Monthly Archives: August 2024

Weekend Favs August 31st

Weekend Favs August 31st written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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

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

  •  Hunter.io helps you find and verify professional email addresses, making it easier to connect with potential leads or partners.
  • Paperform.co enables you to create versatile, customizable forms and surveys without needing coding skills, streamlining data collection and automation.
  • Decktopus.com allows you to quickly create visually appealing and professional presentations with minimal effort, offering templates and design tools to enhance your slides.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Connect with me on Linkedin!

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

Scale Your Business with Precision: A Step-by-Step Guide to Implementing the Marketing Strategy Pyramid

Scale Your Business with Precision: A Step-by-Step Guide to Implementing the Marketing Strategy Pyramid written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Want to stay ahead of your competition and keep your business growing? A solid marketing strategy and understanding the Marketing Strategy Pyramid are key.

With AI evolving fast, attention spans shrinking, social media algorithms constantly changing, unpredictable ad costs, and tighter privacy rules, it’s easy to get caught up in the latest “quick fixes.”

But what your business—or your clients’ businesses—really needs is a steady guiding light to stay on track. That’s where the Marketing Strategy Pyramid comes in.

You can catch the podcast episode here if you would rather listen to me talk about the Marketing Strategy Pyramid.

Table of Contents
1

What is Marketing Strategy?

2

The Marketing Strategy Pyramid

3 Core Components of the Marketing Strategy Pyramid:
3

Business Strategy

4

Developing a Marketing Strategy

5

The Real Brand Strategy

6

Formulating a Growth Strategy

7

Building a Customer Strategy

8

Implementing a Team Strategy

What is Marketing Strategy?

It’s easy to get tangled in the jargon of marketing tactics, but at its core, a marketing strategy is the master plan that sets the direction for how your business will compete and stand out in the marketplace.

For fCMOs and business owners, it’s critical to not just know but to master the art of aligning these strategies with broader business objectives. 

For businesses, it’s important to prioritize strategic planning over quick fixes. Strategic planning provides the framework to make decisions that enhance long-term sustainability rather than just immediate gains.

If I were to give marketing strategy an emotional definition, it’s how you will place the flag in the sand to say, “Here’s how we’re going to dominate.” But that probably isn’t helpful in understanding how to create a successful marketing strategy. That is why I built the Marketing Strategy Pyramid.

The Marketing Strategy Pyramid

Think of the Marketing Strategy Pyramid as your roadmap for integrating comprehensive strategies with your business’s key goals. The Marketing Strategy Pyramid shows that there is no one magic marketing strategy or marketing tactic. It’s really about integration, and that’s what we do for clients, something we call Strategy First. 

The Marketing Strategy Pyramid has five layers to it, and the middle three layers are really the marketing strategy component and everything rests on the overarching business strategy.

3 Core Components of the Marketing Strategy Pyramid:

  • Business Strategy: This is the bedrock that focuses on growth, dominating your market, and retaining clients.
  • Marketing Strategy: This layer is the heart of the operation, including brand, growth, and customer strategies.
  • Team Strategy: The capstone that ensures your strategies are executed flawlessly by your team.

When we come in to work with a client, the main thing we are there to do is develop the marketing strategy and then the list of tactics to employ that strategy, but everything is based on the overarching business objectives. So if growth is a business objective, if dominance in a market is a business objective if retention of clients is a business objective, then the marketing strategy is built around that and only that to begin with.

Business Strategy

The foundation of all of this is the business strategy, which sets the stage for every tactical decision.

For example, the very first thing we do in working with a client is try to understand where they’re going, try to understand the profit that they want to make in this business, try to understand the market share that they want to enjoy before we ever start really suggesting anything.

And unfortunately, very few marketers actually take that approach. Very few business owners actually take that approach. They want to hire a marketer to generate some leads, and that usually leads them to doing a whole bunch of different tactics that they shouldn’t be doing and takes them away from focusing on the things that are actually going to allow them to meet their marketing objectives and drive real growth.

Developing a Marketing Strategy

The marketing strategy is the meat of the Marketing Strategy Pyramid and consists of brand, growth, and customer strategies. These three elements reflect the comprehensive journey a customer takes with your business.

At Duct Tape Marketing, we believe this is how a customer or a lead effectively moves through a business. These three elements reflect the marketing journey inside of the marketing strategy. 

Often, people end their marketing strategy with a clever tagline, colors, and logos, and they call it a day. But what I want to suggest is a marketing strategy actually runs through the entire customer journey. 

We use something called the Marketing Hourglass. It’s a tool we use to reinforce this idea of the customer journey. 

The Real Brand Strategy

Brand strategy is where we will help identify who makes an ideal customer, narrow the focus, and define the products and services the customer is looking for. 

We also are going to focus a great deal of attention on messaging. Are we promising to solve that ideal customer’s biggest problem as opposed to, here’s what we sell, so nobody cares what we sell; they want their problems solved.

  • Narrowing Focus: Pinpoint your ideal customer to tailor your marketing efforts directly to them.

  • Defining Offerings: Clarify what you provide that specifically solves your customers’ problems.

  • Messaging: Shift the conversation from what you sell to how you solve their biggest headaches.

For example, consider Cedar Ridge Retreat Homes, who came to us facing significant challenges in marketing their luxury home-building services. Their previous marketing efforts failed to resonate, leaving their brand message unclear and poorly aligned with their business objectives. 

Through our “Strategy First” process, we pinpointed their ideal customer and crafted a resonant brand identity that emphasized retreat spaces over generic rentals. This strategic pivot not only clarified their offerings but positioned Cedar Ridge for substantial growth in their niche market.

Brand strategy development also includes things like how we want to be perceived. Are we fun? Are we very serious? Are we analytical? This drives all of your content. Lastly, many people put this first, we want to make sure that the names, colors, graphics, logos and things all support the message and the brand promise are aligned. That is all the first part of marketing strategy.

Strategy First Marketing Graphic

Formulating a Growth Strategy

The second part is the growth strategy. What are the tactics we’re going to use to attract, build trust, get people to try and buy from us? 

The growth strategy includes all of the communication and content designed to move people through the Marketing Hourglass stages. Certainly, it’s advertising and all the things that create awareness. It should also be about building trust and facilitating a seamless buying experience.

  • Content and Advertising: Use these tools to educate and engage potential customers.

  • Sales Processes: Create processes that are as streamlined as they are effective.

By staying attuned to the current landscape, we, as fractional CMOs, can pinpoint the opportunities and challenges that will shape the success of our strategies. For instance, if we observe a rising trend in video content consumption and it aligns with the business strategy, it’s essential to weave video marketing into our growth plans to effectively capture and engage our client’s target audience.

Building a Customer Strategy

After the sale, the real work begins. Your customer strategy should aim to turn first-time buyers into lifelong fans and advocates. This includes:

  • Onboarding: Make their first experience with your brand unforgettable.

  • Customer Engagement: Keep the dialogue going and the relationship growing.

  • Referral Programs: Use satisfied customers to bring in new ones. I wrote an entire book on referrals called “The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself” that covers this topic extensively. 

Our past customers are often our best customers. Did you know 80% of a company’s revenue comes from just 20% of its existing customers? 

By investing in these customer loyalty strategies, you can build a base of devoted customers who drive sustainable growth for your business.

Implementing a Team Strategy

So their overarching business builds on this business strategy, has marketing strategy in the middle, and the cherry on top is the team strategy. 

The team is there for the execution. You build it (business strategy), communicate it (marketing strategy), and execute on it (team strategy). 

Team strategy includes:

  • Team Alignment: Ensure everyone is on the same page and fully equipped to deliver.

  • Training and Development: Keep your team sharp and informed with regular training.

  • Culture: Cultivate a team culture that attracts and retains top talent, emphasizing values that elevate both the company and its clients.

As a business owner, the team also allows you to scale efficiently and effectively.

 “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

For fCMOs and business owners, a well-crafted marketing strategy is more than a set of tactics. It’s a comprehensive system that threads through every layer of your business. By leveraging a structured approach like the marketing strategy pyramid, you can align your business goals with your marketing efforts to drive real, sustainable growth.

Visit dtm.world/growth for insights and tools to understand your or your clients’ marketing strategy and ultimately grow your business.

Navigating this journey isn’t just about knowing what to do; it’s about making strategic moves that make sense for your business. 

Why AI Continues to Suck at Original Content?

Why AI Continues to Suck at Original Content? 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 talk about the elusive: Content. What it is, What it’s been, and where it’s going. In other words, Air, King, and now AI-generated?

I refer to content not as a tactic but as the voice of strategy. But how can AI be used effectively in content creation?

With the approach of producing ‘Pillar Content’ and breaking it into subtopics. The best use of many AI tools is to ‘produce good content in the easiest way possible,’ which is video—producing and repurposing it into various formats.

I also discuss the ‘Content Sprint Methodology,’ which involves using AI to generate additional assets based on the original content.

 

Key Takeaways

  • Content is essential for building trust and authority.
  • AI can be a valuable tool for content creation, but it is best used to generate ideas and enhance original content.
  • Producing pillar content and breaking it into subtopics is an effective strategy for creating valuable and relevant content.
  • Using AI to create videos and repurpose content can save time and effort in content production.
  • The content sprint methodology involves starting with original content and using AI to generate additional assets

 

Chapters

[00:00] The Importance of Content in Marketing
[00:57] Using AI Effectively in Content Creation
[02:23] AI’s Limitations in Producing Original Content
[04:34] Producing Pillar Content and Subtopics
[05:58] Repurposing Content with AI
[08:48] The Content Sprint Methodology

 

This episode was brought to you by:

 

ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

 

Wix

work in sync with your team all on one canvas, and reuse templates, widgets, and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best-in-class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites.

 



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John Jantsch (00:00): I don’t believe that AI today is very good at producing original content. I use it all the time for ideation for like, what did I miss? Are there things that I should be saying here? Is there a research statistics to back this up? So I use it in that manner when I’m creating content, but here’s the way that we produce content. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and you got it. Another solo show, just me and the microphone. So I want to talk about content today. I used to stand on stages and say, content is king. Remember that? And then everybody got the message and really, content became air, really have to have it to play. Today, pretty much every single industry, obviously there are a lot of industries that realize education, building trust, building authority, those are things that go hand in hand with marketing, period.

(00:54): But pretty much every industry today, regardless, local businesses, construction businesses, plumbers need to have content today. And I actually refer to content, not as a tactic, but as the voice of strategy. Alright, with all of that set up, I want to talk about something I’m seeing a lot of right now. AI is a tool that certainly offers a lot of promise around the idea of content. Some people actually say it can produce all your content for you. However, I believe that what I see a lot of people doing is using content or using AI in some of the various new tools in the wrong way. And I think actually backwards would be how I would refer to it. I was in a presentation the other day and somebody was demonstrating some AI tools, and really it’s pretty easy. I’m kind of geek out on the coolness of some of the things that some of the AI tools can do and will increasingly be able to do.

