Client Services Q&A Call #1, CS Modules 1-2

Questions and Answers

1. Question: How do we use the Value Proposition Design Canvas when we are working with clients?

Question (1:28-1:34) | Answer 1 (1:58-10:13)

2. Question: In case of managing many client accounts, or any high volume accounts (tens of campaigns, hundreds of ad groups), how do you organize changes in tests for paid advertising campaigns? Could you share your systems and frameworks that help you stay on top? For example, to remember to check how a test you’d launched two weeks ago is going, targeting changes, bid changes, new ad copy, etc., (e.g., Google Ads and Facebook)?

Question (12:57-13:22) | Answer (13:33-24:18)

3. Question from George: I think the question was more specifically about how to keep track of the inventory of experiments and change across multiple concurrent client engagements. Do you use a database, spreadsheet, Word doc, or your system’s standard operating procedures to use them?

Question (24:19-24:35) | Answer (24:39-29:12)

4. Question: Having lots of stakeholders is one of the big things to avoid with my service business. Even though bigger companies can probably pay more, like in the pizzeria versus direct response company example. I get much better results, and much quicker results, when I can work directly with one to two key decision makers. How have you navigated finding and managing clients where there are multiple stakeholders involved?

Question (29:16-29:43) | Answer (A1: 29:44-34:51; A2: 34:53-41:45)

5. Question from André: So I’m curious, presumably when you’re thinking of taking on a new client, and at some point it’s revealed that there’s these downstream layers of other clients that are going to be part of the decision making process, presumably if it’s a requirement of you to only ever work with one client, then you would just wouldn’t hire such a person unless it was super lucrative, or how does it work? Do you try and figure out from the get go how many layers down a certain relationship is going to go?

Question (41:49-42:36) | Answer (42:38-46:29)

6. Question: When it comes to value pricing, how do you balance correctly setting expectations while also charging for the value of your brain? Is this something that Blair Enns’ book Pricing Creativity dives into more detail? How do you balance setting the scene of, “this is the outcome we’re working toward and what we will be worth to you,” at the same time as acknowledging that this takes time to work and it’s a collaborative process?

Question (47:33-47:54) | Answer (48:00-55:55)

7. Follow up from André: I have a friend, George, who works with some really big clients. As part of his onboarding, before he makes the decision of hiring a customer, any client, he makes them do a certain–he makes them answer–it’s a variation of the value proposition design canvas. It’s not as detailed as that. It’s a simpler version. But basically they unpack who the customer is and all these different questions, and as part of…One of the questions he asks is revenue based. How much do you earn? How much do you make per year? So he gets to see all of that when they do the work and then pass it to him. Now, those that don’t do the work, they obviously don’t become clients and he’s just weeded them out without actually doing anything. But for those that do the work, he gets to see exactly how much money they’re earning, and he can then make an informed decision as to what his skills are going to be worth to them. Because now he knows, now he has an idea of how much they earn, how much he thinks he can probably move the needle for them, and then he will set his price based on that. So his retainer’s always going to be slightly different depending on the client, but that’s how he does it. He gets a little bit of a viewpoint of certain things before….so he’s not completely winging it.

Question (56:11-57:48) | Answer (57:49-1:09)

6. Question from Gareth: Is there a recording of how to set up a Google Ad account in Shawn’s walkthrough of how he did research and set up his offer?”

Question & Answer (1:09:23-1:12:01)

7. Question from George: On your list it would be great to learn whether you’ll comment on LinkedIn advertising at all in the client services section and any points from either Facebook or Google ads would translate. I think where some of my offering and client services, LinkedIn is a great network to get attention on.”

Question (1:12:07-1:12:24) | Answer (1:12:25-1:15:23)

8. Question: Do you recommend doing the value proposition design course or will you cover this more on the traffic engine?

Question (1:15:27-1:15:34) | Answer (1:15:37-1:18:08)

9. Question: Who would be your first two hires as you move from freelance solo work into building a business?

Question (1:18:33-1:18:39) | Answer (1:18:46-1:27:48)

10. Question: Am I hearing correctly that the value proposition framework essentially goes through the process of uncovering what makes the boat go faster? So everything ends up getting framed around that?

Question & Answer (1:28:38-1:35:44)

11. Question: Are you tailoring reporting based on what the process uncovers?

Question & Answer (1:35:52-1:41:36)

12. Question: If your client doesn’t want to be part of the value proposition design conversation, what have you found to be the best way to get the information you need to complete it?

Question (1:41:42-1:41:50) | Answer (1:42:02-1:44:23)

13. Question from Moses: I have a client who sells flooring. Their lead times are generally around six to eight weeks from customer contact to sale. I’ve tried to convince them the value of tracking a sale as a true conversion, but their previous agency has a thinking that tracking a phone call will do. Getting the sale data is not easy, but I’m wondering, and taking your suggestions from one of my email questions, if it would be possible to get tracking on a sale if they were to use online payments like Stripe, I would be able to tap that into analytics and therefore get a true conversion. If I can do this, my business reporting to them would be possible. At the moment, I have no transparency into their actual sales.

Question & Answer (1:44:38-1:53:40)

14. Question: The same client was told by their previous Service Provider that we needed to keep the CPC under $2, of his $3,500. I’m trying to convince them to think differently about that. For ads in general, do you have mechanisms or thoughts for doing this?

Question & Answer (1:53:44-1:58:12)

15. Question: Going through the offer creation part with the client, how does that look like, to do it with a client? Are there certain questions?

Question & Answer (1:58:23-2:00:22)

16. Question: Do you also create redo landing pages, sales pages, and PPDs the Multi Page Presale Site or only run traffic? How do you determine if you should be doing these things? For example, the sales page converts, but maybe not. How do you price creating these?

Question & Answer (2:00:24-2:04:00)

17. Question: How do I price creating full builds? How do I price creating these?

Question & Answer (2:04:02-2:05:22)

18. Question: Do you work with clients who have untested offers or products? If so, how do you have that conversation or set the expectation that what they might have worked can be redone?

Question & Answer (2:05:23-2:07:57)

19. Question: I have some offers that perform well with organic search. Do I need to do Value Proposition Design canvas or skip it? Because, I already know the offer performs on Google Search. Even if it’s organic and not paid, is there a different ad that runs at a Google Map Pack or is there a feature for that in the regular Google Ad?

Question & Answer (2:08:02-2:10:46)

19. Possible Reference to the Previous Question: So, hire people that help you get the work done that matters?

Question & Answer (2:12:15-2:16:40)

20. Question: I’m retired now and interested in doing some part-time client work, where I’m planning on proposing that I do the work and only asking for pay upon results. Like you, I love to teach, so either consulting or doing the work are fine with me. It’s surprising to me how many business people in sales and marketing don’t have a clue about all of this. Listening to Dean Jackson’s podcast, More Cheese Less Whiskers, for instance, makes that very obvious. So I’m confident I can add lots of value. Do you have suggestions on the best way to find those prospects who are either wanting to get started with this, or who are doing it and struggling, or maybe just doing affiliate marketing for myself? I’d love to hear from André about this affiliate marketing life. Last part, I’ve been watching, studying and involved around the edges of Google, Facebook ads and marketing for many years, but don’t have a lot of expertise to show, because I’ve been in another life.

Question & Answer (2:16:43-2:27:31)

21. Question: How do you convince a client that they can’t speak to everyone all at once? I have a client with a course on overcoming a loss of a loved one. Her messaging is currently trying to appeal to the loss of a child or spouse or lawsuit or divorce and recently she started saying any kind of loss like freedoms being stuck at home, et cetera.

Question & Answer (2:27:41-2:35:24)

Transcript

Shawn (00:00:00):
All right, let’s get started. So good morning everyone, morning for me. It’s 8:00 AM eastern. I see we’ve got a small group on the call today, which is good. I’ve got a list of questions that were submitted by people who are not able to be on the call. And this is really an opportunity, for those of us in a small group like this, to just ask whatever you want for questions. I will start with the list of questions that I have, they’re broadly interesting, and then we’ll just see where everything leads. Please feel free to add your questions to the Q&A function, makes it easier than trying to find it in chat.

Shawn (00:00:38):
So the first question. I’ll read the entirety of the question, some of the questions are the same questions, just repeated. So I just want to make sure I answer all of them. So this is the entirety of it. “I just signed up a new client, the therapist’s selling a course on how to deal with the loss of a child or spouse. I’m going to use this framework as I onboard,” or the framework that he’s referencing in this question, is the Value Proposition Design Canvas. “Will you be covering how to do this exercise with the client in a portion of the traffic engine? Do we need to actually do this exercise with a client, or are there questions we can ask, do this exercise on our own and then come back to the client, verify it makes sense with them?” And then the remaining questions are essentially the same questions asked in slightly different ways. So really, the crux of the question is, here, how do we use the Value Proposition Design Canvas when we are working with clients?

Shawn (00:01:34):
I’ve done this and I have a long answer to Evangeline in the module, in the, Audience and Offer Masterclass, Part Two, she asked a similar series of questions, and I answered in detail. I will probably repeat a lot of those answers here, too. So you can go see if I’m consistent in my answers by referring back to the comment as well.

Shawn (00:01:58):
There’s a light version and there’s a deep dive version. In my experience, very few clients are willing to do the work or pay for the exercise to do a very deep dive version of Value Proposition Design Canvas. Some do, if you’re hired to do very significant work and you can really position this as being the exercise that unlocks your ability to do your best work, then maybe. In my experience, clients don’t want to pay for a method, or a framework, or a thing to do. They also often really think they know this. The more savvy clients that I work with, either they realize later that they don’t know this, or they realize if you take them through a light version of the process, that what they think they know, they don’t actually know.

Shawn (00:02:52):
And the way that usually manifests, in my experience, is that somebody says, “This is our audience.” Very definitively, the client, they know their audience. It’s often, you’re sitting around a table with some leadership team and they just know, they’ve been quote, unquote, doing this for 30 years. “We know who our clients are,” and they don’t. They think they know who their clients were, is what it often comes down to. I’ve had this experience many times where, just by asking questions, you realize that what they’re describing as one audience is three audiences, or five audiences, or more.

Shawn (00:03:32):
And the distinctions in an audience really come out in Value Proposition Design. When you are focused on the jobs, pains, and gains, you can look at an audience and say, well this audience has the same jobs, pains, and gains, and you put them all on a canvas and you say, “Yep, see, I told you, it’s the same audience.” And you say, “Okay, well, which of these jobs is most important?” And then you realize three or four jobs are really important, but they’re really important to different people. And that’s the signal, those are different audiences. They’re different audience segments. If what makes an audience is the combination of jobs, pains, and gains, or a particular job, or a particular pain, or a particular gain, that resonates so much that that audience is willing to pay for it above all else, where it’s the big thing they’re trying to solve. And that’s really what you’re looking for is, it’s like archeology, you’re just digging, digging, digging. So if I have clients who I think are not willing to do this work in depth, then I never actually talk about Value Proposition Design. What I do instead is, I ask questions, and I don’t necessarily use the language of jobs because it’s a weird concept. And you have to then explain, Clayton Christensen and the milkshake example. And you can just go on and on and on, and people’s eyes glaze over. So what I do instead is, I just ask questions. I’ll ask question like, “What is the client really trying to accomplish here? What are they trying to feel? Who are they trying to impress?” And sometimes they look at you strangely, with those questions, like, “What do you mean, who are they trying to impress?”

Shawn (00:05:28):
I will use examples. I will say things like, just in passing. If I ask, “Who are they trying to impress?” I will say things like, “Well, there’s a difference between someone who buys a Timex versus a Rolex, right? They both tell time, but you’re making a very different statement when you wear a Timex versus a Rolex. So what statements are your clients trying to make?” And really, it will depend on who you’re working with, and what you’re trying to accomplish, and what they’re trying to accomplish, but that questioning and asking about, especially about the social, and the emotional, and using the language of pains, and you can, “What’s difficult when they try to do this now? What prevents them from having this now? What’s the hardest thing that your sales team has heard, that people struggle with?”

Shawn (00:06:25):
You have to play with a client. Where the quicksand is, when you get clients that shut down the questioning, right. Especially in the paid traffic side, you will get clients who, sometimes they actually outright say it, but other times it’s more implied. “Hey, I already know who my customers are. I already know what my offer is. You just need to go out and buy me some customers, right. Move along.” To me, that’s the short path to firing a client. And I tend to not work with those clients anyway.

Shawn (00:06:57):
But if you find yourself in a situation like that, the value that you bring is ultimately going to be connected to your ability to understand an audience and what really motivates them, and that connection, and you can work backwards to that, to explain it to a client and say, “Listen, my job is to get clients to notice you and to be interested in what you have to offer, and in order to do that. I need to uncover the biggest motivators that get people to buy. And there are three categories where I look, I look at what they’re trying to accomplish,” and then you have some questions around jobs, and you might dig deeper around the social and emotional components. And you say, “And then I have some questions around the difficulties they face. Those are pains. And then what is it they’re actually seeking to achieve? At the end of the day, what is it they want to feel, what do they want to have accomplished?”

Shawn (00:07:59):
At that point, I’ve done the exercise with them in a stealth mode. And I will often, because I like the framework, I will often go put the information on an actual Value Proposition Canvas, so I can look at it and pull the data out, or I’ll just put it in an outline. If the client is really not giving me a lot of information, I will outline it, which is the second part of the process anyway, is to go back and to say, “Okay, these are the few things that matter.” And those things should then inform messaging and add copy. That’s really how they come together.

Shawn (00:08:31):
So it’s not critical that you sit down across the table from a client, with a sheet of paper and a stack of Post-its and your Sharpie and you do the process. But what is critical is that you answer the questions that the process asks. Value Proposition Design is not useful because of the mechanics of it. It’s useful what you get from going through the process of asking those questions. So, however you need to ask the client those questions, and then formulate the answers, that’s fine. Some clients love the idea of doing an exercise, and you get them in a room and they’ve got a marketing team or a leadership team, and they love that. Some clients just love that. They love to throw it out, and sometimes you get great ideas.

Shawn (00:09:18):
Other times you’re doing all of that work, and your work might be informed by the data too. You might have a client tell you that their market is two different segments. And then the data never supports that. I’ve had this client recently, and I see Lauren’s on the call, and Lauren’s going to know who I’m talking about, but there’s a client who just revealed to me the other day that they’ve spent the last 10 years assuming their audience, which they break out into two segments, that they assume that’s their audience. And the data continues to dis-confirm that. They’re finally waking up to the fact that the story they have been telling themselves, for at least 10 years, about their customers, probably is not rooted in reality. It’s certainly not reflected in their data. Which, it’s fascinating to hear that. Now, does that mean they’re going to change their approach? Who knows?

Shawn (00:10:09):
Okay, let’s move on to the next question. Definitely, before I do that, I want to emphasize Value Proposition Design. This may very well, the thinking behind it, the thinking that informs it, probably is one of the highest leverage points you have if you do client services work, and you have leverage really in two places. If you do paid search, or you do any kind of messaging, landing page, copy, structure, multi-page presale sites. If you do any of that, the Value Proposition Canvas is by far the most effective framework for uncovering the things that actually matter.

