Episode 273: The 1 Page Marketing Plan with Allan Dib

Welcome to another episode of the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. My name is Bradley Hemner, your host. On today's episode, we have Allan Dib. He is the bestselling author of The One Page Marketing Plan and the founder of SuccessWise. This is a book I picked up a couple of years ago. I was trying to find the email or the Amazon where I bought it. I can't, but this is a fantastic resource that I personally have used. To be able to set our marketing plans. You're going to get a ton out of this. Highly recommend that you check out his book and go to successwise.com and get some of the free resources. But without further ado, here's my conversation with Alan Dib.

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world, yet still remain profitable?

That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers.

I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business. I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it.

Just get what you need and go.

So with that, let's get into today's episode.

Do it.

Allen Dib, welcome to the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

Hey Bradley, pleasure to be on.

Excited to have you. As we were talking before I hit record, your book, The One Page Marketing Plan, and I was trying to go back through to when I actually picked it up a couple of years ago has actually had been a big impact to me personally. We're going to dive into that, but I really want to kind of go back. We always start with background and origin story. So for people that are not familiar with you and kind of your work, I'd love for you to kind of take us back a little bit along your journey and kind of how you got to where you are today and even what led to obviously the genesis of the One Page Marketing Plan.

Yeah, look, it's a pleasure to be on and look, my origin story is probably a little bit different to a lot of marketers. I'm not from a marketing background and I'm not even from a marketing kind of mindset, which is maybe why the book has been so successful. So I started my business life as a dead broke IT geek and as an IT geek, you know, you look at problems as being solvable and solvable through a repeatable systemized process, you know, the computer doesn't work. Okay, these are the troubleshooting steps we take. We start with step 1, step 2, then we try this, then we try that. And so a lot of the stuff that I read and learned about marketing was just very conceptual, very vague, very, you know, branding was this weird concept out there that, you know, no one could really define or understand. And, you know, all of this stuff about like getting people to know you and awareness and all of this to someone from from an engineering background and an engineering mind, this was like very foreign concepts. And so I spent about a decade struggling in that business trying to learn, you know, really for out of necessity, how do I get customers in the door, right? I'm a good guy. I take care of customers. The customers that I've got really love us, but how do I repeatedly and reliably get new customers in the door? And so taking that engineering mindset, I'm like, I'm going to solve this problem. I'm either gonna solve it or I'm gonna die trying. And so, you know, I attended every seminar, I read every book, I worked with coaches and all of that sort of stuff. And so that's really the genesis of where it came from, came from my own struggles to crack the game of marketing and crack the game of lead flow and, you know, all the things that flow from that, you know, like sales and things like that, which are all very much interrelated. So I did not, I did not, you know, study in university business or anything like that. In fact, I dropped out of university. So that was really my origin story. So, you know, thankfully I did crack the game of marketing. I grew that business. We exited very well. I built another tech business and we grew that very, very fast and became one of the fastest growing companies in the country within 4 years. And I exited that. And so that brings us to where I am now. So now I work with a lot of businesses who were me and were like me and are struggling with the game of marketing and I'm helping them crack that game as well.

Alright, so how do you differentiate? Actually, I'll ask that question second. Let me ask you, do you remember the moment that you first sketched out paper, your iPad, whatever, the 9 steps which we'll get into the structure of it too. Do you remember that moment that you kind of—

I actually do. It's a really, I've never been asked this before, but I was literally, because I was in the process of writing, not even writing the book, actually, this probably predates the book, but I was working with clients and consulting in a marketing capacity. And one of the things that I always got at an objection from clients because I wanted them to put together a marketing plan, too hard, too difficult, don't know where to start, all of that. And so This is a problem again, you know, using my sort of engineering brain that I'm thinking this is a solvable problem. How do we crack this problem? And so I was going out for some takeaway and I literally remember where I was going. I was getting some kebabs that night. I was driving there and I'm like a one-page marketing plan. And then I literally pulled over the car, took out a piece of paper and pen and I've still got that piece of paper somewhere. And I'm like, okay, what would go on a one-page marketing plan? Alright, obviously target market, message, and then it wasn't exactly what it is today, but it was very, very close. And I'm like, we could just do this all on one single page and that would solve the problem of how we do a marketing plan quickly, easily, that make it easily shareable, easily updatable, all of those sorts of things. So that's a good question. I've not been asked that before, but I do remember that exact moment.

