marketingpodcast - Sydney Social Media Services

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 1, 2022/by exposure

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

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

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

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

Key Takeaway:

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

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

Topics I Cover:

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

Resources I Mention:

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

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 27, 2022/by exposure

Committing To Your Niche And Owning Your Market

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

Marketing Podcast with Brent Weaver

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

Key Takeaway:

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

Questions I ask Brent Weaver:

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

More About Brent Weaver:

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

Take The Marketing Assessment:

- Take the Assessment

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

Duct Tape Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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August 26, 2022/by exposure

What You Should Be Tracking In Your Marketing Efforts And Why

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

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

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

Key Takeaway:

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

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

Topics I Cover:

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

Resources I Mention:

The Marketing Assessment — Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=2088

August 25, 2022/by exposure

How SEO Has Evolved Over The Years

How SEO Has Evolved Over The Years written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Dale Bertrand

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Dale Bertrand. Dale has been an SEO specialist for fortune 500 companies and venture-backed startups around the world for two decades. He speaks at industry conferences, leads, corporate training events, and serves as entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs Organization.

Key Takeaway:

Foundationally, what Google is trying to do is help people find the right information — the answer to their questions. As technology and algorithms are constantly changing, the world of SEO as we know it continuously evolves along with it.

In this episode, I talk with long-time SEO specialist for Fortune 500 companies and venture-backed startups, Dale Bertrand, about the evolution of SEO and where it stands today, the biggest changes happening, and what you need to do to build trust, increase authority, and rank high today with Google.

Questions I ask Dale Bertrand:

[2:01] What are some of the biggest changes in SEO that you are following?
[4:56] Could you talk about something you’ve written about — the end of technical SEO?
[5:43] Do things like keywords in your titles, metadata, and your URL matter anymore?
[9:14] What’s the value of backlinks today?
[11:41] Do you see it that it is almost like three disciplines of content?
[15:36] Human influence and desire haven’t changed, they’re just on different journeys. Would you say that we just need to remember those principles and apply them to today’s technology?
[18:04] How should companies go about finding and activating the right influencer?
[19:15] On SEO-related sites, how valuable are signals in social media — meaning people linking to you on social platforms like Twitter?
[20:41] Where can people find out more about Fire & Spark and the work that you’re doing?

More About Dale Bertrand:

His agency — Fire & Spark
Contact – Dale@fireandspark.com

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketing Assessment

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

Duct Tape Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dale Bertran. He has been an SEO specialist to fortune 500 companies and venture back startups around the world for two decades. He speaks in industry conferences, leads, corporate training events, and serves as entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard alumni entrepreneurs organization. So Dale, welcome to the show.

Dale Bertrand (01:15): Well, John, welcome to, well, thank you for having me. I must welcome you to your own show.

John Jantsch (01:21): well, I appreciate that. I don’t think anybody’s ever done that, so that that’s awesome. so, you know, we’re gonna talk about SEO. Uh, we’re gonna specifically talk about maybe a brand or an evolution of SEO, but it’s funny before we get into it, you know, a lot of people, you know, I bet you get this question a lot, you know, what are the big changes recently that, you know, in SEO and, you know, I think SEO’s like a lot of things, it just kind of evolves, you know, like some of the big, like the, probably the biggest change, if there was one is, you know, rank brain, which really changed how SEO people need to think about SEO, but that’s coming up on seven years ago. So I think a lot of, a lot of people wanna see like sudden change, but I think there’s this evolution, but I’m gonna ask you anyway, what are some of the biggest changes in SEO that, that you are following?

Dale Bertrand (02:09): Well, thinking of it as an evolution is definitely the right way to think about it. When I started with SEO, believe it or not was in 1999 long time ago. And, um, even back then we knew where the puck was going. So to speak, like, you know, the metaphor like skate to where the puck is going. So we’ve known for a very long time that what Google’s trying to do is help people find the right information, the answer to their question. So Google’s just getting a lot better at it with, um, AI and, and all of the different algorithms that, that fall under the AI umbrella. So we, we call Google an AI based search engine now. And yeah, AI based search engines are just a lot better at choosing the right content for the query, giving you the right answer at scale than the rules based search engine, where, where Google started out

John Jantsch (02:58): Well. And I think, think you can test this for yourself. I mean, you start doing a search anymore and on nine times outta 10, they know what you’re searching for before you finish. right. Yeah.

Dale Bertrand (03:08): Yeah. They’ve got the data. I mean, they process billions of searches a day and every time you interact with Google, every time you enter something into it or click on a result, it’s watching you and Google’s using that to, to basically serve up better rankings.

John Jantsch (03:22): Yeah. And it really, you know, a lot of times people look at SEO as a way to trick Google, I guess. I mean, and that’s kind of how we used to look at it right. In some ways. And really the thing people forget is Google doesn’t care about us or our SEO or our websites. I mean, they’re trying to serve their customer, right?

Dale Bertrand (03:45): Yeah. That’s really important. And I think how you frame SEO and how you think about it matters a lot. So if you understand that you are trying to help Google serve its audience, it’s searchers, right. Help by giving Google the content that it needs. If you’re writing, let’s say you’re writing a recipe for a Manhattan or any other bourbon drink, right? Like Google has already has access to thousands and thousands of recipes for Manhattans. So like you’re just not giving it something useful. So that’s one way to think about it. And then the other part of it

John Jantsch (04:16): Is, you know, it’s only two, o’clock where I am Dale, but Manhattan sounds really good. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Dale Bertrand (04:21): I should a drink cocktail mixed box before this. So we could really have some fun and record it at the same time. So the other way people think about SEO is whether it’s like a technical discipline. Like people think of, well, I’m optimizing my website, so I’m moving the HTML tags around or moving the elements around or, um, adding words like adding my keywords and, and that’s, what’s gonna make all the difference. And that’s really the biggest change that we see with the evolution that Google’s undergone as they switch to AI algorithms.

John Jantsch (04:54): So, so I taking this directly from something you’ve written the end of, uh, technical SEO. This doesn’t mean SEO’s dead. It means that your SEO resources are better spent optimizing for your customers, not Google’s algorithm.

Dale Bertrand (05:08): Absolutely. So Google’s algorithm is trained to find the right content to find the content that your customers are looking for when they’re making a buying decision. So the better, you know, your customers, uh, the information they need, the questions they’re asking and then how to answer those questions and give them the information they need to facilitate the purchase. Well, hopefully they buy from you , but the better you understand your customers and better, you’ll be able to create content that Google serves because Google’s doing like a damn good job of figuring it out nowadays

John Jantsch (05:41): Does do things like keywords in your titles and metadata and your URL to have a keyword. I mean, does that stuff not matter anymore because they it’s know what it says.

Dale Bertrand (05:51): It’s not that it doesn’t matter. Like it it’s just that it, it makes it harder and easier at the same time. Like it’s simple, but it’s hard to do like, you know, just creating the right content, creating the content that your, um, customers are looking for, but you can really boil it down to a three step process. Like the first one is building your platform. So making sure that there isn’t anything very broken about your website that would prevent Google from calling your indexing, your content. So that doesn’t mean you’re optimizing for, to get the last millisecond of page feed on your site, but you’re fixing big issues that would prevent Google from seeing your content. And then the second step would be keyword, visibility. What are the right keywords? Make sure they’re in the right places. That’s different from keyword stuffing or right.

You’re even making sure that, you know, you, you have, you have misspellings or synonym and all of that. Like it, it’s really more about the intent behind the keywords. You want people, you want purchased intent keywords. So yeah, whatever you sell, you wanna make sure these are keywords that people are typing in. When they’re trying to decide, you know, what they’re gonna buy in that category. And, and then the third step is really building targeted content and what I call multifactor authority. So the targeted content is the right type of content around the intent behind those keywords that you identified in the first step. And that could take a number of different forms, but it really depends on what you’re selling and what your customers are looking for. So remember you need to know your customers. And then the other part, multifactor authority is proving to Google that you have the answer.

So if I’m writing about I’m making something up here, non-alcoholic drink recipes or something like that because I sell non-alcoholic, um, spirit. Then Google needs to believe that we are the brand. We’re the website that that information should be coming from. And so that’s back links, that’s engagement with the site, reducing your bounce rate, making sure that when people come to your site, they stay, cuz Google will notice if they just bounce directly back to Google’s, uh, search page and then the company you keep matters. So like if you were selling non-alcoholic drinks, you could imagine that there are a number of medical organizations or mothers against drunk driving that would care about the mission behind your product. And you wanna make sure that Google can see that you’ve got endorsements of all types. You could imagine from authoritative folks in your space.

John Jantsch (08:10): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need it online marketing, no problem. Semrush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try some rush free@somerush.com slash. Now that’s S E M rush.com/now.

And I know the answer to this, but you know, I’m just gonna tee it up for you. Okay. So some might interpret what you just said is getting back links, but you’re talking about something much deeper, aren’t you?

Dale Bertrand (08:56): Yeah. So back links are still important and you know, we work to get white hat, you know, to sorry. We work to earn back links, um, on our projects. So that could be PR, but a lot of it is just making sure that you’re running a good business. So you’ve got customers that are raving about you. You’ve got products worth writing about, and your business is making an impact with your customers or a community or something, uh, where Google can see that you’re gaining traction. So, so that’s why it goes beyond back links. Because if you think about it back links are really a proxy for something. There are proxy for endorsements in your space, in your market. The, if you’re, maybe you’re in the medical space and you’ve got the Mayo clinic, you know, writing about you, you might have a partnership with them. And an artifact of that is the fact that they’re linking to you.

John Jantsch (09:42): Yeah.

Dale Bertrand (09:43): Yeah. So, so we wanna start on, we wanna start with the run, a good business, make good friends, you know, make you earn those endorsements. And then once, once we have that, then we’re looking at ways to translate those into technical artifacts on the web that Google can see.

John Jantsch (09:58): And, and certainly one of the things that they can see better than ever is that they’re the right links, right? There’s they’re links back links. That make sense. That would be logical, that would actually contribute to the conversation. , you know, as opposed to the, you know, round Robin directories that, you know, nobody ever actually sees and they have no authority at all. I mean, that, I think has been something that’s been with us maybe at least five or six years, hasn’t it?

