How to Tell Stories That Convert

welcome to the ecommerce podcast with matt edmondson a show that brings you regular
interviews tips and tools for building your business online
in today's show we are going to get into it with marcus and you i'm
giggling because um i know what his background is on his skype video and it's still making me laugh and we're gonna get into
uh all kinds of stuff with marcus today about how the art of storytelling um the odd of telling stories that
convert to online sales is the title and really looking forward to this one because in the prequel as
you know when we do these podcasts we do a pre-call with who's coming on the show uh just to get an idea of what we're
going to talk about so i can connect with people if i've not them before and marcus's pre-call is one of those
that actually stands out he is such a character and i'm really really looking forward to this one it's going to be great
so marx is coming up in just a few minutes time but before we chat with marcus let me take a quick moment to thank
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[Music]
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without further ado let me introduce to you uh today's guest
now marcus is um like i say he's an amazing character
you're gonna really really like this guy um and he is going to help us increase our conversion rates and engage more
customers by using the old school methods of storytelling now before i give you too much
background on marcus and and all that sort of stuff let me bring him in uh let me press the right button on my
screen here marcus good day we can all see you how you doing very well thank you thanks for having me
matt and just so i'm clear which one are you of the three
the one who's lips are actually moving at this time it's great to have you thanks for being here
now marcus i read in your bio that you've been in business oops my microphone you've
been in business you've been doing selling since is that correct
yeah pretty much and i wouldn't say i've been selling all that time for the first years i was taking
orders and i wasn't very good um and uh yeah it took years to pay off a
jar of nest cafe that i bought in the safeway um but i've eventually learned and
uh i'll earn a lot of scar tissue i'm going to lean forward a little bit because i can see my double chin
now you just go ahead and reposition yourself no problem
there we go so it's down to two instead of three now oh okay yeah that's okay we get that we
get the point we get the message in fact what i'm going to do is i'm just going to change the viewport here that
the viewers can see if you're looking on facebook and you'll get to see
there and for those of you listening to audio podcast the reason why i'm smiling the reason why i'm laughing so much
is the background is from the muppets i mean talk about a
throwback it's the two what do they are they called the grumpy guys they're called what sorry
stackler and waldorf okay i know him as the grumpy old guys that just sort of sat up in the
in the in the posh box yeah why did you choose that as a background
image just out of curiosity they are the um
sorry my daughter's decided to come in i'm recording at the moment um they're the um
news that i have for my podcast so um essentially i have two grumpy old
grizzled veterans um upsetting the audience and the idea is to leave them feeling
uncomfortable and challenged then does that work yeah actually it
really it really does i'm pleasantly surprised i thought that my approach would offend and upset
people and it does um but i have a very loyal following yeah and they seem to derive a lot of value from
it do you think and i mean you you brought it up though and i'm really curious to know what you
think about this um do you think it's good in modern day to be polarizing to actually
step out and say yes i am going to upset a few folks with what i'm doing and that's okay
yes i think if you try and please everyone you please no one and if you don't have an a position or
an opinion then you are bland and anodyne and vanilla now lots of people will you know have
vanilla as their second choice um but i don't think you grow fast
by uh being just one of the crowd if you if you want to differentiate then
you need to stand apart and um i recognized quite early on that of my
total addressable market maybe three percent are my ideal
customer yeah and i only focus on them not because i don't worry about the rest but um you
know the reality is that i serve my ideal customer really well and
if i allow myself to get distracted by what my non-ideal customer wants then
i start producing products and services that are non-core and net result of that
is that i then stop serving my ideal customer well and if you want to really grow fast
the evidence is absolutely abundant if you want to grow fast focus on a very
tightly defined niche so a lot of the work that i do is in i.t yeah and it's no longer good enough to be the
msp for health you now need to be the managed service provider
for walk-in clinics of up to doctors in southeast london yeah now if you do
that and you niche and you've very clearly defined market then you can grow and you know today's
topic is really about uh story yeah well if you build stories that are
deeply relevant timely that enter into the conversations that your prospects
are already having then you lower resistance and you eliminate uh barriers to entry but too often
people who are selling are selfish they are eye-centered they're
they i equate it to showing photos of their ugly children to strangers
the minute you start talking about you your company your products your services how long you've been in
business then people switch off because what i learned early on
is no one believes what comes out of a salesperson's or a marketer's mouth that's very true even the sales people
don't believe it and even the sales people don't i mean when you think about how bad um salespeople self-concept
is um they don't call themselves salespeople anymore they call themselves business development managers
[Laughter] that's very true change the title but not the person don't they
well what people forget is nothing happens in our economy until someone sells yeah and if you
don't sell you don't have a business what you have is a hobby um and the the problem with many
organizations is that they're squeamish about selling selling is a noble
profession it's really important that we understand
that selling is the lifeblood of every business and whether you sell online or offline
whether it's physical product intellectual product or electrons it doesn't matter your job is to go and
find people who need help if you can help them then you have a moral obligation to sell
to them so i always teach my clients that you have to answer two questions
before you do anything else can i help yeah and am i the right person to help i
would much rather refer them to a competitor than take on the wrong type of business for me or the wrong type of
solution for them that's quite fascinating i mean that's that's the opposite to how a lot of
people in business would think they're like a client's a client let's grab the client while we can right
but not all pounds and dollars are equal yeah um if you think about it if you
take on the wrong type of customer i was touching on on it earlier you start to develop the
wrong products or you um build the wrong range of products on your e-commerce website
and as a result you start um attracting people who are non-core and
the net result of that is that you end up diverting your attention from
communicating with and spending time with and getting honest feedback from your
core customers and the the best people to speak to
are there are three types of people that every business should speak to and get their story okay i'm the writer
