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Growing Your Audience (And Your Revenue) With A Book written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Matt Briel

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Matt Briel. Matt is an entrepreneur and the Vice President of Marketing & Communications at Lulu.com, as well as a self-diagnosed collaboration junkie. After more than 15 years leading Sales and Marketing teams in the Media & Publishing spaces, he’s developed a unique passion for helping creators become more successful by leveraging books as a catalyst for opportunities and sustainable revenue.

Key Takeaway:

Writing a book can take your credibility, authority, and your business to the next level – Not only does it you an amazing opportunity to share your knowledge, but it’ll also help increase awareness of yourself and what you have to offer. Matt Briel joins me in this episode and shares exactly how books can bring success for growing audiences, brands, reach, revenue, and more.

Questions I ask Matt Briel:

  • [1:29] Could you tell us about the origin story of Lulu and how did it come to be?
  • [2:25] Is self-publishing a more profitable way to publish today?
  • [5:12] Why would someone want to self-publish a book?
  • [7:30] Would you say self-publishing is seen as a differentiator for businesses?
  • [11:42] What does it take to produce a book?
  • [18:49] What do you say to that person that doesn’t think they have time to write a book?
  • [21:59] Where can people find out more about you and publishing a book with Lulu?

Learn More About Matt Briel and Lulu:

  • Lulu.com
  • Publishforgrowth.com

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

  • Learn more

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists, and it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

(00:50): This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Matt Briel, commonly described as equal parts, loud music, Disney culture, tattoos, and book nerd. Matt is an entrepreneur and vice president of marketing and communications @

Matt Briel (01:02): lulu.com, as well as a self-diagnosed collaboration junkie. After more than 15 years leading sales and marketing teams in the media and publishing spaces, he’s developed a unique passion for helping creators become more successful by leveraging books as a catalyst for opportunities and sustainable revenues. So, Matt, welcome to the

(01:22): Show. Thanks, John. It’s great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:24): So, so give me lulu.com, or Lulu is a self-publishing company. Give me a little bit of the origin story of Lulu and kind of how you came to it.

Matt Briel (01:33): Yeah, it’s actually a really fun one. We were founded by a gentleman named Bob Young, who was the original co-founder of Red Hat, which is a massive software company. Most of your listeners probably know what it is. Um, he and his partner took Red Hat to an IPO early days, and Bob found himself with a lot of time and a lot of money, and a lot of people wanted to hear his story. And so he wanted to publish a book. That journey through its ups and downs led him to basically create Lulu a place where anybody could publish and not face a lot of the barriers to entry Yeah. That people were facing to get their stories published, whether it be money or, you know, and you’re well aware of the gatekeepers at the publishing houses of traditional publishers. So that’s the quick and dirty of our origin story is that, and Bob Young, by the way, is still the sole owner and founder of the company, and very much and involved in what we do on a day-to-day basis.

John Jantsch (02:25): So I, I published my first book in, I think my first book came out in 2007. Boy, the industry has changed a ton in that period of time. But one of the things that I, well, let me ask you, rather than telling you what you’re gonna say, , you know, you think back in just even the last decade, self-publishing still had a little bit of, oh, you can’t get a real publisher. Right. And now I think it’s definitely through technology, through, you know, a lot of advances in opportunities. You know, I think it’s actually become not only a very valid way to publish, there certainly are people out there that have a large platform that see it as a more profitable way to publish.

Matt Briel (03:05): You’re absolutely right. What you’re referring to is the stigma that came with self-publishing. Right. And I, I think it’s even, you know, in the last five years, you don’t even have to go back a decade, but you’re absolutely right. So when Lulu started in 2002, so about 20 years ago, we just celebrated our 20th anniversary. Yeah. Self-publishing a book definitely got you at the bottom of the list of books that somebody was going to read or even take for free. And in many cases, that was warranted. I mean, let’s be honest here, but in a lot of cases it wasn’t, you know, it just, like we said, the manuscripts that are submitted still to this day, to traditional publishers, about 98 to 99% of them get rejected. So there’s a large buried entry. And that stigma has been present up until very recently, actually. And I think you’re right, you touched on the advent of technology surrounding publishing, as well as all the different things you can do now as a self-published author, as it relates to, you know, distribution channels. Right. And so, yeah, I think it’s having its heyday now, I think it’s finally become a very viable source of publishing and creating and printing books.

John Jantsch (04:09): Yeah, it’s interesting the distribution, because you know, even going back 15 years ago, it’s like the publishers had the wholesalers who had the retailers, and that was it. You didn’t get in that path, you weren’t getting in. And it’s really all opened up now to, obviously Amazon probably forced a lot of it, but it certainly opened up to it now where anybody, especially working with a, an organization like yours that’s established in the industry is, you know, gonna see their book in Barnes and Noble maybe if it warrants it.

Matt Briel (04:35): Yeah, that’s right. And again, for a lot of people, that’s what they were concerned with was distribution. Like, how is my book gonna get out there into the hands of everybody? And it was this, it was this thought process that a book is a very, you know, confined thing. It’s something that I wanna write it, I want it published, and I want it into the hands of people in bookstores around the world. There was really no sort of external or, you know, parallel thinking about what else could I do with this book and how else could I distribute it? So yeah, distribution was top of the list and for the longest time, you’re right, the best distribution methods were still at the hands of the traditional publishers who worked with the wholesalers. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:12): So, so let’s talk a little bit about why somebody would self-publish a book. You know, I’ve experienced the benefits of it, but you know, I think a lot of people still are in that, like, I’m not really an author, or I don’t have that much to say, or, you know, I don’t think I could sell a lot of books. So let’s go into a little bit of the reasons, especially well for anybody frankly, but certainly for a business owner, why they would have, why they would publish a book, even with all of those sort of what they’re considering roadblocks.

Matt Briel (05:43): Yeah, absolutely. And that’s probably the number one thing we hear right now, or the question is, you know, why and who would do this? Yeah. Right. The answer I think surprises a lot of people when we talk about this. And I think self-publishing is most beneficial non-fiction creators and writers. Yeah. It’s most beneficial for businesses and institutions, educational or otherwise, that are using this for non-fiction utilitarian purposes. You know, if you look at our user base and our data alone, and we’ve got millions and millions of authors that have used us over the last 20 years, and we’ve published roughly, you know, couple hundred thousand books per year. The bulk of them are non-fiction, and they are utilitarian in concept. They’re handbooks, they’re manuals, they’re reference books, you know, they’re, they’re great books that are done through our platform that are all about coding Python or, you know, tax code laws in, in the northwest region of the United States. And so why

John Jantsch (06:40): You, so, so you should read those if you want to like, get to sleep at night, right? , but somebody finds them interesting, right, .

Matt Briel (06:45): Absolutely. I use some of them in the background to stack up bookshelves for myself here in the office. But yeah, I mean, why you would self-publish really blows down to your goals and your motives. And as a business, you know, a lot of your audience is small business owners or solopreneurs or early stage, you know, entrepreneurs. It’s, it’s such a great tool to use a book as a growth opportunity creator. And with self-publishing, especially now, like you alluded to earlier, with all of the tools and technology we have and what we’ve been able to build in our platform, it’s so easy. And so, yeah, why you would do it is because it creates new opportunities for you as a, as an individual, as an entrepreneur, as a business, or a brand, as an organization. And it’s just an easier way to get it done without having to deal with those gatekeepers, many of whom you’ll never get past.

John Jantsch (07:31): Well, and I think also, you know, I always tell people it’s a great differentiator, you know, if somebody is looking at, I don’t know, three marketing firms, for example, the one who’s got this book that tells a good story about, you know, how marketing’s actually how marketing actually works, even if the person doesn’t read it , it’s a differentiator. And that’s not, you know, based on, oh, you’re cheaper than the other guy, right?

Matt Briel (07:53): Absolutely. Yeah. The big sort of push right now, and a lot of what we use when we’re out at conferences or talking to people and even on interviews, is that books are the best business cards you could ever have. And aside from the revenue impact of having a book to sell, so many people we work with that are successful with them right now, they’re not using them for a source of revenue, or at least not a, it’s a passive stream of revenue for them, but they’re using it as an opportunity creator. And like you said, if you’re talking to two or three people who are consultants in the field of, you know, marketing or, you know, quantum physics, it doesn’t matter if one of those people, if she’s holding a book right, and says, listen, you know, I’m an expert in this. Here’s my book, take this, give it a look over and then, you know, call me if you have any questions. A, you’re not gonna throw that in the garbage. No animal throws a book away. Yeah. And B, that’s definitely gonna put you above. The other two are standing there with just a business card in their hand. And so the idea that you took the time to create a book and you have this information and this very sort of succinct package, you’re absolutely right. That’s a huge leg.

John Jantsch (08:55): I’ll tell you the other thing that I, I think a lot of people underestimate when they think about the time and frankly the monetary investment, you know, to get the thing off the ground. What I’ve found is the person with a book, especially a book, let’s face it, that does make some sense as well written , you get to charge a premium too. That’s right. I mean, you’ll make that money back. I can almost guarantee it. I know when I was already speaking professionally, because I’d been writing for a long time and, and I once, as soon as my book came out, and unfortunately it sold pretty well, but as soon as it came out I quadrupled my speaking fees. So , you know, really the time or whatever monetary investments you have, think it actually, that’s how you justify it, isn’t it?

Matt Briel (09:35): Yeah. And that’s a great point you just made too inadvertently, which was, you know, it’s really popular right now. People wanna get on the speaking circuits for whatever, you know, industry or vertical they’re in. Right? And you see it as well as I do, we’ve crossed paths already in the marketing circles. That’s a big thing to, to get a speaking gig at, you know, something like Inbound or one of these places. Yeah. Conferences, excuse me. And from what I’ve seen, and you can probably vouch for this, in most cases, you’re not even gonna get considered if you’re not, if you don’t have author next to your name, right? Yeah. If you’ve not published something, they don’t necessarily care that it was with McGraw Hill or self-published through, you know, Lulu or whoever. But if you’ve not taken the time to publish something on the topic by which you consider yourself an expert, you’re not even making the waiting list for a speaking engagement. And so for those who are trying to break into that scene, this is again, another way to really put yourself at the top of that list and it’s very inexpensive way. But like you said, even if you take the route of, you know, paying for some help to actually create a good book with some editors helping you and maybe a graphic designer on the cover, that’s still a relatively inexpensive investment in what you just said will be, you know, a very large career booster for yourself.

John Jantsch (10:45): Yeah. I’ve had any number of events reach out to me and said, yeah, our c e O picked up your book in the airport and, you know, thought we ought to really have you come speak at our event. I mean, they didn’t really, I’m sure they did some research, but you know, that was when they found me, right? . Yeah. So, so absolutely. Now from our sponsor, look, whether you have an established following or you’re just starting out, books are a great way for entrepreneurs and creators to establish credibility, grow an audience, and generate profit from landing more speaking gigs to ING leads for your business, to building a community of fans around your brand. A book can spark so many new growth opportunities for you. At lulu.com, they have free tools for publishing and e-commerce plugins for printing books directly from your website for turnkey white label fulfillment. Go check ’em out @ publishforgrowth.com to learn how to get started on your first or maybe your next book today.

(11:39): That’s publish for growth.com. So you hinted at this, so let’s go there. What does it take to produce a book? I think a lot of people think, oh, I just, you know, I type out 80,000 words, I give it to somebody, and while I’ve got a book, what is the real process in terms of putting out a quality book?

Matt Briel (11:55): Yeah. Second most asked question, we get . And so that’s the, also, the second thing that really hung people up for the longest time with self-publishing was it is a true do-it-yourself initiative if you want it to be. So, you know, in the days of traditional publishing, and I would imagine with you and many others that I’ve talked to along the way, you have a team, or your publisher has a team. So when you do your part, when you type your 50 to a hundred thousand words, you just hand that over to your agent or your contact at the publishing house, and then their team, they’ll go through it and tear it apart and do whatever they wanna do with it. Well, hopefully they don’t tear yours apart. But you know, when you’re self-publishing, you’re on the hook for all of that, right? And so what it takes to self-publish a book can be very easy and minimal, or you can make it as complicated as you want, but at the end of the day, you’re in control of all of that.

(12:44): And that’s one of the beauties of it. So what you need is content, you know, and depending on what you’re writing and what your goal for that is, it could be as little as, you know, 10,000 words, 8,000 words. The length and size of the book these days doesn’t necessarily matter as much as the quality of the content and what you’re gonna do with that book. So you need a PDF of that content, right? You need a platform. So if you were gonna use ours, you just create an account, you would upload that pdf, our system will scan it over and check for any errors in formatting or size. If it’s all good, you literally, you know, add the cover file, which you can either create on our platform, others have a similar tool, or if you’ve had your cover created by a graphic designer, which, you know, if you’re not good at it, which a lot of people aren’t, you can go to any number of freelancer sites like Fiber or 99 Designs, or your buddy who does graphic design on the side and hit the publish button and you’re good to go.

(13:37): You designate where you want your book to show up, you can designate it to be private access, meaning you only have access to it, to print copies for yourself. And then our greatest feature right now, and our biggest differentiator on what’s making the biggest waves is that you can now connect it to your own website and sell it directly and keep all the properties. So we work with, you know, Shopify and a WordPress plugins and a number of other ways to do that. So it is a lot easier than it ever has been. And depending on how, how concise and how well-crafted you want that book to be, it can go pretty quickly and inexpensively.

John Jantsch (14:13): I would toss in to the person that, you know, really wants something they can be proud of, that you probably should go out and on the private market look for a a, a true editor , as well as maybe a line editor copy editor. Because I just, from my experience, you know, a true editor has made my books better by saying, well just rearrange this here or tell more stories here. But then, you know, the lo the copy editor who you know, ends up chopping out about 2000 words of me just saying superfluous stuff and also making sure that I’m not using passive voice and I said this way and then this the way and the next one worth the investment. Certainly an additional investment. But I think to if you, if this is gonna be, you know, you’re that attorney and , you want people, you know, to read your book and show your professionalism, you know, it’s worth that investment. I think

Matt Briel (15:03): I would never disagree with that at all. Yeah. And again, if you’re gonna spend the money on any one area, that’s it. And we do also, there’s a spot on our website where we list resources, people, freelancers, editors, graphic designers who you can work with, because you’re right. I mean, if this is something that you’re gonna consider, you know, a growth tool and even potentially a legacy for yourself, right, right. Let’s face it, your books are a legacy, you know, you and many others who are putting these books out there, the last thing you want is some simple grammatical errors or some weird tone or voice that could have been easily rectified through, you know, less than a thousand dollars worth of editing work, you know? Yes. Yeah. So would agree with a hundred percent. John.

John Jantsch (15:40): So you mentioned the idea of selling direct, and I will say one of the cha challenges certainly with a traditional publisher is you have no idea who bought your book. And in fact, the publisher has no idea who bought your book. I’ve always felt in this day and age, that’s a giant gap because frankly, if I knew every single person that bought my book and I had a way to contact them, you know, the upsells, the, you know, the communities that you could build around that, the spinoffs that you could build just from having, you know, people who were engaged buyers of, it’s just like anything, I mean customers, but you don’t know who they are. . So, so now you, by selling direct, they are a customer and you know absolutely who they are. And I think that’s a benefit that you can turn your $14 book into, you know, 14, you know, million dollars, you know, worth of other products, isn’t it?

Matt Briel (16:32): You’re right. That’s the real game changer here too, especially for us. I mean, again, we’re one of the only ones that offer that ability right now. And when you look at the climate we’re in and the shift to online e-commerce over the past few years, or five years or so, and even, you know, with the onset of the pandemic and covid and this boon that’s happening in the creator economy and you know, a lot of the people listening to your podcast are solopreneurs and people who are going at it and really trying to make a living off of what they consider their craft or passion or whatever that might be. The ability to sell direct. Yes. Keeping a hundred percent of your profits is a benefit, of course. And for somebody like you, for example, if you’re selling, you know, thousands of books a month, right? Right. Imagine if you were keeping all of that versus you know, what the publisher is keeping. Yeah,

John Jantsch (17:15): No, I’m fine. I’m fine with 15%. It’s all right.

Matt Briel (17:18): , the real thing here is what you alluded to is customer data. And we’ve all been so conditioned over the years to just give that to Amazon or give that to, you know, whoever is the retailer of your product. For those of you listening that have a brick and mortar store, it’s a little bit different. But for the most part, everybody is really doing something online or utilizing a third party retailer and they’re keeping all of that customer data. It’s not your customer. And like you said, imagine if you had that customer data that you could remarket to and turn a $14 book sale into five years of book sales by remarketing to them and building that email list and owning all of that journey. And so that’s the real benefit that people are starting to discover and that’s really where this has been taking off for us and everybody involved in this.

John Jantsch (18:02): And I think that’s also, I mean you, you didn’t mention it necessarily, but building community, I mean, just knowing who those, I mean, even if it just started with a book club, you know, and you know, building relationship with that reader cuz they’ve already heard your voice, right? They’re, you’re in their head and so you know, you’ve got a real leg up in the trust game on doing that. Here’s the, really the last kind of big question and I’m sure you get it all the time. We’re talking about business professionals, they’ve, they maybe they’re founder, they’re running a company and it’s like, I got a day job , you know? Yeah. How am I gonna write all of this? You know, cuz I think they envision going off to the cabin and you know, for six weeks and Sling going, doing this

Matt Briel (18:37): And smoking a

John Jantsch (18:38): Bike. Exactly. So what do you say to that person that says, I don’t have the time to do this or you know, I don’t know when I’m gonna, you know, be able to create or I don’t even know what I would write. I mean, what do you say to that person?

Matt Briel (18:51): The answer is similar to some of the other things we’ve been talking about and it has to do with the onset of technology right now that is making our lives easier in every aspect of creating content and marketing and selling products, whatever it is you happen to be involved in. But the long and short of it is you have a couple of options for a lot of people listening, they already have content, they just don’t realize it. Right? For people listening to your podcasts that are bloggers or they’re podcasters or they have video blogs on YouTube or whatever that might be, there are so many cool ways where you could take existing content and repackage it, you know, chat transcripts from your podcasts. Uh, if you’re a blogger, take your top 10 most viewed blogs or red blogs and those are chapters now for a book or you know, there’s a lot of ways to repackage content that you already have.

(19:34): But if you’re truly starting from scratch and you’re saying, Hey, I’m trying to get this business or concept off the ground, or whatever that might be, it can be challenging. Of course nobody’s just gonna go off to a cabin in the woods and put their cardigan on and grab an old typewriter and crank out 80,000 words on a topic. But you have to chunk it up, you have to first start with an outline, it makes things the easiest and it keeps things in line and succinct and you know, sometimes just doing your outline could take you a month and that’s okay, but if you’re really putting that time and effort into it, the finished product is gonna be great. So get that outline started that serves as your roadmap, right? You would never get in the car and take off on a road trip without either, you know, maps on your phone telling you where to go or a paper map like you and I have probably used at some point in our life.

(20:18): Your outline is the same thing. So if you can get a succinct and out a well done outline done, you know, from there it gets easier. You just chunk it up and you’ve gotta create time for yourself. You literally have to put time on your calendar, even if it’s only 15, 20 minutes a day. Whatever you can get written in that time, you will see how quickly that stuff will start to add up and before you know it, you’ve got enough to send off to an editor you’re working with who’s gonna help you finish that product up. So it’s time management, like everybody listening to your podcast, you and I both we’re all challenged by it, especially these days. You’ve just gotta carve out the time to do it and the benefits in the end will definitely be worth what you’re sacrificing upfront.

John Jantsch (21:00): Yeah, and I think it’s, I think it’s key to get clear on those benefits, you know, what are you gonna gain from doing it? I always find that that, you know, helps people get the leverage over themselves in their time when they know, gosh, I gotta do this cuz the payoff is X. You know, one, one tip I’d throw in there too, I’ve worked with a lot of folks that they just feel like I’m just not a good writer or I’m, you know, I can’t get it down, but they can speak all day long and so , you know, create the audio version you know, of your book and let somebody turn it into the written word.

Matt Briel (21:28): Um, well that’s where technology comes in, right? There’s so many tools out there right now that you could literally just speak into your book and it will transcribe it for you. There are lots of other tools that will help you, you know, with the actual craft of writing. There are tools that will literally prompt you, Hey, it’s time to write your 500 words, you know what I mean? And guide you through it, so Yep, yep, yep. Technology’s our friend these days and it’s so inexpensive to free to use a lot of it.

John Jantsch (21:51): Yeah. So Matt, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can find out more about publishing a book with Lulu?

Matt Briel (22:00): Absolutely. Thank you John. This has been good. You can find us@lulu.com. Very easy four letters. We’ve spent a lot of money competing with the Leggings company for URL traffic . You can also find us@publishforgrowth.com, which is a little more suited towards your audience and it helps you really understand, like we talked about those benefits of why you would publish something for your business. Um, so yeah.

John Jantsch (22:20): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into each other one of these days out there on the road.

Matt Briel (22:26): We will, and thanks again, John, I appreciate it.

John Jantsch (22:28): 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. 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 episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network and Lulu.

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

Whether you have an established following or you’re just starting out, books are a great way for entrepreneurs and creators to establish credibility, grow an audience, and generate profit. From landing more speaking gigs to generating leads for your business to building a community of fans around your brand, a book can spark so many new growth opportunities for you! At Lulu, we have free tools for publishing, and e-commerce plug-ins for printing books directly from your website for turn-key, white-label fulfillment. Meet us over at publishforgrowth.com to learn how to get started on your first (or next!) book today.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=4819

The Secret To Attracting Your Ideal, High-Ticket Clients written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Russ Ruffino

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Russ Ruffino. Russ is the Founder of Clients on Demand, an Inc. 500 company that helps coaches, experts, and service providers attract the right clients at the right price, anytime they want.

Key Takeaway:

If you’re looking for some serious advice on how to attract high-paying clients and not sure where to start, Russ Ruffino—the mastermind behind Inc. 500 company Clients on Demand joins me to share exactly what it takes to appeal to (and secure) your ideal client at just the right price. He’s sharing the expert tips that could change everything about how you do business.

Questions I ask Russ Ruffino:

  • [1:30] Could you tell us more about your story?
  • [5:08] What are the mistakes people in the industry (coaches, consultants, small agencies) are typically making when they come to you?
  • [7:32] What has to be in place in order for people to want to pay you twice as much?
  • [12:08] What does it take though to build trust?
  • [14:43] Do you absolutely need to have a niche?
  • [15:35] Let’s talk a little bit about your client attraction system – is there an approach that you think for selling high-ticket items is the way to go right now?
  • [19:36] Let’s say I’m a management consultant – do you feel like this approach can work for somebody that’s doing high ticket but maybe one-on-one or not necessarily the traditional coaching industry?
  • [21:55] Where can people find out more about the work that you’re doing and more about you?

More About Russ Ruffino:

  • Clients on Demand
  • Russ Ruffino

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

  • Learn more

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

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes, packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge 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 Russ Ruffino. He’s the founder of Clients on Demand and Inc. 500 company that helps coaches, experts, and service providers attract the right clients at the right price anytime they want. So, Russ, welcome to the show.

Russ Ruffino (01:07): Thank you. It’s great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:09): So, listeners, this is the Construction Zone episode that you might be hearing some background noise, but hey, you know, the show must go on. We’re professionals here. We can work through this. So, so Russ, tell me a little bit about your, I told in the bio, I told you what you do now. Sure. I’d love to hear a little bit of your story. Like everybody has a great story of how they got here, .