Have you ever honestly just yourself taken a moment and thought through, like, that moment you pulled over and now reflect back and say, like, man, that was a big moment in my life, really, because everything that has come from that, the experiences, the people that you've been able to meet. I mean, that's pretty— that's like, I think through, like, these pivotal moments, like, when I've made these connections and, and, and maybe I was at Starbucks or something like that and, you know, pulled over and I was like, oh my goodness, like, this is, this is the thing, this is what I've been searching for. And sometimes happens like as you're driving to go get, you know, takeout, you know.

Totally, totally. And you know, there are, there are many such moments. I mean, they're, they're moments that you maybe in the moment you didn't think were super pivotal, but they do become that. And sometimes you do recognize it, sometimes you don't. And you know, it's one of those things where sometimes you can, you can go to work, you can spend 12 hours working, and you, you walk away from the day and you think, I had nothing done. I checked my email, I handled some fires or whatever. And then other days, you know, you might do 2 or 3 hours of solid work and you're like, wow, I created millions of dollars of value today. Right. So it's, you've got to, you've got to kind of look for those days and plan for those days. And just, you know, I think all the pieces kind of align. It's never just one thing. It's like, hey, something I heard from this guy, something I learned from this book, something I got from this mentor or whatever, and then just the convergence of those sorts of things.

Okay, so I want to ask the question that at the end of the day, whether it is an annual business plan, it's a marketing plan for the business, it's the marketing canvas You have— I don't even know, maybe you have an idea of how many businesses around the globe that you all have been able to help and support. There are business owners that have taken the plan, the canvas. They've said, oh my goodness, this is great. They've put all the work into it. They lay everything out and then it begins to collect digital dust, right? Or physical dust, and they don't ever use it. What is the difference? How do we then take— and again, we'll kind of go back. I'm going to the end here and then coming back to it to figure out How do you actually do this to where it actually gets implemented into the business as opposed to we spend a whole day offsite, did that, and then we actually don't even do anything with it? Does that make sense?

Does make sense. So the whole idea of the one-page marketing plan was that it's not something that you have to have a whole day offsite to do. I mean, it's fine, it's fine to do that too. Some people do, but It's literally one page. We could actually put it together in about 20 or 30 minutes if we work through your business. Yeah, sometimes a bit longer. Sometimes, you know, you already know a lot of the components, but the idea is it's not something that we look at once a year or we update once a year or once every few years or whatever. It's literally one page, so we can literally have it pinned up in our office or sitting on the desk or whatever, and then when you hire a web developer, like if you hire a good web developer, if you hire a good Facebook ads person or whatever, one of the things they're gonna be asking is, or they should be asking is, oh, tell me a bit about your target market. Tell me what kind of messaging is gonna be important for you. Like who do you wanna attract and how's the funnel gonna flow and everything like that? And so you can easily share the one-page mark— you can say, great, thank you for asking. Here's our one-page marketing plan explains all the high level of how we attract customers, the message that really lands with them, who our real target market is. So it's designed to be shareable. The other thing is it's easily updatable. It's one page. So like literally when we get better and more information, when we say, you know what, this message is actually landing better than that message that we thought was, let's update the plan. We can literally go in, edit it and we're done. So we don't need to wait for the annual offsite. We don't need to expensive consultant to help us update a 50-page plan that no one ever reads or anything like that. It's a living document that you can share at any time, edit at any time, work with your team to update all those sorts of things. And so it's designed to be practical that we can use it day to day, update it at any time as we get better and more information. So that's the idea. And so In terms of the implementation, like anything, the way that we win at the game of marketing is the daily, weekly, monthly, right? So if I want to get strong, you know, about 2 years ago when I started going on a fitness journey, right? I was overweight, I was weak, all of those sorts of things. So how do you do that? You do the basic movements regularly, right? If I work out once a year, probably not gonna help me that much. If I work out 3 times a week, Now I'm seeing consistent results. I'm implementing, I'm getting things done. I'm seeing some progress. So it's really about, I mean, when it comes down to it, and like I said, I try to simplify things down to their most simplest blocks. It's really doing the right stuff and then doing enough of the right stuff. So working out in my gym, that's the right stuff. But if I do it once a year, not doing it in enough volume and not enough consistency. So I've got to do the right stuff in the right amount of volume.

That's good. Okay, so let's go over the overall structure. We're obviously not going to be able to get through the entire page study, so we'll pick out a couple little things to kind of go deep on that we think would serve our audience. So once you walk us through, what I think is awesome is the, the way that it flows from a before, during, and after phase. It really is, um, it captures the entire journey, uh, that someone goes on, I think, is, and, and oftentimes that is not even clearly defined, that even in itself gets thrown around quite a bit of the customer or client journey, but nobody ever like really defines what that actually is.