you're raving fans because they can articulate why they love you yeah okay
and why they buy the second are the people who hate you and have fired you
okay that takes a lot of courage because that will tell you why they dumped you why they don't buy
from you yeah and then people who change their behavior if they start buying or stop
buying there are lots of brands out there that have loyal customers who've stopped buying
yep and there's a really good example a partner of mine specializes
in helping companies understand exactly why people buy and this is a big uh retail
consumer brand in the fashion industry yeah and the chief marketing officer um his ego got
in the way and he decided as it always does yeah absolutely ego is the enemy and he
decided that this brand was going to be an action adventure brand so what did
they do they started all their advertising and their marketing um with photos and video of people base
jumping paragliding skiing you know and um off uh off black runs all this kind of
stuff anyway long story short um they did the analysis and they discovered that in their
biggest market china and hong kong people saw this brand as being
something that you went to go out and be seen in and when he went out for dinner with
your family to somewhere nice you'd dress up in this stuff when they fixed that million
pounds to that top line revenues in one quarter wow that's a big difference absolutely and
so this the basis of story is starting with your customer so you said
um let me just close this look because i like my neat notes he said there's three types of clients
that we should have or talk to one was our raven fans the second one was those who hate us what would what was the
third one and the third one is people who've changed their behavior okay they've stopped buying they've started buying
they started buying uh in bulk in some particular area what you're looking for is change
yeah because that's an indication that there's a catalyst there and you need to understand the motive
the cause and the intent okay and very few people really understand
that i mean how to put this politely
human beings don't understand other human beings yeah okay if you just think how messed up
your own family is okay and now you then take this into the context of talking to a stranger
remotely through their screen okay if you don't really do
your research if you don't understand what makes them tick if you are not focused on how
uh they go about doing their business how they live their lives what matters
to them chances are you will leave a vast amount of money on the table
uh there's a fabulous book by tiffany bova t-i-f-a-n-i
bova b-o-v-a yeah called sales iq and in there she identifies different
ways that companies can really get inside their customers head oh okay
only company that's done it well is amazon in all areas now they are quite good at e-commerce so
they're probably a good place to start they've learned a thing or two about e-commerce they've definitely learned a thing so
this book by tiffany sales iq you've obviously read it yeah and because that was going to be my next question to you um
in terms of this is all great but how do i do that and obviously tiffany is going to cover
that in her book yeah absolutely another two other books that i urge everyone to read okay and the first one
is the context marketing revolution by matthew sweesey s w w z e y
and he's the chief futurist for salesforce okay that'll definitely be really sweet
smartphone yeah and and the other one is marketing rebellion by the genius mark schaefer
and that's s-h-s-s-c-h-a-e-f-e-r okay um i i did an interview with him on
my podcast about two weeks ago and it is golden um the the the problem that i see
is that people when they're marketing and when they're selling and when they're telling stories make
themselves the hero okay now this um this is this is going
to be interesting so um i i've i do want to just ask right here i
normally ask this at the end of the show marcus but i this will be a good place to do it you mentioned you have a
podcast and obviously you've interviewed the the chap that wrote martin marketing rebellion on the podcast
where what's your podcast called for those that want to go in the inquisitive podcast because i
ask awkward and uncomfortable questions okay and and the uh url is marcus calkey
m-a-r-c-u-s-c-a-u-c-h-i dot podbean dot com and if you want it on spotify or apple
just type in marcus calkey and i have a second podcast called scale ups and hyper growth and
there i interview sales leaders from the fastest growing technology companies on the planet
and they are growing at hundreds thousands hundreds of thousands of percent
you know one company uipath has grown a hundred thousand percent in revenues in seven years and they haven't lost
control and that's the important bit yeah because lots of companies grow very quickly but then they fall apart because
they haven't built the right kind of infrastructure and whatever type of business that you're
building it's crucially important that you plan ahead and you design the business that you
intend to become in six months a year two years three years five years from now
because if you do hit the curve stick what will happen is you'll create a traffic jam behind you
because as sales gets ahead of operations of finance um of hr
what tends to happen is you start to get this backlog and in the same way that a traffic jam
goes backwards at miles an hour and what you find is that you start
creating these bottlenecks and these disconnects and this is where an
organization falls apart because what happens at that point is you start finding blame creeps in
ambiguity creeps in there are gaps between the silos there isn't a handover
yeah and um i learned something really fascinating from interviewing the chief innovation
officer for the city of helsingborg a guy called patrick lindqvist
and he built his team by bringing in non-experts but users of the public services so his
brief is to turn helsingborg into um a city of innovation for europe uh by
and i'm delighted he's invited me over to their expo
um but something he did which is really amazingly insightful he has hired
managers whose sole responsibility is the management of the gaps between the
different departments and processes they're literally gap managers that's
not speaking yeah yeah how innovative yeah very clever
very very clever now when you think about the power of having customers
turn into the people who design your product design your service yeah i know you recently did an episode
on customer generated stories yeah earlier on i said no one believes sales people
they'll believe some of what you show them nothing of what you tell them some of
what they tell them yeah they'll believe a bit of what other people tell them
but they will believe everything they tell themselves wow that's good and so
and you're you're coming sort of bringing this back to where we were five minutes ago the
premise is we can use storytelling to help customers tell themselves
the right story if that makes sense yes and because i think storytelling has a
real real power yeah bear in mind our ancestors have been sat around campfires
telling stories about the great emu in the sky the spaghetti monster and everything else um and we've been sat around those
campfires and we are creatures of emotion and story and where so many people go wrong in their
marketing in their selling even in their planning is they think human beings are logical economists think people are
logical and they were put on the planet to make russell grant look good
yeah are you going to have to explain who russell grant is for the international those people depressingly
young russell grant is a an astrologer um so soothsayers roman reece would slit