(01:50): Kind of creepy. Cool, I suppose in some regards. But one of the things that I see a lot of people doing is there are now these tools out there that you can train to produce video with your avatar. It’ll look like you, it will talk like you sort of. And so what people are doing is they’re now just writing content or having AI create content, create scripts, feed it into this tool, and all of a sudden, voila, I’ve got video produced by ai. But then they spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to get it to sound like them, to say the things that they say, to have the tone that they have, even to be able to pronounce words in their industry the right way. And I think that while, like I said, there’s some coolness factor to it to be able to, I mean, I’ve seen people actually go and produce entire podcast with a host and a guest.

(02:44): Neither one of them actually does it. They produce a script, they produce the answers to the questions, they produce the podcast. And while it is one of those things that’s like, look what we did because we can, I’m not sure it’s, look what we did because we should. And here’s the main reason. I don’t believe that AI today is very good at producing original content. I use it all the time for ideation for what did I miss? Are there things that I should be saying here? Is there a research statistics to back this up? So I use it in that manner when I’m creating content, but here is the way that we produce content, and this is really more of a how to, not necessarily the structure of the content, but I’ll spend a minute on that. We produce what we call pillar content. So we come up with once a quarter, three core themes, and these are going to be themes that we know are ideal client or clients are looking for information on.

(03:37): And if they find it, I guess is another way of saying if they find this content and read it, it’s going to be useful in helping them understand why they might want to work with us. That’s sort of the filter, I guess. It’s not just, well, here, we should write about this trendy thing or that trendy thing. It’s what’s our core pillar content. 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.

(04:36): 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. We’ll also receive 15% off an annual plan. 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 ActiveCampaign today. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites.

(05:39): Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more? Now we’ll take that core pillar content and we’ll break it down into subtopics. And so for example, once we determine what that content is, some of the AI tools, the GPTs out there are really great, frankly at creating outlines. What are the subtopics that would go under this? I mean, you put in any industry and it’s pretty good at actually saying, here are the important things to know about any industry. So we actually do this same thing with clients. And if you’re out there thinking, how am I going to produce all this? Or you’re an agency that says, how can I produce all this for my clients? This is an exact approach that we teach or in some cases just do for our clients that are trying to build brand and build authority.

(06:27): So at the end of this, if you would like to know more about how we might be able to do that for you, it’s just john@ducttapemarketing.com is where I always tell people, just write to me and we’ll see what we can put together for you. But after we produce that topic list, then here is how we employ ai. I actually create videos just like if you’re watching this on YouTube, just like this one. I just stand in front of a microphone and I riff on the topic for five, 10 minutes. And when we have clients, we actually just interview them and let them riff for five or 10 minutes on the topic and we can coach them that way and get great video. But here’s what we get from that. First off, we generally speaking, get good content well, or at least it’s original content.

(07:12): It is from my thinking, it is from my point of view, it is the jargon that I use, the terminology or citing our own IP is going to show up in that video. So that’s a great starting point, but it also is an incredible way to train then an AI tool on how I speak, how I pause, how often I say there’s so many things that can be gained really just by having that original video on top of, as I said, the real starting point there is that we have good high quality original content. So I might actually just pick out one day and spend 60, 90 minutes and record 10 of these videos, which will then give my team enough ammo, frankly, to produce all the social posts, email newsletters, original videos, of course snippets. From that video. We employ all those tools to actually repurpose the content.

(08:07): And I think frankly, right now, today in what are we, almost in September of 2024, that is the best use of many of the AI tools is to produce good original content in the easiest way possible, which to me is video a lot easier than banging out a thousand words. I can talk all day long, A lot of the folks that we work with that remodeling contractor, getting them to write anything would be next to impossible, but getting them to talk for an hour about what they believe, what their process is, how to get the best out of this, new trends in appliances. I mean, they can talk for days on these. So it allows us to really capture a ton of original content and then we turn it into everything, including blog posts, of course, snippets of video I already mentioned LinkedIn posts, Facebook posts, X posts, Instagram reels.

(09:03): There’s just so many things that we can produce when we start with this video first. But then we can also take some of those videos and stack them. And now we’ve got, we can actually use the AI to say, create a course, take these 10 videos and create a course out of them. Obviously we had some thought into what the titles were and the topic and the through line of the 10 videos, but it can actually produce a complete course outline, complete with questions, complete with quizzes, complete with checklists. And so we can create lead capture devices out of that. So we’ll take a checklist or two, we’ll take a tool or two, and we will actually put it into the GPT and say, here, fill this out, complete this. Give me examples, samples. So we have something we call the marketing snapshot, which is our version of a marketing plan, kind of all on one page.

(09:54): Well, I can upload that tool that we’ve created and ask the GPT to fill it in for X industry, in fact, for 10 different industries. And all of a sudden now we’ve got samples that people can relate to and really maybe more thoroughly understand. So if you start my whole point, if you start with this original content in your voice or in your client’s voice, you can then work backwards tremendously producing all kinds of iterations of that good original content that’s in your voice, in your point of view, in your tone, using your industry jargon. So instead of thinking, how can I create these avatars to talk like me, talk like you, and use the transcript of that, which pretty much every one of these tools now produces right off the bat, use the transcript of that. Then to go out and produce all kinds of other assets.

(10:49): We call this the content sprint methodology. It’s something, as I said that we do for ourself, but we also do it for pretty much all of our clients, either inside of a full engagement or as a standalone. We’d be happy to do it for you as well. So that’s it for today. Use AI the right way. Use it for good. Hopefully we’re running into you one of these days out there on the road. Don’t forget, we love those reviews as well. If you’ve got any questions, comments, feedback, john@ducttapemarketing.com. That’s DU CT A PE marketing.com. All right, take care.

Testimonial (11:33): I was like this. I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients, it’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made. What

John Jantsch (11:50): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate, the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory. Call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash Scale.


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(Un)Limiting Beliefs

(Un)Limiting Beliefs 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 aim to stir the pot in yet another solo show by sharing a distinct and uncommon point of view (or five) in marketing.

I’ve never really understood the insane popularity of Simon Sinek’s ‘Find your why notion.‘ I mean, it’s been said before, right? Maybe even better. My why is: Why is that particular video so popular?!

Regardless, Marketers often make marketing too complicated anyway. Fun fact: complexity in marketing is just disguised incompetence. Chasing trends is a recipe for failure, and you shouldn’t just repurpose your content but make it purposeful.

I also draw special attention to the significance of customer experience as the true differentiator and the importance of measuring marketing effectiveness. Stick around for 10 minutes of me crossing the line between fact and opinion as I share all I learned in my experience in the industry in a few words of wisdom, all in one belief system that you can adopt to run your agency better.

 

Key Takeaways (Or What I Believe)

  • Share a distinct and uncommon point of view about your business and its offerings to differentiate yourself in the market.
  • Focus on solving your ideal client’s problems rather than just promoting your products or services.
  • Create purposeful content and use marketing automation to personalize your interactions with customers.
  • Build long-term relationships with customers and prioritize customer experience as the true differentiator.
  • Measure the effectiveness of your marketing activities to avoid wasting time and money.
  • Use data to gain insights and make informed decisions.
  • Avoid unnecessary complexity in marketing and strive for simplicity and clarity.

 

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction and the Need for a Distinct Point of View
[03:25] Solving Problems and Building Relationships
[05:48] The True Differentiator: Customer Experience
[06:45] Measuring Marketing Effectiveness and the Importance of Data
[07:44] Avoiding Complexity in Marketing

 

 

This episode was brought to you by:

Oracle

Nobody does data better than Oracle. Train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive at oracle.com/ducttape

 

Wix

work in sync with your team all on one canvas, and reuse templates, widgets, and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best-in-class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites.

 



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John Jantsch (00:00): Complexity in marketing is just disguised incompetence. I believe that marketers make marketing too complicated and that chasing trends is a recipe for failure that no one cares about our products or services. They care about their problems getting those problems solved.

(00:20): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest again today. As you can see on the screen, if you’re watching the videos, just me solo podcast. So let’s call this one What I believe that’s the name of this episode. I was listening to a presentation on strategy and authority the other day, and really no surprise, that old chestnut of finding your why was mentioned as part of strategy and authority building. They talked about something that I think is a needed twist in this conversation. As a side note, I’ve never really understood the insane popularity of Simon Sinek’s Find Your Why Notion.

(01:01): I mean, other people had said that, hadn’t they? I mean, why is that particular video so popular? But I digress, and frankly, it’s mostly jealousy. So let’s move on. Alright, so finding your why that conversation mostly centers around purpose and beliefs. Sharing with the world that you believe, I don’t know, cats and dogs both deserve love or that the use or not use of the wildly divisive Oxford comma hurts no one. Or maybe even that you believe something universal. We should all love our neighbors. I mean, none of that is a bad thing, but I think those are things that might attract your ideal client, but I think they’re kind of nice to have when somebody’s considering buying from you. I mean, obviously the opposite. I hate kittens. That’s not a, that’s actually going to drive things away. But again, I think that those are, a lot of people focus there and that’s great.

(02:02): Having core beliefs inside of a business I think are great. But I think that there’s incredible brand value in sharing what you believe, especially, or in additionally when you share the distinct and perhaps not so common point of view about what your business does, how it’s different. I mean, it’s the unique value and say it in ways that are beliefs that are really kind of attacking an enemy almost so that some percentage of the market’s out there going, yeah, I not only believe that, but I hate it when people do X. So I think this is how you can start to differentiate your business in ways that addresses the problems that your ideal clients are trying to solve. So with that in mind, I’m going to give you an example, but I also hope to start some fights. I hope that I hear from listeners on this who either agree or wildly disagree with these ideas because I think that there is value in both of those.

(03:06): I’m not saying that I intentionally believe we should all create fights or that we should all create division or polarize markets, but I do think that if there’s not a tinge of, Hey, I believe that, or Hey, I don’t believe that there’s not a tinge of emotion in what you say to people about what you do and why you do it, then we’re probably missing the mark. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets, and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites.

(04:00): Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? It’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape.

(05:07): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. So here I go. We sell marketing strategy. People hire us to create a marketing strategy to implement that plan in many cases and to help them build a brand, help them grow that brand, help them create more customer loyalty and retention. But I would like to believe that everything we do comes with the following point of view. I believe that marketers make marketing too complicated and that chasing trends is a recipe for failure that no one cares about our products or services. They care about their problems and getting those problems solved. Creativity without strategy is art. Sorry, graphic designers. But without strategy. It’s not marketing content without purpose is just noise. And boy, are we seeing a lot of noise these days. AI is making it very easy to create content without purpose. Marketing. Automation without personalization is spam. I’m guilty of this.

(06:14): I understand that it’s wrong. It’s just hard. So a lot of what we try to focus on is not just using these tools. How can we use them to personalize long-term? Relationships matter so much more than quick wins. So you stay in business for any amount of time and you will come to really appreciate that. One. Engagement without conversion is vanity. You see so many people just trying to build up their Facebook profile. I’ve got so many likes, so many followers. So there’s a place for all of that. But without conversion or without at least the thought of why we’re doing this for conversion, it’s simply vanity. Customer experience to me is the only true differentiator. So what I mean by that is so many people are out there trying to find their difference, their unique thing. We’re the purple people or we deliver faster than anyone else, whatever their kind of thing, that can be a competitive advantage.

