The Anti-Marketing Method to Turn What You Have into Sales

Bom dia. There we go. Tiago Ferreira has helped me to speak Portuguese. And today we're going to Lisbon to meet a young man who has transitioned from Google, from having a big corporate career to helping knowledge-based entrepreneurs and high-ticket coaches to generate leads. And we're going to talk about his anti-marketing method. We're going to talk about why so many of us, including me, struggle to define what we do, which is actually one of the sources for a lack of leads and sales. So we're going to talk about how he solves that problem for his clients, talk about what doesn't work on his own journey of becoming an entrepreneur and his favorite book. And then he's going to tell us some extra things about Portugal as well. Tiago, welcome to the show.

Jim, enormous pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me as a guest.

No, it's my pleasure because you're my first guest from Portugal. So thanks for giving me a bit of tip on how to say hello in Portuguese. Thank you for that. But you've managed to make the transition from big corporate and working in marketing strategy for Google and having that experience and transitioning into you running your own business and experiencing the challenges and the obstacles there. We're going to talk about that in a moment. But first of all, when you work with coaches, Tiago, tell us about your framework because you have what you call the Anti-Marketing Method. Tell us what that is and why it helps coaches and value-added service providers to generate leads.

Yes. So that term originated due to my own experience. So I came from Google. I had all these very complex advertisement systems that I was being implementing, of course, in big corporations. But when I came back to Portugal to try to help the local businesses, the local entrepreneur culture, I hit against a brick wall because I was trying to implement complex strategies in my own business, right? Which is not very recommended to overcomplicate at the beginning. Creating your own business is very different than consulting very high, big corporations. And I was complicating my life and my own clients' lives. And so throughout the years, I've been simplifying that approach for myself and for my clients. And I reached this anti-marketing strategy, which is basically, using what you already have currently in your own world, basically your assets, your current contact lists, your current followers, your network to extract ideal clients for your own coaching, mentorship, consultancy business. And yeah, that basically works by leveraging what you have. So, but I can start getting like to in a structure of how it actually works and how I would go through.

Yeah, Tiago, I'd love to do that. Yeah, Tiago Faria, I'd love to do that because I think many of us, especially those of us later on in life, you know, uh, I'm in my 50s and I've run bigger companies and consulted for large companies with my PR agency, and those strategies that work for, you know, 200, 300 people companies do not work for startups.

Yeah.

You know, growing companies. So we apply larger strategies that are not appropriate for smaller businesses. So tell us really the workflow that you deploy and how you simplify marketing.

Yes. So first of all, I ask everyone and myself to start ignoring what the famous internet gurus and influencers are trying to impose on us, like you're one funnel away or you have to use these very advanced funnels and ad strategies. Put that away for a second and try to go back to the internet, not internet even, like the marketing basics, which are timeless, right? Strategies that you can always implement. It will always work in any context, any ad platform, any whatever. So, and it all starts with being very specific about who you actually serve. You can call it niche, right? niche. I don't know how you would actually say it.

The Americans call it niche, don't they? But we call it niche in— Either way, the segmentation, what we used to call a market segmentation, an ideal customer profile.

