Stop Chasing the Wrong Customers!

One of my biggest lessons in marketing, I went to a home show for College Pro Painters in Sudbury and I ended up with like 100 leads. It was roughly about 100 leads. And I categorized them as like a B and C priority. Like which ones were really ready to get their houses painted. Of the hundred leads, none of the C's got their house painted that summer. I don't even know if any of the B's got their house painted somewhere. And only about like eight of the A's got their house painted. But the amount of time and effort I spent on the B's and C's was a huge waste of time. Strategically, I'd like you to think about, is there a market out there that you could do this for that are easier to get from idea to a signed contract because all of these companies that use SAP, it's like a 90 day to 180 day to a one year sales cycle, right? My first company, when I was 20 years old, I was painting houses and I was standing at this company and the woman said, your competitor Andre from Student Painters is coming in a half an hour after he leaves, I'll call you and let you know if we're going to be going with you. I'm like, you know what, here's Andre's pager. We're friends. This was 1989. Page him and tell him you've gone with College Pro Painters because I'm going to take care of you way better than he ever will. I'm not leaving your property until you sign with me because I know we can nail it. Like, you're wasting his time and my time and your time. Call him right now. And she started laughing. She goes, okay, I would rather run that kind of a business because then I can go from problem to solution to sign contract very quickly. You could probably do 12 million in revenue in a, in a weekend if you could market to the small to medium sized enterprise. If you could think about, how could you reinvent to help companies deploy now? Because I'll tell you, if you could help companies get more done with Slack or with Infusionsoft or with Pipedrive, the simpler software too, like, you don't need these $300,000 people. You might be actually selling the right solution to the wrong people. So I'd love for you to strategically think about what could you do to build a $10 million business, by the way, in two years, how could you go from 0 to 10 million in two years or in one year selling to companies that have no more than 300 people in them or 250. How could you target companies that are 250 people or less? And then your social media, your PR, your sales, you're speaking at conferences, literally become like, cause I, I can get clients right now. If I speak at an event, I can get clients to sign up within 24 hours to 48 hours. Now, I'm not lending half million dollar contracts or $300,000 contracts, but if I was targeting the right customers who had the right money with the right pain point, you can do that very quickly. When we were building 1-800-God junk, our average franchise fee and licensing fee was about $30,000. This was 20 years ago, 17 years ago. So it was a pretty good amount of fee. And the lifetime value from that customer was more like 500,000. Okay. Was the lifetime value that we were selling into. So our cost of acquisition, lifetime value, cash conversion cycle, we could figure it all out. We would go out and land what we landed. One story on CNBC, Squawk Box, and we got 21 new franchisees to join. That's $6 million in lifetime value. That's 525,000 in upfront fees. Like, let's get more PR. You might have the right solution for the wrong audience. Maybe if you're married to that and that is your audience, that's the only way to go. And you got to burn your boats. And this is the whole place you got to be focusing on. In the old days in marketing, it was said that a client needed to see our marketing nine times before they took action. But because we're getting bombarded with marketing now, this is something I created 17 years ago. I call it the Rule of 27. It's probably more like the Rule of 100 now. But the Rule of 27 was they only see one of every three things we put in front of them. Like, if I do three emails to you, you only read one out of the three. And then I need to hit you 27 times so that you see nine, so that you take action. The guy need to hit you with three emails and three Facebook and three social posts and three speaking events so that you see me 27 times, so that you listen nine times, so you take action once. You're so sick of your marketing and your team is so sick of your marketing that you think your customers are sick of your marketing. And your customers have never seen your marketing. So the executives at these companies, the decision makers at your, they're not sick of your marketing. They don't Even see your marketing. Your team is sick of your marketing. Your team thinks that they're seeing your marketing. But I assure you that the best is like the top 500 decision makers you're targeting have not seen you four times, let alone 27 times. So it's more like an omnipresent focus sales strategy where you're literally bashing them over the head because the market is so big, it's okay if they tell you to go away. I had a client one time when I was building what's called Gerber Auto collision in the U.S. boyd Auto Body in Canada. I was in Toronto. I was trying to get a guy to sell me his auto body shop. It's called Forest Hill Auto Body. And the owner