ActiveCampaign vs GetResponse: Robust Marketing Automation Prowess or Feature-Packed Value?

Every business owner has a marketer in them, dying to see things done efficiently. This is why an email automation tool that gets the work done most effectively excites them. Marketing tools that automate email marketing can increase your conversion rates by 50%. In fact, at least 75% of all revenue generated from email marketing campaigns comes from triggered personalized campaigns rather than a one size fits all campaign. 

Email automation tools nevertheless are a dime in a dozen out there. A few of them, however, are stand out tools that can assist your small or medium-sized business evolve to the marketing powerhouse you’d like it to be. ActiveCampaign and GetResponse are amongst two of the best of these tools.

The Main Differences Between ActiveCampaign vs GetResponse

The main differences between ActiveCampaign vs GetResponse are:

  • ActiveCampaign has 30 free templates while GetResponse’s are in the hundreds, whereas GetResponse has a broader range of email templates. 
  • ActiveCampaign does not have a free trial period, whereas GetResponse has a 30-day free trial period
  • ActiveCampaign can feel a bit clunky to use and in the field of text editing, whereas GetResponse wins with its easy to use drag and drop editor.
  • ActiveCampaign sorely focuses on highly effective email marketing automation, whereas GetResponse has a range of other features such as its landing pages creator

 ActiveCampaign; A review

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Unlike other email marketing tools with tons of other glitzy features, ActiveCampaign’s sore focus is on the creation of automation rules and workflows.  The platform’s deal pipelines bring the principles of kanban boards or agile into your sales efforts. 

The platform has four main pricing plans; which includes;

Package

Yearly costs

Lite

$9 /mo

Plus

$49 /mo

Professional

$129 /mo

Enterprise

$229 /mo

The power of intelligent automation you will find out is a consistent theme in ActiveCampaign.  This review will cover the software’s performance as a standalone tool. Below are some of its most powerful features.

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Email campaigns

Email marketing tools differ significantly when it comes to email templates. Some are highly disadvantaged by outdated designs, while others have poorly selected templates.  Some other tools will have a difficult to use email editor. ActiveCampaign, however, seems to have all the right email marketing design elements in place.

On their website, ActiveCampaign promises to help you send beautiful emails in a few clicks. Its predesigned email templates cover various industries, with a choice of 30 templates to choose from. This low number is very different from what other tools offer. If you have used more robust builders, you might, therefore, feel a bit underwhelmed.

Nevertheless, the platform has a robust email-marketing arsenal that enables you to build the email automation of your dreams. It has one of the most flexible visual builders out there, supporting a large variety of triggers to automations. The editor has many options that give a lot of design flexibility. 

ActiveCampaign Emails.PNG

There are design elements with various styling options such as its very cool conditional blocks. With these elements, you can, for instance, adapt your email content to the interest of your subscribers via their associated tags. To enhance this block, what you need to do is to increase its automation through intelligent tagging.  

In its powerful, agile fashion of operations, this platform has a systematic approach when it comes to building email marketing campaigns. It is, therefore, very easy to create and send emails to an audience. If you feel that none of the 30 templates suit your campaign, there is the choice of building a custom template from the drag and drop editor. Its image upload, fonts, and color options will aid you in the building of a template that better matches your brand. 

The builder’s drag and drop editor can be a bit clunky, especially in the area of text selection and formatting. After several uses, however, you will find its shortcomings much easier to handle. Its image selection tool, too, can be a tad annoying. If you, for instance, upload an image, you are forced to dig through piles of other images to select it. This minor annoyance, of course, does get old with time, but you should be prepared for it, and hope that the software’s development team will get to it. 

Some other useful features of the builder are the ability to save content elements for future use. If you have built a footer or header that you would like to apply to other templates and keep a consistent look, you can save it from the builder. The platform also allows you to not only track but also to analyze the performance of your email campaigns.

There is also a mobile device and desktop preview function and a useful spam check feature as well. With ActiveCampaign, you will not only enjoy email automation but also perform other advanced actions such as the posting of a webhook or sending SMSs.

Marketing automation

ActiveCampaign’s selling point is its automation prowess. The features under its marketing automation tab are what makes it a stand out marketing tool. Once more in its agile fashion of function, the platform uses a visual workflow builder to assist you in designing your automation. This makes it much easier for its users to build sophisticated branch out segments using conditional logic. The platforms call this system ‘Actions,’ and there are plenty of choices here to work with. 

ActiveCampaign Automation.PNG

This intuitive and highly visual marketing automation builder helps you to build sequences with no prior training. Combine this ease of use with the site and intelligent tracking, and the marketing possibilities are endless. You can, for instance, use this feature to design long term and short term marketing sequences. These can be utilized to build a sales qualified leads for your business’s lead scoring system.

There is also a useful email split testing tool that allows you to perform split tests on emails in an automation sequence. You can set up five split tests at a go, to ensure that your email marketing sequences get better with time. The process will refine your emails via the use of the data captured.  

The ActiveCampaign reports can also assist you in identifying the best time to send out your emails. By viewing your highest open rates, you will find out which precise days, or hours had the highest open standards. You can then go ahead and add ‘waits’ to your automation sequences to ensure that vital emails are sent out when the open rates are higher.  Marketers again love efficiency, and time tracking is one of the best ways you can streamline your workflow.

With the platforms goals feature, you will have the power in your hands to identify the amount of time required to accomplish a specific action. Once your automation sequence is set, you can get valuable data on just how long it takes your customers to perform certain actions in the automation sequence. You can, for instance, trace a customer’s wait period from the sign up to paid customer status.  

It is also possible to identify the amount of time your customers take to leave a review. This feature also helps to gauge the time taken for the purchase of other products or an upgrade of a user’s membership.

Another fantastic feature is the ability to share automation that works. You can, for instance, directly import resourceful automation directly into your account. If you would like to share them with your team, you can do using the feature’s Share menu. On it, you will access a share URL that can be imported into another person’s account. 

Sales funnels / CRM

This is the other feature where ActiveCampaign’s deal pipelines shine. The fantastic CRM can help you to automate your sales processes and move your valuable leads along your pipeline to bring in more revenue. The CRM has a drag and drop functionality with customizable leads stages. 

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The kanban boards like feature will assist you in breaking a sales funnel into manageable stages. From this angle, the whole sales cycle ceases to be a confusing mess of a monster through the assistance of visual deal stages. The leads can be inputted manually, but automation increases output. 

You can add more leads, prioritize, or move them in your CRM based on specific criteria.  The CRM additionally has a scoring component that assigns a score to a lead. This means that you can target your most valuable leads for quicker conversions. Your marketing resources will, therefore, be utilized more efficiently.

Integrations

The platform integrates with over 150 apps, including Shopify, WordPress, Facebook, Stripe, and PayPal. Their extensive library of integrations also has extensive documentation that explains how each app’s integration works.

List management

The platform utilizes tags and lists to manage and segment customer lists. You can, as an illustration, have a record that has multiple tags. You can also have records that have a few unique tags. All your stored business contacts are easily accessible from the platform’s central dashboard. There are filters availed that will help you to apply actions as well as find specific contacts. The software allows you to import contact lists, or add them through the integrated third-party apps.

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Reporting

The success of your email marketing campaigns is highly hinged on data. Reports, therefore, are very critical to marketing success. You can analyze metrics and see what actions work and eliminate those that do not work. ActiveCampaign’s data reporting functionality include goals, automation, deals, contacts, and campaigns. The reports section has a bird’s eye view of all the email campaigns you are undertaking as well as the clicks and opens. To view more useful data, you will need to select a campaign. Once a selection is made, metrics on social shares or mentions, location, bounces, or unsubscribes are revealed.

GetResponse; A review

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A creation of Simon Grabowski, GetResponse is now two decades old. The platform has a wide range of customers from at least 182 countries worldwide. The software is available in 21 various languages, providing top-notch quality marketing solutions to businesses online. 

This all in one marketing solution goes beyond email marketing and provides other fantastic solutions. First, unlike ActiveCampaign, GetResponse has a cool landing pages feature. It also has customer relationship management (CRM) and automated sales funnel functionality.

The platform has four main pricing plans; which includes;

Package

Yearly costs

Basic

$15/mo

Plus

$49/mo

Professional

$99/mo

Enterprise

$1,199/mo

The costs of each package vary according to the number of your subscribers. The more you have, the more you will be required to pay. Below we will review some of the platform’s best features.

GetResponse Price.PNG

Email marketing 

GetResponse has a fantastic 99% email deliverability record, one of the highest seen across platforms. The platform is first, is a spam-free solution, a factor that highly contributes to its deliverability success. Its email marketing feature also has the advantage of over 500 predesigned email templates to ensure that you can send attractive emails without breaking a sweat. 

The software also has a drag and drop editor that makes email marketing a blast for the novice and the professional marketer alike. Your marketing team is also free to design their templates using the drag and drop editor. There are, however, tons of email templates to choose from, segmented by industry. All you need to do is to select one for your brand and get going.  

The drag and drop editor also gives its users the ability to edit HTML code. You can preview your email message before sending, and it has a spam checker tool as well. When you are done with the email template design process, you can either broadcast the message at once or utilize its time travel option, that allows you to send the message later. With GetResponse, you can segment your contacts by their time zones and send emails when they are most likely to open them.

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Besides the extensive library of templates, the platform also makes it very easy to tweak layouts, fonts, and imagery. The quality of some of the predesigned templates, however, is of a good enough condition to be used as-is. If you want a higher quality of email templates, you can purchase more from third-party providers such as Theme Forest. If coding is your thing, then go right ahead and make for your business a custom email-marketing template. The drag and drop editor is at hand to assist you in managing the design process. 

The platform has stayed ahead of the curve by providing responsive templates that easily optimize for different screen sizes. There nonetheless have been some complaints when it comes to the display of these templates on some mobile apps. Users have also asked the developers to add on a few fonts beyond the usual web-safe fonts such as Georgia or Arial. A slew of new and exciting fonts will shake up the e-newsletters design and give them some pizzazz.

Autoresponders

The platform’s autoresponders are a vital selling point of GetResponse. Through them, you can send to your subscriber’s e-newsletters at intervals when they take individual predetermined decisions on your website. You can, for instance, send a welcome message for all signups and then send a discount offer to these same email addresses, a week later. You can set an autoresponder a few weeks down the line, which has a follow-up message.  

GetResponse AutoResponders.PNG

This platform has a comprehensive autoresponder feature that enables action based or time-based message sending. Action-based messages can be triggered by customer steps such as;

  • Clicks
  • Opens
  • Change in user data
  • Subscriptions to lists
  • Completed goals or transactions
  • Birthdays

The platform’s marketing automation functionality envelopes its autoresponder feature and includes the automation of workflows. This automation is done through its drag and drop builder, that will assist you in building an automation flowchart.  This makes it easy to create a user journey, one that is fully customizable. Automationis a beneficial tool in marketing. Unfortunately, it is only available in the more expensive plans on GetResponse, which is a shame.

Sales funnels / CRM

The GetResponse CRM tools have undergone a useful facelift, which has made them much easier to use. You, for instance, no longer need to export data to CSV format to do your mail outs. The tool has grown from its ability to perform basic functions and is now integrated with the software’s email marketing function. 

Now you use it to go beyond the creation of sales pipelines. Through it, you can track activity from phone calls and emails. You can now usher users to your sales pipeline based on actions such as purchases, email opens, and form completions. 

The CRM nonetheless lacks email activity tracking as well as task management tools. Without a task management tool, you cannot assign a task to a team member. With GetResponse, the addition of contacts to a pipeline is not as intuitive as it is with ActiveCampaign. The procedure is clunky and time-consuming, making the CRM look a bit half-baked. 

GetResponse Salesfunnel.PNG

The platform’s auto funnel feature provides the means of creating a sales funnel without the input of other apps. There is a wide range of templates available for this function, and if need be, you can work with other platforms such as Etsy or Shopify to enhance functionality. 

Analytics

The platform has a good range of reporting and analytics tools. They cover the basics such as click-throughs, open rates, and unsubscribe rates. There are, however, additional nifty features such as their one-click segmentation tools. This feature allows you to identify customers who have not interacted with your emails. You can then segment them and send a different version of the email to capture their attention.  

There is a ‘metrics over time’ feature also that pinpoints the best time to send emails. There also are useful email ROI and per-user information features. You can also use the analytics feature to compare the performance of different email campaigns to improve your marketing.

Split testing

An email marketing campaign is a fantastic way to procure repeat and new customers. It is, however, much easier to retain old customers in business than acquire new ones. Data also shows that it is 70% easierto sell a product to a retained customer. However, the probability of selling your products to a new client stands at 5 to 20%.It is therefore imperative to run A/B tests when initiating new formats for an email campaign. The tests will assist you in improving your campaign’s conversion rates which will, in the end, will have a good impact on your marketing efforts.

The platform’s A/B test toolsets up two variations of a campaign and sends them to a small segment of your recipients. Clicks or opens measure the results of the tests, and the version that has received more attention wins the trial.  

GetResponse Analytics.PNG

GetResponse’s split-testing functionality allows you to test at least five messages against each other. You can measure your tests using features such as content, subject headers of a form field. This tool is, however, not that much different from ActiveCampaign’s split testing feature that also allows up to five email tests at a time.

Landing page creator

The conversion of your website’s visitors into leads is the most significant revenue-generating process of your online business. This means that you can never have too many landing pages. Studies have shown that an increase in landing pages leads to a 55% increase in leads.

A landing page does not only capture visitor’s information but converts them into potential buyers. These pages, therefore, have very few distractions on them. GetResponse assists in the building of clean and well-designed landing pages. The lead pages creator is the software’s unique selling point. Most of its competitors lack this functionality. This tool not only builds these useful pages but also tests their conversion rates against each other, in real-time. 

GetResponse Landing Pages.PNG

ActiveCampaign lacks a landing page creator meaning that you will need to fork out more cash for a third party landing pages creator. The feature is available in GetResponse’s cheaper options, but its full functionality can only be experienced in the more pricey packages.

Nevertheless, third party lead page builders have a hefty fee attached to them so, you will save some good bucks through GetResponse’s lead page builder. The feature’s interface, nonetheless, is a little bit clunky and not very intuitive. You will also have to build separate pages for your mobile and desktop pages, which is a hassle.  

Webinars

The platform also has one more feature, which gives makes it a very robust marketing platform. You can create and broadcast webinars from GetResponse, ensuring that you too will engage with your clients on a more personal channel. Webinars are excellent lead generation tools, and holding them from a platform that has your email database makes webinar broadcasts much more convenient. 

The integrated webinar tool means that you will not have to pay more for a standalone webinar solution. The tool is also very easy to use. Your viewers do not need to install any app to view your videos, and you can do a once click record of these sessions. GetResponse also provides free cloud storage for your playback files as well as useful screen sharing functionality.

ActiveCampaign vs. GetResponse

ActiveCampaign is a critical tool for any entrepreneur in need of an affordable email marketing solution. It has robust marketing automation tools that bring better functionality to email marketing campaigns than those of similarly priced peers. Its ability to run a multitude of sales funnels from multiple products is a big plus of the platform.

With it’s easy to use agile like process, you can rest assured that you will not send irrelevant emails to a target audience. The software’s main strength is the management of multiple and sophisticated sales funnels. It also makes it very easy for you to work with a team due to the ease of assigning tasks.

These two advantages place ActiveCampaign ahead of the curve when compared to GetResponse. If your business has multiple email campaigns or products, you will enjoy the ease of use that ActiveCampaign’s platform brings.

GetResponse, on the other hand, can be a bit underwhelming to a user with a sophisticated email marketing strategy. The platform nevertheless has rich features that go beyond the email list. It, for example, has a landing pages builder. It is also better priced than its competitor is, when it comes to its higher feature packages. GetResponse, has a 30-day free trial, meaning that you can take it for a test run, without giving out your credit card details.

Why compare GetResponse to ActiveCampaign?

These two tools are highly functional in email marketing. We’re comparing them so that you can get the best lead generation ROI. 

You do not need both of them for this function. ActiveCampaign’s CRM, however, is hands down one of the best platforms for automated marketing, especially for businesses with multiple products. GetResponse has an efficient CRM tool, as well as other extra features such as a landing page builder. ActiveCampaign can do for your business, if you do not mind paying more for its feature-packed package. If you, however, want to do more for your business, GetResponse is your answer.

ActiveCampaign pros

  • Use of tags and lists for subscriber management
  • Advanced automation features that include customizable workflows and triggers
  • A functional and robust CRM platform
  • An easy to use and attractive user interface for campaign building
  • Thorough split testing tools
  • A fantastic list on integrations
  • Responsive support
  • Tracking and reporting tools
  • Great for multiple email campaigns management

Cons

  • Its higher-priced package is expensive
  • A clunky drag and drop builder
  • Harder to manage contacts on the platform
  • Few predesigned email templates
  • A limited form builder on cheaper plans
  • No free trial
  • GetResponse pros
  • One month no commitment-free trial for a 250 subscriber list
  • Easy to import contacts from other apps into the platform
  • Easy to use analytics and tracker features
  • Award-winning customer support
  • Useful inbuilt landing page creator
  • A robust list of management tools
  • The more affordable option
  • Webinar broadcasting features
  • Wide range of predesigned email templates

Cons

  • No refund policy
  • Poor email activity tracking

Over to you

If you are still unsure of which platform is best for you, perhaps this quick summary will show you the way. ActiveCampaign is perfect for B2B businesses with longer sales cycles. If you are heavily invested in B2B sales, you should have ActiveCampaign working for you. However, if your company sells directly to its customers, GetResponse makes it very easy to manage your campaigns. If your business deals with B2C emails, get GetResponse.

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Oscar Trimboli: Mastering Deep Listening for Impact Business Growth

Listen to our exclusive interview with Oscar Trimboli:

 

Subscribe to this show on Spotify  |  iTunes  |  Stitcher  |  Soundcloud

We’ve all heard what it takes to be a good listener: make eye contact, face the speaker, and so on. But is there more to it? Oscar Trimboli says there most definitely is. He has coached and mentored professionals in a variety of leadership roles in numerous industries including the financial sector, technology, professional services, education, and nonprofits. And he wants to make sure that you, too, understand the intricacies of becoming a truly effective listener.

I’m on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the world.

He points out that only about 2% of us have been taught how to truly listen. This is a problem, since we spend 55% of our day listening. Part of the issue is that when we’re listening to someone speak, we don’t clear enough space in our own head in order to listen to ourselves before we begin a conversation.

Not Listening Will Cost You

In our podcast, Oscar discloses that he is on a mission to help people move from distracted listening to deep and impactful listening. There is a cost to not listening — whether it’s to your customers, your employees, or to anyone else you’re working with.     

He stresses that it’s listening — not just speaking — that is going to make the difference between success and failure when you’re in a business and you’re trying to change people with ideas or raise funds. 

Listening Across 5 Dimensions

Oscar refers to effective listening as deep listening. And in order to do listen deeply, we need to listen across five dimensions:

  • Listening to yourself,
  • Listening to the content,
  • Listening for the context,
  • Listening for what is unsaid, and
  • Listening for meaning.

