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The Marketers Mind - a conversation with Dave Valentine
38 Plays4 months ago
In the 16 years since 2008 Dave Valentine has provided hundreds of clients like Target and Real Simple with consultancy and marketing services that have helped them add over a billion US Dollars in business growth.
It is says Dave, all about finding ways to maximise the return on every dollar of marketing spend.
As Dave explains in this episode of The Independent Minds it is the money that should be working, not the person who spends the money.
Listen to this episode of The Independent Minds to learn about the important role played by corporate values in marketing and building relationships between suppliers, and customers that last despite the bad times.
The Independent Minds is made on Zencastr.
Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform, on which you can create your podcast in one place and then distribute it to the major platforms like Spotify, Apple, and Google. It really does make creating content so easy.
If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr visit zencastr.com/pricing and use our offer code ABECEDER.
Travel to the Oregon
Dave Valentine is one hours drive from Portland Oregon, in a wood house situated by the side of a river in the mountains. It’s remote and beautiful. He told me.
If you would like to visit Oregon, and experience the mountain lifestyle for yourself, a good place to plan your travel is The Ultimate Travel Club. It is where you will get trade prices on travel including flights, and hotels.
Visit the Ultimate Travel Club and use our offer code to receive a discount on your membership fee.
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You can find out more about both Michael Millward, and Dave Valentine at Abeceder.
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If you are listening to The Independent Minds in the United Kingdom on your smart phone, you may like to know that Three has the UK’s Fastest 5G Network with Unlimited Data, so listening on Three means you can wave goodbye to buffering.
Visit Three for more information about business and personal telecom solutions from Three. And the special offers available when you quote my referral code.
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Being a Guest
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We recommend that potential guests take one of the podcasting guest training programmes available from Work Place Learning Centre.
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Thank you to you for listening.
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Transcript
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencaster.
Introduction to The Independent Minds Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello and welcome to The Independent Minds, a series of conversations between Abbasida and people who think outside the box about how work works with the aim of creating better workplace experiences for every everyone. The Independent Minds is the podcast where we don't tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. I am your host, Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida. As the jingle at the start of this podcast says, the independent minds is made on Zencaster. Zencaster is the all-in-one podcasting platform on which you can create your podcast in one place and then dispute it to the major platforms like Spotify, Apple and Google. It really does make creating content so easy.
00:00:55
Speaker
If you would like to try podcasting using Zencaster, visit zencaster dot.com forward slash pricing and use my offer code ABACEDA. All the details are in the description. Now that I've told you how wonderful Zencaster is for creating podcasts, we should make one, one that will be well worth liking, downloading and subscribing to.
Introducing Guest Dave Valentine
00:01:19
Speaker
In this episode of The Independent Minds, my guest, who I met on matchmaker dot.fm, is Dave Valentine, the author of The Marketeer's Mind. Hello, Dave.
00:01:31
Speaker
Hello, Michael, so good to be here. Oh, you could sound a little bit more enthusiastic than Dave. I'm just getting started.
00:01:39
Speaker
Oh, you're just getting started, but yeah it's January and I know where you are in the world and I know it's very cold there, but let's tell our audience that I'm in Yorkshire in the United Kingdom and whereabouts in the world are you? I am an hour north of Portland, Oregon. On a mountain on a river in the middle of nowhere, and it's quite lovely but very cold I Can imagine that it is is it as soon as you said I am an hour north of I knew I knew to sort of say That's what people who live in the wild the wilderness is because mileage means nothing It's so like how far are you from here there or everywhere and people have mentioned time means they're very remote very very much, but
00:02:26
Speaker
If anyone listening to us would like to visit Portland, Oregon, a good place to plan your travel is the Ultimate Travel Club. It's where you will get trade prices on flights and hotels. You can find a link and membership discount code in the description. But let's get
Dave Valentine’s Background and Ventures
00:02:41
Speaker
started. Now, Dave, please can we start by you explaining a little bit about your backstory and how you came to be living on a mountain by a river an hour north of Portland, Oregon. Yeah, I grew up as a military brat. My dad was in the Air Force, so I have the auspicious title of moving the most before I graduated high school. So I lived in 15 different houses in 13 different cities in 18 years. Which means I'm really good at making friends, Michael. is is but I hadn't noticed.