(07:13): But what we sometimes forget is how the customer experiences. That differentiator is what actually makes it valuable. What actually makes it a true differentiator? If you’re not measuring, you’re guessing, sorry, another one that’s hard. But if we’re not measuring the effectiveness of all of our marketing activity, we are just guessing. Sometimes we guess, right? But sometimes we guess horribly wrong and don’t realize it wastes tons and tons of money. Tons and tons of time. And last one, ending on a data note. Data without insights is useless. How many marketing firms just throw out a report monthly report because they said they would to their clients? And without any kind of insight into why any of this matters, does any of this lead to or to us meeting our business objectives? Pretty useless. And then finally, I’m going to end on a harsh one. Complexity in marketing is just disguised incompetence.

(08:10): I think in a lot of cases there are marketers out there that want marketing to seem odd, SEO to be this really strange science that nobody can understand, and some of that really has to do with the fact that they can get away with murder when they do it’s disguised incompetence. So those are some of our whys. Those are some of what goes into those beliefs inform pretty much everything we do. At least I hope they do. It’s not perfect, but it’s the goal. It’s how we fulfill our unique point of view that marketing is simple when marketing is a system. So I’m going to leave you with the words of the well-known brand strategist, Dolly Parton. Here’s our job. Find out who you are and go be it. So I hope that I stirred the pot a little bit here. I hope to hear from you, John, at duct tape marketing.com. Obviously, if you’re somebody who owns a business out there and you’re thinking, Hey, that all made sense to me, maybe I should talk to them about how we can get our marketing system, reach out, john@ducttapemarketing.com. All right, take care out there. Hopefully we’ll see you one day soon. Out there on the road.

Testimonial (09:33): I was like, I founded. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (09:49): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM.world/scale to book your free advisory. Call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM.World/Scale.


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Weekend Favs August 24th

Weekend Favs August 24th written by Jordan E read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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

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

  • ClickUp: an all-in-one productivity platform designed to help teams and individuals manage tasks, projects, and workflows efficiently.

  • NapoleonCat: a social media management tool that allows users to schedule posts, manage customer interactions, and analyze performance across multiple platforms.

  • ZoomInfo SalesOS: a sales intelligence platform that provides data, insights, and automation tools to help sales teams identify and connect with potential customers effectively.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Connect with me on Linkedin!

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

Are You Ready to Be a Fractional CMO?

Are You Ready to Be a Fractional CMO? 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 do a solo show exploring the misconceptions surrounding the role of the Fractional CMO. As businesses increasingly seek scalable marketing leadership, the demand for fractional CMOs has surged. But not so much the supply. Yes, there is some interest, but there’s a lot of noise and confusion surrounding this idea. People want to learn and are learning by doing but don’t feel quite there yet. If you’re one of those people reading this, Are you ready to put that title on your LinkedIn profile?

 

 

 

 

More so;

  • What does it mean to be a Fractional CMO?
  • What are the skills required?
  • How can this role significantly impact your agency’s growth strategy?

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Strategic Thinking: A fractional CMO must lead with strategy, developing comprehensive marketing plans aligned with business objectives. This approach ensures that every tactic and channel contributes to the company’s long-term goals.
  • Leadership: Many businesses lack strategic marketing leadership, especially in the $3 to $30 million range. A fractional CMO fills this gap by advocating for the customer and aligning marketing efforts with the broader business strategy.
  • Technical Skills: Besides strategy, a fractional CMO must possess strong technical skills to advise on and implement marketing technologies that optimize operations and enhance efficiency.
  • Industry Knowledge: A fractional CMO needs a broad understanding of various industries and extensive marketing experience. This knowledge allows them to tailor strategies that resonate with different market segments.
  • Data-Driven Decisions: The ability to analyze data and set measurable KPIs is essential. A fractional CMO must demonstrate the impact of marketing initiatives on the company’s bottom line, proving their value through continuous improvement.

 

Chapters

[00:38] Common Misconceptions: Where Trends don’t meet Scale

The common misconception about the role of a fractional CMO is that while the concept is trendy, the traditional model of working with a few clients part-time may not be scalable. Actually, we’re pretty sure it’s not. What’s needed is developing a more sustainable approach, one that allows fractional CMOs to serve businesses while also scaling their operations effectively.

[01:51] My Take on the Role Itself and Skills Required

Strategic thinking, leadership, and industry knowledge are critical components of the role. Understanding a business’s goals and aligning marketing strategies accordingly is essential, rather than just executing tactics.

[05:44] One word: Branding!

A world where traditional lead generation tactics like SEO and social media advertising are frankly becoming more challenging. a strong brand that builds trust and connects with buyers will be key to success in the coming decade.

[09:15] Leadership

In other words: Vision, direction setting, and aligning marketing strategies with your overarching business objectives. Leadership goes beyond just creating a plan—it’s about guiding the entire marketing function to support business growth.

[10:34] Your Customer’s Journey

Creating organized customer journeys is crucial for market expansion, and guess what? this responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of a Fractional CMO. By designing journeys that customers ACTUALLY want to follow, your business can drive growth more effectively.

[12:00] Acquisition and Retention
A fractional CMO should focus on both customer acquisition and retention. They need to generate new leads and maximize the value from existing customers through retention strategies and memorable customer experiences that lead to repeat business and referrals.

[13:18] A Holistic View

The role of a Fractional CMO isn’t just about marketing—it’s about integrating sales, customer service, and even operational aspects to ensure that the entire business is aligned and working towards common goals. This comprehensive view is essential for delivering measurable impact and long-term success. But always remember to commit to continuous learning.

[09:01] Strategy First

Lastly, Strategy First! Every engagement should start with a well-defined marketing strategy that aligns with the business’s objectives. This strategy-first mindset allows Fractional CMOs to provide clear direction and measurable results, setting the stage for successful marketing initiatives.

 

This episode was brought to you by:

 

ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

Wix

work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites.

 



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John Jantsch (00:00): Brand has always been important. I believe it’s going to become more important the next decade or so. Companies that develop a strong brand, a brand that helps connect with their buyer, helps build trust with their prospect, those are going to be the brands that I think Excel.

(00:15): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and I’m doing a solo show today. Here’s the topic. So are you ready to be a fractional CMO? Are you ready to put that title on your LinkedIn profile? That’s what we’re going to talk about today. There’s a lot of noise around this idea, maybe some misconceptions. I want to talk about how I view this idea and whether or not the positioning makes sense for you. And I want to key in on that word positioning because to a large degree, that is one of the benefits of positioning yourself as a fractional.

(00:55): CMO should help you attract a client who is looking for strategy that wants something more than just. It also is a way for you to develop relationships with clients as a trusted advisor. So there’s a lot of benefits for it. I think that there certainly are some misconceptions. The traditional role that’s, frankly, it’s been around 10 years, it’s certainly gotten very hot and trendy right now, but the traditional role was somebody would have the experience and hang out a shingle, call themselves a fractional CMO, and they would work with maybe four clients, a fourth of their time to four different clients. Now, they might be paid really well for their time, but a pretty tough model to scale. So what we’ve been working on is helping agency owners, consultants, strategists, figure out a way to actually use the benefits of this model, but also to do it in a way that is scalable.

(01:50): But first, I want to talk a little bit about the skills and what I think the role is supposed to look like because what we are trying to do is I think every business, every size of business today, fractional, everything means something to them. They have hired people fractionally for a number of roles now, and so the concept of getting marketing leadership in a fractional way I think is very compelling. But I think now maybe it was companies that were over $30 million, they were maybe on the verge of hiring a CMO period and saw fractional as a way to save money. But I think the real market today is in that maybe, I don’t know, three to $30 million business that was probably not going to hire a CMO at all, but realizes they have a real gap in marketing leadership. So that’s really the model that we are addressing, or at least the democratization of the term, if you will, for how I view it.

(02:50): So let’s talk a little bit about what I think this role involves. So in terms of skills, certainly strategic thinking. I mean, it has to be strategy first. You have to lead with that as any way somebody is going to engage you. You’re not going to go in and just start diagnosing and saying, oh, you need this and this. There is going to be a period of developing strategy. I’ve said this word a couple of times and I think it’s really key leadership. Most of the folks that I’ve talked about in that range of three to $30 million do not have any strategic marketing or marketing leadership period. Typically, they’re very founder-driven organizations still, maybe they have a sales head of sales, but they really don’t have anybody that is advocating for marketing or frankly advocating for the customer. And that’s a big part of the leadership role.

(03:38): Technical skills are going to be important. Obviously, you’re going to encounter firms that need a lot of things fixed that need to start adding MarTech to the current stack of technology. So somebody who can actually come in and advise on what that should look like, how to automate things, how to stop doing things manually. That to me is going to be a big part of this role. Now, there’s also going to be a need for industry knowledge. Now, I don’t necessarily mean that you have to niche to be the fractional CMO for a certain industry, but I think that a broad range of industry knowledge, and maybe another way to say that also is marketing experience. You’ve just seen a lot of things. I think that’s probably key as well. I did a survey with databox and the fractional CMOs that we surveyed had, I think the greatest number was over 10 years of marketing experience.

(04:32): Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean CMO roles, but marketing experience. And I think that while I don’t think that’s necessary, that level is necessary for every client that you might serve, there’s certainly a need for some level of breadth of experience I think. So according to LinkedIn, 2022, emerging jobs report, demand and skills in data analysis, AI and strategy development are the three growing roles. So I think there are three growing needs in emerging jobs. So I think that’s going to run true of this role as well. So the role itself, strategy development, creating long-term marketing plans that aligned with business goals. That’s a key point here because I think there are a lot of marketers that can develop a brilliant strategy and a list of tactics and channels and campaigns that go along with it, but then somebody turns around and says, well, how does this help the business go where it wants to go?

(05:29): And so I think that’s certainly an element that a fractional CMO is going to bring is let me first understand your business goals and objectives, and then I can actually develop a marketing strategy to support those and not the other way around. I believe that brand, well, brand has always been important. I believe it’s going to become more important the next decade or so. The last decade, marketers got a bit lazy, frankly, because SEO, once you figured out how to make that work, it was a pretty easy way to generate leads. The social platforms were willing to sell you all the data on their users, and so consequently, you could really target with effective advertising. Both of those things are going to gradually go away or get much harder. And I think this idea of the companies that develop a strong brand, a brand that helps connect with their buyer, helps build trust with their prospect, those are going to be the brands that I think Excel.

(06:23): And that’s really how we’re going to have to stand out today. Most of the firms that hire you are going to want market expansion. They’re going to want to grow. So having a very strong background in how to actually, and I don’t know if it’s so much create demand. I know a lot of people will call it create demand, but I think organized behavior, organized customer journeys that people want to go down, that to me is how we’re going to expand market and then just optimizing performance. Certainly if you’re going to have a seat at the C-suite table, you are going to be talking about metrics. You’re going to be talking about the things that you can impact, the things that you can measure, and I think that’s really going to be a key role. It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast.

(07:11): 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. We’ll also receive 15% off an annual plan. That’s activecampaign.com/duct tape. Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only. So what are you waiting for?

(08:14): Fuel your growth, boost revenue, and save precious time by upgrading to ActiveCampaign today. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio. Work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more the marketing leadership role? And this I think is probably the biggest leap for a lot of marketers because a lot of marketers felt like my job is create the plan, execute the plan, measure success and report back.

