Tag: icp

Make Your Product a No-Brainer for Your ICP

Direct Comparisons: Make Your Product a No-Brainer for Your ICP

Transcript

Anyway, here we are with plan b. What’s going to happen here is I will be, sharing all the hows, the what’s, the whys, all the theories, some examples of how to leverage direct comparisons in your copy.

And if you have any questions on anything I share here today, if you want some help or a second set of eyes on how you’ve applied this to some copy you’re working on at the moment, or if you wanted to even talk about how we could take this practice from the world of copywriting and apply it to, for example, your sales calls, please just tag me in Slack and let me know. I would absolutely love to work through this kind of stuff with you. So don’t be shy in reaching out if you would like some help or some support. That’s exactly what I’m here for. Okay. On that note, let’s dive into the meat, of the workshop. Let me share my screen with you.

So as you know, today’s session is all about how to leverage direct comparisons to make your offer a really easy yes for your ideal prospect.

So very much building on this month’s theme of straight line copywriting.

Now the best place to start with this stuff is to really highlight the fact that when it comes to decision making, our brains absolutely love comparisons.

Why? Well, quite simply it’s because they allow us to assign value to the options that are in front of us and therefore make a really informed decision.

They help appease the rational part of our brain. If you’ve ever read Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, you’ll know that, we typically make decisions, relating to all sorts of things, including what to purchase based on the rational part and the emotional part of our brain. So there are two different systems at play. Comparisons really appeal to that rational part of your prospect’s brain. Because what they allow us to do very easily is have a justification for why we’ve made the purchasing decision. And importantly, it’s one that your prospect can really easily share with others in their life.

So if the offer that you’re writing copy for is something where your prospect will need to justify their decision to perhaps their boss or their team, maybe their spouse, maybe their friends, maybe their peers, This tactic and this approach of leveraging direct comparisons is actually incredibly beneficial because it gives people the data which they can easily use for that purpose. Right? They feel really confident in sharing why they chose this offer above, other options on the market or why they think this will actually work when perhaps previous purchases in the same realm have not delivered the outcome that they were after. So keep that in mind, as we move forward from here.

Now, of course, we’ll be talking about how direct comparisons apply to the kind of offers that you’re writing copy for. But I think just to get you in the headspace of getting a feel for or realising how these things come into play in everyday life.

We want you here for a minute to think about the bread aisle at your local supermarket.

Now, depending on where you are in the world and how big your city or your town is, your supermarket bread section may not look like this.

The one up the road from me here in Sydney absolutely does. I would say it’s probably even larger than this. There must be close to a hundred different options at least, of bread. Now if you are to leave this recording and go and ask your housemate, your partner, your kid if they’re old enough, hey like what what kind of bread do you choose when you go to the supermarket and can you tell me why?

I guarantee you they are going to have a list of factors in there that are comparative. So that are comparing their bread of choice to other options that are there on the shelf. So for example, and it’s quite sad that I know this much detail about my husband, but I know that whenever he goes to the supermarket, the loaf that he chooses is always just the generic supermarket brand wholemeal bread. And I know that he chooses that because he likes it.

It has more fiber than white bread, right? He’s healthier moves things along, I guess.

And also he likes it because it has less, of those, like, seedy or grainy bits compared to, the whole grain bread. Also, I know that he likes it because of the size of the slices and the way that they fit into our oldest kids lunchbox.

So as I’m talking through this, I mean, yes, those are no pedantic things to be thinking about, but that’s how he justifies his decision. That’s how he has watched the place of knowing that that is his top choice of life. Now, of course, the reasons that you have or the reasons that the people in your life might have for their particular choice of bread are going to be different because different things matter to different people.

The point is that if you drill down enough into someone’s choice of bread, you will get to a point where they are able to articulate why they choose it in relation to other options. So how they think their choice of loaf is different and better than other things that they could have chosen instead.

So the point that I’m trying to make here is that value is relative, right? So it only exists in relation to other options and it’s also subjective. So what matters to me is going to be different to what matters to you in most cases.

So this means that we’re better able to illustrate the value of an offer when we actively compare it to options instead of talking about it in isolation, honing in on the aspects that actually matter to our ideal prospect, right, rather than trying to prove some sort of global superiority.

So two really important points here. Right? We need to compare options to other available alternatives, right, in order to help someone understand in a really concrete, aidable way why something is a different and better option for them given what they value in the thing that we’re talking about.

Now it’s really important that when you are leveraging direct comparisons in your copy, you are really focused on what actually matters for your ideal prospect. If you try and take this a step above and go sort of a step higher and you try to prove some sort of global superiority, like, well, this is simply just the best offer on the market for anyone, you’re going to get tripped up. Because of course, the thing that makes your offer the best fit for your ideal prospect is going to make it not the best fit for the people who aren’t your ideal prospect. Right?

And that’s good. That’s why niches exist. That’s why specificity sells. Right? I also think there is a mindset hurdle that you would also come up against if you were to try and prove that your offer is just absolutely the best flat out regardless of who it’s serving.

So really stick to what the data tells you about your ideal prospect, what they care about, and how your offer responds to that, or how your offer serves those things, those points of difference.

So on that note, if you are not already asking this question in your voice of customer research, start.

How does insert your offer compared to other insert the category of your offer things you’ve tried or thought about trying before? So for example, how does CopySchool Professional compare to other copywriting masterminds you’ve tried or thought about trying before?

How does ConvertKit or KIP I think they are now calling it compare to other email marketing platforms you’ve tried or thought about trying before?

Asking this question alone will get you such rich data and will get you all the information you need to actually go ahead and make really effective comparisons in your copy. It will unearth who your competitors are and also how your offer is different and better in the ways that matter who your ideal prospect. So this question unearth some absolute gold. So if you’re not already asking it, again, please start folding it into your research process.

If you’re looking at this and you’re thinking, oh, that doesn’t quite fit with the project I’m working on, because I know that my ideal prospect hasn’t actually invested in a solution, for this problem or this challenge or to work towards this outcome before, this question may serve you better. What stopped you from getting help with this kind of thing before? So what this will do is help you pinpoint and uncover objections or perceived faults or flaws with available offers that ideally your offer can speak to. Right? You can say, oh, well, actually, you know, you might be worried about x. Here’s what our offer does in that respect that is different and better. So what you’re doing here is making a really clear case for your offer in a great fit in all the ways that matter.

Now I wanna show you a real world example of what this looks like, so you can see how easy and how powerful it is in copy.

So what you’re looking at here, is a spreadsheet I’ve just exported from one of my type forms, a bunch of responses to this question, which is one that has existed historically in my feedback form for a copywriting course that I’ve recently retired.

So don’t worry. I’m not trying to sell you on this. It’s just, it’s just a really good example of direct comparisons. And I think because we are mostly copywriters in here, it might be helpful because you probably know some of these competitors. Right? And certainly you will know copy school.

So as you can see here, the question I ask in the survey is how did it compare to other copywriting courses you’ve taken. Right? So I’m asking about how this offer compared to other offers in the same category.

So you can probably already see that even where there are no competitors mentioned or where there are no direct comparisons drawn, There’s some really juicy, voice of customer here that I can obviously leverage to help someone offer through testimonials. So even the second response here, like brain camp is the only copywriting course you need. That’s a very powerful headline to be able to leverage somewhere. It’s a very powerful point of social proof. And often, you know, down here, you know, Braincamp is where I’m with the best copywriting course I’ve ever taken.

I did something strange there. There we go. Sorry.

So just also to highlight that as well as giving you all the data you need to make the comparisons really actively in your copy between your offer and other available alternatives, this question can also yield just some super powerful social proof that will really help position and sell your offer in a really effective way.

Now what I’ve done here, as you can probably see, every time someone has mentioned a competitor or a competing offer, I have put that in orange.

You know, you can see Sarah Turner’s Right Away to Freedom, copy school comes up a few times. Kate Toon, copy hackers.

I think there’s also some reference to the copywriter think sorry. The copywriter club think tank, yeah, Accelerator. I think Tarzan gets mentioned somewhere in here as well.

So, you know, a lot of big names, but also a lot of clarity for me on who or what else my ideal prospect is considering or has tried before when it comes to investing money towards this goal or towards solving the problem or not feeling like they are a really confident effective copywriter.

So that information is incredibly useful because it gives me those direct comparison points that I can leverage.

The pieces of, these feedback, snippets that are in green, the ways in which these prospects or these customers have identified Braincamp as being a better, more appealing option for them. Now again, I’m not focused here on trying to prove that Braincamp is the best copywriting course ever. I’m really using this question to understand what matters to my ideal prospect and how Braincamp is a best fit option for them. Because I know without a doubt that there are many, many, many people for whom Braincamp would not be the best fit.

And that’s great. I don’t want to attract them to the offer. I actually want to weed them out by highlighting these points so I can draw the right people in We’ll let the other people off the book. Right?

If it’s not the best fit for them, it doesn’t serve either of us for them to actually come in and join the program.

So as you can perhaps see, a lot of the pieces in green make the same points. So more holistic human centric understanding of copywriting, more focused on sales psychology, much more human centered.

There is also a lot of reference to the fact, that, for example, the Slack chat in workshops was so intimate and every question I had got answered.

The intimacy and attention afforded by the small group nature of this course blew away every other copywriting course I’ve taken. So a lot of the points are really similar, which is great, right? When you start seeing those patterns in your voice of customer data, you know you are hitting on something.

So I won’t spend much more time going through this raw data here. What I really want you to take away from having a quick squeeze at this spreadsheet, I mean, look at so many responses here, is that, this simple question gives you all the information you need. Right? It’s then so easy to take this and put it into copy and put it in a format that is incredibly easy for your prospects mind to grab a hold of and pull into their decision making process. So if you’re wondering, okay, what does that look like?

My favorite way to illustrate how an offer is different and better is by writing copy into a comparison table.

Very simple, very effective.

So I’ll have a I’ll do a quick, little scroll of this section of Brain Camp sales page.

I know there are a lot of other copywriting courses out there on the interwebs. Your time is precious and money doesn’t grow on trees. So chances are you’re wondering why you should invest in this one. This handy little table is here to help. Now as you can see, even with this headline, I’m being very direct and very upfront about the fact that, yeah, I’m sure you’re looking at other options or maybe you’ve bought other copywriting courses before and you’ve been underwhelmed by, you know, what’s been waiting for you inside or the kind of results they’ve helped you achieve. I’m addressing the elephant in the room head on, because if I don’t, I can’t effectively talk to or demonstrate how this offer is different and better for the ideal prospect. So don’t be afraid to be really direct.

It’s a much more powerful tactic if you are able to just be really matter of fact and straight to the point.

Now as you can see here, one column here is devoted to other courses, and these points are all pulled from that data in terms of what people found disappointing or lacking about some of the other courses they had tried before.

This column on the right here is all the ways in which Braincamp is different and better on those points. So I put in here all the bits that matter based on that voice of customer research, and they’re all here as direct points of comparison. So for example, you would have seen, in that spreadsheet that I showed you a minute ago that there was quite a bit of, feedback on the fact that the intimate nature of the course was really valuable. So of course, there’s a point in here about that. So other courses have ginormous cohorts, little opportunity for one to one attention.

Brain camp has just twenty five spots up for grabs. By the end of week, we’ll know each other’s names and niches. By the end of week twelve, we’ll probably have matching hats. If you want to need one to one attention, all you need to do is hit me up in Slack, send me a copy for critique, or ask me a question during one of our live workshops.

Of course, I could read all of these out to you. Let me just pick another one just for reference. So, I think one of the other points I called out when I was going through those responses, in the Google Sheet were that people liked the deeper psychological approach, the human centered approach. So other courses teach basic psychological concepts like loss aversion and anchoring.

These are great, by the way, but they can only get you so far. Braincamp takes a deeper applied approach to psychology to give you a genuine edge on your competition.

So this table is really just regurgitating all that voice of customer in a really organized way so that my prospect can read this and have a really direct component of comparison for each hesitation they may have based on their prior experience of this kind or this category of offer. So as you can see, it makes the mental processing incredibly easy, right? Everything is here for this person. This column on the right is basically the justification that they can pass on to anyone else in their lives who they feel needs to hear it.

It also, of course, as I mentioned, helps, really appease the rational part of their decision making process.

Now importantly, whenever you do make these comparisons in your copy, you need to prove them right away. If you don’t, you’re simply seeing your prospect to trust what you say. If you’re able to prove the points as you make them, you’re closing that tap. Right. There’s no question then in your prospect’s mind about whether this is actually a legitimate claim.

They can see that these claims are being backed up by real life human beings.

In this case, because I have all that beautiful data from asking that question in my feedback form after the course is complete.

I’ve gone with testimonials. Right? And the testimonials that I’ve chosen to feature here speak directly to the points that I’m making above, and speak directly to those comparisons. Right? So people can see that there are other people who’ve been through this course, who ideally they know. Right? I’m also strategic here about who I’m featuring.

You can also do that too. So, for Braincamp in particular, given the most, commonly referenced competitor was Coffee School, I have picked people here who are possibly well known in that Coffee School realm. So we’ve got Kenny Williamson, we’ve got Nick Moors, we’ve got Christine Noriano, and also Amisha. So, you can also be strategic with that. Right? Because with your social proof, if your ideal prospect knows off or already knows likes and trust to some extent or maybe looks up to the person whose proof you’re featuring, that helps that proof land even more powerfully.

Anyway, that’s a bit of a side note. I could talk about social proof all day long.

But just remember that whenever you’re making these claims about how your offer is different and better for your ideal prospect, you are able to back them up with some sort of proof.

Now, of course, all that delicious data about how Braincamp is different and better for the right prospect, deserved more airtime than simply being on one portion of the sales page. So I had an email. This is from my twenty twenty launch of the offer. If you’d like to see, the full email, just let me know. As you can see it, it lives in my Google Drive so I can very easily share the link with you.

Bold subject line, something I would never say about my own offer, but something that, the voice of customer data says for me. So from a mindset perspective, it makes it so much easier for me to lead with this information. And again, it’s not that I think Braincamp is or was, you know, the top tier copywriting course in the whole world. It’s just that for a certain type of prospect, it was the best fit offer.

So that is what this email is all about. I won’t read it all, but I’ll read the first little bit just so you get the gist. One of the questions I ask people when they finish Braincamp is how did it compare to other copywriting courses you’ve taken? Which is a great question to ask when your office is in a crowded market because competition breeds comparison and being able to address it directly frees people up to say, okay.

Yep. This is what I need or, ah, okay. This isn’t the right option.

So with that in mind, here are twelve different answers to that question quite literally copy pasted in all their unedited glory. I really wanted to screenshot them to make them even more legitimate, but the text got really teeny tiny so I’m rolling with plan b. This first one is from copywriter Amy Williamson.

So I know I’m like a total fan girl and all, but this is at the very least equal with copy school. Probably it’s better to be honest. Don’t tell Queen Weid. Kirsty, if you haven’t heard of copy school, don’t worry. I hadn’t either until a couple of years ago. It’s pretty much the gold standard of copywriting courses. Which means my imposter syndrome and I had a real fun time with that one.

Here’s another one from email copywriter Megan Baird. Well, the testimonial from the beta round of better than copy school was living over my head the whole time. Can’t say that she was wrong. It’s also completely different from any other copywriting course. I’ve taken a lot of them. I think the biggest difference was that it was neither skill only like copy school or biz only like accelerator. It was also like an added bonus that all of the site copywriting skill you taught could also be applied to my own business.

Brain camp was also a lot less copy paste in a good way. I admit that I’ve watched other courses at one point two five times speed and then relied on the templates or swipe.

That so did not work at Braincamp. I’ve already rewatched all the videos just to absorb more info. Probably because on the first round of watching, it just kept sparking ideas to my own business. So second watch was more how to apply this to my work.

Oh, and it felt more like a mastermind than a course. The size of the group plus the quality of the ladies. Well, that sounds bad. Plus how flexible you were with helping us out.

Never been in a course like that before. Just the fact that the same group of us kept showing up to every zone call that really says something.

Now I won’t keep reading, but as you can see, what I’ve done here is literally copy pasted people’s responses to that question, and I have highlighted, the competing offers so that if someone is in the position of deciding between copy school and Braincamp or between the copywriter club accelerator and Braincamp or between one of Tarzan’s courses and Braincamp, they can go to the piece that feels relevant and they can hear from someone just like them. Right? That is where your social proof is most powerful.

Now, I’ve also included lots of answers to this question, because, again, when it comes to social proof, the more you have, the more powerfully you can actually make the point. Right? There’s there just becomes such a small amount of room for any doubt that what you’re saying is true.

So a couple of side notes there on social proof. But again, the thing that I’m really doing here is really directly comparing the offer to other available options and highlighting all the ways it’s different and better for my ideal prospect. Right? I’m doing the hard work for them of having to think through and compare.

Oh, what about this option? What about that option? Would this actually be better for me? Here’s some hard data from people who’ve already done the course, who have maybe also done the other things that you’ve invested in or thought about investing in, and here’s what they have to say.

So just wanted to show you that as another way to illustrate how powerful this can be.

This email absolutely triggered a waterfall of sales, for Braincamp when I sent it. It was incredibly powerful stuff.

I wanted to also show you another example, of some copy I wrote for a client. It’d be good few years ago now.

But what you’re looking at here is, the client sales page. This was Amber McHugh, who if you work with coaches, you know, you’re familiar with.

This was for her mastermind, called Freshly Implemented.

This was what her sales page looked like before I worked with her.

Also a hot tip if you’re not already screenshotting or recording copy assets that you’re about to work on before you actually optimize them, start doing it. It’s so powerful to have the fors and afters. Quick side note. Over. Okay. So as you can see here, her previous copywriter had, realized that it was important to talk about how this offer is different and better than others that her ideal prospect might have tried before.

The way that they’ve done it isn’t as powerful as it could be. So this is why I wanna show you how you can optimize this information. Right? So this section here, what makes Freshly Implemented so different?

I know that you’ve done a lot of classes and courses in the past and you are dubious to add on another one. There is one thing you need to know. This isn’t a class. I’m not here to give you a bunch of advice you don’t need or add to your to do list.

You’ve been buying get it done mugs and filling up notebooks full of ideas and action steps for years. Now is the time to bring those business ideas and dreams to life. Let me show you how to get it done with these four areas of focus. Time plus strategy plus accountability plus implementation.

Now I won’t read the details, in here, but as you can see, there’s a little call out box for each one of those points of difference.

And for the record, like, these things, the time, the strategy, the accountability, and the implementation were definitely things that came through in the voice of customer data in terms of how freshly implemented was different and better, in terms of other courses or masterminds they tried for their businesses previously.

But as you can see, the the way that this these points are presented is it’s not actually done in direct comparison.

Right? They’re talking about features in a way that is not anchored against anything else. So what they’re really doing here is leaving a lot of space for the prospect to have to do their own mental arithmetic. Right? To join the dots between how this compares to other things they’ve tried or thought about trying before.

Even the formatting of this copy is not optimized. Right? We think about the comparison table I showed you for the Braincamp sales page, that really just takes a mental load off your prospect. Right? You present present it to them in a really easily digestible format.

All they need to do is repeat across the bullet points. This does not do that. Right? So the comparison here is weaker even though copywriter here has actually been able to really identify the pieces of the puzzle that matter. The way they’re talking about them and communicating them isn’t as effective as it could be.

For comparison, here is the point of the bit of the sales page, after I rewrote it that tackles that same piece of the puzzle.

What makes Freshly Implemented different and better than all the other masterminds out there? Girl, I’m so glad you asked. Other online programs, the alternative.

Give you a bunch of ideas and frameworks focusing on the what rather than the how. Freshly implemented for smart CEOs like you focuses strongly on implementation, helping you find the best approach for your current challenge and supporting you as you put it into action, sticking firmly by your side until you get it right.

Other online programs keep the face of the program locked up behind closed doors, only granting you access through pre recorded trainings and the occasional Facebook live.

Freshly Implemented offers one to one on the fly access to me and my amazing fresh mentors So you get true coaching and consulting. This comes to you through back pocket TLCs, open studio hours, speed masterminding and a text me when you need me policy.

Seriously, I give you my phone number right from the get go. Now I won’t keep reading, but hopefully, you can already see how much more powerful this information is when the comparisons are made directly. Right? When they’re called out as they are, honing in on still the same things that matter. Right? But just making the information, a lot more easily digestible for the prospect reading through this page.

Again, scrolling all the way down. I mean, there’s lots of points here. And, again, these were all, given to me through asking that same simple question, in, the voice of customer surveys. And also I got some other richer data through doing, the voice of customer interviews.

But it’s so easy to get a handle on this stuff. The copy pretty much writes itself.

It’s just knowing what to do with it and not being shy about getting quite bold with it. Right? Really spelling out how your offer is different and better for the right person.

Again, there’s proof, to back these points up right underneath the comparison table so that all great information above is not there on a trust basis. Like trust these claims because I’m making them, these claims are then immediately after being proven through testimonials.

So, for example, this first one here before Fresh, I just invested twenty thousand in a membership in a mentorship program that completely disappointed me.

This then goes on to talk about, the results she got out of being inside of freshly implemented.

So that you can see, you know, this person has actually invested in some of these other options before and not got results, but with Fresh that that story was different.

There are a few more testimonials there that I won’t go into, but just want you to see that I’m improving these points as I’m making them so that those comparisons aren’t just hearsay for your prospect. They’re real. Right? They’re being proven.

That tab is being closed. There’s no room for doubts and hesitations. And again, you’re moving closely in that straight line towards your prospect saying yes to your offer.

Okay.

The final little side note that I wanted to leave you with was that comparisons also help us make sense of the world, which is a handy fact to keep in mind if your prospect is new to your kind or category of offer or if your offer is a brand new concept.

So again, as a really everyday example, I won’t talk about, the bread aisle again, but, a few weeks ago, I think it was now my oldest who’s three, he asked me what a donkey was. What’s a donkey?

He’s never seen a donkey before. I think maybe it was in a book that we were reading or a puzzle we were doing. I can’t remember. Anyway, the way I answered his question was taking something he already knew and talking about comparison points.

So he knows what a horse is. He’s seen a horse before. He’s been reading about horses in all sorts of books for many years. So I said, oh, donkeys are a bit like a horse, but they’re smaller, and they’ve got much bigger ears.

Now I’m sure there’s probably a better explanation out there about what a donkey is, but that was good enough for him. And it allowed him to really understand what a donkey was in some concrete terms because it took what he already knew and built on that knowledge using really simple comparisons.

So I mean, you’re probably not going to be using comparisons to explain what a donkey is in your copy. But of course, there may be a case where you are selling a mastermind to an audience of people who, for whatever reason, have never come across the term mastermind before. They don’t know what it is, but maybe they know what an online course is. If that’s the case, you can use comparisons to help build out their understanding to the point where they feel confident about the shape and the value of the offer they’re opting into.

It may also be for example that you’re dealing with an audience who doesn’t know what a custom GPT is, right? I’m sure that’s probably a much more probable scenario than someone who doesn’t know what a mastermind is. So again, taking what someone already knows and expanding that knowledge with the magic of comparisons.

So to put it another way, probably more succinctly because I wrote this rather than said it, the best approach here is to scaffold between what your prospect already understands and what they need to know to understand the value of the offer. So it’s just a really effective way to give someone a concrete understanding that again, they can share with other people if they need to. If they feel the need to justify their purchasing decision. If they want someone else to buy into the fact that they’re excited about buying this offer from you or from your client.

So just a really good thing to keep in mind.

Okay. The last thing that I want to just quickly touch on, before I end this workshop is the worksheet.

So you should already have access to this. If you don’t, I guess, let me know.

But what I have here are just some prompts for you. You may not need these, but just in case this helps you organize your data and organize your thoughts, lean into this. So four questions here for you. What other relevant or related offers has your ideal prospect tried or thought about trying before? Again, you can get this information from asking that one simple question in your voice of customer research.

If that for whatever reason is not available to you, some internet sleuthing would also allow you to do the same job.

Reddit is a great place where you might find, depending on what your offer is, some threads about it or its category of offer. So you can see what people are talking about and what things they have considered or tried before and how those stack up.

How did they miss the mark either in practice or in how they were perceived by your prospect? Again, that magic question in your voice of customer research will give you this data. This is just being able to organize it right into something that you can then very easily turn into copy.

How is your or your clients offer different and ideally better in relation to those points? Make each comparison as direct and specific as you can. So again, don’t be afraid to be really ballsy with this and lean on that voice of customer data, right? It is so much easier, to be able to share something someone else has said then and also also, we see more effective, than just to try and sift through your own brain and come up with the justifications and reasons and answers to this question here.

Finally, how can you prove some or all of those points of wealth? In the examples I’ve shared with you today, in both cases, that was via testimonials.

But, of course, there are other ways. So for example, let’s say you are selling a client’s online course and they have some sort of platform where, you can, you know, post questions and get support. And something that comes through in your research or in your feedback about that program is that that space is far more engaged and supportive, than other similar spaces they’ve been in before. So a way to prove that, in lieu of or in addition to testimonials would be, if you have permission from the people in the screenshot to take a screenshot of people asking for questions or asking for support within that space and getting really good, really quick, really valuable responses, right, from either other people in that space or from the person who actually heads up the program. That’s a really good way to prove that point.

If you are trying to prove how much the UX of your app, for example, or your client’s app, is better than the other available apps that do a similar thing, it might be that, you have a demo or a video that walks someone through all those different things so they can see exactly how easy it is, to click through and, you know, achieve a certain thing, create a task, whatever that might look like. So there are different ways that you can prove points. The important thing is that you do it so that you are not asking your prospect to trust you as you say all the ways your offer is different and better for them. But you are demonstrating that the points that you are making are true and that they’ve come from the people who are in the know.

Okay.

That is it. Like I mentioned at the start, if you have any questions or if you want a second set of eyes on maybe a comparison table that you’re going to now go and write into your sales pages or an email that you’re going to send, whatever that might look like, please just reach out, tag me in Slack, and I would absolutely love to help you.

It’s such an easy and effective technique to leverage in your copy.

So yeah, I just hope you go forth and start using it ASAP. I would love to hear how it goes. I would love to hear about the results you get. Okay.

That’s it for me.

I will see you in Slack. Bye.