open the belly of a geese and read the entrails okay economists most economists have
less valid uh validity uh than someone doing that okay there are a couple out there that
are definitely worth um paying attention to yeah but by and large really don't they talk a load of cards now back
to my point if you can get the customer to generate the story
you are far more likely to get a win so there is a technology company called chronos
and chronos do hr software yep they're very good at it but what's
really interesting is when they put content out
the content gets almost no direct engagement what drives the engagement is a few
raving fans driving the conversation and it's the comments
that really drive the engagement they get something like if i remember
rightly it's something like a uh conversion rate when people have been
driven to them through the comments from customers okay
now think about it yeah yeah okay so it's really important to get your
customer stories it's crucial that your customers have a
voice and mark schaefer talks about this in his book it's all about humanizing your marketing
and if you take nothing away from this conversation take this you must think as your
customer not about them very good so think uh i'm gonna write this down think as
your customer not about not about them because when
you think about them you're intellectualizing you're making assumptions there's conjecture there's guesswork
if you enter their skin look at the world through their eyes and one of my favorite mentors
is a guy called mark galston and he wrote a book which all of your listeners and viewers should
uh read as well called just listen okay and it's the world's leading expert in training people how to
do empathic listening okay now listening is a whole body
experience you're not just listening to the words that people say you're listening to how they are clothed
the tone the pace the emphasis the silences what's not being said
and it's really important that you take this away as well all human beings want to be heard
feel felt and be understood when another human being feels like you
understand completely how they feel they will engage now in order to do that
we as sellers as marketers need to be vulnerable
yeah yeah yeah and when we are crafting our stories it's
so crucial that we make the customer the hero why do you think amazon has
reviews stars testimonials customer recommendations yep yeah because they drive the sale
the copy that the marketer or the seller has put up there is of almost no consequence i mean when
was the last time you bought something that or pretty much anything and you didn't look
at the ones that had five or max minimum four star reviews yeah and when you were really going to
make something a purchase that was important to you how many times have you not then gone and look at the reviews oh you
always do yeah yeah you always do that's our that's our behavior unless we've already decided that we're
going to buy it and we bought it before or we've seen it yep yeah chances are we will always look at the reviews
you do so or you do order the other thing that i it's the same thing but i um i'm getting a new computer so i look
at the reviews but i also going to youtube and i watch people do reviews and all that sort of stuff about it so it's getting more involved isn't it
and again one of the things that i have a tendency to do if i'm gonna review if i'm gonna buy something so uh
yesterday i sneakily bought myself a shiatsu massager um for vast amount of money so i look
i've spent three or four weeks actually doing that i normally purchase things straight away but i'm gonna have to live with this and i knew that i would have to justify
this to my wife um so i spent weeks tell me how you did that by the way
because i've been trying to do this for a while the old message largely by assuming that i'm definitely
in the wrong and i shouldn't have done it but um yeah the the reality is i am
normally wrong so you know in fairness and you know yeah i've been sat um
on my sofa in the conservatory for weeks now and i'm starting to ache so i genuinely
did it um so that the reality is that you have to tell stories
through your customers voice you as the owner of the business have to
tell stories that engage your customer
in a way that makes them feel like you're a fly on their wall you understand their position their
situation their problems their challenges their hopes their fears their aspirations
and in order to do this you need to understand that they are the
hero and you are the guide people buy from us they come to us because they're looking for leadership a
safe pair of hands they're looking to solve a problem more often than not
people buy by moving away from pain more than moving towards pleasure
and um interesting my research on this it's anecdotal so i don't have a paper
to refer to but my close rate is times higher
when i identify a pain they want to move away from than a benefit they want to move towards
now okay fear outsells gain on its own five to one and payne
outsells uh gain to one but understand this people buy stuff
services products whatever because they want a better future so you can't leave them in pain
and the two it's like yin and yang you need to make sure there is a balance there so you identify what the problem
is that they're trying to fix and then you draw them through that process and have them tell their story yeah because prospects
never argue with their own data they'll argue with you're still near blue in the face yeah
yeah and then what you do is you help them to identify what the future a better future looks
like so one of my favorite opening questions is matt let's pretend we've been working
together i don't know months and we're looking back to this conversation today
what needs to have changed materially and in your results in your mindset
for you to say thank god the best decision i ever made was working with you marcus
and then just sit back and let them tell me what that looks like because that now creates a gap between
where they want to be where they aspire to be the gain and where they are now and it's my job
then to help them realize and understand and see for themselves
why it is that i am the person best suited to help them do that and if at any point i spot that they're
that they're not right for me or i'm not right for them then i will tell them and i'll say matt
hands up i don't think i'm the right person for you let me tell you why and here's someone else i'll refer you to
yeah yeah okay so that's um how do how does that
work if i'm i get if i'm in a room with you right and we we have that conversation
um and how could that work do you think online how would amazon do that conversation it
works with videos it works with chat uh with uh online chat
um you you gain more credibility from the questions that you ask than the information that you give
so again it depends on the type of transaction that you uh operate in if you're doing
high ticket online transactions then there needs to be some kind of journey
and you know people aren't just going to turn up onto your website and spend grand yep yeah um if they're buying
um i don't know mars bars then they'll be looking for the lowest price because unless you build value into the
conversation the conversation will always degenerate into cost
okay so let's just pick uh and pick that a little bit so unless you build value into the
conversation the conversation will always degenerate to cost and this is this is really important i think for
online business because this is how you stop the race to the bottom isn't it this is how you stop oh i've got another
cheaper than them they've got and you you create that sort of downward spiral of pricing
so injecting value into the conversation if i can echo back as what i've heard is it's about asking
