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08: Design Your Own Niche In 3 Phases with Nick Bennett (Category Design Series)
61 Plays1 year ago
What problem do you solve? If you're like most agencies, you aren't able to answer this. Which is why buyers see you as interchangeable. This problem will be the downfall of your agency and the only way to solve it is to design your own niche. Nick shows us how.
Here's his absolute killer playbook that I myself have started to refer to everyday: The Agency Niche Design Playbook (notion.site)
Here's his Linkedin profile: Nick Bennett | LinkedIn
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Transcript
Introduction: Guiding B2B Strategists
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the B2B Strategy Podcast, your roundtable of B2B Strategists guiding you in every decision you make in growing your business.
Problem vs. Solution: Inspiring Action
00:00:07
Speaker
Solutions don't inspire action. Problems do, yet most agencies still lead with their solutions, believing that the best service wins. When you lead with a clear, articulate, massive problem your buyers face, they can't help but see it. And once they see it, they will demand the solution from you.
00:00:21
Speaker
The bigger, more urgent the problem, the more time and money they will throw
Creating a Unique Niche
00:00:25
Speaker
at it. This is the argument Nick Bennett makes in today's episode about how to design a niche in 90 days that only your agency can own.
Defining Problems in Content Marketing
00:00:33
Speaker
A big problem I see when people are doing LinkedIn content marketing is that it's extremely unclear what problem they are solving with their service. When you consume their content, you have no idea. When you go to the profile to learn more, you have no idea. And sometimes you go to the website and you still have no idea.
00:00:49
Speaker
And so a question I tell people on LinkedIn to ask themselves is in four seconds, what problem do you solve? And if you can't instinctively answer that question, then you have a messaging problem. Now that is something I talk about for LinkedIn content. Nick, you have essentially created a whole playbook and service based on the fact that agencies have this problem for all of their marketing in general, not just LinkedIn marketing. What problem have you discovered that is holding so many agencies back?
00:01:16
Speaker
Like the great irony of life is that they, they can't answer that question.
Articulating Problems Effectively
00:01:20
Speaker
The question is what problem do you solve? And a lot of times they, the second you ask that question, we start getting a hard pitch. We build websites. We do Google ads. We are a consulting firm, kind of whatever it is. And that lens is what informs all the marketing that you do.
00:01:40
Speaker
And they're all, everyone talks about solutions and benefits and all these things. And if they can't answer the question, all that marketing is going to fall flat. And what I've found is that they don't, they end up just doing no marketing at all, relying a hundred percent on referrals. Cause they can't answer that question. And the marketing agency that can't do any marketing is a very much the shoemakers kids situation living its truest life
Standing Out with Unique Value Proposition
00:02:06
Speaker
here.
00:02:06
Speaker
want to ask a little bit, what defines an agency that is interchangeable? This is something that you have talked about in your playbook and on your website and in your LinkedIn content, and that's being the biggest problem that these agencies have. Could you define what kind of agency is interchangeable and maybe the criteria that they have?
00:02:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's it's interesting. So when I talk about like this lens we use to look at the business. So if we're sitting here looking at the business through the perspective of what services we can offer. And if all these other agencies out there can claim that they do the same things, then you have to start competing and telling people that, well, we're better than them, or we're faster than them, we're smarter than them, we're cheaper than the other guys. And
00:02:51
Speaker
This is really when you get into that interchangeable place because now people are looking at your website, and they're looking at a dozen other agencies and they're flipping back and forth between website tabs and they're like, I don't get it, everyone's offering content marketing something expertise or writing or ghostwriting or this or that and they're looking at it and they're like,
00:03:10
Speaker
They're all seemingly identical things to buyers because they don't understand the nuances of you and the things that make you different because we communicate in ways that just highlights the benefits. I say this is conventional marketing wisdom.
00:03:26
Speaker
to do this. And when you get to that place in the eyes of the buyer, you're completely interchangeable. I think going back to conventional marketing, something that caught my eye is also the conventional copywriting.
Avoiding Generic Messaging Traps
00:03:39
Speaker
So what I mean is that you talked about this and your content about how on homepages or I've seen it in LinkedIn content, people will say, we help large companies grow or we build revenue engines, we solve your business challenges.
00:03:54
Speaker
What's the problem here with this kind of messaging? Yeah, this is the generic gigantic trap. That's what I call the generic gigantic trap, right? It's like these are solutions or problems or just things that are so generic that, again, everyone else can claim that they do it. So if there's a lot of people that do the thing, there's literally no urgency whatsoever to buy from you, right? Everyone offers ghostwriting. Everybody offers
00:04:23
Speaker
Google ads or LinkedIn ads or whatever, whatever it is. And then if it's so big, like these things like help companies grow or build your revenue engine and solving your business challenge, it's like.