Asking the right questions when someone is speaking also makes for a deep listener. “Tell me more,” is a great example. This phrase is not to help you better understand what the speaker is trying to say; it’s to help the speaker better express what they mean. Often, when we say, “Tell me more,” the speaker will sigh very deeply and when they do, you know you’re starting to hear what they truly mean rather than just what they’ve actually said. A distracted listener may not even be tuned in enough to a conversation to notice this, but a deep listener will.

Targeting Your Customers’ Customers

A good salesperson will be focused on their customer’s problem. A great sales rep will be focused on their customer’s customer’s problem. It’s not enough to know the organization’s problem that is in front of you; you also have to understand, who are they serving?

Deep listening requires insight. Oscar stresses that if you’re selling B2B, it’s critically important to understand the needs and problems that your customers’ customers have — that is, keeping an eye out for what’s two steps ahead, not just what’s right in front of you. He adds that a great sales rep will help their customer promote the business to their customer and understand who else they’re competing against beyond the traditional competitors.

Listening Advice

When asked for some specific key pointers to help us listen better to others, Oscar stresses the importance of being comfortable with silence. 

You’ll be surprised how much heavy lifting silence can do for you in a conversation if you don’t interrupt who you’re speaking to.

During a conversation, we seem to be hell bent of filling every gap with words and become uncomfortable with the shortest of pauses. Oscar points out that in Eastern cultures such as Japan and China, long pauses are commonplace in conversations. As the Western world does more and more business with the East, becoming comfortable with silence during a conversation is more important than ever. 

Oscar also shares that we shouldn’t be taking handwritten verbatim notes when having a conversation. Simply put, this type of writing shuts down the part of the brain that actually hears and understands — something no one wants to have happen when trying to listen effectively. Instead, Oscar suggests writing down graphical notes.

The 5 Myths of Listening

Lastly, Oscar Trimboli offers a fantastic resource on his website — a download called The Five Myths of Listening. It outlines the five most common mistakes people make when listening and, most importantly, the five solutions that go along with them. You can find it at oscartrimboli.com/listeningmyths.

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Transcription of Interview (Transcribed by OtterAI; there may be errors.)

Adam Force 0:12
Hey, what’s going on everybody? Welcome back to the change creator podcast show. This is your host, Adam Force. And if you missed last week’s episode, it’s with the one and only Blake Mycoskie, the founder of TOMS Shoes, and the founder of that one for one business model that everybody loves so much. So we learned a lot from Blake and his experience, we talked about what he has going on in his world now, as he kind of takes his steps towards a different path.

So it’s a pretty exciting conversation. So if you missed that interview, there’s a lot to learn from Blake and his experience with TOMS and just kind of like the insights he has for where he’s going next. So check that out, if you missed it. This week, we are speaking to somebody who is a master at the art of deep listening. You know, I have literally read books from people like Richard Branson, and the entire book was about listening. You know, like, this is such a simple thing, it seems simple on the surface. But there’s so much power behind the art of listening. And it’s a really important skill, when you want to be a leader and an entrepreneur who is you know, going to successfully grow their business and create partnerships with people, and all of those types of things.

So we’re going to be talking to Oscar Trimboli, and he has quite a background, he’s done the thing, you know, working as a marketing director at Vodafone, Microsoft, and all those types of things. And he has always been really passionate about the importance of listening to his customers. And today, he’s on a mission to create 100 million deep listeners in the world. And so during this interview, we’re going to talk about what does that actually mean? And how does that work and examples of deep listening and how you can start practicing. And so all those goodies are going to come out of it, I think you’re going to get a lot of value out of this discussion with Oscar.

So stay tuned in just a minute, we’re going to get that started. Issue 28 of change career magazine was with Blake Mycoskie on the cover. And that was a really amazing addition, we’ve had incredible feedback on it. So hopefully you had a chance to peel through those pages. Another update about the magazine is our team is going to be changing the model and distribution of the magazine. So there will be price changes coming up to everybody’s benefit. And also the distribution frequency is going to change as well. So as those details get flushed out, we’re going to be making announcements across our Facebook network, as well as through our email channels. And then of course, I’ll make a shout out here just to give those details, but I wanted to give a heads up, those things are coming down the pipeline, they’re all good changes.

And we’re going to be putting emphasis and in other areas that you guys have been telling us that are really important to you. And then access to the magazine, all of our editions will still be there. And some new editions will be coming out. But again, just a couple tweaks on frequency and pricing models and stuff like that. So we’re just working out the finer details. But there’s a quick heads up just to so you guys know what’s coming down the pipeline. And I think that’s it guys, if you’re not following us on Facebook, that’s our spot.

So follow us over there, that’s where you can get a lot of the the updates, especially in the group. So if you go to our page, you’ll see a link there to the group. And that is about your marketing. So storytelling from marketing to grow your impact business, check us out on the Facebook group. And we have a great little community there — people who are entrepreneurs in the impact space and we share ideas, we network, and there’s a lot of value that comes out of that. So check it out, when you get a chance. It’s a great way to connect with our team and others in the space. So alright, without further ado, let’s dive into this conversation with Oscar.

Announcer 3:54
Okay, show me the heat.

Adam Force 3:58
Hey, Oscar, welcome. Welcome to the Change Creator podcast show how you doing today?

Oscar Trimboli 4:04
Look, I’ve enjoyed a really full day. You’re catching me in the evening in Australia, and you’re just kicking off in the morning where you are.

Adam Force 4:12
Yes, absolutely. That’s right. It’s early and early for me late for you. And you know, as I love that’s what one thing I love about doing this show is talking to people all around the world. So always interesting.

Oscar Trimboli 4:27
Yeah, the world completely connected these days. I was doing a podcast of Boston about four months ago. And somebody one floor above me in the same building was listening to that podcast and sent me an email and said, Where are you in Sydney? And I explained to him what street I was in. And he said, I’m in that street, what floor are you on? I said I’m on five. He said, I’m on six. And that’s how connected the world is today.

Adam Force 4:51
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Awesome. So let’s, I just want to get grounded. And I like to make sure everybody knows kind of like what’s going on in your world these days, like what’s the latest and greatest.

Oscar Trimboli 5:07
I’m on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the world. And that’s no insignificant undertaking. And somebody challenged me once and said, If your goal can be achieved in your lifetime, you’re not being ambitious enough. So the initial goal was 10 million, and they challenged me to put an extra zero on it. So I’m on this quest to help people move from distracted listening to deep and impactful listening. So that means I’m spending my life doing interviews like this, but also helping people with speaking about the topic training organizations to explain the cost of not listening, whether it’s to their customers, or their employees, or the regulators or everybody else that they’re working with as well.

Adam Force 5:53
Yeah, so let’s dig into that just a little bit. So you wrote a book about deep listening and Impact Beyond Words, which I do like that title. And I think listening is such a important art, especially in the entrepreneur space, and just in general as well. Right. So how are you — I guess, let’s talk a little bit about how you are impacting people. So you’re doing these shows, you’re talking at events, and I’d like to dig into what deep listening is to you, and how this helps people just to tee that up?

Oscar Trimboli 6:28
Yeah, I think, for me, a couple of times, people would always reference me as I you know, go and talk to Oscar, he’s a really good listener. And then I remember when I was working at Microsoft, the boss president said to me, after a really highly tense meeting with some global people and some original people, some people from the Australian business. Wow, Oscar, did you realize you changed that meeting at about 30 minute mark, just by how you started to listen to what people weren’t saying? And she said to me Oscar, if you could code that you could change the world.

Now when Tracy said that she actually meant coded into software, and which I will do eventually. And that’s how we’re going to get to 100 million. But I didn’t think much of it at the time. And then three weeks later, another lady said to me, wow, the way you listen, is it impressive, but the way you see who people really are, wow, that’s powerful, that’s transformational for them. And I think for most of us, Adam, we’ve never been taught how to listen. In fact, only 2% of us have been taught how to listen, yet we spend 55% of our day listening. If you go back to school, you can probably remember your math teacher, English teacher, geography teacher. But none of us can remember our listening teachers. And the teachers we remember the most, whether that’s our math teacher, English teacher, generally people say to me, they were the teacher who really listened to me, that really got who I was.

And they were able to get the best out of me, because they were listen well beyond the words. And a lot of us have been taught to focus on the speaker when we’re listening. And that’s handy, the most important person you need to listen to, is you. And most of us don’t clear any space in our own head, to listen to ourselves, before we get to the conversation.

Our head is like a messy kitchen bench top, which has got pots and pans all over it and no room for the listening to land into. So it’s really critical that everybody understands that if you can remove the distractions, the technology, the cell phones, the laptops, iPads, away from the conversation, your ability to listen will exponentially grow. And if you’re in a business where you’re trying to change people with ideas, with trying to raise capital, it’s listening — not just speaking — that’s going to be the difference between your success and getting there as quick as you’d like to.

Adam Force 9:00
Yeah, so let’s unpack that just a little bit. You talk about when you talk about listening, I think a knee jerk reaction A lot of people have and you know, Richard Branson talks about how important is to listen, and you hear these things from people. But when you hear it, you think, okay, so you know, I’ll sit and I’ll shut my mouth. And it seems like such a simple thing. Like, just don’t talk and just listen.

But it’s but it you know, when you can write a whole book about it, and you’re in so many people talk about how important it is, there has to be a lot more depth to this practice. And so I want to see if we can unpack that just a little bit more. So maybe you can share some of the insights from the book or just from your experience about what you know, take it a little bit further, like, can we dig into it?

Oscar Trimboli 9:49
Yeah, look, most of us listen in black and white, because we haven’t been taught any different. And we’re really two dimensional in the way we listen, we listen to words, and we look at body language, and we use visual prompt sto get us moving forward. And that’s, that’s useful. But a deep listener can listen across five dimensions. And those five dimensions are listening to yourself, listening to the content, listening for the context, listening for what is unsaid, sounds like a bit of a ninja move. How do you listened to what’s unsaid, but we’ll spend a bit of time there and ultimately, listening for meaning. About two years ago, I interviewed an amazing nonprofit leader Kathy LeMay out of Boston, not too far from you.

In the US, well, relative to me, it’s not far away. It’s probably a five hour plane flight from Miami. And Kathy at that stage had raised $175 million. And when I got to interview her, the reason I did is because she said the reason she was so successful is she listened to what donors meant by their donation, not what them money was. You know, when you’ve raised that much money, she was raising money for immigration services, she was raising money for domestic violence, she was raising money for people from war torn parts of the world and refugee programs. She has to listen so much deeper than others.

And the minute she stopped trying to understand what their objections might be, and really listening to what they wanted to say, not the first thing that came out of their mouth, but ultimately what they meant, Kathy said, that was the biggest breakthrough. And the way she did it was pausing. It was using silence and not interrupting. So when we talk about listening for unsaid, Adam, here’s a really simple rule for all of us to remember. I speak at 125 words a minute, you can listen at 400 words a minute, and I can think at 900 words a minute.

Think about this very simple neuroscience in my brain, I have 900 words in my head. And the only way I can get that message out to the world is at 125 to 250 words a minute. That means that the first thing that comes out of my mouth is a one in nine chance that what I’m saying is actually what I mean.

Adam Force 12:21
Okay.

Oscar Trimboli 12:22
So there’s an 11% chance that what I say the first time is actually what I’m thinking. Now, I don’t know about you but if I had an 11% chance of success from a surgery, I’d probably ask for a second opinion. If I had an 11% chance of winning a court case, I’d probably ask for a second opinion from another lawyer. And yet, very few of us ask the person who’s speaking for what else is stuck in their head. The head is like a washing machine in wash cycle. It’s sadly it’s messy. It’s rotating, and it’s moving around. And spin cycle is when you speak.

Now, again, I don’t know how much washing you do, Adam, but even washing machines have more than one rinse cycle. So what we want to do is listen to these magical code words, you understand what somebody means when they say words like: “Well, actually,” or, “you know, what’s really important?” “You know what I should have said that I haven’t said so far?”

Adam Force 13:25
Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli 13:26
“Thinking about it, the most critical thing on this topic is… .” Now you’ve just unpicked what’s unsaid when you hear those code words. And here is a phrase you can learn if you take away one thing that’s about maths, it’s the 1 25 400 rule. And if you take away the art of listening at this question, “Tell me more.”

Adam Force 13:49
Yeah.

Oscar Trimboli 13:50
And that question, “tell me more” is not for you. It’s not to help you understand more, it’s helping them to express what they mean. And when you say to more, that will pause, sometimes about five very deeply. And when they do you know, you’re starting to hear what they really mean, rather than what they’ve actually said. So a distracted listener won’t even be present enough in the conversation to notice this. And a deep listener will.

Adam Force 14:19
Yeah, no, that’s all really interesting. And it makes me think you know, about a couple things. So you know, as entrepreneurs, we have conversations with people in our audience to understand you know, what they have going on. But we also have conversations with potential, you know, b2b clients and understand what they have going on. So I’d like to maybe just think about those situations a little bit. And, you know, I hear the things that you’re saying right now, and I’m like looking back in my brain on these conversations.

And you start to think, geez, you know, you’re in these client meetings, and you’re, you have this genuine, you know, interest in helping them do better with what they’re doing. And some of the times, like what happens to me, especially with whether it’s client meetings, or it’s like, with your potential customers, you know, there’s the irrational thoughts and the rational thoughts, what they want, what they actually need, and deciphering, you know, where to put your attention. So when you’re listening, it’s like, is this really what they need? Like? So do you have any insight on how to start listening in a sense to identify the true needs versus just what they think that they want, but it’s not really the need, you know, what I’m trying to say?

Oscar Trimboli 15:36
I think I do. So if I don’t, you’ll know me. As someone who spent 30 years selling b2b in enterprise based accounting, CRM, and call center and human resources and payroll and finance systems, I have spent a bit of time with b2b buyers, but in the last decade of my life I have spent a lot of time coaching CEOs, CFOs, CEOs, Chief Operating Officers, Head of Risk, Head of Human Resources. So I’ve been fortunate enough to get to both sides of the equation. And Adam here’s one thing that I think distinguishes good from great when it comes to selling in a beta Bay context.

A good salesperson will be focused on their customer’s problem. A great sales rep will be focused on their customer’s customer’s problem. It’s not enough to know what’s the organization’s problem that is in front of you, you also have to understand, who are they serving? And what problems can you help them solve? Because it’s one thing to sell them something that helps them; It’s quite world class to sell them something that will help their customers. The other thing that distinguishes good from great when it comes to the database, sellers is a good database seller will beat the competition. And a great database seller will help the person in front of them sell a business case inside the organization.

Couple of years ago, I was working with a customer in New Zealand, and I was selling contact center software. And they were absolutely certain they’d beaten their competition — their very traditional technology competition. But at the last minute, I will call by procurement and told that this was on hold. And what had happened was Kimberly Clark, who are very famous for making diapers, but also make toilet paper had made an offer to the CFO. If the CFO bought a whole year’s worth of toilet paper, that would give them 50% off.

And what they lost to wasn’t their traditional technology competition, they lost to toilet paper because they didn’t understand who was involved in the buying process. They only understood how to beat the competition. So there’s two tips when you’re selling b2b: Tip number one, a good seller will sell to the customer and the customer’s problem, a great rep will sell to the customer’s customer’s problem. And a great rep will also sell the business case and help the person who’s in front of them sell the business case internally and understand who else they’re competing against beyond the traditional competitors.

Adam Force 18:29
Yeah, I think that’s important. So you know, anybody listening I as as Oscar as you’re talking, I think it makes a lot of sense. Because as you’re in these meetings, whether you’re a coach and you’re trying to onboard people to support them, or you’re, you know, support an agency supporting other clients, like, you have to go in there with the intention of listening for those things. Right. So and asking the right questions too I mean, do you agree like you have to go in. And if you ask the right questions, that’s how you get to the point where you can listen and get the information you need.

Oscar Trimboli 19:00
In a lot of cases, we ask the questions too late as well. Well, a lot of time, if you think about the standard unit of the meeting is either one hour or half an hour. And if we’ll just do the half an hour, the one hour meeting because the math is easier for me. You should be asking this question at the 45 minute mark, in any conversation, who else is involved in the procurement process? And most importantly, this is this is the question you want to ask. So they might say, Oh, it’s Adam. It’s Jenny and Simon. And you simply have to ask them, so if they were in this room right now, how would you explain what we’ve just discussed to them?

And when you do, all they’re doing is rehearsing in front of you how they’re gonna sell this business case. And when they do, you can make a judgment call to go, Wow, these people are rock stars, they’ve got it all covered, or gee, they’re really strong at explaining features and functions, but they don’t realize the financial implications of what they do. So if Simon was the finance guy, you just simply have to ask, What other questions would Simon have from a finance perspective that we haven’t covered today? And typically they go, Oh, I think we’ve covered them all.

And you can simply ask, I look, when I work with other finance leaders and other organizations, they typically want to understand the payback period on this. How would you explain that to Simon? And typically they’ll stumble, and you know, okay, you need to help them out there. So that’s a lot around level three listening, which is listening through the context and understanding how things get done in an organization. Rather than just giving them the content, it’s not enough to give them an executive summary in a pitch deck, you need to be rock solid, that whatever questions they’re going to get, you’ve got covered off. That’s why I have to ask it two thirds of the way to three quarters of the way into the meeting, because you’re going to need the next 15 minutes to step them through the kinds of questions other people going to ask them.

Adam Force 21:14
Yeah, that makes sense. And so your recommendation, you know, you so it’s all kind of like ties together. So if you know what to look for, you can ask the right questions, and then you gotta listen for the information and kind of see got a guide these conversations a little bit, right.

Oscar Trimboli 21:31
Yes, and no, I think in a lot of cases, the people you’re dealing with know how things work in their organization. I think if you come across as too guided that it feels manipulative. I think being just being open to working with them and going, How do things get done around here, when a transaction of this size happened last time, how did that work? They’ll tell you the answer. You don’t have to necessarily guide them.

And then all you have to do is pull a couple of different perspectives. So what does that mean for Finance? What does it mean for operations? What does it mean for human resources? And you can use those questions no matter what the organization and the context is. And all of a sudden they’ll go, Yeah, well, Alice in operations is always going on about quality. So tell me what your quality story is, and off you go. And you tell them the quality story. I think in a lot of cases, if they feel it’s their story, and not yours, they’ll go and advocate for it much stronger than they ever would if it was only your story alone.

Adam Force 22:34
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. And is this stuff now — I have not read the book yet that you have. And I’m curious. Can we just talk a little bit about like, what you go through in the book, Deep Listening? Do you touch on these types of topics? Like, where’s the focus? And who is this really written for?

Oscar Trimboli 22:57
Yeah, so the book is small enough to sit in your wife’s coat pocket or, or in your bag, if you carry them around. It’s designed to be read in 90 minutes. The book was designed not to be a dust collecting trophy on your shelf that you never use. And because it’s so accessible, a lot of people go back to it over and over again. The book is designed to do a couple of really simple things: Unpick the five levels of listening, it helps you understand how to use silence.

In the West, and Western economies, silence isn’t used as much as it is in the East in high context cultures like Japan, Korea, China. So again, in a more global world, you’re going to interact with more of these people so understand and become comfortable with pause and silence. And then finally, help you identify which listening villain you are. There’s four villains of listening. There’s the lost listener, the dramatic listener, there’s the interrupting listener. And finally, what have I covered up dramatic, interrupting…

Adam Force 24:06
Interrupting.

