Predictable Prospecting
Growth Marketing Funnel
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Samuel Woods transitioned from the design world to growth marketing and created an agency specializing in conversion copywriting. Creating copy that converts requires that we move beyond ourselves to connect with our target buyer at every stage of the buying cycle. In addition to providing value it’s increasingly important that every campaign message is crafted with the human in mind. Using a buyer’s language to address concerns is a powerful method that Samuel teaches clients and discusses with us today.
Episode Highlights:- Why sharing benefits is not enough
- Understanding the language of your ideal buyer
- The importance of rooting your campaign messaging in buyer language
- Samuel’s discovery exercise
- Exploring buyer’s motivations
- Testing to validate message language
- Remaining agile through processes
- Leveraging the power of email by spacing touch points
Resources: Samuel J Woods Response Copy Connect on LinkedIn Follow Samuel on Twitter
Episode Transcript
Marylou: Consistent Growth and Powerful Copy, Samuel Woods.Sam believes growth can be exponential and consistent. Taking the time to get to know your target buyers is more than getting to know just the facts. Understanding their emotional ties to the decisions they make will help you write compelling copy that get your conversions up, and allows you to scale. Sam’s agency, Response Copy, specializes in conversion copywriting that helps his clients set massive growth that’s consistent and scalable. You can also check out his growth marketing tips at his website samueljwoods.com. In this Podcast, Sam reveals insights into understanding the language of your ideal buyer, the importance of testing and validating your message, and tips for timing your email touch points with prospects. Okay everyone, today I have Sam Woods. Sam runs an agency and the service that really helps people grow their revenue by at least double, most triple for what the type of work that he does. I met Sam in a Mastermind, actually as part of my continuing education I’m always looking to learn how to write better emails. I joined the Mastermind group, met him early on and saw in him that oh boy this is a great resource, a great person to get to know because he understands what we struggle with at our part of the pipeline from the cold queue through the working status qualification and then of course nurture, is how do we motivate people and engage them through this process and get them excited about having a conversation with us. Or in terms of the cold queue, how to start those conversations to people we don’t know. I’ve asked Sam to join us today and I’d like to always start by asking, Sam how did you get involved in this business and what got you interested in focusing on this particular type of writing? Sam: Sure, well Marylou it’s nice to talk to you, nice to be here, thanks for having me on. My story is fairly simple and almost typical I’d say. I actually started of learning and doing graphic designs. My background is in graphic design. And that turn into creating websites for people, this is probably wow six, seven years ago, so a while ago for me. Starting with websites, starting with just creating layouts and understanding human psychology from the standpoint of visuals and graphics and color. The clients that I worked with then they love their size, the size did well but they came back to me and asked me, “Sam how do we actually get leads? How to get clients? How do we turn our website into a lead generation machine or even a sales machine?” That put me on a path on marketing. I start learning about direct response marketing. Some of the old school guys like Gary Halbert, and Dan Kennedy, and a few other people who do a lot of work then. I fell in love with what J. Abraham says, I’m a huge J Abraham fan in terms of general philosophy and marketing philosophy. I got turned into marketing and that led me on that path of okay, people come to our site or people see contents somewhere, how do you get them to respond? How do you connect and engage with them and get them to respond to what you like them to do? I started doing that and helping clients with setting up funnels of different types, anything from lead generation, inbound, to even getting it to outbound, sending out post card, done that a lot. That got into cold email or direct outreach outbound email generation too. From the graphic stuff to marketing, which has then been the core part of what I do for the past four years now which is helping companies use growth marketing which is a combination direct response and the plot psychology, to use that to generate quality leads and do that faster and quicker than they have before. That’s my start. That’s how I really got into it. My clients came with needs and I responded to those needs and here we are today. Marylou: Right. Well, for those of you who don’t know the term direct response. It’s the ability to reach out directly to people that you have targeted, that’s what our framework does. We are putting in our pipeline those companies with whom we think are going to close the fastest with the highest revenue potential. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: We may not know them but we are reaching out to them and targeting them directly as opposed to casting a wide net out there and getting the minnows and the whales, we tend to want to really focus on those whales. Sam’s has just cornered that market in figuring out how to do that. So tell me Sam, what are some of the misconceptions that your clients come in to working with you? What are the things that they come in that you see most often that if you can wave a magic wand and say I wish they knew this, what would that be? Sam: Yeah. It’s a many of things but it comes down to few key mindsets that people have when they think about doing marketing and sales and then getting those leads and conversions. For the most part, into a very degree and different variations, people assume that in any marketing and sales messaging betters about them. And not let say their target audience, their target ideal client profile or person. We use terminologies like the buyer, persona, ideal profile and so on. People have the assumption that, which is often true that they have a great company, they have a great practice service, and then they can offer for a lot of value to people. Those things are true and they should be true. But when you are looking to start a conversation or get in touch with someone and engage them, you have to drop that attitude and that mindset. It can’t be about you, yet. It has to be about the person that you’re trying to reach. You can trace this mindset back to a core fundamental belief that I have which I think is going to be helpful and that is whoever understands their buyer the best will always win. You have to understand your buyer better than they understand themselves, and better than your competitor understands them. It does come down to understanding people, understanding the context in which they receive your message, where they’re coming from, who they are, what they’re looking for. I think that’s the core issue at hand here is understanding other people first before you make an attempt to connecting with them. Coming from the point of it’s all about my company and my product and my service, it will become that at some point, but first of all it is about other people first. The second thing is that you can’t assume unless you know in highly detailed outline who these people are. You can’t assume too much about them when they first see your message. Context in which they see a message, that matters a lot. A lot of marketing and a lot of content marketing is usually outlining how your product works, your opinion on things, and your take on different features or products, or services or your take on the market in general. That’s cool but you have to angle your messaging towards what these people are asking themselves. All your buyers, they come with a set of beliefs, they come with a set of assumptions, they have suspicions, they have fears, they have needs. It’s all these psychographics and all of these psychological angles that you have to account for. Even as simple as answering questions and let’s see your content marketing, you put out article or maybe white papers or webinars. If you create that marketing messaging from a standpoint of what are these people asking themselves and what are some of the bleeding neck issues? What’s keeping them up at night? If you take that approach in terms of answering those questions, your messaging will instantly become more relatable and more impactful. I think that’s the core of the assumption that people make. It looks different whoever you talk to but I think at very basic level is the assumption that your product and your service in your company is what matters when actually it’s about your buyer. Whatever your messaging is, that as long as you talked about how great your features are or what benefits are, even benefits are decent but you have to go one step further in that your conversations and your messaging in whatever format it is, it can’t be about how awesome your things are, it has to be about connecting with your target buyer and your target market and answering their questions, speaking to them from their context, from where they’re at, in any buying process or lifecycle stage. Marylou: So basically what you’re saying, because we all get those emails were we read about the features of a product or service. Sam: Yes. Marylou: And then it’s almost as if we are given the task of trying to figure out how what we want fits into what that feature is. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: And you’re saying that this is a common error that if we can flip that, and I heard you say features translate to benefits but benefits go even to deeper desires, wants, fears, skepticism, all of those other things. Sam: Yup, and needs. Marylou: That’s another great point, and needs. Because we are in our world at the cold conversation stage, we’ve got to really focus on that. How difficult is that for you to teach clients to do that? Or do you do that for them to get them thinking? Sam: So both, yeah. Marylou: How do you get them to that deeper level? Sam: So it’s a combination of things. It’s partly teaching and showing and also helping them through a process we can discover this things, discover the language of your ideal profile or your ideal buyer persona. It’s important that anytime you set up a new campaign or you look into do whether it’s outreach, outbound or inbound, you have to route and anchor your messaging in the language of your ideal market and your ideal buyers. Doing the research necessary to extract that language. That can be done through looking at what people are already saying, and other types of content that exist, you can learn a lot from just picking up what people are saying in book reviews, or what they’re saying on testimonials on other sites. A great thing to do is look at your competitors’ websites