Lessons - How To Be Radically Relevant | Bill Cates - President of Referral Coach

People, so radical relevance, why is this concept alone in the greater scheme of digital marketing important enough to write a book about? Well, it's because we live in a radically relevant world. Let me explain that. I mean, between big data and, you know, the election is the micro targeting in 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 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, you know, people about this, also about this. That's all about relevance. Going into a grocery store and looking for water. How many waters do they have these days, right? Sparkling water, still water, flavor, not flavored, smart, dumb water, whatever. And all of that's to be relevant to whoever, you know, their prospect, their customer might be in the same thing with toothpaste. Now, here's an interesting one. Build boards. All right, so not all parts of the country in the world have billboards, but a lot to do. 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 billboards 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, you know, 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, you know, 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. So that's a really good point. But 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 know, you said you came from like a more traditional marketing era where you would get flyers and pamphlets and whatnot. But now you're well, well versed in digital marketing and we get, you know, 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 males through LinkedIn or emails, spam males, whatever. So obviously that's, 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 like 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 it's 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, 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. So they actually expand who they're trying to reach with 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 time and the right way. And if you don't do that, then you're again, you're white noise. 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, right, 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 about finding the bull's eye and getting the bull's eye. So okay. So one of the points that we discussed before this, you're telling a story of how your clients achieved 900% growth in seven years. So that's obviously incredible growth. So first I want to speak about, like, sort of walk us through that case study and then let's speak about how that's repeatable 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 forms 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, the introducer to more. So she could create more groups. And we got nitty gritty on this. 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 introducer to others. But she also wanted to scale in another way. She wanted to bring on more chairs, more people to lead the groups. We 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. 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, 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? Like, that was really, really good. And that's, so that helped to achieve 900% growth. Yeah. And, 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 first, but that's not always a good thing to do because here's, 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?