Monthly Archives: April 2019

How to Integrate Influencer and Emotional Marketing to Improve Your Content Program

All the digital channels and bells and whistles aside, your success as a marketer today still stems from using emotional marketing that understands consumers’ needs and preferences. Now, with the emergence of influencer marketing, we can combine these two approaches in our content marketing to reach deep into our desired … Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Weekend Favs April 20

Weekend Favs April 20 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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

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

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

Transcript of How to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers

Transcript of How to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

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

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Donna Cutting. She is the founder and CEO of Red Carpet Learning Systems and she’s also the author of a book we are going to talk about today called 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers. Donna, thanks for joining me.

Donna Cutting: Hey, John. It’s really great to be here. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: So, 501 ways. Don’t you think it would be great if you will just do one thing?

Donna Cutting: Oh, yeah, definitely for sure. It’s funny to me how people picked up on that 501 ways and find that amusing but what I’m trying to do is give people enough action ideas, tangible ideas that they can actually take right from the book and implement into their company or at least being inspired by some of these ideas so that they can raise the bar in the service in their organization.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think there are a lot of books that have a lot of theory in them and there’s certainly a place for theory and strategy. But I think there’s also a real need for these books that just … Give me a couple of ideas, give me a couple of things I can go out and do and see how I could do that in my business. And so that’s one of the things that really attracted me to want to have this conversation today.

Donna Cutting: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And you’ll know in the book there’s actually a chapter called Get Red Carpet Ready and that’s because that theory is important and it is really important to have a strong basis if you truly want to give consistently excellent service to your customers. You got to be looking at who you’re hiring and how you’re encouraging them and all of that. But today’s midlevel manager or entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily have time to be as creative as they want. So why not look at what other people are doing and go from there.

John Jantsch: Before we get too deep. You are in Asheville, North Carolina. Is that right?

Donna Cutting: Yeah.

John Jantsch: I just visited there with my wife and we canoed the north broad right through Biltmore and went up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was a beautiful, beautiful country.

Donna Cutting: Yeah. The French Broad River, is that what you’re-

John Jantsch: Yes.

Donna Cutting: Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful area. Oh, I’m sorry I missed you but I’m glad you had a good time.

John Jantsch: A lot of companies think in terms of departments, marketing, sales and service. And I really think … It’s probably always been true but I really think today when there’s really nowhere to hide. If you have bad service, we’re probably going to see a YouTube channel dedicated to it at some point. I’ve come to believe that there really is no room for these departments anymore, that service quite frankly needs to run through the entire sort of outcome with the customer, doesn’t it?

Donna Cutting: Yeah. Customer service is so much more than a department. It really is the … Well, for one thing, there is a direct link between sales and marketing and service especially today because of the experience that you’re giving your customer, they have more choices and louder voices than ever before. Regardless of how great your sales and marketing is, you could lose that customer the minute they walk in the door if the experience they’re getting is not fantastic.

Donna Cutting: They have so many other places to go. And so customer experience is really part of that whole marketing and sales as well.

John Jantsch: Because you sell training that has a cost associated to it and certainly doing customer service well has a cost associated with it. How do you help people make the leap to being an investment rather than a cost, so to speak? What’s the value? How do you measure the value of good service. I think we all know a pissed off customer is a bad thing but how do you measure that doing the basics right?

Donna Cutting: Yeah. Well, I think it varies from the company. But it’s really understanding the lifetime value of your customer. And so understanding that we’re not just talking about one transaction here but how many transactions could they potentially do with you in a year’s time, in five years’ time, in the lifetime of that customer.

Donna Cutting: And I would even add to that how many new customers could they bring to you because they’re having such great experience. I don’t really see that in the typical measurements of lifetime value but I think that belongs there as well.

John Jantsch: Great point. I think that … We all know people that I’m sure you run into them and every company … Hopefully, every company has one or two of them. That person that is … They’re just nurturing. They’re just, “How can we serve you?” They’re just wired that way. But I suspect that you do a fair amount of teaching people that are not wired that way. Is it possible?

Donna Cutting: Well, first of all, you do have to have a heart to serve people to a certain extent. And I think when it comes to the customer experience, making sure that you have the right people in the right roles is very important because depending on the position, it is more important in some positions that you have the people who are the warm, fuzzy, going to make people feel good. And then in other positions, it may be more important that they have the technical piece that they know that job really, really well but they just have to have the ability to be friendly and caring to the customer.

Donna Cutting: Having said that, can you teach empathy? I don’t know that you can. I think that that comes with how they grew up and whether they have an empathetic heart. However, what I have noticed is that there are people out there in organizations that have empathy and they have a heart to serve but the leadership has not necessarily been really great about defining what the service experience looks like. And giving them the tools and the training that they need in order to deliver on that service experience.

Donna Cutting: A lot of times people said to me, “Oh, well, it’s just common sense.” Well, not necessarily. If you’ve got a young person who grew up in a home where they may have … In fact, I’ve met many, many people. They were warm, very warm caring heart but they didn’t grow up learning about the importance of eye contact and smiling and giving a good handshake and caring phrases and all of the things that you can teach if somebody has an open heart to receive it. Did that make sense?