of Forest Hill Auto Body walked me from his lobby to my car out in the parking lot and said, if you ever come here again, I'm phoning the police. And I turned around, I started laughing. I'm like, do you think maybe I can call you next month to sell? He's like, dude, get property. Like, I just wasn't done until he told me to get lost. But I had other people where that kind of approach worked enough that, like, fine, talk to me. What do you sell? Like, explain this, right? I'd be like, clearly you don't like my shirt, right? Like, you have, you know, like, what is it you don't like about this? But so I think for you guys, it is be more omnipresent target. The more hit, the more we wanted to land Home Depot as a referral program for 1-800-got- junk. So we realized that at the leadership team of Home Depot, cfo, CEO, CEO, head of sales, head of ops, whatever, they all lived in Atlanta, Georgia, where Home Depot's head office was. And we needed them to know of 1-800-got- shopped, we only had 20 million in revenue at the time. Maybe 30 million revenue. We weren't that big yet. So we found out where the executives lived. We knew where their office was. So we plugged into MapQuest, which would now be Google Maps address trunk. And we knew the map they would take. So we literally figured out the roads that they would drive from their house to their office. And it's the same map, right? It's pretty easy. So what we did for a period of six weeks is we put signs up along the roads that they would be driving from their home to their office, illegally planted about on the roadways, and then we stood on the on ramp that they would all take to the highway to their office or the off ramp by their office every morning from 8 o' clock until 9 o'. Clock. And we paid guys to stand with the truck and blue wigs, and one of them got junk signs and wave at cars. Now, we didn't know which car was the head of operations. We didn't know which car was the cfo, but we knew that if we did it every morning for six weeks, they would be sick of seeing us. Six weeks later, we started phoning them and emailing them. And you know what the response we got was? You guys are everywhere. We want to talk to you. We're not everywhere. We're just on your road. No one else in the city's ever seen us, but you guys are sick of us. We knew who we were going after, and we were omnipresent and we were kind of monomaniacs. So if you're going after these companies, you have to identify the decision makers. There's going to be, you know that in a strategic shell, there's going to be three or four decision makers in a company. You've got to figure out which ones and hit them and hit them and hit them and hit them and hit them. When we were landing press for 1-800-got junk. I'd been landing PR. I wrote a book called Free PR. One of the things I learned about press, you know, when you see like a newspaper article or a podcast that somebody's on, or a blog that somebody's written up in, or, you know, even if you're on Oprah. We were on Oprah 2003. That doesn't change the company. What changes? The company was pushing that episode in front of everybody. We're telling everybody for 21 years that we were on Oprah. Think of every piece of press that you've got in every type of outlet. You've got it in as a log. Every newspaper article, every podcast, every magazine, every whatever. You got 20 pieces of press. You got 20 logs. Great. You got 20 logs. You want to light the logs on file. You want to put those press articles on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter. You want to put them on your email list and send them out to your target clients. You want to put them on your press page. You want to have your salespeople send it out. You want to have pss on people's emails, like links to your press pages. That's lighting the logs on fire. I really want to spark this thing, right? So once We've got these 20 stories and they're on Facebook and they're on LinkedIn. They're on Twitter. We're emailing them out there on our press page. I want to share it five times a year on Facebook because nobody saw it the first three or four times anyway. So I'm going to show the same story multiple times. I had to email it to my list multiple times. I'm also going to buy traffic and I'm going to push it in front of people. Do you know the reason Simon Sinek's first TEDx talk in Puget Sound on start with why went viral was because he drove traffic. He pushed that link on the TED homepage to hundreds of thousands of people. So they went to it. So it became viral. Nobody was stumbling on another own. That's how you get more exposure from what you've got is you force feed it in front of your target clients until they're like, dude, I've seen your Forbes article six times. I got it. Do you have any press or have you received any press about any of your customers? Like a customer using your tool and benefiting from it. So out of the 200 customers, you can probably find 15 to 20 that are raving fan customers that have amazing testimonials or they're just like, great, Kayston, I want you to take company abc, that's in Dallas, and, and get the newspaper, magazine, bloggers, whatever, to do a story, preferably print, about how that business benefited using your software. So the story is about them and the benefit they got from using the software and empowering their teams. It