Mastering Authentic Brand Storytelling and User-Generated Content

There are some people who just want to be on camera. They just. They want to be publicized. Right. And there are some people who don't. Right. Part of the reason that I don't like to leave testimonials and I don't like to do this stuff is I don't. I don't want to get on camera. I don't want to be in front of a bunch of stuff. But there are some people who love it. Given the option between money and fame, they choose fame. These people are gold. And so we have done campaigns where the subject line, to our customers and clients, we've literally said, can I make you famous question mark? And it's. We're looking to profile five customers, five clients that have had, you know, amazing results with this. If you have, we'd love to talk to you so that we can feature you in some of our, you know, videos that we're making on all of our channels and all this other stuff.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch with your host, Ryan Deiss, and myself, Roland Fraser. Ryan, how you doing today?

Oh, so good. So good. I'm getting off, like, you know, this. We talked about this because we had to reschedule a couple times. Getting over, like, just a series of colds. Like, that's just kind of been the theme so far of the year. It's like, different kids getting sick, bringing different things home, and I think I'm over it. Then I get hit with another one. And it's not bad enough that I get any sympathy for it, though. You know what I'm saying? Like, I want to get, like, real good and proper sick, right? Where, like, I get some sympathy. It's like, no, you still gotta work and, you know, you still gotta do all this stuff. And certainly my wife chores.

Your home chores.

Exactly. I mean, with four, you know, well, four kids, but one, I'm off at college. Like, my wife's like, suck it up, buttercup. Like, we got work to do around here. So, yeah, so it's. It's fun because we get to do this episode while I can hear my own voice echoing in my head because of the congestion. But other than that, I'm awesome. How about you?

I'm good. I'm definitely, Definitely managed to avoid that. So. But I don't have any young kids in the house. And the minute that either of our older kids get sick, I'm like, you were banned. You may not enter the. The home perimeter.

Yeah, I can't do that with mine just yet.

Yeah, I don't know, man, you got kids like 13 years old, that's time to be out in the world doing. Making your own way, man, you know?

Yeah, just shove them out of the nest. Yeah, fly.

Well, that, that said, and speaking of that, this is my transition. Let's talk user generated content.

Oh my gosh, what a. What a good segue.

Right? Right.

Yeah. Master of the sigma.

We were, Ryan and I were talking, there were several campaigns that had kind of caught our eye and we're kind of looking at what can we do as we go into the quarter full on and find some additional ways to generate revenue and followers and all of those leads, all of those kinds of things. And so what were we not using? And what we're not using, really, as much as we would like to, even though we've done a better job than a lot of folks that we consult with, is user generated content, which is basically just testimonials and brand stories and getting the people who you're working with who like your company to share that because that's so much more authentic. It resonates with people. They can say, hey, that person's like me. It's more credible because it's not the company telling me they're great. It's somebody that actually is a customer of the company that's telling me that they're great. And it can also kind of personalize the take away the company ness of your company and make it more people like. And so there were a few campaigns that we were looking at. One was, I think it was for Hosts by Hosts, where Airbnb had interviews with hosts and customers and put that out all over social media. It was very, very successful. That was a few years ago. More recently, GoPro did a GoPro Hero Campaign. Starbucks had a red cup art campaign where people were drawing on the cups and, and there was another one, Blue House Salmon, that got a 1900% increase in social media followers, which is pretty great. I mean, you know, was that 20x basically in, in just 12 months. So, so we were talking about, and Ryan's like, well, we've done a whole bunch of cool things like that. Why don't we share that with you guys? So that's what we're going to talk about today. So Ryan, you want to talk a little bit about, add anything to what I said and then maybe talk about kind of what we're doing.

Oh, I'm just glad that we're talking about it because it is such an overlooked and forgotten strategy. So much so that when we Were talking about episode topics. We're like, what can we talk about? Couldn't come up, like had a hard time thinking of something and you mentioned this. I'm like, oh yeah. Because typically when we, you know, when we're coming up with topics either like what's something, you know, current that's happening out there in the world that we feel like is worth discussing?

And it's like there's 10 things. There's like, it's like, hey, I got 10 things. I got five and I've got five. And today.

Yeah. Oh, but I mean, our favorite is when it's like, oh, we figured something out that's cool. Like we got this cool result. There's this thing that's working now. Like that's our favorite kind of episode to do.

