Monthly Archives: August 2022

Weekend Favs August 27

Weekend Favs August 27 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 I 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.

  • Krisp – a free AI tool that mutes all the background noise during online meetings in real-time.
  • Deck Rocks – is an AI-based tool that generates pitch decks using GPT-3. You just have to describe your idea in 1 or 2 sentences, and you get a deck tailor-made for you within minutes.
  • Writesonic– is an AI writer trained to help you write high-performing ads, sales copy, SEO content and much more. Enter a couple of keywords, and Writesonic will provide several options in seconds. 

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

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

Committing To Your Niche And Owning Your Market

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

Marketing Podcast with Brent Weaver

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

Key Takeaway:

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

Questions I ask Brent Weaver:

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

More About Brent Weaver:

Take The Marketing Assessment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

 

How To Turn Your Customers Into Lustomers™

How To Turn Your Customers Into Lustomers™ written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

About the show:

The Agency Spark Podcast, hosted by Sara Nay, is a collection of short-form interviews from thought leaders in the marketing consultancy and agency space. Each episode focuses on a single topic with actionable insights you can apply today. Check out the new Spark Lab Consulting website here!

About this episode:

In this episode of the Agency Spark Podcast, Sara talks with Bryan Rutberg on how to turn your customers into lustomers™.

Bryan Rutberg, founder and president of 3C Communications, guides and inspires leaders and their organizations to develop better communications skills, including public speaking, to build stronger relationships with customers and other key audiences as a path to deeper loyalties, greater market share, and way more fun for everyone.

 

This episode of the Agency Spark Podcast is brought to you by Monday.com, a powerful project management platform. Monday.com helps teams easily build, run, and scale their dream workflows on one platform.  I personally am a user and big fan of Monday.com – I start my workday pulling up the platform and spend my day working within it for everything from task management to running client engagements. Learn more about Monday.com at ducttape.me/monday

Weekend Favs August 20

Weekend Favs August 20 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.

  • Snipfeed – This platform allows content creators to monetize their content and streamline their storefronts using their social media channels rather than linking to external websites.
  • Let’s Enhance is a Ukrainian start-up that helps designers to improve and zoom online images without losing quality. They use super-resolution machine learning technology.
  • Rephrase – is a very simple to use AI-based rephraser tool that rewrites sentences, paragraphs, or papers using diverse AI writing modes. 

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

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs, you can find them here.

How To Create A Culture Of Learning And Growth

How To Create A Culture Of Learning And Growth written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Whitney Johnson

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Whitney Johnson. Whitney is CEO of the tech-enabled talent development company Disruption Advisors. She is one of the top ten business thinkers in the world as named by Thinkers50. Whitney is an expert in smart growth leadership, and she co-founded the Disruptive Innovation Fund with Harvard Business School’s late Clayton Christensen. She’s also the author of the book — Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company.

Key Takeaway:

Growing is the goal. Helping people develop their potential and become the self they want to be and are capable of being is what leaders strive toward. And as individuals grow, so do organizations. If you want to lead and scale an organization, that transformation starts within. In this episode, I talk with Whitney Johnson about how to grow a business — the smart way — by cultivating a culture of learning and growth.

Questions I ask Whitney Johnson:

  • [1:26] How are you applying the S Curve of Learning to growth and leadership?
  • [2:48] Sometimes, there’s a point in the S Curve of Learning where even though it takes off, it can actually nosedive. Is this something you see happening with personal development?
  • [4:09] I’ve owned my own business coming up on 30 years. And I feel like there’s not just one S curve of growth – what’s your view on that?
  • [6:50] Would you say your book is as much about personal development as it is about leadership development?
  • [8:14] What are some of the new habits or questions that people need to start asking themselves instead of just saying this is the new way we’re going to do things?
  • [9:54] What advice do you have for people trying to get through the long part where they may not be seeing any advancement?
  • [13:25] How can a leader or someone trying to develop personally apply the ‘collect like a child’ idea from your book?
  • [15:43] Do you think the leadership part in your book might be harder to install because of the varying cultural aspects inside of different organizations?
  • [17:19] Your book is filled with interviews – is there a story in the book that you feel has really nailed it?
  • [19:37] Where can people find out more about your book and your work?

