13:30Adam Erhart · Tutorial
The DARK Psychology That Makes Clients CHASE YOU
A 13-minute breakdown of why cold outreach destroys your positioning and the five-step Watering Hole Method for making clients seek you out instead.
February 3rdThe argument in one line.
You do not get consistent clients by chasing them with content, ads, or cold DMs — you get them by giving a valuable free assessment to a handful of partners who already hold the trust and attention of your ideal client.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A creative-agency, design-studio, or production-company owner who gets most work from referrals and hates how unpredictable that flow is.
- A service provider stuck in feast-and-famine cycles who says yes to bad-fit clients and drops prices out of fear of the next gap.
- An introvert who resents having to constantly post content, attend networking events, and put themselves out there to stay visible.
- A consultant who wants a repeatable lead system built on a few strategic partnerships instead of high-volume outreach.
- Anyone curious how to turn an AI scorecard tool into a qualifying lead magnet that books only ideal-client sales calls.
SKIP IF…
- You already have a predictable, partner-driven pipeline and a tightly defined ideal-client profile you can name a real person for.
- You sell a low-ticket product to consumers — this is a high-ticket, B2B, service-business playbook.
- You want a plug-and-play ad-funnel tutorial; this deliberately argues against paid ads and content volume as the primary lever.
The full version, fast.
Most creative businesses live in feast-and-famine because referrals are high-trust but unscalable, and ads and cold DMs are scalable but low-trust. The way out sits in the top-right quadrant: partnerships, which are both high-trust and high-scale. The system has three parts. First, magnetic messaging — pick one real ideal client, name them, and describe their frustrations in their own stage-two language (symptoms), not your stage-four service language. Second, build an irresistible offer: an AI-generated scorecard or assessment that diagnoses the client's problem, qualifies them, and books calls only with high scorers. Third, build a trust grid by giving that free scorecard to 'low-hanging fruit' partners who already have your ideal client's trust. Two mindset shifts hold it together: treat your own business as your number-one client with protected daily time, and always aim to be oversubscribed.
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00:00 – 00:45
01 · Cold open + promise
Street-interview intro and the promise: generate infinite leads without being spammy, without heavy content.
00:45 – 04:25
02 · The cost of relying on referrals
Room admits most work comes from referrals; the group lists the damage of inconsistent leads — bad-fit clients, lowering prices, stress, not hiring.
04:25 – 07:35
03 · The talent limit
Even elite creatives Matt coached struggled with the same problems; talent alone does not produce consistent work.
07:35 – 20:20
04 · Mindset shift 1: your business is your #1 client
Treat your business as a client; capacity is one less than you think; block 30 non-negotiable minutes a day; getting the work beats doing the work.
20:20 – 21:30
05 · Mindset shift 2: always be oversubscribed
Supply and demand — keep demand higher than capacity so you can charge more and say no.
21:30 – 29:00
06 · Trust economy + the four quadrants
Attention is easy, trust is hard. Referrals, cold DMs, and ads mapped on trust vs scale; partnerships win the top-right corner.
29:00 – 32:40
07 · Three types of partnership
Delivery (subcontracting), distribution (borrow an audience), brand (association). Real examples: 25 leads in 3 hours, one VC intro to 80 startups.
32:40 – 40:20
08 · Framework 1: magnetic messaging
Pick one real ideal client, name them, rank last 10 clients, use a client-avatar GPT; specificity is the key.
40:20 – 44:20
09 · The six stages of decision-making
Unaware to review; only ~8% are at stage four shopping, competing on price/speed/quality; engage at stages one and two.
44:20 – 1:01:40
10 · Map the gap: symptoms not services
Live coaching of Bob, Megan, Hector — voice frustrations in the client's boardroom language, not service language; reverse-engineer stage two from stage four.
1:01:40 – 1:02:40
11 · The budget math
Reverse-engineer minimum client size: ~10% of revenue on marketing, minus internal salary and contingency; ideal clients usually do $5M-$20M+.
1:02:40 – 1:27:50
12 · Framework 2: build the scorecard offer
Build an AI scorecard in ScoreApp live for Hector — questions, scoring, dynamic results, qualifying criteria, PDF reports, easy sales calls.
1:27:50 – 1:46:00
13 · Test the message + intro the trust grid
Get feedback on the concept before polishing; introduce the trust grid — who already has your ideal client's attention and trust.
1:46:00 – 2:05:30
14 · Trust grid: low-hanging fruit + partner tiers
A/B/C-list partners; the C-list no-overlap collaboration message (50-80% response); partner-finder GPT; RAS makes partners visible once ICP is set.
2:05:30 – 2:18:20
15 · The partnership call + the agreement
Structure the call as a give: three questions, listen first, then a win-win offer (Laura coworking story); lock a clear agreement so sharing actually happens.
2:18:20 – 2:25:15
16 · Q&A, takeaways + recap
Each participant shares their biggest insight (mostly partnerships); Chris reframes give vs ask; Matt recaps the three-part system.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Referrals are high-trust but low-scale; cold DMs are low-trust low-scale; ads are high-scale but usually low-trust — only partnerships are both high-trust and high-scale.
- Your real client capacity is one less than you think, because your own business is a client too — if you can handle four, your true number is three.
- Only about 8% of your market is at stage four actively shopping for your service, and that 8% competes on price, speed, and quality.
- Success is 80% mindset and 20% strategy — how you think and behave matters four times more than the specific tactic you run.
- One partner is worth roughly ten potential clients, so three good partners already puts thirty ideal prospects within reach.
- Assessments convert far better as lead magnets than PDFs because they qualify the prospect while delivering personalized value.
- If you cannot picture your ideal client as one specific person walking down the street, your profile is too broad to build an offer around.
- Speak your client's frustrations in their language as symptoms they feel, not as the services you sell — swap 'they need a rebrand' for what they say in the boardroom.
- The person who makes the least money is the one who actually makes the thing; getting the work is worth more than doing the work.
- Block a non-negotiable 30 minutes a day for your own business and say no to clients who try to book that time, or the pipeline dries up.
- A scorecard's dynamic results page can hide your booking link from low scorers and show it only to qualified ideal clients, so you never waste a sales call.
- The strongest partner outreach is a give, not an ask: bring a free tool that makes the partner look good instead of asking 'do you know anyone hiring?'
- Reaching a warm partner's audience is like the host of a party stopping the music to introduce you — completely different from working the room cold.
- Your brain's reticular activating system only surfaces partners once you define a specific ideal client, which is why broad targeting keeps you blind to opportunities.
Get clients by giving partners a diagnostic, not by chasing leads.
WHAT TO LEARN
Consistent client flow comes from three moves — name one real ideal client, build a free scorecard that diagnoses their problem, and hand it to a few partners who already hold their trust.
02The cost of relying on referrals
- Map your lead sources on trust versus scale: referrals are high-trust but unscalable, cold DMs and ads are scalable but low-trust, and partnerships are the only source that is both.
04Mindset shift 1: your business is your #1 client
- Treat your own business as your number-one client and protect a non-negotiable block of business-development time every day, or the pipeline silently dries up on a delay.
05Mindset shift 2: always be oversubscribed
- Aim to be oversubscribed on purpose — keep demand above capacity so you can raise prices, say no to bad-fit clients, and stop making decisions from scarcity.
08Framework 1: magnetic messaging
- Define one real ideal client so specifically you could spot them in a crowd; a profile you cannot attach to a named person is too broad to build an offer around.
09The six stages of decision-making
- Voice the client's frustrations as symptoms they feel at stage two in their own language, not as the services you sell at stage four, because only about 8% of the market is actively shopping.
12Framework 2: build the scorecard offer
- Build an assessment or scorecard as your lead magnet — it qualifies the prospect while giving personalized value and converts far better than a PDF, and AI tools now build it in minutes.
- Use dynamic results so only high-scoring ideal clients see your booking link, keeping your calendar free of unqualified sales calls.
14Trust grid: low-hanging fruit + partner tiers
- Find your low-hanging-fruit partners: people you already know who serve the same client with no competitive overlap, then send a simple no-overlap collaboration invite.
- Approach partners as a give, not an ask — bring a free tool that makes them look good and helps the people they serve, instead of fishing for referrals.
15The partnership call + the agreement
- Run partner calls like discovery calls: research first, listen for their goals, then position your scorecard as the natural win-win, and lock a specific agreement so the sharing actually happens.
- Remember the rough math: one good partner is worth about ten ideal clients, so you only need a handful of relationships to fill your pipeline.
Terms worth knowing.
- Trust grid / trust economy
- The idea that attention is now easy and cheap but trust is scarce, so leads should come through partners who already hold your ideal client's trust rather than through more content or outreach.
- The talent limit
- The ceiling where being excellent at your craft stops producing consistent work, because talent alone does not generate demand or make a business oversubscribed.
- Magnetic messaging
- Messaging built by naming one real ideal client and voicing their frustrations and desires in their own words, so the offer speaks directly to them.
- Map the gap
- An exercise that captures where the ideal client is now versus where they want to be, expressed in their language, to fuel the offer and messaging.
- Six stages of the decision-making process
- Unaware, dissatisfied, decision, research, purchase, review — the phases a buyer moves through, where stage four (research) is only ~8% of the market and competes on price.
- Scorecard / assessment
- A short diagnostic quiz that gives a prospect a score, qualifies them, and delivers tailored value, functioning as a high-converting lead magnet.
- Low-hanging fruit (C-list partners)
- People already in your network at your level who serve the same clients with no competitive overlap, and who will usually take a quick collaboration call.
- ARCAVA framework
- A partner-outreach script for warmer-but-not-close (B-list) partners: Reason, Compliment, Anchor, Value, Ask.
- The double thank-you
- Blair Enns' idea that a good partnership ends with both sides grateful — you thank them for the introduction and they thank you for the value you brought.
Things they pointed at.
27:00channelDaniel Priestley (mentor)
1:38:20bookScorecard Marketing (book by Daniel Priestley)
21:30bookSeth Godin (trust economy reference)
2:21:00bookBlair Enns (the double thank-you)
Lines you could clip.
21:30
“I don't think we live in the attention economy anymore. I think we live in the trust economy.”
25:50
“Someone somewhere woke up today with exactly what you need.”
07:40
“Success in life is 80% mindset and 20% strategy.”
1:40:00
“You go from a 10 priority to a one priority when you meet them with the language of what's actually going on in their world.”
2:21:40
“One partner equals roughly ten potential clients. So with three partners, you've already got thirty.”
13:20
“Your real capacity is three, because it's three plus your business.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
00:00The number one question I always get from people is how to generate leads. Today, we're gonna have the ultimate master class on how to generate infinite number of leads. And here's the best part, you can do this without being spammy or reaching out to people in DMs.
00:13You don't have to create a lot of content. Matt, tell us about the program. So you're gonna walk away with a really clear messaging that attracts your ideal client, an irresistible offer that takes interest and turns it into inquiries,
00:26and something I call the trust grid, which is a strategy that will get other people in your network promoting your business for you without you even asking them.
00:36Just out of curiosity, how many of you here get most of your work from referrals or word-of-mouth? Okay.
00:45Pretty much everyone. Right? So referrals are great.
00:48Yeah. We all agree that it's pretty nice when someone says, hey. You should go do business with this person.
00:52Okay. So what would it be like if you could get referrals that were really consistent?
00:59They came to you seeing you as the expert and they were willing to pay what you currently charge consistently every single month.
01:09How would that change your business right now?
01:16Wouldn't have to spend money on ads? Yeah. How else would it change your business?
01:20What do you do now as a result of having inconsistent inquiries and miss the wrong fit clients coming to you.
01:30What are some things that you do that you don't really wanna be doing? Not following up on weak leads. K.
01:35Not following up. What else? How many of you say yes to work that you don't really wanna be doing, but you're like, well, we kinda need some projects this month.
01:43Yeah. So taking on non ideal fit clients. What else?
01:47What other behavior? Has anyone ever lowered a price?
01:51Because they're worried, like, well, if we don't get this project, then where's the next one gonna come from? All the time. Yeah.
01:55Okay. Anything else? Have a lot of stress, sleepless nights, maybe don't hire people because you're like, oh, well, we kind of don't really know where the leads are coming from.
02:05So if we hire this person, then we definitely gonna be able to afford to pay them.
02:09May maybe take on more work that is is out of your scope. Take on more work is out of scope. Out of your personal scope.
02:17Like, instead of you're building the business, we're talking about earlier, you're back in the business, and you might be acting like your old self, your old skill set. Yep.
02:25100%.
02:27Any anyone think of anything else that you do as a result of all of these negative things, like inconsistent leads, wrong fit clients, low low pricing?
02:37Stepping over dollars, yeah, to chase to pick up pennies, like, not paying attention to your core clients. It takes you off the prize.
02:46Okay. So maybe neglecting
02:47some of your core clients Sure. Because you're out chasing work? Sure.
02:52Okay. Cool. Any more for anymore?
02:56Having to put myself out there to meet other people and get write new content.
03:03That's kind of, like, where I don't like to So putting yourself what is putting yourself out there?
03:08Yeah. To to get more visibility, like, Feeling like you're always in I have to, like, you know
03:16and I'm an introvert, so, like, I I hate having to do that. So you're an introvert, and you feel like you're pressured to constantly put yourself out there, create content, go to networking events? Yeah.
03:26Yes. Yeah. Okay.
03:27Cool. So let me just give you a little bit of context. Over the last ten years, I've been lucky enough to coach some of the world's leading creatives.
03:37And just to give you an example on this screen, we've got an ex VP of Disney, internationally recognized DJs, guy who worked at Spotify, ex Typeform, Hyper Island.
03:48I could go on. And I'm not telling you this to impress you. The reason I'm telling you this is because when all of these people came to me, they had the exact same problems you guys have all listed.
03:58Even though they were the top of their game creatively, even though they had these big names on their portfolio, they still struggled with inconsistent leads. They still hated putting themselves out there, always having to chase, underpricing, all the things that we've just covered, these people struggle with as well.
04:13And I say that to know for you guys to know, there's nothing wrong with you.
04:18You're not broken. It doesn't mean that you're not good at what you do. It doesn't mean that you're bad at what you do.
04:23This is a symptom of something I call the talent limit, which we talked about earlier. Right?
04:28So your talent and your craft only gets you so far, but it's not enough to get work consistently in your business and get you oversubscribed. And so this is typically kind of what as a cycle for a studio looks like.
04:41These referrals come in, but because they're inconsistent, I can't remember if was Chris or Hector that said it, but we kind of scramble. We we win the work.
04:48We get excited, and then maybe we focus so much on that new client that we neglect some of our existing clients, or we focus so much on that new client that we stopped doing the thing that got us the clients in the first place. And so then we have this whole cycle that repeats and repeats and repeats, and it feels a little bit like this.
05:04And as creatives, that doesn't feel like a great place to be. Right? Because when it when our income is like this, when our lead flow is like this, you like you said, it feels stressful, and stress is in a good state to do our best work in.
05:16Would you agree? Yeah. 100%.
05:21So if we're gonna break this well, I mean, before we do that, who's like Chris said earlier, who's actually committed today, like, a 100% in your body to breaking this cycle?
05:32Like, you have come here today because you're like, I am bored of this. I wanna do something about it. Just just by a show of hands.
05:38Is anyone not is anyone, like, ninety percent? Ninety. Okay.
05:43He's perpetually 90%.
05:46Never gives you a 100, man. What
05:49what would need to happen for you to be a 100%?
05:52I think for me, it's just more like of a
05:54belief thing. Yeah. Um, what would you need to believe in order to be a 100%?
06:00The most I've ever gotten paid for, like, a freelance shot was, like, two k. So I haven't seen any bigger numbers than that, which for me, that's just a very, like, limiting belief. So I guess
06:11if I consider, like, the amount of money that it would have take to potentially pay for other people, like, 10 k at least 10 k projects. Okay. Let's just separate for a second running a business from this specific problem.
06:22Okay. Right? So all I need from you right now, I don't need you to commit to growing a business or any of that, like, further.
06:28All I need from you is to be a 100% committed to solve the problem of inconsistent lead flow. Yeah.
06:33Are you a 100% on that? A 100 on that. Awesome.
06:36Cool. So we're all in. So if we're gonna solve this problem, those of you that came to the podcast today will know I'm big on mindset, and I believe the success in life is 80% mindset and 20% strategy.
06:50So 80% how you think and how you behave and 20% what you actually do. And so if we're gonna solve this problem, there's two fundamental mindset shifts that we need to make and these are the two things that I find keep people stuck in this roller coaster cycle.
07:07The first one is let me just ask you guys actually before I tell you. What's who's more important?
07:14You or your clients? Honest answer. Honest answer.
07:19What you really believe and what you really think. Who's show of hands for me. Show of hands okay.
07:24Two, whose clients? Yeah. Okay.
07:29Cool. So my belief is the reason that we experience this feast and famine cycle is because we make our clients more important than us.
07:40And so the first mindset shift that I want you to make is that your business, you are your number one client. So why do you think I say that?
07:50If we don't take care of ourselves, we can't take care of anyone else. Yep. That's kind of ballpark roughly, but let's get a little bit more nuanced.
07:58What does that really mean in the context of business?
08:03Do we just describe in this cycle? What happens? Not doing our best work.
08:08Not doing our best work? What actually creates the cycle if you think about our actions? What do we do that creates this cycle of feast and famine?
08:18Accepting lesser work. Let's not what our expertise is.
08:23You're in the sales cycle, and then you're not in the sales cycle. Yeah. We prioritize our clients over our business.
08:28Right? That's ultimately what we're doing. Hey.
08:30There's a new project. All hands on deck. Everything to the client.
08:34So I'll tell you what this means from a very practical perspective. How many clients do you think you can handle at one time at the moment in in, let's say, a month or depending on how let's say your brand sprint is six weeks.
08:47Like, how many how many clients could you take through that sprint simultaneously? Four.
08:54Okay. So your real capacity is three because it's three plus your business.
09:03Five. Yeah.
09:07Right? So we don't factor in our business as a client. So when we're busy, we have no room.
09:12We have no capacity to keep doing the things that are gonna nurture our business. It's a little bit like going on holiday.
09:19Right? And you go on holiday and you leave all the plants, you give them a bunch of water, but they're probably not gonna look great when you get back in two weeks because you just gave them a bunch of water and then you just left them.
09:30You have to keep gradually watering them every day or every week. Right?