Yes.

And we actually just did that. We did get a really cool result. We had had a really big win last month at one of our companies and it was in this area. And again, this strategy is so overlooked and it is so forgotten that I myself forgot about that. And so I was really glad when you mentioned it because. Yeah, I mean, last month and one of our companies, we got 10 customer stories. And these aren't just like random kind of one off testimonials or reviews. Like these are in depth. A client who has gotten a result agreeing to essentially be interviewed by somebody who is, you know, they're literally being filmed and it's being cut up into, into a customer story for us to, you know, to utilize. And we got 10 of them last, last month. In any given month, you know, we're only bringing on, call it, you know, 20 to 30 new clients. So I mean, that's pretty good. It's the first month we've ever broken into double digits. And so, and it was all, it's not that like we only all of a sudden just started doing good work. It's like we finally perfected the ask. And so I think that's kind of what I thought would be worth talking about today.

Let's, let's start to just so everybody that that's, you know, hearing or seeing this can say, see how it will help their business. So is this like, it doesn't sound like this is something that you would do if you were a coffee shop. It doesn't sound like it's something that you would do. Maybe if you're a, an architect or you're, you know, running a gas station or any of those kinds of more traditional businesses. Sounds like initially maybe this is just something or you know, or let's say you're, you know, bigger, you've got, you're a cabinet manufacturer, you know, selling wholesale to wholesalers, or you're an affiliate based model. How does this help those guys? Because I think a lot of people might tune out and say, I don't think that. I don't see myself doing that.

Yeah, and that's a good point. I think a lot of times when people think about it, when they think about these things like testimonials and reviews, they think about the Amazon review or like the Google review or something like that and that's all they think. So if you have a consumer driven, you know, product, then you probably think about it in terms of reviews and if you don't, then you probably don't think about this at all. Or you might think about it just kind of like as a one off, like case study or something like that. What, what we're talking about here is less the volume of reviews. I think that that can be important again, especially in consumer. You want to get those five stars, you want to get your average star rating up, you want a lot of people talking, saying nice things about you, that social proof is important. But really what we're talking about here is lower in volume but, but greater in quality. Yeah, like somebody saying something in a more like in a much bigger fluid way. And the reason it applies to all those businesses you mentioned is for all the reasons that you mentioned at the start of this, it does better personalize a brand. So like if you are that coffee shop, you know, it's not just somebody be like their coffee is good, but it's them telling a story about their life and how, you know, how this is just the ultimate start to their day and when they don't get, you know, this coffee, how their day is totally miserable and they're telling like the story about the one day that they didn't get their coffee and I was the worst day ever. Right. And really beginning to bring some narrative into what very often is a lifeless brand. I mean, oftentimes we're taught as marketers and as business leaders that we need to speak with more emotion, that we need to tell more stories. And the stories we tell all too often are our own stories. It's actually way more interesting if we tell stories about our customers. If we tell stories about our clients, not only do they resonate more with our audience, but they're better received because we're not always talking about us all the time. So yeah, there's literally not a business on earth that this doesn't apply to. Yeah, yeah.

And just to kind of bring home what you said too. So you've got reviews out there, like trustpilot reviews that you have to pay a ridiculous amount to subscribe to or Google reviews and things like that. And then you've got testimonials which are typically more often than not print like a little picture of the person and a statement, like a quote or something like that. And neither of those are particularly convincing. Obviously overwhelming, positive, five star reviews. People are going to look at that and go, oh, that's great. But it's not usually going to cause them to make a buying decision. It's more confirming a decision that they're trying to just not get taken advantage of and be sure they're going to get what they're bargaining for when they do business with you. I don't think it actually drives customers. Testimonials are designed to actually drive conversions, but they're very suspect because they're, they've been abused by marketers and you know, and other people. And then you have, you have these kind of brand story type things which I think is what we're talking about here, which are probably the next step up. Like the bridge between the testimonial that I talked about and these. Would you call these brand stories or what would you call these?

Customer stories? Client stories. Customer stories, yeah, customer stories.