(09:12): But if we’re going to add this level of marketing leadership now, I think we’re talking about vision and direction setting, long-term marketing goals aligned with the business objectives, certainly focusing on competitive positioning, differentiating the brand, and what’s probably going to be crowded marketplace because every marketplace is crowded According to Deloitte, only 19% of companies align their operating model with their strategy. That’s going to be a big part of your job. Brand strategy is going to go beyond brand identity. It’s sad, but most marketers know this, but we still talk to a lot of folks that brand is logo. It’s your personality, it’s your message strategy that is really going to allow you to not only differentiate, but have a prospective client say, wait a minute, you’re talking about me. Why isn’t anybody else addressing the problem that you’re promising to solve? That goes a long way towards brand strategy and then obviously how you carry that out, how you act, how the company or how the prospect or client experiences you is all part of brand strategy.

(10:18): Harvard’s business review study found that consistent brand messaging can increase revenue by up to 23%. No shocker there. Alright, optimizing growth. I mean a lot of that’s going to be around channel selection, integrating campaigns, performance tracking, but let’s not forget good old customer journey. I think that is a great element of this idea of optimizing growth. And it goes hand in hand I think with a brand strategy. Another stat for you pulled a whole bunch of stats together to drive home these points. Forrester reports that companies using advanced analytics to optimize marketing channels see a 15 to 20% increase in marketing. ROI. No surprise there at all. It’s the hardest thing to do. It’s the hardest thing to get a business excited about doing, but it might just be the difference. Data-driven, you are going to be data-driven, KPI setting teaching actually, I mean a lot of the folks that you end up working with in this role are going to be looking for somebody to come in and say, you know what?

(11:22): We need to be, we need to be tracking these things. Here are the analytics tools that we need to put in place. Here is how I can teach everyone about the marketing p and l. And that’s really the way for continuous improvement. And that’s a big part I think of this role or at least. And now people may not actually be out there asking for that role, but it is the role that they need. And I think somebody who can position themselves as very data-driven along with very strategic and along with bringing leadership is going to have the package. Gardner found 74% of high performing marketing teams used data analytics to make informed decisions. Alright, acquisition and retention. I think that one way that somebody is a fractional CMO is really going to set themselves apart is to not just think about lead generation. So many marketers are hyper-focused on lead generation.

(12:17): Frankly, so many business owners, I just need more leads. Well, somebody who can actually help them get more business out of their existing clientele, how to retain and get repeat business and understand how to create a better customer experience that turns into referrals. That is going to be definitely an element of how to differentiate yourself as a fractional CMO. Alright, your road to success if you will. It’s going to take a very holistic view, and by that I mean we have to go beyond maybe what we think of as traditional marketing tactics and elements. We have to get into sales, we have to get into customer service. Again, if you would think about what a traditional CMO would do, they would sit in the csuite and they a meeting about what needs to happen to make marketing grow and they would be talking about all the elements across many aspects of the business, how the phone is answered.

(13:18): If we want to get completely granular. Those are things that somebody who is taking a holistic view is going to be very focused on because it all adds up to marketing. You are going to have to be able to prove your impact. My hope is that you are going to be charging much more maybe than you are today, but certainly more than somebody who’s just selling packages of tactics. However, that’s going to come with the price tag of being able to show measurable impact. So make sure that you are going in from the get-go saying, how do we map this to a business objectives? How do we set up the KPIs? How do I get access to the p and l so that I can understand what our cost to acquire a customer actually is? Those are things that if you’re going to take this role, you have to boldly demand that you gain access to those things because it’s going to be the only way for you to show measurable results and impact.

(14:19): And then lastly, you have to commit to continuous learning. One of the things that you will definitely do if you want to add value is that you will become the r and d department. Every new thing that comes along that maybe they’re reading about or maybe they’re hearing about in their industry meetings and things, that you’re the one that is going to be the voice of reason for it. No, we don’t need to follow that. Here’s how we can use that. This isn’t ready, this is ready. We need to go all in on this. You need to be the R department as well. And that’s just going to involve a commitment to continuous learning. I’ll leave you with one last statistic. Fractional CMO report in 2024 indicates that businesses with fractional CMOs are 36% more likely to achieve their long-term strategic goals that might be reason enough to pursue this avenue.

(15:16): Alright, hopefully that’s given you some food for thought, would love to visit with you. We actually have a program where we teach folks who maybe are not yet calling themselves fractional CMOs, or maybe they are calling themselves factual CMOs, but they’ve decided they want to find a way to scale this business. We actually give them a tool called Strategy first, which is a very scripted way to create a marketing strategy that has scope. I think one of the challenges a lot of folks have is they walk into a business. The business says, I need you to be my fractional cmo. Nobody defines what that role actually involves. We are trying to define it to package it, to make it something that somebody can scale. So just go to DTM world slash growth. We’ve got an ebook there on what we believe is the model of the future for being a fractional CMO. Lots of other resources. You can also find out about our certification program. All right, that’s it for now. Take care.

Testimonial (16:24): I was like, I founded, I founded. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made. What

John Jantsch (16:41): You just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash Scale.


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Why Leadership Requires a Conscience: The Shift CEOs Can’t Ignore

Why Leadership Requires a Conscience: The Shift CEOs Can’t Ignore written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Andrew C.M. Cooper

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed: Andrew C. M. Cooper, author of ‘The Ethical Imperative: Leading with Consciousness to Shape the Future of Business,’.

We discuss the importance of ethical leadership and the impact of the pandemic on business practices. He emphasizes the need for companies to care about their employees and the issues that their employees care about. Andrew Cooper also explores the concept of turning in business and the cyclical nature of societal challenges. He suggests that companies should authentically align their actions with their values and navigate the balance between doing the right thing and the potential cost. Cooper also discusses virtual and mixed reality’s educational potential in understanding complex societal issues.

 

 

Key Takeaways

  • Ethical leadership is crucial in shaping the future of business
  • Companies need to care about their employees and the issues that their employees care about
  • Authenticity is key in balancing the potential cost of doing the right thing
  • Virtual reality and mixed reality have educational potential in understanding complex societal issues

 

Chapters

  • [00:00] Introduction: Andrew C. M. Cooper and ‘The Ethical Imperative’
  • [02:32] Leading with Consciousness: The Ethical Imperative
  • [05:17] The Impact of the Pandemic on Business Practices
  • [10:12] Navigating the Balance: Doing the Right Thing vs. Cost
  • [17:27] Exploring Complex Societal Issues through Virtual Reality
  • [20:36] Conclusion: Connect with Andrew C. M. Cooper

 

 

More About Andrew C.M. Cooper:

 

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:

Oracle

Nobody does data better than Oracle. Train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive at oracle.com/ducttape

 

Wix

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Andrew Cooper & John Jantsch (00:00): Herbert Dow over Dow Chemical. He said the most effective way of working is to care for our employees and to see that they are happy and contented. That is a very different than if you fast forward post 1970 and you look at a CEO like Albert Dunlap. At Sunbeam, Albert said, employees don’t matter. The only thing that matters is shareholder value, which I think more often reflects a modern kind of pre 20th century view than what I previously described.

(00:32): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Andrew CM Cooper. He’s a Fortune 500 executive attorney, inventor, lecturer, writer, and board director. Couldn’t decide on what clear he wanted, I guess. He’s currently the Associate General Counsel for Strategic Transactions and Mergers and Acquisitions at Meta Platforms Inc. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, the Ethical Imperative, leading With Conscious to Shape the Future of Business.

(01:04): So Andrew, welcome to the show. Hey, John, thanks for having me. So I don’t want to get too sidetracked here, but I can’t help notice the saxophone in the background and the word inventor in your bio. So can you share what inventor, how that label got applied? Sure. Yeah. Like he said, sometimes I don’t think I can decide on a specific career path, so I try to embrace ’em all right. Actually, I helped to invent a method for landing unmanned aerial systems. So UAVs on top of UPS package cars, which matured into a US patent along with two other inventors. My primary vocation is a patent lawyer, so that’s kind of where the inventor came in. And then the saxophone, that thing is collecting dust over there in the corner is, I haven’t picked it up since maybe a few years now, but I played alto saxophone and band in school and just kept it around.

(02:00): I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, and we liked to play Charlie Parker as our favorite son, but I think he used to play there a lot. I don’t know, did you see in my bio that I used to work out in Kansas City? No, I didn’t. You’re right. My very first law firm was ARDI and Bacon. Oh, sure. Of course. Out in Kansas City, Missouri. And my wife and I, we lived in Raytown. You probably know Raytown not far from there. Course, of course. Yeah. That’s great. Well, I’ve just completely upended up the topic for the show here. We better get into your book. So the title, ethical Impairment with Consciousness to Shape the Future of Business certainly is a topic that is, I would say has evolved, feels like there’s a whole lot more intentional information about this concept. Would you say that there is a generational aspect that is kind of driving that evolution?

(02:48): Without a doubt. I think the number of executives come from the old school School of thought. We have Milton Friedman approach to business. The only thing that matters is making profit, and that just doesn’t resonate these days with younger executives. And honestly, that is the reason I’ve wrote this book about every other show I do. I blame something else on the pandemic. Would you say that you actually refer to it as a pivotal event in kind of bringing this consciousness to the forefront, would you say Maybe it was happening, but that certainly accelerated it my entire career avoiding weighty issues like death, but the Pandemic brought it right to my doorstep. I was sitting in my office one day and I get a phone call and I pick it up and someone says, Hey, we’d like to get some services from you guys. I’m like, okay, this is a totally normal call, but why are you calling the legal department?

(03:39): I shouldn’t be talking to our marketing and sales guys. They’re like, yeah, no, you don’t understand what we need are refrigerated containers to hold dead bodies because our morgues are overflowing. And in an instant, my world was turned upside down to really start thinking about things like death. I had members on my team that suffered multiple deaths, one after the other, taking care of human beings became the primary concern during the, I think most executives will know during that period of time. And the truth is, I began journaling about what my team was going through, and that kind of matured into for earliest parts of the book. But the truth is the pandemic though it was a pivotal event, it didn’t change the way business was being done, that what really changed is who we were as people, what we cared about. There was one question that I think came to the top of everyone’s mind during the pandemic and is it’s, do you care about me?

(04:39): And that really put work in perspective for a lot of people. The relationship between work and worker changed, and because of that, our considerations as leaders to regain performance has to change as well. So you mentioned care about me, but is there also an aspect of do you also care about the things I care about, right, the dream, the planet, not like it’s disposable. I mean, would you say that, so I can have all the nice fess the show you care about me, but I also care about a lot of things out there. I mean, what element does that role in? It’s an enormous element. So I grew up in a small rural town in South Carolina called Walterboro, South Carolina on the wrong side of the train tracks. And my neighborhood was literally dirt easements. There were no paved roads. And I grew up in a single wide trailer, and I talk about the death of the Walterboro economy in my book.