Yeah, absolutely. So really, we, when we look at the whole client lifecycle, client journey, it's like there's a before phase that, and in the before phase, no one knows that you even exist, right? And so that's probably where most people spend their time in marketing, but that's really only a third of the whole marketing journey. So we want to create awareness. So we want someone to going from not knowing that you exist to now being aware of you and raising their hand and saying, look, I'm vaguely interested in what you've got to offer. So what that looks like in practice might be clicking your ad or phoning your office or submitting a form on your website or something like that. So that's kind of the before phase. They go from not knowing that you exist to now awareness. Then the during phase is, right, okay, someone now vaguely knows that you exist. How do we take them from that nurturing them, taking them through the whole sales process and then them making their first purchase with you. And you know, depending on your type of business, if you're an e-commerce business, that may happen within a matter of minutes, right? Where someone adds to cart, checks out and makes the purchase. Or if you're in something that has a longer sales lifecycle, like maybe B2B enterprise software, that could be 6 months, right? Where someone goes from vaguely interested to purchasing. And then there's the after phase. And a lot of people think, have sort of think, you know, what do you mean the after phase? That's got nothing to do with marketing. That's customer service. That's delivery. That's all of that sort of thing. But that's really where the real money is made because on the front end, that's great. It's exciting to get new clients in the door and it's exciting to close sales and create a new deal. But the after phase is really where the money is made. If we can, number one, deliver a world-class risk experience so that we retain clients so that we don't have a leaky bucket where people are leaving and, you know, trying our product, buying once or twice, leaving for a competitor. Then increasing customer lifetime value. How can we take someone from being worth $100 or $1,000 and make them worth $10,000 over their lifetime? Because if we can do that, then we can spend more to acquire customers. So if we can increase that reliably and How do we create a referral engine so that one customer equals multiple customers so that we have a virtuous cycle of people just referring new business to us and bringing new people and making other people aware? So we turn our customers into evangelists and help us in our marketing process.

You know, it was really interesting whenever I got my hands on the book and I started to go through it. At first, I was like, wait a minute, we're talking about a one-page marketing plan and at the very bottom, We've got when they become a customer. And I was at first, I was like, that, that, that, that didn't seem to fit with marketing because I always thought about marketing on the thing. But then as I went through it, I thought, oh, you know, you are constantly, no matter what you're doing, you're constantly reselling, having to resell the value of the customer. And it is so important to keep customers as much as it is to be able to get new customers or customers, clients on the, on the front side. And I thought That was just really fascinating that you put that in there from a marketing perspective because I had always seen it from it's all about just getting new customers.

Well, I see it similar to, you know, I try to compare stuff in the marketing process because, you know, sometimes it's a bit conceptual to just stuff that we know and understand in real life. So for example, why do a lot of relationships fail? Because there's a lot of romance and excitement in the beginning. We love each other, we'll do anything for each other. But, you know, as as time goes by, we may neglect, you know, normal things and things that we took for granted and things like that. So you have to keep falling in love. You have to keep doing the right things. You have to keep up the romance alive and all of that. Otherwise, the relationship does die or becomes close to dead or whatever else. And so the exact same thing is true in business and in marketing. I mean, your customer may have been super excited about your product, got it and everything like that, but then you didn't give them a reason to stay. A lot of times clients won't leave because you did something wrong. Clients leave just because you didn't give them a good reason to stay. Somebody else wined and dined them and romanced them and everything like that. And so they went away. And so very, very similar to real life. If we don't keep relationships alive, if I don't call my friend or if my friend doesn't call me on a regular basis, if I ignore my wife or don't don't interact with my wife or do the right things, I mean, our relationship would break down as well. So the exact same thing is true in business. We've got to maintain relationship. Relationships are not taken for granted and not a given. So we've got to— there's work to do on the back end. So you're right, you have to keep reselling and remarketing as you go.

When we think about on the before and the during phases, And this may be not a fair question because I would say there's holes in all of them, but what do you see as the biggest area in general, by and large, the majority where you say, this is, this is where most businesses are really missing the mark here. This is what we see the most to where if they, they need to focus on all the areas, but this is one that we see the what would be the most glaring opportunity for them to improve?