Dale Bertrand (10:21): Oh, longer than that. So I, I should know because we, I mean, I was doing, I’ve been doing SEO for a very long time. So there used to be black hat techniques that worked and, and we did it because it worked nowadays. It just, they have to be natural links. Like you really do need to be building a community around your brand and, and content. A lot of it depends on whether you’re B2C or B2B. If you’re B2C, you wanna build a community, um, around your brand, get traction and make sure Google can see it. And then if your B2B, then the number of searches is gonna be lower is just gonna be lower volume, but still they’re gonna be valuable. Organic traffic is valuable. But in that case, it’s more that you want to make sure that Google can see the company you keep so that you’re, you’ve got relationships with the industry, trade organizations and conferences. And if you’re in the medical space, it’s PhD, sorry, MDs or MD PhDs, which is even better and what, whatever works in your industry.

John Jantsch (11:15): So there’s really a lot of elements here. I mean, there is the technical aspects of content of website that, that lead to SEO. There’s the, the actual good deep content itself. But then in a way it’s actually promotion of that content , you know, to the right audiences that, that then drives, you know, the right links or drives the right mentions or right. Traffic. So, I mean, do you see it that way as almost like three disciplines?

Dale Bertrand (11:44): I, I try. So, yes, but I try not to. So when it comes to like a, a successful SEO campaign, there’s gonna be a lot of elements. Like you said, the technical platform, keyword research, the customer research, the content, and then the authority building. And then there’s, you know, there’s PR within that, there’s a lot of dis disciplines within that, but it’s really hard, especially for small business owners to think about, um, to, to even, you know, have the courage to do SEO when it requires so much. So instead. And, and I, I think I’ve learned about this, John sitting next to you at a dinner a long time ago, where you, you kind of helped me simplify some of my ideas, the way that I like to think about it. We, you have a purpose behind your SEO. And, uh, what I mean, when I say you have a purpose behind your SEO is that you’ve got a purpose behind your brand, a purpose behind your business. Yeah. And, and a quick example I’ll give you is that we worked with a company that was a manufacturing company and what they manufactured was Velcro straps. It’s, it’s pretty darn boring. And I hope they’re not listening to this cause they get excited about manufacturing. It’s run by two engineers. And these Velcro straps are used by electricians. If you’re installing bundles of wires into a big building, you need a lot of these Velcro straps to make sure that it’s not spaghetti of wires everywhere.

John Jantsch (12:56): I got a few of ’em here with all my technology that hook up here.

Dale Bertrand (13:00): Perfect, perfect. And for them, we, they wanted to do SEO. They wanted to build content, but what were they gonna do? They gonna write 50 articles about Velcro. Like, Hey, Velcro’s awesome. For all these reasons, we’ll write one article about each reason. So you could do that, but it’s not gonna help you build a community, build authority and have Google see that you’re gaining traction. So what, what we realized when we were talking to them is one of the founders of this company was he was volunteering weekends at a technical high school near, near where, um, they’re located. And so what we did was we put together a campaign. We called it the campaign to recruit the next generation of electricians. And basically it was, you know, they were going to identify, it was young people, help them pay for some exams, some licensure and, and also help them put a little bit of money towards their schooling.

And what we did was we promoted that campaign. We said, Hey, if you care, and we reached out to like-minded organizations like organizations that care about providing, you know, job opportunities for young people. And there was one that was about finding job opportunities for recently incarcerated people. And we told them like, we’re looking for kids to help. Could you help promote this campaign? And basically when we look at it that way, and the reason why I call it purpose driven SEO, is because we wanna find something behind our brand that we can promote and build a campaign around. And then we get all of those other artifacts of SEO, the, the content, the technical platform, the traction, the links, the authority building the, the endorsements of like relationships with other organizations that are helping us promote our campaign. We get all of that by just focusing on this one purpose. So that, that’s why I like to think of, uh, SEO campaigns as like purpose driven SEO campaigns. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:44): And, and I love that. And before people think, oh, I have to learn this new, you know, tactic or this new technique. What you just described is what people like me were doing in the eighties. Right? Yeah. It was just PR and community building, but we pitched a newspaper, you know, or we went out to a nonprofit agency and got them, you know, to partner. What? So, so the more things changed, the more they say the same, I mean,

Dale Bertrand (15:09): Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:10): Human influence hasn’t really changed or what people’s desires are or what lights them up. Hasn’t changed. We just have to figure out now they’re on different journeys. They’re, they’re in different platforms, they’re in different places. They get their information differently. And we just have to, we have to just remember those principles. Yeah. And then apply it to the technology. Don’t we,

Dale Bertrand (15:30): And then also realized that there was a hiccup in the fabric of time in the marketing space. Yeah. Where all of a sudden these technical people, I have a technical background. I was a programmer before I started doing SEO, but technical people for all of a sudden had all this value because the web came along. Right. And if you could optimize a website just right, or get your programmer to do it, you would get tra traffic from Google. Yeah. And, and those days are, are really behind us. Yeah. Where like Google’s AI has gotten to the point where it understands when a brand is building traction or, or if you like sell a B2B service or something like that. When you have endorsements in relationships with folks in your space that makes you worthy of organic traffic and rankings. Yeah. So now Google’s getting like, just getting so good at what they do that we’re reverting back to actually generating the, the right content that your customers are looking for and proving to Google that you’re authoritative in your space.

John Jantsch (16:26): So that example that you gave you, you give that a name or at least a point of view, which I think people I’d love for you to kind of riff on this a little bit, because I think people need to acknowledge this and, and think about this more and you call it promoting the story, you know, not promoting your content or not promoting your products or your, you know, webpages or whatever, but promoting kind of the whole story, which to me was that was the technical, you know, school, you know, story that, that people got interested in and the byproduct was you got links and you got traffic and you got eyeballs.

Dale Bertrand (17:03): Yeah, exactly. That’s what Google is, is looking for. So just think of it as like brands that are building traction or building like an audience. Yeah. And if you can show that initial uptick, then Google will give you the rest of the traffic and kind of have to help you go along that trajectory help you grow along that trajectory.

John Jantsch (17:21): So one of the elements of this kind of authority ideas is actually finding and activating influencers. I mean, people that you, you know, we all think about the, oh, you know, the top 10 names, every single person can name. Sure. We want them to talk about us and our stories and, uh, content. But you know, for that you’re Velcro person, Gary V talking about, them’s probably not gonna really do ’em much good. You know, how, how does the Velcro, you know, manufacturer go out there and find the right influencers to, to talk about their story.

Dale Bertrand (17:51): So what you would love is if it was your customers and it depends a lot of it depends on what you sell. So you could be in a consumer space where you’re basically, um, you’re basically incentivizing your customers to, to be brand evangelists and talk about the products, review the products, whatever you can do to get them to do that would work. It could be an ambassador program. And then in the B2B space, it, it might not be your customers. A another example I’ll give is we work with a 3d printing company that sold, you know, multimillion dollar high-end 3d printers, but there’s just not enough customers to really, you know, turn that into links and, and relationships that Google would see. So we focused on 3d printing hobbyists in order to generate content and build a community around the brand, even though what we were selling and making our money off was high end 3d printing machines that, that they could never afford. But we were able to build a community around the brand that Google saw and, and generated rankings and traffic.

John Jantsch (18:49): So I, I have kind of one final question that, and I’m just curious your opinion on this, cuz there’s a lot of various opinions, you know, on, on SEO related sites, how valuable are signals in social media. So people linking from Twitter, people talking about your brand from a pure SEO standpoint, how valuable are those?

Dale Bertrand (19:11): So there’s two answers, both are correct, which is the direct value of the links in the mention is not valuable. Yeah. But we still use social media as a tool for PR, which helps us build relationships, get back links on, on websites that Google can see stuff like that. And we know that it’s not valuable cuz short version of the story, Bing had tried to use social media instead of back links because Google started out, you know, really focused on back links to determine authority in the best websites. And when Microsoft started its search engine, they said, ah, we’re gonna do it better. We’re gonna rely on social media and it just didn’t work. Yeah. So they abandoned it. They went to links just like Google and now Google and, and Microsoft are both trying to figure out how to incorporate social signals. But uh, apparently what we see in the research is that it it’s just not, it’s just not good. Like it doesn’t help them identify the best content, the same way back links, engagement, and these other artifacts of real world relationships do.

John Jantsch (20:15): So Dale tell people where they can find out more about fire and spark and uh, the work that you’re uh, doing.

Dale Bertrand (20:21): Yeah. So we’re at fire and spark.com all spelled out and you can email me directly Dale, D a L E fire and spark.com um, all spelled out. And um, always, I love talking about SEO. So if anybody has any SEO questions, I’m, I’m happy to hear it.

John Jantsch (20:37): Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road again, maybe in beautiful state of Maine.

Dale Bertrand (20:46): Awesome, John, and thank you for the

John Jantsch (20:48): Opportunity. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=2019

August 18, 2022/by exposure

The 5 Stages Of Marketing Every Business Moves Their Customers Through

The 5 Stages Of Marketing Every Business Moves Their Customers Through written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

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

Key Takeaway:

Topics I Cover:

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

Resources I Mention:

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

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

August 12, 2022/by exposure

How High-Performers Overcome Customer Indecision

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

Marketing Podcast with Matt Dixon

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

Key Takeaway:

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

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

Questions I ask Matt Dixon:

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

More About Matt Dixon:

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

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

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

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

August 11, 2022/by exposure

10 Essential Website Elements Every Homepage Needs To Have

10 Essential Website Elements Every Homepage Needs To Have written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show on the 10 essential website elements every homepage needs to have.

Key Takeaway:

What’s the purpose of a website today? Your website has many jobs to do—and that’s part of what makes it so challenging to figure out what elements you should or shouldn’t include on your homepage. Ask yourself: Does your website build trust? Do you articulate what you do and who you serve? Are there clear calls to action? The list of questions goes on. I believe there are 10 critical elements every small business must include on its website, and in this solo episode, I’m breaking them down one by one.

