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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tory Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Henry Adaso, fueled by Coffee and Hip Hop. Henry is an award-winning marketing leader with over 15 years of experience, a former music journalist. He’s a natural storyteller and innovative marketer. He’s currently the head of marketing for CMEX USA and the author of three books, including his latest that we’re gonna talk about today, The Art of Messaging – Seven Principles of Remarkable Messages (Or How to Stand Out in a Noisy World). So, Henry, welcome to the show.

Henry Adaso (01:30): Thank you for having me, John.

John Jantsch (01:31): So going through your background, I feel like you have a very colorful journey to how you got to hear . You want to give us a little kind of what’s been your entrepreneurial journey? It kind of brought you to this point. I’d love to hear a little more about it.

Henry Adaso (01:46): Yeah, John, absolutely. Colorful is the right word. I call myself an accidental marketer because I didn’t know that I was going to end up in marketing when I was a young boy in high school. I was the kid who used to annoy all of his friends by making my own kind of handwritten newsletter and then forcing my friends to endure my newsletter. So I, I always thought I was going to become a publisher, but to somewhere along the line, I noticed that they were kicking publishers out of the building because of this thing called the internet. And so I pivoted to digital marketing, and what I quickly realized was that a lot of the same skills that I had developed writing my own book when I was a kid and writing newsletters translated to marketing because it’s ultimately about storytelling. And so today I work as a marketer and I love it.

John Jantsch (02:34): So, so, you know, messaging obviously is a key part, strategic element of marketing. I, I’m, I agree with you, but I’d love to hear your take on why you chose to call it the art of messaging. Why do you feel it it is elevated to the level of art?

Henry Adaso (02:52): That’s a great question. I think that people are intimidated by messaging it. It’s something that is often thought as a reserved for a select few copywriters, marketing gurus, great communicators. But it’s really an art. It’s an art in the science, but it’s primarily an art. And it can be taught, it can be learned. And what I realized looking at a lot of different brand messages is that they tend to have certain things in common. They have certain attributes in common. There’s a pattern that occurs. And if you study that pattern and try your best to recreate that in your product or service, if it works, it has to work. It’s not about something that doesn’t work. If you have a product that truly solves a problem, you can learn from the best brands on how to message in a way that truly resonates with your audience.

John Jantsch (03:45): Where, you know, if somebody comes to you and says, oh, we’ve got this company and we’ve got, you know, we’ve been around for X amount of years, and we just feel like we’re copying what everybody else in our industry does, I mean, where do you first send somebody to look for, like, where is your message? You know, like where is it hiding? You know, the secret sauce that’s gonna really make a difference.

Henry Adaso (04:04): There’s a great quote by Michelangelo that says, every block of stone has a sculpture in it, and it’s the job of the sculptor to find it. So every brand, no matter the industry, whether you’re B2B or B2C, there’s something that is interesting about your brand. And sometimes you may have to dig a little bit deeper, maybe do some research, talk to people who’ve been there a little bit longer. But you really have to try to understand the essence of your product or service or your brand. And that’s where I would begin. So for example, there’s a sock company called Bombas, and they sell socks, which, you know, could be consider the commodity, but they’re very successful because their product is tied to this idea that the, one of the most essential pieces of clothing that, that you really need is something that keeps you warm. So like socks, right? So every time you buy a pear, they gift one to, uh, somebody in need. So that’s a story, and that’s something that’s interesting that makes them, it kind of takes them beyond the idea of just being a soft company to now something bigger than that. And that’s really where you start. What is the essence of your brand? What is the thing that really makes you a little bit different from the others?

John Jantsch (05:17): You know, one of the things that I find is I think there are a lot of companies out there that they are unique. They are doing something different. Their customers, you know, stay with them because they are doing something different, but they still tend to talk about what they sell. How important is it to understand the problems? You’re, so you really solve for your customers, even if they’re the little things. I mean, I think that’s sometimes where people get caught up. They think of this messaging being this grand thing that’s gonna make us sound, you know, really important and amazing when their customers will say, well, yeah, but it’s, this is what you actually do for us. I mean, how important is it to understand the problems you’re solving?

Henry Adaso (05:58): I’m a marketer and I’ll be the first to admit, we love talking about ourselves. , we love talking about how great we are, how great the product is. It’s a very, it’s a comfortable space to be in to talk about how great the product is, but the customer is really interested in one thing. And that is, what can you do for me? So what we have to do is shift our messaging from a We Messages, which is focused on how many awards we’ve won, how great the company is, and shift it to a you messages, which is how do we talk about the customer? Every opportunity that we have, we need to be saying, let’s talk about you. What problems do you need solved? And the thing that resonates the most is if we can show the customer that there is a transformation on the other side of that conversation, on the other side of that interaction, we’re more likely to engage them and we’re more likely to be effective with our messaging.

John Jantsch (06:50): Yeah. And obviously with a Title seven principles, you know, we’re gonna break down a little bit of, of framework, but I’ll tell you a question I get all the time, and I’m sure you do as well when you talk about this topic, is the company that says you, you used bombass, you know, sells socks, which is a commodity. But you know, what if I sell just a really boring product, I don’t know, let’s say cement for example, know anybody who does any messaging for, you know, a product like that. I mean, how do you turn something kind of sexy maybe that just people don’t think is?

Henry Adaso (07:22): So I happen to know a thing or two about selling some given that’s primarily what we sell. And it, and I have to tell you, it’s one of the, just on, on the surface, it’s one of the most boring products. It’s literally just a gray powder, right? in, substitute the bags and it’ll look the same. So how do you make that interesting? A couple years ago we started this tradition, I’ll tell you a quick story. And we, at the end of the year, we would create a holiday newsletter and we would send out a holiday newsletter to our customers just as a, as an an expression of our gratitude for their business. Over the course of the year. The first time we did this, it was a very standard holiday newsletter. There was nothing special about it. It simply said, you know, happy holidays, it was beautifully designed, content was great, but we didn’t get much of a response.

(08:07): So we switched it up a little bit. And the next year what we did was we gathered all of our sales folks and we created this theme around football, and we had them hold up props. So footballs, helmets, trophies. And we also wrote in the newsletter, little fun facts about them. So this helped personalize our sales folks. And this newsletter had trading cards that you can tear out . And so if you’re a customer, you received this, it was, it’s not your usual cement newsletter, right? And then now you have something else to help you connect with that salesperson because they’re a person, right? That got a lot of great feedback from customers. The following year we did a similar theme, but this time with superheroes. And the same thing, dozens of customers wrote us asking for additional copies of our holiday newsletter, which is a marketing material, right? So, so here we are in a world where there’s so much noise and most customers are saying, I just get outta my inbox. I don’t wanna hear from you, but we have the reverse where they were saying, can you send me more copies of your marketing materials? All we did differently was tell a story. Mm-hmm. . And a story is something that always resonates. So I would say for something, someone who may be thinking, I have a boring product, I mean a niche space, just try to tell a story.

John Jantsch (09:28): Yeah. Yeah. So you, I have a framework that I think you probably refer to it as “best” because that’s what it’s spells, B E S T. So you wanna kinda unpack that. These are like the kind of some of the key elements. The good message has. You want to kind of go through that framework.

Henry Adaso (09:44): So I looked at about six years ago when I was working on the agency side, I looked at a, a lot of brands and they had, that had great me. And I started to study them to understand what they had in common, because I wanted to replicate that for my team. We had lots of clients that needed messaging. And what I realized was that all of them had these four attributes in common. They, it just kept coming up over. And the attributes are, they’re bold, remarkable, messaging is empathic, it’s specific, and it’s transformative. And so those four attributes spell out the word best, which makes it easier to remember. Mm-hmm. . And so a bold message is something that makes you stop and look. It’s something that earns your attention. It’s something that is engaging. And that’s the first question we have to ask is, in a noisy world, how do we make people stop and pay attention?

(10:42): An empathic message is simply something that incorporates a core human need in the messaging. So what is the emotional need that we’re solving for? Is it peace? Is it joy? Is it relief from pain? Is it I’ll help you make more money, spend more time with your family? What is that emotional driver? And then specificity is about understanding that nothing is for everyone. And we need to be clear about who the product is for and what it is as well. Because sometimes you’ll be driving and you see a billboard and you’re wondering what are they selling? Right? , at that point, you could have earned attention. So we have to be clear about what’s on offer and who it’s for. And then the last attribute transformation is really showing what the outcomes would be for the person. People don’t buy features and benefits. They buy the transformation. And so if you are, if you have something that helps people make more money, well the transformation is not that they’ll make more money, that might be a benefit. It’s what the money brings them. Mm-hmm. , it’s time with your family, it’s, Hey, maybe I’ll be able to pay off grandma’s mortgage or travel more. That is more likely to connect us.

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(13:30): So, you know, I’m imagining a group of folks sitting around saying, okay, yeah, this, that’s a really bold message. And we’re talking about like the transformation and you know, we spelled out exactly what we do, but then you take it out to the market and it’s like, I don’t get it. Right? I mean, how do you kind of test to the point where you’re like, yeah, this is, you know, how do you know? How do you know you’ve nailed it with, you know, the ideal client you’re trying to impact?

Henry Adaso (13:56): I encourage all marketers to take testing very seriously because the market knows best. And sometimes we will have, you may have a hunch or maybe you have some best practices based on experience, but when you test it, you might discover something different. So think testing is the first place I would go. And one easy way to test is through email marketing. So you could maybe test your headline and the way this works, most email platforms allow you to do this. You would have two different subject clients and then you would break your audience into two and send one subject line to one audience and the other to the other group. And you’ll study this over the course of two to four hours to see which subject line yields more opens. That’s how you pick a winner. So that’s one relatively affordable way to test. Uh, another one would be to run ads if you have, if you’re already running some ads, try different headlines and see which ones are generating more clicks.

John Jantsch (14:56): Yeah. Yeah. And increasingly, you know, some of these tools, particularly the tools that are trying to sell your ads, you know, will actually, you know, show you a winner. It’ll, you know, it’ll produce the winner for you because that’s the one that’s making them the most money. So consequently it’s the one they want to want you to land on.

Henry Adaso (15:13): Yes, yes, yes.

John Jantsch (15:15): How important is it for an organization to have kind of a central message or a core message? You know, something that really delivers the brand promise first. Obviously there’s messages for campaigns, for products, for divisions, for different types of clients, but how essential is it to have something that brings together, like, this is what we stand for?

Henry Adaso (15:35): Consistency is credibility. So it’s very important to be consistent with your messaging across all of your customer touchpoints within the organization. If you have sales and marketing and customer experience delivering different messages to the marketplace, that is a perfect recipe for market confusion, right? So we wanna mitigate that by creating a source of cohesion for our messaging. And this could be something as simple as having a value proposition matrix that is available to all of your touchpoints. What I propose in the book is a messaging menu. And so your messaging menu has different servings of your messaging, starting with the starters, which could be something like an elevator pitch or your smaller plates, which could be something like your social media posts or entrees as I call them, which are longer messages when you have a presentation, what is your messaging? But they’re all part of the same core message. They’re all part of your value proposition. And so over time, if you deliver the same message consistently, then it becomes clear what you stand for and what your brand is all about. And then when people are ready to make a purchasing decision, they know exactly to turn to you.

John Jantsch (16:54): So you have a couple, um, exercises, I guess you called it. Somebody could actually, again, as an organization, you know, go through the one, I might have this wrong, but the, is it messaging tower or is that how you refer to it?

Henry Adaso (17:05): Messaging tower. So the messaging tower. Tower, yes. So that that, that is a tool that allows you to extract the most effective messaging points, the most important attributes of your product or service. And the messaging tower essentially is saying that there is a hierarchy when it comes to messaging. So at the base of your messaging is going to be your features, and these are things like descriptive elements of your part. Mm-hmm. the service. So if we take a headphone for example, maybe it’s lightweight or the color or the base production, those are all features and they’re descriptive and features appeal to a technical audience. Then at in the middle of the tower, you have your benefits, which is what can it do for me? So for this sticking with the headphone example, it may be something like, hey, it’s portable or it has noise cancellation. So it allows me to have peace of mind when I’m on airplane. At the very top of your messaging tower is the transformation. And the transformation is the powerful why behind your product or service. It answers the question you,

John Jantsch (18:12): You’re just gonna look damn good. Right? Exactly. . So by talking about this in a hierarchy, I mean you’re kind of suggesting that like all these things, if you gotta have, you gotta understand the features and what, how those translate to benefit before you’re gonna get to correct. What may be the most important part, the transformation is that right?

Henry Adaso (18:32): Absolutely. Really the cream of the crop is the transformation. If you can get to the transformation, you have a better chance of connecting with your audience. The example that I always think about is Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. So I noticed that their messaging was, hear music the way your favorite artists hear music. Mm-hmm. . And that is a transformation because at the time there, there were no premium headphones that could do what Beats could do, so, so the messaging there was about you having that proxy experience to the celebrities that you like and look up to, right? Versus they didn’t talk about the features, they didn’t talk about the benefits, they simply went for the top of the messaging tower, which is a transformation. There are lots of brands that do this effectively and cite several examples in the book as well. But when you start, once you see this messaging tower, you start to see it all over the place. You see billboards that are doing this. You see commercials that are doing the same thing. That is the most powerful type of messaging, the messaging that says, Hey, here’s how your situation will be different after you buy this product or service. Great.

John Jantsch (19:41): Well, Henry, I wanna appre, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to tell people where they can find your work, your book, uh, connect with you in any way that you’d invite them to do?

Henry Adaso (19:51): Absolutely. You can find me on my website, henryadaso.com or on LinkedIn. It’s going to be Henry Adaso or Instagram at @henryadaso as well. John, thank you so much for having

John Jantsch (20:02): Me. You bet. No, I’m, again, I appreciate you taking the time and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Henry Adaso (20:09): Look forward to meeting you in person. Thank you so much.

John Jantsch (20:12): 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, dot 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 episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

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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March 24, 2023/by exposure

Redefining Strength: How Anxiety Can Be a Leadership Asset

Redefining Strength: How Anxiety Can Be a Leadership Asset written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Morra Aarons-Mele

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Morra Aarons-Mele. She is the host of The Anxious Achiever, a top-10 management podcast that helps people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. Morra founded Women Online and The Mission List, an award-winning digital-consulting firm and influencer marketing company dedicated to social change in 2010.

Her upcoming book is called The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears into Your Leadership Superpower where the mission is to normalize anxiety and leadership in today’s workplace.

Key Takeaway:

In today’s workplace, anxiety is a constant challenge that can hinder the potential for high performance, but it doesn’t have to be that way. There should be no separation between mental health and leadership, and mental health should be normalized in the workplace. Morra shows that anxiety is a part of life, in fact, it is fundamental to leadership, and with the right tools, you can take advantage of its power and turn it into a strength instead of a weakness.

Questions I ask Morra Aarons-Mele:

[01:29] So leadership and mental health in the same sentence, can you explain this idea that you’re putting those two topics together?
[03:29] What are you bringing to the conversation, that’s gonna help people see anxiety as a strength?
[04:43] Do you feel like there is more anxiety today, and if so, what’s causing it? Or are people just more freely talking about it?
[06:14] You talk about transforming anxiety from a weakness to a strength. So what’s the process that somebody might go through?
[12:06] I once read that if you’re not feeling a little stress, you know, you’re just not trying or you’re not pushing yourself enough. Is there any of that thought in the anxious achiever?
[12:53] What physical manifestations are people experiencing because they are not managing the anxiety or the stress?
[14:17] Do you think a true leader now should be coaching around mental health? Obviously not providing therapy, but somehow coaching or at least giving people opportunities to be coached?
[15:20] Many people in managerial positions who are like me age-wise, are managing much younger people. Is there a real challenge cross-generationally?
[18:00] Do you do any work inside organizations? Where would you go to help an organization that’s trying to maybe change its culture?

More About Morra Aarons-Mele:

https://morraam.com/
Listen to The Anxious Achiever
Connect on LinkedIn

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

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): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Creative Elements hosted by Jay Klaus. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals creative elements goes behind the scenes with today’s top creators. Through narrative interviews, Jay Klaus explores how creators like Tim Urban James Clear, Tori Dunlap and Cody Sanchez are building their audiences today. By learning how these creators make a living with their art and creativity, creative elements helps you gain the tools and confidence to do the same. In a recent episode, they talked with Kevin Perry about how he goes viral on every single platform. Listen to creative elements wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:54): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Morra Aarons-Mele. She’s a host of The Anxious Achiever, a top-10 management podcast that helps people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. You might recall she was on this show for one of the best titles ever Hiding in the Bathroom . But she’s back with another book we’re gonna talk about today, The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears Into Your Leadership Superpower. So, Morra, welcome back.

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:28): Thanks, John. It’s good

John Jantsch (01:29): To be back. So leadership and mental health, uh, in the same sentence, I mean, is juxtaposed even, are we talking about a bit of an oxymoron here?

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:38): No, we’re talking about,

John Jantsch (01:41): I mean, people don’t typically think about those two things I know is the whole point of what your, what your work is about. But, so help me kind of work this idea that, that you’re putting those two type topics together, you know, intentionally.

Morra Aarons-Mele (01:55): Yeah. I don’t think that there should be any false separation between the discussion of leadership and mental health or to that matter, mental illness. Yeah. You know, it’s a part of life at anyone’s part of life. They will probably experience mental ill health and hopefully mental wellness. Right. It’s, it’s exists along the spectrum and we all go through it, and it’s part of our leadership and how we show up. Sure.

John Jantsch (02:18): I don’t disagree at all, but the fact that you’re having to talk about normalizing this in the workplace, there’s a lot of really built up angst about it, isn’t there? I mean, just the, you know, go back a generation and you never talked about mental health issues, right. It’s like that was, you know, that was taboo. And so a lot of people are dealing with that baggage, right?

Morra Aarons-Mele (02:39): I, I think so. Even today, you know, we, um, we conflate mental illness or ANGs or depression with weakness, right? We, we conflate it with characteristics that seem to go against what we want our leaders to be and stand for mm-hmm. . And so of course there’s no incentive for leaders to talk about their mental health because everyone is afraid that they’ll be judged. Right,

John Jantsch (03:00): Right, right.

Morra Aarons-Mele (03:02): And that’s the kind of stigmas they’re trying to break.

John Jantsch (03:04): Yeah. And I think when we use the term mental health, you know, obviously people go a lot of places with that, you’re narrowed in on this idea of anxiousness, you know, which mm-hmm. again, you talked about a spectrum could be in this, not a little of nothing. And the point that you’re making is that this is like, this can be a strength, right? I mean that this idea that you’re an achiever doing this, so, you know, it hasn’t always been seen as a good thing. So how, what, what are you bringing to the conversation? You know, that’s gonna help people see that as No, that’s a strength of yours.

Morra Aarons-Mele (03:36): I hope people understand that leadership and anxiety go together because , when you’re leading, you’re going into the uncertain. Yeah. And a lot of anxiety is about facing the uncertain and the uncomfortable, even scary feelings that we have around that. You know, what leader is an anxious Yeah. And indeed, when we think of our, our greatest leaders before battle, when we read history, we understand that they were full of fears and deep, deep insecurities before battle. The key is moving through it and being able to go into battle.

John Jantsch (04:09): Don’t you think though, a lot of those leaders that you mentioned, you know, this insecurity came like after the fact, or at least admission of the insecurity came after the fact, but they felt like, no, I’ve gotta put on the, I’ve gotta put on the face, you know, and don’t you think a lot of leaders take that? Like, I, you know, even though I’m dying inside, you know, I can’t let that show .

Morra Aarons-Mele (04:28): Some do, some don’t. I mean, when you read histories, for example, of Abraham Lincoln, he walked around with great melancholy and anxiety, and he didn’t hide it. In fact, he built a team around him of people who could take care of him even in his lowest hours.

John Jantsch (04:44): Do you feel like there is more anxiety today? Maybe this is just a guess , but more anxiety today? And if so, what’s causing it? Or are people just more freely talking about it in it appears that there’s more?

Morra Aarons-Mele (04:59): It’s, I mean, it’s hard for me to know. I’m not a right, I’m not a data scientist, but I do think that when you look statistically, the numbers of people reporting anxiety and depression in this country are overwhelming. And certainly among our young people, we’ve been through a period which has been really damaging to our mental health. Yeah. And I don’t see much that is making our mental health shore up right now. Certainly on a global scale. And even just from a macroeconomic perspective, things are very, very uncertain and scary. And that’s when we get

John Jantsch (05:31): Anxious. I mean, and, and we talked about like what we’ve gone through, but even now, as we continue home, I mean, is that actually making the issue, uh, worse or sustaining the issue? Uh,

Morra Aarons-Mele (05:40): It’s hard to know, right? I mean, I think the, the jury definitely is not out there. I think for a lot of people working from home makes their anxiety feel better because they may have less social anxiety. Yeah. Right. There may be fewer instances. On the other hand, anxiety loves a communications vacuum. And when we’re all, and we’re communicating on slack and strictly in audio, we may have more anxiety because we’re not clear on what our counterpart wants. We may feel the need to control and we’re micromanaging more. So it’s hard to know, but I think there are pros and cons. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:14): So obviously you spend a great deal of time in the book, not just explaining the people have these anxieties, but transforming them, you know, to being from a, from a what was maybe at one time a weakness, uh, to a strength. So what’s, what’s the process that somebody might, uh, go through? Because I, you know, I’ve spent 10 years, uh, meditating just to get rid of stress and anxiety. Uh, and now you’re telling me, bring it on.

Morra Aarons-Mele (06:37): No, look, I’m not telling you bring it on. I mean, if, if, if you found a way to dissipate it, amazing. Good for you. Um, you probably have a lot to teach

John Jantsch (06:46):

Morra Aarons-Mele (06:47): Because ultimately what you’re doing when you’re meditating is you’re sitting with thoughts and you’re just sitting with them. You’re observing them, you’re noticing them, but you’re not holding onto them.

John Jantsch (06:59): Right? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Morra Aarons-Mele (07:02): And what has that process taught you?

John Jantsch (07:04): Uh, that reality is far less scary than than, than, uh, the, the assumed, uh, reality, which I feel like is the creation of a lot of anxiety.

Morra Aarons-Mele (07:16): That’s right. Anxiety is all about the assumed reality , right. Anxiety is our brain’s threat appraisal system going into high gear. On the other hand, our brain may sense a real threat or it may not. Right. And so many of us, myself included, spend so much time anticipating threats Yeah. That we almost forget how to calm down. Right. And then along the way that anxiety becomes our activating energy, it becomes our oxygen. Yeah. It pushes us forward. And we can’t separate what’s anxiety and what is our true drive for excellence. And it can really, really have intense consequences. And so in the book, I do a lot of what you probably do as a meditator, noticing when your anxiety pops up in what circumstance, how your body feels.

John Jantsch (08:04): Yeah. It probably gets a bit habituated Right. Too. Like we stop mm-hmm. noticing it becomes of when X happens, Y is going to occur in my body or in my head, . Um, and, and so you’re right. I, the first step probably is actually witnessing it to some extent, right?

