Archive of posts from September 2024

Buyers don’t want a ‘killer offer’.

All they want is:

• Something to really enjoy
• Something to look forward to
• Something to solve their problem
• Something they feel is just for them

Solve ’em in reverse-order:

• Get to know them
• Know what they want
• Know how they want it - Put on an amazing show

For every opinion you find online,
You will find an equal-but-opposite opinion.

For every best-practice you find online,
You will find someone who did just fine without it.

For every process, habit, or ritual you find online,
You will find someone who used none of those things.

Do please learn. And enjoy learning, that’s awesome.

But don’t ever feel you need to adopt any of the ideas you learn as your own.

Try them on, like hats. See how they feel. See how you feel.

Keep the hats you like, throw the rest out.

Suits you.

If you believe what the social media gurus say,
you’ll have a dozen new tools to use daily.

And subscribe to.

And to learn, keep up with, and tweak each time they change things.

You won’t hear it cited often, but there’s magic in using fewer tools.

Fewer moving parts. Fewer things that can break. Fewer subscriptions. Fewer dependencies.

As this carries a hidden upside:

More mastery in what you do use. More time doing your work vs wrestling with software. More creativity.

I list the tools I use on my Tools page. You’ll notice the list rarely changes (I include the date of each tool I incorporated).

Stick to fewer tools. Be great at them. Be creative in your uses of them.

You’ll get so much more work of value done that way.

More niche? More sales.

Here’s the logic behind why that is:

• You can’t listen deeply to a crowd (too noisy)
• A product that fixes every problem solves no problem well
• Marketing that speaks everyone’s language, speaks no one’s

It’s not really a choice.
Going too broad literally voids your business.

So in this week’s newsletter:

• What to listen to
• What a win looks like - Zack Enriquez drops wisdom
• Sedgwick loses his cool (again)

Drops in a few hours at https://theproductoon.com.

You don’t need more sales. You need better buyers.

Get them by remembering 2 things:

1. People enjoy to buy
   (So make buying enjoyable)

2. People hate being sold
   (So don’t sell them)

Therefore:

• Losing brands run boring marketing to pushy sales
• Winning brands run enjoyable marketing to easy sales

Choose accordingly (it’s called Salesforce, not Forcesales, after all!)

Buyers don’t trust marketing.

Here’s 4 ways I make mine trustworthy:

(True of my own products + for studio clients)

1. Listen more.
   All flops were due to insufficient listening.

2. Use their words.
   They believe their own words
   (or they wouldn’t think them)

3. Take the risk-behind-the-risk away.
   They don’t trust money-back offers if they don’t trust you.
   They don’t trust free trials if you request CC info.
   Go deeper to find their fears.

4. Make it enjoyable.
   Putting on a great show shows you care about their experience.
   Being boring / clinical exposes you as transactional.
   Want them to enjoy their order? Prove it up-front.

15 years ago, I sold thousands of products/month.

Here’s what it taught me:

• Most of your competitors are boring
• People buy more if buying is enjoyable
• Media covers you more if you’re interesting
• People tell others if they have a blast with you

Stop tweaking your offer.
Start showing them a good time.

Not getting the marketing results you want?

What you want is on the other side of:

1. Talking to customers,
2. Listening to what they want
3. Listening to how they want it
4. Staying nimble enough to pivot based on what you learn.

The less you listen, the more boring you sound.

The more you listen, the more you grow.

The web is full of ideas about how to optimise your life and your work.

It’ll try to convince you that you should optimise everything.
Everything has an app, hack or cheatsheet you ‘must’ try.

I’ve found there to be a much better way:

Step 1: Optimise your core things, through use.
Step 2: Do not optimise anything else.

Why does this work better?

By optimising through use, you’ll not just collecting productivity tricks.
That’s a fool’s game designed to distract you from producing meaningful work.

And by only optimising your core things, you’ll choosing to invest non-work, non-recreational time on refining things that actually matter.

