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(00:54): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Amanda Holmes. She is the CEO of Chat Holmes International, which has worked with over 250,000 businesses worldwide. At age 24, she inherited her father's multimillion dollar enterprise, which specializes in helping companies double their sales. A lot of their works based on the best selling book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, of which they have a new edition coming out. Amanda's name will be all over the new edition as well. And she has merged her father's proven process with her own forward thinking ideas to connect the old school sales process with hybrid, online and offline instant gratification and short attention span that we see in consumers today. So Amanda, welcome back to the show.

Amanda Holmes (01:45): Thank you so much, John. You know, it means so much to me that you interviewed my father and then you interviewed me so many years ago and here we are again. It just, it means a lot. I, not a lot of people interviewed my father either, so

John Jantsch (01:58): I I was gonna say, I might be one of the few podcasters who has interviewed you both .

Amanda Holmes (02:03): Yes. Just I have never heard it from anybody else and I've done hundreds of interviews, so you are the only one

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

Amanda Holmes (02:21): .

John Jantsch (02:22): So we also have another shared connection. My daughter has actually worked for me for about 12 years. She is our chief operating officer. So I really kind of have to go there. Didn't work in the business as a family member. Right. You really brought, came into the business. I would have to think in some ways that was a pretty tall order because in fact I think you were studying music in college and you know, not necessarily preparing for a career as a ceo. Right. So what's it, I guess I was gonna ask you what's like working with family, but that's not really, it wasn't really your experience. So what was it like really? And I know you've told this story many times, what was it like basically being thrust into an ongoing organization, but as a family member?

Amanda Holmes (03:08): Yes, it, well, it was hard because me and my father were very close. I was actually born in his birthday. We shared the same birthday February 13th, and it was as if just the stars aligned. And so losing him was like losing air . It was like I didn't know where up was or down was. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep. So getting all of that while at the same time, like I can remember just days after his funeral. And the only reason why I remember that cuz all that time is such a blur, but I just remember all of these flowers around my room from his funeral and I was sitting there and they had just sent me the PNL of all the companies and it was the first time I'd ever seen it. And it just felt like this PNL was never ending. I kept scrolling and scrolling and I just broke down.

(03:55): It was like, how, how is this possible that, So my father battled with cancer for a year and a half before he passed. And he spent 352 nights in the hospital and never once did he spend it alone. So it was me, my mom, and my brother. We just, we rotated spending all-nighters with him. So I spent easily a hundred allnighters with my father in the hospital. Never once did he say, Hey Amanda, let me explain to you what my businesses are . Let me explain to you who runs them. Let me tell you about where I'd like this to go. We never had that dialogue and there was time and I speak on that because I think it's critical that more parents take responsibility for the fact that there are other people that if you leave this world without a plan, you're hindering them.

(04:48): So I do talk on that every once in a while. But, so it was utterly shocking and it really is. I look back and I think it's a miracle that we're here today based on the fact that Right, I knew nothing. I was trying to get over the loss of my father while couple hundred staff, you know, this crazy enterprise. But here we are. I stepped in and it took me two years to step in cuz it just looked like, this is crazy talk. I don't know why I ever would. But then over time I fell in love with our clients. I recognized that there was something that was really beautiful about what my father had built and it could be carried on. It just needed that heart in the center of it to make it all work. And yeah, I increased our leads by 1176% the first year I stepped in and doubled our coaching clients multiple years in a row. And this year we're up over 300% and that's without the book releasing just yet. So it's a lot of wonderful things. My father had a great system and a great framework for how to grow organizations and I had to learn it from his books and his training programs instead of him explaining it to me. But nonetheless, I think I'm probably one of his greatest success stories just because of that.

John Jantsch (06:04): Right. What was hard for you? I mean you, you, you obviously made some changes, you know, what was hard for you to change? I mean, not necessarily resistance, but just really hard for you to even wrap your head around

Amanda Holmes (06:16): Changing. So we had never processed an order online. My father was very strict around, you know, every sale should come from a salesperson having a conversation either over the phone or in person. So I could remember the first time that I put some pricing online and I took a moment and it was like, I'm so sorry dad, I know you said this, but times have changed and I have to do it, have to put some of our stuff online. So that was a big, that was a big turning point in learning how to do digital marketing was critical and selling things online. And then also a huge change was for me, the people that I surround myself with, a lot of them were very different than who my father surrounded himself with. So I find that the culture that he thrived in is different than the culture that I thrive in.

(07:08): And making that distinction because at first it was anybody that my father respected, ultimately they would say, Well your father said I was the best in the planet on this. And I'd go, Okay. And I'd put them up on this pedestal of who was the best, right? Cause my father said he was the best , even though I started realizing that everyone said that my father said they were the best. So then I started reading through his emails to try and figure out what he really thought of them. That was the way that I would find out. And then the next level was okay, just because my father said he was the best, now I have to discern, is this somebody that I can work with? And there were quite a few of them that did not work with me very well. And that's okay. It's just a little bit of a different modus operandi, but still the strategies are the same. So it was interesting to see that culture shift.

John Jantsch (07:59): So shifting gears a little bit to maybe a more positive, less of a challenge, what's been the most fun for you?

Amanda Holmes (08:05): ? The marketing and sales part. Oh my gosh. Oh, you'll appreciate this John. So I just, you know, I'm in this whole book tour thing going on right now, right? I just went to all these different trade shows. I spoke at HubSpots inbound, that's where I saw that you're in HubSpot Network. Congratulations on that. Yeah, that's awesome. So I went there with a four foot billboard strapped to my back cuz I was looking for a way for people, My father teaches the first thing you need in a trade show is to get noticed. Yeah. And I was googling like, Oh, maybe we'll do a backpack and we'll design a backpack or something. And then I found, I typed in human billboard and this huge thing, it's a backpack that straps, but it's, and it lights up, it glows like a billboard sign. So I've been walking through all these trade shows with this poor foot billboard on my back. I call her Bessie now because I'm very fond of her. And on the last day of trafficking conversion, actually they shut me down because I was creating such a buzz and generating so many sales that the sponsors, the booths were getting jealous .

(09:12): But that's been a blast. And just being really creative about ways to get attention and then converting those, that attention into sales and leads and sales. That's a ton of fun for me.

John Jantsch (09:26): Would you say that your, and I know this is gonna sound sort of stereotypical, but would you say that your music background, your arts background, has brought a level of creativity that maybe didn't exist?

Amanda Holmes (09:38): Absolutely. So the new addition to the book The Forward, instead of saying Dear Reader, I instead said Dear dad. And that was a, and it something that Julia Easton, my book coach at the time, had suggested I do. And when I wrote it, everyone that read that majority of grown men that read it would cry reading it. And they thought they, out of all the every page, every sentence, I made sure that it was some way to double sales. But that letter to my dad, everyone said lead with that. Cause that's going to touch more people than just doubling sales techniques. And I put that into a video actually. And that's been what I've been using to promote the book. So to me that video is a music video. I wrote the lyrics, even though I'm not singing them, they're written. But everything that I had as a songwriter, I put into that video. To me, that's the single that came out with this new edition of the book, which is kind of funny to think about. But man, it is hitting people in a completely different way that I never expected. And it was the most nerve-wracking thing on the planet to put that thing out. I really thought that. I didn't think that people would like it, but everybody kept saying, I love it, I love it. You should put that out. And it's been such a loving response. So yeah, that, that songwriter in me, I think

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(11:51): , describe who C I A CH homes an international works with. Who's your typical client?

Amanda Holmes (11:57): Yes. Okay, I'll answer that by asking you a question. And you probably know the answer to this. What percentage of businesses do you think make it to a million in annual sales?

John Jantsch (12:06): I don't know the exact answer other than it's relatively small. Not,

Amanda Holmes (12:10): Yeah, if you

John Jantsch (12:11): Had to guess, I would say 9%.

Amanda Holmes (12:13): Okay. That's close. That's close. 5% of companies make it to a million of that 0.08%, make it to 5 million of that 1.5%, make it to 10 million. So it gets a little bit better. then 0.004%, make it to a hundred million and beyond. So what we teach is how to get from a million to five, from 5 million to 10, From 10 million to a hundred million and beyond. Because it's actually not about our product or service, which majority of entrepreneurs think, yes, if I just tweak this a little bit more, then I'll get more. Right. If that was true, McDonald's wouldn't be the number one grossing hamburger join in the world. Right? It's a terrible burger. It's skills it takes to grow the business and skills can be developed. So we assist entrepreneurs to grow from that one to five, from five to 10, from 10 to a hundred million and beyond.

John Jantsch (13:07): One of the core concepts. I have actually not, not seen what you've done in the second edition yet, but in the, certainly in the first edition. Well, and, and I know it's a core concept of your coaching, is this, uh, concept of the Dream 100. I wonder if you could kind of describe that. Cause I know that's a big E for

Amanda Holmes (13:22): You. Yes. It's the fastest, least expensive way to double sales . This one strategy has doubled the sales of more companies than any other. My father invented it working for billionaire, Charlie Munger, co-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. So he doubled the sales of nine different companies for Charlie all within 12 to 15 months. And several of them multiple years consecutively. So he realized that he had a system for doubling sales and it went something like this. So he was given a list of 2200 potential prospects and they said, Okay, go cold. Call these 2200. But when he did some research, he realized that only 167 of them purchased 95% of the space. So instead of going after 2200, he led an intensive dream 100 to just those hundred and 67. Now it being in their face, in their place, in their space, what can we do to provide the most value for them?

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

(15:04): How can I make this work with direct mail? And how do I get a hundred people on my list? You're missing the point if you're super focused on just those two things. Because we have so many marketing mediums in our use today. I show how I used a dream One, I focused on one potential dream client and I followed up with them every single day using social media. Every time they post something on social, I'd comment with something of value. Every time they posted another thing, I'd add another piece of value and another comment at another For every single day, for three months, I commented on every single thing that this person said. And three months in they came back to me and said, Hey, I'd like to buy 650 books of the Ultimate Sales Machine. I'm still reaping the benefits of that. Three months of Pig had a discipline and determination.

(15:52): Today they bought another thousand books. It's actually, it was the CEO of ClickFunnels. So Dave Woodward I did this with. So the point is, it's about picking who's one person that could completely change your world. And then can you multiply that even by, you could have four, you could have 10, I'm calling it the Target 12. It doesn't have to be a hundred, right? The whole point is just to get laser focused and follow up with pigheaded discipline and determination, whichever medium that may be. If you wanna use direct mail, that's great because it will land cuz nobody's doing direct mail, right? Yeah, yeah. But if you wanna do it on Instagram dms, that's where I did it to get that client. Right. It could be on LinkedIn, it could be on voice drops, on cell phones

John Jantsch (16:35): Or all of them. Right? Or all of them. Or all of them, right?

Amanda Holmes (16:38): . Yeah. If you only have a hundred, Right? And you're sending, if you're doing Facebook ads to them, if you are sending them text messages, if you're arriving at their door, they're like, you are everywhere. It's like, yeah, I'm only everywhere to the select 10, right? Select a hundred. So they're just amazed, right?

John Jantsch (16:53): Yeah. And I think what's so important about that lesson is you can now afford to spend money and time and energy that is gonna just swamp what anybody else is doing, you know, to that same person because they're spraying it, you know, 10,000 people at a time.

Amanda Holmes (17:11): Absolutely. We had a client, so I went, I've created these bootcamps and a client went through the bootcamp, they went after four people that had already said no to their services. It was a hard, no, I'm definitely not interested. And then he led with an education to those four. After he gave the presentation of an education, he closed 8.4 million worth of sales in just six weeks. Six weeks. And the average sales rep would sell 8 million in an entire year. He did it in six weeks. Cuz he targeted his dream. He only needed four. Dream four to generate 8.4 million.

John Jantsch (17:49): So one of the challenges, I th I, you kind of alluded to this, we're so focused on digital right now, you, you have yourselves firmly in what you're calling old school processes, but they really, in some ways, some of the old school processes are working better than ever, aren't they?

Amanda Holmes (18:07): Absolutely. I mean, take what I just did at trade shows. It's shocking how many people at trade shows have no idea how to have a face-to-face conversation. I'd walk up to a booth and 90% of them had no idea how to start asking questions. You know, I'd ask, What do you do? And they have no idea. They look starstruck. Like what? You're talking to me in real life. I don't know what to do. It's so bizarre how we've lost the frameworks and the basic foundational principles. Everyone thought, Oh, a billboard. Yeah, that's brilliant. But then I also QR code there so that I could collect people that were taking pictures. Anyways, the first few days they were taking pictures of me cuz they thought I was hysterical. But then they didn't realize that now I'm converting them cuz they're clicking on that I'm getting their email and then they're buying.

(18:54): So it's blending of the two. My funnel online got me the sales, but me walking around with a four foot billboard on my back in a trade show got the attention in the press. And now I've taken vi video that I got from influencers in the space that were recording me cuz they thought it was hilarious. And I'm using that in my ads and I'm repurposing it, right? So there's so many different ways that I think in person too. It was just at a mastermind with Grant Cardone two weeks ago, and there were 80 people in the room, all of which would've loved to talk to Grant Cardone. He walked out of the room and nobody followed him. And I'm looking around the room going, Are you kidding me? That's a billionaire. I'd love to talk to Grand Cardell. Why not? So I run out there and I start to have a dialogue with him. It's like, it's as if we only can communicate through a text or on right in an in a social media aspect. He was right there living, breathing. And I handed him the book and I said, You should watch Dear Dad, it'll make you cry. I'll send you a book. And he's like, I will definitely cry from that. I'm sure I will. I love that. Thank you

John Jantsch (19:54): . Amanda, thanks for dropping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Tell people where they can find all the work that you're doing and certainly get a copy of the new book or the re revised, updated, fully updated book.

Amanda Holmes (20:06): Yes. Ultimate sales machine.com is where everybody can pick up the book. It'll give you a bunch of extra bonuses that you wouldn't get on Amazon. And then if you wanna online, I'm a lot of different places, but I spend more of my time on Instagram. My name Amanda Holmes was taken, so I'd use my salsa name Amanda Dita Holmes. So you can find me on Instagram at Amanda dita Homes.

John Jantsch (20:29): All right, awesome. Well, great to having you back on the show again and uh, hopefully we'll run into you again, one of these days out there on the road.

Amanda Holmes (20:36): Thank you, John. It was such a blessing.

John Jantsch (20:38): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode or the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the nudge podcast, hosted by Phil Agnew and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. You can learn the science behind great marketing with bite size 20 minute episodes packed with practical advice from admired marketers and behavioral scientists. Nudge is a fast pace, but still insightful with real world examples that you can apply. Her recent issue. Talked about the, the idea of getting your customers, your prospects in the habit of buying from you or listening to you or following you habit based marketing, download, nudge, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Andrew Warden. He is the CMO of Semush. Semrush. We'll talk about that. Yeah. Time in the second square we're on behalf our conversation, right? it's an online visibility management SaaS platform that is used by millions of marketers worldwide, including this one. So, uh, Andrew, welcome to the show.

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

John Jantsch (01:40): Yeah, I actually was gonna ask you that directly and then I actually blew it in the intro but I know I've even seen some of the videos you've produced of, you know, making fun of the idea. Is it, I'm curious since we got on the topic, even though it's a goofy topic, is there a regional preference? Like do Americans use one or the

Andrew Warden (01:59): Other? No, you know, I think it's, I actually, I don't think it's necessarily linked to geography. Yeah. I think that's linked to history. Right? Number one, because originally right, the founding of the company was, it's always like square in the search engine marketing at the yeah. Yeah. Kind of die hard SEO community. And that's true. And that's still very much a core of our community, but you know, now gosh, 14 years later, we're 55 plus tools. Not only SEO, not only at the sweet spot. So I think it's probably more linked to his history and maybe our, maybe our diehard SEO fans. Right. S SCM. Right? Yeah.

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

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

(03:46): And we're all still friends, but the points of the, kind of the peaks and the valleys, and even some of the troughs it's like, you know, had this moment, this illuminating moment a couple weeks ago where it's like, this was all preparing for this exact moment actually. Right. And that's really resonated with I'm. I'm really curious and happy that you bring it up. Cuz a lot of people have been talking about this, right? It's like not many officers of public companies are making such statements, but I have to, you know, and it resonates with our team internally. It resonates with people outside. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

John Jantsch (05:08): I mean to use that, like as your core

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

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

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

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

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

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

(08:27): And if it makes less than a certain amount, we're like, you know what? It just didn't work out. And we should not do that for another couple of years. And it's very similar with experiments. I would say are a little bit, even more further afield. Like it's could even liven more out there. Right? We have a hypothesis that actually, we just did one of these experiments. I don't have the result yet, which is kind of a let down for this kind of conversation. Sorry. But we did a direct mail experiment. How's that for a SEO or for a digital marketing company, you know, it's like, I wait to the team and I said said, has anybody sense, literally, a mailer to small business owners, you know, cuz I had this contention that small business owners, it's not necessarily like me or like you or somebody else who hangs out online. Right. The barber. Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:08): They're not reading search engine land, the barber

Andrew Warden (09:10): Who's cutting my hair, who I love. Right. Is opening the door for me, cutting my hair, sweeping the floor register, you know like this person is on LinkedIn, you know? It's like, how are you reaching that person? So, so we did two different tests over the summer or sorry one over the summer. I think one just went out as well. So I'm waiting to see, I have no idea, but this is what I, you know, you ask about experimentation and you always have to make sure that you're carving out, you know, 10, 10, 15% of your budget of your spend to try new channels. Because the moment that you rest on the laurels of the channel, that's working so well for you is the moment it stops doing that.