Shawn (00:10:56):
Also, you can use it as a client services professional to find your highest value clients, to find that core of clients. And sometimes you have to work with, what’s that expression, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince, right? You might have to find that you work with a lot of clients you wish you didn’t work with, to realize where the pains are. Right? I’ve done it. I’ve got a list a mile long of clients I don’t want to work with. That’s just the game, right? You have to get there. Maybe you already know, “These are things I won’t tolerate.”

Shawn (00:11:31):
Great. Make your own Value Proposition Canvas. And you can do this lots of ways. You can do it from your perspective, to inform who you do and don’t want to work with, you can make a Value Proposition Canvas about your ideal customer. What are the jobs that you do that light you up? What are the things that you can’t stand? The deal breaker pains? And then, what gains do you get? Is it positive feedback? Is it seeing and building a process? There are all kinds of ways you can use this for yourself. That’s one layer.

Shawn (00:12:05):
The next layer is, do it from the client’s perspective. What does the client need? What jobs are they seeking to have done? You can do this all different ways, but what makes it so powerful is, it’s just an elegant, simple framework. And you internalize the thinking, so you start thinking in terms of jobs, pains, and gains, and how you map what you do well, or what your client does well, to an audience’s needs. And it becomes a way of thinking that’s just extremely powerful. It’s an empathic, client-focused, value-led way to think about marketing, that has so many downstream positive consequences. I can’t overstate how valuable this tool is.

Shawn (00:12:47):
Okay. Let’s move on to the next question. This seems to be specific, I believe this is, well, he says Google and Facebook. So I’ll just read the question. “In case of managing many client accounts, or any high volume accounts.” And he puts in parentheses, tens of campaigns, hundreds of ad groups. “How do you organize changes in tests? Could you share your systems and frameworks that help you stay on top? For example, to remember to check how a test you’d launched two weeks ago is going, targeting changes, bid changes, new ad copy, etc.,” then he’s referencing both Google Ads and Facebook.

Shawn (00:13:24):
So really, this is a deep question, because there’s lots of layers to it, and there are really two primary scenarios. Scenario number one is what I think is probably the most common, is we, the imperial we, me and my team, or you and your team, or you, have come into an account that already exists. And if you’ve ever seen the movie, Christmas Vacation, in the beginning, with Chevy Chase there’s a scene where Chevy Chase hands, Russ, his son, this enormous ball of Christmas lights that’s just the most tangled mess you can imagine, and says, in passing, “Here, Russ, untangle these.”

Shawn (00:14:06):
That’s what it’s like to be a client services professional with paid traffic, often, when you come into an existing account, that is, it is this mess that nobody knows how it works, if it works, why it works, what the intent was behind to make it work. And so much of that, that’s just a different exercise. That’s finding out, what’s the client’s goal? How is that performing relative to the goal? Sometimes it’s straightforward. The goal is conversion, it’s e-commerce, you can see the data and you just start sorting by performance, and then you can restructure it.

Shawn (00:14:46):
That’s the hardest scenario, because you don’t know what the intent was in the first place. And when you don’t know the intent, it’s really hard to measure the result. You’re looking at the results through a partial lens. It’s just difficult. So I’ll cover how to address that in a second.

Shawn (00:15:09):
Let me hit the other one. The other one is, we get hired and we’re really starting from scratch, or we pause everything else in the account, or we just put our name on the things that we were doing and we’ve tried to pretend that everything else isn’t there. I have a philosophy of business here. I don’t know where I learned this, but I do remember I did not come up with this myself, somebody taught this to me and I felt the power of it. I continue to use it because it’s incredibly powerful. And the lesson was this, the person closest to the work makes the decisions about how the work is done. Now, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have opinions, and I don’t certainly drive thinking on outcomes. And that’s my job, my role is strategy and understanding what the client needs and to share experience and expertise. But when a decision needs to be made about how the work is completed, how it is executed, the person who is closest to doing that work ultimately makes and is responsible for those decisions.

Shawn (00:16:18):
And I use this, I haven’t said this for years, but I used to say this when I would hire employees and contractors, I would say, “If you have not made a significant mistake in the first 90 days, you will no longer have an opportunity to work here.” And people often thought it was hyperbole, like, “Oh, that’s crazy. He doesn’t really mean it.” And I meant it, and I’ve always meant it. And some of the things I’ve done is shared my top 10 list of really stupid things that I’ve done, to show mistakes happen. I’ve made plenty of them.

Shawn (00:16:53):
And the reason I did that is because if I say to somebody, “You’re responsible at this level,” then I have to make a couple of decisions that are congruent. One, I have to recognize that they’re going to make mistakes, and those mistakes might have costs. And that’s fine, right? Because if they don’t make any mistakes, it means that they’re staying ultra, ultra conservative. And for some platforms, some audiences, some markets, that may make sense, but I would like at least to have given the permission to fumble around a little bit, try new things, make some mistakes.

Shawn (00:17:34):
But the other, bigger part of this is, I can’t say to somebody, “Hey, this is your responsibility.” And then come in and tell them how to do the work, tell them how to report it. And I mentioned this, I believe, in the second Client Services Module, in that conversation that day I spent with Peter [Shutz 00:17:52], right? That was such an insight to me. Let people know what they need to do, or what you want them to achieve. You can’t do both. I know I hate that. If someone says to me, “Well, these are the outcomes we want, but this is how you need to do it.” I’m like, “Hey, pick a team, right? You either need to tell me what you want to accomplish, or what you want me to do, but you don’t get to do both.”

Shawn (00:18:13):
So I mention this here because in the context of reporting, especially when we take over an account, the person who is in that second scenario, where we’re spooling up an account, where we have created, and we are creating the campaigns, whether it’s prospecting, whether it’s retargeting, or both, whatever it is, my expectation is that the person who was doing that, is going to be the person who was monitoring it, and the person who is organizing and talking to, thinking about the things that he or she wants to test. And I’m not going to bring a framework to that. I bring questions, like a check-in, a schedule either with me or with the clients, but I am expecting in that scenario that the person closest to the work is making those decisions.

Shawn (00:19:12):
Now, that sounds a little like sunshine and unicorns, what happens when that doesn’t happen? I have worked with people in the past who, that didn’t happen, and I did have to come in and structure some reporting frameworks and structure some, how do you test? How do you develop a hypothesis? What is it that you test? But there is no one size fits all. How and what you test on Facebook is not at all how and what you test on AdWords, Google Ads. They’re not even related in concept. So we don’t have that framework. And the platforms and the strategies evolve, too.

Shawn (00:19:56):
I remember years ago, we worked with a client, I don’t know why this number stands out to me, but when we launched, it was Facebook only, when we launched the campaigns for that client, there were 478 different ads. And when we were testing, we had this grid of variables. It was a very old school way to approach, and it was great. We got great data and it was an incredible experience, but that needed a framework. And that framework was specific to that client in that scenario, in that strategy, and that outcome, and the framework was an enormous grid. We drew it on a four foot by eight foot whiteboard, and that grid had the combinations. It was gender, age, geography, and interests made up the grid. And then what we were filling in, and what we were testing was, the calculation was ROAS. We were looking to find where the bright spots were, what segments, what combination of geography, gender, age, and interests drove the greatest performance. And that’s what we found, that’s what that framework was. But that framework never would have worked for a different client.

Shawn (00:21:07):
So a lot of what you will need to create, and it really depends on if you’re doing Google only, if you’re doing Facebook only, you have to back yourself up from intent. What is the client trying to achieve? So I think an example that I’ve used, I don’t know if I’ve written about it, I’ve talked about it recently, but I had a former employee who went to work in an automobile aftermarket parts company. They had three divisions and those three divisions were splitting up the budget across the entire United States and across all of these different types of parts for different vehicles, it’s not like replacement parts. It was more accessory parts, bolt-on stuff.

Shawn (00:21:58):
So my role, their framework, the thing that they needed to be able to look at was entirely different than what other clients might look at. So I actually had to develop their framework, which is, I think about it as a lens through which to see performance. So in that example, the lens that we needed to see, it was what matters for this client, right? So that’s what informed everything that followed, that informed the framework that we created for their experiments, for their data gathering, for everything.

Shawn (00:22:39):
So in their scenario, what we needed to understand was, which products sold the most by, we knew that all three divisions were going to get a piece of the pie. So we couldn’t just say, which division sells the most? So it was, of the three divisions, so that’s the starting point for their framework, just imagine a spreadsheet, division one, division two, division three. Within those three divisions, then, what were the five products that sold the most in the last 90 days? And then we would, underneath that, we would list them. Great. Then it became another variable, where do those products sell the most geographically? And we looked at it through that way.

Shawn (00:23:22):
And then there were other variables too, like obviously bigger states, bigger search volume, but all of that framework led to this question, which is, where could we sell the most? Well, that changed the framework entirely. Then what it became, and this is an example I used, is that we focused on the top, I believe was the top three, then it became the top five products within the shipping radius where people received it in two days, so that we could say, “Second day shipping for free.”

Shawn (00:23:55):
And that, then, became its own framework that we evaluated an entire set of campaigns through, and then we bolted on to that the next geographic area, and then it just became, and the example is less important than the insight that you will have to create your own frameworks, right? That’s the insight.

Shawn (00:24:19):
George has asked a question in the chat, clarifying on this. He says, “I think the question was more specifically about how to keep track of the inventory of experiments and change across multiple concurrent client engagements. Do you use database, spreadsheet, Word doc, or your system’s standard operating procedures to use them?” So, yes, that’s how I’m thinking about this, and what I’m trying to communicate, perhaps not as effectively as I could, is that there is no, in my experience, standard operating procedure that does this, unless you focus on a set of things that are common to everyone, which means they’re not useful in general to everyone.

Shawn (00:25:06):
Now, this is also reflective of my experience. So one thing to be very cautious about here, if you work in a particular industry vertical where the goals are the same, the approach is the same, lots of companies do this. There are pay-per-click agencies for real estate. Well, if you’re a pay-per-click agency for real estate, you can absolutely have a standardized reporting process, a standardized framework for testing. Everything can be standardized because it’s the same thing, real estate has a very simple formula, it’s geography plus real plus estate, and that’s it, it’s town, city. It’s just so straightforward. We’ve done a bunch in the past with AdWords with real estate, and it’s formulaic. So if that is your model, then yes, you can absolutely standardize.

Shawn (00:25:55):
My experience, because it’s across so many verticals, is we reinvent reporting based on what the client is optimizing for, which often requires us to have some hard conversations with clients to undercover what exactly they’re optimizing for, because often what they think they’re optimizing for is not at all what they’re optimizing for behaviorally. So in the example that I gave you before, with the aftermarket auto company, they were optimizing for internal politics. The three leaders of the three divisions, different auto parts divisions, were all jockeying for a greater slice of the pie. That’s actually what was happening on the ground. So everything they did followed that framework, and the new framework that was introduced optimized for something entirely different, which was return on ad spend.

Shawn (00:26:54):
And it sounds crazy, like no one would sacrifice return on ad spend for politics. They absolutely do, all day every day. I see it happen all the time. So this is a hard question to answer, because there is no, “Do it this way, do it, one, two, three, and off you go.” You have to work back from what the client is hoping to achieve. And you have to then structure how you’re going to focus on that. And for me, I’m method agnostic. We’ve used Google Docs in the past, where we’ve written and said, “Here’s what we expect. Here’s the experiment, A versus B. Here’s what we think is going to happen.” Seven days later, “This is what actually happened. Were we right? Were we wrong?”

Shawn (00:27:42):
Which is less important than, was our thinking about how we were right or wrong, accurate? Right? It’s really easy to have a hypothesis and get it right, and have no idea why you got it right. It was just luck. So what I’m interested in more is, why did I think something was going to happen? Did it happen that way? Yes or no? And how was my thinking related to that outcome? Was it luck?

Shawn (00:28:15):
I don’t want to spend too much time on this because I’m drifting out, and we can come back to this in the other questions, you can ask clarifying questions, but the central insight that I want you to have from this very circuitous trip is that, if you try, unless you’re in a hyper focused niche, if you try to jam your reporting, and jam your testing frameworks into a standard framework, you will, by definition, underperform, because you have to allow for the understanding of exactly what is important to each client individually. And you have to force yourself to go find that, get buy-in about that, and to structure everything in service to that. That’s the real answer here. We’re going to have plenty of time to discuss this over in the Q and A, when we get to that point, we can really dig into that.

Shawn (00:29:12):
So let’s move on for the next question. Okay. Next question. There are two questions here, actually, we’ll do them in parts. First one, “Having lots of stakeholders is one of the big things to avoid with my service business. Even though bigger companies can probably pay more, like in the pizzeria versus direct response company example. I get much better results, and much quicker results, when I can work directly with one to two key decision makers. How have you navigated finding and managing clients where there are multiple stake holders involved?”

Shawn (00:29:44):
This is a really, really, really, really important question. I can’t emphasize enough how important this consideration is. It took me a long time to figure out that I am at my best when I am working with a decision maker, because I don’t have time for politics. I don’t have time for bullshit. I don’t have time to make decisions that are in service to somebody else’s agenda to make them look good. And these are not fake examples. These are all things I’ve dealt with in the past.

Shawn (00:30:15):
I am in the, cut to the chase, business. What is it you’re actually trying to accomplish here? And how does what I know how to do accomplish that? That’s the business I’m in, which means that I cannot be five or six or seven levels down in the conversation, where everything needs to go up the chain of command and down the chain of command. Took me a long time to figure that out, and many, many failed experiences, my forehead is flat from banging my head against the wall of those experiences.

Shawn (00:30:50):
A lot of your answer to this question will depend on what it is that you offer. If you are a service provider who does a certain thing well in the whole chain of a project, and there’s one part that you are responsible for, and you’re good at it, and there’s a beginning, there’s an end, you just need a clear description of the job and you can do your work, then I don’t think it’s nearly as important that you’re working with stakeholders. You just need to be working with the people who are making the decisions about the work that you’re doing, and that’s it.

Shawn (00:31:24):
The work that I’m doing happens to be at the level where I need to have to be working with the stakeholders. This is a very important question to answer early, and to figure out, who do you need to be speaking to? And there are lots of ways client services relationships can manifest. Years ago, this one to me is still ridiculous, we were the programming company for the local marketing company, that worked for the New England regional company, that worked for the national company for Nestle Purina, right.

Shawn (00:32:04):
I was on one or two virtual meetings, and I didn’t even know who everybody was. I didn’t know who the decision makers were. I couldn’t figure out, and think about the chain of command for that project. Right? I had to go, if we got a statement or a request for proposal that was pretty clear, but not entirely clear, there were still questions. So when I asked questions, I had to ask questions to the local agency, who had to then ask questions to the New England regional agency, who then had to ask questions from the agency of record, who then had to ask questions of the client, and then it had to come back down the chain of command.

Shawn (00:32:46):
It was insane. It was absolutely insane. There are entire business models that rely on that. If you’re doing high level programming work and you have big projects, that might be your business, and that’s just the nature of the beast. You’re not talking to stakeholders, in that opinion. And you might find that the people who you are talking to have ulterior motives, and they have their own needs to look good, and lots of things can go wrong. So you really need to find where you fit in the services that you provide.

Shawn (00:33:23):
Another example I can think of, that’s quite common, is you have a team working on a project. So you’ve got the client, and then you might have the design build person. And the design build person might be working with the traffic people. And then you might have a coordinator of some sort, who’s responsible for the overall messaging, lots of moving parts. So who do you work for? Right? Do you work for the coordinator? Do you work for the client? What happens when you work for the client, but the other people on the team aren’t meeting their objective? It gets really crazy, really fast.

