Manufacturing eCommerce Success – with John Jantsch

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

marketing, customers, people, book, content, business, john, duct tape marketing, stages, marketers, damon, small business owners, world, referrals, talk, customer journey, today, hourglass, idea, entrepreneurs

SPEAKERS

Damon Pistulka, Curt Anderson, John Jantsch

Damon Pistulka  00:06

All right, everyone. Welcome once again, to the manufacturing ecommerce success series. I’m your co host, Damon Pistulka. And manda we have a show for you today. We have a guest that we don’t even really need to introduce because people know who it is. But I’m going to let Kurt Anderson take it away. Thanks so much,

Curt Anderson  00:24

Damon. Thank you, brother. So guys, happy Friday. Welcome. What an amazing, glorious day it is today. This is a big day, we have a celebrity with us today. Very humble man. I’m sure we’re making a little uncomfortable. But guys, no introduction needed. We have John Jantsch, the famous, really the small business marketing guru. John, welcome to the program. Thank you, brother.

John Jantsch  00:45

Thanks for having me. And as you guys know, because it was happening before we went live, I have chaos here today. But you know, that’s what we live with COVID. Now it’s like we got the animals running through and let grandkids run it through. So I apologize to all of your audience if it gets a little a little crazy here. Absolutely awesome. More than where you’re bringing

Curt Anderson  01:05

my dogs are some kids playing. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what we have. So guys, drop a note in the LinkedIn. Let us know that you’re here. Let us give a shout out to John here. So guys, if I can’t imagine anybody is not familiar with John. But John, you know, Seth Godin calls you the Peter Drucker of small business marketing what I mean, and I’m a huge Peter Drucker fan would an absolute honor in major compliment there. So John, I’m going to you have a brand new book out we’re going to be talking about that today. But of course, you know, I’m going to give you how about this for a compliment. If we’re interviewing Tom Hanks Vaman you know, huge, you know, tons of movies. I have to ask him about Saving Private Ryan right I asked him about Saving Private Ryan. So when John Jan’s is on the stage, though he has an enormous amount of books, content, accomplishments, great keynote speaker, we have to ask about duct tape marketing. So John, I’m a huge I don’t know if I’d say a disciple. I’m a huge Michael Gerber fan. And for guys when duct tape marketing came out for all of us like back remember bookstores Damon? Orders and Barnes and Noble do I remember those days before online used to got my duct tape marketing book and John, your the introduction to forward of your book is from Michael Gerber. How did you land Michael Gerber for that forward?

John Jantsch  02:21

You know, I was also read the E Myth like millions of other people and was a big fan. And I actually did some work with Michael when I was getting started. And you know, I give Mike a lot of credit for kind of my thinking systems thinking for sure. When it comes to marketing and I got to know I got to know Michael well enough that when I somebody published our can you remember who it was now pitched me on saying, hey, we want to publish your book. I was like, Uh, maybe I need to get an agent. I don’t know. So So I called Michael and and he gave me a link into his agent, which has been, you know, was such a great introduction. He’s still my agent today. And and so then we said, Hey, Michael, would you write the foreword? So a perfect person at the time to write the foreword for duct tape marketing?

Curt Anderson  03:08

Well, what an honor what a privilege and you know, and Michael so around I just heard him on a podcast recently on entrepreneurs on fire he is still on fire himself. What I absolutely love and you’re for it so guys, you know, first off please connect with John Jan’s what an What a legend and small business marketing number one. Number two, check out his books. You know, if you haven’t read duct tape marketing, it is timeless. And what I absolutely love what Michael Gerber says, and again, like the the E Myth man says this about on chance. It’s not necessarily a book about marketing. It’s about marketing, integrity. And I absolutely love that combination. And, you know, there’s so many books about marketing, John, and like, you know, there’s so many gurus out there, but what I feel what you did is like, you just really simplified it, you really built a better mousetrap. And you know, for the plumbers, the service providers, the hairdressers, you know, for a small business, you know, when you’re, when your book came out, it was just such a game changer. How, like, just if I know we have a great presentation for you guys today, can you just share, like, how did you come up with this simplistic concept that would speak down on

John Jantsch  04:14

you know, like, a lot of things in life, I did it for myself today the truth, you know, I, I loved working with small business owners, but I’ve personally found it kind of hard to do based on how I had been trained, or how I saw, you know, the, the world of marketing to be. And so I said, Look, if I’m going to work with small business owners, I got to figure out a way where I can walk in to say, look, here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s what you’re going to do, here are the results we hope to get, here’s what it cost, you know, marketing’s a system. It starts with strategy before tactics do you want it? And so it really was a like a lot of things in life. You know, it was kind of me trying to solve my greatest frustration and landed on something that that I think eventually solved the greatest frustration many small businesses still have today and that it’s very hard to buy marketing services, you know, as a small business and so I think that that’s really what I ended up tapping into. But like I said, in some ways, it was sort of an accidental discovery. Accidental as

Curt Anderson  05:08

well. Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  05:09

Thank you for the accident. Because yeah, thanks for the accident. Yeah, exactly.