John Jantsch (09:46): No question BEC if it's working well for you, other people are using it too. Right. To me when I hear that, it sounds like, like if I came to you and said, Hey, I have an idea. We should do both. It sounds to me like the hypothesis is gotta be really soft. Like you really believe this is going to work

Andrew Warden (10:01): Because absolutely right. Yep. Yeah, no, you can't just like you can't just be like, Hey John, I wanna, you know, I want to go and take out and add in the wall street journal. Okay. Why do you wanna do that? I don't know. I mean a lot of people read it. No, you know, you know, you have to be able to, I mean, look, you could, there are ways to make that more scientific. You can say, you know, during this period there or the wall street journal, you know, more for financially focused people, it's like earnings typically happen between this day and this day tech earnings come out between this day and this day. So we want to run this and with this type of promotion, because people in that demographic tend to buy around that period. It all has to be, it's quite, it's a lot more scientific than I had anticipated. I'll put it that way, but I love that. You're

John Jantsch (10:42): Gonna, you, you're gonna get a sales call from the wall street journal. Now I

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

John Jantsch (10:49): Now let's hear from a sponsor, you know, today everybody's online, but are they finding your website, grab the online spotlight and your customer's attention with Semrush from content and SEO to ads and social media. Semrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen, get Semrush, visit Semrush that's Semrush.com/go to try it free for seven days. All right. You kind of may alluded to this already, but I was going to ask you, I mean, it's certainly, I've been, uh, a Semush user for many years. Thank you. And I certainly saw it as, uh, as an SEO tool. Mm-hmm over the year. Well, it was more than that years ago, but it is certainly more than that. Now what's been the challenge of getting of changing. People's thinking that, oh no, it's 50 tools and it's, you know, it's a, in fact, I think you even called it an online visibility platform. Yeah. As, as a differentiator, is that Mo moving the definition of what your company is? Yeah. Has that been

Andrew Warden (11:57): A challenge? It's a, it's a huge, I mean, it's still very much in progress, right? I mean, again, we are so, and thank you for being a user for all these years as well. You know, I don't take anything for granted and there's so many solutions out there. I would say that, you know, we, we believe, you know, over the next several years and we, I mean, if we see it right now, we feel it right now in the, but we also know, particularly with small business owners that breaking through the noise in today's market, right. This, and that's, it's not even necessarily new, this kind of like fragmented view for a consumer and, you know, people spend on average seven hours online, you know, it's but how do you actually get through all of that noise and reach a perspective customer? How are you building your audiences?

(12:33): And, you know, again, all respects like that started out with SEO, you know, but at the same time we realized over time that there's a need amongst our own user base and our future customers for content creation for marketer, you know, you name it, you know, for traffic analytics, right? It's not only about finding what your audience is looking for, what they're searching for. It's also like how do I solve the problem of now figuring out how to talk to them and engage them. Right. So if you're asking me, is it a challenge to change how we're, how we are viewed in the market? Absolutely. You know, but at, you know, at the same time and we're adding, uh, we're adding our growth rate has not slowed over the last couple of years. So when you think about a comp, a KR, a compounding annual growth, we are, our velocity is not slowing down. So we are adding more and more people and expanding our own audience and reach. So I would imagine the days where this is a big, you know, question for the future, the days where, you know, this kind of Semrush or the core of SEO, I think that will always remain amongst, especially our initial users. But I think that there's also a future people join because they have like myriad problems they're trying to solve. Right. Not only SU yeah.

John Jantsch (13:41): Yeah. And that's how they're introduced to you. Yes. Yeah. You know of the brand is different. Yeah. Let's move a little bit to cuz, cuz I know you're running some, you know, some television that is, I would call it very branding oriented as opposed to say growth oriented. But has that, is that a conscious, in other words, it's not saying by this because it'll get you this result. Mm-hmm , it's more like your CEO will think this, you know,

Andrew Warden (14:03): That kind of, are you talking about that kind of thing? Are you talking about the most recent one? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I call this

John Jantsch (14:08): And that's just an example. My real question is, you know, how do you as an organization, that's this mature, how do you start? How do you start balancing mm-hmm the need for branding mm-hmm versus the need for just like we gotta have X amount of new

Andrew Warden (14:20): Users. I think the problem starts is that we think they're separate

(14:24): Because those campaigns are the goal for those campaigns are new users and they're achieving them. The first one we did in the year will exceed the target. The second, which the second campaign, which is, which was a dedicated for a small business owners. And we're, you know, this year is as much as it has been are, you know, about growth. We're also doing what I call these grown experiments, large experiments. So these foray into connected TV advertising the, using the same creative that can be used for, of course banners and digital classic. We can also then use that. There's so much production value. You can turn around to Hulu or YouTube connected TV, Disney plus like you name it. And you can like literally upload that ad and set a budget and go. So this year is also about testing new audiences, new ideas, new ways to engage.

(15:12): And one of our big bets is looking at what I would call and I didn't mean to correct you, but what I mean is that there's like brand, you are right. That like the approach is more about positioning the company and how it can help you grow. Right? This is this I call, these are, this is a customer needs based play versus a classic like, you know, every tool you need for X per month, right? That's more of what you call the classic performance or growth marketing. Yeah. Those hacks. But guess what? We're really good at the ladder. Like we're pretty okay at that. Right. In terms of digital and paid and even on the organic side, but we have incredibly aggressive growth plans over the next five to 10 years. And so I've gotta be able to lay my head on the pillow at night, knowing that we're testing every new channel, every new style of marketing and advertising that we can to keep new or existing and new customers engaged. So, but I do love how you distinction. You make a distinction right. From off the bat. Cause I get that a lot. People are like, well, you know, but this is a big kind of like kind of branding push on connected TV. And it's like, yeah, but we can trace back the connection that we acquired, that, that user, the attention of that user from that ad. And we can trace it through to visiting us. We can trace it through to registering doing a trial and eventually becoming summer's customer. So

John Jantsch (16:31): Yeah, you, I think you can almost make a case for saying it's targeting. It is in a way, because I think your core acquisition person that says these tools for this much and they know what those tools are. Right. that's right. Whereas your typical business owners actually like I don't really wanna know what the tools are. Yeah. I wanna solve this problem. Yep.

Andrew Warden (16:48): Yeah. And again, these are very large place and I, I'm not here saying every single one of these is gonna knock it outta the apartments goal obviously. But I think that I can tell you that the entire team, the entire its 200, 200 marketers in the organization every day, we're learning every day, we're stretching what we thought was possible again on our existing user base, what people want to expand for their relationship with summers, but also like net new people who have totally different needs and value sets compared to existing. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:16): So couple maybe these are your easy questions. Maybe these are hard. Sure. Couple more questions. Is there a small set of metrics that you rely on as

Andrew Warden (17:26): A C a small set? No, they're only big. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:29): I wanted to say small because , I didn't wanna see what you can. Yeah, I, yeah,

Andrew Warden (17:34): Well, yeah. I, I would say small at Semrush is big and it would be, I would, I wouldn't want in any other way, but the ones that I really live in the stress or get excited, you know, we measure very much on new user. Mr. So look, you know, know as a SAS based company, you've got SA classic SA SA metrics and we are a very different organization in terms of marketing than I would say at other kind of corporations or big company. You know, a lot of companies marketing is assisting with sales and kind of provides M QLS or SQLs to sales leadership. And then they carry on and close the deal at Semrush. Actually it's a little bit different. We are responsible for bringing in new user acquisition, right. And that's a material difference from other companies. So the emphasis and the laser focus on metrics is like not optional.

(18:22): You have to know every day. So I'm looking at, I'm looking always at registrations at trials. Trials is always a leading indicator. If, you know, if we see a swell in trials, there will be a, certainly a bump in new subscriptions. But new user MRI is my first, the first kind of traffic light. If you will, I'm also looking at increase or decline of our own spending, right? Because sometimes we slow down the engine either during holiday periods or periods where we don't think people are gonna have the propensity to buy and that's, we don't always get that. Right. You know, it's hard to know when to pull, pull or release that lever. I'm also looking at global dynamics, like different by different markets. Like right now the dollar fluctuation, you know, is difficult for a lot of companies. Right. And yeah, yeah. You know, in Europe, gosh, I just came back from meetings with the team in Amsterdam, in London.

(19:07): I got back late last night and you know what, you actually, you see and feel not only inflation, but also the currency of fluctuation, you know, in London, it's like 1.15 to the dollar. I mean, even when I was in grad school in 2007, it was never that low, you know, it's like, it hasn't been that low in, in 30 years or something. So, so there are different dynamics about the global economy. But I would say if you're asking for the shortest list, the shortest list, I get nine emails every morning at 7:32 AM that give me the holistic view of the business, but I would tease those as the kind of the ones that really matter. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:42): Yeah. All right. So pretend you were speaking to a group of CMOs in an audience only today, and somebody said, what do you think is the biggest challenge for most CMOs today? What would your answer

Andrew Warden (19:55): Be? I would say the loss of innovation culture, and I would say too much emphasis on having to be the smartest person in the room that is to the CMO audience. I would say that it is increasingly more and more difficult. Look as marketers. We are, it's almost like encoded in our own DNA, our personal DNA, every single action you take must yield an outcome, must yield a financial improvement right. To, to the top line even. And I think that the reality is, you know, again, it depends on which stage of growth you're in as a company or even if you're even as a small business or large business. The fact is marketing is a constantly evolving and field. Literally the pitch, the field, the markers change every day. You know, as soon as, like I said before, as soon as you find a channel that works, it doesn't work anymore.

(20:44): Or you say something that your audience doesn't like, and then you kind of get like temporary put in the timeout box. You know, it's like it happens. But I think that is also conditioned people. And I would also, I do say this to my peers, that it conditions us to like be a risk averse and to not take, take too much time on experiments. I mean, I have, for example, every month I have what I call elevator pitch sessions. Like anybody can turn up to this call. It's like 15, 18 minutes long. You get two slides, you get five minutes, you know, it's like, what's your idea? What do you wanna do? What do you, you know, and it can be a request for like a 50 K campaign. It can be a request for a $5 million acquisition doesn't or 10 or whatever, you know, that's not the point.

(21:23): And it's funny, these are they're meant to be intentionally very snappy very quick. Like if anybody's kind of drowning on, it's like, come on, tell me that, what's the point, what's the point. But you know, I'll tell you, like, we've done real things based on those, like we've done, we've made that's cool, real investments, material investments. And so, yeah, I would just say that, you know, I think especially as a CMO, it's very easy to get kind of stuck in your own routine and rhythm of what works. And I think that's why I was just reflecting after a year. Like I have more energy John than when I started. And usually like, you know, you kind of know yourself at this stage in your career. Usually you're like, okay, I found this works. We're gonna go head into budgeting season and then we're gonna, we're gonna keep going. But like I make stuff. I make shit every single day, you know? And as soon as, as the CMO, I think is an executive leader, as soon as you stop doing that, like, like you personally, I think you have to kinda reevaluate what's going on. Right? Like

John Jantsch (22:15): I think those little mini pitches sound really empowering, especially imagine somebody who like got their deal.

Andrew Warden (22:20): Anybody. Yeah. No, but really, but we have like junior PR ex execs within the team, like with a handful of years of experience, like I want to do, I wanna try this, you know? And I'm like, why is that a good idea? Well, are you sure? Tell me why you believe it, you know? And it's like, it's even just going through that experience early in your career, it changes you. Right. It opens your mind and that's also, you know, really important to me.

John Jantsch (22:43): Yeah. Awesome. Well, Andrew, it was really a pleasure to have you sub by the duct tape marketing podcast. And we can, you can tell people how they can reach Semrush. You can spell it for them. if you like, we'll have it in. Well, it's, we'll have it in the show notes. It's on your shirt. Yeah. Semrush

Andrew Warden (22:58): Semrush.com Semrush. Do. Yeah, I can't. Yeah. So I, I would that's as simple as it can be.

John Jantsch (23:03): Yeah, absolutely. Well, hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. In fact, the end of this week, I'm gonna be in Austin. Oh,

Andrew Warden (23:10): Great. Stop by. Yeah.

John Jantsch (23:11): Which I know you are

Andrew Warden (23:12): For, for a drink. Cool. All right. Thanks for having me. Cheers.

John Jantsch (23:15): Appreciate it. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That's just marketingassessment.co I'd. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:49): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest today's Steve Miller meetings and conventions magazines calls him the idea, man, for his unconventional edgy, no spin approach to marketing and branding. He's the author of the Amazon. Number one best seller UN copyable. How to create an unfair advantage over your competition. He speaks in, uh, his speaking and consulting clients have ranged from entrepreneurs to fortune 100 corporations, including Proctor and gamble, gray star, real estate, caterpillar, Boeing, airplane, Starbucks, Phillips electronics, and the prestigious Ted conference. Today. We're gonna talk about his latest book, stealing genius, the seven levels of adaptive innovation. So

Steve Miller (01:38): God, thank you for that. When having me on to talk about this, this is great. I, you know, I mean, I think I'm pretty sure no, this is how authors work, right. But my book went to number one, which was for a brief period of time. okay. You and I both on top of it again sure. That I knocked you off the best seller list for like two or three days, you know, then you immediately just jumped right back.

John Jantsch (02:07): Well, that is good to know. And then listeners won't won't know this, but this is our second attempt at this interview because we had a technology glitch. And so Steve was kind of kind enough to come back. There's I, and, and I, you know, if you were to listen to the other recording, just know that it would not be the exact same thing. I, I suspect because I never know what a questions I'm gonna ask. And I know Steve, has you

Steve Miller (02:29): No idea what Steve has no idea. I,

John Jantsch (02:34): So, so I do wanna start by unpacking the, just the ti the words or the, that you use in the title. So in two cases, the first one, stealing genius, maybe give us a definition of, of that

Steve Miller (02:45): Going well. This if, to try to unwrap it as quickly as possible that the Genesis of this is that too often, businesses doesn't matter what size business you could be, a, a single person, entrepreneur, you know, or, you know, a fortune 500 company too often. They get fall into the trap of paying too much attention to the competition, too much attention to the world within their world. Okay. And as, as such, you see an awful lot of dare. I say, incestuous behavior among companies, you know, they copy each other. They might try to improve upon somebody else's idea, but they kind, that's kind of how they come up with their future plans for, oh, we're just, we're gonna get better than the competition. We're gonna get better than the competition. Well, many years ago, my father, Ralph Miller and his cohort and crime bill Le of li jet, they got together and came up with this concept that they, they deemed the eight track tape player.

Steve Miller (03:54): Okay. So yes, my dad was part of that world. now the reason I bring that up is because while they were planning on building this product, ultimately after a lot of, of starts and stops and stuff like that in various locations, they ultimately ended up in Japan trying to build this product over there. Now this is back in the sixties. And when you think of the, when you think of made in Japan, back in the sixties, for the most part, it was kind, you know, they were known for those little umbrella straws, you know, things that would go into your drinks, you know, it would open and close. And they, and there was an American consultant who got in with Toyota and his name was w Edwards, ding and Deming was really the precursor or one of the guys that kind of got the total quality thing moving well.

Steve Miller (04:44): So, right. So my dad and bill Le knowing they had to build a quality product in Japan, they brought him in to be part of the team. So, and then my dad, who, now this, I don't wanna get into a discussion with my dad, but he decides that the way to spend quality time with his young teenage son is to drag me along and fly me to go to hang with these guys, right? Oh, that was a blast. And, but one of the things I remember was that DMing was very, this guy was really a pound the table, kind of a guy, right. When he got really, and, and the thing that he got really big about was benchmarking. Okay. Because that's essentially what we're talking about. When we say that, that we, as companies tend to look at our competition, we tend to look within our world.

Steve Miller (05:41): We are benchmarking is what we're doing. Okay. Now D ding called that intrinsic benchmarking where you were benchmarking in your industry, but he maintained that in order to think creatively, that was a mistake. You were not gonna come up with new ideas by just studying the competition. You were gonna come up with new ideas by going outside your world, outside of your natural, uh, environment and go study aliens. And he called it extrinsic benchmarking, and I call a call it stealing genius. So, so that's where, that's the Genesis of where it all came from. It all started hell of a long time ago.