Topics I Cover:

[5:04] Number 1 – Make a promise to solve your ideal customer’s greatest problem
[7:02] Number 2 – Include clear calls to action
[8:30] Number 3 – State clearly who your business gets results for
[10:02] Number 4 – Outline your core offerings
[10:54] Number 5 – Articulate your process and what customers can expect
[11:35] Number 6 – Feature your team
[12:31] Number 7 – Build credibility and trust
[13:29] Number 8 – Include a video on your homepage
[14:51] Number 9 – Use segmentation to personalize content offerings
[16:33] Number 10 – Offer various ways to get in contact with you – including SMS or text messaging
[17:37] Number 11 – Ensure your site is mobile optimized

Resources I Mention:

Website Essentials Workbook

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

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

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Janssen today. I’m doing a solo show, just me, nobody in the other screen. All right. I wanna talk about websites, but more importantly, I wanna talk about what I think are the 10 essential elements that every small business website, particularly the homepage needs to have today. And here’s the reason, the question that causes the reason for so many elements being necessary. The question is what’s the purpose of a website today? I know many people would say it’s to get customers or it’s to track leads, but I’m gonna suggest that your website has many jobs to do. And that’s part of the challenge, I think, with trying to figure out what goes on there. What doesn’t go on there. What do people need to see if you think about your website being the hub, maybe, or at least the starting point for a lot of your customers, for a lot of the decisions that are made about doing business for you.

John Jantsch (01:45): It’s part of the journey. We wanna find people that we can know and like, and trust as I’ve talked about for years. And I think that the website does a lot of that filtering both attracting and repelling. I suppose, those who come to your website. So it’s not simply just, I gotta have a website so that people can find me and buy from me. I mean, 87% of potential customers won’t consider a business with low ratings. So it’s not just that your site has to be there and be findable. People have to get there and they have to build some trust. You have to prove there has to be social proof. There has to be reviews. There have to be things that can make people say, yeah, okay. I checked that box. 64% of consumers say watching a video on Facebook has influenced a purchase decision.

John Jantsch (02:32): So part of the journey is that may be where they come to find out about you. But now they’re looking for more of that same type of content on your website. 86% of buyers will pay more for a better experience. I know I have I mean, 86% is most of us. So a lot of times our analysis is, does the site load quickly do the forms fill out? Does it look intuitive? Does it look like what I think it should look like for this industry? I mean, we all have gone to that website that looked like it was built 20 years ago and we’re out of there. And I think that’s a big part of a job that our website’s going to do. It’s going to start the experience of what it’s gonna be like to work with you. And then finally, and I think this one points to the need for all of these elements that I’m gonna talk about today, probably more than anything, 92% of consumers will visit a Bo a brand’s website for reasons other than making a purchase.

John Jantsch (03:31): So what are those other 92%? And by the way, that’s not just prospects and buyers. That’s also potential employees because really when we talk about all these changes in marketing, the thing that’s changed the most, I think is really how people choose, get to choose, to become customers and employees and the kind of straight line suggestion of the funnel approach to marketing of get some people to know you push a few small few through that to small end of the funnel. I mean, that journey, that linear journey is really doesn’t exist today. And that, that many of the ways in which people decide about a company that they’re gonna do business with might be considered out of our hands out of our control in some ways. And our job really then is to guide people along this journey. But let me give you one last biggie for why your website needs to look a certain way, act a certain way, provide a certain journey for people, your website.

John Jantsch (04:28): I believe because it is such an important part of the journey gives you the greatest ability to increase something that I came across it in Harvard business review talking about enterprise companies, but something called WTP, which is willingness to pay. And I think that in the sea of options that people have out there, if you can increase your worthiness, if you can increase the experience from your website, you’re going to increase, somebody’s willingness to pay. All right? So let’s get in quickly to the 10 things. So the first thing your website needs to do is make a promise to solve your ideal. Customer’s greatest problem. So many websites today that I go to you go there. First thing you see above the fold is we are this business or we’re this kind of business, or we’ve been in this business for X amount of years.

John Jantsch (05:22): Typically the person that’s visiting the site knows what business you’re in, because that’s why they found you. That’s what they’re looking for. But what they wanna see is do you get me? Do you understand? I mean, is there something that you’re doing that’s different? In fact, if you can communicate the problem, a lot of times people don’t really even know the problem they’re trying to solve necessarily. They know, for example, I’m a marketing firm. They know, for example, somebody’s a remodeling contractor. And so they go to a remodeling contractor, but what problem now? I mean, people don’t wanna buy marketing services. They don’t really even wanna buy remodeling services. They want an incredible kitchen with an incredible experience. They want quick wins, long term growth, hassles. They want great communication. I mean, those are the problems that people are trying to solve quite frankly, through looking at our businesses as a way to do that.

John Jantsch (06:11): So what problem can you promise to solve that needs to be above the fold? And frankly, I’m starting to actually see websites to Google this sometime problems we solve. And you’re gonna see some websites that are actually dedicating entire pages to a list of problems that they solve. You know, for example, in, in marketing, most of the problems we encounter are actually strategy problems, but nobody goes, I’m gonna go find me to buy some strategy today. but they, that they’ve, they wanna know why they can’t charge a premium for their services or worse, why they’re always having to offer discounts. And so that’s a problem that can be solved with strategy, but we have to identify the problem. The thing that they’re actually experiencing is they can’t charge enough. We’re gonna fix that with strategy, but it won’t. We have to articulate that problem first before they’ll listen to our solution about strategy calls to action.

John Jantsch (07:04): If somebody, you know, how today is so popular, so common to get these long scrolling home pages. Well, if somebody comes to your website and they’re starting to engage and they’re starting to scroll down and say, oh, who do they serve? You know, who are their case studies? They start looking for things. We wanna have the ability for somebody to click, to take an action, to do something that’s CTAs calls to action above the fold, right under your core message. There are people that are, that actually are just looking to contact you. So make it easy for them to do that. But the vast majority of people are looking for a price, quote, an evaluation, a free report. That’s going to tell them how to do X, Y, and Z. Sprinkle those throughout your homepage, sprinkle those throughout your website.

John Jantsch (07:52): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with some rush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing, build, manage, and measure campaigns across all channels, faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get Semrush, visit Semrush.com that’s S E M rush.com/go. And you could try it for seven days for free, who we get results for.

John Jantsch (08:34): Tell me very specifically who your ideal customer is. Don’t tell me that you serve homeowners. Tell me that you serve homeowners in a very specific area of town with a very specific challenge with a very specific need. I mean, identify as clearly as possible show pictures of, you know, maybe you have three or four segments, but don’t just leave this open to where somebody says, well, I own a home.

John Jantsch (08:58): So I guess I can call them be very specific where somebody says, oh my goodness, you serve me. You’re talking about me. And I’d like to use the word who we get results for rather than who our customers are, who we sell to getting results as what people are after in a lot of ways, that’s a problem, uh, that, that you’re trying to demonstrate that you can solve. And one of the things about that approach to who we get results, it’s sort of implied who we don’t get results for or who we can’t work for. Again, using my business. As an example, if somebody just comes to me and says, I want leads, I on Facebook ads and, you know, go, I mean, we get results for people who actually wanna build a long term strategy that allows them to dominate their market and not just have a quick event that is maybe going to make the phone ring.

John Jantsch (09:45): Maybe not. We talk about strategy incessantly because that’s really, in fact, that’s really the only way to engage my firm. And so we want to chase people away. We don’t want people who are like, oh, I don’t need that strategy stuff. We want them to know that’s not who we’re gonna get a result for number four, our core offerings. So there’s so many businesses that sell, have the ability to sell. I should say 27 things. But when we really dig in, what we find is that there are three things they do that generate 80% of their profits, 80% of their business, really their ideal engagements. And yet they list everything they could do. What I want you to think about doing is saying here’s the three things at the most that we do, and we do them better than anyone. Now, if you get a customer and you, you have a great relationship, you start working with them.

John Jantsch (10:38): It doesn’t mean you can’t sell them the other 27 things. But when it comes to actually getting that ideal customer, you want to, you want that profitable customer. You want them to know that the service that you sell, whatever it is, it, you are better than anyone else at doing it. That you’re the obvious choice for doing that. The fifth thing I wanna hear a little bit about is your process. If you have a process for getting me your result, I mean, it might be the ordering process. It might be your onboarding process. It might be your 37 step process to make sure that the job site is cleaned up after you’re done. Processes are amazing marketing materials because they prove that first off you have a professional approach. You have thought out how to get me a result, put those on, on, you know, tell me what’s going to happen next.

John Jantsch (11:24): I mean, you could even have a process that says, look, if you fill out this form, here’s, what’s going to happen next. You know, if you’re trying to get a quote, tell them the steps in the process, tell them what to expect team, you know, for, I read thousands of Google reviews and I will tell you that for most small businesses, when a customer is happy, they’re happy with the person they worked with. Not necessarily the company, the person they worked with, the technician, the person that delivered the service, you know, to them, that’s the brand. And so let’s feature our team. Let’s show. ’em what our culture is all about. Have videos of all of your staff saying their favorite meal on their birthday or something goofy like that. Just make sure that you’re featuring everybody, that person’s going to be working with the client.

John Jantsch (12:11): That person’s gonna be the person that shows up at the door. Let’s have pictures. Let’s have videos. In fact, what’s great about those is if you have salespeople, if you have technicians, send those out, here’s who here’s, who’s coming to see you. Great way to, you know, to really open the door, to really build trust, to create an experience. I feel like I’ve met that person now, before they show up, trust my customer journey. You’ve heard me talk about it forever. No, like trust, try by repeat and refer. I think trust today, especially when you think about somebody who’s just going out there surfing, or maybe somebody told ’em in a Facebook group, oh, you need to check out this company or this website. They’re making a lot of decisions about whether or not they even wanna pick up the phone or fill out a form or engage you in any way, shape or form based on what they see right away.

John Jantsch (12:59): Kind of first impression. I mean, that’s how we do it today. We won’t move forward. unless we feel like, okay, I like what I’m seeing. There’s proof that they’ve worked with other people, oh, they’ve got these three people as customers. I know who they are. Oh, they’ve their content has shown up in this publication. That must mean something. Oh, they have 108,000 Twitter followers. Again, all the ways in which we show proof that we’re a real business, that other people trust us, that we can get results. I love case studies to show that we’ve gotten results for people. Number eight, generically video video is for a percentage of the market out there is how they want to consume content. I, I mean, I can decide all the statistics about YouTube and frankly, even TikTok. And some of those other places that are very video centric, people love video, but it’s also a great way to build trust.