09:35And so it's the same for our business. And so the one thing that I'd like you all to do as an action right now is I'd like you to open your calendar, whatever calendar you use, Google, iCloud, or whatever, and I'd like you to schedule a minimum of thirty minutes a day, which is a meeting with yourself or with your business.
09:58And you can if you need to do this over a block, so if you need to, you know, do one and a half hours on a Monday or one and half hours on a Friday rather than thirty minutes a day or whatever, I think that's the right maths. Right?
10:10You can do that, but I actually want you to block out that time, and that time is the time for you and your business, like the way you treat your clients. Hey.
10:19We need a meeting on a Friday or whatever your arrangement is. That's for your business. So I'm genuinely like that's your first action.
10:28Thirty minutes a day. Thirty minutes a day. So if you need two and a half hours a week two and a half.
10:32Yeah. Can you describe what that looks like working on your business? Because I feel like that's a never ending thing for me.
10:39Yeah. Yeah. I will get to that in this process of what you actually do in that hour, but that's the first thing we need to do.
10:46And by the way, if you take nothing from this workshop and you just do that and that action is whatever you're currently doing to get clients, like networking events or posting on LinkedIn or whatever it is, that's better than nothing.
11:00And if all you took away from today was this action, I would be pretty confident that in ninety days your business will be in a different place. On repeat.
11:08On repeat. Right? Scheduled, repeat every single week.
11:12And so what just quick shout out. What day is that? Is that have you done it thirty minutes a day?
11:17Have you done it one particular day?
11:19When have you scheduled it? I scheduled it thirty minutes a day, but it will likely fall into a two and a half hour block on Mondays. Okay.
11:26When we're at What time on Mondays? Um, probably starting at noon, I would say.
11:32We meet in the office. Okay.
11:34So if a really important client comes along and says, hey, guys. Um, we'd love to speak to you. Can you guys do noon on Monday?
11:41What's your answer gonna be?
11:43That's tough. As of right now, I would say yes.
11:47But
11:48From today? If I'm being honest. Yeah.
11:50But from today, what's the answer gonna be? It's gonna be no. It's gonna and what are you gonna say?
11:56I mean, usually, I don't give a reason. I'll just, like, reschedule.
11:59Like, oh, we're not available during that time. What is the reason? It's
12:04I have it as a BD block business dev. Yeah. You have a meeting.
12:07We have a meeting. Yeah. Yeah.
12:09With yourself. Mhmm. Yeah.
12:10You have an internal meeting. Right. Because I feel so much tension already.
12:14Like, oh my god. Our business is gonna fall apart. I feel like Chris wants to maybe challenge me on this a little bit.
12:19Oh, so many, but I'm not going to. Okay. Well I just wanna say, like, uh, I wanna rename the studio
12:24the crucible because we are only allowed to tell the truth here. Okay.
12:29So if you're not gonna do it, don't say you're gonna do it. Okay. And if if you're gonna give some, like, powerful answer that you won't say, don't say that either.
12:37We're only gonna get somewhere we just tell the truth. So, Matt, myself, we need to know what you're really going to do or not going to do more importantly, that then we can think about maybe how to help you some other point in time. So will you have you blocked this out?
12:50Because you're like, in theory, everything feels very soft and ethereal with you. You got it?
12:56So okay. You scheduled it. And so when somebody says, hey.
13:00We need to schedule for a Monday, you will say what? Now I need you to say it more emphatically so, like, I believe because I didn't believe you the first time.
13:09I have a meeting at that time, but we can schedule for later in the week. Here's my availability.
13:13Perfect. You know? Yeah.
13:17actually have daily, um, already blocked out for my time, and I don't get anybody to, uh, book on that unless it was a client
13:29it was a it's a sales call. Sales are kind of the other end of the flow. Like, you've done if you think about lead generation versus sales, there's a delay.
13:40Right? So your action, whatever you do today, it's not like you go out to a networking event, and then tomorrow you have a sales call and sign a 50 k client. Might happen once in a blue moon, but probably doesn't happen very often.
13:49Right? There's like, people need to get time to know you. So this time in your calendar is more for the upstream.
13:56So it's what's called a lag sales and sales meetings are what's called lag metrics. So they're a lag from what you've done, like, ninety days ago. So my preference would you would be that you had another day that you take sales calls on, and that day is still for leads and marketing.
14:13I think I don't have a problem in this one.
14:18So if you follow the logic and you're just like, if half an hour is good for me a day, wouldn't be an hour be better? And if an hour is good, wouldn't a day be better?
14:29And then at some point, you say, well, shouldn't I be spending all my time on my meeting internally to me? Is this where this is going, Matt?
14:37I don't think so. Do wanna come up here though? Feel like you know No.
14:39You got no camera on you. So when we go I do have a camera on me. Oh, you do?
14:42Oh, okay. Sorry. My bad.
14:43I'm good. My bad. Yeah.
14:45Rephrase the question. Sorry. If half an hour is good for a meeting with ourselves, if we're gonna prioritize ourselves, if I am my own number one client Yes.
14:53Then could you argue that an hour a day is better than half an hour? And if an hour is better than half an hour, isn't a day better than an hour? And then if meeting with myself is the most important thing, then five days a week sounds pretty important.
15:11What do you say to that? There's a there's a real question, by the way. Yeah.
15:14Okay. It depends where you are. Right?
15:16So if you have if you're really struggling, like, holy crap. I don't know where my next lead's coming from, and you're like, Matt, I think I should spend an hour a day or two hours a day on business development, then, yeah, sure, because you need leads. If you've got lots of work and you're booked up for a month and you're like, hey, Matt.
15:30Actually, I wanna spend another five hours a day doing business development. I'm like, well, lead flow looks pretty good right now.
15:36So for me, this is relative, but it never goes to zero. So a little and often every single day. And when you see the rest of the framework, I think you'll understand why thirty minutes a day is actually enough to achieve a high volume of leads because we're not doing we're not spending half an hour an hour going to a networking event or doing cold outreach on LinkedIn or creating content or whatever.
15:58You can do all of that stuff if you want, but with the the final part of this, the trust grid, you only need like two or three partners, and once you've got those established, you're really just checking in and maintaining those relationships.
16:11What's more important and or valuable to your business, getting the work or doing the work?
16:15I don't think they I think they are equal in merit. Because if you don't get the work, then you don't have any work to do.
16:25If you get the work and do a shit job, then you don't have more work. Okay. Let's use your logic.
16:29K. Earlier today, you said take one idea of thinking, take it to its extreme.
16:34Let's say you do very little getting work and mostly doing the work. Mhmm. If you keep doing the work, eventually you'll get no work.
16:40Mhmm. Right? Yeah.
16:42But if you say you don't prioritize getting the work and you're actually not prioritizing doing the work and you just get a lot of opportunity.
16:49No. I didn't I didn't say prioritize not doing the work. I said if your capacity to deliver a delightful experience is four clients, it's actually three.
16:59So you are a client.
17:01I didn't say No. No. No.
17:02I didn't say what you said. I'm just saying if we just say, what's the biggest priority for any business?
17:07And hopefully, can get to some truth here. Is it getting the work or doing the work? You're like, it needs to be fifty fifty.
17:13So I said, let's just go extreme. I'm not saying you said this. I'm just saying let's go extreme.
17:17Yep. Where one let's say that it's between Hector and Ray. Hector is like, I'm gonna just focus on getting the work.
17:23Ray's like, I'm just gonna focus on doing the work. Mhmm. He focuses on doing the work.
17:27Eventually, he gets no work because he hasn't done any marketing or lead. Right? Whereas Hector focuses on getting the work.
17:33So now he's got so many leads, but he's not prioritizing doing the work. Yep. Who is better off in these two situations?
17:39Hector. Of course. Yeah.
17:41So that's why I said if focusing on generating leads is a priority, why not just make it your only priority? Because as you get money in for leads, you just hire people.
17:51Yep. Right? Mhmm.
17:52That's what ad agencies do. That's what some production companies do. In fact, that's what most big successful businesses do.
18:00They focus on getting the customer because as it turns out, the Stan Shee smile curve is the person who makes the least amount of money is the person who actually makes the thing. It's the bottom of the value chain. And I know it's a hard message for people to hear, but I just wanted to go extreme so they've because they're gonna default to I don't wanna work on getting the work.
18:17Mhmm. I'm just trying to, like, pull them in there. Yeah.
18:20Because I just look at this I don't look at it as lead generation, but your business, my business is my number one biz most important highest priority.
18:28That's why have two days. Client. What's that?
18:30Client. Your business is your number one Client. Client.
18:34Yep. And what's the difference between priority versus client? Priority is my business takes Preston over everything.
18:41Client is out of all my clients, that is number one.
18:47So in the context of clients, not in the context of everything.
18:52Okay. I'm not sure I understand the nuance. I'm gonna keep going flowing with that though.
18:55Okay. I was gonna tell people I spent two days where my calendar's blocked off that you can't book me. The team cannot book me.
19:03The only person who can break the exception is me. Mhmm. And so that that's by default.
19:08So I was in there thinking I should have three days booked off Maybe. And eventually five days booked off where no one could book me for anything except for me. Yeah.
19:15I mean, that would be a true kind of owner
19:18way of operating versus yeah. Yeah. 100%.
19:20Yeah. I agree with you. Okay.
19:22Cool. So that's mindset shift number one. Mindset shift number two is kind of what Chris just alluded to, which is we always wanna be oversubscribed.
19:29So the common thing I hear agencies saying is, well, we don't really need to do any marketing right now or whatever because we've got lots of work. And what they don't realize is they've stopped the tap down here, but they just haven't seen the effect of it yet because it hasn't caught up because there's a delay between when the water stops and when you see it not coming out of the hose anymore.
19:49So we always want more people, and it's just really simple supply and demand. Right? What's happened to the price of oil right now?
19:56It's gone up. What's changed that's made it go up? Less supply.
20:01Demand is exactly the same. The only thing that's changed is supply. And so all of you have a limited supply.
20:10And so the more limited that you make that supply and the higher the demand is, the more money you can charge. So that's why I want you to have the mindset of if there's ever less people inquiring about working with us, then we have the capacity to work with, there's a problem.
20:27You should be saying no to people. You should be saying the earliest I can take you guys on is in two months or three months or whatever that is.
20:35Right? So they're the two big mindset shifts. I'm still a bit concerned about time because we've we've only just we've already just started getting into the concepts.
20:44I want you guys to do some stuff. So this is the last few bits I'll say is I hear a lot of people, the Gary V's of the world, talking about we live in this attention economy. Right?
20:52And so a lot of the advice I see out there is create more. Make more content, message more people, spend more money on paid ads, and it can work to an extent, but most creatives I speak to don't wanna do this because it feels like hustle, and b, you don't have time to do this.
21:09And so I don't think that we live in the attention economy anymore. I think more in alignment with Seth Godin, I think we live in the trust economy. I don't think the challenge is about getting attention.
21:17I think it's quite easy to get attention these days. Write a controversial post, do something stupid online, and attention goes. Chris biting his tongue again.
21:27Uh, but I think it's very difficult to build trust. Right? So what I wanna talk about today is how we build trust at scale.
21:34But, essentially, there are kind of four quadrants. And so on the left hand side here, we've got trust. On the bottom here, we've got scale.
21:39So how scalable is this? So up here
21:45up here It's popped off a little bit.
21:48Can you see it now? Yep. Okay.
21:49Cool. Um, this is referrals. Right?
21:52Referral is a super high trust, but they're very low scalability. It's very difficult to to scale referrals.
21:59Down here at the bottom, you've got these kind of cold cold DMs, one to one. Hey.
22:04By the way, you guys probably get them all the time on LinkedIn and stuff. Right? Hey.
22:07By the way, guys, we do this thing. Do you need help with it? It's like, okay.
22:12Low scalability. I mean, there are some people who will try and scale this by saying, hey.
22:17We have this AI automation. There's a bit of a delay on this. Um, we have this AI automation thing that can send millions of DMs or whatever, but it's pretty much low trust, low scale.
22:27K? Then up this end, there's lots of successful people who've scaled their business through paid ads, very, very scalable, and combined with content can be high trust.
22:38But in general, a cold ad that you've never seen before to a cold audience, highly scalable, throw more money at it. But I don't know about you guys. These days, I see these offers that are, so good that you can't believe them.
22:50Right? Oh, we'll get you 10 clients in the next ninety days or you don't pay me anything. How many of you have actually clicked on that thing, booked a call, gone and actually had the call with them?
22:58Right? Probably not that many. Maybe one.
23:00Right? Okay. Now there's something here which I think is one of the most underrated strategies that exists, and that's why I really wanna talk you through today.
23:09Up here in the top right hand corner, there is a way to have high trust and high scale, and it's what I refer to as partnerships. Partnerships.
23:21Okay? So this man here, does anyone recognize this guy?
23:27Daniel Priestley. So Daniel's been one of my mentors for about ten years now. This is when I still had hair, as you can see.
23:33And when I first started when I first met Daniel, when I first started working with him, he said somewhere something to me which really stuck with me. He said someone somewhere woke up today with exactly what you need. Someone somewhere woke up today with exactly what you need, and I realized that I had been thinking about this whole business development thing and marketing thing wrong.
23:54I've been thinking about where is my next client coming from? How do I get my next client? But then I started thinking through the lens of Daniel and I started thinking why am I not thinking about where are my next a 100 clients coming from?
24:08And so the new way, the way that I wanna talk to you about today is instead of going agency to prospect, we're gonna go agency to partner, and the partner has not only the attention, but the trust of your ideal clients.
24:22So this I'm gonna rephrase this, which I put on the workbook. Somebody somewhere today woke up with the attention and the trust of your ideal clients. And what we're gonna do today is we're gonna find these people because what I can promise you is they already exist in your network.
24:36So this isn't random people that we have to just try and find on the Internet. These are people that probably exist within your network, and we're gonna get them to introduce you to your idle clients.
24:48So it's a little bit like going to a house party and it's the difference between turning up to the house party and not knowing anyone, going around shaking everyone saying, hey, guys. I'm Matt. Oh, how what do you do?
24:56Blah blah blah versus knowing the host of the house party, him stopping the music, clinking a champagne glass, and saying, everybody, this is Matt.
25:05I need you to meet him. He's an awesome guy. He does all of these things, and then off you go into the party.
25:11That's gonna be a different experience. Right? Now I've traveled with Chris for long enough to watch this in effect to the extreme.
25:18Chris gets up on the stage in front of hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, and as soon as he gets off that stage, people are in a queue to talk to him. Now, obviously, Chris has done a lot prior to that building up to getting on that stage, but I've even experienced this for myself.
25:33So when I started this business, I the business that I run now before I was I ran a marketing agency and I decided I wanted to be a business coach slash life coach.
25:44That was the thing that I wanted to do. And I came out into this market and I had zero credibility because I wasn't known as a life coach or a business coach.
25:51I was I was the guy that built your websites, that did your social media management. And so I thought about this principle and I thought who has woken up today with the attention and the trust of my ideal client?
26:04And I remembered my friend Laura, and Laura ran a coworking studio just down the road from me.
26:12And so I said to Laura, I was like, hey, Laura. I'm starting this new business. I've got all of these ideas.
26:18I think they might be useful for some of the people in your coworking. We had a conversation. I ran through a very specific framework which I'm gonna teach to you guys.
26:26And before I knew it, I was given a presentation to 30 of my idle clients. So I went from knowing nobody to being introduced by Laura who had trust and credibility, 30, and that was my first day with my first six clients.
26:41From those 30 people there, I got six clients, and then my first six clients is a business coach. Then I just kept applying that strategy. So then I thought, who else do I know?
26:51And my speaking engagements gradually just got bigger, and so I was speaking at things like the Google campus. And some of you may have seen my videos on the future channel, and this keeps going.
27:04Right? So I'm technically now borrowing Chris's audience.
27:08And I believe that if we deliver enough value to people that already have the attention, the trust of our ideal clients, they will happily share us with their ideal clients. And so that's the strategy that I really wanna talk about today.
27:24I'm gonna handle some yeah buts in a minute, but has anybody got a yeah but or a question that isn't on this slide?
27:33Is partnerships, uh, the same as, like, subcontracting with another agency?
27:39Because that's how I've actually built my business and been around for twenty years. It's a form of it. I don't wanna get too much into the nuances right now, but there's essentially three different types of partnership.
27:49So there's delivery partnerships, which is subcontracting for another agency or kind of white labeling.
27:55There's distribution, which is literally just getting in front of other people's audience, and then there's brand. So if you think about, let's say, George Clooney and Nespresso, that partnership with Nespresso is purely a brand partnership.
28:08Right? People think of George Clooney. They think of Nespresso.
28:11They associate those two things. That's why they want that relationship. If you think about maybe, like, Nike, for example, and they bring out a new trainer and they partner with Walmart, that's purely a distribution strategy.
28:25Right? They just wanna get as many trainers in front of as many people as possible. And then if you think about a delivery partnership, that might be someone like, uh, Bose who partner with Porsche or Mercedes, and they say, hey.
28:38We we're gonna have a deal so that our speakers go inside every car that you make. Does that make sense? So there's kind of different types, and so that is an example of a delivery partnership.
28:48My preference today is that you walk out of here with some ideas of distribution because they're more powerful in my opinion.
28:56If you can get something that ticks all three, then that's where the kind of real gold is. Any other questions or yeah, buts?
29:03I wrote some down here just from that I get from my clients. So, like, my example was speaking. I don't wanna be a speaker.
29:08I run an agency, and so I'm just gonna tell you about a few people that do this and don't speak. Um, why would people promote my business? We're gonna talk a little bit about how we get that.
29:16I tried this before. I asked for referrals all the time.
29:21Have you got one? I'm just gonna make a one for the group. Okay.
29:24Cool. Yeah. But why would the host promote me?
29:26Yep.
29:28So you're gonna create an offer that is so valuable to your host that they can't help but introduce you to the party.
29:36You're gonna have something that makes them look good and that brings value to the party so that they would feel stupid not introducing you.
29:44Okay. So I just wanna give you a few quick examples, and then we're gonna do the first bit of homework. So these guys run a creative studio, and their niche is kind of in the motorsport area.
29:55So this client they got was from an asset they created, which we're gonna create today called a scorecard or an assessment.
30:03And that person shared it with that, uh, with their network, and they got something like 25 leads in about three hours.
30:12But from that, they got a big client. And the thing that I love about this was this was their just zoom in a little bit so you guys can see that.