Curt Anderson  05:13

You know, I don’t know, you know, 1000s, hundreds of 1000s. Yeah, entrepreneurs, you’ve made life so much easier. So guys, we, let’s jump in. Let’s go ahead and dig into you have a presentation for everybody today, guys. John has a brand new book that came out just came out in the fall during COVID. Genuine I connected like a year ago, and you’re like, Man, I’m knee deep in this book. And I’m like, hey, when this book gets off the ground, please come in on our show, we are so honored and blessed to have you here, you want to go ahead and pull up that presentation. And let’s just share we’ll dive in.

John Jantsch  05:41

Alright, so everybody out there, I’m going to invite you to re think the customer journey, that’s what we’re going to spend some time on. And I’m going to unpack it, you know, pretty pretty thoroughly. I do invite you, as Kurt said is this presentation is kind of drawn from my latest book, The Ultimate marketing engine, invite you to connect, there’s a couple places where you can find out more about the book. But then obviously, if you’ve got any questions or comments or thoughts today, I’d love to hear from you. It’s just John at duct tape marketing.com. Let’s go back a couple of years I gosh, almost exactly two years ago, this is March 15 was a Sunday. Some of you probably are thinking, oh, yeah, remember what was going on, then. But on that particular day, I got an email or actually was a text from a longtime client. And it was essentially the the content that he was going to send to his 50 plus employees, dozens of clients that they had projects underway, they were remodeling contractor, and essentially it said, Don’t come into work on Monday. We’re not no one’s coming to the job site on Monday, we’re shutting down, we’re putting a halt, you know, we’re calling a halt to everything we’re doing till we figure this kind of new world new reality out. And the thing that, you know, obviously lots and lots of businesses, we’re doing something very similar, but I was on the chain of replies back. And the thing that struck me immediately was the people were like, Hey, you’re doing the right thing, you know, we’re gonna stick with you don’t worry about it, you know, we’re with you, we support you. 100% There was even one gentleman that said, Can I pay in advance for my work, and and what it did, for me was shown such a bright light on something that has fundamentally always been true, but I think it’s, I think it’s really something we’ve gotten away from, and that is that, in good times, quite often businesses survive or thrive just by being in the right place at the right time. But in tough times, businesses thrive, as I saw many do by being meaningful, important in the lives of their customers. And as I said, I think that’s always been true. But I think that, that we’ve gotten away from that this this sort of funnel, this tactic obsession of you know, let’s, let’s drive our customers to do what we want them to do, you know, let’s, let’s create demand, and then, you know, push some small percentage of folks out, you know, through that demand. And I think that that idea of, you know, tactic obsession is something that has has really gotten us away from being focused on the customer. And listen, I get it, I’m gonna I’m gonna rifle through a few statistics. I mean, I get why it’s happening. I mean, 61% of mobile searchers are more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile friendly site. So we’ve got to have that site that looks good. We’ve got to focus on that the the mobile aspect of marketing 87% of potential customers won’t consider businesses with low ratings, all those places where people now can go out and talk about our brand that we no longer control, we’ve got to figure out a way to impact those 64% of consumers say watching a video on Facebook has influenced a purchase decision. So it’s not enough to just be on all these platforms. Now we have to squeeze our content into the format that they want us to put our content in 92% of consumers will visit a brand’s website for the first time for reasons other than making a purchase. Our websites have so many jobs to do so I get it. I understand why we have to be obsessed with tactics, getting those leads driving demand. But here’s a couple more statistics I want to share 86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience. I know I will hate 86% It’s practically all of us. So maybe there’s some money in focusing on what happens after somebody becomes a customer. One final 180 3% of business owners claim their main source of new business is referrals. There was a more recent Texas Tech survey that found that that they survey 2000 consumers and 86% of them said that they had a brand they had a company that they loved so much they were willing We happily refer business to them. But you know what only 29% of them actually did. So maybe there’s some money in closing that over 50% gap of those people who would love to send you more business, but they aren’t. See, the thing that’s changed the most about marketing is not all the platforms and tactics, it’s how people today choose to become customers. And that the customer journey is no longer this linear path that we drive that we control, it looks a heck of a lot more like this. And then our job, I think our primary job, frankly, as marketers, is less about creating demand and more about organizing behavior, less about us getting them to do what we want them to do, and more about us, guiding them on the journey that they want to take. For many years now, I have been using a framework that I want to introduce and unpack for you today, and something that I call the marketing hourglass. The idea behind this, of course, the metaphor of the hourglass borrows from the funnel shape. And really, there’s there’s nothing inherently wrong with this idea of getting some percentage of the market out there to know about us and then an even smaller percent to feel like we’re an ideal fit for them. But for many marketers, that’s where it stops. And what I want to suggest is at that point, the hourglass flips over the funnel flips over becomes the hourglass, and at that point is where the real opportunity to grow and scale and actually be more profitable in our business exist. So my marketing hourglass or my customer journey has seven stages. They are no like trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer. And what I feel the primary job of marketers is, is to to guide those intentional behaviors, the behaviors that people want to go through, in all of our marketing is to understand, you know, how we can impact each of those stages. And you’ll notice those words are more like behaviors. So the behaviors I think we want to go through, and it’s, it’s actually fairly easy to test in your own, you know, world your own buying. I mean, if you’ve got a problem, don’t you want to know who’s out there that might be able to solve it? And of course, then what do we do we immediately turn to their website, we start making snap decisions, you know, do do I like what I’m seeing is this, somebody I’m even going to invest any time in finding, you know, if they have the solution. And then of course, you know, today, we’re certainly not going to buy from somebody that we we don’t trust or we don’t feel like they’re going to deliver on what was promised. I don’t know about you, but I love it, when it when I can learn a little bit what it might be like to try or to work with somebody. And and you know, we’re all used to that 30 Day software trial when we think about a try. But let’s face it, when somebody picks up a phone and calls our business walks into