Marketing Matters Kickoff Session

Webinar Transcript

Welcome, everybody. I’m Alan Gross. I’m joined by my colleague, Deanna Fisher. And on behalf of the GSM marketing team, thank you for spending a little time with us. This is the kickoff of a brand new series.

We’re calling it Marketing Matters. And if you got the double or triple meaning of this, then you’re obviously in the right place.

We’re here to ask questions. We’re here to answer questions. We’re here to help think about things that frankly are part of our our reality all day every day, and I and I and I appreciate that you have at least some interest in in experiencing where this goes. This is intended to be a series that goes all year. We have a lot of things to talk about.

And I’ll I’ll tell you that that everything that’s on our mind here to share, if we do it right, should never ever sound like an infomercial. In fact, if you hear anything that even sounds like an infomercial, then we failed because our purpose here is to have good conversations to express what we’ve learned, what we’re hearing, what we’re reading, what we’re seeing, what we’re doing, what what we feel like is working, maybe what’s not working like it once did, and new things that may be interesting to you to help clarify and enable you to do what you do better.

And frankly because we spend so much of our time behind the curtain in the service of others doing this, we thought it’d be a lot of fun to just lean in and step up and start here. So thank you for for for at least, being part of this experiment and see where it goes. I’ll I’ll tell you upfront that this works best if it’s a conversation.

And I know that’s a little difficult because this is not a Zoom meeting. It’s a webinar and I’m I have the microphone and you don’t.

But it’s not meant to silence you. It’s meant to just appreciate that if we do get to a larger space and we want to have more active conversations, we’ll do breakouts, we’ll do roundtables, we’ll do other kinds of things as well, and we’re already contemplating what that might be.

But I would actively like to ask you to forward your comments, forward your questions as we’re talking, as we’re discussing, as ideas and thoughts come to you.

As you as you may know in in in in this environment, there is a chat window, of course. Feel free to use it amongst yourselves. But if you’d like to ask me or Deanna a question, please do so through the q and a window that you have.

Deanna is is is monitoring that window, so that I can be eyes on you and talk about these things directly. But but certainly she’s gonna bring up your questions anytime you have something that we can share with the group.

I’m gonna ask you a few polling questions. There are a couple of things I’d like to know and kind of express and talk about together.

But ultimately, this is about creating value and it’s a shared idea, which is it’s on me I think to deliver what we think are interesting and actionable insights.

I think it’s on you and I hope it’s on you, you see it as on you to listen to what parts of it can you take away that make make this information important and useful to you.

Please understand that what you see in terms of our suggested sequence of topics and such is just that. It’s a suggestion.

If you’d like to to say, it’d be awesome if we covered a different topic or more of something that matters to you. I’d love to hear about it.

This is in fact that perfect moment to weigh in on these things.

So without further ado, we we kind of carved out about thirty minutes plus Q and A. So if you’d like to stay out of the end, that’s a that’s a part of the session that I’m going to say is ask anything you want on anything you’d like. I’ll answer any question that I can, as will as will Deanna in terms of what we think, what we see, what we believe, on marketing.

We’ll restrict that answer to marketing, by the way, at least for for this session. We have lots of things we care about, but that’s the whole notion. We’re gonna challenge the status quo. We’re gonna challenge conventional wisdom.

We’re gonna we’re gonna challenge a little bit about what what we think is truth versus myth and what matters and go from here. So, buckle up. Let’s have a good time. Let’s make this let’s make this useful.

I look forward to your feedback after this in terms of how to make this series really actionable to you. and I wanna start with, if I may, with with this obvious I hope obvious question.

What is your biggest marketing challenge? And I wanna ask you to spend just a couple of moments and weigh in on this poll. Pick one. You may have more than one challenge, and I appreciate that that, frankly, most of us do.

But I’d like to understand from from us just a perspective of priority.

What’s really gonna move the needle for you?

Take a few more seconds. Thank you to the many of you who’ve already weighed in. Almost everybody has.

Three, two, one.

Okay. We’ll end the poll.

Thank you. Almost everybody weighed in. Here’s the results. Here’s what you told me.

Almost half of you said attracting new customers is priority and challenge number one.

Interestingly, attracting referral partners is important to to many of you and not missing the fact that sometimes marketing and a marketing challenge is how do we engage, how do we get the intention of, and frankly, how do we retain clients? And I wanna talk about why I think that matters.