00:04:35
Speaker
Well, no one believes that you can do it because it's just like this all encompassing umbrella thing. It's like, well, if you were really capable of doing it, more people would know. You wouldn't really have to be telling everybody you're the best. Like everybody knows that this is not true. Or if it's true, it's true to maybe some minor extent. You do help people do something. In most agencies I talk with do really good work and their customers love them, but I don't think it's as all encompassing as we
00:05:04
Speaker
try to message it to feel. Yeah, I think I've seen lots of this kind of generic messaging and copywriting on LinkedIn profiles on websites. And my theory is that people do this copywriting because they see other people do it. For example, in a lot of people's LinkedIn content, they will kind of put on this salesy advertisement tone like
00:05:28
Speaker
You know, this is world class or I'm trying to think of a good example, but it's just they see other people saying these things and they also say it, but they don't really think about what's going to get that person to take action, what's going to, it's not thought through.
00:05:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's the conventional marketing wisdom that tells people market the benefits. And so that's what everybody does. And again, it's a vicious cycle. All these people are marketing benefits, and so everyone offers the same thing. And so now you have to think that if you can convince people that you're better than someone else, that they'll pick you. If a buyer could just see
00:06:07
Speaker
that you were better, that they would consider working with you. There's so many downstream effects or problems with doing this too.
Communicating Unique Point of View
00:06:17
Speaker
It's like now no one can command a premium price because we're turning everything into a commodity.
00:06:23
Speaker
Now, we can't market the business because marketing has become largely ineffective. And now if a client churns, we have some really tough decisions to make. And we probably have to lay people off if we can't backfill that revenue soon enough. But we don't have a marketing engine. We rely on referrals for everything. So well, now we're kind of playing this waiting game. It's a terrible place to be. It's the race to the bottom.
00:06:46
Speaker
That's just, that's, that's really what it ends up being is, is who can get there the fastest when we communicate in this way. And like you talked about, like people.
00:06:58
Speaker
what is motivating people to take action? What people don't realize is that they're sitting here tinkering with their messaging so diligently. If I can only get my website to just say this thing or say it right and someone could land on that and just have this epiphany and want to work with me or at least book a call because when I can get on a call with them, this is the way that we end up thinking.
00:07:21
Speaker
The thing is we skip all the steps required to have a compelling and interesting and differentiated message. And we just go straight to messaging. And when you do that, you bypass the whole part where you truly understand the problem that you're solving for people. And you're just like, well, I know one thing for sure. It's what I do. And so that's the thing I'm going to be able to talk about in extreme detail. And people just don't care because everyone else can do it.
00:07:50
Speaker
And it's like a vicious, vicious cycle. It's rough. It's rough out there. So when I hear you saying this, so my thoughts are now this seems like very applicable advice for an agency that really does solve one problem.
Focusing on Solving Major Problems
00:08:07
Speaker
So for example, my service is just very, very simple because I help people create LinkedIn content in less time. That is the problem that I solved. People are too busy.
00:08:17
Speaker
But for an agency that offers so many different solutions, how are they going to be able to define the problem that they solve? I mean, they could have so many different, they could have so many different services in an agency. How would an agency go about defining that problem for them? We'll go on to the steps later. But yeah, so actually, let's like, we'll talk about you, you just mentioned like what you do. You just, you told me a solution. Like I help people create content less time. It's like,
00:08:45
Speaker
The problem is that you want to make LinkedIn work. The problem is that you know LinkedIn should be working for your business, but you're not investing the time to do that. Or you don't have the time to do that. You're not willing to invest the time to do that. And so you have a solution to that problem called give me an hour and I'll give you a month's worth of content. It's a very different conversation. So when you talk about agencies that solve a whole bunch of problems,
00:09:14
Speaker
Most of these agencies solve one massive problem for people. The problem shows up in people's lives in a ton of different ways. I call them the ramifications of this problem manifest itself in the lives of the businesses that have it in a bunch of different ways.
00:09:34
Speaker
But it kind of all rolls up to one gigantic problem. That's what the agency exists to deal with. And you can solve the problem and address it in a bunch of different ways. Like most agencies will offer paid ads as a service. They'll offer.