30:22This is the coolest part about this, I think. So this was the first project. Sorry.
30:28There's a bit of delay on this, I think. Or it's just not working. Yeah.
30:32There we go. Right. This is the first project that we've had which hasn't been through word-of-mouth or referrals in three years.
30:42K? And these are just normal guys. They don't know who's speaking.
30:44They don't do podcasts. They don't do any of that stuff. Right?
30:47Um, this is Adam, and this I chose this because this was the funniest thing. He set up a little notification that that when anyone filled in the form, he got this little note.
30:55Hey, Adam. Someone has completed the form for the free brand audit. This shit might actually be working.
31:00So that's a good example of someone that didn't maybe quite believe this strategy would work at the beginning. This is Izzy. Izzy uses startups and scale ups.
31:09That's his ideal clients, and he had a couple of VC partners that put in front of 80 startups in their portfolio.
31:16Right? So one person, 80 potential ideal clients through one relationship. That's what I want you guys to get.
31:23Right? The power of this. You only need a handful of partners to have hundreds and hundreds of ideal clients or hundreds of conversations.
31:30Okay. I'm not gonna draw on this. I'm gonna talk you through it because it will take me too long.
31:35But there's three parts to this that we're gonna we're gonna implement today. Um, the first one is we're gonna create magnetic messaging. So we're gonna pick an idle client who you wanna get in front of, and we're gonna really understand their challenges, their pain points, their desires, what's going on in their world so that when you create an offer or you create something, it speaks directly to them.
31:58And what I want you guys to get is that we're not pivoting your whole business here. I'm not saying that today you have to walk away with a new niche or a new positioning. Think of this as like a so you guys are kind of website marketing.
32:09Think of this as a campaign. This is just a campaign you're gonna run for a particular type of client, but specificity is the key here.
32:17The more specific we are, the easier this is gonna be. So to give you to go back to the example of Jack and the creative studio, what they created it within their niche when we identified their ideal client, they realized that idle client was a young racing driver who was rising up through the ranks and was looking for new sponsors.
32:34Right? That was their idle client. And so what they created was this was a sponsorship assessment.
32:40And so they filled this assessment in, and it told the racing driver whether they were ready to go after the big sponsors. Right? And so that was their assessment.
32:49So do you see how specific that is for such a specific person? And that's why it was so shareable. Like, wow.
32:55This is really cool and really valuable because it's so specific to their challenges. Right? So I want you to not be broad.
33:01So we're gonna get very magnetic messaging. Um, I'll talk about the decision making thing in a minute. Then we're gonna create an irresistible offer.
33:08We're So gonna use that messaging to kinda hook people in, and then we're gonna build today together. We're gonna build an assessment, which I believe is the kind of first step, the easiest thing that you can build as an irresistible offer.
33:21Obviously, you can come up with more ideas and different ways of skinning the cat, but I want you to leave today with something really tangible. And then we're just gonna test this message with a few people and see how it starts to land. And then finally, we're gonna look at this trust grid.
33:35Right? Who are the people in in our network right now that already have the attention, the trust about idle clients? How do we create something like Chris said, why would this person promote what I do?
33:45How do we create something that makes it a no brainer for them to share? And we're just gonna create a really basic agreement. Hey.
33:51We're gonna do this for you guys, and you're gonna do this for us. So that's the overview of what we're gonna what we're gonna cover today. Has anyone got any questions on those three parts specifically?
34:02Because the next thing I'm gonna do is get you guys to do some homework. So if you jump over to the workbooks, here's what I want you to do.
34:10I want you to go through your last 10 clients or the your latest 10 clients, however you wanna think about it, and I just want you to fill out that spreadsheet. Right? Um, and then you're basically gonna gonna rank them on a few things in that spreadsheet if I so business name, what industry are they in?
34:32Who's the main contact, what's their role, and then total revenue generated for you.
34:38So it's gonna give you a high, medium, or low option. So in the scheme of all the clients you've worked with, did they pay you really well? Did they pay you okay, or did they pay you really poorly?
34:49Um, how impactful do you feel the work was? And then how enjoyable were they to work with? So you're just gonna rank them, and then you'll get an automatic client score.
35:00Current clients. Previous clients. Pre yeah.
35:03Past 10. And if they're current clients and that's working for you, then that that works as well. There's not.
35:10I'm gonna try and do this, like, quite methodically because otherwise people get lost.
35:16I know it might seem a little bit paint by numbers, but we created a little client avatar GPT. So if you click that avatar GPT, it should open up in a a new tab, And you're just gonna click help me pick an ICP.
35:34And then what you're gonna do is you're gonna take this.
35:41Hector, if you're on an iPad, this might be a little bit tricky for you, so you can just describe it to the GPT. But for everybody else, if you're on a laptop, you can just go file and then download, and just download this as a an Excel document.
35:57And you could just upload it into the GPT.
36:01So does this exercise supposed to find the actual person that you did well with with that particular company? Yes. Because my GPT just spat back a generalization.
36:12The CPG CEO, I I should choose a, uh, an actual person and an actual company.
36:20Right? Yes. Correct.
36:20Yep. Understood. Yep.
36:22Thank you.
36:23This information. Okay. So if you go to the workbook, there is, uh, something here which says client avatar form.
36:33If you click on that, then it should bring up this. We just need this filled in basically ASAP.
36:39So I know this feels a bit tedious, but, like, this pie is fundamental for making the rest of it work. If we don't have this specific person in our mind, then the rest of it just becomes really hard. Who is this person?
36:50Like, if I said to you, who's this idle client? You should be able to describe them. We all go, oh, yeah.
36:54I can imagine somebody like that. I can think of someone like that. So not like, oh, CEOs.
36:59It's like CEOs is not an idle client. Right? We want Jeffrey, who's a project manager of this Fortune 500 company in the medical space.
37:07Yep. Got it? Cool.
37:11Are we good? Okay. Cool.
37:13So the next thing we're gonna do, oh, where's trigger? I'll stay standing up because, um, the next thing we're gonna do is we're do something called mapping the gap.
37:22Mapping the gap is figuring out where they are now and where they wanna be, most importantly, in their language.
37:32So when we think about frustrations and we think about desires of our ideal clients, one of the common mistakes the creatives make is they talk about the frustrations and desires from their perspective through their lens.
37:46So they say things like they don't have a great brand or, uh, their website isn't good enough or all of these things. And that's fine, but your ideal client probably won't resonate with that unless they're looking for that particular thing right now.
38:01Okay? I'll talk a little bit about the decision making process because I think it might be helpful. But, Chris, like, do you wanna add anything here in terms of what when you do this with your clients' frustrations, etcetera, any, like, common mistakes or examples that you can think of where people really get this wrong versus where they get it right?
38:19Yeah. They usually get it wrong because they build a composite of too many different types of clients and it's not any one person.
38:25And the second mistake they make is they really don't know their clients at all. So they're just making up random things, and it's not logical. It's not consistent.
38:34Yep. Cool. So we've got a GPT to help you, but what I want you to do is once you've got these frustrations and desires, actually go talk to the person you just wrote down and see if these things actually resonate.
38:44Like, is this on the mark or am I totally off? Do you experience these things, or do you not? Right?
38:48So a little bit of validation there. So I just wanna quickly talk about the decision making process just for one second because I think it's really important.
38:59So I talked about this earlier, but I'll do a very quick whistle stop tour for you guys who weren't here earlier and YouTube.
39:07As humans, when we're making a considered purchase, there are basically six phases that we go through. We start phase one where we're not really aware that we have a problem.
39:17We're pretty satisfied with life as it is. Then something happens, and we move to stage two where we become aware that there is a problem or we're dissatisfied. Okay?
39:27So if you think about anything that you've bought recently in your life that was a considered purchase, so not like you just went to the shop and bought a new pair of jeans, like you've been thinking about it for a while, you can probably identify with this. Right?
39:40Then we stay in this stage two for a while, but we're not really happy, but then something happens.
39:46The phrase, the straw that broke the camel's back, and we're like, damn it.
39:51I've had enough of this thing. I'm gonna go and get whatever it is or I'm gonna change this.
39:56And then we go out into the market and we start looking at the options. What am I gonna do? Am I gonna buy this phone or am I gonna buy that phone or am I gonna buy this car?
40:03I mean, maybe we've already kind of got the thing that we want in our head. And as soon as we make the decision, we go from three to four and kinda skip to five.
40:12But most people do a little bit of research in stage four. They look at the options. Is this you know, even within the range is am I gonna buy the MacBook Air, or am I gonna buy the MacBook Pro?
40:20Right? We might have already decided on a MacBook. Then we make the purchase, and then we review that purchase.
40:26And if you're a weirdo like me, you actually go back onto YouTube and watch the reviews and compare it to your experience and see if those two things match up. Right? So we're constantly reviewing this.
40:36And if we're not happy, we go back to stage two. Like, ah, this thing isn't what I thought it was gonna be. Right?
40:42And we either return it, and then that person has buyer's remorse, or we're super happy, and we become the referrer, and we tell all our friends about it, and we go back to stage one.
40:52Does this make sense? Can you think of something that you've purchased that kind of this cycle clicks for you? Yeah.
40:58It's like you're out shopping with your friends who are much more fashionable. They're like, uh, your pants are too tight. And you're like, I was totally satisfied with the 100% satisfied.
41:06Yeah. Then they bring you to your shop and show you things, and you still are not aware, so you stay in that unaware state. Yeah.
41:12Exactly that. For example. Perfect example.
41:17Somebody yeah. Who knows? That may have happened at some point.
41:20Not real life. Definitely not real life. Um, so here's the crazy thing about this.
41:25Most people think that stage four is the best place to engage with our idle clients because our clients are out there looking for a rebrand. They're looking for a website.
41:33The problem with stage four is number one, it's only about 8% of the total addressable market. So only 8% of your market is at stage four right now looking for the thing that you have. The other thing about it is what?
41:46When people get to stage four, what are they typically comparing services on?
41:53Price. Yeah. They wanna know how much does it cost.
41:55Is this thing any good? Like, what's the quality like? And how fast can I get it?
41:59So we fall into the good, fast, cheap trap. They're the only what's the test?
42:06Do one maximum two, but never do all three. I
42:10think also in addition to price, you're kinda too late to the game. They've already picked who they're gonna consider at this point, and you're a Johnny come lately to the situation.
42:19It's kind of like you found out the agency's bidding on these four firms, and you're like, oh, I wanna get down that, and you seem desperate. And it's like, no. We're not gonna consider you.
42:28We've already gone through the not assessment and procurement period, and we already know who we're talking to. And even if you are one of those four agencies, there's only so many variables that you can pull. Right?
42:40And it's the most competitive if you think about it. Right? Everyone's trying to get to that point.
42:44Attention, pay spend money on Google Ads, SEO. If anyone's ever seen one of those posts on Instagram or Facebook or whatever or LinkedIn, hey, guys.
42:52I'm looking for a graphic designer. Does anyone know anyone? What happens within ten minutes?
42:57There's like a 100 comments. Oh, you gotta speak to Chris. No.
42:59No. You got you can't you know, like, you gotta speak to Ray. No.
43:03You gotta speak to this person. It's like, well, who do I speak to? Right?
43:06So what we're gonna talk about here is how do we engage people at stage one and two of the decision making process, and how do we take them ourselves to stage four so that we become the only choice? And when they assess the options, they're not assessing the options of the market.
43:23They're assessing the options that we're presenting to them. The options of our different packages or the way that we work.
43:30Does that make sense? Cool. So if we're gonna do that, when we talk about frustrations and desires, we have to talk about those frustrations and desires as symptoms that people at stage two would be experiencing, not as services which we provide at stage four.
43:49So the big shift is swap services, websites, marketing, branding, etcetera for symptoms.
43:57And that's how we wanna communicate, that's what we wanna write down here. K? So I have built a little GPT that's gonna help you with this.
44:03You may know some of these answers already, there are two things here.
44:09There's this map the gap exercise, so you can click on this. Exactly the same every time. Make a copy.
44:15And then there's a client avatar GPT, which you're already working with. Right? So once you've got this client avatar, you can either just upload the the sheet that we're working on here.
44:26You can upload this into the GPT and say, hey. Help me map out some frustrations and desires of this person.
44:34You might know some of these already. Now the GPT isn't perfect. So if you find it coming back with things that you think, this is a little bit stage four.
44:43This is a little bit too close to, like, branding or websites. Just push the GPT and just say, hey. This is these are kind of stage four or these are too much related to branding.
44:55I want you to talk more about the symptoms that they'll they'll experiencing, the things that my idle client is saying. Once we get this part right, this is kind of the bulk of the this is the hard bit done. Everything else downstream from here becomes easier.
45:08This is the kind of hardest thing and most important thing to nail. So I think this is probably the bit where maybe we we workshop a few ideas and just make sure that people are on track. So if you think you know some of these frustrations and pain points and desires already, just get them down into this document.
45:26If you don't, then use the GPT and ask it, hey. This is my ideal client. What do you think the frustrations and desires of this person would be?
45:34Um, one of our ICPs are b two b services.
45:40They're Well, just let's just do it like this. Right? Read out we need to read out exactly this document.
45:44So what's their name? How old are they? What's the role?
45:47What? Names, please.
45:49Okay. Yeah. Okay.
45:51First name is Bob. Yeah. Um, age, I'd say around, like, fifties.
45:57Role is founder CEO. Cool. Business snapshot, b to b services.
46:04Team size is about five to 25 employees. Revenue is 500 k to 5,000,000 annually.
46:11What industry so you say b to b services. What does that mean? I'm not a 100% clear on Like, what would you sales training.
46:17This specific. Yeah. Yeah.
46:19K. So put sales training. Sales training?
46:21Yeah. Okay. Do you want me do the whiteboard on this?
46:24The problem with the profile you have, it's super generic and broad. The the way I do this is if I can't visualize this person in my mind, it's not good enough. Like, I wanna see Bob walking down the street and say, that's Bob right there.
46:36So if we're in a room of a thousand people and you say find Bob and you read that, they would not be able to find Bob. Mhmm. Makes sense?
46:43Because a company doesn't make between 500 to 5,000,000. A company does 3,200,000. This is a person.
46:48Right. Right. It has to be a person.
46:49Okay. It's really critical because when we try to voice their frustrations, we're not trying to voice the frustrations of an industry.
46:58Bob, believe it or not, rep there's a lot of Bobs out there, but the way you're doing is, like, it's so broad. Mhmm. Okay?
47:05Yeah. I think I wrote this out a little more, like, about the company.
47:08I should have pinpointed to actually the person
47:11that were Yeah. So the per so the person is still Bob, but what what Chris meant is, like, the company doesn't do that range either. Like Okay.
47:19So I mean, I don't know in America, but in the in The UK, like, on LinkedIn, it tells you what the the range is and, like, what whatever you said isn't a range.
47:29Right? It's like I think it's, like, 0 to a 150,000, a 150 to 500, 500 to a million.
47:36Like, you know, the ranges are much smaller Mhmm. Than that. So I think we need to get a bit more specific on that.
47:41And then in terms of the company or industry, it's like, if they do sales training, it's sales training. It's not like b two b services. Mhmm.
47:47Does that make sense? Yeah. Because, like, loads of things are b two b services.
47:51Right? So when we when we create an irresistible offer, we're gonna create an irresistible offer for b We're not gonna create an irresistible offer for b two two b services because it's not gonna be valuable.
48:01Because how can it be if it if it's just mass appeal to b two b services, it can't be specific enough to be valuable. I think that's where we've struggled with our outreach or marketing
48:11is we are too broad, and and we've helped a lot of clients Yeah. That we've enjoyed Yeah. And we've also profited off of.
48:18So, again, I don't want you to niche the whole business right now today. Right. Yeah.
48:21I just want you to run a campaign to get more inquiries from Bob. Yeah. Yeah.
48:25Yeah? We do need to think about the b to b services aspect of, like, who exactly within that we want to pinpoint.
48:32K. Just choose For today, just choose one. Yeah.
48:35Yeah? Yeah. Okay.
48:36It's okay for you to do this not perfect, but at least you're doing it the correct way. Mhmm. It's more important that it'd be correct, then you can go back in and do a different one.
48:45But at least now you know what to do. So there's a general rule of thumb because a lot of people are like, I have no idea how much my clients make. Rule of thumb is in corporate America, for every employee they have, it's about $200,000 of revenue.
48:56Rule of thumb. So a 25 person company should be doing about $5,000,000 in revenue. Rule of thumb.
49:02Okay? Okay. And then you can also use Perplexity or Gemini or something else to cross reference that to make sure Bob lives in Southern California, runs a sales training company with about 25 employees based on whatever data is publicly available, what you guesstimate as to what they do in terms of annual revenue.
49:19Mhmm. Okay. But general rule of thumb.
49:21Now, I I know business, um, averages so that when somebody builds a profile and I listen to it, I'm like, it's off. I can tell you right now it's wrong. So try to do that Mhmm.
49:31As accurately as you can for one person. You'll see the benefit immediately. Got it.
49:35So for example, if I were to tell you my ideal client works in entertainment, do you know who that is? Um, they work in the video game space, and they are an executive creative director. You have a better picture of who this person is?
49:48And if I tell you it's a man and that person's 34 Mhmm. Does that help you?
49:52Yeah. So that's what we're trying to get to because I can then start to predict the problems and the challenge, the goals, hopes, and the dreams, and the fears of that person versus a really broad industry.
50:03Got it. Okay. Who else has got one?
50:05So the reason I got you to do the previous client exercise is because I actually want you to pick a previous or existing client. So when you're thinking through this, I want it to be a real person because that's the only way to avoid the trap of what Chris just said, which is making it too broad. Right?
50:20So we are thinking about, uh, we know this person because we've done work with him in the past. So we should be able to answer some of these questions around the frustrations and the
50:28Client avatar, it should be a real person or should be a fictitious person that is like a real person? Should be a real person.
50:35Okay. And that we've that we've all that we worked with. Yeah.
50:39Got it. Thank you. No problem.
50:41Cool. Megan, '38 ish. Uh, 250,000,000 CMO.
50:49Of? '38. No.
50:51Of what? CMO of what? Oh.
50:53Oh. Food manufacturing company. Okay.
50:56What kind of food?
50:58Uh, big box food and grocery. So Processed foods?
51:05Processed foods. Okay.
51:07Yeah. Cool. That works.
51:09So let's just stick with you for a minute. What Yes. What frustrations and desires have you come up with for Megan?