Shawn (00:34:02):
It gets really crazy, really fast. Burying our heads in the sand doesn’t answer the question, it doesn’t make progress. Where I tend to default, which, use with caution, is… I believe in radical candor. Radical unemotional candor on a project, I will just ask questions “My understanding is X, Y, and Z is supposed to happen. Here’s my role. I can’t do this until these other things are accomplished. These other things are not getting accomplished. Who is responsible for making that happen.” It’s not the best way to win friends and influence people all the time, but that’s how I do things, which is partly a result of having done a lot of projects and not having a lot of patience for nonsense anymore.

Shawn (00:34:52):
So getting back to the specific question within the overall question, which is how have I navigated finding and managing clients when there are multiple stakeholders involved? Proceeding with caution to figure out… There are a couple of key things you have to figure out. Do both stakeholders have a common vision for the outcome? Often they do. I’m thinking of a particular example a couple of years ago where it was a founder and a COO, and they both could describe very accurately the outcomes that they wanted. However, right after that was the… One of them was a lot more focused on the volume of work, and the other was a lot more focused on the reporting on what happened. One person, operational, wanted to see a lot of work, a lot of action is happening. And the other person wanted to see that a lot of leads were coming in. Well, now you have a mismatch, and there are some solutions where you can report the action to one and report the outcome to another, or you can include both in the reporting.

Shawn (00:36:13):
But it did in that particular example ultimately led to, I believe, it was a big factor in the demise of that relationship, amicable demise of that relationship, but that the two people who were… Neither one of them was ever really completely happy, because everything we talked about was always bifurcated between both of their roles. So you have approximately half the time at every weekly check in I had, I was speaking to things that the founder didn’t care about. And then the other half of the time, I was speaking to things that the COO didn’t care about. It creates a weird dynamic. I’d love to tell you that if you just get them in the same room and have these conversations candidly, that it solves the process, but it doesn’t. In my experience, ultimately, I end up working primarily for one person. There is one person whose view of success I have clearly articulated for myself, and it’s a lot easier to work with a single stakeholder. If you work with multiple stakeholders, by definition, it’s going to be harder unless they’re just so on the same page.

Shawn (00:37:27):
If you find yourself in that situation you can do one or two things. You can try to appease everyone and cover all the bases, or you can decide who is the real decision maker and there often is a real decision maker, and it’s not always the person who’s at the top of the org chart. It’s often someone below. And once you find that person, work to his or her, obviously not at the expense of everything else, but focus reporting, focus everything on your understanding of how that person has defined success. And I guess the third way is to do the exercise early and don’t do it individually, do it in the same room, preferably in person, or you can do it in Zoom or some other way too, but have the conversation and be upfront. I’ve done this a couple of times. It’s scary. It’s really scary. But I think every time I’ve done it, it’s been successful. From my perspective it’s been illustrative and joking about and other things and things were surfaced, but have a conversation and say, “Listen, early in a relationship with multiple stakeholders, I have observed that it’s difficult for me to know exactly what the outcomes are that matter collectively. So could we please go through your individual definitions of success together so I know what success looks like?”

Shawn (00:39:02):
And then I just repeat back what I’ve heard, and if there’s conflict, I repeat back the conflict and I will ask the question. In a situation where both of these things can’t be achieved, which is most important? I did not use this strategy with the particular client I mentioned before, but had I used it, a question I might ask is, “In a situation where we have to make a choice between focusing on the volume of work that we’re doing and reporting all the individual tasks that were accomplished, or we need to focus our attention on reporting the outcomes at this level,” the leads or whatever it was. “In those situations, which of the two is more important to the enterprise?” And then shut your mouth, let them answer it. Don’t fill in and say… And after they’ve answered it… And then oftentimes, I’m thinking of one example in particular, they answer it and what you realize is they just disagreed. Don’t move on. It just takes a lot of courage and it’s hard, but to speak, to be honest in that moment and say, “Okay, I feel I have just uncovered something that is going to create problems down the road. I heard you say X, I heard you say Y, I need a little additional clarification.”

Shawn (00:40:33):
It’s hard. I can’t stress how hard this is. Because working with clients, ultimately, you’re working with other people. It’s relationships, it’s difficult. But if you say okay, before they’ve actually made the decision and it’s their job to make the decision, not you. If you say okay, in the absence of that making the decision, you have doomed yourself for the entirety of the client relationship. Ask me how I know. I’ve said yes to things where I’m like, “I just want this to go away. Let me just move on.” And those things have come back and bit me in the ass more times… You have to have that presence of mind to stay in that moment where there’s discomfort and say, “Ultimately, I need to be responsible to one.” And this is what you’re saying in your mind, not to them. “Ultimately I’m responsible to one stakeholder, to one vision of success. What is that vision of success in HD detail? And I am not going to leave this conversation until- [inaudible 00:41:43] enormous downstream problems.

André (00:41:49):
So I’m curious, presumably when you’re thinking of taking on a new client, and at some point it’s revealed that there’s these downstream layers of other clients that are going to be part of the decision making process, presumably if it’s a requirement of you to only ever work with one client, then you would just wouldn’t hire such a person unless it was super lucrative, or how does it work? Do you try and figure out from the get go how many layers down a certain relationship is going to go?

Shawn (00:42:38):
It’s hard. what I’ve done, I’ve gone the opposite way. I have forced myself to move upstream to the decision maker. I used to say, “Work for the person who signs the checks.” And a lot of times the person who signs the checks is not the maker. And I also used to say, just while we’re doling out advice here, “Never work for someone where the check their writing is big for them and small for you.” Anyway, side note. I move upstream to solve this problem because I’ve experienced this problem more times than I care to remember and I don’t ever want to experience it again. But again, I want to emphasize, this is a reflection of me, and it may not be a reflection of you. I’ve worked with so many people who are so content to have a reasonably clearly defined set of responsibilities and just go do that work. If as a service provider, that’s you, then ignore everything I’m saying about moving up to the decision maker.

Shawn (00:43:52):
Just be sure that you’re working for the person who can make the decisions about your work. That’s probably a better way to say it. Who is the person who’s ultimately going to decide if your work was good or not? If it met their expectations or not? I’ve had a client now, I think 12 or 13 years, for the first six or seven of those years, that client had a marketing director. The marketing director’s agenda in many ways was the agenda of the client, and in many ways was not. So there was an extra layer for the marketing director, which was that she needed to quote unquote, “look smart.” And there was this extra stuff. So I continuously ran into friction where we would pursue campaigns that were bright and shiny, they looked it was… You could see the see ads everywhere. There was a lot of sizzle. No steak. And I hated it. But because of that second need, it just created infinite tension for me until finally I told the client either I work with the owner, the COO, or I don’t work with you anymore, because I can’t do stuff that I think is stupid. That is objectively not beneficial because it is fulfilling a need that’s not really a need of the enterprise, it’s a need of a person within the enterprise.

Shawn (00:45:28):
It sounds ridiculous, but that’s that’s me. So finding the person who ultimately says, “This is what the work is, and this is how it will be judged good, bad, or otherwise.” You just have to find that person for whatever it is that you provide. If you’re doing landing page, design, build stuff, Unbounce or ClickFunnels, or you set up stuff, and it’s pretty clear, what are the expectations? There should be a pretty clear, either a document or something that says, “This is what success looks like.” You don’t need to work with a CEO for that. But if a client’s spending $10,000 a day, and you’re responsible for the ad creative that’s going to determine how best to spend that money, you really want to be talking to the person who’s going to make a decision about whether or not you’re going to get hired for the next renewal of your contract, so that you really know that you are meeting their needs. That’s ultimately what it comes down to, I think.

Shawn (00:46:32):
And again, ask clarifying questions in the Q&A so we can dig. This is a very important concept to understand. I mentioned in the first client services module that avoiding bad clients is the biggest leverage point that you have. Bad clients does not mean bad people. It means bad fit, and often bad fit clients are clients where you are not at the appropriate level of decision making. And it can be too high. It can be an issue where you’re working for the person who runs the whole show, but he or she has never responsive because the work you’re doing, you really should be reporting to somebody three layers down. But there are lots of ways this can go wrong. But understanding it and knowing it and really hearing about your experiences and coming back to it will be very helpful.

Shawn (00:47:21):
All right, next question. Same person. I think this is the last question on these lists, but I’m going to go back up because I see André, you’ve made a couple of notes here. So the question is, when it comes to value pricing, how do you balance correctly setting expectations while also charging for the value of your brain? Is this something that Blair Enns’ book Pricing Creativity dives into more detail? How do you balance setting the scene of, “this is the outcome we’re working toward and what we will be worth to you,” at the same time as acknowledging that this takes time to work and it’s a collaborative process? So much to unpack here. The first and foremost, value pricing is hard and it’s exceptionally hard. I violated my own rule when I gave the examples, which I look back on now, I don’t love, and I should note something parenthetically there, which is, I gave a really clear cut example for something that’s often not very clear cut.

Shawn (00:48:17):
So the example around AdWords is very straightforward. It’s not rare in the AdWords world, it’s very common. It’s not at all uncommon for me to go look in an AdWords account and find that at least 50% is waste, often way more. Demonstrably, objectively, I can show you in five minutes waste. In those scenarios, the value pricing is very clear cut. Other scenarios, it becomes less clear cut. So let’s talk about some of the things that you might provide as services for paid traffic services. If you were to do lead gen, you could do a value based service based on… Let’s assume someone’s doing traditional lead gen, and the focus is entirely on cost per lead. You can be inventive and you can move upstream one step and say it focuses on a quality lead, and you may define a quality lead as someone who not only becomes a lead, but opens the first email. That’s common in a few spaces that I’m aware of where that’s the initial qualitative indicator.

Shawn (00:49:35):
You might sit down with a client… And I wouldn’t spell the data out in advance, so that they know and they can take action on it, but I might look at that situation and say, “Let me look at a 90 day sample of your data, and I want to see these two pieces of information. Or three pieces. How many leads did you get? What was your cost per lead? How many of those leads opened the first email?” So now you have three pieces of data and you can calculate another calculation, which is cost per quality lead. So let’s just assume that they get… I like to say five out of four people are bad at math, so I’m going to avoid doing a lot of math here. Let’s just assume for the sake of argument, they’re getting $3 leads and $7 quality leads, because just the way the structure of your lead magnet and other things that most people just abandon, they’re just gone and never open another email.

Shawn (00:50:29):
So $ 3 leads, $7 lead, and you look at that and say it’s very clear to you why they’re getting the result that they’re getting, because they’re putting so much on the front end and their people are just downloading the goodies and they’re not at all interested. Because you’ve been in André’s world for a long time, there’s a better way to acquire leads in the front end that is going to drive them to that first email. But that’s really what they’re going to be most interested in. So you sit down with a client and say, “Listen, it’s costing you $3 to get a lead. It’s costing you $7 to get those leads to open your first email. I’m pretty confident I can get that $7 down to let’s say five.” And they’re doing however many leads that are doing so you’re going to save them… Let’s just stay on this for the sake of argument, you’re going to save them $10,000 a month if you hit that goal.

Shawn (00:51:25):
What is it worth to them to save $10,000 a month? And the answer to this question is always $10,000. That’s what it’s worth doing because that money just drops to the bottom line. So in a situation like that, I might look at that and say… Let’s just say it’s $4,000. I’m willing to get paid 40% of the money that I save you to get a qualified lead. That’s how I would approach value pricing in a situation like that. Where value pricing is difficult is design build, landing page layout, very difficult there, because just the nature of that work, it doesn’t tend to lend itself as well, unless you’re making… Unless there might be situations where you know a landing page layout. I have a friend in the financial lead gen space, they have a landing page template they’ve used that’s just amazing. So if you have something like that in your back pocket where you do a lot of lead gen, and you have a particular landing page format, copy structure, whatever it is that just outperforms, you could use value pricing and say I will redesign things based on this… Whatever, your method, I would say a landing page template, it’s just the such and such method informed by data. And in our experience, it would be 17% better than XYZ.

Shawn (00:52:53):
If the client has never… If they’re not running traffic already, then you can’t do that, because relative to what? That’s the problem. Design build is always a problem with value pricing. Value pricing tends to work pretty well in copy, full service. It tends to work pretty well if you can get your hands in all the pods, but this goes back to the question about who you’re speaking to. Value pricing, you almost always have to speak to the highest person on the decision making chain, because it’s a big commitment. The other thing with value pricing that’s terrifying is you have to be willing to get paid based on your results. You don’t get paid if you don’t get the result. And don’t make it binary either. You have to have a scale. If we hit this threshold, we get paid X. We hit this threshold, we get paid Y.

Shawn (00:53:42):
Blair Enns in Pricing Creativity, there’s a book, and then he has a video companion. There’s three different variations of it on his site. Extreme detail about this, and I’m not doing it justice at all. There’s so many ways to do value pricing. But really, it’s not going to be the pricing model for all things all the time. Lots of people won’t embrace it. Lots of good clients won’t embrace it. I have clients like this. And oftentimes your market, what your audience is exposed to informs their thinking. So if you’re working with a client that you’re the seventh or eighth agency they’ve worked with, find out why, but if you’re that seventh or eighth agency, and you come in with a value pricing model and all they’ve paid is retainer for the previous 15 years, either you’ll have a really difficult sell, or you might have really easy sell. I mean, who knows. But their experience will inform that too. Value pricing is hard.

Shawn (00:54:46):
It’s wonderful when it works, but I would say less than 25% of the work I’ve done from an agency perspective is value priced. I say that. I never price a project without considering the value to the client when I price the project. I say no to clients where I can’t provide value in a way that’s reasonable. Value to me and value to them. Like the pizzeria example. It’s not worth it. To anybody it’s not worth it. So I take the contribution into consideration, but I think if I measure it over 21 years, I’m guessing it’s closer to 20% of projects were valued priced. Everything else was priced based on my father in law’s formula, actually. My father in law was the president of a bank, and I asked him, I think it was 20 to 21 years ago, “What’s the best way to price projects?” “Figure out what it’s worth to you, figure out what it’s worth to the client, and that’s how you price it.” I was like, “What? It can’t be that easy.” And it is actually that easy. So ask questions about value pricing in the Q&A. I want to look at André’s notes here quickly. It looks he added one.

André (00:56:02):
I just want to share something. And I’m certainly no pro when it comes to this because I don’t have any clients, but I have a friend, George, who works with some really big clients and Shawn knows who I’m talking about. As part of his onboarding, before he makes the decision of hiring a customer, any client, he makes them do a certain… He makes them answer… It’s a variation of the value proposition design canvas. It’s not as detailed as that. It’s a simpler version. But basically they unpack who the customer is and all these different questions, and as part of… One of the questions he asks is revenue based. How much do you earn? How much do you make per year? So he gets to see all of that when they do the work and then pass it to him.

André (00:57:01):
Now, those that don’t do the work, they obviously don’t become clients and he’s just weeded them out without actually doing anything. But those that do do the work, he gets to see exactly how much money they’re earning, and he can then make an informed decision as to what his skills are going to be worth to them. Because now he knows, now he has an idea of how much they earn, how much he thinks he can probably move the needle for them, and then he will set his price based on that. So his retainer’s always going to be slightly different depending on the client, but that’s how he does it. He gets a little bit of a viewpoint of certain things before…. So he’s not completely winging it.