More About Whitney Johnson:

Take The Marketing Assessment

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

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

Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Whitney Johnson. She’s the CEO of the tech enabled talent development company, disruption advisors, one of the top 10 business thinkers in the world as named by thinkers 50. She’s an expert at smart growth leadership. She co-founded the disruptive innovation fund with Harvard business. School’s late Clayton Christensen and she’s the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today. Smart growth, how to grow your people to grow your company. So Whitney, welcome to the show,

Whitney Johnson (01:22): John, thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:24): So Clayton Christensen is probably the person that, you know, people that have been doing this, as long as me hold up there is like, that’s the first person that like said stuff that made sense to me. so, so let’s start with the S-curve then, and just kind of, I’m sure a lot of people have been exposed to it in various statistics classes or something along those lines, but let’s talk about how you’re applying it to, to growth into leadership.

Whitney Johnson (01:46): Yeah, so I was exposed to it in investing with Clayton. So we all have our, our place that we learned about it and it’s been around for a hundred years and we used it to help us figure out how quickly an innovation would be adopt and trying to make investment, buy, and sell decisions. And as we were applying it for investing, I had this insight that we could use the S curve, not only to think about how groups change over time, but how individuals change over time. Yeah. And every time you start something new, you start a new project, start a new job. You are at the base of that S and growth is happening, but it’s gonna feel slow until you reach a tipping point or the knee of the curve. And you move into the sweet spot that steep, sleek back of the curve, right? And then you reach this place called mastery where growth starts to taper off. And my aha was is that we could use it to understand the emotional arc of growth. And when we take on something new, it allows us to say, okay, if I know where I am in my growth, I know what’s next. Yeah. So that’s how I’m applying it.

John Jantsch (02:46): So unfortunately, you know, while a lot of people accept this idea of yes, oh, there’s this point where it takes off, you know, there’s a lot of times, that’s the point where it actually dives nose dives too, right? Mm-hmm we get through the hard part and now we’ve kind of outgrown our, our abilities. D does that, do you see that happening with personal development in the same way?

Whitney Johnson (03:04): Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that was interesting to me is as you have now, surmised, I’m very steeped in disruptive innovation. And what we saw with disruption is that even if you were going to pursue a disruptive course and your odds of success increased by six times that went from 6% to 36%. So there was still a 64% chance that it wasn’t going to work. And it’s going to be similar. When you decide I’m going to jump to this brand new S curve, I’m going to do something new. There are, there’s a large possibility that you’ll decide this curve isn’t for me, or this is not going to work. And so one of the things that I recommend is at the launch point, you have this Explorer phase of deciding, do I even want to be here? Whether you decided to jump or were pushed, but then you’ve gotta go through this collection phase. Yeah. And that’s that place where you say, I do wanna be here, but can I get the resources that I need from this ecosystem in order to accelerate into the sweet spot?

John Jantsch (04:06): So I’ve own my own business for, um, coming up on 30 years. And one of the things I’ve realized is that I’m constantly in about 47 S-curves at any given time is what it feels like to me. I don’t feel like there’s one S-curve of growth. Yeah. I feel like there’s everywhere. So mm-hmm how do I mean, I think it’s, I think it’s easy for people to sort of oversimplify this idea of oh, here’s where we’re on the curve. Mm-hmm but how do, I mean, what, what’s your view of, I mean, do you feel like that’s a reality or is that just me being psychotic?

