WEBVTT
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Hey, Greg.
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Welcome.
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You liked that music?
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Huh?
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digging that.
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Yeah, you got to have a little pump up music to get started here.
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Hey, welcome to the virtual CMO podcast in our masterclass series around building a strategic marketing plan.
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I'm really glad that you could join us today.
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Sure.
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Cool.
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Yeah.
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So, uh, as we were talking just a little bit about in the, in the pre-call, uh, this is part five of our series.
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So we started out talking about what it means to build a strategic marketing plan.
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And then what is your target market and ideal customer profile really important to have those things identified.
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And then in part.
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Three, we talked a little bit about product market fit and competitive differentiation, and then moved on to really creating your brand story.
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What does your brand represent?
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What does it mean?
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And I'm really excited today that now we're going to be able to explode that out a little bit and talk about really dominating the competition with a compelling three to five word marketing message.
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And you are the guy that I sought out to talk about this, because I know that this is a focus of your company pitch kitchen.
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And I was wondering if you could just start out the conversation today.
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By giving folks a little bit of a background on what you do and what his pitch kitchen.
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Yeah.
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Sure.
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So I'm Greg.
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And I started pitch kitchen.
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About four years ago, having a really, a whole career in selling a commodity services, like language translation services to companies like Apple and Texas instruments and IBM.
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And language translation.
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That means website translation.
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And that means using all sorts of artificial intelligence and software.
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And so I was selling all that stuff.
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And, uh, I realized that the marketing, that the marketing material that I got from marketing.
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Uh, was really bad.
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The sales decks that we had to use the, uh, even the homepage.
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That we refer to our customers too.
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I was really embarrassed to send our customers to them.
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Because there was just so self-serving, there were so focused on how great we were and how perfect our offering is.
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And that what's inspired me to just build my own sales enablement.
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Uh, sales slides and that, uh, I use that for myself and for my team, my sales team, and, uh, we were having good success and I decided that it was a real opportunity to do that on the side, start a side hustle, helping other sales teams.
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Develop their sales messaging, and slides to have better conversations.
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So, uh, I quit my job and did that full time because, um, it was really lucrative.
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Uh, because it's really filling a big need, this gap between sales and marketing that, uh, I found, so pitch kitchen is focused on, uh, fixing bad sales, presentations, and boring homepages that sadly make themselves the hero of the story.
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Hmm.
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I think that's great.
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You know, I worked at Oracle for 18 years and I'm very familiar with a lot of ugly sales presentation, sales decks, and it's not really anybody's fault.
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You know, people are trying to do the right thing.
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But there is this idea, like you said, if people being a little self serving, they want to talk so much about what their product or service does that they forget that it's really about engagement with your target buyer.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, it's engaging with your target buyer.
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It's also engaging with the ideas that your target buyer needs to understand, or the ideas that they understand, but they need you to shine more clarity around those ideas.
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And so those ideas, for example, HubSpot HubSpot came out in 2012 with this concept of what they called inbound marketing.
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And that's an idea that they had slides on.
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They had website content on, and it was an idea that they believed that that was the future of.
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Uh, of, of marketing.
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Uh, and they also appeal to customers who believed that in that marketing was the future as well, and something they should spend time on.
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So there was selling to people that we're talking about, an idea, they were promoting an idea that's gonna.
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That their ideal customers believe in already.
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And I think that's great marketing.
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That's a great marketing where you are not talking about yourself.
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You're not promoting your slogans or not about how awesome you are.
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But they're how awesome a particular idea is, and that idea or that, that path, or that.
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A method that our approach is the approach that leads to winning.
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And that's what I think, sadly, too many marketing teams, miss, they just focus like, Hey, I'm a marketer, I'm a CMO.
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Uh, I'm tired to do marketing.
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I'm going to market the hell out of this company.
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I'm just going to Mark it all day long and I'm going to shop for the mountain tops, how great our product does.
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But the reality is, and you know, this, I know this, we all know this.
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Nobody really cares about you or your product.
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People care about themselves and their businesses.
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And if you're coming to them, you know, with your fancy pants solution, talking about how great you are, uh, sadly that doesn't work anymore.
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No, that's so true.
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And I think you also mentioned something earlier that I think is really important.
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You know, we talk a lot about this concept of a buyer's journey and really, you know, there is this handoff between marketing and sales.
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That sometime is not a very.
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Uh, kind of contiguous process, right?
