Bill Cates, President of Referral Coach | 4x Best Selling Author

The only podcast you need for your business, let's do this. Welcome to the sales versus marketing podcast, I'm your host Scott. Join me as we explore and demystify the latest trends, technologies and strategies used to achieve massive growth in 10X businesses. I'll be sitting down with sales, marketing and business leaders. Dissect what's work for them, dispel myths and deliver actionable insights that you can use to ensure repeatable, sustainable and predictable revenue in your business. Thank you for joining me on the sales versus marketing podcast. Today I am sitting with Bill Kates and I'm very excited because we're going to be speaking about Bill Kates book radical relevance. Now Bill is an internationally recognized client acquisition expert author and speaker who motivates others to take action with proven strategies. So Bill is a successful entrepreneur. He has sold two book publishing companies so he's done this before and now he is working to help others grow and emulate the strategies that has made him successful. He is written for best selling books, including the one that we're going to try to about today, including get more referrals now. Don't keep me a secret beyond referrals and radical relevance. So a lot of ties into both sales and marketing strategy. Bill has delivered his business growth methods to over 500,000 professionals, small business owners and sales people across five continents, helping them increase revenue without increasing their marketing budget. Bill has been featured in various publications including Success Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, Selling Power, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal and his business has been featured in Money Magazine and on top of that he's one of the founding members of the Million Dollar Speakers Group and was inducted into Professional Speakers Hall of Fame. So I have no doubt he definitely has a gift of the gab. So Bill, I guess introduce yourself and we'll talk a little bit about your book, Radical Relevance and that will sort of speak about some sales marketing strategy intro that we'll draw out of that. Sure. Just to make sure everyone heard you correctly, it's Bill Cates with the C not Bill Gates. I was hoping for the interview in my career but not in just getting it. I still get a shot at it but what I like to say is Bill Gates has a lot of money, Bill Cates, that's me, I'll help you make more money. Yeah, I mean, forever I've been an entrepreneur, I've been in sales, I've been in marketing, I love both. What I really love is acquiring new clients. I kind of like the prospect and the chase, whether it's a sales or marketing and obviously there's a relationship there, but I like that. I don't mind delivering the product or service afterwards but I really do like it in a deal. And when I first got started so long ago and the marketing folks that listen to this will appreciate this, I was involved with direct response marketing but this was before there was an internet. So I had some books and other things, I put ads in the back of magazines, little classified ads and things and most people don't even know what I'm talking about right now but it was all about selling information through the mail and now of course people sell information on the internet but the principles were all the same and so I just love being able to take all those things I learned so many years ago and apply it to today's technology and of course it's a double-edged sword, it's easy to get our message out but because it's easy to get our message out, it's now actually hard to get our message out and there's so much noise in the marketplace and that's why I wrote radical relevance because we've got to cut through all that stuff and how do you cut through all that and reach people and then keep being relevant and then move them to take action, it's not just reaching them, it's also moving and taking action, that was a genesis of the book. You mentioned something, you mentioned a couple things that I thought were very interesting. Number one, you mentioned that you enjoyed prospecting which probably led to your obsession with making that first touch point with the customer and making it impactful so that's something that as we go through I really do want to sort of dive into because I know a lot of people hate prospecting because it's just awkward and uncomfortable and if the marketing isn't done right then it can seem very forced and I think that the second thing you brought up is there's a war for attention for sure, it's all this digital marketing, it's very hard to carve out your niche in the industry but once you do how do you make sure that if you've growth hacked or mastered the way to reach the masses consistently and repeatedly and scalably, how do you make sure that that messaging is good? Because if you do figure how to reach out to people, the one thing you have to be careful with digital marketing, if you don't have a great message then it's just heard by a lot of people a lot quicker, so that's the sort of the two sides, but let's start this off just because I want to speak about the book and the title of the book because the title of the book is obviously going to lend cadence to attention and marketing and reaching out to people, so radical relevance, why is this concept alone in the greater scheme of digital marketing important enough to write a book about? It's because we live in radically relevant world and let me explain that, between big data and elections, micro targeting and all the ways to collect data on person, people, and even if you're not doing it digitally, even if you're doing it in more of a one-on-one-to-one-one-to-one analog kind of way, people expect us to know something about them before we reach out to them, they pretty much require it and salespeople or marketers that are a little lazy and don't do their homework and try to reach out without really knowing the audience are going to be ignored, and just to give you a few examples, I mean it probably started this radical relevance, if you think about it, started with Google and there are algorithms to make sure that the relevant information shows up on a search, right? Amazon, if you look for a book or any product, people about this also bought this, that's all about relevance. Going into a grocery store and looking for water, how many waters do they have these days? Sparkling water, still water, flavor, not flavored smart, dumb water, whatever, and all of that's to be relevant to whoever their prospect, their customer might be, and the same thing with toothpaste. Now here's an interesting one, billboards, all right, so not all parts of the country in the world have billboards, but a lot to everybody knows what a billboard is, the electronic billboards that you see so much now, they are being fed and programmed by data coming from the driving apps, like ways in Google Maps, and so they will change their message based on the demographics of the people who are