00:09:51
Speaker
website build as a service, like just to give you something super specific to go off. It's like, well, if you suffer from X problem, the agency can prescribe one or two of these solutions to get you to where you're trying to go. But they only just see it as how do we explain to people that are paid ad specialists,
00:10:11
Speaker
are so much better than everyone else's. And we need to be able to show that or convince people of the fact that we know something about paid ads that the thousands of other agencies out there don't know. So maybe you could go a little bit more into detail with an example there. What would like for a paid agency, paid ads agency, what would like a problem that they solve be? That's like very, I guess it could depend, but maybe you would have an example.
Differentiation Using Retargeting
00:10:41
Speaker
Um, yeah, there's one, there's one really popular example or like a paid agency or paid social agency on LinkedIn called impactable.
00:10:49
Speaker
I follow their founder. He's very well known. Their agency is really well known. When I see their business, they're like, we're the best LinkedIn ad agency on the planet. I'm sure they do great work. I don't know. I've never worked with them. I've never talked with anyone who's ever worked with them. But they're very visible. And so if you're considering LinkedIn ads, you'll probably consider them. But that doesn't mean that you're also not going to consider a variety of other agencies that offer the similar service. They happen to only do LinkedIn ads. So if that's only the thing you want,
00:11:18
Speaker
There's value there, but like really anyone can offer you LinkedIn ads and how do you know who to choose? So when I look at them and I look at the way that they communicate and the things that their founder Justin's always talking about, it's like in my eyes, the problem isn't that you need LinkedIn ads. The problem and the one that he always talks about that he solves for people, but he doesn't position it this way. And I'm like, you could, if you just refocused your lens, you would be like,
00:11:41
Speaker
So many more people would be able to see this and would just be ready to go. His whole thing is retargeting. His whole message is based on this idea that you gave up on your LinkedIn ads because your cold layer failed. But the reality is all the money is in retargeting. His whole platform and his whole strategy is based on this fact that
00:12:02
Speaker
are retargeting is what's going to get your RO is where your money is going to come from. He's like, but you solve a failure on your cold layer. And so therefore you just pulled the plug, or you fired your agency or whatever the thing is. So like, so the problem isn't that LinkedIn ads don't work. The problem is that you gave up before you got to the part where you make money.
00:12:22
Speaker
And we know exactly how to build that funnel for you. Like that's the way that I see how they could be communicating more intentionally versus just trying to prove to the world that they're the best at LinkedIn ads. And now again, I'm just using them as an example. I don't know anything about their business. I just tell you what I see scrolling through my feed. So like, I'm not trying to call anybody out. I'm sure they're, there seem to be doing just fine without me, but I think more people who do LinkedIn ads would probably consider them.
00:12:52
Speaker
if they were like going after the specific like cold to retargeting thing like your your leap from cold layer to retarget is is where your fallouts happening and that's where your money is going to be made on linkedin and that's what we do i think this i really like this paid ads example because i was working in a paid ads um agency that did struggle with this problem is that people consider it because there's so many different
00:13:19
Speaker
pay to ads people in your mind. You're kind of picking through a list of whatever. Thousands of agents. The interchangeable part is very true there. Right. And so the big part about content though is that you do the content so that people will trust you and so that you differentiate yourself that way.
00:13:43
Speaker
But I'm guessing that you argue that on top of that content, you in that content, you also need to talk about the problem that they have, not just about paid ads in general, so that they trust you, but also that you show that you understand the problem.
Making Problems Visible
00:13:56
Speaker
Yeah, the marketing's job is to make the problem you solve highly visible to everyone who experiences it. So it's no longer enough just to create transactional information with people, transactional information, try to exchange, you know, eyeballs or attention for this information.
00:14:14
Speaker
and assume and hope that you're gonna build affinity with people. That was what content marketing was five plus years ago, because the only way to get content into people's hands was through Google. Google was all transactional information exchange. So the idea was, let's create information, people will search for it, they'll find it, they will build affinity for us and with us, and they will consider buying from us because we have information that they need.
00:14:42
Speaker
Now that chat GPT exists and the value of this information has gone to zero. There's nothing that someone can know in this transactional information environment that you need to get through a human to get. If I needed to know something about Google ads, I could ask chat GPT and it's going to tell me. So I don't necessarily need to go out and find an expert to get some basic information.
00:15:11
Speaker
So that's really where marketing in that way and trying to communicate and show people that stuff is like, it's 100% commodity. So that's why I say market the problem. Because if people don't see the problem, they're not going to see value in the thing that you also have to offer. Or if they do see value in the thing you have to offer already, you're in this place where they're comparing you amongst how many other vendors
00:15:40
Speaker
and you're trying to prove that you're better, faster, smarter, cheaper, like, again, back in this vicious cycle. So differentiation isn't about the sake of doing it for the sake of being different. It's doing it so that you don't get lumped into this place in people's minds that make it really, really difficult to not only win deals, but command the premium price and attract new business that are only considering you.