Worksheet

Leveraging Direct Comparisons

Worksheet

Leveraging direct comparisons

Transcript

Hey, everyone. Very quickly before I dive into the content of the workshop, I just wanted to apologize for having to cancel last week’s workshop at such short notice.
Unfortunately, we had a very poorly timed stomach bug come through our families. So it was just, not a situation in which I could have fronted up for an hour on Zoom. Anyway, here we are with plan b. What’s going to happen here is I will be, sharing all the hows, the what’s, the whys, all the theories, some examples of how to leverage direct comparisons in your copy.
And if you have any questions on anything I share here today, if you want some help or a second set of eyes on how you’ve applied this to some copy you’re working on at the moment, or if you wanted to even talk about how we could take this practice from the world of copywriting and apply it to, for example, your sales calls, please just tag me in Slack and let me know. I would absolutely love to work through this kind of stuff with you. So don’t be shy in reaching out if you would like some help or some support. That’s exactly what I’m here for. Okay. On that note, let’s dive into the meat, of the workshop. Let me share my screen with you.
So as you know, today’s session is all about how to leverage direct comparisons to make your offer a really easy yes for your ideal prospect.
So very much building on this month’s theme of straight line copywriting.
Now the best place to start with this stuff is to really highlight the fact that when it comes to decision making, our brains absolutely love comparisons.
Why? Well, quite simply it’s because they allow us to assign value to the options that are in front of us and therefore make a really informed decision.
They help appease the rational part of our brain. If you’ve ever read Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, you’ll know that, we typically make decisions, relating to all sorts of things, including what to purchase based on the rational part and the emotional part of our brain. So there are two different systems at play. Comparisons really appeal to that rational part of your prospect’s brain. Because what they allow us to do very easily is have a justification for why we’ve made the purchasing decision. And importantly, it’s one that your prospect can really easily share with others in their life.
So if the offer that you’re writing copy for is something where your prospect will need to justify their decision to perhaps their boss or their team, maybe their spouse, maybe their friends, maybe their peers, This tactic and this approach of leveraging direct comparisons is actually incredibly beneficial because it gives people the data which they can easily use for that purpose. Right? They feel really confident in sharing why they chose this offer above, other options on the market or why they think this will actually work when perhaps previous purchases in the same realm have not delivered the outcome that they were after. So keep that in mind, as we move forward from here.
Now, of course, we’ll be talking about how direct comparisons apply to the kind of offers that you’re writing copy for. But I think just to get you in the headspace of getting a feel for or realising how these things come into play in everyday life.
We want you here for a minute to think about the bread aisle at your local supermarket.
Now, depending on where you are in the world and how big your city or your town is, your supermarket bread section may not look like this.
The one up the road from me here in Sydney absolutely does. I would say it’s probably even larger than this. There must be close to a hundred different options at least, of bread. Now if you are to leave this recording and go and ask your housemate, your partner, your kid if they’re old enough, hey like what what kind of bread do you choose when you go to the supermarket and can you tell me why?
I guarantee you they are going to have a list of factors in there that are comparative. So that are comparing their bread of choice to other options that are there on the shelf. So for example, and it’s quite sad that I know this much detail about my husband, but I know that whenever he goes to the supermarket, the loaf that he chooses is always just the generic supermarket brand wholemeal bread. And I know that he chooses that because he likes it.
It has more fiber than white bread, right? He’s healthier moves things along, I guess.
And also he likes it because it has less, of those, like, seedy or grainy bits compared to, the whole grain bread. Also, I know that he likes it because of the size of the slices and the way that they fit into our oldest kids lunchbox.
So as I’m talking through this, I mean, yes, those are no pedantic things to be thinking about, but that’s how he justifies his decision. That’s how he has watched the place of knowing that that is his top choice of life. Now, of course, the reasons that you have or the reasons that the people in your life might have for their particular choice of bread are going to be different because different things matter to different people.
The point is that if you drill down enough into someone’s choice of bread, you will get to a point where they are able to articulate why they choose it in relation to other options. So how they think their choice of loaf is different and better than other things that they could have chosen instead.
So the point that I’m trying to make here is that value is relative, right? So it only exists in relation to other options and it’s also subjective. So what matters to me is going to be different to what matters to you in most cases.
So this means that we’re better able to illustrate the value of an offer when we actively compare it to options instead of talking about it in isolation, honing in on the aspects that actually matter to our ideal prospect, right, rather than trying to prove some sort of global superiority.
So two really important points here. Right? We need to compare options to other available alternatives, right, in order to help someone understand in a really concrete, aidable way why something is a different and better option for them given what they value in the thing that we’re talking about.
Now it’s really important that when you are leveraging direct comparisons in your copy, you are really focused on what actually matters for your ideal prospect. If you try and take this a step above and go sort of a step higher and you try to prove some sort of global superiority, like, well, this is simply just the best offer on the market for anyone, you’re going to get tripped up. Because of course, the thing that makes your offer the best fit for your ideal prospect is going to make it not the best fit for the people who aren’t your ideal prospect. Right?
And that’s good. That’s why niches exist. That’s why specificity sells. Right? I also think there is a mindset hurdle that you would also come up against if you were to try and prove that your offer is just absolutely the best flat out regardless of who it’s serving.
So really stick to what the data tells you about your ideal prospect, what they care about, and how your offer responds to that, or how your offer serves those things, those points of difference.
So on that note, if you are not already asking this question in your voice of customer research, start.
How does insert your offer compared to other insert the category of your offer things you’ve tried or thought about trying before? So for example, how does CopySchool Professional compare to other copywriting masterminds you’ve tried or thought about trying before?
How does ConvertKit or KIP I think they are now calling it compare to other email marketing platforms you’ve tried or thought about trying before?
Asking this question alone will get you such rich data and will get you all the information you need to actually go ahead and make really effective comparisons in your copy. It will unearth who your competitors are and also how your offer is different and better in the ways that matter who your ideal prospect. So this question unearth some absolute gold. So if you’re not already asking it, again, please start folding it into your research process.
If you’re looking at this and you’re thinking, oh, that doesn’t quite fit with the project I’m working on, because I know that my ideal prospect hasn’t actually invested in a solution, for this problem or this challenge or to work towards this outcome before, this question may serve you better. What stopped you from getting help with this kind of thing before? So what this will do is help you pinpoint and uncover objections or perceived faults or flaws with available offers that ideally your offer can speak to. Right? You can say, oh, well, actually, you know, you might be worried about x. Here’s what our offer does in that respect that is different and better. So what you’re doing here is making a really clear case for your offer in a great fit in all the ways that matter.
Now I wanna show you a real world example of what this looks like, so you can see how easy and how powerful it is in copy.
So what you’re looking at here, is a spreadsheet I’ve just exported from one of my type forms, a bunch of responses to this question, which is one that has existed historically in my feedback form for a copywriting course that I’ve recently retired.
So don’t worry. I’m not trying to sell you on this. It’s just, it’s just a really good example of direct comparisons. And I think because we are mostly copywriters in here, it might be helpful because you probably know some of these competitors. Right? And certainly you will know copy school.
So as you can see here, the question I ask in the survey is how did it compare to other copywriting courses you’ve taken. Right? So I’m asking about how this offer compared to other offers in the same category.
So you can probably already see that even where there are no competitors mentioned or where there are no direct comparisons drawn, There’s some really juicy, voice of customer here that I can obviously leverage to help someone offer through testimonials. So even the second response here, like brain camp is the only copywriting course you need. That’s a very powerful headline to be able to leverage somewhere. It’s a very powerful point of social proof. And often, you know, down here, you know, Braincamp is where I’m with the best copywriting course I’ve ever taken.
I did something strange there. There we go. Sorry.
So just also to highlight that as well as giving you all the data you need to make the comparisons really actively in your copy between your offer and other available alternatives, this question can also yield just some super powerful social proof that will really help position and sell your offer in a really effective way.
Now what I’ve done here, as you can probably see, every time someone has mentioned a competitor or a competing offer, I have put that in orange.
You know, you can see Sarah Turner’s Right Away to Freedom, copy school comes up a few times. Kate Toon, copy hackers.
I think there’s also some reference to the copywriter think sorry. The copywriter club think tank, yeah, Accelerator. I think Tarzan gets mentioned somewhere in here as well.
So, you know, a lot of big names, but also a lot of clarity for me on who or what else my ideal prospect is considering or has tried before when it comes to investing money towards this goal or towards solving the problem or not feeling like they are a really confident effective copywriter.
So that information is incredibly useful because it gives me those direct comparison points that I can leverage.
The pieces of, these feedback, snippets that are in green, the ways in which these prospects or these customers have identified Braincamp as being a better, more appealing option for them. Now again, I’m not focused here on trying to prove that Braincamp is the best copywriting course ever. I’m really using this question to understand what matters to my ideal prospect and how Braincamp is a best fit option for them. Because I know without a doubt that there are many, many, many people for whom Braincamp would not be the best fit.
And that’s great. I don’t want to attract them to the offer. I actually want to weed them out by highlighting these points so I can draw the right people in We’ll let the other people off the book. Right?
If it’s not the best fit for them, it doesn’t serve either of us for them to actually come in and join the program.
So as you can perhaps see, a lot of the pieces in green make the same points. So more holistic human centric understanding of copywriting, more focused on sales psychology, much more human centered.
There is also a lot of reference to the fact, that, for example, the Slack chat in workshops was so intimate and every question I had got answered.
The intimacy and attention afforded by the small group nature of this course blew away every other copywriting course I’ve taken. So a lot of the points are really similar, which is great, right? When you start seeing those patterns in your voice of customer data, you know you are hitting on something.
So I won’t spend much more time going through this raw data here. What I really want you to take away from having a quick squeeze at this spreadsheet, I mean, look at so many responses here, is that, this simple question gives you all the information you need. Right? It’s then so easy to take this and put it into copy and put it in a format that is incredibly easy for your prospects mind to grab a hold of and pull into their decision making process. So if you’re wondering, okay, what does that look like?
My favorite way to illustrate how an offer is different and better is by writing copy into a comparison table.
Very simple, very effective.
So I’ll have a I’ll do a quick, little scroll of this section of Brain Camp sales page.
I know there are a lot of other copywriting courses out there on the interwebs. Your time is precious and money doesn’t grow on trees. So chances are you’re wondering why you should invest in this one. This handy little table is here to help. Now as you can see, even with this headline, I’m being very direct and very upfront about the fact that, yeah, I’m sure you’re looking at other options or maybe you’ve bought other copywriting courses before and you’ve been underwhelmed by, you know, what’s been waiting for you inside or the kind of results they’ve helped you achieve. I’m addressing the elephant in the room head on, because if I don’t, I can’t effectively talk to or demonstrate how this offer is different and better for the ideal prospect. So don’t be afraid to be really direct.
It’s a much more powerful tactic if you are able to just be really matter of fact and straight to the point.
Now as you can see here, one column here is devoted to other courses, and these points are all pulled from that data in terms of what people found disappointing or lacking about some of the other courses they had tried before.
This column on the right here is all the ways in which Braincamp is different and better on those points. So I put in here all the bits that matter based on that voice of customer research, and they’re all here as direct points of comparison. So for example, you would have seen, in that spreadsheet that I showed you a minute ago that there was quite a bit of, feedback on the fact that the intimate nature of the course was really valuable. So of course, there’s a point in here about that. So other courses have ginormous cohorts, little opportunity for one to one attention.
Brain camp has just twenty five spots up for grabs. By the end of week, we’ll know each other’s names and niches. By the end of week twelve, we’ll probably have matching hats. If you want to need one to one attention, all you need to do is hit me up in Slack, send me a copy for critique, or ask me a question during one of our live workshops.
Of course, I could read all of these out to you. Let me just pick another one just for reference. So, I think one of the other points I called out when I was going through those responses, in the Google Sheet were that people liked the deeper psychological approach, the human centered approach. So other courses teach basic psychological concepts like loss aversion and anchoring.
These are great, by the way, but they can only get you so far. Braincamp takes a deeper applied approach to psychology to give you a genuine edge on your competition.
So this table is really just regurgitating all that voice of customer in a really organized way so that my prospect can read this and have a really direct component of comparison for each hesitation they may have based on their prior experience of this kind or this category of offer. So as you can see, it makes the mental processing incredibly easy, right? Everything is here for this person. This column on the right is basically the justification that they can pass on to anyone else in their lives who they feel needs to hear it.
It also, of course, as I mentioned, helps, really appease the rational part of their decision making process.
Now importantly, whenever you do make these comparisons in your copy, you need to prove them right away. If you don’t, you’re simply seeing your prospect to trust what you say. If you’re able to prove the points as you make them, you’re closing that tap. Right. There’s no question then in your prospect’s mind about whether this is actually a legitimate claim.
They can see that these claims are being backed up by real life human beings.
In this case, because I have all that beautiful data from asking that question in my feedback form after the course is complete.
I’ve gone with testimonials. Right? And the testimonials that I’ve chosen to feature here speak directly to the points that I’m making above, and speak directly to those comparisons. Right? So people can see that there are other people who’ve been through this course, who ideally they know. Right? I’m also strategic here about who I’m featuring.
You can also do that too. So, for Braincamp in particular, given the most, commonly referenced competitor was Coffee School, I have picked people here who are possibly well known in that Coffee School realm. So we’ve got Kenny Williamson, we’ve got Nick Moors, we’ve got Christine Noriano, and also Amisha. So, you can also be strategic with that. Right? Because with your social proof, if your ideal prospect knows off or already knows likes and trust to some extent or maybe looks up to the person whose proof you’re featuring, that helps that proof land even more powerfully.
Anyway, that’s a bit of a side note. I could talk about social proof all day long.
But just remember that whenever you’re making these claims about how your offer is different and better for your ideal prospect, you are able to back them up with some sort of proof.
Now, of course, all that delicious data about how Braincamp is different and better for the right prospect, deserved more airtime than simply being on one portion of the sales page. So I had an email. This is from my twenty twenty launch of the offer. If you’d like to see, the full email, just let me know. As you can see it, it lives in my Google Drive so I can very easily share the link with you.
Bold subject line, something I would never say about my own offer, but something that, the voice of customer data says for me. So from a mindset perspective, it makes it so much easier for me to lead with this information. And again, it’s not that I think Braincamp is or was, you know, the top tier copywriting course in the whole world. It’s just that for a certain type of prospect, it was the best fit offer.
So that is what this email is all about. I won’t read it all, but I’ll read the first little bit just so you get the gist. One of the questions I ask people when they finish Braincamp is how did it compare to other copywriting courses you’ve taken? Which is a great question to ask when your office is in a crowded market because competition breeds comparison and being able to address it directly frees people up to say, okay.
Yep. This is what I need or, ah, okay. This isn’t the right option.
So with that in mind, here are twelve different answers to that question quite literally copy pasted in all their unedited glory. I really wanted to screenshot them to make them even more legitimate, but the text got really teeny tiny so I’m rolling with plan b. This first one is from copywriter Amy Williamson.
So I know I’m like a total fan girl and all, but this is at the very least equal with copy school. Probably it’s better to be honest. Don’t tell Queen Weid. Kirsty, if you haven’t heard of copy school, don’t worry. I hadn’t either until a couple of years ago. It’s pretty much the gold standard of copywriting courses. Which means my imposter syndrome and I had a real fun time with that one.
Here’s another one from email copywriter Megan Baird. Well, the testimonial from the beta round of better than copy school was living over my head the whole time. Can’t say that she was wrong. It’s also completely different from any other copywriting course. I’ve taken a lot of them. I think the biggest difference was that it was neither skill only like copy school or biz only like accelerator. It was also like an added bonus that all of the site copywriting skill you taught could also be applied to my own business.
Brain camp was also a lot less copy paste in a good way. I admit that I’ve watched other courses at one point two five times speed and then relied on the templates or swipe.
That so did not work at Braincamp. I’ve already rewatched all the videos just to absorb more info. Probably because on the first round of watching, it just kept sparking ideas to my own business. So second watch was more how to apply this to my work.
Oh, and it felt more like a mastermind than a course. The size of the group plus the quality of the ladies. Well, that sounds bad. Plus how flexible you were with helping us out.
Never been in a course like that before. Just the fact that the same group of us kept showing up to every zone call that really says something.
Now I won’t keep reading, but as you can see, what I’ve done here is literally copy pasted people’s responses to that question, and I have highlighted, the competing offers so that if someone is in the position of deciding between copy school and Braincamp or between the copywriter club accelerator and Braincamp or between one of Tarzan’s courses and Braincamp, they can go to the piece that feels relevant and they can hear from someone just like them. Right? That is where your social proof is most powerful.
Now, I’ve also included lots of answers to this question, because, again, when it comes to social proof, the more you have, the more powerfully you can actually make the point. Right? There’s there just becomes such a small amount of room for any doubt that what you’re saying is true.
So a couple of side notes there on social proof. But again, the thing that I’m really doing here is really directly comparing the offer to other available options and highlighting all the ways it’s different and better for my ideal prospect. Right? I’m doing the hard work for them of having to think through and compare.
Oh, what about this option? What about that option? Would this actually be better for me? Here’s some hard data from people who’ve already done the course, who have maybe also done the other things that you’ve invested in or thought about investing in, and here’s what they have to say.
So just wanted to show you that as another way to illustrate how powerful this can be.
This email absolutely triggered a waterfall of sales, for Braincamp when I sent it. It was incredibly powerful stuff.
I wanted to also show you another example, of some copy I wrote for a client. It’d be good few years ago now.
But what you’re looking at here is, the client sales page. This was Amber McHugh, who if you work with coaches, you know, you’re familiar with.
This was for her mastermind, called Freshly Implemented.
This was what her sales page looked like before I worked with her.
Also a hot tip if you’re not already screenshotting or recording copy assets that you’re about to work on before you actually optimize them, start doing it. It’s so powerful to have the fors and afters. Quick side note. Over. Okay. So as you can see here, her previous copywriter had, realized that it was important to talk about how this offer is different and better than others that her ideal prospect might have tried before.
The way that they’ve done it isn’t as powerful as it could be. So this is why I wanna show you how you can optimize this information. Right? So this section here, what makes Freshly Implemented so different?
I know that you’ve done a lot of classes and courses in the past and you are dubious to add on another one. There is one thing you need to know. This isn’t a class. I’m not here to give you a bunch of advice you don’t need or add to your to do list.
You’ve been buying get it done mugs and filling up notebooks full of ideas and action steps for years. Now is the time to bring those business ideas and dreams to life. Let me show you how to get it done with these four areas of focus. Time plus strategy plus accountability plus implementation.
Now I won’t read the details, in here, but as you can see, there’s a little call out box for each one of those points of difference.
And for the record, like, these things, the time, the strategy, the accountability, and the implementation were definitely things that came through in the voice of customer data in terms of how freshly implemented was different and better, in terms of other courses or masterminds they tried for their businesses previously.
But as you can see, the the way that this these points are presented is it’s not actually done in direct comparison.
Right? They’re talking about features in a way that is not anchored against anything else. So what they’re really doing here is leaving a lot of space for the prospect to have to do their own mental arithmetic. Right? To join the dots between how this compares to other things they’ve tried or thought about trying before.
Even the formatting of this copy is not optimized. Right? We think about the comparison table I showed you for the Braincamp sales page, that really just takes a mental load off your prospect. Right? You present present it to them in a really easily digestible format.
All they need to do is repeat across the bullet points. This does not do that. Right? So the comparison here is weaker even though copywriter here has actually been able to really identify the pieces of the puzzle that matter. The way they’re talking about them and communicating them isn’t as effective as it could be.
For comparison, here is the point of the bit of the sales page, after I rewrote it that tackles that same piece of the puzzle.
What makes Freshly Implemented different and better than all the other masterminds out there? Girl, I’m so glad you asked. Other online programs, the alternative.
Give you a bunch of ideas and frameworks focusing on the what rather than the how. Freshly implemented for smart CEOs like you focuses strongly on implementation, helping you find the best approach for your current challenge and supporting you as you put it into action, sticking firmly by your side until you get it right.
Other online programs keep the face of the program locked up behind closed doors, only granting you access through pre recorded trainings and the occasional Facebook live.
Freshly Implemented offers one to one on the fly access to me and my amazing fresh mentors So you get true coaching and consulting. This comes to you through back pocket TLCs, open studio hours, speed masterminding and a text me when you need me policy.
Seriously, I give you my phone number right from the get go. Now I won’t keep reading, but hopefully, you can already see how much more powerful this information is when the comparisons are made directly. Right? When they’re called out as they are, honing in on still the same things that matter. Right? But just making the information, a lot more easily digestible for the prospect reading through this page.
Again, scrolling all the way down. I mean, there’s lots of points here. And, again, these were all, given to me through asking that same simple question, in, the voice of customer surveys. And also I got some other richer data through doing, the voice of customer interviews.
But it’s so easy to get a handle on this stuff. The copy pretty much writes itself.
It’s just knowing what to do with it and not being shy about getting quite bold with it. Right? Really spelling out how your offer is different and better for the right person.
Again, there’s proof, to back these points up right underneath the comparison table so that all great information above is not there on a trust basis. Like trust these claims because I’m making them, these claims are then immediately after being proven through testimonials.
So, for example, this first one here before Fresh, I just invested twenty thousand in a membership in a mentorship program that completely disappointed me.
This then goes on to talk about, the results she got out of being inside of freshly implemented.
So that you can see, you know, this person has actually invested in some of these other options before and not got results, but with Fresh that that story was different.
There are a few more testimonials there that I won’t go into, but just want you to see that I’m improving these points as I’m making them so that those comparisons aren’t just hearsay for your prospect. They’re real. Right? They’re being proven.
That tab is being closed. There’s no room for doubts and hesitations. And again, you’re moving closely in that straight line towards your prospect saying yes to your offer.
Okay.
The final little side note that I wanted to leave you with was that comparisons also help us make sense of the world, which is a handy fact to keep in mind if your prospect is new to your kind or category of offer or if your offer is a brand new concept.
So again, as a really everyday example, I won’t talk about, the bread aisle again, but, a few weeks ago, I think it was now my oldest who’s three, he asked me what a donkey was. What’s a donkey?
He’s never seen a donkey before. I think maybe it was in a book that we were reading or a puzzle we were doing. I can’t remember. Anyway, the way I answered his question was taking something he already knew and talking about comparison points.
So he knows what a horse is. He’s seen a horse before. He’s been reading about horses in all sorts of books for many years. So I said, oh, donkeys are a bit like a horse, but they’re smaller, and they’ve got much bigger ears.
Now I’m sure there’s probably a better explanation out there about what a donkey is, but that was good enough for him. And it allowed him to really understand what a donkey was in some concrete terms because it took what he already knew and built on that knowledge using really simple comparisons.
So I mean, you’re probably not going to be using comparisons to explain what a donkey is in your copy. But of course, there may be a case where you are selling a mastermind to an audience of people who, for whatever reason, have never come across the term mastermind before. They don’t know what it is, but maybe they know what an online course is. If that’s the case, you can use comparisons to help build out their understanding to the point where they feel confident about the shape and the value of the offer they’re opting into.
It may also be for example that you’re dealing with an audience who doesn’t know what a custom GPT is, right? I’m sure that’s probably a much more probable scenario than someone who doesn’t know what a mastermind is. So again, taking what someone already knows and expanding that knowledge with the magic of comparisons.
So to put it another way, probably more succinctly because I wrote this rather than said it, the best approach here is to scaffold between what your prospect already understands and what they need to know to understand the value of the offer. So it’s just a really effective way to give someone a concrete understanding that again, they can share with other people if they need to. If they feel the need to justify their purchasing decision. If they want someone else to buy into the fact that they’re excited about buying this offer from you or from your client.
So just a really good thing to keep in mind.
Okay. The last thing that I want to just quickly touch on, before I end this workshop is the worksheet.
So you should already have access to this. If you don’t, I guess, let me know.
But what I have here are just some prompts for you. You may not need these, but just in case this helps you organize your data and organize your thoughts, lean into this. So four questions here for you. What other relevant or related offers has your ideal prospect tried or thought about trying before? Again, you can get this information from asking that one simple question in your voice of customer research.
If that for whatever reason is not available to you, some internet sleuthing would also allow you to do the same job.
Reddit is a great place where you might find, depending on what your offer is, some threads about it or its category of offer. So you can see what people are talking about and what things they have considered or tried before and how those stack up.
How did they miss the mark either in practice or in how they were perceived by your prospect? Again, that magic question in your voice of customer research will give you this data. This is just being able to organize it right into something that you can then very easily turn into copy.
How is your or your clients offer different and ideally better in relation to those points? Make each comparison as direct and specific as you can. So again, don’t be afraid to be really ballsy with this and lean on that voice of customer data, right? It is so much easier, to be able to share something someone else has said then and also also, we see more effective, than just to try and sift through your own brain and come up with the justifications and reasons and answers to this question here.
Finally, how can you prove some or all of those points of wealth? In the examples I’ve shared with you today, in both cases, that was via testimonials.
But, of course, there are other ways. So for example, let’s say you are selling a client’s online course and they have some sort of platform where, you can, you know, post questions and get support. And something that comes through in your research or in your feedback about that program is that that space is far more engaged and supportive, than other similar spaces they’ve been in before. So a way to prove that, in lieu of or in addition to testimonials would be, if you have permission from the people in the screenshot to take a screenshot of people asking for questions or asking for support within that space and getting really good, really quick, really valuable responses, right, from either other people in that space or from the person who actually heads up the program. That’s a really good way to prove that point.
If you are trying to prove how much the UX of your app, for example, or your client’s app, is better than the other available apps that do a similar thing, it might be that, you have a demo or a video that walks someone through all those different things so they can see exactly how easy it is, to click through and, you know, achieve a certain thing, create a task, whatever that might look like. So there are different ways that you can prove points. The important thing is that you do it so that you are not asking your prospect to trust you as you say all the ways your offer is different and better for them. But you are demonstrating that the points that you are making are true and that they’ve come from the people who are in the know.
Okay.
That is it. Like I mentioned at the start, if you have any questions or if you want a second set of eyes on maybe a comparison table that you’re going to now go and write into your sales pages or an email that you’re going to send, whatever that might look like, please just reach out, tag me in Slack, and I would absolutely love to help you.
It’s such an easy and effective technique to leverage in your copy.
So yeah, I just hope you go forth and start using it ASAP. I would love to hear how it goes. I would love to hear about the results you get. Okay.
That’s it for me.
I will see you in Slack. Bye.

The Buyer Handbook: Find and Attract Your Ideal Buyers

The Buyer Handbook: Find and Attract Your Ideal Buyers

Transcript

Excellent. Okay. So we have a few more people joining. Of course, this is recording, but this is our Copy School Pro call of the week. This week, we are talking continuing on with our final week, actually, of the buyer handbook.

Next week, as you’ll see in the Coffee School Pro training area very soon, next week, we will have a whole new theme starting, and that one for the month of July is under the sunshine growth model.

When you look at the skills part of the sunshine growth model and the skills that you use, those are used to grow your business, like administrative stuff or things like list building and social followers. That’s what we’re doing next month is all about list building, and getting more social followers where social can be the best path toward building your list today. But we’ll talk more about that all next starting next week. We’re gonna get started on Instagram.

We’re gonna get into gamifying list building, with Shane. We’ll do a webinar, like, how to create a waking up to the problem webinar that you can present to other people’s audiences. I’ll be running that. So if you are wondering how to get in front of other audiences, like what we’re gonna talk about today, then this will be useful for you.

So there’s a lot coming up in July. Watch for all of that. Two lessons a week as usual.

And then this week this week oh, yeah. This week, we have Shane wrapping up, our, buyer handbook month with using AI to create your business’ actual buyer handbook. So that should be fun and exciting.

Alright.

It’s a bit of a working session today. We’ll be doing some actual work, which I hope is good for everybody in the room. And, yeah, there will, of course, be a replay, and there is the worksheet. So if you can open up the worksheet that we that Sarah sent out over the weekend that has the buyer handbook, find and attract your ideal buyers. I’m about to share my screen.

This is, of course, a really this is a fundamental topic, finding people who will buy the stuff that you’ve got, pretty important.

We we we need to do that. That’s just how life works. Now, hopefully, they’ll find you right back, but you still need to show up conveniently where they are. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about here today. Let me just go into presentation mode.

If you haven’t watched other sessions from the month of June on the buyer handbook, go back through the Coffee School Pro training area and pick up some more stuff there where we’re talking about ICPs, personas, personas underneath your ICP, all of that kind of stuff that, is critical to understanding who you’re talking to and if they’re the right person to talk to right now. And, of course, they will talk about where they are. So this is going to be very useful for you. If you wanna find out where your ICPs are, you will need to have your laptop open in front of you to do this work.

If not, your phone might be okay, but we’re gonna go into a tool, today. And maybe you already have access to that tool. And if you do, awesome. And if you don’t, that’s okay. They have a free thing that you can use today.

And then after this, you’re going to be ready to start pitching brands, not people.

Brands on partnering to share your content. Now there are people at the brands, but what people often talk about for freelancers with cold pitching is go cold pitch a potential client. And there’s nothing technically wrong with that, except it doesn’t scale very well. It takes a lot of work to do it, and we would all rather people just come to us.

So we’re gonna borrow the authority of other brands, which I talk about all the time, because that’s how I got here. So if not for me, absolutely latching on to the authority of other brands, way back in the beginning, I would not have the business that I have today. Not at all. And I’m very happy with the business I have today.

And so I can say, and I think a lot of people who look back at their growth or their lack of growth will be able to look at the network that they tapped into or did not tap into early on. So for me, Hacker News was a big part of it. So that’s community. What community can and should you participate in right now? We’re gonna work on finding those communities today.

It would be better if you’d started working in that community five years ago. Of course, it would everything better if we’d started doing any of this stuff five years ago, but we didn’t. So we’re going to do it today and not let any of the crap in because this crap always comes in. Oh, there’s no way in. It’s saturated, etcetera, etcetera. Shush.

We’re just gonna do the work. Just do the work and don’t think about it.

I also partnered with brands.

Unbounce was just starting out. HubSpot was still small enough that people weren’t necessarily that familiar with everything HubSpot could do. It wasn’t ubiquitous like it is today when I was starting out. Leadpages was like a whole different thing at the time, and Wistia was two dudes.

That was it. So but we partnered with them early on, and now their brands have grown. Our brands have grown and been able to, like, carry on. Our brand has grown and been able to carry on with it.

So I borrowed their authority. You need to do the same because there is an a early version of Wistia out there right now. There’s an early version of Unbounce out there right now.

Partner with them. They have as much hustle as anybody else had twelve, fifteen years ago, they are people to, partner with. So we’re gonna talk about who those, like, hidden gems are, and that’s really the goal today. When you find where your people are at, then we want you to put a webinar, which you’ll probably call a workshop, in front of them as soon as humanly possible.

And you’re going to force it to snowball. You’re not going to sit there and go, okay, I wonder if this is gonna work. You are going to make it work because that is how we get shit done. That’s what separates us here. We will force the snowball effect. Okay. So how do we even get started?

We’re gonna find people online using SparkToro. Has anybody used SparkToro before?

Yes. Cool. Are you using it now?

Good. It’s very easy to start and cancel, start and cancel. That’s actually you know, anybody who’s worked with them knows that’s a an actual challenge for them. As you use it, get everything you need out of it, and then you cancel, but you might come back four months later and use it all over again. So it’s a bit of a a different subscription model. But will you use SparkToro, in order to find out where people are, obviously, that’s what SparkToro does. It helps you find out what they’re talking about, etcetera.

But oftentimes when you’re using SparkToro and I’m just gonna open this up, over to the side as I move Zoom around. When you’re using SparkToro, it’s often defined, like, keywords and things like that.

Not keywords for social necessarily, what brand should I be looking up?

Just mine. And so I’m what brand should I be looking up? Just mine. And so I’m going to recommend that you look up a complementor. So instead of a competitor, this is someone who is like a competitor, but they’re more complimentary. So for us, ConvertKit or Kit might be a complimenter for us because we share a similar audience of digital creators, but we want to find a group that has more traffic, ideally, significantly more traffic than we get.

So for me, I might look up convertkit dot com, or I might look at other complementors. April Dunford and I have similar audiences in some ways. It depends on what I’m trying to sell. In other ways, we have very different audiences.

So that might be somebody that I look up to see, what because we can’t look up ourselves. Right? If you’re if you have a brand new website or you’ve got, like, five people coming a day to your website, you can’t really use SparkToro or yourself to get a sense of it. So we need to go and basically get a sense of the audience that our complementors or even full on competitors have.

So if you’re like, okay. I’m serving this market, but I know that this other brand is huge and they’re serving the same market I am. We’re just gonna use this over here in SparkToro. So you should now be seeing the SparkToro interface where you wanna go to the tab audience research.

What I recommend is right now, while I’m chattering, if you’re not using SparkToro, start an account right now. It’s free. You just, like, go to SparkToro dot com, use your Gmail or whatever to create an account quickly, get in there because we’re going to go to the audience research tab and this there’s all sorts of things.

Claire, did you work with Jia and Claire on SparkToro stuff?

Sorry. Muted. I have someone on the tab. Yes. I did. Okay.

Wait back to before two point o.

You would know, of course, more than I I’ve used for Arturo on and off, but I’m not, like, a power user of it. So, Claire, if you have anything to add, please do feel free to at any point or anybody who uses this and and has something to add here, please please do.

What we wanna do today is start by listing out three brands, ideally, the dot com version, like, the actual website that gets the audience you wish you could get. Now that could a really obvious one is some sort of software Software made for different audiences. So if you’re like, I want to work primarily with nonprofits, then you’d go look you should know what software people who are at nonprofits use. If you were like, I only work with real estate developers, then you’ll know or or realtors. And you might say, like, okay. Realtors use follow-up boss. So I’m going to look up follow-up boss and see what comes up.

And that’s what I’ll use to get started here on filling this in.

We have to wait for it to load, so we’re gonna do that. While that’s happening, make sure you’ve started your SparkToro account and start thinking of these people. So you have to first first know who your ideal audience is and then what they trust. So I don’t have a part on here for your ideal audience because you already know that That’s, like, very introductory basic stuff.

Tell Rand what did you say? Oh, got it. Fine. To pedal faster?

Is he in a race right now? Is he, like, biking somewhere, Andrew?

Or Andrew?

Are you chatting to us? Oh, he’s powering the sparktor.

I got it. I didn’t get that. Okay.

Now I got it.

I was slow. It’s my damn slow. Yeah. It’s taking a while to load up. Is it slow is it slow for everybody?

No? For some? Okay.

So we’ll just set that aside, and I will walk through what our objective is, like, what we’re going to do along the way. So if you can list out those three to five groups, you’re going to enter and repeat this process for those three to five different groups in here. For follow-up, boss, really?

