Steve Bambury
Growth Partners
Digital Marketing Agency
In this episode of Biz Bites, we chat with Steve Bambury, co-founder of Growth Partners Ltd. We dive deep into the world of sales and marketing, exploring how to align values with clients, harness technology for growth, and revolutionise website design. Steve shares insights on building purpose-led organisations, fostering collaboration between sales and marketing teams, and leveraging AI ethically. Plus, get exclusive tips on the biggest website design mistakes and how to avoid them.
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Transform your sales and marketing for growth and building purpose driven websites. In this episode of Biz Bites, I welcome Steve Bambury, the co-founder of Growth Partners Ltd, who shares his passion for accelerating the impact of purpose led organisations and reveals the secrets behind successful revenue generating strategies used by global brands and how to make that work for mid tier businesses and down.
Tune in to explore the importance of aligning values, With clients understanding customer behaviour and leveraging technology to predict future revenue. Additionally, you’ll gain some insights into the common pitfalls of website design and the unique methodology of building websites backwards. Don’t miss the bonus content as well on the three biggest problems with website design.
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Welcome everyone to another episode of Biz Bites. And I’m really fascinated by my guest today because we’ve had a little bit of a chat recently, and his approach to building websites is quite different, but he’s got a lot of information to give. Give us and share and I know that they’ll make a big difference to everyone listening in today.
So let’s welcome Steve to the program. Welcome. Thanks for having me Anthony. It’s great to be here. Look, I appreciate you giving up your time and I think best way to get started with these things is for you to give us a little bit of an introduction to who you are and what you’re about. Sure.
But my name is Steve Bambury. I’m very proud and privileged to have co founded you. growth partners a number of years ago now. And I’ve been in the field of sales and marketing, helping connect companies with more of their ideal customers for coming up to 40 years now. It’s something I’m really passionate about.
My personal passion is to accelerate the impact of purpose led organisations. And as I say, a few years ago, I had the privilege and the pleasure of co founding growth partners. And our team have successfully delivered revenue generation strategies for some really big global leaders, brands like Qantas, like Apple, like Johnson.
And we’ve taken what we learned from working with those big brands, those same, if you like, elite methodologies. And we’ve developed the systems and the processes and the technologies that allow us to deliver those same strategies for the mid tier market in a way that’s just previously been unreachable for them.
Fantastic. There’s a lot to discuss in in this and we’re definitely going to to get through a whole bunch of things, but I wanted to pick up on you very first. On the very first part, just about the idea of purpose driven, because I think that’s a fundamental idea that you’re about. Tell me what that means to you.
Yeah, look, that’s a great question. I think in business with the speed of business that’s happening and it’s accelerating it, we lost our way that, we’re really, it’s humans doing business with humans. All right. A friend of mine said to me the other day, we don’t sell to a building, do we?
It’s no, it’s so for me it’s really about that human connection. It’s really understanding the other person, the person on the other side of the conversation. What’s really important to them? Who are they as a human? What is their core purpose in life?
What is the difference they want to make and what are their values? For me, a value exchange. Starts with the value alignment. So it’s really important for me that we, we have these common values that we work towards. And when we engage with a customer, we don’t look at it as a supplier customer relationship.
We look at it as a partnership and a formal real partnership. It’s important that you’ve got those common values in that way of being. And that enables us to work together in a collaborative partnership for the mutual benefit of all parties. So when I talk about accelerating the impact of purpose lead organisations, it’s like, what are you passionate about?
Why does your business exist? And what is the difference that you want to make? That’s what I’m really interested in to start with so that we can make sure that we were actually partnering with someone that’s going in the same direction is what we are. Yeah it’s such an important thing, isn’t it?
Because if you’re not sharing values, then the chances that the relationship will work out not very good. And it’s not something that people spend enough time, I think, discussing and working out what actually is their purpose. It’s become a little bit of a catchphrase for some at the moment and people think, Oh, it’s a bit woke.
I don’t need to do that. But it’s not That’s not the case at all. The underlying idea of the purpose of the business is so core to who you are and what will attract people to you, isn’t it? Absolutely. Absolutely. And look, Simon Sinek’s got a lot to, he played into that with, start with why.
Why does your business exist? And why should other people care? And cynics, as people don’t buy what we sell so much as they, they buy what we believe. People, if they believe that what we’re doing is good, then we can attract an audience to that. And for me, it’s you know, you touched on a point there, Anthony, which I think is really important.