They are kind of between those two would be. Well, how do I tell that the testimonial is real. So what a lot of companies do is they'll snapshot social media posts by their customers saying good things about them and then put that up so you can see it was from social media. But these go much deeper and I think these actually create, like Ryan said, we know stories sell. One of the best ways to convert is to tell through something through a story. And having the customer tell the story is really, really powerful. So, so whoever you are, even like our prime corporate services that does entity formation for people and stuff like that, you would think. And we drive that business. We don't go get customers directly. Usually we go to affiliates. So they're kind of like our wholesalers, if you will. So if you have a wholesale business or an affiliate driven business, our stories are about our affiliates because our customer that we're trying to get is an affiliate. And so if we have an affiliate tell a story about, or if we tell that story about the affiliate and how working with us was good for them, then that is powerfully convincing to other affiliates. So don't think it's just the end customer either. It is anybody who is sending you business. That to me, I just wanted to kind of clarify those couple of things. So that being said, yeah, I agree. It applies. Whoever you are, whether you're a professional, you know, service provider, a locksmith, an H VAC person, a, you know, coffee shop, a wholesaler, retailer, manufacturer, whatever it is, your customers should be elevated. And I was just talking to our mutual friend John Kronstadt jcron about his revenue and recognition program. And I want to say that he said that still about 40% of their $2 billion valued business is driven by elevating customers and recognizing them. And then they make those customers affiliates. And that was pretty powerful. Like, that's a. That's something that he and his founding partner put into place years before the super smart giant private equity people came in with all their professional managers and everything. And that still drives more revenue than anything else that any of them have done since then. So just like, if you need to believe what we're saying works, I mean, it really, really does. So that. So let's assume that you guys believe that this will apply to you and that it can work. What the heck is it? How do I do it? Let's talk about that.

Yeah, so the. I'll tell you what not to do. Because we did this is what we did in the beginning, when we would finish with, we'd get to the end of an engagement with a client, right? And we'd be like, great, we're done. This is so good. Would you be willing to do a customer story? Would you be willing to give us a testimonial? And it was always like, yeah, sure. I mean, even the happy ones, right? We would just go straight in, like, ask for the testimonial, ask for the customer story. And we got some. But in general was like. And if you think about it, it kind of makes sense because what you're basically doing is saying, this is really great. Now I've given you homework. Okay, so two things that we changed that made all the difference in the world. Number one, the timing of the ask. Instead of waiting until the end, we asked as soon as there was any clear, obvious, measurable exchange of value. And that's important, right? Because that's when they're most excited. So the second that somebody expresses that, like, ah, I'm happy about something, right, You've got a brief glowing moment where they're kind of in that ether, where they're in that state that you can make an ask. And if you wait a day, they're gonna come out of that state, they're gonna be focused on something else. They're gonna forget about you. Okay? So just changing the ask from the end of the engagement till, you know, right afterwards, that was the first big change. And again, you know, we're talking about more of a B2B kind of professional services type application here. But this does apply if you're, you know, coffee shop. This does apply if you're a dentist. You know, this does apply if you're a custom cabinet maker. Right. There's always some moment in the delivery where, you know, there's like an aha, revelation, you know, and it comes at different times, but it's usually not at the very, very end. Right. It's usually going to be some time. And yet we wait until the very end to do the ask. Don't do that ask, like at the exact moment. So the timing was the first big change. The second big change that we made is we changed the nature of the ask. So instead of saying, can we have this big testimonial customer story? What we said and what we asked instead was we asked for a little ask, a tiny ask. We said, hey, that is so great. Thank you so much for that feedback. Quick question for you. From time to time, people will ask us if. And this does apply more to services. I'll give another example for, for consumer. From time to time, people, people will ask us, you know, if there's anybody that, that, you know, that like a reference client that we could send, that they could talk to if they've got questions about our services. Given that you've obviously had a good experience, would you be willing to just be one of those reference clients? I promise not to send you people every day or every week or anything like that. And I'll give you a heads up before I send anybody your way. But just would you be willing to be on kind of our reference client list? Now, that's a small ask, because you're not. They don't have to do anything today. You're not asking for a testimonial. You're not asking for. For a customer story. You're not asking for a referral. Okay. You're simply asking if there'll be a reference client. Can I put your name on a list to maybe send somebody your way sometime in the future? It is an easy yes today because they won't have to do anything until maybe sometime in the future. Now, once you've got that little yes, then it's very simple to say, amazing. I'm gonna add you on there just were on the same page. Like I would love to do a customer story with you as well so that we can get on the same page. Like if I did send some, send somebody to you, what you would say. And frankly, if I had a customer story, I wouldn't even have to send people your way. I could just send them your story. Now the customer story shifts from being me, us giving them work to us taking future work off their plate.