(05:35): That was a result of the loss of industry. It was a real economic catastrophe, similar but not as deadly as the death of East Palestine, the railroad industry in East Palestine, Ohio, which recently had a catastrophic event. But what ends up happening when you grow up on the wrong side of the train tracks is that you realize that there are people over there that need help. And the first chapter of my book, it’s about forgotten towns. The second chapter is about forgotten people. And these are two groups, two things that organizations and leaders need to really focus on if they are to survive that tomorrow’s economy. I read recently some statistics that 84% of millennials give to charity, and that has only been going up by generation. Gen Z is right behind them on that. And in addition to giving, they want know, they want to work for organizations that they know care about, those issues that they care about.

(06:40): So it’s two things that, hey, where are the resources going? Where’s my money going? And then where is my time going? And I want to align my future with those two things because that’s where I see real value. That’s where I see care and concern. I wonder if you could unpack a concept because you talk about it as you have actually called it an existential challenge, the idea or the concept of turning in business. Yeah. So we are adding a generational junction. I really enjoy the book by Neil Howe, the For Turning, and I highly recommend it to the listeners. But the idea is that we are, there are some things that happen over and over again, their cyclical and a lot of ways. In a lot of ways we can look at the period that we’re in as businesses and as an economy similar to those who were to businesses pre 1970.

(07:38): So if you go back between 1920 and 1970, what you find are a generation of people. So you’ve got the silent and you’ve got the greatest generation working in businesses and organization, and they are navigating through what was a generation defining event. So you had the World War Wars, world War ii, and then just before 19 20, 19, 17 time period, you had a similar pandemic like event. And when you look at what CEOs cared about, you look at guys for example, like Thomas Watson at IBM or David Packard at hp. They were on record saying things like, to build a business that lasts, we must treat employees with the same care, respect and consideration that we give our best customers. That came from Thomas Watson, Herbert Dow over at Dow Chemical. He said The most effective way of working is to care for our employees and to see that they are happy and contented.

(08:37): That is a very different than if you fast forward post 1970 and you look at a CEO like Albert Dunlap at Sunbeam, he was famous for tearing companies apart. And Albert said, employees don’t matter. The only thing that matters is shareholder value, which I think more often reflects a modern kind of pre 20th century view than what I previously described. But the experiences that we’re having now in 2020, and for the next 50 years between 2020 and 2070 ish, we’re going to be experiencing a generation of people that are looking to reinvest in humans. Despite all the things you see on news about AI and technology taking over, there is going to be a re-engagement with humanity and the human condition to address the issues that were at the forefront back in the 1920s, in the 1930s and the 1940s, there is a new crusaded business, and my hope is that with this turning, executives will lean into conscientious behavior and conduct.

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(10:48): Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape. That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. So one of the concepts of that book, I also read that a few years ago was this idea of cycles. Of course it’s turning and that there was a bottoming out that had to happen. Have we had fun? Have we bottomed down? I hope so. I hope so.

(11:49): We have seen, and I talk about this in the book, we’ve seen enormous challenges in the economy. If you just look at the banking sector, for example, and the number of bank failures that happened in rapid succession, if you look at all of the indicators of late stage capitalism where food prices are in some ways unmoored from their fundamentals. There was a time during this in post covid inflationary period where we were spending almost $8 for a carton of eggs and no one could really point to even after the supply chain issues were addressed. And I happen to know something about supply chain UPS for so many years that even after those issues were resolved, we saw heightened elevated costs. And so I think the consumer, and we’re seeing that ve out in a number of indices. It’s not just economically speaking where consumption is starting to soften, but we’re also seeing it in indices like social indices.

(12:51): So our politics has never been more and more raw and angry. And then if you look at things like how people are doing emotionally, I recently saw that male depression is an all time high male suicide is at an all time high. So when we look at various indicators, there are indicators that suggest we are close to bottoming out. My hope is that it’s a small implosion rather than an explosion. It’s funny as we talk about the cycles, of course, you and I have only experienced this one. I suspect there was a bottoming out in 1863 or 1864, the Civil War. That was probably a similar time. Right? So you mentioned along of your book, of course, is about the idea of leading with conscious. There are some companies right now that are trying to leave you conscious and it’s costing no dearly, it’s actually become, it’s entered a vernacular to Bud Light companies for doing what they think is the right thing.

(13:54): Right? So how do companies who are definitely afraid of that, maybe they have shareholders that are going to actually make them hold the light on them. How does somebody balance that very real potential cost with doing the right thing? Yeah, let me take one step back and just describe the book is the subtitles leading with conscience. And then I raise up the example of an archetypal executive, someone I call the conscientious executive. Conscientiousness and conscience are two different words, but they have the same root. The Latin root cia, which means knowledge of oneself, a sense of right, or a moral having a moral sense. And so in a way, they’re linked both words or by morality. The only difference is that conscience is the why we do a thing. It’s the normative question. And conscientiousness is more of the how we do a thing. If you look at in it’s considered a normal trait, one of the big five normal traits, and it generally relates to how someone shows up, how timely they are, et cetera.

(15:00): So it’s more of the how. So when I talk about leading with conscience, I’m really talking about the two prims of the words. So companies need to understand why they are doing a thing and they need to understand the appropriate way to do a thing, how they should do it. And to your point, there have been companies that struggle in navigating those two prisons. They may do one not the other. They may say, well, we believe in this principle, insert whatever principle trust. But then when it comes to the how, actually doing the thing, they score very lowly on trust. They don’t trust their employees, they don’t empower frontline managers. They go through cell checkout and you’ve got 10 cameras on you. It’s like, well, okay, I understand you save you trust, but you don’t demonstrate it in your actions. So in the book, I talk about a number of companies that have navigated that particular question.

(15:59): I juxtapose Chick-fil-A and Nike, two companies that are on different planets when it comes to their social position. And even some of their customers might be antagonistic to each other, right? If you buy Nike shoes, you may not eat a Chick-fil-A sandwich. But the truth is that both companies do a pretty good job of meeting both prisms of the conscientiousness test. They lean into who they authentically are, and then they also put their money where their mouth is in doing so. And I mean, I happily patronize both companies. I think that they’re both great, but really navigating to your question, navigating the challenge is going to be showing fidelity to those two things. And anytime a consumer detects that you are not being truthful to both of those things, they will sense the inauthenticity, they will sniff a mile away. And that’s where you’ve run into problems.

(16:54): The authentic word, even though it gets bantered around a lot these days. I mean, I think you’re absolutely right that companies that get in trouble is when they decide this is a good thing, this wouldn’t look good. We should put some solar panels on the building, as opposed to You’re absolutely right, as opposed to really being part of their DNA, right? That’s right. That’s right. That’s all about culture. And so I’m looking above your head in this image of listeners won’t be able to hear it, but I see an Oculus box up there. And I wanted to talk a little bit about, do you feel that there’s a way to, in some of these simulators, in some of these video games that are very real world, do you feel like there’s a way for people to experience or to understand complex societal issues using these two?

(17:39): I do. There are some studies out that validate the educational use case for virtual reality and mixed reality. One study that comes to mind, they examined students, children in primary school and their retention of information in two different contexts. The first context, they gave them a VHF video. And then after watching a video, it was like of marine biology, someone scuba diving and looking at fish. They were asked questions about what they saw and the kids in the brief discussion and answer session, the kids asked questions like, well, what does it take to be a marine biologist? How much did they make? What was that fish? Very surface level questions. But then when they did it again in the virtual reality context and immersive environment, the kids asked more questions that were topographically important to the subject matter. So they were asking things like how fish were related and how the marine life got understood certain interactions with other species of fish in the environment and what the equipment, how it functioned that the marine scuba divers were using. So there is some anecdotal and empirical evidence that suggests there can be greater learning in these environments. However, and I put a big, however, there we are entering into a time where it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not.

(19:09): I think it’s important to resist the urge to over index on technology over human connection. Technology has this interesting thing about it, and I say this as a technologist, right? As a patent lawyer, technology makes us more connected and disconnected at the same time. And it is very easy to engage in going down rabbit holes and losing yourself and to, especially with video games, for example, I’m also a gamer. I talk about that in the book. That’s easy to lose yourself in virtual games and then ignore those things which are real right in front of you. So on both scores, as a father, I have a daughter. I allow her access to technology and screen time in those use cases that make sense, and then I pull back in those that don’t. And I encourage every parent to do the same. Well, Andrew, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place you would invite people to connect with you and obviously learn more about the ethical imperative? Oh, absolutely. The Ethical Imperative is available anywhere. Good books are sold to Barnes EDOs, Amazon, you name it. I have a website, andrew cooper.com. It’s andrew cooper.com. Happy to connect there or even on LinkedIn, just type in Andrew Cooper and Ethical Imperative and you should be able to find me. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there. I

Testimonial (20:42): Was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly, it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

Andrew Cooper & John Jantsch (20:58): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit dtm.world/scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash Scale.


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Weekend Favs August 17th

Weekend Favs August 17th written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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

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

  • Adsby: A platform offering AI-driven marketing tools to create targeted advertising campaigns and content.

  • Group Collector: A tool that helps Facebook group admins collect email addresses and automatically add them to an email marketing service when new members join.

  • Candy Icons: A resource providing a wide variety of icons and illustrations for enhancing visual content in marketing materials and digital products.

These are my weekend favs; I would love to hear about some of yours – Connect with me on Linkedin!

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

How to Master Product Launches: Strategies That Stand the Test of Time

How to Master Product Launches: Strategies That Stand the Test of Time written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Jeff Walker

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Jeff Walker, a renowned expert in product launches with over 30 years of experience in the industry. Jeff Walker is best known for their groundbreaking strategies that have contributed to multiple successful launches, totaling over $1 billion in revenue. His deep understanding of market psychology and product positioning has made them a go-to authority for entrepreneurs and businesses looking to achieve lasting success.

In this episode, He explains why his much-anticipated revision of his book: Launch needed a revision in the first place and what makes a product launch truly successful, from the initial idea to post-launch strategies. We discuss the importance of timing, customer engagement, and the psychological triggers that can make or break a product’s entry into the market. Whether you’re a salesperson, a coach, launching a new product or looking to revamp your current strategy, this episode is packed with real world advice sure to stand the test of time.

Key Takeaways

With advice relevant 30 years ago and will continue to 300 years from now, Jeff Walker shares critical insights into mastering product launches, emphasizing the importance of understanding your market, perfect timing, and pre-launch audience engagement. He discusses leveraging psychological triggers like scarcity and social proof (here’s to you Apple, even with the planned obsolesce of their products they still manage record-breaking lines with every NPL) to drive sales and highlight the necessity of a solid post-launch strategy to sustain success and build customer loyalty.

Questions I ask Jeff Walker:

[01:15] What is PLM?

[01:43] What  updates are included in the revised edition of your book that would be particularly valuable for someone who purchased the original version?

[03:56] How do you address concerns from people who might think that following a formula means there’s only one way to achieve success?

[06:51] Would you say your success with this method developed organically or was it a case of trial and error?

[12:18] What are the most common mistakes you see people make when they try to follow your method, and where do they typically go wrong?

[14:58] For someone who’s just starting out and doesn’t have a product yet, what would you advise?

[21:39] Where can listeners find more information about your work?

 

Check out the new launch of PFL and Join his Launch Masterclass to discover the 3 simple steps to launch an online course, membership class or coaching program

 

More About Jeff Walker:

 

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. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

 



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Jeff Walker (00:00): The reason it’s lasted so long is because it’s based on strategies as opposed to one hit wonders as opposed to short-term tactics. It’s rooted in psychology and the way our brains work. And so the formula has been working for coming up on 30 years now, and it’s going to keep on working for another 30, I think for 300.

