How Opinion Surveys Are Hurting Your Business | Stories With Traction Podcast

SHOW NOTES:

SUMMARY: In this episode, Craig Andrews and Matt Zaun talk about building trust through a First Time Offer (FTO), how to strategically position the buying process, and why opinion surveys are hurting your business.

CRAIG ANDREWS BIO: Craig is the Principle Ally and Founder of Allies4me, which is a marketing agency that helps companies find strangers and convert them into high-paying customers.  In addition, Craig is a speaker, writer, and will always be a Marine.

For more info, check out Craig HERE.

MATT ZAUN BIO: Matt is an award-winning speaker and storyteller who empowers organizations to attract more clients through the art of strategic storytelling. Matt’s past engagements have catalyzed radical sales increases for over 300 organizations that range from financial institutions to the health and wellness industry.

Matt shares his expertise in persuasion with executives, sales professionals, and entrepreneurs, who he coaches on the art of influence and how to leverage this for profits and impact.

For more info, check out Matt Zaun HERE. 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors.

Matt Zaun 

One of my favorite words in the English language is strategic. I love focusing on strategy. That's probably why I was so enamored with sports growing up.

How do you utilize strategy to win? And then once I entered the business world, I recognize that you can have strategy 24 seven with all kinds of ideas and how to position to connect with clients and offer value.

I absolutely love strategy. That's why I am so excited for this episode because today I am joined by Craig Andrews.

Craig is the principal ally and founder of Allies for Me, which is a marketing agency that helps companies find strangers and convert them into high paying customers.

In addition, Craig is a speaker, writer, and will always be a Marine. Welcome to the show, Craig.

allies4me (allies4me)

No, thank you, Semper Fi.

Matt Zaun 

There we go. So I appreciate what you do more than you will know. So I've seen all kinds of elements of probably primarily focused on your writing.

I love different elements of different things that I've seen you write. Very intriguing. It really made me think in a big, big way.

In fact, I'll start with this. This is something that you posted and I thought so much about this. Bye.

actually tweak something that I was going to do in business. So, and I might be paraphrasing, but you said something like, your product or service creates a new problem as a result of the successful delivery of your product or service.

What do you mean by that?

allies4me (allies4me)

Yeah, so the one way of thinking about it, so I grew up on the Chesapeake Bay as did you.

And everybody wants boats. And so you get a boat. Once you buy a boat, you have a new problem.

You have to know where you're going to dock the thing, where you're going to store it. And so, one of the things that we like to think about when we're putting together offers, we always like to have an element of the offer to be the solution that is solution to a problem that's created by the successful delivery of the preceding deliverables.

And so, if I were in the business of selling boats and somebody came in and wanted to buy a boat for me, I would say.

You know what, we're going to find the perfect boat for you. But once you get the boat, you need to know where you're going to dock it.

Well, guess what? We have relationships with all the marinas, all the out clubs in the area. And we will find out what works best for you.

We will find the perfect dock for you so that you can wake up on a Saturday morning, walk out with a picnic basket with your family, happy and smiley and step one of your boat and you're gone for the day or the weekend, whatever you want.

And so that's an example of if I'm in the boat selling business, I'm also going to focus on the problem that is created by the successful sale of a boat.

They need to store it. And what it does is sometimes prequel, there's a kind of marketing principle that people won't buy your product until they visualize themselves using it.

And so what I do in that process is I put them on the boat. I have their kids and.

So. about smiling and thinking, oh, they are so great that they work so hard that they can get this boat.

And they're experiencing the joy of this hopeful future state. And so all of a sudden the mechanics of picking the right boat, that's even a secondary decision.

They're like, hey, I'm sure you're gonna help me find the right boat, but you already have moved them forward to actually enjoying the product of a decision they've yet to take place.

Matt Zaun 

So I love that analogy and I thank you for mentioning that. So I wanna take what you said and just share with you something that I did based on what you said within this post.

So taking your boat analogy, so you get this boat, now you need to store it. So you successfully delivered, now there's another problem.