Whitney Johnson (04:38): I think that the S-curve is a fractal that you can think of your life as an S-curve. You can think of your career as an S-curve. You can think of a job as an S-curve and then within that job, you’ve got roles and then projects. And so you can continue to drill down. And to your question specifically, once you start to say, okay, well, where am I in my role on the S curve overall, everything that’s required of me, but it very much is a portfolio of curves that you are going to have a number of different curves that you’re on within your work. And if most of them allow for you to be in the sweet spot, then you can say in aggregate, you’re in the sweet spot. And if you think about your life, you’re balancing your portfolio of SSC curves, where you’ve got your career. Maybe it’s a really steep curve. So in your personal life, maybe you don’t want quite a steep of a curve. So you’re putting together that portfolio. I have a background in investing. So I do think in portfolios to answer your question, yes, we’re on multiple curves. You want to balance them. So you’re not, you know, only on the launch point for all of your curves or only in mastery, but to, to create that balance portfolio,

John Jantsch (05:42): I’ve, I’ve actually referred to it as seasons. I feel like, you know, businesses go through seasons. You know, they’re not, they’re not annual linear necessarily, but they’re, I think it’s kind of what you’re describing. Isn’t it? It’s like, okay, now we’re in this gathering, you know? Yeah. You know, because then that’s gonna produce, you know, fruit. I feel like that is something almost tangible.

Whitney Johnson (06:03): Oh, I love that. I love that metaphor. So, and I love talking about growth. And as you can see our, our listeners, can’t see, but I’ve got behind me, botanical prints of strawberries and peaches because we grow raspberries and strawberries, et cetera. But if you, if you wanted to pull that metaphor, you could argue that the launch point that’s the spring and that’s the time where you are planting. And then you’re going to move into the summer, which is a sweet spot where you’ve got that bountiful, you know, everything’s growing. And then you’re gonna start to harvest when you get into mastery. And then when that decision’s made to do something new, you’re gonna go dormant. There’s gonna, there’s this period of latency where you’re quiet and it’s the winter. As you start to think about moving to your new curve.

John Jantsch (06:48): So, so the subtitle book, how to grow your people to grow your company would imply that this is a book about leadership. Mm-hmm I will tell you that as I read it, I was like, no, this is about personal development

Whitney Johnson (06:58):

John Jantsch (06:59): So is

Whitney Johnson (07:00): That so you are very astute it’s both. Yeah. Let me tell you there, there was a study that came out recently from a ego Zender that surveyed a thousand CEOs and the thousand CEOs strongly agreed that to transform the organization, they needed to transform themselves. Sure. 80% strongly agreed. And so my whole premise, my thesis is that if you want to lead an organization and we talk a lot about how to grow your team and grow your organization in the book, but it always starts with you. The fundamental unit of growth is the individual. And so I purposely wrote this book so that if you only care about personal growth, then you just read the narrative and you can get that. But if you do care about growing your team and your organization, then we’ve got these interludes that are very practical, very actionable on how to do that. But yes, you are, right. This starts with you as the individual.

John Jantsch (07:57): Yeah. Cuz really, without a great deal of self-awareness you’re probably not gonna be a great leader. Right?

Whitney Johnson (08:02): no.

John Jantsch (08:03): So are there some, I I’m sure this is like a lot of things, you know, people read this book and they go, we’ve gotta do this. you know, at our company. Right. So are, what are some of the first kind of new habits or questions maybe that, that people need to start asking themselves as you know, instead of just saying, okay, this is the new way.

Whitney Johnson (08:23): Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love that question because I believe in setting small, ridiculously small goals, I read atomic habits and you probably did too. Had em on a podcast.

John Jantsch (08:34): One of my questions actually

Whitney Johnson (08:36): Well, there you go. So yeah. So what I recommend you do is if you find yourself thinking, oh, this model makes sense to me. Yeah. And it is purposely simple. It is purposely visual because that makes it useful. What I would say to you is just get out a piece of paper and draw the S and say to yourself, where am I on this? S yeah. And then have a conversation with a person, a colleague, a person on your team and say, where do you think you are on the S now we have an assessment tool that you can use, but you ask me a simple way to start. Yeah. That’s where you’d start is you draw it out, you have a conversation and then you can plot where your team is. But that initial spark of just drawing that curve and talking about where do you think you are, that orients yourself, orients, you orients your team and you can start to have a very robust conversation about growth and the growth upside you see in this role in your organization.