John Jantsch (00:23): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jeff Walker. He’s the creator of the Product Launch Formula, revolutionized online marketing with a step-by-step process that generated over a billion dollars in launches since pioneering the concept in 1996. His formula has become the gold standard for online entrepreneurial training. He lives in my favorite state of Colorado, way down in the corner of Durango, enjoys Outdoor Adventures and Family. We’re going to talk a little bit about his updated and revised version of his bestselling book Launch, how to Sell Almost Anything Online, build a Business You Love and Live the Life of You. So Jeff, the show.

Jeff Walker (01:07): Thanks, Jen. I’m really happy to be here.

John Jantsch (01:09): Been a long time since you’ve been on the show, but fortunately you and I got to bump into each other recently in Nashville, which is greatly connecting. So for the two people that don’t know, what is PLF?

Jeff Walker (01:21): PLF stands for Product Launch Formula and basically is a process and a system to launch your products online, whether you have an online course, a membership site, coaching program, any type of training like that, it’s also used for art and for books and even for widgets.

John Jantsch (01:43): Awesome. So I always like to ask in a revised book, updated book, you’re in the online space, a lot of stuff changes every day in there. What would you say to somebody who bought the original version? Like what’s new?

Jeff Walker (01:57): Yeah, what really changed? So Product Launch Formula is the reason it’s lasted so long. So as you mentioned earlier, I started developing it in the mid nineties. That was when I did my first launch, was 1997 and developed it, started publishing this as a course in 2005, came out with the first edition of the book in 2014. The reason it’s lasted so long is because it’s based on strategies as opposed to one hit wonders as opposed to short-term tactics. It’s rooted in psychology and the way our brains work. And so the formula has been working for coming up on 30 years now, and it’s going to keep on working for another 30, I think for 300 years. But the online world does change quite a bit. So with that in mind, I revised it and really what I went into deep in the book is social media, which really wasn’t, there was no social media when I started out, and even in 2014, it was definitely a thing, but it wasn’t a thing at the level it is now.

(03:04): And also paid traffic, the ability to, there’s just great ad platforms that there weren’t back in the day. So those are a couple of the really big things. And then one thing that’s really changed is the timing of the sequences. So Product Line Formula is built on sequences, well, it’s built on stories, sequences and mental triggers and the sequences. It used to be there was this pre-launch sequence and that was the star of the show. And then you would actually open up and start taking orders, and that was almost an afterthought, that portion what we call the open cart or the open cart sequence. And that has become the star of the show now. So a lot of the emphasis has shifted from, yes, I’d say it used to be the pre-launch with the open cart being an afterthought, and now the open cart is a full on major sequence.

John Jantsch (03:56): You mentioned when you were describing what it was that you have a lot of pretty big variety of use cases, right? Oh yeah. But somebody might read the word formula and think, oh, there’s one way to do it mean, how do you address that idea?

Jeff Walker (04:12): Yeah, I mean, it’s more, I think that marketing is often, there’s a science and then there’s the art. And within product launch formula, there’s certainly room for the art. And as formulaic as I try to make it because I’m teaching people to do it and the people I’m teaching, some of them are starting from absolute ground zero, have never sold anyone anything, have never done any marketing whatsoever. So I have to assume that’s where we’re starting from. But as you get more experience, there’s all kinds of room for creativity within the formula, the whole idea, it’s about delivering value before the sale. It’s about delivering. One of the ways I like to think about is the value. It’s value before reveal and before you reveal the full extent of what your offer is, you’ve already built great value for people. And then there’s this idea of desire before availability where you’re building up this desire before someone can get it. And if you look at the way, I mean, this is used by big companies, like Apple does this so well, yeah, I mean Hollywood does it. People

John Jantsch (05:24): Waiting around the block for the new thing, right?

Jeff Walker (05:27): Exactly. And that is possible, even if you don’t have a budget like Apple has or the Hollywood studios have or the big gaming companies have, we can absolutely do that by putting together a pre-launch where you walk people through a series of you define a problem that they have, whatever market or niche you’re in, whether it’s quitting smoking or learning meditation or having a better love relationship or building your business or hitting a better tennis serve. It doesn’t matter the people they’re there, they’re in your world because they want something different in their life. And our job is to either still deliver it, is basically to take away pain or deliver pleasure to people, give them more pleasure, take away pain from them. And so they have a series of problems. And if you can solve those problems through your pre-launch and not like the big overarching problem, but if you can start to thin slice some of the things that are keeping them up at night, and you can define those problems really well and then start to solve some of them in the pre-launch, then that just, it builds trust. It builds relationship, but it also builds anticipation that they’re going to want to get whatever the thing is.

John Jantsch (06:52): Would you say that this sort of came about organically, like 1995, I was on 9, 9 2. We were all trying to figure out, Hey, how can I make money on this thing? So you created something and worked. People started asking you, Hey, Jeff, how’d you do that? Would just kind it. Yeah,

Jeff Walker (07:10): That’s exactly it mean. So when I started, I started publishing a newsletter in 1996, and it was about the stock market. And that’s something I had some knowledge on, and I don’t even think I ever told you this, but I started that newsletter, a free newsletter back when there very many free newsletters there. No,

John Jantsch (07:27): We called ’em Easy or something like that, right?

Jeff Walker (07:30): And there weren’t very many, and I think there was probably about zero free ones about the stock market back then. There might’ve been couple. And I actually started publishing that because I needed some to put something on my resume to help me get into grad school. So it’s just by these ridiculous, ridiculous path people started subscribing to that newsletter. And then after I had about six or eight or 900 people, and I’m like, oh, maybe they’ll buy something from me. But at that point, there was no teaching or training about marketing online in 1996. It just didn’t exist. And I had no sales or marketing experience. And furthermore, I thought I had this feeling messed up feeling about marketing and messed up feeling about sales that if I asked them for money for something that they would hate me. And so I decided to romance them, and I gave them a whole bunch of really high quality content, and that gradually led it to the sale. And that one seed of an idea has led all these years later, my students have done a billion dollars in sales. It’s just ridiculous.

John Jantsch (08:38): You mentioned the idea that there is a psychological strategy or psychological component, a lot of this, so you talk a lot about authority and scarcity. Reciprocity. So how do you bake that in a way that doesn’t seem manipulative, but also certainly does the job?

Jeff Walker (08:58): So there’s all these mental triggers, and the pre-launch gives you this amazing time to use those triggers and one of them authority you mentioned, and you absolutely have to lead with authority anytime you’re doing any type of marketing, even if you’re just doing content marketing, if you’re just getting people to try to pay attention to your message out in social, you have to establish some authority or else there’s just no reason for them to pay attention to you. So anytime, any presentation you give of any sort, anywhere, you have to tell people why they should pay attention to you. Now, there’s elegant ways to do this, and there’s clumsy ways to do it, like

John Jantsch (09:41): The picture in front of your jet.

Jeff Walker (09:43): Yeah, right, exactly. I think one of the best ways to do it is to deliver real value and to show up and know what you’re talking about, not have the intro that I just had on this podcast where I was stumbling over myself trying to describe what PLF was. But yeah, so I think authority is a big one you want to lead with, and reciprocity is a mental trigger where if you give something to someone, they want to give something back to you. And when you are giving true value in your pre-launch and it doesn’t cost anything, that’s not manipulative, you’re just giving value. But it does develop reciprocity. So yeah, I mean, I think with a lot, any type of marketing, there’s ways to go to the dark side, and I hope my clients aren’t doing that because I think the reality is if you just show up and you deliver real value, you’ve automatically built up authority and you’ve built up reciprocity and you’ve built up likability. And so yeah, those triggers are built right in all the way through the process.

John Jantsch (10:46): Where I see people, what I was talking about, I’m sure none of your students do this, but we’ve all seen the oh sale ends at midnight every day for the next six months. The sale ends at midnight. And so it’s just manipulative, it’s, it’s not honest and authenticated. 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.

(11:46): 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. 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. So tell me this, you have had lots of success, but I’m sure that you have heard from a person or two, this just doesn’t work, Jeff, for me, what are the common mistakes that people make when they invest in your program? Start to try to follow it. Where do you see ’em fall down if you do?

Jeff Walker (12:36): I think there’s a couple ways, and one of ’em is the people that are just amazing salespeople. And the incredible salespeople, often they have a sales message or a pitch that they’re used to giving. And as an aside, I don’t like the word pitch. I always use the word offer. So I’m using that intentionally here where these folks have a pitch and what they do is they’re like, oh, pitch. And I’d see it in your formula. You usually put out three pieces of pre-launch content. Well, I’ll take my pitch and I’ll just cut it into three pieces. I’ll take my webinar and I’ll make it three 20 minute segments instead of a 60 minute segment that’s not following the formula, that’s not delivering value. So I think the people that are just really good at selling, and I don’t consider myself one, I’ve gotten, I’m really good at marketing. I’ve gotten pretty darn good at selling, but it’s been a long journey for me to get there. But the people that are just natural salespeople, the one that can sell sand in a desert, they get into trouble because

John Jantsch (13:39): They don’t want to waste the time on all that other shelf. Right,

Jeff Walker (13:41): Exactly. Maybe they don’t need to. I don’t know. Maybe they don’t. So that’s one. And the other one is where people, they just get enamored with is, oh, deliver value before the sale. I love that. And then they just teach and teach and teach. And they’re like, if I teach, you say, I’ll put out three pieces of pre-launch content. I know I’ll do three hour trainings. And so they don’t actually follow the formula because the reality is you can easily over teach. And when you over teach what you’re asking people to invest a lot of time with you before they’ve really truly chosen to invest with you monetarily, but also emotionally and intellectually, intellectually. So if you’re just like, I’ll tell you what, for free, just give me your email and I’m going to give you a Harvard MBA. It’s going to take you about three years to get through it, but that’s okay because it’s going to be great. And even if you delivered that, no one when they give you an email is prepared to spend three years getting an MBA and the same. They’re not going to go through three or four hours of training with you until you’ve moved them

John Jantsch (14:51): Or establish some value of that. It’s like, I’m not going to invest the time because I don’t know if it’s any good. Right.

Jeff Walker (14:57): Exactly.

John Jantsch (14:58): Exactly. So alright. What do you tell the person that says, well, okay, I don’t any, I don’t even have a course. Can I make this work or do I need to go to work on sort of the preprint stuff?

Jeff Walker (15:10): Yeah, I, so I think first of all, you need to start anyone who’s building an online business, anyone who’s building any business, you need to start to build an audience. I would start that immediately. And the great thing is you can start that on social these days, but then you want to move people off of social onto an email list. So you want to start to build that audience. And as you build that audience, I consider myself a publisher. It’s like when I’m on the ski lift and someone asks me what, I’m a publisher, that’s what I do. I put out, well, these days often it’s video, but I put words and thoughts and video out into the world, and I think we all need to do that. And the great thing is when you’re just starting out and you don’t have an audience yet, you don’t have to be amazing.