John Jantsch (13:48): It’s a great way for you to show your customers, your happy customers. There’s, you know, you read that testimonial that says they were great, Betty from Memphis. Well, how about Betty from Memphis? gushing about how great they are. Show us how your product’s made. Show us behind the scenes. Again, I already talked about your technicians, your designers, your sales people ought to have videos. You’re seeing more and more videos. And again, this doesn’t have to be high quality stuff. This can be pick up an iPhone. Let people start talking. I saw a great video the other day about, you know, an actual patient. This was not a like deep medical thing. I think it was a dermatologist or something that was had a patient was actually asking them a few, you know, very frequently asked questions and the doctor was answering those questions as part of the video, there was no, I don’t think HIPAA issues or anything with what was going on there, but I just thought it looked very real.

John Jantsch (14:39): It was in the office. It looked like an actual patient. Maybe it wasn’t , maybe it was, there was the technician. And, but it looked very much like an experience that somebody going to that office would have increasingly segmentation. If you have several types of customers, several types of markets, completely different markets. You know, I always use the real estate agent as an example. They want home buyers and they want home sellers. totally different needs, totally different questions, totally different objectives. So how do you talk to them? Well, today we’ve gotta start using technology. And one of the simplest technologies is to have a path. Are you this? Or are you that go here for the best content for this go here for the best content for this. Maybe you can actually have, you know, you’ve probably gone to a website that has these popups, that, that are actually asking questions.

John Jantsch (15:31): I think we used to think of those popups as being really intrusive. And yeah, sometimes if I’m really trying to find something specific on a website, you feel like they’re intrusive, but if I’m coming to a website for the first time, and I’m trying to understand, like where do I find the answers? I’m very willing to answer a question. If the proposition is tell us, you know, which tell us who you are. tell us what you’re looking for so that we can actually make sure you get the right content. I think we’ll give people that shot. I mean, we actually want that more personalized journey. The technology is there today and you’ve got competitors out there that are completely personalizing for, you know, who people are once they get in their CRM and you come back to my website, you know, I should be able to tell you, heck I should.

John Jantsch (16:19): I should say, I should actually know a lot about you and not bother you with the free report that I know you got the first time you came here. So those are things that people are expecting today because the technology makes it possible. Give me lots of ways to contact you like it or not. Text messaging in a lot of industries is the preferred method. If you’re under 40, there’s a good chance. Or I should say if your customer’s prospects are under 40, there’s a good chance that they are going to in many industries want that type of communication. And I’m not talking about the spammy like bomb people with, oh, we have 10% off today kind of stuff. But for appointment reminders, for review request for things that, that, you know, shipping details. I mean, those are things that people now expect to have the ability to get a text or an email, or, you know, a chat bot.

John Jantsch (17:13): I mean, we’ve just gotta give people, you know, all the ways in which they prefer their preferred methods, like years ago, we used to talk about, do you take checks and credit cards well and cash. Well, now it’s SMS and it’s chat bots and it’s, you know, real time response. I mean, that’s really what people are expecting. I know it’s harder, but I think we’ve gotta give people the options to communicate the way they wanna communicate. And then the last one, this is actually number 11, if you were keeping track kind of a bonus, really, but you know, we’ve been talking about for years, this idea of mobile first, we’ve absolutely got to think in terms of what our website looks like and how it acts and how people can respond using mobile devices because let’s face it. They are. I mean, I, I almost every single one of our clients is well over 50% in terms of traffic to their website coming on a mobile device or a tablet.

John Jantsch (18:09): So most designers, I shouldn’t say most, a lot of designers still, or a lot of these, you know, way webpage builders today. People are designing for that big, giant screen they have in front of them. You’ve got to design for a mobile device and then make it work on a bigger screen. And so if you start thinking about that functionality too, I want click to call because I sure as heck don’t wanna have to like, look at your phone number, go, and now I wanna call you. So I have to go to my phone, the phone app component or text app component. And now I have to put that number in and then I have to come back and forth cuz I can’t remember. So click to call texting, chat on mobile, you know, easy like your hours directions. I mean all the things that people on a mobile device quite often are looking for immediately and expecting in the experience, but certainly make sure that you’re, we’ve all seen them.

John Jantsch (18:59): You know, the sites that, that, you know, the content was designed for a big screen, you put it on that mobile and all of a sudden the responsive element of the website just makes the, a mess out of the content. So that’s it, that’s the 10 things. I hope that you enjoyed those today. If you come to duct tape, marking.com, if you Google website essentials, you know, you’ll find, uh, some of this in a, you know, in a video format, in a text format, we actually even have forms a workbook that you know, for, you know, working on your website. So check out some of the resources at ducttapemarketing.com. All right, that’s it for today. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it@marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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

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

August 4, 2022/by exposure

The Anti-Time Management Strategy That Actually Gives You Your Time Back

The Anti-Time Management Strategy That Actually Gives You Your Time Back written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Richie Norton

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Richie Norton. Richie is an award-winning author and serial entrepreneur. An executive coach to CEOs, he is featured in Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc., Entrepreneur, and Huffington Post. Pacific Business News recognized Richie as one of the Top Forty Under 40 “best and brightest young businessmen” in Hawaii. He’s the author of a new book that comes out in August 2022 —Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping.

Key Takeaway:

What if you could enjoy expansive freedom by prioritizing attention instead of simply managing your time? With the Anti-Time Management Strategy, you can. In this episode, Richie Norton, author and serial entrepreneur, shares the framework he’s created that helps you find motivation, prioritize your ideals, create a flexible work-life lifestyle, and actually gives you your time back. We dive into Anti-Time Management and how it will help you be present for the people, projects, plans, and priorities that matter most.

Questions I ask Richie Norton:

[1:29] The book starts with a missile attack — can you tell that story and share the why behind the reason it made it into the book?
[4:13] How does that story kinda launch what you’re trying to say in anti-time management?
[5:56] What is anti-time management?
[6:52] What is time tipping and how does that juxtapose with anti-time management?
[9:13] Why do you think balance is the wrong goal?
[10:38] How do we move away from the idea that has been ingrained into society that if you’re not sitting at a desk from nine to five, you’re not working?
[13:16] How do you get better at protecting the lifestyle you want to live?
[16:23] What is project stacking?
[18:51] What is expert sourcing?
[20:03] Could you talk about something that I think is the essence of the book — changing how you get paid?
[22:23] Where can people connect with you?

More About Richie Norton:

Connect with and learn more about Richie — RichieNorton.com
Get Richie’s 90-day action plan
Pre-order a copy of his book — Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jan. My guest today is Richie Norton. He’s an award-winning author and serial entrepreneur, an executive coach to CEOs he’s featured in Forbes, Bloomberg business week, Inc entrepreneur and Huffington post Pacific business news recognized Richie as one of the top 40 under 40 best and brightest young businessmen in Hawaii. We’re gonna talk about a new book by Richie called anti time management, reclaim your time and revolutionize your results with the power of time tipping. So Richie, welcome to the show.

Richie Norton (01:25): Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here. This is gonna be so much fun.

John Jantsch (01:29): So I do have to warn people that the book starts with a missile attack. Yes. So may maybe you can briefly tell that story and then tell me why that made it into the book.

Richie Norton (01:39): Well, some people may know of this, but if you don’t. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:43): I recall. I recall

Richie Norton (01:45): It. Yeah, it has a good ending, you know, like spoiler alert, but I actually was in, I live in Hawaii. I was on a business trip in, in Tennessee. And while I was there, I get this text message saying ballistic missile attack in Hawaii. And it followed up with this is not a test. And so therefore it was not a test. This was happening. This is from our government, you know, telling us this and I’m freaking out. It’s easy. It’s easy to tell a story now, like when was happening, I mean, this was, it was real. It was real. I mean, there were people in Hawaii that reportedly were jumping into manhole, you know, so they could like take cover, like it was real. So I call, I have, you know, my, my three boys are at home. My, my wife’s home, I’m calling each one of ’em, nobody answers.

Richie Norton (02:33): And you know, the lines get crossed, you know, when there’s a disaster happening. Anyways, my one of my sons calls back and I think he was 13 at the time. And it was crazy. He said his goodbyes, you know, he is, I love you dad. And he was just weeping. And I re I remember when that happened, I just started thinking like, oh my gosh, my whole world is about to get destroyed. My family, my home, everything I’ve known the whole Hawaiian island chain, uh, like who knows what’s gonna happen here. And it was an interesting experience in addition to what was happening at the time, because I’ve had a number of, of tragedies and I’ll list them without getting too emotional here. But I had a brother-in-law pass away at 21 and his sleep. I had a son pass away as a baby. Uh, he caught pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

Richie Norton (03:23): My wife had a stroke and lost her memory. We’ve had three foster kids that we thought we were gonna adopt come and go. After two years, taking care of them, which was so hard. And I had my, I had a son get hit by a car and he crossing the street and he shouldn’t be here, but he is. But so in this moment, while there’s this missile attack, I had the strangest feeling. In addition to all the emotions, I thought, at least we didn’t live without, you know, at least we didn’t live with regret. We lived without regret. We did all the things we thought we could do. We tried our hardest, we did our best. We’ve experienced tragedy after tragedy and we’ve gotten back up and it was just this weird, surreal moment. And of course, then later we get this text saying that it was a mistake, you know, and life goes back to normal. So here we are

John Jantsch (04:13): Pretty, pretty crazy. So how does that doesn’t really anchor the book, but uses the launching off point. How does that story kinda launch what you’re trying to say in anti time management?

Richie Norton (04:24): You know, at times people will, I’m kind of stuttering cause there’s so many different ideas in my head right now. but when people start thinking about their lives, one of the first things they do is they work towards managing their time better. And the moment they do that, they, whether they realize it or not, cuz fish are the last to realize that there’s this thing called water, right? They don’t even know what’s going on. We don’t even realize that there’s this thing that’s been actually controlling our entire lives until we start looking at it. And we don’t realize that time management was actually designed specifically not to give us freedom, but to control every aspect of our lives at work and eventually into our homes. It’s not about controlling time. It’s about who owns your time, who controls your time and time management was specifically designed that someone else would.