51:14Oh,
51:15um, let's see here. Frustrations marketing and creative work moves through an inconsistent workflow.
51:23Brand execution varies across customer facing materials. Projects slow down because responses and approvals take too long.
51:31K. Thoughts, Chris?
51:35That one straddles between what they might say and what you would say. I would like for you to air more on how they would say it. A lot of times we we make the avatar say what we want because we deliver on those services.
51:47Mhmm. You have to forget about you for a minute. Sure.
51:50And just really dive into that. So if you plug in this information into whatever AI engine and ask them what are what's her name? Meg?
51:58Megan. Ask it what are Megan's most likely to say about their frustrations Mhmm.
52:05In using their language and see what it would say and compare it to your answers. Okay? Okay.
52:09Is that what it said? It that's what it said. What I put in based on what I know about her, what Go ahead.
52:15Maybe she's complain is inconsistent workflow,
52:18inconsistent branding, slow response.
52:22Slow response time.
52:26Slow response time from Just projects. We're in retainers, so they're constantly giving us work. So here here's how the difference might be, and we can argue about this.
52:35She's the CMO Yeah. Megan, of a really big company.
52:39Yeah. I don't think she would say, guys, we have a problem with slow response time. I just don't imagine her in a meeting Oh.
52:45And she would say that. What would she say? Well, she's like the coolest CMO ever.
52:49So she's like, hey, Hector. I've noticed that blah blah blah. You're not even in the room, bro.
52:54I'm talking about she's having a meeting Oh. Internally.
52:57Okay. See, you already designed your situation for her to talk to you. I mean, that's pretty awesome, but let's stay real.
53:04Sure. She's having a meeting. She's really upset, and and the heads of the department's
53:08senior vice presidents in the room, what is she saying? I expect this stuff to be done within x amount of days, and I need to make sure that happens. And I'm frustrated because it's not happening on a consistent basis.
53:21We're not getting brand alignment.
53:23Well, just one thing at a time. Okay. So you see the language changed a little bit?
53:27Mhmm. Like, I'm frustrated that we keep missing deadlines. I can't be running a, you know, quarter billion dollar company here when you all can't deliver.
53:36Right. As cool as she wants to be, she's still the boss. Sure.
53:39Bosses don't be like, well, strategically, we're not hitting quarter four. They don't talk like that. Right.
53:44That's you. You know, like, when you watch a movie and they speak dialogue that you're like, no human talks like that. You're writing like that writer.
53:50Mhmm. Write like Quentin Tarantino. It's like, I think that's how they talk.
53:54Yeah. Okay? Okay.
53:55The more you can do that, the better we're gonna be. Yes?
53:58Another mistake that we often make with these symptoms and these challenges is we talk about them very much at stage four in terms of when that project is being delivered.
54:09So, like, missed deadlines and all of these things are only applicable when the project is on the table, when the project is being delivered. Now the problem with that is what happens for the rest of the time? And so one of the challenges that creatives come with me and they say is, you know, I have all these great conversations, but the client doesn't have a project right now.
54:25They don't have any projects for me. So they just sit there twiddling their thumbs waiting for a project, but that's very much a kind of worker mentality. What we're trying to do is we're trying to shift up the chain so that we anticipate these problems and challenges before they become problems and challenges.
54:40So before deadlines are missed, what mistakes are they making and what are they saying to themselves? What's happening in their day to day world before
54:49they get to that point where the project is actually being delivered? I guess it's a long process, so I don't know internally where they start. I just know when it affects me and what past frustrations have been like and how we've resolved them.
55:04Yep.
55:06This is a fairly common response especially the bigger the corporation. There's too many middle management between you and them, so it's really hard for you to figure it out. I'm pretty sure if you ask the machine, if I'm at stage four, what would stage two sound like?
55:21Reverse engineer from that. Okay. Cool.
55:23That's what I'm trying to get to. See? So it's one thing for us not to hit the bull's eye.
55:27It's another thing for us not to know where the bull's eye is. We're just spinning around the dark taking shots. You all should know this is the bull's eye and this isn't it.
55:35And then your creative brain will figure out how to find that answer. Okay. And you could do an informational interview.
55:40It's like, uh, Megan, if you can spare seven minutes of your time for an information review, I'm trying to figure out where CMOs like you get stuck. There's nothing to sell, nothing to buy, I promise you. And, you know, coffee's on me.
55:53Mhmm. Something like that. Yeah.
55:54Okay? Cool. Yeah.
55:56Because they don't you know, I can tell because what you're saying has been sanitized through three layers of middle management, then you get the project. They're not telling you what it sounds like from their point of view. Right?
56:08It's like she might say something like, we are sixty days behind the industry average from a go to market strategy. She might say something like that, and she's not happy.
56:18Yeah. I wonder if I picked the wrong client because we've been doing work with them for fifteen years and on retainer for twelve of those fifteen years.
56:27I rarely speak to them. They send the e it's almost like I rarely speak. We just have a You you didn't pick the wrong client.
56:32You just haven't taken the time to do what Chris just said. You haven't had that seven minute conversation with them. I have audited, and I have heard,
56:40and she hasn't had many complaints.
56:43She hasn't had complaints about your service? Correct. Yeah.
56:46We're not talking about your service. Okay. We're talking about Their world.
56:52What's happening in their world? People only really care about their world. Sure.
56:56So Okay. You only become relevant when something in their world changes where you need to be relevant. I need you for this project because it's now all of a sudden relevant in my world.
57:04That time window is tiny. Sure. The rest of the time they're existing, they're just getting on with their lives.
57:09And what creators find hard is to try and kind of crowbar themselves into their world so that all of a sudden there's work for them.
57:18Okay. Right? How many of you have felt like you're just not a priority?
57:22Like, you're trying to talk to this client and you just Yeah. All the time. Why are you not a priority?
57:27Because you haven't said anything or you haven't positioned yourself in a way that is relevant to what is actually going on in their world. So your project and your work is, like, number 10 in their priority list of shit that they need to think about on a daily basis.
57:42This exercise is trying to get you to make it number one. If you can figure out what is going on day to day that they are losing sleepover, that they're talking about in the boardroom, that they are literally pointing to with their team and you can start meeting them where they are with that language, you all of a sudden go from a 10 priority to a one priority.
58:00Holy shit. Maybe Chris knows something that we don't. On.
58:04What was that thing you just said? Oh my god. I had that thought the other day.
58:06What am I missing here? Hey, Chris. You know that thing you just wrote on LinkedIn or you know that message you just sent me the other week about when you wake up and that's exactly what just happened to me.
58:17Hector, do you consider yourself a proactive person or a reactive person? Quite proactive.
58:24What you're doing is reactive. You don't respond until it's ready to be a real thing. And first of all, wanna say congratulations.
58:31Anybody who's had a client for fifteen years and giving you steady work, it's an amazing thing. Let's not take that for granted. That's pretty cool.
58:38But you're only waiting for them to call you. That's called reactive. So now we're gonna be a dog that goes out to hunt and we're gonna find new game even if it's within the same client or clients just like them.
58:49Mhmm. So we're gonna go from a passive to an active role. Sure.
58:52And I'll tell you something. I'm gonna pretend like right now you sell hammers. Sure.
58:57So you're looking for nails. Sure. And all you only tune in when you hear a nail.
59:01It's like, I got a hammer, but only at the point in which they have a nail and they they wanna drive something into the wall. What when we do business strategy, for creative agencies, is we're like, put away, you sell nothing.
59:11Let's go on on to more of a consultative level business strategy and try to understand what their needs are, some of which we're not interested in or nor can we service, but there's lots of other things we might be able to service that we never even thought about. And here's the cool part. If you wrote that article on LinkedIn that touched upon a pain point that she has, she might say, hey, team.
59:31Check out this guy, Hector. He's doing his thing. We need to talk to him.
59:34That's where they smiled. It's like, we already work with him, boss. You've done your job.
59:37K. But right now, you're not even talking to her at all. You're so far down the food chain, you don't even know that.
59:44You're in the I've already identified a problem. We already set aside a budget, and we're gonna call a couple of people. We'll just call Hector again.
59:50He always does good work. Perhaps I'm getting lazy, but Well, let's not use a label judgment. Okay.
59:56It's just you didn't know any better until right now, which is cool. Sure.
59:59They've
1:00:00Bonus us out every year without a Congratulations. And raise our retainer every year even though we What are you doing here then? No.
1:00:08I was just wondering. Picked the wrong this isn't my ideal client.
1:00:11Great. I'd love More. I need 10 of these.
1:00:13Would you like two of them? Or your ideal client to be your super ideal client? I have four.
1:00:18They're my best, and I need five more just like them. Okay. That's why I'm here.
1:00:23Well, fantastic. Yeah. We'll do the exercise then.
1:00:25Cool. I hate skipping ahead with things, but I'm super conscious of time.
1:00:31And there's one other thing we need to do, and then we're gonna go and build an asset. So imagine that LinkedIn post and imagine the bottom of the LinkedIn post, there's something that will assess where they are, will assess that gap between where they are now and where they'd be, and it's gonna give them a score, and it's gonna show them where they can improve to get from a to b.
1:00:49That's what we're gonna build together. And the reason I'm gonna get you guys to build an assessment today is because I believe it's one of the fastest and most powerful things that you can build for your ideal clients. So think about when you have something wrong with you and you go to the doctor.
1:01:03What do they do? When you step into that doctor's office, what do they do? They ask you questions.
1:01:09And what are they doing? What are they trying to establish by asking you questions? Create a profile of you.
1:01:15Or or or find
1:01:18a problem. Yeah. Well, they're trying to find the problems because you're coming in with symptoms, but what you wanna know is what's creating these symptoms.
1:01:28Right? That's why you go to the doctor because if you knew, then you would just know what the exact problem is, but we don't, do we? We Google the symptoms, and then we look at the things that are the worst that could possibly be that come up, and we tell ourselves we probably got that thing.
1:01:41Right? But we're not the expert. The doctor is.
1:01:43And we see them as an expert because they're able to listen to symptoms, diagnose what's wrong with us, find the problem, and then present us with a solution or some options.
1:01:54Well, we're gonna do that exact same thing for our clients.
1:01:59The metaphor is great, but it's not accurate.
1:02:02Okay. Why? Because
1:02:04at least in America, Americans Western doctors do not actually treat the problem. They always treat the symptom. You got a cough?
1:02:10We'll get rid of the cough. You could have asbestos or mold growing in your house. They do not really address that.
1:02:16So the theory is and if you just really study how doctors work, it tells you a lot about how you might want to work. First of all, the doctor comes referred. Right?
1:02:25And you go into before you can make an appointment, the the whoever it is, asks you why are you seeing the doctor. So you have to tell them something. They write a report.
1:02:34And when you come in, you don't just get to see the doctor. They put you on the scale. They take the temperature.
1:02:38They do all the basic diagnostics first, and then you wait in a room. Then the doctor who's reading the thing outside is prepping right then and there for the sales call goes in, has assumptions about what you may or might not be suffering from.
1:02:50And depending on how good they are, they ask you a series of very calibrated questions to eliminate possibilities of what it may or may not be because you come in self diagnosed. Right? And the better they are, the the fewer questions they gotta go through because it's like, okay.
1:03:05And if it's something really serious, they're gonna go for more expensive tests or refer out to a specialist. Really study that. Now you can ask yourself, do you want to be a general practitioner or do you want to be the specialist, and how do you want to run the business?
1:03:18And and you know, like, there's a rookie in the room, like, they're a doctor in training because they're asking you all sorts of weird and there's a wild goose chase when the real doctor is like, mhmm. Mhmm. Mhmm.
1:03:27K. Cough one time. Okay.
1:03:29Chances are it's these two things. I'm gonna run one quick test and we'll know. Sit sit tight for five minutes.
1:03:35That's how they work, and then they prescribe and you're done. So let's just imagine they're a good doctor. So I appreciate that is very true about medicine, but let's imagine they're a good doctor.
1:03:44Right? So before we create that, what we wanna know is what questions are we gonna ask to figure out if this person needs to go to a specialist or if they're okay just here or or whatever.
1:03:58Right? And so there's there's kinda two versions of this. The first one is the qualifying criteria.
1:04:03So what makes someone an ideal client? Now this should be quite easy because we've got the ideal client in our mind.
1:04:09So we should just be able to say, well, they're generating this much revenue. Um, they have these kind of frustrations and challenges, but there might be a few other things that they have or we need to know about them in order to determine whether they're an ideal client.
1:04:24So just quickly, this exercise we're gonna do, and then we're gonna get into building something. If you just click here on, uh, page number seven, the qualifying criteria template, and there's kind of four to five types of qualifying criteria we wanna look at.
1:04:41The first one is their current situation. So if your ideal client is doing 250,000,000 in revenue and someone fills out a form and says that they're doing less than a $100, are they an ideal client?
1:04:55No. Right? So we wanna give them some options so that they can self select and say, I'm one of one of these people.
1:05:02Right? It's a bit like if we stick on the doctor analogy, if I'm a an adult GP and someone fills in a form and they're 12, they probably don't wanna see me.
1:05:11They wanna see a pediatrician. Right? Cool.
1:05:14So that's the first one. Then the biggest challenge, we just wanna list the things that we've come up with. So they're gonna select one of these things.
1:05:21So it could be three, it could be five. This is more just data for us. As we're gonna create this assessment, we wanna collect some of this data and same with the desire outcome or solution.
1:05:31So, hopefully, this should be a kinda copy and paste exercise where we just get this in. The fourth thing we ideally wanna know is how urgent does this feel. So if you think about when you come with symptoms, the doctor's trying to figure out, like, do we need to send you to the emergency room, or do we need to just give you some tablets, or do you need to come back in six months?
1:05:50Like, what's the level of urgency? Well, we wanna figure this out for our clients as well. So how urgent is this problem to solve right now?
1:05:57How quickly do you wanna reach this desired outcome? Wanna try and measure some kind of level of urgency.
1:06:04And then the final thing is kind of what I just said is custom qualifying criteria. So there might be something that you need to know to apart from these four things to figure out if they're actually an ideal client. Right?
1:06:14So for me, I ask questions like, how long have you been running your business? Because typically, don't really work with people that have been running their business for less than three to five years.
1:06:23So our ideal client is someone who's been running their business for kind of ten years plus. Right? So that might be my fifth qualifying question.
1:06:30Does that make sense as a concept? That should be fairly easy. Just do your best to fill that in as quickly as possible because I wanna get you guys actually building something.
1:06:38So what is the average size of engagement for a project for you? It doesn't matter what the number is. I'll just show you the math.
1:06:45Don't make crazy weird numbers.
1:06:47It'll be difficult to do. Yeah.
1:06:51Great. So
1:06:5320 k. Right? So this is an engagement.
1:06:56And how often are they doing this per year, you think? Once. Just once a year?
1:07:04For that particular engagement. Okay. Well, maybe this is not so bad because what you can do is you can say their gross revenue, right, gross rev on an annual basis will be let's just say it's a million dollars.
1:07:21Most companies spend on average about 10% for marketing, and that includes all the internal fees and vendors.
1:07:29So their budget annually would be a 100 k. So if you say, okay, a company has doing a million dollars in revenue, they might have a comms person internally or buy or something like that. What do you think they have to pay them?
1:07:41Uh, 80. Probably. Right?
1:07:43Yep. So they only have, at this point, minus 80.
1:07:47So the comms person, they only have 20 k left to spend on a vendor. So they're never gonna give you that full budget because if you host them, they're screwed.
1:07:57You know, contingency. Mhmm. What is a safe number that they hold back for contingency back in the agency days?
1:08:03You recall?
1:08:04It's roughly a number, a percentage. A percentage of their overall overall?
1:08:08Yeah. If they have a 100 k, what would they hold back? Uh, I would say 10%.
1:08:12It's usually 10% to 20%. Yeah. I've heard that it's 20%.
1:08:16I don't know if it's true. So they're gonna take out, uh, what, four k from this? Um, 10 is two k.
1:08:22So now you have 16 left. Okay. So we know, first of all, they're underfunded to do this with you.
1:08:31And there's other costs in here, just not that 80 k. So we know that you cannot even approach any client that does less than 1,000,000, not even close. So all you do is do the math.
1:08:40So at 2 mil, they have 32 ks, still probably not enough. So that's why you kinda have to go up. Probably your client has to do at least 5,000,000 plus.
1:08:48I'm pretty sure it has to be higher than that, but that's how you do this. You reverse engineer it. That's right.
1:08:53K? And, you know, a company only does one shot a year.
1:08:58That ain't it because they have to. What do they do the rest of the year? This won't work because what you do for them might happen once a year, but they have other things they want they need to do, social media posts and a whole bunch of other things.
1:09:11Mhmm. So when you factored all that in, this number is gonna be like probably 20,000,000 now. And that's why when somebody has a 300 k annual budget of I mean, revenue, they can very rarely afford anybody in this room.
1:09:26Rarely. That's why I like his answer. 250,000,000?
1:09:28We could do something with that. That's right. Right?
1:09:31Now some really innovative companies or some companies that work in a commodity space, they may spend 70% in marketing. Companies like water, commodities, or soda, they spend a lot of money on marketing.
1:09:43Uh, finance companies, like credit card companies, they spend a ton on marketing. But most companies generally are around the 10% range. That's how you know.
1:09:51Yeah. This this object that product I'm selling, it's it's more
1:09:57a startup strategy product. So it's one to one.
1:10:01There's probably only one or two employees, and so that they don't really have I see. They're early.
1:10:06It's way early. So that's like an early stage one to one, me and a founder.
1:10:11Yep. That number should be 80,000 for let's say, even even it's still a startup company for the same product.
1:10:19Yep. 20 people. So by virtue of you working with an early stage prefunded
1:10:23probably company or angel investor, they very rarely have a lot of money, and they spend it very cautiously.
1:10:31It's one of the problems because their investors say, what are you doing? Why would you spend all this money on this?
1:10:36What if you get that wrong? Did you wanna say something real quick? Real quick.
1:10:39The only reason I have certain clients my my ideal client is 20 to 200,000,000.
1:10:4480% of our clients are that. It's because in the manufacturing, they're consistently coming out with new products.
1:10:49Mhmm. And that's how I CPG? CPG.
1:10:53Perfect. That's It's great industry. Yeah.
1:10:55We are refresher packaging. We're launching new products. We're discontinuing this.