(15:59): Like John, you and I, were at this point now where if we’re going to publish something, there’s an expectation that we’re going to be pretty good because we’re experts in our field. We’re perceived as experts in our field. But when you’re first starting out, no one’s paying attention. You have time to practice and get your chops down and find your voice and find the hooks in your message and find what it is you’re going to bring to the world. I think that almost every one of us, I think probably every one of us has something we can bring to the world that we can teach something that people, what do people come to you to ask you about? What seems like incredibly easy to you but seems hard to other people and some of the niches that people have had success in? John, there was two guys. They had a six figure launch, so a hundred thousand dollars launch teaching people how to scream. And I was like, they wrote in, after they went to the court, they did this launch, they wrote in, they said, yeah, we thought screaming. And I’m like, okay, we got to get these guys on a call and find out what this is. And it turns out that it’s for, I’m like, it’s for screaming for heavy metal, for heavy metal, vocal, how

John Jantsch (17:12): To scream. I was going some sort of mental health release or something, but

Jeff Walker (17:16): Turns out there’s a technique for it, and they knew how to do it, so they taught it. You only had someone teaching sword fighting. It goes on and on, the different types of things. So I think pretty much all of us have something we can bring to the world. I am a big fan of this, what I call a wisdom business, where you’re, whatever you spent time learning how to do, you could show other people how to do it.

John Jantsch (17:41): And what’s interesting too, I think a lot of people underestimate this idea that everybody’s on the continuum of their journey somewhat. So people that have read all the books and gone to all the courses, maybe they’re farther along in their journey, but there’s definitely people back here starting their journey that you can teach something to. I think that’s a lot of times when people, they read your book and they think, I got to be like Jeff, but Jeff serves a certain audience. There’s a whole lot of people out there that your stuff, they’re not ready for your stuff.

Jeff Walker (18:10): And the reality is there’s more people at the beginning. There’s more beginners in any market because everyone starts as a beginner. If you’re teaching guitar, there’s some people that are masters, Eric Clapton, the masters, but there’s a lot more people that just bought the guitar because everyone starts, Eric Clapton bought a guitar one day. Everyone starts and only a few people get to the expertise. So it’s like a pyramid. There’s just more beginners in any field.

John Jantsch (18:41): Yeah, I hesitate. We’re violent at the end of our time. I hesitate at opening up new still, but how has AI impacted what you do and what marketers do in your view?

Jeff Walker (18:51): Well, obviously we’re still in the second inning in the AI revolution, I think. So we don’t know where it’s going to go. I just have no idea right now where it’s at is, I think it’s great for ideation.

(19:10): It is absolutely amazing. I’ve spent my life over the last 30 years becoming a very good copyright. I’m really good at putting words together that convince people to move forward with me. And those words might be delivered via an email, via a blog post, via social media or a script that I say on video. And it’s something I do I’m great at, I’m proud of, but it’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. I’ve spent three decades getting better at it, but right now you can use AI and cut out the first 80% of that. So I think it makes it a lot.

John Jantsch (19:50): You can tell it to write like Gary Halbert

Jeff Walker (19:54): And it won’t write like Gary Halbert. In fact, John, just in the last week I was going back and reading the old Gary Halbert letters. For those of you don’t know, Gary Halbert’s, one of the legends of copywriting. He’s passed away quite a number of years ago now, but one of the absolute legends. But I think AI can get you the first 80% there. AI can help you design a course. AI can help you brainstorm hooks, AI can help you brainstorm lead magnets. It’s just it’s

John Jantsch (20:23): Pain points,

Jeff Walker (20:25): Right? Get to know your avatar. Yeah,

John Jantsch (20:28): I’ve signed it really good at, it’s terrible at creating original content in my view right now, but it’s pretty good at repackaging your good original content. And so for me, for a lot of marketers, you start with something really good. And now because we want to maybe or make sense for us, participate in a lot of different platforms, you can actually take that original content and make it through the podcast. But again, you can’t tell it, write me a 700 word blog post on X or it’ll be pretty garbage.

Jeff Walker (20:58): But something a lot of people struggle with is avatar research avatars, your ideal client. And because a lot of us are more advanced, if you are the guitarist who’s this amazing guitarist now, and you’re trying to remember what it was like to be a newbie because you want to teach some newbies, it’s hard to remember what it’s like. But you can go to AI and ask AI what it’s like to be a newbie and what the concerns are and what the hopes and dreams and fears are. And it’s really good at that.

John Jantsch (21:26): And I think the hopes and courage and dreams, when I picked up the guitar, had more to do with Patty McCormick than learning how to play the guitar. A lot of junior high guitarists. Right,

Jeff Walker (21:36): Right.

John Jantsch (21:37): Well, Jeff, it was awesome catching up with you. Where can people find more about your work and certainly pick up a copy of the updated revised launch?

Jeff Walker (21:46): The book is called Launch. It’s available anywhere books are sold, including Amazon, and there’s all the different types of versions there. Then you can find more about the product launch formula at product launch com. I’ve always got all kinds of great free resources there for you to have.

John Jantsch (22:05): Yeah, and depending upon when you’re listening to this, I know you have a new launch of PFL coming up, and we will let people know where that is. But again, following you listening to this, you’ve can find the latest and greatest.

Jeff Walker (22:18): John, this is great. Thank you.

John Jantsch (22:20): My pleasure. Hopefully we’ll run into one of these days out there on Highway 50.

Testimonial (22:35): I was like, found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for, I can honestly say has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (22:51): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM.world/scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM.World/Scale.


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Are DMs the new Cold Calls?

Are DMs the new Cold Calls? written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Sean Malone, a leading expert in the sales industry and a pioneer in leveraging direct messaging (DM) as a powerful tool for high-conversion sales. With the shift in consumer behavior and the increasing saturation of traditional sales channels, Sean Malone sheds light on why DMs are quickly becoming the new cold calls and how sales teams can harness this untapped powerhouse to drive better results. He explains that integrating DMs into your sales-management strategy could be the key to unlocking more personalized, efficient, and successful sales processes.

Key Takeaways

We’ve all experienced the declining effectiveness of traditional cold calls, but have we explored the potential of DMs as a high-conversion sales tool?

DMs might just be the final frontier for your business sales strategy. Sean Malone and I discuss DMs, which are emerging as a critical component of modern sales-management strategies. As DMs continue to be a sacred place for most people online, he emphasizes the importance of understanding the nuances of DM communication, including personalization, timing, and the art of crafting a compelling message that resonates with potential clients—not just anybody.

You want a potential client, a lead, not just a dead end, so perhaps don’t pitch until the 5th DM. Incorporating DMs into your sales-management toolkit is a strategic approach that balances automation with a human touch. He explains the benefits of DMs in building stronger customer relationships, increasing engagement, and ultimately driving higher conversion rates. In this episode, you’ll learn how to optimize your sales-management practices with DMs, why they’re becoming an essential sales tool, and how to leverage this approach for your agency’s success.

 

Questions I ask Sean Malone:

[01:29] I noticed you’ve built eight companies while reading your bio. Were any ventures that didn’t go as planned, or did they all succeed?

[03:56] Mastering sales has been a consistent theme throughout your journey. Would you agree that sales expertise has significantly impacted your success?

[06:13] You and your partner, Chris, developed a prospecting system now integrated into your software. Could you walk us through the critical elements of this system?

[12:10] With your use of technology, tasks that once took hours can be completed much faster. Do you find DM conversations more effective than traditional cold outreach methods? What makes DMs stand out?

[14:16] You’ve mentioned that the key is getting the conversation started, whether it’s through phone, email, or DMs. Are DMs particularly effective at initiating these conversations, even if there’s a risk of miscommunication later on?

[17:57] Where can our listeners connect with you and learn more about Flowchat?

 

 

More About Sean Malone:

 

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:

Oracle

Nobody does data better than Oracle. Train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive at oracle.com/ducttape

 

Wix

work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites.

 



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Sean Malone (00:00): The one thing that’s different about dms, and actually the numbers prove it, is that when somebody sends you a dm, if it’s good messaging, you don’t discard it. What do you do? You click on that person’s profile and you creep on them a little bit on social. Make sure that they’re real, and then if they’re real and you like their stuff, then you come back and you respond. This is why dms have a high response rate way higher than anything else. And then if you’re not a clown, when you’re actually chatting in dms and you do it well, then you can start actually converting higher than any of the other methods of communication.

John Jantsch (00:32): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Is this John Jantsch My guest today is Sean Malone. He’s the co-founder and CMO of flowchat.com, a software tech company that is refined how people use dms for business agency owners and founders Turn to Flow Chat to set up an effective social selling system using dms seeking automation and one click power. Sean’s built eight companies. It’s first to achieve multiple six figures annually. The next four reached multiple seven figures, and the last two exceeded 10 million sales a year is aims for Flow Chat to become his first $100 million company. So Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean Malone (01:12): Hey, John, thank you so much for having me. I’m so grateful to be here, man, you’re a legend, obviously you writing the books that you’ve written in, so I’m really honored and humbled just to be here and chatted with you today. So thanks for the time.

John Jantsch (01:23): Well, I appreciate those kind words. So when I was reading your bio, I built eight companies. I kept wanting to hear about the total bomb. Was there not a total bomb in there?

Sean Malone (01:34): There’s plenty of bombs in there, I think. Yeah, for sure. Where do we start? Holy cow. This takes me back into when I was 15, I was pushing the shop room for my dad and I was learning, I was watching him. He had immigrated from South Africa to America when I was a young kid, and he just had this work ethic that I still haven’t seen rivaled Today. He was working like 120 plus hours a week, I guess maybe he had to because we moved here with little to nothing. And so he just started to just building stuff on his own. He’s a metal just by trade. He ended up, he was selling metal as a day job, and then he started a small business on the end, which was a import export cookware business. And so that’s where I really kind of started to learn entrepreneurship and I just kind of saw what it took to actually do it.

(02:24): And so then I went off into college and I started my own little auto detailing company. I would say that one kind of bombed. I got it to the point where I was doing work for the city and I was cleaning cop cars and some of those types of vehicles. And then my college career kind of came to an end and I didn’t know what to do. And so I just kind of gave the business away, even though it was making some pretty healthy money. It was, I don’t know, I’d say it’s probably making about 15,000 a month, but when you’re a college kid, that’s a lot of cash. So after that, I started selling as a manufacturer’s rep. I did pretty good, made a bunch of commission, ended up buying my first electronics manufacturing company, and that one I started, I think I negated a lot of failure in the early part of it because I always had somebody that was kind of in the game that knew how not to fail.

(03:15): And so I think it goes a long way to talk about mentorship. But that business, I grew that one from about 250,000 a month in revenue to, well, we were doing about 8 million a year, so that was almost, it was, it’s probably like 650 to, yeah. So I basically doubled that, tripled that business in about a couple of years, and that one got sold out from underneath me without me knowing. I was actually on a sales trip in California and my business partner called me back. He’s like, emergency, and I come back and there was no emergency. He just ended up selling a company without telling me in two weeks, which kind of hurts. Well,

John Jantsch (03:50): I was halfway kidding. But I mean, obviously you learned a lot from every one of those experiences. One of the things that seems to me that was a through line through all of your experience, your journey, including where you’re today, is mastering sales. Would you say there’s an element of that in that? So in fact, I think I saw another interview where you talked about being kind of a sales training junkie along the way. So I talked about Flow Chat being a software tech company, but would you say that at its heart it’s really a selling enablement tool?

