Revolutionizing Marketing Strategy: No BS Approach with Dave Mastovich

Welcome everyone to this edition of Chats with Jason. I am of course your host, Jason S. Bradshaw. The show that helps you transform the experience to transform your business. Today's episode is going to spark your curiosity when it comes to marketing and get you acting in a way that will attract more customers and help you retain more customers. Our guest is Dave Masevich. He he's a multi time bestselling author, consultant and keynote speaker. An absolute legend. Dave, it's great to have you on the show today.

Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the discussion.

Yeah, same here. Now, not sure whether the the show should come with a PG rating. Given the title of your latest book, no Bullshit Marketing, do you want to tell us a little bit about the new book?

Sure. So the reason that I put this book together was for the past couple of decades I've noticed that leaders, either on the corporate side or entrepreneurs, weren't fully able to leverage marketing. And I would hear them complain about marketing and say that it was frustrating, bewildering, expensive, or something that they didn't want to really do. They got sick in the stomach when they thought about marketing. I heard that so many times and I realized it was because they weren't fully leveraging real marketing based on the science and math driving the art, based on what I call the six target markets that you need to influence the six right fit target markets. And so I developed the no bullshit marketing system based on all of my work over decades of doing this and doing turnarounds and growth opportunities and put it into a book that is short, concise and all anecdotes, because I believe anecdotes and analogies are what we remember the most when someone's telling us a story. So that's the essence of the book and that's the why behind it.

I often find when I'm talking, especially to entrepreneurs that they either hate sales and love marketing and when I say love marketing, love the idea of marketing, it distracts them from sales or they just struggle to make sales because they're not doing that marketing base. So when it comes to marketing, there's a lot of different views out there around how you should approach it. Now, coming from a corporate background and an entrepreneurial background, having started my first business at 14 and then working for some large companies, I've had the privilege of seeing both sides. However, I can't ever forget that I was sitting in the room at UCLA's Edison School of Management and the professor said, why does it take you so long to get anything done in Business. And I had recently just taken over a new marketing team and I was challenging them. Why do we need to spend 33 to six months on one campaign, like on developing the campaign when our competitors can do it in half the time or faster? So why do you think people get so hung up on perfecting the campaign? Or a campaign's got to take six months or a year of strategy. What's stopping people from getting it done faster?

Great question. I see it as there's two major markets that you already mentioned. One perspective is a corporate background and the other is an entrepreneur background. The corporate background, they tend to know marketing and they realize that marketing's needed, but they also think they know when they're in a CEO and huge CFO position. They think they know it because they watched a Super bowl ad. So they can be dangerous that way. On the entrepreneur side, they have that bias you mentioned. They have the sales bias because they've had to sell to start their company from scratch. So they want everything to be completely trackable and to be sales oriented. Now here's the thing. Marketing is an effectiveness function while sales is an efficiency function. So entrepreneurs are led by efficiency functions. They're constantly trying to get efficiency out of everything. Corporate CFOs. If you know how many times I had corporate CFOs redlining my stuff, they are used to efficiency functions, whereas marketing is an effectiveness function. So you have this bias by the leaders of corporate and entrepreneur leaders. That's the first problem. Then the second piece is when you get involved in it, we marketers are part of the problem because we get so hung up on the creative. So that's what leads to. What you described is you've got these two different types of leaders that both can bring frustration to the marketer and then the marketer is perpetuating it because they are going through these gyrations and focusing on the creative or the ad, the pay per click or whatever, as opposed to looking at it from a marketing strategy that drives sales through marketing and to have the science and math drive the creative art, then a CFO will actually like you.

Yeah. So let's talk a little about the science and maths of marketing because it's not a term you hear a lot. Of course, every marketer does do a post campaign report that has some pretty graphs in it and says what they needed to say.

Yes.

What do you mean by the science and maths of marketing?

