Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Marcus Sheridan Today, educational content is the price of admission. If you're not consistently producing high quality, useful content that addresses the questions, concerns and needs of your prospects and customers there's a really good chance you won't get found, won't stand out and won't garner the kind of trust needed to make a sale. Oh,  but if you produce useful content on a regular basis you can leave your competition in the dust - particularly if you're in one of those industries where "nobody blogs." My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is “The Sales Lion” Marcus Sheridan, one of the most sought-after speakers on the topic of content marketing. He is also the owner of River Pools and Spas. Sheridan did not start out as a content marketing expert. He started out as a guy trying to figure out how not to go bankrupt trying to sell swimming pools. What he discovered, and soon latched on to, was that pool buyers had lots of questions, lots of concerns and did lots of research. When he started producing content that addressed all of the above, he saw traffic, leads and eventually sales begin to spike. Sheridan got so good at inbound and content marketing that his pool business became one of the biggest in the region and eventually people started asking him to come tell them how he did. Plain and simple - a commitment to consistently producing high quality, useful information and then making content everyone's job. Questions I ask Marcus: How do you make content creation everyone’s job in smaller firms? What kinds of results have you seen from your clients who follow through with content production plans? Where do you get new ideas to create great content? What you’ll learn if you give a listen: A definition of content marketing that is truly timeless How to put yourself in the mind of your consumer to create better content Why your content needs to be honest and transparent This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Hostgator, where you’ll get 24 hour live support via chat, phone or email, 1-click WordPress installs, easy-to-use website builder, design services, marketing services like SEO and PPC, and for my listeners: a 30% Discount. Go to www.Hostgator.com/promo/ducttape

Marketing Podcast with John Warrillow Recurring revenue - now that's business owner's dream - or at least it should be! Creating a model where customers come back over and over again is a powerful way to build ongoing momentum and perhaps more importantly it's a way to build a business that's an asset rather than a job. For as long as I can remember I've been urging product business to create subscription add-on services and service business to turn their services into a consumable recurring revenue product. The thing about business a business where your customer revenue is predictable is that it often requires you to create a system that others can operate independent of the business owner. When you do that, it's pretty easy for someone wanting to buy your business to see how it can still operate even when you are gone. My guest on this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is John Warrillow, creator of the value builder system and author of Built to Sell. His newest book, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry is available now on Amazon. Warrillow had a subscription business and sold it to an organization that knew it could run without him - and it's still ticking along nicely without him. Questions I ask John: How would you define a subscription business? Could this be looked at as financing? Where are some industries that are prime for a subscription model that aren’t currently using them? What you’ll learn if you give a listen: How to create a subscription business in just about any business How your customers will change if you establish a recurring relationship When a subscription services are actually favors for your customers This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Hostgator, where you’ll get 24 hour live support via chat, phone or email, 1-click WordPress installs, easy-to-use website builder, design services, marketing services like SEO and PPC, and for my listeners: a 30% Discount. Go to www.Hostgator.com/promo/ducttape

Marketing Podcast with Michael Hyatt "This year is going to be different!" Have you ever said that to yourself as you start a new year? A lot of people do. Unfortunately, the stats prove that although people have good intentions, things rarely ever change. The way most people set New Year's resolutions just doesn't work. In fact, the average person makes the same New Year's resolution ten separate times without success. Even worse, a full 25% of people have abandoned their New year's resolutions after just one week! Crazy right? But here's another fact... There is always a small percentage of people who do get what they want each year. They aren't any smarter or have any special skills than you or I. But they do approach things differently. What do they do? My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is New York Times best-selling author Michael Hyatt. We talk about goal setting and success throughout this 25 minute discussion. In addition, on Wednesday, January 7th, Michael will be delivering a special presentation called: Get What You Want This Year: 5 Secrets for Finally Accomplishing Your Biggest Goals It's designed to help YOU make this, your best year ever. Listen, there are a million things competing for your attention. Whether it's work competing with family commitments or upcoming appointments and deadlines stealing time from what's important. It's like no matter what you do, you always feel stretched to find time for the things that matter... and the important things are falling through the cracks. Unless you have a winning approach, you'll likely become one of those "stats". Instead, make 2015 your year. Make this the year that you identify what's important and then create a bullet proof plan to make it happen. Learn more about Michael's Best Year Ever Program here Join Michael today for a free webinar and learn how to make 2015 your best year ever.