We often hear growth is job one, that earning the next new client is our most important priority.

I would challenge that by saying, I think that maybe job one is keeping the clients we have, keeping the revenue we have, keeping the market share that we have. It’s vastly more complicated and expensive to earn a new client than keep the one we have.

I’m not arguing the the the poll here that it may be it may not be your greatest challenge. You may be doing a great job of it or feel like you have a successful run at it.

But certainly it’s important that we think of all three of these as as our our primary challenges.

The ways in which we may go around it, well, that’s the whole purpose of spending time together.

So thank you for weighing in on this one. The the question that follows is actually, I think and I hope is a logical one to you, and that’s this.

If that was your biggest marketing challenge, well, how confident are you about your strategy to be able to address it?

Weigh in here just for a couple moments. Think about the one you just said was your most important challenge.

How confident are you that you have a strategy that’s gonna be a successful one to getting that job done?

I didn’t give you a five point scale. I didn’t get say rated on a one to ten. We just thought we’d have a little bit of fun on that. Thank you for weighing in quickly. So what did you say?

I appreciate confidence anywhere on on these things and that’s awesome.

Clearly, most of us are in a place that reflects, shall we say, less confidence. Right? Somewhat or maybe what are you talking about? Confident. Well, that’s an honest place to start.

And that leads to a discussion frankly about, well, when does marketing matter? And we’re gonna have another session entirely on the distinction between marketing and sales and the extent to which they overlap or don’t. But when it might not matter is when you’re checking the boxes.

If you feel like you have a notion as to, hey, we’re doing a good job in attracting new clients. We have we’re doing a great job at retaining the clients that we have.

We’re engaging the way we want to. Then I would tell you I’d be the first to tell you, don’t let anybody sell you on anything that you’re not doing today as being essential.

There are folks out there who who tell us, you’ve got to be doing SEO, you’ve got to be doing social, you’ve got to be doing video, you’ve got to be doing so many different things, you’ve got to. Social, you’ve got to be doing video, you’ve got to be doing so many different things. You’ve got to. Why? Because these are the things that make marketing successful. If you’re reaching your goals, if you’re getting the ROI that you need, if you’re moving the needle, then don’t let anybody sell you anything. That’s first.

Because what’s most important to me is that you understand that that if we’re hitting two out of three then then first of all let’s be clear about what we need to address which isn’t everything And let’s make sure that what we are doing reflects a sense of strategy and clarity around the things that we have to do because well, I didn’t ask you this question, which is how many of you are working with an unlimited marketing budget? That is your that your your your charge, if you will, is to say get it done.

Budget is no object. Whatever it costs is fine.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I haven’t met that client yet.

And if it means we’re working on limited nickels and we have lots of things to get done, understanding our strategy clearly and our prioritization of what can work when we have several options or we have to do several different things becomes really, really important.

And if we can be helpful in helping you think through that, then we’re getting somewhere.

When when it absolutely matters, you know, when it when it does, it’s it’s frankly if your message is unclear, your growth is stalling, or your efforts feel somewhat disconnected from those results, well, then I would argue that their marketing really isn’t even optional. It’s it’s kind of it’s it’s essential to to getting these things done. And if we talk about strategy, and you’ll hear us talk about and you’ll hear me talk about this, and I wanna hear from you in terms of I asked you the question, how confident are you about your strategy?

Well, we’re also talking about the distinction between strategy and tactics.

And I’ll I’ll express to you something that perhaps you see and hear, and that sometimes these words get mixed up.

There are there are times we we we hear folks talk about their social strategy or their email strategy when in fact they were really referring to a tactic.

Strategy is the why.

It’s what are we doing and why are we doing it and where we where where we trying to go. Tactics are how we’re going to get there. So we may have an email campaign, that’s a tactic. We have an event that we’re doing is a tactic. It’s not an event strategy, it’s an event tactic.

It’s all part of a larger camp tactical campaign if you will, But the notion is all the things that we spend money and time on, all those resources that frankly consume your marketing budget, well, those are those are tactics.