So the first thing that I will challenge all of your listeners to do is to systematically. That's the key word systematically gather insights about their company and about their target audiences. And so that's where the science and math comes into play. So the first thing that I find from company after company, regardless of size or industry, is they really don't know what their advantage is. They don't know what their competitive advantage is. They don't know the one reason why people buy the one differentiator. They don't. They think they do. If I go into a leadership team of say five VPs and a CEO to simplify their types and I get them each one by one and they don't know that the others can't hear what they're saying, I will get a different answer, slightly different answer for what they see as their advantage or their key differentiator from each of them. And many times they'll even honestly say, I don't know for sure. That's because they've not systematically gathered insights about themselves. And it doesn't have to be, as you said, doesn't have to be like when I was at UPMC building a system, healthcare system from less than 1 billion with a B to 10 billion in a few years. We could spend millions on research, but most companies can't. So you can do this qualitatively. You can systematically gather insights that goes beyond the instincts of four or five people on a leadership team. By talking to employees, by talking to centers of influence or referral sources, people who are raving fans, by talking to current and past customers, you can get systematically gather insights. So now you're starting to put a little bit of science and math to it. The math then really comes into play in analyzing your own data, which should be gold but is actually garbage. Now you're going to laugh, but when you go to work with a $10 million revenue company, you expect their data might be garbage. They might don't have it in a great setup, they're just tracking things. But I've gone into billion dollar companies where it's equally garbage when it could be gold. So you take three years of sales data and you begin to study that. And now you've got, if you've got that and that voice of the customer research. And the customer isn't just who buys customer sources and employees. When you take those two things, you've now got science and math behind building your growth marketing plan and outlining your right fit target audiences and then doing your storytelling.

There's a lot of gold there, especially around the amount of data organizations have that A, they tend not to do anything with which is your first call to action.

Right.

But secondly, actually being intentional around the data that you're collecting so that you can find the gold within it. And the one thing I would add to what you were just saying around getting feedback from different target audiences is how about asking those people that decided not to buy from you but instead buy from your competitors? Because unless you're walking into your local Whole Foods, the reality is most people shop around.

Right.

If you're buying a lettuce, maybe not, but. Or a bell pepper, maybe not, but if you're buying a car or buying a new computer, most people shop around. And I think there's a pile of information that we miss out on as marketers when we fail to ask what got you to consider us but made you walk away from us. Because that missing piece could be a double digit differentiator in terms of the performance of your bottom line.

Right, exactly. And there's just not enough gathering of those insights in a systematic way. And qualitative insights can still be systematic. If you're asking the same three or four at the most five open ended questions and you're tracking what's said, it has some systematic nature to it. It isn't just all instincts. And what ends up happening is far too often leaders use their instincts and we all have biases, including both you and I. So you need to not only get other people on your team, but then you need to hear what was said about you so that you can find out. We had one university that was struggling and we said, I want to talk to students who were accepted and didn't come and parents of students who were accepted and didn't come. And that ended up giving us gleaning the biggest insights for the marketing plan and the campaign. And they ended up having back to back record breaking classes in size and academic talent because of this type of insights that we gather. Those weren't the only insights we gather, but that's just one example to simplify it.

Yeah, I think it's a good reminder that if a college can take the time to listen to why someone's decided not to go to them after going through that process of applying, it's not like it's an easy process of something else.

Jason, when you said the people are shopping and here's the thing, in today's world, this has always been true. Robert Cialdini, Principles of Influence, the book Principle of Influence. Just a fantastic thought leader out of Stanford, seminal book. And he said this way before the time that we were pounded with Social media and all the access to the Internet that we have today. He said, people are going to know your weaknesses, so you need to address them. And this is so important because so few people have the courage to admit their personal weaknesses or their company's weaknesses, but they're out there anyway. Now, with the way we have access to data, we all know going in what we like and don't like about that company. If you don't address it and bring up that weakness, all they know is what they already perceived as the weakness. But if you come right at it and talk about it in your sales conversations and in your marketing and when you're on a podcast and when you're doing a social media post, when you address it and talk about, sometimes it's a misperception, sometimes it's untrue, but sometimes it is because we're not all things to all people. So using that principle of influence that people do know the weakness already, so you'd be better served to address it and tell that story and picking up.

On that, I don't think we need to be all things to all people either, but we need to know what we are.