Richie Norton (05:13): So this is important because as soon as we start realizing, oh my gosh, time is limited. Life is short. I know it’s cliche. We immediately create a priority and we instinctively put that priority last on a timeline. It wasn’t an instinct. It was taught to us in kindergarten to do that. Here’s how you set goals. And so I, I truly believe that, you know, goals from experience are tasks, goals, outside experience are growth, and there is a way to work from the goal instead of endlessly toward it. And when you have these experiences in life, you start realizing what really matters. And is there a way to make our work, support it as opposed to working toward it and never having it happen?

John Jantsch (05:57): Yeah. There’s a lot to unpack from what you just said there, but I want to get to give you a chance to say like in two minutes then what is anti time management?

Richie Norton (06:06): Anti time management is like a value centered approach. So stop timing your values and start valuing your time. Right? People will like bake a cake without sugar and expect it to be sweet. I know you can put other things in it, make it sweet. I get it. But just go with the analogy for a second. That’s like trying to live a life saying you have values in one day, you’ll live them and expect it to be a life lived on value. It’s not possible. But when you bake in freedom of time and autonomy and the things you want, even inside of an entrepreneurial business from the start, it actually expands. It creates it. So all these entrepreneurs, I’m gonna start a business to get my time and freedom back only to lose their time and freedom to the business, why they created that world for themselves. They didn’t know any other way. They learned it from corporate.

John Jantsch (06:52): So your solution of course, to, to getting a hold of this is something you call time tipping. Mm-hmm . So because that’s in the title as well. Let’s juxtapose that with anti time management.

Richie Norton (07:04): So anti time management, like the idea of time management, they control you anti time management. You get to control what you’re doing. Time tipping is kind of this framework that kind of goes along with this methodology. So the concept here I’ll make it super specific. If you are a college kid or whatever you are, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re an executive. The first thing you do when you wanna change your life in a lot of ways is you decide how you’re gonna get paid. But it, the instant you decide that you’re gonna move to the city to get paid. You made the decision to have a city life you did. And you decided that everything you do revolves around that world. So someone will get paid in a way they don’t like living. And they’ll do that for a really long time, maybe forever. Whereas someone who wants to live by a lake in Montana could go to Montana, live by a lake and make the same money or more and live the lifestyle they wanted from the start.

Richie Norton (07:59): So in time tipping, we reverse it. What’s the goal of the goal. What’s the job of the goal. What’s the reason I’m getting paid. And we go, we move beyond that. So we start with purpose, create projects around that purpose. And eventually we create a model that allows us to get paid that way. That doesn’t mean we get paid last. We can still get paid first. I’m a huge fan of getting paid first. And just saying, all of a sudden your work is in alignment with autonomy, with availability, with ability with actual productivity, as opposed to lying to ourselves and pretending that it one day will.

John Jantsch (08:33): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. You know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with Semrush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing, build, manage, and measure campaigns across all channels, faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get Semrush, visit Semrush.com that’s S E M rush.com/go. And you could try it for seven days for free.

John Jantsch (09:13): So for years, you know, one of, one of the mantras always was, you know, to have this balance work, life balance. And obviously most entrepreneurs know that’s a fallacy, but you take it on pretty head on. I mean, why is balance really the wrong goal? Even,

Richie Norton (09:27): You know, it’s like the word has got, or the term work life balance has gotten messed up with the meaning. Yeah. So, so they’ll say like, I want balance say, no, you don’t wanna sleep for eight hours and play for eight hours on work for eight hours. Maybe one day, you know, like not every day. What you want is these, the essence of that is that you want the availability ability and autonomy to do what you wanna do when you wanna do it balance itself. It’s a weird word because balance itself in physics means motionless. It doesn’t move. Nobody wants a life that is motionless. It doesn’t move. You actually wanna unbalance or imbalance your life in the direction you want it to go. So you’re able to create things and set things in motion, not just do it all yourself. So I, you know, I even work life flexibility is a better term, but even that term misses the point because work life flexibility has become a perk at corporations at the moment. It’s a perk. Get a corporation is not a benefit to the worker anymore. It’s used as another way to control you. So I’m a fan of this concept of time tipping. Cause we need a new language to talk about the things we actually want because it’s not there.

John Jantsch (10:38): So this is slowly changing this sort of industrial age, you know, management, you know, era is changing. I mean my parents and my wife’s parents could never really understand what I do right, right. Because it didn’t fit into what they understood is a job. And you know, increasingly of course I was doing it 30 years ago, increasingly that, you know, my kids are like, no, that’s how I’m, you know, that’s like, that’s normal, right? That’s normal. I’m gonna have freedom. That’s right. I can work from home. I can do anything I want, you know? And so it is changing, but there still are a lot of people that are just very ingrained in that idea of if I’m not busy, if I’m not filling by my day, if I’m not sitting at a desk from nine to five, then I’m not working. I mean, how do we get outta that?

Richie Norton (11:23): It’s true. And I, I think what’s amazing is this is one of the first times I think in history, cuz a lot of the, I, you know, I work with corporations. I work with executives. I work with entrepreneurs. I work with the everyday person. But when you talk about it from like retaining talent, you know, you know, point of view, things start changing because you realize that someone is only in a job for on average in America, 4.6 years, that means you’re turning over at least every five years, more or less. And when that happens, you have a new opportunity. Look, you as an entrepreneur, you can change projects or careers every day. Right? Right. Yeah. But if you’re in one place one time and everybody’s changing every five years and you realize that leaving a job and getting a new one will get you a higher pay raise than staying for the three or 4%.

Richie Norton (12:05): They’re gonna give you every year. Right. Changes the dynamics. So what happens is this is the first generation. I mean generation now, I don’t just mean what age group in generation. Now everyone who’s living. This is the first time that everyone realizes they actually have everyone in quotes. Right. Everyone realizes they have a choice in the matter. Yeah. Yeah. Whether they do something or not is different, but the switching costs are so low to do something new. Whereas in the nineties, even in the two thousands, it was pretty hard. And before that almost impossible today. So they go, wow, it’s so hard to keep these kids on the, on here that work, is it? Or do they just want, do they just know they can do something else and make more money for in, in less time and they’re actually more productive and you wish you could do that too. And you’re jealous. Like what are we talking about here? but what’s cool is our parents, grandparents, they set us up for this. This is the success that they were working towards. So those who don’t wanna take advantage of it, I think it’s an awareness thing. And then those who want take it advantage of it, the opportunities now it’s, it’s never been more readily available.

John Jantsch (13:07): So one of the things that I think trips, a lot of people up is especially, well, people that are bought into what you’re preaching is that there are a lot of things that want to take your time. yes. So, so how do you get better at protecting? You know, you could set up like, here’s my flex, here’s my lifestyle I’m gonna live. And then everybody just like starts piling on.

Richie Norton (13:26): Now that that’s a great question. And it’s, what’s funny about that is like, it’s the same thing with money. When someone realizes you have money that people are like, Hey, I need some money too. Can I have some money? Right. So I like to believe in this concept that I call time flow there’s cash flow and there’s time flow. And you’re right. The people who are the most productive are rewarded with more work. So instead of getting things done, you know, from nine to five and they can get it done in between, you know, nine and 12 or whatever, they don’t get to go home early, early, they just get more work. So then we, everyone starts saying, nevermind, let’s all be average. Let’s all just do the same thing. Let’s spread out day, the exact time, you know . And so here we are.

Richie Norton (14:05): But for people who are trying to like figure out what to do at their time, I straight up, I have to help many people free up their time. They do it on their own, just sharing their principles. And a lot of times they go right back to doing more work. So there’s no judgment of how you fill your time. You’re gonna do it however you want. But there is a way to make one small move that allows one. It makes lots of decisions that you would’ve made disappear. And on the other hand, it creates a number of different opportunities and possibilities. But to answer, it’s like more of a bigger picture question, Aristotle called it a final cause. So like an acorn becomes an Oak tree. So a lot of times we’re planting things that aren’t acorns, but we expect them to become Oak trees.

Richie Norton (14:46): So the moment you realize that, then you can go back and make your work aligned with what you wanna do. Like someone says, I’m not making money. And I say, when’s the last time you asked someone to pay you? Oh no, I’ve been working so hard. Well, if work to you means you’re gonna get paid. Don’t you think you should ask someone to pay you cuz you haven’t worked a day in your life. If you’re defining work as getting paid, now you don’t have to define work as getting paid. But if you do, you should be asking people to pay you that’s aligned work. So when it comes to like how you make your decisions, Aristotle called a final cause. And the idea was an acorn becomes an Oak tree. So academics will use an example of like a table and they’ll say so I need wood.

Richie Norton (15:22): And I need to be able to have a design of how to make it. And I need someone to put it together and voila it’s done well. What’s the goal of the table. If it was to have like an heirloom for your family forever. Cool. If it’s because you have some nice people coming over, some business people, some family, and you wanna have a nice dinner. You there’s Uber eats, man. You can go down the street and go get a taco anywhere. You, you know that there’s a food truck of every flavor everywhere. So when you realize it’s not the dinner, it’s not the table, it’s not the wood. It’s the experience. Well then you can change what you’re doing. The idea is stop focusing on means and focus on ends. Covey didn’t say begin with means in mind, he said begin with the end in mind. And so I think we’ve made goals, habits and strengths. We’ve turned those into means, sorry, we’ve turned. Those means into ends into themselves. So then we lose all of our time and things that don’t lead us anywhere. Even though we think they are, instead of just saying, you know what, if I just did the thing, all this stuff would go away. I’d have more time.