Strategy takes budget to the extent that you spend time in the consult consultative area of doing your SWAT and doing competitive analysis and managing your messaging and your positioning and your message to market and all those things. Time is valuable and then there’s cost. But most of what we do is in the service of all the outputs of marketing, and those are tactical. And there’s a reason to make sure that we’re clear when we say, are you clear about your strategy and are you are are you confident your strategy will be successful? Because I want to make sure you’re not talking about tactics because you may have a really really well articulated email campaign and that may be really well drafted and it may be really well articulated over time as as an engagement campaign or an awareness campaign and so on, with a clear call to action. But if it’s a tactic that is not aligned to a particular strategy, then you have the potential to really throw away a lot of money.

It becomes noise.

And that is potentially the most important thing for us to to to kinda get straight together is that we’re talking about strategy and that we are being really careful and precious with what we call our marketing budget and our marketing opportunity.

So I want to think about what happens when you confuse the two. Well, when you confuse the two, you wind up with interesting experiments.

Meaning we’re trying social, we’re trying SEO, we’re trying ads, we’re trying events. We don’t say that we’re doing that but that’s actually what we’re doing. Meaning, if they’re not associated really clearly delineated from a strategy, the strategy is to attract new clients. To do that we have to do a a a better job of creating a differentiated message to the market as to who we are and what problems we solve and why choose us, and we articulate that through, it could be email campaigns, video campaigns, social ideas, events, and so on.

If we’re not clear about the strategy, then the tactics themselves can be out of order, they can be overweighted or underweighted, and they can just be wrong, frankly.

Because what if the answer was there were five things to do when you had budget for three?

Wanted the right three. How do you manage that idea? By the way, if you’ve joined us a little late, thank you for coming aboard.

Please use the question, the q and a window to to share a comment or a question you’d like to address here. I’d be happy to speak to them in line as we have time and if for any reason we don’t have time or there’s something that we should take offline, you know, we’ll get back. But our purpose is to make this as much of a conversational flow as you like.

I will otherwise consume the time because I have lots to say. But I’d like to invite you to to weigh in as you’d like.

This series is about goals.

It’s really not about buzzwords. There’s lots of interesting things and by the way we’ll get into some of the certainly that some of the things that that are important in terms of of the jargon of the day and some of the buzziness, but it’s really mostly about our goals, which is to to build trust, to build value, to establish clarity, to support growth. And you can argue that that that maybe that you would see this in a different order.

When we ask someone, we invite them through content.

When we say, here’s an email, here’s a video, here’s a social post, here’s an advertisement, We’re really saying in a marketing sense, I’ve got something timely to share with you.

Watch it on my website. Read it on our website. Download it from our website. Sign up for it from our website so on. Or buy it if that’s if that’s what it is.

We know that very few people take that specific action as a percentage of all the people that we try to reach. Very few people convert in that in that fashion.

Now one of two reasons may be primary in terms of why they don’t and you can probably guess them and I won’t put it up on a polling question here.

One, they don’t have that problem.

We we we have something to share with them which is, we think, important and timely and it’s it’s a it’s a it addresses a problem that you may have. Well, maybe you don’t have that problem.

Well, if that’s the case, we have a different issue which is perhaps we’re not aligned in terms of who we’re talking to, that we’re not as segmented and is not personalized and not as as specific in our outreach to you that we’re talking to you about things that don’t matter to you. That’s can be fatal in terms of marketing intention. But assuming that the folks we’re addressing have those problems, have those challenges, then it’s fair to say that if they’re not taking the action, they’re not ready to yet.

And perhaps they’re not ready because we have not yet established comfort and we have not established trust.

Not that they don’t have the desire to solve that problem.

They have not decided that we are the solution to that problem or that we have earned that yet.

You can say that’s why we email people six times, eight times, nine times, ten times. This notion of how many touches and how many opportunities. Why? We’re trying to create trust.

On our website, we have the statement. It’s like it’s kind of like on our foreheads. It says, it’s not lead gen. It’s relationship gen.

It’s not that we don’t respect what leads mean or contacts mean.

It means that every time and I do mean every time we talk to owners in in our industry about what drives them, what motivates them, what has made them successful, almost always they say something about the quality their understanding of what does it mean to deliver on the promise of a relationship.

That we do it in the boardroom, we do it in finals presentations, we do it when we’re face to face, but our marketing on websites and in other places tend to be product driven and service driven and bullet lists of of things that we know how to do with credentials that are well earned, but that most people don’t understand, but also don’t tell us don’t tell them what problems we solve of theirs and why they should choose us among the many qualified individuals and firms who can do these things.

