Episode 334: How He Got New Clients in an Industry Where Clients Don’t Sign Up with New Companies...

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you want to know exactly how to win again and again, go to Wydell on winning.com webinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode of Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm here to talking with Jackson Headen. Jackson, it's fun to hear you talk about your experience of how you got started with your company and how fast once you got the basics in place, how quick it took off to where it not only took off fast, but Getting in the Inc. 5000 Number 251 in a couple of years from startup that's like, people don't do that or companies don't do that. So not only have you had success of the 100th percentile of people that launch out to become designers, but your company has done the same thing.

And.

You think it's that knowledge, that base you had, but it's not only the base of knowledge. You probably have base of contacts and all kind of insider tracking to tap into when you got overwhelmed on the way up. How did that, how did, how have you tracked your way through that?

So I guess let me just, uh, be super clear. Like all the clients that I worked for at my previous companies and jobs, we all had contracts basically saying we could never entertain any kind of discussion with them. So all I had to start completely from scratch when I opened up my own company and acquired new clients in an industry that doesn't acquire new clients. So I had to from the ground. That's why I'm in Inc. 500, is because I redid the game of acquiring clients as an industrial design firm. Most industrial design firms, it's, oh, I had this guy design my product. They do great work. Go work with him. How do you get someone new and how do you get them to trust you and to spend the amount of money that they're about to spend on getting a product to market? That's super hard. That's really hard. And so it was about building that interaction, that funnel that led a client to us. And when they got to us, the experience was so overwhelmingly positive, there was no way they were going to sign on with IDO or Smart Design and not us. See, the thing is, those companies, you have a meeting with them, and it feels heartless and soulless. You have a meeting with us, we're going to know everything about your company because we're going to do research prior we're going to know everything about you as an individual because we want to know you. Because what makes our products so damn good is knowing not just you and your position in the company, but the entire company, the brand and everyone else we're involved with. Because what we're doing is we're designing the most cherishable gift ever, one that you will love and everyone you sell it to will love as well. And that's what makes us good, is we're trying to get to know everyone.

And so if I were to summarize what you just said, the first one of the things you did was when you got that first meeting, you put lots of personal, individualized research into the meeting and then you made it more like meeting a new friend than a sterile business type thing.

So it's really getting to know them at like their goal, what they want to do, getting to know them personally. Right? As well. Because at the end of the day, sometimes projects morph and change into different things. Like one of the things we're super proud of is we sign a client, right? But what we're proud of is how long they last with us. We're proud to say that like we've never lost a client. They're either incubating, launching that product or they're building up new brands and new style guides for their next product launch. Like we have. A majority of our business is top of funnel, but we're developing this mid funnel and this lower funnel to just start acquiring not just new projects within, inside that company, but sister companies and other companies that are, they're familiar with. Because the experience is so positive, they can't help but become a, what's called in the user Persona world, a hero for that service. So they, they go out and they talk about that service. If you make someone super fall in love with your service, they go around proclaiming how great this service is. You saw it with like, exactly. Apple fanboys and Samsung fanboys. They love their phone so much, they will die to the death for defending their gui, their ui, their ux, all the little intricacies of their cell phone. They will go to war with Apple fanboys because they believe that hero mentality that, that's so great and that's what we try to create with every client that comes in that hero mentality. We treat our business as a product as it should be. Right? We design products 24 7. Our business should be one as well.

Now where did you elaborate on the top of funnel, mid funnel and bottom of the funnel?

Absolutely so top of funnel is like people who've never heard of us.

Okay.

And mid funnel is like they've worked kind of beside these top of the funnel people or they've heard of us through campaigns, marketing or something like that. We acquire them that way. It's kind of like warm stuff. Like they know of us, they've seen us maybe and then we're kind of like touching them, talking with them and kind of having like these interaction points. Lower funnel is like they, they deeply, intently know us. It's like a sister company or it's like a. We have a lot of serial entrepreneurs that come to us. So a lot of entrepreneurs who been doing this for years and years and years and they have multiple companies and so they're like, I need you to do this company, I need you to do this company and I need you to do this other company. Because design is about morphing as well. You have to fit into their box. They don't fit to you, you fit to them. And you have to become the lock to their key. Right. You have to morph yourself personality wise, completely change on a dimension and engulf yourself in their company to like really, really hit everything you need to do.

Yeah. And you know when you give them that feedback and you do that, that sends the signal to them that you're paying attention, you're listening and gives them confidence that they tell you they really want something, you're going to pick up on it. Rather than, you know, how many times we, I mean just even ordering something that I drive through window, you have to say it's like ordering a hamburger. I'll have a medium, a cheeseburger with cheddar cheese. And they'll say okay, how do you want that done? You know, I want a medium cheeseburger. Well what, you know, medium cheddar cheeseburger. Okay, well what kind of cheese? And so a lot of that is same type thing happens with a lot of companies. They're just not listening to you and because very frustrating when you talk about the user experience being fun. It's fun when you talk to people and they actually listen to you.