Morra Aarons-Mele (08:20): Yes. And anxiety’s tricky. I spoke with someone the other day and, and he said, you know, my anxiety shows up as vertigo, huh. And I was like, wow, that’s unexpected. You know, there’s a detective work process that you have to go through sometimes because we think that we know an anxiety hits and it’s that classic sort of fight or flight and our heart starts racing. Right. But always like that. Right. And, um, the thing that’s interesting about work is it gives us a lack. We can pick up a lot of patterns for our anxiety going off mm-hmm. if we pay attention

John Jantsch (08:49): Mm-hmm. . So do you have a framework, if we wanna call it that, to to, to that you’re actually can coach you through, you know, here’s, I didn’t know every individual’s front, but do you have, at least for how somebody might go through this transformation to turn it into, as you said, a I think a I think even superpower somewhere,

Morra Aarons-Mele (09:07): , I mean, in this book, I’m not a, I’m not a clinician or psychologist, but I draw on many different schools of psychology and research and you know, I mean, I think that the general consensus, like you said, is that when you feel like your anxiety is getting in the way, the first step is to notice it. Yeah. Really understand how it’s showing up, what it’s feeling like in your body, naming it, I’m anxious, I’m really anxious before this negotiation, what’s going on? And then doing the work to understand it, right? I mean, that is the work that we all do, but it can be really, really illustrative. And in the book, we look at everything from your childhood hurts mm-hmm. , those patterns that mo may go very, very deep to recent job experiences to, again, habits that you get stuck in. You know, so many of us get stuck in what I call thought traps. Mm-hmm. , right? Those negative instant thoughts. When we feel anxious specifically about something that we feel might shame us, our brain goes to a place of, I’m not worth it, I’m stupid, I’m gonna fail. Right? And that becomes a comfortable habit. Perfectionism is the same thing. And so it’s really about understanding and playing detective, and then trying to figure out what’s motivating the anxiety.

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(11:56): There was a book a few years ago, and I don’t remember if it was really even very good , but the title got my attention was called Stress for Success. And the main point that the author made was that if you’re not feeling a little stress, you know, you’re just not trying or you’re not pushing yourself enough. Um, I mean, is there any of that, um, thought, uh, process, uh, in anxious achiever?

Morra Aarons-Mele (12:21): Yeah. I mean, the neuroscience will will show that, right? I mean, we need anxiety. It keeps us alive. So if you are, um, faced with something that you really care about, that you feel might be a test, um, that you feel you really want to take a leap forward mm-hmm. , and there’s a risk of failure, of course you’re gonna feel anxious. You need to feel anxious.

John Jantsch (12:42): So what, what is the right word? But the, again, a lot of scientific research is really going in body connection. You know, what physical manifestations, you know, are, you know, are people experiencing because they are not managing the anxiety or the stress?

Morra Aarons-Mele (13:03): Well, we like to get into habits, right? Mm-hmm. . And, um, our brain creates habits as a way of hoping to dissipate the anxiety. So a lot of us, when we’re anxious, we may go into familiar behaviors, right? A lot of us may reach for a drink, we may reach for Netflix, we may reach for TikTok mm-hmm. , right? Mm-hmm. , we may exercise. Some of our coping mechanisms are what’s called adaptive. Mm-hmm. , they help us and some are maladaptive mm-hmm. at work. We also have anxiety habits. We may get into micromanaging. When you’re anxious, you feel out of control. It feels really good to try to reassert some control. And that could mean calling your team and bothering them . Right. It could be overwork. And so the important thing is to see how you’re reacting to the anxiety and ask yourself, is this really, is this serving me? And that’s where the mindfulness comes in again.

John Jantsch (13:56): Mm-hmm. . Yeah. Yeah. Is

Morra Aarons-Mele (13:57): This serving me? And sometimes you might say, yes, I am anxious right now. This is serving me.

John Jantsch (14:03): Yeah. So when it comes to, you talk about leadership and obviously typical leader, you know, manages people. So in some cases, teams or multiple teams. Are we at a point where, you know, a true leader now should be coaching around mental health, even though, you know, obviously not providing, you know, therapy, but somehow coaching or at least giving people opportunities to be coached around it.

Morra Aarons-Mele (14:30): I mean, this is a pretty controversial topic as you can imagine. Yeah. And it’s new, it’s really evolving, you know, in the field of workplace mental health. I, I say that, um, n no manager or colleague should ever feel like they need to be someone’s therapist. You know, that is not your job. There are a lot of programs that are helping, especially managers become conversant Yeah. In talking about mental health. Right. So that you can at least there. But you know, in part of the research for the book, and in my podcast I’ve interviewed many HR leaders and you know, their general consensus is your job as a manager is to listen and facilitate. So you wanna be someone who’s safe to listen to. You don’t need to solve an employee who’s having a mental health challenge. Right. That’s not your job. You can facilitate where they need to go next. Yeah. And I think that that is sort of maybe can help managers relax a little bit. It’s not your job to be the therapist.

John Jantsch (15:20): Many people in managerial positions are, you know, look a lot like me age-wise, um, and, uh, they are managing people who look a lot like my kids. Is there a a real challenge, you know, cross generationally? It’s

Morra Aarons-Mele (15:35): So funny, every time I say yes, I get people writing into me saying, no, it is not about generation. , you know, I think it’s really, really individual. Yeah. There are many people of certain ages who’ve been through a tremendous amount of therapy and their own healing journeys. Yeah. And another thing that’s interesting that I have heard anecdotally is that people who are, who have power tend to be more open and more willing to talk about things like mental health. Mm. And people in the start of their careers as well. It’s the people in the middle. Yeah. The people who are just holding on for dear life. Right.

John Jantsch (16:12): And this is just like another black marker possibly. Right. Well,

Morra Aarons-Mele (16:15): This is just something they just, they just feel overwhelmed by because they’re in the climbing phase of their career. They probably have a very busy home life.

John Jantsch (16:22): Yeah. Yeah. I have just anecdotally maybe millennials, maybe Gen Z, you know, tend to just be much more open about it. I mean, so the stigma appears to be gone of saying, you know, on, on Facebook, you know, my therapist said, you know, which Oh yeah. 20 years ago, you know, would’ve been somewhat, you know, it would’ve been with your girlfriend and a couple glasses of wine maybe. But that’s about it. Right. Um, so is that, is that just a social change or is that, you know, a positive change for, for good in, in the entire issue?

Morra Aarons-Mele (16:55): I think it’s hugely positive. I mean, I wish everyone could have a therapist. I think it’s a truly remarkable experience. And obviously there are a lot of barriers to getting good mental healthcare in this country. Yeah. Um, but I love, I love when people are open to talking about the road to self-awareness the same way they would as developing any other skill. Because what this comes down to is self-awareness as a leader. Yeah. And self-awareness is one of the most sought after an elusive leadership characteristics. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:25): I’ve often said, I think it’s the, it’s the, you know, super powerful leadership. I think, you know, because that, you know, where people really, when when people struggle with that, you know, then they give people answers and they , you know, they try to hold on to power themselves and you know, not, you know, not give it out. I mean, the most self-aware leaders wanna rise everybody up and they want, you know, they wanna share, you know, with the team, which are all I think very positive, you know, types of things.

Morra Aarons-Mele (17:52): Yeah, yeah. For sure. So

John Jantsch (17:55): If, if, if somebody reads this book and they’re a leader and they say Morra, we’d love to work with you. Do you do any work inside of organizations? Um, because this is, this might be hr, has certainly might be leadership, it’s definitely culture side of organizations. So where would you go to help an organization that’s trying to maybe change the culture, not just an individual leader who’s trying to get better?

Morra Aarons-Mele (18:22): I mean, this is really about culture change, you know, and I think the good news is as leaders change, culture changes, I don’t think that this kind of reduction of stigma around mental health in the, in the workplace should be seen as a perk or a nice to have or something we’re doing for the Gen Zs to keep them happy.

John Jantsch (18:38): It’s an AppRight or something, right? . It

Morra Aarons-Mele (18:41): Is actually foundationally about working better mentally healthy workplaces Sure. Work better. Absolutely. Where people, you know, have boundaries and treat each other kindly and can have open communications. I mean, it’s kind of the, the shangrila that we’re all looking for. So all of this stuff is actually foundational to anything you’d learn in a basic leadership or seminar. Right.

John Jantsch (19:02): But as you just pointed out, particularly when it comes to culture, that’s not something that you put on a plaque. I mean that, you know, that’s gotta be, you know, that’s gotta be lived and it’s gotta be lived a lot and it’s gotta be repeated and um, you know, before people believe it. Especially if you’re trying to make a change. You know, I mean, I think that’s the hardest part. You know, you’ve grown to 200 people and you know, they have accepted the organizations a certain way. Um, you know, changing that, you know, is really difficult, isn’t it?

Morra Aarons-Mele (19:32): It’s absolutely. I mean, that’s the thing we’re all working on. That’s why podcasts like ours exist. Yeah. Yeah. . But, you know, I’m not, I’m not saying that change has to start with a single person because we all live in systems, but I do think if you’re feeling anxious at work and it’s getting in your way it’s worth looking at. It will lead you to a path of discovery.

John Jantsch (19:51): Yeah. If nothing else, you’ll be happier. Right? ,

Morra Aarons-Mele (19:54): That’s, well, there you go. .

John Jantsch (19:56): Well, Morra, it was great having you back on the show. You wanna invite people where they can find, I know the book will be available everywhere, but, uh, where they might connect with you as well.

Morra Aarons-Mele (20:04): Absolutely. I’d love it if you listen to my podcast, The Anxious Achiever, wherever you get your podcast. And, um, if you have a question for me, reach out on LinkedIn and I’ll write back. Just send me a message.

John Jantsch (20:14): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the road.

(20:19): Thanks.

(20:20): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before Tex? 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, dot 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 episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

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

March 23, 2023/by exposure

How To Scale Your B2B Marketing Strategy

How To Scale Your B2B Marketing Strategy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Louis Gudema

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Louis Gudema. Louis is a fractional CMO for B2B companies, and mentors startups at MIT. Previously he founded and grew a marketing agency, and pivoted it into a SaaS company, growing it into one of the top three or four companies in its national market before a successful exit. The first edition of Bullseye Marketing was named One of the Best Marketing Plan Books of All Time by Book Authority. He also has a side hustle as a ghostwriter of business and marketing books.

His upcoming book is a second edition of Bullseye Marketing where he teaches how to develop, launch, and scale a successful marketing strategy for B2B companies.

Key Takeaway:

This second edition of Bullseye Marketing focuses on B2B marketing exclusively and highlights examples of how creativity can be implemented in B2B marketing strategies. Louis emphasizes the importance of the third phase of the Bullseye Marketing approach, which is to create mental availability and build up brand awareness so that you are top of mind for your customers and make your short-term marketing more effective.

Questions I ask Louis Gudema:

[02:11] Why’d you write a second edition? What was needed? What’s new?
[07:37] You talk a lot about conversion rate optimization, so tell me a little bit of your thinking on what you’ve seen when you’ve got people to focus on that.
[09:24] What are the significant like channel differences even, or approaches to a B2B marketer as opposed to a B2C marketer?
[12:44] Regarding brand marketing, how can I invest in that when I really can’t measure it?
[18:45] What’s your take on AI in marketing these days?
[21:53] You are an author of a great book: Bullseye Marketing, but you also write books with, and for other folks, I suppose, as a ghostwriter. Can you talk about your decision to do that?

More About Louis Gudema:

https://louisgudema.com/
Connect on LinkedIn
Follow on Twitter
Contact Louis

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Louis Gudema. He is a fractional CMO for B2B companies and mentors, startups at MIT. Previously, he founded and grew a marketing agency and pivoted into a SaaS company, growing it into one of the top three or four companies in the national market before a successful exit. The first edition of Bullseye Marketing was named one of the best marketing plan books of all time by book Authority. He also does a little side hustle as ghostwriter of business and marketing books. But we’re gonna talk today about the second edition of Bullseye Marketing. So Louis, welcome back to the show.

Louis Gudema (01:38): Hi, John. Great to be back. Good to see you

John Jantsch (01:41): Again. So every time I have an author on, oh by the way, I also should have should point out because I’m certain he’s listening that Douglas Burnett wrote the Forward for this new edition with the, uh, marketing book podcast. I, he tells me I’ve been on like six times. He’s better about that stuff than me keeping track of. But whenever I have second,

Louis Gudema (01:59): He’s telling me that you were, uh, very close neck and neck for his most, his champion for most

John Jantsch (02:04): Episode, his most episodes by one author. So I always ask second edition books, authors, why’d you write a Second Edition? What was needed? What’s new , you know what? Because obviously that it’s a lot of work to do and to update a book. So there had to be some compelling reason, I’m guessing, that you felt it needed an update.

Louis Gudema (02:25): Yeah, it turned out to be more work than I expected. So the reason I wrote, and Douglas was very encouraging, even two or three years ago, he was like, you should do a second edition. So I’ll have to ask him someday why he thought it needed improving . But first of all, the first edition was B2B and B2C, and this edition is exclusively B2B. And I, that’s really my expertise. That’s where I do, you know, almost all my work. That’s where most of my experience is. And so I really wanted to focus on that. One of the things, and I have two or three others I’ll quickly say, but one of the things is that I think B2B marketing especially lacks creativity compared to B2C. So I populate the book and tried to make a real effort to show how people, and give a lot of examples from a lot of companies of kind of really creative and excellent B2B marketing.

John Jantsch (03:13): Yeah. And I actually wanna dig in, dig into some of those differences a little bit. But uh, go ahead.

Louis Gudema (03:18): Yeah, so another thing is that I laid out in the first book that the three phases of the Bullseye Marketing approach, you know, and the first is to take advantage of your existing marketing assets for fast, inexpensive results. Secondly, use intent marketing. And thirdly, I called cast of white or net and I renamed it a more accurate scientific correct phase, which is build your brand and grow your mental availability. Because what I’ve learned between the two additions is much more of the research that it turned out really validated by bullseye approach and the real importance in the long term of the third phase of building mental availability. And I can explain what that is. Yes. And it’s something that in this era of short-termism that, that so many marketers are focused on, what can we do with this campaign? What can we do this quarter that they’ve, they miss out on the long-term growth that can be achieved through those phase three programs, which is equal to, or even greater than the, those short-term

John Jantsch (04:32): Programs. I, I was gonna bring up the phase approach cuz it’s one of the things I really liked from the first edition. I know it’s back in this and I think that I’ve been, you know, for many years talking about, you know, I call it the customer success track in my last book. That, you know, there are there certain things that have to be done first, can be done first. Maybe it’s the low hanging fruit or it’s the foundation, you know, but it’s then what’s the promise of what’s next and the promise of what’s next. And I think you maybe don’t call it the same thing, but I think there’s a little bit of that same idea. The long game, you know, goes on while the short game is played as well.

Louis Gudema (05:05): Yeah. And I realize, you know, the first edition I thought was kind of focused on people who weren’t really experienced marketers. And then it turned out some very experienced marketers like were saying this is really great and very helpful. And so there the first phase is both a foundation for success in the second and third phases, but it’s also, you know, in and of itself, it can produce a tremendous result just in three or six months.

John Jantsch (05:34): Yeah, yeah. Like here’s an idea, send an email occasionally to your 1,237 customers that haven’t heard from you. Right.

Louis Gudema (05:42): , well it, that was, so bullseye marketing grew originally from the fact that I was working with companies, you know, as a fractional CMO and things that were supposed to be like the best, you know, like inbound marketing or social media posts or other things, you know, they wouldn’t produce results in in three or six months. No. And I thought, well, what really does produce results? And that’s when, you know, bullseye Marketing grew out of that. And also from my experience as you know, I’m sure you’ve had work, I would start to work with the new client and I’d say, oh, how many email addresses, you know, do you have? And they’d say, oh, we have 12,000 or, you know, whatever the number might be, right? And I’d say, oh, how often do you, you know, email them? And they’d say, oh, around the holidays,

John Jantsch (06:31): ,

Louis Gudema (06:31): And, you know, email is marketing is such a tremendously powerful, you know, and almost free tool. And yet they weren’t taking advantage of it. And so that’s where the idea of the marketing assets that were kinda like money that people had in the shoebox under the bed, you know, and they just had to use it better.

John Jantsch (06:50): I had a client one time that, that we were doing a monthly newsletter and he was like, you know, that’s just a pain. Let’s just kill that. I just, you know, I don’t wanna do that anymore. And I was able to show him spikes in web traffic, spikes in conversions, , you know, every single time that thing went out. He was like, okay, I get it. I get it. . Yeah. So it’s awesome. Hey, you know, speaking of conversions, I also like your thinking on this. You know, a lot of times I have said before on stages that, you know, if you dropped me into your business and you said, look, you’ve got, you know, a couple weeks, what’s like the one area you would work on? And I always say it’s sales or conversion , you know, rate optimization. Cuz you, most of the time nobody really focuses on that. You like tweak the dial one half a percent and sometimes, and it can really drop to the bottom line. Can it, so you have, you talk a lot about conversion rate optimization. So tell me a little bit of your thinking on what you’ve seen when you’ve got people to focus on that.

Louis Gudema (07:46): Oh yeah, I mean it just makes a huge difference. You know, it, it’s just the idea is so simple is it’s way easier to double your conversion rate with the existing amount of traffic than it is to double the amount of traffic with the existing rate of conversion. And it, when you double your conversion rate, which you know can, it’s one of those, another one of those almost free things. Yeah. You know, you’re not only getting twice as many leads or sales or whatever your conversion is, you’re cutting the cost per conversion in half. And, and sometimes it’s, it’s really obvious stuff. Yeah. And so, you know, I I like to say that if you start to ramp up your marketing without first optimizing your for conversions, yeah. It’s like trying to full a buck fill a bucket that’s full of holes, you know, you’re just wasting a huge amount of your time and effort.

John Jantsch (08:42): Yeah. And I’ll throw one more variable in there. You get lead conversion cranked up, raise your prices , and you know, it may cut into conversions a little bit, but you know, it’s pure profit in many cases. So, you know, it’s worth the take worth taking a look at both of those, I think in a combination.

Louis Gudema (09:01): Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:03): Te tell me a little bit in your experience, um, the, what you see as the significant marketing differences between, you started already alluding a lot of B2B businesses, you know, the marketing’s very boring and because they feel like, oh, it has to be very professional or something. But talk about just the significant differences between B2B, not talking about like the tone or the messaging, but the, you know, the significant like channel differences even or approaches to, you know, a B2B marketer as opposed to a B2C marketer.

Louis Gudema (09:33): Well, and I’m gonna talk about the leading B2C companies, the p and gs and those Yeah. Right, right. Cause they, yeah, they do it so well. And there are some great B2B markers like Salesforce, you know, which really gets it also, and I give other examples in the book. But what they realize is that you have to build this idea, uh, of mental availability first of all. And that means that customers, it starts with the recognition that 95% of your market is not interested in buying from you today. Right? So it doesn’t matter what you say or what you offer, you know, they bought it six months ago, or they have a vendor they’re happy with or they, or it may be a, you know, if a, a firm has an accountant, a law firm, you know, some other, uh, service provider that they’re very happy with, they’re just got not gonna switch.

(10:28): If they bought a new crm, you know, two years ago, you know, they’d have to be really upset to switch, you know, and that’s true just of many things. The typical consumer insurance customer stays with the same company like Progressive or Geico for 11 or 12 years. And you know, and that’s the case in the B2B world too. So mental availability is building up awareness so that you are top of mind when they do want to actually buy something in your category. Because the short list is often very short. And one, sometimes just two companies, you know, I, I have in there a study in the book where someone, an analyst was surveyed their customers, their clients who had just bought new digital asset management systems. These are big enterprise expensive software system. A majority of the clients had looked at one vendor, they had done no competitive bake off at all.

(11:27): And I hear that all the time from small company, you know, companies that are selling to SMBs, you know, that they are, you know, someone hears good things about the MailChimp or about HubSpot or about Constant Contact and they’re like, they look at it, yeah, looks good, let’s go with it. And they don’t spend, you know, three months doing a competitive bake off. And if you aren’t, if you don’t haven’t built up that mental availability over the previous months and years, you don’t know about that opportunity. All the search marketing in the world and email marketing in the world will not make you aware of that opportunity cuz they’re just not gonna talk to anyone. They’ve already settled before they bought it. And so you wanna get yourself, and this is what, you know, this is why p and g and companies like that, you know, you look at the Today Show and they do their 15 second ads and it’s just to constantly be, you know, maintain that aware that mental availability, which is more than awareness, so that when you are ready to buy, when you are ready to switch, you are the one they’re thinking of.

John Jantsch (12:31): You know, I can already hear listeners saying, well, that’s great, p and g has billions, you know, somewhere, you know, how can I afford, you know, how can I invest in that type of, you know what, maybe people would’ve called brand marketing or something at one point. How can I invest in that when I really can’t measure it, you know, scientifically,

Louis Gudema (12:53): Well, I compare it, I like to make this comparison, John, brand marketing and building awareness is like exercise, you know, it’s well documented that people are healthier and live longer and live healthier, right. If they exercise, you know, five times a week, right. You know, half an hour a day, not a huge investment, but you know, if they do that they will be much healthier and live longer. And that’s like brand marketing. You know, it’s not with exercise where you can say, you know, last Tuesday I ran a 5K and that’s what made me healthy, or I got X return from it . Right. You know, it’s the doing it constantly over and over again at the same time, you know, in terms of medicine, you know, when you got an emergency, you get a, you know, chemotherapy, you get surgery, you get your covid shot, you know, those have great short-term effects. They may even save your life, but they don’t produce long-term health and wellness. And so you need ’em both. And what the researchers, what the studies show is that optimally you have a roughly 50 50 balance and spend between brand and lead generation.

John Jantsch (14:04): Yeah. And I can attest to the fact that having that long-term approach, whatever it is, however, you know, shows up, doesn’t, it’s not always running ads, you know, on the Today Show that having that brand mental availability, brand awareness out there actually makes your marketing your short-term marketing more effective. I have found. So in other words, you know, we’ve invested for years in inbound. That’s just part of what we do. I produce content, we’re on social media, I speak on stages, I do webinars. You know, those are all kind of things that in many cases are just kind of getting the name, keeping the name out there when we then decide there’s something we wanna promote and we put ads behind it. I can tell you anecdotally, but I, you know, probably could go do better than that, that we have people all the time saying, yeah, I read Tape Marketing eight years ago and then I saw your ad and it just reminded me how awesome it . You know, I mean, it, it, you know, I, again, I th I I think it’s really testament to the fact that they support each other. I think it’s not just like for the long term someday.

Louis Gudema (15:05): Oh, sure. So are you familiar with Gusto? The Oh, okay,

John Jantsch (15:08): Sure, sure. Actually, my, my, my daughter has done a lot of marketing with them or my daughter’s firm. Yeah.

