John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, is it duct tape marketing listener? We know you're always on the lookout for ways to more efficiently scale your business. That's why I'm so excited to chat about. I digress another show on the HubSpot podcast network. Troy Sandra is the host of I digress, talks all about how you can eliminate complexity, complications and confusion from your business equation and create clarity to streamline strategy solutions that achieve scalable and sustainable success. Check out episode 24, start there 14 minutes or so. Strategy is power. You know, I love that idea. So listen, learn and grow with I digress on the HubSpot podcast network at hubspot.com/podcast network.

John Jantsch (00:57): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch I'm going to do a solo show today. In fact, I'm going to do a series of a couple of solo shows this week. If you're listening in order because it's launch week for my new book, the ultimate marketing engine five steps to ridiculously consistent growth. So I'm going to cover in short order, those five steps over a series of podcast episodes. Hopefully you can string them all together. We'll have them in the show notes, all strung together. If you want to pick up a copy of the book, if you haven't yet, it's just the ultimate marketing engine.com. You can find lots of free resources there and speaking or resources. The book is chock full of every exercise and checklist and task lists that I give you so that you can get the work done.

John Jantsch (01:43): That's in the book. I'm going to start today by reading, actually from the book to give you a little sense of the content, but also to set up today's lesson. So what is the ultimate marketing engine? I'm guessing you're reading this book or listen to me read this book because you have at least a mild interest in the answer to that question. So I won't hold back. The ultimate marketing engine is a successful customer. Now you may be saying, duh, everyone knows that you need customers after all. That's pretty much what every marketing book says a customer's king, blah, blah, but I'm going to show you how most, every other marketing book, including a couple I've written gets this idea terribly wrong. The school of thought that says the purpose of a business is to profitably, acquire and retain customers is not entirely wrong. It's just limiting and hard to sustain the purpose of a business.

John Jantsch (02:39): What if the purpose of a business was to discover what it takes to make your customer successful? What if then you concentrated all of your efforts on that goal for an ever expanding roster of ideal clients. What if growth came with your customers? Not from them. Note that my answer to this question is the ultimate marketing engine includes not just the word customer, but successful customer successful may seem like a nice adjective thrown into flower up the writing, but it is much more than that. Think about what it takes to help a customer succeed. And the key distinction comes to life. Your business succeeds. When your customer succeeds, I'm going to stop reading there and really dive into the first step, the steps in order. Then I'm going to talk about step one map where your best customers are today and where they want to go as well.

John Jantsch (03:39): We're going to talk about today. Step two, uncover the real problem you solve for your ideal customers to transformation. They are seeking. We'll do that one in another episode, step three, narrow your focus to the top 20% of your ideal customers. Step four, attract more ideal customers with the narrative. They are already telling themselves and step five, which is essentially all about referrals, scale with your customers by serving their entire eco system. So step number one map where your best customers are today and where they want to go in this book. I introduce the ideas customer as members. Now I'm not necessarily talking about fact, I'm not talking about a membership program or something like Costco. Those are great business models. I'm really talking more about a point of view. What if we came to look at our customers more like members, what if we attracted members to our organization, people who actually wanted to become customers to invest in themselves because of what we were able to offer them.

John Jantsch (04:44): Now that may sound like an interesting idea, and I try to bring it to a very practical life using something that I call the customer success, track the idea behind the customer success track is to actually just create a roadmap of where your customers are today and where they want to go. Now, this roadmap is going to have several elements. The first element is just a list of stages. What I find is that most of our customers, and maybe you find this to be true for your business as well. Most of our customers come to us in a certain stage of their business. We sell basically marketing consulting and strategy. And so a lot of people come to us lacking that strategy. And of course lacking the implementation of the online presence that it really takes to have a strategy come to life. So they're in a foundational stage.

John Jantsch (05:39): Now what we've learned over the years is that people that come to us in that stage have certain characteristics. We can recognize them. We can spot what's going on in their business. And because of that, we also know the challenges that they are probably facing on a daily basis. They're not able to generate enough leads or certainly able to convert leads. They're not able to attract ideal clients. These are all symptoms or challenges of being in that stage because our job is to solve those challenges. We've also been able to create a list of milestones. We know what we have to accomplish. We know the boxes we have to check in order to move people to that next stage. And so we can ask a series of yes or no questions, not is their website effective. No way to answer that question, but we can say, does the website load effectively on a mobile device?