driving by in any particular time of day. That's radical relevance, but we can go even more radical than that. A lot of these bill boards are equipped with pollen sensors, and so when the pollen count gets over a certain level, they automatically start showing allergy medicine ads and local pharmacy ads, so we live in a world that's like that, and everyone listening to this podcast has been hit up multiple times a day by people who don't know anything about us, right, and we just as soon as we can tell they don't know who we are, we just delete them, because if someone shows a little knowledge of who we are, then we might start to pay attention a little bit. In fact, I reward people who reach out to me, and if they've read my blog or just watched the video on my YouTube channel or somehow had a sense of who I am and indicated that, I will pay attention. I will even schedule a phone call just to reward them for taking the time to do that. That's a really good point, that when you reach out to people, if you're not relevant, it's just like white noise, because we get that all day, every day, you said you came from a more traditional marketing era where you would get flyers and pamphlets and whatnot, but now you're well-versed in digital marketing, and it's like 10x what we used to get, because now it's so easy to reach out to people right at scale, and it's like, you know, in-mails through LinkedIn or the emails, spam emails, whatever. So obviously, it makes sense why being relevant is important. So sharpen your marketing message. That's the subtitle of your book. How do you actually do that? How do you sharpen your marketing message so that you are relevant while maintaining that scale? Because everybody knows if you're prospecting, going back to prospecting, you're prospecting a client, you can go do research on them, you can go reach out to them, and that's really what is a good idea to do that, but how would you do that at scale so that you can still, you know, there's still a volume and velocity to your outreach? So the key is on narrowing your scope. It's not expanding, it's narrowing, and it's knowing your target, and then taking that and maybe going a little deeper in that target, and then a little deeper to the point where you get your bullseye, which in marketing you often call it the persona, the avatar, the ideal person, the demographics, the psychographics of those people, and the mistake I've seen a lot of marketers and sales people make is when they're crafting their message, especially for folks that aren't as experienced, when they craft their message, they tend to expand a little bit. They go, well, we don't want to leave these people out, or we want to leave these people out, and so they actually expand who they're trying to reach where their message, and all they do is water down the effectiveness of the message and reach nobody. And so if you have different personas, if you have different ideal types of clients or customers, you got to make sure you deliver the right message to the right person at the right timing and right way. And if you don't do that, then you're again, you're white noise. And so you can have more than one target market, for sure. You can have more than one persona or ideal within that. I like to call it a right fit client or a right fit customer, but you better make sure that you're dividing your messaging up. So on your website, who are the people that visit your website, make sure you they can self-identify who they are and click the right button, and then they go into the stream of information that's totally perfect for them. And it's just it's just about finding the bull's eye and getting the bull's eye. So okay, so one of one of the points that we discussed before this, you're telling a story of how your client achieved 900% growth in seven years. So that's obviously incredible growth. So first, first I want to speak about a like sort of walk us through that case study. And then let's speak about let's speak about how that's repeatable for for other people. So if they were trying to implement like a best idea or practice that they could take out of that case study, like what would that one idea or maybe multiple ideas be? Yeah, sure. So this is with McKay CEO forums out of Vancouver Canada. And so when I met Nancy McKay, she had by herself had acquired 100 clients, these are CEOs of companies, mostly in the Vancouver area where they would get together in round table forums and very impactful for these folks. But she's got big dreams and big goals and she wanted to go further. So the first thing we worked on actually was her referral process, how to scale her business by getting her clients, these CEOs to introduce her to more. So she could create more more groups. And we got nitty-gritty on this. We we recorded audios, we recorded all kinds of stuff to give her scripting of how to talk to her CEOs, to refer them, refer her, introduce her to others. But she also wanted the scale in another way. She wanted to bring on more chairs, more people to lead the groups. We'll lead so many groups, right? So her scale was increasing the number of clients, but also increasing the number of people who could facilitate these groups. And so it was all about referrals and introductions for a number of years. And that really brought a lot of people in. Then we started to help her refine the messaging because she was finding that not always the right people were being referred or coming into the groups and didn't always work. So we had to get really, really clear on the right people. And she now can be on a phone call with someone. And within about five to six minutes, the prospect and Nancy will know if it's a match. And you know, just by a few questions she asks and just by a few things she talks about. And if they're not a match, she won't take them on. And that's important that when we talk about our value, when we talk about the work we do, whatever this situation is, we've got to make sure we're attracting the right people and repelling the wrong people. And even if it's in a mass situation and it's all digital, right, we don't want to waste time their time or our time, bringing people through a funnel, through a campaign, eventually ending up in a phone call where it's not a good match. And so everything has to be very clear. This is who we work for. This is who we serve the best. And if you're not in that, we're not right for you. And so therefore, let's not waste our time together. No, that's really good. There's so many things you can take out of that story because you spoke about referral networks. So right off the bat, the strongest way to sell is a referral network for sure, like word of mouth. That's the way to do it. You spoke about optimizing your message or personas. And then you spoke with something that a lot of people have trouble with, which is qualifying out. So getting rid of those deals and just sort of freeing up your time. So those are all like, I don't know if you meant to do that. But that's kind of like my list of things that you