has to be something that transfers so that all businesses understand the value of leveraging their software. Right. There's an old. And I would, I would have a title or a subtitle of every press article that is something like this. A shovel doesn't dig a hole. A shovel is merely a tool. If you don't know what to do with the tool, it's useless. Your software is useless unless people know how to get the most value from your software. Here's how our software helped these companies get the most value. And the lesson is your company can get more value from your software. So you got to get company ABC Press about them in Dallas and the stories how that company got value from software and how your company can too. You can take that same story and get it about company 1, 2, 3 in Chicago. You can do that same story about company XYZ in Boston. It's the same different day. We got 5200 individual unique stories at 1-800-got junk. They were all the same five stories, one was the genesis story. How Brian started the company, saw McDonald's drive thru, saw a truck, started company. We had the overcoming adversity of the hero's journey. How we struggled, how he failed, how he almost lost the business, quit his job, whatever. How he overcame that adversity. It inspires, it educates. We had stories about our customers, we had our leveraging of technology stories, and we had our culture stories. That's it. We had five stories and we landed 5,200 individuals. The people in Dallas didn't read the Chicago stories. The ones in Chicago didn't read the San Francisco stories. Oprah's story was the same one that ran in the Boston Globe about a different guy. It was a pack rat. We cleaned his house, we made him happy, we made him cry. Done. Same story as on Oprah. So. But then what you do with the stories is you push them in front of your customers until they're like, Mac Martin, please don't send me any more stories. I get it. Well, then why aren't you using us? As we're doing this video which is being recorded, I have this camera sitting slightly off to the side and getting B roll. So Now I have two different videos of me doing the same stuff. DJI Pocket 3. It's a $600 camera. This isn't super professionally done. I'm sitting in a packaged office right now in Kelowna bc. But I also do one call every month. I do one call a month and they do one hour call with me and they ask me questions and I answer them off the top of my head. They take all of the answers of mine, they slice them into videos, they caption them and they post them on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. For me, it doesn't cost me a lot to do that. I don't have to think of the content. They just ask me random questions. And then your team can push that content in front of everybody or your team can actually share that on emails on LinkedIn. The goal isn't to become like an Alex Hermosi or Tai Lopez. That's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is for the 50 core decision makers, 50 people or 100 people. Can you keep pushing videos in front of them so that you become this credible thing? And they believe that more because he said it's more like reality tv. You're not trying to do this to become like the next great American thought leader. Foreign gut reaction is it might be slightly changing your messaging so that your marketing is a Little bit more polarizing so that the only people you're attracting are the ones that are ready to buy, because there's no point in bringing all these people in and spending time when they're not ready to buy yet. One of my biggest lessons in marketing was 1986. I went to a home show for college pro painters in Sudbury, and I ended up with, like, 100 leads. It was roughly about 100 leads, and I categorized them as, like, a, B and C priority. Like, which ones were really ready to get their houses painted? Of the hundred leads, none of the C's got their house painted that summer. I don't even know if any of the bees got their house painted summer, and only about, like, eight of the A's got their house painted. But the amount of time and effort I spent on the B's and C's was a huge waste of time. I felt good about the hundred leads until I realized I wasted all my time on that. So I think if you can polarize a little bit more and just show them, like, you know, like, don't even. Like, it's kind of like if you need to ask the price, you shouldn't be coming into the store. Like, don't come into her maze. If you're not ready to spend five grand, like, you're the wrong person. Like, put a sign out front that says, you know, 100, you know, entrance fee or $500 entrance fee. Like, then you'll have the right people coming into your store. It's one of the reasons why, Kate, I like having price upfront, too. Like, I like to. Actually, some people will have their landing page and they have people call them, and then they get on a call and they're like, oh, my God, they get sticker shock. Here's the price right at the top of my CEO alliance website. I've got the price right now. Like, it's just like, here's the price. I don't even want a lead from somebody who's like, oh, my God. I thought it would be, like, 500 bucks. You just wasted minutes of my life. So because you only have three inputs. People, time, and money. You only want to spend the people, time and money on the people that have the highest quick roi.