John Jantsch (06:29): so, so, so let's, uh, unpack this other term then. So stealing genius really essentially comes down to looking for ideas that you can apply to your business, your industry in maybe unusual places. So then it's a matter of, and, and the book really then comes up with these seven levels of how to think about it, of adaptive innovation. So, so, and

Steve Miller (06:52): So an adaptive innovation is really a it's, it's really the how to do it of stealing genius is that you go out and, you know, like I say, I talk about seven different levels of, of Ben benchmarking, petty them. And you look for people, organizations, companies who are not part of your world. Right. And you go stuck. Geez, what are they really good at? Okay. And you look for the genius in those people, and then you ask yourself, okay, is that something I can actually steal? And that's where you, you're answering the question. Is that an innovative idea in my world that I can adapt? All right. Cause you know, I mean, you can go study, you know, companies and people in other industries and they'll have great ideas, but you'll never, you just won't be able to figure out a way to use them.

Steve Miller (07:41): So it has to be an innovative idea that you can adapt back into your industry. So, so to just say, you know, as just a simple example, like if you are in the high tech industry right now, then I would be telling you, go out and study the food industry, go out and study, you know, reader, industry, go detail, go out and study, you know, some AIAN high tech is using it, right? So at restaurants, you know, and ask yourself, is there something out there that we can steal and bring back to high tech? And nobody's UN copyable hard, nobody in high tech is approaching anything like that right now. And if you do it right, you can actually create a situation that, you know, from my previous book is, is hard to copy.

John Jantsch (08:25): And now let's hear from a sponsor, look, you've worked hard to grow your business and finding CRM software. You can trust to help grow it even more. It isn't easy, whether you're starting out or scaling up, HubSpot is here to help your business grow better with a CRM platform that helps put your customers first. And it's trusted by enterprises and entrepreneurs alike with easy to use marketing tools like drag and drop web page editors that require no custom code content strategy tools, where you can create topic clusters that automatically link supporting content back to your core pillar pages to ensure search engines can easily crawl your site and identify you as an expert on any given topic. HubSpot helps your business work smarter, not harder, learn how your business can grow better@hubspot.com. So, so one of the things that I think is probably difficult, I don't think anybody listening so far is like, oh, that's a dumb idea that, that, I mean, I think everybody pretty much agrees with yeah, that's, we've all seen that in our lives. Maybe you're in some business innovation where everybody was like, that's brilliant, but they really just brought it from somebody else who was doing it. So how do you advise people? I mean, I sure the first question a lot of people ask is, well, where do I look? You know, how do I get started?

Steve Miller (09:47): Well, you know, and with the Lev, the seven levels, you know, I try to take it from like the easiest way to start, you know, do I want to innovate right. And up to the most complicated and the easiest way to start is, first of all, is ask yourself just a question. Like, like, okay, what do I wanna, what I'll, I'll use an example of, uh, of, um, let you know, trade shows, for example, you know, one of the, one of the biggest issues with trade shows that the, the producers of trade shows, you know, they have to go out and they're finding exhibitors who are spending a lot of money to come in and buy these booth piles. Well, one of the biggest challenges for the build these booths and, and spend that money, and then they have to attract people to come to walk up and down the ERs is they want those people to walk every single aisle, right.

Steve Miller (10:35): Because they want them to get in, to go buy all those people who are spending money. So if you ask the question, how do we get people to walk the aisles? Right. Well, that's so let's say that's the project. That's, that's the question. So you ask, now the question you ask yourself is okay, who to that is not in the trade show. World is really good at forcing people walk and, and the number one example, the biggest example of all are supermarkets. Okay. It's the food industry, but supermarkets are brilliant. They are genius at forcing you to travel as many aisles as possible before they will let you out. okay. You get your cart. That's right. And, and like, just like the simple question, where is the milk in the supermarket? It's as far away from the front door as it possibly can be, because everybody's gonna, everybody's got milk on which means you have to go their list.

Steve Miller (11:44): Right? So, so they're gonna make you go as far away as possible. And they're, you know, up and down aisles or around the corner or some different stuff like that. So that is, and trade shows by default historically have always put the milk in the front of the front of the hall. When you go into a big trade show for the most part, the biggest exhibitors, the ones who are the destination ex they're, like anchor stores at a mall. Okay. They are making, they let you walk in and boom, you walk right in. Well, smart trade shows that, and I've consulted for a number of really big, you know, the top put the milk in the back of the hall hop shows in, in, in the country. You know, you finally get them to understand, no, you, you they're the milk, right. They're still gonna get every single person into their booth, but, but the people have to travel to get to them. So that's see, that's an example of it's where you start at that kind of level level one where you define, find the, define the objective, and then you go out and you ask yourself who is doing this. That is an alien in, in our world.

John Jantsch (12:54): Yeah. So I think that the key to that as I'm listening to you is it's not just a matter of going out and saying, oh, that's different. We could do that. It's really, I think first you have to look inward, you know, what is our industry doing? What does everybody do? What does common practice and really start then saying, how can we, you know, Zig let's go look for a Zig. That would make

Steve Miller (13:16): Sense. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've all heard. And I use the term map, the experience. I mean, you know, the customer journey, I mean, everything like that, but you know, those of us that are the consult, you know, we have these conversations with our clients and we talk about all these things. And then what I do is as we map the experience of the customer and go through all the touch points that they might have, then what I do is I, I, one by one, we go through the touch points. So we say, okay, is this something that we can change? You know, or do we have to just keep doing it the same way everybody else is doing it right now, if it's, you know, let's ask ourselves that question, you know, how do we make somebody travel? You know? And that might be the big question, but you do it with every, you know, every opportunity that you have, you look for a way to ask the question, is this something that we can do differently?

Steve Miller (14:05): You know, now, but even when you say, well, you know, you know, we, we could go look at companies and oh, look what they're doing. Well, that's actually one of the levels. Okay. But mm-hmm, before you get to, before you get to the point where you just go look at a company and say, gee, what are they really good at that, you know, you kind of wanna go through these other levels. So you get in your mind and you get yourself thinking in terms of what do they do, great that I can steal and use back in my

John Jantsch (14:31): Work. So one of the things that I, you know, a lot of pushback from companies, why they don't innovate is because will it work? Nobody else in our industry is doing it. You know, it's almost like a fear to try. So what are some of the ways that, that somebody can, this is probably two questions, but first know how something know that something's going to work is not gonna be a big risk. It's not gonna turn their customers off.

Steve Miller (14:55): Well, I think the first thing to ask yourself is do people buy from you because you're similar to the competition. and yeah.

John Jantsch (15:05): And yeah. And in fact, jump in, push back more. I would guess a lot of people would say, well, not necessarily because of that, but they have a certain expectation, you know, of how they're gonna be treated, say in

Steve Miller (15:17): The industry life. I know if their expectation for you is the same as for everybody else, you know, then, then we run into the problem and you, and I both know where this ends up, this ends up with, you know, first of all, everybody's product is quality. Everybody has high quality products today, everybody right. Says they have the best customer service on the planet. Everybody says that. Okay. Right. And if everybody has the best product and you know, and essentially in most industries there, it's, they're commoditizing now, you know, that's the way technology is working. And the second thing is, if everybody says they have the best customer service, well, the customer, no, you know, the customer never buys similarity. The customer always finds a difference. And if they can't find it between the product or the service, it comes down to price. And I I'm, I'm saying to people, if you wanna compete on price, then I'm not your consultant. no question about it.

John Jantsch (16:15): Yeah. Well, there'll always be somebody willing to go out of business faster.

Steve Miller (16:18): That's right. Chase that to the bottom. That's exactly right.

John Jantsch (16:21): do you have a couple examples of companies that you think are just routinely

Steve Miller (16:27): Good? Oh, well, you know, but the, and of course, yes, they they're, they're the obvious answers. Right. You know, the Disneys, you know, the, you know, the apples and, and groups like that. I mean, I love to look at companies that are not huge, that are doing things that are just wicked, you know, wicked different. I have a client who they build those, you know what, like if you go into a auto body shop or something, or a car auto shop and the technicians who are, and these guys are really good at what they do. Okay. And they own all of their own tools and they have those tools in a really nice toolbox. And it's usually like this huge toolbox standing up really tall and it's red. That's exactly right. Yeah. And, and one of my clients who is one of the suppliers to that, they, you know, he wanted to, you know, we were fighting over like, okay, how do we separate?

Steve Miller (17:26): How do we separate? You know? And you know, you try to get 'em to, oh, you can change color. But really what we're looking at is we're looking at what can we offer people that nobody else is gonna offer? And, you know, and he said, you know, they're all expensive. You know, at that level, they're very expensive. So how do you prove value to a customer? Cause I always say where value is clear, the decision is easy. And so he came up with this concept of, of not just a lifetime guarantee, but he came up with a, with a concept of a 55 year guarantee. And what he did with that was by, by taking a specific number like that, instead of saying lifetime, cuz lifetime is kind of one of those things, people, banner, you know, bandy about, you know, all, all over the place he said for, he says, if you call me within 55 years, I will give you a brand new, you know, you know, case, or I'll give you your money back.

Steve Miller (18:23): Okay. And then, and, but then he, you know, in the guarantee he also says, put, my kid is take, okay. We both know I'm not gonna be alive in 55 years. right. He's actually taking a long taking over the business. And so my kid will be, you know, taking care of the, so, so what he's doing is he's just essentially, you know, a lifetime guarantee and he' now spun it into language that people will remember. And that's what we're, that's what we gotta be cognizant of is that people do business, you know, with people, they like, they know they trust and they remember, okay. And that's the thing that it just for him, you know, it has separated from the crowd and man, and you know, and he is killing it.

John Jantsch (19:06): So Steve, tell me, tell people where they can find out more about obviously the book, a stealing genius or uneven.

Steve Miller (19:13): Well, you know, you can find out about him on Amazon,

John Jantsch (19:15): Find out more about your

Steve Miller (19:16): Work. You can absolutely do that. Yeah. But here's what here's, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna, I'm gonna give a gift to everybody because I love giving out books. And so what I'm gonna suggest is go to the website, be copyable dot. No, I'm sorry. Whoops. Back up. I started to say wrong, no stealing genius.com/do tape. Okay. And if you go to that site right now, here's what you do. You go buy stealing genius on Amazon. I don't care put, if you buy the Kindle, it doesn't bother me. Right. And then you go to that webpage and it asks you for your email address and you email address. And, and then I will follow up with you. And I will say, okay, now send me your mailing address. I will send you a free paperback copy of my book, UN copyable as my gift to you. And yes, I will even sign it because John, you and I both know how much more valuable that makes that book. Right. you know, don't personalize,

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

Steve Miller (20:27): Yes. Is it? Cause personalization actually drops the value of the book.

John Jantsch (20:32): That's right. That's right. No, no longer re well Steve, thanks again for, uh, taking the time, stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we will run into you again soon when

Steve Miller (20:41): Hope so. Can't wait. See your next book either. Thanks.

John Jantsch (20:43): Thanks Steve. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it@ marketingassessment.co 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.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the salesman podcast, hosted by Will Barron and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Look, if you work in sales, wanna learn how to sell, and frankly who doesn't check out the salesman podcast, where host will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win big business ineffective and ethical ways. And if you wanna start someplace, I recommend the four step process to influencing buying decisions. Listen to the Salesman Podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:44): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Laura Nelson. She's marketed, sold to and collaborated with local businesses for over 10 years of her career. As a marketer and business manager, she's currently the vice president of marketing@signpostfollowingroleswithbroadlyreputation.com and patch. She an MBA from the university of Michigan and a BFA at Carnegie Mellon university. So Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura Nelson (01:15): Hi Jen. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:17): So what did you work on in your, uh, fine arts?

Laura Nelson (01:20): I was a paint drawing, um, print making specialists. So mostly two, two dimensional works. However, through the program, we had to learn how to use every medium from the traditional media to, uh, computer based video, everything in between.

John Jantsch (01:42): So, so what do you do with that now in life Still paint or,

Laura Nelson (01:47): Yeah. Awesome. I do still practice my art. I, I draw quite a bit and make prints of it and give them the friends or sell them. The pandemic was a great opportunity to get back into it. Just given that I had more spare time as

John Jantsch (02:03): We, I picked up the, I picked up the mandolin. Oh, there you go. So yeah, I think a lot of people did that. Yeah. So, so let's, you are at signpost for those that don't know signpost specializes in, in a lot of, uh, local marketing, uh, tactics. So we're gonna talk about local national differences in marketing. So let's start there. Are there any significant differences, uh, say for a plumber versus say a software company when it comes to digital marketing?

Laura Nelson (02:33): Yeah, absolutely. Um, a plumber primarily is trying to attract homeowners, you know, to his or her business right

John Jantsch (02:42): In their community generally. Right?

Laura Nelson (02:45): So like, you know, they are restricted by geography. They have a certain budget in mind. Often there are trade offs when they're budgeting for marketing versus other, you know, expenses and other staff, et cetera, company like ours signposts. We are a B2B or business to business company. So we sell all across the United States and we sell primarily to businesses rather than to homeowners plumbers are our customers. Right, right, right. Along with other contractors who are looking for ways to, uh, attract homeowners with looking for ways to build their brand and their communities and ultimately grow their businesses. Right.

John Jantsch (03:30): So that local business that works in a community, obviously they, they want people generally speaking in proximity for a lot of businesses to, to be able to go online and find them. I mean, that's obviously the major difference. And in, in my experience, especially lately, if they're not finding you in maps and things like that, it's almost like you don't exist because so many people are making or purchase decisions that way. What about that business that has 10 locations, they have a, a different problem, a different challenge. Do they need to be optimizing for all 10 locations? How does that kinda change their calculus when it comes to, to online local marketing?

Laura Nelson (04:13): Absolutely. And you know, we work with businesses that have one to 10 locations. It's just an example. That would be our sweet spot. You know, the single location is going to be solving for slightly like different problems than someone operating a business at 10 locations. Sure. They're thinking about scale and achieving economies of scale, right. Depending on how they're set up, you know, across multiple communities or multiple states, you know, they may have different, um, needs in turn of their marketing strategies, the reach and the software that they invest in. However, they, you know, the things that they have in common are the basics, right? You mentioned showing up on Google maps, like if your business is not optimized for that, you're not part of the conversation. A homeowner is not going to find you and, and pick your business.

John Jantsch (05:07): Yeah. The, so, so let's jump right to what makes Google maps happen. The Google business profile for a lot of businesses is I, I mean, we work with businesses. It's probably the most important aspect. I mean, it's scary because it's owned by somebody else, but it's, it is, it's probably the most important aspect having optimized, having the right signals there, having lots of good reviews, but obviously showing up. I mean, that, that, that, you know, for a lot of local marketers is maybe job one. I mean, so what advice, I, I know you work with business owners, helping them optimize that, uh, tool. So what, you know, what advice I, I'm sure people come to you all the time, say, I wanna show up in that thing of, of course you do. What do we have to do to show up in that thing?

Laura Nelson (05:49): You're absolutely right. John, the Google business profile also formerly known as Google. My business is probably the most important thing you can do to establish your business's presence online. And everyone wants to be in what we call that local repack, right? When someone searches for plumbers in your area or roofers cetera, you wanna be one of those businesses that's in the top three that are most obvious to those homeowners looking to solve a problem. The real challenge as you alluded to is that, you know, that is somewhat out of our control. Right? Right. There are basics that we can do to invest in improving that profile. Like first claim it first. And for most, if a business hasn't claimed their presence on Google, you know, they're missing out on this free opportunity to be found and chosen. So that's number one. But beyond that, there are optimizations to do right.

Laura Nelson (06:51): Link it to your website, link it to your scheduler, add photos of your team and the work that you do, make sure your phone number's right. Yeah. I just went over to, uh, a granite countertop business over my lunch break a few minutes ago. And you know, I told him, Hey, I've tried to call you for two days and your number's not ringing through. Right. So we'll get into what happens next in terms of a homeowner making that next step. But getting all that critical information is, you know, absolutely essential to showing up online. And of course, I, I don't want to leave out customer reviews. Right. We don't know the perfect Google formula to, you know, what enables a business to rank in that three pack. But we do reviews are an important part of that. So having a lot of reviews, ensuring you've got a consistent, um, stream of them over time is really important.

John Jantsch (07:50): Yeah. And, and, and actually I think they are giving some pretty good clues these days, because if you do a local search, a lot of times what they surface will say, well, these words were in some of the reviews. I mean, and they'll actually show you some of those reviews. So we obviously know that they are, that they are using those really almost like keywords in the past for optimization. One of the things that, of course over the last 10 years, let's say has dramatically changed for local business is, is just the way people buy. You know, everybody wants to talk about how all the changes in these platforms and new, you know, new networks and things that show up, but it's really the consumer behavior, you know, has really changed dramatically. And I would say that even comes to referrals. So referrals are for local businesses, word of mouth for local businesses, still a huge, uh, way that they generate business. But you used to be, if I went across the fence and asked my neighbor and they said, oh, you should call this for remodelling contractor. I just picked up the phone. I called, you know, today I go and I do a full review of them, you know, to, before I ever call. So how has that, how has that, what I just described kind of changed the game for local vis.

