Published Sep 6, 2018 - [Chris] G'day world, Chris Hogan coming to you live from the Gold Coast, and I'm here with Jack Corbett, who is co-founder of ISR training, and we're here for Get Fact Up!, episode 94, on why, focusing a disproportionate amount of energy on sales and marketing is critical to your business success. Thanks very much for joining me, Jack, how you going man? - [Jack] Really good, really really good. Thank you for inviting me along. - [Chris] No worries, mate. So why is it important that companies focus a disproportionate amount of energy on sales and marketing? - [Jack] I think the reality is that in all facets of business, without sales, you are scheduled to fail. I think that a lot of small business owners, especially people that are in that seed or startup phase, think in the first 12 to 18 months, it's all about R&D, it's all about product development. It's all about message to market. But the reality is that, if nobody wants to buy your product from you, because it's not either fulfilling a void in their life, or alternatively it's not meeting the budget they've got available to creating a solution to that problem, then you've got something that looks beautiful, but you're really the only person that's having a chance to use it. - [Chris] Perfect, so you guys have a sales system, you call it SWISH. - [Jack] We do. - [Chris] And what does SWISH stand for? - SWISH stands for selling with integrity, and selling honestly. After arriving here on the Gold Coast 10 years ago, from Birmingham in the UK, I found that unfortunately we don't have the greatest stigma in terms of the ethics that we have, and the customer-centric approach to our sales mechanisms. I saw that firsthand when I began to recruit salespeople around the Coast, most Gold Coast boiler rooms is the term they like using in mass media at the moment. Had one focus, which was how much money could they make and how quickly. And what I, I'm very much somebody who has the opinion that if you can solve a problem, a lot of money is the natural byproduct of doing so. - [Chris] Absolutely. We have a big belief at MeMedia that we need to create value for our clients. - [Jack] Yes. - [Chris] So we are all about creating value. - [Jack] Absolutely. - [Chris] And solving, I guess, global problems on a local scale. - [Jack] For sure. - [Chris] Global minds is super important. So, what's one tip that people need to do, maybe, I guess in those very early stages of starting a company. - [Jack] - Yep. - [Chris] And, we'll start with that one. - [Jack] For me, I'd really focus on understanding your own price point. A lot of the times, I meet and I train an abundance of entrepreneurs, that have designed a product that fills a void in their life. One thing I will tell you, as entrepreneurs, is you are unicorns. You're very unique. We're not logical people, you know. We're somebody that's given over, 60, 80, 90, 100 hours of our week, to potentially never get paid for doing so. So I need you to appreciate you're not like the average Joe. Now if you want your product to be able to achieve global scale, then it needs to have mass appeal. So what I would do, first and foremost, is take my product to the market, I would give it to people who are not in my friend or family groups, because they will always have a biassed opinion, give it to your demographic of people you expect to purchase the product from you, for free, or for the bottom line expense, and ask them how much would they be willing to pay you for it. How often would they expect to purchase it from you, or with what regularity. And then I would scope my revenue model accordingly. Once I knew that, then I would say to myself, okay, if sales are what are going to help me to achieve growth within my business, how much time should I put aside, or should I actually assign to that task, for me in the early stages, follow the Pareto principle, 80, 20. If you're going to work for 10 hours a day, eight hours of those should be spent in revenue generating activities. - [Chris] Okay. And how does marketing tend to fall in to the whole sales and marketing process for you? - [Jack] For me, it's salt and pepper. They don't belong, either of them, on the plate without the other. So, you can have all the sales skills in the world, I've met these people. I've trained these people. They are guns. But they don't have a single customer's name, email address, or phone number to utilise or to engage conversation about the product or service. On the other side of that, there have been an abundance of businesses that generate high volumes of leads, they have to switch off their digital marketing, because they can't even communicate with the volume of people that are wishing to engage their services, yet, they don't have the customer communication skills, the rapport building skills, to make sure that they turn that lead into dollars in the tin, or dollars in the pocket. So for me, one cannot exist without the other, and there is really no value in disproportionately applying your time. I think they really are salt and pepper, 50, 50. - [Chris] Okay so, you've brought up a lot of points there, which is somewhat overwhelming for many people