1:10:59We're doing that. Always need need have a need. That's great.
1:11:03So that's interesting. Let's just tie into that for a second because that probably ties into some of the frustrations and desires. Right?
1:11:08So if they're always launching packaging and new products, what is that's okay. You know, I said before, like, oh, it only becomes relevant when you've got a project.
1:11:18In your case, there's a slight exemption to that rule because that's part of their business model. They're always launching new things. Right?
1:11:25So what are some of the frustrations that they face as a result of constantly launching new products?
1:11:32New regulatory for packaging. Great.
1:11:36So now we're talking. That has nothing to do with you, has nothing to do with what you offer. That's probably a discussion they're having in the boardroom.
1:11:44Hey. This new regulatory thing just came out. Oh, man.
1:11:46Are we gonna so just as an example, and this is just straight off the top my head, it might be a shit idea. But what about if there was an assessment or a scorecard that they could run their ideas through to see if it would pass some of the new regulatory ideas?
1:12:00Right? Hey. By the way, guys, I've got this thing.
1:12:02It's for CPD, blah blah blah blah blah. You take this assessment, and it tells you whether your new product launch is gonna be a success. It measures in these three areas, regulation, design, packaging, whatever.
1:12:13Right? And you take it, and it tells you straight away. How valuable on a scale of one to 10 might that be for your idol client?
1:12:18Very, very valuable. Right. Now imagine that there's somebody who's got a bunch of those people in their network, and you go to them and say, hey, man.
1:12:25I know you work with a lot of these people, and the idea of partners is that you don't have competing services. You I know you help them with this, but I also help them with this. And I just built this tool, and I from having these clients, I know that one of the things they're really concerned about is regulations.
1:12:39And one of the things they spend a long time trying to figure out is their go to market. Is this thing gonna work? So I just built this tool.
1:12:44I just built this assessment that looks at these three key areas, and it gives them the score, and it also tells them what they need to focus on before they launch that product. Do you know anyone that might get better get value from that? It's totally free on me.
1:12:56Beautiful. Right? Now you've got an irresistible offer that you've just shared with a partner, and that partner's like, dude, Hector's got this really cool tool that does this thing.
1:13:06Right? I wonder who else would find this valuable. It makes them look good because it's free.
1:13:09They haven't had to do anything for it. And then you get the people that fill out that assessment, you get all the leads. Sure.
1:13:15That's where we're going. That's what we're trying to build. Good.
1:13:18Thank you. Just for clarification, did you say consumer packaged goods or CBD?
1:13:23CPG,
1:13:24consumer packaged goods. Because I think I heard you say CBD. Right?
1:13:27Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, c c Same difference.
1:13:29Tomato, tomato. I just want to clarify. They are.
1:13:32In California, are. CBD needs CPG. Yeah.
1:13:36Both need regulations, but one more than the other. Okay. Alright.
1:13:41Matt, what's the next thing we're doing?
1:13:43Let's build something. Right? Let's build an asset.
1:13:45And when you walk in a way today with something like that example we just gave for Hector that feels like, man, this could actually be really valuable for for idle clients. Recently, ScoreApp brought out a tool which kinda changed the game because up until this point, it was quite a long process to build a scorecard, right, and an assessment.
1:14:08But now we have this AI builder that these guys have built, and it's a little bit like if you've ever used Lovable or anything like that. Right? You just kind of type your ideas in, and it will actually build out the questions.
1:14:17It will build out the landing page. It will build out basically everything for you. So if you go to the workbook and you just hit the link that says ScoreApp AI builder, and we're gonna see now that we've got an ideal client, what kind of ideas might the AI scorecard builder or the AI assessment builder come up with for our ideal client.
1:14:39Right? So we're just gonna I think I've got this prompt on here.
1:14:44Yeah. Right? So number two, you can literally just copy and paste this if you want.
1:14:49Help me create an assessment for your ideal client. And remember, the more specific you can make it, the better.
1:14:55So it's not b to b services. Sorry. We're on page number 10.
1:15:01Yep. So we'll start with some ideas, and then we'll have a quick break, and then we'll come back and build something.
1:15:10So the way I've designed this, hopefully, you can just copy and paste this into here, and you've got your top frustrations, You've got your top desires.
1:15:25You've your ideal client. So you're just gonna put it in. I might just use an example as one of you guys so we can build it.
1:15:34So I don't need to build it for Hector. Yeah.
1:15:37Let's build it for Hector. Oh, help me create an assessment for Hector, let's describe your ideal client.
1:15:48CMO.
1:15:49Consumer packaging. CPG is between 20 to $200.
1:15:58I know his ideal client. They're the CMO for a consumer packaging good, big box store, processed foods, you said.
1:16:06Right? Yeah. Like snacks and things like that.
1:16:09Like Frito Lay?
1:16:10Like research buying foods?
1:16:12I don't know that. Potato salad. They're in every store.
1:16:15Oh, I see what you're saying. So And then payment grant assessment for CMO of a consumer Package, CPG. Yeah.
1:16:22Goods company. Goods company that does between 20 to $250,000,000 annually.
1:16:28K. Big box store.
1:16:31What's the let's just pick one frustration. You know, the biggest thing that you think The biggest frustration. What do you think their biggest frustration is right now?
1:16:39Uh, consistent branding across all their No. That's your that's your we've gone back to Hector, you're in the phantom loop again. Hector, hold on to the mic.
1:16:48It's not dangerous. Okay. Yeah.
1:16:51Their biggest frustration
1:16:53From their perspective. Getting product out super fast Correct. To the marketplace.
1:16:59So
1:17:00Slow to slow to market? Yeah. Struggle with, uh, being slow to market.
1:17:08Why is that why is that frustration? What what happens as a result of being slow to market?
1:17:13They'll miss I mean, they get competition, so they need they need to get their product out before Okay. Uh, slow to market and have loss Loss of brand visibility.
1:17:24Sure. That's your language. And want more.
1:17:26So what are the oh, actually, maybe we do that. So be slow to market and, uh, want k.
1:17:34So we're just gonna start broad, and then we're gonna narrow it down as we go, and it's gonna give us some ideas. Right?
1:17:39So it's gonna say, hey. Pick from one of these ideas.
1:17:43So it says to shape a high converting assessment for a CMO in CPG who's slow to market once more. What's the assessment for your primary goal? Here are some suggestions.
1:17:52Lead magnet to book strategy calls with CMOs, uh, internal diagnostic workshop slash webinar.
1:17:58So we're gonna say lead magnets of book strategy calls. Right? You want more strategy calls with CMOs.
1:18:02Of course, we're gonna click this one.
1:18:08That's the quickest to to making a sale path.
1:18:11Yeah. Maybe not the exact right one, but quickest to make a money miss some money. So
1:18:17strategy
1:18:18session. Well, it's straight to booking a strategy call versus, like, you gotta take a webinar with me or you do an internal diagnostic. In reality, that's probably the more more likely the things that they'll do.
1:18:29Yeah. So it says perfect. What do you do for your company, uh, that you want to see in order to book a strategy call for?
1:18:35So we help them speed up innovation. We're a growth slash brand strategy consultancy. I would say that one's pretty accurate.
1:18:41Right? Pretty close to you guys? Yeah.
1:18:44Yeah. You could choose your own. Like, if none of these don't work, you can type your own in.
1:18:48But just for speed, does that we're we're a growth slash brand strategy consultancy for CPG. Sure.
1:18:54Yeah? Yeah. Cool.
1:18:55That sounds right. K. So which type of CPG companies is this been mainly for?
1:18:59So these questions feel specific and credible. Here are some suggestions. Mid market brands, 20,000,000 to 200,000,000, enterprise CPG with complex innovation and approvals, challenger brands launching new products.
1:19:11Which out of those would you pick? Challenger brands?
1:19:15I feel like that's a little bit because didn't you say they were, like, doing, like, 250,000,000 or something?
1:19:2020 to Launching new products. Oh, I suppose. Yeah.
1:19:22Launching new products frequently. Yeah. Okay.
1:19:25DTC plus retail.
1:19:27So what what Matt is showing you that is that the score app will ask you lots of questions to help you build the assessment. It used to be that you'd have to do this. Now the AI prompts you through all this, and it's seeming like asking a lot of good questions here.
1:19:40Nice. Last discovery question so we can tailor the scoring and the call to action. What does slow to market usually look like for these challenger brands?
1:19:47Pick the closest. Here are some suggestions. Too many see, this is great.
1:19:50Right? This is an example of the scorecard drilling down into the symptoms, not challenges.
1:19:55It's recognized that slow to market is a challenge maybe in your language, and now it's saying, okay. Well, how would they recognize that? Right?
1:20:02So it's saying, um, what does slow to market usually look like for these challenger brands?
1:20:09Pick the closest. Too many handoffs and approvals so the launches slip. Retail readiness and packaging slash compliance delays, they launch, but messaging and positioning are unclear.
1:20:20So velocity so velocity is weak. 32. Told you.
1:20:24Number two, retail readiness and packaging. Right? Yeah.
1:20:26Okay. Sweet.
1:20:30Let's see. It's it do its magic.
1:20:34Hector, can you see the swing from there? I know. It's a little small.
1:20:38Uh, can you command shift plus or whatever that is?
1:20:41There it goes. Okay. I know that's a little bit better, but Yeah.
1:20:45Okay. Cool. Okay.
1:20:46So this is another really cool feature. If you give it if you give us your URL, it will at least pull some of your branding and logo and stuff into this so that it pulls it automatically into the into the landing page. Do you wanna get Yeah.
1:20:58Brings a look or feel? Yeah. Yeah.
1:21:01It's not per like, one thing I coach a lot of designers and the landing pages and stuff it comes up with from a design perspective aren't the best, but it's a really good start that you can play around with saves you going and entering all the brand colors manually and your logo and everything. Right? .
1:21:15It's pretty close. Yeah. Hand grenade.
1:21:17MBN
1:21:19creatives. Okay. So w w w dot n for November?
1:21:23Like, making brands new. MBN creative. MBN.
1:21:27Yeah. MBN. So m for Mike.
1:21:30Make making brands new.
1:21:33M for Mike, b for bravo There you go. N for November. Just teaching you the kinetical aspect as well when you I you know, I just like to keep people surprised about what I'm gonna teach when I'm here.
1:21:44And then creative? More bucks now. Yeah.
1:21:46Yeah. Creative.com.
1:21:48Okay.
1:21:50K. So now it's gonna give us some options to choose from for the scorecard concepts. Right?
1:21:54So we're just choosing concept right now. So the first one, pretty close to kind of what what we suggested. Right?
1:21:59So the retail ready launch scorecard, find out what's slowing your next retail launch and how to fix it. Right?
1:22:05Summary, a diagnostic built for challenger CPG brands selling DTC plus retail. You can read. Um, your speed to shelf score.
1:22:14See, do you see how, like, specific it's getting because we've given it the idle client and how how great this is? A fast high clarity assessment that produces a single score showing how launch ready your brand is for retail expression. Um, what is your launch bottleneck?
1:22:31So any of those three really resonate with you? Yeah. B.
1:22:35Okay. B. Let's go with b.
1:22:37Continue with this concept.
1:22:38Isn't it so cool? Right? We're just, like, clicking buttons and then Yeah.
1:22:41Very cool. The speed to shelf is like a cool name too. Yeah.
1:22:46It makes sense. It's using kind of their vernacular and you got alliteration going, so it's pretty clever with how it's even naming this. Yeah.
1:22:52Right? A lot of this oh, not a lot of this. All of this depends on you identifying an ideal client profile.
1:22:59You're welcome. Thank you. Mhmm.
1:23:01Right? Garbage in, garbage out. Right.
1:23:04That's why we spend so much time helping you try to figure out who your ideal client is and making sure it's accurate.
1:23:09Yep. So now what it's gonna do is gonna come up with a bunch of suggested questions. So you once it's created these, can go in and edit them really easily, it but just saves you actually going and coming up with them yourself because, obviously, this is a big barrier to entry for a lot of people.
1:23:22Um, I'm just gonna scroll down quickly because it usually produces quite a few. But west what sorry. Which best describes your role in launches right now?
1:23:29So it's even kind of giving you some qualification questions a little bit. Right? Because it kinda wants to know who I'm talking to.
1:23:36Am I talking to the the marketing manager? Am I talking to the founder? Right?
1:23:40What's the number one outcome you want for improving speed to shelf? So we're talking a little bit about desires. Now the cool thing about this, and I'll show you a little bit behind the back end in a minute of score app.
1:23:48But if you imagine, let's say 10 people fill this out, it will start to show you patterns. It will say 60% of people that filled this out said that the number one outcome they want from, uh, from improving speed to shelf is fewer delays and surprises in packaging compliance.
1:24:03Yeah. Right? So you now know that your ideal client, 60% of them, have this as their top priority.
1:24:08So when you talk to them or if you wanna create content, you've got some really tangible things that you know are actually happening in their world, you and haven't even had to have a conversation with anyone yet. Beautiful. It's cool.
1:24:18Right? Yeah. When launch slips, what's the most common reason?
1:24:22So what it's doing here is it's, like, suggesting scores as well. Right? So it's giving kind of plus one here, plus one there.
1:24:29And, essentially, what it's gonna do is gonna it's gonna kind of score them. So do you have a single agreed definition of retail ready? Packaging compliance needs that that everyone uses.
1:24:37Yes. They're gonna get a point. No.
1:24:39They're not gonna get any points or unsure. They're not gonna get any points. Right?
1:24:42So the idea is that if they're doing this really well, they score really high. If they're not doing it well, they score low. And so if they meet your idle client criteria, but they also have a low score, how easy is that conversation to start?
1:24:53Right. Hey. By the way, Hector, I noticed that you scored really low in this category.
1:24:57Would you be open to a quick conversation about how we might be able to improve that? And that's it. That's your sales conversation.
1:25:03Yeah. Right?
1:25:04Or they score really low. You have a resource you can send them with a CTA to them, the resource. Most of our clients who score low on this find this resource to be helpful.
1:25:14They read that like, man, this guy know. So you're priming them to see you as an expert with solutions for them. So the sales calls are very easy.
1:25:21Yeah. Yep. Absolutely.
1:25:23Right? And the cool thing about ScoreApp is that you can actually tailor the results page. So when you add these scores up, it will give you an option to create what they call dynamic content.
1:25:32So if somebody scores low in a category around your ideal client, so they're not really an ideal client, You can direct them to a resource, but if they score high and they're like, this is an ideal client, you can direct them to book a call with you directly. Mhmm.
1:25:46Right? So if you imagine, you go to sleep, a partner sends this out to their list, you get 50 people fill this out, Five of them are your ideal clients.
1:25:53You wake up the next day, and you've got three calls with your ideal clients booked in your calendar.
1:25:58Sounds amazing.
1:26:00Right? Cool. So I'm just gonna go ahead and create this because it's it's given us quite a few questions here.
1:26:06It shouldn't have given us more than 20 or 25, I think, um, but we're just gonna click build the scorecard. And it's now gonna go away, and it's gonna build the landing page. It's gonna build the scores.
1:26:15It's gonna build the results page. It's gonna do it all for you. Right?
1:26:19Now like Chris said, it's it's a hand grenade. So it's gonna do most of the work, but it's it's 80%. And then as creatives, we're gonna put the the icing on the cake.
1:26:27Okay? So I'll show you a little bit what this looks like, but I'm not gonna ages and ages going through and tweaking their questions and tweaking the design because you guys are creatives.
1:26:36You're intelligent people. I think you can figure that bit out. What I really wanna make sure we have time for is how do we get this scorecard in front of our ideal clients without sending cold DMs, without spending hours creating content.
1:26:48Right? Yep. Cool.
1:26:50So I'm now building your scorecard. Your scorecard is now ready to build. So we're gonna just click go to builder, and this is kind of where the magic happens.
1:26:57Now I would encourage you to just watch these videos on the back end of score ScoreApp because it just talks you through the platform. Um, I'm not gonna play them now, but if if you're watching this, I would I would, um, suggest that you do.
1:27:10And, obviously, you can just click next through here. Um, but I just wanna I just wanna show you this one feature.
1:27:16So it's spat out a little a little test a little scorecard for you here. Um, and, again, I said, it's rough, so don't don't judge this from a high level branding design web Full path.
1:27:32Perspective. But yeah. Okay.
1:27:33Is what it is. Right? So stop losing retail launches to hit on bottlenecks.
1:27:37Uh, Mister launch date, blah blah blah. Start your speed to shelf scorecard. So I would suggest that we work the most on this, and I've on the in the workbook, which I won't go through massively now, I've got something called a hook generator.
1:27:50I would work on this because this thing here is the kind of hook that's gonna get people to take the scorecard. So stop losing retail launches to hidden is okay. But what I would probably do is have your pain point and your desire in this hook somewhere.
1:28:04And I've got a GPT where if you put this in, it will give you ideas of better hooks. So this is this above the fold as the web gurus will tell you is the most important thing.
1:28:14Right? So you wanna try and get the the kind of desires and the challenges up here somewhere and then start your shelf scorecard.
1:28:22They just put their name and their email in it, and it's gonna spit out a score for them. So you probably wanna add to this, but it's it's a really good start.
1:28:30I just wanna quickly show you before we we go on to the partner piece. Wait. Was that the whole thing?
1:28:35No. No. No.
1:28:36That's just the landing page. Well, can we just oh, did you scroll all way to the bottom or no? Well, that's what it just created for now.
1:28:41And then if you go to edit if you go to edit this, basically, blah blah blah blah, landing pages, it's just a kind of WYSIWYG builder.
1:28:50Right? So if you go into this landing page, you you can just add content and section sections here really easily.
1:28:58Is it using your colors?
1:29:01Is that your logo? Yeah. It's my logo.
1:29:04Okay. Is that your logo color? It's close.
1:29:07That's red. Okay. Like we said.
1:29:08Okay.
1:29:10Yeah. Well, that's not a color accurate monitor, so we're seeing two different things.
1:29:15It is it
1:29:17is color accurate, man. Pull the hex code on that. So all of the content here is kind of in blocks.
1:29:23So you would just choose things here which you feel are are kind of relevant to the way that you typically display content.
1:29:30Right? So if you wanted some testimonials, there's, testimonial blocks. If you want a video, if you want the different categories.
1:29:36So, yeah, WYSIWYG builder. I'm not gonna go into too much detail about that.
1:29:40The the thing I just want you to show to show you guys really quickly is the results page. So it's gonna spit out a result for them for your ideal client.