should take away from the story that regardless of, you know, whatever business you're in, those are just best practices to implement, right? That was really, really good. And so that helped to achieve 900% growth. Yeah. And let's talk about the qualifying out first. Yeah. And it depends on the business. Obviously that you have what that's going to look like. And sometimes they could get qualified out digitally in which case you're not really wasting much time. And with that said, with the referral process, a lot of businesses will take on clients that aren't necessarily right for them, kind of out of respect, if you will, or different. Yeah. First, but that's not always a good thing to do because here's the guiding principle. What's right for that prospector client, right? And if they're not right for your business, and you don't believe you can bring your full impact of value to them, then you're not right for them. And so what we don't want to do is create lose, lose situations, especially if there's a referral source involved where they might wonder why did they send someone to you because that person is not being served as well as they should be because you took them on in a way you shouldn't have. So all of it has to be guided by that. What's best for that person? No, I was going to ask, do you find it's or how would you suggest that somebody who is looking to build that a referral network? Because it's a very strong way to sell. But then again, they may attract the wrong clientele. So it's almost like a channel network without any sort of compensation. It's built on trust and respect and just really a really good job well done. So how do you optimize a message so that the person down the telephone line or down the grapevine is getting the right message about who you are, what you can do for your clients so you don't have to have that conversation. Or maybe you do, I don't know. Well, sometimes it depends on the business. Yeah. Service business is more likely you may have that conversation. So there's a few elements here. And before we get into that, I just want to make a point that we're talking a little bit about relevance. The fastest way to become relevant with someone who doesn't know you is an introduction from someone they do know, right? An introduction from someone they trust. So we operate from that borrowed trust. And the higher price your product or services, the more likely, I don't care what you do digitally on the front end. Eventually, there's going to be a conversation. And so we've got to make sure that that we meet people the way they want to meet us. A lot of people, a lot of businesses see the furls as kind of icing on the cake. But for a lot of businesses, it is the cake. It's how the prospect would prefer to meet that person. Some people hide behind the digits. They hide behind the digital marketing. Yeah. Like that. So with that said, the first line of defense really is to educate your clients or customers who you serve the best. To make sure they get that message, to make sure they know that they are a right fit client or a right fit customer. This is the criteria. And so that they won't send people that don't fit your world. That's the first line of defense. The second line, of course, is qualifying. And there's different ways to qualify. But if someone calls you and says, hey, my friend George said, you know, I should talk to you that he's happy with the work you've done. And I should work with you. Your response, especially if you haven't talked to George about this person is great. I appreciate that. You know, I know we're not right for everybody. Let's chat a little bit. I'll tell you a little bit about what we do and learn a little bit about your situation. And we'll see if it makes sense to continue the conversation. Yeah. So make no assumptions. Yeah. Make no assumptions, though. That's really the takeaway. Yeah. And you know, prospects appreciate that because they may be braced for someone who's going to try to sell them. And here we are. We're almost taking ourselves out of the sales situation to a degree where we're just saying, let's just talk. Let's see if it makes even makes sense to continue the conversation. Now, real quick, tactical thing. If you if you realize and usually they will qualify themselves out as you describe what you do and do you serve the best, you want to get on hang up the phone and get on the phone with your referral sources quickly as possible. It's a hey, I talked to your friend George, great guy, great conversation. We discovered the timings and right for us to be working together or his business business situation is a little different than who we're geared to serve. Appreciate the trust and I appreciate the next time. So we're not revealing any proprietary information. We learned about their thread that wouldn't be appropriate, but we're letting them know. Yeah. Keeping that referral source in the loop, which is very important. And so just to make sure you're not letting that slide because you do have to educate them. So the next one will be more suited or will be better off because I do think that it is a little bit of an awkward conversation. If you continuously have to tell people like listen, like this wasn't the right fit. That wasn't the right fit or turn and you never want you never want the person that was referred to you to be the one always telling the referral source. Oh, I couldn't, you know, he didn't want to talk to me. He didn't want to do business or whatever. So there's always that, you know, that line of communication you want to keep open to. That's why you want to do it first. Yeah. And you know, in some businesses, you probably could explain to that referral source right on that phone call white match. But I do, I do a lot of work with financial advisors and bankers and folks where that conversation could actually contain some proprietary information that the referral source shouldn't know. And so sometimes it's appropriate to just let them know what happened and then later a separate conversation educate them a little bit on who you serve the best. So it isn't linked specifically to that person. That'll be a judgment call. You got to be careful what you reveal. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So let's let's go back to the relevance piece because I know there's there's rules of relevance that are scattered throughout the book. So what what are the top because there's a few of them? What are the top rules of relevance for people to take away marketers to take away that can they can action immediately in whatever organization doesn't really matter what they do. Obviously, we're not talking about like a self-serve software product. We're talking more like a consultative cell, but that kind of business. Go through a couple of those. Yeah. So a few things. I already gave you number one, which is a shortest route to relevant through an introduction from a trusted source. The second one is a good one, which is give your clients a seat at the table. Give your customers a seat at the table. What I mean by that is you never want to develop marketing campaigns, a copy for your website, LinkedIn profile, whatever we're talking about without talking to some customers or clients. A lot of the big boys know this. They have focus groups and things like that, but some of the small companies don't always take the time to do that. Most businesses have some very satisfied clients or customers. It would be happy to have a conversation like that. They like being led in on what you're trying to accomplish. Especially if you have a client or customer that has a bit of a marketing mindset. It's great. So in my business, I see so many quote-unquote experts, authors, speakers, consultants. We'll talk to other, their peers. What do you think about this book cover? What do you think about this title? What do you think about this article? I'll say, here's my opinion, but I'm not your customer. Make sure you're talking to your customer about this because they're going to give you information and ideas that you just wouldn't even think of. They're going to give them to you in the right words and phrases and concepts already in their brain. Make sure we tap into that. Radical relevance rule number five is only differences that matter matter. What I mean by that, of course, is that you can talk about some things that make you different. But if you're not talking about it in a way that's very specific benefit-oriented that someone's going to say, yeah, that matters to me, then it's irrelevant. I'll give you an example. I'm consulting with a bank in New England. This bank happens to call just on commercial accounts. One of their, what they called unique selling propositions, was we've been established for 127 years. I'm thinking, just like a lot of other people might be thinking, so what? If you don't define what that means, then whoever the recipient of that message is will define it for you. If it's a younger person, they may think, well, okay, Stodgy, they don't have the latest apps and stuff. Yeah, I don't want to work with them. Or an older person might think, okay, stable. I get that. I like that. But we don't know. And so we've got to translate that into the benefit. A lot of businesses will come up with kind of cool things and color schemes. They're branding is unique. They're brand name is unique. All that's kind of cool stuff and that's fine. Nothing wrong with that. But you know, it might get someone's attention. But if it doesn't matter to the prospect of the day, they don't see the benefit of that to them, then it's window dressing. It's not really going to produce a result. I think you brought up a good point that you have to be very explicit about how you build out your own brand because like that 100 plus year old bank, they're putting out this verbiage into the world and people will, people will infer or assume their own ideas about what that means. So regardless, and even if they aren't putting that out, you know, I always speak to brands that aren't putting stuff out on social media or even individuals that are trying to build their own brand on social media or out into the world. And if you don't put out your own brand, your own content, you don't speak to who you are. People, you have a brand, but it's just going to be dictated by the people that are consuming you, right? Well, I'll give you an example, just in my own business. Yeah. It was not a bad thing. It's good thing. But so my system, my referral system was called the referral advantage program. And and what I learned is my market, my clients, prospects, everybody out in the niches, the targets that I go after, nobody knew what that would they just call it the Kate system. You know, we're using Kates. Yeah. Yeah. And so finally, you know, my staff hammering me says, you got to put your name in the system, because your your clients have already named it. Yeah. So now we call it the Kate's Academy for relationship marketing and and my name is in stuff. And I resisted that sort of thing for a long time. I didn't want it to be about my name. Yeah. Now we know with a lot of businesses, depending on the size, the personality can be the differentiator, right? For sure. People didn't want to do that. But these days, because there's so much noise, sometimes we need the the personality to be that differentiator. Yeah. Give you one more rule of radical relevance. Please. Yes. No, no, do it. Because these are like these are very good. And like the ones that you mentioned, like, like, I love how these started, again, this is sort of blending into anybody in marketing anything. There's so much carryover and so much crossover. So please, like, if you want to go through a couple more, I want the one, the one point I want to hit after this, I want to speak a little bit about, um, uh, neuroscience of relevance, because I love like, uh, like, I've read, um, uh, what they call the pitch anything by orange claph, which is, uh, just basically speaking about the psychology of selling. So I want to get your take on the psychology of being relevant in in 2020, um, because that's super interesting to me. I love like, understanding how we consume and whatnot, but go through a couple more rules. And then I want to, I want to touch on that point too. Yeah. So, uh, rule number 13, uh, use more personal messaging. And so essentially what we want to do is rather than, you know, when people hit our website or anything that we're using to communicate, we want to initially resist using we, our mind, I, to go to your, right? Yeah. Your, uh, and, and, and, and, and here's where this comes from. This comes from the idea, the concept, uh, that you, your company, your product, your service, is not the hero of the story, right? I think of the old original Star Wars, the hero, yeah, Guy Walker, right? And Yoda, Yoda, the guide was. And the enemy was Darth Vader. And so many companies try to set themselves up as the hero and they talk about the awards they've won. They talk about all the good work they do. And it doesn't mean you don't do that at some point. But the draw people into your world, you have to create empathy. There's a situation, a sense that you know them. They got to, they got to read your copy and look at the website and however you're getting in front of them and go, uh, this person gets me. This person knows a little bit about who I am. Then we start to create credibility for us as the guide. But first we got to pull it, pull them in. And some, some companies do a very good job. A lot of folks, especially the smaller companies, where they, they're not really aware of this. Don't do this. So, so we want to make sure that we're focusing on them first. I'll give you one more. And, and guys, this is the universal rule of marketing. So if someone is an experienced marketer, they'll roll their eyes at this one. But if you're not experienced, please take this to heart. And that is test, test, test. Yeah. I remember when I was, I joined the direct marketing association so many years ago, I got this big manual about, you know, concepts of