Are you selling painkillers or vitamin pills to your clients?

Welcome to the latest episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. Today I want to talk to you all about painkillers and vitamin pills. But first, I hope you are doing well and your business is doing well and you're managing to pivot and continue to serve your audience where necessary and listen to your audience. And kind of listening to your audience is really what today's podcast is all about. So if you had a headache, would you reach for a painkiller or a vitamin pill? Well, it's obviously a painkiller, right? We want to get rid of our headache. We want something to solve it right now, and the painkiller is going to do that job. Yet why is it that so many agencies are selling their clients or trying to sell their clients vitamin pills when what they need is painkillers? So that's what we're going to dig deep into in today's episode. So let's get on with the show. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob Abdacosta. Imagine going to your best friend's wedding. You have a fantastic time, maybe too good a time, and the next morning you wake up with an almighty hangover and you're not feeling too great. So would you reach for a painkiller or would you take a vitamin pill? Well, of course you're going to go for the painkillers. And this is a good analogy to think about what our clients are buying from us. Because our clients are usually in some kind of pain. They want a transformation from being in pain to not being in pain. And they look to us to come up with a solution and sell them a product that will help them get out of pain. Yet I see so many agencies who are trying to sell their prospective clients vitamin pills, something that would be good for them, but isn't solving one of their top three pains right now, rather than trying to sell them a painkiller, which is something that they really want. And of course, when we're trying to sell things to clients that, that we think will be good for them, but it isn't one of their top three pains right now, then it becomes much harder to make the cell. And there's a whole number of components that I want to unpick in this episode. So of course one of those components is really understanding your client so you understand what pains they have so you can produce solutions that are the painkillers to those pains. And one of the crucial components of this is to be able to stand in your client's shoes. So see the world from their perspective so that you can identify what their top three pain points are. So it's worth reminding ourselves of exactly what a client is buying from us. Sounds pretty obvious, right? If I'm selling PR services, then they're buying my PR services. Or I'm selling web design, they're buying web design. But actually that's not predominantly what they're buying. What they're buying is a transformation from A to Z or A to B. So fundamentally that transformation is I'm in pain to I don't want to be in pain anymore. So if I'm buying PR services, then my pain point might be that I've got no market awareness. I want your help to get some market awareness. If I'm buying website, it might be that I have no online presence or my website doesn't have much traffic, or my website isn't generating many leads and the transformation to being out of pain would be not. Now my website's representing my brand really well and generating lots of leads. So we always have to think about the fact that the client is buying that transformation, which is from being in pain to not being in pain. And any given day, a client is looking to solve one of their top three pains. So your product or service or solution has to be one of those pains that they're looking to sell. And if you're selling pain number 10, 11, 12, which looks a bit more like a vitamin pill, something that you know will be good for them but isn't solving their top three pains today, then it's going to be a really hard sell. And that looks like the kind of selling where you're really trying to convince someone they should do something. But at the end of the day, remember, if they've got a headache, whilst a vitamin pill might help them not have a headache in the future, it's not going to get rid of their headache right now. So what are you selling that will get rid of their headache right now? So hopefully you can see the issue of selling vitamin pills rather than painkillers and you may be guilty of this yourself. I know I have been in the past and you will certainly see lots of other people who try to sell to you trying to sell you something that you don't really want. Let me give you a real example of this because something happened to me last week that made me think about this topic. So I got a cold call from a company that can track visitors to your website and it can give you detailed information on them. So that sounds really fantastic, right? We'd all love to know more about our website visitors and this would be a great vitamin pill. I'd love to know more about my website visitors, but to be quite honest, it isn't one of my current top pains. So regarding my website, a current top pain would be that actually I'd like to get a lot more traffic to my site and then if I had, you know, thousands of visitors a day visiting my website, only then would it be worth me investing a monthly fee on visitor tracking software. Meanwhile, that product is just a vitamin pill for me, so I'm not going to buy it now. The guy on the phone wasn't really listening when we had this conversation and he just kept trying to tell me that spending 500 pounds a month on their amazing software was a really good investment and I would get tons of return on investment. But as I say, he wasn't really listening to me and it definitely wasn't going to be solving one of my key pain points. So I needed to get off the phone now. They needed to better target their audience and better segment their audience and kind of tells you why cold calling doesn't really work or certainly isn't one of the most effective sales and marketing marketing strategies in this day and age. And that sort of brings me onto the second point about this topic, which is you can't address a customer's pain points unless you know your customer intimately well and the more niche you become, and I talked about this many times, as you'll know, but the more niche your business, the easier it becomes to pinpoint exactly who you're targeting. So it's no good just saying I target anybody that's using a WordPress website that's way too broad and you'll never be able to identify the specific pain points. So if you were to become a bit more niche and say I target financial service businesses in the southeast of the UK that use WordPress as their web development platform, then you're getting a little bit warmer. And then of course you need to do some work on your customer Personas, your customer avatars or your ideal target customer. And again, you all know that I talked about this before, I have lots of good content on my website which I'll put in the show notes that gives you a step by step guide on how to create your ideal target customer. But I would highly recommend that you do that piece of work before you ever even start thinking about any sales and marketing messages. So if we really understand the type of person in the type of organization that we're targeting and we understand what a day in their life looks like, what their challenges are, what they're looking for, where they look for that information, and what some of their objections would be to buying our product or service. Then suddenly it becomes much easier to identify specific pain points for a specific person, rather than general vagaries for anybody. So make sure you create your ideal target customer, your customer, avatar or Persona before you start doing any work. And of course before that, you also need to