Louis Gudema (15:14): Okay. So I quote the former CMO of Gusto, she was the CMO when they grew from 500 to 50,000 in customers. Yeah. So hugely successful. Now she’s the ceo. That’s what you get when you go from 500 to 50,000. You get to be CEO next time. Yeah. And of Mutiny a marketing AI firm. Ah, and she says that at Gusto, she found that whenever she turned off the brand marketing, six months later, their customer acquisition costs, their CAC went through the roof and their conversion rates tanked. And, you know, she tried it. She ran the, this experiment and other companies, Adidas found the same thing in B2C, you know, six or seven years ago, they said, oh, we’re just gonna do this, you know, digital lead gens, you know, online sales stuff, we don’t need the brand marketing. We’ll leave that to Nike. And after about three or four years, they said, oops, you know, they found out. So a lot of companies have found out in a lot of different industries that just exactly what you said, brand supports LeadGen, and you need ’em both, you know, hand in hand.

John Jantsch (16:30): This is a

Louis Gudema (16:30): Say, just one other thing, and they are fundamentally different. Yeah. Yeah. And you might even need different people or different agencies doing them because the brand is all about creative and emotion and characters and humor

John Jantsch (16:44): Message. Yeah. And

Louis Gudema (16:44): The lead gen is all about rational, 10% off sign up for our webinar conversion optimization stuff. So they are very different skills. And you may need different, you know, groups of people doing them.

John Jantsch (16:58): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process. It, it’s going to allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification.

(17:46): And now, word from our sponsor, are you ready to get out of spreadsheets? Look with HubSpot CRM, get realtime data at your fingertips so your teams stay in sync across the customer journey. Build better content, generate more conversions, and get the context you need to create amazing experiences for your teams and your customers at scale. All from one powerful platform. It’s why more than 150,000 companies already use HubSpot’s CRM to run their businesses better. Plus, HubSpot’s user-friendly interface sets you up for success from day one. So you can spend less time managing software and more time on what matters your customers. There’s no better time to get organized. Get started for free @hubspot.com today.

(18:35): If this next question were part of a drinking game and you had to drink every time somebody asks a question about this right now, if we all wouldn’t be getting much done, but where are you, where, what’s your take on AI in marketing these days?

Louis Gudema (18:49): Uh, I think it’s very new and I think it’s gonna have a huge impact. I actually was sitting, you know, I, until last month, I headed up a group in Boston that you’ve spoken to sales and marketing innovators. And we had a speaker today on AI in marketing, and he was making a point. So first, all the writing I see from AI today, I think is very bland and mm-hmm. Undistinguished. Yep. But who knows what it’ll be like in two or three years. But he was saying that, you know, what AI does is it brings in a huge amount of internet content and, you know, and then it generates new things from that. Now, LinkedIn itself, the LinkedIn B2B Institute says that 75% of the ads on LinkedIn are in a, and as we’ve been talking about, most B2B ads are not very good. So if you’re using an AI that’s taking in all the mediocre stuff that’s being done today and creating new things based on that, I don’t think that’s what you want. I, you know, and I think that to the degree that AI is valuable, marketers have to be better than AI or, or we won’t have jobs.

John Jantsch (20:01): Well, you know, at least what I’m telling people right now is it’s an efficiency tool. It’s a research tool. So, you know, you may ask it’s something and get 20 ideas where you would’ve thought of 10 or something. You know, I’m with you. I mean, it’s certainly not at the cut and paste stage by, by any means. Boy, I tell you, it does a good job of outlining things. It does a good job. Metadata is a perfect example. I mean, you know, for SEO purposes, keyword research for SEO purposes, it just speeds. You know, it gives us a lot of speed and efficiency in doing some of those routine tasks. And I think that’s how, if we use it that way and free up sort of those, the mental capacity, you know, to think strategically, I think it, it certainly has a place today.

Louis Gudema (20:44): Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it’s great for brain, you know, brainstorming and you might get, you know, 15 or 20 ideas and you say, yeah, that one, you know that that might be a good topic. Although I heard, uh, I saw on Twitter, this guy at this agency said that they were doing a branding campaign and they asked Chad g p t and it came up with, you know, like 10 15. And then, so they immediately tossed all those out as being the obvious banal things. And their job then was to find the new innovative approach that something like ChatGPT wouldn’t come up with.

John Jantsch (21:22): Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been using it a lot for some strategic research too. You know, you develop a persona and then say, you know, what are the 20 concerns that, you know, this persona might have when buying X Service or considering X Service? And, you know, I have to say it, you know, it, it is probably the common stuff, but it just, you know, it’s, it create create in that particular case, it creates a nice framework for, you know, maybe we ought to be messaging around a few of these. Yeah. So let me shift gears a little bit. You are an author of a great book, bullseye Marketing, but you also write books with and for other folks, really, truly for, I suppose, as a ghostwriter, you, you wanna talk a little bit about your decision to do that? I find it difficult because it’s so much work to write a book. I can’t imagine writing somebody else’s book.

Louis Gudema (22:11): . Well, you know, they have to pay you to do it

John Jantsch (22:15): .

Louis Gudema (22:16): So I can help you on that part of it. So yeah, after I wrote Bullseye Marketing, I contacted a few publishers, and the thing is, I’ve been a, a ghostwriter, if you wanna call it that. Well, that’s for my entire career. Right, right. I’ve written for, you know, I’ve written for CEOs, I’ve written for clients, you know, campaigns, I’ve a hundred page manuals and videos and, you know, I’ve written for clients my entire career. So this is just a, a different form of writing.

John Jantsch (22:42): Different package, huh? Yeah. A different package. Yeah.

Louis Gudema (22:46): Yeah. And so I, I let a few publishers know, and last year one of them contacted me and said, yeah, we do need someone to write a marketing book. And it was an interesting topic. It was B2B, but it was not an area I had done a lot of work in. So it was kind of interesting. And I, I could learn the author and I got along very well. He liked, you know, what I wrote, and that helped us get along well. Right. . Um, so now in that case, I did not have a credit, and now I’m, you know, talking with a, another author who, where I would be a co-author on the book. So yeah, I am interested in doing that. And as I said, it’s kind of a, you know, it’s something I’ve done for a long time.

John Jantsch (23:28): Well, you know, ChatGPT, they’re, you know, just have it spin out books for you and then they’ll be very profitable. Right?

Louis Gudema (23:35): I think so , I think if I can just have ChatGPT write it all in the background, it’ll, you know, and I can do about 20 or 50 at a time.

John Jantsch (23:44): Yeah. , like who are some of those people? Patterson, James Patterson, that spins out, you know, like eight books a year. But I guess he’s, I guess he’s just hired an army of people that can work inside of his sort of framework model and write. Oh, is that what he does? Yeah. Yeah. Apparently. So that’s why he, that’s why he’s so prolific.

Louis Gudema (24:03): Well, Stephen King does is outrageously prolific with his novels. Yeah. I think he ha does something like, I, I read his book on writing. I think he has a goal of something like 2000 words a day.

John Jantsch (24:16): Oh, wow.

Louis Gudema (24:17): And so, you know, he sits down every morning, writes his 2000 words, and, you know, that’s,

John Jantsch (24:23): That’s how

Louis Gudema (24:24): You, he has another very

John Jantsch (24:25): Long, how to say that that’s how you get to eight, 800 pages. Right.

Louis Gudema (24:29): Yeah. .

John Jantsch (24:30): Although I will say Bullseye Marketing is no thin work there either. It’s, uh, I think you’re with the index, you’re over 400 pages and in that book and it’s really, you know, I don’t know if you see this as a compliment or not, but I think it’s a, I think it’d be an amazing textbook just because you cover so much ground and you do it in, I think in very practical ways.

Louis Gudema (24:49): Well, thank you. I have, I had a, a one reader in their Amazon review of the first edition called it an encyclopedia. Yeah, yeah. Of marketing. It’s, you know, when I kind of picked it up to do the second edition, I was like, this is ridiculously ambitious . But it’s funny you mentioned that cuz when Douglas Burett interviewed me, you know, five years ago on the Marketing Book podcast, he started off by saying, so I weighed this and it weighed 1.5 pounds. So I were you, it wasn’t what I thought was the most notable, but apparently it is longer than those

John Jantsch (25:28): Books on top of pages. You, I don’t know who, you know, Wedgewood Press got the paper from, but I just think it’s, I think it’s just a bulky, heavy book in general compared to a lot of other 400 page books. So it has something to do with the weight of the paper. I think even,

Louis Gudema (25:43): Well it’s got over a hundred full color illustrations.

John Jantsch (25:47): Well that too. Yeah. Did the first tradition, I’m forgetting, did the first tradition have color? Oh, okay.

Louis Gudema (25:52): And so, you know, wanted high quality paper.

John Jantsch (25:55): Yeah, yeah. Well you accomplished that. Well Lewis, thanks again for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna invite people to connect with you and find out more about Bullseye Marketing in its various forms.

Louis Gudema (26:07): Yeah, so, so the book will launch on May 2nd. I’m not sure when this will drop, but either, you know, right. Presumably

John Jantsch (26:17): It’s May 2nd, 2023 I should say. Cuz people listen to this show years later.

Louis Gudema (26:22): That’s true. May 2nd, 2023, the ebook can be advanced ordered, but the physical book for some reason cannot. But you can buy it May 2nd and you can connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter or louisgudema@gmail and would love to, you know, communicate with any of your, uh, listeners.

John Jantsch (26:42): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon. One of these days out there on the road, Lu. Thank you, John. Be well. 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, dot 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 episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

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

March 18, 2023/by exposure

Cracking the Code of Data-Driven Marketing

Cracking the Code of Data-Driven Marketing written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Christina Inge

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Christina Inge. She has two decades of experience leading digital strategy and managing complex marketing technology projects. She specializes in articulating effective, efficient digital strategies for organizations using the latest channels to drive results. She is the founder of Sleek Marketing, which offers hands-on education on digital marketing in the Boston area.

Her book Marketing Metrics: Leverage Analytics and Data to Optimize Marketing Strategies, is a practical guide to creating efficient future-focused marketing strategies powered by data-driven techniques that can develop stronger brands and products.

Key Takeaway:

Strategy is essential to manage a business today, and a data-driven strategy is one of the trending techniques to impulse your business growth. Christina mentions the importance of collecting, analyzing, and leveraging data and at the same time conducting experiments to have a competitive advantage in trends and in your market. The data you need to focus on should be anything related to ROI, unique KPIs, consumer perception, and the overall health of the branding and company. She emphasizes the idea that it’s not just about collecting data; it’s being smart about the data you collect.

Questions I ask Christina Inge:

[01:50] When you’re talking to somebody about this idea of a data-driven strategy, how do you bridge that gap if they really aren’t working from a strategic framework anyway?
[05:03] There is so much you could measure today, a lot of data to be analyzed. So how do we get to what’s the important stuff?
[08:40] Are there some best practices in even assigning attribution or guessing or dividing attribution amongst channels?
[10:51] How do you end up being smart and build empathy back into the data?
[15:24] What role do consultants have in bringing data more to the forefront with their customers?
[17:45] Talking about the changes in privacy, it’s not as easy to get some of the data that we used to get before. What do you see that businesses need to be doing?
[21:35] What are you telling people about GA4 today?

More About Christina Inge:

https://thoughtlight.net
Get your copy: Marketing Metrics: Leverage Analytics and Data to Optimize Marketing Strategies

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Christina Inge. Just two decades of experience leading digital strategy and management and managing complex marketing technology projects. She specializes in articulating effective, efficient digital strategies for organizations using the latest channels to drive results. She’s the founder of Sleek Marketing, which offers hands-on education on digital marketing in the Boston area, and she’s also the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today, Marketing Metrics: Leverage Analytics and Data to Optimize Marketing Strategies. So Christina, welcome to the show.

Christina Inge (01:34): Thank you John for having me here.

John Jantsch (01:36): So here’s my first question. When you use metrics and strategies in the same subtitle title, most businesses I end up running up against don’t have a strategy, let alone a data-driven strategy. So, so how when you’re talking to somebody about this idea of a data-driven strategy, how do you bridge that gap if they really aren’t working from a strategic framework anyway?

Christina Inge (01:59): I think most people, even if they’re not working from a strategic framework, either believe that they are, yeah, , or know that they are not and wish to do so. I have yet to meet anybody who says, you know what? I hate strategy. I wanna just fly by the seat of my pants day in and day out. I’m sure they’re out there, but mercifully or unmercifully, I have not met them. . So the first thing is, there’s really not a lot of resistance to the idea of having a strategy. People don’t have one, but that’s all the more reason why they want to have a strategy and why they turn to data. Because if you don’t have a strategy right now, half the time, if not 70% of the time, you believe, rightfully so in most cases, that the reason you don’t have a strategy is because you don’t have enough. And data is really just information. Yeah. So most of the time people are like, yeah, I absolutely need a strategy and I need the data to develop that strategy. And datadriven strategy is like the buzzword of the moment. Sure. So people are for the most part on board with it, especially if they don’t currently have any kind of strategy at all.

John Jantsch (03:11): So, so you know, well, a lot of times when you work, what I hear you saying, I shouldn’t put words in your mouth, I’m gonna ask the question, is that a lot of people figure out what they’re gonna do and then say, let’s figure out how to measure it. And what you’re in some ways saying is, let’s look at what the data tells us to figure out what to do.

Christina Inge (03:29): Yes and no. So you should be always making data driven decisions. You should probably not be making decisions just based on gut feel or the mood of the moment. And I’m just, uh, swinging around here to be slightly less backlit, although I have that angelic look here going on. So you should be looking at the data to have it help you decide what to do. But you should also be conducting experiments. You should be doing ABM multivariate testing to test out hypotheses about what you should be doing. I’ll give you an example. So you can look at the data for what worked six months ago in a space like consumer, I don’t know, health and beauty, right? But what was on trend six months ago, what was on trend three months ago is not necessarily what’s on trend now. So if you go at that, go and look at that data and say, well, these particular influencers were really productive for us, or this kind of subject line in our emails or our marketing automation was very productive. It is not necessarily going to be the case right now. So I say, yeah, look at the data, but don’t just retroactively look at the data and then proactively predict forward. Well, predicting is a forward looking thing. Pride forward what you’re going to do, use that as a guide. But the past is only one of the many guides to what you should be doing. You should also be actively experimenting.

John Jantsch (04:55): One of the complaints of course, that I think people, uh, have today is there, you know, 20 years ago there was only so much you could measure today, lots of data, lots to be analyzed. So I mean, probably too much, right? In some cases. So how do we kind of get to what’s the important stuff?

Christina Inge (05:16): Anything that’s related to ROI is what you should focus on. I’m gonna say there’s three things you should be focusing on. One is anything related to roi, because at the end of the day, you’re either in the business of making money or if you’re a nonprofit, you’re in the business of serving a particular mission. And then your roi, it may not be monetary, but it’s gonna be there in elephants saved or disease cured or what have you. So you need to first and foremost say, am I doing things that help us meet our mission? Whether it’s shareholder value or saving elephants? Is this email campaign? Is this social media campaign, ad campaign, this combination of things, this customer, are any of these things helping us actually achieve that mission? And for that unique KPIs, key performance indicators that tell you, well, how will I know that we’re succeeding?

(06:07): So that’s the first thing, and I’ll get back to the issue of KPIs in a moment, but I wanted to also talk about, all right, what are the other two things that are help you narrow down to the metrics that matter? Not everything is gonna be a direct driver or even a quantifiable driver of roi. So for instance, if you have an outstanding, if you do a rebranding the way Campbell Soup recently did a rebranding, maybe more soup’s gonna fly off the shelves, maybe not. Maybe it’s gonna give them a little bit of a bump. But rebranding, people often don’t do it with the view towards all this is in and of itself, right? Going to cost people to stamped and buy my product. So you also want to measure consumer perception, your own positioning in the marketplace. And that takes it a step above ROI to the overall health of your branding your company.

(06:54): And then finally, if you wanna think about it as a Venn diagram where ROI is here, well may encompassing mo that mostly your brand health is here. Then the biggest circle of things you need to be measuring is your industry. You want to think about looking ahead to trends. Don’t forget, when you think about building a blue ocean strategy, one of the ways in which you can carve out a blue ocean for yourself. And if that’s not a mixed metaphor, I have no idea what, so we’re carving out an ocean and leveraging the ROI and running it up the flag pole. Oh my word. That’s way George jargon for a Monday afternoon is, which is when we’re recording this, but one of the ways in which you can create a blue ocean for yourself is by anticipating trends, right? Being ahead of the curve. Now, of course, the idea that there’s always a first mover advantage has been thoroughly debunked. In fact, that paper got retracted and cringe whenever anyone says first mover advantage. Cuz it’s not that simple. Sometimes there isn’t, sometimes there isn’t. But what you can’t afford to do in this world is be utterly oblivious to emerging trends. And instead simply being reactive or trying to be proactive, but only being proactive with a narrow time horizon. So time horizon A, look at your ROI of what you’re currently doing, time horizon B, look at the health of your brand and then the big time horizon start metricating overall industry trends.

John Jantsch (08:25): So on top of too much data, another thing that I hear quite often is this idea of attribution. How do I know exactly what did what, because the customer journey’s a little all over the place, . So are there some best practices in even assigning attribution or guessing or dividing attribution amongst channels?

Christina Inge (08:51): There’s again, three things there that I tell people to focus on. One is, on a tactical level, you want to have a tagging system in place. Mm-hmm. , like if you are not on a very basic level setting UTM parameters, or in some ways actually tracking all of your marketing efforts, start there, right? Gather that data. People will say, well, we can’t measure this or that because it’s on a third party. Yes, you can. Maybe not perfectly, but yes you can. So get the mechanics of measurement down. But a bigger challenge for a lot of people are the two other big things with attribution modeling. The first is simply having an attribution model and understanding what those are. A lot of times people have been doing analytics for quite some time, but they have no real clear idea of the differences between different attribution models like first touch, last touch.

(09:45): Mm-hmm. data driven of course, is very big for anybody using Google Analytics or many other platforms Right now we’re just gonna tell you what we think your attribution is and that’s fine. But you should still be able to manually set and explore different attribution models. So you instinctively understand how to map a customer journey and know the differences in attribution. If you attribute things to what we call first touch, which is the first interaction someone has last touch, last interaction, and so on and so forth, like equal credit to everything, those are really gonna give you dramatically different pictures of your customer journey.

John Jantsch (10:25): So, and Oh, go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say, if you wanna finish that point, cuz I’m gonna move on to completely different,

Christina Inge (10:33): Oh well really quickly. The biggest part of customer journey mapping that people leave out is empathy. You want to have an ability to put yourself in your consumer’s shoes. It’s not just the data, it’s being smart about the data.

John Jantsch (10:48): Hmm. Say more about that. Okay. How, how are you, how do you end up being smart and build empathy back into the data?

Christina Inge (10:55): Well, the nice thing is that there’s a couple of tools out there, and in case anybody’s wondering what the movement is over my shoulder here is I’m being photo bombed by my dog, . Hi Kelly. Say hello to the people. Yeah. So we are one of the favorite tools that I like to use. I am shocked by the number of people who don’t start every marketing effort with personas. People will talk about these great groups of customers they have like, oh, millennials for instance. And I often use this example, in fact, I’ve used it in other podcasts. So I’m, I wish I had something completely original to share with you, John, but it’s a favorite analogy that I like to use. I will, when I do this, when I do my class at Harvard for instance, or at Northeastern, I’ll put four pictures up first I’ll say, okay, do you wanna reach, let’s say teenage girls, parents with large numbers of kids, people who travel with their pets and LGBTQ millennials and everyone’s like it.

(11:52): Totally. And then I put up a picture of a teenage girl and it’s Joan of Arc, and I put up a picture of a person with a lot of kids and it’s Genghis Khan . And then the guy traveling with a bunch of pets is Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants and the LGBTQ millennial is Alexander the Great and I say, are any of these folks gonna buy your gum or your frozen dinner service? No. But what would they all buy? Oh, armor. Yes, they would buy armor or I don’t know, catapults or whatever the heck you needed. I don’t know what Hannibal needed to cross the LPs, but I dare say armor was part of it. Swords spears, they’re in the market for those products. And so one of the things that happens when you don’t have personas is that you lump people together by demographics or by a specific buying behavior that may ha be no indicator of who they are.

(12:45): Because I tell you right now, Joan of Arc is not buying your car insurance from you or your lip B and try selling anything to Genghis Khan. Mm-hmm . So the point here, being an A persona is a really good way to take that vague abstraction of your, you know, millennials with two kids or whatever, and actually think long and hard about whether you’re sell, whether they’re buying what you’re selling. The next thing that I really love to do, it’s called an empathy map. I don’t know if you’ve used one of those in the past, or I’m sure several of the listeners have love empathy maps. There’s some really great templates out there, but they help you dig into how is your consumer feeling in the moment? Yeah. What do they,

John Jantsch (13:29): What are they seeing? What are they hearing? What are they saying? Right? Right. Exactly. Yep.

Christina Inge (13:34): And that takes that persona who is still a two-dimensional figure, and you are right there with them and you’re understanding what they need. Like, gosh darn, I wish I had a catapult at this moment.

John Jantsch (13:46): , hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process it. It’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(14:34): And now word from our sponsor, are you ready to get out of spreadsheets? Look with HubSpot crm, get realtime data at your fingertips so your team stay in sync across the customer journey, build better content, generate more conversions, and get the context you need to create amazing experiences for your teams and your customers at scale. All from one powerful platform. It’s why more than 150,000 companies already use HubSpot’s CRM to run their businesses better. Plus, HubSpot’s user friendly interface sets you up for success from day one so you can spend less time managing software and more time on what matters your customers. There’s no better time to get organized, get started for free @hubspot.com today.

(15:23): So what role, because you do consulting, what role do consultants have in really bringing data more to the forefront with their customers? So a lot of marketing firms out there, yep. Say, oh, you want a website or you want leads, you know, we’ll get you that. But they’re not really, they’re certainly not leading or pushing a client to be more data-centric.

Christina Inge (15:44): Think the role that consultants plays a vital one, because we’re often perceived as more objective. And I would say arguably we often are, and that helps us look at the data without knowing so much of the backstory that we aren’t willing to consider certain things. So going back to my favorite analogy, if you’ve been trying to sell pet beds and you’re not selling them and you think, oh, we need to redesign the pet bed, and I come in with my crew and we say, no, the reason that your pet beds aren’t selling is because your target customer has an elephant, we are the ones willing to speak to the quote, literally or figuratively, usually figuratively elephant in the room, right? And say, okay, the fundamental assumptions here are wrong. We can do that from place of emotional safety. That’s part of it. I think the other vital role customers play is again, that fresh perception, which comes down to the fact that we can conduct data audits or other inventories or even just questions asked about what kind of data are you collecting and identify gaps that people have learned to live with.