Which is nothing more than who is the specific group of people you're helping, which context they share, like something in common, needs, objectives, and which specific problem are you going to help overcome? Right? So that's the starting point. And you first understand that clearly and define it clearly. So who can you help the best? Who have you served and generate profound transformations? And then you try to understand a bit better about those group of people instead of being in our own mind and trying to guess everything what they need. I recommend everyone to actually interview at least 5 to 10 of people that you think are in that specific niche to understand what are their needs, what is actually suffering daily, How does their day look like? How do they feel? What do they ambition to have? What are their objectives? And because with that, you'll have already a lot of fuel to add to your marketing. You have actual words, people saying what they want you to give them, and then use that in your communication. So that's the starting point for you to think about, okay, what do I actually need? What can I create to give them what they want? And so you start creating your own offer around all those information that you collected. Which gives you many, many multiple wins just by interviewing people. You first craft an offer that will be very easy to sell because you're giving them what they need and want. And then you're also creating already connections. Your first potential clients are already being open up and willing to work with you and participate in your journey because everyone wants to give you opinions, right? If you ask them, look, I'm trying to create an offer about this, would you be willing to talk to me during 10 minutes just to I want your feedback. I want your opinion. People love to give their opinions, right? So you'll for sure talk to 5 to 10 people about that. You start creating your own offer and then you have the choice, the opportunity to go back to those people and say, look, I created this that helps this problem that you told me about. What do you think about it? What's your opinion about it? And then many people will be interested because it actually solves the problem that they were mentioning to you. So you have already an opportunity to close clients there very easily. And then the second, the third thing. So first, talk to your niche. Second, create an offer around that. And third thing, which is also basics of marketing, is to create a proactive referral program basically so that people start helping you get clients for your own business. So you incentivize them some way, like giving them a commission. If you bring someone, I can give you a commission of 20%, for example. Or if you enter my program and another person enters, you both have you know, like a discount to come into my program. So, and like this, you start creating your own network of your own sales team. And that is highly motivated because they're compensated by it. And without doing much, almost no marketing, just talking to people, you might already have 3, 5, 7 high-ticket clients trying to, willing to work with you. And so that's the starting journey of the anti-marketing. There's other things you can do. I can mention about the— so you have your network of people, you talk to them, you have past clients that work with you, you can do the same process. And then look, I have this new program, what do you think about? So you already can collect clients that way. But you also have, for sure, have a follower list on your email list or social media. And I'm quite confident that you would have, if you have 2,000 people at least following you, you would have 3, to 7 high-ticket clients that would be willing to buy your new offer because it's very targeted, right? And you know those people very well. So if you create those kind of specific hand-raising posts that are, they're kind of popular nowadays, but many people still don't use it, which is simply ask, look, I'm looking for some, a group of people that are willing to reach this objective. If you're this, this, and this, I have a program for you. If you're interested, please. And that way it's very easily, if you create those kind of posts, you can extract ideal clients from your following list. And then you simply have a conversation with them, again, talking to people, chat with them, bring them to a sales call. And as you see, using your own assets, it's possible to kick off a very highly profitable business. And then you can replicate it obviously because your audience will grow. your network of referrers will grow and they will incentivize each other, et cetera. So this is the overview of the anti-marketing approach.

Okay, for real, I love that. It's quite an organic approach, isn't it, really, to building out a business? And I've had some guests on the show that are on the product side, building products and selling those. And what's been interesting is that It's actually a similar approach. I've had Melissa Snover on, for example, from Nourished, and they're building a very successful 3D-printed gummies business. And they took products to people and had them try them and in the room give responses straight away.

Yes.

So your, you know, anti-marketing method is, is a wonderfully humanistic approach, isn't it? An organic approach that applies whether you're selling a coaching program or, or even products. You're starting with the conversations with customers, which is really, really powerful.

Ideally, if you sell higher-ticket products or services, because it's a very organic approach talking to people. So if you need to sell hundreds, it can become a bit overwhelming, right? Really.

And I guess that's the role of webinars, isn't it? Where people use webinars as funnels to go from one-to-many and many-down-to-few. Thiago Faria, When you left Google and went back to Portugal, and I know you're about 20 minutes outside of Lisbon, and you kindly shared you live in a sort of a rural idyll where you can be both sort of in the countryside but also close to Lisbon. It creates obstacles, doesn't it, when you have a career change and you move from corporate to entrepreneurship? What obstacles have you faced and how did you overcome them? Those from a marketing point of view, because you have to build a new network, a new brand. How have you done that?

Yes, absolutely true. So I actually had a great idea to start creating my own authority here in the markets because nobody knew me in Portugal. I was away for almost 10 years. So I heard someone say, I don't know if you know Miles Beckler, He's one of the internet, good people of the internet marketing space. But he said that one of the easiest ways to create, start to create authority is to like what you're doing, create your own podcast. So I started in 2019 to create my own podcast and interviewing experts in my area, celebrities, et cetera, which immediately gave me authority because I was talking to these higher level people, right? I'm in the same level. And wait, did I lose my— sorry, you're sharing screen. And that helped me get a name out there and slowly started building my audience, which helped me with creating partnerships with local people, sharing email lists, sharing assets, et cetera. So that helped me. But of course, the issues were around Me not knowing how to simplify my approach. That was basically it. I started doing testing everything I had brought from Google, like Google Ads. Also, Facebook Ads were growing like crazy. I wanted to play with it as well, but I was hitting against a brick wall because I didn't have a business. I had just some ideas, some things to add value to the world, but not very structured, nothing very specific, not concrete. I was not being able to help my clients because I was complicating everything for myself and for them. And yeah, that was the main obstacle I had for almost 3 years. I was growing slowly my authority here in the market, but not actually having anything concrete to help people. I was trying to shoot in every direction. So that's the main mistake that most people do.

Interesting.

Yeah, that's interesting.

