Guest: 

Tom Poland

Host:

Josh Fonger

Duration:

36:00

Please Note:

The following is a computer auto-generated transcript and will include some inaccuracies.

Josh:  00:24-00:54

Welcome to the Work the System podcast. We help entrepreneurs make more and work less using systems and I’m your host, Josh Fonger. And today I’ve got a special guest. I have Tom Poland. Tom is a multiple best-selling marketing author. He’s clocked 39 years as a sales and marketing professional. Since 1985, he’s been a specialist in generating inbound new client inquiries. He lives in Castaways Beach, Australia, and says that he’s voluntarily married. Right. Well, Tom, welcome to the show today.

 

Tom:

 

00:55

Thanks, Josh. Great to be here.

 

Josh: 

00:56-01:07

So Tom, why don’t you give us the backstory? How did you get into it? Being a multiple author, and just being an expert at inbound marketing?

 

Tom:

  01:08-03:58

I guess it was. I say a mother of invention is necessity and my story starts decade ago where I had my own business and I’ve had a bunch of businesses and managed a bunch of teams and sold a bunch of businesses but this particular one, you know, I, understood very early on that every business was really essentially about marketing and if there wasn’t a marketing machine, at the heart and the soul and the core of the business, then you have the best product in the world, and you’d probably go broke, so I set off on something a request to find out how marketing works, because I always love the idea that some will just find my product or service and make an inquiry and buy it without me having to do any, any of the hard work of selling. Long story short, I invested in a lot of programs, I literally went around the world and sat at the feet of many marketing masters and would go back and implement everything. To my horror, I found that not much made any sort of a difference, so I figured out there because I was marketing services advice and it took me quite a few years to figure this out, but it was a different style of marketing. The types of marketing where you could sell a set of golf clubs for 50% off on a billboard, next to a freeway was what didn’t work for, for services or advice. Then later in my career, we had this thing called

Software

which didn’t exist at the start of it, and that also fell into a similar category, it was kind of halfway between hardware, which is the golf clubs as the house or whatever physical cars that could be marketed versus advice, such as consultants, business coaches, that type of person would be marketing. It completely different styles of marketing and if you try to teach marketing, one style marketing fits everything from the dry cleaning to the chiropractor, the management console, it’s not going to work, at least for some it won’t work, so essentially, this journey that I’m on now still on some almost 40 years later, came about because of my frustration, disappointment, at the marketing that I had paid money to learn that didn’t actually work. I would say probably 70% of the audience has paid money to someone or something or program or course or a person or a business coach or American advisor or something and I’ve gone and implemented and found that didn’t get any, any results. My experience that I had way back then was ubiquitous. When I started my fourth business in 1995, I was really good at marketing, you know, but that procedure was working pretty darn well and a lot of people kept asking me about what are you doing free marketing, and they were more so than the marketing of my programs than they were micro programs. So that’s when the light bulb went off and you know what effective marketing does I think more than anything else is it gives someone an offer that they’re already looking for, so that I did so I read some books on the subject and changed course.

 

Josh:

 

03:59-04:11

Just to give a real wide lens, we can then zoom in detail. Do you have a distinguishing line between sales efforts and marketing efforts? Just so that when people listen in, they know exactly what you’re talking about?

 

Tom:

 

04:12-06:34

Sure. Yes, indeed. Sales is what you do once you’ve got an inquiry and marketing is generating that inquiry and if you, the worse you are the marketing, the better you have to be selling. Okay, in fact, you could say the opposite as well, really good marketing. Makes selling redundant and in fact, you know, one of one of my favorite sayings is that the selling is what you have to do and your marketing sucks. That’s a little tongue in cheek, you know, I’ve built sales training programs, and I’ve trained hundreds of salespeople. You know, I’m not, it’s not like I’m anti-selling, but what I’ve discovered over the decades is that the better you get a marketing list selling you need to do, and most people feel uncomfortable selling. Selling is convincing and marketing is confirming. Marketing says, we think this is what you want, can we confirm this is what you want and selling is going, I really need to convince you Josh, this is what you want. You might not be thinking about this, but it’s really, really good for you and you should ever buy life insurance or, you know, teeth whitening or something you hadn’t been thinking about. That probably leads us nicely into the difference between inbound marketing versus outbound marketing because what inbound marketing does is it makes someone an offer, after we’ve confirmed that they’re interested in that.

