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How To Hire a Fractional CMO

How To Hire a Fractional CMO written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I go solo and dive into the trend in the marketing consultancy agency world that is: Fractional Chief Marketing Officers or CMOs.

This episode is a must-listen for business owners, marketing professionals, and consultants seeking a game-changing approach to business growth.

Key Takeaways:

I explore the game-changing concept of Fractional Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), highlighting its cost-effectiveness compared to traditional hires. Emphasizing the importance of leading with strategy, I challenge the conventional project-based approach to marketing, advocating for a transformative focus on strategic direction. By intentionally evolving the customer journey, businesses can position themselves for sustained growth in 2024 and beyond. Tune in to discover how embracing Fractional CMOs and prioritizing strategy-first methodologies can revolutionize your marketing approach and drive long-term success.

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Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and I’m doing a solo show. Just me, nobody else in the camera, right? All right, so I’ve been doing a number of shows. We do a lot of education. We license our fractional CMO system to agencies and consultants and strategists all over the world. So I thought it might be interesting. A lot of small business owner listeners here might be interesting to do one that I might call how to hire a fractional CMO. Now, you can go to duct tape marketing.com and you’ll find how we talk about our fractional CMO approach. You don’t really have to call it a fractional CMO, but it really is going to lead with strategy, and that’s really why I call it the fractional CMO approach, because that’s the implication that you’re thinking at the C-suite level about your marketing, that it’s going to be somewhat strategic.

(01:03): Now, what is a fractional CMO? I should start there, right? Fractional chief marketing. Now, you might not have chief anything in your organization, but you do have a marketing function, and wouldn’t it be lovely to have somebody that was their core laser focus? It is a growing trend fractional everything frankly is a growing trend out there in the business world. So why not marketing? Why not bring somebody in who is going to be at the highest level thinking strategically about your marketing today? Boy, there’s so many tactics. There’s so many things to know, so much that’s changing every single day. Having somebody that is focused on that at a very high level, I think has become really essential for any kind of business. Now, why would you consider hiring a fractional CMO? Well, probably the top line benefit is somebody that’s going to bring high level strategic marketing leadership, not just ideas without the full-time cost of an executive.

(02:12): I mean, I know you’re not thinking about probably hiring A CMO, but if you were, you’re going to be looking at north of 200,000, north of 300,000 in some cases. For somebody that’s got that kind of full-time experience, plus they’re not going to write the email copy. They’re going to hire people or they’re going to hire people to do that. So it’s a very expensive proposition, but you can actually get, I believe, an adequate amount of strategic thinking for your business without really spending anywhere near that. Well, literally a fourth maybe of that or a fifth of that. The right person, the right fractional CMO, the right consultant, whatever you want to call it, is going to bring an outside perspective with probably hopefully fresh ideas for your marketing. Now, we’re going to get to how to spot the right one, but hopefully that’s what somebody’s going to bring you.

(03:04): A lot of times people will think, well, I’m an accounting firm or I’m a remodeling contractor. I want somebody that’s got years of experience in my industry. Certainly some knowledge of your industry having worked with past clients can be a very good thing, but too deep or a specific niche only tends to actually bring kind of cookie cutter brings, like, this is what I do for this company in Des Moines. This is what I do for the one in Tokyo. This is what I do. Same exact thing, same exact approach, and some of certainly may work and been informed by years of doing that approach, but also it could be stale. There could be no innovation in it. Having somebody that’s worked in a variety of industries, I think actually brings you a better potential outside perspective and fresh ideas. A lot of times marketing tactics are just kind of a like, how do we make the phone ring?

(03:57): How do we get the email? How do we do this tactic? The right fractional CMO is going to help you. Marketing strategy and business strategy are not always the same thing. In many cases, they certainly support each other. There might be some overlap, but your business strategy might differ greatly from your marketing strategy, but the right person’s going to help you align your overall business goals really with your marketing objectives and hopefully keep you on track and hold you accountable for staying on track. I mean, the right one is not going to just let you say, I know we said last quarter our three priorities were X, but now we’re going to go this direction. Hopefully you actually look to that person to push back a little bit on holding you to what you’ve really the stated objectives are. There is a bit of flexibility in this approach.

(04:46): I mean, you can scale it up. Maybe you have a seasonal business, maybe you have a business that really in the winter really almost practically shuts down. Well, this is an approach that you can scale up and scale down. I don’t necessarily recommend shutting marketing off ever, but you might actually have the need to think strategically or even oversight of what you’re doing might actually come down dramatically. The right person is going to actually drive marketing results and ROI with proven methodologies and best practices, they’re going to be experienced. Hopefully they’ve actually developed some methodologies, some frameworks that they can bring and immediately bring to your business. I already mentioned this idea of holding you accountable. I think that’s a big deal for a lot of businesses. It is really easy, especially if you’re working or making a lot of the decisions on your own.

(05:40): It’s really easy to just wander off course because seems easier to go this way. You get the idea of the week. The one last piece I want to tell you that I think is extremely important because as a business owner, as A CEO, sometimes we get very bottom line oriented. We get very, this is easier for us to do it this way. This is more efficient to do it this way, and we lose sight of what’s best for the customer. Sometimes the right, I mean in a traditional organization, A CMO is going to actually be the advocate for marketing, going to be the advocate for the customer. So what if you brought a little bit of that, even a fractional little bit of that, somebody who’s saying, well, why are we doing it this way? That may be easier for those two people to communicate that way, but it’s not good for the customer.

(06:26): So customer experience is it’s actually how you charge a premium. It’s actually how you keep your customers. It’s how you build momentum. So what if you had somebody that was very focused on the customer, very focused on the customer experience? Alright, let’s get down to, let’s say you’re thinking about doing this. What would you look for in the right? I use the word right, fractional CMO. Well, first and foremost, it should be somebody that’s got some expertise in track record, and by track record I mean of results. Have they helped other people get the results or move in the direction that you want to move? It’s very easy to hang a shingle out and say, I’m a fractional CMO. I mean, maybe the highest level I’ve ever been in an organization was a marketing manager, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to have Fortune 500 CMO experience.

(07:13): You’re not a Fortune 500 company. I’m guessing maybe one or two of you are, but I’m guessing that you’re not, and so you don’t necessarily need that level. You actually need somebody who’s worked in a company like yours or worked with organizations that are the size of yours or that comes of yours that are experiencing the growing pains that you’re experiencing, that kind of track record, that kind of deep expertise is what you should be looking for. It doesn’t hurt if they’ve worked with multiple companies. They’ve been in business for a while. But again, some of that just has to do with the track record that they can prove. Do they have case studies, references, really, that are not just saying they’re nice people that really help demonstrate the ability to drive growth? I mean, is there social proof? Do they have their thought leadership published in places that would demonstrate that they do maybe know what they’re talking about?

(08:09): It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs, and they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider. You can try ActiveCampaign for free for 14 days and there’s no credit card required. Just visit activecampaign.com/duct tape. That’s right, duct Tape Marketing podcast. Listeners who sign up via that link will also receive 15% off an annual plan if purchased by March 31st, 2024. That’s active campaign.com/duct tape.

(09:14): Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today. Next thing I’d really be looking for is a structured, we call it strategy first, by name, by brand name, but it’s still, it’s an approach, right? Do they have an approach that says, well, before we get into doing X, Y, and Z, we are going to study what our strategic direction is going to be. We’re going to study how we’re going to differentiate. We’re going to study how to narrow our target market focus. I mean, if they’re not coming with that strategy first approach, and they’re really just coming with saying, what do you need? What random acts of marketing do you need and not have a proven process, that’s a red flag. Now, a proven process doesn’t mean cookie cutter.

(10:04): It just means that a process that ticks certain boxes allows you to discover things very quickly and move in maybe new directions very quickly. That proven process that we have, a very repeatable process that we install, and what it’s done is it’s allowed us to get very good at delivering results very quickly, because we’ve done it so many times. Now, this is going to include auditing your current marketing building, hopefully a full strategic plan that you can look out in the future and say, okay, I have an idea now of not just what we’re going to do next quarter, but the next quarter, the next quarter, maybe the entire year. Now, most businesses, at least the size that I work with, small, mid-size businesses, they can’t really afford to hire somebody that’s going to lay a plan on their desk and say, good luck. So the right or maybe the ideal fractional CMO that you might hire, marketing strategist that you might hire, would also come with execution, the ability to then actually execute the plan for as long as you need them to be there.

(11:12): Now, while I stress this idea of a proven process, there obviously needs to be some flexibility. They need to have a wide sort of depth of channels that they might play in or have an expertise or be able to bring partners to the table, expert partners to the table, because every business has, maybe this sounds cynical, 20% that’s unique, 20% that really is a variant because they’re B2B or B2C, or because they’re a local business or a national business, or they’re primarily their customers. Find them online. I mean, those are the variations that need to be taken into play. I mean, there’s no question that somebody who has deep expertise for in e-commerce is probably not the same person that has deep expertise in marketing, say professional services at the local level. So you do want somebody that has certainly the ability to tailor and create a flexible engagement model for you that might involve flexible packages, but also flexible pricing.

(12:15): Not every business has the same needs. Not every business wants to run at the same speed. So certainly the ability to charge appropriately based on revenue, based on growth is something that you want to look for. Make sure that you have the strategy first approach should help you define a very clear scope of work. What’s going to be a deliverable, and most importantly, how we’re going to measure what we’re doing. A lot of, sadly, a lot of marketing folks just throw magic fairy dust out there and print off a couple reports that don’t really indicate that we’re first off even tracking the right things. Somebody who’s going to come in and immediately help you identify the key performance indicators, identify how you’re actually going to extract that data for a lot of businesses, figuring out what their cost to acquire customers, no easy task. So somebody that is very focused on helping you not only develop the process for that, but then track and hold themselves accountable.

(13:17): If you have team, very few people have a full marketing team or anything that you would call a department ahead of marketing even, but a lot of companies have maybe one or two people that are doing marketing functions. Maybe it’s social media or maybe it’s producing a newsletter, or you’ve hired freelancers to write content or to do SEO work or something. So the right fractional CMO can help you do one of two things. Build and manage and integrate with that existing team, help you build additional resources or be able to demonstrate that they can bring their own team. A lot of times, one of the challenges with hiring marketing folks inside of your organization is if marketing’s not your full-time job, which most CEOs or owners it is not, then even managing those assets, those resources, I should say inside your organization can be a real challenge or it can just be a distraction.

(14:16): So if somebody who can actually help you manage your existing team and also manage and help orchestrate all of the implementation is a great asset as well. If any of you who are listening to this have hired the SEO person content person, web person, it’s as much work to manage those multiple resources, certainly as it is to get a lot of the work done. So having somebody who can help you orchestrate that, I probably don’t need to say this, but certainly cultural fit chemistry, you’re going to work very closely. In fact, some people come to view this role as almost a member of the team. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they have to have a seat at the table in every leadership discussion, but a lot of times they will be involved in some of the deeper discussions about where you’re going, about your overall business strategy.

(15:07): They’re going to get into the books. I mean, they should help you understand revenue and profit and expense and your cost to acquire customers. So they’re going to get deep into your business. So chemistry and cultural fit, I mean, one of the best ways probably to measure how the relationship’s going to go is communication style. Understanding their communication style and how it meshes with you, how it aligns with really your values or the values of the organization indeed aren’t important to try to see if you can get, so having that good rapport is, it’s not everything, but it’s certainly a piece that is going to make working together easier. Lastly, I would say somebody who is not talking about quick wins are important. Quick wins are nice, but long-term results oriented mindset is really what you’re after. Somebody who understands where you are today, but also understands where you want to go, where you want to be, and can help guide you that as your marketing matures, so are they going to not only focus on long-term success, but then start thinking in terms of building infrastructure around marketing processes, SOPs, things that will actually scale as you start to scale the business and viewing it almost as a partnership.

(16:27): I know that’s kind of cliche, but to talk about, a lot of people are like, we’re partners with you, but that’s how you want to view their relationship and you hope that they do as well. Alright? There’s no question that marketing leadership, it can actually become one of your greatest competitive advantages if you can figure out how to do this role, right? The model itself allows you to get real business systems for a fraction of the cost. It’s also, I hate to be on a negative, but it’s also if the relationship doesn’t work out, the fractional model is an easy one to fire as opposed to hiring somebody. So again, if any of this made sense to you, if you’re thinking about this, it doesn’t matter what you call it. You don’t have to call it a fractional CMO if you don’t want to call it that, but if you believe that your business would benefit from a strategy first approach, there’s tons of information on our website about it, you can actually find, we license this methodology of ours to other consultants around the world, other agencies around the world.

(17:31): So you could find somebody there, or we’d love to talk to you about how the fractional CMO plus implementation model might work for your business. It’s just duct tape marketing.com. That’s D-U-C-T-A-P-E marketing.com. Love to hear your feedback always on this. It’s just john@ducttapemarketing.com, and if you’re a regular podcast listener, heck, if this is the first time you’ve listened to the podcast, we love reviews on whatever platform you listen to, the Spotifys, the apples out there of the world gives us a review. Alright? That’s all. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Remote Work Revolution: Drive Sustainable Growth with Virtual Teams

Remote Work Revolution: Drive Sustainable Growth with Virtual Teams written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Scott Cox. Scott brings a wealth of experience in the ever-evolving world of sales and marketing, with a career spanning over a decade. Scott is best known for founding Social Reach in 2017, which is a marketing agency that caters to small business owners in varying industries.

Today, he provides business coaching, where he helps business owners grow and scale their businesses from 6 to 7 figures by implementing the right systems and processes, as well incorporating Virtual Assistants.

Key Takeaways

Scott shares insights into leveraging remote work for sustainable growth. He highlights the importance of embracing virtual teams, navigating growth challenges, and balancing automation with human interaction. Scott also discusses the potential of integrating AI technologies to enhance productivity and creativity. By building resilient businesses through remote work and technology, entrepreneurs can thrive in today’s fast-paced world.

 

Questions I ask Scott Cox:

[00:59] What made you decide to exit the agency world and become a coach?

[03:22] How do you help your customers stay ahead with the changes in Marketing?

[06:58] How do you see the world of virtual assistants giving small businesses a competitive edge?

[10:47] What are some of the hurdles that people have to overcome in order to effectively engage remote workers?

[13:51] Do you screen, place and train virtual assistants for your clients or do you just show them how to do it?

[15:57] How do you balance automation with the human touch when working with virtual assistants?

[17:55] Where can people connect with you, and learn more about your work?

More About Scott Cox:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now

Visit WorkBetterNow.com mention the referral code DTM Podcast and get $150 off for your first 3 months.

 

John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Scott Cox. He brings a wealth of experience in the ever evolving world of sales and marketing with a career spanning over a decade. Scott’s best known for founding social reach in 2017, which is a marketing agency that caters to small business owners in varying industries. Today he provides business coaching where he helps business owners grow and scale their businesses from six to seven figures by implementing the right systems and processes as well as incorporating virtual assistance. So Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott (00:45): Thank you so much for having me, John. Really appreciate the time and happy to bring as much value as I can to you and your audience.

John (00:51): So let’s start first, I work with a lot of agency owners and there are challenges with that business model. There are challenges in every business, in every industry. What made you decide that I’m going to get out of the agency world and become a coach?

Scott (01:04): Oh, that’s a great question. I don’t get asked a lot. For me, it was, as an agency provider, you’re busy providing services, you’re busy managing a team, and especially if you have multiple clients and if you’re across different industries, it’s just marketing and agencies are a chaotic world. There’s just so much going on and to really do it right. And so I had typically been working with small business owners, so this is maybe mid to high six figures to low seven figures. My niche was helping those mid to high six figure business owners get to seven figures and the low seven figures get to multiple sevens and scale through those processes and all the challenges that come at that level, which are many doing. Working with that audience, there was a lot of need for my clients to solve challenges in their business that were coming from growth that were not directly related to the marketing.

(02:08): They were challenges caused because the marketing was working and bringing in new leads, new customers, new business. But then my customer was, Hey, great, but what I don’t have systems. I don’t have processes. I need to hire people. And so there was so many bottlenecks that these clients of mine, these small business owners had. And so I really just saw it as a massive opportunity to bring value in a different way. And honestly, I was just burned out from the agency life after doing it for a long period of time. And I just felt a more natural calling to saying, Hey, I can help business owners build these teams within their own businesses, solve these problems as they grow, focus more on just that and actually help them reach more success and not just, Hey, hire an agency and get some marketing, but then hit some other hurdles and have to stop because they aren’t doing what they need to do in their business.

John (03:05): I guess this is the point where I should say that marketing is everything. That’s how I view it. I’ve been doing this about 30 years and obviously marketing’s evolved. There’s new platforms, new technologies, how do you help? I will say that’s probably the biggest complaint I hear from business owners is like, how do I keep up with all of it? How do you keep up with the changes in marketing, and then how do you bring those to your customers to help them stay ahead?

Scott (03:29): Yeah, I think it’s really important to stay focused on the basics, right? There’s fundamentals of marketing that will work regardless of the platform you’re on, regardless of the medium that you have and everything like that. And so I think making sure that you’re focused on the fundamentals first, doing the core marketing tasks and objectives that need to be done to create a good effective message, get it in front of the right people, and then give them an opportunity to convert. And then it comes down to just your personal style and brand. And if we’re specifically talking about small business owners, you as a small business owner are pretty much going to be the driver of content in your business for good long time. So if you like recording videos, maybe you have a YouTube channel if you like writing copy, maybe you’re on LinkedIn if you like making funny gif, maybe you’re on Instagram.

(04:21): Obviously your audience is a big dictator of what platform and medium you use. But I think you should also be looking at your own personal skillsets and what kind of fits into your workflow. Look at how many businesses, small businesses specifically are on TikTok just recording what they’re doing in their business. They’re making stuff and they’re just recording it and they’re having a ton of success. An agency can’t just sit here and record their process. So you have to look at those core things like what is your business? What kind of content does it lean towards? Where’s your audience? What kind of medium and content do they want to absorb? And then what specifically fits to you and your style, your skillset, and how you communicate best.

John (05:04): So when I go out and speak, I’ll give people the seven ways to do blah, blah, blah. And then inevitably somebody comes up and says, okay, that’s great, but what’s the one thing I need to do? Because everybody wants the simple magic pill. But have you found that there are, I don’t know, a handful of tactics that when it comes to sales and marketing, pretty much every business needs to understand and do?

Scott (05:27): Yeah, every business needs to get as much exposure as they affordably can. They need to stay in front of that exposed audience as consistently as possible, and they need to craft a really good message. And look, we have the Alex from Moeys of the world who’s absolutely brilliant in marketing and explaining terminologies and how these different concepts work. But if you have a business where you can create an irresistible offer, obviously that’s going to make a massive difference. But even just having a message is effective and effective means connects with your audience, leaves them with a good impression of how their life is going to be different after they’ve interacted with your business. That is the core things you need to do. Exposure, stay in front of that exposure and then have a really good message that leaves an impact with people.