John Jantsch (16:24): Well and how much stuff do we do in the name of being busy? That doesn’t really go anywhere, right? Yeah. So one of the, you have the book broken up into sections. One of the sections is ultimately some practices, you know, for implementing your methodology. So I jotted down a couple that I’d love to hear you explain a little more project stacking for the first

Richie Norton (16:43): One. Oh man, that’s such a good one. it’s such a good one. The concept is how it’s not multitasking. It would be super single tasking. Where one thing you do impacts all of your other companies, whether you like the guy or not. Elon Musk is a master at this thing. You know, his one company will affect all of the others. So you know, space X and you got the solar thing and you got Tesla, they’re using similar technology. They’re using similar resources. One thing impacts the other, you got this boring companies. Now these cars can go underneath. So that’s the idea is you might say, I wanna do all these different things and I’m not saying it to do ’em all at the same time. Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t. But if you can look at your projects and instead of putting them linearly, turn ’em over and stack ’em, it’s almost like this alignment allows you to say, Hey, I wanna make this decision. And this decision makes these different things in my life happen. I can give you more examples, but is that a good, is that, yeah,

John Jantsch (17:44): That’s a great example. And I’ll actually take it. If some people are thinking, oh Teslas, blah, blah, blah. You know, but I mean you write a hundred blog posts over a hundred days. You turn that into a hundred pieces of audio content that turns into a book. I mean that, you know, that’s another way of kind of looking at it on a real simple term, isn’t it?

Richie Norton (18:00): Oh absolutely. You know, every time we share an example, just leave, have a super example. It becomes like, whoa, like, so for me, yeah, I was an entrepreneur. I still am. People ask me questions. So I wrote a book about it. This is an alignment. The book. I mean the other book I’m referring to is the power of starting something stupid. That book turned into coaching consulting, online courses. All these things can happen with the same client that turned into me creating a product based business, where we make over a hundred different products at any given time for entrepreneurs all over the world. And now I’m making yoga pants and I’m making tiny houses in the same breath. And then I’ll be like, wait, what are you talking about? Like, yeah, it’s one decision. And it all came because of the book, the mindset. And now I have an editing company for people and people go like, what are you doing? How you do so many things. So I don’t, my job is to get people their time back. And if there’s a way I can do that in a way that also gives me my time back. Why wouldn’t I?

John Jantsch (18:51): Yeah. And it leads to another practice expert sourcing.

Richie Norton (18:55): This is, so this one’s so important. Expert sourcing is so important because what most people do, you know this, we all do it. We all do it like, oh, I need to delegate or I need to outsource or I need to hire an employee. So what they do is they go and find someone that’s as cheap as possible. But with that choice, it is not about money. They could be the same price. Just depends on what’s going on. But they intentionally go into it saying, I’m gonna teach this person how to do what I do. And they intentionally from the start have set up themselves instead of having zero jobs, they now have at least two or three jobs.

John Jantsch (19:30): that’s why it’s so hard to do. Right. That’s why people don’t

Richie Norton (19:33): It. It’s like I’m gonna hire this person. I’m gonna teach them how to do it. They’re gonna do it wrong. And then I’m gonna do it myself. . But in, in inherently in the word expert, I’m inferring, they know how to do it better than you. Right. There is zero training in expert sourcing. Sure. There’s little things about, I like this. I like it done by then. And here’s how, you know, we work, but this person should be able to teach you how it’s done. And in that sense, everything changes.

John Jantsch (20:03): Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome way to look at it. Let’s wrap up today talking about something you’ve hinted at, but I want you to hit this dead on because I think it’s in a lot of ways. I think it’s the essence of the book change, how you get paid,

Richie Norton (20:15): How you get paid dramatically impacts your life in every way. And I don’t mean how much you get paid. I get that. You need to make a certain amount and I get the more the merrier you and I both know millionaires. Maybe even some billionaires that have no time and they hate their lives. They’ll say they’ll even say money is easy. Time is hard. How you get paid, decides how you live your life. So if I am making a ton of money, but I’ve decided I have to work in a swivel chair, I will stay in that swivel chair spinning around all day long. When I told myself I wanted to work from my cell phone, this is before Facebook. This was before Facebook, when phones folded it was a decision cuz I knew that would force me to have to think, wow, I can’t be in an office.

Richie Norton (21:05): How am I gonna get this done? I can’t necessarily have people all around. How am I gonna get this done? So it allows you to be creative, these positive constraints. We’ve ended up just being on the road for six months at a time with our kids, screaming in the back of the car, doing whatever we want. Not that we had all the money in the world, we’re making money on the road while we’re good, just like we would anywhere else. So the idea is when you can create an environment that allows you to live the way you want, then you can also get paid to support that environment. And it’s a very different way of thinking, but it works like magic.

John Jantsch (21:37): Well, and it’s kinda like the end in mind of thinking too, that you just mentioned too, is if you start there , you know, then all the decisions you make, you know, should support that. And just, as you said, in some cases, they force you to make certain decisions. Don’t

Richie Norton (21:51): They, they do. It’s a forcing function. And so that’s why with small moves, you can reclaim your time. You can be as productive as you already are. I’m not saying get rid of things that you, that are good that you like. I’m just saying, don’t lie to yourself when it’s not working, let’s just work on something that’s in alignment. And here’s how to do it in a way that creates time for you and your family and for others.

John Jantsch (22:13): And, and I guess we could spend a whole nother show talking about how you actually figure out what alignment means, but there you go. That’s for another day, right? the Richie. Thanks so much for stopping by the duct marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can connect with you. Obviously the book will be available wherever you buy books.

Richie Norton (22:28): Yeah. Go to Richie norton.com. And if you go to Richie norton.com/time, I have a 90 day action plan that helps walk you through this. So you can find your alignment and make these things happen now, you know, and it’s really powerful. So, but honestly, John, I’m just so grateful to be on your show. Thank you so much. This has been so, so good to me

John Jantsch (22:45): Now. You, you bet great book again. I appreciate it. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Richie Norton (22:51): Definitely. I’ll see

John Jantsch (22:53): Ya. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we create a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment dot co .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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

July 30, 2022/by exposure

The Power Of Regret

The Power Of Regret written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Daniel Pink

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Daniel Pink. Daniel is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including his latest, The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, published in February. His other books include the New York Times bestsellers When and A Whole New Mind — as well as the #1 New York Times bestsellers Drive and To Sell is Human. Dan’s books have won multiple awards, have been translated into 42 languages, and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in Washington, DC, with his family.

Key Takeaway:

Everybody has regrets — it’s human. Understanding how regret works can help us make smarter decisions, perform better at work and school, and bring greater meaning to our lives. In this episode, 5-time NYT best-selling author, Daniel Pink, joins me to talk about the power of regret and how looking backward can actually move us forward in life. Daniel debunks the myth of the “no regrets” philosophy of life through his research in social psychology, neuroscience, and biology.

Questions I ask Daniel Pink:

[2:37] How does one really conduct research on regret?
[3:44] Are there were differences between the world product and the American product?
[4:53] There are posters and tattoos around the world that say no regrets, so how is this a positive thing?
[6:49] Are you saying that people make mistakes and learn from them?
[7:42] How did you land on this particular topic?
[11:44] Could you define what regret is and how it differs from disappointment and guilt?
[16:51] Could you walk us through the four categories of regret: foundation, boldness, moral, and connection?
[19:35] Does the demographic data show that older people have different regrets or bigger regrets than younger people?
[22:41] How does the research you’ve done connect with or have a relationship with mental health?
[25:49] Where can people learn more about you, your book, and your work?

More About Daniel Pink:

Get a copy of his latest book — The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward
Learn more about his work — DanPink.com

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Daniel Pink. He is the author of five New York times, best sellers, including his latest, the power of regret, how looking backward moves us forward. His other books include the New York times best sellers win and a whole new mind, as well as the number one New York times, best sellers drive and to sell is human. His books have won multiple awards have been translated into 42 languages and have sold millions of copies around the world. He lives in DC with his family. So welcome to the show, Dan, I should say

Daniel Pink (01:23): Welcome back. Yeah, no I don’t. How many times is this now? John? It’s like five

John Jantsch (01:27): Or five. I’m go. I’m gonna, yeah, at least. I mean, like, I didn’t mention Johnny Bunco, but you know, you were

Daniel Pink (01:31): . That was, yeah. I was thinking as I, as I was look putting together my to-do list for the day and like what kind of appointments I had, I was thinking, geez, Louis, I think this is like the fifth time I’ve been on Jan’s show. So yeah, I think the sixth time I get a free bagel. Isn’t how it works

John Jantsch (01:45): With you. That’s actually let’s I like that idea. Let’s not talk about your book then let’s just talk about politics in DC right now for the whole show.

Daniel Pink (01:52): Uh, I, Hey, go for it. Go for it. It is, you know, if you wanna bring tears to your audience’s eyes, that’s fine with me. It’s your show. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:59): No, I will forego that, but some people may not know that you spent some time in politics and did some speech writing for at least one president, if not two.

Daniel Pink (02:09): Well, I have, I, I worked in the reason I live in Washington is that my wife and I came here as a very young people. I worked in politics. I sort of fell into becoming a speech writer. My wife was a litigator for the justice department, and then we both left those jobs, but we didn’t leave DC and ended up raising, um, ended up raising three kids here. DC is a lovely place to live. And the truth of the matter is that day to day, it is far less obsessed with politics and most people outside of the beltway think.

John Jantsch (02:37): Yeah. Yeah. I totally agree. So let’s, let’s get into the book regret, the power of regret you for most of your projects, you do a lot of research and you did something called the American regret project. I think you, I think I heard you talk about how does one really conduct research on regret?

Daniel Pink (02:53): Well, it’s a great question. And so actually there’s sort of three legs on which this book stands. One of them them is I looked at about 50 years of research that scientists did on this emotion of regret. And this is research done by developmental psychologists, uh, by social psychologists, by neuroscientists, by cognitive scientists and others. I also did, as you mentioned, the American regret project, which is just a gigantic public opinion survey, the largest public opinion survey of American attitudes about regret ever conducted to try to get some insights about this profoundly misunderstood emotion and then, but wait, there’s more. I also did a third piece of research, which is called the world regret survey, where I collected lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of regrets from all over the world. And so that, so I wanted, so that’s how I came out there. A lot of work involved trying to crack the code of this deeply misunderstood emotion.