So after I read you post this, I was in the process of putting together my longest training ever. So I primarily do workshops, trainings, keynotes, different sessions and they vary in length.

So my keynote 45 minutes to an hour, my workshop is typically half day. It's around three hours. Well, this training could potentially take between five and six hours.

Now the value is immense. I fully believe people go through it. They're going to be transformed when it comes to storytelling.

And I've taken everything I've learned in the last decade and I've put it into this training. But again, there's a problem, right?

Because a lot of people might not have five to six hours to go through it. Or they might be mindful of, wow, that's, that's almost a day that my employees would have to take to go through this.

So I'm creating another problem. So I actually took what you said and now I'm being mindful of the way I'm packaging, the way I'm marketing, the way I'm saying, Hey, it's an investment.

The six, the six hours are going to yield this amount of time. Long term. So I'm trying to quantify, Hey, if your team does this, they save time.

And that was all based on something you said. So I think the practicality of it, people listening to this, not everyone sells boats, right?

allies4me (allies4me)

There's very, very specific way you can take this analogy and apply it to your business. So I appreciate you mentioning that.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and anybody can use it. And it's, when I describe the concept, it's really hard for people to grasp.

And that's why I use the boat analogy. Everybody can appreciate a boat.

Matt Zaun

And they can understand that challenge. For sure, absolutely. Who doesn't like to be on a boat and have fun, for sure.

So it's a good analogy. One of the things I want to talk about, speaking of analogies, I love the analogy that you mentioned regarding a relationship that I want you to talk about.

You actually connected almost like a courtship because I think a lot of companies, which it's mind-boggling to me, even companies that are innovative in some ways, they're still utilizing sales funnels from decades ago.

Like how to get people through a funnel from...... decades ago, a very archaic way of marketing, doing sales. And I really appreciate what you talk about regarding those stages of courtship.

So can you take us through that first time offer and kind of take us through instead of pounding the payment, cold call is trying to get these huge deals closed, take us through more of a strategic phase that you would take your clients through.

allies4me (allies4me)

Yeah, there's, you know, we look at sort of five stages of courtship. And if we, you know, stage one is you need an introduction that can come via a variety of means.

Maybe it's maybe you're running ads. Maybe it's referrals. Maybe it's something else. It doesn't matter. You just need a mechanism that gets an introduction.

And then you have a conversation. And if you think about courtship, the next step after conversation isn't marriage. It's usually a coffee date, you know, and from my understanding, I asked the ladies when they do this, they, they drive separately.

usually, and they have one of their girlfriends call them in about 15 minutes to see if they need a rescue.

And so what it's about is, hey, this is a new relationship. We have high hopes that will go a long ways, but it's so new, there's some risk and we're going to take the risk out by putting these blockades in there just to make sure it's easy to sever if things don't go well.

And so that's what we call first time offer. And if we go back to the courtship model, if coffee goes well, then you move on, you start having dinner.

And if that goes well, eventually you move to commitment. But what we found to be really effective is when you engineer a great coffee date, and especially if you're dealing with a high, high ticket, high trust product or service, this coffee date works wonders.

And the thing that I like to liken it to is, so you grow up in Baltimore. And you know, call the playing is big, big.

bar and music district, if you walked into a bar and saw a cute gal on the other side of the bar and walked up and said, Hey, you're kind of cute.

Can I have your phone number? Or will you say we just go get married? Well, she's going to think you're creepy and run away.

She may even call the police. And the and so in real life, we know not to do that. We're like, you know, that's a little bit inappropriate.

But it's so amazing when it comes to business, that's precisely what we do time and time again. And I can think of an example right off the top of my head.

Some I have talked to in the last month or two. Their their initial commitment is three year minimum.

Matt Zaun 

Wow.

allies4me (allies4me)

And a average dollar value average contract value of a quarter million dollars. And they're trying to get somebody to commit to that tenant as an initial commitment.

And the reason I haven't talked to them recently is we say, Hey, this is going to fail. And they're like, yes, but we're going to keep trying.

Okay, we're going to keep trying until it works. And I know they're now laying off people. And that breaks my heart because lives are being ruined because of a bad strategic decision.