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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Newman (21:08): Yeah,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Jantsch (25:42): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co not.com. Co. check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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

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March 11, 2023/by exposure

What To Say To Get Your Way

Social Media

What To Say To Get Your Way written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Jonah Berger

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Jonah Berger. Jonah is a Wharton School professor and internationally bestselling author of Contagious, Invisible Influence, and The Catalyst. He has a new book we’re going to talk about — Magic Words: What to Say to Get Your Way.

Key Takeaway:

Words are crucial to almost everything we do, including communicating, persuading, and connecting. In this episode, Jonah Berger joins me to discuss the science of language and how certain words have a more significant impact than others. You’ll learn practical tips on how to use those magic words to make a real difference.

Questions I ask Jonah Berger:

[1:14] Would you say there’s kind of a theme or a thread that’s run through your work?
[2:12] Would you go as far as saying that you are advising people to be scientifically intentional about the words they choose when they’re influencing?
[3:56] What was the research that you did like to compile the six types of words that can increase impact in every area of your life?
[7:21] At what point does the concept you’re talking about become a negative influence?
[9:05] What have you noticed in what the example you use in the book, Donald Trump, has done that has actually influenced people, you know, regardless of how you feel about it?
[15:58] What role does listening play in this universe?
[18:21] Can you unpack the language of beer?
[20:20] Where can people connect with you and learn more about your work?

More About Jonah Berger:

JonahBerger.com
Magic Words: What to Say to Get Your Way

Learn More About The Agency Intensive Certification:

Learn more

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

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Outbound Squad, hosted by Jason Bay and brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The audio destination for business professionals host Jason Bay, dives in with leading sales experts and top performing reps to share actionable tips and strategies to help you land more meetings with your ideal clients. In a recent episode called Quick Hacks to Personalize Your Outreach, he speaks with Ethan Parker about how to personalize your outreach in a more repeatable way. Something every single one of us has to do it. Listen to Outbound Squad, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jonah Berger. He is a Wharton school professor and internationally known, best-selling author of books like Contagious, invisible Influence, and The Catalyst. And we’re gonna talk about his latest book today, magic Words, what to Say To Get Your Way. So welcome back to the show Jonah.

Jonah Berger (01:13): Thanks so much for having me back.

John Jantsch (01:15): So before we get into your current book, w just looking at the, your titles there as I read them off, would you say there’s kind of a theme or a thread that’s run through your work

Jonah Berger (01:23): There? There is. I would certainly say it relates a lot to influence and think about how influence works, whether it’s seeing others through word of mouth, which is what Contagious was all about, influencing others through traditional social influence. We’re doing the same thing. We’re doing something different and how others motivate us or demotivate us using influence to drive change, which is very much behind the catalyst. But along the way I realized that a lot of what was behind influence was the language we’re using, right? When we’re sharing word of mouth, we’re not only trying to get people to talk about us, we’re trying to get them to say certain things. When we’re trying to change others, we’re not just trying to get them to change. Using broad strategies, certain particular words are quite impactful. And so for the last decade or so, a lot of the work I’ve been doing is involving natural language processing or insight from textual language data. And so it finally was to the point where I thought it was ready for a book on the topic.

John Jantsch (02:12): So, so would you go as far as saying that you are advising people to be, uh, let’s see, scientifically intentional about the words they choose when they’re influencing?

Jonah Berger (02:21): You know, I think about language a lot like math, right? You can break down interpersonal interactions into a series of things that are more and less likely to work and to drive action, right? And what’s so neat is, you know, the amazing amount of data now that we have out there on language, you know, you and I are having a conversation right now. It may end up being transcribed when we call customer service. It’s recorded when we post our opinions online, we leave them in our language, in digital form, we can mine all this data for insight and we can use a rich set of new computational tools to extract that insight. And so we’re really living in a time where we can learn a lot about what type of language increases

John Jantsch (02:58): Our impact. Yeah. You know, one thing, we do a lot of work with companies to help develop strategy and I find that a lot of comes out of what their customers are saying about them. Yes. Like here’s the value you really provide. So we’ve just been taking all their reviews, chucking it into ai and it’s saying, here’s the stuff that people really value about what you do. And I, I think that’s, you know, it’s pretty scary how fast we could process that amount of data now.

Jonah Berger (03:21): Yeah. But you can almost think about, we’re talking about a sort of social listening. You can almost think about people leaving breadcrumbs right behind about their opinions and attitudes. And sure, one person’s opinion or attitude may just be one person’s opinion, right? But if tan a hundred, a thousand, 10,000 people are saying the same things, you can learn a lot both about where your brand should be, what problems your customers are having, who your competitors are, and what strategies might be useful in, in the future. And so it’s amazing to see both how we can use language to influence others, but also how we can learn from the language people leave behind and be better marketers as a

John Jantsch (03:55): Result. So coming from your world of academia, I’m, I’d love if you share a little bit about the research that you actually did to compile. Think you, you have six types of words that can increase impact in every area of your life as you claim. So what, describe the research that went into Sure. Boiling that down.

Jonah Berger (04:14): Yeah, so let’s just take a step back. You talk about six key types of words and I often talk about them in a framework called the speak framework. And that’s S P E A with two C’s at the end rather than a K. I’m not clever enough to figure out how to make it have a K, but the S is for

John Jantsch (04:27): The language is the toughest letter in Scrabble. It really is

Jonah Berger (04:31): . That’s good to know. I will try to avoid it in future frameworks. But the S is for language that evokes similarity. The P is for the language that helps us pose questions. The E is for language of emotion. A is for language of agency and identity. The C’s are for concreteness and confidence. And lemme just give you one example. So often when we’re trying to get others to, to do something, we often use verbs. And what do I mean by that? Well, if we’re asking for help, we say, can you help me? Or if we were a nonprofit, for example, trying to get people to, to turn out and vote, we might say, can you go vote? Right? We use verbs to encourage people to take that desired action. But the study was done at Stanford University a number of years ago where they saw whether a small subtle shift in language and they actually two letters could increase the impact of a request.

(05:16): So rather than asking some students to help, for example, clean up a classroom, they asked some to help and they asked some to be a helper. Now helper is the word help with two letters on the end. Er, very small difference. Only two letters yet led to a 30% increase in the percentage of people who helped it. And you might say, well that’s students and a classroom. Does that really work in the real world? Well, some similar scientists wondering, could we use this to actually change the number of people that turn out to vote? So they sent out tens of thousands of mailers to voters. Some people they said, Hey, could you go vote? And others they say, well hey, would you be willing to be a voter and go vote. Now voter and vote are only one letter difference, but there it led to a 15% increase in turnout.

(05:59): The reason why is quite simple, right? People like actions, but they really wanna hold desirable identities. We all wanna see ourselves as smart and helpful and interesting in all those various things. But turning actions, verbs, helping voting into identities, being a helper is a way to encourage people to claim those desired identities. Right? Voting is fine, but if voting is a way to show I’m a voter, well now I’m more likely to do it. Similarly, losing is bad, but being a loser would be even worse, right? Cheating is bad, but being a cheater would be even worse. And so research shows that framing undesired actions as undesired identities is more likely to get people to avoid them. Cuz no one wants to be a loser. Right? And so a, a great way to encourage people to do something is not by using actions, but by turning those actions into a,

John Jantsch (06:45): It’s actually like you’re almost getting them to join the team.

Jonah Berger (06:48): Yeah. You’re a team. It’s a question of which team it is. Yes. But Right, right, right. It can be different teams. And the same thing is true even with talking about yourself or colleagues, right? You wanna make someone look good, don’t say they’re hardworking, say they’re a hard worker, . Now it seems more persistent, right? If you call someone a runner, it seems like they run more often than if you just said, well they run. And so calling someone a creator rather than they’re creative, calling someone an innovative rather than they’re innovative. All of these things make them seem more like persistent, true aspects of self and makes other people see them more favorable.

John Jantsch (07:21): I won’t be the first or the last person to go here on this, but you know, at what point does that become negative influence? Like somebody responds to being called a runner, but they don’t really like to run that much, but they just kind of like the association. So you can actually trick them , you know, by giving them the association.