1:29:49It's gonna give them an overall score, um, and it's gonna give a bunch of copy and stuff here, which I, uh, would encourage you to change.
1:29:58One of the features here is is dynamic content. Okay? So depending on where they score, low, medium, or high, you can display different content on this page.
1:30:10So one of the things that we do with our ideal clients is we create a section in here, which is essentially a a call to action. And the call to action is gonna be something like book a strategy call.
1:30:23Right? So I'm gonna click here. Um, it's gonna come in.
1:30:26We're gonna make sure that this is dynamic content.
1:30:32And what we can do is we can go back into the categories if we want to, and we can have a category which is just for our qualification criteria.
1:30:41And we don't have to let the ideal client know that that's what it's doing, but it's doing that behind the scenes. So here, we say low.
1:30:52It says low content, but we can change it to what whatever name we want. Let's say we want this high because it means they're an ideal client. We can actually edit this so that this link goes to our booking calendar, for example.
1:31:05And this section will only be shown to people who score high in that qualified criteria category.
1:31:13Right? And so why that's important is because if you've got this amazing tool, you don't wanna be booking calls with non ideal clients because then you're just back in the exact same situation you are when you get a crap referral.
1:31:25So what you want is you only wanna be offering your calendar and your time to people that are qualified, and that's why I love this tool. And the other thing you can do is you can create audiences. So audiences are similar, but they're just a really quick, uh, kind of way to to qualify people, basically.
1:31:43So they are like conditions. So I might call this, like, qualifying criteria. And then, for example, um, one of these so which best describes your role in launches right now?
1:31:54I might select that. If the answer is, um, I own the brand marketing, but launches are mostly led elsewhere, right, I might say I might save that.
1:32:05So I might call this, say, unqualified.
1:32:13And then save that. K? So anybody who answers yes to this question is gonna come into this audience, And then depending on what CRM or whatever you use, you could have a different email sequence for unqualified, which just sends them to your LinkedIn to consume your content, maybe you have a podcast, something like that.
1:32:32So they're just kind of getting warmed up. And then people that are qualified, we could create another one that says if they answer yes to this question, they're qualified, then they go into a completely different sequence. And that could just be inviting you, hey.
1:32:43Have a conversation with Hector. He's got over twenty years experience. He can look at your results, he can tell you in twenty minutes exactly what you need to do in your next launch.
1:32:50Book your call here. So you're only getting calls booked in your calendar with qualified prospects.
1:32:58Does that make sense? Cool.
1:33:01We could and Daniel, if you follow Daniel Priestley, does full two, three hour workshops on scorecard marketing. In fact, there is a book that I've, uh, brought here to give you guys on scorecard marketing, how to how to get it.
1:33:16Um, and we'll put a link in the description below this video to get the scorecard marketing book because there's a whole this is a whole marketing strategy. Right? But I just want you guys to see how quick and easy it is to build something like an assessment.
1:33:28Because we could sit here and we could brainstorm ideas about workshops and PDFs and whatever, but assessments actually have a much higher conversion rate as lead magnets than PDFs.
1:33:38Right? Let's do a quick recap and let's spin out to break. Quick recap number one is if you use a quiz or an assessment tool, it allows you to qualify them while giving them value.
1:33:51You have a lot of nuance control. And luckily through AI and the the kind of the smart people behind this, it gets you something up really fast without making you all the heavy lifting.
1:34:03Because that's usually the bottleneck. Like, I don't know where to start. I have to figure out the questions.
1:34:06I have to wait the score. And it gives you a lot of highly customizable ways to identify who's a good fit for you.
1:34:13Clearly, you don't want to talk to every single person who's like, I want a book because your calendar will be filled and you have nothing left to do and you'll hate all of us. We're not trying to do that. So you can see right now, you get to see really quickly who's a good fit, identify them, and determine next steps while also giving value to people even if they're not a good fit.
1:34:33You're not ready to go from something to shelf. Was that strategy to shelf or Yeah. Something like that.
1:34:39Right? And now they know and they can go back to your team. And you can really work on this to your heart's content to make sure it's dialed in to questions and language.
1:34:46Matt was talking about it'll kick you out something. He strongly encourages you as I do as do I. The above the fold copy, that's gotta be really strong.
1:34:54So why not just use another tool to generate 10 more headline ideas that really sound right? Okay. Uh, based on your experience, how many people actually fill this out and how long does it take them to fill it out?
1:35:06It shouldn't take them more than five minutes.
1:35:09And is it 50%?
1:35:11When you say fill them out, do you mean the landing page conversion, or do you mean the amount of people that actually finish the questions? Questions. Yeah.
1:35:17The questionnaire. Percent. 80.
1:35:19Yeah. I'll show you. We did it for registration for our book launch.
1:35:21We had something like 400 well, I don't know. I've I've got the numbers here. X hun 100 of people.
1:35:27So let's say it was, like, 270 and, like, 290 took it.
1:35:33Wow. So 270 out, 290 filled all the questions in. And we create every single lead magnet on Score app, and we just answer five simple sorry.
1:35:42We just ask people five simple questions when they download anything from us, whether it's registering for an event, getting a copy of my book, whatever it is, and they are the five qualifying questions. So if they're qualified, they get different resources than if they're, quote, unquote, unqualified.
1:35:57Sure. And so if they're unqualified, we just send them to all of our free stuff because we know we don't work with anyone generating less than a 100 k in revenue. So I'm not gonna invite them to have a conversation because I already know that, you know, we're not gonna work with them.
1:36:08So it's just gonna be a waste of both of our time. I just wanna cover one more thing about, uh, ScoreApp before we go on to the partners piece. Who here doesn't really like sales that much?
1:36:20Okay. Cool. The reason I wanna cover this is because a few of you said, okay.
1:36:24Well, the sales call of would you like us to help you improve your score is okay, but what am I actually gonna talk to them about? So this particular feature isn't available on every single tier.
1:36:35I think it's the higher tiers. But one of the cool things that you can do with the score app is you can create PDF reports.
1:36:43So you can actually create reports based on their questions and and scores. So I just wanted to show you one of, uh, the reports that I've created on one of my scorecards.
1:36:52So imagine you're having a conversation with an idle client who's taken this Score app, and they book a call in, and they've they've gotten a copy of this PDF.
1:37:03Right? And you say, hey, guys. Let's, uh, let's open up this PDF, and let's just go through your score.
1:37:10Right? So it's gonna show them. So this is my particular road map, for example, and it's just talking about the the different layers, but it's gonna give them overall category scores.
1:37:19So you can sit here and talk through this PDF and say, cool. Look. I noticed the differentiate is great.
1:37:24So right now, you're obviously using your story. You're you're kind of differentiating yourself in the market, but you're really struggling at the moment to communicate that. Let's look at some of the reasons why that might be.
1:37:34Right? So then I can talk through these kind of different areas of the road map, and all of this stuff is customizable depending on what they score.
1:37:43So I can change what content is put into this PDF depending on what they score just like I can on the results page. So I just wanted to kinda point out that as a tool because I think it's really useful for sales conversations, and it's also useful for your content.
1:37:59Yeah. So this gets sent before you've even spoken to them. So they get this PDF in their inbox once they've taken the score.
1:38:05So they can actually just pull this up and read through it, and they hopefully will get some insight. And it you know, like you can see from this one, it's it's pretty detailed. Right?
1:38:13There's a lot of stuff in here that you can really go through. Now these are I've created different sections for each of the scores, so there's more content there.
1:38:21There's, a different bitty piece of content depending on what they've scored. But, yeah, I just thought that was a really cool feature that I wanted to to mention.
1:38:30I think the reason why a lot of people don't like sales calls is because they don't know what to talk about. They think it's like, I'm gonna squeeze you into something, use some psychological levers, create scarcity and urgency.
1:38:41And if we just actually wanted to review something together, I'm not even selling anything. I'm just reading the diagnostic with you in case you have any questions. And if you've done your job at this point, they have identified the problem where they're weak, where you might be able to help them, and they're gonna probably say, can you help me do this?
1:38:58That's it. So does this sound like it'd be scary? Because I know you don't like sales.
1:39:02You don't like friction if you just went over the report. Easy peasy? Fresh and easy?
1:39:07Lemon squeezy? Okay. Cool.
1:39:09That's it. Yeah. Awesome.
1:39:11Okay. So I wanna shift gears a little bit. Um, let's come back to the PDF.
1:39:16So we've built this assessment. There's a part here which I'm not gonna get you to do now because it requires a little bit of longer input, shall we say.
1:39:26And I've called it test your message, and this is basically reaching out to some previous clients that you have good relationships with who meet your ideal client criteria and just getting some feedback on this concept. So rather than Hector doing what a lot of creatives do, which is going away and being like, oh, I'm gonna tweak my landing page.
1:39:44No. Does this look right here? And this is the perfect hook.
1:39:46And two weeks later, Hector still hasn't shipped his scorecard yet. He's just gonna go. He's gonna use the hook generator GPT that's gonna give him some ideas, and he's just gonna ask a client, hey, man.
1:39:58I just created this assessment. It shows you x, y, and zed. How valuable would something like that be to you on a scale of one to 10?
1:40:09And we're just gonna see what people say. And if they're like mere two, okay, maybe we need to go back to the drawing board a little bit, but hopefully, we can ask them some questions.
1:40:17Right? Oh, why did you say two? And what's what's happening for you right now?
1:40:21And we can do the seven minute assessment and ask some of those deeper questions. Maybe we've got some of these challenges wrong. Right?
1:40:27So I've I've actually got some templates here. I've got a message template guide, and I've got draft documents in this workbook that you can just use.
1:40:35You can just copy and paste this and send it to your previous clients. But my suggestion before you get to OCD on the landing page and the results page and all of this stuff is just go and get some feedback on this concept, on this idea. Does it resonate with people?
1:40:47Do a social post about it. Right? Hey.
1:40:49I just this was actually one of the best, uh, things I did that I thought was an amazing idea, and it, like, just flopped on social. Like, no one commented on it.
1:40:57Right? And then I just was like, oh, what about this idea? And I just thought, meh, probably not gonna work.
1:41:02And loads of people commented. Was like, oh, I didn't expect that. I was still using the challenges and the desires, but I was just kinda going through them and testing different hooks and different angles.
1:41:12And one of them, loads of people responded with, and another one, not really that many people. So I just built the one that everyone responded with. Right?
1:41:19Um, so that's your kind of homework from this training. Because if we sit here now and I'm like, right.
1:41:25Go message a bunch of people, we will be here all night. Um, so I wanna talk about your trust grid. I wanna talk about the people in your network right now who already have the attention and the trust of your idle clients.
1:41:39So I'm gonna use Chris's framing around this.
1:41:45I'd like us to use our brains first, and then I would like us to use AI. So maybe we start with Hector as as a group.
1:41:54I think we can help each other because oftentimes it's easier for us to think of things from an outside perspective as it is for you running your business. So, Hector, just remind us all again, who is your ideal client and describe them in a way like Chris said, that we can all picture that person like, oh, yeah.
1:42:11I can all imagine somebody like that. Megan, 38? Yep.
1:42:15Okay.
1:42:17Mom? Yep. Two daughters, one little son Mhmm.
1:42:22Out in Oklahoma, works remote for a Southern California company. She's a CMO, wicked smart, doesn't wanna be bothered with little things, so I'm constantly anticipating.
1:42:38But, um, and she doesn't want any problems. She doesn't want me bringing any problems to her.
1:42:44She wants solutions kinda like you guys talked about earlier. Yep. So I bring solutions as often as I can.
1:42:51She's my goal Let's try not to deviate
1:42:54too much. We just wanna know can can we all picture Megan? Can we all think what Megan looks like?
1:42:59But You didn't describe the important part of her. I know. She works for a $250,000,000
1:43:04company. Yeah. Consumer Packaging Goods.
1:43:06Consumer Packaging
1:43:07consumer packaging goods. He's a CMO. Yep.
1:43:11You're missing a really Okay. Okay. Yeah.
1:43:14You need to say this. Oh,
1:43:16um, I'm gonna say probably 30 products at least Yep.
1:43:23Reoccurring. She needs a lot of attention.
1:43:27Shelf or frozen?
1:43:29K. Just pass the mic just so we've got a bit of backwards of all taking this. Are they shelf or frozen or the different types of packages?
1:43:39Primarily shelf. Okay. Cool.
1:43:41So now can we all pitch Megan a bit more, but, yeah, you could could call.
1:43:45We tend to be so I don't know what it is. If I'm gonna put a label on it, there's something about why you're reluctant to talk about her, and you want to skip into, like, this is what I do and how I saw it.
1:43:58You guys, you have to shake off the old habit. You really do. When we talk about the customer, we're just talking about the customer.
1:44:04Don't talk about you, your services, or what you do, and why you're so good. Okay? So when we do this again, please don't repeat that same thing.
1:44:10Now what do we do, Matt? K. So
1:44:12I want before Hector answers this, when you think about Meghan, who do you think already has her trust?
1:44:23Who do you think Megan already trusts? She does trust me. Apart from you, I hope Oh, you no.
1:44:29She did a great job of shaking that off, man. She trusts her. She I didn't Yeah.
1:44:34Trusts the buyers that she works with. Okay. Cool.
1:44:37Tell me more. Uh, she goes to them weekly and gets feedback from them and has to implement on their, uh, decisions.
1:44:47Cool. She has to pivot based on what the market buyers tell her.
1:44:52Who else apart from the buyers? So that's that's one. Right?
1:44:55The buyers? The of the company?
1:44:58Yep. So think think external more than internal, but Okay. Yeah.
1:45:02I'm I'm thinking about specific people, so I'll be more specific in my question. Um, who does she she or her company already buy from?
1:45:13Vendors. Many vendors that make, uh, boxes, pouches, containers of all sorts.
1:45:21Yep.
1:45:22So buyers and when you say buyers, just for everybody else that doesn't know this industry, what do you mean by buyers?
1:45:27People that are at big box store like Costco that's gonna say, I'll take your product Yep. But you gotta do this, this, and that and then I'll take it and it's gonna be at this price Yep.
1:45:37And I need it now. Mhmm.
1:45:40Yep. Okay. So buyers and then what's the difference between a buyer and a vendor?
1:45:44A vendor would be a a supplier of
1:45:47raw goods or, you know, containers.
1:45:50Yep. Cool. And then within that, are there any organizations or governing bodies that these vendors and these buyers and even maybe Megan and her company are part of?
1:46:03I'm sure there's some organizations. I am not privy to those.
1:46:09Okay.
1:46:10Gonna go really left wing here. You said Megan is a mom, and what were some other attributes?
1:46:17She's a mom, a wife Yep. Lives in Oklahoma.
1:46:22I wonder, are there any Facebook groups or communities of female CMOs or working mom CMOs on the Internet?
1:46:40Must be.
1:46:44That that question is super, super specific. May I just zoom out one level? We know who influences her decisions based on market suppliers, vendors, and buyers.
1:46:55Who influences her opinion about the world and specifically her job? Who might influence her, and where might those influences be?
1:47:05Think about that because that'll apply to everybody here. Mhmm.
1:47:08Her coworkers, her boss?
1:47:11Yeah. The
1:47:12the reason I went specific on this is because if you have a specific avatar and you find a specific, uh, group of people Mhmm.
1:47:21There tends to be a very high level of trust there because they feel like a tribe. So I'll just I'll jump forward a little bit. Right?
1:47:29Imagine if you went to the owner of this Facebook group and you asked for permission to post in the group. I know you've got a load of CMOs who are working moms, predominantly female in this group. I work with a lot of these people.
1:47:40I've I've come up with this free tool, this free assessment that I think might be valuable to some of the people. Would you be open to sharing it in your group? Right?
1:47:49That's kind of where I'm going with this. Right? So I'm thinking of something that would look good to them that would also be valuable for the people in that group.
1:47:57So now I don't know if this is where you come in because I don't know the industry well enough to know how buyers work and how vendors work and things like that. But I bet from working in this industry long enough, there's probably someone in your network who has the trust, whether they're a buyer, whether they're a vendor, or someone of someone like Megan.
1:48:16Like, they're connected. Maybe even just a small group, ten, fifteen, 20 Megans. Can you think of anybody in your Oh, there's vendors.
1:48:23That's how I've gotten my clients, the long term ones. Okay. That's the only way I've gotten So imagine now so most of you have this.
1:48:30Right? Most of you have somebody who's made the majority of your introductions or who just generally speaks well about you in the network. The problem is it's our communication with them is usually very stage four.
1:48:43Oh, hey. Like, are there any projects that have come up or, you know, what's going on? We're basically fishing for is there any work?
1:48:49So we're positioned as somebody who generally kinda takes, that's more of a take than it is a give, and we're always positioned at stage four. So I'm trying to flip that.
1:48:59So they see you as a problem solver, and like Chris said, they see you as someone who is active, not passive waiting for, oh, when have you guys got a project? So, hey. I now have a so imagine going to those people and being like, guys, I've got this tool that I think might be relevant for some Megans in your network, but also might help you because I know that when Megan has this challenge, you guys also have this challenge because that impacts on you.
1:49:22Do you think this tool would be valuable for someone? And that's how Matt and Jack got all of those leads. They just went to a previous person who was in their network who referred them work in the past, who kinda said, oh, I always speak highly about you and said, instead of, hey.
1:49:36Have you got any work? Hey. I think there's something of value here.
1:49:39Hey. Can I tell you about this thing that I'm working on? Can I tell you about some things that I've noticed in the industry?
1:49:44And I really wanna provide a solution to this. And guess what? It's totally free.
1:49:49It takes less than five minutes. And at the end of it, they're gonna get real insight into challenge, frustration, desire.
1:49:58Is there anyone you know who that might be valuable for? Now imagine that you've got two or three of those people who share that for you.
1:50:08Right. Beautiful. Yeah.
1:50:10I can definitely see that working. So I just want you to test that. I just want you to reach out to those people and say, I've been thinking about developing this tool, and it does this thing.
1:50:20Do you know anyone that'll be that'll be valuable for? Or how valuable might that be for you on a scale of one to 10? Sure.
1:50:26And get some feedback from people. Right? Yeah.
1:50:28So I just wanted to set the scene high level concept. Are we seeing how this works? Because it is a bit of a mindset shift.
1:50:35Right? It's a bit of a mindset shift going from prospect to partner.
1:50:40And our partners aren't prospects. They're on our team. We wanna impress them.