Okay. So we’ll go through a creative free SparkToro account, go to audience research, search the website or domain of a complementor, then we’re going to fill this in for for, like, three to five of those groups. Knowing that as just happened here, sometimes, Barktoro won’t have enough data for it. So just keep that in mind, and then just repeat. Then afterward, we’re going to save this and downloaded data because you can export data on, SparkToro from SparkToro to wherever. This is the kind of thing that you’ll want to share with your VA as you move forward or just have for yourself as you, like, get deeper and deeper into building your business.

Knowing more about who and where they are is everything. It’s the thing that keeps people from growing is I don’t know how to get in front of my audience because I don’t know where they are. What are they paying attention to? And then everybody gravitates to the exact same people.

Well, all Chorus creators want to get or or follow Amy Porterfield. Okay. Great. But what software are they using?

What plug ins for that software are available? What Chrome extensions are they using? Can you partner with those smaller groups in order to get some traction? Because everybody can’t go around pitching Amy Porterfield, and her audience gets fatigued too versus the smaller companies that are out there that are gaining traction and would love to help an x to have an expert like you come in and teach their audience.

This is a big thing. Unbounce wanted me to come in and teach their audience to be better at making landing pages because it’s good for Unbounce. Same was true for Leadpages. Same was true for ConvertKit.

All of these different groups early on want you to come train their audience, and the good thing is you want to do that too. You wanna be an authority in front of them, so we need to find out where they are. So we’re gonna use SparkToro to find out where your buyers are. It might not be your audience.

Now if your audience if your website gets a lot of traffic, then this is gonna be really directly applicable for you. Like, oh, this is where my audience is coming from. That’s cool to know. What you’ll really wanna focus on, though, are not, like, the top accounts, but the hidden gems.

So you’ll see when you do oh, now they do have stuff. You’ll see when you go through here that, they have these bigger accounts, like, how are you going to pitch Realtor magazine?

Instead, you’ll probably wanna look at some hidden gems. Now they don’t have any hidden gems here, so that would be a thing where I’d have to then go do another search. But what I want to do is not just focus on all of these giant places to pitch, but where are my buyers going? What websites are they visiting is step one.

So we wanna write in the websites that they visit based on what you’re seeing here. Focus only on the ones that where you can actually answer. I can guest here, or I can advertise here. If it’s not an option, although this is a column that I have on the worksheet, if you can’t do anything with this, like, if you’re like, well, I can’t do anything with Keller Williams.

Like, it’s a giant broker brand. What what might I do? That’s too hard for me to conceive of putting a web webinar together. I mean, maybe maybe it’s a ten x that’s worth it more than, like, something else that could feel like a two x.

But try to be, like, realistic because you could list out all the websites they visit that are huge names. And then you think, okay. I can guess here. And if you get no’s across the board, you’re going to not feel good about it. So we wanna be able to get you wins in here. So maybe put some big websites in alongside some smaller websites in.

Don’t underestimate the power of directly advertising in some of these spaces. That doesn’t mean you go to their advertised page, but there are ways to get in. We’re not gonna talk about those today.

But you can, in some cases, advertise where they’re at, and that’s gonna get more real as we get into newsletters and podcasts that look more like sponsorships.

Then you’ll go through and look at their, YouTube channels. This is really straightforward stuff. Right? Like, you just go through and use SparkToro, but document what you’re learning so that you’re not just like, oh, yeah.

Cool. I’m gonna, like, probably hit home lights. We’ll write it down. Write it down and then say, okay.

I can guess here. Because at the end of this, we’re gonna go through and make an actual plan for what you will do over the next ninety days. This will feel like, big work, but it’s useful work to do. It’s where your buyers are at right now.

Like they’re sitting there right now.

So we want to go get them. So we’ll go through and look at YouTube channels that they watch. There are a lot of columns here. Websites are a little trickier, so I didn’t put that many or a lot of rows.

Sorry. I didn’t put that many rows in here because a website could feel like, what do I even do with the website? What we’re really saying is the brand behind the website. A YouTube channel is far more specific.

If you know that they’re all going to let’s see where they’re going. HomeLight. Okay. So HomeLight is really popular as a YouTube channel, I guess, for people in the realtor space.

So you could write in home light, and then you could figure out what am I going to do with this. Go look. Go look into what HomeLight is doing on YouTube. Is there anything you could do there?

It might just be as simple as I can try to advertise. I can put a video together for these people. I can try to figure something out. Can you guest there?

You’d have to watch and see. Like, do they have podcasts that are also video that they post there? Can you try to pitch them on getting on that? If you can and if it’s a big enough swing, it’s going to be worth your time.

If it’s a small swing, then you have to make sure it’s a really scalable thing. And that’s, like, put one workshop together, which we’ll be talking about next month, that you can then pitch and you keep repeating that workshop in all of these smaller places. It’s a twenty minute workshop. The leads come directly to you, not to them, etcetera. We’ll get into that next month.

But first of all, you need to know where you’re gonna pitch it. Otherwise, when you put the webinar together next month, you’ll be like, well, what the hell do I do with this thing now? So this is that work.

Every second page in this workbook is for you to make notes to self. So if you haven’t printed this off and started going through it, I recommend you do. If you don’t print it off, if you just, like, go through and mark up the PDF, absolutely cool too. But some people will look at this table and do nothing with it.

Go like, oh, yeah. Cool. Good lesson. And move on. I don’t want you to be that person.

You’re here right now. Do the thing.

Add notes to self. Add notes for a VA if you’ve got one.

What are you thinking right now about the Homelight YouTube channel? What are you thinking? Write down your notes as they come up. If I’m chattering, turn the volume down on me. You can come back and watch the replay later if you’re actually doing work and I’m talking through your work. I’m good with you muting me. I just can’t mute myself because other people have to still do the work.

Continuing on. Oh, Claire. Yes.

Sorry to interrupt.

I I can build a list on Airtable. So I’ve got I’ve got a list of, like, fifty websites.

Sorry. Eight hundred websites, actually. Fifty YouTube channels and a bunch of subreddits that I kind of narrowed down. The subreddits were actually easiest to narrow down to my OCD.

Yes. Yes. They’re also obviously the easiest to, like, research and post on. But when it comes to YouTube and websites and I’m looking at, like, big brands, like, let’s say Crazy Egg, for example.

They do SaaS. They do analytics. People who are interested in that are probably interested in what I do. Mhmm.

But, wow, how do I begin to, like, even start narrowing down all of the different sites and also, like, figure out if they allow advertising. Because a lot of places have stopped having, like, a guest posts available page because they get crazy. Right. So yeah.

So, yeah, any advice on that?

That’s where I I firmly believe that if you can run a workshop that gets recorded and played and that brand then puts it on their YouTube. It comes up as a search result when your name is searched.

That’s what we wanna do. I would focus entirely on what is an audience.

It could be Crazy Egg if you’re subscribed. So step one, make sure you’re actually subscribed to that brand’s newsletter or email list, however that comes in. If that means you have to get a free, a free user account, free trial account, then do it. Do it and start, like, looking through.

Does Crazy Egg ever invite people to workshops?

Like and if they do, have a look at it because you might be like, Kajabi invites a lot of people to workshops, but then they’re also affiliates for all of those workshops. So you have to sell something in the workshop. So that’s not gonna be a good fit because Kajabi would be like, no. Because you’re not selling anything at the end, and so we’re not gonna make any affiliate revenue off of this.

Okay, fine. So the more you know about what they’re doing to create content and share content for their audience, the better. So that would be step one. And then then the challenge is not a guest blog post because a lot of people are not publishing guest blog posts right now.

Written content is not what it was.

So what can you do? Can you get in front of their Instagram audience somehow?

Can you I would really, really put all my eggs honestly in the basket of workshop, workshop, workshop.

They’re going to do live events of some kind. I mean, live online events.

Any brand that is scrappy enough to try to break in right now that has a little bit of money to spend is teaching their users to be better users. It’s just like a really classic playbook for getting your SaaS brand out there.

So if you if you can say, okay. I’m really clear on who my ICP is on the persona under that that this group does watch workshops.

Workshops get a bad rap. No one watches a webinar. No people people don’t watch low value stuff. But if it’s coming from a brand that they trust, then they’re more likely to watch it.

So I will watch all the webinars that Gong dot IO puts out, because they teach good stuff about sales calls and all of the stuff that matters to me. They’re not putting crap out there. I don’t get three tips for running a sales call. I get, like, here’s how to do multithreading four zero one, which is really valuable.

Right? So you do need a workshop.

It needs to be the right value level for the audience you’re trying to attract that will wake them up to their problem. So not thirteen copywriting tips, obviously, but something more strategic, something that where five people who attend reach out to you immediately, not some other thing, which, again, we’ll talk about next month when we talk about the workshop that you should be getting out there. But, Claire, as a long answer to your question, focus on getting that workshop together and then finding the right group based on what you know about how they’re creating content and promoting it to pitch because Crazy Egg might not be the way to go.

Does that make sense?

Got it. Super helpful. Yes.

I love that you have that giant air table.

That’s great. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Like, pay for it. It’s so expensive as software.

So I might as well use this.

Yeah. Totally.

Yeah. The tricky thing about, like, lists of eight hundred is, like, where do you start? Right? So that’s very tricky. And that’s why I frankly like limiting it to, like, only the size of this worksheet.

If you can take that table you already have all filled in and start, like, limiting your options, putting those constraints around it. You’re only allowed twelve podcasts that they listen to only right in twelve then. Every this is ninety days. This isn’t the rest of your life. This is the next ninety days. What are you going to do? Where are you gonna pitch?

So same as these for podcasts. They listen to make notes to self subreddits that they frequent.

And that might not be where you create content, but you can get involved in conversations, obviously.

Any notes to self there, social accounts that they follow, these are gonna be hidden gems, not the big ones necessarily, but not tiny ones either. So you wanna look through and make sure and next month, we’ll talk more about Instagram followers and stuff like that.

But keep in mind, when I say buyers throughout this, I don’t just mean ICP. So not just that ideal client profile, but the persona under it. So you might say, people who are in a marketing capacity are your persona, and a lot of them are women. So they may be on x social space versus other groups.

So what I want you to do is not discount. I’ve had people discount. Oh, nobody’s on social. None of my the people that I’m trying to reach are on social.

And I’m like, that’s Europe to lunch. Of course, they’re on social. We’re all on some form of social unless you’ve actively chosen not to be, and then chances are good you’re not in digital marketing because you you gotta be on social if you’re in digital marketing. And if you’re hearing this and going, but I’m not on social and I’m in digital marketing, get on social.

It’s time. You have to. You have to. If I have to, you have to. Because I have to, and I’m not always happy about it.

Then we wanna get into keywords and topics. This is just not so that you’re creating content that is keyword rich or keyword targeted necessarily.

But when it comes time as we get deeper and deeper into the work, this isn’t just it’s not none of the work we do is siloed. Right? It feels like it because it’s a rectangular document, and it effectively looks like a silo. But it’s not.

This is all gonna work together. So you might not use trending keywords you can post about right now. But since you’re in SparkToro and it will share with you what some of those trending keywords are, you can see all the keywords. Obviously, it’s Rand.

Document them because that could be stuff that you can pitch content about. If it’s trending in particular, you can then adjust your workshop or webinars that the title is more about that trending keyword, but it’s still actually about the same thing. And this would just be a trending keyword that’s related to what you do. So if you’re like, oh, none of these keywords are related to what I do, that’s okay.

Just put a strike through it so that you know you did the work and nothing was there or do an NA or whatever, but I just don’t want it to look blank. I find that frustrating when things are blank. Maybe you don’t. Okay.

Now this is gonna wrapping up this conversation here. I know that we can’t do all the work because SparkToro is being a slow little bunny.

But go off and do it afterward, please. It’s on your business. Your business wants you to. That’s why you’re part of Coffee School Pro. So make sure that you do it.

Hacker News was where I started. I swear by finding a community and being of value to it before you try to take anything out of it. So add to the bank. Keep adding to the bank, and then later, you can start withdrawing.

Start now. If you don’t have a community that you’re part of, start now. It’s time to. Got it. And it could pay off a lot faster than, like, I wasn’t using Hacker News for a thing. I was just interested in what people were doing on Hacker News, like, cool, fun startup ideas and stuff like that. It’s, like, scrappy atmosphere.

So I want you to know what your Hacker News is.

I found that if you go on Reddit, you can find a lot of good communities talked about on Reddit. So go on there immediately.

Most of us are on Reddit for some things anyway, just for fun even. If you can go on Reddit and search something as simple like where are marketers hanging out? And you’ll see all sorts of responses. You can just Google Reddit and then that search phrase or whatever you want to look or, you’ll find them.

They’re listed there. Slack group. You need a couple Slack groups that you could request to join. So, ideally, they won’t just be open to everybody.

If there are a hundred and twenty thousand people in there, don’t do it. Don’t you go into that Slack group. That is going to be a waste of your time.

So Slack groups that are limited or private membership or even that are, like, you have to pay the cost of the monthly Slack charge, like, eight bucks a month plus two dollars for the administrative person who has to take care of all of this, that’s going to narrow the number of people who are in that Slack group, and that’s good for you. You don’t want a hundred and twenty thousand people in a Slack group, in a Discord, in in bigger communities maybe.

You you really do wanna focus on a concentrated group of professionals.

So if that means joining the paid product led growth Slack group, if there’s a way to do that without taking the course, I don’t recommend the course. But if you can do that, cool. Because now you’re in a product led growth Slack community, and everybody in there is concerned about product led growth. And most of them are just actively in start ups or tech companies that are using product led growth.

If that’s your ideal audience, it only makes good sense for you to participate in that group. Adding value, not taking it out, not saying, hey. I’ll do that for you. Wait until people are like, woah.

Wait. You’re a SaaS copywriter, and you do the research?

I had no idea that’s true for you. Can we talk? That’s exciting. That’s better. That’s good. So find a Slack group.

Discord, particularly if you work with tech in any way. There’s going to be a bunch of nerds who said no to Slack and yes to Discord.

So go check out Discords as well, which, of course, Reddit is also very good for nerds. So you can find all the Discord groups on Reddit too.

Clearly, I am more targeted at tech and SaaS companies than I am health and wellness and other groups like that. However, you can apply the same rules to finding same stuff for health and wellness. And if you’re like, Reddit doesn’t work for that, well, then something else, the health and wellness equivalent of Reddit.

Be resourceful. Figure that part out. The point is you need to walk away with at least one really solid Slack group for that your ideal audience is in so that you can start participating and adding value, answering questions, posting useful resources, all of those sorts of things that make you a useful part of that community. And then when it’s time for you to, like, withdraw a little from the bank, you got lots of credit there.

You got lots that you can do there. So go ahead and make sure you’re brainstorming based on everything you’re seeing on SparkToro, based on the idea of participating in a Slack group. What are you going to do? Can you come up with a brand that you could partner with?

Can you come up with three brands that you could partner with? And I mean, Unbounce thirteen years ago, Wistia twelve years ago, those sorts of groups.

Who are they today?

Can you find a way to partner with them? Where are they showing up? Where are their heads of growth showing up? Or where are the CEOs slash CMO slash cheap garbage take routers? Like, they’re doing everything.

Where are they right now? Where are they consuming content? Where are they hoping to find that next great idea?

Get in front of them. But you need to brainstorm this stuff, move through it, and then start to figure out, okay.

If it’s x brand, whoever it is, if it’s boards, let’s say words is up and coming. They’re doing lots of cool stuff. They’ve got lots and lots of users, but they really wanna scale. Boards could be my audience.

What webinar could I pitch to boards? What would make the users of boards better users of boards? Maybe it’s around x. And if it doesn’t make sense to it, you’re like, oh, no.

They need me to, like, help them write social posts and stuff. Forget it. Not boards. Next.

Cool. Eliminate things. That’s a big part of, like, finding the gold is washing away everything else until you get to the gold. Right?

So put a whole bunch of stuff in there and then start figuring out what to do. That’s the point of brainstorming. One page should not be enough. If you can do it all in one page, that was like a brain drizzle.

We wanna go on full storm, really stormy stuff, lots of stuff. And then that’ll help you get down to a ninety day attraction plan, which is free. It’s free and loose because all of this is there to tighten up your ideas where you can be. Now once you’ve got a brainstorm in place, what are you going to do over the next ninety days?

That’s July, August, September. Or if you’re watching the replay, whatever month you’re in, plus two more after that. What are you going to do for that, for the next ninety days? Are you going to pitch?

First, you have to put that webinar idea together pretty loosely because you wanna get it approved before you start actually going out and putting a full workshop together only to find out that nobody wants the damn thing. So what are you going to do to try to get out there? Keep in mind that next month we have full training on more stuff around using social media and getting your workshop in front of other audiences.

Any questions on this really quick run through of finding your buyer?

Thoughts or concerns?

No?

Andrew’s thinking.

Okay.

That is the training for today.

Do you have any questions about it, or are we ready to move on? Oh, I just saw your thing about the joke. Are we ready to move on, to the AMA part of today’s call? Good. Yes.

Alright.

Cool.

Let’s do that then. So as usual, if you have any questions, please start by, sharing your win, win of the week. Jessica has put up her hand. So what win do you have to share with us first? And if you could I know, Jess, you’re on your treadmill, I think, so you probably don’t want to come on camera.

But feel free to. It’s also encouraging.

Yeah. Share your win. Ask your question. And if you want everybody in the room to weigh in, please be sure to open it up to everyone. Otherwise, I’ll just jump in. Jessica?

Thank you. Sorry. I’m in the dark right now, actually, so that’s why I’m not on camera.

You can hear me alright? Yes. Okay. Perfect. So my win is leads into my question.

So I thought on Friday, my win was, I don’t know if people saw, but I’ve been doing the big pivot back to books. And that’s great. I feel really, really solid about that.

And I was in the middle when I made the shift. I was in the middle of a VIP client potentially hiring me for a optimization retainer for their ecommerce emails. So I was in the middle of that conversation when this shift kind of happened, but it was kinda looking that good, I guess.

Also a client who’s not ideal, so it was a very stupid choice anyway.

The win was on Friday, I kind of thought that I made it clear that this was not going to move forward via an email. I tried in a meeting. It didn’t work out. I made it clear in the email. I’ve since gotten a so I felt really good.

The winners, I felt really good because I was like, yes.

All in on books. Let’s go.

But since then, I’ve gotten a reply, and it’s kind of become clear that this it’s a fractional CMO. She would really like to work with me, but she’s really it’s, like, it’s becoming the classic thing you always coach Joe about when they can’t afford you and the things they want. And it’s like, a guarantee and promises and when can we see results or whatever. And so, of course, I stupidly used in my email response finally to just really cut this off. I I said that I I kind of attributed it to her need for guarantees and promise of results in the first like, by month two even though month one was spent on strategy. We need to analyze your data. We need to look at all the things, whatever.

So, anyway, my point is is basically, I need to now cut this off completely, and I’ve really just made a freaking mess of it. And, I don’t know. She she wrote me this long email trying to justify I misunderstood, and we can continue working. I just want clarity around the promises and the potential results and all that, and it’s just a mess. I’ve made a mess of this, and I need to get out of it.

Okay. So you’re trying to get out of it while preserving the relationship?

Yeah. I mean I mean, at least at least in a I know we’re not gonna work together in the future, but I don’t wanna be an asshole.

Oh, you came to the wrong place. Just kidding. Sorry.

It might be a bit of just kidding.

Okay. So what do we so this person had enough time to write you a long email instead of just saying, hey. Can we hop on a call? You’d already hopped on a call before, Jessica?

Yes.

Last week, I tried to hop I did hop on a call with her to say, look.

I this isn’t, you know, whatever. And I’m I know it’s a growth area. I I need to work on this, but I did I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. We can work out a and stupid. It was my fault.

So you were saying we can work something out?

It was more like I defaulted to okay.

I wouldn’t say we work yes. Sure. Let’s go with that. Yeah.

It’s okay.

I’m gonna need No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. It’s hard to say no, especially if you haven’t practiced saying no.

So I think that’s completely fair.

But now you have to practice saying no. So, it’s awkward. It is. Even when you practice at it, it’s still awkward because you have to let them down.

But one way that I would recommend going about it is saying, like, hey. Something’s changed for me. I’ve actually been running two different service businesses, and the other one is taking off big time. So I need to now reprioritize my efforts on that one because it’s a service, and I am the service provider. So I can’t move forward with you on the ecommerce side of things. And that’s absolutely true. And how could she argue with that?

No. She really can’t. I think it’s I think it was just my yeah. I I should have led with that. I’m kicking myself. I should have led with that.

That’s okay. I mean, I think you’re do so, like, so what? You’re not honestly, she’ll be over it within a minute.

I’m moving on, so I wouldn’t I wouldn’t overthink it. I think it’s nice that you’re worrying about it. Just tell her the fact in a nice way, and then she’s released to go look for someone else instead of waiting around hoping that it might work out with you.

Yeah. Okay. Good? Thank you. That’s cool. It still feels like garbage. But Yeah.

It does. Lots of the things will feel like garbage as you grow.

That’s why you have to make a lot of money to make up for when you feel shitty. Yeah.

Yeah. You’re right. Okay. I’ll add that to the list, become millionaire faster than I wanted to be Exactly.

So because of this. I like that. I like that. Except it needs a deadline. Okay.

Alright. Cool. Awesome, Jessica. Good luck. Thanks. Thanks.

Johnson, what’s your win?

Hey.

So a win, for this weekend is related to the question is that, I developed, three to four more outlines for various products within narrative selling to follow the sort of land and expand model that you, were talking about. And, it actually came fairly easily once I was kinda looking at it from that perspective, and it’s quite exciting.

So my question is that I’ve, I have this this this new idea for a for a product wise, a service based product, that I’m calling the founder’s narrative, as a sort of standardized offer with the authority building offer that you’ve seen in in that document as the, sort of upsell and then ongoing retainer.

So the the founders product is basically to help founders, find their story and and message, like, a kind of a well, a few elements of it, but but but a key story that is sort of their why, their, their meaning, behind their sort of their mission, and then, signifier stories that can be reframed in in multiple ways to convey various, aspects of, their their product.

And then there’s some other stuff about how to tell stories and how to adjust them for various audiences.

So my question is, does that sound like a good pairing and a good choice for the land and expand?

And, also, do you have any thoughts about the the document that you placed on?

Yes. The document. Thanks.

Yes. So so the idea with the founder’s narrative for land and expand is you’re brought in to work on the founders narrative, and then you work through other departments?

Yeah. Sort of to to look for founders who are keen to be out there, get in front of people, talk about, their stuff, which I I feel like won’t be hard to find, and, and to give them a framework to do that that that they, that that helps, helps them resonate with their target audience, basically.

Okay. Cool.

Let me open the doc then. Okay. So if you feel good about that as your land and expand, that’s cool. The only question I have around expand is if it’s a founder’s narrative, how big is the ICP that you’re going after?

How many employees does it have?

Well, I guess somewhere between sort of ten and fifty is a very sort of rough number. I’m imagining around, twenty to thirty, probably on on average, in this sort of, in that sort of range.

Do you think there’s a do you think it’s it might be too small?

Well, there’s just not much room to expand there. Where land and expand when you’re, like, talking about going up market is I mean, you still can.

You would just land in c suite and then expand to marketing might want the product narrative, I guess.

Yeah. I’ve got something for for marketing and sales as well.

So it was sort of like get the founders on board, make them love us, and then it felt like it would be an easier sell to the rest of the the teams.

Yeah.

And maybe that’s so in looking over your pricing, the thing about the founder’s narrative and, like, it’s cool and, like, I don’t know.

It feels like there’s it’s got legs because it’s a lot like positioning, but for the founder, which is cool.

So you could definitely, like, piggyback off of a lot of what April Dunford’s done. Like, if April did it, you should do it.

So that’s worth considering.

I guess I just wonder about the retainer side of it.

April also doesn’t have a retainer model for hers. However, there is this, like, there is more of a land and expand, which might be more of the retainer for you, where you would instead start with the founder’s narrative as the thing that you’re standing up, impress the crap out of the founder with that, and then say, okay. You know, we can do the same thing for your products, or we can do the same thing for your different groups, like the sales team or whatever. You’d have to figure that out. When I look through your document, the part that’s tricky is, like, the the execution y stuff, like monthly lead magnet development, it feels like forcing the issue, in order to get that easier performance based retainer in there or performance driven retainer in there.

So I would for you, I would say, okay. This week, I’m going to pause thinking about my business as stand up offer followed by retainer and instead think of my business as fully land and expand. Okay. That’s all I’m going to do. If I were to do that, what would expand look like? So land is the templated thing that then gets applied to different departments.

For that to work, what did my what would my ICP need to look like? What would they need to believe?

What would need to be their struggles right now? Because you have to solve those by repeating this thing across everywhere, which is doable. But I would put aside anything that has to do with, execution.

I’d keep it at the strategic level, and you can always recommend other people to execute. Yeah. I know. Right?

Johnson, you just graduated from executing. Well done.

That’s awesome.

My word. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. There’s a win for me. I was having a conversation with my, teammate where we were discussing, like, just how much I want to move away from delivery, of execution of products, and onto consulting.

Yeah. Cool. So And if you’re down for traveling too, the only side note is that if you’re going to go in and impress founders, they often need to see you in real life.

So you have to travel.

Fair.

And if I was willing to, sorry to hold the mic. But if I was willing to, switch up because, again, like, I feel like there’s a lot of ways I could apply these ideas, and there’s a lot of ways I could go with it.

If I wanted to look at a more sort of enterprise y level of the really upmarket, sort of land and expand.

Do you have any thoughts about, just the maybe the land product?

The problem is I really like the idea of the founder’s narrative.

I feel like it reminds me of this is so stupid.

It reminds me of on Friends when Jennifer Aniston says something about apartment pants to her, boss, who’s like, now I want apartment pants. They’re not even a thing, but it’s such a good, like, idea. Like, you could sell it.

So she’s like, let’s invent apartment pants.

And that’s the same kind of thing here. Like, the founder’s narrative just sounds really good. You know, you can see that founders would be like, I want a narrative. I need a narrative.

Get me a narrative. I want this, just like apartment pants. So now you just have to figure out what the founder’s narrative is. Stacy just said leaders narrative, potentially.

Yeah. Right?

I think that there’s if it’s blank narrative, you’ve got a big idea there that although people have been saying narrative, it’s kind of like story brand. It’s blank brand. But your blank narrative But then you just you gotta be ready to go all in and, like, own narrative. And I think that’s cool. I think that’s great and strategic and potentially expensive.

But, yeah, you do have to rethink that. Maybe it is leaders’ enter leaders’ narrative.

Maybe. Yeah. I love that. Yeah.

I I love that, Stacy.

Thank you.

And, okay, just one other tiny, tiny, tiny thing, because I feel like you will know the answer to this. I have this, as far as, like, coming out with this idea and talking about it and being this, thought leader, and creating all of the content, I have this fear that someone is going to take the the developed idea as far as it’s developed right now and then run with it faster than I can, and rename it, rebrand it into something else.

Is that, not stupid, but, like, is that something worth worrying about?

Yeah. Except you’re gonna do it better. You’re going to stay with it. People will steal your ideas all day.

So many. But they’re also lazy and quickly bored because they don’t have their own ideas. So I would say, like, don’t worry about it. They’ll come in.

They’ll swoop in. They’ll try to steal it.

The more you can’t. So that’s the worrying side of it. You can protect it as well. You can’t protect it from some parts of the world.

But once you’ve trademarked the thing, you’re good. You’re pretty good from there. People will still try to knock you off, but there was actually a story that Bob from Rewired Group was telling me a couple of weeks. I think it was Bob was saying, that one of his friends has, like, this big IP.

And someone from, like, McKinsey came to his friend and said, like, oh, we love your, we love or no. It was Blair Ends, maybe. I mean, we love your, blah blah blah product, the program, the framework. We use it across we’ve been using it across our x y z clients.

He sent them an invoice for his consulting fees on that because it’s his protected IP, and you cannot teach it. And so he got paid, like, three million dollars or something because this guy from McKinsey didn’t know better than to keep it to himself.

There was legal shit involved. Not that it wasn’t just like, oh, we’ll pay this invoice. Like, there was stuff. But that said, write a book about it.

Knock that thing out. You can do a better edition once it gets traction. Like, second edition is actually good. Like, well written.

First one is just great ideas. Document your framework. Own the title, trademark what you can, and then no people will steal it. And you just have to push through and be better at it.

Don’t switch to something else. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it will happen.

Alright.

It’s just the way it is.

Okay. Okay. Alright. That’s helpful. Thank you, Joe.

Sure. I look forward to reading the book in a couple months.

Yes.

Yes. Good. Awesome.

Deadline’s next ninety days.

Got it.

Oh, good. I hope so. Andrew, what is your win?

Hey. Can you hear me okay? Yeah.

Cool.

My win is that, I gay I did a, redid a client’s, land paid search landing page, maybe that they started testing about six weeks ago. And as of today, they they’ve a little bit lower traffic, so we’re using eighty percent as, significance. And as of today, I have a winner, at about twenty eight percent increase Nice. At eighty percent significance.

So, you know, not Getting there.

You know? Yeah. Amazon is not, you know, not gonna count that as a win, but it’s been consistently leading, and the copy from before was really bad. So I’m pretty confident that it’s that it’s true, but there’s some some reality behind the those numbers. So that’s exciting. That definitely lights me up. I like that stuff.

I love that. Cool. Nice work.

Yeah. That’s a big that that that’s the stuff that really lights me up is checking, like, to go into the, into Optimizely and be like, winning.

Anyway, so my my main question is that what I’ve noticed is that the companies that I tend to have the most success with, are companies that are, like, doing fairly well. Like, let’s say, they’re already at, you know, maybe fifty million, a hundred million, but have obviously bad copy on their website. Like, you can go in, and it’s usually, like, a problem, and it’s just, like, way too technical. Like, you know, clients that like, I have a client who’s running a headline. It’s, like, accelerate analytic productivity, and it’s, like, okay. What?

So what I’m so I’m kind of wondering, like, is that, like, a reasonable strategy to sort of look for companies that are, like, succeeding despite bad copy? Because I just I just feel, like, a lot more confident going into those situations where it’s, like, I can just look at their website and just know that I’m gonna be able to make it better.

Guess the question is I would look at their team. Why is the copy bad?

It’s because it’s use often because they’re having their product marketers write it, and their product marketers are really smart, but they’re very technical and write in a sort of academic tone, and nobody really knows. Like, when I come in and start talking, like, copy hacker stuff, their minds are exploding.

Yeah. Cool.

I love hearing that.

No. I’m sorry. I’m just kidding. Thank you.