Russ Ruffino (01:30): Yeah, my, I mean, my story’s all right. It’s, I should probably just make up something more exciting. But basically I, I was a bartender in Los Angeles from age 21 to age 31. I was there in LA because I wanted to do acting. And when you’re, you wanna do acting, you’re waiting tables, you’re giving massages your personal training, you’re bartending, you’re doing something right. And I turned 30 and things just were not going my way in terms of my career. And I, you know, I just had no idea what I was gonna do. So one day I was on break at work and I walked into Barnes and Noble and right there sitting on the shelf was before hour work week by Tim Ferris. And I originally thought, what the hell is that four hour work week? That sounds like nonsense, but I’m interested enough that I’ll pick it up and read it.

(02:12): And that book really introduced me to this idea of, um, making an online income, making a passive income online. I didn’t even know that was possible until I read that book. And so I said to myself, look man, I, you know, come hell or high water, I’m gonna figure out a way to make this work. I’m gonna figure out how to do this. So I started doing just a little bit of online marketing, a little bit of affiliate marketing here and there. Started making a little bit of money doing it. I think I was making maybe like $500 a month maybe. And then one day at work I got, I really got into it with my manager and, and I wanted to tell ’em off. And I, I didn’t have the guts to do it. And I went home and I told my, my, my girlfriend, who’s now my wife, I said, David, you know, I got in a big fight with my boss and I really wanted to tell him off.

(02:48): I didn’t do it. And I just, I feel like I’m being a worse to myself. And she looks at me dead in the eye and she goes, you gotta quit. And I was like, okay. And she had just lost her job two weeks before. And it’s not like, again, I wasn’t making a fortune online. I was making $500 a month, maybe, which is certainly not enough to live on when you’re in la. I think my rent was like two grand or $2,400. Crazy. Yeah, I’m crazy like that. But I said to myself, look man, I bet that if I try to do this full-time that I, I can make it work. So I walked in there, equipment bartending job, woke up the next morning, you know, I went to bed feeling incredible and proud of myself. Woke up the next morning, terrified in terror cuz I didn’t have enough to cover rent, literally the next month.

(03:28): But, you know, long story short, I went to work making money online and I could just do it. I could write copy, I could do sales letters, I could do sales videos, I could do. And I had never done any of these things before. There was an actor and a bartender. I had no idea about marketing. But I ended up doing $250,000 my very first year and, um, changed my life. So then I went on to create my own low ticket products. And the problem then I realized in doing launches, and I realized the problem with low ticket and launches is it generally speaking, people don’t do anything, right. They’ll buy your $27 program, your $97 program, they’ll watch it. They’ll say, oh John, that program was awesome. I’ll rush. That program was awesome. And you’ll say, did you do anything? You know, did you take action?

(04:04): No, not really. I’ll get around to it. . So I asked myself, look, you know, what would happen if I flipped this model on its head? And instead of trying to work with thousands of people to low ticket price, what if I started charging five or eight or $10,000 to work with me? And I started working with fewer people. And uh, that’s what I did. And I guessed that if I did that I would probably be able to work with a lot fewer clients that I’d be able to make more money, that those clients would be more committed and they’d give better result. And that’s exactly what happened. So when I first switched from low ticket to high ticket, I did $200,000 that first month. And then I haven’t looked back since. And today the business is doing, you know, well into the eight figures. And it’s just amazing. You know, the was, people are now, they’re getting results, now they’re taking action, now they’re doing the work. And it’s, it’s just unlocked a whole new level of joy in this work because now I can see the difference it’s making in people’s lives. And that’s really what gets you outta bed in the morning.

John Jantsch (04:52): Yeah. So you like a lot of people, I mean, you figured out how to do something and then all of a sudden it’s like, hey, there’s a lot of people that need this. I can teach this to other people as well. So that’s really become your business hasn’t, is teaching other people how to do what you discovered how to do. Right,

Russ Ruffino (05:06): Exactly. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:08): So talk a little bit about some of the, like when people come to you, you’re probably seeing the same mistakes over and over again. They clearly you’re, you know, set up to fix mm-hmm. . But how do people typically come to you? And we’re talking about coaches, we’re talking about consultants. Sure. Maybe small agencies. So talk a little bit about like the mistakes they’re making.

Russ Ruffino (05:27): Well, most of the time right outta the gate, they’re undercharging. And so they decide to get into coaching and they look around in their, in their space. There’s usually some other people that are already doing this. You know, if you’re a marriage coach, you’re not gonna be the first marriage coach the world is ever seen. You know, there’s other people doing this. And so the mistake they make is they look at those other people and they go, God, you know, that person’s got better branding than me and all, they got better pictures than me. And maybe they’re better looking than me and their website’s a little nicer and everything. And they’ve got all these followers on YouTube and Instagram. Oh man. And their program is a thousand dollars. So how so I better price mine at 700 bucks or whatever. And what we teach our clients is that what your competition is doing is irrelevant.

(06:05): Because fundamentally what people are buying from you is not your knowledge, it’s not your expertise, it’s not your time. What they’re buying is an outcome. There’s a certain result that they want to achieve in their life. And that’s the value you provide. And so what that means, John, is that all of your pricing should be based on what it’s worth to have that outcome. Like if you can really save someone’s marriage, what is that worth? You know? I mean, it’s priceless, right? So of course you can charge five or eight or $10,000 for your work. And when you do that, now all of a sudden, like I was saying, you can get, you can work with fewer clients. They show up committed, they show up resourceful. You know, you can give ’em a real v i p experience and actually get people the outcome, actually get people the result.

(06:46): So the first mistake is that they’re undercharging. And then I’d say the second mistake I see is that a lot of them don’t have a client attraction system. They’re depending on word of mouth, they’re depending on referrals. And they, people are very proud of that fact, well I haven’t, I’ve never had to advertise and I get all my clients through referrals. I’m like, and that’s great, you should be proud of that. But PS it also means you can’t scale because you’re constantly gonna be going to your clients. Do you know anybody else you could send to me? Do you know anybody else? And eventually they’re gonna be like, no dude, I’ve referred everybody that I can. So unless you have the ability to run ads on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or TikTok or wherever and turn those ads into new clients, you know, you have a business but it’s not a business you can scale. And, but when you do know how to do that, you’ve got something you can build up to a hundred K a month, 500 K a month, even up to like 1000001.5 million a month because now you can turn advertising into dollars. Does that make sense?

John Jantsch (07:32): Yeah, absolutely. But you hit on a really key issue. I think a lot of people don’t think about outcome. They don’t think about the problem they’re solving. They think about the thing they’re selling. Mm-hmm. . And I think until they can get over that, you know, they’ll never really, because I, you know, I tell people all the time, raise your prices and they’re like, I don’t how. Right? So, you know, it’s not, I mean, it’s really nice for you and I to sit around and say, you should double your prices. Right? . But people are like, okay, how do I do that? What it has to be in place in order for people to wanna pay me twice as much?

Russ Ruffino (07:59): That’s a great question. So, and I really think you actually just hit the nail right on the head, is that people put all of their attention on what they’re selling. Meaning the course, the program, what are the bonuses? What are, what’s the, you know, whatever, it’s an eight week program, you know, it’s a 12 week program, you know, it’s a six month program or now getting into the, you know, the guarantee if you don’t get results all come to your house and wash your car or whatever, you know, what you are selling is the outcome. And that is what you need to build all of your communication around, right? Like again, using the example of a maybe a marriage and family therapist. In fact, I have a client who’s a marriage and family therapist. She was a marriage and family therapist in Australia. I think she was charging a hundred dollars an hour.

(08:36): She was seeing couples in her office. I think they were making about $70,000 a year doing that. She came to work with us, I believe it was four years ago. And we took her whole business online and now she’s doing a million dollars a month. So, so getting her to understand that it wasn’t an hour of her time that people were buying, cuz that was what all of the marketing, all the communication was around. And so the customer understood, well, I’m buying an hour over time, you reorient all of your communication to make it crystal clear that what they’re buying from you is a saved marriage. You know, what they’re buying from you is to lose 30 pounds. What they’re buying from you is to have a business that works, whatever it might be, and then you charge accordingly. And believe it or not, that reassures people that you are the best of the best. And that’s something that I think people need to understand. Doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out, what matters is can you get them the outcome? And are you building all your communication around that?

John Jantsch (09:27): Yeah. And I actually see the other side of like, there’s also this belief of well, it, it’s too good to be true. It’s too cheap. Like, you know why you surely can’t get me the result, right? Of

Russ Ruffino (09:36): Course that’s so common. Because the thing is like, if you are a coach, then chances are you solve some of the biggest challenges in life or in business. You know, you’re a dating coach and you help people find the love of their life. You’re a trainer, you help people get into amazing shape, you’re a nutritionist, you help people get into shape and fix their autoimmune conditions, whatever else they have going on. All of those outcomes are priceless. And so if I come to you and I go, listen, I’m gonna help you do this. We’re gonna work together for eight weeks, but at the end of that eight weeks, you’re, you are not gonna recognize your marriage. You are gonna be in a completely different level of love. And you know, with your wife and attraction and passion and PS it’s eight grand. Now I’m gonna take you seriously. No.

John Jantsch (10:08): Yeah. And I think that that, you know, the part that I see people, you know, they just, they don’t like just what you said. We’re so used to selling time or we’re selling a product, you know, that’s tangible. And I think that if you can get somebody a result, I don’t care what it costs. Like if I got a million dollar problem and you could solve that crisis is way down the list.

Russ Ruffino (10:28): Mm-hmm. people need to understand that, especially if it’s a million dollar problem and you’re charging ’em ak, then it’s a steal. And you think to yourself, well $8,000 is a lot of money to save your marriage. No, I mean I got a client, a Jamie who works with teenage girls that are having some serious problems and the parents hire her to work with the daughter and work with the parents to restore that relationship and get the kid back on track. Now look, I don’t have any teenage kids yet. My oldest is seven. But if I was in that situation, I’d mortgage my house, I would sell, I’d sell my other three kids just to save the one kid . But like you do whatever you have to do to get that outcome because you got no choice. It’s your kid. If someone’s gonna charge me a hundred dollars an hour, I’m sitting there going, God, you know, I hope this works. But if somebody comes in and says, Hey look, we’re gonna work with your child for 12 weeks, it’s $10,000, but your entire relationship with them will be transformed. Now I’m, now you’re talking, that’s what I want.

John Jantsch (11:21): 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? 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. What does it take though to build the trust? I mean, right, I’ve got a million dollar problem, but how do I know you can solve it? I mean, what’s it take to like get to that high ticket trust?

Russ Ruffino (12:16): So this is the thing that no one seems to understand. The conventional wisdom out there in the marketplace says that if you want to have high ticket clients, then you really need to spend a lot of time in energy building your authority. You need, you know, a million followers on Instagram, a million followers on YouTube. You need to hit podcast, you need New York Times bestseller, you need 50 different things. And uh, that’s what everyone told me when I was first starting in high ticket. And I said to myself, well you know, God, I don’t have any of those things. So let me try and do this without any of those things. And let’s see, let’s see what happens. And I’m really happy to be able to come and report to you that you don’t need any of that stuff. The truth is that if you want to establish your authority, you only need one thing.

(12:54): And that’s empathy. Empathy. So when you come onto one of our webinars, mine or one of the ones that we create for our clients or one of our marketing pieces, what you’re gonna hear is you’re gonna hear that marriage coach describing your problem better than you can. You know, maybe saying something like this, does this sound like you do? You wake up every morning 10 inches away from the love of your life, but you feel like there’s miles separating you. And every day that gulf is getting bigger and bigger. And if you’re in that situation, you’re like, yeah, that’s exactly how I feel. You know, has your situation between you and your wife gone from being, you know, F but lovers to friends now to roommates and you have no idea how it happened. You know what I mean by describing your problem where you’re going? Yes. That’s exactly what I’m going through. Your immediate reaction is that this person must have the answer, right? So if I can describe your problems

John Jantsch (13:43): Better they they get me. Yeah.

Russ Ruffino (13:45): Right? Yeah, exactly Right. And there’s this thing that people have where we assu, you know, when we hear someone describe our problems better than we can, we automatically assume they know the answer. And so by creating that empathy and that connection at the beginning of the webinar, right, where like, I don’t have to talk about myself. I don’t have to talk about my accolades, I don’t have to talk about how great I am. I don’t have talk about you. Let’s talk about you and your problems and I will tell you what you’re going through and once you, I accurately describe what you’re going through and then I can tell you, look, and then I bet you’ve tried this and you’ve tried this and you’ve tried this other thing and none of that’s worked and here’s why. And here’s the thing that will work. Now you’re gonna wanna work with me. And so all of that time building up your authority, you can do that in a 10, 15, 20 minute video, a 40 minute webinar, something like that. You can do it very fast.

John Jantsch (14:27): So common vice right now is, you know, niche, you gotta have a niche, right? I think I go back and forth on that. I mean, I like to work with people I like to work with, not necessarily dentists. Mm-hmm , that’s the wrong with dentist, but . But I like, you know, I like working with people who have the values. I have the same, you know, beliefs I have. So, you know, do you absolutely need to have a niche?

Russ Ruffino (14:47): So what you do is we don’t start with the niche. What we start is what is that problem that you solve? And then once I know what that is, I can ask you, well who do you most want to solve it for? Or who is the, what is the piece of that audience that you most wanna work with, right? So you don’t have to niche down again, I’m just gonna beat the marriage example to death cuz that’s something everyone understands. You know, maybe you are, maybe you’re really Christian and you tell me like, hey Russ, you know, I want to do, I want to, I wanna help people save their marriage, but I really wanna work with Christian couples. Sure you can absolutely do that. On the other hand, if you’re like, you know, I don’t care if they’re a Christian, Muslim atheists, you know, or whatever down, I’ll help them. I’ll work with ’em to save their marriage. So y you don’t need to narrow down in that way, but if you want to, you usually can. But it’s more about what’s the problem you solve and who’s got that problem.

John Jantsch (15:35): Let’s talk a little bit about your client attraction system. I mean, is there one channel, you’ve already said you don’t need to have a thousand or million followers and this and that. So is there a, an approach that you think for selling high ticket items is the way to go right now?

Russ Ruffino (15:48): Yeah, absolutely. So the best method that we have found to attract high ticket clients is to run ads on social media. So that’s Facebook and YouTube and Instagram are the three best right now TikTok is looking pretty good, but it’s a little bit inconsistent right now cause they keep changing things. So you got those four platforms there, you run ads on those four platforms, you drive that traffic into like a 20 minute presentation. So it could be a video, they could be automated webinar, whatever, but for 20 minutes they’re gonna sit there and listen to you do what I just said. Where you’re connecting with them, you’re showing that empathy, you’re explaining to them why the other stuff they’ve tried has not worked and can’t work. And then what you’ve got instead and why that approach is better. And then you offer them the chance to book a call with you, Hey, you know, if you wanna learn more about how you can apply this stuff to your marriage and get things turned around, you know, click here to book a call and that’s it. Then you get on the phone with them and in one conversation you can enroll them into your five or eight or $10,000 programs. So one of the things that we do that’s different than most other coaches, we don’t teach our clients to do a lot of follow up. I saw a guy the other day saying, well if you wanna make sales on the phone, you gotta follow up with that person 16 times. Like, I dunno about you, but like I , like there’s just no way that’s gonna happen. Yeah, I’m

John Jantsch (16:51): Getting the restraining order right now. Yeah,

Russ Ruffino (16:53): Of course. It’s like, dude, so 95% of our enrollments happen on that very first conversation and most of the time they booked that call within like 24 hours of clicking on our ad in the first place. So what I’m talking about is taking people who’ve never heard you, never heard of you before, they don’t follow you, they don’t know who you are, but they see your ad and your ad speaks directly to them. They click the ad, they watch your 20 minute video, 10 minute video, whatever it is, they book a call with you and then they’re enrolling in your high ticket programs within 24 to 48 hours.

John Jantsch (17:22): And I can, uh, that’s the exact approach you use in your own business as well. Cuz I’ve, you know, I went through your webinar and I, you know,

Russ Ruffino (17:28): Oh nice. Good follow up. Yeah, that’s good. And I see that, I see that more and more now, man. It’s like people will be like, oh yeah, you know, Facebook groups is the best way to get clients. And then, you know, you click on their ad and it doesn’t go to a Facebook group, it goes to a webinar. I’m like, what are we doing here? You know, like,

John Jantsch (17:43): Yeah. One thing that people might have missed is you skipped the, I hate these terms, but you skipped the trip wire and the low cost stuff and the, you know Yeah. Up to upsell to this crap and upsell to that crap. And you go right for if this is for you, here’s how you get it.

Russ Ruffino (17:57): Yeah. So there’s this myth that says that if someone buys something from you, even if they buy something for $5, then now they’re a buyer. And the buyer leads are worth so much more than any other leads. And that’s absolute nonsense because they’re not buyers, they’re $5 buyers. And a $5 buyer is not a $10,000 buyer necessarily. They might be, but you don’t know. What I’ve found, man, is that when you have a bunch of trip wires and low ticket offers and like, you know, you sell ’em some for $27 and then $97, and then there’s the 1 97 upsell and do all that stuff. What that does is alienate the people that really need your help, right? Because if your health is failing, your business is failing, your marriage is failing, you know damn well that $27 e-book is not gonna fix your marriage. You know what I mean? ,

(18:45): You’re like, bro, my wife hates me. There’s no way I’m buying this e-book and all of a sudden everything’s gonna be cool regardless of what the marketing copy says. And the sad thing is that usually the marketing copy is saying that’s what’s gonna happen. The, oh, you’re gonna buy this ebook, it’s gonna fix all your problems. And you know that’s not true. But when I come to you and I’m like, look man, we are gonna work together for real to fix this. I’m gonna work with you. I’m gonna hold your hand every step of the way. We’re gonna execute this game plan. I’m gonna be available to you to answer your questions to coach you through this entire process and it’s 10 K, but we’re really gonna get you the result. Now I have your attention, now you understand that this is something real. So what those low ticket offers do is they tend to attract the curious, but not the committed. The committed people see that $27 ebook and they’re like, yeah, whatever, I’m done, I I don’t need it.

John Jantsch (19:26): Yeah. Or worse they buy it and realize you can’t help them . Exactly. Because it’s like, this is garbage.

Russ Ruffino (19:31): When y’all eagle didn’t save my marriage, why would I give this guy 10 grand? You know?

John Jantsch (19:36): So what you’re describing, you know, this client attraction system, I mean, I know that you specialize in help people do group coaching programs, but mm-hmm. , let’s say I’m a, let’s say I’m a management consultant. Do you feel like this approach, you know, can work for somebody that’s doing, you know, high ticket, but sure, maybe one-on-one or not necessarily the coaching, traditional coaching industry.

Russ Ruffino (19:57): So how you deliver the outcome is basically irrelevant. You could do it in an eight week group coaching workshop. You could sell them a block of one-on-one mentoring sessions over the next six months. You could even get ’em into like a small event, like a 3, 4, 5 day retreat, something like that. So the way you choose to deliver the magic is really up to you. The only thing that matters to make it high ticket is it’s gotta be, it’s gotta be set up to give them the outcome. So if you can get them the outcome in a five day retreat, go for it. You know, if you can get them the outcome with one-on-one mentoring, it’s not my favorite, but go for it. It’s terms in terms of, as far as how you sell it, doesn’t matter as long as it’s all about the outcome.

John Jantsch (20:35): Yeah. The one-on-one mentoring better be really high ticket, right?

Russ Ruffino (20:38): Yeah. . Well, you

John Jantsch (20:40): Know what? There’s only so much, there’s only so much one

Russ Ruffino (20:43): . Well, so here’s the weird thing, man, is I’ve done both, right? So I’ve done one-on-one mentoring and I’ve done, I’ve also done like online group coaching and um, online group coaching gets way better results. And no one seems to believe that until they try it. Like, I didn’t believe it until I tried it. I was like, oh, you’re, you know, if you’re doing group programs, you know you’re lazy and you don’t care about your client results. And I was like, look, I’m gonna try this and I’m gonna see how it goes. But what’s really interesting is that what happens is this whole group dynamic is created where now the clients can support each other, cheerlead each other, answer each other’s questions, and you feel like you’re not like this lone soldier. So people get much better results in a group program than they do even with one-on-one coaching, which is amazing.

John Jantsch (21:20): And I’ve actually found that since the pandemic, people are hungrier than ever for that kind of cohort, small cohort stuff.

Russ Ruffino (21:26): Oh yeah. Because most of these big problems we’re talking about are very lonely problems. Like if you’re, if again, if your marriage is falling apart, it’s like you might not even wanna tell your best friend that, you know what I mean? Like you might, the people closest to you, it’s like nobody wants to admit that. Nobody wants to get into that. You know, if you’re 80, 90, a hundred pounds overweight, like it’s, it’s really hard to go to the people you love and have a conversation with that about, you know, but if I join this program and now there’s all these other people I don’t really know, but they’re in the same boat that I am now, I feel like I’m not alone and I feel like I have a community that can support me and help me.

John Jantsch (21:55): It’s kind of the stranger on a plane that, you know, you’ll tell ’em your life story. Right? So ro, tell people where they can, uh, find out more about the work that you’re doing at Client on Demand and just connect with you. I know you have a podcast as well.

Russ Ruffino (22:05): Yeah, sure. So we have a podcast if you wanna check that out, you can go to clients demand.fm. If you wanna check out just our homepage and what it’s like to work with us, you can go to clients on demand.com and then you can also find us on YouTube and Instagram and everywhere else. Probably the best place to go is clients on demand.com. Check out the presentation on that site and that’s gonna give you a really good introduction into what we do and how we can help you do the same thing.

John Jantsch (22:25): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for checking the time to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you soon, one of these days out there on the road.

Russ Ruffino (22:32): Thanks John.

John Jantsch (22:33): 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 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.

Uncovering The Hidden Power Of Your Unfair Advantage written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba

Ash Ali & Hasan Kubba, guests on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba. They both are award-winning authors and entrepreneurs. Despite not going to university, Ash became a serial tech founder and the first marketing director of a unicorn startup – Just Eat). Hasan built a successful startup from his bedroom with nothing more than an online course and a yearning to escape the ‘rat race’. They are now international bestselling authors, coaches, and keynote speakers. Their latest book is – The Unfair Advantage: How You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed.

Key Takeaway:

Behind every story of success is an unfair advantage. Your unfair advantage is the element that gives you an edge over your competition. In this episode, I talk with Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba about how to identify your own unfair advantages and apply them to any project in your life. We talk about how to look at yourself and find the ingredients you didn’t realize you already had, to succeed in the cut-throat world of business.

Questions I ask Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba:

  • [1:44] The book starts out with the premise — life is fundamentally unfair.  Could you break that idea down?
  • [3:37] What you would call an unfair advantage that people tend to recognize?
  • [6:46] Would you characterize this book as a business book or a self-help book?
  • [9:43] What are some of the places that are less obvious unfair advantages that people don’t even realize they have?
  • [11:41] Some people are purely lucky, but I would say a lot of entrepreneurs have come to the realization that they make their own luck, and that’s something that is earned as opposed to something that’s an unfair advantage. How would you respond to that notion?
  • [13:52] What are your unfair advantages?
  • [19:13] What do you say to that person that feels that they don’t have an unfair advantage?
  • [22:57] Where can people find out more of the work that you’re doing and grab a copy of the book?

More About Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba:

  • Follow Hasan on Twitter: @startuphasan
  • Follow Ash on Twitter: @ash_ali
  • Learn more about the book: The Unfair Academy

Take The Marketing Assessment:

  • Marketingassessment.co

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes, packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:48): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ash Ali. And Hassan Kuba gonna have two guests today, their award-winning authors and entrepreneurs. And despite not going to University, Ash became a serial tech founder and the first marketing director of the Unicorn Startup Just Eat Hassan built a successful startup from his bedroom with nothing more than an online course and a yearning to escape the rat race. They’re now international best-selling authors, coaches and keynote speakers. And we’re gonna talk about their latest book, the Unfair Advantage, how You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed. So Ash and Hassan, welcome.