John Jantsch: Yeah, absolutely, and I think that you kind of hammer home a belief that I have that is that service, good service, red carpet service is really kind of culture. And so, I think organizations that it seems to run throughout. They hire for it. That’s a qualification for the job is to maybe measure the idea of empathy but then they also empower folks.

John Jantsch: I was on a flight this week, Southwest Magazine always has stories about their people doing good and then we all know companies that really tend to empower their employees to do things. There was a layover that the person wasn’t changing planes but they’ve laid over ironically in my hometown, Kansas City, and the person was … Their son really wanted a Royals’ baseball hat but they just didn’t have time to get off the plane. And the flight attendant heard, went in, bought a Royals’ baseball hat at a shop, came back out, gave it to him.

John Jantsch: And of course, then the person wrote a letter talking about how great it was. I think that that flight attendant is empowered to make that kind of thing and rewarded for doing that kind of action. And I think that that has to run really deep, doesn’t it?

Donna Cutting: It definitely does. And it is. And getting back to that whole chapter in getting red carpet ready, that really is all about culture. The question that’s asked of me a lot is, “How do you get an hourly employee who maybe has never received the red carpet service to give that?” Yeah, you have to model it for them by the way you’re treating them and empowering them and encouraging that kind of behavior. So what a great story, I love that.

John Jantsch: One of the things that I think a lot of companies, they get it. Okay, customer service is great. We got to do something to really be over the top and it comes out sort of robotic. I think the best customer service is something like that story I told but it’s often very personalized and I think that’s even trickier, isn’t it?

Donna Cutting: Yeah, I think it is. And also, I wanted to say, I don’t necessarily think that it has to be over the top. To me, there are three areas of customer experience to pay attention to. One is that technical piece, so that is what the customer is buying for, the service or product that they’re purchasing that it works the way they expect it to work, all of the logistical things that go along with delivering that product and service. And you obviously want that to be proficient.

Donna Cutting: Then the next piece is warmth and hospitality, so how are you delivering it? Do you have a team of people who have that empathetic heart and are warm and hospitable. Really, if those two things are rock solid, people are going to feel like they have a great customer experience if it’s consistent, so meaning every employee is delivering that to every customer at every opportunity, every single time or close to it.

Donna Cutting: And then the third piece would be that wow or I call it movie moment, those moments you remember and want to repeat from the movies, making those kinds of moments for you customer. But to be honest, the first two have to be rock solid but before that over the top, wow, really makes a difference. And I think you’re right. That has to come authentic and that comes from just allowing your employees to come up with their own ideas about how to do that.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I’m not sure you’re really saying this but I think you make a good point. In some cases, the bar is not very high. Just getting the basics right. Returning phone calls, doing things that people expect or unfortunately have come not to expect. That kind of part the basics are so important and many companies miss that even.

Donna Cutting: That’s exactly right. It is surprising to me when I ask my audiences, “Tell me about the best service you’ve ever received?” How many times people will just tell me a story about how they walked into a hotel or a department store and everybody was friendly and smiling and they’re bending over backwards to do what they can for you. I think that’s just what customer service should be, never mind the over the top stuff but that’s what people are wowed by today because unfortunately, we’re not receiving that as often as we could be.

John Jantsch: One of my favorite and I’m not even sure this is customer service. This certainly is marketing in my mind, but one of my favorite things is when somebody surprises me, when they do something I didn’t expect. I ordered some shoes from a running store and got some powerbars and socks thrown in there. And that had me targeted. In fact, you’re probably about the 10th person on air that I’ve told this story to. And I think there’s almost a product roll for that type of thing.

Donna Cutting: Oh, definitely. And I love … That reminds me of … I’m trying to remember the name of that company. One of the examples in the book is Retrofit and they are a company that sells sportswear. I’m sorry, RecoFit compression gear. And they sell compression gear for cyclists and triathletes and runners. And one of the things that she does is she came up with the idea of just thinking about that crackerjack box and remembering how exciting it was as a child to get that crackerjack box and while the caramel corn were delicious, that’s not really what we’re excited about. What we’re excited about are the free stuff, the little prize.

Donna Cutting: And so she does exactly what you were just talking about. Susan Walton, the owner of the company, she’ll just put something, a free little gift that people aren’t expecting in every single box. And that’s what people get excited about. That’s the little extra. I love it.

John Jantsch: Seth Godin actually had a book, you probably remembered called Free Prize Inside that really kind of talked about that whole concept. To give you a moment to define your red carpet phrase, how do you go about making people feel like stars and should you be looking at it as that over the top, kind of roll out the red carpet approach?

Donna Cutting: Well, to me, ultimately red carpet service is about making that person in front of you right now, so whether they’re physically in front of you or on the other end of the phone or even the other end of an email, feel like the most important person in the room or the most important person in that transaction.