Whereas outbound marketing makes that offer before we know if they’re interested in that thing. So the billboard on the side of the freeway talked about offering a discount golf club, that’s outbound marketing. We don’t know if the drivers on that freeway interested in golf clubs or not, but there’s probably going to be enough of them that we can get away with it and that that was what I discovered way back when you know, close on 40 years ago, why the marketing that I had bought for and implemented wasn’t working. It’s because it was designed to work with outbound marketing. Send out 10,000 direct mail letters. Send out you know, as it was later on 10,000 faxes or around 10 to 10,000 SMS says and it was that outbound marketing that was the problem. I’m not saying that monogamy is good or bad. I’m just saying it doesn’t work very well. If you’re marketing services advice or work and you know, high end software. And that’s what I had to change. I had to change from outbound marketing to inbound marketing.

 

Josh:

 

06:35-06:50

Inbound, so with this podcast because an inbound because people are familiar with this channel they’ve been following for a while, we have a decent sized list and so we’re having a conversation, and so they’ve already shown some interest and so we’re talking together with this via some level of inbound marketing?

 

Tom:

 

06:51-09:51

This is a really effective medium for inbound marketing, because it’s what I call 100 sweeping bears analogy. Let’s say we had 100 listeners, and it’s probably a lot more than that but let’s just say there were 100 listeners, like 100 sleeping beers and in a forest and let’s say magically, we knew that three of those bears were hungry for our honey. Honey being a metaphor for our services or products, the bears being a metaphor for potential clients, but there any prospects. What outbound marketing would do is we’d go running through that forest with a big, long, pointy stick and jab the bears in the ass to wake up one at a time we’d wave the honeypot in front of their face, and have their hunger exceeded their anger, then eat the honey and not us. Marketing can just piss a lot of people off, whereas what inbound marketing does is it puts the honeypot outside the forest and the three bears that are hungry will wake up because they’re smaller honey, they go home with a sunny round here, and they’ll come out of the forest. The medium does not define, this is I think, common misconception. The medium does not define whether a thing is outbound or inbound. It’s the sequence that defines it, so if I started straight off and said, “Hey, everyone, you should join my program, you should work with me and here’s the link”. That’s outbound marketing, even though the context is a podcast. Whereas if I was smart enough and waited to the point where you said, well, where can people find out more, then we’ve probably got the three hungry bears tuned in at that point, so what defines marketing as inbound or outbound is not the medium. It’s the sequence, so you take a pay per click ad, for example, people say oh, that’s definitely inbound marketers people click on it, and they go into your website or your offer depends on what you offer. If you offer your services as $1 ticket attached, you could buy here, that’s up and marketing based ad, we’ve given them a price, we’ve told them what it is, that’s up, I’m not going to go get it. I’m saying it’s right or wrong. I’m just saying doesn’t work for professionals, marketing services, advice, or high ticket software items, we could use the same Pay Per Click ad to offer people our special report, or a video series or an educational tour or a demonstration of our services, that’s inbound marketing. Once they click on that, and they get engaged in the content, the flag but the one of the three hungry bears, and then we make the offer, so almost every marketing medium can be used in an outbound way or an inbound way. If you’re marketing products, such as selling houses, golf clubs, or even holidays, these physical type experiences work pretty well with outbound marketing. If you say a solicitor, injury, you know, compensation sources aside, foreclosure attorney aside, but if you’re practicing law on a day to day basis, it’s going to be very difficult for you to make outbound marketing effective. Business coaches, management consultants, people marketing, online services, programs, courses, etc. really need to have inbound marketing in place.

 

Josh:

 

09:52-10:14

Okay, so where do people go wrong with their purchasing decisions with marketing, so just for the standard small business? We know whether it is a high ticket or a low ticket, like, are they? Is it because they bought into this idea that they must have ads or they must, you know, Google ads, and they must have direct mail? Or they must have a certain medium? or why do they make bad choices?