Yes. And that goes back to not understanding your advantage. When you go in and talk to those leaders and you say, what's your advantage? First they go, what do you mean? So then I say, your competitive advantage, your unique differentiator, why people buy. I said, have you ever asked your customers these types of questions? What's the one reason why you first bought from us? Now you have to ask that because it might have been. If it's B2B, it might have been. My cousin was working there. Okay, but now what's the one reason why you're still buying from us? So now you've covered if they bought because their sister, their cousin, whatever, and you find why they first bought from you. You know, I heard about you guys from this way, and I still buy from you because you do this. I had someone say to me today on Zoom when we're recording the call, they said, you guys are so responsive. It's incredible to me how responsive the Mass Solutions team is. Now, I didn't get to ask, what's the one reason why you stick with us or you love us? But I'm pretty sure that they told me. Pretty sure they told me. So now when I'm on my next BD call, I can bring that example up and that's an anecdote. Remember I said at the beginning, Remember? Anecdotes and analogies. So that's just the way to do it. And that's you ask those kind of open ended questions and then this is key. Shut up and listen.

Don't write the answer for them in your mind. Listen to what they're actually saying. Now the first chapter in your latest book is why systematic referral source marketing is your untapped advantage. Now I know in that you specifically are looking at healthcare, but I would argue and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this referral source of marketing as actually being an untapped advantage for almost every industry out there. Because when was the last time a company you've bought from has asked you for a referral?

I agree. I was speaking to a group of CEOs and one person raised her hand and said I'm in a wealth management company. And what you described here in your book applies to us and we're not a healthcare company. I said thank you because look, I'm going to put health care on there because a lot of our business is health care and a couple of my major turnarounds were health care. But the reality is about 35% of our clients are not healthcare. 40% even. And we're doing this for every type of client because referral source marketing matters for a professional services firm big time architects, law firms, accounting firms and wealth management. But it also a manufacturer just got the phone with a precision mold company and tool and die company. And they are applying these tactics because most people have somebody at the company who's pretty strong at relationships. And that person now goes out and gets gathers some business at a smaller company. And the problem is we're now worried if that the old line, what if they get hit by a bus if that happens, all of that is not systematic. There's this law firm where two friends of mine are doing all the BD and they're fantastic at it. But we're doing is working with them to systematize that so that we see what type of people they're talking to and then we can mimic that with other people. We see how often they're talking to them. We can't replicate the skills of these two. They're natural business development people, rainmakers. But we can still bring systematic marketing to it so that there's other people can apply these tactics. And they might not be as good as them. Basketball wise. Not everyone's Stephen lebron. Your fifth guy still is pretty important. And so that's what you can do with your law firm or with your precision tool and die company or with your wealth management company is to apply. Just like you said, it can be applied to any industry.

Yeah. And I think it reinforces the old saying that you don't rise to your vision or to your dreams, but you fall or fail to the level of your systems in your business. And really, when I was looking through your book, you do reinforce that quite a lot. It's about how can you have a repetitive way of doing business focusing on the core customers to achieve, I would say, a predictable outcome. Not necessarily the same outcome every time, but a predictable outcome. Now, I really like you talk about the six target markets and current customers, prospective customers, but you also talk about current and potential employees. You don't see that a lot, especially from marketers. They're usually talking about external factors. Why are employees so important to the marketing mix?

I stumbled across this when we were building UPMC Health System. We had grown from about 15,000 employees to 50,000 employees in a short time. And I saw that the more that I could make each team member a de facto member of the marketing team. It was hugely powerful. And it was our differentiator. I would say it was our differentiator. And what we did was we realized that it's not just about having them tell a story in a positive way. It's about infusing the cultural messaging of the why of the company. Because that is the second piece of BTE marketing. First, it's that you want to get them saying something good about where they work. So let me take that for a second. When we're at a Christmas party, a holiday party, Labor Day party, whatever we're at, we want to talk about what we do. So we have a choice as leaders, you and I with our companies, is to say, how do we get them to say something positive? So we have to educate them, inform them. We have to listen to them when they complain, and we have to show them where their complaints are correct and what we're doing about it, and then show them where their misperceptions were. Because when they're at that Labor Day party, they're going to be asked how things are going at work. And you want them to say something positive. But the second thing is you want to infuse the cultural messaging because then they understand the why of the company. Then the third thing is you want to make sure that you improve communication up and down and across the organization because that improves productivity. So B2E marketing, business to employee marketing isn't just about recruiting. It's about retention, but it's about Results. Because your productivity is going to go up when you do that cultural messaging and you infuse the why. And when you improve communication from bosses to team members, productivity goes up. So that's why current and prospective employees are so important and why BTE marketing is a. Is pretty much a phrase we've developed and honed and talked about for about eight years because we believe so strongly in this business to employee marketing.