Yeah, that's pretty clever. I like that.

And that shift that when you talked.

About asking for the reference list, I'm like, I don't want to be on your references. I'd rather give you a testimony. Right.

But it's, but it's easy to say yes to today because it doesn't require anything. And what you're saying is I don't have anybody today. That's the important thing. You don't say, oh, there's somebody I'd love for you to talk to. It's yeah, can it be in a reference list? I don't, I'm not gonna say anybody t today or tomorrow, like I don't know. But like it's an easy yes. But then you now are going to completely remove the burden by having to do that. Changing up the ask made all the difference in the world in more of a, you know, B2B type type context. I would flip it a little bit. I'm sorry, B2C in this case, because you're dealing with more volume. You likely, hopefully you're just trying to get people to leave reviews. What you're looking for in these cases are the love letters. So every now and then you, most of the reviews are like, great service, amazing food, love the coffee. Jan was nice, right? That's most of them. But every now and then you get a love letter and it's just like long, it's paragraphs.

Yep.

When those happen, pay attention to those and see if you can't reach out to those folks proactively. Most review things, you can respond to them. Hey, thanks so much. You know, we'd like to thank you for this kind review. You know, please send me an email here. You know, we've got a gift for you. Love to give, have you come in, you know, buy a lunch on us or something like that. When that happens, then because they've already taken the first step, you can ask them for a more in depth customer story that can be turned into user generated content. The key is the timing of the ask and the extent of the ask.

Nice. So if you are thinking about the people to ask and you've got, let's say a lot of customers and, and there's not really a, like a love letter format that is currently available. Should you have some tool that you put in place to capture that or indicate that, like I'm thinking if you're measuring Net Promoter score or CSAT customer satisfaction, if you're using something like that, if somebody comes back all 10s, then that would seem to be indicative that they had a pretty exceptional experience so you could reach out to them. And I'm guessing, are we using any tools to gather testimonials now that we might be able to use to identify the love letter coming in?

So yeah, it depends on the business. I mean some businesses are using just your basic like trustpilot type review services. There's another tool called testimonial to that we use a little bit. Not an affiliate link, free plug. But I'll tell you, none of those have been quite as effective. We do also run NPS surveys, you know, fairly regularly. And yeah, when we get an obvious promoter, so somebody giving us a 9 or a 10, there is the, the software and this is just run through our CRM. It's just run through HubSpot. It automatically if somebody gives you a 9 or a 10 and most NPS NET Promoter score tools will do this will then give you an opportunity to, to leave a review.

So if you're not doing that now, I'm asking, obviously we know the answers to these questions. We ask each other usually. But I'm asking you guys if you're thinking, but I don't have that right now. It's like, well, you definitely should consider having something to get feedback from your customers so that you can see when you're doing things well and when you're doing things that could be improved. So that's, they're out there probably anyway on Google reviews. And so I can tell you a lot of businesses when we go consult have never looked at their reviews. Yeah, they're, they're running their business. They're just so they don't know what people are complaining about or not complaining about or you know, maybe they've got a, a terrible Better Business Bureau, which, you know, I have a whole agent, a whole agenda. I have a whole, you know, opinion about that that I won't share with you guys. But you can probably guess what it is. But, but like those, those review things are out there already and so if you, like, if you're saying, I don't know, I don't know how to do this, probably a place to start would be. And it'd be difficult for you to find who they are because it's usually like, you know, RF or, you know, or rd, you know, that's out there, but. Or Ryan D. Like, you don't have their contact information, but it would give you the ability to see maybe things that you could improve and start generating those love letters. And then I'd say think about putting something in that allows you to capture the customer contact information. So whether it's testimonial to. Thank you. The one that I was thinking of, I can't ever remember the name of it. I think it's the to at the end.

Yeah, to.

And there are others as well, but HubSpot has that functionality. So if your CRM, you know, your customer relationship manager, if you're using one of those software, allows you to do it, then start. Start doing that. And do you have any other tips, Ryan, for. For what people might do if they're trying. If they're a little like, I just don't know where to start with gathering this.