make sure you've got a clear niche, which is another topic. And I previous podcast episodes that have talked about niching. So please go and have a look for them. And again, I have lots of good content on my website to help you in identifying what an ideal profitable niche would be for you. So now we've got clear on our niche. Now we've got clear on our ideal target customer. We can now start to think about creating some sales and marketing messages that really will resonate with them. Your, your target with your sales and marketing should be that someone reads your content and says, blimey, they really understand me, or this is really speaking to me. All of the best email content or blog content I've ever posted has had received that feedback from people that they read it and they thought every single point I made applied to them. It was almost as if I was sitting across the table talking to them. And guess what? It's not because I'm particularly clever at marketing. It's just because understand my ideal target customer. I understand what makes them tick, I understand the challenges that they face, and therefore I can write to that. That kind of brings me on to my third point of this podcast, and that is a really big bugbear of mine. And I challenge you, when you finish listening to this, to go and look at your own website and see how you compare to this. But so many websites don't start off by trying to show their reader that they really understand them, but instead they start off by saying, we're amazing and we do this and we do that, and these are the people we've done it for. But the problem about that is that they've lost the reader before they've even begun. So the reader doesn't really care who you've done it for before at this point anyway, because what they care about is you demonstrating that you can help solve one of their top three pains. So most homepages on websites start off by saying, we are a WordPress web development agency and we can do this, that and the other, or we are a PR company and we, we help, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's all very well and good and there is absolutely a place for that on your website. It's just not on your homepage. And trust me, 99% of websites don't get this right. But every good website I see does get this right. And that is that they use their homepage to build empathy with their ideal target customer by showing them that they understand them. And that will often be by starting off by showing them that they understand one of their top three pain points or all of their top three pain points. So if you look on my website, I will talk about my clients taking one step forward and one step back, or hitting a brick wall that they can't get over to grow their agency. I will talk about winning, retaining ideal clients and I will talk about finding and retaining the best staff because I know that in the small growing agency sector, which is where my target client is, those are the top three pain points that I consistently hear from my audience. So my homepage will talk about that so that someone reads that. And at this point I haven't mentioned coaching or training or anything at all. Because what I want someone to do is read that and say that sounds interesting. That applies to me. Tell me more. And the tell me more equivalent on a web page is scrolling down the page or clicking on a link that might be about us or services link. And that's where you can start talking about how you do what you do. So this is the old kind of why, what how. And you have to start off with the why, which is why should your ideal target customer care about you? And you overcome that by showing them that you really understand them and the top three pain points they have. So this is where you're starting to sell a painkiller and not a vitamin pill. And of course this doesn't just apply to your website, it applies to all of your outbound marketing and all of your sales approach as well. So if you're regularly sending out emails, which you should be, and you should be building your list again, another topic, but if you're regularly sending out emails, you have to stand in your clients shoes and think about the things that keep them awake at night, those top three pains, and write around those subjects. Because again, you want your reader to really resonate with your content. You want them to feel like you're sitting across the table, having a coffee with them, talking to them, so that when they read it they pay attention and they feel, whoa, this company really understands Me, I want to talk to them. Anytime I ever talk to a client and I ask them why they buy from me, it's always because they say, rob, you've stood in my shoes. It's clear you understand me and my business, and I'd much rather work with someone who's understands me than a generalist. Now, one of the ways that you can really understand your clients is by working out what jobs they're trying to get done. That sounds like a strange thing, but what I mean by that is jobs to be done are the things that your client is trying to achieve right now and how you can solve them. Now you can work out what jobs they're trying to get done by kind of getting them to project into the future. So you could say, if we were to meet three years from now, what needs to have happened in your agency for you to feel happy about your progress, and what fears and obstacles do you feel might get in your way that stop you delivering that progress? If we can understand the progress that they're looking for, then we can understand what it is they're looking for in terms of a product or service. And if we can understand what things they feel might get in their way and what fears they have, then we can also address some of them in our sales and marketing messages. So their fears might be cost, they might be time investment, they might be being sure that this is really going to work for them. And if we understand that, then we can build in clarity around how much time it will take them, I. E. Not too much time. We can put different payment plans in place, and we can use lots of testimonials and case studies of people just like them to show that this can really work for them. So we can overcome those objections before they ever even become objections in the conversation that you have with them. So I guess that's my last point in this short podcast, which is really dig deep and understand what jobs are to be done. Now, the way I've done this in the past is I've done my work on my ideal target customer, my customer avatars. I've written them down. If I have six of them sitting on the wall opposite me at the moment so that I'm always reminded exactly who I'm talking to. And I've also supported that further by doing some telephone research. So talk to a bunch of customers that have just bought from you and understand what jobs they're trying to get done. Obviously you don't ask that question, but ask the question that I just said about projecting forward three years from now, what needs to have happened in their agency for them to feel happy about their progress and also explore what fears and concerns they have and obstacles they think might get in their way. So there you go. That's my short podcast for the day. It might be short, but hopefully it's got lots of tangible, actionable points for you that you can start thinking about and applying. You know, my goal with these podcasts is to get you thinking slightly differently about your agency, or about how you go about marketing your agency, or how you communicate with your audience. And I think we've touched upon all three of those things today. So, as ever, if you've enjoyed this podcast, I would love you to leave a review that really helps with the rankings. And please do share the podcast with your colleagues. And I will see you next week. For our next guest interview, Sam.