direct marketing. And they'll say, you know, sometimes a red headline while pull a blue headline. And, and, yeah, the color of the headline will change the response rate. And they asked the marketer, well, why will red, output, blue and a good market will say, I don't know. It just tested that way. Right. We can take our best guess and make some good educated guesses, but ultimately, you'll never know until you test it. So big testing and the whole science behind testing, very, very important on a macro scale and a micro scale as well. No, those are all very good. Those are all very, very good. Yeah. Science, if you want. I want to. I want to, I want to understand a little bit about how you use it to stay relevant. How, like, what's a psychological driver? Because there's obviously tons, right? There's so many different psychological tricks and tactics that marketers use, sales reps use in the discussions, in the copy, in the branding, everything is all is all psychological. So what's the, what is the neuroscience of relevance? Sure, I'll give you a few things. And there's a lot in the book and I'll give you a couple. I am by no means a neuroscientist. I did have several neuroscientists review what I wrote to make sure I was. Oh, this is a peer reviewed. Okay. This is good. Okay. Good. Good. Good. No, I have several actually. And so, two things. First of all, one thing we know about the brain is that, and this is, this is below the psychology. This is the primitive basic stuff that six times a second, the brain is scanning. Now think about six times a second. That's fast. Where am I, am I safe? Where am I, am I safe? Where am I safe? Right? And so preservation of the organism. That's the brain's first function. And three times a second, it's going, is there an opportunity? Is there an opportunity? The brain loves to act, loves to take action, loves to explore, you know, the old ADD squirrel. Yeah. Yeah. Like that. But only when it feels safe. And so this is why, and any marketer, kind of knows this intuitively, if they don't know the brain science behind it, is that the brain will respond more quickly to negative messages in the sense of messages dealing with the problem. Challenge with the obstacles. And so in most cases in marketing, we want to lead with knowledge of their obstacles, empathy for their obstacles and challenges before we present the opportunities. And now when we target a specific market, we can get very targeted with what their obstacles probably are. And this is only what the opportunities are after that. So that's all based on just how the primitive brain works. And so that's why we focus, that's why like a headline of the 10 mistakes that people make towards blah, blah, blah, out, pull, you know, the best thing you should ever do to build your business, right? Opportunity versus not making mistakes. The brain immediately wants to make sure it's not making those mistakes. How do you make sure that it's not, like once you draw someone with that negative, because I also, like I obviously dabble in the marketing space, but and I knew that point, but I don't know how you can, with 100%, 100% what's the word I'm looking for? Yeah, certainty, excuse me, that the messaging or the overall feeling or takeaway from that messaging isn't negative. So how would you pull someone in with that problem solving a verbiage and copy and then make sure that the takeaway is positive, because that's the sort of the taste that's left in the mouth from the brand. So there's different ways and every business is a little different. What some people like to do is actually start with a little positive, but get to the negative quickly and it's more of a sandwich. There's an opportunity and you have these challenges, right? So there's a lot of you can, you can accomplish this even though this challenges, right? Yeah, we'll do that. They'll start with a positive something and they'll get into the challenges that we know our prospects are thinking or feeling, right? They go, yeah, I want that, but I got these challenges. And so then you go into the challenges a little bit and then you come back to the positive. So just like a sitcom, yeah, have a, a laugh every seven seconds, even in the middle of very poignant moments, it's the same thing. We can talk about the negative. We can talk about the challenges, but we got to shift to the positive fairly quickly within that conversation. It doesn't have to be this way. There is a way out. One study I saw showed that if you just talk about the problem, but you don't quickly represent it in a way that you are a solution to those problems, who actually will drive people away, right? Yes, yeah. Problem without presenting yourself as that possibility for the solution, they will go away. It will be too negative. They just, they don't see you as the answer. So that's that's that another thing that I learned. And this is in the realm of brain science. And it's actually called cognitive neuroscience. And so there's this concept called cognitive fluency. I have to keep reminding myself, cognitive fluency. And here's what this, this is. If, if the copy that you use to describe your product service, whatever the offer is, is a little confusing. Or if navigating your website is a little confusing, or anything, any aspect of how you present yourself is a little confusing. The brain automatically makes the assumption that working with you is going to be complicated. And so we've got to be very careful on how creative we are. It's great to be creative in marketing. But if we're, if we're creative to the point where people don't quite get it, if they have to think too hard, then we're going to lose them. So the brain wants to keep the body alive. The brain wants to expand less energy, not more. So a slightly confusing or complicated message or process, the brain doesn't like that. Now somebody really wants your, your product, they'll hunt, they'll figure it out. They'll, they'll write you an email, say, Hey, I really want to buy this, but I can't figure out your website. But how many people have you lost that aren't going to go through that? Yeah. cognitive fluency. It's a, it's a critical element. I'm always looking to see, is this as smooth and easy as possible and clear as possible? And that's where giving your customers and prospects to see that the table comes in, right? Because you have context in how you write your things and design your things, that they will never, that don't, your prospects will never have. Yeah. So that your brain fills in the gaps in areas that could be confusing to someone visiting you for the first time. I think that's really, that's really smart. I've seen it in action when I've used post sales surveys. So after customer purchases, we do like, we do a customer success, a representative will go out, speak to the customer, ask them why they bought. And then they'll use that verbiage in the picture, the marketing material, like literally the key words that the customer is using to say why they bought that maybe nowhere on the website, the features