Donna Cutting: And so it really does just start with being 100% present fair for them, making people feel like you … Even if you’ve heard and this is the challenging part. Even if you’ve heard this question 15 million times from every customer, delivering service in a way that I would consider the illusion of that first time. So like in the theater, we have people do the same dance steps, the same speech, the same lines 20 million times depending on how long that show goes on. And yet for every audience, it’s a new show. And so really looking at it that way. It is finding the fun things that you can do to really make them say, “Wow, you know I didn’t expect that.”

John Jantsch: So, I warned you about this before we started with the book 501 Ways, I’m going to ask you to pick maybe four or five of your favorite ones that you can tell us a little vignette about just to give people a sense of the abstracts of each of these kind of ways.

Donna Cutting: Sure, absolutely. Well, I’ll start it with Ruby Receptionists. They’re a company I actually give business with for many, many years. And I’ll start with them because there’s such a great example of those three areas that I talked about. They are a voice answering service but so much more than that. We referred to them endearingly as Call Ruby.

Donna Cutting: When they would pick up my phone messages, technically, it went perfectly, 99.9% of the time. They would get my message. They do their transfer right to the person it needed to go to on my team or we would get a voicemail and a followup. And it just worked perfectly. If it didn’t work perfectly because they were having software issues or something, they were communicating with us every 10 minutes until it was back up and running was amazing.

Donna Cutting: That piece is really perfect and then the second piece is I never had to worry about the receptionist that was answering the phone. They had many, many people working for them but they were all upbeat, friendly. I certainly secret shopped myself. My customers would talk about what friendly people I had working for me. It was just amazing. They had those two pieces rock solid. But then, they would add the wow and this goes back, John, to your whole piece of empowering employees because every person that works for Ruby Receptionists is empowered to practice wowism is what they’d call it but make these surprising delight moments for their customers.

Donna Cutting: For instance, when I had my dog, Snowball, one time they sent me a little package of dog treats for Snowball in a little frame with a picture on it that looked kind of like Snowball. And they would just do little things like this on a regular basis. I know other people who use them as well and that we’re always comparing the little gifts that Ruby Receptionists send us out of the blue. So, there’s such a great example of those three areas of service.

Donna Cutting: And then one that I was thinking of when you were talking about your airplane, the Southwest Airlines example, is this gentleman who worked in Tampa airport. And I loved this. When this little boy left his beautiful Hobbes, his precious doll, if you remember the old Calvin and Hobbes. He had a little tiger and he named him Hobbes and he left it at the airport, and one of the employees picked it up. And of course, they let him know, “Absolutely, you can come pick it up. Hobbes is here. He’s fine.”

Donna Cutting: But in the meantime, they took all kinds of pictures of Hobbes doing things at the airport working in the control room, working in flying the plane, all of these things. And they put it together in a little album so that when the parents came and they actually picked up Hobbes, not only did they get the doll but they got this album of memories that Hobbes shared. That’s such a great example again of an employee just taking responsibility and wowing the customer.

John Jantsch: As I hear you say that and after reading many of the tips or the ways in your book, I think a lot of ways the underlying thread or theme is fun. I think a lot of the companies that do this stuff is because they’re having a good time and so they look for ways to bring a little bit of fun and joy into people’s lives regardless of what they’re selling. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that might be … If you’re going to nail sort of one emotion, that might be it.

Donna Cutting: No, I think you are … Absolutely, you just hit the nail on the head. I mean the next one I was going to share with you is the Village Coffee House in Boulder, Colorado. If you are there for the first time and somebody gets wind of it, you’ve been dubbed a village virgin and they announce that there’s a virgin in the house and everybody applauds and everyone’s kind of in on the fun even all the customers that have been there before. And then of course, there’s ways for you to earn prizes if you bring in new virgins to the coffeehouse. So, it’s definitely a marketing tool but it’s also just like you said, having a great time with your customers and for your customers.

John Jantsch: I’m visiting with Donna Cutting. She is the founder and CEO of Red Carpet Learning Systems. And she’s also the author of a book 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customer. Thanks for joining us and hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road somebody.

Donna Cutting: Thanks for having me.

How to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers

How to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Donna Cutting

Podcast Transcript

Donna Cutting

My guest on today’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Donna Cutting, CSP, Founder & CEO of Red Carpet Learning Systems. She is also the author of 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers.

Think about how much time you spend trying to get clicks, drive traffic, make the phone ring. Now, compare that to how much time you spend making sure your customers have an amazing experience every single time they interact with your company.

See any gaps? We’re all so busy trying to generate leads that we forget the most potent source of new business is a whole bunch of very happy customers.

Donna knows all about providing exceptional service. She leads a team of experts that train organizational leaders to turn prospects into delighted customers and delighted customers into raving fans. Today, Donna and I discuss what it means to give your customers the “red carpet” treatment.

Questions I ask Donna Cutting:

  • How do you measure the value of good service?
  • What are some ways that companies can go above and beyond to deliver a memorable experience?
  • With the title of your book starting with “501 ways,” can you pick a couple of your favorite ways to roll out the red carpet for customers?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

  • What actionable and tangible ideas you can use to raise the bar in service for your organization.
  • How the customer experience is directly related to your sales and marketing.
  • What the three components of great service are and why consistency is critical.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Donna Cutting:

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

How to Make Storytelling Work for Your Brand

How to Make Storytelling Work for Your Brand written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Kyle Gray
Podcast Transcript

Kyle Gray

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Kyle Gray, founder of The Story Engine. He and I discuss insights from his book, The Story Engine: A Busy Entrepreneur’s Guide to Content Strategy and Brand Storytelling Without Spending All Day Writing.