Shawn (00:57:49):
Yeah. I think anytime that you are… And I know the level at which he works. The best position you can be in is to be full service. When I say full service, I mean, full digital marketing. You see all of it. It’s rare, and often you have to earn your way there, but not necessarily. Again, you can structure your business. That’s your thing. You can be full service AdWords. You can be full service Facebook. You can be full service paid traffic. Wherever you define where you are, you can then ask questions about that that inform your decisions for creativity. How much have you spent per month or per day over the last 90 days? What was your anticipated return on ad spend? What was your actual return on ad spend? Do you calculate return on ad spend or do you calculate CPA, AOV, and LTV. Depending on which of those, what were your calculations?

Shawn (00:58:47):
First of all, these are great diagnostic questions. If you ask a client what their 90 day ROAS as was by campaign, and they look at you like you have nine heads, you might want to run for the hills, or you might’ve just found the most amazing client that you can transform. Who knows, but there’s so much revealed in those conversations. This is not a question, but this is a little tip that I don’t think I have shared yet. Think about your ideal customer and then try to come up with a filter that finds those customers. I’ll give you my example in a second, but before I do that, I want to unpack this idea a little bit for you to use. If there’s a conference or a certain method or… Let me do that in the right order. If there’s a certain method that you are… If PLF is your thing, Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula. If you’re a PLF person, and you know it backwards and forwards and you’re a launch consultant or whatever they call the people that provide those services and certified… There there’s a language that community has. Now obviously you can go find them if you’re going to LaunchCon or other things, sure.

Shawn (01:00:08):
But there’s also a language. Launch is part of that language. But you want to find the thing that lights up your clients, that makes them realize, “Wait a minute, this person gets it. Okay, this person’s inside the tent.” If you have a sophisticated client and you start talking about CPA and AOV, that’s a signal to that client that you understand their model. You get it. Assuming you do. Or if you speak to ROAS to an ecommerce client, that’s a subtle signal that you actually know how to calculate from a client’s perspective what matters. And that’s the entry level thing. The example I’ll use, which is very, very, very specific, so keep that in mind, and I’ll unpack why it’s so specific.

Shawn (01:01:02):
So if somebody says to me, at a conference or something… There’s always a conversation, “Oh, what do you do?” “I’ve run an agency for a couple of decades.” “Oh, that’s interesting.” “Who do you work with?” What I’ll say is, “Just a little company in Baltimore.” Or sometimes in the past I’ve said things, “A little company in Baltimore and in Delray, Florida.” And that’s it. If 99 times or 95 times out of 100, the person just kind of looks at me, has no clue what I just said, and the conversation continues. That’s a very powerful signal to me. Why? Agora Financial was one of the largest direct response companies in the world, revenues measured in billions. And there they’re located in Baltimore and Delray, Florida. If you hear Baltimore and Delray and you don’t think Agora, then you’re not an ideal client for me, because my ideal clients are very familiar with Agora. They’re the 800 pound gorilla in the direct response market.

Shawn (01:02:15):
I used this once… Funny aside. I used this once at a conference with somebody who ran a division of Agora. Talk about a weird conversation. The person came over. I thought he was just a average person me, standing around after the event, between different parts of the event, and we’re just making small talk. The person’s just, “Oh, what do you do?” I told him. “Who do you work with?” “It’s just a little company in Baltimore and Delray.” And immediately looked at me and said, “Wait a minute. What?” And that’s the signal. I’m like, “Oh, you know what that means.” Now that’s hyper specialized because I’ve been doing this for so long. Your thing for that will be different. Your thing might be language, or it might be a well known personality. You’ll find your thing, but it’s a really good tool to have in your toolbox to eliminate all the people who have no idea what you’re talking about.

Shawn (01:03:12):
If you’re in a paid traffic… There’s two ways to look at this. If you want to run a paid traffic agency or be a paid traffic client services professional, and you reference ROAS or CPA and AOV, and your client has no idea, your prospect has no idea what you’re talking about, either you run because that client doesn’t have the baseline knowledge, or you see that that’s an opportunity, that maybe they’re more interested in the easier stuff like brand and awareness and other super easy things, which are great. It’s absolutely great to do that. There’s no reason not to. But that gives you information in that initial conversation, the prospecting conversation, that information, and you can do this to… To circle back here to this question about value pricing, you can have this as a filtering question related to value pricing to see if you think somebody is going to be amenable to the idea. And if you start talking about reducing CPA by 20% and driving up AOV by 50%, and you know in the back of your mind the economic impact over that with a thousand customers a week is staggering, and the person just looks at you, confused, value pricing is going to be an uphill battle, because they don’t understand how to calculate the value. Now you might be able to get them there, but they’ve given you a very strong signal they’re not there yet.

Shawn (01:04:46):
Penny just put a great mention in here. Perry Marshall calls this racking the shotgun. It’s from this book 80/20 Marketing, which is a really great book. We used to use this in paid advertising more with Facebook, which we don’t do as much now for cost reasons, where you would have content focused ads that when somebody [inaudible 01:05:13] clicked on this. For everybody’s clarification, and it’s actually [inaudible 00:31:21]. Sorry, spotty internet. Just popped up and clear. So racking the shotgun, it’s actually the wrong term. Should be cocking the shotgun, just to rub a nose. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, but the story comes from this seedy Las Vegas nightclub, and one person tells the other he opens and closes the shotgun and looks around, and anybody who hears that sound and knows what it is, the point is that you don’t mess with those people. But the people who don’t know what that sound is, those are the quote unquote “marks” or whatever. So that’s kind of the idea. What’s the signal you can throw up into the marketplace that when you get a response to that specific signal, that you get a piece of information that’s very valuable? So great concept, great book. Lots of ways that can go. I would look at Jack Born’s Tactical Triangle first before the book, because the wisdom of 80/20 the book is encapsulated in Jack’s 80/20 Tactical Triangle, but that’s just an aside.

Shawn (01:06:26):
All right, André made one note here under the question about frameworks, perhaps it’s worth creating a short lesson teaching frameworks, on how to create frameworks. Anytime I get a chance to teach how to do something about how to do something, sign me up. So I will record… It’ll either be us sub-module additional content. This is a good opportunity to talk about what the traffic engine as a thing is going to look over the next months. This is an eight week sprint. What I have tried to accomplish is ludicrous. Any sane person wouldn’t have tried to do this. And the only thing that’s getting me through every day of creation is knowing, just because of my process, is knowing that I get to go back and keep making it better, because I to polish as I go along, and there’s just not enough hours in the day for me to do that now. There are so many things the short lessons on frameworks, and there’s just so much I want to include if I try to include it all now, I’m going to lose the high level point and you’re going to get less value and I’m never going to finish it. It’d be a year from now and there’d be a module 1.25789. So just know that lots of stuff is going to be added. I’ve mentioned this, and actually I think this is an email that’s going out maybe today or tomorrow, but the participants that… We’re going to start doing a weekly digest of things that got added.

Shawn (01:08:03):
… participants that we’re going to start doing a weekly digest of things that got added, screen casts and things, not just the big modules. I mean you already get those announcements, but as stuff gets added whether it’s a screen cast or a video, God forbid a video or audio or additional content, whatever it is. There’s just going to be a weekly highlight reel. Here’s the stuff that went into the core course. Here’s the stuff that went into the client services modules and ask. Send me emails. I mean I’m not going to promise that every single thing you could ever imagine that you want I will add, but I love this stuff. I love working with all of you and it’s a wonderful opportunity.

Shawn (01:08:41):
So if you send something, like this framework idea. It’s not something I would have thought to do because it’s complicated, but I would love to teach how I sort through that complication. So it’s great content to add. If you have things like that that you’re interested in, send away and if it makes sense to add it, I’ll add it. I’d love to do it. I’m going to jump into the Q&A. Anything to add André while you’re typing away on the screen? I’m going to move this. I don’t see you typing.

André (01:09:08):
No, this is all good. I think we can move to the Q&As now. I’m just making notes in the doc for later so we don’t forget.

Shawn (01:09:15):
All right, so Gareth has asked the question I don’t want to answer which means I’ll answer it. He says, “Hey, can I ask a non-client related question? If so is there a recording of how to set up a Google Ad account in Shawn’s walkthrough of how he did research and set up his offer?” Those two things do not yet exist. For the first one, I mean you don’t need the walkthrough to set up a Google Ad account. I just included in the, it’s not module zero, it’s above module zero. I call it the Roadmap. If you log into the Academy, you’ll see there’s a new document added yesterday called Roadmap.

Shawn (01:09:54):
That is sort of four paths through the traffic engine depending on your situation. Like if you have an offer or you don’t have an offer or whatever, at the bottom of that I put resources for setting up Facebook accounts, Google analytics, AdWords and Google ads, and then something else like a tag manager. So there’s a great resource for setting up a Google ads account. I am still going, I’ve still recorded my setup of mine. It’s just I don’t want to hold you up. The offer has been a nightmare, absolute nightmare. I don’t know what idiot sort of set up that idea and put himself in that kind of a box. I do know the idiot, it’s me. Wow. What a fool, but it’s funny because this is-

André (01:10:40):
It’s going to be awesome once it’s done.

Shawn (01:10:42):
Well, what’s good about it is you’re going to see the truth. You’re going to see what it’s really like. And when I say you, I mean everybody in the course because that’s what I cared about more than anything. I did not want somebody to see me do something that looked easy and then when they tried to do it, it was hard and they blamed themselves. That to me was the worst possible outcome because then that person thinks that he or she did something wrong or he or she is deficient in some way when the truth is, if you get the people who do this all day, every day in a room, all we talk about is how hard it is.

Shawn (01:11:19):
So as miserable as it is, I am glad it has been so difficult to create the offer, to refine it, to go back and beat myself up against it over and over again realizing where I got it wrong because I get to share that and share how tough that was so that everybody understands, it’s not them. It’s the nature of the beast. So, okay.

André (01:11:45):
You did create a keyword research video that we’ve included now that I don’t think we’ve mentioned yet.

Shawn (01:11:55):
That’s in module three. This is the walkthrough of sort of how I approach keyword research. So if you haven’t seen that, that’s in there too. All right George, let’s see here. “Hi Andréa and Shawn, hope you’re well. Maybe on your list it would be great to learn whether you’ll comment on LinkedIn advertising at all in the client services section and any points from either Facebook or Google ads would translate. I think where some of my offering and client services, LinkedIn is a great network to get attention on.”

Shawn (01:12:24):
So after Facebook and Google or Google on Facebook, in my order of battle, this is this the sort of the progression I see. I would go Google ads to Facebook, have, I don’t know, three to five campaigns on each that are working. I would then port the campaigns from Google ads directly to Bing search. In my experience, you’ll get somewhere between 10 and 16% of the results that you get from Google you’ll get on Bing often at a slightly lower cost. They’re ported over exactly the same. You can import them, improve them on Google and then just move them over, copy them over exactly the way they were set up to bidding on the search side and then for Facebook, it’s not quite that simple with LinkedIn.

Shawn (01:13:21):
I hadn’t thought about doing a LinkedIn, anything with LinkedIn because LinkedIn is kind of its own thing and I don’t know that I want to start tugging on that thread, but I like George, so I don’t know. Let me give some thought. I like all of you, don’t know nobody get offended, but I want to say two things. I want to say let’s stay focused on Google and Facebook. That’s where the money is et cetera, et cetera, but we also do LinkedIn work. So it would be disingenuous to say that. So I am going to say, I’m going to-

André (01:13:59):
Maybe for the official release end of the year.

Shawn (01:14:05):
It’ll be something like… My other concern is I don’t want to distract people. This was another sort of a thought going into the creation of the traffic engine, which is the more variety I include the greater possibility for procrastination. So I do want to add a Bing, LinkedIn sort of bonus, extra something. I don’t know what that is, but let’s just say we’re going to do it. And George, why don’t you send me an email when you have some time and tell me from your perspective, what that would look like? What wildly successful would look like for you from that perspective? And again, I’m not going to do a hands on how to do LinkedIn, start to finish. Those are all out there and you can find that info, but I’ve run a lot of traffic on LinkedIn.

Shawn (01:15:04):
So from that perspective, as it relates to the core goals of the traffic engine, what is it that you would like to learn about LinkedIn that would be ultra high value to you and just recognize you’re now speaking for the entirety of the first cohort of the traffic engine, so there’s enormous weight on your shoulders. I’m going have some fun. All right, next question. “Do you recommend doing the value proposition design course or will you cover this more on the traffic engine?” I don’t, I don’t usually say something this blunt, but I don’t recommend doing that course.

Shawn (01:15:41):
There are two webinars that are free on Strategize, webinars about business model canvasing and there are two webinars about the value proposition design canvas. Do those two webinars. They’re worth it. Couple hours, do it on like 1.5 to two speed. But I wouldn’t pay for the course. I just don’t think it covers enough new ground and really value proposition, this is where I get hung up on some stuff related to value proposition design and jobs to be done and other stuff is it gets to be a little too intellectual esoteric for me. I want to know how do I use this thing? That’s my jam right there. I’m interested in things, but I’m interested in things because I’m looking out to how can I use this? This is counterintuitive or this is a really interesting way to use things, but what do I do with it? That’s what matters to me and the what you do with value proposition design, you can get in a hurry.

Shawn (01:16:46):
Then it’s just a matter of doing it. Go out there and do the work. Don’t try to learn how to do something better that you’re not doing. That’s the big challenge in all of this virtual learning stuff is that we can get caught up in this idea that I need to know all the stuff before I do anything. Don’t do that. Go fail forward fast. Just go try to do a value proposition canvas following what I put in the, what I outlined in the audience and offer masterclass part two. Is it perfect? Is it complete? Probably not, but it’s going to get you 85, 90% of the way there if you do the work. What were you going to say, André?

André (01:17:25):
I mean everything you need is inside there, other than the question prompts, which is the only valuable thing you can get from Strategize and it’s all free, you just sign up. I mean honestly, you can just go to Google and type in site:strategizer.com and then type in PDF or filetop:PDF and it’ll search the entire domain name for any and all freely available PDFs. And then you don’t even have to sign up for an account because all their PDFs are indexed on Google and then you can just download them. Again, they’re all free anyway, but if you didn’t want to sign up and jump through the hoops, you can do that.

Shawn (01:18:02):
If you watch the webinar, sign up because you have to, unless you have some crazy way that you can find that too. We’ll have to learn that, like how to circumvent lead gen part of this call. We should probably edit out.

André (01:18:13):
Well people shouldn’t have the PDFs indexable then.

Shawn (01:18:16):
If you say so. All right, next question. Oh, this is such a good question. This is a hard question. You guys aren’t throwing any softballs today at all, had zero easy questions. All right, the question is “Who would be your first two hires as you move from freelance solo work into building a business?” This is such a good question because it’s so counterintuitive. My easy answer is I’d hire Lauren because I did, but I mean that’s an obvious answer. So this is what I think most people do. You’re a freelancer or you’re doing whatever and there’s a certain amount of the work that you hate and there’s the paperwork and there’s all this stuff. And you’re like, “I just need somebody to do all this stuff I don’t like so that I can focus on the work that I do like.”