 

Tom:

 

10:15-12:11

Well, it depends on the purchasing as to why it’s a bad choice. I think that doesn’t sound too facetious. So, take advertising, for example, people generally invest in advertising, but they normally go into it with their eyes half wide open going, I’m probably gonna lose half my money on this, but it might work and outsourcing advertising saying to a radio station or TV station or even a local newspaper, something like that, it’s easy. You just write the check, and they’ll do pretty much everything for you. That’s the reason why a lot of people get into try advertising. They understand they might not get a return on it and they’ll ask the sales rep, you know, can you guarantee a return or what are the likely results and, you know, most of the sales reports are surprisingly ethical and go we can’t guarantee results and they take the money, probably knowing that this path of least going to get might as well be flushed down the toilet. That’s the reason why this is the primary motivation why people go to advertising, even though they are suspicious that it may not work is because it’s quick and it’s easy, and it’s simple. If you look at the marketing, it doesn’t work. There’s around six reasons. Normally it’s too complicated. You take Facebook advertising and all the funnels and tripwires and segmentation and auto responders and split testing and pay per click testing and it’s incredibly complicated to get that well but the promise behind it is incredibly seductive because you can just set this thing up and a little go down to the beach for half an hour a day on your laptop, a little of money wash over your body, because it’s all automated. It’s a seductive value proposition, isn’t it? Most people don’t get it working because it’s too expensive. It’s too complicated. It produces poor quality lead sets or for an effective but the biggest reason why most people invest in marketing, it doesn’t end up working is really, really simple and by my estimation, 97% of marketing efforts fail for this one simple reason. And it’s, and it’s that we don’t want to do it.

 

Josh:

 

12:12-12:13

What if I don’t want to do it, tell me also why?

 

Tom:

 

12:13-13:50

Well, we want the outcome but not the input. The message is that we have to find a style of marketing that we want to do. You know I’m 63 years old, so I’ve got the benefit of some hindsight here. If I look back on my life, the things that I’ve done consistently and the things I’ve gotten credited, you know, well, modestly, I should modesty aside from our I got quite good at them. Other things I’ve wanted to do and even some of them I didn’t get very good at. But, I never did things that I didn’t want to do consistently well. Take weight loss, if I can find a weight loss system that I wanted to do the food that I wanted to eat, when I wanted to eat, I’d lose weight. If I tried to fit myself into the discipline to force myself to do some sort of weight loss program. I never persist with it and this is ubiquitous. This is you know, a universal truth. It’s the same as marketing. You know, if, if someone says to me, look, you can get a lead you want from going to business, networking meetings and conferences, but I’m an introvert. And I hate doing that! Even if I started, I probably won’t keep doing it, so we’ve got to find a marketing method, that when we wake up in the morning, we go, “Oh, goody”, and this is why LinkedIn marketing often fails, because people do not want to wake up in the morning and go, “Oh, I log into LinkedIn, cool, I’ll post 50, you know, connect 50 people, and I’ll ask them, if they want SEO Services today”. You don’t want to do that, so don’t do it. So find a marketing method that you genuinely are inclined to want to do, even if you don’t know how to do it very well. If you want to do a thing, you’ll do it consistently and that consistency will take you to a standard of excellence.

 

Josh:

 

13:51-14:01

So, what are some things that people like to do? I’m thinking of my clients, and a lot of them enjoy doing their thing, but they don’t enjoy marketing their thing. So I’d like a list of the things that people actually enjoy commonly?

 

Tom:

 