We’ve worked really hard to build an amazing culture and to be able to attract the talent into our team to deliver the outcomes that we do. And that talent is really hard to find. And if we bring people into that culture that don’t fit and don’t align with that culture, Then we run the risk of losing good people.
We run the risk of bringing people into our ecosystem, if you like, that don’t share those core values. And that can be that can be a real mismatch for everyone. Yeah, sometimes the best people in terms of a skill set are not the best people for your business if your values and your purpose are not aligned.
Absolutely. Yeah, couldn’t agree more. So talk to me then about how you take this idea of what you’ve been, what you wanted to achieve as a business and how do you end up with clients like Apple and Qantas and the like. We hope you’re enjoying listening to the Biz Bites podcast. Have you ever thought about having your own podcast, one for your business, where your brilliance is exposed to the rest of the world?
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So come talk to us. Podcast done for you. com. au details in the show notes below. Now back to Biz Bites. And how do you end up with clients like Apple and Qantas and the like? It’s really come down to, the quality of talent that we’ve had. within the organization. People have been in this game for a long time and have been on top of their game and have been doing good work.
And it all comes down to results and outcomes. At the end of the day, we can talk a lot about what we do, but at the end of the day, it’s those results that make them make a real difference. So delivering those results allows people to get recognized. for the work that they’re doing.
And if they’re good people, then people want to spend more time with those good people. So some of the talent that we’ve got within our team they’ve been doing this for a long time. And they’ve delivered some pretty amazing results for big brands like the ones that we mentioned. And that’s that’s awesome.
and being able to then, smart that down so that we can make it available to companies where it’s been unreachable previously. That’s a real buzz for me. It’s been, I came from, the startup community. I’ve started a couple of my own businesses in the past. So I love that notion of having an idea and one to create a meaningful difference in the future where you’re in that startup phase, but you haven’t got the, the size of the budget that these big brands have got, but you’ve still got access to the skills and the talent that can actually take you on that journey and allow you to make a big difference.
Yeah, it’s and it’s interesting is that difference between working for those big brands. I know when you’re a business and you’re tied to those big brands it’s great at first. There’s a lot of expectations on what to deliver. And big budgets can mean bigger pressure as well.
Usually does. And so what made, what triggered the decision to go from, okay, we’re targeting these big end of town to saying, we need to start looking at a different model for the business. Yeah. Look, I think for me, a couple of things, one has been able to bring it back to the community that I live, that I really cherish having come from it myself.
And having seen the struggles of the, the small to medium enterprise and being able to give back to that community is really important. So that for me is, the fundamental in being able to do that. One of the other things that’s quite important is that this is a level playing field now.
This whole digital world. It’s not so much the size of your budget in many cases, not so much the size of the budget that’s going to make the difference. It’s about deploying the skills and doing things differently. And when I say it’s a level playing field in the area that we’re in the organic space, you own that organic space by being relevant to your customers.
And the way that they’re searching, the way that they’re behaving online. And you can’t necessarily buy that. So we we see in a lot of cases the ability for smaller brands to be able to go up there and upset, upstage if you like, some of the bigger brands by doing things smarter and by doing things better.
And by being able to connect with their customers in a way that their competitors aren’t doing. So that’s exciting. And one of the other things to consider also is that with some of the big brands and I don’t want to make a gross generalization here, but one of the one of the big advantages for smaller companies, the reason that we work in that mid tier is by having direct and immediate access to key decision makers.
We can make decisions quickly. We can present a strategy that makes sense for everyone, collaboratively agree on it, and then we can move like that. And a lot of these big brands don’t have the luxury of being able to do that. Decisions are made by committee. Some of those people are overseas. And that decision making process can be very long and very slow.
And and that that could be quite frustrating. So the mid tier, as I say is exciting because we’ve got the ability to have that agility and and move quickly and are moving quickly, we gain a competitive advantage and a team love that. The team, one of our core values is passion and you’ll see that our team are very passionate about the partnerships that we choose to engage in so that when we have that partnership with a customer that customer’s competitors become our competitors.
Our number one goal was to go out there and help grow their business and we do it together. And we’ve got a much better chance of doing that if we can be agile and move quickly. What I love about your response to all of that was we started off. Before I asked that question about the big brands talking about why and purpose, we didn’t actually ask you what, completely what your why and purpose is, but it’s so evident in the way that you responded to that, that being in that mid tier market is something that you guys are absolutely passionate about.