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Marketing is putting out all this fancy, uh, uh, messaging to the marketplace and then sales comes in with a completely different approach to how they do it.
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And so there's a disconnect between what customers may be I've seen on the website.
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Do you deal with that a lot?
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When you talk to your clients?
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Yeah, and this is the principle that I rest on.
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So, uh, Seth Godin just said yesterday, That the purpose of marketing.
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Is.
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Is change.
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The purpose of marketing is, is to, is to promote.
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The change.
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Uh, And I think that's a great definition.
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Uh, but the purpose of sales then is to help facilitate that change.
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So there's a perfect alignment in marketing sales.
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If your marketing is like, let's go back to the HubSpot analogy.
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If marketing is.
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To promote this idea of inbound marketing is the new better way to go about your marketing.
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Then the purpose of the sales team at HubSpot is to help people adopt and facilitate that change to, to start doing inbound marketing instead of outbound.
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Um, so, uh, that, I think there's the alignment.
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Yeah.
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I think that that makes a lot of sense.
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And it's so important because you know, that buyer's journey really is from before your customer to when you're in the buying process, to when you are a customer, you know, there are opportunities throughout that continuum and it's important that that messaging is consistent through there.
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About the buyer's journey, too many people talk about the damn buyer's journey as it.
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The end of the goal is that they're a customer.
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They buy a sign on the dotted line and press hard twice.
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So it goes through the carbon copies.
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Just kidding.
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That's a reference to that.
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So that's, to me, that's not the buyer's journey.
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The buyer's journey is their before state, before they met you.
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Uh, their current way of doing things that is, you know, maybe it's untenable, maybe it's okay.
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Maybe they're good to, to continue doing the things that they're doing today.
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Hopefully, if you're selling something to them, that's going to help them be better.
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Then the future, the journey that they're headed to is, is not to work with you, but to achieve that, that state, that future state, where they're, they're achieving their goal, where they're successful, where there have a better reputation or they're getting more customers or whatever their future state is.
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I think that that's the filter that I look at, what a buyer's journey.
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I think too many people think about buyer's journey to be, Oh, we put the finish line.
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Is when they are a customer and that's not the finish line because a year later they're going to move because so many SAS businesses today rely on, you know, their renewals and they're not going to get renewals.
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If they think their buyer's journey stops at the finish line of.
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Uh, sales.
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I think that's a great way to look at it.
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That's a very, uh, people can look at it very transactionally, right?
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And it's not, it's really a journey gets what, what are you enabling that customer to do?
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Because they've purchased your products or service and how can you help them on that, that full journey.
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I'd love to sort of dig into some of these points a little bit more with you.
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So let's start with the first one, which is really around simplifying your sales message, whether that's something on your website or in your presentations.
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So what do you think are the elements sort of have a good, strong sales message?
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Yeah.
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Um, So.
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Uh, the sales message really needs to be.
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When I say singular sales message is the platform for.
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Uh, are you still there by the way?
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Yeah, I'm still here.
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Yeah.
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The sales, when I say the sales message, what is not so much your elevator pitch, which is like a sentence.
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But what is the.
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The essential story that you're all about.
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And, uh, I'm writing a book now called the 12 essential conversations.
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Uh, in sales therapy.
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Uh, the 12 essential conversations that are needed to help a customer along that buyer's journey.
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Um, and, and again, with the goalpost being, not the sale, but the, where they are successful.
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And I think the fundamental sale.
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The, the attributes of a great sales message is number one.
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It, uh, it's not, self-serving, it's not a slogan that promotes are great.
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You are, it's a slogan that points to the future state that your customers want to be in.
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So for example, like.
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Uh, Donald Miller.
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Well, let's talk about Donald Miller's story brand at the moment.
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Uh, Donald Trump.
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So, uh, yesterday was inauguration day.
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Uh, yes, Donald Trump was president for four years.
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It's a fact, uh, it's another fact that his slogan that had five words make America great.
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Again.
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Uh, spoke to his people.
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It was started with a verb like Simon Sinek, start with why.
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Like, um, uh, Nike's just do it.
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And the three of those slogans speak to their tribe, speak to their people, speak to their constituents.
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About a future vision of themselves or a, like, what do you need to do so that you can be successful?
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And so I think those are really powerful things to have a three to five word hashtag or a story.
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That's not about you, but it's about the place that you are helping your people get to.
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And I say you're.
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Let me just stop there.
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Uh, I'm sorry if I'm rambling, but.
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no, you're not rambling at all.
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I think that makes a lot of sense.