John Jantsch (09:33): So this leads me to my James clear moment as a matter of fact. Yeah. So you just talked about orienting yourself and I, and I suspect that there is a point, I, I think people probably can orient themselves in the sweet spot and they probably can orient themselves into getting started. It’s that messy middle, that sometimes is really long, boring slog mm-hmm . And one of the things that, that James puts in, in atomic habits is that a lot of times people are successful. Not cuz they have better goals, but because they can tolerate boredom because that’s a lot of what it, you know, we get tired of the stuff. We don’t wanna do it anymore, even if it’s working. So, you know, how, what, what advice do first off, I guess I have to ask you if you agree with that assessment, but if you do, you know what, you know, what does allow people to get through that long part where you’re not seeing any advancement necessarily? And so you don’t really know where you are.

Whitney Johnson (10:22): Yeah. It’s a great question. And what I would say is I wouldn’t necessarily call that the messy middle, cuz I think when you’re in this sweet spot, that’s where you’re exhilarated and you’ve got this optimized tension of it’s hard, but not too hard. So you’re feeling this sense of, of competence and autonomy and relatedness. I think what you’re referring to is when you’re at the launch point and you’ve made the decision, Hey, I’m gonna do this and growth is happening, but it’s not yet apparent. It’s like the, the Lily pads in a pond, like there’s one and then there’s two and then there’s four. But ah, there’s not very many pads in the pond. And so what I recommend you do there is number one is know psychologically what’s happening is that you are at the launch point. It is going to feel like a slog.

And that helps you talk yourself through the impatience that you feel. But then to your James clear or James clear moment to make things clear is if you think about what’s happening in your brain, whenever you do something new, you’re running a predictive model. And so with the launch point, you’re running this model and you’re making lots of predictions, most of which are inaccurate. And so your dopamine is dropping a lot and that is not fun. And so what you can do is you can set those small ridiculously small goals. Like for example, I’m learning Korean right now. Am I studying well because I love K dramas, but am I studying 30 minutes a day? No, I have an app. I pull out dual Ando and maybe I do 30 seconds a day. Maybe I do three minutes. Yeah. But I’ve done it for 103 straight days. Right? Yeah. And so what happens is when that goal is really small, you can hit it every day. You can oftentimes beat it. And when you beat goals, guess what happens, dopamine ding. And so it’s that ability to have those small goals, beat those small goals at the launch point that allows you to basically gamify it and move through the slog of that place where growth is not apparent until you hit that sweet spot and things become exhilarating.

John Jantsch (12:24): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a small business means doing it all. You deserve an online marketing platform that does the same. Semrush is an all in one platform that will lighten the load handle SEO, social media, and advertising all in one place, attract new customers, save time and money on marketing and get ahead of the competition. If you need online marketing, no problem. Semrush will get you started. If you’re ready to grow online, try some rush free @ Semrush.com/Now that’s Semrush.com/now.

So you have a lot of you break kind of the stages down into a lot of things that you should be doing or paying attention to. Or I talked about maybe new habits and I’ll just let you, um, kind of talk about how it applies is collect like a child. You know, I’ve always told people, I think curiosity is really, you know, my superpower. I mean, I’d love to see how things start, how they work, why they don’t work, why something is out place. And so that to me, I was like, well, yeah, I just do that instinctively, but talk a little bit about that. How a leader, you know, or somebody trying to develop personally can apply that idea.

