Monthly Archives: December 2018

Weekend Favs December 29

Weekend Favs December 29 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Draftium – Create website prototypes quickly.
  • OneTeam – Set weekly team goals in Slack and track progress throughout.
  • Motion – Turn an image into a geometric GIF.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

The Top 5 Duct Tape Marketing Podcast Episodes for 2018

The Top 5 Duct Tape Marketing Podcast Episodes for 2018 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

In 2018, I had the opportunity to speak with an amazing group of guests on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. As the year draws to a close, I wanted to take a look back and share with you the five interviews with the highest number of downloads for the year.

If you enjoyed what you heard here, check out the full line-up of shows. We’ll be back the first week in January with all new episodes and guests.

Joey Coleman – How to Attract Customers and Keep Them Forever

Joey Coleman

Joey Coleman is a marketing expert and the Chief Experience Composer at Design Symphony. He has an eclectic background that includes selling custom research to Fortune 500 executives, racing along the Great Wall, juggling in front of the Taj Mahal, and singing a solo at the Kennedy Center. He’s the author of Never Lose a Customer Again: Turn Any Sale Into Lifelong Loyalty in 100 Days.

Biggest takeaway: Retention is really the key to your business’s longterm success. If you’re able to get involved in the customer journey earlier and stick around for longer, you can convince all of your first-time customers to become loyal, repeat ones.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Petra Kolber – Letting Go of Perfection in Order to Reach Your Goals

Petra Kolber

Petra Kolber is an expert in positive psychology and fitness. She has worked with the likes of Nancy Kerrigan, Dana Torres, and George Foreman and served as a consultant to companies including Reebok, Adidas, and Gatorade. She’s also the author of The Perfection Detox: Tame Your Inner Critic, Live Bravely, and Unleash Your Joy.

Biggest takeaway: When we attach negative emotions to the concept of perfection, striving for it can paralyze us. But when we give up the idea of being perfect and make small, sustainable changes to create new habits around our thinking, we can achieve great things.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Garrett Moon – How to Create Content that Stands Out and Gets Results

Garrett Moon

Garrett Moon is the CEO and co-founder of CoSchedule, the web’s most popular marketing calendar and the fastest growing startup in North Dakota. He’s also the author of 10x Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint For Creating ‘Competition-Free Content’ That Stands Out and Gets Results.

Biggest takeaway: When creating content, you need to get specific about the problem you solve for your customer and define the one specific action you’d like them to take as a result of consuming the content. When you do that, you’ll create content that leads customers to associate the solution of their problem with your brand.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Mike Blumenthal – How to Help Your Local Business Get Found Online

Mike Blumenthal is the undisputed king of local SEO. He is the owner of Blumenthals, one of the founders of Local U and GetFiveStars, a review service that helps local businesses.

Biggest takeaway: Proximity, prominence, and relevance are the three major determining factors in how you rank in Google search results. Blumenthal covers the ins and outs of how to give your business the best shot at dominating local search and making sure you get found.

Click here to listen to the episode.

David Mihm – Tips for Attracting Local Clients

David Mihm is a digital marketing expert for small businesses, co-founder of GetListed.org (now part of Moz Local), and founder of Tidings. He previously served as Moz’s Director of Local Search Strategy, where he led the development of Moz Local.

Biggest takeaway: Google’s search results are now comprehensive enough where a customer theoretically doesn’t need to visit your website to do business with you—they can get all the information they need to complete a transaction from Google. This is why optimizing your presence on Google is critical, and Mihm shares tips on how to get the best results for your business.

Click here to listen to the episode.

Is your favorite episode on the list? If not, we’d love to hear which one you enjoyed listening to the most!

For our podcast audience, we can’t thank you enough for your support over the years! If you like the show, click on over and subscribe and if you love the show give us a review on iTunes, please!

Six Ways to Enhance Your Sales Pipeline with a CRM

Six Ways to Enhance Your Sales Pipeline with a CRM written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Your sales pipeline is quite literally the thing that keeps you in business. That’s why managing it effectively is so critical.

CRMs provide you with all the data and functionality you need to make sure you’re talking with leads and closing the deal in the most efficient way possible. Plus, they allow you to see the bigger picture and to set strategic goals for your business based on your existing sales pipeline and how you hope to see it grow.

Here, we’ll take a look at six ways to enhance your sales pipeline with a CRM.

1. Don’t Let Leads Slip Away

When you’re juggling all of the many priorities that come with operating a business, it can be easy to lose track of leads. You’re so focused on delivering for your existing clients, that when a lead reaches out to learn more or you don’t hear back from someone immediately after you’ve initially made contact, you quite frankly might just forget about them.

But when you have a promising lead in your sights, you need to remain proactive about reaching out. They have a problem that needs solving and their own deadlines they need to meet, so if you’re too slow in getting back to them, they’ll go with your competitor that was quicker on their feet.