Hasan Kuba (01:32): Hello. Thank you. Thanks for having us.

John Jantsch (01:34): Hi. Awesome. So the book starts out with this premise, and we could probably do the whole show without me asking another question, but here it is. Life is fundamentally unfair. Who wants to take that dollop of hope?

Hasan Kuba (01:47): I’ll take it. I’ll take it going and so life is unfair. Yeah. That is the under underlying principle behind our book is that life is not fair. And sometimes when you get into self-development, like I did, and still I still enjoy a bit of self-development. Mo you know, you learned that you know, what you got in life is what you deserved. You know, you built the life that you’re living now. You designed it. Your decisions led to the moment you are in now and all these kinds of quotes and beliefs and mental models to make you take responsibility for your life, which is a very useful tool, but it’s limited because it’s not actually that accurate. So one of the ways to look at, well we talk about this in the book, is that it’s, it’s all about mental models. So there’s one extreme, which is to think that all success is based on hard work and, you know, merits.

(02:35): And the other extreme is to think it’s all luck and unearned. Mm-hmm. And the reality is squarely in the middle. Yeah. Right. There’s a lot of serendipity in life. There’s a lot of luck of births and genetic lotteries and there’s a lot of things that just happen because you were in the right place at the right time. Yeah. But at the same time, you can, you know, stack the deck in your favor. You can make the right decisions, you can be consistent in how you think, think and how you behave and the decisions you make to lead towards success. So it’s a mixture of both. Life is unfair and ultimately, you know, we’re so lucky and we should all be so grateful for everything that we have going for us. And at the same time, uh, we can also exert our own agency on the world. We can also take bear some responsibility. We can also take control of our lives to an extent.

John Jantsch (03:19): Yeah. Cuz it, it’s interesting. I mean, we all know people have had everything handed to them, all the funding, all the backing, all the mentors, all the, you know, whatever. And they’ve still found a way to piss it away, haven’t they? . So it really is kind of that combination.

Hasan Kuba (03:33): Exactly.

John Jantsch (03:34): So, so let’s maybe start out by defining, um, what an unfair maybe some examples of what you would call an unfair advantage that people tend to recognize.

Ash Ali (03:46): Yeah. So I mean, an unfair advantage is something that’s unique to you based on your circumstances and also based on your background and who you are as an individual. There’s so many books out there that talk about strengths, but what we do is talk about your strength, but also about yourself as an individual, as a unique person. So we talk about, you know, life is unfair and it’s not a level playing field, but sometimes when life is unfair and it’s not a level playing field, some people can grow up with a victim mindset and a victim type of thinking say, I didn’t have this, I didn’t have that. But actually what we say in the book is actually, how do you turn that around? How do you make that stuff that you, you felt was unfair growing up in poverty or growing up in an area that wasn’t great?

(04:26): How can you turn that around and make it part of your authentic story and use it to an advantage? So an example for me would be, I grew up with little money. And when I start companies now, and I know a lot of listeners are listening here who are run small businesses, when you don’t have a huge amount of money for marketing budgets, for example, I’m the perfect person to come in and work with you because I know how to be resourceful cause I had no money. Right? So my mindset is always based around being resourceful. That’s just an example of something that you could use, uh,

John Jantsch (04:53): Strip. But again, I, you know, to the flip side of that, I guess we all know people who had everything and should have made it. You know, there, we, we all probably know at least somebody, or at least you’ve read their story of somebody that sh never should have . You know, like you said, they didn’t have the education, they didn’t have the backing, they didn’t have the money. Yeah. They didn’t really have seemingly, you know, didn’t seem that smart, you know mm-hmm. , but, you know, they’ve, they’ve made themselves successful the way we defined that. So, you know, what are, you know, I guess to Hassan’s original point, it, it’s kind of somewhere in the middle, isn’t it?

Ash Ali (05:28): It is somewhere in the middle. It, it’s interesting because, you know, like I’ve got a daughter now who’s growing up in privilege and I look at her and I look at my life and think, okay, you know, does she have the fire in the belly? And what can we do to help her have the same mentality of working hard and trying to achieve things in life? And one of the things I found was that interestingly is that constraint does kind of foster creativity. And if you just live, give everything to your children, for example, straight away, then they’re not gonna, um, uh, feel grateful for it straight away. And unless they’ve worked for it. So con, sometimes having constraints, uh, does make you more resourceful and more creative. And that’s just an example of something we’re living in an abundant world now where everything is available quickly. You can audio your takeaway quickly, you can audio your cab quickly and you know, they’re growing up in a different environment compared to us where we had to wait for something, but we had to have some patience around something. So it’s understanding what constraint is and how to manage that, I suppose.

John Jantsch (06:24): Yeah. I I of course, it’s so cliche now, but you know, I like to tell even 30 year olds, you know, about uh, dial up, um, internet and, uh, . Yeah. Things of that nature. Can you, can you imagine that now, you know, it might take 10 minutes and we had to take turns, who could use it, right. Only one person could be on at a time and pretty crazy. So I think what would you classify or would you characterize this book as a business book or a self-help book?

Hasan Kuba (06:50): Yeah, good question. It really is in the middle because what we’ve done with our book is we’ve, so the origin of the book, let’s get into the origin. We did this book because we were getting pitched by loads of startup for funding and it was just like Shark Tank essentially. They’d come in and, and pitch us and we thought, what is the difference that makes a difference here? You know, when we confer between ourselves, we’re like, what is it with some people that we’re like, you know, even if we didn’t believe in them, they’re not gonna close out their funding ground. Nobody else is gonna believe in them and they’re gonna really struggle here. And what is that difference? And we start thinking about this and really diving into it and we decided to write this down, this idea of the unfair advantage. It’s essentially a sustainable competitive advantage for a big business.

(07:32): It’s kind of the type of thing Warren Buffet talks about in value investing. You want a business that has the economic modes, the defensibility that it’s gonna sustain. And it’s the same thing for individuals because at that early stage of a business, when you don’t yet have a product, even sometimes when you don’t yet have, um, customers, you don’t yet have traction in sales, how are you gonna judge it? Well, you’re gonna judge it by the team, by the co-founders. And when you’re judging it by the co-founders, that’s when you have to try and decide, okay, what have they got going for themselves? What do they have that’s gonna allow them to push through? Do they have a track record? Do they have something that gives you the idea that they’ll be able to get into this? Do they have the unfair advantages? Yeah. And essentially that was the idea behind the book. And that’s what made us think about like how we can help people to gain that kind of self-awareness. Yeah. To know what kind of business to go for, to know what kind of strategy to go for. Should you raise funding? Should you bootstrap? Who should you partner with? These are the kind of decisions we wanted to help people with at that early stage. So we’re just bringing it back to the individual. So that’s why it’s in between a business book and a self-development, cuz it’s about the early stages of a startup.

John Jantsch (08:40): Yeah. Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients. For the first time ever, you can license and use the Duct Tape Marketing system and methodology in your business through an upcoming three day virtual workshop. Give us three days and you’ll walk away with a complete system that changes how you think about your agency’s growth. The Duct Tape Marketing System is a turnkey set of processes for installing a marketing system that starts with strategy and moves to long-term retainer implementation engagements. We’ve developed a system by successfully working with thousands of businesses. Now you can bring it to your agency and benefit from all the tools, templates, systems and processes we’ve developed to find out when our next workshop is being held, visit dtm.world/workshop.

(09:37): That’s DTM world slash workshops. So I think there are some unfair advantages that, that are pretty obvious that people could identify. But if I’m out there listening, you know, what are some of the, what are just some of the places that you go looking, I know you have a framework you call the Miles framework. So we can kind of go, you know, letter by letter for the acronym. Uh, but, but what are some of the places maybe that are less obvious that you’ve said, Hey, you know, these are unfair advantages that people don’t even realize they have?

Ash Ali (10:06): Yeah. So the Miles framework is, uh, it stands for money, intelligence, location, and luck education and expertise and status. And it sits on top of mindset. And we talked earlier about why it’s important for people to understand the unfair advantage in the context of business. Because business is all about people. And most investors invest in small startups and early stage startups because of the people, not because of the idea itself. It’s the founders themselves. And so if you can identify your unfair advantages and then amplify those in your pitch, in your message to hiring people to your cust or getting customers, it will help you get your early traction, which is what starts a business. So coming back to the Miles framework, it’s about understanding within each one of those miles frameworks in the each one of those acri, the letters, what you have that’s going for you.

(10:56): Right? And one of the big ones is insight. For example, when you’re starting a company, right? If you have insight into something that nobody else has and you are starting a business around, that’s a very powerful unfair advantage. And there’s so many case studies in our book around that, um, about specific insights around that. Another one is being in the right place at the right time, right the location. And look, you know, if can you find the right co-founder? Can you find the right, um, uh, customers who are close to you potentially who can, who can become customers straightaway? Status is another one. You know, your network. And here, you know, when you are starting a business, if you know how to raise money quickly and you have a network, that’s an unfair advantage. And if you need to go out to the market to raise money from ground zero and have nobody, no network, it’s much harder to do. Much harder to do. Right? And we know how that’s how investment generally works. So there’s lots of little examples in different places for different types of projects or businesses. It depends where you wanna apply the framework itself, whether it’s a project, whether it’s your career, whether it’s, uh, a business itself.

John Jantsch (11:54): Yeah. Let me, I wanna come back to insight in a minute and have you share some examples, uh, to, to help clarify that one. But let’s talk about luck. Some people, some, some people are purely lucky. I mean, they run into luck, right place, right time, like you said. But I would say a lot of entrepreneurs have come to the realization that they make their own luck. And that, that that’s almost something that’s earned as opposed to something that’s an unfair advantage. How would you respond to that notion?

Hasan Kuba (12:23): I I totally believe in making your own luck as well. So we talk about luck and we talk about the fact that it’s overlooked and luck exists. Hey, luck does exist, talent does exist. You know, that all these books has become trendy to say there’s no such thing as talent. Just work super hard and get the 10,000 hours in and, and that will be, that’s enough. These things exist. Tiger Woods was like, could swing a, could swing, a golf could swing a club before he could walk . Like, like these are the kinds of things that that is like pure talent. Oprah Winfrey was like giving speeches to whole congregations at church when she was three years old making. So these things exist, but making your luck also definitely exists. Yeah. We talk in the book about how you can actually increase your luck. There have been psychologists who’ve studied the phenomenon of people who think of themselves as lucky versus people who don’t.

(13:10): And how the fact that they think of themselves as lucky just makes them more proactive, makes them more observant to opportunities that come up. And it’s been literally proven in studies. So it’s quite interesting that you can make your own luck. We say put yourself out there more. Yeah. Increase your surface area to luck and maybe more lucky things will happen. So it’s essentially like rolling the dice, just keep rolling it. No one’s counting how many you’re throwing the dice, how many times you’re throwing the dice. If you keep rolling, you’re more likely to roll the double six.

John Jantsch (13:37): Yeah, I actually, I started my blog in 2003 that I talk about being in the right place at the right time. That was luck to spot that technology. But also it, you know, it led to my first book four years later, but that point I had also written a thousand blog posts. So , you know, I always talk about really that was a lucky decision on my part to go that route. But then I, I do think, you know, you, you have to, you, you can also then turn that luck into something that is very fruitful.

Ash Ali (14:04): Yeah,

Hasan Kuba (14:04): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (14:06): So what’s your unfair advantages? Yeah, let, I’ll let you both answer that one. Go on. For example, as you mentioned, you didn’t go to college, so we’re,

Ash Ali (14:17): Okay,

John Jantsch (14:17): I’ll stop the college degree from Oxford off the table, right?

Ash Ali (14:21): . Yeah, that is, that can be an unfair advantage if you know how to use it. Some people don’t know how to use that as well. You know, we see people coming to us, Andre like, oh yeah, I went to caught Oxford in Cambridge or wherever. And it, it’s just, I’ll say it’s normal for them, but actually that could be an unfair advantage if you know how to use it properly. Uh, an unfair advantage, you know, there’s several different things with strength. There can be double-edged swords as we call them, right? So having something and not having something, and we talked about constraint earlier on, I’ll go through it from my perspective, which is kind of like the double-edged sword version of it. And it has someone go through it from his perspective. So from my perspective, I had no money growing up. So now when I’m building startups, I’m really shrewd and very lean and I can build things very quickly and I’m very resourceful.

(15:01): And, and actually what it does, has done to me is made me more creative. So one of my high skills is creativity, um, intelligence, um, and insight. I have lots of insights with businesses cause I’m doing things all the time. I’m always taking action. So I’m seeing opportunities and getting insights and different things and intelligence. There’s different types of intelligence. You know, a lot of people said to me, Ash, you’re really cool. Uh, you’re the glue amongst your friends. So I’m good at bringing people together and doing things together, which is cool. And I like to be, I don’t like to be the smartest person in the room, you know, I’d rather not be the most intelligent person in the room, but I can learn from other people quickly. So as well as that’s the, the eyesight location and luck. You know, I was born in Birmingham, which is like the second biggest city in the uk, an automotive retail industry kind of community.

(15:41): And the tech industry was booming in London. So I moved to London at the age of 19. If I didn’t move, I wouldn’t have had the same opportunities, wouldn’t have been able to join companies like just eat and do the I P O and look the IPO o you know, how many companies IPO O far and for few between it once again. And there’s a luck factor behind that and the right timing of that. And then seeing how that would work out. Education, I didn’t work university so I didn’t feel entitled, you know, so that, that’s what made, that’s why I kind of hit everything and anything. And I built my expertise up in Dear Tomar. So I was, and, and the time when everyone wanted to know how to do SEO and online marketing, I was there. And then status, you know, like, you know, and your Rolodex of contacts, you know, like I didn’t know many people, but now I know a lots of people. So if I need to do anything now, for example, I can open my black book of contacts, LinkedIn network connections and make things happen because of my status of having connections that are built up over time. Yeah. So that’s become an unfair advantage.

John Jantsch (16:31): What’s interesting, as you said, you know, the degree from a prestigious school used to really mean a lot. It feels like in the, particularly in the entrepreneurial space, it’s more about what were you doing for your summer job, , you know, than what degree you got or your side hustle or whatever seems to actually hold more weight than, than, you know, cost. And I think a lot of it’s because people realize college is great for making connections. What they teach in a lot of, like a marketing course in college will have very little application to what it’s like to market in the real world. And so that, you know, that education, the actual learning classroom education is probably not that valuable.

Ash Ali (17:09): Yeah, I, I mean if you want to learn, so,

John Jantsch (17:11): So Hassan, how

Ash Ali (17:13): Then the fastest way to learn is reading blogs like yours, John. And if you wanna learn about marketing, you can learn a lot more from reading blogs and marketing books can get old very quickly, right? What happened, you know, some time ago. Yeah, yeah. Timing wise might not work now. So it’s keeping fresh and uh, up to date with knowledge. I think that’s really important. And we talk about this in the book about this, there’s three aspects of university, but I’ll let Hassan talk about the Miles’s favorite from his side and what, what his advantages are.

Hasan Kuba (17:39): Yep. Yeah. So, so for me, look, so it is, it’s easier to simplify to what is your unfair advantage, but the reality is we’ll have a set of unfair advantages and a unique set of them. And that’s why Ash goes through so many, well, you know, for Ash, I would definitely say his creativity is, is just one of the top things about him. And the fact that he just gives things a go, he just goes for it. So for me, I would say that it’s my ability to learn really fast. So I think I have that kind of the intelligence where I pick things up fast and then I’m able to communicate them. So one thing that really helped me to get my initial clients and start to develop and get referrals is the ability to build rapport and build trust very quickly. So I think that’s partly just from my ability to absorb information and knowledge in the space that’s so new.

(18:25): And like something I was, one of the main things I was doing was seo. I was doing branding and websites stuff, but SEO and getting people to the top of Googles was huge. And so the fact that I was able to explain it to local businesses, build connections with them, build trust, I think that massively helped me. So that was huge for me. And then you can go further back and just say, listen, I was born in Baghdad, Iraq, and I came to the UK in London when I was three years old with my family to escape the war and all of that. So I’m, my unfair advantage is we moved to, to the UK when I was a baby and I grew up here in London. If you imagine if I’d come when I was 20 years old, I’d have the thickest accent and I’d have so much difficulty in terms of, it’s just how I come across the status side of it in terms of building rapport, building trust. So this is so lucky. So you can kind of go into the genetic lottery of it all. You can go into where you grew up and what kind of schools you went to. You can go into your ability to skill, skill stack and build your skills and expertise and learn things quickly. So I think that learning side is kind of the massive piece for me.

John Jantsch (19:27): So, so I suspect is you’ve both gone out there and maybe given talks on this or or web done webinars on this, that, that, you know, ultimately somebody comes to you and says, look, this is great, but I don’t have any unfair advantages, you know, what do you say to that person that that feels, especially since mindset really sits on top of this, what do you say to that person that, that has that mindset?

Hasan Kuba (19:52): So I would say that essentially this idea and ashes touched on it, this idea of double-edged swords, what you think is a disadvantage, you can turn into an advantage. And I’ll give you an easy one. So we have a few examples in the book of people who had a kind of a classic disadvantage. So a classic disadvantage is a woman entrepreneur, right? So a woman founder, the example of Sarah Blakely, founder of Spanx. Mm-hmm. . Now if you think about her, what was her unfair advantage? Okay, well it was tough. She had no idea about how to raise funding. Nobody would believe in her. She had no connections in that space, et cetera. But what did she have? She had an amazing insight into a problem based on her status as a woman, which is that this idea of like shape wear and, and spanks what turned out to be spanks, she would cut off the feet off tights.

(20:40): Like man wouldn’t have come up with that. wouldn’t have had that insight. The same with Tristan Walker, who’s another example in the book. He’s a, he grew up in the projects in, I think it was the Bronx maybe, or if I’m remembering correctly, Queens actually the queens in New York. And really poor, his dad was murdered when he was young. But hey, he was smart. He got scholarships, he got into good schools. He spent a long time thinking about what his big idea is. In the end, his insight was that black men need a different shaving system than other people do because they have more ingrown hairs. And so he developed this single blade shaving system. He used different rappers who also from his location, so the rapper Nas grew up also in Queens, and then he promoted his brand and then eventually he was acquired by Proctor and Gamble for 30 million.

(21:27): So it’s like what seems like a disadvantage you can use to your advantage if you grew up poor. Then you have an insight into how poor people live, what, what needs they have, what mass market products you might be able to create, let’s say. Or if you grew up as whatever, like you grew up from another country, or you’re learning languages or your, there’s all these different aspects to everything. So it’s all about your mindset. If you have a growth mindset, and we call, we talk about in the book the growth, uh, the reality growth mindset, because we wanna root it in some real reality, then you can grow and you can turn what seems like a disadvantage into an advantage. And listen, if you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re able to read this book, you probably have a lot to be grateful for. So you just need to kind of do a sort of an audit. And gratitude is one of the underlying themes of our book.

John Jantsch (22:13): Yeah. And it’s interesting too because as we grow up a lot of the things that drive our parents or teachers crazy, you know, ultimately come out as an advantage, you know, we were told they were a negative. For example, I, you know, I, my parents used to always joke about how curious I was and always getting into things because I had an teacher, same thing. You know, I was told for a long time that that was a problem that has served me extremely well in my professional life. And I think that’s, uh, sometimes we just have to overcome, you know, the, what, what society has told us is a negative, don’t we?

Ash Ali (22:43): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. When people focus on your weaknesses more than your strengths, that’s when you start to misunderstand really what your unfair advantage is. Because we’ve all got strengths. And what we, the idea of the premise for the book is to double down on your strengths rather than focus too much on your weaknesses and then plug those gaps where you can appropriately and understand that we work in teams and people. It’s about businesses, about people. So it’s not just about you as an individual.

John Jantsch (23:09): Yeah. So, so Ash, uh, Hassan, where, tell people where they can find more of you, more of the work you’re doing, and obviously a grab a copy of the unfair advantage.

Hasan Kuba (23:19): Yeah. We’re all, all, all over social media. So I’m at Startup Hassan. Uh, Hassan is spelled with one s and Ash is, is it Ash Ali, uk Ash, for most of your socials you can find us and our website is the unfair academy.com.

John Jantsch (23:33): Awesome. And the book is, will be available in, I, I don’t believe there’s an audio version. Is there? There

Hasan Kuba (23:39): There

John Jantsch (23:39): Is, yeah, there is. Okay. So an audio and then, uh, in e ebook format as well as, uh, hard cover and available. Mm-hmm. depend upon when you’re listening to this available everywhere that you buy books.

Hasan Kuba (23:50): Yeah, it’s available now cuz it’s at the time of recording. It’ll be released tomorrow. So it’ll be available by time comes,

John Jantsch (23:56): And I should have mentioned this, but the book has been awarded. I don’t have it written here. Tell me the best business book in the UK in 2021 or something. You can do it better than I just did. Tell me, tell me what the award was.

Hasan Kuba (24:08): . So, so we were surprised and happy to learn that we’d won our category of the startup category of the business book awards. Yeah. And then it was like 12 different categories and then it turned out we’d won the whole thing as well over all the categories. So we’d won the business book of the year 2021. It was actually, it’s based in the uk but it’s an international award as well. The only country that the book hasn’t come out yet until now is in the US and Canada in North America. So yeah, it’s done really well. It’s really popular on Good Reads, it’s on YouTube, it a lot viral videos on YouTube’s took, summarizing it. So if you want to check it out a bit further, you can see some summaries on YouTube, you can read all the reviews. It’s, it’s doing, it’s thankfully spreading by word of mouth cause people are loving it.

John Jantsch (24:53): Yeah. Awesome. Well thanks so much for stopping by the the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you both, somewhere out there on the road.

Hasan Kuba (25:00): Thank you John. Thank you John. And big fans of Duct Tape Marketing, by the way, .

John Jantsch (25:03): Appreciate that. Thanks so much. 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. 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.

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What Employer Branding Is And How To Build It For Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with James Ellis

James Ellis, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview James Ellis. James. James is the principal of Employer Brand Labs in Chicago and is a born employer branding nerd whose mission is to create a million employer brand thinkers. He is an author, keynote speaker, practitioner, and podcaster with a wealth of experience across multiple industries for almost a decade.

Key Takeaway:

No matter the size of your company, you can use an employer brand to your advantage. With it, not only could you be seen as a desirable place for great talent but also gain serious business outcomes – like reducing recruitment costs and shortening search times! In this episode, James Ellis shares his insights on what exactly an employer brand means and how it’s possible to make the most out of yours.

Questions I ask James Ellis:

  • [1:20] What is employer branding and why does it matter?
  • [2:29] Would you go as far as to say a primary marketing message talking about what a great team you have and how great people like to work there, is really not a bad attraction message for customers either is it?
  • [4:46] How does somebody need to start thinking about creating and communicating a positive employer brand?
  • [7:38] Culture and employer branding are the same in a lot of ways – would you say one is just the communication of it in an outward way?
  • [11:46] How do you measure employer branding and what is the ROI?
  • [13:39] Should employer branding be in the marketing department? And how are companies wrestling with marrying marketing, recruiting, and overall branding?
  • [15:50] There are plenty of surveys out there that show that people will take far less money to work in a place that focuses on creating a great ROI – would you ever use that type of argument to get the ROI and practical nature of this?
  • [18:50] I tell people all of the time you have to have a narrow focus on who’s an ideal client, and that means you have to tell some people they’re not an ideal client. Would you suggest to some degree that as a company the same idea applies?
  • [21:06] What has virtual remote work from home done to this dynamic?
  • [23:19] Where can more people connect with you and find out more about your work?