our our business meets a salesperson that’s representing our business, they are trying our business. Now, they may not be sitting there thinking I’m gonna pick up the phone and try this business. But that’s exactly what is happening. So what are we doing as businesses to make sure that they are having a great experience at each of those stages? And certainly, I think most of us like to buy. But we’ve also all been let down when we were promised something that a company didn’t deliver. So what’s the buying experience? What’s the orientation? What, what’s the onboarding experience look like? Because that’s where referrals actually start happening or not happening is in that first experience. And then of course, once we find somebody that meets our needs, I don’t like to restart my search. I just go back, it’s like, yep, they did what they said it was great experience, I love them. I’m going back, I’m not even gonna think about it. I’m picking up the phone and call him again. And then I think as human beings, we’re wired to talk about companies and experiences that exceed our expectations, we’re wired to refer. And the question then, you know, for most businesses is if you are referral, what are you doing to stimulate those referrals, these, these need to be intentional marketing functions. I want to break them down a little more deeper for you now, and put them into some groups and start talking about the things that that we need to think about, okay, what needs to go in each of these stages then so we can help be that guide for our clients. So the first three stages know like and trust are essentially where we create the relationship and most businesses when I ask them, okay, what you know, how do people come to know about your business or people in your industry? That’s the easy one. For most people, almost everyone can answer because we know we’ve got to run advertising or we’ve got a network or we’ve got to have sales. salespeople or we have to be on social media. But unfortunately for a lot of people, that’s where it ends, that’s where the relationship building ends is, I want to go from no to buy. And the point of the stages in between there is that’s how you attract an ideal customer, by your, your processes and the attention and the campaigns that you’ve put together, for building for somebody who who can realize, yeah, I like what I’m seeing here. This is somebody I can trust. That’s how you actually charge a premium for your services. That’s how you actually attract only ideal customers. So in the life stage, our message, you know, our brand elements, our story, just the first thing that people see. So quite frankly, the user experience the house, how quickly does the site load? Forms? Are they easy to fill out? Do they make sense? Those are the kinds of things that we need to be focused on? Because that’s when people are making that first snap decision about our business, then, and only then will they start thinking, Okay, I’m going to dig in, I’m going to see what’s here, I’m going to call this business and see if they can tell me more about that’s that we won’t even go that far unless we have a level of trust. So what are the visual cues, what content is deep enough now for for me to realize you understand how to solve my problem, what social proof is there, the reviews, the testimonials, the case studies, the likes, all those things that add up to help establish and build trust, these are all things that have become kind of standard. These days, people talk about them a lot. But I believe that they are an essential part of intentionally building a great customer journey. Now, once we’ve done that, once somebody said, okay, they seem to get me, I want to see if they can actually solve my problem. Now we’re gonna go to the try and buy stage. And this is really the bridge to long term success. Having a great experience, trying your business, and then ultimately buying from your business is what leads to somebody staying a customer or what leads to somebody evangelizing your business. So this is really where the long term success a lot of people in at, hey, I got the order, hey, I got the business. But But I see these two stages as really setting you up for the future, not just setting you up for what happens in today’s sale. So in the try stage, these are all the things like quote requests, and phone calls and evaluations and forums, and maybe even low cost ways for for people to try you being a part of a community, like this community are ways that people can try what it might be like to work with you. And then certainly the by part, I can’t tell you how many how many people have, you know, they set up their, their websites and their transaction, you know, put them on autopilot. They don’t even know what it’s like to be a buyer, you know, of their products and services anymore. We have to constantly be be looking at evaluating and tweaking that transaction process, even just how somebody gets a proposal or a contract from us the onboarding, the way in which we orient them the way we start communicating with them from, or at least telling them how we’re going to communicate. And I’m going to talk a little more about content and its role after the purchase. But But I think it’s one of the most underutilized aspects of producing content, how do we continue to teach people how to get more out of what they bought from us how to be successful with what they bought from us, those are all great places for us to be thinking about content in the buying process as well. Alright, so the last two stages. This is where we scale with your clients, I don’t need to tell you everybody knows this, it is so much more profitable, so much easier to do more business with people who already trust you than it is to go out there and find new clients. But for some strange reason, we are wired to go out there and do the chase, as opposed to actually creating that great experience and discovering what it might take to do 10 times more or 100 times more business with the people we’re already doing business with that are already ideal clients. So in the repeat phases, it’s Do we have a retention process? I mean, do we have a way to make sure that people are getting the results that they’re happy? are we continuing to educate? Are we even telling them what else we might be able to be doing with them? Are we discovering what else what other gaps they might have? These are all things that need to be part of your marketing processes. So a lot of people think of this as just, you know, operations and there’s no question that operations, how you fulfill your promises. His marketing No, no stretch here and I’m sure Curtin Damon will concur that I believe everything is marketing anything that any way shape and form or which you come into contact with your customer or prospect, you’re performing at that point or that time a marketing function. So operations, and the way that you fulfill on your promises is very much a part of marketing an end to end marketing experience. And then finally, referrals. You know, what are you doing to stay top of mind? Just are you even asking for referrals? And then what are you doing with those champion clients who already love you? Are you bringing them together to make sure that they love you even more. And then, of course, strategic partners, great source of referrals, co marketing with other businesses, great story source of referrals, just teaching your clients how they could actually get more referrals is a great source of referrals. So I see you guys have come back on camera. So I think you have some stuff you. Yeah, we got enough stuff out here to Yeah, the pot. Lots of