00:03:16
Speaker
ah the
00:03:20
Speaker
Yeah. And ah in my house, we might my dad had been an entrepreneur um when I was a young young boy before he joined the Air Force. There was just always this entrepreneurial spirit about our home. My dad, ah when I was 10, I went to my dad and said, hey, could I get a loan for $5 so I can go buy some candy bars and some erasers and pencils and pens and sell them out of my backpack to students, friends who needed them for class or wanted them. and He said sure and a week later I gave him the $5 back because I had made 10. And so that was kind of my first foyer into entrepreneur land. I started my first growing up business when I was 25. It was a Facebook and Instagram advertising agency, built that up, sold it and started some other companies after I sold it. So I started a firm where we booked meetings for other businesses to close and sales, started a branding agency after my non-compete ran out, bought into a PR firm, bought into a couple software firms, started a flight school with my brother. So now I own an entirety or a portion of eight different companies and run them all from ah run them all from the mountains and
00:04:39
Speaker
in the middle of nowhere. So, yeah, that's that's my background. That's great. That's great. Thank you very much. And of course, one of your latest endeavors is this book, The Marketeer's Mind.
Exploring Marketing Psychology in 'The Marketeer's Mind'
00:04:51
Speaker
That's correct. What is The Marketeer's Mind? Yeah, so there's you know there are people that talk about flow states all the time that you know you start writing and you get into a flow state or maybe you're playing guitar or even maybe perhaps just doing work, coding, whatever. And there's a ah flow state that I've found that you can find where you kind of tap into this bigger idea of the marketer's mind.
00:05:14
Speaker
It's one where we really start to understand the psychology of the people that we're speaking to and also our understanding how to effectively communicate because really good marketing is actually effective communication. It's not necessarily clever, it can be clever, but it's really just effective communication. And so the marketers mind is a series of stories that I've collected and anecdotes and big philosophical ideas behind marketing. that I've acquired over the past 18 years speaking with Fortune 50 chief marketing officers all the way down to stories of individuals that own a single coffee shop and how do they address marketing. And so it's philosophies and stories and all of it is an attempt to show people a way to get into the flow state that is the marketers mind.
00:06:06
Speaker
I suppose it doesn't have to be an activity that you say, I'm now going to deal with marketing. The flow state is where it becomes a natural part of your day, a natural activity. You don't have to consciously think, I'm now going to think marketing. You're constantly thinking marketing because it's in the flow of work. Yeah, that's correct. You know, one of the things that I did early on in my career is I would, I subscribed to the local newspaper. Remember those?
00:06:37
Speaker
ah Yes, yes. We still have oh yeah we still have them. brilliant um we We still have them in the States too, but no one gets them anymore. I used to subscribe to them not to read the articles. I would subscribe to them to look at the ads. And I just wanted to know what went went well and why did it work well. I would watch commercials with great intent, why does this work? And some of the most interesting commercials and ads that you see are the ones that are really ah novel. They're not what you're expecting. There's a certain cadence to a lot of ads that are in print or on radio or yeah you know yeah on TV.
00:07:24
Speaker
And if you break that, you actually start to stand out to the consumers that are listening.