More About James Ellis:

  • EmployerBrandLabs.com
  • Subscribe to James’s free newsletter – Employer Brand Headlines

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

  • Learn more

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes, packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is James Ellis. He’s a principal of Employer Brand Labs in Chicago, is a born employer branding nerd whose mission is to create a million employer brand thinkers. He’s an author of keynote speaker, practitioner, and podcaster with a wealth of experience across multiple industries for almost a decade. We’re gonna talk about, you guessed it, employee branding, employer branding. James, welcome to the show.

James Ellis (01:18): Thanks so much for having me, John. I’m thrilled to be here. So

John Jantsch (01:21): This is one of those topics that we probably shouldn’t have to, but we better start with what is in fact employer branding, and then we can go into why it matters.

James Ellis (01:29): No, I honestly, the employer brand has been long run long enough, but it’s still vaguely understood that I watched lots of people try and sell it. And I’m like, until you define it, that’s why I feel like you’re just grabbing me by the ankles and trying to shake the change outta my pocket. Classic if such a thing could be said, the classic definition employer brand is it is the individual perception, meaning it’s in your head. It’s in my head. But they’re different of what is it like to work at Company X based on touchpoints and experiences, some of which happened before the recruiting and job search process. Some of happens during and some happens after. So it is that individual perceptions. So what I think it’s like to work at Nike and what you think it’s like to work at Nike are, can be different, but they can both be. Right. And so influencing those perceptions is the job of employer brand

John Jantsch (02:15): In, let’s just go right into marketing, cuz that’s all I know. the, you know, when you think about it, uh, people wrestle to differentiate themselves with a marketing message, right? And quite often it’s about our thing does this, or, you know, here are the benefits. But would you go as far as saying that as a primary marketing message, talking about what a great team you have, what great people , how great people like to work. There is really not a bad attraction message for customers either, is it?

James Ellis (02:44): I don’t know. So if I go to a, if I pick a flight, they’re all Boeing through air buses. They’re all working the same routes. They’re all working. I mean, they’re all flying outta O’Hare. So what’s the difference? Well, gosh, the only difference is the people working there. So the difference between a delta and a, a frontier and a united is the almost exclusively a function of the people working there. So if you choose a certain kind of person they embody, they are owning that sense of what it’s like to work here. And that creates the experience of what it’s like to be a customer on that side. Now, airlines are an obvious example, but it’s true. The, any company you work at or any company you’re a consumer at, it’s good to know who works there. It’s good to know that they’re friendly faces, that they’re happy, that they’re, you think they do better work, you think they’re delivering a better product, right?

(03:29): Right. There is an inter intersection for the longest time employer brand has lived over in this, what I will lovingly refer to as the recruiting and talent acquisition ghetto. It’s the way of saying, Hey, let’s write a better job posting, or, Hey, let’s make some Glassdoor scores better. What employer brand is, when you really get down to it, it’s the human face of the marketing side. Marketing’s gonna talk about products, it’s gonna talk about features, it’s gonna talk about position, you know, your classic five Ps, four Ps, however you learned it, right? But nobody talks about the people. That’s the sixth p. And if employer brand can kind of own and drive that message and say, look, yes, it’s a great product. Yes, it’s gonna solve your problems and aren’t these wonderful people who make it, it just further reinforces why someone should

John Jantsch (04:09): Buy it. I tell people it’s, it’s how people actually, it’s how customers and prospects are experiencing your brand or company. Yeah. Because that’s, it’s, you know, the person answers the phone, greets ’em at the door, you know, sells ’em something. I mean, that’s their perception of the company.

James Ellis (04:24): Yeah. Target thinks that what it sells is products at a low price. What it really sells is a decent experience of that where I don’t feel bad about myself because those people seem like they’re happy wearing those red shirts and they’re doing their thing. Like, okay, great. I feel better about it than I would and say another company where it just feels like everybody’s, oh, this is the drudgery job.

John Jantsch (04:42): Yeah. All right. So now we’ve brought complete clarity to what it is. So let’s talk about how somebody, like what are the components of, what are the mechanics? Like, how does somebody need to start thinking about creating, but then also communicating in a positive employer brand?

James Ellis (04:58): Yeah. Employer brand has two sides of the same coin. It is that definition, that distillation of what is this brand? What is the message we’re going to market with? But it’s also the ongoing seemingly perpetual means of activating and localizing that brand. So to build a brand, my model is there are four kind of legs of the stool. There is what is the stand or the actual experience of a employee working there, right? Mm-hmm. not what I want to be true, but what do they say, right? Yeah. Two is what is the leadership saying and where is the company going? You know? Right. They have a sense that leadership’s job is something future facing. So where is the company going? Three, what is an employee want in a job? Right? Some people want stability, some people want status. Some people want big old sacks of cash.

(05:42): Everybody’s motivated by different things. So what does your audience actually care about? And then what is the relative competitive set, right? Yeah. If you’re talking, if you’re trying to hire a product manager and a product manager can work almost anywhere, well, gosh, they have a different kind of, you know, set of competitors than say, a nurse who’s only gonna work in a hospital, a clinic, or a doctor’s office. So understanding those four things brings your employer brand into pretty clear clarity, right? There’s a little creative work that happens to kind of distill it and kind of put a bow on it to make it like, oh wait, that’s really tight. But those are the four ideas that you have to wrestle with.

John Jantsch (06:16): Well, you make a great point too about the competitiveness of the industry too. I mean, a lot of times people will think, oh, our industry is so competitive, we gotta have that extra edge, right? But where I like to go is, okay, the remodeling industry or the tree service industry, right? This is a huge edge , right? Mm-hmm. To stand out, because anybody who comes into always like to pick on home services, anybody who’s coming into my home, the exper, I kind of figured they got wrenches, they got trucks, they can do the work, but the experience is the huge factor for

James Ellis (06:48): Me. Yeah, yeah. The plumber you hire, they all have the same wrenches, they all have the same hammers. It’s what you do and how you do it that really makes that experience real.

John Jantsch (06:57): Yeah. And I, you know, I’m probably hypersensitive, you know, like I’m going with companies because I like their follow up process, you know? I mean, it’s like, yeah, they get it if they’re doing that thing, right, , you know, they’re probably gonna do the other stuff, right, too, maybe. Why? Exactly.

James Ellis (07:08): But there, there’s a swing in like, you know, if you’ve talked to B2B marketers, it’s always about, it’s not b2b, it’s p2p, it’s person to person. Yeah. Consumer marketing has not quite got that message that it’s a person buying and it’s a person selling, and they need to adopt some of those lessons as

John Jantsch (07:22): Well. Yeah. Just go read the reviews on every plumber. It’s Russ, rusty fixed my boiler. He was amazing. They don’t even mention the company, right? It’s the person that came in.

James Ellis (07:30): Yeah, we just did our kitchen and this guy lived in my house for three weeks. I mean, it’s like this. They lived here. So yeah, I, it’s the experience of the human.

John Jantsch (07:37): Yeah. So let’s use the culture word then, because you know, all of the employer branding initiatives in the world are not really going to move the needle if people don’t think it’s a great place to work, right? I mean, so yeah, how do you, I mean, they’re really one and the same in a lot of ways. One is maybe just the communication of in an outward way, right?

James Ellis (07:59): Yeah. I always kind of get weirded out when this conversation starts because everybody kinda goes, oh, well I know what brand is, I know what culture is, and therefore I’m equating the two. It’s like, yeah, in a shorthand that works. Yeah. But the truth is, I’m a big believer that there’s a lid for every pot that the company that I wanna work with and I would adore working with, is not the company you wanna work with. And that’s not, I’m good, you’re a bad, or vice versa. It’s simply what we want is different than as humans. That’s completely natural. We look at, you know, use the stories that come out. Goldman Sachs, they’re working their junior analysts to a hundred hours a week, and oh my God, the calamity. And even inside my industry was like, oh, this is gonna really impact their employer brand, and it won’t.

(08:37): Because the truth is every single person hired for that job knew the workload that they were taking on, but they also knew the reward of taking that workload on. They made a conscious and very informed choice to do that thing, right? You’re gonna take my twenties, I’m never gonna see my parents for 12 years. That’s fine, because I’m never gonna see the inside of a coach cabin on an airplane ever again. Right? That’s the trade off you’re making now for someone working at state government, that sounds hellacious, but their motivations are completely different. They love the idea that at five o’clock they close their laptop, and I’m done for the day. I can go do this other thing and have this life. They’re motivated by different things. Is one job better than another? No, and that’s the problem. Everybody is really focused on this very linear sense of good versus bad, right?

(09:22): Glassdoor has said, this is your score, and therefore that is your employee brand. We’ve heard things like, this is your culture, therefore that’s your employee brand. It focuses too linearly In the end, you might want status, you might want opportunity, you might want op autonomy, you might want, there’s like nine core human motivations that move us to pick a job. The problem is, candidates don’t realize that they are o motivated by that. But two companies need to understand that this is, they care about who they bring in and the motivations they have. If you are a company of sharks where com competition and backstabbing and win at any cost is the norm, they should be crystal clear about that so that the accidental sheep doesn’t wander in and get murdered in the, you know, feel the sharks. And I know I’m cross-referencing land and and sea animals here, but

John Jantsch (10:07): There’s a lot of mixed metaphors

James Ellis (10:08): Going on yet. That’s right. That sounds like what I do. . But the opposite is true, right? If you’re a company where collaboration and best idea wins and supporting one another, how you want to do business, hiring a shark is just a horrible idea. So there is a lid, furry pot. The job is to communicate what does that mean in a way that’s meaningful and credible.

John Jantsch (10:26): You know, that’s a really great point because I think some people, rather than owning who they are, actually try to say, no, here’s who we should be. And that’s, you know, regardless of what you’re doing, , that’s a recipe for disaster, isn’t

James Ellis (10:37): It? Yeah. You see these lists of these are the best places to work, and you’re like, oh, we’re just like that. Like, no, you’re not. Otherwise you’d be on that list, wouldn’t you? But okay, that’s neither here

John Jantsch (10:45): Nor there. Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients. For the first time ever, you can license and use the Duct Tape marketing system and methodology in your business through an upcoming three day virtual workshop. Give us three days and you’ll walk away with a complete system that changes how you think about your agency’s growth. The Duct Tape Marketing System is a turnkey set of processes for installing a marketing system that starts with strategy and moves to long-term retainer implementation engagements. We’ve developed a system by successfully working with thousands of businesses. Now you can bring it to your agency and benefit from all the tools, templates, systems, and processes we’ve developed to find out when our next workshop is being held, visit dtm.world/workshop. That’s DTM world slash workshop. All right, so now I’m the boss, and James has come to sell me on this idea of employer branding. And so I’m going, going to say, how do I measure this? What’s C R o? Roi, right?

James Ellis (11:57): That is,

John Jantsch (11:58): I’m the first person that’s ever asked you

James Ellis (12:00): That. Yeah, that’s true. True. You, congratulations, you’ve invented that question. The problem is, it’s the wrong question. You don’t really ask classic branders that what you say is, can you focus our message so that it resonates and connects with the right audience? If you’re selling planes, you’re not like, does my mom know? Does my mom wanna buy our planes? That’s probably not a likely audience for you. However, our CEOs wanting to buy your planes. Okay, that’s really interesting. Will they buy your planes? Well, that’s a salesperson’s job. So branding it as a measurement function is really hard to do. What I would say is that when you’re thinking about employer brand, what you’re really trying to do is make the right people want to work for you. It’s not about more applications, it’s not about volume. And here is where I get into trouble talking to an actual marketer, marketing, and I say this non pejoratively, very positively.

(12:47): Marketing worships at the temple of more, they want more eyeballs and more shelf space and more wallet space and more impressions. And more and more, everything is a function of more employer brand is probably the only aspect of marketing where quality is better than quantity. And I say that and every marketer goes, I like quality too. You’re like, in the end, I have the one job and I can only give it to one person. So my job isn’t to give it to a hundred people. My job is to give it to the best person. That is how I measure. And so really good employer brands should be measured on quality. Are you attracting better quality talent? Are you attracting more people who are potential award winners, or the people who are gonna be the rock stars of your industry? If you are employer branding is doing that job, getting a million people to apply for your job is how you get fired, right? You sell a million, anything you’re gonna get employee of the month, you get a million applicants, you’re getting fired

John Jantsch (13:38): . So how does somebody, you know, we talked off air a little bit, like should this be in the marketing department? Is it in hr? You know, there’s no question that recruiting anybody, you know, showcasing how your company is different. I mean, those are marketing functions, but so, so how are companies wrestling with this aspect, which maybe is, well not maybe has always been there, but now has kind of got a bright light on it and marrying those into like, well, here’s what our overall brand is as well.

James Ellis (14:09): Yeah. Most companies start employer brand as kind of a pilot project. And it’s usually sitting in the recruiting side, Hey, we gotta, why don’t we have an Instagram channel? Hey, why don’t we put some content on LinkedIn? Hey, let’s make a video. Right? They have that pilot, right? Right. They start it, they kind of go, oh, this worked. What if we got serious about it? And they have a pretty clear maturity model of how this works, right? They specify and they get specialists who write caught it and build videos and all that stuff. And we build advocacy who integrate it throughout the entire company. The ideal of all this, the goal of the platonic ideal of what employer brand should be is that the company has one brand. And that, yeah, it’s a lens through which consumers look through or consumer marketing looks through through it to talk to consumers.

(14:52): Investor relations looks through it to talk to their investors. And employer brand looks to see what the candidates want. And so it’s the same brand. And when you see it as a single brand, one, the conversation of where should it live kind of gets a little, it doesn’t really matter. You know, we all have a, you know, if we’re all looking at the same thing, it really makes things easier. But once you’re all looking at that same lens, the work employer brand does, makes consumer marketing better. The work consumer marketing does, makes employer brand better, and therefore they should be integrated. They should talk to each other. Do they need to live side by side? Ah, equivalent on that.

John Jantsch (15:27): So when you talked about attracting talent, there are plenty of surveys, at least that I’ve read, that talk about people. People will, you know, take far less money to work in a place that they’re happy to, you know, work in a place that probably does focus on creating a great employer brand. So would you ever use that type of argument to get the roi, to get these sort of practical nature of this?

James Ellis (15:50): There’s plenty of evidence and research that shows a bad brand. You have to pay a premium to bring in talent that matters. Yeah. That is just, you know, no one wants to work at Bob’s filling house of whatever. You gotta pay 20, 30, 50% more to get that person to even consider you because it’s added risk to them, right? That logo is now on their resume forever. And so that’s a burden, huh? At the same time, I know incredibly smart and talented people who teach, I know incredibly smart and talented people who work at nonprofits who’ve made a very clear decision to say, look, I’ll lose 20, 30% of my income because I’m doing a thing that matters to me. Yeah. So when we think about the phrase evp, everybody forgets the wor middle word, which is value. So what do people value? Okay, yeah.

(16:29): Everybody likes money. Let’s be fair. It’s America. It’s wherever you are. Capitalism works. It’s o not the only conversation, right? If you have to, if you’re, are you choosing Goldman Sachs or you’re working a hundred to 110 hours a week where you’re making all this money, that’s a value transaction. People choose to say, I’m gonna have work 40, 50 hours a week to get this kind of work-life balance. Some people will burn themselves out working for a mission that matters to them, right? Yeah. You look at everybody who works at SpaceX, they’re not there because the management style is so great. They’re there cuz they’re trying to go to Mars and what other companies go into Mars. If that’s what you care about, that’s where you go. It’s the end of that list. So getting a better sense of what is my value offering is really where the conversation happens.

(17:11): The problem is, in most recruiting and candidate experiences, when you think about being a candidate, you hear, oh, we’re a great company, we’re very innovative, we do this, we have this, we do. You get all these claims, and I love talking to marketers cause I can use the word claims with, and you get what I’m saying. Recruiters go, Hey, wait a second, I meant that. But you get all these claims and you’re like, that’s great, but none of them are provable. They’re all completely subjective saying, you are very innovative, it’s easy to do, right? I just did it, but when I show up and you give me a four year old Dell laptop and say, this is your computer from now on, I’m like, whoa, time out. What happened? Innovative. Well I meant this. And suddenly you understand how, how subjective, it’s, so if you look at the entire experience of getting a job, you realize there’s only a handful of non-subjective points being made.

(17:56): And the most important one is salary. Because if you say you’re gonna make a hundred thousand dollars and that you hire that person and you pay them 90,000, that’s called fraud. In fact, it’s technical felony fraud, and people go to jail for that stuff. And you don’t wanna do that. Saying you’re innovative is just some BS you just get to spit out. So in recruiting, the job is to say, if you focus on a non-objective value, if you focus on the subjective value, we have status work, left balance, innovation, autonomy, whatever it is, my rule of thumb is you have to prove it 10 times harder than an objective value. Right? The objective value being, Hey, what’s my title? Hey, what’s my start date? What’s the bonus structure? When do I get a review? That’s pretty hard and fast saying, this is a great place for families to work. Anybody can say that you gotta work real hard for me to go, oh, you, I, that’s true. That must be true. And that’s where the value conversation needs to happen.

John Jantsch (18:50): Yeah. That that’s where, you know, repeated stories demonstrate . That value has really kind of come to play. You know, one point that you made that, you know, as marketers, I’m constantly telling people, you got a narrow focus on who’s an ideal client, and that means you have to tell some people they’re not. Yes. An ideal client. And I think I, I think the same probably holds true here to a degree that you know, if you are X, Y, Z, or if you are looking for X, Y, and Z we’re probably not the place for you. Would you suggest people could go that far?

James Ellis (19:16): Ab No, actually there’s that. That’s a complete tenant of what employer brand is. Your job is not attractive to everybody. In fact, if you really looked at it, you only need to hire, let’s pretend you’re a good concise company. You only need to hire about a thousand people at most. You need to get a hundred thousand people to be really interested enough to work for you that they apply. Okay, a hundred thousand people relative to 8 billion people on the planet. That’s a really low percentage, which means you really only need to be engaging and interesting to 0.001% of all the audience you could be talking to. And once you realize that, you start to go, okay, so I don’t need to make these grand claims that we’re a world beating company, that we’re the greatest company, that we offer the best in class, blah, blah, blah.

(19:57): But I realize who I’m trying to reach. And that means I can start to understand what they care about and suddenly I can put messages out that only they care about, right? If I’m trying to hire working mothers. And that’s a really broad spectrum, but at the same time, I don’t know any companies who say we’re trying to hire working mothers because they are really good at kind of balancing work life. They’re really good at getting things done, they’re really good at managing expectations. They’re really good at talking to customers. There’s a whole narrative about this particular audience would be great for us. So in order to attract, then you have to talk about the things they care about in the way they care about them. So you talk about mother’s rooms, you talk about leave, you talk about balance, you talk about education spending, you talk about all this stuff that a non-working mother might not care about, but you don’t care. You’re trying to focus on this audience. The more you specify and the more you segment, the more specific you can get can get about what they care about. And suddenly you’re not just any company talking, which is every company, but you’re a very interesting company because you’re speaking their particular language.

John Jantsch (20:56): Yeah. So key there is understand what that language is. Well absolutely. I’m getting tired of asking this question, but you know, especially anytime that it comes to people conversations, what has virtual remote work from home done to this dynamic?

James Ellis (21:10): Well, first off, it’s, it just, it changes the math, right? It used to be, well, I’m a hospital or I’m a small startup and I’m in Chicago. You draw a circle on the map, those are the people I can hire. It’s real simple. But suddenly that circle got, went, got erased where it has holes in it. Certainly even companies who I’ve engaged with, where they’re very focused on, you have to come in the last three years, they’ve really said, okay, there’s talent out there that we normally wouldn’t say yes to, but let’s have a conversation. And having to deal with that kind of model and realizing that good talent can bring in good quality work, even if they’re a thousand miles away, has changed the conversation internally in leadership. I know there’s a push to say, let’s bring ’em in, let’s bring ’em in, let’s bring ’em in.

(21:52): That’s a reaction. That is a mm-hmm jean jerk reaction to say, I liked it the way it used to be. I understood that world. Let’s go back there. But I’m pretty sure that’s not how change usually works. It usually just keeps going forward. So this is a, just from a math point of view, it matters at the same time just saying we are a fully in-house work environment. We are a fully hybrid work environment. We are a zero. We are a fully remote work environment that plants massive flags to people saying this is, it shapes their perception of what it’s like to work there. You look at an automatic where there’re completely remote work, there is no office make, make your own office that says volumes about what it’s like to work there relative to a bank that says, no, no, a hundred percent everybody shows up.

(22:38): You wear a suit, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That says a lot. Does it say all of it? Absolutely not. But it does frame the conversation. And what goes back to that sense of competition. If you’re trying to hire a developer and you’re a bank, you have to know that developer is also looking at automatic going, I could work at a fully remote wear, wear my pajamas every single day, do amazing work at midnight kind of thing. Or I have to go to this bank and dress up in a suit and what’s a tie? What that, I sounds like a word, but I don’t know what that word is. Like that you have to explain why that’s good for them. And that kind of focus really changes the math on who you talk to, what you talk about and what they care about.

John Jantsch (23:16): Speaking with James Ellis about employer branding, James, do you want to invite people to connect with you somewhere or find out more about your work?

James Ellis (23:23): Absolutely. You can find me employer brand labs.com, but really I run a, oh, a newsletter. It’s free, it’s really designed, you know, you mentioned my mission of getting a million employer brand thinkers, right? This is how I’m trying to get recruiters, marketers, HR VPs to say, oh, there’s a heart of employer brand that I can use and I can leverage. And that’s where I would invite them to go. So you go to employer brand headlines.dot com or just Google employer brand Headlights. It’s a free newsletter. I, it’s a lot of great content every single week.

John Jantsch (23:49): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and uh, hopefully we will run into you soon, one of these days out there on the road.

James Ellis (23:56): Thanks so much, John. This has been great.

John Jantsch (23:58): 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.

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How To Build A Business That Builds Leaders written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Robert Glazer

Robert Glazer, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Robert Glazer. Robert is the Founder and Chairman of the Board of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency, and the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards two years in a row. He is the author of the inspirational newsletter Friday Forward, the #1 Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the international bestselling author of five books: Elevate and Friday Forward. His latest book is – Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build A Business That Builds Leaders.

Key Takeaway:

Leadership has gone through a dramatic shift and we’re missing out on the opportunity to use businesses as a way to grow human beings as leaders. Robert Glazer joins me in this episode to talk about how leaders can help develop their people as well as the organization for long-term success — all while keeping everyone fulfilled in both work and life.

Questions I ask Robert Glazer:

  • [1:45] Would you characterize this as the new generation of leadership?
  • [2:35] People are leaving jobs left and right because they aren’t fulfilled. Do you see this as a trend moving forward?
  • [4:51] How essential is building trust when it comes to leadership?
  • [6:16] How important is it to check your egos to gain a level of self-awareness before you can even start down this path?
  • [7:35] Would you say that the things you talk about, your ideas, this approach, this mentality, this mindset is something that you found inherently in you or that came naturally to you as a way to build this business?
  • [10:33]  You have for many years now written a newsletter you call Friday Forward. How much of how you think about elevating your team came from what you learned writing that?
  • [13:18] Do you think everybody in an organization needs to be looked at as a leader?
  • [18:03] If you have everyone on your team reaching or at least feeling like they’re moving toward their full potential, what kind of marketing or brand impact do you suppose that has for an organization?
  • [20:29] Want to tell people where they might connect with you, learn more about your work, but obviously also pick up a copy of the book?

