TES 014 - Oh My What a Marketing Mistake - Lesson Learned

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there. I'm Mel Abraham, the author of the Entrepreneur's Solution, the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy, where we teach you how to design a business and create a life, a life of financial freedom and peace of mind. And welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur Solution show. And this episode is going to be a little different. Maybe some of you might think it's a rant, but here's what I want to do is I want to talk about irresponsible marketing and the five lessons you can learn from irresponsible marketing. This is about something that has happened to me just in the last, oh, four to six weeks and just want to talk about it. I think that it'll be instructive to understand what marketing is about. How to set your marketing up for success, how to create connection with your customers, with your team as you move forward. So after this brief introduction, we'll be back and we'll talk about the five lessons that you can get out of irresponsible marketing. Talk to you soon. Oh wait. Before we get to that brief introduction, if you happen to not be at your computer and you're on the road listening to this and you want to get the downloadable guidebook, go ahead and text my legacy to 38470. That's 38470 mylegacy. No spaces. As if it was one word. We'll get text to you with the download link. It's going to ask you to give me your name, your first name and your email address through text do that will get you into the system. Look forward to seeing you after this brief introduction to the Talk to you soon.

Welcome to the Entrepreneur Solution where highly successful entrepreneur Mel Abraham becomes your entrepreneurial mentor. Here, Mel reveals his business building strategies and even gets a chance to answer your questions. Mel Abraham, a CPA by education, but an entrepreneur by exhilaration and a true believer in the entrepreneurial way of life. It's through entrepreneurship that we create community, support society and live Our dreams.

It's where possibility meets reality again and you can have the life and lifestyle you want. One of freedom and peace of mind. Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution where it's time for you to be bold, dream big and live life your way.

Hey there. Welcome back. This is Mel Abraham of the Entrepreneur Solutions show. And as I said earlier, I want to have a frank discussion about marketing, about frankly irresponsible marketing. Let me tell you what happened and I'm going to kind of give you the rundown. But I actually started a relationship with a service provider with a company that was helping me connect to my customers. And it was a service provider that allowed me to reach out, reach out to customers. Now.

I'm not going to give you the company name because I think that it would be inappropriate at this stage. But this is something I was testing out and wanted to create a relationship with. Now when I look at working with people on an ongoing basis, I want to create, I'm looking at long term relationships. This isn't transactional. I never really look for a transactional situation because transactional relationships, they're fleeting, they're not valuable. You can't create a mutually beneficial, valuable relationship except for that moment. And it doesn't really feel good. And I think that our market place today is looking for something greater than a transactional to transcend the transactional relationships, to create something that is more meaningful, something that's deeper, something that is more valuable, something that creates connection and creates, in effect, evangelists. And so I started out with this service provider just to test them out and see how it goes. And literally within a week, within a week of working with them, the CEO of the company sends out a blog. And this blog.

The subject line of the blog was Death 2 and the company name. So certainly intriguing. And I get.

Marketing strategies, I get the strategy of influence and all these types of things. Certainly intriguing. But let's just talk about what transpired from there and how this played out. And I'm actually going to read some of the posts to you because I think it sets the stage for what is going on. And so what you have was a post that basically said the death of and the company name and written by the CEO. And this was as it says on the screen, February 9, 2015. So this was relatively recent. And he goes on in this post, it certainly piques the interest of the death of them. I'm going to read it because I happen to be working with him, kind of wondering what's going on so he goes on to say as he tells it in a story for him, it's a wonderful write up per se. I walked into the office just like any other day. Yet this day was different. It was filled with dread, doom, gloom and a sense that the end was near. Certainly not something that's going to create confidence, that's going to create trust, that's going to create certainty in my mind or my heart as a customer as it went on. And so he goes on, he says, but on this day it was bad and I felt like it was the end. So he's almost going through a confessional here in the sense of what's going on in him now. What you don't get because I haven't given you the whole post is that this is a conversation.