Yeah. So the. You're. There are some people who just want to be on camera. They just, they want to be publicized. Right. And there are some people who don't. Right. Part of the reason that I don't like to leave testimonials and I don't like to do this stuff is I don't. I don't want to get on camera. I don't want to be in front of a bunch of stuff. But there are some people who love it. Given the option between money and fame, they choose fame. These people are gold. And so we have done campaigns where the subject line to our customers and clients, we've literally said, can I make you famous question mark? And it's. We're looking to profile five customers, five clients that have had, you know, amazing results with this. If you have, we'd love to talk to you so that we can feature you in some of our, you know, videos that we're making on all of our channels and all this other stuff. It's especially powerful if you're B2B, because then people don't just feature themselves, but they get their companies featured as well. You know, I know people who've been featured on, like, Shopify commercials and stuff like that and have generated business for it. So.

So email campaign. So an email campaign, a social media campaign.

Can I make you Famous those.

Then a sign at the cash register that says, can we make you famous?

What is that about?

Right, that just so wherever you are in your sophistication level, you can do this. I guess that's my point.

And what I'll tell you though is, you know, prior to about 60 days ago, we were frustrated because we didn't have, at the business that we got, we didn't have any of these, no good ones at like events and meetings, stuff like that. We would collect some and they were always just sort of okay, you know, there. We didn't have a good process around it. It was very. Just sort of willy nilly. And so the biggest change that we made is we started measuring it now on our scorecard, our account managers were held accountable to a goal of they had to generate a certain number of client stories every week.

Ooh, I love that.

And so once that was measurable and trackable, and it was. How many did we get this week? None. Okay, well, that's not good because the goal is, you know, I think the goal last month was eight. And going into the last week they only had four. And so they did a big push and wound up getting six. So beat the goal in the last week.

That's great.

And so measuring it is big. Incentivizing it is, you know, is important. But if you don't have any right now. Yep. Go back and tap the list that you have. Ask them. But the best thing that you can do is just to fix it moving forward. Do the things I talked about before time, your ask. Right. You know, kind of meter measure. Your, your ask following the process that I described. Because you just don't need that many, you know, the, the campaigns that you're talking about. I mean, how, like how many customers did they really feature? Like a half a dozen, maybe at most two or three sometimes.

Yeah. Now I will. You don't. You don't. Okay, so let's talk about, before we talk about how you use them once you've got them, a little bit more specifics. So somebody says, yeah, I'll do it. You've got the person, they love you, they're ready, they're committed, they've said, okay, what do you want to capture? What is the ideal thing going to look like? Is it a.

And I'll tell you. Yeah, the best thing that you need to do, you got to get them on video. If you can do it, you got to get them on video. And depending on your business and how you want to use it, you know, if you're like a Shopify or something like that. I mean, I know they're flying, you know, people out to them or they're. They're flying video crews. Like, we've actually flown, you know, we've had local video crews go to somebody's location and had a producer, you know, read, you know, ask them a series of questions and things like that, or flew one of our people out with a video crew. So you could spend as much or as little as you want. In general, what we're doing and what we're finding is the most effective is just to get people on Zoom talking or to get them like on a FaceTime, you know, record. Like a FaceTime. Because there's an authenticity to it. Right. That, you know, we found. Actually, if it looks overly produced and it looks commercialized, then it's not as effective. Yeah, it's less credible. So don't think that you have to have some crazy high production value. Value on this kind of thing. I remember we don't do.

They were beautiful. There was one that was like out in a horse farm and it kind of did the whole background and we had these just amazing cinematic kind of experience. And then, then you get somebody that's just telling their story and it. It just feels more legit. Even though, like, they were both legitimate. The one was beautiful, but it felt like a commercial, whereas the more underproduced one just feels like a conversation or something, I guess, more. It feels more spontaneous, too, than planned and so just more trustworthy.