(16:51): I mean, I’m a lifelong Bostonian and I can tell you that when people come to town, they’re often absolutely shocked about how much we live with potholes. We’ve gotten used to it, we take it for granted. Oh yeah, the streets are filled with potholes, whatever. And it takes an outsider to say, wait a minute, the streets are filled with potholes. Now mind you, I can’t go out and fill those potholes. So it’s, the analogy falls apart, but the point here being, it often takes that external perception to tell you what’s actually happening beyond just sort of puncturing those common assumptions, which people often desperately want you to question, but you are also actually asking, well where’s the state of com coming from? That’s very

John Jantsch (17:36): Valuable. All right, so I’m gonna, we don’t have all the time that it will take for you to answer this next question , but I’d just

Christina Inge (17:43): Like to

John Jantsch (17:44): , I’d just like to you to weigh in on the changes in privacy. Certainly tracking, certainly the data we get. You know, obviously everybody’s familiar with, you know, the Facebook, you know, tracking that’s gone or behavioral, you know, attribution that have gone away. Where do you see that, whether we know where it’s going or not, what do you see that businesses need to be doing? Because, you know, it’s not as easy to get some of the data that we used to get,

Christina Inge (18:10): You know, don’t, I can actually answer this pretty quickly because I would say it’s two things. One is double down on your own first party data, right? Make sure that you’re doing data audits, making sure your data is ethically collected. In other words, it’s fully opted in and make sure it’s clean. I guarantee you most people’s data is not as clean as they’d like. It’s kind of like your refrigerator, your fridge is never as clean as you’d like. Neither is your data. The other thing you want to do is start going old school, in my opinion, which is figuring out what are the proxies for the data that you can no longer collect. I mean, even Google is using predictive modeling to fill in the gaps that are resulting from people opting into integrated privacy protection, whether it’s legally mandated or not. What I mean by that is I’ve been in marketing long enough that I remember when you had to target people by the magazines they read and those kinds of targeting where you’re targeting people by a self-evident, self-selected and self-identified interest are not bad. And we have to get back to thinking like that. To go back to my analogy, if you are trying to figure out what you can sell to Hannibal Alexander, the Great Joan of Arc and Genus Khan, if you were forget their age, forget their other demographics, if you were targeting all of the, the readers of, or Facebook, well I’m that old that I actually refer to Facebook, Facebook fans or Instagram fan fans of Catapult monthly

John Jantsch (19:41): .

Christina Inge (19:42): You would be getting your target audience and you’d be doing it in a much less invasive way because you’re partnering up with media outlets that have already reached people. It doesn’t matter who they are, it doesn’t matter what they are, what matters is what they want to buy from you or what cause they want to support or activity they want to engage in. Go where it’s self-evident that the crowd you’re gonna find does that, that data is out there and that data tends not to be as tightly regulated, nor is it as ethically questionable. So

John Jantsch (20:12): Go back, yeah, you, you know, everybody’s locking down on the online data, but you can buy a lot of data. You know, I can buy a mailing list of just as you said, people that read a certain magazine that have maybe a certain ailment. It is pretty, pretty crazy. And so I, I mean, I, I think what you’re suggesting too is app pending customer data with some of that, uh, external data might be a way to build, uh, a richer profile or persona.

Christina Inge (20:37): I, I have my own moral reservations about when and if you should be doing a pending, you can certainly do that and it will get you a lot of that data, but if you don’t feel comfortable, so a pending customer data would mean I’ve got a list of 20,000 of my customers and then I go to a data broker and I find out how many of these people are into canoeing, right? Or chain mail or whatever. That may still be something your consumer doesn’t want you to do about them, but if you, again, partner up with folks who have already found your audience because they self evidently need to congregate around a certain media property that I think everyone feels comfortable with. But you know, that’s a line you have to decide yourself organizationally, append is an option, but so can partnerships, so can good old fashioned advertising or media partnerships or inf more contemporary influencer partnerships can be a way of getting around that data privacy as well in a way that’s maybe a little bit more comfortable.

John Jantsch (21:35): You and I are recording this in March of 2023, Google Analytics, which is a, I would suggest a core tracking piece of data gathering by July of 2023 is changing its model completely and certainly its interface completely. Do you, what are you telling people about GA4 today?

Christina Inge (21:55): I actually am quoting my friend Chris Penn on this one. Chris is telling people that you should already be on GA4. If you are on uni, you know, if you’re on Universal Analytics that’s going away and you’re gonna lose your historical data because you are gonna be stuck with switching over in, I don’t know, July or whenever you’re gonna be forced to do. So you could do it maybe even now, but you’re already then, but you July it’s going away. So I don’t know if you’re planning on doing it anytime soon, but do it as soon as possible. Switch over so that you’ve got that historical data. Because what’s wonderful about GA4 is its predictive modeling. It’s gonna predict your, for instance, your most likely converters and it’s gonna need a nice rich data set to do that. So the longer you wait, the slower you’re going to be able to realize the great benefits of it and it’s gonna, you, you know, the learning curve, you just have to accept it and learn how to use this new platform and you’re gonna be happy you did.

John Jantsch (22:53): Yeah, I’ve been telling people you had to learn GA3 , so it’s just, you’re used to it. But we actually did that, we actually put the tags on all of our client sites probably a year ago. So we’ve been collecting that data, but we don’t have many of ’em that want to, you know, use the interface until they have to. But we’ve at least been collecting that data. So yeah, you definitely, and and you know, the myth that they might just push it back for six months, I think is people better probably stop listening to because they have no incentive to push it back. It, it is a free tool that they’re getting sued for using right now. So I guarantee it’s gonna happen on July 1st. That’s my permission.

Christina Inge (23:29): Even if it gets pushed back, you’re, you have nothing to lose because you’re still collecting the data.

John Jantsch (23:35): Yep.

Christina Inge (23:37): And that’s the point. So, no,

John Jantsch (23:39): You’re doing great. So Christina, thanks so much for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find certainly marketing metrics, but really even connect with you and your work?

Christina Inge (23:48): Absolutely. So you can find my book Marketing Metrics on Amazon and it’s, I believe the Kindle version is currently, I had a nice little discount as well of I think 20%. But don’t quote me because you, I don’t know when you’re gonna be listening to this. If you want to find out more about me, you can go to my, the website of the agency that I founded here in Boston in 2014. We are in our ninth year in going strong. And that’s thoughtlight.net thought as in thinking light as in light bulb, T H O U G H T L I G H t.net. And you can reach out to me there, you can find out a little bit more about our services or even order the book. And I personally answer all emails that are addressed to, Hey you.

John Jantsch (24:34): Awesome . So Christina, again, thanks for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Christina Inge (24:42): Thank you. Have a great day, John.

John Jantsch (24:44): 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, dot 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 episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

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

March 16, 2023/by exposure

Unveiling The Mystery Of Effective Selling

Unveiling The Mystery Of Effective Selling written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with David Newman

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview David Newman. He’s the founder of the Do It! MBA mentoring program and the host of The Selling Show, a top-rated business podcast. He is the author of the business bestseller Do It! Marketing, and his new book, Do It! Selling, where David helps professional services sellers land better clients, bigger deals, and higher fees.

Key Takeaway:

Successful selling requires reframing sales as an invitation, and a conversation with an approach to authenticity, curiosity, and service. David Newman joins me to talk about the frameworks needed to generate more effective selling. This requires developing skills of being strategically dumb and perpetually curious, digging deeper into the problem. David emphasizes the importance of focusing on the prospect’s needs and cultivating a mindset of curiosity.

Questions I ask David Newman:

[01:51] Why do you think many people despise the word selling?
[02:59] Why do you suppose that selling is considered the hardest work for most people?
[05:07] Are there certain skills traits, and personality traits that make somebody better than somebody else at selling?
[07:28] How do you break down the set journey or stages of selling?
[10:22] Based on the training that people have received over the years for good or bad; things like overcoming objectives or closing problems, do they still have a place in Do It! Selling?
[15:15] How do you teach people to overcome that fear of price? which is a fear of rejection.
[17:40] Are there unique aspects for professional services sellers?
[21:31] How do I go out there and start kind of knocking on doors without cold calling? How do I start building some opportunities?

More About David Newman:

https://doitmarketing.com
Pre-order: Do It! Selling

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

(00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is David Newman. He is the author of the business best seller, doit Marketing and his new book, doit Selling. He’s the founder of the Doit MBA Mentoring program and the host of the Selling show, a top-rated business podcast with over 300 episodes, I think I maybe even was on once. It helps professionals twice, right? Health professionals, service sellers, land better clients, bigger deals, and higher fees. And that is what we’re gonna talk about today. Welcome back to the show, David.

David Newman (01:28): Hey John. Thank you. It’s great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:30): So the name of your new book, Do it! Selling: 77 Instant Action Ideas to Land Better Clients, bigger Deals and Hire Fees. So when people hear the word selling , uh, you know, I often tell people, entrepreneurs that you know, half 50% of your job, probably at least in the beginning, is gonna be selling . Um, and yet most people, kind of, many people at least despise the word. Why do you suppose that is?

David Newman (02:02): I think it’s two things. I think it’s the way that we have been sold to mm-hmm as prospects, right? Because every entrepreneur wears the salesperson hat, like you said. And we also, in real life we’re also prospects and buyers of all kinds of things, right? And it’s also the way that they’ve been taught to sell by some of these big sort of franchise training organizations that have been doing this for 20, 30 years. And unfortunately doing it 20, 30 years, probably the wrong way. That sales is manipulative and pushy and there are scripts and you have to apply pressure and all of these things. So you take those two things together and it’s no surprise that most independent professionals certainly just hate sales. They hate it a lot. Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (02:50): , I mean, some would just tell you that I don’t necessarily hate it cuz I know I have, you know, I’ve gotten over, I know I have to do it to survive. But most people will still tell you they find it kind of the hardest work they have to do. I mean, what do you suppose that is?

David Newman (03:06): I think they’re looking at it as different than the delivery work. So as, let’s say you’re an accountant and you love accounting, you’re a consultant and you love consulting, you’re a coach and you love coaching. If you look at the diagnostic process, once a client hands you a check, once a client hands you a credit card, you’re asking all kinds of questions, you’re digging, you’re probing, you’re uncovering, you really want to help them. Imagine if we just reframed the sales conversation as you’re very first delivery conversation. So there’s no pressure, there’s nothing to hide, there’s nothing to prove, and you’re just having a human to human conversation about their situation and seeing if you can help them or not. So part of that also is our mindset that we cannot go after prospects like a hungry dog going after a piece of meat . So whether you need the business desperately, you need the business not at all or somewhere in between.

(04:07): We have to remain detached. And I like to reframe, and this is in the do it selling book. One of the first chapters is about reframing the word sales with two other words, invitation and conversation. And most people like invitations cuz usually there’s a party of some kind or bourbon or cookies or barbecue or something fun. And most people are also not afraid of a conversation. So a conversation is where you get to make new friends a conversation is where you get to learn things. A conversation is where you get to exchange ideas. If we reframed the sales process and each sales conversation as simply an invitation to a conversation, I think it would be a get a lot easier. And I think folks would realize they’re probably better at it than they think.

John Jantsch (04:54): Yeah, yeah. I think you’re absolutely right. Most, if most people realize that’s what it was, , um, they wouldn’t necessarily be afraid of it. Right. So I think you already answered this, but I was gonna ask you, you know, are there certain skills traits, personality traits, you know, things that make somebody better than somebody else at sell?

David Newman (05:15): Sure. Well, I think it’s not personality traits because someone argue, oh, you’re a born salesperson, John, you’re just great at sales and you somehow have the sales gene, or you had sales DNA from the time you were a small little tiny baby . I think the two skills that we need to cultivate, which every good trusted advisor has is to be strategically dumb and perpetually curious. Hmm. So all the things that, you know, whether you’ve worked with 10 clients or a thousand clients, you might think, oh, I know all the typical problems, I know all the typical questions, I know all the typical stuck points. I’m not gonna waste time asking this one prospect if they suffer that particular symptom or problem or condition. But I’ll tell you, you gotta be strategically dumb. Pretend that every client is your first client. Every prospect is your first prospect.

(06:08): And start asking questions from that place of being strategically dumb and perpetually curious. Perpetually curious by the way, means never take the first answer at face value. Mm-hmm . So I also talk about this in the doit selling book that we are so concerned with. Two things that we should not be concerned at all about. Number one, sounding smart. Number two being liked. If you are in a sales conversation and you’re very concerned about sounding smart and being liked, where’s your focus? Your focus is on you. If you are committed to being strategically dumb and perpetually curious, meaning asking lots of follow up questions, really digging and probing and uncovering and finding the symptom behind the symptom and the problem behind the problem, then the focus is 100% where it belongs, which is on your prospect.

John Jantsch (07:00): Let’s, let’s talk a little bit about stages of selling. You know, it’s just like a, any kind of customer journey. You know, people’s questions and objectives, you know, change in each other’s stages. So like prospecting, you know, is a common thing. I mean, we sometimes have to go out there and find people who might wanna listen to us, right? And then obviously the conversation can change to like, how’s this gonna work for me? All the way through the, well maybe before that trust building , you know, to, how’s this gonna work for me? How do you break down kind of the set journey or stages of selling?

David Newman (07:34): Well, so the demarcation, and I’m sure you get this question a lot of course as well, it’s like, well when does marketing stop? Yes. And when does selling begin? And certainly for independent professionals, that is a very, it’s a very smooth continuum. So you might think that you’re in a marketing conversation, but you’re actually in the sales conversation. If they express interest, if they have urgency, if they have really desire to fix this problem, sometimes you’re in a sales conversation and it turns out, you know what, they don’t have a need, they don’t have an urgency and it’s just a nice marketing conversation. That person may or may not come back later. But I look at the demarcation point, marketing is everything that happens to get the initial face-to-face, zoom to zoom, voice to voice conversation. Once you’re in that conversation, that literally is the beginning of the sales process.

(08:28): And depending on what we’re selling and how complicated it is or how expensive it is, you might be able to have a one or two call sales process. There might be five steps, six steps, seven steps. We sort of lay this out in the book that somewhere between three and seven steps or three and seven touchpoints is most of the sales conversations that folks that we work with end up with. We’re not selling satellites, we’re not selling complicated manufacturing. Technology is no such thing as a six month or a 12 month sales process for small and solo business owners. It’s just a question of can we get the information and can we share the information to build a level of certainty with that prospect that we can really solve their problem? And that starts with understanding and that starts with listening. And that starts with really probing and questioning to a deep level.

(09:22): I think a lot of folks make the mistake with sales conversations first. Sales conversations specifically. They keep it too polite, they keep it too surface level and then they leave it sort of open-ended saying, well great talking to you John, and you know, you know, call me back if you’ve made a decision or let me know when you’re ready. And they just circle off into the sunset, never to be heard from again. So I think having some discipline and having some linkages in that sales process, because as salespeople, when we put our salesperson hat on, it’s really a leadership role. So we need to set the guardrails and the boundaries of how this sales conversation is gonna go and one of the the key principles that will help people right away, never leave one sales conversation without booking the next sales conversation on the prospect’s calendar so that you’re always getting forward momentum.

John Jantsch (10:20): So you talked a little bit about the training that people have received over the years for good or bad. I mean things like overcoming objectives, closing, you know, or kind of common things that are taught in this. Do they still have a place into Do it! Selling?

David Newman (10:36): Well, so let me answer both the way that we have the sales conversation. There’s a sales conversation roadmap that’s in the book. It’s really meant to prevent objections in the first place. Usually an objection is some sort of surprise. So

John Jantsch (10:51): People say, I don’t have enough info. Yeah,

David Newman (10:53): Yeah, exactly. And they think that when they have a closing problem, it’s something that they screwed up at the end. Usually it’s something they’ve screwed up at the beginning or maybe in the middle. But if you’re not closing enough sales, you’re probably not opening the relationship the right way. You’re not having the initial sales conversations that would really diffuse and, and almost melt away all the typical sales objections. No time, no money, gotta check with my boss, gotta check with my wife. It’s not in the budget. We’re already using someone else. I mean, these are all the standard objections. If we’re asking questions about these things early and often, we will surface these obstacles and we’ll be much more prepared to discuss them and dissolve them as the sales process moves forward. As far as closing, I think a really human to human sales conversation leads to the prospect closing themselves, right?

(11:52): So here are the closing questions that are at the back of the book. And these are, I think our listeners will find these so tricky and so manipulative and so difficult. Here they are. . Well, John, does this sound like something that you’d like to do? John, what do you think about moving forward? John, does what we talked about so far makes sense, John, is this something that you’d like to do? It’s like, oh my God, he’s having a, like, this is like a waiter. Imagine you have a beautiful seven course meal. The waiter comes up to you at the end and says, Mr. Jan, would you like coffee? Would you like dessert? You’re not likely to throw down your fork and go, I can’t believe the sales pressure. What is going on? How dare you ask if I want coffee, if I want dessert. No one gets upset with those two closing questions.

(12:40): Why? Because they’re a natural extension of everything that has come before. So if we learn to have really strong opening sales conversations, surface the issues, get to the question behind the question, the issue behind the issue, the obstacle behind the obstacle, and then it comes time to, hey, we’ve had the value conversation before, the price conversation. I know what I’m solving, I know what I’m fixing, I know what I’m getting and I know what the investment’s gonna be. Would you like to move forward? Does this sound like something you’d like to do? Where would you like to go from here? These are all closing questions that let the fish jump into the boat.

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(14:56): So you mentioned price. That’s clearly an area that people get very nervous about a lot of times when they get asked that. In fact, I, you know, I work with a lot of professionals, consultants and it’s the area that trips ’em up the most. I mean they’ve, you know, I urge them to double their fees . And they say, well I could never get that. So, you know, how do you teach people to, to really kind of overcome that fear of price, which is a fear of rejection, a fear of like, I’m not gonna get the work. But you know, we’re given it away a lot of times by underpricing. And that’s really a function of just not having the right posture, isn’t it?

David Newman (15:33): Yes, absolutely. So I totally agree with you. Just like you, I encourage everyone listening to double your prices right now. , wait a minute, wait a, so let me write that down. Double my prices. The reason that this is important is, and I want to address some of those objections too. I’m gonna price myself out of the market, right? Well if you’re struggling, if you’re a consultant, you’re a coach, you’re a trusted advisor and you’re having a hard time selling at your current price, when you double your price, you will totally price yourself out of the broke market and you’ll start to price yourself into the premium market. And I sometimes ask prospects and clients the same question. I say, do you think over the course of your career, is it possible that you might have lost a couple of deals because you were too cheap?

(16:26): Yep. And almost without fail, they start telling me a story. Oh my gosh, I was talking to this company last year and I lost the deal and I went back to the buyer cuz we had a good relationship. And I said, what was up with that? Like what, you know, what decision criteria made you choose someone else? And the buyer says, well, you know, the price was just so low, it made us nervous. It made the c e o nervous, it made the team nervous it, it made me nervous that I really didn’t think you could solve my problem. And there’s always a story like that. So literally when you price yourself out of one market, or the common objection that we hear is, well my clients would never pay that . I’m gonna agree with you . They wouldn’t because you’re prospecting to the wrong clients. Right?

John Jantsch (17:12): Yeah, 100%. I mean it is, I, you know, I’ve seen it time and time again where somebody, they, it’s almost like what you described, like the person thought it was too cheap, it couldn’t possibly get the result, but you also just, you know, you double your fees and you just, you’re gonna have different, you’re gonna have conversations with different people and that’s, you know, that’s the real key. So, but it’s hard, you know, you’re thinking, can I take $10 today before I get the $20? You know, so it, it keeps people trapped it, you work with a lot of professional services folks. Are there unique aspects of, you know, that type of sale that you think need to exist where they might need not need to exist in a, what I would call a more transactional sale?

David Newman (17:57): Yes, absolutely. Well I think most trusted advisors, unlike selling widgets or unlike selling products, we are the product. Yeah. So we take the sales process and we take rejection very personally. , I think this is something where we need to reframe the mindset and the value that you’re delivering is where we need to focus the conversation. Not, I’m a great consultant, I’m a great attorney, I’m a great coach, I’m a great accountant. Of course you’re great. That’s table stakes these days. Wants to hire someone who is reassuringly expensive and has certainty that they can really solve the problem. Cuz they’ve solved this hundreds or thousands of times before. But because we are the product, when we’re in a professional services sale, and again John, I’m sure you’ve worked with these folks that are coming outta corporate, they’re like the top salesperson for at and t and they can sell corporate cell phone contracts till the cows come home.

(18:54): Now they’re a consultant and it’s like, John, I’m selling myself. It’s completely different what happened? Like I didn’t know this was gonna be different. And it’s completely different because we are now selling a personal transformation where the client wants to go from situation A to situation B. They want to either fix the problem or achieve a new higher level outcome. And we are the bridge, right? We are the conduit, we are the catalyst from where they are to where they want to go. That’s why, for example, all of the things that you teach about, you know what? You’re not the celebrity. The system is the celebrity. The methodology is proven and it works. And that’s why, you know, that’s why that level of certainty, cuz people really want two things at the end of the day, prospects, they want to know that you have a system, that you’re not winging it, you’re not making this up as you go along.

(19:48): And they want certainty that they will get to the outcome that you’re being hired for. So if you can anchor yourself in asking questions and having conversations about what they really want, what they’re trying to fix, what they’re trying to solve, and what are the radiant consequences. So the consequences of the consequences. What if you get this right? What if you get this wrong? Sometimes I’ll even, and this is also in the book as far as the detective questions and the go negative questions. What if you don’t do anything? What if this just continues going the way it’s going for the next six months? Uh, and at any point in a calendar year, you can also ask a prospect, well I’m curious if you look back over the last 12 months, what if your next 12 months looked exactly like your last 12 months with this problem, with this situation? Oh my god, that’s unacceptable. No, we have to fix this. So we’re uncovering just by questioning, we’re uncovering urgency and priority and the values through which they’re gonna make this buying decision. And you absolutely have to do that. Otherwise, you know, we’re pitching instead of asking and listening and so many times with a professional services sale, we actually listen our way into the sale. We do not talk ourselves into a sale.

John Jantsch (21:03): Yeah. I can’t tell you how many times the best question you can ask is, tell me more about that.

David Newman (21:08): Yeah,

John Jantsch (21:08): and then just shut up. Right? And you know your point earlier about a lot of times they will sell themselves by just repeatedly. Tell me more about that, tell me more about that. And then finally they dig themselves in such a hole that you know, they’ve, you know, they clearly are like, you’re right , I need to fix this. Well, last question I wanna talk about, I’m that newish salesperson, or maybe my company doesn’t really provide pipeline. How do I go out there and start kind of knocking on doors without cold calling? I mean, how do I go out there and start? And I shouldn’t put words in your mouth. Maybe you’re gonna say cold call, but I mean, how do I start building some opportunities?

David Newman (21:43): Yeah, so fantastic question and I do wanna address this issue of cold email, cold LinkedIn, cold calling. There’s a huge difference between cold outreach versus initial conversation. People equate those two things where they will say, well John, I don’t like marketing because I really hate cold calls. It’s like there’s a million other things that you could be and should be doing besides randomly cold calling strangers. But let’s talk about initial outreach. What makes initial outreach immediately warm, even if the person’s never heard of you and there’s no preexisting relationship. It is three things. Number one, research. Literally spending 15 minutes researching that prospect, researching their company, going on LinkedIn, going on their website, going to their media page, seeing the press releases, seeing what they’re up again, seeing what they’re working on. So that’s the research and then coming on their radar with something that is immediately relevant to what’s happening today.

