Digital Game Plan: Let’s Go Rounding the Bases to Win the Game

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Transcription 

Curt Anderson  00:00

Hey, hello there. Welcome, Damon. How are you, my friend?

Damon Pistulka  00:03

I’m doing great, Curt. Ready to go?

Curt Anderson  00:05

Let’s dive in. So we’re gonna hear. We’re talking here today about the digital game plan, and it’s we’re if for our baseball fans out there, Damon, we’re gonna talk a little baseball. How’s that? You you don’t mind you you don’t mind talking baseball, do you?

Damon Pistulka  00:19

I don’t know. Our team’s not doing well this year. Oh, your

Curt Anderson  00:21

team’s not doing well. All right, so we’ll we’ll gloss over that. We’ll be

Damon Pistulka  00:24

okay. We’ll be you’ll

Curt Anderson  00:25

you’ll survive. Yeah. So, but you are Super Bowl champs. You’re reigning Super Bowl champion. So yes, you know. So you’ve got you’ve got bragan. Yeah. So

Damon Pistulka  00:34

going to the first game today. So it’ll be good.

Curt Anderson  00:36

Can’t own you know. Can’t you can’t have everything, Mister. No, no. You know, champion, Mister Win it all, right? So, all right, let’s dive into rounding the bases. Yep, rounding the bases is a powerful, incredible tool exercise. Actually, I came up with this. Man, I think I had hair back then. It was like it was in my 20s, right? It was back in the 90s. I came up with this little exercise of like putting clients in buckets, and I found it just so helpful, so valuable, powerful. Because instead of like trying to be everything to everybody, right? I started like, okay, well, targeting these folks, and they have different needs and challenges, and targeting these folks, and we were good at targeting those four, but not great at targeting. There were certain bases that we were better at, and we were nurturing. So when you hear rounding the bases, you’ve gone through this many, many times, segmenting your customers. What stands out to you? What’s the value play that you find?

Damon Pistulka  01:32

We really begin to figure out what customer segments you don’t want to focus on.

Curt Anderson  01:38

Yeah,

Damon Pistulka  01:40

and it can. I mean, that’s products and service too, right? Because it kind of ties together your products and services and customers,

Curt Anderson  01:46

right? So what we’re doing is we’re going to take a look at the digital game plan software tool that we’ve come up with, and you take a look here. The very first tab, we’ve been going talking frequently about the strengths, the opportunities, and then we have our so what we call that the strategic subtraction. Today we’re going to talk deeper about rounding the bases. And for our baseball fans out there, just basically this, like you know, hey, who’s that customer, that client, that ideal buyer persona that is a single? You know, like hey, we have all sorts of singles. Love our singles, but it’s hard. You know, we’ve got to accumulate a lot of singles to win a game, right?

Damon Pistulka  02:26

Yep.

Curt Anderson  02:26

Boy, those doubles, man, Damon, I love my doubles, right? Buy twice as much, you know, just better volume. You get those triples, you know what I’m talking about. You get down and dirty head first in the third, right? That those triple, those rare, wonderful clients that just buy that much more, and then we have the holy grail. We have the home runs. Okay, anything that you want to add as far as like segmenting from our singles, doubles, triples, home runs? What’s going through your mind?

Damon Pistulka  02:53

Well, you really just usually people as we go through this with them, they’re they’re looking at volume, or they’re looking at you know diversity of products they buy. There’s a few different ways to look at it, but segmenting an amount like this is is really the place to get started to understand who you serve the best.

Curt Anderson  03:12

And I’ll tell you, with AI, you’ve got a couple different components going on here, and so in in we’ve had several clients say like contract manufacturing space where they have hundreds of customers. We’ve had many that have had like aha brick to the head discoveries. We’re like, you know what? They had some bases that they weren’t quite profitable on. We’re like when they because now what you can do is you can take your customer base and take your sales per customers, drop that into AI, drop it into Cloud or Chat or whatever. Use this tool here of segmenting them by singles, doubles, triples, and home runs, and man, Damon, it’s almost consistently the Pareto principle-that 8020 rule, like almost to the like the first the single percent, and it’s just mind blowing on how 80% of the customer, 80% 20% of the customers are almost consistently creating 80% of the sales profits, what have you, or same thing with the product line. Very eye opening, right?

Damon Pistulka  04:10

Yeah, yep, and it allows you to really focus your company, everyone in on your best opportunities to to succeed.

