108: Unlock The Power Of “Lean Marketing” With Bestselling Author Allan Dib

Title: Unlock The Power Of “Lean Marketing” With Bestselling Author Allan Dib

Guest: Allan Dib

Peter: I’m excited to share a special interview with best selling author Allan Dib. Allan is the author of The one Page Marketing Plan. The book provides a simple framework for mastering your marketing. It’s a step by step guide to putting your entire marketing strategy on one page. In this interview, we discuss Allan’s brand new book, Lean Marketing, which is a companion to the one page marketing plan.

Lean marketing. When is this book going to be released, Allan?

Allan: That’s next week on, May 7, finally. So it’s been a two year journey, but, yeah, next week, May 7, it’s out. And so it’s available, obviously, for preorder right now.

Peter: What is the origin of lean marketing?

Allan: The origin is kinda funny. I was in 2019, I was invited to speak at an event in Mexico, and I was one of the keynote speakers alongside Guy Kawasaki and Salim Ismail. But it was the last event that I had to be at on a long five week speaking tour throughout The US. I had an amazing time in The US. I saw a lot of people, but I was away from family.

I landed in this what seemed like a one horse town in Mexico, and I’m I was tired, and I’m thinking, what in the heck am I doing here? And as often happens, in fact, something that was kind of a low point in the moment became a high point. In fact, it became a turning point not just for me, but also for a lot of my team. But it turned out to be, an event where I was speaking to car manufacturers. Right?

It was put on by the automotive industry, and I kept hearing lean manufacturing, lean six sigma. And then one of the attendees came up to me and said, hey. I read your book, The one Page Marketing Plan. I’m super excited. I consider your book to be lean marketing, and I’d never heard that phrase before.

I I said thank you. It was polite, and we had a bit of a chat and all of the rest of it. But that kinda stayed in the back of my mind for a long time. And then I started really looking into what is this lean stuff that everybody’s talking about. It’s a very powerful methodology that manufacturers have used for a very long time now, really, since since World War two, and it was pioneered by Toyota.

It was initially called the Toyota Production System. But long story short, it’s a way to do manufacturing in a way that’s much less wasteful, much more efficient, that needs less labor, less capital, less equipment. And it really gave the Japanese a massive advantage. Japan went from being some of the lowest quality products in the world to the highest quality products in the world. I mean, a lot of us don’t even remember Japan being low quality because all our lives, Japanese stuff has been the best made stuff.

If you think of cars like Toyota I mean, if you want a low cost, reliable car, it’s hard to go past a Toyota. Companies like Canon, companies like Honda, all of these companies are are world renowned for high quality. And they did this on the back of being super, super efficient, reducing waste, and competing with mass manufacturers who had massive factories who kinda like the Henry Ford style where you’ve got these massive production lines, massive equipment. The Japanese just didn’t have that as an option because their industries were completely devastated after the after World War two. So lean became their massive advantage.

And then I kind of took that concept, and I thought, how do we apply some of the lean concepts to to marketing? Because there’s so much waste in marketing. There’s even that phrase that says half half the money I spend on marketing is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half. And Mhmm.

In an industry like manufacturing, you’d never see someone say, hey. Half of our labor is wasted. I don’t know which half, or half of our raw materials are wasted. I don’t know which half. Never would never happen.

In fact, the the gold standard in manufacturing is called six Sigma, which is basically 3.4 defects per million opportunities. And so if we start thinking of marketing that doesn’t work as a defect, then that’s something that that we can really learn from. And so I took a lot of the principles of lean, particularly in lean enterprise, lean thinking, lean manufacturing, and applied them to what we do in marketing. And so the whole idea is that we can do more with less. So less waste, less labor, less team, and get a bigger and better result because we keep being told to do more and more.

Every book you read, okay, there’s more to do on my to do list. Every podcast you read, okay. There’s another five things I’m not doing that I need to do, and it’s just getting exhausting. And it’s unnecessary because when I see what the best marketers in the world are doing, their marketing is usually pretty lean. They’re usually doing a few things, but they’re doing them very well.

And and, yeah, so that’s really the key concept of lean marketing is how can we get a bigger and better result by doing less stuff.

Peter: I think I know the answer to this in part, but I definitely wanna hear your take. Why now? Like, why do we need it now?

Allan: Yeah. Look. Writing a book, it’s not it’s something I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It’s like it basically was two years of my life. But similar to I heard Seth Godin once say, I only write a book when I’ve got no other choice, when I have to.

And the, on social media and everywhere, people saying do more, spend more, do more complex stuff, and this is really needed. I wrote the one page marketing plan because it was the book that I needed when I was first learning marketing. And so, similarly, I wrote Lean Marketing because it’s the book that I feel both myself, my team, and really my clients really need at the moment because we keep bomb being bombarded with more, do more. I recently read a marketing book and say the author or the name of the book, but in the first title page, it said, do more volume, more stuff, more whatever. And I think he means well, and he’s a very smart marketer as well, but it’s just become almost impossible for the small business owner to compete and do that and execute that effectively.

So, yes, of course, we wanna improve our marketing infrastructure and increase it and do more as we grow and as it’s working and it becomes more sophisticated. But like I said, even the most sophisticated marketers that I know of, myself included and many of the people that I admire, they’re usually not doing a thousand things from a marketing perspective. They’re usually doing a few things, and they’re doing it really well. So now we’ve just been bombarded with so many things to do and spend more, do it more complex, post more often, and all of that sort of thing. And so I think challenging that a little bit and taking a bit of a contrarian take, I think a lot of people will find that very refreshing.

Peter: Yeah. For sure. So looking at the two books, I mean, I’m a huge fan of this. In fact

Allan: Thank you.

Peter: When we meet with a new prospective client, I give them a copy of this book. I give them a Reader’s Digest version of what it’s all about, and I say, if you’re not in on this, we can’t help you. But what I’m curious about is how you see these two books working together. I mean, clearly, this has a lot of strategy to it. How do you see these two kinda

Allan: Yeah. That’s a great that’s a great question. So I wrote the book so that you get massive value from just reading one or the other, so they’re not necessarily sequels. But together, I feel like it’s one plus one equals three. Right?