out there, especially when they're thinking about their marketing. - [Jack] Yep. - [Chris] So, we at Me Media, we're focused heavily on content. - [Jack] Yes. - [Chris] Distribution. - [Jack] Yes. - [Chris] Staying in constant contact, communication. - [Jack] For sure. - [Chris] Which one has the highest priority, there, do you they come in that order, or? - [Jack] I'm about to answer this question like a politician, and I apologise for that, because there isn't a one size fits all answer there. I believe you need to be both recent and frequent, I think if you look at most consumer activity, you will purchase a product or service that was either made available to you most recently, i.e., I've walked through a shopping centre, oh, there you go, there's somebody that does what I need. Go in and purchase it. Or alternatively, you will do it with a company that has communicated with you most frequently. So, I believe you should be adding value to your database, with some content, approximately every three to four days, just to stay recent in their thinking, remain in their conscious thoughts, and therefore they're more likely to take activity against your product or service. But, the other side to that, is, content for content purposes is the quickest way to lose an audience. So, if that content in context to why they contacted you in the first place, or the problem they're experiencing, then you could lose me very quickly. You know, I won't name a business, but, I subscribe to a lot of development and building material, because I like to know, what big buildings are coming up in my city, and how I might be able to invest in them. And when a company then sends me information on their newest retirement village, you have immediately disconnected me as your audience, I'm probably not going to open their next email. - [Chris] Fantastic. So, that can actually come into tagging in sales and marketing automation systems, - [Jack] For sure. - [Chris] So you're only sending out content that's of interest to that audience. - [Jack] For sure. - [Chris] And also, we have the content types. - [Jack] Yes. - [Chris] So, video, obviously text. - [Jack] Yes. - [Chris] Imagery, being photographs, or infographics, case studies, all of those types of things, all of huge value, but if they're out of context. - [Jack] They serve no relevance. - [Chris] Yep. - [Jack] Yep, absolutely. - [Chris] Fantastic. What would be one of the things that, you've had a tremendous growth trajectory in probably the last quarter of this year. What would be one of the things that maybe you would go back and change about your sales and marketing, sales and marketing, that maybe would have made this last three months even better? - [Jack] Yeah, I mean look, we've been quite fortunate in the fact that we've had an abundance of PR. And for me, true public relations are really the most powerful form of marketing, 'cause it's not you telling the world how good you are, from your first-party, biassed perspective, it's somebody else writing a news story on you or having an opinion that solidifies the services or the quality of the service that you're offering. But if I was to rewind the clock three months ago, and we aired on our episode of Shark Tank, aired on the fifth of June, so that's coming up in and around that two and a half month mark, what I probably would have done is been a little more tactical in my spend in the pay-per-click space. I very much targeted the major key words, such as sales training, business coaching, very competitive, very expensive, and hasn't shown to have the best conversion as there's a lot of window shopping in that space. So what we would have probably done is focused more on long tail key sentences, and definitely on search that's done in the spoken word. We're becoming aware that roughly one in every five searches on Google is now done through Alexa, through Google, through Siri, and the average person will speak about 17 words. Whereas when we type, we'll only type 3.4 to 3.7 words, before our Neanderthal impatience causes us to go, I need to search! - [Chris] With that noise. - [Jack] Yeah, I need answers, now! We will get very granular on our spoken search, you know, who are the best sales training organisation in and around the Gold Coast, that can support my call centre of 25 people in the insurance industry. Now what I've found, is that only gets searched three times a month, but there is nobody bidding on that search. So instead of paying 10 to 12 dollars, I'm paying 10 to 12 cents. And my conversions are probably three times greater, because I'm speaking to someone who actually knows what they're looking for. - [Chris] Fantastic, so data backed research, super important, something we absolutely focus heavily on as well. You're looking for those shoulder searches, shoulder niches, in and around your key service offerings. Fantastic advice. Thank you very much for your time, how do people stay across what ISR is up to? - [Jack] Look, with myself personally, I'm not huge on social media, which Chris is riding my back for, but you can always find me on LinkedIn, Jack Corbett, alternatively we're across all social media handles just at ISR Training.