And Thiago's website is tiagofaria.pt. Um, and yes, for those people that want to see Thiago, he's on our YouTube channel because I load all of these videos up online. So I do a quick screen share and you'll see he's got a wonderful, a wonderful site in Portuguese. So it's outside of my, my ability with my one-word, uh, sentence in Portuguese to understand it, but lots of wonderful content. And as you say, the obstacle of overcomplicating at the beginning. How did you overcome that, or what gave you the realization, um, that that was the mistake that you're making? Because sometimes it's easy to just kind of lose confidence, isn't it?

Yeah.

You're doing the— you think you're, you're doing the right thing, but it's not getting the right result. Sometimes you question yourself. that you're not the right person, not that you're necessarily doing the wrong thing. How did you get to that realization and move forward?

Yes, I knew that I had value to give. I was not being structured. I always believed that I would somehow succeed, but it was 3 years. It was quite frustrating. So I started, okay, what am I doing wrong? I have to do something. And then I remember that I interviewed all those people in my own podcast in the beginning. And I thought, okay, what do they have in common? How do they reach their level? Very fast in the beginning stages of their careers. And I realized that most of them had hired a mentor, a coach immediately at the beginning. So they didn't wait too long. They didn't try to break, hit, like how to say, break stones in Portuguese expression, try to break the stone all the time on your own. So they hire someone that is already steps above them to grow exponentially, right? So I found that it was a pattern, a clear pattern. And so I thought to myself, okay, whoever I've been following that I trust a lot, and one of the people that I've been following was Terry Dean, another of the good guys of the internet marketing space, and hired him as a mentor. So, and since then, 2021, I was exactly what I told you. I've been simplifying my approach much more. I made a clear vision of 3 years, who I want to help, being specific on who is my target audience. creating an offer around that. And that was exactly the point where things stabilized for me, started growing. And now I just see ahead the next steps, right?

Yeah, no, that's wonderful. So that's also wonderfully, if you like, mature of you to also listen in a way to all the advice you're getting on, getting free advice on the podcast. And that's in a way a great tool I found as well, a great platform to to meet so many wonderful people. Um, Tiago, in, in terms of building your own brand, um, you've talked about going out there. Is there, is there a mistake that you'd, you'd say, other than overcomplicating it, um, which is a structural mistake, if you like, uh, from a marketing perspective, is there something that you'd say you did that you would recommend people don't try at home?

Definitely, definitely. The beginning stages, I was trying to be someone I am not. I was trying to portray myself as, I don't know, having as a— as having— I was trying to be a very confident person that I know everything. I know all my shit. Sorry, pardon my French. And so I was forcing a bit myself to be something that I'm not, to try to become an authority very quickly. And that doesn't work. People can read through that and it doesn't portray Exactly who people want to hear. People want to hear your own true self and your genuine self. And that was the point. If I actually have a video in Portuguese about that, because I had a 120 video challenge on YouTube, so I created 120 videos in 120 consecutive days because I wanted to be proficient in the art of creating videos. And around video 30 or something, I decided, man, this is not working. And actually made a video. Look, today I'm going to talk to you In an informal way, because I was being like very formal. In Portuguese, we say você. I don't know how to say in English, usted, like a very formal approach.

Yeah. Oh, that's right. Yeah, because there's a— that's right. In French and many languages, there's the formal and the informal.

Exactly.

Tu and vous. So I switched to the informal. We don't have that in English, right?

Yes, exactly. You don't have it in English. I switched to the informal and say, man, now I know exactly who I'm talking to. I'm going to talk to you. And I pointed to the camera exactly. And since that day, I've been completely being more of myself and portraying my own unique point of views, not trying to please everyone, you know, and that actually makes completely the change. You've some, you probably will repel some people, which is great. Fantastic. They will never be your ideal client, but you will, you know, bring to your world the best people that you really want to work with. So I think that's the main mistake I've made and I don't recommend. Don't try to be someone you're not.

Yeah, that, that's really wonderful advice. And I think that, uh, this idea of authenticity comes back time and time again. I was looking online and the search in books for the term authenticity has gone up exponentially. It's one of the most sought-after terms, uh, actually in the books that people are reading. So in this day and age, people are looking for authenticity. I guess because there's so much fake news and so on around. Tiago Faria, with your business where you're helping, you know, high-value coaches and knowledge, um, if you like, knowledge workers as we are now, to get more clients, what would you say from a, again, from a marketing point of view, really has moved the needle for you? You've talked about creating those 120 videos, um, but you're now moving from the starter stage into, into growth. your business? So what's really working for you?