More About Robert Glazer:

  • RobertGlazer.com

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

  • Learn more

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

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Robert Glazer. He is the founder and chairman of the Board of Acceleration Partners, a global partner marketing agency, and the recipient of numerous industry and company culture awards, including Glassdoor’s Employees Choice Awards two years in a row. He’s the author of the Inspirational Newsletter Friday Forward and the number one Wall Street Journal, USA Today and international bestselling author, five books I think you’ve been on for Elevate for Friday forward. We’re gonna talk about his latest book, elevate Your Team, empower Your Team to reach their full potential and build a business that builds leaders. So Robert, welcome back to the show.

Robert Glazer (01:33): Thanks John. I see you again and

John Jantsch (01:35): The dog barked on cue. Yeah,

Robert Glazer (01:37): That’s perfect. Right, right, right, right on cue. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:39): , the dog is happy to the, you’re back on as

Robert Glazer (01:42): Well, . And he didn’t even hear you say it whole lot . You saw the mailman.

John Jantsch (01:47): Absolutely. So, so would you characterize this as sort of the new generation of leadership, you know, books or new, you know, leadership training? I mean that it’s kind of out with the old sort of hierarchical leadership?

Robert Glazer (02:00): Yeah, yeah. I think I talked a little bit about a new leadership playbook. I think this transition has been happening for some time. I think it’s been masked the last couple years with sort of high growth, low interest rate, you know, super stimulus kind of company unicorn, but command and control died in the military, uh, a long time ago. And now with a societal level of burnout that we’re seeing. I just don’t see how the old playbook is going to work for building an organization that that requires constantly swapping people out, going forward.

John Jantsch (02:35): Well, and I mean a couple dynamics of course that make the news every day, people are struggling to find people, period. People are leaving jobs that are not fulfilling because the last couple years haven’t been very fulfilling in some cases. And so, I mean, do changes like that in the workplace that are happening right now? I mean, is that something that you see as a trend going forward or is that really this little bubble that we’re in for a few years?

Robert Glazer (03:01): We’ve had a lot of ups and downs, you know, power dynamic between employer and plan. And it depends on what industry you’re in, right? If you’re in hospitality or travel or whatever, you have all the power in the world. If you’re in digital marketing and e-commerce right now, it’s not pretty. Yeah. So you probably don’t want to quiet quit, but I just think we’re missing, I think we’re missing the opportunity to use businesses as a way to grow human beings, grow them as leaders and you know, talk about this concept of capacity building, but you know, work on things that help poop improve people both in the business outside the business. And I, you know, I’m very sort of, I, there, there’s camps, right? There’s the oh results and then people like I, I’m in the middle. Like I, I think you should really try to take care of and grow your people, but also you need results.

(03:45): You need performance and you can’t look, you know, the other way at those things. And a lot of those cases, that’s someone who’s just doing something that they shouldn’t be doing or is doing the wrong thing and you’re not helping them either. So I think that with work from home and all these changes, I just don’t, I don’t, I’ve always said like, I don’t think you, like imagine the person who wakes up at home and is super groggy and tired and bad with money and sucks at per prioritization and they just kind of show up as a different person at work five minutes later. I don’t think that’s the case. So I think it’s like you’re gonna, if you wanna work on , if you wanna have people be better at prioritization and time management and their health and kind of have energy and doing a lot of these things, like, that actually kind of needs to be a holistic approach

John Jantsch (04:29): When you start talking about a holistic, I was gonna ask you about remote, because obviously that’s changed, you know, everybody’s leadership, you know, it’s like I don’t ever see my team now, right? Yeah. You know, how do I lead them? But how, how central is the idea of building trust? First? I’m gonna envision somebody reading your book and going, this is what we’re gonna do. But we’ve never been that , you know, before. I mean, so how essential if I’m gonna actually like go to Robert and say, I’m gonna help you achieve all of your dreams both in work and out outside of work and you know, it’s like what Yeah. You know, how essential is it to build trust first?

Robert Glazer (05:04): I like it. I talk about this a lot. I see way too many leaders managed to the exception . Yeah. They, you know, if something’s gonna happen 99 out of a hundred times, like harping on the one that it went in one direction, it’s actually a terrible thing to do. Like Right. Don’t make something goes a certain way 90% of the time. Like make that decision all the time and don’t worry about the 10%. So I’m a big believer in you give trust first, but like one, once trust is broken, it cannot be repaired. Mm-hmm. . So, so I think a lot of people point out to the one person who abused something or otherwise, but if that’s your default approach is not to trust all of your people because of one person that acted in a way, like it kind of is a really bad assumption. But I, so, so I think it’s better to set a threshold, particularly in a remote or otherwise that like, look, we trust you and we expect you act like an adult, but you know, when we find out you were working two jobs or you find out you abused that trust, it’s hard to, to get that back.

John Jantsch (05:57): Yeah. I know the answer to this, but I want to hear how you answer this , you know, how key, cuz one of the underpinnings of this is that we’re gonna help others succeed. Like we’re gonna lift them up. Whereas a lot of people are like, these people are here to help me succeed. So, you know, how important is it to check that ego is to gain a level of self-awareness that you’re doing that, you know, before you can even start down this path?

Robert Glazer (06:26): Yeah, I think peop people look at these things incongruously and they’re not, for example, like the 80 20 rule has never been overcome, you know, that I’ve ever seen. Yeah. And you got a lot of leaders getting a lot of people spinning wheels and working on stuff on crazy hours that just doesn’t matter and isn’t getting results. So it, I’m not sure that’s good for the company, it’s good for the leader, it’s good for the employee versus if you could, you know, I have a whole chapter on getting more outcome oriented, you know, with the business and the results. What are we trying to get to? What does good look like? Like we’re not gonna focus on a million things. We’re gonna focus on those things and there’s the accountability and their performance piece. And that also maybe makes it so that people don’t need to work a hundred hours a week or aren’t getting emails at, you know, 11:00 PM at night. So a lot of these things really, truly are, I wish there was a better word, but they are vicarious or win-win in that what’s good for the business is good for the employee. I, I mean, the 80 20 rule would tell you that, you know, most organizations today tw 80% of what they’re doing is only getting 20% of the right outcomes.

John Jantsch (07:35): W would you say that the things you talk about this approach, this mentality, this mindset is something that you find in, inherent in you that it came natural to you as a way to build this business? Or was this sort of hard one, you know, because you went out and said, well here’s how everybody else builds a business and I guess that’s how you do it.

Robert Glazer (07:53): Yeah. You know, it’s interesting. I looked at a lot of the things that were going on out there and they didn’t make sense. And I wanted to build a type of business that I was excited to, to work in. And I’ve done my core values, I’ve done the y work, like I my is very much around finding a better way and share it. So it’s like, how do we make people better? How do we make the business better? How do we grow that? So, so and, and then we just really saw that worked. Now again, we are high accountability, high performance of growning, 30% a year for almost a decade. Right? It’s not, I think sometimes when people talk about businesses that help people and care about people and all, you know, that there’s this kumbaya family thing. Yeah. And you haven’t grown revenue in a decade.

(08:30): I mean, we’ve been, we’ve grown 4000% in, in, in 10 years. So I, I just didn’t wanna build a growth business that required constantly changing the people. So the question was how do we grow the people and have that be the impetus for growing the business, not artificially grow the business and then drag people along. And most of our leaders have, and look, I, this was a decision five years ago, I said, if, if you were trying to do this now, if you were trying to just grow by telling people to grind it out in 89 hours a week, they’re so burned out that I just don’t think you’ll have any employees. And in this whole world, you’re either gonna have the freelance mercenary for rent people or you’re gonna have one of people that want to be at your company. And there’s something about being at your company that, and particularly if they’re working from home, that it ties together and it helps them, you know, get what they’re looking for in some ways. But none of these things are, you know, helping people like meet their personal goals should directly correlate to helping the organization reach its goals. Yeah. Some of them should be exclusive of each other.

John Jantsch (09:32): Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients. For the first time ever, you can license and use the Duct Tape Marketing system and methodology in your business through an upcoming three day virtual workshop. Give us three days and you’ll walk away with a complete system that changes how you think about your agency’s growth. The Duct Tape Marketing System is a turnkey set of processes for installing a marketing system that starts with strategy and moves to long-term retainer implementation engagements. We’ve developed a system by successfully working with thousands of businesses. Now you can bring it to your agency and benefit from all the tools, templates, systems and processes we’ve developed to find out when our next workshop is being held. Visit dtm.world/workshop. That’s dtm.world/workshop. You have for many years now written a newsletter you call Friday Forward. It came out on Fridays. You sent it across, typically it was a, almost an internal comms piece, and then eventually grew to following, grew to a book. How much of what you, how you think about elevating your team came from

Robert Glazer (10:54): What

John Jantsch (10:55): You learned writing that

Robert Glazer (10:58): A a lot of it, I’m like a framework person. And so I realized, and when I originally wrote the book, I went to write a compilation book and agent was like, no one likes a compilation book. Like what is it? What have you done? What are the stories? I went back and looked at all the pattern analysis and the categories and that’s where I came up with this whole capacity building construct. That was the premise of both Elevate and elevate your team. And I was like, huh, this is the theme. This is what we’ve, this is what I’ve been doing personally. This is what we’ve been doing around training. We’ve been helping people with spiritual capacity, intellectual, physical, and emotional. Yeah. Like it just sort of, the pattern started to reveal itself. And when I was able to kind of lay out the framework, then I could more say, Hey look, this is, you know, if I went through the the checklist, it’s like that’s how we were training and developing people. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:43): It’s, it was really encouraging to hear you talk about, you went back and discovered, you know, that you had this framework because I, the reason I asked the question, the way I asked is because I think a lot, lot of people underestimate how much having a regular writing practice, how much you learn from ha about yourself, about, you know Yeah. The world. Because you have to pay attention to put that out there. And I think just doing that is actually, and, and again, people should subscribe to Friday forward because you’re gonna see it’s a different kind of newsletter. But I think that it, you know, that’s one of the essential elements, right? Is, I mean, because consistently writing about those things, you know, at some point people had to say, I guess he means it.

Robert Glazer (12:25): Yeah. And look, the, I think there’s a, you probably feel this way. I know a lot. I think there’s probably a misperception that when I write something, like I had it all figured out, it’s actually the topic. It’s like, huh, I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while and now I’m gonna have to spend two hours and like Right. Come up with an opinion on it. So sometimes it really provides that clarification. Like I said, I like frameworks, so yeah. My writing is sort of about how do you put a concept or idea and a framework that then you can do something with it. You know, when you, like we read a book, you know, and you’re like, oh, I’ve known about this for a while, but just the way that John put it together, like, now I get it and it clicks and I know how to do something with it.

John Jantsch (13:01): Well I, I often, you know, somebody on my team will say, you know, I’d like to learn more about Google ads. And I said, oh great, two weeks from today you’re gonna teach a class on it.

Robert Glazer (13:08): Yeah. .

John Jantsch (13:09): And you know, they immediately learn a whole lot more than it had. I like shared, you know, what I knew about it. So I, I just think there’s a lot to that. Does everybody, does everybody need in an organization, do you view everybody as now you have a professional organization, you have very high level, you have leadership folks naturally. Yeah. You know, titled leadership folks. Do you think everybody in an org organization needs to be looked at as a leader?

Robert Glazer (13:34): No. In fact, you know, there is a whole section on this. I think one of the, you know, the premise first is look, give everyone the best chance to be successful in their organization. Yeah. But then you also need to be objective about what the organization needs and what people skillsets are and what they’re good at. And a lot of people, you know, with this word, a lot of people frankly want to be good individual contributors. Right. I think the biggest mistake historically an organization makes, right? They promote the sales person into a sales manager when they just wanna sell and the commission or the engineer into an engineering manager. Generally, I, some people aren’t really interested in managing and leading. They wanna produce and they wanna deliver and you shouldn’t cap their upside. But they are, you know, they get their good feelings from, you know, whatever they did.

(14:19): Personally, a leader, when you come a leader, you need to switch your reward center from what it is that you did. But first what that your team did. And some people just aren’t interested in that and Yeah. Because we want ’em to move up the arch chart and pay more money. Like, like we, you know, put them in charge of teams and frankly, if you’ve got a man or a woman that can sell 10 million a year, like don’t crack their commission. Like let them keep selling. Don’t make ’em managed salespeople. If that’s not what they want to do. They, if they wanna be a rainmaker, let ’em be a rainmaker. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:52): And, and I think the real key you’re saying is work as hard as you can to get people in the right spot. Right spot for them. Right. Doing the right things because they’ll thrive.

Robert Glazer (15:02): Yeah. But look, help them build their capacity, help them learn all this stuff. Yeah. One of the things they may learn is that they don’t do some pre leadership stuff that I don’t like leadership. I like selling, delivering. You know, I like getting all the credit myself. Like I think if people then can be honest with themselves, if you can have that dialogue and the organization can be honest with them, you know, we had someone years ago who just, you know, was in a leadership role and we reversed them out of that leadership role and put ’em in a contributor role. Cause we’re like, look, you don’t like your leading your team. They don’t like having you as a leader. You like to just do stuff and get credit for it. Like we, here’s a contributor role that you could be good at. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:42): Well and the key there too is that, you know, every organization needs somebody who geeks out on Google Analytics, right. Or whatever it is. I mean you need those tools. It wants

Robert Glazer (15:51): To be the best analytics person, the best engineer, the best salesperson, right? The there there’s not a manager of Google Analytics. I think that’s fine. So I think for that reason too, I think you need to, you, you might have training, you might, you know, for young up and coming leaders, but you also need to give ’em an escape, you know, route too. If they start down that process and realize it’s not the right thing,

John Jantsch (16:13): It’s become very trendy to talk about leaders needing to be coaches and coaching their teams. You know, where do you fall on that idea?

Robert Glazer (16:21): Yeah, look, I, a leader’s job is to make I think the sum of the parts greater than the whole, right? And so they should be talking to their team increasingly not telling what to do, but finding out where their blockers are, what they need, discussing problems with them, not solving the problems, but discussing the problems, talking about resources. So yeah, I think the coach mentor, you know, is the, I mean that to me that’s the difference between a leader and a manager. A manager just takes the sum of the parts and tells people what to do and moves the chips on the board. Like, you know, a leader is trying to get something that is more than the sum of the parts. And so I think that is the modern analogy of, you know, people talk about my friend Jamon McCormick, you know, wrote a book like Modern Leadership, but the modern leaders on the bottom of the org chart, like, Hey, I work for my team and how do I make you better get outta your way? Remove obstacles. Again, that true leader who sees their success as how well their team does, not how well they do. And by the way, this is a huge thing that most organizations miss. I would say 80 to 90% of organizations do not rate their managers as managers. , they rate them based on their contribution. So they’re totally rewarding the wrong thing. If you have a leader, someone who manages two, three, or four, five people, the number one thing that you need to be rating them on is how good of a leader they are. .

(17:42): If you rate them on their production, then you’re then, you know, if their teams, if it’s a sales leader and the team is all meeting their goals, but they, they all hate ’em or heard and they’re, you know, they’re all looking for a job and one person’s way ahead of their quota and isn’t getting promoted and one’s under their quota is not getting fired. But they’re all like, again, the results mask. That person is not doing their job as a leader. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:04): So we started talking about this before I hit record and I want to loop back to it, you know, part of the subtitle Empower your Team to reach their full potential if you have one on your team reaching or at least feeling like they’re moving towards their full potential. What kind of marketing or brand impact do you suppose that has for an organization?

Robert Glazer (18:21): Yeah, look, I think they’re fundamentally three types of organizations. I talk about this in the book. The first is a star sniffling and I worked at one of these outside of school, like this is where like me, you know, te you know, mediocrity just tried to stay in place and like good talent left as fast as they could. It was like, you know, there was a whole group of people who just were protecting their job and knew the politics and otherwise. So like while that organization is bankrupt, like everyone I worked with is doing an amazing thing. Like it was one of my first jobs out of college. So the second is catch and release, right? I think these are the organizations that develop people and when they don’t have an opportunity or there’s two people going for one job, they’re actually happy to help that person.

(19:00): And you know, like seeing them go somewhere else and be successful. Patty McCord used to say, we love to see people go be from Netflix. And I think that’s really powerful, the brand and pretty awesome. The hardest one and the one that I think you can’t be all the time is sort of a true meritocracy. An organization that is willing to put the best person on the field, you know, at any time. And you know, my historical example from this in the book is that in 2001, right, the, the Patriots had just signed Drew Bledso for $103 million. I think Bill Belichick is the best example historically of this. It doesn’t matter what you’re paid, where you’re drafted, otherwise whoever is performing best will get the role. And Bledso got hurt. And when he, you know, the sixth round quarterback skinny kid that, you know, no one knew Belichick left him in there.

(19:46): And when the quarterback came back he said, he’s playing really well. I’m not gonna take him out. I mean you’re talking about he doesn’t make that decision and Tom Brady’s not the best player of all time. Very few managers I think are willing to make that decision or take someone and say, look, this person is objectively higher achieving and better than other, we are going to push them forward. So I think we’re all organizations actually are all flavors of those at time to time. But if you want to build a great brand as an organization, one where people can move up on their own merit or the organization supports them to go take better roles elsewhere, like I think that those are places that people wanna work.

John Jantsch (20:24): Speaking with Robert Glazer, he is the author of Elevate Your Team. So Robert, you want to invite people where they might connect with you, learn more about your work, but obviously also pick up a copy of the book.

Robert Glazer (20:35): Yeah, it’s all@robertglazer.com. You can find my podcast there. Book and Friday Ford and would love to, to have everyone join. Awesome.

John Jantsch (20:44): Well thanks again for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon. One of these days out there on the road. Thanks John. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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

How To Quickly Double Your Sales written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Amanda Holmes

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Amanda Holmes. Amanda is the CEO of Chet Holmes International (CHI) which has worked with over 250,000 businesses worldwide. At age 24, she inherited her father’s multi-million dollar enterprise, which specializes in helping companies double their sales. She’s the author of a book — Based on The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies.

Key Takeaway:

At just 24, Amanda Holmes inherited her father’s multi-million dollar enterprise – Chet Holmes International. Without much direction, she had to navigate the uncharted waters of running an enterprise at that scale. In this episode, Amanda shares more about her journey as CEO and the challenges of implementing change in a long-standing organization. Amanda dives into the process her father developed years ago that has helped large companies quickly double their sales and how she has helped that process evolve over the years.

Watch this Episode on YouTube

Questions I ask Amanda Holmes:

  • [2:49] What was it like being thrust into an ongoing organization as a family member?
  • [6:04] What was hard for you to change?
  • [7:58] What’s been the most fun for you when it comes to stepping into the CEO role of Chet Holmes International?
  • [9:26] Would you say that your music and arts background has brought a level of creativity that maybe didn’t exist in the org before?
  • [11:50] Who is your typical client at CHI?
  • [13:17] A core concept of your coaching is Dream 100 – can you describe what this is?
  • [17:48] One of the challenges you alluded to – we’re so focused on digital right now, you particularly have yourselves firmly in what you’re calling old-school processes – would you say that the old-school processes are working better than ever?
  • [19:59] Where can people find out more about you and your work?

More About Amanda Holmes:

  • UltimateSalesMachine.com
  • Get a copy of her book on Amazon — Based on The Ultimate Sales Machine: Turbocharge Your Business with Relentless Focus on 12 Key Strategies.
  • Connect with Amanda on Instagram — @amanditaholmes

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

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:48): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Amanda Holmes. She is the c e O of Chat Holmes International, which has worked with over 250,000 businesses worldwide. At age 24, she inherited her father’s multi-million dollar enterprise, which specializes in helping companies double their sales. A lot of their works based on the bestselling book, the Ultimate Sales Machine, of which they have a new edition coming out. Amanda’s name will be all over the new edition as well. And she has merged her father’s proven process with her own forward thinking ideas to connect the old school sales process with hybrid, online and offline instant gratification and short attention span that we see in consumers today. So Amanda, welcome back to the show.

Amanda Holmes (01:38): Thank you so much, John. You know what means so much to me that you interviewed my father and then you interviewed me so many years ago and here we are again. It just, it means a lot. I, not a lot of people interviewed my father either,

John Jantsch (01:51): So I I was gonna say, I might be one of the few podcasters who has interviewed you both . Yes.

Amanda Holmes (01:58): I have never heard it from anybody else and I’ve done hundreds of interviews, so you are the only one

John Jantsch (02:03): . That’s funny that, that was about 29, 20 0 9, 20 10, something like that maybe. And podcasting was in its infancy at the time, but somehow I’ve stuck with it

Amanda Holmes (02:15): .

John Jantsch (02:16): So we also have another shared connection. My daughter has actually worked for me for about 12 years. Uh, she is our chief operating officer, so I really kind of have to go there. Didn’t work in the business as a family member. Right. You really brought, came into the business. I would have to think in some ways that was a pretty tall order. Becau, in fact, I think you were studying music in college and you know, not necessarily preparing for a career as a C. Right. So what’s it, I guess I was gonna ask you what’s like working with family, but that’s not really, it wasn’t really your experience. So what was it like really? And I know you’ve told this story many times, what was it like basically being thrust into an ongoing organization, but as a family member?

Amanda Holmes (03:01): Yes, it, well, it was hard because me and my father were very close. I was actually born on his birthday. We shared the same birthday February 13th, and it was as if just the stars aligned. And so losing him was like losing air. It was like I didn’t know where up was or down was. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. So getting all of that while at the same time, like I can remember just days after his funeral. And the only reason why I remember that cuz all that time is such a blur, but I just remember all of these flowers around my room from his funeral and I was sitting there and they had just sent me the p and l of all the companies and it was the first time I’d ever seen it. And it just felt like this p and l was never ending.

(03:45): I kept scrolling and scrolling and I just broke down. It was like, how, how is this possible that, so my father battled with cancer for a year and a half before he passed. And he spent 352 nights in the hospital and never once did he spend it alone. So it was me, my mom, and my brother. We just, we rotated spending all nighters with him. So I spent easily a hundred all nighters with my father in the hospital. Never once did he say, Hey Amanda, let me explain to you what my businesses are . Let me explain to you who runs them. Let me tell you about where I’d like this to go. We never had that dialogue and there was time and I speak on that because I think it’s critical that more parents take responsibility for the fact that there are other people that if you leave this world without a plan, you’re hindering them.

(04:42): So I do talk on that every once in a while. But, so it was utterly shocking and it really is. I look back and I think it’s a miracle that we’re here today based on the fact that Right, I knew nothing. I was trying to get over the loss of my father while couple hundred staff, you know, this crazy enterprise. But here we are. I stepped in and it took me two years to step in cuz it just looked like this is crazy talk. I don’t know why I ever would. But then over time I fell in love with our clients. I’ve recognized that there was something that was really beautiful about what my father had built and it could be carried on. It just needed that heart in the center of it to make it all work. And yeah, I increased our leads by 1176% the first year I stepped in and doubled our coaching clients multiple years in a row. And this year we’re up over 300%. And that’s without the book releasing just yet some, it’s a lot of wonderful things. My father had a great system and a great framework for how to grow organizations and I had to learn it from his books and his training programs instead of him explaining it to me. But nonetheless, I think I am probably one of his greatest success stories just because of that. Right.