A reflection that he was going through from back in December. So it's been six weeks in the making and this is the culmination of it at this point in time is to make this post. And so later in the post he goes on and he says, this is on a solemn walk on the beach. I thought back over the four years of my business, so effectively so it's a brand new business. You know, four years is not that old, it's not that weathered, it's not that mature. And you're, you're in a typical growth and growth curve per se. And my frustrations lit a fuse that turned into a smoldering anger. Totally get it. You know, I have built businesses from the ground. I've had the opportunity to scale businesses and build them once they plateaued and to try and get that fire started. You know, there's a challenge with business when we start out as a startup, when we're first starting out, we need certain systems, we need certain controls, we need certain elements to support us in the growth stages, the fledgling stages of business that accelerate growth, period, that are different as we continue to grow. We need to be able to move beyond that in order to scale the business beyond the million dollar mark, beyond the five million dollar mark, beyond the ten million dollar mark. There's plateaus and there's differences that come about. And during that process, certainly there's frustration, certainly there's, there's aggravations, certainly there's challenges and obstacles that we need to move through. But the CEO, he continues on, he says the business was not what I envisioned it to be after all this time. And right then and there I realized I had built a business that I had grown to secretly despise. You know, as a customer.

You know, it's challenging for me to say, hey, I want to invest my time, my resources, my energy and my customers, my clients, the people that believe in me, in a resource where I have the leadership who's saying, I despise the business that I'm in. I want to work with people that have the heart in the business, that have the passion in the business, that had the belief in the business, that have my, my best interest and my client's best interest in mind. Yet he's exposing the dirty laundry. And I think that maybe he thought he was doing himself a favor, but let's see how this plays out and get the feel for what it was he was trying to accomplish. Because it's still somewhat unclear to me. I've not, truth be told, I've not had a conversation with the CEO about this and about the thought process behind this or the thought that maybe this was a clever marketing ploy because you're going to see what he does with this to.

Get the attention of the marketplace. He said, I spewed my frustrations, limitations and my creeping resentment for my average business, the startup that had just excitedly joined. So what he did is he took a new employee and decided to express his frustrations. Now here's someone that comes in and says, I'm going to invest my life, I'm going to be an employee, I'm going to help you build your business and I'm going to believe in the business and I'm going to use this as a vehicle to have me self actualize my life, my growth, my life at the higher level, to take care of my family, to take care of my children, to do all of that. And then immediately here's the CEO saying, yeah, this is frustrating, it's aggravating and I actually despise this. And he goes on and says, I thought out loud, am I a captain of a sinking ship? Have we turned into a zombie startup? Interesting, interesting analogy, interesting kind of thing, he says. Or do I dig my heels in deep and give it everything I got? In that moment, I was certain of one thing, the business needed a change.

He talks about how he was so frustrated with the business here in this lengthy blog post and gets to a point where he's saying, I despise it. It's not what I wanted, it's not what I want in life. I don't like this anymore.

It's dragging me down and just frustrating. And he starts, and remember, he starts out with the death of the business and then tells you how he hates the business. And at the end of that post, at the end of that post he leaves it with that line of I knew things had to change and then leaves it with to be continued.

So you know, I get cliffhangers.

In TV and in movies and series and all that, but that's not real life. That's Hollywood, that's films, that's tv. That's something that isn't affecting my livelihood, that isn't affecting my clients, that isn't affecting you, my customers and my community and the entrepreneur solution nation. And, and when I have someone that is a service provider to me, that in a sense to me is playing games and saying, hey, I'm not sure if I want to kill off my company. But you know what, I'll give you the answer later. That pisses me off, that bothers me. That's totally irresponsible in the way they go. They shouldn't, in my opinion, that's not the way that this thing should play out. Now that was one day, a day or so later he posts the second post on this. Now in the meantime, and I'm going to show you the response to this first post based on the postings that from some of their customers and some of their non customers and see the impact it had on.