John (06:18): I mentioned in your bio that you help place and figure out systems for working with virtual assistants. My organization’s been like a lot of companies I think has been virtual probably for 15 years. Many of my team’s been distributed. I haven’t tell you the last time I sat in a client’s office, it’s been at least 15 years ago. It’s a pleasure, right? For the pandemic, certainly. Yeah, exactly. The pandemic certainly accelerated that for a lot of folks that hadn’t even considered it, it’s now the norm. Talk a little bit about how somebody might, and I know we’re recording this, it’s morning for you or it’s morning for me, it’s later in the day for you because you’re in Thailand. Talk a little bit about how you see the world of virtual assistants connecting with small business and how we can go into some other one. Let’s just talk about how you see that connecting right now.

Scott (07:09): Yeah. There’s all kinds of small businesses out there. There’s virtual businesses like ours, and then there’s brick and mortar, there’s local businesses. And look, I think at a fundamental general level across the board, utilizing remote workers, virtual assistants gives you a much larger talent pool to choose from. When you’re looking to hire and source talent for the business, it gives you a much more affordable resource to find that talent. And look, I’ll tell you, a big part of success for small businesses is if they can understand that there’s multiple ways to grow your business, and there’s definitely an avenue and a medium where you should have an agency come in and help your business grow. But there’s also a way where you can hire your own core team to do some of your core functions and affordably scale to the point where you actually can utilize, really, truly utilize what an agency can do for you, but have this core team in place and have the consistency in your business and in your marketing to, I talk a lot about this in my videos.

(08:26): One of the biggest challenges that small business go through, especially when they’re going from six to seven figures, is the cyclical effect, right? It’s just the ups and downs of business, the high seasons and the low seasons. And what most business owners do is when their busy, they tend to spend money on marketing and they market, but then when things get slow, they tend to stop spending money on marketing and stop marketing. And really what you need to do is you need to just be consistent throughout. So that means don’t overload the marketing when you’re busy. And that means don’t cut off the marketing when you’re slower. Pick a strategy and a budget that will allow you to market consistently. And remote workers are a massive part of that because if you can lower your overhead as far as human resources, then that’s just going to allow you to do so much more for so much longer.

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(10:17): That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code. Yeah. I talk to a lot of business owners that you’re not the first person to talk about remote workers, right? That’s been something people have been talking about for 10 years offshore, they used to call it, I don’t think they call it that so much anymore, but the idea of there are actually places you can get remote workers for much less than say a US wage would be for various reasons. But what are some, I’ve also talked to a lot of people said, yeah, I tried that and I couldn’t make it work. What are some of the mistakes or the hurdles that people have to overcome in order to effectively engage remote workers?

Scott (10:55): So a lot of mistakes just come from employee management in general. And so I think a lot of it’s as small business owners, we’re not trained on marketing, we’re not trained on sales, we’re not trained on business operations, and much less are we trained on employee and people management. And so I think you just have a lot of general mistakes from lack of systems and processes. So having a way to organize your projects, your tasks, your notes, all of those communications, lack of training, method, process, resources. And then I think honestly, a big part of it is just expectations. I think as people, we have a lot of expectations of, oh, I’m going to go hire this person. They say they can do this thing. I just trust that or expect that they can do what they say they’re going to do, and then we give them tasks and they fail at it for one reason or another.

(11:46): And so then we go, oh, that didn’t work. I’m never going to do that again. And so there’s a lot of things that come into play and lot of reasons why these failed. But those are some of the big things that’s really honestly just lack of understanding of how to manage people. And when it comes to remote workers specifically in VAs, these systems become so much more important and crucial because you’re not with that person, can’t just, there’s a difference when you’re working with someone through the computer versus if they’re in your office, there’s a comfortability there where they can come talk to you, they can see your facial expressions, your body expressions, all that. And honestly, we have video chat now. So a lot of that stuff is not a moot point in my opinion, but it’s just different. And so even more so with remote workers, you have to really have these systems in place because ideally, you’re not going to be sitting with them eight hours a day, right?

(12:43): You’re a business owner, you have stuff to do. Having these systems in place to manage them effectively, giving them resources to be able to reach out, get support, SOPs, standard operating procedures, how long have employees been around? When businesses still don’t use standard operating procedures, they don’t even know what they are. A lot of these, again, it’s just fundamentals, but we’re not taught and trained small business owners on these things. And so we don’t know. We don’t implement them. And then we hear about, oh, you can go hire a cheap $3 an hour copywriter and just expect to be able to write copy and it can work. It does work. Just doesn’t work the way the marketing people who are trying to, I don’t know, sell your freelancer or something or saying it. So I don’t know. I love the market. It’s beautiful, but it’s also still one of the last wild west of the world. Anything almost goes in marketing.

John (13:37): Yeah. Yeah, that’s too, and a large part too, the fact that a lot of business owners don’t really understand marketing. A lot of marketers don’t really understand marketing, and you get a lot of this, oh, I just have to take what they say. Talk a little bit. Do you screen and place and train virtual assistants for your clients, or do you just show them how to do it?

Scott (13:58): Yeah, so I do both. I’ve got programs from where I can build out. I have an audit that I do that to the first interaction, one of the first interactions with me besides a one-on-one consultation, I do an audit where I’ll come work with business owners and we go through a checklist and highlight all of their, Hey, these are where all your gaps missed opportunities are. Here’s what you can do to fix it. And then, yeah, one of my services, again, besides one-on-one consulting or doing a preset program of, Hey, you need to hire sales person, let’s take you through that process. Where are the SOPs, the job description, all that. But yeah, I actually am able to work with my clients on saying, Hey, I need a marketing team. I need a sales team. Great. I can actually come in. I can help you source, vet interview, and then train and get your own internal team set up for that.

John (14:49): Let’s talk a little bit about technology and automation is great. I think a lot of people lean on it maybe too much. You see some of these AI chatbots now that are more frustrating than helpful. So how do you balance the fact that there is a lot of automation that can create some efficiencies, but then you lose the human touch, which is I think probably people are craving more than ever. How do you create that balance,

Scott (15:11): The rule of automate everything you can that isn’t human interaction, and then when you have human interaction, make that human to human as much as possible? Obviously, we’re going to automate things that are like emails or maybe text messages or marketing campaigns, but if you’re going to have a chat system, if you have the volume, if it makes sense for your business, having a live person respond to that, it’s not convenient, but it makes a difference. And I think something, especially in a country like the US or in a lot of other Western countries, I think what small business owners have lost sight of is the fact that as small business owners, the way we can compete with large corporations is by offering that really amazing personalized service. And that’s really the only way. We can’t compete on cost. We can’t compete on fulfillment. We can’t compete on refunds and warranties and exchanges and all of that.

(16:11): The big corporations are always going to beat us out on those things. Where small business owners can win is that human to human look. We have systems and processes, but we’re not a large corporation where you have a unique situation. And look, we just have a system and a process. So that’s it. You just have to, we are small business owners. We can make exceptions. We can really work with people and give that really specific touch. And that’s been my model when it comes to what should you automate and what should you leave human to human? And I’ll just say on a note of tech and ai, I think one of the most undervalued or underutilized pairings right now is using AI with remote workers. So a lot of people talking about remote workers, a lot of people talking about ai, but maybe where three years ago I had to pay a remote worker copywriter 10 to $15 an hour to get a decent English speaking or English writing copywriter.

(17:08): Now maybe I can hire a three to five. They’re not as proficient, but they can use something like chat, GPT, Grammarly Hemingway, and they can actually produce really quality copy. And again, I’m lowering my overhead and using the software to, even if you have a really quality remote worker, and let’s say you’re paying them a little bit more than the average, you’re going to enhance the quality of work they do, the speed of the work that they can do, and the creative output. And when it comes to tech, a big focus of mine too is saying, Hey, let’s pair the AI and these enhancing tools, which I think is a really cool perspective to think about them with your team and just make your team more productive, more creative.

John (17:51): Awesome. Scott, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you want people to connect with you or find out more about your work?

Scott (17:59): Yeah, you can find me on pretty much any of the social media channels, mainly Instagram, Facebook. I have my YouTube channel, nomad Talk N zero Mad Talk, and my website STO. You can go there and find out about my consulting and my programs for VA sales and marketing, and you can send me an email or shoot me a friend request on Facebook or Instagram and we can chat.

John (18:23): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

How to Achieve Remarkable Sales Results Every Time

How to Achieve Remarkable Sales Results Every Time written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Ian Altman, renowned sales expert and author of “Same Side Selling.”

Ian grew his prior businesses from zero to over one billion dollars in value. He has since built a reputation for helping others build a culture of growth achieving remarkable results.

For 5 years in a row, he has been recognized as one of the world’s top 30 Experts on Sales, and his Same Side Selling Academy is repeatedly rated one of the top 5 Sales Development Programs globally. Ian hosts the popular Same Side Selling Podcast and you can read hundreds of his articles in Forbes and Inc. In this episode, Ian shares invaluable insights into the essential components of a winning sales process.

Key Takeaways

With an emphasis on consistency, alignment between sales and marketing, and the wise utilization of technology, Ian Altman underscores the importance of a well-defined sales process. By implementing a common process and language, businesses can navigate meetings effectively, overcome common obstacles, and shift the focus from price to value. Collaboration between sales and marketing teams ensure a cohesive approach that attracts and engages ideal clients, while leveraging technology enhances efficiency without sacrificing the personal touch. With these strategies in place, businesses can achieve remarkable sales results consistently, driving growth and success in today’s competitive market.

Questions I ask Ian Altman:

[01:27] What is the sales process?

[03:00] How important is a repeatable sales process?

[03:45] What are the core components of a repeatable sales process?

[05:37] As a Sales Guy, what do you think about Marketing?

[06:50] How important is the role of marketing in getting a prospect to pick up that first sales call?

[08:03] How do you effectively combine the culture of a sales process to the ultimate goal of closing a sale?

[09:59] How do you appropriately employ the use of technology in a sales process?

[15:13] How critical is ongoing training to better master the sales process?

[16:54] How do you make roleplaying effective?

[19:24] What are the common pitfalls beginners usually fall into when creating a sales process?

[21:37] Where can people learn more from you?

More About Ian Altman:

 

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Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

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John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Ian Altman. Ian grew his prior business businesses from zero to over 1 billion in value. He has since built a reputation for helping others build a culture of growth, achieving remarkable results. For six years in a row now, he has been recognized as one of the world’s top 30 experts on sales. And his same side selling academy is repeatedly rated one of the top sales development programs globally. He’s also the author of a book named Same Side Selling Podcast, is called Same Side Selling. So Ian, welcome back to the show.

Ian (00:51): Thanks so much, John. It’s almost like that duct tape marketing theme where everything’s named the same. I don’t know how we come up with these things. I just attribute it to a lack of creativity.

John (01:00): Well, I’d counter that by saying that the market responded well to same side selling, and probably you then said, well, why don’t I call everything that it’s kind of branding 1 0 1, right?

Ian (01:14): There could be some truth to that, but it could just be that I was too lazy. But I’d like to think it’s better branding, but I’m just not a great branding and marketing guy like you. So for me, just I call it just blind luck.

John (01:25): Alright, so we’re going to talk about sales process, not just closing or whatever, one aspect of it, but the entire process. So maybe let’s start with defining what that is, what the parts of it are, because I think that’s a term that a lot of people will mention, but what is it?

Ian (01:45): And it can be different for different types of organizations. So depending upon what people are selling, you can define it differently. But fundamentally what it comes down to is how do we earn the attention of our ideal clients? How do we differentiate and stand out from the competition? Then how do you navigate meetings to help people make a decision faster than they might otherwise? And how do you shift the focus from price to value and results? And it sounds simple and it can be simple. It’s just not easy. And the reality is that I think where many organizations fall down, many individuals fall down is in every other aspect of their business. They have a defined process. Here are the steps that we follow. Here’s the language we use, and in sales, we just make it up. And that’s one of the biggest gaps. And so over time, we’ve discovered different steps that no matter what methodology you’re using, doesn’t have to be same side selling. If you follow these core components, you can be pretty darn successful.

John (02:45): So I know a lot of what you preach, you’ve kind of shadowed it a little, foreshadowed it a little bit. There is a repeatable process, but sort of the myth of the, oh, I’m just like a natural born salesperson. Probably butts with that a little bit, right? So how important is a repeatable process that says step one is this, then we ask for this, then we do this.

Ian (03:08): Well, so here’s the thing. When you have different people on a team and some follow a process and some don’t, what we find that the people who outperform others tend to be the ones who follow a consistent process. And if you’re managing a team of multiple people and you don’t have a consistent process, you don’t have a consistent language and you get different results, then you’re left guessing. Is it the individuals? Is it the process they’re following? Is it their approach? But if I have the same process for everybody, that becomes less of a mystery

John (03:40): How important we’ve talked about, I mean, I think we’ve high level said the importance of a sales process, but are there specific components that go into creating such a process and refining and evolving? I mean, is there a follow-up component? I know I’m going to cheat a little bit because every business is a little different, but are there kind of core components?

Ian (04:01): Yes. In fact, there are, and there are three components, and we can walk through ’em one by one. But the three components that I have found, let’s do and keep in mind in our same side selling academy, these were not necessarily things that we started with. And then we figured out, well, why are some people having success? Some aren’t. And then we added stuff and all of a sudden it’s like, oh, when we combine all these together, this works really well. It wasn’t like, oh, I knew all these things were going to work, and we did that in version one. No, it was over time we realized, oh, here’s what we’ve been messing up. Now that we’ve figured it out, I just want to share it with others. So the three components come down to the first is a common process, not only a common process and language, but how do we teach that common process and language internally and reinforce it?

(04:47): Then it’s what we call a playbook for obstacles. So many businesses will have a small number, maybe a dozen of the most common obstacles they come up with, and their team kind of invents the answer each time it comes up, even though it comes up almost every single day, which is silly. And the last part that most organizations overlook is that they don’t place enough emphasis on weekly role play or practicing coaching feedback and things like that. And those three components, if we can step through ’em piece by piece, are what I find are the difference between the top performers and those who are doing just Okay.

John (05:27): I do want to come back to that, but I’m going to throw another topic out. I’m a marketing guy, so I get the salespeople greatly. Those idiots can’t close. Well, that’s probably true. Now you are a sales guy. What do you think about marketing? That’s

Ian (05:40): Probably true. So the reality is that, and you and I have talked about this and we’ve got many friends who the big gap for many organizations is this lack of alignment between sales and marketing. So oftentimes the sales organization looks as marketing as top of funnel creating, and then it’s off to sales. And the reality is, throughout the sales process, there are questions that come up. There are issues that come up that marketing could provide content that will support the sales process. And too often there’s this wall between the two. They don’t talk to each other enough, and then you don’t get that multiplier effect for the organizations where sales and marketing has joined at the hip, that’s when you get the multiplier effect because you say, okay, the leads you’ve been generating, some of them are great. Some of them what we think we can refine the message to attract the ideal customers. Great. Which it’s all marketing wants. Marketing doesn’t want to create bad leads, they want to create great leads, but you have to work collaboratively to make that happen.

John (06:39): Yeah. Yeah. So I think increasingly today, and you correct me if I’m wrong on this, I mean a lot of trust has to be built before I even want a sales call. I mean, because there’s lots of ways for me to avoid sales calls. And so how much of the role then, does marketing really play in establishing the trust high enough to where I even want to pick up the phone or have you set an appointment with you?

Ian (07:03): Well, a lot of it comes back to this notion of disarming. So it’s the notion of if someone comes to your website and feels like you’re just telling the person who landed there, look, we’re the greatest thing in the world. You just don’t know it yet. They’re like, Hey, yeah, we’ve heard this before. Say from a marketing standpoint, here’s who’s a great fit not, and if you think you might be in this category, it’s a great fit. Here’s some questions we ask to make sure that we can deliver the results for you. And if you’d rather talk to one of our team members who can help figure that out, that’s great. The client ultimately has to feel as though, and you can’t fake this, that their outcome is more important than the sale. And once that happens, the guard comes down and people say, oh, you know what? These guys actually, they want to ask questions to make sure they can deliver what we’re asking for. They’re not just looking to pitch stuff at us. They want to see if we’re a good fit. Okay, now I can have a conversation.

John (08:00): That’s a brilliant point because I was going to ask you about the idea of culture. I mean, how much of what a prospect experiences from a brand, obviously some of it’s the website, but how much of it then is the culture of the sales process as well? Because there are definitely brands that want to be very consultative, very educational, not pushy at all. I mean, so how do you marry that?

Ian (08:24): Well, I think nowadays, if you’re not focused on the client’s outcomes, you’re missing the boat because it used to be 30 years ago, you could drop the ball and the person who you disappointed might tell their closest friends today, they’ll tell a million people they’ve never even met before. So we need to make sure that the good news for the marketing people is that when there’s a lack of alignment between sales and marketing and they get a different message from marketing, they do from sales, they assume one of them is lying. Usually they assume it’s the salesperson. So the marketing people are safe. But ultimately, if you’re trying to get a better outcome, the idea is if every message from beginning to end says, I’m more concerned with your outcome than I am the sale, then your customer can relax and say, okay, they’re asking me questions about success that the other vendors never even brought up, so I’m better off working with them than somebody else.

(09:16): But part of it is how do you get people to ask those types of questions? And when you talk about the culture, the top performing organizations that we see through our academy and through the clients I work with comes down to businesses where if you talk to them, their culture says nothing is more important than the client’s outcome. And if we don’t think we can deliver it, we’re not taking their business. And these are companies that went from 5 million to 50, from 17 to a hundred, from a hundred million to 700 million. I mean, we have example after example of businesses that have grown dramatically following these three core steps and focusing entirely on the client’s result is more important than us making the sale.

John (09:57): I love it. Alright. Used to be sales technology was a mobile phone. Now of course, so we’ve got AI bots and we’ve got all kinds of automation and all kinds of follow up. What’s the balance between using that for good and using it for not so good?

Ian (10:14): Well, generally I think what we do is we see some level of automation like ai, and then in most businesses, we figure out a way to mess it up and make it worse. And I’m a big fan of taking the IS s approach, which is we want to do things that are incrementally less stupid than they were last time. And so if you can take an incremental approach, and for example, we use AI tools for audio transcription and summaries for phone calls and video calls, and that way the system can draft a summary. Now if you just copy and paste it and don’t review it, shame on you. But if you take something that used to take you 40 minutes to summarize, and now you can edit it down in five minutes and send it over, that’s great. I think that the mistake that people make is rather than using this technology to assist, they try to use the technology to replace and then they’re all of a sudden not human. As soon as the client figures that out, think about it. We’ve all used a chat bot that we’re like, man, I can’t tell if this is a chat bot or a human. And then it reaches a point where you can tell it’s not a human. And now you go from being, this is cool, this sucks. And so you got to figure out where you intercept it and hand it off to a human.