Damon Pistulka  20:54

comments. But Sam, Sam Gupta has got a question. He’s asking about ladder offerings, what are the ladder offerings? And he says it like tiered products.

John Jantsch  21:03

Yeah, so so the idea of this doing more with your existing customers, it’s not a new concept. I mean, you look at especially in digital marketing, it’s, I’ve got the $29 book, you know, so that you, you know, you’ve learned so much about me, and trust me that you want to buy my $199 course. And then because you liked my $199 course, so much, you want to do one on one coaching with me. And because you love my one on one coaching, you want to get into my premium mastermind group that cost $10,000 a year. And there’s links in the chat. I’ll put them in there for all of these. No, I’m just kidding. But But that’s, you know, that’s kind of the idea that, that you, in a sense, just a matter of saying, what else can I sell to people, it’s that if you start to develop customers who are getting a tremendous amount of value from working with you, or from your products, then then some percentage of them really want to do more. And so the question becomes, you know, how can I how can I offer more so that I can create an even greater transformation for those customers that I’m already helping?

Curt Anderson  22:06

That’s fantastic. John, as we come to the top of the hour, some some folks might have to cut off again, not that there needs to be an introduction with with John janss. John has a brand new book of course, if you haven’t read duct tape marketing, sticky marketing, please go back. It is a it’s a classic. It is timeless. Grab duct tape marketing, John’s new book, The Ultimate marketing engine. And John Wood I love if you go on Amazon, there’s a probably a friend of yours, Michael. McCalla wits. Oh, yeah. Mike. Yeah. Wonderful author of profit first. He has a little video of a testimonial. And he and he’s, he’s like, Yeah, and you call the book to buy the wrong name. This should be called the the essential marketing book for small business owners. Then it goes on and on. And it goes, well, actually, that’s a horrible name. I like your name better. But this is an essential marketing book. So guys, grab John’s new book, John, we’re gonna cut out again, I just want to give a shout out. Hi to everybody. John. John biglietto. Dan bigger. Gail, Dr. Elissa is with us today, Chris Harrington, Jason. And we’re gonna continue rocking and rolling. We’ll keep an eye on the chat. And we’ll be back in a few minutes.