Oscar Trimboli 24:08
And the fourth one should be really obvious as he looks at his fingers. So lost, dramatic, interrupting, and shrewd, of course. Sorry about that. The shrewd listener is disproportionately represented in the sales profession. So what a shrewd listener does, Adam, is they go, you think that’s your problem. But I’ve already solved that. And you haven’t thought about the three problems I’m already solving for you, I wish you’d hurry up. And while you’re doing that, you’re not really paying attention to what they’re saying.

The interrupting listener is the most over listening type because the interrupting listener just jumps in every time you draw breath and think that’s a commercial break to jump in. The lost listener doesn’t actually know why they’re in a meeting or they’re distracted when they’re in the meeting. And the dramatic listener loves listening to your story because they’ve got a bigger story. If you had a bad boss, I had a worse boss. If you had a tough merger, their merger was tougher than your they’ll love your stories, because it just builds a theatrical stage for them to continue on, on the journey as well. So helping right now Adam, which one of those 4 do you think you are the most or…

Adam Force 25:22
I think I have I try my best to have silence but I think I become interruptive.

Oscar Trimboli 25:30
Yeah. And look in 32% of people in our research database identify immediately with the interrupting listener. But listening is situational and relational. You’ll listen differently to a customer that you’ll listen to an advisor. You’ll listen differently to your parents than you will to a doctor. So we’re actually all of those listening villains, it just depends on the situation that we find ourselves in.

And if there’s one tip, I would give any men listening to this podcast right now, stop trying to fix women. Yeah, they’re not broken. And if you just listen to them, it will completely transform your relationship. I’ve got a funny story. I was coaching a guy called Mick and Mick was working with me for three months. And he said to me, we need to talk. It was a Monday and he said, this is what happened last Friday night. My wife said to me, we need to talk, Mick. And when your wife says that that’s not a good sign 12 years into a marriage. The kids had gone to bed, she sat me down across the dinner table and said, We need to talk.

And he took a deep breath in and she said, You can be completely honest with me now. You’re having an affair, aren’t you? And he took a deep breath in and he says, Wow, she says for the last three months, you have never, ever paid me so much attention in the last three months as you have in the last 12 years of our relationship. So tell me, who are you having the affair with? And she said, Look, and Mick said, I Ggtta be honest. It’s a bloke. It’s a guy. And the guy’s name is Oscar. And he’s been teaching me how to listen for the last three months. And she went, Oh my God, this makes complete sense.

And the funny thing from this whole story is Mick said, her closing comment is, in the last three months, you have never appeared to be more sexy than you have when you listen to me. So Mick’s reflection was he realized for the last 12 years of his relationship, all he was trying to do was fix his wife. And all she wanted was for him to listen to her. For all the work I’ve done and all the researchers in a workplace. But sometimes people get a bit crazy and go and use it at home as well. So

Adam Force 27:53
It’s a powerful tool for just your life in general, I guess. Right?

Oscar Trimboli 27:58
Yeah, whether it’s our home relationships, whether it’s community relationships, whether it’s work relationships, I think we’ve spent a lot of time in the 20th century learning how to speak, how to speak with influence, how to speak with impact. But I think the productivity hack of the 21st century and where you’re spending half your day, is listening.

Adam Force 28:21
Yeah, makes sense. So let’s wrap up with just one last question for the entrepreneurs on this line. Because I think this is such a powerful tool, and I want to give you a chance to kind of give your final words of wisdom to them. And if you were going to give a piece of advice for the early stage entrepreneur who’s you know, trying to get the next client, trying to get the next sale? What would you tell them about the art of listening as they try to grow their business?

Oscar Trimboli 29:00
Be comfortable with the pause, be comfortable with silence, you’ll be surprised how much heavy lifting silence can do for you in a conversation if you don’t interrupt who you’re speaking to. The number one tip I would say is if you’re in front of somebody, and you’re trying to do business with them, build a relationship, create a transaction. Keep this in mind, try and avoid taking verbatim notes. Meaning if you’re hand writing notes, don’t write up word for word or don’t write sentences or don’t write phrases. Try and write graphical notes. The reason you don’t want to take handwritten verbatim notes, or take handwritten notes is that you shut down the part of the brain that actually hears when you’re writing these verbatim notes.

But if you take graphical notes, the part of the brain that allows you to take graphical notes doesn’t shut down the part of the brain that actually hears and when you take graphical notes, you’ll take fewer notes, but you will force yourself to listen at level five and listen for meaning. Your recall from that conversation will be higher, and your eye contact with the person you’re talking to will be much stronger.

The most significant signal you can send to somebody that they believe you’re listening to them is when your eye contact is the highest. So if there’s one thing I would say is get rid of the electronic devices, go analog and just take simple graphical notes about concepts in the meeting, draw the linkages between them, but don’t take verbatim notes. You’ll be much more present in that meeting. And you will transform the person in that room because you’re paying them the biggest compliment in the world. You’re giving them your full attention.

Adam Force 30:51
Yeah. Excellent. Thank you so much Oscar. This is enlightening and very interesting. And I think it’s a very important part of just you know, not just business but like you said life, right? So I think the better we can understand these practices, the better we’ll be all around. So we appreciate you sharing your insights and the work that you’re doing.

Oscar Trimboli 31:14
Well, thanks for listening.

Adam Force 31:16
Absolutely. All right, Oscar. Let’s just give a shout out. How do people learn more about what you have going on? Where can they find you and information and stuff like that?

Oscar Trimboli 31:26
Look, we’ve got a really simple download for everybody called the five myths of listening, which is a downloadable. It’ll tell you the five most common mistakes people make when it comes to listening and the five solutions that go along with it. So if you go to oscartrimboli.com/listeningmyths, you’ll be able to download it there. And that will open up a pathway to the book, the playing cards, the jigsaw puzzle, the podcast series, and soon the comma animated comic strip about how to listen better in the workplace.

Adam Force 32:00
Excellent, and we will include that link for anybody in the show notes when the interview is active on the website. Again, thank you so much Oscar and we will be in touch.

Oscar Trimboli 32:12
Thanks for listening.

Announcer 32:13
That’s all for this episode. Your next step is to join the Change Creator revolution by downloading our interactive digital magazine app for premium content, exclusive interviews and more ways to stay on top of your game available now on iTunes and Google Play or visit changecreatormag.com. We’ll see you next time where money and meeting intersect right here at the Change Creator podcast.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

How to Avoid Manipulation in Marketing With These Ethical Practices

The Way You Market Matters

If manipulation in marketing gets you down, don‘t worry. There is another way.

In 1991, when I received my marketing degree, we didn‘t have all the sleaze that we have today. 

I also didn‘t realize how much destruction marketing would do to people and our planet. Sure, I knew about false promises and labeling as well as sleazy advertising, but that was about it.

It wasn‘t until the internet was introduced that everyone had the opportunity to make money. And as soon as you wave bills in front of people‘s faces, they will do almost anything to grab it.

Marketing Created a Monster

In our society, we were born and raised to value material things over what truly makes us happy: Relationships and experiences. 

Instead, we buy stuff for the sake of buying stuff. Even if we don’t need it and many times, even if we don’t want it. 

Why? Because

  • We’re lured into thinking we’re getting a bargain.
  • We want to impress someone else.
  • We think it‘ll make us feel better.

We‘ve created a greedy society of “Gimme, gimme now!“

No please, no thank you, just gimme! And that as fast as you can!

Much of this excessive consumerism can be blamed on the manipulation in marketing.

Either we see ads that encourage us to buy things we don’t need. 

Or we feel the pressure of wanting to buy the latest gadget.

Or we feel better when we buy cheap clothes because we certainly can’t wear the same dress to a different party where the same neighbor will be attending.

Since we‘ve been taught to want more stuff, our closets and drawers are so full, we have to regularly sort through it all just so that we make room to buy more new things.

And, we’ve maxed out our credit cards to the point of bankruptcy. Talk about insanity.

The Chicken vs. the Egg Scenario

We, consumers, wanted cheap and fast and the industries gave it to us.

Or was it the other way around and the industries showed us that we‘ll be happier with cheap and fast?

It doesn’t matter if the chicken came before the egg. This discussion is a moot point as addictions, even a shopping one that seems „harmless“, can cause families to split up.

And let‘s not forget about all the animal cruelty and destruction of our environment resulting from the manufacturing of cheaply-made products. That‘s an entire different post in itself.

Fact is: Humans, animals and our planet are suffering because of our spending habits and it‘s about time we make some changes.

Since we have to get to the root of the problem, I‘m starting in my own industry because I see a lot of change that can easily take place in marketing. Not just easily, but effectively without any stress on your sales or psyche.

Let‘s change the way people shop and market.

Thinking Strategic

My mission as the founder of Ethical Brand Marketing is to help purpose-driven brand owners create an ethical marketing strategy that will help them increase revenue so that they can become change creators in their own industry and be able to realize their vision of a better world, whatever that means for them. 

The term ethical means something different to each person and in marketing, it‘s still a fairly new term in the practical sense although the words conscious, mindful and ethical have been chosen to describe how we should market for a very long time.

And yet, we’re still seeing a lot of manipulation in marketing to this day. The reason for this is because humans don’t like change and the manipulation practices have been proven to work.

Why change a running system? Because of all the reasons mentioned above.

When you think about marketing your purpose-driven business, I challenge you to accept and understand that you are unique. 

Seriously, you don‘t want to be like everyone else. 

The reason why you‘re in the business you‘re in is because you want to make changes, so why revert back to traditional marketing methods when you can implement new ethical practices?

Practices that are easy and effective.

7 Ethical Marketing Practices You Want to Use in Your Strategy:

1. Rounded Prices

We’re so used to seeing odd prices such as $5,99, $247 and $99, but it’s not because it makes our lives easier, it’s psychology.

Since we read from left to right, the number on the far left is most important and if it‘s lower, we feel like we’re getting a bargain. 

Even if we have brains and know better.

No matter how „harmless“ it may seem and everyone uses it, it’s still manipulation.

As an active member of the ethical move., I inspire others to take the Pricing Pledge.

It’s an easy first step to show your customers that you don‘t want to use manipulation in marketing.

2. Honesty and Transparency

I’m sure you’ve read that transparency is vital in marketing. Yadi, yadi, ya.

Yes, that term is overused, I’ll admit.

BUT, it’s more important now than ever because greenwashing is on the rise and extremely dangerous.

The first time I heard the term greenwashing was at the first Green Tourism Camp in 2011. Greenwashing was practiced way before 2011, but I just hadn’t heard that term before.

Since then – almost a decade later – greenwashing is EVERYwhere. Unfortunately.

When you read “We don’t believe in animal testing” on a shampoo bottle, what you’re actually holding in your hand is a product that WAS tested on animals. They may not ‘believe’ in it, but they also haven’t taken the measures to stop doing it either.

Believing doesn’t always mean supporting because if they truly believed in supporting animal rights, they would have written “We don’t test on animals” or slapped a leaping bunny or peta cruelty-free logo on their packaging.

It’s also one thing to say “We donate 5% to various charities.”

What does 5% actually mean? Five percent of sales or profit? And what charities do you support?

And another to say “For every 10 dollars you spend, we spend $1 to plant a tree in the Amazon rainforest through our charity partner: One Tree Planted. For more details, click here.”

THIS is what honesty and transparency means.

It proves you’re the real deal and makes you stand out against others. 

It helps your customers decide if they want to support you or not.

It’s what your customers want and actually expect from you.

3. Abundance and Patience

This is a tough one because I’m talking about avoiding the so-called scarcity and urgency tactics we see all over the net.

“Only 3 spots left!!

“If you buy this online course before midnight tonight, we’ll throw in 10 bonuses worth $2475!”

“Quick, time is running out! This is the 1st of 15 mails you’ll get over the next 5 days to pressure you to buy this product!”

“Oh, sorry, even though we’ve advertised this toy so that your child begs you to get it for Christmas, we decided to lie to you and say it’s sold out so that you’re forced to buy another gift for Christmas. And THEN – get this, we’re pretty darn clever – when January rolls out and we want to keep up our sales, we’ll advertise the hell out of it so that your kid will say, “Mommy, Daddy, guess what, it’s back on sale!” and you’ll say, “OK, we feel guilty, let’s buy it today!””

True story. This is what the major toy manufacturers do to manipulate parents.

Scarcity and urgency tactics were invented to cause people to develop a fear of missing out (FOMO).

What comes after most FOMO purchases? Purchases that: 

  • No one needs or wants.
  • Make people feel unhappy and angry they wasted their money. I have several unfinished online courses on my roster. You too?
  • Increase our landfill and further destroy our environment because they get thrown out.

So, while these tactics can be successful to get the sale, they’re damaging for a business’ reputation and to our planet and have no place in this ethical space.

I must add this though. If you really only have 3 spots left, fine. 

If you honestly have to sell by a certain deadline, OK.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but, please, for the love of all things beautiful on this Earth – be mindful of the way you communicate it. 

You don’t have to promote fear or pressure to get people to buy from you.

If you have an established and trusting relationship with your customers or clients, they will continue to support you, so instead, help them feel good about their purchase by showing them what your offer will do for them in the long-run.

Nurture your customers, don’t make them feel inadequate.

4. Long-term Collaborations

So many business owners and marketers feel that competition is a negative thing. 

Have you’ve heard the phrase: Collaboration is the new competition? This is because you can’t create change alone. 

You need the help and support from others and the best and easiest way is to get it is from those who understand your own industry.

You have competition in both the ethical and traditional space as you not only want to serve the conscious consumer, you also want to bring your products and services to the mass market so that change can take place in this world. 

So that you’re able to realize your vision.

As a change creator, you have the opportunity to partner up with whomever you want.

Thinking Big

A traditional partner can help you get your products into big retail stores.

How many books about doing business better are sold on Amazon for profit and reachability sake? Even though we all know Amazon employees aren’t even allowed to pee?

Probably about 99% of them.

There’s also nothing wrong with trying to sell your bamboo toothbrushes in Wal-Mart. In fact, just looked online and they’re already being sold there!

Sure, you have different ethos and missions, BUT, if you have big retailer partners, the mass market will find out about you. You will increase sales and credibility. And you’ll nurture that seed that’s been growing in everyone’s mind since Greta showed up on the 6 o’clock news a year ago.

I feel though, that too many in the echo chamber are holding back because of their ethos.

I’m guilty of this too and maybe I should offer my inspiring children’s fantasy book on Amazon. ??? 

In all honesty, we have to be bolder if we want to help change the way people shop. 

And just think of your leadership role in this equation. What if you helped a bigger brand become more sustainable with your amazing communication talents? How incredible would that be?

Staying in Your Own Safe Space

NOW, if you honestly feel like you’d be giving away your soul to the devil, then please don’t go this route. It has to feel good for you. You won’t be doing anyone a service if you’re wrapped up in guilt.

Not only do you have the opportunity to collaborate with the big guys, you can – and should – also find ways to collaborate with your competition in the ethical space.

I see this as a huge challenge for some though, especially in the sustainable fashion space as fashion is traditionally a highly competitive industry. Too bad though because it’s a huge lost opportunity.

But, think about it, you could:

  • Organize a fashion show together as most customers are not loyal to only one brand.
  • Purchase your materials in bulk to get a better price.
  • Organize a mastermind group with colleagues to discuss trends and business challenges to help each other out.

This will put your fashion brand in front of customers you wouldn’t otherwise reach and save you time and money. Win-win.

There are so many ways to collaborate inside and outside the ethical space with no need to ‘beat your competition’ as you’re in this together and there’s room enough for all of you.

The possibilities really are endless.

5. Brilliant Customer Service

During my corporate marketing days, I worked for a company that was highly stressed about their competition. 

Me, as their marketing director? Not so much.

I didn’t feel the need to concentrate on them. 

Because concentrating on our competition that was in the game for decades longer and had the highest market share in the world wasn’t worth my time.

It wasn’t a Coke vs. Pepsi scenario with us battling over the claim of ‘being better’. It was more like an Apple vs. Microsoft case whereas our brand was Apple, the brand that was different and appealed to a more quality-driven audience. With a higher product quality and that of customer service, care and attention. THAT was our focus and what set us apart.  

Not only that, since it costs more money to gain new customers than it does to keep existing ones, I recommend to do all you can do to nurture your own customers, not someone else’s.

6. Valuable Connections via Social Media

Social media is a great way to connect with others. It brings old school friends and ex-work colleagues together and now we can easily communicate with people from around the world.

That’s what it was all about over 10 years ago anyway. Now, it’s also the place to go for trolling and faking it until you’re making it and while we’re at it, not getting compensated for all of our data that is being sold and making the head cheeses of these platforms filthy rich.

Just think, if we were to receive $0,01 every time Facebook sold our data, we’d all be rich and they’d still make a considerable profit.

But we’ll never see that day and now we have bots wasting our time and interrupting our day instead of humans. Oh, the joy!

And those who follow you on Instagram only to get your follow so that they can turn around and unfollow you again.

This is not the social media world I signed up for. Neither did you.

You signed up to have real conversations with real humans.

Ice Cold Lead Nurturing 

Social media is at the top of the funnel in your marketing strategy.

It’s often where you meet your potential customers for the first time.

Even if there are no guarantees in marketing, I will guarantee this: No one wants to be hard pitched right after meeting you. It’s like asking someone to marry you on the first date.

Your audience will probably NOT visit your link in bio on Instagram, so you have to nurture them differently than on Facebook.

And since your posts aren’t getting shown like they used to 10 years ago, you have to learn how to use your time wisely.

Is it on constant posting and hashtag research or engagement to get to know each other better?

I’ll give you a hint. It’s the latter!

Facebook and co. are now being forced to make social media non-sleazy which is one reason why they change their algorithms so much. If they don’t do this, they will be sent back to court again and again and be forced to pay a lot of money because they will not win this battle.

So, while they’re trying to weed out the sleaze, it’s hurting your stats, but you have to play by their rules and that means you have to engage. 

They want to see comments, not necessarily likes.

They want to see activity in groups, not so much promotion on your business page.

Just like with Google. We all now know that keyword stuffing and black hat SEO tactics penalizes a website, so no one in their right mind is doing that anymore. Not that doing it before was cool, but at least now it’s punished.

Spam commenting on social media is also now being phased out and soon, the visibility of the number of likes of an IG post will be phased out in ALL countries, not just a few like it is today. This is to reduce the imposter syndrome that makes people feel bad on social media.

This is a step in the right direction because we are now learning to put the social back in social media and nurture our valuable connections so that they become our customers.

So that we actually see a return on investment in our social media strategy. Companies like LUSH don’t need social media anymore, so they stopped cold turkey. But you’re not LUSH and you need to grow your audience first and social media is the cheapest way to do that.

7. Ethical Sales Pitch

When I received my marketing degree in 1991, I really sucked at interviewing so landed a crappy inside sales job. It was horrible and I only stayed there for one year.

I am not a good saleswoman even though I sold more Girl Scout cookies in my troop year after year and that’s why my mom said I should go into marketing. 

My secret? Going door-to-door during the icy upstate New York winters and getting those empathy sales from kind grandmas who had already bought a few boxes from their own granddaughter.

Selling in person is a different story than online though. We’re not standing outside someone’s door clattering our teeth at the mere age of 12.

