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What are digital conversations and why is it so important for you to become an expert in them? Co-creators of The Captivate Method share everything you need to know.
This talk will cover…
— Digital marketing and vacuum sales
— The role stories play in our online business
— How we navigate the Story Map
We also recommend:
- Jon Tobin: Legal Stuff Entrepreneurs Need to Know to Run Their Business Effeciently
- Adam & Amy: The Hard Truth About Delegating For Your Startup
- Jon Macdonald: Get More Sales Through Smart Optimization of Your Existing Website Traffic
Transcription of Interview
(Transcribed by Otter.ai, there may be errors)
Adam G. Force 00:03
Welcome to the Change Creator podcast where entrepreneurs come to learn how to live their truth, get rich and make a massive difference in the world. I’m your host Adam forest co founder at Change Creator and co creator of the captivate method. Each week we talk to experts about leadership, digital marketing and sales strategies that you can implement in your business and life to go big visit us at Change Creator comm forward slash growbig to grab awesome resources that will help drive your business forward. Hey, welcome back to the show, everybody. This is your host, Adam force. Hope you all had a good kick off for the week on Monday and are starting to rock and roll here on Tuesday. And this show is going to give you some inspiration around your marketing. So you know we do a lot of Facebook Lives but if you’re not following us on Facebook, that’s fine. We’re going to thread some of these conversations into the podcast as usual. And in one very interesting conversation that we have had. It was between myself and Daniel Sutton, who is one of our partners as a co creator of the captivate method, which is a signature program here at Change Creator. So what we talk about is digital conversations. What the heck is a digital conversation? Why is it so important for you to become an expert in them? And we cover a couple key things, you know, digital marketing and vacuum sales. Why are we talking about game sales, see the role that stories play in our online business and how we can start navigating? You know, the buyer journeys and what we call a story map. So stay tuned. We’re gonna dive into that conversation in just a bit. Now. If you missed the last show, it was it was an expert discussion with john Tobin. Now john is a he’s a legal attorney, a legal attorney. He’s an attorney. And we talk about all the legal stuff that entrepreneurs need to know to run their businesses more effectively, all right. And he has a lot of great insights that he shares there. Because the legal stuff, as we all know, is kind of like the expensive stuff that we always put off. Because you know, especially if we’re in the first few years of our business, and we kind of put that aside as something to do later, and that’s okay. But there comes a time where we do need to get serious about those things. And it’s good to be aware of what that stuff is. So we wanted to have this conversation with john in order to start sharing some of those insights with you guys. Let’s dive into this conversation about what digital conversations are and why they’re so important. Okay, show me that heat. I hope everybody’s doing amazing today and you have better weather than we do here in Miami. It’s pretty miserable.
Danielle Sutton 02:43
I got all the good weather. Really, it looks nice.
Adam G. Force 02:46
We got the rain out here over the ocean. And we’re we’re looking today to talk about a digital conversations you know what is a digital conversation and why it is essential for your business now. It’s something that really came to mind for us, actually in the past year. And it’s a way of framing something up because we are storytellers here, right, Daniel. And we look at marketing a little bit differently because we’re trying to come at it from a very authentic place. And this is just what has worked for us. So Danielle, and I were talking just a little bit before and I’ll let tell you a little story about how he came up with this and what it actually means to you and your business. You know, we were running paid ads for a while and putting a good chunk of change in there. And so when we were doing that we kind of gotten absorbed into the world of these funnels. Right now everyone’s talking about funnels for years now or like, you know, it’s part of the sales process and nurturing someone to become a buyer and connecting with them and things like that. But it’s very the way people talk about marketing right now and they talk about funnels. It became very got, like absorbed in it and a little bit lost in it. And it became very cold as this process, right? So we have all these different pieces of the puzzle online. And we would be putting them together and mapping them out, oh, we gotta say this, we got to do that. And, you know, it was all about the transactions and getting the buyers and all these things and you kind of get lost in this marketing thought process. And it’s kind of like what