So one page marketing plan was very much about strategy, about your plan, about being clear about what you’re going to do. We had some tactical stuff in there, but, really, mostly, it’s about getting your plan and your strategy right. Lean marketing is very much about implementation. How do I take that strategy? How do I take that plan and make it a reality and get more by doing less with leverage?

In fact, even on Amazon just the other day, I managed to group them as a series even though they’re not necessarily a numbered series. You could read one first, the other second, really doesn’t matter. But together, I feel like it’s a street smart MBA in marketing. I think you you’ll get a lot out of them, and they’re very complementary. The message is very complementary.

There’s definitely some overlap. I’ve covered a lot of the same concepts in both of them because there’s there are some key concepts that if you only read that one book, you need to know them. You need to know how to select your target market. You need to know how to put together an offer, those sorts of things. But you’ll get a lot out of both of them.

Peter: Got it. Yeah. That make that’s kind of the conclusion that I had that I had come to. So in going through the book, I saw a quote in here on page 56 that that I’ve heard you repeat on other podcasts, so I want to explore it a little bit. The best marketer wins every time.

Let’s talk about that.

Allan: Yeah. So one of the things that we’re often told, and I think this comes from particularly from the likes of Silicon Valley and things like that where they’re so focused on product. Like, the product is everything. And, look, I 100% agree that product is incredibly important. But how many times have we seen a good product just die or not do very well in the marketplace?

Because not enough people have bought it, not enough people know about it, not enough people are are aware of it. So my view is, yes, a great product is important for customer retention. But before customer retention, we need to figure out customer acquisition. So no one’s ever gonna know how good your product or service is until they buy from you. Before they buy from you, they only know how good your marketing is.

So to me, that’s incredibly important. So so, absolutely, we wanna have a good product so that people stay, so that people refer, so that people have an amazing experience. That’s super important, and I’m not minimizing that in any way. But what really, we want our product to be successful in the marketplace, and that’s gonna be as a result of your marketing, how you communicate it, how you position it, how you talk about it, your messaging, and all of those sorts of things. So as an example and I think I use this example in the one page marketing plan.

When the iPod came out, it wasn’t the best m p three player out there. It wasn’t the first m p three player out there, but it was the best marketed m p three player out there. I remember and, I mean, I’m probably dating myself now, but there were a bunch of other m p three players out there, and they would always talk about how many gigabytes they had, the specs, and all of that sort of thing. That means nothing to anyone except if you’re a geek. Whereas the iPod came out, and they said thousand songs in your pocket.

Now everybody can understand that. A child can understand that, wow, I can have a thousand songs in my pocket. And that’s that essentially drove Apple’s resurgence. I mean, then there was the iPod, then came the iPhone, then came all the iPads and everything like that. And without that and without that focus on their message, on their market, and being so good at just marketing the product that they had, we wouldn’t have the Apple that we had today.

So being being really intentional about your messaging, about your target market, about your marketing in general is just so important for you to be successful in the marketplace. And a lot of people kinda push back on that. They want they want life to be a meritocracy, and I wish life was a meritocracy. I wish nurses and firefighters were the highest paid people. I mean, they’re probably the most deserving people, people who put their lives at risk for all of us, but we know that’s not the case.

It’s not the most deserving people that get the reward. It’s the people who you get what you negotiate, not what you deserve, unfortunately. If it was up to me and if I was creating the universe, I would make sure that the most deserving got what they deserved, but that’s just not the case. So really as marketers, we need to figure out how do we get our message out there? How do we get that unfair advantage so that people select our product or our service first?

Peter: That makes sense. So I’m just going to skip through a few quotes I saw in the book. Here’s another one. Well, you talked about b to b and whether or not this lean marketing applies to b to b sales. I I I really liked what you just say about that.

Allan: Yeah. So often, it’s funny. I get emails from readers almost every day, and sometimes even in the same day, I’ll get an email two different emails like this. One person will say, hey. I read your book really good.

I can I can absolutely see how this applies to b to c businesses to consumer businesses, but I sell b to b? Does this stuff really apply to me? And then and I’ll have another email in my inbox that says, hey. I actually sell to consumers, and I read your book and I really liked it, but I can see how your stuff applies to b two b, but does it would it work with consumers? So it’s really funny.

So that’s why I addressed that in this book because we’re not selling b to b. We’re not selling b to c. We’re selling h to h, which is human to human. Right? And whether you’re the CEO of a company or whether you’re the janitor, we all respond emotionally.

So we buy emotionally, and we justify with logic. And a lot of people will push back for that with that, particularly in a b two b context. They’ll say something like, you know what? My buyers are super sophisticated. They’re CEOs or they’re CFOs or whatever it is.

They don’t respond to kind of this emotional stuff, and that’s absolutely not true. They’re the same people who are watching Netflix evening. They’re the same people who are making dumb purchasing decisions. They’re the same people who have got the same fears as everybody else. And I I use this in the book to demonstrate.

I came from the IT industry, and a lot of times I had to work with IBM equipment. So I I really know my equipment and vendors very well. IBM was never the best value. It was never the best quality. It was never the fastest or highest spec stuff.

But people often bought IBM, and one of the driving forces behind it was a brilliant piece of messaging that they created was nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. So is that an emotional message, or is that a logical message? That’s an emotional message. Right? They’re like, particularly if you’re selling b two b, the top thought on someone’s mind there, whether you’re the CEO or anyone in between, Is it gonna, like, make me look dumb?

Is this gonna ruin my career? Am I gonna get fired as a result of making this purchasing decision? Am I so there’s a lot of emotion associated with that, and there’s a lot of risk aversion. So if you sell B2B, one of the best messages you can use is, look. This is the safe option because whatever it is.

Because it we’ve been in business for a long time or because it’s whatever, you can return it or because it does this and that. So whether you’re the CEO, whether you’re janitor, you I say emotion does the crime and logic does the cover up. So that that’s that’s something that you need to keep in mind whether you’re selling b to b, b to B2C, whatever it is, whatever the designation, you’re selling to humans. And humans respond emotionally, and they often justify with logic after the fact.

Peter: That’s great. So one of the big themes in both books is creating assets, marketing assets that you can that can really create value in your business. And so there’s a few points here that kind of all tie together. But, one of them was one of the points that you made was equating marketing assets to investment assets. Wealthy derive their income predominantly from assets rather than labor.