Thank you for Okay.

Can you are you willing to pick a fight with product marketers writing copy? Would you write a headline ever that says product marketers can’t write copy?

Yeah. I’ll take some whack with that as a former product marketer.

But yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I’m sure a lot of them would be like, yeah.

No. That shouldn’t be my job in the first fucking place, by the way.

Yeah. Doing a very respectful way.

Well, that’s the thing. In a if the real challenge is, can you put a banner up that says product marketers can’t or shouldn’t write copy?

But you have like, if you can stand behind that, if you could put it on a T shirt, then you might be on to something.

Right? Because then then you can go out to these groups and or they’ll come to you and they’ll see, like, oh, this person understands that product marketers, maybe the word is shouldn’t. But what you need to know when figuring out if this is what’s keeping them from writing good copy, if it’s not just bureaucracy, if it’s not just dilution of things as more features are added, If it’s really product marketers are writing this stuff and they shouldn’t, that may need to be the fight that you pick. And if that’s the fight that you pick, you have to be willing to fight that fight.

And that really does mean you have to pick a fight. You have to say product marketers shouldn’t write copy, and it’s everywhere. And that doesn’t mean that’s going to be your tagline, but you have to be willing to do that. Like, your head has to get right with that, with the big statement, whatever that big statement is.

So I think, yes, if you’re willing to stand behind it and really say something.

Yeah. Otherwise, there’s no point.

Yeah. I mean, I think I would as maybe a question of when I back in when I need to start doing internal interviews with the people I just called out.

Hey. You guys are so smart. Love what you do. But, I mean, honestly, that’s part of the problem.

Right? Is that they they know the product too well. They don’t have any objectivity. They’ve learned it in a kind of academic way.

And so they’re just disconnected from how people are going to buy, you know, I mean, you you send them to copy school, then sure, they can do it.

But if they haven’t done that yet, then they’re just not the people who should be writing your conversion focus Exactly.

Conversion copy. Yeah.

So as long as you have the support for that, then I think but you just have to be willing to say it. You have to go on LinkedIn and say it, and then support it with everything that you just said. If not just LinkedIn, I actually whatever. But I know everybody else likes, like, LinkedIn.

Go wherever you’re going online and and say the thing, and then support it like you just did. And they will buy in. They’ll agree with you. That’s just the way it is. Yeah. And some won’t, and that’s good. Some shouldn’t.

Yeah.

Okay? Then we can pipe it. Cool. Thank you. Sure. Awesome.

Thank you. Claire, what’s your win?

Hey. Well, I just completed my win, which was narrowing my Reddit parse my Reddit, like where is the subreddit? So where is the subreddits?

Sorry. It’s late for me.

My YouTube and my website’s down. Also under forty. So each of them is under forty, which is a good start. And I’ve got some, like, moonshots in there and some, like, realistic ones.

Interestingly, I don’t know if anyone else is targeting b to b SaaS, but here’s quick fun insight.

Everyone’s YouTube channel, like, if you are targeting people who, like, follow April Dunford, for example, are interested in product led growth, those brands’ YouTube channels, crap.

Like, as far as the scale of YouTube goes, like, their view count is pretty low, and their cadence is pretty low as well Okay.

Which is really interesting. What’s the opportunity there when you know that? What do you think the opportunity is then?

Well, Crazy Egg hasn’t posted a video in three years. But three weeks ago, they posted a video, and I’m like, oh, does that mean Coming back. That they’re trying to do something? Does that mean that some marketer in there has gone like, crap, guys.

We really need to work on our, you know, stuff.

And some executive has gone, yeah. Find people.

Yes. Totally. And you, like, miraculously show up at the right time.

Right time, right place.

Love it. So nice.

That’s the one thing.

Cool.

Okay. So I you told me a while ago to name, what I’ve been working on, which is onboarding flows. So I’m gonna say, like, broadly this this is for everyone, by the way. Broadly, this flow, will include include emails at its most basic.

It’s more complicated. It will take someone from free to paid. So that means the in app prompts the sign up page for when you, like, click the, sign up button or stop for free, that page, and even the pricing page in future. That’s like the expanded version.

It’s, like, comprehensive.

So I’ve got a few options that I’ve narrowed it down to. Two of them were like, oh my god. Like, that might work moments.

And two of them were chat GPT moments. So the premise being that onboarding flows, typically, most people understand them as like a linear path. Right? And my fight that I’m picking is that, no. It’s not a linear path.

It is very much, and this is my latest one, like a pinball machine. Right? So the user, like, drops it, and then they get, like, knocked all over. Maybe get close to converting, visiting a pricing page, and then nope back to product experience.

Yeah.

So, the pinball onboarding machine, TM was one idea.

The pinball what? Onboarding machine. Onboarding machine. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Interesting.

And then my brand name is Coby Ireland. I had, like, a little wobble about whether or not I need to change that and ultimately decided that the effort of changing it probably wouldn’t be worth the payoff.

But bucket list onboarding was another kind of concept where the user has to go through, like, a bucket list of things that they need to check. Basically, points k.

In order to actually activate.

K.

That was the one.

And then the other two are Japanese. I love Japan. Obsessed.

Also, my audience is fairly, like, interested being nerds and all.

So the one is pretty classic. Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy of continuous small improvements Yep. Which has three kind of main principles of involvement of everyone. So that would be like sales, customer success, etcetera. Standardization of the practice that would be more about the optimizing side and the process. That would be the process of confiding someone.

K.

There were two other Japanese words that I thought could be could work with onboarding flow or activation flow. The one was, which means to wake up something dormant, and kumiki, which is the Japanese woodwork. I don’t know if you guys know about it, but they very carefully cut, their wood so it slots together. Like, their houses are built with no nails they used to be.

The workmanship is extremely precise so that everything, the whole big picture just slots together.

Yeah.

Those old ideas. Anyone any of them feels sticky? I was driving myself.

Anybody wanna chime in?

I have thoughts.

I would just on the on the Japanese words, I would caution against that right now because of the whole issues with cultural appropriation and things like that. So I don’t know that I would want to latch onto another culture’s term for, you know, for commercial gain.

That’s something that I would be beware of. I I love the pinball concept, and I think you have a lot of potential with that.

You know, pinball pinball onboarding, don’t tilt, you know, get the high score or all the kinds of things. I mean, there’s a lot you could do with that. It’s kinda it’s fun and and memorable.

Just my my take.

Cool feedback.

Anybody else have a note for Claire on this?

So I like the I like that pinball is a known thing. For me, pinball means chaos, though. Like, it flies everywhere.

So I wonder if there’s, like if you could dig into pinball the way you dug into these Japanese terms.

What are the little toggle guys called? What are the what are the parts called?

And I would, like, try or what’s, like, the outcome or the sound when you when you land it? Like, what’s the like, when the the ball goes in the hole? Whatever hole that is. What are the I would dig more into that famous pinball players even, in the past and stuff like that simply because I like the analogy.

I like metaphor. I like I like that it’s pinball.

I don’t love the visual chaos of things going everywhere, Right.

Because you’re not going to bring chaos. It might be that things are popping all over the place.

But, yeah, what’s the oak? What’s the I dig into it because I think there’s something there. And maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks chaos with that word.

So there’s that to consider, but I like it. It’s it’s a thing. It’s a known thing. I know what it is.

I could talk about it. It’s pinball.

When it comes to the Japanese stuff, I didn’t see it the same way that Stacy does, but I think it’s valid and worth considering, of course.

The Kanuki one seemed most interesting simply because Kaizen, I feel like a lot of tech companies were talking Kaizen, like, seven years ago or somewhere in there. Yeah.

Although I really like that the model has, like, those three parts that you could, like, model out, no share, use as your diagnostic, and things like that.

But the visual of the Kanuki is nice. I think it was Kanuki is what you said. Kanuki? Kanuki?

It’s with an m, but pretty close. Okay.

I don’t know it.

But that could be interesting and also, like, ownable and still in the the area of Kaizen and everything that we learned from Toyota and all of these other great brands that are extremely efficient.

So, yeah, those are my thoughts. I like where you’re going, and I love that you’re giving it a name. Oh my gosh. Yes to naming things. Yes.

But naming is extremely difficult while we’re on the subject. So yeah. Yeah. And pinball dot I o is twenty five thousand US dollars to buy.

Mhmm. Interested in really going in on that and only getting an I o out of it while we’re on the subject. So, yeah. Johnson, do you have to add do you want me to add anything here for Claire?

Oh, mine’s, that’s, well, it’s, like, related to knitting, but, I don’t you I I don’t wanna cut off the phone. Claire.

K. Claire, is that helping at all? Like yeah. Yeah. Load it also over in the Slack group for those who weren’t here today.

Yeah. Cool. Awesome. In the CSP part, not just in the intensive because it’s a CSP.

Okay. Perfect. Cool. Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Claire.

Johnson, you’re back.

I’m just getting in all the questions I should have gotten in Do it.

Over the last excellent. Yes. On naming things, right, which you just mentioned.

So you might remember, I my sort of and, Stacy, I would love your feedback on this too if you’re willing.

The the name I came up for my idea was narrative selling. And that was gonna be sort of the overarching concept. And now we’ve got, like, founders narrative and company narrative and product narrative and narrative selling itself as, like, its own sort of subdivision, of it. But I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on how narrative selling as a as the overarching, sort of as the forget the final, as the jobs to be done, like, does that make sense as a, as a name, or is there maybe a different direction I should think about?

Stacy, do you wanna share your thoughts since you were invited?

I mean, I’ve as a name for you mean, like, a brandable name for your Yep. It’s too generic to be a brandable name, I think, because, I mean, there’s already there’s so many people talking about narrative selling already. It’s just a thing. You know? I mean, I Sassy writes sales narratives.

It it’s just, you know, lots of people are doing narrative selling and talking about narrative selling. So I would find another brandable name that you can own and figure out, you know I mean, and make that narrative selling could be what it is, but I would I wouldn’t necessarily call it that unless you’re and with you’re talking about that as a product. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

I mean, I I maybe I’m not I’m probably not in the same circles as you, but, do they call it narrative selling as, like, the the that combination of words, or is there just talk about narrative and selling as, like, a sort of Well, like, I mean, like, StoryBrand has a whole thing on, you know, selling with story, and there’s a whole they have a whole course in that.

And I’m I’m very, very involved in story because I’ve, you know, ingested, like, pretty much everything having to do with story. I have all the, you know, all the books and all the things because I’ve been a StoryBrand I’ve been a StoryBrand certified guide for six years, and, about thirty percent of the StoryBrand certified guides use my software.

So I’m very, very steeply involved in story.

So, I would just you you know, if you want something brandable, I would just say that narrative selling is a generic term. That’s that’s all I’m saying.

Cool.

That’s a thing. It’s a valid thing. And if you can talk about narrative selling, that’s fine to talk about it. But if it’s if you’re looking for a brandable term, I don’t think that you’re gonna have success with that as a brandable term.

Got it. That’s really helpful, Stacy. Thank you. I didn’t know that you, you’ve worked so much with story branding.

That’s cool. I will we have to do a coffee meet soon, actually. I meant to message you. Sorry.

Okay. Jo, do you have any thoughts?

Yeah. I mean, I feel like, okay. Cool. So totally fair on maybe narrative selling, but I still think there’s room there.

I honestly do. I think, it doesn’t have to be that. I like I really like the founder’s narrative. People have been talking about storytelling and narrative for all time, and no one’s ever nailed it.

Like, there’s still you walk away even with StoryBrand. We get all people that copy hackers coming over from StoryBrand because they’re like, well but I can’t actually, like, write the stuff. Like, I can put it mapped very well, and that’s great. But, like, now my clients need the next step, and I can’t do that.

And that’s fair. It’s fine to stay higher level. That’s fine. It just means I think that it leaves what it’s speaking to is that there’s room in the market for more gap filling.

I I every time you say you talk about this, Johnson, I think of The Message and the Messenger, which is a book that I would write if it made sense for me too.

What what I keep seeing from brands is right now, they don’t know there’s a mismatch between what they’re saying and who they are, and they’re publicly demonstrating that on social media, trying to be something that the brand isn’t, But that’s because a brand has a hard time being authentic, but a person can be authentic. Like, a person can be real. And so a founder wants to be the right messenger for his brands or her brands or their brands message. So so to me, it feels like there’s an opportunity opening up, thanks to social media largely, where the messenger needs to have the right message, and it has to come together. It has to work.

And that’s where the founder’s narrative is interesting.

To me, I would try to break it, though. I think that we should always try to break the things before we invest. So how could that be broken? Maybe it does get confused with StoryBrand.

Maybe it gets confused somehow with Rem’s book Lost and Founder somehow.

You don’t you don’t know. Right? But you just, like, start trying to break it. And then, okay, if we can break it, now let’s rebuild it stronger and better so it can’t be, which could be trying to break it for me would be like, okay.

If the founder’s narrative is my land, my expand has to be getting into other parts of the organization.

So what are those called? Is it like, we were talking about, is it product narrative? Uh-uh. Not great.

Is it the sales narrative also not really meaty?

So play around with that. You’re I think there’s something there. I would also, like, try to work through how Simon Sinek got to start with why. Because we are talking about something strategic here. We are talking about something that would attract a lot of c levels if they heard it, if they saw you on stage or heard you on a podcast.

It would feed their ego, honestly, to have their own narrative created by some great person from England with an accent. Like, there’s a lot there, honestly, as this I know that sounds stupid, but I think it would sell extremely well.

Interesting.

So what is the name?

If it’s not the founder’s narrative, stay in that vicinity, though, and see Well, I I do like that.

Yeah. I mean, I, like, I do like the founder’s narrative as a, as a name for this particular product.

And I I’m just I I feel like I I keep kind of asking this thing. It’s like, is this the right umbrella to put my these ideas under? Because I know that once this is done and I invest it and I buy the websites and, like, that’s it. It’s locked in. And I just kind of wanna I know names are maybe the least important part in many ways of Okay. You know? Oh.

They’re both not important and entirely everything.

So, yeah, if you get it right, it doesn’t matter. If you get it wrong, you’re screwed.

Right. I mean, I think founders narrative is is great. I really like that one. I think that’s strong and that the the the thing that I don’t like about that is that it doesn’t bring you into the enterprise market, which is why you can have founders narrative for the smaller companies and leaders narrative for the enterprise companies. And for the for the enterprise companies, leaders narrative is great because every enterprise wants to harness their workforce to help them establish thought leadership.

So if you’re if you’re going into an enterprise and helping them establish thought leadership across the enterprise by teaching them a process of the leader’s narrative and then empowering everybody to share the same story, you can make a fortune doing this.

So I did have an idea that I’ve called the organizational narrative, which was a sort of internal look at the narratives that are at play sort of strategically within the organization where there’s conflicting, perceptions essentially about, well, the stories, the the narratives that exist within the company, of what teams are doing, of what C suite wants and does.

And that was a that was a sort of next the next sort of one I wanted to start fleshing out a little bit.

Yeah. So cool. Okay.

I mean, it sounds like You’re separating it from the human element then, though.

You’re breaking up the organizational narrative. That’s like the people are what matter when you’re telling stories. Right? So the if you you you make the leaders narrative align with the organizational priorities, and then you have happy people who have their own story that they get to share that’s aligned with the organization.

Does that make sense? What do you think, Joanna? Yeah.

I fully agree. Yeah. Organizational narrative bored me immediately, and it’s, it’s it’s probably because it’s missing people. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Alright. Okay.

And think about the job that they’re actually hiring this to do. It might feel like they’re hiring it. They’re hiring this service to do, so a a job inter I would say they’re hiring it for they’re likely going to wanna come out of this, feeling better about themselves. It’ll be a personal job they’re really hiring it for, feeling valuable, feeling, of course, like they can can perform better and go out into the world and really understand their message.

But but so if you know it’s about you’re gonna have people making people based decisions, name it in a way where it’s, like, gotta have it.

This thing, the leadership story deck, there’s a guy, David Hutchins. His book is, The Circle of the Nine Muses. He has this great deck of cards, and it’s all about stories. And it’s the stories that individual people can tell, and it breaks it down into this whole framework of, like, when to use what story for what. It’s really fantastic. I think if you checked it out, it would be a a good, thing for sparking ideas for creating your own thing. But he goes in and does workshops, and it it becomes, actually a personal transformation for the attendees.

It’s it’s about them transforming themselves by learning to tell these stories and to to do it through work. So that’s a that’s another thing to think about. Think about the people, the people.

Alright.

Okay. That’s really helpful. Thank you.

And so narrative selling maybe as an umbrella term is not, possibly not the the best way to go, but something narrative was narrative something, maybe still to keep these all under a similar sort of, format.

Yeah. I think so. Yeah.

Alright. Thank you so much, guys. This was incredibly helpful. That was, like, a little bit of a electricity for me there. Thank you.

Good. I, I love it.

Okay. Excellent. Good stuff. Alright. Thanks, y’all. Thanks for hanging on, and see you later. Have a good one.

Thanks, Stacy. Thanks, Jared.

Bye.

Worksheet

Find & Attract Your Ideal Buyer

Worksheet

Find & Attract Your Ideal Buyer

Transcript

Excellent. Okay. So we have a few more people joining. Of course, this is recording, but this is our Copy School Pro call of the week. This week, we are talking continuing on with our final week, actually, of the buyer handbook.

Next week, as you’ll see in the Coffee School Pro training area very soon, next week, we will have a whole new theme starting, and that one for the month of July is under the sunshine growth model.

When you look at the skills part of the sunshine growth model and the skills that you use, those are used to grow your business, like administrative stuff or things like list building and social followers. That’s what we’re doing next month is all about list building, and getting more social followers where social can be the best path toward building your list today. But we’ll talk more about that all next starting next week. We’re gonna get started on Instagram.

We’re gonna get into gamifying list building, with Shane. We’ll do a webinar, like, how to create a waking up to the problem webinar that you can present to other people’s audiences. I’ll be running that. So if you are wondering how to get in front of other audiences, like what we’re gonna talk about today, then this will be useful for you.

So there’s a lot coming up in July. Watch for all of that. Two lessons a week as usual.

And then this week this week oh, yeah. This week, we have Shane wrapping up, our, buyer handbook month with using AI to create your business’ actual buyer handbook. So that should be fun and exciting.

Alright.

It’s a bit of a working session today. We’ll be doing some actual work, which I hope is good for everybody in the room. And, yeah, there will, of course, be a replay, and there is the worksheet. So if you can open up the worksheet that we that Sarah sent out over the weekend that has the buyer handbook, find and attract your ideal buyers. I’m about to share my screen.

This is, of course, a really this is a fundamental topic, finding people who will buy the stuff that you’ve got, pretty important.

We we we need to do that. That’s just how life works. Now, hopefully, they’ll find you right back, but you still need to show up conveniently where they are. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about here today. Let me just go into presentation mode.

If you haven’t watched other sessions from the month of June on the buyer handbook, go back through the Coffee School Pro training area and pick up some more stuff there where we’re talking about ICPs, personas, personas underneath your ICP, all of that kind of stuff that, is critical to understanding who you’re talking to and if they’re the right person to talk to right now. And, of course, they will talk about where they are. So this is going to be very useful for you. If you wanna find out where your ICPs are, you will need to have your laptop open in front of you to do this work.

If not, your phone might be okay, but we’re gonna go into a tool, today. And maybe you already have access to that tool. And if you do, awesome. And if you don’t, that’s okay. They have a free thing that you can use today.

And then after this, you’re going to be ready to start pitching brands, not people.

Brands on partnering to share your content. Now there are people at the brands, but what people often talk about for freelancers with cold pitching is go cold pitch a potential client. And there’s nothing technically wrong with that, except it doesn’t scale very well. It takes a lot of work to do it, and we would all rather people just come to us.

So we’re gonna borrow the authority of other brands, which I talk about all the time, because that’s how I got here. So if not for me, absolutely latching on to the authority of other brands, way back in the beginning, I would not have the business that I have today. Not at all. And I’m very happy with the business I have today.

And so I can say, and I think a lot of people who look back at their growth or their lack of growth will be able to look at the network that they tapped into or did not tap into early on. So for me, Hacker News was a big part of it. So that’s community. What community can and should you participate in right now? We’re gonna work on finding those communities today.

It would be better if you’d started working in that community five years ago. Of course, it would everything better if we’d started doing any of this stuff five years ago, but we didn’t. So we’re going to do it today and not let any of the crap in because this crap always comes in. Oh, there’s no way in. It’s saturated, etcetera, etcetera. Shush.

We’re just gonna do the work. Just do the work and don’t think about it.

I also partnered with brands.

Unbounce was just starting out. HubSpot was still small enough that people weren’t necessarily that familiar with everything HubSpot could do. It wasn’t ubiquitous like it is today when I was starting out. Leadpages was like a whole different thing at the time, and Wistia was two dudes.

That was it. So but we partnered with them early on, and now their brands have grown. Our brands have grown and been able to, like, carry on. Our brand has grown and been able to carry on with it.

So I borrowed their authority. You need to do the same because there is an a early version of Wistia out there right now. There’s an early version of Unbounce out there right now.

Partner with them. They have as much hustle as anybody else had twelve, fifteen years ago, they are people to, partner with. So we’re gonna talk about who those, like, hidden gems are, and that’s really the goal today. When you find where your people are at, then we want you to put a webinar, which you’ll probably call a workshop, in front of them as soon as humanly possible.

And you’re going to force it to snowball. You’re not going to sit there and go, okay, I wonder if this is gonna work. You are going to make it work because that is how we get shit done. That’s what separates us here. We will force the snowball effect. Okay. So how do we even get started?

We’re gonna find people online using SparkToro. Has anybody used SparkToro before?

Yes. Cool. Are you using it now?

Good. It’s very easy to start and cancel, start and cancel. That’s actually you know, anybody who’s worked with them knows that’s a an actual challenge for them. As you use it, get everything you need out of it, and then you cancel, but you might come back four months later and use it all over again. So it’s a bit of a a different subscription model. But will you use SparkToro, in order to find out where people are, obviously, that’s what SparkToro does. It helps you find out what they’re talking about, etcetera.

But oftentimes when you’re using SparkToro and I’m just gonna open this up, over to the side as I move Zoom around. When you’re using SparkToro, it’s often defined, like, keywords and things like that.

Not keywords for social necessarily, what brand should I be looking up?

Just mine. And so I’m what brand should I be looking up? Just mine. And so I’m going to recommend that you look up a complementor. So instead of a competitor, this is someone who is like a competitor, but they’re more complimentary. So for us, ConvertKit or Kit might be a complimenter for us because we share a similar audience of digital creators, but we want to find a group that has more traffic, ideally, significantly more traffic than we get.

So for me, I might look up convertkit dot com, or I might look at other complementors. April Dunford and I have similar audiences in some ways. It depends on what I’m trying to sell. In other ways, we have very different audiences.

So that might be somebody that I look up to see, what because we can’t look up ourselves. Right? If you’re if you have a brand new website or you’ve got, like, five people coming a day to your website, you can’t really use SparkToro or yourself to get a sense of it. So we need to go and basically get a sense of the audience that our complementors or even full on competitors have.

So if you’re like, okay. I’m serving this market, but I know that this other brand is huge and they’re serving the same market I am. We’re just gonna use this over here in SparkToro. So you should now be seeing the SparkToro interface where you wanna go to the tab audience research.

What I recommend is right now, while I’m chattering, if you’re not using SparkToro, start an account right now. It’s free. You just, like, go to SparkToro dot com, use your Gmail or whatever to create an account quickly, get in there because we’re going to go to the audience research tab and this there’s all sorts of things.

Claire, did you work with Jia and Claire on SparkToro stuff?

Sorry. Muted. I have someone on the tab. Yes. I did. Okay.

Wait back to before two point o.

You would know, of course, more than I I’ve used for Arturo on and off, but I’m not, like, a power user of it. So, Claire, if you have anything to add, please do feel free to at any point or anybody who uses this and and has something to add here, please please do.

What we wanna do today is start by listing out three brands, ideally, the dot com version, like, the actual website that gets the audience you wish you could get. Now that could a really obvious one is some sort of software Software made for different audiences. So if you’re like, I want to work primarily with nonprofits, then you’d go look you should know what software people who are at nonprofits use. If you were like, I only work with real estate developers, then you’ll know or or realtors. And you might say, like, okay. Realtors use follow-up boss. So I’m going to look up follow-up boss and see what comes up.

And that’s what I’ll use to get started here on filling this in.

We have to wait for it to load, so we’re gonna do that. While that’s happening, make sure you’ve started your SparkToro account and start thinking of these people. So you have to first first know who your ideal audience is and then what they trust. So I don’t have a part on here for your ideal audience because you already know that That’s, like, very introductory basic stuff.

Tell Rand what did you say? Oh, got it. Fine. To pedal faster?

Is he in a race right now? Is he, like, biking somewhere, Andrew?

Or Andrew?

Are you chatting to us? Oh, he’s powering the sparktor.

I got it. I didn’t get that. Okay.

Now I got it.

I was slow. It’s my damn slow. Yeah. It’s taking a while to load up. Is it slow is it slow for everybody?

No? For some? Okay.

So we’ll just set that aside, and I will walk through what our objective is, like, what we’re going to do along the way. So if you can list out those three to five groups, you’re going to enter and repeat this process for those three to five different groups in here. For follow-up, boss, really?

Okay. So we’ll go through a creative free SparkToro account, go to audience research, search the website or domain of a complementor, then we’re going to fill this in for for, like, three to five of those groups. Knowing that as just happened here, sometimes, Barktoro won’t have enough data for it. So just keep that in mind, and then just repeat. Then afterward, we’re going to save this and downloaded data because you can export data on, SparkToro from SparkToro to wherever. This is the kind of thing that you’ll want to share with your VA as you move forward or just have for yourself as you, like, get deeper and deeper into building your business.

Knowing more about who and where they are is everything. It’s the thing that keeps people from growing is I don’t know how to get in front of my audience because I don’t know where they are. What are they paying attention to? And then everybody gravitates to the exact same people.

Well, all Chorus creators want to get or or follow Amy Porterfield. Okay. Great. But what software are they using?

What plug ins for that software are available? What Chrome extensions are they using? Can you partner with those smaller groups in order to get some traction? Because everybody can’t go around pitching Amy Porterfield, and her audience gets fatigued too versus the smaller companies that are out there that are gaining traction and would love to help an x to have an expert like you come in and teach their audience.

This is a big thing. Unbounce wanted me to come in and teach their audience to be better at making landing pages because it’s good for Unbounce. Same was true for Leadpages. Same was true for ConvertKit.

All of these different groups early on want you to come train their audience, and the good thing is you want to do that too. You wanna be an authority in front of them, so we need to find out where they are. So we’re gonna use SparkToro to find out where your buyers are. It might not be your audience.

Now if your audience if your website gets a lot of traffic, then this is gonna be really directly applicable for you. Like, oh, this is where my audience is coming from. That’s cool to know. What you’ll really wanna focus on, though, are not, like, the top accounts, but the hidden gems.

So you’ll see when you do oh, now they do have stuff. You’ll see when you go through here that, they have these bigger accounts, like, how are you going to pitch Realtor magazine?

Instead, you’ll probably wanna look at some hidden gems. Now they don’t have any hidden gems here, so that would be a thing where I’d have to then go do another search. But what I want to do is not just focus on all of these giant places to pitch, but where are my buyers going? What websites are they visiting is step one.

So we wanna write in the websites that they visit based on what you’re seeing here. Focus only on the ones that where you can actually answer. I can guest here, or I can advertise here. If it’s not an option, although this is a column that I have on the worksheet, if you can’t do anything with this, like, if you’re like, well, I can’t do anything with Keller Williams.

Like, it’s a giant broker brand. What what might I do? That’s too hard for me to conceive of putting a web webinar together. I mean, maybe maybe it’s a ten x that’s worth it more than, like, something else that could feel like a two x.

But try to be, like, realistic because you could list out all the websites they visit that are huge names. And then you think, okay. I can guess here. And if you get no’s across the board, you’re going to not feel good about it. So we wanna be able to get you wins in here. So maybe put some big websites in alongside some smaller websites in.

Don’t underestimate the power of directly advertising in some of these spaces. That doesn’t mean you go to their advertised page, but there are ways to get in. We’re not gonna talk about those today.

But you can, in some cases, advertise where they’re at, and that’s gonna get more real as we get into newsletters and podcasts that look more like sponsorships.

Then you’ll go through and look at their, YouTube channels. This is really straightforward stuff. Right? Like, you just go through and use SparkToro, but document what you’re learning so that you’re not just like, oh, yeah.

Cool. I’m gonna, like, probably hit home lights. We’ll write it down. Write it down and then say, okay.

I can guess here. Because at the end of this, we’re gonna go through and make an actual plan for what you will do over the next ninety days. This will feel like, big work, but it’s useful work to do. It’s where your buyers are at right now.

Like they’re sitting there right now.

So we want to go get them. So we’ll go through and look at YouTube channels that they watch. There are a lot of columns here. Websites are a little trickier, so I didn’t put that many or a lot of rows.

Sorry. I didn’t put that many rows in here because a website could feel like, what do I even do with the website? What we’re really saying is the brand behind the website. A YouTube channel is far more specific.

If you know that they’re all going to let’s see where they’re going. HomeLight. Okay. So HomeLight is really popular as a YouTube channel, I guess, for people in the realtor space.

So you could write in home light, and then you could figure out what am I going to do with this. Go look. Go look into what HomeLight is doing on YouTube. Is there anything you could do there?

It might just be as simple as I can try to advertise. I can put a video together for these people. I can try to figure something out. Can you guest there?

You’d have to watch and see. Like, do they have podcasts that are also video that they post there? Can you try to pitch them on getting on that? If you can and if it’s a big enough swing, it’s going to be worth your time.

If it’s a small swing, then you have to make sure it’s a really scalable thing. And that’s, like, put one workshop together, which we’ll be talking about next month, that you can then pitch and you keep repeating that workshop in all of these smaller places. It’s a twenty minute workshop. The leads come directly to you, not to them, etcetera. We’ll get into that next month.

But first of all, you need to know where you’re gonna pitch it. Otherwise, when you put the webinar together next month, you’ll be like, well, what the hell do I do with this thing now? So this is that work.

Every second page in this workbook is for you to make notes to self. So if you haven’t printed this off and started going through it, I recommend you do. If you don’t print it off, if you just, like, go through and mark up the PDF, absolutely cool too. But some people will look at this table and do nothing with it.

Go like, oh, yeah. Cool. Good lesson. And move on. I don’t want you to be that person.

You’re here right now. Do the thing.