How to Close the Sale 

Since customers buy when the perceived value far exceeds the price, you’re faced with the challenges of finding the right customers and justifying a high production cost if you’re product-based or proving your expertise usually without a full guarantee if you’re service-based.

In order to close the sale, you have to help your potential customers make the right decision.

This could very well mean NOT hiring or buying from you because 

  1. They honestly don’t have the money right now or 
  2. If the wrong person buys from you, they may be unhappy and write a bad review.

Being honest (#2) really is the best policy even if it means not getting that sale.

It’s when you create an incredible offer that appeals to your ideal customer without the pressure of a hard pitch that you have a good chance of closing that sale.

Dare to be Assertive

I also see a lot of holding back with service-based social entrepreneurs because they’re either afraid of being sleazy or don’t want to away too much information.

Thing is, if you don’t present your offer, you’ll never make the sale and your customers will go somewhere else. 

That’s certainly not good for business either.

Key Takeaways about Making Marketing Ethical:

1. Show Respect: Market Like You’d Want to be Marketed To
If you feel icky about a particular marketing tactic, don’t use it in your own strategy and stay clear of those companies that do use them.

Be mindful of your audience and before creating any promotions, think about how you can nurture and help your customers solve a problem, not how you can make more money off of them.

2. Know Your Worth: Do More of What Makes You Happy
You’re in the business you’re in because you know you can do things better and provide a high-quality product or service. Implement tactics in your marketing strategy that are fun for you and your ideal customers because at the end of the day, we all just want to be happy.

3. Dare to be Rare: Show Your True Brand Colors
You’re selling to humans who have emotions. By connecting with your audience, you’ll be able to show your brand personality in creative ways so that you can attract those who want to see more.

Those who are entertained by your unique power.

You can choose to either be better or different than your competition, but a word to the wise: Being different is better.

You might also enjoy:

Paxton Gray: Take Your Content Strategy and SEO to the Next Level

Listen to our exclusive interview with Paxton Gray:

Subscribe to this show on Spotify  |  iTunes  |  Stitcher  |  Soundcloud

We all want our businesses to be successful, so the importance of effective content strategy and an eye towards SEO are decidedly important. As 97th Floor’s Executive Vice President of Operations, Paxton Gray knows a thing or two about both. In this interview, Paxton shares some great tips on optimizing your content strategy and how and when to focus on SEO. 

Should SEO Be Your Main Goal?

Paxton explains that link-building is still an important and effective part of SEO. Links are important to outreach. He goes on to explain that there is an abundance of data that shows that pages rank well when they have good links pointing back to them. 

However, a couple years ago, he and his team learned that the particulars of SEO may not necessarily be the most important thing to focus on. It’s far more important to focus on quality content. His team was using a bunch of data to determine what they should write about in order to give their pages a good ranking. Makes sense, right? And it did work. The pages ranked. However, because they were so focused on SEO, there wasn’t nearly enough focus on developing quality content.

While getting your pages to rank will attract people, showing them quality content will incite action. In fact, as long as you’ve got well-formatted title tags and good user experience, it is much better to focus on the content than on SEO.

Developing Great Content

One great way to come up with some great content is to care about the user. Focus on what it is the user is looking for and expecting to see when they visit your page.

Put yourself in the shoes of the customer.

Carefully consider how you provide them with what it is they’re looking for. Content for the sake of content isn’t going to be helpful. Make sure your content is helpful and relevant. The last thing you want is for a potential customer or client to have their intelligence insulted by content that’s nothing more than fluff. Think about who your typical user is and good content will follow. Especially if you’re a solopreneur who is just starting out, focus on what you can give your clients to make their lives better. Building a fan base this way is a much better investment of your time than figuring out SEO.

Hire Some Help

For additional guidance, as you grow, consider hiring a consultant you trust to do a quick once-over for you. Then, when you’re in the market for an agency, compare what they say to what your consultant said. 

Marketing Automation: An Effective Tool

If you’re a medium-sized business and you have at least one or two people on your marketing team, Paxton suggests you get into marketing automation. Marketing automation is taking the “one-to-many” approach of advertising and making it feel like the “one-to-one” approach of sales — tools such as chat bots and emails.

If you don’t, you’re probably not making as much money as you could. But make sure you’re doing it right. Marketing automation done wrong is a quick way to make your business look really bad. Effective marketing automation is a lot more like computer programming than content marketing. 

Lastly, good content is really all about telling a great story. Focus on telling an interesting and captivating story when promoting your brand and building your fan base. 

As long as you can tell a good story, you will be successful in marketing and in business.

We also recommend: 

 

Transcription of Interview (Transcribed by OtterAI; there may be errors.)

Adam Force 0:12
Hey, what’s going on everybody? Welcome back to the Change Creator podcast show. This is your host, Adam force. And if you missed last week’s episode, it’s with Heather Dominick. Can we talk about how to scale your business as a highly sensitive entrepreneur? Really great conversation. So check that out when you get a chance. And today we’re gonna be talking with Paxton Gray. He’s the Executive Vice President of Operations at 97th Floor. And he covers all kinds of work that the agency produces for clients like Discover, ESPN, Salesforce, you name it. He’s full of incredible insights when it comes to marketing and digital work like content strategies, SEO and all that good stuff. So you guys are going to learn a lot. And we’re going to have a really fun conversation with Paxton today, which we’re going to jump into right now. Keeping this intro short and sweet today.

Announcer 0:58
Okay, show me the heat.

Adam Force 1:03
Hey, Paxton, welcome to the change, greater podcast show how you doing today?

Paxton Gray 1:07
I’m doing great. How are you?

Adam Force 1:08
I’m doing awesome, man. You know, another day, another dollar living life. You know, you have so much cool experience. And I just I actually I really liked the name 97th Floor as well. So why don’t you just tell us what you are doing today? Not today, specifically, but like what’s going on in your world at this time? And where you’re at?

Paxton Gray 1:32
Yeah, yeah. So I I’ve been here at 97th Floor for six years. We’ve been around as an agency for 14. And, you know, we focused primarily on on digital marketing. And so that’s, that’s where my head is thinking, you know, how do we leverage all the different platforms and, and tools within the digital space to get results? So yeah, that’s that’s kind of where I’m living what I’m working on trying to help grow 97th Floor to be even bigger than it is.

Adam Force 2:00
Awesome. Awesome. I am curious, you know — actually, that triggers a number of questions. But before we get into it, you know, what got you into the marketing space, what led you to 97th Floor, just a little background would be helpful and know where you’re coming from?

Paxton Gray 2:14
Yeah, so I studied advertising, actually, at a university here in Utah. And my plan was always to go work at the big sexy New York advertising agency. You know, that’s kind of where I wanted to end up at Ogilvy or shy day. I mean, those aren’t in New York, but yeah, you know what I’m saying. So that’s kind of my plan. And I started looking around for internships in New York and Chicago. And then I, you know, I also got engaged around that same time to a girl that hates the idea of living in a big city. Like, her ideal is to like, go have a bunch of horses and live on a giant ranch. So I stopped looking for internships in New York and Chicago, because she didn’t want to go there. And instead, I looked for places around here in Utah. And I found this company called 97th Floor. And I was like, that sounds like the big sexy New York agency I wanted to work at, you know, so I applied and it, anyway, so I start working at 97th Floor and back then it wasn’t even close to being you know, that big, sexy giant agency. It was a very small shop at the time. I think I was like employee number 12. And I realized, however, that if I could — like, this agency has potential, like, really cool services, the market is growing really well, awesome talent. And if I stuck it out, and I worked my butt off, I could maybe turn it into the big sexy agency that I always wanted to work at. And, you know, I don’t think we’re 100% there. You know, we’re still growing. But you know, we have an office out in San Francisco, hopefully in a couple years will be out in New York as well. So we’re getting in there.

Adam Force 4:00
Excellent. Excellent. And so my question would be, are you actually on the 97th Floor?

Paxton Gray 4:07
No, we’re not. The tallest building in Utah, I think, is 36 floors. So it’s not on the 97th floor.

Adam Force 4:18
Cool, cool. Cool. Yeah. So do you know where the name came from?

Paxton Gray 4:23
Yeah. So when our founder — so, we started 14 years ago, this September, and back then it was just our founder, you know, he was kind of running a one man show. And he wanted to give it like an LA and New York type vibe. And I believe he was planning on calling it the 100th Floor. And his wife said, yeah, that doesn’t sound very good. Like, doesn’t roll off the tongue 97 rolls off the tongue way better than 100.

Adam Force 4:48
Yeah.

Paxton Gray 4:49
And so he’s like, all right, check for the domain name. It was available, and boom, that was it.

Adam Force 4:54
Awesome. That’s cool.

That’s cool. So when you got there, I mean, what what was going on at the time? Like, can you describe for us the environment there? And what you guys were working on?

Paxton Gray 5:06
Yeah. So it was very much and still is about results. You know, we’re always focused on how do we get results for clients, not just how do we make a ton of money? Or how do we just get hours to bill. All of our contracts are based off of results. And so that leads into like a very scrappy, innovative testing type culture. And that’s kind of what I walked into, kind of anything went as long as it works. So there was no bad ideas, or just experiment trying new things. And so there are some areas, we were a little rough around the edges. But by and large, you know, we just, we were really good at getting the job done. And that’s kind of been our focus always is just getting the job done.

And so that’s kind of what I walked into. There was a time — in fact, it’s kind of a funny story — it was my third week there. We were using a couple different tools sets. And I won’t bother you with particulars. But I found this weird loophole and how to use a couple of tools with each other to get some really cool results. And it was working really well. But it ended up getting — like, I didn’t realize that we were being billed for all this — these API calls that we were making on this one tool. And we got a bill from this tool for, I guess, $6500. So with my third week there, I was like, boom, I was a huge liability.

Adam Force 6:27
You’re welcome!

Paxton Gray 6:29
Yeah. But our CEO, I mean, to his credit, it’s like, Hey, man, that’s what it’s all about. It’s all about testing and trying things. And I love that you’re experimenting. So that to me cemented in the idea of nothing’s, you know, nothing’s not worth trying.

Adam Force 6:42
Yeah. Now, that’s pretty cool. So yeah, so it was just some kind of like marketing stuff you were trying to pull off? or What was it?

Paxton Gray 6:51
Yeah. So back then, we did a lot of link building, which if you’re familiar with SEO, you know, links are important for ranking. And I was doing some outreach. And I discovered, well, we had one tool that allowed us to find the email addresses for editors and publishers.

Adam Force 7:11
Yeah.

Paxton Gray 7:11
And then we had another tool that allowed us to scrape all the backlinks of our competitors. And so I figured out that I could scrape all the backlinks of our competitors, get get thousands and thousands of URLs, and then stuff all those URLs into this other tool that was basically an email scraper. So I could walk away with, you know, 20,000 email addresses of publishers, and editors, and then I could just hit them up just all day. And what I didn’t realize is that the email scraper charged per scrape. And so when I stuffed 20,000 URLs into it, we got a giant bill, but it worked out that way. We got it. I got good results. And…

Adam Force 7:50
Right, so you got the return on it.

Paxton Gray 7:51
Yeah, we got the return. Just a little unexpected costs there.

Adam Force 7:56
Yeah, but that’s pretty cool. So like, what was your role when you started there?

Paxton Gray 8:01
So my role when I started was SEO marketer. So I basically got doing the link building, doing optimizations, kind of doing all the legwork for SEO.

Adam Force 8:12
And how have you been seeing now the evolution of the marketing space? You know, we’re talking, we got a lot of entrepreneurs listening here. And obviously, marketing is a very important part of any business. And I’m just curious from your experience, you know, we’ll just tap into the SEO conversation for a minute. Just how you see things changing, like, do you still focus on, you know, link building? Or how is the dynamic changed in your mind over the years?

Paxton Gray 8:40
Yeah, so link building is still an important part of SEO, we have oodles and oodles of data that show that pages that have good links pointing back to them do rank well, so it’s still a big part of the algorithm. It’s gotten a lot more complex than it was back when I started 11 years ago, for sure. Like back then we were keyword stuffing and putting words and meta keyword tags and all that good stuff.

But these days, you know, I think as long as you have your bases covered, and your you got your title tags, great, and they’re formatted well, and you’ve got good user experience, I think it’s much better to focus on the content, necessarily, than the particulars of SEO. Now, something that we learned a couple of years ago, there’s a system called TFIDF, the term frequency inverse document frequency analysis, where essentially, you are using a bunch of data to figure out what you should write the page about to give it the best shot of ranking as possible.

And it was working. Like, we could get these pages to rank. However, we were so focused on the content being formatted to rank well, and not focused enough on the content actually being good.

Adam Force 9:54
Exactly. Yeah.

Paxton Gray 9:56
So we’ve made a pretty big pivot over the past couple years into, hey, that’s still good to know. But primarily, what we want is great content that is going to actually incite action once a user visits and reads, rather than just merely attracting eyeballs. Because you attract eyeballs, and it’s not good content, that’s not good for your brand. That’s not that’s that’s a waste, right? So, yeah, so I’d say, from an SEO perspective, like still know what you’re doing, still, I would say consult a professional, get people involved, because you can make some pretty serious mistakes that will cost you a lot of money. But then beyond that, I think it’s really important to focus on the content, the message and the user experience once they actually come down.

Adam Force 10:38
Yeah, you know, we, my co founder is really into the SEO stuff and knows it well. Thank God, because I have no idea. And it’s not where my brain goes, right? You know, we think about our titles and stuff, but it is really thinking, like you said, it’s like, Who is this for? And what purpose does it really serve? And, you know, like, what are they getting out of it. So as long as it really speaks to them, and then she’s always like, at least have a good title in there. That can help rank and get get noticed. Because you want to, you know, you want to get picked up by by Google. And we do get like a pretty good high value on the worth of our our content. So it does make a difference. And interestingly enough, like we were running a Facebook campaign to sell one of our programs. And as people came in, on the early days, I would reach out and say, hey, how did you find us and talk to them. And I was hoping it was our Facebook strategy. And it was always the content marketing that was bringing people in. So content wins, man.

Paxton Gray 11:40
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s so many articles out there that will tell you that the market is just over saturated. And it’s not worth the investment to do content marketing, because you have to do so much to stand out. And I, you know, all the data that they pulled it say, hey, the internet is growing by 15 million pages a day, the vast majority of those pages are just computer generated pages that will never be seen by anybody. And the other half are just a bunch of crap articles that were written by people who don’t care about the user. I don’t think it’s, I mean, I think it’s definitely worth the investment to have some good content. Like, I got an iPad recently, and I was like searching for some cool creative things to do with an iPad. And so I searched for that on Google. And I can’t tell you, like, the vast majority of them said things like buy a screen protector, get get a cover for your iPad, it’s like, Dude, are you serious? Like you don’t think I’ve just thought about that already. Like, you clearly don’t care about me. You’re just trying to get my views so that your ads, you can get some ad revenue.

Adam Force 12:38
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I saw it all the time, too. Yep. Agree. Yeah.

Paxton Gray 12:43
Yeah. So just caring about the user. And, you know, keyword research is something that is used by SEO and PPC, very heavily, for obvious reasons. But it’s not used enough by content marketing. And Google is that special tool in our lives that we ask questions from Google that we don’t ask anybody else.

And so that query data that you can get from Google is so important from a content perspective, because if you see people are asking this question over and over and over again, let’s give this some great content to answer that question, let’s help make their lives better. And that will attract an audience and develop really good brand relationship. And hopefully, people will get into the funnel and convert, you know, rather than just saying, like, hey, let’s use this keyword research to so they can rank like, pick some keywords, the high volume keywords to rank for.

Adam Force 13:32
Yeah, exactly.

Paxton Gray 13:33
Which has its place it has its merits, but using it, like looking at that data from a content marketing perspective, I think is is really valuable.

Adam Force 13:41
Okay, and are there any tools you would recommend that people may want to check out to help support, you know, their efforts in in that journey?

Paxton Gray 13:50
Yeah. So there’s lots of lots of cool tools around. Ahrefs has some really great data on keywords. My favorite is Spyfu. And the reason I love spyfu because it’s actually built for PPC kind of intelligence, but they have this organic part of the site. And the data is just so fast. And Spyfu is so cheap. So if you’re, you know, if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re trying to decrease the cost of your marketing stacks Spyfu is a great way to do it. It’s only I think it’s like 30 bucks a month. And they have really great data really fast and gives you everything you need.

Adam Force 14:27
Cool.Yeah, isn’t it because Ahrefs is we use Ahrefs, but it’s pretty expensive, isn’t it? I don’t remember how much it is every month.

Paxton Gray 14:33
Yeah, it is. I mean, it they have different levels, but it’s definitely more and more expensive than Spyfu.

Adam Force 14:39
Yeah, yeah.

Paxton Gray 14:40
And then beyond that, I actually have a template that is built for use with Spyfu to where you can kind of run some data, export it and then shove all that data into a template. And it will sort through all of it for you and find the best keyword opportunities. Because it kind of allows you to sort through, you know, 40,000 rows of data in 10 minutes, as opposed to one by one. So it’s a really cool template that I can share with your users. I have a URL I can give you afterwards.

Adam Force 15:13
I mean, is it like, do you have to be some kind of super user to figure it out?

Paxton Gray 15:18
No, I actually, within that template, I also have, there’s a link to a YouTube video where I can walk everybody through how to use it. So yeah, so I teach a course actually, university around here. And it’s intro to SEO and analytics, and I teach them that exact same process for keyword research. And so I’ve taught a lot. So it’s very, very easy. Anybody can do it.

Adam Force 15:42
So you know, one question I, you know, as we think about being entrepreneurs, and building up our marketing and stuff, you know, you got to pick and choose where you’re spending your time. And I mean, would you recommend like, Hey, you should have some basic understanding of these thing and these tools. You might be a small team. So you guys are like you wear multiple hats. But do you I have noticed to like it can be really tough when you try to bring on somebody, there’s a lot of like swindlers in the SEO space. And yeah, any advice on like, Is it worth hiring people? Or should you kind of get basic knowledge yourself?

Paxton Gray 16:17
I think it depends on what stage you’re at. So if you’re the solopreneur kind of stage, you’re just doing it by yourself, I think it’s far more valuable to just focus on your audience and focus on what do they need? And what kind of what can I give them to make their lives better. And in that way, build a good audience and build a fan base, that’s going to be way better investment of your time thanfiguring out the ins and outs of SEO. And then, you know, once you’ve gone past that stage, and you have some more time on your hands to focus towards marketing, I think it would be a good idea to learn, learn the basics, but just enough so you don’t get swindled, you know, and I think a really great way to dip your toe into it is to hire a consultant that you trust, to just come in and do a real quick once over, just say what are the big things I should focus on? And then when you go out to shops, shops, some agencies compare what they say against what that consultant you said that you trust what they said, Yeah, I think that’s a really great way to save yourself some time and avoid people who are just in it for a quick buck.

Adam Force 17:19
Absolutely, yeah. When I, when I built up stuff on my own, and I didn’t know anything, I had all these articles and all this stuff going on. And then Amy came in. And she was like, man, we gotta fix this, you know, so you can end up creating more work or hurt your your site, your website’s, you know, effectiveness, if you don’t always take a little bit of time just to get a basic understanding. So I think your your flow of like where you are and what you should do, it makes a lot of good sense. That’s helpful. Yeah. Yes. So you know, as you now are you obviously you’re still doing a lot of that, is that still a big focus for you at 97th Floor at this point?