Jonah Berger (07:41): Yeah. You know what’s challenging about influence and tools in general is the tools themselves are neither good nor bad. Yeah. Yeah. So take a hammer, right? A hammer’s not a good thing or a bad thing. It can be used for some great things. It can help us build buildings. It can also be used to hurt someone. A hammer itself is neutral. The way we use it is positive or negative. And so if you said, Hey, you know Jonah, can we use these tools to get people to turn out to vote and help them exercise more and encourage ’em to be better to the world around them? We’d say, this is fantastic, right? If you said, well it’s gonna encourage people to buy junk and hurt people and do bad things, we’d say, well let’s not use these tools. And so it’s not about the tools themselves, it’s really about how we use them.

John Jantsch (08:18): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process. It, it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create and can have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s DTM world slash certification. This is a perfect segue to your name checking of Donald Trump in the book. But you use that example I think to illustrate that, you know, influence for good or bad depending upon, you know, where you stand on that. So, so talk a little bit about what you’ve noticed in what he has done that has actually influenced people, you know, regardless of how you feel about

Jonah Berger (09:25): It. Yeah. And so I don’t want to get into politics cuz some of your listeners may hate Donald Trump and some of them may love Donald Trump. Regardless of whether you like him or not. What you can agree with is he’s done an amazing job of motivating some set of people to action. Right? Even if you hate his policies and hate his ideas and hate him as a person, you can’t sit there and go, well he hasn’t had an effect. He’s clearly had an impact. And so even if you hate him, I think it would be a good idea to figure out why he has such an impact. And if you look at what he does, the same thing that startup founders and gurus and individuals we think are quite really good speakers often do, which is they exude confidence. They speak with a great deal of certainty, right?

(10:02): He doesn’t say something might happen, he doesn’t say this could work. He says, this will definitely happen, it will be amazing and everyone will love it. Right? He speaks with a great degree of certainty and compare that with most academics. And I’ll throw myself in the bucket here, right? We often say things like, well I, I think this is a good strategy, this might work. Or you know, as a consultant I often do this, right? I say, oh yeah, you know, I think this will be a good idea, this should work. Or you know, this is probably the best course of action. And what we’re doing there is two things. One, we’re sharing our opinions, but we’re also subtly undermining their impact. Because using hedges, the language I, you know, I think might, could possibly, all those are examples of hedges. Hedges undermine our impact cuz they make us seem less certain, right?

(10:45): They make observers think we’re less certain about what we’re saying and because of that they’re less likely to follow our advice. And so does that mean we should never hedge? No, they’re certainly cases where we should, but one don’t just hedge cuz it’s convenient and two, certain hedges are more impactful than others. So saying for example, it seems to me rather than it seems, suggests you’re willing to stand behind that opinion. Mm-hmm. . And it actually makes you seem relatively more confident rather than less and makes you relatively more persuasive compared to saying just it, it seems. And so I’m not saying pretend like everything is true all the time, but we need to be careful about the language you use and use it in a way that helps us rather

John Jantsch (11:23): Sense. Yeah. You know, one of the things to I think that comes from a book like this is that, you know, even if you don’t take all of this and run with it yourself, I think maybe it makes you a little more aware of how you’re being influenced. You know, if that makes sense. I know I had Robert Shield on the show author of, you know, one of the original books on Influence. Yeah. Called Influence. And he said he originally wrote that book because he saw a lot of really negative bad things happening to people because they were being influenced. He wanted them to understand yes. Why it was happening.

Jonah Berger (11:51): . Yeah. And I wanna be careful here, you know, I know the subtitle, this book is What to Say to Get Your Way. And so it may seem like an influence book. I don’t love the subtitle, I like that it rhymes. I like that it’s clear about one of the things you can do with language, an alternate title was, you know what to say to build social connection, persuade others, hold attention, be more creative, stick to your goals. And that was like this long and it just didn’t, it didn’t work. And so there’s certainly some things in the book about how to use language to, to increase your impact. There are also things about how to be more creative, right? Mm-hmm , rather than saying what, think about what you should do, think about what you could do. Switching one word makes you a better problem solver. There’s language of how to deepen social connection by asking the right types of questions. Follow ups rather than other types can make you have closer relationships with the people that you care about. And so this isn’t just an influence book, how do we get people to do what we want? It’s really how we can use language to increase our impact in all domains of life.

John Jantsch (12:46): You went over it very briefly. I wanna come back to that idea of asking questions because I find that one sort of intriguing when we think about magic words, we think about us telling people declaring things, right? Yeah. And this idea of being more impactful by asking the right questions I think is really interesting. I wonder if you’d go into that.

Jonah Berger (13:05): Yeah. You know, the more I’ve learned and studied questions, the more rich and and powerful they are. They do so many different things. We think about questions as ways to collect information, but they shape how others perceive us. They shape the type of information we collect, they shape a variety of outcomes. So take something as simple as asking for advice, right? Most of us think it’s a bad idea. Why? Well one, we don’t wanna bother someone, but two, we don’t wanna seem like we don’t know what we’re doing, right? Mm-hmm. , you know, if we ask a client for advice, we ask a boss for advice, they’ll think less of us because we assume that we should know the answer ourselves. That’s actually quite misguided intuition because what the research finds is people actually think you’re more competent, you’re smarter, you’re better when you ask for advice.

(13:48): And the reason why is very simple. People are egocentric. Everybody thinks they give great advice, right? They have useful things to say. And so they assume if people are asking them for their advice, well that person must be smart cuz they’re smart enough to ask me for what I think. And so advice giving makes us seem asking seems better rather than worse or something like follow up questions is also fascinating. Mm-hmm. too often we, we use questions at the beginning of a conversation or collect information, but we don’t always follow up. Someone says, oh, you know, I had a tough day, or That meeting was really difficult. We say something like, I’m sorry to hear that. But we could also say something like, oh, tell me more about why. Or you know, oh, what made it so difficult? Or that’s interesting, why did they react that way? Those type of questions not only show that we paid attention, but that we understood and we care enough to follow up and it makes people like us more as a result. And so questions don’t just allow us to collect information. They shape a variety of different aspects of our lives.

John Jantsch (14:44): And it’s funny, I have had numerous prospective clients over the years that I would just, they would say something and say, tell me more about that. Yeah, tell me more about that. Tell me more about that. In about 30 minutes of me doing that, they’re like, you’re brilliant .

Jonah Berger (14:58): I was like, yes. Oh yeah,

John Jantsch (14:59): , all I did was it’s

Jonah Berger (15:00): Also good. And what I love about that point though right? Is it’s easy to say just ask questions. And that’s actually, I don’t think what you were saying or what I’m saying. Yeah. It’s asking the right questions, right? Almost like a psychiatrist would. Right. Helping pull out. And that’s what great consultants and great leaders do. They pull out things by asking the right questions, by knowing when to ask questions, how to ask them the right one to ask. They really encourage people to, to figure out their own answers. It’s also powerful strategy with kids. Right? Too often I think when it reads kids’ book, we’re like, where you say here are the words in the books, rather than saying, what do you see? What do you think? Why does that cat character feel that way? Yeah. By asking them questions, we really help them be more involved in the journey and and learn more as

John Jantsch (15:41): Yeah. Plus you get some really interesting look into , a very creative mind .

Jonah Berger (15:49): Yes. Yeah. What do they see? They might see quite different things than

John Jantsch (15:52): You do. Quite different. Yes. I go guarantee you they haven’t been in that programmed yet. So, so this may seem counterintuitive to a book about word. What role does listening play in this universe?

Jonah Berger (16:03): That’s also a really interesting question. And uh, talk about that. Uh, based on an experience I had. So a few years ago I was, uh, coming back from a consulting assignment. I was on my way to the airport, I get a text that, you know, every traveler dreads saying my, my, my flight has been delayed and they’ve re-booked me. So I call customer service and you know, they very nicely re-booked me on a connecting flight the next day rather than a direct flight I’ve had. And obviously I’m quite frustrated just hoping to get home to the family and, you know, I get off this interaction with a barely better outcome, but quite frustrated the very nice Uber driver’s like, oh, you know, I heard you talking to customer service. I’m musing about how difficult it must be to have that job because people just are frustrated all day.