John (11:29): It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with a must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs. And they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider. You can try ActiveCampaign for free for 14 days and there’s no credit card required. Just visit activecampaign.com/duct tape. That’s right. Duct Tape Marketing podcast listeners who sign up via that link will also receive 15% off an annual plan if purchased by March 31st, 2024. That’s activecampaign.com/duct tape. Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today. Yeah, we tested, we did all kinds of training. They’re just not quite there yet, but we tested an AI trained bot, and you could see people would get to a point where they just go, well, now I’m just going to ask it stupid questions. Because you’d see the transcript, you’re like, eh, that’s probably not a great experience.

Ian (13:03): And it’s that I remember overuse. It’s that overuse. It’s that overuse of automation that becomes a problem where people say, oh, well, okay, they said this, so I’m going to route ’em to this situation. I had a situation with a flight recently where the airline lost the luggage, and it wasn’t that they lost the luggage, it was that I had better technology than they did. So I had an RFID tag, so I knew where my bag was. They didn’t, and I’m talking to the gate agent and I said, look, my bag’s over there, but I’m over here, which means my bag isn’t making on this flight, and we have an hour and a half and you guys get on, we’re fine. The AI bot at the airline says, oh, in a baggage issue, it’s like, look, I don’t care that baggage didn’t get delivered. I care the people in the airport didn’t do anything and had 90 minutes to fix it, but an AI bot goes, no, he mentioned baggage. So we route ’em to this box, and it’s like, no, that’s not what you want to do. Yeah,

John (13:56): But there are definitely places where, for example, if I want to schedule an appointment with somebody, just being able to click on a link and schedule it without interaction is a better experience. It removes the friction of me having to go back and forth. So definitely we’re, I know you’re not anti-technology.

Ian (14:13): Not at all.

John (14:13): It’s just the poor use of it.

Ian (14:16): And keep in mind when John, even that example of the calendaring, if I just send you a link and say, Hey, pick this thing. Your perception may might be, this guy’s lazy. If I send you a link and say, Hey, John, let me know what’s convenient for you. In fact, if it makes life easier for you, here’s a link that has my availability. You can pick from that, and if nothing shows up at a time that’s convenient for you, just fire us a note and we’ll find a time that works for both of us. Nine times out of 10, the client’s going to just click on the link, and now they don’t feel like it was lazy. It’s like, Hey, I’m just trying to minimize back and forth for you. Oh, and me, but for you. So how do we do that? So part of it’s how do we couch that in a way that doesn’t sound like we’re lazy,

John (14:59): Right? So I remember when I first started my career out of college and it was essentially a sales position, and so they sent me to a two day workshop how to be a better sales person, and then they never mentioned it again. So how critical is the ongoing training?

Ian (15:18): Ongoing is the key. It’s like anything else in life. If you took a golf lesson, never practiced that swing and never got reinforcement, you might be worse rather than being better. And it’s like in anything else, but in sales, people think that’s okay. So it gets back to those three components, which is if I’ve got a consistent language and I reinforce it with my team, if I say, here are the most common dozen things that come up, how do we overcome those? And now they’ve got a formula for how to deal with those. And then every week we have a formula for how we coach people. That’s when we get those high performing teams. And the funny part is that I’ve had clients reach out to other people like, wow, these guys, they grew from the prior three years. They’ve gone from 14 to 17 million after implementing this.

(16:00): They went from 17 to 109. How they do it, they reach out to the client and the client says, yeah, so we practice for an hour a week. And he goes, well, so in a year, how many times do you do it? And my client says, well, my calendar is 52 weeks, how about yours? It’s like we do it every single week. It’s not like, well, we say every week, but sometimes we don’t all in. This is something that we just do and we create a way to make it fun. I remember I had the CEO of the same company. He says, yeah, I mean, we’re growing like crazy, but people are doing the same sign and improv role play thing. And I don’t know, it’s like when I go over there, they’re just all laughing and having a good time. I’m like, okay, so that’s good. They’re actually enjoying it and they’re crushing your numbers, so they don’t have to be miserable. They can be having a good time, which is why they’re happy to do it every week.

John (16:50): So set that up a little bit. Give me a little explanation about, because everybody talks about role playing and we’ve all probably experienced really painful role playing. So how do you make that effective? And one of the things you said, consistency is probably one of the keys, but how do you make that effective when it is practiced, but it’s not in a real live situation?

Ian (17:11): Well, so I’ll break it down into first how we set it up, how you create variability, and then how you give feedback, because those are the three things you need to have. So first, in terms of the setup, we have three characters. We have a salesperson, we have a customer, and we have an observer. The observer is purely observing and taking notes because they’re not in the moment. So they actually learn more than anyone else in each round of role play.

John (17:36): Their wheels aren’t turning the whole time.

Ian (17:39): And so what we do is we say, okay, first you need to have an objective. So you need to say, here’s the scenario, here’s the background of this meeting, et cetera, because you can’t just jump in the middle of it. And usually it’s for the salesperson, okay, who’s this customer? What’s the background? Now what we do is we then create something we call in same side improv. We call ’em secret cards. We do it all digitally now, but the secret cards are a series of dozens of different scenarios. So it’ll say, for example, for the customer, they pick one or more of these cards and it might say, you’re afraid to lose control or headcount, or you’ve had a bad experience with a prior vendor, or you don’t trust, or your existing vendor, or you are using this meeting to leverage your favorite preferred vendor, or there’s executive pressure to solve it.

(18:23): Those sorts of things that often come up that people don’t know about. And then the person playing the customer plays that role. And so we’re trying to advance the meeting to achieve certain objectives. And that’s all very well defined at the end. What I tell people is the first person to get feedback is the salesperson and the salesperson’s supposed to say, what did you like? And what’s the one thing you would’ve done differently? Then we ask the person, who’s the customer, what are the things that stood out that were especially positive for you, and is there one thing that you would suggest that they do differently that they haven’t already mentioned? And then we do the same thing for the observer. So what happens is everyone’s giving positive reinforcement of, this was good, this was good, but here’s the one biggest thing that you might want to do differently. And I’m giving the salesperson the opportunity to share something that, no, because if I can do now, it’s like, okay, I can get to something that no one else has gotten to.

John (19:20): So one final question. We’ll end on the downer. What are the big mistakes that you see people falling into the pitfalls that when they’re trying to set this up and get something like this going when it hasn’t existed before?

Ian (19:33): So either there’s a few, I wish it was just one. One is that they say, oh, yeah, we should do this. But then they don’t really enforce it. It’s like in our academy we say, here’s the process to follow. Well, we have a dashboard that shows the individual what they’ve done. It shows the leader what people have done. So if you set deadlines and people aren’t actually following through, you need to hold people accountable. The second part is that when they’re doing coaching, the biggest mistake is either the leader, which sometimes is the CEO, sometimes as a sales leader, often feels their job is to ride in on the white horse and save the day. And the reality is that their job is to coach and mentor their team. And then during the coaching session, they look at it as an opportunity to beat the other person over the head instead of say, Hey, you did these things really well.

(20:22): Here’s the biggest thing that I would change this one thing, because you can’t change 75 things at a time. But if every time they had a role play session, they got one thing better in the course of a month, they’re going to be dramatically better. And what I love is that we take people who were never in sales before and six weeks into it, all of a sudden they’re the top performer in the company. Everyone’s like, what happened? It’s like we gave ’em a simple process they can follow. We told them how to deal with the most common objections that come up, and then we’re coaching them so they can develop those skills on a weekly basis. And surprise, wow, now they’re doing great. And it’s not that hard. It just requires that level of discipline.

John (21:03): Yeah. I like what you all said. The main thing too there is we probably tend to over complicate things, and by having a simple process to follow, we’re going to do it.

Ian (21:12): Exactly. I think there are a lot of great systems that are so complicated, no one’s ever going to follow ’em. And so what I present in same side selling and what I find attractive in just about every system that works is a level of simplicity that says, here are these really complex concepts. We’re going to make it simple enough that people will actually do it. And that’s what I think moves the needle. Yeah.

John (21:34): Awesome. Well, Ian, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to tell people and where they might find out more about what we talked about today, same side selling and your academy,

Ian (21:43): This is going to be a great shocker, but if they go to same side selling.com, they will find everything they want. And of course, you can find me on social media just at Ian Altman, I-A-N-A-L-T-M-A-N, but same side selling.com will get you to me also.

John (21:57): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road soon.

Navigating Failure: The Science of Failing Well in Entrepreneurship

Navigating Failure: The Science of Failing Well in Entrepreneurship written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Amy Edmondson, the Novartis professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. Renowned for her research on psychological safety and author of several acclaimed books, including The Fearless Organization, and the Science of Failing Well – winner of the 2023 Financial Times Business Book of the Year. Amy shares her insights on the science of failing well in entrepreneurship.

 

Key Takeaways

Amy Edmondson challenges the conventional view of failure, advocating for a shift towards intelligent risk-taking in entrepreneurship. By emphasizing the importance of clear goals, informed hypotheses, and systematic risk assessment, she guides listeners towards embracing failure as a catalyst for growth and innovation. Amy underscores the role of organizational leaders in cultivating a culture where intelligent risk-taking is encouraged and celebrated, empowering teams to experiment, learn, and adapt. Through reframing failure as a natural part of the entrepreneurial journey, Amy inspires aspiring entrepreneurs to navigate challenges with resilience and optimism, unlocking their full potential in today’s dynamic business landscape.

 

Questions I ask Amy Edmondson:

[00:51] Why do a lot of business gurus promote the concept of failing?

[02:58] How do we create a methodological approach to failing?

[05:21] Explain the gap between rhetoric and action when it comes to failure?

[08:11] What are some of the characteristics of smart failure versus just failure?

[10:39] Do you ever run the risk of people sort of preparing to fail on purpose?

[11:45] Does expecting failure to a certain degree a mentality?

[12:59] What are some of examples of ROI an organization can start to see by well designed failure experiments?

[15:43] How do we empower our managers and team leaders to give people permission?

[17:35] What are your thoughts on thinking big: 10x vs 2x. Could it help people fail faster?

[19:15] Where can people connect with you, learn more about your work and pick a copy of your book?

 

 

More About Amy Edmondson:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now

Visit WorkBetterNow.com mention the referral code DTM Podcast and get $150 off for your first 3 months.

 

John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jansen. My guest today is Amy Edmondson. She is the Novartis professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School, renowned for her research on psychological safety for over 20 years. She’s the author of the Fearless Organization and Teaming, and a book we’re going to talk about today, right? Kind of wrong, the Science of Failing Well, which was a winner of the 2023 Financial Times Business Book of the year. So Amy, welcome to the show.

Amy (00:41): Thank you for having me.

John (00:43): Alright, so I’m just going to toss this up and let you bat it out of the park because it’s a softball question. But there’s a lot of literature lately, a lot of gurus online talking about how entrepreneurs have to fail and fail fast and fail often. And frankly, I don’t like failing. So why are you telling me I have to do it?

Amy (01:05): So I don’t like failing either, and that’s why I wrote this book because actually really it’s a book about success, but success in an uncertain world where we cannot prevent all failure, it turns out we can prevent an awful lot of failure. We can prevent unintelligent failures, we can prevent the kinds of failures that happen when you mail it in, you don’t do your homework and you fail the exam. Those are preventable. And I think the reason why there’s all this sort of literature or sometimes happy talk about failure is that we recognize it as a necessity for progress in any field. And if you’re a startup, by definition, you’re doing something that doesn’t yet exist and you’ve got a hypothesis that it might work. In fact, don’t do it if you have no confidence that this could work at all, stay out of the game, but you have a sense that this could work.

(02:03): In fact, you’re probably pretty sure it could work, but because it’s new territory, there is a possibility that you were wrong. That with all the effort, all the brains, that this thing might not work. That would be what I would call, especially if you’ve done your thinking and had good reason to believe it would work, that would be an intelligent failure. And that is the kind of failure that the Silicon Valley talk, fail, fast, fail often is implicitly referring to, but often they’re not explicit enough. And it sort of sounds like they’re saying, yeah, go ahead and fail at everything. No, nobody wants to fail.

John (02:42): So not doing your research and not understanding if there’s product market fit, that would be silly failure, right?

Amy (02:50): Right. Not doing your research to find out what we know, what we don’t know, and what’s worth trying next.

John (02:58): So how do we make this a science that obviously implies that there’s a very methodical approach to it. How do we make that a science?

Amy (03:07): Well, I think it is really the science of assessing risk thoughtfully. And of course there’s technical work on assessing risk thoughtfully, but in a more colloquial way, I offer three, four criteria that are from first principles really. But any scientist is either implicitly or explicitly using them. So first of all, do you have a goal? Is there somewhere you’re trying to get, whether that’s a new business or a new invention or a new relationship, you have a goal. And second, there’s no way to look up the answer that it’s in new territory. And third, you’ve done, as we’ve talked about before, your homework, you’ve found out what is known, what isn’t known, and you have a theory or a hypothesis about what’s worth trying. And then fourth and importantly, the risk you’re taking is no bigger than necessary. You do not bet your entire net worth on this new company that may not work. You borrow as much as you can afford to borrow, you bet as much as you can afford to bet, but you’re mitigating risk because there’s uncertainty. And that is true whether you’re starting a company or developing a new product in a company or going on a blind date, you mitigate the risk. You don’t agree to go off for a weekend with someone. You agree to meet for coffee and you

John (04:39): Tell a

Amy (04:39): Friend. Sense what I’m saying?

John (04:41): You tell a friend to text you and text you in 10 minutes,

Amy (04:45): Got to go. So we all know, we know how to mitigate risk when we’re thoughtful about it, but sometimes we’re not. We just don’t think systematically. So the science part refers to the fact that you can be a very logical, very systematic, very thoughtful about the risks you take. In fact, I advise it.

John (05:05): Yeah. Yeah. So there with your reference to the date, there was actually a rom-com movie. I don’t know if you know that that was titled the Right Kind of Wrong.

Amy (05:15): Oh, I didn’t, and I dunno it. That’s terrible. It’s a

John (05:20): Terrible movie. But you talk in the book about the gap between rhetoric and action when it comes to failure. Can you elaborate on that gap?

Amy (05:29): Yeah. So the rhetoric is, I think my challenge with the rhetoric is it’s a little glib. When you see fail fast, fail often, or celebrate failure, it sounds like it applies to everything evenly. All failures are the same and all failures are not the same. And I think the last thing you want to do, and of course the last thing you would do is celebrate preventable and occasionally tragic failures. Go into a manufacturing company and tell the plant manager to fail. Often she’ll just look at you, what are you talking about?

John (06:07): Get people

Amy (06:07): Killed. We’re going for six s signal. Yeah. Yeah. That’s not what we do around here. We’ve got a really good processes that are in control and capable and you say applaud. And similarly, scientists who fail, which they do all the time are not, you don’t want them failing because they mixed up the chemicals that they were supposed to be using in the experiment. You only want failures that are truly new tests in new environments that haven’t been done before. So the rhetoric is just a little sloppy and a little non nuanced. Whereas the reality of failing well is thoughtful risks in new territory are to be applauded whether they end in success, which we hoped for or failure, which we didn’t hope for, but we still must welcome the new knowledge and in familiar territory for which there is a recipe or a protocol or a process, we should use it and use it thoughtfully.

John (07:09): Yeah, I think about all the times I’ve heard the cliche Edison, 10,000 failures was just giving him like 9,999 that were of the wrong answers. And I think a lot of people really look at it that way as you’re eliminating wrong answers when it’s more, this was a hypothesis that had some thought behind it and

Amy (07:30): We

John (07:31): Either made it or didn’t, right? Yes,

Amy (07:32): I love the Edison quote, but it is right. It gives the wrong impression of scattershot. And I think because the 10,000 is probably not a scientific number, but a kind of poetic number. What he’s saying is, I didn’t mind all of the false starts on the way to the phonograph or the electric light bulb. I understand that’s a necessary part of being an inventor, not scattershot,

John (07:59): Right? So I think you’re actually calling this smart failure, but you may have already said that already, but I know it’s in the book Smart Failure. So in the context of say, an organization, what are some of the characteristics of smart failure versus just failure?

Amy (08:16): Smart failure is anything that’s legitimately in new territory in pursuit of a goal and with a hypothesis and no bigger than it had to be. And that literally could be a formal r and d project, a clinical trial, or it could be a salesperson making a call on a potential client and trying an approach, a script, a way of describing the product that hasn’t been tried before and it falls flat. And that’s a smart failure as long as some thought has gone into it. So I think in companies day in and day out, depending on which part of the operation you’re in, which tasks you have, there’s ample opportunity for smart failures, but they are more numerous in r and d than in execution of operations. But even in operations, let’s say you have an idea, a hypothesis about a way to speed up the line a little bit and you test it in a small way and it doesn’t work, right? That’s an intelligent failure in a routine setting, but it’s a very small one indeed.

John (09:31): And now a word from our sponsor. Work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing. They’re a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator. And we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness, and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team. And to top it off, each dedicated and full-time work better Now. Professional is 2350 per month and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit work better now.com. Mention the referral code DTM podcast, and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months. That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code, do you ever run the risk with a lot of emphasis on failure? Do you ever run the risk of people sort of preparing to fail and so it’s like, yeah, we’re going to try this thing, it’s probably not going to work, and so then it doesn’t, right? Does that ever crop up?

Amy (10:51): I haven’t actually thought of that. I haven’t seen that. But I love the question and it would be worth keeping an eye out for it. I think most of the time that risk is counterbalanced by our very human desire to do well. Even when we know we’re in novel territory and there’s a real risk that it might not go well, we’re still hoping that we’re going to be the ones who gets it right? So even a scientist who, like my husband who says 70% of the experiments in his lab fail even there every day, every scientist, every young scientist is sort of hoping that they’re the ones who are in the 70, not in the 30 that day. So I think of course, motivation can be missing. You can have a place when people aren’t, are apathetic and don’t really care. And then it would be a bigger risk.

John (11:44): I think of a lot of venture capitals that often talk about, they bet on 10 companies kind of almost with the hope that one’s going to be a unicorn, knowing that seven are going to fail. And that probably becomes a bit of a mentality. It

Amy (11:59): Can become a self-fulfilling prophecy because, and this goes back to the old research on teachers where if you start to expect this one’s a winner and this one’s not a winner, you’ll start to unconsciously do things that help the winners and toward the losers. And so you do have to be honest with yourself and thoughtful about how am I thinking about this company, this project, this person? And if your honest answer is, I don’t think they can make it, test that, think a little more carefully if you really think so. Maybe it’s time to pull out now, maybe you’re wrong. What are you missing? Have an honest, difficult conversation with them or with the executive team. It’s always important to step, be able to step back later and say, I think I did everything I could.