I'll give you two. Probably the two most common is, so number one is target market. So a lot of people, you know, if they're a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, an insurance person, an accountant, a lawyer, whatever. When we say who's your target market, they're like, everyone, like I can help everyone, right? Everyone needs insurance, everyone needs a lawyer, everyone needs a doctor, everyone, you know, And, you know, and that's coming from a good place. It's like, you know, we're entrepreneurs, we want to help as many people as we possibly can. But it's a massive mistake because your target market is really the fundamental that everything is built on. And if that's shaky and if that's vague, you're gonna have a lot of problems with messaging. You're gonna have a lot of problems with media because if you say your target market is everyone, well, Well, what's the message that's going to attract everyone? And then what's the media that's going to reach everyone? And then how do we lead nurture everyone, right? So if you say it's everyone, it's really no one. We want to be super specific. Who are your people? So a good way to think about it is this. So if we took all of your customers and exported them into an Excel spreadsheet and I said to you, look, Sort your customer base from best to worst. Who are the customers you love hearing from who are super profitable? They're fun to work with. They're easy. They really value what you do. They're just awesome customers. When you see them ringing, you're like, ah, great. I'm gonna, you know, it's good news. Then let's work down the list and let's look at that bottom 50% or bottom 20% and who are the customers who are just painful? They just complain. They price shop you constantly. When you see a phone call from them, you like, you send it to voicemail or you cringe or whatever. And so there are customers who are more ideal for you than not. And so if we could spend more time, money, and effort on the ideal customers because because I bet you're spending most of your resources on your suboptimal clients, you know, on appeasing them, on following them up, on getting them to pay on time, on all of those sorts of things. So they're taking up the vast majority of your resources and the clients who are your best clients, who just pay their bill when they get it, who don't complain about price, who just are fun to work with, they actually get the least of your attention. And so rather than rather than giving all your oil to the squeaky wheel, replace the squeaky wheel, right? So get rid of the clients who are causing you pain and focus more on your top 20% of clients. So in every business who tells me, hey, our clients are everyone, once we drill down, we actually find, hang on, no, there are much more ideal clients than others. Some are worth much more than others. And I call this the principle of the unequal dollar, right? A lot of entrepreneurs think, hey, a dollar from a client is a dollar, right? It's a dollar in the bank account. But, and your bank manager will say that too. Hey, a dollar is a dollar, right? We don't know the difference, but a dollar from an optimal client is worth way more than a dollar from a suboptimal client because the suboptimal client's gonna cost you a lot more on the back end, both in money, but also in energy and in focus and in pain. So we wanna focus more on our ideal clients. So that's really mistake number one is thinking that going far, far too wide on your target market, even when people think they've got it niched down, like sometimes someone will say, hey, my target market is women over 40. Okay, great. We've narrowed it down to a billion people in the world, right? So you can almost always niche down further and further because once you get specific, the other stuff really falls in place a lot better. We can get messaging that we can really nail. We can really get messaging that really lands with someone. We can find media that we can reach those people a lot cheaper and easier and more targeted. So that's super important. That's messaging. The other place where people really fall down, I feel, is lead nurturing. And that's where they'll basically do 1, 2, 3 phone calls and that's it. They kind of fizzle out. So having a system where you can follow up leads, where you can nurture leads over the long term. So like let's assume a lead is not ready to buy today. A lot of people will treat those as tire kickers. They're like, oh, try, try, look, come back when you're ready to buy. But the sophisticated marketer knows that there's two buckets of prospect. There's people who are ready to buy today, and that's awesome, but everybody's fighting for those people. Everyone's running ads for those people. Everyone's cold calling those people, but they make up only a very small percentage of your addressable target market. There's a much, much larger target market who are ready to buy sometime in the future. It could be 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, a year, two years' time. So a sophisticated marketer knows how to build a pipeline, a systematic way to keep people warm until they're ready to buy. And that could be a year in the future, 2 years in the future, but you're building an asset of future clients and future revenue.

Oh, this is good. Okay, I'm gonna go back to the first one that you mentioned. One of the things that was helpful to me around ideal is I used to think of it as, well, either someone who ends up becoming a client or a customer is either ideal or they shouldn't become a customer. But one of the things that I saw, and it might have been Dem, I'm not really sure, they had almost a bell curve and it was like, here's ideal. And then the outer edges, here's acceptable, right? And it was like, oh, well, that was a really helpful visual to say we're not, we're going to turn away money, but we also understand we're not targeting these people on other ends of the bell curve. Do you agree with that?

I agree with that. And a lot of people are like, hey, do it. Should I be turning people away? Sometimes the answer is yes, but sometimes the answer is that's fine. Look, if, if a non-ideal client is coming to you and you're willing to take them on, great. But where are we going to allocate our scarce resource? Because that's really the role of the entrepreneurs to figure out where are we going to allocate cash, where are we going to allocate talent, where are we going allocate time, money, and energy. And so who are we actively going to go after? And that's got to be your ideal client. You can't spend time, money, energy, talent going after suboptimal clients. If they come to you and you're willing to take it on, fine, no problem, we can take that on. But who are we actively going to go after? Who are we going to wake up in the morning and say, right, I want more of these kind of clients and and create activities around that.