Add notes to self. Add notes for a VA if you’ve got one.

What are you thinking right now about the Homelight YouTube channel? What are you thinking? Write down your notes as they come up. If I’m chattering, turn the volume down on me. You can come back and watch the replay later if you’re actually doing work and I’m talking through your work. I’m good with you muting me. I just can’t mute myself because other people have to still do the work.

Continuing on. Oh, Claire. Yes.

Sorry to interrupt.

I I can build a list on Airtable. So I’ve got I’ve got a list of, like, fifty websites.

Sorry. Eight hundred websites, actually. Fifty YouTube channels and a bunch of subreddits that I kind of narrowed down. The subreddits were actually easiest to narrow down to my OCD.

Yes. Yes. They’re also obviously the easiest to, like, research and post on. But when it comes to YouTube and websites and I’m looking at, like, big brands, like, let’s say Crazy Egg, for example.

They do SaaS. They do analytics. People who are interested in that are probably interested in what I do. Mhmm.

But, wow, how do I begin to, like, even start narrowing down all of the different sites and also, like, figure out if they allow advertising. Because a lot of places have stopped having, like, a guest posts available page because they get crazy. Right. So yeah.

So, yeah, any advice on that?

That’s where I I firmly believe that if you can run a workshop that gets recorded and played and that brand then puts it on their YouTube. It comes up as a search result when your name is searched.

That’s what we wanna do. I would focus entirely on what is an audience.

It could be Crazy Egg if you’re subscribed. So step one, make sure you’re actually subscribed to that brand’s newsletter or email list, however that comes in. If that means you have to get a free, a free user account, free trial account, then do it. Do it and start, like, looking through.

Does Crazy Egg ever invite people to workshops?

Like and if they do, have a look at it because you might be like, Kajabi invites a lot of people to workshops, but then they’re also affiliates for all of those workshops. So you have to sell something in the workshop. So that’s not gonna be a good fit because Kajabi would be like, no. Because you’re not selling anything at the end, and so we’re not gonna make any affiliate revenue off of this.

Okay, fine. So the more you know about what they’re doing to create content and share content for their audience, the better. So that would be step one. And then then the challenge is not a guest blog post because a lot of people are not publishing guest blog posts right now.

Written content is not what it was.

So what can you do? Can you get in front of their Instagram audience somehow?

Can you I would really, really put all my eggs honestly in the basket of workshop, workshop, workshop.

They’re going to do live events of some kind. I mean, live online events.

Any brand that is scrappy enough to try to break in right now that has a little bit of money to spend is teaching their users to be better users. It’s just like a really classic playbook for getting your SaaS brand out there.

So if you if you can say, okay. I’m really clear on who my ICP is on the persona under that that this group does watch workshops.

Workshops get a bad rap. No one watches a webinar. No people people don’t watch low value stuff. But if it’s coming from a brand that they trust, then they’re more likely to watch it.

So I will watch all the webinars that Gong dot IO puts out, because they teach good stuff about sales calls and all of the stuff that matters to me. They’re not putting crap out there. I don’t get three tips for running a sales call. I get, like, here’s how to do multithreading four zero one, which is really valuable.

Right? So you do need a workshop.

It needs to be the right value level for the audience you’re trying to attract that will wake them up to their problem. So not thirteen copywriting tips, obviously, but something more strategic, something that where five people who attend reach out to you immediately, not some other thing, which, again, we’ll talk about next month when we talk about the workshop that you should be getting out there. But, Claire, as a long answer to your question, focus on getting that workshop together and then finding the right group based on what you know about how they’re creating content and promoting it to pitch because Crazy Egg might not be the way to go.

Does that make sense?

Got it. Super helpful. Yes.

I love that you have that giant air table.

That’s great. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Like, pay for it. It’s so expensive as software.

So I might as well use this.

Yeah. Totally.

Yeah. The tricky thing about, like, lists of eight hundred is, like, where do you start? Right? So that’s very tricky. And that’s why I frankly like limiting it to, like, only the size of this worksheet.

If you can take that table you already have all filled in and start, like, limiting your options, putting those constraints around it. You’re only allowed twelve podcasts that they listen to only right in twelve then. Every this is ninety days. This isn’t the rest of your life. This is the next ninety days. What are you going to do? Where are you gonna pitch?

So same as these for podcasts. They listen to make notes to self subreddits that they frequent.

And that might not be where you create content, but you can get involved in conversations, obviously.

Any notes to self there, social accounts that they follow, these are gonna be hidden gems, not the big ones necessarily, but not tiny ones either. So you wanna look through and make sure and next month, we’ll talk more about Instagram followers and stuff like that.

But keep in mind, when I say buyers throughout this, I don’t just mean ICP. So not just that ideal client profile, but the persona under it. So you might say, people who are in a marketing capacity are your persona, and a lot of them are women. So they may be on x social space versus other groups.

So what I want you to do is not discount. I’ve had people discount. Oh, nobody’s on social. None of my the people that I’m trying to reach are on social.

And I’m like, that’s Europe to lunch. Of course, they’re on social. We’re all on some form of social unless you’ve actively chosen not to be, and then chances are good you’re not in digital marketing because you you gotta be on social if you’re in digital marketing. And if you’re hearing this and going, but I’m not on social and I’m in digital marketing, get on social.

It’s time. You have to. You have to. If I have to, you have to. Because I have to, and I’m not always happy about it.

Then we wanna get into keywords and topics. This is just not so that you’re creating content that is keyword rich or keyword targeted necessarily.

But when it comes time as we get deeper and deeper into the work, this isn’t just it’s not none of the work we do is siloed. Right? It feels like it because it’s a rectangular document, and it effectively looks like a silo. But it’s not.

This is all gonna work together. So you might not use trending keywords you can post about right now. But since you’re in SparkToro and it will share with you what some of those trending keywords are, you can see all the keywords. Obviously, it’s Rand.

Document them because that could be stuff that you can pitch content about. If it’s trending in particular, you can then adjust your workshop or webinars that the title is more about that trending keyword, but it’s still actually about the same thing. And this would just be a trending keyword that’s related to what you do. So if you’re like, oh, none of these keywords are related to what I do, that’s okay.

Just put a strike through it so that you know you did the work and nothing was there or do an NA or whatever, but I just don’t want it to look blank. I find that frustrating when things are blank. Maybe you don’t. Okay.

Now this is gonna wrapping up this conversation here. I know that we can’t do all the work because SparkToro is being a slow little bunny.

But go off and do it afterward, please. It’s on your business. Your business wants you to. That’s why you’re part of Coffee School Pro. So make sure that you do it.

Hacker News was where I started. I swear by finding a community and being of value to it before you try to take anything out of it. So add to the bank. Keep adding to the bank, and then later, you can start withdrawing.

Start now. If you don’t have a community that you’re part of, start now. It’s time to. Got it. And it could pay off a lot faster than, like, I wasn’t using Hacker News for a thing. I was just interested in what people were doing on Hacker News, like, cool, fun startup ideas and stuff like that. It’s, like, scrappy atmosphere.

So I want you to know what your Hacker News is.

I found that if you go on Reddit, you can find a lot of good communities talked about on Reddit. So go on there immediately.

Most of us are on Reddit for some things anyway, just for fun even. If you can go on Reddit and search something as simple like where are marketers hanging out? And you’ll see all sorts of responses. You can just Google Reddit and then that search phrase or whatever you want to look or, you’ll find them.

They’re listed there. Slack group. You need a couple Slack groups that you could request to join. So, ideally, they won’t just be open to everybody.

If there are a hundred and twenty thousand people in there, don’t do it. Don’t you go into that Slack group. That is going to be a waste of your time.

So Slack groups that are limited or private membership or even that are, like, you have to pay the cost of the monthly Slack charge, like, eight bucks a month plus two dollars for the administrative person who has to take care of all of this, that’s going to narrow the number of people who are in that Slack group, and that’s good for you. You don’t want a hundred and twenty thousand people in a Slack group, in a Discord, in in bigger communities maybe.

You you really do wanna focus on a concentrated group of professionals.

So if that means joining the paid product led growth Slack group, if there’s a way to do that without taking the course, I don’t recommend the course. But if you can do that, cool. Because now you’re in a product led growth Slack community, and everybody in there is concerned about product led growth. And most of them are just actively in start ups or tech companies that are using product led growth.

If that’s your ideal audience, it only makes good sense for you to participate in that group. Adding value, not taking it out, not saying, hey. I’ll do that for you. Wait until people are like, woah.

Wait. You’re a SaaS copywriter, and you do the research?

I had no idea that’s true for you. Can we talk? That’s exciting. That’s better. That’s good. So find a Slack group.

Discord, particularly if you work with tech in any way. There’s going to be a bunch of nerds who said no to Slack and yes to Discord.

So go check out Discords as well, which, of course, Reddit is also very good for nerds. So you can find all the Discord groups on Reddit too.

Clearly, I am more targeted at tech and SaaS companies than I am health and wellness and other groups like that. However, you can apply the same rules to finding same stuff for health and wellness. And if you’re like, Reddit doesn’t work for that, well, then something else, the health and wellness equivalent of Reddit.

Be resourceful. Figure that part out. The point is you need to walk away with at least one really solid Slack group for that your ideal audience is in so that you can start participating and adding value, answering questions, posting useful resources, all of those sorts of things that make you a useful part of that community. And then when it’s time for you to, like, withdraw a little from the bank, you got lots of credit there.

You got lots that you can do there. So go ahead and make sure you’re brainstorming based on everything you’re seeing on SparkToro, based on the idea of participating in a Slack group. What are you going to do? Can you come up with a brand that you could partner with?

Can you come up with three brands that you could partner with? And I mean, Unbounce thirteen years ago, Wistia twelve years ago, those sorts of groups.

Who are they today?

Can you find a way to partner with them? Where are they showing up? Where are their heads of growth showing up? Or where are the CEOs slash CMO slash cheap garbage take routers? Like, they’re doing everything.

Where are they right now? Where are they consuming content? Where are they hoping to find that next great idea?

Get in front of them. But you need to brainstorm this stuff, move through it, and then start to figure out, okay.

If it’s x brand, whoever it is, if it’s boards, let’s say words is up and coming. They’re doing lots of cool stuff. They’ve got lots and lots of users, but they really wanna scale. Boards could be my audience.

What webinar could I pitch to boards? What would make the users of boards better users of boards? Maybe it’s around x. And if it doesn’t make sense to it, you’re like, oh, no.

They need me to, like, help them write social posts and stuff. Forget it. Not boards. Next.

Cool. Eliminate things. That’s a big part of, like, finding the gold is washing away everything else until you get to the gold. Right?

So put a whole bunch of stuff in there and then start figuring out what to do. That’s the point of brainstorming. One page should not be enough. If you can do it all in one page, that was like a brain drizzle.

We wanna go on full storm, really stormy stuff, lots of stuff. And then that’ll help you get down to a ninety day attraction plan, which is free. It’s free and loose because all of this is there to tighten up your ideas where you can be. Now once you’ve got a brainstorm in place, what are you going to do over the next ninety days?

That’s July, August, September. Or if you’re watching the replay, whatever month you’re in, plus two more after that. What are you going to do for that, for the next ninety days? Are you going to pitch?

First, you have to put that webinar idea together pretty loosely because you wanna get it approved before you start actually going out and putting a full workshop together only to find out that nobody wants the damn thing. So what are you going to do to try to get out there? Keep in mind that next month we have full training on more stuff around using social media and getting your workshop in front of other audiences.

Any questions on this really quick run through of finding your buyer?

Thoughts or concerns?

No?

Andrew’s thinking.

Okay.

That is the training for today.

Do you have any questions about it, or are we ready to move on? Oh, I just saw your thing about the joke. Are we ready to move on, to the AMA part of today’s call? Good. Yes.

Alright.

Cool.

Let’s do that then. So as usual, if you have any questions, please start by, sharing your win, win of the week. Jessica has put up her hand. So what win do you have to share with us first? And if you could I know, Jess, you’re on your treadmill, I think, so you probably don’t want to come on camera.

But feel free to. It’s also encouraging.

Yeah. Share your win. Ask your question. And if you want everybody in the room to weigh in, please be sure to open it up to everyone. Otherwise, I’ll just jump in. Jessica?

Thank you. Sorry. I’m in the dark right now, actually, so that’s why I’m not on camera.

You can hear me alright? Yes. Okay. Perfect. So my win is leads into my question.

So I thought on Friday, my win was, I don’t know if people saw, but I’ve been doing the big pivot back to books. And that’s great. I feel really, really solid about that.

And I was in the middle when I made the shift. I was in the middle of a VIP client potentially hiring me for a optimization retainer for their ecommerce emails. So I was in the middle of that conversation when this shift kind of happened, but it was kinda looking that good, I guess.

Also a client who’s not ideal, so it was a very stupid choice anyway.

The win was on Friday, I kind of thought that I made it clear that this was not going to move forward via an email. I tried in a meeting. It didn’t work out. I made it clear in the email. I’ve since gotten a so I felt really good.

The winners, I felt really good because I was like, yes.

All in on books. Let’s go.

But since then, I’ve gotten a reply, and it’s kind of become clear that this it’s a fractional CMO. She would really like to work with me, but she’s really it’s, like, it’s becoming the classic thing you always coach Joe about when they can’t afford you and the things they want. And it’s like, a guarantee and promises and when can we see results or whatever. And so, of course, I stupidly used in my email response finally to just really cut this off. I I said that I I kind of attributed it to her need for guarantees and promise of results in the first like, by month two even though month one was spent on strategy. We need to analyze your data. We need to look at all the things, whatever.

So, anyway, my point is is basically, I need to now cut this off completely, and I’ve really just made a freaking mess of it. And, I don’t know. She she wrote me this long email trying to justify I misunderstood, and we can continue working. I just want clarity around the promises and the potential results and all that, and it’s just a mess. I’ve made a mess of this, and I need to get out of it.

Okay. So you’re trying to get out of it while preserving the relationship?

Yeah. I mean I mean, at least at least in a I know we’re not gonna work together in the future, but I don’t wanna be an asshole.

Oh, you came to the wrong place. Just kidding. Sorry.

It might be a bit of just kidding.

Okay. So what do we so this person had enough time to write you a long email instead of just saying, hey. Can we hop on a call? You’d already hopped on a call before, Jessica?

Yes.

Last week, I tried to hop I did hop on a call with her to say, look.

I this isn’t, you know, whatever. And I’m I know it’s a growth area. I I need to work on this, but I did I was like, oh, okay. Yeah. We can work out a and stupid. It was my fault.

So you were saying we can work something out?

It was more like I defaulted to okay.

I wouldn’t say we work yes. Sure. Let’s go with that. Yeah.

It’s okay.

I’m gonna need No.

No. No. No. No. No. No. It’s hard to say no, especially if you haven’t practiced saying no.

So I think that’s completely fair.

But now you have to practice saying no. So, it’s awkward. It is. Even when you practice at it, it’s still awkward because you have to let them down.

But one way that I would recommend going about it is saying, like, hey. Something’s changed for me. I’ve actually been running two different service businesses, and the other one is taking off big time. So I need to now reprioritize my efforts on that one because it’s a service, and I am the service provider. So I can’t move forward with you on the ecommerce side of things. And that’s absolutely true. And how could she argue with that?

No. She really can’t. I think it’s I think it was just my yeah. I I should have led with that. I’m kicking myself. I should have led with that.

That’s okay. I mean, I think you’re do so, like, so what? You’re not honestly, she’ll be over it within a minute.

I’m moving on, so I wouldn’t I wouldn’t overthink it. I think it’s nice that you’re worrying about it. Just tell her the fact in a nice way, and then she’s released to go look for someone else instead of waiting around hoping that it might work out with you.

Yeah. Okay. Good? Thank you. That’s cool. It still feels like garbage. But Yeah.

It does. Lots of the things will feel like garbage as you grow.

That’s why you have to make a lot of money to make up for when you feel shitty. Yeah.

Yeah. You’re right. Okay. I’ll add that to the list, become millionaire faster than I wanted to be Exactly.

So because of this. I like that. I like that. Except it needs a deadline. Okay.

Alright. Cool. Awesome, Jessica. Good luck. Thanks. Thanks.

Johnson, what’s your win?

Hey.

So a win, for this weekend is related to the question is that, I developed, three to four more outlines for various products within narrative selling to follow the sort of land and expand model that you, were talking about. And, it actually came fairly easily once I was kinda looking at it from that perspective, and it’s quite exciting.

So my question is that I’ve, I have this this this new idea for a for a product wise, a service based product, that I’m calling the founder’s narrative, as a sort of standardized offer with the authority building offer that you’ve seen in in that document as the, sort of upsell and then ongoing retainer.

So the the founders product is basically to help founders, find their story and and message, like, a kind of a well, a few elements of it, but but but a key story that is sort of their why, their, their meaning, behind their sort of their mission, and then, signifier stories that can be reframed in in multiple ways to convey various, aspects of, their their product.

And then there’s some other stuff about how to tell stories and how to adjust them for various audiences.

So my question is, does that sound like a good pairing and a good choice for the land and expand?

And, also, do you have any thoughts about the the document that you placed on?

Yes. The document. Thanks.

Yes. So so the idea with the founder’s narrative for land and expand is you’re brought in to work on the founders narrative, and then you work through other departments?

Yeah. Sort of to to look for founders who are keen to be out there, get in front of people, talk about, their stuff, which I I feel like won’t be hard to find, and, and to give them a framework to do that that that they, that that helps, helps them resonate with their target audience, basically.

Okay. Cool.

Let me open the doc then. Okay. So if you feel good about that as your land and expand, that’s cool. The only question I have around expand is if it’s a founder’s narrative, how big is the ICP that you’re going after?

How many employees does it have?

Well, I guess somewhere between sort of ten and fifty is a very sort of rough number. I’m imagining around, twenty to thirty, probably on on average, in this sort of, in that sort of range.

Do you think there’s a do you think it’s it might be too small?

Well, there’s just not much room to expand there. Where land and expand when you’re, like, talking about going up market is I mean, you still can.

You would just land in c suite and then expand to marketing might want the product narrative, I guess.

Yeah. I’ve got something for for marketing and sales as well.

So it was sort of like get the founders on board, make them love us, and then it felt like it would be an easier sell to the rest of the the teams.

Yeah.

And maybe that’s so in looking over your pricing, the thing about the founder’s narrative and, like, it’s cool and, like, I don’t know.

It feels like there’s it’s got legs because it’s a lot like positioning, but for the founder, which is cool.

So you could definitely, like, piggyback off of a lot of what April Dunford’s done. Like, if April did it, you should do it.

So that’s worth considering.

I guess I just wonder about the retainer side of it.

April also doesn’t have a retainer model for hers. However, there is this, like, there is more of a land and expand, which might be more of the retainer for you, where you would instead start with the founder’s narrative as the thing that you’re standing up, impress the crap out of the founder with that, and then say, okay. You know, we can do the same thing for your products, or we can do the same thing for your different groups, like the sales team or whatever. You’d have to figure that out. When I look through your document, the part that’s tricky is, like, the the execution y stuff, like monthly lead magnet development, it feels like forcing the issue, in order to get that easier performance based retainer in there or performance driven retainer in there.

So I would for you, I would say, okay. This week, I’m going to pause thinking about my business as stand up offer followed by retainer and instead think of my business as fully land and expand. Okay. That’s all I’m going to do. If I were to do that, what would expand look like? So land is the templated thing that then gets applied to different departments.

For that to work, what did my what would my ICP need to look like? What would they need to believe?

What would need to be their struggles right now? Because you have to solve those by repeating this thing across everywhere, which is doable. But I would put aside anything that has to do with, execution.

I’d keep it at the strategic level, and you can always recommend other people to execute. Yeah. I know. Right?

Johnson, you just graduated from executing. Well done.

That’s awesome.

My word. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. There’s a win for me. I was having a conversation with my, teammate where we were discussing, like, just how much I want to move away from delivery, of execution of products, and onto consulting.

Yeah. Cool. So And if you’re down for traveling too, the only side note is that if you’re going to go in and impress founders, they often need to see you in real life.

So you have to travel.

Fair.

And if I was willing to, sorry to hold the mic. But if I was willing to, switch up because, again, like, I feel like there’s a lot of ways I could apply these ideas, and there’s a lot of ways I could go with it.

If I wanted to look at a more sort of enterprise y level of the really upmarket, sort of land and expand.

Do you have any thoughts about, just the maybe the land product?

The problem is I really like the idea of the founder’s narrative.

I feel like it reminds me of this is so stupid.

It reminds me of on Friends when Jennifer Aniston says something about apartment pants to her, boss, who’s like, now I want apartment pants. They’re not even a thing, but it’s such a good, like, idea. Like, you could sell it.

So she’s like, let’s invent apartment pants.

And that’s the same kind of thing here. Like, the founder’s narrative just sounds really good. You know, you can see that founders would be like, I want a narrative. I need a narrative.

Get me a narrative. I want this, just like apartment pants. So now you just have to figure out what the founder’s narrative is. Stacy just said leaders narrative, potentially.

Yeah. Right?

I think that there’s if it’s blank narrative, you’ve got a big idea there that although people have been saying narrative, it’s kind of like story brand. It’s blank brand. But your blank narrative But then you just you gotta be ready to go all in and, like, own narrative. And I think that’s cool. I think that’s great and strategic and potentially expensive.

But, yeah, you do have to rethink that. Maybe it is leaders’ enter leaders’ narrative.

Maybe. Yeah. I love that. Yeah.

I I love that, Stacy.

Thank you.

And, okay, just one other tiny, tiny, tiny thing, because I feel like you will know the answer to this. I have this, as far as, like, coming out with this idea and talking about it and being this, thought leader, and creating all of the content, I have this fear that someone is going to take the the developed idea as far as it’s developed right now and then run with it faster than I can, and rename it, rebrand it into something else.

Is that, not stupid, but, like, is that something worth worrying about?

Yeah. Except you’re gonna do it better. You’re going to stay with it. People will steal your ideas all day.

So many. But they’re also lazy and quickly bored because they don’t have their own ideas. So I would say, like, don’t worry about it. They’ll come in.

They’ll swoop in. They’ll try to steal it.

The more you can’t. So that’s the worrying side of it. You can protect it as well. You can’t protect it from some parts of the world.

But once you’ve trademarked the thing, you’re good. You’re pretty good from there. People will still try to knock you off, but there was actually a story that Bob from Rewired Group was telling me a couple of weeks. I think it was Bob was saying, that one of his friends has, like, this big IP.

And someone from, like, McKinsey came to his friend and said, like, oh, we love your, we love or no. It was Blair Ends, maybe. I mean, we love your, blah blah blah product, the program, the framework. We use it across we’ve been using it across our x y z clients.

He sent them an invoice for his consulting fees on that because it’s his protected IP, and you cannot teach it. And so he got paid, like, three million dollars or something because this guy from McKinsey didn’t know better than to keep it to himself.

There was legal shit involved. Not that it wasn’t just like, oh, we’ll pay this invoice. Like, there was stuff. But that said, write a book about it.

Knock that thing out. You can do a better edition once it gets traction. Like, second edition is actually good. Like, well written.

First one is just great ideas. Document your framework. Own the title, trademark what you can, and then no people will steal it. And you just have to push through and be better at it.

Don’t switch to something else. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, it will happen.

Alright.

It’s just the way it is.

Okay. Okay. Alright. That’s helpful. Thank you, Joe.

Sure. I look forward to reading the book in a couple months.

Yes.

Yes. Good. Awesome.

Deadline’s next ninety days.

Got it.

Oh, good. I hope so. Andrew, what is your win?

Hey. Can you hear me okay? Yeah.

Cool.

My win is that, I gay I did a, redid a client’s, land paid search landing page, maybe that they started testing about six weeks ago. And as of today, they they’ve a little bit lower traffic, so we’re using eighty percent as, significance. And as of today, I have a winner, at about twenty eight percent increase Nice. At eighty percent significance.

So, you know, not Getting there.

You know? Yeah. Amazon is not, you know, not gonna count that as a win, but it’s been consistently leading, and the copy from before was really bad. So I’m pretty confident that it’s that it’s true, but there’s some some reality behind the those numbers. So that’s exciting. That definitely lights me up. I like that stuff.

I love that. Cool. Nice work.

Yeah. That’s a big that that that’s the stuff that really lights me up is checking, like, to go into the, into Optimizely and be like, winning.

Anyway, so my my main question is that what I’ve noticed is that the companies that I tend to have the most success with, are companies that are, like, doing fairly well. Like, let’s say, they’re already at, you know, maybe fifty million, a hundred million, but have obviously bad copy on their website. Like, you can go in, and it’s usually, like, a problem, and it’s just, like, way too technical. Like, you know, clients that like, I have a client who’s running a headline. It’s, like, accelerate analytic productivity, and it’s, like, okay. What?

So what I’m so I’m kind of wondering, like, is that, like, a reasonable strategy to sort of look for companies that are, like, succeeding despite bad copy? Because I just I just feel, like, a lot more confident going into those situations where it’s, like, I can just look at their website and just know that I’m gonna be able to make it better.

Guess the question is I would look at their team. Why is the copy bad?

It’s because it’s use often because they’re having their product marketers write it, and their product marketers are really smart, but they’re very technical and write in a sort of academic tone, and nobody really knows. Like, when I come in and start talking, like, copy hacker stuff, their minds are exploding.

Yeah. Cool.

I love hearing that.

No. I’m sorry. I’m just kidding. Thank you.

Thank you for Okay.

Can you are you willing to pick a fight with product marketers writing copy? Would you write a headline ever that says product marketers can’t write copy?

Yeah. I’ll take some whack with that as a former product marketer.

But yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I’m sure a lot of them would be like, yeah.

No. That shouldn’t be my job in the first fucking place, by the way.

Yeah. Doing a very respectful way.

Well, that’s the thing. In a if the real challenge is, can you put a banner up that says product marketers can’t or shouldn’t write copy?

But you have like, if you can stand behind that, if you could put it on a T shirt, then you might be on to something.

Right? Because then then you can go out to these groups and or they’ll come to you and they’ll see, like, oh, this person understands that product marketers, maybe the word is shouldn’t. But what you need to know when figuring out if this is what’s keeping them from writing good copy, if it’s not just bureaucracy, if it’s not just dilution of things as more features are added, If it’s really product marketers are writing this stuff and they shouldn’t, that may need to be the fight that you pick. And if that’s the fight that you pick, you have to be willing to fight that fight.

And that really does mean you have to pick a fight. You have to say product marketers shouldn’t write copy, and it’s everywhere. And that doesn’t mean that’s going to be your tagline, but you have to be willing to do that. Like, your head has to get right with that, with the big statement, whatever that big statement is.

So I think, yes, if you’re willing to stand behind it and really say something.

Yeah. Otherwise, there’s no point.

Yeah. I mean, I think I would as maybe a question of when I back in when I need to start doing internal interviews with the people I just called out.

Hey. You guys are so smart. Love what you do. But, I mean, honestly, that’s part of the problem.

Right? Is that they they know the product too well. They don’t have any objectivity. They’ve learned it in a kind of academic way.

And so they’re just disconnected from how people are going to buy, you know, I mean, you you send them to copy school, then sure, they can do it.

But if they haven’t done that yet, then they’re just not the people who should be writing your conversion focus Exactly.

Conversion copy. Yeah.

So as long as you have the support for that, then I think but you just have to be willing to say it. You have to go on LinkedIn and say it, and then support it with everything that you just said. If not just LinkedIn, I actually whatever. But I know everybody else likes, like, LinkedIn.

Go wherever you’re going online and and say the thing, and then support it like you just did. And they will buy in. They’ll agree with you. That’s just the way it is. Yeah. And some won’t, and that’s good. Some shouldn’t.

Yeah.

Okay? Then we can pipe it. Cool. Thank you. Sure. Awesome.

Thank you. Claire, what’s your win?

Hey. Well, I just completed my win, which was narrowing my Reddit parse my Reddit, like where is the subreddit? So where is the subreddits?

Sorry. It’s late for me.

My YouTube and my website’s down. Also under forty. So each of them is under forty, which is a good start. And I’ve got some, like, moonshots in there and some, like, realistic ones.

Interestingly, I don’t know if anyone else is targeting b to b SaaS, but here’s quick fun insight.

Everyone’s YouTube channel, like, if you are targeting people who, like, follow April Dunford, for example, are interested in product led growth, those brands’ YouTube channels, crap.

Like, as far as the scale of YouTube goes, like, their view count is pretty low, and their cadence is pretty low as well Okay.

Which is really interesting. What’s the opportunity there when you know that? What do you think the opportunity is then?

Well, Crazy Egg hasn’t posted a video in three years. But three weeks ago, they posted a video, and I’m like, oh, does that mean Coming back. That they’re trying to do something? Does that mean that some marketer in there has gone like, crap, guys.

We really need to work on our, you know, stuff.

And some executive has gone, yeah. Find people.

Yes. Totally. And you, like, miraculously show up at the right time.

Right time, right place.

Love it. So nice.

That’s the one thing.

Cool.

Okay. So I you told me a while ago to name, what I’ve been working on, which is onboarding flows. So I’m gonna say, like, broadly this this is for everyone, by the way. Broadly, this flow, will include include emails at its most basic.

It’s more complicated. It will take someone from free to paid. So that means the in app prompts the sign up page for when you, like, click the, sign up button or stop for free, that page, and even the pricing page in future. That’s like the expanded version.

It’s, like, comprehensive.

So I’ve got a few options that I’ve narrowed it down to. Two of them were like, oh my god. Like, that might work moments.

And two of them were chat GPT moments. So the premise being that onboarding flows, typically, most people understand them as like a linear path. Right? And my fight that I’m picking is that, no. It’s not a linear path.

It is very much, and this is my latest one, like a pinball machine. Right? So the user, like, drops it, and then they get, like, knocked all over. Maybe get close to converting, visiting a pricing page, and then nope back to product experience.

Yeah.

So, the pinball onboarding machine, TM was one idea.

The pinball what? Onboarding machine. Onboarding machine. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Interesting.

And then my brand name is Coby Ireland. I had, like, a little wobble about whether or not I need to change that and ultimately decided that the effort of changing it probably wouldn’t be worth the payoff.

But bucket list onboarding was another kind of concept where the user has to go through, like, a bucket list of things that they need to check. Basically, points k.

In order to actually activate.

K.

That was the one.

And then the other two are Japanese. I love Japan. Obsessed.

Also, my audience is fairly, like, interested being nerds and all.