Gray has helped dozens of startups and small businesses succeed in content marketing. He writes content that educates entrepreneurs on how to build their businesses with content marketing, manage remote teams, and scale up their businesses.

Gray got his start as the content manager for WP Curve and helped expand the blog from a single contributor to a multi-person team of guest writers with documented systems and strategies. He helped the startup grow to nearly 1 million in annual recurring revenue.

Questions I ask Kyle Gray:

  • How has your personal story influenced your approach to storytelling?
  • How important is visual storytelling?
  • What role does your audience play in your story?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

  • Why storytelling is a central part of marketing today.
  • What people misunderstand about storytelling.
  • How to do storytelling well.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Kyle Gray:

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

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Why Being a Podcast Guest Is Your Secret SEO Weapon

Why Being a Podcast Guest Is Your Secret SEO Weapon written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

We all know that there’s a lot of SEO value in generating your own content. Blogs, videos, webinars, and podcasts are all great ways to build your brand’s online reputation, drive more traffic to your site, and boost your SERP standing.

But creating your own content takes a lot of time and effort. Fortunately, guest podcasting allows you to generate the SEO benefits that come from content creation without all of the legwork of building the content yourself from scratch.

Want to learn more about how being a podcast guest can supercharge your SEO? Read on!

Build Your Reputation

When you’re a guest on a podcast, you immediately gain trust and credibility. Someone who produces a show invited you on as an expert in your field; that means something!

Not only does this help you build trust with your audience, it gets your name out to their audience. People who are listening to this podcast are likely already loyal followers of the show and the host’s brand. They trust the host’s opinion, and the host’s endorsement of you is noteworthy for their audience.

Plus, appearing as a guest helps you gain credibility with other podcasters. With each guest appearance you do, you should turn around and pitch other podcasts hosts—those who have even bigger followings. As you continue to be a guest on more shows with a greater reach, your reputation will grow and you’ll attract more and more attention to your business’s online assets.

Collect More Backlinks

With each podcast you’re on, you’re generating more backlinks for your website. Podcast hosts often post show notes and transcripts on their website to accompany each episode. You and your business’s name will be tagged in all of the content for your episode, creating backlinks and driving more traffic to your website.

And again, this has a cumulative effect. For each podcast you are a guest host on, you generate more and more backlinks (with more and more reputable websites) which is an important ranking factor in SEO.

Increase Social Media Mentions

It’s not just about directing more attention to your website. Being a podcast guest also gives you the opportunity to generate more traffic and attention on your social media pages.

Podcast hosts are excited to promote each episode, and will tag you and your business in their posts. You want to get involved, too. Share the link on your own social media, tagging them back. Interact with fans who are responding on social media, either on your page or the host’s page.

Engagement on social platforms can help you generate more followers and increase the SEO rankings for your social pages as well.

Generate Additional Content for Your Website

The great thing about podcasts is that, like video, the audio can be a jumping off point for even more content. You can easily transform a podcast transcript into a blog post about the topic at hand. Or you can generate a series of tweets based on quotable content from your episode. You can even use the audio to put together a video with relevant infographics and slides.

The more meaningful content you can generate on your website, the better off you’ll do in SEO. And repurposing that podcast episode is an easy way to generate additional content with minimal effort.

Get Visitors to Stick Around Longer

Google likes to keep all the specifics on how they calculate SERP rankings under wraps, but there is a strong indication that dwell time—the amount of time visitors remain on a given page—influences SEO.

Embedding your podcast episode on your website is a great way to get someone to stick on that page for a long time. While they might skim a blog post or watch a quick explainer video within a few minutes’ time and then bounce away to another website, a podcast episode requires that they stick on the page for 20 or more minutes.

Reap All the SEO Rewards with a Fraction of the Work

The best part of all this is that guest podcasting allows you to get all the benefits of SEO with very little work. Producing your own podcast requires a lot of time and effort. You have to record, edit, create accompanying blog posts and transcripts, promote it with your audience, and worry about building a following for your show.

If you’re a guest on someone else’s podcast, they have to handle all of that. You simply show up, share your expertise, and use the results to generate more attention for your brand. Yes, there is work that goes into being a podcast guest, but it is a fraction of the work you’d put into creating your own show.

Being a podcast guest is a great way to increase your exposure with potential customers and to boost your SEO. From creating more content for your own website to generating backlinks and building your online reputation, the benefits are many.

Weekend Favs April 13

Weekend Favs April 13 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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

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

  • HelloCast – Organize your podcast production workflow, all in one place.
  • Hyperlapse – Create time lapse videos for Instagram.
  • Twemoji – Access more than 3,000 open source emojis for Twitter.