Curt Anderson  04:20

Exactly, and it helps. I can’t tell you how many clients over the years were like, we get a call, a text, an email. Hey, we just landed a double. Hey, we’re focusing on our triples. Or you know, some customers like, hey, you know what? I want to swing for the fence. I want to go for that home run. Other folks are like, you know what? I can’t. You know, those home runs are just a little bit too much for us right now. We need to go a different direction. I’m going to show a great example. I think it’s a great example. This company here, Damon. You check out this fritter. Here, hey, you’re a dog lover, are you not? Yes. My dog is snoring right next to me as we speak. Poor guy had surgery yesterday. He’s like, he’s on the road to recovery. God bless him. So for all of our pet fans out there, this is a wonderful. Oh my goodness! I love every client. This client was very special. This is a company in the state of Illinois, and they’re called Fritters for Critters. They manufacture dog treats. The staff that manufactures the products, they have different, different. They’re differently abled. Some physical challenges, that type of thing, and they do an incredible job of putting out dog treats for their community. It’s just it’s such a warm, heartwarming project, and just a wonderful company. And check out their website. Go to Fritters for Critters. You can buy your dog treats right on their website. They got full blown into e-commerce. They’re now on social media. They’re doing all sorts of fun things, but a big takeaway for these guys was going through that rounding the bases. If you go on our website, we actually have a testimonial from Josh, the director of the program, talking about how it was very powerful on going through that segmentation. Now, what they did is they had their customers that they they have a physical storefront and it’s a really cool. Let me let me scroll down here. They’ve got a really cool storefront here, and you know just checking out their website. Here’s their staff, all sorts of fun things. Here, like customers are bringing their their dogs right to the shop. You know, nice, cool. They get the and here’s the shop right there. They know that I’m actually going to try to visit them next week, believe it or not, and they actually know their dogs and pet owners by name, and so they call them their doubles, right? Like, hey, these are the folks that come on a regular basis, our regulars, our locals, our our loyal customers that we know. We know the dog by name, the dog, you know, that’s their doubles. They’re like, man, we love our doubles. We feel like we have a really good. We’re not taking them for granted, but we have a good grip on our doubles. They are on Route 66. Damon, have you ever driven Route 66?

Damon Pistulka  06:50

I have a little bit. Have

Curt Anderson  06:51

you? I’ve you know what? I’m I’m very little on my. I’m just

Damon Pistulka  06:54

like a little teeny bit too.

Curt Anderson  06:56

Little teeny bit. That what a great. You know what? Maybe you, myself, and the wives. We should make that a bucket list. We’ll drive 66. They’re on Route 66 in the early stages in Illinois, and so they’re like, “Hey, you know, we have a lot of people that come by once a time. Their pet parents traveling with their their furry best friends. How could we target those more frequently? Maybe they’re going to buy once, but they would go back home and maybe buy online. They’re like, those are potential singles. They’ve got their doubles, who are their loyal customers that biweekly. They also wanted to get into wholesale, and they were like, “How could we find boutique owners who would sell to those pet parents who are singles, those pet parents that are our doubles? But how can we create like a bit of like a wholesale distribution network to those small boutiques, and then a home run would, of course, be like say major brick and mortar, PetSmart, that type of thing. They’re like, you know, we’re not quite ready there for the home run, but we could go after those tourists. We want to take care of our doubles that we see on a weekly basis. What if we started? They had a night. They had nice little momentum with their wholesale. They want to expand on it? They wanted to expand, make their website speak clearly to that tourist, that single, in that triple, the B 2b relationship, and it made they felt it made their life so much easier by having that clarity of like, who are we trying to target market? Yeah. What are your thoughts? Your takeaway there?

Damon Pistulka  08:18

Well, that clarity really allows you to speak to them in words that those ideal customers will understand and relate to. That’s that’s really what that clarity gives you.

Curt Anderson  08:30

Yeah, exactly. So you know now understanding like, hey, that where’s that tourist hanging out? Well, you know they’re not going to be on local, maybe Google Business Profile per se, or you know how can we find them from you know anybody that’s doing a search for traveling things to do pet parent friendly travel on Route 66 so they want to start thinking differently like what type of content that they could be inviting to get these folks to come in what are some alignment that they could do like tourist websites or that type of thing right on the B 2b side, they’re like, you know, that might be a LinkedIn play. Maybe that’s more of an Instagram play. Maybe we need to have like some video content that speaks to that B 2b buyer. So by going through the rounding the bases exercise, it was just very eye opening. We find it just consistently, over and over again. We actually we’ve aligned with a an incubator, and we’ve talked with a couple companies that are actually startups. So even if they’re starting at zero, and we’ve gone through the rounding the exercise, rounding the bases exercise, and it’s been kind of aha moments of like, man, we’re a little bit too broad. Let’s get these focused on who we’re targeting. So that’s our takeaway here, Damon. Closing thoughts, words of wisdom that you want to share on a rounding the basis.

Damon Pistulka  09:44

Well, segmenting your customers is is really critical in your marketing, and I think the digital game plan is a has a great structure and a and a way to do that.

Curt Anderson  09:55

I agree, my friend. So, all right. With that being said, we’re going to wrap up for today. We. Appreciate you more than you can possibly imagine. We wish you massive, incredible success on your venture, whatever you have going on today, and we will catch you on the next one.

Damon Pistulka  10:10

Now, before we leave, though, people can go to the link in the post here and try their own version of the digital game plan.

Curt Anderson  10:17

Thank you, Damon. You know what, Mom says I’m not great at doing that. So, all right, combination. Let’s close out with this. Connect with my friend Damon on LinkedIn. He would love to hear what you have going on. I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn. Drop a note. Let us know what’s going on in your world. If you’d like a little strategy session going through the digital game plan, we’d be happy to help you out with that. Get your free version. We also have a we have a jam session coming up where we take this much further on a webinar coming up in two weeks on september 24. I have that in the chat comment section as well. Register for that jam session and Damon, thank you for giving me that nudge, that little friendly reminder. So guys, have a great rest of your day, and we’ll catch you next time.