(16:42): He goes, oh, not really. You know, my daughter’s in customer service, she loves it and she’s so good at it that they now ask her to train other people. And so I’m sitting there going, what does she do that makes her so good at this and training others? And so we actually worked with a, a couple different companies, got hundreds of customer service calls and analyzed them to look at the language that makes ’em go better. Now obviously in a flight situation, we all want a, you know, a direct flight leaving right away. We all want them to find our bags. We, you know, we all want the good stuff, the problems to be solved, but could the language we use in those interactions matter? And what we found quite interestingly is that concrete language was really powerful. What do I mean by that? Rather than saying, oh, I can help you with that saying I can go find you a placement flight rather than saying, we’ll refund you soon, your money will be there tomorrow.

(17:26): Right. Using more specific concrete language increases customer satisfaction and it makes people more likely to buy from the brand in the future. Why? Because it makes people feel like that representative listened, right? Yeah. It’s so easy in these situations just to use kind of Swiss army language, right? I can help you with that. I can solve your problem cuz it works for any problem. Right? And as, as leaders, we often do the same thing. We say, oh, I I care about that, I’ll take care of that. But using concrete language shows that we listened, right? It shows that we paid attention, it shows that we heard them and as a result has a variety of positive downstream effects.

John Jantsch (18:00): Yeah. The one I hate is how is your Monday going? Yeah, right.

Jonah Berger (18:04): Well you sit on hold and they say, oh, they sit on hold and they’re like, your call is valuable to us. And you’re like, yeah, that’s why I’ve been on hold for 50 minutes because your call must, my call must be really valuable. And so, you know, the intentions are good. Yeah. They want a signal that they care, but actually doing the work requires understanding the language to, to get there. Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:21): Let’s wrap up today on, um, one of my favorite topics, the language of beer. So, so, so unpack that one for

Jonah Berger (18:27): Us. Yeah. So someone did a really interesting study looking at how language changes over time and they did the study in the language of beer groups online. So imagine you write a review of a beer and then you come back next week and you write another review of a beer and they look at what happens over time and they find that sort of the new members that come into this community end up adopting the language for the most part of other members of that community. But how well they do in an enculturating sort of join the community predicts whether they’re gonna stick around or leave. And I think this is neat in, in beer, I don’t know a lot about beer, but you see people adopting the language of beer. Yeah. But subsequent work is found the same thing is true in an organizational setting.

(19:07): Yeah. So I can predict, they can predict whether you’re going to get promoted, whether you’re going to get fired or whether you’re even gonna choose to leave the company based on the language you use in your email. Right. When you join a company, your language is different from your peers, but eventually it sort of comes to meet your peers, right? It becomes more similar to other folks in the organization. If it never does, you end up being fired more likely to be fired. It suggests he didn’t really enculturate to the firm. Mm-hmm. . But once you’ve kind of gotten there, you’ve shown that you can be part of the group. It’s interesting, some people stay part of the group and some people’s language diverges and that divergence predicts whether they’re gonna stick around, right? Some people can learn to fit in, but they end up deciding to leave for greener pastures elsewhere and their language reveals it even if they didn’t tell people. Right. The fact that they’re no longer trying as much to fit in with their colleagues linguistically is a good predictor of whether they’re gonna leave.

John Jantsch (19:58): It’s really interesting, I read a book, recent book called, and that was really one of the conclusions that probably the biggest conclusion of that, that language was one of the biggest tools that were used for good or for evil, or certainly made somebody feel like they were more a part of a community. There were certain words and phrases Yeah. That were unique to them. So pretty fascinating. It’s

Jonah Berger (20:19): A great marker of identity. Yeah,

John Jantsch (20:20): No question. Well, so John, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can connect with you? I know they can find, uh, magic words pretty much anywhere you buy books. Yeah.

Jonah Berger (20:29): So first of all, thank you again for having me. Great to be back on. There’s a bunch of information about me, the book, but also a whole bunch of free resources. Uh, one pager with the framework, some guides to apply the ideas on my website, which is just jonah burger uh.com. And you can find me on social media at J one Burger on Twitter or on LinkedIn as

John Jantsch (20:46): Well. Awesome. Well, again, thanks for supp by and uh, hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Thanks so much for having me. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it@ marketingassessment.co not.com dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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

February 23, 2023/by exposure

The Way To Raise Your Prices Without Losing Customers

Social Media

The Way To Raise Your Prices Without Losing Customers written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Jeb Blount

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Jeb Blount. Jeb is the CEO of Sales Gravy and the author of 14 books including Fanatical Prospecting, Sales EQ, Objections, Virtual Selling, and his brand new book — Selling the Price Increase: The Ultimate B2B Field Guide for Raising Prices Without Losing Customers.

Key Takeaway:

A lot of small business owners struggle with charging enough, and that price increase conversation is something many people avoid. The payoff for increasing your prices and retaining your customers and clients along the way is massive. But the problem is, price increase initiatives bring forth fear and anxiety in both your salespeople and you as a business owner — especially if you’re the one who has to communicate that message to your customers.

Yet, when you approach the initiative effectively, customers gladly accept price increases, remain loyal, and often buy even more from you because they see your value. In this episode, CEO of Sales Gravy, Jeb Blount, reveals the strategies and tactics that allow you to successfully master price increase initiatives.

Questions I ask Jeb Blount:

[1:21] A lot of small businesses I work with aren’t charging enough — would you say that’s an idea in their head that they don’t think they worth it?
[3:18] As a business owner, how do you move past that idea?
[5:50] What’s changed in this current climate when it comes to pricing and everything almost seeming like an emergency?
[12:01] What’s your advice for people for setting the table for price increases?
[16:59] How do you suggest a salesperson handle a price increase when there’s no particular rationale or reason for it and it’s happening simply because the company can?
[18:48] Could you talk about your DEAL framework and system you’ve created?
[21:12] Where can people find out more about your book and your work?

More About Jeb Blount:

His brand new book — Selling the Price Increase: The Ultimate B2B Field Guide for Raising Prices Without Losing Customers.
JebBlount.com
Salesgravy.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 (00:46): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jeb Blount. He is the CEO of sales gravy, the author of 14 books, including fanatical prospecting, sales, EQ objections, virtual selling, and his brand new book. We’re gonna talk about today, selling the price, increase the ultimate B2B field guide for raising prices without losing customers. So Jeff welcome to the show.

Jeb Blount (01:15): Well, thank you so much for having me back. I always love to be on your show. It’s one of my favorite podcasts.

John Jantsch (01:20): Thank you. Thank you so much. So, you know, one of the things interesting, I know a lot of the book, you talk about a salesperson that has an account that has to go out and you know, it’s like, oh, we’ve had this cost come. We have to raise prices, but I will tell you working with so many small business owners, they’re not charging enough right now. And one of the things I tell them all the time is you’ve gotta go raise your prices. So a lot of that’s kind of in their head, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like, I don’t think I can get this, or I don’t deserve this or whatever it is.

Jeb Blount (01:49): Yeah. You know, there, there is the, I don’t deserve it. And I think that’s, I think that’s a very common feeling with small business owners, especially when they’re dealing with bigger companies. And I know that as a small business owner, as you know, a company that’s growing I’ve, I’ve often felt the same way that maybe I don’t deserve this and that to somewhat some, you know, some extent is something that is totally in our heads, right? That it’s a lie that we tell ourselves. And I mean, there may be some cases where we don’t deserve it, but in most cases we do. But on top of that is, you know, the constant fear of the business owner that if I go ask for a price increase, I’m gonna lose my customer. I’m gonna lose the orders. Maybe they’ll throw in my face. Something that went wrong in the past and well, there’ll be conflict. And, and of course there’s a potential that they just say, no, and I get rejected. Yeah. And that makes me feel really bad. So, and those fears by the way, are things that we make up in our own head that we have to get past. And some of those fears could be true. I mean, you could go in and create a lot of problems if you haven’t been taking care of your customer and then you go ask for a price increase.