So establishing trust, that throughput, if you will, is is so much about what I think about when I think about goals.

If we do that and we’ve created clarity around that, we’ll establish value and we’ll support growth. And if that means back to the question that we asked, is it about earning new clients, is it about being a good referral partner, is it about engaging the clients we already have a to do more business with us or refer others to us or frankly just not leave just to, you know, eliminate attrition.

These are super important. And if your your your voice to me was, you know, and the question about confidence, many of you said, well, I’m not really super confident we have a clear strategy and or or less, Perfectly understandable.

and if that what motivated you to spend time here, thank you. Because our our notion here is not to sell you on on anything actually and it’s not here to we’re not here as I said upfront. This is not an infomercial to to hire us or for him to hire anyone. It’s to understand your role and your opportunity and your team is the is the purpose on this. So when we think about topics, I wanted to make sure that I had a just a little time to address this because I’m gonna ask you a question that’s related to this in a moment.

Here are several that we contemplate managing over this series this year, And there’s a lot to cover. There’s a lot to get into, and that’s why I thought this kickoff might be really helpful to kinda kinda orient and perhaps also getting your your your juices flowing thinking if there are other topics you’d like to to to to suggest, this is a great time to do so.

Put marketing in his lane really means let’s be really clear about what marketing is and what marketing isn’t in the in the in the marketplace, in the place of business.

Marketing and sales get get overlapped more often than they should.

We talk about marketing sometimes, we mean sales and vice versa. We’re gonna talk about the strategic and tactical component this is and how to make sure that everybody around you hears it that way and understands your purpose.

Stop throwing your money away is really as simple as that.

If you’ve got to be clear on on what your purpose is and at least experimentally, what do you think has the best potential to to achieve it. If you’re doing less than that or if you’re doing what you’re doing this year because it’s what was on our our plan last year and the year before, there’s a really good chance you’re you’re you’re not optimizing that opportunity, and that’s too expensive. None of us have too many extra nickels to run around.

Moving the needle is really another way of saying ROI.

And marketing often gets on a defensive posture. We wind up having to talk about well, there’s a qualitative component to brand awareness. Our name’s on a blimp or or on a billboard going by.

We can tell you how many people saw it. We can tell you how many impressions it got. We can give you all kinds of leading indicators of how many people it potentially touched, how many people walked by us in an exhibit hall at a conference, how many people picked up our brochure or downloaded our white paper.

Those are all interesting. But moving the needle really means not just activity, but affecting the business bottom line. And if you think about it from the perspective of the c suite, and I think it’s wise to do that, it’s to appreciate that moving the needle means, did we in fact earn more customers?

Did we support our our partners in a tangible way?

Did we reduce attrition, or did we engage customers that were previously unengaged?

Did they did they buy more services from us or more products?

Those are are are quantitative components to this.

I am not so metrics driven as to suggest to you that those are the only things that matter in terms of what to track and what to focus on. As I said earlier, we say every day here, it’s not lead gen, it’s relationship gen. I believe very strongly and if you do if you’re oriented around what it takes to earn a relate earn and keep a relationship, the money will follow. The transactions will follow. The referrals will follow. If you’re doing the right things for the right reasons, you will move the needle.

But being clear about setting expectations, certainly with with those you serve, is critical to that.

Getting serious about video is a reminder because we have learned so much over the years that, yes, it’s obviously true people would rather quite often watch than read, that video presents a brand opportunity, a component of your personality and your tone and your message that words on a page even the equivalent words struggle to accomplish.

It’s still not as easy as as it may seem to some and there are choices in terms of what to do when when sometimes the goal is to be simple and authentic and other times it’s to be brand worthy and meaning homepage worthy, and talk about how much you address that in a way that feels rational to your purpose.

Making engagement interactive is perhaps one of the most powerful things that I think we can talk about together When we produce collateral, when we produce websites, when we do video, even when we’re doing this and I’m trying not to make it all one way, but most often we’re doing the talking, others are listening.

On your home page, you’re trying to tell people a lot of things typically or on your website, but when we know that to be successful so often the answer is we were really much more successful when we ask questions and then we listen.

Well, making engagement interactive to incorporate with intention this idea of being able to listen, to ask questions, to get feedback, to help guide people to what they want is extraordinarily powerful, and I’m gonna demonstrate to you some ideas about that.