Paxton Gray 18:00
In terms of SEO?

Adam Force 18:01
Yeah. I mean, you’re right now you’re Executive Vice President, right?

Paxton Gray 18:06
Yes.

Adam Force 18:06
So you’re focused on operations. So I guess you’ve expanded far beyond just the SEO focus?

Paxton Gray 18:11
Yeah, yeah, I’m not I’m not involved too much in the day to day of SEO. But I do I mean, I do, I’m very aware of kind of what’s going on in the industry. I kind of view my job rather than the execution, my job is to keep us on the cutting edge of marketing strategies in SEO, PPC, marketing, automation and content marketing. And so I’m, you know, I’m constantly consuming media to, to kind of help spark those ideas and to test out new things. And so, yeah, I’m very aware of what’s going on the industry. But yeah, I’m not from a day to day perspective involved much.

Adam Force 18:52
Interesting. And so, you know, as far as like, so you’ve gone through a process of like, building an effective team. And I guess, you know, I like what you just mentioned, which is that, you know, you’re you’re leading into the understanding what’s cutting edge for content marketing, but also automation. So I guess I like to talk a little bit about the content, marketing automation, and what you’re seeing is going on today. And if there’s anything that we can, you know, get from your insights there, that would be cool. And then I’d like to talk about well, as we’re starting to build our teams, like, what should we be looking for around these things?

Paxton Gray 19:30
Yeah, yeah, with marketing automation. So much opportunity out there right now. And that barrier to entry is, is getting so much lower than it has ever been in the past, to where, you know, if you’re, if you’re a medium sized business, you know, if you’ve got, if you have at least one or two people in your marketing team, you should be getting into marketing automation, because if you don’t, you’re leaving a lot of a lot of money on the table.

Adam Force 19:55
Okay.

Paxton Gray 19:56
It’s also a way to quickly make your business look really bad. If you don’t do a good job with marketing animation. In a sense, you know, I used to have a much more simplistic view of marketing animation, you know, the idea of, yeah, someone comes to this page, they download an E book, they get an automated email for me, Bing, bang, boom, they become a customer. Pretty simple.

And I’ve been very corrected in terms of how simple it actually is. I mean, it can be very simple, depending on your, your sales cycle and your objectives. But marketing animation is much more akin to computer programming than it is content marketing, in my opinion. Because you have to get that logic correct. Because if you if your logic is off in terms of the flow and the automation and the triggers, then you’re going to make your business look really stupid. Even if your content is great. If you don’t, the wrong message is the wrong time. Because your logic is off. Yeah, the potential for downfall is high.

So I would say, if you’re going to dip your toe into marketing automation, and you’re going to do it yourself, keep it as simple as possible, I would recommend using HubSpot. They’re very, in terms of complexity, they’re pretty simple. They build their business off of working with this small and medium level businesses. So there’s a lot of support a lot of great content out there. But keep it really simple.

And the best thing to do, and this is true for all marketing, this is actually probably true for business and product development. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer. And what what do they expect to see when they click that button? And how can you give them what they expect to see? Right?

If that’s off, then then you got to make some changes. So I think start simple and make sure that that’s true, whatever their customer expects to see. Give them that. And as long as you can keep that true, as you add more more and more complexity, then you’re gonna be good.

Adam Force 22:03
Yeah, that makes sense. And can you just define for people, when you say automation, I have a number of things, it could be a chatbot experience, it could be an email sales sequence with behavioral marketing. How were you looking at it.

Paxton Gray 22:19
Yeah, loosely defined marketing automation is, you know, the difference between sales and marketing is sales is one to one. And marketing is one to many. Or I should say like advertising is one to many. Marketing automation, is trying to take that one to many approach and make it feel like it’s one to one, so that the person is getting spoken to in a way that is very customized in it and makes sense for their particular stage of interaction with your business.

So that can be through chat bots, that can be through email. Some something that people don’t do often that is actually something that’s great is calls to action on content should change dynamically, depending on what has happened before. So for example, if you have an article talking about, it doesn’t matter was talking about but it has a call to action download this this white paper. Yeah, or this ebook.

If you use marketing automation, you can have smart CTA, where if they if it knows that that person has already downloaded that ebook, then instead it says, sign up for a demo, or download this other ebook that we know you haven’t downloaded. So having smart calls to action is really simple execution and saves a lot of waste of time, you know, from asking people to do something they’ve already done, or that doesn’t make sense for their particular situation.

Adam Force 23:37
Yeah, I like that. So the personalization is definitely, you know, something that we focus on too. It’s a great point and actually the smart CTA, I haven’t actually seen that before. We use Active Campaign for, you know, our email sequencing and automations, and it’s pretty cool with their behavioral marketing. And you mentioned HubSpot. What about HubSpot do you find compelling like what are they they can you do the smart CTA with their software? What’s the difference there?

Paxton Gray 24:06
Yeah, you can if if you’ve built a CTA, through HubSpot, or the landing page through HubSpot, then you can use smart CTAs that will change…

Adam Force 24:13
Ah, ok.

Paxton Gray 24:14
Yeah. I like HubSpot a lot. It’s not something we use. We use more complex platforms typically for larger level businesses like Lexmark Animation Cycle. But for the majority of businesses, HubSpot is a great, great suite of tools.

Adam Force 24:35
Okay, that’s pretty cool. And so 97th Floor, like who’s your typical client these days? Like I actually, I’m curious to know how that’s evolved. Like, who was your client when you started? And who’s your clients now? Like, is it changed? Or you guys have the same focus?

Paxton Gray 24:50
Yeah, so our focus is primarily on more enterprise level businesses, a lot of b2b tech, and then b2c lifestyle fashion. We have a lot in that space as well. And that’s what we’ve been pretty much since I started at 97th Floor. Our background really is, in the early days, there’s a company called Omniture, not sure if you remember.

Adam Force 25:20
Yeah.

Paxton Gray 25:21
So you know, our CEO kind of was talking with Omniture and convinced them to let us do a test on one of their keywords. And back then we were doing primarily just SEO. And the test went really well, we got the keyword to I think spot one or two. And so based on that test, they hired us to do work for Omniture. And then when Omniture was acquired by Adobe, Adobe did the review of their agency and the work that we had done for Omniture and then fired their agency and hired us.

So then we started working for Adobe, and Adobe is one of those companies that people come to work for, so they can get on their resume, and they go somewhere else. So we did such good work for Adobe that as people came and went, they brought us with them. And so we kind of spread over to the companies that their marketing team went to after they left Adobe. And so largely, the growth of 97th Floor has been organic and based off based on the work that we do, not based off of really great marketing of our own brands, you know, our sales team is really small.

And especially in comparison to our fulfillment, I think on fulfillment, fulfillment, we have probably 80 people and our sales team is three people. So we rely pretty heavily on word of mouth. Like our clients, you know, we used to do SEO for our own brand. And that’s just like, the people that we’re trying to talk to they don’t go to Google when they’re searching for their agency.

Adam Force 26:44
Right.

Paxton Gray 26:46
They ask their connections, you know, what’s an agency I should use? And so we work on trying to be that agency that people recommend.

Adam Force 26:53
Okay. Yeah. And so when you I guess I’m curious, because I always see people trying to start their own, you know, agencies and stuff like that. And I think you know, it is that immediate Rolodex that can really get you off the ground, but like, sooner or later, the Rolodex runs dry, and you’ve kind of gone through it, and you got to start picking up cold leads.

Have you guys. And I know you mentioned referrals now, and you guys are obviously well established. But there must have been a time where you had to get new clients that were cold. And I’m curious if there was, if anything stands out to you on how you guys approach that?

Paxton Gray 27:29
Yeah, referrals still represents the majority of the leads that come through today. Okay. But other things that we’ve tried, we’ve, we’ve run some ads on LinkedIn. Not a lot of success there. Just the cost is pretty high and hard to get down. We’ve run some ads on Facebook and Instagram, surprisingly, with a lot of success. Yeah, we actually just did a survey of a lot of clients and the vast majority are pretty active on Instagram, which isn’t something I would have guessed.

Adam Force 28:03
That’s interesting. Especially clients that you go after, like the enterprise clients. Yeah,

Paxton Gray 28:08
Yeah, you kind of think they’d be a little bit more maybe boring or more business focused. But everyone loves Instagram, everybody loves those pictures so I guess yeah, so it’s been Instagram has been pretty successful for us. So that’s what I would recommend trying out if you want to run some ads.

Adam Force 28:22
Yeah, we’re big fans of Facebook and Instagram and obviously they tie together there and really powerful marketing tool like just just really smart and the depth you can take it for, you know, really getting niche is and retargeting and all that stuff is pretty cool.

Paxton Gray 28:41
Yeah, yeah. Lookalike Audience is awesome, too.

Adam Force 28:44
Ah, yeah. And you know, like we and I love that they let you you know, retarget so you could do like a video sequence where, you know, did they watch, you know, 75% or 95% of that last video? I’m going to retarget those people.

Paxton Gray 28:56
Yeah, yeah. There’s other agency that I I saw, I watched one of their videos, and now I just get their videos all the time. Like, I’m definitely in their cycle of videos.

Adam Force 29:07
Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s funny, I watched. I don’t know, if you saw this documentary, you probably find it fascinating. It was The Great Hack on Netflix.

Paxton Gray 29:16
I saw it as my things to watch, but I haven’t watched it.

Adam Force 29:23
My god, it’s been one of these things that I’ve been talking about recently, because I just saw it. So I’m bringing it up here. A little off topic. But it’s interesting, to say the least. And you know that my wife and I sometimes we’ll be talking about something. And then next, you know, she’ll be looking at like Facebook, 20 minutes later, she’s like, swear to god, these microphones. They’re listening to us through these microphones, because I didn’t go to this website. But now I see the ad.

And I’m like, that is interesting. Because I know, the Facebook machine. And I know someone so I was watching this movie. And you know, these companies that Cambridge Analytica, they’re like, here’s what the said like, have you ever had the experience where, you know, you think your microphone is listening to you? And next thing, you know, you see this ad and I was like, holy shit, this is what we were just talking about.

And like, well, that’s not actually what’s happening. What’s happening is we have so much personality data about you that they can predict like, what you like want to talk what you’re going to be talking about and what you’re thinking about. And so all of a sudden, you’re getting served these things that are just predictive ads.

Paxton Gray 30:27
That’s creepy, man. That’s trippy. Yeah, I think we’re getting to a point where technology is just outpacing the capacity of the human brain to think, frankly.

Adam Force 30:38
Oh, yeah.

Paxton Gray 30:40
This kind of stuff is going to happen more and more. And, you know, in aggregate, we’re pretty predictable beings. And as long as you have enough data, and it’s the right data, you can kind of guess what we’re going to be doing next.

Adam Force 30:52
And that is scary, that is creepy because you know what, with what the whole point of this documentary was, they were showing, like so much data is being used without your consent to do things that we will never understand. Like, they basically Cambridge Analytica came out and they’re like, yeah, we made Brexit happen. We made Donald Trump happen, and they explained how it worked and what they did. And when you see it, you’re just like, Whoa, did not even have a clue about that.

Paxton Gray 31:20
That’s crazy, man. Yeah, I gotta check that out. I gotta check that out.

Adam Force 31:24
Oh, yeah, it’s definitely worth it. I think you would really be fascinated by it. And now it’s just like, so what is real anymore? What is being mass manipulated? And what’s actually real?

Paxton Gray 31:35
Yeah, I mean, I, there’s so many times when I’m on even LinkedIn, like on LinkedIn. Oh, man, this is going to get into a weird story. But it’s like sometimes I’ll see this debate that’s raging on LinkedIn. And I’ll follow someone down the rabbit hole and be like, I’m pretty sure this is a fake account. Like they’re not endorsed by anybody. They don’t have any experience or anything that seems like this is a real profile. They’re just like stirring stuff up.

Adam Force 32:02
Yeah.

Paxton Gray 32:03
Yeah, pretty crazy. We actually at 97th Floor we have a day called Black Hat day that we do every Halloween. But it’s the week before Halloween. And basically everyone brings their like dirtiest sneakiest online trick that they can figure out, you know, not with the idea that we’re never going to actually do it at 97th Floor. But I think it keeps people sharp and kind of aware of like what is possible out there when you have the right sets of data.

Adam Force 32:29
Oh, yeah.

Paxton Gray 32:30
My hack last year was to create a fake LinkedIn profile. And made her a recruiter at Ogilvy. And so she’s connected with CEOs all over the United States. And yeah, it’s crazy. And it’s just like a total fake account. I pulled two images, and I combine them to make a profile image. And then I just pulled pieces of other people’s experience and made this fake profile. It looks super legit. And because she’s a recruiter, like people hit her up and connect with her, like all every day, I get like 10 to 20 LinkedIn requests for profiles bigger than my profile. Yeah, it’s nuts. I was I was just playing around like, I wasn’t, I don’t do anything with it. It just exists.

Adam Force 33:09
Sure, sure!

Paxton Gray 33:12
As for to do something like that was easy. It was easy to build that up.

Adam Force 33:17
Wow. That’s crazy. I did want to — we’ll wrap up here in a minute. I want to be respectful of your time.

Paxton Gray 33:24
No, I love this. This is awesome!

Adam Force 33:25
Okay. Yeah, well, one of the things they mentioned is like, you know, when they have this, like when they have a campaign of any kind of something going on, they will have like a whole warehouse of people who create those types of accounts. And like an instance that they were referencing here, they’re like, there was literally like a million and a half like 1.5 million budget, going at the monthly 1.5 million a month being pumped in to trolling accounts to shift and combat, like things that were going on with misinformation.

Paxton Gray 34:00
I believe it.

Adam Force 34:00
All these fake accounts are made and all these fake websites. And all this stuff is put together as a complete manipulation machine, which is — and they know like what happened, like Cambridge Analytic is like, well, we have 5000 data points on every American. And we isolated everyone that we we called “the persuadables, and they have this huge bucket of persuadables. And then they would run these crazy campaigns that would just constantly push people to believe certain things so that they would vote their way. It’s like, Oh, my God.

And yeah, like one other quick example. And I don’t want to spoil too much, but like, they would this is what really impressed me. They were in like another area for an election. And there was two different populations. And they knew one population of — and they were going after kids. And they’re like, so we can’t talk about politics because kids don’t care. But they do like to get behind movements, and they react to things. So they came up with this thing called the do this campaign.

They would make it this thing about like, oh, like, I’m not going to vote, I’m going against the man and blah, blah, blah. And so they knew that one population of kids, they would stick to it, and they wouldn’t vote and they wanted that to happen. But the other population, which was like another race, like just to be clear, they said, Well, we know that they listen to their parents, and their parents are going to tell them you better vote and they know who they’re going to vote for. So now they got the one side to not vote, and then they got the other side to vote.

Paxton Gray 35:31
Wow, wow, that’s sophisticated.

Adam Force 35:34
That’s sophisticated marketing on a very mass scale, and you don’t even know it’s happening.

Paxton Gray 35:38
I would love to see somebody start a social platform that requires like, some kind of identification. I mean, like Coinbase can do it like. Get something where it’s like, only you can have that profile and you are verified, who you say you are, and then not let anyone else in. And I think that’d be so much healthier,

Adam Force 36:01
It probably would be and I’m surprised we don’t see things like that. I’m wondering if naturally these types of things will start surfacing just because of the environmental circumstances of what’s going on.

Paxton Gray 36:11
It does seem like the market’s right for something like that.

Adam Force 36:13
Why don’t you get on that?

Paxton Gray 36:15
Yeah, we should. Yeah. It’s my next business idea.

Adam Force 36:20
You know, everybody complains about the changes, you know, Instagram makes about the way they’re running the feeds, and you know, the organic traffic on Facebook, all these things. And I’m always wondering like, well, if you want things like, where you see every post, like chronologically, right? Well, why don’t you create a platform and test that out and see, like, maybe you’ll get all those people that would much prefer to have that and no one’s doing it though.

Paxton Gray 36:43
Yeah, I think people are just scared of that. Like, I think we’re often fed that message of, you know, you want to enter a market where no one else is where you’re gonna have no competition. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the wisest thing. You know, so many people are just tired of their current selection of social media. I think there’s still room for other platforms.

Adam Force 37:04
You know what, and that’s that I think you’re 100%, right. Because at the end of the day, you always feel like it’s too saturated, too whatever but I think that when you see it over and over again, like there’s, you can someone else will start something sooner or later, and then you’ll go Oh, I guess there is I guess you can start acting out there’s always like a niche you can carve out.

Paxton Gray 37:23
Oh, yeah. Well, I’m plus as humans, like, we’re so attracted to new and something that’s novel.

Adam Force 37:29
Yeah.

Paxton Gray 37:30
And how old is Facebook? I mean, freak. I started Facebook, back when only college students were allowed to be on Facebook, you know, like, yeah, that’s old. That’s like, I’m ready. I’m ready to get off. I would love to get off. In fact, if I didn’t have to be on for like, other reasons, but yeah.

Adam Force 37:47
Yeah. I mean, I don’t — Are there things you don’t like about Facebook at this point?

Paxton Gray 37:52
I’m not a fan of all the all the breaches, all the data security, like,

Adam Force 37:56
Yeah, yeah, that was I mean, they got they got hacked, man. And that was, yeah, that was a big, that was a big to do for sure. I’m, and I’m surprised because obviously, they have they should have pretty tough firewalls and all that stuff. But and they did step it up. Now they got all this, like two step authorization and all these other things going on, which was a real pain in the ass, by the way.

Paxton Gray 38:18
Yeah, yeah. No, I’d love to see, I’d love to see someone marry the idea of Facebook and Instagram and YouTube, in the sense of, you know, like, with Facebook, we’re selling, there are data like we’re the product right? At least on YouTube, the creators get some cut of what’s going on. Why isn’t that true on Facebook? Like, why don’t Instagram influencers or creators get a cut of the ad revenue that Instagram gets from them producing content? I think, you know, that’s that, I think is an opportunity there.

Adam Force 38:50
That’s a good question. And the platforms are — well, Facebook at least is getting more and more complicated. And I have noticed that when new platforms like this come up that like, hey, only the cool kids know about it. They — the simplicity of it is something that people tend to really like. So if you have something that’s simple, and just like it has like a very singular focus, people tend to like that.

Paxton Gray 39:14
Yeah. Well, I hope one of your listeners is a developer and does something awesome.

Adam Force 39:20
I know, I wish I you know, I always tried to get into learning development. And I’m just I’m far more of a front end like designer and creator. But as far as the coding and stuff, I just have a hard time wrapping my head around that all.

Paxton Gray 39:32
I’ve always said, like our kids, when we get old, our kids are going to tell stories to their kids about us and say like, my grandpa did this. And he didn’t even know how to code! Similar to how we say something about like people way in the past, like this guy didn’t even know how to read and he did this like Isn’t that crazy?

Adam Force 39:49
Yeah. Well, I don’t know, when you were born. I was born in 79. So I’m sharing my age here. But I always say to people, I’m like, Listen to my friends. I’m like, we’re probably the last generation that will ever know what it is to drive with a hard copy map or not have had the internet.