John Jantsch (02:51): Right. Well, and so, so the sales rep of course like a business owner, a lot of times I tell them, you just gotta, you gotta understand the value you bring and go ask for the money. But a sales rep, a lot of times, I mean, somebody told them, go tell the client, the right is going up. Right. It’s not, you know, it’s not my fault, but I’m the one that has to deliver the bad news. And I might lose that commission. Right. Because they go somewhere else. So, you know, how do you, I mean, be in that particular instance, you know, how do you get over that kinda head thing? It’s like, it’s not my fault, but I gotta deliver the news.

Jeb Blount (03:23): Yeah. Well the, with the salesperson, the same fears are in play. So the, one of the biggest problems for salespeople is the boss says, you gotta go get a price increase. Right. When I, it wasn’t uncommon. You know, when, back when I was working for a boss that they would come in, bring you your accounts and say, we need 6% across the board. Go figure it out. Right. And you know, you’re sitting there like rolling the dice on which customer are gonna take the price increase too. And very much like when we were talking about, you know, the business owner says, well, I kind of don’t deserve this. I think salespeople get the same thing in their head. We don’t deserve this. Or in a lot of cases, they feel like they’re doing something to their customer versus doing something for their company. And by the way, that’s, that is exactly true for the business owner as well.

Jeb Blount (04:03): Sure. So for me, you know, the, I, you know, I just like everybody else, I’ve experienced the anxiety of having to do a price increase as a salesperson. And I’ve experienced the anxiety of having to deal with price increase as a business owner. And one of the things that helped me really get over that hump is understanding the power of a price increase. So there’s a reason why you tell your clients, you gotta go get a price increase. And one of those reasons is that a price increase is almost pure drop through to the bottom line. Now forget about a time that we’re in right now, where we’ve got inflation or, you know, there are supply chain issues. Whenever you get a price, increase the drop through on a price increase versus going out and getting a new piece of business is about 400% higher to your bottom line.

Jeb Blount (04:47): That’s a big number. So what I had to do as a salesperson and later on as a P and L owner, is to really understand what the purpose of a price increase is also it’s important. And this is also important for business owners who have salespeople working for them. And you gotta go tell your salespeople to go, to get a price increase is understanding how that new profitability helps the health of the company. And for, especially for, you know, for the group of people that pay most attention to you at duct tape marketing, you know, there’s nothing in the world that is more important than free cash flow, right? And a price increase is instant cash flow in instant revenue increase. And that is by the way, as long as you keep your customers, you may have to get the price increase and keep your customers and keep your orders. And essentially that’s what the book is all about. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:34): So you mentioned the current climate we’re in, you know, it used to be like the annual price increase, but obviously people are dealing with weekly and monthly. I had a remodeling contractor give me a bid on something. And he said, this proposal is good for 24 hours because I don’t know what it, you know, the door’s gonna cost tomorrow. Right. So, so what’s changed in this current client about, you know, the approach. I mean, because some of it’s just like emergency, right?

Jeb Blount (05:58): Yeah. You know, there, when you start thinking about approaches or you’re thinking about is messaging, right? So there are, there’s essentially a couple of different ways that we deal with price increases. One is a price increase that we just give to our customers and then we defend it. So we tell our customers, you’re getting a price increase. And then we deal with the objections. We message it. We talk about it, but we give everybody the same price increase. And typically you do that when the risk of losing your customers or the orders is relatively small against the gain that you get on the price increase. And typically the price increase itself is gonna be small relative to what your customers are spending. The other is when you, the price increase may be negotiable or there is some risk. You may either present the price increase as if it’s non-negotiable, but you’d be willing to negotiate.

Jeb Blount (06:43): Or you go in and you ask your customers. So for example, if you’re a small business like mine and you’re dealing with big multinational fortune 500 companies where the risk of losing that company to my company is really high. Then I’ll typically go sit down with my customer and I’ll message it. Like I’ll build a business case for why I deserve the price increase. And that could be based on past value I’ve delivered. It could be on some future value that I’m going to deliver, but in a time like this often it’s an economic fairness message. In other words, what I’m doing is I’m laying out to them where my costs have gone up, where I’m getting impacted. So for example, in my world, because we fly all over the place, it’s travel, you know, the cost of travel has gone up exponentially over the past few months.

Jeb Blount (07:25): So we have to go to our customers and say, we’re raising the price on what we charge when we travel someplace. And this is why, and the good news is that because most people, this is humans. Okay. So most humans have an innate sense of fairness when you can articulately lay out the case, the economic fairness case for why this should give the pricing increas. In most cases, the probability is relatively high. They’re gonna say, yes, you just have to be able to make that case. And in a time like ours, where it’s, it is an emergency in some cases, and it is a moving target. What you really have to be prepared to do is to deliver that message. So you wanna sit back, practice that message. And by the way, deal with any objections you might get and have rebuttals for those objections. So

John Jantsch (08:10): One of the cases I make sometimes where we’re getting people to raise their prices to, to a level that might be fair is that they actually might be better off losing some of the clients that leave for that. I mean, you talked about the bottom line, right? If, you know, drop 20% to the bottom line, but you lose, you know, 3% of the customers doing it, right. You’re better off. And in some cases, not always, but in some cases, in my experiences, that’s a client that you probably didn’t have a great relationship with anyway, and that may be your fault, or it may just be that it wasn’t a good fit anyway.

Jeb Blount (08:42): Yeah. I use, uh, to analyze where, which customers I’d like to lose. I just use a, basically a four quadrant. I call it a fit matrix. And at the very top right hand quadrant is, it’s a, it’s easy to work with. Yeah. And high profit. Yeah. And right below, that would be easy to work with low profit. Yeah. On the left hand side, it is hard to work with high profit. And on the bottom left hand side, it is hard to work with low profit. Yeah. It’s the hard to work with low profits that I typically go after. And this is, you know, me as a small business, I had a fortune 100 company that we were working with. We had closed a deal. We celebrated it in about a year into it. We realized that we made a grave mistake. They were killing us.

Jeb Blount (09:23): They wanted so many of our resources. You know, they had 20 people for every one of my people and they would just had this endless just line of requests for us. And my whole team said, we gotta fire this customer, cuz we were really hard to work with. We weren’t making a lot of money. And so I didn’t wanna go burn the bridge because I just felt like it would be a bad thing just to go tell a big company like that when I’m a little tiny company, just go away. So I went in with a 300% higher price than I had previously given them when we signed the deal in the first place. And I expected them to throw me out the door. And when I gave it to them, the buyer simply the person that I was dealing with with the contract and procurement said, how can you justify this?

Jeb Blount (10:04): I, then I explained it. I said, you guys are really hard to work with. Were a small company. You asked for all these things. A lot of the things you ask for are off contract and we feel obligated to do it for you because you’re, you know, you’re the big gorilla and you know, your team needs things done right now. And the only way that I can keep serving you is I gotta hire more people in order to come in and do this. And the procurement person just, you know, they just looked down at the contract for a minute and looked at me and goes, you’re right. We are really hard to work with signed the contract. And then we were good again, like it felt, I mean, I felt like we didn’t resent them. They signed up for more, which was a good thing for us.

Jeb Blount (10:38): And I found that happens often that in a lot of cases, you’re undervaluing yourself. Yeah. That’s the first thing you and I talked about. But if, if you can, if you can put your customers in segments like that, it’s a lot easier when you look at it and you realize I’m not making any money at this, it doesn’t make a difference how much revenue you’re making. If you’re not dropping to the bottom line, you have no cash flow. You have no cash flow, you’re dead. So you can at least look at it and go, okay, that gives me the courage to go in and have a conversation with them cuz I’m not making any money. And oh, by the way, if a few of these went away, I could probably spend those resources right on the easy to work with high profit customers and make them even more profitable and sell more things to them.

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John Jantsch (12:02): So one of the things you, uh, mentioned already also was this idea of relationship building. And I think it’s like a lot of things you get that next sale or that price increase months before it actually happens. Right? Yes. And so, you know, what’s your advice to folks to say, look, it’s inevitable. You’re gonna have to go ask for this. How do you set the table?