Yeah, that makes sense. And you know, what are some specific things? Well, I'll ask it this way on the lead nurture, and that makes a lot of sense because I was thinking through my own businesses and I was like, yeah, see, we do, I think, a pretty doggone good job on the front side of, you know, when someone comes and fills out a form and then we're on them, you know, that way, and then we're following up with them or whatever. That 3 to 6 month to 9 month period of time, it tails off and say, oh, they've gone completely cold and we haven't, I haven't architected anything to make sure we're in touch with them. What is a logical blend between an automation? Okay, so an email part that's just going out and also something that is part of a system, but it requires like a manual, like I'm going to call them, I'm going to pick up the phone I'm going to call them or I'm going to text them. How do you see that as part of the lead nurture system overall? And I know that that may differ depending on the value of the client, right? If we're selling a $99 a month software, we probably are not necessarily doing that. We could do things more automated in that way versus if you're selling a $20,000 program, certainly picking up the phone 6 months later and touching base with them is probably a good idea. Does that make sense?

Totally. That makes 100% sense. So a couple of things. So I think of a lot of people talk about automation and bots and email sequences and all of that. And I love all of those things. Now the way I see those things is like an Iron Man suit. Like, so if ever anyone's watched the movie Iron Man, it's just a normal geeky guy, Tony Stark, but he puts on the Iron Man suit and that gives gave him a lot of leverage, a lot of powers that he didn't have otherwise, but it doesn't replace him. It's not doing the work instead of him. Now he can fly, he can shoot lasers, he can do whatever. He's got a lot of skills and that's the way I see technology and marketing automation. So it augments our abilities and it gives us leverage, but it doesn't replace us. So I'll give you an So we have, with many of our clients, we've set up long-term nurturing sequences. By long-term, I mean it could be a nurturing sequence that drips out over 6 or 9 or 12 months or whatever else. Now, a lot of what we do in our email nurture sequences is stimulate people to reply to emails. Like a lot of people send out emails from like info@ or sales@ or whatever. Or the worst is like no reply at. I'm like, why would you not want a prospect to reply to one of your nurturing emails? It's the craziest thing I've ever heard.

We do not want you to contact us.

Exactly. So it's the most—

we hate money. Like I think on your Amazon, it says don't read this book if you hate money. It's like we hate money.

Exactly. Exactly. Well, it's like, it would be like opening up a physical store and then paying rent and fitting it out and all of that and then shutting the front door and locking it so no one could come in. It's just the most insane thing I've ever seen. So what we do is we send emails from a person. So in the case of my business, I'm sort of the face of the business and it comes from alan@ and we actually encourage replies. We're like, hey, hit reply if this resonates with you or hit reply and tell me about some challenges you're having in your business or whatever. And every single day we get replies and sometimes someone's been on my list for maybe 6 months, a year, 2 years and something resonated with them or now is the right time in their business and in their life and they put their hand up and say, look, I'm interested in coaching or I'm interested in consulting or hey, tell me more about your course or whatever. And so So what we're trying to do is we're trying to stimulate conversions because convert— we're trying to stimulate conversations because conversations lead to conversions. That's a very, very important point. So what we want to do is during the nurturing process, we want to do stuff that will stimulate conversations because conversations will lead to conversions. So we do that via email. And like I said, I said sometimes just someone from my team doing a phone call, like, like with all the tech wizardry and all of that, people are actually getting a lot less phone calls than that than they ever did. And so sometimes just picking up the phone and having a conversation with them sounds pretty simple, but, you know, fewer and fewer people are doing that than ever before. So the point is, if you've Imagine you've got a hot prospect who's going to buy from you definitely, but they're not gonna buy for a year or they're not gonna buy for 2 years. If you do nothing, they're likely gonna forget who you are, where you're from or whatever, right? In 2 years' time, they'll type into Google whatever product or service that you do and find someone. They'll be that, you know, small percentage of people who are ready to buy today. But if you've created a relationship with them over time, if you've nurtured them, if they're aware of you, they know you, like you, trust you, and now they're ready to buy, I mean, you've created a pipeline of future leads and future revenue that's super, super valuable. And so, and a lot of your content can stimulate that as well.

What do you think? What do you think? And maybe you can answer this for your own business. So I'm not asking for numbers, I'm thinking more percentages that of people that come in and they have just heard about your book, they listen to this podcast they go by the book, and the next thing you know, like, they're, they're a hyper buyer, right? There's like, they're like podcast, book, course, in, in coaching, right?