Without this distinction, you’ll lose hours tweaking your email folders for a potential five-minute time saving, when you could have been practicing your craft to produce even better work, more confidently and more quickly.

Lean into what matters. Optimise what should be optimised. Leave everything else blissfully un-optimised.

Your work - and your schedule - will thank you.

Most entrepreneurial blogs and gurus advocate for trickery:

Tricks to get people to pay more money at the time of purchase.

Tricks to subtly increase prices over time for more durable revenue.

Tricks in positioning so people will FOMO into buying more than they need.

Tricks tricks tricks.

But safety sells way better long-term:

Safety in knowing the price won’t change on you.

Safety in knowing the service won’t get acquired-n-dumped next month.

Safety in knowing the service provider advocates for you, not just themselves.

Trickery works…

But not quite like safety.

Which marketing is more likely to work:

Option 1: Knowing what you want to say
Option 2: Knowing what they want to hear

Both work…

But one is very expensive & takes a long time,
The other is affordable & effective right away.

So in this week’s newsletter:

• Let’s explore the differences
• Sedgwick tries to be like Apple
• Cait Holmes drops wisdom

Drops in a few hours at https://theproductoon.com.

The funny thing about sales?

The best sales advice has nothing to do with sales:

• Know what your buyer wants
• Know how your buyer thinks
• Lead with value, not a pitch
• Speak using their language
• Offer progress, not product
• Make it enjoyable for them

A silver-tongue only wins a silver-medal.

Giving buyers gold wins the gold.

The Algorithm is Your Best Ally.

(Here’s why):

The algo shows people:

• what they want to see
• how they want to see it

And you want to make:

• what they want to see
• how they want to see it

We’re in perfect alignment!

So, if something ‘doesn’t work’, remember:

The algorithm isn’t being mean.
It’s guiding us to refine and improve.

“How do you create so much visual content?”

I use these 3 steps:

1. I talk to you

• I enjoy our friendships
• I enjoy hearing what you want & how - Ideas come from you, not ol’ chippity

2. People over product

• If you love product, you have to pitch
• If you love people, you build what’s right
• People want what they want, how they want it!

3. Process & practice

• I created stuff for over 20 years
• Process reveals itself along the way
• The more you do it, the better & faster you get

Love your people + love your practice.

Your self-doubt doesn’t come from:

• Your product
• Your price
• Your offer
• Your site

Know where it comes from?
Not spending enough time with your customers.

’Cus if you did, you’d know:

• What to say
• How to say it
• What to charge
• What to change

Feeling self-doubt?
Spend more time with customers.

I love taking notes.

It’s fun, and it’s useful to see what I think, on paper or on the screen in front of me.

But I’m intentional about never being great at it:

• My note-taking ‘system’ is simple, void of intricacies and tricks
• My notes have poor hand-writing and the most basic of structures
• I don’t use any ‘second brain’ methodologies whatsoever

I don’t want to be a professional note-taker.

I want to remain a professional doer. Just enough notes to get something started. Just enough notes to review how it went so I can go again promptly.

To be a great doer, consider being only an amateur note-taker.

Put that energy toward making something wonderful.

We can tell when your creativity is a byproduct of templates, best-practices and hacks.

It probably gets seen, but lacks soul.

Soul that you bring when you create like an artist.

So create like an artist (we’re desperate to see something new),

But let a scientist sign it off (so we know it’ll fly).

Is marketing hard?

Or is it just full of:

• distracting new ideas
• gurus with templates for sale
• obsession with tactics vs strategy
• tools that don’t solve the real problems

(Gee, I wonder!)

So in this week’s newsletter:

• What to focus on NOW
• Sedgwick almost gets shot
• Maria Ledentsova drops guest-wisdom

Drops in a few hours at https://theproductoon.com.

After over 20 years in marketing,

Here are 3 things I think distinguish the best marketers:

1. They accept they have no idea.
Past experience means you can spot patterns,
it doesn’t mean you can predict the future.

