Exclusive interview with bestselling author Allan Dib

My friends, there is a difference between growing and scaling, and I think most people don't get it. Most people try to grow when really we want to scale. So what's the difference? Growing is where it takes more resources to get more output, and scaling is where it takes less resources, less input to get more output. And that's why Allan Dib, my buddy from down under, has joined me today to talk about this in the marketing front. So Allan, it's Great to, as always, great to see you.

Hey, Mike, pleasure to be on. So good to connect.

Congratulations on your brand new book, Lean Marketing.

Thank you.

Let's dig right into it. What is the core premise of this book?

Look, the premise of this book is that we can actually do less but get a much bigger result. And, you know, I don't, I'm not as prolific as you. I don't pump out books all the time. I write a book. I heard a quote by Seth Godin. He said, I only ever write a book when I absolutely have to. And, you know, Um, I feel like it's so needed right now because every book we read, every podcast we listen to, everything is telling us to do more, to spend more, to do more complicated stuff, to post more often. And it's just exhausting and it's just not practical for most business owners. So for me, finding a way that we can do less but get a much bigger result, uh, that's really been my work over the last 5 years with entrepreneurs in our, in our various programs.

Yeah, that is the definition of leverage. Do less to get more.

Exactly.

To your point, the mentality has been like, you know, you're not running enough ads, you got to run more ads, you got to make more spend.

Yeah.

And I think we see some people, some names that seem to be successful in that route.

Yeah.

But my perception is it requires a lot of money. So can you have that big impact, whatever that means, big exposure by doing less? And if so, give me some practical ways to digest this?

Yeah. So if we, if we want to get a bigger result with fewer inputs, we need leverage, right? So, and leverage is basically a force multiplier. So if I was to want to smash down a brick wall, well, you could do it with your bare hands. Maybe it would hurt a lot, take a long time, and be very, very demanding on you. But if you had the right tool, you had a sledgehammer, you could do that in a few seconds very, very easily. So In a similar way, I want to find the right tools, the right assets, the right processes that are going to help you get a much bigger result for your inputs when it comes to marketing. And so that's really what I talk about, lean marketing. That's what we've been talking about with our clients over the last few years and getting massive results where we're doing fewer things, but we're getting much, much bigger force multipliers out of them. So we're getting much bigger results because we're using leverage. Thinking and leveraged actions in our marketing.

Yeah. Your subtitle is More Leads, More Profit, Right? With Less Marketing.

That's exactly right.

Yeah. So I want some of the practical applications now. Let's say I want to enhance my lead flow. That's the most common question I get from people that I'm working with. Where do I get started in getting this leverage?

So one of the— I outlined 9 principles of lean marketing in the book and won't go through each one, but one of the core, the very first one, it's about creating marketing that's genuinely so valuable that someone would potentially pay to receive it. So if you think about it, like there are paid newsletters now that you might pay $99 up to like even $500 a month to receive. So they're publishing information so valuable that people actually do pay for it. So in a very similar way, I want everyone to think about their marketing. Is your marketing annoying? Is it interrupting people? Is it like spammy? Is it stuff that people kind of like feel bad when they receive? Or is it like super valuable? Like people would literally pay money to receive that type of marketing. So if it's kind of, if it's in the first bucket, if it's that annoying interrupting kind of stuff, well, that's stuff that's gonna be hugely inefficient. It's gonna be what they call in sales and marketing a numbers game. You know, we're gonna hit 1,000 people and one of them might, open or buy or do something. So you're going to have to spend an enormous amount of resource to get any kind of result, which is what most people are telling us. They're telling us to run more ads, send more often, post more often, all of that sort of stuff, because they're treating it like a numbers game. We're going to send out a whole bunch of spam and we hope that one or two will, will respond. But what I, what I'm— a core premise of lean marketing is we want to make our marketing so valuable that people just want to receive it. People want to see your newsletter, people want to see your social content, people want to share it. And so that makes your marketing so much more efficient because we're building a lot of goodwill with the audience. So the audience, not only does the audience want to receive it, they want to share it, they want to be part of it. And so that's gonna make your marketing so, so much more efficient. So that's, that's a key premise of the book is how do we create marketing so valuable that people actually want to receive it?

And how do we convert from if we were the prior model Aka myself, where it's interruption marketing. How do we convert to consumption marketing? Because now people are primed saying, oh, it's another one from Mike. I'll just ditch it. What do I do to make the conversion over to something that people desire?