You—

I know you see that happen all the time.

Totally.

But then there's— what is the percentage just generally, like, back in the neck and stuff, of that versus people who are more, okay, I'm listening to podcasts, yeah, I think I'll buy the book, and then 3, 6, 9 months later, what is that?

What do you see that Yeah, it's about 10x. Like, so when I, it's about, there's about 3% of your target market who's kind of really hot and ready to buy today. And so 3% is not a big percentage, but there's probably about 30% to 60% of your target market who are, you know, interested in what you've got to say, interested in following you, interested in hearing more from you, but they're just not ready today for whatever reason. Maybe it could be budget, it could be timing, could be something's going on in their life. And you know, when you think about it, like think back to like the last major purchase you bought, maybe, maybe a car, maybe a house, maybe some expensive item or whatever. You probably didn't wake up that morning or hear it on a podcast and think, oh, I'm buying this today, right? So you probably researched it. You probably thought, you know, do I want an electric car? Do I want a fuel-powered car? Do I want an SUV? Do I want a compact or whatever? And hey, this car looks really cool and maybe I'll take that one for a test drive. So your buying cycle, it could be months, right? But if you show up to the car dealership, most car dealerships are like, hey, what can we do to get you in a car today? And if you're not ready to buy today, you're a tire kicker, right?

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That is such a good example because I and, and I'll pivot it slightly. I'm actually in the market right now for a golf cart to, to use in the neighborhood, drive up to the pool. It's summertime here, drive down to, you know, drive down to Starbucks, whatever. Well, that is a— I really want to spend about $8,000, you know, but so $8,000 to $10,000 purchase. I have been looking at this for a month. I've gone to 2 dealerships follow-ups. I haven't gotten a single follow-up call, and they didn't even ask me for my information when I was there. And furthermore, now Facebook knows— Facebook knows, and Facebook Marketplace and other things know that I'm looking at it because it keeps throwing algorithm stuff at me, you know, whatever. But, you know, you start to— like, I'm learning, okay, I want a 72-volt lithium battery, I don't want a 48-volt, you know, all those kind of things along the So I'm like curating this down versus if they had gotten my information, lead nurture, and then they would have said, what is— what are you in the market for? Hey, we just had one come in. They could make a sale if they found out the exact one that I'm looking for. Is that— I think that's such a good, um, like, parallel, 100%, right?

And, and now you're having to do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of the research. But what if it— what if they handed it on a silver platter? They said, look, hey, this is the difference between this type of lithium battery and this type of lithium battery, and here are the pros and cons of this type this type, that would make your life a lot easier. That would be genuinely helpful. And so a lot of what people think marketing is, is hey, it's interruption, it's like pushing and all of that. But I see marketing as being part of your product, part of being helpful. Like how can I help my target market be more successful or get the result that they actually want? So how can I actually create something of value that will actually help them whether they buy from me or not because that's just gonna create so much goodwill with them.

Yeah, I want to, in our remaining time, I wanna go to stimulate referrals. So I wanna talk about that aspect of it. It's number 9 as part of the one-page marketing plan and a lot of our listeners would say if you ask them, hey, what do you do to get leads? What's part of your marketing plan? And, and, and if you ask them to lay out their top 3 to 5, one of them would almost— from the majority of our listening audience— would say referrals. And then you ask them, well, show me what is your referral playbook, right? And they're like, uh, we, we don't really have one, right? What— give us some best practices around stimulating referrals and actually doing a good job of getting quality referrals and then converting those to to clients?