Paxton Gray 40:10
Yeah, Yeah, no kidding.

Adam Force 40:11
Right?

Paxton Gray 40:13
I mean, we’re getting close to the end of combustion engine cars.

Adam Force 40:17
Yeah. Yeah.

Paxton Gray 40:19
Not a long time, like our kids are gonna look back and say I remember when you guys had a gasoline car. Isn’t that crazy?

Adam Force 40:25
Yeah, I can’t believe you are burning gas every day.

Paxton Gray 40:29
Sounds so prehistoric and caveman-like.

Adam Force 40:32
You know, there’s a lot of talk about those Tesla cars. So it’s, you know, talk about a great marketer and a great entrepreneur. This is a guy who just has this. He’s a great storyteller. He has a story that everybody wants to be part of. And he’s really good at leaning into it and kind of like — he doesn’t care. Like, he’s gone bankrupt multiple times. And I forget what book I was reading about him. And he’s like, yeah, you know, I went bankrupt. And I wasn’t worried. So I started PayPal with some people and made my money back so I can fund my next idea.

Paxton Gray 41:03
Yeah, I like him a lot. He’s, he’s a cool guy. And I think that that idea of storytelling, you know, that’s what marketing is at its core. And that will never change. What works with SEO now won’t work in the future. PPC will different, it will be different, some sometime in the future, Facebook will be gone and all that changes from day to day.

But what will never change is that humans love stories. And as long as you can tell a good story, you will be successful in marketing and in business. That’s the art form, that’s the golden standard is being able to tell a story and incite action from telling a story and he is just so good at that.

Adam Force 41:44
100% agree. I think that’s a great a great note that we can wrap up on because it was perfect. And I always say that to him, like the tactics change. And there are certain things that change all the time. But there’s other marketing principles and fundamentals that are just so deeply rooted in our human you know, wiring and behavior that stuff like storytelling — it’s a skill that you want to master because it can make or break your business.

Paxton Gray 42:11
Yeah, for sure.

Adam Force 42:13
Well, Paxton, I really appreciate it man. That was a fun conversation. And let’s give a shout out you know, people I mean, you know, I know you work with enterprises. But guys you want to check out Paxton what they’re doing over at 97th Floor. It’s 97thfloor.com. You can see what they’re up to. And there’s a cool video of facts in on there. And Paxton, yeah, maybe we can get that link to that template. And we’ll share that in our show notes and put it up on the site for people.

Paxton Gray 42:41
Yeah, yeah, I’ll send it over. You can watch the video and download that template.

Adam Force 42:44
And you’re okay with us, including that there. I just want to make sure you’re cool with that.

Paxton Gray 42:47
Yep. Yeah, for sure.

Adam Force 42:49
Okay, awesome, man. All right. Well, listen, appreciate your time and good luck with everything sounds like you’re doing some really exciting stuff. And listen, if you’re in Miami, open for a cup of coffee if you’re around.

Paxton Gray 43:00
Awesome. Sounds great.

Adam Force 43:02
Alright, man, take care. Appreciate it.

Announcer 43:03
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai

5 Simple Ways to Make More Impact Locally

Businesses that have managed to find success in their local community should feel a sense of gratitude and a need to give something back as, at the end of the day, their community is the reason they’ve become as successful as they are. However, donating to local charities isn’t the only way to give back to your local community. In fact, there are many ways you can go about doing this and the best part is that there are actual practical benefits for your business if you focus on the right things. So, in order to help you out, today we are going to take a look at how your business can give back to the local community. 

1. Organize a fundraiser

Fundraisers are a great way to get the local community together in order to solve a common issue they may be facing. For example, if there’s an area of your town that’s run down and needs to be renovated or if there’s a local person who needs support you can step in and take it upon your business to be the ones to solve these issues through fundraisers. You can organize charitable events such as a sports tournament or just put together a big gathering for which you will provide the necessities such as drinks and food for people to come to and donate their money. This can be a very good way to give back to your local community as you will not only be solving a common issue or helping out a person in need but will also get everyone together and make them feel good if you are able to reach your goals.

2. Sponsor a local sports team

Local sports teams tend to be one of the main pillars of a local community as they allow for people to get behind a local symbol and connect with each other. Because of this, becoming a sponsor of a local sports team can be a great way to show your local community you want to support them through things they really care about. This can be even more efficient if the sports team has training programs for kids which you’ll be able to help with the funds it needs to operate as well as to keep the prices acceptable and get publicity in exchange for your support. 

3. Help preserve the environment

Another great way to give back to your local community is by helping it preserve its natural beauty and make a move towards environmental sustainability. In fact, around 70% of Americans think the environment is more important than economic growth which means general people would be a lot more thankful if you organize an event to clean up a local park than if you open a few extra jobs. There are many different ways you can help preserve your local environment as a business and one great example is that of the Jack Brown invest island project. Essentially, it aims to protect the paradise-like environment of an island in Indonesia through three simple steps.

The first step is a reduction in the general use of plastic which would result in a reduction of plastic waste. Secondly, it aims to increase the general awareness of local inhabitants as well as tourists have about the dangers of not preserving the environment. And finally, it believes that the education of younger generations is key as they will grow up learning the effect that waste is having on our planet and the damage that it can cause to the environment they live in, which is why they are organizing many different educational programs. Each of these three steps individually can be a great way to give back to your local community and should give you plenty of inspiration, to begin with.

4. Promote other local businesses

Finding other non-competing local businesses to partner up with is another great way to not only give back to your local community but also to help your businesses grow. By aiming to buy most of the products, services or materials you need to operate your business from other local companies, you will promote growth and increase the overall prosperity of your local community. However, it will also allow you to reach more people and thus end up being a big win for everyone involved. 

5. Encourage employee volunteerism

Finally, you also shouldn’t forget the role your employees can have in supporting the local community. There are a lot of businesses nowadays that encourage their employees to volunteer in local charities by giving them a specific amount of paid time each year to go out and volunteer. Doing this also has the added benefit of promoting a positive spirit within your businesses as it will encourage your employees to do good deeds but it can also serve as a great team-building exercise as your employees can form very strong bonds when volunteering together

Conclusion

When wanting to give back to your local community it’s important to remember that there are many options you can choose from but that you should also keep the capabilities of your business in mind. If there’s a way you can give back by offering the specific products or services, your business offers you should make sure to utilise them as they will have the smallest impact on your funds while at the same time helping you promote yourself. 

Drew Dudley: How to Work Less but Have Way More Impact

Listen to our exclusive interview with Drew Dudley:


 

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As you listen to our interview with Drew Dudley, you’ll soon see why he has been called one of the most dynamic speakers in the world. His talks on leadership are captivating and inspiring — so much so that his 2010 TEDx conference talk on lollipop moments was voted one of the most inspirational TED talks of all time. 

For the last 15 years, Drew has inspired countless individuals and corporations to expand their leadership capacity. In our talk, he discusses the importance of not going overboard in the amount of time you dedicate to your business. Working countless hours each week can become addictive, he warns. We promise ourselves that we’re working an insane number of hours now so that we can work less in the future. However, as company leaders, we become addicted to working too much and end up just following society’s expectations of putting in long hours.

Leadership is not martyrdom.

Working a meager 40 hours per week goes against most of what you’ve heard about scaling your business.

“We live in a 90-hour-per-week hustle culture and if you’re not burning the candle at both ends, you’re clearly not committed to your business.”

Drew points out he is failing himself if he’s working more than 40 hours per week. “If you overdo anything,” he adds, “you don’t love it as much.”

Remember Who It Is You Want to Be

Often, we lose ourselves in the process of setting up a new company to the point that we end up forgetting who we are. Drew points out that our values — those core beliefs that govern our day-to-day decision making — should be reflected in our businesses.

Research shows that clarity on personal values plays a much bigger role in happiness, productivity, retention, and overall effectiveness in the workforce.

Drew’s Six Key Values

Drew shared with us his six key values, each of which has a specific question tied to it that helps him make sure that he’s acknowledging the leadership skills in others. These values are:

  • impact
  • growth
  • courage
  • empowerment
  • class
  • self-respect

It seems logical to make business decisions that will avoid any immediate negative consequences. But what if those decisions go against your values? Drew points out that sometimes we sacrifice integrity in order to save the company. The problem is that you will always regret this down the road. Why? Because you’ve gone against the fundamental beliefs that make you who you are.

The Five Year Question

One amazing bit of advice Drew offers when faced with a critical decision to make is this: Ask yourself how a person you respect would react five years from now. Would they support you in having gone against your values to keep your business afloat, or would they be proud of you for sticking to what you believe in and doing what you feel was the right thing to do? Drew promises us that the latter is what will make us happiest in the long run.

Good leaders live their values whenever they get the chance and great leaders create opportunities to live their values.

We also recommend:

Transcription of Interview (Transcribed by Otter.ca; there may be errors.)

Adam Force 0:12
Hey, what’s up, everybody? Welcome back to the change Creator podcast show. This is your host, Adam Force. And if you missed last week’s episode, it was with Paxton Gray. He is one of the main guys over at 92nd floor. And he’s an SEO and content marketing and strategy expert. So we got into a lot of good stuff there. We even branched off and spoke about Cambridge Analytica. So that was a fun little tangent to go off on.

And today we’re going to be talking with Drew Dudley. Drew is a leadership expert. He’s worked with all kinds of major companies like JPMorgan Chase and major universities. But also, he had his first book, “A Practical Guide to Leadership That Matters” And he’s spoken to 250,000 people across five continents, doing TED Talks, and all that kind of stuff. So a lot of exciting experience and knowledge coming from Drew, we’re going to tap into that conversation in just a minute. And just yesterday, we were talking about how some people are getting very frustrated with their, you know, marketing, not connecting, they’re doing all the social media posts, they’re doing blog posts, podcast, you know, all this stuff. And they’re just not getting the results, you know, webinars that go out there, and they’re not making sales, and we totally get it. We’ve been there; this is a disconnect. You know, there are two things that have to happen: a good product, and a good offer. And then you have to have also a third thing, I guess, which is you’ve got to have your messaging line up. And that’s part of that offer, right? So, you know, when your messaging is out of sync, these things just don’t work.

So if you see other people getting results with the same stuff you’re doing, and you’re not getting the results, that’s usually why. And you know, we we ran a beta for our captivate program in 2018, and worked with a bunch of people like Jay Shetty, and Seth Godin, and got all kinds of advice and put together a program to help solve that problem — to fill that gap, you know, using storytelling, provide clarity, but also how do we use it with our businesses and our startups, and where do we apply it and all that kind of good stuff. So we are on version 3.0, of what we call the Captivate Method now, which is really exciting, guys. So our team has been putting it together, and we’re going to start getting our plans for release. 3.0 is not out yet. This is going to be a much more enhanced program and platform with major community forums and all that kind of stuff. Lots of coaching calls, live sessions, and goodies. So keep an eye out.

I wanted to just give you guys a heads up that we are working hard to help solve for that disconnect that is causing frustration. But more importantly, is causing entrepreneurs to give up on what they’re doing. Right from burnout or just financial strain. Okay? So we need your ideas. You guys are out there trying to change the world, we want you to succeed. So we’re working really hard to make sure you can overcome those challenges. Alright, guys, we’re gonna jump into this conversation with Drew and let’s see what he has to say. Don’t forget to stop by the App Store and leave us reviews. We appreciate it.

Announcer 3:03
Okay, show me the heat.

Adam Force 3:08
Hey, Drew, welcome to the Change Creator podcast show. How you doing today, man?

Drew Dudley 3:12
I’m doing amazing. I’m in my happy place when I do this interview. So I’m really excited to be here.

Adam Force 3:19
Awesome. Yeah, so we were just talking before this chat, and you know, the name keeps escaping me. We tell me that happy place again. Where were you in Canada?

Drew Dudley 3:28
Oh, I’m in Cape Breton Island. So the northern tip of Nova Scotia. And if anyone out there is listening, make this part of your to-do list in your life.

Adam Force 3:37
I’m actually going to write it down so I can look it up when we’re done. Okay. Cool. So yeah, what are you doing out there, you just want to vacation, you got some stuff going on for work? Tell me what you have going on these days

Drew Dudley 3:52
Well, actually, what happened was I have a speech that is happening this Friday, and it’s Tuesday right now. And one of the things when I talk about my work, and we’ll probably get into this a little bit later, is making sure that I never lose sight of the fact that leadership isn’t martyrdom. And you know, it’s all about 90 hours a week and the hustle culture, particularly in the entrepreneurial world is just like, if you’re not burning the candle at both ends, you’re not really committed to your business and to growth. And one of the things I’ve discovered, you know, after doing things on my own now for over 10 years, is that basically, when you’re empty, you have nothing to give. And so I came out here because even though it’s only three or four days of downtime, and hiking, where I can continue to work on ideas, I can continue to work on speeches, and sort of write as I walk, ultimately, I’m so much better at my job if I take even two or three days in a place that makes me feel refilled, as opposed to trying to pack it into, you know, two weeks of vacation once a year. It really is a way of recharging. So it’s something I try to scatter throughout my work. And you know, this might be sacrilegious in the entrepreneurial world. But I’ve come to believe if I work more than 40 hours a week, I’m actually failing myself because I love my work. But if you overdo anything, you don’t love it as much. So for me, it’s sort of like as long as I keep my work organized and efficient and I don’t work more than 40 hours a week, one, I better at my job, and two, work always stays a treat. Because I mean, you could love pizza, man, but if you eat pizza for a month straight, even this thing that you love begins to lose a little bit of luster. So I’m out here to follow my own advice.

Adam Force 5:39
Well, I love hearing that because I’m with the man I’m on the train of you know, not agreeing with this, like I work 100 hours a week, it’s the only way to succeed. And like, you know, I see too many times otherwise, that people who work hard but smart and you know, you accomplish the things that you need to do in a reasonable amount out of time. Right? And you know, I always said when I was in the corporate world, I was like, just because someone’s coming in early and staying late doesn’t mean they’re getting more done.

Drew Dudley 6:09
Yeah, and I think one of the things that gets me is this idea that we convince ourselves that we’re only doing it temporarily, right, like I’m working 90 hours a week now, so that I can, you know, spend more time with my family or I can have freedom later on in life. And what happens is, it’s an addiction, right? So you tell yourself, you’re doing it to create all this time and freedom and security later on. But we never stop doing it, when we have the opportunity to start living a life that sort of is better for us. We just don’t, because we’ve never trained ourselves to do it. And I think that’s something is that we always rationalize that approach is temporary, for long term gain. But I found very few people that once they get, you know, to that place they were chasing, ever give up the lifestyle and and I was one of those people and I am much more productive, much more successful, and much happier now that I’ve sort of said, Hey, those hundred hour a week craziness that I did 10 years ago, they got me to a place where I could take that philosophy. And I actually seize that opportunity. I see a lot of people who don’t.

Adam Force 7:15
Yeah, no, it makes sense. And there is that culture today. And I mean, I guess it’s been around for years, but you hear the words “grind” and “hustle” in everybody’s entrepreneurial vocabulary. And after a while, it just drives me nuts. Everyone’s like, Oh, I’m grinding. I’m hustling. I’m like, and so I don’t know, I feel the same way on different levels with that. And I’m certainly not afraid of hard work. And I do lots of that myself. But I guess it depends on how we define that and what we’re actually spending our time doing, exactly.

Drew Dudley 7:48
Because when you grind things like if you really think about what a grind is, there’s a purpose to it, right? You’re grinding something to sharpen the saw, right? Yeah. And ultimately, if you don’t stop and say, okay, the grinding has now accomplished its purpose, what happens if you leave anything up against the grindstone for an indefinite amount of time? It just gets worn down to nothing. And when you wear yourself down to nothing, that’s a hard hole to climb back out of. And so I’m not saying don’t work hard. And I’m not saying don’t be passionate, I am saying that you need to build a business that serves your life. And by that what I mean is that you need to build a business that is going to give you the last day of work that you want. Look ahead and say, What do you want the last day of work of your life to look like? How do you want to feel? And make sure that you’re building a company that creates that and serves your life, as opposed to you creating a company that you are then a slave to forever. And yeah, you created it. But now it’s now it’s your master. And I think that that’s really important. Because if something you build becomes your master, you know, why did you build it?

Adam Force 8:55
Yeah, and I think something that you said there really stuck out, which is you build a company that serves you. And you know, everyone can have a slightly different variation of what success means to them, right? So you can run a million dollar a year company with you and a partner. And that could be more than enough for your lifestyle, you know, you don’t have to have 100 million dollar a year company. So don’t let other people define what success looks like for you. Right?

Drew Dudley 9:22
Yeah, because for me, success is being completely happy with what you have, even as you’re driven to try to accomplish more like my job and what we managed to build, I’m still driven to take on new challenges and grow. But if there was never another day of growth for the rest of my life, in terms of business, I am really happy with the life that has been created around me. And so I think that true success is when you can say I am driven, I want to get more, I want to grow more, and I want to become something bigger as a person in terms of skill and insight. But I’m really happy with what I have. Yeah, when you’re happy with what you have, and you’re still driven to want more, not because you’re supposed to, but because it’s an innate piece of who you are, that’s a successful life. If right now you say I have built something that makes me happy and I still want to do more, but I’m not sort of addicted to that need. So that’s what success means to me. And, and I think you’re right, the idea that you could make $20 million. And people look at you and say if you can make 20 and you don’t, you’re a fool because you’re not hustling. You know, I’ve lived that a lot of my life. And I’m just like, making more money than I make now means being miserable more than I am now. And as long as what you’ve got is enough to make you live the life you want, why be miserable? Right? Like because honestly, if you’re miserable doing when you work for yourself — like, is there anything worse than just hating your job and you created it? You got no one to look at now.

Adam Force 10:58
You can’t blame the company you work for anymore. Oh my god, this is my own creation; I created a monster.

Drew Dudley 11:05
Exactly.

Adam Force 11:05
So you know, we have a lot of entrepreneurs listening in who are actually — I think a lot of the people that are listening are transitioning or have transitioned from corporate to start something on their own, because they wanted to do something that served them more, meaning it’s meaningful to them, right. So, you know, you want to be excited when you wake up. And I think a tough part for people is, one, when you start a business, there are a lot of moving parts. And you know, as you get started, you have to be a leader from day one. And you have to start making decisions on what to do and how to spend the little bit of budget you might have. Do you bring someone on board or not? And so we’ve gone through all kinds of mistakes, Change Creators, my second company, and I am curious to hear your thoughts. So for that early phase, starting first few years, let’s start a conference around leadership at that point. So any thoughts jumped into your head that you want to just kind of kick that off with?

Drew Dudley 12:07
Yeah, I think one of the things to which we often fall victim when we’re starting our own company, is because it means so much to us, what happens is we start to substitute our to-do list for our to be list. You know, when we start to identify, yes, we want to build this company. But I think far more important when it comes to leadership is Who do you want to be as a person. Because I said your company should serve who you are and should give you the opportunity to create the change you’re looking for in the world. Like, how is your product going to impact people? How is it going to make their lives better? And we get so tied up in how we build the company that we often put aside making sure that we stay true to who we want to be. So one of the things that I encourage everyone, whether they’re starting a business or not, is make sure you define the things you want to define you. And what I mean by that you’re going to be faced with all kinds of decisions, some of the ones that you just laid out, for instance. You’re gonna be faced with all kinds of decisions through building your company.