we talked about in the first Facebook Live just past Monday about, you know, stop thinking like a marketer. Because at the same time, when we were not getting the sales we were looking for, we would follow up with people, we get on the phone and what happened. We, they we would get on the phone for just market research to find out Well, why didn’t you buy and get that feedback? But what happened was, we would actually end up getting questions from them and they would then join our program and become a buyer right? So there’s someone that we can help and we started scratching our head saying Okay, so it didn’t work going through through our funnel, right and then when we get on the phone we’re able to make this happen. And we were like, Well, how do we I literally remember this at night, one night text messaging Amy and Danielle, and I was like, I think we need to just shift the way we’re thinking about these funnels and look at it as a digital conversation. How do we take those types of phone call conversations, and start applying it to all the pieces of real estate online and make it effective and warm. And remember that these are people we’re talking to, right? They’re not widgets that we’re just trying to get across the finish line. And it kind of changes how you think about each piece of real estate online. And everybody that we spoke to on the phone is unique and had and we had to tailor that conversation and it’s really no different that’s what really kind of led us to being more personalized and leaning into like behavioral marketing and things like that. So the digital conversation is the is replacing this idea of funnels to remind us that we are having a conversation right Daniel, it’s like we always talk about knocking on the door. When people go door to door selling vacuums. And they get an hour of somebody’s time. And they sit down. And as that person’s talking, I don’t need the vacuum because or, you know, I have, I’m skeptical because of this, and you get to give a tailored response. And we like to use stories. So we’re storytellers, and we have our stories that we tell to help people get around those barriers. But in the digital space, you don’t get to sit down and in real time, tailor the conversation. So you’ve got to think of how do I take that conversation and put it in the digital space? So that’s sort of that’s, that’s,
Danielle Sutton 06:34
I think that… No, no, that was a perfect intro. And it’s true, like the digital conversation is just bringing the whole experience for both the person providing a solution and the person seeking a solution. Back to the human way of doing things. I think people can get really tripped up when they are trying to build an online business by Yeah, the minutiae of the tactics and the like, what’s the click through rate. And what’s the CTA the call to action? And what’s the ABC c d step? Right and, and of course, every bro marketer and their cousin is teaching all of these strategies. And if you don’t do it exactly the way you’re supposed to, then it’s not going to work, right? And, and so it’s really easy to get sucked into this vortex of like digital marketing, best practice. But the reality is, if we strip away the digital veil, we’re just humans getting to know each other, and providing, you know, a puzzle piece fit where I have what you need, and you need what I have. It’s as simple as that. That’s business, right? So we need to kind of get back to the basics. And that’s why this whole philosophy of the digital conversation has worked so well for us because we’re not thinking of a funnel in a linear step by step. approach. Of course, you know, there’s things we might be trying to improve and iterate and there’s always kind of those details. But at the fundamental level, how are we thinking about the relationship we build with the people are in our world, like in our realm, right? And it’s about that two way street, it’s having that conversation. So one example I shared with Adam was, you know, if you have two people at a ping pong table, and one person is shooting the ping pong across the table, if you don’t give the other person a chance to reply, or like being part of the game, then the game is gonna be very, very short. Right?
Adam G. Force 08:25
It’s such an important part of the process. It’s really a perspective shift. And when you have that perspective, shift, you start, you don’t look at it and say, I need to have these really clever benefits outlined on my landing page. It’s, it’s you’re thinking about it differently. And you’re thinking about, well, at this point in the conversation, what needs to be said where are they it really forces you to think about where they are and their own journey. So you can say, Oh, I understand where you’re at. Let me let me give you information that’s going to help you understand this better, right. Will this work for you? What’s it going to do for you? Like, what do you need to hear based on where you are in that journey? That’s a really important point, we’re adding warmth based on the perspective we have with this digital conversation format.