Well, so you're 100% right. A lot of times when you talk to a client, they're like, yeah, we've got a lot of our business from referrals. And then, okay, what are you doing to actually stimulate referrals? So that last chapter in my book, I've called it orchestrate and stimulate referrals, right? It kind of implies that it's something active. It's not hope and pray for referrals, which is what most people do. And So what a lot of people do is like, they're like, look, if I do a really good job, then hopefully people will talk about me and tell other people. And maybe that happens, maybe that doesn't. But I can think of many times when I was really happy with some product or service, but I never really referred anyone to them just because, you know, I'm busy, I get on with my life and, you know, I'm using that product or getting on with whatever I'm doing. And so I'm not like, if, you know, I'm looking at a Sony camera right now, it's a great camera, I love it and it works really, really well. But I haven't gone around kind of referring people to Sony and saying, hey, you should buy this camera. I mean, if someone asks me what's a good camera, I'll tell them, but I'm not actively going in and referring people. So what you want to do is you want to create a system that makes it easy for someone to refer you, but more importantly, so that they look good referring you. So what I mean by that is a lot of people feel like if I ask for referrals, it's kind of like I'm being needy, I'm begging for business, all of that sort of stuff. And if you frame it as them doing you a favor, then it is that way, right? If you're like, hey, look, Bradley, please do me a favor. Look, would you help me out and just share my book with everybody in your network and all of that, that's really poor positioning and you're kind of like asking for a favor and all of that sort of stuff. But if we frame it in a way that makes them look good. So if I sent you 10 copies of my book and I said, look, here's a gift that you can give to anyone in your network. Now that's completely different because now now you've got something of value. So a book is worth, you know, notionally what, $20 or whatever they sell it for on Amazon. And now you giving something of that and books generally don't get thrown away. Like it's almost a sin to throw out a book. So if you gave a book and someone's struggling in marketing in your network and you said, look, hey, here, read Allan's book and here's a free copy that actually makes you look good, doesn't it? Like, so you've given them something of value. You've given them essentially maybe $20 of value or whatever else, you've created a situation where you are thinking and concerned about them and helping them out. Now that's a totally different thing than me saying, hey, look, help me out. I'm really trying to get more copies of the book out there or whatever. So what I'm trying to basically say is how can you arm your referral network so that they look good making referrals? That they can pass something of value on so that they're not just doing you a favor by referring you, but they're doing a favor to themselves so that they're looking really good in the referral process because most people, and we all are, we're self-focused and we want to increase our status within our network, right? So if I can help a friend or colleague or client or whatever, that increases my reputation with them. They're like, look, Every time I interact with Allan, he's helpful, he provides a lot of value or whatever. So it's engineering those kind of scenarios. So how can you arm your referral network? The other thing is being pretty intentional and open about it. So part of the onboarding process with the client might be, look, Bob, you are an absolute ideal customer for us. And you know, we know that birds of a feather flock together. And so we get most of our business and we can keep our prices very reasonable because because we work on referrals. So we're gonna do an amazing job for you and I'd massively appreciate it if you could refer me to people who are in a similar situation to you because we're gonna help you out. We're gonna help you solve this problem that we're working on and, you know, if you've got some other people. So really upfront rather than what a lot of people do is kind of surprising their prospect. They're like afterwards after the delivery, they're like, hey, and you know, can you help me find some prospects or whatever? Or can you help me find other people who might be interested, just being very open about it, just saying, look, this is a big part of our marketing engine and it's how we can keep our prices reasonable. And, you know, we know that you would probably know other people in a similar situation to you.

Man, that is so good. One question on that. Where are your thoughts around incentivizing asking for the names? Okay. Be like this. A lot of times for them to say, oh, we're so glad to have you on, glad to have you as a customer. By the way, if you give us 5 names, we'll give you a $10 gift card, something like that, right? I mean, and sometimes that is the referral, that's the orchestration and stimulation of the referrals is basically that, you know, here's this page, write these names down, whatever. And, you know, it seems like that could be okay to feel free to give a referral, but it seems like people can't just be bought to give, like, go to my phone and throw out the names of my best friends, so to speak. I mean, I know some people would do it. What are your thoughts around that?

Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of it. I like doing it in retrospect. So for example, you know, hey, if you referred me a new client, I'd write you a handwritten note, say, hey Bradley, thanks so much, and maybe even give you a gift or something like that. I think in terms of being explicit about it, look, in some industries, in some products that may work. And, you know, particularly like if someone's an affiliate or something like that, you can be very upfront about it. That's their, that's kind of their work and what they do, all of that sort of thing. So that can work well. But the other aspect is like, let's say you referred me to a new chiropractor or something like that. And then I found out you got a $100 gift card for doing that. I would be thinking, did Bradley refer me to this guy because he got the $100 gift card or does he really think this guy is a good chiropractor? You know, so it kind of compromises the relationship a little bit. So I think people would be motivated much more by raising their status within their group rather than a little bit of a gift card or something or other. So I would rather do that in retrospect. And like I said, it depends on the product, depends on the service, depends on who the referrer is and what kind of system you have in place. But for most people and for most businesses, I think those transactional kind of setups generally don't work super well.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense to me and I think I would agree with that because then if the person is referring because they say, no, this has been genuinely helpful to me, you you should read this book, buy this course, join this program, join this mastermind, join whatever that may be, because it's actually— they— it was a world-class experience. It was really helpful to me. And then you send me a gift as a thank you for it. Well, I wasn't expecting that. And that even maybe makes me even more inclined to want to send people to, because it was like, oh, I was doing it because it genuinely helped me. Most of the time I don't need the like, no, I don't need the gift card. Like I'm doing it because this is actually genuinely helpful or whatever.