Genuine Marketing and Value Alignment
00:07:30
Speaker
If you continue to be in the flow of what we all expect, it becomes white noise to the, you know, depends on who you talk to. There's a general disagreement on this, but ah the consensus is we see somewhere between 5,000 and 20,000 advertising marketing messages every day. So in order to stand out, you have to do something that's going to actually make someone's brain think differently about what they're seeing and engaging with. Yes. Because when somebody who lives on a mountain by the side of the river, an hour north of Portland says that we see 20,000 advertisements every day, you should think like, did someone put a billboard on the other side of the river? I think it's, I can, if you're in a big city, yes, if you're outside, it's,
00:08:19
Speaker
But I know what you mean. Everything that we do in podcasts, radio, television, walking down the road, an advertisement can be the A-board outside the local shop. It can be a sign in the post office window. All sorts of various different things hit us in all sorts of different ways. And today I was in our village hall and there was a notice board in there of the different classes. And there are lots of yoga pilates type classes. And I was thinking like they're all advertising essentially the same thing. Which one has stood out to me the most? and Which one comes across as really the one that is going to deliver the best opportunity? And listening to you there, I'm thinking back to that experience today. It's like the one that is most genuine, the one that is slightly different, the one that
00:09:09
Speaker
looks and sounds as if the person cares about the service that they're delivering rather than just, this is what we're doing. It's like in the marketeers mind, you talk a lot about values and the values of an organization are displayed through the way in which it it markets itself, the way in which it advertises itself. They're all how you present the values of the organization. Yeah, you know, one of the reasons why I love ah your work, Michael, is that you are trying to bring a new way to go about work to the masses. And I have a similar hope and aspiration. And what I see a lot
00:09:55
Speaker
is that there are individuals who own companies that don't wake up and decide that they're going to be a jerk, but they are. um and so The core values help us navigate not just how we interact with our staff, but it also helps us navigate how we do marketing, how we fulfill for our clients, and how we engage with them on a regular basis. and so That's really, at the end of the day, a guiding principle for us are the six core values that we share across all of our companies. And it really just allows us to use it as like an anchor or a base note for what we do that we come back to all the time. um And they really do help us deliver high quality products and services
00:10:43
Speaker
to our clients and customers and they also allow us to create a work environment that people say things like this is the best job I've ever had, I never want to leave and that's priceless ringing endorsement from them. It's certainly going to save you an awful lot on recruitment and training if you've got people in your organization who feel that positive about the place that they work that they don't see a ah reason to leave but I totally agree with you the idea that You know, if you pay people more money, they won't leave. It's wrong. If you paint the office fancy colors or whatever it is you do, it's all in many ways window dressing, unless the values of the organization
00:11:27
Speaker
are clearly understood by the people who you have and as employees and they can see how your values as an organization, as an employer link and connect with their own values. You're just a job. Once you've got that connection between the values, it does become very difficult to leave because you're you're not thinking about it as work, you're not thinking about it as something that you have to do. It becomes something that becomes part of you, you want to do it, you enjoy it, it's a natural environment to be in. You remove the conflict between the internal self and the self that people have to present in order to be successful.
00:12:09
Speaker
If I have to go in to work and be someone else, then there's no point in me being being there. I might as well move to somewhere else. One of my things has always been that I don't want to work it in an organization where I'm going to be told, and I say told rather than asked, told to do something which I know or believe to be either illegal or immoral. And in my world, my definition of immoral is that if it's if it's immoral, it's something that I wouldn't want to tell my mom and dad about. If I can talk to my mom and dad about it, then it's it fits in with our family values. But ask me to to go outside of that, and night I'm not going to um not going to be engaging with that type of activity. Because the way in which we
00:12:59
Speaker
interact with ourselves, with other people, the products that we buy, where we buy those products and services from. is all an important part of who we are. and That alignment of values is increasingly important, increasingly important. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And it's um one of those things where ah people underestimate the power that it has to transform their organization and increase their revenue and profits, but it has a direct correlation. and um
00:13:30
Speaker
Yeah, most more people need to embrace it. They do. We could go around this for a long time. But what sort of examples can you give us from the marketeers mind of businesses that are putting this into action? Yeah, I mean, there there are a number. I have a client friend who ah she owns a ah small agency in in Denver, and they're doing right about a million dollars in revenue. They have a small team of, I think, six or seven.
00:14:00
Speaker
and Every other Friday, they get a half day. And the idea of the half day is go serve the community. Go out into your community and do something of service. or Some of them go to soup kitchens, some go work with the animals. they all have different endeavors that they partake in and it's become part of the ethos. And one of the things that they really champion is that they like to work with brands that are on a mission, that are doing something more than just, let's make more money, right? It has to be more interesting than that. And so because of that, they have a long list of people that want to come work for them. Another story of another company that
00:14:49
Speaker
has a couple dozen people that work there. They're known as an organization that has a high emotional intelligence. So they did this this crazy thing, Michael, where they said, hey, listen, we're going to give everyone on staff, in addition to paid time off, we're going to give them 10 additional days for mental health that they can take at any time, whether it's just to take a break, or because they actually need a mental health day. A crazy novel idea, especially in the States. And they're their list of candidates that want to come work for them, that are actively looking at their website every week going, is there a new position? Is there a new position? Is actually in the thousands for a company that only has 24 people.