John Jantsch (05:58): What was hard for you? I mean you, you, you obviously made some changes, you know, what was hard for you to change? I mean, not necessarily resistance, but just really hard for you to even wrap your head around

Amanda Holmes (06:10): Changing. So we had never processed an an order online. My father was very strict around, you know, every sale should come from a salesperson to having a conversation either over the phone or in person. So I can remember the first time that I put some pricing online and I took a moment and it was like, I’m so sorry dad. I know you said this , but times have changed and I have to do it, have to put some of our stuff online. So that was a big, that was a big turning point in learning how to do digital marketing was critical and selling things online. And then also a huge change was for me, the people that I surround myself with, a lot of them were very different than who my father surrounded himself with. So I find that the culture that he thrived in is different than the culture that I thrive in.

(07:02): And making that distinction because at first it was anybody that my father respected, ultimately they would say, well your father said I was the best in the planet on this. And I’d go, okay. And I’d put them up on this pedestal of who was the best, right? Cause my father said he was the best, even though I started realizing that everyone said that my father said they were the best. So then I started reading through his emails to try and figure out what he really thought of them. That was the way that I would find out. And then the next level was okay, just because my father said he was the best, now I have to discern, is this somebody that I can work with? And there were quite a few of them that did not work with me very well. And that’s okay. It’s just a little bit of a different modus opera Ren, but still the strategies are the same. So it was interesting to see that culture shift.

John Jantsch (07:52): So shifting gears a little bit to maybe a more positive, less of a challenge, what’s been the most fun for you?

Amanda Holmes (07:59): ? The marketing and sales part. Oh my gosh. Oh y’all appreciate this John. So I just, you know, I’m in this whole book tour thing going on right now, right? I just went to all these different trade shows. I spoke at HubSpots inbound, that’s where I saw that you’re in HubSpot Network. Congratulations on that. That’s awesome. So I went there with a four foot billboard strapped to my back cuz I was looking for a way for people that my father teaches, the first thing you need in a trade show is to get noticed. Yeah. And I was googling like, oh, maybe we’ll do a backpack and we’ll design a backpack or something. And then I found, I typed in human billboard and this huge thing, it’s a backpack, the straps, but it’s, and it lights up, it glows like the billboard sign. So I’ve been walking through all these trade shows with this four foot billboard on my back. I call her Bessie now because I’m very fond of her. And on the last day of trafficking conversion, actually they shut me down because I was creating such a buzz and generating so many sales that the sponsors, the booths were getting jealous

John Jantsch (09:04): .

Amanda Holmes (09:06): But that’s been a blast. And just being really creative about ways to get attention and then converting those, that attention into sales and leads and sales. That’s a ton of fun for me.

John Jantsch (09:19): Would you say that you’re, uh, and I know this is gonna sound sort of stereotypical, but would you say that your music background, your arts background, has brought a level of creativity that maybe didn’t exist?

Amanda Holmes (09:31): Absolutely. So the new edition of the book The Forward, instead of saying Dear Reader, I instead said Dear dad. And that was a, and it something that Julian Eon, my book coach at the time, had suggested I do. And when I wrote it, everyone that read that majority of grown men that read it would cry reading it. And they thought they, out of all the every page, every sentence, I made sure that it was some way to double sales. But that letter to my dad, everyone said lead with that cuz that’s going to touch more people than just doubling sales techniques. And I put that into a video actually. And that’s been what I’ve been using to promote the book. So to me that video is a music video. I wrote the lyrics, even though I’m not singing them, they’re written. But everything that I had as a songwriter, I put into that video. To me, that’s the single that came out with this new edition of the book, which is kind of funny to think about. But man, it is hitting people in a completely different way than I never expected. And it was the most nerve-wracking thing on the planet to put that thing out. I really thought that. I didn’t think that people would like it, but everybody kept saying, I love it, I love it. You should put that out. And it’s been such a loving response. So yeah, that, that songwriter in me, I think.

John Jantsch (10:55): Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients. For the first time ever, you can license and use the Duct Tape Marketing system and methodology in your business through an upcoming three day virtual workshop. Give us three days and you’ll walk away with a complete system that changes how you think about your agency’s growth. The Duct Tape Marketing System is a turnkey set of processes for installing a marketing system that starts with strategy and moves to long-term retainer implementation engagements. We’ve developed a system by successfully working with thousands of businesses. Now you can bring it to your agency and benefit from all the tools, templates, systems and processes we’ve developed. To find out when our next workshop is being held, visit dtm.world/workshop. That’s DTM world slash workshop. , describe who C HHI at CH Holmes and international works with. Who’s your typical client?

Amanda Holmes (12:02): Yes. Okay, I’ll answer that by asking you a question. And you probably know the answer to this. What percentage of businesses do you think make it to a million in annual sales?

John Jantsch (12:11): I don’t know the exact answer other than it’s relatively small. Not

Amanda Holmes (12:15): Really small. Yeah. If

John Jantsch (12:16): You had to guess, I’m gonna say 9%.

Amanda Holmes (12:19): Okay, let’s close, let’s close 5% of companies. Make it to a million of that 0.08%, make it to 5 million of that 1.5%, make it to 10 million so it gets a little bit better. then 0.004%, make it to a hundred million and beyond. So what we teach is how to get from a million to five, from 5 million to 10, from 10 million to a hundred million and beyond. Because it’s actually not about our product or service, which majority of entrepreneurs think, yes, if I just tweak this a little bit more, then I’ll get more. Right. If that was true, McDonald’s wouldn’t be the number one grossing hamburger joint in the world. Right? It’s a terrible burger. It’s skills it takes to grow the business and skills can be developed. So we assist entrepreneurs to grow from that one to five, from five to 10, from 10 to a hundred million and beyond.

John Jantsch (13:12): One of the core concepts, I have actually not, not seen what you’ve done in the second edition yet, but in the, certainly in the first edition. Well, and, and I know it’s a core concept of your coaching, is this, uh, concept of the Dream 100. I wonder if you could kind of describe that. Cause I know that’s a big E for

Amanda Holmes (13:28): You. Yes, it’s the fastest, least expensive way to double sales. This one strategy has doubled the sales of more companies than any other. My father invented it working for billionaire, Charlie Munger, co-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. So he doubled the sales of nine different companies for Charlie all within 12 to 15 months, and several of them multiple years consecutively. So he realized that he had a system for doubling sales and it went something like this. So he was given a list of 2200 potential prospects and they said, okay, go cold. Call these 2200. But when he did some research, he realized that only 167 of them purchased 95% of the space. So instead of going after 2200, he led an intensive dream 100 to just those 167. Now it being in their face and their place and their space. What can we do to provide the most value for them?

(14:20): For him, back then it was direct mail, cold calling and faxing. So twice a month he was doing direct mail. Four times a month he was cold calling and following up with a fax in an email every once in a while. And he did that for months. For the first four months he got nothing, which un talked around the office like what is this? Why is this expert in sales? And he hasn’t generated a thing. But in the sixth month he closed the largest contract that the industry had ever seen. And then subsequently after that doubled the doubled. Now. So by definition, there’s always a smaller number of better buyers than there are all buyers. That means that marketing and selling to them is cheaper than marketing and selling to all buyers. And I’ve even, as I look at this and what you’ll see in the new edition is so many people get, they see the Dream 100 and they go, oh my gosh, how do I do direct mail?

(15:09): How can I make this work with direct mail? And how do I get a hundred people on my list? You’re missing the point if you’re super focused on just those two things. Because we have so many marketing mediums in our use today. I show how I used a dream. One, I focused on one potential dream client and I followed up with them every single day using social media. Every time they post something on social, I’d comment with something of value. Every time they posted another thing I’d add another piece of value and another comment. And another I, for every single day, for three months, I commented on every single thing that this person said. And three months in they came back to me and said, Hey, I’d like to buy 650 books of the Ultimate Sales Machine. I’m still reaping the benefits of that three months of pigheaded discipline and determination.

(15:57): Today they bought another thousand books. It’s actually, it was the CEO of ClickFunnels, so Dave Woodward I did this with. So the point is, it’s about picking who’s one person that could completely change your world. And then can you multiply that even by, you could have four, you could have 10, I’m calling it the target 12. It doesn’t have to be a hundred, right? The whole point is just to get laser focused and follow up with pigheaded discipline and determination, whichever medium that may be. If you wanna use direct mail, that’s great because it will land cuz nobody’s doing direct mail, right? Yeah. But if you wanna do it on Instagram dms, that’s where I did it to get that client. Right. It could be on LinkedIn, it could be on V voice drops on cell phones

John Jantsch (16:41): Or all of them. Right? Or all of them. Or all of them, right?

Amanda Holmes (16:43): . Yeah. If you only have a hundred, right? And you’re sending, if you’re doing Facebook ads to them, if you are sending them text messages, if you’re arriving at their door, they’re like, you are everywhere. It’s like, yeah, I’m only everywhere to the select 10, right? Select a hundred. So they’re just amazed, right?

John Jantsch (16:58): Yeah. And I think what’s so important about that lesson is you can now afford to spend money and time and energy that is gonna just swamp what anybody else is doing, you know, to that same person because they’re spraying it, you know, 10,000 people at a time.

Amanda Holmes (17:16): Absolutely. We had a client, so I went, I’ve created these bootcamps and a client went through the bootcamp, they went after four people that had already said no to their services. It was a hard, no, I’m definitely not interested. And then he led with an education to those four. After he gave the presentation of an education, he closed 8.4 million worth of sales in just six weeks. Six weeks. And the average sales rep would sell 8 million in an entire year. He did it in six weeks. Cuz he targeted his dream. He only needed four. Dream four to generate 8.4 million.

John Jantsch (17:54): So one of the challenges, I th I, you kind of alluded to this, we’re so focused on digital right now, you, you have yourselves firmly in what you’re calling old school processes, but they really, in some ways, some of the old school processes are working better than ever, aren’t they?

Amanda Holmes (18:12): Absolutely. I mean, take what I just did at trade shows. It’s shocking how many people at trade shows have no idea how to have a face-to-face conversation. I’d walk up to a booth and 90% of them had no idea how to start asking questions. You know, I’d ask, what do you do? And they have no idea. They look starstruck. Like what? You’re talking to me in real life. I don’t know what to do. . It’s so bizarre how we’ve lost the frameworks and the basic foundational principles. Everyone thought, oh, a billboard. Yeah, that’s brilliant. But then I also QR code there so that I could collect people that were taking pictures. Anyways, the first few days they were taking pictures of me cuz they thought it was hysterical. But then they didn’t realize that now I’m converting them cuz they’re clicking on that I’m getting their email and then they’re buying.

(19:00): So it’s blending of the two. My funnel online got me the sales, but me walking around with a four foot billboard on my back in a trade show got the attention in the press. And now I’ve taken vi video that I got from influencers in the space that were recording me cuz they thought it was hilarious. And I’m using that in my ads and I’m repurposing it, right? So there’s so many different ways that I think in person too. It was just at a mastermind with Grant Cardone two weeks ago, and there were 80 people in the room, all of which would’ve loved to talk to Grant Cardone. He walked out of the room and nobody followed him. And I’m looking around the room going, are you kidding me? That’s a billionaire. I’d love to talk to Grant Cardone. Why not? So I run out there and I start to have a dialogue with him. It’s like, it’s as if we only can communicate through a text or on right in an in a social media aspect. He was right there, live breathing. And I handed him the book and I said, you should watch Dear Dad, it’ll make you cry. I’ll send you a book. And he’s like, I will definitely cry from that. I’m sure I will. I love that. Thank you .

John Jantsch (20:01): Amanda, thanks for dropping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Tell people where they can find all the work that you’re doing and certainly get a copy of the new book or the rev revised updated, fully updated book.

Amanda Holmes (20:12): Yes. Ultimate sales machine.com is where everybody can pick up the book, but it’ll give you a bunch of extra bonuses that you wouldn’t get on Amazon. And then if you wanna online, I’m a lot of different places, but I spend more of my time on Instagram. My name Amanda Holmes was taken, so I’d use my salsa name Amanda Dita. So you can find me on Instagram at manita holmes.

John Jantsch (20:34): All right, awesome. Well, great having you back on the show again and uh, hopefully we’ll run into you again, one of these days out there on the road.

Amanda Holmes (20:42): Thank you John. It was such a

John Jantsch (20:43): Blessing. 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.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=4401

The Winning Agency Formula For Steady Growth And Continuous Profit written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Marcel Petitpas

Marcel Petitpas, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Marcel Petitpas. Marcel is the CEO & Co-Founder of Parakeeto, a company dedicated to helping agencies measure and improve their profitability by streamlining their operations and reporting systems. Marcel is also the fractional COO at Gold Front and a speaker, podcast host, and consultant, specializing in Agency Profitability Optimization.

Key Takeaway:

The most profitable agencies have a winning formula that results in happy returning clients, steady growth, and continuous profit. In this episode, the CEO and Co-founder of Parakeeto, Marcel Petitpas, shares his insights on what that winning formula looks like and how agencies can optimize their businesses for profitability.

Questions I ask Marcel Petitpas:

  • [1:49] What should we be measuring if we want to optimize for profitability?
  • [4:14] When it comes to KPIs, how do we strike the right balance between too much information or narrowing in on the right things to track?
  • [6:40] Where can people find your agency profitability toolkit and checklist?
  • [7:24] One of the hardest things to measure is internal staff working on various accounts. How do you spread that kind of unit of labor across where it should be expended?
  • [11:03] What do you see as the most useful way to do billing?
  • [16:00] Everyone in the organization should be tracking their time. Yes or no?
  • [17:51] What kind of challenge does white labeling add to the pure optimization model?
  • [20:05] Why wouldn’t you use a resource plan with your white label partners to some degree?
  • [20:52] How much responsibility do you think that marketing agencies have to really get that deep inside an organization?
  • [23:04] Where can people find out more about Parakeeto and the work you do on behalf of agencies?

More About Marcel Petitpas:

  • His business — Parakeeto
  • His podcast — The Agency Profit Podcast

Learn More About The Agency Certification Intensive:

    • Learn more here

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

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.

Grow Your Business Faster Through Experimentation written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Andrew Warden

Andrew Warden, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Andrew Warden. Andrew is the CMO of Semrush – an online visibility management SaaS platform that has been used by millions of marketers worldwide including this one.

Key Takeaway:

A crucial component of growth is experimentation. Experimentation is the engine that drives innovation. It helps businesses implement and test ideas quickly so that they can learn and define failure and success quickly and pivot accordingly. In this episode, I talk with the CMO of Semrush, Andrew Warden, about leading a mature organization and how experimentation helps push its growth as an organization.

Questions I ask Andrew Warden:

  • [1:40] Setting the record straight on how to pronounce “Semrush”
  • [2:44] What prepared you to take on this job at Semrush, a really somewhat mature organization?
  • [4:52] As a CMO, given the DNA, and all these acronyms of the organization, do you feel a tug to just do more SEO sometimes?
  • [6:38] I want to talk a little more about your experimental process – do you have a process for saying, you know, we’re gonna throw these 10 things out there and this is how we’re going to measure them?
  • [11:41] Today, Semrush offers many more solutions other than an SEO tool – what’s been the challenging part of redefining what people view your company as?
  • [14:08] As a mature organization, how do you balance the need for branding versus the need to acquire more users?
  • [17:16] Is there a small set of metrics that you rely on?
  • [19:43] So pretend you are speaking to a group of CMOs in an audience only today and somebody said, what do you think is the biggest challenge for most CMOs today? What would your answer be?
  • [22:44] Where can people learn more?

More About Andrew Warden:

  • Semrush

More About The Agency Certification Intensive Training:

  • Learn more about the Agency Certification Intensive Training here

Take The Marketing Assessment:

    • Take the Assessment

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

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes, packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Andrew Warden. He is the CMO of S e m, rush Sam Rush. We’ll talk about that time. Rose in a second as well. That half our conversation, right , it’s an online visibility management SaaS platform that is used by millions of marketers worldwide, including this one. So, uh, Andrew, welcome to the

Andrew Warden (01:14): Show. Great, thanks so much. So good to be here. And let me just cla, let me just jump really quick cuz this is like one of the hottest contested things in our community, I would say. And beyond. It is some rush here. It’s here, here. The way that it sounds, the way it rolls off your tongue. Think people, it’s true. Historically it was s SCM rush and it didn’t help when we went public because our stock checker is S E M R. So people automatically, but if you wanna know where the brand of the heart is, it’s with Cem Rush

John Jantsch (01:39): . Yeah, I actually was gonna ask you that directly and then I actually blew it in the intro , but I know I’ve even seen some of the videos you’ve produced of, you know, making fun of. Sure. The idea , is it, I’m curious since we got on the topic, even though it’s a goofy topic. No. Is there a regional preference? Like, do Americans use one or the other? No.

Andrew Warden (02:00): Or you know, I think it’s, I actually, I don’t think it’s necessarily linked to geography. Yeah, I think that’s linked to history, right? Number one, because originally right, the founding of the company was, it’s always like right square in the search engine marketing at the Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of diehard SEO community. And that’s true and that’s still very much a core of our community. But you know, now, gosh, 14 years later, we’re 55 plus tools, not only seo, not only at the sweet spot. So I think it’s probably more linked to his history and maybe our, maybe our diehard SEO fans. Right. S e m, right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:34): So you’ve been, in fact, I think you had a LinkedIn post at celebrating your one year anniversary. Mm-hmm. . So you’ve been there a year. I’m curious, just because I didn’t give a lot of background, obviously, what prepared you to take on this job as, you know, really a somewhat mature organization?

Andrew Warden (02:49): Yeah. Well, I mean, this is my third time as a cmo, right? So it’s not my first rodeo, I would say. I think you’re referencing this, this LinkedIn post. I, you know, it’s taken me so many years to be absolutely comfortable with being vulnerable as a leader, wearing my heart on my sleeve. There’s a lot of people who totally go against this concept or they say, no, you should always be rather stoic and be very, you know, but I, you know, after years and years, you know, working with people from all different backgrounds know late state, later stage career, early stage career, at the end of the day, you know, people just want a path to grow. They want a path to grow themselves. They want, obviously we want to earn, but people wanna be engaged, you know? And so that post I was reflecting after a year, you know, it’s like all of the things, all of the points in my career of the super heights, you know, being at Cisco when I was in my early twenties, you know, promoted several times in a couple of years to crashing and burning effectively with a startup with our own money and, you know, several other people’s money and we’re all still friends.

(03:47): But the points of the kind of the peaks and the valleys and even some of the troughs, it’s like, you know, have this moment, this illuminating moment a couple weeks ago where it’s like this was all preparing for this exact moment, actually. Right. And that’s really resonated with, I’m, I’m really curious and happy that you bring it up cuz a lot of people have been talking about this, right? It’s like, not many officers of public companies are making such statements, but I have to, you know, and it resonates with our team internally. It resonates with people outside. Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:13): Frankly, I think self-awareness is the new, like, key leadership skill. Frankly,

Andrew Warden (04:17): I, I couldn’t agree with you more. I, you know, really, you know, I, I, for years it’s always kind of this player coach mentality. You know, people at the, my job, at the end of the day, again, I am a very hands-on cmo. I get stuck into any given day. I get stuck into ad copy or going to board level to ad copy. I’m always there to jump in and help a junior and a senior member of the team out. But at the end of the day, you know, I just try to remove as many blockages. And those can be sometimes budget or resource blockage, but it can also be psychological blockage, right? Sometimes people get in the way of themselves how to unlock people. And that’s where I think the awareness that you’re talking about, you know, really comes in. Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:53): . So as a cmo, given the DNA n all these acronyms, of the organization, do you feel a tug to just do more SEO sometimes?

Andrew Warden (05:04): So I feel a tug to do more seo. No, actually it, yeah.

John Jantsch (05:07): I mean, you use that like as your core channel.

Andrew Warden (05:09): I got you. Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah. Actually, I can tell you something. No, cuz it’s been the opposite this year. I can tell you that this year, this past year, we made significant, I mean, incremental, significant and material investments into large scale paid campaigns. And actually that was a really interesting inflection point for us as a company. It’s like, you know, we, we are on a rocket ship trajectory, right? We have the, again, all the DNA as you said, of startup culture, right? High educated risk taking, high experimentation, fast fail in like a matter of weeks versus quarters and quarters. And I really look at the whole mix. But one of the things that I noticed as soon as I came in September of 29, excuse me, 2021, is that we were not experimenting as much as I would like to with paid, right? Because we have very, very competitive, I’d say ad positions compared to other others in our set. But I will tell you that the organic piece for next year and for the others, there will start to be more balance. But no, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t face any problems of inertia, if you will, on, you know, given that SEO is at our core. But at the same time, it’s also something that we should be pretty damn good at, right? Because we, that’s how we started .

John Jantsch (06:20): Yeah. I hate to say it. I always, you know, I get pitches like everybody from SEO experts that are gonna put me on page one and it’s like, I can’t find you . This

Andrew Warden (06:29): Is a big deal. And also anyone promising a silver bullet like that, especially so quickly, right? It’s always something to be very wary of. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:37): Yeah. Absolutely. So, so let’s talk a little more about your experimental process. Yeah. I mean, do you have a process for saying totally, you know, we’re gonna throw these 10 things out there, here’s how we’re gonna measure ’em. I’d love to

Andrew Warden (06:47): Hear them. We absolutely do. So I’d like to, we have a, a system set up, and this was already in place, uh, before I joined. I’m just putting, I’m just adding more fuel to it. I would say, at least from a marketing side. So we have a quarterly bets and experimentation program. And I like to think of it, these are totally my words. I was like O OKRs on steroids, right? Yeah, yeah. This is like, you know, bets are what we believe is possible. And we have a format that’s really clear. It’s like, what is it that we wanna do? Why is it needed? Why do we believe X is possible? And here’s how we measure success. Like, here’s what success is and here’s what failure is. And the most important thing is crucial for me is that it’s okay for ABET to fail. And when, you know, for me, this is also the big difference in my opinion of like kind of big corporate, uh, versus a company like Seru, right?

(07:39): I would rather a leader, usually, you know, BES can be conceived by anybody in the company, right? But I will hold our VPs or heads of accountable for, for the mixture between experiments and bets. The, I would rather somebody focus on two, three or four bets and know if one of them pans off, you know, pans out. Like we’re off to the races. I’m always after a sign of life, you know? And so it is so helpful to hear how teams think about bets on a quarterly basis of, yeah, we think that we can capture more people through advertising on Hulu. We think that Bec, which is a new channel, right? We think that’s possible because, you know, X percent of our demographic for this persona hangs out there, right? And we believe it’s possible to achieve X number of registrations, trials, subscriptions or payments.

(08:26): And if it makes less than a certain amount, we’re like, you know what? It just didn’t work out and we should not do that for another couple of years. And it’s very similar with experiments, I would say are a little bit even more further afield. Like it’s a could even little more out there, right? But we have a hypothesis that actually we just did one of these experiments, I don’t have the result yet, which is kind of a letdown for this kind of conversation. Sorry. But we did a direct mail experiment. How’s that for a SEO or for a digital marketing company? You know, it’s like, I wait for the team and I said, has anybody sensed literally a mailer to small business owners? You know, cuz I have this contention that small business owners, it’s not necessarily like me or like you or somebody else who hangs out online, right? The barber,

John Jantsch (09:08): Yeah. They’re not reading search engine land.

Andrew Warden (09:09): The barber who’s cutting my hair, who I love, right, is opening the door for me, cutting my hair, sweeping the floor register. You know, like, this person isn’t on LinkedIn, you know, it’s like, how are you reaching that person? So, so we did two different tests over the summer, or sorry, one over the summer. I think one just went out as well. So I’m waiting to see, I have no idea, but this is what I, you know, you ask about experimentation and you always have to make sure that you’re carving out, you know, 10, 10, 15% of your budget, of your spend to try new channels. Because the moment that you rest on the laurels of the channel that’s working so well for you is the moment it stops doing that.