Fortunately, CRMs are a great way to stay on top of all points of contact. You can easily track and visualize when you last spoke with a prospect—without having to hunt through your email inbox or search through your call history on your phone—so that you can make sure you respond to inquiries in a timely manner and are on top of following up with those prospects who have gone radio silent over the last few weeks.

Of course, not all leads are created equal, so there’s value in assessing each lead and deciding how you’ll most effectively divide your time to attend to existing clients while also catering to your most promising leads.

2. Use Lead Behavior Scoring to Focus Your Efforts

There are some leads who will never convert, no matter what you do and how hard you try. You need to wipe those leads off of your radar screen so that you can spend your time wooing those who actually have a shot at becoming clients.

Lead behavior scoring is the process of evaluating your leads’ profile and actions and assigning a score that corresponds with how likely they are to convert. By using the data you’ve assembled on your current client base, you can establish a method for taking an educated guess about the value of a given prospect.

If a prospect shares nine out of 10 characteristics and behaviors with your current client base, that’s someone who could very likely need your services and want to do business with you! If it’s a prospect who only lines up on two of the 10 points, though, don’t spend copious amounts of time and effort speaking with them. They’ll likely never become a customer.

3. Analyze Your Pipeline Data

CRMs are great at collecting data about your current processes and allowing business owners to slice and dice the information in a way that makes sense for them.

You want to track the way your business guides prospects through the first part of their customer journey. What’s working and what’s not so effective?

Once you begin looking for patterns, you’ll likely see some room for improvement. Let’s say you’re a contractor whose homepage has a call to action button inviting prospects to sign up for your newsletter. The newsletter contains lots of tips and tricks on renovating, and when you analyze the CRM data, you notice that the CTA button gets a lot of clicks. But you also notice something else: you’re not seeing a lot of newsletter subscribers taking the next step and reaching out for a consultation.

This information alerts you to an issue in your pipeline and allows you to do a deeper dive into what’s not working. Maybe the newsletter is sent too frequently and so people aren’t reading it, or it’s ending up in spam folders. Maybe you don’t provide a clear next step for readers—adding a big, bold button at the end of the newsletter inviting prospects to reach out for a consultation might get their attention. Or maybe you already have a button there, but prospects are hesitant to do it because they don’t understand the terms of the consultation. When you add language clarifying that it’s free and has no obligation attached, you might see yourself getting some traction.

4. Set Informed Goals for Growth

Putting together an annual plan is a critical step in running your business. But it’s hard to set goals when you don’t know where you already stand. Fortunately, CRMs allow you to see what your typical pipeline is like at the moment and how you can work in the future to improve it.

Take a look at where you stand now. What are your conversion rates? How long is your sales cycle? What is the average deal size you see with first time customers? How many customers come back, and when they do, are they spending more money on bigger and better products?

Using this information, you can identify potential areas of growth. Let’s go back to the contractor example. Right now, you see that a lot of your first time customers are hiring you for smaller jobs like refinishing projects or building decks, and your customer return rate is low. Again, armed with this data you can begin to do some digging into the why behind the issue and then take steps to remedy it.

Maybe what you learn is that there’s a local architect who’s partnered with your biggest competitor, and as a team, they’re going out and winning the majority of bathroom and kitchen renovations in the area. If this is the arena you want to work in, you need to change your strategy. Establishing your own partnerships with suppliers of materials or another architectural firm could help to boost your visibility in this arena. Or maybe there’s a local interior designer who you can partner with and display your work jointly in a big design showcase.

When you know where your weakness lie, you’re able to take a strategic approach to addressing them.

5. Establish a Clear Process for Managing Pipeline

Sometimes businesses that don’t have a CRM in place can become a bit like the Wild West. Salespeople are left to go out and do their thing with little supervision, and you don’t have any visibility into what tactics are working, what’s not effective, and whether or not the sales team is taking the most effective approach to managing their workload.

Once you’ve taken a look back at the aggregate data in your CRM, you’re able to see what exactly is effective and what isn’t. From there, you can establish a clearcut system for dealing with leads.

The best way to find leads and stay in contact with them will vary from business to business. You also want to understand how the sales pipeline functions so that you can be sure you’re providing your team with the tools they need to succeed. Maybe that’s asking your marketing team to create white papers that address concerns prospects often mention to your sales team. Maybe that’s establishing best practices for how frequently the sales team follows up with prospects.

Salespeople often possess traits that would serve them well in any sales position, but every business is different and has their own unique needs and effective approaches.

You’ll want to provide training to your salespeople on best practices for your industry and your business. Maybe they relied heavily on email communications in their last job selling software to tech companies, but here you may have found that phone calls are the most effective way to generate business. Even small tweaks like that can help to improve the overall effectiveness of your sales approach.

6. Managing a Referral Program

We’ve dedicated a number of articles on the blog to the importance of referrals for any business. CRMs can help you to establish the most effective referral program and ensure that you have a steady stream of referrals coming into your sales pipeline.