Whitney Johnson (13:32): Well, first of all, I want to flag for you. That is a superpower. Whenever someone says, Hey, I just do this instinctively that is telling me, oh yeah, that’s a strength. Not everybody. Does that just a reminder. Yes. Yes. So just wanna wanna say that one of the things that, that a child does that around the curiosity is first of all, they, and we would go into something and say, I just want to understand what this is. I just want to figure this out. And at that point there’s very little ego and your identity is not on the line. And so for example, I can remember when I was three or four years old, our family had gone to see the sound of music and I came home and we had an upright piano and I started to figure out how do I play? DOE re me on the piano.

There was no question in my mind of like, will I not be able to do it? Will I look dumb if I can’t figure it out? None of that identity ego was part of the equation. And so collecting like a child is to be at the launch point and say, I like this curve. I, I want to be here. I now have to get the data that would tell me, can I get the resources that I need? And, and I’m gonna be able to gain momentum here and just to collect that data and not have it be a referendum on your identity. It’s just data. Can I get the resources? Do I enjoy this? If the answer is yes, then I keep going. If the answer is no, then I stop. It’s not about my ego. It’s just about iterating and learning and growing and developing. And so that’s the collecting like a child where the ego is out of the equation.

John Jantsch (15:10): So it may actually be a superpower. My parents didn’t always think it was

Whitney Johnson (15:14): Then it definitely is

John Jantsch (15:15): so you, you know, the personal development part, I think, you know, people are gonna grow by reading this book. The leadership part in some ways is, might be harder to install in an organization because there’s so many, there’s so many culture aspects that I’m, that keep coming up for me as, you know, just that collect like a child, giving people permission to do that. Doesn’t always happen at organizations. Does it?

Whitney Johnson (15:39): Yeah, no it doesn’t. And I think that one of the things that is increasingly apparent to me, the more experienced I get in life is that so often will say, well, I think this using this as a tool to think about growth is a great idea, but can you persuade my manager? Right? And the answer is, no, I can’t persuade your manager. Um, but you can. And the way that you can is if you will start with you and if you will start to implement this idea with the people on your team. Yeah. And to collect those data points, because when you are persuading someone to do something new, you are effectively asking them to jump to a new S-curve, which is scary. They don’t want to do it. And so what you’re doing is you’re packing a parachute for them to make it safe for them to do that new thing. Yeah. And you make it safe by you being a Proofpoint by being the people on your team, being a Proofpoint and something as simple as drawing an S and having a conversation. That’s not very scary. Yeah. That’s pretty easy to do. And so you have more control than you think you do, and start with something so simple. So ridiculously small, it’s pretty tough to say, well, I don’t wanna listen. No, it’s something simple. You can start there.

John Jantsch (16:53): So you filled this book with a lot of interviews of people that you had talked to that, you know, kind of are, are doing some of this. This is probably a difficult question. So I’ll let you break it up. If you want, you know, is there a story in the book or is there a person that you’ve talked to since, you know, reading the book, even that you feel like has really kind of nailed this approach, brought this approach to their organization and it’s made a difference.

Whitney Johnson (17:15): Yeah, I do actually. So, and they’re not in the book. So it’s a company called Chatbooks. They’re in Provo, Utah, and they turn Instagram photos into, or actually Lehigh, Utah. They turn Instagram photos into books and they have been around for about seven years. It’s a great culture. People like to work there. And because people like to work there, they had a lot of people who were getting to the top of the S-curve. They were reaching mastery. And so we administered our S-curve tool. And our CEO said, Whitney, this is really helpful because it’s giving us a language to talk about our, our experience. Three examples specifically, what happened? One person, the chief marking officer said, now I understand the experience I’m having. It’s not that I don’t like working here. It’s not that I don’t like you as a boss. It’s just that I’m at the top of my curve.