Shawn (01:19:12):
And so you end up hiring and sometimes it’s a VA and that’s I’ll argue for that in a second. Sometimes it’s a VA and there’s, sure. And that makes, there’s a lot of reasons to do that, but oftentimes it’s more like you’re trying to find somebody to do work that either shouldn’t be done at all or is low value work to free up your time. That’s great if freeing up your time is what you’re optimizing for. You will get some increase in revenue because your, but the increase will be incremental now. And I think that’s later, but what you want early is you want exponential revenue. You want a nice big chunk of money coming in that makes a big difference. You can’t save your way to business success. You need revenue to do that.

Shawn (01:20:08):
So what I would argue is that the first couple of hires, at least the first hire is somebody who is going to make you money and that often means somebody who does what you do and nobody, and that’s the thing. People get terrified. They’re like, “I don’t want somebody…” Let’s say you’re a Facebook specialist. “Oh, I know Facebook backwards and forwards. I want to do more Facebook. I’m going to hire someone to help me with all this stuff that’s not Facebook so I can do more Facebook.” Well let’s take a look at that. You’re getting a bunch of work, a bunch of Facebook work. Why not hire somebody who does Facebook work and get more of it? And you’ll get a funny situation to where one plus one is greater than three. I don’t know. It just always happens that way.

Shawn (01:20:52):
You get somebody to bounce ideas around and you get some, like something happened. So my first two hires would be, I would be willing to, even for the first two hires, I would be willing to work a little more. I’d be willing to do a lot more because those first two are going to give me a nice boost in revenue and when you get a chunk of money coming in, life changes. There are certain inflection points with money where it is far less valuable. I think there’s a lot of analysis that after 90000, $90000 a year, our satisfaction for additional money begins to drop off precipitously. Sure, that’s sort of true. In my experience it’s more like when you hit, I don’t know, a couple of hundred, $250000 a year in revenue, in income, pretax income going from 250 to 350? It’s just not a big deal.

Shawn (01:21:52):
But going from 75 to 150, oh that’s a really big deal. And that’s what the first two hires do for you. They take you from a exchanging your time for dollars business to exchanging other people’s time and your reputation and your processes and methods for dollars. So my first two hires in scenario one, and I’m going to contradict myself in a minute, which is I do to entertain everybody. My first two hires going from freelance to solo would not follow the conventional path of trying to build infrastructure for a business. I would, and I’ve seen this happen successfully without thinking of a bunch of examples. I would go hire two people who were either good at what they do related to what I do or could be in a short amount of time and were eager to learn.

Shawn (01:22:47):
And I would make myself like a little virtual, expanded free. I wouldn’t pretend to be a big agency or anything. I would just be “Here’s who we are. There’s three of us. We just get this work done. We do the same work.” I wouldn’t be, and this could change depending on a couple of scenarios I’ll talk about, but if I was all Facebook all the time, I wouldn’t hire a Facebook person and then try to hire an AdWords person because clients ask about AdWords too. Oh, great. Deal with that later. What I would do is I would look and say, “I’m a Facebook freelancer. I want two more people who do Facebook and we’re going to be really good at it,” because then everybody’s work gets better and you get, that’s how you get exponential gain initially. That’s how you go from under a 100000 to three or $400,000.

Shawn (01:23:43):
Two or three times growth comes from those first two decisions. The other way to do this, there’s sort of wrong way and the right way. The wrong way to do this is the first two hires are infrastructure hires where you’re like, Oh, okay, well I need somebody to do my books and I need somebody like the Tim Ferriss approach. “I need to hire out somebody.” I do my 80/20 analysis of where my highest value is. I want to offload all the other stuff that’s not high value and that’s great and you’ll go from $75000 a year to like 90000 or a $100000 a year. Because now you have this new expense that you can’t afford yet. You can afford that expense when you’ve hired two people that are rainmakers driving your cash up. Then you can afford to hire the VA. You can afford that. All that stuff makes sense then, but when you try to do that early where you’ve run into this problem where you’re not freed up enough to make enough money to offset the fact that at your freelance level, that first hire is an economic drain. It’s an expense.

Shawn (01:24:54):
And the first couple of hires, you want to be profit centers. That’s really the goal. Now the counter argument to that is if you don’t want to manage people, like if you’re a crafts person, whether it’s you’re a writer, this happens often with really good writers or you’re a hyper focused specialist. If you don’t actually want to build a big team, don’t do things that build big teams. That sounds so obvious and I’m not saying this like, “Oh, you foolish people don’t get this.” I’m laughing at myself the whole time I answer these questions because I have done some of the dumbest shit you can imagine because I didn’t take five minutes to ask myself what I was optimizing for.

Shawn (01:25:45):
And I’m like, “No, I don’t like this. So I want to do something that fixes this.” Well a better idea is not to do it at all. That’s a smarter answer. So if you are a freelancer or doing solo work and you want to build your business, ask yourself first, what business do you want to be in? Do you want to be in a business where you’re running a big team or a small team? If so, hire a big team or a small team as you can, like in the process. But if you’re thinking to yourself, “I want to hire other people to do the work so I have more time to focus on this work that I enjoy. I want to make my life less complicated.”

Shawn (01:26:22):
Let me tell you, more people is more complicated and it’s not, there’s some mathematical formula for this that as you add people, the complication does not scale linearly. It scales logarithmically because of all the communication between people. So a 16 person team is not four times more complex than a four person team. It’s like 64 or 128 times more complex. I can’t remember the math. It’s crazy. And you experience that viscerally. You’re like, “I did this thing because it was supposed to be better and more fun and I’m miserable.” It’s like, “Right, you created a business you don’t want to own. Don’t do that.” So that’s the pre answer to the answer. So what the question you asked is you presuppose that you do want to hire people. You can’t hire people and be a freelancer. The VA economy is great. You can do that. I think that’s a different, it’s just slightly different and you just need to recognize that you’re going to be, your work is responsible for paying for that. It’s very unlikely that a support person is going to pay for himself or herself. The idea is that they do because of what they free you up to do and I’m certain there’s some truth to that. Absolutely, or nobody would do it, but it’s not quite… You just have to recognize it’s an expense. There it is. George just posted it in there.

Shawn (01:27:52):
I’m not even going to try. I can’t even read it the formula. So it’s a lot, but George just posted, translated as a lot. And it gets weird. I was actually in a, I have a team that did this. It was a very well known internet marketer, Thor person team, incredibly successful, had a really lucrative launch, bunch of money in the bank and said, “We’re going to take this thing to the next level,” and it went from four to 16 people. And I was one of the extra that as a freelancer was involved and it was not long that they were back closer to seven or eight because it’s a different animal, absolutely different animal.

Shawn (01:28:34):
All right, next question. Let’s see here. “Am I hearing correctly that the value proposition framework essentially goes through the process of uncovering what makes the boat go faster? So everything ends up getting framed around that?” I wouldn’t think about it that way. With the value prop, so just to put everybody on the same page. Men’s eight British rowing team, 1996, silver finish the World Games somewhere and they spent 40 years. They hadn’t won since early 1900s. They hadn’t won a gold. They spent the next four years prior to Sydney asking every decision they had to make was framed against one question. Will it make the boat go faster? That’s the title of the book written by the captain of the boat?

Shawn (01:29:20):
And what I mean, every question. Should we try these new shoes? Will it make the boat go faster? No. Who cares? Really at the end of the day, who cares? So from that perspective, will it make the boat go faster? I’m sure we’re going to find a relationship, but in general that is the business. That’s a high level business question. What for you, back to the previous question, if you’re thinking about hiring people, will that make the boat that you care about go faster? Make your revenue go faster and if your boat is based on revenue, if that’s how you’ve defined it, making more money than yes it will. But if your definition of faster is lifestyle, it’s another consideration for more of a craft focused business, then no it won’t, it’s going to make you miserable.

Shawn (01:30:14):
So that’s sort of where we use that. Value proposition canvas, I think of it more it’s like an X-ray vision into what really drives the market and it lets me see the parts of the market that are motivated by different things. I used it in the classroom for [inaudible 01:30:36] Tech. I used lots of things that I buy as examples to sort of just make myself look in some ways it’s I’m willing to make myself look foolish. I use the example that I used in the module about the [Suunto 01:30:49] Corps, all black military, all black watch from the equalizer. But this is like another example I use is I own a 2019 Tundra, Toyota Tundra TRD Pro. Right? So if you were to use value proposition design, there are lots of people who buy trucks.

Shawn (01:31:11):
You could say there’s a market. We saw the truck buyers, but immediately in the truck market, there’s a bifurcation. There is a smaller truck, which for Toyota’s the Tacoma and then there’s the full size pickup, which for Toyotas, the Tundra. So that’s immediately, if you were doing value proposition design, you would start to winnow down. It’s like the person who buys a Tundra is not a person who buys a Tacoma. So we’ve now focused and we say, “Let’s look at the Toyota Tundra buyers, but then you get into this next phase too, which you might be able to capture. There might be a value proposition canvas for Tundra buyers and in that canvas, you’re going to have, there is a functional need. Go from point A to point B. There is a functional need to have the bed of the pickup where you can haul stuff occasionally, whether it’s picking up an appliance or whatever.

Shawn (01:32:03):
Sure, there’s functional needs and that defines a chunk of the market. So we start getting this X-ray vision like, “Oh, there’s a big chunk of the market that wants a full size pickup to go from point A to B where they can occasionally put a load in the back. And if you just stop your thinking there, you’ve missed out on so much nuance because eventually you find that there are lots of other things that people, there are lots of other reasons people buy things that can drive the price up and some of them are functional, but most of them are social and emotional. So functionally, I live four miles from pavement. So functionally, I drive a truck because I’m on a road that in the springtime it’s muddy and kind of gross and it has a certain type of suspension which I would know nothing about if it bit me on the ass. I can read the descriptions, but I don’t know enough about it, but in some level that’s important.

Shawn (01:33:10):
But what you get to and the value proposition canvas is that you find that there is some, and I don’t know if it’s social, emotional, whatever it is, but there is something about the fact that there is a buyer like me who spends 80% more than a buyer would spend on the base model to get the TRD Pro because it is the highest, it’s the most expensive trim line on the Tundra, but it’s not the luxury version. It’s the most expensive trim line in custom colors only available in that edition at certain things that signify, like all this stuff, you don’t see many of them on the road.

Shawn (01:33:51):
It has all of these factors around an off road pickup, right? Somehow like that collection of needs is a different, it’s [inaudible 01:34:01] and when I bought, this is my second one, when I bought my first one and I had a conversation with the salesperson and I walked in and I said, “I’m thinking about the TRD Pro,” and sort of worked it out and then he mentioned in passing and I said, “You guys have had that for a while,” and he goes, “I don’t try to sell that truck.” He goes, “People who buy that truck come in and they buy that truck and they don’t want to look at anything else.” And I just, I knew they had one Four Runner, one Tacoma, one Tundra that were all TRD Pros, all custom colors, the dealership only gets one.

Shawn (01:34:35):
And salesperson said it best. “We know there’s just a certain type of person who just walks in and that’s the only truck they’re going to buy. They’re going to buy it and you were that person today,” and it was like, “Okay, well that’s the insight from value proposition design.” There’s nothing, the decisions that led to that that’s true for other models of trucks and other models of products and other models of things, you would uncover those in a really deep dive into the value proposition canvas. You would find out that there’s somebody, that the fact that it’s a custom color, matters to them. And I don’t want to know why that matters to me, but it does.

Shawn (01:35:14):
So that’s really what you’re looking for with a framework is you’re looking for those things that cause audiences to buy for Kate. To say, “Over here, here’s this group of us and we care about these three or four things. And if you speak to these three or four things, we’re five, six, seven, 10 times more likely to buy that if you speak to these other bland things,” and the beauty of paid traffic is we can speak very clearly to different audience segments very specifically. Excuse me, I’ll take a quick drink of water and then get back to the next question.

Shawn (01:35:51):
Okay, next question. “So are you tailoring reporting based on what the process uncovers?” Assuming this is related back to the framework questions I do. It is a good idea to do the sort of additional info on how to think about creating frameworks for clients because it really does get back to this question of what are they optimizing for? And is that what they’re really optimizing for? So the reporting, I prefer narrative reporting. I don’t like dashboards and I’ve invested a lot of time and energy and dollars and had people help create dashboards and I’ve never yet had a dashboard that actually made a client happy. And that includes dashboards created exactly to the specifications a client asked for, because dashboards don’t really tell you anything. And they oftentimes they tell you things, like reports often tell you things, they distract you with things that are meaningless, particularly as a client services professional.

Shawn (01:36:56):
I can’t emphasize enough, do not report data to clients that you don’t want them commenting on. I said that in the module and I can’t overstate this. If you report cost per lead to a client, but what you care about is cost per acquisition, you are going to have endless conversations with clients about cost per lead that end with you saying, “But that doesn’t really matter because the CPA target, we’re hitting the CPA target.” Just don’t, don’t do that. It’s mind numbing how, and I’ve done this a million times and then asked myself, ” Why did I do that? What possessed me to share that information? And you’ll see it and you’ll have clients ask you. I have a client now and they have a new marketing person and she’ll ask me questions like at high level strategy meetings.

Shawn (01:37:42):
“Well what was our average cost per click in AdWords?” And I’m like “That question doesn’t even, that’s a meaningless question,” but everyone thinks somehow they need to, that these questions are helpful. They’re not. The answer to the question that you’re asking is reporting needs to be connected to the thing that matters and the thing that matters is usually the thing that is deciding whether or not you are rehired at the next inflection point of your relationship with a client and you’ve agreed to that whether or not you’ve done that explicitly. You have agreed when you’ve signed on with a client that you’re going to be evaluated and judged by their standards and if you think their standards are driving down CPA and increasing AOV, but their standard is actually how well you respond, how quickly you respond to their requests for changes, that mismatch is going to be evident immediately.

Shawn (01:38:41):
It shows up in reporting and I use reporting as a method, as a forcing mechanism to focus my clients on the things that matter and to get them to stop focusing on things that don’t ultimately matter. Lauren and I right now are working with a client where they had a webinar that was not at all, it was attracting an audience, that had within that audience the hope was their actual audience might be found, but overwhelmingly that wasn’t their audience. They were putting out bait for fish they didn’t want to catch and wondering why they weren’t catching the right fish at their right rates. Very common, nothing to do with this particular client, but what ends up happening with and it starts with what we report on is you start to work back almost from frustration to the beginning to realize that the thing that you’re trying to accomplish, the numbers are showing you you’re not accomplishing it and you go to figure out why and you realize that the thing that you’re given to work with can’t possibly do what the client has asked you to do.

Shawn (01:39:54):
And that’s when things get interesting. And if you just use a dashboard, where you just have a spreadsheet. “Here you go. Here’s the data.” You never get that insight. So I like to use the narrative thing and it forces me, sharpens my thinking to go back and say, “Do I know what the client’s trying to achieve, I mean clearly? Do I know how to measure it? Do I know the few things that drive those measurements and what we’re doing, if it’s good, bad, or otherwise, relative to those goals, can I use the data that I’ve just found to inform me how I can do it differently? That’s really what reporting should be.

Shawn (01:40:32):
Not a Google data studio, whizzbang, knobs and graphs. For that sure, there’s a place for that, but the place for that is it’s like the thing about decaf coffee, the place for that is nowhere in the trash and the place for those types of dashboards really are like, “How many customers did we get, daily customer account rolled up to a weekly customer account relative to last week?” Those kinds of dashboards, okay that’s good. You can take a quick look, “Oh yeah. We’ll try. Customers are going up,” but how is this happening? And what do we need to do to make it better stuff? Don’t show that stuff to clients. Don’t get them involved because they will get involved and if you’re working, if you have been hired as a professional, you should be better at what you were hired for than the client. So you should be asking them very specific questions that you need as a service provider and kindly saying, “No thank you,” to anything else because you’re the professional. That’s your role. Show up and be a professional. All right, next question. Getting animated about this stuff?

Shawn (01:41:43):
“If your client doesn’t want to be part of the value proposition design conversation, what have you found to be the best way to get the information you need to complete it?” I mentioned this earlier. I mentioned this in the comment for Angelina in the modules as well. Just ask them the questions, the jobs, pains, and gains questions and don’t call them jobs, pains, and gains. If I-

Shawn (01:42:03):
Pains and gains questions and don’t call them Jobs, Pains, and Gains. If I were you, depending on what service you’re providing, I would standardize on three to five questions that represent Jobs, Pains, and Gains and don’t forget to include in jobs of the emotional and social questions. If you work primarily with, let’s say business coaches, if that’s your audience, I would standardize a set of questions to find out who precisely your client is speaking to, who is their target audience? And they might be a business mindset coach, right? And so the questions would be around, it would be to uncover when people hire a mindset coach, what are they trying to accomplish? And just tailor it and you don’t even, and I think it’s probably easier not to ever even mention the Value Proposition Design Canvas to clients.

Shawn (01:43:06):
It confuses things, unless they’re sophisticated and there’s some rare examples, but just ask the questions and do the work yourself, knowing that the framework is wanting to guide you in the direction of really good messaging. And it’s also a way that if you hear lots of different things and you uncover that… But they told you there’s one audience, there’s really three audiences that it gives you a way to come back to them and say, “I know we’ve been talking about that you serve sort of one audience of whatever, professionals, but when you answered my questions and I sat down to create the messaging for your advertising, what I realized is we’re actually speaking to three different sets of primary needs. And one of them is this,” like, “these are the three things that matter. Another one of these three things or another one is these three things.”

Shawn (01:43:58):
“So it looks to me like we actually have three audiences, not one,” or three segments of an audience. And a lot of time that’s eyeopening to the person that you’re working with. They might look and say, “I’ve never thought about it that way,” which most people have. It’s great. It positions you as a professional, but you never have to talk about the fact that you’re using this particular tool. You’re just using the tool and I think that’s what matters.

Shawn (01:44:24):
We’ve got a long question coming up. Moses, is this the last question? Wow. No, no, it’s not, all right. It’s just long. I’m not sure if you got my questions that I sent them this morning. I did not see this. I’ll put them in some apologies if you’ve seen them already. I have a client who sells flooring. Their lead times are generally around six to eight weeks from customer contact to sale. I’ve tried to convince them the value of tracking a sale as a true conversion, but their previous agency has a thinking that tracking a phone call will do. Getting the sale data is not easy, but I’m wondering, and taking your suggestions from one of my email questions, it would be possible to get tracking on a sale if they were to use online payments like Stripe, I would be able to tap that into analytics and there for get a true conversion. If I can do this, my business reporting to them would be possible.

Shawn (01:45:17):
At the moment, I have no transparency into their actual sales. Other question I have is, AdSpend the same client was told by their previous Service Provider, what they needed to keep the CPC.

Shawn (01:45:26):
Oh, that’s fine. First question, yes, it is possible. The way to do that though, is you need to get the lead early. So whatever you do, and it doesn’t mean you need to do lead gen like traditional lead gen, but whatever the initial point of contact is, you need to match how they got that lead. Let’s just say it’s Google ads or Facebook, wherever, you need to match that to the person in their email address. I would also ask at that stage, if they have alternate email addresses, they may object to that and that’s fine, but it just. It will solve a downstream problem because let’s assume later they buy through Stripe. Then you can actually, and you just you’ll have to do this manually in some way, compare and contrast with what you can then do is connect to the first point of contact that you’re responsible for, with the revenue that was eventually purchased over a very long period of time, six to eight weeks or other pixels aren’t going to fire and track it.

Shawn (01:46:36):
But you can connect that at the individual level, by email address, very sophisticated tools, like Wicked Reports; that’s what they do. They capture the email early and the email becomes the canonical reference that ties that user’s behavior together with other factors too, like IP and other things. But when a sale is triggered, if you’ve ever used Wicked Reports, you’ve seen this, that when a sale is triggered, that sale is associated with the email address. The challenge and Wicked Reports doesn’t solve this years ago. But the challenge in the past, and the challenge that you’ll have, which is why I mentioned asking for multiple email addresses is occasionally you’ll get somebody uses their personal email and when they become a lead or their professional email, and then later they buy and they use their personal email or some version of that. So there’s a mismatch.

Shawn (01:47:26):
So it’s easier on the front end to say, “Are you going to ask, what’s your primary email?” Whatever it is, you want to try to make that connection because that’s going to be the tie that connects the two things together. I don’t know what they use for lead. They do traditional lead gen, like if someone downloads a report or they are a pricing estimator, or they schedule a phone and they have to give their email address or text number, or whatever it takes to find that identifier. You just need to get that from the client on an ongoing basis, and then get the sales data from an ongoing basis, and then find the matches and then do the calculations. Then you can show categorically, this is how much money you’re making. It’s not fun that it’s manual, but manual really is… And this example, I think until you can make that more efficient, that’s really how you calculate the data.

Shawn (01:48:28):
That’s how a lot of the tools calculate the data. They just do it in a more sophisticated way. And when you see it, and what I like about doing this manually is it really makes interesting conversations. You’re going to see a richness of data that I suspect you and the client aren’t aware of. Because then you can start doing things like date to conversion, right? So let’s say, what I would do is I would have a spreadsheet that captured it, first name, last name, mobile phone number, email address if I could get, whatever I could get and the date of first contact and if you know where they came from, if you’re tracking Google versus [inaudible 01:49:08] versus Facebook or whatever, you could include that too, that’d be great to have, but have all of that information and then have the Stripe information.

Shawn (01:49:20):
So you get two pieces of information, but then you get a little extra too, what you get as a timing, then you get a velocity number. How long does it take on average before someone becomes a customer? You said six to eight weeks in your question, do you know that? Are there like certain, is that average six to eight weeks? My guess is that there’s probably a distribution curve in there and there. And what you may end up being able to tell the client is that for every, let’s say every 100 customers that they get, that 75% of them convert in the first 48 hours. Like, Oh, wow, I’m just making this up, but you’ll find a richness of data in there that you would not see without actually going in and mocking around with the data. So I would do it all manually. I think it’s just, you’ll understand it and you’ll see things, and those things that you see will inform how you do the front end so much better. I’ve done this so many times where I’ve made so much extra work for myself and cursed myself for doing it, and then had a profound insight as a result that changed my relationship with a client, or showed me a new way to do things or… And it’s so valuable. That’s how I would approach that question. In the second question, the other question I have is, AdSpend the same client was told by their previous Service Provider that we needed to keep the CPC. I’m assuming to keep the CPC a certain level. This gets back to you’ll never ask a question that you don’t want an answer to, you never talk about a metric you don’t want an answer to their previous agency, told them something that’s nonsense because, that agency was managing the CPC. That’s it?

Shawn (01:50:55):
Of course, you can’t go to the client, be like, “Hey, your previous agency was dumb!” You can’t do that. So this is an opportunity for you to step into the role of teacher and advisor, counselor. So to sit down and say, to explain how cost per click fits into the overall goal that they have, which is to generate revenue from the sale of flooring. So you can work backward from that and once you have collected some of the data, you’ll be able to show them that the way in which cost per click does or does not affect their overall outcome. Yes, it’s absolutely a factor, but it’s not nearly the factor that they think it is. And where I think you’ll find when you get to a certain point and you feel free to use a phrase that I’d love to use, which I stole from Kelly Starrett in a different context, but the phrase is misplaced precision.

Shawn (01:51:51):
I see this all the time. I use this phrase a lot. I train my clients to understand this phrase, which means you are focusing on something very precisely, that does not really matter and it’s hard to say it that way. So you have to be very cautious. But I entered the first time I run into misplaced precision. I use that as an opportunity to introduce the idea gently to say that… And I say, “Great,” sort of often I’ll say it’s something like this. Like a client will be focusing on some obscure metric and I’ll stop for a moment and say, “Let me just take a moment to reorient to the larger goal here. The larger goal, as I understand it is to find high quality leads to become customers. This particular thing that we’re talking about probably contributes less than a half a percent to that goal.

Shawn (01:52:48):
So knowing that I don’t want to waste too much of your time discussing it, but I just want to acknowledge that, yes, this is something that we look at when it’s applicable, but because it’s not a high leverage driver, we don’t spend a lot of time on it. We refer to that internally as misplaced precision, and we do our best not to focus lots of our time and attention on things that ultimately don’t matter as much to you as the client.” So then you’ve put it all on you. It’s not them. They’re not dumb or whatever else, but now you’ve introduced it a gentle way, this idea of misplaced precision, and it becomes a buzzword later. I have clients now who use that phrase. I’m just thinking of a particular client I mentioned earlier with the owner of the company will scold his marketing and sales team about their misplaced precision using my language so that I don’t have to. It’s wonderful, but it took me 12 years to get there.

Shawn (01:53:40):
So it looks like the question was cut off, says the full question. The same client was told by their previous Service Provider that we needed to keep the CPC under $2, of his $3,500. I’m trying to convince them to think differently about that. Ads mean general, you have mechanisms thoughts for doing this. So yeah, this is a great question for anything direct response related people. Ask me this all the time, “How much will leads, cost? How much should my budget be?” These are all questions that… and they’re important questions. If you’ve put aside $500 to drive some traffic and you don’t have any idea what your results are going to be, then yes, it’s critically important. However, established business with an offer that is converting, those questions are perfect examples of misplaced precision, because it is again, it’s an opportunity to reorient.

Shawn (01:54:35):
What this customer has been told is under the previous agency, in order for their $3,500 to be economically viable, they had to get cost per click for $2, and then you need to connect the dots. The reason for that was as they needed to get X number of clicks, to get X number of leads, to get X number of customers. Now, assuming that’s true and make the chain of causality for the client, show them that. “This is how, what they said relates to your actual goal. And you can see, a typical order.” You can say, “Your average order value is $3,500. Your margin on that is whatever,” let’s say they make $1,500 on that sale. “You have said that you don’t want to spend more than $150 of that margin to get a customer, which means based on cost per lead,” and you work it all the way back to cost per click. That’s the idea.

Shawn (01:55:43):
But then you have to show them… They just have to understand what that’s based on, but then you can say, “However, you’ll notice this campaign that we’ve been running over here for the last 30 days, the cost per click is actually $6. However, because the next two factors are so much better,” because obviously you’re much better professional. That’s why you get hired. “But because of these other two factors, it’s actually better economically for you to pay the $6 to get the $3,500 sale than to pay the $2 with a previous model.” Now they get it. Now you’ve shown them, like, “Oh, okay.” Now if they don’t get it, don’t give up, come at it a different way and there’s a lot of education that need that needs to be done. And you need to be able to do this on a piece of paper over the crayon.

Shawn (01:56:33):
But the ability to educate the client is huge. And there’s so much value in smart clients, train clients to the language that you use, train clients, to the things that you care about to the levers that you pull, get them to start speaking your language. It makes everything easier. If they’re still the language of the previous agency, the question is why aren’t they working with that agency? Obviously something was wrong and you don’t have to say it overtly, but implicitly, you can suggest that what was wrong was how they thought about paid traffic, forced them into a situation where the maximum that they could pay was $2 because everything else in their system forced that, but you do things differently. You can pay way more because your method is better, it produces a better result. If that’s not true, then you got to be cautious with that.

Shawn (01:57:25):
I mean, I don’t ever want to suggest in any way, shape or form that we tell a client anything that is not true. This is not sales and persuasion. There’s no trickery. Step one, is be able to deliver the goods. If you can’t get them a lead, or if you can’t get them a viable customer paying more than $2 for cost per click own it and say that you’re right. We’re not going to spend more than that because it’s going to cut away too much of margin, but then turn around and figure out how to do it better. And then be really excited when you announced to them, “Hey, we can pay up to $3 now. Here’s what we did to get there,” right? “Hey, we can spend $4 now. Here’s what we did to get there.” And by educating the client on that, you’ve made a better client. You’ve improved your skill, everything gets better, everybody wins. All right, let me jump to the next question, get a drink of water.

Shawn (01:58:24):
First question. Going through the offer creation part with the client, how does that look, to do it with a client? Are there certain questions? So I’ve answered this for the part two Value Proposition Design. I want to be clear that part one of the audience and offer masterclass was really focused on the segment of the Traffic Engines First Cohort that does not have an offer. And they’re thinking about like, what is their offer going to be? So that Venn diagram of interests and where you can contribute value in an audience that is valuable for that’s really, if you don’t have an offer. Now, if you work with clients who don’t have an offer, sort of two things I’ll say about that, yes, you can use that exercise and the client should go through that and they should spend a lot of time with it and then come to you with it.

Shawn (01:59:14):
The second thing I will say is, don’t work with clients that don’t have offers. If you do already, no judgment, but just trans… And I’ve done it more times than I want to admit, but go work with clients that have… Especially if you do paid traffic go work with clients that have offers, it’s just infinitely easier. There are lots of them. You want to work with clients with proven offers. Now, if you have a client as proven offers and they want to develop new offers, that’s a different animal. You can specialize in that. There’s a whole way that you’ll learn about a lot of that in the Testing Module 6.5, the Facebook testing framework, like, “Oh, sure.” But don’t put yourself in a position where you’re primarily work… Because you’re going to, you’re going to check all the wrong boxes. You’re going to check the boxes of it. It’s incredibly difficult. The client is rarely happy. Most offers fail. They’re often writing checks that are big for them and small for you. Just, don’t do that.

Shawn (02:00:07):
It’s a nightmare use that if you’re thinking about your own offer and it could be how you want to position the client services offer. Absolutely, use part one. Part two is the thing that you can do either with a client or on behalf of a client asking them questions. So the next question, do you also create redo landing pages, sales pages, and PPDs the Multi Page Presale Site or only run traffic? How do you determine if you should be doing these things? For example, the sales page converts, but maybe not. How do you price creating these? Lots of questions in here. So yes, the end result of The Value Proposition Design process should be to tailor the full spectrum of assets to your audience sub-segments. Now that’s rarely possible unless you’re, unless a subsegment of your audience can be reached directly online and it’s big. And I say that, so it justifies doing all of that extra work.

Shawn (02:01:05):
If it isn’t, then your ads need to speak to individual things like you want to focus in on an audience sub segment, but then your landing page, or sales page, or multi page presale site needs to speak to the needs of the total larger audience, just for efficiency reasons and economics. So let’s just say for the sake of argument you have, what you think is one audience. It’s the example that I used in the module. You think you have an audience of data-driven marketers, but what you realize is that audience actually has three different segments. One is the person who does it for themselves, looks at the data herself. Another person works for that person. It’s one account, but they’re responsible for managing that account. And then the third person has an agency, they do that for multiple clients.

Shawn (02:01:55):
And you have a product that does that, provides that broad service for all of them. Well, you can do it a couple of ways, way I would do it the most efficient way is to have the front end, your ads, speak to the individual audiences. If you can target them individually, great. If it’s Facebook and you just put all three up and people see different variations, that’s okay, too. It’s similar with Google. I would, I would try to target it by the search phrase. But when you get to the landing page, you can actually speak about the product in general and all the things that it does, but break it out by segments and let people sort of self select and skip to who they are.

Shawn (02:02:44):
So you can say something like, if you’re a data driven marketer who dot, dot, dot manages your own account, and then there’s a blurb, like this is what’s important to you. This is what it does and then you just skip to the next thing. Then I could say, if you’re a data driven marketer who manages, AdSpend on behalf of a company, “Oh, okay. Boom!” Here’s what it does. Or if you’re a data driven marketer who advertises on behalf of clients, and then there are the threats that you break, you make all the content on the assets, but broken up a little bit. That’s easier to do, far less cost effective, far less caught cost-intensive than to try to have three separate variations of everything, unless there’s so much money in these, that there’s sub audiences are enormous, that you can focus on those. That’s very rare.

Shawn (02:03:39):
I think what you’re going to find generally, is your ads speak viscerally to the felt needs of the audience segment. And as long as you have that content broken out clearly where somebody can find it on whatever your front end is, they’ll find it. And they’ll get you to 90% of the way there. And the extra 10% usually isn’t worth the work involved. How do I price creating like, like the fulls? So we don’t, we don’t do full builds anymore. I want to make sure that I understand the question. So how do I price creating these? If these, you mean like all the assets we generally don’t, we’re providing information to clients like here’s a design brief, here’s the arts, it’s a creative messaging brief, is really what it is. Here’s, we think there are these three audiences or this one audience often there is just one audience. We think this one audience really needs to… That this is the emphasis of the client that I was mentioning earlier, that Lauren and I are working with.

Shawn (02:04:46):
They just created a new webinar and they created the new webinar. We did this sort of dynamically ad hoc, just reflecting back on them, what we were hearing them say, their actual audiences. So it was very much dynamic and sort of in the moment on a weekly phone call, but they then created, they have the webinar infrastructure, but it’s their responsibility to then go. And they’ve just created a new webinar and we’re now going to test that. So we didn’t do that work. So I don’t have a great answer about creating those. That would be, I mean, that would be all over the place that would, that’s writing copy, that’s doing design build. So yeah, I don’t have a great answer for that. Sorry.

Shawn (02:05:24):
Do you work with clients who have untested offers or products? I sort of answered this already. If so, how do you, how do you have that conversation or set the expectation that what they might have worked could can be redone? I have regret every decision I’ve made to work with somebody with an untested offer, or an unproven offer. I have regretted without exception, every single one. The expectations are really high, very few people just because of the nature of what we’re immersed in. We’re immersed in advertising that talks about how you’re one funnel away from your multi-crew trillion dollar funnel. You buy this one course and spend 5,000. I just saw this other day, $5,000 and the poster person for it and made a million dollars on a launch. So you go to LaunchCon and the Platinum Plus Club is up there with their multimillion dollar launches and the ideas that you can have a million dollar launch too. That’s the mindset of the person in general with the untested unproven offer, that is not the reality of an unproven offer.

Shawn (02:06:29):
The reality is overwhelmingly, it’s going to fail and somebody who… I’ve done a lot of these and they all generally tend to follow the same path. It’s exciting. You think they’ve heard you say that it’s going to be a process of iterating towards success. They spend some money, they get a result that’s either suboptimal, crickets. They sell one, they sell none. It’s not the $50,000 they had in their mind to being what they thought was going to happen on their first webinar and their first week, whatever it is, or 10,000. And they’re unhappy, unhappy clients are not fun clients. And it’s very hard to make a happy client out of someone with an untested unproven offer, because that’s not a happy place to be in. It’s not.

Shawn (02:07:18):
If you love the game and if you want to just play the creative game and you recognize that the rules of the game are most things are going to fail on the way you get to successes to continue to learn and iterate, learn and iterate. That’s great. Most clients, aren’t coming to it with a big pocket of cash to watch you learn and iterate over and over again. So it’s just categorically, if you can avoid this is like one of those mistakes, and I’m not saying these are bad people or wonderful people, but if you can avoid working with clients with untested or unproven offers, that’s a really good strategic decision to make early. There’s not a lot of joy to be found there, unfortunately. Next question. I have some offers that perform well with organic search. Do I need to do Value Proposition Design canvas or skip it? Because, I already know the offer performs on Google Search. Even if it’s organic and not paid, is there a different ad that runs at a Google Map Pack or is there a feature for that in the regular Google Ad? I’m not sure I understand that. Oh, the Google Maps that has a different entry. So let’s go back to the main question here. This is kind of a thing that comes up in various forms, a lot in the comments and other things, which is the, do I need to question? I mean, the short answer is you don’t have to do anything. You can just kind of through the framework and pick and choose. But the value of the framework is all of the pieces fit together, and I have not shared anything yet that I feel like isn’t going to contribute real value to you. Like outsize value worth a hundred times the amount of time you spend on it.

Shawn (02:09:05):
So if you have an offer and it’s doing exceptionally well in organic search, you may already know the answers as to what goes on Value Proposition Design canvas. You also may be the luckiest person in the world. You’ve just got away. Who knows? I have no idea. You might have a landing page, you might be in a market where nobody else got it, who knows? But take two hours, just two hours and go through the process. And if you’re through the first hour and you haven’t felt like you’ve had any insights, call it quits, check the box and move on. But what I think you’re going to find if you just carve out that time to do it, it’s going to be well worth your time that you’re going to see something a little bit differently than you saw before. And that what you see usually shows up as frustration. You’re like, “Well, I can’t choose five things,” or, “I can’t choose only three things because there are five. I know there are five. I hear these five all the time.”

Shawn (02:10:08):
Guess what? That tells you there’s two segments, not one, maybe three, right? That’s the kind of insight that you find. And it’s in that frustration that you find these breakthroughs. So devote an hour, devote two, get yourself a cup of coffee, turn the phone off, close your browser, get your posters out, whatever it is, whatever you call them elsewhere in the world are posters here, but do the work. And that’s always my answer to these questions. Do the work because I believe that every single exercise that I’ve shared so far, every single part of the framework is exceptionally valuable. You’re not going to find it show, there’s no… I realized yesterday, I did a quick count so far, not including the Q&A no Q&A, no emails, there was something else where 47, almost 48,000 words, not for the traffic engine so far.

Shawn (02:11:01):
So we’re going to probably be North of 100,000 words of copy plus the screencast and a million other things. There is nothing that I have included because I wanted to fill space. Believe me, this is whittled data. I will be adding to it later. So when you see an exercise, that’s me telling you this is worth your time. I do it. I think you’ll get value from long answer to a short question. I just want to really emphasize that.

André (02:11:26):
Also worth mentioning that just because something’s converting with organic doesn’t mean it’s the best version of it can be. I mean, you can learn so much more doing the Value Proposition Canvas, and then put that into the offer that’s getting its organic traffic and it does way better.

Shawn (02:11:50):
And it might inform something downstream too. There’s kind of stuff like that. You might realize you nailed it on the front, but that you could add some stuff to your email sequence later that you hadn’t thought about a certain way. Sometimes it’s just a prompt. You’re like, “Ah, that’s just…” Whatever it is that makes you think about something. I don’t know. There’s so many ways it’s valuable. Just have fun with it. Next question. I think this is in reference to the previous question. So it’s hire people that help you get the work done that matters seem simple enough. Hired people that make your boat go faster and to find how your boat going faster, answer the question. What are you optimizing for?

Speaker 3 (02:12:25):
I’m not optimizing, like for me-

Shawn (02:12:27):
And be able to go back and use the traffic engines as an example, like the promotional email sequence and stuff for the traffic engine. I’ve mentioned this, I think I mentioned in the last email, but André and I were optimizing for revenue, at no point did we optimize for revenue. Which seems ludicrous. We trusted that the right people would show up. So if I had to highlight, if I use this as an example, like how would I hire people to get that work done that matters? I wouldn’t hire someone to do the things like, the telesales team. I wouldn’t do that because that’s not what we were optimizing for. So it’s such a critical question and it’s one that it’s so easy to think that we know, especially as agent, if you want to be a client services professional, if you are one already and you think you know the answer to this, I would challenge you to go spend six hours in a room alone with a pencil and some paper, and really uncover what matters to you.

Shawn (02:13:27):
And I’m guessing if my experience is any indicator that you’re going to find things that you didn’t expect. I just had this happen to me. I thought I had figured out and I sort of have an answer to a question about why do I do what matters to me? I’ve had a pretty clear answer to that for a long time. And last week I uncovered an entirely new layer of nuance about what I really… And I wouldn’t have uncovered if I hadn’t… I sort of listened to somebody else, describe it and I thought, “That’s really, that is what I’m doing.”

Shawn (02:14:05):
This process never ends and it changes depending on where you are in your career. If you’re just starting out optimizing for lifestyle and making sure that you get your eight and a half hours of sleep that you like to get, and you’re working five days a week, you’re done every day at 5: 00, good luck. I used to do a quick seminar with one of my mothers intro to entrepreneurship classes or intro to business classes. And people invariably would say, “Oh, I want to own my own business because I want to choose the hours I work.” And I’d say, “Yeah, I get to choose which 16 hours a day I work.” And at the time that was true. That’s not true now, but you’re depending on where you are in the process, you have to know the answer to this.

Shawn (02:14:56):
And sometimes if you’re early and you’re not really great at what you do, I mean, no judgment. I wasn’t, if that’s where you are in the process, then what you’re optimizing for is to need to make enough money, not to be worried about money is really what you’re optimizing for early, and to build your skills so that you don’t have to be that way forever. Those are the two things early on that you’re optimizing for. So when you make decisions, you’re making decisions around those two variables, and that might be who can I partner with so that the two of us can make 50% more money than either one of us, because that’ll get me to that next inflection point where I’m not worried about money. Excellent. Do that. I absolutely do that. I don’t want to harp too much on this, but this in later, don’t build businesses you don’t want. Don’t build a business that requires you to manage millions of people because you want to have the ability to stay and do work.

Shawn (02:16:03):
Because you want to have the ability to stay and do work, focused for 8 or 10 hours a day without interruption, right? Those two things don’t mix. Or if you hate being alone with your thoughts in a room, staring at a screen all day, go find a way to be a creative professional on another team, or go work with clients hands… go do something where you get that juice. It sounds so simplistic, but it is so important not to optimize for an outcome that you don’t want. Because you will get the outcomes that you optimize for, absolutely, without fail, you will get them. Just be aware of what it is that you’re optimizing for.

Shawn (02:16:40):
All right. Next question. Oops, okay. I’m retired now and interested in doing some part-time client work, where I’m planning on proposing that I do the work and only asking for pay upon results. Like you, I love to teach, so either consulting or doing the work are fine with me. It’s surprising to me how many business people in sales and marketing don’t have a clue about all of this. Listening to Dean Jackson’s podcast, More Cheese Less Whiskers, for instance, makes that very obvious. So I’m confident I can add lots of value. Do you have suggestions on the best way to find those prospects who are either wanting to get started with, or who are doing it and struggling, or maybe just doing affiliate marketing for myself. I’d love to hear from André about this affiliate marketing life, which I could not speak to. Last part, I’ve been watching, studying and involved around the edges of Google, Facebook ads and marketing for many years, but don’t have a lot of expertise to show, because I’ve been in another life. So let’s see. André, why don’t you talk about the affiliate marketing part? And I will use that as an excuse to ponder and get a better answer then I’m going to come up with an immediate term.

André (02:17:56):
My view on affiliate marketing now is different to what it was when I first started. Also, the entire game was different. So for the most part I’m going to generalize here. Pure affiliate marketing is not a business. You’re not building an asset. The guys that make the most money doing pure affiliate marketing are just buying cheap clicks and bit-slinging them through CPA networks and they couldn’t care less about the customer and they’re doing it at scale. So if that’s the business you want to be in, then that’s a full-time job. I know a few people that used to do that and still do that and it’s a nightmare, although it is good money. So yeah, I’d dissuade you from doing that. I think affiliate marketing is great if you already have a business, so you already have an audience, you sell your own stuff, and affiliate marketing is just a channel of that business. I think that’s my quick answer.

Shawn (02:19:13):
This is a really interesting set of questions, because you got some… there’s a lot to unpack, right? So you’ve retired, you’ve had some interest and experience in one area, and now you’ve kind of got some free time, and this body of knowledge and wisdom. I’m an incredible fan of wisdom. Wisdom from my perspective is, someone has seen a lot of whatever a subject matter is, and can tell you the few things that actually matter. I seek that out. I had a conversation the other day, yesterday actually, where someone they kind of told me two or three things, and I just gravitate to that and I love it.

Shawn (02:19:56):
So I guess the question I would ask is where is your… and this gets back to how I positioned it in one of the modules, which is, where do you have an advantage? Where the knowledge that you have right now is exceptionally… who is that knowledge exceptionally valuable to or outsize value to? That, to me is such a magic formula and there might not be 1000 people in the world that your specific area of expertise is incredibly valuable. And if that’s the reality, that’s the reality. I mean, just do that exercise. What’s the thing that you’re interested in that kind of lights you up that is valuable, it can be valuable to someone, because you mentioned that you do a pay for results, I guess backing up to the question, where can you get results that others can’t?

Shawn (02:21:02):
Where can you compete? So here’s a sort of a personal example from me, even though I work with clients in the financial trading space like AGORA, I don’t trade. I literally have access to all of these systems that produce incredible results, but I don’t trade, why is that? That’s stupid? Because my expertise there just… it’s not a place where I’m going to have an advantage. There are other people who, that’s what they do all day every day and they’re going to be better at it. So I think about that for this question, where can you… you may find that there is an audience where there’s, I think of these as a first 20% audience. And what I mean by that is, I think what you may be getting to, there are audiences that they just are not aware of the fundamentals of whatever, sales and marketing.

Shawn (02:22:03):
I mean, and often they don’t even know that it can be known, for whatever reason, they’ve been involved in a business their entire lives or professional entire lives or whatever it is. And they don’t know what they don’t know. And somebody can come in with a basic understanding of some fundamentals and radically transform their business and get paid for that. That’s a great business. That’s a great business for this sort of Chip Conley’s idea of the Modern Elder. It’s a great business for that. We can come in and if you’ve had the experience to have worked in a certain profession or whatever, then you, you come in with instant credibility. I’ve been down this road before, and I can show you the three or four things in my experience that really drives sales and marketing.

Shawn (02:22:48):
Here’s what they are. I’ll walk you through this process. I only get paid on results, hugely valuable, but to take that same first 20% skillset and then move up the value chain to a sophisticated audience that has sophisticated service providers, then you get crushed in that audience, in that market because you can’t compete. So I think what you just need to figure out is, what is your expertise? What can you be great at? Or have you been great at? And the answer that you need to answer this question? Where can you get results that they’re going to pay for? And then, who are they? That’s hard. I see that you’ve got a chat here, so I want to… affiliate marketing… okay, sorry. That’s Andréa’s chat. I thought, Bob, that you dropped something in here that clarify, okay, distracted. That’s how I would approach it. It sounds simplistic. But it’s obvious. But sometimes the power is in the obvious, which is to sit down and say… if there’s partly… this was the pizzeria direct response marketing exercise before there are a lot of people that you can create value for. So you need to find that second element, which is who is going to be able to pay you a king’s ransom for the value that you create. If you get these results, maybe it’s not a king’s ransom, a princess ransom. You don’t want to walk down to the local store and the person can use your knowledge and double his or her sales and make an extra 10 grand a year.