So the one is pretty classic. Kaizen is a Japanese philosophy of continuous small improvements Yep. Which has three kind of main principles of involvement of everyone. So that would be like sales, customer success, etcetera. Standardization of the practice that would be more about the optimizing side and the process. That would be the process of confiding someone.

K.

There were two other Japanese words that I thought could be could work with onboarding flow or activation flow. The one was, which means to wake up something dormant, and kumiki, which is the Japanese woodwork. I don’t know if you guys know about it, but they very carefully cut, their wood so it slots together. Like, their houses are built with no nails they used to be.

The workmanship is extremely precise so that everything, the whole big picture just slots together.

Yeah.

Those old ideas. Anyone any of them feels sticky? I was driving myself.

Anybody wanna chime in?

I have thoughts.

I would just on the on the Japanese words, I would caution against that right now because of the whole issues with cultural appropriation and things like that. So I don’t know that I would want to latch onto another culture’s term for, you know, for commercial gain.

That’s something that I would be beware of. I I love the pinball concept, and I think you have a lot of potential with that.

You know, pinball pinball onboarding, don’t tilt, you know, get the high score or all the kinds of things. I mean, there’s a lot you could do with that. It’s kinda it’s fun and and memorable.

Just my my take.

Cool feedback.

Anybody else have a note for Claire on this?

So I like the I like that pinball is a known thing. For me, pinball means chaos, though. Like, it flies everywhere.

So I wonder if there’s, like if you could dig into pinball the way you dug into these Japanese terms.

What are the little toggle guys called? What are the what are the parts called?

And I would, like, try or what’s, like, the outcome or the sound when you when you land it? Like, what’s the like, when the the ball goes in the hole? Whatever hole that is. What are the I would dig more into that famous pinball players even, in the past and stuff like that simply because I like the analogy.

I like metaphor. I like I like that it’s pinball.

I don’t love the visual chaos of things going everywhere, Right.

Because you’re not going to bring chaos. It might be that things are popping all over the place.

But, yeah, what’s the oak? What’s the I dig into it because I think there’s something there. And maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m the only one who thinks chaos with that word.

So there’s that to consider, but I like it. It’s it’s a thing. It’s a known thing. I know what it is.

I could talk about it. It’s pinball.

When it comes to the Japanese stuff, I didn’t see it the same way that Stacy does, but I think it’s valid and worth considering, of course.

The Kanuki one seemed most interesting simply because Kaizen, I feel like a lot of tech companies were talking Kaizen, like, seven years ago or somewhere in there. Yeah.

Although I really like that the model has, like, those three parts that you could, like, model out, no share, use as your diagnostic, and things like that.

But the visual of the Kanuki is nice. I think it was Kanuki is what you said. Kanuki? Kanuki?

It’s with an m, but pretty close. Okay.

I don’t know it.

But that could be interesting and also, like, ownable and still in the the area of Kaizen and everything that we learned from Toyota and all of these other great brands that are extremely efficient.

So, yeah, those are my thoughts. I like where you’re going, and I love that you’re giving it a name. Oh my gosh. Yes to naming things. Yes.

But naming is extremely difficult while we’re on the subject. So yeah. Yeah. And pinball dot I o is twenty five thousand US dollars to buy.

Mhmm. Interested in really going in on that and only getting an I o out of it while we’re on the subject. So, yeah. Johnson, do you have to add do you want me to add anything here for Claire?

Oh, mine’s, that’s, well, it’s, like, related to knitting, but, I don’t you I I don’t wanna cut off the phone. Claire.

K. Claire, is that helping at all? Like yeah. Yeah. Load it also over in the Slack group for those who weren’t here today.

Yeah. Cool. Awesome. In the CSP part, not just in the intensive because it’s a CSP.

Okay. Perfect. Cool. Cool. Awesome. Thanks, Claire.

Johnson, you’re back.

I’m just getting in all the questions I should have gotten in Do it.

Over the last excellent. Yes. On naming things, right, which you just mentioned.

So you might remember, I my sort of and, Stacy, I would love your feedback on this too if you’re willing.

The the name I came up for my idea was narrative selling. And that was gonna be sort of the overarching concept. And now we’ve got, like, founders narrative and company narrative and product narrative and narrative selling itself as, like, its own sort of subdivision, of it. But I’m just wondering if you have any thoughts on how narrative selling as a as the overarching, sort of as the forget the final, as the jobs to be done, like, does that make sense as a, as a name, or is there maybe a different direction I should think about?

Stacy, do you wanna share your thoughts since you were invited?

I mean, I’ve as a name for you mean, like, a brandable name for your Yep. It’s too generic to be a brandable name, I think, because, I mean, there’s already there’s so many people talking about narrative selling already. It’s just a thing. You know? I mean, I Sassy writes sales narratives.

It it’s just, you know, lots of people are doing narrative selling and talking about narrative selling. So I would find another brandable name that you can own and figure out, you know I mean, and make that narrative selling could be what it is, but I would I wouldn’t necessarily call it that unless you’re and with you’re talking about that as a product. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

I mean, I I maybe I’m not I’m probably not in the same circles as you, but, do they call it narrative selling as, like, the the that combination of words, or is there just talk about narrative and selling as, like, a sort of Well, like, I mean, like, StoryBrand has a whole thing on, you know, selling with story, and there’s a whole they have a whole course in that.

And I’m I’m very, very involved in story because I’ve, you know, ingested, like, pretty much everything having to do with story. I have all the, you know, all the books and all the things because I’ve been a StoryBrand I’ve been a StoryBrand certified guide for six years, and, about thirty percent of the StoryBrand certified guides use my software.

So I’m very, very steeply involved in story.

So, I would just you you know, if you want something brandable, I would just say that narrative selling is a generic term. That’s that’s all I’m saying.

Cool.

That’s a thing. It’s a valid thing. And if you can talk about narrative selling, that’s fine to talk about it. But if it’s if you’re looking for a brandable term, I don’t think that you’re gonna have success with that as a brandable term.

Got it. That’s really helpful, Stacy. Thank you. I didn’t know that you, you’ve worked so much with story branding.

That’s cool. I will we have to do a coffee meet soon, actually. I meant to message you. Sorry.

Okay. Jo, do you have any thoughts?

Yeah. I mean, I feel like, okay. Cool. So totally fair on maybe narrative selling, but I still think there’s room there.

I honestly do. I think, it doesn’t have to be that. I like I really like the founder’s narrative. People have been talking about storytelling and narrative for all time, and no one’s ever nailed it.

Like, there’s still you walk away even with StoryBrand. We get all people that copy hackers coming over from StoryBrand because they’re like, well but I can’t actually, like, write the stuff. Like, I can put it mapped very well, and that’s great. But, like, now my clients need the next step, and I can’t do that.

And that’s fair. It’s fine to stay higher level. That’s fine. It just means I think that it leaves what it’s speaking to is that there’s room in the market for more gap filling.

I I every time you say you talk about this, Johnson, I think of The Message and the Messenger, which is a book that I would write if it made sense for me too.

What what I keep seeing from brands is right now, they don’t know there’s a mismatch between what they’re saying and who they are, and they’re publicly demonstrating that on social media, trying to be something that the brand isn’t, But that’s because a brand has a hard time being authentic, but a person can be authentic. Like, a person can be real. And so a founder wants to be the right messenger for his brands or her brands or their brands message. So so to me, it feels like there’s an opportunity opening up, thanks to social media largely, where the messenger needs to have the right message, and it has to come together. It has to work.

And that’s where the founder’s narrative is interesting.

To me, I would try to break it, though. I think that we should always try to break the things before we invest. So how could that be broken? Maybe it does get confused with StoryBrand.

Maybe it gets confused somehow with Rem’s book Lost and Founder somehow.

You don’t you don’t know. Right? But you just, like, start trying to break it. And then, okay, if we can break it, now let’s rebuild it stronger and better so it can’t be, which could be trying to break it for me would be like, okay.

If the founder’s narrative is my land, my expand has to be getting into other parts of the organization.

So what are those called? Is it like, we were talking about, is it product narrative? Uh-uh. Not great.

Is it the sales narrative also not really meaty?

So play around with that. You’re I think there’s something there. I would also, like, try to work through how Simon Sinek got to start with why. Because we are talking about something strategic here. We are talking about something that would attract a lot of c levels if they heard it, if they saw you on stage or heard you on a podcast.

It would feed their ego, honestly, to have their own narrative created by some great person from England with an accent. Like, there’s a lot there, honestly, as this I know that sounds stupid, but I think it would sell extremely well.

Interesting.

So what is the name?

If it’s not the founder’s narrative, stay in that vicinity, though, and see Well, I I do like that.

Yeah. I mean, I, like, I do like the founder’s narrative as a, as a name for this particular product.

And I I’m just I I feel like I I keep kind of asking this thing. It’s like, is this the right umbrella to put my these ideas under? Because I know that once this is done and I invest it and I buy the websites and, like, that’s it. It’s locked in. And I just kind of wanna I know names are maybe the least important part in many ways of Okay. You know? Oh.

They’re both not important and entirely everything.

So, yeah, if you get it right, it doesn’t matter. If you get it wrong, you’re screwed.

Right. I mean, I think founders narrative is is great. I really like that one. I think that’s strong and that the the the thing that I don’t like about that is that it doesn’t bring you into the enterprise market, which is why you can have founders narrative for the smaller companies and leaders narrative for the enterprise companies. And for the for the enterprise companies, leaders narrative is great because every enterprise wants to harness their workforce to help them establish thought leadership.

So if you’re if you’re going into an enterprise and helping them establish thought leadership across the enterprise by teaching them a process of the leader’s narrative and then empowering everybody to share the same story, you can make a fortune doing this.

So I did have an idea that I’ve called the organizational narrative, which was a sort of internal look at the narratives that are at play sort of strategically within the organization where there’s conflicting, perceptions essentially about, well, the stories, the the narratives that exist within the company, of what teams are doing, of what C suite wants and does.

And that was a that was a sort of next the next sort of one I wanted to start fleshing out a little bit.

Yeah. So cool. Okay.

I mean, it sounds like You’re separating it from the human element then, though.

You’re breaking up the organizational narrative. That’s like the people are what matter when you’re telling stories. Right? So the if you you you make the leaders narrative align with the organizational priorities, and then you have happy people who have their own story that they get to share that’s aligned with the organization.

Does that make sense? What do you think, Joanna? Yeah.

I fully agree. Yeah. Organizational narrative bored me immediately, and it’s, it’s it’s probably because it’s missing people. Yeah. Yeah. Cool.

Alright. Okay.

And think about the job that they’re actually hiring this to do. It might feel like they’re hiring it. They’re hiring this service to do, so a a job inter I would say they’re hiring it for they’re likely going to wanna come out of this, feeling better about themselves. It’ll be a personal job they’re really hiring it for, feeling valuable, feeling, of course, like they can can perform better and go out into the world and really understand their message.

But but so if you know it’s about you’re gonna have people making people based decisions, name it in a way where it’s, like, gotta have it.

This thing, the leadership story deck, there’s a guy, David Hutchins. His book is, The Circle of the Nine Muses. He has this great deck of cards, and it’s all about stories. And it’s the stories that individual people can tell, and it breaks it down into this whole framework of, like, when to use what story for what. It’s really fantastic. I think if you checked it out, it would be a a good, thing for sparking ideas for creating your own thing. But he goes in and does workshops, and it it becomes, actually a personal transformation for the attendees.

It’s it’s about them transforming themselves by learning to tell these stories and to to do it through work. So that’s a that’s another thing to think about. Think about the people, the people.

Alright.

Okay. That’s really helpful. Thank you.

And so narrative selling maybe as an umbrella term is not, possibly not the the best way to go, but something narrative was narrative something, maybe still to keep these all under a similar sort of, format.

Yeah. I think so. Yeah.

Alright. Thank you so much, guys. This was incredibly helpful. That was, like, a little bit of a electricity for me there. Thank you.

Good. I, I love it.

Okay. Excellent. Good stuff. Alright. Thanks, y’all. Thanks for hanging on, and see you later. Have a good one.

Thanks, Stacy. Thanks, Jared.

Bye.

The Buyer Handbook: Researching ICPs

The Buyer Handbook: Researching ICPs

Transcript

Alright.

Y’all, I know you’re still filing in, but we have Ali here, Ali Bloom. I’ve have I ever said your full name? I’ve always said Ali Bloom. Is it Blum?

It’s Blum. Yeah.

It’s Blum.

I think we’re the only ones to pronounce it that way. The German pronunciation is Blum. I don’t know how my family did it this way, but here we are.

Got it. Okay. Cool. Well, so we’ve known each other forever.

Mhmm. It’s been a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Like, ten years maybe?

I was counting it earlier. Yeah.

Yikes. Spoke at, MicroConf at least one time together. Got to speak to them by each other at the speakers dinner. That was fun.

And Ali’s been working a lot on, gosh, all sorts of things. Do you wanna give a quick background on what you’ve been doing the last few years? Sure.

Yeah. So I took technical I met Joe and took Joe’s copy technical training too long ago. Like, really, truly close to a decade ago. Doesn’t the pandemic makes it seem like it was just a year or two ago.

And since then, I have worked in almost every department in a software company. So before copy, I did PR and content and marketing. And I said, I wanna get closer to the sale. Like, I gotta get closer.

So I kinda did copy, and I was like, write all these copy, did a lot of onboarding emails, and then started to feel like, well, I the product needs some help. Like, I gotta go fix the UX. So then I started going to UX, and then I started going to research. And I worked with Sofia Cantero, the founder of EnjoyHQ to because I was like, okay.

Actually, no. It’s not just me who needs to know it. Like, everyone needs to know the research and VOC. So how about I go mobilize VOC for all these people?

And so I got to help a lot of people get their repos set up and get into research and then research ops. And then, had a chance to go zero to one on a like, as a fractional, had a product last couple of years, which has been so cool.

And now I’m going back my I was pretty fractional pretty close to in house, and now I’m going back to, consultant helping people get buy in on VOC, jobs to be done, and research. Like, how do we actually do this CLG thing that that we talk about?

Yeah.

Dig it. Love it. So yes. It’s amazing. And I really love the progression of going from, like, focusing on copy to working so much in product to see where you can go with this career when you focus on, like, strategy, research, listening to customers.

Right? Like, there’s so much room out there. I think it’s really inspiring.

And so this month, we’re working on the buyer handbook, of course, in Coffee School Professional.

Part of that is really understanding your ICP.

And so we’ve been talking about ICPs a bit so far.

And now, yeah, I wanted to bring you in, Ali, just to, like, share how to do research for ourselves potentially for our own businesses as well as when clients when you’re working with a client, maybe they don’t know who they’re talking to. Yep.

Happens a lot.

They may not know they don’t know who they’re talking to.

Yeah.

Yes. Right? Perfect. So, I know we’ve only got an hour. We’ve got fifty five minutes left, so I would like to stop talking.

I’ll let you take over. Everybody, please get your notebooks ready. And, Ali, please take it away with helping us understand ICP research.

Woo hoo. Okay. Cool. Alright. Let’s see how good I can be at sharing my screen.

Let’s see. I have the browser open.

Okay.

I should have done this while you were talking. Would have been a much more dramatic event.

Oh, no. It’s good. Everyone’s having time to, like, get settled in too.

So it’s Yeah.

Okay.

There we go. Okay. Here we go. We go to present, and then we say presenter view, and then we say sent, and then we say share, and then audience window.

Perfect. Thank you. Okay. So you guys can see my screen?

We can see audience window. Yes.

Okay. Excellent. So I close this. You can see a nice Canva color palette here. Okay. Cool.

Wonderful.

Alrighty. So we’re gonna talk about how to research and mobilize an ICP that actually gets used. So I see so, so often that we do all this work, all this work to get our ICP, and then it just sits on a shelf or somebody’s, like, you know, worst case scenario, fighting us, questioning the fact that we would even do this. I’ve seen all kinds of ignoring of ICP or jobs to be on or any kind of customer development work ignored. So we’re gonna talk about how to bake that part in from the beginning and how to actually do some of the research.

So today, we’re gonna talk about how we can make an ICP useful, unignorable, mobilizable.

Didn’t tell me spell spell check didn’t say that was a fake word, so we’re going with it. How do you build a coalition around your ICP?

And then the five steps of which building a coalition is one of them to research and mobilize your ICP, and then what it kinda looks like when you’re done, what you kinda get out of that.

So before we get into that, I’m gonna ask you guys, why bother researching ICP? Why are we doing this?

Anybody? Go for it.

Internal buy in right from the beginning?

Yeah. On what?

On who the client is and helping them see their client in a different light.

Yeah. Why do we need that?

Because they don’t understand the client and what they’re building it for. And then by the time they build it, it’s not what the client actually wants.

And then what happens?

They don’t use the information that they have, and it just stops right there. So, their copy changes, that’s not what they wanted to say. They don’t know who they’re talking to, and products just die on the vine. Yeah.

The products die on the vine. Yes. So often, if we do not get this right, and it it goes through all these different departments, we don’t get right, things die on the vine. That is that is a really good way to put it. Cool. So that’s what we’re doing this for. That’s why that’s our urgent reason to care here.

So before we get into some of the ways to make it succeed, there’s two main ways that I wanna talk about the how we can avoid failing and how you just nix these. Like, just crush them off your you’re not worried about them anymore. The first one is building something that I call a static ICP. So you’ve probably seen these.

If you’ve been working in marketing any amount of time, it’s like a list of attributes, and it’s fixed. I call it static because it’s fixed in a moment in time. It’s just a a description of of what we’re doing of who the person looks like. And what I call a dynamic ICP is something that’s constantly evolving and also speaks to how your ICP progresses through time.

So to give you an example, we might say, okay. Here’s a regional small business. They’ve got annual volume, hundred million dollars, ten locations, two to three hundred employees. They sell office supplies.

We could maybe sell them, like, CRM. Like, they’ve got some sales. We could maybe sell them HR software. Like, we can, like, there’s hints about things they might need, their business.

They need business things. But if we know, like, actually who their ICP like, who we’re talking to and what their moment in time is, then we might know. So I don’t know how many of you guys have seen the American Office, but we know that there are many different characters with many different roles, many different sets of circumstances. They go through mergers.

They go through getting spun back off. They go through potential downsizing. They have cost cutting. They have all of these different scenarios, some of which, result in buying decisions.

And they don’t the important thing about this is that we’re also looking at the individual, like, not the the company as as a whole necessarily. We’re selling to the company, but we wanna also make sure we we we talk about the individual because people buy things, not companies.

So pothole number two. So pothole number one, making sure that we have, like, a it’s a more, dynamic. We know the storyline in time. Particle number two is thinking you only need to research your customers.

So do you have any idea who the other person the other people we need to research as they’re doing this project?

The client.

Okay. Client, customer, pretty, like, a good product.

Any other guesses? So it’s your coworkers. It’s your colleagues.

So you’re going through this process. You’re gonna be researching your customer, but you’re going to be researching them the you’re going to be building a a tool that’s going to be used by your colleagues. So you wanna make sure you don’t exclude them from the process.

So this is especially, it’s especially important no matter if you’re in house or if you’re a consultant.

But it’s especially important to keep in mind because so often we and I used to do this all the time, and it it often got me tripped up. We’re often hired for expertise. We say we’re gonna go do this thing. We go off, we do the thing, and then we come back and we say, I did the thing.

Here’s the ICP. And then that can kind of sit on a shelf. So we wanna make our ICP stick. So part of what we’re gonna be doing here is making sure that we get that, get that understand who we’re going to be getting that buy in from before we start.

So that brings us to our five steps here.

Yep. So the five steps that we’re going to research and, to learn to research and mobilize your ICP. First is building your ICP coalition.

So we’ll talk about how to do that. So making sure you know who the people are that are going to be in part of this. Then there is quant research, two types of qualitative research, leading indicator and lagging indicator, and then, share as you go steps. So this is kind of a step you do every step of the process, but it’s a really important thing to keep in mind.

So the first step, building your coalition.

So your colleagues are your ICP for your ICP project. If you’re doing jobs to be done, you wanna do your the jobs to be done on your clients, on your colleagues. You wanna know what circumstances they’re in. You wanna know their stage of awareness.

Right? Because if we come in and we say, let’s do an ICP to someone who doesn’t even know they need an ICP, they’re totally unaware, you’re we wanna avoid going from that unaware or that problem or stage to just like, hey. Be most aware. Have high intent.

Let’s just do this thing now. It’s a very, very hard jump to make in a single conversation. I haven’t been able to do it. Maybe your maybe your skills are better, but it’s really, really challenging.

So we wanna nurture people along those stages of awareness by understanding where they are.

So and why this matters? Okay. So miss Congeniality, Ocean’s eight. We wanna be less of this think of yourself less of this, like, lone wolf who’s like a like a genius and has it right, but is alienating everyone around them.

Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock plays a, FBI agent who goes undercover in a beauty pageant, and, she’s not taken seriously. She’s also really mean to all of her coworkers. She’s right. She saves the day, but barely with the help of her teammates.

Versus Ocean’s eight, she’s leading this coalition of people to do a heist. So she knows that she’s really good at planning the heist, but she’s gonna be bring in people who are really good at at safe cracking or, like, rebuilding jewelry. Fencing is a thing you need to know how to do if you’re in a heist. So we’re going to be working with other people. So we wanna make sure that we’re in a scenario where we’re setting ourselves up to have that pro social kind of collaborative, heist that we’re making we’re doing together.

I should think of a fun way to work in heist heist, jokes here. Okay. Cool. So this brings us to our first activity.

So, Sarah, I will take you up on that offer. If you could send that, doc out to everyone. So I have a coalition building workbook.

You guys are the ones getting to see it for, like you’re gonna be the first people to ever see it. I am so excited to hear what you think of it. There’s a lot more that I wanna add to it. But the way that I want you to think about it is these are the different things. These are the blanks to fill in as you’re going through to build your ice to research and mobilize your ICP.

So you should see in the first section, build your coalition, there should be a couple of different blocks, and it should say name, title. Some of the titles will be filled out, stage of awareness with respect to ICP, and a problem that they complain about.

So, for example, if you are working with a CEO and the CEO is just like, god. Our churn sucks. Our churn sucks.

Marketing can’t get it together. Product can’t get it together. Like, our churn sucks. That’s what they’re complaining about. They’re not complaining about not having ICP. They’re complaining churn sucks.

So I want you to, I have a couple there. You’re gonna wanna do this for, like, three to five people ideally, but for right now, I’m gonna put five minutes on a timer. I’m gonna invite you to think of like, to fill in the blanks that you can for one person.

So other people, you’re you’re gonna have three different people that you can invite in types of people to invite into your coalition.

Your champion, this is prompt someone who’s not terribly involved in the nitty gritty of the work. That’s the CEO most likely.

Your allies, these are people in other departments. You’re like, you’re you’re doing some of the work together and then your coconspirators.

This is your work bestie. This is who you’re gonna come in and be like, okay. I can’t can you believe this? Ding dong.

Like, that kind of person where you can have that kind of relationship where you can talk through how to actually do this. So five minutes on, I’m gonna ask you guys to, fill in one just the profile for just one coalition number. I’m gonna put five minutes on the clock, and then I’m gonna ask one of you to share and tell me about this person. And if it’s not if you’re, if you’re a consultant, you can do it for, like, your client point of contact.

Okay. That’s just about five minutes. Does anybody want how’s it going? And does anybody want to share a member of your coalition?

Anyone dare to?

I’ll dare. Okay. I was gonna call on you, Claire. You look like you might want to. That’s awesome.

Well, it’s like I’m so curious. I wanted a feedback.

Cool.

I have, for example, the director of marketing, who’s stage of awareness for ICP is probably about a five out of five because it’s their job.

Okay.

And they’re probably complaining about low conversions. Put all this effort to get leads in, and they’re not converting, and they’re complaining about it because it’s messing with their interests.

Okay. Is this a real director of marketing or a hypothetical director of marketing?

A hypothetical director of marketing.

Okay. If you were to, turn this to a real director of marketing you may have worked in in the past, what would you do to take that one level of one level more specific?

I don’t think I have worked with the real director of marketing, to be honest.

Okay.

Yeah. I’ve worked with the head of sales.

Okay.

She was kind of like a three out of five.

Okay.

And sort of at a loss, one between departments. Like, everyone’s going like, this is the thing that you should be focusing on. No. This is it. No. This is it.

So she was really struggling to know, like, what do I what am I telling my reps? What is the message that we’re putting through to people?

Yeah. And what were the specific go ahead.

I’m sorry. I’m just asking if that was the more specific Yeah.

A lot.

What were some of the consequences of not knowing what she could tell her reps about what kind of pitch to make?

I think it was more emotional than actual, like, real life consequences. So I think it was more just like, I need to prove results, prove myself, and I’m not sure that I’m going to.

So many things are changing. I’m confused. They’re confused. Like, we need a ground base.

Okay.

I’m not sure.

Yeah. I’m not sure what her internal conversations look like.

Okay. What kind of was she hitting her her quotas? Was her team hitting her quotas? Their quotas?

I actually don’t know. We mostly had a conversation about, like, what she’s seeing in customers at the moment.

It was more of like a discovery call for me to understand Okay.

What they’re hearing from their current customers. Cool. But yeah.

Cool. Okay.

Excellent. Anyone else wanna share theirs?

It’s a small group. There’s not much room for you guys to hide.

I’m I’m saying this to, like, try to give you an out if you don’t want to.

But Jessica, I know you’re on your, treadmill right now, but, is there anything that you this is a good chance to get some notes as you work through what you’re working on.

Any thoughts? Anything you wanna share? If you’re talking, you’re on mute. Just trying not to be called on.

You came off mute, Jessica.

No? Alright. Everyone’s shy today, Ally. Oh, Katie’s down. Katie, are you down?

I’m mute. Sorry. Okay. Yeah. But I got on problem agreement evidence. Could you clarify what you were looking for there?

Yeah. So this is where we’re going to find, this is something we’re coming to later. So this is great feedback for me of how to work out with this. So that’s research that you’ll get to find that you can say, okay.

I see you head of sales. I see you head of marketing. This problem’s real. I know I I found some evidence.

Like, I’m not I take your word for it, and I want to go track down some evidence. So what I do with these this is sort of the starting point, but what I ultimately like to do over time is keep a problem library. Anytime somebody complains about something, I write it down. And at first, I’m not trying to prove it.

I’m not trying to solve it. I’m just like, okay. Someone’s not meeting their quotas. Sales is about product and marketing.

Like, some there’s problems. I’m just gonna keep track of them, and I’ll add all that data as I go.

Any other questions?

So but the problem agreement is around you finding evidence that that problem exists and that the product that you’re selling, in this case, like, an ideal client profile, could solve that problem Exactly.

Yeah.

To support the need for what you want to sell. Okay.

Yeah. The key to getting your project to to be really, really popular is to position it as a solution to other people’s problems. So we wanna be the experts. I don’t know too much about Margaret Thatcher, except I know that she was a politician who was famous for knowing more than anyone else in the room. So you wanna show up to these rooms knowing more about that problems that other people are having than they do, and that’s looking for some of that evidence as you go. We’ll talk about the ways you can do that in a second.

But there’s also a second kind. So you’ll also see that there’s this quant research step as one of the next, channels. So this is the or one of the next blanks to fill in. So this is one of the other areas where we wanna be collecting a lot of data.

So this is the second step of looking for our ICP, and this is where we’re going to figure out how we can make sure that this is an ICP grounded in reality and an ICP grounded in what people actually do versus an ICP that’s maybe a flight of fancy as many many of them are. Now anybody here do we have you can say in the chat or not in the chat. Anybody here, like, Okay. Okay.

Four out of three people are bad at math, and I’m the fourth.

So Great.

Okay. Cool.

So I’m not either. I love having numbers. I want them. I need them. I crave them.

I don’t wanna make a decision without them. I am, like, very data driven, when I make decisions at work. Not at home. But at work, I’m very, very data driven.

However, I’m not a numbers person. A day when I have to go fight a dashboard tool is a bad, bad day. I know SQL. I would prefer not to have to write my own query.

So how do you what do you do with this? So you can say, like, alright. This is actually a good opportunity to really break down what we mean by quant and what we want our quant to do. So we’re really asking a question with our quant data.

How do you measure ideal? Like, when we say our ideal customer, what does that even mean? Like, how do we know that they’re ideal? What’s the type of, thing that they’re doing in our product?

So that might be activation metrics. It could be churn. It could be volume.

Some indicator that they are picking up what we’re putting down.

Are there any other, are there any other metrics that you guys use when you’re talking about ideal customer profile that, I might be missing here? I’m sure there’s many.

I mean, I feel I’m, like, less in the software space and more in coaching, but I think, like, success, like, they achieve the outcome that was promised in the in the original pitch.

Yeah. Did they actually get a benefit out of the product or the service? Yeah.

That’s a big one. What else?

Everyone’s being so quiet today. Everyone is shy. No.

We’re talking about key metrics. Correct? Really, what we’re looking at are key metrics. So you can really look at that for driving could be primary goals.

Could be driving revenue growth. It could be reducing costs. Would that be correct? So you could say, like, maybe one person wants to have cost savings, one person wants to increase conversion rates, one person wants more ARR, one person wants to have more MRR.

Would that be correct in what we’re looking at for metrics?

All of it. Yep. Yes.

Depending on the person and the ICP you’re interviewing. Correct?

Yeah. That’s a that’s exactly it. So we’re we’re going to want to see customers that are not going to cost us money to serve. So those higher margin, that’s a customer, that’s a one way to look at it. All the other ones that you outlined as well.

And sort of like what what you were saying, Claire, around that that person that’s head of sales had a really emotional component, they all there are some numbers they care about. So it’s we can figure out, okay, what are the numbers that they care about? And we can say, alright. Let’s point our lens. So like I said, I’m not a numbers person, but here’s how I use that as an opportunity to pull other people into my coalition.

So what I do is get really good at framing the questions that I wanna ask. Depending on how much time you guys have get to spend with data, the the opportunities are really endless for the queries and the questions you can come up with. And that is really a huge, huge part of the data work that that happens on data teams. So you can get really good at saying, this is the number I need to understand, and here’s how I need to understand it changing over time.

And then you can find a quant person either at your client, like, hey. Do you have a date person chartered data? Maybe it’s it’s gonna be somebody different at every at every type of company and say, hey. Can we pair on this?

Because I have some things that are really important to some of these these execs that I wanna figure out how it works. And then you can also use that as an opportunity to ask the data person, hey. You guys you you seen any numbers that we gotta pay attention to? Because those data people are probably getting ignored because they’re probably coming up with number after number after number presented in a very numerical kind of way with without the story, without connecting it to a problem.