14:02-16:47

Well, if you try to answer that question, what you have to do is you have to segment marketing process and you know, Work the System, we talk about breaking the processes down into a series of small systems and the systems are a series of actions its own. So, the marketing method that I favor that I liked, it works for me, and it took me too many years has someone else initiating the process, so I have to build the system, prove it works, hire someone to do that, train them on it, performance, manage them, incentivize them, and then you can figure it. Right? So, my system is that I run a webinar once a month and it’s a demonstration of how I work with my clients and this is what I recommend that all my clients do. During training, webinars, run demonstrations, run them online, because it gives you geographical reach as soon as they’re incredibly efficient, they’re incredibly cost effective, you can actually run 40 minute webinars now with zoom for nothing, which is a really good price. So, you can reach out well beyond driving distance, you don’t have to hire conference centers or anything else. The event is still one of the very best marketing mediums for inbound marketing, but does the best demonstration not as if not as a free training exercise. And then we have Joint Venture Partners promote that demonstration online and I had someone else lining up those Joint Venture Partners. So, every first Thursday of every month, I wake up at 6am and prepare for my 7am presentation and we have attendees from all over the world and the other 100 you know that the 100 sleeping bears and three of them, come and come buy the honey at the end of it. So, that’s a classic example because even though I’m an introvert that’s true of I think a lot of comedians are actually introverts and people who like to talk a lot like me are actually introverts. I wouldn’t go out you know, my wife goes back to Germany for a month and my worst fear is that the phone will ring and someone invites me out to dinner because I’m on my own. So, as an introvert, I’m actually quite you know, if you put me in front of a microphone with as 1,000 people in a live physical event or 100 people on webinar I come to life that’s what I do sort of thing, but after the show’s over, I call back on my shelf. So that’s a style of marking, it really suits me. If I’ve got if someone else has got the audiences for me and all I have to do is go through my PowerPoint, which is well-structured and well-presented and I’m confident people are going to get value in the right people reach out at the end, that’s something I wake up in the morning want to do. I don’t wake up in the morning and do split testing on different funnels. I ran Facebook ads and funnels for five years and was quite profitable for us before it became too expensive, but again, a lot of that was outsourced.

 

Josh:

  16:48-17:06

So, for people who have never done inbound in a systematic way, do you have a kind of a process you take them through where they start to think through what they like and how to present it and how to create an offer and how to create a demonstration that works? I mean, what is the process?

 

Tom:

 

17:07-18:53

Right? So, we start with the marketing model that everyone needs to understand. Outbound inbound selling fridges or you know, or you’ve got to have an audience, right? So, when you understand that, it doesn’t matter how good your product is, how good your messages are, if you don’t have anyone hearing it, receiving your offer, and knowing about your brand, you’re not gonna sell anything, obviously. So, you got to have an audience and therefore, the question is, what’s the best audience for my marketing? For my service? We can come back to that if you want. To have an audience, you got to have an asset through which you get your message or your offer out to the market that can be the billboard I talked about, it can be the webinars I talked about, but there’s a vehicle through which we have to get out our offering our message about our products and services out to the marketplace, pay per click advertising, there’s about 115 different options there. So you need an audience and an asset, and you need a call to action and so the call to action can be to buy something it can be to book a consultation, it can be to do a trial or a demo. So, there’s a lot of different options for audiences. Amazon has an audience for books, for example, for book readers, no radio stations have audiences. These audiences are everywhere. Buying your buy list, you could LinkedIn, some audience, so lots of what’s the best audience depends on your service, your product, your market. What’s the best asset? Because a lot of those, you could write a book, which is quite long and involved. I’ve written five of them. So it takes a while. Podcast is an asset, and webinars are an asset, so what’s the best one, and then finally, the call to action. So, if you start at the bottom, for most people, marketing services, advice or software, the best call to action is to book a time to first have a chat and see if this is the right thing for you. The best. So I go ahead.

 

Josh:

  18:54-19:36

I was gonna jump in with and then actually run through a scenario using your process. Well, the reason why is because I mean, I, and you may or may not know this, I’m certifying a bunch of coaches and consultants. And I’m training them and now they’re like, “Hey, Josh, I’m gonna put on some events”, and I and some of them actually have done it. And they want to get out there in the local markets, some of them online, but the ones that I’m thinking of actually want to do a live event in their city, and then get clients to help them put us into their businesses. And I can loosely give them this process, but what would you advise them to do? Like, how would they go about doing that board?

 

Tom:

 

