can set those small ridiculously small goals. Like for example, I’m learning Korean right now. Am I studying well because I love K dramas, but am I studying 30 minutes a day? No, I have an app. I pull out dual Ando and maybe I do 30 seconds a day. Maybe I do three minutes. Yeah. But I’ve done it for 103 straight days. Right? Yeah. And so what happens is when that goal is really small, you can hit it every day. You can oftentimes beat it. And when you beat goals, guess what happens, dopamine ding. And so it’s that ability to have those small goals, beat those small goals at the launch point that allows you to basically gamify it and move through the slog of that place where growth is not apparent until you hit that sweet spot and things become exhilarating.

John Jantsch (12:24): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need online marketing, no problem. Semrush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try some rush free @ Semrush.com/Now that’s Semrush.com/now.

So you have a lot of you break kind of the stages down into a lot of things that you should be doing or paying attention to. Or I talked about maybe new habits and I’ll just let you, um, kind of talk about how it applies is collect like a child. You know, I’ve always told people, I think curiosity is really, you know, my superpower. I mean, I’d love to see how things start, how they work, why they don’t work, why something is out place. And so that to me, I was like, well, yeah, I just do that instinctively, but talk a little bit about that. How a leader, you know, or somebody trying to develop personally can apply that idea.

Whitney Johnson (13:32): Well, first of all, I want to flag for you. That is a superpower. Whenever someone says, Hey, I just do this instinctively that is telling me, oh yeah, that’s a strength. Not everybody. Does that just a reminder. Yes. Yes. So just wanna wanna say that one of the things that, that a child does that around the curiosity is first of all, they, and we would go into something and say, I just want to understand what this is. I just want to figure this out. And at that point there’s very little ego and your identity is not on the line. And so for example, I can remember when I was three or four years old, our family had gone to see the sound of music and I came home and we had an upright piano and I started to figure out how do I play? DOE re me on the piano.

There was no question in my mind of like, will I not be able to do it? Will I look dumb if I can’t figure it out? None of that identity ego was part of the equation. And so collecting like a child is to be at the launch point and say, I like this curve. I, I want to be here. I now have to get the data that would tell me, can I get the resources that I need? And, and I’m gonna be able to gain momentum here and just to collect that data and not have it be a referendum on your identity. It’s just data. Can I get the resources? Do I enjoy this? If the answer is yes, then I keep going. If the answer is no, then I stop. It’s not about my ego. It’s just about iterating and learning and growing and developing. And so that’s the collecting like a child where the ego is out of the equation.

John Jantsch (15:10): So it may actually be a superpower. My parents didn’t always think it was

Whitney Johnson (15:14): Then it definitely is

John Jantsch (15:15): so you, you know, the personal development part, I think, you know, people are gonna grow by reading this book. The leadership part in some ways is, might be harder to install in an organization because there’s so many, there’s so many culture aspects that I’m, that keep coming up for me as, you know, just that collect like a child, giving people permission to do that. Doesn’t always happen at organizations. Does it?

Whitney Johnson (15:39): Yeah, no it doesn’t. And I think that one of the things that is increasingly apparent to me, the more experienced I get in life is that so often will say, well, I think this using this as a tool to think about growth is a great idea, but can you persuade my manager? Right? And the answer is, no, I can’t persuade your manager. Um, but you can. And the way that you can is if you will start with you and if you will start to implement this idea with the people on your team. Yeah. And to collect those data points, because when you are persuading someone to do something new, you are effectively asking them to jump to a new S-curve, which is scary. They don’t want to do it. And so what you’re doing is you’re packing a parachute for them to make it safe for them to do that new thing. Yeah. And you make it safe by you being a Proofpoint by being the people on your team, being a Proofpoint and something as simple as drawing an S and having a conversation. That’s not very scary. Yeah. That’s pretty easy to do. And so you have more control than you think you do, and start with something so simple. So ridiculously small, it’s pretty tough to say, well, I don’t wanna listen. No, it’s something simple. You can start there.

John Jantsch (16:53): So you filled this book with a lot of interviews of people that you had talked to that, you know, kind of are, are doing some of this. This is probably a difficult question. So I’ll let you break it up. If you want, you know, is there a story in the book or is there a person that you’ve talked to since, you know, reading the book, even that you feel like has really kind of nailed this approach, brought this approach to their organization and it’s made a difference.