Yeah, I absolutely buy into what you were saying there. Most people would agree with you. My challenge to you is why do so many leaders just ignore the employee in the experience, the process?

I think that some, I think today, many aren't. I think they just don't have the means and the know how to do a better job of communicating. I think a lot of leaders really want to communicate the why and they want to communicate what makes that company different. And they want to communicate how they're doing things for the employees. And they haven't thought it through because remember, we started this talk by saying the bias that corporate people have about marketing and the bias that entrepreneurs have about marketing. Let's take those entrepreneurs. They're already biased about sales and not spending money on marketing. Now we're telling them, spend money on marketing to your employees and they give you a huh? And on the corporate side, they're used to it. They know it. They say internal communication is important, but they don't understand that, yes, it has to be the same way you market to employ to clients. When you market to a client, you don't go, hey, buy from us. You bombard us. I get bombarded. But guess what? It works. Sometimes I'm happy that I got hit with a ad when I went to a website because I'm like, yeah, I do mean to buy that. So we do that with customers all day long. Every company bombards them. But we don't think about having to have that same system to tell the message again and again. Know how? I don't think it's that they're apathetic and in the ivory Tower. Like 30 years ago, that was probably the case. 20 years ago, that was probably the case. But I think today most leaders are saying, I want to get these employees to buy in. I want to keep them happy. But they don't yet see that it has to be the same way. They talk to customers, current and prospective customers. That's the difference.

Yeah, I think that that's fair. And potentially employee expectations have shifted faster than our collective ability to refresh our approach to internal comms. Because you know, certainly an element of internal comms comes from a place of compliance as opposed to a place of inclusion and culture building. I'm sure we'll get there. Right. There's hope yet and there's definitely a new group of leadership coming through. Now we all have it as marketers, we all have stories, we all have a that one campaign or that one activity that we did we wish would get buried somewhere deep in the dark ocean. And then we have that one campaign that was just amazing success and we wish we could replicate it a million times over. What I've known to be true is in both of those cases there will be a really strong learning. So as a marketer, my question to you is what is the biggest learning you've had either from a success or a failure that has changed your perspective in how you've approached marketing going forward?

That's a fantastic one to think about. I'll take a couple of them. When I was doing these bigger company turnarounds, what I learned was that the things that ended up making the biggest impact were often when I would get to talk to a group and just let them say what they thought, listen and come back as non defensive as you possibly can. So when as we got more and more with social, I think the same thing applies with social media. Whenever you have the chance to communicate on a social channel is the best people out there doing it, the best companies out there doing it that are doing what I just said. I can remember going into board meetings or community meetings when we were doing these turnarounds of these health care systems which were the largest employer in each community that we would go to. That was typically the case in the turn of the century. And I would go in and I would ask a question, let them just go and say all their stuff and then I would calmly come back and say the case of what was really going on and we would make traction. Now you can do that with a tweet and you can do that with a response back and forth on a LinkedIn string. So I think the biggest thing that I learned way back then was it's amazing how powerful that is because even before social that would still spread. That would still spread in like 2005, you still had things spreading because people just talked. So I think that was one lesson that I learned. The second is that I just continually see how significant the systematic beginning of insights is early in my career. It was something I thought was cool and it worked three, four, five times like you said. Now I just see again and Again is if you do that voice of the customer. And all six of those target audiences that I mentioned are the customer. If you do that, plus look at the data and then look at your competitors that systematically of gathering insights can drive everything that a marketer does. And anyone listening to this is saying, of course that's logical. How often do you really do what I just said? That's the key. How often do you really go to a client, say, name your top two competitors, and we limit it to two because we're usually doing a strategy two day strategy session with 8, 10 leaders. So we limit it to two and it ends up coming back, that three will get multiple mentions. And we come back and we then go analyze those three for them and come back. And you'd be amazed, Jason, that when we show them on screen what they're saying, what competitor one is saying, what competitor two is saying, they actually look amazed at, wow, we're all saying the same thing. And that's because no one at those organizations is taking the time to go and do that on a monthly basis, which doesn't take long and tell everybody, look, we're saying the same thing. Our blog headings are almost the same thing. That's all hugely powerful, but it's going back to systematically gathering insights again and again. So that's the biggest thing that I learned.