Jeb Blount (12:23): Well, if you think about price increases in the suite of things that we sell, price increases are on the expansion side of the, of the equation. In other words, I already have the customer, I need to expand the relationship. So price increases should not be, as we think about this time that we’re in right now, something that we’re thinking about right now, price increases are something that we’ve gotta be thinking about forever because we’re always looking to expand those accounts. And when we’re in that boat, it’s in our best interest to make sure that we’re managing our accounts in the book. I just break down something really simple, but I just tell you the truth. And that is that about 70% of the time when you lose a customer, it’s because of neglect. Yeah. And that would be true is if you go in and you ask for a price increase or you present a price increase and your customer gets mad at you is probably because you weren’t taking care of them.

Jeb Blount (13:13): So the easiest, fastest way to get price increase is just manage your accounts. You just take care of them, do the things that you’re supposed to do as a business, delight your customers, deliver a great customer experience, make sure you’re constantly solving problems. And if you’ve ignored an account for a long time, and that happens in business and it happens with salespeople as well in their portfolios, if you’ve ignored it, don’t let the first conversation you have with that customer in six months, be about a price increase, put yourself together, a campaign, go in and set the stage, go solve some problems, do an account review, rebuild a relationship and then come back in with a price increase. But the biggest problem that we, you know, that we see in with price increases across the board is that because they’re unpleasant for both parties, the, the party that has to bring the price increase to the customer has a tendency to put it off.

Jeb Blount (14:03): Yeah. So they end up dropping a price increase in the customer’s lap, but don’t really give them any time to deal with the price increase. Yeah. And if you’re just, if you’re a business, you know, you’re and you buy things from other, from vendors, like most of us do, you can imagine that what, that the sort of, what that would put you in terms of a, you know, a bad spot or how it might back you into a corner. If one of your vendors came with you as came to you with a price increase at the last minute, and you didn’t have time to figure out how you were gonna absorb it or pass it on to your customers or deal with it. And that typically happens because we, we just don’t want to confront our customer with the truth.

John Jantsch (14:40): Yeah. It’s funny too, because nobody likes change. It’s really funny of any kind. I mean, I swear there have been times when I’ve tried to give somebody something for free and they were, you know, suspect. I hadn’t told him why I hadn’t said because. And I think that’s, you’ve been talking about this price increase. Like it’s just a unilateral kind of price sheet kind of thing. But as I listened to you, describe this. It’s almost like you can, if you have the right conversation, you can actually come to an agreement together on what’s the right approach. Can’t you?

Jeb Blount (15:09): Yeah. I mean, if you’ve got a great relationship with your customer and in, in the book, I give you eight different narratives, right? That can be woven together in ways that allow you to have that conversation with your customer. But if you’ve got a great relationship with your customer, and I think, you know, that most of us do what I found is that the thought of going in and having the conversation about the price increase is way worse than the actual conversation itself. and it’s a lot better. If you can go in and you can make your case, just build a good business case and sit down with your customer and work it out with them that in most cases, because human beings are inherently fair to each other, that you’ll be able to work something out without a lot of objections. And it’s also important.

Jeb Blount (15:53): I think that you start thinking about how do you set the stage? Because what you talk about is you don’t really like change. Nobody likes change. If you spring it on someone, you’re likely to get a really tur response or you may get pushback. If you start setting the stage forward, if you start talking about the marketplace and your price is going up and you know, I’ll even say to someone, you know, we’ve been raising our prices on our other customers right now, we’re holding the line with our existing customers, but there’s a pretty good chance that we’re gonna have to come to you with a price increase sometime in the near future. I didn’t actually put a price increase in their lap, but I began to get them accustomed to the fact that it’s gonna happen. Yeah. And they’re thinking about it. So, and that typically makes it a little bit easier for them to absorb the price increase in our conversation or notice, I guess probably a better way of saying that.

John Jantsch (16:41): All right. What about the sales rep that’s faced with the situation? We all know there are companies out there that, that do this where the real reason they’re raising the price is because they can. Right. And so now the sales rep is faced with that’s their only, I mean, they’re obviously not going to go in and say it. That’s why we’re raising the price, but that’s their only real talking point. So, you know, how do you suggest somebody handle that when they really don’t have a great rationale?

Jeb Blount (17:04): Well, first of all, you wanna make sure that you are being professional and you’re being nice and that you don’t walk in already defensive. I’ve had that happen where I’ve had a salesperson come with a price increase and they’re te and they’re, you know, they’re cold because of their own emotions rather than mine. Yeah. And you don’t wanna do that at all. And certainly right now, if you’re in a situation where you can raise your prices and drop more money to the bottom line, you absolutely should. I mean, as a business, that’s your job to make profit. And by the way, there’s a difference in, you know, doing that. And then, you know, shoving something down someone’s throat and doing, you know, doing something that, that lacks in the integrity. I’m just talking about. Yeah. The regular course of doing business, you’re in a situation where you can drop more profit in and continue to serve your customers.

Jeb Blount (17:47): You should do that. So you start off with again let’s so let’s start setting the stage. Let’s build a campaign, let’s start, preframing the price increase early. Let’s be professional. Let’s be super nice. And then go back to our narratives. One of the narratives that you want to use in a situation like that is past value. Here are all of the things great that we have done for you. Yes. You’re gonna be paying more for the same thing you were getting before, but look at all the things that we have contributed to you and your business over the years. And, and when you use that approach, most people will accept the price, increase most business people, especially people that you know, that are in the B2B world, right? They get it, they understand what’s happening. They don’t like it. And they’re not gonna be, you know, jumping up and down and, you know, bringing in a bras band to welcome your price increase in, but they understand and they get it. The key is the way that you approach it, relaxed, assertive, professional confidence. It wins the day. Every single time

John Jantsch (18:48): You have a framework and I’ll just kind of tease it and you can talk about as much as you want, but obviously it’s a big part of the book and that’s, so there is actually a system, you know, for going out into, and you actually call it deal, you know, an acronym for that, that has four parts. So I’ll let you just kind of take that as far as you want it to.

Jeb Blount (19:05): Yeah. The deal framework is simply a framework for negotiating a price increase. So in, in some cases, especially with your higher risk customers, and there’s also a risk profile matrix inside the book that allows you to take your accounts and drop ’em into that risk profile, to make a decision about how you want to approach them with the price increase. But the deal framework is simply the process of if you begin negotiating and they, you typically sounds like this, John, they’ll say something like, um, Jeb, like, like I totally get that. You gotta give a price increase, but we’re, we can’t pay this much. We haven’t, we don’t, we’re not budgeted for that. Okay. Well, that’s great. So you’ve accepted the price increase because you said I get it, but I’m not paying that much. Now I gotta work out something with you. So I wanna get onto the table what their issues are.

Jeb Blount (19:52): So I, I don’t wanna negotiate before I do that, then I want to give them, you know, my point of view. So, so I want to, I wanna explain the price increase and the reason why I’m doing the price increase and the business case behind it, even though if I’ve already explained it before typically a negotiation, people get amnesia. So I wanna come back and explain it again. And then what I wanna do from there is I want to get to a place where we can both agree. And for me, the one thing that I wanna protect during a price increase negotiation is my points. So let’s say I’m doing a 10% price increase. If I give up five points, that’s 50% of my price increase. So the way that I do that is I try to find things like funny money. And what funny money is something that I have that I can give my customer’s valuable to them, but really doesn’t mean that I’m giving up anything on my end.

Jeb Blount (20:42): So for example, let’s just say that I’m a business and I offer training for my customers and I’m giving a price increase to a big customer and the training typically they have to pay for, and they don’t, they haven’t paid for it. I might say, I’ll give you the training in exchange for the price increase. Well, the training’s probably online. It’s not costing me a whole lot of money to, to run it. And I didn’t give up my price increase points. Cause you gotta remember those price increase points. Those are, you know, those are gonna be adding up. Those are they’re they’re, they’re, they’re, you know, they accumulate over time. So giving up five points over months and months of time can be a really big number for you. So I, compoundings the number of the word that I’m looking for, but they compound over time.