John Jantsch (03:45): I’m curious, and you don’t have to answer this necessarily. I’m curious if there were differences between the world product and the American product. It’s an

Daniel Pink (03:52): Interesting question. And the answer is maybe yeah, and here’s why there, there are two different kinds of surveys. The American regret project was a public opinion survey. And so I can make very safe claims about, you know, are in America, are there demographic differences in regret? What are the sorts of things that people regret, et cetera, et cetera in the world, regret survey, it wasn’t a random sample. I just invited people around the world to submit a regret. Now I ended up with a lot of them. We now have a database of over 21,000 of them and my hunch. And I just wanna emphasize that it’s a hunch I’m willing to make certain claims about the American regret project and demographic differences and other things about American attitudes on regret, my hunch. And it’s just that is that looking at the 109 countries that were represented in the third piece of it, these regrets are pretty universal. Yeah. These regrets are pretty, a lot of ’em are pretty universal. Moral regrets are a little bit more complex because people have different notions about what it means to be moral. But overall there’s a kind of a stunning amount of universality to these regrets.

John Jantsch (04:53): Yeah. The human condition is the human condition. Yeah. Right.

Daniel Pink (04:55): Exactly. Exactly.

John Jantsch (04:57): So let’s get this out of the way. There are posters and tattoos around the world. that say no regrets. So like how is this a positive thing?

Daniel Pink (05:06): Well, I mean, no regrets is no regrets as a philosophy of life is not a particularly good idea for at least two reasons. I mean, truly one is that you you’re leaving a lot of capacity on the table and two you’re kidding yourself. Otherwise is a great idea. Cause because, because here’s what we know. Here’s what we know again, going to that first leg of this stool. Here’s what we know about regret from 50 years of of research. Everybody has regrets. It’s a universal emotion that, that everybody has regrets. Uh, truly the only people who don’t have regrets are people with some kind of problem, uh, sociopaths or people with brain damage or gen degenerative diseases or brain lesions that is like not having regrets is a sign of a disorder. Or it’s also a sign of that. You could be five years old too, cuz your brain hasn’t developed.

Daniel Pink (05:47): But the point is that not having regrets is a sign of a brain that isn’t fully mature and isn’t working properly. So that’s kind of weird, right? Cause I don’t, you know, you were joking around about, Hey, let’s have this fun conversation about regret and here’s the thing I don’t like regret. It doesn’t feel good. Yeah. I don’t like it. But here’s the thing. This unpleasant emotion is everywhere. It’s ubiquitous. It’s one of the most common emotions that human beings have. And so the question then becomes if something that’s so widespread, why you have this unpleasant thing, that’s widespread why and the answer is cause it’s useful if we treat it right and we haven’t been treating it. Right. And when we treat it right, not ignoring our regrets, like those ridiculous, no regrets posters and not wallowing in our regrets, but confronting ’em there’s evidence that confronting your regrets properly can help you become a better negotiator, a better strategist, uh, think more clearly avoid cognitive biases, find greater meaning in life, solve problems, faster, solve problems, more elegantly. There’s a whole array of benefits if we treat it right.

John Jantsch (06:49): Well, so in some ways you’re saying it’s like mistakes, did we learn from it? Right. I mean, is that kind of what

Daniel Pink (06:56): We’re saying? Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, so, but did, but let’s push that a little bit further. Okay. So what we want, you know, everybody makes mistakes, errors has failures. The question then becomes what do you do with them? And the idea that in the face of bad choices, in the face of stupid decisions and indecisions, you should simply never look backward. Ah, it’s in the past, it doesn’t matter or say, I don’t wanna deal with that. Cuz that makes me feel bad. And I only wanna be positive. That’s a bad idea. What we know is that if we treat a regret systematically, we can learn and grow. And so what’s perverse yeah. About this no regrets philosophy. And you mentioned people with tattoos that say no regrets, no one, but you might as well get a tattoo. This is no learning. no growth, no progress. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:42): Yeah. So I want to veer here for a minute. I’m curious how you, I mean you’ve written a pretty eclectic set of books. I’m kind of curious how you find a topic that you say I’m gonna write a book about this and then how you landed on this particular topic.

Daniel Pink (07:57): Well, in general, I have to be really interested in the topic that was really, you know, this, you know, this John writing a book is a giant pain in the ass. You know, this it’s hard, it’s hard. Okay. It’s really hard. So you gotta pick something that you really are interested in and really care about deeply. And that is truly not most things. I mean, truly it’s like it’s most things I do writing a book about. It would be like a form of punishment for a white collar crime, you know, so, so, so what happened in this book was that I had regrets and I was at a point in my life where I was in and someone was trying to reckon with them. I was at a point in my life at the very least where, to my surprise, I had room to look back.

Daniel Pink (08:42): You know, I’d always thought of myself as this like young guy. And all of a sudden I realized I’ve been doing this for TW this book writing thing for 20 years, I had kids graduating from college, like what the hell’s going on. And so I had room to look back and, and as I look back, as many people do, I said, ah, if only I had done that or if only I hadn’t done that and I realized I’d made some screws and mistakes and things and I wanted to make sense of it. And the curious thing though, was when I came back and started, when I very sheep started talking to people about these, my regrets, instead of people recoiling in the way that I kind of expected people leaned in, they wanted to talk about it and that’s, and that was, it was very intriguing.

Daniel Pink (09:21): And so what I ended up doing to your question about books, I was actually working on a totally different book at the time when I started think, when I started encountering this, I was working on, I had a contract for an entirely different book, a book that had nothing to do with this. And I put it aside for nearly two months and I started doing some basic research on regret and ended up writing a brand new, maybe 30 page book proposal for an entirely new book and went to my editor and publisher and said, Hey, I know I’ve contractually obligated to write a book about X, but I think this book about Y that is regret is way better. And let me try to make the case to you that this is a better book. This is a book that I’m, that I like, I feel in some ways compelled to write

John Jantsch (10:07): And, and you of course said, can I keep the advance on the other book for a while too? well,

Daniel Pink (10:11): Yeah, what

John Jantsch (10:12): We did, we just swapped

Daniel Pink (10:13): It out, swapped it out, you know? Yeah, yeah. We just swapped it out. We just said, okay, so don’t do book, don’t do that original book, do this book. And you know, as long as you give us words in English that we can put on pages, we’ll be reasonably happy.

John Jantsch (10:27): It’ll all come out in the wash.

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John Jantsch (11:44): I bet you, some people struggle with like, what is regret. Exactly. Yeah. And I know I’ve had the advantage of hearing you talk about this book at, at a conference I attended and it was, I thought, thought it was interesting that you talked about disappointment and guilt and that’s not regret. And so I wonder if we could kind of sum that up for us.

Daniel Pink (12:00): Yeah. But that’s an important, that’s important. It’s important to understand what this emotion is. So let’s talk about, let’s talk about difference between regret and disappointment. What make triggers regret, what makes an emotion regret and not something else is typically, well, there’s a few things, but at the core of it is agency. That is regret is your fault. Regret is your fault. I’ll give you an example. All right. I li as you mentioned, I live here in Washington, DC. And as we speak here on a very overcast and steamy July day here in the nation’s capital are base. I’m a sports fan and I’m a Washington sports fan. The Washington nationals baseball team have the worst record in the major leagues. The Washington BA Washington nationals have won 32% of their games this season. I mean, in baseball. That’s unbelievable. All right. Okay. So can I, so, and I’m a fan, do I re I’m disappointed about that?

Daniel Pink (12:54): Right? Because I care. Okay. For whatever weird reason I care, whether the nationals win or lose, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. The nationals aren’t gonna care, but if nationals lose, I feel bad. Right. But I can’t feel regret about that, cuz I’m not playing. I’m not managing the team. I don’t own the team. All right. So it’s not my fault. And so regret is our fault. Now let’s talk about guilt. Cause I think that’s another really good one. And let’s even talk about shame while we’re at it. Okay. So guilt to me is a subset of regret. Guilt is a guilt is your fault. I did something wrong and I have people in my database. I bullied somebody. I cheated on my spouse. I swindled a business partner and I feel guilty about that. All right. So guilt is a form of regret.

Daniel Pink (13:35): It’s a subset of regret. It’s essentially a moral regret typically from an action. But shame is very different. Shame is guilt is I did a bad thing. Shame is I’m a bad person. And shame is pretty debilitating, right? If you know, if you make a, if you do something and this is a big problem, why people shy away from regret? It’s like when we make a mistake, we say, oh, I screwed up that decision over there. Therefore I’m an complete idiot. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m the worst person in the world. We make these universe. We make these sort of broad lifetime attribution based on a single action. So, so shame is very debilitating. Guilt is a form of regret and disappointment is simply feeling bad about something. That’s not your fault. I mean, again, I’ll give you an even simpler example. Okay.

Daniel Pink (14:17): So it looks like, so I was, um, so I was thinking about my exercise plan for the rest of the day. And it turns out here in Washington, DC, it at about five o’clock there’s a 100% chance of thunderstorms. Okay. So here’s the thing I could be. I can’t regret that it’s going to rain. Right? If it’s five o’clock and I wanna go outside and exercise, I can’t say, oh, I regret that it’s raining. All right. I can be disappointed in that. But if I have to go to the walk to the grocery store and I don’t bring an, and I forget to bring an umbrella, I can regret that. Cuz that’s my fault.

John Jantsch (14:45): well, you can also regret that you didn’t go running at 7:00 AM this morning when you knew it was gonna rain. Right?

Daniel Pink (14:51): Yeah. You know what? I can’t run that early in the morning.

John Jantsch (14:54): So it’s interesting is I heard you talk about the debilitating aspect of shame. I can see people regretting that they made a poor business decision and that shaming them to the point where they won’t ever go out on a limb and make a decision again.