And that, Ability to move with agility is clearly a big differentiator in and it is a, because when you move to that market and even at, to smaller businesses beyond that the struggle is under, it’s one thing to take the ideas of what you’ve got at a high level in a corporate, but it’s another thing to understand that, I understand that resources and ability even to think strategically in the same way that a bigger company is quite different in that mid and smaller tier.
So how do you correlate those two things? Because it’s bringing it back down and it’s the idea of what you’ve learned and then bringing it back down to that level. How much have you had to change in the way that you think and even communicate? Yeah. Look, great question. We’re very process driven.
So having process is a foundation allows us to create consistency, and it allows us to communicate really well with our customers, what we’re doing, how we’re doing it in that partnership and the outcomes that we’re going to achieve. So we’re very clear on sitting there expectations from the outset and having that process is the foundation is fundamental to that success.
The mindset is totally a big one as well. Having the right mindset, and that comes back down again to, our core values, having that value alignment and every single team member will be able to talk. Freely and openly about our values. We choose our team members based on their values.
We the very first slide in our presentation to our customers when we identify if they’re the right fit and we can actually solve the problems that they’re looking to solve and we can make a big dent in their world and we put a proposal together. The first slide in our proposal is our core values.
That’s what we talk about very first and foremost. So that alignment with the values, having the right mindset, having the process to support everything that we’re doing allows us to be able to make that big difference for the smaller brands as well. It’s such an important starting point. How much as well do you have to, show the vision of what because is the vision of what you want to try and deliver for businesses beyond what they can see themselves? And how easy is it to sell them on that? Absolutely. And I love the questions that you’ve got. You’ve got some great questions here, Anthony. Yeah, totally. A lot of the companies. That we work with.
Not all, but a lot of them are struggling. They’re struggling to make headway in this digital space. A lot of companies have been burnt in the past. They’ve invested into digital strategies that haven’t been effective. They’re feeling a little bit, feeling a little bit burnt by that experience. Their growth may have stagnated.
Their sales and marketing activities that they were doing even as little as 12 months, two years ago are no longer effective. Because this digital space is moving so fast and they’re confused with all the options that are in front of them. So in a lot of cases our customers are confused, are frustrated that what they’re doing is not working and they don’t know what to do.
And we’re able to show them a clear pathway to being able to solve those problems in a way that they haven’t considered before. And that’s really exciting. One of the things that we’ve worked really hard on is building that trust and building that trust early. Because when you’re operating in a market like, like we are, there’s a lot of mistrust.
There’s a lot of broken promises that have taken place. And if your inbox is anything like mine, your inbox is overflowing. But people promising this promising that and people looking at and go, I don’t know what to do. I’m confused. I don’t know where to go. I know what I’m doing isn’t working.
I need to do something different. So in order for us to build that trust, we need to be able to show them a pathway to a better future. And we’ve incorporated a really interesting process into our process. To our sales process, which allows our prospects to try our program before they buy it, and that builds tremendous trust, because in doing that, we can identify some of the reasons why they’ve struggled in the past and how we would do things differently to change that outcome.
And then we start creating a picture. Of the future that we can create for them. We’ve even developed the technology system, which predicts future revenue for three years from the work that we’re going to do together. So they can see clarity to a, to their future state clarity, to a better future, and they can actually see that the money that’s going to flow as a result of that.
And that’s a tremendous way to build trust and be able to paint that picture for them of where they can go and how they can get unstuck. And where they are now. I think and a shout out to George Bryant and you and I’ll talk about George Bryant after this, after the show, but for listeners of BizBytes, you’ll be familiar with the podcast we did earlier in the year with George.
And one of the things we talked about is the no, and trust, but it’s beyond that. It’s the safety. And I think that that’s where a lot of people go astray. They build the trust and then they destroy the trust. Almost immediately because they try to sell upsell people almost straight away or they take the money and then there’s large gaps before anything is going to happen.
And then they get told that it’s going to take a while before you see results and all of, and there’s nothing being fed into the process. Whereas when you do what you’re doing is building that idea of safety in there and people feel safe straight away with the knowledge of that process. Of what is going to happen and how it’s going to happen.
And I think that’s a incredibly clever way of doing it. So talk to me a little bit more about the technology that you’ve got and utilizing for that, because it’s quite unique, isn’t it? Yeah. We’re really hard to develop the solution that we have and it stemmed from, the frustration in the market.