Danielle Sutton 09:07
Yeah, it makes a big difference really. And like you said, with the, the door to door salesperson, even like a more modern example might be thinking of going for coffee with somebody who you met at an event and they said, Oh, like I’m really interested in what you do. I’d love to learn more. You know, let’s meet for coffee. We might have aligned interests. I’m sure this has happened to you. It happens a lot. Right? And and then when you’re there in the coffee shop with your lattes, you actually can ask these questions like Adam said, and you can address misconceptions, which is another big piece early in the process, you know, to help someone understand more what what your what you are offering and how it can help them. All of these little touch points, you know, can go really quickly in a one hour coffee chat, but online, they’re gonna be very in pieces. And so like Adam said, how do we think about where we tell each other stories so that the person on the other end gets the full picture. Even if it didn’t happen in a one hour Sit down. Right? Yeah.
Adam G. Force 10:08
And that that is the key. I mean, and this is like a big shift when it comes to marketing and everything that we’re kind of talking about. So, you know, we, we go through this a lot. And this is something that we’ve now adopted into the captivate method teaching as we go through it, because we, we get into this thing called a story map in there. And so I know nobody knows what that is, because it’s something that we just made up, it’s proprietary. I’m gonna tell you about it. So basically, what happens is, you know, you learn how to connect with people, you learn how to set yourself up, but the story map is going to be kind of like a compass for you, right? And the way we look at it is, well, where is somebody in the conversation? And so we have this map concept, and it’s like, well, maybe they’re not even aware of you as a company. So that’s like you’re at the intro phase of the conversation with the buyer. And then you think about well, what’s the next step of the conversation? Like, how would it develop? If you bumped into someone like the vacuum cleaner? It’s like, Who are you? What are you about? And you get, that’s the beginning. But if as they get warmed up, they know who you are and things are changing. They’re gonna move down the line on the story map, right? So we’re mapping out where they are. And then based on where they are, well, what stories do they need to know at this point. So now we’re aligning which sales stories and things they need to understand. This is not a way to manipulate anybody. This is a way to be relevant and personalized and make sure that they have the right information. And we use stories because you don’t just tell people things because that’s not going to be effective in the sense that they understand it in a way that you want them to with a lot of clarity. Clarity is a big word around what we do. And so stories are better because they demonstrate and people get aha moments and they go oh, I see how that could save me time? Oh, I see how that could apply to my life, right? So it becomes very clear. And so that story map goes through every phase of that buyer journey and all the stories that are most relevant at each stage to be very effective in in our marketing. So that’s a big piece of like, what has a kind of like, come to life, if you will, based on the idea of this digital conversation? So yeah, I mean, that was I just wanted to share that. And I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about the story map outside of the program.
Danielle Sutton 12:33
No, we haven’t. But it’s one of my favorite tools. Because again, so we’re not it’s still there’s still a strategy with these digital conversations. It’s not like we’re throwing all the best practice out the window, but we’re shifting the lens that we look at it through, right. So with a story map where things like Adam said, are they even aware of of your business? So there’s certain places online, where it makes the most sense to share those stories about you and why your origin story? Why you started your business, what your values are, and how you got there. And those stories go really, really well in certain places online. And then in other places, you know, because of how we logically, you know how someone moves through this digital conversation later on, we need to tell different stories, so that they can, like Adam said, see themselves in your examples. So it’s relevant to them, and they’re able to understand if it’s a good fit for them, again, it’s not manipulation at all. It’s like, let’s give them the information so they can make a decision. And if you only have part of the information, you’re not going to make a decision. And that’s like as you and you shouldn’t be like you. It’s our job as the communicators of the value that we provide to give our listeners enough information to make a good decision for them. And that’s how it’s Win Win and that’s how your impact grows. And that’s how people can really benefit from what you have to offer.