Yeah. And so now it's on. It's on Zoom. We actually. We work with the service now. I don't want to. It's still early, too early for me to feel comfortable, like, completely plugging them for free. But there are a lot of services out there now that will do this. And so if you, if you, like, do some searches for it, there are a number of searches out there that will do this. They're not cheap, but what they do is so for, you know, you're probably looking anywhere between like 5 to $12,000, depending on the package that you're doing. But what you wind up with is about a half a dozen to a dozen filmed customer stories. And then what they're going to do is you're going to get all the raw footage, they're going to handle all the asking of the questions, and they've got a process for doing it that's really effective. They're going to create. Each interview is going to be its own standalone, but then they're Also going to do mashups of all the combined ones. So you might get a video as well. Yeah, so it's a video of everybody answering the same question or it's all these different themed ones. And so it really is a nice package and you pay it once and you're kind of good. For like literally years we tried to do it internally with our own video crew and hiring folks and it just, it never worked out as well. So we said, let's just go ahead and bite the bullet. Pay the people who know what they're doing, the price that they charge. And what we have gotten back so far, we've been very pleased with it.

Do we have a link to our reel of those that we could. So people could see kind of what ours look like if they wanted to see what we're doing with it?

We haven't, so we haven't posted the new ones yet.

Will they sit at a particular place?

They will, yeah. Yeah. Let me pull it up. So if you go to. So specifically, just like at Scalable, for example, you go to Scalable Co and there's a link at the top success stories. You'll see in there. There are a number of them, a few of them up there right now.

Okay, so it's just Scalable Co and it's on the homepage.

Yeah, there's a link at the top success stories. I think it's scalable.co testimonials is the URL. But yeah, you can see some of them there. And what you want to produce ideally is what you'll see there is a wall of love is what we call it. And so it's a bunch of videos, but then down below it there's also screenshots of social posts. And you just kind of want to create this obnoxiously long social proof, Irrefutable, overwhelming proof.

Right?

Yeah. But socially, the key thing that you're going for in a story, though, is a story. Right. All good stories start with a character, an interesting character. So you want to find out who is this character? Who are we talking about? What was there before State? Like, like, why did you come to us? What was going on in your world? You know, what were some things that, that maybe had you nervous to get started? Like why, you know, were you a little bit, you know, suspicious of anything? You know, do you have some concerns? How did you ever, you know, come those concerns and then, you know, what was like when you got started then and then now, what's your life like today? So that's the basic flow.

Who are you?

What was going on in your world that led you to us? What were some concerns that you had, you know, some doubts, some possible objections? How did you know to overcome those objections? And then what's life like today? And then the last question is always the same. It's what would you say to a friend, a colleague or whatever who is interested in, in, you know, utilizing our services or, you know, buying our product? And that's where you get kind of the most like, you know, glowing, gushing kind of thing.

Okay, what are the problems that you've seen with this whole idea in terms of the problem, maybe with the mechanics of doing it, the problem with the implementation of it, anything that like, didn't work. Kind of the opposite of what you said that like I. We learned to ask when they, right when they said they were happy, any of the negative things that we should have people looking out to avoid?

Yeah, I mean, so the biggest problem is just getting people to agree to do it in the first place. We talked about the two things to overcome that. The next biggest thing was not asking the right questions during the process to get that. I mean, so, you know, we would have folks who were just like a camera crew. They'd be like, so what's it like? What was your experience like? It's great. And there's no meaningful specifics.

Definitely no story.

Yeah, there's no narrative, there's no story. And so having somebody there who can really say, oh, tell me more about that, tell me more about that. You want somebody ideally asking the questions who has some type of a journalistic background. If you can, if you can find that person, that's great because there's somebody who's going to continue to ask follow up questions and pull the story out of them. Most people don't naturally tell stories. They certainly don't naturally tell their own story. So asking the right questions, but having the right interviewer is important. The interviewer should not be the CEO or owner because that can create a lot of tension and anxiety. Okay. So it should almost be this separate third party. Here's the other thing that we found.

That was incredible because you would think that people are going to tell the CEO what they want to hear. So I think that like an independent interview is going to win every time.

Thousand percent. Here's the other thing that we do that really, really, really helped. When you're doing this on Zoom, the first 20 minutes before we get started is basically just helping them prep their setup. So it's helping them okay, put some books under your laptop so that it's.

A little bit higher.

Hey, can you move this thing over here? And it's less about trying to create the perfect environment and more about giving them confidence because again, we don't actually care that it looks perfect.