Whitney Johnson (17:15): Yeah, I do actually. So, and they’re not in the book. So it’s a company called Chatbooks. They’re in Provo, Utah, and they turn Instagram photos into, or actually Lehigh, Utah. They turn Instagram photos into books and they have been around for about seven years. It’s a great culture. People like to work there. And because people like to work there, they had a lot of people who were getting to the top of the S-curve. They were reaching mastery. And so we administered our S-curve tool. And our CEO said, Whitney, this is really helpful because it’s giving us a language to talk about our, our experience. Three examples specifically, what happened? One person, the chief marking officer said, now I understand the experience I’m having. It’s not that I don’t like working here. It’s not that I don’t like you as a boss. It’s just that I’m at the top of my curve.

I’m not growing anymore. I need to do something new. And so it de personalized her jumping to a new curve at a different company. In another instance, you had the president who was presumably on a new curve, but he was bumping up against the scope of the CEO that allowed them to have a conversation said, Hey, CEO, go jump to your curve. So that I’ve got headroom on my curve. Again, allowed them to have a conversation. And then the third thing that happened was the CTO who had been there for several years, was taking on some new responsibilities that were putting him at the launch point. And he was kind of uncomfortable, cuz he’s supposed to be the expert. Yeah. It gave him a way to say, Hey, everybody doing something new I’m at the launch point, it’s supposed to be uncomfortable and awkward and gangly. And it gave him permission. And then also could talk his team through that. And so very simple language to talk about the experience that people were having.

John Jantsch (18:58): Well, that’s a, that’s such a great example too, because very different outcomes for all of them. Yes. But all of them, even if they were painful because they caused change all of them very positive.

Whitney Johnson (19:08): Right?

John Jantsch (19:09): Yeah. That’s awesome. So, so when you tell people where they can find out, I know the book’s available anywhere, but where they can find out more about your work as well.

Whitney Johnson (19:16): Yeah. Thank you for asking. So one easy place is to go to Whitney johnson.com and or to our podcast disrupt yourself. But Whitney johnson.com is the easiest place to start.

John Jantsch (19:28): Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time out to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you in person one of these days out there on the road.

Whitney Johnson (19:36): Oh thank you, John, for having me.

John Jantsch (19:38): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Semrush.

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to grow a business.

August 19, 2022/by exposure

How High-Performers Overcome Customer Indecision

How High-Performers Overcome Customer Indecision written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Matt Dixon

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Matt Dixon. Matt is a Founding Partner of DCM Insights, the customer understanding lab. He’s also a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review with more than 20 print and online articles to his credit. His first book, The Challenger Sale, has sold more than a million copies worldwide and was a #1 Amazon and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has a new book launching in September 2022 — The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision.

Key Takeaway:

In sales, the worst thing you can hear from a customer isn’t “no.” It’s “I need to think about it.” Traditional sales advice tells you to double down on your efforts to sell a buyer on all the ways they might win by choosing you and your business. Turns out, what rang tried and true in the past, doesn’t work so well anymore.

In this episode, Founder of DCM Insights and best-selling author, Matt Dixon, joins me to talk about the growing problem of customer indecision and a new approach that turns conventional wisdom on its head. After extensive research and millions of conversations with high-performance sales reps, Matt has discovered that only by addressing the customer’s fear of failure can you get indecisive buyers to go from verbally committing to actually pulling the trigger. We dive into concepts from his playbook that will help any salesperson or sales leader who wants to close the gap between customer intent and action—and close more sales.

Questions I ask Matt Dixon:

[1:44] Can you talk a little bit about the research that you did to prepare for the JOLT effect?
[4:18] Why is indecision such an important sales topic?
[5:44] Your research suggests that the old ways of approaching indecision might not be the most productive approach – can you talk about that idea?
[9:02] Does indecision look a lot like the status quo?
[11:38] Would you say that part of getting past indecision is figuring out how to dial down the fear of purchasing?
[15:03] Do you run the risk of the cliche trial closes in this step?
[16:59] Are you advocating to slim down the options for customers and not lead with all of the bells and whistles and possibilities?
[20:03] We’ve worked through the beginning half of the JOLT methodology — can you unpack the LT of that acronym?
[22:26] Is the T in JOLT to give prospects a safety net or is this sort of a last-ditch thing?
[25:20] Where can people learn more about you and your work and grab a copy of your new book?

More About Matt Dixon:

Learn more about his book – The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision.

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Marketingassessment.co

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Duct Tape Transcript