My question for people is, what criteria are you going to use to make decisions because one of the things that leaders have is a set definition for what their decision making is going to be. And you know, I call it a personal leadership philosophy. And another way you could call it is a decision making philosophy. But what the research shows is, if you’re seen as somebody who has a personal leadership philosophy, or is very clear about how you make decisions, and by that, I mean, you can rhyme them off your leadership philosophy in 30 seconds or less. If you do so, it’s not the first time in the last 72 hours that you’ve done it. And if I asked somebody who knows you well, or particularly works with you, hey, what what’s this personal leadership or her personal leadership philosophy, they’re going to rhyme it off, and they’re probably going to roll their eyes when they do it. What it means is that you’ve repeated so many times how you make decisions. And what that means is that what people may not always agree with your decisions, they’re always going to know, and respect the fact that you’re consistent and how you make them. And so what I always argue is: Define the things you want to define you.

So if somebody followed you around for 30 days, and watched how you built your business, how you interact with customers, how you interacted with employees, and with people you’ve never met before, out, serving you a drink in a bar or a meal in a restaurant, at the end of those 30 days, if I sat that person down and said you follow this person without their knowledge, what three values do they stand for above all others? Like what three values do they hope to leave in their wake, personally and professionally? And what three values do they pivot to every time they have to make a difficult decision? You know, if you’ve been the man or the woman you want it, I’ll ask you, my friend. If that was what I did to you, what three values do you hope that person says they see out of you? What three values you want to leave in your wake everywhere you go?

Adam Force 15:06
Sure, yeah, I mean, one big value is collaboration, I believe in working together with people and not competition. So collaboration, I believe in putting people first. So always thinking about the action I’m taking and the holistic costs behind it. So people first, and my last one would be family. So making sure that my life incorporates family into my overall success.

Drew Dudley 15:40
That’s awesome. And what I do is I know a lot of people do that for their business, they put a lot of effort and time into saying, Here are our business values. And that’s important. But what’s interesting is the research shows that clarity on personal values plays a much bigger role in happiness, productivity, retention, overall effectiveness in the workforce. So one of the things I say to leaders as they’re building is determine your criteria for decision making. So define the values you want to define you. And then ultimately, decision making becomes a simple process, but not an easy one. So every time you have to make a decision, as you start to build your business, what you do is you look at the options available to you, and you hold them up next to your list of personal values. And you ask which one of these options is most consistent with these values? Yeah. And the challenge with that is that often the option that’s most consistent with your values sucks, like it doesn’t allow you to avoid consequences, it doesn’t let you look good. It doesn’t let you take the money or remain in the relationship or stay in the job, which I’m sure some of the people listening to this have already experienced.

But ultimately, it’s always the decision you’re happiest you made five years from now, as you start to build a company, every decision you make, ask yourself, Is this the way I want to describe this decision to a room full of people I respect five years from now. And if you make every decision, as if you’re explaining it to a group of people you respect five years from now, instead of you’re about to make it, a lot of the noise surrounding decisions falls away. Now, ultimately, one of the things I ask people is that if you haven’t defined your values, and a value is only a value, if you always reference it, when you make decisions, like if you don’t think about your values, as you make decisions, then they’re not actually values. But what I always ask people is, if you’ve never taken the time to identify and define your personal values, as a professional as a person, what criteria have you been using to make decisions your whole life? And for most people, and me, myself included, the criteria we too often use to make decisions is, which option will avoid the most consequences right now? And that’s not good business decision making. And that’s not good personal decision making.

So one of the first things I always say is, you’re going to have to make a ton of decisions, and there’s going to be a lot of uncertainty in your life. Figure out what are the core values that no matter what you do, you want to make sure you stay true to those. And make sure that you always reference them when making decisions. Do not allow yourself to make decisions based on what will avoid the most consequences now, always make them on what will stay truest to who I am. Because even if that decision causes you to lose a company, and I know that’s scary to think, five years from then you will still be glad that you made that decision. Because all the short term consequences will have passed and what you’ll be left with is a memory that said, this was the man or woman I wanted to be. And sometimes we will sacrifice saving our own integrity in order to save our company. And believe it or not, you always regret that down the road.

Adam Force 19:01
There’s a lot of good points packed into, you know, what you just talked about. And I think something that stood out to me is, you know, I like the way you phrase it go five years down the road, do you look back? Is this something that aligns to who you are, and that you’re proud of when you tell people? I think it’s important because there’s a level of consistency. So to your point, when you’re making decisions based not just on business values, but just personal life values that translate to your business decision making this then should be consistent throughout the entire digital footprint that you have. Because one thing with today, you know, we have these businesses that are making a difference in the world. And as new businesses come up from entrepreneurs that are not established yet. And you know, trust comes with established businesses. So when you don’t have that people look into who you are. So for example, I went to your website, your book page, or social media, and if I see on your personal Facebook, you’re talking out of the other side of your mouth than your business values, like it’s going to be conflicting and inconsistent to me, which then I lose trust.

Drew Dudley 20:08
Yeah, and that’s something that always bear in mind. I joke that in my book, one of the values that I want to live up to is class, which is a commitment to treating people in situations better than they deserve to be treated. And one of the things I said is that leaders always elevate, they never escalate. and elevate means trying to succeed and escalate means trying to win, which means I’ve kind of tied my arms, just as what you said, because there are times that I pissed off, and I want to tweet, and then I realized, dammit, man, you said that leaders never escalate. And, you know, and if you do look, you’ll occasionally find me not following that. But it’s almost always related to people being jackasses on planes. I’m like, I don’t care leaders elevate but don’t escalate that you take your damn socks off on a plane, I’m escalating that.

Adam Force 20:57
I earned the right to escalate that.

Drew Dudley 21:00
Yeah. So I mean, that’s the thing, right is that I have to recognize that I have made that statement. And now every time that I do not elevate a situation, but I say something snarky or I escalate, or I bitch, ultimately, what I’ve said to people is, Hey, I don’t actually buy that. And the thing is, it’s always in my head. And it really should be in yours as well. And there is no such thing as a personal Facebook page. I don’t care how high your privacy is, and like, personal business, whatever. If it’s out there, it’s out there.

Adam Force 21:32
Yeah, you better be consistent and know that everyone’s looking at it, whether you think it’s just family and friends or not, that’s not true.

Yeah, I learned that. And that’s all connected that stuff. So it’s important. And I think it ties together well with what you were talking about. So something for people to be aware of, as they’re trying to earn the trust from, you know, new people who are learning about what they do.

So so let’s just shift gears a little bit, or just use that as a segue to talk about your book, you mentioned the book, and “This Is Day One: A Practical Guide to Leadership That Matters.” And for anybody that doesn’t know, Drew has done a handful of TEDx talks. One of them was the lollipop moment, and I actually saw that one. It’s a fun story. It’s inspiring, all that good stuff. And it’s been quite popular. So things you could check out through his website. But true, let’s just tap into this book. Obviously, this has been a big part of your life, a focus this whole concept around leadership. And now you have this book where you’re, you’re putting it into practical terms for people. So give us the overview of why you decided to put your time and energy into a book and what you’re trying to convey to people.

Drew Dudley 22:41
Sure, well, the book emerged from a fact that I got annoyed about something, which was I ran a leadership program at the University of Toronto, and I’m surrounded by extraordinary leaders, we’re talking students, staff, students who are trying to foster social justice to raise money for charities, and they just would not call themselves leaders. They kept seeing leadership, something they were training for. And what I started to realize is that we’ve been educated out of seeing ourselves as leaders, because we’ve been taught that leaders are giants, from a very young age, and whatever examples you’re given to demonstrate a concept early in life, not only does it shape the way you think of that concept for the rest of your life, it also limits it.

And because we teach kids about leadership, using presidents and scientific groundbreakers, what we basically have done is educated people out of their leadership. And we created a world where the vast majority of the leadership on the planet is coming from people who don’t see themselves as leaders. Because we have dismissed the idea that individual moments of impact of generosity of kindness, of empathy and of forgiveness aren’t leadership, they’re the little things. And what we do is when we call these moments that have the biggest inner personal impact that we have, when we dismiss them as little we reinforce the idea that leadership, for it to be active leadership, it has to make you rich, or it has to make you famous, or it has to involve power, and followers. And so ultimately, I wanted to outline a form of leadership to which we all can and should aspire, I do not argue that everybody can be a CEO, or a senior executive, or even start their own business. But there is a form of leadership that we can focus on on a daily basis. And ultimately, what I wanted to do is give people a step by step process, to making sure that every day individually, they have engaged in specific leadership behaviors.

And so we created a process called the leadership test, which basically is a six-question test, that at the end of each day, we adopted the philosophy that imagine at the end of each day, you had to prove you deserve another day on this planet. And in order to prove it, you had to pass a test. But you actually were given the questions for the test in the morning. And if that was the case, those questions would be non-negotiable each day. You would not try to fit them in between meetings and emails, you would make sure that you live them each day. And what we did is we created a set of questions tied to our core values. And you can’t answer those questions without living your values.

So we said, you know, impact is a value we wanted to live. Well, in order to do that every day, we try to answer the question, What have I done today to recognize someone else’s leadership? And what we do is my work and the book is designed to help people figure out what their specific personal values are. Because you can’t just ask people, you actually have to walk them through the process of surfacing them. And then how can they create their own version of the leadership test? And it’s specifically a test because tests have questions. And what’s really interesting is when we were trying to come up with a way to make it more likely we’d actually live our values, we discovered that simply saying, Okay, I’m going to have impact, or I’m going to have class wasn’t effective. And so what we did is I actually went to a group of psychology professors, and I said, Okay, what are some subconscious motivators that we could use to make sure that this commitment we have to behavior actually translates into behavior? Because we all know that just saying we’re going to do it doesn’t mean you do. And they actually gave you a couple of psychological effects that we turned into these questions because one’s called this the Zeigarnik effect, which says, things on your to-do list that you haven’t completed, take up a more prominent space, and you’re just doing some things you have. So in other words, stuff you haven’t finished bugs you until you finish it.

And the question behavior effect says, If I ask you a series of questions about a behavior in the morning, you’re way more likely to engage in that behavior later in the day. And so if questions can drive behavior, and unfinished tasks cause psychic discomfort, one of the most powerful drivers of human behavior are unanswered questions. When presented with an unanswered question, your brain will feel uncomfortable until it finds an answer, it will seek a way to answer it. And so when you create a question in your life, and you planted it in the morning, that is tied to particular behaviors, what have I done today to recognize someone else’s leadership? How do they help someone else move closer to a goal today? You know, how did I What did I do today to be good to myself, that’s actually going to cause psychic discomfort in your brain until you answer it. So we basically made our brains uncomfortable, until they did certain actions. And those certain actions were specifically tied to specific values.

So that’s sort of where it all came from the day one concept is, the first day of any voyage is the day you’re most committed, you’re most humble and you’re most forgiving. And so the idea is that you say, this is my first day of my leadership voyage. And here are the non-negotiable behaviors that you make part of that voyage, and then you treat me every day as if it’s your first day on the voyage, which actually, you know, emerged in large part from my recovery from alcoholism. Every day you treat it like the first day of your recovery because committing to a particular behavior for the rest of your life every day is too intimidating. So the key is, choose not to have a drink today. And then just treat every day like it’s the first day because I can’t commit to not drinking for the rest of my life. I can’t, but I can commit today. And if I treat every day of the rest of my life as if it’s that first day, then I can do it. And my argument is that we can claim to be leaders and claim to stand for values. But for the most part, most of us can’t point to a specific thing we’ve done today that lives up to those values, we assume that will do it when we get the chance. And good leaders live their values whenever they get the chance. But what separates great leaders from good leaders is that good leaders live their values whenever they get the chance. And great leaders create opportunities to live their values. So the whole book is about saying, okay, you claim to stand for this. Here’s how you prove it every day. Because it’s not just about proving it to other people. It’s about proving it to yourself. And if somebody says, for instance, family is a core value, but you can’t point to a single thing you did today, that reinforces the value of family. And if you’re working 17 hours a day, you’re probably not, you know, it makes you prove it to yourself. And when you’re proving it to yourself, effectively, you’re engaging in behaviors that prove it to other people. So I wanted to write a book that says, figure out what your values are, figure out your own personal questions and create your own leadership test. And what you’ll do is you’ll start to behave every day in a way that you can’t deny is leadership.

Adam Force 29:44
Yeah, that sounds awesome. I mean, lots of inspirational stuff. I just like the way some of the ideas are framed up to help, you know, understand them and take action and things like that. So I guess the proven method of having questions at the beginning of the day, that kind of gnaw at the brain. I haven’t heard that one before. So that’s actually really interesting. And I’m curious, then do you start your day off with certain questions in mind?

Drew Dudley 30:16
Oh, yeah, I’ve got six. And you know, what’s interesting is when you first start, you really got them front and center. But the more you do them, the more it becomes instinctual. We also have an app that you can download that will ask you your questions and say noon, three, six, and nine.

But I have six key values that I want to drive me in my business every day: impact, growth, courage, empowerment, class, and self-respect. And the questions tied to those impact what have I done today to recognize someone else’s leadership, there’s so much leadership around you. And it might be the people that inspire you, it could be the person who makes you smile every day when they hand you coffee. We have so many opportunities to recognize that leadership. And if you are going to start, you’re listening to this, and you’re going to start with one, that one every day for the next 30 days. What have I done to recognize someone else’s leadership for growth? What have I done today to make it more likely someone will learn something, and that could be yourself or someone else? For courage? What have I tried today, that might not work, but tried anyway? And if you’re interested, there’s a great TED talk by John Zhang, who talks about 100 days straight, where he tried to be rejected. And that’s the whole idea of bringing courage back into our life when we’ve been educated out of it. Empowerment is what have I done today to move someone else closer to a goal?

The whole idea of being if you’re creating a business, we need to get people who’ve come out of the education system, and they’ve been taught from day one, you are competing with one another. And ultimately, that question is about creating a culture that says, Yeah, if you outperform 90% of the people in an organization, yeah, maybe you’ll make six figures. But if you become the type of person where everyone who works with you outperforms everyone who doesn’t, then you’re indispensable. And that’s so much rare. And in order to become that person, what have you done today to help someone else move closer to a goal? class is when did I elevate instead of escalate today, and self-respect is, what did I do today to be good to myself. And what happens is, sometimes you’ll plan ahead and say, you know, what, I’m going to call my former boss and tell them that they were leader in my life. But what happens more frequently, is because the questions — and I like the phrase you use, “gnaw at your brain,” what happens is when an opportunity to answer the question actually pops into your sort of daily life, immediately, your brain goes, here’s the chance, grab it now.

And sometimes that sucks, you know, like, I get pissed off over the course of a day or on a phone call. And as I’m about to sort of, you know, let them have it, the little voice pops in my head and says, shit, here’s your chance to elevate instead of escalate, and you kind of have to because that’s the rule. And it does, you know, it starts to, you know, you got a bulkhead seat on the window, and a guy says, Can you switch seats with me for my middle seat in row 32? So I could sit next to my family? And let’s face it, you know, it’s a nine-hour flight? I don’t want to do that. But in my head is the question, you know, how did I help someone else move closer to a goal today? How did I elevate instead of escalate, you know, and the big overall is this when you don’t know what to do, you ask yourself, what would the person who I want to be do in this situation? And then you do that. You know, I often say to people, when you don’t know what to do, ask yourself, what would a great woman do in this situation? What would a great man do in this situation, and then do that.

And ultimately, the option that a great man or a great woman would take, that is also an option that is available to you. And so that I think is the key to these questions is, every time you’re presented with an opportunity to answer them, you have to fight with your brain not do it. And usually, it’ll win.

Adam Force 34:02
Yeah. And you keep the same questions every day, or do you change them up?

Drew Dudley 34:08
For the most part, they always evolve over time. But for the most part, as long as those are the values I want to live, those are the questions that I personally have. Now, the thing is, I don’t try to get, as I said, all six of them every day, I try to pass the test, which means three out of six. And if I get three out of six every day of the year, that’s still over 1000 conscious pieces of value of actions that I’ve taken, that are completely consistent with my values. And on the days where everything outside of your control blows up in your face, what this allows you to do is still recognize that while the day may have been a loss, it wasn’t a waste, because you did seize the opportunity to be the person that you want to be. And that seems like a simple thing. But it’s often not something that we give ourselves. The whole concept of Day One is the idea that you’re not always in charge of what you have to do every day. But you’re always in charge of who you are, as you do it. And I think that we sometimes lose sight of that fact. And if we don’t flex that power, we forget that we have it.

Adam Force 35:11
I love it. Listen, let’s close up on that note, I think that’s awesome. And love, love what you’re talking about and some of the insights that you shared here. So we appreciate your time to do that. And let’s give a shout out to where people can find more about you and catch your TED Talks. Find your book. I’m gonna let you go ahead and shout out your website here.

Drew Dudley 35:33
Sure, it’s drewdudley.com. And on the various social media, it’s @dayonedrew.

Adam Force 35:47
Awesome. They have it drewdudley.com. You can find his book and all kinds of other goodies on there, guys. So check out Drew and his work. As you heard today, he’s got lots of good ideas, so you probably gonna enjoy his book. Drew, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it and look forward to hearing more from you.

Drew Dudley 36:05
Oh, man, thanks for this opportunity. I love getting to share ideas.

Adam Force 36:08
You got it. Talk to you later.

Announcer 36:09
That’s all for this episode. Your next step is to join the Change Creator revolution by downloading our interactive digital magazine app for premium content, exclusive interviews, and more ways to stay on top of your game available now on iTunes and Google Play or visit changecreatormag.com. We’ll see you next time where money and meeting intersect right here at the Change Creator podcast.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Perry Marshall Interview: Getting to the Rock Bottom of Real Problems to Reduce Competition

Listen to our exclusive interview with Perry Marshall:

Subscribe to this show on Spotify  |  iTunes  |  Stitcher  |  Soundcloud

Perry Marshall is the ultimate guru when it comes to sales and marketing. Touted as one of the world’s most expensive business consultants, he is an expert at getting to the root cause of business problems. That’s why his sage advice is an indispensable tool for all Change Creators. His book, “80/20 Sales and Marketing,” was rated as one of the “5 Best Sales Books of 2013” by Inc.com. Marshall describes the book as being “as valuable as a year at MBA school.”

Among Marshall’s many accomplishments is the founding of the $10 million Evolution 2.0 Prize, with judges from Harvard, Oxford, and MIT. The world’s largest science prize, announced at the Royal Society in Great Britain, aims to solve the biggest mystery in biology — to find the origin of the genetic code. This is remarkable when you consider that his roots are neither in biology nor in marketing — he has an electrical engineering degree from the University of Nebraska.

Easy Problems and Quick Fixes

In our exclusive interview, Marshall shares with us some key elements to business success. Through his founding of the Evolution 2.0 Prize, he came to learn that “most people only try to solve superficial problems.” This issue can be applied to practically any profession. Most of us, if given a choice, would prefer to just solve the easy problems we encounter with quick fixes and just get on with our day. Marshall, on the other hand, suggests we should ask ourselves what the most challenging (business) problem we’re facing is that we actually have any chance of solving and then mount a campaign around that.