Jeb Blount (21:22): So, so you want protect your points at all costs. And so that’s typically what I’m doing. So, so deal is just discussing the issue. It’s explaining my, you know, my situation or my business case. It’s aligning on an agreement typically a little bit of give and take. I want to give away things that don’t cost me anything while I’m protecting my points. And the L just stands for locking it down with a handshake or an agreement or a signed contract or money in the bank or something that, that symbolizes the fact that we have come to an agreement.

John Jantsch (21:55): So I know you work with a lot of sales managers who are tasked with coaching, a group of people around doing this. And so you do finish off the book with a nice section for those folks as well. And I, so if you’re a salesperson sales manager, there’s gonna be something in, in you in, in this book for everyone, J Jeb, you wanna tell people where they can find out more about your work at sales gravy, and then obviously all the books and, uh,

Jeb Blount (22:18): Yeah, absolutely. Well, the best place to find out about books is go to Amazon Barnes and noble, wherever you buy books. And you’ll be able to find selling the price increase there and my other books. And then if you wanna learn more about me, you can go to my website, jlu.com. My last name is spelled B L O U NT, or to sales, gravy.com, where you can check out all of our resources that we have for sales and sales people and anyone who is customer facing.

John Jantsch (22:44): Awesome. Well, Jeb’s great to appreciate you taking some time to step stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Jeb Blount (22:53): Yes, sir. Thank you.

John Jantsch (22:54): 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.

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July 8, 2022/by exposure

Using Personalization Data To Reshape Your Customer Experience

Social Media

Using Personalization Data To Reshape Your Customer Experience written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Brennan Dunn

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Brennan Dunn. Brennan is the Co-founder of RightMessage, writes weekly at Create & Sell, and wrapping up a new book on personalized marketing.

Key Takeaway:

The internet has changed the way we do business. It’s given your company access to a global customer base. But that doesn’t mean consumers are all the same. Their location, economy, and finances can influence how consumers engage with your business. So how does a virtual business replicate the vital in-person experience? With technology. Brennan Dunn is the co-founder of RightMessage, a software company that helps you uncover who’s on your website, what they do, and what they’re looking for from you. In this episode, we talk about how we can leverage personalized data to improve the customer experience and increase revenue for your business.

Questions I ask Brennan Dunn:

[1:21] Could you tell me about your book and what inspired you to write it?
[2:09] What has your journey looked like?
[4:44] When RightMessage came to be, were you just working with JavaScript coding?
[5:44] How does the idea of personalization play into the customer journey?
[13:56] How does the technology of RightMessage work?
[18:59] Do you have any data to back up the willingness people have to give you more information when you share how it will benefit them?
[22:15] How does RightMessage use the data it collects to personalize the website for each visitor?
[24:09] Does RightMessage work with the various page builders that are out there now?
[24:51] Where can more people connect with you and learn more about RightMessage?

More About Brennan Dunn:

RightMessage
Weekly, in-depth email marketing advice for creators — Createandsell.co

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 the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roison, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you’re looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world’s most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what’s your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcast. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast.

John Jantsch (00:51): This is John chance and my guest today is Brennan Dunn. He’s a co-founder of right founder of write message. He writes a weekly at create and sell, and he’s working on a new book, all about personalized marketing, which by the way, is what we’re gonna talk about today. So Brennan, welcome to the show.

Brennan Dunn (01:11): Yeah. Thanks for having you, John.

John Jantsch (01:13): So tell me about the book. Is it, is this one of these things where you get some spare time and you go right on it for a while, or is it, is its publication imminent?

Brennan Dunn (01:22): It’s somewhere in between. I’ve gotten much more structured than I was early on. So I am, I do have dedicated writing blocks that I try to keep. Yeah. And the, the finish line is coming up. So I’m aiming for about a midjune finalization, if you will, the manuscript and, uh, we’ll go

John Jantsch (01:36): From there. So, so as I said, we’re gonna talk about personalized marketing. So personalization in your emails and, you know, in your segmentation and your website, of course, and, and the technology there, you know, now, you know, makes that to something that if you put a little effort is really simple to do, I would suggest it’s probably becoming necessary to do I think, in the environment we’re in. But before we get into that, I’d love to hear a little bit about your journey because you and I have spoken briefly, we were at a, a conference, uh, together recently, and I kind of got the sense that you’ve got your hands in a few things, or at least have had your hands in a few things, you know, leading up to right. Message.

Brennan Dunn (02:15): Yeah. Yeah. So about a decade and, and change ago, I used to run a web agency. So that kind of got my experience with, or that, that built up my experience with kind of needing to sell big ticket projects, built that up to 11 people. And I think the, the big core thing that I, the big takeaway I got from that experience was how important things like dropping relevant examples were. And if somebody’s a technical person talking technical with em, if they’re just a marketing person, not talking technical, for instance, and, and so on. So I did that for a while. I got bit by the software bug, we were building apps for other people I wanted to build my own. So I built a little, a software company called plan scope. And in 2011, sold that in 20 15, 20 16, somewhere around then, right at the end of the year.

Brennan Dunn (03:00): And then I kind of started up or kind of came serious about this company called double year freelancing, which is the thing that I frankly did the best at with all these things. And that’s now a community of, well north, almost about 60,000 freelancers and agencies. And it was fun. Like we, you know, I did conferences, I had a podcast, I did the whole like bunches of courses, ebook, like info product, kind of Emporium there. And that’s really got where I got my start with personalization because as we started to get kind of broader in terms of our audience, we had copywriters, we had marketers, we had designers, developers, and really every Stripe of freelancer you could think of. Right. And the developer me thought, well, what if a copywriter is on a sales page? And they see copywriter testimonials, and what if a developer sees developer testimonials and, you know, that kind of opened up this Pandora’s box that I’ve been, uh, continuing to open ever since on what’s possible, given who somebody is, what their relationship is with you.

Brennan Dunn (04:03): So are they new on your website? They just appeared from Google or are they your most, you know, die hard customer? What kind of work do they do? What stage of their business are they at? And yeah, that, that kinda led me to eventually getting approached by a few key investors saying, we see what you’ve been doing on your own site. Can you extract that technology into a product that we can pay for? And they were willing to kind of fund the development of that. So that’s how right message came to be. And that was about 20 17, 20 18, right around then that we kind of launched it.

John Jantsch (04:36): So at the time, were you just doing that with JavaScript coding or something? Or how were you making that happen?

Brennan Dunn (04:42): Yeah, so what I was doing is back then, I was using, I switched from infusion soft, which is now keep to drip back then. Sure. And drip had a really nice JavaScript library that you could put on your website that would allow you, if you knew how to write JavaScript to query and say, Hey, is the current person on my website? Are they on my list? And if so, how are they tagged and what custom fields do they have? So it was really just a matter of writing, a lot of, yeah, custom JavaScript where I’d say, okay, if they’re a subscriber and they’re tagged customer, let’s show this thing instead of that thing. And, and it just became a lot of, kind of very brittle, very manual coding, right. Which really lent itself to building a web-based interface to set it all up.

John Jantsch (05:28): So I was gonna ask you what the biggest mistake you see marketers making today, I’m really just teeing up the non personalization, or just treating everybody that visits the website, just as you said, as the same person with the same desires, the same, you know, method of buying the same journey, all those. So let’s talk a little bit about, you know, that idea of the customer journey. Mm-hmm , I think that’s something I spend a lot of time talking about the stages of and how people make, you know, decisions today. In fact, I, you know, frequently say the thing that’s changed the most in marketing is how people choose to become customers. You know, not necessarily, you know, the platforms and the technology. So how does this role, I mean, thinking in terms of how people buy today, they go, they visit, they see if they like you, they see if they trust, you know, they dig deeper. Mm-hmm . I mean, how does the idea of personalization play into the customer journey for you?