Well, I mean, I think you're one of the people that's really mastered that, Mike. I mean, I see your emails, I see your social posts. I always open because it's usually entertaining, it's usually helpful. It's something that that, you know, I usually learn something or I'm entertained by it or I'm inspired by it. And so that's, that's a lot of what we want to do. So I outline a few different specific tactics in the book. One tactic I talk about is what I call a flagship piece of content, a flagship asset in your marketing infrastructure. So what a flagship asset is, it's something that you're famous for in your target market or in your niche, something that provides a lot of value that helps reveal invisible prospects. I'll give you a tangible example for my business, and I suspect in yours too, Mike. Your book is, or your books in your case, your flagship marketing asset. And so because of my book, every single day I get invites to speak somewhere, I get invites to be on a podcast, I get people asking to join one of our programs. So I'm not pushing, I'm not cold calling, I'm not annoying, I'm not interrupting. It's all coming inbound because of this marketing asset. And, you know, my book, The One Page Marketing Plan, that was written years and years ago, and every single day it's generating lead flow into the business because it's a valuable asset in the business. And, you know, I think you've experienced similar stuff too. So really a core premise of your flagship marketing asset is, can it, does it provide a lot of value? Will it reveal invisible prospects? And what I mean by invisible prospects is, so We now, like, I know that someone who subscribes to my email list or reads my book or whatever, they're now someone who wants to improve their marketing. So they've revealed, they put their hand up, reveal themselves as a potential prospect and say, hey, look, I'm potentially interested in what you've got. Whereas, you know, a visible prospect is someone we can easily get a list of. So for example, lawyers in Texas, we could easily get a list of lawyers in Texas. They're a visible prospect, but someone with, who needs help with marketing, someone who's got back pain, someone who needs therapeutic massage their invisible prospects and we need them to reveal themselves. So flagship asset is super powerful for doing that.

I love that. And what's interesting about a book is people are willing to depart with money. Is that a definition of really effective marketing if people are willing to pay for it?

Totally. Totally. Look, I mean, you and I know when, when, uh, we sell books, I mean, we're never gonna become billionaires from selling books, but really books lead to other things and book, book readers tend to be very highly qualified prospects because, you know, they've spent hours and hours with your material. And presumably if they've gotten to the end or maybe even halfway through the book, they're agreeing with a lot of your premise. So when someone in your team, you know, a salesperson in your team or whatever gets on a call with them, they're not like, okay, who are you? What is this about? You know, why should I listen? They're like, wow, I read the book, really resonated with me. I really connect with this concept. I have this issue as well. Tell me more about how we can take our journey together go further.

Now we have a local repair shop down the street here. They repair cars. Yeah. And I can't envision him sending out newsletters or something that would engage his audience. But maybe I'm wrong. When you're in a more transactional common business, are there other ways to differentiate or do we always default to adding value through marketing?

Absolutely. You, you, you are wrong. Okay, good, good. Look, a lot of people worry that, hey, if I'm in a boring business, you know, I'm an accountant, I'm a lawyer, I'm a mechanic, I'm whatever, content is not something that, that I can really do, or a flagship asset is not really something that I can do. And you know what I mean? When I look at some of the people that I follow, and I don't know, maybe that's a reflection on, on me, but they're in boring business. Like, I follow a guy on TikTok, he's a tax lawyer and he calls himself the crypto accountant, you know, and I don't trade a lot of crypto or whatever, but, you know, his content is interesting because he's talking about what do I do about capital gains tax? What do I do about this? He tells stories about, hey, I had a client who was being audited. The auditor was, the tax office was asking this question, that question, and this is how we navigated that situation. So for someone who's an ideal prospect for you do, they're interested in what you've got. Now, someone who's not an ideal prospect, someone who doesn't care about what you do, well, yeah, of course that content's gonna be totally boring to them, totally irrelevant. So our content is for people who are ideal clients. Now, if I'm an auto repair shop, you know, and especially if I specialize in some kind of particular type of car or whatever, now you've got my attention because I'm following along with what you're doing. So showing even just the behind the scenes, I don't know about you, Mike, but some of them, the content that's gotten us the most views, the most interaction is when we show people behind the scenes, okay, this is how we run our own business. This is how Slack runs in our operation. This is how we've set up our HubSpot. This is how we do our email marketing. People absolutely love that. And look, I don't think there could be probably more, a more boring business than what we do. I mean, we sit behind a computer and send emails and write content and stuff like that. We're not skydiving or anything like that.

