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.