questions and that identify um you know where your customers at
identifying where they are and where they want to be and how you can obviously help during that process am i am i i hope i'm not oversimplifying
it but no you're not but and what you need to understand is customers go through a journey
and you need to understand what that journey looks like so what i've found very helpful for my
business is content the production of valuable content that they want to
consume i i picked up a client um a couple of months ago who'd been following me for
years well that's a long time yeah yeah now they'd never commented they'd never even
liked one of my posts but it just hit the mark and they said
it was like you were a fly on the wall we were having this conversation only yesterday i had to contact you
how do you do this well you do this through the provision of value before they ever find your website
because let's face it most of your audience their website is invisible
there can only be one person or one website at number one in the google search
at any one time okay so they can spend an absolute fortune an obscene amount of
money i mean facebook last year get this billion dollars
trillion impressions that never got a single click no way billion dollars
now you add that up across google you add it across bing and every other um website
uh every other platform most pay-per-click is a waste of money yeah because people
are not engaging with their customers and drawing them in organically making
them volunteers instead of hostages and again mark schaefer and matthew sweesey both make
this point your invasive advertising your invasive marketing
doesn't really resonate i mean just look at your own behavior if you run an e-commerce website
and you have ever gone online how often have you clicked on the ads that are served up to you
no very rarely yeah so what you need to do is you need to build
community you need to build um a value base
so that your customers and your fans are telling your story
the the thing that warms the cockles of my heart is how often people say
you've got to talk to marcus because and it's some piece of content or a st a stream of content that i've
produced that has resonated with them and the net result of that is they then
tell your story for you and people will absolutely believe that
stuff when it's said repeatedly you know hitler and trump have both managed to do this you know
i repeated often enough will eventually become deleted well um if your uh clients and
your fans are constantly out there um giving uh testimonials uh
raving about how brilliant you are telling giving examples of how you've been able to help them
then that lowers the barriers because you cannot convince anyone to buy anything
ever people must convince themselves and that's
our job yep that's our job as marketers that's our job as sales people as customer success as customer service
every time we touch the customer we need to bring value to them even if they are not yet buying yeah
okay even if they're only a prospect so every stage of this customer journey that you're talking about customers are
on a journey whether it's online whether it's offline they're on a journey and you have to bring this
value at each stage in that journey to them absolutely conversations the the moment you stop
bringing value to them you're think of this like an emotional
bank account if you're in credit you can make the occasional withdrawal
if on the other hand you are in deficit so you're overdrawn there
comes a point where they stop giving you any leeway and so
it's crucially important that each time you touch them whether it's and through your marketing
through the experience of engaging with you through your um chat chat bot or your online live
chat through a telephone conversation it doesn't make any difference
that has to be a valuable experience and they need to feel like you care
about them and you have their interests front and center so the model i would
urge you all to pay attention to is jeeves from jeeves and wooster yeah
he doesn't always agree sometimes he challenges but he does so respectfully um and he never whilst he may let
bertie wooster fail he never lets him fail so badly that it's terminal um
and i believe that uh you asked me the question right at the top of the conversation
um sorry let me close this door no
problem you asked me the question right at the top of the conversation um
about um whether it's a good idea to be controversial yeah i
think you should be i think you should polarize um you should have an opinion take a position
because um not everyone is qualified to become your customer
and certainly not everyone is qualified to have a demonstration a presentation a proposal
um and the part the problem that i see with a lot of e-commerce is that and
particularly for software for example and there's a lot of this by a try before you buy yeah without any
agreement as to what happens next about what the customer
is going to measure how they are going to make the go about making their decision and if
you haven't done that then you spend to percent of your time chasing you know when you think about what it
costs an e-commerce business to bring in a lead yeah yeah
and you know in some of the categories we're talking tens or hundreds of pounds per lead and then they blow those leads
because they haven't got a good they've not mapped out and they've not thought about who their customer is why
they are coming to them from where they are coming where they are in their life cycle yeah um and as a result of that they
missed the mark and you know that company that i was telling you about where and they
misjudged the uh the brand well the same uh consultancy that does the work with
them uh worked with another company and by changing seven words they managed to increase
sales by over million pounds seven words was all it took
because they actually understood the customer and so this the key is to get inside the
skin inside the mind of your customer understand what it's like to be them so
if you if i go back to your example marcus of where you were talking about the software company that does the
free trial and how that doesn't really work because you're not getting the customer to quantify what's going to happen
afterwards how would you go about doing something like that
okay um so tell you a story um i have a client who was getting downloads a month and they closed
half a percent well now how much time do you reckon that took up with their sales team
uh most of it i would imagine pretty much okay uh this month oh sorry last month
they posted their best results ever okay now what you do is first of all
when people cut make an inquiry you need to qualify who they are now people who typically
want to download software typically don't have chief in their title do they
that's very true okay so they're normally engineers now if an engineer is going to fiddle
they're normally doing it because they're interested and they want to tinker and maybe improve their cv but they have no power they have no
authority they can perhaps recommend and they may have some influence so
first of all uh in many cases not all and so there's one great example uh
which is crystal which is um a widget that fits on uh linkedin and it allows you to analyze
the personality of everyone's profile oh yeah i know the one you mean yeah brilliant and that's all been a try before you buy
model and that's worked really well for them but they have a fabulous philosophy which is slow down to speed up what they
wanted to do was build that user base and create a community of
raving fans another fantastic one is kahoot um kahoot is a software
company it's sub million dollars based out of oslo get this billion
unique users million unique users per day
that's unbelievable yeah yeah and they did that all through word of mouth through the