and look at the testimonials that they get. That will show you and that will teach you a lot of what people are expecting, what they’re looking for. You can also obviously get the language and the default process and the paradigm from just speaking with your existing customers. That’s a great place to start. When I work with clients, we usually do a combination of just that. We spend some time doing research and discovery, looking for their messaging, the words, trying to uncover the paradigm, trying to uncover how they view the world and how they view their situation in relation to your type of product or service. Also, I do spend a lot of time also just instilling this mindset and talking through with my clients and showing them, not just telling them this is how it is but actually showing the process and showing them how to uncover the messaging. We walk through better cross with clients. We don’t just leave them on the road and then they go off and do something. We walk them through it. For a lot of people, even if you’ve been in a business for 10, 20, 30 years, you start assuming that you know everything there’s to know about your customers. But your customers change, their needs change, their situations change. Whatever worked a year ago is probably not going to work right now. It’s important to always gather that feedback, gather that data. Look at how the people are behaving. Even sometimes disregarding what they say they will do and just look at their behavior. There’s a lot of this, a lot of what you need can be found on what you already have. We walked through a process of discovering and uncovering that and just showing and really opening people’s eyes to, look, your existing customers have a lot of valuable feedback that they can give you. Even speaking to leads or marketing qualified leads or sales qualify leads, ask them the right type of questions, you will get answers that you can then use in other messaging as well. Marylou: That’s a great point. I tell this story a lot about a client of mine who were, they were accountants. They saw themselves as accountants. They described themselves as accountants. But what may do, they doesn’t sound like as in depth exercises what you put your clients through but we did a very brief interview with some of their clients, maybe 10 to 15 of them we interviewed. We asked the question. When you think of ABC Company, how would you describe their people? And not one said they’re my accountant. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: Not one. They said they’re my business coach, they are my kind of right hand men, my right arm. They keep me out of trouble, they are my growth experts. Never did we hear the word accountants. Sam: That’s fascinating. Marylou: Yeah. Sam: And often whatever you think is the reason why the people are buying from you is usually not the primary reason. Marylou: Right. Sam: That’s one thing that I discover all the time. We think we know why people buy from us, why they buy our product or service, but it’s usually something else. That something else is usually on a deeper level than satisfying an immediate need. On the surface it is about satisfying immediate need or getting a specific outcome. But if you go a few layers deeper, you’ll always uncover a stronger emotional reason why people do what they do and why they behave the way they behave. Marylou: This research portion of the work that you do, it’s a typical engagement. How long does that take for you to pull the right information out with your client and work side by side with them and why? Sam: Yeah, sure. It depends a bit on the scope of what we’re trying to do and what part of the funnel we’re working on, and if we’re looking at the whole funnel or just some parts of it. But anything from a couple weeks to a couple of months depending on how quick we can get access to people. Sometimes we can uncover some real gold within a few weeks. At that point, once you have gold and you actually take them, use it. Sometime we have to spend a bit more time doing some research because it might be, maybe your target audience or your buyers are hard to get to. They might not be readily available, there might not be whole lot of information already out there so we might have to spend more time getting qualitative data. I’d say a couple of weeks or couple months, depends on the scope. Marylou: So the planning is, even in our world, planning is a very important part of success. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: Tell us what’s next? After we get our buying personas complete and we know who we want to market to, we know the message that we think will resonate, what’s next? Sam: Then it’s a matter of taking all that quantitative data that we have. Then kind of, the undefined collection of things. We’re turning that into actual phrases, and sentences, and words. What we tend to do is we create inventories of phrasing and sentences that we can use. For example, if we have a heading of a particular pain point, maybe a target buyers looking to do their accounting quicker and not spend hours on it. Then, under that heading, how can we phrase that pain points? What kind of different sentences can we use? What emotional angle can we use in each sentence? That can be as granular as writing out 10 different sentences each capturing a different emotion. We create an inventory in that sense of these different phrases we can use and language and words. After we’ve done that, we put that in front of people. We partly put that in front of existing customers, kinda get a quick validation on yes that’s actually how I feel or how I felt. And then obviously you want to put that in front of a potential new business and potential new customers as well. That can be done either via outbound, direct outreach, or can be done even in blog posts or articles or white papers. It’s important that you have an inventory of different language and phrases and words that you can use in test and see what are people are resonating with. Cause even if you write out ten different sentences for example, there might only be two or three of those are really hitting home, and really getting people to perk up and respond. Marylou: Yes as we talked about I think in our last session. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: There are certain levels of awareness. Sam: Yes, exactly. Marylou: There’s unaware which we get a lot in our world because we’re reaching out sometimes with new product or with new service. That awareness level, there could be a problem awareness, there could be a solution awareness, there could be a product awareness. You have to make sure that you hit those three different messages that you have to test and get out there and start essentially tracking the results. Sam: Yeah exactly. What we can usually find is that our processes are very well defined. We always tell to trust the process even though we might be in the midst of the research and they’re wondering what on earth is going to come out of this. We always tell them, look, trust the process because at the end of this, or even at before the end of it, in the middle of it all, you’ll start seeing trends. You’ll start seeing it okay, these emails would this type of messaging is getting great opens and great responses. Then, you take that and you amplify it. It’s always about keeping track of what’s going on and being able to be quick in making changes. What people responded to three months ago is probably not what they’ll respond to tomorrow. Things change, people’s perceptions changes. Having a process where you’re continuously testing and also being able to make changes quickly and being agile in how you operate, that’s going to be key. It’s important to also have a process that allows for that as opposed to be being locked into this very rigid, very structure, very formal process, but instead having guiding principles. I like to think of it as having heuristics as opposed to algorithms. If you think in terms of that, it’s more about okay here’s a room in which you can move in, on Monday you might want to be on the left side of the room and on Thursday you might want to be on right side of the room, as opposed to here are the exact steps to take. Because when you deal with people, that’s the key. That comes back to what I said early on, when you deal with people, there’s always, always an element of surprise, of unpredictability, and a lot of variables that you just don’t even know about and certainly can’t control. Making room for that in how you do your marketing and how you do your outbound and inbound is going to be key in terms of getting the results you want to get. Just know that you’re always talking to a person on the other end. There’s always a person who’s opening up your email on their smartphone, and who’s reading at maybe 7:00AM in the morning. They’ve just drop off their kids before they are going to work. How is that person going to respond to your message? What do they need to understand and believe about themselves and you in order for them to respond to what you’re asking for, right? Always keep in mind that there’s a person on the other end. You have to account for humanity, and the psychology of the people you’re reaching out to cause that is what will make a break any campaign at any day. Marylou: Right, so the word campaign has come up. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: I think one of the misnomers especially with my audience who has read Predictable Revenue was under the assumption that one or two emails, and that’s it you’re done. Tell us about the campaigns? Sam: Yes. One or two emails then you’re done, you may say yeah you’re done. You’re not going to get much pay on that. Quit today, pretty much. If you want us to talk about direct outbound campaigns and e-coding the campaigns, having more than two steps is going to be more critical because you’ll often see responses on the second, maybe second, probably third or fourth email. That’s just again accounting for the fact that if people receive your email on a Monday, they might be walking into meeting. They have no time to look your email. Then after that meeting, they’re getting another request from other people and there’s things to do. They might have thought to themselves when they got your first email, “Oh, this sounds pretty good actually, I’ll deal with it later.” Well, that later never comes. People forget, things happen, things come up, you just never know. If you only have one email then that’s it, you’re not going to hear from them. But if you have a second or third email, or fourth or fifth email, and this is a touch point, you’re increasing your chances of getting in front of them again, connecting with them again, and being able to get their response when it fits them, and for them to feel like, “Yes, today is a great day for me to deal with this, I have some time.” You can’t just do a one off campaign. This is a process that you have to have in place that runs continuously. If you have let’s say a direct outbound campaign or a process you want to call it, that consist of let’s say five or six emails, then