Yeah. Not just doing one pulse trick, but rather having that system of continuous curiosity, I would say for sure. Fantastic. What's the easiest way for people to follow your work, to get a copy of the book and stay in touch with you?

Amazon has no bullshit marketing Dave Mastovich on it, but I also have David Mmastovich dot com. I tend to use LinkedIn more than the other channels just because I'm a B2B B2E B2C guy. So I tend to do that more than Facebook or anything else. So I'm Dave Mastovich on LinkedIn. If anybody from your show gets the book and can give me a review, that's fantastic. Would love to hear their feedback as well. Anything they can tell me about it. It's been amazing. When we hit number one bestseller and just the reviews we're getting and when I speak the comments and things that are people are saying. This moved me, that movie I had one person called us, she goes, when I read your book, she was, I started tearing up and I was like, my book wasn't intended to make you cry. And she said, no, I know what we need to do and we're not there yet. She runs a Non profit. She said, I just felt like so we had to do so much. I said, no, that's not it at all. It's just to get you started. It's got you thinking different. And that's the first time I had that happen, Jason, where someone was saying, I read your book and I cried.

It's a joy of being an author, right? You get all sorts of feedback and sometimes it's left of field and quite touching. I just want to highlight to the audience the book no Bullshit Marketing does talk a lot about health care, but, and correct me Dave, if I'm completely off track here, but when I was reading through the book and I haven't quite finished it yet, but when I was reading through the book, I could apply all of the lessons to the half a dozen industries I've worked in and none of them were healthcare.

As someone who produces content, author and so forth, had to make a decision because in today's day and age you do want to try to make sure you're as segmented as you possibly can. So when I wrote the book I had some guilt there because my consultants and publishers and everything said let's put this tagline that ties it to healthcare. So there's a lot of times I just say the book's called no bullshit marketing because those things are specific to healthcare. But all 17 of those contrarian ways can apply to a wealth management company, an accounting firm, a manufacturer, any type of business. So you're correct.

Yeah, it's definitely going to last the test of time for sure. Now Dave, what's one thing our listeners today should start doing to improve the way they go about marketing, Their effectiveness of marketing, if you like.

Let's take one quick example. So you have a lot of people that are having to wear multiple hats in marketing regardless of size of company and they sometimes feel they can't get to stuff. So when I say systematic to gather insights to be able to define your advantage and then tell the story about that advantage, that's all key. Remember I said people struggle to define their advantage. If you have to do it qualitatively yourself and with your team and you just ask a couple of open ended questions to systematically gather insights. What's the one thing you change about mass solutions? What's the one reason you stay with mass solutions? What's the one thing that makes mass solutions different? Yes, those three open ended questions and you listen and track it and talk to a couple dozen people. They're going to tell me what mass solutions is special about. And they're going to also point out something. If I talk to 10 people and ask them what's the one thing they changed, I will guarantee you one answer will come up three or four times and then it'll be a bunch of ones. So I have to go, whoa, whatever came up three or four times, I better start working on changing. So that's something that you can do regardless of your situation. Doesn't matter if you're the chief marketing officer or the marketing specialist or the entrepreneur that owns the company. You can do qualitative insight gathering, and then that can help define what your advantage really is. Then convey that advantage internally first and then start pushing it out externally to tell your story.

I love that. Ask the same questions consistently. We've actually got a data set that you can compare and contrast with a message that you didn't say but was there was. Don't ask different people different questions, because then you're not going to be able to do anything with that data. Ask two to three questions, something that we could change or should change. And if you ask that consistently enough, you'll get a data set that you can really help drive your business. Dave, I think that's a fantastic insight and I certainly hope that anyone listening today takes it on board. Because just asking three questions can have a powerful. Create a powerful advantage for your business if you do it systematically. Right? That's what you're saying?

Yes.

Fantastic. Dave, thanks so much for giving up your time for me and the audience today. I really appreciate it.

Thank you for having me.