00:16:06
Speaker
Yeah. So I want to do something because a lot of my audience obviously...
00:16:11
Speaker
Well, I hope a lot of my audience understands my service. So I want to go back to that and I want to ask you, I want to see what your advice would be to me on my service so that we kind of have a walkthrough of how you would go about this. So I want my competitors, how other people might see me on a list with other ghostwriters, other LinkedIn ghostwriters, because it's LinkedIn content creation.
00:16:37
Speaker
How would I go about my messaging if I am helping people with LinkedIn content? So there's a few steps I go through to get to the root of the problem that you're solving. Yeah. And it's a lot of qualitative research. So first thing is we have to talk to your customers and find out why they hired you. What did they hire you to do? What were they considering when they were
00:17:04
Speaker
going to purchase from you, they were considering something else. We need to find out what they were considering because that also helps us understand how people who are willing to spend money on this view the problem. So I'll give you an example of that. In my business, people who consider working with me don't consider working with other positioning experts.
Understanding Customer Considerations
00:17:25
Speaker
They consider external outbound SDRs. So they're gonna hire people to hammer the phones,
00:17:32
Speaker
And they're going to, or they're considering some sort of lead gen, zoom info, Apollo type of like, we're going to get contact information and we're going to try and do marketing to people or to just fuel outbound, uh, sales. So that tells me is that people look at me and they don't see a positioning person. They see someone who's going to help them fill their sales pipeline. So now we have like a, we have a frame of reference for the way that people view the work that you're doing.
00:18:01
Speaker
So I'd be curious to know what people are considering other than you to do this work. Then after we talk with our customers and we kind of learn this stuff and we figure that out, that helps solidify in your mind the way, like the thing that people are willing to spend money on. Then we start figuring out, well, all right, how do we frame this and name it in a way?
00:18:26
Speaker
that not only people will understand the context of it, but they'll be able to talk to their peers or their leadership team, have, bring it up in meetings and be able to talk about it in, in with confidence and be able to share things about it. So there's a whole strategy here that not only fuels true word of mouth, we're not talking about referrals. That's when someone says, you know, Dylan's, I work with Dylan, he's the best, you should call him. You're like, all right, cool, I'll call him.
00:18:55
Speaker
We want people talking about the way that you do business and the problem that you solve. So one of the things you talk a lot about is optimizing your LinkedIn profile. Optimizing your LinkedIn profile is a benefit. There are benefits to doing that. But if I don't understand why that's important, I don't know why I would need to do that.
00:19:22
Speaker
Right. No, I mean, like that's kind of an obvious one, like optimizing your profile feels very obvious. Like, right. People hit there and then they need to, we want them to do something. But if people aren't actively creating content and optimize profile, it doesn't really matter. If people aren't creating content that drives people to want to go to their profile because it's not interesting or it's, um, it's poorly written or I mean, all the things that you
00:19:48
Speaker
probably offer people and like the guidance in the way that you operate with what you're doing. Like, oh, your videos are not edited in a way that keep attention. So people keep scrolling. You don't have a way to stop the scroll. So no one even considers that, right? So like, that's a second order effect or a third order effect is that the profile doesn't convert well.
00:20:10
Speaker
You have to have all these other things in place. You have to believe also that creating content on LinkedIn is going to drive pipeline for your business. So that's down the road. That's how the problem shows up in people's lives. And if they're trying to do it, but they're not doing it consistently is probably a problem that you solve because
00:20:32
Speaker
people tend to like show up for a week and they're gone for a month and they're back for a week, like that type of stuff. So I would, I would say is that it's, it's less about like the nitty gritty, here's a five step program to optimize your profile. And it's way more like, you know, you need to be doing this and you can't figure out how you know, this is a valuable channel to grow your business. Right. But you're not sure exactly what to do to,
00:21:01
Speaker
to turn that channel on. Right. So perhaps a better way to position why you should be optimizing your profile is starting at the problem where I'm saying you are spending tons of time on LinkedIn and you're not getting any clients from it. And so the problem that you have is you want more clients and you can't really do that without the profile. Does that sound, does that sound better?
00:21:28
Speaker
It's much closer. A key part about framing the problem and developing a whole point of view around the problem is being able to very clearly articulate exactly how that problem shows up in people's lives and in their work. The problem of you need LinkedIn to work for your business, but you're not sure how to do it or you don't have time to do it or whatever, however
00:21:56
Speaker
you get to the core of what you're, you're offering people. How that shows up in their lives is going to be a whole, there's going to be a whole bunch of different ways is that it shows up. And there's also going to be a bunch of people are going to be in different stages. Like they might have never started. And they need you to get them from zero to one. There might be people who are on step three, who are just like, can't crack step three. Like only 50 people see everything I post.