The truth about SEO, I hope speaks to you. The truth about SEO is as you see in our our little teaser here, it’s probably not what you think. Well, it’s often true.

Often, we’re we’re asked to associate keywords, the expressions, meta tags if you will, with content on a page with the expectation that that will help a page rank. It’s not that it won’t help, but SEO is really about something much more, and that is not about what we want to rank for. It’s what people are actually looking for.

That session is is one I hope everybody listens to because I think how you hear that and how you frame it for others may make a big difference in terms of how you prioritize it, if you prioritize it.

And that if is not a small if, it’s a capital I on that too. We could say the topic the next topic could be the truth about email, in the same way. But the bottom line is email works. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t get so much of it in our own inboxes all day every day. It does, but it only works if you if you treat it, as I said, to an invitation to something important.

If the conversation is genuine, if your purpose is to support someone else’s need not your own, it has the potential to be very successful and frankly, one of the most cost effective ways of addressing marketing if you do it well.

That’s really the notion. There are so many examples that we’ve seen over the years of folks not doing, we’ll just say, email well and concluding, see, I told you email doesn’t work or doing social marketing and not necessarily doing it in a way that was put had the potential to be successful, but only to conclude, see, I told you social doesn’t work. Or ads or SEO or video or anything else for that matter.

Executing on in a way that speaks to your strategy and to your purpose is really critical to having any notion that they work. But I I’m here to tell you, it does there are some contemporary things we we wanna share with you about what does it mean to color within the lines, to to to email safely, to email successfully as an organization, to to maintain a good relationship with your own email service provider, and frankly to get the most out of the opportunity.

You’ve heard me speak the words it’s not lead gen, it’s relationship, Jen.

This is foundational.

it’s it’s mentioned as a topic here but it’s really woven through nearly everything we say and everything that we do.

I would I would suggest you that everything we’ve learned about marketing over fifteen plus years as doing as a team tells us it matters.

It’s not to ignore lead gen by any means, but it’s also meant to say let’s not look at everybody as where are they in our funnel.

Are you a top of funnel, middle funnel, you know, bottom funnel?

But to treat the idea, the opportunity to engage with people on a more human level and think about their challenges, their needs, their problems, and how we can help them solve them.

The last topic I listed here, it’s more than just your brand.

The the expectation if you underline your, it’s more than just your brand is really what this one’s about.

Because many of you mentioned in in the first polling question that supporting referral partners is kind of important to you, and that’s what this speaks to. That is when you are successful in asserting your brand, you’re elevating the quality of the idea with your partners.

Your brand reflects on theirs.

If you are excellent, they look excellent by affiliation and by association.

If you don’t, well, the reverse is true.

And it’s important to understand that. It’s important to be that partner who elevates them. It’s one of the things that will matter in terms of what they choose from here. Here’s one more polling question then. Alex And, of course, refer yes, please, Deanna.

Before we move on, we did receive a great question that kind of dovetails into some of these topics you spoke about Regarding, your thought and opinion on what is the best social media platform to market accounting and financial type services. So not wanting to throw away our money on all platforms, but where would we focus or look at first?

That’s a really good question.

So there are a number of platforms that purport to be your hub if you will to manage social activity and social meeting and social marketing activity.

I’m somewhat agnostic to the platforms and, Deanna, you may have reason to have an opinion on this that that eclipses mine for sure.

I think more about the the the purpose of of that idea than the platform because I think that most of the platforms that we use or have touched kinda get the job done. That is you can produce content and schedule and syndicate it. You can monitor it. You can manage it, in in in that way.

And we can talk about that in in in more detail as a group if you if you’d like to. I don’t wanna give this short shrift, but I’m more interested in the social component of social. Meaning, if your purpose is to broadcast message, message, message, message on some cadence, I question whether that is in fact social or whether it’s just a one way idea of of look at me, look at me, look at me. It may be a component of what a brand needs to do to create awareness, but the most successful companies and influencers in the world create some form of a conversation with their audience.

and I think that that the intention to do that may be more important than where you do it and such. Dion, do you do you care to share your impression or or or your your thoughts on this? I know we I said we could do a whole session on this, maybe we should. But do you have a have a thought on it?