John Jantsch (06:35): Because it needs to, we can say yes or no. If the answer is yes, great check that box. If the answer is no, we can now assign tasks to accomplishing that milestone. So it effectively gives us almost a guaranteed roadmap that we could complete all of the milestones on for them in that stage on our customer success track. We know the promise of what's going to happen now. So in other words, when we build somebody's foundation, now we can effectively generate and affordably generate leads for them. So that's the promise that be in the next stage. And let's hear a word from our sponsor. HubSpot CRM platform is easy to adopt and there are really two reasons. Two features that make this possible, that contact timeline and the mobile app and mobile keyboard HubSpot's contact timeline gives you the historical context. You need to get the work done and connect with customers because all of your customer data is in one place.

John Jantsch (07:32): It can serve as a single source of truth. In HubSpot, you can take an action, right from the contact timeline, make a call and roll a contact in the sequence, schedule a meeting. You've got it. And if you're on the go, you just use the mobile app to make it all happen and keep everything up to date. You don't even have to spend a lot of time training your team. You can be sure that all the contact information is going into one system, making your team more efficient, look better adoption with a CRM leads to better data, richer insights, and a bigger impact on your customer experience. Learn more about how you can scale your company without scaling complexity@hubspot.com. So we map out we, we, our customer success track for marketing for our customers has five stages. And we're able to map out increasing activities, increasing milestones that are really going to mature.

John Jantsch (08:26): We know for a fact are going to mature their marketing. So that's the idea behind this customer success track that we are able to document exactly what we need to do to move people to the next stage. Now, when you get the co the ultimate marketing engine and you find the companion course, that's contained and referenced many times in the book, you're going to find a whole series of forms and checklists. In fact, I've documented our complete success and all of the milestones for each state. So you're going to have the roadmap for marketing. If you want to use this for marketing your own business. But my real goal is to get you to think this way for your business, for your customers. I don't care what industry you're in or who you serve. I believe that this idea is an idea that will advance your business and ultimately allow you to scale your business, your existing, ideal profitable customers, rather than just out there floundering around looking for more of the same or more of anybody who seems to have a need for what it is that you sell.

John Jantsch (09:29): And that's why I say the ultimate Mar marketing engine is a successful customer. You're going to focus on making that customer successful. Now here's some of the side benefits. If you will, of taking this point of view or this mindset for us, it's actually changed our mission for our business. Our mission now is pretty simple. Take our customers from where they are today or where they come to us today, to where we believe that they want to ultimately go. That becomes our mission, but it also becomes a tremendous sales and marketing message. Because now when we are having a conversation with a potential customer, we're not just talking about here's how we're going to fix today's problem. We're actually saying here's where we're going. Here's the entire roadmap. And by the way, here's the promise. That's going to be available to your business if we accomplish these stages, if we can move you to that next stage.

John Jantsch (10:21): So it's a very powerful and potent sales message and great differentiator. But what we've also found is that let's face it creating systems, something I talk about probably you're tired of me talking about and write about constantly. This forces us to really document our success, track the way we are going to deliver the results we promise on in a way that allows us to hire differently, to train differently, to delegate work. We're actually able to get many of the tasks accomplished in a routine manner without adding overhead, necessarily to our business, because they are repeatable tasks that we do over and over again. So this is not this idea of a customer success track is not simply something that we do as a marketing strategy. It's become really the overarching strategy for the business in every aspect of really scaling our business. And I'm excited to bring you a little more detail on the other steps in this work, but if I've piqued your interest today, head on over to the ultimate marketing engine.com, you can download some free chapters.

John Jantsch (11:33): There's actually a free course that you can get, which is going to be some videos. And you can sample some of the worksheets to all of this before you really buy the book. Obviously the, the book, when you're listening, by the time you're listening to this, the book is available, uh, to ship from your favorite bookseller. And when you get the book you are going to find it is, or at least the companion, a website that we reveal in the book is going to be all the resources that we use on a daily basis. Working with our clients, really implementing the ultimate marketing engine in their businesses. So appreciate you tuning in. Hopefully you can string these together and have a complete end to end journey through the five steps to ridiculously consistent growth until next time take care. All right, that wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast.

John Jantsch (12:25): I want to thank you so much for tuning in, feel free to share this show, feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also, did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you've got employees, if you've got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It's called the certified marketing manager program from duct tape marketing. You can find it at duct tape, marketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.

Speaker 2 (13:07): [inaudible].