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

Transcript of How Giving Back Can Create Business Success

Transcript of How Giving Back Can Create Business Success written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

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

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Sam Ashdown. She’s a UK based property marketing coach to independent estate agents, we would call them in the US real estate agents. But I think it’s about the same thing. So, Sam, thanks for joining us.

Sam Ashdown: Hey John, it’s great to be here.

John Jantsch: So you and I have known each other for a long time because you were one of those people that got out there and said, “I need to go learn about this new marketing stuff” and so you went to conferences and came across the ocean a few times. We bumped into each other there, didn’t we?

Sam Ashdown: Oh we did, yeah. I was your first fan girl, John. Your first fan girl from the UK and my first ever marketing book and I’m sure you hear this all the time and I know you did because I even heard you say this to other people or people say it to you that Duct Tape Marketing was their first marketing book and it absolutely changed my life from that moment on. It was amazing really, so thank you for that.

John Jantsch: I need to have people like you follow me around and tell people all about me. So tell me a little about your journey then because you talk about my first fan girl, that was 2005-06, so you have been doing this a little while. Tell me a little about your journey, you started out as an independent agent, I’m guessing, and things have evolved haven’t they?

Sam Ashdown: You know, you’d think so, because that would be very sensible, but I didn’t. I started off developing houses, I flipped houses as you Americans call it. I bought them, I flipped them, I sold them. I was a single mom, with three kids under 10 and I had no other way to earn money. What happened is I started being asked by friends and family, that’s what happens isn’t it? Then you start to build the business that way.

Sam Ashdown: But you know what you wrote Duct Tape Marketing at the right time for me, because I started my business in 2004. I hit “go” on my website and expected the crowds to flock, and they didn’t. I thought “Oh, there must be something I’m missing.” Then I read Duct Tape Marketing and found out what it was I was missing so I literally followed your book to the letter. I built my business on a consultancy basis really, helping people sell what actually turned out to be high value homes for the most amount of money in the shortest time.

Sam Ashdown: So I became a consultant to homeowners then following the crash, our crash was just a little later than yours, so about 2008 the property crash I started being approached by real estate agents saying “Can you help us build our business?” And I’m thinking “I need to go and read Duct Tape Marketing again. So I did and I followed the principles again and helped them build their businesses. That was really, really enjoyable to me.

Sam Ashdown: There is a third element to this trilogy of property businesses, because I am collecting them I still have business one and two. Business two is coaching for real estate agents. Business three, two years ago, my son-in-law who is married to my daughter Molly, came to me and said “Why don’t we open up a real estate business?” And I said “Because they work really, really hard.” And he goes “Yeah, but we’d be great.” I go “Yeah, but it’s a lot of hard work.” So anyway, we started selling real estate from my dining room with two laptops and not much else and have built it into a really credible business. We’ve got 8 staff, a beautiful office in the English lake district, which is kind of like a mini Canada, full of lakes and mountains. Two years later we’ve just had our second anniversary last week and it has been an incredible journey and one I’ve been really proud to be part of.

Sam Ashdown: So that is kind of my trilogy of three real estate companies in various different ways. Two B2Bs and one B2C. No, two B2Cs and one B2B. That is really how we built it.

John Jantsch: I would have to think, maybe there are other people, I’m sure there are other people because it’s a big world out there. There is probably very few people in the real estate business that are coming at the customer and market from those three distinct positions. In some ways, your business where you are consulting with homeowners could be to send them to your real estate business, so they can sell their home.

Sam Ashdown: Oh yeah, oh yeah.

John Jantsch: Then you are coaching a real estate agent. It’s like you are going to corner the market at some point.

Sam Ashdown: It’s like I planned it that way. Actually, no I didn’t. I wish I could say I had, but each one has been accidental. Each one has a beautifully harmonious relationship with the other two. I have lots more planned as well, so maybe in a future broadcast episode I can tell you about the other plans. But so far, so good. They all work together in harmony and it has been fantastic.

John Jantsch: That is a principle a lot of people underestimate the power of. I mean when you say they work together in harmony, you also have leverage. You have multipliers with that. I think that is similar to my business. I teach small business owners, that’s grown. We consult and coach small business owners that’s grown to then coaching and consultants themselves. Everything we do for one business works for the other or supports the others. I think a lot of people have that opportunity to find those other leverage points. It’s not like going after a new market, per se, and it’s not the same as an expansion. It’s more of finding those leverage points in doing more with what you are already doing.

Sam Ashdown: Absolutely! Not only that, but you have such a deep insight into your clients minds and motivations. I can sit in front of a real estate agent and tell them exactly how their homeowner is feeling because I have sat in front of thousands of homeowners as a consultant that have told me A) why they chose that real estate agent, B) why they think the relationship has gone bad or well C) why they are moving in the first place and how that is going to effect their decision making process over the next weeks, months, and years. So all of those insights going toward a big jumbled strata of information allows me to be able to give the best advice to whoever my client is at that particular time knowing it is based on the best outcome for that client.

John Jantsch: I think it is interesting and probably a little backward, at least in the traditional sense, that you developed a knowledge for how the seller/homeowner feels and you turned that into coaching a real estate agent, although you have never been a real estate agent. Then you backed into being a real estate agent. I think it’s certainly not wrong, but not the path a lot of people take, is it?