When I got together with my business partner we both shared a common frustration having been in marketing for years. I started. My first business in 93. Back in 93, marketing’s role was to, I placed an advert in the yellow pages, the phone would ring, and that was marketing’s job done, right?
Now we see in a complex selling environment, when I say complex, where a salesperson is required to complete the transaction. As opposed to, you buy a water bottle, you see it online, you pull out the credit card, you buy it. Fairly simple transaction, e commerce.
That’s not the space that we’re in. It’s more of that complex sale. So with a complex sale, people are 70, 80 percent of the way through their journey before they even engage with the sales team. So that whole process has changed now. And we recognize that that shift. From, those earlier days of yellow pages, probably 10 percent of the way through the journey.
So that means that we’ve got to fundamentally look differently at our digital assets and primarily our website. Because we see websites that just aren’t doing the role that they need to be filling in today’s today’s modern environment. And that, that stemmed from starting to develop the process and starting to put the technology around that process and the systems behind it to allow us to build websites differently.
And that’s when we came up with a methodology of building websites backwards, because we looked at the traditional way they were being built and said it’s not working. Fundamentally websites are just not performing in the way that they should be. And if your website’s not consistently generating high quality leads.
Then I would venture to say that your website’s not doing what it needs to do in that complex selling environment. Sure, there are going to be websites that just sit there as a nice glossy brochure to validate what what you needed to validate. And in some businesses, a small percentage of them, that’s probably all that it needs to do.
But for most, it needs to do a lot more than that. And we saw a big failing in websites. And that’s that’s why we started to put that technology and the systems in the process around that, taking what we learned from those big brands, putting that into the blend and coming up with. With our methodology that’s got us to this point here.
So for everyone listening in we’re going to do a bit of bonus content that you’re going to have to subscribe to and the details will be in the show notes to get the three biggest problems with with website design. So we’re going to look at that whole idea of building the website backwards in a little bit more detail in the bonus content.
So you’re going to have to stay tuned for that one and we’ll come back to it. But I did want to pick up on, on this whole idea of digital. Assets and changing environment because I think that Often business doesn’t, is looking for a quick fix and the problem with the quick fix, if you find it, and I doubt whether you find it because all those people that are advertising those very quick fixes usually are full of, what the problem is, as you said is things are moving so rapidly.
So how do you keep on top of that as a business, how, you talk about it, Agility in terms of making decisions, but you also have to make, try and find time to allow things to see whether they’re going to be a success or not, know when the right time is to move to the next thing and know which thing to pick because it is a little bit of a gamble because things are moving so quickly.
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s a real challenge for a lot of businesses, even big brands are struggling. In many respects to keep up with some of these changes, as I mentioned earlier, Anthony, we’re an organic agency. So our strategy is based on having that website is the foundation of everything that we’re doing right.
And in our space, it’s moving so very fast. As an example, Google made four and a half thousand adjustments to their algorithm Last year alone Google are the major player in this market because they’ve got over 93 percent market share here in Australia. And that market share hasn’t gone backwards anywhere fast in the last five years.
I think it’s been consistently floating around that level. We’ve seen a move away when chat GPT and other technologies have come in a very small move away, but then it moved back again. Why? Because Google is the most relevant platform out there. And in the organic space, it’s relevance that makes the most important difference.
When you go to Google, you get a relevant answer to the question that you’ve got or the problem that you’re trying to solve. So when they make all of those adjustments, the way that they’re making that relevance and lining up that customer behavior with that website changing all the time, it’s very hard to keep up.
And that’s why our expertise, it plays into our hands and some to some extent because our team are dedicated completely to that very narrow space. And it makes sense. There are other areas as well. Paid media. Whether it be paid social, whether it be Google AdWords, our team have got some experience with that, but we don’t do it.
We’ve got partners in that place that we just pass people on to. And the reason is that we’ve got our hands full keeping up in the space that we’re wearing. And even those big brands come to us. And ask for our expertise in that space because we’re very, very niche in that space.
So if you’re a company, if you’re a, a mid tier company, a small to mid tier company, you’re going to have a marketing team. It’s where do you deploy that marketing team to get the best results. And in some places it makes perfect sense to keep it in house, whether that be some of your social media posts, whether it be making nice brochures for the sales team, those things that make sense to keep in house.