Marketing podcast with Mikkel Svane When you look at a seemingly successful company - say one that went from meager to startup to household name to public phenomenon - it's easy to gloss over what it took to get from the garage to the board room. My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Mikkel Svane, founder and CEO of Zendesk. From humble beginnings: "Zendesk was started in a Copenhagen loft by three friends who used an old kitchen door as a desk. They wanted to bring a bit of zen to the chaotic world of customer support. And they wanted to do it with software that was nice to look at and easy to use." Today Zendesk is a publicly traded company located in San Francisco with customers worldwide and a market cap around $1.65 billion. Svane chronicles the ZenDesk story in his new book Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business. Perhaps most notable in the story is the role Svane assigns to luck. Many great companies are often in the right place at the right time, but of course it's what they do with that timing that makes the difference. Zendesk was started at a time when the voice of the customer movement was still a bit of a whisper. With the mainstream adoption of social media, customer service became a public affair and companies large and small had to get very serious about providing higher levels of service in the instantaneous and often public manner in which the customer now demands. Zendesk met the market demand with a product that brought together both customer and market with the fusion of design and functionality that was perfect pitch. It's both interesting and inspiring to hear founders talk in such humble terms about how they took side gigs to pay the bills when far too often what we see today is simply the fruit of luck and hustle coming together.

Marketing Podcast with Ron Baker The age old practice of billing for time is both unethical and profit robbing. It's unethical because it misaligns you and client. Your goal now is to bill as many hours as possible at the highest possible rate. This is the exact process that has many firms tracking things that don't benefit the client at all and throwing senior people at things they shouldn't be doing. It's profit robbing because you can't make more hours and you probably deliver far greater value than your hourly thinking allows you to consider. Imagine if premium brands like Apple added up what it ultimately cost them to build an iPad and charged us cost plus a 100% markup. We would all own iPads for about $27. Instead Apple charges and receives much more because we value what they do.  They don't obsess over market share, they obsess over profit and value. My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Ron Baker, founder of VeraSage Institute and author of six best-selling books, including: Professional’s Guide to Value Pricing and Implementing Value Pricing: A Radical Business Model for Professional Firms. Our discussion centers on the idea of building value in some as of yet still radical ways. The idea of creating, tracking, measuring and pricing based on value rather than time is so significant that most organizations could benefit from the appointment of a Chief Value Officer on their executive team. Some accomplish this via a focus on branding, but this, I think goes even deeper. One of my favorite moments in the interview is when we talk about scope creep in projects and how a remodeling contractor simply uses a change order to address additional requests. Change orders are now going to become a central tool in my proposal and project management kit. Below is an overview of the Eight Steps to Implementing Value Pricing from Baker's book- Implementing Value Pricing: A Radical Business Model for Professional Firms: Value Conversation with the customer, including the best opening statement to begin this conversation: “Mr. Customer, we will only undertake this engagement if we can agree, to our mutual satisfaction, that the value we are creating is greater than the price we are charging you. Is that acceptable?” Price the customer, not the service. Establish a Value Council, appoint a Chief Value Officer (CVO). Why do actors and authors use agents? Developing and Pricing Options: Offering 3 options, Goldilocks Pricing; heuristics—mental shortcuts we use to decide how to buy; the anchor and framing effects and how they influence the prices we’re willing to pay. Presenting the options to the customer––should you lead with your most expensive or cheapest offering? Codifying the option selected into a Fixed Price Agreement Proper Project Management: Project management is important no matter how you price. Dealing with scope creep and utilizing Change Orders Conducting a Pricing After Action Review