Sam Ashdown: No. It’s kind of back to front. I think what it did give me was for years I’d be saying “Look, it doesn’t matter that I haven’t been where you are, because actually I can give you an outside perspective that you haven’t necessarily had before.” But actually now I have both sides of that. I have the consumer perspective and I’ve got running an agency and trying these ideas every single day. So I literally, as you do John, I try and I teach, and I try and I teach. It’s beautiful. It’s like a little dance.

John Jantsch: I’ve told people that all the time. All I do is I try stuff and I go tell people what worked.[inaudible 00:07:38] So one of the things that you did, and this maybe just supports the global picture I suppose, you created a pretty unique idea that you called the Success at Marketing Club. Those of you that are following along closely know that my guest’s name today is Sam and Success at Marketing spells SAM, a bit of brilliant branding there. Tell me about that. I mean obviously, we want to get in to what it is, but I’d like to hear your thinking on why you thought it was even a good idea.

Sam Ashdown: Absolutely. It started off purely selfishly, and has had two [inaudible 00:08:17]. The first time, I had just come out of a really difficult divorce. I had just moved with my three kids and everything was up in the air. I was moving to an area that although I’d lived in the past, I had only been around school gate moms. As much as I love school gate moms, I’m looking for entrepreneurial friendships and relationships to help me grow as a person, somebody that is not going to be bored to death as I tell them my hundredth story of my marketing successes that day.

Sam Ashdown: I wanted a place where I could come and meet other entrepreneurs and this very often happens, there is a gap for me therefore, there must be a gap for other people. Therefore, I create something to fill the gap. That is really what I did with the SAM club. It grew out of that and it grew very, very slowly for the first 2-3 years. It literally was me meeting up with entrepreneurial sort of solo preneurs once a month to talk about marketing. As my skills as a marketer grew, then so my teaching grew and I started being the teacher of the group.

John Jantsch: At that point it was no longer real estate, right? It was just anyone that had a business, right?

Sam Ashdown: No, it was nothing to do with real estate. Nobody there had anything to do with real estate at all which is why I learned what to cross with different businesses. I know you, John, have crossed all businesses, but I haven’t really done that before. I only really understood about property and marketing.

Sam Ashdown: So that was about six years ago, and I let it lag for a couple of years, much to my chagrin because I wish now I hadn’t. What happened when we decided, my co-director and I, to open up the estate agency, I said “I need some kind of networking system.” I had read your referral network, another plug for you. Referral Engine, sorry. I listened to it on Audible, which is even better and I thought “Well, what can I do to have a system? Not necessarily automated, I don’t mind doing it manually, but what is my system. What is my end result that I am looking to achieve?” I thought “I know, I’ll revive the SAM club, that will be a really good referral engine for me.”

Sam Ashdown: I launched it again, the first time we launched it was February two years ago, so two years and two months ago as we are recording this now. I had eight people then. I thought “Woo! That’s good. That’s exciting!” Then slowly, slowly it grew. We did a different topic every month and what was unique is that I let them choose the topic. I said “If there is ever a time that I don’t know enough about this topic to teach, go figure, I will bring in an expert.” A couple of times I’ve done that, but most of the time these are people running shops, restaurants, very small businesses that I am probably enough ahead of them to teach them. They are a bit of a workshop environment so as long as I do a bit of research I get to kind of be able to teach it.

Sam Ashdown: This is now two years later, so we’ve gone from eight people to the last time we met we had sixty-three people in the room, which just blew me away. We’ve got over two hundred and sixty people in the Facebook group. Every single one of them is a local business owner. Our referrals have gone through the roof. Just in the last one we had four people there that were either selling or had sold their house with us out of sixty-three people.

John Jantsch: Right, because every business owner owns a house, go figure, right?

Sam Ashdown: Every business owner owns a house. Every business owner has a great online profile and they are trying to make it better that is a win-win. So this builds. You are the master of the know, like, trust, try, repeat. That is exactly what this is. I think networking in somebody else’s group is never going to be as powerful as me standing in front of the SAM club as Sam and teaching them something I am passionate about. As I’m seen as a leader, seen as an influencer, and that then attracts other leaders and other influencers in my area. It becomes this self building entity that is bigger than me, which is fantastic.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and again another sort of leverage tool that is feeding, serving several purposes at once.

Sam Ashdown: Yes.

John Jantsch: So let’s get into the logistics.

Sam Ashdown: Sure.

John Jantsch: You mentioned that you come, and you have a topic. How often do you meet? How long is it? I’m assuming people pay a little money to be in it?

Sam Ashdown: No, absolutely. First the money that I charged was [inaudible 00:12:48]. I wanted just to meet as many entrepreneurs and local business owners as I could and I thought I’m going to lower the barrier so it’s so low they can’t say “no.” Five pounds, which is about seven dollars is what I charged at first. I just put the price up, only because we moved to a new venue. Venue is my most difficult challenge, only because we live in a tourist area and all the hotels that would let us have a room in the Winter would not let us have the same room in the summer because of weddings and tourists.