power of story kids talking to other kids talking to their teachers and saying miss mess
we've just had a great class it was really good fun you should try this and now they're being taken into major
corporations like facebook twitter google and most of silicon valley is now using them and so
that's where they've commercialized it but it's been a long game yeah now with uh other software
companies what you need to do is you need to create gates so the first thing you would do when
someone makes an inquiry about you know can we demo can we download your software is have
them answer a series of questions yep okay first of all
how do why do you want to uh to use the software what you know a circumstance or application
will you be applying it into okay what are you hoping the outcome will be as a result
and how are you going to measure it if it meets those measured requirements
what happens then who besides you would need to be involved to have a conversation about using the product now
in all fairness my view is that a premature presentation of the product
will typically increase the cost in the prospect's mind okay reduce the probability of closing
yep and massively elongate sales cycles deal slippage is exceptionally common in
companies that do this try before you buy yeah in the s and s it was the puppy
dog clothes yeah yeah you give them the puppy for the weekend they can't bring it back yeah well in this day and age
buyers are way more sophisticated than that they are they've got to care about the puppy
software you download is not a puppy is it's just absolutely and they but again it has to be personalized because people
buy for their reasons not the seller's reasons and all
all decisions to buy are emotional when people say oh no i've you know i do
and you know a spreadsheet in comparison remember okay they're just more emotionally attached to appearing logical
and i've taught people to sell it's very true very true multi-billion dollar deals um and you
know complex uh highly sophisticated deals so you know they've taken five years to get through
and and i come along and we close it in six months because each to every two years selling to the mod uh every two years
the people that you're selling to change jobs yep they have to start again again and again but they've never been able to
coordinate it now i know and i'm i'm pretty sure if someone was selling
three billion a pop uh on e-commerce they'd probably do the one sale and then beat a lot
but um yeah and that would be decent margin yeah and so the the reality is that
when you take people through that buying journey and don't always make it easy for them to
buy make them work for it what's really interesting i find that that's count or people would then
challenge that and say isn't that counter-intuitive especially in the world of e-commerce it's like no the it needs the journey needs to be easy it needs to
be easy but sometimes i think people need to be challenged yeah yeah and if you train dolphins or
dogs yeah and you just give them a treat every time they get bored yep yeah sometimes you
have to just throw them a fish for the sake of it and sometimes you don't reward them i think you know the whole process of
making this intellectually stimulating uh you know i'm not an e-commerce specialist by any
stretch of imagination so um you know you're probably right but i do understand human beings
we like to have to think we like to have to figure stuff out and we like games and you know
gamification is something that marketing and sales really need to pay attention to it's a massive thing and little nudges
and you know what we're not when i'm in my world so it's unrelated to yours but i think
it bears uh uh telling in my world i will identify a
prospect and i will then start producing content specifically with them in mind
thinking as them and the way i do it is i do these little narratives
so it's a conversation between me and a prospect or a salesperson and their manager or the ceo and the cfo or the ceo and
their investor whatever um and i produce a series of little
character snippets with an interesting picture or a video and a call to action and after a while
yeah i'll connect with these people on linkedin and then i'll tag them because i think i
thought you might think this was interesting and i'll have um people in my network who are connected with them as well tag
them because i want to surround them so by the time we actually get to speak i'm already familiar to them my work is
already familiar to them and i mean it's pretty unlikely that
you're gonna go onto a website you've never seen before and just make a purchase
yeah i mean how many times have you gone back to amazon rather than buy off a site you're not
familiar with particularly in this day of cybercrime yeah it's an inter i'm i have to be honest with max i'm the
wrong person to ask this question i deliberately avoid buying off amazon okay fair enough sorry
so i i'm i think because i run my own e-commerce businesses i'm always like no no i want to go find people like me and
i often find actually it's cheaper but that's beside the point and it's like how can i support a local business guy
rather than the big monster so i think i'm the wrong person but again let me let me just pick up on something
i would rather feel secure than pay less yes yeah
and that's what amazon have done very well convenience and security you feel like you feel like they've taken
care of you one thing i would urge all of you to do is get testimonials from your clients
and have them talk about the stuff that really matters to uh to your customers okay um
and this is um about having them say um what it is that they love about
you and one of the things i would say is about how safe they felt yeah i have a testimonial template which
i give to my clients and people i've had okay that's interesting so that helps your customers write a good testimonial
well if you look on my linkedin profile i've got of them on there and most of them are at least an apage long
oh wow okay and i don't know any other trainer that has anywhere even close and
excuse me it goes who are you and who do you serve yep what pains originally caused you to
invite me into help yep what were your initial reservations security whatever okay what results did
you achieve with my help what surprised you can you describe a wow experience
okay was it fun and would you recommend me and why yep yeah now if you look on my linkedin
profile it's just teeming with these things not all i'd say at least maybe or of them
uh you know i could write a book just by lifting those and putting them in a book fantastic
and it tells the story because and dan kennedy said this
gather the herd and produce product to suit and the other thing that he did he said
was um people buy from people like themselves so testimonials that's why i say who do
you serve who are you and you serve i want their job title i want the industry that they're in
and who their market is because then people can instantly relate and say ah that's me
yep yeah now and he did a really interesting study he was selling vitamin b tablets for
horses [Laughter]
okay and what he found was american quarter horse trainers would not buy off testimonials from arab trainers or
thoroughbred trainers but only off american quarters trainers nurses nurses firemen buy from firemen
yeah yeah yep and so we need to get really smart
really smart and we have to do our research in this day and age customers have the entire sum of human knowledge
at their fingertips with a few flicks of um the keyboard and few taps of the mouse
if you haven't done your research and you don't understand who the archetype is and this is another reason
why i think um a lot of marketers go wrong yeah they talk about persona you know dave is a year old sales