The marketplace. So the next post he comes out and he says, in fact, I had no idea how this initial series of posts would turn out for us. Was it business suicide? Now I don't know if it was business suicide. It certainly wasn't going to promote business. It wasn't going to promote the things that I think we need to promote as business owners in our marketing, in our connection with our customers. I think it's a complete violation of trust and it's a complete erosion of the respect for the customer. When we start to play these games, it may have been the nail in the coffin or the best decision we ever made. Maybe, maybe not. So he says, so what am I asking of you? Nothing. Watch us fail. Watch us succeed. Learn in the process. So in effect what he's telling you he's going to do is allow you to watch them try to do something with their business. What he really did in this process was to get what he was trying to do is get you to opt in to a process, opt into a, a blog, opt into to a series of communications based upon a restructuring of their business. And I totally get that. And you know what, had he done that up front and said, here's what we're doing, we're Going through, we're going through a restructuring because we want to make it better for you, the customer. And I'd love for you to watch, I'd love to get your input, I'd love for you to learn in the process, because we're going to learn the process. You know what, I'm on board for that. I certainly think that that's a great, a great tool. I think it would have been a great value. But the way they did it is they polarized this over a series of three posts over a week and allowed their customers to stew, to question, you know, where they were, what stability was there, what certainty was there, and do I need to look for another provider? And I think that that's totally, totally off base. That is the epitome of abusing your relationship, abusing your authority, abusing the connection and the pristine nature of a client provider relationship that I think ought to be respected. I think that the customer, the client is the one that is bringing the business to you. That's allowing you the opportunity and the responsibility to live as an entrepreneur, to give you the ability to live your dreams through entrepreneurship. And that ought to be respected. And granted, you're providing a service, you're providing solution, and hopefully you're providing aspiration and something greater for your customers so they can live their business at a higher level. Well, he says, here's what you'll learn each week. We'll be sharing with you the key insight that we've learned along the way in the past, lessons that we've already implemented, including, and he lists some things out which would have been wonderful in email or post number one, not where I had to wait a week to figure out whether I needed to find another service provider. This would be cool, but not the way they did it. At least not in my opinion. Now maybe some people out there would say, oh, this was a really cool strategy. Create a cliffhanger. Yeah, create a cliffhanger. But not one where it's going to affect, may affect my relationship with my customers and my ability to serve my customers at the highest level to provide them an experience that is a Cadillac experience, a Rolls Royce experience, something that we strive to do. So let's look at what some of the responses were because I think they're telling.

Here's a response. This is a post that is being read by active clients who in a small way or big way, rely on your service. Currently, I am all open for ended, I'm all for open ended loops and other copywriting magic, but in this case Leaving it with a to be continued doesn't really serve your clients. If you're folding up the business, people need to know so we can look for alternatives. I think this is an emotional manipulation of the client. I think it was totally wrong in doing this. They go on. This is another post. I'm not even a customer. Now get this. I was only a customer for a week but I don't understand what the point of this. I don't understand what was the point of this post. Are you planning to relaunch and transform it into something new? Simply close it down? I'm interested in the product but not if it's closing down. Why is there a sign up form at the end? I really don't get it. It was unclear and it was a ploy to get someone to sign up at the end. Here's a couple more. Okay, so your whole idea is to get everyone's attention. I am sorry but I have a real now this one really resonates with me. I am sorry but I have a real business to run and need to have a partner who doesn't waste my time.

Absolutely. I will be moving my services from you. Thanks. I question how many clients like myself did they have that turned around and said I don't want to do business with you. I will do business with people that have the same ethics, the same integrity and the same caring for their customers that I do for mine. This is marketing bs. I'm looking for a new provider no matter what his secret message may be.

Then the last one here is cut the fluff and get to the point. People rely on you for their business. Stop toying with them. I am not a customer. And now reading this rubbish. Glad I am not. I don't know what was going through their head and why they thought it was a clever thing to do to try and do this. But what they did is they polarized their own customer base. Polarization in a marketplace. Something that is done a lot and that is okay to attract the right types of customers and I've talked about it in prior posts and prior trainings. The concept of polarizing customer base where there's going to be customers out there that absolutely love what you do and there's going to be customers that don't. The worst customer you have is someone that is indifferent. They don't care one way or the other. I actually want customers that are just raving lunatic fans and if there's a group of them that are raving lunatic, you know, whatever they don't want to do business. I get it, we've polarized the marketplace. But I don't want to take the people that are doing business with me, that are clients with me, that came to me and said, here, I trust you and I'm giving you my money to do the work for me so you can help me take care of my customers and my clients at a higher level and then polarize them. So let's talk about some of the lessons that I think can come out of this tale of what I term as irresponsible marketing and how we look at this. So the first thing I want to kind of talk about is what's marketing for? What's the objective of marketing? Now some people would easily say, well the objective of marketing is to create sales. I'm not sure I agree with that. I think that the objective of marketing is to create relationships that will convert into sales. Sales is the byproduct of the relationships that we create. So when we look at this, let's look at the five lessons that we can take from this.