John Jantsch  23:10

All right, so so I’m going to go over really the the steps in the hourglass as they relate to content because I know contents really, it’s probably the greatest heartburn for a lot of business owners. And then we can come back guys and just kind of answering the questions that you have. So again, the marketing hourglass know like trust tribe, by repeat, refer, these are behaviors that I believe our best customers want to go through. And our job as marketers really is to focus on that end and journey. And and let me tell you the money’s in after somebody becomes a customer. If you want to really scale and make your business far more profitable than it is today, figure that part figure the second half of this journey out because that’s where the money is. Alright, let’s flip to content. How to create less content. You know, you don’t hear a lot of marketers talking about that. In fact, people like me stood up on stages 10 years ago and said content is king and everybody believed it. And so now we’re all drowning in it. And probably the greatest source of stress for most marketers is the the idea that they have to produce all this content. Well, the thing is, contents really air today. Yes, you do have to have it. It’s the ante to get into marketing today. But it needs to be the voice of strategy. So many people look at content as okay, I’ve got to write five blog posts a week or whatever it is, and that and most of that content is actually not providing any value to a reader or potential customer and certainly not to the business. So how can you start thinking about every piece of content fitting into some aspect of the customer journey if you do that, you can produce a A lot less content, because it will all have impact. So let’s break this down. Content is not a tactic, it is the voice of strategy, if you start thinking about it that way, don’t worry about blogging or, you know, creating video YouTube channels, think about producing content. It may be on YouTube, it may be on a blog, but think about producing content as a way to a tool to guide people through your customer journey. So again, back to these stages of the customer journey. And know like interest in getting to know you, a lot of times your ads need to have landing pages, and certainly there will be blog posts, and there will be your core web pages, and maybe free tools and how to videos, you know, these are all forms of content, where somebody is just kind of saying, oh, somebody said, You know what you’re talking about, let me check you out. So these are all things where we have to be thinking about the problems that our customers are not are trying to solve, not about what we sell, nobody cares. Here’s some cold water for you. Nobody cares about what we sell, except us, right? What our clients, our best clients care about is can we solve their problems? Do we understand you know how to solve their problems, so that no content has to be focused on ways that we can demonstrate that we get them that we understand that. So what we have to think about when it comes down to, these are all the types of content we need. But when it comes down to the topics that we need to have at each of these stages, we have to have a pretty darn good understanding of the questions and objectives, our prospects and customers are trying to achieve at each of those stages, because they change dramatically, when somebody is not even 100% sure of what their problem is, they just know they have some symptoms. They are looking for content, or they’re looking for answers out there that can shed some light on why they can’t achieve what they’re trying to achieve. And so our content needs to be focused on that. As somebody starts going, Oh, you seem to know what you’re talking about. And they dive in, they start reading our content. Now they want to see, are there other ways that you can demonstrate that, that you’ve fixed this for other people? No, maybe how to videos? Now we’re going to jump in and think, Okay, I like what they’re saying about but how would it apply to me? My particular situation? Could they really help me? Do I like the people that I’m going to be working with. So now we’re gonna start looking at case studies and webinars and maybe even comparison guides, or we’re gonna just drip content to them, you know, over a long period of time, you have to figure out you have to determine the questions that your customers are asking at each of these stages and what they’re trying to achieve. As they move through the stages, we kind of have our mental checklist of what we’re, what our objective is, for a sales call what our objective is, for downloading your free content, we’re in different stages. Now, there’s no linear path, nobody comes to the stage and exact same place. But for the most part, we have to know that that people are out there doing this journey. Quite often without our knowledge, they’re checking us out, they’re researching us, they’re downloading our content. They’re asking their friends about us, before they ever reach out and contact us because they’re trying to achieve certain objectives along the way. When it comes to the long term success, we need content that they can try that might be a community group, it might be an ROI calculator, it might actually even be a way for them to to buy something on a guarantee from us. Those are the forms of content we need. Once somebody comes down to the point where they’re thinking about buying, maybe we need to have a low cost option, maybe we need to have an audit, or a free trial of some form. Maybe we need to have, you know, bonuses that we put into the buying journey as part of that stage. When it comes time to after somebody has become a client and as I’ve said many times that I think this is where the real opportunity for content is for us to teach about features to cross promote, to have kind of roadmaps for, you know, here’s where you are today. But here’s where here’s where we can take you, you know, here’s where you’re going to actually kind of future cast. Here are the here’s the promise if we accomplish this project, and the next project and the next project. And then finally, for referral, having some process where you actually use either content or a process and I use the term content very loosely for me content is a checklist. It’s a video. It’s an email, it’s a blog post It’s a social post, it’s a process, it’s a meeting, where you actually accomplish something like a review of the results you’ve gotten for a client, it’s, it’s actually maybe a group of bringing, you know, doing training around referrals, actually teaching strategic partners, how to refer you, you know, these are all great uses for content. But we just have to think in terms of, as I’ve said many times, applying the content to the stage that our customers in to the objectives, and to the questions that they have in each of those stages, if you do that, you can produce a lot more content, and every single bit of it will be far more impactful. Alright, so Kurt, and Damon, that’s really where I want to stop today. And hopefully, this marketing hourglass concept. And if you go on duct tape marketing, if you have, obviously a pitch for the book, if you buy the book, you can get lots of the resources that come with that really unpack this for you, as well. But this you let this sink in this is probably the most important framework, you know, that I’ve developed, certainly, as you know, really been a body of work for 30 years, I still feel like this is the most important concept.

Damon Pistulka  31:14

Yeah, especially how you’re talking about the the questions and answering the questions about the content at each stage thinking about those questions, that list of questions and what and how you can, you know, do build the knowing, liking trusting and all the way through, and I the repeat. And in refer I think that is just so key, the repeat first of all, because hey, it’s like everyone knows once you have a customer if you can keep them forever. It’s like so much better. But awesome stuff. Yeah. Great, John,

Curt Anderson  31:48

what I’d like to do is I want to take a dive into the book guy so again, if you haven’t purchased duct tape marketing, go out and get it let’s talk about the new book is John’s covering through here. Ultimate marketing engine, the five steps of ridiculously consistent grow to ridiculous ridiculously consistent growth that was easy for me to say, John would absolutely love you put up the march 15 2020. You open up the book with that that line. And you have a phenomenal quote where that gentleman was reached out to you a client of yours. He was putting out an email putting out attacks. And you know, we our entire world shutting down and you dropped a great quote in the book. Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same thing. I think it was a quote from from the fray, right?