development rep working in a tech call center well that's dave yeah yeah i need to understand
um what drives these people and i need to understand because most
brands interestingly enough according to martin lucas the ceo and founder of gap in the matrix
he said that most brands attract one archetype okay only one
if you don't know what your archetype is and who your best customers are and what archetype they fit into
chances are you will spend an awful lot of time money effort resource and opportunity costs marketing to the
wrong people so when you go into a company and i've seen it on their walls actually when i've been into companies um they've
got five personas on the wall and actually what you're saying is if i'm understanding this right is
forget the five focus on the one yeah and it's not just about persona it's about
the archetype and getting right into their head and understanding how they think and
feel as opposed to what it is they do and where they live precisely and the the problem is
that too often um people are asking the wrong questions as a
result if you're asking if you're focused on the wrong end of the problem
chances are you're asking the wrong questions we need to challenge ourselves and this
is where i think really great content uh can come into its own
it's where we ask ourselves questions like well what if that's wrong what is the opposite truth
what if we stop doing this and i have a poster on my office wall which i'm very fond of it comes from my third favorite
website despair.com well it's it's fabulous you should deck
your office out in it uh do you know these horrible um posters that you know uh the motivational posters of eagles
dare to say that yeah very s
it's it's that rhymes with rank and um this is the opposite of that
um it's the antithesis they have a customer dissatisfaction charter
their primary driver in their customer dissatisfaction charter is we're not happy unless you're not happy how could you
not want to buy from a company like that okay now this poster
is a picture of the pamplona bull run yeah you know all those drunk blokes running
along yeah in white outfits it's about their brains they're being faced by very angry
bulls it says tradition just because you've always done it that way doesn't mean it's not incredibly stupid
now and this is the point this is the point you need to look at your habits
and traditions because if a process hasn't been reviewed in the last three
to six months it's become a habit yep you are a slave to your habits and your habits today
may not be ones that serve you old yesterday may not be ones that serve you today and they certainly won't be ones that
serve you tomorrow right yeah so again we need to understand the changing narrative that goes on
in our customers minds uh in terms of what's happening to them where they are you
know the narrative that needs uh how many organizations uh are hoping that we'll go back to
business as usual oh geez i've always count how many times people have said that
it's not gonna happen people wake up it just genuinely isn't here if you are a road
warrior sales person and you're waiting for the day you can get back in your car and go and see three customers a day
you are in you're about to you are already extinct yeah okay everyone's become an sdr a
sales development rep you have to sell over zoom or the phone and if you can't adapt you will die now
what this means is um that the narrative has changed the way customers want to engage has
changed they want to speak to people over zoom over xthey want to speak to people
over skype why because they can still have the face-to-face interaction but they don't have to put up with their bad breath and
their and you need to understand that where you have to meet your prospect
where they are not where you want them to be and and that means that in terms of your
skill set you have to evolve uh you have to be a voracious student
if you are not consuming at least a couple of books a month you are doing yourself a monstrous disservice
and not only consume them apply them yeah okay there's no point being the
most the best educated pulper no that's very true it is very true it's one of the common things you know in
like here i get to talk to some amazingly successful people and you can see some of the common traits in their lives one of them is
they are avid learners and they will you know some a lot of people read a lot
of books for some people find a lot of people dyslexic actually who are entrepreneurs so they'll have the audio books well my
eyesight went about seven eight years ago i've listened to nearly audio books since then yeah yeah see same thing it's that that
consuming of content um and understanding how you can apply it because
learning it i have this phrase that i use when we do a lot of the courses and stuff learning is not the same as um
implementation is not the same as learning absolutely it's very very true that actually you can go to these things
and just never implement and it's a nightmare now one other point on this um generalists
operating in a specialist field that requires creativity typically massively outperforms
specialists do not confine your learning to a narrow
field that's true yeah and there's a fabulous book david epstein's book range where he
posits this theory and he's absolutely on the money i've worked in different segments of the market and i've taken
lessons from selling aircraft carriers to uh teaching people how to sell matchmaking services
yeah so being gentle if any of you are old enough to remember that and um you know working with a a former
dominatrix who sold um a female fantasy fulfillment coaching
and uh using what she learned and her experience and her story in uh the
context of a law firm uh where probably that might be a better fit uh than maybe a software company
yeah okay who knows um but if you if you read widely read history yeah read biography
or read rhetoric uh read philosophy particularly the stoics
and uh buddhism and you know religion so you know some religious texts are
really very interesting and very powerful um and think about the power of the
emotional storytelling of parables yeah why do you think religions have taken uh
hold because they capture people's imagination they give them the parables of christ two thousand
years later don't we it's the it's the go-to thing when you talk about stories it's like well
this was master storytelling and it's in its deepest form well think about this there is a
fabulous um publisher called the great courses um and one stood out for me and it's called
from yao to mao years of chinese history okay
get your head around this years ago the chinese had an
empire which they ruled efficiently of a billion people
one billion people years ago when the americans and the chinese met
to discuss the peace talks for uh over korea
um the americans rented three floors
of the uh hilton in seoul yep the chinese delegation rented a
five-bedroom house for three years who do you reckon might win that
negotiation play the long game don't you jeez that's
clever yeah absolutely and you know chinese and japanese companies have hundred year
plans we operate on quarterly earnings yeah yeah so we can't plan ahead so again
if you're building a business make sure you have a long-term plan and if you're going to get investors
make sure that those investors understand that you have this long-term plan you're not just turning up for the good
of your health and you're not focused only on growth you're focused on building longevity
into the business now you notice how throughout this conversation i've peppered
all of my message with story but it's not necessarily directly from
where um the customer is you can use analogy you can use parallels you know that being able
to see these things through the eyes of different people and diversity