Absolutely. And I mean we have this profile we build out of each client. So we have this like beginning phase we do with every client is get to know them and we love to ask them what they like, but what we truly cherish is what they dislike because that's like no go zones. So we'll ask them what they like and then like we'll like put things in front of them to See if we can get a response of like, what they hate and if they're like flipping out and like yelling, we've done a good job because now we know what we don't need to even talk about or touch ever again. So it's like, it's a meeting filled with like, love and hate. And it's a great meeting because then the second meeting, it's all filled with love. It's all filled with concepts that they truly adore and love. And in that second meeting, we've had clients, like, scream at the top of their lungs in excitement. We've had people break their monitors and flip their cameras upside down because they're so ecstatic about the concepts we present. And it's just getting to know them. So many people don't take the time, especially in the firm industry, to really get to know their clients. And that's what we do here. We get to know them in such a deep level that we have a level of excitement that is really unheard of in a corporate setting.

Well, when you talk about what they love and what they hate, it's, it's easy to get them emotional. One of the things in sales, you're going to make a sale, you got to get people emotional about things. You know, you got to get. Take it beyond the list of features and facts that you could do. And how did you get that? When you say top of funnel, mid funnel or whatever. In normal prospecting and sales, it's basically cold market, warm market, and people you don't know, people maybe through a friend and then people who. Your direct friends. And so how do you go? The hardest thing and the lowest percentage is cold market. People have never heard of you. And when you're starting a new company, that's every. It's most people because, you know, you haven't been out there to be heard. So how did you go about. And how much effort was, you know, a lot of prospecting? Because you said somehow, you know, one of the things I principals I, I have in my book on winning, you know, once you decide what you're going to do and you launch out, you don't just do it, you overdo it. You start with a bang. You know, you, you explode onto the scene. And obviously you had a way that you figured out how to explode onto the scene and attract some interest where you could get those first appointments. So how did you do that?

Hey, listen, there's a lot of information online, but there aren't a lot of people who have actually done something in My case, I've actually built a successful business, has accrued over $5 billion in assets under management, and has done well even during trying times. Now, if you want to know exactly how I've done this, go to Whiteellawinning.com webinar Now, I've compressed a decade of learning into five short weeks. Just for those of you who want to give yourself an incredible advantage and are tired of waiting and watching others move up.

I could not agree more with how you said it. It's a bang. It is an explosion, right? So I kind of picked up on a bunch of different industries because business is business everywhere. Like the business we do here at the firm is the same business someone does at a restaurant. You know, a waiter or a waitress is if they repeat your order, they're more likely to get a bigger tip, right? It's like a saying in a phrase. We do the same thing here. Repeat the exact design that they want, repeat the exact stuff that they want because they know that you're paying attention, right? So we're taking little tidbits here and there, and we basically, in the beginning, we made this whole sheet on how to acquire a customer, how to acquire a new customer, make them fall in love with you and want to purchase something from you, because this isn't a normal purchase. They're buying homes and cars with us at a degree where they have to pay up front and they don't receive this home or car for months. So it's like completely different. You have to be the best salesperson in the entire world to get someone to spend that type of money in such a short period of time of knowing you, and then spend it all on your skill level. So it was really a how do we make them fall in love with us? How do we hit all the personality stuff to where they're accepting that? Because I haven't talked about skill, and we have great skill here. We are the best designers that you can buy right now, like, hands down. But to get someone to fall in love with you and to use that skill level is what you have to do. It's basically how you design products. So the way to design a product, a really good product, it has to be beautiful because you don't touch a product before you buy it. Now you buy it on Amazon, you buy it on whatever website you went to, and you're buying it because of how it looks. That's the same thing with winning a client over. You do it with your personality. All the other stuff comes afterwards. So you have to hit it with your personality first.

Yeah. It's funny, you hear things that looks don't matter. Oh, yeah.

And.

You got to start somewhere. You got to have some bait, you know, but how do you find. How did you get your prospect list? And, you know, you got to go to where you got their attention, you know, the first step of the attention, and then you warm them up to the point where you can actually do a presentation. So how did you go about through that?

So there was no prospect list. Everyone was cold. Every client. I mean, not now anymore, but every client in the beginning, all cold, all cold. None of them got presentations.

You approach them cold. You did that.

So it was them approaching us, but it was all cold. So we've never met them. They've never met us. But they knew that they needed a product design, and there was no presentation given either. We're not showing they've seen our past work. Right. But we're not. We're not giving a presentation of like, we're going to deliver this. Right? That's cold. That's like, how are. How am I supposed to have a conversation with you as I'm going over a presentation and reading it line for line? You can't. You can't do that because it's unpersonable. Like, that person could care less about this presentation that I'm giving. They want to know how can I help them, right? And what I'm. What am I going to do that's going to be different? And what is. I need to know all that information. So I need to dig deep and get to know them personally. And then you get to. They need to know my personality as well. So I need to show that presentations just kill it. You don't even need it.