Yeah. Absolutely. So social, of course, is a large topic and it certainly depends, like, the question asked as far as the audience but also what your goals are. If it’s a due diligence step, like you said, just message, message, we checked the box, any platform will really do. If you’re looking towards converting or having them go to a landing page or really make an action, contact your team, we’re gonna be where those folks are and they’re not spending their time on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. That’s gonna be more of your LinkedIn or professional audience.

But if you’re looking to just make sure for awareness building and company, this is us, meet our team type atmosphere, you of course can kind of move to those other markets as well.

So I think it’s definitely a multifaceted answer and not one that we could, answer completely in our short time today.

Thank you for raising it though. And yes, we will lean into this and we’ll come back to this as a topic and we’ll add this as a as a formal topic. It’s a good one. Let me ask all of you this question, and we’ll do it as a quick poll.

Of the many kind of topics that we’ve talked about, they fall into various categories if you will. And maybe this isn’t a perfect question, but I’ll ask you it this way.

Which of these would be valuable to learn more about?

And you don’t have to pick just one and nor do you have to pick all of them, but I’ll invite you to check the ones that speak to you.

So as I said, you can pick as many as you like, but I’m just interested in overall where the group’s priority might might lean us to in in the future.

Clarifying strategy, prioritizing spend, specifically getting message right, improving overall ROI.

Two more seconds for those of you who may still be contemplating, and then we’ll close this and show this back.

Great.

Thanks for weighing in.

So here’s what you this here this is what you said.

Pretty interesting distribution. About half of you, maybe a little more, certainly interested in clarifying strategy.

Awesome.

Some would value effort to to understand how best to prioritize our spend. Maybe about half said, let’s get our message right for sure and improve overall ROI.

I might say I’m a little surprised that improving overall ROI wasn’t as critical, but that’s only a point of interest.

I will tell you that the reason I asked you about getting our message getting your message right is that it literally influences literally everything we do.

If the message isn’t right, if you don’t have a well differentiated and a clear message and a powerful one to market, then it almost doesn’t matter how well you execute on email or social or web or video or events. And if your message isn’t right, then none of the others have any potential to be really optimized, do they? They really can’t be successful.

We’re gonna spend time on all these, but this is really good feedback for me, so I’m grateful for it. Thank you for for sharing these.

We’ll close here.

You know, on a couple of quick thoughts. Does marketing matter? You know, the the question we this this title marketing matters. Well, there’s a lot of marketing matters.

Yes. If it’s about creating clear strategy, obviously, if not, we think it’s noise. It can be a huge driver for growth if it serves your goals. And that’s really what this is about.

This is making sure that it’s aligned to your purpose and not simply to a continuation of effort and time and budget and so on. Marketing matters when it’s done right.

We wanna share good ideas and frankly things that you can put into practice.

The question here asked a little bit ago about platforms where we use tools that may be useful to you, we’ll share. There’s no secret sauce to these things.

We apply a lot of effort and time to understanding what works for us, and why as a team, and happy to to share that with you.

I’d like you to contemplate this, and I’m not gonna ask it as a polling question here. But if you think about one thing you’re doing in marketing and what’s the business goal it’s tied to, my question to you is not how to answer it here, but my question is, do you have an answer for it in terms of it’s not just what the marketing concern is, but super clarity around the business goal that it’s tied to? If the answer is yes, I have a clear answer to that, then we’re already in a better place because we’ll pick up on that when we meet next.

It’s essential to me that we really keep this real and let’s talk about what works and what doesn’t.

As I said, this is not to sell you anything that that that that we do or how we do it, but to be helpful to you in your process.

But I’m also here to be and Deanna’s here to be a a sounding board for ideas, for questions.

If we can save you making, a choice that we wouldn’t have made, sometimes that’s the best advice we can give you. It’s not just what to do, it’s what not to do. Because what not to do means whatever you do, don’t spend money and time doing this and this and this if you’re not at this point or that’s not aligned to your purpose. Why? Because it will one hundred percent chew up money and time that you won’t get back.

And it’s money and time that you would have had and you needed to have to apply to the things that do matter. And that to me is about keeping this real.

Let’s think about and let’s work together on ideas that move the needle, that align to your purpose, and that make this happen.

I want to thank you for for taking a little time to spend with us on this. Remember, our next session, we’ll put out dates on this in the next couple of days, we’ll be putting marketing in its lane. It’s not sales, but we have a lot to talk about how to align purpose and strategy when we get to that topic.