Shawn (02:24:27):
There’s no money in that for you. So you’ve got to find the person who can pay you happily a sum of money that is worth it to you. You’re going to go to, “I’d love to do the work for this amount of money.” And they’re happy to write that check. I like happy clients that write checks. Because everybody’s winning, right? This means it’s a way to arrange your thinking, to make sure that you’re adjacent to the people who value what you’re able to do best. And you may have intuited some of this too. You may find that the thing that stands out is that there are people out there who love to learn. Maybe you find that your ideal audience is the younger business owner, freelancer, whatever it is, or younger contributor who knows that there’s so much to learn and is a good student.

Shawn (02:25:17):
And because you love to teach, that’s a really good fit. Oh, excellent. That’s absolutely excellent. You just have to find those few criteria. So what I would do is I would go through the audience and offer masterclass part one, exercise, make your three lists and focus. It seems like you’ve done a lot of the work on list number one, but really focus on that core answer to the question, what results can you get and for whom, and then make sure that the who you’re getting the results for that you’re at the absolute, highest level of that food chain possible that you are at the… whether it’s by size or whatever it is so that you can get paid the most because you get the most results. That’s how I would approach this question. Very long answer. Next question. So to just clarify, you’re thinking about small business clients and be careful with small business clients, especially the super small ones, because it’s hard to get paid enough.

Shawn (02:26:22):
You can go miles deep with the small clients because there’s so much they need. So you can really be super focused, you get X amount of… I worked with a business coach for years, whose name was Bob actually incidentally, and I paid Bob $700 a month for two hours of his time. And we had… the beginning of the month, I would drive to his place. We’d sit down for an hour and a half. And we had a format and sort of worked through things. And then at the two week mark, the middle of the month, we would have a half an hour checking call, which was just me checking in on what I said I was going to do what I’d actually got done.

Shawn (02:27:02):
And then anything I needed from him to help me be prepared, to make sure that when I came to his office in two more weeks, that everything I had committed to would be complete. That was the deal over and over and over and over again and it was a good chunk of money, but it was worth me spending that money and it was excellent. So you might find that you can arrange your time this way, where you’re making decent money, not hard to do, if you can deliver the goods and I’m sure you can. So then jumping off the call, looks like we have one question left. Wow.

Shawn (02:27:41):
How do you convince a client that they can’t speak to everyone all at once? I have a client with a course on overcoming a loss of a loved one. Her messaging is currently trying to appeal to the loss of a child or spouse or lawsuit or divorce and recently she started saying any kind of loss like freedoms being stuck at home, et cetera. So this is, I’d mentioned this in the comments too, wow, this is a hard client, hard, hard client. And I want to be clear why I say that it’s a hard client because of the content. And if you read through the question, this is a… imagine you have a client who their clients have lost a loved one. That’s rough, right? Spouse, child, that in and of itself is just for me, that would be a big challenge.

Shawn (02:28:38):
So the first question I would ask myself and listen to the small voice that gives you this answer. Can you really provide value for this client? Because what you’re trying to do here, when you even use the word in the beginning, convince the client, convincing anyone is hard, right? I think it’s Seth Goden said, “If you want to open a nudist academy or a nudist colony, first thing you do is sell the nudists, not try to convince people to become nudists.” Right? So as service providers, the first clients we want to go find are the clients who have already decided that they want what we offer the way we offer it. That’s the name of the game and client services. So you are faced with a client who is in an exceptionally difficult market, is overall and she’s not listening to you because you’re having to convince her of something.

Shawn (02:29:39):
Those to me… and there might be a million reasons why you’ve decided to work with this client beyond just a standard client relationship. You may feel compelled to work with this client for some other reason. So I will assume for the moment in this answer that you have made the decision to work with this client in that case… so you’ve made the decision to work with this client and you need to convince her of a marketing truth. I think you need to be very straightforward and hear her position and her position is basically one of fear. What she is saying to you, based on what you’ve described here is, “I am so concerned that if I pick any one of these things, I’m not going to be successful, that I need to pick all the things to increase my chance of success.”

Shawn (02:30:35):
So what you need to acknowledge is that’s her truth and that’s her fear. But what she really wants is the absence of that fear, which is to feel like anything that she chooses will be successful. That’s really what you want to focus the attention. So knowing that, that’s her core goal, her core desire is to be successful. That’s where you step in as the expert and say, “I understand what you’re hoping to accomplish by making this offer widely available. However, unfortunately, the larger the audience we speak to the less likely we will be to convert that audience to customers.

Shawn (02:31:18):
So even though it seems like that might be a better choice, in fact, that’s going to make it less likely to get the result that we really want, which is to begin signing up customers. The way to get the result that we really want is to focus on one segment of the market and speak to their felt needs in a way that no one has ever spoken them to before. Who on this list, can you speak to, from experience, expert, whatever it is, who can you speak to in a way that they’re going to hear it?

Shawn (02:31:52):
Where is the highest likelihood of success?” And then once you’ve asked that question, shut your mouth and listen. And if she says, “Well, I don’t know, anybody, anyone of them.” Shut your mouth and listen, you’ve asked the question, wait until she answers the question and it may be uncomfortable for her. It may be wildly uncomfortable for you, but the position you need to stake out here is that you know she wants you to accomplish something and you know as the professional, the best way to accomplish it is to look at this broad list of options, choose one where she can be the best and have the greatest chance of success and focus on that at the expense of everything else before looking elsewhere or try to layer things on. And the pushback you’re going to get is, “Well, that doesn’t make sense because if I can help all these people, why shouldn’t I try to appeal to all these people?”

Shawn (02:32:58):
And the answer to that, there are lots of answers, but one of the answers that you can use, sort of use as a way to move her this direction, is to say that the moment that we start to have to pay for attention, then we need to focus to have to increase our likelihood of success. And we can’t focus across all of these audiences. We need to focus within one. So of these audiences, which do you think is most likely to become a customer in the shortest amount of time, right? That will get her there. I just want to read out loud the comment that you made here. So you said, “Thank you. I think it’s more based on ignorance than fear. She has a very successful clinical practice, and this is a passion project to reach more people. She lost a child. and that would be the best way for her to serve…” I think… that’s a lot of nuance.

Shawn (02:33:52):
So this is just hard, right? So the question I would ask, and it seems like the answer is in what you just said, she lost the child, she’s going to resonate with people who are suffering that same thing. Focus her attention there, but knowing that this is a passion project, knowing you have to speak to her heart, this is not about CPA. This is not about any of this. This is speaking to the heart. This is saying I understand that your experience is incredibly valuable to anyone who’s dealing with loss. However, your story, your experience is going to be most meaningful for somebody who’s lost a child and is experiencing that unbelievable grief.

Shawn (02:34:41):
That’s where she can make the biggest impact and focus… speak to the heart and move in that direction for a variety of reasons and the most important reason is everything I just said is incredibly true. I mean, I can’t imagine what that experience must be like, I can’t even begin to imagine, but she can. And so for the person out there, who’s trying to understand what the loss of a child must be like, she is in a position, very unique position to serve that person in a way that others can’t. And to me, that’s a calling, that’s a gift. So I would speak more to that language. And this is a good segue into sort of the last point, I’ll leave you with, if there are no other questions, which is our clients are as multi-dimensional as the value proposition canvas suggests, right?

Shawn (02:35:37):
I tend to be, to a fault, hyper rational, I’ve been called. Hyper focused on client outcomes, as I understand them in financial terms, because that is often what I’m hired to do. And that’s probably I’m hired to do that because that’s what I tend to think anyway, pre cursive there. But that doesn’t mean that doesn’t have to be how we approach things. We don’t have to find clients and only speak to the transaction, only speak to CPA and AOV, right? The world’s a wonderful multifaceted place. You may find that you like working with a certain type of client or you don’t like working with a certain type of client and that the real driver for you, maybe the experience of working with a client, you may come alive when you have a client who listens to you teach, and you may shrink when you have a client who glazes over when you’re trying to show them something, right?

Shawn (02:36:42):
That’s good to know. It’s also good to pay attention in meetings with a client in their body language. What is the relationship between the stakeholders in the room? I mentioned an example in the client I always wanted for, I think it was 15 or 16 years, and I got them they were the worst clients I ever had. I should’ve known because the body language of everybody around the table when the owner spoke was discomfort, fear, concern, everyone was looking to his reaction. I should’ve picked up on that. I should have thought to myself, why is everybody around this table not like this guy. And they spent a lot of time with them, right? Or this is a very common one that I find, is that… and I don’t mean to do this and I often do it and I feel very bad about this.

Shawn (02:37:31):
That you may find that your presence as an expert, intimidates people on a team, especially if the people that are on the team were doing the thing in some capacity that you’ve been hired to do and to come in… I’m thinking of very specific example right now that Lauren’s familiar with too, where to come into something… and I made a mistake in this example where I didn’t take the time to think, okay, there are three people on this team, what are everybody’s needs here? And how does me showing up, me written largely us, how does… but I’m thinking for myself in this, how does me showing up to the party, what did that say to people on the team about their performance? What’s their state of mind right now relative to me, irrespective of the results.

Shawn (02:38:21):
In fact, if we get amazing results, that’s going to make at least one person feel even worse, right? I’ve got to think about that. So client stuff is so multifaceted. Watch the person you’re talking to, especially if you’re in an environment where you’re dealing with a director of marketing or a marketing coordinator, and you’re in a meeting where the boss, whoever their boss is, pay attention to the things that they seem uncomfortable with. If the boss asks a question about when the such and such thing is going to be finished and you see the person looks nervous, recognize that, right? Pay attention to what your clients, beyond the numbers, what matters to them and include that. People hire people that, and they keep people around that they like if you can’t perform, you don’t get the work done you’re not going to last very long.

Shawn (02:39:19):
Although I’ve seen surprisingly long if they’re likable people. But if you’re a jerk, even if you get really good results, you tend not to stay long either. So there is a force multiplier of being a caring, dedicated, kind, decent human being who is paying attention to… and if you can think about it in terms, if you want to, the value proposition canvas, where coming to meetings with clients over the long term, not just a meeting or ask. And you can use the Dan Sullivan question. There’s something like, if we were looking on this relationship, 18 months down the road from now, what would have had to happen for it to be wildly successful and then shut up and listen, right?

Shawn (02:40:06):
And you’ll hear that… I’ve asked that question a few times and I ask it in different ways. I love to ask the question, how would you define wildly successful? Or if we were having this conversation next year and this relationship had created results that were wildly successful, what would those look like? And not successful, success [inaudible 00:24:26], wildly successful. Because then what often people will say, it was like, “Oh, I know it couldn’t ever happen…” you just gave him permission, you said wildly, “I know it couldn’t ever happen, but it would be amazing if.” And what they just described might be something you absolutely can do, or it can become your own sort of private thing that you’ve talked about that you have your own private language where you report in on something, but you’re like, “Okay, we’re not at that wildly successful levels you described whatever. But I think we’re a step closer.” You’re oriented. Now you’ve got this bond. Those are the things that sounds so simple. So easy overlooked. It’s easy to think it’s transactional, but it’s not.

Shawn (02:41:09):
Come in and have those conversations. Think about that framework. I keep reorienting back to the value proposition canvas. Ask questions like tell me three things that have been absolutely miserable when you’ve been working in Google Analytics or whatever it is, whatever you’re doing what? What are three things that drive you crazy about working with a service provider? Don’t worry I won’t be offended, we haven’t even started working together yet. I just don’t want to do those things, right? And oftentimes just asking the question, builds reports. It was like, no one’s ever asked me that question before.

Shawn (02:41:41):
Well what, bothers you? Don’t say, why did you fire your last agency? What did they do wrong? Don’t ask that. Just tell me three things that really bother you about working with an agency or with a creative professional or with whatever, and just listen. Tell me three things that you wish would be different. If you could wave a magic wand, what three things would be different. In class will tell you things like, “Oh you know what would be great. If I could just once a week, someone would just send me an email and tell me what happened just once a week.” Excellent, I’ll make sure you get that once a week. There’s so much opportunity and it gets back to that framework. Understanding that they have functional needs, for which you were told you were hired, they have emotional and social needs, which were probably more of the reason that you were hired and that they have pains that they hope you’re not going to bring that they’ve dealt with a lot in the past.

Shawn (02:42:37):
And they hope you’re not doing it too, but they kind of expect that you are, and they have in the back of their mind things that they wish they would get this time, that they didn’t get last time or that they hope they get. And if you can put some words to all of those in just a little… I mean, you can be 10 times better than a competitor by paying 5% more attention. And that’s a really good trade. All right. That is all the questions. No one has dropped anymore in, if there are no more questions, André, anything to throw out there as we wrap up in the end here. Now you want to [crosstalk 02:43:13] clients, don’t you?

André (02:43:14):
Yeah. I’ll just add for Francis. So the last question is to perhaps buy them a copy of This is Marketing by Seth Godin as a gift and say for me to be able to serve you, I need you to read this. And ultimately you need them to or you want them to change after they’ve read that. So if they are unwilling to make that change, after reading This is Marketing that’s going to be a powerful signal for you that this is probably a client that you can’t help. But hopefully if they read that book, because that book’s all about that, they would be completely changed and then you’re good to go and then you can help them.

Shawn (02:44:05):
That’s a good insight too that I… pay attention to your client’s bookshelves, or if they don’t have any, a client once told me no joke. I suggested reading a book and the client looked me in the eye and said, “I don’t read books.” And I love the pregnant pause of the, I wonder what he was thinking like, “Well, I read that magazine or whatever.” I love to go and to see what do people have on their bookshelf? What books have they read? What are they interested in? Do they read? Do they have a kindle? A little quietness and again, rapport stuff, but just soak it all in. One last thing before we wrap up, if you have things you would like to see in the client services modules for the traffic engine, send me an email.

Shawn (02:44:59):
I can’t promise that everything will go in there, but ultimately this course is for all of you, right? This is a… I do write selfishly because I like to understand, but this is stuff I pretty much understand. Or if I haven’t figured it out yet, I’m not going to figure it out because I’ve done it for long enough. So the traffic engine really is supposed to be for each of you and the more I know about what really matters to each of you, the more I can make sure that I’m hitting that need. So you don’t have to do it today next week or so, if there’s something that you think to yourself and I’ll just use the question I used before, what would be included in the client services part of the traffic engine that would make you feel like you could be wildly successful because of it.

Shawn (02:45:48):
Put that in an email, shoot it off to me. And I will do my absolute best either to include it in the material, if it’s something that’s just so specific to you, I might just do a quick audio and attach it, who knows, but I do want to make sure that all of you are getting as much value as possible. And I do better when I hear your questions and I can respond to those and I do sort of imagine the questions on my own. Excellent. Thank you, André as always-

André (02:46:14):
All right. It’s a wrap.

Shawn (02:46:15):
See you guys later. All right. Bye.

André (02:46:16):
Thank you everyone.

NEXT: Client-Services Module 3: Getting Results for Clients