Well, I'm still confused in the sense that how did they know to call you, you know, or did you make yourself available? Where people look for if. Where they sort through possible firms to get. For design, if they've got. They want a certain kind of design, how did they find you to call you?

Yeah, so we do a bunch of basically placement. All right. I look at the web as land, and I look at it sometimes as trash as well. And you just have to pile on. It sounds totally weird, but you just have to pile on more trash or put more signs on land on the web. This. This idea came from a product design that is very famous over in China. It's basically rentable bikes and scooters. They have these piles of rentable bikes and scooters. And the bike on top is the one that wins because no one's going to dig down to the bottom to grab that bike. They're going to take that top bike and they're going to go to work with it.

So you used ads on the Internet.

Not just ads. Not just ads. So like ads, but placement as well. Like, you know, you want to be where people, where it validates you, right? So like even the inc 500, that's validation, you know, every award we apply for because that's validation that shows who we are as a company. Everything builds on top of one another and it's more signs and more trash to throw on the pile.

Who received the, when you started, you were receiving the phone calls, I guess, and you were, you were handling it from the front line like your first clients, your first significant clients. How did talk through that process?

So I mean, it's all how you build yourself, right? You can build yourself to look corporate or you can build yourself to look like a startup, right? I'm sure you've, you've acquired it where like there's multiple emails in a company, but there's only like three people there. You can build it like that or you can build it like a startup. We, we tried a little bit of both, right. So sometimes I was answering emails from multiple email accounts and then it just makes the company feel larger than life. Other times it was very personal. It was just me talking back and forth with them and it became this really personal relationship. We do beta studies all the time, so we're going to test stuff out like that all the time to see kind of what draws clients in. Because clients are so special to us. It turns out that no one wants to be shoved off just the name of the game. So we dropped that whole corporate mentality and we went more towards that personal round. So all emails are answered by a, by someone here that works here, but not. That just works here, but that is part of the project. So there's no one that's like contacting you. There's no like accounts that's contacting you about your past due invoices or something like that. That's the project manager talking to you about it and asking what's up? There's no one here that's talking to you from like, you know, the ad department wanting to get, acquire, you know, more business in that side. It's your designer talking to you about, hey, I think we should market this way or hey, I think we should do some graphic design here or, or some website design. I've brought in a fellow designer. He specializes in the website. We're going to kind of run you through what we're thinking. So it's about kind of building that connection and never letting go. So many companies are so willing to throw you to Jim Joe over there and change people around left and right.

Yeah. What did you. You know, it's kind of like when you go to the doctor, you want to see the doctor, you don't want to see the physician's assistant. You know, I came in to see doc. You know, I never more pissed when I get an appointment to go in to see such and such doctor. And you know, you've rearranged your schedule because that's when he had the time and the appointment. And then you go in there and then all of a sudden, you know, you wait and then you go in and you say doctor so and so will be with you in a minute. Like wait a minute. That wasn't the one I came to see. And even if it's another doctor, you know, you want to see the same one. You don't want to be shuttled around. And that just goes to say the things. If you don't like something in business and other businesses being treated a certain way, probably the people you're going to be dealing with as customers in your own business have the same reaction. So it's a lot about treating people the way you want to be treated and you notice things. You were paying attention as you were working for free. And what gave you the idea? What were some of the experience or some of the things you noticed that you said, when I start my company, we're going to do things different and that's going to give us an edge. And you probably started to get excited about the kind of company you could build and the kind of success you could have even before you started it because you were seeing things, you were learning things.

So I think I would just to say I would 100% agree. It's all about learning those pain points, those negative interactions and changing it. That's what makes you successful. Every great company's done that before. I 100% agree. The biggest pain points that I witnessed from these companies was no interaction from top level management or CEO to the actual client. There was no bells and whistles being blown. There was no like, this is what we're doing. This is why it's effing awesome. Right? It was like, you can email them their stuff, we're not going to explain it to them. What?

You're kidding.

We're not going to get their first reactions. Like, personally, I want to see their reaction. I want to see them fall into tears because they love it so much. Like, that's my goal. My goal is to have clients hate me at the end of the day because there's too many good decisions on the table and say that they have to do all of them and pay extra money. That's my goal. My goal is to get you to spend more money because you love everything than have you just be all right with everything.

Absolutely valid and true. Like you said, businesses are going to be the same. Clients are going to be the same. If it's an individual or it's a multinational CEO of a multinational corporation. There's people behind all of these things, folks, and they want to be treated the right way. You know, they want to be treated special. They want to be listened to. And Jackson has shown how far and how fast you can go when you do that. Right.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell, and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.