John Jantsch  32:29

Yeah, it’s this. It’s actually a song lyric from the free but I absolutely

Curt Anderson  32:33

love what you how you dug into that. And you talk a lot in a book. I absolutely love the new book. And I can’t I’m not sure which one I like better. I know I have. I have the hard copy of your original book. I have the version of both. I’m duct tape marketing and your new one. And it’s highlighted everywhere. And what’s funny is you know, when you read on digital, when dozens of people have already waited and there’s lines underneath like half your book has lines from like people highlighting everything throughout your book. I love that you have T O L we’re all familiar with FOMO fear of missing out. You have a great term t o l can you share with the folks with this T Oh,

John Jantsch  33:09

yeah. So so so it’s actually more related to more people, obviously. FOMO you talked about, but there’s another term called YOLO. You only live once that you know is usually something a teenager says before they’re getting ready to do something really silly. But where this came actually came from is I think you mentioned Seth? Yeah. You did mention Seth Godin. Yeah. So his podcast Kimbo great podcast I love listening to. And he has a feature on this podcast where people come in, leave messages or ask questions are recorded. And then, you know, he picks a couple and kind of riffs on them. So there was a gentleman Howard, from who’s a school teacher, a high school school teacher in New York. And he came on and talked about this idea. He said, Yeah, you know, a lot of my students say YOLO. And he actually said that it’s right before they’re getting ready to do something stupid, said, I have I, I sit them down. And I asked him to rethink that idea. I want you to imagine that you’re going to go visit a good friend. And unfortunately, that friend is going to die soon. And you know it. They don’t. And you can’t tell them. Would that change? You know anything about your your interaction that day? I want you to actually use the term Tolo or at least think of the term Tolo to LA or Oh, to Hello, they only live once. And, you know, when I heard that, I was like, obviously, that’s a very deep, inspirational thought. But as I was writing this book, I was like, you know, what, if we looked at our customers a little more that way, you know, what if I mean because in the end, I mean, we are regardless of big corporation or not, we are people selling to people. And I just think that, that, you know, a big part of this book is the idea of If we really want to be customer centric, it’s got to be more than talk. You know, we’ve got to actually think about our customers more like members of our organization. And I just think that’s a really beautiful way to express that.

Curt Anderson  35:13

Wow. Yeah, that just really that struck out to me. I just wanted to bring that up today. We have boiled the chat suspend on fire. So like Chris Young Chris Harrington, Greg, misuse Sam, Jeremiah, Gary Woodvale. Thank you all for joining us today. There’s tons of great comments compliments and thanking you. I want to if you have a couple more minutes, or things I want to talk about in the book, Damon you always talk what color m&m Do you always talk about?

Damon Pistulka  35:38

I always want to be the red m&m and the bowl of green m&m

Curt Anderson  35:42

Green. And so China I know in your book you talk about like one of your favorite taglines is melts in your mouth, not in your hands from Eminem. So Damon is always talking about the red m&ms Green m&ms, you know, that Van Halen, I think that’s what that is a resume from Damon writes a famous line. So John, talk a little bit about like, um, I’m going to flip back to both books. Okay, you talk about, you know, be first be, don’t be the commodity. And I’m going to paraphrase this, I hope I have this right, one of my favorite quotes of years of all time, there’s always somebody out there that’s willing to go out of business before you will. My close.

John Jantsch  36:20

Yeah, so in reference to the idea of, of, you know, competing on price, you know, raising a losing game, right, there will always be somebody willing to go out of business faster than you. So it. And the thing is, I mean, we all know that. I mean, and almost every industry is going through that, you know, the the prices race to the bottom, I mean, you think about I’m in the marketing industry, and there are a lot of marketers out there, they’re selling websites and content. And, you know, I guarantee that I can get a blog post written for $5 on a website WordPress website for, you know, $150. You know, it might be dubious and quality. But the fact is, if that’s what I’m competing against, you know, that’s a pretty tough place to, to spend time. So you know, where we have to compete is being strategic we have to be, we have to compete in in being seen as a trusted adviser, as an orchestrator, you know, of ideas, even as opposed to, you know, a doer of things, because the, you know, the doer of things is is a commodity in a race to the bottom.

Curt Anderson  37:24

Yeah, absolutely. That’s, that’s awesome. And again, great comments in the chat. Now. All right, so you covered a ton. You showed up the seven, seven, no, like trust in yourself seven. Now, in your book, you talk about you have five, the five reads, I’m gonna say it again, five steps are ridiculously growth. And I know we have like map uncovered, do you want to? Do you want to just hit