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It's very action-oriented but you know, I think we've talked about on this show before that there aren't really that many truly unique.
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Products in the marketplace, most things or an iteration of something that's already there.
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And so I think that there's a temptation for a lot of businesses to want to say more because they feel like they need to say more to differentiate their product from their competitors.
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How would you respond to that?
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Or just this notion that we've just got to say more because that's really where the differentiator comes in.
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Uh, when you used to say, you're saying that people need to say more.
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I'm sorry.
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Yeah, when they are, whether it's their sales message or the verbiage on their website that they feel they need to explain in, in very robust terms, sort of why they're different, because it's, it might not be obvious as to why company A's all that different from company B.
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Right.
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Well, it's interesting.
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Well, so many things I'm thinking about.
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I had a poll on LinkedIn last week and the pole was, uh, what's your biggest competition right now.
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And there were three choices.
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One was your direct competition of companies selling similar products and services.
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To customers who are distracted doing other things and three.
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Uh, I have no competition.
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And believe it or not, nobody voted for one nobody.
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So it's like, I think it's an L it's too.
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Self-centric to think that you need to be spending time talking about how unique your thing is.
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I think the focus should be on.
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On on the problem that your customers are facing, talking about that problem.
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And the w and if you can describe your customer's problem.
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Better than they can even describe it themselves.
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They will automatically think that you have the absolute best solution for them because you know about that better than anybody.
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So that's a great differentiator between you and your competition, but to the degree, to which you've described that their problem.
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What do you think about that?
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No.
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I think that makes so much sense because, you know, that's kind of marketing one Oh one, I think in that you want to focus things in terms of what is a pain point and how your solution sort of addresses that pain point.
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But the temptation is to go in and say, this, these are all the things that make our product better.
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I I'm always surprised, you know, if you watch a television ad, you know, they'll say, Hey, we've got this great new.
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product and it's got more of.
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Vitamin Q in it.
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Okay, well, so what.
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So, what does vitamin Q actually do for me?
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Um, but there's just this temptation and say, we've got more of this.
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We've got better this and well, do I need more of this?
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Do I need this to be better?
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What are you actually solving by adding these things to your product or service?
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And I think there's just this temptation to always say what's in it.
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It's.
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Yeah, it's a temptation, I think too.
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Also talk about happy talk.
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I see so much happy talk on websites, homepages.
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You know, be this, do that be awesome.
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You can do this with this.
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But this.
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The problem with that is there's no skin in the game.
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People like, look at that Like, you know what Matt who cares, but I know from selling multimillion dollar deals, Uh, that took nine months and like 14 people to get to make happen that you don't sell by talking about happy things about how great things can be and how perfect your solution is a seamless, integrated fit to blah, blah, blah, that nobody cares about.
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Uh, you only get to a sale, uh, when, when you really get your customers to realize that they too realize, and to acknowledge that if they did nothing.
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Between now and a year from now.
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That and you ask them the question.
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Would you be okay with that?
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If not it with these five things that we talked about that you're dealing with, would you be okay with that with not making a change?
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And if they say like, no, we will not be okay.
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Well, that basically is the starting point for a sales discussion.
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Um, and in that, when you're talking about what you're not okay with.
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That is the, the juice that gets people to make a purchase.
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It's not the juice isn't talking about the goals like, Oh, you know, lose weight.
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Feel great.
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You know, that doesn't motivate anybody, you know?
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Uh, Luke great in a suit.
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That may not help people lose weight.
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What does help people lose weight?
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You know?
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The, the cold reality of how they feel, how they physically feel, uh, and talking about how does that make you feel to, you know, Huff and puff?
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When you walk up a flight of stairs or to not be able to wear your best suit, what does that make you feel?
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Or it's an emotional connection, right?
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What's that.
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emotional connection.
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Yeah.
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How does it make you feel?
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Would that be okay if nothing happened, would you be good if in five years or two years went by and no change.
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And a lot of people would be like, yeah, I guess, you know what, I'd be okay with that.
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That they're, they're not a customer.
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You know, um, I think one of the interesting things too, is we sort of talk about, you know, sort of designing your messaging.
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Is that not every business has long sales cycles.
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Not everybody has to have a PowerPoint deck that they present the customers for many businesses.
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The selling actually takes place on a web or through an ad.
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And one of the things that I thought was very interesting when I reviewed the, uh, the pitch kitchen website.
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Is that your website is loaded with proof points.
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You have, this is what a message looked like before.