Using audience segmentation tools to target your happiest customers with offers to join your referral marketing campaign is a great start. From there, you want to use the CRM to group those prospects who are coming to you via referral together so that you can be extra sure you’re providing them with a great experience. These leads are hot because they’ve already heard great things about your business—if you’re able to prove their referrer right, you’re very likely to successfully close the deal here (and maybe even generate future referrals from them)!

A sales pipeline can be an unwieldy thing to manage, and if you’re trying to keep track of your prospects and manage the customer journey without a dedicated tool, things can easily get out of hand. A CRM allows you to easily store, track, and analyze the data that you need to not only provide the best service for each and every prospect, but to more efficiently manage your big-picture business decisions.

Weekend Favs December 22

Weekend Favs December 22 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

  • Remove.bg – Quickly and easily remove the background of a photo without fancy editing software.
  • Costie – Calculate how much those long team meetings are really costing you (and decide if they’re worth it).
  • Link2Sheet – Copy contact information from LinkedIn profiles into Google Sheets with this Chrome extension.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

A Brand Storytelling Framework From Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

The beloved American children’s classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was published in 1939 by the Montgomery Ward department store. So it’s tempting to think of it as yet another lasting piece of seasonal content marketing. Except Rudolph is so much more than that. It’s also a handy framework for telling … Read the full article at MarketingProfs

The Top Four Marketing Trends for 2019

The Top Four Marketing Trends for 2019 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch on 2019 Marketing Trends

‘Tis the season for end of year lists and content that’s looking to trends in the New Year. Rather than run through all of the ins and outs of what I see coming up on the marketing horizon, I’ve decided to focus on what I see as the four most important marketing trends for 2019.

If you’re a small business owner or a marketing consultant who works with small business teams, these are the trends you can’t afford to ignore.

1. Get Up to Speed on Google My Business

Google has been trying to crack the social media and small business ad platform code for a while. Some attempts, like Google Plus, have not worked, but it seems like they may have finally found their sweet spot with Google My Business. This is a tool where local businesses can advertise and consumers can find nearby businesses on mobile devices.

Over the past few months, Google has been more and more focused on the Google My Business platform. It’s become more feature-rich and useful for business owners, and I think it’s likely that it will become a sort of social CRM tool in the near future.

Google My Business

Photo courtesy of Google

What do I mean by that? In addition to the features like leaving reviews, finding directions, and making suggestions to edit the page, Google has recently added a feature where people can follow a Google My Business page. Not only that, Google’s recently introduced an app just for their Google My Business product.

These changes lead me to believe that they’re aiming to make Google My Business like a social network for businesses. This serves local business owners well. When someone starts to follow your company on Google My Business, that’s obviously a strong indicator that they’re interested in what you have to offer. This provides yet another channel for you to identify hot leads and connect with your fans.

If you’re running marketing efforts for a small business, then you should be paying close attention to all of these developments and additions to the platform and keeping pace with them accordingly.

Eventually, I anticipate that a business’s Google My Business platform will become a ranking factor in Google searches. The more followers you have on your page, the higher you’ll rank in search results. The quality of your business’s online assets and reviews are already ranking factors, so it’s not a leap to think that Google My Business will affect ranking in the future.

2. Focus on Retention

There’s an awful lot of work that goes into generating leads. It’s time, it’s money, it’s effort. This means that retaining leads is really where a business’s bread and butter lies. Research has shown time and again that it’s cheaper to sell to an existing customer than to go out and find a new one.

So what does that mean for your marketing efforts? It means you need to focus on your basic online presence. Existing customers will only stick around if their experience in interacting with you is one that builds trust. When you have a shoddy online presence that’s inconsistent or has big gaps in information, you make your customers doubt you. Have you ever thought twice about using a particular service provider because they had a bare bones website or they weren’t anywhere to be found on Yelp?

Retention is also about focusing on building a robust on-boarding process for existing customers. This needs to be a process that’s clear-cut and allows you to monitor results and make changes and improvements based on the data you’re seeing.

Finally, you need to make sure you’re creating real value for your existing customers. Build campaigns that really train them, events that are experiences that surprise and delight, and a referral process that provides true incentive for them to pass your name along to others.

CRM and marketing automation tools can help you manage these processes. These tools allow you to segment your audience so that you can easily guide, train, and over-communicate with the customers you already have so that retention stays high.

3. Embrace the Cloud

In recent years, the Cloud has become a bigger and bigger part of doing business. And small business owners have already begun to use cloud-based technology to improve their internal systems and processes. Cloud-based storage and communication systems have made it easier for distributed teams to collaborate and get things done.

However, the future lies in harnessing cloud technology to provide an even better customer experience. It’s not just about convenience or lowering cost, it’s become a part of the customer’s expectation that cloud technology is used to enhance the customer experience.

As you begin 2019, think about how you can use cloud-based tools that help with payment collection, online collaboration, and other customer service features to make your customer experience even more seamless.

4. Use Video Content Everywhere

We’ve been talking about content and we’ve been talking about video separately for years, but I think 2019 is going to be all about video content. Short form video content, in particular, is an important marketing trend. Studies continue to show that video content gets the most engagement and highest return on investment.