John Jantsch  37:46

those five? Yeah, sure. Sure. So so the the, the first one is, and it’s, it’s probably the biggest innovation in the book, it’s something I call the customer success track. And the idea behind this is that we map where our customers are today, our best customers, because we, you know, I, I started the book by saying the ultimate target marketing engine is a successful customer. But the caveat to that is we can’t make every customer successful, you know, we have to really think about, you know, who, where our best customers are today and where they want to go. And so the customer success track is essentially a tool for for really understanding, you know, the the characteristics and the challenges of your best customers, what you have to do to help them overcome those. And what’s next, and what’s next and what’s next. So I break it down actually into five stages of you know, each customer for us, as marketing are the customers we work with. And we were able to actually when we break it down into stages, we can actually create the milestones and tasks that we need to accomplish as an organization to make sure that somebody does go to or does get the promise of moving to that next stage. So instead of us just saying, Here’s what we agreed upon today, here’s here are the deliverables. We take this customer success track, and kind of map where you know, match where the problems are trying to solve the day are, but also show them what the future looks like, show them where they can be, if if we can move them through those stages. And I really think that that’s a that’s a concept that I’m beginning to teach. And one little tiny pitch here, I’m putting together you know, kind of a mastermind of organizations that I believe could develop this for almost every industry that’s out there. So the customer success track is stuff that we can, we can cover here in a couple minutes that we have left. But it’s probably the most important innovation, I think, in in strategy for not just for marketing, but for an overarching business. We use the customer success track, it’s changed our culture, change how we certainly change how we sell, change how we hire, change how we train. So it’s it’s really an amazing tool, you know, not just to get results for somebody but to actually directly An organization as to what they ought to be developing how they ought to be scaling with their customers.

Curt Anderson  40:05

That’s well, Irving, I’m glad you and that was that was managed, like you read my mind. That was my next question was digging into that customer track and what I, here’s what I also love, this is a powerful man, you you have so many powerful statements in these in these books. You know, not every customer is ideal. Yeah, not every customer and I and I know, I know, we know that. But sometimes like we bend over backwards, or we go out of our way. And I just, you know, again, like, you know, confronting the brutal facts, you know, Jim Collins, in his Good to Great, you know, he talks about confronting those, you know, those brutal facts. And that’s what I love how you’re taking this simplistic approach for small business owners, for entrepreneurs on how to have better marketing tactics. Just take a little bit into like, What do you mean by that not every customer so

John Jantsch  40:46

so one of the steps is narrow the focus, narrow your focus to the top 20% of your customers. So that that one gives most people the white light. In 20, some years of doing this every, every organization I’ve ever analyzed, there’s no question somewhere around 20% of their best customers or their customers produce 80% of their results, their profits, you know, there. And I mean, it’s just, it’s cliche, but it’s true. It’s why it’s a cliche, right. And so, what I found is that, that, even though it may seem like oh, my gosh, you’re, you’re saying I should abandon this and this and this, that may feel scary. What I have discovered is that the, the, you know, the opportunity lost, you know, by by working with customers that aren’t a great fit, let’s face it, they’re usually not as profitable, they’re not giving you referrals, because they’re not a good fit, right? Yeah. And so the opportunity lost to take that customer that you you deliver amazing value to you, because they’ve got the right problem. They’re the right fit. They’re the right mindset, they have the right values, you know, that customer, you could probably do 10 times as much with, if you took the time to discover how you could grow and scale with them, as opposed to going out and finding you know, more people doesn’t mean you won’t go out and find more people, but you want to go out and find more people that are like them, and make that your total focus. That’s how you’re going to be profitable. There’s a lot of organizations out there that sell a lot of stuff. But their profitability is sort of dubious, because you know, 60 50% of their customer base is really not that profitable. And and I know some people think, oh, wait a minute, isn’t the customer profitable? Well, I tell you, I’ve found so many instances where you know, that bottom third of a customer base is actually costing the company money. And that’s where all their detractors are too. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Damon Pistulka  42:41

And that’s where you spend the most of your time. That’s yeah, and you’re spending all your time on those, those customers? It’s and they’re just sucking the profits out of your company. It’s a complete

John Jantsch  42:49

inverse relationship. Yeah, right.

Curt Anderson  42:51

Yeah. And it’s, it’s great to have a nice network of maybe there’s service providers that are experts. And you know, that not not the customers fault, our fault for not having the courage to say, You know what, like, this is not a good fit for me. Let me find somebody in what a great win win win for everybody, if we could have the courage, the discipline and like remove the ego, to say, like, hey, let’s take you over here. John, I know you’re super busy, I want to be mindful of your time you Social Media Marketing World is coming up, you’re I know, you’re speaking there, you’re just some guys in it for all of us that live in cold weather, John, you have some great dates and some great speaking engagements. And then I and then I want to hit one more thing, but can you just share some of your speaking gigs that you have coming up that people could catch you at?

John Jantsch  43:33

So I do a lot of private, you know, engagements. And so they’re, you know, they couldn’t catch me at those because it’s somebody who’s, you know, national sales meeting or something. But, to that I can talk about for sure, as you mentioned, Social Media Marketing World is March in San Diego, and then a new conference, that is called CX. And it’s really focused on what we’re calling web 3.5. So it’s, you know, the the cryptocurrencies and the NF T’s and just kind of a whole new new world of marketing. That’s, that’s probably coming next. And that that’ll be in May, Brian Clark and Joe Pulizzi, from Content Marketing World and Copyblogger has actually teamed up to create that event in May in Phoenix. Excellent. And

Curt Anderson  44:19

we were talking about Social Media Marketing World before the program, amazing event. So folks, if you’re looking, if you’re if you’re done with COVID, or you’re ready to travel, or you’re ready to hang out and socialize a little bit, great. Check it out. It’s a super lineup of speakers. John’s one of the keynote speakers. That’s a wonderful event. So John, what’s fascinating, so for any of the marketers out there, share a little bit about your business model and how you help marketers really muscle up their business.