Okay. Where it really makes sense to outsource paid media with your with your Google AdWords, for instance, you definitely want to be outsourcing that type of thing, unless you’ve got a big team that can keep up with all the changes. And in our space, it makes sense as well, which is why we form those, why we form those partnerships.
So talk to me a little bit more about your space and give us some insights and tips for what businesses can and should be doing at the moment to, what is happening in the market? What are your predictions of what’s happening? Where should they be moving? There’s a lot of talk around AI and AI is, you Since the mid fifties.
It’s really only been in the last couple of years that it started to lift its head up, and there’s been a lot of talk around AI since, open AI and chat GPT first hit the market. The challenge with AI is that a lot of companies are doing, they’re doing one of two things. They’re typically copying what their competitors are doing or they are using AI to create their content.
The challenge with that is that Google knows that their index is going to be flooded. By copycat or very similar content. So if your content is exactly the same as everybody else’s, it’s not going to stand out. It’s not going to stand above the crowd. So companies need to start thinking differently around how they create their content.
For example, we we look at multilayered content. And let’s just take a step back, initially. If you think around, we talk a lot around Google. How do Google prioritize that relevance and what are their ranking factors? Their ranking factors, have you heard the acronym EAT? E A T.
EAT’s been around since 2014. So that was how they tend to rank content. Expertise. authority and trust. So they’re looking for those factors. Now, in late 2022, they introduced a new one to that acronym, and that was experience. So with experience, they wanted companies or they wanted people to show that they actually had experience relative to what they were talking about.
Now, this might surprise you, but there were travel companies or travel guides that were writing about destinations that they’d never been to. There were companies that were reviewing products that they’d never seen. Alright so what Google’s looking for now is that they want us, is that they want us to demonstrate that we’ve got experience as well as that expertise, as well as that authority, and as well as that trust.
And there are a number of ways that we can do that. So things like case studies, for example, that demonstrated our expertise, are going to build trust. If we’re a company that’s selling a product that’s got medical benefits having medical professionals, whether they be physiotherapists or doctors, providing context to how it benefits those companies, the products benefit benefit people.
Gives us that layer of expertise and experience, and it builds that authority. That multi layered approach to the way that we’re generating content is a great way to start differentiating. Like I say, if everyone’s looking the same, then you’re not going to stand out. So we need to start thinking about that differently.
That’s why I love podcasting so much, because it brings out the individual stories and expertise, which is what the differentiator is, as you say, because it’s okay to use AI to generate the base level of content, because, some things that when you pack a box, it’s still packing a box, right?
But it’s the experience around it and the stories around it that make the difference. To whether they choose one person over the next to who you want to who you want to utilize and I think that’s it’s the whole AI thing is really interesting as well because particularly in the content realm, I’ve noticed a significant difference between the different AI tools that are out there as well.
And I find it really fascinating. fascinating. I tried a bit of an experiment the other day where I was interviewing someone for a client. And so I needed to understand a little bit more about the area of expertise because it was outside of my core understanding. And it was really fascinating to see the difference between what different AI tools.
delivered. And I think that’s part of it as well as keeping on top of, even if you make that decision to use that chat, GPT has the name that everyone talks about, but it is it the best one to be using for your business? And that’s, even that requires some thoughts and constantly reevaluating.
Absolutely. There are so many tools out there now that are all a lot of them in that very narrow space of providing expertise for this or for that or for the other. And they are constantly changing. So one of the things that’s constant is change. But like I say, it’s knowing where to use it and where not to like the point that you made is a good one is that you can use a I to help ideate.
And give you some thoughts and ideas, but there’s this currently we know where it’s going. We’re not too sure where it’s going to end up. But right now, that human curated content that’s been given some insight, if you like, or some ideation from AI is going to help you stand out. It’s going to help you create that content that Google sees is more relevant.
more authority, more trust, and you’ll get traffic as a result of it. Yeah. It’s a very interesting idea that people are so becoming so reliant on AI and the amount of people that I’ve encountered that have championed the fact that they have written eBooks to full books, for example, Just using AI.
I find that a little bit it’s not even that it’s scary. I find that it’s mind numbing because it’s not them. Yeah. And what I want to buy into is the individual. It’s, It still gets back down to that principle, doesn’t it? That people do business with people and if you’re, as you put it earlier, if you’re just buying a bottle of water, that’s a very different story to buying an engaged service with someone and and a much greater expense.