You wanna touch on that a little bit? Because I I think it’s just really key to getting this lean marketing right.

Allan: Yeah. It is super key. So when you look at when you look at people who are wealthy, so and I became wealthier later in life. We derive a lot of our income from our assets, so not from our labor. So meaning from investments.

So from if you own property, you can derive rental income. If you own stocks, you can derive dividend income. And so that’s really truly the only kind of passive income. People talk about a passive income in business, and, really, I think there’s no such thing as passive income in business. Even if your business is low maintenance, which is a good goal to have, it’s usually not no maintenance.

But my my investment in my index fund in my in the S and P 500 or whatever is that’s truly passive. That’s just I have the money parked in there, and then I go get returns over time. So that’s really truly passive income. And that’s really how the wealthy derive their income. So and that’s how people talk about the wealthy getting wealthier.

Right? And sometimes they’re a little bit sore about that. But the fact is they the reason that happens is because they have assets often go up in value over time, but they also throw off dividend income. So and you might you might think of that as kind of, I was saying, quote marks, an unfair advantage. Right?

And so similarly, I think of who the best marketers are and what they do in order to get leads, prospects, new revenue in the door, it’s a very similar concept. They often have very strong marketing assets, and those assets generate a lot of lead flow. Those assets generate a lot of revenue. So for example, if I use myself as an example, my book, The one Page Marketing Plan, that’s probably my key marketing asset in my business. Every single day, I get people who email me, who join my email list, who invite me to speak at their event or their webinar or their podcast or whatever.

These are inbound opportunities I get every day that I didn’t have to hunt. I didn’t have to go after. I didn’t have to cold call. I didn’t have to reach out because I’ve got this asset in place. Now there’s nothing wrong with driving your income from labor.

That’s where a lot of us have started, and that’s where a lot of I still do generate some income from labor from the work that that I do. No. There’s nothing wrong with that. But over time, you wanna move as much of your income generation to assets, whether it’s financial assets or whether it’s marketing assets. So in my business, my my book my first book and, hopefully, my second book will be that asset that just generates new lead flow every single day.

So like I said, every single day, there’s people who would join our coaching program, or there’s people who join our membership program, or there’s people who invite me to speak or whatever because of an asset I’ve got out there in the marketplace. So that’s kind of like a bit of an unfair advantage. Right? Because somebody else could be as good or better than me, have no assets, but they’re on the phone cold calling or they’re emailing or whatever, and it’s a it’s completely different positioning. And so the problem with that also is when they stop, the lead flow stops.

Whereas for us, even though I wrote the book maybe five years ago, every single day, we’ve got lead flow coming in. We’ve got things happening. So it’s a very powerful asset, and assets allow you to compound your wealth. So similar to a financial asset where you’ve got compound interest, same with the marketing assets. So now that I’ve got all this lead flow coming in from the book, I’m now next gonna compound that into a podcast, and then I’ll compound that into other projects and things like that.

And so it just snowballs and gets bigger and bigger. And so the like I said, there’s nothing wrong with earning from labor or getting lead flow from labor. Everybody starts there. But as much as possible, you wanna start building those marketing assets in your business that generate some of that lead flow.

Peter: Yeah. So when you we talk about assets, yeah, I’m curious. I’m sure folks on the call maybe not gonna run out and write a book necessarily, or they’re let’s say you’re working for a corporation. Yeah. What do assets look like?

What what are just some ideas of Yep. What we’re talking about?

Allan: So I’ll give you some ideas. So I talk about something that I call flagship assets. I’ve got a whole chapter on that in the book. And I think of flagship asset I sort of break it out down into three major sort of subclasses. So there there’s flagship content.

So an example of flagship content is my book. That’s a piece of content. There’s flagship tools, and there’s flagship experiences. So let me break each of those down just very quickly. Sure.

So flagship content could be so for for example, if we know Tim Ferriss. Right? His flagship piece of content is his podcast. So we know him from his books as well, but I think he really got his traction from the podcast. So that’s a key asset in his business.

So that’s a flagship asset, something that he’s kind of famous for, something that he’s known for, something that generates a lot of value in the marketplace. If you think of the Michelin star guide and I talk about the history of the Michelin star guide in the book, but that’s essentially a guide that helps people find really great restaurants. Right? Stuff that’s really worth going to. And where that came from is from the Michelin tire company.

Because if you’re a tire company, if people drive a lot, that’s really good for business. So they created a guide that’s genuinely helpful for their target market that will help them drive a lot, and so they’re famous for that piece of content. If you think of Red Bull, they have all of these crazy kind of sports and things like that, and that generates a lot of content. Right? So the people watch the Red Bull on YouTube, on TikTok, on everywhere, watching people do all these crazy jumps out of helicopters and things like that.

So that’s content that they put out on a regular basis, something that they’re known and famous for, provides a lot of value. So, hopefully, you’re seeing a pattern there where your flagship asset is something that you’re gonna be famous for. It’s something that generates a lot of value for your target market. And often, it’s gonna be something that kind of reveals invisible prospects. What I mean by invisible prospects is people who are ideal people for for your target market, but that you can’t necessarily get a list of.

So for example, I could easily get a list of criminal lawyers in the state of Texas. Right? That’s a list that you could get. But I can’t really get a list of people who need help with their marketing. Right?

That’s kinda they’re invisible prospects. I need them to reveal themselves. So somebody reading my book and opting into my email list, now they’ve made themselves visible. They’re like, hey. I’ve got your book.

I read your book on your on your list, and so now they’re visible prospects. Same, for example, if you’re a chiropractor. You really don’t know who’s kinda you can’t get a list of people with back pain right now. They need to reveal themselves. So your flagship asset will often help reveal invisible prospects.

Mhmm. So that’s flagship content. Then I talk about flagship tools. Sometimes you can create a tool that somebody uses that, again, provides a lot of value, that’s something you’re that you’re kinda famous for, something that helps them get a result in advance of them buying. And, again, it’s a useful tool.

So examples I give, like, a few years ago, I read the five love languages. Right? So you try and figure out what language you some people are physical touch, some people are acts of service, blah blah blah, all of that sort of stuff. But a key part of it is a quiz. You go through a quiz and you figure out what love language you are.