But also you don't want them like, look, they're looking at their laptop and you can see up their nose or they're, you know, they've got it up here and it's, you know, they're 10, they're away. Or there's this bright light or a circling ceiling fan behind them that's like creating shadow. Like, I've seen all that stuff and I, I'm so happy you said that because that's been our experience too, is that most people do you remember one of the guys that worked for us and he just had the, he did stand up meetings with his team and he'd drink a cup of coffee like really, really slow and talk really, really slow. And everybody was like falling asleep and that was like this dimly lit, terrible, flickering fluorescent light back.

I was like, dude, I can't even.

Be on one of these meetings because it's so bad. So, so that what you just said, I think is a big deal, especially if you're doing zoom, you know, zoom things. And even if you're.

And let them know ahead of time you're going to do that, like, yeah, let them know, say, so we're going to spend the first like 10, 15 minutes just kind of prepping the space, getting it set up. We do it for everybody. So they don't think that they're like uniquely, you know, broken and jacked up in terms of their like, zoom setup or whatever. But it, and it's a good thing of like, these are the questions I'm going to ask you. So, you know, kind of prepping them on some things and making sure that when they talk about the brand that they say the right names. You know, people will say, call things the wrong thing sometimes. And so those little types of details, you know, definitely matter. So that little prep work is important, but beyond that, no, it really is mostly just good editing after the fact. And it's worth paying people what it costs to pay, what it would have cost you to get done. Right.

So let's talk then about how to use them. So we just gave an example. They're on our website. It's scalable. That's one way. I'll give another one. We have over 100 customer stories and they are one page per customer. With pictures of the customer and them telling their story of how they acquired a business in our epic program. And they're all in a book. So it's basically our customer success book that we send a PDF of to everyone before they get on a call to talk about investing in the program. Other things that you think would be good use of these things once we've got them?

Yeah, tons. I mean, so we'll do mashups for ads. So retargeting ads where testimonials are some of the highest ROI ad campaigns. If you don't know what that is, whoever's doing your media, buying your paid advertising should. And it's incredibly, incredibly effective. So for that, if you've got any type of, if you've got a sales motion and a sales team, I promise you, they're hearing from people saying like, yeah, but have you worked with anybody in my industry who's like me? And if they could be like, yep, here's a few. Boom, boom, boom. And they can just fire off those testimonies. Or even better, leading up to the call saying, hey, before we get to the call, I was just looking at your stuff and you know, we've, we've actually worked with a couple people in your industry. You might want to watch these ahead of time. Far better to inoculate against an objection such that it never comes up than have to overcome one. So anything bottom of funnel kind of to overcome objections, testimonials, proof points in the sales process. And then one of our favorite marketing campaigns that will run at least every other month is what we call the join me in congratulating campaign. And it's literally just a join me and congratulating so and so on achieving this amazing result. And it's, hey, I mean, that's basically the entire campaign. It's the subject line is join me in congratulating, you know, name, and it's join me congratulating this person.

Here's what they did.

They got this amazing result. If you want to see their story over here, check it out. P.S. if you want help getting similar, you know, results, we'd love to talk to you. That's.

Yeah, that's the basic idea that that is super helpful. Like, even if you're thinking, well, I do product launches, and so I don't see this applying to me other than having general testimonials. What Ryan was just talking about, one of the. Was actually the first product launch I ever did and it. And was able, fortunately, to break records doing it. I had a series of emails that went out. So after. Because refunds are a big deal, and product launches of information products, which is what this was, refunds can be 50%, right? And so I was concerned because you got paid your affiliate commission only if somebody hadn't refunded within the first 30 days. And so I had a campaign where I was actively soliciting customer success stories from all the people that bought through my affiliate link. And then every time I got one, I would write an email and the email would go out. And so I was sending once a week, I was sending an email to all of the people that bought this is for retention, to keep them in the program so that they would be like, oh, and I would say, hey, I want to join.

Join it.

It was the same thing. Join us. Join me in congratulating Ryan, who just got his first client doing blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then when it got to be four weeks away, I sent two a week. And then I sent one every day for the last two weeks that we did the campaign like. So as it was getting closer and closer to refund, it was more and more and more overwhelming proof of how wonderful this thing is and how many people were success having successes. So that people would say, you know, would at least think about it, that there's all these other people doing this thing. I bought this thing to do what they're all doing. They're all getting that result. It obviously works. And I just haven't taken the action I need. I'm going to keep this thing, and I'm definitely going to get around to doing it. And so even for a retention campaign, it can be very, very effective.