John Jantsch  44:46

So, you know, I started as I said, you know, 30 years ago with that idea of working with small business owners in a systematic approach, I grew my kind of solo practice, started writing about it and that you know, kind of led to one thing led to another good timing I guess. And that started actually attracting independent consultants and agencies around the world who said, hey, you know, that system that approach makes sense to me too. So, now our model really is, you know, the speaking the writing, I, you know, I do those kinds of things for the brand, we do have an agency, I mean, we work with 10 1215 customers at a time, you know, helping them grow. But we also have a network of about 200 of these independent consultants around the world that that formed the duct tape marketing consultant network. They are all independent solo practitioners, but they, they license our methodology, and frankly, you know, probably get as much or more value out of just collaborating with each other, you know, than any kind of relationship to my organization. But it’s, it’s really been a fun ride to, to see how that organization really allows me to impact 1000s of small business owners, you know, with the duct tape marketing system,

Curt Anderson  45:55

man, it’s, it’s what what an honor, what a thrill This opportunity is. And again, what I absolutely love, what you’ve done is like, you know, it’s not talking to talk, you walk the walk where you took, you know, you unmodded commoditize is that a word we you uncommanded eyes, your own business, practice what you preach, you took your business, follow your own theories and concepts, you’ve scaled it. And now listen, you know, hundreds of other entrepreneurs, other consultants, marketing consultants, and guys, if you go to John’s website, it is amazing when you check out all the testimonials, video testimonials, and it’s a lot of solopreneurs, or small marketing firms that are just ranting and raving on how they were struggling, they were stuck. They’re trying to build build out one customer at a time. And now because of your methodology, the simplicity of what you brought to marketing for business, small business owners, they now are all thriving consultants under your umbrella. And again, like you said, they’re all networking with each other. So look, you know, you’ve covered so, so many topics, they’re building a community, building that trust know, like, trust all those aspects that you’ve taught today. So John, before we let you go any May I like somebody dropped the mic moments today, there was just too many to cover. Any last parting thoughts for maybe, you know, we have some new exciting news that we need to share Daymond I know you had a big news with Dan bigger. Before we wrap up, I want to share that. But for entrepreneurs out there, those accidental entrepreneurs, maybe people that were downsized during COVID, maybe I intrapreneurship is new to them? What advice do you have to kind of give them the courage, the confidence to just go out there and do it? What would you say to that new entrepreneur?

John Jantsch  47:29

Well, well, probably the you know, the biggest challenge for them is to think about what not to do, because, you know, we want to do all 55 things that show up on our list as you know, the great way to start a business. And, you know, be a scientist, you know, guess hypothesize about what’s going to be your best platform, your best approach and do it well, you know, as opposed to doing a whole bunch of things, you know, pretty halfway. Yeah, that’s awesome. So

Curt Anderson  47:54

again, I just I want to I want to thank everybody for joining say you know, Greg Sam dam bigger Jen. Bug, lino So John, we, we have a nice, wonderful, we’re blessed with just an amazing group. Just I’m sure you know, with your great community, folks, you can relate. So dear friend of ours, John, Dan bigger was, firstly the little COVID downsize, he announced amazing, wonderful news last night, a brand new job brand new gig with attesa with our dear friend John Bellino, who’s also on the program today. So guys are we are just so established or our new fire friends here are teaming up at Tesla. So Dan, we wish you massive success. Thank you guys for for for your your leadership, your your support for Damon and myself. So we appreciate that. And we’re just we’re celebrating you, Dan bigger. John, thank you for sharing your your grandchildren, your dog and other Yeah, you’re awesome. So having a great time. So guys, please go out duct tape marketing, check out John’s new book, connect with him on LinkedIn. So John, hang out with us for one second. And again, I can’t express my gratitude. I know how busy you are, and you’re in high demand for you to spend time with us is such a privilege. Thank you for joining us today. My pleasure. Yep, guys, go out have an amazing, incredible weekend. Daymond. I are back here on Monday with with from Purdue University. We have Jean Jones from the manufacturing extension partnership from Purdue University. I’m actually doing a little fun e commerce webinar at Purdue on Wednesday. I’m at Temple on Thursday. So guys come out and check out these webinars. And guys take it away Damon, thank you everybody.

Damon Pistulka  49:31

Well, first of all, John, thank you so much because you boil down marketing at a level that I can understand it, you know, an old business guy that just you know, likes to get out there and do it but I just appreciate you so much for doing this for us small business owners and really given us a path forward because it is one of the toughest decisions I think as a business owner is understanding what I should be doing from a marketing standpoint and you’ve simplified it to a point that That’s easy to do. Thank you for that you read. And thanks so much for everyone else being here today. You know, we have a ball doing this. We’re so glad to see you every week. Okay, if we can help you just let us know. We’ll be we’ll be back in touch and we’ll be back again next week. Thanks, everyone.

Curt Anderson  50:15

Thanks. Thank you, John. Thanks a lot.