John Jantsch (09:45): No question bec if it’s working well for you, other people are using it too. Right? To me, when I hear that, it sounds like, like if I came to you and said, Hey, I have an idea, we should do both. It sounds to me like the hypothesis has gotta be really, so like, you really believe this is going to work

Andrew Warden (10:01): Because

John Jantsch (10:01): Absolutely.

Andrew Warden (10:02): Right? Yep. Yeah, yeah. No, you can’t just like, you can’t just be like, Hey John, I want to, you know, I want to go and take out an ad in the Wall Street Journal. Okay, why do you wanna do that? I don’t know. I mean, a lot of people read it. No, you know, you know, you have to be able to, I mean, look, you could, there are ways to make that more scientific. You can say, you know, during this period there, or the Wall Street Journal, you know, more for financially focused people, it’s like earnings typically happen between this day and this day. Tech earnings come out between this day and this day. So we want to run this and with this type of promotion, because people in that demographic tend to buy around that period. It all has to be, it’s quite, it’s a lot more scientific than I had anticipated. I’ll put it that way. Love. But I love that

John Jantsch (10:42): You’re gonna get, you’re, you’re gonna get a sales call from the Wall Street Journal now, I

Andrew Warden (10:45): Guarantee. Yeah. Well, we’re already talking to him. That’s okay. ,

John Jantsch (10:48): Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients. For the first time ever, you can license and use the Duct Tape Marketing system and methodology in your business through an upcoming three day virtual workshop. Give us three days and you’ll walk away with a complete system that changes how you think about your agency’s growth. The Duct Tape Marketing System is a turnkey set of processes for installing a marketing system that starts with strategy and moves to long-term retainer implementation engagements. We’ve developed a system by successfully working with thousands of businesses. Now you can bring it to your agency and benefit from all the tools, templates, systems and processes we’ve developed. To find out when our next workshop is being held, visit dtm.world/workshop.

(11:45): That’s DTM world slash workshop. All right. You kind of may alluded to this already, but I was going to ask you, I mean, it’s certainly, I’ve been, uh, a some rush user for many years. Thank you. And I certainly saw it as, uh, as an SEO tool. Mm-hmm. over the year. Well, it was more than that years ago, but it is certainly more than that now. What’s been the challenge of getting, of changing people’s thinking that oh no, it’s 50 tools and it’s, you know, it’s a, in fact, I think you even called it an online visibility platform as, as a differentiator. Yeah. Is that mo moving the definition of what your company is? Yeah. Has that been

Andrew Warden (12:23): A challenge? It’s a, it’s a huge, I mean, it’s still very much in progress, right? I mean, again, we are so, and thank you for being a user for all these years as well. You know, I don’t take anything for granted. And there’s so many solutions out there. I would say that, you know, we, we believe, you know, over the next several years, and we, I mean, we see it right now. We feel it right now, but we also know, particularly with small business owners, that breaking through the noise in today’s market, right? This, and, and that’s, it’s not even necessarily new. This kind of like fragmented view for a consumer. And, you know, people spend on average seven hours online. You know, it’s, but how do you actually get through all of that noise and reach a prospective customer? How are you building your audiences?

(12:59): And you know, again, all respects like that started out with seo, you know, but at the same time, we realize over time that there’s a need amongst our own user base and our future customers for content creation, for market research. You know, you name it, you know, for traffic analytics, right? It’s not only about finding what your audience is looking for, what they’re searching for, it’s also like, how do I solve the problem of now figuring out how to talk to them and engage them, right? So if you’re asking me is it a challenge to change how we’re, how we are viewed in the market? Absolutely. You know, but at, you know, at the same time we’re adding, uh, we’re adding, our growth rate has not slowed over the last couple of years. So when you think about a comp a cagr, a compounding annual growth, we are, our velocity is not slowing down. So we are adding more and more people in expending our own audience in reach. So I would imagine the days where this is a big, you know, question for the future, the days are, you know, this kind of s e m rush or the core of seo, I think that will always remain amongst, especially our initial users. But I think that there’s also a future people join because they have like myriad problems they’re trying to solve. Right? Not only seo. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:07): Yeah. And that’s how they’re introduced to you. Yes. Yeah. You know, of the brand is different. Yeah. Let’s move a little bit to, could you, cuz I know you’re running some, you know, some television that is, I would call it very branding oriented as opposed to say growth oriented. Has that, is that a conscious, in other words, it’s not saying buy this because it’ll get you this result mm-hmm. , it’s more like your CEO will think this, you know, that

Andrew Warden (14:29): Kind of, are you talking about the, that kind of thing? Are you talking about the most recent one? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I call this,

John Jantsch (14:34): And that’s just an example. My real question is, yeah. You know, how do you as an organization that’s this mature, how do you start, how do you start balancing mm-hmm the need for branding mm-hmm versus the need for just like, we gotta have X amount of new

Andrew Warden (14:46): Users. I think the problem starts is that we think they’re separate because those campaigns are, the goal for those campaigns are new users and they’re achieving them. The first one we did in the year will exceed the target. The second, which was the second campaign, which is, which was a dedicated for small business owners. And we’re, you know, this year is as much as it has been. Alright. You know about growth, we’re also doing what I call these gro experiments, large experiments. So these foray into connected TV advertising, the using the same creative that can be used for, of course, banners and digital classic. We can also then use that. There’s so much production value you can turn around to Hulu or YouTube, connected tv, Disney plus, like you name it. And you can like literally upload that ad and set a budget and go.

(15:33): So this year is also about testing new audiences, new ideas, uh, new ways to engage. And one of our big bets is looking at what I would call, and I didn’t mean to correct you, but what I mean is that there’s like brand, you are right? That like the approach is more about positioning the company and how it can help you grow, right? This is this, I call, these are, this is a customer needs based play versus a classic like, you know, every tool you need for x per month, right? That’s more of what you call the classic performance or growth marketing. Yeah. Those hacks. But guess what? We’re really good at the ladder. Like we’re pretty okay at that, right? In terms of digital and paid and even on the organic side. But we have incredibly aggressive growth plans over the next five to 10 years.

(16:19): And so I’ve gotta be able to lay my head on the pillow at night knowing that we’re testing every new channel, every new style of marketing and advertising that we can to keep new or existing and new customers engaged. So, but I do love how you distinction. You make a distinction right from off the bat. Cause I get that a lot. People are like, well, you know, but this is a big kind of like kind of branding push on connected tv. And it’s like, yeah, but we can trace back the connection that we acquired that that user, the attention of that user from that ad, and we can trace it through to visiting us. We can trace it through to registering, doing a trial and eventually becoming Summer’s customer. So

John Jantsch (16:58): Yeah, you, I think you can almost make a case for saying it’s targeting It is in a way because I think your core acquisition person that says this tools for this much and they know what those tools are, right? . That’s right. Whereas your typical business owners actually, like, I don’t really wanna know what the tools are. Yeah. I wanna solve this problem.

Andrew Warden (17:14): Yep. Yeah. And again, these are very large plays and I, I’m not here saying every single one of these is gonna knock it out of the apartment. It’s a goal obviously. Sure. But think that, I can tell you that the entire team, the entire, you know, it’s 200, 200 marketers and, and the organization every day we’re learning every day. We’re stretching what we thought was possible, again, on our existing user base, what people want to expand for their relationship with Somers, but also like net new people who have totally different needs and value sets compared to existing. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:43): So couple, maybe these are your easy questions. Maybe these are hard question. Sure. Just a couple more questions. Is there a small set of metrics that you rely on as

Andrew Warden (17:53): A cm, A small set? No, they’re only big.

John Jantsch (17:55): I wanted to say small because , because I didn’t wanna see what you can measure. Yeah, I, yeah, .

Andrew Warden (18:01): Well, yeah, I, I would say small at Sam Rush is big and it would be, I would, that I wouldn’t want in any other way. But the ones that I really live in the stress or get excited, you know, we measure very much on new user mrr. So look, you know, as a SAS based company, you’ve got sa classic SA SaaS metrics, and we’re a very different organization in terms of marketing than I would say at other kind of corporations or big comp, you know, and a lot of companies, marketing is assisting with sales and kind of provides MQs or SQLs to sales leadership, and then they carry on and close the deal at Sun Rush. Actually, it’s a little bit different. We are responsible for bringing in new user acquisition, right? And that’s a material difference from other companies. So the emphasis and the laser focus on metrics is like, not optional.

(18:49): You have to know every day. So I’m looking at, I’m looking always at registrations, at trials. Trials is always a leading indicator. If, you know, if we see a swell in trials, there will be a, certainly a bump in new subscriptions. But new user MRI is my first, the first kind of traffic light, if you will. I’m also looking at increase or decline of our own spending, right? Because sometimes we slow down the engine either during holiday periods or periods where we don’t think people are gonna have the propensity to buy. And that’s, we don’t always get that right. You know, it’s hard to know when to pull, pull or release that lever. I’m also looking at global dynamics, like different by different markets. Like right now, the dollar fluctuation, you know, is difficult for a lot of companies, right? And Yeah, yeah. You know, in Europe, gosh, I just came back from meetings with the team in Amsterdam in London.

(19:34): I got back late last night. And you know what you actually, you see and feel not only inflation, but also the currency, uh, fluctuation. You know, in London it’s like 1.15 to the dollar. I mean, even when I was in grad school in 2007, it was never that low. You know? It’s like it hasn’t been that low in, in 30 years or something. So, so there are different dynamics about the global economy, but I would say if you’re asking for the shortest list, the shortest list, I get nine emails every morning at 7:32 AM that give me the holistic view of the business. But I would tease those as the kind of the ones that really matter. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:09): Yeah. All right. So pretend you were speaking to a group of CMOs in an audience only today and somebody said, what do you think is the biggest challenge for most CMOs today? What would your answer

Andrew Warden (20:22): Be? I would say the loss of innovation culture. And I would say too much emphasis on having to be the smartest person in the room that is to the CMO audience. I would say that it is increasingly more and more difficult. Look, as marketers, we are, it’s almost like encoded in our own dna, our personal dna. Every single action you take must yield an outcome, must yield a financial improvement, right? To, to the top line even. And I think that the reality is, you know, again, it depends on which stage of growth you’re in as a company or even if you’re, even as a small business or, or a large business. The fact is marketing is a constantly evolving and field. Literally the pitch, the field, the markers change every day. You know, as soon as, like I said before, as soon as you find a channel that works, it doesn’t work anymore.

(21:10): Or you say something that your audience doesn’t like, and then you kind of get like temporary put in the timeout box. You know, it’s like, it happens. And, but I think that is also condition people, and I would also, I do say this to my peers, that it conditions us to like be risk averse and to not take, take too much time on experiments. I mean, I have, for example, every month I have what I call elevator pitch sessions. Like, anybody can turn up to this call. It’s like 15, 18 minutes long. You get two slides, you get five minutes. You know, it’s like, what’s your idea? What do you wanna do? What do you, you know, and it can be a request for like a 50 k campaign. It can be a request for a 5 million acquisition doesn’t, or 10 or whatever. You know, that’s not the point.

(21:49): And it’s funny, these are, they’re meant to be intentionally very snappy, very quick. Like if anybody’s kind of droning on, it’s like, come on, tell me the, what’s the point? What’s the point? But, you know, I’ll tell you like, we’ve done real things based on those, like we’ve done, we’ve made That’s cool. Real investments. Material investments. And so, yeah, I would just say that, you know, I think especially as a cmo, it’s very easy to get kind of stuck in your own routine and rhythm of what works. And I think that’s why I was just reflecting after a year, like, I have more energy, John than when I started. And usually like, you know, you kind of know yourself at this stage in your career. Usually you’re like, okay, I found this works. We’re gonna go ahead into budgeting season and then we’re gonna, we’re gonna keep going. But like, I make stuff, I make shit every single day, you know? And as soon as, as a CMO, I think is an executive leader, as soon as you stop doing that, like, like you personally, I think you have to kinda reevaluate what’s going on. Right? Like, I

John Jantsch (22:42): Think those little mini pitches sound really empowering, especially imagine somebody who like, got their deal.

Andrew Warden (22:47): Anybody. Yeah. No, but really, but we have like junior pr ex execs within the team, like with a handful of years of experience. Like, I want to do, I wanna try this, you know? And I’m like, why is that a good idea? Well, are you sure? Why? Tell me why you believe it. You know? And it’s like, it’s even just going through that experience or in your career, it changes you, right? It, it opens your mind. And that’s also, you know, really important to me.

John Jantsch (23:10): Yeah. Awesome. Well, Andrew, it was really a pleasure to have you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing, uh, podcast. Yeah. And I, we can, you can tell people how they can reach Sim Rush. You can spell it for them , if you like. Oh, sure. We’ll have it in, well, we’ll have it in the show notes. It’s on your shirt. Yeah. Sim

Andrew Warden (23:25): Rush.com. Seru dot Yeah. I’m not, I can’t, yeah. So I, I would That’s as simple as it can be.

John Jantsch (23:30): Yeah, absolutely. Well, hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out the, uh, on the road. In fact, the end of this week, I’m gonna be in Aus. Oh,

Andrew Warden (23:36): Great. Stop by .

John Jantsch (23:37): Yeah. Which I know you’re

Andrew Warden (23:38): Go for. Go for a drink. Cool. Alright. Thanks for having me. Cheers. Appreciate

John Jantsch (23:42): It. Hi. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know, know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing 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.

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5 Stages Of Marketing In The Customer Success Track written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

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

Key Takeaway:

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

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

Topics I Cover:

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

Resources I Mention:

  • Get the Kindle version of The Ultimate Marketing Engine for just $2.99
  • Learn more about my book The Ultimate Marketing Engine

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!

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes, packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your s

(00:48): Hey, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I am doing another solo show, just you and me in the radio, as they say. I guess somebody probably said, I’m gonna talk about something that I’ve been talking a lot about lately called the Customer Success Track, little plug for my latest book, the Ultimate Marketing Engine. I talk about it in depth in there, and there’s all kinds of resources. And if you’re listening to this show in August of 2022, you can pick up the Kindle version for 2 99. Okay, there’s a commercial today, but if this topic resonates, go get the book because I go so deep in into it. So here’s the basis premise behind this customer success track. Over the years, I started to recognize, and again, I didn’t wake up on day one and say, this is how the world is over tons and tons of experience, years clients, prospects.

(01:46): I’ve started to realize that there are about five stages of marketing that many businesses go through, and some of them rush through them. Some of ’em hang out in one stage or the another for a long time. But I’ve been able to recognize the characteristics of a business in that stage based a lot on what’s going on in their marketing or what’s going on in, you know, increasingly in their online presence. I know what challenges they’re probably facing at that point because of where they are, but I also know have been able to identify the milestones that we need to move them through, and consequently the tasks associated to each of those milestones. And if we do that, I mean, it’s basically a task list of things that need to be accomplished. If we do that, we can also say, but here’s the promise of moving through that stage.

(02:38): I’m gonna go into some depth from a marketing standpoint. So if you’re a business owner out there thinking, okay, he’s talking about me right now, , maybe it’ll give you some clues to what you need to be looking at in your marketing. If you’re a marketer, if you’re a consultant, listening to this and you work with folks on their marketing, this is a great way to start thinking about how you would retain clients for a longer time, because you’ve got a roadmap that you’re working from. And again, as I said, the much, much more depth on this in the Ultimate Marketing engine and a lot of things that I’ve been writing about. But I thought I would bring it out today, because I think what happens is a lot of times people can’t really identify the problem, or they think the solution is, I just need more leads.

(03:20): Well, what I’m gonna share today is that’s not always the challenge. Uh, there is sort of a linear order to how things need to be done, how things need to be built, how your business will evolve. And I think to some degree, you can start recognizing it’s hard you if you get stuck, because a lot of businesses get to a certain point, frankly, and they’ve grown. They’re doing some things that maybe now they’re juggling a lot of balls, dropping a few plates, but outwardly they appear to have succeeded some. And so they a lot of times dig in and just try to do more where they are. And what I wanna suggest through this idea of the customer success track and the stages in the customer success track is there’s certain things you as the owner, the founder, the head of marketing, whatever your role is, need to start doing differently at each of these stages.

(04:08): And I think sometimes that’s what trips people up. There are a lot of people that, that they love tinkering. They love DIYing, they love getting in and digging under the hood and figuring things out, even if it takes ’em all day long to do it. And that has to change if in fact you wanna move through these stages. So that’s a little bit of what, what I’m gonna talk about today. All right, so let’s talk about the stages. I’ve given ’em names. There are five of them. I’m gonna go through the characteristics, and I’m hopeful that you’ll listen and go, oh, wait a minute. That’s some of what I’m experiencing. So that must be where I am. All right. The stages are foundation, level up, organize, stabilize, and scale. Now, those are arbitrary names. That’s just a name that we pinned to each of the stages.

(04:54): If you’re thinking about developing something like this for your own practice or for your own offerings that you go out there, obviously five’s even an arbitrary number, but we just found that who we worked with, that was a good way to delineate. All right, so what are the characteristics of that foundation business? Quite often, sometimes, but not always. They’re in a startup mode. They’re very founder-driven. All the sales are typically happening from the founder going out there and knocking on doors almost. There’s no website leads coming in. They’ve maybe built a website, it’s kind of a brochure, but no leads coming in. They’re talking about their company, they’re talking about their products in most of their marketing, the, there’s not a consistent online presence. I mean, we see this all the time. Maybe they’ve got a LinkedIn profile, they’ve got a a, you know, Google business profile page, and there’s off branding, off names off what they call it. I mean, there’s just, it’s a lot of inconsistencies. And typically it’s because they’ve not attached any value to participating in social media. They’re not using email in a consistent manner. Even if they’re getting, getting clients, they’re not using email to nurture those leads, to nurture those clients to actually get repeat business.

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

(06:38): Any of that sound like you . Those are the challenges. Now, here’s the payoff. , if we can fix, if you can fix those challenges, if you can start addressing the fact that you have to look at your website, for example, in a much different way, you have to actually start telling stories. You have to actually start using email. You have to actually start understanding the problem you solve for your customers. Some of the strategic things that go into actually creating a consistent online presence, the promise of that is that you’re now gonna have a website that’s prepared to not only attract leads, but convert them. You’re gonna get traffic flow from the search engines because you’re creating useful content that people want to find, people want to read, you’re addressing the problems they’re trying to solve. You can start generating reviews, perhaps automatically using some of the tools that are available today. And you can start thinking about re-engaging past customers. That’s the promise of getting just the foundational stage built.

(07:40): Now, obviously, that may not make the phone ring, that may not actually take you from a revenue standpoint where you want to go. So what’s the next level of maturity? The next stage, we actually call that one level up. A lot of times people will get that website built, they work with a marketer. I mean, they’re starting to produce content, they’re starting to optimize some of their assets out there, but they’re not really converting any of that web traffic. I mean, I guess the first trick is to get some traffic there, , but they’re, it’s not converting. So, so frankly, if you get things out of order, let’s say at this stage you wanna start running ads, well, you’re gonna be wasting a lot of money because until you’re converting traffic that comes to your website, there’s no point sending or or getting traffic that comes there.

(08:26): You’re not getting into page one. You know, search engine results are on maps in for local businesses. They’re, they’re still okay, you’ve bought into social media, but there’s no engagement, which is really the only thing that matters. Leads are coming in, but you don’t have any real systematic way to follow up on them. You’re starting to think about online advertising, but not really sure what to do. And then this is what another thing we commonly run into at this stage. There’s no sales process, not one that’s repeatable anyway. Everything just kind of happens as it happens. Now, again, part of the challenges of being in this stage is maybe you’ve got customers, maybe you’re fulfilling orders, but you don’t have enough time to produce content that, or at least the volume of content that marketers say you need Today. You’re not really sure what content to produce.

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

(10:17): Or what’s gonna at least put them into our pipeline? So the promise there is that, that now first off, you’re gonna start attracting higher quality traffic and leads, because that’s one of the real challenges in that foundation mode is you might be attracting some leads, but they’re the wrong leads. So you’re gonna get more ideal client interactions at this phase. Search engines and maps are gonna start noticing you, you all, you will create, because at this stage, you’re now ready to create some automatic lead capture and follow up. You’re going to create a solid sales process at this stage so that you can start to consistently converting leads that in, in those sales conversations that you’re having. Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients.

(11:08): For the first time ever, you can license and use the Duct Tape Marketing System and methodology in your business through an upcoming three day virtual workshop. Give us three days and you’ll walk away with a complete system that changes how you think about your agency’s growth. The Duct Tape Marketing System is a turnkey set of processes for installing a marketing system that starts with strategy and moves to long-term retainer implementation engagements. We’ve developed a system by successfully working with thousands of businesses. Now you can bring it to your agency and benefit from all the tools, templates, systems, and processes we’ve developed to find out when our next workshop is being held, visit dtm.world/workshop. That’s DTM world slash workshop. All right, now we’ve got somebody up and running. So, so you can see we’re kind of building on this. So once we’re up and running, we’re gonna move into organized.

(12:06): Now what’s happening here is, okay, now I’m starting to get leads. I’m starting to have sales conversations, but now I’m kind of a mess . Now I’m not tracking client relationships. I’m not really fully tracking my marketing results because I’m running too fast. I’m not upselling, I’m not cross-selling, I’m not taking advantage now of the fact that if I just drove more traffic there, say, through advertising, I’m really in a, in many cases, I’m still fighting that competitive dynamic. I’m not seen as a leader necessarily. Now, again, , the challenges that that this stage brings quite often is that your lead cycles are really up and down. Sometimes it’s busy, sometimes it’s slow, , sometimes you can keep up, sometimes you can’t. I mean, marketing return is hard to understand. There’s so many things that go into it, and if you’re not really accurately tracking, it’s a challenge.

(13:01): Client acquisition seems really hard, or maybe expensive. Sales processes still at this point are very manual and customer service. Now, has become an issue and is in inconsistent. So what are we gonna go to work on here? This is a place where we certainly are gonna start talking about the need for a CRM . At this stage, you need to be using some of the tools that allow you to automate some of your marketing, to track some of your clients, to Segment who’s coming to your website. We’re gonna set up a dashboard. You know, at this stage, we want to know what’s working, what’s not working, . We’re gonna track calls, we’re gonna track emails, we’re gonna track ad spend. We are going to start thinking about campaigns now to retain customers, campaigns specifically to sell more to existing customers. We’re probably gonna start talking about referrals here.

(13:52): We are certainly at this point, can take advantage of some of the online advertising, but we also have to really focus on what happens when somebody becomes a customer. This is the stage where we certainly could go to work earlier on this, but we find that this is where it becomes so crucial that we can make it a priority. And that’s the customer experience, the onboarding, the follow up, the communication, the orientation. I mean, all those as set intentions that we can repeat, you know, time and time again. So we do this in this stage, and now we’re gonna see a consistent lead flow. We’re not gonna be wasting money on advertising because we’re gonna understand what works, what doesn’t. We’re gonna automate some of the lead nurturing, not as a way to shield ourselves from having to talk to customers, but as a way to actually create a frictionless, better experience for prospects and customers.

(14:44): We’re gonna be converting the right customers and we’re gonna have much higher retention and referral. This is the place where a lot of businesses, I mean, getting to this space is really the goal. Many businesses don’t even reach this stage, but also this is a place where now all of a sudden, if we’re gonna go beyond this, we can’t just add more revenue, we just can’t add more sales because we’re not gonna be able to handle it. We have to add team, we have to add delegate delegation. This is the place at which, quite frankly, the marketer, the doer, the task doer who has maybe moved to being task manager, . This is the place where we need actually a real CEO . We need the head of the organization to form, because this is the, I don’t know where the revenue is, but it’s certainly when we’re gonna go north of a million in revenue.