I’m not growing anymore. I need to do something new. And so it de personalized her jumping to a new curve at a different company. In another instance, you had the president who was presumably on a new curve, but he was bumping up against the scope of the CEO that allowed them to have a conversation said, Hey, CEO, go jump to your curve. So that I’ve got headroom on my curve. Again, allowed them to have a conversation. And then the third thing that happened was the CTO who had been there for several years, was taking on some new responsibilities that were putting him at the launch point. And he was kind of uncomfortable, cuz he’s supposed to be the expert. Yeah. It gave him a way to say, Hey, everybody doing something new I’m at the launch point, it’s supposed to be uncomfortable and awkward and gangly. And it gave him permission. And then also could talk his team through that. And so very simple language to talk about the experience that people were having.

John Jantsch (18:58): Well, that’s a, that’s such a great example too, because very different outcomes for all of them. Yes. But all of them, even if they were painful because they caused change all of them very positive.

Whitney Johnson (19:08): Right?

John Jantsch (19:09): Yeah. That’s awesome. So, so when you tell people where they can find out, I know the book’s available anywhere, but where they can find out more about your work as well.

Whitney Johnson (19:16): Yeah. Thank you for asking. So one easy place is to go to Whitney johnson.com and or to our podcast disrupt yourself. But Whitney johnson.com is the easiest place to start.

John Jantsch (19:28): Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time out to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you in person one of these days out there on the road.

Whitney Johnson (19:36): Oh thank you, John, for having me.

John Jantsch (19:38): 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 not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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

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

 

How SEO Has Evolved Over The Years

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

Marketing Podcast with Dale Bertrand

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

Key Takeaway:

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

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

Questions I ask Dale Bertrand:

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

More About Dale Bertrand:

Take The Marketing Assessment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Jantsch (09:42): Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

The Most Common Pricing Mistakes & What To Do Instead

The Most Common Pricing Mistakes & What To Do Instead written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

About the show:

The Agency Spark Podcast, hosted by Sara Nay, is a collection of short-form interviews from thought leaders in the marketing consultancy and agency space. Each episode focuses on a single topic with actionable insights you can apply today. Check out the new Spark Lab Consulting website here!

About this episode:

In this episode of the Agency Spark Podcast, Sara talks with Per Sjofors on the most common pricing mistakes and what to do instead.

Per Sjofors, aka “The Price Whisperer”, is a thought leader and author in everything pricing and how companies can use pricing to drive higher growth, sales volume, and profits.

He is a sought-after speaker for various conferences, appears regularly on podcasts and business radio shows, and gets routinely quoted in the financial and business press.

 

This episode of the Agency Spark Podcast is brought to you by Termageddon, a Privacy Policy Generator. Any website collecting as little as an email address on a contact form should not only have a Privacy Policy but also have a strategy to keep it up to date when the laws change. Click here to learn more about how Termageddon can help protect your business and get 30% off your first year payment by using code DUCTTAPE at checkout.

Weekend Favs August 13

Weekend Favs August 13 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 I 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.

  • DALL·E 2 – is an AI-based tool that generates images based on text descriptions you feed it. You can create images from an idea or a scenario like: “A doctor walking the moon in a photorealistic style.” Just feed Dall-E 2 a description, and it gives you a custom image within minutes.
  • Face Swapper – Face Swapper uses AI to detect faces in photos automatically and replaces them with other faces of your choice. To replace the faces, you can use your own photos or images from their gallery.
  • 3veta – People spend around 2.5 hours per week scheduling and coordinating meetings. 3veta is a solution that helps automate that tedious process. You can easily see your team’s availability, create and update calendar events, send automatic email reminders and reschedule meetings with just a few clicks.  

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

If you want to check out more Weekend Favs you can find them here.

The 5 Stages Of Marketing Every Business Moves Their Customers Through

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

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

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

Key Takeaway:

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

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

 

Topics I Cover:

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

Resources I Mention:

Take The Marketing Assessment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

How High-Performers Overcome Customer Indecision

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

Marketing Podcast with Matt Dixon

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

Key Takeaway:

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

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

Questions I ask Matt Dixon:

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

More About Matt Dixon:

Take The Marketing Assessment:

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

 

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

 

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