Digging Deep

Marshall likens asking the tough questions and solving complex problems to digging in a swamp. The bottom of a swamp, once you dig way down, is made of hard rock on which you can lay a foundation. In the same manner, repeatedly asking yourself tough business questions like “Why is my competition doing better than me?” and “Why can’t I afford the click prices in my Facebook advertising?” will help you get to the root of the problem as opposed to putting a band-aid on the issue. And when you get to the rock bottom of your problem, you’ll see that the competition starts to fall away. He reminds us that this is a necessary step because all of our problems are deeper than we think they are. 

Are Your Business Objectives the Right Ones?

Asking yourself a lot of tough questions about your business will help shed light on where you are and where you need to be.

And a lot of times you find out you’ve been putting your ladder of success on the wrong wall.

You may very well find that you don’t even have the right objective to begin with. Marshall admits it may be a bit of a painful process, but digging deep into your business issues will hurt a lot less in the long run than blindly plastering it with band-aids.

We also recommend: 

Transcription of Interview (Transcribed by Otter.ai. There may be errors.)

Announcer 0:01
Welcome, this is the Change Creator Podcast.

Adam Force 0:11
Hey, what’s going on everybody? Welcome back to the Change Creator podcast show. Thank you for being here. And if you missed our last episode, it was with Drew Dudley — he talks about how to become a better leader that makes a difference in this crazy world and we know we need better leaders these days, right? So that’s an episode if you missed it, go back. Check it out. I think you guys are gonna get a lot of good nuggets out of that from Drew. This week, we are talking with the one and only Perry Marshall. If you guys don’t know Perry Marshall, he is the probably one of the most expensive and sought after business consultants out there.

— content missing — 

3.0 and we are in the depths of making this baby happen. And we have gotten so much incredible feedback from people. We are excited to roll this out. So we’re looking at a September, a late September-ish roll out, maybe mid September if we can keep things going as quick as they have been. And it’s going to be really cool guys powerful stuff.

So, the application of taking what we’re teaching around marketing and storytelling and strategy and all this stuff, and really applying it to build automated systems for your business.

So that, going forward, you have sustainable growth. So yeah, that’s exciting stuff. And you guys, check that out. There is a waitlist right now if you go to the Captivate landing page, you can get on the waitlist for the announcements. Alright guys, I don’t want to hold you up any longer. We’re gonna dive into this conversation with Perry and really talk about what he has going on and tap into that marketing expertise. 

Hey, Perry, welcome to the change greater podcast show. How are you doing today?

Perry Marshall 3:00
It’s a beautiful and very warm day in Chicago. And it’s there’s a nice big, bushy green tree outside my window. And it’s fun to look at it. So how are you doing this afternoon?

Adam Force 3:12
I’m doing pretty awesome. I’m in Miami, it’s also warm and the weather is nice, the sun is shining. So can’t complain over here, either. I don’t have a tree outside my window. But I do have some water! So let’s dive into what you have going on in your world today. I know that you’ve got you got a lot of incredible experience. And I just want to hear like what’s the latest right now? What’s going on?

Perry Marshall 3:39
Well, the absolute latest, which I would say is in some sense, a lesson in 80/20. I’ve had a project called evolution 2.0 now for, well, about five years, to the external world much longer than that for me internally. And, I organized a technology prize to solve one of the deepest problems in science. And something very interesting happened to me.

So as of about a couple months ago, it was a $5 million prize. We’re searching for the origin of the genetic code, which is really a very relevant problem to everything. Because if we could solve this, we would also actually have a real AI. Siri is as dumb as a box of rocks. Anybody noticed? Siri could not convince a six-year-old that it’s a real person for more than about 30 seconds, right? I think if we could actually we would actually have real AI if we could solve this problem. And so I had a $5 million prize.

Well, I get this email out of the blue from an Oxford professor who goes, Hey, you don’t know me, but blah, blah, blah, bottom line, you know, me and this other professor would like to have you come to the Royal Society in Great Britain, and talk about your prize and host a media event.

And after I picked my jaw up off the floor, because the Royal Society’s basically the most prestigious scientific organization and old, I’m like a Yes, sir. I’ll be there. And then I flew into action. And, and I went to all the backers that had turned me down before. And I got a couple more to come on board. And it enabled me to raise my prize to $10 million. And it got ran in the Financial Times two days later.

So why am I telling you about this? Well, I guess the first reason is because you asked, What does this have to do with the average entrepreneur? Well, I want you to think about it like this: I have an electrical engineering degree from the University of Nebraska and I do marketing consulting for a living.

And about 10 years ago, I was so distraught at certain things in science that I decided to write an evolution book. And the question is, how does a guy with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering who does marketing consulting for a living, get invited to the Royal Society? Okay, well, believe me, it wasn’t because of some wacky publicity stunt. Or, I know some trick I came up with on LinkedIn or any, anything like that at all.

Okay, here’s what it was, what it really was. I identified a very, very basic fundamental problem that nobody has solved. And I came up with a new way of skinning the cat, that was completely legit. That’s how I got to the Royal Society, like, well, 10 million real dollars by real investors and a properly defined definition of the problem, and relationships. So like, along the way, I get the leading geneticists at Harvard Medical School on my judging panel.

And, and so I’m a complete outsider in that business, okay, I’m not, I’m not a credentialed scientist. But and here’s what I found, what I found was that the average typical rank and file scientist wouldn’t touch my project with a 10-foot pole. And it’s not because they didn’t think it was interesting. But it was because I was too much of an outsider. And they couldn’t, you know, most of them can’t really take risks.

The ones that did take interest in did play ball were the Titans, actually, they were the big guys who are bulletproof. And now, I think there’s actually a very deep lesson in this in and here’s what it is, most people only try to solve superficial surface-level problems, right? And so, like, if you look at any profession, I don’t care if it’s scientists or chiropractors or injection molding machine makers or podcasters, or anybody, okay. Most people, they’ll only tackle the easy problems.

Adam Force 9:02
Yeah, yeah. tends to happen that way.

Perry Marshall 9:04
And then they’ll and they’ll collect a paycheck. Right? Um, I think your mission should you choose to accept it is to look around you. And ask yourself, what is the biggest, baddest, deepest problem that I have any chance of solving, and that I actually have some idea how you might go about doing that. And then mount a campaign to actually take it out.

Adam Force 9:35
Right.

Perry Marshall 9:36
Now, this is not like quick and easy advice that you can do in like three hours. Okay. This project, I’ve actually been working on it for 15 years. 10 years, in earnest in the form that it’s become now. Okay, but again, how many people do go do anything at the Royal Society? And I’m not bragging. I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. Okay? I just say, when you deal with really, like when you go to the roots of things, or I like to say the bottom of the swamp, where you like you touch, like, it’s not, like the bottom of the swamp isn’t swampy at the bottom of the swamp, like, there’s granite, down there.

There’s limestone, like, there’s cement, it’s like, there is a solid rock bottom. When you get to the rock bottom of problems, you’re in a whole different playing field, and you have a whole lot less competition. And, and that is so different from the usual advice that people are giving. I think that’s what we should be talking about today.

Adam Force 10:58
Yeah, I agree. 100%. And do you have just based on your experience, and you know, I know, you have a lot of experience in the marketing consulting world and all that kind of stuff, we could talk a little bit about the 80/20. But based on what you’re talking about, and taking on bigger problems, just the thought process, because I think you’re right. I mean, there’s a lot of people that have taken it at the surface level, and they say, you know, what’s the easiest problem, I could solve the itch and get a paycheck.

And, you know, part of what we’re all about is, is getting into systems thinking and taking on bigger and larger problems that are solving real social issues. So it does take a different mindset. And I guess, you know, if it’s something that you’re passionate about, and it aligns to your values, you might have more motivation around it. I’m wondering if you have thoughts around, you know, just approaching those larger problems and the thought processes around it?

Perry Marshall 11:49
Yeah. So first of all, I just want to point out that when we’re talking about getting to the bottom of the swamp, this doesn’t just have to be gigantic global issues. Okay, this could be the immediate problems that are on your desk right now, in in the course of you know, what came up this afternoon at work. It could be that, but what I’m talking about is that you actually get to the root of the problem, instead of putting a bandaid on it. So right. So let me give you like a marketing example, that anybody listening to this can understand. So. So you say, Hey, you know, I’ve been advertising on Facebook, but the clicks are too expensive. And I can’t afford to do this anymore. And so then, somebody says, Why?

Adam Force 12:46
Right.

Perry Marshall 12:48
Well, because I’m not getting enough click-through rate. Oh, okay. Well, so we go fix that by writing better ad copy or having better pictures, and then we get a better click-through rate. And then, oh, you know, I still actually have great ads, and they have a quality score of nine. But I, but I still can’t afford the click prices. Why? Well, maybe then the next answer is you’re trying to sell $20 ebooks in a market that’s selling $5,000 Mediterranean cruises.

And the economics of the cruise companies are way better than yours. So there’s no way you could do that. Right? And then and then we go, Well, why are you selling ebooks? Why don’t you sell cruises? And you go, Oh, well, like that’s too hard. Right? Or maybe, maybe then you start selling cruises because you work out a deal with some company but some other company is kicking your ass. And, and they can pay twice as much as you can. And you go, Why? And it’s because they have a back end. And they can afford to acquire a customer at a breakeven or even a loss and not making any money because they’re going to make money three months, six months, 12 months down the road. And then you say well, why can’t we do something even better than that?

And where it’s going to usually end up taking you is — Well, you know what people, we need to design a fundamentally better, more appealing vacation than everybody else’s Mediterranean cruise. And your real problem is you’re just a look alike. Like you’re just like everybody else. Okay, so you, you can go through all these layers, right? You can read a whole book on Facebook advertising. And then you can fix that part of a problem. But you still have a problem. Like, and that might not fix the problem at all.

Because you’re trying to sell $20 ebooks and your competition is selling $5,000 cruises, and there’s no way like ever that your economics whatever, keep up with that, right? And, and so and so if you ask “why” five times, you’re probably getting pretty close to the actual root of the problem. And what I find, what I find is true is when you finally start getting to that why number four, or why number five, most people don’t even want to go there. They’re starting to cringe. They’re like, Oh, my word. Like, is that what we’re going to have to do?

And a lot of times you find out you, you’ve been putting your ladder of success on the wrong wall. Like you don’t even have the right giant objective to begin with. And then what happens is, is there’s all these shallow people going around and going, Oh, well, you know, I’ll get you 10,000 clicks to your website for only $179. You need me, right? And like, that’s, you know, if it ever works at all, it’s only a band aid, and it probably isn’t even going to work anyway. But then desperate people who don’t really want to fix their real problems, they’ll fall for it. And this happens just all the time. Right? And so if you ask why five times you will probably get to the real answer.

Adam Force 16:38
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I love that you brought it up. And it’s such an important exercise. And it’s actually something a small piece of something that we take people through in one of our programs as well. And, you know, you mentioned that people cringe. And in our, you know, members, like private group, we ask people to share certain things so they can get feedback, and people are afraid to share their five “whys.” They don’t want to share it. That’s your point. They’re uncomfortable with how deep it goes, you know? It’s a common thing.

Perry Marshall 17:07
So yeah, you know, all of our problems are a lot deeper than we then we think they are. And but again, when when you go after the deep problems, so for example, you know, I got famous in the marketing world for Google ads, and I would have all these people come to workshops, and they’re like, okay, so Perry is going to fix my Google ads.

And so here’s a perfect example. So I had a guy. He was he was in the car shipping business. So if you want to ship your car from Dallas to Los Angeles, on a truck, then these are the guys you call. And so he had taken our Google Ads courses and gotten reasonably good. And then he signs up in this program. And I think what he thought was going to happen was we were just going to get better and better and better and better and better at Google ads. Right?

And on the first coaching call, it said, Okay, so, Michael, the name is Michael Strickland. Michael, why should I buy car shipping from your company instead of any and every other car shipper or broker out there? Because there’s a ton of them? He’s like, uhhhh… He didn’t really have any answer. Okay. And I said, Okay, dude, you’re living on borrowed time, I’d say you got about six months to figure out a really good answer to this question, and lock it in place. Otherwise, somebody is going to eat your lunch, and they’re going to replace you, they’re going to outbid you, you’re going to drown you’re going to be out of business. And so, so we went through a whole process that we call definitive selling proposition, where we started asking the systematic methodical attacking these questions.

Alright, so what can he do better than everybody else? How? How can? How can he have a guarantee? What kind of guarantee would we do? And what we ended up with was, we created this, this guarantee, so if you go to ship a car direct com, which is his website, you’ll actually see it’s got a picture of a blue Ford Mustang in the gloves. And the white gloves of somebody holding it in his hand. And it says, if your car experiences any damage, we pay the insurance deductible. We guarantee that your car gets there safe.

Okay, now, all by itself, a guarantee like that is only sort of interesting. But see this is this is where it actually kicks in because he was a broker, like he’s not a shipper, he finds the shippers, yeah, this means he’s got to get shippers that aren’t going to damage his cars. So now he’s got to have an internal rating system for all the different shippers. And he’s got to based on all his his previous experience.

And so what he did was he created a system where all the different car shipping companies, there’s a private bidding system, where every time a job comes in,  they can all see that it’s come in and they can bid on it. And they rank prioritize the ones it’s kind of like Yelp except internal to them, right? Well, only the five star guys ever get a job. Maybe once in a while a four star guy might get one. But none of the threes or twos are ever going to get any jobs. Okay, well, that’s actually called network effect, because he has a way of matching consumers to vendors with the knowledge that is not available in general marketplace. And the bigger his company gets, the more that knowledge he has, and it just snowballs. And this is how he became the number one car shipping guy in the industry.

Okay, and remember, he started thinking that his problem was Google ads. And what we did was we said, Why, why, why, why? And you can follow it all the way to Oh, well, now now we have a private ranking system for all these trucking companies. And they all have scorecards and stuff. And that’s why, like, that’s why you should buy for me, it’s not even because I have a sexier Google ad. Right? It’s like, look at all my testimonials. And then you look, he’s got all these stars and all these reviews. And it all feeds itself. Right. And that’s because he asked why, why, why, why, why? And, I mean, believe me and some of these coaching calls and some of these questions that we would be asking each other, it got to be nauseating and granular and, and you know skullduggery to, it’s like, well, how do we build this thing out to the nth degree? But he’s got it built out. Yeah, it’s a really valuable business.

Adam Force 22:30
Yeah. Wow. That’s a great example. Just to show the depth because you’re right, that differentiation, especially today, and I’m curious to get your perspective on something, which is, you know, you have your business differentiation, which is powerful for the beneficiary, right for the for the customer.

And I’m curious as today as people are going through these processes, you know, to talk about differentiation, which is the founder, like, look at Blake Mycoskie, with TOMS shoes. And there’s a major differentiation that nobody can copy or steal, which is his founder and origin story, the reason that TOMS started and the value the value is it aligned to so his, which he guided all the decision making for TOMS. So he’s in Argentina, saw all these kids in poverty, no shoes on, that kind of thing. And nobody could steal that story from him.

And I’m curious if you’re seeing an evolution in companies and how consumers are interested in people who are doing good business, and they want to know, who is this person? And can I trust them? And do I want to do business with them and buy their products?

Perry Marshall 23:40
So I think there’s a yin and a yang to this. I think the Yin is, is that your own story is the most unique thing in the world, and nobody can steal it from you. And that is a great start. And the Yang is on the back of that story. You need to build a business system, that eventually nobody else’s really great story can overcome because of what it’s intrinsically able to provide. So I don’t know whether Michael had a great story for his ship a car business,

I don’t recall that he really did. But he was a little smarter than everybody else in some respects. And he had gotten ahead of everybody else. But then he had to turn that guarantee into a shipping network. And now and so now he has both sides. So it’s kind of like, you know, there, it’s like, you might need a temporary moat around your castle just to keep the cowboys and Indians out. Right. And it’s made out of plywood. And that might actually be okay, for a little while. But eventually, you need bricks. You know? And stones and moats and everything like that.

Adam Force 25:06
Yeah, I think that makes sense. And, you know, if you don’t have a great, you know, authentic origin story, then you need a great product story.

Perry Marshall 25:14
Right. So, right, right. It doesn’t necessarily have to be you. Although, yeah, your own personal story, certainly. And, and I find that, you know, and really transactional products, these, these stories aren’t such a big deal. But when when you get to highly considered purchases, or if if they’re going to be following you for a long period of time, your personal story becomes more important than the particulars of your product.

Adam Force 25:45
It’s true. And I’ve interviewed people where even you know, small companies who are having a big impact, they will have customers that say, I’m so excited when I buy your product, because I’m proud to be part of the story. I’m proud of, like, what you stand for. And so people are really into, you know, trying to make good decisions that they they’re happy about like that.

Perry Marshall 26:05
That’s right.

Adam Force 26:07
Yeah. So I know, we’re going to be closing out on time real quick. But you know, man, you got so much I could pick your brain on between Facebook and the 80/20. We didn’t get to tap into too much. I’d be curious, like, you know, you know, will will, as far as Facebook goes – you know, you kind of mentioned this, it’s kind of like the tactics don’t matter if you don’t have like a strong foundation so that if the strategy is broken, that that actual, you know, the differentiation we’ve been talking about here, and you know, what really makes you stand out? If that’s not there, then all the tactics won’t matter. Right?

Perry Marshall 26:43
That’s right. That’s right.

Adam Force 26:45
Yeah. So do you have any insights just to close this out — and I’m gonna let you go — just on Facebook marketing, because everybody does want to win on Facebook, including our team and we have certain successes with things starting a sales funnel with like, certain free downloads, right versus just trying to sell a product directly. So any any top level advice for the small budget, starting entrepreneur who wants to get small wins through Facebook?

Perry Marshall 27:14
Well, so I’ll give you a quick tip. And then and then a larger strategy. The quick tip is that I think almost all pay per click now starts with remarketing and retargeting and and you start with that. And you think of it as your inner concentric circle the bull’s eye, and then you go,

Okay, so how can I expand this retargeting out a little further like, well, it could be retargeting people for five days instead of three days, for example, or two weeks instead of one week. And then how do I go to the next step? So that’s, like, just a really quick tactic. The strategy is everything in online advertising is 80/20. It follows 80/20. So it with with one minute to go here, I’ll just tell a quick story. A week ago, I had beers with a friend of mine, not exactly from my business world, and he’s getting ready to spend $206,000 on a two year MBA program.

And I said, Hey, have you read my 80/20 sales and marketing book? And he goes, I have it, but I haven’t read it. I said, Look me in the eye. I looked him in the eye. He looked me in the eye. I said, this book is as valuable as a year of MBA school. And he goes — he’s got a PhD from Cambridge already — and I said, he goes, are you serious? And I said, I’m serious. This book will totally change your life. We sell it for $7, including shipping at sell8020.com. If you go buy it, you’ll find out why. If you understand 80/20 at a deep level, you’ll be able to figure out almost any Facebook problem at a level of principle. So, I must go. It’s been great. Great talking to you today. Thank you for having me on.

Adam Force 29:06
Pleasure to have you, Perry. I appreciate your time and expertise and keep up all the amazing work. Good luck with everything.

Perry Marshall 29:12
Thank you, thank you.

Announcer 29:13
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai