Saturday, September 09, 2023
The more things change… the more they remain the same.
With so many shiny objects that occupy many marketers' attention, we often neglect getting back to the basics and focusing on our marketing strategy.
Today I’m thrilled to welcome Tim Fitzpatrick to the show! Tim is a marketing expert with decades of experience under his belt.
Discover more about returning to the fundamentals of marketing and how much more we can gain by making this part of our process.
Learn more at https://www.adamliette.com
Discover how to work with me: https://www.adamliette.com/work-with-me
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Transcript
Adam Liette
Hello, welcome to today's episode of smooth operator, it's Friday. So as always, we have our interviews on Fridays, and I have a very special guest with me, we're going to be going into b2b marketing and all the wonderful things we can learn to really ramp up our own marketing fundamentals, get through revenue roadblocks, and really accelerate our own growth. So I have with me, Tim Fitzpatrick, from real results in marketing. He's a b2b revenue specialist has been doing this for years has tons of experience, and came with us to share his insights into really how to get the best results for his clients. So thank you very much. Thank you so much for joining me, Tim. How you doing today?
Tim Fitzpatrick
I'm great, Adam. Thanks for having me, man. I'm excited to to dig into this.
Adam Liette
I am as well, man. Well, could you start by just giving us some of your background how you came to this place?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, sure. I'll, I'll try to make a long story short. So I, when I graduated from college, I was a math major had no idea what the hell I wanted to do. But it was always good at math. So figured man, it's applied in all kinds of different disciplines. So that's what I'm gonna do. My, my dad had been a manufacturer's rep. For a long time, he was an entrepreneur. And shortly before I graduated, he'd started a wholesale distribution company that was related to his rep company. And at the time, he had no full time employees. I knew he needed some help. And I was like, Hey, Dad, let me let me help you for the summer while I figure out what the hell I'm going to do with the rest of my life. Then he said, Sure. So that's where I started, it was the first full time employee. And after three months, I was hooked. Like, I didn't want to do anything else. I was soaking up information like a sponge. I was learning new things every day. We were selling home theater equipment. So I mean, it was like toys. It was, it was just fun stuff to sell. And I was hooked. And so I said, Hey, I don't really want to do anything else. If you'll have me. I would like to keep doing this. And he said, Sure. And it worked out really well. Because my dad trusted me, he gave me a lot of autonomy to, to learn and to make mistakes. And he was there from a strategic perspective when I needed guidance. And that was kind of all she wrote. I mean, we grew at 60%, a year for nine years. We sold it in 2005. And then I stayed on for another three years after we got bought. After that, I transitioned into real estate, I was into residential real estate. Totally different. But I'd always been interested in real estate, I was like, well, kind of starting over at this point. So let me give it a shot. I hated it. Like two and a half years in, I was waking up like Sunday night going, Oh my God, I've got to do this all over again. And that is no fun. It is no fun running a business when you can't stand it. And what's the point in owning a business if you don't like it? So I decided to shift gears. And that's when I got involved in in marketing, which is what I'm doing today, my path in marketing has been winding as well. But I love marketing. I love the fundamentals of marketing, because they don't change. And so that's really where we we focus in the marketing room, which is pretty broad. But we help people get the fundamentals in place so they can build their build their business from there. So that's the short story.
Adam Liette
That's awesome. I find in my travels, like so many of us, we got that little entrepreneurial bite. And it's infectious. Like you said, like being able to just every day is different. You're learning new things. You're trying new things. From my own side. I was I was military, so like, super bureaucracy. And I had my Oh, I'll go get my MBA and go fortune 500 That lasted about 30 seconds into my first time with an entrepreneurial company. When I realized I had no bureaucracy over me. I'm like, Oh, yes. This is amazing.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. If, if you've got it in you, once you kind of get exposed to it, it's it's really hard to do anything different.
Adam Liette
Except now all of our friends think we're weird because we're like sitting up on Friday night reading, like marketing textbooks. Instead of going out like normal people, right?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. Don't you ever quit? No, no.
Adam Liette
antastic Oh, I love that story to him. And it's funny. You're talking about marketing fundamentals. And he just reminded me of something that literally just happened to me a couple of weeks ago, I was at a marketing convention and you If If the listeners here, you know, you've heard me talk about Dan Kennedy before, if you haven't bought Dan Kennedy books, what are you waiting for? Go buy Dan Kennedy books, they're great. But Dan Kennedy was speaking at this convention. And it was hilarious. He said, All you guys think you're special. Like, oh, I'm a digital marketer, that's so special. There's nothing special. It's just marketing guys. It's just marketing. And that really got me thinking about the fundamentals and wanting to take my own journey, like back to my textbooks back to the old school literature, to really start exploring a reexploring marketing fundamentals. And so when we even talk about, like, going back to that route, what does that mean to you? Or what kind of areas? Do you like to dive into? Tim?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's a, that's a really good question it? And the answer you get is gonna depend on who you're talking to. Right. But when I got into marketing, somebody told me, they're like, look, I don't care what the discipline is, like, there's only like five or six pages, right. And everybody is working from those five or six pages, and they're putting their own little spin on it. But, you know, gosh, there's, you know, with marketing, from a tactical standpoint, yeah, there are new things, it's changing. But man, the fundamentals in any discipline don't change. They're the same today as they were 50 years ago, and they're gonna be the same 50 years from now, when I look at the fundamentals of marketing, I look at your target market. First and foremost, every single thing you do from a marketing standpoint, is built from your target market and the ideal clients that you want to serve within that market. From there, you've got your marketing message, write, which is what you're going to put out to the world to grab their attention, gain their interest and get them to take action, you can't create a message until you first understand who the hell you're trying to reach. Yet, so many of us skip these things. Because we just want to take feel like we're taking action, right? Like, if I don't start working on my website, or put up my Facebook page, or start a YouTube channel, like I'm not getting anywhere. And what people don't realize is, when you do that, and you skip the fundamentals, you're putting the cart before the horse, and you're just gonna, you're gonna waste time, you're gonna waste money, on marketing, that's just not going to work, you've got to have a foundation that you can build the rest of your marketing house from. And that's where the fundamentals come in play, you know, and once you have those first two in place, then you have to have a plan of how you're going to get that message in front of those people. And too many people don't have a plan. They're like throwing stuff up spaghetti up against the wall, seeing what sticks. And if it if it does stick, they have no idea why. Right and weave it man, if you're going to eliminate distraction, and be able to focus, you have to have a plan. So that's what I think of when I think of the fun, the fundamentals of marketing.
Adam Liette
For sure, and actually, it makes it so much harder on yourself, when you don't start at the strategic level thinking you're just going to jump into whatever new builder they created a new widget. And you don't do it from a plan, I always find it's almost a right brain left brain activity. Where if you don't have the copy written, if you haven't developed your message, and you try to go straight into the creative side of things, like I don't know about you, I get stuck. Like I can't physically do it. Because I'm trying to use both sides of my brain at the same time. Has that been your experience?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it's um, I think for a lot of people, there's just so many. There's so many people that don't that talk about the tactics, and not the strategy. Right, this strategy is not sexy, it's not cool. You know, it's not a funnel. It's not tick tock. You know, so a lot of people just gloss over it. And, and frankly, with marketing, know, like, when I when I was in the distribution business, man, this was in like the mid to late 90s, like websites where informational brochures, you know, search engine optimization, Google ads were like in their infancy, marketing was so much different than now the, obviously the fundamentals were the same, but there weren't as many marketing channels and as many tactics as there are today. And that, I think, is one of the big challenges that people have right now is, there's so much information overload. And when we've got information overload, and people telling us you need to be here, here, here, here, you know, we just get overwhelmed. We get frustrated, and we just don't know what to do. And that makes it really, really challenging. But that's why the fundamentals are so important. The fundamentals are not complicated. They're simple. We just have to Take now just because they're simple doesn't mean they're easy, right? It's not like they're not work. The concepts are simple. You have to put in the work to put them in place.
Adam Liette
For sure, absolutely. And what the one of the fundamentals you mentioned was target market. Yeah. And I think in some ways, like we have more tools now than ever before to do market research. And I find people are doing less and less of it, or they're allowing themselves to, like come in with their bias and like, go immediately for something that's going to confirm their bias. Like, is
Tim Fitzpatrick
there any ways that you've explored market research that would be really useful? Yeah. So there's, there's a couple of suggestions, simple, simple places to start. One, when you're trying to hone in on who your ideal clients are, the easiest place to start is with your existing and past customer base. Like why reinvent the wheel? So look at your existing and past customer base, and ask yourself these three questions. I call them the three power questions. Who do we love working with? Like, why do you want to be in business and work with people that make you want to bang your head against a wall, there's no point in that, too, who are your most profitable clients? We got to make money. If we're going to stay in business and serve people at the highest level, it's okay to make money. And by the way, your most profitable clients aren't always your largest top line revenue clients either. So don't fall into that trap. And then the last question is, who do we who do we do great work for? Who do we get our best results for? When you ask yourself these three questions, you end up with a subgroup of clients that you answer positively to all three of those questions. And if you're working with people day in and day out, that you love working with that are profitable, that you get great results for men, your business is going to be fun, you're going to be making money, you're going to be getting referrals, you're going to have customers that are going to want to stay with you and work with you for a long time, they're going to want to do more work with you. Those are all really positive things. That's why it's so easy to start with your existing and past customer base. And once you have that subgroup, that's where you start to dig a little bit deeper into Where where are the commonalities in the people that are in this group? The demographics, you look at the numbers, you start to look at the psychographics? Like, what are the common problems they have? What what results are they looking for, what are their goals, their aspirations, all of those things will start to help you identify the commonalities. And typically ones that what ends up happening is you get like one to three smaller groups that share commonalities, it's those smaller groups that tend to be your ideal clients. And that's the easiest place to start. Now, once you've done that, you mentioned something really important, like I've got this cognitive bias. As business owners, we all have cognitive bias, bias, we can't see the forest through the trees and think objectively about our business because we're too close to it. So the way, the easiest way to to avoid that, once you have those ideal client groups is to interview your ideal clients. Take the time, interview them, ask them the right questions, you will get so much valuable information from from that exercise. Honestly, if that's the one thing that your audience does from this interview, it will be absolutely invaluable. I guarantee it, they will see things and you'll be writing these things down. You'll be like, Oh my God, what? Why didn't I think like they say it to me. And now it's completely obvious. Why didn't I see that? Well, we're too close to the fire. And they will tell you things in their words, when you create your messaging and needs to be in their words, not yours. That's how it's going to resonate. So those are two things that I would highly recommend people do.
Adam Liette
And the great thing about that is when you're interviewing your target, Avatar, your ideal fan they are. They get like super excited about it, like the chance to talk to you. I've gotten on Zoom calls to people like I can't believe I'm actually talking with Adam, I'm like, just okay. Like, they get really passionate about our products. And I think it's like it's an opportunity, not only to learn about your market, learn about all those little intrinsic little details. You can you can get testimonials out of that case studies, you can get so much material out of that exercise. And yeah, it's, it's it's a hard week if you're doing like 40 or 50. It's a long week, but I promise you everyone listening. I've done this exercise before as well. And the amount of data you get from there. And it's almost after you do enough of them, you get like gut feelings you get us, you start to develop a spider sense of what they're really saying. And then you can kind of not lead them to it. But ask the right probing questions to get them to say, Yep. What's really on their mind. And it's, it's definitely an art form. But it's one of those things where if you do it enough, you just kind of get it.
Tim Fitzpatrick
And you know what, even if you're not great at it, you're doing something that most people don't take the time to do, the information you get from it is still going to be incredibly valuable. You know, but like you said, you sometimes you have to dig a little bit deeper, you know, why do you work with us? And they say, well, because you have great customer service, guess what? Great customer service is table stakes, everybody expects it, you need to dig a little bit deeper. So for example, they say great customer service, you follow up with another question like, Well, can you give me an example of when we showed great customer service? Like what did that mean to you? You know, you just you just dig a little bit deeper, ask a few more probing questions, and you'll really get to the root of what you need to. But you should we should all be interviewing clients on a consistent and regular basis.
Adam Liette
Absolutely. And if you want a great example of how to do the customer service, answer, go watch the office, I think it's like season four, episode two, it's really, the office is market research for you, marketers, Okay, watch the, okay, I'm an evangelist, I can't help. But lots of good, there's a really good thing in there they do for the show customer service, and it's fun. In the b2b space, like you are, like, is this clients that are then hiring you to do this for them? Or how does that relationship work for when you're doing this for you?
Tim Fitzpatrick
It depends. So some of our stuff is done for you. And some of it is more coaching, where we're guiding them through the process or, you know, course material where it's, you know, done DIY, right, so we have multiple options to meet people where they're at, and, you know, address their specific situation.
Adam Liette
Gotcha. I have a client who was like, You should really do this, like, that sounds like a lot of work and like, yeah, it is. But okay. And I'd lead them to water eventually. When you're working with clients, because you mentioned the shiny objects and the widgets that everyone wants to use, do you have that? Like clients that want to do that? And like, try to steer you in that direction? And like, how do you? How do we combat shiny object syndrome and stay dedicated to what we know works or what we think will work better?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes. So the way we combat it is one our process. So we work through a set process when we work with clients. But the first place we start is with a deep dive assessment of where they're currently at. You cannot create a plan to get where you want to go until you know where you're starting from. Right, if I'm sitting in my car, and I need to get to the airport nice type in Denver International Airport in my GPS, if it doesn't know where I'm starting from, like, I get nowhere. And this is the same process, you have to have a baseline. And that's another thing like there is no one size fits all plan. We're all at a different place. We all have different resources, we all have different goals. And all of those things impact what you need to put in your marketing plan. So we've got to have a deep dive assessment, first and foremost, that helps unlock our growth and profit opportunities. what's working, what's not? Where are the opportunities that we really have that we should be capitalizing on? That's where we start first. And then you jump into making sure okay, hey, do we really have our target market? And our ideal clients narrowed down? Do we have the messaging that's going to engage in and attract those people? Right, we've got to have fuel for the tactics and the vehicles that are in our plan. If we don't, we're just going to waste time. So that's where we start. And then we shift into actually putting managing and implementing the plan and optimizing it on an ongoing basis. But until you've done got that baseline, and you've got the fundamentals in place, and you've put the plan in, you really you really can't do anything and the benefit. I touched on this a little bit earlier with your plan. What's your plan does? Is it out it outlines what your priorities are. And when you know what your priorities are you have clarity. You have focus And you can it's much easier to eliminate all this outside noise, the information overload because, you know, when the next marketing guru comes up next week saying, you know, Adam, you gotta beyond you know, whatever clubhouse you can say, You know what? I'm saying? No, I'm not saying no forever. I'm saying no for right now because I have priorities and this is not one of them. I'll put this on my maybe maybe list for the future. But right now I'm not going to do this. There's a mean, there's nothing from a marketing perspective that can't wait three months are not on your priority list. Unless you have a really good reason to make a change, you should not you should implement what's already on your priorities.
Adam Liette
Absolutely. And, you know, I think it's so important to stay abreast on developments in the industry to be listening to podcasts and be watching reading books, all those great things with the understanding that it's building your strategic plan versus I just saw this great webinar, it's this is going to work this, I promise you, there's no webinar that's gonna fix a bad messaging, or bad targeting. Like there is no tactic that's going to fix bad fundamentals. Yeah, but bad targeting or bad, shiny objects, and good fundamentals will still work. Much better than the other way around.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yes, absolutely. Right. You mentioned Dan Kennedy, Dan Kennedy talks about market message media match, right? You gotta you got to know the market, you have to have the right message that matches that market. And then you have to use the right media, right marketing channels, marketing tactics, all of those things need to be in alignment. If they're not, your, you may get results, but you're certainly not going to get the results that you that you should
Adam Liette
100% Love it. Fantastic. So as the business has grown, I mean, you've added some team members, you have some contractors, have you found, are you still very much a technician in the weeds? Or have you had to kind of step back and take on more of a leadership role?
Tim Fitzpatrick
I, um, I certainly am taking a leadership role. But I'm still involved in some of the fulfilment of of our services, especially, you know, with strategy and planning, I get heavily involved in that. You know, long term, I will see, I'm not really sure. Which way I'm going to take it. I mean, I love strategy and planning. So, uh, you know, I think I want to have some involvement in that, but, you know, we'll see, see where my my business goes. But I certainly would not be where I am without the people that I've hired. I mean, we can't you reach your, your capacity to do everything in your business very quickly. So I think it's important to, to identify as quickly as you can, what you need to get off your plate, and what's the highest and best use of your time.
Adam Liette
And always ask this question, because I think it's a blind spot many of us have, is that I, the idea of offloading, and delegating. And so I'm curious, like, how have you professionally developed that team? Or how do you like keep them informed of your expectations or your experience? Like, like, what's the train up period and sustainment period been like for team members, when they do take tasks off your plate?
Tim Fitzpatrick
You know, it depends on the role. And what the task is, when, when the tasks are very, you know, there's clear steps that need to be done. You know, I've just put checklists in place, right standard operating procedures. I love loom, if anybody, anybody in your audience is familiar with loom L O M, it is a screen capture software, it is like, I use it multiple times every day. It is one of the coolest tools ever. Super helpful, right? So I mean, sometimes when I offload things, I don't even write the procedure, I just shoot a loom video of me actually doing it. And then I give that to whoever's going to be the one managing that and doing that. And I say, Hey, here's the, here's the loom video. Please put together written instructions based on the loom video, include the loom video, and then go from there. But you know, the other thing too, somebody and I can't remember why I heard this, but it always stuck with me. When we write procedures, we need to write procedures for smart people. Like if we write a procedure, and have all 100 steps that everybody needs to take to go through it. It's like, No, that's a disaster waiting to happen. Write them for smart people, you hire smart people, if people can't follow them, and plug in some of those little gaps, they're probably not going to be the right person for the job anyways. So, you know, don't feel like every procedure has to be tight, tighten down button up before you offload it. No. Just offload it given the procedure, and you will optimize it over time, but it's not going to be perfect.
Adam Liette
I am so glad you said it in the way you said it. Like we write it for smart people. That's That's my quote for the day. I'm totally stealing that one. Tim.
Tim Fitzpatrick
I wish I could remember where I heard it. But yeah, it's a it's a good one. It's always stuck with me.
Adam Liette
I love it too, because it relieves a lot of a lot of undue expectations that we're only putting on ourselves. Like we, we come up with this, I must create the Bible of creating a Facebook ad now you don't come on in. It's going to be outdated in six months anyway, focus on the big steps and what has to be done.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Like you don't need to say login to Facebook. Like if they can't figure that out, then then it's not going to work. Right? You know, just, you know. So some of those little minutia like minut details, you don't need to have everything in there.
Adam Liette
I should release like a special collector's edition of Adam's tales from when he was doing Verizon DSL technical support in the early 2000s. Of how to not have to give instructions. I did have one gentleman complain that his beer holder on his computer broke, you know, you hit the button and the beer holder comes out. CD ROM drive.
Tim Fitzpatrick
God, that kind of reminds me when I was in distribution, I was hiring for a position and I got a I got a resume. And the guy's email address was alcoholic dad@aol.com. And I was like, Nope. You know, it's just one of those like things like come on. Can we please just like, I don't know, that might be funny for your friends. But it's probably not the best email to use for your job application? Or on your resume?
Adam Liette
Maybe not. Yeah, gosh, we could all tell stories for days about as we come across. Ah, so fantastic. Oh, great. So awesome, great tips, and I double your emphasis on using loom, I use ScreenFlow. I've used it all the time to get getting stuff off your plate, it's actually really easy. If you do it in that way, like, document it first. And I have another hidden step in there where I will narrate my process. And the funny thing I always find is I'm like, why are you doing it this way? And I have to reshoot it, because I realized there was a much better way to do it. And I was doing something out of muscle memory, where it didn't need to be done that way. But yeah, absolutely. It's It's really that easy.
Tim Fitzpatrick
It's once you start doing it, it's not you know, the the hill or the mountain that you made it out to be? It's really, it's really not. And I think too, sometimes the we need to kind of get out of our own way, you know, it's like, gosh, what if I hand this off to them, and they make mistakes? Well, you know, everybody makes mistakes. Most mistakes are not catastrophic. You know, you can recover from those. Sometimes you got to, like, pull the training wheels off and let people go.
Adam Liette
You also mentioned like data is king like data is what leads us to it informs everything. So when you're working with team members, do you have, like templates that you've created, where they can drag and drop the data to do all the calculations? Or how, how do you ensure that data integrity remains
Tim Fitzpatrick
from, like, with, like, the marketing data that we're collecting? Or?
Adam Liette
Yeah, like any conversion rates or click through rates, like all that kind of data?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I mean, a lot of that stuff we can, you know, I mean, we can calculate, some of it's calculated automatically, right? You know, where we can where it's automatically being calculated, but I think from a metric standpoint, what um, obviously, having accurate data is super important. But identifying the right data, the right metrics to track is equally as important, especially when you look at marketing. Because there's so many vanity metrics out there that really don't don't mean anything. You know, how many visitors do I have coming to my website How many followers do I have on Facebook? You know, at a really basic level, and none of that crap matters unless you're generating leads that are converting to customers. You know, and I think, yes, there is a time and place to focus on some of those other metrics. But man, if you're not really even tracking how many leads you're generating, that are converting to clients, and where those leads are coming from, you have no business worrying about some of the minute, you know, small metrics that that are out there. So you, it's really important to hone in on the right metrics. Because as you pointed out, when you when you are tracking the right metrics, they will help inform your decisions, so that you can make better and stronger decisions with what you need to do, and where you need to make course corrections.
Adam Liette
love it so much. And all of this, it's creating that foundation of our marketing plan and our marketing engine, you know, you're putting all these pieces together. And when you have these pieces together, you can get to our next topic, which is really talking about accelerating our revenue growth and moving faster. And so you mentioned that there are several common revenue roadblocks that you that you've identified and that you work through, that we can remove what I love, I'd love to dive into some of those revenue roadblocks.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, sure. Um, so some of this is going to be a little bit repeat of some of the stuff that we've talked about. But when when we look at the common revenue, roadblocks with marketing, they're in three categories, right strategy, planning, and then leadership, somebody's got to be driving your marketing efforts to get them where to get where you want to be. So we look and we work in those three areas. And within each of those areas, there are three common roadblocks that we see. So within strategy, target market, which we've talked about messaging, which we've touched on, and then your services in your offers, right, your services, and your offers have to be in alignment with the market that you that you're going to serve, you know, do they see the value in those services and offers? Do they solve the right problems? Right, all of those things have to be have to be there. Then when we look at planning, we're looking at, you know, the vehicles that you're going to use. And within planning, there are three main areas that I think are really important to look at. One is lead gen lead generation, where are you? Where are you generating leads? How are you doing it? Are you generating leads from a single source or multiple, right, the more lead gen sources you have, the more stable your business is going to be? Then we have lead conversion. Right, you're generating leads? How are you actually converting them? What's your process for doing that? And then the third one is retention, and referrals, what are you doing to retain clients and continue to get referrals, those are all, all three of those are roadblocks that we look at in planning. And then when you look at leadership, there are three roadblocks there metrics, which we touched on, right? If you want to make good decisions, you got to identify and track the right metrics. So we've got to put those in place, then you have implementation and execution, you can have a great strategy, a great plan. But those go to die if implement implementation and execution are not in place. Like you have to have somebody that is overseeing and managing implementation and execution. And then the third one in leadership is optimization. Your marketing is not set it and forget it, you're always testing, right? Frankly, most of the things you do from a marketing standpoint are going to work. That's why you've got to be testing. And you have to have the right metrics. So you can identify quickly and as efficiently as possible, what's working and what's not. So you've got to be always optimizing. Those are the three things that we look at in leadership. So all nine of those roadblocks are things that we worked through in our system, you can't, you can't take care of all of them at one time. You got to do it in a process. And where we're going to focus really depends on where you're at, in your business. But you got to have strategy that lays the foundation and then you have to have a plan and then you can move into actually managing and leading your marketing efforts.
Adam Liette
And love it and like putting three under each of those three, and they're very, it's just right there. You can't, they can all be explained by my numbers. The most of them, I mean, you can you can track all of these. And it because if you can't track it, you can't fix it. You can't improve it. And that's a firm belief of mine. Yep. We mentioned lead generation just to take take us down Patent a little bit like lead gen is, I know it's evolving, because I'm trying to optimize my own lead gen game right now. Like, what did what are you seeing that's working in lead gen with the shift in communication styles that we've seen these last couple?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Here's, here's my philosophy on lead gen. There are so many tactics out there, they can all work. Okay, what we need to do is we need to outline what's going to work best for your particular business, your situation and where you want to get to. Right. But I think the important thing with lead gen goes back to we can't have just one mean lead gen channel. You know, a lot of businesses grow on referral. And they grow on referral to a certain place, and then they they stall, because referrals are not scalable. If you really want to scale a business and grow a large business. It has to grow beyond just referrals. The problem is, if you if you're working on just referrals, you're riding a unicycle. What happens if the tire goes flat? Okay, so for example, I have a buddy, who is a who's he's an insurance broker, super successful, they've built a great business, their referral partners are mortgage brokers, and they have killed it for so long. But what the hell's happening in the mortgage business right now it is falling off the face of the earth, like guys that were making half a million dollars a year are going to be lucky to make 75. Right. So their leads from those types of referral partners have dropped off significantly, right? That's an example of a unicycle. But if they were riding a four wheeler, and they had referral partners, they had inbound leads coming from content marketing, they were utilizing email marketing, and they were, you know, take your pick, you know, they had a podcast, well, now they got four tires, one tire went flat, they're still gonna get where they need to go, they may have to slow down a little bit, they may not get there as fast, but their business is much more stable. So when we look at lead gen, I think what we need to do is identify which channels we're going to use to take a multi pronged approach here, so that we're not solely reliant on just one lead gen channel for our business, that's a lousy place to be. So I'll give you another example. I love video. Okay, I do I create a lot of video content. If you don't love video, and you're terrified to be on camera, and I say to you, oh, Adam, you've, you have to start shooting short form video, you're gonna hate it, you're probably going to quit early, early on, like, video is not the only way. So that's why again, we can't take a one size fits all approach. I gotta find, we have to identify what works for you what resonates for you. And then we can start to outline the tactics that are going to make the most sense. But any tactic can work, you just have to have the right fuel. And the fuel is the strategy.
Adam Liette
Yeah, I got that fuel, and then consistency, it's just like, every day getting a little bit better, a little bit better. None of us goes back to the very beginning of this discussion, where we're learning something new every day, and we're applying it in real time, you're only going to be able to do that with all of these skills. If it's learn something, do it, learn it, do it, learn it, do it. And it's this constant evolve evolution that we're going through in our own marketing growth. Because I wrote this down that I've come to believe like we we should start referring to ourselves like doctors, like doctors, like I practice medicine. Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't think we should say I practice marketing. Because it's the same kind of field where if you think you're done, you just go retire you're not there's no such thing.
Tim Fitzpatrick
No, there's not. You're You're never done. It is it is a lifelong pursuit. Let's put it that way.
Adam Liette
Fantastic. And my personal favorite, everyone's different obviously. My personal favorite way is reading. Is there any particular resources or books that you would recommend that people add to their collection to that learning?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Man, there's so many great books out there. I work I love duct tape marketing I'm part of the duct tape marketing consulting network, John Jan's over at duct tape marketing, super smart guy. And that's really where I got a lot of my my philosophies on you strategy and why it's so important to focus on strategy before tactics. He's a great one you mentioned, Dan Kennedy, anything from Dan Kennedy is well worth taking the time to go through. I love the thing I love about Dan Kennedy is, you know, very again, fundamental things very tried and true. applicable to any business, it doesn't matter. When you start reading about the tactics with marketing, you know, man, if you wrote a Facebook ads book five years ago, it's, it's it's a dinosaur, it's totally irrelevant. So for me, I really like to get books that are based more around the fundamentals were those the contents more Evergreen. And from a tactical standpoint, with marketing, that's where I like to go, go listen to podcasts, or, you know, websites, forum, stuff like that, where you're gonna get more super current information because the tactics are changing. The fundamentals are not
Adam Liette
fantastic men are to do. I'm gonna go down the rabbit hole duct tape marketing tonight. That's gonna happen. Thanks, Tim. No sleep tonight. But it's okay. Yeah, it's all good. Because God can help the same marketing. Very cool. So if someone would want to be, like, aspire to be in the position, you're at where they're doing this b2b marketing, they have their own firm have their own agency, like what suggestions? Would you give them to get started?