inclusion again something that baffles the brain yeah last year
was the and the uh the the year when the most money was invested in female
owned businesses they got as a percentage of the total global
investment from private equity and venture capital three percent well black owned
businesses got one percent latinos got one and a half percent wow now think about this what percentage
of the population are made up of women well i'm gonna guess half right a little
over i think it's about and how much of the the global population is made up of
non-white people oh goodness i wouldn't know the answer i'd imagine why is the
minority rather than absolutely we are okay so why are we missing out on all of this
talent and in uh rebel ideas by matthew syed uh he cites a couple of really
interesting examples and the cia pre-only had one arabic or two
arabic speakers and no farsi speakers can you believe that yeah okay so did
you get any wonder they missed it kind of baffles the thinking doesn't it really well they've learned yeah yeah okay but he
cites an example if you give an american or a west white western audience
um a uh a video of a fish tank or a fish tank and ask them to describe it
they will describe the fish if you give it to a japanese audience they will describe the gravel
the bubbles coming up the seaweed now if you don't have both of those you
don't have the the whole picture that's really clever yeah so again make sure you surround yourself with
mastermind group of people coming from a very diverse background a diverse teacher they could see the whole picture yeah yeah yeah i would
say i mean for me are you i do you win mastermind groups uh i well i run them um and my clients
are my mastermind group um so i i'm looking for mentors at the moment the mastermind group
um but again i i'm rather disorganized but i do take massive advice i mean the
reason i set the podcast up um is that i don't that's my mastermind group yeah you get people to come talk
to you and share their wisdom yeah i'm experiencing it right now i learn way more from my guests
than they learn from me they all say how their fab it was and how much they learned but you know i i've now probably got the
basis of a dozen books yeah that can knock out about scaling up technology companies super fast without
the wheels coming off yeah no i totally get it i'm the same way i think i learn when you guys come on the show and you
share your expertise in wisdom i think i learned more than anybody anybody else listening to the show i i make the most i have
you know four or five pages of notes as we've been talking and it's um it's i think it's totally
critical that we do that you know and we do learn i'm intrigued by the mastermind idea at the moment
i'm in masterminds we're just about to start a mastermind group um and i i think they're so powerful
aren't they and they're so yeah just they don't want to say anything on it other than just
get into a mastermind perfect i think they're really good if you find good ones they're really good look look definitely look up bigger
brighter better um that george and tracy run they are fabulous and they've got
amazing track record uh the other guy that you should look up is jay allen um just stunning you know he's got um a
x plan how do you grow your business how do you x your business um and uh he's done four years of
research uh on this and they're just getting all of this stuff validated um as to why businesses grow
why they fail um and he's i think identified something like reasons why businesses fail
and he's integrated all of that into his mastermind groups it's just fantastic oh well yeah we'll check him out we'll have a
look yeah i think it's called yeah okay um marcus thank you for your time
i feel like we could go all day but i'm aware we've we've been going most of the day already anyway um how
can people reach out to you how can people connect with you if they want to if they want to do so you've mentioned the podcast just mentioned that again as
well yeah so there's the inquisitor podcast which you can get at marcus calkey
m-a-r-c-u-s-c-a-u-c-h-i dot pod bean dot com it's available on spotify and
apple if you type in markus marcus spacekalki um and then there's the scale ups and hyper
growth podcast which is scale apps and hypergrowth.podbean.com also available on uh pod on apple and
spotify and various others linkedin i'm all over it like a rash uh i'm
on uh twitter as the underscore inquisitor i n q i s
i t o r um and i capitalize the t and i don't know whether or not you need to but i do
um and uh you can email me at marcus calkey at me.com
or facebook i'm on there and and just get in touch you know take
calls and and whatever fantastic well like i say we'll put all of that in the show notes as well and uh
people can reach out and connect to you uh i just want to say marcus thank you i literally have pages of notes
which i now need to inwardly digest and think um how do i implement because it's not
the same as learning um how do i implement this into my uh into my business i love the idea of
um just some of the standout points really some of the stuff you mentioned like um be polarizing
um am i the right person for this client how did you um one of the questions i
had for you actually is thinking that through you said that your core clients were three percent of your total client base
they're largely people who can first of all they they can subsume their ego and take direction
they need to be ready to be challenged because i do not work with people who are sensitive prima donnas um
they are not going to enjoy working with me for the first six to months it is an uncomfortable process because
my job is to hold up the ugly mirror um so they have to be egoless they need
to have invested in themselves or their people probably in the last two years um they
need to have very specific pains but what i'm really looking for is that they keep their word um and i
test that very early on that's right i've said i established something called an upfront contract
and if they stick to it then that's a really good indicator but if they don't keep their word this
is going to be a just a hellstorm for both of us and i would rather not start
um and also i'm outrageously expensive i always tell people in the first five minutes of meeting them
look i'm eye-wateringly sphincter-poppingly expensive whatever amount of money you set aside
for training yourself your people coaching and it won't even cover the deposit so we just
end the conversation now i mean who the hell wants to buy from a cheap sales
trainer it doesn't make sense does it yeah i mean can you imagine the message that
sends to your sales people particularly a sales trainer who's just discounted yeah yeah does it makes do you know one of the
things that um a few years ago marcus i went um we we had this
big successful e-commerce business it's kind of how i stumbled into what i'm doing right and we had this business and it was
selling lots online and it's brilliant and so fundamentally i was an e-commerce entrepreneur and when you get good at
something eventually people start to ask you for help they come to you and say can you help and so the first person asked me for
help said sure i didn't charge him anything just wanted to see whether my thinking would work in somebody else's business
the second person that came to me said can you help i said sure and i charged a bit of money for it and then i just kept doubling the amount
of money that i would charge for this service until someone went and then that's when i thought actually
i probably reached my reach my price point that's how i figured out my pricing but the story here was i went to this
training um seminar i don't know how to describe it basically there was a season where using