John (12:50): Yeah. So it’s very common. People will say it was only a failure if you didn’t learn something from it. What are some of the, other than learning from failure, what are some of the other return on investments that an organization can start to see by, well-designed failure experiments.

Amy (13:07): It’s mostly learning. And learning means learning’s a pretty encompassing category. It means a lot of different things. It can mean very technical things that now we know to do this and it’ll work. Or it could mean just, Ooh, when we don’t try hard enough, we don’t get the results we want. So there’s lots of things we can learn and those are really important dividends from any failure. But I think we also, the other positive output from a failure that we take the time to learn from is that we learn, sorry, I used the word we discover that we didn’t die of embarrassment or something else. So our failure muscles become a little strengthened. We learned that we’re still okay. And so that’s a kind of confidence enhancer, even though it was a failure. There’s a little bit of a more robust and healthy ego as opposed to unhealthy ego.

John (14:06): I don’t know if you have any examples of this, but there are some people that tried something as a hypothesis experiment, it didn’t work, but they accidentally created Velcro or Right. Like that mean, so are there some potential benefits of by trying more stuff, you’re going to accidentally, right? That was the one I was trying to think of. Yeah, this guy, right?

Amy (14:28): Yeah. Post-it, the epitome of that story. But penicillin was an accident in the book I described oyster sauce, which was a small failure of overcooking the oysters, and they burnt and turned into yucky goo. And then it turns out, if you taste that yucky goo, it’s delicious. And there was born a multi-billion dollar industry from that young chef more than a hundred years ago. So yes, I call that the happy accident failure. And those are not the dominant category, needless to say. So if you’re sort of hoping that your screw ups will always yield like wonderful dividends, that’s probably not the best strategy for failing. Well, but if you don’t take the time to pause and taste or dig into the failure, the glue that wouldn’t stick properly and think deeply about and create the conditions where other people can team up to think deeply about the implications of that failure, then you stand no chance of a real success at the end of the tunnel.

John (15:36): I know a great deal of this work is targeted at the decision makers, strategic thinkers, but down the line, how do we empower our managers and team leaders to give people permission? Because part of it, we’re not going to try stuff that we think will work better if we don’t. Culturally, it’s not acceptable. So how do they bring that environment?

Amy (16:01): I wish more than anything to speak to the team leaders, to the managers, to anyone in a project or people management role, because they’re the ones who are shaping the climate far more than executive leadership. They matter, but it’s the local interactions that are really shaping our mental models about what’s possible, what’s acceptable, what’s not. Okay. And if you get that message either explicitly or implicitly that ever coming up short is not okay, then you’re going to either hide when the news isn’t good, or under undershoot specified targets or goals that you know can make rather than ones that are a stretch and bring a risk, and you don’t want people doing that. So I speak, I think primarily to all of those sort of leaders in the middle who are responsible for setting the stage, for describing the world in which we are working as one that brings necessary uncertainty and necessary human fallibility. And when we accept that, those two things like uncertainty in the world around us and fallibility of ourselves and our teams, then and only then are we well set up to actually do our best because we can be honest about it. We can be as ambitious as possible about beating the odds, but we can be honest about when things aren’t working.

John (17:35): There was a book I had the author on recently, and the premise of the book was that it’s actually easier sometimes to think in terms of doing something really big. 10 x is actually how he defined it as opposed to just two x, which is basically like 20% more. We can probably just do a little of what we’re doing harder, but 10% or 10 times growth. We truly have to innovate. We truly have to take big risks. I’m curious of how your thoughts on that mentality. That’s

Amy (18:02): Interesting. Okay, so my first thought when you said that was, well, that’s kind of crazy. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but we’re not going to just do 20 x or 10 x next year. We can’t. But I thought so that might by saying, so that might lead people to kind of go, okay, it’s not discussable, but that’s nuts. As long as it’s actually an explicit exercise, then I think it’s brilliant because then the idea is we won’t think differently if we just say, okay, this piece. But if we say, just for fun, let’s imagine 10 x, what would have to be true? So it’s a way of unlocking our team’s thinking rather than a kind of new ogre who’s come in and said, you must do 10 x, which would be crazy.

John (18:53): Exactly.

Amy (18:54): But as a thought device to get us to think out of the box as it were, I think that’s really fun.

John (19:03): You’d have to have a whole different set of hypotheses, right, for that. Right.

Amy (19:08): You couldn’t just do more of, you’d have to

John (19:11): Do different. Exactly. Yeah. Well, Amy, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace that you would invite people to find out more about your work and obviously find a copy of right kind of wrong?

Amy (19:22): Sure. So the book is for sale everywhere, I think, more or less. But if you go to amy c edmondson.com, there are links to the book, which I really hope you’ll read, and also to other papers and articles, and even some fun little videos here and there. Awesome.

John (19:40): Again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to speak with our audience, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Unlocking Your Leadership Potential: From Hero to Human Leader with Empathy

Unlocking Your Leadership Potential: From Hero to Human Leader with Empathy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Hortense le Gentil, a world-renowned executive leadership coach, speaker, and author. With over 30 years of experience across various industries, including media consulting and advertising, Hortense guides CEOs and senior executives on their journey from hero leaders to human leaders.

Key Takeaways

Join Hortense le Gentil on a transformative journey as she discusses the evolution of leadership in today’s world. Learn to identify and overcome mental obstacles, embrace authenticity and vulnerability, and lead with empathy. Gain actionable insights into unlocking your true leadership potential and thriving in both your personal and professional life. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, Hortense’s expertise will empower you to inspire and connect with others on a deeper level, driving sustainable growth and success in today’s rapidly changing landscape.

 

Questions I ask Hortense le Gentil:

[01:08] What is a mind trap and how does it impact us?

[02:06] How is a mind trap different from a limiting belief?

[02:48] Tell us the personal case study of when you were stuck 15 years ago?

[04:46] What do you do when you can’t trust that inner voice?

[06:41] Explain the concept of transforming from a hero leader to a human leader ?

[08:58] What does the process of unlocking yourself as a human leader look like?

[13:54] How does a leader help their team adjust to their embracing empathy?

[16:25] Is there a level of self awareness needed to embrace empathy as a leader?

[16:56] Do you get some pushback from experienced leaders who deny the relevancy of developing their consciousness?

[17:47] What is the one tip you have for beginners looking to start unlocking their leadership potential?

[18:45] Where can people connect with you, learn more about your work and pick a copy of your book?

 

More About Hortense le Gentil:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now

Visit WorkBetterNow.com mention the referral code DTM Podcast and get $150 off for your first 3 months.

 

John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Hortense le Gentil. She’s a world renowned executive leadership coach, speaker and author. She guides CEOs and senior executives on their journey. From hero leaders to human leaders guided by 30 years in business, working across industries, including media consulting and advertising. And as an entrepreneur, she’s the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, the Unlocked Leader, dare to Free Your Own Voice, lead with Empathy, and shine your light in the world. So Hortense Bienvenue.

Hortense (00:49): Thank you for having John. Happy here.

John (00:52): That’s all of the French that I’m going to attempt today, but I nailed that one, didn’t I?

Hortense (00:57): Oh, you did great. You just love this one.

John (01:01): Alright, so in the book there is a concept called you call Mind Traps. That’s a big part of the book. So let’s start there and let’s define what a mind trap is and how it impacts us.

Hortense (01:14): I’d like to say that the mind trap is, it’s a mental obstacle that is on your way to move forward. This is something that holds you back. It can be something that you used to be, for example, like I used to be perfect or to try to reach perfection. It was a driver for me, but now I feel like it doesn’t work anymore. So when you feel like something is hold you back, holds you back, and you can even feel unhappy and satisfied, you cannot be completely yourself and journeys happen to everyone. I dunno if it happened to you, but every moment, a lot of moment in our life, it happened to us and it happened to me and I remember it was more than 15 years ago.

John (02:04): So let’s get into that. But I want to clarify how is that different than excuse, than a limiting belief? I’m not good enough to lead or something. How is it different from that?

Hortense (02:14): So let’s say that can be cousin. They can be cousin because mine trap is really for me, it’s where you are stuck. So limiting belief when you think I’m not enough, for example, yes, that could be because this is a consequence, let’s say because you are trapped somewhere and then you begin to think, okay, why do I think like that? What is behind that? The scene. So behind the scene you will find the real reason, and this is what I call the mind trap.

John (02:48): So let’s use your example that you were starting to bring up there from 15 years ago to maybe even help clarify that further.

Hortense (02:54): Okay, yes, no, I just wanted to explain that. 15 years ago I felt completely lost and stuck in my life, personal life and professional life. And then I was lost, John, I didn’t know what to do. And then of course everything went south and I went stuck in bed for months. So I had plenty of time to think. And then at that time I had the dream. I had the dream. And my grandmother, it was a grandmother that I just loved and she came back in my dream and she told me something very simple. She told me, you have to find the bus of roses. And I had no idea it was a pass of roses. So I asked her in my dream and I said, okay, where is that and where is it? Because more important, where is it? I want to find the rose.

(03:46): And she said, you just look at me and smile. And she said, you know where it is. And then I woke up. Of course I was furious. She didn’t give me the answer, but I will understand later what she meant was very important. She meant that I had to listen to my inner voice. And very often this is why we are stuck somewhere because we are not listening our own voice. We are not confident enough because it can be risky, it can be difficult. You need to be courageous to take sometimes difficult decision. And then this is what I learned and when I began to listen to my own voice, yes I could do that. Yes, I could change my life personally and professionally. Yes, I could do that and that this is what I did and I began to free myself.

John (04:35): Alright, so what if you can’t trust that inner voice? I mean there’s a lot of things that we call an inner voice that are telling us things that aren’t together altogether positive. I mean, how do you tell the difference between yeah, that’s the right guidance as opposed to that’s just continue to keep me locked.

Hortense (04:51): Interesting. Okay, listen. So what we know, I think it’s more a feeling. So when you want to take a decision, whatever the decision is, I think we know the decision. And when it’s a hard decision to take, we need someone with who that shares this decision. And you’re looking for someone who say yes, do it. But sometimes you can wait a long time before anybody is like, I agree with you. So I will say that this voice is the one that you feel. So we all know exactly what we should do and sometimes we are not ready. But one day when you are stuck, it’s time to face that and to listen to that voice. So what do you really want to do and not the voices behind that because of course when you are stuck somewhere, you need to track the source. So who said you that, for example, who said that you cannot be a CEO, for example. I had a client like that and who said that it was a professor, it was a teacher years ago, this professor was told that young person that you will never be a CEO because I can see all the emotion on your face.

(06:12): And so it was so surprised. So we are making association because we are living with the voices that the community authority, whatever the voices around us and also our brain is cooking voices for us because we are looking for meaning. Okay, why? Yes, I should do that. No I don’t all the time. So silence,

John (06:38): I think I read it in your intro, but it certainly shows up in the book, this idea of taking people from the hero leader to the human leader. Explain that concept.

Hortense (06:49): You know that we need to free ourself from those mind trap to become human leader. And what should we become human. It’s because the world has changed and the expectation has changed. Also, people now they want to connect with you. They don’t need another hero like said, no, we don’t need another hero. We need someone with who we can relate, we can understand, we can connect. And the only way to do that is by being human, by using your secret weapon. That is the empathy. And you need that. And I think that every leader know that because a lot have been said about why we should lead with empathy. But when it comes to the how do we do that and you need courage to do it, it’s very courageous because you have to unlearn what you learned. But it’s another dimension I would say. So now you have to inspire and take care of people. It’s completely different.

John (08:00): And I think a lot of leaders fall into the trap of believing I have to have this strong front that I’m in charge of everything, I have all the answers. And that’s probably an aspect that right or wrong holds a lot of people back, doesn’t it?

Hortense (08:14): Exactly, exactly. Because we are raised like that. Your education at school, I’m sure everyone was telling you, oh don’t show your emotion, right? And how all the answer, but who has all the answer? John, tell me. Who could predict a pandemic? Who can predict every, can we say that we are living in a crazy world today, every day something happen? How can you alone have all the answer? That’s absolutely not possible.

John (08:48): So the core concept of the book of course is unlocking yourself as a leader. What does that process look like? Obviously it’s very drawn out in the book, but give us the high level. What is the process of unlocking yourself as a leader look like?

Hortense (09:01): So it’s going to this process of, okay, be aware that we are locked and okay, are we ready to start this journey? Because it’s a journey, it’s not a destination. And how we do that. So we face our fears first because we are afraid. Maybe we are used to do another way. You need to change. And then we go to, okay, where am I trap? Where I am stuck? And you track the source like who said? And then when you track the source, you found the source. Then you go to what I call the mind shift. So you change your mindset and with some questions, powerful questions you ask yourself. Okay, so you track the source and you said, is it true? Is it relevant? Is it helpful? What I’m thinking right now? And then you’re let go and then you are free yourself and you are able to write your own story.

(09:57): But maybe let me share very quickly an example. So I have this client, he was considered to be the next EO of the company. And so he went through a process in front of a panel of their leaders in order to be the next CEO. And then out of nowhere, out of the blue, his behavior changed and he became very talkative. He was talking all the time, didn’t listen, he changed completely. So he was surprised. Everybody was surprised. And of course he didn’t get the job. Then we had this conversation and he told me, I don’t know, I don’t know what happened, tto, I don’t know. I said, okay, so let’s figure out. And then revisiting his life, he remembered that years ago he had to pass an exam, not to pass an exam, it has to be in front of a panel of teachers.

(10:54): And then one of the teacher didn’t let him talk. So he was shocked. It was a trauma, one of the cos when what is behind it became a trauma. And then it was the same story that I shared before. This teacher told him, I don’t know what you’re going to do young guy, but you will never be a CEO because I can see all your emotion on your face. Young guy, very smart, begin his life thinking that you don’t have to show your emotion. And second, he was not aware. He forgots his conversation, but his unconscious didn’t. And the way the day, the first opportunity that unconscious has to remember that talk in order to not have the same situation that he had before. So going through this process of you track the source, where it’s coming from, it was coming from there. In this case there were trauma and voices.

(11:58): So they are the two main families, the source of your mind trap. So he found the source and then I asked him is the three question, is it true? Is it relevant? Is it helpful today that you cannot be a CEO and you don’t have to show your emotion? He said, no, I know. I said, okay. So we let go. So we walk on, let go. And then you begin to write your own story. What is important for you? How you want to be? Remember, how do you want to show up as a leader, what difference you want to make in the world or around you and all that? What have your values? And you begin to write your own story because you don’t. You live your own life. You don’t live the life that someone wants for you.

John (12:48): And now a word from our sponsor, work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing. They’re a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest hassle-free. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator. And we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness, and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team. And to top it off, each dedicated and full-time work better. Now professional is 2350 per month and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit, work better now.com. Mention the referral code DTM podcast and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months. That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code. So after you’ve worked with somebody or somebody goes through this process and they are embracing empathy, they are becoming maybe more human, but that’s not how their team has experienced them to date. Is that a bit jarring? It’s like, where’s the old John? Or does it just take consistency and proving that you mean it

Hortense (14:16): So good? Of course, but what I recommend very often is it’s difficult to change how people think about you. So what I always recommend is to share with your team. So at fun point you say, okay, my name is, and I want to work on being a better leader and connect better with yourself and have more empathy, whatever it is, or communicate better with you. And then your team or your environ is aware, oh, oh great, she want to change, okay. And you ask for help and say, and I need help. And then everyone wants to help you. No worries about that. And then they say, okay, so let’s do it together. Then it’s faster for two reasons. First, they’re aware that you’re doing something and they appreciate the fact that you want to be better. Then you give the tone so they can also be, okay, I can walk also to be better.

(15:17): It’s all right to not be perfect. Then you set the tone and also they help you because you are in the middle of a meeting and things like that. And after you maybe you ask for feedback and said, what feedback do you have for me? Maybe not every day, I mean, but when you feel it or when you decide and then it’s all together that you’re going to work on that. So on your side you do your homework of unlocking yourself and in fact of telling, be sure of the message and vision that you have and really who you are. Connect with yourself because empathy begin to start with yourself first. You have to connect with yourself. Who am I? What do I want? Can you really say how you are to yourself? Can you say that? Who are you? And then when you are very clear on that, because that is a personal walk, when you’re very clear on that, you’re ready to practice, you’re ready to do it. And after, again, it’s a journey. It’s not a destination. So every day we learn something and every day we evolve and then it’s, it’s wonderful because it changed everything.

John (16:25): I imagine a level of self-awareness, or at least a desire to uncover some self-awareness is really the starting point for all this, right? I mean you can’t really do that. You can’t do the work you’re talking about unless you discover some level of self-awareness. Exactly. I mean, would you say that’s accurate

Hortense (16:41): If you don’t know where to start? Yes, that’s absolutely accurate, right?

John (16:45): So a lot of the leadership I have, a lot of people have written books on leadership. I speak with people that have development programs and a lot of them really try to focus on competencies and skills. Do you get some pushback when, I mean you’re literally telling people that they have to develop their consciousness. So do you get some pushback from people that feel like, how is that relevant?

Hortense (17:08): Not that much in fact, because I think if we are honest with ourself, all of us, we know where we have to evolve and we know that part is very hard and we don’t know where to begin when to start, as I said. So no, I don’t think so. And because most of the leader that I know, they know after you need courage to come and to ask for that. So if you’re not ready, if you, but most of the leaders, they are courageous so they can do it, but it’s because you did courage.

John (17:42): Alright, so I’m going to invite people or ask you to invite people where they can connect with you. But what’s one thing, if somebody came to you and said, give me one thing I could start doing today to really unlock my leadership potential, what would that be?

Hortense (17:56): The first thing I think

John (17:57): Everybody always wants the one tip, right?

Hortense (18:00): I know. So the one tip would be, okay, reflect and do the three colon exercise in your life, personal, professional, whatever, both of them is even better. And do first colon, what do you want to keep? What is good in your life? What gives you energy? Second colon, what do you want to drop? What you drain? You don’t want that anymore. And third colon. So what do you want to add to live to your life today? And then begin your journey. What is the first step? Look at that and begin your journey to the process of maybe unlocking yourself.

John (18:41): Love it. Well, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to connect with you, learn about your work, and obviously pick up a copy of The Unlocked Leader?

Hortense (18:51): So I have a website, so it’s my name, Hortenselegentil.com. And also we can on LinkedIn, everywhere. On LinkedIn, on social Instagram. So I try to be active.

John (19:05): The book is, we’ll have a link to your website in the show notes, but the book could be purchased pretty much anywhere people purchase books. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment or dance and hopefully we’ll run into you on these days out there on the road.