(22:41): So research and relevance takes cold outreach and makes it warm. So if someone were to, let’s say someone, and we get this on LinkedIn all the time cuz LinkedIn’s become a horrible vortex of spam. But let’s say out of my LinkedIn messages, I get the following, Hey David, I see that you’ve written two previous books and your brand new book Do it selling just came out. We’re an A and I’m totally making this up. You know, we’re an Amazon sales agency and we make sure that established authors who are launching a book get a really strong foothold with their initial book sales. Would that be worth a chat? That’s the message. So now I both, we’ve met both criteria. They’ve done their research on me. It only takes about 10 minutes to find that out about me or John or a, any one of your prospects, right? They’ve done the research, Hey, I see that you’re doing this right now at this moment in time. And then I’m not pushing myself on them. I’m simply asking, would that be worth a short chat? Now in my situation, and I think every author that’s launching a new book, I would talk to that person. Yeah. Is a cold call or is that intelligent prospecting? Right? Right. It’s intelligent prospecting because of the research and the relevance.

John Jantsch (23:52): Yeah. And you know, it’s quite obvious when somebody is, you know, attempting to do those things, but they’re, you know, completely inauthentic in doing it. So you know, everybody’s gotten the message, you know, oh, personalize it. But you can see when it’s done cut and paste style, you know, as opposed to taking the time. And it really, you know, as you mentioned, LinkedIn particularly has become so, so bad. I can’t remember the last time I actually accepted an invitation to connect, you know, because of how poor they were. But it’s easy to stand out there now because there’s so much garbage.

David Newman (24:26): the bar. You are so right. The bar is low, my friends, good news for everyone listening. The bar is low. All you have to be is be a better human. This is one of my early sales mentors. Maybe I’ll just leave this final comment for folks to think about. I was very committed early on to be a better salesperson. This sales mentor says to me, David, don’t worry about being a better salesperson. Be a better person and you’ll sell more.

John Jantsch (24:51): Yeah, yeah. Makes ton of sense. I mean, we wanna buy from people that we can develop a relationship. We can like, so tell people where they can find out. I know the book is available, going to be available anywhere you buy books, but where would you like to send people to get more information? I know you have some resources too that, uh, that they can acquire. Yes. Basically to connect with you as well.

David Newman (25:10): Absolutely. So doit selling.com is the global headquarters of the Duet Selling Empire. You can grab the book, like John said, you can download some companion resources, tools, video training that will help you implement the ideas in the book. And everything is waiting for you @doitselling.com.

John Jantsch (25:31): Awesome. Well, David, it was always a pleasure to have you drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we will run into you soon, one of these days out there on the road.

David Newman (25:40): I appreciate you, my friend. Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch (25:42): 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 episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

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

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=5564

March 11, 2023/by exposure

A New Generation of AI: ChatGPT

A New Generation of AI: ChatGPT 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 a trend that has gotten so high in the past few months, ChatGPT.

Key Takeaway:

Nowadays, we look for tools that let us be more productive and help us save an immense amount of time. AI is a really hot trend now and accessible to make some of our tasks easier. The newest trend in AI is ChatGPT, a tool that will change how we work and become smarter in how we collect useful information and data for our businesses in order to create smarter strategies. In this episode, I teach you how ChatGPT will be shaking up the way we do things and gain knowledge.

Topics I Cover:

[01:51] What is ChatGPT?
[03:38] Why use this tool?
[04:32] The process of using AI
[06:49] How to use AI to create Hubpages for your business
[08:43] Discover what your ideal customer needs or wants
[11:51] How to use ChatGPT to create online content

Resources I mention:

Send John an email

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

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): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay, and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals 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. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m gonna do another solo show. If you listen to my last show, I started off by saying I wanna talk about a trend. I guess today I’m gonna talk about a really hot trend . It’s one that you’re hearing a ton about and so much so that I’ve been talking about it for a couple years, but the hype level on this trend has gotten so high that I wanna come in and do what hopefully you appreciate from me. Dear listener, , I wanna calm down some of the hype and talk about the real ways in which you can use this. You’ve probably guessed by now I’m talking about ai, artificial intelligence, this new set of tools, it’s been around for quite a while. In fact, I would suggest that whether you know it or not, you’re using AI every day.

(01:34): If you ever use Google Maps and it gets you to around traffic jams and gets you to where you’re going at the fastest route possible at that given time, that is a pretty common use of AI in our everyday life. Frankly, you know, the series and those kind of tools that are that, that have been around on iPhones are using ai, but a new generation of AI has jumped to the forefront. Something called GPT, which was essentially just a way to programmatically, systematically teach some AI tools, everything , all the content that’s out there, consuming it on certain topics, you know, up to a certain date. That’s the easy, simple way, probably to, and so what has happened is these tools have gotten smarter because they have, they’re basically just processing lots of language, lots of data. They can take that now and say, oh, okay, here’s how to write something based on that.

(02:27): Data tools have gotten better. Let’s face it. There’s no question. I think that while there are some tools like Jasper and Write, Sonic Market Muse that have been around for a while, I think the real game changer came when OpenAI ChatGPT, I’m sure you’ve, if you’re not using it, I’m sure you’ve heard people talk about it because it has really opened up the white hot topic of ai and it’s, you know, when that type of thing happens, you get so much chatter out there that it’s really hard to kind of cut through. I remember, this is going way back, so hang on cuz I’m gonna do a grandpa thing, almost internet grandpa. Anyway, you know when Twitter came around finally, I don’t know what year it was, 2008, 2009, it is. It’s like, if you’re not on Twitter, you know, you’re just like not cool.

(03:19): And I think that’s kind of where we are with AI to some degree, but let me just tell you, it is an amazing tool, not because it, well, if you’re a student out there, maybe it’s writing your essays, but as marketers, you’re not u going to use this tool today to create all of your content. You’re gonna use this today as a tool to get smarter about your customers, to get smarter about the industry, to get smarter about your competition, to create plans, content, no question. And to do a lot of mundane tasks, to get ideas, to get research. So that’s the way that, that, I’m not saying that we won’t get there one day where you just push a button and it’s writing, you know, your webpages for you. But what it’s doing right now, think of it right now as a a, a time saving efficiency tool that’s gonna save you some brain cells , quite frankly, because there are things that maybe if you sat around for a while, you’d brainstorm and you’d come up with a list of, you know, FAQs or something in your industry, but this is just gonna give you 20 of ’em.

(04:20): You’re gonna go, oh yeah, five of those are good. I didn’t have to use any brain power to get to those. So that’s how I tell people to really start thinking about it. Now, I wanna spend a little time talking about the process of using ai. So if you use a tool, the, you know, the, probably the reason ChatGPT has become so popular is because the interface is so easy to understand. If you use a tool, you know, essentially what you’re doing is you’re putting in what’s called a prompt. You’re telling it to create something based on something that you give it. Now you can give it a simple keyword phrase and it won’t really know what to do with that, but it’ll probably still spit something out. Or you can give, you can go as detail and deep as you want to tell exactly the tone that you want to write it in.

(05:07): First person to use statistics. I mean, those are all basically part of your prompts. So like many things, garbage in, garbage out. So if you put in a great prompt, if you keep refining your prompt to get to what you want, you’re probably going to get a lot better output. I’m gonna talk before we’re done today about what I would say is the top 10 ways you ought to be using these tools pretty much every single days, just from a use standpoint. Again, a lot of times I will start with kind of global ideas. You know, I wanna, I wanna start brainstorming a big idea. I’ll let it drill down to subcategories. You know, when I’m working with a client for, to create ideas, we definitely wanna plug in what are their strengths. You know, for example, I work with remodeling contractors. Well, you know, one, a very big remodeling contractor we work with is specializes in design build or design remodeler, because they have the designers and architect on staff.

(06:02): So we wanna play to their strengths. So that’s gonna, we’re gonna definitely use that as a way to create a differentiator inside of tools like ChatGPT. All right, let me just spend the rest of our time together today giving you a list. I said 10, I’m, I’ll probably go more than that. I’m just going to throw out a list of the types of output that you should be getting out of ChatGPT or whatever tool you use. Again, shout out to Jasper is another great tool. Shout out to write Sonic, like the word write Sonic is a great tool, but you know, whatever tool you use, these are the types of things that, that you can do. It’s not just writing content. For example, something that we have specialized in the last decade or so is, you know, with our clients, we create something that are called HubPages.

(06:51): Blogs are totally out. Stop calling it a blog, stop putting blog in your, in your, uh, main navigation. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to read a blog. We want got good content, but we want it structured in a way we could find it. And frankly, the way most people see blogs is it’s kind of chronological content. You, you put in a blog post to today and you put in another one tomorrow and when you wrote yesterday is gone. And so what we do is we take all that great content and we structure it around the outline of a big hub topic. So again, for example, I use the remodeling contractor. If they remodel construction or uh, kitchens, you know, we might create the ultimate guide to remodeling your kitchen in whatever city that you’re in. That would be the starting point. And then we would actually use, you could use a tool.

(07:37): In fact, you could type that exact prompt in to ChatGPT and it will give you a outline. Here are all the major chunks. It’s, you know, planning, it’s budgeting, it’s design, it’s construction, it’s, you know, it’s choosing appliances. I mean, basically all the kind of subcategories that go into a kitchen, major kitchen remodel, and it creates the outline for you. It even suggests steps all the way down to, yeah, that would actually be a good blog post. Why remodel Your kitchen probably would come up in that outline. , you know, the benefits of it would probably come up in that outline and, and that would make a great blog topic. So what it does is it kind of gives you like, hey, here’s, you know, in instead of just like, what should we write on Monday? It gives you kind of the whole outline for like, Hey, we ought to be doing something in each of these categories for the next six months and we’ll create this page that, that will really be a great resource.

(08:30): Instead of just telling somebody, go read our blog and maybe you’ll find something I can, I, in fact, I’ve probably done shows on that topic. But if not just Google HubPages Duct Tape Marketing, you’ll get a very thorough description of what I’m talking about there. Another kind of fun use for this tool is wouldn’t it be great to know what your ideal customer lays awake in bed at night worrying about when it comes to making a purchase of whatever it is you sell ? Well, you can actually tell these tools something along the lines of, you know, create a list of the top 20 concerns that a homeowner might have when it comes to remodeling their kitchen. Use first person and be very dramatic in your answers. Oh, and as a bonus, go ahead and write the responses that a marketing company for this remodeling contractor might write.

(09:24): So that sounds like a lot that can all go in one prompt. And then you are going to get a, a list of course of not just concerns, but actually sad in the way that a homeowner might say, you know, to deal with noise and budget and on time and you know all the things that you should be then addressing in your marketing. Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel?

(10:23): Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. So you can use these tools not just to produce content, but to actually produce strategy. In fact, another strategic use. Take all of your Google reviews, you can just copy ’em, paste them in there, and tell the tool to actually go through the above reviews that you just pasted in and create a sentiment analysis, which is just another way of saying what are some of the key themes, , that keep coming up positive and negative? We can take core messages right out of those themes now. All right, let’s go to another step. Once it gives you that output and says, here are the three themes that keep coming up the most, here are the three problems people keep mentioning the most.

(11:20): You could take those in a continuation, put those in and say, okay, create a core marketing message addressing these themes that keep coming up. And so all of a sudden now it’s gonna get creative with you. So think in terms of research for strategy to do things much, much faster. Maybe to give some insights that you don’t have today. You could take three of your competitors and put them in there. And the same thing. What are people say about them that’s positive? What did they say about them that’s negative? You can create how-to, cause it certainly shines at that. Tell it to write a 1000 word article describing the five benefits of doing X, Y, and Z, and it will produce something that’s not bad. I, in fact, I kind of use the sole, the formula of, you know, 20 60, 20, like you give it 20% of the great ideas, let it spit out 60% of the content, and then you actually polish it the final 20%.

(12:18): And you might actually get some decent content written that way. You can take that content that it writes and say, okay, now give me a two minute YouTube video script based on this content. Franka. You can do that with actually any content you’ve written. Let’s see, you have some amazing content on your website already that was professionally handwritten, bespoke, just for you. You could take it to these tools and say, give me 25 uh, tweets based on this content. Give me a two minute video script based on this content. Repurpose this content for a LinkedIn article. And you are gonna get all those things that you could probably create all on your own. In fact, you could do a great job creating those on your own, but you’ve now saved yourself, I don’t know, five hours maybe to actually have it. And there are things that, that, that don’t require brain power.

(13:10): In fact, they just require somebody who understands how to do it. And these tools understand how I how to do it. Great example of that, writing metadata. So, you know, the titles and descriptions, you’ve probably heard every SEO person in the world talk about how important that is as an on page ranking factor. But it’s also, if you’ve got 10 blog posts, it’s also a bit mind numbing to create these tools. Not only create it, they create it in the way that Google wants to see it. They create it certainly SEO optimized. So even if you know how to do that, if you don’t really know how to do that, this is a great aid. But even if you know how to create something like that, this is a tool that will just save you an immense amount of time. I, I can tell you that, you know, companies that produce articles today, and this won’t be 100%, but a lot of companies that produce articles today, a lot of companies that do SEO work, a lot of people that do podcast transcripts, I mean those are all going to be produced by AI if they’re not mostly being produced by AI today.

(14:09): Google loves question and answers. FAQs have always been great content. There are certain types of people that they just want to go and find the one question they have and get it answered. So every single one of your service pages, if you offer different services or you offer different products or solutions, should, should have a list of FAQs, not just for the company in general. Yeah, maybe you have one of those that talks about how you work or about your process. But every one of your products and services should have cues. But you know, they take time, like everything they take brain power to, to produce. You can use these tools to get a head start on an, on what questions people are asking and the answers that obviously you’re gonna want to sprinkle your own magic on those, those answers, but it just allows you to do things much more efficiently. Do things that you’re probably not getting to today either because of cost or because of just time and you actually get it done quickly and rolled out. In fact, you know, just the very start of of keyword research, you know, just putting in a couple terms and letting a tool, an AI tool give you, I mean there are tools out there that do this, but the AI tool, since you’re using it can give you a list of, you know, the keyword word phrases that people are searching for companies or businesses like yours.

(15:25): You can tell the, you know, I already mentioned the idea of social posts. It’s great at writing four specific Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. I mean, one of the things that’s sort of banding about social media is has a way to differentiate themselves. Each platform now has their own way they wanna see content and what kind of content and what style of content works and what shape the images are. And so using a tool like this to actually write for specific platforms, just take some of the work out of that. You can actually, let’s say you, you wanna make sure that you’ve got a marketing assistant that’s writing content for email newsletter every month for social posts, every month for blog posts every month. You can tell these tools, you can give it the key themes and say create a monthly editorial calendar. If you’re an agency, you can certainly do that for a client and it, and you may not execute on the thing for 12 months.

(16:16): But if you’re an agency or a coach or a consultant and you’re able to show in a proposal to a client, here’s what 12 months would look like, a typical sort of proposed 12 months editorial would look like. It’s a great sales tool. You know, again, like do you execute on every single thing that’s on there, you know, nine months from now, maybe not, but it actually is a great differentiator and is very efficient to produce. Speaking of efficiency, one of the things I’ve learned about advertising or ads, digital ads is you can sit around in a room and guess all you want and some people are probably better at it than others. Which ad, which headline, which picture, which uh, description, which call to action is actually going to be the best. But experience tells me that the only real data that you can rely on is data that you test.

(17:06): So testing your headlines, testing hundreds of variations for ads is how you really get to the winners. Obviously you’ve gotta track and you’ve gotta analyze and you’ve gotta have, you know, your audience variables, right? I mean, there’s lots of variables, but I do know that when it comes to creating lots of variations that you can test, these tools are super fast at doing that. And sometimes you just have to have a lot of volume in order to start testing. So let me ask you this. If you’ve listened to this far, ping me, just send me a note, john@ducttapemarketing.com. Say, I would love it if you would actually demo kind of a working session on, you know, a ChatGPT type of tool. Be happy to do that. So just write that, send me a note, leave me a review. We always love those.

(17:53): Tell other people to subscribe. , what else can I ask you to do? All right, lots to learn. Lots more to come on this. This is actually going to evolve immensely. There will be so many ways that people find to use these tools, but there are very many practical ways that you should be using them today and hopefully this helped sort some of those out for you. All right, take care and hopefully we’ll run into you listener one of these days out there on the road.

(18:21): 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, dot 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.

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

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=5391

March 2, 2023/by exposure

Growing Your Business Quickly And Effectively Like A Weed

Growing Your Business Quickly And Effectively Like A Weed written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Stu Heinecke

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Stu Heinecke. Stu is a bestselling business author, marketer, and Wall Street Journal cartoonist. His first book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone, introduced the concept of Contact Marketing and was named one of the top 64 sales books of all time. His latest release, How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, lays out a complete model for explosive business growth, based on the strategies, attributes, and tools weeds use to grow, expand, dominate and defend their turf. He is a twice-nominated hall of fame marketer, Nasdaq Entrepreneurial Center author-in-residence, and was named the “Father of Contact Marketing” by the American Marketing Association. He lives on a beautiful island in Puget Sound, Washington.

Key Takeaway:

Anyone can grow their business into something resilient and unstoppable — just like weeds do. In this episode, best-selling author, Stu Heinecke, shares his model for business growth by using the successful strategies that ordinary weeds use to spread and prosper in almost any situation. We dive into the weed-based attributes you can use to get the job done quickly and effectively and increase your market share, prominence, and customer base.

Questions I ask Stu Heinecke:

[1:46] Why did you want to use the analogy of a weed and what was your thought process behind it?
[3:14] Why is a weed different than a prize-winning flower?
[4:27] The big premise of using the weed metaphor is really to tap into what you’re calling a weed mindset — can you unpack that idea for us?
[5:32] What are the unfair advantages that you think adopting this weed mindset gives a business?
[7:39] Can you break down the weed model for us?
[14:17] How do you apply this model to taking that next step and getting to the next level with your business?
[17:41] How do you win a weed award?
[19:27] Where can people buy your book and learn more about your work?

More About Stu Heinecke:

His book — How to Grow Your Business Like a Weed: A Complete Strategy for Unstoppable Growth
StuHeinecke.com

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Stu Heinecke. He’s a best-selling business author, marketer and Wall Street Journal cartoonist. His first book, how to Get a Meeting With Anyone, introduce Concept of Contact Marketing, was named one of the top 64 sales books of All Time. We’re gonna talk about his latest book, how to Grow Your Business Like a Weed, which lays out a model for explosive business growth based on the strategies, attributes, and tools weeds used to grow and expand, dominate, and defend their turfs. So Stu, welcome to the show.

Stu Heinecke (01:32): Thank you so much. What a, what a pleasure. And as I’m listening to it, I’m thinking, what the hell is he talking ? What must this guy be talking about

John Jantsch (01:42): ? Well, I’m certain that the first question that many people have given our sort of negative view, typically negative view of weeds is like, wait a minute. You know, that’s like how to smell like a skunk, isn’t it? I mean, why ? You know, why do I wanna use the analogy of weeds? So help helps first go there.

Stu Heinecke (02:02): Sure. Well, you know, by the way, I think the first thing they think of is, you mean this kind of weed, the ki kind of weed you smoke? No, it’s not that kind. That’s not what we’re talking about. But yeah, I mean, well, we all know what it means to grow like a weed. So the fact is that all of this whole logic is already built into our experience. We know what it looks like, we know what it means to grow like a weed. We also know what it looks like because you see it every spring and actually not just through through the spring, but you see what they do all the way through the summer and you see that they, you know, while a lot of the plants have maybe a single season of growth, dandelions, for example, just keep doing it, they keep running that process over and over again so that they are always running these unfair advantages, which is kind of a big part of the whole strategy. Oh, weed strategy.

John Jantsch (02:48): You know, it’s funny, I, I really, I’m, I love all plants, I love all animals, I love trees . So, you know, a lot of times I kinda laugh and say, what weeds are just flowers with bad PR firms? I mean, he is like, what? I know why we call some things weeds, their nature of taking over and for whatever reason they don’t look like what we want our yard to look like or something. But, you know, who gets to call something a weed? I mean, why is a weed different than a prizewinning flower?

Stu Heinecke (03:16): Well, you know, I guess the fact is that, well, if you look at let’s the, it’s full of contradictions because if you look at, let’s say the state flower of California, it is a weed, you know, it’s the California poppy. So they are beautiful. I don’t think it’s really a necessarily a function of beauty, but just are they, are they doing things that we don’t want them to do? Are they showing up where they’re not invited? And so dandelions are probably the great ex example. Everyone experiences them. And you, we, you know, if you have lawns, you see them show up in your lawn. And by the way, if you see one, then you see, you look up and you see hundreds of them. So they’re really, they’re tough to deal with. They’re formidable. And so I guess wheat is probably just, I don’t know, just a, a nasty name for a plant. It’s a plant that some gardeners say it was just a plant outta place. But that’s true only to a certain point because there are some weeds that seem like they’ve come from another planet. They’re just incredibly aggressive and noxious and we don’t really want them around.

John Jantsch (04:16): Yeah. And they’ll take out native species and things like that that, you know, because of their ability to grow and spread. Talk a little bit, of course the, you know, the big premise of the book or a big premise of using the weed metaphor is really to tap into what you’re calling a weed mindset. So yeah, maybe unpack that idea for us.

Stu Heinecke (04:35): Sure. Well, you know, you would, if you think about weed having a mindset, well, first of all, to have a mindset, I guess you probably should have a brain and weeds don’t have brains, so how could that even be possible? But if you watch weeds at all, if you see what they do, if you see how they operate, then you can certainly, you can certainly see that there is some presence there that looks like a mindset because they’re aggressive and resilient and adaptive. And when you, when they’re mowed down, they go right back to where building right back up again, they don’t stop. And, and so they have really admirable qualities that I guess in our experience are expressed as mindset. So that’s where the mindset, the weed mindset comes from.

John Jantsch (05:17): So one of the things I’ve talked about a long time is that having a real point of differentiation, one that matters to the client, can be a way to almost make your, make competition irrelevant. You call it an unfair advantage. So, you know, what are the unfair advantages that, that you think this mi weed mindset or adopting this weed mindset gives a business?

Stu Heinecke (05:37): Well, I would say that for, if we’re, well, so the really, the weeds model goes beyond just mindset, but it’s leveraging a fierce mindset. Mindset and unfair advantages against collective scale and running it against a process. But I would say really, if you’re using any element of wheat strategy, you’re already cre creating unfair advantages for yourself. And when we’re looking at, let’s say the, let’s say the situation of many small businesses, the ones that have no unfair advantages are not gonna survive. So you have to have, right, and I guess we could call them a lot of other things though, certainly one is a differentiator. So, and one of the Wall Street Journal cartoonists that helps me when my cartoons show up in the journal, they reach an audience of a little over 2 million readers. That’s real. You know, no one’s, how is anyone gonna compete with that as a way to cause people to become aware of you and maybe, you know, say, well, you know what, I know about stew’s use of weeds cuz I use weeds to help sales teams break through.