that the customer purchased the product for maybe may not even be discussed and maybe they discovered those just through, you know, their own, their own discovery of the product. And those are things that aren't highlighted. So yes, the getting that customer voice and incorporating the part of your messaging is incredibly important. What I wanted to, another topic that you brought up in the book is strategic relevance versus tactical relevance. Can you speak a little bit about what that means? Yeah, sure. So strategic relevance, all right. So first of all, the 17 principles, I start with that because principles are higher than strategies and strategies are higher than tactics and that they should flow downward, right? The biggest mistake I've seen the businesses make is when something isn't working, they immediately go to tactics, right? And they don't even consider whether they're operating under the wrong strategy or a flawed principle, flawed thinking, right? I start with the principles. Then we go to strategy. Now, the three main strategies I cover in the book are the target market making sure you're clear on what that is. The bullseye, making sure you're crystal clear on the one or more bullseye's personas, right fit clients I call it in the book. And then your differentiation, what are the different points of differentiation that you might want to use in a tactical way. So we've got to make sure we identify those things. Now, one of the things I do with a lot of my clients, especially the larger clients is we will sit with the team, making sure that every division of a company is represented, the smaller company than everybody's there. But what we're doing, we're going to go from the minute someone interacts with us, be it on a website, a lead magnet, walking into a store, whatever the business is, and all the whole process of the client or customer journey, we will delineate all that and see all the different points of value, the questions we ask, the things we teach, the responsive service, all the points of value. And what that does, first of all, gets everybody excited about the value. Everybody starts to realize how much value you bring to prospects and clients or customers. And then that becomes the body of knowledge that we then start to pull from for some of the tactical things, some of the things of how we're going to describe what we do and who we do it for and what makes us a little bit different. So the tactical is that. The tactical is, it's marketing and it could be sales. It depends on whose hands it's in. Yeah. For instance, what, answering the question, what do you do? What do we do? Some people call it the elevator pitch. The only reason I don't use that term is because the way a lot of people have taught that over the years, it's a little too contrived, a little too confusing, a little too cute. I was watching a class once observing with somebody teaching this. And so this financial advisor decided he was going to say, my elevator pitches, I'm like a financial nutritionist. And it's like, okay, kind of maybe kind of get it, but I don't really know. Now, one could say, well, maybe that's going to pull them. Oh, tell me, what do you mean by that? It might pull someone into that conversation. But for a financial advisor to say that, I'm going to go, okay, that's cool. Next. Yeah. I think how it starts to show up in a tactical way. Yeah. I wanted to mention something before you, before you move off elevator pitch. No, sorry. I'll let you keep going. But I also, I think that where you're going to go with this, I definitely agree. The issue with the concept of an elevator pitch is that it's you're in the elevator with an executive and you have so many floors before, you know, they step off and you have maybe 30 seconds to speak about your whole business. I think that's if somebody as a sales rep is taught that that's how they should pitch to their client, their client, like you mentioned, a financial nutritionist, you have no idea what value they bring and you have no idea what they do. And there's so many things that are missed in that that in a real life scenario, you obviously should be practicing how to communicate those things effectively. So to assume that you have 30 seconds is to say what you do and that's it is a fallacy to say you should be succinct in your messaging and understand what you're going to say and sort of practice and iterate ahead of time is not silly, but it shouldn't be just under the assumption that you have 30 seconds in an elevator. So that's my issue with elevator pitch. Yeah, and I think the elevator pitch was originated from, at least a lot of people think a long, long time ago in Hollywood in the movie industry where, you know, you're writing up on the elevator with a producer and you have 30 seconds to pitch the concept of yeah, yeah. Yeah, we need actually what we really need every business and every salesperson needs ways to talk about what we do in varying links. It's going to depend. It's going to depend on the context. It's going to depend on the context of how we're interacting. It's going to depend on the context of who this person is and what we know about them relevance is all about context, right? And that's why it's important we do our research before we even try to deliver a message to someone. So the message we deliver is based on context and not just, you know, throwing it out there and hoping someone's going to stick. So in the book I give a little formula, I call it the miracle formula and the reason I call it that because it's just a formula to talk about what you do very succinctly covers a lot of bases very quickly with very few words. So I'll just give you the template real quick. Yeah, and that's essentially I work with who want to or we work with who want to for example. And so we work with we deliver our value to whatever, you know, you massage the words and that's your target market. We work with entrepreneurs. We work with small business owners. We work with housewives. I mean, that's different people use anymore. If I was being, you know, showvinistic, right? I'm just going fast. So how's house husbands? How's husbands or housewives? They at home, you know, yeah. And then who want to? So whatever they want, that's the benefit. That's how you get to copy that's very benefit oriented and very quickly because whatever your prospects want, that's the benefit. And then the four examples is very important because that brings a little bit to life. That those short little statements are nice and it's good on trade. But then you want to give a four example. So and hopefully an example that's relevant to them. Let me give you a one pet peeve around this. And we've all experiences. So I can't tell you how many people come to me with products and services and they name drop and they say we've worked with IBM, we've worked with Canon, we've worked with, you know, Microsoft, whatever, all these big large companies. Now I serve large companies. I work for large companies, but I'm not one. And so when someone starts a