So you can also help them and bring them into your.

Okay. So that’s it. Step two, quant data. You wanna know you wanna be looking at who has done things that indicate they are the the kind of customer you want to do that with again.

So the next question or the next step is, first of two qualitative research steps. And This is leading indicator qualitative research. So this is happening a little early on, in our relationship with the customer, and I call it the magic question email. I actually call it the magic question email automation. I don’t I left that word off here.

Okay. So I this is another thing that I learned from Joe ten years ago that still works.

So this magic question is, what’s going on in your world that led you to do the thing? And with every client that I work with, I set up a welcome email that has this question at the bottom. Then I pipe the replies to a folder and a qualitative research repository. I use EnjoyHQ.

And then over time, you have a single location with, I’m not exaggerating, I have one client. I think there’s, like, twenty five hundred responses in there right now. And one of the engineers on the team came to me and said, she reads every hour. Every day, she’ll go in and just read replies from an hour.

So when she goes into her product engineering meetings, she’s the Margaret Thatcher in that room because she knows whether or not something’s gonna fail or succeed before they even build it. Whether or not they listen to her, that’s we’ll come we’ll have a master class on that another time, but this is a really, the most powerful thing for building, again, that dynamic ICP. Right? So this is going to give you the answers to questions that pea or the data that people have.

Let me start that over.

Sending this out right after somebody has signed up to start using a product, that’s the moment of that high tension. That’s in that exact switch moment. That’s when they’re really heightened to say, I wanna make sure that I I’m doing something. Like, something has just changed that makes me actually wanna do this.

That energy is gonna be really high. You’re gonna wanna make sure that you capture as much of that as you can. So this is an email that I wrote for a company called Mural many, many moons ago. This is an example of the the type of formula that I use.

There’s a an introduction. I wrote it from CEO.

We had some VOC at the time from people saying Mural was a missing piece they were looking for, so we included it. We added some credibility around the different types of companies that we worked with. We said what’s gonna be coming next because Mural, like many whiteboard tools, blank slate. And at the time when we wrote this, this was not an established category. People did not know how to use these things. And then the one question.

So our activity now is to write your magic question emails. So you’ll scroll down, and you’ll see that’s one of we’re gonna skip quant because that’s not my, that’s gonna be different depending on where you are and because I hate it. And I love this. So we’re gonna go to a magic question email. I can just be so much more useful for you here than I can with the quant stuff. Make a good friend in quant is my quant advice. So, put another five minutes on, and I’ll invite you to write a first draft.

And then I’m gonna ask somebody to read their email if they want. If they’re too shy, then I’ll just go on to the next part. But anyway. Okay.

Sorry. Quick question. Who are we writing this email for? Like, to our ideal client? Good question.

Pick it to a new customer if you work at a for a pro a company where you work or for a client that you might have or maybe one that would that you had, in the past.

Okay. That’s just about five minutes. Does anybody have a first draft that they want to share?

Sure. I’ll go.

Alright.

Doing it. Jumping straight in. Full disclosure, it’s the end of my work day. My brain is fried.

It’s a first round.

No worries.

I’ve written it from, like, a really old client of mine that was super interesting to work with called Pave. So it’s, welcome to Pave name. I’m John, the CEO, and I just wanted to take this time to say we’re really excited to help you grow your newsletter’s revenue.

Pave is the new kid on the block, but thousands of independent newsletter creators have already used it to sell recurring sponsorship slots to big brands like Monday dot com, Masterwork Masterworks, and company Abe. You will find all the tools you need to monetize without spamming your readers with relevant ads. But before you get started, I have one quick question for you. What was going on in your world today that led you to sign up to Pave?

Just hit reply to this email and let me know.

Awesome.

Yeah. Cool. So it sounds like you had this new product in an established space that had already gotten a lot of success. I’m sorry.

You’re celebrating that, making it really exciting. Look at us. You’re or look at you. You’re joining this cool cool new kids club.

And and that’s a great question. Awesome.

I have a question about the question, though. Yeah.

I’ve used it before, and I found, like, people don’t respond to email as much as I’d hope if if there’s, like, a large user base.

So would you ever use, like, a segmenting link, you know, where you just have, like, two options?

So I would probably want to know a little bit more about the situation where you weren’t getting the responses, because I have I worked in one category where I I basically could not get anyone to reply to my emails, but I’ve not experienced that elsewhere.

I have experienced times where, somebody comes in and changes my magic question email and the responses go down for a little bit. So there’s a lot of different factors. But what I would say definitively is that I would leave this question open ended for as long as you can because we don’t know the finite number of reasons why people signed up yet. And the goal that or the the biggest, benefit of having this run continuously, build that repo, is that you get a repo a repository of voice of customer data, and that is part of your dynamic ICP.

So your your ICP is an artifact, but it’s also where your customers are talking, and they’re people. They’re humans. They say things. They complain.

They’re disgruntled. They’re happy. They’re sad. The way they talk about things also changes. Like, I’m sure you guys are seeing with with a lot of the AI things that are coming on, the way that somebody may have responded to this email two years ago, they may be talking about the same things, but in a very different language now compared to them.

So we wanna know that keeps us keeps us sharp with what folks are knowing. So I I don’t really use the segmenting, links unless I know definitively, unless I’ve already built, tested, and had my ICP working for a long period of time, and I I know it’s good, then I wanna start with open ended.

Got it. Okay. So you just send these all to, like, an inbox, where you can access them.

I’m guessing if they go straight to, say, the CEO’s inbox, he might not be active in pulling them to your Yeah.

So you’re gonna want there is some coordination that you’re gonna wanna do with the from name.

So you’ll see on that workbook, there’s a lot of different moving parts to this email. So the the copy is, like, that’s your first thing to get it going, but you’re gonna need to make sure that you have sign off from the person who’s going to be using their from name. Maybe you use a fake email address that’s from the real person and you send the CEO the best emails.

And your I use a qualitative research repository as my receptacle. So there’s a tool called EnjoyHQ, Dovetail, notably, Aurelius. There’s several of them several of them now. I send it all to a folder inside one of those tools.

Great. Okay.

Thank you.

There’s probably other ways to do it.

The only thing I like less than quant is figuring out how to use software. So there are ways to do it that or not this, but this is the one that works I have found that works the best and the easiest for me.

Cool.

Okay. I’m gonna keep going because we’re at step three, and I wanna make sure we get to get through everything. So thank you for sharing. This is awesome.

And like I said, you’re gonna generate tons and tons of responses. In almost every case, there are few limited ones where even tweaks won’t won’t help you too much. We can probably, we can still get other data points here. So step four.

So that leading indicator, you’re gonna say, like, they’re coming in. They they’re right in this switch moment. Then we’re gonna look at our lagging indicator. So this is where we’re going to talk to people who are already successful with us and kind of look back at how they made their decision.

So this is where we’ll do some jobs to be done documentary style interviews. So I chatted with Joe a little bit beforehand. I think you guys have some familiarity with it. Jobs to be Done is its entire own, master class series, so I’ll just hit some of the high notes here.

What I I use the jobs to be done, the job story artifact as the main artifact in an ICP. And the top of that artifact, you’re going to have a sentence that describes your customers, what we call their job story.

So their job story is when I am in a set of circumstances, give me a way to make some kind of progress so I can achieve some kind of outcome. And they’re all going to have this sort of story flow. Once upon a time, I was ahead of sales, and everyone was telling me all of these different things that I needed to do. And I couldn’t figure out who was on first, and I wasn’t meeting my quota. So I need a way to figure out how I can tell my team the single sales pitch to make or the couple of sales pitches to make So I can hit my quotas. I can hit my numbers. My team can all get their commissions.

Right? So we may have a job story come out something like that, and that’s what we’re we’re going to be driving towards here.

Lots of great resources on jobs to be done interviews if you haven’t done them before. I don’t have a a desi dedicated script I use for everyone. I mapped them out based on the category.

But I do have five questions here that I wanna share as an example of how to how to get good data.

First, I always wanna ask somebody about themselves and the role of the company. So much gold in there. I wanna know when they first signed up. I wanna know when they first started looking.

I wanna know what else they considered and what they liked about those other solutions. And I wanna know who else was involved in the decision. This will vary drastically. Like, I have one client.

There’s fifteen people involved in the decision. I’ve worked with others where it’s you’re selling to the buyer. Like, the buyer is the user.

So keep so there’s lots of ways to do it. The the important things to remember are how to, ask good questions to make make sure you get really good data and some just some do’s and don’ts.

I don’t know why I said just some do’s and don’ts, like diminutive as if it’s not, like, the the main takeaway for research. That was a weird thing I just did. So what you want to do is imagine you’re a detective or a documentarian. You are studying a thing that has already happened.

You want to know the moment when somebody switched, when they said, I can’t take it anymore. I gotta get something else, And that already happened. You wanna do that instead of imagining that you’re that they’re a fortune teller. Imagining you can say, like you you don’t wanna say, what would you do in the future?

Or do you think you would do this? Or blah blah blah blah blah. You wanna know what happened.

Another thing that you wanna do is focus on having questions that start with what, when, who, and how.

And there’s a lot of reasons for this, but there’s two main reasons to avoid why. Whether you are a student of linguistics linguistics, psychology, hostage negotiation, patriarchy, all of these systems as you study them, they will tell you to avoid the question why because it is very often accusatory, and it has this kind of accusatory note baked into it. So we wanna avoid it. The second reason is that it can be kind of hard to answer.

I like to give the example and I may have learned this one from Joe too. If we say, you know, why do you love your spouse? Oh, well, why do I love my spouse? Versus what do you love about your spouse?

Hopefully, there is a long, long list and you don’t stop talking until we shut you up. So we wanna make sure we’re asking these kinds of questions that are going to elicit good responses.

Do record the call. One thousand percent get consent and record the call. Do not trust your notes. This is one of the biggest beginner mistakes. I know you guys are learning all about VOC.

I also say if you’re talking to other people who have not done this, those low awareness colleagues of yours, make sure if they’re having calls, get them to record it. Expect it to take two to three months before the message really sinks in. Just keep just kinda keep reminding them. Hey. Thanks for the notes. Did you do you have a call? Whatever.

And then two other techniques I like to probe on general words. If someone says, well, it was just better, what does better mean? What about it was better, versus letting a throwaway word lie. You can’t use better in a in a headline.

That’s not gonna get you anywhere. And then recap and restate. So this is a great way to find, where you may have gotten it wrong and to elicit a response. So you may say, oh, okay.

I heard you say that you were, you had three different meetings in one day, and everybody gave you a different, thing they wanted you to sell.

Do I but you weren’t sure which of the people you should listen to. Do I have that right? And then your head of sales might say, well, actually, it was really the CEO told me to go talk to these people because the CEO didn’t know, and he wanted their opinions or whatever it is. So that gives you an opportunity to get someone to correct you while agreeing with you.

Do I do I have that right? Like, am I picking up what you’re putting down? You can say, oh, no. Not really.

It’s still, like, a kind of agreement type mechanism. Okay.

Step five.

Share as you go. So remember at the beginning, we talked about building our coalition. We talked about wanting to get that trust early on, bringing people in. And, someone I don’t remember who asked a question about this problem agreement evidence.

So you’re going to go through and do this research. You’re going to get evidence of other people’s problems, and you’re going to hear it. You’re gonna be able to share it with people. And And you know what you’re gonna get to say? You’re gonna get to say the three best words in the English language. It’s not I love you. It’s you were right.

Very, very few of us get to hear that in at home, at work, and you’re gonna get to hear that. Like, you’re gonna get to or people you’re working with will get to hear that from you, further endearing them to your cause. So I like to say you’re we’re doing less, like, launching the new iPhone. We’re not going off doing our engineering.

We would’ve built them. We would’ve given them a faster horse if we asked them what we wanted. We’re not doing that. We’re not up on stage.

We’re not separate. We’re a lot more Julia Child. Like, this is how I crack the eggs. Do you wanna taste some of this soup before I add add a little bit more salt in?

We are cooking together. We are involved in this. You’re the expert. You don’t wanna diminish your expertise, but you’re involving people, as you go.

And so there’s a lot of different ways that I like to do that.

My favorite, favorite, favorite thing is to take an interview that you’ve done, get a sixty to ninety second clip where somebody where the customer is talking about a pain point someone else cares about. So if I was working with this head of sales and I’m talking with a customer and that customer is like, you know, I thought you guys were, like, I thought you guys were a CRM, but then I started using you, and I couldn’t, like, I couldn’t do this one thing that is essential for CRMs.

Snip it, put it into the script audiogram, send it to the head of sales in a very casual, informal way. Hey. I heard remember that thing you were telling me the other day? Like, I just got off the phone with this customer. I think you’re gonna wanna hear this. And the reason for this, nobody wants to listen to an hour long interview. Nobody.

You we will do them only when we have an external or internal push to do so. I actually have this story of when I had there were some jobs to be done interviews sitting in the repo for a year that I knew I needed to listen to, but I didn’t listen to them until I found something in the data that said, oh, I gotta fix that. Where’s the data? Okay.

So and so did the research. I’m gonna go get it. So we need to give somebody a push. Ten hours of research, one hour of research, half hour call, this is a big ask.

But there is nobody who is going to hit say no to a sixty second clip that breaks up their day, gives them something really easy to listen to that says you were right.

So highly recommend it. Descript, there’s other tools. Descript is the I haven’t it’s the one to beat. So okay.

So you do all of this, and then what happens when you’re done? So you have all these steps. You’re building your coalition. You’re doing your quant research.

You’ve got your leading lagging indicators for qualitative research, and you’ve been sharing as you’re going.

So at the end, we’re not just getting a document, not just getting an artifact. So at the end, we’re getting a team of people who are bought in and want to see ICT succeed. Their awareness is higher. Their engagement with the work is higher. The how like, what’s in it for me? That’s a question that’s been answered answered months ago. They’re really they’re really with you there.

You’re getting a metrics informed ICP. So because you’ve been incorporating so much data in how you’re pursuing the people that you’re going to research, you’re going to get something that has a lot more data, like, grounding in data reality by the time you ship, and that’s gonna make so much of the work that comes later easier to ship.

So ICP, it’s not just an artifact. It’s something that can seem like, it’s an understanding. Like, it’s it’s not just a piece of paper that says this is who we sell to. It’s I know this is who we sell to, and I know what that’s like, and I know what it feels like. I have a qualia of it. So that that magic question email automation, that’s gonna keep building up your, database.

And then you’ll get that dynamic artifact ICP from your jobs research. And then most importantly, you’re gonna have a team of people who trust your ICP because they were a part of making it. It’s not just Thelma’s project. It’s Thelma and Louise’s ICP.

Everyone’s part of it now. It’s not just my thing. It’s our thing. So thus concludes your introductory crash course lesson, researching and mobilizing ICP.

Thank you so much. This was so fun.

What questions do you have?

I’ll start with you.

So good, Ali. Okay. Amazing.

I’m just so glad that I know that some people couldn’t make it today. I’m so glad that they’ll be able to watch this replay, and the documents you put together too. There’s just a lot of really good stuff here. Even things that are just like, are you saying lagging and leading indicator when you’re talking to a client?

Like, are you using the sorts of jargon? And I know it’s not just jargon. There’s so much more to it than what that. Yeah.

But when a CEO or CMO or anybody hears you use the right words, Your invoice gets paid. Right? You’re the person that knows what they’re doing. So Yeah.

I just love this for, like, introducing people more and more or, like, expanding on, the way that they already talk in organizations.

Yeah. So lots of good stuff here. Thank you, Ali. Yes. Does anybody have any questions for Ali today on ICP research? Or I want you to anything in particular to what we just saw?

No? How are we gonna go forward and use this? What do you think your clients would want to know from Ali if they were here?

That’s a different story. Yeah.

No? Are we good?

Yeah. I think there’s a lot to think about. Oh, Jessica is here. Okay. Jessica has, a question.

Feel free to play. Oh, Clara already asked her. That’s right. So, Jessica, come off mute.

Let’s hear your question. Normally, I would like a win first, but I feel like, I think, honestly, everybody is kind of, like, a little bit scared right now. Yeah. A lot.

Yeah. In a good way, though. Right? Like, there’s a lot of information downloaded on a very specific thing, that is so high value, and now they can go out and talk about this, but it’s, like, processing time.

That’s what I’m thinking of at least. Okay. So, yeah, that’s, Jessica, please.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes.

Okay. Sorry. I’m on the iPad again. Okay. So hi. Thank you so much. I I so I announced in our group last week that, I’ve shifted my business a lot.

So I’m moving away from freelance copywriting to building a book publishing agency. And so this has really shifted all the things because what normally I would go you know, all this focus on companies and, you know, teams and things like that, I’m starting to feel like it might focus a lot more on the thought leader themselves, and there may be a limited number of team involved if at all.

And so I guess I’m just kind of wondering what your thoughts are on how to really identify even the people I’m focused on even for step one. Because the one person that comes to mind for me is the person who wants to either write their book or get their book written and published and marketed and all that.

But I’m not sure, especially in the book writing stage, how much of their team will be involved. So I guess I’m again, all new. This is a very recent shift. So any insights you would have would just I’d really appreciate.

So you are you are starting a book publishing agency. Have you published any books yet, or you’re very, very early?

I’ve published books before, but since this shift in the agency in doing this, no. Not since then. K. We just closed the first.

You just closed your first Yes.

Project since shifting this bus to back to this. Yeah.

And if you had to describe the people who are the authors here, their thought leaders, and their team may or may not be involved in the authorship of the work that you publish?

Yes. I’m not I I haven’t encountered a situation where I would be working with the team, especially in the writing part of it.

Okay.

So your your an ICP can be an an individual.

Is there a reason why you’re feeling like you need to in include the your customer’s team or your client’s team?

No. I just in step one, when you had it broken down, I was like, okay. Well, obviously, the person we would be writing the book for, which is typically, like, the CEO, the founder, the person who wants to build up their authority, you know, that part.

But in terms of any other roles that might be involved, I’m not sure at this point, but if I were working on their marketing, then I could see team more involved. But I was just curious, you know, if yeah.

I was just trying to get any I know it’s a very niched, market I’m talking about.

But Okay.

Good. This is good good point of clarification.

So the people in that first section, like the CEO, your work desk, whoever it is, those are going to be people who are going to be part of the develop development of your ICP.

So when you are working, when you’re working on this agency, the people for you might be your editor in chief, whoever edits the books that come in, or maybe it’s the person who’s responsible for getting the manuscript from digital to paper form or working with the Amazon, some kind of coordination liaison. So you would be working internally with those folks. And then Yeah. If you need to be looking at your your client’s ICP, so the the ICP that they may have would more likely be for their readers if the product that they’re going to sell is a book.

So that would probably be how I would shift that. I it sounds like their team is probably not super significant here.

Yeah. That’s what I was thinking at first. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Sure.

Awesome. Yeah. It’s quite tricky when you’re figuring out something almost brand new. Like, in Jessica’s case, she has, of course, done lots of this work for other people before just over time, and now she’s, like, turning it into an agency.

But the people differ. You know? And it’s been years of doing this work, so, really tough to to figure out your I mean, this is a huge challenge. Right, Ally? Like, nobody easily lands on their ICP. Or do you know anybody who has?

No. No.

No. Just fully no. Yeah. Exactly.

I mean, maybe maybe maybe maybe people who had a very clear idea in mind before they started, like, the founder of American Girl Doll, I think, had the vision for that entire company, but those are so, so rare.

That’s true.

But I can tell you. Okay. So I’m actually doing jobs to be done research now on people who hire jobs to be done providers because I’m so curious about this. Yeah.

So, what I would say to you, Jessica, is I don’t I would go, like, do some interviews with people who’ve hired a publisher. Like, there’s the one that, what’s it called? I don’t know. Nine or two.

It’s I don’t know what it’s called. I think April Dunford used them.

Page two.

Page two. Okay. There’s a number. So I would go say, like, did you, you know, did you hire an publishing agency and do some interviews?

Find people who are making that switch to go from all just make an ebook or I’ll or, or, actually, I don’t even know what the switch they’re making it from. I shouldn’t make the assumption. I love this game. I’d love to guess what the research is gonna tell.

I am wrong. I’m right fifty percent of the time and way wrong fifty percent. So that that’s what I would probably do to to investigate that.

That’s so smart. I love it. Cool. Excellent. Ali, that was amazing. Thank you so much.

Where can people do you are you on Instagram people can, like, reach out if they have further questions or wanna learn more? Yeah.

Okay. So I’m on LinkedIn now. The other socials, not so much.

And I’m working now on getting a more detailed, like, building your coalition around buy in for jobs to be done, DOC, etcetera.

Yeah. Email, course and a more detailed workbook with a little bit more. So I don’t tell Joanna, but my email my business’s email is not really that great. So, so, anyway, I’m getting that all done. It’s alie blum dot com, and it should be done hopefully, hopefully, middle of August.

Okay. Alie bloom dot com. Well, pop that in there. Amazing. Cool. Thanks again so much.

Thank you.

Thanks from everybody, and we look for I look forward to seeing you again, hopefully, at some event we both planned at somehow. Yeah. Hopefully.

Me too. Yeah.

Cool. Alright. Thanks, everybody.

Have a good day.

Take care.

Thank you.

Bye. Bye.

Worksheet

ICP Research Handbook

Worksheet

ICP Research Handbook

Transcript

Alright.

Y’all, I know you’re still filing in, but we have Ali here, Ali Bloom. I’ve have I ever said your full name? I’ve always said Ali Bloom. Is it Blum?

It’s Blum. Yeah.

It’s Blum.

I think we’re the only ones to pronounce it that way. The German pronunciation is Blum. I don’t know how my family did it this way, but here we are.

Got it. Okay. Cool. Well, so we’ve known each other forever.

Mhmm. It’s been a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Like, ten years maybe?

I was counting it earlier. Yeah.

Yikes. Spoke at, MicroConf at least one time together. Got to speak to them by each other at the speakers dinner. That was fun.

And Ali’s been working a lot on, gosh, all sorts of things. Do you wanna give a quick background on what you’ve been doing the last few years? Sure.

Yeah. So I took technical I met Joe and took Joe’s copy technical training too long ago. Like, really, truly close to a decade ago. Doesn’t the pandemic makes it seem like it was just a year or two ago.

And since then, I have worked in almost every department in a software company. So before copy, I did PR and content and marketing. And I said, I wanna get closer to the sale. Like, I gotta get closer.

So I kinda did copy, and I was like, write all these copy, did a lot of onboarding emails, and then started to feel like, well, I the product needs some help. Like, I gotta go fix the UX. So then I started going to UX, and then I started going to research. And I worked with Sofia Cantero, the founder of EnjoyHQ to because I was like, okay.

Actually, no. It’s not just me who needs to know it. Like, everyone needs to know the research and VOC. So how about I go mobilize VOC for all these people?

And so I got to help a lot of people get their repos set up and get into research and then research ops. And then, had a chance to go zero to one on a like, as a fractional, had a product last couple of years, which has been so cool.

And now I’m going back my I was pretty fractional pretty close to in house, and now I’m going back to, consultant helping people get buy in on VOC, jobs to be done, and research. Like, how do we actually do this CLG thing that that we talk about?

Yeah.

Dig it. Love it. So yes. It’s amazing. And I really love the progression of going from, like, focusing on copy to working so much in product to see where you can go with this career when you focus on, like, strategy, research, listening to customers.

Right? Like, there’s so much room out there. I think it’s really inspiring.

And so this month, we’re working on the buyer handbook, of course, in Coffee School Professional.

Part of that is really understanding your ICP.

And so we’ve been talking about ICPs a bit so far.

And now, yeah, I wanted to bring you in, Ali, just to, like, share how to do research for ourselves potentially for our own businesses as well as when clients when you’re working with a client, maybe they don’t know who they’re talking to. Yep.

Happens a lot.

They may not know they don’t know who they’re talking to.

Yeah.

Yes. Right? Perfect. So, I know we’ve only got an hour. We’ve got fifty five minutes left, so I would like to stop talking.

I’ll let you take over. Everybody, please get your notebooks ready. And, Ali, please take it away with helping us understand ICP research.

Woo hoo. Okay. Cool. Alright. Let’s see how good I can be at sharing my screen.

Let’s see. I have the browser open.

Okay.

I should have done this while you were talking. Would have been a much more dramatic event.

Oh, no. It’s good. Everyone’s having time to, like, get settled in too.

So it’s Yeah.

Okay.

There we go. Okay. Here we go. We go to present, and then we say presenter view, and then we say sent, and then we say share, and then audience window.

Perfect. Thank you. Okay. So you guys can see my screen?

We can see audience window. Yes.

Okay. Excellent. So I close this. You can see a nice Canva color palette here. Okay. Cool.

Wonderful.

Alrighty. So we’re gonna talk about how to research and mobilize an ICP that actually gets used. So I see so, so often that we do all this work, all this work to get our ICP, and then it just sits on a shelf or somebody’s, like, you know, worst case scenario, fighting us, questioning the fact that we would even do this. I’ve seen all kinds of ignoring of ICP or jobs to be on or any kind of customer development work ignored. So we’re gonna talk about how to bake that part in from the beginning and how to actually do some of the research.

So today, we’re gonna talk about how we can make an ICP useful, unignorable, mobilizable.

Didn’t tell me spell spell check didn’t say that was a fake word, so we’re going with it. How do you build a coalition around your ICP?

And then the five steps of which building a coalition is one of them to research and mobilize your ICP, and then what it kinda looks like when you’re done, what you kinda get out of that.

So before we get into that, I’m gonna ask you guys, why bother researching ICP? Why are we doing this?

Anybody? Go for it.

Internal buy in right from the beginning?

Yeah. On what?

On who the client is and helping them see their client in a different light.

Yeah. Why do we need that?

Because they don’t understand the client and what they’re building it for. And then by the time they build it, it’s not what the client actually wants.

And then what happens?

They don’t use the information that they have, and it just stops right there. So, their copy changes, that’s not what they wanted to say. They don’t know who they’re talking to, and products just die on the vine. Yeah.

The products die on the vine. Yes. So often, if we do not get this right, and it it goes through all these different departments, we don’t get right, things die on the vine. That is that is a really good way to put it. Cool. So that’s what we’re doing this for. That’s why that’s our urgent reason to care here.

So before we get into some of the ways to make it succeed, there’s two main ways that I wanna talk about the how we can avoid failing and how you just nix these. Like, just crush them off your you’re not worried about them anymore. The first one is building something that I call a static ICP. So you’ve probably seen these.

If you’ve been working in marketing any amount of time, it’s like a list of attributes, and it’s fixed. I call it static because it’s fixed in a moment in time. It’s just a a description of of what we’re doing of who the person looks like. And what I call a dynamic ICP is something that’s constantly evolving and also speaks to how your ICP progresses through time.

So to give you an example, we might say, okay. Here’s a regional small business. They’ve got annual volume, hundred million dollars, ten locations, two to three hundred employees. They sell office supplies.

We could maybe sell them, like, CRM. Like, they’ve got some sales. We could maybe sell them HR software. Like, we can, like, there’s hints about things they might need, their business.

They need business things. But if we know, like, actually who their ICP like, who we’re talking to and what their moment in time is, then we might know. So I don’t know how many of you guys have seen the American Office, but we know that there are many different characters with many different roles, many different sets of circumstances. They go through mergers.

They go through getting spun back off. They go through potential downsizing. They have cost cutting. They have all of these different scenarios, some of which, result in buying decisions.

And they don’t the important thing about this is that we’re also looking at the individual, like, not the the company as as a whole necessarily. We’re selling to the company, but we wanna also make sure we we we talk about the individual because people buy things, not companies.

So pothole number two. So pothole number one, making sure that we have, like, a it’s a more, dynamic. We know the storyline in time. Particle number two is thinking you only need to research your customers.

So do you have any idea who the other person the other people we need to research as they’re doing this project?

The client.

Okay. Client, customer, pretty, like, a good product.

Any other guesses? So it’s your coworkers. It’s your colleagues.

So you’re going through this process. You’re gonna be researching your customer, but you’re going to be researching them the you’re going to be building a a tool that’s going to be used by your colleagues. So you wanna make sure you don’t exclude them from the process.

So this is especially, it’s especially important no matter if you’re in house or if you’re a consultant.

But it’s especially important to keep in mind because so often we and I used to do this all the time, and it it often got me tripped up. We’re often hired for expertise. We say we’re gonna go do this thing. We go off, we do the thing, and then we come back and we say, I did the thing.

Here’s the ICP. And then that can kind of sit on a shelf. So we wanna make our ICP stick. So part of what we’re gonna be doing here is making sure that we get that, get that understand who we’re going to be getting that buy in from before we start.

So that brings us to our five steps here.

Yep. So the five steps that we’re going to research and, to learn to research and mobilize your ICP. First is building your ICP coalition.

So we’ll talk about how to do that. So making sure you know who the people are that are going to be in part of this. Then there is quant research, two types of qualitative research, leading indicator and lagging indicator, and then, share as you go steps. So this is kind of a step you do every step of the process, but it’s a really important thing to keep in mind.

So the first step, building your coalition.

So your colleagues are your ICP for your ICP project. If you’re doing jobs to be done, you wanna do your the jobs to be done on your clients, on your colleagues. You wanna know what circumstances they’re in. You wanna know their stage of awareness.

Right? Because if we come in and we say, let’s do an ICP to someone who doesn’t even know they need an ICP, they’re totally unaware, you’re we wanna avoid going from that unaware or that problem or stage to just like, hey. Be most aware. Have high intent.

Let’s just do this thing now. It’s a very, very hard jump to make in a single conversation. I haven’t been able to do it. Maybe your maybe your skills are better, but it’s really, really challenging.

So we wanna nurture people along those stages of awareness by understanding where they are.

So and why this matters? Okay. So miss Congeniality, Ocean’s eight. We wanna be less of this think of yourself less of this, like, lone wolf who’s like a like a genius and has it right, but is alienating everyone around them.

Miss Congeniality, Sandra Bullock plays a, FBI agent who goes undercover in a beauty pageant, and, she’s not taken seriously. She’s also really mean to all of her coworkers. She’s right. She saves the day, but barely with the help of her teammates.

Versus Ocean’s eight, she’s leading this coalition of people to do a heist. So she knows that she’s really good at planning the heist, but she’s gonna be bring in people who are really good at at safe cracking or, like, rebuilding jewelry. Fencing is a thing you need to know how to do if you’re in a heist. So we’re going to be working with other people. So we wanna make sure that we’re in a scenario where we’re setting ourselves up to have that pro social kind of collaborative, heist that we’re making we’re doing together.