(06:31): It’s like my day job. So when I get to have my my my, you know, my my cartoons show up like that, then it’s just an advantage. That is really tough to, to me. But an an advantage could be a, a location, it could be, it could be a partner that you have. We’re gonna start up a, a new, a new award based on the book called the Total Weed Award. And my new partner in this is the NASDAQ Entrepreneurial Center. That’s an unfair advantage. So it’s all sorts of, all manners of, of unfair advantages from ways to get a lot more, uh, a lot more Boer to help with getting exposure. Kind of like this is a seed pod strategy that we’re executing right here. You’re my seed pod, essentially I’m reaching your audience and you’re multiplying the, the reach of my seeds of these impressions that I get to create from the book and from interviews and talking about the book. And it goes all the way down through, through Thorn strategy and segmentation strategy and rosette and vying and soil and root strategies. All of these are levels of strategies that help us gain unfair advantages.

John Jantsch (07:37): So I think you kind of were just doing it there, but I’m gonna ask you to kind of back up and say, and hopefully you can do justice in a couple minutes. You know, the weed model itself, I think you were ticking off elements of it there, but maybe kind of put it together for us.

Stu Heinecke (07:52): Yeah, well, so there are eight levels of strategy in that weeds in the Weeds model, which is an acronym for weed inspired Enterprise Expansion of Domination Strategies. So that’s , that’s what it is, it’s an acronym, but what it really is standing for are eight levels of strategy. So the, and it really corresponds with the pieces of the, or elements of the weed plants themselves. So there’s seed strategy, which is analogous to anything that causes people to become aware of you and, and form the intent to transact with you. Hearing me on your podcast might hap that might cause people to say, I want to go buy the book or maybe I don’t, what else? I dunno, I’d like to have stu consult with me or something else. I don’t know. But, and seed pod strategy, seed pods, we see those in, for example, dandy lines, those geo geodesic domes of seeds are held up in the air. Those seeds are so magnificently mobile, I mean they just, they fly all over the place. They probe every possible opportunity to take route. So holding them up in the air like that actually gives them a greater chance to travel and spread. So, and then,

John Jantsch (08:53): Yeah, and get a couple, like get a couple five year olds and pull a few of those out and blow ’em too. That really makes ’em

Stu Heinecke (08:59): Explosive. That’s true. , that’s true. They love to, they look, they’re kind of seat buds and, but then Thorn strategy is interesting because that’s using all legal protections, for example, to protect your ip and really your turf, you’re really protecting your turf. And the weeds do that. And we certainly need to do that in business as well. But not all of us do that or are oriented in that way. And then there’s segmentation strategy, which might, we could probably talk the rest of the, our time together on segmentation strategy because that’s, that is the, when you go out and you find a weed in your yard, you might have found some of these that you’ll pull on it and all you get is you get a handful of stuff, but you didn’t get the plant, you certainly didn’t pull it up by the roots. And so that’s actually a defensive strategy.

(09:40): It’s there to prevent or let’s say mitigate loss. Well, in business we have the same things happening. We have disruptions that occur all the time. One of those that co that occurs every, was this a regular cycle of years is recessions. And a lot of us are still caught un unguarded for recessions. We just sort of dread when they show up and we don’t really have much of, a, much of a much of a strategy for dealing it. But what if you’re dealing with those things, there are ways to mitigate them and that’s, we’re gonna be doing that probably soon if the press is correct because they’re sort of beating the drum about recession again. And anyway, there are strategies to deal with that. And then rosette’s strategies, really, I put that into the model because I wanted rots are those that, well, in the example of dandelions, that radial fan of leaves, that spreads out across the lawn.

(10:31): If you come over it with a, it seems like they evolved just to duck the mowers. It’s not really where it came from. But what they’re really doing is they’re covering the ground and they are denying the critical resources that plants around them need. The grass around them needs to grow and really just to live so sunlight and water. And so how can we create those kinds of, it’s really about cultivating unfair advantages, looking for those and finding new ones that we can add. A lot of times we can add those by the partnerships and associations that we create. And that’s mine strategies. So borrowing the infrastructure of others to, to gain dominant access to the sort of warm sunshine of sales and, and all the things that we’re looking for, just sales and exposure and so forth. And then finally there’s root strategy and the plant is the seed of all life force, but in business it’s all of the, it’s where all of the value of the business is sort of stored and curated and maximized.

(11:25): So there are strategies for doing that. And then finally, soil strategy. So seeds are rather, yeah, well the weeds, they don’t get to, they don’t get to change the soil quality that they’re in. They just sort of, they just, wherever they land, they make a go of it. But we have the ability to change the substrate in which we grow our businesses. So the cultures within our businesses and with outside of our businesses, our communities and movements are really interesting. If we can grab of or start movements, those are amazing things to help change the sort of soil strategy or the conditions for us to grow in. So that’s the model op, that’s the weeds model for creating unfair advantages.

John Jantsch (12:04): And now word from our sponsor. Look, if you’re anything like me or every other entrepreneur out there, you’re 2023 is probably off to a rock and start. And as a leader it could be challenging to align your teams on a shared mission and goals for the new year. But with HubSpot’s crm, you can keep your marketing, sales, operations and service teams in sync on one powerful platform that grows with your business and leaves your competition in the dust capture leads, boost sales and engage customers all from one powerful platform. Tools like a unified contact record, help desk, automation and customizable reporting make it easy to unite your team around a single source of truth, which means you can spend less time managing your software and more time connecting with your customers. Learn how HubSpot can make your business grow better@hubspot.com. Yeah, it’s funny, you’ll be driving down the road and there’ll be, you know, a, a weed growing up, you know, between cracks in in pavement and and things like that. I think it really kind of points to the tenacious nature of ’em. But when I hear you talk about the soil, I’m think I’m thinking very much in terms of like creating community and creating value for clients that they want to go out and and refer you as the idea of soil, isn’t it?

Stu Heinecke (13:26): Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it’s all those, cuz all of those create conditions that are much more favorable for our growth.

John Jantsch (13:34): So how then do we take that model and if somebody goes through their business today and says, oh, I’m, you know, I can add this or I could add this, or I could be better at this one. And so we get maybe our weed strategy put together, you know, what’s whatever, what many people want to do then is really scale, grow that business beyond them or grow that business certainly from beyond where it is to today. So how do you apply this then to, to taking that next step, going the next level with the business?

Stu Heinecke (14:01): Well, I think in fact, one of the first things that we can do to grow our businesses, I we gotta be looking at them and making sure they’re viable. If there’s something that’s not viable about it, fix it. But assuming everything is viable and you’ve got a great concept, then one of the first things we can do to grow our business is to root out one-to-one leverage and then jump to either multi-channel or collective scale is for the ultimate, is collective scale. I should explain what that is though. Yeah, we’re sure from just from early childhood, we’re all taught to become self-reliant and sort of self-sufficient. I guess that sort of happens when we, I the first time we played musical chairs and you got left without a chair, you say, well wait a minute, where’s my chair? You know, I’m not gonna let that happen again.

(14:41): And I think that maybe it’s, maybe that’s the first time we get it’s get it instilled in our heads that we’re in a competitive world and you need to be proactive and you need to get things done. You need to be able to rely on yourself to get things done. Then it continues when we’re told then to we go to school and get good grades, study hard, then you’ll get into a great college and from there you’ll get a great job, maybe a really well paying job. But here’s the problem, the all of that is wonderful. We need to be self-reliant. And I would say that the entrepreneurs around us are probably some of the most self-reliant people there are, but, but we can’t do it alone. And that’s the big realization. We, and, and I think probably the more self-reliant and the mortal talented, the more easily you learn things, the harder it is for you to learn to let go and say, well, some of this stuff I’ve just gotta let go of this and that somebody who’s either more better rated toward it or better at it than I am, just let them do it for me so that I can move on to other things.

(15:38): And I would say one of the big telltale signs is if your labor is directly involved in your deliverables, you are at one-to-one leverage. And or, and let’s say if you discover that it’s really hard to take a vacation because the bus, the business stops because you’re not there, that’s one-to-one leverage and you need to root that out really quickly. So you do that I think by jumping to multi-channel leverage. And that really means just forming partnerships with, with people who could bring you to, to other, to new clients, let’s say, or open up new sales channels. I was inviting you to, to, to join a group that I started a group of authors and I guess in a way that’s multi-channel leverage because we get together, we formulate ideas, we bring things together and, and, and you know, that you, that’s the way we’ve gotta, we’ve gotta find ways to collaborate with people as much as possible. I guess that’s really the one of the big messages of we just, that the more we collaborate, the stronger we become.

John Jantsch (16:33): So with an example of that, say a consultant or coach who is doing a lot of that one-to-one work would be building a course or bringing, building a community or doing group work or having, as you said, strategic partners who are going to, you know, send business his or her way. I mean, is that at, at a very simple example what we’re talking about?

Stu Heinecke (16:53): Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think productizing what you do as a consultant mm-hmm. and turning that into a course is a great way to do that because once you’ve built it, and of course you’re promoting it, but other people could promote it. You can go on vacation, you can make money while you sleep. All those wonderful things that happen when you’re not right. When you’re not the factory and you shouldn’t be the factory. Yeah,

John Jantsch (17:13): Yeah. All right, so here’s the burning question, and I’m certain people are listening right now and on the edge of their seats. How do you win a weed award?

Stu Heinecke (17:22): , you have to be, well actually a total weed award , you have to be a

John Jantsch (17:28): Total, total award.

Stu Heinecke (17:29): Yeah. You have to be absolutely audacious in, in the way that you, that you approach your market and create unfair advantages and create scale. And you obviously you need to be an example to the rest of us, but an example of weed like growth.

John Jantsch (17:45): Yeah. So I’ve been, uh, doing interviews, you know, for years and over the last few years, one of the things I’ve seen is title explosion in the C-suite. You know, you’ve got your chief people officer, you’ve got your Chief revenue officer, and now I think you are probably going to introduce a Chief weed officer.

Stu Heinecke (18:03): I am, I’m proposing one more . That’s right. the Chief Weed officer. I don’t know if you, do you know Dan Walch?

John Jantsch (18:09): I do, yeah, I do know Dan. Yeah, he’s on the show before

Stu Heinecke (18:11): He, yeah, Dan is, he’s an amazing guy. He’s, he has the blog Edgy Conversations, I think he has a book out by the same name. And, and he’s a turnaround specialist. Anyway, I interviewed him for the book and he, he gave a quote, by the way, the book has all these, I’m so proud of these quotes at the beginning of the book because they were, when I looked to research for the book, there were no positive quotes about weeds. So everybody I was interviewing, I was asking them, okay, could you share some sort of like, now that we’ve talked about weeds as a positive, what thoughts come to mind? Yeah. And so Dan said, if you don’t have a Chief Weed Officer, you lose . I was his quote

John Jantsch (18:46): .

Stu Heinecke (18:47): Um, and yeah, I think that there will be Chief weed officers, I don’t know if they’ll be called that, maybe they’ll be called Chief Strategy officers or weed strategy officers, but there will be people who will be responsible for growth of the company through the execution of weed strategy that we can watch all around us.

John Jantsch (19:05): Yeah. Awesome. Well, Stu, I appreciate you taking time to Stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find out more about your work and obviously pick up a copy of the book?

Stu Heinecke (19:15): Sure. Well, you can buy the book anywhere, anywhere. Books are sold now it, it launches of course June 1st, but that actually, well, yeah. Can I start that over? Yeah, of course. Do it. Okay. Yeah, you can buy the book anywhere that books are sold, Amazon, of course, and Bo Barnes and Noble, bam and all that, perhaps at the airport soon. You can come and visit me at my author site, that’s stu hynek.com. And when you come there, then one of the things you might wanna do is join my weed, my my Weed bootcamp, sorry, my boot, my Weed Mindset bootcamp. And you can join that from, from my site as well. So yeah, and LinkedIn mention that, that you heard John and my and myself talking on the, on the Duct Tape Podcast. Duct Tape Marketing podcast. And I will be happy to connect with you there.

John Jantsch (20:02): Awesome. Well, we’ll have all those links in the show notes as well. And Stu, congrats on the new book and again, appreciate you taking the time out to, to share with our listeners and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon, one of these days out there on the road.

Stu Heinecke (20:15): I would love that, John. Thanks for having me on the show.

John Jantsch (20:18): 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 episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

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

February 24, 2023/by exposure

The Dos And Don’ts Of Selling Your Business

The Dos And Don’ts Of Selling Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with David Barnett

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview David Barnett. David is an Author, Speaker, Educator, Consultant, and Business Buy/Sell Process Coach who works with people to help them prepare and sell their businesses privately or buy a business privately or via a business broker.

Questions I ask David Barnett:

[1:38] What are the steps someone needs to take to get their business ready to sell?
[3:57] If I’m that solo owner and I’ve been paying myself a nice salary and there’s maybe 10% profit at the end of it – is that considered cash flow or is that considered an expense of the business?
[6:34] Would you say that is very common for business owners to overvalue their business?
[8:56] What are some of the common ways that you’ve seen people structure deals?
[13:03] What do you think about the deals that are structured with certain targets and percentages?
[14:27] Are there some dos and don’ts when it comes to the transition once your business?
[15:47] Do you write clauses in for when new people come in and when people leave the business?
[18:54] What’s marketing look like for selling a business?
[20:48] Where can people learn more about you and your business?

More About David Barnett:

DavidBarnett.com
Subscribe to David’s YouTube channel

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

Learn more

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Duct Tape Transcript

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Barnett. He’s an author, speaker, educator, consultant, business buy, sell process coach who works with people to help them prepare and sell their businesses privately or buy a business privately or via business broker. So we’re gonna talk about selling your business. So if you’re one of those business owners out there that you think maybe someday you wanna do that, listen in today. So welcome David. Hey, thanks for having me, John. So let’s just start with that, you know, business owner who has the notion, gosh, I think I wanna sell my business. What are really some of the steps when somebody comes to you maybe and says that, what are some of the steps you have to say, well, hang on a second, we need to do X, Y, and Z to get your business ready.

(01:38): Yeah, sure. So basically it’s a giant exercise in empathy and understanding the position of the buyer . Yeah. Just like every business thinks about their customers and what their customer wants, when you wanna sell your business, you are basically entering the same kind of world, but instead of your product or service, it’s your business. Now that is the item of objective inventory, if you will, that you’re trying to, you know, promote and sell to the buyer. And so what that feature is that makes somebody wanna buy the business is the cash flow that the business produces. And so people are gonna look at that cash flow and they’re going to, they’re gonna use all kinds of different methods and there’s many different ways to do this, but they’re gonna figure out what that cash flow is worth to them. That’s the very first thing. So the business produces, you know, $200,000 of earnings for its owner every year.

(02:28): That’s the cash flow, and they’ll pay some multiple upon that. And it’s all based on the perception of risk in the industry. So the multiple paid for the septic pumping company is gonna be a much higher multiple than the multiple paid for a restaurant. Mm-hmm. , just because the two industries have a different risk profile, you know, but restaurants, you know, more a discretionary type of service, you know, fewer barriers to entry, lots of competition, you know, new entrance into the market, that septic pumping company, you know, you’ve gotta invest a lot in equipment to get into that trade. You have licensing issues, there’s very little competition. People call you infrequently, but whether they need you and no one can remember quite what they paid three years ago, the last time they called you. So if you, the price is 10% higher, they may not even know.

(03:17): Right. And so a lot of those different features make the cash flow from the septic pumping business worth more to a buyer than the one from the restaurant. And that’s just a quick example that I think people can appreciate easily. The value is one thing, the next thing that the buyer’s gonna think about is, will this cash flow continue under my stewardship? And that’s when you open the Pandora’s box of getting into process, procedure, methodology is the, you know, everything in the business running through that owner is the owner, got his hands on, you know, every deal, every sale. That’s when you get into all that other, you know, e-myth stuff, you know, system. Yeah. So we could go, we could spend the rest of our time talking about valuation. Right. , but, uh, couple things I’m, I’m sure that a lot of people wanna know.

(04:04): So if I’m that solo owner and I’ve been paying myself a nice salary and there’s maybe 10% profit at the end of it, I mean, is that what I’ve been paying myself? I mean, is that considered cash flow or is that considered an expense of the business? So, that’s a great question. So small businesses, and I use, I don’t like the term small business because different groups have different ways of defining it. The government, for example, often defines small business by the number of employees. Banks are gonna have different sets of definitions. So I like the term main Street. Mm-hmm. , because a main street business creates the connotation in our head of that small mom and pop kind of business, maybe with a few employees. And so these businesses tend to sell for a function of seller’s discretionary earnings, which is the profit of the business and the owner’s salary.

(04:51): And the reason why they sell for this type of function is because most of the time the buyers of these businesses are going to similarly be looking for both an investment and a job at the same time. Mm-hmm. , because they’ll come into the business and take over the owner’s position and role, and they’ll start to manage the business. So they’re asking themselves, if I invest my money to buy this business, how much do I get? And they’re kind of mixing the value of their labor and the return on investment in the business together. When you get up to bigger businesses, people are more, uh, you know, they look at it in sort of a more formalized kind of business format. They’re gonna separate out that leader’s role, the salary, and they’re gonna say, you know, that’s a separate kind of expense for the leadership position, and they’re gonna look at EBITDA cash flow.

(05:37): But for that small business that you described, we’re looking at discretionary earnings. And there will be some people that will criticize this and say, you know, why would somebody buy a job? But the reality is that there are a lot of people out there that would like to buy a job because the job they have, they don’t like, or they don’t have a job, or there’s some barrier to entering the labor market that makes them unable to get a job that they might like to have. And so willing to make an investment to, to secure that income. That’s interesting you say that because there are some, you know, let’s say some small business owner’s been paying themselves a quarter million dollars. Well, somebody might look at that and say, well, I can find somebody just as talented as you to do that for a hundred thousand dollars.

(06:15): And so it’s like, I’m gonna actually discount, you know, that, you know, piece of it or you know, as part of the, the cashflow puzzle. So I’m sure you deal with a lot of bi, I’m certain of this because I own a business and I know I’m emotionally attached. You know, a lot of business owners certainly wanna sell their business. But also, would you say that it is very common for them to overvalue what, you know, the market is going to, you know, probably come to the table with when I find deals in the wild, and I describe in the wild being someone who’s not working with a business broker or anyone with a lot of experience of business valuations, it’s typical to find businesses overpriced by two to 300%. Yeah. So that’s two to three times what they’re really worth. And there’s all kinds of ways that people rationalize how they get to the number.

(07:02): They’ll hear things or they’ll read articles and they’ll misapply what they read. They might read that a small business might sell for 2.2 times discretionary earnings, and they’ll do that and then they’ll add on the value of their equipment and inventory and all this other kind of stuff. And, but that’s not how that methodology works, right? Yeah. And so again, it gets back to empathy because if you think about the buyer, you know, if you look at your business, look at the cash flow, look at the money you want, and then say, well, who is the buyer likely to be? Is it likely to be an individual person? And what kind of money would they have available? So maybe they would have some home equity they could pull out or some savings. They’re probably gonna put, you know, some kind of down payment, maybe let’s say 20%.

(07:47): Well, where are they gonna get the rest of the money and what’s that gonna cost them? What’s the debt service gonna be like? You can very quickly find out if there’s enough cash flow in your business to be able to satisfy that scenario. And you can’t put, you can’t have the buyer putting the last nickel of cash flow into debt service because we all know that there’s ups and downs to cash flow. And the only reason that the buyer wants to pay you for the business, what, why they’ll be willing to pay you an amount of money greater than the value of the business’s assets. Now, that’s what goodwill is. The reason people pay for goodwill is to avoid the danger and risk of a startup. Mm-hmm. that that initial period where you don’t make money. And so for somebody to get into business in the first place, there needs to be some kind of return for them.

(08:34): There needs to be a benefit, which means you’ve gotta leave some meat on the bone. There has to be some detectable amount of profit that this person is gonna enjoy beyond the value of the time they put in after they’ve made all the payments to the bank. They need to have some extra bit of profit there that’s going to make this whole endeavor worthwhile to them. Let’s talk about some of the deal structures you’ve seen. So, you know, it’s really common for somebody to, you know, you talked about will this business, can I operate this business without that owner? Well, it’s very common, isn’t it, for there to be a transition period or an earnout even of parts of, so talk about a little bit about some of the common ways that you’ve seen people structure deals that, you know, maybe get the B, maybe get the seller a little more money, but they have to, you know, put a little more effort in.

(09:23): Sure. So we’re gonna assume we’re talking about a good, successful, profitable business here because right, the rules change when you, when those conditions aren’t there. So in general, buyers are terrified that there’s something wrong with the books or the business or something’s not being disclosed to them, et cetera, et cetera. Right? So if you pay cash for a small business, and there are limits to the ability that a buyer has to do due diligence because certain information just isn’t available in a lot of small businesses. So they’re fearful. And if they’re fearful, what they will do is they will discount every possible negative outcome into their offer. So the way that a seller gets a reasonable price for their business is by putting a warranty on it. Mm-hmm. . And the way that you do this is by being willing to accept part of your money over time.

(10:12): So we, this is called a seller note or a vendor takeback, there’s different terms for it. If we want to take an example, you know, you’re gonna buy, sell your business for a hundred thousand dollars and you’re willing to accept, you know, a third of it or 25% of it over time and that seller note. So on closing day, you might get 75,000 in cash. And then there’s a note, just like a car note when you borrow to buy a car and it says you’re gonna pay this amount per month over this many years. But that note often has an offset clause. It’ll say something like this note subject to offset in the case of a material misrepresentation or an undiscovered or undeclared lien or liability. And so what that means is that if something should arise in the business after the handover that costs the buyer money because you didn’t fully disclose, or your books were incorrect, or you know, yeah, I’ve seen all kinds of things.

(11:05): Like a big customer told you they were gonna move their business someplace else, but you didn’t tell the buyer that would be a material misrepresentation. Right? Because most of these buyers are gonna use a disclosure document that’s gonna have a big open question saying, is there anything important you haven’t yet told me about this business . Right? So, so that would be something you would need to put in there. I know that customer X, Y, Z is going to leave, right? Mm-hmm. , it’s gonna materially affect the business. So what would then happen is the buyer can then offset their loss against that note and the seller won’t get the full amount. And so what it does though is it gives the buyer confidence that what the seller is showing them is accurate. And here’s the other big thing, John, is it aligns the interest of the buyer and the seller because now in order for the seller to collect all the money for the business, they need the buyer to be successful.

(11:52): Mm-hmm. , which means they need to choose a buyer who’s got the right capacity, capability, aptitude, et cetera, to be successful. So they’re going to be more choosy about who they do this with. And so they’re gonna pick someone who’s better and they’re gonna be more willing to advise coach and help that buyer to make sure they get off to a good start. Because that’s how they’re going to get paid, is through the buyer’s success. Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days, or your money back sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that’s going to allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel?