Sean Malone (04:26): Yeah, definitely. Tech, sales, enablement, tech, I call us a communications organization. I’d say that’s probably better fit genre than anything else that we want. And like you said, yes, so I learned a tremendous amount of, throughout my journey was all sales related stuff. So I came out of college and I said, Hey dad, how do I make a boatload of cash? And he said, there’s three options. First option, are you a CEO? No, I’m 21. I don’t know what those letters mean. He’s like, are you an entertainer? No, I can’t sing or dance. He’s like, well, you better go and learn sales.

John Jantsch (05:03): Oh, he forgot another one. Can you throw a hundred mile an hour change up with your left hand? That would’ve been another good one.

Sean Malone (05:08): That would’ve been another great question. And the answer to that is also no, but yeah, and so then he said, you better go learn sales. So I was like, okay, great. So I took a job sales so I could learn sales, and I was terrible. I think that was probably my biggest bomb. I made 2,400 cold calls and I never booked a single appointment. That’s really bad. That’s like 80 calls a day for six weeks straight. And I was about done with it. I was like, this sales thing is stupid. I’m done. And I told my dad and my dad was like, don’t quit. I was going to quit. And he was like, go to the library and read a book. Okay, cool. Well, I went to the library, I picked up a Tom Hopkins, how to master the artist selling stuff book. And I was like, oh, there’s a theory. I can get really good at this. I was good at theories in school. I can definitely do that here again. And so that’s really where I started my junkie, I guess down the path. And 500 K later in my own investments of learning every selling system you could think of, I really distilled it down to there’s five to seven things you have to do in every sales situation, and if you do those things consistently, you’ll always win. That’s kind of the idea.

John Jantsch (06:14): So you and your partner, Chris, developed a prospecting system that you use today and have really built into this software. Can you give us the high level? You kind of mentioned five things. I suspect that the five things are in it.

Sean Malone (06:29): So the last start of prospecting is one side and then high ticket sales is on the other side or sales, I guess I should say. And so here’s how it came to be. So we had our software company that completely burned me out, the first one, and I almost took my own life because I was in a very dark place, and we could go really deep on that story anytime you want, but I’ll skip over that for the highlight of where we at. So at that time, my coach, Russell Brunson says, because like, what do we do? We just sold this software company that was doing lots and lots and we were doing 10 million plus a year. We ended up selling it, and we were like, what do we do now? We didn’t even know. And he said, well, what are you good at? And we said, sales.

(07:06): And he said, all these online entrepreneurs, all these agency owners, these SaaS founders, they don’t like to do sales. Like, oh, cool. So we called ’em up, Hey, do you not like to do sales? Yeah, every one of ’em like, yeah, we don’t want to do sales anymore, Sean, fix it. And we’re like, well, we know how to hire on board and train sales teams. You want us to do that for you? And boom, our agency was born. So we find five clients, showed ’em how to hire onboard and train sales teams, and then we showed ’em how to close deals in their warm market. We were doing sales training, and then about five months in, they had big gains in those first couple of months we were actually closing deals with them. And then five months in, they come back and they’re like, Sean and Chris, thank you for the sales team, but now I can’t sleep at night because I don’t know how to put more leads in front of the salespeople that you just built for me.

(07:55): And we’re like, oh, well, we have a system for that that we’re using even before the internet existed. Just put this in your business. It’s direct conversation. One-to-one at scale. Here’s the system how to work. Every one of ’em hit a home run. After about six months of that, Chris and I looked at each other, we’re like, that is more important than all the other stuff that we were doing in the first place. And so how do we do that at scale? And then one of our friends was like, you should do a mastermind. And so then we launched a mastermind and we did a $25,000 three months of put this in your business, nine months of advanced sales coaching to close the deals that the system created had 83% success rate of the dozens of businesses going through the system. And about two years into 18 months into that, one of our clients is like, you guys need a software.

(08:37): And so it was like, okay. We ended up, our messaging ran into our CTO’s messaging and what do you do? I have a software, but I have no clients. What do you guys do? We have hundreds of clients, but we have no software. What if we just did that? And so that was what happened in 2020. We kind of merged, acquired, did the whole thing, redressed the whole thing, and then we brought a hundred clients into this thing and saw how it worked and everything broke, whatever. It was great. And then we put another a hundred clients in, more stuff broke, and eventually we got the machine just ripping. And so now we’ve been into it four years. And really what it does at a high level is it allows anybody at any time to go anywhere and find, connect, nurture, and close deals through dms, personal messenger, dms, and it does it just more than one or two platforms.

(09:23): We actually work on 14 of them. The idea is based on three principles. First one universally importing or extracting what we call suspects. Then we have a qualifier, turns ’em into prospects, and then we take them through basically. So universally importing from anywhere on social at any time, go to a Facebook group, whichever one, click one button and click the whole group list. Go to your post that has thousands of comments, reactions and engagements. Click one button, get ’em all right. That was the idea. Second one was Pipeline view or Kanban Trello style board, but we built it for personal dms and as soon as we launched it, everyone copied it, which is great validation. And then the last principle was that of reporting, because anyone does anything organic, their reporting is usually really messy. So that’s really in a high level of what Flow Chat does. It sits in front of A CRM. It allows you to filter out all the bad and only put the really good into a system like a HubSpot or Salesforce or a pipe driver, a go high level or anything like that.

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(11:24): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. Hey, digital marketers, this one’s for you. I’ve got 30 seconds to tell you about Wix Studio, the web platform for agencies and enterprises. So here are a few things that you can do in 30 seconds or less when you manage projects on Wix Studio, work in sync with your team all on one canvas, reuse templates, widgets and sections across sites. Create a client kit for seamless handovers and leverage best in class SEO defaults across all your Wix sites. Alright, time’s up, but the list keeps going. Why don’t you step into Wix studio to see more? Do you find that, I mean you’ve really built, obviously you’re using technology to do some things that used to take hours to do, right? And do you find though that DM conversations in particular are more effective, different, say because there’s tons of people doing cold outreach, similar sort of approach. So what have you found has been really the driver of, or why you’ve really leaned into dms?

Sean Malone (12:36): So great question, and it kind of goes along the case of your book. You find your ICP and you speak with them in the right way, you’re going to have the right thing. So we just made it so that you can do that at scale. And I think if you look at the methods of communication, there’s usually there’s five, but I’ll say the main four are phone calls. So if you have phone calls, you get spam risk, you don’t even answer, you get a text message, you still don’t know who it is from, unless the words are dead on perfect, you’re probably not going to respond to the text, even though text has highest open rates, has a very low response rate because of that reason. Then you’ve got email marketing, which is you’ve got CAN SPAM and GDPR and A two P and all this other stuff that’s happening now, deliverability down, you’ve got MPP from Apple, there’s all this stuff that’s happening there.

(13:22): So email is a source, right? So you’ve got phone, text, email, but then you have dms. And the one thing that’s different about dms is that it’s better than I think all of them. And actually the numbers prove it is that when somebody sends you a dm, if it’s good messaging, you don’t discard it. What do you do? You click on that person’s profile and you creep on them a little bit on social to make sure that they’re real. And then if they’re real and you like their stuff, then you come back and you respond. This is why dms have a high response rate way higher than anything else. Open rates similar to text, but response rates for dms are the highest. And then if you’re not a clown, when you’re actually chatting in dms and you do it well, then you can start actually converting higher than any of the other methods of communication. I’ve just seen this over the course of almost 30 years in the sales games, like one-to-one communication, if you can do it at scale is pound for pound the best.

John Jantsch (14:16): So really the trick, if you will, is getting the conversation that’s whether it’s on the phone or email or whatever it is. And what you’re suggesting is that the dms have been more effective at getting the conversation. You can still fumble the ball, but you’re not even in the game if you don’t get the conversation.

Sean Malone (14:34): Yeah, I mean, just from a sure volumes perspective, if we looked at, let’s say a hundred is the number, if you’ve cold call a hundred people, you might get two to answer. Just statistically, if you text a hundred people, you’re usually going to get about, I’d say 75 of those people will open your text, but you’re only going to have about six or eight of ’em that respond. Emails send a hundred emails, you’re getting five opens. Maybe two people actually read it, but the dms is different. If you send a hundred dms and you’re really good, you’ll probably get 50 or so people to open those dms. But if your profile is in alignment, you’ll get 30 to 40 responses. So if you’re actually looking at the stuff that truly matters, this is why dms I think is just superior to everything else that’s out there.

John Jantsch (15:27): And maybe the day will come, especially with the success of a platform like yours. But do you find that there’s some people that get angry about a text or get angry about an unsolicited email? Do you find that dms will eventually fall into that category?

Sean Malone (15:44): Yeah, I mean, people will throw shade at any which way that you market to them or sell to them at any time, and dms are no different. But the thing is about dms or text message or any form of communication, if you do it wrong, everyone’s going to hate on you. But if you do it well, then it’s okay. And there’s a few strategies that work really well and for whatever reason, completely unbeknownst to me, when people get into the dms, they just try to just vomit verbally on everybody and sell them everything from one single message. When you can’t do that, it’s like if you go to a live event, you don’t walk up to John Jans and say, Hey, man, do you want to buy my stuff? It’s really amazing. You’d be like, get out of my face. But most people speak that way in dms, which is really unfortunate.

John Jantsch (16:32): Have you found that certain types of businesses do better or this is more suited, or do you feel like this is something that used correctly, could be used by just about any type of business?

Sean Malone (16:43): I think used correctly could be used by any type of business, but there are a few niches and verticals that really hit pretty well. I think business to business and then a lot of business to consumer. If it’s brick and mortar, that’s really a really suited very well for this type of technology because all we’re doing is the same thing that we would be doing anyways. In the old days, you’d get a phone book and a bunch of numbers, right? Today you have technology like ours where you can just go to a Facebook group and collect the whole list. That’s like getting a phone book. And so now you was like, oh yeah, I got the phone book. Let’s use some automation to just filter it down to the ones that I really want to start speaking with. And then you don’t even go, you keep going. Another filtering mechanism is like, let’s send out a series of our first messages to get some responses, and that’s the big key. When you’re DMing, remember, we don’t try to sell in our first message. We don’t even try in our second or third or fourth message. Usually you don’t even ask for anything like a call until message is six, seven, eight, nine. They say 80% of sales deals are closed at 13 touch points. Well, getting engagement usually takes four to six of ’em, right? So it’s like if you design it right, it works really well. Awesome.

John Jantsch (17:53): Well, Sean, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d want to invite people to connect with you and learn more about Flow Chat?

Sean Malone (18:01): Yeah, so just flowchat.com. Fl O-W-C-H-A t.com. Go check out the site and then if you want to talk directly with me, just look me up on Facebook and say that John sent you my way. We’ll take care of you nicely. Awesome. Yes.

John Jantsch (18:15): Again, I appreciate you dropping by and hopefully we’ll run into you soon. I usually say on the road, but you’re just down the road, so we ought to get together soon. Anyway,

Sean Malone (18:24): Let’s go have a lunch. I would love it. Love it, love it.


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