19:37-19:59

So if we look at that we want to live physical events versus live online events, is great for a local territory or region or you know, a city or a suburb, etc. One of the very best ways you can generate new clients is to get people to 100 speaking bears into that room and because the physical connection, eye contact, body language, everything else we know is going to be really effective. So if we look at the model, the asset is seminar. We’ll call it a seminar or event and the call to action is going to be a feedback form at the end, where you ask people to complete it, and you go on for a prize draw, which is a copy of Work the System and they rate the session 1 to 10 provide a little testimonial, and then a little checkbox there, just I would miss it and finding out more about how you work with your clients, please give me a call. And they fell on their mobile phone number, an email address and someone contacts them for the console or better still, is you’d give them the URL, book a chat with Josh.com, and they can do it on their phones right now find a time to have a chat with you and you let them know there’s only 100 people in the room. There are 10 spots available this week, as a little bit of creating some genuine scarcity there but that’s the call to action is to book a consultation. The asset is the live event and that there are eight objectives to achieve during that live event because it’s a marketing event that is hot so we can come back to those if you want to later on. It’s a very tricky part because the asset, let’s see what happens during that hour that is two hours or half day, whatever it is absolutely fundamentally critical and the sequence of that is fundamentally critical. It’s not until around two thirds of the event that people should be starting to learn about how it is that your licensee works with their client you know, as many people are jumping to say, “ hey, let me show you how it all works”. We’ve got to eliminate competitors before that we’ve got to establish that your licensee is an expert at what they do. And as credible as trustworthy, we need to eliminate financial risks and hurdles, we need to eliminate the risk of disappointment, which is seldom spoken about much as a great barrier that people buying is, what if I move forward with this and it’s not for me? Or what if I move forward with this even worse, pay money, it doesn’t work out? I want the unconscious to avoid disappointment, like crazy. Okay, all barriers need to be removed before we get to even a call to action.

 

Josh:

  22:00-22:26

And that’s my concern, right? Some of you have been through a lot of training on this. So you get 100 people, let’s just say you are a coach, right? And let’s say your coach or consultant, and you could fix someone’s business, right? You get 100 people in the room? How should you structure your content to lead them through that I mean, is there like a formula or an acronym to follow?

 

Tom:

22:27-28:19

Well, there’s certainly a formula and I call it the

Persuasion Sequence

and I go through in the book that I sent you in marketing,

The Invisible

. I spell it out more succinctly in this book, their marketing book but it’s a persuasion sequence and it starts with the title. The title needs to be benefit rich, so our title is, you know, how independent professionals and 27 cities in 15 countries around the world are and it goes to big type fonts, generating a weekly flow of high quality inbound new client inquiries. Subtitles without cost are complicated, the title can be long, because people are going to read it, it’s not an elevator pitch, it’s not a USP, which is often verbal. So we get more real estate with a title for an event, be that a webinar or seminar, then we would say, if we were verbally articulating the benefit, it’s got to be benefit rich, it’s not about a practice, not about a service, it’s not about a program it’s not about a brand, it’s about the benefit, that’s the first thing in the sequence is the title. Next thing, is you tell people within the right place, because you describe who this is going to be and who this is for and then you describe your ideal client. And so they’re sitting there nodding, going, “Oh, good, that’s me. He’s just describing me”. And then you tell them why they should listen to you and this is the years of experience, this is the results you’ve achieved, your clients, etc. And then you tell them what it promises and the promise takes the title, and it puts it into evokes as many senses as you can. So my promises, you wake up on a Monday morning, and while sipping your coffee, you feel a smile spread across your face, as you open your calendar and you seek bookings, from people who want to know more about working with you and these bookings have come in that you haven’t had to chase them. And they already know what your fees are, and they’ve confirmed they can afford to work with you. And they’re coming to that meeting, hoping to confirm that working with you is the right thing to do. So you’re not going to have to do any selling. So you’ll notice that in the promise, which is fourth or fifth in sequence. We’ve invoked the census, you feel a smile spread across your face as you open your calendar and actually say outlook, iCal, or the Gcal, so that she’s actually in the mind seeing that calendar, right? So it’s an NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming technique where we’re invoking as many senses as we can to create a picture of what it’s going to look like, when they’ve implemented what you’re about to show them, subtext when they’ve implemented your program or working with you. So that’s the trend, so that’s the promise, we then have to go through the pain avoidance. To get this promise, here are all the things you should not do and then you list the things they hate doing the things that tried and explain to them why they haven’t worked. For example, I’ve explained why Facebook ads are a bad idea that funnels and split testing. It’s very complicated. It’s very expensive, and produces poor quality leads relative to other options. So that point, the nodding and going, oh my God, I certainly don’t want to do that. Yes, I did try that. Oh, that’s why it didn’t work. So you’re increasing what I call relatability at that point, people going this guy or this woman or this man could have been a fly on the wall on my business he knows in my personal life that is exactly what I tried and explained why it didn’t work. If you explain to someone what they’ve tried and why it didn’t work, you will almost inevitably have them in the palm of your hand when you explain what does actually work, because your believability and credibility, relatability has gone through the roof. Then you explain the principles behind why what you do works so well. I have three principles. You’re not Hugh Jackman, which is basically you can propose to people at first sight, you’ve got to give him some dates, inbound marketing you through the principles and then you share in the model of how the three steps only three. I mean, I have 10 of my program, but I need to talk about three, because the enemy of motivation is complication. And the demonstration part, which is one talking about now. This is a demo, let me show you how we generate the inbound leads, three steps, you’ve got to keep this simple and the biggest mistake most people make at this point is thinking that they’ve got to create a lot of information here and you kill people’s motivation when you give them complication. And so, that gives you an idea of a very specific sequence that people need to follow in a marketing type event, such as the one that you’ve just asked about. And then, there’s a call to action. But before the call to action, you got to tell them what the cost is of working with you, what that investment is, tell them who qualifies, who doesn’t qualify, not in an arrogant, snobbish way, but in a reasonable way. This is who I can help, if you have an interest, then, you know, go to this URL book a time for us to have a chat.