00:15:39
Speaker
um The other thing that this manifests to is when you have these core values, it shows up in the way that you engage with customers. And so you grow really quickly. The the company that I was just referring to, literally in the past three months of working with them, they've increased their revenue 6x. A lot of that is because of who they are and how they embody their core values. and their customers feel it and they want to, of course, when they are having you're having a great experience, if you're having an excellent meal, you tell your friends about it. If you're having an excellent experience with a service provider, you want to tell people about that
Social Media and Outrageous Offers in Marketing
00:16:20
Speaker
as well. And so your cultures, you the culture that you create and the core values that you embody can actually lead to all the business success that you so desire.
00:16:30
Speaker
This wanting to tell people about good experiences, good products is something that has really taken off with social media. I have think ah before social media, before being asked to make recommendations and liking things, if you were going to tell somebody about a product or a service that you'd received, it would be because it hadn't worked. it was You'd received bad customer service. yeah There had been problems. Because we just assume that everything is going to work. We assume that the service that we get will be good. But it's only I think since social media and ah took off that people have got involved with saying thank you essentially, isn't it? They're saying thank you for the product that worked. Thank you for the delivery on time.
00:17:17
Speaker
Thank you for the service that we received. Thank you for the value that you added. And of course, when you have a customer or a client who gets involved in that type of process, that is marketing as well. That's right. 100%. Yeah, it's user created content. One of the other things that you've mentioned in in the book is about making outrageous offers. And I'm thinking like, okay, we've just spent the last 10, 12 minutes or so, about a bit longer, talking about the ethics of business and values, and and then your also outrageous offers.
00:17:55
Speaker
And just the word outrageous tends to so like conjure up an image of something that might be too good to be true. So explain to me a little bit about what ah what a good outrageous offer would be. Yeah. So I've got some i've got some fun examples here, Michael, because these these always get confused, I think. Because there is the used car salesman outrageous offer right that is just a hollow lie. um I think when we were offline, you were saying, you know, somebody gives you a guarantee, and then you look at the the terms of the guarantee, and there's just absolutely no way to to get it right. um And so there's ah there's a way to do these that does two things. Number one, it's going to get people to say, oh,
00:18:42
Speaker
You're different. I've never heard that before. And the other one is it actually leads to loyalty with your customers. Right. So the the first part is, oh, you're different. I always like to ask people, you know, what is the roadblock to people working with you? right why Why would people say no? A lot of times people have a hard time articulating why someone would say no to working with them. They can't properly identify the pain points of their potential customers or clients. and That's really where it has to start. I had a ah client that does Facebook and Instagram advertising. That's kind of the front door.
00:19:22
Speaker
and They wanted to know how to get more meetings and they had worked with a lot of other agencies. They paid tens of thousands of dollars to and they just were never able to book them meetings and mass. So I sat down with them and I said, well, we need to come up with an offer that makes sense. And I know that the biggest question people have when they're working with an agency to do their their advertising. they're always concerned, is it going to work? So what if we offered to run their their ads with no minimum ad spend for 90 days? So what that means in translation is you know before this, this agency had said, listen, you have to at least spend $10,000 a month with us in order to work with us and we'll give you a 90-day trial, but you got to spend 30 grand.
00:20:13
Speaker
So what we did was we said, hey, listen, what if we just remove that? They have to qualify for the offer, of course, after they talk with you. But let's remove that and see if we can get more people in. Maybe we'll see a lot more new customers come in just because they'll give us a shot. And so what ended up happening, Michael, was they went from seeing no meetings booked with other any other company to having 102 meetings booked in the first 30 days working with my firm. And the owner turned to me and said, we have four salespeople and they can barely keep up with all the meetings you guys are booking. And it was purely because the offer really struck the note that the customer, their clients wanted to hear, which was, I'm down to try out a new advertising partner, but I need to see proof that this can work and no one else is willing to offer what you're offering.