I should think of a fun way to work in heist heist, jokes here. Okay. Cool. So this brings us to our first activity.

So, Sarah, I will take you up on that offer. If you could send that, doc out to everyone. So I have a coalition building workbook.

You guys are the ones getting to see it for, like you’re gonna be the first people to ever see it. I am so excited to hear what you think of it. There’s a lot more that I wanna add to it. But the way that I want you to think about it is these are the different things. These are the blanks to fill in as you’re going through to build your ice to research and mobilize your ICP.

So you should see in the first section, build your coalition, there should be a couple of different blocks, and it should say name, title. Some of the titles will be filled out, stage of awareness with respect to ICP, and a problem that they complain about.

So, for example, if you are working with a CEO and the CEO is just like, god. Our churn sucks. Our churn sucks.

Marketing can’t get it together. Product can’t get it together. Like, our churn sucks. That’s what they’re complaining about. They’re not complaining about not having ICP. They’re complaining churn sucks.

So I want you to, I have a couple there. You’re gonna wanna do this for, like, three to five people ideally, but for right now, I’m gonna put five minutes on a timer. I’m gonna invite you to think of like, to fill in the blanks that you can for one person.

So other people, you’re you’re gonna have three different people that you can invite in types of people to invite into your coalition.

Your champion, this is prompt someone who’s not terribly involved in the nitty gritty of the work. That’s the CEO most likely.

Your allies, these are people in other departments. You’re like, you’re you’re doing some of the work together and then your coconspirators.

This is your work bestie. This is who you’re gonna come in and be like, okay. I can’t can you believe this? Ding dong.

Like, that kind of person where you can have that kind of relationship where you can talk through how to actually do this. So five minutes on, I’m gonna ask you guys to, fill in one just the profile for just one coalition number. I’m gonna put five minutes on the clock, and then I’m gonna ask one of you to share and tell me about this person. And if it’s not if you’re, if you’re a consultant, you can do it for, like, your client point of contact.

Okay. That’s just about five minutes. Does anybody want how’s it going? And does anybody want to share a member of your coalition?

Anyone dare to?

I’ll dare. Okay. I was gonna call on you, Claire. You look like you might want to. That’s awesome.

Well, it’s like I’m so curious. I wanted a feedback.

Cool.

I have, for example, the director of marketing, who’s stage of awareness for ICP is probably about a five out of five because it’s their job.

Okay.

And they’re probably complaining about low conversions. Put all this effort to get leads in, and they’re not converting, and they’re complaining about it because it’s messing with their interests.

Okay. Is this a real director of marketing or a hypothetical director of marketing?

A hypothetical director of marketing.

Okay. If you were to, turn this to a real director of marketing you may have worked in in the past, what would you do to take that one level of one level more specific?

I don’t think I have worked with the real director of marketing, to be honest.

Okay.

Yeah. I’ve worked with the head of sales.

Okay.

She was kind of like a three out of five.

Okay.

And sort of at a loss, one between departments. Like, everyone’s going like, this is the thing that you should be focusing on. No. This is it. No. This is it.

So she was really struggling to know, like, what do I what am I telling my reps? What is the message that we’re putting through to people?

Yeah. And what were the specific go ahead.

I’m sorry. I’m just asking if that was the more specific Yeah.

A lot.

What were some of the consequences of not knowing what she could tell her reps about what kind of pitch to make?

I think it was more emotional than actual, like, real life consequences. So I think it was more just like, I need to prove results, prove myself, and I’m not sure that I’m going to.

So many things are changing. I’m confused. They’re confused. Like, we need a ground base.

Okay.

I’m not sure.

Yeah. I’m not sure what her internal conversations look like.

Okay. What kind of was she hitting her her quotas? Was her team hitting her quotas? Their quotas?

I actually don’t know. We mostly had a conversation about, like, what she’s seeing in customers at the moment.

It was more of like a discovery call for me to understand Okay.

What they’re hearing from their current customers. Cool. But yeah.

Cool. Okay.

Excellent. Anyone else wanna share theirs?

It’s a small group. There’s not much room for you guys to hide.

I’m I’m saying this to, like, try to give you an out if you don’t want to.

But Jessica, I know you’re on your, treadmill right now, but, is there anything that you this is a good chance to get some notes as you work through what you’re working on.

Any thoughts? Anything you wanna share? If you’re talking, you’re on mute. Just trying not to be called on.

You came off mute, Jessica.

No? Alright. Everyone’s shy today, Ally. Oh, Katie’s down. Katie, are you down?

I’m mute. Sorry. Okay. Yeah. But I got on problem agreement evidence. Could you clarify what you were looking for there?

Yeah. So this is where we’re going to find, this is something we’re coming to later. So this is great feedback for me of how to work out with this. So that’s research that you’ll get to find that you can say, okay.

I see you head of sales. I see you head of marketing. This problem’s real. I know I I found some evidence.

Like, I’m not I take your word for it, and I want to go track down some evidence. So what I do with these this is sort of the starting point, but what I ultimately like to do over time is keep a problem library. Anytime somebody complains about something, I write it down. And at first, I’m not trying to prove it.

I’m not trying to solve it. I’m just like, okay. Someone’s not meeting their quotas. Sales is about product and marketing.

Like, some there’s problems. I’m just gonna keep track of them, and I’ll add all that data as I go.

Any other questions?

So but the problem agreement is around you finding evidence that that problem exists and that the product that you’re selling, in this case, like, an ideal client profile, could solve that problem Exactly.

Yeah.

To support the need for what you want to sell. Okay.

Yeah. The key to getting your project to to be really, really popular is to position it as a solution to other people’s problems. So we wanna be the experts. I don’t know too much about Margaret Thatcher, except I know that she was a politician who was famous for knowing more than anyone else in the room. So you wanna show up to these rooms knowing more about that problems that other people are having than they do, and that’s looking for some of that evidence as you go. We’ll talk about the ways you can do that in a second.

But there’s also a second kind. So you’ll also see that there’s this quant research step as one of the next, channels. So this is the or one of the next blanks to fill in. So this is one of the other areas where we wanna be collecting a lot of data.

So this is the second step of looking for our ICP, and this is where we’re going to figure out how we can make sure that this is an ICP grounded in reality and an ICP grounded in what people actually do versus an ICP that’s maybe a flight of fancy as many many of them are. Now anybody here do we have you can say in the chat or not in the chat. Anybody here, like, Okay. Okay.

Four out of three people are bad at math, and I’m the fourth.

So Great.

Okay. Cool.

So I’m not either. I love having numbers. I want them. I need them. I crave them.

I don’t wanna make a decision without them. I am, like, very data driven, when I make decisions at work. Not at home. But at work, I’m very, very data driven.

However, I’m not a numbers person. A day when I have to go fight a dashboard tool is a bad, bad day. I know SQL. I would prefer not to have to write my own query.

So how do you what do you do with this? So you can say, like, alright. This is actually a good opportunity to really break down what we mean by quant and what we want our quant to do. So we’re really asking a question with our quant data.

How do you measure ideal? Like, when we say our ideal customer, what does that even mean? Like, how do we know that they’re ideal? What’s the type of, thing that they’re doing in our product?

So that might be activation metrics. It could be churn. It could be volume.

Some indicator that they are picking up what we’re putting down.

Are there any other, are there any other metrics that you guys use when you’re talking about ideal customer profile that, I might be missing here? I’m sure there’s many.

I mean, I feel I’m, like, less in the software space and more in coaching, but I think, like, success, like, they achieve the outcome that was promised in the in the original pitch.

Yeah. Did they actually get a benefit out of the product or the service? Yeah.

That’s a big one. What else?

Everyone’s being so quiet today. Everyone is shy. No.

We’re talking about key metrics. Correct? Really, what we’re looking at are key metrics. So you can really look at that for driving could be primary goals.

Could be driving revenue growth. It could be reducing costs. Would that be correct? So you could say, like, maybe one person wants to have cost savings, one person wants to increase conversion rates, one person wants more ARR, one person wants to have more MRR.

Would that be correct in what we’re looking at for metrics?

All of it. Yep. Yes.

Depending on the person and the ICP you’re interviewing. Correct?

Yeah. That’s a that’s exactly it. So we’re we’re going to want to see customers that are not going to cost us money to serve. So those higher margin, that’s a customer, that’s a one way to look at it. All the other ones that you outlined as well.

And sort of like what what you were saying, Claire, around that that person that’s head of sales had a really emotional component, they all there are some numbers they care about. So it’s we can figure out, okay, what are the numbers that they care about? And we can say, alright. Let’s point our lens. So like I said, I’m not a numbers person, but here’s how I use that as an opportunity to pull other people into my coalition.

So what I do is get really good at framing the questions that I wanna ask. Depending on how much time you guys have get to spend with data, the the opportunities are really endless for the queries and the questions you can come up with. And that is really a huge, huge part of the data work that that happens on data teams. So you can get really good at saying, this is the number I need to understand, and here’s how I need to understand it changing over time.

And then you can find a quant person either at your client, like, hey. Do you have a date person chartered data? Maybe it’s it’s gonna be somebody different at every at every type of company and say, hey. Can we pair on this?

Because I have some things that are really important to some of these these execs that I wanna figure out how it works. And then you can also use that as an opportunity to ask the data person, hey. You guys you you seen any numbers that we gotta pay attention to? Because those data people are probably getting ignored because they’re probably coming up with number after number after number presented in a very numerical kind of way with without the story, without connecting it to a problem.

So you can also help them and bring them into your.

Okay. So that’s it. Step two, quant data. You wanna know you wanna be looking at who has done things that indicate they are the the kind of customer you want to do that with again.

So the next question or the next step is, first of two qualitative research steps. And This is leading indicator qualitative research. So this is happening a little early on, in our relationship with the customer, and I call it the magic question email. I actually call it the magic question email automation. I don’t I left that word off here.

Okay. So I this is another thing that I learned from Joe ten years ago that still works.

So this magic question is, what’s going on in your world that led you to do the thing? And with every client that I work with, I set up a welcome email that has this question at the bottom. Then I pipe the replies to a folder and a qualitative research repository. I use EnjoyHQ.

And then over time, you have a single location with, I’m not exaggerating, I have one client. I think there’s, like, twenty five hundred responses in there right now. And one of the engineers on the team came to me and said, she reads every hour. Every day, she’ll go in and just read replies from an hour.

So when she goes into her product engineering meetings, she’s the Margaret Thatcher in that room because she knows whether or not something’s gonna fail or succeed before they even build it. Whether or not they listen to her, that’s we’ll come we’ll have a master class on that another time, but this is a really, the most powerful thing for building, again, that dynamic ICP. Right? So this is going to give you the answers to questions that pea or the data that people have.

Let me start that over.

Sending this out right after somebody has signed up to start using a product, that’s the moment of that high tension. That’s in that exact switch moment. That’s when they’re really heightened to say, I wanna make sure that I I’m doing something. Like, something has just changed that makes me actually wanna do this.

That energy is gonna be really high. You’re gonna wanna make sure that you capture as much of that as you can. So this is an email that I wrote for a company called Mural many, many moons ago. This is an example of the the type of formula that I use.

There’s a an introduction. I wrote it from CEO.

We had some VOC at the time from people saying Mural was a missing piece they were looking for, so we included it. We added some credibility around the different types of companies that we worked with. We said what’s gonna be coming next because Mural, like many whiteboard tools, blank slate. And at the time when we wrote this, this was not an established category. People did not know how to use these things. And then the one question.

So our activity now is to write your magic question emails. So you’ll scroll down, and you’ll see that’s one of we’re gonna skip quant because that’s not my, that’s gonna be different depending on where you are and because I hate it. And I love this. So we’re gonna go to a magic question email. I can just be so much more useful for you here than I can with the quant stuff. Make a good friend in quant is my quant advice. So, put another five minutes on, and I’ll invite you to write a first draft.

And then I’m gonna ask somebody to read their email if they want. If they’re too shy, then I’ll just go on to the next part. But anyway. Okay.

Sorry. Quick question. Who are we writing this email for? Like, to our ideal client? Good question.

Pick it to a new customer if you work at a for a pro a company where you work or for a client that you might have or maybe one that would that you had, in the past.

Okay. That’s just about five minutes. Does anybody have a first draft that they want to share?

Sure. I’ll go.

Alright.

Doing it. Jumping straight in. Full disclosure, it’s the end of my work day. My brain is fried.

It’s a first round.

No worries.

I’ve written it from, like, a really old client of mine that was super interesting to work with called Pave. So it’s, welcome to Pave name. I’m John, the CEO, and I just wanted to take this time to say we’re really excited to help you grow your newsletter’s revenue.

Pave is the new kid on the block, but thousands of independent newsletter creators have already used it to sell recurring sponsorship slots to big brands like Monday dot com, Masterwork Masterworks, and company Abe. You will find all the tools you need to monetize without spamming your readers with relevant ads. But before you get started, I have one quick question for you. What was going on in your world today that led you to sign up to Pave?

Just hit reply to this email and let me know.

Awesome.

Yeah. Cool. So it sounds like you had this new product in an established space that had already gotten a lot of success. I’m sorry.

You’re celebrating that, making it really exciting. Look at us. You’re or look at you. You’re joining this cool cool new kids club.

And and that’s a great question. Awesome.

I have a question about the question, though. Yeah.

I’ve used it before, and I found, like, people don’t respond to email as much as I’d hope if if there’s, like, a large user base.

So would you ever use, like, a segmenting link, you know, where you just have, like, two options?

So I would probably want to know a little bit more about the situation where you weren’t getting the responses, because I have I worked in one category where I I basically could not get anyone to reply to my emails, but I’ve not experienced that elsewhere.

I have experienced times where, somebody comes in and changes my magic question email and the responses go down for a little bit. So there’s a lot of different factors. But what I would say definitively is that I would leave this question open ended for as long as you can because we don’t know the finite number of reasons why people signed up yet. And the goal that or the the biggest, benefit of having this run continuously, build that repo, is that you get a repo a repository of voice of customer data, and that is part of your dynamic ICP.

So your your ICP is an artifact, but it’s also where your customers are talking, and they’re people. They’re humans. They say things. They complain.

They’re disgruntled. They’re happy. They’re sad. The way they talk about things also changes. Like, I’m sure you guys are seeing with with a lot of the AI things that are coming on, the way that somebody may have responded to this email two years ago, they may be talking about the same things, but in a very different language now compared to them.

So we wanna know that keeps us keeps us sharp with what folks are knowing. So I I don’t really use the segmenting, links unless I know definitively, unless I’ve already built, tested, and had my ICP working for a long period of time, and I I know it’s good, then I wanna start with open ended.

Got it. Okay. So you just send these all to, like, an inbox, where you can access them.

I’m guessing if they go straight to, say, the CEO’s inbox, he might not be active in pulling them to your Yeah.

So you’re gonna want there is some coordination that you’re gonna wanna do with the from name.

So you’ll see on that workbook, there’s a lot of different moving parts to this email. So the the copy is, like, that’s your first thing to get it going, but you’re gonna need to make sure that you have sign off from the person who’s going to be using their from name. Maybe you use a fake email address that’s from the real person and you send the CEO the best emails.

And your I use a qualitative research repository as my receptacle. So there’s a tool called EnjoyHQ, Dovetail, notably, Aurelius. There’s several of them several of them now. I send it all to a folder inside one of those tools.

Great. Okay.

Thank you.

There’s probably other ways to do it.

The only thing I like less than quant is figuring out how to use software. So there are ways to do it that or not this, but this is the one that works I have found that works the best and the easiest for me.

Cool.

Okay. I’m gonna keep going because we’re at step three, and I wanna make sure we get to get through everything. So thank you for sharing. This is awesome.

And like I said, you’re gonna generate tons and tons of responses. In almost every case, there are few limited ones where even tweaks won’t won’t help you too much. We can probably, we can still get other data points here. So step four.

So that leading indicator, you’re gonna say, like, they’re coming in. They they’re right in this switch moment. Then we’re gonna look at our lagging indicator. So this is where we’re going to talk to people who are already successful with us and kind of look back at how they made their decision.

So this is where we’ll do some jobs to be done documentary style interviews. So I chatted with Joe a little bit beforehand. I think you guys have some familiarity with it. Jobs to be Done is its entire own, master class series, so I’ll just hit some of the high notes here.

What I I use the jobs to be done, the job story artifact as the main artifact in an ICP. And the top of that artifact, you’re going to have a sentence that describes your customers, what we call their job story.

So their job story is when I am in a set of circumstances, give me a way to make some kind of progress so I can achieve some kind of outcome. And they’re all going to have this sort of story flow. Once upon a time, I was ahead of sales, and everyone was telling me all of these different things that I needed to do. And I couldn’t figure out who was on first, and I wasn’t meeting my quota. So I need a way to figure out how I can tell my team the single sales pitch to make or the couple of sales pitches to make So I can hit my quotas. I can hit my numbers. My team can all get their commissions.

Right? So we may have a job story come out something like that, and that’s what we’re we’re going to be driving towards here.

Lots of great resources on jobs to be done interviews if you haven’t done them before. I don’t have a a desi dedicated script I use for everyone. I mapped them out based on the category.

But I do have five questions here that I wanna share as an example of how to how to get good data.

First, I always wanna ask somebody about themselves and the role of the company. So much gold in there. I wanna know when they first signed up. I wanna know when they first started looking.

I wanna know what else they considered and what they liked about those other solutions. And I wanna know who else was involved in the decision. This will vary drastically. Like, I have one client.

There’s fifteen people involved in the decision. I’ve worked with others where it’s you’re selling to the buyer. Like, the buyer is the user.

So keep so there’s lots of ways to do it. The the important things to remember are how to, ask good questions to make make sure you get really good data and some just some do’s and don’ts.

I don’t know why I said just some do’s and don’ts, like diminutive as if it’s not, like, the the main takeaway for research. That was a weird thing I just did. So what you want to do is imagine you’re a detective or a documentarian. You are studying a thing that has already happened.

You want to know the moment when somebody switched, when they said, I can’t take it anymore. I gotta get something else, And that already happened. You wanna do that instead of imagining that you’re that they’re a fortune teller. Imagining you can say, like you you don’t wanna say, what would you do in the future?

Or do you think you would do this? Or blah blah blah blah blah. You wanna know what happened.

Another thing that you wanna do is focus on having questions that start with what, when, who, and how.

And there’s a lot of reasons for this, but there’s two main reasons to avoid why. Whether you are a student of linguistics linguistics, psychology, hostage negotiation, patriarchy, all of these systems as you study them, they will tell you to avoid the question why because it is very often accusatory, and it has this kind of accusatory note baked into it. So we wanna avoid it. The second reason is that it can be kind of hard to answer.

I like to give the example and I may have learned this one from Joe too. If we say, you know, why do you love your spouse? Oh, well, why do I love my spouse? Versus what do you love about your spouse?

Hopefully, there is a long, long list and you don’t stop talking until we shut you up. So we wanna make sure we’re asking these kinds of questions that are going to elicit good responses.

Do record the call. One thousand percent get consent and record the call. Do not trust your notes. This is one of the biggest beginner mistakes. I know you guys are learning all about VOC.

I also say if you’re talking to other people who have not done this, those low awareness colleagues of yours, make sure if they’re having calls, get them to record it. Expect it to take two to three months before the message really sinks in. Just keep just kinda keep reminding them. Hey. Thanks for the notes. Did you do you have a call? Whatever.

And then two other techniques I like to probe on general words. If someone says, well, it was just better, what does better mean? What about it was better, versus letting a throwaway word lie. You can’t use better in a in a headline.

That’s not gonna get you anywhere. And then recap and restate. So this is a great way to find, where you may have gotten it wrong and to elicit a response. So you may say, oh, okay.

I heard you say that you were, you had three different meetings in one day, and everybody gave you a different, thing they wanted you to sell.

Do I but you weren’t sure which of the people you should listen to. Do I have that right? And then your head of sales might say, well, actually, it was really the CEO told me to go talk to these people because the CEO didn’t know, and he wanted their opinions or whatever it is. So that gives you an opportunity to get someone to correct you while agreeing with you.

Do I do I have that right? Like, am I picking up what you’re putting down? You can say, oh, no. Not really.

It’s still, like, a kind of agreement type mechanism. Okay.

Step five.

Share as you go. So remember at the beginning, we talked about building our coalition. We talked about wanting to get that trust early on, bringing people in. And, someone I don’t remember who asked a question about this problem agreement evidence.

So you’re going to go through and do this research. You’re going to get evidence of other people’s problems, and you’re going to hear it. You’re gonna be able to share it with people. And And you know what you’re gonna get to say? You’re gonna get to say the three best words in the English language. It’s not I love you. It’s you were right.

Very, very few of us get to hear that in at home, at work, and you’re gonna get to hear that. Like, you’re gonna get to or people you’re working with will get to hear that from you, further endearing them to your cause. So I like to say you’re we’re doing less, like, launching the new iPhone. We’re not going off doing our engineering.

We would’ve built them. We would’ve given them a faster horse if we asked them what we wanted. We’re not doing that. We’re not up on stage.

We’re not separate. We’re a lot more Julia Child. Like, this is how I crack the eggs. Do you wanna taste some of this soup before I add add a little bit more salt in?

We are cooking together. We are involved in this. You’re the expert. You don’t wanna diminish your expertise, but you’re involving people, as you go.

And so there’s a lot of different ways that I like to do that.

My favorite, favorite, favorite thing is to take an interview that you’ve done, get a sixty to ninety second clip where somebody where the customer is talking about a pain point someone else cares about. So if I was working with this head of sales and I’m talking with a customer and that customer is like, you know, I thought you guys were, like, I thought you guys were a CRM, but then I started using you, and I couldn’t, like, I couldn’t do this one thing that is essential for CRMs.

Snip it, put it into the script audiogram, send it to the head of sales in a very casual, informal way. Hey. I heard remember that thing you were telling me the other day? Like, I just got off the phone with this customer. I think you’re gonna wanna hear this. And the reason for this, nobody wants to listen to an hour long interview. Nobody.

You we will do them only when we have an external or internal push to do so. I actually have this story of when I had there were some jobs to be done interviews sitting in the repo for a year that I knew I needed to listen to, but I didn’t listen to them until I found something in the data that said, oh, I gotta fix that. Where’s the data? Okay.

So and so did the research. I’m gonna go get it. So we need to give somebody a push. Ten hours of research, one hour of research, half hour call, this is a big ask.

But there is nobody who is going to hit say no to a sixty second clip that breaks up their day, gives them something really easy to listen to that says you were right.

So highly recommend it. Descript, there’s other tools. Descript is the I haven’t it’s the one to beat. So okay.

So you do all of this, and then what happens when you’re done? So you have all these steps. You’re building your coalition. You’re doing your quant research.

You’ve got your leading lagging indicators for qualitative research, and you’ve been sharing as you’re going.

So at the end, we’re not just getting a document, not just getting an artifact. So at the end, we’re getting a team of people who are bought in and want to see ICT succeed. Their awareness is higher. Their engagement with the work is higher. The how like, what’s in it for me? That’s a question that’s been answered answered months ago. They’re really they’re really with you there.

You’re getting a metrics informed ICP. So because you’ve been incorporating so much data in how you’re pursuing the people that you’re going to research, you’re going to get something that has a lot more data, like, grounding in data reality by the time you ship, and that’s gonna make so much of the work that comes later easier to ship.

So ICP, it’s not just an artifact. It’s something that can seem like, it’s an understanding. Like, it’s it’s not just a piece of paper that says this is who we sell to. It’s I know this is who we sell to, and I know what that’s like, and I know what it feels like. I have a qualia of it. So that that magic question email automation, that’s gonna keep building up your, database.

And then you’ll get that dynamic artifact ICP from your jobs research. And then most importantly, you’re gonna have a team of people who trust your ICP because they were a part of making it. It’s not just Thelma’s project. It’s Thelma and Louise’s ICP.

Everyone’s part of it now. It’s not just my thing. It’s our thing. So thus concludes your introductory crash course lesson, researching and mobilizing ICP.

Thank you so much. This was so fun.

What questions do you have?

I’ll start with you.

So good, Ali. Okay. Amazing.

I’m just so glad that I know that some people couldn’t make it today. I’m so glad that they’ll be able to watch this replay, and the documents you put together too. There’s just a lot of really good stuff here. Even things that are just like, are you saying lagging and leading indicator when you’re talking to a client?

Like, are you using the sorts of jargon? And I know it’s not just jargon. There’s so much more to it than what that. Yeah.

But when a CEO or CMO or anybody hears you use the right words, Your invoice gets paid. Right? You’re the person that knows what they’re doing. So Yeah.

I just love this for, like, introducing people more and more or, like, expanding on, the way that they already talk in organizations.

Yeah. So lots of good stuff here. Thank you, Ali. Yes. Does anybody have any questions for Ali today on ICP research? Or I want you to anything in particular to what we just saw?

No? How are we gonna go forward and use this? What do you think your clients would want to know from Ali if they were here?

That’s a different story. Yeah.

No? Are we good?

Yeah. I think there’s a lot to think about. Oh, Jessica is here. Okay. Jessica has, a question.

Feel free to play. Oh, Clara already asked her. That’s right. So, Jessica, come off mute.

Let’s hear your question. Normally, I would like a win first, but I feel like, I think, honestly, everybody is kind of, like, a little bit scared right now. Yeah. A lot.

Yeah. In a good way, though. Right? Like, there’s a lot of information downloaded on a very specific thing, that is so high value, and now they can go out and talk about this, but it’s, like, processing time.

That’s what I’m thinking of at least. Okay. So, yeah, that’s, Jessica, please.

Can you hear me okay?

Yes.

Okay. Sorry. I’m on the iPad again. Okay. So hi. Thank you so much. I I so I announced in our group last week that, I’ve shifted my business a lot.

So I’m moving away from freelance copywriting to building a book publishing agency. And so this has really shifted all the things because what normally I would go you know, all this focus on companies and, you know, teams and things like that, I’m starting to feel like it might focus a lot more on the thought leader themselves, and there may be a limited number of team involved if at all.

And so I guess I’m just kind of wondering what your thoughts are on how to really identify even the people I’m focused on even for step one. Because the one person that comes to mind for me is the person who wants to either write their book or get their book written and published and marketed and all that.

But I’m not sure, especially in the book writing stage, how much of their team will be involved. So I guess I’m again, all new. This is a very recent shift. So any insights you would have would just I’d really appreciate.

So you are you are starting a book publishing agency. Have you published any books yet, or you’re very, very early?

I’ve published books before, but since this shift in the agency in doing this, no. Not since then. K. We just closed the first.

You just closed your first Yes.

Project since shifting this bus to back to this. Yeah.

And if you had to describe the people who are the authors here, their thought leaders, and their team may or may not be involved in the authorship of the work that you publish?

Yes. I’m not I I haven’t encountered a situation where I would be working with the team, especially in the writing part of it.

Okay.

So your your an ICP can be an an individual.

Is there a reason why you’re feeling like you need to in include the your customer’s team or your client’s team?

No. I just in step one, when you had it broken down, I was like, okay. Well, obviously, the person we would be writing the book for, which is typically, like, the CEO, the founder, the person who wants to build up their authority, you know, that part.

But in terms of any other roles that might be involved, I’m not sure at this point, but if I were working on their marketing, then I could see team more involved. But I was just curious, you know, if yeah.

I was just trying to get any I know it’s a very niched, market I’m talking about.

But Okay.

Good. This is good good point of clarification.

So the people in that first section, like the CEO, your work desk, whoever it is, those are going to be people who are going to be part of the develop development of your ICP.

So when you are working, when you’re working on this agency, the people for you might be your editor in chief, whoever edits the books that come in, or maybe it’s the person who’s responsible for getting the manuscript from digital to paper form or working with the Amazon, some kind of coordination liaison. So you would be working internally with those folks. And then Yeah. If you need to be looking at your your client’s ICP, so the the ICP that they may have would more likely be for their readers if the product that they’re going to sell is a book.

So that would probably be how I would shift that. I it sounds like their team is probably not super significant here.

Yeah. That’s what I was thinking at first. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Sure.

Awesome. Yeah. It’s quite tricky when you’re figuring out something almost brand new. Like, in Jessica’s case, she has, of course, done lots of this work for other people before just over time, and now she’s, like, turning it into an agency.

But the people differ. You know? And it’s been years of doing this work, so, really tough to to figure out your I mean, this is a huge challenge. Right, Ally? Like, nobody easily lands on their ICP. Or do you know anybody who has?

No. No.

No. Just fully no. Yeah. Exactly.

I mean, maybe maybe maybe maybe people who had a very clear idea in mind before they started, like, the founder of American Girl Doll, I think, had the vision for that entire company, but those are so, so rare.

That’s true.

But I can tell you. Okay. So I’m actually doing jobs to be done research now on people who hire jobs to be done providers because I’m so curious about this. Yeah.

So, what I would say to you, Jessica, is I don’t I would go, like, do some interviews with people who’ve hired a publisher. Like, there’s the one that, what’s it called? I don’t know. Nine or two.

It’s I don’t know what it’s called. I think April Dunford used them.

Page two.

Page two. Okay. There’s a number. So I would go say, like, did you, you know, did you hire an publishing agency and do some interviews?

Find people who are making that switch to go from all just make an ebook or I’ll or, or, actually, I don’t even know what the switch they’re making it from. I shouldn’t make the assumption. I love this game. I’d love to guess what the research is gonna tell.

I am wrong. I’m right fifty percent of the time and way wrong fifty percent. So that that’s what I would probably do to to investigate that.

That’s so smart. I love it. Cool. Excellent. Ali, that was amazing. Thank you so much.

Where can people do you are you on Instagram people can, like, reach out if they have further questions or wanna learn more? Yeah.

Okay. So I’m on LinkedIn now. The other socials, not so much.

And I’m working now on getting a more detailed, like, building your coalition around buy in for jobs to be done, DOC, etcetera.

Yeah. Email, course and a more detailed workbook with a little bit more. So I don’t tell Joanna, but my email my business’s email is not really that great. So, so, anyway, I’m getting that all done. It’s alie blum dot com, and it should be done hopefully, hopefully, middle of August.

Okay. Alie bloom dot com. Well, pop that in there. Amazing. Cool. Thanks again so much.

Thank you.

Thanks from everybody, and we look for I look forward to seeing you again, hopefully, at some event we both planned at somehow. Yeah. Hopefully.

Me too. Yeah.

Cool. Alright. Thanks, everybody.

Have a good day.

Take care.

Thank you.

Bye. Bye.

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