Marketing Podcast with Carson Tate Routine, process, to-do and task lists - that's how we get stuff done right? Turns out the most productive individuals all have one thing in common and that's a system. In search for that one, perfect system people use GTD, Franklin-Covey, Note pad, Evernote and a variety of hybrid tricks and tools. My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Carson Tate, author of Work Simply: Embracing the Power of Your Personal Productivity Style and founder of a productivity consulting practice Working Simply. My favorite part of Tate's work is the recognition that everyone has their own personal productivity style and that because of that one person's system won't necessarily work for everyone. So, if you've tried to use GTD or Evernote and couldn't wrap your brain around why others swear by them when you just can't get the knack of them, turns out they just don't fit your style. It's lot like learning - some people love words, some pictures, some math, some history. The trick to unlocking your productivity is to embrace this fact. Tate has even created a personal productivity assessment to help you determine your style - take the test here. Getting more done each day, managing the demands of a growing company and juggling all the new things that come at me each day consumes a great deal of my thinking so I invest a great deal of energy in ways that allow me to do more, but with less stress.  

Marketing Podcast with Judy Carter Storytelling in business is a hot topic. Marketers, leaders and brand builders are all encouraged to create narratives around their business, culture and even products. Pay attention to a great deal of the television advertising you see today and you'll find that many possess a little story about who you could become if you only bought their product. Stories possess the power to drive emotional reactions, simplify complicated ideas and create immediate connection between the storyteller and recipient. I've long professed the value of creating a personal marketing story as part of your marketing message. My guest for this week's episode is Judy Carter, a comedian, magician, motivational speaker, and author of four books on comedy and self-improvement including - The Message of You – Turn your life story into a money making speaking career. Carter tells a funny story about how she got into comedy. She was a magician and on one evening the props for her show went missing, but the promoter said she had to go on anyway. She went on and told joke after joke about her mishaps and another promoter of comedy shows hired her to tour through all of his clubs. In The Message of You Carter talks not only about stories, but how to find and use your story as a pivotal element of your personal brand. She talks about finding your story in a number of classic story types. I particularly like what she calls the Signature Heart Story - a story that gets under people’s skin and takes them on an emotional journey that can truly inspire change and transformation. The Message of You is also filled with some exercises aimed at helping you find your story and then use it as a tool to promote your business through public speaking.

Marketing Podcast with Paul Roetzer Back in the day all a marketer need do is create a compelling ad, run it in the right place and if sales went up, job well done. Today there are several hundred television options in a local market, countless social channels and a host of web and mobile advertising platforms to choose from. More than ever marketers must measure every event and track performance based goals and objectives they can impact. My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Paul Roetzer, CEO of PR 20/20 and author of The Marketing Performance Blueprint: Strategies and Technologies to Build and Measure Business Success In addition to running a very successful inbound marketing agency Roetzer now spends a fair amount of time consulting with other agencies. His approach to fee based billing, account teams, internal training and performance measurement make an essential blueprint for any service based business. Make sure you check out Roetzer's free Marketing Performance Pack.

Marketing Podcast with co-authors of Renewable Referrals I love referrals - you might know that already because I write about referral generation all of the time. If fact, I wrote a book on the topic. But today, I have the pleasure of introducing you to my guests for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast - Rosie Taylor, Kelly Weppler-Hernandez, and Dawn Westerberg, who along with Debbie DeChambeau, Jeff Stec, and Ray Perry, co-authored the book Renewable Referrals. The book was written by this group of independent marketing consultants who also happen to be members of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. The collaborative nature of how the book was created is in itself a ringing endorsement of one of the book primary messages. Renewable Referrals serves as a great reminder of the importance of referral generation while introducing hundreds of ideas about how to systematically generate more referrals. Perhaps my favorite thing about the book though is the emphasis on building strategic referral relationships with like minded businesses. I’ve long advocated this approach as the single most potent way to generate a steady stream of referrals. Books are fabulous bargains when it comes to continuing your education and I heartily recommend that you pick up a copy of the just released Renewable Referrals. (It’s currently less than $10) Just one idea that allows you to amplify your referral efforts will make your investment a pretty wise move. You can grab a copy of Renewable Referrals here.