Daniel Pink (15:09): They’re exactly right. You’re absolutely right. And this is the, then this is, and that’s because people don’t know how to contend with that regret. Right? So, so they go the opposite direction of the no regrets, the no regrets brigade, they wallow in it. They ruminate over it. What you have to do is you have to the initial step here when you make a mistake or screw up is that you there’s a whole process that you can go through. But it really begins with something called self compassion, which is treating yourself with kindness rather than contempt. The person you’re describing there will often say to him or herself, their self talk will be brutal. You know, swearing it themselves, lacerating themselves. Don’t do, they would never talk to anybody else that way. So don’t talk to yourself that way. You don’t have to treat yourself better than anybody else, but you don’t need to treat yourself worse than anybody else. There’s no evidence that let lacerating self-criticism is in a, is a performance enhancer. Seriously, none. Zero zilch. Yeah. What you wanna do is treat yourself with kindness rather than contempt recognize that mistakes are part of the human condition. And as we were talking about earlier, that it’s a moment in your life, not the full measure of your life. And when we do that, we can open the way to making sense of our regrets and drawing lessons from them.

John Jantsch (16:17): So, so for all those people that have the poster or the tattoo we could, we can still be no regrets, just no regrets. I’m wallowing in. How’s that?

Daniel Pink (16:25): Okay. That’s fair. That’s fair. Yeah. That’s fair. I mean that’s, that’s actually a good, that’s a good way to, that’s a good way to do it again. What we have here is what we have here is this kind of performative courage of no regrets. We think that, I mean, people do it in this very assertive, bold way, right? They say no regrets. They announce it. They proclaim it. They enshrined it on their bodies as a show of courage. But that’s not what courage is John. I mean, courage is looking your regrets in the eye and doing something about that. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:52): Yeah. Turns out there are categories of regret and you can talk about the types foundation, boldness moral and connection. But I have a favorite can I have, is it okay to have a favorite kind? So, and you can unpack what each of those are if you wish. But my favorite is boldness. I mean, I think,

Daniel Pink (17:07): Well, no surprise. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:09): You know, so, so maybe, maybe give us a really quick definition of those four types and then we can get into yeah.

Daniel Pink (17:14): Yeah. So

John Jantsch (17:15): We talked diving into boldness.

Daniel Pink (17:17): We talked about moral regret are if only had done the right thing, right? So you’re at a juncture. You can do the right thing. You can do the wrong thing. You do the wrong thing. Most of us regret it because most of us are good and want to be good connection. Regrets have only had reached out. These are regrets about relationships that come apart. People want to do something, but they don’t. And it drifts apart. Even more foundation regrets are small decisions early in life that accumulate to nasty consequences. Later in life, I spent too much in save too little. I didn’t take care of my health. I didn’t work hard enough in school. And then finally boldness regrets, which are you’re at, at a juncture. You can play it safe. You can take the chance. And when people don’t take the chance, not always, but a lot of the time they regret it and it doesn’t matter the domain of life, but it could be asking somebody out on a date, it could be traveling. It could be speaking up or, and why I’m not surprised this comes into your world. Is it not starting a business?

John Jantsch (18:09): Yeah, yeah. Or not, you know, not taking a bold move. I mean, I look at my business and I can clearly think about maybe this is in comparison. You know, some other people that maybe started when I did or do a similar thing that, that I look at and go, wow, if I’d have like gone for it in a certain way, I’d be there too. But I have where I will say I have no regrets. I love where I am but I also do. I do also recognize sometimes when I could have been Boulder,

Daniel Pink (18:35): I think we all do. And I think that’s healthy. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the thing. So the question is John, what do you do with that? Okay. This is perfect example. I feel exactly the same way. Yeah. All right. So I, there were so many times in my life when I could have been Boulder. So here’s what I can do. I can go back there and say, you know what? There were times in my life when I couldn’t have been Boulder and thinking about that right now makes me a little uncomfortable. So I’m gonna plug my ears and never con consider it again. Bad idea. Or I can say, as we were talking about earlier, oh my God. There were times when I could have been Boulder. I’m such an idiot. I’m a moron. I just don’t know what I’m doing. That’s a bad idea too. What I should do is say, huh? What’s that telling me? That’s telling me, well, it’s telling me a few things. Number one. It’s or let’s say you and I similarly situated what it’s telling us, John is this one we value boldness. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Not everybody has to value boldness, but you it’s clarifying what we value and it’s instructing us and it’s instructing us to say, Hey, you know what, next time around, go

John Jantsch (19:34): For it. Take a bigger shot. yeah, yeah. Yeah. Because you have demographic information on the research. Do older people have different regrets, bigger regrets than younger people.

Daniel Pink (19:46): This is a B. Okay. So, so in the quantitative survey, the American the public opinion survey, I had a very large sample in order to try to make determinations like this. Do men have different regrets than women do?

John Jantsch (19:57): Right?

Daniel Pink (19:58): People with lots of formal education have different regrets from people with less formal etcetera, et cetera. There were not that many demographic differences except on this dimension, which is age. And it’s a huge difference. And it’s this, when we are young, we tend to have equal numbers of regrets, of action and inaction, equal numbers of regrets about what we did and what we didn’t do. But as we age and not even age that much mm-hmm thirties is to start to take over in the thirties, forties, and then certainly fifties and beyond regrets of inaction, swamp, regrets of action. When you get to be I’m in my fifties, when you get to be my age, it’s like two to one, sometimes three to one regrets of inaction versus action, which goes to your boldness point. Yeah. It suggests that what we’re gonna, we’re gonna over time, we are, are gonna regret the things we didn’t do. Not asking that person out on a date, not taking that trip, not speaking up, not starting that business, not reaching out to a friend. Those are the things that stick with us and bug us for a long time.

John Jantsch (21:03): Yeah. I think it’s EE comings line. I sort of remembering is we regret the sins of omission rather than the sins of commission, you know, as we get older, , you know, that did, but not didn’t do.

Daniel Pink (21:14): Yeah. But the thing about that is that’s not only, you know, that’s like, that might make intuitive sense for people, but we have a, but I have data from my own survey showing this very clearly. It’s basically the only demographic difference that I’m willing to like go to the ramp arts to defend because the finding was so strong, but it’s also very consistent with what 50 years, the 50 years of existing research are shown us. But

John Jantsch (21:35): I think it probably comes down to, we start thinking and I’m running out of time. right. I mean, whereas when we’re in our twenties, we’re like, eh, I got, I’ll get another shot at that. Right.

Daniel Pink (21:44): That could be, I think that’s part of it. I think the other thing is that action regrets. We can resolve over time in some way. So we can say, so if I bullied somebody or if I hurt somebody or, you know, cheated somebody, I can go and like apologize or make amends or make restitution. There are times where you can take some of the psychological sting out of a regret by finding the silver lining in it. So it’s so if I said, I mean, this is, you know, I said, you know, one point in my life, I thought about moving to California. I don’t regret not doing that. But suppose that I did, I, I said, if only I moved to California, right. And I can say, well, I lived in Washington. Well, at least I was able to send my kids to a great school. You know, I can find a silver lining in, I can find a silver lining in that, but in action regrets, you can’t undo. You can’t find a silver lining. That’s why they nod us. Whereas one poet says they lay eggs under our skin, which I think is a lovely and somewhat creepy way to put it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:41): Yeah. so at the beginning you were talking about research that was done in all these various fields that have some relationship to mental health. And I, you know, do you have an opinion or a view from the work you’ve done and now all the talks you’ve given and conversations you’ve had with individuals, how big of a mental health problem is this?

Daniel Pink (23:01): It’s an interesting question. Okay. So I think there’s some new, I think there’s some nuance to it. Yeah. Okay. So I think that the, I think mental health is a pretty significant issue. However, this is my view. Okay. And I just wanna emphasize I’m not a physician, right? I think that it is a little bit less of a medical issue than we make it out to be. And what I mean by that is that what I think the big issue here is that we haven’t taught people how to deal with negative emotions. Yeah. What we’ve sold them, a bill of goods we’ve said you should always be positive. And we don’t, and our lives are not uniformly positive and negative emotions have a place. We just haven’t taught people to deal with them. And so I think that we have a mental health crisis, perhaps even a me, you know, medical problem when people get so consumed by their regrets and their negative emotions that they, it ends up metastasizing to anxiety, depression, or something that is actually a medical ailment.

Daniel Pink (24:03): But, you know, but I don’t think that that every negative emotion is not a mental health crisis. It can become a mental health crisis. If we don’t tell people the truth, that negative emotions are part of life. That negative emotions are instructive. That negative emotions are in fact, in some ways more instructive than positive emotions and that we can deal with them in a systematic way. And when we deal with them in a systematic way, we can live better and work smarter. And so I, I think that among the young people, among younger people that this mental health problems we’re seeing in younger people are because they’ve somehow gotten the message from us that they need to be positive all the time. Yeah. And then, because they’re human beings, they sometimes don’t feel positive. They feel sad. They feel regret. They feel fear. They feel these negative emotions and they look around and say, oh my God, everybody else is so perfect. There must be something wrong with me. And I don’t know what to do with this feeling. And I think that’s the problem. We need to equip people to deal with negative emotions, harness them as a force for progress.

John Jantsch (25:04): So I regret that I didn’t lean in a lot harder to my baseball career, but it sounds to me like, uh, maybe I could still get a tryout with the NATS.

Daniel Pink (25:11): Well, yeah. This year you could, and you know, this year, this year you could, but that’s an interesting, that’s an interesting thing that, you know, it’s like the question then becomes like, what do you do with that kind of regret? Cuz that’s not an uncommon regret. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of sports related regrets, actually, John. And so, so the things like, okay, are you going to get an MLB contract? Probably not. Okay. But the question is like, what is it about that that you regret not leaning into? So you felt like, okay, I didn’t push myself to the hardest I could push myself. You know, I didn’t take a, I didn’t take a big shot and there are plenty of time and plenty of other realms in which you can push yourself hard and you can take a, you can take a big shot.

John Jantsch (25:47): Awesome. Always great catching up with you. Dan tell people where they can connect with you and the ways that you want to. And obviously the books are available everywhere you

Daniel Pink (25:55): Buy books. Yeah. The best other starting point is my website, which is Dan pink.com, D a N P I nnk.com. And there’s a newsletter. There are a lot of free resources, all the books, all, you know, unicorns, rainbows, cotton candy for everyone, all kinds of good stuff

John Jantsch (26:10): And no regrets posters. I can touch you. Dan. Thanks again. Uh, always great to catch up and uh, hopefully we’ll see you one of these days there on the road.

Daniel Pink (26:20): All right, John. Thanks for having me back. Look forward to my bagel next time. Hey,

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