But even even with the bottle of water, there’s a story that is around it that can be quite different to this, to the next bottle of water. Absolutely. Absolutely. And look content today. Sure. We’ve gotta write our content to some extent so that it, it appeals to the robots that are trolling and giving us that, that, that are doing their work.
But we’re selling to humans, right? So it comes back to that early part of the conversation we’re having today, making that human connection. And if we are gonna be 70, 80% of the way through our buyer journey and that’s gonna be a digital journey. Then we need to make that human connection. And what better way to make a human connection than a human, writing that content and delivering it to another human on the other side, to be able to express our differentiators in a way that AI can’t necessarily do it.
By making that, that, that connection, we’re going to build a deeper layer of trust and we’re going to earn, we’re going to earn those differentiators through Google’s algorithms as well. So they’re looking for that. And I think people are craving that human connection as opposed to content that, you’ll know it yourself.
You’ll see content that’s been produced by AI and it goes, oh that’s all well and good, but it’s, yeah, versus someone that’s actually taking the time. Because it takes, let’s make no mistake, it takes longer to create it in the way that we’re talking about. But the results are certainly worthwhile.
A reminder to everyone, we’re gonna come back to some website tips and bonus content. So you’ll have to click on that link below. But I did wanna ask you about one other area, because you talked from the beginning about sales and marketing, and these are two fundamental areas that. Often have been in conflict with one another for lots of historical reasons.
But talk to me about in this changing environment that we’ve got, how that blend is becoming more and more critical and how you find that idea of where does, what is it that, Marketing needs to do now. And where is it that sales needs to take over? Yeah, look, that’s a great question. We have a lot of conversations with CEOs that had the marketing team in the sales team are a little bit of war.
That the marketing team had an experience recently where the marketing team had generated 1000 leads for the sales team, and they were frustrated. They were complaining to the CEO that, Sales team were useless. They couldn’t close one single lead that they were given. The sales team were frustrated because they said, look, we’ve been given a thousand leads, I’ve gone through a hundred of them, they’re absolutely rubbish, the marketing team have got no idea of what an ideal customer looks like, and they’re giving us all of these rubbish leads, their wheels were spinning and they just gave up on it.
So there’s this tension or this friction between sales and marketing. At the end of the day, the most important connection that we need to make is with our customer. So by deeply understanding our customer. And then sharing that information with both sales and marketing, we have the opportunity to get them both on the same page.
And that’s that’s one of the joys that we have with the work that we do is by deeply understanding the customer and then sharing that knowledge with the sales and the marketing team and collaborating together, we can bring everybody onto the same page. So I think fundamentally we need to get You know, we need to get sales and marketing in the same room at the same time and collaborating more closely together.
And some organisations are really good at doing that. You’ve seen the rise in recent years of the chief revenue officer so that you’ve got a revenue, someone who’s responsible for revenue and recognizes that revenue is a responsibility for both the marketing and the sales team working together.
Other companies that are still getting it wrong and they’ve got marketing and sales completely siloed. They’re in separate parts of the building and they never get together and you get that, that, that tension and that frustration that comes from it. I think the ability to really understand our customer, the way that they’re behaving, the problems that they’ve got, the challenges that they’re facing, because we can see those in the digital world, and then bringing those two teams together and working together towards a common goal and a common outcome is certainly a way to resolve that.
I think it’s such an important thing and something we could delve into more at another time. But it’s just to comment and say that to me, one of the interesting things about this is that for marketing and marketing companies, be they, small outsource things to, ideas to, internal marketing teams, making the phone ring is not necessarily the hard part.
Making the phone ring with the right people. Is where the challenge is. And I think too often, what happens is people look for quick fixes and they go out and they do this. So I’ve worked with an organization recently where they’re saying what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to guarantee this and you’ve got to guarantee a certain amount of sales.
And you talk all of these things up and. And you, and I look at it and say, but there’s no way for this business to deliver on that. So yes, it’s bringing in a whole bunch of leads, but they’re under false pretenses. So you break the, so you break the trust almost immediately, but also as the question of whether they can even afford it.
forward what really is the solution and the time it takes to deliver that solution. There’s just a complete mismatch. And I think really understanding who those ideal clients are and taking them on that journey is so important that when you feed off from the marketing into the sales area, that the story is not changing because otherwise you do waste a lot of time.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And it’s a really good point. In a complex sale. We’re consuming not only we a long way through our journey before we engage our sales team today, but we’re consuming multiple pieces of content and we’ve got lots of questions and in a complex cell. It’s never just one question.