Marketing Podcast with Ann Handley The simple answer to the promise of contained in today's title is this - get Ann Handley's latest book - Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content Handley is my guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and she knows a thing or two about writing. She's a former writer for the Boston Globe and this is her second book. Perhaps more to the point, she's the cofounder of early web news provider Clickz and currently acts as the Chief Content Officer for MarketingProfs. In those roles she rummages through and sometimes edits hundreds and hundreds of pieces of ridiculously good content and sometimes ridiculously bad content. By keeping an eye on the types of content people love to consume and share as well as the typical mistakes many first time and long time writers make, she's gained a pretty keen insight into what works and what doesn't. In Everybody Writes she makes the case for the fact that writing is inevitable to success in business and that in some form or another we can all stand to get better at this most basic form of communication. She also sticks a flag in the sand and takes a stand for better writing in general. The great thing about Handley, and you can hear in the interview, she's serious about better writing, but doesn't take the notion too serious at all. In fact, her writing style is down right humorous at times. In my last book, Duct Tape Selling, I suggested that writing may be the master skill for anyone that needs to communicate an idea. Even if you don't write for a living, but developing a writing practice you will become a better salesperson, speaker, thinking and communicator. Everybody Writes is jammed packed with ideas, stories and great advice as well as simple practical tips that every writer can use to improve their written communication. I love the last section of the book that breaks down how to write better landing pages, video scripts, emails and on and on - very practical stuff that everybody writes! Just for fun I thought I would also toss in this infographic from the grammar checking folks at Grammarly. The graphic attempts to answer the age old question - are women or men better writers? Click on the image below to see the full research and draw your own conclusions. Click to see full infographic from Grammarly  

Marketing Podcast with David Meerman Scott My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is my friend David Meerman Scott, author of the longstanding best seller New Rules of Marketing and PR and the more recent, The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business Scott and I have been closely aligned since our first books on marketing came out in 2007 so it's no surprise that we are both back with book on sales and selling around the same time. In our conversation for the show Scott confirms a theme I've been promoting for some time now and I think it's the driving force in most of conversation around what's being called "modern selling." Sales and marketing have changed because buying has changed![Tweet "Sales and marketing have changed because buying has changed!"] When you fully grasp that idea it's not hard to understand why sales today looks a lot like useful marketing. Check out Scott's amazing 100+ slides below to get a full read on his new book. The New Rules of Selling from David Meerman Scott

Marketing podcast with Jordan Harbinger My guest for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Jordan Harbinger - cofounder of an amazingly successful business called The Art of Charm - a business with the tagline - where ordinary guys become extraordinary men. Now, to be fair, some amount of the work The Art of Charm does is teach guys how to meet women, but I for one believe that many of the elements regarding confidence, conversation and networking taught by Harbinger apply to success in business. How you project yourself has a lot to do with how you are heard and who you influence, whether it's in a one-on-one sales environment or a keynote speech in front of an auditorium audience. But, the real reason I wanted to have Harbinger on my show is that his business is another fabulous example of one built on the back of content. His Art of Charm Podcast was large and popular before he ever had training to sell. He built a community and then built a business around their needs. Read and reread that last sentence as it is such a powerful concept for anyone starting or running a business to keep in mind. Of course the ultimate secret to his success involves the value delivered through his products and services, but it all started with the trust built delivering solid value through his content.