Laura Nelson (08:58): Yeah, it definitely has. And we perfectly described how homeowners have shifted their behavior. Right? We'll still have those conversations with friends and neighbors and trust what they say, but then we're gonna go online to what we learned. Right. So if my neighbor tells me, Hey, work with this contractor, he did a great job. I still need to go on Google to figure out how to get in touch with him. Right. Right. If I see something lower than a four and a half or four stars, I'm gonna start to question right. That recommendation, right? These are people who are coming into homes and, you know, doing an important job. And you know, if the quality of the reviews isn't aligned with that recommendation, I'm gonna start doing my homework. I'm gonna start looking at other providers in my area. Yeah. That's one way, I think also, you know, first and foremost, people are starting that search on Google, right.

Laura Nelson (10:00): That's where the majority of people are starting, but there's this other class of referral that I don't want local business owners to miss out on. And, and that's the conversations that are happening in Facebook groups. Sure. On nextdoor, you know, especially when it's a tougher project. And for instance, I can refer back to the contracting project I'm working on right now. It's a smaller job. It's not a mansion, but I do have a renovation planned. And you know, I had a hard time connecting with the contractor through traditional means, right? Like filling out contact forms and calling people. Yeah. So I went on next door and posted, I went in faced groups to post and asked people, you know, who do you recommend? And I got a lot of responses that way. Yeah. So it's another important thing to keep an eye on.

John Jantsch (10:52): And now let's hear from our sponsor. Look, if you're tired of slowing down your teams with clunky software processes and marketing that is difficult to scale, HubSpot is here to help you and your business grow better with collaboration tools and built in SEO optimizations. A HubSpot CRM platform is tailor made to help you scale your marketing with ease, integrated calendars, tasks, and commenting, help hybrid teams stay connected while automated SEO recommendations, intuitively optimize your webpage content for increased organic traffic ditch, the difficult and dial up your marketing with tools that are easy to use and easy to scale learn how your business can grow better@ hubspot.com SOS.

John Jantsch (11:38): So many of the home services industries right now are swamped in, I mean, getting somebody to even call you back right now, it's gotten, uh, much more difficult than you would think it should be is hasn't it?

John Jantsch (11:48): So, so let's jump back to, uh, reviews. You mentioned that 4.5, uh, I've actually seen some interesting research on that, that, that says 4.6, 4.7 is actually the perfect score. And that's because I think as consumers, we see 105 star reviews and we kind of go, uh nobody's perfect. And so I think that's interesting. You actually wanna few three star reviews that you can respond to in a public way. I think, because it, it, it feels more believable, but I know I work with a lot of businesses that have customers that love them, but they still can't get reviews. So how do we get those reviews from customers that seem to be happy?

Laura Nelson (12:33): You're absolutely right about, you know, these mid four star reviews are great. Yeah. Right. Real business is perfect and they'll make mistakes and you'll see the occasional irate customer that adds to the authenticity of the reviews that are there. Right. So it's so painful and so personal. Right. Especially when a business gets a, a one star review it, the recommendation here is to bury it with positive reviews. Sure. So you asked how, right. It all comes down to putting a process in place and getting your team behind it and ensuring that you have the right tools. Yeah. So for example, I see team all the time who, you know, wrap up a job, they have a happy homeowner right there and, you know, fail to take the extra step and say like, you know, Hey, are you happy? And, and if so, would you mind writing a review for our business?

Laura Nelson (13:26): You know, these matter to us, they help us find more homeowners just like you. And you know, it'd be mean the world to us, if you did, that's one, you know, making that ask personal, when you wrap up every job and number two is actually following up, right. Gotta make it easy for the homeowner. If they can't find your Google listing, if they can't find your Yelp listing, even if they have the best intentions they're gonna move on with their day. Right. They're gonna go somewhere else. Like they wanted to do it, but it wasn't easy. And, and that's where tools like signposts can really make a difference. Right? You shoot, 'em a text message. You shoot, 'em an email goes right to your listing link and takes several steps out of the process and ensures that it gets done.

John Jantsch (14:13): Yeah. And I, it, it's funny that, uh, you know, QR codes are certainly high having a day again. Right. Um, because we all got used to ordering our hamburgers with them and

Laura Nelson (14:23): Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:23): So I'm seeing more and more people put those on business cards and things, you know, for reviews because it is actually, everybody knows how to do it now, you know, you you're seeing them in ads on television and things. I mean, it, it's kind of funny cuz they were hot 10 years ago and then it just kind of went away. But they really so, so to your point of making it easy, certainly a way to do it.

Laura Nelson (14:44): Yeah. QR codes are a great tool and, and you used to need a separate app to read them, but now we can read them through the cameras on our phones and you know, that's a great DIY way to leave behind a card with a customer, no matter what business you're in. Like they know how to use them. Now.

John Jantsch (15:05): It's kinda like when it's kinda like when podcasts first came out, it was very hard to listen to 'em and when apple put the app right on the iPhone, all of a sudden podcast took off as well.

Laura Nelson (15:15): Oh yeah.

John Jantsch (15:16): So what about all the, one of the things I know frustrates some business owners, but I think it's, it's like back in the day when it's like you, you have to take credit cards and checks and cash, you know, now you have to be online and chat. You have to use SMS, have to have appointment scheduling because people are going to, people want to interact with you the way they want to interact with you. How do you manage all of those various channels?

Laura Nelson (15:41): Yeah. It's incredibly difficult. And this is where technology and other services can make it super easy. I referenced that granite countertop store, my first breast for reference was not to call them, but they forced me into it.

John Jantsch (15:56): Right,

Laura Nelson (15:57): Right. So I will not always do that because I would like a path of lease resistance. Yeah. And that's what homeowners and customers are really gravitating toward, but I send way more texts a day than make phone calls. And I think that's common across the population. So if I can get a quick answer, you know, through text message or through chat, I'm gonna do that. I'm gonna take out the friction of a phone call, but that's like, that's very difficult for businesses to manage if they're using like their traditional tools. Yeah. Like, you know, the owner's cell phone and you know, a team member, cell phones and you know, a chat widget,

John Jantsch (16:37): Someone's gonna be there's yeah. Graded.

Laura Nelson (16:39): Yeah. If it's not integrated. Yes. It becomes overwhelming. Right. Right. And you have to hire someone to manage all of that. That's what signpost helps to make easy is to bring all of those messages into one place. So you don't and have 50 tabs open of leads coming from different sources that can come into one dashboard. Yeah. Right. And you've got all your messages there where you can fire off quick replies or automated replies too. Yep. Is really important. You know, if you miss a customer's call, for example, know, our system can send a text and ensure that customer was heard. Right. We got your message. We'll get back to you. And that enables you to start a text conversation, right. With them.

John Jantsch (17:23): You can say, while you're waiting, here's the 27 projects we did last week, right? Yeah, exactly.

Laura Nelson (17:27): You can customize that reply. You can send your scheduling link, you can get them kind of moving down the funnel of making a decision of whether they're going to hire you.

John Jantsch (17:37): Yeah. Yeah. It's a very differentiator too. Cuz a lot of people may maybe called three people, you know, Sunday night, you know, waiting for them to all come call 'em back Monday morning. And uh, yeah. All of a sudden you've advanced the ball a little bit by having

Laura Nelson (17:50): And people are gonna hire the person who responds first simple

John Jantsch (17:55): Cases. That's right. Especially the environment where we're in now, its anybody responds. They're probably gonna get hired. What are some industries where you think or ahead of the curve in this and, and then I guess maybe, well you don't have to name some that aren't doing it well other than to say, if you're not doing it well, you can learn from these people.

Laura Nelson (18:15): Yeah. I think, you know, in the realm that we're talking about, say online reviews and communications technologies. In my experience, I've seen dental and medical offices a little ahead of the curve there. That's not to, to say all of them are because you know, the issue now that we're seeing is that the software is pretty educated, so it doesn't solve all of their needs, but there was a time when dental adoption of these products was quite sure

John Jantsch (18:43): The it's probably true of anybody who lived by appointment, you know, scheduled all day long. You know, that, that, that those were probably some of the first adopters weren't they?

Laura Nelson (18:54): Yeah. Because like they, you know, they want to fill every slot in their day and they know if, you know, if someone cancels, didn't get a reminder as just an example and they're losing revenue yeah. For that spot. And it's very difficult for them to fill unless they've got a long waiting list and you know, people are available fill slots.

John Jantsch (19:11): Can I just complain about the people that send me an email, call me and send me a text as well. They really need to, it's like when we first got into the AI bots, you know, it's like, they've gotta be done well or they're really not very helpful.

Laura Nelson (19:25): I totally agree. I think that, you know, businesses, you've gotta choose one and my recommendation is communicate in the way back that the person came in. Right? Yeah. With the exception, if you missed their call, you ha you give them that option of texting back. That's just, you know, a common courtesy. Right. But yeah, aside from that, you know, people don't need to be bombarded. Correct. That's not a great experience and you know, that may turn them off. So it's really risky.

John Jantsch (19:55): Yeah.

Laura Nelson (19:56): To add on the question that you asked previously, signpost really concentrates on contractors though, we serve dozens and dozens of industries. We focus on contractors because we saw real need, you know, there are companies across the spectrum when it comes to tech adoption and, and marketing savviness. So we saw that, you know, there was a need, we had the best product market bit. And so that's why primarily we focus in that area.

John Jantsch (20:25): Yep. So we've mentioned the name signpost, it's just signpost.com. Do you, do you wanna invite anybody for the 50% off, uh, special because they're a duct tape listener.

Laura Nelson (20:36): Yes, absolutely. Um, visit, sign post. I can't guarantee that you'll get a 50% off rate, but you know, certainly if you are a listener, you are eligible for a promo rate. So visit signpost.com, visit the upper right corner and request a demo, check our product out, see if it's a good fit for your company.

John Jantsch (20:59): Laura saying, thanks so much for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we'll, uh, get to run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Laura Nelson (21:06): Thank you so much us John. Really appreciate it.

John Jantsch (21:09): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That's right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your client's tab.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the salesman podcast, hosted by will Barron and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Look, if you work in sales, wanna learn how to sell, and frankly who doesn't check out the sales podcast, where host Will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and win big business ineffective and ethical ways. And if you wanna start someplace, I recommend the four step process to influencing buying decisions. Listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:42): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Marcel Petitpas. He is the CEO and co-founder of Parakeeto a company dedicated to helping agencies measure and improve their profitability by streaming their operations and reporting systems. He's also a fr action COO at gold front and a speaker podcast, host and consultant specializing in agency profitability optimization. So Marcel, welcome to the show.

Marcel Petitpas (01:11): Thanks for having me, John. It's a pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (01:14): Do, did you like how I nailed that French?

Marcel Petitpas (01:17): I, you know, you didn't even ask me how to pronounce my last name, which is the mistake most hosts make. And then I see their eyes just filled with fear as they realize, oh my God, I have to try and pronounce this thing. That's on the bio introduction, but you nailed it. I'm impressed.

John Jantsch (01:30): Well as somebody whose last name, uh, ends with five consonants, you know, I'm very, very aware of people's last names. Actually, my mother's maiden name was da Sonia and my, uh, wife's maiden name is Duval. So I'm also maybe a little French too, that might have helped.

Marcel Petitpas (01:46): I like it. No, you did a great job.

John Jantsch (01:48): All right. So a lot of agencies track revenue, some actually even track profit, but you, if we're gonna optimize, um, profitability, what, what should we be measuring?

Marcel Petitpas (02:00): That's a great question, John. The first thing that I, I think the first opportunity that almost every agency owner has is just making a couple of tweaks to the way that their accountant or bookkeeping team looks at their financial statements so that they can understand two important things that they're probably not seeing right now, or might not be obvious to them, where to look to see it. The first is understanding their agency gross income. So this is the understanding that you have the total amount of money that comes into your business, but you're not responsible for the efficiency or the profitability of all of that revenue. There's a certain amount of that for a lot of especially digital agencies that is passing through you onto other vendors. Simple examples of this would be things like advertising spend print budgets. Sometimes you might be using white label or outsource partners.

Marcel Petitpas (02:42): And so the way I would frame this question is it, if you're trying to determine what is pass through revenue and what is your revenue it's like, are we responsible for the margin on this revenue? If the answer's no it's probably pass through. And so the important thing that I think a lot more agencies should be paying attention to, especially if that's a factor for them is when we strip out all that past through revenue what's left over because that's a really important figure. That's the actual size of your business. That's what you should be benchmarking your profitability against. And it's what you should be using to benchmark other spending decisions in terms of, you know, how much we spend our office and our team and sales and marketing, all this other things. So isolating, AGI or gross income on your financial statements is kind of the first key thing that I think a lot of folks should do.

John Jantsch (03:24): And, and I'm guessing from your experience, that can be all over the map, right? I mean, wildly varying from agency to agency, right? Even, even if one says I'm a $10 million agency, there's a lot of 10 millions, right?

Marcel Petitpas (03:37): And that's, I think one of the powerful things us about our approach, this is how we level the playing field and actually benchmark agencies across each other. And when we put everyone on this level, AGI playing field, it's amazing how consistent the patterns and benchmarks and percentages of spending across different areas become. But until we do that, it's really hard to compare one agency to another. And so, yeah, I think that's a really important thing.

John Jantsch (03:59): I work with a lot of agencies as well. And one of the things we try to get 'em to do is obviously have some key performance indicators and because we can get so much data today, sometimes they have, you know, 273 of them. So, which I find is not very useful. So, so how do we get strike the right balance between, you know, too much information, really the right things to track?

Marcel Petitpas (04:22): Yeah, it, it's a really tough question because so much of this comes down to the nuance of the business model, but the way that I encourage people to think about this is number one, focus on four key areas of the business. So there's your core financials that of course includes AGI, which we've just talked about. It also includes what I call delivery margin, which your accountant we'll call gross margin, or maybe contribution margin. We don't use accounting terms cuz accountants get mad at us, um, for, you know, not doing everything G but for

John Jantsch (04:49): Izing their profession,

Marcel Petitpas (04:51): That's it right? They cause. And this is the funny thing about general accounting practice is our way of looking at a service business. And it's ironic because accountants run service businesses, it kind of flies in the face of general accounting practice. And it's important to understand that like general accounting practice is meant to satisfy a certain compliance around taxes, reporting to investors and shareholders and things of that nature. It's not necessarily designed to give you insight as a business owner. And so you kind of have to understand that there's a separation there. So when we strip out pass through, and then we measure the margin on that pass through, it's almost like we have two layers of cost of good sold, which is a concept that a lot of accountants kind of struggle with. So the second thing that we wanna do in core financials is understand what is our margin on AGI?

Marcel Petitpas (05:35): So for every dollar of AGI that I earn, how much did I have to spend to earn that? And that's mostly gonna be the labor cost of the work that we do for clients. So all the salaries and payroll that's allocated to the delivery function in your business, and then what we like to call, share delivery expenses, which would be some of the software or tools that you're paying for that aren't necessarily for one specific client, but you need to do the work. So your Figma, your stock footage, library, you know, your tools for managing ads and things of that nature. And generally you want to be aiming for 60% or higher delivery margins. So you don't wanna spend more than 40 cents on every dollar in AGI that you're earning. If you're lower than that, it's gonna be challenging to have a good bottom line profit without squeezing overhead spending kind of making a lot of cuts to the, I guess, the lifestyle expenditures of your business. So definitely pay attention to AGI, pay attention to delivery margin, and then pay attention to what percentage of your AGI is going to overhead. And you generally wanna keep that under 30% with eight to 12% going to admin eight to 14 ish percent going to sales and marketing and somewhere between four and six to going to facilities and rent.

John Jantsch (06:39): So, so, so do you have, is there somewhere we can send people to say here what you just said, if you wanna find like the checklist or the sheet for that?

Marcel Petitpas (06:48): Yeah. Yeah. We have a agency profitability toolkit, which we put together. It includes training videos, spreadsheet, templates, checklists, cheat sheets, with all these benchmarks. You can grab that@perketo.com for slash toolkit. So yeah, if you're listening to this in the gym or in the car and you're like, oh crap, I need to come back and take some notes. Uh, don't worry. It's all for you. It's all there for you in the toolkit.

John Jantsch (07:06): So one of the, probably the hardest units, I think that people have to measure, particularly when they have in a lot of internal, uh, staff working on various accounts, you know, how do you spread that? I mean, they're not spending every minute of their time, you know, in billable hours, so to speak, if we can use that ancient language, but you know, how do you spread that kind of unit of labor across where it should be expended, I guess?

Marcel Petitpas (07:31): Yeah. So I think this is where a lot of people make the mistake of trying to measure earning efficiency, purely using financials. And the reality is like, I think at the agency level using your financial statements is always gonna be the most accurate and truest form of measurement. But when we start slicing down to the client or project or phase or task or however your agency is structured and that's where there's some nuance where you really want to think about, you know, do I have distinct departments within those departments? Like what is the S of your business, because that's gonna inform what does your data need to be structured, like to get you good reports. But when we start getting more nuanced than just the agency level, I think using your accounting tool and your financial statements to try and measure profitability on clients is generally not the best idea because it's gonna require a ton of expense and time and investment.

Marcel Petitpas (08:18): The easier way to do that, the easier way to measure what I call earning efficiency is using what I like to call average billable race. And it's a very simple formula. What is the AGI in that bucket? And it could be a time period. It could be a subsection of the business or both, and how many hours were worked to earn that AGI. And so simple example, I have a $10,000. I spent a hundred hours on that client. I made a hundred dollars per hour on that client doesn't matter what it said on the rate card that I gave them or on the proposal, I made a hundred dollars an hour because I had to invest a hundred hours of my team's time on that using that metric, you can very quickly start to compare one time period to another one, client, to another one type of service to another.

Marcel Petitpas (09:02): It makes it very fast and easy to on a tighter time horizon, get a sense of what's more or less efficient than another service offering. And as long as you understand roughly what your average cost per hour is on labor, then can get a sense of how close is that to my target, you know, delivery margin or gross margin or contribution margin, and use that to much in a much simpler way, get touch points on earning efficiency. And that's how I would encourage people to do it on, you know, tighter time horizons or more specific subsections of the business, cuz it's just so much less expensive than trying to do. Cost-based accounting on projects in your accounting tool.

John Jantsch (09:37): And now let's hear from our sponsor. Look, if you're tired of slowing down your teams with clunky software processes and marketing that is difficult to scale, HubSpot is here to help you and your business grow better with collaboration tools and built in SEO optimizations. A HubSpot CRM platform is TA made to help you scale your marketing with ease, integrated calendars, tasks, and commenting, help hybrid teams stay connected while automated SEO recommendations, intuitively optimize your webpage content for increased organic traffic ditch, the difficult and dial up your marketing with tools that are easy to use and easy to scale learn how your business can grow better @ hubspot.com. Yeah, well, and it, it actually informs billing, right? I mean it informs what proposal should say in the proposal. It performs. If we're on a, a retainer, it informs how much we can actually do that month, you know, for the call.

John Jantsch (10:36): And I think that's where a lot of people get stuck is they're thinking our, you know, internal rate is X. And so we're gonna propose, you know, this. So, you know, how do you suggest that first off? How do you suggest billing? I mean, I'm a huge fan of retainers. A lot of people like projects, a lot of people like hourly. I like actually selling results. Like here's what you get matter. You know, how many hours we put in or, you know, what it takes to get you there, you get the result and here's what the result costs, but what's your advice or what do you see as maybe the most useful sort of way to do consider billing?

Marcel Petitpas (11:11): I'm gonna give you an unpopular answer, which is I think all I there's four ways of pricing for my perspective. And I think that there is a room there's room in the industry for all four. And it has to come down to what we evaluate this through a value and risk lens. And I have a, a podcast that people can go listen to how to price your agency services, where I kind of go into more detail, but I have this pricing quadrant that I think of. So if you can imagine you have a vertical access on that access, you have high value at the top. You low value at the bottom. So that's a question of asking what is the value of this service in the market? And generally that comes down to two things. How commoditized is your positioning around that service? So are you a graphic designer or are you a graphic design firm that specializes in helping B2B SaaS companies communicate visually like through their complicated data systems for enterprise customers like same service, graphic design.

Marcel Petitpas (11:59): One is clearly more scarce and more expert than the other. The other thing with value is sometimes it's relative to the client. So to your point, if I'm increasing the conversion rate on apple dot com's website, by 1%, that's worth hundreds of million S of dollars to apple. My aunt Shirley who sells, you know, handmade goods on Etsy, it's worth 10 bucks to her. It might take the same amount of work, but it's just not as valuable to aunt Shirley as it is to apple. So understanding the relative value is important. The other thing is risk. So how risky is this work? Are we building, you know, a website from a template for a legal client and we've done hundreds of them and we know kind of exactly how long that's gonna take that's low risk or are we trying to land a rocket ship on a barge in the middle of the ocean and building control systems for that on a new technology stack?

Marcel Petitpas (12:44): That's not very well documented. Well, it's impossible to scope how much time it's gonna take to do that work. So understand where your service falls on that value, risk continuum. If it's low value and high risk, you're probably gonna want to go towards some kind of time and materials billing model so that you can share risk with the client, build them for the hours that you're working. Because if you can't estimate how much time it's gonna take, then you need to try and create some protection in the contract for that. And then it becomes a game of billing for as many of the hours that you're working as possible. And just try to keep your average cost per hour, a level where you have enough margin in that hourly rate to be profitable, if you have high value, but still high risk. This is where I like what I call abstracted time materials.

Marcel Petitpas (13:23): So you're not talking about hours. You're saying, Hey, you need this enterprise website. I'm gonna lease you this, you know, cross-functional development team. It's 10 grand, every two weeks. We think it's gonna take 16 to 20 a sprints to do this, right? This is what companies like media monks for example are doing. It's the contract structure is time materials. So it helps absorb and share some risk with the client, but we arbitrage the value to level the conversation up from an hourly rate. So I like that model for high risk high value work. If it's low risk, low value, I like flat because John, if you asked me to build you a website and I told you it was gonna be 500 bucks an hour, you'd probably tell me to go pound sand. But if I said it was gonna be five grand and I could get it to you in two weeks, and it was gonna be blazing fast, SEO, optimized, prove it to convert for your industry, whatever you might say, that's a great deal.

Marcel Petitpas (14:09): I might still make $500 an hour because I know the risk and I can arbitrage that in the flat rate. And then if it's high value, low risk, that's where I really like value based pricing. So we can start anchoring the price to the value to the client and arbitrage the fact that we have low risk and really start to stretch the upside. But you could see how I think different pricing models for different moments and time for an agency. And as their products and services mature, they should migrate up into the left and ideally graduate to forms of pricing that allow them to arbitrage more value in that conversation with the client. So that might be the nerdiest way that's ever been explained, but that's how I think about it.

John Jantsch (14:47): Well, you know, as I listen to you talk about that high risk, you know, I think there's a huge amount of communication with the client that has to go in that too, because yeah, there may be a client out there that's trying to get a flat rate bid. Well, it's like remodeling a kitchen. It is never gonna be what that flat rate bid told you. Person told you it's going to be. And then all of a sudden it's like, well, yeah, we had 30% cost overruns, but I think that communication in that risk, you've gotta have a client willing to say, yeah, I'm, I'm in for part of the risk too. Right?

Marcel Petitpas (15:16): Yeah. And, and that is a challenge with time materials, billing models, right. As you're asking the client to share some risk, but that should be rooted in this conversation of, you know, a couple of ways to spend that number one, the process we need to use to solve this problem appropriate for you requires us to iterate together and learn together and change. So like, we, we can't predict this or putting the onus on the client to say, if we're gonna take on this risk, I need you to more clearly define what the deliverable is here. Yeah. And, you know, we need to be really aligned on what the scope of work is. And so those are kind of some of the things, but I, I think you're absolutely right. The, the scope management and expectation management becomes critically important when you're talking time materials, because you are asking the client to take on more risk. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:59): All right. So you get a one word answer to this next question should pretty much everybody in the organization be tracking their time.

Marcel Petitpas (16:07): Yes. Short answer. Yes.

John Jantsch (16:10): No, that's now the follow up, cuz I knew you were gonna say that. That's why I only gave you one word, but it's a pain in the, but now go ahead.

Marcel Petitpas (16:19): Yeah. So the first is the why and why should be because that's your best insight into the efficiency of your own business. So I think the misconception with time tracking is it's something you do for the client. It really should be something you do for your own organization so that you, yeah.

John Jantsch (16:32): Even if you're not billing hourly, you're not even billing hourly. That's right.

Marcel Petitpas (16:36): Yeah. It'd be like, if you were running a restaurant and you had no idea what your food costs, you that'd be absolutely insane. That's what running an agency without time tracking looks like. But then the question I get is like, well, my team hates time sheets or pain in the ass. The software sucks, whatever cool. I understand that I don't like filling out time sheets either. So there is, is a way to adapt your business model and do this without time sheets. And it's called resource resource plan based time tracking. And this is again what companies like media monks are able to do, but it's because the way they staff their team is never working on more than a handful of projects at a time. So what the, that, what that gives them, the ability to do is have a project manager create an updated resource and on behalf of their team of eight, nine direct reports and do that through a series of weekly touch points.

Marcel Petitpas (17:19): And then the team doesn't have to fill out time sheets, the project manager, who's probably the person who's most excited about this. Anyway, they get to do it. And it, it maintains a high enough level of fidelity that you get insight, but you get, you're able to do that because you've reduced what I call client dilution, the amount of clients that a single person has to work on in a given day, which makes that a feasible model. So you can do it without time sheets, but it does require you to be very deliberate about how you resource plan people and try not to have one person working on a billion projects at a time.

John Jantsch (17:51): So a lot of organizations today have been able to scale their businesses, especially in the digital age, using third parties, white labels, you know, freelancers, some sort of mix of, you know, there's three of us sitting around here pulling all the levers, you know, 47 people all over. What does that do? What kind of challenge does that add to the sort of pure optimization model?

Marcel Petitpas (18:15): Yeah. There's benefits and there's cons to it. I can tell you that some of the most profitable agencies that we have ever audited were running a, like almost fully outsourced white label model where all of the high risk work was being done by external vendors. And they typically retained account management and some form of strategy. So they retained the highest value services and those companies were extremely profitable. However, they have an entire part of their business that they don't really have any direct control over and it's, you know, all of the execution. And so it requires you to have very good partners. It requires you to have some redundancy. So several of them that you can balance work between. It does require you to have somebody hovering over them and managing them very closely. And it does take a lot of the process and quality control out of your purview.

Marcel Petitpas (19:07): So those are some of the risks to watch out for. But I do think it's a model that can work well. If it's done intentionally, you apply enough margin to what those white label partners are charging. You have a contract structure in place that really does help you take downside risk off the table. Like if you think about you're doing high risk work, there's two ways to decrease the risk. Number one, you have to find a way to get better at scoping that whether that's tightening up the scope of work or getting better data, getting better estimating, or it's like just don't be responsible for the risk anymore. Give that to a white label partner. So it is a fast track to decreasing risk, but it does still leave you with a lot of responsibility for over service for overseeing that vendor. So I think the mistake a lot of people make is well, like I won't need to track time. I won't need to pay to profitability anymore. That's not true. You will still need some level of internal team and you still need to measure their efficiency. It just tends to be easier to make that efficiency very high when all the high risk stuff is off your plate.

John Jantsch (20:04): Well, and it would probably, as I listen to you talk about a resource plan, it would probably, why wouldn't you use a resource plan with your white label partners to some degree?

Marcel Petitpas (20:12): Yeah. I mean how that relationship is managed it, yeah. There's a lot of opportunity there to get it tighter, but like certainly there's still gonna be management required there and measurement of efficiency,

John Jantsch (20:22): You know, as a marketing agency, one of the things that we've learned over the years is to really scale with our clients. We actually have to help them operationalize some of their marketing as well, because I mean, it's not just a matter of yeah, we got your leads, you know, it's like we build onboarding for them. We do a lot of things for them that, that actually retain those clients and turn those clients into repeat clients because they're happy how much, and this may be outside of the area that you end up working with, but you know, how much, um, responsibility do you think that marketing agencies have to really get that deep inside an organization? If they, I, I, responsibility's probably the wrong word. Where do you think? I, I think there's a huge opportunity if they are willing to ago that deep. I'm curious if, because you do a lot of operationalizing of agencies, you know, if that's sort of a byproduct of doing that.

Marcel Petitpas (21:14): Yeah, I would agree. I think one of the things that often gets overlooked in the agency space is really deeply understanding the job the agencies being hired to do. We, we tend to think of what we do in terms of the or deliverables that are being rendered, but I really encourage listeners to zoom out and think about like, what's the problem we're solving. What's the job we're being hired to do. And how can we do that job better? And the deeper you go into this and the more creative you get with how much of a scope of responsibility you can take on the harder it becomes to fire you, the more context you build with that client, the easier it is for you to retain and expand the relationship you have with them. And it also puts an onus. I think there's another really important part of this, which comes down to client communication, which is the number one place that I see agencies falling short is just not communicating proactively enough with clients and managing expectations well, and in a proactive way. And I think if you can do those two things, well, it will, it'll set you apart from every other vendor that they work with in a big way and dramatically improve your retention, which you and I both know, John, it, it has a massive impact on the ed economics of your business. And of course, uh, can't be overstated in terms of its importance. Yeah.

John Jantsch (22:27): The, my longest running client, uh, has been a client since 2004. So I don't, I don't know how many millions that adds up to, but it's a lot. Yeah. But fortunately they've continued to grow, but I, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, we work with a lot of founders, business owners, direct owners, and you know, a lot of times I think making their life better is actually part a big part of our job. I don't think any of them actually ask for in a deliverable, but I think that's the problem in a lot of cases we're solving by helping them get some control over their marketing. So to your point, that's how we view it as well. So, so Marcel tell people where they find out more about per keyto and, and the work that you, uh, do on behalf of agencies.

Marcel Petitpas (23:08): Yeah. Parakeeto.com is, uh, the, the place where you'll find the most information. Also, if you're listening to podcasts and you like podcasts, we have a show called the agency profit podcast. John's been a guest on there. He's gonna come back for round two here soon. Um, so make sure you tune in there. If you want to nerd out some more with stuff like this. Um, and if you wanna connect with me directly, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm wearing a shirt with birds on it. I'm not hard to spot, and I'm always happy to nerd out with you on agency profitability. If you got questions.

John Jantsch (23:34): So Marcel, thanks so much again for stopping by take time to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And, uh, hopefully we'll see you, uh, one of these days out there on the road.

Marcel Petitpas (23:41): Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (23:45): All right. That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in. Feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also, did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you've got employees, if you've got a staff member that wants learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It's called the certified marketing manager program from duct tape marketing. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.

John Jantsch (00:00): ]This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the Gain Grow, Retain podcast, hosted by Jeff Brunsbach and Jay Nathan brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network Gain Grow Retain is built to inspire SAS and technology leaders who are facing day to day. Challenges of scaling Jeff and Jay share conversations about grow growing and scaling subscription businesses with a customer first approach, check out all the episodes. Recently, they did one on onboarding, such a key thing when you wanna get going, keep and retain those clients. So listen to gain, grow, retain wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Laura Bull she's best selling author and brand strategists who specializes in transforming people into competitive sustainable business brand. She's also the author of, from individual to empire, a guide to building the, an authentic and powerful brand. So Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura Bull (01:15): Thanks for having me. It's the long title, isn't it?

John Jantsch (01:18): You know, it's fun, not the longest I've seen that's for

Laura Bull (01:22): That's true.

John Jantsch (01:23): My publishers love to get a bunch of, uh, stuff in there.

Laura Bull (01:26): Yes they do.

John Jantsch (01:28): We were talking off air and it's in your bio, but I didn't read it, uh, that you spent 10 years with Sony music entertainment in artist development, working with brands like Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, Johnny Cash. And I, and it's interesting when I was growing up, people wrote good songs, recorded them and then went on tour to sell albums. The three artists that you named, or that, that I named in, in, in your bio, you know, are really more of a package. Aren't they? I mean, it's that the industry, or just even the branding of the industry has changed dramatically, hasn't it?

Laura Bull (02:00): Well, I think people are starting to understand that they have to become a brand. A, the industry has changed in the sense of nobody's really selling the products that they're making. Right? The albums have become basically obsolete because of retailer. I iTunes decided that they were gonna, you know, charge 99 cents, basically, right? When, you know, the record labels, who is the manufac of the music, they actually were putting in millions of dollars and needed that $20 return on investment for each sale. So when that kind of started getting a little wonky, you know, and people, listen, Johnny Cash has been around and he's been doing it for much longer than iTunes, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so he, you know, he knew it had to be a package deal. He did the television, he did merchandise. He did sponsorships. I mean, that's kind of, I think now newer artists are realizing that they really have to start out with all of those different revenue streams in order to even state a chance. And so I think that, you know, in the Johnny Cash days, I think that the brand kind of developed over time and in our, what I call the narrative age, you know, PA post the internet age. Now we're in the narrative age where there's just so many narratives coming at us daily. And minute by minute, you know, I think everybody is realizing that they have to really figure out that brand at the very beginning or they don't stay at a chance.

John Jantsch (03:20): Right. And, and I think the parallel there is for business brands as well, right. I mean, it's not a hundred percent, yes. We don't just make a product and get, hire a sales team and send them out there to tell the world about it. Right. I mean, it's so many channels and avenues

Laura Bull (03:33): Well, and a lot when you're dealing with people, a lot of the time and, and record labels used to do this all the time and kind of still do, they'll just throw out a song to radio and if it sticks and they'll throw out a few and then if it doesn't work, then they'll just drop 'em and make their millions on another artist. Right. You know, that's true in so many different industries publishing in

John Jantsch (03:52): Politics, book,

Laura Bull (03:53): Publish publishing book, right time a person is the product that they're selling as a business. You know, a, I find in my experience that these people aren't actually treating themselves as businesses do. Right. Uh, they don't have a mission statement, you know, like things like that are just so commonplace in a business scenario when you're developing staff and, you know, corporate environment, you know, people aren't realizing that they need to do that as well.

John Jantsch (04:21): All right. We're gonna move off the music, but I gotta, I I'd be remiss if I didn't at least invite you to tell me. What's like one of the wackiest stories that came out of I'll give you two avenues to go here. Oh, what's one of the wackiest stories that you wanna share or who's somebody that came on the scene and didn't develop like flamed out. Like they should have, should have gone big and didn't

Laura Bull (04:44): Oh gosh, I have so many friends that should have gone big. And didn't I, and I didn't, I can't even, I wouldn't give you those names cuz it's not fair to them. So a wacky story. I mean, I've had some pretty wacky stories. I have a cool story. I'll tell you we were doing the Johnny Cash. I think it was Johnny Cash. No, it was the, it was one of the CMA awards or something. And I was a lowly intern and I was like a, I was working a stage hand. This was, I won't tell you the year. It was a very long time ago. And the, the crew all had their like meals together in the Opry house, next door to the, the, or whatever, where all the production and the television production was going on. And I sat down one time and OU Harris was sitting with the crew, having the meals with us. And it was like, everybody else was hold up in their dressing rooms, having their minions, bring them food. You know what I mean? And she was the most senior person there and didn't really say anything. She was just chill. She was just hanging out. I was just like, okay, hi.

John Jantsch (05:49): Well, well I'm a huge fan. So that goes right on what my perception of her brand is too. So

Laura Bull (05:54): Yeah. Very chill. Very cool. Yeah. I won't tell you all the I'll save all the wacky, the, the insane stories that you would not ever believe unless, you know, so that I can save myself from lawsuits.

John Jantsch (06:05): Well, that's all right. Let's talk about, uh, the topic of the hand, personal branding is something that's been with us like a decade. I don't know. Tom Peters came out with brand me, which was an awesome book probably 15 years, years ago. And feel like that was sort of the launch of it. But I know from your book, you're saying that like we've moved on from that. And that influencer branding is a very different thing. So I'll let you just kinda set that up.

Laura Bull (06:29): I'm so glad you said that. Cuz I feel like, you know, everything, all buzzword get a little stale, right? So authenticity, I get it's in the title of my a book, but you know, that's one of these words right now that is just like so overdone, because nine times outta the out of 10, it's actually used in an incorrect way. And there is a whole study of personal branding. But when it comes to what I call influencer branding, first off, I'm trying to redefine the term influencer because influencer is just not online. Only, you

John Jantsch (06:59): Know, it's not TikTok. I don't have to just

Laura Bull (07:01): Start at TikTok. It's not TikTok. You may have to start a TikTok. I'm not saying you can't, but you know, there are on, there are offline influencers that are just as powerful and, and for 2000 years, this IST something new, right. You know, influencers are influencers. So that's the first thing I'm trying to do. But then secondly, in it's really about these people who are products, how do they figure out all the crazy things and all the unique things that make them unique and authentic and real and people, but then they have to whittle it down. Then they have to whittle it down, uh, to something that is as focused as like a Nike shoot. Right? So I think that is where influencer branding comes in because it's taking that personal brand and then turning it into something that is competitive in the marketplace, but also focused enough to be a business brand.

John Jantsch (07:50): So I think the, I think the unfortunate thing is when we talk about influencers, you know, there's all like the really plain examples. Good and bad. You, you know, that probably aren't that useful in some cases for the person who's actually trying, uh, to build something. So would you say that one of the traits that I notice and I just let you sort of share your thoughts on this is that it's not just about being popular or, and you know, putting your name on all kinds of stuff. It, the people that I think really do a great job with it kind of have a point of view about what they're trying to accomplish.

Laura Bull (08:26): Well, it's gotta be a purpose. Yeah. So that that's, you know, that comes into the personal branding thing. You have to have a purpose, you have to just like any business, you know, whatever Nike stands for, you know, somebody has to connect with that over Adidas. You know what I mean? So it's the same thing when it comes to people, they really, if they have a very unique purpose with a unique concept around it, whether that's a product or a service they provide. And the way that I kind of look at the brand itself is three different avenues. You have the image, you have the narrative and you have the product slash service. All three of those things have to be saying the exact same thing to the consumer, for them to really connect directly. There is no such thing as an it factor, right? I like if you have all three of those things and a consumer can pick it up within nanoseconds, then you have a good brand. That is something that is gonna connect with people.

John Jantsch (09:25): Well, I'll push back a little on the it factor thing, because that certainly, and I, I don't mean to challenge you on. I just mean that's certainly a perception that like in the music industry, I'm sure you saw people is like, I don't know why they didn't make it, but this person made it. I don't know why either, but it's just like people connected. So I mean, it, it exists, but I think what you're saying is that it's not something you can just bring to market.

Laura Bull (09:49): It's not something that you're born with. Right. They're like when I say there's no such thing as an it factor, it's because it's not something that is like, oh my gosh, this person has it. And this person doesn't right. It's, you know, if you have two minutes on the tonight show talk, uh, couch, right, right. If you can, if your image says exactly what your purpose and what your brand is, and your conversation says the same thing and whatever you're selling connects with all three of the, those things that is a clear enough message that the consumer feels like that person has the, you know what I mean? Yep.

John Jantsch (10:23): Yep. Yep.

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John Jantsch (11:23): So I, I, I wanna get into some practical like how to things, but I you've mentioned the word narrative a couple times and in the world of marketing and branding storytelling is, you know, again, another decade or so of, you know, nobody was talking about it to now there's a whole section in book stories on, you know, on storytelling and marketing. You've mentioned narrative. And I think that's, I really picked up on that because in my last book, I talked about the difference between nor narrative and storytelling. And I'd love to just throw that to you. What's the difference in your view of narrative versus storytelling?

Laura Bull (11:54): I feel like storytelling is part of the narrative. Yes. Everything that comes, anything that is a message to the consumer about the brand is a narrative. So I have a whole chapter in my book about narratives and breaking it down and how to avoid bad narratives. You know, a lot of brands get muddled. They have two too many narratives going on. Some are the inauthentic, you know, some are, they don't have, you know, some don't even have a narrative. They don't know what they're out there saying they don't know what they're trying to communicate, you know? Yeah. And so it could be everything from the bio, the story, you know, I feel like I'm trying to think any, I'm trying to give other examples. And I can't think of 'em off the top of my head, but like even a housewife, like in that chapter, I use Bethany Frankel as an example of a narrative coming before the product.

Laura Bull (12:44): Right. She was a, a TV personality and her personality was the narrative. I really, the way that I plotted out in my book is personality traits, values. All of those things are part of the narrative. So she already had that out there before she even created skinny girl. And then, so the product came after which in normal business product service comes first and then you build the narrative around it. Right? Yeah. So I think we're in this really interesting place now where if social media and with television and all of the different direct to consumer platforms that we have, I think that narrative has almost, if not become the most important thing to connect.

John Jantsch (13:25): Yeah. I tell people, it's the way you tell the story, you know? So it's like a movie that starts with the fiery crash, you know, and you don't know what happened. And then all of a sudden cut to the protagonist in seventh grade. I mean, it's like, there's still a story in that, but it's the way that the story's delivered that sucks you in.

Laura Bull (13:42): And I also, in addition to that, I also say tone. Yeah. Yeah. You know, are you a professional tone? Are you a familiar tone? How are you delivering the message? All of those are part of the narrative. Absolutely.

John Jantsch (13:53): So let's get into sort of nitty a gritty, like your framework. So you talk about traits or the five PS, you know, of an influencer. So if somebody's thinking, okay, we've talked in general terms about influencers, you know what, you know, what do I need to do if I'm a brand and I, I want to increase my influence, my power, you know, what are the things need to start thinking about doing first?

Laura Bull (14:18): Well, so the first part of my book is about that personal branding side. So it's a lot of the introspection things. Yeah. So the five PS right here, the five PS

John Jantsch (14:28): Are wait. Right. Did you have to go reference your book, Laura,

Laura Bull (14:31): I'm pulling up as a visual.

John Jantsch (14:35): The only reason I, I say that is I, I too get interviewed on shows about my books and somebody will say on page 47 in this book. Yeah.

Laura Bull (14:42): I definitely dunno. What's on page 47.

Laura Bull (14:45): I, I, I make this comment on social media all the time. I forget so many things that I've written in my book. It took me five years to write this book. I wrote a hundred thousand words and only 50,000 good ones. So, and I'm not writing another one, but so the five PS that you're referencing is more about the psychology behind the fact that as people who are also the product that can get in your way with self branding and with, you know, making business decisions that are personal driven instead of business driven. Right? So a lot of the, the, okay, so passion is one. Yeah. Perseverance is another positivity is another purpose and power. And there's a lot of grit elements in that from Angela Duckworth. There's the happiness advantage factor from Sean ACOR. You know, a lot of people confuse passion and purpose. And so that's an issue. And then power is really about, you have power over your own brand as the CEO of your business, right? And once you under the psych accepting the fact that you have the power actually gives you the confidence to be able to pull it off, you know what I mean to, and that confidence actually comes through in the brand. So these elements actually do shine through, into the brand itself. Once you get to the second phase, it, which is, you know, creating the actual brand pillars. Yeah. So,

John Jantsch (16:13): So, you know, you kind of hinted at what I hear all the time, people talking about imposter syndrome. And I think that's really what you're talking about in some ways is that the, and I hate the whole like fake until you make it, you know, conversation. But there really are a lot of people that, that it's really, that they own that power. And that's really allows them to make the decisions that are in their best.

Laura Bull (16:35): Maybe benefits goes 90% of the way for, you know, public figures, for sure. Yeah. You know, you have to, and if you don't have the confidence that you are an expert in what you're talking about, nobody's gonna believe you, that you have that expertise. So, but also when you are a public figure, like a musician or like a TV personality or whoever they're, they have so many people around them and everybody is gonna chime in with what they think you should be and what they think your brand should be. And if you don't have a solid foundation in what you are, then you will get derailed. Every single person that I have seen has had that happen, that is the number one way people are failing.

John Jantsch (17:18): So there's a pretty well known influencer in the marketing business space. Gary Vanderchuck like, you've probably run across Gary V. Yeah. And I really think that, you know, I, you know, I met Gary when he was just starting, cuz I've been around a long time and he just, that, that was his whole stick is like, you have to believe me because I'm so confident, you know, and that really attracted people. I'm saying he wouldn't hustle and you know, do a lot of things. But a lot of it was just an attraction factor of guys. This guy's so positive about what he's doing, that he must be onto something.

Laura Bull (17:49): Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:52): So there was one other, um, piece in, in your book that I found very interesting. I'm kind of a cool, I'm kind of a tool and process person. So your, your brand matrix.

Laura Bull (18:04): Yes.

John Jantsch (18:05): So do you wanna maybe unpack that for us and, and uh, oh,

Laura Bull (18:08): It's hard to explain without visuals.

John Jantsch (18:11): Well, well you, you feel happy to feel free to send me anything. I'll post it. Uh, if you've got some visuals you want us to post,

Laura Bull (18:18): Oh, they can go to my website, Laura will.com. I have free resources there. So the, okay. Think about a Vinn diagram, right? Three circles. One is the image, which I said earlier, narrative is the other and the product and service is the last one. The intersection is a group of terms that can apply to all three areas, right? So let's say pink, for instance, the artist pink, pink hair, right. Would be under image. Yeah. But that's obviously not gonna apply to the narrative and the product that she is offering. Right. However, if you dig deeper about the pink care Rebell, Rebell is in the center, you can portray revel in image. You can portray it in narrative and you can portray it in the product and the service that she offers. That is the type of things that you're looking for at the center. Now taking it a step further, you need at least four or five terms in the center of that ven diagram, because it's the grouping of those together that it's going to make you unique from the outside in the marketplace, from the outside competition, right?

Laura Bull (19:24): If there is something in there, like let's say you get those final grouping together and you're looking at these words and it minds you of somebody that's already in the marketplace. All you have to do is remove one and replace it with another true and authentic. Of course, you're always, you gotta make, you gotta do the authenticity work first, get to the brand matrix. So basically once you have your four to five brand pillars that is incorporated it for the rest of your career, and they have to be generic enough to be able to evolve over time, but they also have to be specific enough to set you aside from the competition. So it's this really narrow spot that you're trying to work towards.

John Jantsch (20:02): Well, I think you did an amazing job explaining it to,

Laura Bull (20:04): I think that was the best one I've done to say.

John Jantsch (20:07): And obviously pick up a copy of the book if you really wanna dig into to this. But so Laura, it was awesome having you stop by.

Laura Bull (20:14): And it's an audio book too now, by the way,

John Jantsch (20:16): Which

Laura Bull (20:17): Just came out instant bestseller the first week I was, I held off on that too, because I was confused. I was concerned without the visuals, but it they're taking it good. So I like it

John Jantsch (20:27): More than 50% of my book sales are audio book now it's crazy. Yeah. So, all right. Tell people where they can find out more about, obviously the book can be purchased anywhere you buy books, but uh, where can they find out more about you and your work?

Laura Bull (20:40): Laura bowl.com? I have, uh, free resources there and any of my books and information and connecting information there, as well as my social media, I met the Laura bull on all the platforms. Awesome. And Laura bowl branding on Facebook. Sorry.

John Jantsch (20:55): That's all right. So thanks for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast and hopefully we'll, uh, see you one of these days out there on the road.

Laura Bull (21:02): Yeah. I love it. Thanks for having me. You

John Jantsch (21:03): Bet. All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That's right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your client's tab.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the Salesman Podcast, hosted by will Barron brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Look, if you work in sales, wanna learn how to sell or just peek at the latest sales news. Check out the sales podcast where host Will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and in big business in effective and ethical ways. One of my favorite episodes lately, how to personalize your sales outreach at massive scale, who doesn't want to do that, listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dan Franks. He's a co-founder and president of podcast movement, the world's largest conference and trade show for the podcast industry. And he's a CPA was formerly the businessman manager and director of live events for mid role media. So Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Franks (01:07): Thanks for having me, John I'm super excited.

John Jantsch (01:10): So, so give me a little bit of the history of podcast movement. I guess let's start there. The trade show that you run and known.

Dan Franks (01:18): Yeah, so there was four of us who were big time podcast fans and podcasters ourselves. And, uh, this would've been 20 12, 20 13, somewhere in there and quickly realized that it was a, a somewhat lonely space sitting in closets recording, you know, your own voice and maybe having a guest. And at that time it was trying to figure out how to record people on Skype. And it was really just a very impersonal, medium to be a creator. And so getting together, we thought it would be really neat to create some kind of environment where we could get together with other creators and learn, you know, learn from each other, but meet each other and really just kind of bring some personal connections to this creation side of things. And that's where we started in 2014.

John Jantsch (01:56): So, so I guess now tell me, what does it look like today?

Dan Franks (01:59): Yeah, so at that time it was, you know, kind of a community gathering. We about five or 600 people at that first year event, which is, was really big way bigger than we thought it would be. We actually launched it on Kickstarter. So really just kind of throwing it against the wall to see if anyone else was out there. That thought it was a good idea. And since then, it's grown to a twice a year event where each event gets, you know, somewhere between a thousand and over 3000 attendees each year, and then a Facebook community with 70,000 members, that's super active, the largest Facebook community for podcasters. So really just grown to, you know, a lot of other things too. We've got a daily newsletter, that's got over 25,000 subscribers. That's all about, you know, podcasting and news and tips and tricks and all that. So really grown from just that, you know, idea of a game gathering to now, this living, breathing kind of media machine, all for people who create podcasts,

John Jantsch (02:50): You know, it's funny, you mentioned that about it being kind of a lonely space. I actually started mine in, in 2005. So I, I may be one of the, the old school oldest school, particularly of continuously running because you know, a lot of people that started when I did, I think it was hard to do. It was hard to get people to listen because there weren't, you know, we didn't have the iPhone, you know, app that, uh, came, you know, delivered with the iPhone. And so I think a lot of people did give up on it because they really weren't building any audience or didn't see any point in it, uh, no, necessarily, but then obviously once it became much more mainstream, probably around 2012, 13 is when it really probably took off again. So, so what's been your history. I mean, you said you were a, a CPA, uh, that's not necessarily an industry that jumped into podcasting early on. So, so what was kind of were, was that a real differentiator for you as a CPA or was podcasting just a side gig?

Dan Franks (03:41): Yeah, so, I mean, it started as a CPA sitting, you know, working 80 hour weeks behind a computer, just kind of, you know, plugging and chug chugging numbers and trying to figure out what to do to pass the time. And podcasting was from a listening standpoint, something that really filled that gap. And then from there, you know, just kind of thinking, Hey, maybe I should try this. A lot of people do with while listening to a podcast, it's very common thing. And yeah, ended up connecting with a coworker who had similar thoughts. We were both accountants. We, at that time were specializing in, they call it outsource, uh, CFP. So we were kind of helping small business owners with their financial, not just taxes, but a lot of their financial planning and book keeping and situations like that. And we thought it would be real cool to kind of talk about small business, best practices and interview small business owners and that kind of thing.

Dan Franks (04:28): Yeah. And now that's like one of the most common niches in podcasting, a small business, but you know, 20 12, 20 13, it was still a little bit more of a, of a open pond, so to speak and yeah, just started that way and really kind of immersed ourselves into that creator community. And like I said, the one thing led to another and we just really enjoyed being creators ourselves and getting no other creators. And that led to us kind of putting together that, you know, curating that community and, and led to a podcast movement as it is today.

John Jantsch (04:56): You know, you mentioned that. I mean, it was such a great differentiator right early on. I mean, it really kind of raised a lot of people to the ranks of authority, but you have a lot of people now that're saying, you know, the world doesn't need another podcast. I mean, there's too many of 'em. I know the answer to this, but I'm gonna ask you if you were talking to somebody thinking about starting a podcast and they had a good idea and a good platform, would you tell 'em now it's, it's too late?

Dan Franks (05:19): No, it's not too late, but it's definitely crowded and whatever you can think of that you wanna find a podcast about for the most part, there's a podcast out there. So really the approach, you know, back then, wasn't, you know, back then we could say, is there a podcast on this topic? There's a good chance. It isn't. So you can dive in and be the one and kind of, you know, have that, that early first to market, uh, effect so to speak. Whereas now there's pretty much ever everything out there. So, you know, what's the angle is that you're going to do it at better quality. Are you gonna tell better stories? Are you going to have better guests? Are you going to bring a different angle of ex your experience to the table? Are you representing a brand that hasn't ever had that outlet to speak to its customers or its potential customers? So what are you doing that's different that would just make somebody who's searching your topic in the iTunes, you know, apple play store or in Spotify searching your topic and come across yours and make you pick yours versus the other one that has to do with, uh, you know, a similar topic.

John Jantsch (06:14): Yeah. And I, I think the good news is yes, the market is crowded, but there's also, you know, millions and millions of more people listening to podcasts. So, so every niche that you could think of has got a pretty good size audience, I suspect.

Dan Franks (06:28): Yeah. And it's, you know, it's exciting now because back even five years ago, really to be a successful podcast, a lot of people saw it, meaning you get over 10,000 listeners and you start to be able to sell ads and have advertisers on your show and you make money with the podcast. Whereas now there's so many different definitions of success when it comes to your podcast. It could be, yes. I want to get a whole lot of listeners and sell advertisements, or it could be, I have this product or service that I'm trying to start on the side. And the podcast is meant to be a funnel for that or, or, you know, some, so, so in that particular instance, okay, success, isn't 10,000 plus listeners and being able to sell ads it's can I convert one of my 100 listeners every month to being a customer?

Dan Franks (07:09): And then that's way more, you know, way more profitable for you if that's your goal than just trying to, you know, fight for advertisers. So, you know, now I think there's so many, any more opportunities and with tools like Patreon and all these, where you can kind of, uh, launch these additional add-ons for your listeners. Now, you don't necessarily, again, need those thousands and thousands of listeners. You just need either listeners who are gonna convert for you or your business, or who are going to kind of support you as a creator from that, you know, crowdfunding type standpoint, that premium offerings type standpoint. So just so many more ways now to define success.

John Jantsch (07:44): Well, and I'm, I'm glad you touched on it too, because I tell business owners all the time, you know, think of it as a potential lead generation, uh, tool as well. I mean, if you're, I'm a consultant, if let's say I'm targeting, you know, midsize company CEO as well, I'm gonna do a show, getting best practices of mid-size company CEOs, and I'm gonna have 'em on my show. It's gonna be great content, but at some point some of them are gonna go, oh, I'll take your phone call now and listen to what you know, you, I mean, so you're not using it to sell necessarily, but you're using it to get access to a potential target market. I, I think that one of the most underutilized, you know, aspects of podcasts, you become a member of the media.

Dan Franks (08:25): Yeah. And, and another thing that kind of, that, that reminds me of is one of the things we see a lot now are like professionals. You know, we talked about the accountant thing, but professionals who are almost talking shop amongst themselves, and it's not meant for the customer, it's meant for other people in your position. So for instance, you might be some sort of specialized surgeon that there's only, you know, a thousand of you in the world, but if you're doing a podcast just for, you know, you and your fellow colleagues and you start listening, everyone else starts listening to the show. Well, then you've got these super high dollar advertisers who desperately want to get in front of that particular type of doctor, you know, people aren't reading magazines anymore. And, you know, there's limited ways to get in front of just that targeted audience.

Dan Franks (09:05): But if you have a podcast where, okay, it maybe only has 150 listeners an episode, but 150 of 'em are the exact type of doctor that you're trying to get in front of for your, you know, piece of medical equipment or whatever it is. There's hardly any other way to get in front of that group in such a targeted way. So again, like there's, we see that type of thing start popping up or dentists in a lot of it's in the medical, but it just becomes such a, you know, such a targeted way that you can, you know, create content and get in front of those advertisers that become super profitable. And some, I talked to one doctor who started taking less and less shifts to put more and more focus. And you know, the starting salary there is already pretty good, but the podcast is doing better. So it's pretty exciting.

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John Jantsch (10:42): So let's flip the mic around. Um, a lot of times when people talk about podcasting, they think, oh, okay, I have to start a podcast to use podcasting. I actually started an entire company called podcast bookers, sorry, there's my ad podcast, bookers.com that that our whole intent was to actually get people on podcasts as guests. And I think a lot of times, certainly a lot of people like to be on shows, but actually making that a very intentional part of your marketing, uh, activity to get on the right shows to get the exposure, you know, to get maybe the scene as well. You know, an expert you're gonna get content, but the little dirty little secret is, I dunno about you Dan, but when somebody comes on my show, I promote the heck out of that show. I promote the heck out of the links that they mentioned, you know, on the show. So it's the greatest way to get back links today. So talk to me about, you know, your idea or what you've seen people doing to make podcast guesting, just as effecti as podcast hosting.

Dan Franks (11:38): Yeah. So, I mean, obviously there's services like the one you provide that kind of curates what shows would be best for you as a potential guest, but you know, that's something and you would say this too, that someone, if they wanted to, you know, roll their sleeves up and put in the dirty work, they could do that themselves. And I think there's a lot of value that goes into finding those right fits for you as a guest to be on. I, I like to say like, look at the longevity of these shows that you're potentially sure looking to get on because quite honestly, a lot of people do get that shiny object syndrome, right. And start their own show and you might get pitched to be a guest on that show and it looks good because it's this fun idea and you go back and check it out after your episode is released.

Dan Franks (12:14): Like six months later, you check it out and the show's, you know, sunset and no one's gonna ever hear your show again, because it's gone it's off the air. So yeah, I think, you know, as you're, if you're looking to be intentional about being a guest go, you know, research shows spend some time find those best practices or again, you know, work with someone like you, but yeah, just getting in front of those audiences. And again, like I said about those people that can, you know, buy advertisements on very specialized shows, that same approach can be taken to being a guest. You can find very specialized shows that are the exact right audience that you're looking to get in front of. Yeah. And if you bring something compelling other than just a pitch for yourself, but something compelling, you know, an expertise that maybe some, one else couldn't provide or that, that show was never featured before, you know, you can be as much of a value add to that show as, you know, getting that value in return.

John Jantsch (13:01): I had a client tell me this one and I'd love to hear, you know, if you've seen any really out of the box uses that he actually went and found shows that other guests were kind of his profile of who he was looking for. He'd go beyond the show. And then he would go through the list of guests and contact them, say, Hey, I saw you were on this show too. You know, I really loved your episode. You know, maybe, you know, I'd love to, I'd love to meet you and hear more about what you do. And he, he actually uses it as a somewhat aggressive lead generation or lead mining approach.

Dan Franks (13:32): Yeah. I mean, I think there's a couple different angle there where being on podcasts or hosting podcasts really kind of put you in connection with people that otherwise you wouldn't be able to. So I know a lot of people who host Joe's and bring on guests who otherwise, if they had just cold emailed this person, they'd never make this connection, whether it's a famous person or an influencer in their space, same thing goes with that. If you have that, that, like you said, that, that commonality, Hey, we were both on this show and I, I really enjoyed your episode. Like, can we connect that's, you know, one, a foot in the door that you otherwise wouldn't have had that to be able to relate to people. So yeah, a lot of different ways to skin the cat in terms of leveraging podcasts and guesting and being a guest and having guests, you know, to further, you know, your personal or your professional brand.

John Jantsch (14:14): So in the end, we're really just talking about content, audio content, right. And so a lot of people think in terms of it as a broadcast out to the world, but I'm in, I'm seeing one trend I'm seeing is increasingly companies are using it, you know, even internally or communities are using it internally, just as a communications means what kind of trends along those lines are you seeing?

Dan Franks (14:35): Yeah. We're starting to see a lot of, like you said, companies who are not necessarily replacing, but supplementing that weekly, you know, company update with an audio version of it, or maybe they're interviewing whether it's executives or just interviewing other employees of the company to where you can kind of, you know, learn the stories of the people that you either work with, or that are maybe in other departments. So really just kind of bringing a little more personality to what otherwise would be that weekly team update email. Yeah. I'm also seeing yeah. Municipalities and cities and counties use both YouTube. So video style, but also podcasts for those weekly, you know, updates that the city might send out. You know, don't forget trash is getting picked up, you know, late this week cuz of the holiday. And that sounds super boring, but there's a lot of people who, Hey, I just want to hear that, you know, three minute update from the city and I'm more likely to listen to the podcast than read the newsletter. So that's a super exciting trend we're seeing. And then, you know, a little bit in a similar way, we're seeing these, you know, companies use it a little bit more for content marketing and, and communications with customers or, or potential customers. So in a similar way of, you know, disseminating information as, you know, municipality or a company with it for internal communication, we're seeing a lot of that for external as well. So a lot of kind of newer developments in extensions of what podcasts might be.

John Jantsch (15:51): All right. So a, I know you don't have the silver bullet answer to this, but I know you also get asked this question a lot. So I got my show going, how do I get more listeners?

Dan Franks (16:00): Yeah, no, that is, and you mentioned in, you know, 2005, it was hard to find listeners because you know, there weren't that many of them to begin with the limited shows, but limited listeners. And now it's the opposite problem. Lots of shows and lots of listeners. Lot of what we see working really well are, is cross promotion between shows, right? I know, you know, on some of your episodes, you have, I think it's paid sponsorships, but it's podcasts advertising on another podcast and new shows can do that, have that same effect on one another, just by finding shows, maybe in a similar niche or that might have complimentary audiences and really help each other promote like, Hey, if you like my, this other show you should check out. And we know it works because we see the big, the biggest networks in the world cross promoting their own shows on their own shows.

Dan Franks (16:41): So that's a great way. Just once you've got a show going, you've got a track record, reach out to similar shows. We also see something called feed drops done on a somewhat regular basis. And that's when you find those same shows, maybe develop that rapport with them by by cross-promoting. And then you actually drop one of your episodes on their feed and they'll drop one of their episodes on your feed. So you're not just telling them about, you know, telling your audience about this show and you might record a custom intro on the front end and say, Hey, you know, this week we're taking off, but we've got this special bonus episode of a show that I think you're really gonna like, and then the, they listen to it and then they'll seek it out and subscribe. So a lot of kind of ways like that, where again, everything we do is community focused. Yeah. Um, at podcast movement and that's a community focused type way to help yourself grow and other people as well.

John Jantsch (17:27): I tell you what I've done a couple times and it's been really fun, especially when I have like a new book coming out or something like that. So I have a reason to be very promo emotional myself is I'll actually have a guest host. So I'll actually have somebody come on my show, who does a show and interview me on my own podcast. And now obviously it gives 'em an opportunity to, or, or she to promote their show. So another kind of fun twist.

Dan Franks (17:50): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's all kinds of things you can do. And that's the fun thing about podcasting and, and YouTube and blogging and anything else where, you know, there's not really anyone telling you what you can and can't do. You can just come up with ideas like that, try it. And if it bombs, don't do it again. But if it works, which a lot of times it does, then, you know, you know, it might go after and do it again.

John Jantsch (18:10): So let's, we a geek out forever on this. So I'll try to keep it short. You know, let's talk just a moment about the tech for podcasting. When I first started, I actually recorded phone calls. I had a little device that I bought from the FBI. I think that plugged in, it was almost like tapping the phone and then it would go into an external recorder and, and I would have to upload that file. It was a mess. It was a lot it's, it's why a lot of people quit early because it was so much work. Now, of course, we've got where you and I are recording this on Riverside. You know, there's all kinds of tools to transcribe, do all this stuff at a minimum. What's in your opinion, the best kind of starter set up for, you know, somebody who wants to get going on a podcast.

Dan Franks (18:51): Yeah. I think the best starter set up is to get a basic USB microphone. There's several out there that you can research and they're, you know, 50 between 50 and a hundred dollars. It's an investment for sure. But it's not a gigantic one, right. Plugs directly into your computer or your laptop. Uh, they dynamic microphones usually. So they're pretty good about canceling out external noises. Right. And yeah, so like from a technical setup, like bare bones, USB microphone, the two that we really like are the audio Technica, uh, 2100, I believe is the current model. And then there's a Q2 Q2 U by Sampson. Those two are very good. They come with little Mike stands. So really those plugged into your laptop and a semi quiet environ, we'll give you pretty good results just to start. And then there's all kinds of like hosting companies out there that'll provide free service.

Dan Franks (19:37): Anchor is the most known one, but some of the really good ones out there red circle is one. I really like, uh, that is free hosting. And you can, yeah. You know, put a, get a podcast ready to go for somewhat minimal investment. Now I don't necessarily think you should just like get on there, plug the microphone in record, publish a podcast. Definitely think there's some, you know, planning and, you know, mapping out what you want this show to be and getting some episodes under your belt before launching. But you know, at bare minimum, it's not a giant investment. We were talking before getting on the air, I'm in a room with a road caster, which is a giant mixer with fancy lights and a bunch of mic microphones all over. Those are cool to have, but definitely think people should, you know, get started, make sure they like it. You know, my parents used to always, you know, we'll buy you, you know, something small and make sure you like it. And then we'll get you the expensive bike. If you actually, you know, show us, you actually wanna ride the bike on a regular basis. Same thing with this. Like you can definitely go more expensive, but make sure it's something you wanna with before spending too much.

John Jantsch (20:34): Okay. My current every day, Mike is as sure what's this one S SM seven B, I think they call sure. SM seven B into a cloud lifter, which lifts the gain into a two mix mixer channel that, or it's actually a four mixer channel. I just use two channels. That was probably a hundred dollars. So, I mean, all, all in all pretty professional setup, you know, under a grant. And what's your current setup,

Dan Franks (20:56): Dan? The one I'm using here in this little, uh, studio at my coworking space, it's as sure SM seven B the same microphone. Yeah, probably one of the, the, the better high end microphones there. But like I said, the roader a mixer, which it's a great mixer. It's really good if you're recording three or four people at once in the same location and

John Jantsch (21:12): Like the Eagles are there and they wanna perform. There

Dan Franks (21:15): You go. There you go.

John Jantsch (21:17): Cause it could handle that.

Dan Franks (21:18): Yeah, for sure. But yeah, I mean, it's, you know, like I said, most, a lot of people would not notice the difference between the listener. When I say, say people, the difference between the a hundred dollars setup and the thousand dollars setup, a lot of it is how you use it, what your recording environment is like, if you're, you know, got the window open and there's someone mowing the lawn outside, it doesn't matter how expensive your setup is. It's still gonna sound like the window's open and someone's mowing the lawn outside. But you know, everything from, uh, I, I know people, I know very large podcast who record in their closet because, you know, close everywhere and really dampens the sound and creates a really nice recording environment. I know someone who's a, a college professor who wears his graduation gown kind of throws it over him as he records. And again, it's like a little recording booth. So, uh, a lot of the podcasters you listen to on a regular basis, they're making due with whatever they can in the house. I mean, that's something that anyone and everyone could figure out kind of a solution for

John Jantsch (22:12): One of my first guests early on was Tim Ferris, right after the four hour work work week had come out and he was on a mobile phone walking on a windy day. So you can imagine what that sounded like.

Dan Franks (22:24): Yeah. And you know, a lot of people now, the iPhone microphone and the, in the AirPod microphones are not horrible, not recommended, but you know, just technology as you, you were referencing earlier has gotten so much better even on those handheld devices again. Yeah. Maybe don't walk down the streets of Chicago on the phone for, for a podcast recording, but you know, if the best you have is your, you know, your iPhone phone, it might make due for that, you know, some of those test episodes.

John Jantsch (22:53): So Dan tell people where they can find out more about your work and certainly, uh, check out the next and maybe tell us when the next podcast movement is.

Dan Franks (23:00): Yeah. So, uh, podcastmovement.com. We've got all of our daily newsletter up there, all kinds of, uh, tips and tricks and advice for new podcasters, as well as, uh, existing podcast and industry professionals and podcast movement right now happens twice a year. So the end of March, 2022 is our next one. And then our flagship event is this August in Dallas. So two big events, hopefully getting back into in person event action this year and yeah. Looking forward to continuing to grow.

John Jantsch (23:27): Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for stopping by the duct tape, mark marketing podcast, Dan, and, uh, hopefully we'll run into you one of these days at a podcast movement or on the road somewhere

Dan Franks (23:36): Looking forward to it. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (23:38): All right. That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in, feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also, did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you've got employees, if you've got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It's called the Certified Marketing Manager program from Duct Tape Marketing. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the MarTech podcast, hosted by my friend, Ben Shapiro, brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes, the MarTech podcast shares stories from world class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success. Recent episode, one of my favorite extending the lifetime value of your customer. You know, I love to talk about that. Listen to the MarTech podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:43): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jacqueline Lieberman. She's a former managing partner and the head of strategy for story worldwide and the co founder of Brand Crudo. So I guess we're gonna talk about brands today. So Jacqueline, thanks for joining me.

Jacqueline Lieberman (01:02): Thanks for having me, John. It's a

John Jantsch (01:05): Pleasure. I, I, I always like to get kind of to deeper than the tagline, shall we say? Uh, when, when I talk to people about branding, one of the things that, that you are talking about is making brands more human, putting purpose into practice, and I'd love it. If you would take that beyond the tagline.

Jacqueline Lieberman (01:22): Oh, sure. Well, I mean, I think one of the things, one of my goals is really, when I say I wanna make brands more human is when I think about brands, brands are really people's introduction and their way to interact with companies. Mm-hmm so that's what a brand is to people. So the more human that, that brand is the better that interaction's going to be. So all the beloved brands that are out there, those are the ones that really just behave like a human being. They have a conscience, they have a point of view, right? They have a soul. So, so I think that's, that's what I try and help my clients to do,

John Jantsch (01:57): But they're also probably telltale signs. They're also able to communicate that effectively and deliver on it. If I, and, and people experience that it's not enough to just have that soul, is it

Jacqueline Lieberman (02:08): Exactly, exactly. You have to practice what you preach. You can't just say it. They cannot just be a nice phrase on the lobby wall. You actually have to walk the

John Jantsch (02:16): Walk. So I work, I work with a lot of small business owners and have over the years. And if I mention the, you know, I sometimes call it the B word because they're, they're almost like, oh, well I don't have a brand that's that's for big product companies. And my contention is every business has a brand because it's, it's really just the collective perception of the people that you come into contact with good, bad or indifferent. So, so where do you fall on, you know, companies kind of ignoring that idea?

Jacqueline Lieberman (02:44): Well, I mean, I think even, even those owners, their brands, their personal brands walking around embodying. So, so even if it's their company and just because they might have a, a business name doesn't mean that they're not a brand cuz they're associated with, when they, when somebody hears the name of that company, somebody is going to have a gut feeling about that, that company. And so whether it's the, the, person's the founder's name on the wall, or it happens to be a name that you just made up that has to resonate with people. And so you have to really pay attention to that and have some care and attention into branding, even if you're small.

John Jantsch (03:24): So, so I wanna get into some specifics, but I will tell you this time of year, a lot of people are watching, uh, football. I don't know if you're an NFL fan at all, but uh, playoff season, a lot of people are. And, and of course all the ads are insurance companies that are bay, basically communicating a brand that has nothing to do with their product. Progressive Geico, even state farm seems, seems to be the trend with insurance companies is, is create personality. So we don't have to talk about products. People don't really wanna buy anyway. So, so talk a little bit about that as an effective approach. And, and is it for everyone?

Jacqueline Lieberman (04:03): Well, I mean, I think so taking insurance, just for an example, I mean, so that's, that's a tough, that's a tough market to be in, right? So talk about like a low interest category. We're not talking about automobiles that people look forward to having that purchase when the, when the time comes. So, so taking that tact is, is smart for insurance because they have to associate their brand with something that's positive because for insurance, the flip side of insurance is that you don't wanna need it. So the flip side is that there's some sort of disaster that has happened to you, so they wanna make it a positive feeling. And I think that that's exactly why of those brands are taking the tech that they are. But that said, I think that that's a lesson, a lot of brands can, can take. And it doesn't matter. A lot of, as you mentioned before, oh, I'm a small business and I'm not a big brand, but I think it doesn't matter what category you're in. You can still create a brand around what, because that has to resonate with people. And that's the only way that you're going to be able to connect with people is, is by doing that

John Jantsch (05:09): Well. And I think particularly today there's so many channels and ways to reach, uh, consumers that I think a lot of that's happened. I, I, I think brands in a lot of cases, what go back 20, 30, 40 years ago, I know you weren't around, but it, but for some of my listeners, the brand was kind of the personality of your advertising in a lot of ways was, was the brand. But now you go on, you look at Google reviews and they talk about rusty, the technician that came to their house and did an amazing job. And all of a sudden that's the brand. So how, how do, how do you suggest that brands? I, I wanna say deal, that's probably the, the wrong word address. The fact that there are so many channels and, and so much of the, the brand in a lot of ways is certainly out of our control.

Jacqueline Lieberman (05:50): Yeah. And, and I think, well, I mean, I know that Marty Newmeyer, famous author of the brand gap, he, he basically says a brand is not what you say it is. It's what, what everybody else says it is. And so that's really, that's really what a brand is. So in looking at those reviews and that's the best social listening that a brand can do by the way is, uh, that's the best consumer insight. But I think when looking at brands, I use usually the, the quickest, one of the quick tools that I always give to, uh, any client and even on social me, my social media feeds is saying, if you think about a brand in terms of three spheres of like you think of a ven diagram of you have mind, you have heart, you have conscience. And it's thinking about a, is like in their mind, what's their point of view in the conscience, what's the soul?

Jacqueline Lieberman (06:42): How do you wanna be remembered? And the heart is what are your non-negotiable beliefs? So in saying those things, and, and when you're talking about and how to deal with reviews, it's the reviews fit under one of those things. Right? So, so it's like in Howard ranch should respond is really about that. So if you're always thinking in the realm of that, you have kind of those three facets of the brand, it really dimensionalizes it. And it gives you latitude to dial things up or down as you need to. So you could still be agile and respond. So it doesn't have to be just here's the advertising line. It's like, well, no, what's our point to view about this, or know, how do we help these people who are having the same problem in these reviews? And so I think it's just like an easy construct that people can really wrap their heads around. Even if they know nothing about branding or marketing. I just kind of give that to them as a, as a framework. And it starts to lead people, even non marketers down onto a place of like, Hmm. How, how do I think about my brand as a conscience? Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:43): And so, yeah. So as you start getting into like, what would the brand do cluster, right. we can use that as a decision making. We need to get some of those little bands and put 'em exactly say that. So, so when somebody calls you in, and I know that you, I, I, I know that it's very common for, uh, brands to have a marketing agency that is really doing a lot of the tactics, a lot of the execution, and they will typically sometimes call in a, an outside or a third party brand, uh, strategist what's generally going, uh, is about a five part question what's generally going on when that happens. And then what's your process than for adding or, or I think you used the word excavating as a, as a, as part of the process. So, so walk me through what's going on when somebody finally does that. And then what do you do to try to turn this up?

Jacqueline Lieberman (08:32): Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of times, so unfortunately what happens is, and I don't know why maybe you can tell me why, in your opinion, I'd love to hear what you think about it is. I don't know why, but there's when management, there seems to be a, a change in management. Yeah. And it doesn't matter, uh, really what the level is, but it's typically at the senior level, they feel like that they need to completely blow up the brand. Yeah. And start over and put their own point of view and their spin on it for the sake of doing something new and relevant. And I'm not saying that that being new and relevant in and having a new marketing, the view is, is the wrong way to go. Because usually if there's a change in leadership, there's a need for that change. Yeah. Yeah.

Jacqueline Lieberman (09:22): But the, the part that I, that I always find so surprising is that they come in with no regard to the history of the brand, the origin story of the brand. So whether that origin was five years ago or 50 years ago, or a hundred years ago, it doesn't matter. Every brand started for some reason, it was some somebody thought of it for a reason. There was a value there. So typically what happens is I've gotten called in now more, more than I can count for that scenario where there's a change of a change. Of course, the rest of the team doesn't agree. The senior management wants to go in one direction, but then there's legacy people who feel like that they're going, that it's in their gut, that it doesn't feel right. Yeah. And they need somebody, they need like a, a third party to come in to just kind of almost do brand therapy.

Jacqueline Lieberman (10:14): Yeah. To understand. So, so the, the excavating part is me talking to the CEO or the CMO and finding out. So tell me exactly why is it that you think that this part of the brand needs to change. And very often those are the conversations that's when I start pulling out really the reasons why, because the reasons that they're articulating is actually not it at all. Yeah. Yeah. And so when I start going in and asking those questions, well, tell me why, and tell me a little bit more about that. And then I also will interview the, the other stakeholders, the people who perhaps have been on board for a while, and I start to kind of marry those two worlds together. And, and that's really the beginning of, of the new brand foundation. So it doesn't mean that we're forgetting the origin story. And it doesn't mean that all we're talking about is legacy stuff. It just means that we're creating a new foundation starting from a fresh place that has everybody's input at the table. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch (11:14): But I, but you could see the, you could see the pressure, the internal pressure, the CMO just got fired. The new CMO is not going to make any head wide by saying, we're just going, keep going down this path. Right. Exactly. They do have to bring in kind

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John Jantsch (12:28): This is sort of a weird question, but since we're talking about bigger companies, what we're role does politics internally play in, in the mess that gets made?

Jacqueline Lieberman (12:38): Yeah, a lot. Uh, it's a huge role. And I think, and a lot of, a lot of my role I end up playing is I am the facilitator and I'm bringing all of these worlds together in a way that a allows them to all speak their mind right. In a safe place. And, and I'm the one. So if I'm the one that's coming up with the insights and playing back, what I heard, then there isn't, there, there are no enemies made because they can't argue really with me because it's like, well, I'm saying, well, this is what I heard. Yeah. And so that's, so I become like the facilitator, the therapist, the marriage counselor, bringing everybody together. But at the same point, I'm also constantly asking questions to mind. Well, why, and tell me more about that. And when you say your values are, you're a trusted brand, by the way, everybody says they're a trusted brand, but tell me exactly why you think that. So that's really a lot of what my role is, is to help get away from those politics and just kind of ask the right questions.

John Jantsch (13:42): How often do you get the chance to go deeper than marketing? So into sales, into service, you know, into, you know, pretty much every facet because I that's all part of the brand. Whether people, people say it or not. So how, how often do you get that opportunity?

Jacqueline Lieberman (13:58): Well, when I do workshops, I specifically ask for the attendees in the workshops to be all representatives from. And I ask for, give me somebody from sales, give me somebody from R and D, somebody who sits in customer service. I don't want all marketing people in that room. Right. So I say, if we have to make this a, a two part process, then let's do it. But I do not wanna have all marketing people in the room because, because to your point, a brand is made up of all different facets. It's not just what the marketing team dreams up. So I need to understand the points of view. And very often a lot of that insight comes from the people. Well, not in the marketing department, it comes from the people on the front lines or the people who are thinking about the brand in different ways.

John Jantsch (14:42): Yeah. Referrals rarely happen because of good marketing

Jacqueline Lieberman (14:46):

John Jantsch (14:47): Right. And, and, and yet most businesses, a significant part of their business comes by way of referral. And that happens because somebody had a great experience. Yeah. Not, not because they saw a fun ad. That's true. So do you have, do, do you have any, I was gonna say examples that you don't necessarily have to use, uh, concrete examples, but do you have any examples of where sort of typical gaps happen and it's almost like there's no internal communication and that's creating a bad experience.

Jacqueline Lieberman (15:16): Yeah. Well, I mean, there's, there's one where there's a, a human legacy founder person. Mm-hmm, , who's either no longer with the company and the company is struggling with how to tell that story. So some with, do we tell it at all, or some are struggling with, how do we tell it and then tell it in a new way? Yeah. So there's, so that's, uh, that's a typical problem that, that I tend to, to face with with clients. Another is they, they have a, a really great mission statement and all of the players are all kind of singing out of the same HYN books, so to speak, except they don't know what to do with it. So they don't know like they know why they're there. And they're really jazzed about working there, but they don't have like that, that statement that actually, because it, it tends to be a mission statement's also very long, typically as opposed to like a purpose statement, which could be very condensed and piffy, and you can remember it.

Jacqueline Lieberman (16:16): So really the recall is really how people start to embody it in their everyday life. So if you can't remember what your mission is, then it's like, then it's probably too long and wordy and you probably need to revisit it. But the other part of it is taking that purpose into practice. And, and that really is going right down to, at the HR level of like, you need to put your purpose in your job postings, make sure you're hiring the right culture. You need to put it in your performance reviews, that everybody needs to be accountable for living the purpose and embodying it and your everyday jobs. Because if, if, if you don't bring it down to that level, then it really is just a nice statement in the lobby.

John Jantsch (17:00): Yeah. It's interesting. I think they're growing consensus among, uh, organizations that internal communications is actually where branding maybe starts. Yes. Completely. So talk to me a little bit about whether what you've seen or maybe how you sort of advise people on that.

Jacqueline Lieberman (17:17): Yeah. I mean, I think it's it really, because, I mean, I think it's the, it's how people think about marketing. So people just think that marketing is this advertising box that you need to track in order to sell stuff. But at the same point, it's really having a group of Evangel us who believe in it inside mm-hmm . So that's why, when I talk about I, I came from the world of brand storytelling and of course I, I believe in brand storytelling, but I also really started to think about, and, and started my consulting around brand truth because no one can argue with what's true. So if you could really, really believe it and believe it on the inside, inside the walls, that's how the marketing really starts because then people are excited to be at work. They feel well compensated. They feel well respected. And, and it doesn't matter whether you are part of the marketing team, you are marketing for that company because you're happy being there. Yeah. So you're creating evangelists inside the walls, and that's the first step of marketing right there.

John Jantsch (18:18): Well, and it's, it's, it's painful almost to see these companies, that transparency is one of our core values. And then when generally there's no transparency , you know, going on. Cause I really think that's, excuse me. I really think that's the biggest disconnect is people sit around and come up with what should sound good rather than what, like you said, what is

Jacqueline Lieberman (18:37): Yeah, exactly. I mean, when it's very, I mean, and I, I could see why it happens because businesses they're myopically focused on the task at hand, right in front of them. And they're trying to just get through what they need to get through, especially right now, everybody is, you know, having a hard time in, in all different ways, but, but you have to at least be in the regular practice of going 30,000 feet once in a while, once a quarter, once a year, at least, and start to look at your brand from that level and say, how are we really living our purpose? Is it really trickling down? Is it something that we need to reevaluate? How are we creating this world for the consumer? That's something that they wanna be in, as opposed to us just selling messages

John Jantsch (19:26): 2021 is still gonna be a year where I think people are reeling from 2020. And so is there a, is there a message of trends or behaviors or things that people need to be aware of or looking out for, or doing more of or doing less of, or is it still, is it really just a matter of, of be true and stay the course?

Jacqueline Lieberman (19:50): Well, I mean, well, it's definitely be true and stay of the course. I mean, for sure what the pandemic has highlighted, is it really highlighted the brands who did not, if they were not already purpose driven, it really highlighted the brands who were struggling with that. So it's like, if you already know that and that's already part of your marketing, then it's, you're ahead of the game. And the reason why is because consumers are really out there and they're looking for, they're looking for something like they're looking for a little glimmer of hope and optimism, and that's what brands and companies give each other. And so if you're just giving bla platitudes and you're not really doing anything of substance, then consumers are really gonna look at that and they're making their choices because of that. And, and I think the brands who are winning right now are the ones that are, are really doing things that are, that are real and not just marketing because they're trying to just hang on and survive. Yeah. They're,

John Jantsch (20:50): They're, they're meaningful in some way to their customers think is a good way. Good way to look at it. So you have a podcast as well, uh, called UN do you wanna tell people what they could expect if they tuned in?

Jacqueline Lieberman (21:01): Sure. Uh, so I've been told that it's, uh, NPR, like in terms of in, to the format. And I, I like to have guests on who either have a great brand story to tell. So if it's a new up and coming brand, or even a legacy brand, I like to have brands on who have an authentic story and beginning that they wanna share. And I try to dissect that in a way that I extract insights that really, if you are a planner, if you're a creative, a designer, uh, account person, if you're listening to it, you can apply those insights directly to your work. And that's really what I'm trying to do is, is give people kind of like a marketing insights, 1 0 1 that if you need, if you have 20 minutes from your day and you wanna listen, but you can listen to that and extract and apply to your work. Awesome.

John Jantsch (21:48): So you wanna tell people where, uh, they can find out more about, uh, brand Kuo and, uh, your work. Sure.

Jacqueline Lieberman (21:54): Yeah. Uh, so you can go to, uh, dub, dub, dub, brand crude.com and on there's a link to uncooked we're on apple, Spotify anywhere you, you know, get to podcast, but, but yeah, you can find everything there on brand crude.com.

John Jantsch (22:08): Awesome. Well, Jacqueline, it's a pleasure spending time with you this afternoon and hopefully, uh, we can run into each other when we're back out there on the road someday.

Jacqueline Lieberman (22:15): Wouldn't that be nice. that would be great. Thanks so much, John, for having me.

John Jantsch (22:20): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and, you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients, and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That's right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your client's tab.