Tim Fitzpatrick
Oh, man, you can't all kinds of great questions. I would say it, it depends on where the position that you're in. Right. So if I was just getting out of college, right now, and I wanted to get into marketing, I would probably work for at least one or two agencies to get my feet wet to learn the business because there's so many areas of marketing, you gotta you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to pick where you want to be. Right? And it took me longer to really figure that out for myself, because like you said, it was practicing marketing, it was learning it. And, you know, I, it took me a while to really hone in on gosh, where is where are my special abilities? What am I great at? What do I love to do. And in order to get there, I dabbled in a lot of different things. And I think it's a hell of a lot easier to dabble in a lot of different things working for somebody else than it is trying to do it yourself. So if you're in that position, that if you're in that position, that's what I would recommend you do. If you're, you know, coming out of corporate or we're, you know, just looking to start a new business opportunity, I would recommend that you find some people to follow, you know, like, duct tape marketing, or, gosh, even you know, Dan Kennedy has gotten multiple programs, there's, there's all kinds of people out there that have programs. But man, we don't need to reinvent the wheel, you got to find people that were that are where you want to be, and then learn from them. They'll help they will, you will get to where you want to go faster if you do that. So those are, I guess the two things that I would add in there.
Adam Liette
One thing I'll add is like, don't be afraid, like you said, working for an agency, don't be afraid to take that lower hanging job opportunity. Just in perspective, I've in four years, I've gone from social media manager, to director of operations to CEO. So that's how fast this industry works. And if you immerse yourself in it, you practice your skills you learn as you go, you do all your data, you do your fundamentals, like things have a way of growing, because this industry is so ridiculously fast and always changing even if some things always remain the same. It's those that won't change with it that are left by the wayside. Those that are flexible. We're still here. So that's it. antastic. Tim, I've had so much fun exploring with this, I know we're coming up on the top of the hour and I do want to respect your time. Do you have anything to add or anything that you'd recommend the listeners do if they want to further hone their their marketing fundamentals?
Tim Fitzpatrick
You know, just dig into the resources that that we've kind of touched on if if you if you want to connect with me, you can do that over at our website react on marketing.com which is ri A O to marketing.com The other thing that I will also make available to your audience. We put a revenue roadblock scorecard together and that is over at revenue roadblocks. scorecard.com a revenue robot scorecard.com in less than five minutes, you'll get a personalized report. It'll give you visibility to your revenue roadblocks, you'll be able to discover and assess which of the nine revenue roadblocks that we talked about today are slowing down your business growth and what you can do to start getting where you want to be.
Adam Liette
Love it. Yes. We'll link to all that in the show notes. And you have courses available as well to correct.
Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, you know, most of our, none of the courses that I have are on our website. So if somebody you know, if somebody wants info on that, they can just reach out to me directly through our website at realtor marketing, and I'll be happy to talk to him.
Adam Liette
Fantastic. Great. Well, Tim, this has been a whole lot of fun. I've definitely taken plenty of notes. Now I have to go back to work practicing my own marketing, which is great. I thank you for the homework. And I hope everyone else did the same out there. It really is. It's this beautiful changing world. But like we all see, like, so much things is just being disciplined in how we're practicing, not being distracted by the shiny objects. Focusing on the messaging, the messaging will get you there. And it's it's just so much fun. It's what so many people skip over. If you don't skip over, this doesn't matter if if you're winning, it's win. And, you know, there's a reason Tom Brady is still the goat because he still practices his fundamentals. And so if I can do a football analogy, since we're deep into the season. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Sam been an absolute pleasure. And if you want to learn more about Tim do check out the show notes at Adam liette.com. We'll have them up here and links to all of Tim's stuff. And thank you so much, Tim, we look forward to having you
Tim Fitzpatrick
back. Thanks, Adam. I appreciate it.
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