Developers and tech companies have caught wind of the trend as well. They continue to come out with new tools and products that make it easier for anyone to produce short and engaging videos that can be used for any and all marketing efforts.

Video isn’t just something splashy to put on your website’s homepage anymore. It can and should be used to provide meaningful content all throughout the customer journey. You may use it during the early phases to introduce the brand story and team members, but it can also be employed further along the journey to share content that establishes you as a thought leader in your industry (building trust with prospects), and later to provide in-depth tutorials for customers so that they can get the most out of their recent purchases.

You should be using video across channels, too. Video on your website is great, but also put your video content to use in ads, social media posts, and as a way to introduce your blog posts. When video is used in this way, it goes beyond being just a tool to becoming something that produces deep, meaningful content all along the customer journey.

I hope taking a look at these trends gets you excited about all of the wonderful marketing possibilities ahead in the New Year!

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

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How to Use CRM for Audience Segmentation

How to Use CRM for Audience Segmentation written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

All customers today are looking for a highly personalized experience. They expect businesses—from the big guys like Amazon all the way down to their local coffee shop—to understand their wants and needs, and to treat them like an individual.

When you’re running a successful business with hundreds or thousands of customers, though, it is impossible to make your audience feel special if everyone is getting the exact same messaging. That’s where audience segmentation comes in. When used properly, the information stored within your CRM can be used to create subsets of your prospect and customer population who you can then approach with highly tailored messaging. This makes every individual feel like a VIP, and it makes them all the more likely to do business with you over the other guy.

Today we’re going to take a closer look at audience segmentation: What it is, how to do it, and why it matters for your business.

What is Audience Segmentation?

Audience segmentation is the process of breaking your audience down into smaller groups. There are a number of ways that you may choose to segment your audience, and each business will segment differently based on their individual needs and goals. You can consider the following categories of attributes when you’re thinking about segmentation:

  • Demographics: Do you want to break your list down by age, gender, geographical location, income, or job title?
  • Stage in Customer Journey: Is this individual a prospect, a repeat customer, or somewhere in between?
  • Actions: Have they signed up for your newsletter? Abandoned a cart on your e-commerce website?
  • Interactions: When was the last time they interacted with your business, and how did they do so?
  • Purchases: What purchases have they already made, and how recently?
  • Preferences: How do they prefer to be contacted? And how frequently do they want to hear from you?

Segmenting your audience allows you to approach different subsets with different messaging and offers. These targeted messages are more likely to meet with a positive response than if you send the exact same message to everyone on your mailing list.

How Do I Segment for My Business?

Every business has unique goals and will segment their lists differently as a result. The first step in deciding how to segment your list is to look at your ideal customer: What are their attributes, and what actions can you take in contacting them to ensure you’ll move them further down the marketing hourglass?

For example, for a retail store with both a brick and mortar and e-commerce platform, geographical location is an important way to segment your list. You want to be sure that the people receiving your email about in-store deals and promotions live close enough to actually come to the store. For a B2B business, factors like job title or company seniority might be more important to take into account when segmenting. Those who are in leadership positions are more likely to be the decision-makers in selecting your business, so you’ll want your messaging to reflect that.

The great thing about CRM tools is that they allow you to segment based on multiple attributes and actions, so don’t feel like you only have to pick only one or two. The system will manage each individual’s profile, and the more information you have on each person the more able you are to target them with the messaging that is most relevant.

Why Does Segmentation Matter?

Creating an incredible user experience is all about personalization. Marketo released the results of a survey recently, where they found that 63 percent of all respondents were “highly annoyed” by generic email blast messaging. Nearly 80 percent of those respondents also indicated that they will only engage with promotions from a brand if the promotions are related to a prior purchase they made.

With statistics like those, it’s easy to see why segmentation is so important. People are less likely to do business with you—even when you offer them a promotion or deal—if it’s not something specially tailored to them. Not only that, but when you begin to annoy customers and prospects with generic messaging, you erode trust and effectively encourage them to look for a competitor who will acknowledge their individual wants and needs.

Use Segmentation to Inform Future Campaigns

Outside of the unparalleled personalization that email segmentation offers, there’s a benefit to your team in email segmentation as well—one that goes beyond the obvious benefit of more sales. Email segmentation makes it very easy for your team to run A/B testing on different messaging and campaigns.

When you break your list down into subsets, you can send variations on the same messaging to groups in your email list and see which campaign gets greater traction. When an email campaign is successful, you know that something about the messaging was persuasive to the audience. The next step for you is to identify what made it so great and then to replicate this in future campaigns. As you continue to refine your approach, your audience will be delighted by how well you understand them and their needs, and will be all the more likely to become return clients and to refer you to their friends.

How Do I Find the Right CRM to Implement Segmented Messaging?

All CRMs allow you to collect and save data on customers and prospects, and many have campaign management and email marketing built directly into the platform. Others work with an outside email messaging system to get the job done.