So that’s a really useful tool to try and figure out what love language you are. So if I think of another tool like, let’s say, Google Analytics is for people who run websites. Right? And people who run websites want to know what their traffic is doing, and so Google provides this tool completely for free. But it’s so powerful for Google because they get all of this data around billions of websites in the world.

But more importantly, people who are measuring their website traffic obviously want more of it, so they’re gonna sell you Google Ads, of course. So a tool could be really powerful for revealing a problem somebody has. Because if I do a quiz and I find if I get a score of 47 out of a 100 on your quiz, well, the next thing I’m gonna wanna do is improve that score. And often, improving that score will be you taking me through your product, your service, or or whatever else. So that’s a really powerful way.

And finally, I’ll talk about flagship experiences. So this is probably should be considered for most small businesses a more advanced strategy, but it can in the simplest form. If you’ve ever walked through a shopping mall and you’ve go had a taster, somebody offer a plate of cookies or whatever or a little piece of a cookie or whatever as a taster, that’s an example of a flagship experience. Or for example, I’m a BMW customer, so sometimes they invite me to a drive day. So you can go and experience different models of the BMW.

You can drive them around a track or whatever. So it’s helping people have an some kind of experience that’s, again, reveals invisible prospects, that provides a lot of value, and that helps them get a result in advance. So I I love trying out different models of BMW or whatever, and often that stimulates my buying experience. Think, okay. Yeah.

Maybe I will upgrade or maybe I will buy that SUV version or whatever. Right? So that’s basically flagship assets. So we break them up into either a piece of content or a tool or an experience. And like I said, it doesn’t have to be anything crazy.

It’s just something that helps your target market get a result in advance.

Peter: I think that ties in perfectly with so in the book, you’ve got it laid out in nine principles of lean marketing. You kinda list the nine. In fact, you sent me this beautiful metal sheet here with nine the nine principles on it. And then on the back, it’s got the force multipliers tool, assets, and processes. But the first tool, which I think ties directly to what we just talked about, is create value for your target market with your marketing.

Allan: Yeah.

Peter: Now my little joke was, hey. I thought marketing was supposed to interrupt your target market to get the value they had to buy from you.

Allan: A lot of what our marketing does is promise people how good their life will be after they buy from us. And that’s totally fine. That’s a part of marketing. But what if our marketing could provide value for people regardless of whether they bought or not? Because that’s gonna be something that truly builds goodwill in the marketplace, builds your brand.

So often actually, before I get into that, there’s an economics principle called externalities. I don’t know if if you’ve heard of that, but, basically, economists will it’s basically the side effect of an economic activity. I’ll give you an example. So for example, a factory that’s manufacturing a product, but it spills pollution into the air. So that’s called an externality.

So it’s creating a cost to the community that they’re not bearing. Right? But you can also have positive externalities. For example, literally, if I look over my balcony here, my neighbor has a beautiful garden, and they spend all day long maintaining it and watering it and all of that. And I when I sit on the balcony, I kind of enjoy it, and they’ve got a little waterfall or water feature or whatever.

And that came at no cost to me, whatever. I don’t have to maintain it. I didn’t pay for it or whatever. That’s a positive externality. And it also elevates the neighborhood, makes the neighborhood look nicer, and all of that sort of thing.

So that’s a positive externality. Now most external analysts tell tend to be negative, kinda like the pollution spilling into the air from the factory. But what I wanna do with our marketing with lean marketing is create positive externalities. So what I wanna do is positively affect people even if they never buy from us. So an example in in my business, I’ve got the one page marketing plan Canvas, and we get millions of downloads for that from people all over the world.

Some people have never even read the book. Maybe somebody has told them to download it or they’ve searched for it or whatever. Now I’m totally fine that millions of people download it, and the vast majority of them, probably 99%, will never become clients will never pay me a single cent, and that’s totally fine. I’m still creating a positive externality in the marketplace, but a small percentage of those people will buy one of our programs, will buy a book, will buy a membership program or a coaching program or whatever else. And you can be successful beyond your wildest dreams even if 99.9% of the the world doesn’t know who you are.

But if you’ve got your targeting right and if you’ve got your messaging right, there’s a small percentage of people who buy, and you can do very well out of that. So I want you to think about how can you create a lot of value in the marketplace even for people who will never buy from you. And and, again, couple of examples I gave earlier, would you flagship asset? So for me, it’s my one page marketing plan canvas, and it’s my book, And, hopefully, it’s my second book as well. So those are things that provide a lot of value to the marketplace to people who will never even buy from me.

So that’s something that creates a lot of goodwill. It’ll create referrals, and goodwill can be monetized down the track. So if you’ve got a business that generates a lot of goodwill, you can literally sell that. Like, when you sell a a business, the accountant will write, okay, whatever the cost of your plant and equipment are, but there’s a line on the bAllance sheet called goodwill, and that’s the value of your brand and your reputation that people have bought.

Peter: Now keeping in that same asset piece, I liked your your thought. Principle number five, assets increase your yield on marketing activities.

Allan: If we start thinking about our marketing as a capital expenditure rather than just an expense so when you buy a capital asset, you want it to create a return. You want it to create an income, and we talked about income comes from assets. But we can actually improve most assets. So if you buy a property and you fix it up, you can now charge more rent for it. You can increase the yield on it.

So you may have let’s say you bought a building for a million dollars, you fixed it up, you improved it, you renovated it, whatever else. Now you can charge more rental income than it would have been unrenovated. So similarly with marketing, we wanna build marketing assets. Sometimes you can even buy marketing assets, but let’s say we’re gonna build them, but we can improve them over time, and we can increase our yield on those marketing assets. So, again, using my business as an example, I’ve got the one page marketing plan out there.

Now I’ve got lean marketing out there so that that asset becomes more expansive, reaches more people, has a complementary message as well. I’m about to launch a podcast later this month. That’s another asset that I’m deploying in my business. So the and they’re things that are gonna generate a lot of goodwill, a lot of value in the marketplace. And, again, like I said, 99% of people may never buy a single thing from me, but it’s gonna generate a lot of goodwill, and a percentage of those people will.

Peter: Right. You know, one thing I think about is we’ve got a lot of clients that spend a lot of money on ads, and they’re driving traffic to their website. And if they’re not providing value when the people visit the website, of course, we’re using remarketing and retargeting and things like So we’re not wasting those clicks. But, yeah, it just makes sense that if you’ve got assets that provide value, it’s gonna increase that yield for sure. I I I can totally see that.