Brennan Dunn (06:19): I think for me, and, and what I typically recommend, a lot of people do, especially those of us who are trying to do kind of email first, where right. You know, instead of pushing somebody to buy or trying to get them on our list and then over time, build up trust and then get them to buy later. I think the thing that as being on the consumer end, always frustrates me is if I’m on an email list of a brand, let’s say, and I get their, you know, their latest email and drives me me back to their website, then I’m hit with a giant popup asking for my email address. Not only is it a bit annoying because you know, they presumably know that since they just E you know, they just email me , but a marketer me thinks that’s a missed opportunity. I mean, that, that’s a perfect opportunity to say, Hey, you’re on my list.

Brennan Dunn (07:03): You’re kind of already a little further down the funnel. Why not present a product, an entry level product you haven’t yet bought. And then if they’ve bought that entry level thing, let’s now put onsite called actions for maybe the more premium product or right. You know, the, the, the crazy mastermind in Cabo, San Lucas, five figure thing, if you’re the super customer, right. Like, I mean, that’s the kind of thing that I think a lot of us, I think are doing that over email with campaigns that are saying like, you know, for different cohorts of subscribers, we wanna send different marketing messages. But I think considering that most of us are bringing people back to the website, whether it be to listen to the latest podcast episode or to read at the latest blog post, or just to look at a sales page. I think having that interplay back and forth is something that most of us should be doing. It’s just, it’s one of these things that it’s a little challenging to figure out how to do, which is one of the things I’ve been trying to help ease.

John Jantsch (07:56): Yeah. I think a real obvious use case. You talk about the popups that, you know, version one, everybody saw it every time , you know, it’s like, get outta here, get outta the way. So we were constantly just slapping him away. Then they got a little smarter, oh, you’ve been here before your, in the last two weeks. So I’m not gonna show it to you, but like you said, the ultimate is I know everything, or I know a great deal about you and our relationship already. So I may have one of eight things that I would show you, obviously that’s next level, isn’t it?

Brennan Dunn (08:28): Yeah. Yeah. And doing that, but also doing, um, more horizontal things, like, depending on maybe the industry somebody’s in or the job role that they’re in, or their goal, maybe offering different products or different recommendations to them showing different messages. I already mentioned the testimonial example of yeah. Depending on somebody’s kind of business, they run, what kind of case studies and testimonials should they see even things like one of the, one of the most rewarding, if you will. Things that I tested that that has worked consistently is I have, for one of my courses, a free email course that feeds people to the paid course. Yeah. And what I did is I simply asked people when they joined the free course, which of the following three things are you trying to solve with this course? Cause the course is on pricing and the three options would be, I want to get an idea of how to price in general, I went to start pricing on value, or I went to learn how to write proposals better.

Brennan Dunn (09:18): And those were kind of the three things I uncovered were why people kept joining the email course. So all I simply did was I said, well, okay. They tell me this upfront, what I’ll do is when the email course completes and I then start to pitch the paid thing, the paid thing relates to the email core, the free course. Yeah. So let’s just say, if they said they’re struggling with proposals, make the focus of the course and why they buy it to help you with proposals. Right. Yeah. Right. And it’s things like that I think are kind of a no brainer when you think it through. I mean, it’s any, anything like if I was trying to sell you over the phone on something I would, and, and you said, you know, you, you signaled something to me that allowed me to mentally segment you into this is John’s pain point. You, I, a good salesperson is gonna right. Keep playing off that. Right. So it’s the same, same thing just in a more scalable, um, more high volume, medium, if you will.

John Jantsch (10:13): Well, and I think that that approach of narrowing, you know, the focus, because I think a lot of times what we do as marketers is we default to, well, here are the five things we know are the reasons people buy this. So we’re gonna tell you those are all the benefits. Yeah, exactly. You know, so then consequently, we’re like, well, one of those matters to me, the other’s just like more clutter that I have to read about. And now I’m just confused. Yeah. And I think that idea of being able to zero in on something, they told you, I mean, they basically said here’s how to sell me. Right. right.

Brennan Dunn (10:42): Yeah, exactly. And, and I mean, this plays out, I think in a lot of more impactful ways, like I mentioned, the first software company that I sold, it was a project management tool called plan scope. So think of task management, normal kind of stuff like that time tracking. And I, I sold to freelancers and agencies cuz really the only difference with an agency was they had multiple seats and every functionally was the same thing. But I remember I, I got on a call. This is, would’ve been like 2013. So you know, quite a while ago in internet time, at least I, I got on a call with an agency owner and I was talking with them and I was showing them our website and kind of figuring out like what was holding them back from moving forward. And their objection was anything that works for a freelancer couldn’t work for our agency.

Brennan Dunn (11:24): And you know, it was kind of this weird. I struggled at the time as the person who knew the product inside out thinking the only logistic differences is maybe some things on the reporting end, but also the fact that there’s like multiple contributors and stuff to a, you know, a, a project rather than a single contributor. But it just kind of, it floored me thinking like, is this a very, is this a common shared thing? You know, that there’s this bias of teams think solo people don’t have anything in common with them. Yeah. And maybe convert vice versa. So anyway, that was a, uh, for me that would’ve been like a prime. I, I was even thinking at the time maybe I spin off like plan scope, premium or plan scope pro.com make it completely separate marketing site, make it all about agencies. And just say, if you’re an agency, you go to this site. Yeah. This lead magnet, whatever freelancers, get that one. But really the, I think the beauty of personalization is you can have the same products. You can have the same marketing site, you can have the same marketing and you just kind of dynamically alter bits and pieces. So you can get around those core objections in a and really elegant way.

John Jantsch (12:31): Yeah. And I think one of the things that I, I hear a lot of times, you know, sales people complaining that I got multiple stakeholders to sell, you know, the sales manager cares about vastly different things than the CEO does. And so I think that idea of job title, you know yeah. In your database is really crucial because I mean, case studies you could deliver that are different. I mean every benefits, all of your messaging can be different. Yeah. And sell those multiple stakeholders came.

Brennan Dunn (12:57): Yeah.

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John Jantsch (13:54): We’ve already talked about a lot of the ways I think people can use this. Tell, tell me a little bit about the technology. I mean, how, how, without getting to a level that you have to be a coder to understand what you’re saying, you know, how does this work?

Brennan Dunn (14:06): Yeah. So what, we’re the way we’ve modeled. This is you integrate with your email database. So that could be, you know, convert kit, HubSpot, drip, whatever. Yep. Active campaign, different things like that. And the, the way we look at it is that should that record about somebody. So Brennan’s record in John’s active campaign database is the single source of truth about what we know about Brennan. So presumably you segment me when I buy from you, you know, Stripe does its thing. You then tag me as a customer. You, I buy something else. I get another tag and so on. So it’s really just extending that to say, well, can we also sync up to that record attributes about, you know, industry chal current focus, whatever it might be. And then what we do is we say when one of two things happens, if somebody opts into your list, we basically kind of do a little think of it as a bit of a hijack, if you will saying, okay, a record was just added to active campaign for this browser.

Brennan Dunn (15:12): So when it comes back active, campaign’s gonna say, Hey, we created a record and its internal ID is 1, 2, 3, and then all right message says is great. We’re gonna drop a cookie on the browser saying this is active campaign record 1, 2, 3. So then from that on out until they clear their cookies, we just query and say, what do we know about 1, 2, 3, and, and get back that, that data. So then we can pull that data down, but also push shade up. So if we learn something new about this person, like they change their focus or they change industries, that data can then be synced to that single source of truth. So what we’re basically creating a bridge, if you will, between the website and a specific record in your email database and then pulling data down and pushing data up and we pull data down and we can say, when this data’s present, so when they’re tagged customer, don’t show the sign up form at the top of the website and the hero show, the upgrade button or something.

Brennan Dunn (16:07): Yeah. Right. And being able to do interesting stuff like that. And that’s really what we’re trying to do is we’re, we’re trying to really help people. And it’s difficult because it’s a bit of a challenge strategically to think it all through, but we’re trying to help people create more holistic end, end ex and end experiences where, you know, you’re getting personalized emails, you’re getting emails that are targeting just customers. But then when you go back to the site, you’re not treating, you’re not being treated as an anonymous person. You’re being treated as that customer too.