So if you’re doing a social media post, if you’re doing a Google ad word and you create some interest and you answer one or two questions, you’ve got to bring them back somewhere. We can continue that journey was effectively for every question that’s relevant to our business and relevant to what we sell, the problem that we solve.
We need to be the ones that answer it. For every challenge that the customers got, we need to be the ones that overcome it. Because if we don’t, then we’re not going to attract our audience of ideal customers. And we leave the door open. For our competitors who do answer those questions.
And now we’ve lost control of the sales process. So you’re absolutely right when we need to be able to take customers on a journey, we need to be able to dynamically engage them, attract them and engage them. And we need to answer their questions and help solve their problems. And that gives us the opportunity.
Then we weren’t the right now to put our differentiators in front of them. What sets us apart? Who do we work best with? Who don’t we work best with? So that we’re using our website asset. To qualify and disqualify so that those that aren’t the right fit, we may help them and educate them. And that’s great, but they may not be the right fit.
And if we’ve helped them and educated them, we’ve built some trust. And if they’re not the right fit, they might bump into someone that is the right fit and say, Hey, it was written as content from this great website content here. You should give these guys a call. So we’re never going to damage our brand by doing that.
But then we qualify disqualify so that by the time they do reach out to our sales team, they we’ve got tremendous trust with them. Because we’ve answered their problems, overcome their barriers. And we’ve got, they’ve got preference for our brand because, they’ve largely made their mind up by the time they reach out to the sales team.
And if they’ve largely made their mind up and we’ve qualified and disqualified, we’re generating really high quality leads for the team. And that’s a fundamental difference. As you point out, not all leads are created equal. Those thousand leads that were created, I don’t know how many, there was bound to be a few good ones in there, but the sales team were going to, they just stopped running it.
They were so frustrated that they were sitting there wasting their valuable time finding people that weren’t interested, hadn’t been qualified, didn’t know the price point and didn’t have a problem that they could solve. Flip it around and get it right. And it’s a totally different conversation.
So much insight in that again, want to thank you for everything. We’ve got one last question. I want to ask you before we finish up, but just a reminder to everyone. You definitely have to stay tuned for the For the bonus bit of content, because we’ve got three big problems with website designs that we’re going to talk through, that’s going to give you some huge huge ideas about how you actually work backwards in designing your website.
So I’m fascinated by that as well. So stay tuned for that one, but just to finish things up wanted to ask you The question that I love to ask all of my guests, what’s the big aha moment that clients have when they start working with you that you realize that you wish people would know in advance that they were going to have when they work with you?
I think the biggest aha moment would be understanding the extent to which their customers are actually online and engaging in content. Relative to the problem that they solve. I think the biggest mistake that a lot of companies make is that they don’t actually believe that their audience is online.
They’ve always felt that, for the, for that, for the history of their company, it’s always been word of mouth. Or it’s been referrals. And days gone by, that was true. And it’s still an important part of many businesses today, so I’m not discounting it. But companies make the mistake of actually not thinking that their audience is actually online, relative to what they do.
I’ll give you an example. We worked with a with a manufacturing company in the New Zealand market, and they were selling an agricultural product to dairy farmers. It was an expensive product. So it was, in the tens of thousands of dollars. They didn’t believe that, that dairy farmers were online actively using the internet.
But their sales had stagnated and they weren’t getting the growth that they wanted to get. We were able to dispel that myth and we took them on a journey in their first year. They grew tremendously. And over a period of less than three years. We almost doubled their revenue.
Now that was, they just couldn’t believe that their audience was online. So I think the aha moment is actually realizing how many of their customers are actually actively engaged Online is the big aha moment. And then we lean into some of the other problems with website design is a couple of aha moments there as well, but we’re going to talk more about that in the bonus content, right?
Absolutely. We can do that shortly. For now, Steve, I just wanted to say, thank you so much. So much great content that you’ve given for everyone to learn from. And I think there’s a lot of ideas that people that will get people start thinking about how they might State start changing the way that they’re operating, making those little 1 percent of differences to their business.
And and I thank you for that. We are going to of course, include all the details on how to get in contact with Steve in the show notes. But for now, Steve, thank you so much for being an amazing guest on the program. It’s my pleasure. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bites. We hope you enjoyed the program.
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