you’ll let that run its course to a list and then you’ll let that list rest for a bit, then you go back, and recycle that campaign into the same list. Leaving it up to chance and leaving it up to one hit wonder will never work out well. It is always important to understand that your emails reach people at different times. They may not be ready, they may not be aware enough, or they may not just have time to deal with it when they see it. By stringing out touch points throughout a period of time, that is how you increase your chance of actually getting a response. Marylou: Okay. Sam: You can say the same thing for inbound and different types of other campaigns too. It’s staying tough in mind is the usual phrase people use. Following a process where you’re not just doing marketing for a while and you do nothing for a while, cause then you’ll be at least famine roller coaster cycle there were you have a lot of new business coming in then nothing for a while and then a lot of business coming in and then nothing. Having consistency in what you do and how you do it, that’s going to be the key for getting long-term results. Marylou: And it sounds like your firm does address the multiple streams that come in from lead generation. My heart is always with the outbound, so I was like, hence I slat most of our conversation to that. Sam: Sure. Marylou: We do have the influx of inbound leads. I know you work with landing pages and all of those other forms of lead generation that all come into the funnel. Sam: Yeah, and the way I see it is just you’re stacking your odds and you’re layering how many different streams of leads you can have, and even how you deal with them when they come in, right? You can have high touch campaign where you have phone calls and meetings, or you can have low touch campaigns where there’s just emails that go out. For example you have a SAAS and you have the, during an on boarding face, you can either have a high touch there too or a low touch, depending on how much resource you have available to yourself and to your company or how valuable that lead might be to you. The way I look at it is as long as you have the foundation right in which you have the messaging, you have the right message to the right person at the right time, you understand the psychographics of who they are, and if you have a really strong offer of whatever might be for the next step in a sales process. If you have a hook and a promise to that, then you can layer the channels on top of it. You can reuse that same hook promise and offer and use that for your outbound. You can use in your inbound and that could be either through webinar, or articles, or white papers, or whatever that might be. But as long as you have the foundation right, as long as you have the core right, then all you’re doing when you’re adding more channels and more campaigns on top of it is you’re stacking the odds and you’re layering the different avenues you have which should open up new streams of leads. It’s a quick way of doing growth with just—people have this perception that you can grow over night which is never true but if you can stack and layer your channels and campaigns on top of each other, then those are incremental changes, right? Marylou: Right. Sam: If you can have 50% in one campaign, 8% in another, 3% in a different campaign, 20% in a another campaign, then all those small percentages are going to add up. That’s how you get to double or triple growth. It’s you stack those campaign in top of each other. Marylou: Right, so let me reiterate that for our audience. Sam: Yeah. Marylou: First and foremost, before you decide how you’re going to reach out to your prospective clients, you’ve got to fundamentally know why they should change, why change now, and why choose you. As Sam was saying, you have to get down to the core essence of the why regardless of product feature. There are features that translate but it’s the ultimate benefit that they’re going to get. Once that is figured out with Sam’s guidance and his team, then they work with you to figure out, okay what are the different streams or what we call channels. What are the different channels we should send these messages through? As he was saying, when you layer or overlay multiple channels on top of a really good core message system, that in aggregate is going to give you that double or triple growth. Sam: Yes, exactly. Marylou: Okay people, so we cannot take shortcuts here. Sam: Yeah exactly. I really want to stress it too. This is another misconception, right? People think that okay, one or two channels and one or two outreach or inbound mechanisms are enough to double lead quantity or even double or triple just like and that’s simply not true. That’s not reality. Marylou: Right. Sam: Reality is always that you’ll have some channels up perform others. There’ll be some messaging that’s going to be stronger than others. But if you can’t stack them in top of each other, that’s how you can double or triple your growth and lead some sales. Marylou: It’s like a symphony where you have all the different parts of the symphony, all the different percussion instruments, you have the wind instruments, and they all work together to produce this amazing result. Sam: Exactly, that’s it. Marylou: Yeah. Let’s talk now about the typical engagement. Who would be a good candidate for your service and how long could they get expect to be working before they start activating? Because the planning process is really a joint partnership in that you’re relying on the client to get you the information