1:50:45We wanna show them that we're active. We wanna give them valuable stuff for free, but we also wanna have conversations with them to figure out what's going on in their world. The same way that we would with clients, we wanna try and get on calls with potential partners all the time, figure out what they're trying to achieve and what their challenges are because then we can see how what we've got slots into that.
1:51:07So it's exactly the same as a conversation with an end client, but we're just having it with a partner. Difference is there's nothing for them to buy. There's only free value for us to provide.
1:51:18Right. Is this making sense? Yes.
1:51:20Okay. Cool.
1:51:21So let's just use our brains for five minutes. I'd love Yigon? Chris?
1:51:26I I like that because that's more actionable. The people who send you work now and give them the tool first. That seems like very within your reach, low hanging fruit.
1:51:34But the reason why I asked that question of like who influences her decisions, they're usually influencers. Every industry has people reporting, talking about it.
1:51:44So find the person who's talking about and reviewing things, see if you can get a relationship going. That's a that's a bigger ask, a bigger lift. Also, like for you specifically, maybe my reference here is out of date, but the die line might be a good place.
1:51:58Mhmm. You know the die line? Yeah.
1:52:00That's, uh, an award excellence in consumer packaged goods. And then you control that place and, like, who's talking, who's writing the articles, and reach out to them specifically. That would be a good strategy.
1:52:11So the people who are writing the articles and so award shows, people who are doing news and reviews, that would be good. And every every industry has a trade association. Find out that thing because you don't know enough yet because this is a new Hector.
1:52:23The old Hector was just a different Hector waiting for work to come. This Hector goes upstream to see where where the problem is. Cool.
1:52:30Makes sense? Beautiful. Okay.
1:52:32Thank you. So I'm gonna get you guys to do a little exercise in a minute, but Chris just used a really important term that I've actually written down here in the workbook, which is low hanging fruit.
1:52:41And so I want us to start there because I almost guarantee Chris said, don't say anything that you know know is a 100% true in this room, so I can't say this perhaps through certainty.
1:52:50But I have a high percentage of certainty that there is somebody in your network right now that you already have a relationship with that has the trust and attention of your ideal client. K?
1:53:02And that's what I would term as your low hanging fruit. So what Chris just said, 100% right. And the way I think about potential partners is the same way I think about celebrities.
1:53:11There's an a list, there's a b list, and there's a c list. And the c list are the people that we already have relationships with.
1:53:18They're on our level. If we said, hey. Do you wanna jump on a quick call?
1:53:21They probably would. Right? The a list, if you send them a message and say, hey.
1:53:25Do you wanna jump on a quick call? They probably get hundreds of those messages every day. If they don't know you, the chance of them jumping on a quick call is pretty low.
1:53:32So we've actually got different approaches depending on whether they're a, b, or c. And so in the workbook and, uh, I've got lowest hanging fruit exercise, um, and I've also got this partner finder GPT, which will make some suggestions.
1:53:49But I've also got some suggestions. The partner pitch GPT and the partner response document will show you that there are basically different approaches.
1:53:59So for your c list, you can literally, this is what's worked really well for our clients is that low hanging fruit. They literally just reach out to them and they say this.
1:54:08Hey. I noticed that you also serve this kind of client, and there's no competitive overlap.
1:54:15You guys run a branding studio. We run an animation studio, or you guys run a PR firm. We run a branding studio.
1:54:21Would you be open to jumping on a very quick fifteen minute call and working out if there's any way that we could collaborate? And that's it. That's the message.
1:54:29And that gets between a 5080% response rate. Hey.
1:54:33You also serve these people. There's no competitive overlap. Would you be open to seeing if there's a way that we can collaborate?
1:54:39That simple. But the caveat is you have to be connected to them or know them in some way. You that that doesn't work for your a list people.
1:54:47Okay? Your b list people have a specific framework called the arcava framework, which I won't go into because it's all there.
1:54:53And if we have time, I can talk through it, but it's a specific understand the word you said. Oh, sorry. Our car.
1:54:58Our car is an acronym. It stands for reason, compliment, anchor, value, and ask.
1:55:04I know I'm This is all it says. This Yeah. So this we're on page 14 at the moment.
1:55:10Ray has a question. Okay. Two just before I come to you, two secs.
1:55:13And then the the a list has a totally different approach. So I just the reason this is important is because I don't want you going to the awards people who have no idea who you are and be like, hey, guys.
1:55:25I think we could collaborate and, you know, they've got 2,000,000 subscribers on YouTube or whatever.
1:55:31You're probably not gonna get a response, and then you're gonna go, oh, this strategy doesn't work. So start with the low hanging fruit. Start with the people you know, and see if you can just book some calls.
1:55:40So out when we work when we run through this with our clients, the objective is can you get two or three partner calls, and can you just have a conversation with someone about potentially collaborating? That's a win.
1:55:50Right? That's like you've shifted your thinking, you're getting people on calls, You're seeing how you can collaborate, and then you basically just work your way up the chain. Once you have a few c list partners, you then think, oh, cool.
1:56:00How can I get some b list partners? Once you have some b list partners, then you think about a list, and it kind of works. So this once you've got a c list, sometimes the c list can introduce you to the b list.
1:56:09Mhmm. And you just kinda work your way up the the pyramid. Right?
1:56:13You actually answered my question. So You're good. Cool.
1:56:16So what I'd love you to do quickly is don't do this together, guys, because you work in the same business. So we've got two and two here.
1:56:23Just tell the other person who your ideal client is, and your job together is to kinda brainstorm who might already have their attention just like we just did here. Let's test what you guys came up with.
1:56:36So we created a GPT, and you got two options.
1:56:40You can just literally upload the client avatar form into there and ask it to give you some suggestions, or you can copy and paste it in. I'd just be curious if you guys do this, if it gives you ideas, if it's the same things that you've been discussing, or if it gives you totally new ideas.
1:56:59So upload the the client avatar form.
1:57:06What page? Page number 13, lucky number 13, and click partner finder GPT.
1:57:17And this should open up something like this, and then you're just gonna click help me find partners. And it will ask you to either upload the avatar form you filled out or just copy and paste it in.
1:57:33We are targeting health care as an ICP. Um, so we filled out the client avatar form.
1:57:40I uploaded it. It's saying that the best fit partner categories would be grant writers and fundraising consultants, public affairs and government relations consultants, and then strategic planning consultants for nonprofits and public agencies.
1:57:54K. How do you feel about those suggestions?
1:57:58I feel pretty good about that. I mean, the public affairs consultants, I feel really good about.
1:58:04The grant writers and fundraising consultants,
1:58:07I feel like we'd have to talk about how to break into that. Yeah. So You know?
1:58:11And of those, do you know anyone who meets any of those criteria? The public affairs, yes. The grant writers Cool.
1:58:18Not me personally. No. But, yes, start with that.
1:58:20Right? That's your low hanging fruit. Right.
1:58:23So that's what we're looking for right now. Like, your job right now is to connect with some of those people and see if you can get them on a quick ten, fifteen minute collaboration call.
1:58:30And so that kinda leads us to the next part, which I'll get into in a minute, but that's a great example. Yeah. Yeah.
1:58:34Awesome.
1:58:37Is that a great example? Yes. Because that's what you're waiting for.
1:58:40Yes. Exactly. That's the answer.
1:58:42Yeah.
1:58:43Yes. Exactly. That's the answer that I was looking for.
1:58:45Okay. Perfect.
1:58:47Chris is, like, dubious. This is the What's that? I feel like you're dubious.
1:58:51Dubious? Yeah. Like, doubtful, suspicious?
1:58:53Yeah. Like, unclear of the actual outcome? No.
1:58:56Because she had said prior that this is what she was waiting for. So this is just checking in with a customer.
1:59:03You know? Did you get what you came for? And if you didn't, we gotta keep doing our work.
1:59:07Represent. These guys. These these guys are their process.
1:59:11No evil here. No evil. Speak no evil over here.
1:59:14Yeah. Come on, guys. Represent.
1:59:17Who's got it? Raise your hand. Make a motion.
1:59:20Twitch, you are you ready? Right? Put ideal client, and I put Sarah, CMO at a $50,000,000 fashion company.
1:59:31Partner?
1:59:32Yeah. What did it suggest? Oh, you know, I'm gonna just read off the partner side.
1:59:35Yeah. We're the one that you might be able to work with.
1:59:38Potentially collaborate. What just read out the partners, and then out of those, are there any that you think you might be able to start a conversation? The first ones that it says for partner types is paid media agency serving fashion brands.
1:59:50Yep. That makes sense. Right?
1:59:52Makes sense. I don't know why I didn't think about that. Yep.
1:59:55So far Ecommerce Shopify agencies. Email SMS marketing agencies.
2:00:02For me, would be the paid media agencies.
2:00:06Yeah. And you work in an agency. Right?
2:00:08Correct. So if one agency reaches out to another agency, you're kind of at a similar level. Hey, guys.
2:00:12Notice that you do you do work for fashion brands. Mhmm. But you guys focus on paid media.
2:00:17We focus more on brand. Do you wanna hop on a quick fifteen minute call just to see if there's any way we might be able to collaborate? Yeah.
2:00:23Seems like a pretty low friction
2:00:26It does. Price. Right?
2:00:28Almost too simple. Yeah. Almost too simple.
2:00:31Yeah. Right. I guess I'm used to just, like, having to, like, I don't know, point tooth and nail with people, which seems really simple and easy.
2:00:42Sweet. That's how we want it to feel. Uh, my ideal
2:00:46partner types or brand strategy agencies, shopper marketing agencies, which I've never dealt with one of those, packaging manufacturers and converters, that sounds really spot on, fractional CMOs, food and beverage brokers.
2:01:02Sweet. Any of those feel like low hanging fruit, so people that you already know in your network? Yeah.
2:01:07For sure. Awesome.
2:01:08Yeah. Primarily the packaging manufacturers and converters, they have access to everything that's been printed and,
2:01:20uh, a handful. Perfect.
2:01:24Handful is great. A handful is what we need. Yeah.
2:01:26Remember, one partner, let's say, equals roughly 10 potential clients. Yeah.
2:01:32So with three partners, you've already got 30 potential clients there. Yeah. Yeah.
2:01:37Wanna add in?
2:01:40Uh, okay. So I focused my my ICP on that, um, CEO founder, 20,000,000 to 200,000,000, um, either CPG or RTD drink.
2:01:52So it's consumer packaged goods or ready to drink. And, um, they gave me a bunch here, but the one that I'm actually most excited about, who I've been thinking about focusing on is private equity and m and a advisers, those kind of guys who have portfolios of companies, and they all run with with kind of the same kind of guys, and they need fast fixers.
2:02:14And that's like you know, I've got a handful of folks like that in my network, and I feel like that that's it's a small group of people who know a lot of people in that group who need help, and they need, like, pros to come in and, like, work fast. Yeah.
2:02:27So one of my examples was Izzy, who's a brand strategist,
2:02:31and he partners with VCs who have big portfolios of startups. Yeah. And he just gets introduced.
2:02:36Like, they he is now the go to person. Every every startup that they work with, they well, he has to qualify them first, but the VC kind of automatically qualifies them by backing them, And they all get a free concept brand strategy consultation with Izzy as part of the That's exactly what I would like to, like Yeah. Focus on.
2:02:52Yep. A handful. I mean, I I haven't I haven't really trimmed the screws on it yet.
2:02:56I've I've actually seen other brand strategists who who who focus who either embedded in a VC company, who they service their internal portfolio, or they're, you know, they're a consultant.
2:03:11It's hard to find something when you're not looking for it. And we tend to find the things that we look for. You look for trouble, you find trouble.
2:03:19Are you looking for trouble? Never. I only look for money.
2:03:23So, Chris, here's the cool what's that? Shut up.
2:03:27You wanna do you wanna get on this? Don't start a fight you can't finish, Drigo. You know, that's right.
2:03:31Better walk away. Hold me back. Alright.
2:03:34Chris, here's the cool part. You had some suspicions.
2:03:38This might be somebody you wanna talk to. The assessment or the AI thing just told you the same thing. So now it gives you a little bit more ammunition.
2:03:46If you don't already know them because I I sense some wavering in your answer. Like, I think I might know, but I don't like, there's not three people I can call right now. Right?
2:03:53You know some? But the cool part is let's pretend like you don't, and that's low hanging fruit ish. Your mind will start working on it like, a minute.
2:04:02That other person I met at our party, they said something I wasn't even interested in them. And now it's like, oh, I need to talk to them right now. That's how that works.
2:04:10Right? Yeah. I can't I can't, uh, stress the power of that more because,
2:04:16a, if you're like the girls over here that have very broad targets, it's already a struggle to find your ideal client because your brain a part of your brain called the reticular activating system that's always looking for things that it believes are relevant to you doesn't pick up on it because who's relevant? B to B service.
2:04:32Oh, cool. Who who do you know who's called B to B service? No one.
2:04:36We know Megan who's day six and alright. So how do we get introduced to Megan? So your brain is not looking for it.
2:04:41So that's the first part. So you just even by honing in on your ideal client, your brain is gonna basically meet people that you didn't meet before, and you'll be like, why am I all of a sudden meeting all these people?
2:04:52Well, because you weren't looking for them before. Right? We've all had that experience when we buy an item of clothing, and then all of a sudden we see other people wearing it.
2:04:59Not Chris because all of his clothes are so unique, but for the rest of us peasants, right, we we see that item of clothing everywhere or we buy a car, and then all of a sudden we see that car everywhere. That's just your brain noticing what was already there. So that's kind of part one.
2:05:12But part two is you probably weren't thinking about partners. You were thinking about clients.
2:05:17So all of those people you might have ignored connection requests from on LinkedIn or not spoken to at the networking event. Now all of a sudden, you're like, hold on. I didn't make this connection before.
2:05:27This person could actually be really useful to me because they may have the attention and the trust of my idle clients.
2:05:33Alright. So perhaps before today, you came to the thing to the workshop. You're like, I'm not sure my who my ideal client profile is.
2:05:40I don't even know who I'm gonna reach out to. I don't have a plan, or I'm doing all that I can. There's nothing else I can do.
2:05:45Or the narrative is, oh, this is a friction filled process. The whole process makes me feel icky about myself. And now without a lot of effort, you found somebody potentially that is a win win.
2:05:57That's what was the side said. It's a win for you. It's a win for them.
2:06:00You're serving the same clients. No competition. And then when you eventually get these people on the phone, there's not even a sale.
2:06:07I'm just gonna tell you what the report says, and if you have any questions, I'm more than happy to answer them. Is this all doable? Yeah?
2:06:15Okay. How do you feel right now? Great.
2:06:18I have a time shirt I need to sell you.
2:06:21Okay. So I wanna land the plane on this. Right?
2:06:24But there's there's kinda two other things, two places where people fall down. Your main focus when you leave this room is can I book calls with my low hanging fruit?
2:06:34That's what you wanna focus on. Right?
2:06:36When you book those calls, you're just gonna ask them three questions. Number one, tell me a little bit more about you and your business.
2:06:45Now, hopefully, you're all smart people, so you might go and do a little bit of research before that call. So an even better way to start that conversation is, here's what I know about your business. What have I missed?
2:06:56Or what else is relevant? Okay? So where are they right now?
2:07:01Tell me a bit more about your business. So this is what I know about you. Cool.
2:07:06What's going on with your business right now? What are you trying to achieve? What goals do you have?
2:07:09Right? Now remember, this is not a sales call. This is a partnership call, but you can't create a win win offer unless you know what's important to that person.
2:07:19If you just go in with your agenda and your thing and you try and force this assessment down their throat, it's gonna feel salesy. So I'll give you an example. When I when I created my first partnership with Laura in the coworking space all those many moons ago, I didn't just go in and say, hey, Laura.
2:07:33Um, I need some clients. You guys have my ideal clients. Can I do a workshop for you?
2:07:38Would have felt a little bit salesy. Right? I just said, look.
2:07:42I I love what you're doing here. Um, I think there might be an opportunity for us to collaborate, but can we have a conversation about it? And for the first ten, fifteen minutes, I just listened to Laura.
2:07:50So what's going on with the coworking space right now? Oh, it's great. We have these things.
2:07:54And so, you know, what are you trying to achieve? I'd love to build a more sense of community. You know?
2:07:59I really feel like our freelancers and our hot desking people, they're great, but there's no real cohesion. And, also, it's a really high turnover. As soon as things get tough for them, the coworking membership is one of the first things to go.
2:08:11Right? So these are some of the things you started talking about. So when I pitched the workshop, I didn't say, cool.
2:08:15Well, I need some clients, so why don't I come in and run a workshop? I said, what about if we put on an event together where we brought people together?
2:08:22So we did a lunch and learn, and we create this event, and I taught people how to attract better clients.
2:08:29So that instead of them canceling their membership, they actually had more clients so that they could pay you for longer.
2:08:37How would that be? She'd be like, that's amazing. Cool.
2:08:40All I need from you is the space, and I just need you to promote this workshop to everybody in the coworking space. Can you do that? She's like, yeah.
2:08:47I'll send an email out next week. Perfect. And I'll bring all of my material.
2:08:51I'll, you know, contribute where I can, and I'll even share this outside of the coworking space to my network to try and maybe get a few more bums on seats and to get a few more people into this space who might be interested in signing up to the coworking. How does that sound? And I literally use that strategy with co working spaces as my only partnership to grow my first that was my first 6 figure year.
2:09:15And I worked with WeWork. I worked with General Assembly. I worked with small independent co working spaces, and the pitch was always exactly the same.
2:09:22Would you like some more freelancers in your space? Would you like there to be a more sense of community, and would you like them to know how to get more clients so that they could keep paying you? And guess what?
2:09:31People were like, hell yeah. And it's all free.
2:09:35You don't need to do anything. You just need to provide me the space, and you need to send a few emails out. And, hey.
2:09:39Look. These are the kind of emails that people have sent out in the past. They work really well.
2:09:42We'll write them all for you, and you just hit send. So you see how I'm not selling anything. I'm trying to find a way to collaborate, but I can't do that until I know what they're trying to achieve and what's important to them.
2:09:54So you're gonna book calls, and I've also got links to structures of how you structure this call in the workbook. You're gonna book calls, you're just gonna figure out what's important to them. What are they struggling with right now?
2:10:04I'm pretty sure that that scorecard, that assessment that you've created will fit in somewhere to their goals because if it's valuable for your end clients, your ideal clients who are also their ideal clients, then by default, it's probably gonna be valuable to them.