So, when you wake up on Monday morning, you haven’t done the event and there’s this whole bunch of people who have booked a time to talk with you. They know what your fees are, they’ve confirmed that they can afford to work with you. That told you the system that they’re ready to start if you agree, it’s a good idea. They’ve attended your event, your webinar, whatever it happens to be. So we’re talking about the highest quality, new client inquiry. Gone are the days where someone books a time and you realize later on, they were just there to pick your brain. Gone are the days where you get all year with a prospect and they’re excited. You’re excited about working to get on, they say, “ Great, look, I’m going on a world tour for six months, but I’ll be sure and give you a call and I’ll get back because I’m really excited about this”. Right? That those days are gone and I can see you smiling this has happened as well. Right? And, gone are the days where people get to the end. And you finally tell them the price like oh, my goodness, I had no idea that cost. I’m sorry, but I can’t afford to work with you. Those days were all gone. We’re doing high, highly qualified, inbound, new client inquiries.

 

Josh:

28:20-28:45

Well, this is for anyone who’s doing exactly what you’d mentioned their time. Hopefully, they took notes, I took notice that it was really detailed. Now. Let’s maybe, it doesn’t apply, and maybe it does. So what if you are selling something that is low? Like let’s say you are a massage therapist, and you’re selling $100 massages? Can you still gleam some of the same psychology in the same sequence of events to your ideal people?

 

Tom:

28:46-30:24

It’s exactly the same. So while I mess up, a massage therapist is not my ideal client, you still got exactly the same model, you’re gonna need an audience, you’ve got to have an asset through which to get your message about your magic messages out to that audience, and you need a call to action. But at that price point, the call to action is not a console, the call to action is by the thing book the massage. So content marketing is still good for them. So I mean, the best thing put into place, once they have some clients coming in as a referral system. Develop some mercurial cards, but you know, content marketing on your local community Facebook group, you know, being active there that the audience is the Facebook group is local, they’ve got to drive that drive more than half an hour, probably, with rare exception and if they do, they won’t keep doing it. As my wife’s an acupuncturist and craniosacral therapist. So, she has a very physical business. I came to it to a massage business, you know, 90 minute appointments and price points similar and so on. So, a local Facebook group, whilst it’s a pretty crap idea for a business coach or consultant or someone like that, is really good for a massage therapist or a chiropractor. So, business networking meetings, the audience is already there, right? There’s a business networking meeting about the asset, take along a card with a first session 50% off the URL on there. So people can book online, make it very easy for them to get a smartphone and book and buy that book to talk with you. So the same model, it’s the audience, the asset and the call to action.

 

Josh:

30:25-30:36

And then in terms of deciding whether you go to an appointment versus just buy the thing, is there a certain sweet spot price point that seems to be the inflection point there.

 

Tom: 

30:37-31:15

It’s relative to the type of service that’s being offered. But once you get over around $500 a month as you know, a description based program or something like that. Once you get over that, it’s much more difficult to get people signed up off the back of an event or at an event. I have seen people get signed up with a $20,000 price ticket at an event. But we’re talking to people that have you know, $10 million turnover business. So, it’s relative to the revenue of the business as to what you can get away with in terms of an offer at a live office I at a seminar or on a webinar.