00:21:09
Speaker
Another example of this, Michael, is using an outrageous offer that makes you stand out. So, wait a minute, wait a minute. Okay. You increase the number. Oh, it's rewind. Yeah, yeah, v yeah. You have an organization that is saying, in order to work for us or work with us to employ us, this is the minimum spend that you have to have. and that you have to guarantee that you're going to spend that over a period of time. I can see exactly how that would limit the number of organizations that wanted to work for them. The number, you know, I've got to make this commitment based upon your promises rather than on what you're delivering and that as somebody who's running a business that doesn't really appeal to me at all.
00:21:54
Speaker
But you're then saying take away the minimum, create an outrageous offer of we will do this for you, we will prove that what we're capable of doing, and then we'll be able to and start charging you. So the question that comes to mind is like, is part of the strategy to recoup? the cost of the three the three months, the 90 days that were free, or do we then go on to the $10,000 a month minimum spend? How does and does the knock-on effect work? Those sorts of situations to create this outrageous offer. Great question, Michael. yeah so The idea is to essentially give them a try before they buy sort of situation.
00:22:40
Speaker
And so what they did with these clients was they wanted to see them before they said, hey, we'll give you this offer officially on a call. They they just simply asked the question, how much are you spending right now on your digital advertising? And so if they were spending at least 10 grand a month, then they'd offer them the, hey, we'll we'll work with you with no minimum for the first 90 days. And so it'd be a precursor to knowing that they had the budget that they were looking for. um But again, most people are hesitant to switch between agencies because
00:23:18
Speaker
As you know, Michael, 90% of B2B sales is, I like that guy. yes And so this gave them the opportunity to prove their expertise, their value, their worth, give them an opportunity to demonstrate their professionalism. And so then what would happen after the 90 days is they would say, okay, you know, here's the results we got with $3,000. You know, if we extrapolated this out, if we had the full ad spend that you guys we're talking about or if we had ten thousand dollars of your ad spend here's what we would see expect to see in results as well and it just became an honest conversation of how they could move forward or if it was worth moving forward so out of the people that said yes to working with them sixty percent said yes to extending beyond the next beyond that ninety day trial.
00:24:06
Speaker
And they ended up having their best sales you years ever working with us and in large part because they were able to do that. But then the other thing that happened to Michael, those people that came through that door, a lot of those companies grew because yeah that's a function of marketing. and so I actually was speaking with the owner not too long ago and she said to me, you know one of the the leads that you sent us back in 2020, they were giving us $1,000 a month initially, it's turned into a $100,000 per month client wow because we've built it up over time. and so There are ways to to leverage these that that really you're able to grow these these opportunities into something that's a lot more sizable.
00:24:53
Speaker
Yes, yes. And I think from the description there, the one one word that really jumped out to me was this word honest. You have to be honest with your clients from the word go. And you also have to ask your clients to be honest with you as well. so that you've presented an honest, accurate marketing message. You've included your outrageous offer, which is different to the offer that you might get that is cost-based as such. like We're going to do this for you. yeah this Here is the discount. Here is this. Here is this. is it
00:25:30
Speaker
All sorts of things that you start to disbelieve. What you're describing is an outrageous offer that almost involves some sort of sacrifice on the part of the organization making the offer.
Importance of Honesty in Marketing and Creative Strategies
00:25:44
Speaker
yeah yeah We will put our cards on the table. We will demonstrate our worth. we will deliver for you based upon the fact that there is no risk for you as the client so that you can then have confidence in us. It's a different type of outrageous offer to the one that you might see on a TV commercial or a secondhand car lot, used car lot type of thing. That's right. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. and Another example of this that I think is worth sharing, Michael, is we worked with a high-end cannabis company that was producing cake pops that had cannabis infused in them, and they were looking to break into the California market.