John Jantsch (16:33): You know, CRM, maintenance and updating is, you know, is the bane of a lot of people’s existence. And to some degree, you know, this is automating a great deal of that. Mm-hmm for people. I mean, it’s making your CRM smarter without you having to do a lot of effort once you get it in place. I think,

Brennan Dunn (16:48): Yeah. It’s just feeding. I mean, you obviously need to set up the different surveys right. And quizzes or whatever else, but yeah. It’s enriching. And I like to think of it as, especially those of us who are focus focused on low touch email stuff. Yeah. So you’ve got the lead magnet, the most we know about most of our people on our list is their first name and email address. Yeah. That’s pretty much it, which again, isn’t the end of the world. But I think if you can find out a bit more about why is they downloaded the lead magnet and what are they currently struggling with and what best describes their situation. And obviously the questions change depending on the business, the underlying business and stuff. Um, yeah. I mean a good example that we, that we like to reference a lot is we have a customer that’s in the health and fitness space and they do what you would expect, which is they ask like, what are your current goals?

Brennan Dunn (17:35): Do you wanna build muscle lose, you know, lose fat, whatever. And they’re able to then just dial in on both the products offered, but also the stories told over their marketing emails to just resonate better. I mean, it allows us to, I think all of us know that niche websites typically outperform generic. And the reason for that is they just, they had their messaging dialed in to one, one type of person with one type of need. And, um, but there’s no reason you need a niche, the entire business. Right. You know, it, it can be done. It’s like when I used to write proposals for my agency, we did web mobile apps for all different types of companies. When I wrote a proposal, I was effectively nicheing down our business to fit their unique need. And that’s all we’re talking about doing is just a, a way of doing that kind of dynamically.

John Jantsch (18:21): You know, what’s interesting about this, you know, you’ve, we’ve all gone to that, uh, to get that free download and presented with, you know, 18 fields of data that they want. And we’re reluctant to fill that in because I, I, I feel typically we don’t trust that company enough yet or, you know, whatever it is that we want to really give them that much information. Plus I think it, it feels like I’m giving you this information for your benefit. Right. And one of the things I like about this approach of asking people, I think it’s very easy to get a lot more data because it’s positioned or you can position it as, Hey, this is, this is so I can send you the right stuff. You know, this is so you get only what you care about. And I think that positioning really dramatically changes, you know, how much willingness people have to give you and trust that you develop. But I’m wondering if you have any data to back that up.

Brennan Dunn (19:14): I do. Yeah. So we used to be really pushing people. And I think you and I talked about this kind of recently where we used to push people to do a lot of upfront data collection. So pre optin get industry job role, all that stuff. Right. We’ve and the calculus was always, well, if we got more data about somebody could then show them a personalized optin. So if I knew you were in this industry with this problem, instead of join my newsletter, I can say, join my newsletter, you know, focused on helping, you know, marketing coaches with X, you know what I mean? Like just being able to make that really dialed in. And, and there’s some like that can sometimes work better, but if it’s tricky, so what I recommend most people do at this point is get that data post optin. So do your usual normal optin stuff.

Brennan Dunn (20:02): And then I like using the confirmation page. So the thank you page that usually says, Hey, thanks, go check your email goodbye. Instead, use that as an opportunity to say, Hey, so, you know, thanks for joining. If you can spare a minute or two, I’d love to just find out a bit more about how I can make sure you get exactly the content you need and nothing more. So this is something that, you know, we do, I do, but also many of our customers do. And on average, we’re getting usually it’s about 80 to 85% of all new opt-ins end up going through that process. I mean, assuming it’s not a thousand questions, if it’s, you know, four or five things that are multiple choice questions, most people are willing to kind of click through that because you’re positioning it as exactly that you’re not doing this to say we wanna put together a, a slide deck to investors showing the composition of our audience, give us data.

Brennan Dunn (20:51): Instead it’s positioned as if I can find out why you’re here and what you need. I can reduce the amount of noise I send you. Yeah. I can make sure that I’m giving you exactly what you need. And people tend to agree with that and like that. So, yeah, I mean, we’re, I’m getting four outta five people who join giving me more than just a name and email. I know in my case what their current email marketing objective is, what email provider they use. If they have one, how comfortable they are with it, what they’ve done with it, if they haven’t, why haven’t they signed up yet? So for me, I’m like, well, I can go and say, send an email right now to everyone on my list, who does not use an email marketing platform and maybe they’ve struggled. Maybe they haven’t done it cuz they’re not sure which one. Yeah. Well, I just came up with this great, uh, review video I put together and I really pushed the affiliate thing that I, you know, for the platform I, I recommend. And that’s how I could target that for, right. Yeah. So I can do like so many interesting things once you have, uh, that data in your database.

John Jantsch (21:49): Yeah. So, so let’s wrap up on, uh, the idea of creating personalized messages on your website. I think a lot of what we’ve talked about implies that I’ve got that data. So now I can send better email, but a lot of us out there myself included have segments, different, unique segments that we sell mm-hmm and wouldn’t it be amazing if on the homepage , you know, when they came there, they saw case studies and testimonials that were only related or were specifically related to that segment. And so talk a little bit about the idea that using this tool and using this data that we collect, we can actually now have the website say different stuff.

Brennan Dunn (22:25): Yeah. So the way, the way we do it with the right message is we allow you to quickly like click on a headline. So what you could do is you could go into our tool within the tool, go to your homepage, let’s say, and then click on the headline, like, you know, your main headline mm-hmm and then toggle between all the different segments you’ve defined. So if you’ve defined, um, segment a segment B and segment C, you could say go to a, change the headline to a B change this, click on this picture, change it to the picture of the Panda for people in a change it to, you know, change this, change that. And it’s really just kind of very, if you’ve ever used a tool like Optimizly or VWO, it’s very similar in that respect where it’s point and click. So that that’s how we’ve designed that.

Brennan Dunn (23:07): But what I usually tell people is even if they don’t want to go that far one easy fix, it’s not the most elegant fix, but it’s an easy fix would be, let’s say you’re promoting a new product or course, and duplicate your sales page like two or three times and make those tweaks. And then just within your email platform, when you’re writing the emails, have some conditions, let’s say if they’re in this segment, point them to landing page a. If they’re in this segment, go to line page B and, and obviously it’s not the nicest way of doing it, especially when you consider that one benefit of a platform like right messages, we can do multivariate personalization. So you can say, you know, these benefits are here because they’re in this job role, this headlines, because they’re in this industry, this testimonial is because they’re struggling with this pain point and that can yield. If you just do simple math, it can yield, you know, 10 industries, times 10 job roles. You already have to have a hundred variations, which would be untenable if you were to duplicate it a hundred times. Yeah,

John Jantsch (24:08): Yeah, yeah. And is it, does it work with the various page builders that are out there now because you you’re just putting in blocks of HTML or something

Brennan Dunn (24:15): That’s right. So all we’re doing the easiest way to think about it is we’re effectively, post-procesing the page. So you put our script on the site. What we do is your page builder sends up the wire the final page. And we’re just saying, even though the server says, we should be showing the headline that says ABCs, we see their tech customers. So before they even see the page, we’re gonna change it out to X, Y, Z. So it’s just a, kind of a, the benefit there for us is it’s, it’s agnostic in terms of what you put it on, it’ll work on anything that allows you to just run our JavaScript on

John Jantsch (24:46): It. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Brendan, thanks for taking time to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. You, you wanna send people obviously we’ll have a link to right message. But do you want anywhere else you wanna send people to connect with you?

Brennan Dunn (24:57): Yeah. I mean the, the, you know, besides right message. I, I do write weekly, like you mentioned, at create and sell.co and there, I just write about everything from, you know, tagging versus custom fields to what I’ve talked about recently.

John Jantsch (25:11): A lot of email stuff,

Brennan Dunn (25:13): Just email, like, you know, should you have design emails versus simple text? Yeah. I mean just a lot of emailing, things like that.

John Jantsch (25:19): Awesome. Well, again, uh, thanks for sub by and hopefully, uh, we’ll run into you, uh, one of these days again, out there on the road.

Brennan Dunn (25:26): Absolutely. Thanks John. Hey,

John Jantsch (25:28): 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 dot com.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.