Marketing Podcast with Tom Martin For the last few years I've been telling business owners that sales and marketing has changed so much because buying has changed so much. Today's buyer doesn't not call up a company and ask for a brochure or salesperson to come calling. Today's buyer does their homework online, asks their network for suggestions and essentially creates their own brochure. So much of what we have to do to attract and be found by that buyer is now what we call inbound marketing and sales and it applies across the business in audience development, sales and even service. That buyer is constantly adding inputs from our creation, their experience and collective experience of our customers and community. I cover this idea extensively in Duct Tape Selling and for this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Tom Martin, author of The Invisible Sale: How to Build a Digitally Powered Marketing and Sales System to Better Prospect, Qualify and Close Leads to add even more color to the notion. Martin's book reinforces many once novel ideas, such as content creation, teaching vs selling and platform building as the foundational sales and marketing tactics they have become. Any organization, from solopreneur to marketing and sales department, that is not focused on guiding a customer journey through content and personal connection is bound to be left behind in the buyer driven environment we live in today. Transcript of podcast below from Pro Transcript:

Marketing podcast with Mike Michalowicz It always amazes me when I see how little focus business owners have on this concept known as profit. There seems to be a total infatuation with revenue and head count when the true health of a business investment is profit. Far too many business owners come to view profit as what they pay themselves and to me that sounds a lot like a job. My guest on this week's episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Mike Michalowicz, author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, The Pumpkin Plan and Profit First: A Simple System to Transform Any Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine. In this interview Michalowicz reveals several simple, yet powerful ways to change the profit mindset including, most importantly, taking profit from the business first. Michalowicz also talks about his own experience of going from newly minted millionaire entrepreneur to bankruptcy a few short years later. A couple of his tips, such as creating separate bank accounts for things like expenses, salary and profit, may seem like a shell game at first read, but I know first hand that it's a powerful way to create some financial discipline where there often is none. Several years ago I had Greg Crabtree, a CPA and author of Simple Numbers, on this show and he implied that if a business was not showing at least a 10% profit after all expenses, including the expense of paying the owner a competitive salary, the business was in trouble. I think the key is to view a business as an asset with a pretty big investment on your part. That's the way that any potential buyer of the business would view it - "could I invest in the business and see that investment pay dividends otherwise known as profit?" The making of profit gets a bad rap for a couple of other reasons too. Many people were raised on the notion that profit is a bad thing - that someone was losing if you were gaining. This mind set is pervasive and does a great deal of harm in the way business owners approach everything from pricing to service models. Another attack on the notion of profit actually comes from well intentioned accountants who view profit as the cause of short term tax burden rather than the cause of long-term health. I know people can get caught up in and consumed by the notion of profit, but the first step is to view profit as the important measure it is in business.

Marketing Podcast with Sally Hogshead Have you ever taken one of those personality tests? - Tests with names like DISC, Kolbe Index and Myers-Briggs. While interesting, the focus of the results is ultimately based on determining "how you see the world." My friend Sally Hogshead has spent the last few years inventing a test that flips this notion around to help participants learn instead "how the world sees you." You can dive deeply into this idea in her latest book How the World Sees You - Discover Your Highest Value Through the Science of Fascination. Want to find out how the world sees you? Readers of this post are invited to take Fascination Advantage Personality Test completely free of charge (normally $39) Visit How The World Sees You - use the book code - ducttape to get your free assessment. The building blocks of Hogshead's approach are what she calls archetypes. These 49 elements make up your core "advantages" and give you insight into the best way for you to operate in the most authentic way. How The World Sees You also introduces the concept of a personal anthem based on your personality advantage. This 2 or 3 word tagline can become your filter for how you make decisions that are right for you. Listen to the interview linked above and hear Sally break down my personality type and anthem. I believe this type of assessment and introspection is invaluable for business owners or anyone that interacts with other human beings. (How's that for a broad statement!) I also believe that this is an idea that could prove valuable to bring to your clients. Helping them understand their unique value could prove to be one of the best gifts you can give them.