00:22:24
Speaker
my videos that takes me two hours to edit them, but I only get 20 minutes of watch time, right? Like it shows up in people's lives in different ways. And like the profile like, Hey, if you notice a ton of people get to your profile, but no one's clicking that button to get to your site.
00:22:41
Speaker
Like, that's like, that's really where you frame or you show people where they are in all of this. And that's the way it shows up in their lives is that the profile is not kicking people over to the site to book calls because, and you have to, again, frame it, right? You have the data that shows that verifiable evidence that the most common route from
00:23:04
Speaker
from scrolling in or scrolling LinkedIn to paying someone money is to go through the profile to the website to book to booking a call. So you have the evidence to suggest that this is a necessary thing. And you just have to frame it in people's minds so they understand where where
00:23:25
Speaker
in where it is in the whole process, like what link in the chain is. Great. I love that. I like that we also use my example. I'll get some free advice here. There you go. Hey, let's use this time for free consulting. I love it. You have a whole playbook on this notion playbook. I love it. So I want to go kind of in a little bit more.
00:23:46
Speaker
clear way from phase one to phase two to phase three so that the listeners here can picture it a little bit better how they should go about this. So we just used an example, but now we're going to use it a little bit more in terms of the playbook that you have. So phase one is define the one different massively valuable problem you solve. So how do we solve this problem? How do we define this problem? Sorry.
Discovery Process: Defining the Problem
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm even starting to like change the way that I language this because a lot of people are like, well, how do you define the problem? It's more so a discovery process than it is anything else. And you already have to believe and understand that problems are what inspire people to take action, not the benefits, not your solutions, all of those things. And so.
00:24:35
Speaker
This is the thing that once people see the problem, they're not going to be able to unsee it. And once people see problems, they need, they're going to want a solution to them. And now that's part of, that's where I said like the massively valuable part. It's like, it needs to have some serious ramifications and a world without it needs to be worth it. You need to want.
00:24:58
Speaker
You need to create the desire for someone to want to invest the time and the energy and the money into a life without this problem. Otherwise you're just going to have a bunch of free users and you're not going to be able to convert them into paid users. Or you're going to have a whole huge audience that you hate and you have a bunch of followers that you don't like because no one's buying anything from you because the problem is, it's fine. Like I can live with it. I live with it as long as I have. Um, and so we need to get to the point where it's like,
00:25:27
Speaker
This thing's got to hurt. And so it's a discovery process. And basically, all problems, I call it, this is in the playbook too. So all problems come from market insights. And that's really the key. You have to know not only to look for market insights, but you have to know how to swirl them around in your brain and figure something out and extract something from them.
00:25:58
Speaker
Phase one is this market insights. What do you know? What have you learned over the years of working with customers and being on sales calls and creating content and doing the thing that you're doing to be able to like, and what do you know? Right? Like that's the first thing. And that's separate, but equally as important as like, what do people hire you to do? And this is where we start the thinking process of like, okay, how do we start piecing all of this together? Because one of the things I find with the agencies that I talk with,
00:26:26
Speaker
A lot of them do work that they don't want to be doing anymore. Every time I'm like, okay, well, they're like, I solved this problem today, or I'm doing this thing today. I'm like, well, do you want to be doing that? Like, no, I want to, I don't want to build people's websites. I want to be a consultant. So just because people hired them to solve a certain problem today, they're like, I need to get out of this. And so this is really where this discovery process kicks in, right? So we talk about the market insights. What do you know? And what have you seen? Um, a big portion of the people I work with to our solo printers or people who
00:26:56
Speaker
want to leave a full-time W2 employment. They're like a marketing director or VP of marketing or even like a VP of sales. They want to leave that full-time employment and they want to go solo, but they're like, I don't know how to come out of this into a way that I'm going to be seen as just not just another sales consultant.
00:27:18
Speaker
And so, a really popular story of someone doing this exact process as a W2 employee, I'm sure you know who Chris Walker is. Like he's huge on LinkedIn. And he tells this story all the time. And I just think I see his story through a different lens, because he tells this story about how he was a marketing manager for a medical device company.
00:27:41
Speaker
And he went on sales calls, he went on ride-alongs and he talked to customers and he saw a market insight called B2B buying habits in places that you can't track. That was like this big aha moment for him as a marketing manager. So you don't need to be an agency owner or a solopreneur or like you don't need to be in any specific place in your life or in business. You just need to know to look for stuff and to think critically about it and invest the time into thinking about it.