name drop, names that are not relevant to me that it's like in a different stratosphere or even a different industry, it not only is it not relevant to me, but it's a it's a turn off. And so we got to be careful how we give examples and testimonials and name drop that we make it relevant to our audience. And if you're sending out that generic message to lots of different audiences, then you're you're not hitting any of them. Yeah, that's I think that a lot of people just the they defer back to their largest logos, like he said. And then it doesn't mean anything to you. And look, you can use it and say, you know, we work with Microsoft. So we know what the big boys are doing. Yeah, take that and we can apply it to a small business like yours. Oh, okay. Now I'm getting it, most people don't do that. No, a lot of people don't. Sure, when they should be the guy. Okay, so we've gone really deep into the book. I want to bring it back to you, but is there any other major points that you brought up in the book that that we should highlight here before I go back? Oh gosh, we did we did cover actually some pretty good stuff there. Yeah. No, I'm not thinking about it the moment. If it comes up, I'll let you know. Okay, that's fine. What I wanted to I wanted to sort of clearly define for people that are listening, what as a consultant as an entrepreneur yourself, what is your niche when you're working with people, what what is your target client? What is your, you know, of everything? Who do you try and position yourself as a relevant service provider to? And that's just for people who are listening who would like to get in touch with you. Yeah, thank you. So I have kind of an overarching target, but three targets within that. So my overarching is professional services. So I work with companies, individuals, you name it that are talking in terms of clients versus customers. They usually consultative sales process involved. They usually have longer term relationships. There's a relationship that gets built. It's not transactional. I've done work in that space, but mostly it's with for the professional services. And so my three target markets within that are financial services, financial advisors and insurance banking, which is kind of financial, but it really is different and unique to its own and then accounting. And so I work, you know, those are all kind of financial oriented, but they're different enough that I need to bring different messages to those people. I can't use the same message. So that's the essence of who we serve. And if you've been, I probably should have covered this at the beginning, but if you've been an entrepreneur for the majority of your life, so is that like, how did you end up here? That's a good question. I'll give you the really shortest possible version. It's always a loaded question. All right, so I'm an airplane. And I worked for an airline, actually, I worked for American Airlines. And I was bored. And I was reading one of those avatorials. It's an ad that looks like an article, right? And the title of it was Dollars in Your Mailbox. And I go, hmm, wouldn't want Dollars in their mailbox, right? So I read this thing and was about how to sell information through the mail. And so I actually bought a book about how to sell information through the mail. And then I thought, well, what do I know about it about that? Well, I know about airline careers. I wrote an airline career guidebook. And I used to sell that. And that was that, you know, I did that while I was working. I eventually quit that job so I could devote full time to that airline career guidebook. And that's how I started the publishing business. And it was all about selling information that time through the mail. And now, of course, it's the same principles as we've already discussed using the internet. I think my entrepreneurial journey, you're just like you're the topics that you touch on are very relevant to anybody in sales and marketing. Obviously, it's not hard to find. But normally the type of person that goes into a sales or marketing consulting role is like CXO from large company eventually retired, wanted to do. So you just went right into it. No, well, I like that. I went into the book publishing. Yeah, yeah. It happened is it morphed into cookbooks. I'm not a cook. It was a business decision. Yeah. How people would read books and get a vicarious pleasure from the recipes. And so I launched the whole line of cookbooks. We used to sell them in grocery stores and gourmet shops. And I had my biggest sale, which I talked about in a book with 400,000 books. One client, bumblebee tuna. I sold them a seafood book. That changed my life because I was a sales rep. I got a commission. I was a company owner. I got all the rest. And so and I had another book publishing company that's praying out of the first one. So I really was building a business. I was an entrepreneur. And I sold both of those businesses one for a lot of money, one for just to get out of the debt with my partner, which a lot of entrepreneurs can appreciate. Yeah. Yeah. Then a friend of mine said, Bill, you know so much about building a business and you should become a consultant speaker author. I never really thought about that. And so 25 years ago, after I sold my last business, that's what I got into this world of helping other entrepreneurs, marketing, marketers, salespeople with their journey. Amazing. I always find everybody's on origin story, but how they got to where they are today. Very interesting because it's always, there's never, it's never linear. It's always all over the map. And then you find yourself and you look up and you're like, how the hell did I get here? But it's good. Like everything, you know, a whole bunch of books like to be a professional musician. And yeah, you call me an entertainer, right? Well, yeah. That now feeds me going on stage and giving speeches, right? Yeah. It's all it one has led and fed to the other. And you know, if you keep learning from what you've done before, you know, bring that becomes part of who you are. Yeah. Bring it to the next step and the next step. Then you really can bring a lot to the table. And so all that diverse experience, I think is really, you know, it's helped me. It's made. Yeah. Well, you've proven it out. You've proven that like you're you're you're living it now. So that's it's very impressive. What was I going to say? Oh, so I like to ask this question just because it gives some context for people that are earlier on in their career. What would be the one lesson that you've learned over your career? Well, trying, trying to keep it at one that you would tell your 20 year old self. Yeah, I'd say if you have a sense of something you really want to do, and I'll give you example in my own world, then listen to that and take the risk and try it. And here's what it was in my world. So I my graduate school was in film and television. And I could have gone into that. I was thinking about being a sportscaster. I was thinking about, you know, the on camera role in that. And I