 

Josh:

 

31:16-31:24

Okay, well, that’s good. It’s good to have a rule of thumb over $500 a month, then you gotta start thinking about having a real conversation with somebody.

 

Tom: 

31:25-32:07

I mean, if you, but you know, if you’re talking to Airbus executives or Boeing executives, then that could be million dollars. More often or not, in my testing over many, many, many years, it’s far more profitable with me, if I have the bandwidth, I have this space, my calendar offers a console because some clients will become $50,000 clients. Some prospects become $50,000 clients. Some will become, you know, $6,000 clients and so on. And if I have a console, I can direct them I call the multi directional console, I can direct them with their one on one client, with your program client, or whether referring to someone else, so that it is always more profitable, provided I have space in my calendar for those consults.

 

Josh:

  32:08-32:21

Make sense. Now, because I gotta run to my client, or you gotta run to, I want to make sure I give you the floor a little bit. So what’s one question that I didn’t ask you? But I should ask you?

 

Tom:

 

32:22-33:39

I think it’s around people chasing shiny things, and why people do that and so why do people chase shiny things? Because the answer, I guess you want the answer as well and because we were seduced by the short, the simple, and the quick and we have pain now. So we want a solution now. The problem with that is it keeps us on a treadmill of stress and anxiety and anyone who’s kept trying to short the simple shiny things will probably have it and will eventually get to the point where they wake up and they go, okay, well, that didn’t work so well. So, my best piece of advice is to figure out the strategy. So, if your strategy is aligned with mine and you want to get audiences from other people’s networks, and because it’s free and high quality and you want to run events, whether that’s online or offline and you want to have a call to action, we know that strategy works. So stick to it, until you get it working. And by all means, do some business networking meetings, or go to conferences and pick up the odd, you know, random bit of marketing as you go but make sure that you work towards the strategy, and you make it successful before you try something else.-

 

Josh: 

33:40-33:48

That’s great advice. So build a strategy and stick with it and then maybe you can tack on the shiny objects, maybe once it’s built in working, right?

 

Tom: 

33:49-34:22

Exactly. And to do that, find someone you trust. I mean, you’re very trustworthy. Sam is very trustworthy. Work the System is a brand that’s very trustworthy. So invest in the brand and the person that you trust and when you get the second, when you get the doubts and the fears and suspicions, and the frustrations, and maybe even some disappointments, stick with it because you made a decision to trust that brand and trust that person. Because if you’ve got someone you can trust and you’ve got something that’ll work, stick with it until you get it working. Don’t go and chase another shiny thing.

 

Josh:

 

34:23-34:47

Definitely, well, then if someone’s saying you’re gonna be a millionaire in a few months, probably best to move on to something else because it’s hard to build a business. And you and I’ve been there and doing it long enough to know that it’s the companies that are still doing it and doing it well are the ones worth checking out. Well, Tom, I wish I could stay longer. This has been really helpful to me, hopefully to our audience. Where can people find out more about you and your business?

 

Tom:

 

34:48-35:06

The best thing to do is have a chat, so they can go to ineedinbound.com, as in I, me. Ineedinbound.com, book a 15 minute chat. I’ll be happy to have a conversation and see if I’ve got something here that can help you. That’s, that’s the best thing they could do Josh.

 

Josh: 

35:07-36:00

Perfect. All right. So, ineedinbound.com we’ll put that in the show notes as well, depending on where you’re listening or watching this but I would take you know, if you’re the right person for Tom, I take up on the offer because he is a pro. Every time I talk to him, I learn a lot. So again, Tom, appreciate you making the time. This has been great and thanks everybody who’s watching the podcast or listening, who’s here with us live. We’re gonna be doing another podcast in about a week. So stay tuned to that and check it out. Also, if you want to get a copy of the book, Work the System, you go get it for free at wtsenterprises.com or you can get a free copy mailed to you. If you leave us a review. Again, wherever you’re watching or listening to this, leave us review and send us a picture of that to [email protected]. Once a week we grab a name and a hat and a copy of the book. Otherwise, we’ll stay tuned and we’ll see you next week. And again, Tom, thank you for being on the call.

 

Tom:

 

36:01

Thanks, Josh.

Cheers everyone.