00:28:12
Speaker
So that's the big part about, that's like part one of solving or discovering a problem. Part two of that is like all of these insights reveal what is missing from the marketplace. And the missing is really like the big aha moment. So for example, like we'll go with the Chris Walker example.
00:28:41
Speaker
the fact that he revealed this insight that said B2B buying habits in places you can't track, it revealed this missing piece to the puzzle which was like the missing was the strategy aligned to how people actually buy. It was like a pretty direct shot from insight to thing that the whole market category or niche didn't have. And so this missing then evolves and basically like becomes
00:29:11
Speaker
and informs the actual problem itself. Right. And so to further the Chris Walker example, it was the problem is that you don't have a process to develop and grow revenue programs for the way people actually want to buy. So like, and then that whole thing became, and this is like the fourth part of like, I call problem discovery cycle. It creates new markets and new niches, new categories. Right. So he took that.
00:29:38
Speaker
and turn that into what we now know as revenue R&D. So that's like a little tiny mini case study of like someone who thinks it's like Chris is definitely not a client. I'm just very interested in his story and like the way that he thinks. And he's a very public figure. So people kind of get that example when you walk people through it. And these are all things that he has said in the way that he communicates. These are all things that he's very, very public about. And people just look at him and go, so host of an event,
00:30:08
Speaker
get on podcasts and post to LinkedIn tactics. Got it. And they miss, they skip all the stuff that is the strategy in the discovery of what is proven to be a massively valuable problem. All right. Zero to 20 million in three years is.
00:30:24
Speaker
Zero agencies have done that before him. I mean, I'm sure there's some, but agency owners that I talk with are about 10 years in and they're at like 2 million, 3 million, and they're smashing their head into the wall trying to figure out how to break through it. So it's this way of communicating is extremely powerful.
00:30:42
Speaker
All right, so I wanna go to phase two and I think we might be able to keep using Chris as an example there because I think he does that fairly well. So phase two is develop your unique point of view. So how do we do that?
Framing and Bridging Solutions
00:30:58
Speaker
The point of view is built up of three main blocks. I call them blocks. And basically block number one is to frame and name your problem.
00:31:12
Speaker
So again, we talk about like, how does the problem show up in people's lives? Or the ramifications of not solving the problem? What do we call it? How do we allow? How do we set this up so that people can talk about it? And again, we get word of mouth and referrals confused. People tell me all the time, I can't grow without referrals. My clients refer me to other people. That's where my business comes from. Nothing wrong with that. But you can't apply force to it.
00:31:36
Speaker
when we language the problems that we solve, it gives other people the words to talk about it. So it's why Chris Walker is so great at applying force to word of mouth because he understands how to language problems. So for example, he framed this whole problem and he said,
00:31:57
Speaker
most B2B tech companies are on this never ending pursuit of more or new or better initiatives. And they just hope to God that something literally anything will work. And he called like he, he wrapped all this up into one term, he called it revenue chaos.
00:32:19
Speaker
And these are like the little things that people, again, they, they skipped straight over because now people have not only like language to describe the thing that they're suffering from, but they also can talk about exactly how it shows up in their lives. So he always talks about, um, the attribution mirage. The thing that you think is fueling your business isn't actually feeling right. He's languaging the problem.
00:32:48
Speaker
He talks about dark social, whether or not he ever coined that term is totally relevant. He popularized the term. So when people use that term, they're talking about him, they're marketing for basically him in first company. So he's giving people the language to describe the problem and how it shows up in their lives so that when marketing managers go into a meeting and they're like, hey, I just realized something that has been holding us back versus like, can we hire a refine? Like this is a very different conversation.
00:33:18
Speaker
And this is why so many people tell me every single time, like, who are you going after right now? We're going after CEOs. We're going after CMOs, CROs, only C-suites. Like, well, yeah, because you can't activate individual contributors. If you're only talking about solutions, of course, all you're going to say is, yeah, we target CEOs and decision makers. Like, who doesn't? But if you want people to talk about you and you want people to advocate to solve your problem, it's going to start with individual contributors. Those are the people who are actively searching
00:33:48
Speaker
in consuming things way more than, and from a way different perspective than C-level executives. Not that they're not doing this stuff, but it's just a different experience for them. And so if we want to like, instead of writing off the marketing manager, like let's give them the language to advocate to solving the problem that we solve, to bring it internally into a team meeting and talk about it and use the language that we want them to use to describe it. So.