From Generalist to Specialist: The Blueprint for Vertical Market Domination

From Generalist to Specialist: The Blueprint for Vertical Market Domination written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Corey Quinn, former CMO of Scorpion and now a dedicated agency coach, Corey specializes in guiding agency founders to scale with vertical market specialization. At Scorpion, he played a pivotal role in growing the agency’s revenue 8x in 5 years to a remarkable $150M. Corey is also the author of ‘Anyone, Not Everyone,’ a comprehensive guide for agency founders looking to move beyond founder-led sales. He is currently on a mission to empower 1,000 agencies to become vertical-market specialists, leveraging his extensive experience and insights.

In this episode Corey provides a comprehensive blueprint for agency founders looking to transition from being generalists to specialists in their field, paving the way for vertical market domination and sustained growth.

Key Takeaways

Corey Quinn underscores the significance of vertical market specialization in transitioning from founder-led sales to scalable growth for agencies. By honing in on a specific vertical, founders can position themselves as experts, differentiate their services, and attract ideal clients. Corey outlines actionable steps for identifying the right market, validating its potential, and building relationships with key influencers. With a focus on long-term success, agencies can leverage vertical market specialization to achieve sustainable growth and dominance within their niche.

Questions I ask Corey Quinn:

[00:57] Explain the concept of anyone, not everyone

[02:52] What is vertical market specialization and how is it different from picking a niche and getting specialized?

[05:45] How does one position themselves as the go-to agency for a specific market?

[10:00] Tell us about the strategic gifting outbound approach

[12:58] What are your favorite platforms or tools for building the ultimate list of who to target?

[15:57] How important is it to network with big names in the target industry and how is it done?

[19:24] Is it advisable to repeat the approach with other markets or stick to one?

[20:37] Where can people connect with you and grab a copy of your book

More About Corey Quinn:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Sign up for a 15% discount on annual plans until Mar 31,2024. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Corey Quinn. He’s a former CEO of Scorpion and now a dedicated agency coach. He specializes in guiding agency founders to scale with vertical market specialization. At Scorpion, he played a pivotal role in growing the agency’s revenue eight x in five years to a remarkable $150 million. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, anyone, not everyone, A comprehensive guide for agency founders looking to move beyond founder-led sales. So Corey, welcome to the show.

Corey (00:47): John, it is a real treat to be here.

John (00:51): So let’s start with the title. I find myself always doing that because authors picked every word of a title so carefully. What’s the big picture you’re trying to imply with this idea of anyone? Not everyone.

Corey (01:03): So the big promise or the transformation that I wrote the bill to really help agency founders with is this idea of escaping founder-led sales, which is a challenge that many agency founders will go through in the sort of the lifecycle of their agency. And the way that I’ve personally seen this happen, both in the work that I do as well as in dozens of other agency owners I’ve interviewed, is one way to become sort of independent of sales and also to help scale your agency is to get really clear on who you’re targeting. Not only just get clear but specialized in serving a specific vertical market. And the funny thing is that title did not come day one. It was a much different title, and it wasn’t until I was working back and forth with my editor and I was saying we were using the term, it’s like something around you could do anything but not everything type of thing. And that’s where it was born from.

John (02:07): Well, if you don’t nail this getting out of founder led sales, I mean you’ll never be able to sell the business. I mean, to me, that’s kind of job number one, isn’t it?

Corey (02:16): Correct, absolutely. And there’s a saying that I love somewhere that I think is super interesting, which is that you want to build a business that everyone wants to buy that you don’t want to sell, right? And that’s a business that probably creates the freedoms in your life as a business owners that you want to have. So a hundred percent if an acquirer is looking at your agency and you are instrumental to the growth of it, that is not as interesting of a value proposition versus otherwise.

John (02:48): So I know you go very deep into this idea of you actually, I think I read it in your vertical market specialization. How is that different from the sort of well-worn advice of pick a niche and get specialized?

Corey (03:02): Yeah, I think it’s a good question. The idea of niching down is very common. There’s a great saying, the riches are in the niches, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I think the challenge is that it’s today it’s a very vague idea of what does that mean exactly? Does that mean I’m targeting females between 35 and 50, who like donuts or am I targeting flight attendants or what does that exactly mean? It’s very vague. And so what I wanted to do is be much more literal and specific about when you want to scale an agency. One of the great ways to do it, it’s not the only way, but one of the great ways to do it is to specialize in a vertical market. So in a way, vertical specialization is a type of niching down by the way, you can specialize in what you do, like SEO, that’s another type of specialization. But I personally like to help agencies and I’m really obsessed with this idea of taking a vertical market approach and I really care about helping people get there.

John (04:04): So one of the challenges I think is I think a lot of people hear that advice and they’re like, okay, where’s the opportunity lawyers or dentists? And having never worked with those markets, they just charge into ’em. And sometimes it works. Sometimes they realize, I hate working with Dennis. No offense, Dennis, but how do you make sure that you’re making the right sort of decision because it is a decision to send your business down a track

Corey (04:30): A hundred percent John. And there are situations where it makes sense as an agency founder to start down that road on day one, but generally that does not the way it works usually it is an agency owner who opens their doors and does business with their family and their distant family in the local chamber of commerce, and they say yes to a lot of different businesses. And I think that makes a lot of sense. As you’re launching your new business, you want to have revenue and you want to get it off the ground, but it is only until they realize that they can’t get beyond a certain point because they’re serving a wide variety of clients. They’re a jack of all trades, and they lack expertise in any one area, which has a direct impact in their ability to do things like operationally scale, but also their positioning becomes very watered down. The market doesn’t see their true value for what they are. They compete on price and they lose deals to lesser firms. And that all of that results in slow and inconsistent sales and all of those aspects bring the founder right back into sales because when the sales isn’t happening, that’s the founder’s responsibility at the end of the day. Right?

John (05:40): Yeah. So what are some of the key steps? If I’ve decided maybe I’ve been out there, I’ve had some success, I have some ideas about markets that I like, I’ve been able to serve, I’ve been able to add value. What are some of the key steps to really kind of positioning myself as the go-to

Corey (05:55): Absolutely. So in that case of that generalist who’s been around for a while, you have a lot of sets and reps. It’s important as you’re going through this process of verticalizing your agency to look at your current book of business and see who do I like working with? If I was going to fill my business with dentists as your example, what kind of life would I be enjoying at that point? Right? The whole outcome you’re trying to create is you want to fill your practice with a whole bunch of this type of business. And so first thing you want to do is you want to look at your experience. You want to look at, like I said, who you like working with, what problems are you really good at solving for them, and are they willing to pay for those problems? That’s number one. You want to look at your current business.

(06:38): Number two, you want to look at the market because you don’t want to target an audience that is too small or maybe too big. If you’re targeting an audience that says that, let’s say that has a small budget inherently then, and you charge $10,000 a month, and on average the average business owner in that industry makes a hundred thousand dollars a year, you’re going to have a hard time finding clients. And so there’s an aspect of it where number one, you have to feel like you’re good at it and you want to do want to work with these folks. But then number two, that the market that you’re going after is what I call, you have to validate it. You have to validate it’s not only large enough, but that it is a good fit for the kind of business you want to create.

John (07:22): I have people come to me all the time and say that I want to work with X, and I’m like, well, they don’t spend money on marketing at all. That might be a slog for you.

Corey (07:31): Yeah. The number I like to use as sort of a benchmark is when you’re doing the market research, does the average business in this vertical make a million dollars a year? This is specifically in the context of marketing agencies, and the math is if they make a million dollars a year and they spend 10% of that revenue on marketing per year, which is a hundred thousand dollars, you divide that by 12 months, that’s $8,333 per month. And you think about marketing today, you have to have a website, SEO content, PPC book, reputation management, do a podcast. All of a sudden you’re stretching that $8,000 pretty thin. And so depending on the type of service you have and the type of revenue you want to generate per client, a million dollars is a good barometer to make sure that they actually do make enough money for you to justify targeting them.

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(09:32): Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign. Today, we have worked for years with various agents or various industries and certain industries, certain verticals are just getting hammered by people that have taken this approach. Remodeling contractors, for example. I mean, get 10 pitches a day from somebody that says they’re an expert in their industry. You have an outbound approach that uses gifting as a kind of unique approach to really stand out, right? They get the 10 emails. How are you different? Yeah, talk about that approach.

Corey (10:13): Yeah, absolutely. So the prerequisite is number one, you have a vertical market that you specialize in, that you position your agency around, and then what you do is you want to, and this is based on my direct experience of working at an agency where we sent literally millions of dollars of cookies to attorneys. Another one of these markets that is oversaturated that you could argue, but the way that I teach my clients, what you do is, number one, you build up a 20% lead list. And what I mean by that is out of all the attorneys in the us, let’s say you are targeting personal injury attorneys, you want to take that list and then you want to qualify it to identify what’s the top 20% of this list that if I can get them on the phone, then I have a very high likelihood that they’re going to be a great fit.

(10:59): They’re going to want to work with us. And so you create that list that becomes your lead list for this gift based outbound. The next thing you want to do is you want to identify a gift that would be unique, it would be striking, and it would leave a positive impression. You don’t want to send a ballpoint pen with your logo on it because that’s too easy to ignore. And as a result of this 20% list, it’s not very much of a spray and pray approach. It’s much more of a quality over quantity. I’ve done things, everything from sending gourmet cookies to sending alcohol to attorneys, to sending flowers to dentist office, you name it, video brochures. We’ve sent books. We’ve written books. Lemme share with you the impact of this. When we sent cookies to attorneys, this is again an industry where there are gatekeepers whose primary job is to prevent me from getting in touch, talking to the attorney.

(11:57): So that’s their job is to weed me out, screen me out. And so what we would do is we would send the cookies into the law firm, and these are again, not generic cookies. These are amazing mouthwatering cookies. They would be put in the FedEx box, sent to the law firm, addressed to the lead attorney. Of course it would go right past the mail room. It’s a FedEx box, it’d go right to the attorney’s desk, it’d be sitting there. The attorney would open it up, be this amazing presentation of cookies which would end up in the break room. And then people would be eating these cookies and everyone’s saying, gosh, who brought these amazing cookies? And it was like, oh, this company’s scorpion. And everyone’s like, well, who’s scorpion? There’s this buzz all of a sudden about this company that sent this amazing gift. By the time a salesperson called, which was right after the gift arrived, the gatekeeper would, the energy would be shifted from who are you and who do you want to talk to? Oh, you’re from Scorpion. Let me put you through, he wants to talk to you.

John (12:51): So this may be a little in the weeds, but your research piece, like the list targeting the top 20, and do you have some favorite kind of go-to list sources or platforms or tools?

Corey (13:04): Bring up a really great point, which is that the list is typically thought of as a check the box, go do Apollo or go to ZoomInfo and download a list or just use their interface. The list is the strategy, meaning you have to spend some additional time on the list than you otherwise would. And so what I recommend doing what I teach people to do is to source a list from these third party list vendors like a ZoomInfo or Apollo download leads into your own software like Excel or Google Sheets, and then you want to qualify those leads even further from what they gave you. You want to look for things like what are some objective signals that I could see that would indicate that these businesses can afford my services, that they actually have the pain point that I saw? And you need to go through these on a very manual basis.

(13:59): Unfortunately, I know we all like to go super fast, but if you’re planning on sending cookies, and by the way, it’s not just sending one gift, it’s sending gifts for three years. It’s not a one and done. It’s an ongoing event. Every quarter you send ’em a gift. So that’s even more reason why you want to just slow way down on the list on list build. So that’s kind of how I do it. Another place where you can find a high quality list is every vertical market has associations. They have conferences. And as you begin to target these folks, you’ll be going to these events and you’ll begin to build lists from those experiences where you tend to get really high quality leads from.

John (14:38): And I tell a lot of people, there are a lot of agencies out there, like 10 more clients, good clients that would move the needle significantly, but they’re trying to a list of 5,000 as opposed to that’s list of a hundred. Let’s spend 500 bucks on each of them as opposed to $5 on spray and pray approach. Approach. And

Corey (14:58): That focus, and I think the focus is kind of the thing that helps you to stand out. The fact that you are sending a thoughtful gift, it can be a personalized gift to them. As I said, it’s not just once. They may ghost you on the first gift and that’s okay, but then the next quarter comes, you send ’em a second one and the next quarter comes, you send ’em another one. Eventually you’ve built up all this reciprocity and they’re going to at some point say, okay, I got to talk to John over there at Duct Tape Marketing, because clearly they want to talk to us and they’re being very persistent in a meaningful way. And we also know that people, every attorney, every dentist, they’re going to shop for a new agency once every three years, let’s just call it that. And that’s why the time horizon behind this strategy is it’s a three year program. By the time that every single person on your list has been gifted over a three year period, all of them had an opportunity to go back to market, and you want to be on that list.

John (15:57): So every industry has key people. Everybody knows maybe their authors, they’re big consultants, they’re advisors or accountants or something in the industry. First off, how important is it to get into some relationships with those folks and then second part of how do you do it?

Corey (16:17): Yeah, great question. So the part of the strategy, once you become a vertical market specialist, the benefit of targeting a vertical or one of the unique benefits is every vertical is kind of like a village and everyone kind of knows everybody else. There’s definitely a gossip train and so on and so forth. And in any one of these type of social circles of a vertical, there are going to be people that Malcolm Gladwell calls Mavens, and these mavens are people that everyone else looks to make a decision on who to hire. And so as a vertical market specialist, as you’re trying to build your reputation and visibility in that market, it makes sense to try and build a direct relationship with these mavens versus just going out to market and talking to anyone. I’ll give you an example. One of my clients was focused on the chain restaurant industry, the industry of restaurants that had multiple chains, and there was a maven in that industry.

(17:15): He’s the editor of a magazine called QSR, and he is prolific on LinkedIn and he’s at the keynoting, the conferences on the stages and whatnot. He’s everywhere. Well, as a result of identifying this person as really a maven that people look to as a tastemaker, we made a decision to try and find ways, genuine ways to build a relationship with that person. Of course, we did that over time, and that resulted in a lot of opportunities for my client. That’s number one. And then number two is what I call influential brands. And influential brands are effectively the same as a Maven, but it is sort of a big brand in that vertical that everyone else looks to. If it’s good enough, if this company’s going to hire this agency, well, they’re probably good enough for us. And I saw this firsthand at my last company when we were getting into the franchise world, multi-location businesses, and we landed the biggest, the most well-respected, multi-location franchise business in the industry as really our first client. It was through a relationship. And as a result of that, that led to a lot of really almost frictionless introductions in the franchise space, which ended up being a big growth engine for us.

John (18:29): It’s funny, over the years, I’ve targeted manufacturers that have distribution networks, and the same thing is bring them something, build a relationship, provide value, and they’re very motivated to help their distributors. And so all of a sudden it’s like you’re the person. And as you mentioned, it’s a layup to get the business because in some cases they even had co-op dollars to give them.

Corey (18:53): Yes, yes, exactly. The reason why these things are important is you need to focus first. Once you get clear on who you’re targeting, marketing becomes a whole lot easier. Which keywords to target, which conferences to go to, what associations to get involved in all these things become super clear. It’s those agencies that haven’t made this decision to narrow their focus on this vertical market that are challenged with this things I said, the water down positioning, the ineffective marketing.

John (19:23): So is it safe to say once you get good at one market, you can actually repeat this approach, or should you just stay narrow?

Corey (19:32): It completely depends on the founder and their ambitions. I’ll give you an example. The last agency I worked with where we ran this play, we started off with attorneys, and then it was home services and then franchise. And I think the way that I coach agencies on how to approach this is, number one, you want to get to about 3% of the total addressable market. So if there are a thousand businesses in this market, once you get to 30, that’s a signal that you probably have enough momentum in that vertical that you as the founder, could lift your head and go find another adjacent vertical. What I mean by adjacent is it’s a business that has the same problem that you’re already solving, or it’s a vertical that has the same problem but is not well-served. So the example, my last company was attorneys, local service businesses, and then home services, local service businesses, both depended on Google for new leads, both needed a great website, reputation management, all of those things. That’s what I mean by adjacent.

John (20:32): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, Corey, it was great having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is there someplace you want to invite people to connect with you and obviously find a copy of anyone? Not everyone.

Corey (20:43): Gosh, John. I appreciate that. So the best place to get plugged into more of this type of content is my book, which is called, as you mentioned, anyone, not everyone. I have the website, anyone, not everyone.com, where you can go and learn more about the book. So I invite you to go there.

John (20:59): Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you taking a few moments, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Unlocking the Secrets to Premium Pricing in Professional Services

Unlocking the Secrets to Premium Pricing in Professional Services written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I uncover the intricate world of pricing for professional services. Pricing in the realm of professional services can often feel like a nebulous task, as unlike tangible products, services are intangible and the value they provide can vary greatly from client to client.

Join me as we explore the secrets to unlocking premium pricing in professional services by crafting messages that sell solutions, not services.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

 

1. The importance of messaging: Before even considering pricing, it’s crucial to nail down your messaging. Communicating the problem your services solve and how you uniquely understand your clients’ challenges is the first step towards charging a premium.

2. Differentiation is key: Standing out in a crowded market isn’t just about being different; it’s about showcasing how your unique approach directly addresses your clients’ pain points.

3. Building trust through personalized interactions: In today’s competitive landscape, automated solutions are no longer enough. Clients crave personalized experiences and a deep sense of trust before committing to premium pricing.

4. Productized packages for long-term relationships: Offering productized packages not only simplifies your offerings for clients but also lays the foundation for long-term relationships built on trust and value delivery.

5. Embracing monthly recurring revenue: By focusing on solving specific problems for specific clients in a consistent and reliable manner, you can shift towards a scalable business model centered around monthly recurring revenue.

These key takeaways provide actionable insights into the nuances of pricing professional services, empowering businesses to navigate this tricky landscape with confidence and clarity.

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John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m doing a solo show today. Today I want to talk about how to charge a premium for your services, how to charge more. So we’re going to talk about pricing, but more specifically how to price professional services. Professional services are tough to price, right? I don’t know, you’re essentially selling air in some cases. There’s nothing tangible that you’re going to set on somebody’s desk and say, here it is. However, you’re also in many cases, selling the hope or the promise of some massive result, help you get your life back, put your business on track, help you make more money, change your relationships. It’s something that has a massive potential result attached to the pricing. But here’s the thing that I think a lot of people get wrong. It’s not simply a matter of having some service that is just awesome and gets a great result.