An example of what I think is a responsible marketing. The first, let's look at the objectives. The objective, the first is to capture, capture their attention, to capture the market's attention, to sit up and take notice about what it is you have to offer. The solution that you have for them, the difference it'll make in their life. Now they certainly in their, in this campaign if you will, got people to take notice, but not from a positive way. And these were customers that have both customers and non customers that caused them to question the judgment, the integrity and the certainty of their services. The second objective is to communicate, to communicate with what I call empathy. Empathy marketing is to communicate with empathy, to communicate that you care about them. There's nothing in this campaign, there's nothing in this post that showed that they cared about the customers. All they cared is about their little selfish game. As far as I'm concerned that they decided to play with the customers hearts, minds and business and I think it's totally inappropriate. So one of the objectives is to communicate with your customers, your clients and in fact your team. I mean this affected a new employee where he got dumped on. So with your team, that you care about them, that you understand them, that you want to be connected with them, that you have compassion and empathy. That's what creates the deep seated loyalty. And then once you do that is to create vehicle for them, a solution for them that doesn't just solve the issue at hand but creates a bigger vision for them. That is aspirational in nature, that gets them to realize that this is going to transcend simply the solution. It's what I call in some of my trainings, the unexpected needs to solve the unexpected needs of the client and the customer. So we communicate that. And then the fourth is to convey a low risk, a low risk opportunity, a low risk entry point for them to do business with you, to allow them in in the process. And then the last is to connect. As I said, I think that we are in a place where we need to use empathy, marketing, where we are creating connections that are deeper than to the pocketbook and the issue at hand. But to create a deep seated connection that is emotional nature that gets them, get your customers to stay on board and say I'm with you. I'm with you because I believe in you, because you believe in me, because you've taken care of me, you've over delivered, you've actually met my unexpected needs. I didn't even know at a level that is surpassing, remarkable and into the realm of excellence and really building that. So the objective of marketing to me is these five things to capture, to communicate, to create, to convey and to connect. And when I compare this little piece, if you will, to these certainly captured the attention, but in a negative way. They didn't in my mind communicate any kind of compassion, caring, empathy or any of that. They certainly didn't create any kind of certainty or low risk opportunity. They raised the perspective or the speculation of risk.

As far as that, did they create a solution for me? Because I didn't know if the solution was going to last. And they, they did a whole lot to damage the connection with me. And from reading some of the responses with the rest of their audience, yeah, certainly there was a couple responses that said that was kind of a cool marketing ploy. Well, that's exactly what it was. It was a ploy, it was a manipulation, it was a disrespect to the customers and the clients. So what questions should we ask? Here's the five questions I think we need to ask when we decide that we're going to go on a marketing campaign or when we're going to post something out on a blog or going to send something to customers or to the marketplace. Here's the five questions that I think we need to think about to make sure that we hit these five objectives. So the first question is, is it responsible? Is what you're planning to present? Is what you're planning to do responsible, socially responsible, fiscally responsible, personally responsible, or Is it going to make someone feel wrong, feel bad, feel uncertain, feel uncomfortable, feel like they got to run? Is it ecological in that process? And if it's not, fix it, don't do it? I think we need to act responsibly. We need to take the responsible.

Path for what it is we do. Second, is it caring and compassionate? Does it communicate caring and compassion? Why do I want to do business with someone that doesn't care and has no compassion? That is just some institutional thing saying, I can go to get a robot, I can go to a vending machine, because there's no caring, there's no compassion. Put the money in and get the result out. Does it communicate caring and compassion? Remember, one of the issues, one of the challenges for business is one, your solution needs to be relatable. It needs to be relevant. In order for it to be relatable and relevant, there has to be caring and compassion there. Is it respectful? Are you respecting the customers where they're at? Are you respecting the clients where they're at? Are you coming at it from a condescending perspective or disrespectful perspective? Or are you truly being respectful for what it is they bring to the table and where they are? And if you're not, once again, fix it, change it. You cannot put it out there. It's got to come from a respectable place. The fourth is, does it build trust? In this case, as far as I'm concerned, this eroded trust, there was no trust built. If we're going to connect with our marketplace, there's got to be trust. There's got to be respect. Those are two of the biggest characteristics in any relationship, whether it's a personal relationship and think about your personal relationships.