(15:37): Obviously that’s an arbitrary figure because types of businesses are different, but this is the one to 10 to 50 million range where short of a leadership team, short of, uh, you being a CEO and no longer being the marketing manager or the marketing doer, has to happen. So what’s happening here, you know, we’re using, and the characteristics now are actually more positive because you’re using a CRM for sales. You’ve established some marketing KPIs. Maybe now you’re starting to get the room, the breathing room, to think, Hey, we can develop new products, new offerings. We’ve got online advertising working for us well enough. Maybe we’re starting to feel like, Hey, we’re a bigger player. We need to get more involved in the community, more involved in our industry. We need to start developing internal marketing roles. Now the challenge, of course, at this stage, the all those characteristics sound lovely, right?

(16:34): Profitability starts to vary. At this stage, we maybe we’re really pumping in expenses cause we’re buying advertising, we’re adding team. So expenses are increasing rapidly. It’s tough to maintain marketing momentum with the growth that’s coming and even harder to maintain fulfillment, it’s time to actually probably bring on a strategic marketing hire as well. And this is the point where a lot of founders actually have to start analyzing, am I the right person to be in this seat, to be the ceo? Do I need a coo? Do I need somebody who’s actually not only running marketing, but to somebody who’s actually running operations or at least creating the delegation and the systems and the processes for getting all the work done. So in many cases, this is where we’ll definitely go to work on trying to automate things in an elegant way. Again, not to just shield the, the business from ever having to talk to anyone.

(17:33): This is where we’ll make significant talk about making significant investments in both marketing spend, team spend, and then I guess a third one, operations spend. If in some cases this is the place, you know, for many of our consultants, for example, this is a place where they need to start adding account managers. They need to ac actually start adding managerial levels in, in, you know, several places because business is there, but if it’s going out the back door as fast as it’s coming in the front door, you’re not really gonna gain any traction. But the promise here, if we can get this done, if we can build systems for both marketing and for fulfillment here, we can start replicating what we’re doing. We start replicating what you used to be doing, maybe as the founder and the startup. And this is gonna actually lead to consist lead conversion, which certainly is going to lead to consistent growth.

(18:27): This is where word of mouth and referral generation just starts happening steadily. Your business really becomes start starting at this point to become an asset to the owner of the business because it’s not as dependent on you. And frankly, if you ever want to talk about, uh, exiting your business or selling your business, I mean, that’s certainly one of the criteria. Somebody has to be able to see how this would run without you. You know, there are many businesses that get found by an individual, get grown by an individual, and really a lot of the relationships are with that individual as opposed to the systems and the framework of the business. All right, the last one is we call scale. And really this one, probably this stage, you know, probably fits somebody that is maybe, maybe thinking in terms of exiting the business or certainly of maybe exiting their role as a, you know, day-to-day CEO or something, you know, kind of moving to a board type of role.

(19:24): So what’s going on here typically is that, again, more positive characteristics, but still same challenges. So lead flow is pretty consistent and predictable, starting to build an internal marketing team. You’re sales management driven, not just a couple salespeople out there, right? There’s an entire selling system starting to become recognized as a leader or in your industry or in your town. There’s a bit of financial mastery. So at this stage, while again, some people who are more financial oriented, you know, maybe start this in the first stage, but this is where profit and your cost of acquisition of new business, this is where you’re starting to have capital needs. I mean, so financial mastery is, has become a much bigger piece of the puzzle for success here. And you’ve really almost built and established, uh, uh, an internal org chart of roles of management roles. Now, the challenges here, of course, is anybody who’s grown to this, I mean, we might be talking about 20, 30 people or more here.

(20:27): We might be talking about 10, 20, $30 million or more here. And so all of a sudden culture, the thing that maybe was a great thing, not only for those people that work there, but for your customers, um, rapid growth sometimes really comes with a deterioration of culture. There’s staff turnover, there’s no emphasis on employee branding. There’s a challenge to innovate, to continue to grow that bring new products and service offering can add a lot of stress at this stage. So in terms of many of the things that, that I talked about as characteristics, I mean now you’re gonna go to work on you, you absolutely are gonna build team, you’re gonna build leadership team here. You’re going to formalize structure around people, operations. You’re going to need to give more and more focus to fulfillment and more and more focus to innovation. In fact, a lot of leaders in this stage of business, actually, their primary job is to innovate, becomes the, you know, you’ve got that operations higher in place that is, that are managing the people, that you’ve got somebody that’s focused on culture.

(21:35): You’ve got somebody that’s focused on sales. You’ve got the finance piece figured out. So in many cases, uh, the role of the leader at this stage is ideas. is innovation, is to figure out how you can get more market share. Again, the promise, the value of the business will continue to grow. Cash flow will be consistent if need be. You’re gonna be set up in now to raise significant capital. A lot of folks go out and raise a whole bunch of capital based on money , or I’m sorry, based on an idea, but a, a business that generates consistent cash flow can demonstrate an ability to grow is going to have a really easy, um, access to a lot of cash should they need it. And certainly this is that are seen as leaders have a much easier time attracting experienced talent to, to the organization as well.

(22:26): So all of that to say, you know, many companies, many businesses come to us say, I wanna grow, I want more business, I want more leads. And what we’ve discovered is certainly that’s, we’re gonna get there , but first we’re gonna develop more clarity. First, we’re gonna develop more confidence in the systems, more control over what works and what doesn’t work. And there is a linear process for this. But for us, having this roadmap is such a, you know, it becomes, the mission becomes taking folks from where they are to where they want to go in terms of training, in terms of hiring, in terms of even sales messaging, being able to demonstrate that you have a path to build on for many particularly service businesses is a pretty compelling differentiator and a compelling offer for somebody who has just had so many people selling them the tactic of the week.

(23:19): So while I just went through kind of our customer stages and I could do a whole nother show on every milestone involved in accomplishing, moving people through there, but my feeling is that just about any business, I’ve done marketing here, right? But just about any business that sells to other businesses, maybe even individuals, could develop this idea of staged growth, of staged evolution or maturity. So that’s what I wanted to share today. As I said, if you pick up the ultimate marketing engine, you can pick that up wherever books are sold, all the electronic book, if you’re listening to this in August of 2022, is on sale now for $2 and 99 cents. When you get the book, you’ll actually, the entire show that I went through has a, has this roadmap in a form. So when you get the book, you’ll actually get all the forms and tools that are shown in the book as well.

(24:11): So that’s it for today. Hopefully we’ll run into one of these days out there on the road. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. 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.

The Seven Levels Of Adaptive Innovation written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Steve Miller

Steve Miller, a guest on the Duct Tape Marketing PodcastIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Steve Miller. Meetings & Conventions Magazine calls Steve Miller the Idea Man for his unconventional, edgy, no-spin approach to marketing and branding. He is the author of the Amazon #1 bestseller, “UNCOPYABLE: How to Create an Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition.” Steve’s speaking and consulting clients have ranged from entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 corporations, including Proctor & Gamble, Greystar Real Estate, Caterpillar, Boeing Airplane, Starbucks, Philips Electronics, and the prestigious TED Conference. We’re talking about his latest book — Stealing Genuis: The Seven Levels of Adaptive Innovation.

Key Takeaway:

Improvement is not innovation and innovation is essential if your aim is to survive in today’s business environment. Fixating your mind on improvement in today’s world is a dangerous path—one that ultimately leads to commoditization and irrelevance. In this episode, I talk with author, Steve Miller, about innovating in today’s business world by creating powerful, uncopyable experiences for your target customer.

Questions I ask Steve Miller:

  • [2:34] What does ‘Stealing Genuis’ mean?
  • [6:29] What is adaptive innovation?
  • [9:39] How do you advise people?
  • [14:43] What are some of the ways to know if something innovative is going to be a big risk and not turn off customers?
  • [16:23] Do you have a couple of examples of companies that you think are just routinely good at innovation?
  • [19:06] Where can more people find out about you and your work?

More About Steve Miller:

  • Get a copy of his book — Stealing Genuis: The Seven Levels of Adaptive Innovation

Learn More About The Certification Intensive Training:

  • Learn more about the Certification Intensive Training

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

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Nudge, hosted by Phil Agnew. It’s brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes, packed with practical advice from world-class marketers and behavioral scientists. And it’s not always about marketing. Great episode. Recently you learned the surprising truths about and tips for beating, stress and anxiety. Sounds like a great program, doesn’t it? Listen to Nudge wherever you get your podcasts.

(00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Steve Miller, meetings and conventions, magazines, calls him the idea man for his unconventional, edgy, no spin approach to marketing and branding. He’s the author of the Amazon number one best seller, copyable, how to Create an Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition. He speaks in, uh, his speaking and consulting clients have ranged from entrepreneurs to Fortune 100 corporations, including Proctor and Gamble, Graystar Real Estate, caterpillar, Boeing Airplanes, Starbucks, Phillips Electronics, and the prestigious TED Conference. Today we’re gonna talk about his latest book, stealing Genius, the Seven Levels of Adaptive Innovation. So John,

Steve Miller (01:35): Thank, thank you for, uh, that when having me on to talk about this. This is great. I, you know, I mean, I think I’m pretty sure no, this is how authors work, right? But my book went to number one, which was for a brief period of time, . Okay? You and I both jump on top of it. Again, heard that I knocked you off the bestseller list for like two or three days, you know? Then you immediately just jumped right back, .

John Jantsch (02:05): Well, that is good to know. And then listeners won’t, won’t know this, but this is our second attempt at this interview take, because we had a take technology glitch, take two. And so Steve was kind, kind enough to come back. There’s I, and, and I, you know, if you were to listen to the other recording, just know that it would not be the exact same thing. I, I suspect, because I never know what questions I’m gonna ask. And I know Steve has actually thank you.

Steve Miller (02:27): No idea what he, Steve has no idea. .

John Jantsch (02:32): So, so I, I do wanna start by unpacking the, just the ti the words or the, that you use in the title. So, in two cases, the first one, stealing Genius, maybe give us a definition of of that

Steve Miller (02:43): Going well, this, to try to unwrap it as quickly as possible. That the genesis of this is that too often businesses doesn’t matter what size business, you could be a, a single person entrepreneur, you know, or, you know, a Fortune 500 company. Too often they get fall into the trap of paying too much attention to the competition, too much attention to the world within their world, okay? And as, as such, you see an awful lot of, dare I say, incestuous behavior among companies. You know, if they copy each other, they might try to improve upon somebody else’s idea, but they kind, that’s kind of how they come up with their future plans for, oh, we’re just, we’re gonna get better than the competition. We’re gonna get better than the competition. Well, many years ago, my father, Ralph Miller and his cohort in crime, bill Lear of Learjet, they got together and came up with this concept that they, they d deemed the eight track tape player.

(03:52): Okay? So, yes, my dad was part of that world . Now, the reason I bring that up is because while they were planning on building this product, ultimately after a lot of starts and stops and stuff like that in various locations, they ultimately ended up in Japan trying to build this product over there. Now, this is back in the sixties. And when you think of the, when you think of made in Japan back in the sixties, for the most part it was kind, you know, they were known for those little umbrella straw, you know, things that would go into your drinks, you know, would open and close. And they, and there was an American consultant who got in with Toyota, and his name was w Edwards Deming. And Deming was really the precursor, uh, or one of the guys that kind of got the total quality thing moving well.

(04:42): So, right. So my dad and Bill Lear, knowing they had to build a quality product in Japan, they brought him in to be part of the team. So, and then my dad, who, no, this, I don’t want to get into a discussion with my dad, but he decides that the way to spend quality time with his young teenage son is to drag me along and fly me to go to hang with these guys, right? Oh, that was a blast. And, but one of the things I remember was that Deming was very, this guy was really a pound the table kind of a guy, right? When he got really, and, and the thing that he got really big about was benchmarking. Okay? Cuz that’s essentially what we’re talking about when we say that. That we as companies tend to look at our competition. We tend to look within our world.

(05:39): We are benchmarking is what we’re doing. Okay? Now, D Deming called that intrinsic benchmarking where you were benchmarking in your industry, but he maintained that in order to think creatively that was a mistake. You were not gonna come up with new ideas by just studying the competition, you were gonna come up with new ideas by going outside your world, outside of your natural, uh, environment, and go study aliens. And he called it extrinsic benchmarking. And I called a, call it Stealing Genius. So, so that’s where, that’s the genesis of where it all came from. It all started hell of a long time ago.

John Jantsch (06:27): . So, so, so let’s, uh, unpack this other term then. So stealing genius really essentially comes down to looking for ideas that you can apply to your business, your industry in maybe unusual places. So then it’s a matter of, and, and the book really then comes up with these seven levels of how to think about it, of adaptive innovation. So, so yeah.

Steve Miller (06:49): And so starting the term with adaptive, so adaptive innovation is really a, it’s, it’s really the how to do it of stealing genius is that you go out and, you know, like you say, I talk about seven different levels of of, of be benchmarking, study them. And you look for mm-hmm. people, organizations, companies who are not part of your world, right? And you go study, geez, what are they really good at? Okay? And you look for the genius in those people. And then you ask yourself, okay, is that something I can actually steal? And that’s where you, you’re answering the question, is that an innovative idea in my world that I can adapt? All right? Because, you know, I mean, you can go study, yeah. You know, companies and people in other industries, and they’ll have great ideas, but you’ll never, you just won’t be able to figure out a way to use them.

(07:39): So it has to be an innovative idea that you can adapt back into your industry. So, so to just say, you know, as just a simple example, like if you are in the high tech industry right now, then I would be telling you go out and study the food industry, go out and study, you know, read their industry goes detail, go out and study, you know, some aian high tech is using it, right? So these restaurants, you know, and ask yourself, is there something out there that we can steal and bring back to high tech? And nobody’s un copyable, nobody in high tech is approaching anything like that right now. And if you do it right, you can actually create a situation that, you know, from my previous book is, is hard to copy.

John Jantsch (08:23): Are you an agency owner, consultant or coach that works with business owners? Then I want to talk to you about adding a new revenue stream to your business that will completely change how you work with clients. For the first time ever, you can license and use the Duct Tape Marketing system and methodology in your business through an upcoming three day virtual workshop. Give us three days and you’ll walk away with a complete system that changes how you think about your agency’s growth. The Duct Tape Marketing System is a turnkey set of processes for installing a marketing system that starts with strategy and moves to long-term retainer implementation engagements. We’ve developed a system by successfully working with thousands of businesses. Now you can bring it to your agency and benefit from all the tools, templates, systems and processes we’ve developed to find out when our next workshop is being held.

(09:15): Visit DTM world slash workshop. That’s DTM world slash workshop. So, so one of the things that I think is probably difficult, I don’t think anybody listening so far is like, oh, that’s a dumb idea. That, that, I mean, I think everybody pretty much agrees with Yeah, that’s, we’ve all seen that in our lives maybe or in some business innovation where everybody was like, that’s brilliant, but they really just brought it from somebody else who was doing it. So how do you advise people? I, I mean, I’m sure the fir question a lot of people ask is, well, where do I look ? You know, how do I get started?

Steve Miller (09:52): Well, you know, and with the level, the seven levels, you know, I try to take it from like, the easiest way to start, you know, do I want to innovate? And up to the most complicated? And the easiest way to start is first of all is ask yourself just a question. Like, like, okay, what do I want to, what I’ll, I’ll use an example of, uh, of, uh, let you know a trade shows for example, you know, one of the, one of the biggest issues with trade shows that, that the, the producers of trade shows, you know, they have to go out and they’re finding exhibitors who are spending a lot of money to come in and buy these booth piles. Well, one of the biggest challenges for the produce bill these booths and, and spend that money, and then they have to attract people to come, to walk up and down the producers, is they want those people to walk every single aisle, right?

(10:40): Because they want them to get in to go buy all those people who are spending money. So if you ask the question, how do we get people to walk the aisles, right? Well, that’s, so let’s say that’s the project. Let’s, that’s the question. So you ask, now the question you ask yourself is, okay, who to that is not in the trade show world is really good at forcing people walk. And, and the number one example, the biggest example of all are supermarkets. Okay? It’s the food industry. But supermarkets are brilliant. They are genius at forcing you to travel as many aisles as possible before they will let you out. okay? You get your cart. That’s right. Yeah. And, and, and like the, just like the simple question, where is the milk in the supermarket? It’s as far away from the front door as it possibly can be, because everybody’s gonna, yeah, everybody’s got milk on, which means you have to go on their list, right?

(11:50): So, so they’re gonna make you go as far away as possible, possible, and they’re, you know, up and down aisles or around the corner or some different stuff like that. So that is, and trade shows by default, historically, have always put the milk in the front of the front of the hall. When you go into a big trade show, for the most part, the biggest exhibitors, the ones who are the destination ex, they’re like anchor stores at a mall. Okay? They are making, they let you walk in and boom, you walk right in. Well, smart trade shows that, and I’ve consulted for a number of really big, you know, the top put the milk in the back of the hall, top shows in, in, in the country. You know, you finally get them to understand, no, you, you, they’re the milk, all right? They’re still gonna get every single person into their booth. But, but the people have to travel to get to them. So that’s, see that’s an example of, it’s where you start at that kind of level, level one where you define the, define the define the objective, and then you go out and you ask yourself, who is doing this? That is an alien in, in our world.

John Jantsch (12:59): Yeah. So I think that the key to that as I’m listening to you, is it’s not just a matter of going out and saying, oh, that’s different. We could do that. It’s really, I think first you have to look inward, you know, what is our industry doing? What does everybody do? What does common practice? And really start then saying, how can we, you know, Zig, let’s go look for a zig. That would make

Steve Miller (13:21): Sense. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve all heard, and I use the term map, the experience, I mean, you know, the customer journey, I mean, everything like that, you know, the, those of us that are consult, you know, we have these conversations with our clients and we talk about all these things. And then what I do is as we map the experience of the customer and go through all the touch points that they might have, then what I do is I, I one by one, we go through the touch points. So we say, okay, is this something that we can change, you know, or do we have to just keep doing it the same way everybody else is doing it right now, if it’s, you know, let’s ask ourselves that question, you know, how do we make somebody travel? You know, and that might be the big question, but you do it with every, you know, every opportunity that you have, you look for a way to ask the question, is this something that we can do differently?

(14:10): You know, now? But even when you say, well, you know, you know, we, we could go look at companies and oh, look what they’re doing. Well, that’s actually one of the levels, okay? But mm-hmm , before you get to, before you get to the point where you just go look at a company and say, gee, what are they really good at that, you know, you kind of wanna go through these other levels, so you get in your mind and you get yourself thinking in terms of what do they do great that I can steal and use back in

John Jantsch (14:36): My work. So one of the things that I, I see a lot of pushback from companies why they don’t innovate is because it’s like, will it work? Nobody else in our industry is doing it. You know, it’s almost like a fear to try. So what are some of the ways that, that somebody can, this is probably two questions, but first know how something know that something’s going to work, it’s not gonna be a big risk, it’s not gonna turn their customers off.

Steve Miller (15:00): Well, I think the first thing to ask yourself is do people buy from you because you’re similar to the competition, , and Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:09): And yeah, and jump, jump in, push back more. I would guess a lot of people would say, well, not necessarily because of that, but they have a certain expectation, you know, of how they’re gonna be treated, say,

Steve Miller (15:22): In the industry life. But if their expectation for you is the same as for everybody else, you know, then, then we run into the problem. And you and I both know where this ends up, this ends up with, you know, first of all, everybody’s product is quality. Everybody has high quality products today. Everybody says they have the best customer service on the planet. Everybody says that. Okay? Right? And if everybody has the best product, and you know, and essentially in most industries they’re, it’s, they’re commoditizing Now, you know, that’s the way technology is working. And the second thing is, if everybody says they have the best customer service, well the customer, no, you know, the customer never buys similarity. The customer always finds a difference. And if they can’t find it between the product or the service, it comes down to price. And I, I am, I’m saying to people, if you wanna compete on price, then I’m not your consultant. , no question about it.

John Jantsch (16:20): Yeah. Well, there’ll always be somebody willing to go out of business faster.

Steve Miller (16:23): That’s right. Chase that to the bottom. That’s exactly right. ,

John Jantsch (16:28): Do you have a couple examples of companies that you think are just routinely

Steve Miller (16:32): Good? Oh, well, you know, but the, and of course, yes, they, they’re, they’re the obvious answers, right? You know, the Disney’s you know, the, you know, the apples and, and groups like that. I mean, I love to look at companies that are not huge, that are doing things that are just wicked, you know, wicked different. I have a client who, they build those, you know what, like if you go into a auto body shop or something, or a car auto shop and the technicians, the, the who are, and these guys are really good at what they do, okay? And they own all of their own tools and they have those tools in a really nice toolbox. And it’s usually like this huge toolbox standing up really tall, and it’s red, it’s red, red. That’s exactly right. Yeah. And, and one of my clients who is one of the suppliers to that, they, you know, he wanted to, you know, we were fighting over like, okay, how do we separate, how do we separate, you know, and you know, you try to get him to, oh, you can change color, but really what we’re looking at is we’re looking at what can we offer people that nobody else is gonna offer?

(17:43): And, you know, and he said, you know, they’re all expensive, you know, at that level they’re very expensive. So how do you prove value to a customer? Because I always say where value is clear, the decision is easy. And so he came up with this concept of, of not just a lifetime guarantee, but he came up with a, with a concept of a 55 year guarantee. And what he did with that was by, by taking a specific number like that, instead of saying Lifetime, cuz lifetime is kind of one of those things. People banter, you know, bandy about, you know, all, all over the place. He said for, he says, if you call me within 55 years, I will give you a brand new, you know, you know, case or I’ll give you your money back. Okay? And then, and, but then he, you know, in the guarantee he also says, but my kid is take, okay, we both know I’m not gonna be alive in 55 years. ,

(18:37): Right? He’s actually taking a long, taking over the business. And so my kid will be, you know, taking care of the, so, so what he’s doing is he’s just essentially, you know, a lifetime guarantee and now spun it into language that people will remember. And that’s what we’re, that’s what we gotta be cognizant of, is that people do business, you know, with people they like, they know, they trust and they remember, okay. And that’s the thing that is just for him, you know, it has separated from the crowd and man, and you know, and he is killing

John Jantsch (19:11): It. So Steve, tell me, tell people where they can find out more about, obviously the book A Stealing Genius or Uneven,

Steve Miller (19:18): Well, you know, you can find out about him, ’em on Amazon ,

John Jantsch (19:20): Or find out more about your work.

Steve Miller (19:21): You can absolutely do that. Yeah. Yeah. But here’s what, here’s what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna, I’m gonna give a gift to everybody because I love giving out books. And so what I’m gonna suggest is go to the website, be copyable.com No, I’m sorry, whoops, back up. I started to say Wrong, no, stealing genius.com/duct tape. Okay? And if you go to that site, now, here’s what you do. You go buy Stealing Genius on Amazon, I don’t care if put your feet by the Kindle, it doesn’t bother me, right? And then you go to that webpage and it asks you for your email address, and you email address and, and then I will follow up with you and I will say, okay, now send me your mailing address. I will send you a free paperback copy of my book Copyable as my gift to you. And yes, I will even sign it because John, you and I both know how much more valuable that makes that book, right? , don’t, you know, don’t personalize.

John Jantsch (20:25): Absolutely raise raises the price of my books, uh, by 50 cents on eBay when people are selling

Steve Miller (20:31): It, at least, yes, but don’t, is it because personalization at least actually drops the value of the book, so .

John Jantsch (20:37): That’s right. That’s right. No, no longer available. Well, Steve, thanks again for, uh, taking the time to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we will run into you again soon when Hope so. Can’t wait to see your next book either. Thanks, thanks Steve. 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.

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