(01:15): Obviously that’s got to be there, but before pricing or before charging a premium anyway really comes messaging. And what I mean by that is in many cases, whether you’re selling accounting services or consulting or like me marketing services or training, you got a lot of competitors essentially saying the same thing, promising the same result. So how do you rise above that? I think one of the real keys is differentiation. Now, I know many people say, you’ve got to have a point of differentiation. USP, whatever, all the other things people call those. But I think where people get this wrong, of course, is nobody really cares that much that you’re different. In some cases, that can be the thing that allows them to say, oh, okay, I know why I would pay you as opposed to them. But a lot of times what we get stuck in doing is explaining how we’re different.

(02:12): Nobody really cares that you’ve got some different framework or different approach until that difference matters to them. And the only way to really help them understand that is not to explain your difference, not to explain your framework and your process even. It’s to first help them understand that you get what they’ve been doing before, why it doesn’t work, that you totally understand. You’re essentially communicating the problem that they have. And a lot of times we get really caught up in communicating the solution that we have and there’s no kind of connection to problem solutions. So by first helping them understand, look, I get why what you’ve done to this date has it really worked? And here’s another key sort of transition, and it’s not your fault. I also get you’ve got all these people screaming in your ear, you’ve got this going on, you’re distracted with this.

(03:08): I, I understand why it’s so hard to solve this problem, and here’s the real issue. Now here’s the solution. For many years, marketers have been talking now about the hero’s journey that’s been around for hundreds of years, and essentially that’s what it is. I understand what your challenge is, why what you’ve done to date hasn’t worked. It’s not your fault, and I’m here to actually guide you to get the solution that will actually finally work for you. And now that differentiation actually means something because they can connect what it is that you do to them solving the problem. You’re essentially in your messaging, you’re promising to solve their greatest problem. So now all of a sudden that differentiation means something to them. So you have to be able to state that in very clear terms. I don’t tell people I sell marketing services or I don’t tell people I license my fractional CMO system until they understand that we work with agencies that are tired of working more and making less.

(04:17): That’s the problem we hear all the time. That’s really what we do. Now here happens to be the different way that we do it, but that’s the start of messaging that allows you to charge a premium. I know I said this was about pricing, and it is, but you can’t have that without the proper setup. You solve a specific problem for a specific person in a specific way. Now I want to listen. Now you can charge a premium for what it is that you do because you are talking about something that nobody else is talking about. And what’s funny, premium pricing, there’s actually far less competition charging premium pricing than there are people that are charging an increasingly falling price point because they don’t have that message. They don’t have that differentiation. They don’t understand the problems that their ideal client is trying to solve.

(05:13): And even if it feels today like, wow, could I really charge that much? Pick a number, $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, whatever it is that you do as a service that you provide. In many cases there’s some amount of fear holding you back because you’ve felt the pressure of being like everybody else. And you go in and you say, I do this. And the next person says, I do this. And what’s the buyer going to do? How much? And so there’s a lot of pressure, downward pressure on pricing in that kind of lower tier. You start getting this messaging right? You start going out and saying, no, we charge a premium because we deliver an amazing value. In fact, we know our value and we can stick to it. You’re going to have far less competition for the ideal client at that level. So it’s kind of counterintuitive, but it makes a ton of sense.

(06:02): And then of course, you can start doing all kinds of the math calculations on this. You want five clients at X price or you want three clients at a much higher price. It’s probably not that much more work to serve clients at that higher price. So even if you get especially initially more nos at that higher price, who cares? And now a word from our sponsor, work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing. They’re a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest hassle-free. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator, and we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness, and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team.

(06:57): And to top it off, each dedicated and full-time work better. Now, professional is 2350 per month and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit work better now.com. Mention the referral code DTM podcast, and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months. That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code, the math will actually help itself work out. If you’re stuck in low pricing on your services today, start going and telling your clients why you need to double and triple what you’re charging them today. You’re going to lose some of them, but again, work the math on it. Probably in the long run you’re actually better off and certainly as you go out to new clients, in fact, I’ll challenge you if you’re listening to this today, and this resonates, this idea of I’m stuck in this price rut.

(07:57): Just the next three people you talk to, next, three prospects you talk to, just shoot a much higher number for your services and see what happens. You might actually be pleasantly surprised that you get no resistance, and maybe the resistance was here right in your own head. I know it sounds really simple, but you get that message part right? And you’re going to have different conversations. Now, another thing that I want to throw in here, this is going to add on, but if you want to have clients for life as opposed to just going out there and doing a project, then going out there and filling the pipeline again and starting over again, here’s one of the things I would urge you, regardless of what you sell, if you’re a marketing consultant, this will really resonate with you, but certainly any service business, professional service business can take this approach, create a productized package.

(08:49): So figure out the real value you bring, the real problem you’re solving, and figure out how on the front end to sell a very repeatable productize. Here’s what you get. Here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s what you’re going to do. Here’s what it costs, has a very set timeline to it, and that’s going to be your initial offering. That’s how you’re going to attract clients. What happens is, first off, it becomes very easy to explain. Everybody else is out there saying, we had this process and we’ll do discovery and we’ll figure this out. And you’re saying, no, we’re going to solve this problem in this way, and here’s what it costs. You’re going to attract some clients that just if nothing else, because of the ease of being able to explain that. But here’s what also is going to happen. You’re going to get really good at delivering that productized initial package.

(09:39): You’re going to be able to deliver far greater value. You are going to actually be able to potentially start delegating some of that consulting work that seems very hard to do for a lot of people because of this productized approach. But what you’ll also do is in that first phase one engagement is you will develop so much trust with your client that the idea of an ongoing client for life relationship is probably a foregone conclusion because of that trust in the relationship that you’ve built. Now, the second piece of that is then a lot of people talk about long-term retainers, and in many cases, they are scoping out what the work is or doing. A heaven forbid, a proposal about what the next six month follow on project might be. And the way that I would suggest that you consider is if you want to have a client for life, what if you mentally asked yourself or maybe actually asked the client at that point, what’s the amount of money that you would feel good or you would feel capable of paying me every month for the rest of your life?

(10:56): Heard another consultant. We’ve been doing this for years, and I finally heard another consultant actually give it a name. He calls it Colorado pricing. I can’t remember actually why he used that term. I haven’t live in Colorado, so that’s probably why I remembered it. But the idea here is that you now have that level of trust that you are going to actually scope out what needs to be done. The client’s not saying, how many hours do I get for that? Or, what are you going to do next week for me? That you are actually saying, look, we’ve got a level of trust. We’ve worked together. I’ve delivered an amazing result. Would you like to have that amazing result as we mature and do more and more for you each progressing month, I’m in charge of the scope. I’m in charge of what that costs me to deliver.

(11:40): Obviously, all of the profit equations that have to go into what you can afford to deliver, but you’ll find that clients get very used to getting that result. They get very used to paying that amount. There’s no more monitoring as long as you’re delivering, obviously. Hopefully that’s a given. But it is a way for you. We have clients that we have kept in that relationship for in excess of 10 years. The business has grown. We’ve matured with them. We’re able to continue to deliver value, but the relationship is such, that becomes their expectation. It becomes a builtin cost for them because they see the return on investment. So let’s wrap this up. Charge more for professional services by having the right message that’s not just, here’s how we’re different or here’s our solution, but it is, here’s the problem that we promise to solve for you because we get it.

(12:31): Nobody else gets it. Nobody else is communicating it. We get it. We’re going to solve your problem in a very specific way using this packaged approach that gives you the first phase of our engagement so that we build this amazing trust and an amazing relationship. Then you’re just going to be a client for life. That is our expectation. Lots goes into what that package looks like. Lots goes into what that fulfillment looks like on an ongoing basis, but this is how you build a monthly recurring revenue model that allows you to scale a professional services business. Alright, that’s it for today. Hopefully we’ll run into a listener or two out there on the road.

Navigating the Challenges of Scaling

Navigating the Challenges of Scaling written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Jason, the CEO of ActiveCampaign, a leading platform for intelligent marketing automation.

A lifelong entrepreneur, Jason has been named to Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40 list and was named EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year Midwest. He is a member of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) and The Economic Club of Chicago. Jason also serves on the board of the Future Founders Foundation, a Chicago-based organization that empowers the next generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs. He is also a regular contributor to Fast Company and Forbes.

Having founded ActiveCampaign as a means to fund his education, Jason pursued a degree in fine arts until shifting his focus entirely to growing the company. He is a self-taught software engineer and technologist. Our conversation dives deep into the challenges that businesses face when scaling up, offering valuable insights and strategies for navigating this crucial phase of growth.

Key Takeaways

Jason emphasizes the importance of maintaining customer focus, embracing change, learning from failure, building a strong team, and staying true to your values when scaling a business. By prioritizing direct interaction with customers, fostering a culture of innovation, viewing setbacks as learning opportunities, investing in employee development, and upholding integrity and ethical conduct, businesses can navigate the challenges of growth and achieve sustainable success.

Questions I ask Jason Vandeboom:

[01:02] Is there a reason why ActiveCampaign was decided to focus specifically on small to mid-sized businesses?

[02:33] Have you been able to keep that self-taught view in the value system and culture of your company?

[03:52] How has your personal life changed since running such a demanding business?

[05:10] When it comes to failures do you have any business advice for people starting out?

[07:37] Do you have a management philosophy as a first-time manager of people and teams ?

[09:10] How do you make decisions about how to innovate?

[12:10] What are you hoping to communicate in positioning yourself as the marketing automation CRM of small teams powering big businesses?

[13:40] What role does AI play in your road map as a leader?

[14:52] Is it an oversimplification to say it’s just better lead scoring?

[15:54] Describe the Leap Year special event ActiveCampaign is organizing?

[17:57] What’s your secret to never getting bored with what you do as a CEO?

[20:16] What’s on your bucket list in the next 5-10 years, outside of work?

 

 

 

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John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jason Vandeboom. He is the founder and CEO of ActiveCampaign. Founded in 2003, ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. Today, ActiveCampaign is the market leader in intelligence driven marketing automation with customers in over 170 countries leveraging the platform to grow their business. He’s also a regular contributor to fast company in Forbes. Having founded active campaign as a means to fund his education, Jason pursued a degree in fine arts until shifting his focus entirely to growing the company and his self-taught software engineer and technologist. So Jason, welcome back to the show.

Jason (00:57): Yeah, thanks for having me. Looking forward to chatting.

John (01:00): So this is at least your third time on the show, and I think we were laughing about it off air that the company was just a couple of years old now. It’s obviously grown in many ways, so it’s really been fun to watch and really be a small, very small part of that growth. ActiveCampaign is very focused on small, mid-sized businesses, SMB market, which a lot of the bigger tech companies kind of ignore for enterprise. Is there any reason that you said no, we’re going to go after that segment and focus on it?

Jason (01:32): Yeah, I think there’s the couple of things. One, just a big believer in this idea of over-delivering on value, and if I think of how do you do that or who can you serve and do that the most, it’s a small team. It’s that individual marketer, small team of marketers looking to do more. It’s almost being that additional team member within that company. One of the most impactful things that I’ve found at least building a business is just the impact. If you can see the impact you’re having on brands throughout the world and on the teams themselves and whatnot, that’s the thing that drives not just myself personally, but selfishly that drives my team as well, right? Because doing something, you can see that immediate impact and so I think that’s part of the reason for it. And then also I think there’s just a huge opportunity and need to help that part of the market. All too often I think people look at that as hard to serve larger companies, that’s fine for them, but there’s a real need opportunity and it’s a challenge, which is exciting.

John (02:33): Yeah. So I mentioned in the intro that you have customers in over 170 countries today, but you essentially were bootstrapped in the very beginning. It sounded like self-taught, which means you were making it up as you were probably going that kind of scrappy mentality. Have you been able to keep that in the culture and the values?

Jason (02:54): I think it’s challenging as you scale, because as you scale, all of a sudden it becomes more about, success can be sometimes function role, you start to get further and further away from the actual customer. And so I think the key for me is how do we keep everyone as close to the customer as possible? If I’m not talking to a customer, if I’m not directly interfacing with the customer in a given week, I’m just going to get farther and farther away myself. How to replicate that across lots of people, across lots of departments, lots of teams, certainly a challenge, but I think it’s easier when you’re focused on so many interesting brands that we work with. And you can take these stories, you can bring customers to meet the team. It’s like the purpose behind what you do is something I think people don’t always focus enough on. And that purpose can be very motivating. It can be kind of a rallying cry. It can help drive what you’re looking to do as a business itself

John (03:52): Personally, how has your life changed? You didn’t have kids when you started this company, you’re now the CEO of really a leader in a very large industry. What’s that done to, I don’t know, work-life balance? I hate that term, but what’s that done to? How have you maintained sanity? Let’s put it that way.

Jason (04:10): Yeah, I think it’s changed, right? And I think the only just embracing just constant change. I think that’s what makes it exciting. If there was a moment where I thought I had it all figured out, if there’s a moment where there’s not something new to try to solve for, then it’s kind a boring operating model in my mind. And so I think it’s building team, but it’s building team and keeping them close to that customer experience, close to the customer and ultimately having to focus on different things over time. But it’s not up to any single individual, but having the right people, building the right team, having the focus to the customer, to the problem that’s being solved, that’s where I put a lot of my time and energy, which is very different than earlier on where it would be actually writing code or doing something.

John (05:03): So a lot of times when people look at companies that have really been very successful or at least certainly outwardly appear that to them, we don’t have all the behind the scenes. Are there any kind of personal or business failures where you went, well, hopefully we learned something from that, but that was a disaster? Anything along the way that I think it’s actually helpful for people to hear that when they’re growing a business?

Jason (05:28): No, I think there’s, it’s just a countless running list of maybe not, I don’t want to call ’em all disasters, but of these learning moments. But I think to your point, I think it’s the most helpful thing to embrace that. And then so one thing I like to do is I like to surface If we’re doing a company update, if I do weekly emails to the entire company, try to surface obviously the wins and the positives and stuff like that, but also try to surface and celebrate. We tried this thing, we all rally behind it, total failure. Cool. We realize that success in itself and keep moving. That’s really hard to get people to be able to embrace it though, because oftentimes through our work there’s a very personal attachment to a lot of the work. And so failure is not even thought of as we didn’t do something right business wise, but it’s like people take that on as their personal connection.

(06:23): We spend so much time working, we spend so much time in this work atmosphere, so it makes sense, but I think it’s this, you have to both as an individual, but then try to get others to identify failure, call it out in not a terrible way, but just if we can call it out quickly, that’s success. To just build this idea of iteration. And that’s something that’s always been obsessed with is just how do you just continually iterate and find these little moments of progression. When I think of failure moments that stand out, it’s like when we get too locked into an idea, we want to do something, maybe it’s a marketing type of campaign, maybe it’s a certain type of product offering and we’re like, we’re going to do this, and we just get locked in. We get blinded to the reality of we different data points, different things that are showing us maybe it’s not the right move or the customers are not responding to it, partners utilizing people that have a different view into your business. If you don’t listen there, that’s when you’re going to just start to extend that time duration of spending time on something that isn’t value add. And that’s when it moves from failure is kind of a good thing. Realize it to you just wasted a bunch of time.

John (07:38): A lot of startup founders have to actually learn to be managers sometimes have never managed people and certainly have never managed managers of people. I mean, is there any kind of one people management philosophy that you swear by

Jason (07:52): Not a singular philosophy or framework that’s out there? I think everyone is learning in their own way. One thing that I didn’t do a lot of early on was just reach out to other people thinking that they wouldn’t want to actually share or they wouldn’t share a reality. What I found is it’s quite the opposite, both when it comes from founder to founder, but then also different functional roles. There is a people that have gone through different experiences of learning going from not managing anyone, demand your managers, to your point, there’s all sorts of trials and celebration, all sorts of failure, all sorts of interesting pieces. And so to learn from others in addition to just constantly pushing yourself, I think that’s really the only way of doing it. And then the only other piece is just having that comfort level with people that you work with to be able to give really direct continual feedback versus holding in a thought to an annual cycle or something like that.

John (08:54): I’ve had a fellow Chicago on the show, Jason Freed founder of Basecamp, and one of their philosophies was, you don’t build features in just because people ask for ’em, but I’m sure you feel pressure all the time. People are wanting just make it do this little thing or do that little thing. How do you make decisions about how to innovate?

Jason (09:14): It has to be guided. So customer feedback is so important. Partner feedback is so important. It helps guide the themes of where you should focus, but if you do it exactly how someone is describing it, it’s probably been done before. You’re going to lack innovation by the very fact of it’s trying to replicate something, right? So to try to get to that root cause of what is actually trying to be solved, how can we do it a little bit differently? And then also to your point, how do you not actually feel compelled to do what someone is asking? And that is not easy. We had a situation once years ago and we had a potential deal that would’ve been a million dollar plus type of contract type of deal. It was just like they’re just going to take a quarter or two of our roadmap, so get certain things and it was this real testing moment of the team was playing.

(10:09): It would be nice to have some of the stuff actually kind of like we want to do anyway, but they want to do it in such a specific way that we think it would actually be muted in value for 80% of the population. And if we’re starting to think of something is not valuable for a material portion of the customer partner base, then that’s a distraction. It could be the short-term win, but long-term, we’re probably not going to appreciate it in that situation. We actually chose to not pursue and not go forward with that opportunity. Probably looking back at it, the right call in the moment, painful, sad, kind of happy we made the right call. So promotions.

John (10:53): It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with a must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs. And they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider. You can try ActiveCampaign for free for 14 days and there’s no credit card required. Just visit active campaign.com/duct tape. That’s right. Duct Tape Marketing podcast listeners who sign up via that link will also receive 15% off an annual plan if purchased by March 31st, 2024. That’s activecampaign.com/duct tape. Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today.

John (12:09): Yeah, awesome. So you’ve recently leaned into positioning, obviously marketing automation, CRM still, but small teams powering big businesses. What are you hoping to really communicate through that?

Jason (12:22): So we’ve always been about how do you unlock more, how do you allow that individual or that team of marketers to be able to do more With the idea that we’re doing a lot of the feature function, we’re doing a lot of the execution of work, we’re trying to tap into the genius of the marketer and try to extend that, right? And so we’ve always been trying to describe ourselves of we’re SMB friendly, we’re helping people in mid-market companies as well. And ultimately the commonality we have across all of our customers, across all these countries in the world, it’s these teams that are doing remarkable things that are doing more than they could have done before. And so this idea of small teams building a big business that just resonates. And at a time like today, most every marketing team, every marketer I talk to, they’re being asked to do a little bit more with less. And there’s this sufficiency. There’s also this, there’s a lot of businesses trying to figure out how do we grow in this new situation that we’re in? And you put all that together and it just creates this opportunity to help unlock growth, help be that partner, that additional team member in a way to the marketer, to that marketing team.

John (13:32): I think that’s some of the initial allure or promise, whether it’s true or not, we can debate of ai. And what role does AI play in your roadmap as a part of the tool, as a leading edge of the tool? How do you see it?