because you don’t know their product necessarily. You may have some experience but you don’t know their uniqueness. They have to work with you to get that piece done. Let’s pretend that is a certain timeline you said, anywhere from two weeks to two months. What about activation? What can they look for for activation about? Sam: I want to go a step back and say during this assembly process, before we start an engagement, we do look for a couple of areas that we can get our clients quick wins early on. Even though we do have which is a critical part which is that whole gathering data and understating people and sending products, we do make sure that okay, what are some quick wins that we can recommend right away that make a huge difference. Marylou: That’s nice like a fast track. Sam: Exactly right, so we have those the things that going on at the same time. I don’t know why we still see this but one of the most common, common places and areas we can get a quick win is to simply implement resurrection campaign is what they call. Or a second reactivation campaign. Marylou: Like we call dead accounts. Sam: Yeah, dead accounts. Or even leads that have gone cold. You can apply this to different parts of the life cycle of a customer of yours. You can apply a resurrection campaign to leads that have gone cold, to leads that are sales qualified leads but they maybe have responded to like I say, our proposal or something else. You can also apply a resurrection campaign to past customers. It’s a reason why they should buy from you again, probably. It’s easier and it’s more profitable to get a past customer to buy from you again than it is to chase after a new customer. Marylou: Sure. Sam: What we love to do and we always find this to be true, or for the most part with our clients, is they don’t have those resurrection campaigns. Not because they don’t want them but they usually don’t think about, it’s not something that you usually consider and realized you can actually implement that really easily. Marylou: Right. Sam: We usually do one of those campaigns or a couple of those campaigns where it makes sense to do so and implement that really quickly, and that will usually plug any leaks that exist in your funnel and set you out for even great results later on. While that’s happening, then we are also doing that assembly. We gather all the data and information that we need. Marylou: You are getting invalidation from that campaign, the resurrection campaign to help you with the language now a day. Sam: Exactly, right? It all feeds into each other like this all ecosystem that uses talks. It just feeds in each other. It’s a great way to get feedback. Once we’ve done that, then we activate whatever their campaign is. We usually get activation to a high intense period of activation where we’re testing a lot of messaging, we’re testing numerous different languages and words, and we’re testing channels, and we’re testing formatting. That process can take anything from one to three months depending on the scope of your funnel, depending on what part of the funnel, and also and especially depending on what we’re seeing in terms of feedback from the first month or two. Sometimes, we can hit on a really great campaign, a really great messaging really quickly and that will make a huge differences. So what we do is we focus on that and amplify that result. Marylou: Right. Sam: However, what is most common is that from the first month or so, you’ll have some good results in one campaign, some decent results in a different campaign, and you have to do a lot of analyzing the data in terms of okay, what’s actually going on here? What are the factors that are contributing to this growth, the kind of trick that we’re seeing? And then what can we do to amplify that and turn that from let’s say an 8% conversion to a 20% or 30% conversion in terms of response or anything else. It is very important that in the first month or two of that activation that we review the data, we make changes on a weekly basis sometimes. You have to be really quick on what you change. You might launch a couple of campaigns with messaging that you think is going to work but then the results aren’t what you want them to be. You need to be, okay let’s change how we do this and let’s make that change fast as opposed to running something into the ground that’s not working right. Agility is really critical when it comes to marketing and sales. Being able to change, being able to make adjustments to what the feedback you’re getting is. You’re looking at a couple of months there. Marylou: Which goes back to the preparation of multiple ways to language something so that you’re basically going down the list and saying okay, well this didn’t work. Now, we’re going to implement this one because it was the next in priority as being important. Sam: Exactly. Marylou: That’s great, and you calibrate as often as you need to. Sam: As often as we need to. Marylou: Okay. Sam: On a granule level, that looks like it really depends on the client, the scope, and the funnel and what we’re doing. That whole activation process is early on a very intense period of a month or two, sometimes less, just depending or to feel what we’re getting. But once we have a few, once we learn enough about the messaging and the channels that we’re getting, from there on out, we can keep that running for forever. For however long someone wants to use it, right? Our typical engagement is anything from three to six months and beyond. Just depending on how many funnels people want to work on, how many