2. They learn what their people want.
The best offer/funnel/whatever in the world,
is not best if it’s not what the buyer wants.

3. They learn how their people want it.
You’ll forever be fighting for attention unless,
you execute in formats they love & look forward to.

Knowledge doesn’t make great marketers.
Wisdom (as above) does.

Best-practices are holding you back.

Because they:

• impose answers before knowing questions
• dictate right/wrong on your thinking
• trade creativity for cheatsheets
• advocate in-the-box thinking

Blessed are the ignorant,
For they are the most creative.

Because they:

• ask questions others deem ‘answered’
• think right/wrong comes from buyers, not books
• make what buyers want, not what gurus prescribe

Stay ignorant, friends.

10 ways brands kill their own reach:

01 Building for themselves, not customers. 02 Copying competitors, no originality. 03 Chasing trends, not shared values. 04 Avoiding bold, lovable marketing. 05 Safe experiences over fun ones. 06 Playing it safe with humour. 07 Not listening to customers. 08 Features over connection. 09 Using safe, dull language. 10 Ignoring customer stories.

Listen carefully,
Then put on a show they’ll love.

What customers don’t care about:

• Who has the most features
• Who has the most awards
• Who has the best story
• Who runs the most ads

What customers DO care about:

• Who focuses what they want & enjoy
• Who focuses on features they need
• Who understands their story
• Who cares most about them

We’re not in the features business.
We’re in the relationship business.

Speed is touted as the superpower of the greats.

You’ll find chapter and verse from folks like Bezos talking about how important speed is to their culture (even if you can also find former employees attributing the lack of meaningful work to do because of all the fixing of premature releases as a critical factor to high staff churn).

You’re less likely to find popular quotes from people saying it’s OK to go slow and build great work.

Not sure why that is. Perhaps it’s because they’re busy going slow building great work.

“I can’t choose which social platform to engage on”

“I’m researching social channels for my social strategy”

You might hear this sort of thing a lot, when chatting with SMBs.

What they often fail to remember is this:

Social platforms are just places that people go to sometimes.

If those people are your people, that platform is viable.
If those people are not your people, it is not.

That’s all there is to it!

Ready to choose?

The algo is not the enemy.

All it really cares about is:

“Do people like what you said & how you said it?”

So this week in the newsletter:

• Where we should place our focus
• Aya Ellaboudy shares how to pop on social
• Sedgwick fights the algorithm ⚔️

Drops in a few hours at https://theproductoon.com.

How to solve your marketing problem (3 steps)

(Anyone can do this)

1. Interview buyers (check what they want & how they want it)
2. Review your copy / messaging (does it match step 1?)
3. Review your presentation (does it match step 1?)

This alone gets you further than you think!

Obvious when you think about it, huh?

How thinking like an artist makes you a better entrepreneur:

Entrepreneurs often focus on:

• Speed to market
• Enterprise value
• CPA, AOV, CLV

Artists often focus on:

• Doing their best work
• Delighting their patrons
• Taking time to do it right

Customers want what artists focus on.

Think like an artist.

Creators always forget this…

Customers aren’t impressed by:

• How fast you built an MVP
• Which template you use
• Your MRR / stats

They’re impressed by:

• How well you listen to them
• How well you understand them
• How thoughtful you are with their problems

You don’t need big stats, just a big heart.

The key variable for business failure vs success?

It’s just 4 things:

1. How well do you know WHO you’re creating for?
2. How well do you know WHAT they want?
3. How well do you know HOW they want it?
4. How well do you implement THAT?

There aren’t 2,123,123 things to master.

Just 4.

You got this, champ.

Grind hard all year and you might impress yourself with what you accomplish… at the expense of your relationships.

Make steady, patient, balanced progress over a decade and you’ll blow your dreams away… at the expense of absolutely nothing.

Your choice.