00:34:14
Speaker
to wrap up that part, right? This is what Chris did. And so it's just a credibly legendary example. The second block is evangelizing a future without the problem. So people have to want a life without it. And you have to explain to them in extreme detail what that looks like, right? What are the outcomes? And the outcomes are not like,
00:34:44
Speaker
optimized, blah, blah, blah. It's like these need to be tangible. These need to be real things. This is where we talked about like the gigantic generic trap.
00:34:53
Speaker
And people communicate in ways that's like, overcome challenges. It's like the outcome of overcoming challenges is just meaningless to me. Like that's not desirable of a direction to go or, and there's no urgency. One of the things a lot of people say is like, this is a really popular headline. They'll go Google ads to grow your business. That'll be like the headline. It's like, well, like.
00:35:18
Speaker
the future of growing my business. Of course, everyone wants that. No one would pay or actively try to downsize their business. So we need to talk about a future in great detail that is a combination of the actual business outcomes, the real ones, and we have to talk about it in a way that not only is it desirable and people aspire to go in that direction, but they need it urgently. They can connect the dots between the problem
00:35:47
Speaker
And and this outcome and in going to this different place So we'll use chris as another as an example again Um, they framed this whole world like what life looks like with revenue rnd and they said Oh, here's another thing they said we use this thing called self-reported attribution To help kind of feel this together regardless of what people think of that Like doesn't matter if you're for or against it. This is languaging and he said
00:36:17
Speaker
All this stuff is what's going to align your executives and your investors and your company on what does or doesn't work. And we're going to create a culture of innovation and we're going to improve decision making and confidence and credibility. And these are all outcomes. They're not benefits of working with them. So all outcomes of doing revenue are in day. So he languished it. He said, this is what world your world looks like. And he pulled people in that direction. He's pulling people in that direction.
00:36:45
Speaker
Okay. Block three. You ready for it? I'm like, I'm on a tear, dude. This is not as great in detail. Block number three is to build the bridge from the problem to the future, right? So people have to get it. People have to understand that there's only one way to the future and it's to cross the bridge that you have built and your company is operating the toll.
Creating a Clear Path to Solutions
00:37:14
Speaker
Like this is, this is also a part where a lot of agency owners that I talk with kind of like, I don't understand. Like if I'm the face of the business, people are going to want to work with me and like the company, like when does the company come in? Shouldn't we be doing this from like a company account or like, it's like all this, people feel that this weirdness about the whole thing.
00:37:32
Speaker
The company is operating the toll, right? They are transporting people from the problem to the future. They offer and provide the solution if you're not like a solo printer, right? Like if you have a business, again, Refine has tons of people, like people don't look at them and go,
00:37:49
Speaker
what do you mean I don't get to work with Chris Walker, right? Like, it's a different people. So people don't have that expectation. And so the company operates the toll. So more examples of this, like their whole bridge plan, they said, if you want to stop revenue chaos,
00:38:06
Speaker
not only do you need revenue R&D, but you need us because we're the people who created it. And therefore like we're the only people who can take you there. We understand the ins and outs of it. We've like, we're going to be able to prescribe this system inside of your business and deploy the system inside of your business. So it's like,
00:38:28
Speaker
You won't look at the way that they communicate and anyone on their team. I mean, their entire leadership team goes to the market and communicates to the marketplace in this same kind of way. They may not use the exact terms and things that I just talked about. This is the overarching POV for the business, or at least the way that I see it.
00:38:46
Speaker
But every single person in their company that is active in creating is like more public front facing figures. They're all communicating in this way. They're not sitting there hoping that the website headline is we've tinkered with it enough times that it's going to get someone to take action, right? They know that the website copy is what's going to reinforce the message. It's going to galvanize the message and really retain. It's going to be that recall mechanism. So when people think about this thing,
00:39:15
Speaker
They think about us, but all, everyone in their company goes to market this way. And it's why like, it's just, what is so powerful about getting a full leadership team doing this at once versus like.
00:39:30
Speaker
Just having one person being able to do it. So that concludes phase two. That concludes phase two. That concludes phase two. And I will leave a link for the playbook into the description so that people can also have this in written form. So phase three, the last phase here. Deploy your point of view, market the problem, become the solution. So you've kind of touched on that.
Deploying Unique Points Across Channels
00:39:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think the most important thing is how you think about marketing. I'm very passionate about this idea of making the problem highly visible to people. That's the job of marketing. And we can see how that plays out in a business like Refine Labs and how some people like Chris Walker do it. So when people think, though, deployment, again, they jump straight to the website.