don't know, somehow I talk myself out of that. I think I could have been good at it. I think I would have loved the hell out of it because I love sports and being around that. I now have a couple of friends who are sportscasters. And so I get the tail along a little bit, but I just I didn't trust myself and I didn't I didn't take that risk. Look, I love what I do now. I there's no regrets here. And there is that situation that I could have taken another path that I probably would have also enjoyed. I probably maybe wouldn't have had to travel as much as I travel now, given what I do. But just, you know, trust that instinct. There's that calling. And you know, it may work out. It may not, but take the risk. Take the risk. That's good advice. That's very, very good advice. Another, okay, so the last point that I wanted to bring up just so we have it on records. So everybody's listening who doesn't see the tax associated with when I post this, you have a guide that's linked to the book. Can you can you just give us a little bit of a heads up on how to find that guide if they want to? Yeah, I'll give you I'll give you two things actually one. Okay. This this first guide actually links all the referral introduction word of mouse stuff I've been doing for so long and the new content to messaging kind of together. And it's called exponential growth guide dot com exponential growth guide dot com. It's free. Go get it. I think you'll find it helpful. And then if you want to learn more about the book, I mean, you can go to Amazon. Just look up radical relevance or Bill Gates. But we do have a website before the book, which is radical relevance book dot com. And so you can learn a little more about see if it's right for you. See if it's relevant for you. Yeah. And then get it. And if you do, by the way, if you get the book, you you then tap into something we call the radical relevance tool kit. And you'll see inside the book, there's a way to register the book and get the toolkit. And it's a ton of stuff that I didn't put in the book because I didn't want the book to be too large. Just so much I wanted to give. It's a lots of reports and guides and checklists. Free. If you get the book, you get access to the toolkit as well. That's a lot of value. Just going over what, you know, what I've learned about the book and what I've read and this up we discussed today. So like, if that book comes with the artillery stuff, I want to check it out. To be quite honest, but I think that like listen, like, sales, marketing, individual contributors, leaders looking to either grow their own organization, people looking to sort of, you know, move to the next step in their career and they want a good resource to learn from entrepreneurs or people that are looking to become entrepreneurs, maybe start their own side thing. Anybody who really needs a little bit of insight as to how to tap into their customers. Listen, the more help they can get with that upfront, the less money, time, resources, they're going to waste figuring it out on their own. So I think they should definitely check out the book. I have no idea what it costs, but it can't be that much. It's a book and it comes with a whole bunch of guides. So I think it would be worth it. In 95 on Amazon and you get the audio book or you can get the Kindle. Yeah, I'm a big fan of like podcasts, audibles right now. It's just, it's much easier. Actually, that's another thing I like to ask, where do you go to learn? So where are your resources outside of what you produce? Yeah, I mean, I read a lot. I read a lot on airplanes and I read. Do you have any titles? What's that? Do you have any titles that you're a fan of now? Yeah, I'll tell you one that I'm very much a fan of and I actually have a chapter in the book kind of devoted to something. Okay. And it's a book by Donald Miller called Building Your Story Brand. Donald Miller, Building Your Story Brand. So he goes into some things around the clarity of the message and he talks about the being the hero and the villain and all that sort of stuff. So mine goes a little wider in some of the breath, but it's a great book and we used it in our own company and then I put him and some other folks in the book. So that's that's a good one. Where do I go? I read a lot and I'm getting at the podcast a lot more. Not only being interviewed by them, but I actually I found that it allows me to work out longer in the end. If I'm looking to listen to a good podcast, I'll stay on the treadmill. I'll stay on the elliptical. I'll stay on the rover, you know, if I'm yeah, do a good one. So yeah, I have to stop and take some notes and then get going again. That's my biggest issue when I'm listening to a podcast that I'm really enjoying and I'm like, oh, wow, I need to I need to start typing some of this stuff down. But then maybe I'll go back later to be quite honest. I love listening to podcasts, but at the same time, I appreciate like, you know, tapping into all the people that I get to speak with because if you don't think I'm learning something right now, you're getting yourself, you know what I mean? So it's a it's a great opportunity. Read and writing my book. You know how much? Yeah. Writing the book. 100%. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. If if people want to actually reach out to you, what's the best way? LinkedIn, email, how would they, how are they going to touch? Definitely look me up on LinkedIn, Bill Cates, C-A-T-E-S, regular website is referralcoach.com. And I'll give you my email address. Go straight to me. Bill. Yeah, sure. Go coach.com. Bill at referralcoach.com. Okay, cool. That's all I got. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on? Yeah, no, I just I'll leave you with a thought. All right. All right. If if you're not relevant, you're going to be ignored. And if you're not compelling, once you have their interest, you'll be forgotten. So we have to continually be relevant and compelling, relevant, compelling. It's almost like a motor that's just turning and turning and turning. And we've got to think about how we're going to attract the right people and how we're going to move and take action. That's the purpose of our messaging. Awesome. Thank you. And thank you. Thank you for doing the podcast. I appreciate it. Well, you're very welcome. So this has been another episode of the sales versus marketing podcasts featuring Bill Cates. And radical relevance. So if you haven't, if you haven't read the book, go check it out. You can download this podcast wherever you can download podcasts. You can watch it on YouTube. And if you haven't already, please like, subscribe and share with your friends, family, peers, whoever you think can benefit from sales, marketing, or business knowledge in general. So that's that's all I got. Have a great, have a great day. Have a great week and we'll speak again soon. Bye now. Thanks for listening to the sales versus marketing podcast brought to you by R.O.I. Delivering strategy, technology, and insights to both sales and marketing leaders and teams. Global.