Allan: Yeah. We’ve all been kind of we’ve all opted into someone’s list or clicked on an ad and then been spammed to death because what they’re trying to do is get a return on their ad spend straight away. And that’s okay. That has a place, but you kinda feel a little bit icky. You’re like, man, this person is really doing the the hard sell.

And even if you want the product, you kinda put off. And I think of that as that pollution, that negative ex externality. So and it’s 99% of people will be put off, 1% might may buy or whatever, but you’ve burned a lot of goodwill in the process. You’ve burned a lot of people who may have been buyers in thirty days, sixty days, ninety days, a year, two years. I’ve had people on my email list who’ve been on my list for years, and then suddenly something happens in their business or suddenly they’re ready now to buy.

And had I been, like, kind of just a spammer hammering them to buy immediately, we would’ve lost those people. So in fact, would say the vast majority of people who buy anything from us have been on our email list for some time. And so we try and make we of course, we do offers to our email list. Of course, we do promotions and things like that, but mostly, we try and provide a lot of value, a lot of education, and create that positive externality. So that’s something to really be aware of is the best advertising is stuff that creates a lot of positive a lot of positive goodwill with your target market.

There’s Howard Gosage. He said people don’t read ads. They read what interests them, and sometimes that’s an ad. Right? So if your if your ads are really content, and that’s really the most powerful kind of advertising is content, things that people actually wanna consume, well, that’s so much more powerful when you watch a movie and think of and see product placement.

Right? You see James Bond running or strangling someone, and you see the Amiga watch, or you see the Aston Martin he’s driving or whatever. It’s part of the entertainment. The advertising is part of the entertainment. It’s not interrupting.

It’s not, pushing you to buy now and all of that. It’s just putting that in front of you, and it’s entertaining you in the process.

Peter: That’s great. So going a little different direction here, I thought this concept made a lot of sense. And my background was sales from a marine electronics manufacturer working in Europe. I was the regional sales manager. When you work for a small company, you’re in charge of marketing as well.

Right? It’s like they’re one and the same. People don’t think about it. And I and I thought this principle number six sort of captured some of the essence of that, kind of what I learned along the way. You said selling is the best way to build your brand.

Allan: Yeah.

Peter: And I thought so the one example you gave was Nike founder Phil Knight selling running shoes from the trunk of his car at TrackMates. And in fact, I grew up down near Oregon, and our track coach was actually a friend of Phil Knight’s

Allan: Oh.

Peter: And had the Nikes that the kids on the track team work through that connection. Anyway, let’s talk about that a little bit. This idea of, like, hey. Sell. Let’s build our brand.

Let’s sell.

Allan: A lot of times, people look at what big companies are doing like Nike, Apple, or whatever, and they see that these big advertising campaigns, these flashy billboards, these stadium sponsorships, that’s how they got successful. And, no, that’s the result of their success. That’s not what created their success. If we have a look at their origin story exactly as you said, Phil Knight, who’s the founder of Nike, he was just selling his product out of the boot of his car. He was just hustling and trying to get his product sold.

And he did very well, obviously, and then it scaled and so on. The two Steves from Apple, again, they weren’t creating all of these crazy ads and things like that that you see now. That’s a result of their success. That’s a result of their sales success. It’s not a precursor to it.

So if you see all these big successful companies and you try and copy what they’re doing, you’re not gonna be successful. You wanna copy what they did to become big. So which in all circumstances was sales. So they sold their product to more people, and so people got to know them. People used the product.

They loved it, and then that’s how they got successful. So and it kinda comes back to my definition of branding. You ask 10 different marketers the definition of branding, you get 10 different answers. My definition is it’s the personality of a business. Now how do you get to know the personality of a business?

I think the best way is to do business with them. And so a lot of branding is trying to stimulate the feeling that you’ll get when you buy from someone. But my view is let’s just get them to buy, and let’s get them to feel what it’s like to work with us, and that’s really building your brand. So my view is building your brand is something that’s done after somebody buys from you, not before. It’s it’s getting that world class experience.

It’s using your product. It’s referring other people. It’s all of that. That’s what really builds your brand. The superficial stuff that we think about when when they think about branding, the colors, the fonts, the website, and all that.

Yeah. Look. Absolutely. You wanna make sure your website is attractive. It’s clean, it’s easy to understand, all of those things.

But none of those things are things that I think of as true branding. That’s part of it. So if you think of the person someone’s personality, yes, the way they dress and present themselves, it’s important, and that’s part of their personality for sure. But that that’s a that’s pretty superficial. That’s kinda just a small part of it.

Really, when once you get to know them and the way they speak, who they hang out with, who they are, that’s really their true core personality. And similarly with your business, your the personality of your business is how you do customer service, how you do delivery, how you, interact with clients, how you do post sale service, all of that sort of stuff. So that’s really where you get a chance to build your brand. So, yes, the superficial stuff, of course. Let’s pay attention to that.

Let’s make sure your website’s clean, that you’ve got fonts that are usable, all of that sort of thing. But that’s not what branding is. That’s a very small part of it.

Peter: It looks like we may have a question in the chat. Okay. So it’s a question from Chris Goldman. Go ahead and ask it. When you talk about lean marketing, I start thinking of lean messaging.

My personal area of work with business clients, how messaging. How important is it for messaging to be both clear and also concise?

Allan: That’s a great question. And thank you, Chris. You said you pre ordered a month ago. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the support.

So, Chris, great question. Really good. Messaging and in fact, I I kinda step it back. I talk about copywriting. But copywriting is so much more than just words on a page.

And in fact, I’ve got a chapter in the book. My biggest chapter in the book is about copywriting. I talk about the 10 copywriting commandments, and one of them is about being clear, not clever. Right? A lot of times, marketers try to be clever.

They use some weird pun on words or whatever, and they lose clarity. One of the key principles is we wanna be clear, not clever. So we wanna make sure that our message could be understood by even a 12 year old. So if someone can’t explain it easily in a single sentence, that’s an opportunity to revise that message and make it clearer. In the book so in that copywriting chapter of the book, I’ve got 10 copywriting commandments that I talk about on how to create a a message that really cuts through.