It's also effective for referral strategy. Once somebody has given you a testimony or testimonial or a customer story, that is the time to say, amazing. Is there anybody we should send this to who's in your network? Right. Like, who do you know that that should probably know in your world who should be in our world that should know that you said this about us is a really simple question. I think oftentimes the reason that businesses don't get as many referrals as they would like is because, number one, they don't create as many successful clients as they think they do. And one of the ways to make sure that you create successful clients is you pursue success stories as a metric, because then you're going to make sure that you actually do pull people you know across the finish line. But if you're making successful clients, if you're turning those into Success stories after that, then saying, hey, can I get a referral? That's. That's the time to ask for it. And so then there's other campaigns you can run in terms of, you know, if they've got a big network on LinkedIn, if you're B2B, or if they're, you know, if they've got a, you know, if they're a center of influence in any kind of thing to feature them prominently. I've gone to events where I've been a speaker, and at some point in the past, I had given one of the vendors a testimonial. So I'm walking around the trade floor and there's my face on somebody else's booth saying nice things about their product.

Very smart. Good on them.

Very smart. Because I'm a center of influence. I'm on stage. They knew that. And so they chose to feature, you know, my customer story, you know, in their booth as that additional validation. So there are so many different opportunities, so many different ways that you can utilize it. And even if nobody knows the individual, if they just know the organization or the group that they belong to, if it's, you know, if other people live in the same city or town that they live in, it doesn't have to be directly connected for it to be still effective. But the key is just to go out there and start generating them. You'll come up with lots of ways to use it once you have it. I love it.

Well, hopefully that has been helpful to you guys. Anything else to talk about with that before we kind of wrap today? Ryan?

I'll just say the only marketing channel that gets better as it scales is word of mouth. Every other marketing channel gets worse at scale. It gets more expensive, it converts less. As you widen the top of the funnel, it performs increasingly more poorly. That's true for every type of paid advertising. It's true for, you know, pretty much every channel out there, with the exception of word of mouth. The more people who are talking about you, the better it gets.

And this is word of mouth at scale. Right?

And this is exactly. It is engineered word of mouth at scale. So it is a channel that if you're not investing in this year, it is absolutely worth investing in because it's. It's going to pay dividends.

Love it. Well, hopefully you guys enjoyed that. I know that it will be valuable to you if you take it and don't just listen to it, but actually re. Listen to it and take some notes and write it down and take action, because this is stuff that actually works for us. So that's it for today. We will see you next time. If you like this, please share it with a friend. If you didn't, keep it to yourself. Talk to you guys later. Ever wondered how some people build real wealth through acquisitions while others just sit on the sidelines? Well, I'm here to tell you it's not about luck. It's about having the right system, the right deals and the right guidance. And that's exactly what we give you in the EPIC Deal Fast Track. If you've been thinking about buying a business, but you keep getting stuck, whether it's finding the right deal, structuring the financing or or negotiating with sellers, you are not alone. Too many people waste months, even years just thinking about acquiring a business while the real opportunities pass them by. The EPIC Deal Fast Track is not another course. It's actually an implementation program and it's designed to get you from the idea to the acquisition in just 16 weeks or less. We work with you one on one to help you find, fund and close your first or or next deal. And once you do, we're going to plug you into our elite EPIC board community so that you can keep scaling through acquisitions. We install three powerful systems in your business. The first is the Deal flow engine so you always have high quality off market deals coming to you. Number two, we give you our offer and funding system so that you can structure offers that get accepted and fund them creatively many times with no money out of your own pocket. And number three are closing and integration systems so that you don't just buy a business, you actually successfully run and scale it once you have acquired it. Plus you'll have direct one on one support from an EPIC Deal Advisor every step of the way. And that's people that have actually come up through this system and done these deals themselves. That's the only way to become an EPIC Deal Advisor. And if you're serious about acquiring a business this year, don't just sit on the sidelines. Just text I'm in to 334-458-9034 and we'll get you in. So text I'm in to 334-458-9034. We'll get you in. No fluff, no wasted time, just real deal making from people that are actually out there doing deals right now. I'll see you there.