Sam Ashdown: We are actually in a golf club and that brings a whole[inaudible 00:13:18] benefits because of the type of people that play golf. So the referral network to high value homeowners is fantastic. I’m talking about high value homes with the owners, not high value homeowners. We meet every month on a Friday morning. Something I did accidentally and if anyone is listening to this and wants to [inaudible] this. I am very happy to have messages about this and help set these up, because I am amazed at how well this has done and I’m passionate about people doing this in their local communities.

John Jantsch: Before we give away your email address, which we will do in the show notes. I was going to ask you, so save this question. This seems like something maybe you could teach as an offering.

Sam Ashdown: If I wasn’t running three businesses, John.

John Jantsch: I’m going to steal the idea then and do it.

Sam Ashdown: Please have it! Call it the John Club.

John Jantsch: Alright, so Friday morning. And we will put your contact information in the show notes. What was the sort of stroke of luck thing that you said?

Sam Ashdown: Yeah, the stroke of luck was I did it in school mom friendly time. Bear with me here, I don’t know if you have BNI there, I’m sure you do. Six thirty, seven o’clock start, nine o’clock finish. You get a lot of people suited and booted so the professionals with the ties. Some of them, sorry about this guys, have egos to bring to the rooms. The ladies get a little pushed out if they are in softer kind of industries, sometimes that is what happens.

Sam Ashdown: What I found was that I started club at half past nine in the morning because that was what suited me. Our school drop off time is just before nine so I got loads and loads of school moms and it was just accidental. The best thing about school moms is they refer like crazy and they are all great on Facebook. You ask a question on Facebook and you get one hundred answers and they are all women. They just are, that is what the ladies in my group are like. So, we are probably about 9 to 10, sorry, one out of ten people will probably be a guy and the other nine will be women. I’ll give you a picture of our club last month if you want to put it on the show notes, because you’ve got to see the mixture.

Sam Ashdown: Two and a half hours in the morning, so the moms can do drop off. They get there, have a coffee, have a little chit chat, then they sit down learn about marketing for two and a half hours and they go and evangelize to everybody about how great the SAM club is. Obviously, by definition some of that spotlight falls on me, which is fantastic. I’m referring them, they’re referring me. A whole little referral engine.

Sam Ashdown: Something else that came out of it, just an accidental spark was we did a competition for AshdownJones on Facebook, just before Christmas 2018 to boost our likes a little. I needed twelve businesses to get to do a giveaway. Who am I going to approach? My SAM club members. So we do a little spotlight video every day for twelve days, they all get a big boost on their Facebook likes, we get a big boost on our Facebook likes. They love us, we love them, everybody loves each other. It’s just win-win-win. That group keeps getting bigger and bigger. I’ve gotten fantastic friendships out of it, fantastic referrals out of it. I couldn’t be more grateful for what I have received personally, but everybody seems to think that I’m giving to them.

John Jantsch: The beautiful thing is you have probably never asked once for a referral have you?

Sam Ashdown: No, never. Actually, when they bring referral to you, and I probably feel the same to them, they bring it like a gift. They are so excited. “Sam! Sam! I’ve got a referral for you!” It’s just lovely! I’m like “Oh, thank you! That’s so exciting!”

John Jantsch: Obviously, in the early days, like a lot of things, it was not paying off at all probably. You put in the effort, you went, you did your meeting for two and a half hours, and you went “Where did that day go?”

John Jantsch: Again, that’s like all things. That’s why it works, because that is the point where a lot of people give up. Like blogging, I wrote five blog posts and it’s not paying off so forget it.

John Jantsch: So today, other than the residual benefits that you have talked about, it’s pretty much self funding, even at seven pounds or whatever that pays for the coffee.

Sam Ashdown: Yeah! Well, now it’s ten pounds, about thirteen dollars, and it costs me about two thirds of that for the venue et cetera. I just give the rest to charity at the end of the year, that’s fine. To me as long as it’s cost neutral roughly either way then I am happy with that. After about a year Phil said to me, that’s my son-in-law, “Look, do you think this is worth it?” Friday morning two and a half hours, about four hours by the time I’ve chitchatted, had coffee et cetera. It’s only fifteen people, then seventeen people, then twenty people. It was painful.

Sam Ashdown: We reached about fourteen months and there was a tipping point and I actually suggested to everybody we had a bring a friend meeting. Because I thought every meeting is a bring a friend meeting I’m going to make it an official thing where they’re free and they’re friend is free and we swelled the numbers by about twenty percent on that day. It has never stopped since. It just keeps building momentum. We have a new member request every single day now.

John Jantsch: Talk a little about the topics you cover.

Sam Ashdown: They are just basic. Again, I just take a vote and I do it actually when we are in the club. That gets buy-in. I say “Okay, what do you want to know next time?” They just shout out all of these ideas. Then we take a vote and we go “Alright, next month we are going to do Facebook marketing.” Or Facebook Live, or Linked In, or blogging. This month, which is on Friday, we are doing one of your favorite topics, John. In fact, I need to get you to come over and speak if that’s okay, which is how to get Google to find your website in brackets SEO. Which they haven’t heard of.