So in terms of growing my business, so the starting point is the anti-marketing to stabilize your business, to have a stable current business that brings leads constantly, right? Every day. But now I'm trying to grow in it to the different sense in regards of extending my own network, right? So this approach of Creating your own, growing your network of people, talking to influencers around your area that would have your ideal client, potentially have your ideal clients, is a great way to grow still without spending money on ads, not needing to spend money on ads. A great way to do it is to participate in podcasts of potential of other people, right? So this is one thing that I'm trying to create more network around that area. And also my own podcast, I'm gonna return to do that so I can connect with even more people in my area, in my space. So that's my next step that I'm doing this year. But then of course, after this, I will want to start automating more things. So that will be the following step, which will be to create your own funnel, you know, play around finally with those things that many people want to do at the beginning stages. But I've been now much more sure of myself that it is not necessary at the beginning. You don't need to go wild with those strategies until a certain point. Okay, so this is my current strategy to increase my network, increase my reach to different audiences, internationalizing my brand. This is also my current stage. I've been mostly focused in Portugal, but many coaches were saying, why are you just focused in Portugal? You speak perfect English. Why are you limiting yourself? And it has been a limitation on my own, thinking that, oh, you know, international market is so much more competitive, but it's all limiting beliefs. It's basically, I was limiting myself to a 10 million market, Portugal, right? Versus 1.8 billion English-speaking market with their space for everyone. There's no need to be, to have those limiting beliefs. Yeah. So that's my current stage. Yes.

That's wonderful. I think you've really wonderfully articulated there how As your business grows, your mindset changes, and also the systems that you deploy change, and getting the appropriate marketing structures and tactics and also tools, because there's so many tools and some of them are so actually low cost now, it's quite tempting to invest in those, and they take your business off course, don't they? They, they get you to do different kind of workflows that you wouldn't necessarily need to do for that size of client base. Um, I'm going to introduce a new question to this podcast, and that's about books or podcasts. You can have a choice. Is there a book or a podcast that you would say has been inspirational for you that you'd like to share with my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs?

Yes, for sure, for sure. So I would say the one everyone mentions, I don't want to bore everyone, but Of course, it's Rich Dad. This is the book that changed everything in terms of my corporate mindset to become an entrepreneur, an investor, et cetera.

And Tiago just held up the Robert Kiyosaki book, Rich Dad Poor Dad.

Oh, Rich Dad Poor Dad. Sorry.

Sorry. Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. So if for those who didn't—

But the one I'd like to recommend is Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got from Mr. Jay Abraham, because he focuses a lot on what I Actually, this book inspired me to focus my strategy on using all you've got, your current assets, your current knowledge, and simply make small tweaks to those and use everything you have already proactively instead of thinking of, I need to find new clients or I need to find new strategies, new platforms. No, simply use everything you've got currently, tweak it in a way that you use all your resources properly. and efficiently and strategically. So he talks a lot about the referral systems, lots of little things you can tweak in your own business, like the upsells, the 3 ways you can grow a business. So yeah, basically this is the book I would love to recommend.

Okay, so we'll put a link. That's Jay Abraham, right, is the author. Tiago Faria in Lisbon, it sounds like a wonderful place to come and visit and do an in-person podcast would be great. But for now, if you want to find out about you and how to get a hold of you, where can they come?

Yes. So you showed my website. So it's still in Portuguese. As I said, I'm in the beginning stages of my internationalization process. So tiagofaria.pt. You can lurk a bit more about me there. And if you want to send me an email, ask a question or comment about something we talked about today. You can do it at tiago@tiagofaria.pt. And if you really want to have a chat, do a brainstorm about your current assets, do a diagnosis about what you currently have to see if you can use this anti-marketing system, you can go to tiagofaria.pt/call and book a quick 30-minute call and have a chat.

Tiago, we've had 25 minutes and I've got a huge amount of value and really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Thank you so much. It was a real pleasure and I hope someone took some value out of this conversation.

Well, I know I have personally. So selfishly, I've got a great deal of having you on the show, Tiago. So thank you for that. But I think for all of us listening, what Tiago is sharing is a journey of going from corporate to being a startup entrepreneur, solo entrepreneur, to building his business. And really a key message about using what you've got. And in this day and age when times are getting tighter, to look at the resources that we've got rather than the resources that we don't have or that we might aspire to having, believing that they might give us success, is I think a really wonderful and positive message. So let's look inward. Let's see what we've got in the contacts database, in the file that we— the people we know and reach out and let's ask them the questions. about what they need. And that's actually the way that all businesses start and grow. So thank you for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. As I grow this show, really dedicated to helping the unnoticed entrepreneurs amongst us, including me, to build a brand, to build businesses, and to serve our communities. And if you've enjoyed this, please do follow the show. And if you've got a chance to review it on the player of your choice, that would also really help me. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating. Thank you for listening.