And then I’ve got what I call the magnetic messaging framework. So it’s seven steps to really create a very short, concise message. So places that you wanna use a short, concise message would be above the fold on your website or in in your social media bio or places where you’ve got only maybe a sentence or two max to really get your message across. And there’s seven things that I talk about that that make a magnetic message, and I’m gonna run through them just very quickly now. Number one, is it about them, or is it about you?

So a lot of messages are are self focused. Like, we’ve been in business since 1994. We’re so good. We’re we do this, that, and the other. What you wanna talk about is you wanna flip it.

You wanna talk about their problem and what they’re thinking about. So you wanna talk about your prospect. Number two, is it easy to understand? Like I said, clarity trumps cleverness always. So could a 12 if you explained that in a sentence to your 12 year old, would they understand what you’re talking about?

Number three, is it believable? So a lot of times we can make a claim, and the claim can be 100% true, but there’s still a believability gap. So someone’s like, yeah. Look. So what we’re gonna use is proof.

So can you have a proof element in there? Number four, is it interesting or unique? Can you create a little bit of an interesting spin on what you do or present it in a slightly unique way? Number five, is it the good thing without the bad thing? So a lot of times with whatever we sell, we’re selling the good thing.

But in the back of the prospect’s mind, there’s like, but this bad thing. So for example, you you do weight help people with weight loss, something in the back of people’s mind will be, well, but do I have to spend hours and hours on a treadmill, or do I have to give up all my favorite foods? So in your message, you might say something like, lose lose 10 pounds without giving up your favorite foods or something like that if that assuming that’s true. And, of course, we wanna make sure your message is true. At number six, is it very clear who it’s for?

Is it very clear who your message is for? So will someone read your message and say, oh, that’s for me. So that’s something that you really wanna make sure of. And finally, very important, is the next action clear? So is the next physical visible action that you want the prospect to take, is that clear?

So click here, buy now, download here, enter your email address, whatever you want them to do. Tell them exactly what you want them to do. So they’re kind of seven steps of the magnetic messaging framework, and I I cover that in a lot more detail in the book. But you won’t necessarily be able to hit all seven, but that’s something that I use as a bit of a filter to see, is my message magnetic? Could I make sure it’s about them?

Is it easy to understand? Is it believable? Is the next action clear? Is it clear who it’s for? All of those sorts of things.

So I hope that helps, and and that covers some of your question there, Chris.

Peter: Yeah. That’s great. Thank you, Allan. We got another question here from Charlie. He says, you mentioned marketing depends on how you leverage your assets.

I get assets, but can you explain the act of leveraging with an example?

Allan: Yeah. So leverage is anything that multiplies the force of your input. So just to use an example, so if you wanna break down a a brick wall, you could try with your hands, and you maybe after a lot of force and a lot of pushing and kicking and all of that, maybe you might be able to push it down, maybe or maybe not. But gonna have very sore hands. It’s gonna take a long time.

It’s gonna be very difficult. But if you have a sledgehammer, you could do that in in a couple of minutes. No problem. Because that sledgehammer multiplies the force of your inputs. It literally multiplies your force, you can smash down that wall.

So, similarly, marketing assets will help you help you multiply the force of your input. So to give you a a concrete example, let’s say I wanted to get a lot of people to buy to buy a product, right, that I’m selling. Let’s say my book. Let’s say I wanted to get which I do. I want a lot of people to buy my book.

One thing I could do is I could go onto LinkedIn or buy an email list and spam people to death and tell them to to buy it, and that’d be a lot of labor. Like, I’d have to email people individually. I would have to get a lot of backlash. I’d probably be banned off platforms and all of that sort of thing. So it’d be difficult.

It’ll be labor intensive. It’ll take a lot of time, and it probably won’t be very effective. Kind of like breaking down that brick wall with my bare hands. Now something that I could use to get a lot of leverage is I’m showing up on podcasts similar to this. Like, I I was recently on another very big podcast.

So they’re that they’re high leverage marketing activities because I can go on, provide a lot of value, and show up for an hour or an hour and a half or whatever it is and reach literally millions of people who actually wanna hear my message. I’m not spamming them. I’m not being disruptive. I’m not getting banned, and I’m not spending a lot lot of time. I’m spending an hour providing a ton of value and reaching mill millions of people.

So that’s an example of a high leverage marketing activity that’s gonna be highly aligned with my goals. And I recognize that the vast majority of people who are on that podcast may not buy my book or whatever, but if they got a piece of value and I created a positive externality in the process, I’m very happy with that. So that’s an example of a high leverage marketing activity that I’m literally doing to help get awareness of a new product that I’m putting out into the marketplace. So what we wanna do is really think about with whatever you’re selling, where is a high leverage marketing activity that I can do that will create positive externalities where I can reach a lot of people? It doesn’t even have to be a lot of people, but it’s something that where you’re not having to do just manual labor one one to one kind of thing, which is what a lot of people do.

Peter: We have a different question here, a little off out of the marketing realm, more kind of into the current business climate. So we’ve got an attendee asking, when you look at the current business climate, what are you seeing? Are companies in growth mode, nervous mode, constricting mode, etcetera?

Allan: So we we are heading into an era of incredible change. So particularly in in The United States, you’re going to have an big election. There is definitely going to be a market correction, so a lot a lot of people don’t believe that there’s a recession coming. There’s definitely a recession coming. This is not financial advice or whatever, but AI is coming going to be very disruptive.

I’ve got a whole chapter on AI in the book. Now a lot of people view these things with trepidation. These are the opportunity these are when fortunes are made. When you look at some of the biggest businesses, they were almost always founded in a recession or in a downturn of some sort or whatever. So this is not something to be fearful of because if you can if you can be someone who’s creating a lot of value in downturns or upturns, but both.

But in upturns, pretty much everybody’s a genius. Right? Everyone can do well. Right? So that that doesn’t differentiate you very much.

Great. You ride the wave, of course, and take advantage of that. But in downturns, if you can maintain your focus, not be freaked out by what’s happening, because we know after every downturn, that results in a in an upturn, in a in usually a very big upturn. It’s kinda like when forest fires clear out all of the debris and things like that, and then what happens after that? New growth just comes out.