Jason (13:50): Yeah, so I think a lot of people have been focused on AI in the way of content, and I think that to be helpful, it’s like a helpful tool for the marketer, but I think that’s a small piece of it that in reality what we’ve already been trying to do is how do we take these ideas marketers have build upon them to give them the next kind of light bulb moment. So when I think of our product roadmap of where we’re investing from the AI standpoint, there’s some of that in terms of content, getting content very personalized down to the individual contact, but kind starting with the root of what the marketer thinks it should be, and then focusing even more time on what is that next part of the journey the marketers should be thinking about, what’s the next part of the journey the marketers should be crafting? How can we start to preset some of that for them? So then give them these light bulb moments that’s already kind of like in a structural format with content, everything like that. But then they can take their own, they know the business better, they know their customer better and craft from there. I think that assist type of mode is where I have the most excitement.

John (14:52): I mean, is it an oversimplification to say it’s just better lead scoring?

Jason (14:57): I think so because I think lead scoring by itself is just thinking about typically trying to group people into segments or buckets and rally the different types of paths one can create at a customer experience, the different ideas of what are you not already doing? Maybe it’s something you’re not doing for repeat customers or maybe you’re just missing nurturing in different parts of the life cycle. Figuring out based off of where others have had success and where things could make sense to explore ideas like that that you are not thinking about. But to your point, I think part of it also is here’s a bucket of contacts and that just should be marketed a different way, should be having a different customer experience. But I think it can be far more of this. The best way I can describe it’s this light bulb generating machine with that also gives you some of the structure as well.

John (15:51): So 2024 has an extra day in it. February 29th leap day in leap year, you guys are doing a kind of fun event, an audacious event. Maybe I’d let you describe it, but a little about your leap day.

Jason (16:07): Yeah, so we see it as leap day provides extra time, it provides an extra ability for people to get more done through the use of automation. That’s also building on this idea of save time, let’s be able to do more with it. And that allows you to do other things in your business, other things in your personal life, whatever it may be. And so yeah, we have this very subtle idea of doing a very long online event all focused around the marketer and how to build out more for your business customer experiences and through automation. And we have an exciting array of sponsors all lined up that have all gotten together that we’re all working together on, and tremendous amount of speakers as well, providing something that not only fits an entire day, which is pretty crazy for an event, but across all these different regions as well. And the exciting part about that, at least that I’m personally really excited about too is there’s different tactics, there’s different ways, there’s different themes, there’s different macro situations throughout the world that’ll come to life as part of this as well. It’s going to be pretty exciting.

John (17:13): So you didn’t say it as directly, but I mean you’re literally going to run for 24 hours. The event is going to go when people are sleeping in one part of the world and watching it in another part of the world.

Jason (17:26): And actually longer 29 hours we’re going to hit all the days around all the, a

John (17:33): Lot

Jason (17:33): Of, I think there’ll be a couple people that are around for the whole thing. The expectation is not everyone watching it live all the entire time, but it’s going to be quite an interesting event

John (17:44): And there ought to be some sort of award for that. If somebody can actually do it for 29 hours, you got to have some prize for that. That sounds amazing. Really, like I said, very innovative, very clever. Should get tons of attention. When we were talking, again, I think off air, this part of it, you’ve been the CEO of this company for 20 plus years and you mentioned, and I thought this was really exciting to hear that you still don’t get bored. I mean, you don’t get bored with what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis. I tell people that about my work as well. What’s an average day for a CEO of a, I’m going to get the number wrong, 750 plus person organization.

Jason (18:24): It’s very much around some of the themes that we’re working on. I take a particular interest in the product side of the business. Where are we going? How does that influence, how does that work with our customers, our partners? I won’t be talking to them all the time. And then how do we really get alignment just as a company? We’re spread out across the entire world. We’re in 170 plus countries in terms of customers, we have team around the entire world. How do we get this rallying point of how are we going to actually help make more time for all of our customers? How are we going to help give more of those light bulb moments for customer experiences and then just continue to scale all aspects of the business? So a good portion of my time also is just on team and building, aligning all sorts of things that it’s very different than a few years ago, but as I was describing, it’s just continual evolution of challenges and experiences and continuing to see that impact we’re having on so many brands.

(19:24): And that’s exciting about the event coming up for the Leap Day event as well. It’s just this, if we’re able to help anyone find, make more time and their day-to-day or to be able to do more with their business, automate more with their business, that can be truly changing for someone’s, just what they’re able to do within that role career at the business as a whole. And that’s something that they can only build on over time. It’s never done. I think that’s the both building a business, but then also this idea of marketing, customer experience. What can you automate the blend of automation, human touch, you’re never done. Every time you find a little more ability to craft it, that next thing is all of a sudden the new light bulb pops up. And that’s why we’re trying to play that role of here’s this next idea of to make more time for yourself and for your business.

John (20:14): Awesome. All right, one last question in a personal question. Anything on your bucket list outside of work next five, 10 years?

Jason (20:22): That’s a good question. Nothing that

John (20:23): You got young kids, right? You’re just trying to survive.

Jason (20:26): Honestly, it’s like where I’m at right now in life with young kids. My bucket list is what they want to do in life and making sure I can make enough time to both try what they’re trying to do. Whether that be something I can totally fail at and hurt myself with or not in terms of sports and activities, but really finding, and that’s why I love automation as well. It’s this idea of how you more time for those moments in life that matter the most.

John (20:54): Sounds like since you’ve moved to Colorado, you’ve taken up mountain biking. That’s what I’m guessing.

Jason (20:58): A little bit of biking. Yeah.

John (21:01): I myself have taken up mountain biking in the last five years and when you said try not to kill yourself, that’s kind of where I am at Mountain bugging. Yeah. Awesome, Jason. Well, it was great having you stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. We will have a link to the Leap Day extravaganza in the show notes. Anywhere else you want to invite people to maybe connect with you and find out more about what you’re up to.

Jason (21:22): Yeah, no, definitely check that out. I’ll be around during most all of the events. I’ll try to make it 29 hours. We’ll see. Feel free to reach out directly through that online email, anything. But appreciate having me and really enjoyed the conversation.

John (21:37): Awesome. Well hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the ski slopes or something. In real life.

Mastering SEO in the Age of AI

Mastering SEO in the Age of AI written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Stephan Spencer, an acclaimed SEO expert and founder of net Concepts, an interactive agency specializing in search engine optimization. Stephan is also a bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, and host of two popular podcasts, “Get Yourself Optimized” and “Marketing Speak.” With a wealth of experience in the field, In this episode Stephan and I uncover the evolving landscape of SEO in the age of AI, sharing invaluable insights and strategies for success.

Key Takeaways

Embark on a transformative journey with Stephan Spencer as he discusses the intersection of SEO and artificial intelligence. Learn how to leverage AI to optimize your website for search engines and stay ahead of the competition. Discover the importance of adapting traditional SEO tactics to accommodate the advancements in AI technology, from content creation to technical optimization.

Unlock the secrets to mastering SEO in the age of AI, and position your business for sustainable growth and success in the digital realm. Whether you’re a seasoned SEO professional or a business owner looking to enhance your online presence, Stephan’s expertise will guide you towards achieving your goals in the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization in 2024.

 

Questions I ask Stephan Spencer:

[00:58] What are the highlights of the new edition of The Art of SEO?

[04:45] What are some of the core tactics that are still proving effective in 2024?

[07:57] How would generative search impact SEO tactics?

[13:37] What do we need to prepare for and come to expect from voice search?

[15:08] What new updates have come to light concerning local search?

[17:41] What are your favourite AI tools for optimizing content?

[22:10] Where can people connect with you and grab the latest edition of your book?

 

 

More About Stephan Spencer:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now

Visit WorkBetterNow.com mention the referral code DTM Podcast and get $150 off for your first 3 months.

 

John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Stephan Spencer. He’s an SEO expert founder of the Interactive Agency, net Concepts and bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, life hacker, podcaster, and contributor to Harvard Business Review and Adweek. He also host his own podcast, in fact, two podcast shows, get Yourself Optimized and Marketing Speak. He’s the author of three books, including one we’re going to talk about today that is now in its fourth edition, the Art of SEO, mastering Search Engine Optimization. So Steven or Stephan, welcome to the show.

Stephan (00:48): Thanks for having me.

John (00:49): I have a brother that spells his name that way, but it’s Stephan, so forgive me if I say it wrong. It

Stephan (00:55): Happens all the time.

John (00:57): I bet it does. So I guess if there’s a need for a fourth edition of a book as big as the art of SEO, it must be that some things keep changing. So what are the highlights? We’ll drill down into them, but what are some of the highlights of this new edition?

Stephan (01:13): Yeah, was so much. I mean, it was pretty much a rewrite from the bottom up. So actually the previous edition, the third edition was a thousand pages, and so we had to cut down quite a lot because the more material in a book, the fewer copies that sell it gets a little bit ridiculous. Who wants to read a thousand page book?

(01:33): So there’s a whole chapter now on AI that wasn’t present in the third edition, and that’s using LLMs generative AI to create everything from keyword strategies and processing your keyword lists into different kinds of use cases, categorizing and grouping keywords together, everything like that to doing the more technical stuff like writing blocks of Etre Lang tags. I’m getting a little geeky here. I don’t want to make this full of acronyms and buzzwords and so forth, but there’s a lot of technical stuff that you can do the heavy lifting using AI now and not have to do it the old fashioned way. So there’s a lot on that. There’s material on things like page speed and core web vitals or three different metrics and core web vitals. That’s a Google innovation that’s coming out of Google. They want you to have a fast loading website, and that relates to what they call their page experience update.

(02:41): So there’s material on that. There’s material on the helpful content update, and that’s actually a series of updates. They want to ensure that people are not creating a huge RAF of content using LMS AI that will fill the internet with a bunch of croft things that are not really that valuable or are not properly fact checked. There’s already lots of issues with AI creating and just making up facts, references, studies and that sort of thing. So if you’re putting out AI material as if it’s handcrafted, you could end up getting by the helpful content updates or by other algorithmic adjustments from Google or a manual penalty even. So you got to keep up with the times.

John (03:28): And there’s a few things you mentioned. Again, I’m getting off of the order of my questioning here that I’ve had prepared, but there’s a few things you mentioned that I’ve seen immediate impact. I mean, we’ve had a couple websites that for whatever reason got really slow. They fell off the core web core vitals threshold and just immediately started seeing results tank when you fix ’em and they come back. So there’s no debating that that’s a ranking factor, is there? So

Stephan (03:59): Maybe let’s, yeah, actually sometimes less is more. So there’s this tactic or this approach in SEO called content pruning, which means you actually take old obsolete content off of your website, or at least no index it, so it’s not part of Google’s search index anymore, and that can actually help your overall website perform better in the search results.

John (04:23): Yeah, we had a 2000 page site that we did just that to 1400 pages and immediately lifted their results. They had a lot of stuff on there that just was probably just not relevant anymore to the reader. So let’s talk about, maybe if we can categorize what are some of the core tactics that are still proving effective in 2024?

Stephan (04:45): So it’s important to understand that the tried and true techniques and tactics of SEO still apply in terms of identifying good keywords, topics that resonate or relate to your audience. So we don’t want to lose track of these tried and true things, optimizing title tags and the body copy and all that sort of stuff, doing proper keyword research, optimizing the technical underpinnings of your website, doing all the configuration of your server and so forth using Yost SEO plugin for WordPress. These sorts of things are still applicable, but now with the advent of ai, we need to find ways to differentiate your website to make it seem like it’s handcrafted, it’s fact checked, it is authoritative and trustworthy. So there’s this acronym from Google Quality Rater Guidelines. It’s EAT, it to be EAT. This is a Google acronym, and it stands for experience expertise, authorit and Trustworthiness.

(06:05): And AI does not have any experience. It cannot write about its experiences, learning how to downhill ski or how to basket weave, or how to, I don’t know, train for an Olympic sport. So that’s where the experience of a human really differentiates. And if you can prove that to an algorithm at Google, that’s going to be very important. So it’s not just about showing your credentials of the different degrees, diplomas that you’ve earned and all that, but actually having the experience displayed in a way that looks super legit. It’s almost like you’re going to look super credible. And this idea of being super credible, I am going to steal a page from Peter Diamandis playbook, and that is that when he announced the xprize, he did not just, and it’s a $10 million purse, so the winning team would get $10 million. Well, guess what? He didn’t have the money. So he announced it without the funding, but he had super credibility because he had on stage with him making the announcement, multiple NASA astronauts and the former deputy director of nasa, it was super credible. Nobody asked him, do you have the money? So for years he didn’t have the money until finally he found the donor, the patron. So if you can show yourself as super credible to an AI and a human visitors and do that in a way that doesn’t look like you’re being bragga, braggadocious, whatever, that’s really the winning formula.

John (07:55): I mean, just from a practical business standpoint, would you say things like case studies of real life, examples of doing the work that you’re describing, or even FAQs, I mean things like that, does that add another level of experience

Stephan (08:08): Potentially? Yep. I would say if you can provide, let’s say a testimonial that’s not just a written testimonial with a person’s first name and the first initial of their last name, but you actually have all their details, their full name, their title, their company, their location. You have a video of them, you have a headshot of them that looks really quite credible, and if you can even better get them to talk about what didn’t work or why they almost didn’t sign up with your service or buy your product, that’s really quite compelling. So anytime that you can augment your and your assumptions with hard data and with real world examples, screenshots, charts, graphs, stuff that helps build your case and substantiate your claims, you’re going to be in much better shape.

John (09:10): You know what I think is always funny is over the years, what you just mentioned, that’s how you are more credible to a potential buyer, even without search. I mean that just comes to your website, sees the data, sees the proof, and it just feels like with every change in SEO or optimization techniques, it’s really just getting it closer to what would be good for a human period,

Stephan (09:34): Right? That’s right, yeah. But on top of that, you have considerations now that you are writing for ais as well as for humans. You’re not going to write primarily for an ai. You’re not going to try and keyword stuff. Your article. I hope that’s been done in the past and it’s never worked well and it won’t work in the future. But if you are keeping in mind a core audience of ais as an audience, reading your quote, reading your article, I think you’re going to end up with a better outcome. So that includes things like how do I interlink these different pages together? How do I lead people on a story arc or a hero’s journey? Because leading the AI through that hero’s journey too.

John (10:22): So you mentioned AI’s reading and playing a part in search, so this might be a good time to ask about the whole concept of generative search and how that’s going to impact probably two things, not only SEO tactics, but certainly search

Stephan (10:38): Behavior. That’s right. If you go to search generative experience, SGE from Google and you start asking it questions, you can get some misinformation from it, just like with any ai, because remember, we have hallucinations. Those are not going to go away in the future. Those issues of it’s essentially an auto complete, it’s an auto complete on steroids, what’s the next word? What’s the next word? What’s the next word? And if it doesn’t have an answer ready and available, we’ll just make it up. So there’s going to be a lot of fact checking and gatekeeping to make sure that wrong information isn’t served up, especially when it relates to financial matters or with medical advice or anything like that. So I personally don’t anticipate search generative experience being the primetime kind of answer engine that people have been touting it to be because of those risks.

(11:37): I mean, think of the liability for Google. If it tells you to take some sort of pharmaceutical and there’s a contraindication or some sort of side effect, lawsuits will abound. So I think that it will be more of an add-on feature for who knows how many months or even years. But I do see it as the future, and we’ll be talking to our computers and our devices more than we’ll be looking at them I think, in the future. So it’ll be like Star Trek computer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if your website has that future in mind when you’re creating content, then you’re going to be in a much better position. You’re going to lead competitors when they’re just writing for today. You know the Wayne Gretzky quote, skate to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is at.

John (12:29): And now a word from our sponsor. Work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing. They’re a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest hassle-free. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator, and we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness, and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team. And to top it off each dedicated and full-time work better now, professional is 2350 per month and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit work better now.com. Mention the referral code DTM podcast, and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months. That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code. So you led really right into my next question. We’ve been talking about voice search probably since Syria came around. So where do we stand in voice search? You just talked about talking to our computers more than viewing them. So where do we stand today in that? What do we need to be prepared for? Because again, it’s one of those things I feel like we’ve been talking about for 10 years and

Stephan (13:56): We’re still talking about it. It’s still coming when you have a result that is less than awesome. When you’re asking, for example, your Amazon device, I’m not going to say the word begins with an A and she’s listening right now for it’s wake word and it’s going to start chiming in on this conversation. So that device, when you ask it simple questions that Google would just nail on the first try and it completely gets it a hundred percent wrong or just doesn’t give you any answer whatsoever and say, I don’t know the answer to your question, that’s frustrating. And it makes people just not want to even try this. There will be a tipping point though, where you get much more than just, or a recipe or a timer from your Amazon Echo. And that is the point. That tipping point is where this will completely take off. And if you are not prepared for that, you’re going to be chasing after a train that’s left the station. So plan on this being an eventuality because it is an eventuality. It’s just a matter of the timing.

John (15:06): So talk a little bit about, I know you cover local search, obviously there are a lot of businesses that they’re only trying to people in their town find them. So what are some new realities, if you will, in that kind of business that’s the remodeling contractor that just wants people to find them?

Stephan (15:23): Yeah, there’s been a lot of innovations with local search, and if you’re familiar with that world, there’s this kind of a blending of paid search and local SEO with LSA

(15:40): Local search ads. You’ve got these tools that I just can’t imagine not using them for local SEO, like local Falcon, which will show your physician in Google Maps results, the three pack, the local pack and the Google results. If you are, let’s say even 10 miles away from your current location, your headquarters, your local results could be markedly different. And how are you going to know without VPNs or traveling around town and doing searches from your mobile phone? You need to use a tool like Local Falcon. It’ll show you a grid of whether you’re in the top three positions and what position you’re at, and it’s kind of like a heat map sort of thing and across a whole metro area. So you can see, oh, I’m really strong in this part of town, but not at like I’m invisible in this other part of town.

(16:41): Maybe I need to start up a satellite office by appointment only. Not a sketchy thing like a UPS store location, but a real legit office there. And you don’t have to pay a fortune for that. It might be under a thousand dollars a month for an office that has signage that is really a real office, not a PO box, and that could make a world of difference. And now you’ve got two locations and now you’re really strong in that other part of town that you were invisible for. How are you going to know this and track this without a tool like Local Falcon? So yeah, you need different tools and strategies for local search than just regular SEL.