John Jantsch: That’s great. I was doing a presentation one time to a group of business owners one time that probably should have known better and I was telling them “You need this element and this element. And SEO is so important because…” and about ten minutes in someone raised their hand and said “What is SEO?” Oops.

Sam Ashdown: Teaching really brings you down to Earth doesn’t it? It really does. When they say “Why’d you do it like that?” And you think “Why do we do it like that? That’s a really good question.” I really try to teach to the lowest in the room, but also give some really good tips for the highest in the room to go after. What I’ve also had to do is put together some advanced workshops for certain topics, Facebook ads for example. I’m pretty good at Facebook ads so I want to have a little advanced group. I charge separately for that, that’s fine. Mostly, it’s the main socials and content. All the stuff you and I talk about all day long. I do a bit of direct mail, because direct mail is one of my hot topics and I think it’s very underused. Content, I don’t really do website design, but I kind of do the customer journey. We did do campaign planning, that was a really good one because campaign planning can bring everything in.

John Jantsch: Yeah, absolutely. Have you ever considered or with all the technology we have now, brought anybody in via Skype or something like that?

Sam Ashdown: No. You know why, the wifi in the golf club is terrible. If you’re offering, John, I’ll see if I can get them to upgrade.

John Jantsch: No, no I want the first class plane ticket.

Sam Ashdown: I’m sure something can be arranged.

John Jantsch: What’s funny is, you are doing this for a specific purpose and it is serving its purpose, but I can envision somebody out there going “Okay, I’m going to do the seven pound one and the seventy pound one and then they’ll be a seven hundred dollar group.” It wouldn’t be that hard to do it would it?

Sam Ashdown: No, it wouldn’t. Actually, I think that is absolutely credible to build up a business like that based on a club, but I think if every single local business owner thinks about how they could use this, it doesn’t matter if you are a restaurateur, shop owners, any kind of services owner they could do this. They don’t have to call it a marketing club, it could be a business club, and it could bring an expert each time. They could top and tail it, do the intro and outro, and it would be their club. They’re bringing everybody together and it’s not a networking club, it’s a learning and discovery club.

John Jantsch: I think that is a real key. Like you mentioned BNI, BNI serves a purpose for a lot of people, but a lot of people also feel like I don’t want to go there and be beat to death if I didn’t bring referrals.

Sam Ashdown: I think you have to be a very outgoing person to make BNI work for you effectively. You don’t have to be a very outgoing person to come alone, sit at the back, be shy with a notebook, and not even raise your hand and learn about Facebook marketing for two and half hours. You get a huge amount of value after that.

John Jantsch: I will say, I know you better than my listeners do at this point, but you bring a couple attributes to make this work. You are terribly giving, you are a connector, you chitchat for an hour and a half after the thing with some people that want to and that is really what made it work. I think if someone is listening and thinking “This is brilliant. I’ll put together a club and just get a bunch of people together and make money for me.” You invested significantly before it ever made any money for you.

Sam Ashdown: I think even if somebody does want to make money out of this, it is possible. I think that they are going to have to put the leg work in it first and it will feel like it’s not working. Suddenly, as long as you give, give, give, give, it will just work. You’ll like this John, you are a very generous person. You give, give and you don’t ask for anything back, but those things come back to you anyway.

John Jantsch: I do think that it’s one of those sort of non intuitive facts of life that you are going to make a bunch of money if you don’t try to make a bunch of money off of this.

Sam Ashdown: I know. When will people realize this? I’m fifty it’s taken me till forty-nine and a half to realize this truth. The people that I really respect and listen to, like your podcast, the marketers that are really successful on lots of levels, they are all givers. It’s not coincidence.

John Jantsch: I bet you’re going to listen to this episode.

Sam Ashdown: Oh yeah.

John Jantsch: So Sam, tell us where people can find out more about you? As I said, we’ll put the contact info in the show notes because I do know that your offer to tell anybody about how to do this is genuine.

Sam Ashdown: Absolutely, thank you!

Sam Ashdown: If you are in the North of England and selling your house, please come to AshdownJones which is my little agency. Although, that seems probably a little bit unlikely. I suggest that if you are a real estate agent you follow me on Marketing Magic for estate agents, which is on Facebook.

Sam Ashdown: My main site is home-truths.co.uk, unlike your dot coms, I couldn’t get the dot com, and that is where you will find all manner of home selling advice. One of those three places is where you will catch me, but you’ll put the best email address in the show notes for people. I’d love to hear from people thinking about doing this in their area.

John Jantsch: AshdownJones sounds like a car that James Bond would drive.

Sam Ashdown: Well, it is. That is exactly what it should be. No, I’m the Ashdown and he’s the Jones. It’s a beautiful partnership.

John Jantsch: Sam, thanks so much for joining and sharing so willingly. Hopefully we’ll see you somewhere out on the road, or I’ll get to the UK, who knows.

Sam Ashdown: Oh I really hope so John. It’s been my pleasure, thank you so much!