Adam G. Force 13:58
Yeah, hundred percent. And it makes me think about something that I learned over the years. And it’s not something I’m making up. It’s something that our mentors have taught us and helped us mature as entrepreneurs. And so I’m going to share this little pro tip with you is funnels don’t really matter. They will optimize your financials, in some regards, I totally get it. But you can say, Oh, look at this formula, this this funnel flow, or this webinar model or framework, whatever it might be. And those things don’t actually matter. They work for certain people, and they accomplish certain things based on all the trial and error that particular entrepreneur might have had. But what really ends up mattering is, do you know exactly who you’re talking to? And what stories are you filling the funnel with? So now when we call it a digital conversation, we’re saying, we’re here to build a relationship. And yeah, we have stories to tell you so you can get to know us you can get to know why, what we stand for what our product will do for you. And now we’re having this conversation and warm them up, it doesn’t you can put them through all kinds of different funnels, you just need to have the them filled with the right messages and the right stories. And that’s why we focus on that so much in captivate, because it’s all about the storytelling that’s like the fuel for the car. I don’t care how you build the car, but
Danielle Sutton 15:19
It could have all it could be top line car, right Ferrari level components.
Adam G. Force 15:25
Exactly. I mean, you can get Russell Brunson webinar script or his funnels, and if you put crap in it, it’s just not gonna matter. It just will not work. Okay, so this is how a lot of people also get hung up, because they’re like, Oh, I put all this stuff together. And I’m gonna now run this ads and you know, $5,000 later, it’s like, oh, my God, like, I don’t have sales, what’s going on? It always comes down to how we’re communicating with people. So storytelling is what has created movements. This is what has created all social change. And if you’re not harnessing this as the CEO of your company, It’s gonna be a long road, I think. Yeah, yeah.
Danielle Sutton 16:03
Yeah, I agree. I think Adam Let’s leave everybody with a little challenge because we didn’t talk about this before. But I think now that we have shared this idea of the digital conversation, I want you to listen like pay attention to somebody new a new business or a new person that pops up into your perspective and if they interest you, like pay attention to why you want to keep learning from them or why you don’t and if you decide to take the next step with them and like kind of go meta on on somebody new in your world and just notice you know, how they do the digital conversation well or not well, I think he that some, some experiences from the receiver and can feel very, you know, flat or dull or just plain annoying, right? And some are such a gift and you think like I can’t wait to hear from this person again. So just notice that as a as a receiver of the messages.
Adam G. Force 17:02
Yeah, absolutely. I think that covers everything. I mean, the the primary takeaway really just comes down to, you know, how we think about is I had a note here. Yeah. So I mean, the primary takeaway is really just how we’re thinking about our marketing. If we step away, remember that we’re talking to human beings, that we’re building relationships. And these are conversations, just because we’re online, let’s not lose touch with the fact that these are conversations with people. We’re not just filling online widgets and hoping for sales like we’re actually talking to people. It’s just that we’re doing it in a different way. So you know, we focus a lot on how to how to use each piece of real estate, what stories to tell, I mean, there’s a lot of moving parts. But when you become a master storyteller, this stuff is fun, right?
Danielle Sutton 17:51
Really fun because it’s just as fun as getting to know someone new at the coffee shop or at the bar or meeting a friend of a friend. You know, that’s the feeling we want. Be able to have so.
Adam G. Force 18:01
Exactly exactly and listen, one of the things that I love about storytelling and these marketing principles that we’re teaching is they are not a fad they’re not come in and go in and like gonna get oversaturated or die out and they don’t work for some people but not others know, this is tried and true. It’s proven throughout all our history. It’s just a matter of really getting to know how it works for your business and putting it into practice. It will work for you and it’ll work for the remainder of your years as an entrepreneur
Danielle Sutton 18:28
Yeah, I’ll back to clarity right you get that clarity and you can rock and roll.
Adam G. Force 18:34
Coming here from Change Creator, we are all about making the world a better place. We are all about helping people. So when we talk about selling and getting rich, we mean Yeah, get rich and money get rich and fulfillment help people make the big difference in the world. All that good stuff.
Danielle Sutton 18:50
Awesome, thanks Adam
Adam G. Force 18:50
Thanks for tuning in to the Change Creator podcast visit us at Change creator.com forward slash go big to get access to free downloads and other things great resources that will drive your business forward.