If you have yet to select a CRM for your business consider a comprehensive tool like ActiveCampaign, ZoHo, OntraPort, and InfusionSoft. These platforms offer more traditional CRM functions like sales and lead scoring, plus segmentation and email marketing.

If you already have a CRM in place that doesn’t provide an email marketing function, don’t despair. Most email management systems will integrate with CRMs; take, for example, MailChimp’s integrations with a variety of CRM and e-commerce platforms that allow you to undertake effective email segmentation by bringing the tools you already use together.

Audience segmentation is the key to providing the kind of highly personalized attention that prospects and clients not only want, but expect. Using a CRM to help you create detailed profiles and send targeted messages to users based on their individual wants, needs, and attributes helps establish your business as a likable and trustworthy brand—the kind of business someone is excited to interact with.

Weekend Favs December 15

Weekend Favs December 15 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

Transcript of Finding Success and Happiness as a Company of One

Transcript of Finding Success and Happiness as a Company of One written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

This transcript is sponsored by our transcript partner – Rev – Get $10 off your first order

John Jantsch: Everybody wants to scale up these days. Big topic, right? Well, in this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I visit with Paul Jarvis and we talked about, he has a nice book; Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business. Check it out.

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest today is Paul Jarvis. He teaches online courses, runs several software businesses and hosts a handful of podcasts from his home. He’s also the author of Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business. So Paul, welcome to the show.

Paul Jarvis: Hey, thank you very much John, I appreciate it.

John Jantsch: So your intro, I think is almost intentionally sort of small-sounding, isn’t it?

Paul Jarvis: I think a little bit, but I also think, it was funny because one of the first things my agent and book publisher asked was, “Well, what awards do you have?” Or that sort of thing. And I was like, “I don’t actually have any.” I’ve never actually tried to win an award, I don’t know what I would get an award for. So, I think some of it’s intentional, some of it’s that’s just the way that my work works.

John Jantsch: Well I guess what the point of that comment really is that, those who know you know that you’re quite accomplished in what you’ve done and I think that in some ways you’re maybe giving people hope that, “Hey, it’s okay to record a podcast from your home, you can still have success on those terms” right?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, exactly. I’m also Canadian, so there’s a bit of a lack of hubris sometimes I think.

John Jantsch: You haven’t apologized yet, though. So, you know the big term, of course the big concept right now, is scaling. So, in some ways, people could make a case for saying you’re sort of anti-scaling.

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, that’s kind of the point, so I guess the point of the book and the point of kind of where my thinking around this idea has been is not that scaling is bad, it’s just that scaling should be thought about first. I think this actually applies to a lot of things, that we should probably think about things before we do things. For the most part, it kind of makes sense to do that. So it’s not really a book about anti-scaling, it’s more a book about considering whether it makes sense or not, because it doesn’t always make sense to scale.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and that’s a great point, because I think a lot of people just get caught up in the, “well if I start a business, that’s the goal”, right? And not necessarily “what do I want?” Is it?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah. I think a lot of times, people kind of, they start the business, and then work backwards, trying to make it work for the life that they want. And to go the opposite way, we can think about the life that we want, and then build a business that, obviously that’s profitable because that’s the point of business, but that also supports the life that we want. Like for myself, I don’t want to have to manage a team or have to work 16 hours a day to make enough money to survive. So I don’t want to build a business like that, because that doesn’t support the life that I want. And I think lifestyle business gets a bum rap, but I kinda think that every single business is a lifestyle business. Like the friends that I have that have venture-backed, Silicon Valley tech companies, they have a very specific lifestyle that their business makes them have, right? So I think every business has the possibility of being a lifestyle business, in so much that you can kind of pick what you want–

John Jantsch: You know, I sometimes think there’s a lot of confusion around the terms growth and scale, that people kind of see them as the same thing. One of the things that I’ve seen at least, is that I think scale can imply doing more with less. I think it can also imply that you’re more profitable, because you’ve developed systems of things. I think sometimes scale gets a bad rep.

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, you’re speaking my language here. I think that there’s things that are really good for scale that don’t necessarily mean growth, and I think a really good example of that is a newsletter. It takes me as much time to write an email to one person as it does to write an email to 30 thousand people. So that to me is a great example of scaling my reach for example that doesn’t require, I don’t need 30 thousand people writing one email to 30 thousand recipients. So I think scale a lot of times, if we do it properly, doesn’t have to require the growth or the expenses required for that growth.

John Jantsch: Freelancing is, I don’t know what the numbers are, but I’m sure it’s in the multi-hundreds of times percentage growth, that pretty much everybody that has a job is freelancing today, it seems like. One of the points I know that you make in the book and I know that you do this in your courses and a lot of the work you’ve done is that, you know, a lot of freelancers just think of themselves as just gig-workers or you know, “I’ve got some spare time to do this…” you know, it’s not really a company. So, how is freelancing different than a company of one?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, I think they can be the same, but where they’re different is, and I know this just from experience of teaching thousands of freelancers, mostly in creative industries, is that they tend to work in their business so much that they don’t think about working on their business. And what I mean by that is we can get caught up in client work, and I mean if our business is doing well as a freelancer, we have a lot of client work. But if we don’t stop to think about filling the funnel a bit further down the road, then they’ll be this feast or famine thing.

If we don’t think about things like taxes or accounting, we could get into trouble at the end of the year with our governments. So, I think that there’s, and we also need to think about things like how word of mouth is working fr a business. A lot of freelancers, that’s their main source of finding new clients; it’s keeping in touch with people and keeping that network really strong. So I think that a lot of freelancers don’t treat their business like a business, and either way, it’s still a business. So, I think thinking about how to make freelancing into a business, and keep thinking about it like a business is always really, really important, because like I said, it is a business, whether you think it is or not.

John Jantsch: So is there a critical mindset shift that occurs when somebody decides, “Yeah, I’m a company.”

Paul Jarvis: Well, I think that definitely when they start to consider profit, that’s always important. I think there’s a lot of things that can be hobbies, and hobbies are great and you don’t need to worry about profit if it’s hobby. The best thing about a hobby is you don’t have to worry about the money side. But when you want something to support you, you have to start to, especially in freelancing or when you work for yourself and build solo products, I think we have to consider what enough is.

So, what would be enough to sustain this as business longterm, or even in the beginning, what would be enough to sustain this month to month. Like, “how much income do I need?” Because if we figure those things out, then we can work backwards. Say we need $5000 a month ad we wanna charge $1000. Well, can we find five clients per month to cover just those bases? And then six or more to be profitable, right? So I think we need to start to think about what enough is, like, “How many clients is enough?”, “How much profit is enough?”, “How big our audience should be is enough.”, “How much time spent on the business is enough?”.

I think a lot of times, the ‘enough’ question is probably one of the most important things, it’s probably the main reason why I wrote the book. Because we all start from zero, right? We all start a business without a backlog of clients, it’s really hard to start like that. But we all start at zero and build up. So, we all need that growth mindset to get to enough. But where a lot of us don’t think about it is, if we don’t consider what enough is and then change based on if we’ve reached enough or not. So if we have enough revenue, then maybe we don’t need to keep growing and growing and growing, we can start to optimize for that revenue instead. And so I think that’s probably one of the most important things.

John Jantsch: What are the challenges that a lot of people getting started, even if they have that plan like, “here’s where I think I wanna get”, it’s the– and I hate the term shiny object, but no question opportunities pop up, “Gosh, should I chase that? Should I chase that?” Do you or did you have a filter that allowed you to decide? Because sometimes opportunities sound great, and sometimes they’re dead ends, sometimes they just are distractions, maybe they just replace the money you were making over there. So do you have a process that you go through to say, pros, cons, how do I consider this?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah. For me the first thing mindset-wise, is I consider what the maintenance costs, because every opportunity has an associated cost, right? So I consider; if I say yes to this thing, what does that mean for a whole bunch of things, so, what does that mean for my profit? What does that mean for my existing customers? What does that mean for my happiness? And what does that mean in terms of maintaining this longterm? Like say I wanted to add another course to my roster, or add another client, or add another feature to a product. I’m going to have to then be able to sell that new feature. I’m going to have to support that new feature.

I’m gonna probably build other things around that feature to make it work better. So everything has a cost and I think if we start to think about, “What’s a reason we started this thing in the first place? This business, this freelancing, whatever we want to call it. What’s the reason we started this and what do we want to get out of it?” And I think if we have, it sounds a little hippy-dippy, but I think the more that we have and consider what our purpose was for starting, and it can change granted, it can definitely change, but if we have a purpose, I feel like that’s the best lens for decision making we can have when we work for ourselves. So if we have a purpose in mind for what we want to get out of it, or why we’re doing it in the first place, then we can say, “This opportunity doesn’t line up with this purpose, therefore it’s okay if I turn this thing down. It’s okay if I maybe lose a bit short term, but gain a bit in the long term. Because I’ve been doing this for 20 odd years, I kinda think longterm with a lot of the decisions that I make.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And obviously, experience ends up teaching you that. Because I think there’s this like, “I’ll never get this chance again.” Kind of mentality. I think experience teaches you “yes you will”. And so I think once you get confident in that it makes it a little easier to trust your gut I think. My favorite chapter in the book; a chapter called The One Customer, and I think that a lot of freelancers kind of tend to think, you know, you think of an Upwork project or something, you know, it’s done, I never really met the customer, I delivered the product, I don’t really even think of it a customer, its more of a project. But I think that the one big mindset shift that you identify is that I think when somebody decides they have a company of one, all of a sudden this customer is something to grow, isn’t it?