(12:49): Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create, and you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. How about, and I’ve seen deals that, that are structured this way where they said, here’s, you know, here’s the totaled package. You know, here’s how much you get at closing. You have to agree to stay here for two, three years, whatever it is. Mm-hmm. and that, and by the way, if we hit this target and this target you get, you know, even you get a hundred percent of the deal or you get, you know, less if we don’t hit targets. Yeah. So, so what you’re describing is you’re describing a scenario where maybe the business is very dependent on the owner. Yeah. So the buyer, they can’t buy the business without, you know, sort of inden the seller to be part of the whole thing.

(13:39): Right. That, that you have to sign a term of service kind of mm-hmm. , you know, and, and so we see that a lot in businesses that are very driven by an individual professional service firms, you know, accounting practice. Yeah. Uh, architecture firm, marketing agency. When, when I sold my business brokerage, that was the kind of deal that we had where basically I was getting a percentage of all the files I had opened while I was the owner of the business from the buyer. And so they were buying this catalog of inventory of businesses I had for sale, but they knew j all of the different things that could happen to cause a business not to close. Right. And so my payment was contingent upon the deals actually closing. So, alright. Let’s say that, let’s say we’ve got that, you know, we’ve got the deal done, you know, we’ve signed all the things.

(14:34): I mean, are there some dos and don’ts when it comes to transition, you know, to make it very smooth? Or is it just kind of every deal’s different based on the relationship of the buyer seller? Yeah, I, it depends on the experience of the buyer, because if they are someone who comes from the industry, they’re gonna have a pretty good idea of what is going on in the business already. I always suggest that the seller is the one that should be creating the transition plan because they know the things that need to be transferred as far as knowledge from the buyer’s point of view. I always point out that, you know, that transition period is a great time to be bringing in some process and procedure and documentation into the business if it’s not there the way you like to see it. I’ve had examples before where buyers have, and this is easy now, the day of cell day and age of cell phones, making videos of the seller doing different things, explaining different things.

(15:28): And those videos can be referred to help the buyer, but then they also become part of the training catalog available for when the buyer wants to then hand that thing off to an employee to delegate. Right. You know, you’ve got that person who knows it really well, who sort of gave the training script and now it’s been recorded. Right. Stand on transition, you know, so we’ve got 10, 15 employees, they love David, David’s like, been a dad to that new person comes in and they’re like, I’m outta here. You know, that kind of materially changes the deal possibly. Do people write clauses in for that or is that just a Hey, you know, if it happens? Well it, it’s interesting you should say that because the call just before this one, I was talking about that with one of my clients who’s a buyer and he’s worried about that.

(16:13): And so there’s a few different ways to do to handle this. I mean, obviously we don’t own people, right? I mean, anyone can get sick, you know, fall in love with someone in the next city over or decide to quit. In my experience, most employees need their job. And so even though they may not be happy to hear the news that there’s been a changeover, most employees can’t afford to just up and quit. And so they’re going to give the new person a chance. They’re going to, they’re gonna see how it goes. Right? One of the, you know, the client that I was talking with earlier, he’s buying a business that is a very technically oriented business and there’s estimators and foreman and people that run a shop floor and things like this. And he identified four key people and he is like, if one of these four leaves, this is gonna be really bad.

(16:57): So here are some of the suggestions is that in the transition agreement with the seller, if one of those four people quits within the first year, the buyer has the ability to get the seller to come back and help hire and train someone new. So that’s something the seller can agree to and the seller is qualified to do the, and if sellers don’t want to do that, the only other thing you can come up with is, well then if one of these four people quits in the first year, I want some kind of offset against the note. Yeah. Because I could face some kind of financial hardship trying to replace them or trying to run the shop without them while I fiddle around trying to figure out how to do their job. And that’s gonna cost me money. So, you know, if I get to, if I knock 50 grand off what I owe you, then I should be just about square.

(17:47): And of course sellers don’t want that. Want to collect all their money. Sure. And so it’s, you know, that’s one of the best ways that, that I’ve come up with of how to do that. The understanding, the depth and the breadth of the labor market can be important. There was, uh, this time I was, had a business for sale. They were in the forestry products industry. They had a very high end computerized molding router. They could run miles of wood through that and make all these different kind of, you know, quarter round and window trims and all this kind of thing. And so the buyer asked the question, you know, who’s qualified to run this thing? And the owner said, you know what, this is the most sophisticated piece of machinery around here. There’s a community college that has a class every year of people that are in the millwright trade, and they come here on a co-op stint for a couple weeks to play with our machine.

(18:37): And so any of those people potentially could become a new operator. And of course the manufacturer has a whole training thing set up for that. And so that buyer then became satisfied that if the person left, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. There would be some way to, to keep operations going. So let’s talk about, we’re doing this out of order maybe a little bit, but you know, we’ve got their business ready and you think, yeah, we’ve got the price nailed and we think we know, you know, who we’re going after. You know, what’s marketing look like for, you know, a business to get? I mean, cuz theoretically you want the most buyers potentially, or most people that have a, maybe even a strategic reason to buy the business. So you’ve gotta get that word out. Is it, is it really any different than a traditional marketing campaign?

(19:20): Oh, it’s very different because you have to keep it secret. Ah. So the last thing you want is for people to find out the businesses for sale. Because if people find out your business is for sale, the business can be destroyed. Ah. And there’s all different stakeholders that are gonna worry and freak out potentially from employees to suppliers to customers, you know, the whole gamut. Your banker, you know, I’ve seen lots of bad things happen when word got out that a business was for sale. So we want to keep it secret. So this is why if you go onto one of the big marketplace websites where they advertise businesses for sale, you’re gonna find things like family friendly restaurant franchise in southwest Wisconsin. You know, it’s gonna be very broad, but what you should see is you should see the annual revenue number and the cash flow.

(20:06): Remember that the valuations based on the cash flow. So anyone who’s looking for a restaurant in Wisconsin is gonna see that ad and they’ll say, Hey, that might suit me. They reach out to the broker or the seller and then they’re probably gonna be asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Right. And it’s critical for buyers to understand that this sellers want to keep this confidential and so should you. Yeah. Right. Here’s why you’re gonna be valuable thing you’re trying to buy. Right, . Yeah. If you really hate your job or if you’re trying to grow your business by buying other businesses, this business could be the solution to your problem. The last thing you want to do is upset it in any way. Yeah. Because it won’t serve your needs ultimately. So. So David, as we wrap up, I appreciate you coming by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

(20:52): Tell, I’d invite you to tell people where they can learn more about what you’re up to and connect with you. Yeah, sure. So the easiest place to find me is at my blog site, David c barnett.com. And there’s links there to all the stuff I do about a YouTube channel and podcast. And I’ve written books and I have some online courses and stuff, all kinds of information on there. There’s over 500 videos that I’ve done. So if you wanna learn about buying or selling small and medium sized businesses, there’s all kinds of content there for you to learn. And I’d love for everyone to come and be my guest. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a little time out of your day and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Thanks John.

(21:29): 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 c reating 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 assessment.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.

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

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February 17, 2023/by exposure

How To Buy Back Your Time And Reclaim Your Freedom

How To Buy Back Your Time And Reclaim Your Freedom written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Dan Martell

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Dan Martell. Dan is an entrepreneur, and angel investor and became a highly sought-after coach in the SaaS industry and founder of SaaS academy after exiting three technology companies within a ten-year period. He’s also an Ironman athlete, philanthropist, husband, and father of two incredible boys. He’s the author of the book – Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire.

Key Takeaway:

Want to get more out of your free time? Dan Martell joins me in this episode as he shares how to design the freedom to engage in high-value work for energy and fulfillment. We cover how to work less, play more, and build an empire. Listen and get practical steps for buying back time, rapid growth, and wise time investment for both work and life.

Questions I ask Dan Martell:

[1:48] Let’s talk about the title “Buy Back Your Time” — what did you mean by it?
[3:14] Why did you decide to tackle time?
[5:37] How much do people have to overcome being set in their ways of needing to do certain things themselves because they’ve been programmed to do so before they start taking on some of these principles?
[7:55] What is buy back rate?
[12:43] What’s your advice for someone getting an assistant who doesn’t know what to tell them to do?
[18:00] What is the replacement ladder?
[22:52] Where can people buy a copy of your book and learn more about your work?

More About Dan Martell:

Get a copy of his book — Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire.

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

Learn more

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

Duct Tape Transcript

(00:49): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dan Martell. He’s an entrepreneur, angel investor and became a highly sought after coach in the SaaS industry. Founded SaaS Academy after exiting three technology companies with a 10 year, within a 10 year period. He’s also an Ironman athlete, philanthropist, husband, and father of two incredible boys. I’ve never met them, so I’m gonna have to take word for that one. But, uh, he’s also the author of a new book out to buy Back Your Time, get Unstuck, reclaim your Freedom, and Build your Empire. So Dan, welcome to the show,

Dan Martell (01:26): John. It’s an honor and, and it is because you were one of the first marketing podcasts I ever listened to back when I was starting online stuff. So it’s cool to be a

John Jantsch (01:35): Guest. I’m just hanging around. I you’ve been on before though, weren’t you, weren’t

Dan Martell (01:39): You on before? I think I was

John Jantsch (01:40): Clarity or something. Yeah.

Dan Martell (01:42): But even before that I was, I was a listener. So it’s, it’s always cool to, to see and get reconnected.

John Jantsch (01:48): S so buy back your time. I had a little trouble with, not trouble with, but you know, kind of processing the title name and, you know, everybody talking about time is money and, and yeah, some people can say, you’re suggesting money is time. Am I getting them

Dan Martell (02:03): Wrong? I’m, yeah, I’m saying, I actually, in the book, I, there’s three levels of trading. I call, I call it being a, a great trader. When we start off, we trade time for money. That’s for the most people. That’s employees, right? Like you. Yep. Yeah. Create value then, then as an entrepreneur. So there’s employee then entrepreneurs, level two. Level two is trade money for time, right? It’s, it doesn’t matter if you’re, you know, you buy a Roomba to clean your house, well, you go to the office and pack stuff up. That’s, that’s trading money for time or employees or even contractors or your accountant or whatever. And then the third level trader is money for money. And that’s, that’s the empire builder, right? And I think if people understood that that’s the trajectory in life to create one of unlimited, and that’s why I say buy the, build your empire. In my world, building your empire is a life of unlimited creation that you never have to retire from. And I just think everybody should strive and maybe consider doing that.

John Jantsch (02:58): I’m not gonna argue you on that one, but I did want , I did wanna throw in here, there’s a lot of books. There’s probably a section in back when we had bookstores, remember those? There’s probably a whole section on time management books, some of which I suggest you probably drew from. I mean, just because people have been writing about this for a hundred years, right? So why did you decide to tackle time?

Dan Martell (03:17): Because, cause it’s the core of everything I’ve ever done. You know, people see my life and their like, you know, how do you run two eight figure companies as a c e O train for Ironman, you know, be a relatively good husband. I think I’m a great father. I’m still working with a husband’s stuff, but my wife gives me good scores and stuff. But you know, I, I live a pretty integrated life. You know, I just got back from a hell trip we were just talking about, and you know, last year we took about two and a half months off traveled Europe and stuff. Like, people always ask me, how do you do this? And it’s based on this core premise called the buyback principle, right? And this is what’s unique about my book then, you know, all the greats, right? And, and I’ve read them all, you know, you mentioned like, you know, getting things done and you know, eat the frog and like there’s all these like epic productivity books.

(04:03): But the buyback principle states is we don’t hire people to grow our business. We hire people to buy back our time. Cuz you can get the first if you do the second, but you can definitely not get the second if you get the first. Cuz I’ve just been friends with so many creatives, business owners, et cetera, that essentially build a business that they grow to hate. And the biggest risk to business is not the market, it’s not the economy, it’s not, you know, your team. It’s literally you deciding, I don’t want to do this anymore and just stop doing it. Right? And I addressed that in the book with this framework called the Pain line and the buyback loop. And you know, so in my, in my world of productivity, we always start with the calendar and we always figure out what our buyback rate is.

(04:45): And if we understand what are things that light us up that make us money, and what are things that take our energy that, that drain us, that that could cost very little pay somebody else. And, and, and you have some structure around how you sequencing, hiring and buying your time back. It’s honestly math. It’s a mathematical equation. You can’t mess it up. Like you won’t be able to grow your business where you make less money without adding. Like, you literally will buy back time and live a higher quality life cuz you know, you can’t build a million dollar company off $10 tasks. But yet people every day, it doesn’t matter if they’re, I have clients that are running a hundred million dollar companies and still do the most ridiculous things with their time and, you know, nobody’s ever challenged ’em on it.

John Jantsch (05:25): Yeah, I think it’s amazing. You know, it’s, it’s pretty simple math, right? If I want to have a million dollar company, I have to do x a month , which means I have to do x a day, you know? Right. Every

Dan Martell (05:34): Hour has to

John Jantsch (05:35): Produce X. Yeah. Yeah. So, so how much, and maybe you don’t even bother trying to argue with people that are in this mindset, but how much mine trash, you know, is built up with people of saying, oh, but you know, my dad said I was supposed to mow my own grass. You know, I mean, how much do, do people have to overcome that kind of mentality, even if it applies to the workplace before they can even start, you know, taking on some of these principles?

Dan Martell (05:59): Th that’s, I mean that’s everything. It’s why I wrote chapter three is called the Time Assassins because there’s these mental scripts that people run. You know, like when I started off I was, you know, I’m supposed to be the chief office cleaner and sandwich maker and you hear these things, right? But like, I remember one time I was reaching out to when a company invested in this, this kid Ethan, and I was like, Hey, we should go to the office and work on like, kind of strategy. And he’s like, I’m doing my laundry . Alright, you just raised 1.5 million from us and you’re telling me you can’t pay for wash and fold and you just said no to an investor. Like you see where there’s, there’s some logic that’s, that’s broken, right? So it’s everything though. It’s, you know, I address this in the book as much as I can.

(06:43): It’s around self-worth, right? I don’t feel worthy of this. There’s an element of that. Yeah, there’s, I’m fearful of what other people, including my team would think, right? If I hired somebody to do this for me, what would my neighbor think? I mean I’ve, I’ve coached clients on every level where, you know, one woman’s like, I don’t want my neighbor to think that I’m so busy in my business that I can’t clean my own house and have a cleaning lady parked in my driveway. Right? Or I don’t want my mother-in-law to find out that I have somebody making, you know, lunches for my kids or meal prepper or dinners or whatever it is. Like it’s just fascinating. There’s, I can’t afford it, right? It’s not true. But they say that to themselves. I don’t trust myself. This is a big one. What, what if I buy back my time and I don’t do anything good with it and I just wasted that hour, right? That’s another one I’ve, I’ve heard them all. So it is, it is actually all of that. So that’s why like I try to break it down into a first principle like real math where you just can’t deny it. Look, this is, this is the reality. If you understand your buyback rate and you do anything that you could have paid somebody else that amount or less, then you’re working against yourself of trying to create a life that is actually better for you and your family.

John Jantsch (07:55): Yeah. So let’s, I had it down to, to ask you about, but let’s go ahead. This is a great place to throw in, you know, explain buyback rate.

Dan Martell (08:01): Yeah, it’s math so I understand John, right off the bat I’m gonna lose people so please everybody just stay with me, I’ll make it fun. So essentially you need to understand what you can afford to pay somebody else to do based on your current income level, right? And income for me is your salary profit and then also discretionary expenses. Cuz a lot of people don’t make any money on paper cause they don’t like paying taxes. Fine, but throw that in. So let’s say I make a hundred thousand a year in income, that might be 70,000 in salary. I pay myself from the business. It could be 20,000 in profit and 10,000 a year in discretionary expenses that aren’t really business but you know, who cares? So that’s a hundred grand, I divide that number, whatever it is for anybody by 2000, you know, in this case that works out to about $50 an hour, 2000 is because that’s the amount of hours an average person that takes vacation and weekends off will work, right?

(08:49): And then because you wanna get a four times ROI on your investment of buying that time, take that number and divide it by four, right? So that works out to about $12 and 50 cents. So if you look at your calendar and you’re doing anything with your time that you could have paid anybody $12 and 50 cents or less to do, then you’re actually not being a very good time trader and you’re working against yourself to free up the space for you to go and reinvest that in higher value, higher leverage things, even if it’s stuff that is equally valuable but you just don’t like to do. Get that stuff off your plate because just stacking things that are green will have the most, the biggest impact out of everything because you’re bringing a sense of energy to the next thing, the next thing that you just can’t even quantify a dollar roi, but it’s an emotional roi.

John Jantsch (09:37): Yeah. It’s funny you mentioned that like 1250, right? I remember when I first started I did payroll and I did payroll reports and I filed all the reports. First off, there’s a mind numbing amount of reports , but I also hated every second of it. And so I put it off, I was late, I hated, I got rid of that. I don’t even know what I paid for, but it was worth a fortune, , whatever. I didn’t pay that much. That’s the scary thing, you know, to get rid of it. But I, you know, you talk about the emotional costs, I think that’s one that people, especially when you’re doing stuff that you hate, it’s, it’s the opportunity lost in actually writing that book, you know, that you could’ve been doing right?

Dan Martell (10:15): The only you can do, and that’s why I wrote the book cuz I, I actually sh demonstrate that your business, your customers, you will just be happier and way more productive producing when you, you kind of follow those two, you know, lights you up and makes you a lot of money. Try to just do as much of that in your calendar when you decide to work and when you’re not working, go spend it with people that you love and yeah, that’s a good equation.

John Jantsch (10:38): Yeah. Imagine how much time people waste and if they just like work three hours a day on like the stuff, that’s all they’d have to do.

Dan Martell (10:45): the one thing, I mean this is, this is what’s interesting is a lot of people I think use the busy work. You know, your inbox is nothing more than a public to-do list for everybody else’s goals on your time. And these are strangers for the most part. Yeah, yeah. So it’s like, there’s just a lot of things that people do that from a dopamine point of view, it, it keeps ’em busy and it feels productive because they don’t want to think, right? It’s like, oh, if I just start now for two hours and work on my email, be productive. It’s like, not really. No. The productive thing would actually be to sit back and look at what your goals are for the quarter of the year and say, does this activity actually get me closer to that or not? And I’ll tell you, just processing an inbox is not gonna help you double your business in the next 12 months. They’re just, they’re not correlated.

John Jantsch (11:29): I used to tell my kids when I was little and they’d say, what do you dad, what do you do for a living? I say, I delete email professional

Dan Martell (11:36): Email

John Jantsch (11:37): Deleter , hey marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s going to allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. So archive,

(12:26): One of the things that you, and you’re not the first to say this, but I like your approach to it is clone yourself. Everybody should have an assistant. Everybody should teach somebody else how to do the stuff that they think only they can do. I know pe other people that have given that advice, I think you’ve gone a little farther and had a, actually a better system for it. But I also know a lot of people that have tried that and they just, they like look at that person and go, I don’t know what to tell ’em what to do. So, so what, what’s your advice on somebody? First off you’re saying just get overdo it, but then one

Dan Martell (12:54): Thing, then I give it a system. Yeah, so I mean what what’s fun for me is nothing I wrote about I think is, you know, I think that’s just life. I’m, I’m, I’m built by my community. I’ve read over 1500 books. I’m, I’m a remix of everything I’ve ever read. What was missing for me, and this is why I wrote it, I have like very unique perspective. So for example, with the executive administrator admin type role, there’s two things that have to be true. One, you have to give them a hundred percent of your inbox, meaning that you do not touch the emails first they do and they triage. And two, you do not touch your, in your calendar. You give them a framework for your calendar, which I call the perfect week. Kind of like, uh hmm this is what my perfect week looks like.

(13:33): These are the areas you put certain types of things in there and, and you own that, not me. So I don’t even touch my calendar. If I want to add something like this podcast, I I, I will send a message to my executive assistant or she manages it and then she’s responsible for making sure everything’s there. Now where it falls apart, cuz you just mentioned it, like what do I even get them to do? My brother ran into the same thing. I have a brother Pierre, he’s like, you know, and he ran, he was running probably a, you know, multiple eight figure company when he, when he is like, Hey, I probably need an executive assistant. I’m like, yeah, but you know, he got really efficient and after he got through this like crazy pain line period of his life, he hired project managers, he runs a home building company and he, he got to a better place, but it just, it it started eating away of his mindshare and he’s got two little girls and he just noticed that he was not present.

(14:21): So he is like, I need somebody that monitors so that I don’t have to worry about it. Right? Because that’s really what an inbox is. It’s like, do I have a fire? No, I’m good. Do I have a fire? No, I’m good. Right? So I gave him, I gave him all my SOPs and stuff. It was about three, four years ago and you know, six weeks later we’re at a barbecue and I was like, Hey, how’s the new assistant? Like, tell me all about it. I was all excited and he’s like, I don’t see the big ideas. And I’m like, you didn’t give them a hundred percent of your inbox, did you? It’s like, what are you talking about? I said, I, I wrote it in all bold. And he goes, well no, I just CC them on stuff. That’s the challenge. If you are triaging, you didn’t buy any time back, right?

(15:02): Like just having somebody that you like schedule this, buy this, you know, you’re like giving them orders. No, your inbox is actually their, their their projects. So like for example, my executive assistant, I don’t have projects, she has projects. They technically happen to be mine, but I’m the talent on the project. So she owns getting them complete. I don’t own getting them complete and it’s just a little shift like that that I think is what could be missing. You know, how do I keep them busy? And then, and then, you know, then people are like, well how often do you talk to them? I put that in the book. I literally took all the questions I’ve been asked, I just don’t have enough time in my week to have these very detailed conversation with all my friends. I just put in the book, here’s the daily meeting.

(15:42): Actually have it right after this, the conversation, I have it with my exec assistant. It’s very structured. I give the agenda in the book. I, I tell the purpose, even the email system, the email GPS system, it’s in the book here. All the folders we use in the labels and why we use them and it, it, everybody my wife bought hired an executive assistant, John, okay? She lives with me. She sees this, it wasn’t until I wrote the book, she read the book. She goes, I get it now. And she got an executive assistant, changed the game for her. So yeah, I’m really excited because I think that those are the missing pieces that even was missing for me, you know, 15 years ago that has really allowed me truly a clone. I mean there’s two people in my life, my house manager Betty, and my executive assistant Anne. I would sell everything before they leave my life

John Jantsch (16:26): . Well, and that’s, you know, that, that’s where I think people struggle sometimes too, because it didn’t start that way, right? I mean that took a, that took time. that took time. I will, I will say that I sent you the request for this interview and I really, you know, what I appreciated is a lot of people have executive assistants and it actually comes off as like, now their job is to make more work for me, the other person. And your, your whole process is more like, I really thought you read my email, but she was doing you a favor by jumping in because you

Dan Martell (17:01): Were busy. I teach that in the book. Did you see the language used? Yes. I teach that in the book cuz I’m Canadian, John, I I don’t wanna be taken as like, you know, too good or what. Like I had a lot of fear in my mind in that language of saying, you know, this is Anne Dan’s assistant and I got to this before he did and I thought you’d appreciate a speedy reply man that unlocks everything. And, and look, I would’ve replied if I had the time, but I was pr like, this is the thing is I get to go on and have great conversations with yourself and I’m here and what if the next meeting there’s an email that canceled it? Well, because I have somebody supporting me. Yeah. That meeting gets filled with somebody else that was on the queue and pulls forward. So like think about just the amount of, of opportunity I pull forward into this calendar year because I get to spend, like you said, what if you only did those three hours of things you could do? Yep. And none of the other stuff. But those three are like really meaningful energy giving, green productive stuff. Man, your life just gets really cool, really fast.