00:40:24
Speaker
And I'm like, okay, that's it. Like, that's the thing I gotta do.
00:40:28
Speaker
And if I can just get this right, my problems will be solved. Deployment is multifaceted. People, again, they see successful companies and they'll say, I'm going to post on LinkedIn and I'm going to host the podcast and I'm going to host a weekly virtual event. And they're missing the whole fact that we need to communicate in this really intentional way, in this really intentional way. So in deployment, we really start thinking about what are the different categories of
00:40:58
Speaker
content channels that are out there, right? There's discovery channels. These are the places, anything that's based on a feed. If you can doom scroll it, this is where people have no intent whatsoever. They're not looking for anything specific. The mindset is just like, I'm here. And yes, consideration spans are low. People will just flip through your foot straight past your post. If you don't have a thumb stopper or a good hook or whatever. But
00:41:28
Speaker
Attention spans are are still there. People will watch long videos. People will read long posts. There's a ton of different ways that you can get people to read that stuff. It's like there's always everyone sells like how to write a hook and all this. There's plenty of that on LinkedIn. Oh, yeah, there's plenty. Let's play that everywhere. Even like on TikTok, there's like everyone's like the three second rule, right? You got three seconds to get someone to want to watch the whole video. If you can get past three seconds, then you probably got someone for the majority of your.
00:41:56
Speaker
But we need to think about distribution channels in this type of way. So it's like, all right, if someone's in this mindset that they're just trying to just scroll, and if someone's served up information from us, like how do we communicate and advocate for the problem? How do we talk about that in a way that someone who has no intent whatsoever is going to want to not only like consume, but maybe share, engage with, talk about with some other people, send it to their company Slack channel, like a whole bunch of different things.
00:42:26
Speaker
Then there's more like traditional distribution channels, right? The intent channel. This is a Google search, YouTube search. Some people use TikTok search, like just anything that, like I need transactional information exchange. This is not the most effective way to like teach people about new problems because typically if someone's searching, they already have this bias in their head that's like,
00:42:50
Speaker
I have this problem and I'm looking for ways to solve it, or I'm looking to solve it in this specific way. Like you're not going to, you're going to have a much harder time trying to like reconfigure the way someone's thinking in that environment, because the mindset is totally different. Not impossible, but it's hard. And I don't really recommend you start there. Uh, especially if you're trying to get out of the commodity information stuff, it's like you want to get into this place where people can discover you with an open mind and people want to share the thing that you're doing.
00:43:17
Speaker
Not a lot of people are really interested in sharing blogs that they found on Google because it answered a very brief and inconsequential question they had about how to fix their toilet or something. And then the last one that I need, I'm going to add this one to the playbook. Shout out to Jay Klaus. He kind of reconfigured my thinking on this one. I don't know him either. I just read his stuff. He reconfigured my thinking on one of these, which was
00:43:42
Speaker
Uh, there are relationship channels that are equally as important, right? These are the podcasts. These are the newsletters. These are the memberships of the communities. Like these are places where it's a much deeper connection. Like you want to consume their content and you want to make sure you see it. Like you want the information and you want to, you don't want to miss it. So there's definitely, there's, there's a ton of value there. And we have to think about, it's like, how do we advocate for the problem? And how do we talk about these things in these different channel types? So most people in our world, right? Like B2B.
00:44:11
Speaker
uh, agencies, solopreneurs, like coaching, consulting, advising, like those, those types of businesses, just professional services. Um, it's all, it all starts with LinkedIn. Like that's really where, cause you're not going to be fighting over who's the best web designer, uh, ever. Like I, I, if you Google HubSpot web design agency, there's a real link, by the way.
00:44:32
Speaker
From HubSpot, it says the best 3,910 web design agencies in HubSpot. And it's like, all right, even HubSpot is trying to commodify their partners. Maybe it's unintentional. Maybe they don't realize what they're doing, or they didn't think through it in that way. But if you're not going to show up in that way. So we think about LinkedIn as the primary means of not only deploying the POV, but how do we message test? Do people understand what you're saying? Do they resonate? Does it resonate with people?
00:45:02
Speaker
Do they like it? What questions do they have? How do you communicate in a way that people can receive? There's just as much art as there is science to deployment.
Conclusion and Further Guidance
00:45:16
Speaker
I hope that in today's episode, you have realized a big mistake that you might be making. If you can't identify the problem that you solve, you may be positioning yourself in the eyes of the buyer as an interchangeable agency.
00:45:26
Speaker
Nick was generous enough to let me put the link to his playbook in the description. I've used it myself and will start using it with more clients. I recommend that you check it out. See you all next episode.