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, I think that in all I’ve done all sorts of types of business and I’ve worked with all sorts of customers, from Fortune 100 startups to entrepreneurs. It’s, business is always, and I hate business sayings for the most part, but there’s one that I actually like, and I think it’s, “Business is all bout who you know.” So I think building relationships and fostering relationships in the longterm just makes a lot of sense. I think, whether it’s startups or freelancers, I think we tend to focus more on acquisition than retention, and its cheaper to retain customers if you’re a freelancer if you’ve already worked with somebody; the sales cycle can be shortened. Because you don’t need to convince them to work with you anymore, they did, they hopefully liked it, they just have to say yes or no to a new project. If it’s a tech company or a SAS product, then retaining the customer just means that they don’t cancel and turn out. So I think focusing on making, and these are the people who are already paying attention, these are the people who probably already like our work if we’re doing good work. Then, it makes sense to pay attention to them, it makes sense to listen to them, it makes sense to not let those relationships die.

Even looking back to when I did freelance work, I had some customers that were probably 13, 14 years of work, and sometimes we would go a year without working together, but because I would keep in touch with them, and because I would reach out to them often, even if there was a bit of a slow time, all I had to do was email my existing customers and say, “Hey, just checking in, see how your business is going, see if there’s anything I can help with.” Just in doing that, I could fill my client roster for a month or two. So I think keeping in touch with people is such an under-utilized skill.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And that one tip really works for any business. If you’ve got a list of past–

Paul Jarvis: It’s a magic email.

John Jantsch: Yeah, it really is. If you’ve got a list of past happy customers, and it’s a slow Friday, just send out an email. So, one of the things that’s made this company of one idea so viable really is all of the tools and technology and automation that we have available. What’s some of your, let’s make this a two-part question. What’s some of your favorite tools for automation, and then what are some of your famous no-nos for abusing automation?

Paul Jarvis: So, I really like email. I think email, so one, email marketing newsletters accounts for most of my revenue, so I would be silly if I didn’t really like that. So I think, and for me, the way that I use it, and it’s funny because everybody’s like, “Oh emails, Dad emails, Dad…”, and I feel like I’m the guy in the back raising my hand, like, “I don’t think so.” So I’ve had a newsletter, a weekly newsletter, which is good because it’s called the Sunday dispatches, so it makes sense that I send it once a week. I’ve had a newsletter since November 2012, so it’s about six years old, and every week I send an article to my list and that just keeps in touch with people, it keeps reminding people that I exist.

And it also, I sometimes have things to sell; not all the time, but sometimes there’s something to sell. And by keeping this cadence as really regular cadence, of showing up for people saying like, “Hey, I still exist, here’s some thoughts that I have.” It shows people that like, “Oh, okay, I really resonate with these things that Paul is saying.” Some people, not all people but some people. And then when I do have something to sell, it’s not like I’m just hounding them to get something for myself, it’s I’ve been providing value for them, sometimes for years; sometimes people are on my list for years before they buy something, so then it feels like there’s some reciprocity there. So then, the sales cycle just becomes, “Hey I made this thing, maybe you wanna check it out.”

John Jantsch: Yeah, you know, I laugh because I get those notes all the time, “I’ve been following you for 10 years, and finally decided to buy–” it’s like I gotta figure out how to shorten the sale cycle so—

Paul Jarvis: Yeah I think that can be good. And then as far as things that I don’t really like using; I don’t like any tool that is realtime or that shows my status. So I really dislike products like Slack because it feels like there’s—so things like that, I don’t even need to single out slack, but just any service that shows my status; even Skype, I only sign in to Skype to use it. And I think that a lot of times we have this FOMO about, “Oh, I’m gonna miss something so I need to stay logged in to everything, or I need to get notifications for all of the things.” I don’t know how I could work, I don’t know how I could accomplish the tasks I need to do on any given day if I was interrupted when I’m doing my work.

So if I’m working on something I can’t leave Slack open, I can’t leave Skype open, I can’t even leave social media open. So, if I’m writing the only thing I have open on my computer is my writing software. If I’m on Twitter, the only thing I have open on my computer is Twitter, and I don’t get notified of things that I’m not focused on or things that I’m working on. So I think that there’s a lot of technology now that allows us, like we were talking about, that allows us to scale without growth, which is awesome, but I also think that we can fall into the trap of just being interrupted by all of these great technologies, so I try not to let that happen as much as possible, because I like to get my work done, and then be done work for the day.

John Jantsch: So, I’m curious, and this is just on a personal note, what is your writing software?

Paul Jarvis: I use, so I like IA writer for just me writing, it’s just a markdown minimal software app. I use for collaboration I use Google Docs, because it’s just the easiest thing when I’m working with copy editor and editor, or collaborator. But then, my publisher, and I think all publishers are old school, so I also use Word, but I begrudgingly use Word. I actually had to buy a license to word for the first time in ten years just to–

John Jantsch:  That’s so funny. We’re getting ready to bore our listeners to tears here, but my current book, I’m working on another book right now, and I’m writing the entire thing in Google Docs and I convinced my traditional mainstream publisher to take the manuscript in Google Docs, can you believe it?

Paul Jarvis: Awesome.

John Jantsch: So excited about that.

Paul Jarvis: Your power of persuasion is greater than mine. I tried to do the same thing; it didn’t work.