00:26:26
Speaker
And a similar story, I worked with some other agencies, they came to us and they said, hey, we really want you to help us generate some meetings. And I said, well, if you're giving away free samples, like everybody else, you're going to struggle. They said, well, that's what we want to do. That's the easiest thing. I said, okay. Uh, so they only booked one or two meetings a month and they came back to me and said, Dave, it's not, you know, it's not working. We're only getting one to two meetings a month. And I said, well, that's because you're, you're not doing what I told you to, which is, uh, you, you can't just give away the free samples. So we started to have this conversation, Michael, and and it's fun to rehash this on this podcast. The conversation went kind of like this, the people that are making the decision to put your products on their shelf. It's the owner of the the business. It's the product manager, or it's the general manager of the store. They don't care about free sense. I said, they care about making money. They care about getting people into their store, their location. They care about the bottom line. So what would they want to do? And the two people that were representing the company said, we don't know. And I said, okay, let's let me just spitball some ideas here.
00:27:32
Speaker
So one idea that we came up with was, what if you do a co-branded billboard, because you can't do digital ads in the state for states for cannabis, or if you did a a ah a billboard within a five mile radius of the location, where we highlighted your delicious looking artisanal cake pops, and then pointed them to the store location where they're supposed to go. And they said, well, that's probably going to be like four grand for that billboard. And I said, yeah. I said, what's a ah so what's the smallest wholesale deal you've ever done? And they said, 40 grand. I said, okay. So the smallest wholesale deal you've ever done is 40 grand. What's the biggest? And they said, oh, like 500,000. I said, okay. So there's a big range there. What are most of your wholesale deals? And they go about 150,000 a year.
00:28:19
Speaker
I said, great. So for grand to get a new, a new storefront is pennies on the dollar. If they're going to be selling your products for the next four or five years. They said, that's a good thing. The second one that we came up with was, well, what if, uh, what if we have a chef that comes in and makes cake pops, like he frost them and they're not THC based. They're just regular cake pops, but they get the same flavor experiences they would when they buy the, uh, the cannabis infused ones. What if they came to the location and actually put on an event? at these cannabis stores. And they said, oh, that's brilliant. So the the difference, and this is what I want to highlight, Michael, we didn't change any of the outputs. We were sending the exact same number of cold outreaches. We were doing the exact same you know people that we were reaching out to.
00:29:05
Speaker
All we did was change the offer. The previous month, they had booked one or two. The first month we ran the new offers, they booked 19 meetings. The second month, they booked 34. The third month, they booked 36. By the fourth month, they said, okay, we need to pause the campaign. It's working too well. And this is the power of outrageous offers. If you find the thing that is really going to be important to your customer, you will get new business coming to you left, right and center. Yes. And also you've got to do something behind the scenes to make sure that if your marketing campaign is successful, that you can fulfill all of the demand that the marketing campaign generates.
Episode Conclusion and Recommendations
00:29:49
Speaker
yeah I get the feeling that we're just like dipping a toe into the whole area of the marketeer's mind. I would highly recommend reading the book to everybody listening, but for the moment, Dave, thank you very much for taking time out from being on the mountain and helping me to make such an interesting episode of The Independent Minds. Thank you very much. Thank you. Pleasure. And I am Michael Millward, the managing director of Abecedah, and I have been having a conversation with the independent mind, Dave Valentine, the author of The Marketeer's Mind. You can find out more about both of us at abecedah.co.uk. There is a link in the description.
00:30:32
Speaker
I must remember to thank the team at matchmaker.fm for in introducing me to Dave. If you are a podcaster looking for interesting guests or if, like Dave, you have something very interesting to say, matchmaker dot.fm is where matches of great hosts and great guests are made. There is a link to matchmaker.fm and an offer code in the description. That description is well worth reading. A little bit of marketing there for the description. If you've liked this episode of The Independent Minds, please give it a like and download it so that you can listen anytime, anywhere. To make sure you don't miss out on future episodes, please subscribe. Remember, the aim of all the podcasts produced by Aprosida is not to tell you what to think, but we do hope to make you think. And until next time, thank you very much for listening.