John (17:27): You said 10 miles. I’ve seen half a mile in a very competitive, like I live salon, a hair salon or something where there’s one on every corner. Really, geographic proximity is tough. You mentioned tools like Local Falcon. What are some AI tools, business people who are trying to optimize their content, create new content, be more efficient in creating content? What are your favorite current tools? I know tomorrow I’ll ask you and it’ll change, but what are they

Stephan (17:55): Today I’m going to start with the tried and true obvious AI tools, and that would be Chat g, pt, and Claude, which I would think I consider to be, it’s it’s big rival or Arch Enemy. Anthropic is the creator of Claude, and Open AI is the creator of Chat, GPT. And some of the folks, some of the top leadership at Open AI left and started Anthropic and created this competing Claude AI tool. And it’s amazing. It’s got a hundred thousand at this point in time, a hundred thousand token limit on input, meaning that you could upload an entire book and have it use that as part of your input. So you could upload, let’s say a manifesto or how you think and operate in the world and your values and philosophy on life and business or whatever for your industry. You have that manifesto, you upload that and you ask Claude or chat GPT questions based on your understanding of my company, my brand from this uploaded manifesto, come up with a voice and tone guideline for me, come up with a social media strategy for me, come up with an editorial calendar for my blog for me, and it will do incredibly well.

(19:19): And that is so much better than just typing in a prompt. I mean, yeah, you get sophisticated with prompts and do your prompt engineering, but why not upload something that’s really representative of your company, your brand, your unique differentiating point of difference, and then you let the AI come up with all sorts of different things, social media posts and draft blog articles and strategy documents and positioning statements and so forth based on its understanding of you from that kind of cornerstone piece of content that you’ve uploaded. So there’s that. There’s using super prompts, which are prompts, the input that you type in. It’s on steroids because everything has been thought through, and you don’t have to think through all these things yourself. You don’t have to come up with like, please ignore all prior prompts. I want it to not be influenced by a whole series of previous questions that I asked.

(20:23): I want it to create, let’s say a table marked down table. So it’s nice pretty formatted table. I want it to not display any kind of narration or explanation around why it’s outputting particular things. Just want the output file of whatever my editorial calendar is that I don’t want to explain. Its thinking as it’s going along. So all these things baked into what’s called a super prompt, which might be 250 words of stuff. If you can paste somebody’s super prompt, whether it’s on creating a keyword strategy or on even creating other super prompts or on writing a blog post or something, you are going to end up with such better output because the old adage from the programmer days of garbage in, garbage out still applies. If you write a lousy prompt, you’ll get lousy output. So that’s the difference maker right there. And you don’t have to go to all the fancy new tools, which may not exist in six months. They might go out of business. So if you’ve got a podcast, you could be using, let’s say, cap show or Cast Magic or decipher without, it’s like decipher without the E at the end. It’s just R without ER. So these tools are awesome, and who knows which ones will exist in six months from now chat, GPT, that’ll exist, Claude will exist, Google Bard will exist. So you get masterful at those. Wow. You’re going to be definitely leapfrogging your competitors.

John (22:05): Yeah. Awesome advice. Well, Stefan, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere you’d invite people to connect with you, learn about your work? Obviously pick up a copy of the latest edition of The Art

Stephan (22:16): Of sel? Yeah. In fact, if let’s say, if Handful, I’ve got the publisher is O’Reilly, and so I can’t just give away copies of the book, just add infinitum. But I did get permission from my publisher to give away a handful of copies. So if somebody wants to email me@stephanspencer.com and just say they want to kind of put themselves into the lottery for a free art of SEO fourth edition digital copy, I’ll send some of them and actually everyone can get a copy of Google Power Search, which is in its third edition, which I do have a hundred percent of the rights of. So I can send that to everybody who sends an inquiry. My personal website’s, stephan spencer.com and net concepts.com is my agency. And you mentioned at the beginning my two podcast shows Marketing Speak, which you’ve been on, john marketing speak.com, and then get yourself optimized, which is get yourself optimized.com. Not an SEO podcast may sound like one, but it’s actually personal development.

John (23:20): Nice. Awesome.

Boss Beauty Unveiled: Empowering Women Through Inspiring Stories & Strategies

Boss Beauty Unveiled: Empowering Women Through Inspiring Stories & Strategies written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Lisa Mayer, an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and co-founder and CEO of Boss Beauties, a media and entertainment brand with roots in digital collectibles that inspires women and girls to be everything they want to be through impact programs, content, and consumer products.

With a mission to inspire women and girls worldwide, Lisa shares insights into the power of women’s empowerment and the strategies for fostering it in today’s world.

Key Takeaways

Lisa Mayer, CEO of Boss Beauties, shares actionable strategies for women’s empowerment in this episode. Drawing from her book: Boss Beauty: Inspiration to Be Everything You Want, we uncover embracing the fearless pursuit to cultivating confidence and kindness. In this girl powered episode listeners gain insights into the Boss Beauty mindset. Through mentorship and taking proactive steps towards empowerment, women and men can make a meaningful impact in their lives and communities. Join us on this transformative journey towards a brighter, and equal future for all.

Questions I ask Lisa Mayer:

[00:51] Describe this very visual book in your own words?

[03:09] Would you say that men can learn a lot from this book as well?

[03:40] With this book what does Boss Beauty hope to accomplish and bring into the world?

[05:29] What are digital collectibles, how and why are they featured in this book?

[08:14] What was the selection process like for the inspirational women that feature in this book ?

[14:30] Would you say that overcoming adversity is a common characteristic the women featured in this book share?

[16:54] Do you have some advice and strategies for the particular kinds of challenges women face in business as opposed to men?

[18:38] Would you say you have a superpower?

[20:33] How would you define boss beauty?

[22:05] Where can people connect with you and grab a copy of your book?

 

 

More About Lisa Mayer:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Sign up for a 15% discount on annual plans until Mar 31,2024. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Lisa Mayer. She’s an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and co-founder and CEO of Boss Beauties, a media and entertainment brand with roots in digital collectibles that inspires women and girls to be everything they want to be through impact programs, content and consumer products. We’re going to talk about her recently released Book Boss Beauty Inspiration to Be Everything You Want. So Lisa, welcome to the show.

Lisa (00:43): Thank you so much for having me, John. I’m excited to be here.

John (00:46): So the book, obviously we do video snippets, but most people are listening to this. So describe the book because it’s obviously a very visual book, more so than a lot of books. So describe the book.

Lisa (00:59): Yeah, absolutely, and I’ll show it on screen a little bit. I know you do some clips and so you can see it as well. So Boss Beauty, inspiration to Be Everything you Want. It officially launches on March 12th, just in time for Women’s History Month. We thought if we’re going to have the book launch at a special time, make it happen in Women’s History Month, which is exciting. But the book features inspiration advice, real world wisdom and quotes and inspiration from Incredible Boss Beauties that I’ve met along the way. Just many different role models from a lot of different industries. So we have Olympian, Allison Felix, who has some inspiration and a quote in the book. We have one of our board members, Randy Zuckerberg, so she’s featured in the book. We have a NASCAR race car driver, Julia Landor, who I attended actually one of her races a little over a year ago.

(02:05): And to be a female NASCAR race driver in that industry, it’s very competitive, so we wanted to feature her, but basically the book features a lot of wisdom and advice from incredible women role models in all different industries. The book also features the artwork from our Boss Beauties digital collectible collection. So we have 10,000 unique portraits, our Boss Beauties, and the book artwork is really bold and vibrant and bright, and so the book actually can live on coffee tables, desks, bookshelves, you name it, schools in boardrooms of women and girls of all ages. And I hope that it really inspires them when they’re going into a big meeting or maybe a big pitch or something that they’re a little nervous for. We want that book to be like, it’s cheering them on during those situations.

John (03:09): What about us guys? Don’t you think some men should actually acquire this book as well?

Lisa (03:14): A hundred percent I do. Yeah. And we have a lot of people in the Boss Beauties community that have gotten the book for their daughters, or maybe a woman they mentor, someone that they work with. So a hundred percent we’re building a community of women and men all over the world.

John (03:36): It’s probably self-evident somewhat, but I always like to ask a lot of authors, what would be a perfect accomplishment for this book? What do you want it to actually help bring to the world or do?

Lisa (03:48): Yeah, for me, the book is something where it’s really special to me that this book is getting our digital collectibles artwork that started in the digital realm out there into the world in a physical format. So I love that our digital collectibles will now live in this book and can be in bookstores, on desks all over where women and girls can pick it up physically. So just the fact that we’re getting this book out there is really special and meaningful to me. But my dream is to get this book out there to millions of women and girls all over the world. I dream really big. You never know if you put that dream out there, but I’d love it to be in schools, in businesses, colleges, all over the world and really to reach millions of women and girls. But the stories that I hear even about Boss Beauties reaching various girls in the community, it’s always really special. So even when we reach one woman or girl or motivate them, I love hearing those stories too. So of course any way we can make an impact at a grassroots level too that’s really meaningful,

John (05:13): Just need to get it in the hands of Taylor Swift at this point. I think that’s hundred percent.

Lisa (05:18): Yeah, that’s true. That’s a good point. They called it the Taylor Swift Effect, I think. Right?

John (05:27): It’s the new Oprah Effect. You’ve mentioned digital collectibles a few times. I know what they are, but maybe some people in the audience don’t really understand what that concept is, so maybe talk a little bit about what that actually is, and of course then how and why it’s featured in the book.

Lisa (05:43): Yeah, of course. Absolutely. So Boss Beauties, the way our company originally started, and right now we’re really building a media and entertainment brand. So we’ve branched out of where our roots were in Web3, but for anyone who’s listening that’s not familiar, boss Beauties initially started in the fall of 2021 and my son was about three months old. I’m going to share a little of the story too. That’s perfect. So my son was about three months old. It was not actually the most ideal time at that moment to start a new company, launch a new venture, but I had followed John, I’m sure you saw it’s super interesting to follow what was happening in the Web3 space with NFTs. We are now calling them digital collectibles, but just seeing the rise of digital assets with digital artwork. I mean, people were really buying digital assets. And so at that time, we launched Boss Beauties.

(06:48): We launched 10,000 Digital Collectibles again at that time known as NFTs, and we sold them and we built this global community. And what that really means is that people were able to acquire a digital asset. I mean, we all understand when we’d go to the store or buy something on Amazon maybe, or to buy new clothing, or maybe we buy a new phone or we all understand and really grasp what it means to buy and purchase a physical product that we can hold in our hand. That’s not something that any of us need explaining, right? But digital assets, that has been something that’s been growing over the last few years. And so consumers started to buy digital assets in the form of digital collectibles. And it’s really interesting because you can actually track who owns a particular digital asset on the blockchain. So if you’re looking and if you’re listening and you don’t see this, I’m showing it to John, but I’m showing him one NFT if we can actually see who owns these particular boss beauties because there’s a certificate of ownership, which is really cool.

John (08:14): How did you go about selecting, you mentioned some of the people that were going to meet in the book. Did you have a criteria or a process, or did you just want a lot of diversity in who was represented, or did you have a process because there’s obviously a fair number in the book.

Lisa (08:34): Yeah, the way I first started is thinking about some of the real life Boss beauties in my own life and people that mentored me and just people that I really looked up to. So I had been reading a lot about Allison Felix, who’s actually the most, Alison holds the most medals of any track and field athlete that has competed in the Olympics, I believe of all time. I’d have to look up that stat. But Alison really inspired me with her journey, and Allison in particular, she actually had to hide her pregnancy while she was competing and training for the Olympics, and I just thought there’s a lot to her story that was really inspiring and how she’s spoken out for athletes that are also moms. I mean, anyone who’s listening, you can look up Alison, but just read her story. It’s really inspiring, but that’s just one example. I really wanted to feature Real Life Boss beauties and different role models that have a story to tell and that inspire me personally and a lot of different careers too. I wanted this book to inspire women and girls from all different industries and careers. So even if you don’t want to be a NASCAR race car driver or be an Olympic athlete, you can still learn a lot from the stories of the women that are featured as well.

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Lisa (11:50): A hundred percent. Yeah. I think, and mentorship is something that’s really helped me in my own career and just reaching out to different role models and asking them their advice and asking them for their feedback, and really getting into those rooms where I could meet with mentors that have been further along in my own journey. But I think one of the things I would mention in addition to mentorship is actually just getting access to people in these professions. So let me give you an example. Our company, boss Beauties, recently hosted internship. It was a paid internship for five students that are studying computer science, and it’s actually called the Sprint internship. It’s like a sprint internship. We hosted it in partnership with this nonprofit Breakthrough Tech, which has an incredible mission. But in that internship, what we tried to do is set up ways for those students to get access to people from all different industries and careers.

(13:00): One of our investors, he actually was on the founding team at founding Macintosh team. He was a longtime advisor to Steve Jobs building, iTunes, and a lot of the technologies that Apple launched. So that’s just one example, but we set up those interns to have a mentorship chat or conversation with that investor of ours, James, who’s just a phenomenal role model. And we like those types of things to be set up in a lot of the things we do because they’re then getting access to incredible people from different industries, getting to learn from them, even just getting to meet them and ask them questions or spend time with them. We’ve brought students down to the New York Stock Exchange to meet women in the finance industry, and sometimes not just the mentorship side, but getting to go into those buildings and see themselves in the New York Stock Exchange or in Apple or in these boardrooms and the companies that they want to work at. We also think that goes a long way as well as paying them paid internships, opportunities like that, that also compensate them for their work and their talents.

John (14:28): Did you find that of the women represented in the book, did you find that there are common traits, common characteristics, grit, overcoming adversity? Are there a handful that show up a lot?

Lisa (14:40): I love this question because I would absolutely say that’s true, John. What’s really interesting is that some of the women featured in this book, their actual, their expertise is very different, like their technical expertise, right? Right. Alison Felix is this Olympic athlete that clearly can run a lot faster than I can. And then you have someone like Julia who is this competitive NASCAR race car driver. Her skill sets are very different than Allison’s. And then you look at some of the others that are in the book, there’s Olympic softball player, there are CEOs, women in technology, but there is a common thread of what I’ve observed in all of these boss beauties and women, and I a hundred percent agree and go into your question and saying, I would say that grit and resilience, those are the two things that I notice that’s common in everybody in this book. And just the fact that they don’t give up, and they might have different technical skill sets and different knowledge and things they’re actually doing in their industry, but they all have those common traits of having that resilience and not giving up and continuing to keep going.

John (16:11): Yeah, I mean, I think you could mark those as just success traits in general for people who overcome, because you start a business, you have to have a lot of grit. You’re going to have a lot of resistance, you’ve got to get up. Again, people, everyone starts in a different place. Some people have great advantages to be able to get to where they are. Some people really have to overcome things that are unimaginable and sometimes in some cases. So do you ever coach people on strategies in particular women, because unfortunately, as you’ve noted, women have to in business even still today in 2024, still have to overcome a lot of things that men don’t. Do you ever give any advice or strategies for how to overcome those types of challenges as women, particularly in the business arena?

Lisa (17:03): Yeah, I do actually. And I’ve talked a lot to different women that are entrepreneurs and founding companies specifically, but not just for entrepreneurs. I think one of the things that I’ve coached them on is showing up with confidence. So I learned a lot about confidence early on in my entrepreneurial journey because as an entrepreneur, you’re not going into a big meeting with an established company name behind you. You’re not going into that pitch with saying, I worked with Apple, or I work with Disney or Barbie, or whatever the brand is. As an entrepreneur, you’re going in without that recognizable name. That’s an established brand or corporation that someone already knows. And so a lot of it is the confidence that you have and the conviction that you have in your ideas and in yourself. So that is one of the things that I’ve coached other entrepreneurs on as well as other women in business. And I think that’s a big part. Of course, knowing, having the expertise, there’s a lot of technical expertise and knowledge about finance and business that comes into play. Clearly can’t just be confidence, you need to back it up. But I would say that’s one of the things that I’ve coached women that I’ve mentored on along the way.

John (18:38): Would you say you have a superpower?

Lisa (18:41): That’s a great question. I have to think about that. Oh my goodness. I think all of us have a superpower, right, John?

John (18:49): That’s where I was headed because a lot of, when I heard you talk about you have to have that confidence, well, a lot of that confidence comes from knowing your unique ability or your unique strength that you bring. And so a lot of people do characterize that as a superpower. So that’s where I was headed with that.

Lisa (19:06): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know what one of my superpowers is goes back to that last question because one of my superpowers is being able to envision something that’s not happening today, and maybe it seems almost impossible that you could achieve it at the stage you’re at right now. But I do really put those things on my vision board. A few years ago, I put it on my vision board that Boss Beauties, which was a brand new company which partner with Mattel and Barbie. And clearly Barbie was a much larger company. Mattel is a much larger company than Boss Beauties was. But I wrote that down and a lot of people said I was a little crazy. I write down some of these big dreams and goals, and then I don’t see it as impossible. I truly feel like nothing’s impossible if you really keep going and don’t give up and find the right way to achieve those dreams.

John (20:15): And I mean, it’s improbable if you don’t at least start with that thought, right?

Lisa (20:21): Yeah, definitely.

John (20:23): So tell people where, well, one of the questions I probably should have asked you in the very beginning was even just this idea of Boss Beauty. What is a boss beauty? How do you define that? How does somebody become their own boss? Beauty? Is there a true definition or is that up to me to define?

Lisa (20:48): So two answers. I’ll share with you how we’ve defined Boss Beauty in our book, but I don’t want it to stop there. I really want people to form their own definition of what that means to them. So I’m going to show you the book. Here’s one of the pages and some of the artwork definition of a Boss Beauty. And again, this is just how we’ve defined it, but we said Boss Beauty is a woman who is in fearless pursuit of her dreams, one who is kind. I added the kind. I thought that was important, kind, confident, bold, brave, has grit and never gives up. She is pursuing her many passions and knows her worth. So that’s how we’ve defined it. But again, I want it to feel personal to anybody. What do you believe being a boss beauty means to you?

John (21:49): Yeah. So it’s really, rather than a definition, it’s more of an attitude probably. Right. Would be a way to look at it. That’s

Lisa (21:55): A great, yeah, I’m going to start using that. I’ll credit you though, John. Don’t worry. That’s

John (22:01): Quite all right. So Lisa, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to invite people where they can find the book and maybe connect with you and learn more about your work?

Lisa (22:10): Yeah, absolutely. So you can find Boss Beauties online at boss beauties com, and then from the Boss Beauties website, you’ll find links to pre-order the book. You can find us on social. Our handle is Boss Beauties, and then my handle is Lisa Mayer. And then finally, I want to share one really cool thing that I’m passionate about and excited about for the book is that we are going to be hosting different book chats. We’re calling them Book Boss Beauties. Book bashes, kind of like a Boss Beauties book party. But we’re bringing together different women in business, different industries where they can bring their daughters, they can bring women and girls they mentor or maybe a mentee at their company, bring together and gather the boss beauties in their world. So we’re going to be setting these up virtually and even in person. So if anyone who’s listening is interested or wants to be a part of what we’re building here, would love for you to reach out. There will be parts of our website where you can sign up to get involved as well. Right.

John (23:26): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the podcast, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.