campaigns we want to launch, and how long they want to keep on going with it. Marylou: That’s great. As we’re finishing up here, I’m sure some people in the audience are thinking wow it’s a lot of work, which it is. Sam: That’s worthwhile. Marylou: It’s definitely worthwhile. It’s on the road to Predictable Revenue. It’s on the road to generating double, triple growth consistently and repeatedly. But if we were to think about step one, and you’re out there buying into this concept and thinking boy, this is something I want to explore, what advice do you have in terms of taking the steps? Sam: Yeah. If your first step is okay, I get it, this makes sense. I want to move forward in terms of just going down that path. The first thing you should do, unless you already have this, but if you do have this you should do this anyway, that is to flesh out your buyer personas and what you know about your ideal target. Not just who your customers are now, but also flesh out okay, what are they like before they buy from us? Whatever a person is like when they bought from you is not always who they were before they bought from you. Getting a deeper understanding of your ideal buyer personas or your target market, that’s a first step. It’s not about understanding their age and if they have a dog or two or three or a house or a car, these are information. What you’re looking for are the psychographics. What they think, what they feel, what they know, the beliefs they have, the suspicions they have, the fears they have. You want to really go down on a deep psychological level, you don’t have to spend weeks or months during these. It’s a rabbit hole in it of itself. If you can fill out a document that contains some of the core human emotions, the type of persons that these people are, are they more analytical, then that’s the type of a person that will respond to different messaging. Or are they more creative in handling thing, are they more strategic? Just having an understanding of your target market but also your customers are, fleshing that out, that’s going to go a long, long way because the messaging you get from that will make a huge difference in what you are saying, and what you doing with the channels, and the campaign you put in place. Marylou: Yeah and you know really people, it’s very true still to this age, and that is people first look at things emotionally and then they switch more to a logic to justify the decision that they want to buy. Sam: Exactly. Marylou: It doesn’t matter if it’s B2B, business to business or business to consumer. At some level, you’ve got to hit them emotionally. It could be curiosity, mystique, you mentioned fear, greed, the typical human emotions. Check them off your list to make sure. There’s this IT guy, he’s analytical but does he want a promotion out of the deal? Sam: Right. Marylou: Or it is a marketing person who’s very creative but once a bigger seat at the table with the big boys in sales? You have to really think it through to that level. Sam: Yes, absolutely. Marylou: Regardless of your product. Sam: Yeah. It might seem like okay, you’re going too far back, or that’s too much work, or how’s that going to result in bottom line increase? Understanding that is at least half the battle, it’s usually probably 80% of the getting to the results you want. When you then put them together, the copy, and the landing pages, and the campaigns, all of that will fall into place and can be put together really quickly when you have this bulk work already done. Marylou: Right. Sam: You might think of it as wow, we’re not getting anywhere. All we’re doing is just getting information, and looking, and understanding, and reviewing. But yes that’s exactly what you’re doing, that’s exactly what you need to do because then putting the other campaigns will happen really quickly, that that’s the easy part of that point. Marylou: Right. Sam: That’s another misconception that I want to really mention is that people think that the constraints is or are the campaigns that you have and the mechanisms of it and that’s not true. Those things can be done really easily, really quickly. The tech exists for it, the apps and the technology, that’s happened really quickly. The constraint is actually you understanding your buyers and your market better than they understand themselves and better that your competitors understand them. Marylou: There’s a phrase I remembered that once you understand that, the copy writes itself. Sam: Yes Marylou: Not to be little what you, your team do. Sam: Sure. Marylou: It certainly, Sam: But it’s true. Marylou: It’s a hard thing to do because we’re so focused on why don’t take it, why these feature will help them, and it’s not about that. Sam: Yes, exactly. Marylou: It really isn’t. So if we sit back and pretend that we’re having coffee with the guy right across from us, they’re humans. At the end of the day, everybody’s a human. There are some underlying needs, desires, wants, fears that we need to get to. Sam: Yup, exactly. Marylou: And then take it from there and then morph that into this is the feature, this is the benefit, this is the deeper benefit, this is the desire. Well, thank you so much Sam for your time. How do people get a hold of you? Sam: Sure, they can find me on Twitter at @heysamwoods or you can go to my website stimulead.com. That’s where my agency is housing and resides. I also have a personal blog it’s samueljwoods.com. Either one of those two, you’ll find me. Marylou: Alright great, well thank you again for your time. It has been great. Sam: Thanks so much.