And I'm sure that many of us have had it where the trust and the respect in the relationship got eroded and the relationship itself fell apart unless we could rebuild it, which is not an easy thing to do. So why take the risk of putting marketing out there, posts out there, or doing anything out there that's going to erode the respect and the trust, the relationship that it took so long to and so much money to gain.

So I want to make sure that everything that I do in the market space, in the marketplace is going to do that, to continue to escalate and elevate the respect that I have for my clients and they have for me and the trust that we build within each other and through that process, then. Then we create a positive buzz. Does what you're doing create a positive buzz so people Will talk about it. This created a buzz, but it wasn't positive. People certainly talked about it. They got a response, but it was a real response. We turn around and we say, oh, just kidding. We're not going anywhere. Do we think that that is the right way to treat our customers? Say, got your attention? No, because that really pissed a lot of people off. They lost clients. I'm sure they eroded the trust and the respect. For me, it's not the way I do business, and it's not the way they're going to get my business. And I think that when we think about marketing, we need to think about it from the responsible side. What is marketing? What are the objectives that we're trying to do? We're trying to care for our customers. We're trying to be a service provider. Yes, we've been blessed with the opportunity to be an entrepreneur. We've been blessed with the possibilities that come with entrepreneurship. But we've also been saddled with the responsibilities. Along with opportunity and the ability to live those dreams, along with the opportunity and the ability to have the life by your own design comes the responsibility to do it with respect and do it with trust. You are a role model as an entrepreneur. You are. Someone is looking to you as an example. Whether you know it or not, they're looking to you as an example. They see you and they see how you live. My son drew. Drew that picture of me. Many of you seen the drawing from when he was six years old, but then he drew another one. He sent me another one when he was 16. That said.

He didn't tell me how to live. He simply lived and allowed me to watch. And I think we need to think about that as good entrepreneurial citizens. What are we doing with people watching? What are we doing when we don't think people are watching? We don't know who's watching us. So we want to be responsible with our business. We want to be responsible with our actions. We want to be socially responsible, and we want to build relationships based on trust and respect and creating solutions that are meaningful, that come from caring and compassion. And our marketing, our approach to the audience, our approach to our community, our approach to the market space needs to come from that place also. Otherwise, in time, we will erode all of it. And we will destroy our business because we've destroyed relationships, and business is based on relationships. I hope that this served you. I hope that you found this of value. And I hope that you take the five objectives and the five questions and put them into your business. Put them into the way you communicate with your marketplace. It will serve the marketplace. It may take time to build relationships. Relationships. Real, real, good, deep seated relationships take time, but they're worth it. They're worth the energy. They're worth the time. Because when you have a deep seated mutual relationship, everyone wins. So I hope that this serves you. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. And until we get a chance to see each other again, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant. See you soon. Cheers. Oh wait. Before you go, if you have questions for me or comments for me, please go to askmelnow.com that's AskMen. Now you'll be able to leave me a voicemail right there that I can take and I can use that to answer your questions in one of the future episodes. We got some tremendous comments and questions on that question line and you'll be seeing some of those responses in some future episodes. So leave me a question. If you like this episode, go ahead and subscribe to make sure that you get notification of all the future episodes and might as well share it with a friend. Go ahead and share with a friend. Let's give them the gift of possibility. Let's give them the gift, gift of entrepreneurship and bring their dreams out of the darkness and bring them to life again. And if you want to get the downloadable guidebook, go ahead. Go ahead and go to melabraham.com session014. That's melabraham.com session014. All the resources from this session will be there. And again, if you happen to not be at your computer, you can text to 38470 text mylegacy one word no spaces 38470 see you in the next episode. Cheers.

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