2:10:21Not 10 out of 10 times, but eight or nine out of 10 times. And so then when you present that assessment at the end of that conversation, that feels like a real natural give rather than, hey, guys.
2:10:31By the way, I've got this cool thing. Could you promote it to your audience for me? It's making sense?
2:10:37Questions, thoughts, comments? Were you able to land your own personal clients from this? Yeah.
2:10:42That's how I got my first 6 figure year. Mhmm. Yep.
2:10:45That is the concept of the win win offer. I've got some scripts and some things like that, but that's the kind of second to last piece that I wanna talk about.
2:10:54And then the final piece is kind of boring but important, and it's a little bit like having contracts with your clients. Okay?
2:11:02So this is a bit of a tightrope, and I can't give you specific advice on this because I don't know your specific situation, but it's always best to have as much of an agreement as possible so there are no unspoken expectations. Now I don't mean a contract that your partner signs. I mean that when I had that conversation with Laura, it was like, cool.
2:11:19So just to get this straight, and this could just be in an email. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna bring my best content, my best ideas.
2:11:26I'm gonna run this workshop for free. I'm gonna post it out to my community, blah blah blah blah, and you're gonna do this. You're gonna send an email to your database.
2:11:34This is what you're gonna say in it. We're gonna hold the event on this specific date. We're gonna have 30 tickets, and we've got that agreement in place.
2:11:41Does that sound good? Are you happy with that? Because what happens for a lot of times is people agree to something like, oh, yeah.
2:11:47I'll share this for you. And you go, cool. Great.
2:11:48Thanks. And that's the end of the conversation. And then nothing really happens.
2:11:52Thanks so much for offering to share it. What would be the best way to share this? Do you wanna share it with your email list?
2:11:57Do you wanna share it on LinkedIn? Is there someone specific you wanna send it to? How are you gonna share it?
2:12:02I've got some ideas of some emails or some ways that you could share this. Are you open to me writing some stuff for you? You know, you really want a specific agreement in place that we're gonna do this and you guys are gonna do this.
2:12:14Now when it comes to delivery partnerships, obviously, this is even more important because you're actually getting paid for the work. But what I would encourage you guys to do with your delivery partnerships is think about how this assessment could be valuable for the people you already deliver work to, but it could sit at the top of the funnel.
2:12:31And what I mean by that is it's actually just a standalone asset that's valuable for them that they could use. Right?
2:12:38So they could actually just give that to their ideal clients as a standalone value piece, and you guys just get the data on the back end. So that for me, if I was thinking about you guys, that would be the lowest lowest hanging fruit.
2:12:49It's like, well, we're already partnering with these people, but we're just delivering work. So that's a very kind of transactional relationship versus, hey.
2:12:56Do you know what? We've been having quite a few conversations or we've been thinking about this thing. We've developed this tool, which I think is really useful for your end client.
2:13:03Would you be open to sharing it with them? So this is the final part, establish an agreement. And, again, we've got agreement creator GPT that even does it for you, and we've got some templates here.
2:13:12I'm not gonna sit here and go through this now, and I know it sounds like maybe I've been copying out of that a little bit, but I wanna use this workshop as the kind of high level principles. Because if you don't understand the core principles and you don't get that penny drop and you don't have that kind of mindset shift, then all of the logistical, tactical, strategic stuff isn't really gonna make sense.
2:13:31But this workbook is here. You can go away and you can go through these steps, these kind of micro pieces on your own anytime. And there's a lot of thought and time and energy we put into these GPTs to really refine them.
2:13:42So you should just be able to say, here's a conversation I have with a partner, drop it into the agreement GPT, and it will write you a draft agreement for this particular partner. That's pretty much the end of this.
2:13:53Right? So I'd love to use the last ten, maybe fifteen minutes depending on how much patience everybody has got for a bit of q and a. But first of all, I guess I would love to just hear, like, what has been your biggest insight or takeaway from this session?
2:14:05And I'd love to hear just one thing from everybody.
2:14:07I'll give you some time to think. Matt, if people are watching this whenever they're watching this video, they're probably gonna be wondering, do we get the workbook?
2:14:16Yep. So the workbook will be in the description and link below. You can check that out.
2:14:20It's all the prompts, the AI stuff. You can just follow along at your own pace. That's it.
2:14:25Alright. Who's got a
2:14:27an answer? It's yeah. Let's just just go from left from right.
2:14:30Like, biggest insight or takeaway?
2:14:32Uh, I guess my biggest insight was just the partnership side of things. It's something that, you know, we've been subcontracted before.
2:14:42We have partner agencies. But thinking outside of that and how many other partnerships we could have with other people, with branding people, with with PR, with grant writers, like all of that. It's, um, something that I've never really thought of, and I'd like to start experimenting in.
2:14:58How many partnerships do you think you would need
2:15:01in order to double the revenue of your business?
2:15:05I guess it I mean, it depends on how big those partners are, but, um, I don't wanna say four at the minimum.
2:15:14Maybe do you have does that sound right?
2:15:18Probably four. I mean, we do have, like, referrals still coming in. We still get, um, a lot we do have a lot of clients that come back for revamps every so often, and it's like I feel like we have a solid pipe as of right now.
2:15:30But Even more reason to do it. Right?
2:15:33Right. Right. Solid pipeline right now.
2:15:35So And we experienced that. We actually went it down, and we were kinda panicking. And then we have a few projects to work on now.
2:15:42We're really busy. We are a small team, but it doesn't we do need to be putting that effort into our own agency and excelling on our side.
2:15:50So, um, yeah, the partnerships. Do you have something? Uh,
2:15:55I was just gonna say we we've been so reliant on agency partners that we thought that would be, like, um, you know, that's just we consistent, but it just in the last year, it has changed.
2:16:09So and that's why we're looking for other avenues and actually making up a system. So what like, this process is like a system that we can follow, and so I think that's the insight that, you know, the take from here is having a system to do that.
2:16:25Yeah. And I'd love to see because there's there's a couple of mindset shifts that I really want you to pick up on. The first is the downstream thing.
2:16:33Right? So what I just heard was you've got a bunch of partners, but that work kinda dries up.
2:16:39But it also sounds like there were partners where you only really engage with them when a new project came in. Would that be fair? Correct.
2:16:45Right? So I really want you to get this idea of repositioning how those people see you. Because right now, they don't see you as a partner.
2:16:52Yeah. They see you as a worker. Hey.
2:16:54This is an extension of our business overflow. When we're super busy, you guys get the work. I want you to come upstream and start building tools and start building things that are valuable for the people that they serve.
2:17:07So all of a sudden, you're relevant to the things that are going on day to day in their business, not just relevant when they don't have enough capacity internally and they need someone to outsource it to. Does that make sense?
2:17:18Yeah. Yeah. Because if you can make that shift, I think even the partners you've already got would probably get back to a level where it would sustain you.
2:17:26Uh, I think, you know, that's a very true statement because the partner is thinking of us as, oh, they did not they did not know that we have this strategy piece
2:17:37that and that we were just executing. So so that's a big shift to to show the them, you know, what we we got to offer.
2:17:46Yeah. 100%. Thank you.
2:17:50I I'd echo that. I think the partnership is a really great reframing of, um, the referral, you know, that your network, not not just seeing them as, a one and done referral, but actually leveraging them as as partners.
2:18:07I've heard Hermozzi do something similar where you reach out and you say, hey. Can you give me two you're you're not gonna sell the person you reach out to. Do you have two people you can recommend me to?
2:18:16It's kind of a similar Yeah. Analog. But even that sorry to interrupt your insight.
2:18:20But even that, the mindset shift is that's an ask.
2:18:24Have you got two people you can recommend me to? What am I getting from that? I want you guys to be a give.
2:18:29Hey. I've got this thing that I think is really valuable for you and the people that you serve. So the more you can be seen giving, the more people will think of you as a genuine partner who they want to speak to, not just, oh, Chris is calling again.
2:18:46He probably wants more work.
2:18:48It's like, Chris is calling again. I wonder what cool tool he's just invented that's gonna be amazing that I wanna share with everybody. I I would say the, um, score app.
2:18:55I'm just really glad to see that as a tool and take thank you for taking us through it because it's it it looked like a quiz before, but it's a pretty powerful tool that we've you've positioned it. And thanks.
2:19:08Awesome day. Appreciate it. Amazing.
2:19:12So I think we're still getting hung up on constantly looking for clients.
2:19:17It's always the same thing. We're hungry, we need food. We're hungry, we need food.
2:19:21And to elevate it, because when you guys talk about partners, I'm like, what do mean you only need four partners and it might work? The way that Matt's talking about four partners is more than enough because they keep referring you to new people and they wanna collaborate so that it's a win win.
2:19:36The problem with the way we keep thinking about our relationship is what do I get? We don't even ask what do they want. So in the in the in the case of Matt talked about with WeWork, WeWork needs warm bodies in a room.
2:19:48That's how their business model works. And some of those people might walk around like, it's pretty cool. I need a space here.
2:19:54So Matt's like, I got a perfect solution for you. If I make an assumption about your business is your business depends on having creative professionals in this room. Well, I've got something that would bring them here, and you don't have to pay me.
2:20:05I'll do all the work. That's a give. There's a secret ask inside of that, but it's mostly a give, at least on the surface.
2:20:12Right? You all understand that? So when you're doing that, then they're sitting up at night thinking, how do we get you all back in so that we can do this again and again and again?
2:20:23That's why he's like, after this workshop, you're going to learn how to generate infinite leads. You have to think of it like that. It's a fundamental shift in your thinking.
2:20:32If you don't think like that, it is will work for a little bit and then it's gonna taper off. Does everybody understand that?
2:20:38The difference is like, how do I make it a win for them? Blair calls it the double thank you, where you thank them for including you in their event, and they thank you for helping them to achieve a certain result.
2:20:51Asking for how many people do you know might might need my work my help? That's just you asking. That's it.
2:20:57It's not a win for them.
2:20:59Yeah. Like, he mentioned I like having, the tool. It makes me, like, being able to, like, think outside of I think the thing you're I don't remember the exact term, but just kind of almost going, like, on autopilot and not thinking what was it?
2:21:13I I wrote it down. Know? The default mode network.
2:21:17There we go. Yeah. Yeah.
2:21:18Yeah. So this is helpful to get out of that type of thinking.
2:21:22Thanks, dude.
2:21:24Hector the connector.
2:21:26Yes, sir. Um, I guess discovering new partner types that I hadn't really thought about and where my low hanging fruit is and, you know, I don't spend enough time.
2:21:38There's so much noise in my day to day where lots of noise.
2:21:44If I can sit down and with these tools which are freaking amazing, I can hone in and take care of low hanging fruit and all I need is a couple of nice pieces of, you know, clientele and things will be running smoothly and I can continue to do this and continue to build.
2:22:05So, uh, yeah.
2:22:07Signal versus noise. Right? So how are you gonna determine the signal from the noise?
2:22:11What are you gonna do? What's the mindset shift that you've made that you're gonna walk out here with today that's gonna It's not about me. It's about them.
2:22:18Yeah. I'm gonna shake it off, baby. Yeah.
2:22:21And also don't forget what we talked about right at the beginning. Right? You are gonna sit down every day, and you are gonna forget the noise.
2:22:27You're just gonna focus on, can I connect to the one or two new partners today? Yeah. And if you do that every day for fifteen minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, within ninety days, I promise you you will have a totally different business.
2:22:39Yeah.
2:22:40I kinda set aside thirty minutes on Sunday before Monday comes
2:22:47so that I already know what the plan is and Great time typically Great time to plan your week. Yeah. And then Would you do client work on a Sunday?
2:22:54No. So why are you doing you're number one client?
2:22:57Why are you doing that on a Sunday? I'm just teeing up Monday, so I'm thinking I I agree. I like planning my week on Sunday, but that's different from dedicating that time every day or week to this particular thing where we're finding partners, where we're doing the business development side of things.
2:23:12Yeah. They're two separate activities at least in my mind. Oh, for sure.
2:23:15I'm just saying I already have
2:23:17it's not on the regular, but it'll have to be on the regular now. I have to be committed. I'm a 100%.
2:23:21Nice. I'd like to be a 112, but we only have a 100%.
2:23:24Okay. Also FYI.
2:23:26So you have been watching a master class to generate an infinite amount of leads for your creative agency.
2:23:36There were three key things that we did in this training that you need to get right. The first one is getting really clear on exactly who your ideal client is and what their pain points and frustrations are in their language, not your language.
2:23:49We then built an irresistible offer, a scorecard assessment tool that identifies some of these challenges, some of these pain points, and diagnoses what the problems are in that business.
2:24:00And then we looked at our low hanging fruit, which is the people in our network that already have the trust and the attention of our ideal clients. So your job now is to go away and reach out to two or three of those people and start forming some meaningful partnerships.
2:24:17Partnerships are the key to growing your business consistently and generating leads. And just remember, somebody
2:24:23woke up today with the trust and the attention of your ideal clients. That's a good summary. Hey.
2:24:29If you've made it all the way to the end of this video, it means something. This was super valuable for you, so we're not gonna tell you what you just watched because you made it to the very end. Now we know this.
2:24:38Less than 20% of you who actually watch them like this will subscribe to the channel, go so ahead and reward yourself with a nice fat thumbs up. Make sure you make a comment and subscribe so that you don't miss any future episodes just like this. And if you enjoyed this, you've probably going to download the resources.
2:24:53Give Matt Essam a follow on LinkedIn. It's Matt Esam, e s s a m.
2:25:00Got it. And that's it. Right?
2:25:01That's it. That's it. That's a wrap.
2:25:02Thanks very much. See you guys next time.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The number one question every service business asks is where the next client comes from. This two-hour Futur masterclass answers it without a single ad or cold DM — by rewiring who you ask, what you give them, and the one habit that keeps the pipeline alive.
Named ideas worth stealing.
1:55:00model
The Agency Lead Flow System (3 parts)
- Magnetic messaging (define the ideal client)
- Irresistible offer (build a scorecard/assessment)
- Trust grid (give it to partners who hold their trust)
The full system: get specific on one ideal client, build a diagnostic scorecard as an irresistible free offer, then distribute it through a few partners who already have that client's trust and attention.
Steal forany service business that wants predictable leads without paid ads or cold outreach
07:40list
Two mindset shifts
- Your business is your number-one client (protect daily BD time)
- Always be oversubscribed (keep demand above capacity)
The two beliefs Matt says keep people stuck: not treating their own business as a client, and not maintaining a surplus of demand. Fixing both breaks the feast-and-famine cycle.
Steal forframing a coaching or sales-training offer around behavior change, not just tactics
21:30model
Trust vs Scale — four quadrants
- Referrals: high trust, low scale
- Cold DMs: low trust, low scale
- Paid ads: high scale, often low trust
- Partnerships: high trust AND high scale
A 2x2 mapping lead sources on trust and scalability. Partnerships occupy the underrated top-right corner where you borrow both the trust and the reach of someone who already serves your ideal client.
Steal fora landing-page diagram that positions partnerships as the smart choice
29:30list
Three types of partnership
- Delivery (subcontracting / white-label)
- Distribution (get in front of their audience)
- Brand (association, e.g. Clooney x Nespresso)
Partnerships come in three flavors; distribution is the most powerful for lead flow, and a partnership that ticks all three is the real gold.
Steal forauditing existing relationships to reposition delivery partners into distribution partners
40:20list
The six stages of the decision-making process
- 1. Unaware / satisfied
- 2. Aware / dissatisfied
- 3. Decision (straw that breaks the camel's back)
- 4. Research / compare options
- 5. Purchase
- 6. Review (become referrer or return)
A considered-purchase journey. Stage four is only ~8% of the market and competes on price; the strategy is to engage buyers at stages one and two and walk them to a stage four where you are the only option.
Steal forany content or offer that wants to reach buyers before they are actively shopping
44:20concept
Map the gap — symptoms not services
- Where they are now
- Where they want to be
- In their language, as symptoms felt at stage two
Capture the client's frustrations and desires the way they would say them in their own boardroom, not as the services you provide. Reverse-engineer stage-two symptoms from the stage-four project.
Steal forrewriting a sales page so headlines mirror the prospect's internal monologue
1:50:00concept
The doctor analogy for offers
- Comes referred
- Pre-visit intake questions
- Basic diagnostics before the doctor
- Calibrated questions to eliminate possibilities
- Diagnose, then prescribe or refer
A good doctor diagnoses through calibrated questions before prescribing — the model for a scorecard that asks qualifying questions, diagnoses the problem, and positions you as the expert.
Steal fordesigning assessment questions that make the prospect feel diagnosed, not sold
1:53:20list
Qualifying criteria (5 types)
- Current situation
- Biggest challenge
- Desired outcome / solution
- Urgency
- Custom qualifier (e.g. years in business)
The categories a scorecard should measure to decide whether someone is an ideal client, mirroring how a doctor triages by situation and urgency.
Steal forstructuring the scoring logic of any qualifying quiz or intake form
2:01:40list
Partner tiers: A / B / C-list
- C-list: people you already know, same level — direct no-overlap collaboration message
- B-list: warmer strangers — use the ARCAVA framework
- A-list: high-status, hard to reach — different approach, earn your way up
Treat potential partners like celebrities in three tiers and match the approach to the tier. Start with low-hanging C-list fruit and work up; C-list can introduce you to B-list.
Steal forprioritizing outreach so you start with the partners most likely to say yes
2:02:30acronym
ARCAVA outreach framework
- Reason
- Compliment
- Anchor
- Value
- Ask
A structured cold-ish outreach script for B-list partners who do not yet know you well.
Steal forwriting a partner-pitch DM or email that leads with value before the ask
2:08:20list
The partnership call structure
- Tell me about your business (here's what I know, what have I missed?)
- What are you trying to achieve / your goals?
- Present the assessment as a natural give
Run the partner call as a give, not a pitch: research first, listen for their goals, then position your free scorecard as something that helps them and the people they serve.
Steal forany discovery call where you want to co-create an offer instead of pushing yours
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
2:15:00product
“The workbook will be in the description and link below — all the prompts, the AI stuff, you can follow along at your own pace. Futur Pro is the professional creative community to grow your business and network.”
Soft and value-first — the free workbook and ScoreApp affiliate carry the primary ask; Futur Pro and the Scorecard Marketing book are secondary. No hard sell in the room.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