So I think we’re well overdue for a forest fire in terms of what’s happening in the economy and, the world scene, but I think following that, massive fortunes are going to be made. So regardless of what the economy is doing, you wanna be providing a lot of value to clients, building your brand, delivering a great world class experience to your customers and vendors and things like that. So that’s something to be aware of. So I would be building marketing assets right now because you wanna use that as leverage to get you through whatever happened. And look.

Even if I’m completely wrong and no downturn ever happens, no recession happens, that’s a it’s a good thing to be doing, to be building your marketing assets, to be creating leverage in your business and in your marketing.

Peter: Great. We’ve got a couple more questions here. This is from Darlene. You talked about b to b and b to c. Any thoughts on marketing for a service business rather than selling a product.

And I I do happen to know Darlene does have a service that she sells.

Allan: Perfect. What kind of service do you sell, Darlene?

Peter: She has she is a mobile pet grooming business. Actually, one with Australia in it. I know you’re from joining us from Melbourne today. Aussie Pet Mobile is the name of the company. Oh, I

Allan: love it. I love it. So, Darlene, regardless of whatever service you’re selling, the reason somebody buys a service is because it takes them from point a to point b. Point a is a worse place. B is a better place.

So I want someone to take me so the reason I buy a pet grooming service is because my pet’s got tangled, whatever. They need a wash. They need a grooming or whatever, and I I don’t want I either don’t have the expertise or don’t have the time or whatever to do it. So we’re all, regardless of whatever service we’re offering, we’re really taking people from a worse condition to a better condition. So and the distinction between marketing between a product and a service, yeah, there are some minor distinctions there.

But for the most part, people are gonna respond to similar messaging, similar similar marketing. So we wanna go from a worse place to a better place. The the reason I bought this microphone is because I want it to sound better on podcasts. Right? I was in a worse condition.

Now I’m in a better condition. The reason I bought this big screen that I’ve got on my computer is so I can see spreadsheets and have a lot of windows open and stuff like that. So I can go from a worse condition to a better condition because I don’t have to stare at a tiny little laptop screen. So with that in mind, we wanna make sure our messaging is super clear around that. So we wanna talk to the problem that the person has and take them from where they are to a better place.

So in in terms of what you do, you would be talking about the impact it has on the pet, in terms of how they’re able to you’re able to take care of your pet is more comfortable, you’re cleaner, whatever. I would even see about and you may be doing this already, but look at a subscription service so that you don’t have to organize it every time. I remember when I mean, my my doggy died a couple of years ago, and we haven’t got a new dog, but, you know, the amount of money we spent on that dog, like, that was that was a lot. Right? She had literally five beds around the house, one inside, one outside, one upstairs, one downstairs every everywhere.

So pet owners love to spend a lot of money on their pet, and we absolutely use mobile dog grooming because we didn’t didn’t have time and we didn’t have expertise. There’s someone coming in, taking care of it, blow drying, all of that sort of stuff. Great. Love it. So one of the pain points was trying to organize it.

So every month, my my wife would text the person trying to arrange a time. That time doesn’t work. No. Can you come at this time? Whatever.

But if you can organize a subscription where someone just shows up at the same time every month or whatever, it could be on the, whatever, the first of every month or whatever it is, whatever you mutually agree, and I think that’d be a great way to do it.

Peter: I think if I could add, I was just looking at the book. You’ve got this whole chapter three on what are you really selling. Right? Yeah. And you’ve got you talk about vitamins and painkillers.

Are you selling freedom? Are you selling safety, basic needs, time, convenience? There’s a whole host of things.

Allan: And in terms of emotional selling, I mean, almost nothing trumps a a pet, maybe someone’s kid, but that’s about it. Like, after someone’s children, their pets, I mean, that that is an emotional buying trigger. Like, you you see the dog food or whatever, and then they say it’s gourmet and this and all of that sort of stuff. Really, a dog doesn’t care about that. That’s selling to the human.

Right? The dog just will inhale it. So the dog doesn’t really care if it’s gourmet or got gravy or whatever. That’s really emotional selling to the pet owner. So and more and more, people are spending more on their pets, often more on their pets than on their kids.

Peter: True. We’ve got one more question from Emily. You mentioned world class experience, which I know comes from one Page Marketing Plan. What are some examples of world class experience for service area businesses and specifically thinking about roofers or home service contractors that they could employ right now?

Allan: That’s a really great question, Emily. Good good question. So when I think about world class experience, I often reverse engineer a little bit. So let’s play a little bit of a reverse game here. So what would be a terrible experience as a roofer or a contractor of any type?

Right? So when I think of a terrible experience, which is pretty common, by the way. Right? So they show up late or they don’t show up. When I ask for a quote or something like that, they either don’t get back to me for a very long time, or they’ll maybe scribble it on the back of a business card or a scrappy piece of paper or whatever else.

When they finally show up, they make a big mess. They stomp through the house in muddy boots or whatever, leave it leave a big mess. The work’s not done to standard, so they’ve I’ve gotta get them back. Takes weeks and weeks to get them back. So that’s what a that’s part of what a bad experience looks like.

Now if we use logic and we say, okay. Let’s reverse that to to see what a great experience looks like. A great experience looks like they show up on time. They take off their boots, or maybe they put on boot covers when they come through the house. They’re not smoking or using bad language or whatever around the kids and things like that.

They explain everything that they’re going to do, why they’re doing it, why this is important, and all of this sort of stuff. They get it done really quickly, and they’re back out. So for a lot of businesses, and I talk about this in the book, just doing the common stuff uncommonly well. Like, you don’t have to stand on your head and do anything magical or crazy. Often, it’s just doing the common stuff con uncommonly well.

So when I think about service businesses that I’ve left or that I’ve gone to in the past, it’s very rarely about the core thing that they do. So I’ll give you an example. I’ve been through maybe three or four accountants in my business career, And I’ve never left an accountant because they were bad at accounting. It was just the common stuff like returning a phone call, being a bit proactive, sending me replying to my emails, and things like that. It’s never because they didn’t do accounting well.

And by and large, most accountants are pretty pretty interchangeable in terms of the work that they do because they’re all working with the same tax code. They’ve all got the same bag of tricks for reducing tax legally. There’s a little bit of variance here or there. But for the most part, the reason I switched accountants is because I just wanted the guy to return my phone call or the guy to reply to my email in a timely manner or be a little bit proactive and give me a call and talk about my situation a little bit more often. So often, it’s just this common stuff, and common sense is not really common practice.