John Jantsch (18:00): So I wanna, I wanna cover one more concept for we’re out of time here and that’s the replacement ladder.

Dan Martell (18:07): It’s one of my favorites because I always get asked like, so what’s the sequence, Dan? Like how, who do I hire first then second, third. And took me a while to kind of really like battle test this strategy. But essentially the idea is if I was starting at zero and I had to hire four or five people what order based on the buyback rate, based on the drip matrix, based on the calendar, if I had to sequence it, these are the, these are the five I would hire in order first one right out of the bat. Level one replacement ladder is an executive assistant and the clear outcome and I write about this book is inboxing calendar. They have to own it. That’s why I talk about ownership. They own those two things, not me. Then I get to move to level two if that’s true.

(18:52): Level two is delivery, what some people call fulfillment, right? Or onboarding. And the two things that that person owns is the post-sale experience and the customer experience. So they onboarding. So like as soon as somebody takes a credit card, they process it, they onboard, they, they, they get information from them, they get ’em scheduled, whatever it is in your business and any questions that person might have about their work, that person can answer, right? So that you can just do, if it’s coaching, logo design, podcasting or whatever, you do that nothing else. Level three is marketing because a lot of people run into this like feaster famine when it comes to marketing because when they’re busy they stop and when they’re not, they are hungry. So they do a lot of it and it just keeps going like a yo-yo. So even a part-time person focused every day waking up and just focusing on what I call the campaigns and the traffic, like thinking strategically, creatively about the campaigns you should run annually.

(19:49): There’s, there’s this natural rhythm in, in business. And then also like, did somebody change the color of a button that made it so that nobody sees it in the checkout page? Like what’s the traffic doing? Like I’ve seen this happen. Yeah. So it’s just part-time or full-time. Somebody dedicated to generating opportunities for your business and you, you can still be the talent, right? Like I run a big coaching business, I’m still the talent, I’m the face of the business, but I do not, you know, click buttons in Facebook ad manager or whatever the team does. Yeah. Then level four is sales, right? Hmm. And sales is all about the call, right? Which is super fun. You get an opportunity that comes in your inbox, your assistant can just forward it off to Mike, who’s your scale specialist, your product specialist, your strategy special, like whatever you want to call them.

(20:34): And then Mike can move that thing forward while you’ve been in meetings with your team or talking to another client or whatever it is. And they own the follow up because CEOs and entrepreneurs are horrible at follow up. So it’s like all these things are now gonna be done outta 10, outta 10. And, and, and at level four what happens, John, that I think is super exciting. This is where you actually have a business that can make money while you sleep. You know how everybody talks about that? And those infomercials and those internet marketers talk about this. You have somebody now that generates leads, somebody that enrolls that client into your world and somebody onboards and takes their payment and make sure they’re good to go. And you get to show up and do the work you love to do. Level five, which is the top level, this is leadership and this is when you start thinking about company building and not just, you know, just a solopreneur and stuff.

(21:18): And you could stay there honestly if you’re, if you’ve got those four other hires in place, I mean, you could be making a couple million bucks a year and working 25 hours a week and that’s a beautiful place to get to. Then you can learn how to trade your money for money. But yeah, the level five is a fun one and that’s usually where I start working with clients. But those are the five levels of the replacement ladder. And mathematically you can’t deny the cost that each level kind of goes up, but it unlocks another level of revenue at the appropriate time. And there’s a reason why you do sales before or after marketing, et cetera, et cetera.

John Jantsch (21:51): You know what’s funny is as I listen to you list those, I, I’m thinking about all the companies that do the, the exact opposite order. You know, it’s like I’m the leader of the company. I have to like be, you know, be that I need to be the CEO and then I’m gonna go hire salesperson so we can get more sales

Dan Martell (22:08): Or a coo. Let, let’s go, let’s go. Oh, I I don’t wanna do this anymore. I’m gonna hire a coo. Do you have an executive assistant? No, start there. That’s a way cheaper. I had a friend go, I need to hire a salesperson. I go, how many sales calls do you do four a week? You don’t need a salesperson, you need to generate more than four a week. Why? Why don’t have time to do the marketing? Oh, why don’t you have time to do the marketing? Because I I’m still involved in fulfillment. Oh, do you have an executive assistant? Yeah, kind of. Does she manage your inboxing calendar? Not really. So it’s, it’s really, you just can’t argue. It’s, I really wanted to distill the book in the first principles that were backed by some level of math to just show people like time does have an equation and the way you leverage that, good or bad is gonna dictate if you can move things forward.

John Jantsch (22:52): So Dan, we’re invite people. I know you have a, a website for the book itself. The book’s available everywhere. Selling really well, why don’t you invite

Dan Martell (22:59): People Wall Street Journal best bestseller. I don’t know if you saw that John number

John Jantsch (23:02): Two. I did, I did, I did.

Dan Martell (23:03): That was pretty cool.

John Jantsch (23:05): Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, it’s, and it’s one of those books that we’ll probably pick up momentum because people will tell their friends, you know about it just because it’s got some real practical hands-on, you know, very dialed in stuff. So where, where would you like people to connect with you or find out more about, uh, the book itself?

Dan Martell (23:19): Yeah, so the website’s buy back your time.com and you can go to any retailer in person or online to get a copy. But I do have a free workbook that I, I added in the book or you can go get on the website and then I’m Dan Martel to Elza Martel on all social platforms, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, you mention it, I’m there. And my favorite though is Instagram story. So if people wanna actually see how I apply the buyback principle in my work and personal life, like how I interact with better house manager and, and people to support my wife and I, that’s where I do it. Cuz I think it’s really, really cool to just share the, the nuance of the systems. I’m a I’m a software guy, so like I, I can nerd out on a lot of the tools in the process.

John Jantsch (24:01): Awesome. Well Dan, thanks for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we will run into you soon, one of these days out there on the road.

Dan Martell (24:09): Absolute honor, thanks Sean.

John Jantsch (24:10): 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.

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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February 10, 2023/by exposure

Mastering the Art of Listening

Mastering the Art of Listening written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Oscar Trimboli

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Oscar Trimboli. Oscar is the author of How to Listen: Discover the Hidden Key to Better Communication – the most comprehensive book about listening in the workplace.

Key Takeaway:

Despite leaders spending 83% of their day listening, only 2% have been trained in effective listening skills. Oscar Trimboli joins me in this episode as he shares his practical insights to help you notice and improve your listening skills. Listen and learn to master the missing half of communication and create a greater impact in your personal and professional life.

Questions I ask Oscar Trimboli:

[1:16] How would you describe the act of listening in the workplace?
[4:10] What are you finding that not listening in the way is costing people?
[5:34] What are some of the real benefits of listening?
[7:23] What role does the entire body or body language as people refer to it, play in listening?
[9:48] What role does the fact that we’re all on Zoom and virtual meetings and we’re not in person in offices nearly like we used to be — what role does that play in degrading people’s ability to listen?
[11:49] I suspect gender plays a role in listening on who’s maybe more naturally in tune to that. What did your research find there?
[13:26] What about listening from a cultural perspective – are Americans terrible listeners for example?
[15:52] Do you have any kind of ritual to bring your focus toward listening?
[18:36] Could you walk me through your decisions from a format standpoint on the book because I get the sense that you’re very intentional about everything you do?
[21:43] Where can people learn more about your work and get a copy of your book?

More About Oscar Trimboli:

Take the Listening Quiz
Get a copy of the book: How to Listen: Discover the Hidden Key to Better Communication

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

Learn more

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

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals 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. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Oscar Trimboli. He’s the author of How to Listen, discover the Hidden Key to Better Communication, the most comprehensive book about listening in the workplace. And he’s also got a new book out called Deep Listening Impact Beyond Words. So Oscar, welcome to the show.

Oscar Trimboli (01:12): Good day, John. Looking forward to listening to your questions.

John Jantsch (01:15): . Well, let’s see where we go. In fact, maybe the fir, I always like to start to get a kind of a baseline on some terminology sometimes. I mean, how would you describe the act of listening in the workplace?

Oscar Trimboli (01:30): Listening in the workplace, A lot of people have heard about active listening, which is listen to what people say, pay attention, focus, paraphrase and nod. And when we talk about deep listening, when you understand the neuroscience of listening, the most important thing to listen to is what people don’t say. There’s a huge differential between the speaking speed of the speaker and their thinking speed. They think at 900 words a minute, yet they can only speak at 125. So when you are listening in the workplace, the most important thing you should be listening to is what they haven’t said. ,

John Jantsch (02:05): I’m gonna choose my words carefully today. Of course. So maybe more so than with some guests, you have done some research, I don’t know, over 10,000 workplace listeners. Describe that a little bit and you know, how is a we a research project like that conducted and what are some of the things you’ve discovered?

Oscar Trimboli (02:22): Yeah, like, like the book, like the playing cards, like the queers, the research came about because my clients asked me to, and we are sitting about 24,000 workplace listeners now. The research was about what gets in the way of people’s listening at work. There’s a lot that’s being written about what a world class listeners do. What is it in terms of being aspirational to listeners? What we did with our researchers, we weren’t quite the opposite way. There are small things that get in the way of what people do. So we started off with 1,410 people that we surveyed. Half we knew they had interacted with the work we did, and half we didn’t know. We used a panel of participants who were in the workplace, normed against a database of the working population. And we asked them three simple questions, what do you struggle with when it comes to listening?

(03:17): What’s the one thing you’d love to improve when it comes to listening? And when you are the speaker, what’s the listener doing that really frustrates you when it comes to listening? So we got a mountain of information there, John, but then we did a second round of research, which was quantitative. We used numeric scaling and we came up with descriptors of the four primary things that get in people’s way when it comes to listening. These are the four villains of listening and these four villains of listening from the research and in fact named by the research participants, dramatic interrupting, lost and shrewd, a listening villa.

John Jantsch (03:59): I was having some, I’m having some construction done here at the house.

Oscar Trimboli (04:02): I, it’s not coming through on the episode. By the way, you mentioned that on your last interview, isn’t it? I

John Jantsch (04:10): Did So, uh, so forgive me there. So what I was starting to ask you is what are you finding that not listening in the way that you’re talking about at least is costing people

Oscar Trimboli (04:21): The cost of not listening and the way people described it in the research was lost. Customers were still you winner customer that becomes an unprofitable customer cuz you didn’t listen to what they actually said. Particularly if you were in any kind of professional services industry, whether you’re an accountant, whether you’re a lawyer, market researcher, you’re in software industry, winning the wrong customer can be probably the most costly thing you can do. The other costs of not listening are great employees who leave before they should because they don’t feel heard, valued, or seen in the workplace. You’re not getting the most out of your suppliers. You have issues with your regulator or the media because you’re not paying attention to what the external marketplace is saying. But for the vast majority of people who run their own businesses, it’s typically coming down to reduced profitability because of rework where people are having multiple meetings to get the same project, the same product, the same campaign done to the quality that was expected. So the cost of not listening is quite significant.

John Jantsch (05:34): So I guess flip that around. Let’s flip that around to the positive then, you know, what are some of the real highlights? Like if you were gonna sell somebody on on the benefits or the roi, you know of listening, you know, what would be some immediate trackable things that somebody could point to?

Oscar Trimboli (05:49): Yeah, this is a good question. We attracted 1,410 people from our research group and we’re giving ’em specific things to try. What they’ve said consistently is they get more time back in their schedule because they have fewer meetings and the meetings they have are shorter. How does this happen? When you start to listen, not just to what people say, but to what they think and what they mean, meetings don’t come back later on and go, oh, I thought you meant X. And as a result you have to do a whole rework. So the big thing that people are reporting back is the first one time on average people are saying they get 5% of their schedule back Now doesn’t sound a lot. That’s a week in a week. That’s one day in in a year. That adds up quite significantly. The other thing that people are saying is the upside of listening in their workplace profitability is increasing because rework is declining. So your costs and your sales effectiveness is increasing, not because you’re winning more, but the customers you have got. You are listening to bigger problems that are not symptoms, but more systemic problems for the customer. And either you can refer somebody to them or what normally happens in our client base, they say that discovering more problems for their clients that they can solve.

John Jantsch (07:23): So, so when we mentioned listening, you know, we immediately think ears, right? What role does the entire body or body language as people refer to it, play in listening?

Oscar Trimboli (07:36): So there’s five levels in listening and you are referring to level two, which is listening to content. It’s what you hear, what you see and what you sense. So when we think about the middle one, what you see in terms of body language, when we spoke to Susan Constantine, she’s known as the human lie detector. She’s advising lots of legal practitioners about how to select jury panels, for example. But whether we spoke to her or to Mark Bowden, one of the things that people consistently say is, as humans we overplay our sense of the role of body language and what we see. The most important thing you want to, whether it was Susan or with mock body language, is about the congruency between what people say and how their body is showing up As a human, you can do that in a microsecond. You are coded to do that really quickly. Unfortunately, if your face is in a laptop, looking at your connected watch, looking at your cell phone, the likelihood you can be present to notice body language is really low. So I’d encourage everybody listening is a contact sport and it’s three-dimensional. When you look at content, it’s what you see, it’s what you hear and it’s what you sense. So you also have to notice what people say and how they’re saying it.

John Jantsch (09:02): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step processed it. It’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. So you mentioned multitasking to some degree there. What role then playing on with that little bit, what role does the fact that we’re all on these zooms and the virtuals and we’re not in person in offices nearly like we used to be? You know, what role does that play in degrading people’s ability to listen?

Oscar Trimboli (10:07): So listening situational, relational and contextual. You’ll listen differently in a mediated environment like a Zoom, a team web, a Google meets. One of the things people say to us is in our research group that we keep tracking, they say to us, I oh Oscar, I don’t have that connection that I had in a face-to-face meeting. I say yes, and you have a completely different connection because in a lot of cases people are gonna be sharing their backgrounds with you, they may be sharing part of their home with you. And I remember talking to Dr. Bronwyn King, who runs an organization called Tobacco Free Portfolio. She had to travel the world for 300 days of the year to visit boardrooms in finance organizations all around the world. She was never, ever invited into somebody’s home in any of that time that she travel face to face.

(11:00): Yeah, with Zoom, she’s able to do that on a very regular basis. And the connection she has now as a result of that is completely different. So one of the things I’d encourage you to do, if you’re a leader or you run your own business, don’t blow her out your background. Just be who you are because it’s gonna help create a connection for you and the other person. It will give you something to discuss. Now, by the way, when you’re on Zoom, you can stare at someone’s eyes and they’ll never know. You can’t do that in real life. John .

John Jantsch (11:34): Yeah, it’s a good, that’s a great point. Yeah. It’s funny, when the pandemic first came around and everybody immediately shifted to zoom, I remember seeing a lot of spare bedrooms and , unmade beds and , things of that nature. People eventually kind of set something up that looked a little more like an office. But uh, yeah, there was a period there where we were seeing things we’d never seen before. So I suspect, I’m not gonna make an assumption, but I suspect gender plays a role in listening and who’s a better listener or who’s maybe more naturally in tune to that. What did your research find there?

Oscar Trimboli (12:07): Whether it’s my research or volumes of academic research, this is an old question. Do the genders listen differently in terms of listening effectiveness, there is no material difference in the way the genders listen. Yet the way people experience listening from different genders is quite radically different. The research summarized is women listen to feel. Men listen to fix. That means our listening orientation comes from a very different place. Now, this is a vast generalization, John. I’m sure there are women who listen to fix and men who listen to Phil. But when I say this and I talk to people and we look at the way our listening villains show up, there is a slight variation in the way genders show up and how they listen, but it doesn’t actually make a material difference to their listening effectiveness. So when it comes to your gender, the only thing I would say is no matter what you’re a woman or a man or another, you can always improve your listening in the very next conversation.

John Jantsch (13:25): So let’s carry on with that idea. What about culturally are Americans terrible listeners? For an example,

Oscar Trimboli (13:30): , we’ve researched the English speaking Western workplaces. Yet because of that we’ve touched on how do Eastern Europeans listen? How do South Americans listen? For example, if you’re in a really strong relationship with somebody in South America or Eastern Europe, it’s not uncommon to talk over the top of the other person. An interruption is actually a sign of a tight relationship. Yet in America, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia, the opposite is true. Talking over someone will be a sign of rudeness. The big cultural variance across Asia and high context cultures, Korea, Japan, China is the role of silence.

(14:14): So in the West we use this phrase, the awkward silence, the pregnant pause, the deafening silence. I struggle with silence. I want to fill the silence. Yet in the east and in high context cultures like the Polynesian cultures, the Innu cultures of North America, the aboriginal cultures of Australia and the Maori cultures of New Zealand. These high context cultures use silence as a tuning fork for the group. But it’s also a sign of wisdom, respect, and authority. So culturally, we do listen differently. Yet across all cultures we tend to struggle most with distraction. Turning up and being ready to listen is the most common thing that gets in the way of every human’s way of listening. Because we listen at 400 words per minute, yet they speak at 125. So you’re jumping ahead and you’re using heuristics and matching mindsets to go, oh, I know how to solve this. Oh, wish they’d hurry up. Oh I need to get some lunch. And all these other things that pop into our mind. One of the biggest fallacies about listening, John, focus on the speaker first. That’s interesting, but it’s really unproductive. You need to listen to yourself first. Most of us have multiple browser tabs open in our mind and our memory is so full that we can’t process what the person in front of us is about to say.

John Jantsch (15:45): That’s really interesting. I mean it’s almost like our mind gets bored listening to somebody and so we start processing other things. Do you have any kind of a ritual, so to speak, for like let’s say you were getting ready to get on this call or you’re getting ready to meet with somebody. I mean, do you have something to bring your focus into? Okay, let’s turn this stuff off. Let’s be here now and listen, I mean, is there a process you go through or recommend?

Oscar Trimboli (16:08): Number one, I have a completely different browser tab and setting for when I go onto video conferences. So all my notifications are completely off. I don’t even have to worry about it. That is set up and all of us can do that. That’s very simple. Whether you’re on a Mac, a pc, an iPhone or an Android, there’s one button to switch off all your notifications. That’s 83% of the distractions our research group tell us gets in the way. Ritual number two is play music as little as 30 seconds for me. There’s three different songs that I use depending on the energy I need to bring to the group, the audience and the outcome that I’m working with ranges from very soft, instrumental all the way through to heavy rap wrap ritual. Number four, drink a glass of water before I go into the conversation. And ritual number five is take three deep breaths before you press.

(17:06): Join the meeting or walk into the meeting as well. If you do get distracted in a meeting, some of the quickest tips I could recommend just have a glass of water consistently. The brain, 5% of body mass yet is consuming 26% of blood sugar. And the quickest way to help the brain process the listening, just pause, drink a half a glass of water. Now if you drink coffee, that’s great, but I encourage you also to drink water. Coffee is not a substitute for water, although it does have water in it. And John’s just showing us that he’s got a regular supply of water where he is right now, the most important thing about water and breathing, it sends a signal to the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of the body that sits around the lungs and it just says, relax John. Everything’s gonna be okay. And you can be present to what the other person’s saying.

John Jantsch (18:01): I want to talk a little bit about and thank you for sharing that. Those were all great tips cuz I do think that it, there has to be something intentional about saying, okay, like I’m shifting into this new thing. I wanna talk a little bit about the format. Again, I’m holding up for those of you that are on video, we’ll also have it on our show notes. But the format of your book is rather unique. It is. First off a boxed book. It is rather small in size relative to other books, about a quarter of the size, perhaps going a little shirt pocket. And then there’s also a deck of what I could only describe as playing cards, but I think you would probably call them practice cards for for listening. So tell me a little bit about your decisions from a format standpoint on the book, because I get the sense that you’re very intentional about everything you do.

Oscar Trimboli (18:45): Well again, think you give me much more credit than my community. My clients, my research group, both the book and the cards have all come about by listening to my clients. And one of the things the clients say is, wow, Oscar, this listening stuff, it’s much bigger than I thought. Could you package it up into something really small? And the format was very deliberate because it was the format the group had asked me for. I want something to be able to reference. I want something to be able to put into my handbag, my jacket pocket to be able to take on a flight. I’ve had photos of people who are by the sides of waterfalls in hotel rooms, all showing me the book. And yet the other thing is the applying cards, the practice cards. They’re designed around the five levels of listening. And each card has a concept and a question that you can practice.

(19:41): And what I recommend with the cards is once a week, use one card, maybe share it with somebody else, maybe someone you trust in the workplace, maybe a life partner and just say, Hey, I’m working on this week. Have a look at the card when I do it well hey, give me a cheer when I don’t, just remind me. The cards are about listening happens before, during, and after a conversation. And this is about the third part, how do you sustain your listening? Listening like any other thing is a practice, it’s a strategy. And you need to be building your listening muscles intentionally over time. When you do listening moves from heavy energy sapping to lite n easy because your orientation moves from I need to listen to what they say to how do I get them to say what they have and said, when you do listening’s, light listening’s easy people describe their listening batteries. When they come into workshops with me, as am my listening batteries yellow or orange red or maybe touching on black. Yet when they finish the workshop they go, wow, my listening batteries are recharge. I can see how I can stay on green all the time just by practicing with these cards.

John Jantsch (20:59): You know, it’s funny you mentioned the idea of silence and like getting people to say, you know what they aren’t saying. And I find that actually silence is really one of the best tools for that because a lot of other people have that sense that I need to fill up the space. And so many times your silence will actually in some ways force them to continue or to go deeper or to explore, you know what what you ask them at a deeper level. So I, I think there are many ways that that I have seen. I mean, I have so much work to do or as you as I guess you suggest most people do. But I have seen the power of this, certainly this idea firsthand of deep listening.

Oscar Trimboli (21:36): Yeah, just remember silent and listen, have the identical letters.

John Jantsch (21:41): Yeah. . That’s right. That’s great. Tell people where they can find deep listening. Find more about you and your worker. I invite you to share whatever you wanna share.

Oscar Trimboli (21:50): Look, uh, as much as I’d love you to connect with me, I’d love you to connect with your own listening and learn a little bit about your listening. So if you visit listening quiz.com, you can take the seven minute quiz, you can find out which one is your primary listening villain and your secondary, and you’ll be able to grab a report that gives you three tips to help you with your primary a listening villain. That way, like others, at a minimum, you can get 5% back in your schedule each week.

John Jantsch (22:20): Awesome. Well, Oscar, it was a pleasure having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time and hopefully we’ll uh, run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Oscar Trimboli (22:30): Thanks for listening. Hey,

John Jantsch (22:31): 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. 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.