european funds um a small business or a startup business could get most of my coaching
costs covered by the grant and so i quite like working with startups i
love helping sites if i can um you know everyone needs a break don't they at the beginning and so i was like this sounds really cool
i sat and i kid you not i sat in a room with people who all were gonna do this sort of coaching
and consulting thing so i said to everybody so listen i'm not a business coach i'm not a consultant that's way not niche enough for me i'm
gonna focus in on digital business and e-commerce businesses that's what i do and then we went around the room and everyone's like i'm a business coach i'm
a management coach and i'll do all this and they're all competing for the same people i asked a question at the start of the meeting
one simple question which was this how many of you in this room have ran a successful business how many
of you started a successful business yourselves and ran a successful business out of a room of people
how many of them could put their hand up maybe two but probably none there was one it was me the others were
all bankers and accountants yeah corporate refugees yeah there are more consultants than flies
[Laughter] why would you hire these people right i
just don't get it i remember do you remember years ago we used to have the um the double glazing sales people though knocking the door
joined by i did this thing with them whereby i don't know where i learned this from but i thought it was it's what i always did and i said to the
guy listen because it was always a guy it was never a female but there was always a guy on the door and he was like do you want to buy double glazing and i
say listen before we carry on this conversation i'm going to tell you how it's going to go you're going to tell me that your
double glazing is by far the best that there's some unique feature about it that makes it outshine everybody else's and that's
cool and i am willing to listen to you but first i want you to do me one favor
i want you to call your company now and have them fax me because it was in the backstage you'd get the door knockers
i want you to fax me a copy of the order that you placed for this double
glazing because if this product is so great and so fantastic and so amazing as you're going to tell me you've
definitely got it in your own house and if you haven't because you you know you've not got a house or you live in a
block or flat somewhere then your mum has definitely got it in her house and i want to see one of those
two orders if you can if you can give me one of those orders we'll have a conversation
and no one ever came into my house because no one could ever prove to me that they believed in the product enough
to buy it why would i buy it absolutely well it's like when i'm interviewing for
my clients um for sales roles i'd start out with they're they're two mean questions but
they're intended to be because they filter very quickly and the first one is matt thank you so much for coming today we've
really been looking forward to meeting you over to you
if they haven't got a plan then that tells me they're not a planner and good salespeople are organized and they
plan yeah and if they don't have a plan then i need to know that they can adapt
quickly and they respond well under pressure yeah so um second question is very early on
matt when is it okay to lie to a prospect
now if they don't respond never in under a second that's me going to be digging very deep
into their honesty because sales ethics yeah are really important in fact i'm delighted
that i have peter block coming on um who is the author of a fabulous book
called the right use of power and this is all about management ethics but i think sales ethics is an area that
we absolutely have to work on um sales has oh it's such a bad reputation isn't it yeah it
has it's unbelievable and zig ziglar always says that sales is telling the truth attractively
and i've always sort of gone with that actually it's all about telling the truth but doing it in an attractive way and
i remember we interviewed one guy once and i said to him
you've just reminded me of this i sat down this guy in this interview and i said to him i said listen let me just tell you um whilst i have certain beliefs
and i don't expect you to have those beliefs but this is my company and i want my company to uphold the values
which i fee deemed so important right one of those is we don't lie to clients we tell the
truth we are an honest question and we tell the truth we are brutal with the truth in some respects
and when that doesn't happen then there's an investigation right i want to know why this guy said to me and i quote in the
interview he said you know what if you get a client on the phone and you can't lie to them because you
feel like you have to tell the truth that's okay just pass the phone to me and i'll sort them out
oh that was a short interview i said thanks very much for coming in don't let the door hit you on the way out you always do me a favor it's like
oh you you can't lie you've got some moral code that's not i don't have that so just pass the phone
to me because then it'll be all right like it's mark twain said it rather well which is uh always tell the truth it confounds
your enemies and surprises your friends the problem with lying the problem with
lying is people might forgive you but they can never forget so every word that ever comes out of your
mouth after that is suspicious yeah yeah it's a fundamental problem isn't it and
um listen i feel like we're getting drawn into yet another conversation listen uh it's been great chatting to
you i really really do appreciate you uh being on the show do get in touch with marcus
i'm sure marcus will be more than happy to chat with you but marcus uh thank you so so much
wasn't that absolutely fantastic that time with marcus he's such a character i loved his muppets backdrop
i love the fact he is so polarizing he knows what he thinks and he told us exactly that and it was
great and wonderful and i hope like me you've got pages of notes um or if you're driving
just go to the website and you can download the the notes that we'll put on there for you and you can have a sort of think about
how you can implement some of those ideas that marxists learn how do they work in an e-commerce business how do you get
in your customers mind how do you write stuff that that speaks
to where the customer's right you enter the customers conversation i like that phrase um what could you do how could you do it
and so i hope you've got some great ideas out of the podcast if you have do write to us and let us know what's uh what you
found useful out of it and write to marx and let him know as well i'm sure appreciate you letting him know that i'm sure i'd appreciate
hearing those stories from you do connect with him on linkedin uh he's he's a he is a character and do
check it out his podca do check out his podcast uh very very good very helpful podcast
so that's me that's all for today's show thanks for listening thanks for joining in i hope you've got a lot of it
the call to action because you know we always like to have a call to action in these things just make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcast from
as we put out regular and free content and if you're new to the show i hope you've enjoyed it and that you do connect with
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our facebook pages we do stream live as we record these interviews and you get a chance to ask your questions
and maybe have a bit of one-on-one with our guests which is fantastic so uh right i'm going to leave it there
thank you so much for watching i will be back very very soon with another amazing guest on the e-commerce
podcast bye for now
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