So if you can do just some of those common stuff as a service business, as a contractor, you’ll be far ahead of most people. So just this basic common stuff where you’re delivering a great experience for someone for when they normally would expect a pretty poor experience.

Peter: That’s great. So I do have one last question that I ask on my podcast completely. It involves a little bit of story, so you’ll just have to bear with me for a moment. So I call this, give them the pickle. So in The US, probably thirty years ago, there was a restaurant called Farrell’s.

It was an ice cream. They called it ice cream parlor, and it kind of had a 1920s motif. They had player pianos playing music. They had people wearing these funny uniforms that looked like they were out of the 20s. And it was a great place to go to because they would deliver the ice cream to your table, like a big bowl of it, and they put it on a stretcher and they’d run around the place.

And they had this siren that was blaring and they had all this loud music. And it was just a great place. I mean, if Farrell’s opened up again, I would definitely go there. But early in Bob Farrell’s career with the restaurant, he received a letter from an unhappy customer. And the customer said, Listen, Bob, I need to tell you about something that happened the other day.

I went into your restaurant and I always get a cheeseburger, a vanilla shake, and I get an extra pickle. And that’s the way it’s always been until yesterday when I went into your restaurant and I ordered my cheeseburger, my vanilla shake, and my extra pickle. And the wait person said, Sir, we’re going to have to charge you for that pickle, and I need to go ask my manager how much we’re going to charge you for that pickle. Now, they had always just given him the pickle, right? And so this customer was incensed and said, Unless you fix this, I’m never coming back.

So Bob gets this letter. You can imagine sitting in your office like, What the heck? Then he gets and, of course, he sends the guy a note immediately. No. Come back.

We’ll give you some free food and all this. But he but Bob used this as a rallying cry for his customer for his wait staff and for the whole the management of the restaurants and everything. And he said, guys he got them all together. He said, guys, listen. We gotta give him the pickle.

Give him the pickle. And he actually Bob actually turned this into a career. He was actually a management consultant after he sold all the restaurants, just talking about that giving them the pickle. And really, what I take away from that is giving them the pickle is listening to what the customer actually wants and making sure that you deliver on that. It might be something totally tiny, small, but if you’re not paying attention, you could miss that and you could lose a customer.

And obviously, this has to do with world class experience, what you were just talking about. Yeah. So my question to you, I’m gonna kinda put you on the spot here, Allan, is Go. How does your business give them the pickle?

Allan: Yeah. That’s a super great question. One of the ways that we try and do that is by implementing gifting in our business. So we have a whole a lot of people are kinda haphazard about gifting. And I read a book a few years ago called Giftology, which was really good.

It’s by my friend John Rulan, and he talks about being very intentional about gifting, and it’s something that we’ve done with our client base. So sometimes people just send a Christmas card or birthday or whatever card or whatever, and it feels like a a mass approach. Whereas we’ve got a in fact, we’ve got a person whose whole job is called customer success in our business, and part of it is being very intentional about gifting in in our business. So every pretty much every quarter, we will send out a little gift to a client that’s personalized to them, something that they’re working on in their coaching program or whatever else, or maybe they’ve had a baby or maybe they’ve gotten married or whatever is relevant. So and importantly, with gifting is that it be something, number one, that’s personal to to them, that’s unexpected, and that re that is meaningful to them.

I think that’s one way that we do it. There’s a lot of ways that we do it. We u we also use shock and awe packages very effectively. So but it’s basically a package that goes out to somebody. It can be either a prospect or it can be somebody you’ve been on a podcast with or whatever, and there’ll be usually my book, maybe that metal card that’s been in there, sometimes a handwritten note as well.

Sometimes there’ll be, like, a book stand or something like that. So it just depends on those situations. So personalized gifting, I think, is a great way to to do that.

Peter: Bravo. Yeah. I was really impressed by this, and this is not going to leave my desk.

Allan: Okay.

Peter: I’m not sure where I’m gonna put it, but it’s gonna be somewhere on my desk.

Allan: That way, you can use it as a bookmark.

Peter: There we go. There we go. So I do have one last slide I want to share with everybody, and then I think we’ll wrap up here. So if you would like to learn more about Lean Marketing and Allan’s company and how they can help your business, certainly I encourage you to read Lean Marketing and one Page Marketing Plan. Also, Allan has a lot of resources at leanmarketing.com, including that one Page Marketing Plan canvas as well.

So highly encourage you to visit leanmarketing.com and sign up for their emails. They really are great emails. And then if you’d like to learn more about just or you’d like to have some help with your marketing, we’re available, bizmarketing.com. We offer a free no obligation marketing consult. And when I say no obligation, I mean really no obligation.

And we are not trying to sell you anything. We really want to learn about your business and your needs and how some of these principles may be able to help you. So if you’re interested in that, just go to bizmarketing.com. In conclusion, Allan, is there anything you’d like to just kinda share as we wrap up here?

Allan: Look. First of all, wanna really thank you, Peter, for your support and for what you’ve done. Peter is a certified one page marketing plan marketer and consultant. He’s one of our most successful graduates. So I do encourage you to take up Peter on his consultation.

He’s an excellent coach. So I highly encourage that, and thank you, Peter, for all your support. Guys, thank you for for com coming along. If I can ever be of service, please feel free to reach out to myself or or Peter. If you decide to get the book, thank you in advance.

And if I can do one more little selfish ask, if you do get the book and when the book comes out on on Tuesday, if you’d leave me a review on Amazon, I’d be really grateful. Reviews help other people discover the the book as well. So so with that, if I can ever be of service to you, feel free to reach out to myself or or Peter, and I’d be more than happy to help. Thank you so much, everyone, for having me on.

Peter: Allan, thank you for joining us from all the way from Melbourne today. We do have some thank yous in the chat as well. Anne says thank you. Emily says thank you. Chris says great conversation.

Again, thank you so much for being with us today.

Allan: Bye for now.

Peter: Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson. You can subscribe to us on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and most of the other popular podcast platforms. Please tell your friends about us and leave us a review so even more people will find out about us. Thanks again. We’ll see you soon.