So thank you for this. Much appreciated. I’m gonna stay on. If any of you would like to to pose additional questions, I’ll stay on to address. Deanna will stay on and otherwise we’ll say thank you and we’ll see you next time.

Alan, we did receive another question just now.

How do you navigate building a marketing strategy when the folks you’re working with can’t clearly articulate what the business does, why, and what makes them different from the competition?

This is something we’ve certainly have met people and I’m sure you can expand upon this just a bit.

So how do you do this when you’re working with people who are not clear about their purpose, their strategy, their message?

So the gist of it?

Yeah.

That’s not a small challenge.

It’s not.

I would tell you that that there are times that I would fall back to something like a SWAT exercise because I’m hitting it from a different point of view. When we talk about what are our organizationally, internally, our strengths, our weaknesses, our opportunities, our threats, we may never choose to express any of those whiteboard ideas to anybody else, but we will clarify what our purpose actually is. We will clarify what our our our ideas might be, right, and need to be to to make this happen.

Comment and chat, too many cooks in the kitchen. Everybody thinks they’re a marketing wizard. That happens, especially if folks, feel like that that’s something that they gravitate towards.

It’s essential to establish agreement about what our purpose is, first and foremost.

I’ve certainly been in in in rooms where that wasn’t the case, where we don’t even agree on what our goal is or what our biggest opportunity is or frankly what our biggest challenges or biggest threat is. And if you’re not on the same page with those things, invariably whatever you choose to do in marketing will be on point for somebody and completely wrong to somebody else.

And invariably if it doesn’t move the needle the way they thought, it’ll be a failure or it’ll be less than successful because they framed the whole challenge of it differently.

We have it’s essential that we all agree on what what the mission is. What are we trying to do? What does success look like?

That’s first and foremost. What does success even look like? When we sit on the top at the top of this chat, you know, what’s your biggest marketing challenge?

Is it attracting new clients? Well, are we doing that or not? Right? And if so, what is the metric by which we will say we were successful?

Is it x number or x percentage of new clients? Is it acquiring x dollars of new revenue or recurring revenue? That’s our our metric. Whatever that is is great.

If we don’t agree on what that what the idea is, then it then marketing can’t be helpful.

And by the way, hint hint towards next session, marketing ain’t sales. K?

Marketing sets the table for sales. That’s what you’ll hear me say on on, like, minute one of that session. Marketing sets the table for sales.

But it’s really important that we understand what it is we’re trying to do.

It is not a small challenge and certainly one that we could talk to probably for the rest of this afternoon.

But I would I would say that that if you’re in an environment where it appears that not everybody’s on the same page about what the goal is, then that’s the first challenge to to to kinda tackle is to is to is to say, listen. It appears that we have a a number of really important initiatives, but they’re either competing for priority or they’re competing for budget or they’re competing for clarity. That’s an executive decision or at least a a group decision that has to be one at the end of the day. It says, listen.

Maybe not everybody agrees, but we have to line up at the end of the day. So, okay. We’re at least acknowledging these are our top three priorities, and we’re gonna go for them. and here’s what we’re gonna do in support of that.

Here’s our plan to to make that happen. Anything short of that is is kinda helter skelter, I think, to me.

Right?

It’s an interesting thought. I very much appreciate where that goes.

We’ve certainly lived it, Deanna. Yeah. You know?

That is for sure. Yes. I read the question. I thought we might have experience in this area.

We might. We might. You know, when when we when we do we serve we we you know, our model is kind of fractional CMO and team. We’re an adjunct to organizations in in retirement and wealth and fintech and related kind of spaces.

Our purpose is not to take turf and not to not to eat anybody else’s lunch. We’re here to be helpful. So we don’t care where these arguments came from or historically why they why they happen, but we really want to help guide, you know, a path forward because everybody needs it. We need to feel like we’re we’re all together marching in the same direction, and we know why.

Anything less than that we know is is really not ideal.

That’s for sure.

This has been a great first session. I’m grateful for all of you who stayed on with us.

Deanna, thank you as always for partnership on this. I look forward to your your your voice on our next one. We have a lot to talk about as we go and, we’ll share not only the replay of this for the benefit of those who weren’t able to join us today, but also share dates for the anticipation of the series and we look forward to all of you being with us. Thanks, everybody.