Client Services Q&A Call #2, Module 3

Questions & Answers

1. Question: How do you break up gracefully with a client where things just aren’t working?

Question & Answer 1 (0:44-9:42)

2. Question from Justin: One question I wish I had submitted for the previous Q and A, last Thursday, has to do with Facebook retargeting ads. What do you recommend? Do you have a framework for them? Do you just reuse the initial ad? Do you advance the narrative and talk to people as if they know who you are? What does a successful Facebook retargeting ad look like in a sphere of influence world?

How does it support the pulling in of committed people? And technically, how can I take the tracking data out of Google analytics and use it to create an audience for Facebook ad? What metrics should I use to measure success? Any guidance would be most appreciated.

Question (16:30-17:04) | Answer (17:20-45:25)

3. Question from Francis: “What have you found to be the best way to manage multiple projects, specifically knowing which ones to work on when and what about clients who want timelines moved up?”

Question (46:02-46:11) | Answer (46:17-1:07:44)

4. Question from Francis (follow up): “Was it worth putting all those hours in to build your business or would you do it differently?”

Question (1:07:49-1:07:53) | Answer (1:08:01-1:11:38)

5. Question from Kyle: So, I can use some insight on this idea. I’m building a series of information products targeted to product marketing managers. It’s marketing information. For this discussion, let’s assume the product is actionable info around topics like messaging, positioning, et cetera. Target audience are product marketing managers. That’s a role inside of big corporations, usually in tech, that are industry experts about a niche industry that the big company is in. They have input into all of the marketing of that product line. They work with the engineering side to build products, are coveted roles inside of companies that use the product marketing titles.

Kyle’s background was as a pro product marketing manager of seven software product lines and the flagship product running on over three billion devices around the world. The info products you will build will be centered on the ideas topics that he’s used, learned, et cetera. The dilemma in question, because these are big companies, I’m dealing with multiple layers of decision makers. Do you have any suggestions on how to approach this or ideas where I can turn this idea of targeting a big company to a smaller company, so I can deal with executive management directly?

Question (01:11: 54-1:13:02) | Answer (1:13:11-1:16:00)

6. Question from Kyle (follow up): My first question is how should I approach building an audience? So, if you go to step zero, where you define what your audience is going to be, that you’re ultimately going to serve, and we have the decision maker … I agree 100% with what you said about the decision maker does not necessarily mean executive management.

That’s sort of relative, depending on the business unit and division divisions. I guess my question is, do I target those people as an audience or should I go lower down in the food chain to build a group, which is ultimately going to be bigger just from pure statistics? Build a group of people who are going to benefit from that, and then slowly try to pick off or peel off the executive decision makers to close a deal?

Question & Answer (01:16:30 – 1:31:18)

7. Question from Francis: “What are your top three avoidable mistakes you’ve made?”

Question (01:33:26 – 1:33:31) | Answer (1:33:47-1:41:12)

8. Question from Francis: What are three mistakes about getting clients?

Question & Answers (01:41:13 –1:49:43)

10. Question from Gareth: We have a client in the U.S. who we’ve started to partner with. They have a core business on leadership management and want to offer marketing services along with agile training and coaching. We’ll be doing the marketing services and they’ve already been referring their clients to us, including one where we added at least $5,000 to the value through your three tier concept. Their clients are perfect clients with most being eight figures or more in revenues. They have a portfolio of these three separate companies. We’ve been offered 50% of the marketing company and the lion’s share of the revenue it generates.

We’ll get a proportion of revenue from the other two companies. Just before COVID we were going to receive 3.3% of revenue from the original company and given they do around a million dollars and aren’t scratching the surface, it would be pretty lucrative for all concerned. On the surface, it’s all excellent. We trust them and they trust us.

What I’d love is an insight into it, and how to fairly get a level of revenue from the other two companies in the portfolio and perhaps what level it should be at? Or if you’re up for a challenge, how can we potentially get an equity share in all three? We’ve transformed their marketing from referral only and single transactions in a simple repeatable system, based on relationships and deepening engagement.

Going through COVID, we help with implementation for a reasonable monthly flat rate. And we’ve definitely over-delivered, including helping them retain some staff, so there’s a lot of goodwill in the bank. I’d like to make the most of it. So my question is, do you have any suggestions on how to ask for an equity share in the other two companies? Or have you seen a performance-based model that works well we could adopt?

Question (01:50:36- 01:52:38) | Answer (1:52:47-2:02:24)

11. Question from Francis: How do you pick a business partner?

Question & Answers (2:02:42 –2:13:52)

12. Question from Gareth: I’ve created a 900 word advertisement on Facebook and all the metrics are great when analyzed through Lorin’s process. Only thing that’s concerning is the lack of signups. I’ve generated 85 visitors and zero signups. I’ve never had that in my life. I’ve previewed the ads, clicked the link and it works so I don’t believe there’s a technical reason.

I’ve created a split test page with a very simple landing page that repeats the final paragraphs call to action, that there are no surprise and still no sign ups. In Lorin’s write up, he says, that something people could be clicking through from the learn more button without clicking to read more and fully pre-qualifying, but I’m at a loss to understand how I can send 85 plus people and not get a sign up. Any idea what I can be doing so drastically wrong?

Question & Answers (2:14:53- 2:38:58)

Transcript

Shawn (00:00:00):
All right. So welcome everybody. Today is the second, The Traffic Engine client services call. Got three really long, detailed questions submitted in advance. Thanks everybody for doing that. We’ll work through those. Kyle, I see that you’re here on the call, so we’ll probably just unmute you at some point and have you… You can just walk through yours, do a hot seat format and I see… Oh good, Francis, thank you for throwing in a question. Usually I answer the questions that are submitted in advance. We have plenty of time for questions today, but you just asked a great question, Francis. That’s exactly the question that I want to take a swing at early to get things warmed up. So Francis’ question is this. How do you break up gracefully with a client where things just aren’t working?

Shawn (00:00:48):
I’ve done this a lot, just did this recently with a client I’ve had for 14 years. I’ve thought about this a lot. I have probably fired, I don’t know, 10 to 15, maybe 15… Probably 10 to 15 clients -ish over the years, several recently, for a variety of reasons, but… Doing it gracefully, you’ve said the thing that’s most important. Firing a client because you’re… And even if they deserve it, but firing a client because you’re pissed off, even if you’re justified in being in it, you just leave things hanging, that’s never cool. It can bite you later. So the way I’ve done it, I have a statement of work that I use with clients for the most part, and it says in there that they can effectively end the relationship anytime and I can end the relationship anytime with 30 days notice. And that’s my way. I don’t know that I’ve ever just used 30 days. What I generally do is I have a conversation, I’m very clear. Like here’s what’s not working. And occasionally, also to be fully transparent, I have decided to fire clients in the past and then have had it work out.

Shawn (00:02:13):
I had a client, who I still have, that I’ve had for I think 12 years. And there was a period of time where it was just mind numbing, it was a difference in two people’s working style between the owner of the company and me. He was driving me crazy. I knew at some point I must be driving him as crazy. And so the way I initiated that is I was just honest, and that’s where you have to start, is 100% transparent, radical candor, not emotional, no blame. It’s not their fault, it’s also not your fault, but it’s just not working out. The relation… And be clear about what specifically isn’t working out. You do not have to do a chapter from Warren Peace. Write them an email about you did these 20 things. It’s not about blame unless it’s something particularly egregious, they’ve just done something awful. Then just say, listen, this is outside my comfort zone because this has happened. I’m not able to work with you any longer, and here’s how. And this is really the next key thing. Here is how I propose, we separate amicably. I don’t want to leave you in a bad position. And at the same time, I can no longer continue to work with you effectively. So let’s look at the next 30 to 45 days and transition you to working with somebody else.

Shawn (00:03:33):
It doesn’t mean it’s your responsibility to find them somebody else. You don’t have to do that. And it depends too, like is this a one off person? If the client’s one person. Is it a company? Are there other people involved? Are there any ways to salvage the relationship? There are lots of questions to think about. I think maybe it’s worth sharing a couple of examples. So the one that ended up being okay, that sort of righted itself. This was one of those situations where, people say alcohol doesn’t solve any problems would solve a client relationship problem, because the person who owned the business that I was working with, I asked him, I said, let’s just go out to dinner. We’ll have a nice meal together, and we’ll figure out how we’re going to make this transition work in a way that’s fair to everybody. I don’t want you to feel like I’m leaving you hanging. I’ll help you find somebody new. Let’s just have that conversation. There’s two adults looking at each other and recognizing that we all want what’s best in this situation. And when I walked into the restaurant to wait for him to show up, I just happened to glance over and noticed one of the signs was that the drink special was a pair of Martini. So several pair martinis later. I became the greatest of friends and we continued to work together. We’ve had tons of ups and downs that we’ve worked through.

Shawn (00:05:05):
And in that particular example, it’s comical to me because it just sounds so idiotic. But what came out of that conversation with the reduction of inhibition from alcohol was that we just had a trust issue, and it was a misalignment of values. It really bothered me that he didn’t fully trust me because I had his best interest at heart. And he didn’t distrust me. But his question suggested to me that he wasn’t valuing my opinion as deeply as he should. And that really bothered me. And once I’ve had a couple of drinks, I was able to say to him, “Hey, it really pisses me off that I have your best interest at heart. I’m working in those interests all the time. Here’s how I’m thinking about things. Here’s how I make decisions. And then when you ask a million questions, it pisses me off because it suggests that you’re not trusting both me and my expertise.” And out of that conversation, I think he realized that that was not intentional. That was not what he was trying to communicate. So we got to a level of understanding.

Shawn (00:06:06):
So it is possible, and it’s something to think about when you think about breaking up gracefully. The first question is, do you need to break up? And in the absence of having a few pair of martinis, you may just not be able to get there, or you might want to have a candid conversation and say, listen, here’s what’s going on, and this is why it bothers me, or this is what’s going on, and here’s where it bumps up against my values. Whatever it is. Here’s the situation, and then get that feedback from the client. And if the client says, hey, that’s just the way things are. Okay, that’s everything. You do you, I’ll do me. Everybody’s happy. But when you’ve decided that it’s time to part ways, it’s a very challenging time. I’ve had one experience where a client, we parted ways, I agreed to continue working with them for a period of time. I did. This was early on. I worked way, way, way too much over. I was supposed to be on vacation over Christmas. I did a ton of work for them. And in that the way they said thank you to me later, they never paid their final invoice and they did it deliberately, and basically told me that because their business attorney was the same as mine, it was the same person and that he would not represent me because he had been a client with them longer. And they very deliberately screwed me out of some money. That was awful. And that was 18 years ago, 19 years ago, it still bothers me. So you want to make sure you don’t put yourself in a position where later you’re going to have something that kind of sticks in your mind as being bothersome.

Shawn (00:07:46):
So I don’t know how you get paid by this client if they pay, if it’s like a monthly fee or something. And if they pay you in advance versus retroactively, but make sure that you cover that base and you don’t put yourself in a position where they’re going to get 30 or 45 days of work from you and then not pay. It happens. And I don’t know anything about this client, so I don’t know if that’s something they would do, but that does happen. Don’t put yourself in a position to do that. At the same time, don’t be that person who’s like, I’m not doing another thing until you’ve paid me. Because they have this concern as well. Like, are they going to pay you and you’re just going to disappear. So much of it comes down to this conversation where two adults need to look across the table from each other or across the computer screen, whatever it is and say, here’s what’s not working, and here’s why I think we’re not going to be able to move forward working together. However, there’s no ill will. I still want you to be successful. I think you’ll be more successful working with somebody else. So here’s how I can assist in that transition. And here are my expectations of what will happen during that transition.

Shawn (00:08:58):
And I think it’s perfectly okay to recognize, just to bring everything out on the open, excuse me. And say things like, one of the concerns that you’ll have is that you will pay me and I won’t do any work. And one of the concerns that I have is that I will do work and I won’t get paid in this final invoice. So let’s recognize that and let’s work together to figure out how best to do that. And then commit. Say, listen, I want to be very clear. There’s no ill will here. So I intend to continue working with you until we make this transition of 30 days or whatever it is. And that’s not something you have to be concerned about. Excuse me. So long answer to a pretty short question. But this is hard. And it’s funny too. I was at a conference years ago with a person who was a referral partner and it was just, it ended up being the most disastrous relationship imaginable. But this person had this underlying belief that somehow, because I was in a particular type of business and she needed that particular type of work that I was somehow obligated to work with her. That because by the very nature of being in this business that I… It was almost like in her mind, I couldn’t say no, because that was the business that I was in.

Shawn (00:10:24):
And it was such a strange conversation to have with someone to say, one of the reasons I am in business for myself is that so that I can always say no, if I want to, I don’t have to work with everybody. I don’t have to work with anybody. It’s a choice. And in some people’s minds, including many clients’ minds, it’s not a choice. You’re a service provider. They need that service and they pay you. And I’ve had people say this to me, that as long as I write the check, then sort of you’re going to do the work. And that’s one of the most offensive things anybody can say to me, professionally. It just suggests that somehow I do this thing, it’s a commodity and it’s like a vending machine. You put the quarters in, you get the output out. So much of this comes down to your clients’ demeanor. But when you know it’s time to go, being gracious, being aware that they have a lot of concerns to externalizing those, telling, recognizing them out loud to the client and saying, listen, I know that you probably have three or four things that are really concerning you about this. What’s going to happen if this? Let’s talk about those, and let me know what your concerns are so that I can speak to those, or I can help with those.

Shawn (00:11:43):
And there’s something about that radical candor, about that honesty and that transparency that I think works very well. And sometimes another, I guess, a final thought to share is we, as a species, have a remarkable ability to rewrite history and rewrite a narrative, especially if it feels like somebody is at fault. So I have a client currently, longterm client currently, who, because of a variety of factors that came together, I was no longer able to work with them successfully. That’s sort of the summary version of it. And I communicated that to the owner. The owner was very upset, really with the team, less so with me. I’ve worked with him forever. And this, the latest team is just the newest iteration, but the owner was initially very upset with the team and really wanted me to stay as long as possible and to kind of figure this out. And then at some point, the team, they had interviewed some other vendors. I was part of that process. I helped them know what to put in the RFP. I was as helpful as I possibly could be. But when I saw the agency they were about to choose, there were some things in their contract that were not okay, and nobody had picked up on them. And I think there were some reasons for that. I think there were some ulterior motives happening. It was part of the original problem that created everything. But I raised that and I was asked to look at the RFP, sorry, to look at the proposal. And I did.

Shawn (00:13:22):
And when I did, I saw some things that were probably extremely problematic. So I raised those issues with the owner of the company. And then the narrative became that somehow this was kind of, I had put them in this position. It was my fault because I had sort of decided to quit. I had decided to leave them in this bad position. And there was some anger and resentment directed at me, which is not how the situation unfolded, but that happens a lot. And you need to be prepared for that psychologically, you need to just be prepared that you’re going to do the best possible things that you can with the best interest of you and the client in mind.

Shawn (00:14:05):
There’s a very high likelihood that no matter how well you handle the situation, the client who you are firing is going to say things about you that are not true, that are not particularly nice. It’s unfortunate, but it happens a lot. Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe you will be the exception. But the only thing, I’ve been a practicing stoic for a long time. If you boil stoicism down to its fundamentals, it’s really comes down to this idea that you focus your energy and attention on the things over which you have control and ignore everything else. And one of the things over which you have no control is what another human being chooses to believe or how they choose to act. So your power in this situation, 100% of your power is how you handle your part of it. What you say, what you do, how you act, how you react or choose not to react. That’s where all of your power is. You’re not going to be able to change the client. You’re not going to be able to change the story that they tell themselves later. You’re not going to be able to change the things that they say to other people later, and don’t get attached to it because that’s so outside of your control. So focus on what you can control, which is how do you show up. How do you interact with a client as gracefully as possible to let them know what’s not working, why it’s problematic enough that the relationship needs to end. How you will work with them and for how long. What your expectations are about what that looks like, what you think their expectations are and how you want to address those.

Shawn (00:15:40):
And after that, let it go. Whatever happens, happens and move on. And don’t be too anxious to bail unless they’re a real jerk. Be kind, which I think you’ve already done. Okay. Let’s call that one. And feel free, we have a small group today. So Francis, feel free. If you want to follow up on that at all, drop in the chat, drop it another question. However you want to do it. All right. Let’s go.

Shawn (00:16:10):
We’ve got some long questions here. Kyle, I might make you wait till last, just because I’m just joking. We’ll do yours in a second. We’ll do yours Kyle is like a hot seat. All right. I’m going to answer a question from Justin. Lauren, you’re going to be involved in this one too. So here’s the question. I’ll just read what Justin sent, start to finish. One question I wish I had submitted for the previous Q and A, last Thursday, has to do with Facebook retargeting ads. What do you recommend? Do you have a framework for them? Do you just reuse the initial ad? Do you advance the narrative and talk to people as if they know who you are? What does a successful Facebook retargeting ad look like in a sphere of influence world? How does it support the pulling in of committed people? And technically, how can I take the tracking data out of Google analytics and use it to create an audience for Facebook ad? What metrics should I use to measure success? Any guidance would be most appreciated.

Shawn (00:17:04):
So I think I’ll run through this. Lauren, we’ll just jam on this for a little bit, this is a big question. And these are broad questions, right? How do you do Facebook retargeting? That’s kind of, especially in a sphere of influence environment. That’s really broadly speaking, like the question is here. So there are a couple of nuances with Facebook, and this is the reason that module seven part two has been kicking my ass like nothing ever before, because I had this realization about Facebook retargeting versus GDN, Google retargeting that was just… It hit me in such a way that was so profound that I’ve just been wrestling with this broader implications. So here’s the interesting thing about Facebook retargeting. When you advertise on Facebook, whether or not you are retargeting or you’re reaching cold traffic who has had no interaction with you, it doesn’t matter. All of the advertising happens in the same context. It’s within the feed of Facebook. That’s entirely different than the Google display network, because all of that advertising happens in the context of other websites, which have a dramatic impact on it. So if you, let’s just say for the sake of argument, you have a three page, multi page presale site that leads to an opt-in that leads to a seven part soap opera sequence for emails that all is leading to this point of a, well say a membership program. And the GDN… So if somebody comes to, let’s just say they come to the site and we have some qualitative filters on page one. So they read from page one to page two, but they don’t… Or actually let’s just say they read page one, page two, page three, but they don’t opt-in. That’s a very typical inflection point for retargeting. They’ve shown that they’re interested. They consumed content, but they haven’t taken the next step in the journey. That is a perfect, perfect example of when you would use retargeting, both on Facebook and on the Google Display Network.

Shawn (00:19:12):
The weirdness here, the question that you didn’t ask, but I’m just sort of introducing in this conversation anyway because it’s fun, is what happens next for retargeting on Facebook happens within the same context of the first ad that they saw. Where you advertise on Facebook, it’s always the same place. It’s always in the Facebook interface. The Google display ads that follow, those will show up in the New York Times and Fox News and CNN and The Weather Channel, those ads will follow them across a very different context. So I just mentioned that as sort of a prelude to what’s coming with module seven, part two that I think is a fascinating, it really changes everything.

Shawn (00:19:53):
But getting back to the question about Facebook retargeting, there isn’t a framework. I like frameworks. There isn’t a template, various kind of a framework. And the framework is really described in module seven. So I would suggest going back and rereading that because it is there. I clearly need to make it more visible for you to chew on. But the framework really is what is the next inflection point? What are the big inflection points here? So if you look at a, say a typical ad that goes to an offer or we’ll do three versions, ad to opt-in to offer, that’s very typical. So you see an ad. It’s like, hey, there’s this great thing. And it’s a video, whatever it is, there’s an ad that introduces somebody to something, they go and… But they can’t get to something until they give their email address. It’s gated. Then the something is on the other side. And then they watch say VSL or a webinar. And then it says, oh, by the way, there’s this thing you can buy. That’s very typical, right?

Shawn (00:20:54):
So what are the inflection points there? Well, there’s a binary relationship after the opt-in, oh, I’m sorry, after the ad, someone clicks on an ad and it’s binary, they opt-in or they don’t, simple. They can’t consume any more content unless they’ve opted in. So that’s the first inflection point. How many people saw that second page but didn’t opt-in. The mistake most people make is they retarget all of them, but people vote where their behavior. So there’s a reason most people didn’t opt-in. But let’s just say for the sake of argument, a typical opt-in rate around 20%. For every 100 people who click on an ad, who see the landing page, 20 of them will opt-in. That means 80 didn’t. And a lot of people think, well, that’s the opportunity, 80 people didn’t, right. But 80 people voted with their behavior and said, I’m not interested. Of those 80, some of them disappeared immediately. They clicked on the ad by mistake. So don’t retarget them. Use a qualitative filter. Like maybe they need to stay longer than 15 seconds or something. It gets rid of the bot traffic. It gets rid of the junk traffic. Maybe they’re 50 people who didn’t opt-in.

Shawn (00:22:02):
Well, that inflection point is the first opportunity for you to ask some questions. Why would somebody click on my ad, stay on this page long enough that it’s clear they’re a human being with some interests. They’re reading some things, 15 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever it is, but not take the next action. There’s no template for that. You have to figure that out on your own. You have to look at that exact journey. And what happens a lot is there was something in the ad that was curious enough that somebody needed to get it answered on the next page. And that’s why curiosity is awful in general, for Facebook advertising. I’m going to be cautious about saying this, but it creates way too many problems. Because if you introduce something that’s intellectually interesting, this is the typical approach to direct response advertising, where you’re like, you kind of open this loop in the ad that gets closed either on the landing page or in the opt-in. Once somebody knows what the answer to the thing is that you introduced to them, they’re gone. That’s all they want to know. They just want the answer. We don’t like open loops as a species. I know a guy that’s written about this, André something, anyway.

Shawn (00:23:17):
So when you look at it from a distance, right, and look at your house. So what is my ad talking about? My initial ad? Why would somebody click on that and then on this page not proceed? That’s the whole thing in the first part of retargeting. Now, I’m using a very basic example of ad to opt-in to whatever magical thing comes next. Let’s look at your specific example. Ad to multi page presale site. So the way I think of the sphere of influence. So broadly speaking, I think it’s a meta idea. I think André did something that borders on magic. Is that he taught the micro, like do this thing, but really taught the macro, which is there’s a way to look at the entire world of digital marketing through a different lens. And that to me is as close to magic I’ve seen anybody do, period. So the magic and sphere of influence from my perspective is that it’s far less about the multi page pre-sell site. It’s about the narrative arc that begins with the point of first contact, that ad, and then closes with the purchase, and to be clear where we’re staying with the customers after purchase. But that initial narrative arc is ad through multi page presale site through emails afterwards to offer.

Shawn (00:24:55):
And let’s just assume for the sake of argument that we’ll keep it simple. There is an ad, there is a three page multi page presale site. On page three, you can opt-in. When you opt-in, you get five emails, and those five emails are leading to a membership offer. Same thing we talked about before, that’s the entirety of the process. Now, once we have identified that, now we know how to evaluate a few things, where are the opportunities for retargeting? And then how do we decide how to retarget and what to say and what might be necessary? So the first thing we look at is that the ad… And if we look at it in a reductionist way, we say, well, the ad’s responsibilities to get people to the first page, and then the first page to the second, the second to the third, the third to the opt-in, and then each email is to get you to buy. That’s a very reductionist way, a linear way of looking at the world. I think everything from start to finish is to get somebody to buy. It’s a systems view. It’s an emergent view that all of the parts together create an effect that no one of those parts individually does on its own or could do on its own. The parts are necessary, but they’re not sufficient. All of them together have to be sufficient to produce the overall effect, which is the customer at the end.

Shawn (00:26:12):
So we look at the ad and what’s for the sake of argument say that for every 100 people who click on the ad, 50 of them don’t see page two of the multi page presale site. What does that tell us? On its own, it doesn’t tell us a lot. It may say there’s some disconnect between the messaging and the ad. In page one, it may say there’s some disconnect. There isn’t enough poll from page one to page two, there are lots of things it could say. It could also very well say that a lot of people who are clicking on Facebook ads are on mobile, and they’re in the checkout lane of the grocery store and they’ve clicked on the ad and they’ve read page one, and by the time they get to the end of page one, they haven’t gone any farther because it’s time to check out. It could say lots of things. We don’t really know what it’s saying, but we need to start inferring what we think might be going on.

Shawn (00:27:09):
So in that case, I would look… That’s really the first inflection point in a multi page presale site. What is the rate at which people go from page one to page two? I think about this more broadly. What is the rate at which people who click on the ad see page two? That to me is, that’s the magic number. So if I send 100 people from an ad to page one, and only 10 of them see page two, that’s a problem. That it costs me 10 times as much to get people to see page two. There’s a mismatch there. I wouldn’t use retargeting in that case to try to get more people to page two, I would try to figure out what the data’s telling me. Why are people clicking on this ad, but not going past page two? Right? So that’s part of the troubleshooting. That’s part of the process. Where do we know that the solution is retargeting? Not that retargeting is a bandaid for a deeper problem. So if you have nine out of 10 people click on an ad don’t see page two, you don’t have a retargeting challenge. You have a mismatch in content. And I just mentioned that as an example to be aware of it. Though, I wouldn’t use retargeting in that example to try to drive more people from page one to page two, because there’s clearly a problem.

Shawn (00:28:29):
I also get a different example, same broad structure. But now we have for every 100 people who click on the ad, 60 see page two. Excellent. That tells me that the ad to landing page congruent, like that transition and the flow into the multi page presale site is solid. It’s congruent. It works. There’s nothing to solve there. So then what I’m curious about is how many people who click on the ad see page three at the point of opt-in. That’s my opportunity to get an opt-in rate. So we’ll just do some quick math in our head. Let’s say for every 100 people who click on the ad, 40 of them, let’s will say 50, make the math easy. 50 see page three and of those 50, 25 opt-in. Those are typical numbers, I would expect, that wouldn’t be shocking. Well now we have an interesting thought experiment. Why would 25 out of 50 people. So why would half of the people who make it to page three read all of that content but not opt-in for what’s next? That’s a retargeting opportunity. Sometimes it’s a mismatch in media, right? Sometimes it’s a… You’ve brought everybody with a written word. You have a written ad, three pages of written content, but it’s a very visual person responds better to video and you don’t move in that next step, because they’re not quite pulled because of the media that you’re using. That’s one possibility. Now, if everything that follows is written content and the entire offer is written, I don’t know that I would introduce a different media to try to pull people in because you’ll create weird downstream effects if you use video to sell long copy. That’s one thing you’ll notice. You never see André and I using video. We both are writers and we both write long copy. So you’re not going to see us talking, doing video to sell long copy. It’s weird. I mean, it’s just a weird mismatch.

Shawn (00:30:31):
So at that inflection point, and again, this is a thinking exercise. You have to sit down with a piece of paper or a white board or chalk on the sidewalk, whatever it takes, but you have to ask yourself this question. Why would somebody get all the way to page three and not opt-in? And then look through that lens. And that’s where your first retargeting inflection point comes in. Or you may realize, well, if you think it’s a problem solved by retargeting, then I would use retargeting so that somebody makes it to page three, they don’t opt-in. And then I might retarget them with something that talks about what comes next after the opt-in and sends them back to a very clean opt-in page, because you know. And this is the key thing with retargeting. You know what they’ve seen already, you know what they’ve consumed, you’re using their behavior to show them what’s next. So you know that there are 25, in this example, 25 people who have consumed the content and not opted in, but you don’t know if they just on page three, if the browser tab is still open. They were distracted. They forgot about it. So it’s a great opportunity to use retargeting and just do a reminder, clean things up, have a nice, easy, you might say clean things up. I mean, just clean up the messaging around, and don’t say, don’t overtly say, hey, I noticed that you got all the way to page three and you didn’t opt-in, so opt-in, click here. Don’t make it that obvious, but create an ad that recognizes the reality of their particular situation, which they’ve saw three pages of content. They didn’t opt-in. Reinforce what the value that in the ad, the value that they get after they opt-in and you know what they’ve already read. So you already know kind of what, you’ve done some work. So build on the work that you’ve already done, create an ad that emphasizes the opt-in. That’s your first retargeting ad.

Shawn (00:32:36):
Then after they opt-in. Again, in this model, we have five emails. There is a percentage of people who are going to read those emails, one after the other, every single day and buy on day five. There is another percentage, if you do it right, who are going to read every one of those emails and send you an email on day two, asking when they can buy, because they’re going to be super fans. They want it. There’s also another significant percentage of people who are going to have read all of the content, opted in, read all of the emails…

Shawn (00:33:03):
… Who are going to have read all of the content, opted in, read all of the emails and had not yet purchased, but who may purchase. In this example, that’s your next retargeting opportunity, and I don’t think I would wait many days. I would probably wait, after let’s say day five, you make the offer, and just for the sake of argument, let’s make it a seven part series. So you build up to the offer daily, one through five, and then every other day, they get two more emails. So days five, and then seven, and then nine is about the offer itself, and then you move them into sort of your weekly email series after that.

Shawn (00:33:43):
In that period of time after they’ve seen the offer but not yet taken it, I would retarget about the benefits of the offer. Here’s what the offer is all about, because now you know, again, taking a step back, here’s what you know, you know that based on their behavior, the person who is seeing the ad has seen all three pages of your multi page presale site. They have received five emails from you, five, six, or seven emails from you.

Shawn (00:34:09):
They’re aware of the offer, you’ve built this world for them, the stars have aligned, and now in that context, you are putting in front of them, the next logical step for them to take, which is the offer that you’ve made. That is a classic, classic look at a very high value, low energy, low input required, sharp retargeting campaign. You don’t need to retarget every single step of the way. Retarget the big inflection points.

Shawn (00:34:42):
Loren, I’m going to turn it over to you in one second. One thing I just want to draw attention to, the last question that you mentioned, Justin, which is “How can I take the tracking data out of Google analytics to create an audience from the Facebook ad?” You can’t, that’s not where you create audiences. You create audiences for Facebook within Facebook, based on the Facebook Pixel. That’s what determines the audience behavior and other things, and Loren has a lot of information about that module seven, part one, so look there for that. Google analytics audiences are used to define… Or Google analytics is used to create audiences that are used to define Google display network advertising for retargeting, Facebook Pixel is used to create audiences for Facebook retargeting.

Shawn (00:35:23):
All right. Loren, your thoughts on this?

Loren Pinilis (00:35:25):
Yeah, I think it’s hard to add too much to what Shawn just said. I mean, that was some knowledge right there. I think that what stuck out to me as he was talking was it really boils down to what is their next step and why haven’t they taken it? And that is in essence what retargeting is. Sometimes you might be retargeting someone who added a product to the cart but didn’t finish it. At that point the reason they haven’t taken it, maybe it was just not a good time. Maybe something came up. So they haven’t always said no, maybe they’ve just said “Not now.” So a simple retargeting about… The classic line that people used for a while was, “Did life get in the way” or just basically getting in front of them and reminding them again, “Hey, let’s complete this transaction.”

Loren Pinilis (00:36:17):
Sometimes it’s just simply getting in front of them again. Other times it may be that they have a particular objection, so while your initial sales sequence might not have answered those objections, you can follow up with further proof to just drive it home further, things like testimonials, social proof, those work well as retargeting. Even though those are of course going to be in your sales sequence initially, there’s something powerful about just seeing that again, in “case they missed it, but just being reminded, Oh yeah, this is really good. Other people that are experiencing benefits from this product or service, let me investigate this further.”

Loren Pinilis (00:36:56):
Maybe they have any other particular objections that you can answer. It may be FAQs, something like that. Also on the eCommerce side, one thing we’ve got to keep in mind is are you selling them a product that they’re going to purchase one time? Some type of information product that they’re going to purchase once, and then that’s the end of it? Or is it going to be a supplement or something where they’re going to purchase again in 30 days, in 60 days, in 90 days? That type of eCommerce of course provides many opportunities for retargeting.

Loren Pinilis (00:37:27):
There are many opportunities to use retargeting for upsells, cross sells, things like that, that are more than just the traditional ad to offer to buy my product. Okay, after you bought the product, there’s post-purchase retargeting that can happen to further increase the value that you get from every customer. And that has benefits for economics when you’re driving paid traffic, the more you can get for each customer, the more average cart value you’re getting in lifetime. Then of course, the more you can pay to get that customer in the first place from just a strictly economic space, paid traffic point of view. Post-purchase retargeting is something that people have done where they’ve asked for testimonials, they’ve asked for user generated content like, “Hey, can you make us a video testimonial” that then they can use on their sales page, or then they can use in their sales materials, even Facebook ads later down the line.

Loren Pinilis (00:38:26):
One popular retargeting strategy too for eCommerce is to offer a discount. If you haven’t purchased then a week later, “Hey, here’s a 20% off discount off, 30% off discount. Put this coupon into the coupon code,” or “Here’s a special Facebook only ad that you’ll see.” Those are effective and different people have different opinions. I think, I don’t know, it’s a little cheesy to me. I kind of like just like the consistent pricing, not offering someone that type of scarcity, urgency type stuff, but to each his own. It may be very effective and could be used ethically, I’m sure. But that’s basically the gist is what is the next action we want them to take?

Loren Pinilis (00:39:12):
That may be not simply they haven’t purchased the product, but it could be they’ve purchased our product, they’ve downloaded our lead magnet or watched our video that we wanted them to watch. They’ve taken the lead generation action that we wanted them to see. They’ve opted into our list. What is the next action we want them to take after that? Again, it really comes down to a lot of times we don’t want to assume that the answer’s no, we don’t want to assume that they thought about everything, they calculated it, they took out a piece of paper, wrote down the pros and cons and decided very intellectually and very deliberately to reject our product or service or reject opting into our email list.

Loren Pinilis (00:39:54):
The real world is that we’re busy, and as Shawn had the example, you may be in a checkout, you’re looking at the grocery store and then something happens, your internet connection goes down. I mean, we can all think of millions of reasons why just as I was saying earlier, life gets in the way busy-ness happens. So they may not be saying, “No,” they may have just said, “Not now,” and getting in front of them again may be a potential opportunity.

Loren Pinilis (00:40:19):
Then finally, I think one very important aspect of retargeting is we’re not talking about an email sequence where you are delivering these emails effectively for free. You are paying to put this out in front of people, so I think there’s definitely the consideration there. You want the retargeting economics to work out. If you’re selling a high end product or high end service, it may be potentially worthwhile to keep people going through each step of your funnel leading up to… I know Shawn hates that word, but each step of your funnel leading to the eventual high ticket destination. But if you’re eCommerce and you’re selling a rather low priced widget, retargeting at every point may not economically make sense.

Loren Pinilis (00:41:08):
In that case, I generally would prioritize later in the process that the add-to-cart people who abandoned cart, those type, the further down you get, the more the economics tend to make sense because they’re more valuable prospects at that point, because they’ve already invested so much into that journey. They have just a short way longer to go. They’re more valuable traffic so the economics tend to work out better the further down that process you’d go. But that’s pretty much what little I could add to retargeting,

Shawn (00:41:45):
I feel like I should tell you, “You crushed it, bro” if we’re going to talk about things I hate saying.

Loren Pinilis (00:41:50):
Yeah, you crushed it, bro.

Shawn (00:41:52):
Couple other thoughts that bubbled up too, listening to Loren. So retargeting, really the sky’s the limit. There’s absolutely no reason you can’t also retarget for consumption, for example. You can’t retarget to reinforce a good decision, especially if you have a high ticket offer. Let’s just for the sake of argument say that you sell a $2,000 offer and it’s great, and you know from your data that a lot of people buy it and they don’t even… It’s shocking to me, some people even log in or they log in 30 days later and then your refund rates are kind of high because they get excited about the offer, but then they’re nervous that they’re not going to be able to do it. Whatever it is, it is absolutely economically beneficial in many situations to reinforce the purchase decision, showing people how to best consume your product.

Shawn (00:42:47):
Let’s just say for the sake of argument that you have a $2,000 offer and there’s a seven day onboarding where they just go through and they get up and running, I would retarget anyone who doesn’t log in to that. I would just keep retargeting to get them to log in and to go through that seven day series, even though they’re already a customer, And it may sound crazy on the surface, but if we’re optimizing for longterm, happy, repeat customers or optimizing for happy customers, one of the ways that you stop being a happy customer is by when you stop being a customer, when you refund. So we want to mitigate that as much as possible, and we want to get more people to consume the value that we’ve created. So absolutely retarget consumption.

Shawn (00:43:33):
There’s another variation of this, which is just reinforcing that they made a good buying decision. You can retarget with more in depth content, knowing they’re already a customer and you’re just positioning yourself more as an expert, reinforcing the “Hey man, you made a great decision” is sort of how I think about it. You’re not saying that outright. You’re not saying “I know you’re a customer, so here’s some great stuff,” you’re just doing a little more, showing them a little bit different to reinforce that you were a good person to purchase from. If you have something that is a recurring product, you’re going to have a distribution curve of when people fall off. Let’s for the sake of argument say that you sell a supplement and the first offer is 60 days and only half of the people renew after 60 days. I’m going to assume it’s a high quality supplement, it does what it’s supposed to do. You can use retargeting at like day 40 or day 45 to go back to the benefits, emphasizing that this is something that over the long term really pays dividends, or however it happens. Or if you have a course and that course is a monthly subscription service and you know that the most significant drop-off point in your course is on month six, beginning in month five, I would do an entire re-invigoration campaign by email and with retargeting to get more people past that six month hurdle.

Shawn (00:44:56):
It is absolutely within your economic interest to do that. So many people when retargeting forget about their customers. It’s so much harder to get a new customer than it is to keep a customer, so there’s absolutely no reason not to retarget your existing customers to reinforce the behavior that made them customers in the first place, the positive behaviors that they’re taking, and there are a million different ways to do that.

Shawn (00:45:22):
We kind of went all over the place with the answer to this. I hope that’s just a broadly useful answer about retargeting. All right, let’s go to… Francis, I’m going to answer your question next too. I’m kind of prioritizing you guys who are on the call. Actually, yeah, I’ll do that and then Kyle, let’s do yours right after this. We’ll do it as a hot seat. We’ll just open it up and have you throw some questions. What we’ll do is I’ll sort of read your overview, Kyle, and then it’s your choice, really. If you want to just do more of a live thing, or if you’d rather just have me answer the question directly, you can just drop that into the chat, your choice. All right, Francis. Francis’ question, “What have you found to be the best way to manage multiple projects, specifically knowing which ones to work on when and what about clients who want timelines moved up?” So a couple of different questions here to really think about. I don’t think there is a magic bullet for managing a lot of projects. I do think there are some broadly useful ideas. We were a typical shop for a very long time, switched to Agile about 12 years ago, have done various implementations of Agile. None of them, except for a short period of time, none of them that anybody outside that really knows Agile would say, “Oh, everything you do is you’re using Agile.”

Shawn (00:46:46):
In terms of the principles of Agile that I have embraced are what are the units of value as defined by the client? What are the most important, highest value to the client? Like what really matters to them, getting very clear about that and making sure that work happens first. I think the best decision I’ve ever made from a project management standpoint is that I don’t try to manage projects, and that sounds ridiculous but let me explain what I mean. We have sort of a rule, framework rule, I don’t know how you would interpret it, that I’ve embraced for a very long time, which is that the person closest to the work makes decisions about how the work is done.

Shawn (00:47:32):
So I don’t manage how Loren does his work. For example, I share with Loren, Loren knows the client’s goals, Loren knows the landscape in which he’s working, he knows if I’ve identified any quicksand, whether it’s psychological stuff with the clients, sort of who gets wound about what things or do they not want to do, or what will they do? That’s my job is to identify some of that, but the actual work itself is managed by the person who is responsible for the outcomes of that work, and that has been the single best decision I’ve made from a sort of managerial standpoint. Partly it was a decision of necessity because I don’t want to manage work. I’m not a manager.

Shawn (00:48:14):
We have had, and continue to have multiple projects. In the past, I’ve worked with as many as 35, 38 clients at a time, that’s a lot of moving parts. I have used probably every permutation of the big project management tool as you can imagine whether it’s Basecamp or Wrike or Asana or the lighter weight ones like Monday.com or Airtable. I built a custom application years ago, and none of those were causal. None of those made a significant difference. We’ve also had a physical iteration in the office. I have a four foot by eight foot whiteboard that was for a period of time converted to an enormous Kanban board, and it just had all of our clients and then the different lanes for who on the team was working on things. There was somebody whose job it was to keep that up to date and we saw where things were flowing.

Shawn (00:49:19):
We’ve tried it all and in my experience, there is no causal tool where I said, “Oh, now that we have this, everything’s so much better.” So I’ll use Basecamp as an example. Basecamp is very popular, plenty of people love it. I continue to use it in different ways. It has tons of features that are great. It works, but Basecamp is a tool. Basecamp, it’s like a shovel. A shovel doesn’t dig a hole for you. You dig the hole with a shovel. So you get a tool like Basecamp and maybe it’ll work, but ut has to reflect your process. You need to really understand what is your process and does your process make sense?

Shawn (00:50:11):
I like, and I think that the most powerful thing that I saw that really… Because be aware that I’m very visual, visual, spatial learner, so where I see things and where things exist in space for me in three dimensions are very important. So the physical board was the first time where I really felt like I could see the flow of work and I could see where it was getting hung up. I think maybe what I would recommend for you to start, there’s a book called Personal Kanban. If you can’t find it, shoot me an email and I’ll send you a link to it. But that was a really good overview of Kanban as an idea, and how to do it in a way that it’s really simple.

Shawn (00:50:55):
You have your backlog, your work in progress, which is limited to no more than three, and then you have complete, and that trains you to see work that flows. That’s where the whole term workflow comes from. Work is supposed to flow. When you use that with a team, or if you have multiple projects and it’s just you, it’s a structure that allows you to see where do things get hung up? What prevents something from… because it should flow from left to right from backlog to work in progress to complete. When we first did this, one of the early things that I noticed was that I didn’t capture in the structure client review.

Shawn (00:51:39):
So what I imagined in my mind was someone on… We had defined work, I had defined some work. I worked with a client, understood what they wanted to do, I’d written up a creative brief or whatever it was, and that was available and there was work to do. Then the person was doing the work and it would be in work in progress, but then it wasn’t done. It sat in work in progress, and you never want to go from work in progress back to backlog. You don’t want to move backwards. So things would sit in work in progress and it was infuriating. I’m like, “Why is this happening?” And because it was a visual structure and because the structure needs to match reality, I very quickly realized that the client was the hangup. Client approval.

Shawn (00:52:21):
We had to add another lane of the vertical to capture that, okay, we’ve done our work and we’ve handed it off to the client, but the client, that’s where things are slowing down, and that happens a lot in a client services business. If you don’t have visibility into where things are slowing down in your process, you can’t fix it. Often you will sense it intuitively, but you can’t act on it. So I think there are two answers to your specific question. I don’t know if you have a team or if it’s just you, it doesn’t really matter. If it’s just you, it’s easier in many ways. Harder in some, because everything begins and ends with you. But the first question, “What have you found the best way to manage multiple projects,” the first one is to get everything visible.

Shawn (00:53:12):
If you want to do this, and I encourage you to do this in a way that is disfluent, meaning it’s not super easy. Software is super easy. You can do it a couple of ways, get a whiteboard, create some lanes. You’ll see how to do this if you get Jim Benson’s book or just go to his site and you can see as examples of it. But if you just create three lanes, backlog, give yourself plenty of room, so a big backlog, narrow channel for work in progress, limit yourself to no more than three, and then done. Those are the three columns in a typical, basic Kanban board.

Shawn (00:53:43):
Then observe the flow, and work in progress is prioritized. You don’t work on all three things and work in progress simultaneously. That’s not the point. Everything about Agile and about Kanban is flow. You want to take something, you want to look at your entire backlog, this is how you prioritize. You look at your entire backlog and because it’s all there, you can look at it and say, “Okay, of all these choices, this one is the most important.” The criteria for importance will be up to you. It may be a timeline and it may be if it’s due tomorrow and something is due Monday, then the thing to do tomorrow is a higher priority. There are lots of ways to come at this, but you want to be able to take something from backlog, see all of your work. All of it has to be there, that’s critical.

Shawn (00:54:36):
When you make a choice from all the work that’s there, you put that as the most important thing in work in progress, and then let’s just say, and this is referred to as WIP, and there’s a WIP limit and you set the WIP limit. It could be one, it could be two, it could be three. Don’t go more than three. But what you’re trying to do, what you’re basically saying is, “Of all this work in my backlog, this is the highest priority. I will not work on this next thing, which is the second highest priority until I finish the first. I won’t work on the third thing that’s the third highest priority until I’ve finished the first and the second.”

Shawn (00:55:12):
Now, if you scope, and this leads to the next thing, you have to scope your work very well and very accurately. You can’t put projects in your backlog, you have to put tasks, work that can flow through what is the delivered unit of value to the client. Write it on a Post-it is the easiest way to do it. Write down on a Post-it, prioritize it from the backlog, put it in work in progress. When it’s finished, move it to done. That’s how things flow through. Just that exercise will give you a PhD in how your work flows, because you’ll run into situations that will tell you where the problems are. You’ll write something on a Post-it that is not a delivered unit of value. It’s not a task, it’s a project. You’ll write it on a Post- it, and you’ll put it in work in progress and realize you can’t finish it. It’s not finishable because of the way you wrote it.

Shawn (00:56:05):
Then you have to take that and you have to say, “Okay, this thing is actually, the part that I need to do now is this.” Well, now you’re learning, so now you’ve written down the thing you can actually do. Then you’ll also notice things like, “Oh, I can’t go from work in progress to done because I get my part finished, but then I hand it off to the client and the client has to review it before we can say that it’s done.” Well, now you just added a new lane, a new vertical. After work in progress, there’s client review.

Shawn (00:56:33):
You might realize, like we did, that it’s backlog, work in progress, client review, and then often there are changes that have to be made after the client reviews, so it goes back into work in progress, and you can decide do you move that work in progress forward? Or do you move it? Do you have another column so that you know that this is client reviewed work and then you move it to done. You start to build out a board that accurately reflects the way your business does work, how you deliver value. That’s the beauty of Kanban, is it’s the simplest way to capture how work actually flows through your business.

Shawn (00:57:19):
A metaphor that I’ve heard for Agile and why it’s so powerful, I’ll share it because I just think it was one of the things that opened my eyes, like, “Oh, okay, I get it. I finally get it.” Let’s just say for the sake of argument that we have a nonprofit and that nonprofit, it could be anything. We’re going to save puppies. I love dogs. So we’re saving puppies and we’re going to do a fundraiser and we have 5,000 names of people who have given to us in the past and we want to raise money from those 5,000 people. We have a stack of envelopes, we have a stack of letters that are solicitations about this, requesting money and what it’s for. We have a stack of stamps, we have a stack of return addresses, and then there’s a mailbox, we’ll say it’s outside.

Shawn (00:58:06):
What conventional wisdom says is you batch everything. Someone sits down, you get you and your buddies and a 12 pack of beer or whatever it is, and you all get together and let’s say we have to fold the letter… We’ll do this as a process. We fold the letter, insert the letter into the envelope, put the stamp on the envelope, the return label, the address label, and then we put it in the mail. Because we’re also smart, then we’ll say it’s this group here, we decide we’re going to sit down and we’re going to fold 5,000 letters because that’s efficient. Right? I don’t know how long it takes to fold 5,000 letters, but let’s just say for the sake of argument it takes us a day.

Shawn (00:58:51):
We fold all 5,000 letters, and at the end of the day, we tell ourselves we’re closer to our goal, yet we have not delivered a single unit of value. There is not a single opportunity for anyone to send us a check because no one’s going to get these letters. We just folded 5,000 of them. Then the next day we come in and we’re like, “Okay, today we’re going to fill, we’re going to stuff 5,000 envelopes” and we stuff 5,000 envelopes. At the end of the day, we pat ourselves on the back. “Wow, look at all the work we did. We stuffed 5,000 envelopes.” We still haven’t delivered a single unit of value. No one can send us a check. The next day we come in, we put the labels on. We put the stamps on, we do it. Finally, we’ve delivered a unit of value because now they’re on, we put them in the mail and now they get to people, and then they can come back.

Shawn (00:59:47):
What Agile says instead is that we fold one piece of paper, we fold one letter, we stuff one envelope, we put one address on it, we put it in the mail. Now if you’re walking out to the mail, you might do 100 or whatever it is, or you might do however many you can do in a day before the mail person comes and picks them up. But instead of waiting to deliver 5,000 units of value, three days in advance, you put 1500 units of value in the mail each day, and then 2000 on the last day. That’s what Agile is, trying to get that flow. It’s counterintuitive. Where it manifests in the client services business is that we’re very tempted to… From a project perspective, it’s called making things full kit. We’re thinking about full kit all the time.

Shawn (01:00:37):
We sit down and we’re like, “Okay, we’re going to… “Let’s just say we’re going to run traffic for a client, so we need 10 or 12 things from them. We need all of their creative assets, we need all their logos, we need all this stuff and we need a bunch of data and we need sort of this long list and we’re not doing anything until we get all of that put together.” That’s a conventional way and it makes sense. Intuitively, it kind of makes sense. Like, “Let’s get everything we need and then we can work.” Except you can spend days, weeks working with a client and deliver zero value. And then what happens? The clients get pissed. “Why aren’t we getting things done?” Then you get pissed. Like, “What do you mean, why aren’t we getting things done? We’re asking for a million things and your team’s dragging their heels and we’re not getting our stuff.” Nobody cares about that. That’s falling on deaf ears.

Shawn (01:01:28):
You got hired to deliver a result, so your job is to find the fastest path between you and the delivery of that result in the shortest amount of time. In that scenario, we’re running traffic, there’s some critical things we need. You need access to their advertising account. Great. That has to happen immediately. But what is it going to take to get one ad set up and running? You don’t need all 50 creative assets or whatever, you need one ad, one campaign running. That becomes the unit of value that you’re delivering. That’s sort of the mindset for Agile. When you do this with multiple projects, it just means you have to prioritize.

Shawn (01:02:07):
What I would probably do in that scenario is have your work in progress, work in process column really defined by your… I don’t know how many clients you have, but it’s really by project, so when you’re looking at your backlog, you want to move… I think, again, not knowing your situation specifically. You want to make sure that what you’re working on is not three different things for one project at the expense of all others, unless that makes sense. Sometimes that makes sense. If you can finish a project in three days, then it becomes a matter of, are you doing things sequentially, or are you doing them in parallel? When you do work in parallel with a finite resource, everything takes longer. Let’s say you can do six units of project value per day, and you have six projects, you can move each project forward one unit of value per day, or you can move one forward six days, essentially. That’s the wrong metaphor, but you can either concentrate on one and move it farther forward or concentrate on many and then make them take steps forward. This doesn’t always apply to client services because often you have a longterm relationship where you’re doing lots of work, where you are moving things forward day after day, week after week, so it has to reflect your business. That’s a hard distinction to make.

Shawn (01:03:40):
If you’re doing project work, then this distinction is critical. Are you working in parallel or working in sequence? If you work on lots of things in parallel, you’re going to make less progress and everything’s going to take longer. That’s just the nature of it unless you add resources. Fewer projects go faster, one project goes the fastest, in general. It really depends on the nature of the work. If you have one incredibly complicated project and then three or four quick ones, then you have to make that assessment different. There’s a different assessment there. It really comes down to the texture of these multiple projects. If they’re relationships, then it’s even more where you have this ongoing work.

Shawn (01:04:23):
A lot of nuance in that question. I’m trying to summarize however, there’s so much wisdom in Agile and other things that… I mean, I think one thing I would recommend, I don’t know exactly the name of it. If you want to email me, I will find it though because I own it. But there is a Udemy course on Agile that’s simple, it’s fast. You just kind of get through it, hit the principles, and sort of design it. That might be worthwhile, but I think if I were you, I would start with Personal Kanban. Loren dropped the kink in. It’s so good. It was transformative for me because you just start seeing the world through the lens of flow, and that’s incredibly valuable.

Shawn (01:05:01):
Then one of the questions you asked is knowing which ones that work on landing when clients want timelines moved up. That just becomes a resource question. If it’s just you and do you have the time, it’s very easy to say yes, especially when a client pays you a lot of money. “Could we do this faster?” Sure, you just have to identify clearly for yourself what is the opportunity cost, both to you and to them. I spent a lot of years working seven days a week, 16 hours a day to get stuff done that I committed to. A lot of years. I put my time in, I have distinct memories of the early days where I remember once working 28 days in a row, and I remember that it sort of got capped by working through the Easter weekend to get a complete redesign up for a client but for which I charged them pennies.

Shawn (01:05:54):
Yeah, you can do it to a certain point. But if you’re the only resource, you have a finite amount of time and energy, and much less energy than time, frankly.

Shawn (01:06:03):
… Of time and energy, and much less energy than time, frankly, and you have to manage that. If you have a team, same thing is true for the team. When clients want to move a timeline, if you are at 80% or higher utilization of your resources, moving that timeline is going to have profound opportunity costs and you have to figure out if you’re willing to pay those. And those opportunity costs generally show up, as you say yes to something, and then other clients suffer, which may or may not be a problem. You say yes to something and you suffer, which may or may not be a problem. Your decision. Or you say yes to something and the client suffers because they’ve heard you say yes, and you can’t meet the expectation. So, you have … If you say yes to something, you have to say yes with eyes wide open and know how you’re going to do it, and knowing and hope are not the same thing.

Shawn (01:06:53):
I’ve used hope as a strategy far too many times with projects. Don’t do that. If you look and say, “I think I can make this work.” You can’t. Unless you sit down with a pen and paper and or a pencil and paper and show how you’re going to make it work, it’s not. This isn’t magic. There is a certain amount of work that you can do each day and a certain amount of energy you have to do that work, and if you change deadlines, you’re putting yourself in a disadvantageous position. That’s the bottom line. If assuming you are fully utilized as a resource and fully utilized as resource is not 100%. Nobody works at 100%. Anything above about 80% utilization is fully utilized. That 20% buffer is critical. It gets sucked up by things like checking email and impromptu conversations and taking a walk and all that other stuff.

Shawn (01:07:46):
And I’ll just treat this next one as a followup question. So Francis asked, “Was it worth putting all those hours in to build your business or would you do it differently?” That’s such a great question. Sort of a reflective question. I am so happy with where I am right now that I would be terrified to change a single thing. At the same time, I can look back and see every mistake I made with razor sharp clarity. I just don’t know if they were actually a mistakes looking forward when I was doing them or if they look like mistakes, looking back from the vantage point of where I am.

Shawn (01:08:23):
There are … So, I have this belief and it may be my blind spot, so I’m going to externalize it, so you all know my perspective. One of the things that irritates the hell out of me is when someone claims expertise and they haven’t done the work. So, this shows up … I see this in my profession, I see this all the time. Someone has had one … They’ve had a success or a couple of successes with a client, and now they’re a paid traffic expert and they’re telling the whole world what to do and how to do it.

Shawn (01:09:02):
And partly, this is an age thing. I’m 49 and pissed off at the whole world is younger than I am. Whatever. Sure. But I get really irritated when I … And this is a significant blind spot for me, and it doesn’t … It’s not just related to my discipline. That are … I’m thinking of a couple of others. André knows exactly who I’m thinking about too where they’re positioning themselves as being experts well beyond their years. And they haven’t earned the right to be experts. And I don’t know if it’s 10,000 hours, K. Anders Ericsson’s work on deliberate practice. Malcolm Gladwell got that wrong. He popularized the 10,000 hour rule. It’s not what K. Anders Ericsson’s research was saying, but you got to put the work in. This is thousands of hours worth of work to be good at a craft. That’s the deal. That’s part of it. So, I look back. At one point, I calculated my total hours in my profession was north of 50,000. So, I look at that and I think I wouldn’t want to change that. There are things I did that looking back and I go, “Well in hindsight, I would have done that differently.” But I don’t know. I mean, I think there’s something magical about doing the work that … Now I’m experiencing the benefits of that. I’m able to do things now with far less effort because I did so much effort before. I learned my craft just in depth. So, I tend to have a blind spot around that. I believe that’s very important. I’m a craftsperson at heart and I have tremendous dedication to my, to my craft and I never want to be sort of that fake … I don’t know. We won’t even go down that road. I don’t like that fakery.

Shawn (01:11:06):
I don’t mean fake like it’s not real. It’s just it’s not deep. I want deep expertise, I guess. So, that’s a long, circuitous answer to get back. I do believe it was worth the hours that I put in because of where that got me in sort of looking at how that happened, and I feel good about it. I feel like I’ve earned the right to share the things without ego. I don’t think I have the answers, but I have a perspective and I have some answers and I believe there’s value in those because I’ve done that work. So that’s the answer here. All right, Frances, do you have another question? I’ll give that … I’ll tackle that in a second. I want to jump onto a conversation with Kyle. Kyle, I’m going to read what you wrote first to kind of get everybody oriented.

Shawn (01:11:54):
So, I can use some insight on this idea. I’m building a series of information products targeted to product marketing managers. It’s marketing information. For this discussion, let’s assume the product is actionable info around topics like messaging, positioning, et cetera. Target audience are product marketing managers. That’s a role inside of big corporations, usually in tech, that are industry experts about a niche industry that the big company is in. They have input into all of the marketing of that product line. They work with the engineering side to build products, are coveted roles inside of companies that use the product marketing titles.

Shawn (01:12:33):
Kyle’s background was as a pro product marketing manager of seven software product lines and the flagship product running on over three billion devices around the world. The info products you will build will be centered on the ideas topics that he’s used, learned, et cetera. The dilemma in question, because these are big companies, I’m dealing with multiple layers of decision makers. Do you have any suggestions on how to approach this or ideas where I can turn this idea of targeting a big company to a smaller company, so I can deal with executive management directly.

Shawn (01:13:02):
I’m going to … Before you jump on, I’m going to throw a couple of answers out and then we’ll have at it for a little bit. So, the question and dilemma. Working with big companies, multiple layers of decision makers can be challenging, but here’s the other side of that though, and this is a blinding flash of the obvious, but it’s important. Big companies tend to write big checks with ease. So, the downside of not working with the CEO or not working necessarily with the leadership team or being connected is that often, far downstream of that are enormous budgets with … And I’m just thinking I’ve worked with a variety of client sizes in the past and I had a consulting relationship with a large company that sort of fits your criteria here, and it was wonderful because they wrote really big checks, were incredibly appreciative of the work that I was doing. The teams were amazing and the work was just outstanding. I loved every second of it. And there was … And I was working with … There was one person who kind of got this thing started who was at the EVP level, executive vice president level.

Shawn (01:14:22):
But I wasn’t working with the actual leadership team. They were not part of the decision making. So the message there is there are leadership teams lower on the food chain within divisions. There are leadership teams within categories. There are leadership team … There are lots of teams that have big budgets and you don’t have to talk to the CEO all the time. Like I mentioned that, and I know in some of the content that the closer you can get to the ultimate decision maker, the better, but often the ultimate decision maker in a large business, the decision that he or she is making is that the people who are subordinate to them make the decisions about the work that you’re involved with. So, you are actually speaking to the decision makers at those lower levels.

Shawn (01:15:11):
Really, decision-making is budgeting authority. So if the person you’re talking to has the ability to say yes to something that costs money, then that’s the level at which you want to be operating. The challenge is when you are talking to somebody and you are building rapport, you’re developing a relationship, and that person can’t say yes to signing the check or authorizing the signing of the check. That’s the problem. And they then have to go and essentially take the relationship equity that you’ve created and then use their relationship equity with somebody else to get permission to spend the money, and you’re disconnected from that, and that’s a problem. But as long as you’re speaking to somebody who has financial decision authority, you’re in a great spot. Absolutely a great spot. So André, do you mind making Kyle … I don’t know, magical whatever it is, and let Kyle throw some nuance and we can go back and forth with some questions.

André (01:16:10):
Sure. There we go.

Shawn (01:16:14):
All right, Kyle. You are … Mic is muted. There you go. All right. So, fire away any questions, nuances on that or what [crosstalk 01:16:21] more I need to know. Yeah.

Kyle Graig (01:16:24):
Yeah, that was great. That was great insight. My first question is how should I approach building an audience? So, if you go to step zero, where you define what your audience is going to be, that you’re ultimately going to serve, and we have the decision maker … I agree 100% with what you said about the decision maker does not necessarily mean executive management. That’s sort of relative, depending on the business unit and division divisions. I guess my question is, do I target those people as an audience or should I go lower down in the food chain to build a group, which is ultimately going to be bigger just from pure statistics? Build a group of people who are going to benefit from that, and then slowly try to pick off or peel off the executive decision makers to close a deal?

Shawn (01:17:22):
Yeah. So the way I would think about this is who brings, who brings these ideas to the attention of the decision makers? Because in some industries, people find things … The person who is making the decision is the person who stumbles on the, or researches or whatever, the tool for the software solution, the training, whatever it is. That’s their job. In most cases, though, that’s not their job. In most cases, there’s somebody lower … There’s somebody within their group whose responsibility it is to bring those things to the decision maker’s attention. So that would argue more in favor of the second way you described it, which is let’s assume that we’ve got a decision maker and then teams of 10 or 20 people underneath them. Somewhere on those teams are people … There are people whose job it is to be aware of the value that you create.

Shawn (01:18:22):
And they then bring that value to the decision maker. That’s the access point. I’m thinking my best friend for example. My best friend is in a management position in an IT field, and there are things that his team bring … The technical stuff, the tools, a few other things. There are people on his team who bring that to his attention. He then needs to narrow the potential from maybe three or four solutions to either one or two solutions or a solution. And then when he is working with his boss who is the decision maker, that relationship … There are two steps. There is someone who has brought it to him, he has then worked through it, and then he brings it to someone who can write the check. So, you need to reverse engineer that for your … The value that you’re creating, that who becomes aware of it first? And whose job is it to be aware of it?

Shawn (01:19:27):
And maybe it is the decision maker and that’s entirely possible. But my guess is there is a subset, there’s part of the team, and I’ll just throw out an example for reference. This is not your example, but it’s an example. If you have a team that is, let’s say, a software team and they’re producing a certain level of results, and then somebody on that team is responsible for knowing the software solutions available to do what that team does, and that person evaluates them, and when a new one is available, they become aware of it, and it’s their job to know that thing they used three years ago, it just got upgraded and it’s way better. It’s somebody’s job to know that. So for you, whose job is it to know that first layer of awareness? Whose job is it to know that? And then who do they bring that knowledge to?

Shawn (01:20:25):
And does that person they bring the knowledge to make the decision about it, or do they then bring it to somebody else as one of several solutions, or do they need it to be the solution? Because now we need a … We’re reverse engineering how somebody becomes aware of what you do and then how they make a decision to purchase it. And we just have to reverse engineer that process. And then your entry point is that first person. The person whose job it is to know that you or what you have to offer exists. So, do you have a sense of who that is, how that is?

Kyle Graig (01:21:03):
In a general sense. As you move up the chain, it’s going to become more specific. It’s going to become industry specific. It’s going to become solution specific. It’s going to be … And it’s sort of a weird paradox that to hit the broadest group of people whose job it is to look for a solution as it … To reiterate, as it bubbles up, as that person whose job it is to find the solution, as they move it up the chain to that next level of decision maker, they’re going to ask a different set of questions, which my original targeting content marketing solution is probably not geared towards. So, I might hit the big circle, but as it bubbles up to the executive, even if they don’t have the decision making yet, they may disqualify the whole thing, because this isn’t for us, or it’s not specific for us, or it’s not in the solution or it’s not in the industry.

Kyle Graig (01:22:04):
I agree with the flow of what you said, and I have a general sense. As far as a process, it will probably only go up two levels. If the big, broad person is say the product marketing people are even someone on a team of a product marketing team, it will go up to someone who is either a general manager or division level. Some companies might have a VP there. That person probably has decision making budget authority. But beyond that, it will only go up one more layer, which is … It depends on how they have the general … You mentioned an executive VP. That might be one, but some companies structure their executive levels different.

Shawn (01:22:47):
Yeah, I think … I mean, there’s a case to be made here that you target everybody. Excuse me. And that in an ideal world, what you want is the decision maker to see your stuff, and then just share it with the person whose job it is. I can completely see that scenario where whatever. They’ve logged into Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, or they’re on one of their … An industry specific site and they see this ad and they click on it and they forward it to the person on their team who needs this on their radar.

Shawn (01:23:24):
The challenge with that from a messaging perspective that you just mentioned … And in an ideal world, I mean, if we target … You could do this. I think if you do this on LinkedIn, you can target very well on LinkedIn by job title, so you can do a both/and situation. Let me walk through the dangers of that in a broad audience. If you’re not … If you’re speaking to the needs that will get the attention of the initial person, but it will disqualify you with a decision maker, you don’t want to have any targeting for the decision maker, because you want them to share it with a person who needs to investigate it, so that later it comes back to them for review. It’s no different than …

Shawn (01:24:04):
And I’ll use it as a poor example because it doesn’t really happen, but it’s kind of a conceptual example that I’m responsible for the Facebook advertising we do with our clients, but I’m not in Facebook every day. That’s Lauren’s job. So, I might see something that’s, “Hey, this is the latest and greatest thing about Facebook and it’s whatever and it’s great.” I can imagine a scenario where someone in my position might share that with Lauren to say, “Hey, check this out.” And then Lauren would look at it, and later, Lauren might come back to me and say, “Hey, that thing you sent to me actually looks really good. It’s $1000. Are you cool with me buying it?” “Yeah, sure. Buy it. Everything’s great.” Sure. Conceptually, I can imagine that happening.

Shawn (01:24:44):
But if the thing … If the ad I saw spoke to Lauren in what would interest him and not to me, then that wouldn’t happen. Or if it spoke to me, but not to Lauren, the content didn’t speak to him, then there’s a mismatch. So, it suggests to me that we want to have two parallel tracks where we wanted an environment like LinkedIn where you can target by job title and say either “Here’s the messaging for the executive level, the EVP level, GM level, whatever it is. Here’s the messaging for them and what resonates most with them by industry.” And you can bifurcate it that way. And then here’s the messaging for everybody in these other roles who considers it if it’s not the same messaging.

Shawn (01:25:29):
That’s one way to approach it. Just the challenge with LinkedIn, it’s a small pool, high quality. So, in Facebook, it’s much harder to do that job title. Lauren can speak to this, but I don’t believe job title is as broadly useful on Facebook. Just because it’s … I know I don’t have my job title on my Facebook.

Kyle Graig (01:25:51):
Yeah, right.

Shawn (01:25:52):
So, I mean, does that … You’re kind of following that logic there without about how you approach this to show … I actually think … So, if I woke up tomorrow owning your business knowing what I know, this is the framework I look through things. I would start by focusing only on the people whose job it is to know about what you offer and have such a … And this is an idea borrowed from Seth Goden, but really emphasize the story that those people are going to be able to tell to the decision maker. And I think it’s in … There’s a Udemy course Seth Goden has. Not the big one on the … Not the condensed version of the marketing seminar, but even a smaller one. And I think it’s about story. And if you want to email me, I can send you exactly which one it is.

Shawn (01:26:40):
But one of the things he mentions in that is you want to have a story about your offer the person to tell other people. So, if you’re the safe solution, if you’ve been in business for a hundred years and nobody’s ever gone wrong hiring the company that’s been in business a hundred years, then the story that the person who makes the recommendation to buy your stuff to the boss is able to tell is really the story about I’m not going to get in any trouble recommending the industry leader that’s been in business for a hundred years. No one’s going to question that. That’s a story. That’s not the only story, but you need to have a … You need to craft your messaging around the story that the person who you’re targeting is going to be able to tell about you to the decision maker. Right?

Shawn (01:27:33):
So, that story could be, “This seems to be the latest and greatest thing that’s totally cutting edge. Or this is … It seems like everybody’s talking about this.” Right? You name it. There are variations of that story, but that’s actually …. That’s the messaging for that audience who then is going to tell the decision maker why to buy what you have to offer in language that you really can’t know in advance, because you don’t know exactly what pushes the decision makers buttons. So you’re selling you’re selling your story to the person who’s going to bring it to the decision maker who’s going to inform their story from the benefits and testimonials and other things from your offer, but in their own language, in their own way, because you’ve given them a story to tell. [crosstalk 01:28:22] sense?

Kyle Graig (01:28:22):
That’s a great point. Yes. Another thought that popped into my head as we were going through this is I’m really going broad, and I’m thinking sort of horizontally across all companies, all levels. And yeah. I just realized that that different people can see different campaigns. And I might be able to front load specific messaging that’s industry specific, or at least segment specific and appeals to the people whose job it is to do the work and to find out the solution, but also the decision maker with enough specificity so that they don’t … At least they get me on the phone. And if I work out multiple campaigns, that doesn’t … Wherever the landing page is or wherever the website is could be generic information, but there’s no reason why I can’t target different segments specifically for both of the people, because there’d be no confusion because one segment is not going to see the other segments ads. And the second segments not going to see the other segments ads. That might add a little bit … That might make it a bit easier on my end to solve the problem.

Shawn (01:29:40):
And then it’s just a prioritization. Stack the deck in your favor. Where do you have the most compelling … Where can you say the most compelling things, create the most compelling value? Stack everything in your favor. I like to … When I approach paid traffic in general, and it’s not just limited to paid traffic, but it’s just such a good microcosm. My whole thing is how could I most stack the deck in my favor, so that it should be an easy win?

Shawn (01:30:07):
And it’s interesting how hesitant people are to do that, but because our targeting is so granular on platforms like LinkedIn and others that just stack the deck in your favor, speak to the felt needs of a smaller audience where you really know that you can connect the dots there. And then if that … And this is … One of the reasons this is so powerful is if that doesn’t work, it should, right? I mean, where things get weird is if you do something really broad and it doesn’t work, you don’t really know … First of all, you don’t know is it never going to work? Can I iterate my way to success? Or there’s just lots of questions. Like, what have I done wrong? And it’s so hard to figure it out. When you do a narrower audience with a much narrower focus, that should be a nice, fat pitch over the plate that should just work, and if it doesn’t [crosstalk 00:24:58].

Kyle Graig (01:31:00):
Then I made a mistake.

Shawn (01:31:00):
Well, then you have a small window which to look for the issues. Is it a messaging issue? What did I get wrong? And you can iterate out of that box.

Kyle Graig (01:31:09):
[crosstalk 00:25:09].

Shawn (01:31:10):
Much faster. Right? That’s so much faster.

Kyle Graig (01:31:13):
Yeah.

Shawn (01:31:14):
Cool. Thanks, Tyler. [crosstalk 01:31:16].

Kyle Graig (01:31:16):
Yeah, I appreciate that. It’s very insightful. It also helps that the industry that I’m targeting is huge. So, it’s my expertise, so I can put together a couple of fat pitches and get some instant feedback, but I thank you very much for your help. That helps me clarify my thinking. It really helps to talk to somebody. Thank you.

Shawn (01:31:36):
Oh, absolutely. And thank you, Kyle. And if you have questions, follow up stuff that bubbles up, shoot an email to the … Just reply to the Q&A email or whatever. That gets to me and we can just keep the conversation going.

Kyle Graig (01:31:47):
Thank you.

Shawn (01:31:48):
Yeah. Thanks, Kyle. All right. Let’s … Frances asked a couple of great questions. So, I’ll answer the last one, the quick one. As [inaudible 01:31:55] was saying the scrum is a method … It’s is an agile methodology. So, if scrum is agile, but agile is not necessarily scrum, just one flavor of scrum, [Kanban 01:32:05] is a flavor of agile scrum. There are others. Get more detailed, more specific, and sort of more … There are different reasons to do different things at different team sizes and different applications. But agile as a philosophy and principle is exceptionally powerful. At the principal level, it’s exceptionally powerful because it focuses on the rate at which work flows through a system and how to make that flow faster.

Shawn (01:32:32):
And that simple organizing principle has so many downstream consequences that if you just internalize that simple principle, which incidentally applies to everything that we do in marketing is that we are trying to increase the flow, the throughput through the system we’ve created for our business. So there’s a direct parallel there. So the more you know about agile, there’s direct, immediate crossover to your business in general. Frances asks one of my favorite questions, which is, I love to ask people that if I have 10 minutes in a hallway with somebody who’s a subject matter expert in something, I’ll often ask them, “What are the three most common mistakes you see people who, whatever, fill in the blank, do? Or what are three things that you’ve learned over the last 20 years working with X that you think are most important?” I love questions like this. So Frances’s, question, “What are your top three avoidable mistakes you’ve made?”

Shawn (01:33:33):
It’s a great question. So I probably have 3000, so I think that’s why my brain is on overdrive trying to figure out what the three mistakes are. Probably the biggest mistake I made early, and I remember the moment where the epiphany happened. I remember exactly where it was in my office. I remember everything about it. I may have mentioned this before, so I apologize if I’m repeating here, but this was just so profound to me that it … And it continues to be profound, but the … I thought … I was not a born entrepreneur. This happened to me sort of just because of a lot of things that happened in my life. My father was diagnosed with cancer. I moved home. I had a different career, different profession. Never expected to have my own business ever. And then I just woke up one day and decided I didn’t like … I needed to be able to eat so it was the logical outcome of a set of decisions I had to make.

Shawn (01:34:35):
So I was instantly in business and needed to be profitable in month one. So, I didn’t have a background of what to do, what to expect, which I’m very thankful for, because I think a lot of conventional business advice is worthless. I’m going to … And I am an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship, and a lot of what I teach in the classroom is how worthless most business advice is. So, the first mistake that I made early was thinking that there was a point at which I was going to have “made it” right? So that I was trying to reach a point and it was infinitely frustrating as I would try to … I always had this idea that there was a mountain I was climbing and once I got to the top of that mountain, I could relax.

Shawn (01:35:25):
And I was reading I believe it was The Obstacle is the Way, or I think that’s the Ryan Holiday book where they he quotes there’s a Haitian proverb that behind mountains or more mountains. And the point of that is you’re not going … In business, there is no making it, right? I think I’ve mentioned this in an email recently. Warren Buffett’s in his late 80s, mid 80s. Goes to work every day. Jeff Bezos worth however many deca billionaire. [inaudible 00:29:54]. Now everyone’s talking about billionaire. [inaudible 01:35:56] billionaires and it’s kind of lost its impact on us.

Shawn (01:35:59):
The stat that shocks me is a million seconds is like four and a half days. A billion seconds is 33 and a half years. That’s the difference between a million and a billion. And Jeff Bezos has tens of billions … He’s worth tens of billions of dollars. And what does he do? He goes to work every day, right? So, this realization that you have to fall in love with the game. You’re not trying to get somewhere, and André and I have written about this and we talk about this, the infinite game, it never ends. It’s that. But it’s also this recognition that all of the juice of work happens in the act of working. That’s where it all is. That’s where all of it happens. And because I was often looking ahead trying to get to this point that is not achievable, it was a huge mistake.

Shawn (01:36:51):
Would I go back and tell myself not to make it? I don’t know. I mean, I’m glad that I made it because it was such a profound realization that that every day is a chance to play the game, and I love the game, so every day is a win. I get to win every single day and feel the benefits of that winning. So, that’s sort of a dual phantom mistake and that you see how not to make the mistake sort of packaged into one.

Shawn (01:37:16):
Other avoidable mistakes that I’ve made. I have … This was more a long time ago and I’ve probably over-corrected for it. But I have had … And this, again, be careful of the context here. I’m telling you something that I do now having reached a level of success, not what I did to get here. So be very careful about that kind of advice, but I did let my ego get in the way a couple of times. I remember being pissed off about a few things and getting wound up with clients about some stuff that it was unnecessary and it was foolish. It was ego. Yeah. Anytime my ego shows up to the party, it’s not great.

Shawn (01:37:56):
Now, be careful with that one though, because ego also big driver for me and ego pushed me to do a lot of the work. So, is that what a mistake? It would be a mistake now. I mean, something I’m very proud of now is I really don’t bring a lot of ego to the party. I bring confidence. There are things I’ve accomplished that I’m proud of, but I don’t believe I have the only answers or the canonical answers. I just … It’s one person’s opinion based on a set of experience, and I offer it that way and with no expectation of its receipt. It’s just … I don’t have ego now, but that’s 25 years into the game. So, keep that one with a grain of salt from your own perspective. Nothing wrong with ego if ego’s directed in a way that’s healthy. Ego just has this funny way of perpetuating itself. It really exists to perpetuate itself. I think the biggest mistake that I made, and again, I want to be cautious with this one, because this is dramatically affected by context, but I tried. To do everything myself for a really, really long time, just 20 plus-

Shawn (01:39:03):
… A really, really long time, just 20-plus years. And when I say myself, I’ve been blessed to work with people like Lauren and others who are gifted. And I don’t mean I did all the work, but ultimately I took on 100% responsibility. And that’s how I’m wired. Agency is very important to me. I have an internal locus of control. I believe it is up to me to happen to the world, not for the world to happen to me. Because of that, I think I overemphasized my responsibility. And having had an experience for the last five-ish months or so of a true partnership with a dear friend and my most capable thought partner, the things that I’m able to accomplish working with André as a collaborative partner are not different in degree, like a little bit better, it’s a difference in kind. The whole experience is fundamentally different.

Shawn (01:40:06):
Now, I don’t know that you can just walk down the street and find… André and I tend to finish each other’s sentences, and it’s freaky how we think alike and we’re able to write together in ways that don’t make sense. So there’s a lot there that… I recognize there’s some weirdness there. But I think the underlying mistake that was the precursor to that was that I did too much of it myself. I relied too much on myself and didn’t find help where help was available, beyond sort of some smaller areas. That’s a mistake that looking back, that feels like a mistake to me. The more I interact with others and get that recognition of the juice from it, that’s really, really exciting to me. And my creative output, working in collaboration with a thought partner is so much different than what I create on my own, that it’s not recognizable as even being the same act, which is amazing to me.

Shawn (01:41:12):
And to your second question on this, fault. Three mistakes about getting clients. That’s a great question, too. I think my biggest mistake, maybe, I might talk myself out of this. My biggest client-getting mistake probably was never trying to get clients. That sounds so ridiculous. And this is an example of me to a fault. And I still think about this. I’ve chased one client in my entire, I don’t know, 21 years running an agency. Meaning, I actively went after one client, and it was a disaster and it felt so gross. And it’s a client who it should have been easy. It’s a local company. I love their product. I knew it backwards and forward. I could have been a salesperson for them. I could have sold the hell out of that and done it exactly right. I reached out to a friend, who was a long-time client, my first client who I still have and he introduced me to the owner. And it was disaster. And I felt gross the whole time, like I was chasing a client.

Shawn (01:42:23):
It’s just so funny to think how terribly that warped me. I relied on 100% pull toward me through doing good work, which is great. I’m very proud of that, but it also had its own downside, that I did not have a system with a dial when there were times when, for whatever reason, work wasn’t coming in well. I never had the security of a system that was producing results for me. So if I could go back, knowing what I know now, I would have built that system early and I would have built that system around at least exposing me to good clients. And then having the opportunity to talk to them. I relied entirely on relationships for 21 years to get clients.

Shawn (01:43:23):
I’m exceptionally lucky that it worked as well as it did. But that was a real mistake. Don’t make that mistake. Build your client acquisition system for your… If you work with clients, build that system, and care for that system, and feed that system and protect it. It’s very important. There’s nothing wrong with it. It was stupidity on my part not to do that. The path that I took, I’m glad, in many ways, I took it. I emphasized relationships. But I would have loved the peace of mind of having a dial in some of the times when I didn’t and it sucked. There were times that it was awful and scary. And I don’t wish that on anyone.

Shawn (01:44:05):
I think a second mistake, a client getting mistake. I’m thinking of a particular example. I just want to be cautious with this one. I’m not nearly as emphatic about this one as the one I just answered. But this is more of a… There was one client I always wanted from day one, for a variety of reasons. It was an area of interest of mine. I had a lot of respect for the client, the person who owned the business, sort of the personality of the business, all of that. And I eventually got the client and it was one of the worst clients I’ve ever had. He was a truly miserable human being, unhappy and unkind. It was a big company. The entire company took on his personality. It was gross.

Shawn (01:44:59):
It was an awful experience. I think the mistake I made there and was thinking that this public persona of a person who seemed likable and whose business I was really interested in, that somehow that translated to a good client. The underlying mistake there is that I didn’t do the work at the time, I’ve done it since, to really know the ingredients of a great client for me. And I know those now. And I don’t work with clients who… I’m not taking on new clients now, but in the last few years, when I’ve been very aware of this, I’ve taken on clients that have met those criteria. That has made an enormous difference. Not just getting blinded by sunshine, and unicorns, and taking on a client that I thought was going to be amazing, who it was horrendous, horrendous experience.

Shawn (01:45:51):
I’m tempted to say for the third mistake is go back and see the first mistake. That’s so powerful. So again, let me reemphasize. Build a system that produces the opportunity to get you clients. I guess that’s a good segue into the last mistake. I’ve worked with clients I shouldn’t have. I’ve taken clients because of the money, which is really an extension of the first problem is I didn’t have a system that produced really high quality opportunities. So there was a period of time where I worked with a series of clients, back-to-back, all from a single referral partner who was a terrible fit. Everything about the situation said I shouldn’t do the work. Yet, I did the work and I did it entirely for financial reasons. In many ways, I’m glad it happened because I can look back on that.

Shawn (01:46:45):
And it was such a teaching lesson. So I wouldn’t want to give that up. But wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others. Here’s your opportunity for some wisdom from today’s call, there is no upside to working with bad clients. Having just given you some upside of saying, that’s a great learning experience. For you, now that I can tell you categorically how awful it is. There’s no upside for you to have to go through the experience yourself. Don’t take on the experience intellectually. That’s not enough. What you really need to do to prevent this mistake, Josh Waitzkin calls this fire walking. You need to burn it in physiologically. You need to feel what it feels like to work with awful clients or to work with clients who you don’t… It’s a bad fit. You shouldn’t work them. They’re not paying you enough.

Shawn (01:47:36):
They don’t know enough. Whatever it is. You need to sit with that. Burn it in. Really think about what it’s like to get dumb questions over and over again. Whatever it is for you, burn it in so that you avoid it habitually. That you don’t let it happen to you. The mechanism to make it so that you don’t need to have it happen is to build a system that’s going to consistently produce a big pool of people who you can say no to. And within that big pool of people who you can say no to, are going to be two or three gems consistently that you can say yes to. That’s a really important system to have in place. Don’t try to build a client acquisition system where every time it spits out an opportunity from the end, you think you’re taking the opportunity.

Shawn (01:48:28):
It spits out opportunities. Design whatever your front end system is, put the bait out for the fish that you want to catch. If you want a certain type of client, then how you position yourself needs to attract that kind of client. And yes, you’ll get some other lower value ones, or you’ll get other stuff in there, but you want to get enough that you can say no to six, seven, eight out of 10 of them. Nine out of 10 of them. 19 out of 20 of them. Whatever it is, as long as the economics are there. There’s an infinite number of potential clients for you out there. Don’t worry about that. That’s another mistake. I’m just going to add in here, like 3A. And maybe for your business, you can look and say, “I only serve 12 big companies.”

Shawn (01:49:13):
Well, sure. There are limits. But the limit to the value you can create, and the expertise that you can bring, and the people who can benefit from that is effectively limitless. You’re not going to run out. Build a system that attracts people to your world, who are going to… Some percentage of them are going to be ideal and focus on the ideal. Don’t let yourself get sucked into particularly the ones that are just clearly not fits. That’s a long answer. Two long answers. Thank you, Francis. Those are great questions.

Shawn (01:49:44):
All right. We have a one… Lauren, you and André are being awfully quiet. I’m sick of hearing my voice. I think you need to start hollering or something here. All right.

André (01:49:56):
You’ve got such a beautiful voice.

Shawn (01:49:58):
Sure, nice. There we go. It’s that deep, Barry White voice. All right. So this is the last question. It’s a very long question. It’s from Gareth. Gareth’s not on the call. So Hey, Gareth, what’s up? I’ve actually worked with Gareth in the past. So this is a fun one. All right. A couple of questions I’d love some insight on. It looks like they’re two big questions. So I’ll just sort of maybe answer these as we go. And one of them is Facebook. Lauren, I’ll pull you into that as well. I just realized I didn’t send the Facebook stuff to you in advance today, Lauren. I’m sorry. I apologize for that.

Shawn (01:50:35):
All right. Question number one. We have a client in the U.S. who we’ve started to partner with. They have a core business on leadership management and want to offer marketing services along with agile training and coaching. That’s why agile was on my mind. I read this last night. We’ll be doing the marketing services and they’ve already been referring their clients to us, including one where we added at least $5,000 to the value through your three tier concept. Thanks again. You’re more than welcome, Gareth. Their clients are perfect clients with most being eight figures or more in revenues. There’s great synergy. First, before even proceeding. Congratulations, Gareth. This is huge. Huge accomplishment. I hope you take a moment or two to be incredibly proud. While the world falls apart, you’re doing these incredible things. Outstanding work. All right. They have a portfolio of these three separate companies. We’ve been offered 50% of the marketing company and the lion’s share of the revenue it generates.

Shawn (01:51:24):
We’ll get a proportion of revenue from the other two companies. Just before COVID we were going to receive 3.3% of revenue. They have a thing about threes. From the original company and given they do around a million dollars and aren’t scratching the surface, it would be pretty lucrative for all concerned. That’s for marketing strategy alone, not implementation. So another great distinction there. I’m getting paid to be smart, best job in the world. I’m getting paid to do the work, second best job in the world. On the surface, it’s all excellent. We trust them and they trust us. What I’d love is an insight into it, and how to fairly get a level of revenue from the other two companies in the portfolio and perhaps what level it should be at. Or if you’re up for a challenge, how can we potentially get an equity share in all three? We’ve transformed their marketing from referral only and single transactions in a simple repeatable system, based on relationships and deepening engagement.

Shawn (01:52:18):
Going through COVID, we help with implementation for a reasonable monthly flat rate. And we’ve definitely over-delivered, including helping them retain some staff. So there’s a lot of goodwill in the bank. I’d like to make the most of it. So my question is, do you have any suggestions on how to ask for an equity share in the other two companies? Or have you seen a performance-based model that works well we could adopt? So, lots of questions embedded in this. And there are a couple of things. There’s rising levels of challenge, performance, profit sharing, infinitely easier to get than equity in general. Equity, you’re getting literally a part of the business. And from the perspective of the shares, of their 10,000 shares, and you get 1,000 of them, you own 10% of the business. That’s just sort of how it works. And you get the benefits of 10% of that business.

Shawn (01:53:12):
Equity is much harder. It’s a much harder conversation to have. I think that the advice I would give you here, I want to give you simple, actionable advice. My goal here is to give you simple, actionable advice that I think is actually a contribution I can make, not to tell you things you’ve probably already thought about or that other people would answer better around the mechanics of it. Because I have had performance-based relationships with clients in the past. I had an equity relationship that I left that business because the other people involved just couldn’t find their ass with both. So I’ve been involved in different variations of this. But here’s the insight that I want to leave you with on this. You have a presupposition in your thinking that is costing you.

Shawn (01:54:04):
And that presupposition is that it’s up to you to find the solution. And it’s not. This is a collaboration. And the best person to collaborate with in my experience, and a way to get way more than you might offer yourself is to ask the other party, have them solve the challenge for you. What I would do in this situation is I would make this case that you’re sort of, as you’ve made it, I would set up a conversation about only this topic. I would frame and prepare the hell out of it. Go buy Oren Klaff’s book, Flip the Script. It’s such a great book, but it’s got 100,000 insights in how to structure this well. You’ve done a lot of them already. Read that book like five times, burn it into your soul. It’s just so good for this conversation. Schedule a conversation with this client or whoever the decision makers are, whoever really you feel like that the appropriate people to have this conversation.

Shawn (01:55:04):
And what you want to do is you want to show them the future that you’re imagining. Talk about the successes you’ve had, and be open, and honest and candid about, I feel like we’re scratching the surface here. We’ve done all of these things already. Terrible environment to try to be doing anything. We know things are going to get easier and better. Position yourself as the expert, command their respect, not demand it. You’re commanding their respect through your expertise by showing them sort of a high level picture of what’s happened so far. But then also showing where you think this could go. And show your work a little bit. You don’t even have to get in detail. This is not a detailed conversation. But it’s not a, we’ve done X. And I think 20 times X is possible, because it’s not believable.

Shawn (01:55:53):
It’s, we’ve done X and we think 20 times X is possible because of these five factors. And that may be a little conservative or whatever. Show your work a little bit. Show your thinking. Here’s where we are. Here’s where we’re going. Here’s where I think we could be going. Here’s what’s involved. And then you want to bring your… You want to go first, essentially. And going first is you saying… It’s essentially saying the more we’ve been involved with this project, the more I’ve realized that this is a perfect area for us to demonstrate our expertise. I’ve really enjoyed working with your team. Really speak from the heart. Don’t make this shit up, speak from the heart. Be honest. Here’s why I think this really is a synergistic relationship. Maybe don’t use synergy, whatever. Instead of using the word, describe the words.

Shawn (01:56:46):
You can say things like, “I’m noticing that we’re getting so much better results when we’re working together than either of us have worked on our own.” That’s the definition of synergy. It’s just spelled it out. Make that case. And then make it clear what you want. And you kind of wrap it up into that. When I see all of this information together, it leads me to this conclusion that I would really love to be more involved. And I or we, if your team, we really want to be part of what happens next. But to do that… And not in a but. Make it an and. Say, “And to do that, I would like to work with you to develop a compensation model that makes sense for everyone. Where everybody wins when we succeed together.”

Shawn (01:57:43):
That sets the conceptual foundation. Now, it’s not you asking something from him or her, or you’re no longer facing each other across the table in a way that’s low level adversarial. It’s two parties. Not mean adversarial, but it’s two parties looking at each other. Now you’ve reoriented to it’s, you’re side-by-side looking out on the world together. And really have that mindset. Imagine that. This is a great, by the way, if you can do this, especially with men, if you can have these conversations in a car, it’s the greatest thing in the world because there’s something… I don’t know the psychology about it. I know people have studied this. But there’s something about men, and this is not true for women. Women tend to communicate with each other facing each other.

Shawn (01:58:27):
Men, for some reason, when we face each other it’s more likely to be interpreted as aggression. This is, again, this is not my research. This is somebody else’s. But that idea of shoulder-to-shoulder, when you’re facing the same direction, particularly effective with two men. I’ve seen this happen over and over again in my professional experience. But you want that mindset. How do you literally or conceptually change the dynamic so it’s you and the other party looking out at the opportunity together? How would you together define a compensation model that makes sense for everyone? Now you’re distributing the responsibility for that. And then the other person gets to, and you might lead with a couple of ideas. You might say something like, “I’ve thought about the obvious. We could do a strictly performance-based agreement. If the terms are appropriate and over a long enough time horizon, that it was advantageous for everyone.” That signals that you understand that performance relationships need to be longterm.

Shawn (01:59:31):
You’re also signaling that you’re thinking about this as a longterm relationship, which is important to the other party. They don’t want you disappearing as much as you don’t want to disappear. And that’s important to understand too, is they want you as much as you want them, because you’re creating results. And then you can hint at and say… Or, we may find. Use we a lot. “We may find that an equity relationship makes more sense.” And you have one of those in place, so they’re obviously open to it. The key insight here is align the conversation so that the two of you are on the same team, looking out at the opportunity together. You’re not looking at the opportunity from different sides of a table trying to figure out… Because then it becomes, what are they getting?

Shawn (02:00:18):
What are you getting? You don’t want that. You want, what are we getting? Make it we. how can we make something that we both feel great about, that’s better than anything either one of us would have come up with on our own? That’s such a beautiful question. When you ask somebody a beautiful question like that, in general, they’ll rise to the challenge. If they don’t, if they’re dismissive or whatever else, that’s given you a lot of insight too. My sense from the way you described all of this is that’s not the case. That they’re going to be receptive and this is a powerful relationship that you can capitalize on. I’ll leave that question there. Do that. Make it we. Use the language of we, use the language of how can we create a solution together that’s better than anything that either of us would create on our own.

Shawn (02:01:11):
I would even use that as a quick touch point back to what you’ve already done. I might say something like, “How can we use this situation to create something better than either of us would develop on our own? I think about that a lot, because everything we’ve done together so far has been better than what you were doing before and better what we had even imagined was possible. So I know that when we work together, we’re able to get results that neither of us get individually.” You’re reinforcing that message. That, and the goodwill, and the value that you create, I think that will come together in a perfect storm. And you’ll be surprised, I’ve done this several times with clients in a similar variation, that’s sort of nuanced for the different situations. But I’ve done this in ways where I’m thinking of myself, if I got 10%, that’d feel pretty good.

Shawn (02:02:01):
And then the first thing out of the person’s mouth is like, “Well, would you be comfortable with 20%?” Yes. Let’s sign the documents now and move on. You’ll be surprised that if it’s a good partner who you really want to work with, then they’re going to come back with something that’s probably better than what you would imagine for yourself. Start there. And Gareth, you know you can always reach out to me with any other followup questions, if you want to. That’s the same for everybody. So just, I say that to Gareth, because I know Gareth, but all of you are part of this, know that you can do that too. All right. Looks like Francis has thrown the last question. I have great answers to this question, because I’ve done this poorly and done this well through sheer luck. Francis’s question is this. How do you pick a business partner?

Shawn (02:02:49):
The reason I’m laughing so much is that you don’t. Let somebody else pick you and have it be ideal. I got lucky. So, there’s that. That’s not a great answer, Francis. Though it is absolutely tongue in cheek. I’ve been partners with two other people in a business that didn’t ever get off the ground because it was more an intellectual exercise for the other two parties. And I just realized there’s another part to Gareth’s question. We’ll circle back to that. We’ll make that the final question. I’ve been business partners with two other people in a business that was never going to go anywhere. And I should’ve seen it sooner, and I wasted way too much time, way to much emotional energy. My wife saw it immediately, as is usually the case. She was far smarter than I am. I should’ve listened to her. André, please send me that part of the recording so I can play that for her so I can get some goodwill.

Shawn (02:03:47):
I’ve also had a business partner where I chose the business partner and it was absolutely disastrous. And it was disastrous because, for a variety of reasons, it was one of my best friends. Who is really no longer even a friend. We don’t speak at all. I suspect ruined a 30 year relationship. There are infinite number of lessons in there. It was an evaluation on something that should have so obviously worked, because of the complimentary skillsets, and sort of what I brought to the party and what the other person brought to the party. On paper, everything about it should have worked. And because it should have worked, both of us were willing to make assumptions about how it would work. We didn’t do the hard work of sitting down and talking about what would happen when we would disagree.

Shawn (02:04:47):
And we just didn’t do that work. I mention that, that if you do choose a business partner, don’t skip over that work. They’re rare exceptions, which I guess I’ll mention also. If I had to go pick a business partner… And I guess the third example here, the obvious example. And this is the semi tongue in cheek example, but there’s wisdom in it. So let me kind of do the funny, ‘haha,’ part and then tell you what I think is the wisdom in it. The funny part, someone asked me the other day, a similar question that was like, well, you just need to find somebody who thinks exactly like you do, values everything that you value, works exactly the same way that you work, is very tolerant of your nonsense and you’re tolerant of their nonsense.

Shawn (02:05:37):
And at the end of the day, they’re just somebody you genuinely like and hang out with. If I woke up tomorrow and Jeff Bezos decided that one of those billions was just getting in his way. And he said, “Shawn, I know you’ve been a customer for a long time. I know you had a lot of books that you haven’t read in that damn Kindle that you keep stacking up. So here’s a billion dollars. You have all the time in the world now. You can go finish all those books.” What would you do? I would continue to figure out ways that I can work with my business partner, André. And most likely doing very similar things, because I have been very fortunate to have stumbled on something that I didn’t even… I wouldn’t have believed existed in that collaborative partnership.

Shawn (02:06:25):
I’m exceptionally lucky in there, but in there, the wisdom is in the ingredients. Ingredient number one, I would be friends with André and was before this, would be after this, and am in it. That’s sort of the first critical ingredient. I like spending time with him, I like thinking with him, I like him as a person, I like to hang out with him. If you have a business partner, you’re going to spend a lot of time together. You need to like the person. If you think you can tolerate a business partner, because they produce results, you are on the fast track to hell, because you have to like the other person. And I think really liking them helps. The next most important thing, and it’s probably part of liking someone, is you have to have congruent values. André and I, in very weird ways, our values are very similar, eerily similar.

Shawn (02:07:25):
That’s the weird part. Where we care about things that are outside the norm higher than… It’s weird. An example I think we’ve shared publicly before, maybe in emails, at the end of the traffic engine the last email that went out, I had an idea that from a marketing perspective was bat shit crazy. And I sent André the email. I think it ended Monday. The bat shit crazy idea was let’s discourage people from buying on the last day by giving them effectively an eight week free course of great material an putting it together. From a conversion standpoint, from a last day of a promotion standpoint, that is so bat shit crazy that 999 out 1,000 marketers who do what we do in that same situation would have looked at me like I had nine heads.

Shawn (02:08:20):
And there certainly was a part of me that was like, I think André’s going to think I’m crazy. And as soon as I said it, his response was immediate. Like, “Hell yeah, that sounds great. Let’s do that.” And we’ve since done it again. That’s weird, right? That’s a congruence of values that we both overvalue the customer experience relative than squeezing out a few more dollars. That’s rare. It doesn’t have to be that value. But your values absolutely have to align, because values are a place where we don’t have a lot of give. You can give on methods. There’s lots where you have some buffer. You don’t have a lot of buffer in values. If somebody violates your values, you feel it instantly and viscerally. You just don’t like it.

Shawn (02:09:06):
I think that that values is a core thing. And then I think a last thing with a business partner, and this is probably an extension of liking the other person. It’s probably an extension of similar values and other things. But there is a component of this that is a willingness to… I’ll give you two more things. This one, and then there’s another one. You have to have a willingness to defer the individual decisions, to the decisions of both of you. I’m not explaining this well, so I’ll give it to you as an example. André and I are thinking about doing something that I’m really excited about. Not to put words in André’s mouth, but I think I can say that he’s more reserved about it than I am. And I’m very sensitive to that. And I’m 100% present and comfortable with the fact that I’m really excited about it, but I’m also as present and as comfortable with the fact that he has more reservations about doing it. And I’ve said before, repeatedly the analogy I use is, I like to jump out of airplanes and make parachutes before I hit the ground. I’m comfortable doing that. But I also know that’s not necessarily his style in some ways. The mechanism that that has come out of that, that I think is critical for a good partnership is, I know in my mind that on a scale of one to 10, my enthusiasm for this project is high, but it’s lower than his reservations about the project. So let’s just say on a scale of one to 10, that my enthusiasm is an eight and his reservation is a nine.

Shawn (02:10:52):
There are two ways to approach this. I could try to coerce him. There’s a lot I could do to try to move him. But I know in my heart that there’s reservation. So to have that model, and it’s just a framework for the way I think about it. But to have that model, allows me to look at that and say, “I can be 100% okay that I’m excited about this. And I can also recognize that my excitement doesn’t rise to the level of his reservation. And I’m going to let his reservation be the thing that drives the decision making and feel good about that.”

Shawn (02:11:28):
I don’t feel slighted. I don’t feel like I’m not getting something that I want. Dammit, why can I talk him into it? I feel I have so much peace with it, because of just thinking about that framework. I know that he would respect, and I think a part of it is it gets back to values. I know he respects that. That if the roles were reversed, I have this strong suspicion that if he was kind of mildly uncomfortable and knew I was over the top excited, that the roles would reverse. So it makes it very easy. Having some kind of framework like that. And the last part that-

Shawn (02:12:03):
So having some kind of framework like that. And the last part that I just hinted at a second ago, if you can work with somebody where the work you do is better than what you do on your own in a way that you don’t understand, and that it’s easier in ways that you don’t understand, and that you see the output of that work and are genuinely impressed by it, but with no ego, you don’t feel like you owned it, you made it. André and I write together a lot, and sometimes I can see what he wrote and what I wrote, but it doesn’t feel like that. We create, and it’s better than what I create. And I think, again putting words in his mouth, that what we create together is better than what he creates on his own too.

Shawn (02:12:55):
So find that. And it doesn’t have to be a creative collaboration in the sense of you’re producing video or written word, whatever. You could be making a business, and you and your partner could have complimentary skillsets, so that the thing that you make as a result of that partnership is greater than what either of you could make on your own. That to me is the very definition of a great partnership. And it can happen in different levels too. Lorin and I are not business partners, but we’re very much intellectual partners in this endeavor that we work on together. And it has a similar dynamic, that I believe what happens as a result of the work we do together is better than what Lorin produces or what I produce on my own. Certainly better than when I would produce on my own, I know that. So you can think of partnership broadly speaking.

Shawn (02:13:46):
I think of people who work with me in any capacity as partners in some capacity and partners in this work. So very long answer to a short question, but a beautiful question. I think really the most important question, one of the most important questions we can ask is, who out there could I do this with? Because we’re social creatures. Even me, I love to lock myself in my office and I have my own weirdness around that, and I like to be alone and I like introspection, but I’m also a social creature. There are people I like to be around. And when you find that vibe, it’s electric, and you want more of it and the experience changes. And when you get it right, it’s the most beautiful thing you can imagine. And when you get it wrong, it’s pretty ugly. So stay away from the wrong stuff. Blinding flash of the obvious. All right. Great questions, Francis. Thank you. Last question, Lorin. This is the two of us. This is a hard one too. I’m going to have you answer this. Sorry, but have you answer this and then I’ll chime in.

Shawn (02:14:49):
This is from Gareth as well. This is a Facebook ad question. Gareth says, I’ve created a 900 word advertisement on Facebook and all the metrics are great when analyzed through Lorin’s process. Only thing that’s concerning is the lack of signups. So everything’s great, except the only thing that matters. Gotcha. All right. I’ve generated 85 visitors and zero signups. I’ve never had that in my life. I’ve previewed the ads, clicked the link and it works so I don’t believe there’s a technical reason. I’ve created a split test page with a very simple landing page that repeats the final paragraphs call to action, that there are no surprise and still no signups. In Lorin’s write up, he says, that something people could be clicking through from the learn more button without clicking to read more and fully pre-qualifying, but I’m at a loss to understand how I can send 85 plus people and not get a sign up. Any idea what I can be doing so drastically wrong? Lorin.

Loren Pinilis (02:15:41):
Well, I did notice he said that he checked the tech, which as I’ve mentioned before, anytime I’m seeing a zero, I just want to reassure myself that everything’s functionally working. If it is, and he says he’s checked it, then it gets difficult. What I like to do is I like to set up, I like to kind of envision the flow of someone through the process. So they see the ad and then they click on see more. Then they perhaps click over to the landing page. From the landing page, maybe they spend a certain amount of time on the landing page. Then from that landing page, let’s say it’s a multi page presale. Okay. So then they go to page two, then they go to page three, then they opt-in. Then they visit a sales page, they add to cart, they end up purchasing. However long your process is, I like to get numbers on each step in that process, particularly as I think we covered in the modules, there’s ways that with Google Tag Manager, you can fire a pixel code on a page after someone has been on the page for a certain amount of time, 10 seconds, 15 seconds, something like that. For any page where you are hoping for them to read, like page one of a multi page pre-sale, or all the pages of multi page presale for a long copy landing page, you can add those tags in so that you can see, okay, of the people who are visiting that landing page, how many people are actually sticking around long enough that they’re hopefully consuming the content. And then you just take it from 0.1 all the way to the conclusion and see where does a breakdown occur?

Loren Pinilis (02:17:24):
Now, you say that your metrics are good, so I’m guessing you’re looking at your CTR (All), which is what you would look at for that first step. That’s showing you how many people are having any engagement on your ad. Typically that’s people clicking on see more. Then you’re looking at your CTR, which is how many people are clicking your Facebook ad and then visiting your landing page. Those metrics you’re saying are good. Then the problem is, is okay, probably not there in terms of, well, at least generating clicks. Then you go to the landing page. One thing I would look at is actually calculating of the people who click, how many become landing page views? In the dashboard there’s a way to select landing page views. I don’t think it comes up on any of the kind of preset dashboards. You might need to customize the columns and add it in.

Loren Pinilis (02:18:17):
But look at landing page views. Now what a landing page view is, is it’s when the Facebook pixel loads and you spend some amount of time on there, a fraction of a second, I don’t know exactly when Facebook counts it as a landing page view, but it’s basically after the pages load and the pixel is actually fired. And you would be surprised how many people drop off because of a slow loading page, particularly since many people are viewing it on mobile, they may have poor connections. You’d be surprised how many people will click your link and drop off before the page even loads. If you get above 85%, that’s good. That’s where I would expect it to be. Above 90 is actually very good. I want to see above 85. If you’re seeing 60%, 50%, well then you know, okay, I need to work on my page load speed.

Loren Pinilis (02:19:07):
Take a look and see if the click to landing page ratio is good, if it’s right around 85% or higher. Then it sounds like you’ve got a short page, so I wouldn’t worry about putting any tags to fire to see how much time people are spending on it to see if there’s some break off there. But what you’re getting is you’re just not getting people signing up. So it sounds like you’re going like a one page sign up and they sign up right there. In that case, what you need to do is, whenever you have a breakdown, you know it’s not after that, obviously. You don’t need to worry about stuff after that because you’re not getting signups. There may be problems further down the line, but that’s not your constraint at the moment. So why are you not getting signups? Well, it’s due to something before that. And that’s where a lot of the art comes into play.

Loren Pinilis (02:19:55):
You said that you’re getting good metrics on your Facebook ad. Okay, good. So I look at the data on each step, but then you look at the metrics. But once you have a breakdown that your data reveals, then you need to look further up the stream to say, what is leading to this breakdown? Because just because you have a breakdown at the level of getting signups doesn’t mean that’s where the problem is. The problem may be way, way, way back on step one or step two. And that’s where a lot of art comes into it. Take a look at, is it the messaging? Is it that the ad is not congruent? If you have hypey image that people are clicking on and not even reading your copy, they’re just immediately clicking over to your landing page. And then your landing page is just really short and sweet, people will be like, why am I opting for this? What’s the big deal for this? So, there is a lot of art to it, unfortunately.

Loren Pinilis (02:20:58):
I mean, I wish I could give you some conclusive look here. But some of the places I would look, if you look at the ratio between your CTR (All) and your CTR, I want to see two or three to one, somewhere around there is good. Higher than that, five to one, six to one, that’s okay as long as you’re getting a good CTR. That just means that people are clicking see more, reading your copy and not clicking over. As long as you’re getting good CTR, then that’s probably not a huge issue. If you’re seeing closer to one to one, if your CTR (All) is say 3% and your CTR is 3%, then what that tells you is people aren’t even clicking on see more, they’re just clicking over. So take a look at that and then say, okay, do I need to tweak my image? It could be that your copy, if people are clicking, then your copy is doing a good job of driving clicks, but is it properly setting the stage? Is it congruent with the experience that people are getting on the landing page?

Loren Pinilis (02:22:04):
And then are you selling the sign up or are you just driving the click? You could be very curiosity based, very just take that next step. Or are you selling the benefits of what they’re going to get in the sign up? I imagine if you’ve read what Shawn’s written so far in the traffic engine, you’re doing a good job of selling. Then take a look at your landing page. Again, is it kind of congruent with what you set in the ad? Is there some disconnect there? Is there any technical issue, like slow load time? Or perhaps maybe try a different landing page, maybe add some more copy into it other than that brief little line. See if that matters, really is the type thing where you kind of take a look at it, maybe having an experienced eye look at it and go with your gut.

Shawn (02:23:00):
All right, one technical thing and one conceptual thing, which I think is just a variation of what you said, Lorin. So I’ll say what you said and then take credit for it. It’s my favorite thing to do. So from a technical perspective, make sure you’re testing on mobile and testing desktop. I’ve seen more times than I can count somebody goes through everything, and there’s a problem, they do the tech on their desktop, everything seems to work. And then you open it up on your phone and the opt-in box doesn’t appear, or some random weirdness like that. You got have a very high percentage of mobile users and some weird funkiness with mobile, rule that out. Similar thing that Lorin mentioned, it’s possible, especially in a long format, it’s possible to ask a question in the ad that’s answered on the landing page and it doesn’t require opt-in, and what they want is the answer to the question.

Shawn (02:23:53):
I don’t mean you actually ask a question, you can imply it. But you can open a loop in an ad, and the loop that’s strong enough that somebody clicks through the ad because they want to close that loop, and then you close it on the landing page. And it could be something as simple as, what is this thing? Oh, it requires an opt-in. It’s a thing, it’s a download. It’s not a video. Or whatever, it can be something as simple functionally as that, they just want to know, what is this thing? I’m excited, I’m engaged. Oh, shit, it’s an opt-in, forget it. It could be that, or it could be you’ve hinted at some question or some, like Agora Financial is famous for this, I think I used some of their examples in one of the modules for the traffic engineer, where they talk about Obama’s mistress. You’re like, oh, what are they talking about?

Shawn (02:24:49):
Obama’s mistress was the U.S. Federal Reserve. That was the reveal. So once you know that the hook, once you know what it is, you’ve closed that loop. You’ve got the dopamine shot, you’re not pulled toward it anymore. And then you can bail and you don’t have to worry about it. So I’m not imagining that your ad referenced Obama’s mistress for the Federal Reserve, and then you closed the loop that way. But that’s a really demonstrative way to think about how very subtly we can do that. We can open loops and introduce some kind of question in the prospect’s mind, and want to give them value by answering it before the opt-in. But because we do that, we create a false signal, because what we’ve really done is we’ve introduced a very subtle form of curiosity.

Shawn (02:25:41):
And that’s why curiosity is a tough one to use well. You’ve got to really know how to use curiosity for this very reason, that you can get a lot of people who are just, they need to close the loop to get the squirt of dopamine, to know what the thing was from the ad. And then they can say, okay, great. Oh, it’s a course, or, oh, I see, I’ve going to do this thing, I’m not going to do that. So it’s better. I’ve said this before, I don’t know if I’ve said this yet in the traffic engine, but I think from a 10,000 foot perspective, that when you open a loop in an ad, especially long form copy, you can open and close loops a lot in 900 words of copy, that if you open a loop in the ad, close it in the ad, don’t close it on the landing page.

Shawn (02:26:31):
The only loop to leave open in the ad needs to be one that’s closed with the purchase of the product, or that’s closed with the, whatever the next action is, if you want to make a little bit closer. So, in the past it made sense in a low cost environment to open loops and ads that were closed on landing pages because the economics worked. The economics don’t work anymore to do that. So if you’re going to leave something open that’s going to keep pulling a prospect forward, it needs to pull them forward to a deeper point, not just to the landing page where you’re just paying for curiosity clicks. So I’m not suggesting that’s what you did here, but those are two places I would look just for possibilities.

Loren Pinilis (02:27:15):
One other thought I had, and this was something I realized I didn’t mention in the previous Q&A call that we did, the core Q&A call, CCPA. I’ll explain that in a minute, but CCPA may be rearing its ugly head. When you say that you’re not getting any signups, I would actually look in whatever email CRM you’re using and perhaps verify there, are you seeing signups there? Even if that means that you have a specific signup that is strictly for paid traffic and another one that’s organic so that you know that it’s coming from paid traffic. When I say check your tech, don’t just check to make sure that the signup goes through and that you received the email. Also make sure the pixels are firing, because if you’re seeing zero signups within Facebook, it could be that the pixel is not properly firing. That you’re actually getting signups, but that the pixel event is not just happening.

Loren Pinilis (02:28:14):
So make sure that the pixel event is firing. To do that, you can look at Pixel Helper, I think is what it’s called. I use it, gosh, so much I don’t even think about anymore. It’s actually a Chrome extension that Facebook has authored. So it’s legit. It’s not in anything black hat. And it will tell you the Facebook pixel data that’s firing so that you’ll be able to see it that way. Also within the Facebook Ads Manager side, you can go in there and test events, and run through the funnel and make sure that the pixel events are firing properly. You can do that back in the Events Manager part of Ads Manager. Even if you’re seeing that everything is happening, the pixel events are properly firing, what could be happening is that if any of that activity is coming from California, there’s this new law that has been passed the CCPA, I guess it’s the California Consumer Privacy Act, I think is what it is or something, that has kind of thrown the Facebook world into a tizzy a little bit.

Loren Pinilis (02:29:23):
But basically the long and short of it, is that for a resident of California, your Facebook Events might fire, but then they do not get tracked in Facebook. In other words, your tech is set up perfectly, but if a sign up comes from California, then that will not register in Facebook. It will be anything that happens on the platform, if they click like, if they comment, if they click on an ad, any on platform activity, if they share, on platform activity is properly tracked in California. But anything on a website, so once they click over to your landing page and now they’re off platform, they’re on your website and the pixel events are firing there, even if you’ve done everything correctly and the pixel events are firing correctly, they may not be tracked properly in Facebook if that resident is from California. So what I would do is, CCPA probably does not apply to you. It actually applies to very few businesses. Businesses making, I think 25 million or more in annual revenue.

Loren Pinilis (02:30:33):
There’s a few other qualifications to see if CCPA applies to you. It probably doesn’t. So what you can do is actually go within Facebook and turn off that CCPA feature, it’s called like a limited data tag or something, I can’t remember off the top of my head. But it’s something you only have to do once, you just go in there and you tell Facebook, yeah, we don’t need limited data usage because CCPA does not apply to us. I’ve talked to Facebook reps, and Facebook’s official point of view is that they’re going to provide you the tools to be compliant with CCPA if you decide that you need to, but they’re not going to advise you on whether or not you are, that the CCPA applies to you. They’re not going to advise you on the legality of that. They’ve encouraged everyone to reach out to their own legal teams, and then they’re just going to provide you the tools if you want to use them. What Facebook did was, starting in July, they actually had that limited data use on by default to kind of, I guess, ease everyone into it.

Loren Pinilis (02:31:44):
I don’t really know why they did it that way, but that’s the way it happened. So many people are unaware that they’re being treated as if the CCPA applies to them, even when it doesn’t, because Facebook is doing it by default. All you have to do is go back into your Ads Manager somewhere. I, for the life of me, I can’t remember. I had to do some searching to find it. And it’s only something you have to do once, you just toggle off a little switch that says, yeah, I don’t need to worry about limited data use because CCPA does not apply to me. In the coming weeks, I’m not exactly sure what Facebook is going to do by default. Once you toggle that off, you’re probably good to go. So that is something additional to check with a tech, to kind of summarize, look in your CRM, make sure that you’re actually getting or not getting emails. Even if it works and you’re not seeing anything in Facebook dashboard, then make sure that the pixel events are firing properly, and finally check to see if you’ve got that CCPA toggle on.

Shawn (02:32:51):
One last thing, Gareth, all of this of course may not apply to your specific example, so send me an email with a link to the ad and a link to the landing page or pages and take a look. If there’s just some weirdness in it, we can take a look and maybe give you some advice on that if it’s more of a content thing. All of these things, we’re sort of going through lots of different permutations of answers to be broadly useful for anyone listening to the recording of the call or reading the transcript, knowing that in your particular situation’s probably not necessarily going to be one of those things. It’s probably just some weird content, mismatched, something going on like that. But this is all part of what we need to evaluate to answer our questions.

Shawn (02:33:34):
And that’s really the last thing. I think we’re out of questions and out of time. I guess we’ll sort of leave everybody with this that I think is a theme from this call, is that it’s easy and I think a lot of people approach it this way, and I’m not dispiriting them in any way at all, but it’s easy to look at a lot of what we do as client service professionals, especially with paid traffic in a reductionist linear way. Like, let’s go look at this piece of data and try to figure out why this thing’s not happening. And in my experience and the way you’ve heard Lorin describe it, it’s never that. There’s never a thing. It’s always all of the things, and all the things tell you where to look. Your business is a system. It’s a system with many parts, and those parts are necessary, but individually they’re not sufficient.

Shawn (02:34:28):
And from the interaction of those parts, effects emerge that no single part produces. That system’s theory in like 90 words. So your business, and your paid traffic and other things are an emergent effect of lots of things happening, the overwhelming majority of which you are completely unaware of. You have no idea the context of the person who is viewing your ad is in, how they feel, none of that. So, so much of what we do is outside of our awareness, but we do have a body of information we can look at. Lorin talked about some of this when he was talking about how he might troubleshoot this. And it’s not looking at, if you look just in your Facebook interface, you’re going to see some data. And if you look at Google Analytics, you’re going to see some data. And if you look at your email service provider, you’re going to see some data.

Shawn (02:35:20):
None of those pieces of information independently really will tell you anything, unless there’s just a technical mistake. A mistake like, the pixel is not firing, and of those 85 people, you got 25 signups, you just didn’t know it. Okay, that’s something that you might uncover and realize that the problem that you thought was happening wasn’t the actual problem. There is no problem, everything’s fine. In the absence of that, what we really need to do as client service professionals who work in this field is look at the system data, and then infer from that data what we think the story is that’s being told. We might have a certain audience or certain characteristics that have a certain set of metrics at the beginning of a journey, and those metrics then change when they interact with our content, and then there’s a lot of other data. But monkeying around with the little pieces of that isn’t going to produce much. In general, what it will do is it will move you backwards.

Shawn (02:36:21):
And there’s a sort of a funny thing that happens with the system, is that when you try to make these linear reductionist changes, you often break the emergent effects you want from the system. And a classic example we use a lot, I think we’ve used it in some of the email series we’ve written, is that if you have a system that has paid ads to generate leads, to then send people through an email series to buy a product, you can highly optimize lead gen and break the entire system. You can make the acquisition of leads do so many things to get so many more leads, but that actually has downstream consequences that kills the whole point of what you’re doing. So it’s critical, and you don’t have to spend 10 hours getting all the data and get paralyzed by the navel gazing, but you do need to know what the system is doing, and you need to know the part that you’re concerned about, in Gareth’s example, the parties concerned about he’s sending traffic to a landing page and not getting conversions.

Shawn (02:37:21):
That exists within a larger context. So he needs to step back. We all do. Always step back and look at the whole context, look at as many pieces of data as we can, and then tell ourselves the story that data is telling. And if we can’t tell the story, and we need to need to keep at it until we can. And that story could be, you’ve had 1,000 people who have interacted with this long ad and that ad has set them up to go to this webinar. And of those 1,000, 500 sign up and 5 show up. Well, something’s wrong. We know now that we did one part really well, but there’s a mismatch. And we don’t care about what our click through rate of the ad was when 500 out of 1,000 people are showing up to the webinar. That’s misplaced precision. So then it would become a question of, how is the system I have created able to produce this weird result, where we have 1,000 people click on an ad, 500 sign up for a webinar, 5 stay for the webinar?

Shawn (02:38:26):
There’s a weird emergent effect from that system of interaction, let me look at the whole system and look at all of those parts, and then decide what I think is going on. Not look at, what was my click through rate or what is my opt-in rate? Because those are just pieces of a larger puzzle. That’s really the work. That’s the work we spend our lifetime doing as professionals, is we figure out what is contributing to the effects that we’re seeing without breaking the system in the process. André, you’ve been silent. I think you’re kicking back, shopping for your racing [crosstalk 00:02:39:05]. I think he’s bought all the parts when we’ve been on this Q&A call. He’s just like, oh, whatever, he’s got it all set up. Anything Lorin, André to add? I appreciate you guys always being on the call, of course. And thanks, Lorin, for all of your contributions. But as we wrap up, I want to say thanks to you guys as always. Thanks for being here. And anything you want to throw out there before we wrap up for the day?

Loren Pinilis (02:39:28):
No, I’m good. Thanks everyone for your time and hit us up in the modules if you have any questions. And I hope everyone goes out there, and in honor of Shawn, I hope everyone crushes it, bro.

Shawn (02:39:39):
I knew that was coming.

Shawn (02:39:45):
Yeah, this has been great. I don’t have anything to add other than this was pretty awesome. I didn’t even fall asleep.

Shawn (02:39:52):
There’s the standard of excellence [crosstalk 02:39:53] … All right, for everyone on the call and everyone who submitted questions, thank you very much. It’s always a pleasure and an honor to be working with all of you. So as Lorin said, go forth and crush it. See you guys [crosstalk 00:28:05]-

André (02:40:05):
Yeah, it’s pretty cool that 100% of people have stayed all the way through to the end.

Shawn (02:40:11):
Weekend fun with numbers. All right. See you guys later.

Shawn (02:40:14):
Take care, man.

End of AGENCY and Freelancer Training Lesson