So yeah, totally, totally. I mean, just think about the last time you recommended a restaurant to a friend or a movie, you saw a cool movie and you're like, man, you should watch this movie or like, you know, I've been binge watching Succession, right? And see, I've told other friends, man, yeah, have you watched Succession Season 4 or whatever? And like no one incentivized me to do that. But I know if my friend watches Succession and enjoys it a lot or whatever, again, that raises my status in the pack. Or if he goes to the restaurant that I really enjoyed and he goes, man, I had such a great time. What a great restaurant. Again, that makes me feel good. That deepens our relationship rather than the restaurant incentivizing me or HBO creating some referral program or whatever, right? So really, I'm thinking about how can this deepen my relationship with my friend or how can I raise my status within my social group? And that's a super important way of thinking about it rather than just thinking about it transactionally.

Yeah. Well, that's a good way for us to close out because I genuinely have loved the book. It has absolutely impacted the way that we think about in our businesses for sure. And so I can absolutely recommend not only just getting the book but also reaching out to your team. In fact, how would you, where would you point them to if they want to connect with you, learn more about the book, the courses, then the things that you guys have to offer to both be able to support business owners?

So the book is available where all books are available, Amazon, all of that. The book is super popular on audio on Audible, so you can get it on audible.com. Our website is successwise.com and you can learn about everything that we do. We've got a range of training and coaching and consulting programs there and you can get a lot of free info there. You can get the One Page Marketing Plan Canvas and join our email list. We email a couple of times a week with really helpful marketing tips and things like that. So even if you never want to buy anything from us, I'd recommend joining our mailing list and you'll get lot of good information.

Awesome. Allan, you've been great, man. Uh, hope to have you back on in the future. Appreciate you.

My pleasure, Bradley.

All right, so 2 or 3 things that I took away from this. I think number 1 is whenever we talked about how making it a living document and, uh, something that you use on a regular basis as opposed to something that just collects digital dust or sits there and, you know, you, you spent an hour putting it together, but then it was like, okay, you know, we don't actually use it. So I think making it a living document, number one. I think whenever he went through what are the areas that, you know, tend to not be as looked at as much, you know, target market, who is our target market, really specifically diving into who do we serve, who is our best customers, who is maybe our worst customers, in clearly defining and articulating that. It's a good reminder. I think number 3 then is, I mean, if you heard him say like 3% of the customers of your target market are going to buy immediately or soon, that might be low for some of you, but I think it more speaks to the fact that, yeah, majority of people are going to buy 3 months, 6 months, 9 months? And is— does our marketing plan, our one-page marketing plan, does it clearly articulate what our plan is to be able to convert those leads into clients or into customers at that period of time? I think that it's easy to have as part of your sales process What are we gonna do whenever we initially get a lead? We gotta walk in, we gotta call in, we get an online lead. This is what we're gonna do. It's made me think about what are we gonna do 6 months later? You know, somebody wants to join Blueprint as an example. What is that gonna look like? Uh, whenever we have an initial conversation, they decide now's not the right time. What does that look like to actually have that down? Answer is no. I gotta think through that. Those were some of my key takeaways. Great having Alan on. Um, he's in Australia, as you can tell, uh, from his, uh, from his accent. But he is, uh, he, he's a stud. And, uh, I think he's got an awesome book and some really good courses. I enjoyed learning about this stuff too. Hope you did as well. Big shout out to our podcast sponsors: Autopilot Recruiting, Coach B Consulting, and Club Capital. Go to club.capital to find out how you can start to leverage your financials to be able to make better decisions in your business, such as, do I have the money right now to be able to hire more people? Don't want to staff up and bring on 2 sales acquisition person— people, or a couple account managers, maybe even a marketing person. But if I need help to be able to do that. I know I need to do it, but how do I do— go about finding A-players? Everybody talks about A-players, A-players. Well, how do you find A-players? You gotta do it consistently, and that's where Autopilot Recruiting comes in. And they now have a concierge onboarding process to be able to help you make it a great experience for your team. Go to autopilotrecruiting.com. And then, you know, the value of investing investing in your team. That is not a surprise to anyone. And you know the value of investing in yourself. You've been listening to this podcast, you certainly do that. Go to coachpconsulting.com. He's going to let you in on an entire free month. That's 8 trainings for you and your team to be able to attend, and you'll be able to get the agent-only call that happens once a month for free just for giving him a shot. Go to coachpconsulting.com. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well.