John Jantsch: One of the things that, I was really happy to read this line because I’ve believed this forever, but you said this really well. That education is a serious marketing channel. And I don’t think people appreciate that. We’ve all bought into, you know, “Yes, educate, educate, useful content.” But I think you took it a step further really, and talk about it as the tool to actually grow your existing customer base and that you should teach everything, you should look at that as a product opportunity. And I think a lot of people who do, say design or really any kind of work, really underestimate the power of that.

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, I mean, it was funny when I was doing web design, I noticed that the only thing that web designers wrote and shared on the internet were things for other web designers. And I always found that weird because, no web designer would ever hire me because I was a web designer too, we had the same skill set. So when I started to think about content, I thought about, “Okay, well what can I do to create content for people that hire web designers?” So I started to write articles on the subject, I wrote a book on the subject.

And then I noticed that my schedule was so full I didn’t know what to do with it because people were reading the things that I was writing, that were looking to hire web designers, and because they had read that from me, they thought, “Okay, this Paul guy is the expert on this subject, so why wouldn’t I want to hire the expert on educating clients on successful design projects? Because he’s the one who’s sharing this knowledge.” And it became a really easy sell at that point, it was just, people had already heard of me, it was more just a matter of seeing if it was a good fit to work together than having to pitch or sell anything. So I’ve kind of taken that and run with it for the rest of my business life.

John Jantsch: And I think a lot of people, people are getting off of this a little bit, but imagine 10, 15 years ago, nobody was really educating, you know, you were selling. And so, when I was out there telling people that, “No, tell them everything, reveal all the candy, don’t hold anything back.” Because they don’t wanna actually do it themselves, they just wanna know that you know how to do it. And that’s the best way to demonstrate it, and I’m glad we’ve come around.

Paul Jarvis: Yeah, people feel like they’re backed into a corner if they feel like they’re being sold to, but people listen a lot more if they feel like they’re learning something; they pay attention, and that attention is gold when you are trying to sell something. If you don’t pay attention to the selling, you pay attention to the teaching, and then you’re right, they’re just gonna be like, “This person knows what they’re doing, I’m just gonna pay them.”

John Jantsch: Well, or they go out there and try it and they go, “Gosh dang this is hard, I am gonna hire somebody.” So, you mentioned hippy-dippy, so let’s finish on a concept that I love and I’d love for you to expand on how you apply this to a company of one. And that’s this idea of finding your true north.

Paul Jarvis: Yeah. It’s funny because I think that, and even, I think I kinda felt that way too. I mean, I live in the woods on an island that’s very hippy-dippy on the West Coast of Canada, so I feel like I’m surrounded by this, and I feel like I push against it. And so, I think that in the beginning I though that having a purpose or a north star for my business was too in the realm of like, “Well businesses are supposed to be profitable, so why would I worry about applying my values and what I want?” And I think that that was to my own detriment.

I think a lot of times, we get tired from having to make decisions all the time in our business. And if you run a business, you have to make decisions all the time and that tires you out. It’s funny, I was reading an article in the Atlantic about how tiring making decisions is, and I was like, “This article is speaking my life.” So I think to come around to the part about having a purpose, I think like I said earlier, I think that having a purpose alleviates some of the decision making. Because if we know why we started the business and why we want to run the business and kind of where we want to take it, and if I think about success, I see what success looks like in the media, and then I think about, if I applied myself to that version of success, one of two things would happen.

I would either get it, which means I would win at what I was challenged by, but I would be left with somebody else’s version of success which wouldn’t be mine, so I kind of wouldn’t win. And if I didn’t win at achieving that person’s version of success, I would be left feeling like I failed. But I failed at something I didn’t actually want in the first place. So I think if we define what success looks like to us, and it’s different for every single person. I did so many interviews for the book, and what success means to you isn’t what it means to me. There could be similarities, sure, but it’s always different. So I think if we have a purpose then it becomes a wholly pragmatic exercise, which is the opposite of hippy-dippy, at least in my mind.

John Jantsch: I’m getting ready to print t-shirts; “fail at something you wanted to fail at”, I love that.

Paul Jarvis: Exactly. It just makes more sense from a pragmatic standpoint to be able to do that. So I think having a purpose just makes it easier to make decisions and it makes it easier for us to align with where we want to go. Because we’re the ones steering the ship, so if we end up somewhere we don’t like, it’s our fault.

John Jantsch: I seriously am stealing that, you’re gonna see it in my next book. So, speaking with Paul Jarvis, author of Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business, depending upon when you’re listening to this show, it’s out on the shelves January of 2019. So Paul, tell people where they can find more about you and your work.

Paul Jarvis: Yeah. So my newsletter, The Sunday Dispatches is at pjrvs.com, or if you search in Google for Paul Jarvis, I’m the first page. And then the book, Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business, is on all digital shelves and should be in most bookstores as well, and the website for that is ofone.co.

John Jantsch: Excellent. Paul, it was great visiting with you, hopefully we’ll catch up with you out there fishing or something in the West Coast of Canada.

Paul Jarvis: Sounds good John, cheers.