No, nothing exciting. No, not even working on cars.

Totally.

What about the company that needs to generate leads right now? I need some business in the door now. Maybe I don't have time to develop content marketing to build this rapport. Are there ways to get a burst of opportunity that's still lean?

Totally. Again, content is part of your whole infrastructure. So what I really want people to think about is how do I build a system. Now, part of the system might be inbound and content, which you're absolutely right, it does take time to develop, but it's totally fine to do outbound outreach as long as it's super helpful. You know, I've, you know, me just like you, if I look at my spam folder, there's a million messages saying I'm gonna help you get leads or SEO or traffic or whatever. And you know, of course we just delete those or let them stay in the spam folder or whatever. but I've also got very valuable outreach. Like, I had a guy reach out to me and say, hey, came across, and he, he recorded a personal Loom video. So, you know, of course I'm gonna open that. There's a video of my website, and, you know, he said, hey, I've been going through your website. I noticed you've got this plugin but not that one, and, you know, I'd be happy to help you get that installed because that's gonna increase your conversions or your site speed or whatever else. So, is it helpful? Is it personalized? Is it something that's gonna actually help me get a result? So that's something that you literally could do today. So if you could go on LinkedIn or find people who, you know, you could potentially help and send them a personalized and valuable outreach. So send them something that's actually going to genuinely help them and, and get that result. So I think about it like, you know, if you are, you are walking through a, a mall and, you know, people have got that, you know, piece of bread or muffin or something like that, and you can have a free sample and taste it, and you're like, wow, that's pretty good, I might get a dozen of those, or whatever, right?

So yeah, that is actually a brilliant example. Yeah. And you did this personally, um, when you were leading up to launching Lean Marketing. Yeah, you sent me, I'm sure some other authors, a really cool book page holder. I don't even know how to explain because it wasn't a bookmark, It was, uh, it's a book stand.

Yeah.

You also personalize it. It has my name on the front.

Yeah.

I don't think that there's any of your logo or any of your material on there.

No.

Um, and what's remarkable about that is it makes it to me at least more memorable. I know that came from Alan Dib. It sits, uh, next to my desk, uh, not this office, but my other office. Yeah. Every time I look at it, I'm like, oh, that was from Alan. Yeah. It seems like we maintain this mental inventory and we don't need to be promotional with our logos and so forth.

Yeah.

When it comes to this personalization, what is your perspective of how to maximize the return or benefit of doing it?

Yeah. You know, it's, it's a concept that I got from our mutual friend John Ruhland, who wrote Giftology, excellent book. But, you know, if I send you a crappy mug or a pen or something with my logo on it, that's not really a gift for you. That's, that's really advertising and it's pretty poor advertising and you'll probably look at it, you'll, you might toss it in the trash or whatever. Whatever. But if it's got your name on it, you know that I've thought about you, I've personalized it for you, and it's something, something beautiful that you might keep, um, then that has a lot more meaning than, you know, if I sent you some cheap thing with, with my logo on it. Because you don't care about my logo or my, you know, my name or whatever. You care about your name, right? You care about, you know, something, someone having thought about you, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let's talk about some other marketing strategies that you contain within the book. Is there some other tips that you can share with us? Give us an insider access.

Totally. So a lot of the book talks about things that are outside of the scope of what we traditionally think about marketing. So I talk about how to retain customers, how to upsell, how to, how to convert as well. And so a lot of people think that like Well, that's up to the customer service team. That's up to the support team. That's, you know, that's nothing to do with me. And so a second principle of lean marketing that I talk about is that marketing needs to be integrated throughout your whole entire customer journey, meaning not just, hey, we create this product, we then sprinkle some pixie dust marketing over the top and we sell lots of it. That's where marketing kind of goes to die. Because often a company will spend a lot of money creating something and then trying to find a customer for it. Whereas what we want to do is we want to figure out who are our people, who are people that we want to serve, you know, and having a super clear picture of that. You know, there's a whole, there's a, it's no mistake that the One Page Marketing Plan and pretty much all of what we do in our consulting starts with being very, very clear around who your target market is because when we are very clear about them, we know how we can best serve them. We know what they're struggling with. We know what, you know, what their dreams, what their desires, what their fears are. And so we can then really, really talk to them with a message that really lands with them. So, you know, for example, you know, it's very, very clear who you serve, Mike. It's entrepreneurs who may, you know, often solopreneurs, they're potentially struggling and they need to figure out, you know, leadership, you know, they need to figure out marketing, they need to figure out how to do their accounting, all of those things that you help them with. And, you know, it's pretty, you know, I could easily recognize somebody who I know one of your books would help because it's very, very clear who your target market is. And so similarly with everybody else, you want to be super clear who your target market is. If you describe it to me, I should be able to say, oh great, this person's a great referral to you. So that's really where it starts. So So I say that because everything throughout your whole customer journey needs to have marketing embedded. So for example, if your customer service team knew that, hey, there's an opportunity to upsell someone to the next version of the program or whatever, that's gonna increase your customer lifetime value. If your sales team was genuinely helpful and people looked forward to speaking to them rather than avoiding them or not wanting to be spammed by them, well then that's gonna massively increase your conversion rates. So all of these things that are embedded through your whole customer journey are gonna be helpful in your marketing metrics, in your lifetime value, in your customer acquisition cost. All of those metrics that marketing measures, uh, well, they're massively affected by things outside of what's traditionally considered marketing. So that's another core principle of the book is we wanna really embed the marketing all throughout the business. And that's really a core principle of Lean. So where this book comes from, so I've, this book Lean Thinking by James Womack has been massively influential in the world of manufacturing. It talks about how to implement lean in a manufacturing business. This book, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, very influential in the startup space, how to build a startup without massive investment and, you know, using a minimum viable product. So what I wanted to do with my book Lean Marketing was really create the category-defining book on how to implement lean through into marketing. And so the whole, the whole idea is that where we've got marketing embedded throughout the whole entire customer life cycle and that we're making that way, we're making marketing more effective, more efficient, and lower cost.

I have one final question. It's my great conundrum and it's this: when do you know that it's time to turn off or stop marketing or it's actually time to double down. And I'll give a little fodder for this.

Sure.

I've had people say to me, Mike, you're not doing enough of it. You got to do more. That's why it's not working. And other people said, no, you're blowing money. It's good money after bad. Is there a way to distinguish those two?

There is. So the, the, the, the two metrics that— and I talk about this in the book— the two metrics that matter most above all else. And really, there's one metric that stands above, you know, there's a million metrics, as you know, that we can measure as markers, click-through rate, open rates, all of that. But really what it comes down to is lifetime value. What's a customer worth to us over our lifetime? And then the second metric that's really related to that is how much does it cost us to acquire a customer, right? And so if our lifetime value is high, then we can spend more to acquire a customer. We can spend more to delight a customer. We can spend more to make the experience amazing for them. Whereas if our lifetime value is low, we're gonna have to scrimp and save and figure out ways that we can acquire a customer and then we're going to have to scrimp and save in the customer experience where, you know, we're not going to be able to deliver exactly what we want. So we know that we're on the right track when lifetime value is increasing, when it's high, when we can afford now to spend money on a salesperson, on marketing, on all of that stuff. That's how we know to double down and, and keep investing. When, when it's shrinking, when our lifetime value is low, when our churn rate is high, well, we've got some things to fix up. Up before we really doubled down on marketing. And, and that's a really good point, actually. A lot of times when we start working with someone, they're really excited and they want to work on new campaigns and ads and all of that. And there's nothing wrong with that, but a lot of that is just amplification. And if we're amplifying a message that's kind of a crappy message that people don't want to hear, that makes things worse, not better. It's kind of like, um, if you're a singer, right, and we amplify you with a microphone and amplifier and you're a terrible singer, that just makes things worse. You're now a loud bad singer, right? So, um, so what we what we want to do is make sure that our target market is perfect. We've got product market fit, we've got a message that's worth amplifying and then boom, we're gonna, we're gonna hit the accelerator and double down with all of those tactics and we want to watch those metrics, lifetime value and cost of customer acquisition.

Allan Dib, you are an authority in the marketing space, literally one of my top 3 favorite authors in this space. I implore Everyone listening in or watching in gets a copy of this book. I got my copy already. Where's the best place for folks to go to get a copy?

Yeah, available obviously where everywhere books are sold, Amazon. We'll, I'll share a link with you as well, but everywhere books are sold, Lean Marketing.

Lean Marketing, get it by Allan Dib. We'll have it in the show notes too. Allan, thanks for sharing these insights. I know we just scratched the surface and there's so much more in this book, but I really appreciate what you shared me today.

It's my pleasure. Thank you, Mike.

Be well, brother.